Early in the 1984 film Breakin’, a young white woman named Kelly Bennett drives to Venice Beach with her gay best friend to see a sidewalk performance by a crew of street dancers. She drives her convertible up onto the grass, throws her belongings in the back seat, and leaves her car there, unlocked and top down. It’s a minor detail in the film, but a telling one. Even though she is constantly warned of the dangers of this and other Los Angeles inner-city neighborhoods, Kelly instead finds the people friendly, accepting, and endlessly, essentially creative. It’s a place where everybody is too busy dancing or making music or painting murals to rifle through bags in an unlocked car. It is, the movie reveals, a kind of utopia, a depiction that is perhaps culturally naïve yet still powerful even 30 years later.

Breakin’ of course is the king of the breakdancing movies, a minuscule budget (less than $1 million) that ballooned into a true pop-cultural phenomenon. During its run in theaters, on HBO, and in the then-nascent home video market, the movie and its sequel had a generation obsessed with breakdancing, or street dancing, or social dancing. It was soon followed by a slew of imitators, including Beat Street (which Breakin’ had narrowly beat to the box office), Body Rock, and Fast Forward. But the Breakin’ saga remains the most popular in the small b-movie genre, perhaps because of the utopia it depicts. This is a Los Angeles defined by bright colors and vivid motions: dancers poppin’ and lockin’ in neon duds against a backdrop of clear blue skies, green palm trees, and vibrant graffiti murals. Compare that palette to the grays of Beat Street, which is set in New York City and might as well be shot in black-and-white. Sludge and snow seem to cover every surface, and every building is rundown and decaying. The actors huddle and shiver against the cold air, dancing as less as self-expression than as a means to keep warm. Who wouldn’t prefer sunny Venice Beach? Breakin’ offers neither an accurate nor a particularly nuanced portrayal of the neighborhood, but there is something powerful and attractive and weirdly defiant in its optimism: an extension of the politics of breakdancing.

Breakdancing was also known as social dancing, and it is the glue that holds the communities together in this pair of movies. Adolpho "Shabbadoo" Quiñones plays the male lead known only by his street name Ozone, and he is well cast: Born in Chicago but raised in Los Angeles, he helped to define and popularize the dance form as the leader of the Lockers, a pioneering crew made famous by their appearances on "Soul Train" and the short-lived NBC series "The Big Show". By the early 1980s, he was one of the most famous dancers in the country, choreographing music videos, appearing on Broadway with Bette Midler, and touring with Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson. Quiñones developed the idea for a movie about breakdancing and presented it to producer Menahem Golan, who co-founded Cannon Films to produce some of the cheesiest flicks of the decade, including Revenge of the Ninja, American Ninja, Ninja III: The Domination, and the Xanadu knockoff The Apple (which remains one of the best bad movies ever made).

Quiñones insists that Breakin’ was largely based on his own experiences in Los Angeles. "We were real street dancers," he told The Black Hollywood File back in 2008. "We weren’t something that was manufactured by Hollywood. We were real…It was like they just took a camera and followed us around…. So in that way I think the young kids in the inner city [and] around the world identified with that as being real." Another aspect that was real: the multicultural aspect of breakdancing. Especially for a low-budget b-movie, in retrospect Breakin’ seems progressive in its depiction of various races and demographics in Los Angeles, each contributing something vital to what would eventually coalesce into hip-hop culture.

Even if our point-of-view character is white, it is significant that it is a young woman instead of a young man (as in similarly plotted '80s b-movies like Footloose, Gleaming the Cube, and North Shore). As played by Lucinda Dickey (who showed off her martial arts chops in Ninja III: The Domination), Kelly Bennett becomes obsessed with street dancing and street culture because the community treats her as a viable member rather than as a sexual or commercial commodity. The boss at the diner continually harasses her; she is nearly raped by her dance instructor; and her agent wants her to sell out. But when she goes into the inner city, she finds only respectful artists who first and foremost admire her moves. The movie won’t commit to showing her in a mixed-race relationship with Ozone, but at least doesn’t depict her as a victim.

When Kelly drives out to Venice Beach, she is immediately invited to dance with Ozone and Turbo, her precise jetés appearing like a variation of breakdancing rather than a contrast to it. In this circle of poppers and lockers everyone is accepted: black, white, Hispanic, gay, straight, even physically disabled. Kelly’s best friend is a flamboyantly gay man named Adam, whom she nicknames Cupcakes, and while he does fit the bill as Gay Best Friend, the film affords him more agency and dignity than similar characters in, say, Mannequin.

In this version of inner-city Los Angeles, crime is mentioned only occasionally but never shown onscreen. The only real violence occurs on the dancefloor, when Ozone and Turbo face off against a rival duo. There are no spoken rules, but such is the code of breakdancing that the winners know when they’ve won and the losers know when they should duck out the back entrance. After losing their first battle, they recruit Kelly—who by now has her own street name, Special K—endure a rehearsal montage, christen themselves the TKO Crew, and finally win the rematch (which, it should be noted, is emceed by none other than Ice-T). No fist ever meets jaw, no kick makes contact; dance fight operates as a parody of action movies, all bug eyes and air punches.

Most of all, the inner city is never presented as something to escape or overcome. In fact, Kelly spends both movies attempting to join the community. "I have everything I want right here," says Ozone of his friends and neighbors, of his garage apartment, of his community. Even when they audition for a professional dance troupe, they do it explicitly as representatives of the street. The final scene (spoiler) shows them on Broadway, where they are presenting their own production based on life in Venice, and the camera makes sure to show every single minor character up on stage—not just Cupcakes and the requisite child dancers, but also the members of that rival crew. The triumph isn’t in leaving the neighborhood, but in bringing it with them.

Filmed and released just months after Breakin’, the justly maligned sequel only makes these themes more explicit. In Electric Boogaloo (named after one of Quiñones’ former crews), success has splintered the TKO Crew, with Turbo and Ozone returning to Los Angeles to teach kids how to breakdance at a synagogue-turned-community-center called Miracles. But a wealthy developer wants to knock the place down and build a luxury shopping mall, because malls in inner-city neighborhoods are guaranteed goldmines. In the middle of battling another rival crew and suffering through some tedious romantic drama, the newly reunited TKOs launch a gigantic stage show to pay off Miracles’ debts.

"What I find particularly interesting about Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo is that this story is about anti-gentrification, which is such a hot topic today," says Quiñones in the new commentary for Shout! Factory’s Blu-Ray edition (which includes both movies). "There’s a firestorm of controversy surrounding gentrification, and we did it! At its core, it’s a social movie… there’s something about keeping your culture, keeping your people together."

Whether or not this is an accurate depiction of Los Angeles is almost beside the point. These two movies may be silly and derivative, naïve in their politics and vague in their plotting, but their depiction of the inner city as a heaven for creativity and self-expression remains powerful and strangely compelling 30 years later. "With dance you save the community," remarks director Sam Firstenberg in the same commentary. The Breakin’ saga is a fantasy of race and culture and class in America, and as such it is all the more poignant since we know that subsequent depictions of these neighborhoods will be much gritty and more antagonistic once TKO has been displaced by another set of initials: NWA.

Photo by Johnathan F. Lee

Japan’s fueihō (or "entertainment business control law") code governs everything from dancing, to drinking, to sex work, to nightclubs. Since its inception in 1948, the set of laws has technically forbade the existence of nightclubs under 66 square meters in size to allow dancing or for any sized club to allow dancing after midnight or 1 a.m. (depending on the area). For decades, officials turned a blind eye to the code, but in the last five years, police began enforcing the laws, leading to the closure of many dance halls and clubs. That, coupled with factors like the aging of Japan, threatened to decimate the country's clubbing culture. Fearing extinction, several promoters and club owners in the scene organized—through a coalition called Let's Dance—to use the 2020 Olympics as leverage and put political pressure on the government to update the laws. After several failed attempts, they finally forced the government to rewrite some of the code earlier this summer. This revision loosened some of the dancing restrictions and now allows for certain clubs to be open past midnight or 1 a.m. (provided certain stipulations, like having the requisite amount of light in the venue, are met).

But while many impressions in the media presume this revision marks significant progress for Japanese culture, Terre Thaemlitz—an American expat and outspoken trans DJ/producer known as DJ Sprinkles and G.R.R.L.—feels this was a blown opportunity to affect any meaningful change. As it goes with drawing any new social lines, many people—whether club owners operating under the 66 square meter line or queer sex workers (who, unlike their straight counterparts, are not legally allowed to operate)—have been entirely left out of the revisions and public conversation. And now they're forced further toward the margins. I spoke with Thaemlitz about why this perceived victory for Japan is one giant step sideways, if not backwards. 

Pitchfork: You wrote an open letter and concluded that the fueihō revisions will not affect the majority of clubs...

Terre Thaemlitz: Right, most clubs do not meet the legal requirements to obtain dance permits. First and foremost is the space requirement, which specifies any dancehall must have a certain amount of uninterrupted space—including no ceiling support pillars, etc.—and it is incredibly hard to find architectural spaces within Japan that meet those requirements. I forget the exact size, but I think it is around 65 square meters? Like, last night I was just playing the opening party at a new club called Arc, and I would classify it as a pretty big venue, yet even they could probably never pass the dancehall application process simply based on architectural limitations. So the fueihō restrictions about curfews, etc., apply to legally licensed dancehalls, but everyone else is operating outside the law. That is how it has always been done here—which is really stressful for club owners and staff.

Pitchfork: What are the punishments that have been handed down and whom does it affect?

TT: There have been a few articles written in English about the Club Noon case in Osaka, which was the most notorious case in recent history, so I would encourage people who are interested to read about that. Basically, legal charges can be brought against club owners and all officially employed staff, and the venues are closed. I believe this results in a legal arrest record for staff, which is a high price to pay for working as a dishwasher or mop-up crew. So these risks also perpetuate off-the-books labor, to protect staff from legal charges, which of course means people are working with no legal protections or benefits, etc. And with closures, the owners generally face bankruptcy. The fueihō codes really do more to perpetuate social problems than resolve or 'protect' anything or anyone! It's the truly obscene aspect of all this obscenity law stuff.

Pitchfork: Have you ever witnessed a club shut down yourself or been taken to jail for any of your involvement?

TT: No. I have had police enter rooms I was playing. It was more common a few years ago. But not lately. Generally, the club staff keep an eye on police patrols, and if the cops come they quickly rush to turn down the volume of the sound system, which quickly breaks the mood and generally stops people from dancing. This is a quicker and more discreet way of stopping the dancing than making an announcement—although they usually also move through the crowd personally asking people to stop dancing momentarily until the cops are gone. Sometimes the audience doesn't understand what is happening, and can start to shout or complain—especially foreigners with little understanding of the context—but things usually stay pretty calm, which is good.

Pitchfork: Is there any meaningful opposition within Japan to the 2020 Olympics? It seems like some countries have slowly started to wake up to the fact that large-scale games like this can break local economies.

TT: Yes, absolutely! But as in most countries, it makes no difference. The Olympics are too fucking powerful. I fucking hate sports—they generate so much fucking nationalism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, racism, economic exploitation, displacement of communities to build fucking worthless bankrupt stadiums.

Here in Japan, one of the big crimes of Olympic preparations is the fact that all of the nation's construction workers are being preoccupied with building things in Tokyo, and as a direct result of this, the country has still been unable to build housing for those dislocated from Fukushima after the 2011 nuclear disaster because there are not enough people to do the work! The Olympics take priority. It's fucking heartless. Not so different from the stories of Chinese farmers going without water for crops in order to make the river prettier during the Beijing games. What the fuck. How can anyone watch the Olympics? I can't understand it. Really. Boycott that shit, people!

Pitchfork: What keeps you in Japan? Do you ever plan on leaving or do you ever flirt with that idea?

TT: I hope to remain in Japan for the rest of my life—although who knows how things can change here, with Prime Minister Abe and his league of doom at the helm. I keep my U.S. passport as an escape route. I am always very clear that my ability to live here is based on my past experiences in the U.S. It is not about Japan being so fucking amazing. As far as I am concerned, humans are a shit species, so there's nowhere in this world to get overly excited about. It's more about safety in daily life, the absence of guns and class-A drugs, the way people in the street ignore those they dislike rather than lash out verbally or physically. Like, if I'm in drag on the subway, I might get one or two silent looks, but nobody shoving me or shouting "Faggot!" At the same time, if I was born in Japan, I am sure I would not want to live here—just as I cannot imagine myself being emotionally able to return to the U.S. now.

Pitchfork: What are concrete steps to meaningfully revise these laws in a way that allows more freedom to use one's body? How can these coalitions of DJs and club-related people—or anyone, really—express any power in this system?

TT: The lawyer involved in the fueihō revisions describe it as a baby step process. They expect further revisions, bit by bit, that will eventually allow small clubs to be legally licensed, etc. I am skeptical about the types of concessions that will be given to the police in that process. I mean, the police have way too much political power here. Actually, the fueihō revisions were supposed to be put to a vote many months ago—the date was set. I don't remember exactly, but I think it was supposed to be in June 2014? Or maybe after that. Anyway, this was after a couple of years of hard negotiating between lawyers and politicians, and everyone was really glad to have finally reached a consensus. But literally the day before the vote, the police entered and told the politicians the revisions were unacceptable and they would rewrite the proposal themselves to submit for the formal vote. And the politicians immediately conceded. And months later, the revisions as rewritten by the police were put to a vote, and approved. It's pretty scary to think that kind of thing happens in relation to national legislation. As part of those changes, the police now have more direct control over what is defined as legal and moral entertainment. One of my lawyer friends thinks it's not a big deal, but for me it's super scary to think about how that can be abused, and what restrictions it places on the public—not only in terms of who can get arrested for doing what today, but how it limits future possibilities of public 'perversity.'

The coalition of DJs who issued that "Declaration on the Future of Japan's Club Culture" is meaningless. They are just a PR mechanism to appease conservatives, and a tool of the lawyers attempting to sell an image of club goers as socially upright. Their argument is that clubs should not fall under the fueihō code since they have nothing to do with sex work and other things at the core of the morality code. In social terms, it's a pretty big 'fuck you' to other communities affected by the fueihō—to have all of this legal mobilization around revising the morality codes, yet refuse to address the notion of morality itself. That's politically irresponsible. In my eyes, it's a form of cultural violence.

I don't know how we can express power within that system. But I know that the entirety of Japanese club culture has evolved despite the law, parallel to the law, simultaneous to the law. So I would like to think that other types of activities will continue, despite how that dominant system attempts to perpetuate itself and be 'all-inclusive' simply to apply restrictions more effectively. As I said, most of the clubs here are not legal dancehalls anyway, but in the spaces in which I interact with people—owners, staff, clientele—I see them attempting to interact with each other in ways that allow them to continue to hold events with as little police intervention as possible. That is a type of strength and organizing, for sure. And club staff have their own ways of doing things to keep the cops out.

Pitchfork: Can you explain how these laws extend to affect queer and transgendered communities?

TT: Queer sex work generally does not meet fueihō requirements for legal licensing, so it happens in illegal spaces, and in illegal ways. That has always been the case. As you can see, there is a constant pattern of that which has happened and continues happening despite being outside the licensing regulations of the law, and this kind of liberal-minded attempt to bring people into the fueihō code as a means of "public protection".

It seems evident that the more profound, helpful, and meaningful way to protect people is to dismantle the morality code, and grant people the freedom to openly organize without legal risks—rather than attempting to legally regulate everything, which will always enact social exclusions at some level. I mean, these kinds of laws never protect anyone, despite claiming to be all about protecting the public. Each legal restriction only strengthens the power of mafia and crime organising who step in to help people do what the law says they can't do, in every country. This is indisputable. Within all of this enforcement of "morality," there is no sense of how to morally, ethically, or fairly help people live safer lives. It's all about banishment or punishment or forced destitution—all of which creates more desperation, and more social risk-taking by people in moments of crisis.

With Labor Day weekend and the summer shrinking in the collective rearview mirror, deliberation continues over 2015’s Song of the Summer. In the world of music, this honored position in the zeitgeist is serious business, meriting features, polls, and endless assertion and debate on social media. (My vote goes to "Why the Fuck You Lying?") Moreover, it’s a bit of monoculture that—as the notion slips away—listeners can agree exists, even if they have lots of different favorites.

"People relax," Peter Robinson, editor of Popjustice.com, a UK-based citadel of poptomism, told The Guardian in 2009, when it tried to suss out the elements of Songs of the Summer in the UK. "People stop trying to cover up the fact that they like simple pop music. Pretending you don't like music with a very catchy tune is tiring, so people take the summer off."

