Interview and Photos by Jordan Edwards

Singer-songwriter Nova Miller released the single "Venus" on Friday (June 17). The track is a soaring ballad that showcases the strength of her voice.

Born in Sweden and based in Los Angeles, Miller boasts a five-octave range and an ability to easily shift between upbeat pop and melodic breakup songs. We talked to her about "Venus," the LA music scene, and being part of her home country's rich pop legacy.

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Music Reviews

Megan Thee Stallion's "Suga" Shows the Hot Girl's Soft Side

On her new project, the Houston rapper is more vulnerable than ever.

Megan Thee Stallion - B.I.T.C.H. [Official Video]

Just weeks before releasing her debut, Fever, Megan Thee Stallion lost her mother, Holly Thomas, to brain cancer.

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MUSIC

"Hot Girl Summer" vs. "Summertime Sadness": Lies the Internet Told Me

Megan Thee Stallion told us it's hot girl summer, but what happens when you're not hot?

Megan Thee Stallion - Hot Girl Summer ft. Nicki Minaj & Ty Dolla $ign

If you haven't heard, we're in the midst of Hot Girl Summer.

The term was coined by rapper Megan Thee Stallion, who created an alter ego named "Hot Girl Meg" to accompany the release of her debut mixtape, Fever. Following its release on May 17, the term "hot girl" quickly took off online, becoming a symbol of a metamorphosis into an upgraded, more confident version of oneself.

Stallion later elaborated on the phrase's connotations, clarifying that it was meant to be gender-neutral. "So it's just basically about women and men being unapologetically them, just having a good-ass time, hyping up your friends, doing you, not giving a damn about what nobody gotta say about it," she said. "You definitely have to be a person that could be like the life of the party, and … you know, just a bad bitch."

In typical Internet fashion, the term's message of carefree hyper-sexual-liberation didn't hold up for long against the online world's nihilistic bend. Quickly, Hot Girl Summer memes—those quiet, wry expressions of our online collective consciousness—began cropping up. Though many of them featured photos of people celebrating their own radiant auras, more lamented the failure of Hot Girl Summer, revealing the disappointment lingering just beneath the the term's glossy surface. Refracted through memes, the phrase revealed its own fragility: "me tweeting 'hot girl summer' and then sitting in my room texting 'haha hey what r u doin'" read one. Another, more sobering message: "who was I kidding? I was never meant to have a hot girl summer lmaooo likeee I'm too loving." Another: "how am I supposed to have a hot girl summer with $5?"


Apparently, "hot girl summer" can be shattered by a sad album, or by falling in love.

Sure enough, "hot girl summer" has become a polarizing term that feels liberating for some but promises much to others while actually exacerbating their own self-consciousness and uncertainty.



Predictably, several weeks after Megan Thee Stallion set Hot Girl Summer into motion, Lana Del Rey's 2012 hit "Summertime Sadness" returned to the charts.

"Summertime Sadness" offers a marked alternative to the "hot girl" way of life. While "hot girl summer" connotes unconditional self-love and radical abandon, "summertime sadness" permits languorous hours lying beneath one's fan, mourning anything: the state of the world, one's love life, or lack of funds. "Hot girl summer" is exuberant, brash, performative. "Summertime Sadness" is depressed, tongue-in-cheek, firmly planted in the shade. If "hot girl summer" embodies the untouchable glam of stars of the early aughts, like Britney and Beyoncé, "summertime sadness" is the domain of Lana Del Rey, Lorde, Halsey, and their decidedly anti-pop ethos.

Together, these two divergent summertime pathways highlight a contrast that is very specific to the Internet. The online sphere thrives on polarization, and often a single scroll through recent posts reveals both performative ecstasy and equally performative, exaggerated depressive sentiments. The Internet has always thrived on these kinds of contrasts, as by nature it is well-suited to black-and-white thinking. People are either "cancelled" or deified. There is no such thing as "neutral" or "middle-of-the-road." One is either perpetually bikini-clad and living out a Hot Girl Summer or fully surrendering to the rip tide of summertime sadness. There is no in between.

In reality, however, sharp binaries rarely hold up when they exit the screen and join the equally chaotic but much less starkly divided corporeal world. Both Hot Girl Summer and "summertime sadness" are aesthetically beautiful in the conceptual realm; both begin to glitch when used as blueprints for how to live.

After all, no human is capable of existing in a perpetual state of Hot Girl Summer—not even the bikini models, LA hustlers, and influencers whose online profiles embody the term, but who have quietly and consistently spoken out about the falsity, emptiness, and depression that tends to accompany their professions.

Similarly, not even the Internet's self-proclaimed sad girls exist in a perpetual, stagnant state of summertime sadness. When that sadness does arise, it is rarely of the languorous, vintage-styled sort that Del Rey's early career promoted. In this, "summertime sadness" is equally as hollow and ephemeral as Hot Girl Summer.

