Mac DeMarco is back, and he’s unsurprisingly low-key about it. Yesterday, the recent-ish New York-to-Los Angeles transplant announced his third album, This Old Dog, the follow-up to 2015’s understated Another OneEP and 2014’s slacker odyssey Salad Days. He also shared two lead singles off the new record, the dreamy title track and the drum machine-driven “My Old Man.”

Reached by phone later that day, between morning coffee and plans for a lunch of bánh mì with a friend, DeMarco seems characteristically unfazed by the pressures of a third LP. “Choruses? Fuck a chorus,” he says of the album. “What else? Bridge? I don’t think I've done a bridge on the last three albums.” Expect mainly acoustic guitars, along with plenty of synths—“but they are, like, pretty mellow.” DeMarco talked with Pitchfork about the making of This Old Dog, his take on Star Wars: Rogue One, and more.

For this album, I understand you gave the songs a little bit more time to breathe after you demoed them. Did that affect how they have turned out?

Mac DeMarco: That's the thing, a lot of the songs I did demo in New York, and then kind of had them sit. And then I tried to redo a bunch, because I moved to Los Angeles this summer. What I found was the more I tried to demo stuff, the less I liked it. So what I ended up doing was using a lot of components of the demo recording. That song “This Old Dog” that came out today, that's pretty much just like I recorded it on the floor of my bedroom in New York. I redid the drums and the bass. 

Is this all you playing on the record?

Yeah, it’s all me. The only time I had somebody in this time was, my friend Shags [Chamberlain, who has worked with Ariel Pink, Weyes Blood, and the Avalanches] was here when I was mixing. It was the same as any other time, I guess. The drums are still sloppy. Everything is still sloppy. It's definitely me playing. 

What else can you tell us about the album?

I think my favorite song on the record is the first song from side two, “Dreams From Yesterday.” I tried to do a bossa nova album when I was younger, maybe when I was 20 or something. But that one's a little bit bossa nova-y sounding, I suppose. There are two others on side B, one called “One More Love Song” that has real acoustic piano in it, which I’ve never recorded before. And then “On the Level”... it fits on the album, but it's a little bit different—kind of a sister song to [Salad Days standout] “Chamber of Reflection.”

It’s definitely one of those things where the album makes more sense as a whole, a full thing rather than single, single, single. Which was funny, deciding on the singles, but you know. We chose what we chose. Anyway, it's not up to me to decide.

You and Jon Lent from your band have been covering everybody from Prince to James Taylor. Were you listening to anything in particular that influenced this new one?

When I started writing the record, yeah, I was listening to a ton of James Taylor and a ton of Paul Simon. I kinda had just gotten into James. I knew how huge he is, but I didn’t know a lot of his stuff. But I always listened to Paul. The problem with listening to guys like that is like, “Yeah, cool, I’ll try to do a more acoustic-y sounding record.” These guys have written, like, some of the greatest pop songs of all time! So, yeah, a little hard to emulate, it’s almost frustrating. I mean, you try, but it’s something to reach for, so it’s cool.

What was it like being covered by the guy from “Stranger Things”?

You know, I liked it and thought that it was great. I have texted with him [Finn Wolfhard, who plays Mike Wheeler] a little bit, and he's a really nice dude. It’s pretty wild. I like the show, too. He’s so young [14]!

Last fall you and your whole band performed live dressed as Will Forte’s character from “Saturday Night Live,” MacGruber. How did that come about?

We did Conan O’Brien’s show one time, and Will Forte was the guest. We found out earlier, and Andy [White], my guitarist, is like the biggest MacGruber fan on the planet. We watch MacGruber all the time on tour. But when we got there—it’s weird. We’d never played on TV. They keep you in this cold green room, and Conan O'Brien and Andy Richter walked by. It’s terrifying. So we were too afraid to talk to Will. We blew it. 

So then we played this festival, Festival Supreme, which is run by Jack Black, and Will was performing there. It was near Halloween, so we thought, “Okay, we’ll all dress as Will’s character, and then he won't be able to ignore us." We eventually did meet him. A really charming and nice man! It was maybe a little creepy on our side, but hey, you know.

You like Star Wars so much that you even wrote a review of The Force Awakens. Any thoughts on the newest Star Wars movie, Rogue One? 

I liked it a lot. I know there’s a lot of haters. I thought it was great.

Here’s my opinion on it: It didn’t have to happen. It’s a story that didn't have to be told, but for me, and especially Jon, and Andy that plays in my band, we’re big Star Wars fans. We watch Star Wars even more than we watch MacGruber. And for people like us, it’s kind of like, “Hey, why not?” You know, why not have it? It’s nice because it doesn't really follow the set-in-stone 2017 movie routine where it’s like, okay, set it up for something else, you know? It’s not like, “We’ll only give them half the fun, then they gotta come see the sequel.” It's cut-and-dry. It's just there. That's all it is. See you later. No problem.

Some elements of it were a little jarring for me. I saw it the night before Carrie Fisher passed away, so it was a bit strange to wake up the next day. Rest in peace. Rest her soul, you know, it’s just crazy, but I’m a fan. I’m a fan of the new one, and hopefully the one next year.

You did a Planned Parenthood benefit a year ago. I’m not expecting your album to be like, “Oh, now Mac’s political”—it’s not really your style of songwriting. But is this kind of thing on your mind right now?

I think it's kind of hard for anybody to not really be political these days, but I don’t think the album really reflects that too much. But, you know, I live in the States and things are really crazy right now. I try not to talk about it publicly too much, but just to make a difference in my immediate community instead. But it’s super crazy. My heart goes out to all the people that are feeling super insane, or being prosecuted, or whatever right now.

How do you plan on touring these new songs—full band or alone?

I’ll bring my band, for sure. Usually when I’m doing a record, I keep that in the back of my mind. This time I forgot about that part. So it’s gonna be interesting. It might sound a little bit different than on the record, but I think it will be a fun and cool learning experience to work them out in some way or another. There’s a lot of acoustic guitar on this record. I’m having nightmares about feedback.

Oh also, do you have a dog?

Actually, I’ve never had a dog in my life. I’ve had a lot of cats, and “This Old Cat” doesn’t really ring the same way.

Welcome to Pitchfork's new monthly metal column, where we’ll guide you through the genre’s new music and various happenings with an eye towards a specific theme. This month, somewhat inevitably, that theme is hopelessness. Below you’ll find one of this month’s bleakest stories and some of its best new songs—ones that illustrate metal’s ability to express our uniform sense of hopelessness, by fighting against it or simply providing a soundtrack for living through it. 

The general stigma of metal is that it’s angry music. Yes, a lot of the best metal is angry, but oversimplifying the genre’s reach to just one mood is a disservice to the myriad talents playing heavy music. Metal bands can be sad, playful, romantic—or, as Slayer vocalist Tom Araya proved this month, tone-deaf, mean-spirited, and homophobic. What made Araya’s move upsetting was not just that he sympathized with our fascist head of state and poorly Photoshopped him into an otherwise badass band photo—it’s that, at its best, metal can be used to fight oppression, not benefit from it. Whether in virtuosity, extremity, or even just sheer loudness, heavy music can arm listeners with tools to fight off the kind of world Trump plans on giving us. But with the message he sent, Araya subverted that potential, further alienating those in his audience who needs Slayer’s music more than ever. “This picture did exactly what I thought it would do,” he explained, “Pissed some of you off!” 

Of course, Slayer have always pissed people off. And metal’s ability to offend is precisely what draws in certain listeners. But it’s indicative of the times we’re in that members of the metal community—some of whom still wear Burzum shirts and can be found at Autopsy gigs shouting along to songs about disembowelment—have generally reacted to Araya with disgust. Trump’s disgusting brand of madness is one we do not wish to play with.

While other members of Slayer have spoken out against the post (not the first time Kerry King has covered the band’s ass, as anyone who listened to Repentless can attest), the damage is, in a lot of ways, already done. There’s a reason Slayer stands as one of the genre’s most iconic figures—why their logo is not only represented on battle jackets and T-shirts but also regularly carved into flesh: their music has acted as a symbolic force against evils of the world. Their debut, 1983’s Show No Mercy, arrived during the Reagan administration, making their righteous fury not just novel, but necessary. In one of the band’s most powerful songs, Araya depicted a coming apocalypse: “an unforeseen future buried somewhere in time.” He envisioned a hopeless world filled with chaos and distrust, run on impulse and hate. At the time, it felt safe to assume which side he’d be fighting on, but today, the battle rages on without him.

Shaarimoth // Temple of the Adversarial Fire

We were about halfway through George W.’s second term the last time Norway’s Shaarimoth released an album. It was called Current 11 and it introduced a band as unclassifiable and thrilling as early Celtic Frost: crushing in a totally unpredictable way, shifting between terrifying ambient passages and ripping death-metal powerhouses. Inasmuch as an album can be worth waiting 11 years for, Temple of the Adversarial Fire does not disappoint. Every bit as inspired as its predecessor, the LP is filled with high-drama epics that trudge eerily like an angry mob (“Elevenfolded Wrath Of Sitra Achra”) and thrash chaotically like a colony of ants fleeing under foot (“Ascension Of The Blind Dragon”). By the time it ends with the bizarro clean vocals of “Point of Egress,” you’ll feel dizzy—exhausted, even, though maybe you were already feeling that way.

Me and That Man // “My Church Is Black”

With its acoustic guitars, harmonica breakdowns, and general potential as a “True Detective” theme song, Me and That Man’s “My Church Is Black” might not immediately scan as metal. But “That Man” isn’t just anybody: it’s Nergal, the tough-as-nails Behemoth frontman, without whom most of the bands in this column would not exist (especially Shaarimoth, whose atmospheric death metal owes so much to Behemoth that their band names almost kind of rhyme). The folk-rock stomp of “My Church is Black” is a surprising turn, yes, but one that suits Nergal’s slick baritone and long-standing penchant for odes to the dark lord. With phrases like “all hope is gone” and “no kingdom come,” consider this both an anthem and an elegy, made no less effective by its ability to slide seamlessly between Leonard Cohen and Lucinda Williams on your next road-trip mix.

Planning for Burial // “Whiskey and Wine”

Drinking alone can be relaxing, but it can also be brutal as hell. Holding it down for the latter, Thom Wasluck’s one-man-band Planning for Burial announced the release of his anticipated third album with “Whiskey and Wine,” a lonely, drunken hallucination of a single. This is the gruesome sound of a slow anxiety spiral, somehow made cozier by how much the song’s twee-ish music boxes and lo-fi glaze make it feel like home.

The Ominous Circle // Appalling Ascension

On their debut album Appalling Ascension, the anonymous, leather-clad members of Portugal’s Ominous Circle make ferocious death metal with an atonal edge that pushes it all the more towards total bleakness. A prime example of their gloomy sound appears in album highlight “Poison Fumes,” in which the riff devolves into a two-note dirge that plods along so slowly, you’ll beg for some kind of motion. Feeding into the entirety of the slow, gruesome record, consider this technique the aural equivalent of feeling totally trapped, unsure of how you got here or how you will escape.

King Woman // “Utopia”

King Woman started out as the solo project of Bay Area musician Kristina Esfandiari, who’s since assembled a band as fully formed and vicious as her constantly evolving compositions. Their power is evident in “Utopia,” the first single from their upcoming Relapse debut, Created in the Image of Suffering (out February 24). While everyone involved sounds possessed, rattling and raging like a plane ascending through a storm, Esfandiari stands at the center of the chaos. The song gains its queasy power through her delirious vocal layers, as she slips in and out of key for the chorus’ eerie harmony. In a stately howl, Esfandiari closes the song asking, “Is this really happening?.” It is really happening, but luckily we’ve got King Woman to help us through it.

Dumal // The Lesser God

The sixth track on Pennsylvania black metal trio Dumal’s The Lesser God is a woodsy, instrumental passage called “The Wind Demon.” Composed seemingly entirely from tribal drums and ’80s synths, the song transcends its status as a traditional mid-album interlude while also sounding atmospheric enough to slot into an early Peter Gabriel album. Suffice it to say, “The Wind Demon” is not representative of the rest of The Lesser God, a record whose heaviness and surprising melodic beauty helped it sell out its entire first pressing in less than a month. But the song is representative of just how talented this band is, how good they sound doing just about anything. It’s a surreal nightmare in the middle of an otherwise steady, blacked-out sleep.

In 2015, young R&B phenom Jamal Lyon inked a major endorsement deal with Pepsi. He got his own primetime spot directed by “Empire” creator Lee Daniels, joining the ranks of Michael Jackson, Madonna, Britney Spears, Kanye West, David Bowie, Papa Roach, and more who’ve done marquee ad campaigns for Pepsi. The commercial features Lyon on his way to perform a show, slamming a Pepsi on a New York subway. The train’s all pop-locking and mugging with hyperrealistic joy, alive with the Pepsi Generation once again.

Of course, this didn’t really happen. Or, it did happen, but technically not in real life. Such is the genius of the Pepsi-Cola Company and its marketing department, who placed this meta ad inside the a three-episode arc on season two of Fox’s “Empire.” The fictional Jamal Lyon (played by Jussie Smollett) landing an endorsement deal with Pepsi in afake-but-real commercial (yes, directed by Lee Daniels) is perhaps the most self-aware and self-fulfilling campaign in the history of Pepsi’s unscrupulous advertising department.

For nearly 60 years, Pepsi’s mission has been to tie its soda inextricably to modern music and the aspiration of youth culture. Pepsi’s unchallenged relationship with musicians is so ingrained in our culture that it exists in a fictional universe as a means to sell real Pepsi in our real universe. As the old revenue streams for musicians dry up and as capitalism barrels on, is it possible now to separate the value of Pepsi from the value of the music playing alongside it? Moreover, is this separation something young music consumers, perhaps estranged to the very concept of selling out, can do?

The annual Pepsi Super Bowl Halftime Show is billed and received as the ne plus ultra cultural event of the year. One hundred million people glue themselves to four hours of television on this the high holiest day of advertising—and Pepsi has top billing. This Sunday will be Lady Gaga’s first grand stadium performance since launching a small rock-club tour behind the so-called rootsy authenticity of latest album Joanne (a tour that was thoroughly sponsored by Bud Light, by the way). Much like two of her inspirations, Madonna and Jeff Koons, Gaga delights in confounding art and commerce. She presents herself as an artist of fascinating intersection: just a gawky theatre kid now worth $275 million; just a New York cabaret singer who was once carried by a litter of men in a translucent pod to the Grammys.

With PepsiCo’s CEO Indra Nooyi sitting on President Trump’s Strategic and Policy Forum (the one Uber’s CEO recently exited), it’s unclear whether politics, broadly, will be involved in Gaga’s show. But if she goes off script and decries Trump as America’s own kleptocratic pustule and turns Super Bowl Sunday into St. Crispin’s Day, Pepsi’s ad department will no doubt offer a cheshire grin. Surely they didn’t blanch at the outrage surrounding Beyoncé’s Black Panther bandoliers last year because how could they, really? Pepsi has historically made their bones selling brown sugar water by invading and subverting counterculture.

Pepsi’s innovation in the field of nestling, settling, and establishing connections in pop culture began in 1960 with their first major ad campaign aimed at the youth market. Always playing second fiddle to Coca-Cola, the “Pepsi. For Those Who Think Young” approach was devised as a way to shed them of their underdog status. Pepsi realized that they were essentially a parity product, whose difference in taste and quality with Coca-Cola was seen as negligible (a specious claim to this day, but whatever). So in a revolutionary move at the time, they began to run ads that focused not on the quality of Pepsi, but the idea of Pepsi as a youth staple. In the early ’60s, ads for Pepsi were aimed at young boomers who “consumed soft drinks far in excess of their weight in population,” a former Pepsi executive noted, as found in Timothy Taylor’s book The Sound of Capitalism: Advertising, Music, and the Conquest of Culture.

“Pepsi was way ahead of the curve,” now says Taylor, a professor of social science and musicology at UCLA and the author of several books on music and capitalism. “Their early efforts to capture the youth market were clunky, but they were smart in trying to do that. They knew baby boomers were out there, and wanted to make their soft drink cool to them.”  

By 1964, the Cola Wars were gathering steam, and Pepsi had launched their now infamous campaign “Come Alive! You’re the Pepsi Generation.” The printads featured hip, attractive kids with rapturous smiles, looking the pink of youth, sharing a Pepsi. “For us to name and claim a whole generation after our product was a rather courageous thing,” Alan Pottasch, head of advertising at Pepsi in the ’60s, would later recall. But this decision to claim an entire countercultural generation in opposition to the placid homogeneity of the ’50s would prove wildly successful for the rest of Pepsi’s career. “What you drank said something about who you were,” Pottasch continued. “We painted an image of our consumer as active, vital, and young at heart.” (Pepsi declined to comment for this story.)

Rock’n’roll, civil rights, and the Vietnam War were implanted in the zeitgeist of the late ’60s, so Pepsi bottled those spirits and poured them into its 1969 campaign, “You’ve Got A Lot To Live, and Pepsi’s Got a Lot To Give.” With a new theme song written by Joe Brooks (who would go on to write the hit ’70s ballad “You Light Up My Life”), Pepsi now sold liberation, idyllic societies free of commerce, and the sound of the Beatles dabbed with the spirit of Timothy Leary. In a release at the time, Pepsi described the tones of these new ads: “Exciting new groups doing out-of-sight new things to and for music. It’s youth’s bag and Pepsi-Cola is in it. There’s a whole new way of livin’ and Pepsi’s supplyin’ the background music…[it] obliterates the generation gap and communicates like a guru.”

Johnny Cash, B.B. King, Tammy Wynette, and Three Dog Night were among the artists who sang “You’ve Got a Lot To Live” for radio ads in the early ’70s. It was Pepsi’s entrée into the music industry, and the beginning of their seamless integration to sell the Pepsi Generation via musicians. The upshot here was that this was not all bad for black artists who, finally, had a global brand co-signing their mass appeal. “Many of these musicians are African American,” says Taylor, “and when Pepsi started using black musicians in the late ’60s, black musicians were for the most part happy to sign on because for them it represented mainstream acceptance.”

As Pepsi worked to tie their product to every demographic of the growing Gen X generation, they crashed through a whole new ceiling in 1984 when they paid Michael Jackson a reported $5 million for a commercial. That campaign would once again shift the culture of advertising and music. Jackson’s Thriller coup at MTV and family-friendly celebrity status made the new spot one of Pepsi’s first must-watch events for millions. Allen Rosenshine, the worldwide CEO of BBDO (Pepsi’s longtime ad agency), imagined the target audience to be between 12 and 24. “You can’t ignore the world of music if you wish to be the badge of the leading edge of youth,” he said (via The Sound of Capitalism). “...They express themselves through music, they live through music; MTV is not an isolated phenomenon. So if we’re going to be leading edge, we have to be in music.”

