The first proper single of Tupac’s career was "Brenda’s Got a Baby" in 1991, and that’s kind of insane to think about, and it’s insane in two different ways: (1) because of what it is about, and (2) because of what Tupac eventually came to represent in rap.

"Brenda’s Got a Baby" is about an illiterate twelve-year-old girl who gets impregnated by her older cousin, secretly gives birth to the baby on a bathroom floor, puts the baby in a Dumpster, gets kicked out of her house, attempts to become a crack dealer, gets robbed, becomes a prostitute, then gets murdered. It’s as "socially conscious" a rap song as has ever been written.

The singles that followed either replicated the tone (though rarely to such extremes)
or spun in the other direction altogether. Over one very eager stretch of six months in 1993, he released "Holler If Ya Hear Me", a frustration anthem and his very best Public Enemy impersonation, followed by "Keep Ya Head Up", a female empowerment song, followed by "I Get Around", which is about having lots of sex with lots of females. The contradiction was an early indication of the kind of in-the-moment, emotionally reflective artist Tupac was, and would become, and that’s how we get to what Tupac came to represent.

Distilled down to its pith, the entirety of gangsta rap imagery is Tupac; he is the archetypal gangsta rapper, and he has come to stand in for any and all other rappers in the subgenre. That’s an easy claim to make because he, in fact, perfected gangsta rap, but it’s also slightly tricky. He was so convincing in the role that he effectively rendered all other portrayals obsolete, or, worse still, uncool. (Nearly) all of the images we’ve come to associate with gangsta rap are images he presented. And the origination of that version of him was him on "California Love", when Dr. Dre stood back behind him in the Thunderdome and framed his mania, and it was so exciting and obvious when it happened.

♦

"California Love" is a great song. It’s a funky, chirping, fever of noise, the sonic weirdness is boxed in by Roger Troutman’s robo charm, pummeled into acquiescence by Tupac’s fury, and weighed and measured by Dre’s steadiness. All three parts play perfectly together. Examined free of the context of Tupac’s career, it would have lived a perfectly pleasant life, and likely even still managed to become critical to the rap genre.

But it arrived to an almost unfathomably perfect orchestra of circumstance, and so it is endlessly important today, and forever, on earth and in heaven and anywhere else they listen to rap. To wit:

• It was the first song Tupac released when he got out of prison in 1996, and that would’ve been gigantic all by itself. But the insanity surrounding his court case at the time of his sentencing had grown his indestructible gangster myth tenfold, so Tupac getting out of prison was less him getting out of prison and more him rolling away the stone and stepping up out of the tomb.
  
  
• It was the first song from his new album, All Eyez on Me, which was coming behind Me Against the World, his most successful album to that point, commercially (it moved more than 3.5 million units) and critically ("Dear Mama"; see page 106).
  
  
• It was the first thing he delivered under Death Row, a label that was, at that moment, the biggest and baddest and most overwhelming in rap.
  
  
• It was produced by Dr. Dre.
  
  
• And his amazing film run from 1992 to 1994 (Juice, Poetic Justice, Above the Rim) stretched his name well beyond the parameters of just rap, and even just music.

You can imagine the sort of fervor that surrounded this song when it dropped. It was his biggest song figuratively, because of its commercial success, but also literally. Up to that point he’d mostly been an insular artist, with ideas and thoughts aimed in specific directions. “California Love” gave him the wide-screen treatment we’d watch the Notorious B.I.G. get later. It was a glimpse at what he was going to do as a proper superstar, and also pointed toward where Puff Daddy would eventually take rap.12

♦

"California Love" was not originally Tupac’s song. There are two conflicting stories on how he nabbed it. One comes from Chris "The Glove" Taylor, who claims he helped produce the track (though he received no credit for it), and the other from Death Row’s cofounder and former CEO Suge Knight, who is like if an angry rhino began morphing into a human and then stopped halfway through and so that’s just how he was stuck.

The parts that they quibble about are the parts you’d expect (Taylor says he helped piece together the track with Dr. Dre at his house, while Knight tells some overly complex story about a stylist wearing a leather suit and that’s where the Mad Max theme for the video came from, or something), but they both agree on one point: It belonged to Dr. Dre before it belonged to Tupac. Taylor says he and Dre made it at Dre’s house during a get-together, and then Tupac showed up and was in the studio so he recorded a verse for it. Knight says that the song had been written for Dre, but since The Chronic had already been out, and since Tupac’s album was on its way, Suge thought the song should go to Tupac. There’s a moment during Suge’s explanation where he basically congratulates himself for not blatantly stealing the whole song by allowing Dre to remain on it, and it’s easy to see how Suge eventually pile-drove Death Row into nothingness.

♦

There are thirteen reasons you should visit California and celebrate California, according to Tupac and Dr. Dre in "California Love".

Good Reasons

1. Lots of opportunities for sex: If you are in charge of promoting tourism for your state, you should 100 percent include that your state has a higher sex rate per capita than other states, if that happens to be the case.
   
   
2. Bomb-ass hemp: "Bomb ass" is slang for "very good," and "hemp" is slang for "marijuana." I remember reading this thing about how when you want to add a new word to your vocabulary, you have to use it two times out loud, so I’d recommend that here for you so that you can get comfortable saying this. For example, if your friend’s mother passes away, you might try consoling him or her by commenting on the high quality of the event: "Susan, hi, I just want to say real quick that this is a bomb-ass funeral. Your mother, also bomb-ass, would’ve been pleased."
   
   
3. Dance floors busy with bodies: "Ecclesiastes assures us . . . that there is a time for every purpose under heaven. A time to laugh . . . and a time to weep. A time to mourn . . . and there is a time to dance." —Kevin Bacon, Footloose. Footloose is so much fun.
   
   
4. Hoochies, likely screaming: Hoochies who like to scream are better than, say, hoochies who like to stab, or hoochies who like to steal your identity.
   
   
5. Chucks: This is in reference to the Chuck Taylor Converse. Chucks are timeless.
   
   
6. Dark sunglasses and khaki suits: This seems a lot like something that a murderer would wear, because it’s difficult to picture a sane person shopping in a store and asking where the khaki-suit section is. But dark sunglasses and khaki suits are always cool.
   
   
7. Caution: This is from the line "Flossin’, but have caution," and, really, being cautious while flossin’ is smart, and it’s the way I’d floss were I ever in a position to do so. (It’s also probably counterintuitive to the spirit of flossin’. Still, it’s a good reason, just to be safe.)
   
   
8. The potential to bump and grind like a slow jam: I am a very big fan of bumping and grinding, be it like a slow jam or any other jam, really.
   
   
9. Bomb beats from Dre: Sure.
   
   
10. Serenades: Okay.

Roger Troutman’s Zapp band had a very clear influence on G-Funk. Dr. Dre choosing to use him for the hook on “California Love” indicates a new stage in rap: having precedents and heroes and the ability to incorporate them into the new music being made from their seeds. That he was being featured on a song that was connecting gangsta rap with G-Funk for this new thing feels significant, too, as does the fact that this celebration of Cali counterculture was happening while the ground was still vibrating from the police batons and boots that had swung at and stomped on Rodney King. “California Love” was Tupac’s turn as the biggest gangsta rapper in the world. He was dead nine months later.

Bad Reasons

1. Pimps: I’ve only ever met two pimps in my life. Neither of those times was that great of an experience. The pimps were not anywhere near as entertaining as the flamboyant pimps you see in movies from the '70s. They were more like the pimps from Taken.
   
   
2. Fiends: What’s happening right now?
   
   
3. Riots (not rallies): No, thank you. But you have fun at your riot full of pimps and fiends. That’s ten good and three bad. California seems okay.
   
   

1. This.
   
   
2. Just.
   
   
3. Keeps.
   
   
4. On.
   
   
5. Getting.
   
   
6. Worse.
   
   
7. And.
   
   
8. Worse.
   
   
9. He was shot five times on December 1, 1994, the night before the sentencing. He rolled himself right TF into the courtroom the next day.
   
   
10. The first five albums Death Row released: Dr. Dre’s The Chronic, Snoop’s Doggystyle, the soundtrack for Above the Rim, the soundtrack for Murder Was the Case, and Tha Dogg Pound’s Dogg Food.
    
    
11. I can’t think of four actors who had a better back-to-back-to-back run, seriously.
    
    
12. I meant this generally—the big videos, the budgets, all that—but in this case it’s also specific: Puff re-created the desert scene from "California Love" in his "Can’t Nobody Hold Me Down" video. He just replaced the Mad Max cars with a very expensive one for him and Mase.
    
    
13. The original version, I mean. Not the 2011 remake. The 2011 remake was a real chore, the one clear exception being Miles Teller as Willard.
    
    

He wasn’t nearly as complex as Chris Penn, but he was still a total gem.

This is an excerpt from Shea Serrano's new book, The Rap Year Book: The Most Important Rap Song From Every Year Since 1979, Discussed, Debated, and Deconstructed, which is available now. Reprint courtesy of Abrams Books.

Photo by Timo Andres

Last week, Kanye West performed "POWER" at a Democratic National Committee Fundraiser. Before he emerged, the curtain opened on a woman alone singing wordlessly, stacking her voice into a harmonized chorale and building to an arresting peak. This was Caroline Shaw, a 32-year-old contemporary classical composer who lives in Manhattan.

Shaw is a member of the vocal octet Roomful of Teeth, which has collaborated with tUnE-yArDs. She performed on Music for Heart and Breath, a modern classical work by the Arcade Fire’s Richard Reed Parry. In 2013, Shaw won the Pulitzer for her piece Partitas for 8 Voices. The year before that, she was virtually unknown outside New York City classical circles.

West’s fascination with Shaw doesn’t seem to be passing: Yesterday, he posted a reworked version of 808s & Heartbreak’s "Say You Will" that featured her anxious, ear-catching murmurs and wails. Given his track record of finding and spotlighting unexpected voices on his projects, she seems one step away from appearing on his next album.

So now that she is about to be made famous, who is Caroline Shaw? In her music, she treats the human voice like something to be trapped, pulled at its edges, broken apart, and set free—it’s a pliable instrument that she seems determined to ply as far as possible. You can hear some of Meredith Monk, Björk, and Robert Ashley, but those are surface comparisons, and you’ll likely forget them once you push deeper into her music. Here are some pieces you can listen to now to get to know her better.

1.) "Passacaglia"

Six straight minutes of dazed, becalmed awe, like standing in a supermarket aisle at 5:45 a.m. and gazing dumbly at the endless row of cereal boxes. The singers chant "oooh" while medicated voices chant jargon-y things at you like "The 86th, 87th, and 88th points are located symmetrically across the central vertical axis of the wall." A spiritual cousin to Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach.

2.) Entr'acte

A piece for string quartet, and a rapt one, where the bows hover just above the strings. There are moments where everything veers into dissonance, but otherwise, you could slot this next to Ravel’s sinuous String Quartet in F, written in 1903. A hint that this piece wasn’t written a century ago can be found in the first YouTube comment on this performance in eight months: "Yeezy about to make it blow like a nuclear bomb."

3.) "Allemande"

Along with "Passacaglia", one of the pieces that make up her "Partita for 8 Voice". Like Laurie Anderson, Alvin Lucier, or Robert Ashley, Shaw is fascinated with the way that conversational speech can become music on its own.

4.) "Its Motion Keeps"

A choir tangling with a single, scratchy-throated viola. Even Shaw’s most beautiful works have a sour note embedded in them on purpose, something to strain your hearing muscles and introduce a note of discord. You can hear it in the full-throated "ooohs" that the choir sings near the end of the piece, a thorn in the side of the harmonies

5.) "in manus tuas"

Shaw composed this piece to ask the cellist to dig into the strings, producing a haunted sound somewhere between a moan and tendons snapping, while occasionally singing a single pure note. If you want a spotlit closeup of Caroline Shaw’s musical mind, this intimate piece feels like a good place to start: Over nine-plus minutes, the cello roams a stark, empty landscape, playing what sounds like a scrambled version of a Bach Partita. 

In his memoir, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink, Elvis Costello deviates from the rock star bio template, and resists recounting history in a straight line. Instead, Costello works circuitously about subjects near and dear, telling stories in bits and pieces with plenty of interludes, quips, and deviations thrown in. At points he works in circles around the Beatles, who make more appearances than anyone save for Costello’s father, orbiting handed down singles to autograph books to buying their first EP to recording Imperial Bedroom with George Martin to singing backup with Paul McCartney in his later years. Except not in that order.

In due time he does the same with the Nazis, with his love life and with his musical influences. One of the more remarkable tales is the epic journey of how "Shipbuilding" became a song, from the story of his father’s home being bombed in WWII to the death of Chet Baker, who played trumpet on his recording of the track, with multiple digressions in between.

Costello does create a structure around pockets of his professional life, stringing you along on the unending tours behind his first three albums, as well as the surplus of pills and alcohol that drove it, but the unveiling (at last!) of his true references while writing those songs is what will capture the attention of his devoted fans. When it comes to his most notorious moment, the drunken and infamous evening he dropped the n-bomb and all that came after it, Costello recounts nothing in detail, claiming a memory destroyed by drink that night. Instead he takes a page out of the memoir of Suze Rotolo, Bob Dylan’s early girlfriend (Dylan being the second most mentioned musician in this book), and gives the reader raw emotion, trying not to be defensive and failing but seeming all the more human for it, as though assuming you’re already familiar with the scene enough to not need any setting of it.

The puns, insults, and metaphors present in his work as a lyricist don’t go missing in the memoir. Lines like, "His girlfriend, Toots, looked like a bag of old clothes that had been abandoned when the Shangri-Las left town and seemed to take offense at the slightest thing," ring out as true Costello-isms. They’re punctuated with sardonic and self-aware truths like, "You don’t really need musical notation for rock and roll. I always said it was all hand signals and threats, I just didn’t specify who was doing the threatening." Costello presents himself, like always, as a man who is aware he’s one of the smartest people in the room but entirely unwilling to be serious about it. One thing he is not, perhaps to the chagrin of his young self, is brief. At nearly 700 pages, he touches on highlights from every one of the five decades of his career and the array of influences that shaped it. It’s fun to read him being a fan, almost as much fun as it is to read him taking the piss.

"In a country that thinks it's divided by race, where actually it's divided by class, Johnny Cash's songs of hillbilly thug life go right to the heart of the American underclass."

That's the first line of director Quentin Tarantino's short essay for Johnny Cash's 2000 anthology Murder. Supposedly, Tarantino is saying that Cash transcends racial divisions. But he's also saying, obliquely, that when he thinks of Johnny Cash, he thinks about blackness.

That's a bit unusual; most people don't necessarily call to mind the African-American experience when they look at Johnny Cash. In the first place, though he's sung on numerous occasions about his Native American background, Cash appears, and has mostly lived and been seen as, white. More, he is one of the iconic representatives of country music, a genre that has in large part defined itself through whiteness, and the rural white experience. And while contemporaries like Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis drew heavily from black traditions and repertoire, Cash's much less so. When Cash did cover black songwriters, as on his trainwreck version of Ray Charles' "What'd I Say", the results are…well, let's just say most people would not see that song as going to the heart of the American underclass. More like the tonsils.

Perhaps, though, it's Cash's very iconic whiteness that, for Tarantino, links him to blackness, or the black experience. It's not true, as Tarantino says, that America is divided by class instead of race; America is divided by both. But Tarantino, in his films, is fascinated with the idea that those on the margins of the American political economy can get around, or sidestep, America's racial hierarchies. In Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, and Django Unchained, gangsters, and those living on the edge of the law, are able to form close interracial friendships. Similarly, in Death Proof, white women and women of color, threatened by patriarchal violence, are joined in feminist sisterhood (and in beating the crap out of that skeevy patriarch.) "I've often wondered if gangsta rappers know how little separates their tales of ghetto thug life from Johnny Cash's tales of backwoods thug life. I don't know, but what I do know is, Johnny Cash knows," Tarantino muses in his liner notes. In his films, Jules and Vince shoot people together; Jackie Brown and Max Cherry scam people together. Black and white thug life becomes one.

For Tarantino, Johnny Cash is literally the soundtrack for that interracial gangsta ethos. Cash's late-period "Ain't No Grave" was remixed by J2 and Steven Stern, and used as the opening music for Tarantino's trailer to Django Unchained.

