"She wore her sexuality with an older woman's ease, and not like an awkward purse, never knowing how to hold it, where to hang it, or when to just put it down."

― Zadie Smith, White Teeth

"Shout out to them freshman on Instagram straight flexing."

― Trinidad James, "All Gold Everything"

Post-Jason Derulo Jordin Sparks, skinny and curly-haired, is liberated. Liberated from the weight of expectation that comes with winning "American Idol", liberated from her weight. Her first mixtape, #ByeFelicia, marks a new era for her. "Double Tap" ft. 2 Chainz, one of the more popular singles, recently got a video.

"Double Tap" sounds like a Tinashe throwaway, a leftover co-write that Jordin hopped on out of, perhaps, a desire to catch up to or emulate her DJ Mustard-produced peers. But "Double Tap" is actually so much more; it’s about the marriage of the male gaze and technology. While the sound is new for Jordin—it’s the same sticky, infectious sound heard since before last year—the visuals, explicitly appealing to the male gaze, set it apart from similar pop offerings.

In the first scene, Jordin is coming out of the bathroom, wearing an A-line thigh-high robe, swishing her hips from side to side with a phone in her hand. She walks past a big screen TV. Shortly thereafter, she holds the phone up and documents herself, using her phone’s front-facing camera. Meanwhile, men— three hot, black men— surveil her Instagram photos from a living room far removed from wherever Jordin is. They watch her while she watches herself, writhing in bed. She gets out of bed, goes in the bathroom to get ready to go out—for more male validation, real looks—and begins primping herself in front of the mirror while taking more selfies from every angle. She takes a call from girlfriends, telling them to come over. They oblige and dance/get ready in front of a mirror while taking selfies with Jordin. They leave to go to a party, but not before inviting the hot guys. At the party they take more selfies and dance with each other. Jordin ditches her friends to dance on a countertop with 2 Chainz—one of the only scenes where Jordin is not holding her phone—until eventually meeting face-to-face with one of the three hot guys.

"Double Tap" connotes a with-my-girls-but-by-myself-even-when-I’m-with-my-girls agency. Jordin knows her own angles; Jordin writhes in bed while taking sexy selfies of herself; and Jordin performs friendship, on Instagram, through group mirror selfies and phones/friends attached at hips. The lyrics, forgettable, reference "double tapping." This reference is lost on anyone who doesn’t use Instagram or anyone who uses Instagram but doesn’t refer to liking a photo on it as "double tapping." This reference is hackneyed today and severely dated tomorrow, which is the danger in novelty. Boastful, Jordin brags, "Bet I look better than your last one/ Everybody know I don’t care/ Instafamous overnight, yeah." While there’s nothing but comaraderie between Jordin and her girls, she’s in active competition with other girls, but, of course, she’s oblivious—that’s what she tells herself. "You gotta let me know...bet you won’t double tap that ho" is one request; another request, this one more direct, "If you like what you see, you gotta let me know.”

"Double Tap", lyrically, never becomes a "Post to Be", a "Show Me" or a "2 On". Psychically, it’s analogous to when a white girl gets her hip-hop wings. Miley’s "We Can’t Stop" is a good example of this, but a better, and more subtle, example is Jojo’s "Andre". "Double Tap" is to Jordin what "Andre" is to Jojo: it distinguishes herself from herself. In "Andre", Jojo’s fixation on a lover named Andre simultaneously shifts the attention away from her while also marking the end of whatever we thought Jojo was going to be post-"Leave (Get Out)". Fourteen-year-old Jojo, after all, signified a certain American oddity: the black girl in the white girl in the black in the white girl; layers of Blackground Records-cultivated down white girl simulacrum and a golden voice. The opposite of a Diva.

In 2014, I wrote this definition of a Diva in reference to Charli XCX:

Only a Diva can make us believe, in the cultural moment, that “Yeah, keep turning it up/ Chandelier-swinging, we don’t give a fuck” will never not sound cool because Divas are matryoshka dolls of authenticity. Inside every Diva is another Diva and another Diva and another Diva. Bad Bitches are shells constructed by the male gaze with the help of Instagram filters. A hard and fast Bad Bitch-Diva dichotomy doesn’t exist, but we can glean from the video that Charli is in fact the ‘realest.’

In the same way Jojo, at least in her infancy, was no Diva, Jordin, at the beginning of her post-"Idol" career, was no Bad Bitch. A Bad Bitch, however, is what she’s angling to be in 2015. Amber Rose, who is literally writing the book on How to Be a Bad Bitch, would probably say Jordin’s well on her way to being one. But just like Jojo’s Diva posturing is saturated with an inauthenticity, Jordin’s Bad Bitchdom, "constructed by the male gaze with the help Instagram filters," is ill-fitting, awkward. She wears her sexuality exactly how a 25-year-old Evangelical Christian, formerly ‘chubby’ "American Idol" contestant whose only really dated one guy would wear her sexuality: peekaboo-style, hiding behind layers of herself.

Two weeks ago, a crowd huddled in a posh brownstone in Williamsburg braced themselves for a noise show. Cups of oat, almond, and soy milk were served to accompany platters of vegan chocolate chip cookies, baked by the performer themselves. The small, square kitchen was transformed into a makeshift performance space: a giant amp sat in one corner, while hulking electronic equipment overtook a back counter and a microphone stand hovered over another. In the back room, a merch table offered tote bags, cassette tapes of a new EP titled Katatonia, and a limited edition of twenty t-shirts made for the occasion, with the words QUEER NIHILIST REVOLT MUSIK spelled out in a circular design, all created by the evening’s performer, Dreamcrusher. Julia Pelta Feldman, the proprietor and founder of Room & Board, the experimental artist’s residency that takes place in the apartment and host of the event, flitted from room to room, making sure everyone had refreshments and earplugs.

An elegant Brooklyn apartment and vegan pastries are understandably distant from what normally comes to mind when most people hear noise music, yet for Luwayne Glass, aka Dreamcrusher, it was a perfect venue. Unbeknown to the audience members chatting with each other before the show began, Glass sat beneath the island in the center of the kitchen, secretly DJing the party from underneath a black tablecloth.

"I don’t like talking to people at shows," he explained.

By 9:00 p.m. the lights were shut off and a strobe light began to flash from the back room, prompting the crowd to merge into the anterior living room to watch. Glass revealed himself from beneath the island, rising up during the dirge-like opener, "Mirror", off Katatonia. He climbed the island and moved catlike on top of it, each movement staggered from the strobe light. Later, during the pounding "Now I Am Become", he stripped his flannel shirt open to reveal a black leather harness stretched across his chest as he shrieked lyrics into the microphone, its cord wrapped tightly around his neck. Watching a Dreamcrusher show, with its high-decibel howls, crunched, digital soundscapes, and Glass’ equally standoffish and dynamic stage presence, is a spectacle like little else.

Though born and raised in Wichita, Kansas, 26-year-old Glass has been in New York for the past month and a half. After creating a Gofundme page to crowdsource enough money to take his Dreamcrusher project on the road, Glass joined a weeklong northeast tour with one-man Brooklyn noise artist Radio Shock. "[He] hit me up and was like, ‘I know what it’s like to come from a fucking small town, doing some noisy shit, and no one’s coming to your shows,’" Glass said of the tour. He later connected with Feldman’s Room & Board project through a friend in the band Middle Grey, and was surprised when she responded positively to his project. "They were like, we checked out your SoundCloud, this shit is fucking popping. Let’s do this," he said. "I was freaking out about it."

Dreamcrusher’s origins are in the annals of MySpace, but his earliest recordings currently available date back to 2006, with Glass’ characteristically crunched, deconstructed sound palette applied to remixes of everyone from Lady Gaga and Erykah Badu to Daft Punk and These New Puritans. Since then, he’s released a constant flow of new material, currently racking up 24 releases on his prolific Bandcamp. "I have weird spurts," he says about his creative output. "I’ll go six months without recording anything and then I’ll go another six months recording at least three songs a day."

Katatonia, while still smeared in chaotic feedback and screeching synths, hews closer to melodicism than some of Glass’ other works. "Imponderabilia" offers a stuttering back beat similar to some of Crystal Castles’ darker electronic impulses (one of Glass’ influences), while 13-minute closer "Mirror" starts with waves of undulating noise before dissolving into a bath of warm sounds and voices that altogether form something celestial, choral, and mesmerizing. It’s an impressive set of songs, showcasing Glass’ unique fusion of noise and electronic music.

After the show, once the strobe shut off and the regular lights turned on again, Glass threw himself into hugs with friends who came to see him perform. Enthusiastic and funny in person, he put on a host of accents and voices as he posed for pictures, simultaneously urging guests to buy his limited edition t-shirts and take cookies home with them as they left. I did both.

Pitchfork: Can you explain "nihilist queer revolt musik" to me?

Luwayne Glass: I was trying to come up with a counter to noise music that I liked but couldn’t personally connect with.

Pitchfork: What kind of noise do you feel that way about?

LG: Anything made past 2008. Seriously, it feels like sometimes it’s a competition of who can look like a Neo-Nazi. Everybody has the same fucking haircut, they all wear black, they don’t talk to anyone. Not that you have to force a sense of community into a music scene, you don’t have to do that, but you should at least not be an asshole. There’s a small noise community in Kansas, but we’re lit. If Torturing Nurse comes, we’re like, I’m coming out, I’m gonna shake my titties, I’m gonna get it poppin’.

When I first started playing shows I didn’t want to do it. It was 2012 and I had been making music for five years, and I was like, I can’t play here. Who the fuck’s gonna come? You have, what, 10% of the people that play [in Kansas] are noise people, 30% is indie rock, another 30% is metal, and another sub-genre is like, white boys with dreads rapping. Literally that’s it. Those are your choices. So I was like, no one’s gonna come to my shit. I’d just put out Death in the USAand most of the people that were buying it were in England. Then another person that was in town came to visit and he was like, "Are you Dreamcrusher?!" I had just barely gotten off of Myspace, I was still holding on to dear life to MySpace, but he was like, you have to perform here because think about the other kids who are in town who like the same shit but think there’s no outlet.

But the people I was booking with… ok, so you know the metal guy at the noise show? Those would be the kinds of people that I would be playing with. They were into my music but they weren’t into me, you know? I came out when I was 13. I’m not gonna hide myself, I’m not gonna do any of that. I’d be playing shows with these people who were like, eh, whatever. So it got to a point where I was just like, fuck this, I need to get the fuck out of here, so I started the fund.

Pitchfork: How did you start making music?

LG: When I came out I was trying to come out to keep from going to public high school. I was like, high school is scary, they’re gonna kill me. Literally, they’re gonna kill me. It could have fucking happened. I went to a magnet school and I was actually weird. I was fucking listening to Autechre in the computer lab and people would look at me like, ‘Did you break the computer?’ The first song I ever made was this weird, jungle-y, fucked up shit and I was like, ‘oh my God I want to keep making them!’ I kept adding compression to everything so it just sounded fucking ridiculous. Then my sister was like, you should put it on MySpace. I was using MySpace specifically to find music. That’s how I found out about HEALTH and Crystal Castles. And then I heard "Alice Practice" and I was like, I’m getting the shirt, I’m going to Canada, I’m gonna get lit, I’m gonna start drinking, smoking, moshing. I put a song up on MySpace that was terrible, and it got 1,000 plays in like a week. It was weird. I was like, they like that?

Pitchfork: Since you attach the queer label to your music, how much of your queerness do you feel impacts your music?

LG: It impacts all of it and none of it. The vessel I create out of is queer so anything I do is gonna be queer. But I don’t necessarily talk about… I mean, there are barely any words and if there are they’re like mad morbid, stupid, word vomit. But I don’t know, it’s unavoidable for it to be part of it, you know? It’s just kind of there. I’m debating whether I should include more of it in there. This time in the world is so weird because on the one hand you have infinite possibilities and it’s visible. You can see it. And then you still have those little bit of powerful people who are a smaller group and are older, who are like, we want strict this, that’s it. In the underground scene it’s really apparent and it’s really fucking annoying.

Skrillex keeps putting butts in my Twitter feed. One butt, actually—a woman's, clad in tight, fuchsia bikini bottoms. There's a front view of her, too, complete with an anatomically improbable thigh gap. The curves of her body have been retouched, and her skin is covered with digitally applied tribal tattoos, OWSLA logos, and space aliens. The whole thing is really fucking creepy, frankly; it's like the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue as reimagined by DIS magazine. Oh, and she's also cut off from the shoulders up, so the upper part of her body is just a skeleton. (Maybe the designer was feeling inspired by Art Department, who also cut off a woman's head in a recent flyer.)

The image in question is part of an advertisement for a new compilation from OWSLA, Skrillex's label, and it's also being used to promote a party that he's throwing in Miami later this month, during Ultra. But thanks—or no thanks—to the way that Twitter displays photos, it's that bikini-clad body that commands your attention as it comes thrusting its way into your feed, ass- or crotch-first, like a health-goth avatar of pure, hot-pink sex, optimized for Retina Display.

Perhaps this is all supposed to be ironic, a way of slyly poking fun at the sun-sex-and-spring-breakers clichés that have long accompanied Winter Music Conference party flyers. But the visual style of the image doesn't feel ironic. There's nothing particularly tongue-in-cheek about its sexualized tropes; it merely replicates them. Consider, too, the way the viewer is treated to both back and front views of the woman's nether regions: it's like she's been put on a spit and left to rotate for our visual pleasure. It's party flyer as horndog Panopticon.

Unfortunately, this kind of voyeuristic, objectifying male gaze is all over dance music, and it seems like it's getting worse. For years, the Ultra label's various compilations have featured a parade of buxom, oiled-up swimsuit models on their covers, but the press release for last year's Ultra Dance 15 spent two full paragraphs discussing its bikini-clad cover girl (Melanie Iglesias, 2010 winner of Maxim's "Hometown Hotties" competition) before even touching upon the songs inside. Not only that, but Ultra also shot "behind the scenes"cheesecake videos to promote recent editions.