As soon as Jackson sang “You’re the Pepsi Generation” as a hellacious parody of the chorus of “Billie Jean,” Pepsi’s full integration was all but complete. Ninety-seven percent of the American public saw a version of that commercial at least a dozen times in the space of a year and Pepsi’s sales skyrocketed. Jackson was approached by Pepsi again in 1987 for a reported $15 million to do another campaign that premiered with resounding success on MTV.

These mega-deals opened the floodgates for musicians who saw Pepsi as the mecca of brand endorsement, from Madonna’s infamous “Like A Prayer” debut with the brand, to Ray Charles’ early ‘90s campaign, to Mariah Carey’s “original ringtones” spot, to Nicki Minaj’s ad built around her “Moment 4 Life,” to Beyoncé, who famously pocketed $50 million from Pepsi in 2013 for yet another ad—and that’s just the shortlist. An endorsement deal with Pepsi would put you in the pantheon of some of the most critically and commercially successful artists of all time. It’s quite a bulwark against the once gauche idea of selling out.

If there still exists two separate states of art and commerce, they are often smeared together by the marketing concept of creativity: the extremely clever ad, the artist-facing sponsored content, the spectacular Pepsi Super Bowl Halftime Show. As long as there is the appearance of creativity, the brand underwriting the show will fade into the background and the consumer will fawn upon its aesthetic bona fides. It may even be truly transcendent, leaping from mere creativity to high art. We were awed by Beyoncé’s cameo last year, and downright floored by her headlining spot in 2013. All Lady Gaga has to do capture our attention for about ten minutes, and the line between Pepsi and its musicians, between art and brands, will remain mostly hidden.

The “it’s complicated” relationship between art and commerce perpetuated by musicians and brands alike do not make for an easy and prescriptive response in 2017. But there is power nestled, settled, and established in consumers as well. Instead of waging war against capitalism, the consumer can siphon power from brands by looking at how other systems, like fandom or activism, create value and agency outside of capitalism. “ Virtually all the musicians I know are dying to get noticed by capitalism, but they’re not,” Taylor tells me. “On one hand we need to keep capitalism in focus because it’s the dominant system and because it’s exploitative. On the other hand, we need to learn how to better appreciate and notice other ways value is produced and say, ‘These are legitimate too.’”

Meanwhile, Pepsi now has a direct line to Trump and continues to position itself to be one of the Medicis of music’s future. The company recently launched The Sound Drop, a sort of promotional pipeline for artists gestating under the major labels, including Jidenna, Lukas Graham, and Alessia Cara. The platform uses MTV, Shazam, and iHeartMedia to push songs to a wider audience using a very artist-centered soft-branded approach. Pepsi also recently opened the Kola House in Manhattan, a club and cocktail lounge that serves as a “modern hub for consumers to share social and immersive experiences that were anchored in the exploration of our cola’s artisanal craft and flavor.”LCD Soundsystem played its opening in September. In front of an invite-only crowd with Swizz Beats and JB Smoove, playing with no logos behind them are anything, you could barely tell it was put on by Pepsi. In a way, it was transcendent.  

Earlier this week, Beyoncé Knowles-Carter commandeered everyone’s Instagram feeds when she posted a now-iconic photograph announcing her pregnancy with twins. She’s seen kneeling and surrounded by an aura of flowers—both a pose and a set of references that emphasize her fertility. More than the photograph’s composition, Bey’s image underscores this contemporary moment where the model, as both patron and matriarch, can control the dissemination of her likeness to a broad audience via social media. In a culture now in the throes of appropriation from historical sources, in the midst of trying to figure out what the future holds, what are we to make of these luxurious maternity photos of one of the world’s most famous women?

Awol Erizku’s photograph is now part of a series on Beyoncé’s website under the title “I Have Three Hearts.” The accompanying text, written by poet Warsan Shire (whose work Bey also quotes in her Lemonade film), intersperses lines like, “Mother has one foot in this world and one foot in the next, mother black venus” and “Venus has flooded me,” among family pictures and photo sets from not just Erizku, but Kaleb Steele and Daniela Vesco as well. Here the emphasis is doubly referential to her position as a mother and the allegorical embodiment of love—a “black Venus.”

Awol Erizku’s photograph is now part of a series on Beyoncé’s website under the title “I Have Three Hearts.” The accompanying text, written by poet Warsan Shire (whose work Bey also quotes in her Lemonade film), intersperses lines like, “Mother has one foot in this world and one foot in the next, mother black venus” and “Venus has flooded me,” among family pictures and photo sets from not just Erizku, but Kaleb Steele and Daniela Vesco as well. Here the emphasis is doubly referential to her position as a mother and the allegorical embodiment of love—a “black Venus.”

We would like to share our love and happiness. We have been blessed two times over. We are incredibly grateful that our family will be growing by two, and we thank you for your well wishes. - The Carters

A photo posted by Beyoncé (@beyonce) on Feb 1, 2017 at 10:39am PST

These homages to Venus recur through the ages. There is, of course, Sandro Botticelli’s 15th-century painting TheBirth of Venus, which shows the goddess of love, sensuality and procreation at its center while winds blow roses at her feet and violets freckle the landscape. The ubiquity of this image—appearing in posters hung on the rooms of young girls across the world—has become a touchstone for artists interested in the aggrandizement of images of love. Venus (or her Greek equivalent, Aphrodite) is no submissive pet but an astute interceder in world events. Who do you think started the Trojan War?

Venus as shown by Botticelli was not new then, and it is not new now. Rather, it draws from the 4th century B.C.E. via the sculpture Aphrodite of Knidos, a Hellenistic depiction of the goddess that is groundbreaking because it marks the rise of the female nude in art. Before that, the nude male body was considered of superior beauty. In the photographs, Beyoncé shares with these other Venuses a modesty often found in the historical female nude. She is not naked. Her hands cradle her breasts and protuberant belly, and in some instances she dons demure knickers.

Even enveloped in all this history, it is the more contemporary references within these photos that hammer away at the viewer. Erizku seems to echo celebrated New York portraitist Kehinde Wiley’s process of substituting black bodies into historical paintings. But unlike Wiley’s depictions, there is an attempt here at timelessness rather than timeliness. Erizku is no stranger to this kind of iconographic mashup—see his well-known 2009 work Girl With a Bamboo Earring, which reinterprets Jan Vermeer’s iconic Girl with a Pearl Earring with a modern black model.

Despite the mostly wholesome nature of the “I Have Three Hearts” photographs, there is also a windswept, Koons-esque flavor to the set. Jeff Koons also grappled with Botticelli’s Birth of Venus in his depiction of his wife La Cicciolina in his Made in Heaven series. In these images, we witness the couple’s intimacy and revel in a florid arena of Rococo-like fantasy. Koons would go on to collaborate with Lady Gaga on an ARTPOP cover inspired by, among other artworks, Birth of Venus. On some level, all these contemporary jaunts play off each other.

I am also struck by the tropical and Meso-American touchstones within Erizku’s photographs. Beyoncé’s figure and staging at once evoke another great conveyer of multi-faceted femininity: Frida Kahlo. Kahlo’s nudes, as purveyors of nuture and the calamities of nature, get at the intertwinement of Beyoncé’s images of personal life with her own celebrity. Kahlo’s personal hardships (miscarriages, affairs, a disability) coupled with her very public relationship with her then-more-famous-husband Diego Rivera became her subject matter. Beyoncé’s family photos tow this line of letting you in and keeping you out. Their closest visual precursors are Rivera’s Nude with Flowers (Veiled Woman), from 1943, or even his Sunflowers, from 1921, with its depiction of a kneeling black woman encircled by flowers (seen below).

Ultimately, this brings us back to the “black Venus,” a term used to describe Saartjie Baartman, or as she was commonly known in 19th century France, the Hottentot Venus. While on display in England, Baartman was admired and ridiculed by British audiences for her curvaceous derrière. Baartman, who ultimately was enslaved in her later years in France, represents the darker side of Venus’ legacy. Rumors linking Beyoncé to an upcoming Baartman biopic turned out to be false, but perhaps they surfaced for telling reasons. Baartman encapsulated the more prurient desires that English Victorian male audiences claimed to disavow. Erizku’s images of Beyoncé carry with them the weight of these historical references, yet the artist’s mega-stardom guarantees her agency in a way that Baartman could never have achieved.

Beyoncé’s verecund pose (veil and all) and obvious fecundity (fruitfully round belly) also distracts from the most striking feature of the “I Have Three Hearts” series: Beyoncé is no shrinking violet, nor a come-hither courtesan. She stares directly at you. She is in charge.

In another era, these photographs would have been commissioned by Jay Z and kept for his own pleasure, akin to the way that Camillo Borghese kept the sculptural portrait of his wife (and Napoleon Bonaparte’s sister) Paolina away from public view due to her semi-nude state. Beyoncé emulates Paolina Borghese’s victorious pose in one photograph from the series (seen up top), in which she drapes across a low couch. The pose, taken from Ancient Roman reclining nudes on lecti (beds for dining and entertaining), has its closest source in Antonio Canova’s triumphant portrayal of Paolina Borghese as Venus Victrix (or Venus Victorious), from 1808. In fact, some of our most frequently referenced nudes were intended for private delectation. I like thinking of Courbet’s Origin of the World, or Titian’s Venus of Urbino, which was commissioned by the Duke of Urbino of his young wife and for his viewing pleasure. The latter (seen below) is a key examplebecause it servedasone source for Canova’s reclining Venus; let’s call it the grandfather of Beyoncé’s portrait.

Beyoncé as subject, patron, and distributor of her image speaks to her agency, and it is a staggering level of power available to few women throughout history, such as Nefertiti and Queen Elizabeth I. So it is no coincidence that in one of the photographs, a bust of Nefertiti sits on the floor facing away from Beyoncé. The accompanying text reads, “In the dream I am crowning, Osun, Nefertiti and Yemoja, pray around my bed.”

“Beyoncé is the readymade who seemingly gets us closest to a vision of black female agency, black female pleasure,” Columbia Professor Saidiya Hartman once surmised of Bey’s superstardom. Power and pleasure coupled together. There are few portraits of black women by women, with so many others falling into the category of exoticizing fantasies of the male gaze. So while Erizku took Beyoncé’s portrait, he did it in a way that sustains her agency. For one, we know he was already enthralled by her in 2014, when he pulled inspiration from Jay Z’s declaration that “Beyoncé is Mona Lisa with better features” to create a bearded, Duchamp-inspired interpretation of her H&M ad. And at this point, Beyoncé partakes in visual endeavors where she maintains creative control.

Her name reverberates even in the academic world. Last Saturday, sitting on the steps of the Anderson Collection at Stanford, I watched my fellow art historians eat lunches from pink cardboard boxes while scrolling through their Instagram feeds. “The world is falling apart,” said Aimee Shapiro, Director of Programming at the Anderson. “Yes. Maybe we need to recognize that in the contemporary moment, works of art now come from many different places—perhaps ‘The Wire’ is just as culturally trenchant as Courbet’s Burial at Ornan,” replied NYU professor Robert Slifkin, speaking of the painting’s elevation of rural folk to the revered status of history.

Stanford Professor Marci Kwon had just emphatically quoted a memorable bit from Ralph Lemon’sScaffold Room in a presentation: “There’s a Beyoncé in every universe so that if and when the world ends, she’ll be replicated into infinity.” I laughed at this second reference to the world ending because for now, outside of these walls, it was at least crumbling. We had come here hoping to change the shape of art history, but found ourselves at a remove from history happening now.  The Muslim ban and subsequent protests had taken over our feeds, but only Beyoncé would manage to break through the hyper-political and polarized moment over the next few days. Perhaps she would be replicated into infinity.  

Which brings us to what the power of these photos really is. One has to wonder if the depiction of Beyoncé as Venus might seem the epitome of a culture entrenched in narcissism, in which social media only amplifies its self-obsession. Can the power of celebrity (branding and fashion) really equate with that of queens or the cults devoted to Venus (leadership and divine protection)? Must we recognize images rising to the highest level of popularity as deserving of sustained attention because of their iconicity across social strata? Perhaps only time will tell if Beyoncé’s power widens the lexicon of beauty and female control of their image for girls and women who aspire to be just like her—a dragon breathing fire, with beautiful mane, like a lion. But what we know now, and perhaps knew on some level before, is that Beyoncé is a Venus of our times.

“Oh my gosh, you can see all my bubbles!”

Teena Lemieux is watching Grimes and Janelle Monáe’s “Venus Fly” video for the first time. She is very psyched. Because, along with some cyberpunk regalia and flame-tinged swords, it’s Lemieux’s bubbles that make this epic video really, you know, pop. Her bubbles are not normal bubbles—in the clip released via Tidal last week, Lemieux’s creations fill with smoke, burst into flames, and envelope Grimes’ entire body. And Lemieux is not a normal bubble lover—she is a self-proclaimed “bubbleologist” who has studied her unique craft for nearly a decade.  

Known professionally as Miss T the Bubble Queen, the Ontario-based artist has brought her trademark Bubbleology Show to Canadian TV, festivals, schools, children’s cancer camps, along with plenty of birthdays and weddings. So when Grimes’ team reached out to her a few months ago, she was ready. 

Pitchfork: What did you think when you got the offer to do this Grimes video?

Teena Lemieux: I was honored to demonstrate my art with someone else who appreciated it. Bubbles are special—they’re like smiles. I’m the only one in Canada who does this. There’s no book out there, it’s all practice. I heard Grimes loves bubbles and she saw all these scientific marvels that I do with them—I could do everything she wanted. She was excited to have a bubbleologist in her video.

Were you nervous on set?

Not really, but everything relied on the bubbles working—every scene had bubbles in it. Bubbles only last a second, so I had to get this one massive bubble—or millions of floating things—in the right position at the right time.

There’s one scene where Grimes sets fire to a bubble in her hand. It looks dangerous.

[laughs] It’s not dangerous at all, you don’t even feel it. It only ignites the gas for a second.

How do you make a bubble like that one?

It’s top secret! It’s based on my own scientific studies!

How did you teach Grimes to work with your bubbles?

If you wet your hand you can hold a bubble. That’s it. If your hand is dry, you’ll pop the bubble. Everyone knows that.

Are your bubbles more durable than normal bubbles?

Mine are totally different—do you want to be a bubbleologist?

I am curious about it. When I saw your name listed under that title in the credits, I was like, What the hell is a bubbleologist?!

It sounds scientific! What are you?

I’m a writer.

So you’re a writerologist!

How do you think the bubbles factor into the video conceptually?

Bubbles represent moments, or other worlds, or ideas or thoughts floating around, so you gotta go get ’em, otherwise they’ll float away or pop. So those bubbles were all Grimes’ moments.

Would you want to do more Grimes videos?

Of course, I could see bubbles in all of her videos! And I’d like to be onstage during a Grimes concert. Do you think the people who love her music would like to see the bubbles?

Yes, I do.

Lady Gaga, an artist who has always expressed herself through sound bites as much as song lyrics, didn’t have much to say at last night’s Super Bowl LI Halftime Show. But midway through her performance, she did take a moment to tell the crowd at Houston’s NRG Stadium, and the roughly 112 million viewers watching at home, “We’re here to make you feel good.”

By then, she had already performed her most explicitly political song, the queer anthem “Born This Way”—and become, in all likelihood, the first singer to say the word “transgender” during a Super Bowl telecast. As solemn audience members waved golden lights, she then launched into the country-tinged ballad “Million Reasons.” Released as a single on Election Day, the song contains such explicitly religious lyrics as, “When I bow down to pray/I try to make the worst seem better/Lord, show me the way.”

Inevitably, reviews began appearing on Twitter even before Gaga ended her hits-driven performance by screaming “Super Bowl Fifty-One!,” dropping the mic, and catching a football. By almost all accounts, she really did succeed at making our scared, angry, and perhaps irreparably fractured nation feel good for about 15 minutes.

WOW. Amazing.@ladygaga's #PepsiHalftime Show! :clap:#SB51https://t.co/z9vCKRBKkC

— NFL (@NFL) February 6, 2017

“Wasn’t sure what to expect with everything going on,” tweeted 2016 Republican presidential hopeful, staunch conservative and occasional Trump critic Marco Rubio. “But that was quite a show by @ladyGaga one of best #SuperBowl shows I can remember.” Hillary Clinton was just as impressed: “I'm one of 100 million #SuperBowl fans that just went #Gaga for the Lady, & her message to all of us,” she gushed. Other satisfied viewers included Joe Biden, Ivanka Trump, and outspoken Bernie Bro Mark Ruffalo. Meanwhile, as Breitbart’s alt-right culture warriors were pronouncing Gaga’s set acceptably apolitical, the newly minted resistance leaders at Teen Vogue were chiding readers, “If You Think Lady Gaga's Super Bowl Performance Wasn't Political, You Missed the Point.”

Incredible performance by @ladygaga#PepsiHalftime#SuperBowl

— Ivanka Trump (@IvankaTrump) February 6, 2017

One of pop music’s greatest powers is its ability to unite broad swathes of a public that can’t agree on much of anything—usually under the umbrella of vague, universal emotions like love, ecstasy, and melancholy. But American pop culture has, in the past several years, become more politicized than it had been since the civil rights and anti-war struggles of the 1960s. Many of 2016’s best (and best-selling) albums explicitly celebrated identities that diverge from the straight, white, Christian, male minority to which our new president’s so-called populism appeals. These days, it’s grown difficult to say much of anything (or say nothing, in Taylor Swift’s case) in the public sphere without pissing off either the right or the left. Beyoncé didn’t even have to speak to set off a Fox News temper tantrum at last year’s Super Bowl Halftime Show; she only had to perform a song that praised her “Negro nose,” flanked by a crew of black, female dancers in Black Panther-style berets.

So, how did Lady Gaga manage to vaguely please just about every faction of an audience nearly as large as America’s voting public? Surely (and depressingly), her whiteness alone helped soothe racists anxious to interpret every artist of color’s raised fist or Black Lives Matter T-shirt as a call to violent revolution. In fact, her glittery, revealing, but not at all outré costumes and surprisingly minimalist, American flag-themed stage set represent dozens of missed opportunities to make an explicit partisan statement. In another apparent attempt to avoid controversy, she cleaned up even the relatively apolitical hits she performed. An abbreviated take on “Poker Face” allowed Gaga to get in her Texas shout-out without scandalizing anyone with her bluffin’ muffin. Although she and her dancers seemed to be trolling the game a bit by performing “Bad Romance” in campy football drag, this edit of the song was conspicuously free of “rear window” innuendos.     

Sure, a handful of credible left-leaning critics rightly accused a rarely subtle artist of playing it safe, while others cringed at her repetition of well-intentioned but offensive lyrics that refer to Asian people as “Orient” and Latina heritage as “Chola descent,” in a rather inelegant rhyme. But most of the liberals in my Twitter feed simply cheered her choice to perform “Born This Way”—a bland, Madonna-lite love letter to human biodiversity that suddenly (and worryingly) sounds more subversive now than it did upon its release in 2011.   

