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As long as there has been scripted television, there’s been someone recording original music to be played under the scenes being acted out. Sometimes it’s a composer and sometimes it’s a band; but in the last few years, independent musicians have been getting in on the game.

Jónsi of Sigur Rós composed the score for the first season of WGN’s "Manhattan". Mogwai scored "The Returned" on BBC. Zach Rogue scored the HBO series "On Freddie Roach" and Ross Flournoy of the Broken West and Apex Manor scores original music for CNN. Liz Phair’s post-major label career work has been scoring multiple TV shows as part of a team with Marc "Doc" Dauer and Evan Frankfort, including The CW’s dystopic sci fi drama "The 100", the "90210" reboot, and USA’s "In Plain Sight".

The unifying characteristic of these shows is that while some have been critically lauded, they’re not prestige dramas or films. These are the blue collar equivalent of composer jobs, ones that require creating huge amounts of score on a grueling, weekly episodic schedule. Taking on one of these projects means that artists must put albums and touring on the back burner.

To understand why artists are pursuing this as a career path, you have to look at the the current landscape of music placements on TV, or as they’re known in the industry, needle drops. Lyle Hasen, the owner of Bank Robber Music and House of Hassle Music Publishing, works with Grizzly Bear, Beirut, Joanna Newsom, and hundreds of other independent bands by placing their music in shows. Music placement opportunities are up, thanks to the growing number of shows on basic and premium cable, as well as streaming—though the overall price for placements has been dropping for a decade as more bands and artists are willing to say yes to what was once considered a taboo revenue source. "There’s so much more programming looking for licensing material. Fees have dropped considerably over the last decade, so [bands] have to change their game a bit," Hasen says. "It’s more a game of small goals, where you try to get more licenses rather than a few biggies on the major networks."

Where in the previous decade there were a host of shows that specifically sought independent music for needle drops and considered them central to the show's aesthetic (i.e. "The O.C.", "Gilmore Girls", "One Tree Hill", "Gossip Girl", "Grey’s Anatomy", etc), shows now are more interested in whatever is new. "Some of your established licensing workhorse bands have aged out a little bit," Hasen says. "It’s ‘What do you have that’s new?’"

Jason Rothenberg, show runner for "The 100", wasn’t looking to hire someone from the indie world to score his post-apocalyptic sci-fi drama. He ended up working with Liz Phair because he’s close with one of her composing partners, although he’s a longtime fan. In the show's first two seasons, the composing team was creating nearly wall-to-wall score, as much as 30-to-36 minutes of music for a 42-minute episode. With two seasons under their belt, Rothenberg explains that they now have a library of music to reuse, but it was absolutely a grind during the first season to create that much new material for a 22-episode season on an 8-day shooting schedule, spread over 9 months.

Even a demanding job like this is an attractive and stable way to make a living for artists who might prefer to stay home with their families rather than tour 200 days a year. Artists can work a fixed schedule with a guaranteed paycheck—entirely unlike releasing a record. "It's so crazy when you do work for people to pay you when it's over. People in the music business say, 'We'll pay you 90 days after the next fiscal period, maybe if the accounting comes through.' I was shocked when I first did some ads. I did the work and then they just paid for it," Zach Rogue says of his experience composing.

Rogue scored a six-episode miniseries for HBO in 2012 about boxer Freddie Roach. For the Rogue Wave bandleader it involved learning an entirely new way of composing music. Working toward someone else’s vision was a challenge, as was creating additional music to accommodate last minute changes. With the deadlines and time constructs for the project, Rogue didn’t work on anything else during the time he spent composing for the show. "There were some days where I didn't sleep," Rogue says.

In her 2008 memoir, When I Grow Up, Juliana Hatfield recounts her 2006 tour with her band Some Girls. She details the mundanity of being on tour, playing in small clubs she’d played 15 years before. She reveals that she’s actually losing money by doing this tour in an anecdote about a guy she brings along to sell their merch who wants a raise midway through the tour. NPR took a look at the economics of playing smaller venues in 2011 and found it wasn’t unusual for bands to simply be able to cover their own costs of touring with the money they made. Moving up a tier to theaters helps, the manager of the National tells them, but requires more staff which costs more money which eats into the profits. In short, it’s a lot of work in which the band is the machine, while working as the composer on a TV series puts an artist into a smaller role as simply a cog in a bigger machine.

Rogue has since pursued other TV shows, saying the intellectual exercise of learning a new way to write music was rewarding. "I submitted to a TV show, but I was scared to get it, because I knew if I did that would be my life for a long time," he explains. Ultimately, Rogue says he also has to consider it because it would give him more time to be at home with his family and young children.

Perhaps one of the most important reasons an artist might consider taking this career route is one that Rothenberg brings up: passion. "It's a love of film and television [that drives people to the medium]. It's such an amazing art form because it aggregates all the other art forms—writing, photography, music and acting—all together. When it works, it really is transcendent," Rothenberg says. "The right piece of score can elevate a scene and show you what it's about. Those are the great moments, when I hear the score and see it to picture for the first time."

On her mega hit "Hello", Adele belts out the title phrase with all the subtle, glottal oomph of an avalanche. If you answered your phone and heard someone emoting a greeting like this, you'd gasp. "Hello from the other side/ I must've called a thousand times/ To tell you I'm sorry," but then I had to keep calling back because I burst your eardrums and you couldn't hear me anyway. A simple "Hey, what’s up, hello," would certainly do.

Musical greeting as overpowering rush of volume and emotion obviously has a certain appeal, given the song's ascent to the top of every chart within hollering distance, which is every chart. Other performers, though, have taken less, or differently, dramatic approaches to salutation. Here are some famous, and less famous, musical howdys.

Sonny Boy Williamson: "Good Morning Little Schoolgirl" (1937)

An early example of the greeting-as-come-on, from way back in 1937, with the first Sonny Boy Williamson on vocals and harmonica, and Big Joe Williams and Robert Lee McCoy on guitars. "Good morning, little schoolgirl/ Can I go home with you/ Now you can tell your mother and your father that Sonny Boy is a little schoolboy too." You can read those lines as indicating that Williamson is in character as a schoolboy—or you can read them, more queasily, as Williamson encouraging his underage interlocutor to tell her parents that he's younger than that knowing voice assures you he is. Though the promise of the diamond ring later suggests that the girl could be older too; we may be talking age-play here. There could well have been negotiation even before that first salutation.

Billie Holiday: "Good Morning Heartache" (1946)

This song became something of a standard, with many cover versions, but Holiday's 1946 recording is the first and best known. In sentiment this isn't so far away from Adele's smash, but where "Hello" goes back and forth between regret, nostalgia, and hope, Holiday sticks with resignation. Saying "hello" isn't a new approach to an old lover, but a weary reiteration. And nobody does weary resignation better than Holiday; if her guest had any manners at all it would get right up and leave rather than setting in when Holiday declares, "might as well get used to you hanging around/ Good morning, heartache/ Sit down."

Faron Young: "Hello Walls" (1961)

Willie Nelson's first major songwriting breakthrough, "Hello Walls" nicely encapsulates his ability to blur the line between twangy corn and disturbingly cracked despair. When you say "hi" to the walls, you don't really want the walls saying "hi" back, especially not in that eerie chorus.

Ruby and the Romantics: "Hey There Lonely Boy" (1963)

A rare instance of the female-on-male-salutation-come-on genre. Those light, innocent vocals by Ruby Nash are the antithesis of Sonny Boy Williamson's—you feel like you could go on watching after the greeting and not see anything to scare the kittens.

Lionel Richie: "Hello" (1983)

The most direct precursor to Adele's massive schmaltz hit is Richie's same-named smash. Richie even did an Instagram mashup so the two could "hello" at each other.

Kate Bush: "Hello Earth" (1985)

Most singers say hello to a love, a stranger, a wall; Kate Bush is always thinking bigger. Maybe it's a space alien talking here; maybe it's God, who knows?

Simple Minds: "Hello, I Love You, Won't You Tell Me Your Name" (2002)

Jim Morrison's tacky come-on turned into tackier electro-dance-floor crap. Doors fans really hate this version judging by the YouTube comments, but (like many Doors songs) it's such an ill-conceived train wreck to begin with that further train wreckage seems entirely in the spirit. Someone greets you with this, you head for the exit.

Beyoncé: "Hello" (2008)

An inverse pick-up line song. "You had me at hello/ It was many years ago," Beyoncé sings, and then goes on to chronicle why her long-time guy is still awesome years later. It's sweet, rather than stalkerish—and a reminder that Beyoncé really spends an unusual amount of time singing about marital bliss.

Diddy-Dirty Money: "Hello Good Morning" [ft. T.I. and Rick Ross] (2010)

The Dirty Money music collective of Diddy, Dawn Richard, and Kalenna Harper, is joined by Rick Ross and a scene-stealing manic Nicki Minaj for a Eurotrash tribute to the early morning, or late evening, depending. The "hello, good morning" gets repeated so often, and with so little inflection, that Diddy doesn't sound like he's talking to anyone. He's just repeating the greeting reflexively sans brain activity—which is how you say "hello" to most people most of the time, is the truth.

Photo by Cheryl Dunn

Is Ian Svenonius serious? That question tends to come up in response to his writing. A few weeks ago, when The New Republic published an excerpt from his new essay collection, Censorship Now!!, some readers on social media questioned his sincerity and even his sanity. Many seemed to have already answered for themselves; their reaction was really less "is he serious?" than "surely he can’t be."

It turns out Svenonius’ writing is a lot more interesting if you keep asking this question—is he serious?—while you read, without ever deciding. Because it’s never quite clear whether his grand statements, provocative polemics, and jump-cutting through political and cultural history are genuine, ironic, deceptive, or heartfelt. At its best, his prose is all of the above, much the way his sloganeering bands Nation of Ulysses, Make-Up, and Chain & the Gang have served as homage, critique, and parody of rock history.

Censorship Now!! simultaneously deals in the heated rhetoric of insurgent calls to action, the seductive broad strokes of propaganda, and the clever winking of surrealist humor. Often when I’m really convinced Svenonius has gone off a paranoid deep end, the next sentence hits back with knowingly-hilarious exaggeration or profoundly spot-on analysis, realigning my perspective and making me wonder again.

The sincerity level of Svenonius’ last book, the thoroughly entertaining Supernatural Strategies for Making a Rock 'n' Roll Group, was easier to suss out. Its insights were couched in a conceit so far-fetched—interviews with dead musicians conducted via séance—that clearly some humor was intended. Censorship Now!! is more conspicuously earnest. Aside from a few formal jokes (the back cover reads "INSTRUCTIONS: READ ONE WORD AT A TIME"), most of Svenonius’ absurdities are embedded in pointed diatribes that could easily be taken seriously.

In fact, some chapters in Censorship Now!! work as straightforward arguments. The lead title essay, wherein Svenonius stridently insists state approval of art is more dangerous than censorship, is the book’s most convincing piece. A chapter that touts the oft-mocked practice of collecting physical things as a counter to the homogenizing minimalism of Apple and Ikea rings true, as does one on the poisonous effects of tipping in the service industry, which essentially forces workers to pay each other.

It’s when Svenonius makes leaps through history that thinks get murkier. It’s hard to tell if his dizzying surveys across epochs, such as "The Historic Role of Sugar in Empire Building" and "The Twist: The Sexual Repression Revolution and the Craze to be Shaved", identify real cultural developments or intentionally cherry-pick the past for imaginary connections. Still, even those pieces have their share of thought-provoking points.

More memorable are sections where Svenonius combines worthwhile broadsides with bizarre conclusions. One hilariously biting chapter posits that modern documentaries—especially rock nostalgia trips—are dumbed-down messages for future alien races. "The documentary’s careful and childlike elucidation of events are calculated to be understood by an exotic sensibility, and their genial idiocy seems like careful consideration of an interstellar consciousness," Svenonius writes. "Why else would a film like Standard Operating Procedure (2008) be so asinine and simpleminded?"

Even funnier is a chapter on the purported deadly influence of the 1988 film Heathers. Does Svenonius actually believe that movie is, as he puts it, "on a par with Birth of a Nation, Gone with the Wind, Star Wars and Titanic in capturing and shaping the attitudes of its age"? Either way, his outlandish claims house a fascinating interpretation of the film’s symbolism, akin to a video that claims, with tongue partially in cheek, that Back to the Future predicted 9/11.

At the end of Censorship Now!!, Svenonius returns to the more overt humor of Supernatural Strategies. Presented as a one-act drama, "The Backward Message" depicts four characters talking to "the voice of a backward record," which doles out sweeping philosophies on rock history. It’s fitting that a book whose intentions are ambiguous begins with a call to censor art and ends by letting art do the talking. Even more fitting is the book’s final line, uttered by a character who was asked what the record is saying: "Gosh. I guess we’ll never know."

Nicolas Fraser’s "Why You Always Lying" was a perfect Vine. His comedic DIY interpretation of Next’s '90s hit "Too Close" quickly became one of the most enjoyable memes of 2015. The dance moves, the inexplicable prop toilet, and the all-important phrase: "Mmhohmygod, why the fuck you lying?" The video is approaching 50 million views on Vine alone and while most people watched the video and shared it with friends, SoundCloud saw producers in a rush to create and upload the best remix of the clip.

"Vine works so well for club remixes because the way looping something just makes [the audio] inherently musical," says Schwarz, a Baltimore club producer and label owner. "[It] opens people to think of it musically more immediately." The video sharing app Vine was created to make brief six-second videos that could stand up to endless viewing—essentially a longform GIF. That particular style fit right into the already hyperactive style of Baltimore and Jersey club. Both offshoots of house have experienced ebbs and flows of attention around them in their lifetimes, but they remain catholic in their parameters of what is worthy of sampling.

Before the Internet provided the palette for Baltimore club, it wouldn’t be surprising to hear songsgrab from television shows or even stand-up comedians used for sample material. That genre elasticity was stretched a couple years ago, when a video of a train explosion went viral and within 24 hours the producer Matic808 remixed it into a Baltimore club track. When producers are already eager to repurpose any interesting audio clip they hear, of course the readymades of Vine would be next.