If Ultra hadn't, somebody probably would have done it for them. Just search YouTube for "electro house" or "deep house" and you'll be confronted with a veritable deluge of semi-naked women in kittenish poses. For the administrators of YouTube channels, bared (female) skin is all part of the quest to bring in clicks, and thus ad dollars. In just the past three years, Majestic Casual has racked up 2.3 million subscribers, and more than 646 million views, with a business model that involves pairing moody tech-house with sultry, soft-lit photos of young women in various states of undress. Dozens of channels pursue a similar approach, and though their aesthetics vary from "tasteful" Hipstamatic blur to Victoria's Secret tacky, they are united in their objectification of women's bodies. You can't necessarily blame the artists whose songs are featured on those channels; their music is often used without permission, and getting one's music taken down requires a fair amount of effort. Then there are artists like Henry Krinkle, whose own uploads are festooned with all manner of lad-mag-inspired skin shots, from "lesbian" softcore to Lolita-like ingénues. (Then again, what would you expect from a guy who names himself after an alias of Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle, he of the child-prostitute fixation?)

And it's not like "legit" artists and businesses are any better. Calvin Harris' team specializes in titillating, exploitative videos like the one for "Thinking About You". Zhu, who shares management with Krewella but has been promoted as a shadowy, Burial-type figure, broke through with a video that looks like it was art directed by Terry Richardson or American Apparel's Dov Charney, and is chock full of writhing nubiles and winking drug references. Hard festival creator Gary Richards, who records as Destructo, doesn't stop with mere objectification. His 2012 video for the song "Technology" is about a dude who gags, smothers, and returns as "defective" his sex-robot girlfriend when she has the audacity to fall in love with him. In his 2013 video for "Higher", a sex-addicted woman spurned by her boyfriend rips her heart out and dies. His "Party Up" video, in comparison, was relatively tame; it just featured a busload of strippers—the logical extension of one of YG's repeated lyrics in the song: "I keep my bitches on the bus."

(Oh, and while we're speaking of outright misogynists, don't even get me started on Borgore.)

This is not the first time I've written this column. I've drafted variations upon the theme various times over the past few years, but I've never published them. In part, I didn't want to seem like a scold. And in part, calling out EDM bozos for being sexist is shooting fish in a barrel. But seeing that OWSLA flyer bummed me out. Skrillex is supposed to be a chill dude. He's supposed to be on the side of the underdogs. Instead, right around International Women's Day, his label was propagating the myth that the ideal woman in dance music is svelte, faceless, mostly naked, and on display. And that really sucks.

Maybe one reason that women are so woefully underrepresented in electronic music—that is, as DJs, producers, promoters, label heads, sound technicians, mastering engineers, etc.—is that they see shit like that and they feel excluded. Maybe they see shit like that and they feel threatened. Who wouldn't, if she had the (quite reasonable) suspicion that clubs and festivals must be full of horny young men who have been brought up to treat women as sex objects? Or maybe, most reasonably of all, they see enough shit like that and they decide they wouldn't touch dance music with a 10-foot pole, because why bother with a scene that's so pitifully unimaginative and creatively bankrupt?

Music On Film is a column from The Dissolve recommending movies fans of music should make a point of checking out.

When a band gets big enough, it ceases to become primarily an organic artistic creation. It’s no longer a matter of writing a great song or album but rather about keeping a miniature industry of roadies and managers and lawyers and agents and assistants and other hangers-on afloat and functioning.

At a certain size, a band becomes a machine of commerce that must be greased and finessed and manipulated or it will break down entirely. By the time Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky (who died February 21st, just a few weeks before the death of mentor Albert Maysles) brought their cameras to the recording sessions of what would become St. Anger, the angry, profane, roaring beast that was Metallica had long since reached that point.

The group’s management team, in a fit of desperation, hires "performance enhancement coach" Phil Towle, a gooberish middle aged man who bears a distinct resemblance to television Dr. Phil in both looks and personality, to oversee therapy sessions to get the band functioning again.

When Berlinger and Sinofsky brought their cameras to The Presidio, a former military base where recordings began, but pointedly did not end, they had no idea whether there would be a band or a movie at the end of the journey. They couldn’t have known whether they were chronicling a band’s end, like the Beatles documentary Let It Be or its creative resurgence. But like the Maysles before them, Berlinger and Sinofsky were blessed with tremendous patience and curiosity.

So the filmmakers waited it out along with the band as it went through a series of crises that both tested the band and made it stronger, from James Hetfield’s absences and eventual recovery from alcoholism to the backlash that followed the band’s attack on Napster to having to find a new bassist to replace the departing Jason Newsted.

As with the films about the West Memphis 3 that brought Berlinger and Sinofsky into Metallica’s circle (Metallica agreed to let the filmmakers use their music for their films about the wrongly imprisoned teens, a huge coup for up and coming filmmakers), the filmmakers are obsessed with the intricacies, joys and heartache of process. They’re fascinated by the act of a band pulling itself apart to try to figure out its underlying dysfunction so that something that once must have felt like the most natural thing in the world but over the years began to feel almost impossible—Lars Ulrich, Kirk Hammett and James Hetfield playing new music in a room together—can happen again and Metallica Inc. can resume operations.

One of the darkly comic contradictions of Metallica: Some Kind of Monster is that it takes months upon months upon months of hard work, honesty, cutting through bullshit and rigorous honesty for Metallica to make an emotional breakthrough and create what appears, to untrained ears, to be some of the worst music of their career.

The album whose torturous creation Some Kind of Monster so unforgettably documents is particularly feeble from a lyrical standpoint. Apparently it took the intervention of Phil and months of therapy for one of the biggest and most important rock bands of all time to write lyrics that sound like they were cribbed from the diary of a pretentious goth teenager. Yet it’s a testament to what a strange and singular rock documentary the film is that it’s redeemed less by the frequently awful music but rather brutal introspection from some of the dudes in pop culture you’d least expect to acknowledge their emotions, let alone spend an entire film talking about feelings.

In a recent interview with Billboard, Modest Mouse frontman Isaac Brock explained why it took so long to put out their recent Strangers to Ourselves.

"We kept having people come in to work on the record, but everyone had other shit scheduled after x-amount of days, so no one wanted to hang out while we took three years rerecording bass parts and putting mics in jugs of water to see how it sounds," Brock said. "It doesn't sound great. There's a reason they're not selling the jug-of-water mic." 

Recently, Pitchfork learned of other experimentation and mishaps that contributed to album's continued delays. Here are a few:

Isaac Brock's car broke down constantly. "Such a classic excuse, it should be bronzed by now," he admits.

For "Coyotes", Brock bred and raised a pack of his own for research purposes. Two of the coyotoes, Scruffles and Otis, are actually executive producers on Strangers to Ourselves after winning an Empire-like power struggle. 

Each week, Brock refused to enter the studio before he had read every available Walking Dead recap. When it was pointed out that he doesn't even watch the show, he sent a huffy group e-mail questioning the band's commitment to the album's themes. A detente is not reached until summer sweeps.

Three failed attempts at collaboration with Death Grips came to an unceremonious end when Zach Hill promised to come by the studio and instead mailed Brock a blank VHS tape covered in lye and nine Polaroids of MC Ride's pet iguana Hagar—named for the main character of popular syndicated cartoon Hagar the Horrible—in a blank padded mailer.

Gifted an advance copy of William Finnegan's forthcoming Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, Brock becomes fixated on making a surf rock album. A now deleted YouTube features Brock warbling "Surf City, ohhh yeah, come on mama get your damn board" in front of a confused group of chamber musicians.

Brock sent James Mercer to trace the route of 20th Century Explorer Percy Fawcett, and when he arrived at the Lost City of Z, Brock had Mercer call him from an early-2000s Nextel flip phone which Brock recorded with a mic placed inside a hotel bidet. "There's a reason they're not selling the patchy-call-from-a-Nextel-in-the-Amazon bidet mic," Brock said. 

Confused, Brock spent hours of paid studio time campaigning Big Boi to invite Grand Funk Railroad guitarist Bruce Kilnuck to the recording session, despite Big Boi's repeated protest that he had never heard of the group and wasn't sure why he had to be the guy to talk to him. "They're an American band!", Brock says. 

A year's worth of sessions and ideas are wiped out when Johnny Marr suddenly quits. "I'm not used to being the most handsome member of the band," he tells Brock over e-mail. 

After hearing the Modest Mouse reference in Vampire Weekend's "Step", Brock became obsessed with returning the favor. Dozens of notebooks later, he gets as far as the couplet "what a way to end / this vampire weekend" before looking at what he had done and pitched the collected drafts into a fire.

It was an early Spring morning, the soft yellow light crept through dusty floral curtains as the young white lady arose from her upcycled bed, tenderly, ready to embody Stuart Murdoch’s archetype of an ethereal indie darling. "We are open to Eve’s nationality (e.g. British, French, Australian)," read Murdoch’s casting call for the lead character in the Belle & Sebastian bandleader's blindingly white film, God Help the Girl. One does not imagine he meant the native Aboriginal population of Australia when envisioning his perfect leading lady; the cast is entirely white.

As a lover of Belle and Sebastian, I was disappointed, though certainly not surprised. Over their entire discography, a grand total of two people of color have graced their album artwork, appearing on the cover of Storytelling. While Storytelling commodifies the cover girls’ culture, Belle and Sebastian commodify Whiteness; God Help the Girl merely underscores this. The film itself is an egregious mess that romanticizes a woman’s struggles with an eating disorder for the sake of Murdoch’s self-promotion. The optimistic, happy-go-lucky and painstakingly adorable aesthetic evidenced in every character he created is founded in Whiteness. Whiteness is beauty; Whiteness is what gives the character the ability to dream of fostering a career in music; Whiteness is what enables the audience to empathize with Eve’s character. A recurring filler in the film was a fictitious radio show where two men try to decipher what "real" indie is and every band mentioned is white, enforcing the film’s aspirational Whiteness. While Belle and Sebastian aren’t the only examples of perpetuating Whiteness through indie rock, this movie serves as a microcosmic view of what is wrought by racial exclusivity that is omnipresent in indie rock.

In indie rock, white is the norm. While indie rock and the DIY underground, historically, have been proud to disassociate themselves from popular culture, there is no divorcing a predominantly white scene from systemic ideals ingrained in white Western culture. That status quo creates a barrier in terms of both the sanctioned participation of artists of color and the amount of respect afforded them, all of which sets people of color up to forever be seen as interlopers and outsiders. Whiteness is the very ideal for which art is made in Western culture, be it the cinema of Wes Anderson or, say, the artists on Merge Records.

What substantiates this are the microaggressions, as well as overt and covert expressions of racism, that happen as a result of those systemically held ideals. Some may take the success of artists of color as threat to their space or scene. White art is deemed more worthy of respect, and so white audiences respond to it positively—it is set up for success. It’s evidenced the last week of news: be it the insidious petition urging Glastonbury to drop Kanye West in favor of a "rock band" (read: a white artist), or the repeated co-option of Indian and Desi pop culture by Major Lazer going unremarked upon. White art additionally dilutes and flattens aspects of other cultures' music that it adopts in the process of making them more "accessible" for those whose curiosity does not extend beyond the parameters of Europe and North America. White "ambassadors" decide what parts of these musics of cultures get to filter through based on white notions of what is good, or real or what ethnomusical practices appeal to an American sense of authenticity (see also: Diplo).

Artists, labels and producers are not the only ones complicit in perpetuating this, though. It’s successful music publications—Pitchfork included—who have celebrated Vampire Weekend and Dirty Projectors' use of attenuated 'afro' elements, calling the latter’s music "idiosyncratic" and saying the former owes thanks to Paul Simon, the evident creator of African music.  White musicians seemingly can have it all: their almost impenetrable music scenes as well as their bastardization of most any other cultures. The root work by artists of color effectively disappears.

I can count on one hand the prominent performers in the independent scene that look like me: M.I.A., Rostam Batmanglij (Vampire Weekend), Himanshu Suri (Heems and Das Racist), Dapwell (Das Racist) and Natasha Khan (Bat For Lashes). Five people. Batmanglij and Khan are highly visible but have never courted controversy, and rarely acknowledge their ethnic heritages through their art. What we hear in their work is artistic assimilation, their careers evidence the easy acceptance that comes of that. However, both Heems and M.I.A. root their work in rap, put their Desi heritage and brown skin on blast, curve balling their outspoken resistance back to critics with a middle finger. Whether it’s Arulpragasam’s observation of "Some people see planes/ Some people see drones/ Some people see a doom/ And some people see domes" on "CanSeeCanDo" or Suri’s ironic chanting of "USA! USA! USA!" on Eat Pray Thug’s "Al Q8a". They illuminate political issues that concern and affect them, which is what resonates so intensely with brown fans of their music.

The price of being outspoken about race--the price of speaking their truth—for Heems or Dap, for M.I.A., is much higher than it is for any white musicians with a message, be it Kathleen Hanna or Kim Gordon’s mass appeal white feminism or Bono, whose career is foundationally built on his white savior complex. Heems' work (both solo and with Das Racist) explores racial problems in both American and Asian society with a distinctly satirical slant, but the label of "joke rap" is one that has become difficult to escape, and one that invalidates and writes off the truth of their experience as Asian Americans. M.I.A. prefers to take a route that relies less on humor and blunty screams about her problems with both the West and Sri Lanka. The often casual dismission of her politics ultimately results in her having to scream even louder. M.I.A. or Heems' assertion of their racial identities and experiences, becomes, at best, inconvenient, and often plays as badly in the underground as it does in the mainstream.

Intellectual delineations associated with race make for a lack of serious discussion here: White people accept Kathleen Hanna’s branch of feminism though it has often and primarily benefitted other white women, and stand by her in solidarity as she praises icons of White aspiration like Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift. While Hanna has, historically, played with sarcasm and irony in her lyrics, her work has never been derided as a joke, her lyrical critiques have been taken as just that. M.I.A. and Heems, however, are often subject to bad press for this same approach--press that paints them as attention-seeking and caustic. The feel-good feminism of white women earns infinitely more respect in both the artistic and 'real' world as evidenced by their prominence and visibility; making art about your experience of racism is seemingly much less acceptable, cool or "punk".

It’s difficult not to be deterred and alienated by the overwhelming Whiteness of it all, especially when as a person of color, Western society flat out resists the witness of your life. However, it’s important to seize and act on precedents being set by the likes of Heems and M.I.A., paving a way that makes it easier for new artists of colour to follow suit and make their mark. Whiteness is a mark of exclusivity that must be broken; to have masses of talent ignored in favor of a select few is not acceptable. Visibility of people of color in independent music is absolutely paramount for the genre to evolve and truly represent those cast away from the scene for too long.

