Critics’ darling and rising star Shamir recently gave NME a playlist of his favorite recent musical discoveries, and his most lavish praise was for little known (for now) rapper Michete and his mixtape Cool Tricks, described as “a gift from the ratchet gods.” It’s a description as compelling as most any Shamir song, pulling our ears (and eyes) to check out this supposed Prometheus who Shamir previously hailed with fire emojis. Fire, indeed, is what Cool Tricks seems poised to generate—album opener "Rap Game Kimmy Gibbler" alone gives an idea of the controversy and heat Michete will inevitably face.

If nothing else, the track will cause some outrage when Michete—who identifies as transfeminine and has no gender pronoun preference between she/her and he/his—concludes the song by boasting that she is "burning all these bitches like my last name Hitler." Fading from that final verse, Michete’s outro claims "I’m off the Richter/ Uninvited guest, rap game Kimmy Gibbler." In other words: she blows past your scale for "acceptable" behavior—holocaust "jokes" being only the beginning—and doesn’t really give a fuck if you don’t like her presence (as a white person or otherwise) in the rap game. Michete’s professional identification with Kimmy Gibbler is apt: uninvited and unwelcomed and unwanted.

That one song requires a move from Disney cartoons to Hitler to "Full House" exemplifies the quintessential Michete quality setting him apart from his peers. While Pitchfork’s most recent survey of "queer rap" locates the alleged genre’s suspects in increasingly avant-garde territory, Michete rears with delight in the trashy moors outlying queer rap’s current designation as "art rap." Cool Tricks offers up the new genre of qrap: the versed ribaldry of poor taste—a crassly mouthed "fuck you" to the gay male archetype of the connoisseur. It’s not only the collision of references that mark (or marr) Michete’s work as qrappy, but also the crude, Fruity Loops software sound of his beats. If queerness has come to connote high-brow artiness in rap discourse elsewhere, Michete’s qrap claims a space for queer rap as kitschy, agro-referential romping from one cheap beat to another.

But how much qrap can Michete get away with, as a white transfeminine-identified person? Rap has never before been so embroiled in conversations centering around whiteness, yet "Rap Game Kimmy Gibbler" gives a flippant middle finger to the current cultural climate which increasingly critiques white rappers’ work as performing a caricature of blackness. Such performers and caricatures, the critique usually goes, are only made possible by virtue of the rapper’s racial privilege. As a queer trans* person, however, Michete complicates this rhetoric because she also faces oppression, thus scrambling the map of identitarian privilege. Both her music and identity highlight what the current discourse on rap and (in)authenticity—endlessly coming to the same conclusion regarding Iggy Azalea and Macklemore—must still answer for: To what degree can other categories of oppression like gender identity and sexuality qualify a (white) rapper as authentic, despite their equal appropriation of fundamental facets of black culture?

If white rapper B. Dolan has demanded that white rappers "be accountable for their whiteness and privilege"— in part by having an "ongoing conversation" with fans—then where does that leave Michete? On this new scale of accountability, where do we place the transfeminine white rapper who blithely dismisses the B. Dolan model with lines like "Me and my bitches got no respect/ Me and my bitches just wanna get wrecked"? Brooke Candy may express similar sentiments (see: "Feel Yourself (Alcohol)"), but at least there is always the background of her radical and well-established politics of sex-positivity and Fag Mob pride. Michete simply wants to get fucked up, or fuck, or tell everyone to fuck off. Yet, if she has internalized a hateful/transphobic world as her audience, then the flouncing displays of apathy her music makes in lieu of an "ongoing conversation" on race seem understandable—if not praiseworthy. Some trans* and queer lives have simply been damaged too much to care about others—their own survival is the only possible happy ending, and that often involves indifference and self-destruction. Queer rage has its own forms, and careless aggression against the general world is often one of them. 

Still, the question remains: how much can one permit the absence of racial self-awareness in Michete’s incendiary thematic, considering the often unfriendly or violent cis majority trans* people face? To answer such questions, the discourse needs to move to more intersectional terrain, one where questions of authenticity involve nuanced critiques. Introducing queer and trans* artists like Michete into the conversation is one step music critics, creative communities, and fans could take in this regard.

Such inquiries must take into account not only the queer artist’s clear offenses (like a Hitler shout out) but also the artist’s potential radical value—Cool Tricks, for example, rebels against culture’s collective aversion to radical faggotry. From her voice to his words, Michete’s music sounds out a femme machismo that violates the rules of gender performance. In a Lil' Kim-reminiscent rebuke, Michete plays with the gendered aurality of misandrist take-downs throughout Cool Tricks. Decades since Kim and several years into the "queer rap emergence," why do tracks like "#Fuckboy" and album standout "Closet Case Fags" still disturb listeners with their cavalier expression of gay sexual disillusionment and fatigue? Maybe—just maybe—it’s because American culture is less progressive than recent narratives suggest… because we can handle gay marriage but not actual cock-sucking, bussy-thumping gaysex. This is not to say "If you dislike Cool Tricks, you’re a bigot," but rather that if listeners don’t dig Michete’s mixtape, it might have something to do with the music’s gender-bending tendencies and the audience’s conditioned response to them.

"You whack faggots never touchin’ my vernacular," Michete pronounces in "Bacon"—both an assertion of his lyric mastery and of how unlikely listeners are to want to "touch" his language. After one song or maybe two, most listeners will be done with Cool Tricks, at full fag capacity. Aversion to Cool Tricks derives from society’s deeply ingrained fear of the femme-male subject. Listening to "Me and My Bitches" is akin to daring a man to don a wig and dress for the first time—there will often be a visceral reaction of disgust. "But they don’t want that renegade/ They don’t want that Monster," as Michete puts it in "Caps Lock".

None of this intends to give Michete a free pass for anything in his music—rather, this early look at the new artist hopes to attract others who will pursue those lines of inquiry. At the same time that potential readers should take Michete to task for Hitler shout-outs, we should note that Michete calls for an intersectionality of "categorical complexity" that compares rappers of color eschewing terminology and transfeminine Michete as belonging to subgroup categories beyond mere "white" or "black" or "queer" designations—how does race as well as their nuanced identifications inform even the choice to latch onto a label? Again, these questions are for others. For now, one thing is certain: Michete’s debut marks the arrival of a subversive new presence in the "queer rap" landscape, which at the moment seems to have just (finally) exhausted its novelty value, no longer shocking simply for existing.

"Look up, look up—seek your Maker—’fore Gabriel blows his horn"
- Bob Dylan

"Gather round hustlers—that's if you still livin'"
- Jay-Z

On September 10th, 2001, I only had enough money to afford one of the many tempting albums releasing the next day. I was a 17-year-old college freshman who didn’t take his then-girlfriend out on a date the weekend before, just so I would have enough money to buy an album. This was not new; I come from a place where everyone often only had the money to buy one album on Tuesdays. Poverty isn’t always romantic, but it makes your choices meaningful. It makes what you choose to carry with you last longer than just a week, month, or a year. I miss going to a proper record store and buying an album, so much that I even do it now from time to time, even with endless access to any music I could desire right at my fingertips, far more accessible than it was in the fall of 2001. There is something more complete about physically handing a person money that you worked for, and in exchange, getting a copy of something that an artist believes in. When I fell asleep on the night of September 10th, 2001, I truly thought that the biggest problem I would face upon waking was not having enough money to buy all of the albums I desired.

The truth is that music alone doesn’t decide who gets to live and die in America. It shows up and feeds on what is already present. Our fear, our violence, our love and lovemaking, our sadness. Still, there is no song that can un-bury a body, send a dead loved one back, living, to your arms. Music, at its best, has to face the world it arrives in, and whoever is still left alive in it, eager to be carried away from whatever new long-held innocence is being ripped from their hands.

I like to think that Jay Z has always known and understood this. Especially the Jay Z of 2001, who dragged himself through the hail of bullets and shiny suits that rained down on hip-hop in the mid- to late-'90s, and emerged as the heir to the throne. A king without a fully formed crown, still looking for a mid-career masterpiece to transition him seamlessly from the block to the boardroom. The Blueprint still holds up as the album we needed before we knew we would need it. A love letter to reinvention, an ode to being rebuilt as a newer and stronger machine. In the aftermath of an unimaginable violence, I believed in "The Takeover" as more than just a diss track, but also as a meditation on fear and fearlessness. A flag of our own making, stuck in fragile ground. This is not a wholly patriotic statement, rather, what it can feel like to wrestle power back from overwhelming anxiety. Owning your space while you still have it, even if it’s only for three minutes. I find this in hip-hop more than anywhere else, even now. It could be due to the idea that so many rappers are making music to legitimize their lives, or become less feared in a country that has always used its fear of them to justify their death. The Blueprint was a brave and immensely sad album, at a time when both of those things were equally felt, and equally needed. I say all of this without even mentioning The Blueprint as the Jay Z album that contains the best rapping from front to back. The album that birthed the Jay Z that coasted into his prime dominance, the smooth storyteller, the boastful lyricist, the MC who finally stopped bowing to production and made the production bow to him. And still, everyone I knew needed to hear "The Ruler’s Back" just as much as they needed to hear "Song Cry", we needed both of those doors opened for us to walk through. More than any other song, "Heart of the City" rolls every sentiment into one. Boastful and longing, nostalgic for what was, but still firmly planted in the present. Eager for a simpler time, but still surviving in its own, reaching for a new and promising sky.

What Bob Dylan knows is something different. I don’t speak from experience, but I imagine that to come from the Midwest and conquer your country’s grandest city is to be always hungry for the most calm and silent memories that you have. I have always heard that in Dylan’s music, a lens on the America that he felt most guilty about not waking up in. Love and Theft, by most critical standards, is the central piece in Dylan’s second great trilogy of albums, preceded by 1997’s Time Out of Mind and followed by 2007’s Modern Times. In Dylan’s wild and relentlessly fading America, there is always an outlaw, or a bad man. There is always an apocalypse on the horizon, endless foreshadowing with no answers to be had at the end. Love and Theft is probably the Dylan album that has the least amount of hope to be had, amplified by when it arrived to us. I trembled while listening to "Mississippi", Dylan growling out the line "sky full of fire/ pain pouring down," the eerie way the album itself crafted the idea of panic and uncertainty felt at the time. The way the apocalyptic "Sugar Baby" closes out the album, stripped down and urging listeners to look up and seek their maker. It seems prophetic only until you remember that this is what Bob Dylan’s America always looks like. The clouds are always gathering overhead, as they are through the eyes of most poets. In regards to what he could do for us, Bob Dylan in the fall of 2001 wasn’t much different than Bob Dylan in the fall of 1964. The musician who doesn’t pull us back from the brink, but the one who moves us even closer to the edge, and shows us what lies below. The world that is as bad as we think it is, the other reality that we often need, the honesty that we are going to have to recover from, whether we like it or not.

In America, especially in times of emergency, people find it easy to convince themselves that we are the world’s underdog. The one who will rise to the top, despite all manner of resistance. When I first heard Fabolous, it was on DJ Clue’s 1998 mixtape The Professional, when he went by the name Fabolous Sport, hailed as the leader of a brand new, sharper era of Brooklyn MCs. By the time his 2001 debut was primed to come out, most people in my circle of "serious" rap fans had dismissed him as an extension of the status quo: a punchline rapper with a sleepy flow, devoid of substance, draped in jewelry. In retrospect, he was absolutely all of those things; his first music video appearance was complete with all of the era’s staples: large rims, even larger throwback jerseys, bright colors. We saw these things with most mainstream rappers of the era, but the feeling around Fabolous in 2001 was "who does THIS guy think he is?"

I love hip-hop as an instant proving ground. While that’s slightly less true now than it was in 2001 (and in 2001, it was slightly less true than it was in 1991), the fact is still that your body of work talks so that you don’t have to. And if it doesn’t, you’re not going to make it. Ghetto Fabolous is one of my favorite debut albums. Admittedly, I was rooting for Fabolous. I probably believed in the idea of being an underdog in the midst of feeling helpless, and I needed the album to be more than an afterthought. It is the perfect debut for a New York MC facing a new century. The scope and range of the album was impressive, opening with a fierce warning shot, "Click and Spark", becoming more calm and introspective as the album goes on, peaking in the middle with the unapologetically romantic "Trade It All".

The Fabolous I remember best existed in that September. The mixtape superstar with a world of expectations, and more than enough people hoping he wouldn’t live up to them. Showing up, and delivering a small triumph.

I don’t pretend like any of this can erase tragedy. I don’t get to pretend like in 2001 and beyond, I didn’t sit in fear as both a young American and a young American Muslim. Still, I had the luxury of turning my face away from the burning in a way that not everyone else in this country did. It is a privilege to press a button on a television and re-enter your world, still fractured, but not on fire. None of us should be carried through tragedy alone. None of us should be encased in grief, and not have a small window to some better place. Music was the window where I was, in Ohio, afraid of what came after The Month That Changed Everything. Late in September 2001, I borrowed my roommate’s copy of Ryan Adams’ Gold, and watched autumn descend on the city. It opened with "New York, New York", a love song to the city and its flaws, a city most in need of such an ode. As the song ended with Adams singing, "I’ll always love you, though/ New York, New York, New York," I brushed a lone leaf from my shoulder, walked down to the record store, and gave the person behind the counter my last twelve dollars.

Since the premiere of "The Muppet Show" in 1974, music has been an integral part of the Muppet universe. In the original series, each episode would have a single guest star who, whether a musician by trade or not, would perform some sort of song routine, usually with the cast. Additionally, the Muppets would perform their own covers of songs, like the Muppet Glee Club’s rousing "Temptation" and Miss Piggy’s Marie Antoinette version of "Staying Alive". ABC’s new show "The Muppets" promises to turn the traditional format upside-down, with each episode offering multiple guest stars, in addition to a musical guest. While the success of this modern approach remains to be seen, the original series created many iconic numbers that are the perfect mix of humorous and heartbreaking, just like the Muppets themselves.

Below is a list of the best musical numbers from "The Muppet Show"’s original run:

Elton John
Season 2, Episode 4

When Elton John appeared on "The Muppet Show" in 1978, he was the first real rockstar to host the program, following a string of comedians and country stars. However, in between the production of the episode and airing, John announced that he would be retiring from performing live (this only lasted a year and a half, but is still a fun fact that makes this performance even more of a treat).

As Brian Henson explains in the episode’s opening commentary, John’s appearance on the show occurred as he was exciting his career’s more flamboyant stage. Henson explains that John agreed to do anything on the show except wear all those "crazy flamboyant costumes with the big feathers and glasses." Of course, the Muppets got their way, and John performs "Bennie and the Jets", "Goodbye Yellow Road", and "Don’t Go Breaking My Heart" in full regalia. The show’s highlight is John’s rendition of "Crocodile Rock", which remains one of the show’s most famous performances. Dressed in rainbow peacock plumage, a mirrored headdress, and pink glasses, John plays the song in a swamp, backed by the Electric Mayhem.

Julie Andrews
Season 2, Episode 17

For her episode’s opening number, Andrews gamely performed "The Lonely Goatherd" from Rodger and Hammerstein’s 1959 musical The Sound of Music. In the 1965 film, the song is performed by Andrews’ Maria and the von Trapp children in their home’s puppet theatre. "The Muppet Show" acknowledges the film’s original choreography, staging their rendition of the song in a soundstage version of a puppet theatre, an elaborate mountain set complete with yodeling goat, chickens, and a very dapper Prince Kermit. Near the end of the number, Andrews sits in front of the Alpine lodge, reminding viewers just how tiny her costars are.

Alice Cooper
Season 3, Episode 7

In his 1978 episode, the "talented but frightening" Cooper offers the Muppets riches and fame in exchange for their souls. Cooper is one of the few guests whose persona informs the tone of the entire show; episode 307 is sinister and creepy, with Cooper arriving with his own group of monsters called the Vile Bunch. While his opening number "Welcome to My Nightmare" sets the episode’s ghoulish mood, the final number, "School’s Out", is the episode’s best. Backed by the Vile Bunch, a cap-and-gown-clad Cooper and series of scholarly Muppets dance their way through the number. The song ends with the gentle giant Thog setting off a small explosion and Cooper ultimately ripping off his outfit to reveal a devil costume.

