MUSIC

The Most Disturbing Music Videos of All Time

It's Halloween, so if you wanna scare your friends, here is your chance.

Halloween is right around the corner, and while the music video art form is undergoing a transformation thanks to streaming, many of today's artists still rely on music videos to help elevate their music.

Sometimes, the results are horrifying. We all remember the day we were first exposed to Marilyn Manson's eerie music video for "The Beautiful People," or what we were doing when Tool's cartoonish depictions of rape in "Prison Sex" sent us all reeling. As shown by our list below, the music video format is one that can truly shock and awe, and while horror films are having their moment this week, let's revisit some of the most disturbing music videos in recent memory.

"A Little Piece of Heaven" By Avenged Sevenfold

The playful animation, musical skeletons, and goofy cut-outs quickly lull the viewer into a false sense of security, but the next thing you know, the video's protagonist is killing his girlfriend and viciously raping her rotting corpse. At one point he even purchases a heater to keep her body warm. The cartoonish nature elevates the disturbing narrative told by M. Shadows and will forever change the way we listen to this song.

MUSIC

To Achieve Gender Equality in Music, We Need More Female Producers and Musicians

When women aren't writing, producing, and playing their own instruments, when they're singing words they don't believe in, or when they're feeling uncomfortable around all-male recording and production teams, how could they be making their finest work?

Photo by Eric Nopanen on Unsplash

Fact: 21.7% of artists in the music industry are women*.

Additional fact: only 2.1% of music producers are women.

Recently, there's been a lot of discussion about the lack of female representation in the music industry, but there's been less emphasis on the startling lack of female producers. This has to change, because in order for women to achieve real equality in the music industry—not just illusory representation in the form of overt sexualization and commodification—they need to be producing their own music.

They also need to be playing their own instruments, working their own sound systems, and signing artists to their own labels. In short, more women need to be taking control of their work.

In a recent interview, producer and artist King Princessstated that "it's tough out here for women who have a vision, and I think that the most important realization I came to in music was that I need to be the person responsible for my vision. I need to hold myself responsible and learn this shit. It's not hard, it's just daunting to be a tech god."

Miquela interviews King Princess | Coachella 2019www.youtube.com

She's right. Many women, for whatever reason, find themselves deterred from production, resigned to the idea that only men can adequately mix and master their tracks; but, in order to totally take control of their images and sounds, women need to hold themselves accountable and learn.

After all, just because a woman sings in a band and poses for press photos does not mean that her success is a victory for women on the whole. Women have been featured as vocalists in front of all-male bands since time immemorial, propped up as pretty faces while men rail on their guitars, fiddle with the levers on their soundboards, and pull the strings of the entire situation.

Plus, female frontwomen—especially in the commercial cover band industry—are often held to disturbingly sexist standards. Just look at the ads for artists on Craigslist and you'll notice that many of the calls for female vocalists specify that the candidate must be "in good shape" or even "slim," a disturbing and archaic requirement that throws the standards and requirements that haunt the music industry in stark relief.

This isn't to say that all female frontwomen are nothing more than pretty faces. It is to say that if we want to achieve gender equality in the music industry, underrepresented parties need to take up space not only behind the mic but in all aspects of performance and creative development.

First and foremost, female producers would create space for many female artists who might have otherwise been deterred from pursuing music. After all, recording studios and concert halls are dark, intimate spaces where sexual assault occurs far too often, and it's impossible to know how many women have left music industry due to bad experiences at the hands of men who feel they have the power to take advantage of them. Earlier this year, a bassist named Ava revealed that she quit the music industry because of abuse she received at the hands of Ryan Adams when she was underage; and her story is far from an isolated incident. According to The New York Times, Ava "never played another gig" after "the idea that she would be objectified or have to sleep with people to get ahead 'just totally put [her] off of the whole idea' of being a musician." Her experience is not an isolated incident.

This is a tragic but all-too-common story. But if more women were to take up production, claiming these traditionally masculine spaces as their own and creating safe environments for young female artists, who knows what kind of alchemy could occur?