Photo by Jessica Lehrman

"If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you." This sacred insight, attributed to Jesus of Nazareth in the Gospel of Thomas, pulsates within every track on offer in Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly. A missive of militant transparency, it chronicles afresh Lamar’s tried and true conviction that giving lyrical voice to his deepest fears, anxieties, and resentments is the surest path to shaking free of them. "I could never right my wrongs ‘less I write it down for real," he once explained in "Poetic Justice" on good kid, m.A.A.d city. But this time around, he puts a diviner point on it: "My rights, my wrongs, I write ‘til I’m right with God."

He embraces this process of bringing it all forth with such exuberance, good humor, and relentless self-deprecation that no moment—be it anger, disillusionment, or megalomania—is allowed to dominate. With "u", for instance, a screaming hotel room meltdown in which he comes to the crushing conclusion that he’s thrown away his ties to family and neighbor in exchange for a mass market relationship of pseudo-intimacy with strangers, the shame spiral is suddenly interrupted by a knock on the door from a Spanish-speaking housekeeper who’s trying to finish a shift. Other lives go on and even crowd themselves in amid the audio of his angst. One degraded self-conception is interwoven with another or made to counter it. Bouts of suicidal depression in "u" are referred to in "i" as one more mood contended with, rebuked, and overcome ("I went to war last night"). And the compassion he struggled to have for himself is offered as a clarion call, an imperative, to be communally applied.

"I know there is a devil, because he talks so loud," Prince once announced on Lovesexy’s "I No". And where Prince named the deluding spirit Spooky Electric, Kendrick Lamar opts for Lucy (read: Lucifer) who appears not only as a corrupting influence that would keep his imagination captive in comparison, competition, and condescension when it comes to his peers and predecessors. Lucy also promises homeland security for friend and family in exchange for his affections. Righteousness is endlessly complicated. "For Sale (Interlude)" highlights that evil ("Misusing your influence…Abusing my power") is too elusive to ever be resisted once for all. If Lucy can quote scripture with ease, the all-pervading confusion with which he contends won’t stop outside church buildings: "They say if you scared, go to church/ But remember, he knows the Bible too." Being true, or in Lamar’s phrase Mandela-like, involves deep discernment and consistent dismissal of many a false signal. In this sense, the album is like an experiment in self-examination.

In her novel The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin makes a distinction between explorers and adventurers: "The explorer who will not come back or send back his ships to tell his tale is not an explorer, only an adventurer; and his sons are born in exile." With a constant determination to dramatically lyricize his setbacks and missteps, Kendrick Lamar has long opted to be an explorer. As early as "Fuck Your Ethnicity" on Section.80, he made clear that the table he was spreading was set out for all comers also in process: "Know that this fire that’s burning represents the passion that you have." To Pimp a Butterfly’s "Mortal Man" continues this vocation ("Let my word be your earth and moon") but he poses a question that’s different from the question of fame. He wants to make sure people are truly picking up what he means to lay down: "Is this relationship a fake or real as the heavens?"

Or as he also puts it, "When shit hit the fan is you still a fan?" And this is the question he tells us a prophet has to ask to even be a prophet. Are we really interested in the worlds to which he’s bearing witness? Are we receiving his witness at all? There’s many a precedent for such a move but an especially apt one is Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, whose narrator offers his own singular experience as one black man in a world ordered according to the rules of white supremacy in the hope that readers might see or sense their own experience—their own voice in a tale candidly told, a door left open a thousand times now made visible. Radically open-handed telling true, he imagines, is probably his only possible method and his only hope. "What else could I do? What else but try to tell you what was really happening when your eyes were looking through?" asks the Invisible Man. Maybe we will see. Perhaps a call is being successfully transmitted: "Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?"

This open-ended question is deeply in sync with Kendrick Lamar’s album-ending exchange with Tupac Shakur. Having drawn Tupac’s voice into the conversation through 20th century recordings, they’ve discussed sanity, survival, and the hopes of the world. Lamar offers his own vision (The "Only hope we have left is music and vibrations") and offers an account of the caterpillar, destroying its surroundings in an effort to get born, and contrasts it with "the talent, the thoughtfulness, and the beauty of the butterfly." There’s misunderstanding, resentment, and exploitation in the attempt, on the part of the caterpillar, to pimp the butterfly, to only see and use it perversely. But, as Lamar sees it, what’s yet to be widely understood is that the caterpillar and the butterfly are one. What might Tupac—or Tupac’s devotees—make of that? Tupac?

With this question a gift of spirit’s been set in motion and a site is made ready and available for all takers. Perhaps the form of life Lamar conjures here, will somehow inform our own. "Everything’s bullshit but the open hand," Bruce Cockburn once sang. And Lamar’s hands are open. Perhaps, on the lower frequencies, he speaks for you.

David Dark is the author of The Sacredness of Questioning Everything. He teaches at Tennessee Prison for Women and the School of Religion at Belmont University.

Yesterday, Rihanna released the latest single, "Bitch Better Have My Money", from her forthcoming new album. We polled Pitchfork contributors about their initial impressions.

Safy-Hallan Farah: On “Better Have My Money”, Rihanna’s voice is scratchy like she smokes Newports, not just blunts. Somehow Rihanna sounds like she simultaneously has run out of fucks to give and cares so much she’s coughing up blood. This is that song you listen to in the line at the financial aid office, or if you’re parked outside the house of a person who owes you at least a stack. Other optimum listening scenarios include while doing your invoices or protesting the government for your 40 acres and a Bugatti.

“Better Have My Money” is 37 exits south of Stay in Your Lane for Ri-Ri BUT I LOVE IT. Before I heard “Better Have My Money”, this was my reparations anthem: 

All I’m saying is DON’T play “Better Have My Money” at a Migos concert to warm up the crowd. DON’T play this at your family cookout this summer; that’s just instigating. And DON’T play this at the club either because anyone guilty of owing money will be too shook to dance. Please listen responsibly!

Jayson Greene: Yeah, Safy, I have always loved her voice when she lets it fray and get raspy.  I remember realizing, when she performed "We Found Love" at the MTV Awards in 2012, how much character she had in that range. It came as a little revelation, because up until then part of her energy and power as a pop star derived from her voice, which is almost inhumanly even and powerful. Like, the chorus of "Only Girl in the World": The studio version of that song feels like being commanded by someone from atop a mountain. She's still formidable here, and projecting "formidable" feels like the song's reason for existence. The cracks work so well here, like she's battling laryngitis and losing, or like she's at the end of a very long press-junket day and is hollering anyway.

Molly Beauchemin: First of all, look at the incredible artwork— those eyebrows that burn holes in your soul, the chandelier earrings and bucket-slick hair. This is an obvious Frida Kahlo reference: a dark, powerfully feminine reference. The shadowy color palette and the way she’s angled with the camera make it look like its an Edward S. Curtis portrait, so I think that from a purely aesthetic perspective this is indisputably the most fire artwork Rihanna has ever put out—let’s hope it’s the album cover; its so singular and direct, like Patti Smith’s Horses engineered for a new era. 

Which brings me to the real point of this single: Rihanna is rapping! And it sounds good! Like she's stepping to the Game of all the boys in her league and stealing the show. "Your wife in the backseat of my foreign car"—hooooBOY, that is a fire lyric; that shit makes me wanna pull the fire alarm and whip my towel in the air like I just witnessed a filthy dunk during the NBA All Star Game. I would love to see her rap more often, and not just as a one-off like Beyonce on her "Flawless" remix with Nicki Minaj. 

Anupa Mistry: FINANCIAL ADVISORIH! I’ve absorbed reams of financial wisdom from Rihanna over the years, and yet here I am waiting on outstanding checks (@AllMyEditors). “Bitch Better Have My Money,” which functions as both drinking anthem and summons, quells some of the outrage: invoicing’s wack, even when you’re getting that DreamWorks money. 

Rihanna been knowing. On “Lemme Get That,” from Good Girl Gone Bad she preaches: “A girl need a lot, the girl need some stocks, bonds is what I got, BONDS IS WHAT I GOT.” And on her last album, 2012’s Unapologetic, having scaled bad bitchdom: “I’m fucking your cheap thrill, on top of my 50 mill’,” before the full sensory: “My fragrance on and they love my smell — I still got more money.”

I didn’t realize how much this messaging—women and girls being financially solvent, minus the moralizing—was absent until rewatching Working Girl, an Oscar-nominated 1988 film about a brilliant Wall Street secretary (Melanie Griffith) who gets played by her idea-stealing boss (Sigourney Weaver). Mel starts off apprehensive but is scene-stealing as an alpha, like purring this Riri-worthy lyric to a potential partner, “I have a head for business, and a bod for sin. Is there anything wrong with that?”

Girl power is dead. Who else has spent near a decade reminding today’s women that in a capitalist patriarchal society the best way to survive is to do you and get your own?

Meaghan Garvey: As anyone who has spent significant time freelancing is painfully aware, asking for money you are owed fucking suuuuuuucks. Typing my third, fourth, whatever follow-up email of “Hey there! Hope all is well! Just wanted to see if you’d ever looked into that check from four months ago. Thanks sooooo much! :)” A smiley face? A god damn smiley face! I got better at this stuff, as one does, but it’s still an act that requires a few minutes of pep talk, maybe involving a Nicki verse rapped quietly in the mirror or a GIF of Rihanna doing her little finger-shotgun dance. Look at these bad ass women: would Rihanna whimper like a fucking Teletubby when asking for money for which she worked her ass off? I'd already assumed the answer was an emphatic “fuck that,” but now it is official. 

Corban Goble: All I have to say is "too soon." Me and Jeff Van Gundy are still mourning Zayn.

 Ernest Wilkins: I'm willing to bet $30 that most reviews of this song will say it's "Kanye influenced" and using some variation of the following words: "trap", "gritty", "brash", "sexy".

Photo by Erez Avissar

How are we supposed to talk about "queer rap", if at all? Is it a scene? A genre? A burgeoning movement? Or, perhaps none of the above? Is this just a case of a handful of incredibly disparate artists unwittingly (some unhappily) being grouped together for the sake of the convenience of labeling? "Labeling something [for it] to be found is sometimes for the betterment of society when it can allow outsiders to gain the ability of looking in," says Contessa "Cunt Mafia" Stuto, who is sometimes categorized this way. With that in mind, it seems an important juncture in our cultural history to at this moment re-evaluate the ways that music created by LGBT artists are consumed and discussed.

Despite the convenience of the label, it’s crucial to reiterate that "queer rap" is not a thing. Of course there is some benefit to emerging, queer artists who are discovered because of their association, but the problem is that certain kinds of classifications absolutely work towards further marginalizing the artists, and relegate them to a kind of sub-altern obscurity. Being a "queer rapper" obfuscates their own personal narratives and the dynamics of their musical output.

Purely for argument's sake, it wouldn't be too hard to make the case for "queer rap" as a musical genre. According to this logic: Queer rap does have an incredibly unique sound, with its own set of slang, linguistic tricks, sonic influences, and cultural image repertoires that often stand out starkly from the rap more regularly heard on the radio or in the hip-hop underground. Many rappers who are queer feel pretty comfortable talking about queer sex in their music, a seemingly still-taboo topic everywhere else. The proclivity for video game references and chiptune-styled synthesizers, the love of Paris Is Burning samples, and borrowings of the beat structures of ballroom music: do these similarities somehow coalesce to form a coherent genre or sub-genre?

This line of reasoning has some unpleasant (if not outright pernicious) results. One would think that appreciating "queer rap" as a genre would perhaps allow for more nuanced evaluations by critics of the music being produced, but, according to Cakes Da Killa, it reaps the opposite result: "I include a lyric booklet with every thing I release. Let's focus on the overall narrative of my work as opposed to a bar where I talk about giving a blow job."

In the three years since Pitchfork posted a look at queer rap as a genre/trend, the LGBT artists featured have popped off; it has only grown easier to identify a new wave of outre artists creating rap and rap-adjacent music. Yet, all the while, the same artists have had to fight consistently with and against their LGBT categorizations, with Zebra Katz most vociferously speaking out against the classification. "I've been against the whole coinage [of the term queer hip-hop] since it happened … I've been trying to work my way outside of that," said Katz to Rosenberg on Hot97. Meanwhile Le1f and Mykki Blanco have rightfully and repeatedly complained about undue comparisons to other LGBT artists, calling out the homophobia of that critical shorthand. Resistance to and suspicion of the label is understandable considering the ways non-white LGBT culture has been borrowed, stolen, appropriated, and transformed by (sometimes well-intentioned) straight white culture for decades. From Madonna's wholesale lifting of vogue to more present-day battles about the invention of vernacular like "shade"—non-white gay culture is seemingly always on the verge of a breakthrough, that is until something more accessible and Macklemorian comes along.

Still, the reason these queer hip hop artists are held up to a different standard has little to do with their generic classification and their talent and way more to do with homophobia and racism. By many metrics, these artists are better than what passes for, ostensibly, their mainstream competition, but their success is not proportional. With all this talk about how to talk about these artists, it's easy to forget the quality and subtleties of the music itself. It's also important to remember that discussions of rap by queer or gay artists tend to be unfairly focused on queer and gay men. Says Contessa Stuto: "These writers are writing pieces that promote patriarchy; when they even interview a female subject it's always about fucking girl power, on the assumption this is a male centered issue [to begin with]." The term "gay" rap in particular usually refers to people identified as male and ignores the vast diversity of sexual identities available (as if sexual identity was a stable category to begin with)—many of the "gay" artists culled into this category barely identify as "gay". In fact, it is this very conundrum that some of these artists are toying with. Rapper Big Dipper comments: "I try to play with gender, to present sometimes feminine looks on my body which is big and burly and hairy, to strip down to underwear—something normally saved for muscle twinks—and to rap honestly about my life." These kinds of genderqueering nuances are lost on audiences who are more interested in the pure shock value, aesthetic audacity, or humor of this brand of art.

In the three years that have passed it's become way easier to talk about these issues now that the supposedly-applicable artists have more considerable (and entirely impressive) bodies of work, many of them veering much more towards the avant-garde than the accessible. From Le1f's somewhat Björkian soundscapes in his Tree House mixtape, to Mykki Blanco's aggressively experimental industrial rap on Gay Dog Food, to Zebra Katz's minimal masterpiece DRKLNG, to Cakes' deeply personal #IMF EP, to Big Momma's hyper-violent and transgressive album The Plague, it might seem hard (if not impossible) to see these works as massively divergent from the narrative of mainstream hip-hop. (The term "art-rap" has been thrown around as an alternative, an unfortunate specification that implies that the rest of rap isn't art.)