Cash's pained warble declares, Ain't no grave/ Can hold my body down, while onscreen manacled slaves trudge drearily. "Ain't No Grave" was originally released on Cash's posthumous 2010 album of the same name, and he sounds exhausted and breathless; you can see him on that chain gang, ready to fall. But at the same time, the lyrics are triumphant and hopeful: When I hear that trumpet sound/ I'm gonna rise right out of the ground. Tarantino turns that, in the spiritual tradition, from a faith in a future life to a hope for freedom in this one, as Django (Jamie Foxx) leaves his chains behind, and heads for vengeance (to the tune of James Brown's "The Big Payback").

The juxtaposition of Cash and James Brown parallels the friendship between Django and King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), the white German bounty hunter who sets Django free, trains him to shoot, and dies to free Django's wife. Cash symbolizes, then, the good white man who understands the wrongs of bondage— a figure ubiquitous in Hollywood slavery films. "Ain't No Grave" becomes white savior music. It is the soundtrack for white people who save black people, and, perhaps, for the fantasy that white people can be saved if only they become black people through some combination of empathy, coolness, and the right mixtape. Thus the director's defensive response to criticisms of Django Unchained in his recent New York Times interview. 

For Tarantino, then, Cash is an embodiment of that fantasy—a totem of whiteness so tough and knowing ("Johnny Cash knows") that it transforms into blackness. Jonny Cash functions for Tarantino as, say, Robert Johnson functions for Eric Clapton--a viaduct to black authenticity. This is complicated though—and I think intentionally so—by the fact that Cash, like Tarantino, is white Using Cash to signify blackness can, as Tarantino says in his liner notes, be taken as a way of saying that black and white aren't really divided. But it can also be a way of emphasizing the artificiality, and the awkwardness, of Tarantino's investment in black music, Blaxploitation film, and black cool.

The most revealing and interesting use of Cash by Tarantino, though, is in Jackie Brown. The song is "Tennessee Stud", a wise, wry, convincingly virile ballad from Cash's first American Recordings album in 1994. The track, just Cash and his guitar, starts up as Jackie Brown (Pam Grier) and Max Cherry (Robert Forster) are finishing a conversation, in which it becomes clear that Ordell, Jackie's criminal associate, is planning to kill her. The scene then dissolves to outside their house, where Ordell Robbie (Samuel Jackson) is waiting and smoking. Ordell puts on gloves to avoid prints—and then turns off the music.

Until Ordell switches off the player, there is every reason to believe the Johnny Cash song, with all its dry menace, is background music chosen by Tarantino. The revelation that it's Ordell who picked the song is a multi-level joke. More than the minor push against stereotype of a black city dweller listening to country music, though, Ordell's choice is funny because it suggests he's psyching himself up. He is playing mean, evil music to get into a mean, evil mood. Just as Tarantino arguably uses Johnny Cash to become a black man like Ordell, so Ordell is trying to become Johnny Cash.

And if Tarantino fails in the transformation, so does Ordell. After he turns off that music, he goes into Jackie Brown's house to kill her. Instead, she shoves a pistol into his balls before he can get up the nerve to strangle her. Rather than becoming the manly Johnny Cash, Ordell is completely unmanned. He is not Johnny Cash, bad man; he's just a doofus wannabe gangsta. He was reading Quentin Tarantino's liner notes when he should have read Johnny Cash's: "These songs are just for listening and singing. Don't go out and do it." 

Cash, in his inimitable way, is telling Ordell, and Tarantino, and anyone who will listen, not to take the persona for the person. Don't be so enamored of the bad man image that you take your guns to town and get shot. Tarantino's fantasized bad man Johnny Cash is not the real Johnny Cash. Which is perhaps why Tarantino is fascinated with him. A man who isn't there is a perfect symbol for the racial divide which, Tarantino claims, doesn't exist either. But that alluring image of the conduit-to-blackness Cash is also a reminder that even when one imagines race does not exist, it still can shape the aspirations, and the actions, of Tarantino, of Ordell, and of others, black and white.

In the opening seconds of composer Laurie Anderson’s new film, an animated version of Anderson—which she identifies as a "dream body, the one I use to walk around in my dreams"—narrates a macabre but hysterical vision the artist once had, concerning her rat terrier dog, Lolabelle (whose eventual death is just one spoke in the film’s wheel of concerns). From there, it isn’t long before Anderson’s wry voice—half speaking, half singing—pivots to a vivid, wrenching memory of her mother’s death. As a director, Anderson is similarly discursive: making the briefest of references to her late husband Lou Reed in one moment before shifting to a discussion on the evolving way that Homeland Security officials communicate to New York’s citizens (and tourists), in the post-9/11 era.

Anderson’s film opened Wednesday in a select number of cities, ahead of a 2016 broadcast on HBO. The musician’s longtime label, Nonesuch, is also releasing a near-complete rip of the film’s sound design as a soundtrack. (Though, caveat emptor, it’s best heard after a viewing of the film itself.) This week, after I arrived at Anderson’s downtown New York home, she took me into her studio, where we talked about the film while sitting next to a pair of the modified electric violas that have been an iconic part of her four-decade career. The following excerpts have been edited lightly for clarity.

Pitchfork: This is quite a bit different from your first film Home of the Brave, where the soundtrack can be enjoyed as a discrete work outside of the film itself.

Laurie Anderson: Oh yeah!

Pitchfork: How did the requirements of the "essay film" style change your approach to scoring—or improvising—when you were creating the sound design?

LA: It’s not like a record. Each song doesn’t have to illuminate the last one, or have anything to do with it! One of the reasons I used strings is it really frees you to work in a more polyphonic way with the sound. As soon as you put a beat there, it’s either "on the cut", or preceding the cut, or remembering the cut. So when you don’t have that and you’re streaming through shots, your eyes are able to do much more rhythmic things. And that’s really interesting to me, because [Heart of a Dog] is really for a wandering eye that’s looking around the frame. And I tried to use words in that way, that would worm their way into the back of your mind. And a lot of this film, I hope, takes place there: on the level of hearing constant language. And it’s also falling apart—so that’s the reason the second story in the film is my mother’s deathbed speech.

She was a very formal person, and she waited until her eight kids show up—and then she stands up, sort of like at a microphone, going, "Thank you all, for coming." And we’re all like: What the hell? She’s hallucinating, all of her senses are shutting down really fast. She’s dying—and she sees all these animals. She’s talking to them. Then it’s back to talking to history, the family, saying goodbyes in a very formal way. And throughout that, the language is just shredding into a million pieces.

Pitchfork: It’s through telling some pretty personal stories—including about your relationship with your mother—that you also discover the ways that you’ve distorted your own history, by repeating it so much over the years.

LA: The fallibility of language, which is throughout the film, is a big part of the story. What I guess I’ve been most surprised about is people going, "I couldn’t believe you said that about your mother." I really tried in this film…I mean, it is about the structure of stories. But it’s also about trying to find some truth in them—and what does that mean, when you misremember them or you tell them too often? Or when they get all warped?

Pitchfork: There’s a graceful, abstract movement between your personal narratives of grief—concerning the death of your husband, or your mother, or your dog—and then your meditations on the changes in American culture since 9/11. When in the process did you know you were going to be taking such big thematic strides: talking about the surveillance state, as well as, you know, your dog learning to play piano, after going blind?

LA: Arte [the film’s commissioning entity] is kind of notorious for doing, like, super-abstract art films. Train the camera onto a candle and, you know, talk for 20 minutes. And that’s the film! And I love that kind of film. I’m a total sucker for those. I love Chris Marker. [Heart of a Dog’s eventual] producer was at a talk I was giving about the recent death of my dog, and he said, "Why don’t you do that"? And like a lot of things it was very organic, you know? I thought: I’ll add some other short stories, and see what happens.

[It came together] when I included the story of Lolabelle. Here’s, like, a dog who’s kind of a West Village see-and-be-seen dog. And when I took her to Green Gulch in California [after 9/11], I realized what happened was that even though she came from the West Village, when the hawks came down, in the back of her dog brain she knew exactly why they were there. Nobody had to say, "These hawks are dangerous." No. They’ve come to kill me. And I thought, "Oh my god, I’ve taken my dog all the way across the country to teach her fear. Great. Congratulations!"

And then I started thinking about what happens in a surveillance culture, in terms of framing and profiling and telling a story about who you supposedly are. Defining you. It happens all the time: You brand yourself, whether it’s for your Facebook page, or whatever. You’re telling a little story about who you are. In the same way you would tell a thumbnail sketch if somebody says, "What kind of kid were you?" And you know two or three stories you’ll haul out about "I was shy" or whatever. "I was a punk". And they’re not meant to really tell somebody what kind of person you are. It’s social glue.

But these profiling things don’t go that far either. For example, you buy something on Amazon. Two seconds later: "You liked this, you’re gonna like that". You go, Wait a second, that was a gift. I don’t think you know me. It’s a little more complicated than that. But that’s how that story is built and then pushed onto you. I’m sure a lot of people have had that feeling of being totally misidentified, starting from junior high school. It gets thrown at you, and you have a hard time scraping it off.

Pitchfork: After Lou’s death, you took about a year off in the middle of making the film. How did you know you were ready to return to it?

LA: It was so on and off. I kind of put some stories together, then shot a bit. Then stopped for a year. It was always sort of hobbyish. Maybe when I put the sound on, that was the speediest it got. I tried to keep it really organic, and at a leisurely pace.

Photo by Erez Avissar

The recent 20th anniversary of the Million Man March celebration in Washington, D.C. was themed "Justice or Else" and aimed at continuing to raise awareness around injustice and the economic, political, and social forces that impact people of color in America. One of the common refrains was from Kendrick Lamar’s "Alright", a song that’s become a de facto black national anthem since its release this spring.

"Alls my life I has to fight, nigga
All my life I…
Hard times like God
Bad trips like God
Nazareth, I’m fucked up
Homie, you fucked up
But if God got us we then gon' be alright"

The words of the Compton rapper push black people to question our position in the world, yet quickly offers the Lord as the answer we need. It’s a means of praise but also a question, asking: how could we bear this if not for faith? For most black American Christians, these two threads—of civil and human rights and religious salvation—are inextricably tied. From 200 miles away, watching the D.C. gathering online, I wished to be there, though the videos flooded me with a feeling I have known since my back first knew a church pew.

I craved sleep too much to believe in God. Early morning church services never matched my circadian rhythms. I sang along with the choir, gave tiding, and admired sun-soaked stained glass, but I was passed out by the time the pastor cracked the Old Testament. Church spoke to me, but I never got the message.

Christian faith and the sinful words of rap music might appear contradictory. Still, it’s rare for any rapper to denounce the role of faith in their life. Kanye West can declare himself a god, but even then he’d never claim to be God or stand where he does without God’s grace. While some MCs will rap that they’ve fallen far from big-G God or are beyond saving, they maintain a tether to faith and religiosity. The Long Beach, Calif. rapper Vince Staples, whose rhymes all but reject the presence and power of a Lord above, glibly said in an interview earlier this year: "I know I’m going to hell... I don’t believe in any of that stuff. That stuff’s not real, man."

On "Turn", he raps:

When it’s judgment time I doubt that God can look me in my eyes
'Fore He send me down to hell cause Imma ask a nigga why?
Never played it by the book, because the book was full of lies
And the preacher full of shit, and the teacher full of shit

There is a joy to be found in the brazenness of Staples asking the nigga that made the entire universe, "the fuck?" He's no longer accepting the standard Sunday school lessons—even with a black Christ—or that all of the two centuries of atrocities committed against black lives in America are part of His Great Plan. Staples is saying that if this is His plan, he’d like to ask for a vote on the next destination.

On Staples’ Summertime '06, he dives into the type of life lived by kids a decade ago, when they were leaving childhood innocence and starting to run with the grimier, grimmer aspects of life in Southern California. The conceit isn’t dissimilar to Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d city, where Lamar finds himself navigating the seeming inevitabilities of gang life, death, prison, and other obliterations.

Lamar opens his album meekly praying to the Lord that he’s a "sinner"; Staples plainly states he’s a "nigga" and that is all the world wants to see in him. He speaks to blackness without religion, without teasing earned hope or trading temporal pain with eternal salvation. This is blackness at its darkest, where no light of faith can reach. Still, for those like myself there was warmth, a comfort in addressing that bleakness, of merely admitting that the world does not care about all of its creations equally and that there is no reason to act otherwise.

That ain’t Kendrick. To Pimp a Butterfly, Lamar’s follow-up to good kid, m.A.A.d city, needs a higher power. The album burrows deep within Lamar and the spiritual complexities he embodies. He stresses over whether his message is getting through to the people and if he’s even communicating the right words at this moment. That is what drives "These Walls", "u", and "i"—that Lamar’s greatest fear is that he is exactly the kind of rapper who speaks a big talk but is not there for those who need him and cannot connect to those who need the good word the most. Lamar’s rap fame-fear has shades of a youth pastor—one who realizes his power to lead lost souls to salvation, but stresses each day if he himself is truly walking on the righteous path.

Rap is inherently a nihilistic art form. What else could one expect of music from the disenfranchised that primarily concerns itself with examining a world that doesn’t care about them? Yet the nihilism is curtailed when an artist offers a way out of the pain. To its credit, Staples’ Summertime '06 ends in a fog of what is expected of black kids who are never given a chance to succeed. The second disc’s penultimate song, "Like It Is", strives for a redemptive arc, but as the last track starts with a TV-like voiceover saying "Next time on Poppy Street", Staples reassumes the gangster role he was just shedding and cuts the track mid-verse to the sound of static fuzz. He does not placate or even allow for a false of sense of emotional progress that redemptive narrative arcs establish.

While not so much it’s opposite, To Pimp a Butterfly seeks spiritual closure and finds spiritual possibility. Lamar can no longer turn inward to answer such questions and instead seeks the spirit of 2Pac to answer the questions he’s been struggling with throughout the album. "What you think is the future for me and my generation today?" he asks. In letting 2Pac speak, Lamar suggests that perhaps this political and very public role is one he isn’t ready to assume. The title of the final track is "Mortal Man"; even with all of the ambition Lamar puts on display throughout the album, he cops to not having the answers, or the keys to heaven, suggesting that we should ask these questions of God, not him.

Before the surprise release of To Pimp a Butterfly, BuzzFeed’s Reggie Uguwu wrote "The Radical Christianity of Kendrick Lamar", which centered around the role of that Christian faith to the rapper’s music. In prescient closing lines, Uguwu wrote:

...A righteous awakening may not make Lamar more popular in any of the spheres that would seek to contain him. Instead, it could serve to complicate and deepen his output in fascinating and unexpected ways.

Lamar is the rapper that both the Christian and secular world desires. He raps with the bravado of a black man given national spotlight—soft-spoken with black skin is an American oxymoron; he turns towards God whenever asked; and he’s the correct level of politically conscious, but is not leading any revolutionary marches. He knows the weight, he knows the price. Thus Lamar’s outlook on the world can only be so bleak, as his baptism in the Lord’s water places him right in line with America’s founding ideals. It’s the reason that his words can be chanted. Lamar can fight so much within and still raps with the conviction of a preacher, because he knows there is a receptive black audience to his message. There might be a separation between church and rap, but there is no division between black people and the cries from a Sunday pulpit. Lamar’s audience knows what to do with his gospel, how to act, how to react, and what should be taken away from each scriptural reading.

Staples is not so blessed. There is no biblical backing to his thoughts on the world. No Old or New Testament texts means there is no historical black American backing to his thoughts. His lyrics are waged to stand on their own, without a nation to shout back at him "Amen". He is rapping to an America full of ghosts of black boys just like him. Both rappers wrestle with wanting to reach their local communities, their blocks, but where Lamar reaches for familiar foundational texts, Staples only counts on the world that is in front of his eyes. Staples’ words are not hopeful or malleable enough to fit into a scripture quote or a rally slogan. Therein lies what makes Staples’ music so rewarding: he’s not seeking grace.

Photo by Hilton Als

When Tavi Gevinson, now 19-years-old and Editor-in-Chief of the richly-articulated Rookie Mag (as well an actress and fashion icon in her own right) talks about pop culture, her ideas about music, style, and adulthood transcend mere observation in favor of something more astute and endearing: she is in her element, lord knows, but she’s also still figuring it out, which is part of the charm.

