On February 15, New York City rapper Princess Nokia performed in the UK at Cambridge University’s Charity Fashion Show, where her efforts to help raise money for the disabled took a disturbing turn. According to front-row witnesses quoted by The Cambridge Student, the artist born Destiny Frasqueri allegedly asked an audience member, a white man, if he was being disrespectful, threw a drink on him, and leapt from the stage before hitting him three times. Returning to the stage, Frasqueri threw another drink towards the crowd and declared, “That's what you do when a white boy disrespects you.” She then walked off the stage, ending the concert just two and a half songs into her high-energy romp of a set. 

The unnamed audience member who was attacked told the Student, “I was standing in the audience and was told by a fellow audience member that the name of the performer was ‘Abigail.’ Given that I was enjoying the performance, I shouted out 'Let’s go Abigail!' After I shouted this, she came down from the stage. She slapped me and threw drinks on me.” Backstage, Frasqueri told two students—Richelle George (a member of FLY, Cambridge's network for women and non-binary people of color) and Jason Okundaye (VP of the Cambridge University Student Union’s Black and Minority Ethnic Campaign), that she could “see him mouthing dirty obscenities like, ‘Show me your tits.’” In a blog post, George and Okundaye expressed solidarity with Frasqueri: “We must emphasize that the humiliation experienced by Princess Nokia onstage is all too common in the daily experiences of women of color at Cambridge.” (Multiple requests for comment from Frasqueri went unreturned at the time of publication.)

Frasqueri’s incident is just the latest in a long line of incidents in which women (especially women of color) are objectified, sexualized, and harassed in the course of performing or otherwise just doing their jobs. It remains impossible for women to get onstage (or hell, walk down the street) without the threat of men calling out to comment on their bodies. But Frasqueri’s response is reflective of a broader trend in the way that we respond to politicized hate speech at this point in time. And make no mistake—in 2017, a white man sexually harassing a brown woman on stage at a black-tie charity event at one of Britain’s most storied academic institutions is most definitely political speech. Particularly when you consider what a Princess Nokia set can do, how her shows shake with empowerment when she adopts the “girls to the front” sentiment of Kathleen Hanna and asks her fellow women of color to heed her words.

While the student that Frasqueri struck disputes her account, it’s clear she felt her safety was compromised, and she responded to that threat with violence. Whether one condones or condemns her response, it’s no longer an outlying method of dealing with threats. Punks have been fighting Nazis pretty much since the genre was formed, but one need not look all that far back for evidence. As recently as 2013, the Dropkick Murphys’ Ken Casey felt the need to beat the hell out of a fan who had joined the crowd onstage during a St. Patrick’s Day performance, only to start throwing up a Nazi salute.

Ever since Richard Spencer’s on-camera face-smashing got meme’d into immortality, the previously rhetorical question of, “Is it OK to punch a Nazi?” became a legitimate part of contemporary political discourse. The music world was not exempt from this—lovable beardo percussionist Thor Harris even posted a short PSA on Twitter, in which he instructed proper Nazi-punching technique. His sentiment drew some condemnation (though technically not a Twitter suspension as suspected), sure, but he also received a fair bit of praise from more liberal corners. And when Milo Yiannopoulos was greeted at Berkeley by violent protests, the outrage drew condemnation from the President—but the message that he was not welcome rang loud and clear.

dear friend Thor Harris was suspended from Twitter for posting this how punch nazis in the face video. here you go! pic.twitter.com/1tJcKiWi7c

— Xiu Xiu (@XiuXiuforLife) February 8, 2017

Of course, yelling “show your tits” at a woman onstage is not a Nazi act. But the groundswell of public (or at least online) support for Nazi-punching raises the question of where to draw the line. If it’s OK to punch a Nazi, is it OK to punch someone spouting hate speech towards women? Or even just disrespect and harassment? Spencer and Yiannopoulos are just two (admittedly high-profile) voices preaching anti-inclusive messages, but their sentiments are now being broadcast from the highest levels of government. The fact that it took until this week for Trump to bother commenting on the rise of anti-Semitism is concerning but not all that surprising, given his administration’s policies targeting the bodies of women, Muslims, and people of color. This political environment has emboldened a culture of bigotry and discrimination, and as the concert in Cambridge proves, it’s not just limited to the U.S. In a country where half of women say they have been sexually harassed at work, is it any surprise that a college student might feel comfortable enough to sexually harass a musician on stage as she tried to do her job?  

When a young Nazi sympathizer passing out white power flyers on the Cal Poly campus was greeted recently with a fist to the face by an anonymous masked avenger, his boldness instantly receded. He declined to even file a report or even give his name to police. This line of logic suggests that audience members will harass a performer only if they think they’re safe from physical harm. Is the Cambridge student likely to repeat his actions in the future with the sting of Frasqueri’s jabs reverberating in his memory? In theory, an eye for an eye is an ugly way for humanity to live. But history also proves that oppressors are not reformed by simply asking nicely.

“Incantations delivered in weightless, improvisatory vocals above undulating grooves; they're entreaties of yearning and devotion… a preacher of sensuality in his pulpit.” So esteemed a New York Times concert review of Leon Ware from back in 2008, some 40 years into his career. With the news of Ware’s passing yesterday, you’d be forgiven for thinking that you have never heard Ware’s music. Despite 12 solo albums released over the course of his career, Ware never quite landed the R&B hit that he so graciously bestowed upon others. Only the rustling silk sheets of 1979’s Inside Is Love reached the lower echelons of the R&B charts—which is a shame, since songs like “Rockin’ You Eternally” and “Why I Came to California” and the 1976 album Musical Massage are exquisite in their own right.

Ware’s subject matter often centered around boudoir whispers, so it made sense that he moved at his smoothest when in the shadow darkness. Or as he put it a few years ago on the occasion of having his 1982 self-titled LP reissued by Be With Records: “I wear the bed. I’m one of the Soldiers of Love.” His moves manifested in the likes of Quincy Jones, Maxwell, Isaac Hayes, Donny Hathaway, Nancy Wilson, Ike and Tina Turner, Bobby Womack, Marcus Valle, and most famously, Marvin Gaye. His way with expressing the communion of love transcended language, with his songs perhaps even more popular and revered in Brazil and Italy.

Born and reared in Detroit, Ware’s career started as a songwriter at the local hit factory, Motown Records. By 1967, he had credits on songs from the Isley Brothers, Martha & the Vandellas, the Jackson 5 and soon after, Michael Jackson on his debut. But it was when Motown’s Berry Gordy was trying to convince his biggest star, Marvin Gaye, to come out of a recording sabbatical that Ware finally had his moment. As Ware told Jason King on the anniversary of Marvin Gaye’s sensual classic I Want You, Gaye loved a song that Ware had penned for Jackson (“I Wanna Be Where You Are”) and during a session at his home, Ware put on a demo of his unreleased duets with Minnie Ripperton. “Marvin walked towards his bedroom, turned around, looked at me, and said, ‘If you give me that album, I'll do the whole thing,’” Ware remembered.

The result was Gaye’s lover-man comeback, I Want You, as libidinous an R&B album as has ever been laid to tape. The dynamic between Ware and Gaye carried over to the unspoken language that lovers use at their most intimate. “Being two men sincerely dedicated to sensuality, that was all we ever discussed,” Ware said. “All that happened on that project was so innate, so natural. It deserves to be timeless. The aroma that anybody gets from it is real, and you should be feeling it.”

Here are nine other stunning works in which Ware made his mark in service of his collaborators.

“Got to Have You Back,” Isley Brothers (1967)

One of Ware’s earliest co-writing credits was on this primitive Isley Brothers cut, when they were still masters of shouted soul. This song, powered by Funk Brothers drums and a blast of fuzz guitar, finds the Isleys freshly wounded in their hearts, pleading for a lost love.

“I Wanna Be Where You Are,” Michael Jackson (1972)

Ware’s breakthrough song gave then-13-year-old Michael Jackson his third straight solo Top 40 hit and reached No. 2 on the R&B charts. An elegant bit of baroque pop that somehow folds in harpsichord, orchestra, flutes, and wah-wah guitar, the song has been covered by the likes of Beyoncé, Zulema (who had a disco hit with it), Marvin Gaye, Dusty Springfield, Jose Feliciano, the Fugees, and SWV with Missy Elliott.

“Body Heat,” Quincy Jones (1974)

After hearing his work for Donny Hathaway and the Miracles, Quincy Jones tapped Ware as vocalist and songwriter for his slinking 1974 album, Body Heat. On the steamy title track, Ware and an array of vocalists (including Al Jarreau and Minnie Riperton) raise the temperature with their harmonies, against a backdrop of heartbeat drums, softcore wah-wah guitar, and the arcing cry of an ARP from Billy Preston and Herbie Hancock.

“The Junkies,” Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson(1974)

In a rare soundtrack appearance by Ware, his voice appears on five tracks from renowned African-American composer Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson’s score for The Education of Sonny Carson, a doc about the civil rights activist and community organizer. On this two-minute track, Ware lends his delicate high register, where it mingles with the string section and flute to sublime effect. One can hear how that intermingling of falsetto, synthesizer whinny, and supple strings would inform Ware’s work on I Want You a few years later.

“Inside My Love,” Minnie Riperton (1975)

In an alternate universe, the duo of Ware and Riperton would be as revered as that of Gaye with Tami Terrell. The two met while working on Jones’s album and the next year, Ware wrote this R&B hit for Riperton. On the surface the song scans as a lascivious paean to sex, with a chorus asking in an ever-escalating register: “Will you come inside me? Do you want to ride inside my love?” Tellingly, Ware attests that the lines were actually inspired by a preacher from his childhood bellowing the phrase, “Let us come into the house of the Lord.” The sacred and profane were one to Ware, though; “I’m a sensual minster, here to remind you all to make sex your principal religion,” he once quipped.

“The Voodoo Lady,” Lara Saint Paul (1977)

Italian-Eritrean singer Lara Saint Paul has had a long and storied career; her Wikipedia page alone features photos of her alongside Hillary Clinton, Luciano Pavarotti, and Quincy Jones. Starting in the early ’70s, she recorded with Jones and performed with the likes of Ray Charles, Louis Armstrong, and Stevie Wonder. In 1977, Saint Paul came out to Los Angeles, where Ware produced this Afrobeat-flavored album with help from the Pointer Sisters, Ray Parker Jr., and James Gadson. This epic track features trills from Saint Paul and flutes that trek into spacey disco territory, to sweaty success.

“Mystery Dancer,” Shadow (1980)

Featuring three members of Ohio Players, Shadow never attained the successes of their former group. For their second album, they brought on Ware to write, arrange, and produce. With sweet three-part harmonies, this disco-kissed soul-jazz track might not have become a hit, but it showed off Ware’s ability to blend elegant orchestrations with body-moving grooves.

“Estrelar,” Marcos Valle (1983)

In the late ’70s, Brazilian MPB star Marcus Valle wearied of life under the military dictatorship of his country and briefly relocated to L.A. He soon found himself working with Ware on the two albums he made for Elektra in the early ’80s. And while Ware didn’t land a hit from their collaboration, upon Valle’s return to Brazil, he had his biggest hit with “Estrelar.” Co-written with Ware, it’s a dazzling boogie number dedicated to the joys of working out.

“Sumthin’ Sumthin’,” Maxwell (1995)

On Maxwell’s debut, Urban Hang Suite, the neo-soul star conceived of a concept album detailing a single love affair, from first contact through conclusion. If that overarching narrative brings to mind Gaye and Ware’s I Want You, it’s no coincidence, as Ware was a close collaborator with Maxwell on the album and garnered a songwriting credit on this hit.

Josey Rebelle's dark, defiant Discwoman set and Max D's positive-vibes “Yes Mix” bookend this month's column, both asking the same question and coming up with different answers: In a world gone mad, how can dance music keep you sane? Aïsha Devi's thrilling FACT mix takes a more spiritual route, while sets from Deena Abdelwahed and Shy Layers propose globalist solutions.

Josey Rebelle – DISCWOMAN 18

“Listening back, I think I was maybe in a bit of a dark mood when I did this,” writes London's Rinse FM resident Josey Rebelle of her set for Discwoman’s podcast series. “The world feels fucked.” But her mix is defiant, not shying away from overt political messages. Not five minutes in, civil rights activist Angela Davis can be heard lecturing about race and immigration over System Olympia’s woozy, R&B-infused techno. But exhilarating tracks from Indo Tribe and Lone—the former from 1991, the latter sounding like it—carry the implicit promise that we might still rave our way to utopia, while damn-near headbanging cuts from Ikonika and I-F offer more aggressive opportunities for bloodletting. Blitzing through hi-def techno, rapid-fire disco, breakbeat hardcore, and classic electro, it’s an audacious mix—as hopeful a soundtrack you could wish for in a world heading towards hell in a handbasket.

Aïsha Devi – FACT Mix 589

“I am the zero point, the primal vibration,” intones a computer-generated voice at several points in this mind–melting set by the Nepalese-Tibetan-Swiss producer Aïsha Devi. “You will smile when you die… I am the prophet and you are me.” Heady stuff, but fitting for a mix modeled after religious ritual and spiritual ascension. Ambient synthesizers alternate with deconstructed dancehall, apocalyptic trap, and birdcall-riddled bangers like Gila’s “Don’t Chirp.” Sending Young Thug a cappellas soaring over spacy synths, pairing 2Pac verses with Shackleton drum tracks, and closing with a breathtaking Keith Jarrett edit, Devi ventures so far beyond club music’s outer limits that you can practically see Trappist-1’s seven orbs glowing in the distance.

Deena Abdelwahed – Groove Podcast 95

In advance of her appearance at the opening of Berghain’s Säule—the Berlin club’s new ground-floor room dedicated to experimental club sounds—the Tunisian DJ Deena Abdelwahed puts together a captivating set of heavily abstracted electronic beats from Tunisia, Ghana, Crete, London, Boston, Rotterdam, and Portland, Oregon. Her balance of industrial atmospheres and jagged drum grooves is unusual within the global bass scene. Loping drum patterns are wreathed in anxious clang, and tangled snippets of foreign-language vocals lend the impression of spinning Radio Garden’s virtual globe and hopscotching from transmitter to transmitter.

Shy Layers – Métron Musik Mixtape 037

Shy Layers’ wonderful self-titled debut album wears its influences on its sleeve. There are vocoders reminiscent of Kraftwerk, vocals paying homage to Arthur Russell, a production sheen indebted to ’80s pop like Tears for Fears and Phil Collins, and small touches suggesting project principal JD Walsh has logged plenty of hours listening to Steely Dan and Paul Simon. But the most distinctive sound on the Atlanta native’s album might be the snaky guitar lines derived from West African highlife, and that’s the inspiration he unpacks in this gorgeous set for Métron Musik’s mix series. He covers plenty of ground: De Frank Professionals’ “Afe Ato Yen Bio” is a mid-tempo dance number with close-harmonized vocals and an organ/guitar/drums mixdown that oozes into the red, while Seckou Keita’s “N’doké (Little Bro)” is a lilting kora instrumental, expressive but understated. Ata Kak’s “Daa Nyinaa,” on the other hand, slips through a disco-rap trapdoor and winds up in a remarkably strange place. An eerie closing track from the Ethiopian organist Hailu Mergia ties it all up in a bittersweet bow.

Lowtec – RA Label of the Month Mix: Workshop

Workshop’s penchant for “warm-up music, closing music, and something to fill the many in-between situations,” as label cofounder Even Tuell puts it, is well represented in Lowtec’s mix for Resident Advisor’s Label of the Month feature. Willow’s “A1” is an early highlight, the reverb around her wordless vocals spreading out like rings around rocks tossed in a pond. Kassem Mosse’s brand-new “MPCDEEPLIVEEDIT” adds electro-funk squelch to Lowtec’s typically languid style, while D Man’s flickering, half-speed “Cream Test” is among several unreleased treats. In RA’s accompanying feature, it becomes clear that the key to Workshop’s quirky charm is the disinclination on the part of its core artists to treat it as anything other than a hobby. For once, then, thank goodness for day jobs: It’s the square life that keeps Workshop sounding so delightfully bent.

Anna Adams – Mixtape 10

Judging from the sound of this mix for DOCUMNT Magazine, Dresden’s Anna Adams (aka Anna Erdmann) might consider changing her alias to “Anna Addams.” Wending through passages of slow-motion synth-pop and tumbling industrial techno, the set revels in cheerfully gothic vibes. It’s a lot of ground to cover, but she makes it work by virtue of her creative, sometimes counterintuitive juxtapositions. She follows Nthng’s Blade Runner-reminiscent ambient melancholia with pitched-down haunted ballroom from 1952, and her pairing of Cornflakes 808’s bloodcurdling coldwave with Gina X’s slow-motion disco is a masterstroke of evil-sounding sleaze.

System Olympia – NTS Radio: System Olympia 001

A Calabrian musician with ties to Italy’s Slow Motion label, System Olympia devotes her debut NTS show to a megamix of her own productions. She’s partial to brooding synth-pop with a shimmering neon outlook, part Midnight Star and part Oneohtrix Point Never. Toward the end, she ramps up the tempo and sinks into a stretch of pneumatic house, before an echoing acoustic guitar outro that sounds like the Durutti Column spun into cotton candy.