The situation puts many gay artists and their audiences in a tough bind. Those who are genuinely interested in the artists must be careful not to fetishize these rappers based on their sexualities, all the while recognizing the artists' ingenuity within the rap genre at large. The artists themselves can and do display righteous indignation when they are addressed in a creepily pejorative or demeaning way, which dampens interest in what becomes unfortunately and incorrectly known as a "scene" too sensitive for its own good. Straights less familiar with radical queer politics (preferred gender pronouns, the ever-changing list of what words are considered derogatory, etc.) could be quickly put off.

That being said, the conversation about "when a gay rapper will achieve mainstream success" is quite simply insulting, and comparisons between gay and straight rap (as if they were two distinct genres) simply don't make sense without implied bigotry. From Cakes, on this point: "What is straight rap? This question is a carry! If I rented you a loft space in gentrified Bushwick would the heat feel any different if I was a straight or gay landlord?" Similarly, the fact that LGBT rappers from a diversity of gender identifications and sexualities can't be talked about without the simultaneous invocation of other non-heterosexual artists speaks to a larger problem in our culture. In the words of rapper Dai Burger: "Straight or gay it's all sexually driven. So long as you got the bars, I’m all ears for it." How, then, is one to balance the desire to both appreciate the complex narrative of a queer artist's life in the scope of their work while simultaneously not relegating them to the role of victim of systematized prejudices?

The best solution to the problem of "gay rap", is to stop thinking about the classification itself and start listening harder to the (often outstanding) quality of the music being produced. Start booking queer artists alongside straight ones and pay them just as much. Ultimately, this is asking listeners to put aside whatever thoughts and feelings they have about queer sexuality, if only momentarily, to better evaluate certain aspects of these works. If that eventually means more thinking about the similarities and differences between texts by queer and straight artists rather than endless condescending comparisons of "fierce" or "brave" gay musicians, so be it. This task seems easier said than done in the almost obsessively taxonomic landscape of the internet, and yet it shouldn't actually be harder to pay more attention to the lyrical content and production values of music created by queer people. Anything else is just bigotry.

Photo by Daniel Cavazos

I drank from two aluminum rocket cans during the music portion of this year's SXSW. One was handed to me by a woman in a bright yellow Lipton T-shirt who had been hired to pass out samples of carbonated iced tea. The other was handed out by QT from the stage at Empire Garage as she performed at PC Music's official showcase.

SXSW is as reknowned for the branding that happens at the festival as it is for its music. This year, McDonald's gave away free hash browns at its very own tent, while Miller Lite was available on the house across the city. These products are free, but not really—they're consumable ads that prime you to actually funnel money toward the brands or products once you return to your real life. It's conditioning designed to look like generosity.

So what happens when you're given a free sample of something you cannot buy?

QT, the project of A.G. Cook, Sophie, and the artist known as Quinn Thomas, perform with shiny cans arranged on clear shelves and stashed in backpacks around the stage. Thomas maintains an active presence on Twitter and Instagram, where she posts selfies with cans of the energy drink, which is also called QT. She identifies as neither man or a woman, rather a transcendental liquid designed to bring peace to those who drink it. At PC Music's SXSW Showcase, Thomas appeared in a silver PVC dress matched to the drink she was there to advertise, a flesh and blood avatar for a product that doesn't actually exist.

QT is not the only PC Music project to engage the aesthetics of branding, but it is the most agressive of the lot. During the SXSW showcase's first time slot, easyFun performed with video projections resembling airline ads glowing on the screen behind him. Flight attendants smiled and tropical beaches sprawled white for miles while he mixed together a set of his bright, buoyant music. Later, Lil Data played against a backdrop of banal visualizations of the Internet, akin to a powerpoint you'd expect to see at a SXSW Interactive panel on "The Future of Connectivity."

PC Music utilizes the banality and omniscience of branding as an aesthetic tool the way punks deploy teenage agression; it's fundamental to the work. Its artists have hijacked the familiar hooks of advertising—fast, feminine voices that demand connection, bright colors, catchy jingles. The few photos of the English netlabel's artists appear synthetic and pristine; for her album art, Hannah Diamond poses against solid colors in a depthless space, her skin airbrushed to perfection.

When Quinn Thomas appeared onstage to perform QT's only song, she held her cell phone over her mouth and mimed along to a prerecorded bit about a mystery caller interrupting her meditations on how to brand the energy drink. Then she lip-synched and danced along to "Hey QT", the drink's jingle cum single, while cheerfully distributing cans to the audience. I got to hold and sip one. It's a sugar-free beverage that tastes like Red Bull, only a little more tart. There's an ingredient list on the side, along with nutrition facts and a purple bar code that may or may not scan into any database.

The collusion of organic culture and forceful branding has long grated SXSW attendees hoping for something akin to an authentic music experience. It also plagues social media; archives like "Brands Saying Bae" collect instances of faceless multinationals absorbing urban slang into their advertising lexicon, or trading in "feels" on Tumblr. The uncanny valley yawns into a vast chasm when Denny's tweets about "hashbrowns on fleek," in attempt to court virality and bond with consumers via social media. The "bae" tweets and the like are easy to mock, but they wouldn't keep happening if they didn't work.

PC Music operates on much the same mechanism, but throws it into reverse; their critique of late capitalism is more a respite from its aggression. The music's pleasurable in the way advertising is designed to be pleasurable, but you never get milked--or not in the way we anticipate. You cannot buy PC Music. A few of Sophie's singles can be purchased on iTunes, and "Hey QT" is slated for an official release in May, but that's it. I saw plenty of audience members wearing clothing with PC Music logos on it in the crowd at SXSW. They had all made it themselves—there is no merch from the label. There is only a love of the music, and what it inspires people to do.

Photo by Jamelle Bouie

Sometimes softball questions can be the most revealing ones.

At the end of an interview last Tuesday on CBS This Morning, anchor Gayle King asked newly-minted Republican presidential candidate Senator Ted Cruz a pop-culture question. It’s the kind candidates get asked occasionally as an afterthought or lighthearted way to end an interview. Every little thing means something in the hyper-scrutinizing world of politics, but pop-culture topics are usually reserved for Rolling Stone interviews. In network TV and political news, it hardly comes up.

"What do you do for fun?" King asked. Namely, what music kind of music are you listening to? Both President Barack Obama and former Gov. Mitt Romney were asked questions like this as candidates well into 2012 election season. Cruz, being the first major candidate to announce, got it out of the way early.

This is why softball questions can be the most revealing. And Cruz’s unintentional reveal was really something.

"I grew up listening to classic rock and I’ll tell you sort of an odd story," Cruz said. "My music taste changed on 9/11. And it’s a very strange… I actually, intellectually find this very curious, but 9/11… I didn’t like how rock music responded, and country music collectively, the way they responded, it resonated with me, and I have to say it, just as a gut level, I had an emotional reaction that says, ‘These are my people.’"

If you’ll forgive a little political scrutiny mixed in with your music criticism, that is very curious. Pop culture questions—while they might seem trivial or out-of-place—work as an implicit gauge of a candidate’s cultural compass. The answers can even point to their intellectual frame of reference—say, generationally—as a potential leader. If nothing else, it’s a rare question that candidates can answer sincerely without they or their staff feeling like they have to calculate too much—a question they don’t feel pressed about, maybe. Sure, it was probably a calculated answer to appeal to the Republican/Tea Party base that Cruz has so successfully pandered to. Country music speaks—at least stereotypically—to that base. He’s looking to get nominated. Whatever.

But what Cruz said was also telling, mirroring a growing cultural split among conservative—not between Republicans and Tea Partiers, so much—but generationally and between authoritarians and libertarians. To be sure, our listening doesn’t always line up with our political beliefs (or ambitions, in this case). Lately, there’s been a curious trend of young Republican political stars listening to rebellious music and blithely ignoring the actual lyrical message. Sen. Marco Rubio, another potential presidential contender for the GOP, is an avowed fan of Public Enemy. Romney's 2012 running mate Rep. Paul Ryan loves Rage Against the Machine. Rep. Ryan and Sen. Rubio don’t seem to mind their lyrics. Sen. Cruz's answer indicates he did mind rock music’s lyrics—what they did or didn’t say/imply politically—after 9/11. He didn’t like rock music’s tepid post-9/11 response, preferring country’s bombastic one.

But what Cruz is missing out on is the conservative takeover of mainstream rock.
 

When did conservatives steal rock'n'roll from us?

After 9/11, rock music never really got its political feet back under it. On the day, rock radio opted for inspirational songs like U2’s "Beautiful Day" and later the wistful "Walk On". Incubus’ mellow hit "Drive" was ubiquitous for its chin-up chorus, "Whatever tomorrow brings, I’ll be there/ With open arms and open eyes."

As the days and weeks wore on, any radio-rock bands that could’ve been conduits for important political dissent were notably squelched. Having disbanded in 2000, Rage Against the Machine’s entire discography was de facto banned from Clear Channel-owned radio stations indefinitely. System of a Down’s "Chop Suey!", the lead single off its 2001 LP Toxicity, was on that list, too, with its chorus of "self-righteous suicide."Toxicity—with album cuts like "Jet Pilot" and informed by a clearly Armenian-American perspective—would end up debuting at number one on the Billboard album charts that fateful Tuesday. The invective toward System of a Down online was likely the first knee-jerk manifestation of Islamophobia in American music post-9/11. Regardless, neither band cut 9/11 response or anti-Iraq War songs.

As the months wore on into 2002, rock had the odd dissenters. Disturbed’s single "Prayer" off Believe criticized Christian leaders—by name, at times—and organized religion overall for using 9/11 as a source of demagoguery. The band didn’t toe the Support the Troops line its radio-rock peers 3 Doors Down and Linkin Park did. Disturbed pointed fingers in its music while Rage Against the Machine’s Zack de la Rocha and Tom Morello spoke their piece. System of a Down’s Serj Tankian took a gentler approach in an essay called "Understanding Oil," asking for context, peace and togetherness while about to embark on a U.S. tour called—shit you not—The Pledge of Allegiance Tour. They were noble efforts, but country artists had gained control of the post-9/11 American zeitgeist.

There’s an irony in that. Rock artists were some of the most openly patriotic and of service after 9/11, they just weren’t dicks about it. Except for maybe Kid Rock who, surprising absolutely no one, was a dick about it. In terms of sheer enthusiasm, he led rock’s patriotic post-9/11/pro-Iraq War response, doubling down on his "American Badass" jingoism. The network-TV telethon response was predominantly rock and pop artists who led massive fundraising efforts. America: A Tribute to Heroes and The Concert for New York City were a Who’s Who of mostly rock musicians. And they were acknowledged—barely, momentarily—over country’s screaming "God Bless the U.S.A." squall. Indeed, mainstream rock seemed largely inert or perfunctory in its response, at least in comparison to country, falling short on anything truly rocking the boat. Certainly in terms of protest, 40 years after the first anti-war/pro-civil rights songs of the '60s, rock choked.

Neil Young, a legend of the era, seemed to flip flop after 9/11. Young took up the mantle of patriotism—tempered by his signature plainspoken storytelling and apolitical empathy—with his 2001 song "Let’s Roll", released just months after the attack, later re-releasing it on his 2002 LP Are You Passionate? It took him about five years more to cut an anti-Bush protest song, "Let’s Impeach the President", for 2006’s Living With War.

It raises the question, then, what the heck happened to rock'n'roll? What made it so afraid of its lefty protest roots after 9/11 and during the 2003 Iraq War, when America needed it most? You could start with New York Times pop critic Kelefa Sanneh, who wrote the first mainstream inventory and condemnation of Rockism, exposing the parochial—even patriarchal—roots of modern rock'n'roll. In 2004, Patton Oswalt asked condemningly, "When did conservatives steal rock'n'roll from us?!" on his comedy special No Reason to Complain. In a bit on his love-hate relationship with National Public Radio, Oswalt critiques and inventories the music and culture behind conservative and liberal news media.

"All the AM stations, with nothing but racist, fascist douchebags, all their break music is this blasty-ass, gut-bucket rock'n'roll!” he laments, begging NPR to "play some Zeppelin, for God’s sake!"

One of those racist fascist douchebags, Glenn Beck, ran into some trouble with English rock band Muse. Beck played, endorsed and even recited the lyrics to the band’s hit single "Uprising" in 2009 on The Glenn Beck Program, calling them "one of his favorite bands."

There are plenty of examples of rock’s rising conservative cultural ownership after 9/11. But the Beck/Muse feud is particularly telling. Since 9/11, the English band has been the only new (well, new to the U.S.) rock band making bold political statements with a global, or at least transatlantic, audience. It’s only fitting that the band’s political spectacle arguably peaked in 2009, a year of global economic recession. It led The Resistance to capture the zeitgeist: a crisis of confidence in governments, leaders, banks, etc.

And there, in conservative America, was Glenn Beck right alongside them. Beck and Muse singer/guitarist Matthew Bellamy were put on a pop-cultural collision course that seems inevitable in hindsight. By their own admission, they’re both libertariantypes, but on opposing ends of a liberal-conservative spectrum. Any common ground they could’ve shared was spoiled by their public back-and-forth over a kind of ownership of Muse’s music.

It’s one of the more recent demonstrations of a sad truth: rock is more co-opted by conservatives than ever today. A listener is more likely to hear lead rock guitar in break music on an AM talk radio station than a top 40 FM one. The lefty protest songs of '60s classic rock have become a mere memory of youth to the Baby Boomers, who grew in age and into more conservative values. Hell, Republicans can openly be fans of the Doors now, apparently.

Yet, rock’s overall relevance didn’t wane immediately after 9/11. It just wasn’t with protest songs anymore. Instead, the genre looked inward, in a scene located too close to Ground Zero for its comfort. The scene was blooming in downtown Manhattan, predating the Brooklyn boom. The island was captive, at an eerie standstill in the days following 9/11, so the kids downtown found comfort in the brat-punk discontent of rock'n'roll like the Strokes' 2001 debut Is This It. And even there, no political songs took root. "New York City Cops", the band’s closest thing to a protest song, was cut by RCA Records due to post-9/11 sensitivities, leaving the rest of the record in a fit of lyrics about girls and nostalgia. It left Is This It to play as a blissful retro escape of post-9/11 rigors for New York and, in time, the rest of the nation.