This month, Rookie releases Rookie Yearbook Four—the fourth-annual roundup of the website’s best content as compiled and styled into a hardcover that wouldn’t feel out of place in a record shop. This year’s book features contributions from the likes of Lorde, Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig, and countless others. We spoke to Tavi about the release, her favorite bands, Rookie’s approach to music, and why Chic, Green Day, and Beyoncé make the perfect Rookie playlist.

Pitchfork: The last interview you did with Pitchfork was in your senior year of high school, and now we’re talking about Rookie’s "Senior Year"—the fourth edition of the Yearbook. What phase of Rookie are we currently entering, and how has it changed?

Tavi Gevinson: I think that one of the biggest changes for me has been that as much as I’ve tried to make sure that a lot of different voices are heard, my feelings about growing up inevitably affected the types of ideas we were commissioning and the inspiration boards we were giving our contributors. It’s kind of interesting to see where I went from being a little cynical about growing up—a little remorseful about childhood and things coming to an end—and I think the fourth book is a lot more optimistic. Something else I also find very telling is that people always ask me how [Rookie] is going to change now that I’m older and I’m not in school, but [Yearbook Four] has something like three Editor’s letters in a row about the minutiae of being very anxious and very insecure. That’s not a space I want to live in for that long, but I think it goes to show some of our adult readers that adulthood isn’t a kind of doorway that you walk through and all your problems are solved, and teenagers aren’t dealing with such different things than adults are.

Pitchfork: I’m curious about how your personal musical tastes have evolved since the genesis of Rookie, and how Rookie approaches their music coverage now that they have enough visibility to feature and collaborate with various high profile artists.

TG: We were very lucky because people who don’t need press from Rookie have wanted to be featured from very early on. In the beginning, I wanted Rookie not to be dominated by one genre; I never wanted it to feel like too much of a cool clubhouse even though when I started it, I myself leaned more towards artists like Joni Mitchell, which I wrote about. I mean, she’s obviously not obscure, but she’s also not played on pop radio every day. So we’ve always wanted to have a mix, and of course that was harder when we didn’t have the same access to popular artists like we do now, but I personally don’t think that your taste says anything about you; I think it’s what draws you to the things that you like that’s so interesting.

I was talking to a friend who works somewhere where someone wrote about Steely Dan and how it was this crazy catalyst for the relationship he had with his brother, and other people at the magazine were just like "ugh, no, we don’t care about Steely Dan." And she was like, "that’s not why this is interesting." I’d rather hear about someone’s bizarre obsession with something that isn’t quote-unquote "cool"…I don’t just want to be told what music is quote-unquote "cool"; it’s boring.

Pitchfork: What are you a fan of right now, musically?

TG: I do keep up with current music more than I used to… These days I am listening to the new Drake, Raury’s album, and the new Carly Rae Jepsen. I also finally heard the Cocteau Twins. That just never happened for me before, and I had this crazy epiphany—I mean, I was on a plane, and lack of oxygen should definitely be accounted for—but I was on a plane coming home and I just listened to them and drew a very crude copy of the Heaven or Las Vegas cover. As soon as I landed I went somewhere to get it framed because Liz Fraser means so much to me, and the fact that you can’t really hear what she’s saying meant so much, just in terms of letting yourself feel something instead of having to decide on a narrative. That was very important to me.

Pitchfork: Are there any music features in Yearbook Four that you’re excited to see in the print version?

TG: It’s so hard—I can’t choose! I’m really proud of the print-only features because those come together without having been on the site, and a lot of people were very generous with their time and their efforts to make those things special. I’m also proud of the way in which those things are translated. It's so easy to cut and paste, but that’s not why you buy a book. To me it's about being able to go through [the book] and point out to someone which fabric is from my closet, which postcard is from a junk shop I went to in high school, which playlist was handwritten by who… So it can feel a little crazy in the process, and I’m sure no one at Penguin liked being kept at their work past midnight, but I think those touches really come across.

Pitchfork: If you had to put together a quick thematic playlist in honor of Rookie’s senior year, what would be on it?

TG: "Time of Your Life" by Green Day—of course. "Good Times" by Chic, and "Party" by Beyoncé. I think I just made the best three-song playlist of all time.

Months before Drake brought "hotline" back into pop vocabulary, dial-a-star numbers were already having a moment. Neon Indian, Tanlines, Shamir, and Speedy Ortiz weren’t just singing about hotlines—they’d set up connections between themselves and fans.

It’s a call-up that began in the '80s, when AT&T figured out they could restructure the 900 area code to make money off the rubes who dialed in. These hotlines were often $2 for the first minute, $.45 for each additional minute ("ask your parents before you call"). And they all had promo commercials: The New Rap Hotline might have put you in touch with the Fresh Prince and DJ Jazzy Jeff; you might "hear a joke" or "a couple of rhymes" if you dialed the MC Hammer line; the New Kids On the Block promised to "love you forever"; KISS had one, as did Paula Abdul and Warrant.

Arguably, They Might Be Giants were the most altruistic of the OG crew. Not trying to bilk their fans, the two Johns offered a 718 (not 900) Brooklyn phone number that played back original music to the caller, via an answering machine. Called Dial-A-Song, the service originally ran between 1983 and 2006. It was revived as Dial-A-Song Direct in January, as the band has released a new song each Tuesday since then, at 844-387-6962 (and digitally).

In April of this year, the Vegas disco prince Shamir offered a relationship advice hotline to coincide with the release of his "Call It Off" single. In May, the Brooklyn dance duo Tanlines debuted their second LP for fans and journalists via a dial-in conference call. This August, Neon Indian set up a congenial message and sound clip, to prep fans for his upcoming LP. The Boston rockers Speedy Ortiz launched a hotline this September, dedicated to ensuring their fans felt safe at shows.

Between the '80s, '90s, and now, the difference is that these numbers are offering a service, at no significant cost to the consumer. There’s a value-added element, far removed from the naïve promise of talking with Vanilla Ice or whomever. Maybe the most infamous of these is the Corey Hotline, where callers listened to recorded messages of Corey Haim (no relation) and Corey Feldman, with the nebulous promise that you may receive one of the Coreys’ personal numbers.

Consumer-service music hotlines did exist a couple decades ago. David Bowie had one in 1990, where fans called in to request tunes on his upcoming tour. It’s the Epitaph Records hotline that sticks in my memory, how I first heard the Descendents (specifically "I’m the One" from the 1996 album Everything Sucks, though the 34-second "Coffee Mug" would have been easier on my parent’s phone bill). Elsewhere, a Spin Magazine 900 allowed callers to hear records reviewed in that month’s issue. Publications could only dream of netting that per-minute money off of streams today.

Though the artists are no longer trying to collect a paycheck, the novelty of the hotline remains the same: the promise of intimacy or connection, inching closer to the revered. When the singer Tiffany unleashed her own 900 number, her promo didn’t mask this exploit: "I have so many things I’d like to tell you. You’re my friend, so call me."

On "Hotline Bling", Drake’s lover already has his number. Drake’s crush is leaving the city, the distance between him and his lover telescoping their connection. In 2015, when we all have personal pocket hotlines, proximity is still all we really want.

Photo via Facebook

"We tried to sorta marry punk rock and psychedelia, that’s what we were really trying to do," said Alan McGee, co-founder of Creation Records, in the 2014 documentary Beautiful Noise. "It’s no more complicated than that, to be honest."

Perhaps the aural mist of '80s and '90s shoegaze obscures what is, by McGee’s estimation, a simple 1+1=2 scenario of genre fusion. But it leaves out nuanced characteristics (My Bloody Valentine’s churning sensuality, 4AD band Cocteau Twins’ fluid faerie tales and more). In the last few years, a growing number of legacy shoegaze acts have gotten those nuances re-evaluated in the finer light of reunions, tours, re-releases and/or comeback records (mbv in 2013 and Slowdive’s live dates last year, just naming a few).

It’s gone all out this year, too: Swervedriver’s first new record in 17 years, Lush’s forthcoming reissues (with a live reunion scheduled for 2016) and the Jesus and Mary Chain’s world tour behind the Psychocandy anniversary. But most of 2015 has belonged to Ride. The Oxford-born shoegaze foursome has been booked solid with dates worldwide since February, culminating with dates in Asia and in its landmark 1990 debut Nowhere getting a grand reissue next month, marking its 25th anniversary. But it’s the stateside dates—punctuated by festival sets at Coachella in April and next month’s Fun Fun Fun Fest—that have meant the most to the band.

"I always felt—in the last 20 years, it has passed in a flash—that no one gave a shit about Ride," quips Andy Bell, who founded the band with Mark Gardener in 1988. "I definitely credit America and American fans... for giving the music its own life. This reunion, I think, has been powered by the love from America."

Bell paralleled it to how fans in England discovered '70s German Krautrock in the '90s, referencing UK critic Julian Cope and his 1995 book Krautrocksampler.

"Sometimes it takes a different country to appreciate what another country's done," he said. "Which is kind of a sweet thought, really."

Los Angeles producer Justin Meldal-Johnsen (Beck, Nine Inch Nails) played bass in the latter days of Medicine, America’s first sweet thought and major entry of shoegaze in 1990, when Nowhere was released.

"Anytime I'd read any kind of retrospective piece in the British press about that [shoegaze] era, it was always something quite dismissive about it," Meldal-Johnsen said. Richey Edwards of Manic Street Preachers didn’t bother waiting. "We will always hate Slowdive more than we hate Adolf Hitler," Edwards said infamously to NME in 1991. Ian Gittins’ oral history of shoegaze cited NME’s satirization of shoegaze.

"I’ve spent so much time in the UK and U.S. in the past 25 years and I see that," Meldal-Johnsen said. "And it’s a bummer… Ride, Slowdive, Chapterhouse, Lush, they all seem to get more respect in the States for their merits rather than being trendy. It’s a matter of perspective."

The western shift of culture, time, and place to a new generation has enhanced the genre. It’s resonated beyond just a transatlantic exchange as well, with shoegaze’s influence writ large in Japan and around the world. Sonic Cathedral Records’ Nathaniel Cramp cites the soundtrack of the Tokyo-set Lost in Translation as introducing a new generation worldwide to Kevin Shields, My Bloody Valentine, and "Just Like Honey", intermingling on the OST with dreamy Japanese folk-rock band Happy End. Shoegaze’s most recent example of globetrotting is Indonesian label Gerpfast Kolektif’s and Welsh/Canadian label Raphalite Records’ release of Revolution - The Shoegaze Revival, a compilation of shoegaze acts from 30 bands in 16 countries released this year.

Like sound dissipating over a large space, shoegaze has changed as it has traveled over the last 25 years. Like every genre, it’s been defined more and more by evolving technologies. Even more so, given shoegaze’s progressive exploration, even reliance, on live and studio effects. Now the digital and analog are paired consciously—or treated altogether agnostically—as almost de rigueur live or in studio, with one mimicking or transforming the other. And Ride’s Bell, among the old guard, is adapting. He recalled that all the band’s early material was recorded analog to two-inch tape, with Nowhere written and recorded over just eight months. Now he’s on Twitter and Instagram, recording practice sessions for the band’s new material digitally.

"Last night in Liverpool was the first time or maybe the second we’ve managed to have a little jam that could be something new," Bell said from tour. "And of course I had my phone ready to record it. So there’s two minutes of new Ride music on my phone."

"People say digital is just flat and one dimensional but listen to Run the Jewels 2 and tell me that," Curtis said, praising El-P’s production going back to Cannibal Ox’s 2001 landmark record The Cold Vein. "When the digital is so fucked-up sounding and processed in such a cool way, it kind of decides the question of analog vs. digital."

Over the past 25 years, this natural cross-pollination has coalesced into a paradigm shift for the shoegaze subgenre. Call it Nu gaze, if you prefer the pun. Or differentiate between first and second waves. It’s not like "shoegaze" isn’t a contemptuous and outdated term—as Meldal-Johnsen pointed out—not to mention a misnomer propagated by the UK music press from the get go.

"Apart from being quite shy and quite awkward, we just had these pedalboards so we would spend a lot of our time [on stage] looking down because you’re kind of tap dancing your way through the set a little bit," Neil Halstead of Slowdive said in the Pitchfork Classic documentary on Souvlaki. "That label then stuck. I prefer to think of it as progressive guitar music."

Or, in the case of newer acts like Pat Grossi’s Active Child, progressive harp music. Grossi uses his harp less as a lead and more to adorn his music with texture and high-frequency treble similar to Cocteau Twins. He’s one variation in the diverse spectrum of bands labeled "Nu gaze", shoegaze-adjacent in sound and approach, from synth leads (M83) to guitar heroics (Deerhunter) and beyond in their new creative steps forward. It's shoegaze for the digital, laptop, and home studio age. What '90s studio rats like Shields and Cocteau Twins’ Robin Guthrie did for '60s and '70s-derived guitar-centric analog, a new generation is augmenting with '80s and '90s-derived synth-centric digital, wielding the two without what Meldal-Johnsen called "preciousness," calling shoegaze’s first wave "quaint," even "conservative" in comparison to its second.

"The latest iteration is way more electronic-based," he said. "Back in the day, I think all of these bands felt like rock bands. There was a great amount of pride that the guitar was a weapon to create anything in the [sonic] spectrum… And now it’s not really the point. Now it’s like, ‘We’re just making music and we’re going to use whatever tools we need to.’ It’s not inherently guitar music like it was. It’s just music."

Twenty-five years after Nowhere, The Scene That Celebrates Itself has become the scene that celebrates more, beyond Alan McGee’s simple equation of punk rock plus psychedelia or the digital-analog dichotomy; one that the whole world celebrates. Genres of music take steps forward in their own time, even—perhaps especially—if it’s staring at its own shoes.

By the third page of her memoir Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, Carrie Brownstein seems to say it all. "My story starts as a fan," she writes. "And to be a fan is to know that loving trumps being beloved." Anyone who has devoted a life to worshipping at the altar of sound could be moved to tears by the thought. Hunger is full of empathic observations like this, where Brownstein uses her tales—from birth through Sleater-Kinney's hiatus in 2006—to shine a light on some undersung truth about what it means to live and die for music. Her writing is sharp, erudite, and witty, and it makes Hunger my favorite music memoir since Just Kids.

Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl arrives at a moment of unprecented reverence for the feminist rock memoir. It follows celebrated recent books by Kim Gordon, Viv Albertine of the Slits, and Patti herself (whose successes, once again, may be responsible for sparking this new wave). Memoirs always beg particular questions: Why do we read these? What does biographical information really teach? Are the riffs and lyrics and beats implanted in our minds not enough? If, like Hunger, these books are done right, they respond in sublime ways. They transform us as much as the songs do. In advance of Hunger—which is out today—I met Brownstein at her Manhattan hotel room to discuss hunger, Olympia punk, the virtues of ugliness, coping with depression, Shamir, and more.

Pitchfork: What did you learn about yourself from writing this book?

Carrie Brownstein: Gosh... It's very common to think that we're always evolving, that we've changed so much from our younger selves, that within decades we've transformed into these different people. We like to think that. I find so many commonalities, really. I feel in some ways that I am still so much my younger self. That there are certain innate qualities that I've always possessed. And the more I was writing about my younger self... I really wonder how much I've changed. There are ways that I'm different: I feel like I'm wiser and kinder. But I think a lot of the impulses are still the same. I learned that.

Pitchfork: What are some of those innate qualities? I'm curious as to how you feel your involvement in the Olympia punk scene permanently changed you.

CB: I think I still walk around with an irascibility. And I would not call myself an optimist, even though I would aspire to be. I am innately a skeptic. There's kind of an incessant dissatisfaction that I have, that I'm always trying to either expose or fight against or wrestle with. A little bit of that came out of Olympia—kind of an irreverence that I really have never been able to put behind me. Problems with authority. A real mistrust of the mainstream. A mistrust of conformity, normality.