Daniel Avery – At Brilliant Corners (RA Live)

Brilliant Corners is a Japanese restaurant in London’s Dalston neighborhood that boasts what it calls an “audiophile” sound system, where Daniel Avery recently stepped out of his techno wheelhouse to deliver a sit-down set of ambient and shoegaze. The dust on his records might not be quite up to audiophile standards—someone get that man an anti-stat brush, stat—but the selections are impeccable. Autechre’s “Yulquen,” a meditative highlight of their 1994 album Amber, gives way to cosmic wormholes from Italy’s Nuel and Japan’s Iori. Chris and Cosey’s “Trance” and New Order’s “I.C.B.” both lower the room temperature considerably before kosmische traveler Michael Rother (Neu!, Harmonia) and Detroit space-rockers Füxa warm it back up again. Letting tracks play out in full, often leaving a buffer of silence between them, it’s as much playlist as DJ set, but the selections are reason enough to tune in.

Elena Colombi – Dekmantel Podcast 107

London’s Elena Colombi courts no shortage of chaos on this dark, gnarly mix for Dekmantel; it’s no surprise to discover she’s involved in a party called Abattoir. EBM, industrial, and hardcore rave get smashed together in ways that can be difficult to untangle, particularly when knotty polyrhythms from Toulouse Low Trax and Durian Brothers get thrown into the mix. There’s a particularly thrilling passage around the 19:30 mark, where snippets of saxophone and voice are streaked over what sounds like two colliding drum grooves—a tidy encapsulation of the set’s tricky balance of pleasure and unease.

Max D – Yes Mix

Learning when to say no is an essential part of staying sane. But no self-care regimen is complete without the occasional, emphatic yes. So thanks be to Washington, D.C.’s Max D, aka Future Times co-honcho Maxmillion Dunbar, for a set shot through with positive vibes, pulse quickeners, and teasing glimpses of a heightened state of consciousness. (“All over the place—for your mental state,” he notes.) Scene-setting ambient gives way to a spine-tingling voice-and-percussion piece from Music From Memory’s new Outro Tempocompilation; Aleksi Perälä’s curiously tuned breakbeat techno sets up woozy D.C. go-go. Following an eclectic first 30 minutes, the latter half sinks into quick-stepping house and techno drenched in rich color, exuberant almost in spite of itself. The whole thing functions as a jubilant rallying cry to balance out the necessary negativity implied by any act of resistance. It’s going to be a long few years, the set seems to say: pace yourself, and make time for joy. 

And check out last month’s Best Mixes column for even more jams.

On Friday night, Third Man Records’ new Detroit location threw a swanky private party to celebrate the opening of their long-promised pressing plant. Invitations specified that attendees wear “semi-formal attire,” which divided the crowd in two camps: people looking legitimately fancy, and employees clad in classed-up takes on Third Man’s signature yellow and black palette. On Saturday morning, the general public flooded the store in search of free concerts and 180-gram, multi-colored “made in Detroit” vinyl. But on Friday, the scene was all exclusivity and free cocktails.

Third Man garage-rock weirdo and native Michigander Kelley Stoltz wailed on a tiny saxophone from the store’s stage, while a thick industrial smell wafted in from the pressing plant down the hall. All night, employees in jumpsuits pressed records in a roped-off area while the fancies looked on with their drinks and hors d'oeuvres. As Stoltz played, Jack White raised his champagne glass in the air. “We’re all one family,” he said, “and remember this moment, because we’re making things beautiful last for the next generation.”

Third Man Pressing’s opening weekend—both the private and public parties—offered a surreal composite of industrial prestige, uncompromising ambition, and rock’n’roll slime. Jack White was truly on his Charles Foster Kane shit, presiding over the black-tie event as its figurehead while promising a great big beautiful tomorrow on the backs of new machines, manufacturing jobs, tightly curated aesthetics (seriously, matching jumpsuits), and very loud music. Attendees laughed at his jokes and tried to get pictures with him. The next day, a slightly humbler crowd gleefully shoved while the Mummies put on a wild, unbelievable rock show. Here are a few scenes from a weekend of both champagne and spit.

Danny Brown Meets a Hero

The Teacher and The Student

A post shared by Danny Brown (@xdannyxbrownx) on Feb 25, 2017 at 7:43am PST

Since the invitation didn’t specify who would play the private party, the early buzz at Friday night’s event was that Danny Brown was scheduled for a surprise set. Tipped off by friends who work at Third Man, members of Protomartyr and Wolf Eyes showed up on the promise that they’d get to see the rapper perform. (During Kelley Stoltz’s set late in the evening, Wolf Eyes’ Nate Young appeared concerned: “So is Danny Brown going to sit in with these guys or what?”) Sure enough, Brown closed the night with a brief discography-spanning set, including Atrocity Exhibitionhighlights “Really Doe” and “Pneumonia.” The crowd, somewhat thinned by that point, mostly featured the party’s younger attendees.

The bigger story, perhaps, was a simpler one: Danny Brown got to meetone of his heroes. He oncetold Pitchfork of seeing the White Stripes at the Old Miami, a bar two blocks from Third Man Detroit: “It changed my life in that sense of knowing that I seen these guys play in a dive bar in Detroit and now they on MTV and they was winning Grammys after that. They really gave me that inspiration that I could do it on my own terms.” Shortly after Danny’s performance, someone walked up to Jack in the hall and asked what he thought of the set. “Fucking great,” he replied.

A Secret Recording Studio

Third Man’s operation in Detroit is massive, with more retail space than the Nashville shop and a giant pressing plant in the back. On Saturday, Ben Swank—one of the big three at Third Man—offered Pitchfork a quick behind-the-scenes look at the operation. Walking through a kitchen where musicians and employees lingered for coffee, cookies, and beer, he opened a heavy door that looked like it might lead into a closet or pantry. Nope. Immediately we faced another heavy door, behind which was a sound-proof and temperature-controlled recording booth. It’s a legit, professional studio setup with mixers, reel-to-reels, and a bunch of other recording equipment. Monitors looked out onto the stage, and throughout the weekend, they made some direct-to-acetate prototype recordings. The team are still ironing out the kinks, but it appears that Third Man’s Detroit location is gearing up to make live records out of their shows, just like they do in Nashville. But with a pressing plant just a few steps away at the Detroit outpost, it also seems feasible that Third Man could bust their own “world’s fastest record” record with ease.

Get in Line

While VIP guests filed into the shop on Friday night, tents were set up outside for people waiting to get their hands on exclusive records the next morning. By Saturday afternoon, three long lines wound around outside—two out front and a third in the alley out back. When asked about the purpose of the back alley line, an employee clarified that they were also “slangin’ records out the back door.” Up for grabs were locally made, multi-color pressings of the Stooges, MC5, White Stripes, Destroy All Monsters, Derrick May, Carl Craig, and Johnson Family Singers records. On a day that’s neither Record Store Day nor Black Friday, the palpable demand for these homegrown reissues is proof positive that Third Man continue to lock down the exclusive vinyl economy game.

Meet Detroit’s New Country Star, Craig Brown

Attendees of both parties got the chance to see one of Third Man’s newest signees, the Craig Brown Band. Brown is something of a local institution, best known for his work in the punk band Terrible Twos (and also for tending bar at some of Detroit’s better venues). Now, the rock’n’roll mainstay is fronting his own country band, with a debut due out March 31. In a way, the pressing plant’s opening party felt like an industry coming-out for Brown, who commanded the stage with just as much magnetism as the more established folks who played throughout the weekend. Like Margo Price before him, Brown’s getting Third Man’s country-star rollout—a look he wears well.

Sweaty + Bandaged: the Oblivians and the Mummies Take Over

To close out the plant’s grand opening, Third Man flew in two iconic garage rock bands, the Oblivians and the Mummies. If you want to throw a great party, you can’t do much better than booking two of the all-time budget rock institutions. The Oblivians played some of their best songs (older and more recent) and got joined at one point by the Detroit Cobras’ Rachel Nagy. Their shout-along rendition of “Memphis Creep,” invoking the slime of Detroit’s unofficial rock’n’roll sister city, felt especially powerful. (Jack White watched from the balcony, eventually disappearing after a bunch of people in the crowd turned their phones skyward to take his photo.)

Then the Mummies emerged—yes, in full mummy regalia—for a nut-so and sweat-soaked set, in which members screamed and playfully talked shit about one another. Keyboardist Trent Ruane started spitting on the rest of the band while Russell Quan sang “My Girl.” At several points, Ruane threatened to throw his organ into the crowd, instead balancing it on his neck. When they covered Devo’s “Uncontrollable Urge,” Detroit punk hero Timmy Vulgar ran into the center of the crowd and feverishly shoved everyone in arm’s reach. An elated pit broke out, capping a weekend of rock’n’roll commerce with rock’n’roll chaos.

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’s theme is tradition. Below you will find a rundown of February’s notable metal stories: how bands paid homage to the past, built a legacy atop it, or failed to learn from it.

On the first night of February, I watched Moon Tooth frontman John Carbone crawl through the audience at Brooklyn’s Saint Vitus like a rat on a subway platform. He repeatedly scurried out of the room, occasionally returning with new props to play with—a roll of duct tape, a spare drum head—while the band carried on flawlessly and furiously. You got the sense that they’d all been bottled up all day, just itching to get on stage and explode—an energy they easily transferred to the crowd.

The show was a joint bill with Astronoid, a Massachusetts group that combines Mew’s dramatic prog-pop with Boris’ riff-heavy low-end doom to triumphant yet disquieting heights. After their set, I felt as though I’d witnessed a massive spaceship take flight on a starry evening. The two acts could not have carried themselves more differently, but what they had in common was an effective dismissal of the old-school tradition of metal. Astronoid, with their serious and beautiful anthems, and Moon Tooth, with their oddball energy, each twisted the history of metal into something new and distinctly their own.

Metal has an unwavering allegiance to its past, and it’s visible in nearly every aspect of the genre. On a surface level, looking at a band’s press photos often will reveal artists literally wearing their influences on their sleeves, while their logo may nod in a more knowing way. Is it gruesome like Death? Illegible like Demilich? Spacey like Voivod? Of course, a band’s sound can communicate the same well-versed metal devotion as their vintage tees and fan-fiction logos, in a more substantial way that can lead to success. The flipside is that there are often accusations of betrayal lobbed as metal bands shift sounds. To evolve as a metal band, you often have to either swerve into different subgenres (like Darkthrone in their crust punk phase), or simply try to increase the levels of intensity. To do otherwise is to risk alienating your audience (like Celtic Frost’s notoriously clean and poppy Cold Lake), or end up falling into obscurity, making the same records over and over again to a decreasing fanbase.

This month has seen a number of artists effectively paying homage to the glory days. Finnish crossover thrashers Foreseen and Florida death metal traditionalists Gruesome each announced new releases with songs made no less exciting by the fact that they sound like they could have been written at any point over the past three decades. On the excellent Greyhaze label, an obscure 1989 album by the Mist, Phantasmagoria, received a much-welcome reissue. It’s a record whose vicious odes to flying-saucers would be just as powerful if they had emerged mysteriously on Bandcamp today—and for a lot of younger listeners, they might as well have. Many of this month’s greatest moments came from artists sticking to tradition, and innovating in subtler ways.

But not learning from the past also led to some of the month’s worst metal moments. At the Grammys, Metallica once again attempted to freshen up their sound by adding a new voice into the mix. Vaguely similar to the fascinating failure of Lulu, Lady Gaga’s turn as Metallica singer spoke to more than just the band’s misguided attempts to switch things up. The song they performed, “Moth Into Flame,” is one of the finer moments fromHardwired… To Self-Destruct—an album largely heard as Metallica’s best in ages because of how much it sounds like their old stuff. The performance, however well intentioned, was marred by technical difficulties: James Hetfield accidentally offering a perfect metaphor as he shouted desperately into a non-working mic. “I haven’t seen him like that in 20 years,” Lars Ulrich said of Hetfield’s outrage after the show. Maybe that’s good news for fans who heard Hardwired as a harbinger of more pissed-off things to come. Sometimes the whole point of innovating is just so you can get back to doing what you do best.

Power Trip // Nightmare Logic

No band has brought metal’s past to the present quite like Power Trip, the Texas crossover greats whose 2013 debut Manifest Decimationalready feels like a genre classic. Their new album Nightmare Logic thankfully doesn’t toy with their winning formula. While listening to their music can sometimes be an exercise in name-that-riff, Power Trip are further defining themselves as a band whose classicist tendencies—those squealing solos, those shout-along choruses, the very fury of it all—only make them that much more vital. Nightmare Logic serves up eight of their best songs to date—compositions more intense, multifaceted, and exciting than anything they’ve attempted before. It’s the sound of a band demanding to be positioned among the giants of metal, and ending up one step closer to permanently earning their place.

Judas Priest // Turbo: 30th Anniversary Edition

With extreme devotion—as metal often demands of its fans—comes extreme scrutiny. As such, most metal acts have at least one divisive album that can light up listeners with rage for years to come. For Judas Priest, it’s Turbo, the 1986 album that found them synthing things up and reaching for the cheap seats (at the Def Leppard show). It’s an album that raises a number of contentious questions, chief among them the very possibility for a metal band to modernize their sound without losing their identity. On this 30th anniversary 3xCD deluxe edition, which pairs the album with a vicious Kansas City performance from ’86, those questions seem moot. Turbo has aged well, sequencing some of the band’s most immediately gratifying songs in a way that highlights the mainstream potential lurking behind their music from the beginning. Faced with the challenge of translating these tracks to a stadium full of Priest fans, Rob Halford seems even more charged up to deliver. The songs explode in this setting—which is what they were built to do.

Dool // “Golden Serpents”

One of the last decade’s great metal acts, the Devil’s Blood, took inspiration from ’70s proto-metal, when satanism and the occult began showing up more fully formed in the riffs and choruses of rock music. Dool, a band that’s risen from the ashes of the Devil’s Blood, transplants their rhythm section to a punchier setting but takes a similar route to the netherworlds.Their recent debut Here Now, There Then is a dynamic listen that ranges from epic doom to gothy alt-rock, with each song feeling like the towering centerpiece of a completely different album. “Golden Serpents” is its finest moment, a psychedelic burner with otherworldly roots. The song is about “escapism through hallucinogens,” Dool’s Ryanne van Dorst said, after a friend recounted her visions of golden snakes in trees—an image that reminded the singer of her own teenage drug use, prompted by small-town boredom. “Golden Serpents” tells van Dorst’s story with a sense of both dread and catharsis, the visions only growing stronger with the passing of time.

Thou // “Don’t Let It Bring You Down”

“Don’t Let It Bring You Down,” one of the standouts on Neil Young’s 1970 classic After the Goldrush, is structured like a subtle mood swing. The words don’t change but the music does, so that by the end, the mysterious, minor-key drama has evolved into an uplifting folk song. On the benefit compilation Many Waters, Louisiana sludge lords Thou add their own gnarled perspective to the track. It serves as the centerpiece to the collection, which the band curated along with Chicago label Thrill Jockey, to benefit victims of the Louisiana floods of 2016. Let it serve as a case study in metal’s ability to communicate both pain and hope. Things might turn around, they suggest, but burning castles is still pretty brutal.

The Death Archives: Mayhem 1984 - 1994

A gorgeous coffee table book issued by Thurston Moore’s Ecstatic Peace imprint, The Death Archivestraces the tale of misfortuned Norwegian black metal icons Mayhem. It sheds light on their early days up through the 1991 suicide of vocalist Dead, the 1993 murder of guitarist Euronymous at the hands of Burzum’s Varg Vikernes, and the aftermath. While the story it tells is achingly dark, The Death Archives is filled with vivid photographs and insightful anecdotes of a more general nature. “It was bloody tiring to drag those big, spiked clubs all around Europe. They weighed so many pounds, were pointy, and no fun to have in your backpack,” goes one memorable passage, “We got a lot of questions every damn time we were crossing a bloody border. And we had two of them, even worse.”

Now performing their 1994 masterpiece De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas in full at shows with an updated lineup, Mayhem is putting their twist on the aging rock band narrative: celebrating their history without sacrificing their darkness. In fact, more artists should take note on how to age this gracefully. As Jørn “Necrobutcher” Stubberud writes in the foreword, “Mayhem were never interested in exploitation. Our personal experiences did not take place in order to sell more records or gain media exposure and that won’t change now.” The past is alive on every page of this book.

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

LikeNick Drake, the singer-songwriter he’s most often compared to,Elliott Smith’s tragic death inevitably casts a pall over his music. Smith’s songs were already dark, but his passing at the age of 34 in 2003 (perhaps a suicide, perhaps not) turned them pitch black. Next week’s reissue of Either/Or is surely a different listen now than it was in 1997, and not just because of a few previously unheard tracks. It can be difficult to hear his work—as masterfully written, performed, and produced as it is—without a gloomy specter creeping into one’s mind. 