That “Born This Way” raised so few right-wing eyebrows may be a sign that Obama-era progress on queer and trans rights was more permanent than some might worry. But Christian conservatives who may have otherwise been put off by Gaga’s unwavering advocacy for the LGBT community (like Gaga’s fellow Catholic, Rubio) likely also appreciated her many invocations of God. Not only is “Million Reasons” a sort of prayer, but “Born This Way” justifies its embrace of diversity with the lyric, “God makes no mistakes,” and a verse in which Gaga recalls her mother telling her, “There's nothing wrong with loving who you are… ‘Cause He made you perfect, babe.” “God” was even the first word of her performance, which kicked off with a medley of “God Bless America” and “This Land Is Your Land.”

What’s remarkable is that Gaga’s decision to open with these early-20th-century hymns to American exceptionalism felt just as political as “Born This Way.” In any other year, those selections might have come across as safe crowd pleasers—or even appeals to a brand of patriotism that had become the exclusive province of flag-waving conservatives in the years since 9/11. But, as many have pointed out, “This Land” was written by avowed socialist Woody Guthrie, and its inclusive vision of America has made it a fixture of recent pro-immigrant protests. There’s even a bit of relevant subtext to “God Bless America,” whose author, Irving Berlin, was a Jewish immigrant. Trump voters may not have heard those dog whistles, but plenty of viewers on the left certainly did.

It was a performance that, at least for a few minutes, united the tens of millions of Americans who believe in bans and walls with the tens of millions who believe that our nation should remain open to the world’s tired, poor, and huddled masses yearning to breathe free. But it also revealed how quickly and dramatically our national conversation around patriotism has changed. With Trump praising Putin and defying the Constitution in the name of making America great again, while activists on the left don Statue of Liberty crowns and appropriate Pledge of Allegiance words like “indivisible,” love of country is suddenly more ripe for liberal reclamation than it has been since before the Red Scare.

In this context, Gaga’s decision to quote the Pledge’s “indivisible” line at the beginning of her performance doesn’t seem like a mistake. Which isn’t to say that fans who were disappointed by her lack of a brave or brazen move—of the sort that we’ve seen celebrities make at a string of recent award shows—are wrong. But there’s no question that there was a sly political statement behind the Halftime Show’s Americana theme—a message of hope to the left, if not a pithy attack on the right. For those of us who are already aware of the new connotations to the word “indivisible,” and see ourselves as part of the project of reclaiming American identity, her stars-and-stripes pastiche resonated as a low-key endorsement of a new brand of patriotism.

David Axelrod, who passed away over the weekend at age 83, was for a while something of an unsung hero of production and arrangement. During his most active years, from 1963 to 1970, he was an A&R man and producer for Capitol Records, with his two biggest commercial successes coming in the form of Lou Rawls' velvet-smooth R&B and Julian “Cannonball” Adderley's funk-crossover soul-jazz. Through those two artists, you get a strong sense of what Axelrod was capable of bringing to the table: a composer and arranger as comfortable with grand symphonic gestures as he was with direct-hit funk. He could make a record sound like it belonged in a small country church or a massive cathedral, whether the spirituality was explicitly divine or subsumed in something more personal. Aside from Isaac Hayes, virtually nobody's compositions could hit that sweet spot between “beautiful music” opulence, uncannily strange pop-psychedelia, and deeper-than-deep soul quite like Axelrod.

Despite his hitmaker status for Rawls and Adderley, it was Axelrod's more idiosyncratic work that caught a good amount of latter-day notice. In 1968 alone, he helmed production for “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” actor/easy listening instrumentalist David McCallum, South African Apartheid exile and jazz singer Letta Mbulu, and garage-psych Nuggets favorites the Electric Prunes, whom he tried to refashion as an intersection of classical, religious, and acid-rock music. Many of Axelrod’s collaborators were among the era’s most accomplished and well-traveled studio musicians, but the remarkable thing about him was that his uniquely sacred and poetic sense of pop-classical crossover shone through in them.

It was that air of majestic intensity around Axelrod’s music that inevitably made him an all-timer in the hip-hop world. As the raw funk that held sway in ’80s production started to make room for more jazz-based and cinematic orchestral influences in the early ’90s, music that Axelrod brought into the world—whether as a producer for others, or a writer and arranger of his own material—became every bit as sought after as that of Ohio Players or Roy Ayers. He was favored by East Coast boom-bap practitioners and West Coast G-funk creators of both the underground and multi-platinum variety. Axelrod's second life as a hitmaker through hip-hop was perhaps even more productive than his initial run at Capitol—to the point where it feels almost obligatory to discuss them both in tandem.

David McCallum, “The Edge” (1967)

One of the most frequently-sampled Axelrod productions, “The Edge” and its immediately recognizable water-drip plink-plink twang are almost impossible to separate from its role in hip-hop. While Dre’s “The Next Episode” was not the first cut to take advantage of “The Edge”—Godfather Don's murky ’98 remix of Scaramanga's "Death Letter" previously had been the most notable track to use it—the wide-open way that Dre interpolated “The Edge” for this 2001 highlight feels like the one that really gets it the earliest. That slinky guitar figure is all the track technically needs, but the way Dre preserves the original cut's massive “at the sound of the tone the time will be 100 o'clock” opening fanfare feels like professional courtesy from one Los Angeles music auteur to another. Masta Ace's “No Regrets,” the Domingo-produced closing track from his masterful self-reflection concept record Disposable Arts, is able to find another angle entirely, seizing on the more nuanced, mournful elements of the relatively quieter, flute-laced moments on “The Edge.” Not bad for a track Axelrod slipped onto McCallum'sMusic: A Bit More of Mebecause he knew the singer’s face alone would guarantee enough record sales to excuse a little experimentation.

The Electric Prunes, “General Confessional” (1968)

Their name was on the cover, but the crossover between the Electric Prunes who hit paydirt with the psychedelic classic “I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night)” two years earlier and the “Electric Prunes” that composer/arranger Axelrod and producer Dave Hassinger credited for Release of an Oath was approximately nil. Their previous album, Mass in F Minor, had started out as an attempt to get the Prunes on board with Axelrod's vision of a classically-indebted take on psychedelic progressive rock, not unlike what the Moody Blues had done the year before with their pioneering Days of Future Passed. But the band struggled with the complex material, and had disbanded completely by the time Axelrod returned to the studio with some of the session players he'd also brought on to finish F Minor. Fortunately, keyboardist Don Randi, guitarist Howard Roberts, bassist Carol Kaye, and drummer Earl Palmer could all be considered the most omnipresent musicians of the ’60s and ’70s, especially relative to their general anonymity back then, so it could be said that Axelrod traded up personnel-wise. The intense hymnal slow-build of cuts like "General Confessional" paired well with Axelrod's ear for hooky basslines, emphatic rhythms, and wall-of-sound melodies, giving hip-hop producers plenty to choose from, whether they wanted a simmering weed-church haze (The Beatnuts' “Niggaz Know”), a heavy-hitting speaker-rattler (Black Moon's “Duress”), or a skulking midpoint between the two (Wu-Tang Clan's “The Monument”).

David Axelrod, “The Human Abstract” (1969)

The same year that Release of an Oath gave Axelrod a breakthrough album in all but name, his own debut, Song of Innocence, gave a more prominent credit to what he'd been doing as a composer, arranger, and producer over the previous year and change. Every single one of the seven tracks on the William Blake-inspired LP and the vast majority of its companion followup, Songs of Experience, has been sampled at least once by an all-time great producer—including Pete Rock, DJ Premier, J Dilla, Lord Finesse, Diamond D, Buckwild, Swizz Beats, DJ Muggs, The Alchemist, and Madlib. None quite compared with what DJ Shadow did when he got ahold of “The Human Abstract” in 1996, intricately reshaping the track while still retaining the original mood. Shadow’s “Midnight in a Perfect World” isolated the piano from the beginning of “The Human Abstract,” laced it with fusion-jazz samples resembling those of mid-’70s Axelrod, and turned it into the lonely soul at the heart of Endtroducing….. The divinity that stood out in Axelrod's arrangements was captured with a quiet simplicity, pitched up just enough to shine a light on another approach to its mournful emotion.  

The Cannonball Adderley Quintet, “Walk Tall” (1969)

Before Axelrod himself became a cratedigger favorite, his role in ushering Cannonball Adderley into the crossover-friendly world of soul-jazz made his production touch a good match for hip-hop right as its golden age was starting to hit a stride. Two classic debut albums of Afrocentric NYC hip-hop that were conceived and recorded as the ’80s flipped to the ’90s—A Tribe Called Quest's People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm and Brand Nubian's All for One—wound up finding two unique angles on the Axelrod-produced Adderley cut that opened his Quintet's 1969 album Country Preacher—a cut introduced by a young Reverend Jesse Jackson, no less. Given both Axelrod's repeated returns to religious themes in his music and his own upbringing in a largely black part of south central Los Angeles in the ’30s and ’40s, it's interesting to hear these brushes with spiritual activism linked up with latter-day expressions. Tribe overlaid the titular clip of Jackson's “Walk Tall” speech alongside Stevie Wonder/Donald Byrd riffs and Q-Tip at his most joyously abstract on “Footprints.” Brand Nubian leaned on that uplifting Joe Zawinul-led keyboard riff in “Concerto in X Minor” while explicitly calling out the institutional brutality—police and otherwise—that generations before and after would continue to fight.

Lou Rawls, “You've Made Me So Very Happy” (1970)

Prince Paul-era De La Soul did more than just about any other golden-age hip-hop act to incorporate music-historian enthusiasm into their personalities, which is why there are levels upon levels in their usage of Lou Rawls' Axelrod-produced version of “You've Made Me So Very Happy” for Buhloone Mindstate cut “I Am I Be” and its companion piece, “I Be Blowin'.” Originally a yearning Tamla classic by Brenda Holloway in ’67—which then became a hugely successful slab of jazz-rock pomp for Blood, Sweat & Tears in ’69—Rawls and Axelrod aimed to split the difference between the original and the hit, offering a more nuanced and deeply grooved take on a pop-friendly army-of-horns arrangement than BS&T could pull off. Since Prince Paul is something of a wiseass even when he's creating one of his most beautiful beats, he took that characteristic Axelrod chord progression at the beginning, built a loop around it, and presumably decided that he'd have to pull out all the stops to top that horn section. So he called in Fred Wesley, Maceo Parker, and Pee Wee Ellis, because hearing live James Brown Revue horns over an Axelrod beat is a total blank-check dream for any hip-hop producer worth his crates.

David Axelrod, “Terri's Tune” (1977)

When Axelrod jumped ship from Capitol in the early ’70s, his sound took a gradual turn away from the baroque. He hewed closer to the soul-jazz and funk he'd shown in his productions for Adderley—still tautly composed and arranged, but teeming with further possibilities of improvisation. As much as hip-hop producers have favored his Cannonball Adderley collaborations, Axelrod's tendency to get a little more commercial with his increasingly fusion-friendly albums (1974's Heavy Axe, 1975's Seriously Deep, and 1977's Strange Ladies) shouldn't have been such a deal-breaker. Still, the Strange Ladies cut “Terri's Tune” is the closest that post-Capitol Axelrod came to creating a go-to sample source, and its build from icy vibraphone-and-bass minimalism to a wobbly-ankled wah-wah guitar/piano melody to dissonant conspiracy-thriller funk has all the potential in the world. That “Terri’s Tune’s” biggest moment in the spotlight was a 99-second deep cut on a wall-to-wall legendary Ghostface album feels kind of unfair, even if its previous incarnation as Inspectah Deck's “Elevation” at least benefited from a redo with Tony Starks at his peak. Even Showbiz and A.G.'s “Check It Out” just used “Terri’s Tune” for some isolated vibe notes. Dig further and you'll find some gems that make the most of it, though, like Real Live’s “Trilogy of Error” or Freestyle Fellowship member Myka 9's “American Nightmare.”

David Axelrod, “The Dr. & the Diamond” (2001)

Axelrod's comeback after a long hiatus was punctuated by the sort of album that perfectly fit the reputation of a man whose legacy was not just preserved but amplified by the rise of sample culture. His 2001 self-titled album, issued by Mo' Wax—the same label that put out Axelrod-sampling albums like DJ Shadow's Endtroducing….. and UNKLE's Psyence Fiction—is where Axelrod himself finally gets a shot at recontextualizing his old music. In this case, he unearthed the acetate of an unfinished Electric Prunes project based around Goethe's Faust and recorded additional instrumentation over it, reworking a long-lost concept into a statement about revisiting his legacy. It's personal in a lot of ways—the most striking being an album-closing final collaboration with Lou Rawls, “Loved Boy,” about his son who died at 17—but it's also a nod to others, including this track named for Dr. Dre and Diamond D, just two of the producers who helped change Axelrod’s footprints from sand to concrete.

On January 28, while performing in Amsterdam, Drake delivered previously unheard rhymes in a ratatat cadence. “I get my dough in advance/Love is just not in my plans,” he sneered. No sooner did video from the event surface than hip-hop fans started speculating about how much the flow might be indebted to an unsigned South Florida rapper currently behind bars.

XXXTentacion—pronounced “X-X-X-tentación,” as in the Spanish word for temptation—is best-known for a luridly distorted track called “Look at Me!,” which includes these aggressively spat lines: “Can’t keep my dick in my pants/My bitch don’t love me no more.” Its influence on Drake’s song is debatable, but the fact that it was argued at all illustrates how much notoriety X has gained, amidst a fast rise that raises age-old questions about the separation of art from the actions of those who create it.

Around 11:30 p.m. on October 6, 2015, X—whose real name is Jahseh Onfroy—allegedly “punched and kicked” his pregnant then-girlfriend, according to an arrest report. “Victim’s eyes [were] punched to where both eyes became shut and victim could not not see,” the report states. According to documents provided to Pitchfork by the Miami-Dade County state attorney’s office, prosecutors have 51 pages of the alleged victim’s medical records. There are multiple photographs that show injuries Onfroy purportedly inflicted on the woman. More than one shows the two in a tender pose together, with her nose allegedly bruised from an earlier head-butting. Another shows the woman with her left eye reddened and the skin around both eyes all hues of purple. Prosecutors have taken sworn statements from several witnesses, among them the alleged victim, in preparation for a trial.

A small, multi-racial 19-year-old with black-and-yellow hair and face tattoos, Onfroy was arrested in Miami-Dade on October 8, 2016. The official charges against him—aggravated battery of a pregnant woman, domestic battery by strangulation, false imprisonment, and witness-tampering—mean he could be facing years in prison if convicted. Onfroy is being held in his native Broward County for violating a house arrest agreement prior to trial on two other charges, armed home invasion robbery and aggravated battery with a firearm, that stem from an alleged incident in November 2015. He has pleaded not guilty in both cases.

As unsettling as the charges against Onfroy are, they don’t seem to have diminished his allure in rap circles. Depressingly, the accusations—beating his pregnant girlfriend, strangling her, forcibly confining her against her will, and then trying to bribe her not to testify against him—coincide almost exactly with indications of the rapper’s swelling celebrity. In comparison to the sharp spike of interest in X lately, Google Trends data suggests hardly anybody was searching for him before last October, when the battery allegedly occurred.

These days Drake is only one of the famous rappers with X’s name, or at least his rhythmic pattern, on his lips. In the first weeks of 2017, X already has been called the “hardest n---- in Florida” by A$AP Rocky and been quoted by Danny Brown on Twitter (“Cocaine for my breakfast, hold that pistol ambidextrous”). With “Look at Me!,” currently No. 2 on a Billboardchart that measures streaming growth, he has even soundtracked the gaming antics of YouTube personality PewDiePie. His total SoundCloud followers, less than 20,000 within the past year, now stand above 320,000.

X’s musical appeal in hip-hop circles isn’t hard to see. “Look at Me!,” which dates back to December 2015, samples a haunting, voice-like melody fragment from dubstep pioneer Mala’s 2007 track “Changes,” essentially cranking the volume way past the red line. The resulting blown-out, lo-fi production—combined with X’s horrorcore-descended lyrics and trendy triplet rapping style—closes a circle that runs from trap near-contemporaries like Lil Uzi Vert (“Free da xxxster,” Uzi tweeted) or Florida’s Spaceghostpurrp back to the pioneering murkiness of early Three 6 Mafia.

At least in his hustle, X has the potential makings of more than a one-hit wonder. “Look at Me!” is the only one of his songs available on Spotify or Apple Music, but Onfroy has been a steady presence on SoundCloud since at least March 2014. While a promised debut album titled Bad Vibes Forever is still forthcoming, his various EPs and loose tracks paint a portrait of an eclectic artist. In contrast with the hyper-aggressive sexual id of “Look at Me!,” X’s other songs span beat-less introspection, Weeknd-like R&B moodiness, and, most surprisingly, quiet-loud alt-metal. “As of right now I want to work with the Fray, Kings of Leon, and probably Lorde,” he recently told Genius in a call from jail. “I do multi-genre, I don’t just rap.”

American culture has a romance with criminality dating back to colonial times, and historically those flames have been fanned by changes in business and technology. Newspapers helped build up the 19th-century outlaw Jesse James as no common thief but a romantic antihero, an avatar of pure style. The motif of the chic gangster remains a staple in cinema, TV, and popular music: a renewable resource of street slang, drug lore, and general rebelliousness that speaks to urges also latent in law-abiding homes throughout the land. Naturally, the outlaw archetype has adapted to fit the social media age. Brooklyn’s Bobby Shmurda, who Shmoney-danced his way to the Vine-driven smash “Hot N****” in 2014, leaving a trail of arrests in his wake, is serving seven years on gun and conspiracy charges. Kodak Black, who, like X, is 19 and from South Florida, scored his first Hot 100 hit, “No Flockin,” just last month, in between a prison stint on drug charges and an unresolved, far more serious charge of sexual battery. Black was released from jail December 1 on a $100,000 bond.

It’s not terribly uncommon for a rapper to stare down the law just as his career is taking off. In 1995, 2Pac spent nine months in prison for sexually abusing a fan in his hotel room two years earlier, in what a judge called “an act of brutal violence against a helpless woman.” (2Pac maintained his innocence and died in 1996 with his case under appeal.) In 2001, Shyne was sentenced to 10 years for assault, reckless endangerment, and gun possession. In 2009 and 2011, Lil Boosie, aka Boosie Badazz, was handed two separate sentences on drug charges (he was found not guilty of murder). Max B, who appeared last year on Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo, was convicted in 2009 of murder, armed robbery, and other offenses (his 75-year sentence may be shortened).

Some crimes resist being easily romanticized. Gunfighters sticking it to the authorities may always retain a certain cachet, despite the tragic consequences of actual gun crimes; similarly, the drug trade can be seen as embodying capitalism at its nihilistic extreme. But domestic violence, which still affects one out of four American women, may finally be different in the eyes of the public. Long after Chris Brownpleaded guilty in 2009 to assaulting former girlfriend Rihanna, calls for boycotting him have continued, despite Rihanna publicly forgiving and once again collaborating with him. Then again, Gucci Manepleaded guilty to pushing a woman out of a moving car in 2011, and he remains a cult-beloved figure. When female victims are unknown, their fates have been easier for the public to overlook. This was also one of the issues underlying the extensive list of accusations of sexual predation leveled against R. Kelly (who has denied the allegations).