I've always been interested in queerness and underground and fringe and periphery, and who and what flourishes in those spaces. Those spaces that are darker and dingier and more dangerous, more lonely. What comes out of there, to me, is the life force. I'm excited when the center reaches over to those places and pulls inspiration from them, and translates it for a lot of people. I'm not saying that shouldn't happen; that's a really exciting moment. But I'm interested in the crevices, and the grotesque, and the unsavory. That started out when I was young and was really nurtured and fostered in Olympia. I've never quite been able to shake that. 

Pitchfork: When Sleater-Kinney headlined Pitchfork Music Festival this summer, you made an interesting comment on-stage about the music: "This stuff isn't pretty." And in the book, you write about how Sleater-Kinney didn't want to do anything benign or pretty. For you, what are the virtues of ugliness? 

CB: It has to do with a relationship, first and foremost, to nature. The natural world operates by its own set of rules. The animal world, all the places that are feral and ungovernable, that's where I find a lot of inspiration. There is just as much beauty there, but there is also decay and violence. I've been reading a lot of Joy Williams. I've been reading a lot about the idea of extinction. And conservation in America and the world. Fire. I'm really drawn to the uncompromising realness of natural process: It's unadorned. It's not very pretty.

To me, the grotesque is like a sonic manifestation of reality. I don't know how you could look out onto our world and see only beauty. And I like beautiful things. I like the aesthetically harmonious. But I am much more attracted to something that is off-kilter. It is a truer reflection of not only nature, but the human spirit—the state of the world. I just think everything feels a little off. So I'm much more attracted to that artistically.

I was talking to someone the other day about people doing impressions of politicians. We were talking about various actors for that role. I was like, "You know what's so great about Amy Sedaris?" In Strangers With Candy, there's a grotesqueness to her impersonation of someone. To me, that ugliness, that grotesqueness—that's the essence. That's where you realize, it's not about all the consonance and the harmony. It's all the parts that are wrong that help explain why we're drawn to something—what the mystery is—just as much as the beautiful things.

Pitchfork: You write that so much of songwriting for you is about voicing this dissatisfaction—how music is a celebration, but also an act of defiance. Where does your dissatisfaction come from today? What do you feel like you're defying now?

CB: It's really hard to be of this world right now and not feel a slow, creeping despair. I wonder if people have always felt like this. Even if, personally, I'm in a place of contentment or solidity, I feel like it's hard not to look out into American culture and see vast inequity, widespread institutionalized violence and racism and transphobia and environmental destruction. It's hard to be in this world and feel a sense of innate satisfaction at all. There's plenty of things to feel unsettled about. At the same time, I try to… meditate and do other things so that I'm not freaking out about everything. 

Pitchfork: One of my favorite parts of the book is when you describe Corin's apartment in Olympia in the 90s. She would print out words with a labelmaker and put them around on household objects—you mention how she marked a can of baking powder as "RACIST" and wrote "YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL" over a mirror. And this was a way of questioning and confronting every aspect of daily life head-on. Do you feel like Sleater-Kinney absorbed those labels, and that direct approach to dissecting the world? 

CB: We were a band in dialogue with ourselves. There was a constant awareness of a label. We were looking at things and labeling in this slightly reductive way, and then we were being looked at and labeled in a slightly reductive way. But it definitely informed the way we operated at the beginning. It felt really normal to see the world almost from a semiotics perspective: "What does that mean? What does that signify? This is a guitar, but what does it signify?" Everything just felt so symbolic. And that's arduous. You feel like you're inside this cubist painting and you're like, "Ahh! I can't make any sense of this! Please can we animate this and just move to something with more fluidity." 

It seems like we've come back to that now—this hyper-critical, sometimes knee-jerk criticism, with lots of labeling of actions and words. Twitter is sort of that version of labeling, except with 140 characters instead of a labelmaker. It's that way of calling things out for what they are, wearing these badges. Twitter is like the new Scarlet Letter.

Pitchfork: You tweet about new music fairly often. What do you value most in new music today? 

CB: Strangeness, oddity. Passion. And humor. I listen to a lot of hip-hop because it combines so many things like that. I loved the Kendrick Lamar record. And, it's not hip-hip, but I loved the Miguel record. I thought that record was so cool and weird. I'm excited for the Joanna Newsom record. I really like the Kurt Vile record. I was kind of surprised. I've always liked him, but not passionately. There's some good lyrics on there. Do you like Shamir? At Pitchfork [Festival] when we were side-stage, he looked over at me and Corin and he was like, "I love you!" I was so psyched. You never know who listens to your music. I listened to Shamir a lot on the air-stream while we shot "Portlandia" this year. It's good hype music.

Pitchfork: The book's title references the lyrics to "Modern Girl", and hunger factors into the narrative in a few ways. There is your mother's physical hunger as a woman living with anorexia. And there's the creative hunger that most artists live with. You also talk about drawing inspiration from Bikini Kill's "Feels Blind", and Kathleen Hanna sings about hunger on that song. How is the title emblematic of what you wanted your story to say?

CB: It's what you've hinted at. So much of the book is about trying to compensate for lacking. Feeling a sense of emptiness and looking for a way to fill it, and a way to find wholeness. Wholeness is sort of a dubious concept. Because in terms of the human body and literal wholeness and structures, you think: "here are the structures that help make me whole." Family, or school, or the city I live in. When those structures are dysfunctional or decaying, you end up kind of Frankensteining pieces from everywhere in order to make yourself sated and comfortable and alive. I thought the title really worked—it's a journey towards trying to find stability in structures that one thinks they can count on, but really, for a lot of people, have kind of let them down.

Pitchfork: In terms of creative hunger, it made me think—do you want to be insatiable forever? Would you actually want to be full ever?

CB: From an artistic standpoint, that's tricky. Because I feel like—no. We've all seen work where you just think, "Ahh! You have nothing to paint about or write about anymore." You do have to live through things, and to live through things is to observe want, and to observe lacking. Even if the hunger is a curiosity. To me, curiosity is married to optimism. And that's where a lot of my motivation comes from. A lot of my way out of depression and anxiety is that intersection between optimism and curiosity. Because it means taking a step forward with the hope that there will be discovery. I think that is really important. I strive for that all the time.

Pitchfork: Are there any other ways in which growing up with an anorexic mother changed how you thought about the world?

CB: It definitely did. I actually see it a lot with "Portlandia". And the ways that people want their special needs to be met, whether it's their food allergies or their special lotions or shoes. Or the ways that people want their neighborhoods and restaurants curated in a way that's really tailored to them. Growing up with someone who was living by these very strict, repressive rules for themselves—it made me very allergic to the idea of denial. I'm like really sensitive to vegans... Are you a vegan?

Pitchfork: [hides face behind notebook]

CB: You are. It's given me compassion, but it also definitely created a sense of wariness and sadness about the ways that people annihilate themselves on a daily basis. And the ways that women especially hate themselves to the point of wanting to disappear. The idea of self-effacement, the idea that you feel so powerless that the only tiny morsel of power you have is over your own ability to deny yourself food—that to me is a very profound and sad methodology and indicator of how powerless a lot of people feel in this world. That they will turn that onto themselves until they are physically smaller. I think it's affected my worldview a lot—just being sensitive and empathetic towards the ways people want to be small. I don't wish smallness for anyone. No matter what they're struggling with, or based on whatever. Sexuality, ethnicity, economic status, size. I don't wish smallness for anyone. It's a terrible place to live.

Pitchfork: "Modern Girl" captures the sadness of that completely. Speaking of "Modern Girl", I was recently thinking about how prophetic it is that you sing the line "TV brings me closer to the world." Does that feel eerie now?

CB: Yeah, actually. On the tour for No Cities, I thought, "Is that going to sound tongue-in-cheek?" Like all of a sudden, 10 years after writing this song, I have willed myself into... now there's a different definition. When I wrote it, it was about feeling lonely and watching television for the sake of feeling connected to the outside world. Now it's like I'm inside that world, looking out. It's a strange confluence. In that sense, I still feel like it's about me looking for connectivity from the outside. Not as an insider. [laughs] 

Pitchfork: You write that playing music has offered you an opportunity to engage with something ineffable. But then, you wrote 244 pages about it. How did it feel to verbalize something that can seem beyond words?

CB: Towards the end of the book, I say, "We can't name it, but we can sing along." That is my ultimate relationship to any art form, but especially music. Obviously people have spent millennia or at least centuries and thousands and thousands of words trying to explain what music is, but… I don't really know. I can only write about my own experience. I don't know if I'm getting any closer to what someone else's experience is. There's still part of it that I can't name. I'm just sort of along for the ride.

Pitchfork: What is the most essential thing you wanted to say about fandom?

CB: To be a fan is to be curious, and to be curious is to have openness. I think closing-off is the most detrimental thing we can do as people. Also, the idea of not judging oneself. Part of being a fan is to allow 360 degress of experience—to immerse without judgment. It's like a really fearless step forward into new experience. There's something that feels very timeless about fandom. It feels like the thing that's carrying the flag of enthusiasm. It's where I sense the most optimism. I think it's why I sometimes posit myself as a fan. So many things can be filtered through fandom—joy, compassion, love. It is just allowing yourself to be receptive. That's like the basis for half the things you're supposed to do everyday. 

Pitchfork: Everything you're talking about—these are social experiences. But then, as someone who creates so much work, it must require a lot of time alone. 

CB: Oh my gosh, I'm such a loner.

Pitchfork: Does it ever feel weird? 

CB: Aside from the book, a lot of my creative endeavors are with other people. "Portlandia" is a writer's room. "Transparent" is a cast. Sleater-Kinney is obviously a group of people. But I'm kind of a hermit. It's almost easier for me to write about connection than to actually connect. [laughs] I love my friends, but I feel pretty autonomous. I like to connect with people through my work. That's my favorite way—meetings of the minds, fans at a show. Those are nice mediated ways of hanging out. Then I just like hike alone with my dogs.

Pitchfork: You write about your own anxiety, depression, and stresses. You mentioned meditation—how else do you cope with that now? 

CB: Sometimes I feel like it's a lifelong struggle. I have started to meditate. I exercise, but not at a gym. I get out. I've been reading a lot. I've been trying to immerse myself in the narratives of other people. I try to not isolate myself as much. It is really hard. People that are sensitive, you just feel too porous sometimes. There's this inertia that sets in and it's hard to get out of bed. I think knowing that other people go through it is really reassuring. Some of my most motivated, brilliant friends, when they tell me that they're sad, it's like, I'm sad for them, and then I'm relieved for the world. I'm like: "See: we all feel like this."

I don't mean to make light of it. Even I myself, there are some really dark moments. When I read about someone hurting themselves or ending their life, it's devastating to me. I feel like I understand that pathway to darkness. If there is even some little bit of the book where someone feels understood or seen, that's an important thing. When I read other people writing about that stuff, even in fiction, that moment of feeling recognized is so crucial.

Pitchfork: Is there any particular moment in the book where you look back, and think, "I was so empowered at that time" or "I was especially strong"?

CB: Those shows with Pearl Jam, and writing The Woods. Getting on stage before those guys was one of the hardest things we've ever done. It was definitely a turning point for the band. And that tour when Janet first joined the band, those CMJ shows, really feeling like we had found our third member. And also towards the end—I think grief is a step towards strength because it allows you to be porous and take everything in, and have it transform you. What will sit within you is despairing, but at least it's feeling. You're not numb. Grief is sort of the allowance of feeling. When I finally came to terms with the disillusion of the band the first time, that felt like strength. Because for Sleater-Kinney it allowed the next chapter to happen.

Vic Chesnutt noticed the little things. His songs were populated by humble characters from small towns as they went about their ordinary business. But it was through these stories that Chesnutt tackled the heavier subjects. It’s how a song ostensibly about watching "Speed Racer" could climax in Chesnutt shouting, "I am an atheist!," over and over again, as if realizing it now for the first time. Or how "Flirted With You All My Life" begins seeming like a standard love song, but culminates in Chesnutt coming to terms with his mother’s death, realizing that he himself is not yet ready to die. Chesnutt was a fan of the spiral—or, more visually, the free fall. At his best, Chesnutt wrote songs that felt both natural and inevitable: of course a song that begins with him cooing "I am so lonely" will end with him spitting, "I don’t have to be with no asshole anymore."

It is fitting, then, that Kristin Hersh—Chesnutt’s longtime friend and touring companion—has written a book, Don't Suck, Don't Die: Giving Up Vic Chesnutt, about her relationship with Chesnutt comprised almost entirely of these small, Chesnuttian moments, as she free falls into bigger revelations. Unassuming scenes—the book opens with Hersh shoving Jolly Ranchers through Chesnutt’s car window, later the two eating at a diner with their beleaguered spouses—float in and out of the dreamlike narrative. Even their dialogue represents the sort of half-formed, nonsensical banter that occurs between two people who know each other too well: conversation less for the sake of communication and more just to confirm that someone is there. Theirs is the type of friendship in which one picks up the phone only to hear the other say, "Bedspread jizz."

Through this familiarity Hersh illustrates larger themes: of Chesnutt as character, the struggles and triumphs of the touring musician, of the looming inevitability of death. Her observations range from grandiose ("You achieved every songwriter’s goal, cuz you made us think: ‘I’m not alone.’") to aphoristic ("Even when New Yorkers try to dress down they look dressed up, because they did it on purpose.") and always ring with a harsh lyrical truth.

Hersh is also careful in choosing what not to say. In her book, readers will find no traditional biography of Chesnutt. The most repeated stories throughout Chesnutt’s narrative—the teenage drunk driving accident that left him a quadriplegic, the major label deal that wrecked his life and almost did in his career, his suicide attempts—are background, not tentpoles of the story. They are referenced but never squarely addressed, adding only to Hersh’s authority as someone who knew the real person, and saw their life play out in minutes and breaths, not grand arcs. It’s as much her memoir as it is a character study of her friend.

So, during the years when Chesnutt had fallen out of touch with Hersh, leading up to his death on Christmas Day, 2009, he appears in the narrative only in fragments: in flashbacks, in quoted lyrics, and, in one pivotal scene, backstage at Carnegie Hall, texting "YOU SUCK" to Michael Stipe. Referring to Chesnutt consistently in the second person, Hersh, in these passages, writes with particular urgency, addressing, and therefore inventing, a "you" who no longer exists. The book’s strongest moments illustrate the void left when a loved one vanishes. It speaks to Hersh’s power as a writer that, when Chesnutt leaves the picture, the space he occupied is now gaping and unfillable.

In "When the Bottom Fell Out", one of Chesnutt’s simplest and greatest songs, he narrates from the perspective of a man free falling to his death. Yet, in a reversal of his characteristic technique, Chesnutt finds calmness in the hysteria, giving himself time to observe how the wind feels, how his body moves, how the onlookers react. Most pointedly, he takes the opportunity to offer a simple farewell: "So long," he shouts, "It’s been good to know ye." Hersh’s book looks for a similar moment of peace in Chesnutt’s free fall, but Hersh is less successful in finding resolution. Perhaps it’s a trick that only Chesnutt was capable of. Don’t Suck, Don’t Die serves as an eloquent, heartbreaking testament to that gift.

We know now that this was the fulcrum. The breaking point between Pop Star and Monster, the gruesome final rip of provisional sutures. The moment Future became something else—an oracle, or Faustian agent of temptation, or something else that sounds fucking absurd until you hear "Codeine Crazy" wasted at 3 a.m. But who was really ready for Monster, the first of Future’s trilogy of career-resuscitating mixtapes, when it dropped a year ago today? I think a lot of us weren’t. It was a strange time to be a Future fan: there was the fresh corpse of "Body Party", the deeply pathetic "Pussy Overrated". Honest was fine but made you wonder what had happened to its original incarnation Future Hendrix, or to Super Future/Fire Marshal Future for that matter.

This wasn’t music for happy people.

In some ways Monster is a lesser work than the two chapters of the trilogy that would follow. It’s obviously less cohesive than the entirely Zaytoven-produced Beast Mode and the mostly Southside-produced 56 Nights, which inspired a wave of single-producer rap tapes this year. But of course it’s a little incoherent: Monster is Future’s most fucked-up record, aesthetically and existentially. (Listen to "Radical"! The shit is like a Metro Boomin witch house remix of a drunken Gregorian chant about bungee jumping away from your problems.) He stumbles over himself, occasionally onto profundity unlike anything he’d reached before. He contradicts himself, sometimes out of sheer inebriation, sometimes purposeful delusion. Grief is messy like that.

