The question any new, historic work about Nirvana should have to answer is, "Why?" With a story that’s been told and retold to the point of being a well-worn musical legend, a new book purporting to enhance our understanding of Nirvana has a very high bar to clear in order to justify its own existence. (And that’s before digging into the separate deification of Kurt Cobain, himself the subject of an upcoming documentary.) I Found My Friends fails to meet this standard.

Its conceit is smart, in theory—an oral history composed of stories told by bands Nirvana played with, even in the smallest one-off dates, giving a specific arc to the narrative. I Found My Friends finds a middle ground between straightforward narrative and oral history, a format that has substantial drawbacks of its own. Soulsby inserts himself between many of the quotes, providing his own thoughts as guiding observations, like a documentarian’s narration. Unfortunately, this proves to be the book’s biggest weakness.

In the book’s preface, Soulsby writes first that "Nirvana was a bunch of normal guys" and then, just a few sentences later, says of Cobain that "His story, however, is not just the story of a normal man." There are productive ways of holding both of these things to be true and working through that tension, but Soulsby never even attempts to engage in such activity—he loses the thread of "normalcy" in favor of injecting himself into the book almost solely to fawn over the band, and while he repeatedly claims that they were just normal people, he never quite seems convincing trying to bring them back down to earth.

Certainly, Soulsby makes no effort to hide the depths of his Nirvana fandom (he’s already written another book about the band and maintains a Nirvana fan website). But when he begins to describe anecdotes as "gorgeous whimsy" and spews nonsense like "The band’s uncertain status was all-pervasive," he traps the vitality that originally infused the music in a quick-setting reverence, and makes it increasingly difficult to focus on the legitimately engaging, underserved stories of many of the smaller bands.

At times, these interjections are outright horrific, at one point describing Cobain’s drug use as "just dabbling," a dangerous bit of editorializing that he’s in no position to be able to make. By the time he refers to Dave Grohl as "the anointed ruler of the Nirvana drum stool" without any hint of self-awareness, it’s possible to read I Found My Friends as merely a collection of music writing cliches—a carelessness that extends to the organization of the book, which reuses quotes and has so many voices that it becomes difficult to keep track.

Without steady authorial control or the presence of any of the band members, Nirvana itself becomes a sort of void throughout I Found My Friends, presences who flit in and out and ultimately appear to be unknowable. (Indeed, much of the later parts of the band’s story are, by definition, unknowable, because of the distance imposed by fame.) So the best part of I Found My Friends is more a picture of the community that Nirvana emerged from, and a sense for the way their rise changed it—something that’s already captured more effectively, with far more attention to detail (and with the participation of Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl) in grunge oral history Everybody Loves Our Town.

Mostly, the unfiltered voices of smaller players means that most of the fun comes from the bloodsport of people trying to advance their personal narratives or grievances or add a ridiculous number of sides to a rather large number of small stories while telling the same anecdotes for the hundredth time. (Courtney Love hangs over the last 40 pages or so like a wraith, referred to as "Kurt’s wife" and spat on at every possible opportunity.) There are hints of better stories, like a night David Berman heckled Novoselic off the state at a gig, but, like early Nirvana, the raw materials are there, but it lacks the polish necessary to make it a hit.

The real disappointment of I Found My Friends is that many of the people it spotlights are legitimately unknown, and their words alternately hint at two separate, yet related projects: poking holes in the conceit of the punk scene at the time and understanding the way that scene was perceived around the world. Using them as a lens to tell the story of Nirvana itself, however, is destructive to those projects, especially after the fiftieth repetition of "Kurt was a pretty chill dude." Over the course of the book, Cobain comes across as less of a musical genius or generational icon and more of a savvy musician who had a sense for when a particular sound would become popular—a "one-trick pony," as Blag Dahlia puts it. That’s a reasonable way of approaching the material, but it’s frequently at odds with Soulsby’s obsessive superfan presence.

The job of a work of history is to provide context, whether that’s in the form of straightforward information about something that happened, or additional framing for something that the reader might be aware of. I Found My Friends is an enjoyable read for those friends—superfans interested in additional scraps of Nirvana trivia that have yet to be wrung for profit—but its unwillingness to do anything bold is its undoing. Kevin Rutmanis, a former bassist for the Melvins and Cows, tells Soulsby, "Grunge as a label and a genre was always repellent to me—that stuff was all so conservative musically. Like nostalgia." The writer would have done well to listen.

Image via Instagram

Zayn Malik’s departure from popular boyband One Direction last week unleashed a torrent of scorn and mockery; news anchors, bloggers and the Twittersphere groaned and made jokes at the expense of One Direction fans' feelings of loss. But isn’t it natural to be upset when your favorite band breaks up or loses a member? One Direction, after all, isn’t any more lampoonable just because they make perfectly digestible pop music that a fuck ton of people really, really, really like, because the world-at-large is not the real target: their young, female fans are.

By brushing these girls aside and laughing at how stupid whatever they like is, we tell these young women that their interests are less important than what men like. That their feelings somehow become discredited and are not "real" by virtue of who is having them. But what’s not real about a 13-year-old girl who’s still figuring out how to express herself about things she cares about? This is troubling, given that idolization has proven to be a healthy form of growth for girls who want a safe, insular way to explore new romantic feelings and interpersonal relationships. And when you’re attempting to make sense of this, it’s only natural that the group who sings about safe, unconditional love will be an appealing option.

The continual derision of the "fangirl" is damaging, it perpetuates the idea that girls act one way, and boys another. Within all of this, there are intrinsically sexist and ageist tropes at play, an all-too-derisive view of teenage females who are usually reduced to a pair of Ugg boots and a Starbucks Frappuccino with extra whip. She’s a veritable hodgepodge of misdirected, hormone-driven excitement that plays into the very Victorian idea of a "hysterical" female: the impulsive, borderline-psychotic one who lacks rationale and thinks only with her emotions. It's the root of an insulting stereotype that is still used against female senators, lawyers and presidential candidates as a way of barring them entry to positions of power and prestige. After all, "crazy" has and will always be the go-to adjective for the "fangirl," to the point where the two have become almost synonymous. It’s something that has allowed others in the past to dismiss valid passions and disappointments with a hint of sexism. It is a way of telling young girls that they should be embarrassed about what matters to them.

Coloring most of this sentiment also is the idea that the only draw for these girls are the physical attributes of these male pop idols, that they can’t appreciate the actual talent or body of work. Instead, "fangirl" is an idea that has been compounded with the idea of irrational, silly and hysteric excitement, which is reductive at least and misogynistic at worst. It makes it all too easy for people to dismiss women as false enthusiasts with no real critical perspective or stake in the music itself, despite that women are the #1 purchasers and consumers of music.

So let’s stop using the word "fangirl" to marginalize women, let's not use "fangirl" to force them into enjoying what has been vetted as a suitable interest. Let’s free "fangirl" from the relegation of silly and see it for what it is: a serious music fan in the making.

You've been good, so it's time for another installment of Shake Appeal, Evan Minsker's garage/punk/psychedelic/etc. music round-up.

The "great" records in recent months have been huge productions—music about a tumultuous sociopolitical climate and police violence. That stuff's obviously important, but what about the records that don't have lofty arrangements, long run-times, or dense lyric sheets (I'm talking to YOU, Bono)? Sometimes, the best record is the one that puts a big dumb smile on your face—something rudimentary and hamfisted that cuts out by the 90-second mark. With that rubric in mind, please direct your attention to the collected recordings of Northwestern Indiana's the Coneheads.

The German label Erste Theke Tonträger (who previously released the collected singles of Lumpy and the Dumpers) have collected the band's first two tapes Canadian Cone and Total Conetrol on L.P.1., which features some of the punchiest, most fun punk tunes in recent memory. Devo comparisons have been made; Devo comparisons are appropriate. It's even acknowledged in the full title: L.P.1. aka "14 Year Old High School PC-Fascist Hype Lords Rip Off Devo for the Sake of Extorting $$$ from Helpless Impressionable Midwestern Internet Peoplepunks L.P." 

As a member of the Midwestern internet peoplepunk community, the Cones can definitely have my money, though it's not "extortion," exactly. With a record that's got a run of songs as strong as the one from "Big City Baby" to their cover of the Talking Heads' "Psycho Killer", they've definitely earned a couple bucks. It might not have an orchestra or string section or whatever, but L.P.1. is great.

Oh, and heads up: They just released a third tape, too. NWI STRONG.

Of course, Indiana has a deep and storied punk history that dates back a couple decades before the Cones were born. If you need a primer on that history, Magnetic South/Time Change have you covered with the cassette Crazy Al's: Indiana Punk & New Wave 76-83. It's got tracks by Gizmos ("Mean Screen") and Zero Boys ("I'm Absent"), but there are also gems like Joint Chiefs of Staff's "I Hate Pretty Girls" and Video Kids' "Born Too Late". There are 23 bands represented—a real portable party starter. And if this isn't enough archival Indiana punk for you, there's an expanded Crazy Al'stwo-CD set. Apparently, a few of these bands are only just now getting a release via this compilation—learn more about it here.

Another essential compilation comes courtesy of Dirtnap, though this material is from a band of contemporary cult heroes—Portland's Mean Jeans. Singles features 20 A-sides, compilation cuts, and rarities. If you're unfamiliar with the band, this is a fantastic entry point. They've got gleeful "ba ba ba" melodies on "Stoned 2 the Bone" and they're scumbags in their speed punk tune "Total Creep". They cover Sparks ("Forever Young") and White Wires ("I Remember How"). Their theme song for Gonerfest is charmingly cruddy. The biggest draw of the comp? It features their bummed out sci-fi anthem "I Miss Outer Space." Don't we all?! This band's brand of rock'n'roll is exactly as goofy and catchy as the cartoon slugs on the album cover imply.

While we're on the subject of dumb, muscular rock'n'roll, let's talk about Milwaukee's Platinum Boys. (Their very awesome single "Candy" recently appeared in Windian Records' latest 7" box set.) If you've been looking for a solid get-wasted soundtrack, look no further than Future Hits. They're really similar to Liquor Store—dudes relying on electric guitar solos and shouted gang vocals. The intro of "Later Girl" owes a huge spiritual debt to the intro of Def Leppard's "Photograph" (though the rest of the song reads more like a Connections tune). Focused almost solely on the road ("Cruisin' USA", "Ride Free") and how cool they are ("Cool Like That"), they're a caricature of grease-stained 1970s rock'n'roll archetypes. Like Diarrhea Planet before them, these dudes are probably a blast to see live. 

The Chicago power pop band MAMA made a strong first impression with their very good Speed Trap EP late last year. To quote the power pop hero King Louie Bankston, the songs on their Automatic Recordings double 7" Night Shoot definitely point at the rafters. They start off strong with "Dream Babe", wherein they offer their worship of a woman over a full throttle chug. They throw in a couple "OOH YEAH"s for good measure. When they slow down, like on "I'm Shot", they continue to invoke radio-ready power pop forebears like Cheap Trick. Between this and some of those Platinum Boys and Mean Jeans tracks, looks like there are a few strong contenders for your next "drive too fast with all the windows down" soundtrack.

Last year, Aquarian Blood—the husband-and-wife duo of J.B. Horrell (Ex-Cult) and Laurel Ferdon (ex-Nots, Moving Finger)—released a self-titled tape on ZAP Cassettes featuring 15 goofy synthesizer-strewn punk tunes. Now, the label have issued another 15 tracks from the Horrell and Ferdon. II is equally enigmatic and it definitely packs some laughs. They point out the vomit in your hair on "Call the Uncle"; "Knock Yourself Out" dissolves into a series of literal maniacal laughs. Definitely keep an eye out for this band's Record Store Day 7" on Goner, and when you get a copy of this tape, skip ahead to "Everybody Likes It".

II isn't the only recent highlight on ZAP: Nate & the Nightmares' self-titled tape is completely impressive. They deliver the sort of bluesy garage punk nuggets that aren't usually this good on this side of the '60s. They're from Athens, Georgia, and you should keep an eye out for their future recordings. They're talented musicians with an ear for what makes rock'n'roll fun, which makes sense—frontman Nate Mitchell apparently works at the great Athens record store Wuxtry.

The Ar-Kaics are going to have one hell of a singles compilation on their hands someday soon. They've been on a roll since late 2013. Their stuff is always catchy, their guitar work always impressive, and their drum sound is enormous. "Always the Same" on the UK label Market Square Recordings is another major success from the Richmond, Va. band.

When you burn through that platter, do yourself a favor and check out another band featuring Ar-Kaics' Patty Conway. Christi deliver swooning 1960s girl group hooks on their debut 7" (on Feel It Records), but their raspy vocals give the songs an edge. It's powerful stuff for fans of Shannon & the Clams and the other apostles of bubblegum.

Fresh off this year's Total Fuck Off fest in Orlando, Total Punk have yet another ripper on their hands with this 7" by Atlanta's Slugga. On a pair of 90-second tracks that follow up their 2014 demo, Slugga belong in the same approximate camp as Lumpy & the Dumpers—breakneck songs delivered with a grotesque bark. Pretty much any band in this lane could put over a vicious punk tune with the central words "I'm a parasite", but the pacing of this particular song is masterful. The grunted "UHH" that comes in the cracks between the guitar barrage on "Parasite" alone is worth the five bucks.

More hits:

01 The self-titled EP from Delaware's Grace Vonderkuhn. (Shouts to Pitchfork contributor and all-around buddy Martin Douglas for pointing this one out.)

02 Empty Heads, the debut album from the Prettys—a glammy power pop outfit from Vancouver.

03 It's been out for a while, but New York bubblegum punks NANCY have a pretty great 7" that just got reissued on Erste Theke Tonträger.

04 Ile De Rêve, the new album from Montreal's Les Marinellis. (Last time this band showed up in Shake Appeal, they got a comparison to the Black Lips' Let It Bloom. This one's similar, though it probably leans a little closer to the first Davila 666 record.)

Image via MLB Instagram

Baseball season is under way, folks. To celebrate Opening Day, we polled Pitchfork staffers on the song they would choose if they were stepping up to the plate. Here are their responses.

Mark Richardson (Detroit Tigers): Pan Sonic "Rahina I" from their brilliant 4xCD album Kesto. It's Gary Glitter's "Rock and Roll Part 2" enriched with Plutonium-239, has that "Now I am become death, destroyer of bullpens" kind of vibe. The only real question is if there is a major league ballpark P.A. that could do it justice. Would have sounded great in Tiger Stadium.

Jessica Hopper: I go to about one baseball game per decade, so as much I would like to skew baseball-meta with, say, Crass’ “Do They Owe Us a Living", mostly I think about what are the best songs that sound like heaven opening when they are played LOUD AS FUCK. So there is really only one answer and that is Amerie’s “One Thing". 