One of the earliest videos being repurposed was also one of the earliest viral Vines, Terio’s "Ooh Kill Em". The video of the little boy dancing provided an early example of how a Vine could make a lot out of a few seconds through its endless looping. "I told [DJ Taj] that these Vine songs are getting more attention from the youth than anything hip-hop, R&B, or soul," says DJ Flex, describing brainstorming with fellow Jersey club DJ and producer DJ Taj. He introduced the video sharing app to DJ Flex early on, and Taj made one of the early club and Vine hits with his remix of "Bish Whet" video. The last couple of years they’ve remixed everything from "A Potato Flew Around My Room" to "That’s My Best Friend" into their own club staples. These remixes don’t sample a single video, but will incorporate audio from other videos and even dances like the "Nae Nae" or "Whip". The density of references might appear cacophonous, but for those fluid in this post-Internet language it is simply an easy instruction to dance.

"The opportunity inspired me; the easiest way to make a song that everybody would like and vibe to would be an idea or theme that everybody already knows," says DJ Dizzy, a Baltimore club producer with a similar idea of using these songs. There is no kind of genre allegiance when it comes to who will engage with a Vine remix. It’s not rap, it’s not pop, it’s not EDM—it’s music for a generation that’s gone through life with a phone screen.

The conversation between club music and Vine also works the other way, where kids will grab from a club to create their own dance routines. "If you got a popping club track in the back [of a video], it makes it even funnier or a little bit more special," says DJ Angelbaby, a DJ on Baltimore’s 92Q radio station, on the appeal of club within the Vine community. "Everything else is been there done that, but when you hear some club music it’s like let me stop when you scrolling; it hits you hard when you hear it." The back and forth between club and Vine is just the same kids who are watching Vines, inspiring remixes, and creating dances to said remixes that loop back into what pushes DJ to find the latest trend to sample. An endless culture loop, based on a feed of endless loops.

"Baltimore club in the Vine era, someone will make a Terio or 'oohh killem' [and] by the time I heard a Baltimore club producer loop that it’s already been used in a hundred memes," says Baltimore-based writer Al Shipley. "Even if it’s a few days old, it’s old hat just for someone to put the song together." The speed with which videos travel online makes it so that genres always on the latest trend appear dated. Even so, obtuse sample material is the DNA of club music, be it a rap, R&B, a TV show, or even a clip of Young Thug’s daughter; no matter where culture moves, club producers are ready to give it a remix.

Many of us knew where the night was headed before Sufjan Stevens even took a breath. Pittsburgh wasn't going to be different from Baltimore, which was no different from Jersey City, where his "Hotline Bling" cover made its well-documented debut. A handful of YouTube videos and Setlist.fm logs took away the surprise at Heinz Hall, but you can imagine how much of a sidewind that original performance must have been. For his Jersey City audience, it might have felt like Oscar Isaac's out-of-nowhere dance sequence in Ex Machina—a jarring tonal shift from everything that preceded it, which somehow still worked as a natural progression.

And yet Stevens’ encore-capping take on "Hotline Bling" isn’t just another innocuous cover. Viewed as a YouTube artifact, the performance seems like nothing more than a surprisingly faithful tribute to Drake’s biggest pop moment—he hasn’t transformed it into a brooding, acoustic lullaby. But an isolated video tells very little about its context in the show. A majority of his main set consists of Carrie & Lowell in its entirety, but sequenced for an even more relentless assault on the tear ducts (sample section: "John My Beloved", "The Only Thing", "Fourth of July"). It’s a tour that finds Stevens performing the most gut-wrenching and personal material of his career, and these songs still visibly take a toll on him—he wiped his eyes when the lights came down after "No Shade in the Shadow of the Cross".

One of Carrie & Lowell’s most heartbreaking elements was its resolution, or lack thereof. Stevens ends the record on "Blue Bucket of Gold", a gentle song that echoes his pleas from earlier on the album, in search of unrequited validation from his mother. "Tell me you want me in your life," he begs throughout the track, even though he knows that it’s too late for her affirmation. By ending the record here, Stevens suggests that this loose thread is something he’ll grapple with for the rest of his life, and that it may not ease with the passing of time. Not coincidentally, he’s been concluding every main set on the tour with "Blue Bucket of Gold", which trails off into a nearly 10-minute long cyclone of noise.

But the miracle is, there's an encore—by not letting Carrie & Lowell’s closer get the last word, Stevens draws out the hopeful crescendo of "Should Have Known Better" over the show’s two-hour period. Before the Jersey City show, his encores typically consisted of a "hits" collection from Illinois, Seven Swans, and Michigan, and he still leaned on those highlights for the Pittsburgh date. But with the inclusion of "Hotline Bling" he’s giving us a gratifying update on his post-Carrie & Lowell life. The Sufjan Stevens back catalogue counts as a minor emotional reprieve from his current material, but "Hotline Bling" is a well-earned triumph.

At every show since Jersey City, he’s invited tour opener Gallant back out onstage to join in on the festivities, while projections of Drake’s face, the "Hotline Bling" single artwork, and various packaging for Drake’s Cakes appear on a screen behind them. As high-profile covers go, it falls into the category of polished karaoke—and that doesn’t have to be a knock. Stevens and Gallant perform it amiably, like the musical theater star who hits every note, but is still loose enough to make the whole bar laugh. They recreate hundreds of GIFs right before our eyes, leaving the tennis rackets and pizza boxes up to our imagination.

If we take Stevens at face value, he could be covering "Hotline Bling" because Drake is his self-proclaimed "spirit animal"—but he might be up to something else here. Earlier in the encore, Stevens broke his more than hour-long silence to deliver a monologue about living with "open eyes and open hearts," to look out for those around us who can use a shoulder to lean on or a set of ears. He’s a firm believer in the show as a shared experience between artist and listener. Although Stevens is the one baring his soul, he wants us to meet him halfway.

By covering a song as ubiquitous as "Hotline Bling", Stevens isn't just banking on a midpoint— he’s going all the way to ensure universal celebration. Aside from poptimist skeptics, parents who were dragged along for the show might be some of the only audience members who’d feel left out by a song of the moment. Material this inclusive is a far cry from the specificity of Carrie & Lowell.

Not all of us can relate to the precise trauma he details on record, but debilitating loss is among life's only guarantees. He understands that everyone walks into a Sufjan Stevens show with their own emotional baggage—whether it’s a roster of departed loved ones, or the people we can't imagine losing. Achieving a shared experience doesn't have to mean participating to the same degree, but for allowing the listener’s vulnerability to shine through. So when Stevens invites Gallant out for the final song, it’s an exuberant reward for everyone who’s spent the past two hours sifting through some serious shit.

Drake’s "Hotline Bling" is another old-guard Drake song about longing for a nebulous time, place, and lover; Sufjan’s "Hotline Bling" is a brilliant epilogue of survival. It’s some of our only concrete evidence, post-Carrie & Lowell, to suggest that he’s emerged from the darkness with fragments of joy intact. If Stevens can recover from his deepest valleys, swishing around onstage to a Drake song, then why can’t the rest of us?

On paper, June Millington is an unlikely rock'n'roll pioneer. The singer, guitarist, and educator who co-founded Fanny, the first all-female rock band to release an album on a major label, Millington was a shy biracial girl from a religiously conservative culture when she and her family moved from the Philippines to northern California in 1961. She’s also partially deaf, a fact she didn’t learn for years. And she’s queer. When Millington started playing in bands in the mid-1960s, none of those characteristics pointed to a rock career.

Yet she and her sister Jean navigated through endless gender and racial stereotypes with their bands, forever forced into demonstrating that their "chick band" wasn’t a novelty. Millington traces her origins in a new self-published memoir, Land of a Thousand Bridges: Island Girl in a Rock & Roll World. It’s a conversational, occasionally discursive chronicle that conveys wide-eyed wonder at the power of music. She writes about seeing Hendrix play, jamming with her friend Lowell George of Little Feat, and trading tips with Bonnie Raitt, along with the adventures of the the Svelts and Wild Honey, bands she played in on her way to Fanny.

Millington quit Fanny in 1973, done in by band infighting and the external pressure of representing women in the male-dominated rock world. She continued in music, on her own and with other collaborators (including her sister), and has been an outspoken supporter of female musicians and the LGBT movement. In the mid-'80s, she co-founded the Institute for the Musical Arts, a non-profit group supporting women in music, which is now located in western Massachusetts.

There, in front of an enormous fireplace in the living room of the 19th-century farmhouse she shares with her partner of 30 years, Millington talked about her memoir and the belated groundswell of recognition for Fanny, a band David Bowie once said was "as important as anybody else who’s ever been, ever."

"There's really nothing like taking over a room because you're good, not because you got mad."

Pitchfork: Through everything that you cover in the book, there's this irrepressible optimism that comes through. What do you think has kept you so optimistic?

June Millington: Music saved my life. I mean, music is life. It is everything to me. It's why I'm talking to you right now. It's why I can meet people—I was so shy as a kid, and when I started to write songs and perform them with my sister in front of the public, people started to talk to me, and that made me feel really good. Everything about it has always been positive.

Pitchfork: What kind of learning curve did you face at the start?

JM: We had to be our own mothers of invention, in many senses of the word. So the secret, really, to our musical experience as to why we survived and got as far we did is that by the time the Svelts got to L.A., we knew all of the essentials. We knew how to play, we knew how to book a gig, set up a PA, pull a trailer, talk to audiences after, get somehow enough sleep and still get good grades. Let's don't forget that part. We got good grades. And we never got too off-track—somehow.

Pitchfork: Given all of that, did your blood boil when people were condescending because you're women?

JM: We learned how to take it and that was a good thing, because if we spent our time being angry, we wouldn't have been able to get good grades or learn songs that week. We didn't get mad, we just learned how to play better and turned up louder. I mean, there's really nothing like taking over a room because you're good, not because you got mad.

Pitchfork: In the late '60s, you were a bystander to the sex and drugs and just obsessed with the rock.

JM: I think the fact that I was probably born deaf in one ear, and without the equilibrium on that side caused me to not hear a lot of what people were saying to me, and I sort of instinctively knew that, so I was kind of in my own little world. The other part of it is that I'm mixed blood and mixed culture. So I watched a lot. I think that that became a habit, and then it became a defense when I understood this weird thing—racism—was happening. I didn't know the word "racism," but it didn't feel good, I knew that. So then I pulled away a little bit further, and then the sexism. Jeez, by the time we got to sexism and the Svelts, you know, "not bad for chicks," I barely noticed that. Not bad for chicks? Are you kidding? It didn't really mean that much to me, and the fact that we knew that just by saying "not bad for chicks" we had won them over. That was the mantra. In that moment, we knew we'd won them over.

Pitchfork: What gave you the confidence to just brush that off?

JM: Realizing that we could make people happy, that we had the control to do that. Happiness is just a great equalizer. It's like water. You pour happiness liberally and all sorts of great things are going to happen, you know? So once we realized that, it was like pretty much home plate. Why bother with anything else when you can go directly to that joy? If you can give people happiness, you're in their hearts. Now you can just start having conversations with people that you would not have had under other circumstances.

Pitchfork: Fanny is starting to get its due, but what do you think took so long?

JM: I think there are just two reasons. One is that Warner Bros., when they had a failure—what they perceived as a failure—they just didn't see any point in publicizing the fact that they had had Fanny. Our successful producer, Richard Perry, never mentions Fanny, but look at the hits he's had. I mean he was recording "You're So Vain" at the same time we were doing "Hey Bulldog" and "You're So Vain" just got the juice, unfortunately for us. But the other thing is the newcomers on the block, they don't really want to give attention to who came before. They want their time in the sun. I can kind of understand it. I did resent it for a long time, like, "Why didn’t you even mention us?" We were so tired by that point, but we consciously stayed together an extra year, because we had meetings where we talked about how it important that we do this for other women who are coming along.

Pitchfork: What is it that has brought Fanny back into people's minds?

JM: The music itself. I have this theory that people are actually really hungry for sonic space and understanding words, and I think that people are ready to look back and actually appreciate some of what came before. And then you really do have the entire movement that I'm just going to call feminist, because I am a feminist. I think the education of young girls and women about what came before has started and I think that the knowledge of Fanny is part of that.

By now, if you aren’t one of "Adventure Time"’s devoted fans, you’ve at least seen a few kids, college students, or adult children wearing gear emblazoned with the show’s characters (Finn, the last human left in a post-apocalyptic cartoon world, and Jake, his magical dog best friend/brother). Maybe one of those adults has tried to pitch it to you as "not just for kids", or you’ve encountered an adult critic at a prestigious publication fawning over it. Maybe you just heard someone use the word "mathematical" as an exclamation. Or you encountered one of the hundreds of remixes of "Bacon Pancakes".

There’s a reason kids’ TV tends to produce a lot of infectious little songs like this—before they become effectively literate, music is an easy way for children to digest and process information. It’s why you still probably use "50 Nifty United States" to remember the names of all of the states, and why "Schoolhouse Rock" continues to be awesome/one of your primary sources of civics knowledge well into adulthood. It’s unsurprising, then, that "Adventure Time", one of the best and most complex pieces of television of the past few years, period, has created an excellent space for music.

In that light, "Adventure Time"’s "Stakes" miniseries, which debuts on Cartoon Network tonight, should be an event. Not only is it the show’s first foray into extended storytelling—with a single plot unfolding over the course of four days and eight episodes—it includes all sorts of cool action sequences and, best of all, it focuses on the backstory of the show’s most musical character: Marceline (Olivia Olson), the magical land of Ooo’s bass-playing, red-eating eternally teenaged Vampire Queen. But "Stakes", as fun as it is, ultimately fails to fully deliver, mostly because of a lack of, um, stakes. Instead, its most exciting moment is a snippet of a single song.