Loretta Lynn
Season 3, Episode 8

Lynn’s 1978 episode is one of the rare few to not occur in the Muppet Theatre—perhaps fittingly for the country star, the show takes place in a rustic railroad station. For her closing number, Lynn performed her hit "One’s on the Way", originally written in 1971 by poet Shel Silverstein. "One’s on the Way" followed a string of controversial feminist hits like "Rated X" (about the stigma faced by divorced women) and "The Pill" (about the power of choice brought by birth control). By the song’s release, Lynn herself had six children, making the song’s exhausted tone seem extremely autobiographical. In the "Muppet Show" performance, Lynn sings the song as a weary and increasingly exasperated housewife as Muppet babies crawl over her ironing board and cry for attention.

Paul Simon
Season 5, Episode 11

In the 10 years since the end of Simon & Garfunkel, Simon had become a popular solo artist. While Simon mainly performed his solo material on the show, episode 511 opens with a performance of Simon & Garfunkel’s "Scarborough Fair", in an Olde English faire with Simon playing the lute and Miss Piggy forcefully singing the "Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme" chorus. Near the end of the song, Fozzie recites part of the nursery rhyme "Simple Simon", only to be pied in the face by the singer. The song concludes with Simon being arrested for playing a lute without a license.

Simon’s episode is notable as the only one in which every song performed is written by one artist, with the Muppets’ usual musical interludes becoming covers of popular Simon songs. While Gonzo and the chickens perform a wonderful version of "El Condor Pasa", the real highlight is Bobby Benson and the All-Baby Band’s cover of "Baby Driver".

Ruth Buzzi
Season 1, Episode 4

Most famous for her appearances on sketch comedy show "Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In", Buzzi’s brand of physical comedy made her a perfect guest on her 1976 spot on "The Muppet Show" (and later, as a regular on "Sesame Street"). While her bits throughout the episode show off her comedy chops and playful chemistry with the Muppets, her cover of Frankie Valli’s 1967 hit "Can’t Take My Eyes Off You" is the real standout moment of the episode. Dressed as a medieval princess, Buzzi sings the ode to the uninterested monster Sweetums, hassling him until he eventually gives in to her advances, belting the "I love you baby and if it’s quite all right/ I need you baby to warm the lonely nights" verse.

Rita Moreno
Season 1, Episode 5

Originally written by Eddie Cooley and Otis Blackwell under the pseudonym John Davenport, "Fever" has been covered by Peggy Lee, Elvis Presley, James Brown, Madonna, and Beyoncé. Moreno sings the song for her closing number dressed in a slinky red dress with Animal on the drums. After being startled by the Muppet’s drum bursts, Moreno berates him in Spanish and English, only to eventually smash his head between two cymbals, causing the woozy Animal to exclaim, "Now that’s my kind of woman!" The performance would go on to win the 1977 Emmy for "Individual Performance in a Variety or Music Program".

Ben Vereen
Season 1, Episode 17

Vereen’s performance of "Mr. Cellophane" from Chicago is minimal in terms of Muppet presence, shifting the focus to the song’s melancholy lyrics and his smooth moves. So why is this one of "The Muppet Show"’s best musical performances? He approaches the song with a pure and honest heart, which after all, is what the Muppets are all about.

Bernadette Peters
Season 2, Episode 12

Considering that Peters was already a huge star when she appeared on the show in 1977, her musical prowess seems underused on her episode, singing just three songs. Perhaps this was the wisest move because one of these songs overshadows all the rest. Midway through the episode, Kermit’s nephew Robin feels ignored and wants to run away, so Peters sings "Just One Person" from Snoopy! The Musical to teach him to believe in himself. Kermit soon joins in, "making it two whole people" and then, "if three whole people, why not four? And if four whole people, why not more?," as the rest of the gang joins. The song swells to a heartbreakingly beautiful conclusion, making it one of the show’s most memorable numbers. The song would become one of the Muppet’s signature songs, later performed by Robin in a Jim Henson tribute episode and at Henson’s 1990 memorial service, both of which call for tissues.

John Denver
Season 4, Episode 1

Denver’s 1979 appearance on "The Muppet Show" spawned a lifelong friendship with Jim Henson. The singer would later star in 1979’s "John Denver & the Muppets: A Christmas Together" and 1982’s "John Denver & the Muppets: Rocky Mountain Holiday". For his first appearance with the gang, the folk singer kept it simple and goofy, particularly in the song "Grandma’s Feather Bed". The tune is usually attributed to Denver, but it was originally written by banjo player Jim Connor. Dressed in a nightgown and cap, Denver is joined by the song’s "eight kids and four hound dogs," before dissolving into a pillow fight.

Linda Ronstadt
Season 5, Episode 23

In Ronstadt’s 1980 episode of "The Muppet Show", she causes quite a stir by developing a mutual crush on Kermit. Much of the episode is spent with Ronstadt searching for Kermit, who Miss Piggy has locked in a trunk to keep away from the singer. However, none of this chaos appears in her first and finest number, a cover of Roy Orbison’s "Blue Bayou". Set in a hokey swamp and accompanied by a group of rhythmically croaking frogs, Ronstadt delivers a powerhouse performance of the song.

"Look up, look up—seek your Maker—’fore Gabriel blows his horn"
- Bob Dylan

"Gather round hustlers—that's if you still livin'"
- Jay-Z

On September 10th, 2001, I only had enough money to afford one of the many tempting albums releasing the next day. I was a 17-year-old college freshman who didn’t take his then-girlfriend out on a date the weekend before, just so I would have enough money to buy an album. This was not new; I come from a place where everyone often only had the money to buy one album on Tuesdays. Poverty isn’t always romantic, but it makes your choices meaningful. It makes what you choose to carry with you last longer than just a week, month, or a year. I miss going to a proper record store and buying an album, so much that I even do it now from time to time, even with endless access to any music I could desire right at my fingertips, far more accessible than it was in the fall of 2001. There is something more complete about physically handing a person money that you worked for, and in exchange, getting a copy of something that an artist believes in. When I fell asleep on the night of September 10th, 2001, I truly thought that the biggest problem I would face upon waking was not having enough money to buy all of the albums I desired.

The truth is that music alone doesn’t decide who gets to live and die in America. It shows up and feeds on what is already present. Our fear, our violence, our love and lovemaking, our sadness. Still, there is no song that can un-bury a body, send a dead loved one back, living, to your arms. Music, at its best, has to face the world it arrives in, and whoever is still left alive in it, eager to be carried away from whatever new long-held innocence is being ripped from their hands.

I like to think that Jay Z has always known and understood this. Especially the Jay Z of 2001, who dragged himself through the hail of bullets and shiny suits that rained down on hip-hop in the mid- to late-'90s, and emerged as the heir to the throne. A king without a fully formed crown, still looking for a mid-career masterpiece to transition him seamlessly from the block to the boardroom. The Blueprint still holds up as the album we needed before we knew we would need it. A love letter to reinvention, an ode to being rebuilt as a newer and stronger machine. In the aftermath of an unimaginable violence, I believed in "The Takeover" as more than just a diss track, but also as a meditation on fear and fearlessness. A flag of our own making, stuck in fragile ground. This is not a wholly patriotic statement, rather, what it can feel like to wrestle power back from overwhelming anxiety. Owning your space while you still have it, even if it’s only for three minutes. I find this in hip-hop more than anywhere else, even now. It could be due to the idea that so many rappers are making music to legitimize their lives, or become less feared in a country that has always used its fear of them to justify their death. The Blueprint was a brave and immensely sad album, at a time when both of those things were equally felt, and equally needed. I say all of this without even mentioning The Blueprint as the Jay Z album that contains the best rapping from front to back. The album that birthed the Jay Z that coasted into his prime dominance, the smooth storyteller, the boastful lyricist, the MC who finally stopped bowing to production and made the production bow to him. And still, everyone I knew needed to hear "The Ruler’s Back" just as much as they needed to hear "Song Cry", we needed both of those doors opened for us to walk through. More than any other song, "Heart of the City" rolls every sentiment into one. Boastful and longing, nostalgic for what was, but still firmly planted in the present. Eager for a simpler time, but still surviving in its own, reaching for a new and promising sky.

What Bob Dylan knows is something different. I don’t speak from experience, but I imagine that to come from the Midwest and conquer your country’s grandest city is to be always hungry for the most calm and silent memories that you have. I have always heard that in Dylan’s music, a lens on the America that he felt most guilty about not waking up in. Love and Theft, by most critical standards, is the central piece in Dylan’s second great trilogy of albums, preceded by 1997’s Time Out of Mind and followed by 2007’s Modern Times. In Dylan’s wild and relentlessly fading America, there is always an outlaw, or a bad man. There is always an apocalypse on the horizon, endless foreshadowing with no answers to be had at the end. Love and Theft is probably the Dylan album that has the least amount of hope to be had, amplified by when it arrived to us. I trembled while listening to "Mississippi", Dylan growling out the line "sky full of fire/ pain pouring down," the eerie way the album itself crafted the idea of panic and uncertainty felt at the time. The way the apocalyptic "Sugar Baby" closes out the album, stripped down and urging listeners to look up and seek their maker. It seems prophetic only until you remember that this is what Bob Dylan’s America always looks like. The clouds are always gathering overhead, as they are through the eyes of most poets. In regards to what he could do for us, Bob Dylan in the fall of 2001 wasn’t much different than Bob Dylan in the fall of 1964. The musician who doesn’t pull us back from the brink, but the one who moves us even closer to the edge, and shows us what lies below. The world that is as bad as we think it is, the other reality that we often need, the honesty that we are going to have to recover from, whether we like it or not.

In America, especially in times of emergency, people find it easy to convince themselves that we are the world’s underdog. The one who will rise to the top, despite all manner of resistance. When I first heard Fabolous, it was on DJ Clue’s 1998 mixtape The Professional, when he went by the name Fabolous Sport, hailed as the leader of a brand new, sharper era of Brooklyn MCs. By the time his 2001 debut was primed to come out, most people in my circle of "serious" rap fans had dismissed him as an extension of the status quo: a punchline rapper with a sleepy flow, devoid of substance, draped in jewelry. In retrospect, he was absolutely all of those things; his first music video appearance was complete with all of the era’s staples: large rims, even larger throwback jerseys, bright colors. We saw these things with most mainstream rappers of the era, but the feeling around Fabolous in 2001 was "who does THIS guy think he is?"

I love hip-hop as an instant proving ground. While that’s slightly less true now than it was in 2001 (and in 2001, it was slightly less true than it was in 1991), the fact is still that your body of work talks so that you don’t have to. And if it doesn’t, you’re not going to make it. Ghetto Fabolous is one of my favorite debut albums. Admittedly, I was rooting for Fabolous. I probably believed in the idea of being an underdog in the midst of feeling helpless, and I needed the album to be more than an afterthought. It is the perfect debut for a New York MC facing a new century. The scope and range of the album was impressive, opening with a fierce warning shot, "Click and Spark", becoming more calm and introspective as the album goes on, peaking in the middle with the unapologetically romantic "Trade It All".

The Fabolous I remember best existed in that September. The mixtape superstar with a world of expectations, and more than enough people hoping he wouldn’t live up to them. Showing up, and delivering a small triumph.

I don’t pretend like any of this can erase tragedy. I don’t get to pretend like in 2001 and beyond, I didn’t sit in fear as both a young American and a young American Muslim. Still, I had the luxury of turning my face away from the burning in a way that not everyone else in this country did. It is a privilege to press a button on a television and re-enter your world, still fractured, but not on fire. None of us should be carried through tragedy alone. None of us should be encased in grief, and not have a small window to some better place. Music was the window where I was, in Ohio, afraid of what came after The Month That Changed Everything. Late in September 2001, I borrowed my roommate’s copy of Ryan Adams’ Gold, and watched autumn descend on the city. It opened with "New York, New York", a love song to the city and its flaws, a city most in need of such an ode. As the song ended with Adams singing, "I’ll always love you, though/ New York, New York, New York," I brushed a lone leaf from my shoulder, walked down to the record store, and gave the person behind the counter my last twelve dollars.

"It’s not meant to be hilarious, it’s supposed to be erotic. Maybe you don’t understand it." That’s how Tina Belcher, the coolest 13-year-old girl in the world, describes her "friend fiction" to a frenemy in one episode of "Bob’s Burgers". And, while it would be easy for the show to wring humor out of a teenaged girl writing stories about fondling a dancing boy, it’s treated as both erotic and hilarious. Tina’s interest in butts is never the butt of the joke—instead, it’s other people embarrassed that she’s so forward. This is all to say that if you’ve never seen an episode before, "Bob’s Burgers" looks like a family-friendly cartoon—but it’s one of the freakiest and most sex-positive shows on TV.

The entire Belcher family manages to get in on the action. Tina’s attraction to zombies and obsession with butts is, of course, never, ever judged by anyone, unless they’re clearly being close-minded in doing so. But son Gene’s gender confusion (or maybe gender apathy) is one of his more adorable qualities, Louise’s first crush plays out as a fixation on mischievous violence, and we’re frequently let in on the weird, married sex life of parents Bob and Linda. It even extends beyond the nuclear family—the happy ending of one episode involves Bob persuading his father-in-law to vocalize his fetish for the sound of popping balloons so that Linda’s parents will participate in a swingers’ retirement community. And, more often than not, this strain of the show’s outlook on life (and bodies) is conveyed in song.

Music would have been one of the core elements of the show no matter what. Creator and showrunner Loren Bouchard has a musical background (and a home studio where much of the show’s composition takes place). Several of the writers and producers work songs into their episodes. And the voice cast is game to sing themselves silly—especially John Roberts, who voices exuberant mom Linda and frequently improvises songs in the recording booth that make it into final cuts. In fact, the fifth episode of the show starts with Linda putting on a dinner theater musical at the restaurant.

"Hamburger Dinner Theater" solidifies all of the Belchers as delightful, unapologetic hams—and in the very next episode, the show introduces its sly approach to music and sex. At first glance, "Sheesh! Cab, Bob?" appears to have a straightforward, uninspired sitcom plot—Bob gets a second job driving a cab at night to pay for Tina’s special birthday party, and then has to deal with the fallout when Tina’s crush object Jimmy Jr. can’t come—but rather than just making him exhausted and causing stress within the family, Bob’s night moves expose him to a whole new part of the town.

A Michael McDonald pastiche sung with aplomb by Roberts, "Lifting Up the Skirt of the Night" introduces some rather pointed, explicit imagery for an ostensibly "family-friendly" cartoon, made literal by the song’s gloriously absurd DVD extra music video. The lyrics refer to Bob’s initial encounter with a group of ambiguously cross-dressing sex workers who, rather than becoming the butt of the episode’s jokes the way they would on a more conservative show, wind up saving the day by blackmailing Jimmy Jr.’s father with the knowledge that he has a diaper fetish. (Okay, so maybe the show isn’t quite 100% sex-positive all the time.) Marshmallow, one of the sex workers, has become a recurring character, and a fan-favorite, in part because no one on the show ever feels compelled to comment on her appearance.

"Lifting Up the Skirt of the Night" creates a template for the ways in which "Bob’s Burgers" uses immediately-recognizable musical forms as masks for genuinely sexually progressive messages. Sometimes, this is really, really obvious—like the Tori Amos riff "Oil Spill", which is just about a vagina and, as Gene notes, is… not subtle. The character of Tommy Jaronda, terrible guitar-wielding health inspector, forces his music on the Belchers in a way that pokes fun at hyper-masculine ideas about sex of the sort that are frequently encoded into rock music. When Linda puts her high school band back together, her sister Gail (voiced by Megan Mullaly) performs a hyper-explicit, kind of gross love song written for her old crush Derek Dematapolis—and, contravening every instinct we have about how these stories are supposed to go, successfully seduces him.

More broadly, nearly all of the music of "Bob’s Burgers" encourages the characters (and, maybe, the viewer) to discard any sense of shame. Sometimes, that’s just about emotional stability and a willingness to be oneself, something that plays out in the music of Boyz 4 Now, the immensely popular boy band Tina and Louise go to see. Their biggest hit is about a ridiculously exaggerated form of emotional confession and investment. But, of course, that shamelessness also extends to bodily functions, as in Linda’s song apologizing for Bob’s diarrhea or Gene’s insistence that farts will set you free. Gene himself is the vehicle for much of the show’s comedy and casual engagement with gender and sexuality, primarily through his passion for performance and resistance to masculine gender norms. Both qualities are exemplified by "Girls Being Girls", a song he writes for a Dreamgirls-style group before deciding it would be better to just do it himself in a wig and dress.

