Culture News

Hip-Hop Trailblazer DMX Dies at 50

The rapper was on life support after suffering a heart attack.

Earl Simmons, the pioneering hardcore rapper better known as DMX, died Friday after suffering a heart attack. He was 50 years old.

"We are deeply saddened to announce today that our loved one, DMX, birth name of Earl Simmons, passed away at 50 years old at White Plains Hospital with his family by his side after being placed on life support for the past few days," the rapper's family said in a statement. "Earl was a warrior who fought till the very end. He loved his family with all of his heart and we cherish the times we spent with him. Earl's music inspired countless fans across the world and his iconic legacy will live on forever. We appreciate all of the love and support during this incredibly difficult time. Please respect our privacy as we grieve the loss of our brother, father, uncle and the man the world knew as DMX. We will share information about his memorial service once details are finalized."

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BTS at the American Music Awards

By Featureflash Photo Agency

Congratulations–you've survived 2019

We've been through haunting commercials, traumatically bad movies, and the fall of a favorite childhood author. But through it all, there's been Spotify, judging our music tastes like a disapproving boomer. And yet, we persisted. In alphabetical order, these are the top 50 musical lifelines of the 2010s. In the top 25 are the likes of BTS, Bon Iver, Kendrick Lamar, and Childish Gambino. Among the bottom 25 are FKA twigs, Tayor Swift, Julien Baker, and Charli XCX. Notably absent is anything by Ed Sheeran or Justin Bieber, because we don't believe bad listening habits should be encouraged. Happy listening in 2020!

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MUSIC

Leon Bridges and Khruangbin: Texas's Sun-Drenched Dream Team

Bridges and Khruangbin invite you to soak up the Texas sun.

Photo by: Jonathan Velasquez / Unsplash

There's something particularly satisfying about seeing incredibly talented artists collaborate with each other.

Today, an unexpected but beautiful collaboration entered soundwaves when Leon Bridges and Khruangbin announced their forthcoming joint EP and dropped their first single.

Khruangbin is a group inspired by '60s and '70s Thai rock, borrowing from psychedelia, funk, surf rock, and Zouk, Indian, and Middle Eastern music. Leon Bridges is a soul singer-songwriter who also draws from '50s and '60s styles, but the two artist's music is most similar in terms of its emotional resonance and peaceful, expansive atmosphere.

Leon Bridges - River (Video)www.youtube.com


Khruangbin - Cómo Te Quiero (Official Video)www.youtube.com

They're also tied together by shared roots: Both groups are from Texas, which might explain their connection. There's no question that their forthcoming EP's lead single—called "Texas Sun"—is inspired by their homeland.

Cinematic and distinctly evocative of the desert landscape, "Texas Sun" feels like it could easily soundtrack the next dreamy Western or Americana masterpiece. Centering Bridges' weather-worn voice and Khruangbin's distinct beachy, reverb-soaked guitars, it's a masterful melding of talents.

Their EP, also called Texas Sun, will be released on February 7th, via Dead Oceans and Columbia Records. It will consist of four tracks, "Texas Sun," "Midnight," "C-Side," and "Conversion."

Khruangbin & Leon Bridges - Texas Sun (Official Audio)www.youtube.com

MUSIC

Cassandra Violet Discusses Gun Violence on "Dead!"

Dealing with the existential nightmare of controlling men.

Los Angeles indie-pop singer-songwriter Cassandra Violet released her latest single, "Dead!" a few days ago.

Violet said of the track, "I wrote this song tongue-in-cheek from the point of view of my alter ego. However, gun violence is a real and terrifying epidemic in this country that must be stopped. For the first 2 months of the release of 'Dead,' 100% of all proceeds will be donated to Everytown for Gun Safety."



"Dead!" opens on dark sonic colors, as Violet's velvety femme fatal voice glides overhead accompanied by three-part harmonies.

"Woke up alone in bed, with echoes in my head / My dress is ripped, and I have no more thread / Your blood I've shed, the blankets are all red / Last night we wed, and then I shot you dead, then I shot you dead, then I shot you dead."

Follow Cassandra Violet Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | Spotify

CULTURE

Collective Unconscious or Conscious Appropriation: Did Mac DeMarco Steal Mitski's Cowboy Archetype?

Mitski's cowboy was a meaningful subversion of patriarchal norms. What is Mac's cowboy trying to say?

Mitski has repeatedly announced that she doesn't care that fellow indie rocker Mac DeMarco just released a single called "Nobody," off his forthcoming new album, Here Comes the Cowboy. Of course, this news is coming about a year after the release of Mitski's fifth album, Be the Cowboy—which also happened to feature a lead single called "Nobody."