Jeremy Gordon (Chicago Cubs): The best walkup songs announce from the first note that all hell is about to break loose. Apologies to taste but that means I'm picking the instrumental version of Disturbed's "Glass Shatters", best known as the infamous theme song of former WWE professional wrestler Stone Cold Steve Austin. It's Pavlovian: People simply lose their damn minds when that glass shatters, and I need that lizard brain reaction from the crowd if I want to feel amped enough to mash some dingers. 

My favorite team is the Chicago Cubs, because I enjoy flashes of precious optimism inevitably undermined by the crushing reality that life is shit.

Amy Phillips (Philadelphia Phillies): Duh. I mean, Andrew W.K. is the ultimate psych-up music. And I'm going to need to summon a hell of a lot of Power of Positive Partying, since I'm going to bat for my lifelong favorite team, the Philadelphia Phillies, who have settled comfortably in the nether regions of the NL East for the past few years, and don't seem like they're going anywhere any time soon.

Brandon Stosuy: 

 Ryan Dombal: Rae Sremmurd's "No Type" but with the lyrics tweaked to: "I ain't got no type—bad pitches are the only thing that I like." Figure the visual would be something like ...

Ian Cohen (Philadelphia Phillies):I had a chance to field test this when I joined an adult kickball league in the summer of 2013—the plan was to use a different song from Yeezus each time, but the dogs on the sideline started barking uncontrollably five seconds into "On Sight". I actually want to be a closer anyway, because I like the idea of making eight figures to work 20 minutes every other day for nine months of the year. I'd have to use Deftones' "My Own Summer (Shove It)" as my entrance music, because the snare intro/riff has surpassed the Jaws theme in conveying "YOU ARE SHARK BAIT, SON" and as an MLB closer in 2015, I am contractually obligated to maintain the physique and facial hair of a Deftones member in 1997.

Charlotte Zoller: I’ve got to go with AC/DC’s “Big Balls”. The lyrics speak for themselves. 

My favorite team is any team I don’t have to watch play. When it comes to sports, I’m pretty much the Kyle Mooney of Pitchfork.

Chris Kaskie (St. Louis Cardinals): The guitar intro would be amazing for an at bat, the refrain would be pretty prescient for a reliever run out. A dynamic baseball song. Cocksure is baseball defined.

Matt Dennewitz (Chicago Cubs):

Meaghan Garvey: I don't know anything about baseball, but that's where Future Griffey Jr. comes in. See also.

Corban Goble (Kansas City Royals): Though he wasn't a hitter, I remember when Jose Lima (RIP) came out to a salsa song he had recorded himself earlier that year. I thought that was pretty next level. In lieu of a self-recorded salsa song, I suppose my choice would be a tribute to the best walk-up song in baseball—Joe Mauer's consistent use of "What You Know". 

For decades, cinematic depictions of the music industry have stoked our imagination of what it is: homogenous, corrupt, controlled by small concentrations of power, beholden to an ideology that overvalues celebrity and lifestyle, a sector where products win and art always loses. On television, shows like MTV’s "Making the Band" confirmed our apprehension that there were industry executives using templates to assemble groups with the sole purpose of churning out hit records, a tacit corroboration of a Manichean understanding of art and commerce whereby art, in all its benevolence, remains inseparable from the dark forces of the corporate world. In film, stories like Get Rich Or Die Tryin’ functioned as a "started from the bottom, now we here" testimony to talent and perseverance (mainstream music, driven by the juggernaut of hip-hop, is, in part, responsible for the ubiquity of this idea as well). In each portrayal, an inherent emphasis is placed on the final product—the smash album, the hit single, the breakthrough moment, the realization of what the artist would become—with the process of getting there serving little utility, a hollow vehicle to transport us from one point to another. 

In part, the way we interact with music—and art—feeds our penchant for finding value in the final work, not in the journey of how it came to be. So it’s understandable that our depictions of music and the industry behind it would track the type of engagement we are accustomed to. Indeed, it seems kind of unthinkable, and a bit impractical, to critically engage with an unfinished song or a half-complete painting. (As a writer, the thought of being evaluated on early drafts is terrifying.) Yet, there is something revealing, too, in how a work of art is completed: the process can tease out ideas about love and lust, power and celebrity, race and class, masculinity and misogyny, art and politics, all the same, just like the work itself.

In the first quarter of 2015, Fox’s "Empire", a melodrama about a hip-hop music mogul and his family which recently wrapped an enthralling first season, showed how powerful a meticulous lens focused on the how instead of the finished product could be. "Empire" homes in acutely on the important minor details of process that go into creating a finished work. What moves the plot forward are two events: the terminal illness of the family patriarch and protagonist, music artist-turned-mogul, Lucious Lyon (Terrence Howard), and the Initial Public Offering (IPO) of his family-run company, Empire Entertainment. Both function as destinations, forcing upon us a new awareness of the arduous and unpredictable slog of music making.



"Empire" shows us how a finished musical masterpiece came to be, beginning with a careful examination of the mercurial and inexplicable nature of inspiration. In one such example, Lucious manages to evoke the best from his son, Hakeem (Bryshere Y. Gray), a rather glam struggle rapper and potential heir to his father’s lucrative business, with only a few words.

"I mean, it's really nice for some Girl Scouts," Luscious barks to Hakeem, who is sleepwalking through a verse. "But this ain't about being nice! You've got to go hard with this! Come harder."

"Alright. Let me hear the beat again," Hakeem replies, nodding his head in agreement. "I got something for you.”

When the beat drops, Hakeem magically transforms into an inspired, lyrical machine, bent on annihilating the microphone. The song, imbued with new life, transforms into a hit, much to the joy of Luscious, whom we are led to believe knew Hakeem had it in him all along.

It's difficult to determine exactly where the rapper's inner "beast" came from—was it Lucious or Hakeem? A light switch?—but what's clear is that if one were to only listen to the finished song Hakeem's inner-struggles as an artist finding his voice would not shine through at all. We would not know how slippery inspiration can be either. Instead, "Empire" gives a more nuanced answer that teeters between fraudulent and organic. Hakeem’s booth magic rivals that of Kendrick Lamar’s "Mortal Man"—the final track from his recent opus, To Pimp a Butterfly. On the track, Kendrick explains in a hypothetical conversation with his idol Tupac Shakur, "Sometimes I be like, get behind a mic and I don’t know what type of energy I’mma push out, or where it comes from. Trips me out sometimes." Tupac responds almost as cryptically: "We ain’t even really rappin’, we just letting our dead homies tell stories for us." In "Empire", artistic inspiration seems just as befuddling and fascinating.



An intimate window into the process of music making also gives a more robust portrait of who the artists are—that is, it reminds us that they, too, are works in progress as well. Whereas a finished work of art or a refined artistic brand crystallizes who the artist is at that moment, leaving us to hypothesize about what parts of their biography are woven in the work, the process of creation parallels an artist’s personal evolution, reminding us that they, too, are in flux. Such a reminder is all the more crucial considering industry practices of aligning an artist’s idiosyncrasies with their art (which can be incredibly profitable; see: Chris Brown).

In hip-hop, a predominantly black genre, the industry’s distillation of an artist’s persona to match or sell their art can adversely impact perceptions of their human complexity. On screen, careful packaging has the same effect: outlandish escapades and brash, non-white characters are reigned in and filtered (see: Eddie Huang and "Fresh Off the Boat"); human flaws are obfuscated and replaced with polished brands. On "Empire", one of the blackest shows in the history of television (guest stars and cameos include: Derek Luke, Raven-Symoné, Juicy J, Jennifer Hudson, Naomi Campbell, Snoop Dogg, Cuba Gooding Jr., and Patti LaBelle!) characters don’t fall prey to such temptation. Artists aren’t reduced or stripped of nuance at all. The show presents black artistry in way we are not accustomed to seeing: it’s unfettered, unqualified, unapologetic, a portrait in which idiosyncratic isn’t seen as exotic or alien; it’s normal.

Highlighting the many moving parts of the music industry can also more clearly show how the business interacts with the societal forces around it. As one looks at the moving gears, even "creative" ideas and innovation within the music industry are opened up and put under a microscope where they lay exposed, open to scrutiny from all angles.

In "Empire", the longer one meditates on the moving parts, the more the snapshot of the music industry develops. Talking points don’t hold up. Take, for instance, the move to convert Empire Enterprises from a family-owned business into a publicly traded company. "Times have changed," Lucious laments in the first episode. "The Internet has destroyed the musician’s ability to make money because our work is downloaded for free online, and now it’s impossible for the disenfranchised kids growing up in the projects to overcome poverty in the way that I did."

What Lucious is describing is not simply an archaic business model; it is, in part, a symptom of "modernity"—a condition the late American philosopher Marshall Berman describes as "an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are." Yet, Lucious, beholden to the lure of capitalism’s promise ("He only loves money," Hakeem reminds us), and possibly ignorant to modernist philosophy, proposes a market solution: "I am proud to announce that Empire Entertainment has filed to become a publicly-traded company on the New York Stock Exchange," Lucious boldly proclaims.

The IPO represents an old belief that capitalism can solve its own problems. In going public, Lucious is implicitly saying capitalism can answer threats posed by a complex modern world simply by adjusting his capitalistic strategy. Of course, what Lucious sidesteps or disregards in his nostalgic decree is how his opportunity to "get out of poverty" owes a debt to modernity as well (there would be no portable keyboards, MPCs, and burnable discs without mass production). The iTunes age he lambasts—more democratized, lower overhead, fewer barriers to entry, where anyone with an internet connection and a mobile device can record and disseminate music—is indebted to technology, too. In the last episode, once Empire goes public and Lucious is arrested for murder, his company’s stock prices plummet. We may not know at the moment if Empire will bounce back, but it is easily discernible that technology will continue to revolutionize the music industry. Sure, Lucious’s idea sounds creative, dextrous, and inspiring; but it’s really kind of silly.

One might wonder how the same kind of creativity holds up in the real world. Last week, Jay Z, whom Lucious’s character is very loosely based, announced the launch of Tidal, a new "artist-driven" streaming service that will likely compete with the increasingly-popular Spotify, the legendary Pandora, and a soon to be released service by Apple. Already, a number of 1%-er mainstream artists have offered their support: Beyoncé, Usher, Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, Madonna, Kanye West, and J. Cole. The goal, ostensibly, is to solve the problem of artists getting swindled out of their profits by Internet downloads and free streaming. "We’re actually here to improve the landscape," Jay says. But, like Lucious’s IPO, it remains to be determined whether or not the service will solve the problems of industry caused by the moving parts of the modern world.

At the same time, one also wonders if Jay’s business move is a moving piece within a bigger process as well. Perhaps Tidal is not so much about his product as much as critics and analysts have suggested. Rather, what Tidal may be is the beginning of a legacy that hasn’t yet been determined. Consider Jay’s words at the press conference announcing the venture. "If just the presence of Tidal causes other companies to have better pay structure, or to pay more attention to it moving forward, then we’ve been successful in one way," Jay says. "I don’t know where streaming will go in the future. The analytics that we’re seeing tell us that streaming is the next thing, and downloads are going down. I feel like with the history of this platform, from vinyl to where we are now, it just seems like the next logical step."

On screen, it’s hard not to feel as if "Empire" is pouring a foundation of its own, similar to Hov. While the show illustrates the process of building an empire, it is simultaneously laying the groundwork for a legacy that will last even when it no longer is around. As a show about the hard work and sacrifice of a black family trying to build something for the future, "Empire" furnishes quite the allegory to its legacy in a Hollywood notorious for its lack of diversity: the work of changing the game is arduous and the stakes are incredibly high. Sure, the show is brilliant—that is, as a product "Empire" achieves everything it intended and then some—but it is more than an amazing work of art. "Empire" is one catalyst in the slow process of change.

Legacies are not built overnight.

John Cage photo courtesy of EM Records/Omega Point

In 2013, the New York City Opera—the city’s second largest opera company—filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy. A move from Lincoln Center to Brooklyn, a buzzworthy, pop-music-infused opera about Anna Nicole Smith and a Kickstarter campaign couldn’t save the 70-year-old company, which had been struggling for years to reconcile its commitment to staging modern, adventurous works with its fundraising difficulties. Now, even the centuries-old Metropolitan Opera—with its crowd-pleasing programming (18th and 19th century classics, largely), A-list stars and huge endowment—is in dire straits. Current general manager Peter Gelb has racked up huge production costs with lavish and controversial new productions, while attendance is flagging: Receptive younger audiences are being priced out, and the older, traditionally-minded base is, as Gelb bluntly put it, dying off, or not interested in seeing any wheels be reinvented.

These difficulties in New York illustrate why daring new works are so rarely programmed by major American opera companies: Even the most modest attempts to stay artistically relevant can be bad for business. As a result, significant avant-garde works written decades ago—from Gyorgy Ligeti’s surrealistic fantasy Le Grand Macabre, to John Cage’s glacial, indeterminate Europera pieces to Robert Ashley’s spoken-word driven masterpieces—are still never mounted. These days, the "modern opera" placeholders in opera companies’ seasons are often works from post-minimalist composers like—or following in the tradition of—John Adams or Philip Glass. Blending the propulsive rhythms of classical minimalism with elements of older, pre-modern styles, these operas do not push the conventions of the art form too far, usually sticking to conventional vocal writing, plot structure, and tuneful, tonal music.

And so experimental opera is kept alive, mostly—outside of universities and colleges—in small, rented theaters and DIY spaces. The aptly named Experiments in Opera is one of the more interesting new-opera groups in New York City, subsisting on grants, generosity and volunteer enthusiasm. Last week, the five-year-old company presented "Story Binge," a two-day festival at Brooklyn’s Roulette consisting of seven brand new productions. These works are "operas" in the broadest sense of the word: that is—as one of the festival’s composers Nick Hallett put it—dramatic situations in which a "story interacts with a musical landscape." In the works premiered at Roulette, all other limitations, and even that one (most often, the idea of a "story") were either questioned or ignored.

The provocative pieces were not tailored explicitly to new-opera devotees; they seemed to be equally aimed at drawing in open-minded audience members with no pre-existing interest in the genre. The composers and performers came from backgrounds in electronic music, free improvisation, world music and pop or rock music—notably, Faith No More’s keyboardist Roddy Bottum contributed a piece. Avoiding typical and stereotypical operatic gambits, their work did not rely heavily on classically-trained singing. Traditional operatic singers shared the stage with poppier stylists (singer/composer Gelsey Bell sang with a straight-toned, Feist-ian lilt in Rolodex, in which performers used a rolodex as an adapatable score), readers (Aaron Siegel delivered an intensely personal monologue in hushed, NPR-ish tones in "Laughing") and computerized vocalists (most of the libretto of Sam Hillmer’s drone-filled, non-narrative That Was Soon, and That Was the Web This is Going to Be was rendered by text-to-speech bots, and hardly included live vocals at all).