The downtown scene’s heartfelt response came in 2002, courtesy of Interpol's post-9/11 triumph of the maudlin, Turn on the Bright Lights. Written before 9/11 and recorded afterward, it captured the city’s zeitgeist in shadows, romance and Dadaist lyrics. "For a few short weeks in New York, everybody was your best friend," Interpol drummer Sam Fogarino told Pitchfork. "Everybody had your back. Everybody held the door for each other."

Rock'n'roll wasn’t interested in protest songs. As the years after 9/11 went on, rock continued to turn inward, falling into an apolitical oblivion of angst, genre revivals, retooled cliches and nostalgia. Any sense of dangerous youthful rebellion rock once had would slowly migrate toward electronic music, culminating in American EDM about a decade later. Rock would come to rely largely on legacy acts—commercially and artistically—for relevance. Much like conservatives do for their ideas.

Senator Cruz missed all this, apparently. He concluded the CBS interview saying, "I’m an odd country music fan." Maybe he should consider returning to the fold.

You could easily substantiate that 1992 was a banner year for the original wave of noise rock: The Jesus Lizard’s Liar, Babes in Toyland’s Fontanelle, the Melvins’ Lysol, Helmet’s Meantime, the Cows’ Cunning Stunts, the Pain Teens’ Stimulation Festival, Tar’s Toast, and Today Is the Day’s Supernova all appeared within the same 12 month timeframe. So did the debut recordings by Austin, Tex., trio Cherubs, "Pink Party Desert" 7” and full-length bruiser Icing, but these titles (released in quick succession by Trance Syndicate Records) didn’t yet measure up to the type of (sub-genre) transcendent fare—but that was about to change.

In mid-1994, guitarist Kevin Whitley (formerly of Ed Hall), bassist Owen McMahon, and drummer Brent Pager found themselves in a pre-show fist fight that would break up the band. Trance Syndicate was preparing to issue the sophomore effort, Heroin Man, an album merely hinted at by the connective tissue of 7”s released since the debut, but one that would deservedly seed a cult of fans and become a cross-genre inspiration for the next two decades of heavy music.

A band breaking up as, say, its records are about to ship back from the pressing plant, has become the Conrad Bain of an independent label’s existence. Trance Syndicate was founded in 1990 by Butthole Surfers drummer King Coffey as follow-through for a New Year’s resolution. The label would launch or oversee the discographies of Bedhead, Sixteen Deluxe, American Analog Set, Windsor for the Derby, as well as …And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead. But its first few years of shepherding the sounds of the Cherubs, Crust, johnboy, Pain Teens, Ed Hall, Crunt, and Distorted Pony into the world made Trance the Texan answer to Amphetamine Reptile—the veritable home base of the American noise scene.

Titled Heroin Man, Cherubs' second album featured a dead man face-down floating in a dirty bathtub. It was downright ridiculous, and even within the transgressive realm of noise, bordered on tasteless—the previous few years had seen a spate of drug deaths in the community. The album and its themes were the Cherubs’ act of mourning the overdose death of their close friend, Dave DeLuna. Instead of McMahon’s gruff Aggro 101 bark-bark vocals that had dominated Icing, this album had Whitley handling vocals. This was a key factor in Heroin Man’s superiority over not just the first album, but 95% of the bloating genre of caustic, guitar-drive noise rock. With this album the Cherubs had perfected something that broke free of the boundaries firmly set in place by the band’s chosen mini-movement: the noisiest pop music on the planet.

Opener "Stag Party" is one of two tracks built atop a sample of an irritating noise (the now arcane sound of a busy signal), but the first thing that hits the listener over the head is the overwhelming mountain of bulldozing sonic nastiness this band somehow conjured out of its instruments. Heroin Man was exponentially more dense and intense than the majority of what came out of the original noise rock era. It’s hotter-than-hot mix was a middle finger to the redline; it was "lo-fi" but mountainous at the same time. The hooks carry Heroin Man through its 50 minutes of chaos, a stone cold classic that would take on a life of its own as the Cherubs dissolved. Two years post facto, Trance released the Short of Popular collection; a 49-minute odds and ends CD made up of songs tossed from the Heroin Man sessions and cherry-picked brilliance across the 7” and compilation formats. It was like a Singles Going Steady of noise rock—and was as crucial to the Cherubs' legacy as the proper album that preceded it.

Like many other somewhat definable subsections of the '86–'96 underground rock zeitgeist, noise rock has seen the word "revival" slapped onto it at five different intervals in the last decade. So it is 10 years into this "revival" that the original Cherubs lineup reform (last summer), and belying the early message board rumors about a reissue campaign, announced their plans to start recording a proper third album. Maybe they felt the need to record a follow up to an album that was now commanding $200-$300 on vinyl.

You can’t call the Cherubs' comeback "long awaited" because no one saw it coming. 2 Ynfynyty was released on March 3rd (and the vinyl followed last week) by heavy music fighters-of-the-good-fight, Brutal Panda Records. They didn’t make an album that could have come right after Heroin Man, nor does it sound like the last 20 years never happened—though that’s passing as the common review sentiment. This is a work of modern day noise rock minus the revivalist baggage. 2 Ynfynyty feels like the last 20 years did happen and the Cherubs were paying close attention—though whether they were or not is easily debatable. If by some weird turn of events it was revealed that the band secretly recorded and shelved 10 albums between 1995 and 2013, 2 Ynfynyty would make more sense. Few '90s band reunions in the last decade-plus ever seemed to be about anything but cashing in and cashing out, but the Cherubs have returned with an album that shows why they were so worthy of our attentions in the first place.

This is an excerpt from The Pitchfork Review Issue Five, which is available now through the magazine's website and select retailers. Get your subscription here. Illustration by Meaghan Garvey

"Express Yourself" was N.W.A’s obvious shot at radio airplay. There was no cursing in the verses to censor, and rhythmic cacophony was replaced by a loop of the indelibly funky 1971 hit of the same name by Charles Wright and the 103rd St. Watts Band, a pinnacle of the era’s socially conscious soul music. Using the communicative capital inherited from the fiery rhetoric of the Black Power movement, N.W.A sought to use the relative optimism of "Express Yourself" to rend a hole in the firewall around mainstream media, allowing their otherwise dark vision of Compton life to seep through. "There’s a lotta brothers out there flakin’ and perpetratin’, but scared to kick reality," Dr. Dre plainly tells Ice Cube, framing the song’s message before the beat kicks in.

Reality. In 1988, that word—that concept of what is—was just beginning a seismic semantic split, blazing a new definitional pathway that signified not merely ontology but a new form of televisuality. A decade or so before "Survivor" and "Big Brother", and a few years before even "The Real World", reality congealed as a programming format to describe the proliferation of "true crime" telecasts after the runaway success of "COPS" and "America’s Most Wanted". In their representations of American law and order, these shows sided with state authority, working closely with and for American law enforcement to create inexpensive, incredibly popular entertainment programming for the fledgling Fox network, which had launched only two years earlier. They were cheap to produce for the same reasons that audiences flocked to them: "COPS"’ video-verite squad-car ridealongs captured rubberneckers and voyeurs, and "AMW"’s stylized crime recreations and audience-participation structure drew the amateur sleuths and do-gooders.

"Reality is often ironically difficult to capture because it is unstructured, unpredictable, and unscripted," "COPS" co-creator John Langley once said about his program. In his own way, he was implying why other producers and networks were, in a way, "scared to kick reality." Clearly, Dr. Dre wasn’t specifically talking about reality television on "Express Yourself", nor was Ice Cube when he sampled the KRS-One lyric "It’s not about a salary/ It’s all about reality" for Compton track "Gangsta Gangsta". But they were drawing from the same semantic well as Langley and the rest of Fox’s true-crime programming gurus. From opposite ends of the American-entertainment power spectrum, both "COPS" and N.W.A were depicting a vision of American law and order at the end of a decade marked by Ronald Reagan’s Draconian policies on poverty, drugs, and violent crime. To Reagan, such issues were not products of deep infrastructural problems, but social blights to eliminate, thereby improving conditions for the privileged. The metaphor was war, and it shaped television-programming decisions and rap productions alike.

With Straight Outta Compton, N.W.A instigated for rap’s ascent to pop-culture ubiquity a still-active thread of controversy about the connection between rap lyrics and the lived realities of urban black citizens. Before N.W.A, threats of violence on the mic were metaphors for skills on the mic. After N.W.A, the controversies surrounding rap started falling in two camps, as rappers struggled to negotiate the pressures and expectations of a rapidly maturing form of pop music. There were concerns of origin (the authenticity debate—are they "real"?) and of the music’s perceived effects (the morality debate about rappers as terrible role models). But what if rap lyrics, musical production, and promotional imagery weren’t bifurcated along these lines? What if the gangsta rap that N.W.A pioneered wasn’t filtered through authenticity or morality, but through an entertainment format known as reality?

They had a lot of raw material to work with. The bounds of televisual objectivity were being stretched beyond recognition in the late 1980s—lines between public-interest reportage and simple tabloid shock were being blurred. N.W.A came up during the "Donahue" and "Geraldo" moment, which—in the wake of "The Morton Downey Jr. Show"’s 1987 to '89 run—reimagined public-affairs talk-show programming as an incendiary cocktail of racial and class tensions. (On 1992’s The Predator, Ice Cube would chop up Louis Farrakhan’s notorious "Donohue" appearance into an interstitial bit of media commentary.) At the same time, VHS and Hi-8 Handycam camcorders proliferated like Polaroid cameras had a generation before, transforming private activities into network-television entertainment. ("America’s Funniest Home Videos" debuted in November 1989.) More importantly for black citizens’ interactions with police, camcorders promised to democratize surveillance, and could transform awareness of unseen abuses of power. Ideally, cheap video cameras might objectively prove the reality "Fuck tha Police" poetically raged against.

Through Straight Outta Compton, gangsta rap was nurtured in a city with a notorious history of de jure segregation, patches of peaceful suburban living, and a lengthy, dismal post-industrial employment drought that, for some, made crack and crime lucrative employment options. In his 1990 book City of Quartz, Mike Davis dubbed LA "the carcereal city," in which surveillance of the ethnic underclasses was built into the architecture and city-planning and patrolled by a militaristic police force seeking to maintain peace for the middle and upper-classes. Gangsta rap also came of age in the shadow of Hollywood, the world’s largest and most powerful creator of myths. This combination of factors underlines the difference between N.W.A’s hard-rap predecessors and Straight Outta Compton. Reality, that emergent mixture of objective reportage and tabloid shock, perfectly complemented N.W.A.’s dark, violent impression of their part of the world—one that was ignored by the mass media, but constantly surveilled by the police.

No matter their middle-class upbringings and celebrity aspirations—only Eazy had banged to any meaningful degree, via a loose affiliation with the Kelly Park Crips—the fact remained that N.W.A. grew up amidst a war between people who looked like them and police who didn’t, provided the creative fuel for their gangsta performance—observation plus confrontation. As Dan Charnas recounts in his book The Big Payback, "they had all grown up around gangs and guns—in South Central, that was reality." So when the group’s early mentor Lonzo Williams ran into Dre and Eazy buying guns at L.A.’s Carson Mall, he was shocked, and asked them what was going on. Their response was plain: they were going on their first tour. "Dre, Eazy, and Cube were turning that reality into theater, and now that theater was becoming real, too," Charnas explains. "Of course they were buying guns. Everywhere they went now, real gangsters were trying to test them." Their manager Jerry Heller wrote the purchases off as a business expense—to the IRS, they were "stage props."

For many observers, this ontological cocktail—part documentary, part Alice Cooper—made no sense. In a 1990 feature for the Source, rap journalist David Mills claimed that N.W.A’s shock tactics eradicated their claims to represent "the strength of street knowledge." That’s true, though only if rap is viewed through the journalistic convention of objectivity. By freely mixing hard-’hood realities with creative, cocksure fictions traceable back to the blues, N.W.A took rap through the same reality looking-glass that "COPS" and "America’s Most Wanted" were doing for TV’s primarily white audiences seeking a fresh view of American law and order. For N.W.A and the early solo careers of Ice Cube and Dr. Dre, reality gave them a chance to symbolically stand behind the lens of the camera and rifle scope, instead of serving as their targets.

Illustration by Meaghan Garvey

If you call 773-779-5683, it’ll ring, then: "Sorry, the mailbox is full, and there is not enough space to leave a message." It’s been that way since August 2012, when Late Nights with Jeremih fell from the sky and became the quintessential R&B project of the 2010s. "Won’t you call 773-779-LOVE?" Jeremih Felton sweetly requested on the Mike WiLL-produced ode to Chicago’s area code, "773 Love". And I have, every six months or so since—just to check, though nothing different has happened yet. Apparently it’s some poor woman’s land line; when I spoke with Jeremih late last summer, as he prepared for the initial September release date of Late Nights: The Album, he said he’d made several offers to buy the number off her, but she declined. You have to wonder what’s in it for her, screening calls from thirsty fans for two and a half years, her voicemail totally fucked, gathering dust. It’s not far off from the fate of Late Nights: The Album, his third for Def Jam, the release date of which was pushed back to November, then shrugged off altogether.

In January, Jeremih tweeted a SoundCloud link to his new single, "Planes", responding to a leak of an unfinished version. Within minutes, the link had disappeared, suggesting the tensions between Jeremih and his label were still unresolved. It’s meant to be the album intro, as he explained it back in July, and a woman’s voice references Thumpy Johnson, the album’s intended title when it was announced back in 2013. Still, it’s gorgeous, with a beat from Boi-1da protege Vinylz that sounds like light piercing through clouds, the exact kind of diaphanous canvas Jeremih needs to thrive. Ignore the unmentionable J. Cole verse—better yet, dream of a world where the original version featuring Chance the Rapper wasn’t too much of a "gamble"—and it’s one of the best R&B songs of the year.

So what gives? There is no viable reason Def Jam should be so gun-shy with Late Nights: The Album. Its first single "Don’t Tell ‘Em", released almost a year ago, became the third platinum-certified single of his career before it even got a music video. At Sunday’s iHeartRadio Music Awards, the YG-featuring hit beat two Beyoncé songs and two Chris Brown songs (I dunno, man) to win Hip Hop/R&B Song of the Year—a baffling category at a presumably made-up awards show, but still! You’d never know Jeremih was stuck in label purgatory based on his success as a featured vocalist in the past year. He was all over The Pinkprint, featured on 2014 singles from French Montana, Wale, and DJ Khaled, and is currently charting for his contributions to Dutch newcomer Natalie La Rose’s breakout single "Somebody", which is as endearing as a song containing an interpolative fusion of Whitney Houston and LMFAO is allowed to be on general principle. He still manages to pop up on smaller-scale records from hometown heroes, too—Tink’s stellar "Don’t Tell Nobody", still unreleased, or Lil Durk’s latest "Like Me".

