"Johnston had fire in his eyes. He had that thing that some people call 'Momentum.' You could see it in his face and he shared that fire, that spirit."

- Bob Dylan

"He created an atmosphere in the studio that really invited you to do your best, stretch out, do another take, an atmosphere that was free from judgment, free from criticism, full of invitation, full of affirmation. Just the way he'd move while you were singing: He'd dance for you."

- Leonard Cohen

To rock fans in the 1960s, Bob Johnston's name must have seemed like a trademark of quality. The producer, who passed away at the age of 83 last week, had his hand in a fair share of indisputable classics by Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Simon & Garfunkel and Leonard Cohen, among others. Occasionally modest to a fault, Johnston usually characterized his approach to production as staying out of the way: "It Wasn’t Art, All I Did Was Turn the Tape On" is the title of a chapter in his memoir. But he did certainly have a knack for getting iconic performances out of his artists. Below are just a few highlights.

Bob Dylan: "I'll Keep It With Mine" [Blonde on Blonde outtake]

A glimpse behind the curtain during the first sessions for Dylan's 1966 double LP masterwork, Blonde on Blonde. The songwriter fumbles around on piano for a bit, sounding unsure and aimless. Then we hear Johnston's encouraging voice: "What you were doing," he says simply. The musicians fall in behind Dylan, creating an impromptu arrangement that, while still ramshackle, has a touch of magic to it.

Colonel Jubilation B. Johnston and His Mystic Knights Band and Street Singers: Moldy Goldies

One of the strangest and most obscure releases on Johnston's CV, this 1966 album features many of the same Nashville session men who played on Blonde on Blonde. Think of it as a gonzo extension of the drunken marching band sound of "Rainy Day Women #12 & #35", as the producer leads his crew through stumbling and staggering deconstructions of "Monday Monday", "Hang on, Sloopy", "Secret Agent Man", and others. A gloriously weird mess.

Simon & Garfunkel: "Scarborough Fair/Canticle"

From the ridiculous to the sublime. Another '66 Johnston production, Simon & Garfunkel's chamber folk smash, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary & Thyme, is one of the most perfectly realized LPs of its era. The duo's version of "Scarborough Fair" might have suffered from overexposure over the years, but listen with fresh ears and its deep blend of harpsichord, chimes, fingerpicked guitar, and S&G's pristine harmonies will still reveal haunted, hidden depths.

Leonard Cohen: "Bird on the Wire"

A Canadian poet already well into his thirties by the time he worked with Johnston, Leonard Cohen was an unlikely pop star. But the producer managed to bring out the best in the songwriter, putting Cohen's signature baritone front and center, filling out the picture with spare and skeletal string arrangements. Johnston also spent several years backing Cohen on tour, and his irreverent presence in the documentary "Bird on a Wire" is a pleasure—Bob can be seen singing a verse of the doc's title track quite beautifully at about 1:55 here.

Johnny Cash: "Folsom Prison Blues"

"I really thought the place was going to explode," Johnston wrote of the recording of Johnny Cash's timeless live album, At Folsom Prison. Recorded in front of a literally captive audience of inmates, the LP captures the electric atmosphere of the gig, as the Man in Black works the crowd into a frenzy with hardbitten, violent anthems and then cools them down with gospel favorites. Columbia Records was none too enthusiastic about At Folsom Prison at first, but it ended up jumpstarting Cash's then-faltering career.

Bill Wilson: "Pay Day Giveaway"

Bill Wilson never became a household name like those mentioned above, but his excellent 1973 LP, Ever Changing Minstrel, earned some well-deserved attention a few years back when it was reissued by the Tompkins Square label. For the sessions, Johnston brought together some Blonde on Blonde alums to re-create a little bit of the "thin, wild mercury sound" of his days with Dylan. "Pay Day Giveaway", a country funk burner, is one of the standouts.

In the wake of Straight Outta Compton's excellent reviews and seemingly huge box office potential, I was going to write about hip-hop and R&B biopics. But, unfortunately, there are only really four of them: Notorious, CrazySexyCool: The TLC Story, Aaliyah: The Princess of R&B, and Too Legit: The MC Hammer Story. Maybe these genres are too young, or the requisite life rights and music rights are too sticky. Lord knows we'll be seeing more in the future, as Master P—to take one example—is producing a trilogy about his life.

So, instead, here's something different: a list of the best fictional rappers of film and television history.

Cigar - Black & White
Black & White is a weird bastard child of KIDS and Crash. It tries to say so much and, yet, you leave knowing so much less than when you came. See also: every James Toback film. Its cameos (Iron Mike, Method Man, Power, Allan Houston) make it very watchable, but none was better than the film debut of Raekwon the Chef as rapper Cigar. The film ends with Cigar ascending to fame by way of a music video directed by Brett Ratner (playing Brett Ratner). Ratner Plays Itself.

N.W.H. (Niggas With Hats) - Fear of a Black Hat
Tone Def is a dexterous DJ who can scratch with "his butt and his penis". After forming N.W.H. with Ice Cold and Tasty Taste, he leaves the group N.W.H to go solo and make blissed-out PM Dawn tunes in this underrated parody.

CB4 - CB4
Chris Rock can rap really well, but Dead Mike (Allen Payne) wins in this Straight Outta Compton parody: "Flat on her back, I give her some crack/ It's ten o'clock - DO YOU KNOW WHERE YO MOMS IS AT?"

The Mau Maus - Bamboozled
Bamboozled is a Spike Lee joint worthy of the price admission if only for Pierre Delacroix's (Damon Wayan) accent or for Michael Rapaport's spot on oozy turn as a network suit. But also, there's the Mau Maus, a militant fictional rap group named after a real mid-century Puerto Rican gang in Brooklyn, comprised of Canibus, Mos Def, 3rd Bass's MC Serch, Charli Baltimore, and DJ Scratch. They tie the whole film together like a Greek chorus. Says Serch, "B-LA-K: Blak, the opposite of white, man."

Cynthia - Annie B. Real
"The story of a female rapper inspired by the diary of Anne Frank."

Ice + John Hood - Rappin'
Neither John Hood (Mario Van Peebles) nor Ice (Eriq La Salle) can rap, which is why you need to watch this. "This is rap." This shit bangs.

MC Steve Urkel - "Family Matters"
While just the thought of MC Steve Urkel makes everything 25% cornier, his anti-gun message is actually on point. Fuck guns. We're all in the same gang.

Postmaster P - Leprechaun in the Hood
I mean, obviously, fuck this nonsense. But still, crucial best-worst crossover to the big screen.

Krazee-Eyez Killa - "Curb Your Enthusiasm"
Krazee Eyez is a rap cartoon. Like most depictions on this list. But he is and was one of the best things about this long running monument to utter discomfort.

Grandmaster B - "Married With Children"
Oh man, forget about the fact that Bud Bundy's alter ego, Grandmaster B, was "Married With Children"'s proto-Stefan Urquelle. Just know that David Faustino actually released an actual 12" (with Metal Remix) in 1992. Also: related.

"Male Lunch Truck Rapper" (Xzibit) - 8 Mile
While Eminem's character B-Rabbit seems like an obvious choice, Rabbit is automatically disqualified for rapping about his mother’s pasta. When I think of this film (and underground freestyle hip-hop in general), I will always visualize the automotive factory lunchtime cypher of my youth, and this perfect Xzibit cameo that somehow doesn't even merit a proper character name. 

Professor Murder - "Mr. Show"
"Niggas talkin' shit? Imma shoot 'im in the gut/ Causin' hocus pocus like my man Kurt Vonnegut". Here's to hoping Professor Murder rides again in the non-Mr. Show reboot of Mr. Show that coming to Netflix soon.

Ike Love/Shameek - Belly
Ike Love—an early screen-stealing role for one of hip-hop’s greatest thespians, Method Man—is never specifically described as a rapper. But what is he doing in this scene if not rapping?

Bruce Springsteen’s studio output between 1973 and 1987 marks one of the most celebrated runs from the classic rock era, but it only tells part of his story. Coupled with his enormous catalog of unreleased songs and albums, bootlegs of Springsteen’s live shows tell another crucial part of the tale. And while collections like Tracks and The Promise gave official homes to long-traded studio rarities, most of his greatest live recordings have remained unreleased.

This all ended last year when Springsteen announced an officially sanctioned live archive series, releasing full shows from throughout his career. For diehards, the opening of the vault feels like a dream come true: these are all excellent quality recordings of legendary performances. For newcomers, each of these shows could serve as a potential gateway to Springsteen, as essential as any of his studio releases. They are precisely the thing that’ll turn upgrade casual fans into obsessives.

Date: 12/31/1975
Venue: Tower Theater – Upper Darby, PA
Tour: Born to Run
Why it matters: A previously released Hammersmith Odeon concert from the Born to Run tour marked Springsteen’s first European performance: a turning point in his career, where he converted the entire crowd into Springsteen fanatics. The Philadelphia audience gathered here, however, needed no convincing. This was already prime Springsteen territory. Accordingly, Springsteen sounds comfortable and confident, but he still works for your love, even when he knows he’s already earned it.
Highlights: Understated performances like the slowed-down "Tenth Avenue Freezeout" and a quiet, stately rendition of "Thunder Road" provide the set’s most transcendent moments, forecasting the darker material to come.
Bonus points: Bruce casually references his infamous appearances on the cover of both Time and Newsweek at the beginning of "Does This Bus Stop at 82nd Street" with equal amounts of pride and disbelief.

Date: 8/9/1978
Venue: The Agora – Cleveland, OH
Tour: Darkness on the Edge of Town
Why it matters: In the three years between Born to Run and Darkness–what felt like an eternity amid the album-a-year pacing for rock artists in the '70s–Springsteen was fighting for the right to record his own music while also writing the darkest, heaviest material of his career. This show–performed a mere two months after the album’s release–feels like making up for lost time. The setlist is structured like one long howl, with even the more subdued tracks like "Factory" feeling like fist-pumping declarations of power.
Highlights: Here you will find the definitive version of Born to Run’s "Backstreets", dedicated to two ardent fans who had been following Springsteen on tour since '76, mirroring the song’s friendship-over-all-else desperation.
Bonus points: A quick snippet of the Village People’s "Macho Man" is woven into "Rosalita" during the band introductions, providing Clarence "Big Man" Clemons with his very own theme music.

Date: 12/31/1980
Venue: Nassau Coliseum – Uniondale, NY
Tour: The River
Why it matters: One of Springsteen’s superpowers as a live performer is simply a matter of endurance: he can go forever. This night of the River tour stands among the most bootleged concerts of his career; it’s also among the longest. Running just under four hours, this 38-track New Year’s Eve performance spans from the newly released "Hungry Heart" to rarities ("Roulette", "Held Up Without a Gun") to "Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town". One of the truly mandatory non-album recordings of Springsteen.
Highlights: "Racing in the Street" into "The River" forms the dark centerpiece of the show as Roy Bittan’s exquisite piano playing binds the two tracks together into a haunting 15-minute elegy.
Bonus points: The "Night" trilogy ("Night", "Prove It All Night", "Spirit in the Night") to open the show is a small window into Springsteen’s thematic consistency.

Date: 8/5/1984
Venue: Brendan Byrne Arena – East Rutherford, NJ
Tour: Born in the U.S.A.
Why it matters: The end of the River tour marked the end of the small shed Springsteen show—he’d graduated to stadiums and arenas as Born in the U.S.A. took Springsteen to Top 40 ubiquity. The E Street Band had been beefed up to fill the space, with prominent synths and more guitar solos (courtesy of new recruit Nils Lofgren). Playing the biggest hits of his career to the largest audiences yet, Springsteen sounds like he’s been preparing for this moment his whole career: the eternal employee of the month finally got his promotion.
Highlights: This set contains one of the most blistering E Street Band versions of "Atlantic City", hinting at what the mythical, unreleased full band version of Nebraska would have sounded like.
Bonus points: Springsteen’s mom and dad are in the audience at this homecoming show (as are his lawyer and physician, apparently), adding some extra resonance to familially-linked tracks like "Used Cars" and "My Hometown".

Date: 4/23/1988
Venue: LA Sports Arena – Los Angeles, CA
Tour: Tunnel of Love
Why it matters: For the Tunnel of Love Express Tour, previous set staples were either completely absent or entirely re-imagined; "Born to Run" is transformed from the show’s climax into a ruminative, acoustic ballad. "Wouldn’t have wrote this without you, so…" Springsteen sighs as he introduces the song, as if he’s only playing it out of obligation to his audience. Shortly after this tour, Springsteen would divorce his wife Julianne Philips, break-up the E Street Band, move to L.A., and take five years off from his career. This show is cast with a shadow, confusion and darkness that makes this era of his career so fascinating.
Highlights: The biggest takeaway here is the strength of the Tunnel of Love tracks–songs like "Tougher Than the Rest" and "One Step Up"–which rank among the most thoughtful, beautiful work of his career. If any of his albums are due for a critical reassessment, it’s this one.
Bonus points: This release has easily the best Springsteen album art in at least two decades.

DJ Khaled, impresario and bon vivant, has attached his name to some of the biggest hip-hop hits of the past decade. Thing is, it’s often unclear what he actually does. He’s a producer, but rarely credited as doing such, and he does not rap on these tracks. Ask the average hip-hop fan what he actually does and they’ll likely tell you that he is a middleman, a broker. He brings people together for the sole purpose of making rap so resolutely dedicated to its own sense of superiority that it is impervious to criticism. And a truly great DJ Khaled song delivers a thrill not too dissimilar from, say, dunking on a seven-foot basket—you just feel at least three feet taller than usual. I mean, "Bugatti" had me convinced for at least 30 seconds that Ace Hood was a transformative, generational artist.

The track record of We the Best Music Group made the avid Miami Heat fan and NBA conspiracy theorist an obvious choice to curate the soundtrack for NBA 2k16, due out in late September—he isn’t being asked to make beats or scout talent. In addition to putting together a playlist, he’s being asked to perform in his most expert and entertaining capacity, as that of a megaphone and living brand. If you’ve heard any DJ Khaled track or seen any DJ Khaled interview, you can expect him to state in no uncertain terms, as often as possible, that "We The Best".

A few weeks after we spoke, the soundtrack for NBA 2k16 was released, and it appears to be the strongest one yet—you might even say it’s "The Best". Hell, it might be the best soundtrack for any sports game, though that could be damning by faint praise. After all, Madden16 just released its soundtrack and it includes the likes of Blackberry Smoke and a Yelawolf song that isn’t "Hard White (Up in the Club)". NBA 2k on the other hand, has wisely avoided the Bruce Levenson-style bullshit about how the NBA should be less affiliated with hip-hop in order to attract a wider demographic. As recently as NBA 2k12, you’d have to endure the likes of Middle Class Rut, James Bugg and lord help us—Chiddy Bang—while trying to figure out the proper six-move sequence to make a maneuver in the post. The next year, Jay Z was brought on as executive producer and the past two releases have been curated by LeBron James and Pharrell Williams, respectively.

When I sit down to discuss this exciting development in gaming with DJ Khaled, he gives me approximately seven minutes of his time to answer questions about his involvement. In the span of those seven minutes, he proclaims "we the best" about a dozen times. He wants to make this perfectly clear—otherwise, that’s how rumors get started about him not being The Best. Props to dude for being robotically on brand.

Pitchfork: When you use Create-a-Player in NBA 2k, are you modeled after your actual physical characteristics?

DJ Khaled: I’m one of them guys that tries to make everything the best of the best, so sometimes I’m out of control with it. I’m just gonna use every feature to make me outrageous—the best. Some of the guys when they play, they try to keep it reality. Nah, I need the best everything.

Pitchfork: Do have any favorite rock bands that you wanted to include?

Khaled: I don’t have no favorite rock bands. I’m a fan of rock music though. When I was a kid, I loved Van Halen and Guns N' Roses, y’know [sings "Welcome to the Jungle"]. I always wanted to redo that song hip-hop style, so maybe we can make it happen and call it "Welcome to the Jungle".

Pitchfork: Which NBA player truly embodies the "We the Best" philosophy?

Khaled: Definitely Michael Jordan. But if it’s someone playing right now, I would say, of course LeBron, D-Wade, Steph Curry, Westbrook, Kevin Durant, James Harden. They are the standout, "We the Best" logos of each team. Each team always has that one power player, even Carmelo. Those are the guys who would represent the logo.

Pitchfork: Who’s the best rapper in the NBA?

Khaled: Let’s give it to LeBron James for when he was singing that Fetty Wap song the other day, let’s let him live. [LeBron James’ agent] Rich Paul, what up boy!

Pitchfork: How did you decide what’s the best of We the Best when putting together the playlist?

Khaled: When I turn in my list, obviously every record was important to me. I didn’t just put records on there to put records on there. I was excited that "All I Do Is Win" could go on there because you hear it at the end of the game and that represents victory. That’s undeniable. You can’t hate on that, it’s impossible.

Pitchfork: Who’s more important to Miami, Dwyane Wade or DJ Khaled?

Khaled: Man, you trying to start a vibe! DJ Khaled and D-Wade, we represent Miami. It’s definitely Wade County, we love him. Khaled is Dade County. We are one. What’s so beautiful about Miami is that we support each other. We’re just one big family, not just the entertainers, just everyone in general. We call it "the Crib," the 305. Dade County for life.

Pitchfork: Were you rooting for the Warriors or the Cavs during the NBA Finals?