The best of the operas juxtaposed wildly contrasting musical styles. Hallett’s dark comedy To Music was the most elaborate collage, blending off-center pop and Broadway-styled songwriting with blasts of dissonance and electronic detritus. Staged beneath intricate projections of fake laptop activity, the opera features a fictional composer muttering to himself while checking his mail (responding to congratulatory messages from Moby and Marina Abramović), attempting to play buffering YouTube clips (the skips are cleverly echoed in the music), and, ultimately, chatting with a possible Catfish of a social media follower. Co-curator and mod-synth mastermind Jason Cady’s The Captives, meanwhile, was even more committed to being non-serious. The piece is a conversation in alternating songs (static new-wave disco tunes anchored by tinny drum programming) between a human couple forced together by a tyrannical alien species to reproduce. The singers were part of the onstage band, contributing unruly, Remain in Light-style synth blasts when not singing, and an alien appears in a plasticine Halloween-pop-up-store alien mask and gloves. Funny and engaging, it was carried by Cady’s precise, funky arrangements and spirited vocal performances from Vince B. Vincent and Katie Eastburn.

A story and music playing off one another in a dramatic context is one of the oldest relationships in art, but there are various stigmas surrounding it. For musical ideologues from "absolute music" advocate/composer Johannes Brahms to the heckling metal head at the high school musical, there is something inferior about concoctions of music and narrative, whether it’s stylized performance conventions, cookie-cutter emotional platitudes or other perceived elements of gimmickry and cornballness. Experiments in Opera and groups like them, however, seek to insure the continued development of music-drama, overturning preconceptions and avoiding textbook moves. One can only hope that work like theirs will find ways to adapt and subsist, to gain new supporters and even, if very rarely, to make a difference on a wider scale.

Image via Instagram

Over the weekend, the exclusive first interview with One Direction following the departure of founding member Zayn Malik was published in UK tabloid The Sun. The now-quartet— comprising Harry Styles, Louis Tomlinson, Niall Horan and Liam Payne—briefly discussed their sadness since learning of Malik's decision to leave, before returning to the subject that's been at the forefront of nearly every one of their interviews, awards acceptance speeches and tweets since they formed five years ago: the fans.

"We're looking forward to seeing all our fans on the tour this year," Horan said, while Tomlinson praised them for their loyalty and "for being so incredible during this time," and Styles went for the gratitude angle—"A huge thank you to them for everything they've done for us."

Even a casual observer of One Direction knows how powerful their fanbase is, but when you pay close attention, you begin to feel like the band's appreciation is as much about gratitude as it is self-protection.
The band's success is rarely credited to their talent as singers and confidence as songwriters, or their charisma and genuine likability. Instead, they're routinely labelled "lucky", a marker that implies a kind of musical Imposter Syndrome because they were in the right place at the right time, they appeared when Simon Cowell needed a new group to spackle together and sell to teenagers, and their fans took to social media in droves and wouldn't rest until they were the biggest band in the world.

That last part is undoubtedly true. But even when the band broke every imaginable record and sold out the world's largest arenas and stadiums multiple times over, their fans' hunger for information, access and affection only grew. They, after all, were the reason these unknown boys with cherubic faces and dirty mouths were suddenly neck-deep in money, fame and attention.

Which makes it all the harder for those fans, who have grown so accustomed to gratitude and acknowledgement, to learn of Malik's departure and receive no context or explanation.

A week after announcing that he was leaving his bandmates, Malik went on holiday with his family, including his parents, sisters and fiancée Perrie Edwards. Photos of the couple were shared on Instagram by Malik's older sister Doniya. The comments section was instantly seized upon by expectant fans demanding answers from Zayn (and his family) for his departure and the subsequent announcement that he would continue making music solo.

"We pay your bills!" some cried in the comments, "He said he was leaving the band to be a normal 22-year-old, but now he's going solo! This is not what normal 22-year-olds do!", and, "He lied to us!"

A week earlier the same fans were declaring that they'd support Zayn "no matter what". They were sad to see him leave, but supportive of his decision to put his own needs and feelings first. When producer Naughty Boy leaked a demo he recorded with Zayn—presumably intended for inclusion on One Direction's 2014 album Four—the same support turned nasty, with fans threatening to withdraw their support and "end his career", because this path—working with a collaborator who is not connected to the band, and who acts like kind of a dick to 1D fans on Twitter—is in opposition to what they collectively want for him. They're acutely aware of the power they wield, due in large part to the constant credit they're given for Malik's and the band's success, and they know how to use it.

One Direction's mythology centers on the phenomenon of how their fans engage on social media—in their 2013 film This Is Us, Cowell described how their determined, obsessive tweeting and support made it impossible for anyone to ignore or forget about the band—and, because of this, an expectation of information and access has seeped into the fandom, often at the expense of the members themselves.

After the announcement of Zayn's stress leave, which came just days before news hit of him leaving the band for good, BBC Radio 1 stalwart Scott Mills told his colleague Phil Williams he "wasn't particularly surprised" about the departure. "They're the only band we've not been able to interview inside the [BBC] building, because it's too much of a security risk for people outside … Being in this band is not like being in any other band. You can't leave your hotel room, you can't sleep at night because there are people screaming outside your hotel room. You can't go to the cinema, you can't go to the shops because if you try to do that, then the whole town or city will go on lockdown."

You've seen the pictures and videos of these scenes; hundreds of thousands of fans swarming the streets of Rome to welcome the band, girls clinging to the backs of speeding motorcycles in Mexico just to catch a glimpse of the boys, who are shielded away behind the dark windows of SUVs. But this kind of attention is harmless compared more direct interactions. A 2012 paparazzi video shows Liam and his then-girlfriend Danielle Peazer walking through Manhattan. A fan-run "update account"—where admins tweet all sightings and information on the boys' whereabouts—tipped fans off, and suddenly the couple is descended upon. They try to keep their heads down and continue walking, until Danielle is hit with a shoe someone threw at her from the swarm. Moments later, amid desperate screams of, "We do so much for you!" Liam relents and lets them take pictures with him, forcing a smile like the one that's been looped over 15 million times on Vine. He tells the girls by way of explanation, "This is my only day off", but it doesn't matter: They do so much for him by ensuring his continued success, and he is obligated to meet their demands. By the end of the video, he hurries away with his girlfriend and their security detail and the fans are left behind, crying and congratulating one another, so thrilled to have been so close to him for just a moment.



"[With the Beatles] you had the mania and you had people turning up at the airports and recording studios and radio and TV stations," Mills said, "but what you didn't have was that constant insight into people's lives through social media. Some people say it's too intrusive, but you have to be on it if you're a modern band. And One Direction's fanbase pretty much grew through social media."

"We had the advantage of Twitter and YouTube and I think that goes to show how powerful the Internet is nowadays," Malik mused in the 2014 documentary Fan Armies on BBC Radio 1 Stories. "Literally, people shouldn't know who we are [in America] at all, and we've got a little bit of a following because of the Internet."

One Direction is both the guinea pig and the end goal for labels hoping to promote their band or artist on social media, only instead of their interaction with fans being a gimmick or a short-lived campaign, it was the catalyst for their existence. There were no rules or boundaries in place for them, because it wasn't until they stepped onto that "X Factor" stage that anything at this scale had been seen before. Comparing One Direction to bands in the past is as reductive as comparing the Kardashians' hold on reality television to the first season of "The Real World"; nothing is comparable because we're watching these empires expand in real-time. There's no reference for it, and as such any restrictions need to be implemented retroactively. You can't tell where the lines are until they're crossed.

Last month Molly Beauchemin wrote about the control musicians have over their social media platforms, paying special attention to the Instagrammed lives of women in rock. "Social media is playing an increasingly central role in determining how musicians like these are portrayed in popular culture," Beauchemin said.

"If there's like a currency in social media, like a kind of money that people spend, that money is recognition," psychotherapist Aaron Baylick explained in Fan Armies. "With Twitter … if you put something out there and you get a mention back or a retweet, you feel recognised, like there's something good enough about you and this other person has recognised it. And that actually does feel like, in a sense, the creation of a relationship."

But what began, in One Direction's case, as an organic relationship that connected a band to their fans has become distorted along the way when that same connection became a way to monetize a product. One Direction fans will be all-too familiar with the premise of a "follow-spree". This is when a member announces that they're online and will follow a select group of fans, but there's often a catch:

#ONEDIRECTIONBRIT thank you if you’re tweeting this  :-) x

— zaynmalik1D (@zaynmalik) February 25, 2015

CAN YOU DO A FOLLOW SPREE FOR FANS WHO ARE VOTING FOR YOU? <<< this was a DM and the answer is yes ..

— zaynmalik1D (@zaynmalik) February 25, 2015

The fans also show, time and time again, that they're more savvy and self-aware than a label's marketing arm might assume.

can u believe zayn malik faked a follow spree and won his band a brit

— sadika (@malikmecool) February 25, 2015

"Since we’ve legitimized Instagram as a medium that purports to show 'reality'—or some semblance of it—the community’s reaction to these images comes with a degree of entitlement," Beauchemin wrote. The promise of access, and the assurance that the person you see on stage or in magazines is a person who might pay you the same attention on their personal social media account, is dangled in front of the fans like a carrot, but it's snatched away before they can really get a taste.

To promote the release of Four last November, One Direction were interviewed in a Google Hangout that was live-streamed to their fans around the world. Being online at the same time as their heroes were being interviewed was as close as the fans got, though; interviewer Ben Winston read a series of pre-prepared questions and chatted with the band for half an hour, offering no opportunities for interaction from the million plus fans watching around the world. The fans are told to expect proximity and access for showing their allegiance, but the promise ring never quite makes it onto their finger.

Photo by Sagan Lockhart

On his latest album, I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside, Earl Sweatshirt raps like he’s been pulled, kicking and screaming, into the cold world of adulthood. His flow is fleshed with earned aggression, and when he raps about "accepting a fifth of whiskey and necking it ‘til I’m dizzy," he sounds like he means it. The album often illuminates the process of coming to terms with one’s past and broaching an approximation of maturity; on I Don’t Like Shit Earl of the past becomes fodder, another artistic tool. It’s unlikely Earl will ever outrun his early hype—the version of himself that became famous in absentia by making a song about rape, and the one that led him to deal with "a gaggle of 100-fucking-thousand kids"—and he knows it. But by the end of I Don’t Like Shit, he just might be okay with that.

As clear-sighted as I Don’t Like Shit is at times, its insights are hard-won, and cloaked in a haze of depression—in a recent interview with NPR’s Microphone Check podcast, Earl tells host Frannie Kelley that he became "aware of himself" over the course of making the album, gaining clarity about what he had been through since returning to America. And he didn’t like what he saw. "I looked fucked up," he says, describing looking into a kind of emotional mirror. "You get to the other side and it’s like the clearest your head has ever been." Passing through hell to emerge, intact.

Maturity and self-awareness were the sworn enemy of Odd Future when they initially blew up in 2011. The pure youth—the energy and IDGAF rawness of every expression—was so exciting it made that all that Golf Wang misadventure revivifying.

While Odd Future’s musical energy was new, the attitude it was selling wasn’t. As long as there are disaffected, angry young men, there will be music made by and catering to them, and that music will often rely on misanthropy (or misogyny/homophobia) to signal writ-large masculinity to its intended audience. That’s just part of (American) youth, one that often, of necessity, entails denying the humanity of others en route to reaching one’s own moral and emotional self. Yet the diverging paths of Earl Sweatshirt and Tyler, the Creator point at ways of understanding this process of growth, and the way it plays out as they get older.

Take Tyler’s apex, "Yonkers", where the Tyler character serves as a template for the rest of Odd Future, and a cartoonish crutch supporting a certain type of disaffected masculinity. Here, his production is at its most seductive--defining a headspace you either want to be in or can’t stand, but that proves impossible to negotiate on your own terms if you’re not already with Tyler in spirit.

He’s a misanthropic, unhinged loner dude who can threaten rape in one breath and ride around on Jimmy Fallon’s back in the next looking like the cousin about to introduce you to fireworks. He’s defined more by the things he hates than the things he likes. He’s sexually frustrated (you could easily imagine his infamous first line on "Assmilk" going, "I’m not a bastard/ I just don’t get to fuck a lot"), and, as a result, explicitly positions sex as an awkward attempt to assert his own power rather than anything even remotely sensual ("That was me who shoved a cock in your bitch").

Meanwhile, Earl, the not-so-secret weapon of the first Odd Future releases, immediately establishes himself as a master of smashing the boundaries between poetic wordplay and utter depravity. On tracks like "Drop", he’s practically daring you to formally respect his inventive command of the language even as it’s being deployed for horrifying ends:

Tell your bitch to stop complaining ‘bout her achy tits
Her body is a temple
I don’t give a fuck I’m atheist

It’s an effective way for Earl hold our attentions, forcing focus onto prodigious verbal dexterity rather than an angry posture. It mimics much of the appeal of the initial message (expressed in its silliest, purest form as "kill people burn shit fuck school"). The characters of Earl Sweatshirt and Tyler, the Creator serve as avatars of unchecked rage, capable of doing the things all of their younger listeners might secretly want to do but would never act out.

The Earl character, at this stage, takes the same general approach to young dude-ness as Tyler. Both characters are still engaging precisely because they emanate from a core of real pain—the moment at which you can observe and condemn so-called "bad behavior" while still finding it wholly understandable. Like a rap game Tony Soprano, Tyler spends a lot of time awkwardly talking to his therapist, working through another identity—"Wolf," who does a lot of terrible things that Tyler sometimes feels bad about, and sometimes has reasons for doing, mostly related to his absent father.

"Seven", the galloping lead track on his first album, Bastard, starts with Tyler sharing some choice words for him: "I’d tell him to eat a dick quicker than Mexicans spring over borders." Earl’s equivalent of "Seven"—his most overt, personal, and illuminating early revelation—is the breathtakingly ambivalent "Luper"—a murder ballad in which Earl lashes out at a girl because "Most wanna tap and score, I want a fam of four," a desire for familial stability that’s explored in far greater depth on Doris. But here, Earl finds himself exposed, then hesitant, embarrassed: "Not, like, a family of four, just like... fuck it. You’ll never listen to this shit anyway, fuck you bitch."

Somehow, both of these songs are simultaneously repulsive and (to an extent) sympathetic. Tyler wants to be a man, but certainly not the same kind of man as his father and all he represents, while Earl reacts violently to admitting that he wants a normal family. (Try imagining the Earl of "epaR" fantasizing of a picket-fence future.) These remain the most powerful, enduring installments of the Odd Future catalogue—the origin story for the group’s collective performance, capturing the way in which the characters form as important pieces of young, male identity, and how that manifests itself in their art.

Many rappers/artists attempt to identify their personae with their selves as much as possible; Earl and Tyler exaggerate their character until it’s impossible to identify with the human being underneath. In contrasting Odd Future with their hero Eminem, Bethlehem Shoals writes: "The Odd Future bunch never mistake acting nuts for actually being nuts, and what makes their music so easy to excuse, and enjoy, is the sense of living, breathing kids underneath all the ugliness."