The "773 Love" stuff isn’t just to be cute: Chicago has been Jeremih’s foundation since day one. "Birthday Sex" was buzzing locally before Def Jam scooped him up in 2009, initially premiering on WGCI the year before; even R. Kelly did an unofficial remix. But when Late Nights dropped—a free 18-track mixtape, unannounced (before it was cool) and hosted by DJ Drama and Kanye’s old pal DJ Pharris—the city felt like it was buzzing with a new energy, only intensifying the restless mischief that hangs over the last stretch of Summertime Chi. At my regular nail spot in Pilsen, it would play in full as I overheard women gossiping about how they knew Jeremih’s girlfriend. 2012 had already proven to be a landmark year for Chicago rap, but I hadn’t felt so hopeful about Chicago R&B in ages.

The cult of Late Nights built slowly. A lot of the adoration has been retroactive; Jeremih fandom on Internet media didn’t seem to fully percolate until his Shlohmo collaboration, "Bo Peep", in early 2013. Most initial responses went something like, "Lol, the ‘Birthday Sex’ dude?" Jeremih’s 2009 debut single was easily his most recognizable, but it’s been more of a curse than anything. The gist: "Hey girl, happy birthday. I know you wanted flowers or cake or any sign of effort on my behalf, but instead I got you this dick and some crappy metaphors about boxing. Enjoy!" The song is catchy but dumb on a timeless, all-encompassing level—so dumb it will inevitably last forever on this wack earth where men will always suck and birthdays will keep happening until you die—and Jeremih knew it from the jump. In a candid Billboard feature this winter, he disowned his stifling early career: "It never felt right. ‘Down On Me’ can’t showcase my true talent. ‘Birthday Sex’ was robotic." And he’s been saying that stuff all along, though a little more politely. In a 2009 interview with MTV, he was already diverting attention from the hit. "I wouldn’t say it’s my favorite song on the album," he demurred. "It just was chosen first."

Keep in mind that this is a guy, now 27, who’s been playing drums since he was three, teaching himself rhythm by playing along with the radio. He took up saxophone and piano and branched out percussion-wise to congas and timbales, switching between his South Side high school’s Latin jazz and marching bands before graduating early at 16. He didn’t even realize he could sing til college, which could begin to explain the unshowy nature of his voice. Late Nights, Jeremih’s quiet rebellion against major label suffocation, landed smack in the middle of a year marked by blockbuster releases from R&B auteurs. That’s not Jeremih’s game—nor, thankfully, is the "alternative R&B" lane, as demonstrated by No More, his underwhelming collaborative EP with Shlohmo last year. At his best, he operates within the same narrow intersection of radio trends and more graceful compositional impulses as Ty Dolla $ign, another highly-trained purveyor of high-end ratchet-&-b. But Ty’s worked his way from behind the scenes into radio ubiquity; Jeremih’s working in reverse.

It’s easy to place blame on Def Jam for serially mishandling Jeremih’s career, but he’s not faultless himself. There was the Fuddrucker’s incident last November, where he and his touring entourage reportedly caused $700 worth of damage to a Billings, Mont. restaurant; a month later, he was charged with disorderly conduct for attempting to break on board a departing flight. But he’s admitted that the drama was a direct manifestation of the emotional turmoil from an ongoing court case with his two year old son’s mother. The trial ended in his favor, and he seems ready to do this thing for real. It doesn’t take much more than flipping on the radio in the past year to prove that Jeremih is indisputably A Thing by now, and the never entirely accurate "one hit wonder" designation has been officially put to bed. But as Jeremih waits for Def Jam’s signal, Chris Brown, Kid Ink, and Omarion are cashing out on the slick, '90s-nodding Nic Nac/DJ Mustard sounds dominating dude-R&B that Jeremih pulled off flawlessly on "Don’t Tell ‘Em". All we’re waiting on now is Def Jam—who have yet to set a Late Nights: The Album release date but managed to release two aggressively average Rick Ross LPs in 2014—to get the memo. Maybe their voicemail’s full.

Photo by Erez Avissar

How are we supposed to talk about "queer rap", if at all? Is it a scene? A genre? A burgeoning movement? Or, perhaps none of the above? Is this just a case of a handful of incredibly disparate artists unwittingly (some unhappily) being grouped together for the sake of the convenience of labeling? "Labeling something [for it] to be found is sometimes for the betterment of society when it can allow outsiders to gain the ability of looking in," says Contessa "Cunt Mafia" Stuto, who is sometimes categorized this way. With that in mind, it seems an important juncture in our cultural history to at this moment re-evaluate the ways that music created by LGBT artists are consumed and discussed.

Despite the convenience of the label, it’s crucial to reiterate that "queer rap" is not a thing. Of course there is some benefit to emerging, queer artists who are discovered because of their association, but the problem is that certain kinds of classifications absolutely work towards further marginalizing the artists, and relegate them to a kind of sub-altern obscurity. Being a "queer rapper" obfuscates their own personal narratives and the dynamics of their musical output.

Purely for argument's sake, it wouldn't be too hard to make the case for "queer rap" as a musical genre. According to this logic: Queer rap does have an incredibly unique sound, with its own set of slang, linguistic tricks, sonic influences, and cultural image repertoires that often stand out starkly from the rap more regularly heard on the radio or in the hip-hop underground. Many rappers who are queer feel pretty comfortable talking about queer sex in their music, a seemingly still-taboo topic everywhere else. The proclivity for video game references and chiptune-styled synthesizers, the love of Paris Is Burning samples, and borrowings of the beat structures of ballroom music: do these similarities somehow coalesce to form a coherent genre or sub-genre?

This line of reasoning has some unpleasant (if not outright pernicious) results. One would think that appreciating "queer rap" as a genre would perhaps allow for more nuanced evaluations by critics of the music being produced, but, according to Cakes Da Killa, it reaps the opposite result: "I include a lyric booklet with every thing I release. Let's focus on the overall narrative of my work as opposed to a bar where I talk about giving a blow job."

In the three years since Pitchfork posted a look at queer rap as a genre/trend, the LGBT artists featured have popped off; it has only grown easier to identify a new wave of outre artists creating rap and rap-adjacent music. Yet, all the while, the same artists have had to fight consistently with and against their LGBT categorizations, with Zebra Katz most vociferously speaking out against the classification. "I've been against the whole coinage [of the term queer hip-hop] since it happened … I've been trying to work my way outside of that," said Katz to Rosenberg on Hot97. Meanwhile Le1f and Mykki Blanco have rightfully and repeatedly complained about undue comparisons to other LGBT artists, calling out the homophobia of that critical shorthand. Resistance to and suspicion of the label is understandable considering the ways non-white LGBT culture has been borrowed, stolen, appropriated, and transformed by (sometimes well-intentioned) straight white culture for decades. From Madonna's wholesale lifting of vogue to more present-day battles about the invention of vernacular like "shade"—non-white gay culture is seemingly always on the verge of a breakthrough, that is until something more accessible and Macklemorian comes along.

Still, the reason these queer hip hop artists are held up to a different standard has little to do with their generic classification and their talent and way more to do with homophobia and racism. By many metrics, these artists are better than what passes for, ostensibly, their mainstream competition, but their success is not proportional. With all this talk about how to talk about these artists, it's easy to forget the quality and subtleties of the music itself. It's also important to remember that discussions of rap by queer or gay artists tend to be unfairly focused on queer and gay men. Says Contessa Stuto: "These writers are writing pieces that promote patriarchy; when they even interview a female subject it's always about fucking girl power, on the assumption this is a male centered issue [to begin with]." The term "gay" rap in particular usually refers to people identified as male and ignores the vast diversity of sexual identities available (as if sexual identity was a stable category to begin with)—many of the "gay" artists culled into this category barely identify as "gay". In fact, it is this very conundrum that some of these artists are toying with. Rapper Big Dipper comments: "I try to play with gender, to present sometimes feminine looks on my body which is big and burly and hairy, to strip down to underwear—something normally saved for muscle twinks—and to rap honestly about my life." These kinds of genderqueering nuances are lost on audiences who are more interested in the pure shock value, aesthetic audacity, or humor of this brand of art.

In the three years that have passed it's become way easier to talk about these issues now that the supposedly-applicable artists have more considerable (and entirely impressive) bodies of work, many of them veering much more towards the avant-garde than the accessible. From Le1f's somewhat Björkian soundscapes in his Tree House mixtape, to Mykki Blanco's aggressively experimental industrial rap on Gay Dog Food, to Zebra Katz's minimal masterpiece DRKLNG, to Cakes' deeply personal #IMF EP, to Big Momma's hyper-violent and transgressive album The Plague, it might seem hard (if not impossible) to see these works as massively divergent from the narrative of mainstream hip-hop. (The term "art-rap" has been thrown around as an alternative, an unfortunate specification that implies that the rest of rap isn't art.)

The situation puts many gay artists and their audiences in a tough bind. Those who are genuinely interested in the artists must be careful not to fetishize these rappers based on their sexualities, all the while recognizing the artists' ingenuity within the rap genre at large. The artists themselves can and do display righteous indignation when they are addressed in a creepily pejorative or demeaning way, which dampens interest in what becomes unfortunately and incorrectly known as a "scene" too sensitive for its own good. Straights less familiar with radical queer politics (preferred gender pronouns, the ever-changing list of what words are considered derogatory, etc.) could be quickly put off.

That being said, the conversation about "when a gay rapper will achieve mainstream success" is quite simply insulting, and comparisons between gay and straight rap (as if they were two distinct genres) simply don't make sense without implied bigotry. From Cakes, on this point: "What is straight rap? This question is a carry! If I rented you a loft space in gentrified Bushwick would the heat feel any different if I was a straight or gay landlord?" Similarly, the fact that LGBT rappers from a diversity of gender identifications and sexualities can't be talked about without the simultaneous invocation of other non-heterosexual artists speaks to a larger problem in our culture. In the words of rapper Dai Burger: "Straight or gay it's all sexually driven. So long as you got the bars, I’m all ears for it." How, then, is one to balance the desire to both appreciate the complex narrative of a queer artist's life in the scope of their work while simultaneously not relegating them to the role of victim of systematized prejudices?

The best solution to the problem of "gay rap", is to stop thinking about the classification itself and start listening harder to the (often outstanding) quality of the music being produced. Start booking queer artists alongside straight ones and pay them just as much. Ultimately, this is asking listeners to put aside whatever thoughts and feelings they have about queer sexuality, if only momentarily, to better evaluate certain aspects of these works. If that eventually means more thinking about the similarities and differences between texts by queer and straight artists rather than endless condescending comparisons of "fierce" or "brave" gay musicians, so be it. This task seems easier said than done in the almost obsessively taxonomic landscape of the internet, and yet it shouldn't actually be harder to pay more attention to the lyrical content and production values of music created by queer people. Anything else is just bigotry.

Monday brought the splashy relaunch of Tidal, the hi-fi streaming music service offered by the Swedish company Aspiro and now helmed by a slew of boldfaced-name "artist stakeholders," including Jack White, Arcade Fire’s Win Butler and Régine Chassagne, Daft Punk, Nicki Minaj, and Jay Z, whose purchase of Aspiro was recently finalized. The launch, which was accompanied by a flurry of Twitter avatar changes and a press conference that assembled the aforementioned stars as well as a few others, inspired some blowback from users who were cheesed off by the idea of paying the already-rich more money, as well as eye-rolls from those people annoyed by another new paradigm infringing on their day.

The service itself, which is available in browser-based and app form, is fairly elegant; its grey-on-black color scheme is reminiscent of Spotify’s, and navigating through the playlists on offer (which they refer to as "expertly Curated Editorial") is an easy enough experience. Tidal’s cool factor is a bit higher, as evidenced by the collection of stars on the launch’s stage, and the exclusives it’s offering as part of its rollout, which include a White Stripes public-access appearance and a Daft Punk film, are at the very least worthy of blog posts pointing in their direction.

But Tidal, as its artist-proprietors put it, is about more than playlists and unseen concert footage. "People are not respecting the music, and [are] devaluing it and devaluing what it really means," Jay Z told Billboard in an interview published Monday. "People really feel like music is free, but will pay $6 for water. You can drink water free out of the tap, and it’s good water. But they’re OK paying for it. It’s just the mind-set right now."

Tidal, in keeping with that ethos, does not have a free option the way rivals like Spotify do. The service, instead, uses rhetoric involving quality to make its pitch—and not just in terms of artists, but in terms of the audio being offered. The high-fidelity option offers streaming FLAC in CD quality for $19.99 a month.

This price point— double that of the 320 kbps option—could be viewed as a throwback to the CD era, when major-label albums routinely had a list price somewhere in the $18.99-$19.99 range. Back then, the typical music consumer was viewed as someone who purchased a single album a month, and these people were in such large supply they boosted sales of albums by Britney Spears and Santana to heights so unseen, they required a brand-new RIAA certification. Obviously, there were cheaper options available—used CDs, sales, the home taping that was killing music back in the Memorex dBS era—and many listeners, including this one, took advantage of them.

Artists are at the front of Tidal, which makes it, at least in positioning, vaguely similar to Beats Music—the streaming service that launched last year with Dr. Dre, Trent Reznor, and Interscope’s Jimmy Iovine leading its charge, and that was later purchased by Apple. Yes, the blue-skying about new business models in the introductory video was a bit overblown at times, and the launch event—which essentially showed how analog media was still important by having each artist stakeholder sign a huge piece of paper—might have been unnecessary. Not to mention that having people whose wealth and high status is paraded in both their art and the press surrounding them essentially ask for more money is slightly grating, particularly to those for whom money is tight and entertainment budgets are stretched. But having smaller artists would have ensured far less buzz. More importantly, if those same words about new paradigms had been uttered by people who were viewed as having business or tech-industry acumen, would the reaction have been any less knee-jerk skeptical?