If we’re to crown a Song of the Summer in our glorious seasonal afterglow, it helps to get a sense of what’s defined one in the past. This playlist—while not comprehensive or definitive—looks back into the history, the cultural DNA, of American pop’s Songs of the Summer to take stock of what constitutes the prestigious title, the classics and this summer's zeitgeist.

Listen to this playlist on Apple Music.

The Prototypes

Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong: "Summertime"

This timeless vocal-jazz standard has been re-recorded in upwards of 25,000 times, by one estimate. The Porgy and Bess standout is, in a sense, the genesis of Songs of the Summer. Ubiquitous since its first recording in 1935, its lullaby melodies bring listeners into a bucolic respite ("the livin’ is easy"), set in the troubled Jim Crow-era South ("and the cotton is high"). It’s a precursor of sorts to Songs of the Summer that are catchy, even tranquil, but tempered by angst or struggle, heard this summer in Wiz Khalifa’s "See You Again" or Kendrick Lamar’s "Alright". Singers spanning 20th century pop have covered the Gershwins-composed tune, from Billie Holiday to Janis Joplin to Annie Lennox. Even Sublime took a swing at it, interpolating instrumental jazz versions for its 1997 rock-radio hit "Doin’ Time".

The Beach Boys: "Fun Fun Fun"

When Brian Wilson was asked if there are "no good summer songs that [he] didn’t write," Wilson’s reply was, simply, "Not really." He’s not wrong. Wilson and squad de facto perfected the archetypical Song of the Summer in the '60s. The Beach Boys’ legacy may be a bit diluted but nothing can take their era-defining summer jams away from them. Given that a T-bird is central to "Fun Fun Fun", T-Pain’s mixtape flip of Jidenna’s "Classic Man"—a song about his love of classic cars—is one of its closest kin this summer.

John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John: "Summer Nights"
Don Henley: "Boys of Summer"
Bryan Adams: "Summer of '69"

The idea of a Song of the Summer imposes itself enough on culture. Pair it with an inoculating dose of nostalgia about summer, wistful over youthful days past—like this infectious trifecta of songs does—and it’s near unstoppable. "Summer Nights", the 1978 hit from Grease, is a sugar rush of campy Broadway pop. The ghastly "Did she put up a fight?" line (what the fuck, right??) sidles up alongside the central theme of heartbreak and longing.

Henley’s 1984 hit "Boys of Summer" has longing to spare. The classic-rock ballad was given more recent life by pop-punk band the Ataris, updating the song’s original "Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac" to a Black Flag reference. The War on Drugs has mined the song’s sound deeply as of late, namely its shuffle, analog synth, and drum pad sounds. This summer, the "Boys of Summer" sentiment has been digitized into an EDM avatar, encompassed inside a different guitar brrang and laser pulse in Calvin Harris’ "Summer".

Adams’ 1985 hit "Summer of '69" regained a little cultural caché this summer, immortalized previously as a "Freebird!"-type punchline in the age of the Patron Saint of Sad Boys, ol’ Ryan Adams. The name-gamed country artist ejected an audience member over an infamous heckle involving the song and, in that same venue almost 13 years later, covered "Summer of '69" with a plaintive, even haunting, sincerity. Like Henley sighing and looking back at his youth, Bryan Adams’ hit has been captured and digitized—in a supremely nostalgic haze—by Jamie xx, whose "I Know There’s Gonna Be (Good Times)" was the unofficial Song of the Summer (Electronic Music Division).

New Summer Classics

Los Del Rio: "Macarena (Bayside Boys Remix)"

Every few years, American Top 40 craves a Song of the Summer that compels us to dance en masse. If you had working ears in the summer of 1995, "Macarena" was omnipresently, oppressively played to the point of it being dance propaganda, heralding a forthcoming wave of '90s Latin pop. In 2015, dance sensations live largely bottled in YouTube or Vine fandoms/communities, where one of this year’s Songs of the Summer—"Watch Me" by Silentó—gained a steady head of steam all summer, instructing everyone whip and/or nae nae (also bop, do the stanky leg, etc.) into the top three of the U.S. singles charts.

The Sundays: "Summertime"

The UK dream pop band’s only crossover across the pond—it broke the top ten of the U.S. Alternative Songs chart in 1997– hit (as much as a low-key charming UK pop group like the Sundays can "hit") before its hiatus, going out on a high. Modest stateside success aside, its blissed-out chorus rivals even the sweetest of Beach House melodies. No youthful exuberance but Fetty Wap’s in his summer hit "Trap Queen" could match it.

Ace of Base: "Cruel Summer"

The summer struggle stays real into the '80s and '90s with this Swedish pop cover of the 1983 UK hit from Bananarama. Fifteen years later, Ace of Base vaunted it to a worldwide adult-contemporary hit, breaking the top ten in America. "For me, our hit, 'Cruel Summer', played on the darker side," said Sara Dallin, Bananarama singer-songwriter. "It looked at the oppressive heat, the misery of wanting to be with someone as the summer ticked by. We've all been there." This summer’s rise of Rachel Platten’s "Fight Song" was this year’s AC summer-struggle hit, breaking the top ten in the U.S. with its inescapable hook.

Katy Perry: "California Gurls" [ft. Snoop Dogg]
Lana Del Rey: "Summertime Sadness (Cedric Gervais Remix)"

Time will tell if these recent hits will become summer staples but Perry and Del Rey don’t look like they or their catalogs are fading from relevance anytime soon. "California Gurls" is nakedly kitsch, Perry’s forté and something American pop never seems to dispense with fully. She’s boasting about her home state, easy, breezy and beautiful with Snoop Dogg’s effortless verse to boot. It doesn’t hurt the song’s legitimacy that Beach Boys' Brian Wilson and Mike Love gave it their blessings. Rihanna’s comeback smash "Bitch Better Have My Money" is a "California Gurls"-type boast filtered through her rude gyal sensibilities, jagged where Katy chooses to be smooth. Instead of featuring latter-day Snoop Dogg, Rihanna conjures the spirit of his former Death Row labelmate Tupac (so says Killer Mike), bursting with bad-ladyswagger.

Del Rey’s "Summertime Sadness" brought the Sad Girl summer struggle of "Cruel Summer" into present day while Gervais chopped and tucked her vocals in and around the buzzy compression of the EDM sound du jour. Justin Bieber’s vocals got a similar treatment this summer in Skrillex and Diplo’s "Where Are Ü Now". His cut-and-warped vocals holding onto their central emotion like Del Rey’s did. It goes to show that no matter how filtered or altered evocations of summertime become—in sentiment, technological medium, sound, time, space—Songs of the Summer will always be there for us when the time and temperature is right. Can it be summer 2016 yet?

Snapchat is hard to game. There is no way to "like", comment, link, or repost. Photos and videos posted to the app must be under ten seconds long, and even the public "My Story" feature lasts for only 24 hours. Since the content disappears in a day, it's difficult to measure longterm. It is an experience geared toward mobile use, and there’s no way for users to monetize their Snapchat influence within the app. The options for editing are limited to a handful of filters, geotags, a text box, and a "paintbrush"—this isn’t Photoshop.

There is an intimacy between musician and fan that is easily lost in platforms like Instagram and Twitter, as artist social media pages frequently become branches of PR campaigns where artists rarely contribute at all. Snapchat’s focus on the visual impermanence makes it harder for managers and PR teams to interfere with artists’ expression, creating the perfect platform for music fans interested in what goes on behind the scenes. Snaps can function as a running tour diary or simply a window into what happens between the studio and the stage. Snapchat does not dole out blue checks of authenticity, it’s just endless clips of artists messing around with their friends and pulling back the thin curtain of 2015 fame.

Cashmere Cat - miiaaoo

The Norwegian producer and DJ Cashmere Cat saw mainstream exposure last year producing for Ariana Grande, but his Snapchat lacks any pop star sheen. Fairly elusive on social media, his Snaps are typically him and his friends goofing off backstage with plenty of scenes in and out of airports. But as a DJ in the festival age, his best Snaps are not of him in front of the crowd, but his other DJ friends, as if their dad kept taking bad cell phone videos to show his co-workers.

Galcher Lustwerk - galcher

On his Soundcloud, the Brooklyn electronic producer Galcher Lustwerk’s only form of personal social media is his Snapchat name. The mysterious house producer, who frequently obscures his face, doesn’t reveal too much about his day-to-day life. In a way his Snapchat operates like a non-interactive Tumblr with clips of him working on music, split second clips of anime, and abstract information about shows he’s performing that night. Obtuse, but in a way that makes perfect sense.

Justin Bieber - rickthesizzler

Justin is a man of few words on social media. His mystique is crucial to his appeal; part of the fun for his devoted army of Beliebers is filling in the gaps. And if there is anyone capable of creating compelling narratives from a cryptic tweet, it’s teen girl mega fans. Bieber has never directly explained the origin of his Snapchat username, "rickthesizzler"—what do you mean, Bieber? Some fans theorize it’s the name of his country alter ego, a character he plays in some Snap videos where he wears sunglasses and speaks with a faux-southern accent. Far from unfiltered, Bieber runs a tight ship to to maintain his PG-13 image. Regardless of how well versed you are in Belieber folklore, his Snapchat is worth following just to catch a glimpse of the quiet superstar in motion.

Kehlani - kehlanitsunami

Oakland-based singer Kehlani’s Snapchat effortlessly strikes a difficult balance; its visual curation is deliberate and consistent, without coming off as try-hard or impersonal. It’s not dumb luck—she walks this line expertly in her street style and musical output as well. Kehlani’s Snaps include exploring new cities, her squad cramming in a van together, hitting the studio, smoking, drinking, and dancing in hotel rooms, sometimes taken with a fisheye lens or greyscale filter. All of it done in a way that looks Tumblr ready, but also like anyone having fun with her friends. If her collaboration with Charlie Puth on "Hotline Bling" was a surprise it shouldn't have been—Kehlani snapped her time in studio recording the track before its release.

Rihanna - Rihanna

There’s no such thing as too many pictures of Rihanna. Queen Rih’s Snapchat makes a great companion to her Instagram; her Instagram is a polished work of art, and her Snapchat is the "behind the scenes" bonus, featuring lip gloss application and lots of singing along with friends. Rihanna rarely takes the camera herself, and often doesn’t even acknowledge it. Instead, her assistant films their days and provides some commentary of her own. But it’s not all about Phresh Off the Runway fashion-icon Rihanna—the Snaps document day trips on a boat, destinations, and most memorably, that time she found a dog in the bathroom of a club and brought it home with her.

Schoolboy Q - hoovaq

Schoolboy Q’s Snaps include what you’d expect from Q: weed (and brews). But it is compelling for the glimpses it gives of his home life: making dad jokes, teaching his daughter how to nae-nae, and playing with his dog. Q has a great sense of humor, poking fun at cliche rapper flexes (while still flexing)—think counting money with his feet, and kicking around a giant jar of weed.

Slim Jimmy - jxmmi

One of half of Rae Sremmurd, Slim Jimmy uses Snapchat the way one would expect of a young rapper still in the glo-up of early career success. Snaps of women, weed, and fellow Rae Sremmurdians Swae Lee and DJ Jay Sremm are what occupy most of his feed. Even when he badly injured his leg at Governors Ball earlier this year, the Snaps didn’t stop. That is is all just part of his Snapchat life: showing the rap highs, lows, and many nights telling fans to join him on "Grand Theft Auto".

Skrillex - Skrillex

Skrillex is a warm and charismatic dude. Though he doesn't control his Snapchat during his own DJ set—he isn’t just pressing play in the booth—the rest of the time it’s clearly Sonny’s world on display. Goofy selfies with other DJs—why are Ü friends with Diplo, Sonny?—private jet trips and weird jokes with his friends that clearly only he or one of his friends in the Snaps find funny. Even with all of the trips to Ibiza and Las Vegas, one of Skrillex’s best Snapchat moments was just him at a dog park.

Vic Mensa - vicsavemoney

Vic Mensa could’ve been a comedian if rapping wasn’t his current calling. The young Chicago rapper’s Snaps function as a parody motivation speaker: "Y'all need to be more/ Do more/ Get more." These Snaps get funnier each successive time by including friends and strangers off the street, all while interspersed with skateboarding, pranks, and covers of Blur’s "Song 2" and Future’s "Codeine Crazy".

With the launch of Tidal and Apple Music, along with Spotify breaking its own increasingly impressive streaming records on a regular basis, this year is looking to be a particularly pivotal one for the music industry. Which also means it’s the beginning of the end for the preferred format of the last two decades or so: the MP3. Stephen Witt’s recent book How Music Got Free doubles as a detailed ode to the MP3 as it tells the story of three men grappling with digital compression technology and its widespread fallout: German engineer Karlheinz Brandenburg, who created the MP3 and fought to steer it toward ubiquity; 76-year-old music exec Doug Morris, who has led all three of the remaining major labels across his indefatigable career and was stymied by the proliferation of the MP3; and Dell Glover, who worked in a North Carolina CD manufacturing plant and surreptitiously ripped many of the biggest albums of the 2000s—by the likes of Eminem, Jay-Z, and Kanye West—en route to becoming the world’s leading leaker of pre-release music.

According to Witt’s account, these three relatively unknown figures spurred on the tectonic shifts within the music industry over the last few decades and changed how we listen to and consider music today. For instance, there’s probably no Napster without MP3s, and there’s no MP3s without Brandenburg; the piracy enabled by Glover may not have been so widely embraced if Morris hadn’t helped to build the industry up to be such a money-hungry behemoth in the first place. Nobody in the book gets off scot-free, with Morris suffering losses and PR disasters as a result of his technical ignorance, Brandenburg missing out on the hardware market that would eventually lead to the iPod, and Glover ultimately serving a short prison sentence as a result of his rampant copyright infringement. How Music Got Free tells of supreme innovation as well as stubborn hard-headedness, and though its trio of principle characters never actually cross paths in real life, it’s tempting to consider what would have happened if they did, what crises may have been avoided. “Technically, the music industry could have launched something like Apple Music in the ‘90s,” Witt tells me. “But it took them 15 years to figure it all out.”

"After years of hostility, the technologists and the rights holders are now working in cooperation to essentially conspire against us."

Pitchfork: It seems like a lot of the problems the music industry ran into with the rise of the MP3 could have been avoided with more communication between the technology people and the label people. 

Stephen Witt: From our vantage point, it’s easy to look back and say, “Wow, what a bunch of bonehead moves.” But one of the things that’s interesting to me is that each of the characters was really smart in some way but then completely boneheaded in another way. Brandenburg had a terrific understanding of technology and human anatomy and mathematics, but the guy couldn’t even patent the most obvious device that he invented, the portable music player. Glover is this total hustler who sees opportunities but he’s completely dimwitted about the legal consequences of what he’s doing. And Doug Morris can listen to an album and say “I don’t hear a hit here” and he’s usually right—artists don’t like that, but it’s true, and he’s good at managing capital. But when it came to technology, for a long time, he was an utter dunce.

Pitchfork: Morris is an interesting case because he’s been this huge force in the music industry for so long, but the general public has no idea who he is.

SW: He never had the profile of Clive Davis or Ahmet Ertegun, even though he was more powerful than either one of them. He now runs Sony so he is still super busy; he’s best friends with [Apple Music chief] Jimmy Iovine, so they’re constantly scheming about some new thing to take over the music industry. Usually it fails, but they always have a plan.

Morris was the hardest one to convince to talk to me. In the proposal for this book, he came off much worse, like a classic recording executive heavy. But that proposal leaked, and he didn’t like how he was portrayed, so he called me into his office. As I got to know him, he became a sympathetic character. I mean, he’s not exactly the nicest person but he has his motivations; to the extent that there’s going to be a business of music, someone like this is going to have to be in charge. It was obvious to just paint a target on these guys’ backs, so I thought it might be interesting to get inside his head and see how he thinks about culture. 

There's a certain view that all recording industry executives are just vultures profiting off the creative talents of people who are more skilled than them, but I don't actually feel that's true. The executives take a lot of risk and they frequently try to back artists that lose money. I remember someone saying, “Why aren't there more female rappers?” Well, it's because the major labels invested in Lady Sovereign and Kreayshawn, and they were huge fucking busts. And when these labels lose money, they never forget it. If you talk to Morris, he’ll still go on about Pressplay, this music service they tried to launch 15 years ago that nobody remembers—he's still pissed. I think it's true with the artists as well. The public forgets, but they don't. 