MAC DEMARCO - NOBODYwww.youtube.com

On social media, Mitski has been persistently laughing the whole thing off, writing that "I'm 100% sure Mac and I just went fishing in the same part of the collective unconscious… Idk you Mac and you clearly didn't know me lol but thanks for the laugh."

Still, it's hard to understand why no one—no producer, songwriter, or marketing agent—mentioned the similarities. To compound the strangeness, Mitski and DeMarco also both have the same PR person, whom Mitski apparently talks to every day. "What's wild is we have the same PR, so I LOVE my personal conspiracy theory that she heard the album and track titles but kept quiet thinking maybe some Mac fans will mistakenly find me," Mitski added.

After all, both musicians occupy comparable levels of recognition in a similar sector of indie rock. Plus Mitski's Be the Cowboy was one of 2018's best reviewed and most highly ranked albums; Mac and his team would've had to ignore every end-of-year list to have never heard of her.

Their music's also relatively similar, in that they both favor ambient guitars, world-weary lyrics, and dreamy imagery (just listen to DeMarco's "Moonlight on the River" next to Mitski's "Pink in the Night" for comparably psychedelic, mournful, lonely-in-the-dark sentiments)—though their takes on "Nobody" couldn't be more different. Mitski's is a frenetic pop-disco scream that touches on global warming and loneliness, whereas Mac's is a typically low-key, abstract musing that may be about television's ruinous effects on humanity.

Pink in the Nightwww.youtube.com

Moonlight on the Riverwww.youtube.com

Although Mitski might be cool with the presence of more than one cowboy in this town, her fans have not been as accepting. Today, Mitski implored enraged fans not to leap to her defense, tweeting, "while the mob is still in there fighting on my behalf. You may turn against me for saying this, I accept that, I just have to admit it's terrifying to have a big group of strangers acting on my behalf in ways I'd never act myself, and I don't even seem to matter in the equation."

So, to borrow a phrase from a review she wrote about Harry Styles, if Mitski reads this, she'll probably hate it. In that review, Mitski discussed the way that One Direction functions as an idealized projection screen for fans in need of pretty-boy icons to worship. In a very similar way, although Mitski may not have wanted this to happen, her music has become a projection screen for fans treasuring the opportunity to see their identities and emotions represented in an articulate and nuanced way.

After all, Mitski's utilization of cowboy imagery was a purposefully subversive reclamation of an archetypically masculine, colonialist trope. The cowboy—like the kings and demigods that preceded him—is usually a man, violently in charge, and always getting what he wants. Mitski's cowboy turned that trope on its head.

In an interview with The Outline, Mitski explained her album's title, saying that it "kind of came from the fact that I would always kind of jokingly say to myself, "Be the cowboy you wish to see the world," whenever I was in a situation where maybe I was acting too much like my identity, which is wanting everyone to be happy, not thinking I'm worthy, being submissive, and not asking for more. Every time I would find myself doing exactly what the world expects of me as an Asian woman, I would turn around and tell myself 'Well, what would a cowboy do?'"

Mac DeMarco's explanation was a bit different. "Cowboy is a term of endearment to me, I use it often when referring to people in my life. Where I grew up, there are many people that sincerely wear cowboy hats and do cowboy activities. These aren't the people I'm referring to," he said.

Looking at these descriptions side by side, it's easy to see that while Mitski herself might not be angry, some of her fans—many of whom don't often get to see much powerful, successful representation of their identities, mostly due to oppressive hegemonies of white power—might be taking offense. Mitski has grappled before with the implications of her music being taken as something far more symbolic and political than she intended. In response to suggestions that her "Your Best American Girl" was a fuck-you to white male-led music culture, she stated that the song was only about how she personally felt while processing her identity as a Japanese American woman in a relationship with a white man.

But one of Mitski's greatest talents is her ability to make microscopic views of her experience feel universal, and many fans have leaned into this, understanding her music as a touchstone of power, a nuanced and subversive center of solidarity and truth in a white supremacist-run world.

Mitski - Your Best American Girl (Official Video)www.youtube.com

Maybe this all was nothing more than a coincidence. But if Mitski and Mac DeMarco were truly fishing in the "same part of the collective unconscious," what corner of the mind was this, exactly? Maybe the cowboy represents a universal desire for a real hero in an era that seems to desperately need one, or something similarly loaded. But in all likelihood, DeMarco was probably just incredibly stoned, heard Be the Cowboy, and later became wholly convinced he'd dreamt it up himself.

Regardless, Be the Cowboyis available for streaming everywhere, and Here Comes the Cowboy will be coming for us all on May 10th.


Eden Arielle Gordon is a writer and musician from New York City. Follow her on Twitter at @edenarielmusic.