This gap—between acting and being nuts—is, in some sense, suspect (after all, we are what we do), but it allows for an understanding of the mindset the produces this music—most importantly, they are (or were) living, breathing kids. This youthful energy is often definitionally exclusionary and interested in proclaiming its individual identity, something that Odd Future harnesses for creative, if difficult, ends, but it’s more the work of kids keeping the nerds off the playground than real schoolyard bullies.

Forming an identity by "acting out"—something that is, by definition, reactive—is deeply related to actually being able to engage with and understand people in the long term. Possessing an actual, strong, and positive sense of self is crucial to understanding that other people have identities, too, even if they’re not the same as yours. They’re separate people. And it’s impossible to stave off that process forever. Growing up happens and our identities calcify, whether we want them to or not. So taking the process of youthful, masculine rage as far as it can performatively go raises the question: what’s next?

At first, Tyler and Earl playfully rapped about murdering people because it was fun. But it stops being fun and becomes an albatross, and eventually you have to either let your character die or live long enough to see it become a self-parody. Growing up is, in part, about losing that psychic scar tissue and being able to see the blood underneath. Actually being a bad person comes from seeing it and still choosing to ignore humanity, or simply not getting it. And that’s why it’s promising that Tyler appears to have largely discarded his persona.

By Wolf, Tyler’s production is slick, beautiful even—but his heart clearly isn’t in his tongue anymore. Most of the songs on Wolf are, ostensibly, love songs—twisted, creepy, stalker-y love songs that sound like they’re from a mashup of "The Following" and Adult Swim, but love songs nonetheless. In interviews from as far back as March 2014, Tyler expresses a lack of interest in doing anything besides skateboarding and watching Wes Anderson movies. It shows.

By contrast, I Don’t Like Shit is a warning against hanging on to the character for too long. Earl tells "Microphone Check" that, "the funniest part about the album is that it was funny and then it wasn’t funny. Like at all." And, indeed, I Don’t Like Shit isn’t hiding behind, or coyly deploying, Earl’s age, because the man is starting to catch up with the creations of his music—"I been living what I wrote," he raps on lead single "Grief". What he lived and wrote is the prior incarnation of the Earl Sweatshirt character: an avatar of the justifiably angry, gifted young man, naive and violent in equal measure—a sociopathic, brilliant Charlie Brown. ("Good grief," Earl spits.) He knows that it isn’t as cool to be angry when you have to live like that all the time.

In Earl’s dextrous command of his own persona, he’s become a different type of artist—more like a gifted comedian than a stock MC. One of the hallmarks of great comedy is the ability to slather on layer after layer of performance and skillfully yank them away. (Take any number of Louis C.K. bits, which play off the comic’s persona to undermine the audience’s expectations.) Earl frequently accomplishes this in his live show, where he manages to implicate the audience in the actions and impulses of his own character—in one instance, goading a crowd into chanting the "Molasses" refrain "I’ll fuck the freckles off your face bitch" before abruptly launching into the serious self-hatred of "Chum". (In the interim, Earl called out a bro in the audience who refused to join the crowd—making him feel uncomfortable no matter how he responded to the taunt.)

There is certainly a lot to get excited about in Earl’s career, but it’s hard not to think about what lies further down the path of I Don’t Like Shit. Earl’s Ghost of Christmas Future is basically current-day Eminem—a warning of what happens when you stay a psychotic Peter Pan. You get boring. The optimistic approach to I Don’t Like Shit is to call it a distillation of the moment where the persona overwhelms the person underneath, a self-aware version of The Marshall Mathers LP 2, and that in its wake is a reflective young man who knows exactly what buttons to push and when.

Photo by Chris Tuite

Coachella, Coachella was our Woodstock; Jungle our Jimi, Tame Impala our Sha-na-na, Steely Dan our Steely Dan, and Touché Amore our, uh, Modern Life Is War. It was a golden shimmering time, you didn’t recognize the faces but you knew the tote bags and the lingo (English), the unity of spirit was our gift to the universe… Coachella ‘15. The bands had pun names that sounded like other, more famous but perhaps less important, proper nouns; Tiger and Woods, Chet Faker, and one that sounded like Rock Against Communism but totally wasn’t. What are words anyway, but the confusion of Babylon? "Ph" was always interchangeable with "f" and "Z"s were as beloved as vowels were despised. We were wild and free like Paul Banks in 2003, but in 2015 so we could do lines off phones the size of a turtle, no, wait, a tortoise. I pity you, young man, that you were not old enough to experience it. Feel bad. Feel badder.

It was Coachella, 2015, and we were the target age demographic for the middle lineup, the rap acts, the EDM tokens who were more popular than the actual headliners, and the world felt as if it was wide open. It was that brief moment in time in America when you could wear a ceremonial Native American headdress one day and denounce it on Twitter the next and everyone would love you for it, panties and boxer-briefs tossed out the high windows of the changing zeitgeist. Seduction was as easy as reciting the entire Louis C.K. smartphone bit in a well-chosen ear during the intro to "Seven Nation Army". We used our phones to accomplish sexually what it would take literally minutes to accomplish in person at Woodstock, and the '70s, and much of the '80s… ANYWAY, it was an etheric river of water and we all swam midstream to spawn. It was also a literal river of water as we danced through the 324 bathroom stalls of Indio Valley, letting the spirits of our ancestors, the first white people to wear traditional headpieces, worry about a drought! Jerry Brown, from the '60s to the '15s was always a metaphor, his legislature to be taken as aphorism. The only drought that concerned us was the drought between Kasabian albums. You may try to judge us now, you kids with only your 3D print-outs of water to sustain you, but our wisdom was not the kind you could find in a $10 bottle of water. Though, yes, sure, we drank all that water, what truly sustained us were Drake memes.

I’m not trying to make you feel like it’s your fault. If I’ve taught you anything, it’s that nothing is anyone’s fault. Your generation’s festivals are OK; I’m glad Interpol is still playing fifth to last everywhere. We were a magical generation. Like the boomers but slightly less excruciating, we really believed we could change the world and just would rather not. Coachella '15, phrases like "it happened" almost fail to do it justice. Every generation gets the archetypical festival it deserves; Woodstock for the boomers, Lollapalooza for Gen X, Woodstock '94 for Y, and Coachella for Generation (so glad we finally got rid of the very offensive term "millennial") Bloated Hodgepodge of Exhibitionistic/Nihilistic Inanities. You, Generation Steampunk By Necessity, have yet to find yours. I don’t ascribe this to any character flaws in you kids—if I learned anything from Alt-J it was "who am I to judge," but I can’t help but pity you. We made a shimmering city in the desert, our hearts beating as one as we sang united that one Hozier song and that half a Kimbra song, as we celebrated the easy commute of Night Terrors of 1927 and the dogged perseverance of the Cribs and as we impotently shushed motherfuckers during Perfume Genius until we, our own near divine selves, had something we wanted to say to our neighbor. You’ll never know what it was like to live half in a waking dream and half in a never-ending War On Drugs blog post. We existed as they did on Yasgur’s farm in '69 (lol): both besides the point of the music and self-righteous about being "about the music," a beatific panorama of the senses sans shirts, a primal scream mixed with a Tumblr page devoted to "Who’s Primal Scream?" Or whoever the Primal Scream was that year. I don’t remember. But I remember the feeling, and I remember my feelings, and I remember the golden calf that we built to our feelings, that Coachella of 2015, when feelings were our personal and feelings were our political and for some reason AC/DC played!

Coachella was our Woodstock (without all the lame rain) and our Good War (but with the good sense to ban selfie sticks) and our (toned and far tanner) Marriage of Charles and Di and our (not faked) Moon Landing; and we swore, swore on our Mac DeMarco beer cozy and on Azealia Banks’ Twitter timeline and double down swore on whatever it was that made Cloud Nothings and Coasts briefly famous, and Brand New and the Orwells inexplicably long-term famous, swore on OFF!’s credibility and Florence and the Machine’s sense of subtlety, we swore on our Apple watches and we swore on our other non-anachronistic references, to remember Coachella '15, to praise Coachella '15, to pinky swear our age inappropriate affectations and, most importantly, true to our Woodstock ancestors and true to ourselves, to never ever EVER shut up about Coachella 2015.

A few months after the National released Alligator the band played a small college venue to 30 people, a number that included venue staff and the opening band. I know this because I was there, and I counted. At that point, the Ohio-transplants had garnered critical acclaim in their adopted hometown of New York, and were regularly packing small venues around the city--but in a college town their draw was still in the dozens.

After the show, the band sat around chatting with those who’d shown up and I took more of lead singer/lyricist Matt Berninger’s time chatting than I had any right to—he was kind, talkative and probably a little drunk. By the end of the night, one of the National’s guitarists (either Dessner twin, Aaron or Bryce) sat at the venue’s dressing-room piano and plunked out what would become the intro to "Fake Empire", the band’s breakout hit. I heard it faintly through the walls. "That’s kinda pretty," I half-thought to myself, forgetting about it 30 seconds later.

The next time the band came around in 2007, Dessner mentioned writing the piano line at the venue, telling the story to a capacity crowd. Six years later, I reviewed the National’s Barclays Center debut. The songs of Trouble Will Find Me, the group's sixth album, filled the sports pavillion nicely. Packing most of Barclays’ 19,000 seats that night was their rock-star turn.

The National’s trajectory over the last decade-plus mirrors Brooklyn itself: transplantation, sudden growth, rapid gentrification. As a sense of place, Brooklyn plays an essential part in the National’s story, namely Alligator’s. It’s in the album’s inebriated blood, the home and hearth of its interior landscape. To let Alligator tell it, the National’s Brooklyn is an almost bucolic escape from the city, where all the wine is for them.

In the harsh light of 2015, the National might seem fuddy-duddy in a Brooklyn that moves forward so ruthlessly. It’s a Brooklyn that, for most artists, is post-Williamsburg and has seen lots of venues/art-friendly spaces close, including 285 Kent, Galapagos, and Northsix. "A white-hot real estate market is burning through the affordable cultural habitat," said Robert Elmes, Galapagos’ executive director, in the New York Times. "And it’s no longer a crisis, it’s a conclusion."

Add that to the innovation panic of the music industry’s last 15 years and it calls into question the way the National and its peers retooled existing models of How to Make It for independent bands. Ones who start small, gain steam with critics/blogs and snag a deal with a low-key major/large indie label (for the National it was Beggars Group, namely4AD). Perhaps most importantly: constant touring and gradual expansion of its circuit. Fill the breaks between album/touring cycles with solo projects, maybe an extra-musical pursuit or two for some pocket money and de rigeur film/TV/advertising licenses. By no means did the National invent, or even innovate drastically upon the '00s model for rising bands, but they sure worked it to success.

Whether or not future artists will be able to follow the National’s kind of career path is questionable. Regardless, Brooklyn’s irrepressible creative pull will certain remain. Within Alligator, Brooklyn-then was the metaphor at the heart of the album: the duality of its fragile interior world matched by its dark exterior one, the grace and grit of city life writ large. "I’ve got $500 in twenties and I’ve got a ton of great ideas," Berninger moans on "City Middle", as he goes cavorting to do God knows what. "My bodyguard shows her revolver to anyone who asks," he croons menacingly on "Lit Up". "And yeah she comes to attention when you come up to me too fast."

He sets a scene of grace on "The Geese of Beverly Road". "We'll take ourselves out in the street," he sings. "And wear the blood in our cheeks like red roses/ We'll go from car to sleeping car and whisper in their sleeping ears/ ‘We were here, we were here.’" If "Beverly Road” sounds picturesque, it’s because it is. It's a throughway that passes through historic Ditmas Park, where the band wrote and recorded much of Alligator.

"It's a beautiful neighborhood that feels more like Savannah, Georgia than Brooklyn," Berninger told Neumu. "The houses are all free-standing with nice yards and wrap-around porches. I was sitting outside one night watching a bunch of kids running up and down Beverly setting off car alarms. The song is theirs." (The whole band established itself in Ditmas Park permanently in 2003.)

The message within Alligator is like this: Don’t ever leave New York, even if it drives you nuts. "I wouldn't go out alone into America," Berninger sings on "Karen". He would know. He and most of the National grew up in Ohio. On "City Middle", Berninger is drawn to the city like a moth to a flame.

Karen, take me to the nearest famous city middle
Where they hang the lights
Where it's random, and it's common versus common
La di la

When Berninger finds a moment of clarity about city life in his lyrics, it rivals that of his contemporaries (LCD Soundsystem, Interpol), even predecessors (Mark Eitzel, Leonard Cohen). "How can anybody know how they got to be this way?" Berninger sings on Alligator’s "Daughters of the Soho Riots". "You must have known I'd do this someday." These lyrics use Manhattan’s SoHo as metaphor, just as the National’s other songs use Brooklyn. It’s the city as romance and neurosis—loving something even and maybe especially if it makes you insane. Berninger narrates the scattered, scared, sexy, anxious and, especially, inebriated thoughts of urban life as if it were an abstract novel. "I pull off your jeans and you spill Jack and Coke in my collar," he sings sadly on Alligator’s stream-of-consciousness "Baby, We’ll Be Fine".

On "The Geese of Beverly Road", Alligator’s most blissful refrain, Berninger sings, "We’re the heirs to the glimmering world." Brooklyn is their glimmering world—all the front yards, sleeping cars, black city streets, secret meetings, basements and city middles. Ten years on, Alligator tells us that some things, especially the glimmering ones, are worth fighting for.

The best place to watch a band at Portland’s 1500-person capacity Crystal Ballroom is the all-ages side. Except at a reunion show. Then, it’s just the sober section, and "all-ages" mostly means "all of the ages between 35 and 60." This past Friday, the Replacements came to Portland, having kicked off its first proper tour since 1991.

"Were you alive when this came out?" the guy next to me asked as Paul Westerberg tore into "Bastards of Young". I was alive before the Beatles broke up, so, compliment accepted, even if it came accompanied by the implication that I wasn’t there the first time, man.

Maybe that’s because I wasn’t all that hyped compared to my neighbor, who was also fantasizing that R.E.M.’s Peter Buck (who lives in Portland, and played on "I Will Dare", plays in seven or eight bands with Scott McCaughey of opening act the Young Fresh Fellows) might show up. I went to the show with low expectations, and I wasn’t the only one. People I know (on Facebook) were excited (on Facebook) about seeing the Replacements, but didn’t necessarily have a treasured memory of the great show that they saw back in the day. This was especially true in Portland, where, as Willamette Week music editor Matthew Singer recounted, the band’s 1987 gig with the Fellows was so especially awful, the words "sorry Portland" appeared, etched, in the run-out groove of the band’s 1989 album Don’t Tell a Soul.