Even from jail, X has found ways to speak, whether to his 142,000-plus Twitter followers or in interviews with outlets like XXL, where X has been given a platform to reassert his innocence without adding much clarity to the events of October 6 to 8. Meanwhile, the alleged victim has faced comments that she “prolly deserved it”; “IMMA LAUGH WHEN HES FREED AND STUNTS ON YOU AND CONTINUES TO BE SUCCESSFUL AND MAKES THIS SHMONEY,” reads one tweet at her. In December, X’s Twitter account posted a photograph depicting the alleged victim and her nude lower body from behind (a tweet that has been deleted). In a follow-up tweet, erased more recently, the person controlling X’s Twitter account wrote, “All I ever abused was that pussy ):”

X’s case also coincides with a time when U.S. consumers are demonstrating increasing concern over which values their consumption supports. Conscious media consumers are already used to having to weigh an artist’s actions against the merit of their work, but any calculus of aesthetics and ethics quickly gets daunting. Cinephiles have debated allegations of abuse against Woody Allen or the statutory-rape guilty plea by Roman Polanski. In music, men who’ve admitted to domestic violence range from John Lennon to Don McLean, Ike Turner to Bobby Brown, and  Ozzy Osbourne to Scott Weiland—and that’s just those who’ve come clean. Where to draw lines, or whether to draw them at all, is ultimately a personal decision, but it has public consequences in revealing what sort of behavior a society will tolerate when pressed. Fans can only make an informed choice if they know the facts.

Onfroy was born in Plantation, Florida, a city outside of Miami. Last year, in a video interview that has been viewed more than 1.5 million times, for the No Jumper podcast, he described an unsteady upbringing—a mother who passed him along to other people who didn’t always put him in the best situations. “My mom just had it hard, bro,” Onfroy said in her defense. He recounted a tendency to act out violently, not excluding attacks on girls and, despite his protestation that he’s not homophobic, on boys he perceived as gay (X: “You think I can tell the story about that faggot I beat up?”). The latter scrap happened, as Onfroy told it, during a year he spent in a correctional facility for armed robbery, armed burglary, possession of a firearm, grand theft, possession of Oxycodone, and other charges. With a rapper he met in confinement, Ski Mask “The Slump God,” X went on to help co-found a hip-hop collective called Members Only, joined by Houston’s Craig Xen and Florida’s Wifisfuneral.

Like the charges against him, X’s anecdotes are sad and disturbing. In another 2016 interview, with podcast The Mars Files, he spoke of struggling with depression. “There really is no happiness,” he said at one point, later adding, “The only person who inspires me is Kurt Cobain. He did it right as fuck, man.” On January 12, a since-deleted tweet from X’s account concluded alarmingly, “I’ll see you in the next life if there is one.” Rather than view the allegations against Onfroy as cause for empathy or professional counseling, some fans online have cheered the charges as evidence of his gritty authenticity.  

On January 1, the host of No Jumper, who goes by Adam22, announced he was now X’s manager. “I don’t have a comment on his cases except that I believe him that he didn’t beat the girl up,” Adam22 told me via Twitter direct message. After X’s grim tweet about the “next life,” Adam22 wrote publicly, “i talked to x he's fine.” A hodgepodge of lawyers have represented Onfroy in the two pending cases; all either declined to comment or have not yet responded to my requests for comment. A promised conversation with X for this article failed to occur.

I will not be coming home for awhile, it seems that it doesn't matter whether or not the state has evidence against me. I'm sorry.

— MAKE OUT HILL - XXX (@xxxtentacion) January 19, 2017

Adam22 directed me to a video from another call, where Onfroy can be heard saying, “If I can get these charges dropped in Miami, and I can prove this bitch a liar, then I can get out … She knew that I was on house arrest.” In video of another call, provided by the Miami-Dade state attorney’s office and readily available online, Onfroy can be heard saying, “I did not beat that bitch, she got jumped.” There’s laughter. The same voice continues, “And by the way for all you dumb fuck-ass n----- that thought this stupid bitch was pregnant, I got the paperwork signifying that she wasn’t pregnant, so when I get out I’m fucking all your little sisters in the fucking throat hole.” Again, laughter. All told, the state attorney’s office told me it has in evidence more than 200 phone calls Onfroy has made from jail.

Miami’s Rolling Loud festival, set for May 5 to 7, has announced XXXTentacion as part of its lineup. It’s not unthinkable that X could be out of confinement by then; a hearing is set for February 8 on whether he should be released on bond. The charges involving beating his girlfriend are scheduled for trial in April. How audiences choose to assess X’s music and the allegations against him remains to be discovered, but the quandaries punctuated by his ascent are there to be considered. In the months ahead, while X sits at a discomfiting precipice between youth culture and true crime, people—as he demanded in song—will be looking at him.

Invisible Hits is a column in which Tyler Wilcox scours the internet for the best (and strangest) bootlegs, rarities, outtakes, and live clips.

In 1974, an unknown band namedTelevision convinced CBGB owner Hilly Kristal to let them take over the club's typically dead Sunday night, unwittingly kicking off New York’s punk scene. Though Television could lay claim to getting there first, the band lagged behind its Bowery peers in actually releasing a full-length LP.Patti Smith's Horses hit stores in 1975, and the self-titled debuts of bothBlondie andthe Ramones soon followed in ’76. With a volatile lineup and a mercurial frontman in Tom Verlaine, a fan at the time might’ve wondered whether the band would ever get around to painting their masterpiece.

Finally, on February 8, 1977, Television releasedMarquee Moon—a debut well worth the wait. That month, the NME’s Nick Kent called the album “a 24-carat inspired work of pure genius, a record finely in tune and sublimely arranged with a whole new slant on dynamics.” Other records might wither in the face of such a rave. But 40 years later, Marquee Moon remains a singular achievement that transcends the “punk” label and still sounds fresh. It’s a classic from start to finish.

Looming at Marquee Moon's direct center is the album's title track. Clocking in at just under 10 minutes on the original vinyl release (reissues include the full 10:40 take) and featuring an exploratory Verlaine guitar solo, “Marquee Moon” is miles away from the Ramones’ minimalist rock antics or Blondie’s ironic pop moves. For precedents, we’d have to go back to the expansive West Coast psychedelia of the Paul Butterfield Band’s “East-West” or even the Grateful Dead’s twin epics “Dark Star” and “The Other One”—even if the mid-’70s crowd at CBGB would likely shudder at such comparisons. To celebrate 40 years of “Marquee Moon” and the album it defines, let’s trace the song’s history.

The Ork Loft Rehearsal

Apparently “Marquee Moon” was even less punky when Verlaine first imagined it. “‘Marquee Moon’ was written about three years ago and actually it had 20 verses to it,” he told Melody Maker’s Caroline Coon in 1977. “It’s a song I used to do on acoustic guitar.” But there’s no recorded evidence of this mellow embryonic version. The earliest “Marquee Moon” available to collectors comes from a lo-fi rehearsal tape recorded at Television patron/manager Terry Ork’s loft in early 1974. The interlocking puzzle pieces of the song are roughly in place already: the opening guitar’s unmistakable morse code stutter, a thudding bass pulse (played here by Richard Hell); and guitarist Richard Lloyd’s nagging riff (a subliminal nod to the horns on James Brown’s “I Feel Good”). As with most of the band’s Hell-era recordings (he left the group in early 1975), it’s a ramshackle thing, with helter-skelter rhythms and barely in-tune instruments. But the abbreviated end, with all involved racing towards the finish line behind Verlaine’s shivering solo, hints at the heights they’d reach in the coming years.

The Eno / Williams Demo

Later in 1974, riding a bit of underground hype on both sides of the Atlantic, Television recorded a demo with Brian Eno and Island Records A&R man Richard Williams. The demo didn’t result in a record deal, but it did leave us with an essential (and still officially unreleased) glimpse of what could have been. (For a more detailed dive into these tapes, check outthis previous Invisible Hits column.) Ultimately, Verlaine and Lloyd weren’t fans of the overall sound Eno, Williams, and engineer John Fausty cooked up for them, but their “Marquee Moon” is a solid attempt, if not as magisterial as the song would become. The best part comes right after the ascending climax, as Verlaine’s cascading piano washes over the listener; it’s a moment that looks ahead to the more keyboard-heavy approach of Adventure, Television’s sophomore effort.

CBGB 1975-1976

Television earned a devoted audience during their time as regulars at CBGB. But the band wasn’t universally beloved by any means. “[T]hey reminded me so much of the Grateful Dead, just boring solos, y’know,” Lester Bangs complained in conversation reprinted in Richard Meltzer’s A Whore Like All The Rest. “Endless, laborious climbing up in the scales, then get to the top and there’d be a moment of silence and everybody in the crowd would go berserk applauding, ha!” Bangs was likely referring specifically to “Marquee Moon,” which became a fan favorite at CBs as Television began stretching the song well past the 10-minute mark. (It’s actually a bit surprising that the renowned critic didn’t find more to like; he and Verlaine shared a love of raw garage rock and challenging free jazz.) Thanks to crude audience tapes from 1975 and 1976, we can hear “Marquee Moon” come into its own onstage. To my ears, these performances are worthy of berserk applause, as Verlaine and Lloyd’s intertwining guitars shoot off considerable sparks while new bassist Fred Smith and drummer Billy Ficca find a transcendental rhythmic zone beneath them.

Portland 1978

“I make so many mistakes when I play—it’s just that people don’t pick up on them,” Verlaine told Rolling Stone in 1977. “There are any number of ways to get from one place to another on the neck of the guitar that I don’t know about.” Modesty notwithstanding, Verlaine’s six-string skills had deepened considerably by 1978, when Television played its final shows (before ’90s and ’00s reunions, of course). And there was no better showcase for those skills than the nightly ritual of “Marquee Moon,” which usually served as the band’s pre-encore closer. We’ve got a few officially released 1978 performances to choose from:one drawn from the ROIO cassette The Blow-Up,another from a San Francisco FM broadcast. Both are fantastic. But perhaps the finest “Marquee Moon” of all, taped a few days after the San Francisco show in Portland, Ore., remains officially unreleased. Here, the song balloons well past the 17-minute mark, but not a moment is wasted, as Verlaine’s quicksilver solo (with shades of Brit-folk guitar hero Richard Thompson) builds and builds over his cohorts’ fluid backing. If he’s making mistakes, you won’t pick up on them here. And if you listen closely, you might just hear the sound of lightning striking itself.

Last week Bob Dylanannounced the release of Triplicate, a triple album that's also his third collection of standards from the Great American Songbook. If Triplicate is seen as three bundled albums—as it should, since its three discs are arranged thematically and each given titles (’Til The Sun Goes Down, Devil Dolls, Comin' Home Late)—it means Bob Dylan has tied Rod Stewart's record for the greatest number of Great American Songbook albums from a rock singer. This seems strangely appropriate since the two represent opposing sides of a familiar formula: the singer jazzing up a career by looking back at the classics of yesteryear.

Donning a tux and a wink, Stewart made cornball records that pulled on the nostalgic heartstrings, replicating the splash of big band swing. He played to the sound and style, not to the sentimental heart of the songs. Starting with 2015’s Shadows in the Night and continuing with last year’sFallen Angels, Dylan took a different tactic, often spinning the smoky vibe of Frank Sinatra's “saloon albums”—so called because they provided the soundtrack to lonely late nights at the bar—to his roadhouse band. He brought himself to the songs, digging into their meaning and finding a personal connection to tunes everybody knows.

That's what separates the memorable contemporary interpretations of the Great American Songbooks from humdrum evocations of a bygone era. The good records, the ones that surprise, involve artists finding themselves within songs meant for all. Their arrangements can be idiosyncratic or faithful, but in each case, the best of these explorations of our shared history are about the present, not the past. Here are eight through the ages that do just that.

Ringo Starr’s Sentimental Journey(1970)

Far from a singer's singer, Ringo Starr nevertheless possessed an everyman charm. That's evident on Sentimental Journey, the 1970 album he recorded in the wake of the Beatles' break-up. Lost, he decided to tip his hat to his mum, singing the songs he heard around the house while growing up. It's pure nostalgia but producer George Martin shakes things up, turning “Bye Bye Blackbird” into a skipping skiffle and giving “Have I Told You Lately That I Love You” an arrangement where the rhythm section sets up a joke and the horn section delivers the punchline. He may not be flashy, but he certainly makes these songs his own by relying on his own ambling, amiable delivery.

Harry Nilsson’s A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night(1973)

Unlike his good friend Ringo, Harry Nilsson wanted to do it up right when he revisited the Great American Songbook. Nilsson decided he needed to play in the big leagues, taking a gamble by hiring Frank Sinatra's arranger Gordon Jenkins to create the charts for A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night. If the title hints at the irreverence that would ultimately contribute to Nilsson's undoing, the songs themselves are sweet and sincere even when the arrangements wink at the listener: witness how a verse of “As Time Goes By” opens the album, or how “It Had To Be You” almost swoons into “Over the Rainbow.” Ultimately, the album winds up as a showcase for Nilsson's extraordinary vocals. Stripped of studio trickery, he soars.

Willie Nelson’s Stardust (1978)

Willie Nelson's Stardust is the granddaddy of Great American Songbook albums, the record that not only showed how flexible those classic songs are, but proved they still could yield a genuine hit. Remarkably, the album stayed on Billboard's country charts for a decade, going platinum five times. Nelson always had an idiosyncratic touch—his takes on “Night Life” and “Crazy” are much jazzier than the hit versions from Ray Price and Patsy Cline—but the wonderful thing about Stardust is how Nelson luxuriates within a familiar melody, bending and stretching it at will. Producer Booker T. Jones keeps things stripped down—whenever strings are heard, they're an accessory, not the focal point—and the emphasis on earthy rhythms lets Nelson roam, winding up with an album that is faithful to his own take on American music, and to the American songbook itself.

Rickie Lee Jones’ Pop Pop(1991)

Rickie Lee Jones has never played it straight. Even on her smoothest hits, like “Chuck E.'s In Love,” her melodies followed a skewed path, so it's not surprising that her standards album is unconventional in its selections and arrangements. Pop Pop is anchored on a guitar and a fretless bass, a folk-jazz that is elastic and malleable, allowing Jones to bend “My One and Only Love,” “I'll Be Seeing You” and “Bye Bye Blackbird” so they almost sound she wrote the tunes herself.

Sinéad O'Connor’s Am I Not Your Girl?(1992)

Success didn't sit well with Sinéad O'Connor, who at the height of stardom decided to ditch it all by recording a standards album with a full big band. Her controversial appearance on “Saturday Night Live,” in which she tore a picture of the Pope in two, was intended in part to promote her then-new third album Am I Not Your Girl?, but insteadput a halt on her commercial momentum. In retrospect, the album contains many lovely performances from O'Connor and, despite its old-fashioned arrangements, is not without its surprises. Loretta Lynn's “Success Has Made a Failure of Our Home” is turned into a blaring show-stopper, offering a place for O'Connor pleading the title phrase.

George Michael’s Songs from the Last Century(1999)

Just as the 20th century drew to a close, George Michael took a glance back with an emphasis on the Great American Songbook. Michael being a pop diehard, though, he snuck in some contemporary hits like the Police's “Roxanne” and turned them into splashy numbers suitable for a big band. That's the charm of this record: Michael finds common ground between the past and present, sometimes giving the audience a sly wink but never not singing with sincerity.

Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now(2000)

Late in her career, Joni Mitchell teamed with noted arranger Vince Mendoza and jazz producer Larry Klein to revisit melancholy numbers from the pre-rock days. Both Sides Now feels like a cross between one of Sinatra's In the Wee Small Hours and Billie Holiday's Lady in Satin, a late-night affair that lingers on its moodiness. Some of this suspended time derives from the lush bed of woodwinds and brass, but the feel stems heavily from Mitchell's delivery, which is every bit as imbibed with jazz greatness as those from guests Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock. She may draw out certain phrases, but Mitchell prizes staying true to lyrical intent over showy performance.

Jeff Lynne’s Long Wave (2012)

ELO leader Jeff Lynne is perhaps thought of more as a producer than a singer, so the fact that he crooned a set of standards may raise an eyebrow. Named after the kind of radio Lynne had as a kid, Long Wave plays to his sonic strengths, as he emphasizes sound over song. Unlike so many re-interpreters of standards, he dustbins the big bands, instead blending his signature harmonies and aural strings to the compressed sound of old-fashioned radio. That's the difference with Long Wave: it's about the experience of listening to an old record, not the song itself.

Donald Glover is having a moment. A month after his alter-ego Childish Gambino released “Awaken, My Love!” to the best reception of his musical career, Glover found himself taking home two awards at the Golden Globes, winning for both his show “Atlanta” and his acting within it. The FX comedy-drama is a love letter to blackness, a funny but painful look at race relations in the South, and a chance to show off both dramatic chops and his musical taste for the actor and musician. Or is that musician and actor? Perhaps Glover’s biggest achievement is the fact the trajectory of his success in both fields forces us to place the two words side by side. Glover manages to not merely do both, but do both well—and, at this point in time, simultaneously.

The actor who makes music, or the musician who acts, is certainly not a new phenomenon. Frank Sinatra won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for 1953’s From Here to Eternity (a role that heralded the revival of both his acting and singing career), while Oscar winner Cher continues to release music and occasionally act 50+ years later. Separate from the all-singing and acting (and dancing) Broadway star, the musician/actor of the silver screen is not a byproduct of the stage. Anecdotally, it seems as though there are more musicians venturing into film careers than the other way around, maybe for the simple reason that it’s easier to attempt to act than it is to try and create music. While acting is obviously a difficult skill to master, pretty much anyone can act (badly, at least) if they know their lines and repeat them on camera. Musical talent is arguably harder to fake; you either can play an instrument and hit the right notes, or you can’t—the line is a little more defined, AutoTune be damned.

These days, musicians who become known as credible actors often reach the public’s attention via roles that require musical talent (à la Jennifer Hudson in Dreamgirls, Whitney Houston in The Bodyguard), though that approach can also lead to, well, Glitter. Actors who make music—like Oscar winner and Thirty Seconds to Mars frontman Jared Leto—can find it difficult to shake off the “actor” tag despite mainstream musical success. In most cases, the famous artist’s second venture is seen as a quirky side project at best (see: She & Him, Ryan Gosling’s short-lived band Dead Man’s Bones, Scarlett Johansson’s Tom Waitstribute), and a wildly self-indulgent dip into an already crowded field at worst.