"Everything Stays" is pretty much a perfect "Adventure Time" song. It’s quiet, beautiful, and heartfelt—a lullaby for children at heart, no matter their age. It’s comforting in its simplicity, undeniably modern yet still timeless. The lyrics are comforting in their universality ("Everything stays, right where you left it/ Everything stays, but it still changes") while somehow remaining pointed and memorable enough to evade banality. If you approach it with an open heart, you won’t be able to help it evoking something painful and important—it should (and, for me, does) hurt to listen to. And by now, that’s about what you’d expect from songwriter Rebecca Sugar.

Sugar, one of "Adventure Time"’s early storyboard artists and writers, was also one of its most important songwriters, penning, among other songs, the now-ubiquitous "Bacon Pancakes". The hallmarks of a Rebecca Sugar joint are, in some respects, pretty superficially obvious. There’s a simple, stripped-down melody that doesn’t call attention to how stripped down it is so much as it doesn’t take more than it needs. There’s a lot of healthily-expressed pain and often uncomfortable earnestness. Like those bacon pancakes, they contain a pure, concentrated sweetness that should probably cause a toothache—but it doesn’t, because, like the pancakes of Ooo, Sugar’s songs are magic. 

In part, that might be because her creative process is so consciously indebted to and supportive of others—she’s taken to heart the collaborative nature of "Adventure Time", a show where several teams of storyboard artists work on episodes simultaneously, giving them functional control over their own work while still toiling in service of the greater whole—allowing her to consistently rely on equally passionate people with their own complementary visions. In turn, the 28-year-old Sugar has demonstrated a commitment to the ideal that underlies the most powerful, positive version of what she’s doing. She really means it, and you should, too.

That’s readily apparent in the music that made Marceline such a success, almost all of which was written by Sugar. Take "Fry Song", the audience’s first serious introduction to the character, in which Marceline laments her poor relationship with her dad. Like "Adventure Time" itself, "Fry Song" just shouldn’t work—it’s a previously-intimidating character, backed by a goofy white boy beatboxing, singing a heartfelt song about her father eating her french fries. But it works.

The lightness of both the music’s improvisational quality and its tentative self-awareness ("don’t laugh," Marceline implores Finn) are important to the songwriting, but they’re not as important as the way it functions as a solid piece of metaphorical, musical storytelling. Not only is Finn literally being a supportive friend (through beat-boxing), Marceline opening up to sing for him actually uses the intimacy of putting yourself out there to express their growing closeness. And "Fry Song" winds up actually succeeding in its emotional purpose when Marceline’s father (who is also basically Satan) realizes how much he’s neglected his child.

All of Sugar’s best writing for Marceline mines the contradictory nature of the character—a sweet vampire posturing as an occasionally sexually aggressive teenage girl dealing with the psychic aftershocks of living for over 1,000 years—to riff on a series of ideas without having to be certain of their meaning. All of her emotions are raw, as in "I’m Just Your Problem", which introduces the "distasteful" menace of Marceline’s real feelings about her friends and past flame Princess Bubblegum, or "Remember You", which creepily and heartbreakingly dredges up her history with Simon—once a protective father figure, now the amnesiac, insane Ice King.

The performance, in which Marceline sings Simon’s words, accompanied by his shriveled present self, feels like watching an intimate, painful fight tearing apart a family—we, and Finn, feel like we should look away, but can’t. Because an expression of emotion so powerful is absolutely riveting. And if anything, that quality is intensified in the work Sugar has done on "Steven Universe", the show she created while working on "Adventure Time". (Both air on Cartoon Network—Sugar continued working on "Adventure Time" through the show’s fifth season, when committing to the two shows at the same time became impossible.)

As an extremely quick summary: the show focuses on the makeshift family formed by Steven, a young boy, and the Crystal Gems, aliens who defend the world, one of whom is voiced by the singer Estelle. The Gems’ family dynamic riffs on Sugar’s progressive, artistically productive childhood—Steven is based on her younger brother Steven, who works on the show himself. And even more than "Adventure Time", "Steven Universe" is practically a musical—songs like "Strong in the Real Way" or "What Can I Do for You?" are thematically and emotionally dense enough to take whole acts and episodes—or, in one case, a whole season of television—and transform them into minute-long, concentrated bursts of creative energy. That concision is part of what makes the music so striking as art, serving as both isolated work and a conscious part of a much larger whole. As Sugar puts it in Maria Bustillos’ epic treatise on "Adventure Time":

"Sublime art is unframeable: It’s an image or idea that implies that there’s a bigger image or idea that you can’t see: You’re only getting to look at a fraction of it, and in that way it’s both beautiful and scary, because it’s reminding you that there’s more that you don’t have access to."

Without writing a longer, separate essay (or a book), the use of music on "Steven Universe" is both sublime and consistently astonishing in its capacity to top itself and surprise viewers, from the video game-influenced, crystalline score by composing team Aivi and Surrashu to the contributions of the rest of the "Steven Universe" team (particularly storyboarder Jeff Liu) to the most minor songs by recurring characters. That includes an R&B-inflected, goofy PSA about working in a doughnut shop, a punk diss track sung by a band full of time-traveling Stevens, and a whole catalogue for Greg Universe, Steven’s doofy dad (voiced by comedy star Tom Scharpling) who used to be an aspiring rock star, complete with flowing mane and busted tour van.

Then there’s "Haven’t You Noticed (I’m a Star)", a Taylor Swift pastiche originally sung by Olivia Olson (who also voices Marceline), later taken up by Sadie, an insecure teenaged girl.

"Haven’t You Noticed (I’m a Star)" is the perfect version of a major pop song for a kids’ show: The singer is overloaded with friends, mirroring Tay’s infamous squad ("So many I can’t even name them/ Can you blame me I’m too famous"), but, amidst that performance of confidence, she is still trying to get the listener to notice. In the mouth of shy teen Sadie, it becomes a form of empowerment. And in the mouth of Steven, it becomes a way for the show to experiment with gender, putting the boy in drag without a care in the world.

The striking image of Steven proudly wearing a dress is intentional. Sugar tells Entertainment Weekly, "My goal with the show was to really tear down and play with the semiotics of gender in cartoons for children," a statement that would sound obscenely pretentious if it weren’t also one hundred percent sincere and also very obviously what the show is actually doing. Nicki Minaj (yes, that Nicki Minaj) appears on "Steven Universe" as the voice of a purple giant who subtly emasculates men. And the action climax of the first season is—wait for it—a full musical number by Estelle that soundtracks an extremely cool fight scene while also serving as an extended metaphor for the power of emotional intimacy and healthy relationships.

Music matters in Rebecca Sugar’s work, in a way it doesn’t in most entertainment, often not even in other musicals. Rather than (or in addition to) serving as simply a formal delivery system for the story, Marceline, Greg, Steven, and the rest of the characters on "Steven Universe" have an intimate relationship with music and use it to structure their lives (literally, in the case of the themes that back the various Gems’ fusing) in ways that allow Sugar’s work to consistently achieve something close to the sublime.

These are all qualities that "Stakes", to varying degrees, lacks. What initially promises to be a deeper exploration of Marceline’s background and childhood as a human becomes, instead, something closely resembling a video game, complete with a screen that ticks off each vampire she’s killed like bosses in "Street Fighter". Similarity to video games isn’t a bad thing for TV, but in this case it swallows the calmer, emotional moments that used to be so effortlessly threaded in, moments exemplified by Marceline’s mother singing "Everything Stays" to her daughter—voiced by none other than Rebecca Sugar. 

Casting Sugar as Marceline’s mother, in her first bit of voice acting work, is a nifty way of acknowledging the history of the show, and of the character. "Adventure Time" will likely continue to run for quite some time. It’s unlikely that it will ever really be bad, but it might have overexposed its mysteries. Thankfully, that doesn’t lessen the value of Sugar’s musical contributions. Like Marceline and Simon, you can continue to have the same forgetful encounter over and over again, but the music will remain, right where you left it.

And maybe having the ability to engage with ostensibly kid-directed entertainment is just an opportunity to allow people of all ages to grapple with themselves, and to see the music again and again from fresh perspectives. "Something weird might just be something familiar viewed from a different angle," Marceline’s mother tells her daughter, and us, before singing her to sleep. "And that’s not scary, right?"

Neil Young fans have grown accustomed to waiting. The mercurial songwriter started talking about his gargantuan Archives project all the way back in the mid-'80s, promising a comprehensive overview of his career, including unreleased songs, live material, and outtakes. After years of teases, the first volume finally hit shelves in 2009, covering Young's work up to 1972. Even though he suggested that the second volume—covering what are arguably his peak creative years in the 1970s—would arrive hot on its heels, fans are still waiting. Breath-holding is not advised.

We've been better served by the live Performance Series releases, which began trickling out in 2006 with some regularity; this month's Bluenote Café double disc set brings the tally to eight volumes thus far. So it's a good time to look back at the highlights of this ongoing dive into the various stages of Young's onstage life over the decades, where brilliance can be found lurking in the most unexpected corners.

1. Live at the Fillmore East 1970

At they very top of the Performance Series heap is this astounding 45 minutes of Young with the original Crazy Horse (plus pianist Jack Nitzsche) blazing away at NYC's legendary Fillmore East (sharing a bill with Miles Davis, of all things—those were different times!). It just might be Neil's finest live album. The laid-back groove of "Wonderin'" and a gorgeous, definitive reading of "Winterlong" both show off Crazy Horse's sensitivity and range. But the main draw is the guitar bliss found in the twin epics, "Down by the River" and "Cowgirl in the Sand", as Young and guitarist Danny Whitten soar to celestial heights, calling to mind the lean attack of Television's "Marquee Moon" more than any overblown '60s jam. That this was Whitten's final tour with Young before his tragic death in late 1972 of an overdose makes Fillmore East all the more precious.

2. Live at Massey Hall 1971

The acoustic flipside to the electric adventures of Fillmore East, Live at Massey Hall 1971 is a prime example of Young's power as a solo performer. Touring on the back of After the Goldrush, the setlist for this release demonstrates how deep the songwriter's catalog was even at this early point in his career. Veering from Buffalo Springfield chestnuts to stripped down renditions of CSNY favorites like "Helpless" and "Ohio", it's a body of work Young could've coasted on for the next 40 years. Of course, he was already looking toward the future, as he debuts several compositions from Harvest and Time Fades Away. Most interesting is the medley of two songs that would become signatures separately: "Man Needs a Maid" and "Heart of Gold", played with appropriate intensity on the grand piano.

3. A Treasure

An extremely successful curveball. Even the most contrary of Young aficionados have trouble defending the songwriter's uninspired Old Ways LP from 1985. But the International Harvesters, the band he took on the road to support the album in '84 and '85, got their due on A Treasure, released in 2011. Featuring such longtime associates as pedal steel master Ben Keith and bassist Tim Drummond alongside Nashville crack sessioneers like keyboardist Spooner Oldham and fiddler Rufus Thibodeaux, the record captures an otherwise undocumented period for Young. And it's all pretty great, as Young and the International Harvesters cruise through twangy new tunes like "Amber Jean" and "Grey Riders" (the latter featuring a lightning bolt solo), as well as re-imagined classics like "Flying on the Ground Is Wrong" and "Are You Ready for the Country". Best of all is the closer, "Southern Pacific", which charges on relentlessly for close to eight minutes.

4. Bluenote Café

Like A Treasure, the latest Performance Series release shines a deserving spotlight on one of Young's 1980s genre experiments. Now primarily known for "This Note's for You", Neil's deathless diss of his light-beer-shilling contemporaries, Neil Young and The Bluenotes' 1988 album of the same name is not particularly thrilling. But onstage, the horn-heavy group was a force to be reckoned with, with Young's powerhouse blues guitar work framed by swaggering, smoky big band arrangements. On tracks like "Welcome to the Big Room" and "Bad News Comes to Town", the Bluenotes swing convincingly. But it's not all sax solos and throwback blues rock. The lengthy, righteous "Ordinary People" and the fiery thump of "Crime in the City" (which would show up in mellower form on Freedom) are as angry and invigorating as Young got in the 1980s.

5. Live at the Cellar Door

Recorded in late 1970, just a few months before the Live at Massey Hall release, one might think this similarly styled solo acoustic disc would be redundant. But against the odds, it's a winner through and through, boasting the debut performance of "Old Man", a totally unique piano version of "Cinnamon Girl" and a lovely/lonely "Expecting to Fly". The Cellar Door in Washington, D.C. was a tiny club and Young seems to relish the intimacy, chatting amiably with the crowd and indulging in some moments of pure weirdness, such as his extended, sly intro to the closing "Flying on the Ground Is Wrong", wherein Neil conjures up an avant cluster of noise from his Steinway.

6. Dreamin' Man Live '92

1992's Harvest Moon remains one of Young's most beloved and approachable albums—the kind of record that both casual fans and die-hards can agree upon. Dreamin' Man, recorded during solo tours prior to and just following that album's release, offers up an alternate version of Harvest Moon's 10 tracks. Without the backing of the Stray Gators (not to mention Linda Ronstadt and Nicolette Larson's creamy harmony vocals), the sound here is rawer and more immediate, for the most part, with the long, hypnotic "Natural Beauty" as a standout. But while there's little to complain about, Dreamin' Man doesn't feel quite as revelatory as its Performance Series brethren.

7-8. Sugar Mountain - Live at Canterbury House 1968 & Live at the Riverboat 1969

Down at the bottom are these two early solo acoustic collections, which capture Young right at the beginning of his solo career, having just left the Buffalo Springfield, and touring folk clubs in support of his eponymous debut LP. Recorded just months apart in 1968 and 1969, both releases are definitely interesting, but they don't really stand up to multiple listens, aside from a few key tracks. The best stuff on Sugar Mountain is actually the rambling and charming spoken intros and asides, showing off Young's characteristic wit. The Riverboat performances are a bit more assured, but still show Neil searching for the voice that would sustain him through the next several decades. He's almost there—a gripping "Old Laughing Lady" gives the Riverboat audience a preview of the ragged glories to come.