In the Kubler-Ross framework, Monster sees Future slipping from denial to anger. Within the ever-expanding mythology of Nayvadian alter-egos, it falters between his Future Hendrix and Monster personas: the former, detail-fascinated and muse-driven, nudging the latter’s rage-blind id back in check, only to be stifled with Actavis. Often, he is a total dick. But in the unguarded moments between meltdowns and benders, there is the kind of staggering clarity that comes in the calm right after you just say "fuck it." It’s an unflinching tour of the human psyche at its most grotesque and vulnerable. Trap music as Hieronymous Bosch hellscape. I don’t know if it’s the best of the mixtape trilogy, but it’s the most important.

The exact moment everything changes is the 2:10 mark of "Throw Away". First two minutes, pure performative douchery. "Girl you know you like a pistol, you a throw away." Sure, bro. And then the beat changes—can we talk about this beat? This joyless dirge from Nard & B, the guys who once brought you Future’s giddiest pop songs?—and then: "I know your true feelings ain’t… They couldn’t be here, you hear me? They gotta be somewhere else." And then he unravels. He had a threesome and all he could see was Ciara. He has to know if she thinks about him when she’s fucking "him". If she’s happy. "Now: do you feel better about yourself?" He’s talking to Ciara, but he’s talking to himself, too. Was any of this even worth it? The falsetto’s out now. He’s acting pathetic, straight up begging, then backtracking, but it’s too late. Everything’s blurry on Monster, anyway: there’s so much bleed-over between rage and sorrow that it’s pointless to try and map where "good" ends and "bad" begins. It’s not that the avant-garde needn’t be moral. It’s that morality doesn’t exist in hell.

Monster isn’t flawless, but it’s filled with moments of brilliance: the eventual smash "Fuck Up Some Commas"; Metro Boomin’s demonic flute on the title track’s hook, and his echoing woodblocks on "Mad Luv"; Future’s voice cracking on "My Savages", a love letter to his old life; "Hardly", a song about memory as arch nemesis over an 808 Mafia re-imagining of "My Heart Will Go On". But really, it’s all leading up to "Codeine Crazy", the most emotionally transparent Future has ever been, and ever will be, on record. (And his best video of all time, and probably the best music video ever made.) Why did we initially focus on petty lines about taking a girl to Chipotle while he was howling his addictions to whoever was still listening? When he passed out in the champagne room, alone, singing about suicide? When he was dancing in front of his friend’s grave dressed in bone-white, clutching a double cup in a barren field—the future and the past frozen in nihilist purgatory? "I’m taking everything that come with these millions," he cries, the rotten entrails of a rap boast. It’s the rawest, most beautiful rap song of 2014, and I didn’t realize it until months later. Yams knew.

We are neck-deep in the "Classic or Trash" age of cultural discourse, which has understandably turned us all into raging skeptics. Migos are better than the Beatles, Taylor Swift’s business acumen contains the full scope of pop music ontology, Drake exists nowhere between Benevolent Savior and Evil Incarnate. So when people roll their eyes at the zealous devotion of the self-proclaimed #FutureHive that has amassed in Monster’s wake over the past year, I get it. But it’s real. I don’t know how to tell you, but I can feel it. And Monster still holds all the secrets.

Photo by Tom Spray

Pitchfork Music Festival Paris begins today at la Grande Halle de la Villette, featuring performances by the likes of Beach House, Four Tet, Laurent Garnier, Deerhunter, Thom Yorke doing Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes, John Talabot b2b with Roman Flügel, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Battles, Hudson Mohawke (live), Ariel Pink, Kurt Vile and the Violators, Ratatat, Destroyer, Rhye, Spiritualized, Health, Run The Jewels, Father John Misty and many, many more. Weekend passes are sold out, but individual day tickets are still available. Don't forget to check out the set times, afterparties, and download the festival app.

To help you maximize your time in Paris, we’ve updated our 2012 guide to the city’s record shops, bars, and stores with new exhibitions along with tips from some of this year’s bands, all well-seasoned travelers.

Exhibitions (les expositions) 

On the first Sunday of every month, it's free to visit a number of Paris' museums (check out a list and map here). The first Sunday of November 2015 happens to be the day after Pitchfork Paris ends, so take advantage if you've got any strength left. Expect long lines, so arrive early. (Those under 25 and in possession of an EU passport get free entry to museums and many galleries all year round.) 

Check out our pick of current exhibitions at Paris museums and galleries (which aren't all necessarily covered by the free Sunday deal):

Who’s Afraid of Women Photographers? 1839 - 1945

The first French exhibition of its kind, Who’s Afraid… presents work by leading female photographers of the 19th and 20th centuries, exploring gender, self-portrait, photojournalism, landscapes, war photography and filmmaking. Musée d’Orsay, 1 rue de la Légion d'Honneur, 75007

Martin Scorsese, le maître cinéphile

The archives of a great living auteur are opened to the public in this rare exhibition, which also draws from the private collections of frequent Scorsese collaborators Robert De Niro and Paul Schrader. La Cinémathèque Française, 51 rue de Bercy, 75012

Take Me I’m Yours 

Twenty one years ago, curators Christian Boltanski and Hans Ulrich Obrist conceived a novel exhibition for London’s Serpentine gallery, where the public were encouraged to touch, use, take, and swap objects from the show. This year, they revisit the idea in Paris, with contributions from the original artists—including Gilbert and George, and Carsten Höller—along with new additions such as Jeremy Deller and Yoko Ono. Monnaie de Paris, 11 quai de Conti, 75006

A Brief History of the Future

The Louvre commissioned contemporary artists Ai Wei Wei, Chéri Samba, Mark Manders, Tomás Saraceno, Isabelle Cornaro, Wael Shawky, and Camille Henrot to consider "the ordering of the world, the great empires, the expansion of the world, and the polycentric world we live in today" for this groundbreaking and highly anticipated original exhibition. Musée du Louvre, 75001

Warhol Unlimited

To mark the European debut of Warhol's Shadows, le Musée d'Art Moderne is hosting a major exhibition of the pop artist's life works, featuring over 200 original pieces. Musée d'Art Moderne de le Ville de Paris, 11 avenue du Président Wilson, 75116

Girls of Pitchfork Paris

Since 2012, Vincent Arbelet has been documenting the people of Pitchfork Music Festival Paris, from performers to punters. To mark the festival's fifth anniversary, we're exhibiting Arbelet's photos of the festival's female performers—the likes of Lykke Li, Robyn, Perfect Pussy's Meredith Graves, Kathleen Edwards, Purity Ring, Jessie Ware and more. Le Pavillon des Canaus, 39 quai de Loire, 75019

Record stores (les disquaires)

Paris is spoiled when it comes to record shops. You could spend the duration of your trip to Paris solely visiting the city's music-vending establishments. For the most part, our picks below highlight stores that predominantly sell new records, tackling the endeavour with a unique approach. If you're after second hand shops, there's a comprehensive list on Discogs.

Balades Sonores
The Montmartre record store started as a collective and label, before expanding into a brick and mortar shop. They also host a concert series, a mini festival, and in-stores. 1 avenue Trudaine, 75009

Lucky Records
Dealing exclusively in pop from around the globe, Lucky Records dedicates three-quarters of its shelf space is exclusively to records and rarities by Madonna. 66 Rue de la Verrerie, 75004

Souffle Continu
A few minutes' walk from the Père Lachaise Cemetery is Souffle Continu, dealing in metal, post-rock, prickly electronica, improvised jazz, noise, and more. Their picks of new releases should tell you what to expect: Joanna Newsom, Ben Frost and Mogwai are among their highlights. 20-22 Rue Gerbier, 75011

Music Fear Satan
What began as a mail-order store servicing the gloomiest, sludgiest sounds transformed into a proper shop at the end of 2010, while also acting as a label. They also sell T-shirts, DVDs, and magazines. 4 rue Richard Lenoir, 75011

My Electro Kitchen
The proprietor of My Electro Kitchen also owns the lesbian bar next door, Le Troisième Lieu, and the two come together once a week for an instore cocktail hour. Founder Eric Labbé describes the store as offering "food for fussy ears," selling electronic records from the likes of Kompakt, BPitch Control, Ed Banger, and more. 60 Rue Quincampoix, 75004

Ground Zero
Although Ground Zero predominantly specializes in catch-all indie, they're also dedicated to electronic music, with a focus on releases by small French labels. They pride themselves on being specialist, but anti-elitist, and were one of the earliest beneficiaries of Club Action des Labels Indépendants Français, an organization founded in 2010 to protect France's network of independent music and video shops. They recently moved to become part of Nationale 7, an indie boutique specializing in records and furniture. 114 rue de Faubourg-Poissonnière, 75010

Bars (les bars)

Bars and restaurants in France are legally obliged to include service and any cover charges in the prices displayed, but tipping is still de rigueur, as it were. In a bar, round up to the next Euro, and in restaurants, add up to 10% on top of your bill. A single draft beer is "une pression."

Point Ephémère
Although only a short walk from the busy Gare du Nord station, Point Ephémère is a glassy idyll on the banks of the canal, hosting awesome bands and a modern take on French cuisine. 200 Quai de Valmy, 75010

Le Trabendo
Just across the park from La Grande Halle de la Villette, the festival site, sits Le Trabendo, the intimate venue where we're hosting the pre- and after-parties for the festival... and where the Rolling Stones performed their first comeback gig on Thursday. 211 Avenue Jean Jaurès, 75019

Le 9b
"Bar for eating, cave for dancing," is how the bar in Paris' Belleville district describes itself. It's open until 2am, serves food and cheap beer, and showcases Paris' rich, eclectic music scene on its stereo. 68 Boulevard de la Villette, 75019

Le Merle Moqueur
A few streets from Parc Montsouris, Left Bank bar Le Merle Moqueur is renowned for its boundless (and dead cheap) selection of rum punches, natty tropical decoration, 80s pop, and branché (hip) crowd. There are only three tables, so be prepared to bash derrières. 11 Rue de la Butte aux Cailles, 75013

Les Pères Populaires
It might seem silly to keep highlighting cheap bars, but when you've accidentally ended up paying 8€ for a beer in some skeevy tourist trap, you'll be glad to know where they are. "The Fathers of the People" is located in one of Paris' working neighborhoods, serving food all day and drinks into the night. They offer plenty of "grignotage"-- tapas-y snacks. 46 Rue de Buzenval, 75020

UDO
Venturing into UDO feels like wandering into a Kreuzberg dive bar. Currywurst are 4.50€ all night, and their selection of German beers is formidable. (And cheap.) 4 Rue Neuve Popincourt, 75011

Leisure (le loisir)

Paris is the kind of city where you want to make your own adventure, squirrelling out shops, parks, and other nooks, and then claiming them as your own discovery. Below are a few ideas to get you started: a graphic novel haven, a cave of vintage treats, a glorious park, a chocolate shop, and a home away from home for American travelers.

Super Héroes 

Comics and graphic novels are so popular in France that you'll find a pretty decent selection in the local supermarket. Just up from the Pompidou Centre, you'll find the compact but excellent Super Héroes, which has a fine selection of bande dessinée—and if you're keen to dig further into French BD culture, head south of the river to Album at 84 Boulevard Saint-Germain, 75005. Super Héroes, 175 rue Saint Martin, 75003

Parc des Buttes Chaumont
Roughly a 30-minute stroll from la Grande Halle de la Villette is le Parc des Buttes Chaumont, an enormous, beautiful park housing a grotto, waterfalls, a Corinthian-style monument, a few restaurants, and plenty of opportunities for picnics and people-watching. 19e Arrondissement, 75019

Bands' recommendations (Le conseil des groupes)

El-P, Run the Jewels

Paris pro tip: get really really stoned and stand under the Eiffel Tower. Now look up. Granted it's a touristy thing to do but hey, touristy for a fucking reason.

HEALTH

No trip to Paris is complete without paying your respects to the most incredible graveyard on earth, Père Lachaise, home to such great French thinkers as Balzac and Voltaire. But no one gets more visitors than the The Lizard King, Jim Morrison. Everybody loves to rock. U.S.A... but Paris is great.

Nao

Sainte-Chapelle is my absolute favourite place to visit when I'm in Paris. The first time I visited the chapel it took my breath away. I sat there for an hours in absolute awe and silence. There's a magic and beauty in Sainte-Chapelle thats seems not from this world.

Ana García Perrote, Hinds

I think the coolest moment I've lived in paris was sitting next to the Seine, where rue des Bernardins ends, in front of Notre Dame cathedral. During the night, the cathedral turns green and yellow, with its reflection in the water. In France it's legal to drink in the streets and they have the best cheap wine on earth, so sitting there, smoking in the night, is more than magical.

Dornik

Check out Place de la Concorde, the largest square in Paris. A great place to go for a walk, make sure you take a camera!

"Music has always been my constant, my salvation," wrote Carrie Brownstein in the farewell post for her NPR music blog, Monitor Mix. With her memoir, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, Brownstein—one kinetic third of Time's best American rock band Sleater-Kinney, and co-writer and star of sketch show "Portlandia"—has now written a book to the same effect. As much as it’s a record of Sleater-Kinney’s birth and storied career, it’s also a generous document about personal fandom and music as savior. Here, we might read about Brownstein’s musical success and travails with the avidity of fans—but in her praise of music’s sustaining thrill we can see something closer to ourselves.

In the memoir’s dramatic opening, though, salvation seems remote. Brownstein writhes in physical and psychic pain during Sleater-Kinney’s 2006 European tour: she has shingles brought on by stress, and feels isolated from band colleagues Corin Tucker and Janet Weiss thanks to her frayed spirit and contagious condition. Her dissociation is so piteous that she considers slamming her hand in a door so she can go home.

Rewind to the beginning, a parallel period of upheaval and query. Of her own origin story, Brownstein says, "I’ve always felt unclaimed." Music and performance were clear bright spots for a girl in the Seattle suburbs, with parents who were in disarray under the surface. Kenny and Linda Brownstein (namesakes for the wanderers in Sleater-Kinney song "Wilderness") are regular middle-class parents, in that the secrets they struggle to keep destabilize their family. Kenny, as he eventually tells his daughters, has been in the closet for most of his life; Linda gradually yields to a severe eating disorder and is hospitalized, then checks out of the family entirely.

For succor, Brownstein turns to music. From the synth-laden pop of Madonna to early Television, she is fascinated with the mechanics of the songs that make her burn. Particularly, she cherishes live shows, which show her a possible future: "I needed to press myself up against small stages…just so I could get a glimpse of who I wanted to be." Witnessing Heavens to Betsy—one of Tucker’s first bands—play a "strident" college show cements it; like a musical oracle, Tucker agrees Brownstein should seek out the musical community she craves in Olympia.

Olympia, that holy land, proves the nourishing home Brownstein hopes for. Everything there is adrenalizing: "the labels K Records and Kill Rock Stars, the bands, the fanzines, the people, the remnants of Riot Grrrl, the clothes." From there, to recording a first album in Australia and eventually playing stadiums with Pearl Jam, Sleater-Kinney built a sound and reputation.

Nerds and weirdos will feel seen in Brownstein’s account of herself as a scrappy outsider. It’s a surprise to associate her staggering stage and studio presence—in live shows, she is both electric filament and wild force—with the anxious, talky youth on these pages. One band audition, with no less than Elizabeth Davis of 7 Year Bitch, goes awkwardly, and Brownstein’s foolhardy follow-up is "a letter wherein I compared myself to the Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist John Frusciante." It’s a funny, relatable anecdote, and just one example of her familiarity with the no-holds-barred ache of rock dreams.

Brownstein’s prose style often echoes her insistent lyrics, full of staccato, alliterative sentences and jagged adjectives in triplicate. Describing a growing friction between her and her mother: "We vacillated between shouting and silence, the megaphone and the mute." These pointed sentences make her broader-brush writing elsewhere feel vague in comparison; direct speech is rare, for example, and as a consequence certain scenes and people read as flat or elusive.

True to her practice and passion, Brownstein is magnetic when writing about music itself. Passages about her and Tucker’s collaboration explain how their distinctive interplay emerged: "My entire style of playing was built around somebody else playing guitar with me, a story that on its own sounds unfinished." Her appreciation of Tucker and Weiss, both musically and personally, is palpable, especially within the often unpleasant pressure chamber of band life.