That would also be why Westerberg inserted some of the band’s Don’t Tell a Soul era B-side "Portland" (as well as another deep cut, "Nowhere is My Home") into "Talent Show", a Prince-like medley move that (as with Prince) just meant we didn’t actually get to hear a full version of the good song. But if the point of a reunion is to let fans either relive, or experience for the first time, what it was like to see a band back when it was a living organism, the 2015 version of the Replacements are delivering as well as anyone. They were good, they were awful, they were raucous, they were boring, they were indulgent, they were transcendent. It’s handy when sucking just a little bit (and poormouthing yourself, as with the tour slogan "Back By Unpopular Demand") is built into your brand.

"Few legacies are as protected against reunion-tour cynicism as theirs," Singer wrote, an assertion I tweeted about skeptically. I have friends who’ve called this group a "tribute band" and others who’ve bought plane tickets to see it in action. Certainly, however, given original drummer Chris Mars' apparent blessing and the fact that guitarist Slim Dunlap’s stroke is the very reason this reunion ever happened, their reunion karma’s solid.

Band reunions ought to be about the band, and the way they play and sound and interact together, not just the songs. Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks could play Pavement’s catalog better than Pavement but it wouldn’t be Pavement. Pino Palladino’s bass playing for Paul Young and D’Angelo is godlike, but he’s not John Entwhistle.

Of course, you can't really be that much of a purist about the Replacements when Dunlap wasn’t even the original guitarist. Friday’s set highlighted the fact that, as good as the songwriting was on Pleased to Meet Me and Don’t Tell a Soul, it’s Tim, with Bob Stinson still in the band and Tommy Ramone producing, that remains the high point, the Replacements’ sweet spot between punk and craft.

The current group, rounded out by Westerberg collaborators drummer Josh Freese (A Perfect Circle, Devo) and guitarist David Minehan (the Neighborhoods), is, objectively speaking, better than the original, which isn’t always a plus. The old songs, in particular, are the ones that aren’t convincing: 33 years after The Replacements Stink!, "White and Lazy", a perfectly blues-punk move then, could have accommodated John Mayer in 2015. "Hangin’ Downtown" also got an apparently improvised blues interlude about Whole Foods, presumably the result of Westerberg visiting the grocery chain's Pearl District location, which is mere steps from the Crystal.

It wasn’t all old folks: my favorite part of the show might have been seeing two twenty-something women two rows in front of me singing every word of "Left of the Dial". No matter how up and down a Replacements show is, when you can pull out "Left of the Dial" and "Alex Chilton" as your set-enders, it's impossible for anybody who’s ever had affection for the group to walk away unhappy. Plus, what could be more appropriate than a reunion set which peaks with a song about college radio (purportedly written for a member of Let’s Active) and an encomium-turned-eulogy for Alex? Like many reunions these days the nostalgia of the Replacements reunion is not for the music per se, but for the community and people and musical family trees that existed around the music—college radio, Alex Chilton, the Young Fresh Fellows—of a bygone then. We were alive when that came out. And now we all shop at Whole Foods.

Is Record Store Day stronger than ever? Or is it irrelevant? Heading into the 8th annual celebration of "the unique culture" of independently-owned record stores this April 18th, the same evidence can be used for each side of the argument. For the former, there’s the official Record Store Day release list, which includes more than 430 brand new products, the vast majority pressed onto vinyl (there’s a handful of CDs), to be spread across more than 1,400 stores participating in the U.S. alone. That’s a lot of exclusive stuff in a lot of stores, and it’s all brought to you by Dave Grohl, alt-rock ambassador for music’s brick-and-mortar temples, whether legendary recording studios or community-oriented record stores. RSD was always high-profile—Metallica played the inaugural event at Rasputin’s in San Francisco—but it’s rapidly grown into a high-volume event, as well. The release of the day’s list of exclusive releases is a highly anticipated annual ritual, covered on various websites like Coachella and Bonnaroo lineup announcements.

Yet for the stores and labels that won’t be participating in this year’s event, the same data proves their case too: Record Store Day has gotten way too big, and the smaller players—the people who the holiday is supposed to serve—are getting left out. That’s the contention from Pete Gulyas, the owner of Cleveland store Blue Arrow, who was strung along by a distributor for weeks last year before being left without most of his order for the big day, leaving a line of customers disappointed. Gulyas suspects that, as in the past, the distributor gave preference to one of the "big independents" (like Amoeba Records), leaving the bulk of his 125 item-order out to dry. Gulyas’ open letter was diplomatic compared to the UK-based labels Sonic Cathedral and Howling Owl, who recently issued a press release bluntly announcing that "Record Store Day is Dying". Amongst their rationales: the holiday has become "just another event in the annual music industry circus," too focused on product over participants, and indie labels have a hard time getting their exclusives pressed in time for the big day in favor of corporate rock. "U2 have already shat their album into our iTunes," they argue, "why should they constipate the world’s pressing plants with it too?"

As Record Store Day steadily expands each year, this paradox becomes more important to address: Does Record Store Day, which cites independence as a core mission, focus too much on celebrities and corporations at the expense of the little guys? Wherever one falls on the spectrum of Record Store Day’s relevance, both sides of the argument underscore the event’s core ironies. Record Store Day is founded on the overproduction of exclusives, and the creation of a massively hyped holiday to lift the fortunes of humble independent retailers, most of whom would love steady, regular business with the event's annual one-day sales spike.

Here’s the rub, though: the righteous foundation and crass commercialism of Record Store Day don’t cancel each other out. Instead, because of how promotion and commerce work, they mutually reinforce each other. That’s how it has to happen for one of the most successful music brands of the record business’ chaotic post-mp3 moment. I know, I said "brand." But wait! Despite the "Brands Saying Bae" micromoment making brand interactions with consumers a punchline, the concept of branding permeates the selling and buying of music down to its most elemental forms. Though many label owners might be loath to admit it, creating a recognizable brand is likely at the top of their priority list. Record label logos, roster development, website design, and album art are all part of branding—a way to link a bunch of recognizable symbols, artists, concepts, and vibes into a framework that makes consumers feel a sense of identification and develop loyalty.

Thinking of Record Store Day as a brand—as a logo and a logic binding together a yearly ritual of music consumption—is the only way to understand how concepts like "independence" and "community" can be served by good old-fashioned exploitative capitalism. As Sarah Banet-Weiser compellingly argues in her book Authentic™: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture, branding isn’t some evil that infiltrates "real" spaces somehow outside of capitalism, but a basic cultural force permeating every level of social life (anything filed under "indie" is always already a work of branding, too). Citizenship-through-consumption has been a fact of American life since FDR’s New Deal encouraged shoppers to spend their way out of the Great Depression. Fast-forward several decades and dial down the panic level, and a group of indie record retailers organized an annual consumer holiday based around driving music commerce back to local, independently owned stores that were being driven out of business by big-box retailers, online merchants, and streaming platforms. The logic: local, independent music consumption is an ethical good—sales taxes stay in local communities, which are further served by the presence of such cultural institutions—and on Record Store Day, shoppers can feel satisfied that they’re doing their part by buying exclusive records there-- a one-day celebration of ethical spending that stands in for the other 364 days.

Inspired by Free Comic Book Day and various Local First Initiatives, the RSD founders worked with labels, artists, and distributors to create an annual collector’s market for exclusive vinyl records. The goal was in part to change the financial fortunes of indie stores, but more importantly (here comes the brand logic) to change the narratives surrounding their sad fortunes of late. Anyone paying attention over the past several years knows that when such shops make headlines, it’s in the form of a celebratory wake, whether for Manhattan institution Bleecker Bob’s or Louisville stalwart Ear X-tacy, just two of the more well-known shops to go extinct over the past few years. Then there’s the 2008 documentary I Need That Record! The Death (Or Possible Survival) of the Independent Record Store, which actually opens with a voiceover narration phrased in the past tense: "For some, the independent record store was just another place. But to many, it was more." In a 2010 Weekend Update bit about the event, Seth Myers summed up the general consensus on indie stores: "This Saturday marks the third annual Record Store Day, during which hundreds of independent record stores around the country celebrate vinyl records," Myers quipped. "So get down to your local record store and…what? What’s that? It’s a Jamba Juice now? Aw, I’m sorry, man."

Record Store Day is designed to counter this narrative with one that "celebrate(s) and spreads the word about the unique culture" of indie stores. The event’s founders know from this—they’re all either owners of indie stores or veterans of the record business themselves. Yet the manner in which this revival happens—a one-day capitalist orgy of engineered exclusivity—says as much about the precarious nature of event-driven late capitalism as it does music independence. For a single Saturday each April, participating stores enjoy sales spikes representing 2-3 weeks of business, and participation in a promotional ritual that reaffirms their importance to their local community. That’s great, but only if they can make it to the big day. Record Store Day isn’t free, but requires store buyers to schedule a massive order in-between their regular weekly orders from distributors, which means setting aside up to five-figure sums to buy a crop of exclusive merchandise—for some store owners, enough to double their existing inventory—to please the customers, who line up around the block to buy stuff they’ve often specifically requested. On top of this, most stores have no idea that what they order is actually going to arrive—regional distributors are typically in charge of these decisions, and stores often don’t know until the night before which of their orders were delivered. Finally, unsold Record Store Day products are not only unreturnable, but unlike regular releases, start hemorrhaging value with each passing day, like Christmas decor in February. For retailers, participating in Record Store Day means assuming significant economic risk, often with the goal of breaking even. But if the idea is promoting "the unique culture" of their stores, then it’s a win-win, right?

There are other hidden contradictions. Effectively commoditizing the idea of independence means balancing the rhetoric of indie while dealing with the massive corporations necessary to deliver product at scale. On the official Record Store Day website, the organizers take pains to delineate what counts as an "independent" store:

A Record Store Day participating store is defined as a stand alone brick and mortar retailer whose main primary business focuses on a physical store location, whose product line consists of at least 50% music retail, whose company is not publicly traded and whose ownership is at least 70% located in the state of operation. (In other words, we’re dealing with real, live, physical, indie record stores—not online retailers or corporate behemoths).

That parenthetical is important, because if you scroll down on that same page, you’ll note the logos of the three corporate music behemoths—Warner, Universal, and Sony. In part, Sony’s Red Distribution, Universal Music Group Distribution, and Warner’s Alternative Distribution Alliance function as Record Store Day’s primary shippers. The event wouldn’t be nearly as large as it is without them. The three majors also use Record Store Day as an opportunity to do what corporate labels love to do with any new medium or event: reissue old product as "exclusives," often at significant markups (this holds at major festivals, too: think of all the "reunion" shows staged at South by Southwest and the summer festivals). Again, the allowance of corporate behemoth shippers but not stores isn’t cause to rail against Record Store Day’s hypocrisy, but a way of highlighting the necessity of working with the big money players to turn ethical consumption into a global event—mixing politics and crude capitalism is how brands work. At the same time, however, it’s easy to understand the frustration felt by smaller players like Blue Arrow, Sonic Cathedral, Howling Owl and others. Record Store Day gains its emotional force from the put-upon little guys, but they often get sidelined in favor of the more powerful corporate interests driving the holiday’s commerce.

It’s exactly these smaller indie labels and local record shops that have kept vinyl records alive during the format’s incredibly fallow years of the 1990s and 2000s, allowing Record Store Day the platform to launch a holiday based around the format. After the record industry forced compact discs on retailers (and stopped accepting vinyl returns) to stop the industry’s low post-disco period of the late 1970s, vinyl became unsustainable, retreating to the underground and becoming the province of fetishists and subcultural partisans (garage rock bands adopted the 7”, club cultures favored the 12” single, beat junkies swept bins clean of LP-based sample fodder). Yet over the past several years as young and old fans alike have re-embraced the tangibility of the medium amidst a downloading and streaming landscape—a period during which the "vinyl resurgence" has fed a trendpiece economy—the corporate labels and their trendy retail partners have jumped back into the vinyl game, offering new releases on the format, most often at the same ridiculous markups charged for CDs through the 1990s.

Record Store Day is both the biggest single driver for, and beneficiary of the vinyl resurgence. The format’s comeback is part of an odd current landscape of music formats, in which the two growth markets are a post-WWII innovation and digital streaming platforms reliant on Big Data, smartphones, and wi-fi networks. Though it accounts for a paltry percentage of overall music profits, vinyl sales grew 223% between 2013 and 2014, and doesn’t show any signs of slowing down yet. We very well may be in the middle of a format bubble—boom-and-bust cycles have driven the record industry since the 1920s—that will leave future generations of Goodwill thrifters flipping through racks of unsold RSD exclusives. None of this eliminates what’s perhaps the most compelling lesson to learn from the vinyl resurgence, though. A significant number of RSD shoppers are young people with little knowledge of vinyl records—21-year-olds in 2015 were born at the peak of the CD-driven alt-rock boom in 1994, and even their parents grew up in the cassette and CD era. For a lot of these young music fans, vinyl records are as much "new media" as Songza or Spotify—a novel way of interacting with music that requires a bit of a learning curve.

But does Record Store Day do anything for the old-school vinyl fetishist? In the way that some people are crazy enough about cars that working on an engine in the garage is a unique, meditative pleasure, lots of music lovers are nuts about the process of digging through record store bins, unearthing a decades-old copy of something great (or perhaps merely interesting), taking it home, cleaning it up, playing it, and filing it away. Interfacing with music through vinyl sold at "brick-and-mortar" stores is completely unique from any other format. What Record Store Day wants to highlight more than anything is that vinyl records are key components of a corner-store model of indie music consumption—not the dusty crap dug out of Goodwill racks originally bought in the 1970s at Montgomery Ward, or the warped big-band stuff in grandparents’ basements. Through Record Store Day, the history of a petroleum-based industrial music format is retold as a community-driven "artisanal" process akin to regionally sourced slow-food, craft beer, and Etsy-style small-batch lifestyle products.

I’m one of those people who loves spending hours flipping through bins, but I have no interest in buying anything Record Store Day has to sell. This position has nothing to do with the myriad benefits—discursive and economic alike—that the holiday bestows upon indie retailers. Yes, it's as much of a fetish as plopping down cash for a limited-edition 180 gram reissue, but I prefer my LPs to gain value over time, not through an artifically-created collector’s market. I’d much rather spend $30 on an 25-year-old original pressing with ringwear and a bit of surface noise than $40 on a clean, brand-new reissue of the same recording.  I’m decidedly not Record Store Day’s ideal consumer, but at the same time, I am a record store’s ideal consumer. I’m the guy sitting cross-legged on the floor digging through the $1 bin that you have to walk around to get to the "G" section, who regularly drops $75-100 per visit.