Even the show’s otherwise ordinary songs are full of minor lyrical touches conveying bizarre sexual imagery. Banjo, the hero of Bob and Gene’s favorite series of old-school Westerns, wears leather chaps (even in hot weather). Linda asks Bob to show the family his ding-ding. When Bob trains at an arcade game, he’s groping for glory. These moments frequently reveal themselves only on repeated viewings, or to people already inclined to seek out and obsess over lyrics as fans. And while they scan as juvenile humor (which they are), they also almost exclusively punch upward at boring sexual taboos.

It’s not just sex, though—if there’s a subject that doesn’t seem appropriate for a musical number in a family animated sitcom on a major network, "Bob’s Burgers" has probably tackled it. One of the show’s best shorter musical moments is a short riff on wearing seatbelts, of the kind a goofy family might come up with to ground collective cleaning rituals. In this case, the refrain is "Buckle it up or you’ll die!" Another of Roberts’ biggest spontaneous contributions to the show is a lullaby-esque meditation on the death and current non-existence/decomposition of Harry Truman. A new "Bob’s Burgers" song is exhilarating, precisely because of this freedom—when someone starts singing, you have no idea what’s going to come out.

Take the single most popular Bob’s song—"Electric Love", which Bouchard describes as a one-song musical. The song, ostensibly written by Gene for Louise’s science project on Thomas Edison, dramatizes a love affair between the scientist and Topsy the elephant, an animal cruelly cut down by an experiment with electric current. It’s big, beautiful, and wonderfully weird—even as Gene and Tina perform as Edison and Topsy, the vocal performances actually come from Kevin Kline as Belcher landlord Mr. Fischoeder and Mullaly’s Gail. The whole product is great: As Gene puts it, "If it ain’t man-on-elephant love, it ain’t worth singing about!"

Certainly, that’s the conclusion quite a few artists have come to. The "Bob’s" creative team has collaborated with artists ranging from Cyndi Lauper to St. Vincent, the National to Sleater-Kinney. Pulling in well-established musicians to do songs about taffy butts and bad teenage girls is just an extension of the natural exuberance of Bob’s Burgers and its characters, related to the fact that the show is now capable of pulling off a mashup musical of Die Hard and Working Girl. The most recent season premiere doesn’t feature a ton of new music, but "Bob’s Burgers" shows no signs of slowing down, so we can expect some exciting work and titillating butt music for years to come.

Chris Brown can be a pretty nauseating and despicable figure. Despite his continued success in the marketplace and his contributions as an entertainer, it’s his non-musical headlines that have become his calling card stretching back to the last decade. There have been multiple physical altercations with other artists and fans, the destruction of at least one TV studio, several jail stints, an expulsion from court-ordered rehab, repeated probation revocations, and string of  general social media assholery. Looming over all of this, of course, is ground zero for his fall from teen star to manchild pariah—his 2009 assault on then-girlfriend, Rihanna, which left her bruised for the whole world to see. Brown’s subsequent romance with Karrueche Tran has been marked by uncomfortable possessiveness, stalking, and public hostility. Given such context, it makes sense that Australian Minister for Women Michaelia Cash stated last week that, "People need to understand—if you are going to commit domestic violence and then you want to travel around the world, there are going to be countries that say to you, 'You cannot come in because you are not of the character that we expect in Australia,'” in addressing Australian authorities’ indication that they will refuse his visa application ahead of his One Hell Of A Nite tour hitting their shores in December. (Brown has subsequently offered to speak against spousal abuse if allowed into Australia.)
But the situation is not as cut and dry as the Australian government would have us believe. The decision was presented (and reported by the media) as official policy, a blanket approach to visitation privileges within the commonwealth. But the policy has been far from unilaterally enforced and the pressure to deny Brown’s visa came largely via GetUp!, an Aussie activist group that has waged campaigns in support of Julian Assange, the reduction of reliance on fossil fuels, and same sex marriage. Another organization, Collective Shout, a “grassroots campaigning movement against the objectification of women and sexualisation of girls in media, advertising and popular culture,” had led petitions seen as responsible for keeping boxer Floyd Mayweather out of the country.

At a cursory level, all seems legit. Both Brown and Mayweather have convictions for domestic violence and Australia, akin to Donald Trump, doesn’t want the worst kinds of foreigners making their way in. As per Australia’s Migration Act, visas may be rejected “if the person does not satisfy the Minister that the person passes the character test,” or “if the person has a substantial criminal record.” But, like Trump, it appears that the ire is, more often than not,aimed at darker-skinned folk when it comes to deciding who to protect the citizenry from.

While Collective Shout failed at keeping “self-confessed pimp” Snoop Dogg from crossing their borders, they were able to get the Australian Department of Immigration to keep Odd Future’s Tyler, The Creator from performing there, stating that "the content of the product he sells propagates discriminatory ideas about women and other groups, and represents a danger to a segment of the Australian community on the potential basis of incitement to acts of hatred."

Even if Tyler’s shock schtick is more about pushing buttons than condoning actual violence it’s undeniable that the guy has said some pretty sick shit about women. But so has Eminem, who has more abusive punchlines targeting women than any other mainstream rapper. The difference, other than their skin color, is that Eminem is allowed to come and go as he pleases. Collective Shout has a campaign going against Eminem, but GetUp!—which tends to focus on big issues like protecting the Great Barrier Reef, fighting against the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, and corporate tax dodging—have yet to say anything about Em’s upcoming February 2016 dates.

After his headline-making 2011 tirade at "Good Morning America", Chris Brown tweeted (and subsequently deleted): "I'm so over people bringing this past shit up!!! Yet we praise Charlie sheen and other celebs for there [sic] bullshit." It’s not a perfect comparison—while Sheen has a horrific history with women full of sordid allegations (including shooting an actress with a .22 caliber handgun) Brown actually admitted guilt to a felony. And, perhaps more telling of how this world works, Brown was never worth as much to his corporate overlords as Charlie Sheen was at his peak. (Nor is he worth as much as Eminem.) Yet death metal band Cannibal Corpse, whose music was once banned in Australia and whose catalog boasts wonderful songs like "Stripped, Raped and Strangled," "Meat Hook Sodomy," "Entrails Ripped from a Virgin's Cunt,"  and "She Was Asking for It,” are given the green light treatment. Black Sabbath, whose frontman Ozzy Osbourne has no small legacy of putting his hands on his wife, Sharon, recently announced an Australian tour and there has been no backlash, as of yet. Motley Crüe performed five dates in Australia this past Spring, despite drummer Tommy Lee’s well-documented violence against Pamela Anderson, and lead singer Vince Neil’s 2011 arrest for battery against an ex-girlfriend. Slash of Guns N Roses was allowed to perform a half-dozen shows on the continent earlier this year, his 1999 arrest for spousal assault notwithstanding.

Collective Shout’s argument has been that they do not have the resources to launch campaigns against each and every women-beating artist who wants to grace Australian shores. GetUp! asserts that they’re using Chris Brown to send a message. But that message seems to be a racialization domestic violence targets—and that message is underscored by the participation of the Australian government. GetUp!’s petition against Chris Brown stated: “We're speaking out against Chris Brown because his casual visit our country would have enormous symbolic significance, which will only be amplified by our silence. By turning a blind eye to his tour, we send a message to survivors of family violence that it's not that important and that you should just get over it.  If we stand by and do nothing while he performs around the country (even if we don't have the faintest interest in Brown's career or pop music in general) we are implicitly sending the message that if you brutally beat a woman, in a short amount of time you will be forgiven, or even celebrated.”

Parsing those words, it seems clear why Brown would be denied entry. There’s no room for redemption in GetUp!’s position. But the statement obfuscates GetUp! and Collective Shout’s seemingly selective (and race-driven) targeting. And it doesn’t jibe with the official position presented by Australian immigration officials who state very clearly that committing an act of domestic violence is grounds for exclusion. It’s okay to agree (or disagree) with the Australian government’s presented stance. It’s even okay (but limiting) to advocate for the perpetual demonization of perpetrators of violence against women. And it’s possible (with some mental contortion) to understand the call for a referendum on all artists with questionable subject matter. But it’s not okay to let the execution of governmental policy to be driven by race. And given the facts, one  truly has to wonder if Australia is judging these acts by the contents of their character, or the color of their skin.

Before the premiere of The Reflektor Tapes, the new Arcade Fire feature film, Win Butler, the group’s principal songwriter, read Charles Bukowksi’s “So You Want to Be a Writer” as an invocation. The piece’s appeal to him is clear. “So You Want to Be a Writer” speaks with the same kind of alluring, aggressive superiority complex of Arcade Fire’s “Ready to Start” or “Intervention” or “We Used to Wait” — if you’re young, earnest and looking for answers as to why everyone seems like they’re full of shit, they’re willing to oblige. “So You Want to Be a Writer”, in particular, stokes the popular belief that true artists cannot be motivated by fame, approval or “women in your bed”, the latter of which is hilarious to anyone familiar with Bukowksi’s social life. Artists need to be willing to play the messiah and the martyr, ready to die for this shit to deliver salvation. No band has expressed that willingness more fervently than Arcade Fire.

It’s just as well, as Arcade Fire’s solemn dedication to their artistry is the only unifying thread of The Reflektor Tapes, a mostly candid look into Arcade Fire’s creative process, except when it’s a highly stylized deconstruction of their live shows. It’s a meditation on their relationship with Haiti, except when shifts toward Los Angeles or Jamaica. It attempts to stress the equality of Arcade Fire by not identifying any of the members on screen; aside from Butler and Regine Chassagne, the rest of the band plays the same seen but not heard role than MC Ren and DJ Yella did in Straight Outta Compton.

It’s reasonable to expect The Reflektor Tapes is the next best thing to Arcade Fire showing an actual sense of humor, which is to be unintentionally humorous a la Rattle & Hum. Non-LA audiences will have to wait until halfway through the film for the first overblown poetic reference, wherein a quote from Kirkegaard’s “The Present Age” (the one that inspired the title of Reflektor) flashes across the screen. Butler dreams of Elvis Presley and tells us all about it. Twice. The second time, the King informs Butler that Arcade Fire needs to practice 37 hours a week and given the film’s often grim recollections of making Arcade Fire albums, that sounded like a lowball estimate.

The Reflektor Tapes also has an unfortunate tendency to focus on the band’s most sanctimonious songs and put them in a setting that only increases their sanctimony. Neon Biblecloser “My Body Is a Cage” is sorta “Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow” as written by Billy Corgan, and Butler performs it wearing a Public Enemy baseball jersey while Regine Chassagne dutifully plays a drum with some stones, staring off intently in the distance. Later, the band huddles around a battery of keyboards and Butler intones “sugar plum fairy” as a count-off before they solemnly tap out “Rococo,” the snarkiest song in Arcade Fire’s discography. Butler sings “Porno” with a snake around his neck and collapses in a van after another show of leaving it on the stage. 

Butler admitted that director Kahlil Joseph wasn’t a fan of the band until he heard Reflektor; Joseph’s credits include FKA Twigs’ “Video Girl,” the short film that accompanied Flying Lotus’ Until the Quiet Comes and Kendrick Lamar’s m.A.A.d., which played during his run of opening sets for the Yeezus tour. Butler then proudly noted that Joseph turned down a Jay Z video to film the documentary. It’s an inspired pairing, but each party seems to have different aims. Joseph's muddled aesthetic overwhelms The Reflektor Tapes— visual ideas are shifted throughout, from a mix of picture-in-picture contrasts, an endless array of voiceovers set to wistful stares, grainy lo-res footage of Haiti’s Carnival that looks like Hype Williams gone chillwave.

But the biggest miscalculation of all is the minimization of Arcade Fire’s undeniable live show. The live clips are doled out in random intervals, cut cruelly short. Joseph’s favored motif is using the camera as an active stage participant or isolating certain tracks from the soundboard over full-band footage, particularly Butler’s vocals. At times, you get arresting images, stills of Arcade Fire fans losing their shit in costume, whether in a packed basement or the Hollywood Palladium, Will Butler beating a tom drum until the skin breaks towards the end of “Wake Up.” But the quick clips turns the Arcade Fire live experience into SportsCenter’s Top Plays.

More than continuity or cohesion, The Reflektor Tapes simply needed a foil, someone to challenge or prod Butler and Chassagne. Chassagne laments feeling “invisible” in Haiti (from where her parents emigrated to Canada) as someone with significantly lighter skin than both her mother and sister, and that thought is left unfinished.

From most accounts, Arcade Fire seems like a very difficult band to be in if you’re not Win Butler, yet there’s not a moment of tension, with the exception of Haitian virtuosos trying to follow Chassagne’s lead and beat out the rhythms she heard her dad tap on the steering wheel. The band puts an extraordinary amount of emotional investment, time and energy into music whose effectiveness is due to blunt force. So it’s understandable if lamentable that The Reflektor Tapes goes against Arcade Fire’s strengths simply by giving them a chance to overthink things, if maybe not the right things. The Reflektor Tapes speaks to the band’s impressive standing as a pop cultural force, but if you want to know what makes Arcade Fire great, you should probably ask someone who isn’t in the band.

Richard Hell’s new book is not unlike the music he’s made: intermittently stylish and exhausted, mostly working around fashion, and sometimes very boring. In fact, Hell's continued refusal to work new themes, new ideas, new concepts, place this book in the category of diminishing returns.

In this anthology of previously published essays and articles, Hell revisits the touchstones of his previous work—the grimy era of NY punk’s downtown heyday, a so-called "golden age" epitomized by Burroughs, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Carroll. There are scant references to those who are not male or pale, maybe half a dozen in almost 300 pages. The unrelenting sameness of his obsessions abuts the reactionary lack of diversity, and between the two problems, reading this is harder work than it should be. For example, there is an essay on the photographer and painter Marilyn Minter, the high femme filth queen of too-high heels and too much makeup, but he seems confused and it descends into a list of all male artists, none of whom resemble her at all. He makes the same mistake in a republished film column on Sarah Silverman's film Jesus Is Magic, not fully understanding what other people are working through. Aside from these two scant essays, there are passing references to Nan Goldin (but not an extended study—though Goldin would fit perfectly in his milieu), Patti Smith (of course) without any serious cultural engagement, and Kathy Acker. Hell on Acker, especially considering Acker's critical revival, would be a treat, but we get a line or two, and he moves on.

The references to people of color are more scant. There is an essay about the Rolling Stones as Hell's favourite blues band, which gives the impression that Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf only existed so that this white band from England could blow Hell's mind. He mentions Elvis in the same essay, but does not mention Big Mama Thornton, and he doesn't seem to have any notice of any of the great female blues singers.

There are places where he moves a little bit away from this parsimony. A tight, small essay on Wong Kar-wai suggests a kind of geographic isolation, but he breaks the spell with his continued habit of inserting a list of names that may or may not have anything to do with the art or artist in question. Hell hints at Kar-wai’s history of diasporic exile, but then he says the movies are like Douglas Sirk or Jerry Lewis or Martin Scorsese, and he doesn't tell us why he thinks that, except for perhaps a kind of vague romanticism about being lost.

How can one be romantic about being lost, if the writer never leaves homebase? Frustrated by politics that seem dated as much as aesthetics that seem stale, every so often there is a line or a passage which indicates there is something left in those old tropes. The myth of CBGBs is less interesting than the articulated simulacra of Dollywood, but when Hell writes: "It only took three or four years for the place to acquire the garish veneer that's become its distinguishing mark: not the places deathless overall wino-dive griminess, not the long procession of compact neon beer signs dangling like corrupt flags or coats of nasura us arms above the bar stools, not the blunt, ribbed, white tunnel roof of canvas overhead outside with its innocuously ugly CBGB & OMFUG logo," he almost convinces. When he talks about Christopher Wool's paintings, he reduces his aesthetic to a blunt aphorism, something that he returns to when he talks about the poet Robert Creeley: "He still writes poems that feel like certainties struck from the entirely uncertain, that teeter on the edge of sense while being indisputable, but now they are more complex and explicit…" That Hell can write compellingly, but often chooses not to, compounds the ongoing frustration.