Photo via Jana Winderen

Until late this summer, I took daily research walks across a London marshland to inspire a project relating to the area. That was, until I heard about reports of attacks on women near the river. Police thought three different men were responsible; a park ranger told me that one man was cycling up to young, blonde, female joggers in broad daylight, hitting them on the back of the head, and then attempting to assault them. I stopped going, resentful of the fact that my gender made this work unsafe, while my male peers could carry on, unthreatened.

As I sat cooped up at home, I wondered whether this threat to women’s personal safety underpinned the male domination of nature writing and music-making rooted in field recordings. Both depend on being outdoors, alone. Was the comparatively low number of female musicians using nature as a compositional tool a result of feeling vulnerable in certain environments? Were female music-makers taking safety precautions in order to work that their male counterparts weren’t even aware of?

Norway-born artist Jana Winderen specializes in recording sounds from beneath the earth’s surface: under the sea, within the crevices of icebergs. My favorite piece, "The Noisiest Guys on the Planet", is an underwater recording of a mysterious type of shrimp. The decapods snap, crackle, and pop, making a strange, insectival music. Last year’s Out of Range features the ultrasound and echolocation of bats and dolphins. It’s eerie, orchestral, and calming. As well as the unseen world, her art is inspired by Joy Division, Einstürzende Neubauten, and Laurie Anderson.

I put my theory to Winderen. She says that she hasn’t felt held back by safety concerns in her work, but that her environments are possibly safer because they’re rural and natural instead of urban: say, the middle of nowhere in Greenland or Iceland. "It can be scarier to be in a city you don’t know, or a place where you don’t know the social code or what’s happening," she says, speaking from a study in Norway, surrounded by textbooks and recording equipment. "If I’m in a city environment, I ask local people, ‘How is this area? Is this safe?’" She recalls a trip to the Dominican Republic where the local people dissuaded her from going out alone at 3 a.m.

She’s aware there are fewer women in her field but believes the imbalance is changing. "Equipment is much lighter and it’s easier to take your stuff around, although I still carry 40kg around with me all the time," she adds.

German-born, Kent-based Claudia Molitor is a sound artist and lecturer who also sticks to well-trodden locations to find sounds for her music. "I don’t go to places in town that I don’t know at all," she says. "I make my choices. I’ve always wanted to do things like just set out with a tent and walk across Britain on my own, but I don’t think I would ever do that because I’d think it’s a bit dangerous to take a tent and just pitch up somewhere."

We talk while she is in the Alps recording found sounds for a new project inspired by Harry Partch. "The best thing in the Alps are the cow bells!" she says. "It’s just amazing because each bell is ever so slightly different and because they’re all attached to cows that are eating grass, the rhythms are constantly changing." She notes that a sense of historic physical inhibition can be seen in other art forms. "I find in a lot of women’s art—not all women’s art—this attention to tiny little details. Maybe that’s because women's worlds used to be much smaller than men's worlds. If you look at the art of a lot of women hundreds of years ago it focuses on the domestic because that’s the only area they could control."

Molitor has observed, when teaching music students, that "as soon as technology comes in, hardly any women take it up—it’s really still dominated by men." The fault lies in the way that science and technology are taught, she believes, and tells a story about an incident at her daughter’s school. A teacher set the class to work on an experiment with an extra instruction: if the girls were really struggling with the work, the boys could help out. "My daughter was utterly incensed and rightly so. [The girls] complained about it."

Brussels-based composer Christina Vantzou’s work makes sparing use of sound recording. She affirmed that the way traditionally male-dominated subjects are taught can have a crucial lasting influence. Speaking from a cafe in Greece, she told me she was inspired by a cool female teacher in her university’s video department, and a few other role models: "I think that’s the key: ‘Oh, that person’s doing it, it’s no big deal.’" Photographs of the French electronic composer Éliane Radigue and Björk’s outspoken interviews had a similar influence.

Since moving to Brussels, Vantzou has felt a lot safer than she did in Baltimore, where she lived for six years, but says she still encounters risks that men don’t have to consider. Part of that, she says, is just being a woman: the feeling of walking around at certain times of day and in certain places on high alert, avoiding eye contact, hand close to phone or keys. Improvements in tech, she says, are making it easier for women to go out and find sounds in a practical sense.
"A lot of my girlfriends are getting Zoom recorders and that’s been really exciting to see. A lot of people feel it’s an easy thing to get and use."

Ingrid Plum, a conceptual sound artist based in Brighton, thinks the technology issue is structural and systematic. "Men are given permission to learn about it and women are expected to come in at an expert level," she says. "That skill-sharing of learning isn’t supported with women, neither by the opposite sex or by women themselves. We don’t share skills—we’re almost educated to compete." Plum mentions Ian Stonehouse, the head of Electronic Music Studios at London’s Goldsmiths University, who noticed that when he has women working in his studio, the number of female students taking the classes increases. "He’ll always have female members of staff in order to increase the uptake of technology by female students," she says.

Plum’s own precautions when making field recordings include disguising her equipment and avoiding carrying branded bags. She also keeps her earphones in at all times and cultivates support in fellow female communities. Even though she’s trained in martial arts for 13 years, Plum still feels restricted by social dangers and crime. In Brighton, she had planned to record her voice and the sea under a pier, but a rape in the area meant that she didn’t feel safe to return there at night. "I’d have to enlist someone to come with me and that immediately delays the happenstance and spontaneity you need for field recordings. As soon as you have a team, it’s a lot more difficult." It joined another list of projects on the back-burner because of circumstance.

Of course, it’s not only women who are victims of assault. Rob St. John, a musician, writer, and cultural geography researcher spent a lot of time pottering around the River Lea—close to the attacks on my local patch—for his recent album, Surface Tension. "I have felt vulnerable but I also have developed strategies for places and spaces I might feel wary and vulnerable in," he says. Binaural mics, for example, are microphones that sit in your ears so you look less conspicuous out in the middle of nowhere. St. John also avoided recording at night.

But place, power, and who gets to think about the landscape is something he’s very aware of. "I’ve absolutely noticed this gender disbalance in terms of who’s making work, who’s getting published, who’s getting released, not only in sound art," he says, citing an interview with Cathy Lane from 2012 in which she said only 10% of students at London College of Communication were female.

During my conversations with these artists, I discovered that my notion wasn’t the whole story —the truth is never as simple or binary as it first seems, after all. Yes, there is still a gender imbalance in this genre of music-making, but the reasons are manifold. Language, communication, and visibility are crucial agents of change. People will commit crimes—that’s never going to stop—but if support networks such as Ekho, a celebratory website of women working within sound art, and educators, who make efforts to address visibility, continue to exist, the world of women will increase in size, scope and place—as will their art.

Tonight, the Lethal Amounts space in Downtown Los Angeles will host the opening for "601 Photographs", an exhibition from Nick Zinner, the guitarist of Yeah Yeah Yeahs. It’s a continuation of the "501 Photographs" show that ran at Photoville in Brooklyn in 2013. Zinner picked the images from the thousands he’s shot since co-founding Yeah Yeah Yeahs over a decade ago. Most of them were taken while on tour with bandmates Karen O and Brian Chase, or during his own travels. Here he highlights nine photos from the show and tells the stories behind them.

Nick Zinner: That’s in London. I’m pretty sure when we had gone over to do press and play shows for the It’s Blitz record. I like the, for lack of a better word, intangible quality to it. It has a nice feeling and introspective emotion to it. I have thousands of her.

Pitchfork: Do your bandmates still even notice you taking their photos?

NZ: They’re used to it by now. Usually they give me free license, and they’ll let me know when they definitely don’t want their picture taken. I would never take that privilege for granted. I always ask them for approval of any image of them that I would put publicly out in the world.

NZ: When Yeah Yeah Yeahs put out the Is Is EP, we made a live film for it. We were making a video for "Down Boy", but we also played a whole show. There were two shows, the first one was only girls and the second show was co-ed. Everybody wore masks and we played totally in the dark and filmed it in night vision.

Pitchfork: You’re known for taking photos of the crowd at every show. Do you take one shot or is it multiple frames?

NZ: I try to take a lot. My favorite photos are the ones where people don’t really see me. I’m more interested in looking at people looking at things. I’ve tried all sorts of crazy ways to get sneaky with it. There was one tour we did where I had a camera on a tripod that was between the monitors pointing at the crowd and then I had a shutter release attached to something that I could hit with my foot. Most of the time, if I’m fast enough and the camera that I’m working with is fast enough, it’s usually fine, because most people are watching Karen.

Pitchfork: Are you doing it in-between songs or in the middle of songs while you’re actively playing?

NZ: Especially on the last few tours we’ve done, we’ve tried not to have any silence in-between songs, so usually we have a loop going. "Zero" has this really long keyboard intro that’s just a 16th note, or "Cheated Hearts" has the same kind of sample pulse intro. Those moments we like to stretch out to a painfully long time, so those are good moments [to take photos], but in times like that it’s harder to get the type of picture I want, but it’s nice to have pictures of all our awesome fans and just that moment.

NZ: This is from a festival that we played where Kraftwerk were doing their 3D show. I just snuck in the photo pit after we played. I think it’s more interesting if you don’t know what the photo is, in a way. Or it’s just weirder. 

NZ: That’s from South By Southwest, 2013. It’s that quiet time before we go on. That quiet, nervous time.

Pitchfork: It’s still nervous for you guys?

NZ: Fuck yeah.

Pitchfork: Why?

NZ: I don’t think for Brian as much, but definitely for Karen and I. It just gets so anxious. My heart is beating really fast, and it’s non-stop pacing and kicking things.

Pitchfork: Every time?

NZ: Yeah. It’s pretty bad.

Pitchfork: Is it the possibility of things going wrong?

NZ: It’s not so much that something can go wrong, because things go wrong all the time and you deal with them. Everyone always says pre-show jitters, but I can’t put my finger on exactly what it is. It’s not really fear, and it’s not just excitement, because we’re not giddy. I don’t know what it is, but it still happens, pretty much with anything.

NZ: That’s in Morocco. I think it’s in Essaouira. I went there for a few weeks by myself, maybe in 2011, and just wandered around, took photos. I wanted to hear some Gnawa music, which I really like from over there. I’m a huge Nirvana fan and I like seeing things that at first seem out of context, but actually they’re one of the biggest bands in the world. I like to see pop culture, like punk or alternative culture, clash with some other type of culture.

NZ: That’s also in Morocco, in Marrakesh. It was just one of those things when something lines up so perfectly, you’ve really got to take it. I’m a big fan of Henri Cartier-Bresson, the French photographer who had that whole "decisive moment" approach to taking pictures, of having multiple elements line up within the frame.

Pitchfork: Do you always carry a camera with you, besides what’s on your phone?

NZ: I go through phases. It definitely helps if I can wear a jacket, because I can have a camera in my pocket. When we’re on tour or if I go travel somewhere by myself, that’s when I take the most photos. Last year I was only taking pictures with my iPhone, thinking that it was doing the same thing, but I was really wrong. Those pictures don’t look that great and I regret that in hindsight, not even having that basic documentation, mostly because I have a terrible memory. Any special or unusual situation I find myself in makes me want to leave with something. Photography has always been important to me for that, being able to make sense of something or understand something or remember something or laugh at something.

NZ: That’s in Tokyo in, I think, 2012. There’s nothing very interesting about the circumstances.

Pitchfork: I imagine you were coming up the escalator and saw her coming down and just waited to catch that second.

NZ: Yeah, that’s really it. It’s as simple as that.

NZ: That’s from Bamako in Mali, I think two years ago. I was there as part of a program that Damon Albarn from Gorillaz and Blur started called Africa Express where he brings western musician to different countries in Africa to collaborate with them. Or they put on four or five-hour shows in different countries with African musicians and western musicians. I’ve been lucky enough to be a part of this organization since 2010 and it’s completely changed my life, because it’s changed my thoughts on music. It’s been incredibly powerful and I’ve been grateful to those guys for allowing me to be part of it.

That photo is taken from this building that we all took over and set up some studios. Damon wanted to make a record in a week and there was like 20 of us, mostly English people, I think I was the only American there. The reason that Damon wanted to do that was to show solidarity and support for a lot of the musicians who used to live in the north of Mali and Timbuktu who all had to flee when different factions of jihadists came in and imposed Sharia law, banning music. As I’ve learned in the past few years, Mali is home to some of the most incredible musicians in the world. The fact that so many people whose livelihood depends on being able to play, it’s just crazy. There’s a film coming out next year that I scored called They Will Have to Kill Us First that details this whole story, it’s a documentary. There’s also the film Timbuktu, which is not a documentary, but is a beautiful story of this horrendous time. In any case, I ended up meeting this band called Songhoy Blues there. We did one song together at that time, and then I went back six months later to do their record. It was really fun.

So that’s from that studio area looking down on some guys doing karate practice. It was insane and totally beautiful at the same time.

NZ: That’s one of these photos, I have no idea where it’s from. I can’t remember.

Since the attacks in Paris, I’ve been sleeping in pants and keeping a coat and my laptop by the bedroom door. I live on a busy downtown Toronto street, in a row of buildings close to a mosque, and I’m scared of retributive violence. Sometimes my cynicism in the wake of Western terrorism makes me feel ashamed because I want to mourn, but since 9/11 I’ve seen how terror crests outward, away from the site of impact into ordinary communities like mine specifically aimed at people who look something like me. What could happen to the mosque next door, and what violence toward it means for me, a non-Muslim, is terrifying. What if I wake up to my smoke alarm blaring in the middle of the night? I’ll need to make a quick escape. Before closing my eyes, I remind myself that if I can feel the heat I’ll have to leave the cat behind.