Lana Del Rey - Summertime Sadness (Official Music Video)www.youtube.com

Viewed this way, the two terms are far more similar than they initially seem. They are both designed to be surreal and cartoonishly dramatic. They both advocate for not really caring about anything, yet somehow simultaneously promote an all-consuming fixation on oneself.

In this, they both reflect social media as a whole. For all of the ways it promises to connect us, social media has become an echo chamber through which we perform and obsess over fixed, simplified, and ultimately nonexistent versions of ourselves."Hot girl summer" is about being single, feeling fantastic, and not giving a f*ck all at the same time; it connotes billboards, consumption, sugar, perma-smiles. "Summertime sadness" is about languishing inside one's own brain, clinging to a lost love, passively accepting a jaded worldview.

Still, both "hot girl summer" and "summertime sadness" have a time and a place, and they each make for great Instagram captions—but neither should suffice as a permanent way to spend one's summer months. Whereas the Internet thrives on isolated circuits of people with similar views, all-encompassing labels, and quick fixes, real life is far more defined by monotonous repetition, complex relationships, and murky questions that lack definitive answers.

In this corporeal reality, no one is a brand. No influencer is solely comprised of makeup and white teeth; most fitness models have cheat days; most online spiritual coaches don't constantly emanate love and incense; and most managers of depression meme accounts do not spend all of their time lying on piles of rotting pizza and dirty clothes (hopefully).

But it's only July; many summer nights still stretch out before us. When we find ourselves at the impasse between Hot Girl Summer and summertime sadness, perhaps we don't have to choose either path. Maybe we can make peace with the fact that we all have a little of both within us.

Frontpage Popular News

Let's Not Be (feat.)-Obsessed

(feat. Me)

Earlier this month, Drake jumped on a song by a mostly unknown Memphis rapper. The song is now one of the most popular in the country. Two weeks later, its music video has over 20 million hits on YouTube, almost 30 million plays on Spotify, et cetera et cetera. Now BlocBoy has a feature in XXL. Articles like "BlocBoy JB is now in the running to become America's next top rapper" from The Fader have begun to pop up around the internet. Suffice to say that, as a result of one song feature, this persons life has changed forever.

Drake is so powerful, it's creepy. Few people on Earth without "CEO" or "President/Prime Minister" in their title have a greater influence over large populations of people as he does. You'd be hard pressed to find more than a few hip-hop artists of this generation who've come up without the help of a Drake cosign. He hopped on "Tuesday" and created iLoveMakonnen, remixed "Tony Montana" and out came Future, gave "Versace" a verse and helped birth Migos. It's amazing to think back now on his 2012 "Club Paradise" tour, which featured such up-and-coming rappers as Kendrick Lamar and A$AP Rocky as opening acts. Today, that same show would cost you an arm and a leg, then your other arm and your other leg too if you purchase secondhand.

Cosigns and song features long precede Drake, and hip-hop was on a track towards the mainstream even before he entered the set of 'Degrassi'. But in a music space where a single artist can vault another artist to nationwide (even worldwide) fame solely on the basis of a single guest appearance, it makes sense that features have become comparably as significant to a song's success as the quality of the music itself. It's why you'll see weak album tracks like "White Sand" (Migos feat. Travi$ Scott), "Lil Baby" (2 Chainz feat. Ty Dolla $ign) and "Relationship" (Young Thug feat. Future) over-performing their superior counterparts—in this case, songs like "Countin", "Open it Up" and "Me or Us", respectively. Furthermore, in an environment where songs often gain popularity in proportion to the number of famous people involved, it makes commercial sense for musicians to pair up more often, regardless of actual artistic considerations.

At first this was all really cool. "Watch the Throne" put together the game's two biggest names, and it couldn't have been more hyped. Years later it happened again, with "What a Time to be Alive". Of course, both albums turned out to be slightly underwhelming—good but not great, and of lesser quality than any of the involved artists' individual works. What were the lessons learned? Perhaps that putting two artists together isn't simple arithmetic, if you're a listener. Or, if you're a label, that a collaborative album of enough star power can sell regardless of quality.

In 2017, it felt like we learned the second lesson but not the first. There was the 21 Savage-Offset album which was pretty good, and the Travi$ Scott-Quavo tape that was supposed to be even better but ultimately turned out worse. Metro Boomin' and Gucci Mane put in a solid project with a couple of certified bangers, but Young Thug's mixtape with Future was nt worth a second play through.

I think it's great that rappers these days are friends, and the violence and territorialism of the 90's isn't really around anymore. And I'll admit I'm part of the problem here: when the hype machine starts rolling on, say, the rumored Migos-Young Thug tape, I'm right up on it. I'd also never presume to tell anyone else what to listen to. But maybe we could do more to reward quality of music, rather than this additive fame factor, by being aware of ourselves.

BlocBoy is better than Drake on "Look Alive". We're at the point now where that sort of thing really doesn't matter.

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