Creely might be complex and explicit, but those virtues are absent here. That absence might provide a through-line to the book. Writers should have obsessions they return to, and for a writer to be working for as long as Hell has, it might seem disingenuous to fault him for these thoughts or processes. If Hell is familiar, then the work and essays are familiar. It might be useful to have them in one place. Consistency is a virtue and he is nothing if not consistent. The problem is that he wants readers to think he is a prince of vice, but both his virtues and his vices have a familiarity that lacks surprises—personally or aesthetically.

Midway through my freshman year at a residential arts high school, my older friend Aaron made me a mixtape. He attached it to the door handle of my dorm room with a rubber band—no case, no label, no track listing. I loved every song. I’d pester him to tell me the names of the bands, but he ignored me. I was, after all, a freshman. 

The tape allowed me to fantasize about worlds I hadn’t known existed. I’d just moved out of my parents’ house in Mobile, Alabama and all I knew about life was the mall, middle school, and MTV. Let’s lynch the landlord—ok! Robert DeNiro, sit on my face—yes! We’re Bikini Kill and we want revolution. Girls don’t wahhhhhh—Girls don’t what? Don’t what? 

The songs that mattered most to me were at the end of Side A and the beginning of Side B. The band sang about passing letters, pissing on cops’ faces, and bloodthirsty forty-fives playing out of tune. Gay boys dumped other gay boys. I didn’t want to be first to disapprove but the taste of my mouth’s grown tired of you. Where was this world? It seemed so real for a full eight minutes. It was nowhere to be found in Birmingham in 1995. 

I’d heard about riot grrrl that summer on MTV. Courtney Love had socked riot grrrl Kathleen Hanna in the face at Lollapalooza. That’s how MTV’s Kurt Loder described her—"Riot Grrrl" Kathleen Hanna. MTV treated riot grrrl like a cutesy coven of witches: dangerous, but too frivolous to be taken seriously.

Riot grrrl, I was told, happened in Seattle, Portland, Olympia, Washington, D.C., and Minneapolis. According to the older boys at my high school it was a bunch of girls "singing about their periods", and Birmingham punks were "too smart for that." Supposedly, a couple of riot grrrls had tied a boy to a tree and "sucked his dick till he started bleeding." This was the lore. 

Aaron’s mix tape was my first exposure to riot grrrl, my initiation. I was so curious about what girl rage sounded like but MTV only showcased major label bands, and the Internet was not yet a proper place for music. Anything underground require an enlightened elder passing you a tape, a zine, or a flier.

The band at the end of Side A and the beginning of Side B sounded different than the other riot grrrl bands on the tape. The singers had English accents. The songs were more militant, violent even. Being gay had never sounded so punk, and being punk had never sounded so tough. Who was this mysterious English riot grrl band of witches and fagboys? 

Social life at the Alabama School of Fine Arts was strictly codified by age and musical taste. I was into boys and girls. Art school should have been a mecca of make outs, but the students were image conscious. Cool was more important than sex. Everyone wanted to be cool, but you couldn’t belong to more than one circle. You couldn’t smoke pot and listen to D.C. hardcore. You couldn’t skateboard and get good grades. You couldn’t kiss other boys and be punk.

That’s how it felt in 1995, anyway.

The only queer punk scene I knew about were the four songs on the mixtape, and I didn’t even know the band’s name.

In class you’re three seats up from me
This note is all the indication I need
I feed off ideas like yours—
Sex and confusion, sabotage and hardcore.

I listened to these songs over and over in my dorm room. A menacing surf-rock guitar riff faded into distortion, and then the singers started to bark at an unnamed older boy. I feed off ideas like yours—Sex and confusion, sabotage and hardcore. The taunting sounded flirtatious.

I sat behind Aaron in Music Appreciation class. I wondered if he might be into boys, too. It was so hard to tell. In my fantasy, he’d turn around and hand me the mixtape. All the bands would be listed. The cover would be a pixelated silk screen of Ronald Reagan’s smiling face. The title: Sex & Confusion, Sabotage & Hardcore.

Yeah, yeah, the letter you sent me.
Yeah, yeah, the letter you sent me.

In the fantasy, we’d do really sexy stuff like hold hands and walk over the steaming potholes of downtown Birmingham. I didn’t let myself imagine anything more.

The songs on the tape stirred me into action. Maybe Aaron liked boys too? I had to find out.

We were smoking cigarettes in a locked stall in the bathroom. The juniors were taking turns admitting who they liked. They looked at me.

Fuck it. Punk rock and honesty. I told them that I liked Aaron.

"Aaron?" one asked. "Aaron," the other said. "Kessler, you’re not gay," the third one said. "You wish you were gay," the first one said and they all started laughing.

By final bell the next day, everyone knew.

Aaron didn’t avoid me. He just didn’t act kinder.

I took it hard. I yelled at myself. I ate lunch and dinner alone. I dangled my feet off the parking garage stairwell. I had no one to talk to. I walked around downtown Birmingham, searching for some imaginary store full of people who’d get me. Then I’d go back to my dorm room and listen to the songs by the band whose name I didn’t know.

My boyfriend…Teen Angel
My boyfriend…Irresponsible
My boyfriend…Venereal
My boyfriend…Violates his parole.

In my fantasy, I dumped Aaron. I would pace my dorm room and imagine yelling in his face, berating him,  he'd hang his head, knowing that he had wronged me. I'd scream that he was irresponsible, venereal, a teen angel. I didn’t know what venereal meant, but I assumed it was a clear ointment like Neosporin. Liking a boy didn’t feel mainstream, but it didn’t feel punk either.

For eight minutes, the English riot grrrl band provided the dreamscape upon which my fantasies unfolded. In my head I screamed at Aaron; on my stereo the band screamed at me. I was punk, I was fine, I was good.

I needed to hear more, but only Aaron could tell me the band’s name. And now I was too embarrassed to ask.

On the last day of school, the kids packed dorm rooms. I stared out my window and watched the cars and trucks whizz along I-20. I picked up the phone and dialed six of the seven numbers and hung up. Finally, I called.

Aaron’s little sister answered. She yelled his name. She yelled his name again. Aaron said hello. I knotted the phone cord around my index finger and tried to act calm as he recited the track listing on this tape.

I’d fast-forward, push play on my stereo, and Aaron would rattle off a band name—Unwound, The Dead Kennedys, Bikini Kill. Soon we got off-topic. We talked about Kill Rock Stars, the Fugazi show in Huntsville. We talked several more times that summer. We still talk today.

"Oh, hey," he said. "I got to go. My mom needs the phone."

"Wait," I said. "Who does the spoken word track at the beginning of Side B? About the boys and stuff?"

I played the song.

Darling of raspberry
Lip Bit
Mother and shit shit shit
But angel’s on a mission to earn redemptive ears.

"Oh," he said. "That’s Huggy Bear. They’re pretty much the best band in the world."

I ordered Taking the Rough With the Smooch the next week at a local record store. It took six weeks to arrive. I called the store every other day. I became known as "that Huggy Bear kid."

The vinyl was so small! I envisioned a triple LP opus. The twelve songs lasted twenty-two minutes. Every time I played it, I’d close my door and put on my headphones. The music was a secret.

By the time I’d discovered them, Huggy Bear had already broken up. I’d heard that they believed that all bands should break up within three years, that they refused to have their photo taken. I don’t know if any of that’s true. But I do know that Taking the Rough With the Smooch meant a lot to my other queer punk friends who grew up like me, isolated in places like Alabama, Kentucky, Arizona, and Missouri.

Huggy Bear did for me what no one else did that year—they listened. I shut my eyes and thought about Aaron; Huggy Bear screamed and yelled and after the music was over they whispered. They told me that somewhere, somewhere far away from Alabama, there were others in the world like me. In the summer of 1995, that was the only thing I needed to hear.

As Gary Wrong Group’s set winded down on the first night of Gonerfest 12, Gary Wrong leaned off the side of the stage and vomited. It didn’t really come as a surprise—the prolific Alabama punk was wearing a heavy leather jacket in a hot room and was literally dripping sweat before his set even began. His face slack with the unmistakable look of someone who may puke again, he leaned into the mic and said, “This is our last song.” His loud, sludgy, evil guitar sound filled the Hi Tone with feedback. The crowd visibly approved.

As soon as the vomit hit the floor, the show became a convenient caricature of what happens at Memphis’ annual celebration: a slurry of beer and smoke and smoked meats (word to Payne’s) and gutter rock. It’s not just the bile that defines Gonerfest’s curatorial bent, though—it’s the people cheering for the dude who chucked. It’s the tiny baby in sunglasses and noise-cancelling headphones being lofted by Ex-Cult’s JB Horrell as his band’s obliterating new songs filled the Cooper-Young intersection. It’s seeing the same people every year and getting asked if you need a ride to Al Green’s church on Sunday morning (just a few short hours after the last afterparty lets out at the Buccaneer). It’s people excitedly dancing into each other as Ty Segall played seemingly unmoshable songs like T. Rex's “Cosmic Dancer”.

At this point in his career, Segall can work a room without trying. Shortly into the first song of his one-off "Ty Rex" set—beers were flung. Soon, Ex-Cult's Chris Shaw (clad in a cowboy hat) was pouring champagne down Bobby Hussy’s gullet, then he baptized the first few rows in the crowd with what was left in the bottle. A fight broke between two guys, but Segall threw the peace sign in their face, and under his loving glam spell, they stopped tussling and started kissing. Segall and bassist Denée Petracek smashed multiple acoustic guitars, which exploded in a cloud of glitter. Shards of wood got thrown into the audience. Crowd surfers lingered for minutes. There was a Shaw-led Doors cover for some reason. The show felt important—it was inclusive, riotous, fun.

Of course, people pregamed for Ty Rex by losing their minds during the preceding bands. They witnessed another year of Nots’ thrashing, yawping, all-power domination—added proof that they’re one of the most exciting live bands working. Melbourne’s Cuntz lunged, screaming through their aggro set, including new stuff from their just-released album Force the Zone. (During a full weekend of t-shirt envy, the bassist’s #rare Gutter Gods shirt was the most coveted.) The unstoppable Timmy’s Organism rightfully received a hero’s welcome. As the trio worked through songs off their upcoming Third Man album Heartless Heathen (biggest highlight: “Back in the Dungeon”), Timmy Vulgar lit a fuse on the head of his guitar. As sparks started flying, it became apparent that there was a smoke bomb duct taped there all along, and soon, he was blasting the crowd with green smoke while ripping through a massive solo. By the end of the set, he tossed several more smoke bombs in the audience; the band played “Wounded White Dove” as a haze of multi-colored smoke choked the room.

Later that night at the Buccaneer afterparty, Buck Biloxi and the Fucks announced that their set would be the band’s last. “Say goodbye to the bad guy,” the frontman said. With the bittersweet promise that this would be the last time to scream along the words “I AIN’T GOING TO CHURCH” (because let’s face it, there was no way I was going to have the energy to see Al Green’s choir that weekend), a tight corridor of people bathed in dark red light screamed and shoved and threw elbows. The next day, after his excellent opening set playing guitar in band-to-watch Black Abba, I asked Robert Watson Craig III (aka Buck Biloxi) if we really had experienced the last Buck show. “No,” he said, laughing. Well, that’s what bad guys do—they tell needless lies. Then, they put on all-black body suits and distort their vocals to become Giorgio Murderer.

One of the most joyously antagonistic sets of the weekend came courtesy of Pookie and the Poodlez. Trevor Straub immediately stood out with his orange hair, P.U.N.K. T-shirt (a la D.A.R.E.), and high-pitched “Hiiiiii!”. Soon after the trio worked through a couple of their catchy power pop hits, Straub broke two strings. Frustrated, he looked to the audience for their help. “Just give me a fucking guitar, come on,” he said to the crowd before singing two guitar-less songs. A maskless Nobunny (whose set the next night was, as usual, a livewire exercise in working a room) eventually wandered up, plugged in, and finished out the final chorus of “Boy”—a song where Straub sang “I don’t hate boys, I just hate you” while broadly gesturing to the crowd. After expressing to the crowd that people in the Bay Area have each other’s backs unlike this crowd (“the worst guitar techs ever”), he told the audience, “I love you, I hate you, byeeeee” and played his last song.

While there wasn’t a weak spot on the lineup, Hank Wood and the Hammerheads were, for me, the biggest draw—the reason why a trip to Memphis this year felt like a requirement. When you’re on the outside, you hear murmurs about the current New York punk scene. Mostly, it’s tough guy shit—some approximation of humorless knife-wielding assholes. The Hammerheads definitely have a sense of humor—one of the drummers sold me a shirt by saying, “Trust me, you’re going to love yourself in yellow.” Also, they are a thrilling, tight, and incredible live band. There are six guys on stage, and it’s hard to say exactly which one is the MVP. It could be the guitarist, whose solo on “The Ghost” rips exactly as hard as it does on the album. A strong argument could be made for either of the drummers—the guy behind the kit and the dude going rapidfire on cowbells. The organist certainly rules. But let’s be real—it’s Hank Wood, a true showman and storyteller. The guy never stops moving, and his face fully conveys the passion and torment of his lyrics. Yes, the music was fast, feverish, and responsible for an intense pit. They also knew when to level off, cooling down before firing back up. It wasn’t just power on power on power; there was emotional nuance and room to breathe. The album’s called Stay Home. I’m glad I didn’t.

Amidst all the drunken rock’n’roll revelry, an important reminder came during Sonny Vincent’s headlining set. The Testors frontman stepped up to the mic, and when he realized his voice was getting muffled by feedback, he stepped over and turned an amp off. Then, for a moment, he offered an important reminder—that innocent people are getting senselessly killed by police. It’s fucked up, and while rock’n’roll is fun, it’s irresponsible to coast through party mode without acknowledging the awful shit that happens all the time all over the country. It’s a truly punk sentiment coming from one of the genre’s godfathers. Backed by an impressive band, the set itself was also a loud reminder that you should be regularly bumping Testors and Vincent records.

Perhaps the best-curated slot of the weekend was Quintron headlining the final night, the logical culmination of the entire weekend. People partied, drank, and somehow managed to stay upright after three long rock’n’roll-filled days to get to the weekend’s biggest dance party. A Quintron set is a purely joyful thing. Balloons were spilled out of big puffy psychedelic teeth. It was actually the second Quintron set of the night—the first was a masterful (and very funny) opening set by his rock band FIRST. Both sets featured a song with the repeated chorus “teenagers don’t know shit”. It was a longer set, but Quintron is the sort of artist who could go full Springsteen and command a three-hour dance party.

Of course, writing about Gonerfest means feeling like you can’t possibly cover all the best stuff of the weekend. The Ar-Kaics, a classic garage rock band actively spilling ace Nuggets in 2015, are one of the best party bands in America. There’s a full report’s worth of words to spill about Sweet Knives—a sobering, amazing set where Alicja Trout sang the songs of the Lost Sounds (with zero banter) at dusk. New York punk greats Foster Care came through with an intense late night set that definitely got me further excited for their upcoming Total Punk album. Manhunt impressed with their beefy psychedelia. Ultimate Painting and Salad Boys were vital afternoon cool-down acts whose songs are just as satisfying in person as they are on the records. Choke Chains showcased their unapologetic obsession with the sexually aggressive and Satanic. Aquarian Blood were one of the year’s great breakout bands, transferring their weirdo bedroom tapes into an aggro full-bodied bar show (with a violinist!). Somehow I haven’t even mentioned the masterful sets from Memphis hero Jack Oblivian and Minneapolis wreckers the Blind Shake.

But that’s what Gonerfest is like—three days where it’s hard to pin down the highlights. If you’ve never been and you care at all about any of this music, go. This is music that demands being heard live. Stay up all night in the tiny and smoke-filled Buccaneer, walk in and out of Murphy’s on Saturday to catch all 10 bands (especially the ones you’re not familiar with), drink all the Goner-branded beer you can drink for $5 on Friday, and listen to weird country oddities between sets at the Hi-Tone. Most importantly, you get the opportunity to celebrate this music with people who live for it. 

Image via Instagram

When Grant Singer made "Dayzed Inn Daydreamz", his third video for Ariel Pink’s album Pom Pom, the director relegated the singer to a cameo and gave the lead role to Rick Wilder. Shockingly thin, hair dyed marmalade orange, and a hoop through his right nostril, Wilder is an arresting figure. His character alternates between a dull job at a grocery store, drinking in a trailer park, and prancing on a bar’s stage in glittering silver pants.