But another way back into Elliott Smith’s music awaits on Archive.org,the nonprofit online repository that hosts several dozen live recordings of the songwriter, uploaded by fans and collectors with the permission of Smith’s estate. These tapes, stretching from his first solo forays to his final appearance in 2003, give an alternate view of the musician. The darkness lingers, of course, but the songs have room to breathe a bit more in a live setting, allowing us to appreciate Smith’s craft afresh. We even get to hear him crack a joke or two.

Club Congo // Scottsdale, Arizona // late 1994 or early 1995 

In 2017, with Smith's legend firmly in place, it’s easy to say that the songwriter's early solo shows should have been met with a hushed, respectful silence. But in the mid-’90s, some audience members just didn't give a shit. This tape, one of the oldest known documents of Smith as a solo acoustic performer, is a battle between a chatty Club Congo crowd and Elliott's early repertoire. “You guys always pay $7.50 to come and talk?” he complains half-heartedly at one point. But if anything, the distracted crowd—which, to be fair, does seem to include plenty of fans—seems to intensify Smith's delivery. Of special interest is the skewed remake of the old folkie number, “Little Maggie,” with Smith locating the harrowing heartbreak lurking in the timeworn lyrics. (Tracklist and legal download here)

Morning Becomes Eclectic // May 6, 1997

Promoting Either/Or in the cozy confines of KCRW's studio a few years later, Smith didn't have inattentive bar patrons to deal with. But he did have Morning Becomes Eclectic’s inquisitive host Chris Douridas’ questions to deflect, whether about his influences (“I was really into Kiss and the Beatles”) or his upbringing (“let’s not get into that”). Awkward interview segments aside, the music here is captivating, a crystal clear example of Smith’s growing power as a live performer. His whisper-thin vocals cut to the quick with every phrase, while his elegant-yet-urgent guitar playing is note-perfect—check out the bone-chilling rendition of “Needle in the Hay” or the deceptively breezy “Say Yes” for proof. As uncomfortable as Smith sounds when not singing his songs, this was just the start of his time in the spotlight. Less than a year later, he’d be performing at the Oscars, thanks to the inclusion of “Miss Misery” on the Good Will Hunting soundtrack. (Tracklist and legal download here)

Le Pavillon Lion // Bourges, France // April 17, 1999

Smith came to prominence as an acoustic troubadour, but he had his sights set on a bigger sound. To support the more lushly produced XO, the songwriter toured with a lean trio made up of Quasi’s Sam Coomes on bass and backing vocals and Paul Pulvirenti on drums. This tape of the band in France is a high-energy thrill ride, with Smith leading his cohorts through hopped-up versions of XO’s highlights and rearranged older favorites, as well as a few previews of Figure 8. Any fans expecting a mellow night must’ve been surprised by the explosive readings of “Son of Sam” and “Baby Britain,” among others, showcasing Smith’s scratchy, urgent electric guitar. He could switch gears effortlessly, though: check out the solo mini-set here, including a hauntingly gorgeous “Easy Way Out.” This is Smith at his most confident, his most dynamic, his most accessible. (Tracklist and legal download here)

The Wiltern // L.A. // November 9, 2001

In 2001, Smith began working on what would become From a Basement on the Hill, released posthumously in 2004. Though these prolonged sessions with an array of collaborators stretched on until Smith’s death, he began previewing songs early on in the creative process. This mini set from a Los Angeles benefit show is all new material, and it offers skeletal portraits of despair in songs like “Let’s Get Lost,” “Strung Out Again,” and “Twilight.” The Wiltern’s natural echo lends a ghostly vibe to the set, with Smith’s vocals sounding even more vulnerable than usual and a frayed edge creeping into his typically fastidious guitar work. (Tracklist and legal download here)

Henry Fonda Theatre // L.A. // February 1, 2003

“The songs came from Elliott,” his friend Sean Croghan wrote in the liners for rarities collectionNew Moon. “Elliott was not a creation of his songs.” He’s right, of course, but it would take a healthy dose of denial to not hear a man nearing the end of his rope on this tape of an early 2003 gig. Still playing a wealth of new material destined for inclusion on From a Basement on the Hill, the laser focus of previous years is gone, in its place a ragged desperation. The pure self-loathing on the opening “King’s Crossing” is almost tangible. But there are flashes of the old brilliance, including a precisely rendered “Between the Bars,” and even “Miss Misery,” a song Smith rarely returned to after its Oscar nomination. There’s even some welcome humor in his occasionally rambling between-song banter, and a loose cover ofOasis’ “Supersonic,” with764-HERO’s Robin Heringer joining in on drums. “This is probably going to piss some people off,” Smith says by way of introduction, before launching into Noel Gallagher’s cocksure lyrics and swaggering melody—a million miles away from his own approach. But you can tell that, for at least a few minutes, Smith is enjoying a temporary escape from his demons. (Tracklist and legal download here)

Last February, leading pop maestro Max Martin was awarded the prestigious Polar Music Prize in his native Sweden. The honor prompted the songwriter and producer to grant a couple of interviews—something he has done only a few times in the years since hitting No. 1 for the first of 22 times in 1998 with Britney Spears’ “...Baby One More Time.” Now, Martin’s extensive 2016 chat with Swedish financial newspaper Dagens Industri has surfaced online translated into English (and been aggregated anew), and the usually silent Martin seems to have relished the moment to theorize what makes a great song. Certainly he has enough of them, having played a big role in shaping Top 40 over the last two decades, starting with the rise of bubblegum in the late ’90s, surviving through the hip-hopification of pop in the ’00s, and coming back full force as the ’10s began. From Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone” to Kesha’s “Blow” to Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off,” Martin is someone whose songs are ingrained in the fiber of pop but whose personality is, purposefully, not.

In the interview, Martin mentions that if the chords change often throughout a song, writers should consider a more simplistic melodic accompaniment: “If you’ve got a verse with a lot of rhythm, you want to pair it with something that doesn’t.” He notes an approach he cribbed from Prince, where the chorus instantly sounds familiar because the verse preceding it actually has the same melody. He stresses his obsession with vocal melody down to each syllable, which prompts him to tirelessly re-record with his superstar collaborators until the parts sound just as he sang them on his demos. And he shares a rule he learned from his late mentor Denniz PoP (co-founder of the Stockholm songwriting and production studio Cheiron): a song must be recognizable within two seconds. It’s fascinating stuff, all of which Martin is quick to note does not represent a foolproof blueprint by any means. But reading it and subsequently listening to Popjustice’s (excellent) “Maximum Martin” playlist yesterday, it was hard not to hear these elements in hits replayed within an inch of their lives.

Not analyzing pop to death can ensure that your favorite songs don’t fall apart, as some inevitably do when placed under the magnifying glass. It’s not that Martin’s songs collapse upon closer examination, but you start to be unable to unhear his signature moves—and these are just the few he talks about in the interview. Take “The One That Got Away,” one of Katy Perry’s many Teenage Dream hits co-written by Martin and one of his protégés, Dr. Luke. Like most Martin songs, there is little here that could be considered sonically adventurous—he’s not exactly a production boundary-pusher. If anything, the simple, repeating piano undercurrent and swooping strings give “The One That Got Away” a classic feeling. True to Europop form, the 134 bpm keeps the tempo moving at a clip, and there’s a giant earworm of a chorus. If you listen for it, just as Martin says in the interview, you can hear how he adds one instrument after another, each contributing bit by bit to the intensity of the melody. It’s subtle enough so as to be seamless, but when you’re aware of the song’s seams, they’re all you see.

Decoding the algorithm behind pop has become something of a consumer fad, from New Yorker writer John Seabrook’s lauded chronicle of the modern hit factory, The Song Machine, to the viral New York Times video showing how Diplo, Justin Bieber, and Skrillex made “Where Are U Now.” Trend pieces abound on songwriting camps, the now-common practice of pop music groupthink inspired in part by how Martin and his mentees have always worked. Our fascination with pop as a formula to crack only seems to grow. It is interesting, this idea that a handful of songwriters can shape pop radio at any given moment if they all put their brains together. Or it can skew craven, like when the Chainsmokersbrag about considering every digital metric of their music while writing and drop phrases like “deliverables,” “topline,” and “smash” in interviews. But this growing curiosity about how hits get made—and the pressure to make them, in this post-internet world—can feel like the antithesis of what the very best pop songs do for listeners. They should seem effortless, no matter how many tricks are up their sleeves.

Max Martin probably would agree on this point. Though he says he’s stayed out of the spotlight because his “life is so much easier without the attention,” hearing him talk about how“a great pop song should be felt when you hear it” leads you to believe that, despite his go-to strategies, he knows there’s some unexplainable magic in the way he crafts melodies—and that even under extreme commercial expectations, music cannot be relegated to methodology. “You can hear songs that are technically great, songs that tick all the boxes,” he continues. “But for a song to be felt, you need something else… something that makes you feel: ‘I need to hear that song again’” Trying to figure out what exactly that is probably won’t make you enjoy a pop song more. In fact, it might make you enjoy it a little less. It’s called the secret sauce for a reason.

Today, shaggy-haired Philly guitarist Alex G announced his second album for Domino, Rocket, and it’s a doozy. His first for the label, 2015’s Beach Music, was an uneven affair, and not necessarily an ideal place to start with his massive discography throughout this decade (much of which remains unofficially released, if readily accessible on YouTube). His earliest recordings, simply sung with acoustic guitar backing, can bleed together upon initial listens. But highlights emerge, especially songs with particularly poignant lyrics. Like Elliott Smith, whom those early recordings recall, Alex G seemed to tire of his own warped take on a coffeehouse sound, eventually adopting a full band (and more) for his more recent albums. One song on Rocket is essentially hardcore punk, another basically country.

In what was a surprise but perhaps shouldn’t have been, Alex showed up on Frank Ocean’s Blonde last year. Why did this underground star catch the ear of one of music’s biggest stars? Alex shares the love of a sweet and sour song with Ocean, and though Alex’s music skews towards indie rock where Ocean goes R&B, there’s an undeniable similarity to the often indistinguishable way they sing about love and sadness. It’s not difficult to imagine Alex G songs being blasted from John Cusack’s boombox in Say Anything. It’s also not difficult to imagine him playing John Cusack, either. Dude’s kinda dreamy.

His large, diverse body of work is what makes him an exciting artist to get into, but it’s also what makes it such a pain to figure out where to start. Below, find eight highlights from throughout his career, each as good a place as any other to dive in.

“You Are Great”

Clocking in under two minutes, this unreleased track crystallizes Alex’s early magic: extremely basic rhyming, doubled vocals, charmingly cruddy recording, and some shaken sleigh bells for added vibe. It’s an apology note and a love letter in one, and it’s quite beautiful.

“Change”

With its squeaking strings and sinister strumming, “Change”—off his 2012 cassette Trick—bears a strong resemblance to Elliott Smith. Written at the end of Alex’s teenage years, the extremely vague “I don’t like how things change” lyric pretty much embodies everything scary about getting older (a feeling that doesn’t ever stop, it turns out).

“Kicker”

A rough album with bratty moments, Beach Music’s attempted innovations often fell a bit flat. Alex’s experimental inclinations are often what make individual songs special, but they didn’t work as the music’s driving force. The best song from Beach Music turned out to be the most traditional: “Kicker,” an electric upgrade to his basic rock framework, grooves deeply. The vocal recording is also excellent, with Alex’s staccato cadence adding an extra percussive edge.

“Adam”

This 2013 song seemingly about bullying, off a split 7” with R.L. Kelly, adds piano to the mix. Accompanied by deep tom hits, “Adam” initially skews dramatic until muted, amateur shredding gives way to an organ squeal. Maybe it’s unclear how all these elements cohere, but that’s part of the song’s appeal: all the things Alex tries over the course of many albums are smushed into another under two-minute track.

“Be Kind”

The only recording of this song appears to be a low-quality YouTube video of Alex performing it in a stairwell on acoustic guitar; amazingly, it has more than 100,000 views. Though the comments section would have you believe this is peak Alex G, what makes the clip striking is that it captures just how fertile his brain is. Akin to prolific peers like Frankie Cosmos, Alex tosses off solid track after solid track in a way that makes them almost expendable. Perhaps that’s partially attributable to a youthful attitude of focusing on the immediate, a constant desire for newness fostered through iPhone recordings and the like. Whatever the reason for his excess of material, Alex’s got so much good stuff that even the chaff is worth checking out.

“After UR Gone”

Really any song from 2014’s DSU could be on here. The album’s opener “After UR Gone” opens with a squeal of noise and closes with a pretty wicked guitar solo. In between, its mid-pace shuffle is propelled by drums that sound like wood being chopped. The album marked the first time a body of Alex G’s songs truly gelled. The recording is still lo-fi, so some of the more ambitious moments may pass by without drawing as much attention as they deserve.

“Nintendo 64”

Another unreleased track, “Nintendo 64” shows how powerful a take on suburban malaise Alex G can have. “My brother told me he’s gonna kill himself tonight/With a whole bottle of Prozac or a shiny kitchen knife/He said that when he’s dead I’ll have his Nintendo 64/And I can play it all night long sitting on the basement floor.” The high/low stakes seem like a real Raymond Carver take on teen sadness, which makes it an even more curious spot for some standout humming.

“Sandy”

In hindsight, listening to the exactitude of the guitar picking on this 2011 track feels like a young player striving for perfection, like peeking on the early figure drawings of an abstract master. “I just wanna grow up,” Alex repeats through the song’s ending. He did.

What would Sun Ra think? How might he react, that is, if he were told that the cosmic jazz machine he built—the Sun Ra Arkestra—was still announcing new tour dates in the distant year of 2017? Raised eyebrows, perhaps, or more likely an inscrutable half-smirk. Here in the future, however, it is not so surprising that audiences will turn out for a night of spiritual jazz presided over by Marshall Allen, the Arkestra’s longtime player of saxophone and Electronic Valve Instrument. After all, in the year following the passing of star-children Maurice White and David Bowie, the Arkestra’s sonic happenings might represent a ticket-buyer’s last chance to be a part of the utopian musical “equation” that influenced both the pop world and the counterculture in the 1970s. As morbid as it might sound, Arkestra shows are like watching a light show produced by the supernova of a long-dead star.

What’s most surprising is not that Arkestra shows still feel contemporary, but how the Arkestrian approach to jazz is healthier than it has been in decades. Pioneers like Allen and Pharoah Sanders are not only finding collaborators and kindred souls in the next generation to join them onstage—they’re damn near outnumbered by them. The range of artists and collectives boldly waving high the freak flag of cosmic jazz is surprisingly broad in 2017, and that’s not even counting Afrofuturist pop modeled on the Arkestra more in concept than in actual frequencies. Without further preamble, find below a quick lookbook of nine artists each carrying the torch for cosmic jazz in their own ways, from time-defying cross-generational holdouts like Idris Ackamoor to newer mutants like Morgan Craft and Hypnotic Brass Ensemble.

Kamasi Washington

Of all the artists on this list, Washington likely needs the least introduction. The saxophonist’s breakout LP, The Epic, deservedly topped numerous 2015 year-end lists, no doubt nudged by his association with Flying Lotus’ Brainfeeder label and his standout performance on Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly. The Epic’s association with the cosmic jazz revival is so extensive, it perhaps (falsely) suggests the renewed interest is a one-man movement. A few months before sharing the 2016 Pitchfork Fest bill with the Arkestra, Washington played a one-night-only triple-header alongside Marshall Allen and Pharoah Sanders at Brooklyn’s Greenpoint Terminal—a showmany criticstook for a literal passing of the torch moment. But you shouldn’t hold the high visibility of Washington’s echoing take on spiritual jazz against him, any more than you should let it obscure the other great artists to be discovered on this list.

Hypnotic Brass Ensemble

Existing outside the mainstream music industry, Hypnotic Brass Ensemble might not be known to you unless you recently caught Reuben Atlas’ PBS documentary on the group  or happened upon one of their street performances in New York or Chicago. Literal scions of the Arkestra, the eight brothers who comprise Hypnotic Brass are all the sons of Kelan Phil Cohran, best known for his stint as trumpeter for Sun Ra during his Chicago period (1959-1961). When the Arkestra moved on, Cohran stayed in Chicago and built an equally impressive legacy of his own, passing along the Arkestra’s create-your-own-reality brand of DIY to his sons. (Watch Cohran and sons discuss the cosmic nature of their shared ethos below in “yoUniverse,” a short outtake from the doc that Atlas has shared with us below.) Of course, none of this pre-history is necessary to be blown away by Hypnotic’s brass onslaught, which is as likely to include covers of OutKast’s “Spottieottiedopalicious” or Fela Kuti’s “Water No Get Enemy” as they are subtle and moving original compositions recalling Ra.