As things are now, the lack of female producers—and the concurrent number of female artists who have left the industry due to assault and intimidation at the hands of powerful men—could explain why women have been so underrepresented on end-of-year lists and in awards circuits. Plus, even if you do remain in the industry, it's quite difficult to create work that's true to your vision if you're not writing and producing at least part of it. (Rihanna can do it, but then again, Rihanna is an ageless superhuman, so that argument is irrelevant). Many pop songs with female vocalists—especially the kind that are getting pumped out by increasingly desperate LA's producers—were clearly not written by their singers, and so they're weighed down by a kind of synthetic detachment. When women aren't writing and producing, and when they're singing words they don't believe in, how could they possibly be making their finest work?

The same is true for instrumentalists. Though there are millions of extraordinary female musicians, a video of the top 10 greatest female guitarists features only a few female shredders and mostly includes songs with vocals, whereas every man in the top 10 is shown shredding on their rather phallic axes in full-on rock god mode. As long as women aren't shredding, their rock music is simply not going to be as effective as Mick Jaggers. (On the other hand, whether we really need more shredding is a topic for another discussion).

Top 10 Female Guitarists of All Timewww.youtube.com


Top 10 Guitarists of All Time (REDUX)www.youtube.com

Of course, this definitely isn't to say that women can't rock—they can and do. Many women have annihilated all expectations and gender norms, despite impossible odds, using their traumas as rocket fuel. Courtney Love transformed her anger and pain from a 1991 assault into the song "Asking For It," and she's been destroying sexist expectations for her entire career. The entire Riot Grrl movement was dedicated to bucking gender norms and bringing unruly, powerful women to the fore.

Hole With Kurt Cobain - Asking For Itwww.youtube.com

Plus, some of our greatest, most innovative (and most criminally underrecognized) guitarists and songwriters have been women—take Big Mama Thornton, the original writer of Elvis's "Hound Dog" who received precisely zero of the royalties he received from it; or Sister Rosetta Tharpe, whose work was a fundamental precursor to rock and roll; or anyone on She Shreds' list of 50 Black Guitarists and Bassists You Need to Know. So, so many female greats—women of color in particular—have been wiped from history or are just beginning to receive their due.

Similarly, though they comprise a tiny percentage of the whole, there have always been female music producers. The problem isn't that they don't exist, but that they're not recognized, argues producer Ebonie Smith, citing many who are doing excellent work but who are not receiving adequate acclaim. These include WondaGurl, the teenager who produced Travis Scott's "Antidote" and part of Jay-Z's Magna Carta Holy Grail; Nova Wav, who produces for Kehlani; Nicki Minaj's producer DJ Diamond Kutz; and hundreds of others.

Things seem to be moving forward, at least. Initiatives like Smith's Gender Amplified, Inc. are encouraging women and nonbinary people to take up production and music tech. In terms of instrumentalists, a recent Fender study found that roughly 50% of guitars purchased in 2016 were bought by women or girls; and with publications like She Shreds elevating the voices of diverse female guitarists and bassists, we'll most likely be seeing a whole new generation of players rising from the ashes, the angry cries of their foremothers ringing in their ears. For some, that generation has already arrived—for example, LA Mag recently published an article with the self-explanatory title "Women Are Saving the Electric Guitar."

The Way Ep. 5: Cherry Glazerr's Clementine Creevy Teaches "I Told You I'd Be With The Guys"www.youtube.com


Studio Politics Featuring Ebonie Smith - EPISODE 1 - "ALL IS GOLDEN, GIRLS."www.youtube.com


Still, as of now, the statistics show that far too few of the instrumentalists, composers, conductors, and record label executives who occupy positions of power are female. Of course, women are not at fault for their own historical marginalization. For a long time, women have been quietly discouraged from railing on guitars, instead advised to sit quietly at pianos or to sing prettily while men did the work. Plus, the tour and studio life often wasn't viable for mothers (though naturally, it's always been perfectly acceptable for fathers). The dearth of women in the music industry is the project of age-old systems of sexism and classism.