But Morris isn’t a shark; he’s almost more like a Bill Clinton figure. He’s very political and understands how to charm people. He’s also at times a petulant child, but I think even that is like a long-term negotiating tactic. To have a career like his you have to be very canny. He’s run all three major music companies and he’s still signing Miley Cyrus at Sony and he’s 76-years-old, which is kind of extraordinary. It turned out that he is driven by rationality and an almost-scientific approach to music rather than taste. If you look at the top of the charts, where the major labels’ bread and butter is, it’s stuff like Josh Groban and the soundtrack to Frozen. They have to spend way more time thinking about that than they do about a mid-tier artist like Sky Ferreira or even Miguel, who’s a great musician, but he’s not going to make or break their year in the way that an Adele record would. So Morris has essentially been taking a moneyball approach since the ‘60s, although he never would have called it that.

Pitchfork: The irony is that, even though Morris was so statistically minded, he didn’t see that technology could offer so much data about how people consume music.

SW: Now, he’s obsessed with all that information: Vevo, which he created, can see where people are listening to specific videos, and they use it to schedule tours—it’s unbelievable what they do with the data part of it now. But he was late to that. The major labels always understood that piracy was a massive risk to the business, but what they missed is how, to a computer engineer, a rack of CDs isn’t inventory—it’s an array of inefficiently stored data. Now, though, they all get it, and that’s why we have streaming services.

"For musicians, it’s like facing a difficult two-front war with the pirates on one side and the streaming services on the other."

Pitchfork: The book’s timeline doesn’t reach the streaming era, but how do you feel about the more recent developments involving music and technology? 

SW: Spotify was founded in 2006, and the iPhone launched in 2007, and there was a real paradigm shift right around then. In the earliest days of personal computing, decisions were made that gave the users an enormous amount of freedom—the PC was supposed to be a productive tool that we used to collaboratively build new things and exchange information without oversight, and that was really wonderful. But it also created an enormous amount of pain for the rights holders. But now, the smartphone is a very closed device. I can’t torrent off my phone, and they only allow certain kinds of applications to go through. So the user has gone from somebody who’s supposed to be empowered to essentially a customer from whom value is supposed to be extracted. So after years of hostility, the technologists and the rights holders are now working in cooperation to essentially conspire against us. [laughs]

Pitchfork: I just read about a new app called Popcorn Time that allows people to torrent movies without jailbreaking their phones, which I hadn’t seen before.

SW: Maybe that’s the new frontier of piracy. Let me tell you what Dell Glover is doing now: He started a new side business where he buys 20 cheap-ass Chinese commodity computers for $50 each, formats them, and then installs something like Popcorn Time—and then he sell those for $200 bucks a pop to people around town so they can cut cable using torrents or pirate streaming sites. In the past three months, he told me he’s sold about 300 of these things and made about $45,000. He thinks it’s legal because he’s not actually giving you any pirated media, he’s just selling you a Linux box with some open-source home theater software installed on it. In the book, I call him the man who destroyed to music industry to put rims on his car. But now he’s really into fishing, so he’s the guy who is destroying the cable entertainment complex to buy a pontoon boat. 

"If you’re moving to a purely streaming economy, which will happen, why does an artist need a music label at all?"

Pitchfork: Who do you think will come out on top in the streaming music battle? 

SW: Well, first of all, it's important to remember that, although Apple seems predominant, they only control about 20% of the global smartphone operating system market worldwide. The biggest player by far is Google's Android, and Google is currently testing it's own service called YouTube Music Key, along with a bundled subscription to YouTube itself, which would give you ad-free access to all their music videos. So that could prove to be just as powerful as Apple Music. Between them, those two companies control 96% of the smartphone OS market, and they have $100 billion to burn. That's powerful competition. Simultaneously, though, it's possible that something like Spotify can still succeed. [Spotify founder] Daniel Ek often refers to Dropbox, which still does quite well even though both Google Drive and Apple Cloud are out there. The worst thing that could happen from a consumer's perspective is that these services start bidding wars for artists to sign exclusive deals, and then the biggest stars are scattered among three or four services.

Pitchfork: Which would likely just give way to more piracy.

SW: I would think so. For musicians, it’s like facing a difficult two-front war with the pirates on one side and the streaming services on the other. I actually think the reason the industry is finally winning the war against piracy now is because they’ve ended up with a superior service. For the first time in probably 15 years, they can provide something that's better than the jerry-rigged systems that the pirates were building.

But paying $120 a year for music is a lot. During the peak of the CD boom, people were only paying about $70 a year on average, and the average iTunes account generates $12 a year in sales. So if they can really get 100 million people to subscribe to these models, it's bank. And it fucking costs nothing for them to do this. I mean, it costs some money, but the infrastructure is way less expensive compared to building gigantic music retailers all over the country.

Pitchfork: In the book, you mention that Steve Jobs once tried to get Morris to start a label at Apple, and it seems like Apple Music is attempting to groom its own stars now. Do you think this could be the beginning of the end for traditional music labels?

SW: From some perspectives, streaming is great for musicians, but it gives the streaming services a ton of fucking power—more than labels, actually. Getting sponsored on the front page of a streaming service could be a massive thing if there’s a lot of subscribers. And they will seekto control that channel of distribution and play favorites—every radio station does that already, and these services will too because they’re not even regulated by the F.C.C. concerns that govern classic radio play. So there’s a huge moral hazard, and that’s a problem. I think more artists are just gonna abandon labels and go for pure songwriting in a singles mode, like a return to the early ‘60s. And the move to streaming really encourages that. 

And the major labels have to be very concerned about Apple Music specifically because while all of them bought equity stakes in Spotify, their deals with Apple probably aren’t as favorable. At the same time, they sort of can’t afford not to be on Apple. But it may eventually make them go away. I mean, why is it called a “label”? Because, historically, you smacked a label onto physical copy of something you shipped. Now that whole concept is obsolete. If you’re moving to a purely streaming economy, which will happen, why does an artist need a music label at all? Why don’t they just have the streaming service do it? If all the music labels disappeared, I don’t think it would be the worst thing in the world. We’d still have great music.

Inside Boots Riley’s new book of lyrics and commentary, Tell Homeland Security–We Are the Bomb, there’s a picture of the rapper as a kid, clutching a copy of Frantz Fanon’s colonialist takedown The Wretched of the Earth. The Oakland artist has juggled lyricism and activism for most of his life. As a teenager, one day Riley observed people shouting, "Fight the power!" in the cadence of Public Enemy while expelling cops from the neighborhood. It was a formative sight. In 1991, Riley founded the Coup, an avowedly communistic hip-hop group that defied conscious rap clichés while dishing some of the most starkly radical rhetoric around. Today, the Coup endures as a rave-up funk group. Most recently, the band issued Sorry to Bother You, an album based on a screenplay by Riley that McSweeney’s published in full last year. Recently, Riley  discussed his new book, capitalist myths, marketing insurrectionist rap, and crowd-sourced annotations. We met in his office, a narrow room spartanly outfitted with nothing more than a school desk. Floor-to-ceiling windows afforded a view of downtown Oakland below.

Pitchfork: Why’d you decide to compile your lyrics in a book?

Boots Riley: I always write knowing that people will hear it, but also hoping they’ll see it. So a lot of times I make lyrical decisions based on what looks better. Also I write based on what I saw for a video. I obsess over lyrics in the hopes that they’ll endure in different ways. I’m very precious about it. I could live with album, CD, and tape covers where you can read the lyrics, but those are going away. People have the same albums digitally. People ask me questions about songs that used to be answered on the jacket.

Pitchfork: The lyrics are online, but you don’t have any control over their presentation.

BR: When Google has convinced everyone that the company should be responsible for archiving everything in the cloud, things are going to go missing. We’re not going to know why. Later on, people won’t be asking why. That’s a really pessimistic observation, or one that assumes we have the same system in the future. But yeah, that’s another reason to put it on paper.

Pitchfork: Since we’re talking about a book of rap lyrics in 2015 I should ask about Genius, the website.

BR: The annotations can be part of a conversation so long as people aren’t looking to Genius for definitive answers. Sometimes it’s presented in too authoritative a way. There are answers to, "What did the author mean?" But the author doesn’t always say them out loud. Also, there are songs I listen to and maybe interpret differently than the author meant. The idea that there’s a proper definition of a slang term is a different sort of analysis altogether… Basically, though, there are [songwriters] who are good at talking but don’t have anything to say. And they’re the ones who say a lot. They have a vocabulary. They have a long way to explain nothing. A lot of them are on that site. … Sometimes it’s like in Airplane! with the woman translating "jive."

Pitchfork: I think you mention in the book that Steal This Album was the first record where you did print the lyrics.

BS: I always wanted to but the label would be like, "Nuh uh. That’s five more cents per." With our first couple albums we didn’t get a lot of props for quote unquote lyricism. We got that later on. Critics didn’t know the Coup until Robert Christgau started writing about us. And once I put the lyrics on there, then people were like, "Oh yeah, ya know, maybe they can write good."



But also the music sort of set it up to be taken a certain way or not. "Not Yet Free", which was our first single off the first album, had this slow, rolling beat. It went for a minute and a half before I started rapping. I thought dudes would be riding down the street for a while and settle into it first, but like, people don’t really listen like that. I believe it was in the Source, a review said, "More slow rolling gangsta rap from Oakland, California." We were pissed off about that at the time. But it actually built our fan base.

Pitchfork: Right. Folks figured that intellectual, political hip-hop sampled jazz but g-funk production was for street stuff, which is sort of bunk in general but especially for the Coup.

BR: Exactly. We were pissed off because people thought we were just following trends because of our production, or we were dismissed as political rap. Even people who said they were into political rap, a lot of them didn’t want to listen to it. They just liked that it existed! A lot of the industry folks say it would’ve been different for us if we came after the Fugees broke, but at the time no one knew how to market it. This was a time when there was an extreme marketing gap.

Pitchfork: One theme of your lyrics and the commentary in the book is what you call "the myth of Black capitalism." Why do you return to that in the lyrics so much, this sense of economic mobility as fairy dust?

BR: It’s a main ideological element that’s used to keep people out of movements and make them feel that it’s just them fucking up. …That’s why I countered it so much in the music. I’d have these conversations with E-40. He had a totally different situation because he had money from other things, so he was able to hold out for a certain kind of deal. Back then I believe there was a back and forth going on between us in some of the songs about it. It’s funny, like with 50 Cent lately, there’s no way people can accept that he’s struggling. They don’t want to believe it. If they are able to believe it, it’s only because they’ve decided that he really went out of his way to fuck himself over.

Pitchfork: It was interesting to read you on the few songs inspired by Occupy. But there aren’t many songs in your discography that chronicle specific acts of resistance. Is that a conscious decision, a way to avoid sounding didactic?

BR: I just worry that it won’t be that interesting to a lot of people. A lot of my music is for organizers, for keeping them inspired. I don’t have a lot of, like, insider raps. "The Name Game" is the only one where I rap about the industry. There were a lot of rappers who were like industry rappers. Chronicling what was happening on an action or a campaign would be like my equivalent of that and I wasn’t into it. It wouldn’t move me enough to think that it would move other folks. I can imagine doing it in such a way that made people want to be a part of something.

Pitchfork: You write about incorporating an intersectional view of oppression into "Me and Jesus the Pimp in a '79 Granada Last Night". How did you arrive at that perspective?

BR: When we talk about all of these various kinds of oppression that capitalism deals out, the thing about it is that they’re utilitarian; they’re necessary to keep capitalism going. Different kinds of oppression evolve to maintain exploitation. Capitalism needs racism and sexism to support class. Capitalism works for very few people. Racism against people of color is detrimental for everyone and sexism against women is detrimental for everyone. It impedes our ability to live life fully. That’s where that song comes from. It’s not about how so and so shouldn’t talk about this, it’s the idea that a class analysis gets you an understanding of how the whole world works and dictates that you have to destroy the system.

Pitchfork: In the book, you’re also a little derisive of the song, calling it "masturbatory" and suggesting that it’s too long.

BR: I like the epic story. The issue with it being masturbatory is that less people hear it. That song, we had to edit it down to like five minutes to get a few video places to play it. It only got played once on BET after I had a public back and forth with the president of the network. It got played once and didn’t get played again until YouTube came out. If I were the pure agitprop facilitator that some people say I am I’d be making three-minute songs only, with sixteen bar verses. Our verses had sixty-four bars back then. Our first album had no choruses. We thought the label would try to make us sell out by adding choruses. That was the artistic ego. It’s funny that people call what we do pure agitprop, because I can see that I’m not doing agitprop very well. I make a compromise between what I know will work in a political sense and what I think is good, what sounds good.

Photo courtesy of NBC/Peter Kramer

The sounds Black people make are the brick and mortar of the United States. Literally. The enslaved African’s singing was a driving force for the free labor that built a young nation and put it at the forefront of empires. Historically, Black Americans have been amongst the primary influencers of music culture. The genres that were born of Black misery, triumph, endurance, protest, and expression have changed the way the entire world sounds. But it’s undeniable that many of these songs were and still are shaped by the fatigue of the constant protest that comes with Black existence.

As the son of a Black Southern Pentecostal minister, I’ve had the privilege of sitting among the serene sounds of praise that birthed a nation of noir notes. Just about every genre that has risen to popularity is from the offspring of the Black church. If you listen closely enough, you can hear Black American beginnings on this continent in our cultural songs: one part culture, one part community, one part family, one part fear of fire and brimstone. The tears that beg to line my face when I hear Mary Pickney’s "Down on Me", Janie Hunters’ "Jonah", or Mahalia Jackson’s "How I Got Over" retrace Fredrick Douglass’ words:

"I have sometimes thought that the mere hearing of those songs would do more to impress some minds with the horrible character of slavery, than the reading of whole volumes of philosophy on the subject could do….The mere recurrence to those songs, even now, afflicts me; and while I am writing these lines, an expression of feeling has already found its way down my cheek. To those songs I trace my first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery."

It’s important to note that the act of this singing was more than entertainment for plantation overseers or solely expressions of sadness. In its purest form, the slave’s singing was an act of protest. Its beauty and expression transcends the pervasive hell that was the environment that allowed them to be enslaved.

Black existence is an act of rebellion in and of itself, most especially in art. Black people have sung songs amid the persistent onslaught of struggle in the United States, though not exclusively. Enslaved Africans pioneered music like Cumbia, tango, and rumba across the Americas and integrated self-defense and music in Brazil with capoeira. Here in North America, all of the elements of our African diasporic kin’s musical instincts are present in our musical traditions, too.

Since the days of chattel slavery, we’ve heard as our songs have taken different shapes, changed. Jazz’s earliest beginnings in the Congo Square of New Orleans were moments of sanctification, through the allowance of Whites for them to congregate there, to evoke their traditions and make music. Jazz has been consistent in this way over decades. Artists like Nina Simone and Charles Mingus made outspokenness a part of their reputation over the years with songs like "Mississippi Goddam" and "Fables of Faubus". Miles Davis became the embodiment of Black protest to many through his unwillingness to bend to White standards, insistence that Black women grace his album covers, and even making a tribute to "Black Jack Johnson". Other imaginative artists like Sun Ra created other, better worlds for Black people through their music. Some artists like Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln infused what they could into Black protests through their art. In the song "Triptych: Prayer/Protest/Peace", from the classic Black resistance jazz album We Insist, you can hear the waves of emotion Lincoln pours into her vocals. At one point in the song, she arguably sets a shrieking standard for punk rock before the genre officially existed, but not before evoking the symbolic moans of gospel and the blues. The revolutionary nature of Black music always comes back to that starting point.

The blues are Black survival music. While many songs deal with the everyday issues, others from blues’ earliest beginnings up to contemporary times are blatantly political. Three songs about my infamous home state of Alabama come to mind: J.B. Lenoir’s "Alabama", Lead Belly’s "Scottsboro Boys", and John Lee Hooker’s "Birmingham Blues". You can find countless songs about Alabama because it was one of the starting points of the "great migration" Blacks made when they left the South fleeing oppressive violence. Furthermore, it was once the cradle of the civil rights movement and Black activism itself.

Much of the music that defines what most know as Black protest songs are civil rights era protest music. Songs like "We Shall Overcome", "A Change Is Going to Come", "We Shall Not Be Moved", and "Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Round" set the stage for what many millennials like myself would come to know as the movement songs. Documentaries like Eyes on the Prize were filled with these songs as soundtrack to the brutality of White supremacist violence against Black people.

I must admit that seeing these images of Black people singing while being beaten ruthlessly felt self-defeating and depressing as a child. The eternal words of Malcolm X, "stop singing and start swinging," come to mind. Though there should not be any diminishing of the importance of any particular type of protest music, the current Black generation has moved toward a more confrontational approach.