Om’Mas Keith

Om’Mas Keith may be best known to Pitchfork readers as one-third of the brilliant but elusive future soul outfit Sa Ra Creative Partners (and to some as a recurring character on Diddy’s making the band). But much like the brothers Hypnotic, the producer and multi-instrumentalist is the child of avant garde jazz musicians, who spent formative portions his childhood literally sitting at Sun Ra’s feet. In the aftermath of Sa Ra, Keith has become a behind-the-scenes everywhere-man—a composer, producer, and musician smuggling bits of the cosmic jazz DNA into the music of Miguel, Thundercat, the Internet, Frank Ocean, Erykah Badu, Anderson .Paak, and Raury, just to name a few. One gets the clear feeling that these post-Sa Ra productions are a secondary, not yet final stage, in Om’Mas’ artistic evolution. But whatever future projects bring, when Sun Ra gave him his name—from om, the original cosmic syllable in Hindu thought—he unleashed a formidable sound on the universe.

Esperanza Spalding 

Although the word on Spalding’s Emily’s D+Evolution is that the 2016 album is her foray into rock, the heavy stew of Spalding’s virtuosic playing, Karriem Riggins’ drums, and production from Bowie collaborator Tony Visconti is much closer to Weather Report than Black Sabbath. True, her tone on the bass does tend to dwell in that ultraviolet end of the chromatic scale where funk, heavy metal, and Miles Davis live together in dark harmony. But her aleatory approach to composition and choral voice arrangements all channel a music of the spheres. As heard on “Good Lava,” Spalding’s take on the cosmic jazz tradition seems to be about understanding or experiencing the earth as a foreign planet.

Resura Arkestra

Resura Arkestra is truly an institution in their native Brooklyn. The big band is made up of players who, over the last several decades, have “graduated” from the Indoda Entsha African dance and percussion troupe, organized locally by choreographer and martial arts instructor E. Preston Riddick. The accretion of pan-African playing styles resulting from this recruitment process gives Resura Arkestra a truly expansive sound, from its full horn section to spoken-word parts delivered by Riddick in a style reminiscent of the Last Poets. Their original compositions can be hard to place in either jazz swing time or Afro-Latin clave mode, but regardless, to hear them move loosely around one another live while still locked in polyrhythmic groove is something to behold.

Idris Ackamoor & the Pyramids

Idris Ackamoor, a veteran of Cecil Taylor’s Black Music Ensemble, is one of those cosmic jazz warriors who, like Pharoah Sanders and Marshall Allen, simply never stopped. But it’s also not incongruous to count him as part of the current revival. In 2016, Ackamoor reformed his ‘70s Afro-jazz outfit the Pyramids to release the acclaimed album We Be All Africans. The Pyramids’ signature sound combines spiritual jazz with a heavy dose of Frafra music from Northern Ghana, a result of an extended 1972 tour on the continent that included a visit to the Ghanaian town of Bolgatanga. Some 45 years after that initial connection, the Pyramids collaborated with Kologo star Guy One for a uniquely Afrofuturist single “Tinoge Ya Ta’a Ba.” Between these new black Atlantic collaborations and the buzz around We Be All Africans, it’s arguable that Ackamoor’s star has never shone brighter than right now.

The Heliocentrics

London weirdos the Heliocentrics have reverse-engineered their own way-out version of the cosmic jazz sound by fusing elements of funk, Ethio-jazz, and psyche rock a la the Silver Apples. In their own releases and notable collaborations with Mulatu Astatke (the father figure of modern Ethiopian music) and Melvin Van Peebles (the father figure of Blaxploitation cinema), the Heliocentrics have revealed a slinky, versatile way with a next-dimension groove. They often feel like the loosest, jazziest elements of a krautrock jam made into their own thing. If funkier arrangements are never far from drummer Malcolm Catto’s sticks, neither are the group’s cosmic conceits, as suggested by titles like “Big Bang Resurrection” or “Telepathic Routine.”

Theo Croker

Like others on this list, trumpeter Theo Croker is a child of jazz—or rather, a grandchild, specifically to Grammy winner Doc Cheatham. His connection to the cosmic jazz tradition, though, is more circuitous. As a player, Croker’s melodic tone and restless versatility tend to put him more in the “stretch music” spirit of his fellow trumpeter and rough contemporary Christian Scott. On “Transcend,” for instance, he plays off a rhythm section that works as a recognizable dancehall beat. Though his trumpet is often smoother and less transgressive than Scott’s, Croker consistently stacks his compositions with tones that are too free and spacey to be labelled anything but cosmic, often recalling the ’70s output of Detroit’s Tribe Records. Though Croker’s 2016 album Escape Velocity did not garner the accolades of others mentioned here, it’s no less rewarding on repeated listens.

Morgan Craft

A veteran player now working from his home studio in Amsterdam, Morgan Craft has taken his guitar improvisation in a radical direction. His soloreleases are almost solely concerned with space and tone, with crunchy dub grooves occasionally emerging from the ambient washes and cosmic slop. It is an impressively wide range of sound for a solo player who improvises his recordings. While the writing and artwork accompanying these releases evince a utopian interrogation of political realities, song titles like “RQ-3 Dark Star” and “XENON1T” suggest a different sort of futurism—one in which experimentation is taken to such an extreme, it becomes a systematic exploration of the very possibilities of this kind of music.

Kevin Coval came to hip-hop in a very Chicago way: through the city’s vivid house music scene. As a teenager growing up in the suburb of Northbrook, Coval viewed house music’s “notion of radical inclusivity” as a treasured anomaly in an “intentionally segregated” city. From there, b-boy battles and emcee events didn’t seem such a stretch. Inspired by KRS-One, Queen Latifah, and Chuck D, rap eventually led Coval to the library, where he uncovered the texts of Malcolm X and Lerome Bennett, Jr., Howard Zinn’s APeople’s History of the United States and Dudley Randall’s The Black Poets. By the time Coval moved back to Chicago in the mid-’90s, following college and an overseas stint playing basketball, he found himself in the middle of an emerging spoken word scene, where the same spaces used to showcase rappers also were used by poets.

“I’d been writing for like five years at that point, and eventually I was just the white dude in the room, and people were like, ‘my dude, are you gonna...read, or...?’” Coval tells Pitchfork. “There was interest and confusion and eventually I got put on the mic and became a practitioner. I thought of myself as a poet, but I wanted to rhyme, too.”

Two decades later, Coval has bridged that particular gap better than anyone else in his city. As the founder of the Louder Than a Bomb poetry festival and the artistic director for Young Chicago Authors, Coval has mentored and created safe spaces for some of the city’s brightest young creatives, including now-blossoming YCA alums Chance the Rapper, Noname, Saba, and Jamila Woods. He has released several books, including More Shit Chief Keef Don’t Like, Slingshots: A Hip-Hop Poetica, and the anthology The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, which brought together four generations of rap writers from across the country.

Now Coval takes inspiration from Howard Zinn with A People’s History of Chicago, his forthcoming poetry collection highlighting hidden histories within the dramatically segregated city. His goal extends beyond chronicling the city’s cultural innovators (from Sun Ra to Ron Hardy) and great political thinkers (from Ida B. Wells to Jane Addams). “I also wanted to share some of the stories where working people have organized and defeated great odds levied against them in order to achieve the benefits that we reap and receive now,” Coval says.

“Part of what I wanted to do in the book is tell how we got to this point in Chicago hip-hop culture, which is why I include the poem about the Molemen beat tapes, why I have an ode to Common’s Resurrection, why I talk about [King] Louie and [Chief] Keef,” he adds. “Prior to this moment there was a generation of Chicago emcees and producers that I was privy to and around, and in part this moment stands on the shoulders and in the legacy of that moment.” Certainly there’s an artistic through-line that holds, even as generations pass. “When Twista is on Saba’s record, what a victory for the West Side, what a victory for the whole city, and what a continuation of this poetic lineage that has very much to do with one another.”

In keeping with this hip-hop undercurrent, Chance the Rapper wrote the book’s foreword, which you can read below ahead of its April 11th release. Chance and Coval have been crossing paths at workshops and open mic nights for nearly a decade, and Coval booked some of Chance’s earliest shows. “Chance is not an overnight success—I met him when he was 14, so it takes 10 years to become an overnight success,” Coval says. “If you ask people in Chicago, they would say he was dope before 10 Day [from 2012]. There’s a slew of tapes with his friend Justin [J-Emcee] as Instrumentality that people in these youth cultural spaces vibed with and loved. One of those songs helped me through the mourning of my aunt Joyce… For me, one of the most powerful things about him is that from very early on I saw how serious he was about the craft.”

For Coval, it’s all linked—the artistic and the civic, writers from Wells to Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks to the late Brother Mike, and onto musicians like Chance, Noname, Chief Keef, and Mick Jenkins. “If you are an artist or writer in Chicago, you are essentially an inheritor to the legacy of Ms. Gwendolyn Brooks,” he says. “Part of what she talked about is that the artist and writer should tell the stories that are directly in front of their nose. Whether it’s Mick or Noname or [Lil] Durk or Sasha [Go Hard] or King Louie, I think everyone is beginning to really understand that there is a power in saying what is in front of them, and that collectively we can begin to paint a broader picture of what the city of Chicago is actually like.”

From where Coval’s standing, the view cannot be considered without looking back at what hooked him in the first place: the radical inclusivity of the Chicago house scene, where sharing perspectives was key. It’s something Coval thinks the current generation of local emcees is mastering. “Young people in Chicago are getting a much broader representation of what it’s like to love, struggle, and fight to have Chicago be more just for you, your family, and your community.” A People’s History of Chicago hopes to trace the lineage of the city’s loudest voices—and the voices of tomorrow.

Chance the Rapper’s foreword

We got the cheat codes.

There’s no other place on earth where you can go to a centralized space and see thirteen-, fourteen-, fifteen-, sixteen-, seventeen-, and eighteen-year-olds who want to conquer art and music. I left Chicago for a little and went to L.A. But have you ever seen a raw-ass tree or a raw-ass plant that’s beautiful, that’s fully bloomed and growing? It can’t fully bloom if you uproot it. If you take it somewhere else, out of its natural environment, it’s not gonna grow the same way. If you take a tree out of the dirt, a Christmas tree, and move it into your crib, it’ll stay that exact same tree for a little while before it starts to wilt, but it won’t grow anymore. You can’t uproot a plant. You have to let it grow. If I were to have grown in LA, I might’ve grown into some shit I’m not supposed to be or just not grown at all, or just peaked. I can reach my peak in Chicago cuz that’s where I was planted and where I can continue to grow.

I had planned on living in LA, but when I was out there going to parties and feeling that vibe, I thought it was ungodly, it wasn’t true to who I was born to be or what I was supposed to grow to be. Being there made me realize this is not where I’m supposed to get my biggest experiences. As sad as I ever was in LA, the lowest I’ve ever been, it’s not where my lowest was supposed to be. The highest I’ve been, the happiest I’ve been in Los Angeles, was not where my life’s happiest moments were supposed to be. Being happy means doing what you are supposed to do, being exactly who you are supposed to be. My god, my inner understanding, whatever it is that guides me, had me recognizing that I’m not supposed to be there.

We have a head start. If you’ve been in that building once, in the Harold Washington Library, one time, you know. Harold Washington. The first Black mayor of Chicago. A very powerful man. A very connected man. A very humble and grounded man. A household name who died in office while at work. His library is in the center of downtown, in the center of the Loop, where all the trains meet. For us to walk into that building is astounding. My dad volunteered for Harold Washington. That’s how he got his record expunged. That’s how he dodged the system. Years later, he has a library named after him and I could walk in from the cold and experience this temple.

From the age of fourteen, I was trying to go against the grain, to grow into a time and period where it’s dope to be anti-establishment, where it’s dope to not just accept all the answers that are given to you but to look for your own answers. I am trying to push that. I’m trying to push that to other people who didn’t get taught that. As kids that grew up in the ’90s and early 2000s, we are able to ask questions like: What’s going on? Who are the people leading us? Who are those people teaching us? What are they telling us? How are they able to tell us that? Who are they and where are they coming from and is it the truth? I’ve been taught to be a critical thinker, and I was able to say this doesn’t feel right. Having the understanding I’ve been blessed with, I’ve been able to discern that that shit is not right, that it doesn’t feel right, that it doesn’t seem right.

I met Kevin Coval at an orientation at Jones College Prep, the first time I ever went into my high school cuz I didn’t check it out beforehand. I just signed up for it and applied. So my first time going up to the school was for the Louder Than A Bomb team orientation and Kevin was doing a writing workshop. Though I didn’t make my slam team or to Louder Than A Bomb, Kevin ended up being very instrumental to me.

Kevin Coval is my artistic father. He mentored my friends Malcolm London and Dimress Dunnigan and Fatimah Warner and got me shows, and those shows got me a little bit of bread and the confidence to continue and take the craft seriously. In a lot of ways he was the other side of Brother Mike for me, and anybody from Chicago knows what that means and how big a statement that is. He was that for me and for a lot of people.

Kevin made art a job to me. He made me feel like it was real. He made me feel like the competition was real. He made me feel that the money was real. He made me feel that the love and the fans were real. And if I didn’t have him in my life I would’ve been complacent. He took me out of that space and made me understand what it is to be a poet, what it is to be an artist, and what it is to serve the people.

Chance the Rapper

Chance the Chicagoan

With a week to go before this year’s SXSW, CEO and co-founder Roland Swenson is defending the festival against a backlash over immigration language in its artist contracts. The controversy started on Thursday, when Told Slant’s Felix Walworth publicly called off a planned performance, citing a clause that allows SXSW to “notify the appropriate U.S. immigration authorities” if they “or their representatives have acted in ways that adversely affect the viability of their official SXSW showcase.” After Walworth’s announcement, an open letter condemning the contract provision drew signatures from artists including Downtown Boys, PWR BTTM, Priests, and Sheer Mag.

In response, Swenson issued a statement noting SXSW has spoken out against President Trump’s travel ban and “is working hard to build a coalition of attorneys to assist artists with issues at U.S. ports of entry during the event.” Today, SXSW shared a new statement saying the festival “opposes discrimination of any kind” and “will be reviewing and amending” the contract clause “for 2018 and beyond.” Swenson spoke with Pitchfork over the phone on Friday afternoon about the criticism, the rationale behind the contract language, and what might change next year.

Dozens of artists have signed an open letter calling on SXSW to remove the immigration language and publicly apologize. What’s your response to those artists?

Roland Swenson: If you take any contract and just pull out a few clauses, it always seems a lot worse than it is when you read it all together in one long thing. The reason we have those clauses is, one, we need the artists to know the conditions of their visa. It’s really serious business. To get their attention we have some very stern wording there.

But at the same time, it’s also so that the Customs and Border Patrol people know that we’re really serious about visa issues. And we’re trying to make sure that the artists that come in follow the rules. One of the reasons we do that is, we’ve had artists who attended in the past and gone and done shows in L.A. and New York and other places. And then the following year, when they tried to get into the country they were turned away, because that stuff was noted when they exited back to their home country.

It’s a really serious piece of what we do to get these acts, who are not famous in America. So we have this way of getting them in that relies on some very important conditions. One of them being that they’re not being paid in cash, and then the other one being that they’re only going to play these shows that they’re officially invited to at SXSW.

The main concern I’m hearing from some in the music community seems to be that SXSW is using artists’ immigration status to discourage them from playing unofficial shows. Is there anything else you would say to address those worries?

We’re just telling them that these are the conditions of your visa and you need to follow them. We take that stuff really seriously and so do the immigration people. We’re looking out for all the bands that come in this way. It really wouldn’t take that many people being detained for violating their visa to where it would ruin it for everybody.

Is this industry-standard language used by other festivals, or is this SXSW-specific?

Most other festivals aren’t operating in the same way that we are. Typically, they’re booking major bands who are on tour and have a work visa and are free to play whatever shows they want to play. What other festivals do wouldn’t really be applicable to us.

We didn’t write this language. One of our lawyers did. We’ve been using it since at least 2013, and so far it’s all worked out pretty well. We’ve never turned somebody into ICE or anything like that. In our agreement, it’s saying these are the things that could happen to you if you don’t follow the terms of your visa. It’s not stuff that we’re going to do to them. It’s stuff that Immigration would do to them.

You’ve said the clause would only be invoked “if somebody did something really horrific, like disobey rules about pyrotechnics, starting a brawl, or if they killed somebody.” Why not make the clause more specific or straightforward?

We’re trying to pack a lot of information into a one- or two-page contract that people can follow who aren’t attorneys. Is this a perfectly written agreement? No. Could it be better? Yes. Will it be better? Yes. Have we done any of these things that we say can happen? No. 

You’ve said this isn’t perfect, and you’ve previously said you’d consider revising this language. How would you want to revise it?

Our event starts next week. We know we have a problem here. We’re not sure exactly how we’re going to fix it, but we know we’re going to be working on it. At this point, these agreements have already been sent out, and people are going to use them to get their visas into the states. So for us to cancel them all to make this change is just not practical.

We’re going to make it through this year with things the way they are, and then we’ll go back through and look at it with the eyes of a person who is living in the world of Donald Trump. Which was not the case when we sent this out back in September.

 It looks like the person that posted it, they got it just the other day.  Do you know why the timing was like that?