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Conor Oberst and Phoebe Bridgers Want You to Join Their Cult

A surprise new album by folk-rock duo Better Oblivion Community Center presents images of a fractured, damaged world, with hints of hope and religious iconography thrown around for kicks.

Conor Oberst and Phoebe Bridgers Better Oblivion Community - Billboard

via youtube.com

"My telephone doesn't have a camera," begins the first track of Better Oblivion Community Center, the surprise album released this week by Phoebe Bridgers and Conor Oberst.

"But if it did I'd take a picture / of the man on the off ramp / holding up the sign that's asking me for help."

Thus begins an album that's as much about not seeing and not feeling as it is about seeing and feeling too much. That first song, Didn't Know What I Was In For, is a spiraling traipse through a world saturated with news reports about unimaginable tragedies ("got my arms strapped in a straightjacket / so I couldn't save those TV refugees" sing Bridgers and Oberst later in the song). Throughout its ten tracks, the album finds two of folk's modern saints grappling with apathy in the face of a burning world.

Or maybe it's not that serious at all. Better Oblivion Community Center seems designed to invite speculation while also laughing at how intensely it's being scrutinized. That's characteristic of Bridgers, whose melancholic tunes are often cut with biting wit.

At its heart, Better Oblivion revolves around the question of whether or not music or anything we do matters at all, but its frequently upbeat, jangly indie-rock stylings give its hefty subject matter a sense of rhythm and motion. "I wanted to talk about how stupid music is," Bridgers told Rolling Stone of the idea that inspired Didn't Know What I Was In For and ultimately the rest of the album. "I wanted to talk about how awesome music is, and how depressing it is, and why we all make music if it doesn't last forever."

Bridgers, the 24-year-old breakout indie star whose album Stranger in the Alps was released in 2017, met Oberst—the 38-year-old Bright Eyes and Mystic Valley Band frontman—when opening for him on tour, but she'd known about his music long before harmonizing to Lua onstage. She started listening to Oberst in eighth grade, walking around her middle school hallways with Bright Eyes lyrics written on her Converse.

Flash forward a decade or so, and Better Oblivion Community Center was born out of haphazard songwriting sessions in LA. "I'd never had the experience of writing a full record with another songwriter like this," Obersttold Rolling Stone. "The whole experience was just what the doctor ordered for me to get excited about music again." Oberst, long a central player in the sad-folk scene, seems to have found a kindred spirit in his friendship with Bridgers. They wrote most of the album together, sometimes even forgetting who wrote what.

The duo followed the album's surprise release with a video for "Dylan Thomas." Directed by Michelle Zauner of Japanese Breakfast, it's a surreal, cult-inspired dreamscape that features a blindfolded Bridgers and Oberst, towering angels, shadowy figures wearing VR-masks, and a strategically placed Juul at the video's climax. It seems to invite speculation, both luxuriating in its theatricality and also possibly critiquing mass media's cult of personality.

Better Oblivion Community Center - Dylan Thomaswww.youtube.com

A lot of the album's content verges on cultural critique, while at the same time remaining vague enough to stay universal. "All this freedom freaks me out," drones Oberst on "My City," a line that could refer to America's twisted idea of freedom or his inability to chill.

Perhaps some of this vagueness is intentional, part of the album's brand. Before the release, the duo shared a variety of strange, cult-like promotional materials, including a telephone number leading to an odd message and a bus station advertisement bearing the duo's moniker and advertising a "free human empathy screening." Their debut performance on Colbert featured occult symbols and more ads promising services like "Sacred Crystal Implanting and Removal."

So what is the Better Oblivion Community Center, exactly? A metaphor, certainly—for solidarity amidst the storm of the modern world? A cult promising transit to an alternate dimension? An indie-folk duo playing on the Internet's tendency to overanalyze and cling to any entity that promises deliverance?

"At this moment in time everyone is feeling a little impending doom, like oblivion is just around the corner," Oberst explained to NME. "But the idea of the community center means that you're not alone in it. We're all going through this moment in time together, so maybe it's not all doom and gloom in there. Maybe there's some hopefulness in that community concept."

In this era of looming disaster, it's tempting to seek oblivion via any available avenue—but there's also the pressure to open our eyes to the weight of our shared responsibility as human beings. The intense friction that stems from the convergence of these two forces seems to bubble over into Bridgers and Oberst's frenetic compositions. There's a push-pull between desires for rebirth and fear of nothingness, a desperate hope that there's more to existence than what we can see and a suspicion that the angels down the avenue might just be sheets tossed by the wind.

It seems that, regardless, it'll be easier if we face our fate—be it evolution or end times—together. BOCC is heading out on tour in March, and their shows promise to be the ideal venues in which to bond with like-minded seekers of better oblivion, if only for the night.


Eden Arielle Gordon is a writer and musician from New York City.


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