The Black children who grew up around "What’s Goin On", "Say It Loud – I’m Black and I’m Proud", "Little Ghetto Boy", and "(Don’t Worry) If There Is a Hell Below, We Are All Going to Go" would go on to create hip-hop, rap, and contemporary R&B music. Black music has always been gradually becoming more and more blunt. But through the decade leading up to Reaganomics, the the bold lyrics of acts like Sly and the Family Stone ("Don’t Call Me Nigger, Whitey"), the Last Poets ("Wake Up, Niggers"), Camille Yarbrough ("Little Sally the Super Sex Star (Taking Care of Business)"), and Gil-Scott Heron ("The Revolution Will Not Be Televised") influenced the generation that would influence us.

I was a toddler during the L.A. riots and I grew up through the '90s. A lot of my younger peers barely even remember 9/11. They were coming of age during a time a time when Nas said that hip-hop is dead and sparked a debate about consciousness within the culture. Therefore it’s not surprising to see what’s happening musically at Black protests around the country.

This generation of Black protesters singing Lil Boosie's "Fuck the Police" and Archie Eversole's "We Ready" in Ferguson is a reflection of what we’re accustomed to. This is the inherited defiance of Black power infused with a lack of concern about respectability politics. Some people among us have come to realize that those who hate our Blackness do not care if our pants are sagging or if we’re wearing a suit like Dr. King—we can be killed either way. Despite this revelation for some, it still doesn’t sit well with some older Black folks. Barbara Reynolds recently lamented hearing Kendrick Lamar’s "Alright" among young Black activists in the Washington Post, writing:

"I listened to the song, expecting it would be as uplifting as 'We Shall Overcome.' I was terribly disappointed. The beat was too harsh; the lyrics were nasty and misogynistic.

'Let me tell you about my life / Painkillers only put me in the twilight / Where pretty pussy and Benjamin is the highlight.'

Instead of imparting understanding, the song was a staunch reminder of the generation gap that afflicts civil rights activism, and the struggle it is going to take to overcome it."

Some things will never be understood or sit well with those who came before us, just like saying 'Black and proud' didn’t sit well with my Grandmother. She despised the term 'Black.' But the condescending tone with which some elders dismiss the sounds of Black protest today would have you think we invented profanity, misogyny, and nastiness, all of which are present in the aforementioned genres and many artists I’ve named. Ironically, the song she laments (and the entire album it’s on) is filled with jazz, soul, and spoken word.

Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, D’Angelo’s Black Messiah, and Janelle Monáe’s "Hell You Talmbout" are just a few recent musical examples of a rejuvenated young Black movement. These albums and other songs younger Black folks identify with feed protest and rebellion. When I stood watching Monáe perform "Hell You Talmbout" in Chicago, I thought again about how she was taking it back to the starting point, the essence of Black protest music. I could hear the civil rights era, I could hear the blues, and I could hear gospel.

Despite anyone’s feelings about our music, White supremacy is the problem and not how we choose to sing about life as we deal with it daily. This generation is going to sing, rap, and play just like every generation that came before it. I’m proud to see a resurgence of many of the elements of our beautiful Black culture always moving toward a Black future. We always change it up while others lag behind, still trying to imitate what we were doing yesterday.

From Africa, all throughout the diaspora, and to this very day we’re still making music. Despite everything that’s happened we still sound transcendental. I have learned to take pride in knowing my ancestors would be happy we’ve survived and we’re still pushing, unsubdued. That always sounds good.

In Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous, we see Philip Seymour Hoffman as Lester Bangs imparting the film’s protagonist, 15-year-old wannabe critic William Miller, a stand-in for Crowe, with some koans of the trade. "True music, it finds you," he tells him, as if both their lives depend on it. But what about when someone finds it for you first?

It’s 1969 in Almost Famous when William’s sister Anita gives her little brother a bag full of her favorite records, a time when rock was still a tangible corrupter of youth, a rejection of tradition. But in 2000, the year Almost Famous hit theatres, rock was far from that disruptive, cultural revolution. When Anita gave William these records it was like she was giving them to the 15-year-olds in the audience: at a time when Blink-182, Limp Bizkit, and Linkin Park were rock’s monolithic envoy, Almost Famous was trying to sell us on the majesty of Zeppelin.

Fifteen years later, Cameron Crowe’s love letter to the music of his youth continues to stimulate (false) nostalgia in young fans who long for a sincere group sing-along of "Tiny Dancer" that their self-consciousness could never allow, who are searching for a short cut into discovering what music is significant. Gifting musical memory in film, through a mixtape, a song that will "change your life", or, in this case, a stack of pre-loved records, is a familiar and loaded film trope. Just as Almost Famous is trying to recapture a moment (even if that moment was the death rattle of Rock and Roll™), the gifting of music is a fight against the end of something. It’s a way to relive that feeling of the first time you hear a song that enchants you, by stoking that same feeling with a surrogate song or album—ultimately it plays into our love of pre-packaged nostalgia.



Almost Famous filled our brains with the romance of girls who named themselves after Beatles songs, mustachioed critics who’d would stay up all night on speed just to fucking write about the experience of an album, and people sitting around and discussing music with all the divine weight reserved for God or death. It should, by all means, have been a 90-minute parade of saccharine garbage, but it wasn’t.

The film hinges itself on the scene in which Anita passes on her record collection to her lonely little brother. When 11-year-old William discovers the stash of LPs that Anita has left him in the wake of her leaving home, he flips through them carefully, pausing to gasp at Pet Sounds and trace the faces of a Jimi Hendrix Vishnu with his fingertips as Simon and Garfunkel hum softly in the background. This scene is longer than it needs to be, which is exactly why it is perfect. It should be indulgent because receiving this kind of gift has emotional weight, particularly for a sheltered kid who obediently stares into a candle flame while listening to "Tommy", as he was instructed to do. Self indulgence isn’t always a bad thing; it’s about devouring the things you like without shame or discipline, which is what being a fan is all about. Anita promises William that "one day, you’ll be cool" and encourages his interest. Four years later, as he listens to Lester Bangs wax lyrical about the "vast scenic bridges and angelic choirs" music creates in your brain, he smiles because he knows he has found his people.

Anita’s gesture changes William’s life. His obsession with rock music gives him access to a cadre of fellow weirdos bonding through the currency of "being uncool". In the Miller house, rock'n'roll is a distraction from true art, a trivial trend about "drugs and promiscuous sex". To Anita, these songs are expressing what she can’t, which young people will never stop advocating at times when it’s true, and times when it’s not (it’s romantic to say, "I can’t quite explain it; maybe this song can," as if your emotions are so profound and complex that words just won’t cut it). Anita gives William her record collection because she wants to offer him escape from their restrictive home life and introduce him to the language of her rebellion, because she knows these songs and albums are transportational.

In most portrayals of these a-ha moments, these gift of music scenes, the giver is much less generous than Anita—they are condescending snobs, high-minded scholars—with High Fidelity serving as prime example. Record store owner Rob makes a potential girlfriend a mixtape because he finds her a "promising" student. Music is not about freedom or rebellion in High Fidelity, it is something to be studied. There are rules to constructing the perfect mixtape. When Rob realizes himself to be a bit of a manchild asshole at the end of the film, he completes his emotional journey by making a mixtape full of songs that he knows his girlfriend already likes. Suddenly, music is no longer a way to assert his cultural dominance and superiority; it’s an affirmation of his love. Conversely, in Pretty in Pink Andie uses music as a way to flirtingly mock Blane’s mainstream-ness but also invite him into her world. Blane asks Andie for musical recommendations at her record store job as a way to show her that he’s cool with her scene; even if Madonna is a little too "deep" for his tastes. Initially, Andie recommends a "white hot" Steve Lawrence record, in part to tease him but mostly to test him out. Pretty in Pink uses music to show the gulf between Andie and Blane’s worlds, but also their curiosity about each other.

The film that comes closest to Almost Famous’ desire to mythologize musical memory is The Perks of Being a Wallflower, in which, upon hearing "Heroes" by David Bowie for the first time, teenagers Charlie, Sam, and Patrick actively decide to have a ‘moment’. They cast their musical memory in amber while it happens, and when Sam later finds the mystery song on a mixtape and gives it to Charlie, they try to relive the moment again. As they listen to "Heroes" while tearing down a scenic bridge at night, Charlie rhapsodizes about the passing of time and reflects on that feeling when "you’re listening to that song, on that drive, with the people you love most in the world" while that moment is actually happening. This yearning to crystallize a perfect musical moment is achieved through gifting someone else your memory just so you can live it again. This kind of recreation never works in the same way, because trying to duplicate a perfect moment rarely does. But Charlie tries to parrot Sam’s reaction to first hearing "Heroes" anyway because it makes him feel a part of something, it makes him feel "infinite".

How authentic can our feeling be when we’re conscious that our reaction to gifted music is meant to mirror the receiver’s reactions? Maybe it doesn’t matter. In the case of both Almost Famous and The Perks of Being a Wallflower, to share in nostalgia, even if it’s secondhand nostalgia for a time you didn’t experience, is to feel like you belong someplace. Just because music is gifted in these films to produce a particular reaction does not lessen the receiver's appreciation of it. Music is used as an anchor to memory, and the past will always hold more resonance than the present ever does, because we can tweak it to our liking. In Almost Famous Anita wants William to also be "set free" by the records that inspired her own rebellion. By the time that William is 15 and actually able to engage with the culture, he’s told it’s too late. But just like 15-year-old rock fans watching Almost Famous in 2000, he’s happy that "at least I’m here" for a little taste.

Almost Famous is an embodiment of the gift that sets its narrative in motion. Just as Anita passes on her memory to William, Cameron Crowe does so with his audience as to preserve it in a time capsule. It’s a romantic celebration of what he considers to be rock’s salad days, of being at a creative epoch that could never be repeated, of the glorified idea of a time and the ways that it probably wasn’t all that glorious. It gets to the heart of fandom: nothing is quite as good as that first high, but you try to repeat that feeling anyway. In the film, Sapphire the Band-Aid explains that to be a fan is to "truly love some silly little piece of music, or some band, so much that it hurts". Like fandom itself, Almost Famous refuses to be embarrassed by the earnestness of reliving this memory. Gifting a musical memory makes you vulnerable as hell, but Cameron Crowe knows this. All he wants for us is to feel exactly like he did the first time he stood side of stage at a rock concert, with other teenagers pretending to be grown-ups, who closed their eyes and swayed to the music, committing a feeling to memory before it had even finished.

As a general rule I try not to get overly emotionally invested in objects, and there are certain types of them that I particularly try not to get attached to. It’s better not to think of "owning" sunglasses, headphones, or bikes, but to consider them on loan to you until they get broken or stolen.

Recently, like a hardboiled cop in a '90s action movie, I fucked around and broke my number one rule, and fell in love with a pair of sunglasses. They weren’t anything special: a pair of knock-off Ray Ban Erikas that I bought in a two-for-one deal from a street vendor last summer. The other pair I lost pretty much immediately, but the fake Erikas hung in there through a year of heavy usage and knocking around my bag without a case, including two different trips to Europe. Somehow the more trashed they got, the deeper they burrowed themselves into my heart.

Either through fate, or else something weird in my subconscious, I finally lost them on the way back from picking up a pair of Ghostly International’s new sunglasses. I’m a big fan of Ghostly, both for the quality of the music they release and for their willingness to question what it is a label does, then offer interesting experiments as possible answers. They put out an album in the form of a sculpture. They gave away their entire catalog of recordings to anyone in Ann Arbor, Mich. with a library card. And they’ve curated a selection of designer-y nonmusical goods on their webstore that they could easily spin off into their own online lifestyle boutique. Among them, two different styles of sunglasses produced in collaboration with Warby Parker, including the new Henning model.

They’re very nice sunglasses, which is probably good considering that they cost $145. But how do they compare to the ones I just lost?

Looks-wise it’s a draw. The Henning has a rounded frame with a keyhole bridge and looks like it might have some Erika DNA in it. They’re a little smaller than my old glasses, which is a problem since my old ones were what I consider to be the perfect size, and once I find something that fits me perfectly, wearing anything else gives me anxiety.

On the other hand, the matte black single-sheet cellulose acetate and Japanese titanium the Henning’s made out of are a huge improvement over visibly garbage-quality plastic that’s endured a solid year of constant, careless usage. Similarly, the Henning’s polycarbonate lenses offer a crisp, clear view of the world unsullied by the smeary blur of dozens, or possibly hundreds, of tiny scratches from spare keys and USB thumb drives.

The Hennig is an improvement over my old broke-ass sunglasses on nearly every single metric by which the experience of wearing glasses should be judged (especially if feeling like a cool German techno DJ is a quality that you’re looking for in a pair of shades). After a lifetime of wearing sunglasses in the single-digit price range, I can now understand why people are willing to splash out more.

And yet it still remains to be seen if they can ever take the place of my lost shades. I love these, but I’m not sure I can ever be in love with them. I broke that rule once, and I’m still feeling the pain.

On my 16th birthday, the girl I was dating at the time made me a mixtape. Mixtapes are fail-safe gifts, hers even more so considering she had better music taste and was much cooler than me (and probably still is). On that CD, between some Fueled by Ramen deep cuts and, naturally, Butch Walker’s "Mixtape", was a song I’d come to cherish over the years, not so much for the connection to the person who made me the mixtape but to the feeling of existing in that Autumn. The song was "Overdue" by the Get Up Kids, though it wasn’t something she ripped from her CD collection. It was a 128 kbps mp3 very clearly ripped from the early days of YouTube. I’ve kept that same file with me for nearly a decade, its muffled, watery compression migrating from iPod to computer to phone over the years.

For a certain point on the timeline of music discovery, quality wasn’t a defining factor. In the dawn of mp3 players, the big draw was the amount of music you could carry with you. "Your entire library in your pocket" is how Steve Jobs put it when he introduced the iPod in 2001. When filesharing subsequently exploded, there were no rules. Low bit-rate mp3s colored the experience of music discovery in the early 21st century. While often Limewire, Kazaa, or Napster would allow you to sort search results by bit rate, it was an afterthought. Piracy was always about convenience over quality, and especially considering the original iPod had only 5 gigabytes of hard drive space, listeners wanted to bring as many songs along with them as possible. 128 kbps used to be the baseline, and iTunes still labels it as "Good Quality" in their import settings; saying that on most modern music piracy enclaves would get you laughed off the forums.

I’ve come to love these awful quality files. In most cases, listening to their lossless versions just doesn’t sound right to me. My 128 kbps version of Mario’s "Let Me Love You" still has the intro skit from the music video attached, hearing the song without it is jarring. With each layer of compression you can practically hear the thousands of others who shared and copied the same mp3, like a destructive digital fingerprint. Songs ripped from CDs, uploaded to streaming sites, shared via P2P, and burned back to a CD mixtape have incredible amounts of distortion, something akin to today’s over-compressed Instagram memes. Those memes (the author of the linked article calls them "shitpics") carry the signifiers of their virality, a byproduct of a missing repost option on Instagram and its users ingenuity to circumvent that barrier to share another photo of Kermit sipping the tea.

There’s a brilliant quote in an old Blogariddms podcast post that describes the joy of listening to an old mp3 of poor quality. Justifying the inclusion of a beat-up sounding track, they declare: "Tracks like the insane, taut Ruff Sqwad anthem 'R U Double F' … a 64 kbps straight-off-Limewire, never-released work of genius. It's an mp3 dubplate, and the grooves have been battered into submission by repeated compression (we've included many low-bitrate tracks in this mix, because for us fucked-up sounding mp3s were a massive part of listening to music from this era)."

I’ve got dozens of tracks like these on my computer still. A 58 kbps copy of Kyuss’ "Supa Scoopa and Mighty Scoop" that sounds like it’s being played through a payphone. A bootlegged CD of Hendrix demos transcoded up from somewhere to 128 kbps. And for a good majority of so-called lo-fi music, or the delta blues and folk music I grew up on, tape hiss and surface noise are necessary affectations that enhance the mood of the piece. There’s a certain point where the desire for flawless sound is outweighed by your nostalgia for hearing it in a familiar way. It explains the near universal admiration for a crackling vinyl record, or the recent fascination with VHS distortion.

When we think of paragons of music consumption, we think of audiophiles: obsessives with mountains of vinyl records and expensive high-end sound systems meticulously calibrated. It’s clear they love music, look at how much time and money they put into hearing it just as the band intended. The push for high quality digital music in recent years with Neil Young’s questionable Pono Player and Tidal isn’t just ridiculously trite—it's verging on classist. Very few can afford $300 Sennheisers and thousand dollar turntables to truly experience their exclusive Record Store Day Remastered vinyl. Tidal HiFi is $20 a month, a Pono Player is $400. Soundcloud and YouTube are free. For music fans, kids under the age of 18, the majority of whom listen to their music on little or no income, price supercedes quality.