Given her significant musical achievements, Brownstein’s identification with the listener amounts to an act of empathy or, indeed, equality—as might be expected from the person who wrote rock-projection anthem "I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone". Even though she’s achieved her goal—she is Your Carrie Brownstein—she ultimately also claims a space among enthusiasts and fans. You might see her up on the stage or hear her through your speakers, but she’s still right there in the pit with us, screaming and wishing and dreaming.

Widely loved by sci-fi fans and counter culture types alike during its mid-'60s heyday and beyond, there's one subculture with which Frank Herbert's literary space-opera, Dune, really connected: dudes with synthesizers. And while these were not the only artists to find inspiration on the planet Arrakis, the story’s stark landscapes and drug-enhanced space travel pair well with the sprawling and alien music made by analog electronic instruments. During the '70s, a number of established knob twiddlers released Dune-inspired albums, a few of which have recently been or are in the process of being reissued. Though they make use of similar instrumentation – keyboards and sequenced modular synthesizers – these records do not sound the same. Some commit fully to other-worldly tones, while others come off like weedy prog-rock jam sessions that were merely branded with a Fremen place-name. Not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with that.

Richard Pinhas: Chronolyse

Originally released in 1978, Chronolyse is a solo album by guitarist Richard Pinhas, founder of the French electronic rock group, Heldon. A huge fan of Herbert’s Dune trilogy, Pinhas was also the owner of two early Moog synthesizers (a Moog P3 and a Polymoog, if you needed to know) and, ultimately, one thing lead to another. Like much of Heldon’s work, Chronolyse favors melodic minimalism over abstract squiggles. The Moogs play short interlocking melodies that shift in tone and timbre as Pinhas flips various knobs.

I should own up, though: I have only ever read the first 50 or so pages of Dune. And while I have watched the 1984 David Lynch-directed film a number of times, I am aware that it departs heavily from the source material. So, I can’t really attest to the Dune-iness of this music or whether or not Pinhas is effectively nailing the Bene Gesserit vibe on "Sur Le Theme De Bene Gesserit I-VII".

But listening to Chronolyse– a title that, confusingly, has nothing to do with Dune– it’s possible to get a sense of why Herbert’s books resonated with electronic musicians. The story paired future technology with mysticism and altered states of consciousness and there are parallels to that in Pinhas’ music, which uses a mad scientists’ rig of modular synth gear to create delicate and melodic trance music. Out of print since basically forever, Cuneiform has just re-issuedChronolyse on LP and also as a digital download.



Z (aka Bernard Szajner): Visions of Dune

Released a year after Chronolyse, Visions of Dune is a Dune-oriented concept album composed by French synthesizer pioneer and psychedelic light show wizard, Bernard Szajner (working here under the pseudonym, Z). Szajner’s music stands out amidst Dune tributes in that it has a more distant relationship to the cosmic synth and new age music that guides its peers. The others—Chronolyse, Klaus Schulze’s composition "Dune", and even Brian Eno’s sole contribution to Lynch’s Dune film soundtrack, "Prophecy Theme"—are not necessarily meditation music, but they are fairly optimistic and vibey. Visions of Dune is more overtly sci-fi. It is cold and dystopian, full of dissonant drones and alien tape loops. If you’re looking for a deeper read, this record was reviewed by our own Philip Sherburne after it was reissued last year by Infiné.



Kurt Stenzel: Jodorowsky’s Dune OST

Released in 2014, the documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune traces Chilean surrealist filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky’s doomed attempt to realize Herbert’s novel as a motion picture during the mid-'70s. While the project ultimately fizzled, the collaborators that the director assembled—Jean Giraud, H.R. Giger, and Dan O’bannon among them—would port some of the design concepts into sci-fi classics like Alien and Blade Runner. Stenzel’s vintage synth and keyboard dominated score is almost a tribute to '70s Dune tributes, splitting the difference between Pinhas’ soothing repetitions and Sjazner’s eerie abstractions. From time to time, Jodorowsky’s voice is dropped in to provide some inspirational quotes, giving the soundtrack the feel of a guided meditation tape. It will be out on LP and CD on November 13th via Light in the Attic.

Back in the "no future" early days, punk didn’t offer a great retirement plan. After a record or two of three-chord raging, you could stay the course, turn pop, get clever, or check out altogether, like Sid Vicious or Darby Crash. There were pros and cons to all of these.

Now, you can grab a hat and an acoustic guitar and ride off into the sunset. It’s a standard move, the ol’ alt-country switcheroo, but it wasn’t an obvious choice in 1985, when a gang of artsy, lefty ex-punks from Leeds, England, opened its fourth album with words worthy of the Clash or Johnny Cash: "I was out late the other night/ Fear and whiskey kept me going."

The band was the Mekons, and 30 years after Fear and Whiskey arguably gave birth to alt-country, they’re still going strong—and hitting the whiskey. They return Nov. 27 with Jura, a joint album recorded with ace twangster Robbie Fulks on a boozy 2014 trip to Scotland, and sometime next year, they’ll release the record they cut live in July at Brooklyn’s Jalopy Theatre.

If punky-tonk has become less prevalent on, oh, the last dozen Mekons LPs, co-founder Jon Langford still throws down the hoedown with his Waco Brothers side project. And he hasn’t forgotten why Americana first seemed like a plausible extension of angry UK guitar music.

"Both were concerned with addressing their audience directly," Langford says from Chicago, where he relocated with the Mekons in the mid-'80s. "Someone like Merle Haggard, there wasn’t a real big barrier between him and his audience, even though he was a big star. He was very much a populist, very much speaking and writing in terms that were instantly translatable into the experience of his audience. That’s what punk felt like to me."

The Mekons began drawing these connections in the early '80s, after producers Bill Leader and John Gill hipped them to the raw power of British folk (heard on 1983’s The English Dancing Master EP), Cajun music, reggae, and other stripped-down sounds. At the time, punk was growing staler by the second, and the Mekons—themselves in a transitional phase after a period of inaction—opted to switch up instruments, add violin and accordion, and betray one of the genre’s central conceits.

"Punk was very much about discarding the past," Langford says. "Suddenly, three years later, there were these threads going through the past that were really fascinating."

One of those threads connected British folk to American country, which Langford and fellow singer and guitarist Tom Greenhalgh studied via the "honky-tonk classics" tapes given to them by Chicago DJ Terry Nelson. It all came together on the brilliant Fear and Whiskey—a record that suggests a fiddle bow being dragged across Wire, or maybe the house band at some fantasy pub-saloon where cowboys and striking British miners crack Thatcher jokes and sing along with "Hard to Be Human Again" at the top of their lungs.

"We saw America as this strange land nothing like England, nothing like Europe," says sweet-voiced singer Sally Timms, who joined just after Fear and Whiskey. "People rode around in beautiful Cadillacs and listened to country music. It was different, but it’s about failed relationships and drinking and not having enough money and all those things that seemed to be a thread back to the first Mekons record."

Meanwhile, back in America, the members of L.A. punk stalwarts X were also connecting the dots between Buck Owens and "Blitzkrieg Bop". In 1985, the same year Fear and Whiskey came out, X grabbed Blasters guitarist Dave Alvin, reinvented itself as the rollicking trad-country offshoot the Knitters, and released Poor Little Critter on the Road, another seminal alt-country album.

At the time, X singer, bassist, and songwriter John Doe was as bored with punk as Langford had been. Thanks to greaser guitarist Billy Zoom, X had long worked rockabilly into its sound, and the more they listened to old blues and country, the more everyone realized that honky-tonk—O.G. bullshit-free music—wasn’t that different from what they’d been doing.

"X had a lot of songs about loyalty and/or infidelity, songs about relationships, social commentary," Doe says. "Maybe country music is more direct, but that was a main point of punk rock: The lyrics were about something. A lot of what was called rock'n'roll before that, the songs were about fucking nothing, because [artists] were trying to be so general. You had to relate to 10,000 people at a superdome."

Doe has stuck with roots music throughout his 25-year solo career, filling gaps between X and Knitters reunions with no fewer than nine excellent albums of country, folk, and down-home rock'n'roll. Americana, he says, has always been his answer to the question all ambitious punks must ask themselves: "What can I get away with?"

"Not in a cynical way," Doe says. "But what can you sell? The Clash could get away with doing dub because they listened to it so much. But I couldn’t. So what can I get away with? What can I sing and actually believe in and deliver?"

In the case of English singer-songwriter Holly Golightly, it’s more a matter of what you’re willing to try. In the early '90s, as leader of all-girl Billy Childish affiliates Thee Headcoatees, her sound was trashy garage-rock. Since going solo in 1995, Golightly has dipped into older styles like R&B, rockabilly, gospel, and country. Those last two are the principal crops she and multi-instrumentalist Lawyer Dave—her partner in life and the kooky Americana duo Holly Golightly & the Brokeoffs—raise down at their farm in rural Georgia.

The funny thing is that Golightly, like Timms, doesn’t consider herself a huge country fan. If we’re talking arcane Americana, Holly’s way more into gospel. She was drawn to country almost instinctually, as the simplicity lets her tell meaningful stories despite limited guitar skills.

"I can’t say those old '50s artists were pushing the envelope and breaking new ground or doing anything monumental on purpose, but they were singing things that weren’t the usual big-band standards that came before," says Golightly, days before embarking on a tour to support the Brokeoffs’ latest, Coulda Shoulda Woulda. "They were singing their own songs, their personal accounts of whatever was gong on with them. The storytelling elements and the innocence of it—I think that rings true for a lot of punk."

The fact that she’s British adds another dimension to Brokeoffs tunes like "Getting High for Jesus". Golightly says that when she pokes fun at American culture, it’s done with love. Sometimes, she’s simply recycling stories picked up from fellow farmers or the guy down at the feed store.

"I didn’t even know this music existed until I was doing it,” Golightly says. “And I’ve grown to really love it. Being British gives me some license to play with things Americans would do in a different way."

On the opposite end of the walking-the-walk spectrum stands Mike Ness, founder and lone original member of SoCal punk institution Social Distortion. Like James Cagney with a Les Paul or Robert Mitchum with neck tats, this quintessential punk-turned-troubadour has been singing autobiographical songs about drinking, fighting, shooting dope, and causing trouble since 1978.

In the early days, before Social D morphed into the punkabilly band it is today, Ness was very much of the year-zero mindset. He was living too fast to stop and think about how the ferociously honest songs on his band’s 1983 debut Mommy’s Little Monster mirrored the music he’d absorbed as a kid.

Those early influences included the Stones and Creedence, his gateways to vintage blues and rockabilly. Somewhere along the way, he got his pre-tattooed hands on a Smithsonian Folkways set of Depression-era songs, and that rattled something deep inside.

"It sounded really desperate and honest," Ness says. "The Carter Family sounded like how I felt inside at the time. And then when I heard the Sex Pistols, they sounded how I felt inside at the time."

In the early '80s, Ness wasn’t feeling that great inside. He struggled with substance abuse and engaged in all sorts of bad behavior he’s sure to detail in his long-gestating memoir. It wasn’t until he kicked drugs in '85 that he figured out how to reboot the band his addiction had nearly destroyed. He was painting houses for a living, listening all day to oldies radio and cowpunk bands like Jason and the Scorchers, and the next move became obvious.

"I just had a direction," Ness says. "I love country. I love bluegrass. I love folk music. I love blues. I love rockabilly. We need to incorporate all this into our sound."

Like Doe and Langford, he knew dudes with spiky hair and leather jackets didn’t have a monopoly on setting intense feelings to music.

"It became crystal clear to me that Billie Holiday is just as punk as Sid Vicious," he says. "It’s the same thing. They’re acting out. They’re singing about their lives. It’s honest, and it’s really heavy, and it’s hard."

Ness’ new mindset informed Social D’s 1987 sophomore effort Prison Bound, a transitional album wherein he laid the template for later triumphs like 1990’s Social Distortion and 1999’s solo Cheating at Solitaire, featuring Brian Setzer and Bruce Springsteen.

"The guitars were practically doing Marty Robbins gunfighter ballads, but the lyrical content was all real life," Ness says of Prison Bound. "That’s when we said, ‘Is this punk?’ I’m singing about almost going to prison. This is where my life took me. What is more authentic than real life?"

If the Social D album he’s writing now is anything like the last one, 2011’s Hard Times and Nursery Rhymes, it’ll be almost rootsy enough to warrant solo billing. This raises the question of whether Ness might someday set Social D aside, go full-time singer-songwriter, and enjoy the benefits of that punk-rock retirement plan he unwittingly helped design.

"I do wonder sometimes whether I’ll still be able to sing ‘Mommy’s Little Monster’ in my late '50s and early '60s," says Ness. "No one really knows until they get there. But that would be a great way to go out. I plan to live to be 100, so let’s say I spend the last 20 years of my life doing that. That would be great."

More than 40 years after its genesis in the German countryside, the music of Harmonia sounds removed from time. Featuring the late Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius of electronic duo Cluster alongside guitarist Michael Rother of Neu!, Harmonia is often described as a "krautrock supergroup," but that term implies musicians coming together to combine their powers and respective fame. Harmonia’s formation was more casual and informal—Rother calls it an "easy action"—a gentle experiment which yielded lasting results.

Grönland Records’ Complete Works box set compiles the group’s entire discography, including two studio albums, 1974’s Musik von Harmonia and 1975’s De Luxe, two collections of exploratory live material, and Tracks and Traces, which collects sessions recorded with Brian Eno in 1976. The box set offers a way of observing Harmonia’s output as a whole, how its sound informed Moebius, Roedelius, and Rother’s future solo and collaborative works, and its impact on the greater musical landscape, as elements of Harmonia’s sound influenced electronic music makers.

By the time the trio banded together, they’d already helped define the sound that would eventually be called "krautrock." Roedelius, 10 years older than most of his peers, had lived a trying life: as a child he appeared in films, was conscripted into the Hitler Youth, and jailed by the Stasi. Eventually freed, he found his way to West Germany and began exploring the experimental scene there with Moebius, a political activist with a taste for jazz and psychedelic rock. The two formed Kluster, creating clanging, proto-industrial soundscapes before eventually rechristening the group Cluster. Rother had traveled in his youth, studying in Düsseldorf and Pakistan, before joining up with Kraftwerk for a stint and forming Neu! with drummer Klaus Dinger. Neu!’s pop art sensibility popularized the "motorik" or "Apache beat," an insistent drive coursing beneath cosmic swaths of sound.

Coming together in rural Forst, far removed from city life and near the idyllic River Weser, the trio set up their recording equipment in a spacious farmhouse, crafting a swooning sound reflecting their pastoral surroundings. The group’s lifespan was short, only three years, but its influence was wide reaching. Brian Eno described the band as the "world’s most important rock group" before recording with them, and elements of the trio’s sound can be heard in his Berlin Trilogy albums with David Bowie.

None of it was planned, Rother says. When he visited "the Cluster guys" in 1973, it was simply to see if they’d be interested in backing up Neu! during live shows. "Klaus and I were both very unhappy with the musicians we had tested," Rother says. "The two of us back then, with the technology that was available, couldn’t play live. We tried that once. I used a tape recorder…Back then, people thought, ‘Oh, this is a lie, this is not real live music.’ You couldn’t even use a tape recorder to introduce sounds of water or backing sounds. But also, it was boring, just Klaus playing drums and me playing one guitar. It was not the sound we both had in mind."



Rother was familiar with Cluster’s work, and mutually aquatinted through producer Connie Plank. He was drawn especially to "Im Süden", from 1972’s Cluster II, which featured a minimal, four-note drone. "I called them and they said, ‘Yeah, just come over,’" Rother says. "No details. I jammed with Roedelius, and it was sort of a musical love at first sight, really. When Dieter joined in, it was just something I hadn’t experienced before. In good moments, the three of us could produce a real, live music, which was not like a comic version of the music you did in the studio."

After his tumultuous youth, Roedelius had happily settled in Forst, invited there by an antiquarian who’d envisioned setting up an artist’s colony there. "It was really paradise when I was invited to Forst," Roedelius says. "We lived in harmony with nature. We had to work, we had to get water, had to bake our own bread, but it was ‘harmonia’—pure. It was the first time in my life where I really found peace and silence. My wife came to that place, my first child came to birth there. For me, especially, it was pure harmony."