It was a last-minute booking. This was part of our confusion. He had only gotten the invite letter. Not the actual contract. He contacted us saying, well, I don’t really like this, I’m going to drop out. And we said, well, OK. And then the next thing we know, it’s tweeted out. I wish that somebody had spent more time explaining the agreement and how it works and why it is the way it is. But it was somebody relatively new [at SXSW] that fielded this.

You said you feel this is partly being done out of a desire for publicity. Do you still believe that?

Any time you send out a tweet attacking SXSW, and that happens a lot, part of it is wanting to get your name out there.

As you said, we’re in the era of Trump. Do you see why people are upset? Is there anything else you can try to do to address that?

We just sent out another statement on it. After a while people are going to have to either accept that what we’re saying is sincere or continue to call us fascists. The context of this is that we really found a way to do this pretty amazing thing, which is to bring these hundreds of acts from outside the country, who for the most part nobody’s heard of them, and put them in a music festival and let them get exposure to people in the industry that can help them to achieve their goals. If there’s no other reason for people to forgive us, it’s because we’ve been able to do that for thousands and thousands of bands. 

In its four decades, punk has meant many different things to many different people. Its relationship to fascism, the specter of which has stopped rattling its chains from history books and re-appeared in the West, is one of the most complicated examples of how aesthetics and philosophy can appeal to both anti-authoritarian and deeply repressive positions.You can find it in punk’s beginnings, as a reaction to the cultural forces of generations prior, the long shadow of World War II among them. Ron Asheton of the Stooges collected and wore Nazi memorabilia to signify his bond with his father, a former Marine Corps pilot. Sid Vicious’ swastika was a fuck-you to his parents’ generation, and largely orchestrated by the (Jewish) Malcolm McLaren. And the electric eels just wanted to piss everyone off equally.

Look no further than the formation of Rock Against Racism (RAR) for a sub-story that contextualizes just how thin the line can be when it comes to manipulating fascist symbolism. In response to a growing National Front presence in England during the mid-’70s, RAR united rock and reggae subcultures (and more importantly, black and white folks). The organization was closely affiliated with the Anti-Nazi League, a public effort of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party; the strict party line embedded in its core philosophy felt suffocating to some. In the case of peace-punk band Crisis, a RAR favorite, bassist Tony Wakeford (who had been a Socialist Workers Party member) and guitarist Douglas Pearce (who had been involved with the International Marxist Group) began to feel so alienated that they formally split from RAR. Wakeford and Pearce went on to form neofolk group Death in June, which began its career playing with the aesthetics of paramilitary fascism (Nazism in particular) as satire—stances that became much muddier from there. Wakeford got the boot from the group in 1984 for his relationship at that time with the National Front, which lasted less than a year; these days, for his part, he is publicly critical of the far right. But Pearce, who keeps Death in June active still, continues to court controversy.

Similarly, the splintering of both the UK and U.S. labor movements, under pressure from Thatcher and Reagan during their tenures, brought about both racist skinheads and skinheads who reacted by speaking out against racism. All this ongoing friction and subsequent reaction, embedded in punk’s formation and carried through along multiple veins to the present, has also created some of the best and most relevant music to directly critique fascism in its many iterations. Here, we present just a few, shying away from many of the more obvious and well-known choices here (Dead Kennedys’ “Nazi Punks Fuck Off,” Oi Polloi’s “Bash the Fash,” etc.)

Johannesburg, South Africa, 1977: National Wake, “International News”

Following the 1976 Soweto uprising, in which students protesting apartheid were murdered by state police, Ivan Kadey and brothers Gary and Punka Khoza did what countless others have done when feeling helpless and frustrated, in need of a voice: they started a punk band. They mixed Stooges-esque garage, the repurposed disco structures and acerbic political analysis of bands like the Pop Group and Gang of Four, two-tone ska, reggae, and African polyrhythms into one heady setlist. But more on the rowdy and raw hard-rock end of things, “International News” took aim at the role of the international media in perpetuating both apartheid and the atrocities of the Angolan War of Independence with sensationalistic reporting. Unsurprisingly, National Wake found themselves the subject of state police surveillance and censorship, making it difficult to secure spaces to play. The pressure eventually split the band apart, but they hadn’t been forgotten; preserved through tape trading and Kadey’s own record-keeping, their recorded material is now available in its original, uncensored condition thanks to Light in the Attic.

Belgium, 1977:Basta, “Abortus Vrij de Vrouw Beslist!”

Those who have never had their reproductive systems regulated by the government may wonder why a song about abortion rights appears on a list of anti-fascist punk songs; those who know the danger of electing Mike “Burial or Cremation for Aborted and Miscarried Fetuses” Pence to one of the highest offices in the land may not. This 7-inch was Basta’s only release, and one of the first Belgian punk releases of any sort. Beyond this significance, the song is incredibly catchy, with a saxophone line reminiscent of Lora Logic’s dissonant contributions to X-Ray Spex and Essential Logic, and a shouted chorus that was a common phrase at pro-choice protests (essentially meaning, “yes, abortion for women!”). Belgium was actually one of the last countries to legalize abortion (not until 1990!), which made Basta’s urgent-sounding record even more significant: the sleeve listed clinics where abortions could safely be obtained.

Rotterdam, Netherlands, 1978: The Rondos, “Which Side Will You Be On?”

The Rondos were Maoist punks, leftist militants who provoked everyone from the Dutch Communist CPN party to (closed-mindedly) Rastafarian culture to Crass, who held the Rondos at least partially responsible for the violence that often characterized Crass shows starting in 1979 (when the two bands played together) onward. From the Rondos’ own biography: “Were we really communists? We assented to it half mockingly and half seriously. In the beginning, our lyrics were non-political or generally ‘anti.’ Wayward, anyhow. Over time we became more serious about our communist image. More fanatical too, due to pressure from the outside.” They had their own magazine (Raket, or Rocket) and alternative bookshop (Raketbase), a hub for the early Dutch punk scene. “Which Side Will You Be On?” was an urgent pogo and a call to action to do something, rather than sitting around talking endlessly about strategy. One cannot, after all, fight fascism by words alone.

Austin, Texas, 1980: The Dicks, “The Dicks Hate the Police”

A blatantly Communist band fronted by an unapologetic fat gay man in Texas released their first single, in which said singer barked in the voice of a violent cop hell-bent on abusing his power against the marginalized... to impress his parents. The song contained few words and fewer chords, and yet, with an arch sneer, the singer—Gary Floyd, a genuine punk hero deserving of recognition beyond the underground—communicated the essence of state power deployed in its most wretched everyday form. “The Dicks Hate the Police” is, at least to this writer, one of the greatest songs of all time, punk or not. Innumerable covers—chief among them Mudhoney’s most famous one—support this theory.

Essex, England, 1980: Poison Girls, “Bully Boys”

Over 40 and differing from the traditionally attractive frontwoman archetype, Jewish refugee Vi Subversa found herself beloved by Crass and friends upon starting up her first punk band. Inspired by the wryness and hookiness of the Buzzcocks, Subversa brought a delicate balance of thoughtful consideration and pummeling ferocity to the burgeoning peace-punk movement. Her history of real-world activism also helped to accomplish some actual work against nuclear disarmament, among other causes. “Bully Boys” was a remarkably catchy little ditty, all buzzsaw guitars, throaty vocals, and punchy drums in service of implicating the role of machismo in National Front violence. The band said that the track, along with “The Bremen Song” (about the Holocaust), led to racist skinheads attacking them at gigs and at home. Subversa’s lyrics were less “the personal is political” in the sense of isolating her experiences as being characteristic of grander political trends, and more “the political is personal,” focusing on how political systems manifest themselves in everyday life.

East Berlin, 1983: Namenlos, “Nazis Wieder in Ostberlin”

It’s unsurprising that East Germans struggling through the stultified economic conditions of the state-controlled Soviet German Democratic Republic found the crudest impulses of anti-authoritarianism in punk aesthetics to be an effective way of voicing their protest—and that the government responded to them as a direct threat. State harassment, police beatings, and apartment raids were regular parts of punk life, forcing many street kids into churches for sanctuary, where they became politicized, mixing with varying civil rights and environmental activist groups who also needed that protected space to meet. Namenlos were among this newly, ferociously politicized breed, employing wiry rock’n’roll riffage and direct lyrics with appropriate seriousness given their environment. The government doubled down on state repression rather than loosening it, and “Nazis Wieder in Ostberlin” (“Nazis Again in East Berlin”) landed three members of Namenlos behind bars. They were held in jail for six months without full charges while being interrogated, and were eventually sentenced to 18 additional months in Stasi prison for their “anti-government lyrics.” Even public support for Namenlos could land punks in jail for months on end. And yet the fire started by mixing disenfranchised street kids and politically savvy strategists couldn’t be extinguished once it’d been set: an organized youth protest movement, punks included, was no small part of the political rebellion that eventually toppled the Berlin Wall.

San Pedro, California, 1984: Minutemen, “Political Song for Michael Jackson to Sing”

So dig this big crux: Think of Mike Watt and D. Boon as the blue-collar socialist punk versions of Bert and Ernie. Friends since age 13, the duo’s oscillating heartbeat is what makes Minutemen so beloved and still relevant today. While the lyrics to this avant-garde punk classic are the least didactic on this list, they are no less direct than any others, and no less evocative (“Me, naked with textbook poems spout fountain against the Nazis”). How do we assert our politics through song, Boon asks, making sincerity a strength rather than a weakness. A crucial question for anyone who’s ever made an impassioned argument and thought, “I must look like a dork”—particularly at a time when neo-Nazis rely on chaotic disdain for anyone who cares too much as provocation meant to disarm.

Santiago, Chile, 1984: Los Pinochet Boys, “La Música del General/Esto Es Pinochet Boys”

At the most repressive point of the Pinochet dictatorship, Daniel Puente Encina formed an explicitly anti-fascist punk band with his friends and called it Pinochet Boys. Their first single? “Music of the General.” This was not the kind of punk danger most Americans are familiar with; it was not even a Green Room-type scenario. This was treason against a fascist state. With every show a secret, risking shut-down by military police, Pinochet Boys gigs were places for young, emerging activists to meet and strategize. The youth movement would become a crucial part of the revolution that led to the Chilean national plebiscite in 1988, a referendum that finally forced the Pinochet regime from power and paved the road for democracy. “This machine kills fascists,” indeed—though Encina and the other Boys were exiled in 1987. From a purely musical standpoint, the song was half classic sing-along punk-band-name-as-anthem and half bizarre, zippy new wave outer-space transmission, one of the weirdest and coolest earworms around. Even if it hadn’t played a historically documented and practical part in actually bringing down a 16-year dictatorship, it’d be worthy of inclusion here.

Mexico City, 1990: Massacre 68, “Sistema Podrido”

Named for those murdered in 1968 while peacefully protesting the repressive Echeverria government (as part of the Mexican Dirty War), Massacre 68 were fairly straightforward thrashers with lyrics bluntly critical of the government corruption and state violence surrounding them. In 1988, a rigged election declared the Institutional Revolutionary Party the new ruling party, though with phenomenally low voter turnout due to a “crashed” system—a cover that was later revealed to have been the result of corruption and burned ballots. Massacre 68 directly critiqued this election in “Sistema Podrido” (“Rotten System”), off their first LP, 1990’s No Estamos Conformes. These are perhaps the most ripping solos committed to a record about horrendously corrupt voter fraud. But stateside listeners didn’t get hip to Massacre 68 until L.A. label Huarache Records re-released their material in the early 2000s, right around the time documents were finally revealed detailing the Mexican government’s role in both the ’68 murders and the ’88 election fraud.

Six years is an eternity between records, especially in an era where an artist can release two full-lengthalbums in as many weeks and have them both hit No. 1. Plenty of bands return after hiatuses, but those typically follow decades-longbreakups and flashy reuniontours. Not many acts vanish from the precipice and come back from it. Seemingly bucking that trend, Fleet Foxes quietly disappeared after two greatalbums and an even better EP. What began as patient waiting for the album cycle wheel to spin slowly led to piqued curiosity as to why the LP would take so long to make. Robin Pecknold’s revelation that he went off to study at Columbia University only added to the build-up.

Finally, Fleet Foxes will release Crack-Up on June 16 through Nonesuch, as announced today along with the premiere of “Third of May / Ōdaigahara,” a song that’s both bigger and tighter than its predecessors. That the band returns to an indie ecosystem where its former drummer headlines “SNL” is perhaps less surprising than the ways in which the musical landscape itself has expanded throughout this decade, a time when genre lines seem a bit more blurred. Despite the heightened expectations their absence fosters, Pecknold sounds certain in an email conversation with Pitchfork. “I’ve struggled at times with finding a solid, objective reason to live, or I should say I’ve struggled with the notion of needing an airtight reason,” he writes. “So that has meant coming around to making my own meaning, and finding meaning in connection to other people.”

Pitchfork: You once commented that the album title, Crack-Up, was inspired by a few things: an F. Scott Fitzgerald essay of the same name, your arrangement and editing approach, and the initials of your alma mater, Columbia University. How does that Fitzgerald essay relate to the album, and how would you describe your recording process?

Robin Pecknold: The first resonance was feeling like I’d cracked myself to some extent. I read the essay at a time when I wasn’t really sure what I cared about exactly, which is something Fitzgerald addresses a bit. I wasn’t focusing on music, I was trying to find other hobbies but nothing else had quite the same pull.

Beyond that, there are themes in the essay that come up a lot on the album, both lyrically and musically. The essay addresses the necessity of holding two opposing thoughts in one’s mind at once, in the “I can’t go on/I must go on” sense. I’ve struggled at times with finding a solid, objective reason to live, or I should say I’ve struggled with the notion of needing an airtight reason—almost anything you cling to can be explained away with logic in one way or another if you’re crafty enough. So that has meant coming around to making my own meaning, and finding meaning in connection to other people.

Lyrically, a lot of the album deals with perception, and the difference between how I have seen the world and how it actually is, in terms of people or situations or self-assessment, or any other permutation of the problem. As I get older I try and take people as they are and project less onto them, either good or bad, not make damsels or heroes or villains out of people who are just individuals doing their best with the hand they've been dealt.

As far as how the title relates to the structure of the album, the editing and arrangement, there are a number of songs where I wanted the transitions to feel jarring, non-linear, like you were watching a movie that has been edited partially out of sequence, like a Nicolas Roeg movie, or as if it’s a stained glass window that’s been shattered and reassembled.

The Third of May 1808 is a famous Francisco Goya painting—a political piece that is ostensibly about resistance to a dictator, Napoleon. Did this factor into the title of the first single, “Third of May / Ōdaigahara”?

My friend and bandmate Skyler Skjelset’s birthday is May 3, and our album Helplessness Blues was released on May 3, 2011. The song “Third of May / Ōdaigahara” is about my relationship with Skye. It addresses our distance in the years after touring that album, the feeling of having an unresolved, unrequited relationship that is lingering psychologically. Even if some time apart was necessary and progressive for both of us as individuals, I missed our connection, especially the one we had when we were teenagers, and the lyrics for the song grew out of that feeling.

It felt like a funny coincidence to see a Goya painting called Third of May. The compounded coincidences, and how the whole experience of playing music with him itself felt like a series of lucky breaks and coincidences, left me feeling like it was a good phrase to use for the title of a song. Beyond that, though, the painting only served to inspire a few of the lyrics, like, “Aren’t we made to be crowded together like leaves,” or, “Stood, congregated, at the firing line,” but those lines are about Skye and I, and our time playing music together, and not the political events depicted in the painting.

How did going to college shape the album, and what Fleet Foxes represents for you?

I went into college with a naive dropout’s idea of what people in college listened to, like maybe everyone was just jamming Nancarrow and Schoenberg on the quad, so when I was there I was honestly sort of embarrassed to say I was a musician from a pop context. I found academia intimidating, but in a good way, as if being that uncomfortable was helping me to grow. I thought maybe I’d attain some new level of intellectual justification for making music, but I didn’t really end up there. My thoughts on that remain scattered and subjective; I just had to throw up my hands and default back to: just trust your gut, go with what feels right, and let the reasons why it feels right remain somewhat mysterious.

What’s your plan for touring Crack-Up?

I was lucky to do some solo shows opening for Joanna Newsom early in 2016, and people would often say to me afterwards they had only gotten into Fleet Foxes after we had stopped touring, and that they wished they could have seen us live, which I honestly wasn’t expecting to ever hear. I thought that everyone who wanted to see us got a chance to back then, and it would have been redundant to keep touring and I might as well do something else. So, that was heartening and made me excited to make this album and tour again. The show will be a mix of the new and old songs, and we’re working on a set and projections with a visual production studio in Los Angeles called Sing Sing right now. We hope to hit everywhere we can this time.

After releasing two albums and an EP on Sub Pop, you are now signed to Nonesuch. What made you decide to change labels?

Hugely grateful to Sub Pop and honored to have been on that label, but in the years between Helplessness Blues and beginning work on Crack-Up, most all of the people we worked directly with there had moved on to other labels or had started their own companies in the music business. Which makes sense—it’s been a really long time!