Though his sunken face is not familiar to most, Wilder once fronted the Berlin Brats, the group he founded in 1972 that Rodney Bingenheimer described as "the first real L.A. homegrown glam rock band" in the Los Angeles punk scene oral history We Got the Neutron Bomb. After the Brats broke up, Wilder lead the Mau Mau’s in various forms since the late 1970s, with sporadic recorded output. He is also interviewed in The Decline of Western Civilization III, the documentary made in 1998 but widely seen for first time with the boxset release of Penelope Spheeris’s series.

After Singer got the opportunity to do three videos leading up to the release of the Weeknd’s new album Beauty Behind the Madness, he again brought in Wilder and made him a through line in this trilogy. In "The Hills" Wilder looms in the mansion that Abel Tesfaye hobbles into, in "Can’t Feel My Face" he throws the lighter that ignites the singer, and in "Tell Your Friends" he catches a couple bullets. With his hair slicked back and in dark suits, some have taken his character to represent the devil or the music industry (same diff?), but in keeping with the Weeknd’s insistent opaqueness, Singer won’t really talk about the videos’ meaning or what it’s like working with the artist.

Singer and Wilder have become friends over the past year and plan to continue collaborating in the future. At a restaurant in West Hollywood, the two talked about their relationship.

Pitchfork: How did you come together to work on the Ariel Pink video?

Grant Singer: I first saw him in the elevator of the Gaylord Apartments in Koreatown. I was meeting a band that I was doing a video for that was living there. You were living there at the time?

Rick Wilder: Attempting to.

GS: I was immediately attracted to him, visually. It was a thing that you really can’t explain where you’re drawn to someone. I couldn’t stop thinking about him and potentially working with him in some capacity. I tried to track him down. I went back to the Gaylord, couldn’t find him, he wasn’t living there at the time. I attempted in many different ways to contact him, like emailing someone who I thought was your manager that I found online. It wasn’t until Don Bolles, from the Germs and the drummer of Ariel’s band, gave me your number. And I called you and we met.

RW: At Denny’s.

Pitchfork: You approached him about being in Ariel Pink’s video?

GS: Yeah. It’s very cinematic. It’s a narrative. It feels way more like a short film than it does like a music video. It was either going to be made with him or not be made. It was riding on the fact that we get Rick to be in it, and I was ecstatic about the fact that he agreed to be in it.

Pitchfork: You had learned about his history and who he was?

GS: Totally. By that time I was very well educated to his history and became a huge fan. While we were shooting "Dayzed Inn Daydreamz", we were playing his music in the trailer when he was dancing, we were playing the Mau Mau’s.

RW: There was a little T. Rex in there.

Pitchfork: Rick, when you got the call from Grant asking if you wanted to be in a video, were you immediately into it or did you have to think about it?

RW: Actually I really didn’t want to do it. I’m kind of notorious for having an eccentric way of looking at how one should go about making it. I’m a bit more—what’s the word?—arcane. But I saw the stuff he was showing me on how he would do it. I’d like to think of myself as a student of film, I really like old films, so I thought, "This guy has a future and it sounds like a good idea."

Pitchfork: Have other people approached you for opportunities like this?

RW: Yeah, sort of, but they didn’t show me anything like that and they didn’t talk like him.

Pitchfork: Was the Ariel Pink shoot fun?

GS: It was a smaller shoot, so it was intimate, but it was something I’d been wanting to make for so long.

RW: The only thing odd was Bakersfield.

GS: It was in this area called Oildale, which is north of Bakersfield.

RW: Is that what they were saying? I thought they were saying, "This is oil’s ville." You can tell I’m not from there.

GS: It was very bleak. It didn’t feel like a place that was receptive to us filming. The way that we filmed the place, I wanted to create a sense of realism as much as possible, to blur the lines between documentary and fiction, so we picked locations as if Rick would actually live there and everything should be in walking distance to one another. We wanted to create atmosphere. Obviously it was all carefully constructed and not real, but we wanted it to appear as real as possible. But that shoot was really fun. Sometimes when you want to make things for so long and you finally have the opportunity to make them, you don’t take them for granted. With Rick, he was really easy to work with. I didn’t even have to give him much direction, by that time we talked so much about the project that I just let him do what he needed to do and that was it.

RW: Well, you give good directions.

Pitchfork: Rick, do you have acting experience?

RW: Some acting at AADA [the American Academy of Dramatic Arts] in New York, a year and a half there. Other than that, I’ve been in like a hundred films, but only two talking roles. I was in a Cheech & Chong movie [Up in Smoke]. That was a long, long time ago. I was interviewed in The Decline of Western Civilization III. I was in Decline number one for a second. I wanted to say a lot of shit.

Pitchfork: I had heard you were going to be in the original Decline of Western Civilization more.

RW: Yeah, and then she [director Penelope Spheeris] changed her mind because she didn’t want to buck the new system that replaces the old one.

Pitchfork: I heard you were going to MC the shows. Is that right?

RW: I was going to go around and say what I really thought. I would be the only one taking the shit, I didn’t think that would be weird, but I guess she thought the bands would freak out.

Pitchfork: After the "Dayzed Inn Daydreamz" video, did you always intend to work together again?

GS: Yeah. It was such a great experience—for me at least, I can’t speak for Rick—but making that video specifically, it felt right. I didn’t know what we were going to work on next, but I knew we were going to work on something else. Even to this day, I know we’ll be working on something else in whatever capacity.

RW: I hope.

Pitchfork: So how did the Weeknd video come about?

GS: After the Ariel Pink video came out, La Mar Taylor, who is the Weeknd’s creative director, got in contact. Off of "Dayzed in Daydreamz" and "Picture Me Gone", he asked me to do the first single off of the Weeknd’s new record. That was in January or February.

Pitchfork: When they asked you to create one video, did you always conceptualize creating this character who could reappear in other Weeknd videos?

GS: Initially I had no idea what I was going to do for the Weeknd. I hadn’t even heard the song. It wasn’t until I heard the song and met with Abel [Tesfaye] that things started to shape up.

Pitchfork: When you brought up the idea of having Rick in it, were they into it?

GS: I don’t want to talk about how that came about.

Pitchfork: Did Rick seem like a natural fit for the idea you wanted to convey?

GS: I think... [30 seconds of silence as Singer figures out what he is going to say] Yes, things sort of progressed naturally, I guess you could say.

Pitchfork: Did you have it in mind that Rick’s character was something that could continue?

GS: Uh, yeah.

Pitchfork: Were these the biggest projects you’ve worked on?

GS: Yeah, they were big videos. "Can’t Feel My Face' is a huge song.

RW: The song of the summer.

GS: And "The Hills" has like 150 or 160 million views. It’s something crazy.

Pitchfork: When you were making it did you anticipate that it would be this big?

GS: No, I had no idea. No one did. Maybe the Weeknd did. Who knows? We just wanted to make a good video and make something that was cinematic that really evoked the music. That was the only intention, to make a good video.

Pitchfork: So there was no pressure that this video had to break the song big?

GS: Not at all. I was a fan of the Weeknd. I believe you like the Weeknd too.

RW: I always liked all that rhythm & blues stuff, from my Stones fixation I always kept going. I kind of like House of Balloons and the Trilogy albums.

Pitchfork: When Grant asked if you wanted to be in a Weeknd video...

RW: Yeah, I knew who he was.

Pitchfork: What type of director is Grant?

RW: Well, he can be an asshole sometimes. He gets what he wants, in a sort of guerilla way. I noticed that. He doesn’t scream that much, maybe once or twice.

Pitchfork: How is Rick as an actor?

GS: He’s super easy to work with. I give him very little direction—I tell him what the shot is, what needs to happen, he does it, then it’s over. There are people, obviously, you have to be more delicate with them and work with them to get what you want, Rick is the opposite. He knows exactly what I want, does it, next shot.

Pitchfork: What is it about Rick that allows him to pick that up from you?

GS: Right away, even before we ever worked together, just by talking and seeing my aesthetic, he knew the tone I like. From the time I first saw him in that elevator, it was like that connection. It’s not love at first sight, but it’s an immediate connection with a total stranger. It kind of felt like a thing that was destined to happen, so when we did start working together and talking, we were just immediately on that same page. He just knows where I’m going. There’s no surprises, there’s no confusion.

Pitchfork: Have you had relationships like that with directors before?

RW: Never.

GS: The thing I found with Rick, is that most people are obsessed with youth or things that they think are embodied in young people, and I’ve never really been into that. What I’ve found with Rick is an authenticity and this pure rock'n'roll aesthetic that felt very real to me.

RW: Keep going, keep going.

GS: It didn’t feel like an act, it felt like completely real. When you have that, it emanates in anything you do. Acting, it still comes from that same place, that’s attractive to me. When people have that, you don’t really have to work with them, you don’t have to direct them, per se. You just sculpt it.

Pitchfork: Have people been recognizing you since the videos came out?

RW: Oh yeah.

GS: A mini riot started outside of 7-11 when all these kids recognized him. He couldn’t even go inside and get what he wanted to get. He had to run back to his car.

There are days that I'd really like to live in Smallville.

I don't mean Clark Kent's Kansas hometown; I'm talking about the Hamburg label that's home to acts like Christopher Rau, Julius Steinhoff, Moomin, and Smallpeople. I don't think I'm alone in my desire to put down roots, or at least rent a room, in their neatly tended acreage, where I imagine the fences are always white and picketed, and the windowpanes always streaked with rain; the aesthetic that they've created is so total, it exerts a remarkable emotional pull.

To begin with, there's the label's whimsical visual side, courtesy the illustrator Stefan Marx: the oddball cartoon figures, the cozy sloganeering, and even baubly abstracts that'd send J.M.W. Turner himself into ecstasy. It's an aesthetic that's quirky and elegant all at once.

And then, of course, there's the sound. Smallville descends from a long tradition of great German dance-music labels—Kompakt, Playhouse, Perlon, and particularly Dial, a Hamburg imprint co-founded by the frequent Smallville contributor Lawrence—for whom the in-house style is often at least as important as the individual artist's vision. And Smallville might have the most coherent aesthetic of any of them. That's not to say that they seem to be telling their artists what to do, or that all their releases sound the same; it's simply that all the label's records tend to orbit each other, and the energy of their combined gravitational force becomes a huge part of the label's appeal.

At its core, the Smallville sound is all about the contrast between textures, with crisp TR-808s cutting through downy pads, all of it topped off with piano melodies that twinkle like Christmas lights. Their vision of deep house descends directly from the tradition of Larry Heard—just backlit, soft-focused, and spun out until it's the texture of cotton candy.

Last month, Smallville celebrated its 10th anniversary with Smallville Ways, a compilation featuring new tracks from the label faithful—STL, Rau, Moomin, Smallpeople, Bon, Lawrence, Juniper, RVDS—plus a few friends of the crew. The label's first release, We Are Smallville—a three-track EP featuring Steinhoff & Hammouda, Sten (aka Lawrence), and DJ Swap—didn't actually appear until November, 2006, but the Hamburg record shop of the same name dates back to 2005, with Julius Steinhoff, Peter Kersten (Lawrence), and Stella Plazonja originally at the helm. A year after opening their doors, Lawrence and Steinhoff launched the label, while Plazonja moved to Berlin to study philosophy, and in 2010, Just von Ahlefeld (aka Dionne) joined the team, taking over the shop—leaving Steinhoff to concentrate on the label, and freeing up Lawrence to focus on the Berlin gallery, Mathew, that he runs with Carsten Jost. But Lawrence still keeps his studio in the back of the store, and the label operates less like a vertically integrated organization than a loose constellation of actors. Jacques Bon runs Smallville Records Paris, a satellite outfit that stems from Pantha du Prince's stint living in Paris, when he began stocking Dial and Smallville records in his girlfriend's shop; when they lost their lease, Bon set up his own store. And Lawrence's Mathew Gallery has a New York location now, too, while Stefan Marx's annual visits to the NY Art Book Fair help explain why a drawing of Hester Street's Joy's Flower Pot adorns Lawrence's recent ManhattanEP. Smallville is less a place than a state of mind, which makes it eminently portable.

"We talk a lot about what's coming up, and I will either go to his studio to see new things, or he just sends me new stuff," says Steinhoff of his working relationship with Marx. "He always has so many great things to choose from." In fact, Marx's drawings were one of the main motivating factors in the genesis of the label. Marx had just drawn the cover for Isolee's We Are Monster, recalls Steinhoff, and Smallville Hamburg was opening its doors. "We did a little cheesecake-and-coffee gathering at Smallville, and Stefan did a window painting for the store. When I first saw the Isolée cover, it had a big impact on me, as it all made sense. At the time, we didn't have the label yet, but we had the plan to do it, and we knew he should be the one to take care of the visual side."

The label's 11th year shows no sign of a slowdown. There's a new Moomin album on the way, and before that, a Moomin remix of an early '00s soul-disco tune. Fuck Reality, Smallville's fledgling remix label—so far, they've released updates of Westbam & Nena's "Oldschool Baby" and an edit of a Candi Staton classic—has a third release brewing. Move D has teamed up with two friends from Taipei as L'Amour Fou, with a new EP on the way. And Steinhoff is at work with his old pal Abdeslam Hammouda on a guitar-based album. "We will release that somewhere else, but this is something big for me," says Steinhoff.

Here are 10 standouts from the label's first decade. Set 'em aside for a rainy day.

STL, "Silent State" (Smallville 12)

"Silent State", released in 2009, marked the first time that the prolific Stephan Laubner had released anything on a label other than his own Something imprint, where he'd already put out a dozen or more records by that point, or Perlon, home to 2006's The Early Tracks and 2008's Lost in Brown Eyes. You've gotta wonder what made him choose to go with a new label for this one, if only because "Silent State" was clearly the most immediate and expansive thing he'd ever done. (The Smallville heads must have been beside themselves when they realized they were getting this one.) Its elements are as barely-there as on any of his records, in which unvarnished drum machines bump and clatter away against a backdrop of distant synths and persistent line noise, but its proportions are unmistakably anthemic—never mind that it was the quietest, cuddliest anthem you'd ever heard. (Resident Advisor wisely called it a "dance floor healer.") It was the perfect merger of STL's own dub techno instincts with Smallville's billowy deep house, with just a hint of Omar-S's windswept trance states mixed in.

Smallpeople, "Black Ice" (Smallville 27)

Smallpeople, aka Julius Steinhoff and Just von Ahlefeld, are two of the label's core members, so it makes sense that their work would so often cut straight to the marrow of the Smallville aesthetic. "Black Ice" does just that, beginning with a title that's at once nostalgic—it always makes me think of ice skating, for some reason; specifically, the Peanuts cast drawing loops out on the frozen lake—and faintly menacing. The wistful little right-hand riff is as substantial as breath on a cold window, which only makes the drums and bass cut that much more sharply. It's an ethereal mood-piece that kicks you right in the gut.

Roaming, "Believe in Reflecting" (Smallville 31)

Speaking of Peanuts, there's this 2012 cut tucked away in the B2 slot of the lone EP from Roaming, aka Christopher Rau and Moomin, that goes so far as to sample "Christmas Time Is Here", from A Charlie Brown Christmas. It's a quietly audacious move; even more so because the vocals aren't even really synchronized with the track. They're just loosely draped over Roaming's bass melody and crisp 808, spreading the wooziest kind of "happiness and cheer." But somehow, inexplicably, it works—maybe because Vince Guaraldi's piano tone is such an obvious antecedent for the Smallville crew's own penchant for watery, twinkling keys. It helps that the vocals are never brought out of the background; they just hang there, faintly coloring the scene, like a memory on the verge of crystallizing.

Christopher Rau, "Weird Alps" (Smallville LP06)

Long live the one-finger riff. Da da da da-da da, da da-da. The "melody" of this standout from Christopher Rau's sensibly titled sophomore album Two is just a single note—a tinny little brass stab—strung out into a syncopated pattern repeated bar after bar. The genius of the song is the way Rau folds all his other elements around the insistent pedal tone. It brings out the crispness of the drums, on the one side, and the soft, enveloping textures of the chords, on the other, and its dogged focus on that one goddamned note makes an otherwise unremarkable little four-note bass line seem positively epic. A little more than halfway through, the lead suddenly, briefly leaves its post and trips down the scale—a major development! Except that it never happens again, and you're left wondering if the momentary foray into actual melody was all in your imagination. It's a far tougher, more declarative cut that Rau is known for, but unlikely way that he comes out of his shell here is part of its charm.