The band’s debut album, 1974’s Musik von Harmonia, was packaged with the same style of pop art as Neu!’s albums, with its cover depicting a striking neon blue detergent bottle. But its contents echo the quiet naturalism the three experienced living in the country. Songs like "Sehr Kosmisch" and "Hausmusik" feature washes of sound, prefacing the coming emergence of new age music.



Still, the group wasn’t immune to Cold War tensions, even far removed from the cities. "We had military exercises occurring around us," Rother says. "We had long rows of tanks driving in the streets. They were preparing for war, preparing to defend Germany or Europe at the River Basel. There was this military theory that you had to stop the Russians, the Warsaw Pact army, you had to delay them for three days and then the backups would just crumble and they’d have to retreat. We also had these fighter planes flying through the valley, which is so peaceful, at tree-top level. It was so frightening. Children started crying, animals went wild. And your heart stopped."

But beyond these military disturbances, the trio experienced a kind of freedom that felt new to them, and influenced the open, expansive sounds of Harmonia. "One of the first things I did was break down a wall that divided my room into two small rooms," Rother says. "Try to do that in the city and you’ll get trouble with the landlord [laughs]."

With 1975’s De Luxe, Rother took creative lead, shifting the band toward pop and rock textures. "After Musik von Harmonia, something different became evident in our music," Roedelius says. His approach with Moebius was largely improvisational, and finished recordings were often the result of long, winding jam sessions—the kind heard on the archival live material included in the Complete Works box set. "Michael, through his experiences with Kraftwerk and Neu!, [wanted to explore] song-structured material," Roedelius says. "Moebius and I, in a way, we didn’t want to rehearse always the same pieces. At the end, Harmonia’s De Luxe worked out as a studio work. It was Michael—his ideas that became music."

"The magic of the early Harmonia days was that because nothing was premeditated, sometimes nothing happened for two hours and people were bored or fell asleep or started talking or went away," Rother says of the trio’s live experiments. "But sometimes, great moments like the five minutes of ‘Ohrwurm,’ [from Musik von Harmonia] happened. This was five minutes of a two-hour long concert where we tortured our friends; because we were searching and searching and didn’t find anything until that moment arrived. But that was five minutes of pure magic."

With De Luxe, Rother wanted to find a balance between "organization and freedom." "The freedom we chose in the beginning, had, with only a few exceptions, a bad ratio between exciting minutes and boring minutes, in which nothing happened," Rother says. "And that led straight to De Luxe. I owe Joachim and Dieter credit for working with me and making that possible."

The resulting album feels like the work of a new band, incorporating vocals, twitching beats and featuring the most rocking song in Harmonia’s catalog, "Monza (Rauf und runter)". The song was the result of "totally wild" sessions, Rother laughs. "It could have been on a Neu! album, and I guess Klaus was a bit frustrated that it wasn’t," Rother says.



De Luxe, while a stellar effort, underscored the creative differences between Rother and the Cluster duo. The group disbanded; Rother turned his attention to solo work, and Moebius and Roedelius returned to Cluster and individual solo albums. But in 1976, a call came from Eno. The trio admired him, and his mutual admiration for Harmonia had been made in clear in the press. Eno was en route to Montreux to record with David Bowie, but wanted to come and work with the trio.

They agreed to reform Harmonia, but rather than hunker down and focus on art, Eno found himself assimilated into the group’s rural routine. "He shared our life," Roedelius says. "He came with us into the forest and he took our daughter, when we were tired, he took our daughter into his arms and walked through the rooms, relieved us from some strain. It was more community life which we shared with each other, which got its influence into the music."

In the studio, the group experimented, working under "the Cluster concept—open," Roedelius says. "We started from point zero and did something. It was ‘accidental’ music. I like it a lot because we came back to our roots together."

"Brian was there with absolutely no intention," Rother says. "Nobody talked about putting it out the recordings. It was just a guy came to visit. We talked a lot. We went for walks. We took it very easy, but I had this four-track tape machine which was great compared to earlier days. It had four individual tracks, which you could individually record or erase. Four guys, four tracks—it made sense."

Though Eno and Cluster continued to record together—releasing collaborative efforts Cluster & Eno in 1977 and After the Heat in 1979—the Harmonia sessions went unreleased until 1997. In them, you hear blueprints for Eno’s ambient works, music suitable for both active and passive listening, in songs like "Welcome" and "Weird Dream", as well as more rhythmic art-rock, like the galloping "Vamos Companeros" and the woozy, sashaying "Les demoiselles".

"I think he enjoyed to be with us," Roedelius says. "He was on his way to produce Low and Heroes with David Bowie in Switzerland, and David called almost every day that he should come and work with him, and he stayed with us."

After Eno’s departure, Harmonia again disbanded, and devoted themselves to decades of creative exploration. Until his death in 2015, Moebius continued working with Roedelius as Cluster and collaborated with artists like Asmush Teitchens and Conny Plank, releasing a solo album, Nidemonex, in 2014. Roedelius continued to create compelling new work. This year, he released Imagori, a collaborative album with Christoph H. Müller. Rother has maintained a steady creative pace, recording solo work and playing live with Steve Shelley of Sonic Youth as Hallogallo.

Rother and Roedelius remained focused on new endeavors, but the Complete Works retrospective has given them a chance to assess their influence on younger bands and creative legacy, though the impulse doesn’t come especially natural to either. "We all just did it," Roedelius says. "We didn’t think much about if we influenced others or created something new. We did it because it was our thing to do at that point. What people tell us in the moment…young people, new musicians, young generations just find out about what we did and they like it. That’s a good compliment that we receive. That it was authentic and original what we did."

"When I played Harmonia for friends that hadn’t heard it, they were just amazed," Rother says. "A friend of mine, [songwriter] Annika Henderson, she said, ‘Michael, that’s the best you’ve ever done.’ Which is in a way depressing [laughs], but also I really liked to hear that. People will love it. I’m sure. We’ll see."

In 2004, Detroit techno legend Jeff Mills released his first Exhibitionist DVD. It captured him on three turntables, going to town on a dynamic selection of techno, house, and even disco. It was as ambitious as you'd expect from a DJ who used to be known as the Wizard (a sobriquet he picked up back in his days as a hip-hop DJ known for his lightning-quick fingers), but he’s more than topped it with the new Exhibitionist 2, which includes not only a DJ mix—this time, using three CDJs and a Roland TR-909 drum machine—but also an extended solo set on drum machine; a duet with a human drummer, Skeeto Valdez; a tour of Mills' compositional methods; and, finally, a 45-minute dance solo by Pierre Lockett, a Chicago dancer who spent time in the Joffrey Ballet and Dance Theatre of Harlem.

If it's a remarkable demonstration of Mills's skills, it's also a curious product. A few segments, like the drum duet and the dance solo, feel like experiments that probably looked better on paper. He has developed a vast and devoted fan base over the years, but it will take a truly committed follower to sit down and just watch those bits all the way through. Certain aspects of the DVD, like the ability to view Mills' hands from different angles, do give the viewer unprecedented access to his creative process, but the very idea of plopping down on a sofa to watch somebody spin feels slightly at odds with the entire purpose of dance music. But Mills has never taken the path you'd expect him to: Recently he has been pouring his energies into collaborations with symphony orchestras—a relic of the 19th century that would seem to be at odds with the futurism espoused by techno.

Mills sometimes gives the impression of being an artist so focused on his own ideas that he exists in a bubble. "Statistically, I wouldn't be considered one of the world's best DJs," he told me last month, when I reached him at his apartment in Paris. This is an odd thing to say, in part because within techno, he's widely acknowledged to be one of the best, if not the best, selectors alive. But from the measured tone of his voice, you could tell that he wasn't simply being humble; the guy simply resonates on another frequency. ("I'm not sure if you've noticed, but the city where I come from, Detroit, there are, in my opinion, some great DJs there," he continues. "But, statistically, and from popular opinion, we don't see that. There's some great, incredible DJs from Chicago. And New York. But statistically, you know, the populace says that that's not true.")

Musically, Exhibitionist 2 is much more focused than its predecessor. Gone are the days of playing other people's records: He’s responsible for every note on the DVD, and he produced the music in such a way that every track becomes a building block in a much larger structure. He's no longer thinking in terms of songs or even tracks, but in terms of flow. Exhibitionist 2 shows the DJ not as a selector, but as a conduit.

The goal behind Exhibitionist 2, as with its predecessor, is to demystify the art of the DJ, Mills says. "There are too many things that are still mysterious," he says. "They don't need to be mysterious, we're just reluctant to talk about them." The irony is that Mills himself remains as mysterious as ever. A conversation with him moves much like his DJ sets do, with different ideas weaving almost imperceptibly in and out of mix; the topic may shape-shift from '80s Detroit to drum-machine interfaces to the future of space travel. The best option is simply to sit back and enjoy the ride.

Pitchfork: It's been 11 years since Exhibitionist; what made you decide it was time to do a new one?

Jeff Mills: I think there's really no right or wrong time to do something like this. I think any information about any type of art form, it's always the right time. But since the last one, I could see there were many things about the culture of DJing that we don't really talk about. We don't really look at how the music is made, how it's conceptualized, how it's put together. We talk about the equipment and the software, but we don't talk about the reasons why we put the music together in the first place. I thought, you know, maybe it's time, maybe we've mastered the technique of putting together music, and mastered the technique of mixing music together, but we've just barely scratched the surface of why we want to do that in the first place.

Pitchfork: It's funny to hear you say that we've mastered the form of DJing, because few people have skills approaching yours—as you show on the DVD, playing three CDJs along with a TR-909 drum machine.

JM: It used to be more detectable whether DJs could mix or not. These days it's really hard to detect, because the software is doing the mix for you. Everything is being synced up, and it's harder to see where the skill starts and the technology starts and ends. Maybe that's a good thing; it's more enjoyable for the listeners, more enjoyable for the party, if you don't need to worry about things falling off. So maybe we can concentrate on other aspects of the art form.

Pitchfork: I wanted to ask you about that, because I suspected that the mixes on the DVD are improvised, but I wasn't sure.

JM: Yeah. I just made a large collection of music on discs that were untitled, so I had no way of knowing what I was about to pick up next. It was all music I had made for those mixes—I needed to have a certain type of music, knowing that I was going to layer them together. In some, the melody line was more prominent, whereas in others the percussion was more prominent, and so forth. I was just feeding the machines material, and I would not know what it was until I cued it and heard it, and then I would have to figure out how to mix it. I think I must have had 100 discs, and they were all unmarked.

Pitchfork: How would you say your style of DJing has changed over the past decade? Has it changed?

JM: I have gotten slower, because I don't need to be as fast. I'm using three and four decks, so what I would normally try to do on two, I can do with four. For instance, syncing and looping on a CD player is perfect. Previously, to mix three and four turntables, I would have to really monitor and hold the pitch on each one. But now it's locked, so I can spend more time doing other things. So I've gotten slower, but my focus is creating more—creating a DJ set, but also creating the feeling that it's a certain type of production that's happening using multiple decks. I'm layering tracks together, but I'm kind of doing the same thing that I would do in a recording studio.

Pitchfork: You play with a drummer, Skeeto Valdez, on the DVD. I understand he plays a lot with Trey Anastasio, from Phish.

JM: I didn't know any drummers in Detroit; I had kind of gotten out of touch with musicians. So we really searched to find out who the best drummer in the city was, and his name kept coming up, so we took a chance. We didn't even have time to rehearse. He just set up the drums, I explained to him what was going to happen, and I hit record on the camera. We did it in one take.

Pitchfork: What made you want to have a drummer on the DVD? Was it a nod to your own roots as a drummer?

JM: A little bit of that, but I wanted to show the difference between a live drummer improvising and somebody improvising on a drum machine. My point was that we can try to put more of our character into these machines—not only programming them, but using them as instruments.

Pitchfork: That leads us to the 909 workout, where we see you really playing it in real time. What is it about the 909 that makes it your instrument of choice?

JM: More than anything, it's the sound of the machine. They don't need much treatment. You don't need to put reverb and delay on it; the machine sounds great just straight from the outputs. You don't really need to prep it or modify it in order to get a great sound. The 909 is a very strong machine, it's very powerful. And the features of it are very simple, so I can be very quick with it, writing patterns.

Pitchfork: I suspect that for many people, the studio portion of the DVD will be the most educational, because you're showing how the tracks actually get made.

JM: I probably should have said in the commentary that that's not the typical way I make music. I'm normally in a much bigger studio with more keyboards, more gear, it's more set up for recording; that was just a temporary location. I just took the basic pieces that I could produce on in that small setting. What I was trying to show was mostly to people who don't know how to make music, or the people who like electronic music but never understood how a track is made. I was trying to show an older way, without a computer without software, how one machine can speak to the next, and you use one machine to trigger all these things, and then you turn to the mixer and choose which sounds you want.

Pitchfork: Where did you film the studio portion? Is that your apartment?

JM: No, it's my office in Chicago.

Pitchfork: I was fascinated by the art on the walls. It looks like you're really into 20th-century high modernism.

JM: It's an accumulation of things from over the years. But the whole office is pretty much like that. There's one area that's all science fiction stuff. It's like that because I'm looking for certain inspirations. That's actually the place where I come up with most ideas, and I thought maybe that might be the best place to record for the DVD. Those are the paintings and sculptures that I'm looking at when I'm coming up with ideas. And we've seen people in studios before, so I didn't think that would be so interesting. Maybe to try to find a different location would be something refreshing. Being around paintings, I thought, would bring color into the scenario of the compositions I would make.

Pitchfork: Do you make music every day?

JM: Almost! At least five days out of the week.

Pitchfork: The last few years you've done so much narrative-oriented work and film work; do you also just jam?

JM: I would say the project-oriented stuff is around 40 per cent. Sixty per cent is just trying to materialize a certain idea, a certain type of technique that could be interesting.

Pitchfork: R&D.

JM: Yeah. More than half of the time it's just trying to make the machines do something that I haven't done before.

Pitchfork: How does emotion figure into your music? Do you think your music is expressive?

JM: Well, I usually record at night, for the reason that the day is done, and things are more quiet. The nighttime hours are, you know, different. I rarely ever record during the day. Usually that time is spent working or traveling or working in the office. Usually I don't get around to recording until midnight.

Pitchfork: I hear a certain amount of melancholy in your music, but also a certain sense of abstraction—kind of glassy and atonal, like a suspension of emotion.

JM: Maybe that has something to do with a certain view I have about where we're headed—not in terms of music, but a certain type of future that I see. A transparent one, but multi-layered. Clustered. I don't know what the clusters may represent; it could be information, it could be complexity. But I'm always producing with the idea that the music is representing one person. That could play a factor in the intimacy of it. I'm always producing for that one person, never for a group of people—especially if it's non-danceable. I'm always thinking that one person's going to listen to this and that person might want to feel a certain way at a certain time. That can be out in space, it can be at the bus stop, it can be laying in bed listening to music. I look at it as if I'm whispering in someone's ear, basically.

Pitchfork: That's interesting, because on the one hand you play for crowds of 20,000 people at festivals like Sónar, and at the same time you're making records where you whisper in people's ears.

JM: I think when you're in the studio all by yourself, maybe it's easier to think of someone like yourself than a crowd of 10,000 people.

Photo courtesy of the Sam Phillips Family 

A tall, lanky boy named J. R. Cash (that was his given name, and the name by which he had always gone until he joined the service) was one of those poor country boys with a different mind-set. He had first started coming around the studio in February or March, some eight months after getting out of the Air Force. Twenty-two years old, from a little town in Arkansas called Dyess, he had headed straight for Memphis with the idea of somehow getting involved in the music business, arriving on virtually the same day that Elvis cut his first record, at the beginning of July. After a brief side trip to Texas to marry the girl he had met just before being posted to Germany three years earlier, he returned to Memphis, where he secured both a new car and a job as a door-to-door salesman for the Home Equipment Company through his older brother, Roy, an automobile mechanic. He also enrolled at Keegan’s School of Broadcasting on the GI Bill, because he knew by the example of all the country stars who had pursued that path that radio was as good an avenue as any to a musical career. Through Roy, too, a sometime musician himself and proud of his brother’s musical inclination, he met three other mechanics at the big Chrysler dealership on Union, where Roy worked, who had formed a little "practice" band of their own. Soon the four of them were playing late into the night, fooling around with Hank Williams tunes and popular numbers by Ernest Tubb and Hank Snow, with J.R. doing most of the singing and occasionally contributing a gospel original he had written. One of the men, Red Kernodle, played steel guitar, though with a good deal of tentativeness, as he had only recently acquired an instrument of his own. The other two strummed rhythm, much like J.R. — but they decided they were hardly going to be able to present themselves to the public with three acoustic guitars playing virtually the same part, so Marshall Grant bought a bass and Luther Perkins bought an electric guitar, and they all learned to play together.