When we were thinking about how we would release the album, we knew we wanted to try something new, either by self-releasing or by finding a new label, and of the constellation of labels out there, Nonesuch just had the most copacetic energy and history, and it felt like the album would fit there. Their ethos seems expansive and inclusive—they appreciate all kinds of music and aren’t built on a rejectionist ethos but instead a kind of utopian one, one that can logically accommodate both John Zorn and the Black Keys. That is really appealing to me as a music fan and as an artist.

You’ve used Instagram to keep fans very informed about the album rollout, beyond just teasing release dates and posting studio sessions but also getting in the comments. Why interact so closely?

Sometimes I’ve found social media incredibly stressful, either from insecurity about the validity of my “content” or just from seeing too many people living their great wonderful lives. But for whatever reason right now, I just find it entertaining. I like talking to the people who comment on my Instagram, and it's been so long since Fleet Foxes has released anything that I thought a certain segment of people interested in the band would get a kick out of seeing the recording process unfold in real time, transparently. I do worry about fatiguing those people a bit with too many updates, or this whole rollout having taken too long to go down, and I don’t think I’ll be as forthcoming while we’re recording the next album, but I felt like enough people would enjoy watching the process unfold and that it was clear enough that it was going to be a long process, that it just ended up being fun. Also it seems like sharing a small clip of music imbues it with this gravitas or mystery that maybe the full piece lacks (ha), and it felt cool to feature some snippets of songs in that context. 

Last fall, you posted on Instagram that you were working on a solo album. What’s the status of that?

I’m still writing songs for that and the next Fleet Foxes album. The solo album songs have a different character, different stakes, and the next Fleet Foxes album will be fully ecstatic. I feel like Crack-Up begins in pure conflicted solitude and ends in a bright clearing, one of closeness, like the top right hand corner of the photograph on the album cover. I’d like the next band album to be a celebration of or elaboration on how Crack-Up ends.

You won’t find many Portland residents who own up to watching “Portlandia,” Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen’s IFC sketch show that since 2011, has warmly derided the city’s coolness factor. That apparent indifference could be tied into the fact that the show’s reign has coincided with a notable increase in attention on their hometown, with an accompanying influx of new residents that have helped increase development and housing prices. But generally, the common excuse around town for ignoring “Portlandia” is some variation on the idea that Portlanders are ridiculous enough on their own—why watch a show that highlights that?

The facts tell a different story. In January, the website High Speed Internet found that “Portlandia” was currently the most watched Netflix series across Oregon. Sure, that could be the folks in the very Republican eastern part of the state enjoying the mockery of liberal Portlanders, or people in the city hate-watching the show. But my suspicion is that us locals don’t want to admit how much of ourselves we see in these episodes. The show’s writers often nail the details surrounding the independently-minded liberals driving the culture of Portland (and other “cool” cities across the country) because, as Armisen once said, “the characters we do are very much like ourselves. A lot of the characters are pretty much the way I am and we are.”

Of course, it doesn’t hurt that Carrie and Fred have been able to observe and absorb the culture up close during their pre-comedy careers. Both are lifelong musicians who got swept up in the underground and indie rock scenes of the ’90s: Armisen logged time drumming with Chicago dub-punkers Trenchmouth, while few fans of the show need reminding that Brownstein helped seed the Pacific Northwest’s grrrl-style revolution in Excuse 17 and Sleater-Kinney. They reserve some of their funniest parodies on “Portlandia” for skewering the indie music world, and love populating guest spots with folks like St. Vincent, Glenn Danzig, Josh Homme, the Decemberists, Isaac Brock, and… Sarah McLachlan (hey, it worked!).

Whatever camp you ally with, there’s no disagreement that when Carrie and Fred nail their targets, their performances are sharp and amusing, often with a touch of social commentary propelled by a warranted frustration that even the least self-aware locals sometimes feel. With the show’s seventh season coming to a close tonight, let’s look at ten moments when “Portlandia” perfectly eviscerated the hipster mindset.

Adult Hide-and-Go-Seek (Season 1, Episode 1)

From the very first episode, Armisen and Brownstein showed that they had their fingers on the pulse of young-adult culture by poking fun at the “reclamation” of childhood games. Instead of the all-too-common dodgeball league, this sketch focused on a serious game of hide and seek played inside a library, featuring a startling discovery by one character and some pitch-perfect deadpan acting from an elderly bookworm.

Did You Read It? (Season 1, Episode 4)

In under two minutes, “Portlandia” had its merry way with the hipster’s greatest concern: FOMO. Carrie and Fred did their best to one-up each other’s reading habits, and like many of the show’s best bits, it escalates to brilliantly manic proportions, culminating in a literally killer punchline.

Eddie Vedder Tattoo (Season 2, Episode 2)

Hipsters do love their tattoos, especially ones with a little bit of an ironic twist to them. That provides the core of this sketch where Carrie tries to reckon with the fact that her new beau has a terrible tattoo of Eddie Vedder on his arm. It’s a bit of a lightweight concept that’s strengthened a fake Pearl Jam soundtrack and a self-mocking appearance by (former Sleater-Kinney tourmate) Vedder himself.

DJ Night (Season 2, Episode 4)

In the wake of the vinyl resurgence, a new swarm of crate diggers are now taking over record stores and thrift shops around the world. And many of them fancy themselves to be DJs now, providing the background music for bars, coffeehouses, and barber shops. Fred and Carrie turn this reality into a hilarious horror movie parody, where they are chased down by dozens of record spinners all seeking a little recognition for their good taste in music.

Change the World One Party at a Time (Season 3, Episode 2)

One of the show’s few moments that became quickly outdated in the wake of Trump-related protests, this sketch made hay of the then-indifference that most young hipsters exhibited towards actual activism once Obama made it into office. That is, unless you put a booming house beat behind the cause and include a couple of complimentary Mind Eraser shots.

Battle of the Gentle Bands (Season 3, Episode 6)

The Portland music scene is a relatively healthy mishmash of styles and ideas, but if there’s a prevailing “sound,” it’s the one being mocked in this brilliant sketch. This city is home to artists like Loch Lomond, the Shook Twins, and (until recently) Laura Gibson, whose earnest, delicate sounds are built atop a foundation of folk and Americana. Their occasionally timid approaches and performances make the “Portlandia” image of a wispy woman blowing on an array of feathers seem a little too probable.

Portland as Art Project (Season 3, Episode 9)

Packed with hyper-self-aware young people who seem to be performing for an unseen audience, Portland often does feel like an a city wide art installation à la Synecdoche, New York. The writers of “Portlandia” recognized this, too, and took the concept to an illogical extreme in which pursesnatchers, traffic cops, and even Carrie’s parents are all trying out their own artistic experiments.

Spyke Buys a Car (Season 4, Episode 5)

Though Portland dropped to third on the list of best bike cities, the city does love its two-wheeled transportation. The people who love biking can often be a little too into it. Naturally, “Portlandia” has one such citizen: Spyke, the recurring character best known for his court battle with Matt Groening over bootleg “Simpsons” t-shirts, his attempts to bring MTV back to its roots, and of course, bike rights activism. The genius was in the details with this character, from his shitty goatee and gigantic earlobe gauging, to his quick shift in priorities when his work forces him to buy a car.

Slow Driving (Season 4, Episode 5)

“Portlandia” doesn’t reserve the mockery for young hipsters. As aging scenesters themselves, Fred and Carrie save some of their most pointed commentary for those older folks who try to keep up with the culture of cool and fail miserably. On a similar wavelength as the Spyke sketch in the same episode, this clip showed how the headstrong beliefs of youthful idealism—like a steadfast refusal to drive a car—sometimes don’t quite translate to adulthood. No surprise then that when Armisen’s crunchy recurring character Peter has to get his partner Nance to the ER, it doesn’t go so well.

Club for My Friend’s Band (Season 7, Episode 8)

Pretty much all hip young people know at least one person in a band, and chances are, a healthy number of them aren’t that great. But you’re a supportive friend so you check out their show anyway, and sometimes wind up being one of the only people there. This great sketch from the current season had some lighthearted fun with that phenomenon, offering up a venue for such truly unexceptional bands and the loved ones who tolerate them.

Bonus cut: Because self-awareness is key to the hipster mindset, we have to quickly acknowledge the show’s humorous dig at Pitchfork, from season two. For the record: we could think of worse ideas for a band than Catnapped.

Arthur Russell was living in Northern California in the early ’70s when he met the insurance salesman who would become his Buddhist teacher, Yuko Nonomura. Having fled his home amid the Iowa cornfields as a teenager, Russell was residing in a San Francisco commune where he went by the name Jigme and played cello while people chanted at fire ceremonies. Nonomura would inspire Russell to leave his strict ascetic life and practice Buddhism within greater society. Not long after, he gave Russell a picture of a cloud. The cloud came from a batch of nature-focused photo slides that, at Nonomura’s suggestion, inspired Russell’s sky-like, sweetly rolling Instrumentals set, an ensemble piece that could be expanded for 48 hours.

These elemental slides are on display in Do What I Want, the first public exhibition of materials from Russell’s archive, which opened last week at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. One corner of the exhibit is covered floor-to-ceiling in a rendering of Nonomura’s pillowy white and cerulean tones—an invocation of the infinite—as a wall-card calls the cloud “a common symbol in Tibetan Buddhism representing the creative power of the mind and the ability to take any form.” Russell’s musical philosophy, too, was that of the cloud, of serene mutability. Like the shape of sound to come—or more to the point, its non-shape—he was boundless. When Russell moved to New York in 1973, an original motive for “making it” was to help Nonomura finance a new temple (BAM displays letters from Yuko where he thanks the artist for sending some money), but his art process was itself spiritual, diffuse. Russell made conceptual Buddhist chamber pop alongside country love songs, power pop, and mutant disco. He revised constantly but rarely managed to complete recordings. And it is this endlessness that made Kanye West’s sample of World of Echo highlight “Answers Me” last year both triumphal and heartbreaking; Russell’s inability to finish things is poignantly echoed in West’s ongoing Life of Pablo project.

How to house an endless artist, then? How do you wall-off the uncontainable? The curators of Do What I Want wisely nod to the impossibility of such a task, butthe show is an inspired example of how to present a person unconcerned with straight workflow. “Arthur’s process was very nonlinear,” says co-curator Nicole Will. “He didn’t think in terms of hierarchies.” The curators settled on a conceptual timeline in which the various avant-pop strands Russell worked on concurrently are arranged by collaborators (Allen Ginsberg, the Necessaries, Dinosaur L among them), rather than a chronology—which would be impossible. Everything would be stacked on top of each other.

In two rooms, Do What I Want manages to maintain the beautiful disorder of Russell’s anarchic art logic, the way he approached all manner of sound with a powerful air of democracy. “Everybody has their own moments of connectivity with Arthur’s music, and there’s no way that you could possibly contain the essence of someone…” Will trails off. “More or less, we were trying to not be so didactic in an informational type of way, and focus on the variations in the process, and how the different moments inform many other moments. Arthur’s music does not necessarily hold a nostalgia of a time past—it holds much more a feeling intrinsic to the music—a longing, which is distinct from a chronology.”

Arthur and his notebooks; courtesy of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts

Yuko’s clouds overlap with slate-grey practice cassettes for Russell’s ever-changing song “Lucky Cloud” and yellowed loose-leaf sheets from his composition notebooks—pages Russell tore out and folded into quarters so he could always keep them close in his shirt pocket. Fittingly, Russell was also infatuated with water and sailboats; hanging on the walls at BAM are copious posters for his country-pop duo the Sailboats, as well as a photo of Russell and his mother on a sailboat. Across the top of one composition book page, he’d written maybe a potential goal: “A job where you drive a boat.”

Will mentions the “love affair” that people have with Arthur’s work. For existing fans, there is an almost surreal tactility to interfacing with Russell’s tapes and sheet music, his letters and a recording studio receipt—among the clouds, “it’s showing a little bit of something concrete,” the curator says. A snapshot of the downtown art scene in the ’70s begins to emerge. There’s a poster-size blow-up of Russell’s comped Paradise Garage membership ID (the wallflower beatmaker looks endearingly overwhelmed), and an envelope addressed to Russell at his apartment, “the Poet’s Building” on 12th Street (Allen Ginsberg and Richard Hell also lived there). There are flyers for gigs at Tier 3 and Max’s, postcards for Loose Joints’ “Is It All Over My Face” and Dinosaur’s “Kiss Me Again.” A large swath of wall space is dedicated specifically to photographs and flyers for his power pop band with Modern Lovers’ Ernie Brooks, the Necessaries (whose “More Real” is one of Russell’s most affecting melodies ever). There is a listening station at the center of the room, but you can’t skip tracks; if you want to hear stuff from his practice tapes—one track called “RabbitsEar / HidingYourPresentFromYou / NotCheckingUp / CanvasHome,” an Instrumentals rehearsal, and “Let’s Go Play Baseball / Let’s Go Swimming” among others—then you have to hang out.

Do What I Want contains revelations both grand and oblique. BAM Director of Visual Arts Holly Shen was particularly taken by Russell’s notebook riffs: “You would see a phrase repeated,” she said, “And you’re like, ‘what does ‘fashion duck’ mean?!’” Elsewhere, the collage-like manner of his work comes further into focus with notes outlining what he called “P-Ideas,” or parenthetical ideas, which could be drawn upon like colors from a palette. On one wall, a graph outlining minimalist classical work Tower of Meaning contains the line, “The question is whether or not this kind of music is going to hypnotize you.”

Arthur performing with Ginsberg; courtesy of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts

For me, the artifacts from Russell’s Buddhist practice were bracing. A copy of Chögyam Trungpa’s poetry book First Thought, Best Thought was on display, as well as Ginsberg and Russell’s sheet music for “Padmasambhava Mantra” (“om ah hum vajra guru padma siddhi hum,” it goes). Arthur is a quintessential New Yorker, but his foundation in the Bay Area—with Yuko, Buddhism, and discipline—formed the pluralist prism for all that followed, as his art fractured out with light. Buddhism seeped in on a molecular level, present in how Russell was curiosity incarnate and, as Ginsberg said, his “constant preoccupation” was “illumination.” His angelic vocals on “Arm Around You” are an especially sublime representation of that, but consider even the witty domestic charm of a folk-pop tune like “Time Away,” the most spirited song ever about cleaning one’s room, and it’s really about clarity. “It became very apparent how important his Buddhist practice was to literally everything he composed,” Will says. “The music can sound so different, but there is this continual thread of things he was working through—things he was after.”

The scholar Matthew Marble recently used Russell’s archives to write an exhaustive 271-page dissertation, Buddhist Bubblegum, centered on the artist’s spiritual practice. In its opening pages, Bubblegum mentions Russell’s cello teacher Margaret Rowell, with whom he studied at the San Francisco Conservatory. Rowell fostered an “emotional relationship” with the instrument and taught through kinesthetics; her tactile approach was not unlike “the visualization and sadhana techniques [Arthur] was learning through Vajrayana Buddhism,” Marble wrote. One student recalls that in order to get a “pouring tone,” she encouraged filling up a pitcher; for a painterly one, she instructed the student to pretend paint a wall. I thought of Arthur’s exquisite expressiveness. The exhibition at BAM sparked my curiosity and made me want to keep investigating well after I left its walls. Perhaps it is not contained at all.

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

Talent, vision, fearlessness, a touch of genius: they’re all necessary ingredients for the creation of a classic album. But you’re also going to need a lot of luck. The Velvet Underground & Nico, released 50 years ago this month, is a prime example of this. The lead-up to the album, a classic if ever there was one, is filled with right-place-at-the-right-time moments, chance encounters, and timely accidents. Remove one of these elements and the LP’s edifice crumbles. Via a handful of fascinating rarities, we can piece together how The Velvet Underground & Nico came together in a highly unlikely fashion.

Pickwick Studios // Queens, NY // May 11, 1965

After graduating from Syracuse University in 1964, Lou Reed landed a job as an in-house songwriter for Pickwick Records in Queens. The Brill Building it wasn’t. “We just churned out songs, that’s all,” he said later. “Never a hit song—what we were doing was churning out these rip-off albums… I mean we wrote ‘Johnny Can’t Surf No More’ and ‘Let The Wedding Bells Ring’ and ‘Hot Rod Song.’” The curious can check out Soundsville! (a faux compilation), or the (frankly awful) Surfsiders Sing The Beach Boys SongbookLP, both of which feature a number of Reed contributions.