I’m not just paranoid. Right after the attacks in Paris, Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh people living in and around my city have been affected by xenophobic violence. A maliciously Photoshopped selfie of a Sikh man from Toronto went viral two days after the attacks; he was wrongfully incriminated online and in newspapers around the world. Religious centers throughout Toronto have been arsoned and vandalized, and Muslims (and non-Muslim people of color) have been targeted and physically assaulted in public places. Black and brown Muslim women, particularly those who wear headscarves, hijabs, and niqabs, are disproportionately affected by these hate crimes.

In the past week I’ve heard my Muslim and non-Muslim friends talk of self-defense classes being hosted in homes, of parents checking in on adult children who live in the city, of grown men shaking off hangovers to join their mothers on Sunday morning grocery runs, of "passing" Muslims sitting alert—earbuds in, with no music playing—on public transit in case shit pops off. That Islamophobia festers below the surface in the West should come as no surprise: Canada’s outgoing prime minister recently campaigned on a platform of blatantly anti-Muslim rhetoric.

The past 10 days have seen a rightful surge of empathy for and solidarity with Parisians on social media, but the story in my online and IRL conversations is about racialized Canadians (and Americans, and British) who are scared for friends, family, neighbors, and their own bodies. This is the other side of terrorism in the West. It’s something that M.I.A., a musician whose personal narrative is tainted by civil war, displacement, refugee status, and being brown post-9/11, obviously understands.

For years, her politically-charged music has rubbed critics (and even fans) the wrong way. Some see her as a demagogue, more concerned with the aesthetics of politics or the thrill of being subversive. Most of the criticism of 2010’s Vicki Leekx, which took titular and a sort of metaphysical inspiration from Julian Assange and the Wikileaks controversy, was that the songs weren’t actually that political. And yet, when M.I.A. does present more concrete commentary she’s condemned. Rarely has pop music offered solutions to pressing world matters; it is, for many, an escape, and M.I.A.’s music manages that while acknowledging the tensions of modern humanity. "I just find it a bit upsetting and kind of insulting that I can't have any ideas on my own because I'm a female or that people from undeveloped countries can't have ideas of their own unless it's backed up by someone who's blond-haired and blue-eyed," she told Pitchfork in 2007. She was talking about Diplo getting credit for her work, but the same line of thinking—ridiculing racialized women expressing curiosity or fear or an artistic interest in the world around them—can extend to her politics as well. When your body is political the issues are no longer abstract. Yes, M.I.A.’s politics have long been imperfect, but she keeps trying, like many of us who aren’t simply ideologically committed to justice, but are tethered to the fight because of the color of our skin.

Last week, wearily scrolling through the fear and self-righteousness in my Twitter feed, M.I.A.’s new song "Borders" popped up on my screen. I put on my headphones and clicked play. "Borders, what’s up with that?/ Identities, what’s up with that?/ The new world, what’s up with that?" She continues posing a long list of rhetorical questions ("Being bae, what’s up with that?") over a chirruping sample and a dense bassline. It doesn’t sound too different from what she’s done before; it’s certainly less optimistic than "Bad Girls" or "Paper Planes". What starts out incisive turns existential, but that doesn’t make her stream-of-consciousness less concrete: we live in cities and states and countries and on the Internet, and our borders are closing in on us. Many of us are struggling on multiple fronts. If you hear her words as polemic, it seems crude. But if you’re asking yourself the same questions, it can feel like a lifeline. And just for a minute, I felt heard.

The perfect piece of artist merchandise is the kind that first makes you think, "I can’t believe this exists," followed microseconds later by, "Actually no, this makes perfect sense." Of course FKA twigs sells $600 satin bomber jackets with her face airbrushed on the back. Of course Beyoncé has a range of nail art decals inspired by her music videos. Of course Ted Nugent has his own line of ammo.

So it is with the Weeknd’s new collaboration with PAX Labs, makers of the popular PAX line of portable vaporizers. Commemorating his ongoing North American tour, the Madness Tour Limited Edition PAX 2 is the company’s latest update on its already iconic (in certain circles) flagship product. It has a special matte black finish, a special yellow LED in its status indicator, the XO logo silkscreened on the front, and a chip inside that plays a snippet of “The Hills” whenever it’s activated. It’s both completely ridiculous and perfectly on-brand.

Perfectly on-brand, because Weeknd’s brand is being luxuriously high, and the two PAX models so far have been widely praised, even outside of stoner circles, as the ne plus ultra of portable vaporizers for their impeccable design, satisfyingly solid-feeling construction, and high-quality performance. Snobbier potheads—the kind who care about strains and stuff—love them. (I was at a small experimental music festival this summer and at one point pulled out my PAX at the same time two complete strangers standing either side of me pulled out theirs.)

Ridiculous, because the Madness Tour Limited Edition costs $45 more than a regular PAX 2 (even the new all-gold model) and doesn’t offer any actual improvement to the product other than aesthetics. In fact, before I got my hands on one I wondered if it might actually be less functional than the standard model. Having a PAX that plays a clip of music every time you power it up seems like it would ruin everything that’s made it—and I hope I’m not snitching here—one of the best products ever for smoking weed on the low in places where you’re not supposed to be smoking weed. (Turns out it’s a very quiet MIDI clip—like a first-wave ringtone—that you can barely hear unless you have the PAX next to your ear.)

For any of the thousands of fans who spent last week’s Weeknd set at Madison Square Garden screaming along to every word and generally losing their shit for two straight hours, that $45 premium might seem totally worth paying in order to get the overall aura of Weeknd-ness that comes with his signature edition. People have been happily buying overpriced tour merch for years (and no doubt will be for years to come) for the same reason: that totemic sense of connection with the artist that’s no less real for its intangibility, or its seeming silliness to people who don’t get it.

If you’re not a bloodsworn member of the Weeknd hive, it may not be worth it to you, although the combination of matte-black finish and yellow LED is very fly. (In certain geek circles, having a new or rare LED color on a gadget is considered an extremely strong flex.) If not, snag that gold one and save the $45 to get yourself a little something extra the next time your guy comes through.

The Hissing of Summer Lawns will never be an initial gateway to Joni Mitchell. Released 40 years ago this month, it marked a turning point in her career. But its somber, romance-jazz-inflected sound can be better appreciated, the story goes, once one is well-acquainted with her more crystalline statements: 1971’s Blue—the gold standard in pop music of that decade—and '74's Court and Spark. A year later, The Hissing of Summer Lawns was purportedly a transitional experiment, neither self-sufficient nor cleanly rendered.

The album was jarring to many fans. Mitchell had already gone "electric" on Court and Spark, but despite its more rarified storylines, it functioned essentially like a break-up album. Hissing, rather, was a break from "personal" songwriting. When it came along without so much as an "I" in the lyrics sheet, a skeptical Rolling Stone review by Stephen Holden boiled the record down to Mitchell leaving "personal confession" for "the realm of social philosophy". (Mitchell herself has reserved a special rebuttal for the "confessional" characterization of her early work: "What I did I confess to?" she asked in an interview last year.) By Holden's logic, Hissing was the first time Joni wasn't admitting to some secret, or airing some wrongdoing. And for that, she was accused of pretension. As the Detroit Times put it: "Mitchell takes a tone that is smug, sometimes so smug that it is downright irritating".

It wasn't just that Mitchell eschewed the first-person in these slick new songs. It was that her characters weren't experiencing heartbreak—or even clear emotions—in expected ways. The characters that inhabit Hissing, mostly women, are strangers to their innermost feelings, or struggling to become so in order to escape or cope.

Hissing spins the dizzying déjà vu moment of Court and Spark's "Same Situation" out into an entire album. In the song's narrative, a jaded lothario fixes his "gaze" on a new woman, "Weighing the beauty and the imperfection/ To see if [she's] worthy/ Like the church/ Like a cop/ Like a mother." Mitchell's protagonist receives the stare, but it feels too familiar. Each of Hissing's ensemble cast of women are hit with that same hollow but commanding look. On "Harry House/Centerpiece", Harry looks at his wife and mentally recreates a young, bikini-clad version of her. In "The Boho Dance", a priest longs for the pin-up girl on his hidden "pornographic watch." And a mafioso's eyes "hold Edith" in "Edith and the Kingpin". Hissing catapults us into the aftermath of these destabilized relationships—scenes of shared domestic psychosis that read like Clarice Lispector set in the Hollywood Hills. Every song illustrates the feeling of being trapped, unworthy, and marching to the obscure beat of someone else's drum.

In 1996, during an interview with Morrissey, Mitchell clarified the commonalities between these omniscient narrations and her early work—again protesting the use of the "c" word. "The things where I have revealed my own foibles or frailty were", she said, "to create... a rich character full of human experience". The Hissing of Summer Lawns is as full of human experience as anything on Blue. The tone is simply more stern, the perspective less ambiguous. Mitchell's narrator sees everything, giving herself agency, offering selective glimpses of her scenes. Elvis Costello once praised the record's center, "Shades of "Scarlett Conquering": "This is as good as any writing," Costello said. "That's a whole book's worth of writing and yet it doesn't rely on anybody assuming that's you".

Critics said melody was thrown out with the "I" on Hissing. In a hum-it-back-to-me-now sense, they were not wrong. Mitchell's indelible melodic sense was instead subsumed into long verse structures, and fit to the rhythm of speech. It was a direction she had always tended towards, but against the genre-blurring, ever-complicating backdrop of Hissing, there was no denying the peculiarity any longer. An apt review from Stereo Review claimed, "She has done little work on her melodies... she is up to something too subtle for me to detect".

Mitchell structured her Hissing ensemble like Miles Davis on In a Silent Way: Freeform electric piano and guitar crochets created a soupy, gently chaotic center for the band. "I let my players go a little freer than on Court and Spark... cut them some slack", Mitchell said in 1989. She took a page from the book of her hero, Duke Ellington, another bandleader famous for letting his expert soloists' identities shape and lend drift to his well-charted compositions. Mitchell's less dictatorial approach put things in a greyer stylistic zone, setting Hissing apart but also sealing its fate. "A jazz musician, cut loose, will play jazz harmony against my music," Mitchell said. "That intimidates some people".

Hissing is still one of the hardest Mitchell albums to pin down stylistically. Unlike its follow-up Hejira, or any of her previous work, the sound changes dramatically between songs. Winds, strings, and horns are added and subtracted track-to-track. "The Jungle Line", driven by a newly-purchased synthesizer and tribal drumming, is typically singled out as the record's most glaring anomaly, but thematically it's possibly Hissing's most perfect microcosm. The song directly evokes Mitchell’s cover painting: grey and sickly green in the stark, primitivist style of French painter Henri Rousseau, whom Joni reanimates as a predatory force in her song. Another Moog-powered outlier is the mostly-vocal piece "Shadows and Light", which functions like a closing hymn, or the final chorus in a Greek tragedy.

In 1979, Mitchell complained to then-Rolling Stone'r Cameron Crowe about the reception of Hissing, questioning why it was so lukewarm in contrast to that of fellow Hollywood cynics Steely Dan. With the release of Steely Dan's biggest smash and critical darling Aja in 1977, the band had essentially become Donald Fagen and Walter Becker's front for trafficking in famous jazz musicians. Their new music arrived at genre-defying conclusions that were similar to Joni's, even featuring some of the same players. "[Aja] was applauded as a great, if somewhat eccentric, work", Mitchell commented. "I fail to see the eccentricity of it, myself".

But there was no "Peg" on Hissing. Mitchell's carefree ode to the touring life, "In France They Kiss on Main Street"—which actually features a turn from erstwhile Steely Dan guitarist and Doobie Brother Jeff "Skunk" Baxter—managed to peak at #66 on the Hot 100, but it was a smokescreen for the comparatively dour atmosphere of the rest of the album. Hissing debuted at #4, making it Mitchell’s third highest charting, but it fell off dramatically with each successive week. The album became something of a footnote to music Mitchell made in its wake; in furtherance of its esoteric aims, the consensus tended toward the hostile.

It took two decades for a generation of artists to really claim Joni Mitchell as their spiritual forebear. First, there was the Lilith Fair generation. In a brief interview on "The Rosie O'Donnell Show" in '96, Mitchell offered a bemused smile when forerunners of the movement—Melissa Etheridge, Shawn Colvin—were cited as two of her biggest celebrity fans. In those artists' stripped-down folk-pop, Mitchell's early acoustic work was fetishized. The all-star jam at the first Lilith Fair in 1997 was a cover of "Big Yellow Taxi".

Joni didn’t care for the comparisons. Speaking with Morrissey, she recalled a radio show in '96 in which a boisterous male host compared her work with a slew of younger songwriters, in whose work she heard only "Joan Baez and Bonnie Raitt." "To me it bore no resemblance to Court and Spark... because harmonically it was very standard tuning," she complained. "It was the very thing that I left… no matter what colors you put together, you'd heard it."

The cult for the harmonically rich, electroacoustic universe that Joni opened up on The Hissing of Summer Lawns was more disparate. Its ethos influenced singular voices like Prince, Kate Bush, and Björk, who were very interested in unheard "colors." Bush once called Mitchell the only female songwriter with whom she felt an affinity. When the British singer broke with her roots as a piano-based performer, embraced the Fairlight synthesizer, and cultivated a huskier vocal tone for 1985’s Hounds of Love, she likened the shift to Joni’s ever-changing sensibilities—particularly, the use of her voice.

Last year, talking to Pitchfork, Björk chalked her deep-seated love for Joni’s late-70s work up to Iceland’s curious import patterns: "I think it was that accidental thing in Iceland, where the wrong albums arrive to shore, because I was obsessed with [1977's] Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter and Hejira as a teenager. I hear much more of her in those albums. She almost made her own type of music style with those, it's more a woman's world." Björk also praised "The Jungle Line"—"it sounds like something we would make now, it’s crazy!"—and in 2006, covered "The Boho Dance" on a tribute album.

Both of these artists, like Mitchell, moved beyond traditional rock arrangements to play with unorthodox textures and corrall unique performers to suit their subject matter. These concoctions—existing in an unsettled space between "pop" and "serious" music—were their very own. As Mitchell put it in 1989, while comparing her transformation over the course of the '70s to Marvin Gaye’s, she got interested in "moving away from the hit department, to the art department."