But Record Store Day represents a microcosm of indie stores’ roles in their local communities, and I’m not made of stone. I’ve spent hours of Record Store Days past loitering in the aisles of my favorite record store—Bloomington, Ind.'s unbeatable Landlocked Music—chatting with employees and shoppers, listening to guest DJs and swigging from the free keg in the back of the store. My ambivalence toward Record Store Day merchandise is countered by my weird passion for, yes, "the unique culture" of record stores. This ambivalence is a refraction of Record Store Day’s own branding, which requires dealing with certain capitalistic devils: the overproduction of exclusives and the strategic bracketing of "independence." One’s feelings for Record Store Day shouldn’t derive from its perceived authenticity or lack thereof, then, but through the more complicated calculus of Authenticity™. There’s no way around it, so how can a music fan, retailer, artist, or label negotiate the holiday’s twinned drives toward ethical consumption and capitalist exploitation? This question not only permeates all 21st century commercial landscapes, but it cuts right to the conflicted core of what it means to be a responsible consumer-citizen.

Photo by Emmanuel Afolabi

Sufjan Stevens' latest album Carrie & Lowell is unlike any previous work he’s ever released. Haunting and intimate, it pulls back the curtain on the devastation and sadness of his childhood and invites us into its aftermath, and says this happened to me. Ten years ago, the Mountain Goats’ 2005 landmark, The Sunset Tree, did much of the same thing. It interrupted the career of a beloved songwriter, and entrusted fans and listeners with their pain and experience. They were candid about the sort of stuff their peers would think to wrap in cool allegories. The sum of it all suddenly recast their discography in a new light—it showed us something fuller, something inescapable.

In many ways, Sunset Tree something like an antecedent to Carrie & Lowell. The narrative arc of these two albums puts parental abuse and neglect at the center; they also reckon with the death of the parent that hurt them. Stevens’ mother, who suffered from both schizophrenia and addiction, abandoned Stevens as a child. The Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle grew up with the daily threat of physical and verbal abuse from his stepfather. These two albums are linked not only thematically, but in the candor and transformation showcased within them. Both of these albums came from songwriters a decade deep into acclaimed careers and who were mostly known for discographies rich in mythology, spirituality and characters. Their music, while intensely personal, had never been directly autobiographical until then, when grief spurred a reckoning—and brought about songs that broadcast resiliency and grace in the face of complex loss.

The parallel demons these two singers carried into adulthood loom large in their artistic lives, though both were seemingly only able to tackle them after their parents' death. The devastating revelations that finally worked their way into these records opened new avenues of connections to their audience: any casual listener with a crappy childhood could find their life reflected in these records. Gateways are opened, not just to discographies but to the possibility of healing through the catharsis of song.

What elevates these albums isn’t just their honesty or eloquence, but the devastation they refuse to hide. For both songwriters, the deaths of their parents brought self-examination, sadness and self-harm in their wake. The Sunset Tree opens with "You or Your Memory", a song in which Darnielle finds himself in a hotel room, "laying out his supplies" of St. Joseph’s Baby Aspirin and Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers. Alone, haunted by the spectre of his stepfather, he’s bent on self-destruction. "Lord if I make it through tonight, then I will mend my ways and walk the straight path to the end of my days," he sings. For all that Darnielle’s survived, he’s still facing the challenge of making it through the night. Just as he faced surviving adolescence (as the anthemic "This Year" attests), but now with in his stepfather’s absence, he remains his only abuser, unable to free himself from the trauma of the past. Sometimes there is no way to escape a memory. 

Darnielle finally greats his stepfather’s death on the album closer, "Pale Green Things", which juxtaposes something like relief and sets up shop in a singular moment where, decades before, they’d bonded over horse betting: "That morning at the racetrack was one thing that I remembered." It’s an elegiac way to end the album, but it’s cold comfort.

Carrie & Lowell mirrors the self-examination and self-acceptance of The Sunset Tree, its true spiritual successor. In the time following his mother’s death, Stevens is "drunk and afraid, wishing the world would go away." After her death, he finds himself unable to escape the paragon of his mother’s influence, the pall of her lifelong absence now made concrete. "Drawn to the Blood" and "No Shade in the Shadow of the Cross" are despairing, desperate for grace: "For my prayer has always been love. What did I do to deserve this?" Or later, as he bluntly puts it, "Fuck me, I’m falling apart." Like Darnielle, Stevens dwells in a rare memory of time spent positively with her, recalling a summer stay in Eugene, Ore. at his stepfather’s urging. Despite that she’s gone, he clings to her, almost bodily so, "lost in her sleeve" as the lyrics to "Eugene" suggest. A desire for maternal intimacy hangs, forever unresolved. Both Carrie & Lowell and The Sunset Tree present the listener with an opportunity to not only take part in these artists' emotional experiences but to reassess his or her own. The impulse to dwell on our familial past is easy, but the ability to self-reflect and possibly self-heal, is not. It takes the strongest and most introspective lyricists to do so, ones powerfully drawn to the blood from which they came.

Encompassing a wide array of styles and ideas, hip-hop and R&B go together like two swinging double dutch ropes. Some aspects, like the so-called conscious movement, are celebrated as often as they are mocked for their earnesty. But conscious hip-hop’s basement-dwelling cousin, hotep, often flies under the radar.

Conscious, while not diametrically opposed to hotep, represents a distinct school of thought within black culture that factors heavily into how hip-hop is commodified and consumed.
Confusing consciousness—staying woke!—with assorted ankh foolishness and fantasy, struggle and sex, hotep is predicated on misogynoir masquerading as intellectualism, an inexplicable obsession with Egypt and a belief that within each hotep’s dick, vagina and/or ass lies the truth about colonialism, Africa and Black America.

Hip-hop and R&B have always been a site for conscious black identity negotiation and politics, often at its own peril, but the way hotep functions—within hip-hop and outside of hip-hop—is worth exploring. Hoteps come in all different shapes, sizes, shades and income brackets. Together they make up a small but bold semen stain on the crotch of conscious music and black culture, but that’s what black soap and shea butter is for. That’s what the following playlist, a compilation of three of the most hotep songs, ever, is for.

Q-Tip: "Renaissance Rap"

"We made it cool to wear medallions and say hotep!" Q-Tip raps. Hotep, signifying a pose, affirms itself as cool, as part of an aesthetic and renaissance. Q-Tip is cool, for an oldhead, for a hotep.

I’m not a hotep, but I briefly went to an afrocentric grade school, which is one of the blackest—and incidentally, most hotep—things you can do. The instructors, mostly men, wore dashikis and kufis, brushed their teeth with miswaks in the hallways. Like Q-Tip, they were Muslim. But unlike Q-Tip, they were varying combinations of Sufi, Five Percenter, Prislam and/or Nation of Islam.

"You know why they call the projects the projects, right?" Mr. Hall Monitor would ask at least once a semester. "Because projects never end! And the end result is AIDS!"

"Don’t worry about Tuesday’s exam, black people work well under pressure! Your ancestors would not sweat an exam!" the Social Studies teacher would say.

"Thank you indubitably for your notions!" my boxing instructor would thesaurus to me like Oswald Bates' "In Living Color" sketch.

Jill Scott: "The Thickness"

Today, I’m often reminded of hoteps from less benevolent sources like the men in select cities who look at me like I’m singing Jill Scott’s "The Thickness" at the top of my lungs, drawing attention to the flesh around my lungs; the flesh of thickness that makes hoteps see me as a time-traveling alien Queen who built the pyramids. Hoteps are usually shaped like rulers, avocados or condom packages but somehow they want every women—their queens, as deemed by whatever God they worship—to have birthing hips, tiny waists, full breasts and an ass that won’t quit nearly as much as they do.

These men call me "Nubian Princess" or "African Queen" or "thick", but they do not know me. They do not see me, at least not the way I see them. I know a hotep’s aura: incense, belly button lint and the spirit of crickets who were slam poets in a previous life.

Hotep: "Everyday Is a Struggle"

In "Everyday Is a Struggle", Hotep takes his soothing, muddled ode to black poverty and makes a trash video. Hotep, who is in a power struggle with his own hairline (hence, the hat), feels a lot for himself and for the black proletariat.

Black love is represented as a pregnant, bald-headed black woman and dreadlocks-having black man. Their refrigerator is empty but they’re full of black love, enough love for Hotep to jam out on his stoop.



But not enough love for Hotep to not lose his shit next to a fence and check out a heavyset blonde white girl. So much for black love.



Later, Hotep and his boo go to Ashley Furniture. If you glance too quickly, you might think it says Ashy Furniture, but no, it definitely says Ashley Furniture.

"I think I need a hug y’all!" is a real lyric in the song. So is: "What happened to my ancestors’ dream?!" So many questions but Hotep doesn’t have the answers. None of us do. I certainly don’t.

Photo by Erez Avissar

Strolling the streets of Mafateng, Lesotho, in Southern Africa, where I live and work, I heard a thumping hip-house beat, blaring from a nearby storefront. The droning hook was dripping with effrontery—one that my passing Sesotho could grasp: ha ke na nako, ha ke na nako, ha ke na nako ("I don't have time, I don't have time, I don't have time"), referring apparently to all the people vying for the rappers' attention. What struck me was its uncanny likeness to Migos on a Zaytoven beat. The song was mostly rapped in Sesotho (one of Lesotho's two official languages, the other being English, which British colonizers brought with them over a century ago), a language that is largely open-syllabic (in words, single consonants are almost always followed by single vowels). The emcee masterfully deployed his native tongue, facilitating a choppiness that sheathed his monosyllabic, pulsating verse. Wielding Sesotho, it's quite easy to achieve what Western rap audiences refer to as the 'Migos flow'. The beat stuttered, looping a deep bassline underneath a soaring, mellifluous melody. If I closed my eyes, I could've effortlessly pictured myself back in college, very much on one, at a kickback in a smoky West End, Atlanta apartment.

This is not to strip the artists behind this track of originality, or cast Lesotho rap as some little brother of its American sibling. Au contraire. To be sure, Lesotho rap, in all of its indisputably original variants and offshoots (e.g. T'sepe, Mongse, and Mokorotlo) is astonishing in its own right, its roots in Southern African soundscapes that precede the modern nation-state (let alone the institution of trans-Atlantic slavery, which rap didn't cause, and the 'founding' of the Americas some several thousand years later that precipitated "rap" as a genre). The same could be said of African music generally, from which all other world music spawns. The African rap of today is marked by witty lyrics, inventive flows and language, moderno-ancestral melodies, spectral pitch, and unbridled energy.

I asked the young man running the street-side BBQ stand (a food truck, it was not) I had stopped at who the MC on the track was. He didn't know, and wasn't all that interested in investigating. This was understandable: the lack of infrastructure that rankles the country extends from its roads, electrical, water and the web. A general lack of expendable income means that most people don't have computers, or advanced touch-screen smart phones; there is no burgeoning demand for Internet fora, 'salons,' and the like; there is no Reddit culture. Even still, many Basotho (the name of the people of Lesotho), the youth especially, connect via mobile apps like WhatsApp, Facebook, and Twitter, platforms that don't necessitate laptops, Galaxies or iPhones. Cellular towers are located, and radio frequencies are lassoed, in even the remotest areas of the country. Thus, these social media, word-of-mouth, and CDs are the most available means of getting your name out there as an artist. Just like in America, if you miss the name of an artist on the radio, and the people around you don't know, you lob the question to social media to get answers (my network here is nascent, so I was out of luck).

Zooming out, music in the global black diaspora has always been a transcontinental dialogue. Africa's traditional music is the fertile ground in which Black American sonic expression is rooted. In today's hyperconnected world, black musicians the world over hear from one another, and from artists outside the diaspora, who shape their respective sounds.

In the world of rap, Migos' flow arrests attention. With all manner of rapper borrowing a triplet flow Migos gave new life, it's impossible to avoid Migos's musical presence. The similarities between Migos and some of the Lesotho artists I hear on the airwaves here is almost eerie. Interestingly, in an interview with MTV News last year, Quavo said that, according to what he had seen on his Instagram, "researchers" were looking for the origin of the Migos flow "in the bottom of Africa" (where Lesotho is situated geographically). As scholars point to the area nominated now as Lesotho (where dinosaur footprints are still visible) and South Africa, as the birthplace of humanity, this comes as little surprise. All this not to mention Migos' frequent, albeit farcical, references to Medusa and "African" diamonds in tracks like "Versace", "Bando", and "Camera Flash".

Migos' music is not only reminiscent of Africa sonically, but also in its communal tenor as well. Their energy is an invitation; their tracks make listeners feel just as lit as Migos themselves, and the beats they rap on. Their call-and-response vocal play, which can be heard on virtually every track they've released, not only channels African and black American wading and survival music, but serves as the base for their magnetic energy: Offset, Quavo, and Takeoff are each other's, and your, hype men. Their music is participatory: when you rap their lyrics, you feel thorough even if you aren't, and you forget that the songs aren't actually about you in a way that other rappers' occupying egos disallow. Similarly, cuts fading the fairweathers like "Where Were You" and "No Fuckin Wit", personal narratives like "Can't Believe It", and the compassionate "Struggle", resonate with anyone who has come up defying naysayers and societal obstacles along the way.

For all that's said about the flow, it isn't just the the technical polish of Migos' delivery that sets them apart—the doggerels, dactyls, adlibs, playfulness, and even social commentary—even though they have such elements in spades. One of my favorite examples of their technical ability is on their track "R.I.P." when Takeoff spits a bar in a cascading cadence: "I'm thinkin' bout movin' to Canada but I know they gon' still be watchin' me." Here, Takeoff pithily comments on the precarious fugitivity of slinging dope, and the transnational portability of racialized surveillance—all in six metrical feet of flawlessly executed rapid-fire blank verse. Indeed, the allure of Migos goes beyond the mechanical. Rather, it is the composite of these characteristics, plus their unflagging enthusiasm, that captivates listeners. Embodying the '100' emoji, these spitters' youthful zeal is utterly contagious, with the power to put you in That Zone no matter your hitherto state of mind (I would hazard a guess that Migos is a pregame favorite for Marshawn Lynch).

Migos, throughout their oeuvre, toes the lines between self-referential, self-aggrandizing, and self-parodying, comically citing their distaste for school, their enviable relationship with critics and bloggers, and their shoddy, to put it lightly, Spanish. For all their efforts to borrow from Migos, other rappers fail to piece together a simulacrum of Migos' seamless blend of biography and artful deployment of pop-cultural, historical and geographical references. On their most recent tape Rich Nigga Timeline, the track "Cross the Country" showcases these elements to intoxicating effect: in it, Migos reiterates their admiration for Lara Croft, and remind us of the unsuspecting nature of their multiethnic and multinational coterie of plugs. Even elite tastemaker Drake, whose legendary kaleidoscopic-hypebeast rap lends to his seeming ubiquity, cribbed Migos' cadence, and respects Migos lingo.

For all its triumphs, Migos' flaws, which they share with other mainstream male rappers, ring resoundingly. Despite their stylistic innovations, their music is too easily pigeonholed as trap, thematically (though they can be forgiven for rapping about their lived experiences). Moreover, although their bars are mottled with loving references to their mothers, and despite well-intentioned hood odes like "Dennis Rodman", they fail to transcend the untamed misogynoir that pervades the genre. And some commentators, myself excluded, can't help but conclude that Migos' run is ephemeral, and their flame will fizzle out.