Khaled: I’m straight Miami Heat, but I had to get involved for the Finals. I’m not gonna lie, I was going for LeBron to win. First, I was gonna go with Steph Curry and the boys. I want to make it clear, I’m Miami Heat. But when I got into the coaching and the lifestyle, I wanted LeBron to win because he go hard, and I respect anybody that challenges odds. That’s when you know you’re the greatest, when you’re the greatest and people still put odds against you. I respect that because I feel that’s me.

Pitchfork: Now that emotions have settled and you’ve had a year to think it over, do you still believe the Spurs cheated by manipulating the air conditioning in the 2014 NBA Finals?

Khaled: Absolutely! I’m not taking no talk back, the Spurs did cheat in that game. When I was on "First Take", I was serious. I don’t know why people thought it was a game. They turned the AC off and you notice we lost because they messed up the whole cycle, dudes started cramping up, the vibe changed. People don’t realize there are tactics out there and the streets...they’re real out there. Trust me, that’s a whole ‘nother conversation, my brother.

Charlotte, N.C. is a banking city. If there is anything less exciting to be the identity for a city, @ me. Charlotte, for a while, was another place where rappers played catch-up or completely forewent lofty ambition, content sticking to the city’s underground. What’s shifted in recent years is that rappers from the Queen City have begun internalizing a "Charlotte" way of presenting themselves that better encapsulates the place. The music is losing trap clichés, treading down the conscious path of fellow North Carolina forefathers like J. Cole or Little Brother. No major rap talent has come from the city and Charlotte’s rappers are not boasting that they’re going to change the world if they do make it. The collective goal is personal success that can reach back into the city, so each successive generation can feel the impact of the music and not have it lost once another high school class graduates—music for a city full of side streets, endless strip malls, deferred dreams, and people constantly wondering if "success" can really be found in the place that one calls home.

Bankroll Bird

In the year since Dura the King released "#NewCharlotte", the video scored in excess of a million views; the hashtag was trending in the city a week after release. Bankroll Bird, still a couple months out from releasing his own "True Story", received local attention providing the song’s hypnotizing hook, which served as a soft introduction to his melodic style that effortlessly switches between pure rapping and R&B. Hard to believe in 2015, but Bird upstaged Young Thug with his freestyle of the rapper’s song "Check". Bird leads the song’s hook and verses in a way probably too straightforward for Thugger, but the guidances tightly hit on the song’s potential. Similar to the track "True Story", where his verging into melodic sing-song rapping is never a crutch and instead effectively weaves lodging a hook in one’s head along with revealing one’s emotional heart.

King Mez

King Mez is from Raleigh, the capital of North Carolina, not Charlotte. Yet I’d be remiss to not include the main writer of Dr. Dre’s Compton right here. Though he moved from the state to Los Angeles to work with Dre, Mez shines best when the spotlight is on him. Last year when he released Long Live the King he didn’t have any contacts with Dr. Dre, but was instead a solid local act who sought a change of scenery to see if he could make it to the next level. Confident, but not braggadocious, there is a Southern timidness to Mez that is charming. His recent videos that both feature child protagonists fit the mood he attempts to create, which is one where he cannot prove he’s the best rapper, but show he’s the one that’s impacting the most hearts.



Rashaun Hampton

Soon enough there will be a whole generation of rappers and producers known for being "post-Travis Scott". Rashaun Hampton fits into this mold—like Scott, his music isn’t afraid to stack and layer to a point where one cannot even be sure that a human recorded the original track. Last year he put out a project called Mercy Seat, which was fine but still showed a rapper searching for his own voice. Earlier this year when he put out the track "Jesus Piece", it appeared that he was staking claim to one. The hook was rough and buried, but within all of the distortion was a powerful hook and a sense of "I think I got something here right now." His talent is remains raw, but each new track reveals a real next step forward.



Well$

Deniro Farrar might be the biggest rapper to emerge from Charlotte in the last few years, but Well$ is ready to grab and run with that Queen City crown. Well$ doesn’t just stick to a single style of rap. He can go in on a song with #bars, and he’ll also hold back when the time is for restraint instead of intensity. Where a melodic hook can and often does sell many songs, Well$ makes sure each line he writes builds, so listeners can get to know the guy behind the mic. Congolese-American and always ready to rep the state of North Carolina, Well$ makes sure to let people know of these traits since they aren’t markers to which listeners bring a real set of expectations. A charismatic live performer and with still just a single mixtape from last year and a number of singles into his career, the hometown hero is ready to shine whenever the national look is imminent.

Photo by Luis Medina

Reporting from Ibiza last summer, Andy Beta wisely skipped the superclubs and focused instead on the legacy of the so-called "Balearic" style, a hippie-dippie, candy-flipping fusion of synth pop, yacht rock, acid house, faux reggae, and ambient music. "I would say Balearic was having a moment," he wrote, "but that would imply that it went away, when in fact Balearic came and never left."

His analysis was correct; that hard-to-define, easy-to-discern musical sensibility, more an ideal or an ethos than a concrete style, has been an essential part of the electronic-music landscape since the Orb and the KLF, and it has endured through endless varieties of ambient, oddball pop, deep house, nu disco, and more, and simply continues to swell in 2015. You can trace a Balearic interest in spiritual uplift through the latest Laraaji reissues and Four Tet's raga-sampling Morning/Evening, not to mention the Music From Memory label's resuscitation of Italy's Gigi Masin and Mallorca's Joan Bibiloni (an actual, card-carrying Balearic resident!). The outer-limits disco revival has brought us new Lizzy Mercier Descloux reissues, while traces of '80s freestyle and piano house are audible everywhere from Julio Bashmore to Duke Dumont. In underground electronic music, meanwhile, we get exploratory albums like Gonno's Remember the Life Is Beautiful and the deep-diving ambient of Donnacha Costello's Love From Dust.

The latest albums from Tame Impala and Beach House even suggest that Balearic sensibilities have filtered into the indie mainstream, while the well-funded and woefully misnomered "tropical house" genre, featuring a bunch of white Europeans layering acoustic guitars and major-key melodies over wan Garageband beats, is evidence of the major labels' renewed interest in getting some of that Balearic mojo. (If you thought the Café del Mar comps could be bad, wait until you get a load of "tropical house," which is to sunsets as "trap" is to the drug trade: the commercial EDM industry's latest attempt to appropriate, assimilate, and annihilate all difference in the world, on the assumption that anything not acquirable by SFX isn't worth letting exist. The latest corporate salvo in the long war between boardroom and board shorts, in other words. But I digress.)

A quick recap, for any readers unacquainted with the concept: in the '80s, DJs like Amnesia's Alfredo, Pacha's Pitti, and Café del Mar's Jose Padilla became renowned for eclectic playlists that veered from krautrock and ambient music through Italo disco, new wave, funk punk, early house and electro, and quirky pop. Psychedelia reigned supreme—thanks, in part, to the hedonistic scene's chemical undercurrent—but so did populist values like melody and humor.

My own interest in the era has been shaped by my trips to Menorca, the sleepiest of the Balearic islands, even sleepier than tiny Formentera. The closest thing to an actual Balearic moment I've experienced there was hearing a Dead Can Dance album playing at a lighthouse at sunset. But I've come to regard the island's thrift stores as something akin to archaeological sites, and over the years, my digs have turned up records by Ash Ra, Suzanne Ciani, Cocteau Twins, Soul II Soul, Front 242, Freeez, Yazoo, D-Train, Joe Smooth, My Bloody Valentine, Marshall Jefferson, Ze Records' Cristina, Lene Lovich's disco project Kikrokos, Barabas, Ottowan, France Joli—even Athens, Ga.'s Pylon. Plus, of course, the Göttsching-sampling Italians Sueño Latino, whose loon-infused eponymous single might be the most ur-Balearic tune of them all. Did all of that get spun at discotheques? Who knows, but I think it's notable that many of the secondhand records I've bought here carry the rubber stamps of the bars and discos that owned them.

Today's Balearic music is, in many ways, a retro exercise; it has been informed by myths and histories handed down through successive generations of vacationing clubbers, and it has been reinforced by all the resources offered by the internet, like Discogs and YouTube. At its most self-aware, the new Balearic music involves a lot of period drum machines and feathery guitars and loon samples. But even at its most mannered, the best contemporary Balearic music also conveys a spirit of innocence, openness, and adventure.

As we get ready to bid farewell to summer, here are some recent records that joyously encapsulate the Balearic spirit.

Edizioni Mondo: Collezione (Running Back)

Italian "mondo" films—the name comes from the word for "world"—were a curious subset of exploitation flicks. Beginning in the '60s with films like Mondo Cane, these pseudo-documentaries purported to reveal hidden anthropological secrets to viewers; really, they were just shock entertainment seen through a lens colored by colonialism, racism, and sexism. On the plus side, they apparently had some pretty killer soundtracks, to which Francesco De Bellis' Edizioni Mondo label pays tribute. Over the past couple of years, the label has put out four 12"s dedicated to reproducing the mondo style of library music, from ROTLA (Mario Pierro, aka Raiders of the Lost ARP), Studio 22 (De Bellis and Federico Costantini), Odeon, and L.U.C.A. (De Bellis once again). This collection from Gerd Janson's Running Back label gathers all 13 tracks so far. Fans of Quiet Village's exotica revival project will find plenty to love here; so will fans of the proggier side of krautrock, slap bass, slow-motion disco chug, fake reggae, chimes, glockenspiel, and oboe presets. File under "Space Age Bachelor Pad Music," or even just "Waterbeds."

Most Balearic moment: "Blue Marine", with its rolling surf, seagulls, trilling insects, and banjo.
Fat content: 69%

Woolfy vs. Projections: Stations (Permanent Vacation)

If you're looking to shore up your cosmic-disco bona fides, you could do worse than to create a trilogy of albums "loosely based" on the adventures of Captain Starlight, the hero of German disco-rockers Zazu's vocoder-rubbed single of the same name. (Think: Pink Floyd's "The Wall", but starring Ziggy Stardust, and set in Rimini.) Simon James and Dan Hastie's Woolfy vs. Projections project's third album continues to expand the dimensions of their campfire disco aesthetic; they touch on sparkling new age, synth-heavy funk lite, woozy disco house (the sublime "Set It Up"), and dubbed-out folk, with nods to Fleetwood Mac and Metro Area along the way.

Most Balearic moment: The Spanish guitar of "Missing You" feat. El Javi
Fat content: 50%

Hatchback: Colors of the Sun (Be With)

Sam Grawe was a big part of the Balearic revival of the late '00s, both with his group Windsurf and his solo project Hatchback. If you couldn't tell from those aliases, the California producer has got a thing for ocean air, lens flare, the Pacific Coast Highway, and other accouterments of the chill life. Colors of the Sun came out on Lo Recordings—home to the Milky Disco compilations, many of Bernard Fevre's Black Devil recordings, Luke Vibert's Nuggets comps of library music, and other staples of leftfield disco—in 2008, but the 80-minute album has finally gotten its first-ever vinyl release via Be With Records. It's a textbook study of all things Balearic, from the motorik pulses of "Everything Is Neu" to the easy-listening disco of "Closer to Forever"; the guitars on "Carefree Highway" are faintly reminiscent of Dif Juz, and the single "White Diamond" remains a classic of 100-BPM arpeggiated bliss. In seven years, it really hasn't aged one whit.

Most Balearic moment: The 16-minute "Horizon", a new age fantasia featuring sampled birdsong
Fat content: 40% 

Mark Barrott: Sketches from an Island, Vol. 3 (International Feel)
Mark Barrott: "That Ibiza Track" (International Feel)

If there's a label that most represents the Balearic revival, it's Mark Barrott's International Feel. That's partly because Barrott actually lives on Ibiza. The British producer, formerly known as Future Loop Foundation, quit the UK some years ago; first he set up shop in Milan, and then Uruguay, where, he told Pitchfork's Andy Beta last year, the climate inspired his own turn back towards Balearic music. Three years ago, he and his wife packed up their suitcases and relocated to the source of that energy, the White Isle itself. Sketches From an Island 3 is the latest installment in his growing mood board of sunsets and palm fronds, and it's awesome, from the Compass Point pastiche of "Right 4 Me", with its sparkling guitars and sprightly synth-flutes, to "der Stern, der nie vergeht", which sounds like Vangelis on an ashram. "The Mysterious Island of Dr. Nimm" backs up the best kind of shlock-exotica with surprisingly intricate polyrhythms, and the rippling "Cirrus & Cumulus", which balances bells and vibraphone with bowed pads and actual birdsong, is ambient-techno perfection in the vein of Ultramarine.

Most Balearic moment: The shrieking monkeys of "The Mysterious Island of Dr. Nimm"
Fat content: 60%

CFCF: Radiance and Submission (Driftless Recordings)
CFCF: The Colours of Life (1080p Recordings)

Somewhere along the line, CFCF became one of the most quietly ambitious artists in a scene that's all about appearing effortless. Or maybe he was that way all along? After all, even back in 2010, when he was making perfectly pleasant studies in kraut-rocky synth-pop and kosmische Musik, the Montreal producer was also putting out clever mixtapes like Slow R&B for Zellers Locations Canada-Wide; he's covered Fleetwood Mac and David Sylvian; inspired by Wim Wenders' Notebook on Cities and Clothes, he's written homages to inanimate objects in the style of Philip Glass and Ryuichi Sakamoto.

He has two new albums out this summer, and while neither is about explicitly Balearic themes, both extend his investigation of the kind of digital synths and hi-def atmospherics that defined a lot of Balearic staples. Radiance and Submission, an eight-track album for Driftless Recordings, runs the gamut from kazoo-meets-whale-song studies like "Sculptures of Sand" to the gentle Ambien drip of "A Various Language (From the Same Hill)", a perfect Windham Hill pastiche, right down to its title. Despite references like that, though, it never feels forced or ironic or intentionally corny; "The Ruined Map" is as heartfelt a Sylvian-via-Bon-Iver impersonation as you could hope for, and "Blanketed in Snow a Place Returned To" will stir the heart of any Talk Talk fan.

A big part of the Balearic style of DJing had to do with breaking away from conventional song forms, even if that meant playing all 60 minutes of Manuel Göttsching's E2-E4. So what could be more Balearic than a meandering beat suite in the form of a single, 40-minute track? That's the case with The Colours of Life, CFCF's new release for Vancouver's 1080p label. This time, following a steady, 100-BPM groove that threads the set from beginning to end, he dips into slippery "Boys of Summer" guitars, lugubrious alto sax solos, vibraphones, and even Boards of Canada-style ambience. Keep handy for your next sunset cruise and/or rosé tasting.

Most Balearic moment: The Emulator II-style shakuhachi flute samples liberally slathered across The Colours of Life
Fat content: 30%/90%

Suzanne Kraft: Talk From Home (Melody as Truth)

Suzanne Kraft—Los Angeles' Diego Herrera—made his name with breezy, synthetic disco and boogie on labels like Running Back and Young Adults. But his new LP for Melody as Truth, a fledgling label run by Gaussian Curve's Jonny Nash, eases away from obvious dancefloor signifiers to indulge in shuffling ambient sketches, high-necked electric bass melodies, and soft little keyboard miniatures. With rural August mornings written all over it, this short, sweet volume is the perfect thing to accompany morning coffee; it's easy to imagine music like this being made in response to an imaginary Oblique Strategies prompt: "Write a song before you've had your morning coffee."

Most Balearic moment: The gated LinnDrum rimshots of "Two Chord Wake"
Fat content: 20%

Various Artists: Musik for Autobahns II (Running Back)

Ibiza has a love-hate relationship with freeways, which is to say that developers love them and residents hate them. But the Running Back label's second Musik for Autobahns compilation nevertheless taps into a vibe that underscores the longstanding connections between Ibiza and the German imagination (cf. Can's Tago Mago). That's particularly true of mid-tempo cuts like Lauer's "Autofahrn" and Fort Romeau's "Seleno", with their moody, monotone airs. Shan's "Awakening" is a sunrise squall of digital synths, and Orson Wells' "Orbiting Jupiter" has "Sueño Latino" written all over it.

Most Balearic moment: The loon sample on "Orbiting Jupiter"
Fat content: 15%

Ruf Dug: Island (Music for Dreams)

Ruf Dug takes us to a different island—multiple islands, actually. The Manchester producer's new album is titled in homage to Chris Blackwell's iconic record label, which got its start putting out music from Bermuda and Jamaica; it was recorded during a three-month stint on Guadeloupe, where Ruf Dug put together his own fantasy version of Compass Point, the Bahamanian studios where many of Island's records got made. Of course, Compass Point had Sly and Robbie; Ruf Dug had a couple of hardware synths, a laptop, and a 4-track. Slave to the Rhythm it ain't, but the Mancunian producer still gets plenty of mileage out of his imaginary archipelago, from the rinky-dink keys and plink-plonk drum machines to speedy, soca- and slap-bass-infused cuts like "Mosquito". (Ruf Dug's account of his island digging haul is well worth a look, too.)

Most Balearic moment: "Thank You Wally", presumably a tribute to Compass Point keyboardist Wally Badarou
Fat content: 60%

The Loose Control Band: "It's Hot (Columbus Hotel Mix)" (Golf Channel)

Clubbers of a certain age may remember when the Cure got spun at dance clubs; Alfredo was a big fan of "Lullaby". The Loose Control Band—Jonah Sharp, aka Spacetime Continuum, and DJ Spun—flash back to the glory days of gothic disco with flanged electric bass, smeared-on synth pads, and heavy-breathing chants. The original mix takes a more jagged funk-punk approach, while the "808 Mix" precariously balances live congas with 808. They're all as gloriously messy as Robert Smith's hair after a night of dancing in 80% humidity.