Moomin, "Doobiest" (Smallville LP04)

Here's another one that's so quintessentially Smallville in spirit, it's like the label's entire catalog distilled into a single potent drop. With a rhythmic backdrop built out of sloshing waves, a sharp intake of breath, and honest-to-goodness seagull cries, it's one very small step away from being self-parody, but it works. A loop of shimmering Rhodes is all it takes to complete the misty, wistful aura. And the rest of The Story About You, the 2011 album that this song opens, is just as dreamy. (For more seagulls, check Christopher Rau's "RG in el Casa", off the new 10 Years – Smallville Ways compilation.)

Arnaldo, "Moving On" (Smallville 42)

Arnaldo (William Arnaldo Smith) is an Argentine-born, U.K.-raised, and Berlin-based producer whose only Smallville release, until recently, was a 2012 split with Juniper. The title of his new EP, Your Favourite Colour Is Green Yet You Dress in Black, sounds like it might be an emo lyric, which of course makes it perfect for the label's sentimentalist aesthetic. The record's only been out for a few months, so perhaps it's early to declare it among the label's best. But something about the shimmering riff at the center of "Moving On" keeps me coming back to the record, almost obsessively. As is so often the case with the label, the lead synth is a featherweight affair with the attack sanded down until it lands with the weight of a sigh. And at the still center of the track, framed by bone-dry drum machines and watery pads, that demure, two-note riff flickers away like a desert mirage. It's a small detail in a vast landscape, but it holds your attention like nothing else.

Julius Steinhoff, Flocking Behavior (Smallville LP09)

I started off wanting to highlight individual tracks, but that's hard to do in Smallville's case; their theme-and-variations game is so carefully controlled, the elements don't actually change that much from track to track. And once you've heard one, you typically want to hear more.  Julius Steinhoff's 2014 album shows how well the label's aesthetic works when drawn out to full-length format. We get glistening synth experiments ("Treehouse"), Midwestern genuflections ("Where Days Begin"), shivering strings ("Hey You"), nervous 808s ("Sun and Stars"), wispy fillips ("Flocking Behaviour"), and hypnotic bassline tracks ("Cheetah Nights", "All the Things You Are"), all strung in a line like paper lanterns.

Move D & Benjamin Brunn, Songs from the Beehive (Smallville LP01)

Released in 2008, Songs from the Beehive was the first artist album on the label, and it's still one of the very best things they've ever put out. Both musicians, who had previously collaborated on the 2006 album Let's Call It a Day, are masters of nuance and texture, and the album unspools with the feel of a carefully controlled studio jam. "Like a Restless Sea" is an otherworldly, lyrical ambient cut that samples a spoken-word snippet from The Sound of Music, of all things; "Come In" and "Mothercorn" are jewel-toned studies in slow-motion house. Four of the album's undulating, immersive cuts run 12 minutes or longer; "Radar", the dub techno fantasia that closes the record, is nearly 21 minutes long.  For an introduction, try "Velvet Paws", which trembles like a beaded curtain at the doorway to the infinite.

Benjamin Brunn, Live at Golden Pudel Club (Pudelville 01)

Running 39 minutes and broken into two side-long tracks, this live album was recorded at the Golden Pudel, a legendary Hamburg club-slash-dive where punk's counter-cultural spirit, rather than "club culture," holds sway. (Maybe Steve Albini should check it out sometime.) Both sides are essentially drum-free, save the occasional pitter-pat burst of white noise, but even those imitations of hi-hats are quickly swallowed up by bass gurgle and jewel-toned chords. Bubbling like a lava lamp, it's ambient jazz, essentially, with a rippling pulse and richer color than NASA's recent space photography.

Various, 10 Years, Smallville Ways (Smallville CD10)

Even if you've never heard a lick of Smallville before, there are worse approaches than to begin with the new comp and work your way backwards. Jacques Bon's "Tribute to You" is bright-eyed acid—one of the few 303 jams on the label that come to mind, in fact—in a major key. Lawrence's "Dawn 808" offers the perfect balance between crisp claps and squishy chords. Juniper's "Variations in Grey" is built around a tremolo synth squiggle so exquisite, you'd like to frame it and hang it on the wall. Stockholm's Kornél Kovács parachutes in from Studio Barnhus, the label he runs with Axel Boman and Petter Nordkvist, bearing what I'm pretty sure is the first vocal track ever published by Smallville. RVDS & Rau's "Umbé Data" boasts some lovely xylophone flourishes, Smallpeople's "Cricket Orchestra" is narcotic and low-slung, and STL's "Leaving Peaceful" enlivens dub techno with shuffling beats (and slowly rolling waves) as only STL can.

In this edition of Merch Table, Miles Raymer looks at a selection of quality headphones, ranging from earbuds that let you change filter according to genre to a pair wrapped in tweed.

Grain Audio OEHP.01
$199

They’re headphones with earcups made out of wood. Do they sound woody? Kind of, like maybe there is some mellowness in the high end. Maybe this is an item for the person in your life with those acoustics-improving rocks arranged around their living room. Overall, they are nice, but as far as looks, they’re aggressively tasteful, and wearing them around makes you look like Lobot in his second career as a type designer.

Rock Jaw Audio Alfa Genus V2
$79.95

They’re earbuds that let you change the teensy speaker filter in order to adjust for the kind of music you are listening to. It sounds like just another gimmick to make them stand out in a ridiculously crowded market, but they actually make a noticeable difference. The "bass" ones are equivalent to the post-Beats low-end monsters that are the dominant norm, while the "natural" and "treble" ones would be a good match for people who are unhappy with how Beats-style earbuds sound.

Tweedz braided headphones
$34.99

They’re earbuds with cords that are wrapped in tweed, à la high-end guitar cables. Some of them even have vintage-esque patterns that let people know you’re really into analog stuff when you’re not listening to lossy digital music files. The tweed also helps to minimize tangling, which actually works to an impressive extent. Soundwise they’re nothing special, but if a tangle-free lifestyle’s that important to you, this bud’s for you.

Zipbuds SLIDE
$49.99

Or for $15 more you can get these ones that zip up the two earbud cords that seem to cause 99% of the tangles commonly experienced. Their rubbery coating isn’t as tactilely pleasurable as the Tweedz, but they sound markedly better.

Motorola Moto Pulse
$59.99

If you are ready to ditch cords entirely, you can jam on these Bluetooth buds. Bluetooth hasn’t come quite far along enough to match the sound quality of wired headphones, but it’s getting closer. If you’re not a bass snob, you might not even notice the difference with the Moto Pulse, although you will likely notice the occasional static and glitches during playback. These get points for their health-goth-compatible, all-matte-black design, but they lose a few from a recent incident when I turned my head quickly and they flew into the lap of a very surprised stranger.

AKG Y-50
$99.95

These aren’t a new product, but a couple months ago I got a pair in a gift bag from some music app for iPhone. I nearly gave them away without even opening the box; their taxi-yellow color scheme and oversized typographic branding make them by far the ugliest headphones I’ve ever seen. I gave them a shot and immediately they became my go-to pair. They sound as good as any headphones that cost twice as much, but I didn’t feel quite as paranoid about carrying these eyesores around in my bag. I’ve convinced myself the design has an early UK rave/Peter Saville aesthetic quality, although I’m willing to admit that’s a delusional upsell on my end.

Photo via R. City Facebook

Statistics only begin to tell the story: the United States has less than five percent of the world’s overall population, yet nearly 25 percent of its prisoners. Among black males born since the late 1970s, one in four went to prison by their mid-thirties; since the 1970s, America's overall prison and jail population has septupled. These are just a few of the many facts, figures, and keen observations in Ta-Nehisi Coates’ harrowing recent treatise on how incarceration has devastated the black American family in The Atlantic. "The current U.S. rate of incarceration is unprecedented by both historical and comparative standards," Coates cites Harvard University sociologist Devah Prager: "Prison is no longer a rare or extreme event among our nation’s most marginalized groups. Rather it has now become a normal and anticipated marker in the transition to adulthood." America today is the most jailed population ever on Earth. So whywouldn’t we write songs about it?

Even before America’s massive uptick of incarceration in the '80s—even before the phrase "War on Drugs" was coined in 1971—the matter-of-fact portrayal of incarceration has been reflected in pop culture, namely music. You can find it as far back as Lead Belly’s prison and work songs—ones that lament his own incarceration, Jim Crow-era treatment, poverty, existential malaise—in the '30s and '40s. Johnny Cash wrote "Folsom Prison Blues", a fictional tale, in 1955. Elvis Presley’s campy song and film "Jailhouse Rock" came out in 1957, and Cash recorded his famous live albums At Folsom Prison in 1968 and At San Quentin in 1969. In roots music, the outlaw archetype was exalted.

In more recent years, there’s been a shift: System of a Down gave listeners a crash course in the military-prison-industrial complex with "Prison Song", the lead-off track from its landmark 2001 LP Toxicity. Akon scored his first hit with 2004’s "Locked Up", a semi-autobiographical slow jam intended as a "street record", not for radio, where it caught fire unexpectedly. Carrying on the country tradition of prison songs into 2009, Neko Case released "Prison Girls". "They've traded more for cigarettes," Case sings, meeting the despondency of the situation head on, "than I've managed to express."

In just the last few years—perhaps a culmination of this disquieting history—awareness of the prison world in pop culture and politics seems to have reached a new peak. Prisoners' rights have been Pussy Riot’s cause célèbre in Russia, the U.S., and worldwide, showing up at charity functions, live gigs, on talk shows and a music video with Le Tigre members in an episode of "House of Cards". In July, President Barack Obama became the first sitting president to visit a federal prison. A recent special report from HBO’s "Vice" (watch it in full here) followed him inside.

"You have to question whether we have become numb to the costs that it has on these communities," President Obama said, "whether we think it’s somehow normal for black youth or Latino youth to be going through the system in this way. It’s not normal." 

Pop music’s latest entry into this tradition is R. City’s "Locked Away", a top-ten hit on the U.S. singles chart. While it fits the larger historical narrative of prison songs, it was a bit of an odd topic amid a mostly carefree slate of summer jams upon release in June. Its "Would you still love me the same?" hook, sung by Maroon 5’s Adam Levine, is sunny and bright, but its other lyrics ("Tell me would you really cry for me?/ Baby don't lie to me") are imbued with keep-your-chin-up positivity in the face of struggle, or what Ta-Nehisi Coates called "earned" hope.

"Hope is not feel-goodism built on the belief in unicorns," Coates wrote in the wake of the riots in Ferguson, Mo. last year, skeptical of Obama’s take on American race relations. "Martin Luther King had hope, but it was rooted in years of study and struggle, not in looking the other way. Hope is not magical. Hope is earned."

And this is what’s exceptional about "Locked Away": It’s the rare hit single that doesn’t look the other way. The brothers of R. City, Theron and Timothy Thomas, look back and, implicitly, forward in its lyrics, which come from personal experience. Growing up on the Virgin Islands in St. Thomas’ housing projects, the Thomases’ father was in jail for five years when they were just babies. “‘Locked Away’ was just a representation of love that we saw [from our mom] growing up and love that we aspire to have with our significant others," explains Theron. "That’s the kind of relationship we would love to have."

In contrast to “Jailhouse Rock” or “Folsom Prison Blues”, the true story and implicit values of “Locked Away” zoom past simple storytelling or genre exercise. But that’s not to say the duo isn’t accomplished at writing songs for others or experiences not their own, either: the Thomases helped author a series of hits for the likes of Rihanna (“Pour It Up”), Miley Cyrus (“We Can’t Stop”), Nicki Minaj (“Only”) and other huge stars over the last few years. What Dreams Are Made Of– the duo’s major-label debut as performers, out this week– and save for the appearance of Adam Levin on “Locked Away”, R. City is largely unaccompanied on the record.

“We didn’t wanna sacrifice a really good body of work versus a good feature,” Timothy said. “We wanted people to become fans of R. City, to buy into us.”

The duo’s current promotional contest calls on fans to share stories on social media of incarcerated loved ones for a chance to win money for their commissary. The Thomases say it’s the first of many steps in helping to improve people’s lives with their music.

"I’ve had people really close to me locked up, from my dad to one of my closest cousins." Timothy says. "I can’t necessarily say I know what it feels like, but that feeling, like, ‘Damn, nobody cares? Nobody can put a little $100 dollars on my book?’ That we can provide that for some family, some loved one, even if we can’t do it for everybody, we’re making a difference."

Timothy references Tupac’s famous "I will spark the brain that will change the world" quote as their goals for future community outreach and activism.

"We wanna touch minds and show these kids the dream is real," he says. "We’re not trying to make history. We just want to help people."

Considering the institutional enormity of the prison-system issue—compounded by the deep personal impact it has on individuals and families—it’s easy to imagine and accept a cultural response of only American anguish and acquiescence. But R. City, like so many recently and throughout history, shows we can sing—speak out—instead.

While the recent biopic Love and Mercy continued the deification of Brian Wilson, it was his youngest brother Carl that led the Beach Boys for more than twice as long, both onstage and in the studio. Kent Crowley's Long Promised Road: Carl Wilson, Soul of the Beach Boys, the Biography is a fascinating but frustrating effort to recast Carl as the hero of an alternate but equally real version of Beach Boys (and pop music) history. And of all the Wilson family members in need of illumination, Carl deserves it most, the voice of "God Only Knows" and "Good Vibrations", the Boy who captained the band o'er the stormy seas between their '60s hits and their improbable stadium-filling success in the '70s and '80s.

But Long Promised Road reads more like a Carl-centric take on the familiar surf-rock-to-stardom narrative, offering few peeks into the brooding, bearded Wilson on the front cover. Indeed, when 18-year-old Carl shows up at the recording session for Beach Boys Party in late 1965 with his new fiancée on his arm, it's a surprise to learn that young Carl has been dating, or even (one assumes) moved out of the Wilson home in suburban Los Angeles. The textures of Wilson's life are mostly absent as Crowley leaves the well-told parts of the Beach Boys' tale to previous biographers and instead focuses on Wilson's unlikely and influential teendom in L.A.'s thriving independent rock scene of the early '60s. Crowley uncovers some interesting facts (Wilson's teenage guitar lessons with fellow teen and future Walker Brothers guitarist John Maus, who'd played with Richie Valens) and some not terribly interesting ones (Wilson's preferred gauge of guitar strings), but offers no real doorway into Carl himself.

Though Mike Love gets all the (bad) press, and brother Dennis is remembered as his own out-of-control '60s rock caricature, it was Carl who provided the rudder/anchor/shore to the Beach Boys, and his almost-silent subplot within the band invests the book with some amount of natural plot movement. However, it isn't until more than two-thirds of the way through Long Promised Road that Crowley drops one of the book's most interesting points: from early on, Beach Boys' contracts stipulated that the band would consist of "Carl Wilson and four musicians known as the Beach Boys." Carl Wilson wasn't merely the soul of the Beach Boys but, for legal purposes in most jurisdictions, he was the Beach Boys, and his regime was a progressive one.

Following Brian Wilson's emotional recession in the wake of the failed Smile project, it was Carl (as Crowley rightly points out) who fused the road and studio Beach Boys, "reconcil[ing] the complex chorale of 'Cool, Cool Water' with the raucous simplicity of '409.'" These are the years that one wishes Long Promised Road might luxuriate in, building an emotional and artistic historical space for Carl Wilson around the golden art-rock detailing of the Carl-helmed classics Friends, Sunflower, and Surf's Up. Here, Carl was responsible for completing some of Brian's Smile recordings and contributing his own fully-formed songs for the first time. These fertile and collaborative moments of creative calm pass by all too quickly before Capitol Records' 1971 deletion of the entirety of the Beach Boys catalogue and the unexpected second wave of success with 1974's Endless Summer singles compilation, toppling the band's internal balance toward nostalgia.