As aware Migos are of the blogs, I suspect that they do consider how their doubters weigh in. Nevertheless, they've made it clear: they'd rather be rich than famous. If they can continue to shake off the one-trick pony label by varying up their production, cadences, and content while retaining their whimsical yet unmistakably black African identity on their upcoming debut LP, YRN Tha Album, they'll have accomplished just that. At this point, only time will tell. But one thing is certain: whether we're listening from Maseru or Atlanta, we'll be tracking their trajectory as excitedly as a kid at Christmas (or, if you're about that life, an adult with a stack to blow at KOD).

Photo by Erez Avissar

It’s no surprise that sample culture has been amplified by the Internet Age, revitalized by the advent of torrent clients, which have been sparking debates about authorship and ownership ever since Bram Cohen debuted the original BitTorrent code in 2002. After all, illegal online piracy has been constantly posited as an action that’s harmful to artists and their livelihoods, so much so that it’s been remarkable to see a group of smaller, forward-thinking artists actually embracing torrent clients; especially as these independent producers are without the sort of stature of say, Thom Yorke.

In the past few months, Ratking, Salva, Hot Sugar, and, most recently, iLoveMakonnen have released music via BitTorrent Bundles, the artist-sanctioned offspring of the torrent-client giant, and for many of these young hip-hop-affiliated musicians, it’s a conscious choice they’ve made— going back to the online community that bred them and a more egalitarian form of music consumption, serving their work back to the place where many young upstarts find samples, woodshed work and release mixes.

"The Internet democratizes what you want to discover in terms of culture," Hot Sugar’s Nick Koenig said. "When downloading came around you could get an entire discography for free. I look at it as if the Internet is a library rather than a treasure chest that I’m robbing." As an artist who gained notoriety for making original instrumentals for leftfield NY rappers, Koenig also considers himself a "vocal advocate for music piracy"; a concept he believes allows people to educate themselves and a part of why he agreed to release all of his rap instrumentals via a BitTorrent Bundle earlier this March.

It’s also an idea that Paul Salva, who DJs as Salva, cites as a big part of their motivation for returning to a Peer2Peer platform.

"The whole reason for doing this record [and releasing it on BitTorrent]...was to show people I come from authentic rap music," he said. His BitTorrent release was the perfect place to release an album that he considers a statement, a no-frill "straight-up rap record." According to Salva, the focus wasn’t necessarily profit, but was more about exposure and getting his name out there—something he says was reaffirmed by the fact that "all these bootleg remixes got me more hype than anything."

"So why go down the lane of a conventional label or album?" he continued. "A lot of DJs and producers of this mindset are just getting stuff out there for people to enjoy and these kind of one-off, little bootlegs will go viral and get 20 million plays and you’ll get booked for a festival on that...anybody can blow up at any time."

This independent, idealistic attitude combined with the political implications of torrenting is what makes the use of torrent clients by these leading artists even more exciting. Long the scourge of the Recording Industry Association of America, the mere action of releasing on a platform traditionally associated with copyright suits and lost profits is as close to a blatant "fuck you" as you can get. Combined with the fact that this move aligns with all of these artists’ well-documented digression from majors that tend to limit both experimentation and distribution (as Makonnen and Koenig have both cited), it’s a simple political move. Like most other online resources, torrenting eliminates the corporate middlemen: a blatant way of subverting the traditional big label model and allowing equal access for all. It’s especially poignant as hip-hop has a strange and storied history with major labels to begin with, as demonstrated by the fact that most hip-hop labels were founded independently and out of necessity before big labels took notice and snatched them up.

Probably most important is that debuting via torrent clients allows artists to contribute to the continual cultural conversation sampling enables; creating and then redistributing works through an online communities made up of seeders-cum-supporters who (re)make something of their own out of it, is what appeals to artists like Salva, who built their careers doing the same thing with their own bootleg remixes. "All the old rules of old industry, that’s gone," he said. "Kids are getting music in new ways and I think at some point we’re going to hit this saturation point where everything is available to everybody." An idealistic future that is perhaps almost here.

On this year’s Record Store Day, Universal Music will be re-releasing the soundtrack to Clueless to celebrate the film’s 20th anniversary. And while it’s hard to top the revered classic that is Clueless’ soundtrack, the re-release calls to mind all the other great movie soundtracks for flicks about high school, relationship drama, and plain old teenage angst. Here, we break down some of the best teen movie soundtracks over the past few decades.

Clueless (1995)

The Story: Alicia Silverstone plays Cher Horowitz, a Beverly Hills shop-a-holic high school student, with a true heart of gold in this '90s spin on Jane Austen’s novel Emma. She decides to transform new girl Tai Frasier (Brittany Murphy) into the coolest girl in school.

Lunch Table: The popular girls, the fashion-heads, the rich-kids

Artists: Radiohead, Counting Crows, Velocity Girl, Luscious Jackson, etc.

Listen to it: When you’re trying to put your outfit together on the first day of school

Memorable musical moments: Tai getting made-over by Cher and Dionne to Jill Sobule’s "Supermodel", a sunny impromptu photoshoot on the school’s lawn set to Supergrass’ "Alright", and Tai’s moves to Coolio’s "Rollin’ With the Homies".

The Star Track: The Muffs' cover of "Kids In America", the best of the film’s many covers which have '90s artists do '80s hits.

Who’s That?: The Mighty Mighty Bosstones make a cameo in a pogo-filled frat party scene.

Pretty In Pink (1986)

The Story: Andie Walsh (Molly Ringwald) is a poor, fashion-obsessed hipster who falls for a preppy potatohead (Andrew McCarthy) named Blaine while her stylish deadbeat sidekick Duckie (John Cryer) pines for her. Social circles clash!

Lunch Table: Freaks, the art kids, goths, nerds

Artists: New Order, the Psychedelic Furs, the Smiths, Suzanne Vega, etc.

Listen to it: When you’re making your art, or your clothes, or whatever your medium is you crazy kid!

Memorable Musical Moments: Duckie performing a solo lip-sync freak out to Otis Redding, Andie sewing furiously to New Order’s "Thieves Like Us", extreme prom drama accompanied by "If You Leave" by OMD.

Who’s That?: Then friends with Molly Ringwald, the Pittsburgh-based band the Rave-Ups play in a few scenes at the club Andie and her boss Iona frequent.

The Star Track: "Pretty In Pink" by the Psychedelic Furs.

Fun Fact:Echo and the Bunnymen recorded "Bring on the Dancing Horses" specifically for the movie.

Juno (2007)

The Story: Juno (Ellen Page) is a 16-year-old girl who gets pregnant with her mopey friend Paulie’s (Michael Cera) baby, decides to keep it, and then gets a little too close to the adoptive parents Mark and Vanessa Loring (Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner.)

Lunch Table: The loners, nerds, freaks

Artists: The Moldy Peaches, Cat Power, Sonic Youth, the Velvet Underground

Listen to it: When you’re brainstorming how to make eye-contact for more than one second with your crush in Algebra class

Memorable Musical Moments: Juno losing her v-card to Astrud Gilberto’s "Once I Loved", and when Juno gives birth to Cat Power’s "Sea of Love".

The Star Track: "Anyone Else But You" by the Moldy Peaches, which Ellen Page and Michael Cera also cover in the film.

Fun Fact: The Moldy Peaches only made it onto the soundtrack at the suggestion of Ellen Page after she suggested it would be the kind of music Juno would listen to instead of the glam rock director Jason Reitman initially thought the character would like.

Mean Girls (2004)

The Story: Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan) is the new girl at school who helps the misfits of the school infiltrate the popular girl circle to sabotage the Queen, Regina George (Rachel McAdams) but not before becoming one.

Lunch Table: The popular girls, the rich kids, the art kids

Artists: Peaches, Blondie, Pink, Kelis, Samantha Ronson, etc.

Listen to it: When you’re pre-gaming for your sophomore year Homecoming dance with vodka in a waterbottle mixed with whatever fruit juice you had on hand

Memorable Musical Moments: A sabotage montage on Regina George set to "One Way or Another", a hilariously heartbreaking talent-show rendition of Christina Aguilera’s "Beautiful", and a house-party gone-bad soundtracked to Peaches’ "Operate". Where IS Peaches these days?

The Star Track:"Milkshake" by Kelis, which became the anthem of Abercrombie & Fitch-clad hyper-sexed teens everywhere post-release of the film.

Dazed and Confused (1993)

The Story: It’s the last day of school in 1976 and famous-faced actors play angsty football players, keg party enthusiasts, stoners, seniors who haze freshmen and more.

Lunch Table: Stoners, the music-heads, the football players, the popular kids

Artists: Alice Cooper, ZZ Top, Black Sabbath, Foghat, etc.

Listen to it: When you’re out driving at 2:00 am with your best friends shit-talking your hometown

Memorable Musical Moments: The best hazing scene in movie history set to WAR’s "Why Can’t We Be Friends", the movie’s intro to "Sweet Emotion" by Aerosmith, and when Mitch Kramer (Wiley Wiggins) finally gets his ass-kicked by Fred O’Bannion (Ben Affleck) to Alice Cooper’s "No More Mr. Nice Guy".

The Star Track: "School’s Out" by Alice Cooper, because duh.

Fun Fact: Apparently 1/6th of the film’s budget (which was $6.9 million total) went to acquiring music.

Valley Girl (1983)

The Story: Julie Richman (Deborah Foreman) falls for Randy, played by a then-bonafide hunk Nicolas Cage. But he’s, all, like, New Wave and she’s, like, totally a Valley Girl? Their friends don’t vibe with it. A lot of shopping happens.

Lunch Table: The popular girls, the art kids, the freaks, the fashion-heads

Artists: Men at Work, Sparks, the Psychedelic Furs, etc.

Listen to it: At the beach cruising for dudes

Memorable Musical Moments: A dance-filled slumber party soundtracked to Bonnie Hayes’ "Girls Like Me" and Josie Cotton plays "Johnny Are You Queer?" at the coolest prom gig.

The Star Track:"I Melt With You" by Modern English, long before the "mmm-mmm-mmm" track and its several covers landed in a dozen different food commercials.

The Doom Generation (1995)

The Story: This tripped-out bloody road trip flick from Gregg Araki centers on teenaged couple Jordan White (James Duval) and Amy Blue (Rose McGowan) on the run after they pick up a hitch hiker named Xavier.

Lunch Table: The freaks, the recently sexually-active, the loners

Artists: Ride, Lush, Medicine, Verve, Aphex Twin, Cocteau Twins, etc.

Listen to it: When you’re trying to figure out what sex is for the first time.

Memorable Musical Moments: A Parker Posey-initiated bar-fight set to Pizzicato Five, a dark desert car-ride set to Slowdive’s "Blue Skied an’ Clear", and probably way too much shoegaze-accompanied sex.

The Star Track: "Blue Skied an’ Clear" by Slowdive, which closes the film’s horrific, murder-filled ending.

Fun Fact: Dan Gatto from the punk band Babyland also composed the film’s score.

American Graffiti (1973)

The Story: It’s 1962 and Curt (Richard Dreyfuss) and Steve (Ron Howard) are brothers who are unsure of their futures after graduating high school. What follows is a night of self-reflection, sock-hops, drive-ins, car-hopping and general teen mayhem.

Lunch Table: The popular kids, the preps, the nerds

Artists: Del Shannon, Buddy Holly, The Beach Boys, Chuck Berry

Listen to it: On the way to the 24-hour diner on the last night of school.

Memorable Musical Moments: When Laurie, pissed at her boyfriend Steve for asking to see other people, is forced to dance with him to "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes" by the Platters, a shaving-cream car prank set to Chuck Berry’s "Johnny B Goode".

The Star Track: Apparently the entire soundtrack, which got a whopping 40-track release and hit triple platinum in the USA.

Who’s That?: Gravely-voiced American DJ Wolfman Jack makes an appearance and his real-life broadcasts play through-out the film.

Earlier this month, word arrived of a new album by the musician Jim O’Rourke. To some people this will mean a great deal; to the other 99.99% percent of the population it will mean nothing at all. O’Rourke is an artist of mildly godlike status in extremely small circles, a veteran of free improvisation with nearly 125 records to his name whose biggest star turn was briefly becoming the fifth member in Sonic Youth and later producing Wilco’s A Ghost Is Born, which won a Grammy.

O’Rourke’s music varies dramatically, from plasticky synthesizer experiments to sprawling, orchestrated suites that sound like progressive rock played by a somewhat irritable marching band. He is one of those musicians whose admirers call him a "composer," as though what he does requires a level of thought and expertise that places him above people who just pick up a guitar and start shredding, which O’Rourke often does. (He is also the kind of prickly, restless musician who makes a record with guitars and then tells interviewers he doesn’t really like guitars.)

Some of his earliest records were with a project called Gastr del Sol, who took the adventurous mechanics of free jazz and 20th century classical composition and mapped them onto what to most people would just look like a rock band. Gastr’s records came out on the Chicago label Drag City, home to an entire subhistory of noble, subtly defiant freaks, including Bill Callahan and Joanna Newsom, both of whom O’Rourke has worked with as an engineer. They’ve also put out the records for which O’Rourke is probably best known: Bad Timing, Eureka, the Halfway to a Threeway EP, Insignificance, and The Visitor. (The forthcoming Simple Songs is on Drag City, too.)

A quick show of hands among Pitchfork contributors showed a low level of Jim O’Rourke recognition, so it seemed time to revisit the Drag City albums, both for posterity and emphasis. Note that that Drag City’s catalog isn’t on Spotify, and O’Rourke’s releases on the label aren’t even sold as MP3s, which means you’ll either have to get this music the old-fashioned way (theft) or purchase them with money, the way you might with food or other forms of nourishment.

Behold, O’Rourke:

Bad Timing (1997)

O’Rourke's first Drag City record—four long instrumentals led by fingerpicked acoustic guitar—took up the project of the Beach Boys circa Smile or what the guitarist John Fahey called “American Primitivism”: Acoustic music that put an alien perspective on old forms. Most of it feels like film score—music either incidental to an image or designed to inspire one, expanding and contracting to shift mood, moving through itself like it was an imaginary landscape. In this case, O'Rourke's vision is the dust bowl, the big sky, the Pilgrim campground at night—places that have an almost natal familiarity whether you’ve been there or not, absorbed from picture books and kindergarten history. Besides the guitar, almost none of the instruments play throughout, instead existing as color and shade, an approach that—like O'Rourke's music with Gastr del Sol—breaks down the sanctity and romance of the "band" for something more distant and old-fashioned: the orchestra. 

Eureka (1999)

My favorite of O’Rourke’s Drag City records, and one O’Rourke personally called a failure. The biggest and most immediate difference between this and Bad Timing is the appearance of O’Rourke’s singing voice, a grumpy and somewhat noncommittal instrument that hides sheepishly amongst the horns. O’Rourke’s music has a peculiar way of giving teeth to styles that can otherwise seem lame: soft rock, bossa nova, lounge jazz, the stale, grandparental opulence of the "Saturday Night Live" theme.