At some point Reed convinced his bosses to let him (and his new pal, the Welsh wunderkindJohn Cale) cut a demo of his most taboo original composition: “Heroin.” On The Velvet Underground & Nico, “Heroin” has a luminous grandeur, Reed’s first-person narrative of a junkie’s rush-and-run matched perfectly by Cale’s droning, electrified viola and drummer Maureen Tucker’s insistent thump. The Pickwick version, unheard until it was played as part of Reed’s 2013 memorial service, is radically different: an acoustic talking blues that—subject matter aside—could have turned up at one of NYC’s mid ’60s folk clubs. Ramblin’ Jack Elliott meets Hubert Selby, Jr., perhaps. It’s not the Velvet Underground, but it’s proof positive that Reed had his sights set on much more than doo-wop pastiches and Beach Boys knock-offs. (Listen here)

Ludlow Street // NYC // July 1965

After bumping into him on the subway, Reed asked his Syracuse classmate Sterling Morrison to join him and Cale on their musical wanderings. The earliest fruits of their collaboration can be heard on a surprisingly clear summer of ‘65 tape of the trio rehearsing in the unheated NYC flat they all shared. The recording, released as part of the Peel Slowly and See boxed set in 1995, gives us an intimate glimpse of the Velvets. Several of The Velvet Underground & Nico’s songs are here, but in drastically altered form. With Cale on lead vocal, “Venus In Furs” takes on a solemn English folk feel. “All Tomorrow’s Parties” lacks the majestic nature of the released version, Reed and Morrison’s guitars chiming a bit like the Byrds, who were flying high on the charts at the time. Best (and weirdest) of all is the country-inflected version of “I’m Waiting for the Man.” It sounds more like Hank Williams heading up to Harlem to score, with Cale’s viola bursting in like a hillbilly on speed. Overall, the Ludlow Street tape shows an almost entirely unexplored direction for the Velvets, one closer to the Holy Modal Rounders or the Fugs than what was to come. It’s also a treat to hear Reed, Cale, and Morrison cracking themselves up at various points—just friends frittering away a summer night, fumbling and false-starting towards greatness.

 Andy Warhol’s Factory // NYC // January 3, 1966

Another random occurrence. In December 1965, Andy Warhol caught the Velvets (now with Maureen Tucker on percussion) during the group’s short-lived residency at the Café Bizarre, a tourist trap in the Village. Captivated by the raw immediacy of the VU’s sound, Warhol almost immediately brought the band into his then-thriving Factory fold. But the artist’s valuable patronage (both in cachet and actual dollars) came with one big change: Warhol and his collaborator Paul Morrissey suggested adding a German singer named Nico (born Christa Päffgen) to the mix. Surprisingly, the famously stubborn Velvets agreed, and we can eavesdrop on what is probably one of the augmented group’s first rehearsals on this Factory tape, most of which was officially released on the “super deluxe” edition of The Velvet Underground & Nico in 2012. It’s a revealing listen. At several moments, you’ll hear Reed teaching Nico the lyrics to some soon-to-be-classics. In what has to be an intentionally mocking moment, Lou recites the lyrics of “Venus In Furs,” his ode to S&M, to the singer, while Morrison and Cale vamp on “Love Is Strange” in the background.

There are also interesting nods to current pop music of the era, demonstrating that the VU was not hermetically sealed in some avant-garde downtown NYC bubble. Morrison tries out the riff to the Beatles’ “Day Tripper” and the whole group jams loosely on Booker T. & The MG’s’ “Green Onions.” The highlight, however, is the nasty, one-chord boogie “Miss Joanie Lee,” an off-the-cuff number which was quickly discarded by the band (probably in favor of the similarly styled “Run Run Run”). Notice Reed’s self-destructing noise guitar scrawl prefiguring the No Wave movement by at least a decade.

The New York Society for Clinical Psychiatry’s Annual Dinner // The Delmonico Hotel // January 13, 1966

“SHOCK TREATMENT FOR PSYCHIATRISTS,” reads the headline of the New York Herald Tribune’s review of the Velvet Underground’s live debut with Nico. It probably wasn’t far off. In the posh environs of the Delmonico Hotel, the Velvets—accompanied by dancers Edie Sedgwick and Gerard Malanga and a blinding light show—made an unholy racket in front of 350 psychiatrists in formalwear. Avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas was on hand to capture some of the proceedings on Super8 (with fuzzed out sound coming from a performance a few months later), but it’s Adam Ritchie’s photos of the event that give us a less chaotic view all these years later. “Why are they exposing us to these nuts?” one unnamed psychiatrist asked a New York Times reporter. Of course, the reason was obvious: publicity. Soon, Warhol and the Velvet Underground were riding their newfound notoriety across the country.

Symphony of Sound + “Chic Mystique”

The Velvet Underground & Nico ends with “European Son,” a song that devolves into a white-hot free-form raveup, kicked off appropriately by the sound of shattering glass. It was just a taste of the improvisational hijinks that the Velvets were capable of. Cale was the likely instigator for this side of the band. Having played with La Monte Young’s legendary ensemble the Dream Syndicate, he was eager to apply a rock‘n’roll backbeat to the minimalist drones that Young pioneered, developing a sound unlike any other rock group operating in 1966. Of course, the Velvets weren’t just any band—they were part of the Warhol-sponsored, multimedia extravaganza known as the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, and just a small fraction of the sensory overload the show subjected its audience to. As a result, they had the freedom to do pretty much whatever they wanted.

Filmed by a zoom-happy Warhol and Morrissey at the Factory in early 1966, Symphony of Sound is a riot of dissonant sound. But the film is lent an unintended levity by the impassivity of the Velvets, all hiding behind shades, not to mention Nico’s toddler son Ari running rampant amid the chaos. Fittingly, the NYPD shows up about 40 minutes in and shuts down the whole affair, leaving the band and various Factory personalities to wander about aimlessly for the rest of the movie.

“Chic Mystique,” meanwhile, is taken from an April 1966 NYC performance a few months later, and was later used as the soundtrack to Jonas Mekas’ film “Walden.” Tucker lays down an immovable proto-motorik (protorik?) pulse, as Cale, Reed, and Morrison wreak havoc all around her, sounding close to the exploratory krautrock Can, Neu! and Faust would get into a few years later. You can almost see the strobe lights.

Sceptre Studios // NYC // April 18-23, 1966

It’s the kind of find that record collectors dream about. In 2002, Warren Hill is idly flipping through the records at a Chelsea flea market when he comes across an acetate with “The Velvet Underground” and the date “4-25-66” handwritten on the label. He pays a whopping $.75 for the item and soon discovers that it contains previously unheard recordings from the Velvet Underground’s very first professional recording sessions, which took place at NYC’s Sceptre Studios. His $.75 purchase will later sell at auction for just over $25,000. The music itself is soon widely bootlegged and eventually given canon status on the “super deluxe” 35th anniversary edition of The Velvet Underground & Nico, released in 2012. While the differences from the album versions are sometimes negligible—minor lyrical changes, alternate mixes, and slightly altered guitar lines—the acetate is still an invaluable document, peeling back the Banana Album’s layers for a closer look. Most of all, it demonstrates just how far the Velvets had come in less than a year. Thanks to an array of difficulties and complications, The Velvet Underground & Nico wouldn’t be released until the spring of 1967, robbing the band of its momentum and (possible) commercial success. But the LP’s reverberations are still being felt today.

Song to Song was supposed to be Terrence Malick’s paean to indie rock. The New Hollywood legend spent years documenting SXSW and other Austin music festivals for the movie, making headlines as early as 2011 for a scene in which Christian Bale supposedly pounded bongos with Fleet Foxes. Its three main characters work in the music industry, recording artists join A-list actors in its cast, plenty of its action takes place at live performances, its soundtrack features Julianna Barwick and Sharon Van Etten, and a seven-inch record adorns its poster.

But despite all that, Song to Song is not really about indie rock—and not just because neither the bongo scene nor Malick’s footage of Arcade Fire and Iron & Winemade the cut. Although there are plenty of musicians on hand to lend credibility, this story has so little to do with the arts of songwriting and performing, its subjects might as well be investment bankers.Beyond the rock‘n’roll window dressing, Song to Song turns out to be just another minor variation on Malick’s favorite theme—the power of love and spirituality to transcend the life-poisoning curses of ambition and greed—and not a very effective one, at that.

The film begins with a confession: “I was desperate to feel something real. Nothing felt real,” Rooney Mara’s Faye recalls, in one of Malick’s trademark whispery voiceovers. Over a montage that includes shots of men slamming their bodies together in a festival’s muddy circle pit, she confides that she’d been seeking out violent sex. “I wanted to live,” she insists. “Sing my song.”

Faye is, in fact, a young singer and songwriter, although the shape of her aspirations isn’t entirely clear until midway through the film. She hopes that an entry-level job with a fabulously wealthy music-industry macher named Cook (Michael Fassbender) will be her ticket to success. We watch them go to bed together. “I thought he could help me, if I paid my dues...” she intones. 

Then love intervenes. Faye falls for another musician, BV (Ryan Gosling), and Cook sets about making him a star—a process that takes place almost exclusively offscreen. But she and Cook secretly continue their affair, even as the bonds of ambition and desire bring all three closer together. The triumvirate travels to Mexico, where Faye has an epiphany that her romance with BV is the real thing. No one captures the magic of a world viewed through the lens of infatuation with more golden-lit poignance than Malick’s longtime cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki. But the glow fades once Faye and BV settle down together.

Built on a festering lie (and questionable business deals), none of these relationships can last. As all three characters move on to new lovers and continue chasing fame, money, or debauched oblivion, Malick’s favorite question pops up: can an existence defined by striving and struggle, rather than true love and harmony with the universe, ever bring fulfillment? His cinematic manifesto, 2011’s The Tree of Life, presented the tense, combative “way of nature” and the open, peaceful “way of grace” as two diametrically opposite approaches to life. If you’ve seen that film, Song to Song’s groan-out-loud idyllic ending couldn’t possibly surprise you.

Considering that Malick went to such extremes to fully situate his latest parable within the Austin music scene, it’s strange that he couldn’t be bothered to write Faye and BV’s development as musicians—rather than as pretty, young vehicles for an allegory about the dangers of ambition—into the script. We barely see them perform. If you timed it, you might find that the camera lingers longer on appreciative shots of Mara’s exposed midriff than on scenes of any character entertaining an audience.

The large cast of real musicians is frustratingly underutilized, too. Lykke Li and a local Austin singer, Dana Falconberry, both have small roles that could just as easily have been filled by non-musicians. Malick’s festival footage is dominated by mosh-pit and backstage shots. Every once in awhile, a recognizable face (Red Hot Chili Peppers, John Lydon, Iggy Pop, Big Freedia) appears to dispense a morsel of ostensibly unscripted wisdom, in a tented outdoor green room or at a party. Of these cameos, only Patti Smith gets substantial screen time. Amid a sea of dire Malickian clichés (“I love the pain. It feels like life”), her reflections on her husband Fred “Sonic” Smith’s death comprise some of the film’s only dialogue that feels genuine and specific. At one point, she says simply, “I thought I would be with him for the rest of my life, but he died,” and it’s enough to make you long for a whole documentary of artists’ reflections on loss.

Malick fans who also cherish live music will surely go into Song to Song longing to see him channel the almost religious quality of those performances—to watch Lubezki’s ecstatic camera elevate the imperfect music-festival experience so that those sweltering afternoons look as holy on the screen as they do in decade-old memories. Terrence Malick’s great obsession is earthly transcendence. That he would make a movie about music but neglect to capture the way it helps us detach from our everyday preoccupations, and make contact with some force greater than ourselves, just seems like a missed opportunity.

Natalie Portman, Michael Fassbender, and Anthony Kiedis in the film. (Courtesy of Van Redin/Broad Green Pictures)

It’s not entirely fair to take a director to task for failing to make the film you wish he’d made. Malick’s limited knowledge of the recording industry is also hard to overlook. Cook is either a major-label honcho who does all of his own production or an indie boss with access to a private jet. Parties for what is, presumably, the SXSW crowd too closely resemble the poolside celebrity bacchanals of Malick’s previous movie, Knight of Cups. One features a naked woman covered in sushi, a spectacle Lubezki is happy to zoom in on, but not one you’re likely to witness at any Jansport-sponsored industry mixer. It couldn’t be clearer—or more ridiculous—that the director sees Austin and Hollywood as functionally interchangeable.

What is most insufferable about Song to Song’s depiction of music and the people who make it, though, is that it’s philosophically shoddy to the point of hypocrisy.Malick frames Smith, Iggy, and the other successful artists he spotlights as sages. He soundtracks his obligatory shots of nature’s majesty with gorgeous songs that run the gamut from classical to classic rock. At the same time, he implies that Faye and BV can only lead fulfilling lives once they shift their focus from their careers to each other.

But what makes them so different from the artists Malick worships, besides their youth and lack of experience? In their own, sui generis ways, Patti Smith and Iggy Pop were both hungry, young strivers once. To imply otherwise is to twist reality into a simplistic, self-serving fairy tale—which is to say, the only kind of story Malick still seems capable of telling. The result is an irreconcilable film that celebrates a life spent making (and, yes, promoting) music and dismisses it as a distraction in the same breath.

Song to Song offered Malick the chance to complicate the nature-vs.-grace binary he set up in The Tree of Life and has since rehashed in To the Wonder and Knight of Cups, a collection of vignettes about a grieving screenwriter that has just as little to say about the value of creative work. What if there is some element of grace in following inspiration? What if making music—or any kind of art—can be both an act of love and act of ambition? Or, hey, what if there is more than just one way to live a good life?

Instead of expanding upon Malick’s philosophy, Song to Song simply restates it for a fourth time. Frankly, it’s painful to watch a once-brilliant filmmaker spin his wheels like this, planting facile morality plays within casually lurid soap operas as though convinced that his audience still hasn’t absorbed the not-particularly-complex take on metaphysics he’s spent years peddling. Maybe it is Malick’s own creative gridlock that has made him so disinclined to publicly ponder what it means to make art.

On December 30th, a video circulated online of Azealia Banks, clad in safety goggles and a headscarf, surrounded by feathers and black junk. “Three years’ worth of Brujería,” Banks says panning the room, before turning the camera back on herself. At this point she’s holding a sandblaster and ends the video by saying, “Real witches do real things.” Almost immediately, writers from XXL and Page Six began their reports with comments on Banks’ oddity and insanity. Sure, not cleaning a room after three years’ worth of chicken sacrifice is cause for concern, least of all for the smell, but the knee-jerk reaction to call Banks crazy are sensationalistic at best, stigmatizing at worst, and completely typical any way you slice it.  

Banks is initiated in Palo Mayombe, a traditional African religion brought to Cuba from Congolese slaves. It is a belief system built on the veneration of spirits and the importance of the earth’s natural forces, and it’s one that Banks has urged black women in particular to join in order to overcome institutional powers like white supremacy. That message was lost in part because non-Abrahamic religions remain misunderstood, but mostly because anything Banks does is undercut by her persona of instability and insanity. In a Facebook post made days before the witch video emerged, Banks herself acknowledges all this, ultimately bemoaning the public’s misunderstanding of mental illness and psych-drug side effects. She’s sang about these struggles before, like she does on the Broke with Expensive Taste track “Soda.”

Black artists struggling with mental health issues are nothing new, but shifting empathy emerged late last year in the wake of Kid Cudi’s admission of mental health issues and Kanye West’s hospitalization. The former’s Facebook post inspired hashtags, such as #YouGoodMan, and op-eds in theWashington Postand the Huffington Post alike, positioning Cudi as a way to shed light on the hyper-masculinity problem facing male hip-hop stars. So why was Banks’ post about the same exact topic almost entirely ignored by the media? To borrow a turn of phrase from Jamilah King, Banks has been “permanently exiled to the land of broken black bitches, the place inhabited by pioneering black women who aren't perfect and have neither the interest nor resources to hide that fact.”  

Like West, Banks’ pro-black politics have been both complicated and controversial. For Kanye, it was saying that George Bush doesn’t care about black people back during a Katrina benefit, to urging black people to stop worrying about racism 11 years later, to admitting that he would’ve voted for Trump (had he voted at all). Banks’ own assertions have run a similarly jagged course but in a shorter time frame: feuding with Iggy Azalea over cultural appropriation between 2012 and 2014, refusing to date black men in 2015, and offering to perform at Trump’s inauguration, perhaps precisely because he’s “a piece of shit.” Commentators at The Ringer and Slate, among others, have rationalized away Kanye meeting’s with Trump as pure provocation. It would be difficult to see someone doing the same for Banks, though her music and persona are as much about thorny prodding as West’s. But her audacity is often compartmentalized, deemed appropriate through the music (which often has been critically praised) but not through her unfiltered interactions with the world.

Early on in Banks’ career, Spin’s Zach Baron implied that her “brazen ambition” would do her more harm than good in the music industry. And perhaps to an extent, he was right. Banks did not introduce herself as the latest competitor for the female token that mainstream rap allows, but rather, someone who had already succeeded by her own metrics—by being a “rude bitch” and brazenly pursuing her sexual desires, even among male rappers she could best. Whether fabricated or real, this no-fucks-given persona was necessary armor for Banks. In a now-deleted Instagram post, she stated that black people, particularly black men, told her how “ugly,” “skinny,” and “weird” she was, yet whenever she speaks out on this belittlement, she’s deemed the crazy one.  

When Banks fought with Jim Jones over his supposed appropriation of the word “vamp,” he responded by calling her a “2bit slore.” Angel Haze misinterpreted one of Banks’ tweets about non-New Yorkers claiming New York and called her a “charcoal-skinned bitch.” Both jabs reinforced what Banks told the public about her mistreatment in the industry, but they were overlooked because her combativeness was a more interesting story—a woman who was becoming too big for her britches before she paid her dues. Banks’ anger as a form of spectacle has led her to publicly denounce not only mainstream publications, but black-centered ones like Ebony as well, for only focusing on her feuds rather than her career as a whole.