The rhetoric of the tech press, which has come to dominate music-business coverage because of its sheer bulk and almost gluttonous willingness to swallow any PR handed to it, belies a distrust for those artists who don’t explicitly align themselves with business’ interests—which is to say, those artists who don’t release their music for free by default. This strange strain of the Protestant ethic has warped the current tech economy into something that prioritizes conduits over the material passing through them; the high valuation of Uber, which would be less useful without its army of half-employed drivers, brings to mind the rhetoric surrounding faileddigital music services that claimed they would take over the world despite their inability to ink deals with major labels. And even now, Spotify, the company viewed as a streaming-music success, still has a long way to go before the tech world’s desired outcome of world domination; not only are its payouts low, but according to Billboard, Spotify has 60 million subscribers, with only 25% of them paying the $9.99 a month to bypass ads.

In the cocktail-party-set introductory video to the service, Jay Z likened Tidal to a record store—not quite a United Artists-style consolidation of production, but more like a way for artists to assert themselves at a table increasingly crowded with technologists, online bubble-blowers, and, of course, the record-business executives who broker artist-unfriendly deals. But the record store ideal is an imperfect one—the vinyl offerings sold at White’s Third Man Records, for example, are playable on any brand of record player, and the promised "exclusives" will be available to those consumers who bought them long after the licensing deals expire.

And it’s hard to ingrain new habits and direct people toward new formats, particularly when it comes to online music services, which benefit from behind-the-scenes machinations that users never see. A minor row ensued when Taylor Swift pulled her music from Spotify, but no digital shop is immune from these baits and switches—late last fall, the subscription-download service eMusic decided to "[renew] its commitment to independent music" by abruptly ditching the major-label offerings it began selling in 2009. Users are paying for access to a catalog that ideally is similar to the long-storied "celestial jukebox," but the reality is much more checkered; think about albums that were long ago deleted from majors’ catalogs and have no hope for reissue, or 7"s released on tiny labels that ran through their lone pressing.

One trepidation regarding Tidal is that the bigger-name artists involved will pull their music from competing services—which also pay out lower royalties—in an effort to seem more exclusive, but that seems like a shoot-in-the-foot gesture that major labels would object to reflexively. The exclusives now offered by Tidal are okay, and not all that dissimilar to the carrots dangled in the directions of music blogs by publicists; a streamed film here, unseen archival footage there. And the editorial shows a willingness to highlight artists beyond big names, with smaller artists dotting the officially created playlists, like one from Screaming Females’ Marissa Paternoster featuring her influences.

Even with all the star power, though, maintaining the momentum of Monday’s launch event will be difficult in a hype-choked, instantly suspicious, already-paying-for-some-music consumer landscape. When speaking to Billboard, Jay Z talked about how Tidal could potentially change the timeline of how artists promote and release their music. "I think that now for an artist an album cycle doesn’t have to end," he said. "They’re on Instagram and Twitter and all these things, so we’re just talking about ways of extending that album cycle, and it could be anything. What if it’s a video offering tickets to the next concert, or what if it’s audio or video of the recording process? It could be anything." This seems a bit out of touch; albums barely have a pre-release cycle in 2015, which is why the "surprise" release has become the recently preferred method of catching album sales in a bottle.

But Tidal has brought the idea of paying artists back into the conversation, and put forth the radical idea that perhaps tech triumphalism should at least allow for creativity to triumph as well. Even if it misses its subscription targets, its potential to move the conversation about art and how it should be valued is more important than bluster about whatever flavor-of-the-week app its detractors are puffing up.

Pop music, like queer sex, changes the world because it feels good. This is as good an explanation as any for the long history of gay men identifying with pop’s divas. But what of the divas who have, in turn, hailed their gay audience, making them the subject of a song rather than merely its demographic? Historically, homophobia had limited how openly a diva could acknowledge her homosexual fanbase, but with the loosening of sexual mores in the 1970s, we see gay icons like Mae West and Diana Ross begin to more directly pay homage to their queer devotees with songs like "You Gotta Taste All the Fruit" and "I’m Coming Out". Past generations of diva’s meta references spoke for gay men, giving representation to the fabulosity of gay subculture and a means to celebrate it. But in 2015, we are in the golden age of the Diva Address: these icons now speak to the queer audiences that have defined them as such.

Marina and the Diamonds' latest single "Can't Pin Me Down" begins with a strange invitation for the listener: "You can paint me any color…/ But you ain't got my number/ Yeah, you can't pin me down." When she later asks "Do you really want me to write a feminist anthem?" it becomes clear that she's addressing the expectation that female musicians offer messages of (f)empowerment. Marina both refuses this expectation and admits it as inevitable, resigned to how listeners will project or "paint" a feminist ethos onto her music just as mid-century gay men made Judy Garland into a figurehead of sexual freedom. "Can’t Pin Me Down" asserts itself against those who make claims to what a woman’s music means, or who dare to assign intent and meaning. Marina’s song points to the tension between their visions of the diva and the diva herself. This conflict is explored in queer critic Rohin Guha’s Jezebel essay "The Myth of the Fag Hag and Dirty Secrets of the Gay Male Subculture," a damning survey of "gay male diva worship" and how it "permits gay men to dehumanize women–viewing them as abstract objects." Guha’s argument highlights the stakes of the Diva Address made by a meta diva like Marina: the ability to author her own identity rather than circulate as an abstract token among critics.

And of course, none of these critics, including me, are pop divas themselves, begging a basic question: what does the diva have to say for herself? Or as Beyoncé's "Diva" puts it, "Where my ladies up in there that like to talk back?" The following playlist answers that question by charting out songs where divas address their divahood or being a queer icon writ large. Together, these selections represent a cursory archive of self-asserting divadom, divas who talk back to the culture that created them. This collection reveals some common trends among "Diva Addresses" that might support a range of theoretical speculation—mostly though, we get to revel in this compilation of divas talking back in all their cheeky, self-referential, and aggressive glory.

Madonna: "Queen"

A bonus track from her latest album Rebel Heart, "Queen" shows Madonna embracing her title as "the queen of pop," a distinction she has earned from both her musical accomplishments and, increasingly, the accomplishment of holding onto the title for so incredibly long. Yet as "4 Minutes", Madonna's last certifiable hit from 2008, has sank into the past, her pop cultural vitality has increasingly been questioned by detractors and fans alike. In "Queen", Madonna acknowledges her reign is ending, the melancholic chorus pronouncing "The Queen's been slain/ She'll never rule again." The verses continue Rebel Heart's end-of-days imagery, but only "Queen" explains why the apocalypse hovers over the album as its central theme. Collapsing the end of a queen's reign and the end of society, "Queen" shows that Madonna's realization of her own cultural expiration compels her musings on humanity's impending self-destruction. This overlap allows for clever double-meanings in lines like "No rain, no more rain" (or is it "no more reign"?), but more importantly it forges a new role for diva-queens. While divas have been widely understood as the saviors of embattled gay men, Madonna's "Queen" offers salvation to the entire world—a predictably ambitious transformation of the diva's cultural form from the queen of reinvention.

Lily Allen: "Sheezus"

Like Madonna's "Queen", "Sheezus" explores the anxiety inherent in the diva's quest for supremacy, especially for a "comeback" record like Sheezus. "The game is changing/ Can't just come back, jump on the mic, and do the same thing," she sings. Unlike "Queen", Allen resolves her anxiety not through indirect references to her competitors but rather through their invocation in the chorus that namedrops Beyoncé, Rihanna, Lorde and Gaga. Praising their individual strengths, Allen absorbs them, so that what first appears to be complimentary ends with "Give me that crown, bitch/ I wanna be Sheezus."

Although the song's title riffs on Kanye West's "Yeezus" moniker, "Sheezus" also attests to the religious power female icons wield over our culture and the fervor with which gay men worship them. Who hasn't been on the receiving end of a gay man's sermon on a particular diva and our need to recognize her supreme eminence, held captive by a demand we convert to fandom? For these queers, the diva (from the latin "goddess") is divine, and "stan" is just another word for "missionary." Over a panting dancehall beat, Allen makes an appeal to this audience of potential gay proselytes, announcing that she is "born again" and pleading "Tell all of your friends…/ Give yourselves to me…/ Let me be Sheezus." "Sheezus" captures how listening to a diva is for gay men a true ritual, a Catholic communion with their spiritual "leader" achieved through consuming her music.

M.I.A.: "Boom Skit"

Compared to the other women on this list, M.I.A. might not look like a "diva," but her anti-pop sound is exactly what makes her the hipster-gay's diva of choice—the queen of pop music's underbelly. "Boom Skit" is an aggressive send-up of her Western audience and their responses to her work. Lyrics like "Brown girl, brown girl, turn your shit down/ You know America don't wanna hear your sound" were probably what made Interscope executives shit themselves and delay the release of Matangi. More importantly, though, they give insight into what the diva's world sounds like, what she hears on a daily basis from fans and detractors alike. When she sings "Let you into the Super Bowl, you tried to steal Madonna's crown," she sneers at the idea of "the queen of pop" with a divalicious attitude that ironically only makes her a stronger candidate for the throne.

Christina Aguilera: "Glam"

Without a doubt the gayest song in a catalog full of gay classics, this cut from the now infamous Bionic has Aguilera urging listeners to "unleash the diva deep inside." Drawing on the lineage of "Vogue", "Glam" addresses a drag queen in front of her vanity. "Paint your face like a movie queen/ A naughty dream or a fantasy," the first verse begins, later describing the addressee as "superficial"—the emphasis on imitation and illusion evoking the essence of drag artists. "Glam" is a call to the (stage) floor for these hardworking performers. Anyone who's been to a good drag show knows how transcendent a diva impersonator's performance can be: The up-close intimacy and pitch-perfect lip sync can make the drag queen better than the real thing, realer than real. "Glam" earns Aguilera the unique distinction of having actively invited her drag impersonators to one-up her when she sings "Get on the floor in your best couture/ Come on and take me higher." While Bionic's "Prima Donna" also looks at diva identity, it's "Glam" that takes the cake.

Beyoncé: "***Flawless" [ft. Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche]

In the music video for "Bow Down", an early version of "***Flawless", Beyoncé dons an Elizabethean gown, bejeweled scepter and crown to mirror the song's royal proclamation "I'm so crown." Once again, we see a diva reckoning with her own reputation as a "queen." What sets "***Flawless" apart, though, is that Beyoncé doesn't invoke the queen persona as a ploy to win her fans' approval, as Lily Allen does in "Sheezus". Instead of doting desperation, Beyoncé models the queen as disciplinarian, checking fans who view her as merely Jay Z's wife and demanding "Bow down, bitches." Only after putting her subjects back in their place does Bey exercise the queen's role of empowerment; only after assuring she gets recognized as the origin of flawlessness does she offer up the refrain "We flawless." Her distinctive view of her following as subjects rather than electorate makes sense—because really, who else besides Beyoncé could get away with it?

Lady Gaga: "Born This Way"

It was the song that started a pop music revolution. While musicians like Diana Ross had long took measures to subtly attract gay audiences, "Born This Way" proved that outright courting a queer audience could be commercially successful. And everyone from Katy Perry to Pink to Kesha to Taylor Swift to Macklemore took note, as a wave of pro-LGBTQ songs washed over the world's airwaves. Released at the turning point in mainstream opinions on queer people, "Born This Way" was the right song at the right time, bridging the gap between the closeted "anthems" of yore and today's over-the-head empowerment jams. "Born This Way" opened the gates for all pop musicians to, well, express themselves.

Hi Fashion: "I'm Not Madonna"

Ultra queer EDM duo Hi Fashion give us the anti-drag anthem in "I'm Not Madonna", which is as straightforward as its title suggests. The singer constantly gets mistaken for Madonna everywhere she goes, including the Kaballah center and pilates class. Annoyed and exasperated, Hi Fashion rejects the trope of the queer who longingly identifies with or impersonates a diva, a popular stereotype we've seen other singers latch onto.

Madonna: "Veni Vidi Vici"

If anyone deserves two entries on this list, it's Madonna. She is after all the best selling female musician of all time, and lest anyone forget, "Veni Vidi Vici" makes a lyrical trek through her best-known song titles. Madonna's grown more fond of self-references as she's gained more material to reference, but this is Madonna self-referencing on speed: "I expressed myself, came like a virgin down the aisle," she spits in a single line alone. Madonna speaks the secret language of Madonna fandom, and if you're not gay, you probably won't catch every allusion she makes. After a lifetime of banking on gay consumers and culture, Madonna uses the word "gay" in a song for the first time when she pays homage to their early support: "And when it came to sex, I know I walked the borderline/ And when I struck a pose, all the gay boys lost their minds."

Donna Summer: "The Queen Is Back"

Although The Guardian dubbed the late Donna Summer "the accidental gay icon," she fully engages this legacy on "The Queen Is Back" from her final album, Crayons. It's a kitschy, self-aware answer to her gay fanbase's cries for new material. "I'm your dear fairy godmother/ Now you know your queen is back," she puns before retrospecting on when she first "crept into your soul."

"The Queen Is Back" is the most explicit exploration of gay icons and diva worship, and because of this we can spot in one place the many different key elements of diva back-talk. Like Madonna and Lily Allen, Summer makes her address in the context of a comeback album that is both highly anticipated and commercially uncertain—pointing to a relationship between how pressured (or desperate) a star is to succeed and how likely they are to directly call upon their gay following. Allen tells fans to tell their friends, but Summer takes it further and implores them to "Call the DJ/ Call the station." Like "Glam", the song also references the way gay or drag fans "want to be her." Finally, it plays on the presumed pain of her gay listeners à la "Born This Way", promising salvation and belonging through diva identification.

Thus, "The Queen Is Back" is the example par excellence of the Diva Address and its agency, an important forerunner to this decade's recent trend of explicitly LGBTQ-oriented "anthems." Summers' song may not have been a hit, but it makes for one hell of a last dance.

Photo courtesy of NBCUniversal

Money is unclean. Cash flows; as it slips constantly out of debtor’s hands into creditor’s, fingerprints, stains, emotional and moral significations muck up the paper—over time, cash even builds up its own scent. That musk rarely transfers onto polite women anymore, who rarely touch dollar bills in the age of Venmo and sugar baby feminism. Rihanna still wants it in cash. Bad Gal, unmoored and uninspired by American dichotomies of cleanliness and defilement as she is, prefers her payment liquid and solid to the touch.

Liquid like a stack, but also liquid like a perfume. "My fragrance on and they love my smell," she teased on "Pour It Up", and we thought she might knowingly dot her nape and her inner wrists with money smell before the video even came out. And when it did, the dollar bills that hit the gleaming linoleum in the underwater strip club, that collected on her and the sea women, were stamped with her face.