Today, the influence of those artists infringes heavily on younger indie and pop musicians. So, too, has a more expansive view of Mitchell's legacy. Now more than ever before, Mitchell's music is relevant to things happening outside of neo-folkie circles. Joanna Newsom’s 2010 Have One on Me bears the distinct stamp of Court and Spark's mix of pop and effusive narrative. At the time, Newsom welcomed the comparison, claiming to be "collect[ing]" Joni’s albums for the first time. 

But nowhere is Hissing's influence felt more strongly than in the music of L.A.-based singer-songwriter Julia Holter. Her 2013 album Loud City Song features, by her account, a direct tribute to "The Jungle Line" in the form of album highlight "In the Green Wild". Both that album—in its own way, a shadowy Los Angeles phantasmagoria—and Holter’s newest LP, Have You in My Wilderness, feel in line with the ethos of Hissing's timbre. Holter layers lazy washes of strings, horns, and echoing backing vocals (à la "The Hissing of Summer Lawns" or "Edith and the Kingpin") on top of a muted, sophisticated rhythm section. "[Joni] writes about the city a lot in her later stuff," Holter told Dummy in 2013, "and the way it's orchestrated is really cool. There's a lot of attention paid to the production that I really enjoy.”

The Hissing of Summer Lawns was one of the earliest and most high-profile albums by a major pop artist—certainly by a female one—to theorize what a distinctly avant-garde-informed pop music might sound like. Its musical vocabulary—as well as its lyrical one—fell magnificently between acoustic realism and symbolic fantasy. The album's final track provides an apt conclusion in every sense. It's a bare summation of the threads of struggle, compromise, and perseverance that run through the record, but also eerily evocative of its fate in the world. Even before the morning papers came in, Joni seemed to understand what she would be up against: "Critics of all expression/ Judges in Black and White/ Saying it's wrong/ Saying it's right/ Compelled by prescribed standards/ Of some ideals we fight."

It's hard to predict much about Frank Ocean's new album from its title alone. Surely Boys Don't Cry is a callback to the Cure's 1980 album of the same name, but what if Ocean is referring to something else? What if instead, it's a stoic nod to the 1999 film of the same name? Directed by Kimberly Pierce, Boys Don't Cry is based on the true story of American trans man Brandon Teena, though it is as much about the broad themes of identity, nascent sexuality, and body politics as it is about the violence experienced by transgender bodies.

It wouldn't be the first time Ocean's music has alluded to a movie. From the Richie Tenenbaum outfit (yellow blazer, striped sweatband) he wore during his performance of "Forrest Gump" at the 2013 Grammy Awards to the mention of Dragon Ball-Z character Majin Bu in "Pink Matter", Frank Ocean is obsessed with film and TV.

Sometimes, Ocean quotes movies directly – the "too weird to live, too rare to die" line in "Lost" is lifted from Terry Gilliam's madcap desert orgy Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), whose influence also looms large in the "Pyramids" video. In other instances, his imagery is subtly suggestive; the drugged-up silver-spoon students in "Super Rich Kids", for example, are from the same cinematic universe as their Less Than Zero (1987) counterparts. Occasionally, Ocean's film references are esoteric; who is "Novacane"'s "model broad with the Hollywood smile"? With her "stripper booty and a rack like wow", it's not that much of a stretch to read his "brain like Berkley" pun as a cheeky wink to Elizabeth Berkley in Showgirls (Paul Verhoeven, 1995).

Pitchfork's own Ryan Dombal described Ocean's 2012 album Channel Orange as a "Magnolia-style cross-wired heartbreak epic", with its collage of multiple narratives connected by the thematic through-line of unrequited love, and indeed Paul Thomas Anderson's film would fit neatly within the canon of new New Hollywood movies from the 1990s that Ocean references. But Channel Orange and Ocean's 2011 mixtape Nostalgia, Ultra don't just engage with independent films—they also reference Gen X blockbusters and big-budget, conservative films like Pretty Woman and Forrest Gump. Ocean—a bisexual black millennial—uses these films to insert himself into a distinctly American mythology. He is neither fanboy nor voyeur. He is Richard Gere in a tux. He is Jenny Curran. He is Leaving Las Vegas. He is the history of American movies, revised.

In an interview with The New York Times, Ocean describes being inspired by "the anonymity that directors can have about their films." Channel Orange is too rich with life to truly claim anonymity, though given the grand narrative that runs through that album, there's certainly a case for Ocean-as-auteur.

Here are some of the movies that Ocean returns to again and again, paired with the corresponding tracks in his catalog:

Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick, 1999)

Corresponds to: "Novacane"

"Bed full of women, flip on a tripod, little red light on shooting/ I'm feeling like Stanley Kubrick, this is some visionary shit / Been tryin' to film pleasure with my eyes wide shut but it keeps on moving"

In Kubrick's swan song, Tom Cruise's Dr. Hartford stumbles upon a secret society that hosts masked orgies. The bed full of women, the seedy voyeurism, the play on Eyes Wide Shut's title—Ocean cherry-picks from the tropes of this erotic thriller.

And Eyes Wide Shut might not the only Kubrick film being referenced here; the little red light is potentially a nod to HAL 9000, the sentient computer represented by a blinking red eye in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), while "Novacane"'s music video takes place in a hotel room whose 1960s-style paisley patterned wallpaper recalls The Shining's (1980) Overlook Hotel.

Corresponds to: "Lovecrimes"

Eyes Wide Shut crops up again in "Lovecrimes", though this time Ocean samples Nicole Kidman's scornful, marijuana-fueled diatribe on infidelity in relationships. In the film, the scene plays out as a back-and-forth between the couple, but Ocean strips away Cruise's retorts. The effect is a monologue that makes Kidman's Alice sound completely irrational—in keeping with the protagonist who "pleads insanity" in "Lovecrimes".

The Matrix (The Wachowski Siblings, 1999)

Corresponds to: "Sweet Life"

"The water's blue, swallow the pill/ Keeping it surreal, whatever you like"

In The Matrix, Keanu Reeves' Neo is famously presented with two pills—the red pill, which allows him to wake from the virtual reality he is trapped within, and the blue pill, which offers him the chance to live in comfortable obliviousness once more. The narrator of "Sweet Life" encourages (with winking irony, of course) the song's privileged protagonists to take the blue pill and continue to luxuriate in their moneyed bubble of ignorant bliss.

Reservoir Dogs (Quentin Tarantino, 1992)

Corresponds to: "Sweet Life"

"Living in Ladera Heights, the black Beverly Hills"

"Sweet Life"'s privileged personae are coded as black; Ocean introduces them as from the black Beverly Hills—an explicit reference to Mr. Pink's (Steve Buscemi) description of Ladera Heights in Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs. In both the film and the song, Ladera Heights is a pejorative.

Rush Hour 2 (Brett Ratner, 2001)

Corresponds to: "Lost"

"Got my buttercream silk shirt/ And it's Versace"

Not all of Ocean's references are quite so highbrow. A scene in which Chris Rock and Jackie Chan are mistaken for a gay couple during a visit to buy suits is a fun nod to Ocean's own interest in style and fashion—and possibly his queerness, too.

Pretty Woman (Gary Marshall, 1990)

Corresponds to: "American Wedding"

"My pretty woman in a ball gown/ I'm Richard Gere in a tux"

In his riff on the Eagles' "Hotel California", Ocean casts himself as sugar daddy Richard Gere to his "teenage wife". Gere was paired with Julia Roberts (who is 18 years his junior) in both Pretty Woman and Runaway Bride (1999), and it's possible Ocean is playing homage to both films. Importantly, in Pretty Woman Gere waves the magic wand of money, rescuing Roberts' down-and-out sex worker from financial ruin and immersing her in a capitalist version of fairytale romance. Ocean touches on the delicate relationship between sex, work, and money in Nostalgia, Ultra, though it's not until Channel Orange that he explores this theme explicitly in songs like "Sweet Life", "Super Rich Kids", and "Lost".

ATL (Chris Robinson, 2006)

Corresponds to: "End/Golden Girl"

"I can't believe I'm even talking to you, telling you this right now/ You're special/ I wish you could see what I see"

In Channel Orange's outro, Ocean lifts dialogue from hip-hop drama ATL. Yet, as with his use of Alice's soliloquy from Eyes Wide Shut, he only quotes from the female lead. By doing so, he embodies Lisa London's character New New in all her wide-eyed vulnerability, flipping the gendered script at stake. The sound of keys locking a car plays in the transition between "End"and "Golden Girl", another nod to the romantic confession scene from which London's speech is taken—which happens in a car.

Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, 1994)

Corresponds to: "Forrest Gump"

"Forrest Gump, you're on my mind boy/ Running on my mind boy/ Forrest Gump, I know you're Forrest/ I know you wouldn't hurt a beetle"

On "Forrest Gump", the closing track on Channel Orange, Ocean likens his lover to the eponymous Forrest, who is characterized by his slow, sweet naiveté and wholesome wouldn't-hurt-a-fly nature. In the film's most famous scene Forrest's childhood sweetheart Jenny urges him to sprint from his tormentors; here, Ocean's Forrest races through his mind.

"I saw your game, Forrest/ I was screaming 'run 44'/ But you kept running past the end zone/ Oh where'd you go Forrest?"

Here, Ocean quotes the scene in which Forrest (whose jersey number is 44) literally runs past the end zone and into the locker room. In Forrest Gump, Jenny initially rejects Forrest's marriage proposal (though she does concede to sleeping with him). While the film has a happy resolution, in "Forrest Gump" Ocean is interpolated as this earlier version of Jenny—the recipient of Forrest's unrequited love. The two Forrests run headlong into heartbreak, past the end zones of their respective relationships, leaving both Ocean and Jenny regretting what they have enabled.

"My fingertips and my lips/ They burn from the cigarettes":

Lastly there's "Forrest Gump"'s mention of cigarettes. In Forrest Gump, the inexperienced Forrest is startled by a sex worker whose kisses taste like ash; "I'm sorry I ruined your New Year's Eve party, Lieutenant Dan. She tasted like cigarettes." By noting this small detail, Ocean aligns himself with the woman, underlining the fundamental incompatibility between him and his virtuous Forrest-type love interest. It's a subtle reference that shows how their relationship was doomed from the start.

Throughout these songs, Ocean's point of identification moves between male and female, heartbreaker and heartbroken, narrator and protagonist—yet all of his reference points are cut from the same American cloth. Using these reference points, Ocean is able to create a map of America through a collective cinematic imagination. From the magical realism of "Pyramids" to the taxi driver in "Bad Religion", movies are key to understanding the way Ocean understands both himself and his place as an American citizen. When Boys Don't Cry is released, I won't be trying to figure out what Ocean's been doing or who he's been seeing. I'll be listening to find out what he's been watching.

There’s an intriguing motif in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Junun, the making-of film for Jonny Greenwood, Shye Ben Tzur, and the Rajasthan Express’s album of the same name. As a song begins, Anderson’s camera will scan the room – its kneeling percussionists, lined-up brass players, Qawwali singers nestled on cushions, Greenwood hunched in the shadows – before fixing on an open-shuttered window. After a moment's thought, it dives out. A drone bears the camera over the city as the music plays, intertwining the sound with the landscape – its leaning walls, streaming bodies, crowded architecture – and vice-versa. The result of the music, composed by India-based Ben Tzur to blend his adopted homeland’s energy with his middle-eastern roots, is like a gorgeous aerial view over a network of jostling traditions.

Ben Tzur, who grew up in Israel, met Greenwood after the Radiohead guitarist heard a band playing one of Ben Tzur's songs in the Negev desert. Last year in London they played a concert together, which went well enough to warrant further collaboration. Within weeks, Ben Tzur was scouting Rajasthan for possible recording spaces. He bumped into the Maharaja of Jodhpur, a longtime fan of his music, who suggested they set up at his regal 15th Century fort. The subsequent recording, overseen by Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich and documented over a few weeks by Anderson, was, in Ben Tzur’s words, "basically a big process of brainstorming and heart-storming and beautiful experience."

Pitchfork: Jonny, you've said that, as a Westener, you wouldn't have made this record without Indian musicians. What pitfalls did you want to avoid?

Jonny Greenwood: Rock music is quite big in India - but it mostly just replaces all the intricacies of Indian rhythms and Indian melody with lumpen rock drumming and power chords. So that was quite a good negative motivation. As soon as you impose Western chords on an Indian scale, something great collapses.

Shye Ben Tzur: The amazing thing about Jonny is he is so attentive and sensitive to music. He really realized, I think, what the special and strongest points are in some of the songs and what we shouldn’t do. He was trying to avoid harmonies and chords since Indian music is based on an aesthetic that lies within scales and rhythms, rather than chords. For Jonny, it was important that it would be very hot in the face and uncompromising; not manipulated just to be liked by others. The idea of singing in English didn’t even cross our minds. 

Pitchfork: Shye, as the group leader, how was the power dynamic? And how did you find working with Jonny?

SBT: Jonny is the most senior musician; he sat among all of us to basically listen to what was being played, take it, use the best of it, and maybe bring in different ideas. But in reality, each one brings his own personality, tradition, and thought into the collaboration. Something I found very exciting with Jonny was that sometimes I would say, “Okay, which instrument should play together with this? Would you like some guitar line or computer thing on top of it?” And he said, "You know what? This one, let’s just leave it like that. Just your vocal, the vocal of the people, and then some effects towards the end of it."

Pitchfork: What drew you to Indian music, Jonny? I got the impression Junun was the culmination of a longer period of interest.

JG: The strangest part of Indian music is its lack of chords: There's no such thing as major or minor, and it's unusual to hear more than two different pitches at the same time. This means that melodies don't have to be pinned down to chords, so they sound much freer and more fluid than in western music. I was wary of falling into the trap of imposing western chords on everything: so a few songs on Junun have chords, but most don't – it's all about the raag and the rhythms. I thought of the bass and guitar as being droning percussion instruments – droning in the sense that they didn't change note – that could sit in amongst all the Indian drums. It was a little like how I'd imagine playing in James Brown's band – not many chord changes, but some captivating rhythms to kick a bass line off of.