Even those actors and musicians who bypass accusations of artistic hubris and achieve success in their second field will still find themselves viewed primarily as one profession or the other. It is rare for the two sides of the creative career coin to be held in equal esteem, particularly at the same time. Instead, successful crossover artists tend to transition between acting and making music, with the peak of one career coinciding with a lull in the other. Rappers like LL Cool J, Ice Cube, and Ice-T have forged successful acting careers while continuing to make music to varying degrees, but only after the big musical successes of their youth were firmly in the rearview. Juliette Lewis’ 2003-2009 run with indie rockers Juliette and the Licks coincided with smaller and fewer roles, and the longest period in her career without any acting awards. On a bigger scale, young West Philly rapper Will Smith used “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” a TV show he only took on to help pay a massive 1990 tax bill, to launch what would become a movie star’s career. Smith has stopped making music in the years since, but his final Grammy nomination in 2001 was only a year before the first of his two Best Actor Oscar nods (for Ali and The Pursuit of Happyness). Now there’s a whole new generation that only really knows him as a smooth-talking leading man with a famous family, not the late ’80s rapper who doesn’t curse.

So the question remains: Is it possible to sustain a career at the top of your game as both an actor and a musician? Alongside Donald Glover, this year the Golden Globes nominated Riz Ahmed, aka rapper Riz MC, for his acting in the HBO crime drama “The Night Of.” The nomination came days after the release of Star Wars: Rogue One, where Ahmed plays the rebel pilot Bodhi Rook, and in the wake of both an inspired album with Swet Shop Boys and Englistan, a solo effort. Meanwhile, six-time Grammy nominee Janelle Monáe may not have released new music since 2015’s “Yoga," but she also walked the Globes’ red carpet after strong turns in two of the biggest films of the year, Moonlight and Hidden Figures.

Looking back over the last two decades, the biggest examples of juggling both simultaneously are folks like Harry Connick Jr., Jennifer Lopez, and Jamie Foxx. Connick Jr.'s relatively balanced paths are perhaps a privilege of coming from Broadway, and certainly it helps that he's a jazzy crooner as opposed to the most capricious whims of pop. His acting roles have rarely strayed from more wholesome corners of the mainstream—emotional TV movies, rom-coms, and cartoon voice work. His fellow “American Idol” judge J.Lo, whose breakthrough was playing slain singer Selena, has fared even better: Lopez holds the distinction of being the first woman to have a No. 1 album (2001’s J.Lo) and film (The Wedding Planner) in the same week, and her career in both fields has continued relatively consistently since then.

Despite the occasional scathing review for Foxx, by commercial metrics, he’s actually the most successful of the three at both. The “Gold Digger” guest’s 1994 debut Peep This only peaked at No. 78 on the album chart, but the four LPs he released since winning his Oscar in 2005 have all hit the Top 10. Like Sinatra 50 years before him, Foxx used the momentum of an Academy Award to relaunch back into his musical talent—something moviegoers might not have even been aware of before Ray.

It hasn’t always been like this. Less than half a century before J.Lo topped the box office and Billboard, the biggest stars of the screen were routinely singers as well, from Judy Garland in the ’40s to Barbra Streisand in the ’60s. The decline of the musician/actor coincides with the decline of the musician/actor’s natural home: the movie musical. After the notorious Hays Code on “morality” in movies was abandoned in 1968, shifting demographics led to a sharp downturn for the cheery musicals that shaped post-war cinema. The live (not animated) musicals that were successful in the time directly following this often had an adult or ironic edge (Grease, Cabaret, Labyrinth, The Rocky Horror Picture Show). With the exception of Liza Minnelli (who navigated music and film as yet another Broadway baby), and Olivia Newton-John (a singer whose Grease success was followed by a series of TV movies and middling box-office flops), the stars of these musicals were firmly pigeonholed as either actors or musicians.

Since the 2000s, the movie musical has slowly risen as a vehicle for “serious actors” to flaunt their singing skills in exchange for Oscars. This year, the narrative around La La Land (and its 14 Oscar nominations) as some sort of awards season underdog by virtue of its musical status is a fiction. Since the turn of the century, over a dozen musicals or music-heavy biopics have been nominated at the Academy Awards, from Chicago to Moulin Rouge to Les Miserables. One big difference now is that proper triple threats are no longer cast as the leads—besides Queen Latifah's (great) supporting turn in Chicago, it’s mostly A-list actors who retreat away from musical roles after collecting their awards.

Perhaps the future of the true actor/musician—someone who acts and releases music as independent endeavors—can be seen as a reflection of a new culture we’re in, where creatives are generally doing more. Young people find themselves with not one creative job, but two or three or four, and it’s no wonder that the art we are consuming comes from people doing the same. It’s telling that many Disney and Nickelodeon stars of the past decade have been able to flit between acting and music with little fanfare. Even Hailee Steinfeld, who was nominated for an Oscar when she was just 13, was able to score a Top 40 hit with the tepid “Love Myself” in 2015 like it was nothing. An older generation of Disney kid, Justin Timberlake has been in a substantial amount of movies at this point, and no one ever says, “musician/actor Justin Timberlake.” He had to choose a lane in his early career, and his voice made it for him.

Donald Glover’s dual success is, in many ways, an anomaly. Over the years, he has steadily received higher and higher praise for both his music and his acting/writing. In our 2013 review of Childish Gambino’s Because the Internet, Craig Jenkins described Glover as a “restless polyglot” who “could ultimately do well with a little less multitasking.” The irony here, of course, is that the more he seems to do, the better he seems to do it. With Glover’s success riding high alongside that of Ahmed and Monae’s, perhaps we’ll see more Golden Globe wins celebrated alongside Billboard chart-toppers in the future.

In early 1997, a 25-year-old Erykah Badu glided onto the set of BET talk show “Planet Groove” flanked by her backup singers and immediately started lighting incense. “Planet Groove” had attracted some of the era’s biggest hip-hop and R&B stars, from Missy Elliott to Mariah Carey, but none had done it quite like Badu. She hadn’t yet released her debut, but sitting on the show’s couch sipping a cup of tea, the Dallas native’s vision seemed fully formed. This image of her—a Nag-Champa-burning, herbal-brew-sipping free spirit in a goldenrod head scarf—is the definitive one, an avatar for her artistry.

“It’s an expression of me and the way I feel,” she told “Planet Groove” host Rachel Stuart of her forthcoming album. “Badu is my last name, ‘izm’ is what should get you high and Baduizm [is] the things that get me high. Lighting a candle, loving life, knowing myself, knowing my creator, loving them both ... Using my melanin. Using my power, to get to where I need to go to do the creator’s work—that’s what I’m here for. And I’m still fly.”

When Baduizm debuted on February 11, 1997, it was just as she had described, jam-packed with concepts that spoke to a higher consciousness. Lead single “On & On,” the song that first brought her to wider public attention, makes several references to the teachings of theFive Percent Nation, a cultural movement grounded in the belief that all black people are divine. A core part of the Five-Percenter doctrine revolves around the idea of the black man as God. But Baduizm was more concerned with the empowered black woman, putting her work, relationships, family values, and quest for knowledge under the lens.

The album’s melodies and instrumentation reflected a range of influences, most notably jazz, soul, hip-hop, and R&B. Blended as they were on Baduizm, the result was branded as neo-soul, a concept attributed to record exec and D’Angelo manager William “Kedar” Massenburg. He signed Badu to her first label deal and released Baduizm on Kedar Entertainment, his imprint via Universal Records. Massenburg was already marketing D’Angelo as an alternative R&B artist when an early Badu demo landed in his lap, and “Erykah [was] a natural for me to follow that blueprint,” he boasted to Billboard.

Ostensibly, the neo-soul tag was little more than an exercise in branding: take something that already exists, dress up the packaging, and sell it as a new idea. The lines between jazz, soul, R&B, and hip-hop have always been blurred, so Baduizm could be indebted as much to Roy Ayers as to Brandy (an artist thatBadu herself called an inspiration for her debut). But neo-soul came to represent a higher-minded alternative to the R&B ruling the airwaves in 1997, led by the likes of Toni Braxton, En Vogue, BLACKstreet, and Keith Sweat. Taking notes from the smooth soul singers of the ’70s and ’80s, neo-soul artists homed in on instrumentation and narrative construction, typified on albums like Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite or Who Is Jill Scott? Words and Sounds Vol. 1.

Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, dedicated music scholar and multi-instrumentalist, expressed skepticism about neo-soul’s angle early on. Thompson, who didproduction and session work on Baduizm with his band the Roots, recalled his hesitation to Touré inVibe: “The last thing I said to Erykah when we finished her album was, ‘Don’t you wanna sell any units? You got a chance: You sing. Stop tryin’ to be so artsy.’ I said, ‘It’s brilliant, but it’s not gonna do anything.’ I thought the marketplace wasn’t ready.” To which Badu apparently retorted: “Watch. You’ll See.”

Baduizm debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 album chart to widespread critical acclaim. It wenttriple platinum, achieving a million sales within two months of its original release. Badu breached music’s mainstream arena and emerged victorious, walking away from the 1998 Grammys with trophies for Best R&B Female Vocal Performance (“On & On”) and Best R&B Album. For the latter award, she beat out Mary J. Blige, Babyface, and even Whitney Houston—all stalwarts of “conventional” R&B up to that point.

The album’s success was a boon for neo-soul, which Massenburg capitalized on by retrofitting earlier works (D’Angelo’s Brown Sugar; Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite) with his label and guiding the careers of future stars like India.Arie. If there was ever a chance that neo-soul would truly outpace traditional R&B, Baduizm made the case for it as a critically and commercially viable entity, not a niche genre, before blockbuster works like The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill and D’Angelo’s Voodoo blew the roof off the discourse. For several years after Baduizm’s release, the Grammys’ R&B performance categories were flooded with neo-soul nominees, even after the genre’s mainstream apex.

The album’s success also presaged some difficult questions around the issue of categorization. The idea of genres in music lies at the heart of a perennial battle between artists and critics. At its best, categorization can help to inform interpretation of a work by placing it among both aesthetic predecessors and contemporaries. At its worst, it can limit critical discussion in such a way that denies an artist credit for their own intentions.

In the summer of 1997, when Badu visited “Later… With Jools Holland,” she explained how soul and hip-hop were the predominant sounds of her childhood, before emphatically describing hip-hop as “the culture that [she is] from.” In the two decades since her debut, a substantial part of the Badu narrative has revolved around her romantic involvement with some of hip-hop’s most notable stars, like André 3000 and Common. But her early work in particular is rarely celebrated for exemplifying rap’s essence in the vocal styling and cadence (“Appletree”), and for influencing rappers like Mos Def (who sampled Badu on Black on Both Sides). One can’t help but wonder if this has to do with a marketing ploy that, while intended to support and contextualize Badu’s music, came to define her beyond her control.

When a trend grows old, it’s easy to dismiss the concept for reasons unrelated to quality. In neo-soul’s case, it’s more that the mainstream moved towards pop-tinged R&B hybrids in the early 2000s—music that was more concerned with carefree exuberance than social consciousness. Several neo-soul devotees got knocked off course when the tide turned, but this liberated artists like Badu to establish themselves as creative forces separate from the genre they once represented. She may at one point have been taken with the neo-soul association, but has since claimed that she wasnever a big fan of the term itself. “Nowadays it seems appropriate to omit the ‘neo,’” wrote Kelefa Sanneh in his 2016 New Yorker profile of Badu, “not because her music has grown more old-fashioned but because it has grown harder to categorize, and maybe even easier to enjoy.”

Erykah Badu’s role in neo-soul made her a visionary of the modern soul revival, and it’s an influence that reverberates still through Janelle Monàe, Solange, D.R.A.M., and many more. But more than just representing a moment in time, Badu emerged from the neo-soul haze unscathed, with a classic debut firmly in her pocket and an unwavering drive to inspire and create. That’s what she’s here for. And she’s still fly.

Kendrick Lamar lost to Daft Punk. Beyoncé lost to Beck. Kendrick Lamar lost to Taylor Swift. Beyoncé lost to Adele. The Grammys are a scripted event: a black artist releases an ambitious album that defines its year and embodies the deliberate craft the Grammys supposedly reward; votes are cast largely by suits whose sole form of sustenance is industry politics as a drip-feed into their ears; someone else wins.

It's tempting to say the Grammys are getting better at this, but they're not. (The trend also dovetails nicely with the trend of hip-hop and R&B being shut out from Top 40 radio despite dominating the charts and the zeitgeist, not to mention certain real-world regressive political undercurrents.) If the Grammys of yesteryear took place today, it's easy to imagine The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill losing to Madonna’s Ray of Light or Speakerboxx/The Love Below losing to the White Stripes’ Elephant. And in 2017, a strong year for albums—the entire Urban Contemporary category alone would make a fine Album of the Year slate—the voters couldn't find anything more compelling for the main event than Justin Bieber, post-peak Drake, Sturgill Simpson, and a particularly cursory Adele. While 21 defined the zeitgeist and carried the industry in sales for two years, 25 sold well and didn't linger. 25 is the “Set Fire to the Rain” to 21's “Rolling in the Deep.”

Is anyone surprised? No one is surprised. Frank Ocean, who publicly boycotted the Grammys despite having two major albums and a potential Prince tribute in him, was not surprised. Beyoncé's team wasn't surprised; Tina Knowles prefaced Beyoncé's performance with a quasi-acceptance speech on motherhood, and Bey accepted her award for Best Urban Contemporary Album with the solemnity of the Grammys' final act, as if she knew the actual final act would be Adele complaining about being played off (with “Cranes in the Sky,” no less) before delivering two straight Macklemore apologies. It's hard to feel bad, exactly, for Adele; she was in an impossible situation, and she tried. But it's nevertheless symbolic in the worst ways that Adele made a big production about how Beyoncé really deserved the Album of the Year award, broke the original award in two, then kept half of it anyway.

Streaks Continued by Beyoncé

Beyoncé, following up her Venusian photoshoot, staged“Love Drought” and “Sandcastles” inside a lush bower of fertility goddess rites, Marian imagery, Warsan Shire's poetry, and invocations of “a curse being lifted,” a message of healing that, in 2017, felt sorely needed. In doing so, she continued several streaks:

Being the one person on a major awards show who designs her performance like she's on a major awards show: More alluring than the Weeknd delivering come-ons from a cruise-ship ice sculpture, more artistic than Ed Sheeran marveling about hooking up at the pub while the camera marvels at the fact that he's musical enough to use gear, more in conversation with the greats than Adele apologizing through George Michael or Bruno Mars dressing up as Prince. Stray petals from her performance remained on the Grammy stage the entire night, a reminder of the chasm of pomp and execution between her and basically every other performer.

Being an actual feminist: As per usual, Beyoncé’s stage imagery highlighted a bevy of women of color. Even without the digital crowds, Beyoncé's set featured more women than every other performer of the night (particularly puzzling on a night with multiple Prince tributes in potential need for protégées) and, amid the catastrophe of the Muslim ban, showcased the words of a poet of Somali heritage.

Being someone who reads the comments: Ever since Beyoncé dropped “Survivor” in response to jokers comparing the then-revolving Destiny’s Child lineup to the reality show, Beyoncé has made art from the bottom half of the internet, and so she does again. Leaning so hard into the fertility aesthetic is a massive subtweet of the birther rumors that plagued the tabloids last time around, designed for (and, as you'll probably find, successful at) getting under their skin.

Two Other Great Performances

A Tribe Called Quest, Consequence, Anderson .Paak, and Busta Rhymes continued the Grammys' weird, largely unacknowledged streak of good hip-hop spots, while providing the one good tribute (“Award Tour,” dedicated to the late Phife Dawg) and the one unquestionably resonant political statement. “I want to thank President Agent Orange for your unsuccessful attempt at the Muslim ban,” taunted Busta Rhymes amid a staging of protest signs and passports, while Q-Tip ended the set with a clarion “RESIST! RESIST! RESIST!”

Chance the Rapper, supported by gospel fixture Kirk Franklin and Tyler Perry fixture Tamela Mann, delivered a mix from Coloring Book while dedicating his award to Chicago, independent artists, and God. The heartland may, but won't, note Chance led his set with worship standard “How Great Is Our God,” the night's sole nod to religion.

Actual Political Statements

Busta Rhymes: Aforementioned.

Paris Jackson: “We could really use this kind of excitement at a Pipeline protest. Hashtag #NoDAPL!”

Laverne Cox: “Everyone google Gavin Grimm.”

What More Typically Passed for Political Statements

Katy Perry, performing a version of her Sia polemic “Chained to the Rhythm” hastily arranged to emphasize its Max Martinized undercarriage and de-emphasize its Swedish reggae, wore a white pantsuit and an armband reading PERSIST—which might have been a nod to the past week’s rallying cry around Elizabeth Warren, except with the view from the stage it might as well have read SISTER or WRIST. She ended her spot in front of a large clip art Constitution, the only legible part of which was “We the People.” (Worth comparing: Beyoncé famously closed her VMA set in front of a giant “FEMINIST” set piece three years ago; A Tribe Called Quest did their own substantive “We the People” just hours later.)

After limpid commentary on how George Michael's music “excludes no one,” Adele's transformation of “Fastlove” into a Kate McKinnon's-“Hallelujah” dirge that makes casual sex sound like a death march, her subsequent fucking it up, starting over and, groundhog-like, sentencing the world to an endless winter of piano malaise. Plus George finally getting an apology... for Adele making a swear.

National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences president Neil Portnow reading the room a bit poorly: using “America the Beautiful” as a lobbying spot for updating music laws and a kickoff point for a lecture on the need for unity among both sides, as his stage makeup demonstrated unity with the other president.

James Corden failing to descend stairs: a dig at the stair phobia of our nation's own disappointing TV host? Presenter Gina Rodriguez’s invocation of “women standing together”? Ed Sheeran wearing his branded HOAX shirt: a dig at fake news? Who can be sure what’s political anymore?

Achievements in Musical Cosplay

The role of Prince was played by Bruno Mars in literal Prince cosplay (though Blue Ivy wore it best), demonstrating his greatest strength and greatest flaw: his ability to turn any genre or artist into a Vegas jukebox revue. On the one hand, he probably is the one performer at the moment best suited to play Prince. On the other hand, the performance took the prompt “Bruno Mars doing ‘Let's Go Crazy’” and ran exactly nowhere with it besides the inevitable: an imitation of Prince as an “Uptown Funk” imitation of himself.

Lady Gaga has become, prematurely, a tribute act to herself. The Super Bowl set the clock back to The Fame, and her set with Metallica reset it to Born This Way, if everything that sounded like Ladytron was swapped out for everything that sounded like Lita Ford. It almost worked! Though, as we've learned this year, camera angles are important. What looks like Gaga/Hetfield fire up close looks, upon zooming out, more like mic failures and pseudo-moshers stumbling around like wasted zombies. Which is why the show clung to the close-ups.

The role of soul was played, largely, by country artists, wavering somewhere between “a welcome reminder of the roots of a genre mired in rock bluster and tailgate wastedness” and “a handy way to cut off the supposed breakout singles of Maren Morris and Kelsea Ballerini.” The role of rock was played by Ed Sheeran singing a Rihanna castoff. The Weeknd cosplayed the ’80s. Bruno Mars cosplayed Boyz II Men in the ’90s. Twenty One Pilots cosplayed pantsless Blink-182. If it wasn’t for Chance mentioning SoundCloud, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was.