John Cash (he was at this point alternately John and J.R.) was by his own account the worst salesman in the world, the kind of salesman who would follow up his initial pitch to a customer, as often as not poor and black, with the advice that they really didn’t need to buy this washing machine from him on the installment plan. One day he saw an old black man sitting on his porch in Orange Mound playing the banjo. Cash, whose passion for music ran the gamut from Roy Acuff singing "The Great Speckled Bird" to black gospel singer Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s inspirited version of "Strange Things Happening", started talking to the man, who turned out to be a Memphis blues legend, Gus Cannon, founder of Cannon’s Jug Stompers, a popular recording group in the late '20s and early '30s, whose signature tune was the jaunty, vaudeville- flavored "Walk Right In". From then on Gus Cannon’s porch became a regular stop on his rounds; no matter what else might be pressing on his mind, including how he was going to be able to support his family on a meager salesman’s salary, with a baby now on the way, he would always swing by—to talk, once in a while to play or mix in his own distinctive bass voice, but most of all to listen not just to the music but to the unique perspective and experience of the man.

Cash started going by the Memphis Recording Service, he often said, because it was on his way to Keegan’s School of Broadcasting—but it was also just down the street from the Chrysler dealership where his brother and three fellow band members all worked. Elvis Presley’s success certainly impressed him, too. He had seen Elvis perform on a flatbed truck in front of Katz Drugstore at the opening of the brand-new Lamar-Airways Shopping Center, and he was knocked out not just by the music but by the galvanizing force that could come from a simple trio format—he even got to meet Elvis afterward and was impressed by his enthusiasm, conviction, and polite demeanor. But what motivated him most of all, as it happened, was rejection, as he stopped by again and again and was rebuffed each time without getting so much as a perfunctory audition.

He introduced himself to Mr. Phillips initially as a gospel singer, and Sam said he loved gospel music himself but he didn’t have any way to sell it. He told Marion all he wanted was a chance, and Marion said Sam didn’t have the time for him. Finally he just sat down on the curb one day and waited until Sam showed up "and I stood up and I said, ‘I’m John Cash, and I’ve got my guitar and I want you to hear me play,’ and [this time] he said, ‘Well, come on in.’ I sang for two or three hours, everything I knew. Hank Snow, Ernest Tubb, Bill Monroe, I remember singing ‘I’m Going to Sleep With One Eye Open (From Now On)’ by Flatt and Scruggs—I even sang an [old] Irish song I’d been singing all my life, ‘I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen,’ just to give him an idea of what I liked. He said, ‘You’ve really got a range of material you understand and have a feel for.’ He said, ‘You say you got a group? Come back and bring those guys and let’s put something down.’"

When they came back, they were all nervous, Red Kernodle most of all. "He was so nervous he couldn’t play," Cash recalled. "We did about three [numbers] with the steel guitar, and he [just] packed up and left. He said, ‘This music business is not for me.’ And I thought the songs sounded terrible, so I didn’t argue." Sam didn’t really want steel guitar anyway—that, plus the fiddles and the choruses, was just the kind of thing that made every record coming out of Nashville sound exactly the same. But there was something absolutely intriguing about this little group. Just the difficulty they had putting something together, the very tentativeness that they exhibited in attempting to master their instruments—it was the damnedest thing, it was an original sound. Luther painstakingly picking one note at a time, Marshall slapping away at his recently acquired bass ("Marshall, when you play," was Sam’s only piece of advice, "slap the hell out of it") and doing his best to stay in tune. It was nothing but rhythm, a funny, awkward kind of rhythm—boom-chick-a-boom, boom-chick-a-boom—it was, Sam was quick to realize, the only way they could play. But at the heart of it was this Cash boy’s voice, its sincerity, its conviction, its very believability. Sam wasn’t sure just how to characterize it—it reminded him a little of Southern gospel progenitor V. O. Stamps in its depth and certitude, you could hear the influence of Ernest Tubb, or even Bill Monroe—but at the same time it didn’t sound like anything else he had ever heard. For all of the boy’s evident sincerity, there was an exploratory quality to the music—maybe it was the slight quaver in his voice, maybe it was the uncertainty of his pitch, maybe it was the band’s struggle just to get through a single song that made it so compelling in all its painful honesty.

There was one song in particular that Sam liked. "Hey Porter" had started out as a poem that John wrote on the eve of his return from Germany and now offered as both a warmly nostalgic salute to his Southern heritage and a sharply tuned interchange of humor, wordplay, and observation. It was almost, Sam thought, like a traditional folk song as sung by Burl Ives, but with more bite to it and a hard-won musical arrangement that had been agonizingly put together note by note. There was something reassuringly familiar about it—it was a train song ("Hey, porter"), a homecoming song ("How much longer till we cross that Mason-Dixon line?"), and yet it was at the same time charmingly original, too. But he didn’t hear anything else that he could release.

John did have a prison song he had written—it seemed a little morbid, though, and he sang it in a high, strangely affected, almost plummy voice, as if he were imitating Marty Robbins. It started out "I hear that train a-comin’/ A-comin’ round the bend"—but Sam didn’t think they needed any more train imagery either. So he told him to go home and see what else he could come up with. "Go home and write me an up-tempo weeper love song," Sam said—and then he would put out a record.

That was exactly what J. R. Cash did. It took all of two weeks for him to come up with a fully formed song—it came to him from listening to Smilin’ Eddie Hill on WSM, the Opry flagship station. Every night he would announce, "Stay tuned, we’re gonna bawl, squall, and climb the wall." The idea first struck him as the basis for a novelty song, and he wrote it originally as "You’re Gonna Bawl, Bawl, Bawl". But then he reconfigured it as a real country weeper, a brashly up-tempo weeper with an almost cocky tone that he called "Cry! Cry! Cry!" and when he brought it in to Sam after working out an arrangement with Luther and Marshall, Sam heard it right away. He recorded it with the same raw panache that Cash imparted to his delivery—the slapback only served to add to the overwhelming sense of presence that three faltering instruments and one booming voice, served up unadorned, could create.

To Sam these two songs only began to suggest what this surprisingly self-possessed young man might be capable of. For all of his polite, self-effacing manner, J. R. Cash seemed to maintain an unshakable center, with a deep faith, a sly, tongue-in-cheek sense of humor, and a broader experience of the world than Sam had seen in most of his artists. He was a voracious reader whose songwriting stemmed as much from imagination as experience, and his upbringing in the "cooperative community" of Dyess, a socialist settlement, really, created by the Roosevelt administration as an experiment in rural reclamation, could only add to his breadth of perspective.

There was some talk initially of crediting the record to "The Tennessee Three," the group’s loose title before Roy Cash’s brother had joined—but Sam said, No, John was front and center on the record, and, furthermore, he thought "Johnny" Cash sounded better than "John," if you were looking to appeal to young people. John objected at first—he had never been a "Johnny," he remonstrated, it seemed too insubstantial somehow, it seemed almost too juvenile (the only time he had ever called himself "Johnny" was in the love letters he sent home from Germany to his teenage fiancée)—but he wasn’t going to argue the point too strenuously with Mr. Phillips. He knew this was his big break, and besides, it seemed like Mr. Phillips had been right about nearly everything else up till now. He was beginning to feel like Mr. Phillips could "see something happening that nobody else could," could see something not just in him but in Elvis, too, and all the others, that they could not necessarily see in themselves. So he agreed to the name change. When the record came out, it would be by Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two, but with artist royalties split 40-30-30.

He went to his boss at the Home Equipment Company, George Bates, to see if he would sponsor a 15-minute show on KWEM to help promote his new career. Mr. Bates had been very good to him in the eight or nine months he had worked for the company; he had advanced John money nearly every payday, and he had told him frankly that he didn’t think he’d ever make much of a salesman, but he allowed him to keep trying. Whatever his opinion of John’s musical talent—if he had one at all—he never hesitated about sponsoring the show. The only question he had was whether John thought he would ever be able to pay back the money that he owed—over $1,000 at this point—"and I said, ‘One of these days I’m going to walk in here and give you a check for that full amount,’ and he said, ‘Well, I hope you’ll be able to, but I’ve taken care of you because I believed in you, and I believe you will do something.’"

Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two debuted on the air on May 21, just a few days after the "Cry! Cry! Cry!" session, and three days before his little girl, Rosanne, was born. Surprisingly, he didn’t play either of the songs on his scheduled Sun release, and even more surprisingly, for all of his self-disparagement and Mr. Bates’ assessment of his selling capabilities, he was a very convincing salesman, cool and confident and focusing on Cool-Glo Awnings as a plausible alternative to the more expensive option of air-conditioning. He sang "Wide Open Road", an original number that he had written in Germany, and a jaunty version of the Sons of the Pioneers’ "One More Ride", both of which he had already auditioned for Mr. Phillips, and solicited listener requests for future broadcasts—if he didn’t know the song already, he and Luther and Marshall would endeavor to learn it. Then, after highlighting Luther’s guitar playing ("Luther, step up and show all the little children how to play a big boogie"), he concluded with "a good sacred song, one of my own, I wrote it a while back," and sang the song he had first tried to interest Sam Phillips in, the one he considered his best composition, "Belshazzar".

The record came out a month later. It was one of the biggest thrills of his life, Cash often said, to hear his record played on the radio for the first time. For the first time, too, he was beginning to think, "I might can make a living at it, and I won’t have to do all those other things I don’t want to do, like be a policeman or work as a disc jockey or a [salesman]—maybe, you know, by the end of the year I might make enough to pay the rent." But when he took a promotional copy to Elvis’ manager, WMPS DJ Bob Neal, and Neal dropped it and broke it,"“I thought my world had ended. I didn’t think they’d make another one!"

This is an excerpt from Peter Guralnick's new book, Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock 'n' Roll, which is available November 10th. Reprint courtesy of Little, Brown, and Company.

"M.O.R.", from Blur's eponymous 1997 album, mocks the easy tropes of contemporary songwriting and the rolling wheel of entertainment. "Under the pressure/ Gone middle of the road," Damon Albarn sings. Making mainstream music is easy, he seems to suggest: an overburdened iconoclast's last resort. Just so you know that Blur haven't gone the same way on their difficult post-success record, the music is a conceptual continuation of the chord progression that Bowie and Eno threaded through Lodger's "Boys Keep Swinging" and "Fantastic Voyage".

"M.O.R." hit number 15 in the UK singles chart in mid-September, when Elton John's "Candle in the Wind" was in its second week (of five in total) at number one. John had re-recorded (and retooled) his 1973 tribute to Marilyn Monroe to commemorate the death of Princess Diana, who was killed in a car crash on August 31, 1997. The song was performed at her funeral, watched live on TV by 19.29m viewers in Britain alone.

It's a coincidence that the two songs occupied the same space at that time, but a significant one. The very public mourning of Diana's death is widely considered a turning point for British culture. "In our grief for Diana, there is none of that old British reserve," read an (absurd) editorial in tabloid paper The Mirror at the time. "We are united as never before." This wave of sentiment was also linked to the recent '97 general election, in which the left-wing Labour party had ousted the right-wing Conservatives, who had spent 18 years in charge, 12 of which were presided over by Margaret Thatcher. The Economist called it "a repudiation of the regime of meanness which existed from 1979."

All of which sounds lovely in theory, though it was dire for culture. Blur's "M.O.R." proved unwittingly prescient. Britpop was over, and schmaltz was in. Its cuddly yet vice-like grip has hardly relinquished since: "The Great British Bake-Off", Keep Calm and Carry On, London boroughs being gentrified and restyled as cutesy villages. Ballads. Endless ballads. Formerly vibrant British genres—soul, R&B—remade hushed and just-so.

In 2011, Popjustice editor Peter Robinson wrote an essay for The Guardian about what he called music's "new boring": "a ballad-friendly tedial wave destroying everything in its path," exemplified by Adele's stripped-back performance of "Someone Like You" at the BRIT Awards. "She must, sadly, accept and wear the Queen Of Boring crown," he wrote. "It is a crown made of SOLID BEIGE." When Robinson wrote the piece, the YouTube clip of her performance had been viewed 49m times. Four years later, it's now had over 157m views.

Adele herself is not boring—at that same awards ceremony, she was cut-off mid-acceptance speech and flipped the bird at the live TV cameras. Nonetheless, even critical evangelists of her singles and spirit find it hard to love the "wet, ballady water" of her records, as Jude Rogers put it for The Quietus in 2012.

By the sounds of it, Adele's upcoming album 25 might break ever so slightly from the MOR formula that made her the biggest artist in the world. "This time, it was about trying to come up with the weirdest sounds that I could get away with," Paul Epworth toldRolling Stone of the two songs he wrote for the record. "This album feels like it fits in maybe more with the cultural dialogue instead of being anachronistic to it. It's almost like she's trying to beat everyone else at their own game."

Her more leftfield collaborators speak to these tweaked ambitions: Tobias Jesso Jr., Sia, Danger Mouse, Ariel Rechtshaid. And Blur's Damon Albarn, on a handful of unfinished ideas that didn't make the record. "Adele asked me to work with her and I took the time out for her," Albarn said in September. He said she was "very insecure," adding, "she doesn't need to be, she's still so young." He called the songs she had worked on with Danger Mouse "very middle of the road."

In that Rolling Stone profile, Adele hit back at his claims. "It ended up being one of those 'don't meet your idol' moments," she said. "And the saddest thing was that I was such a big Blur fan growing up. But it was sad, and I regret hanging out with him … None of it was right. None of it suited my record. He said I was insecure, when I'm the least insecure person I know. I was asking his opinion about my fears, about coming back with a child involved—because he has a child—and then he calls me insecure?"

It is predictable to the point of exhaustion: an established male musician undermining a young female pop star's power as a way of asserting his self-perceived superiority. ("I took time out for her.") Mistaking a woman's comfort with airing her vulnerabilities to literally millions of people for insecurity. Putting a paternalistic spin on a new parent-to-experienced parent plea. Going into a writing session as the unbending auteur, too proud to meet in the middle.

Albarn's comments say more about his own insecurities than those of Adele, about his longstanding fear of descending into the realm of light entertainment. It screams through his highfalutin side projects as he crafts lavish operas about monkeys and obscure scientists, while doing his best to keep Blur at arm's length. Their new album The Magic Whip was made by accident. His bassist Alex James hangs out with Britain's Conservative prime minister (whose "culture of meanness" may be nearly as pronounced as that of his '80s forebears), makes cheese in the Cotswolds, and recently endorsed a line of supermarket craft beer.

In an interview to promote the range, James talked about the loss of the "culture of independent music" that he grew up with. "The small [bands] are definitely disappearing," he told right-leaning tabloid The Daily Express. "But if you can make pickled onion in your garage, rather than be a garage band, you're in business, and there's a market for interesting artisan foods. The spirit of independence has been transferred to food."

James' comments are laughable in a way, though his point about a type of independent music disappearing rings true. Indie and punk bands still exist, and it's tedious when older musicians pretend they don't for the sake of their own argument, but a certain culture of independent music in the UK is now thoroughly mainstream, its bespoke-reading aesthetic as coveted as pop-up pulled pork outlets and an emphasis on local that has nothing to do with community. Festivals come with thoroughly middle-class price tags; while it's great that indie station BBC 6 Music exists (after it was threatened with closure), the space it creates is filled by lots of pleasant (white) indie music that works well on daytime radio, with fringe weirdos relegated to the night shift.

When Damon Albarn calls Adele's music "middle of the road," he's not just stating the obvious, but failing to realize just how wide the middle of the road is now. For all that Blur predicted it, they also helped pave it.