But for Beach Boys fans looking for fresh angles that might reflect back on the band's music and life, Long Promised Road is full of fun and surprises, a 300-level text perhaps best consumed after more standard works like Timothy White's Nearest Faraway Place: Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys, and the Southern California Experience or even Keith Badman's The Beach Boys: The Definitive Diary of America's Greatest Band. (David Leaf's The Beach Boys and the California Myth remains out-of-print and prohibitively expensive.) Working in semi-unauthorized mode, Crowley pieces together Carl's corner of the Wilson saga without access to Brian or surviving Beach Boys Mike Love, Al Jardine, or Bruce Johnston. The book suffers for it, and interviews with Beach Boys historians offering second-hand assessments don't quite work to fill in the gaps. Since he died from lung cancer in 1998, there remain many aspects of the Carl Wilson story that can never be told. Instead, Long Promised Road delivers its punches in brief episodic bursts that hit like stories told in single panel comics, often more tantalizing than illuminating.

Yet Carl Wilson's personal triumphs and struggles are all present, driven by family demons and the strange Californian currents just as palpably as in the more familiar stories of his brothers Brian and Dennis, but they are almost never fully animated. On the spectrum of Beach Boys writers, Crowley veers dangerously close to being an apologist for Murry Wilson, the band's notoriously abusive father, even quoting members of the Sunrays (a Murry-produced act, introduced to him by Carl) to the effect that Murry couldn't've been that bad. Still, Crowley raises a valuable point as he details Murry's presence around Gold Star studios as an aspiring songwriter a decade before Brian led sessions there for Pet Sounds and Smile: "Murry's musical aspirations and efforts laid the groundwork to turn the Beach Boys from a surf band to the family business to a legend."

In How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'N' Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music, Elijah Wald brilliantly uncovers and connects the seething indie music scenes that existed in regional pockets around the country from the jazz era up through the moment when, Wald notes, surf rock was the last major twist that "helped to form a new image of the rock'n'roll band." Parallel to the arrival of the lead guitar as an iconic totem of the '60s, Carl Wilson was the lead guitarist in the world's most popular surf band. Though they grew long-haired and bearded and briefly psychedelicized, the Beach Boys were never fully at peace with the counterculture, and their creative choices and tensions grew from an earlier and perhaps even weirder time in American history. On the left were the Wilson brothers, voting as a block to continue creating new music and, on the right, cousin Mike Love and others, happy to churn out the hits for paying customers. By the '80s, it was Love was who was most visibly calling the shots. Staying true to his school, as promised, it was Love who forged relationships with Nancy and Ronald Reagan, who sometimes appeared onstage at the Beach Boys' annual Fourth of July concerts in Washington, D.C., where the Hawthorne group branded themselves America's Band. By then, the contracts had been changed and Carl's reign was over, perfectly mirroring the dim end of the 1970s.

"I haven't quit the Beach Boys but I do not plan on touring with them until they decide that 1981 means as much to them as 1961," Crowley quotes Carl as saying near the turn of that decade. It could be a big moment in the book, coming after a long creative battle with Mike Love. Isolated strands of drama lead up to it, such as a pivotal 1977 meeting with Brian voting against his brothers and effectively ending Carl's leadership of the band, followed almost immediately by an acceleration of Carl's own substance abuse. But, like many rock biographies, Long Promised Road goes into fast-forward as the 1980s arrive, covering the entirety of Carl's solo career, subsequent return to the Beach Boys, and remaining decade-and-a-half of his life in the last 13 pages. It's a disappointing end to a promising set-up: a study of the odd and shifting power center of the Beach Boys' American epic, simultaneously an archetype and totally unrepeatable, and the singular Wilson brother who kept it (mostly) together.

Tucked away in the backwater of New York City’s West Village was a cafe called ‘ino. The Bedford Street spot was quintessential New York circa 1855, where you’d expect someone like Walt Whitman seated at one of their hardwood tables chomping on the end of a primitive pen. Instead there was Patti Smith, rock legend and not-so-clandestine poet, who sat at only "Table One" with a cup of black coffee permanently flanking her notebook. ‘Ino’s brunch crowd was unbearable, but the weekday patrons (all three of them at a time) carried milder demeanors. Smith was something of an urban legend to those of us who only frequented ‘Ino semi-occasionally. If you were lucky enough, you caught her there at her table. If she wasn’t there, you had the privilege of actually sitting at that table (and in my case, rubbing it like the Apollo log) and shoveling down a meal in enough time before she got there or else you’d find her waiting in the bathroom until you left. When ‘Ino closed its doors for the last time in 2013, the owner gifted Patti with her now infamous table. The cover of Patti Smith’s latest M Train is a photo of her seated at it.

The prose of M Train floats, and is omnidirectional and impressionistic, like her previous memoir Just Kids. However, in this one Smith presents a deeper delving into her psyche, as she continuously tackles the notion of how to write about nothing. And in doing so, finds there’s definitely something. With M Train, Patti Smith paints solitude as beguiling and essential.

M Train doesn’t glorify sadness or loneliness, nor does it suggest that Patti Smith walks this present-day Earth through a tunnel of malaise. Rather, Smith travels around the world, finding solace in specific cafes in every city. She’s taking notes at every turn, and while her notebook seems to be her only partner on this mission, rarely does she discuss actually getting to write in it. Just Kids had photographer Robert Mapplethorpe as a focal point; M Train references Smith’s late husband Fred "Sonic" Smith in Polaroids, including one where they were forced out of a cab in French Guiana and escorted by the police, following an inspection of the cabbie’s trunk. Other moments include Smith meeting Bobby Fischer in secrecy in Iceland, where they weren’t allowed to speak about chess (instead they sang songs together), visiting the gravesites and homes of artists like Frida Kahlo and Sylvia Plath, and surviving Hurricane Sandy. She keeps her own company, and her pleasant acceptance of isolation manifests itself the most in her celebrating the holidays alone, though her sense of humor remains intact: one New Year’s Eve when a drunk passerby asks her what time it is and she replies "time to puke."

M Train is most remarkably in sync with Smith’s musical catalog, as it’s packed with thoughtful prose and keen observations. Smith has always been a poet first and foremost—before she was ever a performer. Here, Smith has created a book that so many of us wish to write, one that parses what it all means. Nearing seventy, Smith doesn’t sound like she has it all figured out, but she does have a collection of stories that serve as markers in her journey as an artist, in her solitude.

Greil Marcus may be the best known rock critic going—he’s famous for his insights but not for concision. His 2014 book, The History of Rock ‘n Roll in Ten Songs, opens with a five-page run-on. His sentences can be gorgeously knotty, their structure mimicking the circuitous cultural connections. But threaded throughout his work—which includes seminal books such as Mystery Train and Lipstick Traces and editorial roles in collections such as Lester Bangs’ Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung—is a parallel interest in short takes. At the end of the anthology Stranded, for instance, Marcus allots himself only short blurbs on dozens of his favorite albums. It’s a thrilling read. For the last 30 years, Marcus’ main outlet for snappy missives and compact criticism has been the "Real Life Rock Top Ten" column. Recently anthologized in the 500-page Real Life Rock, the column premised on brevity amounts to a great big tome.

"Real Life Rock Top Ten"—which started at The Village Voice, appeared in both Art Forum and The Believer, and currently resides at Barnes & Noble Review—takes in songs, books, movies, and most other imaginable artifacts. It reads like a catalog of the critic’s quotidian consumption, placing side-by-side subjects salvaged from the gutter, be they years-old budget editions or the newest hype. Marshaled under headings, they’re listed one-through-ten and accompanied by assessments that range from punchy fragments to a few paragraphs. Real Life Rock redeems the list format from the current proliferation of "listicles"—and paces it as a thing cultural consumers have always employed for sanity, a way to force some order into an insatiable and unwieldy habit.

The seemingly discrete items in a given column do interact with one another, but Real Life Rock amplifies the sense of teeming conversation. Marcus bickers with statements in song titles and teasingly answers questions posed by lyrics. He’s floored by the Geto Boys’ debut; solo statements from the individual rappers dapple the following pages. He asserts that Beat Happening "invents punk rock"; ensuing indie pop reviews remain at that pitch (though Marcus never uses reductive genre tags). He loves the Fastbacks, who refuse to change, and dismisses the Jesus and Mary Chain’s every left turn. Readers looking for validation or bones to pick will find both (on Courtney Love: "Too theatrical to wound.") and for those purposes Real Life Rock is a useful reference, but there are more urgent takeaways.

It’s a good time for this book: Real Life Rock reminds skeptics that capsule reviews have a long and rich tradition. Indeed, the earlier, shorter installments, bound to printed periodicals’ stringent word-count, pressure Marcus into the best kickers: "…pop Stalinism, or the kind of revisionism you can find in textbooks on American history." Also: "Fuck off and die, cretins." (It’s easy to miss his scabrous bent in the later Believer installments.) Of the Sonics, he writes, "This might have taken longer to record than it does to play," coolly summing the sense of bottled urgency that characterizes the best of the band’s every garage descendent. Resonant commentary doesn’t require voluminous exegesis.

But one of the most instructive implied arguments of the whole text regards intention. Commending an album by the Art Bears in lyrical, evocative prose, Marcus withholds until the end that he’d actually reviewed it on the wrong speed, listens again at the correct setting, and concludes that he liked it best the first time. Today, reviewers’ critical assessments very often hinge on artists’ biographies or industry standing, making Marcus’ book a sobering and provocative reminder that such details, though illuminating as journalism, are somewhat superfluous to listening. And fixating on music at the level of sound is crucial to the imaginative way he careens through the shadowy margins of history in other books. To consider songs’ many lives and unintended ramifications, he lets their authors go.

Photo by Kristin Cofer

When Deafheaven announced New Bermuda in July, bandleader George Clarke offered a hazy sentiment in the press release suggesting that the title referred to "a new destination in life, a nebulous point of arrival." It was as vague as the average record press release, but a month later, Clarke provided clarity in his interview with Rolling Stone, expanding on the "Bermuda" factor and the gravity of this destination. "It's basically sort of a play on the [Bermuda] Triangle — it's like, you're traveling to this place, and you think this is what you want, and you think this is where everything is going to be good. And before that happens, you're swallowed up by the realities of life, the day-to-day."

For most of us, the introduction to Deafheaven came with 2013’s Sunbather, which found Clarke soaking up the affluence and suburban comfort all around him, wondering what a slice of it might taste like. Particularly on the title track, he delivered a knotty take on the American Dream; Clarke, who had recently spent his nights on the floor of a tiny flat with guitarist Kerry McCoy, drove through a sea of mansions and succumbed to extraordinary depression. In an interview with Pitchfork, Clarke characterized the song as coming from a "'what the fuck am I doing with my life' mood." It might seem easy to read sections of the record as by-the-bootstraps capitalist screeds, but Clarke has a bleak enough outlook on the likelihood of success to stop himself before he gets ahead.

If Sunbather was a disillusioned road map, then New Bermuda’s the doomsday arrival. Following their sophomore LP, Deafheaven experienced acclaim that few bands ever achieve, sporting the objectively best-reviewed album of the year, and playing to rooms of larger and larger crowds. Post-Sunbather, McCoy can comfortably blow a few hundred at the OVO store, and Clarke moved to a place in Los Angeles with his girlfriend. Their success sounds like an exhale, but New Bermuda somehow flips the central conceit of "started from the bottom, now we’re here" squarely on its head—the "here" is a trap, void of complete satisfaction and emotional stability.

Deafheaven’s third release is ostensibly a California album. Clarke doesn’t offer any explicit references to places in California, L.A., or even any concrete location (aside from a cryptic recording about George Washington Bridge lane closures at the end of "Baby Blue"), but he delves deep into the emotional consequences of living in its so-called paradise. On "Luna", Clarke denies himself the picturesque setting which surrounds him: "I’ve boarded myself inside. I’ve refused to exit/ There is no ocean for me/ There is no glamour." The interiors of New Bermuda’s are dark—it sure behaves like a direct reaction to the hullaballoo over whether or not Deafheaven is metal enough. Sunbather felt like coasting above the clouds in a chariot; its follow-up often devours you like quicksand. 

But for as much as New Bermuda responds to the band’s detractors, it’s also a rebuttal to Clarke’s desires on Sunbather. Aside from striving toward a better future, the band’s breakthrough was concerned with Clarke mending up relationships and giving loved ones the care they deserve. But the bright lights, peach-stained sunsets, and reimagined suburbia only serve as a catalyst for burrowing further inside his mind, instead of looking outward. Throughout "Brought to the Water", Clarke reluctantly submits to adulthood malaise, and frets over giving up simple pleasures. When he screams, "my world closes its eyes to sex and laughter," you can sense his resistance—yet it still seems like an irrevocable shift.

Similarly, Lana Del Rey cast California as a vital supporting character on her third major-label effort, Honeymoon. If Clarke is Naomi Watts's character in the thick of Mullholland Dr., just getting a taste of L.A.’s ugly layers beneath the peel, then Del Rey is Norma Desmond in Sunset Blvd.—she's hardened into a reluctant diva who claims she’s "got nothing much to live for, ever since I found my fame." It’s a dark, lonely glimpse of Hollywood at night.

The city is all but stripped of its glamour in Honeymoon's universe, and it manifests itself as an opulent, darwinian backdrop for Del Rey's misery. She casually eulogizes a failing relationship on "High By the Beach" by subverting much of the location’s allure: "We won’t survive, we’re sinking in the sand." When she swaps out the song’s title for "all I wanna do is get by by the beach, get by baby, baby, bye bye," you can write an implied "whatever" into her attitude toward the setting. She’s out of fucks to give about her lover, but seems equally unmoved by the place itself.

When she’s not shrugging it off, L.A. drains the life out of Lana. "God Knows I Tried", an early highlight from Honeymoon, finds Del Rey at her most resigned—it reads like a morose, yet razor-sharp submission to the media circuit which has wavered between deifying and ridiculing her. She outlines an exhausting, see-saw routine ("Sometimes I wake up in the morning/ To red, blue, and yellow lights/ On Monday they destroy me/ But by Friday, I’m revived") which could mark any week in the life of Lana Del Rey, but it’s tempting to stretch the period out to her entire career, after that ill-fated "SNL" performance.

Honeymoon works as a dazzling indication of Del Rey’s artistic progress over the last three years, yet also a reminder of how cool disastisfaction remains constant in her work. Fame spawns a laundry list of added pressures, but here they coexist with the universal aches and fears that come with love lost. When George Clarke talks about "the realities of life, the day-to-day" he’s likely talking about the looming fear of complacency, but Del Rey's day-to-day seems consumed by longing—for past loves, future loves, or just a break from the multicolored lights.

Take "Terrence Loves You", when she recalls the toxic imprint of an ex-lover, who drives her to "still get trashed, darling," when she hears his tunes. Del Rey treads on similar ground to when Clarke submitted to the "amber crutch" on Sunbather by letting a reliable vice mask the distance from what she’s striving toward. Whether the destination’s a dream house or a romantic partner in crime, the desired outcome seems clear—the challenge is making it a true haven rather than a temporary escape.

This past January, influential and beloved punk band Erase Errata returned after an extended break to release Lost Weekend, their first full-length in 8 years. While less active than they were in the early 2000s, the band would occasionally play a handful of shows every year, and a new record hinted at more to come. The album was a welcome return to form that found the band tapping into the frenetic energy that defined their sound, while also expanding the experimental notions they always delved into. That excitement was short lived, however, as two months ago the band released an official statement that they were deciding to end the band with a pair of farewell shows taking place this upcoming weekend in Austin and Houston. After 16 years as a band, the trio comprising of Jenny Hoyston, Bianca Sparta, and Ellie Erickson felt like now was the time to say goodbye. Speaking over the phone, Hoyston went in depth as to the reasons why they decided to end the band now, how the politically charged punk she wrote with the band has changed over the life of the band, and why she feels Erase Errata had its place in time that is no more.

Pitchfork: What led to the decision to end the band now?

Jenny Hoyston: It was such a practical decision where we realized that logistically we weren’t able to be available anymore and then making a public announcement and "Hey quit calling us to play festivals because literally we can’t make it happen anymore." It’s as simple as that. It’s definitely very amicable. We’re all still like sisters. We thought we would make a public announcement and do a last couple of shows for us so we can all revisit our catalog. We’re going to play stuff from all four records and eight 7''s at both of the two shows we’re playing in Austin and Houston so that we get to say goodbye to all the music. Bianca, the drummer, has a family and is moving up to Portland. Ellie just graduated with her MBA from Berkeley. She’s thinking about what her next steps are going to be but they’ll probably be a big deal, like managing a big non-profit somewhere, ideally. For me, I’m back here in Texas and I have a job and lots of other projects going on. Everybody’s just staying busy, spreading out, and doing other things, and we realized we couldn’t logistically make it work to get together anymore like we used to be able to.