Carcrash Karaoke, from Least Wanted to Even Less Wanted

Little Big Town introducing Katy Perry via angling for a future Dixie Chicks “Daddy Lessons”-ification of “Teenage Dream.”

Pentatonix singing the Jackson 5 for very little reason.

James Corden starting yet another frat-house singalong of “Sweet Caroline.”

Reminders That We Live in Alternate Reality and Somewhere Out There, Unreachable, Is Actual Reality

Katharine McPhee and the Chainsmokers accepting David Bowie's award for Best Rock Song in approximately five seconds.

Lady Gaga getting maybe 75 percent of the way into a Miley twerk moment before having a sudden moment of clarity.

Leonard Cohen going largely unacknowledged, which doesn’t sound so surprising until you realize it means a major awards show passed on an opportunity to do a tearful “Hallelujah.”

It taking an hour and thirty minutes for the host of a major awards show to plead the audience to use its hashtag, then it never being mentioned again.

The founder of World Star making the tribute reel.

Thundercat doesn’t remember whether he broke up with his ex-girlfriend or she broke up with him—perhaps he’s blocked it out—but what he does remember is that they broke up on February 14th. “Valentine’s Day is like placing a magnifying glass to the sun,” he says now. “It forces a person to evaluate a relationship. It brings up the question, ‘What is this?’”

Understandably, the soul-jazz singer-songwriter, producer, and bassist born Stephen Bruner has a love/hate relationship with Valentine’s Day. “What I love about Valentine’s Day is that you possibly get to have sex. I don’t love how hard you have to work to have sex. But if you really like the person, you’ll want to go out of your way to show them you do. It’s a chance to show somebody, ‘Hey! I don’t think you’re a piece of shit. You're cool, cool enough to show you attention for a day.’ I usually choose my mom or my cat.”

“The hate part is the expectation...” he says. “To some degree, it’s a tell-all as to how you feel about a person. It’s a lot of pressure, especially for a cat person who isn’t into a lot of emotions. You got to take into account that I’m pretty emotionally scarred. I don’t like a lot of affection.”

And yet, the L.A. native’s preternatural funkiness—across his solo work and his collaborations with Kendrick Lamar, Erykah Badu, Flying Lotus, Kamasi Washington, and more—often offers a blanket of musical warmth. On his forthcoming fourth album, Drunk (out February 24), Thundercat opens up a little more, tackling matters of with candor and humor. “The way I make music is by observing, reporting how I feel, and mixing an element of therapy,” he says. “A lot of times, what I say on songs is pretty literal. I don’t dance around it by reading Greek mythology. We’re not having sex? Then this is terrible.”

Thundercat is just as blunt on his new Drunk single “Friend Zone,” which finds him calling the frightening grey area of unrequited love what it is—disheartening. Instead of pleading to be freed, he draws a boundary line: “Don’t call me, don’t text me after 2 a.m. unless you’re planning to give me some, because I have enough friends,” he sings atop cosmic keyboards, after big-upping “Mortal Kombat” and “Diablo.”

He sounds like he knows a thing or two about it, and about love in general. So we asked him for his friendzone litmus test, why cat people apparently struggle with romance, and his sure-fire romance tips for Valentine’s Day. Unless of course she breaks up with you first.

Pitchfork: How do you know when you’re in the friend zone?

Thundercat: Everyone’s been put in the friend zone. Seventy percent of the time, a person is not smart [enough] to know they’re in the zone. If you think, there’s a chance!, if you cuddle at 3 in the morning, if she calls whenever the album comes out—if you’re confused, you’re in the friend zone.

How would you describe the friend zone?

You can’t tell which way is up. A lot of times you just want to get laid. It’s like the animal kingdom: you fight or have sex. There’s no in-between. A lot of times it’s [as if] someone is trying to speak to you in a language you don’t understand.

What was your worst breakup?

There was one when my girlfriend thought I was actually crazy. Where the relationship ended, and she couldn’t tell if I was really crazy or not crazy. But, I was just being a regular old cat. She used to call me Turbo Steve. When I’d go into crazy mode she’d call me Turbo Steve. It led to a breakup that I didn’t really recover from very well, I’m learning to recover.

What does that version of you get crazy about?

It’s everything. John Malkovich’s [character Osbourne Cox] at the end of Burn After Reading is as close to how Turbo Steve feels. You just don’t know what the hell is going on. Everything is a bit perplexing in very, very harsh ways.

Any advice on how to tackle Valentine’s Day?

You just gotta pay. Pay for everything. Pay for flowers, chocolates, a bear, dinner, gas… You gotta buy her some shoes, but don’t buy yourself some shoes. If you do, then it’s not Valentine’s Day. [Laughs] But it’s an ongoing joke, as long as you pay everything will be fine.

Pay attention. Do something that makes the person feel like you pay attention and understand who they are. I’m personally a fan of getting someone something they like. ‘Oh, you like the Thundercats cartoon? I bought you a Simpsons shirt because you like cartoons.’ No. Get the person the thing they want.

You also make it romantic. Take them to dinner, look at them in their eyes, not at their forehead or elsewhere. Focus on the person.

Where are you with love now?

With new relationships, you can’t drag things over into your new relationship. You can’t talk about your ex-girlfriends too much. You can’t treat her like your ex-girlfriend. You have to look at things, as they come, as something new. You also want to give yourself time to figure stuff out yourself. Nowadays everything moves at a fast pace, you have to pick it up quicker. I know love exists, you just have to not be afraid of it because it can be intimidating. Especially with the life that I lead, kind of like a pirate. Love is not always just a feeling. Hopefully the person will be open to the moments that happen, and you don’t wear them out. It’s difficult as it is “dating a musician.” I didn’t realize until recently that that’s a thing, “dating a musician.”

What does that mean, exactly?

I think we get a bad rap for being so wild, not consistent, and always changing. There’s a denotation to not being depended on. I do love what I do, so there’s a possibility that I can love somebody. A lot of times, I’ll experience this in weird inflictions—like the dad of a girl I once dated was surprised I make a living out of music. ‘How’s that going for you?’ What? it’s what I do. And, your daughter likes me. Or they’d be passive-aggressive by pointing out artists they know that are in jail. What? What are you saying? [Laughs]

How much of a role does music play into who or how you date?

The truth is, and this may sound silly, you can tell the person you’re talking to by the person they listen to. A lot of the times that can be a way of looking at the person. You ever been in the car with someone and they put a song on and you just want to slap the shit out of them? What part of this is speaking to what part of you? When it didn’t work out, you’re like, I remember that one time she played that one song and I almost jumped out of the car. [Laughs] At the same time, you don’t want to be fickle or [act like] you can’t put up with the differences, but there has to be some similarities. You got to vibe with that person.

Every year towards the end of the Grammys, the president of the Recording Academy, Neil Portnow, gives a few wonkish remarks. It’s such a famously incongruous moment that this year’s Grammy host James Corden joke-introduced Kanye West before Portnow took the stage, just in case anyone was thinking of taking a bathroom break. During a show lightly punctuated by protests against President Trump, Portnow called on Washington “to help keep the music playing by updating music laws, protecting music education, and renewing America’s commitment to the arts.” The Academy doesn’t just hand out trophies, after all—this is a major industry group advocating for policies that benefit both creators’ rights and the record-biz bottom line.

By the bottom line for a TV broadcast—ratings—this year’s Grammy ceremony looks like it was a success. Still, the show was marred by an Adele false start, a Metallica/Lady Gaga non-working mic, and a speech cut-off that led to audible boos. More importantly, artists ranging from current Album of the Year winner Adele to former AOTY honoree Win Butler have said what Kanye has all along: Beyoncé was robbed. Others, like Sufjan Stevens and Bey's own sister Solange, have suggested the Grammys need to do better all around when it comes to racial equality (a sentiment our own writers share).

In a call with Pitchfork late Monday, Portnow rejected the view that race is an issue for the Grammys. Portnow also revealed that Kanye was approached about possibly performing at this year’s awards, commented on Frank Ocean’s decision not to submit Blonde for the Grammys, discussed plans for working with the Trump administration, and more.

What did you think of this year’s Grammys in general?

We were incredibly pleased. It’s three and a half hours. It’s 20-plus performances. It felt like we really did hit almost all the marks of a high bar in excellence.

Any marks you felt like you didn’t hit? It seemed like there were a couple of little mistakes.

There were some technical errors. And we really regret and are not pleased when they happen. But I would say to anybody that’s watching, how many times did you go to do something at home or plug something into the wall and plug it in the wrong way? Or you put the wrong key in the door? So it’s human error, and these things do happen. Because of the complexity of what’s going on, it’s frankly amazing to me that there aren’t more issues than we have. It’s also the nature of live television. Whatever is going to happen is going to go out on the air.

A stat has been going around since the show, about how a black artist hasn’t won Album of the Year since Herbie Hancock in 2008. Do you think the Grammys has a race problem?

No, I don’t think there’s a race problem at all. Remember, this is a peer-voted award. So when we say the Grammys, it’s not a corporate entity—it’s the 14,000 members of the Academy. They have to qualify in order to be members, which means they have to have recorded and released music, and so they are sort of the experts and the highest level of professionals in the industry. It’s always hard to create objectivity out of something that’s inherently subjective, which is what art and music is about. We do the best we can. We have 84 categories where we recognize all kinds of music, from across all spectrums.

We don’t, as musicians, in my humble opinion, listen to music based on gender or race or ethnicity. When you go to vote on a piece of music—at least the way that I approach it—is you almost put a blindfold on and you listen. It’s a matter of what you react to and what in your mind as a professional really rises to the highest level of excellence in any given year. And that is going to be very subjective. That’s what we ask our members to do, even in the ballots. We ask that they not pay attention to sales and marketing and popularity and charts. You have to listen to the music. So of the 14,000 voters, they listen, they make up their minds, and then they vote.

Now here’s the other interesting part of the process, and we stand 100 percent behind the process: It’s a democratic vote by majority. So somebody could either receive or not receive a Grammy based on one vote. It could be that tight.

The Motion Picture Academy took steps last year to increase diversity among their voters. Is that something the Recording Academy is interested in doing?

Well, they may have had a problem. We don't have that kind of an issue in that same fashion. But we are always working on increase diversity in membership, whether it's ethnicity, gender, genre, or age. In order to maintain our relevance, we have to be refreshing all the time and we have to be doing that across the board.

We’re set up as chapters in 12 cities across the country, so we’re on the ground in each of those cities with staff. Each of these cities has a board of governors, which is volunteers who are again the professionals in the industry who give their time to the Academy, they get elected, it’s a vote among peers again. So each chapter has between 20 and 30 governors that are elected every year. Our board of trustees is 40 people, from all of the 12 chapters across the country. I think we have more elected leaders in the Academy than there are members of the House of Representatives. And the reason for that is to have diversity and broad participation in a very democratic and very open environment.

At the end of the day, we just went through a popular election, but you had the overlay of an electoral college. And so the popular vote doesn't necessarily in and of itself create the recipient of the election. In our case, the popular vote stands by itself and completely determines who receives an award in any given year. There certainly could be those that are disappointed and that had a difference of opinion about another artist than perhaps received a Grammy in any given year, but the fact is that they had a chance to vote. That's the way it came out.

And also, looking for more participation. I think maybe we’ve just seen this in the last national election to some degree. Sometimes people are perhaps disappointed at the results and then when asked, “Hey did you participate in this election?,” the answer is no. And then, it’s after the fact, not much you can do if you haven’t been a part of it. So to anybody that is unhappy with the results or even feels that there could be a stronger representation of any genre or ethnic group, bottom line is very simple. Just become members, join and vote. Then you have the say if you want it.

Are you concerned at all about some of the big names like Frank Ocean, Drake, and Kanye not wanting to attend this year?

They're all different situations. Not everybody comes to the Grammys every year. There’s no requirement that they do it. There are all kinds of reasons why they don’t. I totally respect that. In the case of Drake, we know he had a European tour booked. That's a big piece of business for an artist, to do a continent. So, can’t argue with that.

Kanye, as you know, had some medical concerns and situations. We had dialog with him about actually performing. At the end of the day, what we had heard was he just wasn't in a place where he felt comfortable doing that. That’s completely understandable. And by the way, we hope both of them will be there, whether next year or the year after. They all have very long careers ahead of them.

Frank Ocean’s a different story, because he made a conscious decision to not enter his music in the process. I think that’s a personal choice. Not everybody likes or wants to be part of every organization or awards process. I respect that. What I’ll say about Frank is he did have his earlier album out at an early stage of his career, we were delighted that it was entered, we were delighted that he was a Grammy winner, we were delighted to have him on our stage, which gave him a platform very early in his career. That’s something we're proud of, and down the line he may feel differently. Artists change their opinion. I don’t begrudge his choice at all and we’ll see what the future brings.

One of the feel-good stories at the 2017 Grammys was Chance the Rapper. Besides his obvious talent, why do you think he did so well this year specifically? Did the new policy qualifying streaming releases for nomination, or his campaigning efforts within the industry help him at all?

There really isn’t a great mechanism for campaigning. You can take advertising during the entry period, just as some of the Hollywood publications have for-your-consideration advertising. But there’s no way of knowing if all our voters around the country subscribe to any of those publications. So in the case of Chance, clearly our members listened, liked what they heard, and felt that he was deserving of the Grammys that he won.

To your earlier question about a racial problem. The album, record, song and best new artist categories are ones that the entire voting membership is entitled to vote on. You don’t get Chance the Rapper as the Best New Artist of the year if you have a membership that isn’t diverse and isn’t open-minded and isn’t really listening to the music, and not really considering other elements beyond how great the music is.

People usually think of the Grammys when they think of the Academy, but how important is the advocacy side to what you do all year round?

It’s a huge part of our mission, and it’s actually grown dramatically over the past decade. At this point I would say we are certainly the leading advocates for creators in Washington on policy. That's not to say that there aren’t others who do a phenomenal job and work for their constituents, but in those cases many of them have a more defined constituency: music publishers, the writers, record labels. We are that one organization that represents the entire creative community.

There’s obviously been quite a bit of change in Washington. How much do you plan to work with the current administration?

We have found that many of our issues really are nonpartisan. What we’ll need to do most immediately here is the education process for those that are new in Washington, whether it’s congresspeople or the executive branch. They don’t necessarily have all the background on our issues and we’ll need to make sure that they have accurate information and understand what’s, no question, a fairly complicated ecosystem. But that being said, we’ll work with the Congress and the President as much as possible to further issues we think are important.

By the mid-’90s, British Invasion 2.0 had taken over American music, as Oasis, Blur, Pulp, and Radiohead cracked the rock and college radio charts. But right before those (mostly) self-serious bands broke stateside, there was a British group called the KLF raising all sorts of hell across pop culture. The brainchild of Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, the KLF (“Kopyright Liberation Front”) was full of radical ideas about art, sampling, the media, and the record business; perhaps despite this, they managed to make several appearances on the U.S. charts. Yet the fact remains that though they're rather fondly remembered in their homeland, they don’t have nearly as much of a reputation here in America.

This year has seen several oblique announcements regarding the return of the KLF project, after more than two decades away from music. Just last week, another KLF transmission promised a second book by the duo titled 2023: A Trilogy, likely a take on their mutual obsessions of The Illuminatus! Trilogy (the tome responsible for much of the now-prevalent Illuminati iconography) and the number 23, which features heavily in Illuminatus books and various conspiracy theories. The announcement read, in part: “Down through the epochs and out across the continents, generation upon generation of the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu have told variants of the same story—an end of days story, a final chapter story. But with one hope, even if the hope at times seems forlorn.” Which is to say, the announcement doesn’t tell you much about what you’re likely to hear or read from the anarchic duo. That’s because the murky mythos of the Mu Mus is full of red herrings, shaggy dog jokes, and the occasional profundity. Their work is predicated on the idea of surprise, in that you can never be sure what you’re going to get: high art, crass in-jokes, or some bastardization of the two.

Never ones to get too comfortable, the KLF also went by handles like the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu (the JAMs), K Foundation, the Timelords, 2K (as in Y2K), and more. They’ve been called many things by critics: “punk situationists,” “acid house pranksters,” “art warriors,” “an obtuse piss-take.” Imagine if the Residents got in early on rave culture, the Second Summer of Love, and the birth of chill-out/downtempo—that was the KLF. Trying to establish their own cultish set of iconography, they made a ton of music, shot extravagant videos and a film, wrote a book, and sponsored various art projects. They sampled liberally in the hairy period of late ’80s and early ’90s copyright law, once having to burn boxes of records to avoid prosecution for uncleared ABBA samples. They experimented tirelessly—working with everyone from Martin Sheen to Tammy Wynette—until they ran out of thresholds to break, just six years in.

When the KLF concept began gestation in the perverse mind of young Scotsman Bill Drummond (the tall, short-haired one), he had already spent the late ’70s and early ’80s bopping around different jobs in the British music industry. He played guitar in Liverpudlian punk outfit Big in Japan and managed acts like Echo and the Bunnymen. Drummond met guitarist Jimmy Cauty (the long-haired one) when he was working A&R for WEA Records and signed Cauty’s band Brilliance. Years later, Drummond came up with the idea for a plunderphonics group called the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, and realizing he’d need someone to help execute the vision, he rang up kindred gonzo spirit Cauty.

Their early work as the JAMs was very crude and hip-hop-skewing, like a weirder, Scottish take on the Beasties. Their fast and loose style became somewhat refined, and they started writing hookier singles. They somehow made the leap from fringe weirdos to commercially viable pop stars and never looked back. By the end of the ’80s, their antics had resulted not only in a No. 1 hit (“Doctorin’ the Tardis”), but also a book about how to cynically and formulaically repeat said No. 1 hit. Over the next several years, they’d funnel their profits into increasingly lavish and bizarre productions, videos, and hijinks. In that period, they’d also make one of the best ambient albums of all time.

Then it all famously culminated at the ’92 BRIT Awards, where they ended their performance by machine-gunning the audience with blanks. Just like that, the KLF retired. Before long, their art and propaganda arm K Foundation popped up again, funneling KLF cash into outrageous stunts—like their signature statement, burning a million British pounds and filming it in 1994.

The KLF have popped up here and there since then, but for all intents and purposes, they’ve been dormant as Cauty and Drummond—now in their sixties—have pursued other projects within music and visual art. Their comeback's timing does not seem totally coincidental given that far-right authoritarianism has risen again in the West, vaguely echoing the early ’80s of Reagan and Thatcher. The bleakness and rampant capitalism of England during Thatcher’s reign was where the KLF germinated. The duo was an albatross of the internet culture to follow—weird, humorous, sadistic, conspiracy-addled, fixated with shadow government agencies and corporations—so maybe they have a vision for a post-truth world?

Whatever it is Cauty and Drummond have in store, let’s gear up by looking at some of the most memorable keyholes into the wild and wooly world of the KLF.