Admittedly Banks has made her fair share of racist, homophobic, and otherwise offensive remarks across social media. It should go without saying that she should be held accountable for her ongoing actions, including lashing out at gay men and purported copycat Zayn Malik (whom she called a “hairy curry-scented bitch” and a “Punjab”). These comments (and others), along with assault charges on a security officer and a flight fight, had a calamitous effect on her career. Besides being suspended on Twitter and Facebook, Banks was booted from the London festival Born & Bred as well as her U.K. booking agency. And according to Dazed, Banks’ feud with Perez Hilton led to her being dropped by MAC Cosmetics back in 2012. Is Azealia Banks simply an uncontrollable woman who destroyed her own career, or is there something else at play as well?

In an interview with Broadly, Banks found a parallel in Kanye: “I’ll say something on Twitter and my head gets ripped off. And then Kanye West will say some other fucking meaningless, senseless dumb shit. And then it’s like oh well, you know… he’s just an artsy man. He’s just fucking cool. It’s frustrating.” Unlike Banks, West’s rants both online and onstage are given the privilege of walking the line between genius and madness: look at articles in Billboard and USA Today that position Kanye as an artist whose misunderstood brilliance atones for his transgressions. Obviously his strong body of work is a bit more extensive than Banks’—that is not the point. It’s that this kind of conversation represents a privilege afforded to male artists throughout history, from Van Gogh to Dostoevsky to Poe, to name just a few dead white guys. Their male status in the world not only allowed them to be accepted as successful artists, but it afforded them fluidity in this genius-madness dichotomy. There seems to be a bit less of that among black female creators; look at how the genius-madness scale has tipped within conversations about Nina Simone and Lauryn Hill over the years.

Banks is not at this genius place yet, but there’s little chance she could ever get there if the world writes her off as a crazy villain first. And when she comes correct, the results can remind you why “212” grabbed the world’s attention in the first place. Her refusal to shut up (for better or for worse) doesn’t make her a likely candidate for a public sympathy campaign, but that’s more simplistic than what she actually needs or probably wants. Just as Kanye and Cudi were afforded a small bit of sensitivity around their mental states—some modicum of awareness that they could be dealing with something we don’t understand—so too does Banks. Between her online feuds these last few years, Banks has been talking about these struggles. That’s not what we’ve heard, though.

Years ago, the Britpop band Ash told director Michael Winterbottom that life on a tour bus was more mundane than you could imagine. That thought stuck with Winterbottom, who’d go on to explore music in 24 Hour Party People and 9 Songs, two films that skirted the line between fiction and reality. Though Steve Coogan captured Factory Records’ eccentric founder Tony Wilson well in the former, a modern classic about Manchester’s music scene, Winterbottom couldn't shake his curiosity about filming real musicians—but with a twist.

In his long-simmering exploration of rock’n’roll’s touring mundanities, On the Road, Winterbottom finds a middle ground between documentary and drama. Setting off in March 2015, Winterbottom and his crew accompanied British quartet Wolf Alice as they toured 16 cities across the UK and Ireland over the course of three weeks. Tucked within on the bus, however, are fictional subjects: label intern Estelle (played by Leah Harvey) and roadie Joe (James McArdle), whose budding tryst allows Winterbottom to explore the intimacy of the road without disturbing Wolf Alice's own rhythm.

The film is long and weighty, evoking the humdrum monotony of another identical day in a different venue. Peppered with unintentional humor and grotty living circumstances, On the Road veers away from the cliché rhetoric of sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll to provide insight into working musicianship. “They could have prised in more, but they were really casual,” Wolf Alice’s Joel Amey says of shooting. “It never bothered me. But I found it nerve-wracking watching it back, seeing how much of a loser I am.” Which viewers can soon do: On the Road screens this week at SXSW and opens beyond film festivals later this year (September in the UK, TBD in the states). 

Pitchfork: Had you always wanted to go on the road with a band? Is this the first time you did it?

Michael Winterbottom: It was definitely the first time I'd spent any amount of time on a tour bus. Was it always a fantasy of mine? No. Not really. When we were making 24 Hour Party People, we were researching, talking to people at Factory Records and people who had been in those bands. A lot of the actors took part in the film because they wanted to be in a band. 24 Hour Party People was a fake experience of what that might be like. During that time, I found there to be lots of elements of the music world that were more attractive than filmmaking. That's when I initially thought that about immersing myself in a band at the beginning of their career, rather than looking back 15 years and recreating the past. 

It’s been more than a decade since you made a film about music. Was there something about the current UK music climate that made you want to explore it again?

To be honest, I don't think that's why we ended up making it now. Wolf Alice are similar to bands 20 years ago, and those bands 20 years ago are similar to bands 20 years earlier. You get those cycles in music. There were a variety of reasons for choosing Wolf Alice and making this film now. It wasn't like, “OK we have to make a film about Wolf Alice.” We had the time and space to try this idea we'd been talking about forever. We looked around to see which band would be interesting. There were lots of coincidences that pointed us towards Wolf Alice. One of the main reasons was that type of music—that classic British guitar band sound—is the sort I like.

Did you meet several bands in order to decide?

We didn't meet any other acts, no. We wanted it to be a young tour bus band and in a way there aren't that many. It's a particular strata of bands that are doing that kind of tour. Also, we didn't realize when we started that because Ellie [Rowsell] fronts the band, all the hardcore fans at the front of shows tended to be 14-to-16-year-old girls who connected to her, not the teenage boys you assume this kind of music appeals to. I loved that. That made it very interesting to film.

The blending of fly-on-the-wall documentary style with romantic drama is unique, almost the reverse of the idea you had for 9 Songs, where a couple’s relationship is set against the backdrop of performances from real bands. How did following a band help you build out the fictional storyline?

You wanna feel what it's like to on the bus, and it has to be a real band for that to work. If you do a fictional version of the performances themselves, it's very hard to make a point. Bands are about their own chemistry, the huge passion the fans have for them. What worried me, however, was that if we just did a straight documentary this whole aspect of being away from home and living in a very confined space with a bunch of people you don't know wouldn't be captured. It would just be a record of gigs and rehearsals, but without the feeling of what it's like to be a person put into that world. The private personal story was a way to round out the experience of touring.

The two leads are unknown actors and it feels like they're method acting 24/7. Leah even told journalists coming to interview the band during filming that she was their publicist and began acting as their PR on the bus.

Ha, yes. It was a strange job from an actor's point of view. Leah and James had to be Estelle and Joe the whole time. Estelle was directly engaged with the band because she was supposed to be an intern from the management company, whereas Joe was supposed to be part of the sound crew, which is a more tight-knit world. The experience of living on the road is a lot of hard work, especially for the crew. In 24 Hour Party People, the bands had lots of fun as opposed to the industrial nature of filmmaking. With this, making films felt a lot easier than being in a crew in a band where every night they get the gear in and out, do soundchecks and so on.

Did you travel on the same bus as Wolf Alice?

We travelled on the crew bus, separate from Wolf Alice. Occasionally some of the other crew and some of the support bands would join our bus. The set was where we were living. We'd pack up at one or two in the morning, travel to the next location, then at five or six in the morning we'd be getting up again. It was a claustrophobic experience, especially in Britain. Most of the journeys are an hour and a half long. I found I could sleep when the bus was moving, but as soon as it stopped I'd wake up so I didn't get a huge amount of rest. It was like being on a submarine. It's smelly, lots of snoring, and you'd wake up at 5 a.m. in a car parked outside a venue. I didn't wanna make too much noise because people were asleep, so I wound up walking about city centers at six in the morning looking for somewhere to sit and read a book.

Any revelations from life on the road?

I'd never imagined that from the band's point of view, the bus would be their house. As soon as they woke up, they'd go into the dressing rooms at the back of these venues and that would be where they'd while away the hours until the performance. It was a weird cocoon. The film is about routine. Wolf Alice's set is exactly the same each time. But at the same time, the experience from the crowd—from Folkestone compared to Glasgow, or Manchester compared to London—is an interesting way of seeing Britain. You've got exactly the same thing happening in different cities and each with a different texture. When we finished filming, Wolf Alice were about to go and endlessly tour America for two months. I thought, “Thank god we're getting off.” 

Chuck Berry released his first single “Maybellene” in 1955, not long after the century he would help define reached its midpoint. Rock’n’roll was busy being born, set off four years earlier by “Rocket 88,” the Ike Turner side sung by Jackie Brenston that is often acknowledged as the genre’s first single. The song turned out to be a chain of events that brought Bill Haley & the Comets' “Rock Around the Clock” to No. 1 earlier in 1955. Corny as it may sound now, “Rock Around the Clock” was the work of a western swing band donning new duds as to seem hip to the teens. But Chuck, who was pushing 30 when he rolled into Chess Studios with hopes of cutting blues for Muddy Waters’ label home, didn’t seem old at all. He was young and fiery, “Maybellene” twitching like a live wire.

Berry, who died at the age of 90 this weekend, played the blues throughout his career but he never was a blues musician—just like he never played country music no matter how much he copped its hillbilly rhythms. Repetition has rendered the story of how Chuck Berry created rock’n’roll by splicing blues with country as a cliché, but it’s also a narrative that ignores how Berry viewed his own music: as “nothing new under the sun,” just a collection of guitar licks lifted from T-Bone Walker and Charlie Christian, rhythms swiped from Louis Jordan, late-night blues crooned by Charles Brown, maybe some of Hank Williams' story songs. Berry never abandoned any of these styles over his career, nor did he expand them either. No matter the trend, he stayed true to his sound, never incorporating the uptown grooves of Motown into his music, nor attempting soul or funk. When he tipped his hat to the Beatles for “Liverpool Drive,” an instrumental from 1964's St. Louis To Liverpool—a comeback album released a year after he got out of jail for violating the Mann Act—it was in the form of a guitar boogie.

The closest Chuck ever came to following fashion was in the late ’60s, when he let the big bucks at Mercury pry him away from his home at Chess. At Mercury he cut the 19-minute “Concerto in B Goode,” a purportedly psychedelic instrumental that works hard at having Berry’s boogie seem trippy via echoes and phased guitar, as well as Live At The Fillmore Auditorium with the Steve Miller Band. They were one of the many groups that functioned as Berry's pickup bands—he preferred to travel with just his guitar and sit in with amateurs, some of whom later became stars, like Bruce Springsteen—which indicates just how deeply Berry's music infiltrated the culture. Chuck could expect the local musicians to know his songs because they knew his originals, plus the cover versions by Buddy Holly, Elvis Presley, the Rolling Stones, and the Beatles, to name just a few.

All these covers speak to the adaptability of Berry's songbook—how they were so simply constructed that anybody could play them, how the songs seemed universal even when loaded with idiosyncratic details and turns of phrase. Singular among early rock lyricists, Berry reveled in the rhythms of language, delighting in how the words sounded without losing sight of what they meant. Look at how clipped and rushed the verse of “Too Much Monkey Business” is: “Pay phone, somethin’ wrong, dime gone, will mail/I oughta sue the operator for tellin’ me a tale.” He's dropping verbs to convey his anger, an ongoing inconvenience that Berry pairs with stories of dead-end jobs, Army fatigue, and the drudgery of attending school day after day.

Berry's music remains lithe and visceral, particularly on his earliest sides for Chess where his guitar slid into the red as he was goosed along by Johnny Johnson's barrelhouse piano, but the secret key to his modernity are in the lyrics. Chuck patented the hyper-charged blues shuffle that became known as basic three-chord rock’n’roll—1956's “Roll Over Beethoven” opens with his signature double-note run, a move perfected on 1958's “Johnny B. Goode"—and by the time he returned to Chess for 1970's aptly named Back Home, he settled into a groove where he alternated rockers with slow-burning blues, instrumental boogies, novelty songs, and song poems, a formula he worked off the remainder of his career. But what distinguished the recordings, apart from the odd period flair, are those glorious words.

From the outset of his career, Berry fashioned himself not as a participant but an observer. He was significantly older than most of his rock’n’roll peers, though he didn’t seem it as he strutted across the stage, crouching and bobbing his head in that patented duck-walk instead of anchored to the piano like Fats Domino. Berry also came from a middle-class background, growing up in a household where his father recited poetry and art was encouraged. Still, Chuck wound up getting arrested for armed robbery, which instilled a deep distrust of authority that calcified into a mistrust of fellow men—a suspicion that only heightened after his 1959 arrest for transporting a teenage girl across state lines. His calloused attitude alienated him from his colleagues, but this detachment also served his art. Berry wasn't writing as a participant but rather an outsider, turning his perceptions of society into commercial art.

It's hard to remove commerce from Chuck Berry's music. He wanted his records to sell, so once he scored a second Top 10 hit with the teenage bop of “School Day (Ring! Ring! Goes The Bell)” in 1957—nearly two years after “Maybellene"—he decided to put all his chips on adolescent anthems. With “Rock’n’Roll Music” and “Sweet Little Sixteen” hitting the Top 10, Berry kept mining this vein, essentially combining the two when he rewrote “Sweet Little Sixteen” as “Sweet Little Rock’n’Roller.” He imagined the angst of late adolescence as freedom in “Almost Grown” and captured the teenybopper essence with “Carol” and “Little Queenie.” But Berry was too intellectually restless to only write about high school stuff. He absorbed all the fads of mid-century America, celebrating its open roads, jukeboxes, and all-night parties like a documentarian.

Berry's keen eye also meant that he wrote about race in ways that were verboten in ’50s popular music. Chuck didn't touch on these issues directly, choosing to slyly code his songs about race. The workers scrambling to get out of the way of a runaway train in “Let It Rock” are likely black. The “country boy” of “Johnny B. Goode” was originally a “colored boy.” Originally called “Brown Skinned Handsome Man,” “Brown Eyed Handsome Man” opens with a man “arrested on charges of unemployment"—a trumped-up charge concerning the color of his skin—and closes with a salute to Jackie Robinson. The travelogue of “Promised Land” celebrates the glory of the United States of America, but it slips in sly allusions to civil rights: Berry bypasses Rock Hill, the site where future congressman and then-Freedom Rider John Lewis was beaten in 1961, then wants to hightail it out of Alabama once his Greyhound breaks down in Birmingham.

Despite these groundbreaking songs—pop music didn’t attempt to tackle such political issues in the late ’50s and early ’60s—it's impossible to call Chuck Berry some kind of activist. He was too mercenary for that. He always put himself first, and that included his cutthroat efforts to chase new audiences while the rest of rock’s original wave faded from the spotlight. He kept having hits in the ’60s, quickly charting after his release from prison in 1963 with “Nadine (Is It You?),” “No Particular Place to Go,” and “You Never Can Tell.” The trio of songs actually kept pace with the British Invasion, thanks to their swing and wordplay: he's “campaign shoutin' like a Southern diplomat” in “Nadine” and wrestling with a “safety belt that wouldn't budge” on “No Particular Place to Go,” while the newlyweds in “You Never Can Tell” had a “coolerator… crammed with TV dinners and ginger ale.” His cash grab at Mercury didn't result in any hits but during that brief late-’60s spell, Berry learned that his best bet for relevance was chasing hippies—which he did as soon as he returned to Chess in 1970 with “Tulane,” an ode to a dope dealer on the run.

“Tulane” wasn't a hit but “My Ding-A-Ling” was—his only No. 1 single, actually, a notion that's usually seen as an embarrassment for the greatest of rock’n’rollers. Written by Dave Bartholomew, the author of most of Fats Domino's big hits, “My Ding-A-Ling” isn't a great song but it's an exceptional performance. Chuck plays the role of dirty old uncle to a group of rowdy college students. Just like he did 17 years prior, he intuited where his audience—white, middle-class rock’n’rollers—were headed and chose to ride the wave.

“My Ding-A-Ling” was the last time he pulled off this particular trick. He kept touring and recorded another album—1979's not-bad Rock It, containing the nifty “Oh What a Thrill”—and then subsisted as an oldies act for the next three decades. He published an entertaining and evasive autobiography in 1987, the same year he allowed Taylor Hackford to turn his 60th birthday into the star-studded Hail Hail Rock’n’Roll documentary—a movie largely distinguished by Chuck's combativeness—and then settled into regular gigs in his St. Louis home. Whenever he was interviewed, Berry promised a new album, one that will finally materialize later this year.

Chuck will be a coda to a career that's already legend, but it may also confirm a simple truth about Chuck Berry's art: he didn't change his music but he did adapt with the times. He wound up documenting his era and, in turn, created the idealized version of 20th century America, from coast to shining coast. He captured all the gilded glory of the terrain, the inventions, and the people while also hinting at the darkness that lies within these borders. That's one of the reasons why Chuck Berry's music is fathomless. As simple as they may seem, his songs are layered with meaning and performed with boundless joy. And their magic is hard to wear off, no matter how many times you’ve heard them—which, in a musical world shaped by Berry, may seem almost infinite.