I can’t think of many records that put a sound as calming as a flugelhorn so close to a lyric like, "Nothing makes me want to disappear/ As when someone opens their mouth." (Another track, "Through the Night Softly", is named after a performance piece by the artist Chris Burden in which he crawled on his belly through a long patch of glass. It finishes with a great saxophone solo.)

Lost amongst the arrangements, O’Rourke seems like an irritable next-door neighbor in an old sitcom, puttering around in a cardigan and waiting for the laugh track to turn on him. A little misanthropic, yes, but also beautiful in conventional ways: After all, that flugelhorn is very carefully played. This is the record I like to imagine Sufjan Stevens might’ve made had he not been polluted by wonder.

Halfway to a Threeway EP (1999)

Something of a mini-Eureka: Fewer strings, fewer horns, fewer tricky polyrhythmic turns. The title track is a long, dewy ballad that details someone's sexual appetite for people with disabilities, which in most company would pass for cruelty but in O'Rourke's world passes for humor. More "provocative" than actually "funny," though I do admire the tenderness with which he sings the words "leg brace" and "life support"—he almost makes his intentions seem sweet, which I suspect is the point. 

Insignificance (2001)

The last of O’Rourke’s records to be named after movies by the English director Nicolas Roeg, whose work has the same muted, elusive strangeness as O’Rourke’s. (Of the movies, I think Bad Timing is the most interesting, in part because I never imagined seeing Art Garfunkel amongst so much paranoia and psychosexual violence.) What Eureka did for cocktail jazz, Insignificance does for muscular, '70s-style rock, twisting a familiar sound into an unusual new shape. With the exception of a handful of songs—"Therefore I Am", "Memory Lame", the glistening ballad "Good Times"—I don’t listen to this one much, and have a somewhat active distaste for "All Downhill From Here", which reminds me of Collective Soul and a host of other meaty, neo-buttrock bands that inadvertently got me into indie music to begin with. Still, it’s tempting with someone like O’Rourke—who really does seem to think a huge amount about what goes into his music, possibly overthink it—that there’s something happening here that still elides my ear, but I don’t let it get to me too much.

The Visitor (2009)

My second-favorite to Eureka: A long, hallucinatory ribbon of music that moves through folk, prog-lite, country, and a host of other American traditions subtly turned on their ear for 40 minutes. O’Rourke has always had a reputation for "good sound design," which always seemed like one of those things people said when they didn’t want you to understand what they were really talking about, the tasting note only the most refined palate can detect. And while I got used to recognizing his production sound, especially on mid-period Smog records (Knock Knock and Red Apple Falls are worth the time), The Visitor was probably he first moment I had with O’Rourke’s music where I had the feeling of wanting to step directly into the speakers. Because his music on Drag City avoids extremes, I feel strange overselling how unusual it can be, but I also think that that's the gist of O'Rourke's project: To defy the radical by appearing normal.  

Photo by Tom Spray

"I need to be a hamster!" Robyn yells across a packed hall. Here, at the kick-off of Tekla, the free one-day tech conference that the Swedish pop star has helped organize for 200 teenage girls, she is merely a hamster seeking her other hamsters. As an ice-breaking exercise, the girls have been divided up into animal groups and tasked with creating a new noise that their animal (or jellyfish) makes. Robyn joins the hamsters and they studiously discuss how it should sound; minutes later the room is an orchestra of shrieks, caws and stamped feet.

Aged 11 to 18, these girls are the lucky 200 to be selected (carefully, to ensure diversity) out of the 2000 that applied for the inaugural Tekla festival, which Robyn designed to introduce girls to the creative possibilities of technology, in association with Stockholm’s Royal Institute of Technology (KTH). In September 2013, KTH awarded Robyn their Great Prize, which recognizes groundbreaking contributors to "Sweden’s continued material progress." Staging a seminar for the university’s students is a condition of acceptance, "but it just felt more interesting to do something that was more practical," says Robyn. "Lina [Thomsgård, publicist/right-hand woman] and I talked about this directive that KTH got through the government to try and get more girls into programs at KTH, and we just thought, why not do something for the future students of the school?"

Robyn’s first collaboration with KTH came back in March 2013, after she agreed to participate in their "robot project," where students built a robotic tribute to the Swedish popstar. To help shape its aesthetic—and avoid the one-dimensional, precision-tooled beauty of most female cyborgs—she gave them a book about the Apollo moon landing, describing it, as engineer Elias Josefsson relayed to Wired, as "an example where something is not designed with a fancy cover, but instead the rawness can be beautiful with all the necessary parts visible." That works as a guiding principle for Tekla, too, which was conceived to highlight tech’s creative real-world application, to enable girls to make the connection between surface and software.

"To understand that you can influence things," says project manager Paulina Modlitba-Söderlund, a KTH-educated scientist. "That if you learn how to do it, you can build your own Instagram if you’re not happy with the one you’re using. I think there’s something magical there—flipping girls’ mindsets and making them understand that there are endless possibilities."

Fatuza, who is 13, is excited by today’s video game creation workshop. "They have lots of games for boys," she says, eye-rolling. "I would make a game that makes girls more interested in playing. The girls in Grand Theft Auto can’t help themselves, they are just getting killed, and I think that’s unfair." Ebba, 11, doesn’t like Minecraft’s pre-programmed cities, and wants to learn to use her raspberry pi processor to code them to her own spec. There are also workshops in robotics, music production, 3D printing, hacking, and online privacy; girls can learn to make APIs with Spotify (whose HQ is a few blocks away) and get an introduction to virtual reality from Google. "They were designed not to let adults in, so the girls feel like they’re in charge," says Robyn.

The day kicks off with a performance from Zhala (Rifat), the first artist to be signed to Robyn’s Konichiwa Records. Her three-song performance is the perfect representation of this real-world possibility: she plays backing tracks of jagged electronica influenced by her Kurdish heritage through her laptop and triggers a mini smoke machine in between songs. "She does a lot of her own programming," Robyn explains. "She’s more technologically advanced than I am."

"I got my first computer when I was 22, and I’m 27 now," Zhala says afterwards. "I’ve always been doing music, but it’s always been around guys." Tired of relying on experienced men to help her filter and warp her art, she taught herself to program using YouTube Ableton tutorials, "to be able to express the exact vision I have. I knew that I had my own language, it’s very important that I get to express that."

Robyn’s publicist Lina Thomsgård says Tekla became about creating space for girls to explore interests on their terms. Ellen, 13, describes how at school, "with stuff like programming and computers, the teacher often turns it to the boys, and me and my friends are like, we also want to do it." She calls herself a feminist, but, "after this, I might be even more girl power! Sometimes I get so sad when, like—a teacher was going to carry a table and she [asks], ‘Is there a strong guy who can help me with this?’ And then she stopped and said, ‘Oh, but of course a girl can too.’ Can’t she just say, ‘Can someone do it?’ It’s just something that sits in you, you learn that it is like that without even thinking about it."

For Robyn, making Tekla girls-only was about seeing "what happens when there are no boys in the room—maybe a girl decides that she wants to play the drums, and she wouldn’t if there was a boy there. A different dynamic happens, it frees the situation from some restrictive behaviors for girls. We’re rarely in a girl group when we just allow each other to play around and try stuff." She didn’t have a gateway to this arena as a kid, but "my parents used to have a theater group and they were on stage a lot, so that became something un-dramatic for me. I think that’s what it’s about—when you develop an interest, it usually comes from an environment that de-dramatizes things. Because then you’re able to find your own entrance into it."

Popkollo runs a dozen music camps for teen girls around Sweden every summer, with rock, metal and hip-hop courses offered. Over the course of the 10-day programs, co-founder Hannah Rothelius says they witness a huge difference in the campers. "They’re usually pretty shy and not used to getting a space of their own, and getting wild and crazy and being creative, without feeling watched or judged—it’s amazing."

By the end of the day, all that’s left of Tekla will be some helium balloons collected in the rafters of KTH’s student union, but the festival has been designed to leave a lasting impact. While the girls move between workshops, some parents sit through seminars designed to familiarize them with various aspects of tech so that they might better understand and encourage their daughters’ newfound interests. "We hope it will become an annual event, and I think 200 girls is too few," says KTH dean Sophia Hober. Fostering community is important: Robyn introduced KTH and Popkollo, and soon, all three parties will be pioneering a scheme to get girls and women into studios and provide year-long mentoring programs.

The day’s immediate results are thrilling too, though. Following a presentation from Spotify’s global VP of design and user experience Rochelle King, the students from Popkolla’s programming workshop present their songs: the first has the mutated bass and dragged jaw drawl of Dean Blunt, while the second is more kinetic, a Rustie-ish chiptune rendering of an emptying drain. Then there’s "danceoke", which flips through Beyoncé, Janelle Monáe, '80s aerobics videos, Bikini Kill, and Robyn’s "Call Your Girlfriend". The lights flash and there she is, wearing pastel-pink silk boxing gear. She sings three brand new songs (which got live debuts on last year’s tour with Röyksopp) about freedom and uncontainable physical self-expression. "Work it out and shake your body ‘til you’re dripping with sweat," she urges on the first, a steely, stuttering electropop number; the next song is a shimmying dancehall-house hybrid where she raps about the autonomy of desire: "I’mma give it to you baby/ Some light some heavy/ You can’t control it/ You can’t unfold it."

"We’re not free yet!" she says before the last song, a pounding rave number with a touch of warm Donna Summer transcendence. DJ Lap-See follows, though the room empties rapidly as the students are lured elsewhere by free popcorn and goodie bags. One girl remains though, pop-locking effortlessly alone in the middle of the room. Once she realizes people are watching, she picks up her pink fun-fuzz satchel and walks off.

Photo by Erez Avissar

Each passing month can be marked by a new defining turn in Kanye West’s audacious act(s); attempting to walk on water is perhaps the merest of them. However, Kanye’s gall is rarely off-target. He often presents the unspoken thoughts we never utter, either out of fear or better judgement. For many, West’s candor is courageous; for others, it’s insolent. One audience considers him a perfect icon, while another believes he and wife Kim Kardashian are the epitome of what’s wrong with celebrity. But in Jon Caramanica’s recent New York Times Magazine profile, West proclaimed himself something else entirely: "an activist."

To those familiar with the widespread efforts of justice-advocacy or looks to someone like Dr. Angela Davis as an example of activism, this statement seems like the sort of hyperbole that’s become Kanye’s albatross. Yet, while he’s not an activist in the traditional sense, his entire career makes clear he is motivated by, and steeped in resistance.

A decade ago, Ye was fighting to be taken seriously as a rapper, and even after The College Dropout became accepted as the exalted, paradigm shifter it is, he was still forced to claw his way into conversations about "elite rappers." Along the way, he became the voice for a legion of kindred spirits: regular people who refuse to let anyone deny their aspirations, no matter how fantastical or extravagant they are. There’s a playful defiance to the album’s opening track, "We Don’t Care", while "Last Call" is a 13-minute oral history of his transition from producer to MC, against all odds. Even the album’s title is a blatant reference to Kanye hurdling the accepted requirements for success.

From The College Dropout to Graduation, each of Kanye’s early albums include songs chronicling his rise in the face of adversity. While his tribulations most certainly exist on a much smaller level than historic or contemporary battles for Civil Rights, they’re a similar driving factor for his self-worth. The certainty of triumph, the broadcast of struggle (no matter in what rarefied quarters they occur in), the sheer, striving resilience of Kanye is a constant assertion of his humanity, of his right to exist and succeed as a black man in an America that denies them. He’s adamant about engraving his position among the genius ranks. And he should be.

That’s why he stands tall on Late Registration’s triumphant Curtis Mayfield-sampling "Touch the Sky", and experiences a moment of self-realization as the people’s advocate on Graduation’s "Champion". On "Champion", he acknowledges a degree of social responsibility ("For me giving up’s way harder than trying"), while also pointing out the irony of "the dropout keeping kids in the school." Accomplishments and ego have always been his diamond-encrusted body armor, and its radiant shine was at its brightest during this period of his career.

Historically, Kanye West has represented the gaudy and grandiose; the personification of success rarely—and literally—never being silent. Yet this obnoxiousness was never viewed as menacing until he snatched a microphone from America’s Sweetheart, Taylor Swift. The subsequent self-imposed exile may have produced one of the best albums of the decade, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, but the Kanye West that returned from Hawaii in 2010 was a different man. Criticism following the VMAs pocked that impenetrable armor, and he grew more hostile as a result. He’s faced a stream of obstructions similar to the antagonistic video game bosses impeding main characters from advancing to the next level. This will be a continuous theme in his career as he ascends each mesa of prosperity, but, since the beginning of this decade, he’s been more fierce about proving not simply that he belonged, but that he has the right to.

Kanye has always been anti-establishment, but being perceived as a menace has made him fight it. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was a resurgent, Lazarus-like effort where he embraced becoming the "abomination of Obama’s nation." To boost his crusade, he connected with Jay Z for Watch the Throne. For all of the album’s egregious opulence, it was the duo’s rendering of black nationalism that stood out, and Kanye’s influence echoes louder than Jay Z’s. Why? Because Jay Z (who, in '96, bragged that he was still spending money from '88) has been wealthy for close to 20 years. In Kanye’s mind, he has more to prove. Because elitists view both of them as nouveau riche, they positioned Watch the Throne as a "fuck you" to every oppositional institution. Where "Made in America" was about the achievement of the African-American dream, "Gotta Have It" was them rubbing every snob’s turned-up nose in it. Per the usual, Kanye went the hardest:

Hello, hello, hello white America, assassinate my character
Money matrimony, yeah they tryna break the marriage up
Who gon’ act phony, or who gon’ try to embarrass ya
I’ma need a day off, I think I’ll call Ferris up

While Kanye West might fashion himself a revolutionary with the potential impact of Steve Jobs, there’s a salience to his truth. The most compelling tension at the heart of his work is that he’s fighting against something he desperately wants to be a part of. He fought for his victories, and the only time he hasn’t been able to plow through a barrier is his foray into the world of fashion. This misfit treatment is the only real constant in his fashion career to date.

On "New Slaves", Kanye addressed experiencing the full gamut of discrimination. This extends from being perceived as criminal before customer ("broke nigga racism"), to the Gap’s "token blackie" on "Spaceship", and finally being stereotyped as a wanton materialist ("rich nigga racism"). For all of its bizarre returns, Kanye’s assertion of his creative right is evidence of his endurance. To that effect, his ambition quantifies his "activism."

Taking in the full arc of Kanye’s career, he is more glorious anti-hero than activist; his war is a vigilante mission against those trying to disparage "black people with ideas." As a black man who behaves like his (proverbial) white in-laws’ home is his own, he continually sets an example for the "Can't Tell Me Nothin'" generation he has raised up, showing they have the right to resist and the right to exist.