Pitchfork: Why make Junun now? 

JG: I guess part of it was wanting to make a record using Indian musicians, but trying to get sounds that weren't overly reverential. Lots of Western recordings of Eastern music are done with enormous care and caution – and, usually, absurdly polished production values. No wonder it's sometimes thought of as massage music. There's this desperate desire not to offend. Radiohead don't make records like that, so I figured we could record Shye's band with the same broad strokes. And with all those drummers and beaten up old brass instruments, it was like the noise and distortion was already taken care of before we played a note.

Pitchfork: Shye, how did you come to work with the Rajasthan Express?

SBT: Within the Rajasthan Express there are a few types of traditions. The singers come from a Sufi Qawwali tradition, singing music mostly in the Sufi shrines from 10 or 11 o’clock at night until five or six in the morning. Then there are other musicians ... coming from a community of Muslims, who used to play for the Hindu Maharajas. They were the court musicians, not only of the Maharajas but the royals in Rajasthan, so there’s a lot of emphasis on entertainment within their style of music. And then there's the brass bands. Brass bands come from a tradition of the British being in India, and are now used mostly for weddings and parades. I always used to hear the special sound of these parades, these brass bands playing. There was a sense of joy in it, a notion of a sacred thing. When Jonny heard the brass, he said, "We have to have these guys. This should be the sound of the album."

Pitchfork: I read that, after hearing a traditional Indian band playing in Jerusalem, you dropped everything and moved to Rajasthan to study music. 

SBT: Kind of, yes. I was a musician since I was a kid, and after listening to a lot of kinds of music, I began to investigate different rock bands and other sounds. By that curiosity I came across Indian music. A friend brought me to a concert of Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia and Zakir Hussain. I was sitting there for a long recital, about four hours. Yet the time just passed in a very magical way and I was in awe. I remember the feeling was so deep. After that concert I really felt that I had to go to India and find out more about that type of music. But I didn't plan to spend most of adult life there...

Pitchfork: What did you learn?

SBT: When people talk about Indian music they think of one type of music, but India is a subcontinent with many traditions and cultures which have developed for a few thousand years. So at first I didn't really know what it means. ... I was studying North Indian classical music, but what really drew me in was Qawwali, which is a Sufi music. North Indian classical is a music that tries to basically play Ragas, which are musical scales with melodic rules and outlines. Qawwali music is very groove oriented, very trancey, very powerful. And the mixture of both creates a real magic.

Pitchfork: Jonny, you've described the music as both "celebratory" and "masculine." 

JG: The music is all devotional: Shye is singing about his faith, so the music is quite ecstatic, and joyful. I've called it "masculine" because I guess I found that the most curious aspect – the male chorus singing these spiritual songs with such fervour. Maybe I'm used to religious music being gentler in the classical world.

Pitchfork: You seem to prefer to create before you get too familiar with a particular style or form. What do you get from that method?

JG: As I kid, I was always jealous of the music that my favorite bands had written – but not really of how they played. So I'd daydream about having written songs, and this way above being able to perform them. When I was at school, virtuosity was usually associated with insincerity... there's that Tom Waits quote about never practicing, and only playing an instrument when you're writing something new. That always felt right to me. Having said that, I'm very grateful for the music education I've had.

Pitchfork: It's sometimes as if you're searching for something innate to composition, that goes beyond genre. Does something like that exist?

JG: I sometimes wish taste wasn't ever an issue, and the sounds of instruments or synths could be judged solely on their colour and timbre. Judged by what it did to your ears, rather than what its historical use reminds you of. Or at least, this is how I try and argue my banjo/recorder/harmonica onto Radiohead records...

Photo courtesy of Virginia Sherwood/NBC

On Thursday night, less than an hour before NBC’s showing of "The Wiz Live!", the New York Times culture critic Wesley Morris blasted off with a tweet where he repeated the phrase "PLEASE BE GOOD" seven times and then ended with "(OR TRULY TRULY BAD)." It was an understandable plea, and hopefully viewers wouldn’t have to click their heels three times to get to either outcome.

This performance of The Wiz was the network’s third annual production of a landmark musical on live television, and the preceding installments of The Sound of Music and Peter Pan had lacked inspiration in both their selection and execution. Professional and Twitter critics mocked these two stagings for their unimaginative approaches and the flat performances of their leads, yet early indicators for The Wiz showed promise. With an on-stage cast that included Mary J. Blige, Uzo Aduba, Elijah Kelley, Ne-Yo, and David Alan Grier, as well as strong behind the scenes players like director Kenny Leon and pop music choreographer Fatima Robinson, the talent was definitely present. Then again,the world is littered with failed new takes and offshoots of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Sure, there is the theatrical sensation of Wicked, but more common are duds like 1985’s nightmare machine Return to Oz and the 2013’s forgettable Oz the Great and Powerful. So if "The Wiz Live!" was going to tank, hopefully it could distinguish itself by doing so spectacularly and deposit itself in the cult classic category.

The Wiz was created as a re-imagining of the Oz story with an all black cast. It debuted in Baltimore in late 1974, before moving to Broadway in 1975, where it won the Tonys for Best Musical and Best Original Score. Then in 1978 it was then adapted as a movie through Motown Productions and with musical guidance from Quincy Jones. Directed by Sidney Lumet and written by Joel Schumacher, that version took it out of the Midwestern farmland and set it in a New York City that’s lacquered with stylized grit. It starred Diana Ross as the 24-year-old Dorothy, a mousey teacher who has never been south of 125th St., and a pre-Off the Wall Michael Jackson as the Scarecrow, stuffed with inspirational aphorisms and floppy physicality. The Wiz movie may have had a tepid critical and box office impact when it was released, but it has since become a cultural touchstone, particularly for several generations of African-Americans. (Here’s a 20-second hip-hop footnote timeout: Year's After Jay Z’s use of a song from Annie for "Hard Knock Life", Nas’s autobiographical stray shot "Surviving the Times" sampled Nipsey Russell’s Wiz performance of “What Would I Do if I Could Feel” on a beat produced by former NBA baller Chris Webber.)

"The Wiz Live!" returned the show to the heartland, setting its opening scene against a beautifully washed out LED projection of a Kansas wheat field. The outmoded pimp caricatures of the crows that held back Jackson’s scarecrow in the film were replaced with menacing creatures whose costumes seem indebted to the Night’s Watch. The story of Dorothy, played by 17-year-old newcomer Shanice Williams, was further fleshed out, given an element of tragedy, and unburdened from her famous dog. The dialogue was updated too—the two mentions of "shade" and the allusion to the #squad phenomenon were a couple of the less obtrusive examples.

More important was the willingness to update the score without coming off as pandering. Yes, the Tin Man hit the dab, but the soul, gospel, and early disco sounds of the original were occasionally tweaked with trap snare rolls and a vision of Emerald City inspired by the ballroom vogue tradition. The production also knew when to hold back. The inclusion of Common, playing a doorman dressed in probably the most ridiculous costume in a career filled with many ridiculous costumes, seemed superfluous, but at least they didn’t try to shoehorn in a rap interlude. In the end, "The Wiz Live!" largely succeeded because of the performers and the creators’ ability to see the possibilities for embellishment without totally selling out the source material. Key songs "No Bad News" and "A Brand New Day" went unmolested and retained their power.

What The Wiz Live! truly functioned as was a talent showcase for its performers. For three seasons Uzo Aduba has wowed viewers with her portrayal of Crazy Eyes, a prisoner with mental health issues, on Orange in the New Black, but here she could overpower them with her rendition of “Believe in Yourself” as the poised and powerful Glinda the Good Witch. Elijah Kelley, once tipped to play Sammy Davis Jr. in a biopic after his appearance in the 2007 film adaptation of the Hairspray musical, has since seen his career stall. Here he could impress again as the Scarecrow with his acrobatic dancing and goofy magnetism. These opportunities didn’t always translate into a transcendent viewing experience, but they did open up a world of possibilities that hopefully go beyond a one-night major network TV special.

Next year, NBC is rolling the dice on yet another Dorothy-associated property with "Emerald City". It’s an hour-long drama with all 10 episodes directed by fantastical gobbledy gooker Tarsem Singh that promises to show "the fabled Land of Oz in a way you've never seen it before." Once again, it doesn’t sound like it will be good, but if we’re lucky, it might be truly, truly bad.

It approaches again: the music industry’s annual memoriam of itself, in which thousands of music-industry luminaries (and just as many who’d like to think they are) lavish mucho pomp and drawn-out circumstance upon a set of artists basically nobody else agrees are the best of the year.

2016’s Grammy nominations stand more of a chance than usual of breaking this trend. (Representative headlines: "Surprise! The Grammy Nominations Don’t Totally Suck This Year"; "This Is Not the Year to Complain About the Grammys.") Critics’ favorites like Kendrick Lamar and Courtney Barnett share space with crowd pleasers like Taylor Swift and the Weeknd, with nary a Macklemore in sight. (Worth noting: The Grammy cutoff is September 30, which places, among others, one Adele Adkins on the other si-ide.) What could possibly go wrong? Well…

Standby for a manufactured war between Taylor and Kendrick

Kendrick Lamar and Taylor Swift lead the nominations with 11 and 7 nods respectively, the former the most Grammy nods a rapper has gotten in one night; they compete in Album and Song of the Year. Equally pertinent: wherever Swift goes, awards show drama follows. Surely the producers will be looking play up a nonexistent rivalry. The potentiality for drummed up beef is exactly as silly as it sounds; Swift and Lamar have collaborated before and the Grammys are among the stodgier of ceremonies (though it seems they’d love to shed that stigma).

Alas, the world demands bad blood for the bad blood god (and the ratings god, a much stronger deity), and barring unlikely drama from Ed Sheeran or the Weeknd, this is the stone from which the Grammys will wrench it. The battle lines are just too clear: pop squad leader vs. rap visionary, timeless retro-pop vs. timely social commentary, celebrity and model pal vs. serious thinker, Grammy darling vs. Grammy snub (good kid, m.A.A.d city won zero out of its seven Grammy nominations, but it did win him a Macklemore wall-of-text!)

But speaking of snubs:

Snubs are a lie

Closely related to the tradition of complaining about the Grammys is the tradition of complaining about Grammy snubs. At the moment you read this, a million Directioners are furiously Tweeting vitriol about Justin Bieber’s moment as tween of the hour; meanwhile, the more critic-infested parts of the Internet mourned the omission of such cult favorites as Carly Rae Jepsen’s E•MO•TION, Lana Del Rey’s Honeymoon, and (inexplicably to some) Nick Jonas’s "Jealous".

In Internet Land, Carly Rae Jepsen is pop’s gurgling, blushing heart. In Grammy Land, Carly Rae Jepsen released "Call Me Maybe" and a succession of singles that floundered at radio. Honeymoon was a midtempo album-album that produced no "Summertime Sadness" redux. Jonas is, well, a Jonas. (There can be only one tween of the hour.) The ideal Grammy pop darling looks more like Tori Kelly, whose sunny Natasha Bedingfieldisms earned her a Best New Artist nod over approximately 50 other rising-pop possibilities.

Chief among artists that might actually have been snubbed: the Foo Fighters, who’ve for years turned categories into, in effect, Best Dave Grohl; and former Grammy darlings Mumford & Sons, whose No. 1 album Wilder Mind received a scintillating zero noms. But even this isn’t a snub, on the minor technicality that the album was so undeniably not good even the Grammys couldn’t fake it.

The Grammys continue to Not Get Dance Music

A quick recap of the heyday of EDM, as told by the Grammys:

2012: A David Guetta/Chris Brown/Lil Wayne "tribute" to the genre that came off like a hostage situation.

2013: The humiliating nomination of Liechtensteinian grifter Al Walser and his execrable "I Can’t Live Without You", whose legacy consists of one Bandcamp power-pop cover, one beef with Zedd, and the continued inclusion in lists like this.

2014: A year in which the Grammys still called EDM "electronica." (Perhaps fittingly, actual electronica, the kind that peaked in the late '90s variety, get disproportionate love from the Grammys; this is an awards ceremony that nominated BT(!) in 2011(!!!)

2016’s slate, then, is as good as one can expect: an even split between critical favorites (Jamie xx, Caribou), populists (Disclosure, Jack Ü) and Chemical Brothers (Chemical Brothers) that may well go to unlikely safe choice Skrillex.

The Grammys are trying very, very hard to avoid Macklemore 2.0

Before pondering the Grammys’ takes on rap and R&B, let’s take a quick pan over the other genre categories: Rock remains an absolute mess. (Barnett, for one, isn’t in it, or its alternative counterpart. But hey, she won Australia’s ARIA Award!… for cover art.) Country sticks to its portfolio songwriters (Kacey Musgraves, Brandy Clark, Ashley Monroe) and an underdog of choice (Chris Stapleton, fresh off sweeping the CMAs) over fresher faces like teenage rebels Maddie & Tae or puppyish country bro Sam Hunt. The question of what to do with pop is neatly answered by the omnipresent Swift and the Weeknd riding two Grammy-bait singles: MJ tribute "Can’t Feel My Face" and orchestra-slinky "Earned It". The likes of Meghan Trainor and Jason Derulo go straight to Best New Artist and the song categories.

Meanwhile, in the rap and R&B categories, there’s no way but up to go from Kendrick Real. The rap categories are about as safe as possible, mixing award-bait (Common and John Legend’s "Glory") with rap-radio hits and even the occasional surprising hint of a pulse (the presence of "Trap Queen"). The incoherent gerrymandering of the R&B categories into R&B, Traditional R&B and "Urban Contemporary" remains exactly as stupid and respectability-politicking as it was from the beginning, but it at least broadens the field; by far the most surprising of the nominations was relative newcomer Kehlani, whose You Should Be Here was among the year’s quiet standouts and whose inclusion suggests that a critical mass of people might—behold!—actually be paying attention.