It used to be somebody could call us to play a festival in Sweden and we could all work our schedules around to get together and play a show, but now, between family, work, and all the other obligations that come around when you’re in your forties, it’s not happening anymore. Our band is from a different time. Even though we all still love making music and we’ll all continue that music in various incarnations, Erase Errata just has this place in time and it doesn’t feel like from this time in a way. We’re not really a part of this Internet age and even putting the band on Facebook this year was odd for us. It was a rude awakening that we don’t really like doing this stuff that bands need to do these days. We even tried doing an Instagram account and hated it. We’re not really into doing the stuff that bands that want to stay active need to do in this day and age. It’s not really up our alley anymore. We used to love going on tour and playing punk squats all over the world and doing stuff like that, but that’s not where it’s at anymore.

Pitchfork: Lost Weekend was recorded a couple years ago but released at the beginning of 2015. When you were going through the process of releasing it and the album cycle, did you think of it as a farewell record?

JH: Yeah, we were. We were already kind of wrapping it up. That was another special circumstance, that we even got to make that record. It was a thing where a festival had offered us a fly-in gig, and then we happened to know our great friend, engineer and producer Luke Tweedy, who lived in Iowa City, where Mission Creek Music Festival was happening. It was an opportunity that just came out of the blue. We were all going to be somewhere and could do three days in a studio. We’d recorded with him before, he’s done some of my solo stuff, and he recorded a Peaking Lights record, which was one of my favorite records of the past couple of years. We decided we’d just stay an extra couple of days. We were friends with all of them so we did some bonfires, parties, rode motorcycles and all that stuff in between recordings and we’d spend the days in studios. We were a little surprised that the opportunity came to do the final record because it had already gotten to a bit of a point where everyone was going different directions in their life. When we did get to do it, we couldn’t imagine how this scenario would arise again where we could be in the same place for the time. We played a show and had maybe three days to crank out the record. I’m really proud of it. I don’t think it sounds as rushed as it actually was in making, but we were able to write all the songs and get them recorded in three days.

Pitchfork: How did you decide to build these last two shows around Stargayzer Fest in Austin and Houston?

JH: It’s something we had been talking about since the record came out that we wanted to do a string of shows. We got offered some dates with Deerhoof, who are our good friends, and wanted to do that but couldn’t make it work. We got offered East Coast, West Coast, all of these little strings of shows that we logistically couldn’t make work. I have my band in Houston, Vacation Eyes, so I got all the gear in Texas. I have practice space in Texas, so when a Texas opportunity came up where they could fly in the other girls, we had to jump on this. It was now or never to get to play our last shows and actually get to hear our old songs again. We kind of made it work, luckily. We’re a six piece for these shows. It all came together mostly because I’m based here. I know enough people where I’ve got places for everyone to stay and logistically it became easier to do it here where I’m living. I spent the last three years in Houston and I’ve been in Austin for only a few months but luckily I know a fair amount of people here already. Also, we were able to because of Stargayzer. We’ve been working with Christina Files for the last two records and a 7''. She’s our synth player, and she lives in New York. We had also been playing around a little bit with a saxophonist, Mlee Marie, who plays in Hearts of Animals in Houston. Because of Stargayzer, we’ve been able to fly in our other people who we’ve all been working with for the last few years. We didn’t want to do it if it was a situation where only the three of us could play because we’re dependent on Christina and these other people to make it crazier and more fun.

Pitchfork: Following up on Erase Errata having its time and not wanting to deal with the Internet, what would you say on how music has changed and how Erase Errata is still relevant of the music of today but not necessarily of this time?

JH: I think the music is relevant and if people are into the music, they’re going to be into it regardless of when it comes from. I think it’s more of the climate for bands these days. I put on a music festival in Yosemite every year, and so I work with a lot of younger bands, and I see what they are going through, especially along the lines of social media. They are working with zero tour support anymore because people aren’t really purchasing music anymore, which is fine. It’s just the new way it is. I feel like they’re on the road nonstop or if they aren’t, then their band faces immediate extinction. It’s just a strange situation. Attention spans are so fleeting. Even my own attention span is so fleeting with this new modern gratification of music age. I get why they have to do what they have to do, and I think we just aren’t willing to go there and do that. Everyone has other things they’d like to do. For me, I would rather be in my practice space or playing a local show, or recording at home than being on the Internet and keeping up with our Instagram. I see the kids spending so much time on that and not that much time on other stuff. What if you actually got to practice five days a week and got to write more new songs and really craft your sound? I feel like even the musicians are very distracted from what they want to be doing because of the age they’re working in. For me, I would rather, these days, work my job and then get to go spend time composing, writing, jamming, playing local shows than doing all the other stuff you need to do to remain on the national stage at this point.

Pitchfork: Erase Errata was always outspoken politically, even on the new record with "Don’t Sit/Lie". Do you think there’s a lack of that more politically charged punk in the past few years or is it there in different forms?

JH: I see a lot of young kids doing really great throwbacks to that old crusty, punk stuff I liked when I was young. I think it’s still going on. In Houston we’ve got Walter's throwing 18 and up shows, and at some venues you can find that stuff. I think in general people have morphed the punk sound with a more mainstream, clubby attitude and definitely the message—if people are feeling political, the message is kind of diluted. These days, it’s hard for people to say things. I noticed that some of the bands I’ve listened to locally and even had play at my festival, they have messages, but they’re more masked. They’re not as obvious if you are being political. I think people are afraid these days. Critique is so widespread and people are afraid of saying the wrong thing. I think some things are okay to be angry about one day and then something comes out that well actually, you’re not allowed to be angry about that. You’re exhibiting this or that behavior that’s not cool anymore. I think people are afraid to speak out the way that we felt comfortable.

Back in the day, I had no problem writing lyrics spelling out what I felt. I feel like the gated communities are being built up to keep people like me and my friends out. I feel like the homeless are being eaten alive. You didn’t really have to worry about all the implications and criticism, and to a certain extent, the political correctness of some of it. Back in the day, I wasn’t aware that it might have been a little bratty for a lower middle class white girl to go around complaining about class issues. Now I’m more aware of that situation. I have a lot of privilege and there are a lot of people who had it worse than me, and of course we’re all pawns of the very wealthy in our country for sure. It’s pretty much that way globally. Regardless, there are certain responsibilities that people feel obligated to take on where they don’t feel comfortable being the one to say certain things that maybe we’re all feeling. Maybe we shouldn’t be the ones to say it, and should leave it to other people to have voices and say things. It’s a different climate, and it’s a different world these days. Honestly, the kids just seem to have similar sentiments but they’re so deeply masked because they’re afraid of how it will be taken, and do they have a right to say certain things.

Pitchfork: Looking back at Erase Errata, being in a band isn’t about checking off a list of goals, and things change as you play together and moved on, but how do you feel about what you accomplished in your 16 years with Erase Errata and what do you want the legacy you leave behind to be?

JH: I’m so grateful, honestly, for the opportunities that we got to travel. I’m extremely grateful for the opportunities we got to record and distribute our things that we wrote in our crappy practice space that we shared with 12 other bands. I feel really privileged that we got to have that experience. I feel really grateful that we got to meet and play with some of the bands we did, because out of those situations other creative opportunities came. For example when we were touring with Sonic Youth and I got to write songs with Kim Gordon for our band Anxious Rats, that was a big point in my career with Erase Errata. It was a dream come true to be able to do creative things with some of my heroes. Definitely, some of the travel, as we got to go to Japan a couple of times, Australia, Europe many times, places where I never could have afforded to go. I’ve never been in a position where I’ve been able to do that kind of traveling. Sure, it was working while traveling. It was hard work, 8 hours driving in a van, then getting out, putting on a show, and trying to be energetic every night while sleeping on floors. It was also a great privilege, and we met great people. It allowed me to learn that there are great people in every place and when people generalize that Texas is full of assholes or Germany is full of assholes, it’s a lie. There are great people everywhere, and there are all kinds of exceptions to any generalizations, and it was a huge privilege for me to get to learn that. I’ve been writing songs since four years old. I’m a record collector. I’ve got over 2000 records. It’s so nice for me to have records that are me. That’s me on there. I did that with my best friends. As an audiophile, it’s really cool that I got to do that because it’s something that’s been a part of me for my whole life. I’m really grateful for the band, and definitely very grateful for my bandmates. Ellie and Bianca are my best friends, and they always will be, and it’s been a privilege. I feel really lucky.

At first glance, the sticker on the LP might not seem weird. "Rediscover the sound of vinyl," it beckons, promising music pressed on a "serious 180g" disc, as if part of some coordinated reissue campaign. In some sense, it is. Keyhole Records is one of many companies finding a niche in the ongoing vinyl boom, and the label's albums can be purchased in record stores across the United States, ready to fill collectors' shelves with classic recordings. But Keyhole—who launched in 2012 with a Velvet Underground double LP—isn't in the reissue business, exactly. With a legal home on the half-Greek/half-Turkish island of Cyprus, Keyhole is one of a number of new labels that deal in unofficial product only—live tapes, radio sessions, outtakes—part of a new bootleg explosion that has taken several distinctly 21st century turns, stretching from record shop bins to the iTunes Store.

While bootlegs were mostly an American sport in the '60s and '70s, starting with the infamous Great White Wonder LP of basement tapes by Bob Dylan and the Band, and notorious labels like Trade Mark of Quality, Rubber Dubber, and more, they mostly became purview of Europeans in the '80s and '90s. Overseas, a series of legal loopholes (first in the Rome Convention of 1966) put unreleased music into the public domain so long as it was recorded abroad and labels paid all the proper mechanical royalties. Tested in the German Supreme Court, the practice grew more prevalent during the CD era. Despite a series of high-profile music industry crackdowns on American record stores (and a widespread non-commercial cassette-trading network), the import business only seemed to die a natural death in the United States with the arrival of file-sharing. "Once the Internet started offering downloads, mp3s, YouTube, etc., the market kind of fell apart," observes Joe Schwab, who opened St. Louis's Euclid Records in 1983 and has dabbled in "imports" only sparingly.

But the legal loopholes remain and, when the market for vinyl returned, so did the bootlegs. "They've never really gone away fully," contends Fabio Roberti, co-owner of Earwax Records in Williamsburg, Brooklyn since 1991, citing an older Nick Cave LP that passed through the store's used bin recently. But while Discogs reveals numerous one-off LPs and scattered CDs and CD-Rs in the "dead" period between the early '90s and the vinyl revival of the past half-decade or so, not even Radiohead seems to have warranted a bootleg LP until 2009. Checking "unofficial releases" sections of Discogs, one can see the shape of the illicit vinyl disappearance and return through the bootleg perennials who went away last and came back first: Pink Floyd (1990 to 2006), Bob Dylan (1992 to 2007), and the Beatles (1997 to 2007).

Even as official bootleg series swell by the season, the past three years has seen a mushrooming of the new vinyl grey market. During the past nine months alone, the European jazz and blues label Dolchess has shifted into more popular turf, launching a new imprint to issue nearly 20 titles (and counting) by Tom Waits, Talking Heads, Joy Division, Iggy Pop, Nirvana, and many more. Let Them Eat Vinyl has put out some 250 LPs since 2012, ranging from James Taylor to Marilyn Manson, with most shades of rock in between. Keyhole caters to slightly more alt-driven tastes, including titles by John Fahey, Captain Beefheart, Moby Grape, the Ramones, and others. Even artists who continue to fight bootleggers with their own live CDs and LPs—such as Pearl Jam, the Grateful Dead, and Frank Zappa—find themselves turning up on fresh illicit vinyl for the first time in decades. For Dylan fanatics, there are lavish box sets of the Europe '66 tour (five LPs plus a DVD) and the Supper Club '93 (six LPs). Following the marketplace, there is naturally even now a bootleg cassette label, with the appropriate name Das Boots, committed to the finest unauthorized small-batch jams by Richard Hell, Flipper, The Cramps, and other canonical punks. As always, some of the new bootlegs are by fans, made from love and perhaps even analog sources, and sound excellent. Many more don't.

As the Internet has burped up countless hours of previously unheard audio and created richly interlocked communities of live music traders on etree, Dimeadozen, and elsewhere, the underground LP industry has a nearly infinite supply of new material. Not all bootleggers are particularly discriminating, though. One recent compilation of early Lou Reed tracks features a newly-surfaced and excellent-sounding 1965 "Heroin" demo whose only source remains a cell-phone video made when Laurie Anderson played the recording at a memorial for Lou Reed at the Apollo Theater, the tell-tale hum of the audience quietly audible on the LP. A new Pink Floyd bootleg from the Dark Side of the Moon tour comes from a recording lovingly remixed and traded on BitTorrent by Floyd fans, and sped-up slightly by bootleggers to meet the length requirements of vinyl.

One deeper 21st century plot twist is the thoroughness of the new products' distribution. Where bootlegs once materialized from the car trunks of very independent record distributors, or ordered from ads in the back pages of collectors' magazines, they now come through even more legitimate channels. Many make their way into stores by way of the same regional and national distributors that have handled American indie labels since long before the vinyl boom. Many can just be purchased new via Amazon. What's more, some grey market releases even now appear on the iTunes Store, such as a selection of Velvet Underground audience recordings from 1968 and 1969, paired with titles and cover art first connected to a wave of Japanese bootleg CDs in the late '90s. The British company Start Entertainments Limited did not return a call or an email regarding their stewardship of the recordings, which include what were once highly-sought tapes by Velvet Underground fanatic (and Cleveland punk pioneer) Jaime Klimek.

While imported bootleg LPs would seem to remain the domain of the fetishist, and a somewhat necessarily limited market, availability in the iTunes Store suggests a whole new level, perhaps even in violation of the "import" loopholes, which should (theoretically) isolate the recordings in the European versions of the iTunes Store. One common clause of all the grey market labels, which operate under varying degrees of legality in their countries of origin, is that they all must pay royalties to the nearest local rights society. The Cyrus-based Keyhole, for example, promises that they deposit all appropriate funds with AEPI, the Hellenic Society for the Protection of Intellectual Property, based in Athens. Theoretically, the appropriate royalties on a Velvet Underground grey market release will make their way back to Lou Reed's publishing company, though it is hard to determine how it might stack up against current profits from Spotify.

"You're making an assumption that they don't have the rights," notes Clinton Heylin, author of Bootleg: The Secret History of the Other Recording Industry, the nearly definitive 1994 book on the subject. "It's a grey area only in the sense that one has to have sight of the original recording contract before one can make a judgment about whether something is an authorized release." In the case of fan recordings, European rights law grows murky and murkier. "These radio broadcasts and recordings that have slipped into the public domain, they're not really bootlegs," Heylin continues, "they're protection gap releases. There are real bootlegs, too"—recordings whose master recordings are unequivocally owned by labels or artists—"and a lot of the real bootlegs are coming out in an increasing amount on vinyl."

In the 21st century, many of the rules of the music business have changed, but shady practices run eternal and deep. "The level of piracy has remained static, but the choices the bootleggers make changes," argues Rob Sevier, co-founder of Chicago's Numero Group and a longtime collector. "There's always been significant piracy. It's always dictated by what the market is. Fifteen years ago, bootlegs were largely geared towards DJs, that was the strongest market, until Serato came along," he says, recalling a particular illicit Gang Starr pressing. "Now the strongest market is the dilettante record buyer," he says. Outright piracy, too, continues in the vinyl revival, with some reissue labels finding it better to press vinyl first and answer legal queries later. In all cases, the companies are taking gambles that no one will come asking questions. "It's purely just a hole in the market place," Sevier says of the availability of live recordings on iTunes. "It's like printing pennies. You can print enough pennies and you've got enough for lunch."

At nearly every level of grey market vinyl, the product remains difficult to evaluate from a legal point-of-view, so small scale as to make it impossible (or worth it) to control. "You go after whoever you can find," says Richard Grabel, a veteran music industry lawyer for Sonic Youth and others, who sends cease-and-desists to vendors when he finds them selling bootlegs. But with the labels themselves hiding out in Europe (none responded to interview queries), the source of the vinyl itself will continue to remain obscured. But collectors' fondness for illicit thrills and deep cuts rings loud and clear in old-fashioned analog fidelity.