The underwater compression of a low-quality mp3 is our generation’s vinyl crackle or skipping CD. It’s a limitation of technology that defines the experience of an era. It’s Kumiko, nose pressed against the screen, watching a decaying VHS copy of Fargo for the 150th time. Simon Reynolds, in his 2011 book Retromania, claims "cassettes could be considered a hauntological format because, like the scratches and surface noise on vinyl, the hiss of tape noise reminds you constantly that this is a recording." Low-quality mp3s function in the same way, the only difference being cassettes are no longer the primary medium of choice. When we talk about the coldness of digital music in comparison to the "warmth" of vinyl, we neglect to highlight the peculiar characteristics of digital compression. If it takes someone inventing a Silicon Valley-esque super algorithm to make mp3s obsolete until we can appreciate the quirks of the medium, the sentiment will be long overdue.

This past Sunday night, during the Emmys, Apple Music premiered the first of three advertisements directed by Ava DuVernay and starring Mary J. Blige, Taraji P. Henson, and Kerry Washington. It's a beautiful 60-second moment, shot in a documentary style that captures what happens when three grown, music-loving sisters get up for tea. There's much aspiration afoot: Mary's house is Pinterest-ready, as are the ladies' hair and outfits. The trio dance, giggle, and lip-sync. Its casting is as much about three accomplished black women who are living icons as it is about cashing in on the cultural capital of good feelings their characters and projections have represented over the years. We’re not just getting these stars—we’re getting My Life, and Olivia Pope and Cookie Lyon, avatars Queendom. It's beautiful, until it's not.

Halfway through the commercial, Livvy, wondering how Mary was able to whip out Slick Rick's "Children's Story" as an inaugural jam, marvels at the efficiency of Apple Music. "It's like you have a boyfriend that makes you mixtapes in your laptop," she says. While this is infinitely more appealing to women than having a struggle rapper boyfriend who records his mixtapes on your laptop, it begs the question: Why is the musical experience of these three accomplished women being centered around men? It's as if the commercial goes out of its way to fail the Bechdel Test. It's not just a momentary slip of dialogue, either. At the clip's conclusion, the service is billed as an "Instant Mixtape Boyfriend Experience." Here, women are still treated as ancillary, even when they're primary.

Playlists, the new mixtapes. Go ahead ladies! @maryjblige@kerrywashington@TherealTarajihttp://t.co/cctGZAhwuPhttps://t.co/VTnkmeEr4E

— Apple Music (@AppleMusic) September 21, 2015

The notion that the best way to introduce a streaming music service to women is to present it as an emotional dildo is confounding. And the approach—using Ava and Mary and Livvy and Cookie—of enlisting three women who are currently some of the most accessible and relatable avatars of female independence is manipulative. (It's also a shrewd execution borne of necessity—Beyoncé, Nicki Minaj, and Rihanna have equity in Apple Music competitor Tidal, so all other streaming services going for the sister-girl market, are going to be regulated to those that follow in their billion dollar wake.) Any detractors are not coming at Apple, they're coming at some of the most beloved Black women in pop culture and risking Livvy stans going B613 on dat ass. By putting our heroes in the line of fire, Cupertino has initiated the best defense system in the world.

Unless you're some sort of racist misogynist who despises joy, it takes a lot of energy to hate on the moments of revelry in the clip. DuVernay's directing is sublime, coming off like a reality show that actually shows reality. The minute is warm and intimate and full of black sass and friendly mean-mugging and spirited hair whipping and, oh my, "It's All About the Benjamins". (If you've ever seen a black woman lip sync Lil' Kim's verse on "The Benjamins", you know that you keep your damned mouth shut and applaud until those eight bars are over, if you know what's good for you.) Watching these women—Black women—partake in this level of unbridled fandom is inspiring, giving you all the feels in 3-D sound. It's a fever dream of a tangible reality—Celebrities! They're just like us! But there’s a discordant echo of the male experience in a context where it's totally not needed.

Perhaps, even this critique rings as more of the same—with a male figure mansplaining to women that their happiness is poisoned fruit. Maybe the issue at hand is about women's representation of their own experiences, not the interpretations of a Y chromosome gaze. It's hard to tell, and harder to speak about as a man, without coming off as an asshat. A conspiracy theorist would assert that the lords of Infinite Loop knew what they were doing by playing to the emotional centers of an underserved audience. In a battle of cognitive dissonance, seeing rich and wealthy around-the-way girls doing an '80s wop to Busta Rhymes and Swizz Beatz is going to beat out any allegiances to feminist theory. It's 2015 and that's still a seditious sight. Or that could be it: It's 2015 and women are still defined in their relationships to men, so the most subversive and revolutionary thing that one can do is rock out with cocks out of the picture—even if the existence of men is implied. It's possible that acknowledging men but rendering them unseen and unheard is extremist and warranted payback.

There are two more DuVernay-helmed clips in the series to come later this week. Maybe, in the next one, the ladies will groove to Missy Elliott's "Work It" in between high-powered meetings where they reject lopsided deals to the tune of MC Lyte's "Paper Thin". Or maybe, they’ll pull over to a gas station in a drophead Rolls Royce Phantom and head nod to Lauryn Hill's "Lost Ones" while Apple Music hops out, pumps their gas and completes the transaction with Apple Pay. Because it's like having a boyfriend on your phone!


Photo by Mert and Marcus

As stereotypically gay music experiences go, you can’t go much gayer than attending the opening night of a Madonna tour. I say this fondly, and as a forty-something gay man who has seen lots of ostensibly very gay things, including but not limited to Kylie Minogue’s Fever tour, a semi-private Celine Dion concert in New York City, and multiple Erasure tours. Within the pantheon of music culture that gay men hold dear, Madonna has been serving as a defacto ambassador for nearly 30 years since. Admittedly, talking about gay diva worship in pop culture is to trade in both old stereotypes and terrible clichés, but standing outside Montreal’s Bell Centre Arena on the opening night of Madonna’s Rebel Heart tour, it’s hard not to ponder the connection, standing amid sea of excited gay men—most of them sporting Madonna shirts from previous tours, with a few of them dressed as Madge herself. A DJ outside the venue was spinning Madonna remixes and a pack of horned dancers provided "Living for Love" photo ops in front of a Rebel Heart backdrop. There were of course women, and perhaps a younger audience than expected, but Madonna’s audience of gay men is holding steady.

Since interviewing Madonna for Pitchfork earlier this year, I have often been thrust into the strange position of being a Madonna apologist in the course of conversations about her. Why does she insist on competing with teenage pop stars? (Why not?) Why does she work with the trendiest young producers? (She always has.) Why is she still showing her ass in public? (Again, why the fuck not?) It’s a curious role for someone who doesn’t even own all of her later records. As a goth teen in the late '80s, my bedroom altar was dedicated to Siouxsie Sioux, who articulated my particular strain of teenage ennui.

Still, I loved Madonna for what she represented. That she spoke about AIDS and advocated for gay people at a time when few else did was inspiring to me. When she showed up on "David Letterman" with Sandra Bernhard, the way she seemed born of a mythical downtown NYC I’d only ever read about was life-giving. Yet, after the interview ran, I was kind of amazed at how much grief I encountered on her behalf, most of which can be summed up with some version of How Dare She STILL Be Doing This. She’s always been a polarizing figure in pop culture, but as she gets older she becomes polarizing in new ways; her steadfastness and tenacity as a controversial pop icon are taken as an affront.

After all the noise surrounding the leak and subsequent release of Rebel Heart, the cape-yanking tumble at the Brits, her often questionable Instagram activity, her insistence on remaining both sexual and youthful at the age of 57 (despite the fact that media outlets talk about her as if she was 97), being in a room full of liquored up Madonna fans at the opening night of her tour is to experience her influence made manifest. Also, her longtime fans don’t give a fuck about any of that stuff. In the hearts and minds of those whose lives she has religiously soundtracked for the past 30 years, Madonna is pretty much beyond reproach.

It helps that the Rebel Heart tour, as it turns out, is the most retrospective thing Madonna has done in a decade, mostly dispensing with the thematic narratives of previous shows in favor of something altogether lighter. The show is still an outrageously choreographed spectacle—in which dancers clad as nuns poledance, and Madonna herself first appears in a gilded cage that is lowered from the ceiling—but unlike previous tours, in which she danced, sang, and yoga-posed always like a woman with something to prove. Comparatively, the Rebel Heart tour actually seems like, well, fun. She smiles. She jokes about her own image. She belts out "La Vie En Rose" while playing a ukulele. She does faithful renditions of "True Blue" and "La Isla Bonita" that resulted in nearly deafening arena-sized sing-alongs. The show itself, while still offering plenty of cuts from the new record, also showed Madonna giving a very sweet nod to her own history, something she’s seemed wary of in the past, as if looking backwards too much somehow nullifies the potential of her future.

Madonna isn’t always easy to love, even if you happen to really love her. But why should she be? She may not always give people what they want, but she reliably gives people what she wants, which is just as admirable. Her legacy at this point is untouchable—though her position in popular culture circa right now is a weirdly untenable one. Were she to abandon making new music and simply play the hits, she’d get called out for finally having become a nostalgia act. When she makes new music now—having already recorded a gazillion iconic singles—she gets shit for it, regardless of said music’s quality. Part of what infuriates people about Madonna is that, despite all of this, she remains unbowed. And this, of course, is why gay men love her.

Gay fandom is a complicated phenomenon and one, quite honestly, that I don’t always understand. But what Madonna means, particular for gay folks of a certain age, is something that is not to be taken lightly. These days it’s de rigueur for pop stars to support, embrace, and court a gay fanbase, but back in the '80s that was hardly the case. At a time when an entire generation was being lost to AIDS, Madonna was one of our biggest advocates. (She’s actually the first person I remember ever seeing utter the word "condom" on television, via her MTV safe sex PSAs) At a time when representations of gay people in mainstream media were few and far between, seeing Truth or Dare—a film that matter-of-factly depicts gay friendships in a way my teenage self had never before seen—was an unexpected lifeline. For a lot of gay kids who felt adrift in our secluded, pre-Internet teenage bedrooms, seeing Madonna cavorting with her gay dancers and actually celebrating their queerness felt like evidence that there was indeed a different kind of life out there for us—a club that might actually want us as a member.

I couldn’t stop thinking about all of these things while watching Madonna do a writhing version of "Like a Virgin" some 20 feet in front of me, a bizarro "I made it through the wilderness" moment that apparently a lot of the people in the room were also having. Aging along with your heroes is often weird. Some people—David Bowie, Patti Smith, for example—make it seem easy, cool even, while others (George Michael, I’m looking at you) make it really uncomfortable. For me, Madonna exists somewhere in the middle of those two extremes. Given that her whole career has been defined by pushing back against the status quo, it makes sense that she would continue to do so now. If she bristles at the mention of retirement (as she did when I talked to her), it’s totally understandable. People have been asking her about "aging gracefully" since she entered her thirties. Her career begs the question, at what point is anyone expected to give up doing what they love? And at what point is it considered necessary to give up on your idols and surrender to the tyranny of coolness?

As I get older, I increasingly hope the answer to those questions is never. Singing "Who’s That Girl" along with several thousand other gay men at the Montreal show proved to be surprisingly emotional for me, a rare instance of feeling part of some shared, mainstream gay experience. Watching Madonna medley her way back through the past three decades, I kept thinking about the guy in the lobby I’d seen earlier wearing a Keith Haring t-shirt and how Madonna herself had gotten choked up talking about Keith, as well as the countless other people who supported her career early on and were lost to AIDS. At some point during the show—maybe around the time she pulled out Erotica’s "Deeper and Deeper"—I scarcely noticed when my own cynicism about the whole thing evaporated while I danced. As a person who works in a culture that gleefully encourages snark and bitchiness and in which expressing admiration in a non-ironic way is often seen as a sign of weakness, it’s nice to be reminded how refreshing it is to simply love something because it makes you feel alive.

As Madonna neared the end of the show, it was nice to see that she too seemed genuinely moved by the feeling in the room. She gave up her tightly rehearsed performer posturing for a few minutes and simply became human, smiling and pausing to address the crowd. "Thank you so much for sticking with me all these years," she said. As me and my boyfriend started to drunkenly applaud, we were drowned out by the queen behind me who seemed to sum up everyone’s feelings by screaming out, "That’s right, bitch! Somehow we’re all still here. Aren’t we lucky?"

It’s a peculiar sight to behold: there’s a middle-aged man flouncing and stomping around the stage at the Apollo in Hammersmith, west London, and even though he has 5,000 people hanging on his every word, they’re still not entirely sure they can believe anything he says. "There’s absolutely no way we generate any interest from the record labels in the United Kingdom," announced Morrissey last week. "Therefore, the imminent two nights at Hammersmith are likely to be our final shows in the UK."

Not everyone’s convinced. We’ve been here before. There was a seven-year search for a record label between 1997’s Maladjusted and 2004’s You Are the Quarry, eventually released on Sanctuary’s imprint, Attack. Another seven years on and Morrissey, without a deal again, claimed he "didn’t expect to live long enough to experience an offer from a grown-up label." In 2012, he said he’d retire in two years; by 2014, he’d signed with Harvest.

In some ways, this is what it means to be a Morrissey fan in 2015: always carrying a spare pinch of salt in your back pocket. "I don’t know if what he says is necessarily true," says Moxy, a 30-year-old fan originally from the U.S. "Morrissey is famous for stoking fires." Others are similarly unconvinced. "I don’t think it’s true in the slightest," says 39-year-old Mark. "I think he’s pissed off he hasn’t got a label, but we’ll probably see him play live again." Some aren’t giving it any credence whatsoever. "He’s a bit of a moody old git, isn’t he?" says 43-year-old Harry with a shrug.

Morrissey, meanwhile, isn’t overly fussed with convincing the non-believers. When the lights dim, he marches up to the microphone and begins an acapella rendition of Willie Nelson’s "Always on My Mind". "If I made you feel second best/ I’m sorry I was blind," he sings, and it seems poised to blossom into a grandiose farewell gesture until he cuts it short. "That’s it," he declares after just two lines, sloping off, and the thread’s left there, never to be picked up again.

So begins an evening of strange second-guessing, in which you’re constantly looking for clues that he really does mean it. An early romp through "Suedehead" feels bittersweet as he grabs flailing hands in the front row and then stretches out the "Oh, it was a good lay" coda for just a touch longer than normal, as if this grand old song’s finally being laid to rest after all these years. And the grinding, punch-drunk "Speedway" that follows feels like a defiant last stand, too, as Morrissey reels on the cusp of defeat and brags, "And if you try to break my spirit, it won’t work/ Because there’s nothing left to break." But then he throws in an almighty curveball: just as it’s about to reach its juddering climax, there’s a long pause, darkness shrouds the stage, and when the lights are back up… Morrissey’s somewhere near the back with a tambourine, while one of his band closes the song by singing in Spanish. You think you’ve found a breadcrumb, and it’s quickly brushed away.

Only once does Morrissey reference that tonight is meant to be a final bow, and that’s during the one-song encore. Instead, on a night where every throwaway comment seems loaded with meaning and every song choice heavy with significance, he teases out the uncertainty. If retirement is the elephant in the room, then he’s happy to give it the occasional slap on the trunk, just to remind everyone it’s there. "I’ve said this for the last few nights but I shall say it again," he announces, as if readying a heartfelt speech. "The pain… in Spain… is mainly for the bull." Then he’s off, into the flamenco guitar flourish of "The Bullfighter Dies". Like much of tonight’s set, it’s a cut from 2014’s World Peace Is None of Your Business, and the preference for recent material rather than some greatest hits jamboree feels strange, too. "I understand there was a lot of new stuff, because he wants to finish in a ‘I’m still relevant way,’" says Brad, 46. "But I’d have liked more of the older stuff, because he was so impactful for me at a young age."



People like Brad are who come to mind when you think of the cult of Morrissey: those legions of slightly beery men who, despite not wafting around in billowy shirts unbuttoned to the navel and swinging gladioli, latched onto his rejection of masculinity’s boorish mores. "Morrissey taught us to be a feeling, emotional New Man," says Brad. "Before, everybody was a full-on fucking football fan. There was no room for poets, people who had feelings or emotions, especially young men. Everyone thought he was depressing, that you were a miserable twat for listening to it, but it was the most optimistic, heartfelt thing you could hear."