There are heartening success stories to be (hopefully) had

Kehlani is one of many inspired nominees that might even win; her biggest competition are two other people’s champs, the Internet’s Ego Death and Miguel’s Wildheart; Tame Impala’s Currents and Björk’s Vulnicura received nods really the only place they could (Best Alternative Album); Lin-Manuel Miranda’s groundbreaking musical Hamilton—ineligible for this year’s Tonys due to release date but riding a revolution’s worth of momentum (with Fun Home a distant second, and The King & I’s revival right out). But here’s another underdog, perhaps a little outre: "Thinking Out Loud".

Ed Sheeran is, of course, the opposite of an underdog; the record coated the radio in saccharine goo for months on end, nigh-ensuring its spot in both the Record and Song of the Year lists. But the latter goes to songwriters. One of the more useful functions of the Grammys is its staunch focus on honoring songwriters, continually overlooked and often financially beleaguered even as producers become celebrities. (Everybody has heard of Max Martin.) And despite Sheeran’s lone-troubadour-dude image, "Thinking Out Loud" is equally the work of someone actually unfamiliar to all but Sheeran diehards: Amy Wadge. The Welsh artist and solo singer-songwriter has worked with Sheeran for years—one of his early EPs was called Songs I Wrote With Amy—but her "Thinking Out Loud" only made the cut after she took her financial troubles to Sheeran, who cut the track almost on the spot, earning her a large pile of royalties. It’d smack of publicity stunt if Sheeran didn’t follow through with this, such as by paying off her mortgage; it almost makes the record’s reign of sap worth it.

And, tragically, there are people in the world who like "See You Again"

Somehow.

In 1995, a lucky stop sign in Pleasant City, a neighborhood in West Palm Beach, found itself draped in a drool-repellent Skyywalker Records varsity jacket. Estimated hang time: seconds. I imagine some kid on a bike squeaking off in a flash of satin green, with a dancing bass cloud stitched to his back. Maybe someone snatched the jacket from a car while running the intersection at Spruce Avenue.

Can you appeal a citation for failure to stop at a rare promotional Miami Bass artifact?

More important: Did the jacket have the correct misspelling? A copyright flout in the guise of typo, the double y’s fiber-date the item as "pre-George Lucas lawsuit."

DJ Ross One (Ross Schartzman) missed that stop sign by only 20 years. The Skyywalker jacket was one that got away, and not for cheap. His book Rap Tees is a museum of vintage rap T-shirts and jackets, ranging from the limited promotional (the Tommy Boy Carhartt barn coat that we mooned over in ads in The Source) to '90s street vendor bootlegs (Biggie’s face on every corner), to those ogled at concert merch tables, copped from Goodwills, brokered through overseas swaps. Or just borrowed from the Bronx closet of '90s producer Showbiz. (Not that fetish would render the music immaterial or anything.) The "Renegades of Funk" shirt was discovered in a box of tutus in North Versailles, Pa., by a man with a pet ferret. Taken from the cover of a Soulsonic Force 12-inch illustrated in 1983 by Marvel’s Bob Camp (who later worked with Ren and Stimpy), the shirt has Bambaataa in his King and I pants, punching through bricks—in a girl's small no less, against all Double Dutch odds.

Rap Tees is a history of hip-hop design and branding as much as it is a catalog of want, in service of inclusion. This is a club where No Limit tanks are literally worn on the sleeve while the Grand Royal elephant sits on a couch, blazed out of his mind, trying to remember why he’s there. The secret password: "Grand Puba ‘Reel to Reel’ promotional fishing vest. Not everybody was invited. There’s the Beastie Boys’ homophobic shirt, circa Licensed to Ill. (Run-DMC’s minimal orange bars, now worn by kids who think Run-DMC is gramp rap, was, according to designer Cey Adams, inspired by the Relax T-shirts from Frankie Goes to Hollywood, some pro-queer subtext not lost on the leatherette of old school fashion.) Sadly, the Public Enemy crosshairs logo and Latifah’s "Who u callin’ a bitch???" have not gone out of style, as if literally turning their back on the problem to deal with it head on.

According to Ross One, his book is the "realization of that ideal, unattainable collection of rap T-shirts." For some, the realization arrived late to the armpit. I might still have my 3rd Bass (page 215) shirt had I not actually, you know, worn it. (Perhaps the dilemma posed by sweat stains could be resolved within the arm folds of the b-boy stance.) The 3rd Bass logo, borrowed from film leader, would be shaved into the back of MC Serch’s head, a bit of precision detailing performed by the same clippers which—let’s speculate—could be heard buzzing in a skit on KMD’s first album Mr. Hood. Along with a Def Jam jacket, 3rd Bass’s Pete Nice once used the KMD shirt (page 217) in an unsuccessful attempt to bribe a tow truck driver who’d already impounded KRS-One.

Some shirts place you there and not on eBay. It’s heartening to know that Egyptian Lover is still in possession of his "pink ringer" from the '87 Raptron Tour at Little Rock. My Strictly Business shirt put me at the Charlotte Coliseum on a night when EPMD themselves couldn’t make it. The commerce must go on. Opening for Public Enemy and Guy (!) that night was Sir Mix-a-lot. The satin Nasty Mix jacket worn by his dancer Maharaji was duly coveted, if not howling at the seams.

Emboldened by rap’s storytelling and boasting, rap T-shirts have grown into their own oversized legends. During one of my first interviews (Urb, 1994), DJ Shadow recalled a moment at a show in Long Beach when Run lobbed one of his Adidas shell toes into the crowd. The story, as the shoe flies, has already fulfilled its obligation to myth, having been told many times from as many tour stops. But the loop remaining in my head is "some guy in a Mantronix shirt" intercepting Run’s shoe in mid-air. The Mantronix logo, in THX routing number font, echoes in triplicate at half speed, in a memory bootlegged from someone else’s memory. Stretch becomes document. The shirt, sometimes referred to as "Mantronix The ShirtShirtShirt," is the story, toasted from my orange Mantronix promotional koozie.

Other shirts have left the event and arena behind. Worn by a friend during our first conversation, the LL shirt (circa B.A.D.) will always be attached to our mutual admiration for Leatherface’s (RIP) last twilight dance, waving his Poulan at the sun.

My pink sleeveless Full Force T-shirt probably wondered how it ended up at a family reunion in Tryon, North Carolina in 1986.

And did the Japanese guy at the Wu-Tang show at the 1993 New Music Seminar remember my Diamond D T-shirt, floating in front of him, while in the background King Sun was being hauled off by (much) security after brawling with the UMC’s entire Staten Island crew as Coolio rolled a blunt in the corner?

The weed-wear '90s should’ve capitalized on the Boast logo of the '80s. (Oddly, one could get sent home from school for wearing Japanese tennis gear with a maple leaf stitched to their heart, but a Doobie Brothers T-shirt was okay.) The Funkdoobiest shirt asks "Which Doobie Do U Be?", sampling a cautionary bootlegging episode of What’s Happening!!, when Los Angeles poplocker Fred "Re-Run" Berry met future ballistic missile defense advisor Jeff "Skunk" Baxter of the Doobie Brothers.

A shirt from the later, more enlightened Beastie Boys has the stoner van from Fast Times at Ridgemont High parked on its front, worn by a friend who got the glasses kicked off her face as collateral mosh during the Ill Communication tour. The back of the shirt waves "Aloha Mr. Hand", from the back of the classroom. (Know your history teacher!) It was also in Fast Times that Sean Penn’s Spiccoli presented the ultimate question: Where did you get that jacket?

I got mine, a Skyywalker with vinyl sleeves the color of cookie dough, from a friend who had lost out on a Fat Boys roller derby jacket and figured he needed to "up his bidding game". The superfluous pit gain was taken in so it could appear in Rap Tees, looking far more polished on the page than on my back. (Is it any more okay to wear a varsity bass jacket at age 46 than it is for an expensive Scandinavian clothing line to name a jacket after a classic electro 12-inch?) A magnifying glass will take you to a tiny booster flame, bursting from the rear of a spaceship sewn to the cuff. The dancing cloud is in red high waters and Peanuts shoes.

I’d be remiss to not acknowledge the green Skyywalker that ended up in the hands of Makoto Nagumato, proprietor of Weekend Records in Japan. I don’t know if Mark the 45 King remembers that night in 2003 when Makoto took a knee in front of his turn tables, as if to genuflect, waiting for someone (me) to surprise cape him like James Brown’s valet, while the 45 King’s records flew across the bar. (Not kidding.) The jacket now hangs in Makoto’s store. I traded it for a copy of Booty Shakin’ Breakout (Even less kidding).

The Skyywalker jacket worn by that stop sign in Pleasant City, however, remains unaccounted for. It was last spotted in the rearview mirror of Ray "Raylo" Lowe, co-creator of "Peanut Butter Jelly Time", a song released on purple and peanut-colored vinyl and created from a dance born in Liberty City’s Scott Projects. According to Raylo, his girlfriend left the house wearing the jacket after an argument. She still had it on when he drove past her walking down the sidewalk later that afternoon. He checked the mirror to make sure, stopped at the sign, looked both ways. Never saw that jacket again.

Born in the German state of Bavaria in 1944, Klaus Nomi emigrated to New York City at the age of 28, doing bits of off-Broadway theater work and moonlighting as a pastry chef. By 1978, he immersed himself in the East Village performance art scene and got the first big feather in his cap when he performed an aria in a space suit at Irving Plaza's New Wave Vaudeville series. His face was covered with white powder and black eyeliner, his hair a combination of bedhead-meets-Ed Grimley-meets-Flock of Seagulls. Klaus Nomi self-identified as an alien, and to all intents and purposes he looked like one.

Nomi further refined his onstage persona the following year, when he performed backup for David Bowie on Saturday Night Live. That aired December 15, 1979, and Bowie—flanked by Klaus and fellow NYC performance artist Joey Arias—performed three songs that ultimately marked a turning point in Bowie's career. New wave was the genre du jour, so Bowie was keeping up with the times. It was time to get weird(er), and Klaus' eccentric aesthetic was perhaps the greatest entrée (and cosign) for Bowie into that world.

It was a mutually beneficial relationship that lasted just one evening. Klaus was enamored with the giant plastic tux Bowie wore during the performance, and later made it his own. The exposure also garnered him a record deal with Bowie's label RCA. As for Bowie, he had a new muse, but the adoration would come from afar. Convinced that Bowie would deliver upon a loose promise to work together after their first and last time on stage, Klaus waited for his call. His phone never rang.

Still, Klaus Nomi went on to become his own brand. He was deeply rooted in opera, having previously worked as an usher at the Deutsche Oper opera company in Germany, along with occasionally belting arias at Berlin's landmark gay club Kleist-Casino. New York's burgeoning art scene mixed perfectly with Nomi's existing sound. It wasn't out of the ordinary for Jean-Michel Basquiat or Keith Haring to hop on stage while Klaus performed his selection of hits, most notably his anthem "The Nomi Song". His formula was consistent, but not formulaic. Every song included dramatic multiples shift in octave, where Klaus would rise to extreme highs and lows, handling both effortlessly. He would jerk his hands into karate chops with each changing note, widening his eyes every time he skirted into higher octaves. The production on his songs was always heavily synthesized and theatrical. That plastic suit became his signature attire, and he went on to release two albums—his 1981 eponymous debut and Simple Man the following year. He died on August 6, 1983 from complications due to AIDS, making him one of the first celebrities to succumb to the disease. His ashes were dusted across New York City.

It's 36 years since Klaus Nomi shared a stage with David Bowie, but the title-track from Bowie's forthcoming album Blackstar has a Nomi-like uncanniness. Here's a five-video crash course on the legendary outsider.

The infamous SNL performance of "The Man Who Sold The World". Check Bowie's plastic suit that Nomi would later adopt, as he and Joey Arias sang backup, convinced that night would lead somewhere. (Here's a bonus of Klaus dragging a plastic pink poodle on stage).

A 1982 performance of "The Nomi Song" in the notorious plastic suit. In 2004, Andrew Horn directed a documentary about the life of Klaus Nomi, titled The Nomi Song. The film highlights how Klaus manage to reinvent himself in New York City. This song served as his battle cry, and his fans-turned-friends (affectionately called "the Nomis") would also use it as their manifesto.

Here's the video for Nomi's 1981 cover of Lou Christie's "Lightnin' Strikes". It became something of a tradition for Nomi to take favored pop hits and turn them into avant-garde productions. He also reworked Chubby Checker's "The Twist" from an upbeat celebration of a dance craze to a down-tempo, almost sinisterly seductive song about body contortion. While his cover of "Ding Dong the Witch is Dead" from The Wizard Of Oz is equally odd, it still retains some of the qualities of the original.

Klaus' video for his single "Simple Man". In the video, he's sporting a suit, along with a trench coat, walking around town claiming he's just an everyday guy. At one point during the video he ditches the suit and returns to his plastic tux at a party where everyone is admiring him, but he still seems out of place, hence Klaus' claim that he came from outer space. When he attempted to conform, it didn't work; when he expressed his true self, it still felt otherworldly.

Perhaps Klaus Nomi's most sobering performance, this was his very last time on a stage. Toward the end of his career, Klaus delved deeper into his operatic side, even switching up his attire to appear more theatrical. By the end of 1982, he was deteriorating due to AIDS. His body was covered in lesions, so he would don a baroque-style collar to mask the sores on his neck. This performance of "Cold Genius" (from Henry Purcell's King Arthur) took place six months before he passed, during a European mini-tour. He walked his frail body and tiny legs up the stairs to the microphone, and delivered the performance of his life.

A Bonus to Lighten the Mood: The show "Real People" aired an episode on the Fiorucci store windows in New York City, featuring Klaus and Joey terrifying pedestrians, similar to Michael Alig and the club kids crashing that Geraldo episode 10 years later: