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The Songs That Get Us Through It

SoNgS oN:
The MuSiC iSsUE
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tHaT GeT Us tHrOuGh iT.

The MuSiC iSsUE
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MiTsKi iS MoRe ThAN TikToK

‘Working for the Knife’ Full Track

/ At the end of the summer of 2019, the indie musician Mitski was on top of the world, and she was exhausted. Mitski (whose last name is Miyawaki, though she doesn’t use it professionally) was wrapping up a long, triumphant tour for her acclaimed 2018 album, “Be the Cowboy.” The music website Pitchfork had named it Album of the Year; NPR proclaimed Mitski “the 21st century’s poet laureate of young adulthood”; Iggy Pop, on his BBC radio show, called her “the most advanced American songwriter that I know.” She was about to turn 29 and had finally reached the perch of success and stability that she had been working toward for years, but she also felt disillusioned. Everyone wanted a piece of her. Ninety percent of her time was spent on administrative tasks and promotional duties instead of writing and performing, the part of the job she truly loved. She hadn’t been home in years; she wasn’t even sure where or what home was anymore.

So that June, on her charmingly candid personal Twitter account, @mitskileaks, she announced that an upcoming date headlining Central Park’s SummerStage would be her “last show indefinitely.” Fans protested so vociferously that she issued a clarification: “Y’all, I’m not quitting music!” she tweeted to her 130,000 followers. “I’ve been on non-stop tour for over 5 years, I haven’t had a place to live during this time, & I sense that if I don’t step away soon, my self-worth/identity will start depending too much on staying in the game, in the constant churn.” The next week, she performed the ultimate digital mic drop: She deleted her account. Read More

Mitski moved to Nashville. She’s not quite sure why, because she didn’t really know anyone there, but she liked how specifically weird it was — a town with stories. A local businessman had recently died and left his substantial estate to his Border collie. Bachelorette parties were a surreal and ever-present cottage industry: “There’s always a woman crying on the street and five other women in matching T-shirts comforting her,” as Mitski put it to me. “It feels like such a good place to observe the human condition.”

Maybe she would never make a record of her own again. Maybe that was OK. She would live quietly and relatively cheaply, she thought, writing songs for other artists, perhaps, in anonymity and blissful ignorance of what people were saying about her on the internet.

When she was touring, her writing process became hurried — a few piecemeal lines or melodic ideas jotted down in snatched moments of downtime. But in Nashville, and eventually in the imposed stillness of the pandemic, she found that she could finally spend entire days writing. She likened the process to visiting a Korean spa: “I got to go into the metaphorical sauna and sit there a while and feel it and relax.” One of the first new songs she wrote was an introspective number called “Working for the Knife,” which put words and droning chords to her experience of creative burnout. “I used to think I’d be done by 20,” it goes. “Now at 29, the road ahead appears the same/Though maybe at 30, I’ll see a way to change.”

The songs kept coming. Eventually she accumulated enough of them that she realized — Hallelujah! Goddamn it! — that she was making another album. She called it “Laurel Hell,” a nickname given to the dense and thorny but deceptively beautiful thickets of poisonous shrubs that proliferate in southern Appalachia. Like those flowers’ siren songs, the record contains some of the most immediately accessible music of Mitski’s career, and some of the most tonally and thematically challenging. Sleek, danceable ’80s-pop-inspired tunes coexist with songs like the eerie “Heat Lightning,” which conjures the stirring, dronelike sensibility that John Cale brought to the Velvet Underground. Mitski insisted that the first single be not a catchy pop song like “The Only Heartbreaker” but the finished version of “Working for the Knife,” with its industrial-tinged synthesizer chords that clank like factory equipment.

That might not necessarily seem enticing, but “Laurel Hell” has been Mitski’s most commercially successful album yet. When it was released in early February, it debuted at No.5 on the Billboard album charts, above recent releases by Drake, Adele and the Weeknd, and it was that week’s best-selling album in America. A lot of that has to do with a strange thing that has happened in the three years since Mitski’s retreat from the spotlight: She has become — for reasons that she does not entirely understand — huge on TikTok.

As of this writing, Mitski’s music has provided a soundtrack for more than 2.5 million user-generated videos on the platform, and TikToks with the tag “#Mitski” have been viewed 1.5 billion times. The hashtag #Mitskiistherapy, referring to her emotionally evocative lyrics, has close to 50 million views. “MitskiTok” is its own unofficial corner of the app, where thousands of users fawn over snippets of her interviews (“1 minute of mitski being a literal icon”) and videos of her live performances (“its her world”) and occasionally post lovingly crafted parodies of her songs, several of which have gone viral themselves. Mitski’s music grants people whom society often treats as marginal the screaming vividness of main characters, and this is a huge part of its appeal. Give me your tired, your awkward, your lonesome masses, a Mitski song seems to say, and I will let them feel all the feelings.

“I don’t get it, but it’s nice!” said Mitski, who is now 31, referring to TikTok with a laugh. “I only know what I’ve been told. All of the businesspeople are like, ‘This is so great!’ And I’m like, ‘Please stop texting me these TikToks.’ It’s like a lot of things I’ve just decided not to think about.”

Whether she wants to think about it or not, though, this influx of new fans meant that she would be playing larger venues than ever, including headlining Radio City Music Hall on March 24. For all her ambivalence about the grind of touring, Mitski realized during the pandemic that she missed performing — that pointed sense of meaning that comes when “every moment of every day is leading up to this pinnacle that is the show.” It would take much physical and mental preparation to get her back into that rhythm, and when I visited her in Los Angeles, she was in the middle of several busy weeks of rehearsals.

One afternoon in late January, Mitski and the choreographer Jas Lin stood in front of a mirrored wall in a cavernous dance space called Stomping Ground L.A., running through the show’s meticulously planned moves. “Stay Soft,” an upbeat but haunting new single, blared overhead. “Here it’s like you’re one of those plants that, when an animal approaches, you close up,” Lin instructed.

Mitski is far from a trained dancer: She took a few ballet lessons in first grade and then quit, because a kid who bullied her at school was in the class and the bully’s mom was the teacher (“No offense to them now, because I’m sure they’re very nice people”). Still, when she was planning the tour for “Be the Cowboy” in 2018, Mitski decided she wanted to do something different onstage from thrashing away at her guitar. She reached out to the artist and choreographer Monica Mirabile, and together they choreographed an entire tour in a whirlwind three weeks. The palpable rawness of Mitski’s onstage movement has only further endeared her to her fans. “The fact that she’s not a trained dancer,” Mirabile told me, “gives permission for other bodies to move.”

But at Stomping Ground, it was also making Mitski a bit nervous. “We’re gonna do the scary thing now,” Lin said toward the end of their three-hour rehearsal, spinning Mitski around by the shoulders, “and face this way.” Mitski, who had grown accustomed to watching herself in the mirrors, groaned. But like the flick of a switch, the exacting discipline she brings to all aspects of her work suddenly kicked in, and she calmed herself with a deep breath. The opening bass notes of “Stay Soft” boomed from the speakers, and on the offbeat, she pretended she was peeking through an invisible curtain, greeting an imagined, feverishly expectant audience.

“Welcome to someone else’s home,” Mitski greeted me the next morning at her rental house on a quiet street in nearby Monterey Park. She brewed us each a cup of tea in the kitchen, and then we settled at a picnic table in the Edenic, flora-filled backyard. I asked her, barefaced and wrapped in a hunter green fleece sweatshirt, if Nashville now felt like home. She seemed both surprised and delighted when she said yes: “I miss it now. That’s nice, isn’t it?”

Home has always been an elusive concept for Mitski, who moved frequently as a child because of her father’s job in the U.S. State Department. She was born in Japan but spent time in Turkey, China and Malaysia; though an American citizen, Mitski did not live for an extended period in the United States until she was in high school. She was forever the new kid, trying on a different personality in every school, afraid to make deep social ties that she knew she would inevitably have to break. When she began writing music in her late teens, though, she found a creative outlet for those pangs of outsiderdom. Across her first several albums, she discovered that timeworn songwriter’s paradox: The more fearlessly she confessed her loneliness, the more people connected to her music.

Take “Your Best American Girl,” the breakout single from her 2016 album, “Puberty 2.” The song deftly captures the anxiety and isolation of an intercultural relationship: “You’re an all-American boy,” Mitski howls atop scorched-earth guitar chords. “I guess I couldn’t help trying to be your best American girl.” Trying implies a failure. But the song is also animated by the knowledge that the words “best,” “American” and even “girl” are all stifling fictions, and that anyone claiming to fit those roles perfectly all the time is probably lying. The song’s pulverizing volume glorifies such angst into something epic. It’s melancholic, but also stirringly triumphant.

A few years ago, during one of those strange, liminal moments of tour-related travel, Mitski found herself spending Christmas alone in a Malaysian hotel room. She was so lonely that she found herself opening up the window just to listen to strangers talking to one another outside. As she had so many times before, she coped with the feeling by channeling it into a song, which would become “Nobody,” a disco-inflected single from “Be the Cowboy.” “I know no one will save me, I just need someone to kiss,” she crooned to a mute, unreciprocating nothingness. “Give me one good honest kiss and I’ll be all right.” Like many of the best Mitski songs, “Nobody” luxuriates in an abject feeling until it becomes something celebratory, glorious, almost transcendent. Three years after it was released as a moderately popular single, this yearning boomeranged back to her in the most unexpected way, when it became — of all things — the soundtrack to a meme. By June 2021, it was a full-blown phenomenon, the de facto soundtrack for thousands of videos by TikTok users miming an escape from their fears or unpleasant experiences while Mitski sings the word “nobody” with an escalating passion (one video was captioned “when the closer called out and you see your manager walking towards you”; another “when you’ve been begging for a boyfriend and a boy actually tries to talk to you”). It was random, yes, but also cathartic: Who among us did not fantasize about running away from our everyday boogeymen as though we were the last surviving character in a slasher flick?

Not everyone who made a “Nobody” video became a Mitski die-hard, but it certainly led some younger fans to discover her earlier albums, where they were delighted to find even rawer expressions of young-adult angst. One old song of hers that has become unexpectedly popular online, “Class of 2013,” from an album she released in college, features primal yells and anxiety about growing up: “Mom, am I still young? Can I dream for a few months more?” A quick flick through “MitskiTok” shows it to be a place where many young people have come to express, share and, in some cases, exaggeratedly aestheticize feelings for which they may not have other outlets.

Mitski’s only theory about her social media stardom is half-joking but a bit morbid: “Once someone is dead, they become this hero,” she said. “And I’m dead on the internet, so they make me out to be a hero.” It’s not much of an exaggeration. Among many Mitski fan accounts is the Twitter feed “mitski’s archive,” which reposts screenshots from her deleted account to be pored over like the koan of an ancient philosopher.

Mitski used the phrase “parasocial relationship” to describe the way her fans obsess over and project onto her: It’s a one-sided, emotional bond that people have with someone (usually a celebrity) who is unaware of their existence. She doesn’t think it’s a bad thing, or a particularly novel one. “Before there was celebrity culture, you would have a parasocial relationship with a character in a book,” she said. “I’m sure people had parasocial relationships with Abraham Lincoln, you know?” She added: “Human beings do it, and now we have a word for it. I think it’s good that we’re acknowledging what it is.”

But it’s also true that modern forms of media — Twitter feeds, podcasts, TikTok accounts — create an illusory sense of intimacy that fans would not necessarily experience with the objects of their idolatry a century, or even a decade, ago. Fans often expect more from Mitski than she is willing to give, or push back when she tries to establish perfectly reasonable boundaries. Early in the “Laurel Hell” tour, Mitski requested, via a note posted on her management-run Twitter account, that her fans use their phones sparingly at her shows, because “sometimes when I see people filming entire songs or whole sets, it makes me feel as though we are not here together.” A small but vocal contingent of her fans claimed that documenting moments that they might otherwise forget was their own way of taking care of their mental health. A kind of therapy-speak stalemate ensued. Probably reminded why she left social media in the first place, Mitski deleted her tweets, but as ever, the conversation about her continued in her absence.

The “Laurel Hell” tour opened in North Carolina in mid-February, and I caught its sold-out night in Raleigh — Mitski’s second live performance in almost three years. An impossibly long line snaked around the chilly parking lot of the 2,000-capacity venue, and two people in identical red cowgirl outfits huddled together, shivering. I am only a few years older than Mitski, but I got the distinct impression that I was the oldest nonparent at the show. The woman checking IDs and handing out 21+ wristbands seemed palpably bored.

Once inside, the crowd was fizzy with anticipation, and occasional chants of “Mit-ski! Mit-ski!” broke out. A fan in front of me idly flicked through the “For You” page on TikTok and, when the lights plunged us into darkness, tapped open the camera app and dutifully held the phone aloft, ready to capture an absent hero’s return.

Mitski opened with “Love Me More,” a thumping pop gem from the new album. Everyone around me knew the words, and they sang them back to Mitski in a reciprocal loop of devotion: “I need you to love me more, love me more, love me more/Love enough to fill me up, fill me up, fill me up.”

When she played “Townie,” an exuberant song from her 2014 album, “Bury Me at Makeout Creek,” my mind drifted back to the experience, nearly eight years ago, of hearing her music for the first time. That album seemed to say something quintessential about the millennial experience. My life then felt free-floating and uncharted, unlikely to unfold on the same timeline as my parents’, and Mitski’s songs depicted both the terror and ecstasy of such rootlessness: “I’m not gonna be what my daddy wants me to be,” she proclaimed in “Townie.” “I wanna be what my body wants me to be.”

Watching Mitski’s music connect so viscerally to the next generation has allowed me to loosen that interpretation, though. When I’m feeling optimistic, I see its broad appeal as an example of cross-generational solidarity in times that can feel apocalyptic. Mitski is hopeful about this, too. “Millennials and Gen Z are in the same position,” she told me in Los Angeles. “We can contribute the knowledge and support, and hopefully they can contribute the energy to change.”

At other moments in our conversation, though, we had to admit that TikTok made a very real generation gap uncomfortably visible. “I am always surprised that there seems to be a complete freedom of disclosure about people’s very private things,” Mitski said about her brief glimpses into the TikTok universe. “There seems to be this utter nihilism with Gen Z. They’re exposing these vulnerable things, but there is no sense of ‘exposing this will hurt me,’ because ‘nothing can hurt me.’ They’re just like, ‘The world is burning.’”

Mitski’s most vocal fans treat her as a kind of high priestess of modern-day sadness — a role that makes her uncomfortable. When I spoke to her over the phone a week after “Laurel Hell” came out, she told me she wished she “didn’t have to perform pain and struggle to be valued. The specific kind of pain that is asked of me is the sort of screaming, most expressive, outgoing, adolescent pain. There’s all sorts of other pain. There’s a grown-up, fatigued pain as well.”

On the stage in North Carolina, Mitski was twirling, pounding, staring desperately into her own outstretched hands as if they held Yorick’s skull. She was a magnetic presence, but at no point in the night did I feel as though I were witnessing anything other than an expertly modulated performance. This did not make me enjoy the show any less, and in fact it made me feel that Mitski was taking care of herself, trying to erect certain emotional barriers that would help her continue to make a living doing the thing she loved most.

Near the end of the set, she performed an older song, “Drunk Walk Home.” She and Lin choreographed that piece together. It was “this ritual that she gets to have for herself every night,” Lin told me, “of screaming and burying these inner demons and externalizing these expectations and scripts out of her body during the show.” Brutal guitar sound cascaded in pummeling waves, and Mitski’s body exploded with movement as she rubbed her arms and torso like an antic Lady Macbeth. The crowd roared. The song reached its climax, and Mitski crouched down and let out a horror-movie scream into the floorboards of the stage. Then, as the sound faded, she mimed digging up invisible dirt and casually burying her scream in the ground. She stood up, collected herself and prepared to sing another song.

Lindsay Zoladz is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer. She was previously the pop-music critic for New York magazine, where her work earned her the National Society of Magazine Editors’ ASME Next Award for Journalists Under 30. Arielle Bobb-Willis is a photographer from New York. Her work can be seen in the traveling “New Black Vanguard” gallery show and book.

AdELe aND

ABbA’s SoNgS oF ExPeRiEnCe

‘Easy on Me,’ Adele Full Track
‘Don’t Shut Me Down,’ Abba Full Track

/ Each of the British singer Adele’s records is named after the age she was when she began writing it. It’s a taxonomic habit that neatly summarizes her creative concerns — she was 19 when she sang about fixating on her nascent loves, 21 when she started moving on, 25 when she started looking back — and so it made intuitive sense when, on last year’s “30,” her wide-screen balladeering veered away from youthful anguish into more explicitly adult territory. Claiming that an artist has recorded her “most personal album yet” is a decades-old marketing cliché, but “30” was actually and unavoidably personal: substantially shaped by Adele’s split from her husband, Simon Konecki, with every track pulling directly from her experience as a newly divorced woman.

Consider “Easy on Me,” the album’s first single. Unlike Adele’s previous lead singles — the brawny fight song “Rolling in the Deep,” the showstopping epic “Hello” — “Easy on Me” was smaller in scope. Over a subdued piano arrangement, Adele sang about seeking forgiveness during this tumultuous part of her life. Despite the emotional modesty, “Easy on Me” broke single-day streaming records upon its release, buoyed by fervent anticipation and the collective belief that Adele was about to communicate something important. The song ended up topping the Billboard Hot 100 for 10 weeks. Read More

There’s a specific power that accrues when a singer, through the natural procession of time, manages to turn her long-public story into something like gravitas. Frank Sinatra could have sung “My Way” as a fresh-faced crooner, but it was the older man, exhausted by the music industry’s machinations, who made it a standard. Some artists even manage to age into their own back catalog: Adele herself previously scored a hit with “When We Were Young,” a glossy and dramatic ballad about longing for the old days in the twilight of your life. She released that when she was just 27. You can imagine the distant future where she’ll sing it to graying millennials, nostalgic for this song about nostalgia.

Making positive use of your maturity is inherently at odds with pop music’s unyielding search for the newer, younger thing. And these fresh faces will, in turn, reward the industry’s faith by singing about semiuniversal concerns like “going out” and “being sad, in a cool way” — but usually not something legitimately bracing, like the slow realization that they, too, cannot avoid aging. Many stars struggle to fold more sobering concerns into their work, or even their personal lives. Michael Jackson spent most of his adulthood trying to return to a state of prelapsarian innocence; Britney Spears was legally barred from escaping the rarefied celebrity she built for herself as a teenager. Those are extreme cases, but even a fully realized artist like Madonna, who has chased modern pop trend after modern pop trend, seems allergic to the admittedly loaded concept of acting your age.

Great singers — the Aretha Franklins, the Tina Turners, the Whitney Houstons — aren’t immune to the pressures of the market, or society; they, too, release bad records, and engage in all sorts of confusing personal behavior. Yet it takes only one jaw-dropping vocal performance to remind us of their power. Often this appreciation dovetails with the way we’ve consumed their private turmoils, and we now hear their art as a transference of wisdom and experience. When they sing those big, painful songs that seem to draw every inch of air out of their lungs, it’s easy to believe that they understand the agony of living a little more than we do. Adele was a convincing singer from the beginning, but the tabloid-friendly turbulence of her personal life allows us to think she’s really going through it. There’s a deepening complexity in how she sings about adulthood on “30” — about new loves, small disappointments, unexpected moments of confusion and shame, and all this while trying to raise a small child. Of course it sounds more authentic than if she were imagining the emotions she might have, one day.

Last year, the Swedish radio giants Abba released “Voyage,” their first new album in 40 years. “Voyage” sounded foremost like an Abba record — bouncy grooves, melancholic orchestration, the twinned dusky voices of Agnetha Fältskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad — which was reason enough to celebrate. But it also sounded like music made by a band now in their 70s, completing a thematic loop with earlier songs like “The Winner Takes It All,” which drew freely from their own adult lives. The songs reference self-doubt in the face of age, the pining for lovers long gone who never returned, the potential of revived love at the end of life.

“Voyage” was recorded with Abba’s old backing band (or most of it, anyway) and written by Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson, just like all their previous albums. Unlike some contemporary records made by aging pop stars, there were no collaborations with buzzy songwriters, no guest appearances by much younger singers. The resistance to modernity didn’t necessarily make for better music by itself, but Abba’s approach felt like an honest acknowledgment of how the band had experienced the last 40 years. They had broken up, and never really considered the possibility of making more music — and then, suddenly, the stars aligned for one more record, on which they could sing about their understanding of life as an older, wiser unit.

It’s rare to watch popular performers grow older through their creative work, singing material that reflects who they are in their advancing years, in front of an audience willing to pay attention. When they do, something wonderful can happen. Songs make us feel things, and pop songs are pointed at the largest possible audience, and so sometimes many of us can sit together, in spirit if not in body, listening to Adele or Abba or whomever else singing about who they are now, thinking about how we’ve changed as well. The industry will probably always prioritize something hotter and younger, but in those moments we can glimpse evidence — up there in the cultural firmament that always purports to reflect our hopes and fears — of how life goes on. And so we might believe it goes on for us too.

Jeremy Gordon is a writer in Brooklyn.

EvEntuALLy We ALL TaLk

AbOuT BrUnO

‘We Don’t Talk About Bruno’ Full Track

/ We all know, deep in the marrow of our animated American bones, what a Disney megahit sounds like. It is slow and rising and inspirational — a bubble designed to lift us up, octave by octave, to a better place. It’s all about altitude: High notes and high emotions are belted out at high volume, often by characters who rise, literally, high above their surroundings. Elsa the ice princess sings “Let It Go” while climbing to the tippy-top of the tallest peak in a vast winter landscape. Aladdin and Princess Jasmine harmonize “A Whole New World” at cruising altitude, on a magic carpet, whipping past minarets. Disney’s signature ballads tend to be anthems of individual elevation — heroes transcending society. As Elsa puts it, “No right, no wrong, no rules for me — I’m free!”

Well, not the newest Disney megahit. “We Don’t Talk About Bruno,” the breakout song from the animated film “Encanto,” is the company’s biggest musical success since the old juggernauts of the 1990s. And yet “Bruno” sounds nothing like “A Whole New World” or “Can You Feel the Love Tonight?” or “Colors of the Wind.” It is not an uplifting aria or a yearning lament. “Bruno” is tense and busy — a crowded, convulsing, percussive, down-in-the-weeds medley sung, in shifts, by society itself. Instead of elevating us above the crowd, “Bruno” drops us right down into the anxious fray. It is the opposite of escapism. So why is it such a hit? Read More

“Encanto” tells the story of the enchanted Madrigals, an ordinary human family blessed with magical powers. They live in utopian harmony, employing their gifts (superhearing, superstrength, etc.) to help nearby villagers — until their perfect world starts to crack. (Because it’s Disney, literal cracks rip across the house and landscape.) In the resulting chaos, everyone begins to fixate on a forbidden subject: Bruno, the family outcast. Bruno’s power was prophecy. He was a truth-teller, but people didn’t want to hear the truth. So he disappeared. For years he has been only an absence, a taboo, a raw nerve at the center of their world.

Right from its title, “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” is self-contradictory — immediately and obsessively, it does the thing it says it’s not doing. One by one, major and minor characters do talk about Bruno, listing his various prophecies and purported crimes (“he sees your dreams and feasts on your screams”) in a conspiratorial tone. These voices pile up and overlap until the song becomes a huge ensemble showstopper, à la “One Day More” in “Les Misérables.” You’d need a crowd to sing it at karaoke. By the end, everybody is talking simultaneously about what supposedly nobody is talking about.

Lay it out like that, and you can see why “Bruno” is popular in 2022 America. It echoes an anxiety that dominates our society: the fraught rules of public discourse. Who is allowed to talk about what? What can we say in public, in private, in seriousness, in jest? Who gets to decide? These anxieties tend to burst out in a variety of flash points and buzzwords and panics: cancel culture, Critical Race Theory, the woke mob. But it all reflects the same obsession. In a nation that prides itself on free speech, we devote approximately 90 percent of our speech to adjudicating the rules of our speech. We talk ceaselessly about our talking.

In the 1990s, the classic Disney fantasy of individual escapism might still, just barely, have made sense. But here in our agitated new century, it’s hard to imagine a single voice rising above the fray. Climb to the peak of a mountain, singing at the top of your lungs, and you’ll most likely find a crowd already there, arguing. We can, at most, hope to be one small voice in the chorus, doing our best not to be drowned out, discussing the discussion of the discussion. And “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” is our great, noisy, troubled anthem.

Sam Anderson is a staff writer for the magazine.

WhAt LiEs BeNeAth HiP-HoP’s SwAgGeR

‘Time Today,’ Moneybagg Yo Full Track
And songs by: BIA, Kash Doll, Cardi B, Sugarhill Gang, LL Cool J and Queen Latifah. Full Playlist

/ This is who I am. I will fight you. This is why I matter. These are my favorite rap songs — the songs that say these things. Mean these things.

I am a fan, and I want all the smoke. I want all fight and no flight. Pure delirium. I crave even the weariness that comes with bracing for attack, my armor as heavy as the volume is high. That’s how I got into rap, when it was new: as an early-’80s middle schooler arguing against Led Zeppelin’s decade-old “Stairway to Heaven” for class song. Back then, Cheryl Lynn, Chuck Brown, and Rufus and Chaka churned alongside Donna Summer and Funkadelic, and even the Knack’s “My Sharona” sounded Black — but it was Sugarhill Gang’s 1979 “Rapper’s Delight” that put the playground on tilt. I mean, somebody Black named Big Bank Hank was calling himself a “grandmaster”! My Los Angeles school was multiracial because of mandatory busing, and our student body could (on its best days) feel in line with Sugarhill’s Wonder Mike rapping, “I’d like to say Hello/To the Black and the white/The red and the brown/The purple and yellow.” My logic: Going with Zepp’s grandiosity meant clinging to a reality that no longer existed. We were, suddenly, a “generation,” with our own things. We could say: This is who we are. This is why we matter. Rap said that. Read More

I still want to fight you. That’s why, these days, it’s straight to Moneybagg Yo for me. He’s from the part of South Memphis that my Memphis friend says is home to strip malls with no stores, big industrial parks and people trying mightily to make a life. Moneybagg’s Walker Homes neighborhood is a place you probably have no business being if you don’t have people over there. So you see why a person with the harmonious name DeMario DeWayne White Jr. might start off his persona-​building by calling himself Moneybagg, and end up making a little ditty called “Time Today.”

This is a song that will straighten your spine. It will give you the patience to take a breath and blink slowly and move without fear through any space, from back alleys to sports bars with hockey on all 11 screens. “Time Today” is the Top 40 lead single from Moneybagg’s “A Gangsta’s Pain,” which went to No. 1 on the Billboard 200 album chart. There’s also a version of it that went meme-platinum, last year, as an audio clip on TikTok, lip-synced by users aching to join the Great Resignation:

I don’t like the workers

I don’t like the managers

I don’t like nobody

We can clock out

Or keep it professional

How you wanna go ’bout it

The production, from Real Red (Jorres Nelson) and YC (Christopher Pearson), is an intoxicating grind. In the original song, two minutes of Moneybagg’s merciless monotone, he says that he can get gangsta (clocking out) or keep it cordial (professional), but he still doesn’t like anybody. Some received the song as a message to Moneybagg’s “haters.” Perhaps. But lines like “The hate be so real, the love be fake/Be bumpin’ they gums and bumpin’ my tape” — those lyrics do double duty as a chin-jut at day-trippers who love Black culture and loathe Black people.

Because rap, despite having been around for more than 40 years, is still full of songs in which rappers introduce themselves as if the genre were still new. One of the most harrowing comes from YoungBoy Never Broke Again. He’s a Baton Rouge rapper, born Kentrell Gaulden. His rap name is a news release, and a promise on which, so far, he is making good. YoungBoy’s notorious for landing a No. 1 album while in jail awaiting trial on federal gun charges. Take his 2018 song “I Am Who They Say I Am,” featuring Kevin Gates and Quando Rondo. Each of his words melts into the next, so you might hear this differently — but in my mind, YoungBoy raps, “I’m are who you say I am,” affirming a state of being both singular and plural.

Kentrell is a kid of 22 who dropped out of school in the ninth grade. He told The Fader in 2017 that the grandmother who raised him for a time died of heart disease. In a 2018 conversation with the media personality DJ Akademiks, Gaulden said, “I ain’t never had no daddy, and I ain’t never had no mama — and my mama living!” In “I Am,” he raps that he’s a thug — “from the trenches/Never had a heart/Drug dealer, contract killer.” Raps that “I look for my mama when I try to look inside my woman.” Raps that he “upgraded from nobody/To the one who the man.” I rap along to the awful audacity of YoungBoy, with his ankle monitor and probation violation, because I need to know what strikes chords in the soul of my 17-year-old nephew, with his devoted parents and 4.33 G.P.A.

I put on BIA’s 2021 hit “Whole Lotta Money” just to hear her say, “I put on my jewelry/Just to go to the bodega.” It echoes Drake’s “I wear every single chain/Even when I’m in the house” from his six-times-platinum “Started From the Bottom” (2013). And that, in turn, recalls the thick bike chain the rapper Treach, from Naughty by Nature, often wore around his neck with a padlock, back in the 1990s.

All of these symbols mean things. There’s resistance to ascribing them meaning, because rap is Black, and our musical work, like our athletic labor, is still deemed something that comes to us easily, or even “naturally,” without consideration. Besides which these are pop hits, and there is a certain aversion to seeing the layered poetry in songs like that. But ignore it at your own risk. The persona Bianca Landrau built and named BIA is whispery — but the vibe is very I-wish-you-would. It has to be. How else would she make it as a woman in rap, besides serving the badassery for which Black women are occasionally beloved and frequently berated?

When I really want to half-drown myself in somebody else’s delicious defense mechanism, I rush to the Detroit native Arkeisha Knight, who raps as Kash Doll. Her 2019 song “Here I Go” is a two-minute missive that ingeniously and indelibly defines her persona. When you rhyme along, you are not afraid of anything. You will not wait to get swung on; you will swing. “Since you aggy,” she raps, “Send your addy.” In the first line of her verse she even offers to drop a location pin so you can come to her. I scream every time she repeats the refrain — “I heard you bitches was looking for me” — back to back, in two different cadences. She knows she has to repeat herself for people to pay attention.

Treach and Naughty by Nature signed at one point with Flavor Unit, the management company founded by Dana Owens (Queen Latifah) and Shakim Compere. Both understood how much this shorthand helped people to grasp a mood quickly. Even the honorific in Queen Latifah’s name was shorthand — a shot back at the “welfare queen” trope popularized by Ronald Reagan during his 1976 and 1980 presidential campaigns. By 1991, Latifah was releasing the single “Latifah’s Had It Up 2 Here” (produced by Naughty by Nature). When a sped-up version of her voice announces “Queen L.A.T.I.F.A.H./In command,” there’s the thrill of snatching back and polishing a crown. There is the joy too — as there still is in hip-hop culture — of a people who had their given names torn from them now naming themselves.

These identity songs — the ones that ooze “this is who I am” and sound ready to prove it — are all over the dawn of hip-hop culture. For Run-D.M.C. it was 1983’s “Sucker MC’s.” MC Lyte has 1988’s “Lyte as a Rock.” Too Short has 1989’s “Life Is ... Too Short.” But a persona, in a world that willfully misunderstands you, isn’t always enough. Some go past “persona” and all the way to alter ego. Greg Jacobs — Shock G, of Digital Underground — was also Humpty Hump. Marshall Mathers didn’t just call himself Eminem; most people met him as Slim Shady in the 1999 single “My Name Is.” The Notorious B.I.G. had Frank White. Megan Thee Stallion is Tina Snow. The Georgia rapper Gunna is also Wunna. Beyoncé — actually a stellar rapper when she wants to be (consider the 2014 we-escalating-up-in-here remix of her “Flawless,” with Nicki Minaj) — has both Yoncé and Sasha Fierce.

Heartbreakingly, what plays on a loop underneath all of these announcements of self is Toni Morrison on how racism functions. “It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being,” she said in a 1975 talk at Portland State University. “Somebody says you have no language, and so you spend 20 years proving that you do” — and then the same with your art, your history, your kingdoms. “None of that is necessary,” she said. “There will always be one more thing.”

“Don’t call it a comeback.” The line has, like countless lines from rap songs, been so completely absorbed into the American lexicon that it’s easy to forget not just who said it, but how it was said, and why. After the muted impact of his 1989 album, “Walking With a Panther,” James Todd Smith — LL Cool J, the rapper now best known for his longtime role on CBS’s “NCIS: Los Angeles” — was reintroducing himself by rapping into an art-​deco microphone suspended over the center of a boxing ring. This was the genius 1991 video for “Mama Said Knock You Out.”

From his hits to his stance to his Kangols, multifinger rings and Fila tracksuits, LL is a key inventor of the rap persona that would be imitated, gobbled up and regurgitated until it had influenced most people in the world. In the video for “Mama Said,” he jabs ferociously at the air — so we jab ferociously, too, sharing across time and space the heat of an endless battle to be seen as fully human. In the year before the album arrived, there was a three-day uprising in Miami after a police officer shot a Black motorcyclist, killing both him and his passenger. Yusuf Kirriem Hawkins, 16, was murdered by a gunman within a white mob in the Bensonhurst neighborhood of New York City. And the businessman Donald Trump paid for numerous full-page newspaper ads demanding the death penalty in New York after five boys were arrested in the Central Park jogger case. (They were exonerated years later.)

The video for “Mama Said” teases the viewer with tight close-ups of the rapper. But LL’s face is obscured by the kind of hoodie Trayvon Martin would be killed in 21 years later. Perhaps James Todd Smith, from St. Albans, Queens, doesn’t want to be fully seen. What about the world says: You are welcome? Toward the end of the clip, he throws a towel toward the camera. Blood pumps hard through the hearts of listeners, but is there a more straightforward metaphor for weariness? “Don’t you dare stare,” he raps. It’s as if he can feel people memorizing, and stealing him.

Twenty-six years later, Cardi B enters the chat. Belcalis Amanzar’s 2017 “Bodak Yellow” is one of the most spare, unflinching debuts in music history, her vocals as disciplined and evocative as classics from Gang Starr or Nas or Lil’ Kim. Cardi sets a crisp tone: The girl from the housing projects and the strip-club stages got her teeth fixed, is paying her mother’s bills, is buying up all the Louboutins on Fifth Avenue. It’s within the talk of red-bottom shoes, “bloody shoes,” that we are really introduced to Cardi. Buried in her lines are the angrily blistered feet of a dancer. Buried also: what an Afro-Latina deemed by her very address as “low” must battle to see her way to an orthodontist. Within the song is success, but not relief. Stating your presence is a dangerous and bloody business. But people often miss this poetry because Cardi is profane, and raunchy, and popular.

We rarely recall the fight in foundational tracks like “Rapper’s Delight.” Sugarhill Gang looks rosy in the rear view, just like Roxanne Shanté, the Fat Boys, Kid Frost, Biz Markie. But even though Sugarhill’s Big Bank Hank, a former bouncer, lifted lyrics from the undercelebrated innovator Grandmaster Caz, “Rapper’s Delight” took cultural battles to the big stage. The rappers created swaggering personas as protection from the madding crowd.

They had to. They watched as Black disco was labeled soulless and less than art and dismantled by music magazines. They watched as even manicured Motown stars had to claw their way from Detroit to the pop charts. Radio stations and record stores remained segregated; critics assumed hip-hop was a fad, a novelty, not really music. Hence the tradition of grit as glue in rap songs — this urge to state, with style and coarse grace, your selfhood to the world. To lean back on your heels, arms crossed loosely over chest, projecting placid fearlessness, and rap something like “I’m the King of Rock/There is none higher,” or “Somebody please tell ’em who the eff I is/I am Nicki Minaj” or — as DJ Quik says on the clean version of “Born and Raised in Compton” — “I’m the kinda brother that’s feeling no pain.” When he does feel pain. When Black Americans are systematically undertreated for pain.

This broadcasting of invincibility? It revs my heart. When I am, in my soul, with the band, I exist in all caps. I am fighting and flying high. But how can people not be tired of introducing and reintroducing themselves to those who willfully, even cynically, resist their humanity? Spoiler alert: The bombast is a response, a defense, a pose, a stance. It’s magic, and it seduces. But it’s labor. Under threat of a variety of harms, you have to camouflage your soul. So if I’m tired — of always staying ready, so I never have to get ready — imagine the music-makers themselves.

And yet I — we — still crave the endorphins they radiate. I are who we say we are. We will fight you. This is why we matter.

Danyel Smith is host of the Spotify Original show "Black Girl Songbook" and author of the forthcoming book "Shine Bright: A Very Personal History of Black Women In Pop."

KaNyE aNd AndRé 3000

aRe LoNeLy aNd iN LiMbO

‘Life of the Party’ Full Track

/ “Donda,” the album Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, released last August, is a product of grief; it’s named in honor of the artist’s mother, Donda West, a former English professor who died in 2007, and also covers the aftermath of Ye’s separation from his wife, Kim Kardashian. Three of Ye’s singles from this project — “Hurricane,” “Believe What I Say” and “Off the Grid” — are characterized by his trademark stadium thump, meant to fill arenas the size of their creator’s prodigious ego. “Life of the Party,” which didn’t appear on the original version of the album but on the extended “Donda Deluxe,” released in November, is drastically subdued. Of all the songs on the album, this one, a collaboration with André 3000, shovels closest to both rappers’ psychic turmoil.

The DNA of hip-hop songs can often be found in their samples. Ye’s single incorporates the Dramatics’ 1975 song “I Was the Life of the Party,” about a man putting on a happy face after his romance ends. “Life of the Party” concerns a more multifaceted grief — for Ye’s mom, for his marriage, for dead rappers. In addition to the Dramatics tune, the song’s title references another “Donda” track, “Jesus Lord”: “Mama, you was the life of the party/I swear you brought life to the party/When you lost your life, it took the life out the party,” Ye raps, his voice hoarse. Read More

In “Life of the Party,” the grief is less specific and consequently feels more pervasive and overwhelming. This song finds both Ye and André 3000 in a liminal space, between versions of themselves, a kind of audio bardo. It has a minor-key mood; dark chord changes; lyrics about “spirit-spinning” events, nature and the states of discombobulation both men find themselves in. The Dramatics’ sample — “The life of the party, I laughed ’til I almost cried” — loops. Stuttering piano keys and a strolling bass line recur. The music swirls and doubles back; ad-libs by the Notorious B.I.G. ghost across the track.

André 3000 opens his verse by imagining the potential meeting, in the afterlife, of his own mother and Ye’s: “Hey Ms. Donda, you run into my mama please tell her I said, ‘Say something.’ ... If there’s a heaven you would think they’d let you speak to your son.” Later Ye comes in, describing an experiential spectrum, from cradle to grave: He references an art teacher from his childhood, the near-abortion of one of his kids, Tupac’s murder. Both men come across as lost — orphaned souls in search of some explanation for all that they’ve survived.

In “Raising Kanye,” Dr. West’s 2007 memoir about parenting Ye, she writes of a moment when her son is 12 and she is panicking about getting him to the airport on time. Attempting to defuse the crisis, he asks her to stop criticizing him and contribute “only something that will help.” I was reminded of that passage toward the end of “Life of the Party,” when it poignantly samples DMX, who is assuaging his daughter’s fear as they wait for a thrill ride to start. By the end of the ride, DMX is boasting about his child’s courage. What’s left unsaid is that now DMX is gone; and so is Dr. West.

At the end of the song, Ye’s language becomes almost inchoate, like scat or the communication attempts of a child just learning to use their words. “Y’all can’t hear me ... for the real me ... I been. ... ” And then he moans, a sound that could either evoke an orgasm or an infant’s call for aid. In that instance, when Ye doesn’t know how to express himself — or when he leaves space for the inexpressible — he achieves one of the most beautiful, humbling moments in his discography. It is a devastatingly honest counterpoint to the pompous posts he sometimes shares on social media.

In a foreword to “Raising Kanye,” Ye relays a moment from his childhood in which he sought his mother’s guidance about the variability of different forms of English: “I was saying something and asked her if it was proper. She told me it depends. Language is situational.” In “Life of the Party,” the grieving Ye, usually so loquacious, seems to be searching for words and coming up short. The opener of “Donda” features a singer chanting Dr. West’s first name for 53 seconds; in “Life of the Party,” Ye doesn’t name his mother directly (though André 3000 does). That choice further emphasizes her absence. By the time he gets to the end of this song, Ye has found himself, finally, in a situation in which there’s nothing left to say.

Niela Orr is a story producer for Pop-Up Magazine and a contributing editor for The Paris Review.

TurNsTiLe ExPaNdS

tHeiR CiRcLe

‘T.L.C. (Turnstile Love Connection)’ Full Track

/ Formed in 2010, the Baltimore band Turnstile has long been beloved by hardcore punk enthusiasts. With the August release of their third album, “Glow On,” they became a cross-genre phenomenon, not emerging from hardcore so much as opening a door to fans outside it. Those new fans find eclectic grooves, rushing hooks and — maybe most notable — a feeling of community so potent as to be dizzying amid the isolation of the pandemic. I asked Turnstile’s vocalist, Brendan Yates, about that component of the band’s ethos, best summarized in one song title: “T.L.C. (Turnstile Love Connection).”

What was your earliest experience of feeling a sense of community around music? As kids, we got a group of friends together to start a band — including Brady [Ebert], who plays in Turnstile — and we would practice every single day after school, no matter what. There was no goal other than to try our best. We were all learning our instruments as we went. It was a vessel to figure stuff out, which I’m still doing. But that band led to figuring out how to play a show at a community center by our house, which was the beginning of feeling like I was a part of something. Read More

How did that impact you as a person? It gave me a little sense of worth, and opened my eyes to realizing that I didn’t have to be the most talented or be anything but myself in order to contribute. It was the beginning of seeing what kind of doors something really small can open.

Turnstile started in hardcore, and you’ve spoken about the influence of go-go, the funk style native to the Washington, Maryland and Virginia area. Both are very participatory and interactive. With those kinds of music, there is an actual connection to people. Growing up and watching MTV, music can seem like something you admire from afar but are not actually a part of. I never connected those dots until I started going to shows, where there was more involvement in an intimate setting. We were moshing for the first time, crowdsurfing. I realized there was a wall down. Even something as simple as getting up on the stage and doing your little dance and then jumping off — that kind of freedom is a small wall that’s down. Growing up and going to shows, I picked up on that. It felt special that I was actually a part of it and I could start a band. There’s no filtering process where you have to be a certain quality of musician. If you want to do it, you can do it, whether it’s playing music, being a photographer or finding a little venue and putting on shows.

The band’s music is often spoken about in the context of hardcore or rock, but the songs contain references to pop music and beyond, like the Sly Stone nod on “T.L.C.” Was there a point when you realized the music could hold all of this at once and it would work? No, it’s so unconscious; I’ve always just been a fan of songwriting. Sometimes I think: I don’t even know what this is, but it feels right. We’re trying to naturally embrace where we’re from and what we have to offer and embrace that it’s maybe not as defined as sometimes people want it to be.

Did the isolation of the past two years inspire you to want to make music that was an antidote to that? It put everything into perspective. During that time, it was hard to even get to a point of wanting to release music — because the music exists, but how it takes shape with people in a room is another thing. One of the first shows I went to [after lockdown] was mostly local bands in Baltimore, a show that, prepandemic, might have been, like, 100 kids, but it was over 500 kids, and every single person was so engaged. I sensed a greater appreciation for everything.

Some of the lyrics from “Glow On” specifically address loneliness and isolation. How does it feel to shout “Can’t be the only one!” at the center of thousands of people who are shouting it back? Even when everything is chaotic — even when people are jumping off the stage and bodies are flying everywhere — there’s a weird peace in playing the songs and a weird peace in people singing them. It’s kind of like when it’s raining and the weather is crazy outside, but it feels peaceful.

The first Turnstile show after lockdown was at a band shell in Baltimore, and the footage online is just explosively joyful. What was it like to return to performing after so long? It was so overwhelming — almost like fight or flight, hyperfocused, a blur of overwhelming joy and overwhelming anxiety. I’m still feeling it now, but those first shows back in particular, I don’t think I’ll ever forget that feeling my whole life. It was like every feeling you can possibly have, all at once — I think for everyone.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Jenn Pelly is a freelance writer and author of "The Raincoats."

BaRtEeS StRaNGe

UnDoUbTs hiMseLf

‘Boomer’ Full Track

/ I was doing push-ups in my living room one pandemic morning when my favorite radio station hit me with a dart. By the first bar, I’d gone from plank to prostrate. Bull’s-eye. “Boomer” opens with the sort of male salutation — “Aye bruh, aye bruh, aye bruh” — that typically stokes my inner Travis Bickle. You can’t be talkin’ to me. But he was. The garage rock of it was what got me — sun-on-water guitar, hopscotch drums. And the tumble of lyrics, something about how “I told my girl that I was working, that’s a lie — I’m in the trap.” Their delivery hails from beyond the garage — from a secret room beneath it, actually, where naked people weigh and package cocaine at Uzi-point.

This is rock singing — big and sideways. But the slurry cadences — those are rap’s. The lyrics of the verses don’t get sang so much as slung. Then, a shift downward. The guitar heavies itself and goes chompchompchompchompchomp, a danger known from the metal of the ’80s. The song’s still charging, rumbling, but orderly, so that each word in this speeding caravan now has its own bunk. Read More

Up to now, I had assumed the person imparting this voltage was a Brit, a Black Brit. The ease of lingo, the casual, unselfconscious rock ’n’ roll swagger in time with hip-hop’s lean: a brilliant ploy of joshing synthesis, perhaps. But then I got here, to this scene change:

I, I know most people gonna say what they wanna say

Most people gonna smoke what they wanna smoke

And others, they don’t care about no other things

And sometimes, it’s kinda hard to tell exactly where I wanna go

I know it don’t show

I know it don’t show

 

I knew instantly this person was American. The trip through the live wires of “most people” and their stupid expectations: He’s about to burst from the checked box of Black creative expression — right here in the pre-chorus!

Sure enough, another shift: a chorus-chorus, one whose words slide across the notes so that the dude singing the double “I” that starts it sounds more than free. He sounds, he sounds — what’s the word? Exhumed. Fist-through-a-grave reborn. And at this point in “Boomer,” he is singing that he’s “goin’ in.” Wait, you might think, back into his private grave of shame or doubt or embarrassment? Is this vibrant, vital voice that has been riding shag-carpet guitar amid a nimbus of ooooooohs — is that voice really, really going to rebury itself and try in the next verse and chorus for disinterment? Nope. He’s going in.

A third shift to the rescue: the bridge. One guitar retains its rug-a-chug as another slices atop the bass with the insinuating sex of a back-seat blues. The inflection of the singing evolves again, too. There’s a snarl to it now. “You can’t hurt me,” we hear. “I been buried alive by the devil that’s in them hills.” Now, typically a song’s bridge unites two musical land masses. This one leads somewhere else. It sounds like the chorus, but the words being shouted take up more space. This guy sounds newly determined to unmeet early graves. Indeed, after more guitar-glimmer and some death-metal, death-rattle kick-drumming, the song ends. The bridge was the portal to an exit, to some truer, more fully integrated life.

Bartees Strange is a former college football player. It turns out he was born in Britain — American-military dad, opera-singer mom — and came of age outside Oklahoma City, in a place called Mustang. “Boomer” is the third track on Strange’s debut album, which he named “Live Forever.” And if I’m hearing him right, what never dies is Black music — but also the anxiety of a strong non-Black rock influence. This ain’t “Party Like a Rock Star” — it is rock. His R.&B. is not a silk-sonic costume, but music at peace with how Radiohead, Kings of Leon or the National it can also sound. And the N-word? Bartees doth partake. Nothing’s studied about the song craft, either. This is just what came to him, what came out of him. All of “Live Forever” is like that: oblong, recombinant cri-de-coeur casual. None of it you can see coming.

“Strange,” though. What a name to give yourself. Bartees was born Bartees Cox, and if his life is even fractionally similarly to some of the Coxes I know, that last name, at a certain age, can be a bane. But “Strange” is quite the alternative. That’s what the old Black folks call an evidently queer child in lieu of something worse — queer sexually, queer racially. There was something “strange” about me. That’s what Michael R. Jackson called his racially anxious and sexually queer musical: “A Strange Loop.” The musician Stew called his “Passing Strange.” Each a galaxy of Black American sound in the key of “the only Black person here” and “the only Black person like me here.” So “Bartees Strange” constitutes a mighty self-own. It’s also particularly Black grammar: Bartees [is] Strange, a sentence of life, a threat to live, as a buster of myths and a genre of one.

Wesley Morris is a critic at large at the New York Times and a staff writer for the magazine. Arielle Bobb-Willis is a photographer from New York. Her work can be seen in the traveling “New Black Vanguard” gallery show and book.

ThE diGitaL aNtiHerOeS oF ‘ScAm RaP’

‘How to Write a Dump,’ Punchmade Dev Full Track
And songs by: Teejayx6, Kasher Quon, Bandgang Javar, Chinko Ekun, Intence. Full Playlist

/ Pop music has always had a pedagogical streak. For decades, hit records have offered instruction and edification, lessons from the Book of Love, step-by-step guides to dance crazes. But few songs provide as detailed a tutorial as “How to Write a Dump,” a recent single by the rapper Punchmade Dev. “Go and get a fire carder site/Go to the dump section,” he counsels. “You better put a proxy server on/Or use public connection.” Some rappers aim insults at competitors’ weak rhymes or played-out styles. Dev reserves his scorn for I.T. blunders: “No, dumbass, you don’t need EMV software/That’s only if you tryin’ to code the chip they put on there/You just need a MSR, plus the Deftun software.”

Punchmade Dev, from Lexington, Ky., delivers these lines over a rudimentary beat in a breathless rasp, the voice of a man who is trying to convey crucial information as quickly as possible. (“How to Write a Dump” is just over a minute and a half long.) What he is outlining, after all, is a caper. A “dump” is a kind of internet crime, in which fraudsters access stolen credit-card information to create clone cards. Dev’s nom de guerre refers to “punches,” slang both for entering the credit-card numbers onto new cards and for making illegal purchases. Other songs have titles that mince no words: “Stolen Credit Cards,” “Internet Swiping,” “In $cams We Trust.” Read More

Dev is a scam rapper, part of a vanguard of underground M.C.s who have begun creeping toward rap’s center stage. Hip-hop is always quick to pick up on cultural currents, including trends in not-quite-legal enterprises. In recent years, some star rappers have been shouting out “the scammers” and making references to online fraud. But for M.C.s like Dev, scamming is a stock-in-trade, a muse, a worldview. Scam rap is music by and of digital natives, a generation that has come of age on an internet swarming with dissemblers and con artists: social media grifters, phishing-scheme spammers, “Tinder swindlers,” cryptocurrency shills, conspiracy theorists, troll-farm armies that spread disinformation. In 2022, scam rap is still a niche phenomenon. But it feels more trenchant — more tuned in to the anxious state of the world and the forces shaping culture and politics — than the big hits that dominate charts and streaming playlists. It’s a sign, a sound, of the times.

It’s also a product of a place. The center of American scam rap is Detroit, a city that has birthed many musical future shocks. Around 2017, a handful of rappers there began mixing the familiar sounds and stories of trap music — brawny, bass-heavy beats and narratives about the drug trade — with lyrics referencing ill-gotten online gains. A couple of years later, another young Detroiter, Teejayx6, emerged as the genre’s breakout star. He took a novel approach, focusing monomaniacally on scamming in songs packed with hacker lingo and the technical nitty-gritty of dark-web swindles.

Teejayx6 is funny: “Just got a fire profile and logged into Credit Karma/Can’t even get my hair cut no more ’cause I done scammed my barber,” he raps in “Apple” (2019). He has storytelling skills, a flair for action-adventure scenes in unlikely settings. The viral hit “Swipe Story,” in which he uses a dummy credit card to load up on electronics and gift cards, generates suspense from a Walmart shopping spree. The song has little in the way of a hook, and the verses pour out in a chatty, unmetrical stream, a flow that owes as much to YouTube instructional videos as to rap itself. Many of Teejayx6’s songs, like Punchmade Dev’s, take the form of how-to manuals that purport to give foolproof advice. (“You can get the process done perfectly if you listen closely/This an in-store Best Buy pickup method, listen to these steps.”) It’s unclear how reliable the songs are as guides to committing fraud, but they reflect real aspirations and articles of faith: the belief that systems and power structures, especially financial ones, can be subverted by anyone sufficiently gutsy and schooled in the dark arts.

The music of Teejayx6 and fellow Detroit scam rappers — songs like Kasher Quon’s “CNN News” and Bandgang Javar’s “Only Scams” — has a distinctive Rust Belt flavor. The lyrics bristle with local slang, and the music videos are bathed in the noir glow of Motor City back streets and strip malls. But historically speaking, these rappers are latecomers to scamming music, which first gained prominence years ago, thousands of miles away.

The closest thing to a scam-rap ur-text dates back more than a decade and a half, and it isn’t rap at all. “I Go Chop Your Dollar” was a song from “The Master,” a 2005 Nigerian comedy film about a fraudster who specializes in the “Nigerian prince” or 419 scam, named for a section of the Nigerian penal code — the infamous email swindle that entices the gullible to wire transfer money in exchange for promised riches. The song is performed by the movie’s star, the comedian Nkem Owoh, as a party anthem, propelled by dance rhythms and triumphal brass blasts. “419 is just a game,” Owoh sings. “You are the loser, I am the winner.”

“I Go Chop Your Dollar” was apparently banned by the Nigerian Broadcasting Commission, a move that almost certainly increased its popularity. In the decades since, songs glamorizing the lifestyles of so-called Yahoo Boys — fraudsters who operate out of Lagos and other cities — have become staples of Nigerian pop. The scamming hit parade of recent years includes Chinko Ekun’s “Able God” (2018), Naira Marley’s “Am I a Yahoo Boy” (2019) and Bella Shmurda’s “Cash App” (2020): catchy, tough-minded songs, blending slinky Afrobeats production with hip-hop attitude, which have spawned dance fads and spread consternation about the moral dissolution of Nigeria’s youth. Scamming music has migrated across West Africa, notably to Ghana, a country with a vibrant pop and rap scene and its own scammer subculture, known as Sakawa.

Then there is Jamaica, where sweepstakes fraud — telephone scams aimed largely at elderly Americans — has generated a vibrant songbook. “Scammer Anthem” (2013), by the dancehall artist Stamma Gramma, feels like an early template for the style of Teejayx6 and Punchmade Dev: The video shows young scammers hunched over laptops and filling out Western Union paperwork while a refrain natters, “Scam, scam, scam.” In “Brik Pan Brik” (2019), Skillibeng, Jamaica’s hottest young dancehall star, hisses suave, menacing rhymes about piling up loot from bank transfers. Gold Gad’s hilarious “Client Convo” (2020) takes the form of a phone call between a fraudster and his mark. (“Listen me, your check is on the way/But you got to pay a fee, is that OK?”) The biggest dancehall smash of 2021, Intence’s “Yahoo Boyz,” has a title that winks across the ocean at Nigeria and a singsong chorus about the joys of dialing for dollars.

Sweepstakes fraud is part of what is known in Jamaica as “choppa” culture, illegal hustles that many see as acceptable responses to poverty. The scholar Jovan Scott Lewis, a geographer at the University of California, Berkeley, situates scamming in the sweep of Jamaican history, identifying it as a form of “postcolonial seizure.” It’s not just professors who make this case. “Dem call it scam/Mi call it reparation” went the chorus of “Reparation,” a 2012 hit by the dancehall superstar Vybz Kartel. In a German documentary short, “Meet the Sakawa Boys,” one Ghanaian fraudster says that “romance scammers” who target American and European men are “using this means to attack the white man for slaving their forefathers.” American rappers like Teejayx6 tell their own cheeky racial retribution stories: “Catfished a lame white boy for 6,000 on Tinder/Scammed a cameraman for a video, then blocked him on Twitter.”

But we can discern other political meanings in the scam-rap boom. The hip-hop outlaws of previous generations bragged about criminal activities, but they also embraced capitalism and its meritocratic myths. Rap heroes like the Notorious B.I.G. and Jay-Z touted their Horatio Algeresque back stories, journeys from crack dealing to stardom predicated on talent, hustle, “the grind.” Scam rappers view the grind itself as a scam. The old rap fantasy leaned toward conquest, a dream of owning the streets, of being a boss; scam rap says there is only data, manipulation, cyberpunk sabotage. The best you can do, it suggests, is find a shadowy corner, some hidy-hole in the Matrix, to lurk and hack, siphoning off whatever is available. This vision reflects late-capitalist desperation and nihilism, a scramble to earn, however possible, at whomever’s expense, in an age of austerity and oligarchy. It is also a dark-mirror version of meritocracy — a trickster capitalism in which rewards are reaped not by the thrifty and diligent but by those cunning enough to game an already gamed system.

It’s hard to fault the logic. In the streaming-media era, the tools, tricks and guerrilla stratagems by which ordinary recording artists make their names are not so different from the methods by which a hacker harvests Social Security numbers. Many would argue that the music industry today is one great big algorithmic con job, in which tech Goliaths reap billions while artists earn hundredths of a penny per stream. Scam, scam, scam.

It may be no accident that scam rap has flourished during the pandemic. At a time when social life shrank to the size of Zoom chat rooms, this brand of remote work — heists perpetrated from laptops in bedrooms — may hold particular appeal. It’s certainly true that the genre is gaining momentum, crossing boundaries and borders. Detroit no longer holds a monopoly on American scam rap; dabblers are popping up across the country, telling scam stories in regional accents. Oakland’s witty, irrepressible Guapdad 4000 is a sometime scam rapper; in the single “Lil Scammer That Could,” he and the great Florida rapper Denzel Curry trade lines about getting rich and running Instagram frauds.

There are songs that forge global links. On the 2020 viral smash “Local Scammer,” G4 Boyz, a Staten Island drill duo of Nigerian and Ghanaian extraction, joined forces with the London rapper G4Choppa. (Two remixes added the Chicago drill pioneer Chief Keef and London’s Ivorian Doll.) G4 Boyz and G4Choppa have released two follow-ups, “In Scam We Trust” and “Scam Likely”; hits like Tankz’s brooding “London Scammer” (“I see it, I want it, I click it”) and Central Cee’s “Fraud” show scam rap further taking hold in the drill hotbed of Britain.

Of course, there are scammers and there are scammers. The likes of Punchmade Dev and Teejayx6 insist they really do earn riches through fraud, a claim made incessantly on records and social media. There’s little doubt that some who record scamming songs do indeed walk the walk. In 2019, federal prosecutors arrested the Detroit rapper Selfmade Kash on charges of wire fraud and possession of unauthorized access devices. (He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to probation.) Nigerian scam rappers have also been arrested for internet fraud and money laundering.

Other cases are harder to pin down. A couple of years back, two men wearing “POLICE” and “U.S. MARSHAL” jackets stormed into a Los Angeles club where Teejayx6 was performing, handcuffing the rapper onstage. It was soon discovered that the officers were hired actors; the rapper had staged his own arrest. Over the past few years, scam-rap aficionados have followed Teejayx6’s falling out with his friend and collaborator Kasher Quon — a beef that has unfolded in a flurry of diss tracks and online videos — while wondering if the feud is a publicity stunt, a scam at their expense. Punchmade Dev has his own record of unreliable narration. He has a habit of jettisoning stage names, abandoning social media feeds and starting afresh. (He seems to have first earned internet renown as a star NBA 2K gamer, under the moniker DevTakeFlight.) He too has cultivated a beef with Teejayx6, boasting that he scammed his adversary and posting a video that purports to show him tailing Teejayx6 in a high-speed chase.

For decades, rappers have bragged about their bona fides while denouncing rivals as phonies. Scam rap takes these debates into a hall of mirrors. Are scam rappers truly perpetrating fraud? If they’re lying about running scams, doesn’t that make them ... scammers? Punchmade Dev may or may not spend his time writing dumps, but his song is a reminder of the foundational scam inherent in all musical performances — the artifice, the playacting, the dance of deceit that takes place every time a performer steps to a microphone, disbelief is suspended and we, the listeners, become marks. And accomplices.

Jody Rosen is a contributing writer for the magazine.

DoJa CaT MaKeS aN

ArT of FriVoLiTy

‘Kiss Me More’ Full Track

/ In 1995, when Amala Dlamini was born, the internet was at a tipping point. More than a third of American homes had PCs, which increasingly came equipped with modems. The Pew Research Center characterized use of the internet as “fragile,” noting that only 20 percent of people who went online did so every day. Still, that year marked the beginning of a commercialized web, the dot-com bubble and, more durably, Craigslist, eBay, Match.com and Amazon. Today’s social media giants wouldn’t be missing for long. Myspace arrived in 2003, Facebook in 2004, YouTube a year later. Dlamini was 10 on the day of the world’s first tweet. “Just setting up my twttr,” wrote the platform’s founder, Jack Dorsey. Last year, he sold an NFT of that post for more than $2.9 million.

Dlamini, who records under the name Doja Cat, has now amassed more than 54 million followers across various social media platforms. She is, as may be apparent, “good at” the internet — a useful if dubious distinction and one directly responsible for her bankability as a hitmaker. Doja Cat’s last album, “Planet Her,” proved the scale of that hit making, breaking Spotify and Billboard records to become one of the biggest releases of 2021. Its first single, “Kiss Me More,” featuring SZA, garnered multiple Grammy nominations and unseated Brandy and Monica’s “The Boy Is Mine” (1998) as the all-female collaboration to spend the most weeks in Billboard’s Hot 100. Read More

Doja Cat first went viral in 2018 with a goofy, carefree joke of a music video that she herself has called a meme — something intended to be imitated and that satisfies through tweaked repetition — as opposed to a proper song. The title was “MOOO!” though it’s better known by the lyric “bitch, I’m a cow.” (She announces that, repeatedly, before crooning a long moo over airy, mooing background vocals and chants of “I’m a cow, I’m a cow.”) Baring her midriff and cleavage, Doja drinks a milkshake and dances while images of livestock, farms, ice cream and boobs cycle behind her. Her label may have signed her on the strength of 2012’s dreamy, self-produced “So High,” but it didn’t wake up to its artist’s potential until millions of people watched her smile at a camera with French fries up her nose and twerk in front of a green screen. “Man, this is so stupid and funny,” her producer, Yeti Beats, recalled thinking when he first saw the video. That’s the internet for you.

Since the 2019 album “Hot Pink,” Doja Cat’s music has been praised for precisely the qualities that create stars on social media: humor, playfulness and, above all, versatility. The subject matter of last year’s “Planet Her” is unremarkable; there’s money, professional success in the face of disrespect, feminine power, plenty of sex. But the delivery is eclectic, shuffling through genres — hyperpop, disco, trap — with aplomb. Doja had already showcased this pliability in 2020 with a series of widely praised award-show performances, for which the bouncy and breathless “Say So” kept changing forms, becoming a sleek Broadway number on one stage, angsty rock on another. Plenty of artists experiment with their sound, but the alacrity with which Doja pours her music into new containers feels driven as much by cultural instinct as aural interest.

It seems, in fact, like behavior developed during years spent at a screen — a devour-digest-excrete rhythm that keeps up with consumers’ notoriously diminishing attention spans. Social media’s cardinal rule is to keep it moving, streaming, refreshing, duetting. “I used to be on Periscope a lot,” Doja told Missy Elliott in Interview magazine, referring to Twitter’s video streaming service. “I’d be live for 10 to 12 hours at a time. I’d be making beats, and they weren’t any good, but it was fun.” In 2019 she described her hurt and confusion when first entering such lawless, often cruel environments. “People would pick on me and use horrible, horrible language, just the worst, and I just didn’t understand,” she said. “So I became the person who would make offensive jokes and do things sort of out of the box.” In 2020, clips circulated of her in public video chats, with claims that she was egging on racists in the room; the denial she posted on Instagram noted that “I’ve used public chat rooms to socialize since I was a child.” Those who’ve adapted to the chaos of the virtual world can become inured to the bombastic carelessness it fosters.

To live online like this is to develop a keen sense of the ephemeral and, correspondingly, the absurd. It is broadly true that the internet never forgets. But the internet is also a bottomless pit into which fragments perpetually flow, and most are lost to oblivion, never revisited. Many of the artifacts that remain in the public mind — say, a video of a woman in sunglasses mooing while holding a hamburger — are haphazard and frivolous, which makes the internet a poor place to locate meaning. “Nobody cares,” Doja insisted to Rolling Stone at least four times in December when explaining why she tries not to be too earnest online.

It’s an attitude that leaves her freer than stars who obsess about conveying authenticity or maintaining a brand. Doja is consistent in her inconsistency; it’s a key reason she has avoided cancellation, despite a series of controversies regarding her conduct online. Never landing in one place for long makes it difficult for others to pin you down. In place of heartfelt confession, Doja offers internet-rendered intimacy, a Cubist display of self-deprecating disclosure and good-natured vulnerability that ultimately conveys very little about the person behind the posts.

That the internet, and perhaps culture as a whole, exist for fleeting amusement seems to be a self-evident fact for her. Same goes for her male counterpart, Lil Nas X, another mischievous megastar who began his career via savvy, reckless use of the internet. Their restless posters’ energy — an appetite for irreverence combined with an inexhaustible determination to Always Be Creating — guarantees that their artistic choices are, at the very least, rarely boring, even when their music is not quite new.

Keeping up with the pace of a social-media feed, after all, requires riffing on what’s come before, collaging shorthand references to other people’s work. This approach comes through in Doja’s music. (How could “MOOO!” not interpolate Kelis’s “Milkshake” and “Old MacDonald,” among other classics?) Pop songs are already akin to memes; they’re flexible forms morphing around a core of familiarity. I listened to “Kiss Me More” at least a hundred times before I learned it was built around the refracted chorus of “Physical,” a 1981 Olivia Newton-John song I know well but was too enraptured to detect. As the sum of its parts, “Kiss Me More” is a pat collection of pop mainstays. But delight doesn’t come solely from innovation and surprise; as with memes, there’s a peculiar, profound joy in recognizing what you’ve never seen or heard before.

To view songs as products, as “content,” is sacrilegious to a certain type of music listener and a certain type of creator. But it can be complementary to — if not definitional of — pop as a genre. Doja’s talent is her intuition, her exuberance, her pursuit of pleasure. She wants to have fun with her music. She wants us to have fun with her music. Clearly we do.

Charlotte Shane is a writer, an editor and the author of “Prostitute Laundry,” a memoir.

DeAn BLuNt aNd NoNaMe

GiVe Us HoPe

‘Dash Snow,’ Dean Blunt Full Track
‘Rainforest,’ Noname Full Track

/ Over the last few months of the paralyzing pandemic, my playlists have converged on a familiar refrain: Despite all that we’ve been through, everything’s gonna be all right. This sentiment is a staple of pop — a timeless phrase, like “I want you back” or “I’d do anything for you,” that is retooled slightly each time for the contemporary heart. I heard it in the Asheville-based Indigo de Souza’s “Hold U,” with its exhilarating refrain of “I will hold u” and “It’s gonna be alright” crowd-surfing a retro-funk bass line, and in the offbeat British indie band Metronomy’s crooned proposal that “Things will be fine,” the chorus to a song of the same title. Recently, while jogging long loops to music in the park, I thought I heard something different in the phrase. It was not just a direct, intimate assurance: It felt as if it were addressing a crowd. A chorus is a kind of incantation, making fragile feelings solid through repetition — and maybe if things are going to get better, we need to embrace a bit of collective magical thinking.

But as much as I want my anxieties soothed, I also feel more at home with an optimistic feeling when it teeters a bit, acknowledging how precarious hope can feel in uncertain times. “Dash Snow,” a track by the British art-pop iconoclast Dean Blunt, known for his sludgy, atmospheric arrangements ballasted by a laconic, deep-voiced delivery, may not be uplifting — but it is grounding. “Don’t let me down, don’t let me down,” Blunt drawls over the lazy, swirling echo of a distorted electric guitar, playing with the emphasis. He grapples with the conflicting imperatives of positivity and vulnerability. The request for reassurance, repeated and rephrased, suddenly slips into reverse — a sort of cautious self-soothing, like wrapping your arms around yourself and holding tight. “It’s gonna be alright,” he continues, which becomes simply “be alright” — a semiprivate thought that might as well be a command. Read More

It’s common for a song to work at persuading the addressee or the listener, but “Dash Snow” has the feel of someone trying to convince himself, shifting between contradictory feelings that begin to blur. Pressed together, they form a difficult-to-name compound emotion — one that presses together the commingled urgency and uncertainty of the pandemic, the climate crisis, racialized capitalism and rampant overconsumption, omens of a brittle future.

There’s a similar affect powering the rapper Noname’s most recent single, “Rainforest,” which overlays a sleek and danceable samba track with language that references the postcolonial theorist Frantz Fanon, the theft of Indigenous land and “blood on the moon,” perhaps a nod to a James Ellroy novel set during the 1965 riots over police violence against Los Angeles’s Black residents. With low, chilly vocals that hug the beat close, Noname presses into the uneasy suture of structural injustice and individual needs. Single lines pull toward disparate readings: “How you lemonade all your sadness when you openin up/how you make excuses for billionaires/you broke on the bus” scans the first time as a question, and the second time as flat description, the answer to a question no longer being asked.

It’s in the chorus that Noname veers from the steady speech that marks the verses. Here she’s almost singing: “The rainforest cries/Everybody dies a little/and I just want to dance tonight/and I just wanna dance tonight.” The line expresses a drive to live as much as it mourns; it acknowledges our appetite for escapist distraction, as well as our longing for the possibility of something better. On the repeat, the words change subtly: There’s no and linking the macro to the micro anymore — just two incommensurable moods set side by side, revealing the vertiginous space in which our lives unfold. This ambiguity could be the foundation for a cautious optimism. It reaches for hope while recognizing that all is not hopeful. “I can’t say it,” Blunt declares at the end of his track, but then he says it anyway: “It’s all gonna be alright.”

Alexandra Kleeman is a professor at the New School.

MaRy J. BLigE oN tHe BeAuTy oF VuLNeRabiLiTy

‘Failing In Love’ Full Track

/ One of Mary J. Blige’s earliest lyrics, from her breakout sophomore album, “My Life,” encapsulates the theme that has become central to her 30-plus year career: “How can I love somebody else/If I can’t love myself enough to know/When it’s time/Time to let go?” It is a question that went beyond the tendency of pop and R.&B. songs of the time to look outward (Why won’t you love me?), or to focus purely on the singer’s desires (I need romance) and turned the gaze inward, acknowledging the work to be done on the self first. The lyric also introduced one of Blige’s hallmarks: She doesn’t provide her listeners with answers to life’s big questions, instead complicating the inquiry itself, time and again. More than a guide, she is a fellow traveler.

Blige is now 51, with 9 Grammy Awards, two Academy Award nominations and three Golden Globe nominations, with a hit for seemingly every era of hip-hop and R.&B. since her debut. She was 17 and living in public housing in Yonkers, N.Y., when she sang Anita Baker’s entire “Rapture” album to the music executive Andre Harrell, which led to her record deal. She has spent the ensuing years longing for love on records, finding and losing it in front of the world. Where so much of popular music has been geared toward showing just enough vulnerability to bolster your own fierceness, Blige’s particular brand of honesty and approachability brings out something tender in listeners and collaborators alike. Read More

During the heyday of mid-’90s New York hip-hop, when gritty, gun-toting street narratives dominated the culture, Blige’s vocals helped add nuance to the image of city life and the relationships that governed it. She softened Method Man on his devotional “I’ll be There for You/You’re All I Need to Get By” and added uptown swagger to Jay-Z’s Mafioso flow on “Can’t Knock the Hustle.” In the early 2000s Blige brought soul to Talib Kweli’s “I Try” and a sense of ease and warmth to Common’s “Come Close.” In the years since, Blige’s list of featuring spots has grown to include Ludacris, Lil Wayne, Drake, Kendrick Lamar, Kid Cudi and Wyclef Jean. If you want a track to have real feeling, you call Mary.

In this year’s Super Bowl halftime show, Blige appeared alongside some of the biggest names in hip-hop, past and present, and sang about her joy and her heartbreak. She performed her bouncy club anthem “Family Affair,” (wherein she gifts us with the word “dancery”), and then her ballad “No More Drama” with a kind of controlled anguish, ending sprawled out on the stage in an act of triumphant depletion. As her peers rapped about their own enduring greatness (Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg’s “Still D.R.E.”) and offered broader affirmations for their people (Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright”), Blige kept the show grounded in raw, introspective emotion, even while clad in Swarovski crystals and thigh-high boots.

This February Blige also released her 15th studio album, “Good Morning Gorgeous," her first since her divorce from the music producer Kendu Isaacs was finalized in 2018.The production of the album feels in step with current trends, with features from Anderson .Paak and songwriting assistance from H.E.R., but the substance of the songs is classic Blige: honest about her failures and unabashed about her desire to be loved. On the Starz show “Power Book II: Ghost,” Blige currently plays Monet, the calculating, occasionally murderous wife of an incarcerated drug kingpin. Blige has said that the character reminds her of women she grew up around: sole providers willing to do whatever it takes to survive in a ruthless, male-dominated world.

Blige and I spoke on Zoom the Friday after her Super Bowl performance, in a moment of relative calm before she traveled to Cleveland to perform at N.B.A. All Star Weekend. Though her music is often informed by pain, Blige is more interested in taking stock of life’s fluctuations and grabbing whatever joy is within reach along the way.

So many songs on your new album feel really contemporary but also so genuinely Mary — “Rent Money,” “Failing in Love,” “Here with Me.” How do songs like that begin for you, from a writing perspective? A song begins from an experience, a feeling. Feeling, like, empty, or depleted — what does that mean? What word can define feeling that way? Getting nothing back in return — I think that would be “Rent Money.” And “Failing in Love” is what I seem to keep doing. I’m single, and I’m cool with it now, but the relationship thing, I don’t know what’s going on with it. That’s where “Failing” came from: Sometimes I feel like I failed when it comes to love. “Here With Me,” that’s just how I want to feel — I want to be with someone. I want to feel someone and be with someone and be able to sing those lyrics, you know?

One of your hallmarks is how personal you are in your music. During something like your decade-plus marriage, how do you decide how much of yourself to put in your songs, and how much to hold back? Well, I’m not going to say anything that I don’t want to say. You’re not going to find out anything about me that I don’t want you to find out.

The world is always “Gimme more, gimme more, I need gossip, I need this, I need that” — I’m not going to give you gossip. I’m just going to give you what I know I can confirm, what I know I can stand and talk about and not feel like I don’t have anything left. What I give is what people deal with, what we go through every single day.

I’m not afraid of the world, not at all — I’ve been going through hell since I was little. I’m not afraid to say, OK: I’m going through this, and I need help just like everybody else on Earth needs help. But I’m not going to give up nothing that I don’t want to give up. That’s why I’m comfortable. People in this world can’t force me to do anything.

Is that something you’ve believed from the beginning, or is that a part of your evolution as a songwriter? From the beginning. Ever since I was a little kid, you cannot force me to do things. If you try, it’s always a bad experience for you and me.

There’s this assumption that the thing that makes you so powerful is that you lay it all out. But in reality, one thing that makes you so powerful is that you know which parts of you are going to touch other people. I don’t think people care about the details too much! They just care about the part that they can relate to directly with you. “Me too, girl, me too.” They don’t even care about how you got on that floor. They just know that you were down there — with them. I just give them enough to say, “Me, too. I’m hurting too.”

It feels like this is what I’m supposed to be doing. I got a divorce, you know: OK, Mary, how’d you get through this? Because the world saw you go through all this. It’s an assignment for me to do that. It might not be everybody else’s assignment. But there are a lot of women who love me and respect me and follow me, and want to know — not the details, but how to get to the other side. How did you get to the other side with class and dignity when everybody was tearing you down and teasing you, and the person that you were with was destroying you? I made a way that’s like, Whatever your truth is, speak it.

You have a philosophy in terms of what you reveal. Do you have one on a language level? Do you ever cross something out because it’s just not a Mary kind of word? I do. There are certain things I would never say. And I don’t like to be too literal. “Failing in Love” is an experience. “Rent Money” is an experience. It wasn’t like, “My rent is due, so the song is called ‘Rent Money’” — it was like, Everything is due.

I was thinking about Roy Ayers’s “Everybody Loves the Sunshine,” which you sample on “My Life.” The lyrics of that song are pretty straightforward — it’s “bees and things and flowers.” And that’s what I love about it! That was the first song I really heard, when I was 4 years old. When you think of the sunshine, you think of bees and trees — it’s very A-B-C, 1-2-3. It’s not literal, it’s just plain and simple. I like to write like that, too, plain and simple. Because people get it. Something in the color of that music, something in the keys, something that just drives me crazy in a good way. It has so much medicine and healing. They didn’t have to say anything else but just bees and trees and flowers, and I’m in. “Whatever drug y’all are taking, I’m taking, too.”

You said you love the color of that song. What color is that song to you? That’s gold. There’s something very regal and shiny about it.

You often mention colors in relation to your songs. I hadn’t realized that you’re a synesthesia person. When you listen to music, do you often see colors? Every time. As soon as it comes on, I can tell you what color it is.

“Good Morning Gorgeous” is what color? Purple. It’s royal, an arrival of something new and powerful.

And “Real Love?” “Real Love” is light, like a sunny-day sky blue. Almost all the songs on “My Life” are blue. “Be Happy,” blue. “All Night Long,” blue. “Don’t Go,” blue. “I’m The Only Woman,” dark blue.

The new album’s themes feel very 2022: positive affirmations, self-care, vulnerability, the benefits of talk therapy. Your openness made you so beloved, for decades. But were there ever opportunities or things that didn’t come to you, because you were so real? A lot of people don’t come to me. A lot of people run away from me, because I’m so open. Everybody’s not ready to be open! That’s the professional downside: A lot of people will run. And a lot of people will stay, because they want to get to the other side. If I weren’t getting to the other side, everybody would be running. People run when they’re not ready to get to the other side, to get out — when it’s comfortable. I’m always in a place where it’s uncomfortable, because I’m always trying to get to the other side of any kind of self-hatred, negativity, self-pity. And not everybody’s ready.

When you say people, do you mean other artists, or listeners? I mean some peers, some friends. They’re not ready. Some people run. What I love about doing this is you get to see who is who. The one who is just in it for who you are — famous, or whatever — you see them run when it gets hard. But the ones that love you stay, and they hurt with you, heal with you, cry with you. That’s the beauty of vulnerability. It weeds out all the B.S.

Growing up listening to your music, you always seemed to be one of the girls in the boys’ club — so affiliated with hip-hop, which was so male-dominated. Because of that, when you were the only woman onstage at the Super Bowl, it felt very natural. Was that something you gave any thought to, being the only woman? Well yeah, of course. I’m always in that situation. Because hip-hop is such a male-dominated field, and I happen to be the Queen of Hip-Hop Soul. But I’ve never had a problem, a run-in, any negativity, with my male peers, ever. They love me, they respect me, they call on me. I know how to carry myself. I love that about myself, that I can handle myself with these men.

In the studio, has it ever been difficult to be so vulnerable about things like your romantic experience, in such a male-dominated setting? Not at all. Most of them are like, “Me too, I’m going through it too!” That’s another thing — you’d be surprised what vulnerability can bring. It just opens everybody up. And it’s beautiful because now we can all get some healing together. Now we can write this song together. Like me and Anderson .Paak writing “Love Without the Heartbreak” — that was a heavy session! But he can relate. Doing the whole “My Life” album with my brother Puff — that was a lot. He was going through what he was going through, and I was going through what I was going through.

Has it ever felt like some kind of negotiation when you were the only female voice on a track with men who were, perhaps, expressing negative views about women on the same song? Well, I know who I am. I know they aren’t talking to me. Even when I didn’t love myself, I knew they weren’t talking to me. These are my friends and my brothers, and they’re talking about whoever they’re talking about, and that’s on them. Whatever they have to come through, they have to come through. I don’t like men speaking negatively about women, but I’m not everybody’s boss, I’m not your mother. I’m your friend. So that’s between you and God and whoever you’re speaking about.

When I was younger, that wasn’t something that was on my mind. What was on my mind was making a hot record, a record that we can both relate to together. Like “You’re All I Need.” That’s a beautiful song. Method Man’s speaking highly about women.

I’m always struck by hearing you talk about your ascendant years — how, behind the scenes, you didn’t feel that you were all that, that you were beautiful, that you were as great as everybody said you were. During those years, what was the thing that kept you creating? The fan base, the love for the music, that was my survival. I didn’t have anything else. I was a girl from the hood who didn’t really have much. And then when I got something — which was love from people who didn’t even know me — it was like, wow, OK.

It was the only thing that made me feel good. Everything else about me was like, Yeah, whatever. It was always hard to see myself as a beautiful person — because of so many things I don’t want to talk about that happened in life, from childhood to being a young adult in the music business. The music and the people and the fans and the money — the things that came with it — helped me to cover up everything else.

In the “My Life” documentary, you said that Diddy helped you see yourself as a real artist. What is your definition of a real artist? In my case, a person who’s not afraid to give of oneself to heal, or to help someone else heal. A person who’s not afraid to experiment.

The reason I say that about Diddy is that I was afraid to bring some of the songs to him for the “My Life” album. And that was my first experience as an artist speaking from a place of hurt, a place of “I need help.” And I was afraid to go to him, because I didn’t know how he was going to receive it. Because, you know, the “What’s the 411?” album was not like that. And when I brought it to him, he went crazy. That’s when I knew: OK, this is what I do. This is what I do as an artist. I’m an artist. Puff believes in me, and he sees me. He told me that — he said, “You’re a real artist now.”

As 2022 Mary, do you have anything you wish you could have said to 1998 Mary? If she would have listened to me — because she wasn’t listening to anyone — I would tell her that you have no idea what the future holds for you. I need you to get ready. But you can’t tell her to get ready. Because she ain’t ready.

I think about the years in the late 2000s, early ’10s, when it seemed like R.&B. took a back seat to music that was more dance focused, electronic focused. And those are the years when you went to London and put out the amazing “London Sessions,” which feels like a bridge to current trends. How did you feel during those years, when everybody was trying to make songs for a different kind of club? I felt normal. But I was feeling forced by the labels to do something that would move the needle more, on the charts or whatever. Try this, try that. I could have just kept making the type of music I was making, but the labels wanted dance remixes. I felt like I was being pushed to do things I didn’t want to do, but you know, when the label speaks, sometimes you have to do what they say, because it’s their money. I got in a lot of trouble fighting for the R.&B. singles I wanted to keep. It didn’t hurt anything, but it didn’t help anything either.

But sometimes, dipping your toe into that genre — like the songs with Disclosure, or Kaytranada and BADBADNOTGOOD — doesn’t feel like you got lost. In those songs, no, because I was doing what I wanted to do. I picked Disclosure because I thought they were hot! I saw a video of theirs, and I was like, Who is this? It felt like they knew where we came from, they were sampling everything we were sampling. They knew their history, hip-hop music and R.&B. And Kaytranada, he’s us. I like to do stuff when it feels like I’m not alienating who I am and where my music history comes from. I like to stay where my world is not crossing over to theirs — they’re crossing over to me.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Angela Flournoy is the author of the novel “The Turner House.” She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Academy in Berlin. Arielle Bobb-Willis is a photographer from New York. Her work can be seen in the traveling “New Black Vanguard” gallery show and book.

oLiViA rOdRiGo

rEVivEs ThE LOsEr-HeRo

‘Déjà Vu’ Full Track

/ Since its release last April, Olivia Rodrigo’s “Déjà Vu” has garnered more than 750 million streams on Spotify. And at least a dozen of those have come from my trying to untangle one particular, perplexing verse.

Here’s the setup: “Déjà Vu” laments the end of a relationship. Actually, “laments” is the wrong word, like calling the end of the world a “disruption.” At the heart of Rodrigo’s tremendous appeal is her proximity to the teenage experience; she writes about high-school love with the same raw-nerved intensity Ingmar Bergman brought to “Scenes From a Marriage.” For her, a breakup is nothing less than the death of love itself — because that’s what having your heart broken at that age feels like. Rodrigo’s teen audience understands this implicitly, and her adult listeners are afforded an angsty contact buzz. Read More

In “Déjà Vu,” Rodrigo imagines her ex with a new girlfriend and speculates that the unnamed cad is using the same moves he used on her. Including this one: “I’ll bet that she knows Billy Joel/’Cause you played her “Uptown Girl”/You’re singing it together/Now I bet you even tell her/How you love her/In between the chorus and the verse.”

Initially, the reference to “Uptown Girl” confounded me. There is the matter of what I’ll call “character integrity.” I get — to cite other recent Joel references — why the compulsive liar Howard Ratner would play “The Stranger,” a song about hiding your true self, in the movie “Uncut Gems,” and I buy that the self-martyring Kendall Roy, from HBO’s “Succession,” would enjoy “Honesty,” an anthem about how everyone else is less principled than you. Those choices align with these middle-aged East Coast men. But Rodrigo is a cool teenager from California. It’s odd that a 72-year-old Long Island classic rocker would loom so large in her life. Did the couple in “Déjà Vu” also bond over episodes of “Three’s Company”?

Also, even if we are to presume Billy Joel has been reclaimed by a younger generation, it strains credibility to imagine this would involve “Uptown Girl,” one of the dorkiest tunes of Joel’s catalog. Surely teens cruising the L.A. suburbs would favor deeper cuts, like “Summer, Highland Falls” or “Zanzibar” — an actual recent TikTok hit — right?

But upon investigation, I realized the Joel reference in “Déjà Vu” has both a simple explanation and a deeper, more sophisticated resonance. First, Rodrigo has confirmed the line actually comes from co-​writer Dan Nigro. Nigro is a 39-year-old man from Long Island. We can thus assume he grew up exposed, daily, to Joel’s “Greatest Hits — Volume I & Volume II,” as dictated by local municipal ordinance.

Now the less simple part: “Uptown Girl” was released in 1983, as part of Joel’s ninth LP, “An Innocent Man,” which he made after divorcing his first wife, Elizabeth Weber. Until that point, Weber had been the subject of his most famous love songs, including the 1978 Grammy-winning juggernaut, “Just the Way You Are.”

In the video for “Uptown Girl,” Joel now paid tribute to a new woman, the supermodel Christie Brinkley. The lyrics are about Joel’s proving himself to a lover above his station, no matter his own faults. Contrast this with “Just the Way You Are,” in which Joel sings about overlooking the subject’s faults as an expression of true love.

Sonically, “Uptown Girl” harks back to Joel’s youth. It evokes the harmony-rich pop of the Four Seasons, specifically their 1963 smash “Walk Like a Man,” in which, as it happens, a guy gets his heart broken and is consoled by his chauvinistic father. The Four Seasons’ protagonist is assured his ex will soon “be cryin’ on account of all [her] lyin’.”

So much of pop music is subliminal. It plays upon memories, ingrained biases and everything else that composes our collective psychic baggage. This is how ancient hits are reinvented as the buzziest smashes of today. Because the song never really changes. In this way, “Uptown Girl” connects “Walk Like a Man” to “Déjà Vu.” On either side of pop history, you have essentially the same story — a heartbroken romantic loser smarts over rejection by a dishonest lover. Yet in “Uptown Girl,” Billy Joel is the one who has moved on, after delivering a litany of amorous platitudes to his ex.

Now when I hear “Déjà Vu,” I think about Elizabeth Weber, and I imagine what it must have been like for the subject of “Just the Way You Are” to hear “Uptown Girl” for the first time. And I wonder: Did she picture him telling the new woman in his life “I love you” between the chorus and the verse?

Steven Hyden is the author of a book about Pearl Jam, “Long Road,” out in September.

TaYLoR SwiFt

aNd TyLeR, tHe CrEatoR ExCaVatE oLd LoVe

‘All Too Well (Taylor’s Version)’ Full Track
‘Wilshire,’ Tyler, the Creator Full Track

/ One way to define the arrival of adulthood might be when introducing a new partner to your parents is no longer cause for embarrassment. Maybe they get along. Maybe you get the approval you secretly crave. And maybe you don’t — but if your parents are worthy of the faith you’ve placed in them, they’ll let you make your own mistakes.

In two of pop’s newest, most comprehensive accounts of heartbreak, this is the moment that might outstrip all the other agonies: the shame of introducing a lover to a parent whose welcoming smile almost certainly conceals a bitten tongue. One is Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well,” a fan favorite from her 2012 album, “Red,” that she has newly rereleased — now 10 minutes long, with the inclusion of its long-mythologized “lost” verses. In one of them, Swift’s new, older boyfriend charms her father “with self-effacing jokes/sipping coffee like you were on a late-night show.” But the perfect-suitor charade soon falters. Just one line later, the father sits with his anxious daughter as she watches the door for her boyfriend’s arrival on a pivotal birthday — and he remarks, with exquisite tact, “It’s supposed to be fun, turning 21.” Read More

Mr. Swift could compare notes with the mother of Tyler, the Creator. On “Wilshire,” the highlight of Tyler’s 2021 album, “Call Me if You Get Lost,” the rapper brings a love interest to his mother’s tennis spot despite being well aware that his crush already has a boyfriend. He knows this because — worse still — Tyler is friends with the guy. He’s racked with despair over his loyalties. “They say, ‘Bros over hoes’/I’m like, Hmm, nah, hey/I would rather hold your hand than have a cool handshake,” he admits furtively. Even at the outset of this song, which runs nearly nine minutes, we know he’ll be left empty-handed.

“All Too Well” and “Wilshire” both reflect something agonizingly specific about young heartbreak. As protagonists, Swift and Tyler are old enough to try out parts of adult relationships — romantic getaways, intimate private jokes — but their naïve faith in their relationships obscures the germinating seeds of failure.

These are unusually purgative songs, speaking to their authors’ abiding confusion at how the path to romance can dogleg so brutally. Their heft recalls the moment when a friend switches from texts to unwieldy voice notes — the scope of their dilemma beyond what a blue iMessage bubble can contain. Online, it’s usually brevity that begets pop success. But here, the relentless confession is the appeal. These perplexed epics demand to be told in their full complexity, every glance and item of clothing and sparkling scene another crucial scrap of proof that the author didn’t imagine this.

Yet no amount of compulsive litigation can explain how your soul mate wound up such an inscrutable mystery. Both songs obsessively scour for motive. The restored verses of “All Too Well” add a level of anger, as Swift accuses her heartbreaker of insincerity, coldness and having a conspicuous thing for younger women. Swift is now 32, and the song’s new power comes from her understanding that she deserved better than she ever knew to expect at 21. That perspective shift is only underlined by the reason we’re hearing this expanded version at all: In 2019, Swift’s former label, and the six albums she made there, were sold to a music executive she described as a “bully,” prompting her to rerecord them in an effort to reclaim ownership of her work and devalue his investment. These “lost” verses might be another reclamation, reinstating emotions once deemed unbecoming for a young woman.

Tyler’s situation is murkier. He and the woman both know they’re walking a moral high wire. They delete even innocent texts and arouse her boyfriend’s suspicion with their cagey ha-ha-has. Tyler feels guilty, then reckless. His newfound acquaintance with true desire makes a mockery of the gilded lifestyle he extols elsewhere on the album; no amount of French vanilla ice cream eaten barefoot on a yacht could compare. He knows she wants him, but, it transpires, not enough to actually leave her boyfriend. Tyler resents the guy, hates himself and even briefly hates her, until he admits he’s incapable of that and moves beyond blame. Some feelings defy morality, the 30-year-old concludes, not to mention maturity: “It made me realize adults don’t know what they doin’ either.”

Swift, meanwhile, remembers “the first fall of snow/and how it glistened as it fell” in her relationship’s early days, still convinced by the magic that got her into this mess. In 1956, a 13-year-old Frankie Lymon contemplated the inevitability of heartbreak on “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” For him it’s a simple equation. Sixty-six years later, Swift and Tyler pile on the evidence to insist they weren’t fools, and prove Lymon’s point exactly.

Laura Snapes is deputy music editor of The Guardian and the author of “Liberté, Egalité, Phoenix!” an oral history of the French band.

a NeW, stEaLtH kiNd oF PrOteSt MuSic

‘Pineapple Death,’ Ambar Lucid Full Track
And songs by: Xenia Rubinos, Kali Uchis, Buscabulla, MIMA and Helado Negro. Full Playlist

/ It’s a cliché to say that Spanish is the language of love, when it’s a colonial language like any other — capable of vulgarity, banality and violence. But in recent years, a wave of experimental Latin artists making music in the borderlands between genres and nation-states has gathered its poetic resources to sound out luminous new worlds. Even in English, a tropical sensuality saturates the scene: “Kiss me when the moon no longer shines,” Ambar Lucid croons on “Pineapple Death.” “Between me and you this is the start of the end of times.” When I sing along, I wonder how Lucid’s life history — she’s only 21, the daughter of a Dominican mother and Mexican father who was deported when she was still a child — has shaped her sense of what transformations are still possible on this plundered planet: “I’m waiting for my pineapple death. I’m praying as I lay in my bed. I don’t know what it is that is next.”

Lucid’s song sounds like a surreal reply to the enchantment of fruits and flowers I’ve always loved in Latin music. American listeners might recognize this long tradition in the old bolero, “Dos Gardenias” (written by Isolina Carrillo, 1945), from Ibrahim Ferrer’s version with the Buena Vista Social Club: Like the hearts of lovers, the two blossoms in the title can hold the perfume of remembered kisses for only so long before they begin to fade. In “Mango del Monte” (Tito Rodríguez, 1962), I can feel the slick fur of the pit on my tongue — me chupo la pepa — and in “Buscando Guayaba” (Rubén Blades and Willie Colón, 1978), I can feel the frustrated romance of searching the urban jungle for the sweetest specimen. It’s no surprise that these last two songs were made famous by immigrants to New York City: Loss both stimulates and spoils our taste for living. Even these songs of desire seem stretched thin by distance from a world on the brink of disappearance. Read More

For the Spanish colonizers, that world was once too marvelous for words. When Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo first described the pineapple in print, he wrote with pure wonder, “This outdoes them all, as the feathers of the peacock outshine those of any bird.” Similes would have to suffice, because pineapples couldn’t survive the dank voyage back to Europe without rotting — just another casualty of the imperial adventure. But no measure of death could slow the frenzy of resource extraction. The so-called New World became, for those colonizers, a restored Garden of Eden, where none of the fruits were forbidden and the sins of lust, gluttony and greed seemed forgiven under the sign of a holy mission.

Of course, this world wasn’t new, and the people who lived here first had their own poetic interpretation of their environment. On the islands known as Ayiti and Boriken, it was not the pineapple but the guava that was most mythologized — the fruit preferred by the spirits of the dead, who would creep out at night to feast among the trees and make love to the living. In Aztec mythology, Xochipilli, the god of music, dance and poetry, was sometimes depicted with dilated pupils, hypnotized by temicxoch, the “dream flowers” of psychedelic hallucination.

Over the centuries, the Christian symbols of the colonizers were absorbed by the changing cultures of the Americas, not through a process of seamless mixing but by necessity, under threats of violence and enslavement. The mango, coconut and plantain arrived from other parts of the colonized world and took root among us, expressing new flavors and forms. We’ve come to savor creole foods like sancocho, and to dance guarachas and plenas, where the courtly verses of Spain’s Golden Age — décimas — are syncopated by the rhythmic scratching of the Indigenous güiro.

There’s some poetic justice to the fact that the religious tropes that have taken hold in Latin music — the Garden, the Flood, the Song of Songs — are closely connected to multicultural pagan sources. Somehow, our music has bypassed the chapters of the Bible’s moralizing prohibitions and recovered the Egyptian love poetry under Solomon’s tongue: “Blow upon my garden that its spices may flow out,” from Africa across the Mediterranean and into the cradle of the Caribbean. “Let us go forth to the field” — OK, I’m coming — “Let us see if the vine has budded.” Invitations like Solomon’s always feel contemporary, because underneath layers of history there’s the wild sweetness of the earth and our will to get close to it. My grandmother didn’t go to church except on holidays — she thought most people went just to gossip and show off — but every Sunday she bought an armload of gladiolas for her home altar, where La Virgen Milagrosa’s bare feet crushed a serpent.

When the jazz-trained vocalist Xenia Rubinos set out to make her new album, she was also thinking of her great-grandmother’s bedroom — specifically, a mesmerizing fiber-optic lamp in the form of a flower that, like a music box, was wired to play a single melody. Rubinos chased that melody for years, beginning to reconstruct it from memory before she finally tracked it down: “Una Rosa,” a danza by the Puerto Rican composer José Enrique Pedreira. In her version for the album of the same name (“Una Rosa,” 2021), a keening flute picks up the half-forgotten piano line until Rubinos takes over, humming, finally able to carry the old tune into a new electronic landscape swept by silvery gusts of wind and the shuddering sound of a blown-out car speaker. There’s no rose in the lyrics — no words at all, in fact — as if the perfume of nostalgia must always evade description.

Even as Rubinos reproduces the magic of the music she inherited, the tremble and grind of her version also expresses the effort it has taken to sustain and reinvent it. The lamp itself — transformed by her memory into a ritual object — must have been an adaptive technology, a way to conjure the real extravagance of flowers that thrive year-round on the islands her family left behind for the industrial winters of Hartford. A lamp like that — common, briefly, in the 1980s — was probably made in Taiwan. Even the dreamiest fantasies depend upon the drudgery of women’s work: When the Puerto Rican poet Marigloria Palma first migrated to New York City, she got a job at a small factory making fake flowers. She would never forget the painstaking “struggle to fix the crystal drops of dew to the petals of the roses.”

In the colonized world, beauty can become a kind of curse. Tropical fruits don’t thrive in northern climates and therefore “must” be imported (particular pleasures can generate delusions of necessity). For centuries, European sugar plantations in the West Indies consumed millions of African lives, and more recently, United States fruit companies transformed stretches of Central America into “banana republics,” working to depose democratic governments and install dictators who promised to keep the supply chain steady. I think of this history as I pass the stiff corpses of supermarket flowers flown in from Costa Rica and Ecuador, the buckets of sugar cane and piles of bruised breadfruit in front of the Bangladeshi shop where immigrants try to recuperate the taste of homelands too exploited to sustain their families. I knew Del Monte as a brand name before I ever parted the stinging grasses of the real monte — the green mountains of the interior — or tasted the fruits that are still possible to forage there: toronja; limón cabra.

Carmen Miranda’s neck must have cramped beneath the ridiculous pile of commodities on her head. Latin women know too well how easily our bodies can become, by analogy, just another fruit ripe for the taking. “Mami ay qué rico, that’s all that I hear ’em say,” sings the alt-R.&B. star Kali Uchis on her bilingual slow burn “aguardiente y limón” (2020). She offers a seductive invitation: “En el jardín queda mi corazón/En el jardín, boy, you should taste the fruit.” But in the next verse, she also celebrates her own creative capacity, confident that all the seeds she planted will “grow grow grow grow grow.” When she sings, “I just wanna savor the fruits of my labor,” I hear a subtle critique of the sexual marketplace where Latin women are so often priced and traded. In “Don’t Put Me in Red,” Rubinos escapes that lurid glow — “the color you think I spend my life in” — to articulate her own relationship to the sensual tradition that produced her, a Black Puerto Rican matriarchy: “Mira la negrita/como baila el bembe/la mandan las brujitas/de Guayama y Cayey.” She speaks in an uncanny first person plural as she defends the deep roots of her own allure: “You forget we were here when the west was won.”

The west was won — conquered, colonized — and now the enchanted garden that had seemed infinite is drying up and blowing away before our eyes. Many scholars date the so-called Anthropocene — the geological period defined by discernible human damage to the biosphere — to roughly 1492. That’s when the campaign of global resource extraction began that would eventually lead us here, to face the possibility of an uninhabitable planet. In 2020, the scholar Kyle Keeler argued the Anthropocene should instead be called the Kleptocene, to clarify the ongoing role of colonialism in the climate crisis.

Sometimes disaster seems to close in from all sides — from the bloodshed of the past and the deprivations of the future — until I’m lost at sea, clinging to the wreckage of a Tuesday morning. In those moods, everything depends on whether I can coax a flower from my Dama de Noche. It’s amazing that it has survived at all — propagated from a single leaf that my friend sent to New York from Puerto Rico by United States mail — but I doubt it will ever bloom. We take with us what we can, but we never know what the new conditions will be able to sustain.

Recently the salvific image of Noah’s ark keeps floating through my headphones, first in the Puerto Rican indie pop duo Buscabulla’s post-apocalyptic love song “Eva” and then as a governing metaphor in the electrofolk anthem “El arca de MIMA,” both from 2021. Yarimir Cabán-Reyes, the singer-songwriter known as MIMA, is also Puerto Rican, and the colonial experience inflects her elegy for the dwindling diversity of her homeland’s fruits. Despite the richness of Puerto Rico’s soil, over 80 percent of its food is imported. With the archipelago’s agriculture dominated by cash crops for foreign consumption, it can be difficult to find unmastered pockets to grow and gather the more idiosyncratic varietals MIMA savors: “chirimoya y pomarrosa, granada, cidra, pajuil.” If these losses are “too diminutive for history,” they are “too much for a verse,” and indeed, the intoxicating catalog threatens to leave the singer with no breath left to protest. But she grits her teeth and keeps singing — “jobo, guayaba, jobillo, guanabana, almendra, y jagua” — as if the words themselves could become a spell to ward off the “futuro perverso” she fears.

“El arca de MIMA” is in direct dialogue with Puerto Rican country music, particularly the improvised verses of Ramito, who grew up cutting cane in Caguas. The most recent albums of Kali Uchis and Xenia Rubinos both include covers of much older songs — reaching, perhaps, for what the Martinican philosopher Edouard Glissant once called “a prophetic vision of the past.” It’s possible to hear all of this as roots music, watering Latin America’s long siembra, the metaphor of reaping and sowing made iconic by Rubén Blades and Willie Colón with the title of their groundbreaking salsa album in 1978. “Forget what’s plastic, it will leave you nothing,” they warned, probably without thinking of petroleum’s biological permanence. These new songs grapple with an accelerated timeline of disaster. Counterintuitively, their response is bittersweet: Lyrics are more speculative than strident and many melodies feel unresolved, drifting just beyond the reach of pop radio. We’re in the cloud now, among swelling flocks of angels, avatars and aliens.

But we’re also still here on earth, trying to bear witness to the beauty that has been squandered. Roberto Lange, who makes diaphanous sounds as Helado Negro, sets his 2021 song “Agosto” in the nearest possible future: “flor de naranja caerán en mis pies todo el verano.” He told me, on the phone, that the song’s central image — a summer tide of orange blossoms — came from the enormous tree in the yard of his childhood home in Miami: “So many things happened while that tree was there, you know?” Most of the time, they went without shoes, and when the fruits fell to the ground, “we’d have sticky rotten oranges on our feet.” When he was older, he smoked his first cigarettes in the tree’s shade. He knew Buscabulla, his collaborators on the song, would be able to relate — a tree like that is a kind of “connecting rod” between Latin American people, between one moment and the mystery of the next. We don’t have to cut it down to count the rings. Our music leaves another kind of record.

Carina del Valle Schorske is a literary translator and a contributing writer for the magazine.

TeMs, NaO & JoRja SMiTh’S

CuRE To BuRnOuT

‘Burn,’ Jorja Smith Full Track
‘Burn Out,’ Nao Full Track
‘Vibe Out,’ Tems Full Track

/ “Burn,” a highlight from the British singer Jorja Smith’s 2021 EP, “Be Right Back,” functions as both a therapy session and a cautionary tale. Smith, her voice soaked in empathy and disappointment, hovers over a melancholy bossa nova shuffle, addressing a young woman on the brink.

“You keep it all in, but you don’t let it out,” she tells her, pained. “You try so hard, don’t you know you’ve burnt out?” Smith, who shot to stardom in 2017 after two attention-grabbing appearances on Drake’s mixtape “More Life,” followed by a sensational debut album, “Lost and Found,” is only 24; she is perceptive beyond her years, equipped with a voice that, at its full power, could stop traffic. On “Burn,” though, she sounds as defeated as her protagonist, subdued and delicate. It’s not an empowerment anthem. But then, almost at a whisper, Smith pivots toward something like reassurance. “The fire’s always there,” she reminds her subject, but also her listener and, maybe, herself. “No one needs to get hurt.” Read More

Before the onset of the pandemic, burnout was something we were encouraged to actively combat. Countless articles and books were published on how to fight it. I felt, even at my most exhausted, that I had to find a way to push back, that I was stuck in a cycle not only of burnout but of incessant attempts to fix it. During the pandemic, though, I started noticing something new: I struggled all the same to get small tasks done, but the stakes suddenly evaporated, as did my resistance. Slack pinged; I just stared. My boyfriend at the time wanted to nap with me in the middle of the day; I jumped into bed. Time slowed and then leapt ahead, glitching. I couldn’t, for the life of me, find the urgency in anything.

In 2021, three singers — Smith, her countrywoman Nao and the Nigerian singer Tems — captured this sense of endemic, all-encompassing burnout. Their exhaustion came not from the drudgery of commuting to and from a desk job but from the inherent slog of living in a body in 2021 — a grinding and disappointing year. Instead of responding with saccharine inspirational maxims or rote cynicism, they chose to soak in their fatigue. Their music felt appropriate to the moment, when our collective enervation became something to live with and submit to, a weariness we could no longer outrun.

“Maybe just go slow, there’s nothing to run for,” Nao sings on the celestial “Burn Out,” a track from her third studio album, “And Then Life Was Beautiful.” “ ’Cause we ain’t rushing no more, we got what we came for.” It’s emblematic of how many of us dealt with the past couple of years: We reassessed the problems that, prepandemic, felt life-or-death but now seem trivial. Why rush, Nao asks, when there’s nowhere to be? Tems, whose yearning chorus on Wizkid’s summer hit, “Essence,” instantly made her a rising star, doubles down on inaction in the face of pressure. “If I continue, my ice might break,” she sings on the hallucinatory and sensual “Vibe Out,” from her outstanding second EP, “If Orange Was a Place.” Her solution? “I’ma vibe out today, away,” she repeats on the chorus like a mantra, her otherwise viscous voice reduced to a thin mumble. She would rather walk away than break down.

Upon hearing Smith’s “Burn” for the first time, I was immediately comforted not only by her recognition of everything I’d been feeling but also by the permission I felt she was granting me to simply stop. Hearing Smith tell me that nothing was lost by slowing down felt like a revelation, a salve of sorts. Just stop stressing.

Before Covid, the pressure to constantly optimize myself consumed me. But in the wake of millions of deaths and the restructuring of daily existence, fixing myself no longer feels like the goal. You can call it burnout or just the acceptance of my own limitations; self-compassion has slowly come to replace the guilt I used to feel when I fell short. There is freedom in doing nothing, all three of these singers remind us. The fire is always there, and no one needs to get hurt.

Jackson Howard is an editor for Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He lives in Brooklyn.

PoP’s BiGgEst WoMeN

On LiFe WiThOuT FaMe

‘Stoned at the Nail Salon,’ Lorde Full Track
‘Getting Older,’ Billie Eilish Full Track
‘For Free,’ Lana Del Rey Full Track

/ In rock, being famous is often treated as a self-inflicted wound. “What you get is no tomorrow/What you need, you have to borrow,” David Bowie sneered on his 1975 single “Fame.” Years later, on “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain — an artist who practically drafted the modern blueprint for despising your own success — bemoaned what his prodigiousness had wrought: “I’m worse at what I do best/And for this gift, I feel blessed.”

Hip-hop might seem more comfortable flaunting stardom and status, but doing so is no less burdensome for its practitioners; observe the gold-plated tears shed by Drake or Kanye West in any of their attention-grabbing invectives against attention or DJ Khaled’s 2013 album, “Suffering From Success,” featuring his pained visage on the cover offset by blindingly bright drip. The revelations unearthed during the recent dissolution of Britney Spears’s conservatorship were just more proof that blowing up can leave lasting damage. Read More

The battlefield of the top of the pop charts is littered with superstars audibly struggling to survive the perils of fame. But thanks to the hyperconnectivity of the digital age, you don’t even have to be massively famous to become wary of the attention economy. Even the indie rocker Mac DeMarco questions it, on his song “Passing Out Pieces”: “Passing out pieces of me/Don’t you know nothing comes free?”

Is it any wonder, then, that several pop stars have expressed a desire in the last year to retreat from the spotlight, to imagine what their music and their life would have been if they had never found success at all? “Things I once enjoyed/Just keep me employed now,” sighs 20-year-old Billie Eilish — who has enjoyed more industry success in the last two years than most see in an entire career — on “Getting Older.” It’s the opening track on her ironically titled second album, “Happier Than Ever,” an excellent record that sounds like a slow, quiet backing away from anything resembling popularity.

And after a decade of being a lightning rod for public scrutiny, Lana Del Rey closed last year’s “Chemtrails Over the Country Club” with a cover of Joni Mitchell’s “For Free” — a song about the joys of creation when no one’s paying attention, and one that, in Del Rey’s context, doubles as a reference to her own thorny relationship with public life.

But few have captured this camera-shy moment as clearly as Lorde. The New Zealand pop phenom returned after a long absence with “Solar Power,” released in August, befuddling fans and critics with a seemingly lackadaisical new mode of creation. Tonally, it could not be more different from the hair-raising intimacy of her previous album, “Melodrama” (2017).

Lorde has referred to “Solar Power” as a “weed album,” and as an artistic statement it recalls another cannabis-conjured record, if not in sound then in form: Neil Young’s 1974 bummer masterpiece, “On the Beach,” which he recorded while consuming sticky-sweet homemade edibles known as “honey slides.” Young was 28 when “On the Beach” was released; Lorde is 25. Each record captures an artist in the afterglow of unprecedented success, pondering their place in the world and worrying that the paths they have chosen lead to nothing but regret — Young with his big folk-rock creations and Lorde with her slight, spartan pop songs.

“Solar Power” orbits around the acoustic glow of “Stoned at the Nail Salon,” a single that doubles as the album’s mission statement. True to its title, the song mimics the feeling of being high in a quotidian setting: warm, sun-kissed, with currents of uncertainty and sadness cresting its blissed-out surface. “Got a wishbone drying on the windowsill in my kitchen,” Lorde sings over gentle guitar, acknowledging her good fortune — before wondering whether she actually rolled snake eyes instead: “Just in case I wake up and realize I’ve chosen wrong.”

Lorde’s music also carries a wry sense of humor. The joke of “Stoned at the Nail Salon” is all in the title: At the end of every verse, she undercuts her own despairing ruminations with the chorus “Maybe I’m just stoned at the nail salon again.” But as she’s joined by Phoebe Bridgers and Clairo — two ascendant stars on similar paths of cultishly beloved stardom — the song feels heavier. “I’d ride and I’d ride on the carousel, ’round and ’round/Forever, if I could,” the three sing together. “But it’s time to cool it down/Whatever that means.”

These sentiments — uncertainty, melancholy, a willingness to vanish from the limelight — are delivered with a sense of calm self-possession that breaks with Lorde’s iconoclastic predecessors, who pushed back against fame’s trappings as loudly as they could. There’s no rending of flesh here. To Lorde and her generational cohort, raging against the machine is pointless, possibly carcinogenic and, perhaps, a bit passé. Better to just walk away from it all — or at least sing about wanting to.

Larry Fitzmaurice is a writer and an editor in Brooklyn. He runs a newsletter, Last Donut of the Night.

L’rAiN MaKeS A WaY

OuT oF No WaY

‘Find It’ Full Track

/ The artist Taja Cheek creates music out of looped sounds and voice recordings from her life. There are noises from the streets near her apartment in Crown Heights, friends harmonizing a made-up song, a pastor at a funeral. Cheek has, she has said, “a horrible memory.” The recordings are a way to overcome that. To remember. To keep alive.

But once they’ve been incorporated into Cheek’s art, they are also something else, something stranger and less familiar. Cheek performs as L’Rain, a name chosen in honor of her mother, Lorraine, who died in 2016. Back then, Cheek was working on her first album, and the songs on that self-titled record became a way to process her grief. Now it’s the process itself, the evolving path the music takes, that seems most interesting to her. Read More

The introduction to her second album, “Fatigue,” released last year, lands on a snippet of the vocalist Quinton Brock asking, “What have you done to change?” The phrase “to change” lingers — looping and echoing, altering pitch, fading into the background but still remaining, a ghost of itself — as the album’s first full-length track, “Find It,” launches into a woozy shuffle. Another beat enters, sounding like a muffled hammering on an old wooden box in a distant room of an empty house. Then L’Rain’s voice, hummed and ethereal, repeating a short, wordless melody. This continues for several bars as the track slowly, subtly builds new layers, like other rooms of the house coming to life.

Even a minute later, when L’Rain begins singing actual words, the lyrics are hard to decipher. The first phrase I latched onto with some certainty when I was initially falling for this track was “my mother told me. … ” What follows is repeated as the chorus of the song, though I couldn’t initially untangle it; “Muckaway anno way,” she seemed to be chanting. For a long while I heard this repeated phrase the same way I hear qawwali, the Sufi devotional music — as an ancient, spiritual, ecstatic thing I would never fully grasp. Eventually I just Googled it: “Make a way out of no way.”

The chant rises and rises until, quite suddenly, L’Rain moves on — both forward and backward, repeating her initial wordless melody but, this time, scaffolded by cymbals, horns, a burbling noise like leaking water. The edges of the horns begin to sound a bit like screams, and then exactly like screams. Then they fade, replaced by a sustained chord on what you eventually come to realize is an organ. And it is at this point, over four minutes into “Find It,” that something truly amazing occurs.

For it is at this point that L’Rain drops in a recording from her life, a pastor at a friend’s funeral, singing “I Won’t Complain.” It is a song about having weary days and sleepless nights and hills to climb, but knowing that good days outweigh bad and carrying on without complaint. It is a song of comfort and courage to continue on in the face of unthinkable loss. If you look for the song on YouTube, you will find that it is often sung at funerals. Using a recording like this in your own work, as L’Rain has, is beyond emotionally ambitious: How do you keep such a weighty document from overtaking everything you’ve constructed thus far?

But the phrase “using a recording” doesn’t fully capture what L’Rain is up to here — the way she brings those mournful horns and her own vocal harmonies back to blend into this unbelievably raw gospel, the way she has composed “Find It” so that this glorious, joyous release plays into the track’s earlier sounds. It is a sonic stew of emotions (fortitude, fear) that feels awfully close to our lived reality — of, say, attending a beloved’s funeral, or simply being alive and attendant to any degree of the suffering of these past two years.

“Find It” is a song about working through the impossible, about making a way out of no way and finding that process incomprehensible and frightening and even joyful, and many, many other things besides, often all at once. But most of all it is about the movement, the act of moving itself. It is the way L’Rain has constructed this song — using these parts that inform and propel one another and draw us forward through them — that makes her looped compositions so worth dwelling on, and in. “Make a way out of no way” is sung so that it sounds meaningless, then meaningful, then meaningless again. That is the purpose of any chant or prayer or meditation: repeat a phrase until it sounds like nothing, like everything, like forward motion toward … where, exactly? That is the unanswerable question at the heart of this song; the “it” in “Find It.” What is “it”? God? Love? Whatever gets you through? All of the above?

Ryan Bradley is a writer in Los Angeles. He last wrote for the magazine about the musicians DOMi and J.D. Beck. Arielle Bobb-Willis is a photographer from New York. Her work can be seen in the traveling “New Black Vanguard” gallery show and book.

LaBRiNtH KnOwS AdoLescEnce

iS GnArLy

‘Still Don’t Know My Name’ Full Track

/ Late in the age of prestige television, we’ve arrived at what is perhaps the first prestige teen drama. Like teen soaps since the dawn of television, “Euphoria” seems to be designed primarily to shock and titillate adults, updating the time-tested tropes of the genre (cheating, revenge, domestic abuse) with a new set of even more scandalous ones (camgirls, gender, the opioid crisis). The teenagers on this show are pushing the envelope — as TV teenagers do — but here they act out with postmodern panache. The show’s creator, Sam Levinson, 37, plays liberally with flashbacks, fourth-wall-breaking asides and magical-realist fantasy.

What holds all this together is the music: a maximalist, genre-agnostic soundscape that includes both a licensed soundtrack and a score. The soundtrack — which time-travels from Steely Dan to DMX to Baby Keem — is handled by a music supervisor named Jen Malone. The score — which is really more like an original soundtrack — was composed by the English artist Labrinth. Before “Euphoria,” Labrinth, 33, was best known as a pop producer. Season 1 was his first time working on a score. We talked about his evolution in Season 2 and how he figured out what “teenager” should sound like. Read More

Going into Season 1, how much did you know about the show? I had no idea what it was.

How did Sam Levinson describe what he had in mind for the score? He didn’t describe it. He just said, “I love what you do, and I want you to do what you do on the show.”

But you must have had a general sense of the plot? No. It was just us talking. We spoke about Kanye and Nine Inch Nails. We spoke about Danny Elfman, and especially “Edward Scissorhands.” I’ve always loved that score. Sam was like, “What if all those people did a score?” and I was like, “That sounds like heaven.”

With nothing off limits, in terms of genre or technique, how did you start to narrow things down? What sort of approach to “teenageriness” felt outside the scope of how “Euphoria” should sound? I didn’t want things to feel too commercial. No diss to Ariana Grande — I think she’s a great artist — but I can’t do that kind of magic. People put this squeaky-cleanness on teens, but really it’s gnarly as hell. There are so many raw and gritty feelings, and some of your thoughts go to really dark places.

To me, the score sounds very claustrophobic, like how teenagers can’t always see over the wall of their own emotions. Was there a certain way you achieved that feeling technically? No. I don’t think about anything but my excitement for a sound. You know when you’re visualizing going on holiday, you see yourself sitting on the beach with your favorite drink, with the sun coming up. And you can visualize these images so vividly. It’s literally like that for me with sounds. I would see Cassie walking down a corridor and hear synth with reverb on it, or I would see Rue and be like, “What if I made a sound that sounded like you’re drunk?”

You’re really a vibes guy. I could turn a door into a song. First, I’d imagine the door, just standing there. Then, I’d write a song imagining its feelings: I’m here to protect you/I’m always here to keep you safe inside the house/But no one ever thinks about me. I was watching this Scorsese MasterClass, and another one, from the guy who was in “Happy Days” who became a director. I forget his name, but they were both saying, “Where is your story?” Everything has a story.

Was this how you approached songwriting when you were first starting out as a teenager? When I was younger, it was very much impulsive. I wasn’t aware enough to know what I was doing, or if I was even doing it. Over time, I’ve realized how I do what I do, but the teenage writing style always works better than the formula. It’s so carnal. It makes me feel like I’m going to lose it — and as soon as I feel that feeling, I know it’s a smash.

As you’ve grown in your work in Season 2, and have started to know what “Euphoria” sounds like, has it become harder to resist relying on the formula? Yeah. When you’re a kid, you’re magic. When you get older, you have to learn how to become a kid again.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Jamie Lauren Keiles is a contributing writer for the magazine.

CrYiNg

tO BeAcH HoUsE

‘New Romance’ Full Track

/ Beach House is one of the last pillars that remain where the estate of old indie rock once stood — icons of a music that has been, to hear some tell it, made obsolete, hopelessly out of step with today’s internet music culture. They make sprawling albums in preference to hits, sounds that uncurl slowly rather than hooks. Yet somehow, the duo are beloved on social media: “We’re all going to be so depressed!” squealed one TikTok influencer over their latest album, “Once Twice Melody.” The comedian and Twitter luminary Jaboukie Young-White posted a 2021 Spotify recap featuring only Beach House songs; “you okay?” a fan half-joked in reply. Also on TikTok, their 2015 “Space Song” became a sensation, deployed to attach its ennui to fostered cats, rainy scenes from Korean dramas and lots and lots of crying.

They are the internet’s favorite band, I think, because their music can function both as an anonymous haze and as startlingly specific when it needs to be. Most times, the “you” in the singer Victoria Legrand’s second-person songs doesn’t seem as if it’s you, me or anyone I know. In “New Romance,” the best song on the new album, the band is as oblique as ever. It’s secretly a song about a post-lockdown night out, but the lyrics are sewn-together images and feelings: a hawk in a black-star sky, a text message left unanswered, the words “you feel your heart break and you don’t know why.” The abstractions wash over you until, one day, that you is suddenly you. It’s Beach House’s timeless magic: the experience of arriving in Legrand’s cross hairs. I asked Legrand and the multi-instrumentalist Alex Scally about being so popular online despite not being online at all. Read More

Are you guys aware of how much people post about listening to Beach House, about what Beach House makes them feel?

LEGRAND: I was told last week that there were some videos of some reactions to listening to this record. I don’t know. I didn’t get to witness it firsthand. I think it’s kind of more fun knowing it exists than to be hunting it down and looking at it. There’s a dangerous narcissism that you could go to. It just sounds like people are having fun — and that, to me, means a lot, because fun is rare. Being over the top and grandiose and ridiculous and expressive and crying and screaming and all of that — I’m glad to hear about that happening. Not just with our music, just in general. Over all, this has been a time to not scale back in terms of intensity, you know, in terms of making art or music — this was not a time for us to minimalize. Minimalism felt really ruthless and sociopathic to me.

People typically think of your music as something experienced very personally and privately — yet they have this exuberant reaction where they want to share the experiences that they have with it.

SCALLY: I do think with some young people, it’s like, “It didn’t happen if I’m not sharing it” — that’s kind of a subtext to some people’s way of processing reality.

Some artists come to resent the idea that their art is being degraded as it travels — that people are putting it into a box or using shorthand or reducing it to a stereotype. It sounds like you kind of let it fly?

LEGRAND: Yes, let it go. There’s a point when you’re done and it’s not yours anymore. If we became hysterical about degradation or anything, that was a conversation to be had years ago.

SCALLY: If you’re a political person of some kind, and you’re disseminating information and you watch it get degraded and abused, I think that would be infuriating and insane. But we’re musicians. And I think of this as part of the bargain. If we get to make a living off of this — we get to be musicians and go on tour and stuff — we have to be OK with releasing the music to the world and letting whatever happens to it happen. We can’t control it and we can’t be mad at it. It’s the world. It’s the bargain we are reaching with the world.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Adlan Jackson is a writer from Kingston, Jamaica. He writes the “Critical Party Studies” blog.

ThE dELiCiOuS MiSErY

oF tHe ‘SaD BaNgEr’

‘Half of the Time,’ Pronoun Full Track
And songs by: Bruce Springsteen, Robyn, Carly Rae Jepsen, Zoe Wees, Lil Nas X, James Blake, featuring SZA. Full Playlist

/ I have spent a lot of time these last two years managing small collisions of feeling: sadness laid over pleasure, heartbreak laid over some unnamed desire. This was a result of prolonged pandemic living and all the little rituals we’ve devised to get through it: the Zoom birthday parties, wedding receptions, dance get-togethers, trivia nights. I enjoyed the idea of these events — but the thought of attending them filled me with a cocktail of longing and dread, despite the immense pleasure I felt in seeing the faces of people I loved. The minute-by-minute emotional contradictions of this era have been fascinating to watch unfold, and I’ve been searching for music capacious enough to hold them all.

My pandemic soundtracks came to revolve around what I call “sad bangers.” More plainly put, songs whose lyrics of grief, anxiety, yearning or some other mild or great darkness are washed over with an upbeat tune, or a chorus so infectious that it can weave its way into your brain without your brain taking stock of whatever emotional damage it carries with it. Some of these songs were decades old, some of them brand-new, but all of them speak to the frequent misalignment between what the body wants and the mind understands. We are all suffering from a prolonged hunger, and the realities of our circumstances won’t let us be satiated. Read More

Sad bangers aren’t a new phenomenon — but the old ones have a new potency. Like Bruce Springsteen’s “Hungry Heart,” a song I found myself returning to early and often in my pandemic playlists. The instrumental intro is danceable and upbeat, but then the first line pulls a curtain back on another reality: Our narrator has a wife and kids he has left, hitting the road and not looking back. The trick of the sonic and lyrical imbalances here is that if you get too swept up in one, you might be able to shove the other to the back of your mind, if even for a moment. Getting pulled in by the song’s story line might deny you the pleasure of its call to the dance floor, and being too caught up in the demand to dance might render the narrative pointless.

This captures exactly what I love most about the sad banger: that it gets beyond binary emotions and unlocks a multilayered fullness that might, depending on the song, involve dancing, and crying, and longing, and stumbling out of some dive bar midtune to text or call the person you probably shouldn’t.

You can measure the success of a song by the limitlessness of emotions and impulses it can seduce out of a person. Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own” may be the ultimate sad banger, and it is undoubtedly a classic within the canon, taking its emotional and sonic cues from a long line of sad disco anthems and new-wave hits (Robyn herself has cited musicians like Donna Summer and Sylvester, and songs like “Dancing With Tears in My Eyes,” by Ultravox). All these artists dabble in bright, electronic, up-tempo odes to the specifics of heartbreak, performed with a sort of suddenness — an urgency, as if a person has just walked from the ruins of emotional wreckage and needs to deliver a report on the damage while the memory of it is still fresh.

The sad banger has a lineage that begins sometime around the moment a person realized that a sad song didn’t have to feel sad, though it is also an art to summon that kind of feeling. The pleading of Otis Redding, or the way Dusty Springfield could sound in awe of her own sadness, as if it were arriving to her for the first time, a shining jewel in the center of an open box. But I recall a lesson I learned once from a poetry mentor: Sadness, like many of the big, surface emotions, can be a primary color — bold and obvious, still waiting to be mixed with others to create the specific hue you want to use. Not always, of course. There are times when I am simply sad, and there is no emotional accompaniment. But other times, the sadness is one smattering on a canvas that is asking for something else. I’m sad, but I still want. I’m sad because I’m jealous, and that jealousy is unlocking a passion or a pleasure. I’m sad because of what I can’t control, which pulls me, with arms open, toward the things I can control.

The magic in this type of song is that it doesn’t ask you to lay your burdens down. Bring the burdens with you, if you can carry them. You don’t have to part with your precious sadness in order to enter the portal of a song that might also entice you to dance, or throw your head back in ecstasy. The singers who are the best architects of these songs — like Carly Rae Jepsen, who pretty much earned a Ph.D. in the sad banger on her album “Emotion” — are vocally convincing, and sometimes comforting. They know you’re wading through difficult emotional waters, and they are present, making you believe that they’ve been there recently enough to understand that carrying sadness through to the other side can be a gift. Jepsen’s great trick is invoking the communal over the specific. In “Boy Problems,” her distress is hers, but it’s also yours, it’s also everyone’s. Boy problems are a stand-in for an entire menu of anguish.

In 2021, the sad banger became richer, not only in its range of sound but also in its range of concerns. In the late spring and early summer — the post-vaccination, pre-Delta haze of uncertainty and optimism — there were two equally thrilling songs that suited the times. First, in May, the singer Zoe Wees released the EP “Golden Wings,” which contained the song “Girls Like Us,” a delightful lament turning over thoughts about trust, not wanting to get hurt, isolation. It’s an anthem aimed at young women, but a far-resonating tune. It builds slowly, effectively, beginning with sparse instrumentation, growing gently toward a flourish as the chorus hits, and then the song’s breathlessly spiraling percussion grows louder, before the sonic bottom falls out, stripping itself down to a few simple piano chords for a brief spell, before sprinting to the finish line. The sad banger isn’t always about relentless tempo; it can also offer an opportunity to play with a kind of musical modulation that mirrors tentative pleasure in the face of anxiety.

In early June, the artist Pronoun released the EP “OMG I Made It,” and the penultimate song, “Half of the Time,” has the kind of early-summer brightness that recalls biting directly into a citrus fruit with no regard for how the juice might stain your shirt. It’s an energizing introduction that — much like Springsteen’s “Hungry Heart” — challenges the musical excitement in the first line: “So here we are again, same as it ever was/Cracking a smile while admitting defeat.”

“Half of the Time” is less of an outright sad song and more of a shrug of a song, winding through depths of apathy and contentment in the same verse. The lyrics sometimes run together as rapid sentences, language tumbling from the sky and twisting to fit into lines right at the last minute, like Tetris pieces. It is best summed up by the refrain that gets wrung out at the end, with Pronoun repeatedly singing “Half of the time I’m feeling fine,” leaving a listener to wonder if just half is enough. There might be a sadness in that pondering, but the song itself felt too good (and still feels too good) to leave me with anything but an affirmative response.

Lil Nas X’s “Lost in the Citadel” offered up the always-ideal sad-banger narrative of an unrequited, one-sided relationship. Even if I am not in the throes of unbearable longing, these kinds of songs can convince me not only that I am in love but also that the person I love will not love me back. In an adjacent universe to this one, Mitski returned with another of her periodic odes to crumbling love with “The Only Heartbreaker,” an absolute storm of ecstatic synth-pop underneath lyrics of resignation and resentment. In a slightly sparser offering, James Blake and SZA came together for the atmospheric “Coming Back,” which has an added benefit of the kind of tug of war that exists between two people outlining a similar ache, trying to build a bridge toward each other. Unrequited love rarely fails as a subject for songs because that type of emotion — reaching for someone else who will not or cannot reach back — is an act of sometimes fevered imagination. If the desired party is not present to answer for how you have built them up in your mind, the emotional landscape becomes much more expansive, not tied to the guardrails of reality.

These songs wormed their way into my rotations with the most consistency in 2021. Of all of them, I find myself returning to Pronoun’s tune the most. Probably because of how its chorus builds to a point where yelling the words out seems like the only reasonable reaction, even though that vocal catharsis often leaves me with nothing beyond a fluorescent burst — a collision of palpable but hardly recognizable emotions, and then a fading echo. Nothing is better, but certainly nothing is worse. This kind of surrender has been a comfort for me in recent years, in these uniquely anxiety-inducing times. Most of the things I am angry or heartbroken about are raging beyond my control, and so I need the small containers to put those feelings in, while still giving in to the occasional joyful impulse. A clean floor, not to dance as a way to shake off my burdens, but to find some strange harmony with them amid the sometimes joy, sometimes misery of living. Everything is, and remains, and then another song starts.

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, an essayist and a cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio.

PiNk SiiFu'S

SoNiC GuMbO

'Scurrrrd’ Full Track

/ When a friend asked if sweet-potato pies tasted anything like pumpkin, Amiri Baraka responded with a wry non sequitur. “They taste more like memory,” he wrote in “Soul Food,” a brief 1962 essay defending Black American foodways. He had come across an article claiming that Black Americans lacked a cuisine, he wrote, and was baffled. By definition, he argued — and as empirically proved by all his Harlem haunts — soul food channeled histories and traditions, ancestors and homelands.

It’s that same sense of flavor as memory that guides the rapper and producer Pink Siifu’s roaming music, which spans from hip-hop and jazz to punk and soul. His 2021 album “Gumbo’!” gleefully dissolves distinctions among genres, blending his many influences — Baraka among them — into swampy arrangements that sound both familiar and alien. Yes, this kind of genre fluency abounds among musicians who grew up with the internet, and streaming services encourage artists to prioritize variety, often at the expense of identity. But Pink Siifu’s gumbo of sounds feels more intimate than entrepreneurial. Every drum patter, every sample selection, seems to indulge his palate, to impart his recipe. Read More

One of the richest offerings is “Scurrrrd,” a nearly seven-minute suite of spoken word, introspective rap and tender soul. It assembles an eclectic bunch of collaborators: the jazz musician and producer Georgia Anne Muldrow, the poet and griot Big Rube, the instrumentalist and songwriter Nick Hakim and the R.&B. singer Asal Hazel. This gathering is a kind of family reunion of kindred spirits, knowingly connecting different do-it-yourself scenes, past and present, from across Black music.

It’s Pink Siifu’s fractured recollections, though, that anchor the song. His verse, placed between Big Rube’s stately opening and Muldrow’s warm, maternal finale, is imagistic and anxious. He remembers “slap boxing on the blacktop” and a kid “eating tears on the pavement/Blood on his braces/Smile on they faces/Some pictures ain’t taken/Sometimes the screen keep shaking/Don’t be scurred.” His delivery is spirited, a departure from his usual hushed rapping; it sells the memory’s mix of innocence and violence. It feels as if he’s claiming all aspects of his heritage, glories and failures alike.

Pink Siifu often nods to his origins and muses in this oblique way. His touchstones are specific yet hazy, like half-remembered dreams. On another track, “Smile (Wit Yo Gold),” the warm, sun-soaked groove and proud references to gold teeth recall the rootsy neosoul of the 1990s and the grillz zeitgeist of the 2000s. For Pink Siifu, those maligned accessories aren’t status symbols or fetish objects but an inheritance. “Auntie on my mind, damn I miss her smile,” he sings. “Cousin on my mind, damn I miss his smile/Smile with your gold teeth.” With one gleaming image, he links the music that inspired him and the relatives he loves. Seconds, please.

Stephen Kearse is an assistant editor for Spotlight PA and a contributing writer for The Nation.

ThE OpAciTy oF eArL SwEaTsHiRt

‘2010’ Full Track

/ When I met Thebe Kgositsile, the rapper and producer who performs as Earl Sweatshirt, in the greenroom of the Warfield in San Francisco, he was on tour for his fourth studio album, “Sick!” which was released in January. He arrived the day before after shows in San Diego and Los Angeles. Slouched in an uncomfortable-looking leather armchair, with his hood halfway pulled up over his long dreads, he had scruffy facial hair that made him look uncannily like Bob Marley. Sweatshirt’s music tends toward logorrhea, and I expected him to be loquacious in person. But here he was: a master of language who didn’t necessarily seem interested in explaining himself or his work.

I first encountered Sweatshirt’s music in 2010, when his debut mixtape, “Earl,” dropped and he was anointed as rap’s nascent enfant terrible. A baby-faced 16-year-old who emerged alongside Frank Ocean and Tyler, the Creator as a member of Odd Future — the Los Angeles-based hip-hop collective that borrowed as much from the antics of “Jackass” as it did from Gucci Mane or L.A.’s history of punk performance — Sweatshirt projected a nauseating, slyly funny nightmare of adolescent rebellion. Read More

The macabre video for that mixtape’s title track depicted Sweatshirt and his friends drinking a puréed drug cocktail before they skateboarded around Los Angeles bleeding from their ears and nipples, suffering seizures and pulling out their teeth over lunch at In-N-Out. Eventually, Sweatshirt yanked out one of his thumbnails. “It so happens that I’m so haphazardous/I’ll puke a piece and put it on a hook and fucking cast the shit,” he rapped amid all this grisliness, with a control that was thrilling and repulsive in equal measure. (The question of what he was vomiting up can’t be answered here.) Sweatshirt was Odd Future’s most skilled lyricist, who seemed to wield techniques like internal rhyme and alliteration as easily as he breathed.

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Sweatshirt was probably destined to be an artist. His mother is the legal scholar and critical race theorist Cheryl Harris, who teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles. His father, the famed South African poet laureate Keorapetse Kgositsile, who left the family when Sweatshirt was a young boy, was a key influence on African American poetry in the 1970s and, through the Last Poets, the Harlem-based Black-nationalist collective, hip-hop. Sweatshirt emerged fully formed from the internet like Athena from Zeus, if Athena were a teenager rapping about serial murder and cannibalism.

In conversation, he oscillates between silliness and earnest reflection on his life and art. Alternately cagey and frank, he’ll seem lethargic one moment only to flash his boyishly devious smile the very next, before wading into a heady discussion of — well, anything. Our conversation pinballed from the importance of memes (“They’re repositories of culture”) to the wonder of semiprivate jet services (“JSX, bro. I’m trying to tell you!”) to the contemporary resonance of the West Indian political philosopher Frantz Fanon. Talking with Sweatshirt, you get the sense of a restless but engaged mind.

But despite making music for the past 12 years, Sweatshirt remains one of rap’s more confounding artists. Where his music once provoked, it is now insular, thoughtful, even withholding, prone to elliptical phrasing, meandering rhymes and off-kilter production that shrugs at popular rap music’s conventions (you’d be hard pressed to find anything that resembles a hook on “Sick!”).

Songs like “Grief,” from his 2015 album, “I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside,” buried drums deep in the mix until they sounded as if Sweatshirt were trying to smother them to death. “East,” the second track off “Feet of Clay” (2019), was a drumless loop over which Sweatshirt rapped in such a way to suggest where the drums would be if he wanted to give them to us. This is not music to dance to or find solace in; it invites us to listen attentively even if he uses his facility with language to foil our understanding of his politics and personal life. “Back off,” he warned listeners in the 2018 song “Shattered Dreams,” describing himself as “standoffish and anemic.” It’s an emotional stance audiences will either collapse into or run away from. Either you want to be a part of it, or you don’t.

I did. Listening to “Sick!” I find myself hunching over as my head bops, thumb hovering over my phone screen, ready to rewind every few bars to untangle a particular knotty turn of phrase. Other people feel the same way: When I saw Sweatshirt perform that night in San Francisco, fans nimbly rapped his lyrics back at him — no easy feat. But it can sometimes feel as if the persona he has built is inscrutable. Talking with me about the mechanics of rapping and the nature of his creative process, he was self-effacing and evasive. “I’ve been running around telling people it’s like magic,” he told me. “You supposed to do the thing, and the people go, ‘Whoa ... that’s ... damn!’”

“Sick!” is Sweatshirt’s latest attempt to make them say “Damn!” To hear him tell it, it’s also his most joyous album. When I expressed disbelief at this idea — “Sick!” is an album inspired by the pandemic — Sweatshirt pushed back. “Up and down is a painful dichotomy to be caught between, bro,” he argued. “There’s a lot of places that are not, like, up or down.” His point was that emotional life can’t be thought of in such stark terms. “Joy is something separate from happiness, because happiness is fleeting. I believe joy emanates from somewhere else within you.”

In the middle of a recording session for “Sick!” Earl Sweatshirt’s son was born. In July 2021, he revealed the baby’s existence to fans. This wasn’t the lavishly produced, P.R.-approved social media announcement you might expect from a celebrity like, say, Rihanna. Sweatshirt’s came in the form of a wry joke. “i thank God everyday that my son is a pleasure to be around,” he posted on Twitter. “he save his greatest challenges for his strongest soldiers and he know im not strong enough to be locked in with a bad vibes baby.” When fans reacted with congratulations in response, he pulled away. “yall already makin too much hullaballoo about the situation and yall makin me nervous,” he wrote.

“His skull is soft,” he said when I asked him about his skittishness around the public’s knowledge of his son. “Like, there’s nothing.” For him, putting the baby on a public stage was out of the question. “The baby’s fresh out. He needs to go to bed for three months. And eat. First three months of a baby’s life, all they do is blink and throw up, puke and scream, and then go back to bed.” He paused, seeming a little awed at being a father. “You don’t even start getting into characters and personalities. You’re undercooked right now. Come holler at me when you can talk.”

The revelation of his son’s birth feels typical of Sweatshirt’s engagement with the public. He’s not a recluse: He owes his career to the internet after all, and he showcases his unruly sense of humor on his Twitter and Instagram accounts. But he courts his fans’ interest only to reassert boundaries around what belongs to him and what he’s willing to give. Compared with his Odd Future compatriot Frank Ocean, who opened up about his sexuality in 2012 via a lengthy Tumblr post, Sweatshirt has approached the question of his personal life elliptically, offering personal details in ways that might leave you with more questions than answers. You won’t hear any Drake-style paeans to his son on “Sick!” though he insists the experience of having him permeates the album. “Everything is there, bro. I’m talking about what I’m going through. But also ... there’s no point where I’m like: ‘My son! My son!’”

Sweatshirt’s ambivalent attitude toward his fame might have something to do with his teenage experience of its toll. In 2010, his mother sent him to a boarding school in Samoa, after he was caught cheating on a test. Soon, the young rapper became a cause célèbre. When Odd Future made its television debut on “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon” in 2011, members of the crew shouted “Free Earl” before and after their performance. The slogan became an internet campaign, and the audience that worshiped “Earl” turned on Harris, making her out to be exactly the type of authority figure Sweatshirt thumbed his nose at in his music. His mother even received a threatening note at her Los Angeles home. With Sweatshirt a cipher, fans assigned him the role of persecuted rebel who had been punished for making transgressive art. That experience taught him that fame can be a fraught privilege. In a 2016 interview, he characterized stardom as “a stressful and dehumanizing pedestal” on which he had been placed too early. “I’m still not an advocate for deification, so I take every opportunity I can to assert my humanity.”

Sweatshirt returned to Los Angeles in 2012 in the company of Leila Steinberg, an entertainment manager whom Harris had brought into the fold after witnessing the popularity of her son’s music. By 2013, after much speculation about what a young rapper who had been held out of the limelight for two years would have to say, he released “Doris.” The album’s verbal pyrotechnics were rapturously received, but the version of Sweatshirt on that album was different from the one on “Earl,” more concerned with exploring his emotional life than shocking his audience.

On the song “Chum,” he offered a confessional narrative about his father’s decision to leave the family, his brotherhood with Tyler, the Creator and his strained relationship with his mother since his return from Samoa. (Sweatshirt and Harris eventually committed to family counseling to improve their relationship.) On “Burgundy,” he spoke about how he was “too busy trying to get this [expletive] album cracking” to see his grandmother as she lay dying.

Since then, Sweatshirt’s music has seemed like an exercise in diffusing fame’s dehumanizing glare. His rapping frustrates any attempts to fix him in place or give easy answers to the question, “Who is Earl Sweatshirt?” Instead, he presents his thoughts and life story via oblique allusiveness. “2010,” the first single from “Sick!” evokes that year as a hinge point in his life but never directly addresses the year’s events. “ ’03, momma rocking Liz Claiborne/Had her stressin’ up the wall playing Mary J. songs,” he raps. Is this about his and Harris’s complex relationship? Or his father’s decision to leave the family? Maybe, but the song is more interested in a series of indelible images and sanguine phrases that jostle on top of a buoyant beat. “Threw me loose change, look at what I made of it/When the mood change I’ma poker face ’em/It’s a new day, who got all the aces?” I’m struck by the image of a stone-faced Sweatshirt in a high-stakes game of poker with his audience, keeping his cards close to the vest.

One way to think of Sweatshirt’s music is as a map of complex joy. As evidenced in “2010,” joy is a function of surviving damage and deprivation. Another way to think of it is as a fundamentally private thing, something he is willing to share with listeners but without explanatory notes. It’s the sign of a musician whose creative process and musical production are interested in the possibilities inherent in Black opacity. His music wades in the murky waters of psychological life, showing us how depression, pleasure, fear, anger, silliness and the whole gamut of human interiority interlock to form something like joy.

In his 1990 book, “Poetics of Relation,” the Martiniquan poet and novelist Édouard Glissant insisted on what he called “the right to opacity”: not only the right for nonwhite subjects to be different from their white colonizers but the right to do so without having to translate that difference. This was not a nihilistic concession to the idea that different cultures would remain forever enigmatic to one another but a dream that people could learn to live together despite such difference. As a mode of relation, opacity insists that we take unfamiliar cultures and individuals at face value, as phenomena that have their own internal logic that we cannot fix in place.

Earl Sweatshirt’s music is an exercise in opacity; the continual reassertion of Blackness needs no translation. He doesn’t clobber audiences over the head with corny references to anti-Blackness or contemporary politics. Instead he turns to the stray detail, the unusual phrase, the disconcerting image. Audiences can’t understand or interpret this music so much as feel and intuit through immersion in Sweatshirt’s emotional world. If we feel he’s giving us the stiff arm, it’s only because he’s forcing us to listen in a way we aren’t used to.

Which isn’t to say his music doesn’t explicitly engage with the world or strive for connection — he’s a sensitive and canny observer of politics. During our conversation in San Francisco, Sweatshirt brought up the 1964 essay collection “Toward the African Revolution,” by Frantz Fanon, who practiced in a hospital in colonial Algeria. Sweatshirt was fixated on one passage: A sick Algerian is seen by a French doctor, who asks what the problem is, and the Algerian responds only that the pain is “in my stomach.” And the Frenchman decides that whatever ails the Algerian isn’t worth much attention. Fanon reads this as the impossibility of the colonizer ever understanding the colonized. “He’s saying,” Sweatshirt told me, “the experience of this African man in France is what’s making his stomach hurt. Ultimately, the problem of colonization is messing with his stomach.” Sweatshirt — the son of an African National Congress activist whose work was once banned in South Africa — recognized something of his life in the anecdote.

Sweatshirt initially planned for the album that became “Sick!” to be based on “The People Could Fly,” a collection of African American folk tales he used to read with his mother. But he conceived of that project before the pandemic’s disruptions forced him to rethink the utility of an album based on folk tales. “ ‘Sick!’ is my humble offering of 10 songs recorded in the wake of the worldwide coronavirus pandemic and its subsequent lockdowns,” he said in the announcement that accompanied the project. “A wise man said art imitates life. People were sick. The people were angry and isolated and restless. I leaned into the chaos ’cause it was apparent that it wasn’t going anywhere. These songs are what happened when I would come up for air.”

He got the idea to change tack when he played a track from his original project for a friend. “I played the album for someone, and when ‘Old Friend’ came on, before they even said anything — I watch people when they listen to music — they physically reacted.” From then on, he knew that he had to make an album that reflected that sense of urgency, one that could address the unease and anxiety of pandemic life.

That urgency comes through sound rather than lyrical content: Unlike that of his last two projects, its production has a buoyancy over which he sounds newly invigorated, embracing everything from trap to distended funk. Winking references to his departed progenitors, including Tupac Shakur, the masked rapper MF Doom and Fela Kuti, abound; the end of the title track features the voice of Kuti explaining that “art is what is happening at a particular time of a people’s development or underdevelopment.” Sweatshirt often sidelines himself in favor of his collaborators’ voices, and to that end, these songs feel like condensed archives of a particular kind of Blackness that seeks to remain elusive; maybe that’s why figures like Shakur, Doom and Billy Woods inspire him. Doom, the alias of the late rapper Daniel Dumile, never appeared without a mask and once sent a doppelgänger to perform at concerts in his stead. You can see why such a trickster artist — someone who refused to be captured by a music industry that did not have his interests at heart — would seize Sweatshirt’s attention.

This isn’t unusual for him. Sweatshirt’s father died in January 2018, about 11 months before Sweatshirt’s third album, “Some Rap Songs,” was released. It’s a loss that, along with his grandmother’s death, has haunted Sweatshirt’s already dark music about depression and grief. “Playing Possum,” from that 2018 album, includes a sample of his father’s reading his poem “Anguish Longer Than Sorrow” alongside a speech by his mother. Sweatshirt doesn’t speak a single word on that track, instead allowing the imbrication of his parents’ voices to communicate the debt he owes to them as an artist — and the debt he owes to the wider Black cultural tradition.

When I asked him about his creative process, he described it as a spiritual phenomenon that involves receptiveness to inspiration, and proper preparation to receive that inspiration. Writing a song was a matter of lifting inspiration out of the chaos of everyday life. “Because it’s in there. It’s in there. It’s given to you in some sort of substance.”

He added: “You know when it’s there. It’s like when you got to pee, and you got to be like — watch out, move, move!” In that regard, Sweatshirt thinks about himself and his music as vehicles. “We’re all repositories of a lot of different things,” he said. In this view, he is a walking archive — a resource rather than a deity. And why should anyone be famous for that?

In February, Sweatshirt held a pop-up event at the Good Company, a clothing store in Lower Manhattan, where a line of fans stretched down the block and around a corner to buy limited-edition merch; the most eager ones started to rush the door. But Sweatshirt was hungry, and soon we climbed into a black S.U.V. on our way to Brooklyn. Out of the corner of my eye I saw confused fans looking on — was that their star? Sweatshirt paused, expressing a bit of astonishment at how many people had turned out for the event. “They got me feeling like a rapper,” he half-joked.

Ismail Muhammad is a story editor for the magazine. Arielle Bobb-Willis is a photographer from New York. Her work can be seen in the traveling “New Black Vanguard” gallery show and book.

PHOTOGRAPHS Arielle Bobb-Willis.

ILLUSTRATIONS Lola Dupre (Adele). Río Delcan La Rocca and Pablo Delcan (Bruno). Darien Birks (Kanye/Andre 3000). Lennard Kok (Hip Hop’s Swagger, Scam Rap, Sad Bangers, Protest Music). Ian Woods (Beach House). Cristiana Couceiro (Doja Cat). Matthieu Bourel (Dean Blunt/NoName). Naya-Cheyenne (Olivia Rodrigo). Jesse Draxler (Lorde). Hisham Akira Bharoocha (Labrinth). Tyler Comrie (Taylor Swift/Tyler The Creator). Vanessa Saba (Jorja Smith/Tems/Nao). Mark Harris (Pink Siifu).

STYLISTS Blige: Jason Rembert. L’Rain and Strange: Umesi. Mitski: Carlee Wallace. Sweatshirt: Zelooperz.

HAIR Blige: Tym Wallace. L’Rain: Susy Oludele. Mitski: Phoebe Seligman.

MAKEUP Blige: Porsche Cooper. L’Rain: Misuzu Miyake. Mitski: Vivianne Raudsepp.

GROOMING Strange and Sweatshirt: Melissa DeZarate.

ILLUSTRATION SOURCE PHOTOGRAPHS JM Enternational/Getty Images (Adele). Screen grab from “Encanto” (Bruno). Jimmy Fontaine (Turnstile). Todd Williamson/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank, via Getty Images (Doja Cat). Erik Carter for The New York Times (Noname). Steve Granitz/FilmMagic, via Getty Images (Tyler). Dave J Hogan/Getty Images (Swift). Charlotte Hadden/Contour by Getty Images (Smith). John Shearer/Getty Images & Jamie McCarthy/FilmMagic, via Getty Images (Lorde). Screen grab from “Euphoria” (Labrinth). Ethan Miller/Getty Images (Beach House). Schaun Champion for The New York Times (Pink Siifu).

ADDITIONAL DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT Jacky Myint