But there’s a younger generation, too, who’ve taken to him just as fiercely. Steve and Paul, in their mid-to-late twenties, came from Scotland to pay tribute. "We’re not old enough to have seen the Smiths, but they’re our favorite band," says Paul. Ruby, 17, says that everyone in her school loves Morrissey and that her family have "three copies of Autobiography at home just in case something happens to one of them." Harry, meanwhile, is with his 15-year-old son Alfie; they’ve been going to see Morrissey together ever since Alfie would sit on his dad’s shoulders at gigs. "Most modern stuff is rubbish," says Alfie. "Morrissey is a good outlet."

It makes you wonder why Morrissey hankers so much for a record label. A young audience happy enough to pay £65 ($100) for a show centered around a new album rather than sheer nostalgia would surely be savvy enough, too, to ensure the success of a crowdsourced album. Earlier this year, he dismissed Kickstarter as "desperate and insulting," but his relationship with labels hasn’t been just one-sided mistrust. His bad-spirited break-up with Harvest, in which he accused them of botching the release of World Peace… and subsequently took to wearing a FUCK HARVEST t-shirt in public, is likely to be an obstacle to finding a new home. And yet there’s a particularly memorable snippet from Autobiography in which Morrissey, vexed by another testing meeting with the Smiths’ old Rough Trade boss Geoff Travis, concludes: "I glance around his office searching for an axe. Some murders are well worth their prison sentence." Later, appalled at Sanctuary for befouling the cover of You Are the Quarry with a typo, he laments: "It’s enough to make Van Gogh want to cut off both ears." Maybe being free of the traditional release model would suit him.

When I spoke to Mozipedia author Simon Goddard for NME last year, he suggested that record labels appealed to the pop historian in Morrissey. "He is a romantic and a purist," he said. "He needs his art to be given the official kite-mark of historic quality and distinction." Mark thinks it appeals to bygone times, too, but in a slightly different way. "You Are the Quarry went multi-platinum and is probably his biggest ever album," he says. "It had a lot of promotion and marketing behind it, and he’s never really got that since. That’s probably what he aspires to." But perhaps it’s even simpler than that. "I think this [stance] could just be a moment of disgust, where he says ‘I’m not appreciated’ so he bows out," says fan Moxy. In other words: he’s human and he needs to be loved, even if those relationships often come unstuck.

Whatever he decides to do next, tonight still feels like a triumph. The old glories continue to be glorious. "Let the Right One In" is still silky and sinewy, elevated by Morrissey punching the air like a rock-’em-sock-’em robot as he pouts "I will advise/ Until my mouth dries"; "Ganglord" is a sinister, scary thud of scraping guitars, in which the police take on the guise of a dystopian, uniformed nightmare; and "Now My Heart Is Full" takes the grubby gangsters of Graham Greene’s novel Brighton Rock and turns them into the heroes of a soaring, swooping lament.



And still, Morrissey flits between career-closing ham and perpetual fly in the ointment. "Everyday Is Like Sunday" feels more than ever like a national sing-along treasure inspired by insipid seaside holidays, made even more joyful by him cackling like a pantomime dame and then repeatedly yelling, "I love you" during the outro. But "Meat Is Murder" reaches new harrowing levels with its screeching, pounding guitars that come on like the grisliest of horror scores. Behind the band there’s video footage of terrified animals being slaughtered, and by the end Morrissey’s on all fours with his face slumped near the bass drum, as if he’s so sickened he’s throwing up. Carnivores fidget uncomfortably; it’s not the cheeriest of partings.

"Our UK days conclude, but there’s no need for me to say goodbye," declares Morrissey, at last, when he re-appears for "The Queen Is Dead". "We will be close for the rest of our days." Even if you don’t think this is the last time, it still hurts to see him go. He’s stubborn enough, after all, to dig his heels in and not be back for quite some time. "Has the world changed or have I changed?" he sings. In here, it’s just the same—but the world outside might need a little longer to come round.

Photos by Ana Grillo

There’s this song. It’s a piano ballad, one written for the pre-HIV/AIDS era of San Francisco where poverty-stricken street hustlers wandered Polk Street, turning tricks and sharing burgers at the famed Grubstake diner. "I saw the best bodies of my generation sold, bartered, and destroyed by drugs and prostitution," the lyrics go, describing the "dumb men" who paid the rent and the "young men" who loved them. But "The Golden Age of Hustlers" is beautiful, too, a poetic, vivid song for gloomy cabarets and lonely spotlights, an artifact of a not-so-distant era of queer existence on the brink of vanishing entirely. And its author, "the unsinkable" Bambi Lake, lived it all.

A fixture in alt theater and cabaret troupes in 1970s and '80s San Francisco, Bambi enchanted everyone she met. With her wild beauty and pre-punk, theatrical antics, she was a source of both bedlam and irresistible energy, an early member of the Cockettes who was frequently kicked out of venues and arrested by the police. But Bambi endured, putting out a record of cabaret songs laced with glam and punk DNA in 2005, Broadway Hostess. She also never stopped performing those songs, even to this day: Bambi appears now at cabaret nights here and there across San Francisco, an unstoppable artistic force who found solace from the hardships of being a trans woman in America through song, and whose voice and music shaped countless artists coming of age in the embryonic punk and spoken word scenes of the time.

Silas Howard, the former Tribe 8 guitarist turned documentarian and director, was one of those artists. The first time he saw Bambi, she was crashing a Pride parade. "There was this tow truck pulling a fake cop car, and it was surrounded by all these punks and drag queens with baseball bats and high heel shoes smashing the cop car," Howard recalls. "And then in front of it it said ‘NO APOLOGIES, NO REGRETS.’ That was the sort of crew that Bambi was performing with." Through Howard’s time with the groundbreaking, incisive Tribe 8, he ran in the same circles as Bambi, and became enamored with her as a larger-than-life character, a rare older member of the queer artistic circle in a time when tradition and histories were being erased by the generations lost to the AIDS epidemic.

Last year, Howard returned to Polk Street with camera in tow to put Bambi on film. The resulting short documentary, Sticks & Stones: Bambi Lake, takes a stroll with Bambi as she points out old haunts and dishes on her past, intercut with interviews with longtime creative partner Birdie Bob and archival footage of Bambi performing at San Francisco clubs. The doc is a glimpse into Bambi’s art and life, while also serving as a time capsule of a fringe artist pushed to the margins of history and a San Francisco in the thick of gentrification.

Without question, Bambi’s influence has persisted. Justin Vivian Bond, the NYC-based cabaret legend and trans activist, still performs "The Golden Age of Hustlers" in their live shows, and even sang it in a tender music video that Howard and Erin Ereenwell directed last spring. Filled with a crop of current drag queens and performance artists, the video captured the impact that fringe artists like Bambi have had on current generations of outré artists. But her impact extends even further: just last month, teen fanzine Teenage News tracked her down and interviewed her.

Pitchfork: Can you tell me about the first time you met Bambi?

Silas Howard: In San Francisco, in the early '90s, Bambi Lake was performing with this group of people that were all coming out of activism around Act Up. I often tell this story of moving there as a young person and trying to find my way but not really connecting with the lesbian bar scene or the gay bar scene, and kind of hanging out with the bike messengers and going to see bands all the time. Then my best friend and I went to the gay pride parade and all of a sudden there was this commotion on the sidelines and there was this tow truck pulling a fake cop car, and it was surrounded by all these punks and drag queens with baseball bats and high heel shoes smashing the cop car. And then in front of it it said "NO APOLOGIES, NO REGRETS." It was this really wild, good-looking, sexy, performative group of people that were very irreverent. The humor was really gallows humor. For myself, I was 18, and knew "that’s my people."

Pitchfork: How was she involved in the scene you were performing in?

SH: Bambi was part of that [cabaret] scene and she was older, which, in that age, that era, anyone over a certain age in that scene was a rare thing, because so many people died. People I met that were a little bit older than me, they were like, "Just take your 20 friends and leave two, leave one." It was this mind-blowing thing that we were in the wake of. I feel like that informed all of our activism and urgency. Like, hey, you wanna have a queer punk band? Well, start it now. I opened a cafe with friends, it was the size of a bowling alley, and we pirated our electricity. We did scams to get money. We did a thing where we got bakery samples and we sold them. We had no money. But we stayed open for seven years. Kathy Acker performed there, and Kate Bornstein, Jill Gomez and Greta Schneider showed films there. Justin Vivian Bond came. It was a hole in the wall but a lot of stuff happened.

Bambi would come and hang out at the cafe as well, and because I was in Tribe 8, we played in the same world as Bambi. So I got to know her more as a personality first. And, you know, it was a big personality. And then Justin Vivian Bond covered this song "Golden Age of Hustlers" when Viv moved to New York. Bambi’s work is going places still. Whether or not she’s leaving San Francisco, that song in particular really captured this mixture of the realistic portrayal of a hustler, but also this bravado and poetry that could only come from an insider's perspective as an artist. That’s why I wanted to do this. It’s almost like a short character piece because when we did the music video for "Golden Age of Hustlers" with Justin Vivian Bond, my co-director Aaron Greenwald and I had archival footage we pulled in of Bambi, but I wanted her voice to talk about the song. So that’s what inspired going to get those two interviews.

Pitchfork: How are those two projects related? Because the music video has footage that’s also in the documentary. Was it done at the same time?

SH: Yeah. I’m obsessed with lineage, especially when there’s an interrupted narrative, which the AIDS epidemic certainly interrupted the narrative of queer history and also created a lot of things out of that interruption. When we were doing the song I wanted the idea of past and present in the same room because I feel like I hear a lot of people who are in their late twenties and downtown and in the queer and performance world of New York covering songs from people I knew in the last few years of their life. So rather than nostalgia, like "Oh, you kids don’t know," it actually felt like this attitude was still in the room. It was still part of a lot of younger people who are curious or are artists and activists. So it felt really connected. When we did the video we got this archival footage of Bambi, thank God, because Oddball Films, which is the San Francisco archival film place, is run by Stephen Parr who used to book all of those shows. So he happened to record Bambi performing.

Pitchfork: Have you shown any of it to her? Did she like it?

SH: Oh, yeah. I showed her the whole doc. She’s very out, as she says in the movie, about dealing with homelessness and health issues and addiction and stuff, but when I was getting ready to screen the short doc I couldn’t find her. I screened [the documentary] in San Francisco, screened it in L.A. at the Hammer Museum. I was like, God, I want Bambi to know this but also to see it before. So I got Birdie Bob, who I also knew. He’s such a great companion, he’s like her music husband. He’s very gentle, he understands, and places her in a way that she can’t do for herself. But I finally did find her. At the end of last summer I found her and we sat down and we watched it like three times in a row. She was really happy with it. Thank God.

Pitchfork: What is the atmosphere of Polk Street like now when you visit it?

SH: So, Grubstake is about to get closed and turned into condos. I’m really glad that even though it was windy and messy and cinematically it wasn’t the best frame, there was something about sitting right there in the front of the Grubstake. I just got a link sent to me that the new owners are gonna put a bunch of condos. Polk Street, I mean, she says it when she’s on the street, "It’s real sad." [laughs] I feel like my editor always talks me into keeping the pan to the old lady because it’s so not intentional but it does fit. It just happened. So Polk Street still has that roughness. San Francisco has been changing for a long time, and it’s really such a small, 7x7-mile city. It happens quicker than New York even, when it goes.

Pitchfork: I was actually thinking about that. There’s such a huge gentrification conversation happening right now, especially in San Francisco. Were you thinking about that when you were walking around shooting?

SH: As the city changes so much, there’s no place for people like Bambi. I think gay marriage is important and should happen, but what happens is it sort of steals the focus. Even with all the exposure around trans rights and this and that, there are still a lot of people that fall off the support network. I like that Birdie Bob says that, I know it’s a progressive time but in a way it’s also about making it and money and visibility for yourself.

Pitchfork: That was kind of shocking to me, that Bambi can’t stay in women’s shelters as a trans woman.

SH: Yeah, that’s really common. I’ve had friends from both gender spectrums [say that]. My friend who identified as female but she looked like a crazy mountain man, she was butch, and she couldn’t stay at women’s shelters even though she didn’t identify as male, she wasn’t male, she wasn’t on any hormones. It was pretty tough.

Pitchfork: I was wondering, what was the total output of Bambi’s work? I know she was recorded and put on records.

SH: Yeah, there’s a CD. She and Birdie Bob did Broadway Hostess. She put that out and she performed a ton. And she put out a book, The Unsinkable Bambi Lake. That was on all of our bookshelves. Everybody had that book. It was just her gossiping, who she slept with, who she was in love with. There wasn’t as much recording. There’s another recording besides Broadway Hostess. But she’s an amazing storyteller and singer and she’s never stopped performing. She’s never really totally disappeared. She has the book, a couple CDs, and then there’s a zine in the library in San Francisco that has a few copies, it’s like this long, epic poem.

Pitchfork: We kind of touched on this, but Bambi to me kind of represents this punk ethos of a fringe, trans, female person being given a voice. Do you think there is room for those artists anymore?

SH: I think there’s huge interest. But I think we need to be careful. I don’t know, I guess it’s a tricky thing. I know that grabbing these stories, like what you’re doing, putting this story out there, I’m so excited it’s going to be on this kind of site because she is a musician and a poet and a writer. And I love my LGBT support as a trans person, but it’s nice to have her regarded as a performer in the canon of influences of badassness. That kind of stuff really helps to show in a different light that people could have access to her.

Pitchfork: Did she influence your own music in any way?

SH: She did in that she’s in that scene. There was this spontaneity. There was this thing in the air, people looking around in a way that I think is true of anybody’s journey to a city in some aspect. You move somewhere, especially New York, you try to find your people. Keep in mind, back in that time there was no subtlety of hatred for the LGBT community. It was Jesse Helms, it was quarantining, teachers being fired. It was so not subtle. You had a lot to be angry about. It was angry, but it was also really exciting because we were very united. There’s always someone fighting but we couldn’t afford a lot because there were too many really strong enemies that just wanted us to go. And Tribe 8, we played punk shows and there’d be skinheads at the shows. I got gay bashed several times in San Francisco. So it was like Hothead Paisan, that Diane DiMassa cartoon where it’s this angry dyke walking around. It’s true as you were walking around San Francisco, people would yell dyke, faggot, this and that, which is why everyone reclaimed those words. So Bambi really influenced us in that she was this very authentic voice unlike anybody else around her and we were all trying to do that, trying to do our own weird thing because, again, nobody was gonna succeed. There was no thought of trying to make a penny. It was really like we were practicing and trying shit out and just doing things completely out of any kind of tradition. I just think she was really part of that group of people who were such beautiful nonconformists. Like really sexy nonconformists who were role models for us, for sure.

Pitchfork: Do you still follow queer punk?

SH: I do. Not so much. Tribe 8 just had a lifetime achievement award from this very amazing festival. It was in Austin, this really great group of people that run the Austin LGBT Festival, and they started a new one that’s performance and academia. The award was a gold dildo, in a glass case. That was amazing. And then the other amazing thing was all these bands did covers of our songs. So we got to watch Gretchen Phillips, and Christeene—I love Christeene. Christeene’s an amazing artist on the heels of Bambi and Justin Vivian, totally in that lineage. I love her.

Pitchfork: You also recently directed an episode for the upcoming season of "Transparent". How was that experience?

SH: It was great. The team is amazing, and Jill Soloway, the creator, she’s such a badass feminist. She’s really taking risks and doing it different. Not just in talk, but bringing people in the writers’ room who are friends of mine that I’ve known since the '90s from San Francisco from this whole era of spoken word and queer punk. So Ali Liebegott, one of the writers on the show, and then Our Lady J, who I know from New York and Justin Vivian and tons of friends who all performed in the same cabaret scene together. She’s on the writing team.

And even on the set, my two location guys, they just look like regular guys, but they’re East Bay punks! They were like, oh, I saw Tribe 8, I used to be a riot boy, I had clips in my hair. I felt like all of us weirdos were accidentally on this really big ass studio lot. It was a great vibe, it had a lot of support. And I actually got to bring in weird little talismans kind of in line with Bambi Lake and people from my music past. There’s this really amazing singer and visual artist, Chloe, who passed away a few years ago. She was in this band called Transistor, she’s a trans woman, she played through the '90s and stuff, [Tribe 8] played CBGBs with them. She set up all these organizations around HIV and trans activism. Anyway, I put up a photo of her in one of the characters’ houses, right above Jeffrey’s character, as a little history easter egg for those that know her.

Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hip-hop musical about Alexander Hamilton with a cast composed almost entirely of people of color, is finally publicly available, in part. The cast recording, which presents nearly the entire production unabridged, is streaming on NPR. While there are reasons to avoid the audio if you want to hold out for the full experience, there’s at least one perspective from which everyone can now engage with Hamilton and wonder whether something with its premise "works"—which is to say, they can ask the absolute wrong question.

Of course Hamilton works. It has strong characters, who are ably given life even without being able to see their performances. The music is catchy, thoughtful, and references several different American traditions. It’s fun as hell, and also sometimes makes you want to cry (or is that just me?). So rather than repeatedly claim that Hamilton’s success is improbable, maybe we should ask why it seems strange at all.

A "likely" musical about Alexander Hamilton would probably have been closer to a traditional, stiff, biopic-like affair. Perhaps it would have starred Hugh Jackman. It would have been bad. Critical reaction to Hamilton isn’t a surprise because there’s something "objectively" odd or off about a hip-hop musical about Alexander Hamilton—it’s because we approach the study and exploration of history, even through art, with assumptions that all too often render the players opaque and the events stale.

People of the past are fundamentally unknowable to us, to an uncomfortable extent—their lives were structured differently, shaped by different concerns and needs and conceptual structures. But at the very least, it seems safe to say they didn’t act like they were fulfilling a bad narrative arc written by some dude. The proto-mythic version of history—that George Washington could not tell a lie, Thomas Jefferson was a full-on hero, and everything they did worked out for the best—is taught to, and makes sense for, children. But it’s not appropriate for engaged adults, who should be able to understand that people in the past were still people, who, like us, can be engaged from a variety of perspectives and through a number of lenses.

A part of the genius of Hamilton is that it renders the Founding Fathers—Unknowable Historical Men if ever there were any—understandable, at least from one angle. When Hamilton meets his first New York friends at a tavern, it’s not a fated gathering of titanic figures, it’s a group of idealistic, passionate young men talking shit over beer. When the meetings of George Washington’s cabinet become freestyle rap battles, they cease to be stuffy debates from a textbook, and instead become verbally dextrous, aggressive dick-measuring contests with higher stakes. When the dandyish King George struts around complaining about his lost colonies as if they were a favorite toy (or a lover), he’s a modern archetype that provides a prism for the historical "King George."

Rendering history present and new is hard, but it’s not impossible. Take "The Knick", a period drama about medicine in the early 20th century. It should be boring and unhelpful for any purpose other than a literal (and wrong) imagining of what life was like, but Steven Soderbergh’s frenzied, claustrophobic direction and Cliff Martinez’s pulsing, ominous, electronic score force the viewer into a sense of immediacy, of forgetting that the events depicted have both already happened and never happened. Both pieces of art effectively translate the past, rendering history legible to the current observer.

There need to be a lot more rap musicals—or if not rap musicals, then at least more creative approaches to history that render it present. And if we’re going to dig things up and try to understand them from our own vantage point, we could do worse than to start with the character perhaps most poorly served by Hamilton’s approach to history: Aaron Burr.

The musical’s Burr (given voice by Leslie Odom, Jr.) is, essentially, the Salieri to Hamilton’s Mozart, bemoaning the fact that his high station has done nothing to help him keep up with his intellectually voracious, magnetic friend and rival. Miranda’s Burr is apologetic, and it’s possible the man was—but, more importantly, he also tried to provoke a rebellion against Spanish rule in parts of Mexico, ostensibly so that he could form an independent country. Yes, Aaron Burr tried to become—wait for it—the King of Mexico, and he was the center of America’s first major treason trial. That is nuts, and deserves its own dramatization.

Which is to say that history is full of weird stuff that doesn’t fit the narrative we tend to receive, and musical tools and alternate perspectives are helpful in giving us new ways of grappling with real, complicated people. At the very least, we could give the musical treatment to the guy who winds up as the butt of all the jokes in Hamilton.

Equally homage and interpretation, a cover song references as much as it reimagines. Yesterday, for a few brief hours, Father John Misty (Joshua Tillman) shared his version of two tracks off Ryan Adams’ just-released version of Taylor Swift’s 1989. Yeah, it’s like the Russian nesting dolls of covers. Taking on "Blank Space" and "Welcome to New York", Tillman’s interpretations were less homage than tongue-in-cheek criticism, serving up wry commentary about the imbalance between surface and substance in endeavors like Adams’. Tillman’s two tracks roasted the surface-level sheen existent on Adams’ 1989, which is all very pretty, but lacking significance.

Arranged and performed in the style of the Velvet Underground—with a particularly spot-on impersonation of Lou Reed from Tillman—the songs transformed Swift’s exuberant and Adams’ wistful versions into derisive renditions. After all, Tillman is the man who describes himself as a "self-styled satirist, provocateur, philosopher, and culture warrior." Take for instance his song "Bored in the USA", which pokes the existential bear by critiquing the malaise and mindlessness pervading life in the 21st century.

If Tillman’s covers yesterday didn’t immediately signify mockery—one seemingly aimed more at Adams than Swift—the caption accompanying his "Blank Space" SoundClound upload cleared up any question. "My reinterpretation of the classic Ryan Adams album 1989," he wrote, his tone practically dripping with sarcasm, the word "classic" a jesting arrow aimed at Adams and the critical reception that will most likely build the project’s novelty into something archetypal.

Adams styled 1989 to sound like Bruce Springsteen-era Nebraska mixed with the Smiths. The result, Swift said in an interview, is less cover than complete reimagining, bringing a weighty musical history to the pop star’s already-praised album. What listeners got with Tillman’s versions—at least what they got for the few hours the songs were legally available—is honesty through artifice. Under Tillman’s thumb, "Welcome to New York" became a palimpsest, barely recognizable as the original Swift song save for the lyrics, thanks to his and his band’s uncanny ability to play it in the style of the Velvet Underground. The song even exceeds the original’s tight pop time limit by an additional two minutes due to a heady jam. Leave it to Tillman, then, to one up Adams’ attempt to mine the musical past by showing off his killer Lou Reed impression. It’s a Shakespearean move à la "I do bite my thumb, sir," though intended more for comedic effect than dramatic.

Performing as Father John Misty, Tillman has never pretended his onstage persona is anything other than an affected performance designed to achieve the very verbs he transitions into identities—satirize, provoke, philosophize, and fight the cultural plateau. Recall if you will his Spotify session, where he showed up with a mobile karaoke machine that played his newest releases as MIDI songs. He is both performing a character and a performance of a character: The smartass musician.

Where Tillman is willing to lampoon his own songs at his live shows, which includes trotting up and down the stage, posing in eccentric ways that accentuate his performance-as-performance, and snarking the lyrics to audiences, he appears to take great pains to perform covers with grace, delicacy, and care. Those who have seen Tillman perform the Beatles’ "Happiness Is a Warm Gun", one of his go-to encores during his Fear Fun tour, know how his playfulness quiets down when it comes to covers. That’s when the music fan emerges. He’s covered Leonard Cohen, Nirvana, Cat Stevens, and even Arcade Fire, an oeuvre of influences or at the very least admirations. He may still parade around the stage playing Misty during those moments, but there’s an underlying earnestness that doesn’t always surface when he’s performing his own music.

If psychotropics and their vision-inducing powers helped launch the spirit, if not the career, of Father John Misty then the musician’s most recent vision has silenced him. Kind of. After releasing his covers yesterday, Tillman removed the tracks from his SoundCloud account. In their place, he released a statement less an apology to Adams and/or Swift than one aimed at making amends with the ghost of Lou Reed.

Tillman recounts his most recent dream, involving Barack Obama, a Burger King crown, and the haunting strains of Beethoven’s "Ode to Joy" lingering against that very weird and very Misty-esque landscape. It’s vaguely reminiscent of a scene out of his first album Fear Fun, replete with an ayahuasca-level revelation. Lou Reed appears towards the end to scold Tillman, saying, "Delete those tracks, don’t summon the dead, I am not your plaything." Tillman may have leaned hard on Lou Reed to make his critical point, but he succeeded in creating a spectacle equal to the problem he addressed.

Whether listeners interpret Tillman’s "Blank Space" and "Welcome to New York" as mean-spirited or comical depends upon the ear, but they are deeper reimaginings of what it means to perform a cover, and what that cover can actually say within the greater cultural melee. It’s a reminder that not all that glitters is gold.

It gets very tiring to talk about the myriad ways in which white people blatantly appropriate Black culture. It's too much to talk about and there's not enough annoyance in the world to take offense to it all. But, sometimes, the idiocy reaches peak disrespect and a white child covers Fetty Wap's "Trap Queen" in a paean to the gods of whitewashing and, well, fuck that. Something has to be said.

Granted, Fetty Wap has transcended his initial audience and is now a burgeoning pop star, but that doesn't make his song about cooking cocaine with his girlfriend fair game. The power of the song is in already its juxtapositions—it's a love song steeped in culling a hard option from dire circumstances; it’s a manifestation of street level feminism replete with his and her Lamborghinis and coed trips to the strip club. Subjecting it to full-press hipster racism doesn't make any new observations. In fact, it takes away from them. When young George Dalton sings about making pies with his baby, he's talking about actual pies, not cooking crack, which is a huge poetic step backward. (Thankfully, he's not buying his boo an actual lamb.)

The most disastrous aspect of this whole affair is that it supports a far right anti-hip-hop argument that says that rap music is some sort of Trojan Horse for bringing down American Values™, as opposed to the implications of the original song, which serve as an indictment and fulfillment of the American Dream. Where Fetty takes what's available to him to pull himself up by his bootstraps, Dalton is simply introducing kids to desperate capitalism and escapist self-medication without any of the aspirational despair and melodic danger that makes "Trap Queen" resonate. One has to ask: Where are the parents here? But that's how white supremacy functions: If this were a Black child, it would ring as an indictment on the decaying structure of the Black family. But, because Dalton is white, it's "cute".

It seems that everyone involved in this travesty knows what the song is about and just doesn't care. This is disconcerting because that would mean that the orchestrators of this song and video are parroting Black culture without even taking the time to listen to the subtext, or even caring about what is being said. #BlackWordsMatter and ignoring them suggests that the Black dysfunction born of systemic racism is a source of entertainment, not a case for concern.

It's doubly troubling because—like the worst forms of cultural appropriation—it says that white America sees and hears Black people, but it doesn't see or hear Black people. The kinds of people who make and enjoy these videos tend to cherrypick the most hurtful and ratchet parts of the Black experience to champion and mimic, but discard the ingenuity while turning a blind eye to the conditions which make selling drugs, twerking, and rapping a more viable route to economic empowerment than entering the generally-approved job market. It takes race-fueled social inequity and tries to make it cute. And there's nothing cute about that.

After an opening season so resoundingly successful that it basically rewrote the rules on what resoundingly successful TV show look like, "Empire" returns on Season 2, and like Cookie, it’s coming to take everything. The premiere of the second season had everything -- gorilla suits, cannibalism, Marisa Tomei, *Stefon voice* a severed head in a box -- and reaffirmed that the Lyon’s den is still the center of the television universe. Below, a few Pitchfork staffers sift through it all. 

Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib: I loved the first ten minutes of this episode, mostly because it felt like watching the kid who comes back to school from summer break with a week’s worth of fly shit on in order to distract you from the fact that he’s largely the same kid from the past spring who you didn’t always love, but couldn’t turn away from.

Jayson Greene: Holy shit the first five minutes of this show. Feels like being fed discussion points through a confetti canon. Swizz Beatz! The prison state! #blacklivesmatter and #icantbreathe and Cookie saying "your father is a tampon." The opening dialogue between Cookie and Hakeem is of the hilarious "every line must be exposition" variety (Cookie: "This is about us taking the Empire takeover! Stay focused!" Hakeem: "Jamal’s not gonna like this hostile takeover.") I really do not know how TV writers do this stuff—by the seventh minute, the show had clowned Don Lemon ("You did good at Ferguson!" Cookie assures him, then mutters, "He did mess up on the n-word though") and 50 Cent, who I guess is enough of a punchline now that he is mocked as a "thirsty ass" trying to make fun of "Empire" on Instagram. For rap nerds, I have to say, the realism of this portrait is bracing.

Eric Torres: God, I missed this show. Cookie was in a gorilla suit in the first like five minutes, Miss Lawrence sang "You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)", Jamal’s hot ex boyfriend reappeared, Marisa Tomei is a vulturous power lesbian (whose name is literally Whiteman!).

Hanif: I really loved the grandeur. It’s almost like anyone who ever told Lee Daniels that they liked "Empire" over the the course of the past six months got a cameo. By 9:05, we had Al Sharpton, Don Lemon, Marisa Tomei, and Swizz Beatz. I truly worry that this is going to be the last important thing that we remember Swizz Beatz for, especially since he’s reached that part of his late career slide where he’s kind of always saying the album is on its way, even though we know that it likely isn’t. With that in mind, I hope he becomes a recurring character that at least drives people back to his 2003-2009 run, when he was one of the three best producers in the game.

Jayson: You know, I feel like Timbaland thinks of Lucious Lyon the artist as basically Petey Pablo if he somehow became an untouchable mogul—I think it’s interesting that most of the "classic" Lucious Lyon deep cuts the show’s given us ("What the DJ Spins") are basically circa-'01 Ca$h Money songs cross-wired with some bits from Timbaland’s hits from the same time. The show has always been a little hazy on exactly what kind of artist Lucious is/was—he seems to have as many R&B hits where he sings and plays piano as he has rugged street-rap songs. Bringing Petey Pablo in was a nice touch, and kind of underlined how seriously the show treats pop-cultural memory.

Hanif: I had a very real moment where I thought wait...is Petey Pablo still in prison? I thought it was entirely possible that "Empire" was going for peak realism, and they filmed this episode in an actual prison where Petey Pablo just happened to be an inmate with some time on his hands. The part of this viewing experience that will haunt me the longest is the memory of Marisa Tomei dancing to Bobby Shmurda. Think about Bobby watching this episode from prison and having to process that scene, knowing that there’s nothing he can do to stop it.

Eric: The weird horror touches seemed out of place until I realized they’re just throwing whatever the fuck they want at the wall this season, at which point I accepted the severed head in the box and moved on.

Jayson: Yes on "vulturous power lesbian," Eric. I mean, you have to respect the show’s total allegiance to its soap opera roots. If you have a gay female character, she will be a leering, all-devouring succubus straight out of '50s prison films, and she will direct her omnivorous hunger in all directions. An otherwise straight woman will sleep with her to get something she wants (Cookie: "I thought I told you to sleep with her." Anika: "I did." Cookie: "You can't even dyke right.") For a show that remains one of the best places—the only real place?—in mainstream pop culture for ongoing dialogue about homophobia in hip-hop, they treated Marisa Tomei with all the writerly realism afforded to Jessica Rabbit. Can’t be mad at Tomei, though—she was just drawn that way.

Hanif: I think "Empire" is at its best when it embraces the fact that it’s a soap opera musical, and really goes all out on its absurdities. I like seeing this most when Jamal does almost anything, but I especially love how dramatic almost all of his musical numbers feel. Even in this episode, towards the end. We always get to watch him pacing, or balling up paper, or beating on trash cans. Everything we watch him do feels like work.

Eric: I also live for this show’s boardroom scenes, and the one here did not disappoint: Hakeem was on a goddamn hoverboard, Marisa Tomei used the swivel chair to great dramatic effect, and Lucious dialed in from jail, because you can do that at will, apparently. My questions: Why was Chris Rock’s character a cannibal? Why was Tom Ford mentioned twice? Why were they doing a protest concert for what appears to be a pretty cushy prison system? Is Lucious going to have a monologue this season trying to convince everyone that 1x1 is 2?

Jayson: Also, I seem to have missed the bit about Chris Rock eating people. That was people he was eating in that scene? I was clearly distracted by my amusement, after a full season spent building up Frank Gathers as the embodiment of mortal fear, by the revelation that Frank Gather is … Chris Rock. Chris Rock, even at his most actorly, is still Chris Rock, and not particularly fearsome. The show almost seems to acknowledge this by having him show up, glower at everyone, and then be murdered offstage while screaming loudly, all within the space of one episode. Bye, Frank Gathers! You clearly weren’t that instrumental to "Empire"’s plot!

Photo by Matt Lief Anderson

Jessica Hopper: Since summer is officially done here in this hemisphere, we can weigh in--officially--on what was the Song of the Summer for 2015. I will leave parameters open, and acknowledge that any dominating "song of the summer" has likely been ramping up to do so for nigh six months. Case in point, my selection—"Planes", which dropped in goddamn mid-January and is not so much my choice because the song is perfect or apt, but rather it is simply a wish for more Jeremih. A summer with multiple omnificent "ft. Jeremih" hits is some real Pavlovian conditioning. I know this is Fetty and Abel’s summer, properly, but I choose to rep local in contests like these. It is also my choice because the recent Tink singles make her sound like someone else, and because I am a reluctant comer to #JidennaHive.