Debut Single “All You Need Is Love”

The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu’s 1987 debut single saw Drummond and Cauty take on the alter-egos “King Boy D” and “Rockman Rock” and sample without permission from MC5, the Beatles, Hall and Oates, model Samantha Fox, and an incredibly dramatic PSA from John Hurt. On the surface it sounds like a weird party record or some mutation of a Malcolm McLaren record, but it’s actually a song about the grim reality of the AIDS epidemic and the often irresponsible manner in which the media covered the public health crisis as it unfolded.

The Manual: How To Have A Number One The Easy Way

In 1988, the KLF published this guide on how to play the music industry, using as a case study their No. 1 UK hit “Doctorin’ the Tardis,” a ridiculous proto-Jock Jam take on “Doctor Who” that couldn’t be more British if it tried. The manual includes many cunning passages like, “Having no money sharpens the wits. Forces you never to make the wrong decision. There is no safety net to catch you when you fall.” Like their whole career, the instructional booklet functions both as a hilarious takedown of the music industry and as a legitimate rubric for commercial success within it.  

Ambient Masterpiece Chill Out

Perhaps bored of peak-time bangers, the KLF created an ambient masterwork with their 1990 concept album, which was supposed to be the soundtrack of some mythic train ride through the American South. It was the perfect example of their kitchen-sink plunderphonics approach, where everything from sound-effects records, slide guitar, dollar-bin fodder, and rave stabs made it into their dream-like universe. Cauty was also the co-founder of the Orb, so check their discography if you want to explore more music like this.

The Stadium House Trilogy

VHS tape The Stadium House Trilogy was a supercut of the KLF’s catchiest anthems—“3 a.m. Eternal,” “Last Train to Trancentral,” and “What Time is Love?”—across three longform music videos featuring over-the-top set pieces. The 1991 release melded their Illuminati iconography with the bombast of late ’80s music industry excess, set to a soundtrack of bona fide rave bangers: “3 a.m. Eternal” was a No. 1 hit in the UK and peaked stateside at No. 5 on the Hot 100.

Tammy Wynette Collab “Justified & Ancient (Stand By The Jams)”

In 1991, the KLF teamed with Tammy Wynette for what would be the last hit of the country star’s career, hitting No. 1 in 18 countries. A rumor persists that the Wynette original “Stand By Your Man” and “Stand By The Jams” were released almost 23 years apart (there’s the number 23 again), and that’s one of the reasons why they did it (besides just liking country music). Wynette claimed she has no idea why they chose her, nor what deeper meaning there might be. In addition to wearing a skintight mermaid suit in the video, Wynette “had this crown on. I don't know what the meaning of that was,” she admitted to The Independent. “Mu Mu Land looks a lot more interesting than Tennessee. But I wouldn't want to live there.” The result was schizophrenic pop bliss hung on a Hendrix sample, with Wynette singing about ice cream trucks (ice cream and sheep were two of the KLF’s favorite motifs) and other absurdities.

The 1992 BRIT Awards Performance

The KLF had the idea to use the BRIT Awards to pull a prank so crass, it would singlehandedly destroy their career. Lore suggests they had planned to douse the audience with animal blood à la Carrie, but instead opted for a punk rendition of “3 a.m. Eternal” featuring Extreme Noise Terror as their backing band. Oh yeah, and they fired machine guns (loaded with blanks) into the audience at the end. Their publicist concluded the performance by announcing, “The KLF have now left the music business.” Cauty and Drummond went one step further, dropping off a dead sheep carcass at the after-party and later heading to Stonehenge to bury their BRIT Award (which was eventually drudged up by a local farmer).

Money-Burning Explanation on “The Late Late Show”

In 1994, the K Foundation burned a million British pounds on the Scottish island of Jura, while collaborator Gimpo filmed the whole thing. They claimed this was authentic British currency—money they had earned from record sales. There has never been any credible proof to contradict that this actually happened. One of their consistent points about the stunt was that they thought it was more relevant than spending it on bullshit—houses, cars, figure-8 swimming pools, whatever. Shortly after, Cauty and Drummond went on Ireland’s “The Late Late Show” to defend their inflammatory act of trolling—one that kept good on their promise to do something so egregious, it would end their pop-music career. “We wanted the money,” Drummond claimed, “but we wanted to burn it more.”

2K Live at the Barbican

The Mu Mu boys made one last live appearance together in this predictably insane performance from 1997. The 20-minute show gave them an opportunity to perform their new protest song, “Fuck the Millennium,” both a subversion and an example of the “comeback single.” Cauty and Drummond dressed as wheelchair-bound old men in viking unicorn helmets, and surrounded themselves with a men’s choir, a 100-year-old club of Viking obsessives (the Viking Foundation), a band that does brass covers of acid house jams, a group of Medieval battle re-enactors, opera singer Sally Bradshaw, and actual Liverpool dockers (who were striking for three years at the time).

The highlight arrived near the end of the set when they played “K Cera Cera,” their cover of the Doris Day hit “Que Sera, Sera,” which they first released in 1993 to celebrate a peace accord between Israel and Palestine. It might be the best recorded moment of these two madmen, even though they don’t touch an instrument or a microphone throughout the whole thing. The spectacle is, as always, their instrument.  

Perhaps Chuck Berry’s most curious accolade is the inclusion of  “Johnny B. Goode” on humanity’s mixtape for extraterrestrials. His signature song was etched onto the Golden Record, a 12-inch gold-plated copper phonograph embedded with 90 minutes of music (as well as human sounds and images) meant to represent our humble species. Forty years ago, the record was affixed to the Voyager spacecraft, currently almost13 billion miles from our pale blue dot, and sent hurtling through the solar system at nearly 38,000 miles per hour; an identical record also resides on the Voyager II vessel, trailing2.2 billion miles behind.

For this cosmic tour, Berry can thank Ann Druyan, the creative director of the Golden Record project. Despite protestations from Congress about the project being frivolous, Druyan curated the record ahead of the Voyager launches in the summer of 1977, alongside famed astronomer Carl Sagan, journalist and producer Timothy Ferris, and a small group of other scientists and musicologists. Over the course of about four months, they decided on what was, in the most literal sense, the first “world music” album: a compilation that could theoretically communicate our humanity whole. They braided Berry together with performances of Peruvian panpipes, Indonesian gamelan, Chinese zither, Western classical music (Bach’s “The Well Tempered Clavier,” Beethoven’s “Cavatina” from “String Quartet No. 13”), blues (Blind Willie Johnson’s "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground"), and jazz (Louis Armstrong and His Hot Seven’s “Melancholy Blues”). The disc also includes sounds of earth, from whale songs to babies crying, as well as photos of our humble planet. The most romantic inclusion: an hour of Druyan’s brainwaves, recorded as she thought about the history of Earth and her burgeoning love for Sagan, whom she would marry after the project and remain with until his death in 1996.

“We knew at the time we were making the Voyager Record that we were engaged in a mythic enterprise,” says Druyan, now 67. “The idea of being able to create this Noah's Ark of human culture and experience and feeling, and then pair that with the ingenious exploratory ambition of the Voyager mission: That was the exquisite embodiment of who Carl Sagan was, that place where our best science and high technology meets the deepest parts of our souls.”

Potential ETs aside, the Golden Record has gone largely unheard over the past four decades; Sagan released aCD-ROM and booklet in 1992 (now out of print), and anunofficial website hosts the record’s music intermittently. (Much like UFOs, it seems to crash often.) Despite being popular enough to beparodied on “SNL,” even Sagan and Druyan were reportednot to own a copy. However, this 40th anniversary year has brought renewed interest in the project: aKickstarter campaign raised over $1.3 million to release the music in a lavish triple-album box set (with gold-colored vinyl, naturally). Sagan’s grandson, the producer Tonio Sagan, has also launched an ambitious remix project comprised entirely of sounds from the records; the first release, “Greetings,” inverts snippets of Morse code, didgeridoo, and rain from the Golden Record into a lovely, trip-hop wash.

In approximately40,000 years, Voyager I will approach the next closest star system, at which point the original Golden Record may get its first listeners; if not, it seems likely to reach someone (or something) eventually, considering the record can survive in outer space forup to a billion years. The Emmy- and Peabody-winning author/producer Druyan is revisiting it, too, viaa biopic on Saganand their love story that she is currently producing. She spoke to Pitchfork about the Golden Record’s legacy, her love of Beethoven and Bob Marley, and turning down the Beatles’ hefty price tag.

Pitchfork: In the 40 years since the Golden Record's release, have you heard it? Do you have a copy?

Ann Druyan: Yes, I have actually the reel-to-reel master of the record, which was given to Carl. I'm scared to say I haven't listened, but I've had it preserved and transferred.

There have been a bunch of different versions. For me, my favorite thing was [the free site]goldenrecord.org; that was truest, in my view, to the spirit of the Voyager Record. We managed to get 27 pieces of music for the record, and we were only able to pay the artists and the copyright holders two cents per copy for the two spacecrafts for universal rights or rather, galactic rights. 

There really is no money in music anymore.

Most everyone, including the Beatles, were content with that meager royalty. Except the Beatles’ publishers, Northern Songs Ltd., said no—they wanted something like $50,000 a copy [for “Here Comes the Sun”], which we couldn't charge. That whole project had a budget of $18,000. We all were willing to do it for that, for no money at all, because we were touching such a distant future and such a different place in space, you know? A billion years is essentially four trips around the galaxy, around the Milky Way. 

I'd love to hear a bit about the specifics of your creative involvement in the record. Which of your musical suggestions made the final record?

A lot of them. When Carl told us of this contact [with ETs], my first thought was of an experience in the early ’70s in Amsterdam. My good friend Jonathan Cott, who was one of the first editors of Rolling Stone, invited me to a friend's apartment on Herengracht Canal in Amsterdam. He wanted to play for me a rare copy ofthe Vegh Quartet playing Beethoven's “Cavatina” fromthe Late Quartet.

I remember hearing it and being overcome with a sense of helplessness that I could never repay Beethoven for what Beethoven gave me at that moment. I felt like the “Cavatina” captured a kind of human longing and even human hopefulness in the face of great sadness and great fear. I remember thinking, “What could I ever do for him?” So my very first thought was, “This is my big chance to pay Beethoven back.” 

I found out later two things about this. One was that Beethoven had actually thought about this possibility, which really shocked me. He had written in the margin of one of his pieces, “What will they think of my music on the star of Urania?”—I think, thinking of Uranus, which is about the right time William Herschel discovered it. He actually wrote that. He was imagining how his music would be evaluated on other worlds. That was actually goosebump-raising. On the Late Quartet, on the “Cavatina” manuscript, he wrote “sehnsucht,” the German word for longing, and that affected me deeply because that was at the heart of the Voyager record: longing for peace and longing to make contact with the cosmos.   

It’s beautiful that it could foster a dialogue, in a way, between you and Beethoven.

That's so true. It was like, “Finally.” You could actually respond across time, even to those long dead, as well as beings of future times and worlds. That was thrilling. I very much wanted Blind Willie Johnson, Chuck Berry, and Louis Armstrong because I felt that was where Africa and Europe really met and profoundly influenced music. I felt Chuck Berry had to be on the record and “Johnny B. Goode,” particularly, because I felt it was like a great American novel. Chuck Berry's genius guitar riff was one reason he was a peerless figure, but he’s as great a poet as he is a virtuoso, musician, and composer. Also there's that phrase in “Johnny B. Goode,” “strumming to the rhythm that the drivers made.” The sound of locomotive driving melody: it made you feel like you were moving at 40,000 miles an hour, the American joy of blasting music and driving your car on an empty highway as fast as you could. At every meeting about the music on Voyager, I would say, “Chuck Berry, ‘Johnny B. Goode,’” and people didn't get it. Even Carl didn't get it at first. I'm very proud of the fact that I wouldn't give up.

In the case of Blind Willie Johnson, the idea was [partially symbolic], that Blind Willie Johnson died from lack of shelter. He died of exposure because he was that poor and uncared for; it was just him and his wife and his ruthless church, this broken-down church. Just to think of him as, obviously, a genius who was so unappreciated that he couldn't even make a living enough to protect himself to come in out of the rain. What a predicament on this planet, and yet here was this piece of music, “Dark Was the Night”—which I loved because it's just a moan. There are no words so it's transcended immediately in any of the limitation of the differences of human languages and the languages maybe used to communicate anywhere else in the cosmos. It was pure, universal feeling, and it was a planet-wide feeling. I was absolutely adamant about that. 

I was asked on CNN, many years ago, “If you could add one song, what would it be?” I immediately said it would be Bob Marley's “No Woman, No Cry,” and that that meant so much to me. It just happened that Rita Marley was on treadmill watching CNN and she said, "I want her to speak at Bob's 55th birthday celebration in Kingston, and so she invited me, which was a complete head-snap for me, because I just adore reggae and Bob Marley most of all… I've listened to it 10,000 times and I still find new things in it. That was one of the hoped-for things on the record: that you could listen to it again and still, 40 years later, be discovering something new in it.

Do you ever ponder the location of the record at the moment, where in space it is now?

I do, every night. I think about it all the time. I'm one of the lucky people on Earth who actually has one of the original Golden Covers, and I look at it every night. I try to imagine in my mind, because I know that both Voyager spacecrafts are as real as we are, and they are somewhere moving. I tried to convey that inCosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey[which Druyan executive-produced, directed, and wrote], not only where the Voyager has been but where Voyager is bound for. I imagine tiny little particles of interstellar space and the cosmic rays battering her hull, and yet, still, she bravely moves forward. I can't resist the impulse to anthropomorphize Voyager because she really feels like a child of our lives, of our love for each other. I've visualized countless times imaginary intercepts by the punitive extraterrestrials of my fantasies and what they would make of it and what it would be like, but also just the idea of 40 years, wandering in the night: It has a kind of biblical echo of wandering in the desert for 40 years…

I can honestly say there hasn't been a day since August 20th, 1977, that I haven’t felt a profound sense of humility to be part of this, to have my thoughts and feelings preserved for the closest thing to eternity that we ever get to touch. And then to realize that this, the creative leap that we took from Voyager, happened in the context of the unfolding love that Carl Sagan and I had for each other. It's just too much. Why would I be so lucky? 

Just as Britpop came to an end, so too must the 20th anniversary Britpop celebrations. After all the Blur box sets, Suede reissues, and Menswear reappraisals, the last hurrah came this past October in the form of Mat Whitecross’ documentary Oasis: Supersonic. The film functions as a time-capsule portrait of Britpop’s 1996 peak, framing its narrative around the Gallagher brothers’ triumphant two-night stand at Knebworth for some 250,000 fans that August. Beyond that era-defining event, 1996 was also the year Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker bum-rushed Michael Jackson at the Brit Awards in a symbolic storming of the palace, while Trainspotting cinematically immortalized the mad-fer-it generation just as Easy Rider did for the hippie ’60s and Saturday Night Fever did for the disco ’70s.

By ending the story at Knebworth, Whitecross’ film tacitly acknowledges the moment when Britpop’s champagne supernova started to fizzle into flat corner-store Prosecco. Soon after, the British charts would be taken over by another, decidedly different group draped in Union Jacks and saucy attitudes, the Spice Girls. On the other side of the spectrum, electronic music was plotting its mainstream incursion. But if 1996 is commonly perceived to be the beginning of the end for British rock music’s pop-cultural dominance, then 1997 offered one last jolt of life, like that horror-movie villain who refuses to stay dead.

Britpop was a reactionary movement by design: a celebratory reclamation of once-proud UK musical traditions—’60s pop and psychedelia, ’70s glam and punk, ’80s indie—in the face of American grunge’s pervasive misanthropy and aggro instincts. But the rock music coming out of the UK in 1997 felt undeniably of the moment, embracing contemporary influences—electronica, post-rock, minimalist classical, lo-fi—while snapping out of Britpop’s hedonistic bubble to grapple with the tensions of encroaching technological overload and globalism. It was a year when established bands underwent career-saving reinventions and upstart acts dropped game-changing debuts.

Alas, this didn’t exactly usher in a new golden age of forward-thinking mainstream British alternative. By the end of the millennium, the charts were clogged with the sensitive serenades of Travis and Coldplay, and shortly thereafter, the British music press effectively turned into the Strokes’ PR department to trumpet a regressive garage-rock renaissance. But listening to Brit-rock’s class of ’97 now, you don’t so much feel like you’re revisiting a bygone moment as living in the tense, chaotic future it anticipated.

This month marks the 20th anniversary of the record that got the ball rolling: Blur’s self-titled fifth album. Let’s have a look back at 10 albums that made 1997 one of the greatest years in British rock ever—right up there with ’68, ’72, and ’79.

Blur, Blur (February 10, 1997)

Blur was intended as an act of retreat. After their overly arch 1995 album The Great Escape got steamrolled by Oasis’ universally adored What’s the Story Morning Glory in the much-ballyhooed Battle of Britpop, Blur wasn’t so much interested in plotting a retaliatory strike as playing a new game altogether. It speaks volumes about the aesthetic restrictions of Britpop that the mere revelation of Damon Albarn and Graham Coxon’s fondness for Pavement became a minor cause célèbre in the British music press. While Blur didn’t exactly live up to the“Britpop heroes go full American slack-rock”hype, the album stripped the songs down to their skeletons. They lay bare the raw materials Blur (and Albarn solo) would dramatically reshape on future records, from discordant punk fuzz to murky dub grooves to frayed-nerve serenades. Ironically, in trying to initiate a retreat, Blur only slingshot themselves to their greatest Stateside success to date: American and British football may be totally different games, but sports fans on both sides of the Atlantic can certainly appreciate the rallying power of a good “woo hoo!” (Listen on Spotify, Apple Music, or Tidal)

The Chemical Brothers, Dig Your Own Hole (April 7, 1997)

Along with the Prodigy’s Fat of the Land and Daft Punk’s Homework, the Chemical Brothers’ second album generated a thousand “Electronica Is the New Rock” headlines in 1997. But the album’s success had a lot to do with the way it rewired Old Rock, providing an easy gateway from Britpop to big beat: “Setting Sun” jacked up the Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows” groove with drum ‘n’ bass clatter and rave sirens (not to mention a guest vocal from England’s most famous Fabs fan, Noel Gallagher himself), while the nostalgia-fueled symbiosis between the late ’60s and the late ’90s reached its summit on the sitar-tweaked blowout “The Private Psychedelic Reel.” (Listen on Spotify, Apple Music, or Tidal)

Radiohead, OK Computer (May 21, 1997)

Radiohead’s third album arrived nearly 30 years to the day after Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and it would define 1997’s prevailing pre-millennial tension just as the Beatles’ classic did the Summer of Love. As news telecasts were starting to devote more and more airtime to discussion of the Y2K bug and the oncoming techpocalypse, Radiohead were consumed with an even more frightening—and ultimately correct—21st-century prophecy: that the computers would function all too well. (Listen on Spotify, Apple Music, or Tidal)

Spiritualized, Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space (June 16, 1997)

Boy meets girl, boy loses girl to the Verve’s Richard Ashcroft, boy makes 70-minute free-jazz psych-rock epic with the London Community Gospel Choir, Balanescu Quartet, Dr. John, and the ghost of Elvis, complete with enough drug metaphors to make the Rolling Stones’Sticky Fingers seem subtle. Lest you think Jason Pierce doesn’t come by his “sky”/“high” rhymes honestly, Spiritualized’s tour itinerary supporting their third album includes the near-top of the World Trade Center and the revolving restaurant at Toronto’s CN Tower. (Listen on Spotify, Apple Music, or Tidal)

Primal Scream, Vanishing Point (July 7, 1997)

With 1991’s rave ‘n’ roll masterpiece Screamadelica, Primal Scream seemed like they were the future of rock; by the half-baked boogie woogie of 1994’s Give Out But Don’t Give Up, they were barely the Black Crowes. The dark, dubby rocktronica of Vanishing Point didn’t just herald the Scream’s comeback—it ended up being the most crucial record of their career. Primal Scream’s fifth album reasserted the band’s avant-rock bona fides at a time when they were threatening to fade into irrelevancy, and laying the scorched-earth groundwork for 2000’s electro-punk blitzkrieg XTRMNTR. (Listen on Spotify, Apple Music, or Tidal)

The Beta Band, Champion Versions (July 25, 1997)

A folk group in dub dressing, the Beta Band initially seemed like an antidote to the more modernist music beaming out of the Isles in 1997. But the Scottish group’s debut EP answered electronica’s rise with their own unique and equally disorienting brand of acoutisca, whether transforming a simple campfire serenade into a confetti-strewn circus parade (“Dry the Rain”) or blowing up a low-key funk clang into a thundering percussive onslaught (“B+A”). A year later, Champion Versions and its two successors would be compiled into the epochal Three EPs; before long, the Beta Band would become Noel Gallagher’s new favorite group and the subliminal retail tactic of choice for discerning record-store employees. (Listen on Spotify or Apple Music)

Oasis, Be Here Now (August 21, 1997)

Just kidding!