Most Balearic moment: The live congas—usually to be avoided, but they work here
Fat content: 10%

Idjut Boys: Versions (Smalltown Supersound)

London's Idjut Boys have been making records since the early '90s—François Kevorkian was an early fan of their very first record—and they've been going to clubs since the late '80s, coming up under the influence of DJs like Harvey. So if anyone on this list has an actual connection to the original Balearic scene, it's these guys. And you can hear that in their records, which mix up house and disco with freewheeling aplomb. On Versions, out August 28, they take a razor blade to their back catalog and send the results careening through the mixing desk. The results sound a little like Lindstrøm or Prins Thomas after a meeting with Mad Professor, full of space and warmth and oodles upon oodles of delay. If you're not full-on levitating by the end of "Another Bird", you need to check the settings on your stereo.

Most Balearic moment: The yacht-rock "woo-hoo" of "Going Down"
Fat content: 25%

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Shall we compare Eleventh Dream Day to Neil Young and Crazy Horse? Of course. The influence of Young’s great guitar albums on EDD—filtered through Television, the Gun Club, and the Dream Syndicate, with a large helping of Southern Gothic fiction—is inescapable. But on four records between 1988 and 1993, the Chicago-by-way-of-Kentucky band’s identity was strong enough to bear that weight and more. Then they lost their major label deal and went part-time, retreating into day jobs, parenting, and other bands (Freakwater, Tortoise).

Which still left the band’s core members—frontman/guitarist Rick Rizzo, drummer/vocalist Janet Beveridge Bean, and bassist Douglas McCombs—listing towards a particular strain of Young. The Neil Young who does whatever he wants, whenever he wants, with whomever he wants. The Neil Young who’s always moving forward. The Neil Young who’s still at it. Since 1994, Eleventh Dream Day have released six records on Thrill Jockey, the latest being Works for Tomorrow, which was released last month. This very publication referred to them, along with Yo La Tengo and Sonic Youth, as "veritable alt-rock dinosaurs" 15 years ago.

Depending on whether or not you count 1987’s self-titled debut EP, the 1989 12” single Wayne (made EP-length by the eleven minute-plus "Tenth Leaving Train") or the recent alternate version of 1993’s El Moodio, Eleventh Dream Day have made either 10, 11, 12, or 13 records.

Obviously, for the purposes of this list, the answer has to be 11. "11 Best?" "11 Favorite?" "The 11 Most Definitive?" They are all masterful and worthy of your time.

Eleventh Dream Day (Amoeba, 1987)
"The Arsonist"

While "Liz Beth" was both their first recording and the one with staying power (it was re-recorded for the alterna-star-studded soundtrack to the 1990 movie A Matter of Degrees), this slide guitar-addled ampheta-anthem was the first Eleventh Dream Day song ever released, appearing on the WNUR compilation Heat From the Wind Chill Factory in 1985. I was a freshman DJ at WNUR in the fall of that year, so, lest this choice seem like a conflict of interest, I crowdsourced it on the Eleventh Dream Day Facebook group, where the deciding vote was cast by none other than Baird Figi, the band’s second guitarist until 1992 (that’s him on slide).

What’s great about "The Arsonist" is that the shouted harmonies, fifth-gear tempo, and whiplash drums are all qualities that can still be found on the new record, in the same way there are unmistakable elements in any Woody Allen movie or Elmore Leonard novel three decades apart.

Prairie School Freakout (Amoeba, 1988 / Thrill Jockey reissue, 2003)
"Among the Pines"

Recorded in 15 hours and mythologically dominated by Rizzo’s amplifier trouble ("we finally gave up and decided to make amp buzz the theme of the record," say the original liner notes), Prairie School Freakout is about the band dynamic, built around three couplings: Rizzo and Bean (vocalists, real-life romance), Bean and McCombs (woofer-popping rhythm section), and Rizzo and Figi (seering secret guitar language). "Among the Pines" is the most all-inclusive of the record’s 10 songs: hooky, noisy, and front-porch shufflin’, with three different guitar workouts and indelible, if sometimes heavy-handed, lyrics (first line: "Slipped in the shower stall/ Hit his head and died").

Beet (Atlantic, 1989)
"Awake I Lie"

1989 was the beginning of Eleventh Dream Day’s major label era, several years after the Replacements were on Reprise, but one ahead of Sonic Youth on DGC (also, Taylor Swift was born). Produced by Gary Waleik of Big Dipper and Volcano Suns, Beet is cleaner but in no way sterile, and still awash in anthems, grandiose character sketches, and distortion.

Bean’s relentless and relentlessly melodic "Bagdad’s Last Ride", Figi’s still-timely Grateful Dead-bash "Bomb the Mars Hotel", and Rizzo’s elegiac "Teenage Pin Queen" are all standouts, but "Awake I Lie" is the hit, with McCombs and Bean’s thundrous first few notes and Rizzo’s compact, urgent couplets giving way to a desperate, slowed-down, squalling middle that eventually explodes and reassembles for a snapping chorus and a second round of Bean concussion bombs and dueling dual-guitars.



Lived to Tell (Atlantic, 1991)
"I Could Be Lost"

Sweetest song: "It’s All a Game", a Gram-and-Emmylouish power ballad. Freshest song: the Bean-led garage-rager "You Know What It Is". But "I Could Be Lost" wins for riffy pleasure, and because the video makes Eleventh Dream Day look like members of "The Heights" (though Fox’s fake-band drama didn’t actually premiere until 1992). Check out the precious sidelong glances between Rizzo and Bean (even the usually stone-faced McCombs finds them hilarious).

The clip’s forced quality reflects where the group was at the time: selling poorly and largely estranged from Atlantic. They were also without Figi, who played on the record but left after the first leg of the tour, giving way to Bean and Rizzo’s old Kentucky peer Matthew "Wink" O’Bannon. When Bean, Rizzo, and McCombs all crack up again at the end of the video, it might be because they are watching O’Bannon mime parts that he never played.

El Moodio (Atlantic, 1993), New Moodio (Comedy Minus One, 2014)
"Makin’ Like a Rug"

Eleventh Dream Day was on the verge of leaving Atlantic, which hadn’t picked up the band’s contract option, when Nirvana and Sonic Youth co-manager Danny Goldberg took over the label, wooed the band back and had them remake most of an album they’d already cut with Chicago producer Brad Wood (Liz Phair).

They’re both good records, and the comparisons are fascinating (New Moodio also has three previously-unreleased songs). The guitars, drums and vocals on the New Moodio version of "That’s the Point" are satisfyingly tougher, while Bean’s more prominent harmonies on the El Moodio version of "After This Time Is Gone" make it sweeter and more theoretically radio-friendly. The definitive song on both records is the Bean-fronted "Makin’ Like a Rug" ("Making Like a Rug" on New Moodio), which is basically an episode of "Justified" with loud guitars (and, on the New Moodio version, skronkier solos).

Ursa Major (Atavistic, 1994)
"Orange Moon"

The moment when a generation of music fans would come to know Eleventh Dream Day as "that band Doug McCombs was in before Tortoise." Chicago’s so-called "post-rock" pioneers released their self-titled debut (on Thrill Jockey, which was started by Eleventh Dream Day’s former Atlantic A&R person Bettina Richards) around the same time Ursa Major came together. It’s the first of three Eleventh Dream Day records (mostly) recorded by Tortoise’s John McEntire; McEntire and Bundy K. Brown also play on the record, and the instrumental opener "The History of Brokeback" gave McCombs’ still-active solo band its name.

A highlight of the recent live gigs (and one of the rare oldies), "Orange Moon" is a miniature epic that splits the difference between every great Eleventh Dream Day feedback-laden pounder and the band’s increasingly more ruminative side.

Eighth (Thrill Jockey, 1997)
"Motion Sickness"

Except it’s the seventh (maybe). It’s also the band’s first as a trio—Rizzo would be the sole guitarist (save for occasional live appearances by the likes of Antietam’s Tara Key and Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan) between this record and Works For Tomorrow. Eighth kicks off what you might call Eleventh Dream Day’s Radiohead period, with longer, more deliberate songs, and a notable electronic/studio vibe.

"The Band's focus is no longer on performance of songs but of interpretation of the same," says Thrill Jockey’s website. "The open structure of band allowes them freedeom to experiment" (with grammar and spelling, too!).

One of three instrumentals, "Motion Sickness" is the biggest challenge: five minutes of drummer-less, solo-guitar poetry over background hums and pulses.

Stalled Parade (Thrill Jockey, 2000)
"In the Style Of…"

By this point Eleventh Dream Day were more a side project and recording project than a working band. Bean and McCombs had their more prominent musical day jobs, and Rizzo also played with others (Dark Edson Tiger, his first duo record with Tara Key, came out this same year). The frontman and the drummer were also on the verge of a divorce.

But what they can express in Eleventh Dream Day could only be expressed in Eleventh Dream Day. Compared to El Moodio, The Stalled Parade is an art-rock record. Compared to Eighth, it’s a Beatles record. Being the sole guitar player allowed Rizzo to play both more indulgently and more simply, with a wider range of influences ("Ground Point Zero" could be a Sonic Youth song, while the only thing resembling a solo on the hooky "Interstate" comes from McEntire’s keyboard). The meta exception is "In the Style Of…", which does require a second guitarist to pulls off its deranged equine pyrotechnics: none other than McCombs.

Zeroes and Ones (Thrill Jockey, 2006)
"New Rules"

Eleventh Dream Day’s first record with organist/keyboardist Mark Greenberg (the Coctails), who initially played live with the band at The Stalled Parade record release show. In the six years between discs, they also reunited with Figi for a live show to mark Thrill Jockey’s Prairie School Freakout reissue.

Greenberg’s presence on the first song ("Dissolution") is immediately noticeable, and so are the faster tempos, shorter songs and punchier "we’re a rock band again!" vibe. Listening to it now, "New Rules" feels like a denouement to the band’s decade on Thrill Jockey up to this point: a languid and entrancing Long One (7:48), with gently pretty vocal harmonies and an equally gorgeous (and subdued) guitar solo.

Riot Now! (Thrill Jockey, 2011)
"Damned Tree"

It’s time to cut the damned tree down! The first song on an album is always a statement of purpose, and Riot Now! is something of a buzzsaw. The first of two records where the band workshopped songs live at the Chicago club The Hideout four times in a month, it’s a political record and a punk record, with a cartoon image of Rizzo and Bean’s then-teenage son Matthew on the cover, and as much physicality as anything by Thee Oh Sees (with pretty much the same instrumental configuration). "Damned Tree" crams about three songs of inspiration into its three minutes and forty seconds, with ringing guitars that throw back to the '90s, and then a swinging, stinging middle eight built around Greenberg’s organ and the way Bean and Rizzo sing with and at each other like nobody this side of Exene and John (and X don’t make new records).

Work for Tomorrow (Thrill Jockey, 2015)
"Snowblind"

And then there were five. Guitarist Jim Elkington, who has played with Bean in the Horse’s Ha and McCombs in Brokeback, and is also a member of Tweedy, originally joined Eleventh Dream Day as a temporary live substitute for Greenberg, filling in the sonic holes with his guitar instead of keyboards. The young(er) Brit never left, and the return of Eleventh Dream Day’s two-guitar sound, coupled with the extra raggedness and volume found on Riot Now!, is thrilling.

If amp buzz was the theme of Prairie School Freakout, Bean’s bloodied hands could be the theme of Works For Tomorrow. The drummer pushed Rizzo to emphasize the fast-and-loud. "Janet is absolutely insane how she plays. How can I not join in?" Rizzo told Greg Kot of the Chicago Tribune. "How does she come out of this alive?"

Bean pretty much steals the album with her vocals, too, from the controlled ferality of "Vanishing Point" to her back-up yelling on the title track to an unhinged cover of the 1969 Judy Henske and Jerry Yester psychedelic freak-soul single "Snowblind", which is only available on physical copies of the record.

Nearly two weeks after the release of Straight Outta Compton, we’re still trying to understand what its success means for hip-hop. There are now 111 million reasons why we should be paying attention to the pivotal hip-hop biopic and its accompanying press. Undoubtedly, it makes a claim for the return of engaging, big-budget Black films that do not star a man in a dress. Its careful storytelling and well-rounded edge means that hip-hop history is capable of gripping a vast audience. More importantly, hip-hop biopics are filmed through an empathetic lens: by practice, it often regards the artist (or those closest to them) as subject matter experts. For many Black artists, a biopic places the national narrative into their hands for the first time.

Dr. Dre and Ice Cube’s presence during the film’s production no doubt influenced the finished product. Inevitably, their revisionism led to the absence of certain stories. Despite the group’s notorious misogyny, their career is the stuff of lore: the birth of gangsta rap, the rise of Compton, Los Angeles as a cultural hotpot of the West Side, and the careers of two of the most successful rappers in the game can all be tied to the group’s tumultuous nine-year run. Straight Outta Compton works logistically partially because "Niggaz wit Attitude" is still a controversial phrase nearly 30 years later, and the group’s influential braggadocio can still be felt.

The Great Content Machine wants to know what The Next Big Hip-Hop Biopic will be. Only time will tell if Straight Outta Compton has already birthed a new generation of Black film—though many are taking their bets. The film presents race, poverty, relationships amongst Black men, and the struggle for hip-hop’s legitimacy as challenges not easily overcome. Our Next Big Biopic should feature similar complex challenges. If Hollywood is looking for its next big story, it should look no farther than the Black women who have carried hip-hop on their backs.

Black female rappers in the '80s and '90s not only faced similar agitators, but also battled an industry hostile to them as women. Yet they have always led the charge on creating some of hip-hop’s most seminal works, and their projects were born of and commented on their own personal lives. Frankly, their stories are important and can chart the genesis of hip-hop.

As Straight Outta Compton surges forward, here are five pioneering female rappers to consider.

1. Lil' Kim

Lil Kim’s disappointing feature in the 2009’s Notorious B.I.G. biopic Notorious is a great example of why her biopic should have existed ages ago. Unsurprisingly, Kim was upset by being seen as a mere love interest, and later spoke out against the film’s "false portrayal and lies." She told NME two days before the movie’s release, "The film studio and producers involved were more concerned about painting me as a 'character' to create a more interesting story line instead of a person with talent." Kim’s own story could easily double as its own feature, as she’s far more than a footnote in B.I.G.’s career—her story spans homelessness, abuse, and her eventual rise to the top of the rap game.

2. Missy Elliott

With her career alone, Missy Elliott could tell multiple stories. Her successes as a songwriter and record producer precede her legendary contributions to hip-hop music, and her friendly writer-producer duo with Timbaland generated numerous rap and R&B hits in the 1990s. The release of her career-changing verse on Gina Thompson’s "The Things That You Do" could make a pretty pivotal scene of its own.

Like Kim, Missy’s personal was also political. She experienced the industry’s dismissal of dark-skinned, thick Black women when she failed to appear in the video for Raven Symoné’s 1993 hit "What Little Girls Are Made Of". The directors used a light-skinned, thin model instead, with Elliott’s voice and lyrics. Later on, Elliott continued to stand firmly in the center of her work as its sole love and sex interest. Outside of her career, Elliott has been open about her experiences with childhood and sexual abuse, being diagnosed with Graves’ disease, and depression. Her transparency could benefit the production of her own biopic.

3. Lauryn Hill

Though Ms. Hill’s participation seems unlikely, there’s so much to gain from a Lauryn Hill biopic. Her career has seen her emerge as a singer, songwriter, rapper, and producer. The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill is still widely regarded as a seminal hip-hop release, and its contributions to the gradual embrace of the genre as a legitimate form of art are undeniable. In 1999, she secured five of her ten nominations at the 41st Grammy Awards, including Best New Artist and Album of the Year. She was the first hip-hop artist to ever receive the award.

Hill’s self-imposed exile has been explained before, but never in film. Her struggle to retain her identity and resist "the fear of being black, young, and gifted in [western culture]"—as she told Essence in 2009—made social and emotional obligations unbearable. She fired her management team in 2000 to undergo "spiritual training" and focus on her growing family with Rohan Marley. In the past 15 years, fans have responded kindly to her occasional public appearances, and many continue to anticipate a sophomore effort.

4. Sylvia Robinson

Once dubbed "The Mother of Hip-Hop," Sylvia Robinson is best known as the architect of two of hip-hop’s benchmark singles, the Sugarhill Gang’s "Rappers Delight" and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s "The Message". After founding Sugar Hill Records in 1979, Sylvia assembled Michael Wright, Henry Jackson, and Guy O’Brien into the Sugarhill Gang, naming them after a Harlem area she liked. At that point, she was entering her 25th year as a songwriter and producer who had already gained a name from releasing one of the first known disco singles and penning songs for Ike and Tina.

At only 14 years old, Robinson began her career recording hits for Columbia Records in the 1950s, then later wrote them as part of the popular duo Mickey & Sylvia. When the two split in 1964, Robinson focused only on songwriting and her business endeavors with her then husband, Joe Robinson. In 1972, Al Green rejected a demo she’d penned called "Pillow Talk", so she released it under her name, and the song shot to #3 on the Billboard Hot 100. Her life rights have been optioned though much talk about a movie of her life seems to be just that, still.

5. Queen Latifah

Earlier this year, Queen Latifah turned the camera onto herself to bring director Dee Ree’s Bessie biopic to life. The film is yet another reminder of Latifah’s loyalty to the stories of Black women, and to portraying Black women as engaging, interesting characters. Latifah held tightly onto the project for over 20 years—partially because, as she told NPR, "I would have had half the life experience that I could have brought to this project. […]I'm glad that it didn't quite happen as early as it could have, because I had a lot more to relate to: how to stick up for yourself, how to be respected, how to be independent."

Imagine if someone placed as much care into a film of Latifah’s own life. Since the release of her debut album All Hail to the Queen in 1989, Latifah has proven her powerhouse status as a rapper, actress, record and television producer, and comedienne. Her point-blank discussion of issues faced by Black women earned her the status as one of hip-hop’s leading feminist role models. She would later channel life as a Black female entrepreneur as Khadijah in the popular sitcom "Living Single" in the early '90s before going on to star in productions of her own in the resulting years.

Latifah has been very vocal about her experiences within the hip-hop industry, and a biopic of hers could surely shed light to the complexities faced by Black female rappers.

The end of the summer of 1995 marked a new beginning for dad’s old formalwear.

"Black coat, white shoes, black hat, Cadillac—yeah!" sing the boys from Rancid on "Time Bomb", a standout track from their excellent third album, …And Out Come the Wolves, released 20 years ago last week. They’re talking about a tattooed hoodlum headed for disaster, but the wardrobe they describe—and the perky, jerky music replacing their usual Cali street-punk—nods to Walt Jabsco, the cartoon mascot of Britain’s legendary 2 Tone ska label. Old Walty even turns up in the video.

If the success of "Time Bomb" (No. 8 on Billboard’s Alternative Songs chart) sparked renewed interest in all things 2 Tone, No Doubt’s Tragic Kingdom sent even more American teens rummaging through closets for old sports coats and ties. As Gwen Stefani and her bandmates promoted that breakthrough effort—released weeks after Wolves, on October 10—they gave props to 2 Tone heroes like Madness and the Specials. They even one-upped Rancid by putting Specials lead singer Terry Hall in their "Sunday Morning" video.



The 2 Tone imprint and the early-'80s UK working-class youth movement it spawned had a tremendous influence on Stefani, Rancid founder Tim Armstrong, and the handful of other American kids who formed ska bands during the Reagan years. (Before Rancid, Armstrong had Operation Ivy, ska-punk OGs who followed in the footsteps of pioneers like Fishbone and the Toasters.) Their attempts to emulate and update the 2 Tone sound—a punky English take on the Jamaican R&B variant that eventually became reggae—laid the groundwork for an unlikely American ska boom in the mid-'90s. For a few years there, a subset of Warped Tour kids and MTV viewers unmoved by post-grunge and nu-metal undertook the pre-broadband research needed to learn about the antiracist, pro-feminist, multiracial groups that made 2 Tone such a phenomenon.

Fast-forwarding to today, three of 2 Tone’s original heavyweights—the English Beat, the Selecter, and Bodysnatchers frontwoman Rhoda Dakar—are releasing new albums in the coming months. These LPs arrive at a time when race and gender issues dominate popular discourse like they haven’t in years, and yet the timeliness or timelessness of 2 Tone’s messages isn’t even a discussion. If anyone’s clamoring for another ska resurgence, they’re clamoring very quietly. The silence speaks volumes about how this music tends to manifest itself in the U.S.

When ska bum-rushed the MTV Beach House in the '90s, bands like No Doubt and the similarly long-running Mighty Mighty Bosstones were unique in their roots reverence and relative lack of goofiness. They played fast and loose with genre constraints yet never played the music for laughs. This bears mentioning because ska can easily devolve into circus music. It’s inherently upbeat, with up-stroked, offbeat, quick-tempo guitars that pair nicely with trumpets and trombones. Originally the soundtrack to Jamaica’s independence, it’s danceable even when deadly serious, and it’s no accident that punk-tinged party bands like Reel Big Fish and Less Than Jake were the biggest '90s breakouts.

In fairness, there were more traditional 2 Tone- and Jamaican-style ska acts hitting '90s listeners with potent messages. But as the "third wave" movement drew converts from the punk scene, politics weren’t necessarily central to the plot. When bands did sing about racism, they often came across as self-congratulatory and ran the risk of preaching to the choir. (According to a Chicago Reader article, the Ska Against Racism tour organized in 1998 by Skankin’ Pickle founder Mike Park attracted predominantly white, apolitical audiences and raised a mere $23,000 for antiracist charities.)

In places like suburban Connecticut, where a robust ska scene warranted a 1999 compilation called, naturally, Welcome to Skannecticut, there was nothing like the racial and gender diversity that had characterized 2 Tone. Many bands had black and female members, and the scene was probably more inclusive than the hardcore, metal, or jam-band communities, but a big part of 2 Tone’s legacy was its ability to unite black and white British youth on a large-scale level. Between July 1979 and August 1980, the label’s first seven singles went Top 20 in the UK, and it wasn’t just white kids buying those records. It was people like Bend It Like Beckham director Gurinder Chadha, then a young woman of Indian descent finding her place in London.

"For my coming of age, it really was the first time there was something around I felt a part of," Chadha says in the excellent 2004 documentary 2 Tone Britain. "It was a part of Britishness I could definitely buy into."

And she wasn’t being sucked in by savvy marketing. In launching 2 Tone, Specials keyboardist and mastermind Jerry Dammers was simply responding to what he saw: a nation grappling with racial tensions and the rise of right-wing political groups. The mere act of hitting the stage with a half-black, half-white band and singing "A Message to You, Rudy"—the title and lyric a reference to the troublemaking Jamaican "rude boys" whose gangster duds inspired the label’s logo and aesthetic—was nothing short of revolutionary.



This gets at why America can’t really be blamed for getting ska wrong. When the Specials were issuing frantic urban battle reports like "Concrete Jungle" and plainspoken pleas for tolerance like "Doesn’t Make It Alright", it had only been 30 years since a wave of West Indian immigration brought Jamaican culture to Britain’s cities, challenging traditional notions of Englishness. Thanks to newcomers from Kingston, ska and reggae were known quantities—sounds that sometimes went pop but mostly fueled underground dance parties. Some of the first whites to champion the music were members of the skinhead subculture—a working-class movement that, before becoming tainted by white supremacists, borrowed its look and listening habits from Jamaican immigrants.

In America, youth cults like skinhead, rude boy, and mod—all fashionable in Britain during 2 Tone—have never really translated. More crucially, the racial dynamics in the States have always been very different than those that begat 2 Tone. Here, tensions between blacks and whites stem from centuries of slavery and institutional racism. To the extent this ugliness helped birth beautiful music, it’s been in the form of jazz, blues, rock, and soul—not reggae or ska, which by 1980 had really only reached mainstream America via Bob Marley and The Harder They Come.

That history helps to explain why the Specials, the English Beat, and Madness were one- or two-hit wonders in the U.S. Their lack of success might also have had to do with poor marketing, bad luck, or that old criticism about being "too British." Regardless, Americans not hip to New Wave or college radio missed some vibrant artists whose black-and-white contradictions informed everything from their outfits and album art to their songwriting. They were joyous and pissed, hopeless and idealistic, nostalgic and innovative. These contrasts made for some of the most unforgettable records of the post-punk era.

And some of these artists are still suiting up and doing it. On October 2, the Selecter return with Subculture, the third studio album since singer Pauline Black rebooted the band with fellow original vocalist Arthur "Gaps" Hendrickson in 2011. Compared to their stark early records—the tense, trebly Too Much Pressure (1980) and mellower, moodier Celebrate the Bullet (1981)—Subculture is vibrant and colorful. Black no longer sings like the doomsday clock is hanging on the studio wall, but she’s still got that proud, not-quite-pretty voice. She’s part soul blaster, part bobby siren, and she’s still fighting 2 Tone’s battles.



After wiping the slate clean on hopeful Subculture opener "Box Fresh", a bubbly skanker with an ABBA-worthy piano lick, Black gets down to business. On "Breakdown", a doomy trombone-laced reggae cut reminiscent of the 1981 Specials classic "Ghost Town", Gaps includes Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown in a list of young people killed by racial violence. On brave misstep "Babble On", the band uses twisty Middle Eastern horn sounds to underscore Black’s takedown of Israeli-Palestinian violence. "Walk the Walk"—featuring peppy interpolations of "A Message to You, Rudy" and the Blondie-approved Jamaican favorite "The Tide Is High"—is sunnier and more empowering. "If you want to win the fight," Black sings, "make up your own rules."

Offstage, that’s precisely what Black is doing. Born 61 years ago to mixed-race parents (Jewish mother, Nigerian father) and raised by a white working-class adopted family, she’s the embodiment of 2 Tone’s values. Black doesn’t just front the Selecter—she co-writes most of the songs and manages the band. And she’s added a new "ism," ageism, to the list of 2 Tone foes. In a recent interview for The Guardian’s Women In Leadership series, Black spoke openly about the challenges.

After Black, the most notable female figure in 2 Tone was Rhoda Dakar, lead singer for the label’s only all-female band, the Bodysnatchers. The group found fame with a series of terrific singles but split up in 1981 before it could record a full-length. Due out November 6, the aptly titled Rhoda Dakar Sings the Bodysnatchers is billed as the album the septet would’ve made—even though it features an all-male band. Initially funded via PledgeMusic and recorded in a single day, the collection includes five covers, among them "Too Experienced", a soulful Bob Andy reggae tune the ‘Snatchers turned into a kind of feminist anthem.

Like Black, Dakar doesn’t have the prettiest voice, but her warble has a certain '60s-girl-group charm. When her sweetness comes with sarcastic social commentary, as on "Easy Life", Dakar is especially effective: "Hey girls, it's not too late/ To stay home and vegetate/ Just like mamma says you should do/ Like society says you should do."

It’s too bad Dakar didn’t re-do the 1980 single "Ruder Than You", a playful rallying call for young women featuring the warning, "Rude girls, you better watch out/ Rude girls, there’s more of us about." She also nixed "The Boiler", the utterly fearless song about date rape she co-wrote with the Bodysnatchers and recorded with the Special A.K.A. for 1982 release. A terrifying account of sexual assault set to a creepy disco-muzak-ska beat, "The Boiler" ends in horrific screams that somehow didn’t stop the tune from reaching No. 35 on the UK charts. It’s 2 Tone’s most courageous, audacious moment, and even if it could be replicated, there’d be no need.

Slated for early 2016, Here We Go Love, the first new album from New Wave crossover faves the English Beat since 1982, will also be the product of a PledgeMusic drive. Preliminary samples suggest frontman and lone original member Dave Wakeling has toured enough behind the band’s '80s material to know what fans expect: a mix of love and politics smoothed out over blue-eyed soul, punkish guitar-pop, chipper reggae, and of course, ska. With luck, Wakeling will play some new ones when the Beat open for Rancid as part of the East Bay band’s three-day New Year’s Eve bash.

Wakeling and Black are among the artists interviewed in the episode on 2 Tone made for Noisey’s new Under the Influence series, narrated by Armstrong of Rancid. It’s a thoughtful look at the movement and its legacy, but by highlighting the persistence of underground ska acts around the globe—especially the more trad-minded ones—the filmmakers arguably miss the larger lesson of 2 Tone. It’s not just that punk and ska are two great tastes that taste great together, regardless of decade or hemisphere. It’s that two cultures forced to coexist can find common ground and make revolutionary art that actually changes society.

In 1995, if Rancid or Mike Park or anyone were really going to create an American 2 Tone—incendiary, commercially viable music that black and white kids could define themselves by, and that would still yield worthwhile records 35 years later—they wouldn’t have used ska. They’d have done something homegrown and current, probably with rock and hip-hop, and they’d have needed to be a whole lot cleverer than Limp Bizkit or Rage Against the Machine. If it wasn’t impossible then—before the Internet changed everything, and before this latest rash of racial violence reminded us how some things never change—it probably is now.

In any case, black suits and white shoes alone won’t get you there. In 2 Tone Britain, the clothes didn’t make the bands. They made ratchet-sharp messages that much sharper.

Photo via Instagram

There is no greater cultural crime a young girl can commit than loving pop music without apology. Forever marginalized as the screaming, crying Beatlemaniac, Directioner, or Swiftie, teen girl fandom in 2015 is more powerful and worthy of our respect than ever. Blogs, fan forums, and other online communities are havens for fans to dissect every tweet and performance their idols offer up, and these spaces are often ruled by teen girls. They worship collectively, exalt in mutual understanding, and celebrate both the bands they adore and one another. In fan-dominated spaces, teen girls are the ultimate authorities.

But their power has an expiration date, because pop artists earn respect only when they stop appealing to a teen demographic. Justin Timberlake and Beyoncé are two of the most prominent faces of this, prancing proof of the idea that there’s a legitimacy and longevity awaiting pop artists when they trade their Teen Choice Awards for Grammys. It's an idea that is now so prevalent that we’ve begun predicting who, in new pop groups, will be the one to "pull a Timberlake" and leave the group behind for respectable success. The boy bands and girl groups—not to mention their passionate supporters—that made these artists famous are seemingly only of value when they act as stepping stones to the next, better group of appreciative listeners. Drop the chaste pop songs about unrequited love and hand-holding, they’re taught, and they’ll move on to the right kind of fans: adults, men. That is how one becomes an artist, right?

It’s great that Taylor Swift’s fifth album, 1989, unleashed her upon a new, unsuspecting audience, that it proved so popular with previously Swift-averse adult listeners and provided "SNL" with fodder about the identity crisis serious music listeners experienced when they caught themselves enjoying it after years of dismissing her output. But the girls who’ve spent a decade hanging off Swift’s every word, charting her emotional growth and lyrical progression in McSweeney’s and zines and Tumblr blogs weren’t waiting for that approval. They didn’t need permission from a critic’s begrudgingly positive review of the album to start taking Taylor seriously; they’ve done so from the start.

Pop music is fundamentally about the fans, and when we say things like "fame begets fawning praise" we’re missing a big addendum: it does, except when young female fanbases are the ones stoking the ascent. When fame is girded by a swelling teenage, female fanbase immediately, that celebrity becomes false, temporary, and unearned. We’re always grappling for a reason to disregard the value of a popular—and populist—product because blindly embracing it means the market research and Simon Cowell-eque figures behind it have duped us again. The presence of teen girls offers up a handy barometer: if they like something you can be rest assured it’s not worth a serious listener’s ear.

A year before they toured in support of the Rolling Stones, the funk-influenced Manchester pop band the 1975 weren’t even filling pubs in their hometown. And while eventual and important blessings from gatekeepers like Zane Lowe and the Guardian propelled them beyond the minor leagues, it wasn’t critical co-signs that sold out their shows at the Royal Albert Hall in a span of minutes. It was the band’s dedicated legion of young female fans that carried the 1975 from local also-rans to festival mainstays, with more sold out international tours under their belt than they have albums to their name.

Despite the passion and dedication of his band’s supporters, the 1975 frontman Matthew Healy treads carefully when addressing the matter of their mercurial rise, and just who it is that made them. "What qualifies a boy band, though? If it’s hysteria and a female-led population of fans and being surrounded in hotels by those fans and doing sell-out shows, then we’re a boy band," he said last year. He’s since distanced his band from that designation; female fans are seen as less legitimate, so their adoration is an instant credibility-killer.

The crux of teen-girl illegitimacy is the assumption that they are incapable of the critical thinking their older, male counterparts display when it comes to their favourite bands. But this assumption is doing them a true disservice.

Earlier this year, One Direction fans banded together to shine a spotlight on "No Control", a track from the band’s 2014 album Four that they felt deserved more attention than the sugary singles they’d been offered so far. "Instead of songs that showed the maturity and growth in the sound of 1D, we got 'Steal My Girl' and 'Night Changes'," says Lynn Martineau, one of three fans credited with launching "Project: No Control" on Thunderclap, a flash-mob style "crowdspeaking platform" designed to cluster and amplify campaign messages across social media. "They are both great songs, but they are formulaic and sound exactly like the ‘boy band pop songs’ that 1D has always released."

The fans wanted more, and when 1DHQ announced no further singles would be released following Zayn Malik’s departure in April, they decided to take matters into their own hands. And it paid off.

"Project: No Control is the fifth-largest Thunderclap campaign in history, and the only one [in the top five] that did not have a major celebrity or sponsor supporting it," Lynn says, before rattling off some impressive stats. "The original objective was to have 500 supporters, then it became getting the song added to the set list." PNC boasted 34,449 unique supporters after six days, and One Direction performed "No Control" for the first time ever in June, during a concert in Brussels. Earlier this month, Lynn saw it live when the band’s current On the Road Again world tour brought them to Baltimore.

In May, Billboard reported the track "picked up 1 million U.S. streams in the week ending May 17 […] while its sales rose by a mighty 1,674 percent to 5,000 downloads." The band discussed PNC at the Billboard Awards and during their appearance on "The Late Late Show". Last week, "No Control" earned the band a Teen Choice Award for Best Party Song. All this because a passionate, predominantly female fanbase was savvy enough to identify a) that the band’s critical reputation would not change on its own, and b) the amplification required to chart a new track.

They didn’t just want to consume the band’s music; they wanted to control what was on the menu. "Fans started gifting the song on iTunes, and tweeting about the song constantly. They came up with lists of radio stations to call and tweet," Lynn explains. They Shazam’ed it and racked up plays on Spotify, seeing it rise 1,348 places up the iTunes Song Chart is just two days. Nick Grimshaw, host of BBC Radio 1’s Breakfast Show, called the effort, "like punk all over again; DIY releases." All this because a London university student named Anna mused, to her coven of Tumblr followers, about how great it would be for the fandom to unify around a central goal, in a now-legendary post that, tellingly, was tagged #sorry it’s just a silly idea it would be nice thought [sic]

"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," Sandra Song wrote on The Pitch earlier this year, "That their feelings somehow become discredited and are not 'real' by virtue of who is having them."

The broadstroke opinion of fangirls is that they’re vapid consumers, eager to gobble up whatever scraps a band of dreamy haircuts will toss their way. They’re actively challenging that perception on their own terms, but they’re doing so in their enclosed spheres, far from the white noise of the world assuming they don’t—or can’t—appreciate music for the "right" reasons. In these safe communities, their tastes aren’t ironic or irrelevant, and they don’t earn credibility points for deigning to give a pop act the time of day.

"We’re all in on the secret," critic Hazel Cills once wrote about Lana Del Rey, "The idea that pop stars don’t have teams behind them, that they’re the sole authors of their music, that nobody is styling them—those are sort of antiquated notions in 2015."

The fans know what’s going on behind the scenes of their favorite artist, just as they know how they’re perceived. But what you won’t learn unless you pay close attention, is that they can critically engage with the what "Girl Almighty" says about them just as readily as they can squeal over Niall Horan’s adorable face and that moment in "Better Than Words" when he goes PG-13. Assuming they’re buying records, going to shows, crafting elaborate universes in the fan fiction they write, and cultivating inclusive conversations to do just one of those things doesn’t give them nearly the level of credit they’ve shown they deserve.

Whether or not the MTV Video Music Awards truly "matter" to you (or anyone), whether or not it was a next-level shitshow (‘twas)—what’s not up for debate is that that if Kanye is there, something memorable is bound to happen.

As West stood onstage accepting his Video Vanguard award, his name emblazoned in white behind him, he spoke at a careful, measured pace, wondering whether or not he’d have crashed the stage on Taylor Swift, toting a half-full bottle of Hennessy, back in 2009 if he’d had a daughter then. He adopted a remorseful tone, but left the quandary open. He then ruminated, at length, over the idea of fighting for artists, sometimes in the wrong way. You could hear the glint of lament in his voice when he describes being booed by 60,000 people, and how his incident from six years ago was ground zero for the idea that Kanye West is arrogant.

Last night, West uttered two of the most self-evident sentences he has ever spoken in his decade-plus as a mainstream artist: "I’m confident. I believe in myself." Of course, he goes a little over-the-top at times, comparing himself to Steve Jobs, Ralph Lauren, and various other geniuses of art and industry. He also comes from a hip-hop background, where the "everybody’s a winner/ there’s enough room for all of us" mentality is thrown out of the window. Rap is a competitive sport, and as they say in most sports, if you’re not in it to be the best, you might as well not even be there. But Kanye transcended rap music long ago, whether you like him or not, he’s at the forefront of popular culture at large. And the thing is, he’s been saying he was going to since the beginning. Is arrogance simply the statement of truths yet to happen?

False humility is just another way we put on airs; we’re supposed to pretend we don’t deserve to be successful, or that we’re not as good at a certain thing (or number of things) as we are. Society pats the backs of people who are falsely modest, because it makes them feel more like one of many, even if they have an extraordinary talent most of us will never possess in our lives. If people acknowledge themselves as having a special, once-in-a-lifetime talent, society vilifies them, even if what they’re saying is the gospel truth. Especially when it comes to black men.

"I just wanted people to like me more. But fuck it, bro!"

How many conversations have you had with people where they refer to a confident black man as "self-important" while a white man gets an adjective like "brash"? Do you have friends or family members who have clearly called out Kanye himself as an "arrogant ass" after one of his bold statements? Why does it only seem to happen to artists of color? Like, when Noel Gallagher says something self-aggrandizing, most of us just laugh it off as "Noel being Noel." But Kanye could say the exact same thing and it invokes a level-three shitstorm among those he rubs the wrong way.

Confident black men are constantly held under by society, frequently told to not say much and accept what society (i.e. the whims of white men in power) gives us. This is a tactic to hold us "in place," to make sure we don’t "overstep our boundaries" (i.e. gain a level of influence as to overthrow the people in power, which, again, are a bunch of white dudes). We as black men are treated as secondary, even though our efforts have created some of the greatest art forms our society has been given. And when we hold onto our dignity by believing in ourselves, we are conditioned to hold it at a distance so as not to upset those nebulous powers that be.

Because if we black people actually did show the full confidence of a generation of trendsetters (jazz, rock'n'roll, hip-hop, fashion, visual art, and a plethora of other mediums of art), it would disrupt the status of white men as the gatekeepers of American culture. They would prefer we didn’t believe in ourselves so they could give us little slivers of praise and award the real accolades to white artists who have half the talent and cultural cachet in order to bring them up. We as black men are always under the white man’s thumb, but Kanye West created a body of work to where he could escape.

"We’re not going to teach low self-esteem and hate to our kids. We’re gonna teach our kids they could be something. [...] We’re going to teach our kids to believe in themselves."

During West’s 13-minute call-to-arms for artists to defend their artistry by believing in themselves, he didn’t have to assert the merits of his talent, because he had already spent the past 11 years doing so, having his ego swiped at continuously while persevering and proving everything he said he was going to do from the beginning. He wanted to be the biggest pop star in the world. He became that. He wanted to be a fashion icon. He’s well on his way there. He wants artists to stand up for themselves and what they believe in, because he cares about fostering the future of art. He was probably being facetious when he said he’s going to run for president in the 2020 election, but even if he wasn’t, he has enough belief in himself to make his campaign something special.

What will it take for people to stop conflating confidence with arrogance when it comes to black men? We’ve spent our lives with a strike against us for intimidating society’s hierarchy simply by having darker skin; we just want to believe in ourselves and not catch flak for it.

Analyzing data to find patterns can be tricky. This past week, the Internet has been obsessing on a project by Polygraph, in which Matt Daniels analyzed the top played tracks on Spotify versus the Billboard Hot 100 to find "the most timeless songs in music history." Daniels singles out several individual artists and tracks to find surprising and sometimes interesting patterns, but most surprising of all is probably the list of every Billboard hit from 1950 to 2005 ranked by their popularity in Spotify.

The top 10 of that list is dominated by rock, with two hip-hop and two pop tracks making the cut. Daniels admits his methodology is flawed, saying if it were perfect it would analyze only data from Spotify users born after 1995, because they and their children and their children’s children will be the ones influencing what is popular in 2050. But the aim of this exercise is to determine what songs from the past will endure and be remembered by future generations, versus what was popular at the time it was released.

With a cursory glance at the list of Billboard hit songs with the highest Spotify plays, one influence jumps off the page: placements in film and television. Analyzing its impact is one of many X-factor things the author admits is beyond the scope of his vision in the timeless songs piece, but it’s such a significant factor in several songs on the top of the chart that it jumps off the page at you.

Here is a sampling of tracks from that list with significant placements. The list is incomplete, not showing every single placement or even every song that has a placement, because that would be all of them if you take into account the number of cover songs that reality singing and dancing TV churn through. (It is noted when a song has been repeatedly featured on multiple singing or dancing shows, however.) The list is condensed to highlight TV shows and films that have mass audiences (new or nostalgic), are very popular to stream, or have been in syndication/repeated on cable long enough to saturate the culture.

1. Eminem: "Lose Yourself" - 8 Mile
4. Journey: "Don’t Stop Believin’" - The Wedding Singer, "The Sopranos", "Glee", "Laguna Beach", "Family Guy", "Scrubs", numerous singing competition shows
9. The White Stripes: "Seven Nation Army", arena sports
10. Coldplay: "Fix You" - "Glee", "The Newsroom", "Scrubs", "Extras", numerous reality singing and dancing shows
12. Mariah Carey: "All I Want for Christmas Is You" - Love Actually
14. Goo Goo Dolls: "Iris" - written for City of Angels
15. Oasis: "Wonderwall" - "Girls", "Lost", "Nip/Tuck", "The O.C."
16. Survivor: "Eye of the Tiger" - Rocky III& Rocky IV, "The Big Bang Theory", "Breaking Bad", "The Simpsons", "Gilmore Girls"
19. Queen: "Bohemian Rhapsody" - Wayne’s World, "Glee", "Dr. Who", "Two and a Half Men", numerous reality singing shows
20. Beyoncé: "Crazy in Love" - Fifty Shades of Grey, The Great Gatsby, "The Office", Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, White Chicks, numerous reality singing and dancing shows
21. Kanye West: "Gold Digger" - Trainwreck, "Glee"
24. Blackstreet: "No Diggity" - Pitch Perfect
28. U2: "With or Without You" - "Friends"
29. Guns N' Roses: "Sweet Child o' Mine" - The Wrestler, "The Office", Step Brothers, Big Daddy (cover), numerous reality singing shows
31. Metallica: "Enter Sandman" - sports
33. Radiohead: "Creep" - "Community", "Glee", "The Simpsons"
38. Whitney Houston: "I Will Always Love You" - The Bodyguard, This Is the End, "Two and a Half Men", "The Simpsons"

The idea that people use TV and movies to discover music is nothing new. The Pew Research Center released a study on purchasing music on the Internet in 2008 that found, "Most music buyers (83%) say that they find out about music from hearing a song on the radio, on TV, or in a movie." That was greater than any other discovery method, including recommendations from friends and family, going to a record store or going to a concert. In 2008, TV and film were considered an "offline" resource. Binge-watching as we know it didn’t exist, rather it meant binging on a day-long reality TV marathon on cable. "Friends" wasn’t on Netflix; in fact, most people still had Netflix deliver DVDs of movies to their home. iTunes only began offering movie rentals that year, and films certainly didn’t premiere digitally while they were in theaters.

As an example, let’s examine Journey’s "Don’t Stop Believin’". It’s hard to imagine it now, but in 2007 everyone was confounded by the song’s jump to the top of the iTunes sales chart. It hit a pop culture high when it was featured in the season premiere of the MTV show "Laguna Beach" and an episode of "Family Guy" in the same week, while simultaneously soundtracking a video that had gone viral on YouTube. That could have been the end of the story for this random '80s non-hit, but it was resurrected again in 2007 when "The Sopranos" used it as the final song of the final scene of its much-discussed series finale. This time the track saw radio airplay spike, as well as iTunes sales. The cast of "Glee" performed the song in the show’s pilot episode, which aired in 2009. That show in particular became highly influential on music sales. They resurrected "Don’t Stop Believin’", bringing the original cast back to sing it again in the 2015 final season. That blitz of placements, not it’s endurance on classic rock radio station playlists, is why the song is so popular now. Will it be timeless forever because of the new context these shows have put around it, rewriting its history from a cheesy pop song released in the '80s into a classic pop nugget? We need two more generations to decide. If we’d never heard from the song again after 2005’s TV-borne renewal, it might have disappeared. "The Sopranos", and the intense discussion around the controversial finale of that show, gave the song a salience it didn’t previously possess—and, evidently, legs.

One could make the same argument for "Eye of the Tiger" or "I Will Always Love You", whose subsequent placements in various pop culture moments have everything to do with its genesis as a fight song in the context of the Rocky movies and The Bodyguard. The White Stripes and Metallica are constantly used as bed music in sports broadcasts of all types. U2’s "With or Without You" is a great song on its own, but how many people under 30 know it best as the song that soundtracked Ross and Rachel getting back together on "Friends"?

The landscape has changed quickly and we now live in a world where film and TV streaming influences music streaming. It’s always been a symbiotic system, with varying degrees of success, but a shift in preferences to streaming video as well as music has given the advantage to studios, networks, and record labels that allow their content to have a presence on streaming services. Bands who don’t license their music, like Pearl Jam and R.E.M., have zero songs on this list of timeless music. What was a choice driven by integrity at the time couldn’t possibly have anticipated how much we now allow our media consumption to drive our music preferences. Some of the most important bands in music history will be lost in favor of Journey’s "Don’t Stop Believin’", which is the most timeless song of the 1980s at this point, because a high school kid on an MTV reality show wanted Journey to be playing when he met his girlfriend.

Commodore Barry Park, the oldest park in the borough of Brooklyn, is encompassed by a fence that wraps around the roughly 10 acres of green pasture, baseball dugouts, basketball courts, playgrounds, jungle gyms, and a community swimming pool. Earlier this month, during the 11th annual Afropunk music and culture festival, the park was enveloped by a sea of bodies, mostly different hues of brown, some white, and blue New York City police department traffic barricades. Festivalgoers, in vibrant attire, stood, impatiently and enthusiastically, in a queue waiting to experience the energy of the diaspora that lay inside. The tickets in their palms and pockets—this was the first year the festival charged a mandatory admission fee—seemed a ripe allegory to the festival's underlying mission of acceptance: one must pay a price to truly understand nuances and complexities of blackness; there are no simple routes inside.

In its early days, Afropunk was more acutely focused. The festival, named for a documentary directed by James Spooner, served as a bridge for disaffected black youth navigating the subculture of punk, a most entirely white space, to share in a common experience. The ways in which punk culture intersected with blackness became a means of interrogation and introspection, a bridge to explore a particularity of black identity.

In Spooner's Afropunk, punk culture functioned as a connector. What it meant to like Suicidal Tendencies or Fishbone became a way of seeing oneself. The film shows, with Spooner's delicate lens, a handful of individuals tell stories of their involvement in, and ideas about, punk culture; and what it means to be black as a result thereof. The shots are captured in comfortable, personal spaces like a living room or a studio, and from different angles — the lens looks upward, down, from the sides, and straight forward at the faces of self-identified punk heads from various cities across the country. Afropunk as an identity one must come to terms with comes across particularly lucid and saliently, an allusion to what would become the underlying theme in the Afropunk festivals to come. According to the testimonials, Afropunk is at once a mentality ("I think it’s a state of mind," one of the subjects says) and an affirmation. Blackness is rendered as unquestionable. ("I don't have to say, 'Am I a part of the black community?' I walk out on the street and I figured out all black people are a part of the black community. You don't have to do anything, you're black," one of the interviewees says.)

Since those early years, the spirit driving the festival shifted toward the center, away from the subculture of black punk existing in the margins. Afropunk's identity as a space of examining commonality within a niche counterculture transmuted into what Spooner alluded to on film—a broader, more mainstream vision of what punk could be. In part, this shift corresponded with a change in attitude—black punk slithered into acceptance, from the underground to a more comfortable, crowded mainstream space. But, perhaps more tellingly, those at the helm of the festival decided to redefine it, converting Afropunk from a subculture with a distinct identity into a fluid idea that could be broadly applied across the spectrum of blackness. This shift was apparent throughout the weekend, from the artists to the fashion to the energy.

This year's festival featured an eclectic bill of black musical talent (it's most diverse to date), a mix that included international icons and local stalwarts. The array of performers ranged from aging rock'n'roll legends and young blues aficionados, to resurgent neo-soul vocalists and enigmatic pop icons. The lineup blended style and genre, a survey of diverse voices, many of whom have carved out alternative spaces in the music landscape on the sidelines of the mainstream; yet, notably, each act remained tethered, through style and aesthetic, to widely-accepted popular culture norms.

Washington D.C.'s GoldLink delivered the weekend's best performance. In a red baseball cap and short gold chain, which accented his knee-level gray tee shirt, he rapped, sang, danced, and flexed to songs like "Wassup" (set to Timbaland and Magoo's "Indian Flute") and "Dance on Me". At times, he swapped roles with his DJ, playing hype-man to the main attraction, pointing his microphone at the crowd, leading them in a sing-a-long to "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and Montell Jordan's "This Is How We Do It". He cracked jokes and laughably launched into a flurry of body rolls. His energy, rebellious and rambunctious, was, ostensibly, punk; though his music vacillated across multiple mainstream genres, from hip-hop to EDM to grunge.

Other newcomers harnessed the tangential vibes of black punk, though traces of dominant popular culture permeated their sets as well. Raury and Danny Brown matched GoldLink's enthusiasm, but paid homage to their hip-hop lineage. SZA delicately intoned on songs like "Babylon", but blended her newer mix with sounds from more than 30 years ago. Bass virtuoso Thundercat, an ostensibly avant-garde talent, influenced by the liberation of free jazz, led onlookers in a slow rendition of Kendrick Lamar's "Complexion", a coy testimony against colorism, a de facto endorsement of one of the weekend's key themes.

Afropunk’s defiant political roots showed up in various locations throughout the festival. The stages were outfitted with conspicuous affirmations of tolerance: huge black, semi-transparent screens hung on each side of the Afropunk banner that read in block white letters: NO SEXISM, NO RACISM, NO ABLEISM, NO AGEISM, NO HOMOPHOBIA, NO FATPHOBIA, NO TRANSPHOBIA, NO HATEFULNESS. Throughout the weekend hosts, DJs, and artists echoed this gospel of equality which galvanized the crowds, like a mantra. Advocates boisterously lobbied for their respective political causes, on issues of health disparities to police brutality. Chants of "Black Lives Matter" sporadically sounded. Saturday evening, a group of trans activists mounted a protest, forcefully commandeering one of the main bandshells. There, they led onlookers in a recitation of the names of trans women of color tragically killed this year, invoking Janelle Monáe’s "Hell You Talmbout" (Monáe is an Afropunk alum). The moment seemed poignant, a reminder of the double-consciousness blackness demands: even in a warm, "safe space," brimming with conscious black people, ties to the cold world around you remain unsevered.

In the open space near the tents where vendors sold clothing, jewelry, literature, art, where professionals disseminated information about health screenings and festival workers charged cellular phones, photographers corralled passersby to crystallize their magnificent fashion on film. Afropunk has a way of bringing out limitless black creativity from it’s festivalgoers—expressive and uninhibited. Unburdened. Inspired by the colors and patterns and people of the world. And anyone with a lens wanted to remember the moment. They snapped photos of vibrant dashikis, African tribal face paint, beaded bracelets, skirts and kilts, business slacks with Air Jordan's, flowers clipped to dreadlocks, women with tattooed shaved heads in evening gowns, platform shoes with natural curls, body paint to match leggings and combat boots. Men with European-tailored summer short-suits and kimonos and Timbs. The array of sartorial fervor was beautiful and overwhelming. The impossibility of Afropunk is seeing everything all at once.

As the night fell on Saturday, that dilemma manifested in the performances of the festival’s biggest names. The first, Lauryn Hill, who many had come to see, showed noticeable signs of rust. Arriving late, Hill began her set timidly, her voice restrained. Then, just as she began to find her place in the music, breaking into an uptempo dance sequence alongside her backup singers, Hill was abruptly interrupted; her mic lost volume, the stage lights went dark. Hill continued performing despite the fact that she could no longer be seen nor heard, a move that was met with cheers, but all you could hear at that point was Death Grips closing their set on the other side of the park.

Grace Jones followed Hill, clad in Haring-throwback body paint, channeling the eclectic, idiosyncratic vibes of the day. Shuffling through hits like her 1981 song "Pull Up to the Bumper", Jones eventually ditched her top for a natural expose, strutting about in a cape and voluminous headdress; later, she dawned a mask. The crowd cheered as she launched into "My Jamaican Guy" (a song later sampled by LL Cool J on "Doin’ It"). She also paraded through the crowd on someone’s back, her regality reminiscent of Strangé in Boomerang. Her performance carried with it the confidence of an iconoclast, as Barry Walters recently noted in a cover story for the latest Pitchfork Review. "For her audience, for anyone who has ever been too queer, too black, too female, or too freaky for the world around them," Walters wrote. "Grace Jones is liberation."

What seemed strange about Jones' set was not just how close it seemed to play into the energy of the day, confident and flamboyant, but how well it aligned itself with the direction of the festival's future. Jones, like her fellow headliners, contributed to the spectacle of the weekend. Jones affirmed Afropunk as large and outlandish and worthy of celebration. But she also was a barometer for the grandiosity to come.

The underlying purpose of festivals are that they exist to grow, to outdo themselves every year, to build on what once was. Afropunk has joined that rich tradition. The appetite to diversify is insatiable, and expansion slyly reaffirms its purpose: to experience more one must continue to come back, but the growth provides assurance that there will always be more to see.

As is true of blackness. One can never fully experience it all. For it adds layers as it expands; it deepens as it lengthens.

The beauty of Afropunk is that it has become the largest celebration of that vastness. But, in doing so, the festival has abandoned the very intimacy that allows black culture to be felt in the way it deserves.

It’s never been easier to be in a casual relationship with music. In the age of "try-before-you-buy", when almost every new release is at our fingertips to stream in full, we’re able to consume music without having to commit to anything except a few 30-second ad breaks. We’re in an age in which we aren’t looking for "forever", but for instant, intense gratification. It’s not just the way that pop songs are delivered that’s starting to reflect this—the songs themselves echo these sentiments. "Forever" is an outdated concept, at best.

Lana Del Rey’s "High by the Beach" is a prime example. The first single from Del Rey’s upcoming Honeymoon, the song is a kiss-off, a pre-breakup monologue. A romance is ending, but there’s no grief in the sentiment—rather, Del Rey is exhausted by the relationship she’s in and the idea that she’ll have to put effort into breaking it off: "Now you’re just another one of my problems," she sighs, asserting "I’ll do it on my own." She’s not afraid to be alone—actually, she’s exhilarated by the prospect.

This is in stark contrast to the sentiments at the heart of 2012’s Born to Die. Those narratives deal in eternity as if it is the only option, a future cast in amber. Playing off the album’s twisted Old Hollywood aesthetic, there’s a sense that although we’re hearing about relationships that could easily have been formed over the less-than-poetic medium of the text message, in a time when it’s deemed romantic to watch your lover play video games, we’re in fact hearing the epic love stories of our time. "I will love you ’til the end of time," Del Rey croons in the chorus of "Blue Jeans", "I would wait a million years." It’s all very romantic, but there’s a clear sense of the macabre on Born to Die, where 'til death do us part doesn’t necessarily promise growing old.

Del Rey has always thrived on inconsistency, exemplified by her aesthetic as part-county fair beauty queen, part-Instragram celebrity, but there’s something unerring and decisive about the new direction she takes in "High by the Beach". There’s no romanticism in her dismissal of this relationship as suffocating. When she decides in the song’s outro that "through the fire we’re born again", any concept of "forever" that remained is torched.

Del Rey isn’t the only artist abandoning a legacy built on a promise with no foreseeable breaking point. Taylor Swift’s first notable entry into the pop charts was a song that changed the ending to the world’s most recognizable tragedy to accommodate "forever", but on 2014’s 1989 she upends this notion. 1989 documents a doomed-to-fail whirlwind fling, where "take me home", "we were built to fall apart", and "nothing lasts forever" are the prevailing romantic sentiments. There’s no sense that this relationship is any less meaningful, intense, or worthy of mythologizing. It may be that in order to truly crack mainstream pop, all Swift needed to do was abandon her banjo. However, perhaps a way that she has been able to infiltrate the lives of so many more young people is through her understanding that popular culture has become oversaturated with representations of unrealistic relationships. As more and more young people begin to reject the idea of the long-term, monogamous, heteronormative relationship they’ve been so conditioned to seek out, so too do the figures they look towards to dictate what’s important in the modern cultural narrative.

The trend away from "forever" reaches beyond chart-pop. Mac DeMarco’s Another One is a mixtape of melancholy, a matter-of-fact meditation on "forever". The record is the most consistent of his career, sonically and thematically, as each song evokes the everyday ebb and flow of a modern romance. Here, the first-person narratives don’t address a "you", but rather a "she", as if he’s discussing the fate of this relationship over the cup of coffee he promises his listeners at the end of the record. "Will she find love again tomorrow?” he asks, then answers "I don't know/ I hope so/ And that's fine by me."

"Still Together", from 2012’s 2, uses the same form of address, but instead asserts that "we’ll always go together." DeMarco’s girlfriend, Kiera McNally, is a steady feature in his touring party, accompanying him to press events, and is a part of the mythology that surrounds his public persona. Their relationship is somewhat anomalous: she’s not a celebrity girlfriend whose personality fans might have already been invested in, but through her inclusion in DeMarco’s narrative, fans value their relationship. DeMarco routinely points McNally out in his audiences, a practice that reached its logical conclusion when he performed "Still Together" with her on his shoulders at 2013’s Pitchfork Music Festival. It’s the most concentrated form of PDA possible in pop music. On "Let My Baby Stay" from 2014’s Salad Days, DeMarco muses that for all he knows, the day his lover leaves him could be on its way, and the songs on Another One deal in realistic musings on inevitable expiration dates.

Jenny Lewis’ The Voyager works similarly, relying on realism over wishful romance. On "Slippery Slopes", Lewis says, almost surprised, "I’m still into you, dreams really do come true," promising "If you don’t wreck it, then I won’t wreck it either," and deciding "I want eternity." There’s a pragmatism to this particular forever, as Lewis considers what the concept means when you’re on the road. On "Love U Forever", there’s a sense of impermanence, as the hook isn’t a promise, but rather a guess: "I could love you forever." There will come a time when "all the polaroids fade," when this forever will be called into question.

This tendency toward the skeptical, toward being un-idealistic, feels grounded in a genuine cultural shift. As the lives of musicians become so easily accessible through social media and constant touring, their humanity is emphasized: if they’re just like us, so are their relationships. This isn’t to say that "always be my baby" and "I will always love you" aren’t sentiments that will return to the pop cultural landscape, as trends rotate and repeat. Realism in pop music might be on its way out any minute now—after all, nothing lasts forever.

There was no more expansive chronicle of hardcore and punk in the 1980s than the San Francisco-based, political punk monthly Maximum Rocknroll. For punk and hardcore fans, MRR was an international lifeline, an essential source of information on new records, tapes, bands, zines, scenes, and internecine drama originating from the punk underground.

Chicago-based artist and teacher Marc Fischer of Public Collectors has given us a strange and revealing new window on MRR and the '80s underground with Hardcore Architecture. Hardcore Architecture explores the relationship between the architecture of living spaces and the history of American hardcore bands in the 1980s. On his Tumblr, Fischer unites band info, demo tape, and record reviews culled from MRR issues from the '80s with Google Street View building images of the original contact addresses for bands. The juxtaposition of punk/hardcore/metal band names, ranging from the familiar (Sonic Youth, Judge, Didjits) to the unsung (Public Enema, Abra Cadavers, Death Puppy) plus text samplings from MRR’s quick hit reviews ("thrash" is inescapable) against images of fairly innocuous, sometimes charming, and often suburban homes (Fischer removes the exact street addresses from his postings for privacy reasons) gives us a different perspective on hardcore and its proponents. Ultimately, the blog tells a story about hardcore as a loose but passionate nationwide cultural network.

The Tumblr launched in May of 2015. Fischer recently mounted a Hardcore Architecture gallery show at The Franklin in Chicago and published a collection of booklets on what he’s been chronicling.

Pitchfork: How did the idea for Hardcore Architecture come about?

Marc Fischer: I like hardcore so making these discoveries deepened my interest in that history. Maximum Rocknroll is also important to me, I have quite a few back issues of the magazine. My wife and I bought our first house a few years ago and I was spending a lot of time exploring houses and neighborhoods on Google Street View. I came to enjoy that way of understanding a neighborhood. I loved the strange details that emerge, like the errors in how the Street View camera pieces together the photos, and the cameos made by gardeners or mail carriers. It's always fun when I find the house for a band like Sex Mutants and it comes with the added bonus of some landscapers. In a way, the project unites my teenage years with where I'm at now. I'm honestly more into growing vegetables than I'm into going to all ages shows, but hey, growing food is DIY culture too.

Pitchfork: Were you a reader of MRR in the '80s? How did MRR make an impression on you?

MF: I first learned about MRR in around late 1986 or 1987, when I was 17, and it opened up a gigantic world of people, music, and activity that I had only seen the tiniest glimmer of. I had seen a few fanzines before MRR, but nothing with that level of information and detail. I started mail ordering demo tapes and zines immediately, and began publishing a fanzine—Primary Concern—not long after. My zine lasted for seven issues and most of those issues were reviewed in MRR. It appealed to me—as a source of addresses—because it was the place to send your release to be reviewed if you made a certain kind of music. And, importantly, they reviewed demo tapes, which are more likely to have a home address than a record that has been released by a label. All of the most important and exciting American hardcore bands from 1982 on were reviewed in MRR at one point or another. I could easily start looking for addresses in other sources, and may do that at some point, but I felt like I should work with back issues of MRR first and then see what might be missing. I still have about 20 issues from the 1980s to go. Later I may inch forward into the '90s, but part of keeping some historic distance is about being mindful of privacy.

Pitchfork: How do you choose what to post?

MF: I post every house I can find on Google Street View, unless I'm unsure that it's the correct house, the image quality is unsatisfactory, or the house is completely obscured by trees. The contrast of the band name and release and the image of each house is practically built into the project. I have yet to tire of discovering completely normal-looking homes that were once lived in by someone from, like, Afterbirth.

Pitchfork: How does one differentiate '80s hardcore/punk nostalgia from a project like this?

MF: Nostalgia tends to favor the biggest and most well-known bands with the most iconic logos, without looking into the cracks in small towns, or those groups that never made it past the demo stage, or those who made one album and then were never heard from again. A group I love that is on the Tumblr is Mannequin Beach from Lincoln, Neb. They made a demo tape or two, and an album on Mordam Records, and that was it. Bands like Mannequin Beach were as important for me in the 1980s as any well known group that is currently tearing it up on the reunion circuit for Riot Fest. As Hardcore Architecture grows and more small towns are featured, my hope is that the project will remind people that this music wasn't only produced in Los Angeles, San Francisco, or New York City or Chicago. Bands existed everywhere and often in places that are quite isolated. I think many young people that follow the project on Tumblr get this, and it resonates for them when they find a house that is close to their parents' house, where they are still living. It's empowering to learn that cool music came from your suburb.

The second Hardcore Architecture exhibit opens October 3 at The Outhaus in the Urbana, Ill. backyard of Albert Stabler and Katie Fizdale.

Photo by MuzikAnimal

There’s no single word that can sum up a complicated city like New Orleans. Even less, its horrifying, solemn, and troubled saga with Hurricane Katrina, the 10th anniversary of which was marked this past weekend.

"Recovery" was thrown around by national media outlets in the month leading up to the anniversary date: inadequate at best seeing as New Orleans is still down 22% from its pre-Katrina population, despite a big Census uptick earlier this year, the city’s first since 1960. So-called "recovery" has not been uniform. Poll numbers reflect dissatisfaction and disappointment from locals, the demographics of which have shifted by the thousands. Education, housing, wages, transportation, and so on have lagged behind for poor and black residents. "Resilient" and "resilience" were common tags heard locally during the weekend’s commemoration. On his Thursday visit to the area, President Barack Obama used it. Some locals, notably Louisiana Justice Institute President Tracie Washington among them, have resisted the "resilience" narrative.

"There’s no change… It’s what ‘they’ wanted: move who we don’t want out and bring what we want in," Lil Wayne said on "His and Hers" last week. "It wasn’t the who it’s what they want in—money. ‘We,’ as in me and my people, we scare that money away. That’s what they figure. So wash them out...You tear down the projects to make condos, who you helpin’?" he asked.

For artists who lived in the city before Katrina and returned—like DJ, events producer, drummer, and Bywater resident Rusty Lazer—rising rents plus potentially changing noise ordinances and permitting laws, reflective of a fundamentally changing city, are making it harder to earn a living. Rusty, né Jay Pennington, played New Orleans bounce to audiences worldwide, becoming Big Freedia’s manager until 2012 and introduced a variety of queer bounce artists to receptive white audiences in the art and fashion worlds, often far outside of New Orleans.

"If I didn’t rent this room up here," Rusty points to his upstairs in the large house he’s slowly rehabilitated in the decade since the storm, "I literally couldn’t survive [as a DJ]. I went from making about $1200 a month as a DJ here—doing only small bars, not big ol’ nightclubs, neighborhood bars... I can eat and pay my bills on that. I’m a frugal dude. But after the regulations, Mimi’s [in the Marigny, one flashpoint of controversy over New Orleans’ newly reassessed noise ordinances] could only go ’til 2 a.m., now no more music at all. Siberia can’t go past 2… my [income] went down to $300 a month."

Artists, people of color, and the poor—often one in the same through New Orleans history—are the residents who defined New Orleans’ music and culture, going as far back as the 19th century, when slaves had Sundays off, their mass gatherings limited to Congo Square in what is now Armstrong Park and the Tremé, termed for generations as "back of town." There enslaved Africans mingled with whites, Creoles, Spanish, natives, and free people of color to play and bear witness to the first notes of American music: blues and jazz, European melodic traditions intermingling with African rhythms, native chants, Creole fusion and patronage, and more.

For the anniversary weekend, some of the city’s biggest stars played concerts benefiting charities and raising nationwide awareness: Wayne’s Lil’ Weezyana Fest raised funds for his Tha Carter Fund, administered by the Greater New Orleans Foundation. The city’s local daily, the Times-Picayune, summed it up as, "Lil Wayne: This Is Your Life."

The New Orleans bonafides of maybe the city’s biggest music star to date were on display, bringing out special guests for mini-sets and live collaborations, including bounce music luminaries like DJ Jubilee, Fifth Ward Weebie, and Big Freedia, the Cash Money crew (Mannie Fresh; Juvenile and Turk for three-quarters of a Hot Boys reunion), Young Money Records artists (Curren$y, Cory Gunz), and stalwarts Master P and Mia X. Drake, by far the night’s biggest guest, didn’t show until the end.

"Without this man I would be nothing today," Wayne’s one-time protege reminded the crowd after they crushed "HYFR (Hell Ya Fucking Right)". Weezy paid it forward to the city he loves. "I ain’t shit without you, New Orleans!" he yelled during the finale, before a show of fireworks over the Superdome: a symbol of triumph and tragedy for the city over the last decade.

A video posted by Paul de Revere (@pderevere) onAug 28, 2015 at 10:14pm PDT

The former No Limit rapper, née Mia Young, was one of the most outspoken artists at the weekend’s annual Katrina march. Mia and local rapper Sess 4-5 organized the first of these marches in 2006. This year’s was billed as the "biggest second line ever." Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr., president and CEO of the Hip Hop Caucus, helped lead this year, calling it "a rally and a march but it’s not a show. This is real to us."

Speeches and performances highlighted a spectrum of issues, including a renewed effort for the State of Louisiana to make August 29—the day several levees in the city broke—a state holiday commemorating the almost 2,000 lives Katrina claimed, most in Louisiana. Perhaps the one closest to Mia X’s heart is the long-term mental health consequences of children—ones as young as middle-school age—traumatized by the horrors of the storm.

"They're [likely] to be diagnosed with six or seven different things," Young said. "If you think about any child anywhere laying in the water with dead people and animals and they’re hearing screaming, crying and suffering for five straight days… They still can’t wrap their head around where the water came from. There are so many things they can’t wrap their heads around."

Lil Wayne addressed just this on his 2006 mixtape Dedication 2 with his essential entry into the annals of American protest music with "Georgia… Bush" in the lyric, "The children have been scarred/ No one’s here to care ’bout ’em." Like Mia X, he couldn’t forget about what she called "Katrina babies," some she described as grasped tightly in family members’ arms just above the flood waters in the days following the storm.

So at Lil’ Weezyana, Wayne put on for his city in a big way. He had to, proving himself once again the King of New Orleans. But right now he’s a king in self-exile. He and his family no longer live in the city. Over the last 10 years, Weezy has suggested you’re more likely to find him in Miami or Houston—likely the largest concentration of New Orleans diaspora out-of-state, residents that still haven’t returned—their properties in various states of disrepair.

Solange Knowles’ performance at a benefit for Make It Right this past weekend was a lot less complicated (fewer moving parts, no huge surprises) but no less sincere. "I cannot express in words what this city has meant to me and my family," Solange said, referring to her megastar sister Beyoncé and fashion-designer mother Tina. "I just want to thank you guys for having us, loving us, accepting us." Solange, her son, and husband, music video director Alan Ferguson, moved to New Orleans a few years ago. She is a celebrity exception to a rising new rule in New Orleans: with transplants moving into the city—some of them unfamiliar with and/or passive-aggressively hostile to the particulars of the city’s street culture—new residents and tradition will conflict.

"It’s not noise to us!" Mia X laments. "[People moving here] make all these complaints they can't sleep. What the hell you came to New Orleans for? The second line is the way we send our dead off, it’s the way we celebrate birthdays," she added. "Deal with it or get the hell on 'cause this is what we do!"

Rev. Yearwood, a Louisiana native, looks at New Orleans’ current culture shock with a wide-angle lens and sense of history. He fears the city’s singular culture—the primordial soup of American roots music—might get marginalized, driven out of the city center entirely. Most recently living in Washington D.C. and Prince Georges County, Md., he compared the cultural flight—artists like Lil Wayne who couldn’t or didn’t come back—to the history of Go-Go in his new stomping grounds.

"It’s not in the city as much," Rev. Yearwood said. "You have to go and find it. When [Godfather of Go-Go] Chuck Brown died [in 2012], there are no Chuck Browns coming behind Chuck Brown… It’s shrinking."

"It’s a critical part," he said, and it could apply to D.C., New Orleans, or any major cultural capital. "To lose that, [so as] to be more tourist-friendly—you’re losing something that you don’t even know you’re losing." Rev. Yearwood says this hasn’t happened in New Orleans just yet—he urges caution. There was certainly no lack of awareness or participation regarding Katrina and traditional New Orleans culture last weekend. The march/second line he helped lead was one of 90-plus Katrina-related events listed just in last week’s Gambit.

Queen bounce diva Big Freedia is a lifelong New Orleanian and after Katrina, alongside Katey Red and Sissy Nobby, became a bounce icon. As Freedia has found worldwide fame, becoming New Orleans’ biggest post-Katrina star, her sound has shifted slightly. These days she collaborates with out-of-town EDM producers (she still has her eye out for a place in Los Angeles, she says) in addition to venerable local bounce producer Blaq N Mild. Still, the tradition—the second line, the Mardi Gras Indian chants, and the church—plays into all she does.

"There was so much raw emotion and grief that were all holding on to, the shows [right after Katrina in Houston and on FEMA Fridays in New Orleans] were filled with unbridled energy," Freedia writes in her new memoir God Save the Queen Diva! "They started to become something more than simply a release from life’s daily stresses. They were our salvation."

Electronic music in New Orleans—largely existing on the margins of the city’s roots music-focused scene pre-Katrina, with the likes of Disco Donnie, Quintron and Miss Pussycat, Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor (who moved away before Katrina hit, returning for a dramatic 2005 Voodoo Fest performance), and current NIN band member Josh Eustis’ Telefon Tel Aviv—mostly took the form of rap and bounce. Its presence in New Orleans came into full focus after the storm with Winter Circle Productions, the company behind BUKU Music + Art Project, the city’s celebrated new festival. Its first year featured EDM superstar DJ/producers Avicii and Skrillex as headliners. In addition to EDM, its lineups feature rap, funk, synth pop, jamtronica, and more. Last month, Winter Circle and BUKU were acquired by live entertainment presenter AEG Worldwide, which built a Gulf Coast Office around it.

"[BUKU coming into existence] was reactionary and complimentary," co-founder Reeves Price said. "We saw a lot of young people come in and BUKU was our response to that. [We wanted to] keep building this momentum. We’re not diluting anything [from the tradition]. If anything, I think we’re reinforcing it… By bringing contemporary artists here, they get inspired by the tradition and it helps to build upon that tradition. It’s a logical evolution."

Price came to New Orleans as an undergrad at Tulane before Katrina, and returned to the city after the storm. He founded Winter Circle in 2009 with Dante DiPasquale. As a way of giving back, they founded Upbeat Academy in 2013, teaching music production and business skills—a sort of digital-music answer to more-established New Orleans charities like Tipitina’s Foundation.

It’s hard to cite a more definitive music-related nonprofit effort of New Orleans’ music scene than Preservation Hall. Or maybe a more definitive venue for American music anywhere: it’s one of the oldest continuously operating clubs in America. Founded in 1961, its mission to "protect, preserve, and perpetuate the musical traditions and heritage of New Orleans" dovetailed with the Civil Rights movement. It was inherent: its touring house band, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, was integrated, unflinchingly. It was one of few venues in a Jim Crow-segregated New Orleans to integrate all colors—musicians and audiences alike, openly. In most of early '60s America, much less the South, it was unheard of. The band’s late tuba player Allan and ticket taker/bouncer Sandra Jaffe, husband and wife, shepherded the hall toward what it is today.

Ben Jaffe is their son. He grew up at Pres Hall and is now the creative director, playing his father’s tuba and his own weapon of choice, double bass, in the band. He likes to say he "went into the family business." It’s one of the most important things about New Orleans: working musicians passing down their names to scions, performing intergenerationally (the Marsalises, Bouttés, Batistes, etc). While holding down tradition, Jaffe has made a concerted effort to expand the hall’s repertoire and collaborations with its band to include more modern artists: Arcade Fire, the Gaslamp Killer, Mos Def, Ani DiFranco, My Morning Jacket, and more over the last 10 years. Most recently, Jaffe took in the Foo Fighters for New Orleans’ entry in the HBO series "Sonic Highways".

"Is this a 10-year storm? Is this a 100-year storm? Is it a five-year storm?" Ben mused rhetorically about Katrina and its indefinitely reverberating aftereffects. There were polaroids he snapped spread out in front of him—pictures of his daughter, his travels with the band (Jaffe loves taking pictures of donut shops)—he opened a photo book by renowned photographer Lee Friedlander, looking at photos of his late father and family friends, many of whom had passed away. Jaffe said he lost people in the storm. He said he didn’t want questions about Katrina. This past weekend, it was the topic no one wanted to talk about yet all anyone could think about. He was doing a lot of thinking this weekend.

"It makes anniversaries important," he continued, maudlin. "A lot of us approach it with this idea of it having to be a celebration. And this anniversary is not so much a celebration to me, so much as it is an acknowledgment."

There’s no single genre or sound that can sum up or properly represent a complicated music scene’s like New Orleans. Just like there’s no single word that can sum up a complicated city like New Orleans—or its recovery. It’s all in the gumbo, the gestalt. New Orleans is the most genre-agnostic city in America, where everything happens so much.

Special thanks to Alison Fensterstock of the New Orleans Times-Picayune/NOLA.com for reporting assistance.

Will anyone else besides Miley Cyrus and the drove of drag divas flanking her every side remain visible in our memories of the 2015 VMAs one, two—20 years down the line? Forget Nicki Minaj’s collaborative attempt at a classic VMA opener with Taylor Swift (no really: forget it if you haven’t yet; no one need remember their scarlet glittery Vegas ensembles that only Cher has or ever will pull off.) Even Minaj and Swift singing "the night is still young" reminds us of the VMA’s promise, the water-cooler moment that must be saved for the broadcast’s finale ('cause this sure ain’t it.) Despite their superstar wattage, Nicki and Taylor’s performance is simply the wait time for the debut of host Miley Cyrus, who has that rare iconoclastic quality of being the debutante at any premiere—even those not her own. As the MTV Music Video Awards master of ceremonies, Miley’s opening bit swept the stage of Minaj and Swift to ready our eyes not for the next performer or award, but for her: Miley, the pop singer who can at once birth a slew of think pieces while ensuring audiences question her intelligence, not to mention taste.

Amidst the standard introductions and segues, Miley gave the role of host a heavy dose of herself—more accurately, the hosting enterprise took a big hit from Cyrus’ blunt(ness), as when she cajoles the entertainers sitting behind her to shout "One, two, three—marijuana!" in a selfie-stick countdown. Flash / Snap / Insta, and within a few moments all of mainstream American viewers are turned from flippantly drug-friendly Miley to that most immaculately well-kept diva, Britney Spears. Likely coincidental, the transition nevertheless makes for a stark moment of reflection for those old enough to remember singing along to "Hit Me Baby (One More Time)". Britney stands on stage pristine in a silver’n’gold sequined mini-dress, her flesh nakedly in its prime—her walk to the podium set to the song that broke her good-girl image apart, "I’m a Slave 4 U".

If, as critic Wayne Koestenbaum writes in The Queen’s Throat, "The diva acquires divinity when her predecessor passes on privilege, stature, beauty secrets, fashion tips, and vocal tricks," then Britney in her twilight marks the momentous inheritance Miley will receive. Britney offers Miley the Diva’s Dowry: the illusive ideal body on display, a beauty bound to bow out when youth arrives in a figure like Miley. But the divine body is an inheritance—gift or curse—that Miley refuses with her body-blurring performances throughout the night, culminating in a musical performance of "Dooo It!", a new single from her unannounced free album Miley Cyrus and Her Dead Petz. If Britney’s legacy meant to bequeath to Miley her own "I’m a Slave 4 U" moment—in which Miley asserts an adult sexuality that previous forays into self-exposure (even nude ones) fell short of—then "Dooo It!" rebukes being a "Slave 4 U" and UR fetishization of "adulthood." In place of sex, Miley makes drug use the focal point of her adulthood’s resounding roll call.

To fully appreciate Miley’s performance of "Dooo It!", it’s necessary to backtrack to her last album Bangerz, which had already given us drugs and sex as the two thematic strands Miley weaves throughout the work. Back then, too, Miley’s debut of a lead single seemed overlaid with her debut of Miley-the-Legal-Adult at the VMAs; and there too, she fused her proper sexual objectifying premiere with an effort to assimilate drug use into the actual performance of pop music, not just the genre’s private affair. However, after "We Can't Stop" brought molly (and EDM youth subcultures) to mainstream culture’s conversation, "Wrecking Ball" and the ensuing hullabaloo over its video made Bangerz an album destined to be (over)sexualized. Briefly, "We Can’t Stop" made Miley Cyrus seem like the prototype New Millennial offering our age group a new identification with Generation Y as Gen Y The Fuck Not? As if representing a femme intervention in Big Media’s narrative about our generation as self-absorbed and entitled, my girlfriends and I listened and imagined Miley as the lead crusader ushering in a new discourse centered around a generational hedonism and derangement of the senses in order to unfeel a deranged world. Soon, of course, the politics got lost to the body, no matter what the discourse around that body might say.

Almost as if correctives to the (mis)steps taken by Bangerz to plant Miley’s body in firmly palatable sexuality of Spears-style ingénue territory, "Dooo It!" and Miley's performance bring the druggy subcultural element back into focus in a fringe-worthy way that no one can miss. If Britney's "Slave 4 U" set the mold for pop starlets seeking to fly the teenybopper demographic coop, then Miley's VMA performance and Dead Petz aim to shatter the mold forever by painting her liberation with strokes both sexual and political. In the song’s opening lines, "Yeah, I smoke pot/ Yeah, I love peace/ But I don’t give a fuck, I ain’t no hippy," Miley delivers exactly the kind of generation-making cultural work which I once idealized. The chorus is a chant invoking the millennial poptimism that pervades my peers whether they listen to pop or rap or rock: we are all getting high and happy in the daze of immiscible demands to succeed and to be at this time in this place. The cosmos-eyeing verses describe Miley radicalism, which espouses peace but only commits to singing that espousal while stoned, because "singing what you love" makes you happy. Miley ideology dances around the dialectic between being and getting fucked. Less "World Peace!" more "Yeah, peace…"

When Cyrus struts the catwalk with a cadre of drag queens following her, she attempts more than to stoke the media’s fires—bedecked with drag queens, Miley’s drug imagery now gives a whimsical (and probably high as fuck) take on an Otherness (though she has notably struggled with intersectionality, particularly with regards to race). Aligning druggies and club kids with drag queens, Miley aims to embody these two waves of taboos on the verge of mainstream acknowledgment, if not embrace. Helped most notably by the Haus of Edwards trifecta (Alyssa Edwards and drag daughters Shangela and Laganja, the latter’s 420 zaniness and spitfire rap making her a rare missed opportunity for Dead Petz, which could have used a drag diva cameo or two), Miley curates the 2015 VMAs’ conclusive turn toward the culturally verboten, the unspoken. Thus, she risks and in fact dragaliciously courts commercial "failure," but this only adds to the queer appeal of the work: "Dooo It!" and Dead Petz self-indulge so relentlessly, the music wavers joyously at the point of tripping over itself. "Miley, what’s good?" may be just the question Dead Petz leaves listeners asking.

Problematic as she may be at times be, Miley Cyrus has re-established herself as a shock provocateur with more than base audiences and carnal, sexual maturity on her side. In many ways, Miley Cyrus gives a fuck in more real, artistic ways than her politically tepid contemporaries. If the best we can say is that stoners and drag queens had their day with the 2015 VMAs, then how bad can the day be, really—when racist drug policing continues to ravage communities of color, and when trans* people (including drag queens) still face frighteningly high rates of violence in everyday life? Miley may not be the ideal candidate for political pop’s potential to make material social change for the disenfranchised, but she’s the most likely to even have a platform—high as she may be. In a gurlesque blaze of drag diva aesthetics and drug inspired metaphysics, "Dooo It!" inaugurates the Dead Petz era as one devoted to the marginal spaces in the ever-evolving idea of "pop."

On New York radio show Zach Sang & the Gang, Carly Rae Jepsen recently admitted rather sheepishly that she wrote a song about "...it rhymes with contemplation" for her new album E•MO•TION, but within five minutes told co-writer Bonnie McKee, "'You know this isn't making my album right?" Jepsen seemed to think it obvious that—even in 2015—recording a song about female masturbation would be taboo. But evidence suggests this isn’t the case at all. In 2015 alone, we’ve seen two singles released by women in music that focus specifically on solo sex—one musician completely new to the industry and the other a celebrated performer with decades of experience—as well as the continued success of a monstrous hit from 2014.

In addition to spanning a variety of genres and eras, the songs on this list illustrate the many ways self-sex can enhance women’s lives. To some, masturbation is an erotic form of foreplay; to others, it’s a more defiant act of self love and self care. Some sing of a "you" that they’re missing, some of a "you" that they’re glad to be rid of, and some of no "you" at all.

1. Hailee Steinfeld: "Love Myself" (2015)

I'm gonna put my body first
And love me so hard 'til it hurts

Last month, teen actress Hailee Steinfeld released "Love Myself", where she sings about what she can do all on her own, "without you." Incorporating the traditional language of the sex anthem, "Love Myself" directs it inward.

2. Macy Gray: B.O.B. (2015)

Macy Gray’s latest is an ode to vibrators. The video features dancing phalluses, and Gray genders her vibrator as "he," in this tribute to our battery-operated friends.

3. Nicki Minaj: "Feeling Myself" [ft. Beyoncé] (2014)

Bitch, never left but I'm back at it, and I'm feelin' myself, jack rabbit
Feelin' myself, back off, cause I'm feelin' myself, jack off
He be thinking about me when he whacks off, wax on? Wax off

A standout from The Pinkprint, this song helped imbue the phrase “feeling myself” with a more literal meaning. By juxtaposing the titular refrain with an image of a man masturbating to thoughts of her, Nicki takes control of the sexual situation and her own self-image.

4. Charli XCX: "Body of My Own" (2014)

'Cause I can make it feel just like I'm hanging on
Yeah I can do it better when I'm all alone

Here, in classic Charli XCX fashion, she brags how she can do it better herself.

5. FKA twigs: "Kicks" (2014)

Tell me what do I do when you're not here? I get my kicks like you.

In this absurdly sexy song off LP1, twigs looks for an answer to her loneliness over the course of five breathless minutes.

6. Kelly Rowland: "Feeling Me Right Now" (2011)

If feeling her ain't right, then I guess I'm way too wrong
Cause can't nobody match this loving, yeah, yeah, yeah

Rowland folds the traditional "found love in the club" narrative in on itself as she details a hot and heavy evening spent with the most important person in her life—herself.

7. Pink: "Fingers" (2006)

When it’s late at night and you’re fast asleep
I let my fingers do the walking

"Fingers", a bonus song off Pink’s 2006 album I’m Not Dead, gained notoriety due to its candor. Here, masturbation is used as evidence for a sexually unsatisfying relationship; touching herself is one of the lengths she has gone to in order to curb her frustration—not exactly celebratory.

8. The Pussycat Dolls: "I Don't Need a Man" (2005)

I don't need a ring around my finger
To make me feel complete
So let me break it down
I can get off when you ain't around

Though it was their worst-performing American single, peaking at 93 on the Billboard Hot 100, the Pussycat Dolls' "I Don’t Need a Man" is another valuable addition to the canon. Not only is "I Don’t Need a Man" defiant and super catchy, it also treats masturbation as something wholly unrelated to sex with a partner.

9. Britney Spears: "Touch of My Hand" (2003)

I’m all in my skin and I’m not gonna wait

Many of us care as much about Britney Spears’ wellbeing as we do our own, and on "Touch of My Hand", off 2003’s In the Zone, she sings of being "into myself in the most precious way."

10. Tweet: "Oops (Oh My)" [ft. Missy Elliott] (2002)

I was looking so good I couldn't reject myself
I was feeling so good I had to touch myself

This song was a certified hit, reaching #7 on the Billboard Hot 100 and claiming the Number 1 spot on the Billboard R&B and Hip Hop chart. It’s fully self-focused—with no mention of a partner anywhere in the song.

11. Tori Amos: "Icicle" (1994)

Getting off
Getting off
While they're all downstairs
Singing prayers

"Icicle" invokes metaphors of spring rebirth and borrows heavily from Biblical language about Creation to challenge traditional notions of spirituality, as only Tori can. And does.

12. Divinyls: "I Touch Myself" (1990)

I don't want anybody else
When I think about you, I touch myself

Abandoning euphemism, the lyrics pose masturbation as the ultimate form of flattery.

13. Cyndi Lauper: "She Bop" (1984)

Hey, hey they say I better get a chaperone
Because I can't stop messin' with the danger zone

Cyndi Lauper’s 1984 hit single "She Bop" is perhaps the broadest reaching, most universally recognized entry on this list. The song was subtle enough to be played on mainstream radio and had lyrics that made it accessible to teenage girls (and boys), as the narrator spends her nights wistfully imagining bodies in "tight blue jeans in the pages of a Blue Boy magazine."

The Geto Boys put Houston on rap’s map back when L.A. and NYC were really the only cities being repped, and effectively birthed a Southern style of gangsta rap that was rife with corporeal violence, death, and paranoia. The group’s sundry controversies—their bleak lyrics—put them in crosshairs for hip-hop culture wars. The group rose to infamy when Bushwick Bill (né Richard Shaw) lost an eye after being shot by a girlfriend (a shot of him in the ER following the incident appears on the cover of We Can’t Be Stopped) and woke up in the morgue after being declared dead. A forthcoming documentary, Bushwick Bill: Geto Boy, delves into it all, and attempts to separate lore from the real, storied life of Bushwick Bill.

Filmmaker Greg Roman has now spent three years with Shaw, capturing his life and times. "It’s difficult to find him sometimes," explains Roman. When he does, the outcomes are unpredictable. Roman tells a story of them meeting with Mike Judge at small bar in Santa Monica. "There’s an open mic and Bill goes up and talks to the guitar player and got him to play a beat, then performed ‘Damn It Feels Good to Be a Gangsta’ in front of him, half the cast of TV show "Silicon Valley", some tourists, and me." He’s done the same thing in Texas dive bars, too. "If one person recognizes him, Bill nods and gets onstage and the guy plays a beat and he’ll rap. One song they all know that he’ll sing is ‘Gangsta of Love.’ That’s happened like three times. Producer Kyra Kowasic calls it Bill’s version of 'stage-bombing.'"

The filmmakers have a full-length rough cut and are now crowdfunding to help pay for the music rights and archival footage needed in order to finish production. Before Shaw signed his life-rights contract for the film, he drew up what he termed a "hood rider" for Roman. "Bill’s not afraid of anybody making him look bad," he laughs. "But this basically says if I put something in there that could hurt him and is not true, there’s all kinds of crazy things he can do to me. If you know his lyrics, you can imagine some of what he listed."

Pitchfork: What’s it been like having cameras follow you for a few years now?

Richard Shaw: It’s pretty interesting. It’s just supposed to show my everyday life. Some things are happy, some are not.

Pitchfork: Is anything off-limits?

RS: It’d be hard for anyone to get into your life one hundred percent because a majority of your life is in your mind and your heart—the things you refuse not to say or do. It’s hard for a camera to capture what’s going on, on the inside.

Pitchfork: The director said you get recognized in country bars—everywhere. What’s fame like? Do you enjoy it?

RS: I’ve never had a big personality. I’m an introvert unless I’ve been drinking or something. Being short, I believe people looked and stared at me my whole life before I ever got on stage and rapped. If I was someone of "normal height" I would probably be like those people in Marvel Comic movies where they’re obscure and no one notices them until they have some kind of power, which I guess is what music does. Now it’s not "look at the short guy," it’s "It’s Bushwick Bill!"

Pitchfork: Do you like that better?

RS: Either way it’s notoriety.

Pitchfork: How is Scarface doing since the hospitalization?

RS: I don’t know… he’s had weight issues for years and I think that comes with blood pressure and all kinds of situations. He actually did a show in Rochester a week after he went in the hospital. I know he’s going on tour in September. I called him and that’s when he told me about what he said about on his Facebook, saying he wasn’t going to do any Geto Boys stuff right now but do his own thing. He believes it should be all fair, split three ways.

Pitchfork: Did you get a new eye? It looked like you had something in last time I saw you.

RS: I have a conformer. I had a prosthetic but that broke. I’ve got to get another. My mom asked me about that before she died—she wished I’d get another one.

Pitchfork: Has having one eye changed your life in any way?

RS: I was born with 20/20 vision. The only thing that changes is like a person who loses a limb has that phantom limb movement… they feel they’re doing things with two members of their body. If I’ve been in a room before when I had two eyes, my mind actually sees the whole room from memory. I might turn into the wall and bump into something because my mind is seeing it wrong—I’m not. That’s the part that gets me sometimes. I walk in somewhere and end up turning into a wall and getting knots on my head. 

Pitchfork: What did you think of Straight Outta Compton?

RS: It gives the depth of what’s going on. We’re just people and the music business is a business. As much as you think this person or that is screwing you out of your money… it’s same for 2 Live Crew, it’s the same in R&B, rock'n'roll—any genre. While you’re on stage and signing autographs and seeing people like something that you thought of and how they’re enjoying it as a living thing, it gives you great joy. You’re not really thinking of it like business. Distribution, retail sales, manufacturers have to get paid, how things are taxed—after everyone is paid then the money goes back to the label 90 days later, the label has to pay for the video, tour, et cetera, then how much is left for me?

Pitchfork: Art and commerce are two different things.

RS: Right! When you see the part where Eazy-E is sitting there going over contracts, all he knows is this dude keeps giving him papers to sign at parties—never in the setting when they’re eating and drinking. It’s brought when he’s distracted by everything going on around him. That by itself let me know something shyster is about to be revealed.

What the N.W.A movie revealed is there’s also people who can pay your lawyers and your accountants off to make everything look right to you, to keep you happy. Look at the movie The Rose or the show "Empire". Business has always been cutthroat, no matter what the business is.

Pitchfork: Could you relate to that? Would you say there are similarities in your stories?

RS: As an artist I could relate to the Ice Cube vision, wanting to know what’s going on when an interviewer asks you what it’s like not having money and you’re thinking about the paperwork and what you for this, that and the other. Your mind is on making music—you’re not a businessman. You’re just somebody who had a great idea. How do you learn that unless you go to business school instead of being born with the gift of being creative? It’s hard to be judgmental either way. You’re in the studio and you say, "Hey, why don’t you say this line?" No one told you that means you’re a co-writer. You think you’re just being helpful in the creative mode, breaking bread. It’s complicated.

We ran across [N.W.A] a lot of different times or they just left and we just got there on tour. They came to Houston on Too $hort—when he had music being played from a reel-to-reel. It sounded just like the studio because there was no compression.

I like the way the movie ended because everyone realized at the end of the day, we started with nothing just making music for the ‘hood.

Pitchfork: When will Habeas Corpus be out? What happened with the fundraiser?

RS: I had my doubts about it but I figured if the money came in properly, at what point is someone going to talk to Rap-A-Lot to say "When you hired us as Geto Boys to do these songs the name was already there, you just hired voices… how do we take the name associated with us and do things without including you?" My whole thing is if there’s people out there who feel they got screwed by a record label or person, how do you turn around and do something wrong back? That’s an opportunity to show how to do it right. 'Face left the label, Will left the label. I walked away in disagreement with the group members and the label because I knew my importance. We were frustrating each other. At the end of the day you grow up and put your ego in check. None of us is on the label.

Pitchfork: So the label owns the name?

RS: Yeah and the fans believe the title. Do we be fair and ask permission and share a percentage? I believe anything done right, goes right. The [label] owner does not have a bad heart. I never understood what Willie D was trying to do. If the fans want it, it’s cool. At the end of the day, Geto Boys is a brand and that’s acceptable but the value of everything has to be in the respect for each other. When I read that Rolling Stone article, I didn’t get that line about "we wished we were on three separate stages." I don’t know where that came from. I never felt that way. That was controversy to make things sell or whatever the thought pattern was.

Pitchfork: Are you still friends?

RS: Oh, I’m cool with everybody. You gotta remember I was a Geto Boy from '84. The faces always changed. I’ve never once called to say, "I need money, let’s do a show." I was always called and said, "We’re doing shows. Are you with it or not with it?" Willie D’s trying to keep the brand alive but it’s going to take more than love to keep it alive. It’s gonna take bread being broken fairly where everyone is happy. If anyone’s ever gotten made at a label, I guess when they try to run shows for themselves and see what costs and overhead is like… At the end of the day, right beats might all the time.

Pitchfork: But you guys are the Geto Boys. The label can’t do much with the name without you three.

RS: That’s not true. Look at what’s happened before. I met Scarface and Willie D in the studio in '85. The name changed from Ghettto to Geto when Rick Rubin produced it. In '84 there was Raheem, Slim Jukebox, and Sir Rap-A-Lot. Those were the first three members of the Geto Boys with DJ Ready Red. By '85 it was Prince Johnny C, Slim Jukebox, Bushwick Bill, and DJ Ready Red. By '89 it was Scarface, Willie D, Bushwick Bill, and Ready Red. By We Can’t Be Stopped it was Scarface, Willie D, Bushwick Bill, and Ready Red, on the regrouping album, it was us. By the Til Death Do Us Part album, it was Scarface, Willie D, Big Mike, and Bushwick Bill—DJ Ready Red wasn’t even there. If any true Geto Boys fan is out there they’d see the label believed in the name even when the artists thought it couldn’t continue. The same thing happened with the Temptations and the Four Tops.

Pitchfork: So are you writing your own stuff now?

RS: I’ve got some new material. I’m collaborating with people. It’s mostly inspirational but I also want to go back to some of the gutter-mix stuff because I want to show the change, the growth, and the transformation. I want to explain why I was feeling that way back then and I view things this way now.

Pitchfork: What have you been listening to lately?

RS: I really like Kendrick Lamar. I’m still a Talib Kweli fan, Lupe Fiasco, Mos Def, Common Sense—people who say things that are relevant to everyday life. I don’t pay attention to artists that talk about throwing money away and the car that they drive.

Analyzing data to find patterns can be tricky. This past week, the Internet has been obsessing on a project by Polygraph, in which Matt Daniels analyzed the top played tracks on Spotify versus the Billboard Hot 100 to find "the most timeless songs in music history." Daniels singles out several individual artists and tracks to find surprising and sometimes interesting patterns, but most surprising of all is probably the list of every Billboard hit from 1950 to 2005 ranked by their popularity in Spotify.

The top 10 of that list is dominated by rock, with two hip-hop and two pop tracks making the cut. Daniels admits his methodology is flawed, saying if it were perfect it would analyze only data from Spotify users born after 1995, because they and their children and their children’s children will be the ones influencing what is popular in 2050. But the aim of this exercise is to determine what songs from the past will endure and be remembered by future generations, versus what was popular at the time it was released.

With a cursory glance at the list of Billboard hit songs with the highest Spotify plays, one influence jumps off the page: placements in film and television. Analyzing its impact is one of many X-factor things the author admits is beyond the scope of his vision in the timeless songs piece, but it’s such a significant factor in several songs on the top of the chart that it jumps off the page at you.

Here is a sampling of tracks from that list with significant placements. The list is incomplete, not showing every single placement or even every song that has a placement, because that would be all of them if you take into account the number of cover songs that reality singing and dancing TV churn through. (It is noted when a song has been repeatedly featured on multiple singing or dancing shows, however.) The list is condensed to highlight TV shows and films that have mass audiences (new or nostalgic), are very popular to stream, or have been in syndication/repeated on cable long enough to saturate the culture.

1. Eminem: "Lose Yourself" - 8 Mile
4. Journey: "Don’t Stop Believin’" - The Wedding Singer, "The Sopranos", "Glee", "Laguna Beach", "Family Guy", "Scrubs", numerous singing competition shows
9. The White Stripes: "Seven Nation Army", arena sports
10. Coldplay: "Fix You" - "Glee", "The Newsroom", "Scrubs", "Extras", numerous reality singing and dancing shows
12. Mariah Carey: "All I Want for Christmas Is You" - Love Actually
14. Goo Goo Dolls: "Iris" - written for City of Angels
15. Oasis: "Wonderwall" - "Girls", "Lost", "Nip/Tuck", "The O.C."
16. Survivor: "Eye of the Tiger" - Rocky III& Rocky IV, "The Big Bang Theory", "Breaking Bad", "The Simpsons", "Gilmore Girls"
19. Queen: "Bohemian Rhapsody" - Wayne’s World, "Glee", "Dr. Who", "Two and a Half Men", numerous reality singing shows
20. Beyoncé: "Crazy in Love" - Fifty Shades of Grey, The Great Gatsby, "The Office", Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, White Chicks, numerous reality singing and dancing shows
21. Kanye West: "Gold Digger" - Trainwreck, "Glee"
24. Blackstreet: "No Diggity" - Pitch Perfect
28. U2: "With or Without You" - "Friends"
29. Guns N' Roses: "Sweet Child o' Mine" - The Wrestler, "The Office", Step Brothers, Big Daddy (cover), numerous reality singing shows
31. Metallica: "Enter Sandman" - sports
33. Radiohead: "Creep" - "Community", "Glee", "The Simpsons"
38. Whitney Houston: "I Will Always Love You" - The Bodyguard, This Is the End, "Two and a Half Men", "The Simpsons"

The idea that people use TV and movies to discover music is nothing new. The Pew Research Center released a study on purchasing music on the Internet in 2008 that found, "Most music buyers (83%) say that they find out about music from hearing a song on the radio, on TV, or in a movie." That was greater than any other discovery method, including recommendations from friends and family, going to a record store or going to a concert. In 2008, TV and film were considered an "offline" resource. Binge-watching as we know it didn’t exist, rather it meant binging on a day-long reality TV marathon on cable. "Friends" wasn’t on Netflix; in fact, most people still had Netflix deliver DVDs of movies to their home. iTunes only began offering movie rentals that year, and films certainly didn’t premiere digitally while they were in theaters.

As an example, let’s examine Journey’s "Don’t Stop Believin’". It’s hard to imagine it now, but in 2007 everyone was confounded by the song’s jump to the top of the iTunes sales chart. It hit a pop culture high when it was featured in the season premiere of the MTV show "Laguna Beach" and an episode of "Family Guy" in the same week, while simultaneously soundtracking a video that had gone viral on YouTube. That could have been the end of the story for this random '80s non-hit, but it was resurrected again in 2007 when "The Sopranos" used it as the final song of the final scene of its much-discussed series finale. This time the track saw radio airplay spike, as well as iTunes sales. The cast of "Glee" performed the song in the show’s pilot episode, which aired in 2009. That show in particular became highly influential on music sales. They resurrected "Don’t Stop Believin’", bringing the original cast back to sing it again in the 2015 final season. That blitz of placements, not it’s endurance on classic rock radio station playlists, is why the song is so popular now. Will it be timeless forever because of the new context these shows have put around it, rewriting its history from a cheesy pop song released in the '80s into a classic pop nugget? We need two more generations to decide. If we’d never heard from the song again after 2005’s TV-borne renewal, it might have disappeared. "The Sopranos", and the intense discussion around the controversial finale of that show, gave the song a salience it didn’t previously possess—and, evidently, legs.

One could make the same argument for "Eye of the Tiger" or "I Will Always Love You", whose subsequent placements in various pop culture moments have everything to do with its genesis as a fight song in the context of the Rocky movies and The Bodyguard. The White Stripes and Metallica are constantly used as bed music in sports broadcasts of all types. U2’s "With or Without You" is a great song on its own, but how many people under 30 know it best as the song that soundtracked Ross and Rachel getting back together on "Friends"?

The landscape has changed quickly and we now live in a world where film and TV streaming influences music streaming. It’s always been a symbiotic system, with varying degrees of success, but a shift in preferences to streaming video as well as music has given the advantage to studios, networks, and record labels that allow their content to have a presence on streaming services. Bands who don’t license their music, like Pearl Jam and R.E.M., have zero songs on this list of timeless music. What was a choice driven by integrity at the time couldn’t possibly have anticipated how much we now allow our media consumption to drive our music preferences. Some of the most important bands in music history will be lost in favor of Journey’s "Don’t Stop Believin’", which is the most timeless song of the 1980s at this point, because a high school kid on an MTV reality show wanted Journey to be playing when he met his girlfriend.