Ernest Wilkins: DID SOMEONE SAY #JIDENNAHIVE?!

Meaghan Garvey: Okay look, I get it. Jidenna carries a fashion cane, dyes his beard, says "mumafucka" instead of "motherfucker," and is passionate about Jim Crow-era double round collars. It seems like a huge joke. But the weirdest thing about Jidenna, and his ode to panache as self-actualization, is that it’s not a shtick. I realized how rare this was watching the VMAs: as pop culture corrodes into an ooze of shitty memes, "Classic Man" sets you up for the punchline, then drops a manifesto about community-driven activism and radical pride on your ass. It’s also triple-reverse Iggy Azalea shade. There’s levels to this shit. Stop hating. Yea, it sounds like "Fancy". Yea, he says "I’ve got charm like a leprechaun." #JidennaHive is real.

Ernest Wilkins: TALK TO ‘EM. Look, my love for Jidenna is well-known and infinite, and while it’s my personal song of summer, I can’t call it The Song Of The Summer in good conscience. That honor is sitting in a firm three-way tie between "Insert Fetty Wap song here" (pick one—"RGF Island" is my favorite — there were a bunch, you can’t really go wrong), Major Lazer’s "Lean On", and the Weeknd’s "Can’t Feel My Face". Now that I’ve written that, it’s wholly apparent I’m wrong. The only correct answer is "Classic Man", save for the part on the "Classic Man" remix when Kendrick Lamar goes "Woo-WOO-woo!" because that’s a sound that reminds me of being drunk with my shirt off.

Jeremy Gordon: The song of the summer is Bieber's "Where Are Ü Now". It would have been "Trap Queen", but for my pointed memories of hearing it in clubs as far back as December 2014. (Call it the song of the year--for me, the song of the summer rises right as the temperature does.) It would have been "Classic Man", except that if you transplanted me to the summer of some country where no one had ever made a "classic man" joke, there’s little chance I’d throw it on. My definitive choice is "Where Are Ü Now", because it achieved the rare effect of making Justin Bieber—a man once videotaped pissing inside a bucket after flipping off a photo of President Clinton—seem anonymous, and because I saw so many of my non-music writer friends fall in love with it even after finding out ultra-heel Bieber was involved. That’s really the crux for me: "Where Are Ü Now" is so undeniable that it made Bieber—as unliked a cultural icon as any in recent memory, the pop game Donald Trump—seem like an artist. It’s a poptimist argument using sounds, not words. That is impressive, which is why it’s my song of the summer.

Jessica Hopper: JB's "What Do You Mean?" has squeaked into my late summer top 10 in part because I read it as a song about consent, and for that same reason--it felt like a foriegn hand, detached from Bieber and all his baggage. Maybe late Summer 2015 is the late-pass entry point for reluctant Biebing, between these two songs.

Anupa Mistry: I love the Soulelection-lite vibe of "What Do You Mean?", what a great song for Bieber to come back with.

Andy Emitt: If Diplo saved Justin Bieber from being the "pop game Donald Trump," the Diplo-deployed and defended "Bitch I’m Madonna" made its titular diva the pop game Hillary Clinton: inevitable, compellingly persistent, and disseminator of language both immediate and opaque. What does it mean for one to "be" "Madonna," like Nicki claims to be in her verse, anyway? Who knows, but all season I’ve used "Madonna"-as-adjective in response to anything from work emails to medical advice: Bitch, I’m Madonna; Y'all, last night was pure Madonna; Too Madonna for that, honey! In an alternate (just) universe, "Bitch I’m Madonna" became the hit song every summer needs, a celebration that asserts its own right to celebrate—thanks to the platinum durability of the Ciccone brand’s calling card. Summer itself was Madonna, irresistibly—bitch.

Sheldon Pearce: I think there are strong cases to be made for both "Classic Man" and "Where Are Ü Now", but the song of the summer is Kendrick's "Alright". It’s the song that has helped me, as a black American, get through these trying last few months and I’m apparently not alone. It was at the forefront of some of the protesting. It’s been unofficially nominated for New Black National Anthem. But enjoying it isn’t limited to being privy to the black experience, which is part of what makes it so great: It’s reprise "We gon’ be alright!"—is purposefully vague enough to be empowering for all. "Alright" is a record that somehow manages to muster up the same response at parties and barbeques that the more typical song of the summer contenders get while speaking indirectly to the current sociopolitical climate. It’s a feel-good anthem about overcoming struggle devoid of self-righteousness.

It’s probably worth noting that it has often felt like the Summer of Fetty, but there have been so many different hits spinning through setlists that it’s hard to pin one down, and as Jeremy said, the most obvious one has been out a little too long. There’s probably an argument to be made for the Weeknd’s "Can’t Feel My Face", too, because I haven’t been able to go anywhere without hearing it since like June and it gives off the more run-of-the-mill SoS vibes. But… I’m going to stick with "Alright" and stop before I somehow manage to talk myself out of it.

Minna Zhou: My Song of the Summer vote is Miguel’s "leaves", because summer is ephemeral, like relationships are ephemeral, and "leaves" does a beautiful job collapsing and kaleidoscoping between the two. Not to bust in with complete Debbie Downer vibes. The track is an ending, it’s a beginning, and it’s the limbo in between.  It’s also arguably the most vulnerable he gets on Wildheart.  The mugginess lifts in waves throughout the song, and by the end, with the kickdrum going, it feels like you’re in a drop top (doin’ hunnid, y’all in my rearview mir—jk!)—it feels like you’ve got the top down, racing through the end of the summer with the Pacific wind to your face and the promise, somewhere on the horizon, of a little restored peace. Which sounds real cheesy. But honestly, Miguel says some cheesy things with great sincerity, and I relate. The only kind of bummer about this song is knowing that Billy Corgan has a songwriting credit on it because the guitar riff is kind of reminiscent of the Smashing Pumpkins' "1979". But that’s never really affected my listening. When I first heard "leaves", it actually reminded me more of Mariah ft. Miguel’s "#Beautiful". Which I love.

Jeremy Gordon: What’s wrong with "1979"? #CorganHive

Ernest Wilkins: Wow, I had no idea. Genuinely happy to hear this, because I thought the only Billy Corgan-related news I was getting this summer was this photo:

Joking aside, I’m surprised no one else is caping for "Lean On". It’s a perfect "summer" song, equal parts empty, yet familiar. The song is inescapable but don’t really get tired of it. Yet another weird ass dolphin noise (contributed by DJ Snake). If we’re going full throttle with the metaphors here, "Lean On" was the musical equivalent of Bud Light for me this summer: Harmless and easy, plus your friends from high school all know about it.

Jessica Hopper: I forever mishear the refrain as "Ficus!/ Fire a gun!" and imagine a plant that is both deadly and decorative.

Minna Zhou: I hate Diplo.

Ernest Wilkins: Me too, which is why I can’t believe I liked this song so much.

Jessica Hopper: Thirding that motion. We can come to a quorum on Diplo, then.

Minna Zhou: I just rewatched the beginning moments of the video for that song, which was a HUGE MISTAKE, as I now need to go take a Silkwood shower, put some soap in my eyes in order to wash out those few moments of steaming appropriative bullshit from my vision. I’m not even kidding. I’ll be back when I am clean.

Ernest Wilkins: It’s that bad? I’ve never seen the video.

Wow. Uh, I’d like to retract my previous statement, pull a Sea Org and renew my #JidennaHive membership for the next billion years. 

Minna Zhou: Ok, so admittedly I hadn’t showered in 36 hours, so I was due. But also, that video is terrible.

Eric Thurm: You know what video isn’t terrible, though…?

Andy Emitt: Lets collectively recover from the sight of Diplo shirtless in a tub by imagining him self-consciously adjusting and re-adjusting the creases in his swimming trunks in between takes. Lorde knows his bulge is just as laughable as his dancing in "Lean On", which is to say VERY. Can I say the consensus is in? Diplo was the MRSA bacteria infecting The Songs of Summer 2015: gross, untreatably ubiquitous, and keeping your body in motion.

Anupa Mistry: What the hell, you guys came upon a consensus already? My personal SOTS is WizKid’s Drake & Skepta remix of "Ojuelegba" BUT! I think most people might say—and I can only ascertain this from riding in cars with friends who listen to FM radio—that the actual song of the summer was OMI’s "Cheerleader"? A song that that has been percolating on regional radio stations for years, and then somehow (someone explain how!) was elevated to a global smash this summer? I have it on second-hand info that Kanye loves this song and kept requesting it be played at the OVO Fest After Party. I mean, if there’s any song that new dad Kanye is gonna love, it’s one he can dance and sing along to with his daughter, right?

Jeremy Gordon: The only thing that keeps me from anointing "Cheerleader"—which I love—is that it goes down a little too easy. It’s like the Bud Light Lime of songs. But hell, I love Bud Light Lime, so maybe it’s "Cheerleader".

Anupa Mistry: To anyone who says they don’t love Bud Light Lime, I ask: "MMMMMMMMOhhhhmygod stoopp fuckin lyin!" No, I totally agree that "Cheerleader" is the lightest of lightweight summer tunes, and perhaps I am being too objective in my approach here, but it’s actually the song that real people (as opposed to fake people on the Internet) are listening to! Why is that?

Jeremy Gordon: To be fair, I heard "Cheerleader" outside as much as I did "Trap Queen" or "Where Are Ü Now". (My very objective metric: What song did I hear the most from cars, and at DJ sets run by my friends?) But I’m all here for a math-based approach, unless that approach ends up giving it to the Wiz Khalifa song about Paul Walker (which reigned on the charts for almost two months!).

Eric Thurm: I’m really going to have to jump in this late in the game to argue for the most obvious pick imaginable, huh? Okay, then. As much as I’m forever #JidennaHive, the honest pick for "song of the summer" (a concept I sometimes have trouble understanding) is also, from where I’m sitting, the obvious one—sorry everyone, but it’s "Trap Queen". Go ahead, CALL ME BASIC! Yes, I know it’s been out for quite a while, and I know Fetty has had a buncha buncha hits this summer, and I know that it’s been everywhere for long enough that we’re all probably sick of hearing it, talking about it, and engaging with yet another celebrity awkwardly trying to get in on Fetty mania (shouts to Kate Hudson). But that’s the whole point!  And as it becomes increasingly difficult to identify a single, unifying cultural obsession, "Trap Queen" has done it—for me, you, and my mom. If I’m trying to level with myself about what song I’ll remember as defining the summer of 2015 in 20, 30 years, there’s zero chance it’s not "Trap Queen." I don’t like having to do this, but… somebody had to get us Ready for Fetty.

Sheldon Pearce: Hoping the song of the summer isn’t "Cheerleader" because I’ve been avoiding it like the plague. If the main metric by which a song of the summer is defined is its ubiquity then I’d definitely give the edge to "Trap Queen". But "Trap Queen" peaked in the spring (it hit #1 on the Billboard Rap charts in April and #2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in early May) and the summer buzz was mostly runoff. Even if it’s prompted some to argue that it is this generation’s greatest love song, I don’t think it’s been as big a summer contender as some of the others mentioned. It makes more sense to cast a ballot in favor of "Lean On", despite how terrible its video is. It is definitely a prototypical summer song. Whoever ghost-produced Diplo’s contributions did a really solid job (sorry, that just slipped out). It really caters to those at the intersection of EDM festivals and Top 40 radio so it has big time reach. It’s very easy to love and it has survived traditional radio wear and tear very well. So, I guess this is me adding my name to the "Lean On" tally.

Eric Thurm: Point taken on the numbers and dates—maybe my summer was just lamer than everyone else’s (it definitely was, with the exception of that party where everyone went nuts to "Classic Man"). Here’s one thing I will say: While I was walking to the subway one night, a car pulled up blasting "Trap Queen", and the couple inside looked expectantly at me. After a brief deer-in-headlights moment, I realized they wanted me to dance to Fetty… and, after a brief period of hesitation and panic programmed into me by years of being a teenager, I did. So if "Trap Queen" isn’t technically eligible for "song of the summer," it’s at least the song of my own summer triumph. And that, at least, frees me up to hop on team "Classic Man". Jidenna for Summer 2015, Jidenna for life.

This summer sees the release of two music-related books: a memoir by preeminent New Orleans bounce diva Big Freedia and a comprehensive guide to heavy metal demons Gwar. Check out our reviews of these two books below.

Big Freedia, aka "The Queen Diva", is more than just New Orleans rap royalty. She’s the artist who helped popularize bounce music, the emissary who took the genre outside of the city and served it up to the rest of the world. Between a schedule of touring, a reality television show on Fuse, and the release of her first studio album, Just Be Free, Freedia has been working tirelessly to keep bounce on the map. Her new memoir, Big Freedia: God Save the Queen Diva!, chronicles the events that shaped and molded her effort and artistry into what it is today.

Built around a theme of "struggle and healing", the book takes a chronological approach to her life story. A large portion centers around her growing up queer in the '80s and '90s in New Orleans, splitting time between directing her church choir as a teenager and finding her place in the underground nightclubs as bounce music moved beyond a regional sound into the mainstream. Freedia details how her and other artists like Katey Red started the subgenre of "sissy bounce", where Freedia says,"“the sexually explicit lyrics resonated in a way that the typical misogynistic rap lyrics didn’t. It was liberating for women to be the ones asserting these acts instead of being the target."

From there, the book depicts Freedia’s burgeoning career as she dropped out of nursing school to become a full-time musician and the hardships along the way, from losing friends and family to violence to surviving both a gunshot injury and being trapped in the middle of Hurricane Katrina with her family. The last third of the book focuses on her journey into the mainstream, playing shows all over the world, turning television appearances into her own show on Fuse, and the benefits and challenges that come with reaching a wider audience.

In her story, Freedia speaks candidly about contentious relationships with producers, collaborators, family, and boyfriends. While the primary focus is on Freedia’s personal story, her life is inextricably tied to the history and advancement of bounce music and culture. The book draws on that, providing an in-depth look at the customs and environment that birthed this movement. One passage in particular details an incident in which an audience member angrily confronted Freedia about lyrics in a song because she didn’t understand the context in which they were written. The book provides that context, bringing the reader into Freedia’s world so they can connect with that culture and truly understand where the music comes from.

While the book follows a familiar format, what sets it apart is Freedia’s voice, imbuing the story with her distinct personality. Freedia’s story is inspirational, a journey overcoming poverty and discrimination to become an internationally known star. The rise of Big Freedia is the rise of bounce, and God Save the Queen Diva! serves as a worthwhile encapsulation of that tale. —David Sackllah

Earthlings view Gwar as a performance art/metal band launched in the mid-'80s from the bowels of Richmond, Va., but true fans know they’re the space pirates responsible for killing off the dinosaurs, doomed to roam the galaxy with the Scumdogs of the Universe. The true story of the art collective known as Gwar may never be fully known but new 360-page tome Let There Be Gwar (Gingko Press) attempts to tell it anyway. Compiled by longtime Slave Pit member Bob Gorman and author Roger Gastman with a forward by Kurt Loder, it’s a high-end tribute for a band known for spewing fake bodily fluids from effigies like OJ Simpson, Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II, and Justin Bieber, just to name a few.

The text mixes oral history and narrative from the band’s early art collective days through Grammy nominations, tabloid TV appearances, an ACLU-backed lawsuit, the deaths of members Cory Smoot and Dave Brockie, the Gwar-B-Ques and beyond, bringing us up to Blothar’s re-introduction and the short-lived reign of Vulvatron, promising Gwar will live forever. The photos and paraphernalia packed within prove the concept to be bigger than the music and more of an overall life experience. Fans (known as "Bohabs") know to prep for a night of Gwar, counting on politically incorrect content and reveling in the fact that things often get messy.

The elaborate sets and handmade Mad Max-esque costumes Gwar is known for can be fondled here on glossy pages in all their glory, from a safe distance. Ticket stubs, posters, news clips. and full-color photos fill its blood-spattered pages, complete with a zine of fan-mail wedged in its cracks. Illustrated fan envelopes serving as centerfold and one letter from a "concerned Catholic Christian" berating Gwar as "creatures with the morality of cannibalistic psychotics" add icing to the exhaustively-researched brick-sized opus. All in all, Let There Be Gwar is a Bohab’s wet dream. —Shawna Kenney