Super Furry Animals, Radiator (August 25, 1997)

After hearing their adrenalized 1996 Creation Records debut, Fuzzy Logic, you could be forgiven for thinking the Super Furry Animals were just Wales’ answer to Supergrass. They seemed like another band of Britpop chancers making weekend-ready soundtracks to being young, free, and fucked up (with the odd cameo from a unicorn). But the spectacular Radiator offered the first real glimpse of the future-shocked classic rock that would become their stock and trade, using their familiar Kinks/Bowie base as a foundation for techno-schooled freakery and ominous observations on everything from surveillance culture (“She’s Got Spies”) to xenophobia (“Mountain People”). (Listen on YouTube)

Cornershop, When I Was Born for the 7th Time (September 8, 1997)

Where Cornershop’s previous records initiated a sound clash between Eastern and Western aesthetics, on their third album, Tjinder Singh and co. traversed a shortwave-radio dial’s worth of pan-cultural sounds—funk, soul, indie-rock, Indian psych, even country—with the casual ease of a crate-digger’s record-bin flip. (And for a moment, they pulled off the feat of making a bygone Bollywood star the most famous actor in England.) But embedded within the feel-good grooves are stark reminders of the realities playing out beyond the discotheque doors—“Funky Days Are Back Again” isn’t an invitation to dance, but a call to protest. Perhaps it’s not so surprising, then, that Tim Kaine is a big Cornershop fan. (Listen on Spotify, Apple Music, or Tidal)

The Verve, Urban Hymns (September 29, 1997)

To a certain purist, Urban Hymns isn’t really a Verve album, as it all but vanquished the group’s formative space-rock mysticism in favor of the crowd-pleasing populism that Richard Ashcroft would drive into the ground on his solo albums. For a moment, though, Urban Hymns represented the post-Britpop ideal in that it proved a band could be as big as Oasis but with sonic ambitions beyond Beatles pastiche, exemplified even in the string-swirled samples and hip-hop-schooled beat powering “Bittersweet Symphony.” (Listen on Spotify, Apple Music, or Tidal)

Mogwai, Young Team (October 27, 1997)

For those in the throes of Britpop fatigue, Mogwai’s debut album could not have been better timed. In lieu of crowd-baiting choruses and three-minute singles, Young Team offered noise-rock eruptions and 16-minute avant-psych epics. Where most upstart bands of the day harbored desires to fill stadiums, the Scottish quartet made the sort of seismic songs that actually could topple them. And if coke-fueled excess didn’t kill off Britpop for good, then “Like Herod” surely finished the job. (Listen on Spotify, Apple Music, or Tidal)

Along with the Velvet Underground, Nina Simone, Jimmie Rodgers, and more, Sly Stone finally received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Grammys last week. It seemed an appropriate time to recognize his influence: back in the late ’60s, Sly and the Family Stone was the epitome of freedom in popular music. 

Formed by Bay Area radio disc jockey and producer Sylvester (Sly) Stewart in 1966, the group—as its debut title declared a year later—was on a mission to be A Whole New Thing. Unlike the suit-clad Motown crooners, Sly Stone dressed like a hippie, and was as well versed in the Beatles and Bob Dylan as he was in James Brown and Ike Turner. A former gospel prodigy who started out wanting to be a preacher, Sly was a multi-instrumentalist who knew exactly the sound he wanted his racially integrated group to achieve on stage and in the studio. Sly was determined to forge his own path by infusing layers of psychedelic, blues, jazz, and spirituals.

The first time the band hung out, Sly invited guitarist (and brother) Freddie Stone, bassist Larry Graham, drummer Greg Errico, saxophonist Jerry Martini, and trumpeter Cynthia Robinson to his parents crib so they could vibe; the following day, it was all about practice. Saxophonist Jerry Martini, who still tours with the Family Stone (minus Sly), recalled to me in 2016, “We rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed. It was the most rehearsed band I’d ever been in my life.” A week later they were performing at a club called Winchester Cathedral, owned by their then-manager Richard Romanello. “We did covers, but we would rearrange them and own them, so to speak, Martini added. “And then we moved forward from that point.”

They signed to Epic Records in the winter of 1967, and by the fall, the group’s first album was in stores. While A Whole New Thing served as the blueprint for better tunes to come, it didn’t sell and “didn’t contain a single song any ordinary fan needed remember,” in the words of critic Robert Christgau. Sly went back to the drawing board and, after recruiting baby sister Rose to play keyboards and sing background, scrambled back to the studio.

Released in April 1968, Sly and the Family Stone’s anti-sophomore slump album Dance to the Music and its title-track first single set in motion a legacy-making string of events, from playing Woodstock to putting out what would become modern pop standards (“Everyday People,” “Family Affair”). Sly was also the group’s producer and arranger, who, in that era of studio auteurs George Martin and Brian Wilson, was every bit as brilliant. “So many bands began making music based on Sly’s vision, including Stevie Wonder and George Clinton,” says Rickey Vincent, the author of Funk: The Music, the People and the Rhythm of the One.

Of course, Sly’s reign couldn’t last forever. By the end of the decade, he was sinking into piles of cocaine quicksand, recording erratically and becoming verbally abusive to his group. With no new album delivered, CBS Records released a greatest hits package in 1970 that contained new tracks “Hot Fun in the Summertime” and “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin).”

By 1971, Larry Graham and Greg Errico had left the group, but before departing, they may have contributed (or so we’re led to believe by the liner notes) to the celebrated and misunderstood masterpiece There’s A Riot Goin’ On. Supposedly Sly actually recorded Riot alone with a little help from Bobby Womack, Billy Preston, and a Maestro Rhythm King drum machine, which he called a “funk box.” “The sonic dividing line with music between early Sly and Riot (and beyond) was his funk box. He got plenty of funk out of those 18 preset beats,” says Miles Marshall Lewis, the author of the 33 1/3 book on the album. 

But new levels of funk were not all Stone reached during that era: “Sly went dark with Riot,” Prince biographer Ben Greenman adds. “He went murky and took a turn that alienated, or risked alienating, some of his white audience. But he also made an album that’s a gripping, bleak, amazing piece of artwork.” The subterranean starkness of the record also heavily inspired jazz cats like Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock, whose landmark fusion album Head Hunters contains a way-out song called “Sly.”

Granted, drugs took their toll, but Stone was still creative on his next joint Fresh. Yet, by the time the album was released in the summer of ’73, Sly’s crossover card was in danger of being revoked and many black folks decided to depart to other funk frontiers. For the next decade, Sly continued to record albums under the group’s name (Small Talk, High On You, Back on the Right Track, Heard Ya Missed Me, Well I'm Back), under his own name (Back on the Right Track, Ain’t But the One Way), as well as a various collaborations with George Clinton.

By the early ’80s, Sly struggled to regain the fame he had a decade before. “I know what it’s like to be on top,” he told Jet Magazine in 1982, “and I hope to get there again.” Four years later, Sly made the Billboard charts for the final time when he collaborated with former Prince protégé/Time member (and current D’Angelo guitarist) Jesse Johnson on “Crazay,” a gem bursting with electric funk synths and Afro new wave soul. The world finally seemed to be catching up to Sly.

These days, Stone is 73 years old and the hard living has dragged him down, but his music is still fresh. As a celebration of Sly’s mastery, here are 10 post-Riot tracks that highlight the man’s stone cold genius.

“If You Want Me to Stay” (1973)

The blaxploitation beat of Fresh’s first single “If You Want Me to Stay” sounds as though it’s directed at an audience that keeps making demands on brother Sly. “For me to stay here I got to be me,” he proclaims, as if to say, I know I have my problems and I’ll change when I like. As we know, Sly doesn’t like any pressure.

“Skin I’m In” (1973)

Perhaps the most African a West Coast soul man has ever sounded, Sly opens this Fresh track with a jungle boogie groove and rides bareback on a black panther until the party is over. In less than three minutes, the man has caused a revolution.

“Can’t Strain My Brain” (1974)

Uncle Sly threw the studio sink into this Small Talk track that incorporates jazz and blues with a hint of country and western.

“Insane Asylum,” Kathi McDonald & Sly Stone (1974)

Discovered by Sly’s friend Ike Turner, blue-eyed soul singer Kathi McDonald brings the blues out of Stone in a swampy, guttural way. The late McDonald had the pipes of Janis Joplin and the soul of Aretha Franklin, so this is an underrated gem.

“Crossword Puzzle” (1975)

Perhaps the coolest thing about Sly was that the brother couldn’t be contained by genre. When you thought you knew his sound, he’d flip it around on you just cause. Later sampled by De La Soul for their old-school classic “Say No Go,” this is Sly at the heights of funky-worm slipperiness.

“I Get High On You” Remix (1979)

Back in 1979, Sly fans were screaming sacrilege when Epic put dreaded disco remixes on a bunch of Sly songs for the compilation Ten Years Too Soon (including “Dance to the Music”), but damn near 40 years later, the proto-house vibe of Boston DJ John Luongo has a certain retro appeal on High on You’s title track.

“We Can Do It” (1982)

This is one of those ahead-of-its-time tracks that sounds as left of center and bugged-out now as it did in 1982, on the Family Stone’s final afterthought of an album, Ain't but the One Way.

“Sylvester” (1982)

Nothing more than a dramatic 43 seconds on Ain’t But the One Way, “Sylvester” is a fully formed meditation on identity, stardom, and addiction. “Digressing with the best of them,” he sings in a gravelly voice, sounding as though he’s descending into a crypt. This is Sly at his most haunting.

“Crazay,” Jesse Johnson & Sly Stone (1986)

This Minneapolis dance groove was hip-windingly irresistible when it came out in 1986. While many Sly/Prince fans would’ve rather seen them two get their freak on, the Time’s pink-clad consolation prize was just as dazzling. No doubt, Prince is still somewhere pissed that Johnson got to work with Sly and he didn’t.

“If I Didn’t Love You,” Funkadelic (2012)

Sly Stone has been working with Funkadelic leader George Clinton since the ’70s. “People don't know it, but Sly still working on his music,” the P-Funker told me in 2012. “He got some bad stuff coming out soon. Right now he is in rehab, but when he gets out I'm getting him down here to Tallahassee to work on some music with me. It's not about me helping him, but both of us helping each other.” Two years later, Clinton dropped this vocoder-heavy soul jam, proving that the funk remains alive in Sly.

Vague political statements were the norm at last night’s BRIT Awards. Katy Perry danced amid a phalanx of miniature houses (comment on... the housing crisis?) and giant skeleton puppets that were probably meant to be Donald Trump and British Prime Minister Theresa May. When the 1975 won the award for Best British Group, frontman Matty Healy gave a surprisingly meek acceptance speech for a man whose image is built on (delightful) ridiculousness: “People in pop music and the public eye are told to stay in their lane when it comes to social issues. But if you have a platform, please don’t do that.” That… was it. Fader editor Aimee Cliff summed up his remarks and others like them: “2017: artists use their platform to tell other artists to use their platform to tell other artists to use their platform to tell other artis—”

Forgetting the outside world for a moment, there was plenty to talk about within the room. The recent narrative of the BRITs has revolved around its exclusion of grime, definitively the UK’s fastest growing cultural phenomenon. In 2015, it took Kanye West to get Skepta, Stormzy, Novelist, and two dozen more grime artists on stage during his performance of “All Day,” which prompted a rash of (predominantly racist) complaints to British broadcasting standards association Ofcom. By way of response, Skepta rush-released his single “Shutdown,” which featured a skit based on the outcry read in a middle-class woman’s voice: “A bunch of young men all dressed in black dancing extremely aggressively on stage, it made me feel so intimidated, and it’s just not what I expect to see on primetime TV.”

No grime artists were nominated at the 2016 BRITs, leading to an inevitable #BRITssowhite backlash. Ceremony organizer Ged Doherty promised that changes were being made to the 1100-strong voting body to ensure that history didn't repeat itself, and for a while, at least, it looked as though they’d made some progress for 2017. David Bowie was the only white artist nominated for Best Male Solo, alongside Skepta, Michael Kiwanuka, Kano, and Craig David. Lianne La Havas, Nao, and Emeli Sandé stood alongside Ellie Goulding and Anohni in the Female Solo category; Skepta and Stormzy were both up for British Breakthrough Act. But on the night, Sandé was the only black artist to win in a British category. (Beyoncé, Drake, and A Tribe Called Quest cleaned up the international awards, which were barely mentioned for reasons that went unexplained.) As with the Grammys, the impression was of an establishment trading off the image and artistry of young black creatives, but denying them the recognition they deserve.

When Skepta performed “Shutdown” halfway through the night (following a pitiful interview with Rag’n’Bone Man, the white soul trustafarian who beat him in the Breakthrough category), he used his literal, physical platform to send a message to the music industry. The illuminated staging beneath his feet alternated between flashing red and displaying portraits of his peers taken from writer Hattie Collins and photographer Olivia Rose’s book This Is Grime, a handsome oral history of the genre. “Skepta’s management team got in touch and said he really wanted to celebrate the scene as part of the performance,” says Collins the morning after the performance. Collins has spent more than 13 years covering grime, and her admiration for the scene is evident from the intimate anecdotes she’s extracted in the book, while Rose’s tender portraits capture the artists in domestic settings. Fighting hangovers from Skepta’s after-party, the pair Skyped to discuss grime’s snub, industry cluelessness, and the importance of there being no “true” story of grime.

Pitchfork: Would it be wrong to see Skepta’s use of these photos as a protest against the BRITs?

Hattie Collins: I think that the prize he really cared about was the Mercury [which he won], and I think Stormzy has perhaps been a more vocal figure in grime about the BRITs and the lack of diversity last year. I think Skepta really probably just wanted to use his platform to shine a light on the scene. It was more a chance to display 100-odd people who would possibly most likely never get to be that stage.

His use of that imagery felt meaningful, whereas the BRITs using grime to promote how supposedly inclusive they are turned out to be hollow when they didn't reward any of the artists. Were you surprised?

HC: I was surprised, but I'm surprised at myself for being surprised, because why did I expect any better? Somebody said this to me last night—they gave us the chips but not the steak. I had several conversations last night with key industry people who were patting themselves on the back like, [adopts posh voice], “Oh, you must be so pleased.” Are you insane? If anything it just highlights again how out of touch they are.

Olivia Rose: This might sound mad, but to me it's like Brexit, it's like Trump. How does all of this mad stuff keep happening in 2017? It's so obvious—you only have to look at people's Instagram followers to see who the breakthrough artists of the year were. Ignoring "urban music” is just whitewashing, it really is. The people who vote are not in tune with what the music means to people who live in this country. Somebody asked me last night, “Who is Stormzy?” How can you not have heard his name?

Chip and Stormzy backstage at a show, c/o Olivia Rose and ‘This Is Grime’

There's always debate about whether grime “needs” the validation of the industry at large. Do you think what happened last night matters?

HC: It will have no consequences whatsoever on the scene itself. Having said that, if Stormzy had won, if Skepta had won, the impact would actually have been pretty big. You know, Stormzy has an album out this week. It was so telling that it took Ed Sheeran to bring out one of the hottest music stars in this country—you can compare it to Adele and Beyoncé at the Grammys. The Brits itself didn't want to bring Stormzy onstage, and kudos to Ed for sharing the stage with Stormzy and giving him some love on the air.

It has been theorized that as totally independent artists, their success is seen as a threat to the system that the BRITs is founded on. What do you think?

OR: If that is the case, then the music industry needs to wake up. Things are done in a different way now, and you either adapt or react against it. It's so the BRITs that they would reward the dead man and not the black man. That's the bottom line.

Grime doesn't have a huge written culture around it. Why was it important to make This Is Grime an oral history?

HC: I've written about grime for a long time, so I don't see myself as outside of the scene, but I'm also certainly not a person who's shaped it, so I was very cautious of extolling what I believed grime to be. One of the important things about grime is that it's made by a bunch of mates from East London, so I wanted it to have its own voice.

OR: There is no true history. There's so many different versions of the same story: how grime got its name, when things started, where exactly you pinpoint that. That was the other thing, allowing the story to be told in all of its different forms.

HC: Since we've done the book, I'm hearing more and more stories, and it feels such a waste not to continue to document them, so hopefully it'll be a shifting project.

Kano in his car, c/o Olivia Rose and ‘This Is Grime’

What would the next chapter be?

HC: It would be the last year: the Mercury, the BRITs. It would be really good to have a very frank discussion about the industry and the impact of these institutions upon the scene. It's not just about awards—it does have a deeper impact politically and culturally. I think that's really interesting in this post-Brexit, Trump-ruling world—these conversations that are important, that have been important throughout grime with things like the Form 696 era.

Any final thoughts about last night?

OR: My final comment is, fuck the BRITs! Skepta’s after-party was a turn-up, we all had fun.

Did any of the artists talk to you about what had happened?

HC: I spoke to Skepta for quite a while, but definitely not about the BRITs. I honestly don't think that they're bothered. He's riding so high in his life right now, I just don't think he will give the BRITs a second thought.

Boy Better Know co-founder (and Skepta’s brother) JME, c/o Olivia Rose and ‘This Is Grime’