"Bitch Better Have My Money", #BBHMM as its been hinted at for weeks on her and her friend’s Instagram accounts, is another chapter in Rihanna’s unfolding prosperity gospel. We’ve yet to get the visuals. But the synesthetic verve with which she snarls about getting what's hers amounts to an image and to her scent. Travi$ Scott and Wondagurl’s gothic trap mirrors the construction of incantations, of hypnosis. For the wayward bitch, however, it’s Rihanna’s Set It Off growl that guarantees something like torture. Like brrap! brrap! brrap! She pulses out of the half-humorous, half-deadly threat over and over again, that the bitch restores the natural balance of indebtedness that must always tip towards genius. In typical Rihanna coyness, the difference between the tower of menace she threatens and the tower of money she’s owed dissolves into mere performance. Pay me what you owe me is a speech act; by her utterance, the money will appear.

Rewind three years ago. Two money odes on Unapologetic that predate #BBHMM, "Pour It Up" and "Phresh Out the Runway", came out alongside Spring Breakers and The Bling Ring. Coppola termed the economy of images "trash culture," which was basically a lexicon of scenes of white girls acquiring money informally (read: illegally) and therefore a code for white girls acting like romanticized (read: criminalized) cash-strapped black girls. It’s paradoxical, that speaking about money publicly, holding it publicly, is associated with the underclass. Emma Watson holding a wad of cash, even in character, is redundant rather than criminal; it’s nostalgic for an image that only ever existed in fantasy, not time.

Just as Rihanna’s eponymous girlness-as-image brushes against but never touches affective white girlishness, she functions just outside of the womanish labor so often determining blackness. Her girlness shapes her relationship to cash. Black girls, we get that the necessity of survival casts a pallor on #BBHMM’s gruff staccato delivery, but we are relieved that she never rightly mentions the labor. This is our treasured kind of liberation, concurrent with the struggle critics and listeners alike have strangely wholly ascribed to Kendrick’s mode of self-reflexivity.

There is an anxiety for the image of propertied black women in general, of black women recouping historical debts. The interlocking machines of mainstream pop, rap music, and America are very much contingent on their devaluation. Anxiety mounts when the kind of property is pure cash money. Black girls with money are financially independent and visually, confrontationally untethered to men or to goods. It’s filtered through varying inflections of allegedly bygone puritanism: The black girl flaunting money is ratchet, the black girl with money bankrolled her way there through sex, therefore the black girl with money does not properly own it. Since the racist and the sexist are also by definition prudes, this black girl of their fantasy, no matter how tall her money, can never signify wealth, a sort of class ascendance that has as much to do with politesse in gender roles as it does one’s stock profile.

Meanwhile, Rihanna will pose with the fan of cash on Instagram, lick and stick the bills between her lips in the video. Nicki will walk out of restaurants with Meek Mill demurely carrying an unzipped bag stuffed with tens of thousands of dollars. Twenty years ago, Lil’ Kim, who may be owed the most, presaged the new millenium’s anxiety, a reaction redux as old as the country, with her double entendre: fuck niggas, get money. At the iHeartRadio awards in LA Sunday night, Rihanna transplanted Kim’s second meaning in performance, dressed in her saturated green furs and chill-girl wining against a dancer backdrop of whom none were men. Money doesn’t replace men, although one may fall in love. The tower of cash is less a phantom penis than an extra appendage, an expression of a bad bitch’s increasing girth against social enclosure. Cash collapses her image, her life, and her music in one.

Sprawled amongst her earnings, the moneyed black girl is an enlarged version of herself necessarily taking up the space of her debtors, she’s an image of material liberation. #BBHMM is Rihanna in situ. This loan shark’s bop makes storied materialistic references of course, to Louis XIII cognac and your wife in her foreign car, but you get the sense it’s her briefly becoming a meme of the club male ego that can’t tell breasts from wealth. Rihanna has always loved memes.

If luxury goods are just that, memes, signifiers of money rather than the unmediated, vulgar thing itself, then Rihanna is a glo up purist. Singing about money is something different from singing about opulence; cash cycles through our street economies touching us, while wealth sits sterile with them on top. We know that Rihanna, who outside of the much-anticipated R8 has become the face of Dior and stars in DreamWorks' number one movie Home, is wealthy now, and she’ll eventually be worth billions. But as a black woman whose artistic inventiveness outpaces her peers and music executives by what feels like whole years, she will also perpetually be owed. To be a black woman and genius, is to be perpetually owed.

This February, Father John Misty released I Love You, Honeybear, a pretty folk album that doubles as an exposé of our generation’s subconscious. Critics have zoned in on "Bored in the USA", a mournful white-guy ballad accompanied by laugh track—an apt and self-justifying touch. But the lyrical crux within the album is "Holy Shit". The song grandly reels off a chain of personal and political ruptures—revolutions, holocausts, incest dreams, original sin—which all emphasize the album’s driving concept: the unbearable heaviness of Josh Tillman’s divorce. After he’s tried on many rock-star guises—the chauvinist, the lothario, the "changed man"—it’s in "Holy Shit" that Tillman’s shape-shifting character crystallizes. Honeybear doesn’t just fuck with authenticity; it shows how, when an event shatters our everyday frames of reference, our identity splinters, and we grasp for a toehold in the familiar.

Tillman’s collapsing framework reflects our own, amid an insidious conflation of fantasy and reality. Last year the New Yorkerpublished an investigation that mentioned how a judge, hearing a reopened murder case, had rejected the defense’s new angle on the absurd grounds that "Perry Mason does this. Perry Mason proves the guy in the back of the court did it." Last week, in the UK, a group of onlookers watching a suicidal man atop a multi-story car park goaded him to jump to his death, before uploading footage to social media. Likewise the case of Vladislav Surkov, an eccentric political mastermind considered the second most powerful man in Russia: In the foreword to Almost Zero, a book believed to be pseudonymously autobiographical—and therefore representative of Russia’s real-life political narrative—he playfully claimed that "the author of this novel is an unoriginal Hamlet-obsessed hack."

What links these stories is a bizarre, postmodern rupture of perspectives. We’re constantly flitting between worlds—fact and fiction, simulation and original, digital and physical—and the conflict is shaping us. Web commenters routinely dismiss pop artists like Lana Del Rey, rolling eyes at her manufactured narratives and basic stereotype fulfilment—but manufactured narratives and stereotype fulfilment are precisely what characterize modern people’s lives. It’s possible to experience an ecstatic surrender to this new world’s possibilities, embracing its unruliness and abandoning self-discovery for a new era of total self-creation. Yet, all the same, it’s hard to hear that weirdly poignant buzz-term—are you even real?—without clocking its unnerving existential undertones.

In 1971, Rolling Stone published an interview with a dazed John Lennon, in which he autopsies reality, post-Beatlemania. "The dream is over," he proclaims at one point. "I'm not just talking about the Beatles, I'm talking about the generation thing. It's over, and we gotta—I have to personally—get down to so-called reality." Obsessively he invokes the language of reality—the real, realistic, "so-called reality"—to illustrate his staggering disillusionment with celebrity.

Wherever it’s sought, anonymity allures modern musicians like never before. Some, like the elusive MF DOOM, claim personality has overshadowed good music; others, like Slipknot, want to offer a more fantastical kind. Sia hides her face to avoid intrusion, Gorillaz invent new personas entirely, and countless producers, perhaps pining for the heyday of white-label culture, turn their noses at digital overshare. Burial, raised on rave’s anonymous collectivity, unmasked himself as soon as "the unknown thing became an issue" but never dropped the romance of being "in a symbol, a tune, the name of a tune." Over on the main stage, Radiohead’s Kid A saw Thom Yorke, who’d grown sick of his singing voice, descend into hiccupping half-sentences and computerized gibberish. "How to Disappear Completely", an alienated ballad about the inhumanity of headlining stadiums, is followed by "Treefingers", in which, across four ambient minutes, Yorke has indeed vanished.

Unlike other celebrities, musicians have an implicit duty to realness—ask why it’s pop stars, over more famous red-carpet actors, who comprise eight of the ten most-followed Twitter accounts. The point’s neatly made by Ester Dean, an actor and surrogate songwriter for Rihanna, in a 2012 New Yorker profile: "In the music industry, they don’t know the difference between the part and real life," she said. "If you’re a rapper and you’re talking about drug dealing, that’s not real. You don’t do that. You just talk about it. Your real life is when you walk out of the booth, but in music they intertwine it and in acting they don’t. Here we are, humble people, who have real lives and treat each other as such, and that’s the beautiful part of being in the film and TV world. I have friends there. I have a lot of them."

18+ are a visionary LA duo who, like most visionary LA duos, are bright, sonically dark and fluent in both visual arts and music. The sounds Justin and Samia make are disembodied yet confessional: Unlike other "post-Internet" aesthetics (glitch, seapunk) theirs draws on the minutiae of online relationships. If 18+’s in-song personas seem tacky ("the thug," "the bitch," etc.) that’s sort of the point—they aim, as Justin says, "To do something a little embarrassing that I wouldn't show my friends." These are the elements we suppress, often without realizing, in our shielded online interactions. And the result is an escalating self-consciousness. As the sociologist Laura Robinson puts it in The Cyberself, in online contexts "the ‘I’ is constantly redefined as the ‘me.’"

Another phenomenon that fascinated 18+ was that of the hard-hustling, teenage social media personality. Many have learned to monetize virtual popularity through sponsorship, a move you suspect would interest EMA, whose 2014 LP The Future’s Void is a cornerstone critique of online self-branding. In the midst of the NSA revelations, the record slammed the idea that the internet would tear down and democratize the system. Instead, Erika M. Anderson sang that the effect would be to accelerate commodification, not just of music and products but personalities. Anderson’s smartest on "3Jane", a song that, echoing Gang of Four’s "Anthrax", shuns naive resistance by implicating itself as a commodity. The last chorus, over sarcastically triumphant strings, blends meta-referential humor with a rallying cry of renunciation: "Refrain! Refrain! Refrain!"

Building any online relationship, despite constantly evolving dialects and emotional cues, we’re faced with a deep void of sensory data. Into that void we have nothing to project but parts of ourselves, inborn fantasies that might be positive or negative, but always stem from our own experiences and assumptions—a lens that points back. Likewise, most of us on Twitter address an imagined audience, not of our own followers but the users we follow. On some level we’re aware of all this, but all the same, our social fantasies persist. We have friends there. We have a lot of them.

Self-branding is nothing new—it stems from the basic impulse to make a good impression. Our social profiles are like suburban lawns, pretty fronts that hide a crawling frenzy of ugly reminders that fleshy, dirty nature is deeply unchill. The attitude sounds superficial, but our ability to craft better selves online is pretty beautiful. Like anything creative, it frees people uncomfortable elsewhere to more vividly express and define themselves. Besides, self-image is always part-fantasy, and that’s part of its truth. But at risk of sounding glib, perceived flaws aren’t always something to overcome.

On "When You're Smiling and Astride Me", halfway into Honeybear, Father John Misty briefly jumps out of his vindictive spiral. The escape hatch is a clever reversal of fantasy and reality: "I’d never try to change you," he sings gently, "as if I could—and if I were to, what’s the part that I’d miss most?" The message is that rather than beaming back our dreams, love has to exceed fantasy, so that what look like flaws can coalesce into a transcendent whole. If there’s a minor spectre to digital society, it is its quickness to confuse what we feel and what we say, who we are and who we feel—the reality and the representation. Where we’ll flourish are the fantastic cavities in-between.

Close to four decades after forming, the B52's remain one of the strangest and most radical American rock bands to achieve widespread acceptance. There are myriad reasons why a band as weird and wonderful as this managed to sneak its way into the pop mainstream, but one of them is that from the very beginning, the B52's were an undeniably great live act.

Watching the band onstage in clips from the late 1970s and early 1980s is obviously not quite as good as being there in person. But these stolen moments let us catch a fleeting glimpse of the miracle of the B52's.

Atlanta, 1978

One of the earliest clips circulating of the band, recorded in a small club right around the time of their "Rock Lobster" debut single, is a murky black-and-white video. But the music is positively technicolor, as the B52's burn through their early repertoire, a rail-thin Fred Schneider and the retro-styled Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson commanding the stage. Behind them, guitarist Ricky Wilson and drummer Keith Strickland provide an endless supply of propulsive riffs and rhythms. The crowd responds in kind with a whirl of perpetual motion. There’s certainly plenty of raw, punkish attitude and energy, but this is, above all, a party band. Specifically, an Athens, Ga. party band.

"The Athens party thing was all about dancing," said the band’s former manager Maureen McGinley in Simon Reynolds’ essential postpunk overview Rip It Up and Start Again. "People didn’t stand around talking and making snide remarks. If an Athens band played and nobody dance, they never played again."

"Give Me Back My Man" - Capitol Theatre, New Jersey, November 7, 1980

Two years later, the B52's were still in the business of making bodies move, but they had expanded their sonic palette, not to mention their audience. "Rock Lobster" may have screamed "one-hit wonder" at the time, but this was a band bursting with ideas and possibilities. Maybe the best contemporary reference point is the utopian world beat of Talking Heads on their Remain In Light tour (and indeed, the B-52's would work with David Byrne on in the studio in 1981). The B52's’ entire Capitol Theatre performance is well worth your time, every moment a delight. But if you only watch one highlight, make it Cindy Wilson’s tour de force rendition of "Give Me Back My Man". Summoning up a proto-Riot Grrrl intensity at least a decade ahead of its time, Wilson sings as though her life depends on it.

"Toss That Beat" - The US Festival, September 3, 1982

The crowds kept getting bigger as the years went by—though Fred Schneider may be wearing the same plain white tank top he was back in that sweaty Atlanta club. The 1982 US Festival, a kind of precursor to Coachella’s catch-all eclecticism, brought close to 375,000 people to California’s scorching San Bernardino Valley over Labor Day Weekend. You won’t see a trace of stage fright on the faces of the B52's in the surviving clip of their set, a storming "Toss That Beat." Special notice should be given to Ricky Wilson, a guitarist with style to spare. His death at the age of 32 due to AIDS/HIV-related complications in 1985 robbed us of an utterly unique and creative musical force. But he went out with a flourish. That very same year, the B52's played a joyous, day glo set at the massive Rock In Rio festival in front of an audience of more than a million. Unbeknownst to his bandmates, Wilson was already ailing, but the performance is about as life-affirming as it gets.