But things are changing. Sexism still exists, but with women comprising roughly 50% of the workforce, we can no longer use sexism as the sole excuse for why there are so few female producers. On the whole, as a society, we've moved past second-wave feminism, wherein the only goal was to get women into the workplace. But in the realm of music producers, it's like we're still living in the 1950s, when it was radical for women not to want children. Women—as well as men—are to blame for the lack of female producers in the modern era.

Perhaps the issue stems from mindset. "What the experiences of women reveal is that the biggest barrier they face is the way the music industry thinks about women," said Professor Stacey Smith, whose studies generated a report called 'Inclusion in the Recording Studio?' Smith writes, "The perception of women is highly stereotypical, sexualized and without skill. Until those core beliefs are altered, women will continue to face a roadblock as they navigate their careers."

After all, production requires a unique combination of attention to detail, technological savvy, artistic vision, and brash fearlessness. You can learn literally endless amounts about how to produce, how to mix and master and EQ every fiber of every note; but ultimately, production is taking shot after shot into the dark. It's about believing in your own ability to hear and shape the music into the form you want it to be in. It's about taking control, the kind that will remain largely unattainable to women as long as the aforementioned perceptions exist.

Hopefully, someday this dissolves and we all realize that we're all floundering in the dark together. Maybe someday we'll all understand that gender is a fluid concept, and the ability to create art is one of the things that binds us together as human beings.

But that is not the world we live in. And until that world exists, we desperately need more women behind the mixing board.

*This article recognizes that trans and nonbinary people have often been more erased and marginalized in the music industry to a much greater extent than cisgender women.


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


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MUSIC

Lil Dicky and Grimes are Kickstarting a New Wave of Climate Change Protest Music

After a long period of silence, popular musicians like Grimes and Lil Dicky are taking notes from Joni Mitchell and have started to release climate protest songs—but will their efforts be enough to launch a movement?

Photo by Jayy Torres on Unsplash

For his new video "Earth," Lil Dicky managed to rally some of pop music's titans to form a truly unique visual and auditory experience.

Featured artists include Ariana Grande (as a zebra asking if she's black or white) and Snoop Dogg (as a marijuana plant); as well as Halsey, Justin Bieber, Ed Sheeran, and even an all-knowing Leonardo DiCaprio. It's a deeply disorienting animated journey across time and space, led by a caveman-esque Dicky.

But if you can get past all of the dirty jokes and layers of fluff, at its heart, "Earth" is a climate change protest song—and for that, it's revolutionary.

Lil Dicky - Earth (Official Music Video)www.youtube.com

Music, art, and activism have long gone hand in hand. In the 1960s, musicians sang tirelessly about bringing the boys back from Vietnam and taking down "the big man," and artists like Bob Dylan and Billie Holiday have long inspired activist movements. Today, artists like Kendrick Lamar and Childish Gambino are steadily releasing protest anthems that are sure to go down in history.


Childish Gambino - This Is America (Official Video)www.youtube.com

Still, though it is one of the most fundamentally pressing issues of our time, climate change has been largely ignored in modern protest music. Just Google "climate change protest music" and you'll find articles with headlines like "Where are all the climate change songs?"

In a way, this lacuna makes sense. Climate change can feel like an abstract and unimportant issue, especially for people who fear for their lives when simply walking down the street, or who are too concerned with finding their families' next meal to worry about impending ecological decline. However, climate change will disproportionately affect people of color and lower socioeconomic classes, making it an issue with profoundly intersectional consequences.

And it is no longer an abstract threat—a dire 2018 UN report proclaimed that we have twelve years to reverse the worst effects of climate change, which will effectively decimate the human race if it progresses at its current rate. The existential size of this crisis is unprecedented, and so it calls for unprecedented levels of unity and action—both of which have historically been facilitated by music and art.

Though environmental activism has yet to break through to mainstream popular music, climate change protest music does exist, and it seems to be gaining traction. In March, the singer-producer Grimes announced that her next project will be called Miss_Anthropocene, after an alter ego who personifies climate change. "It's a concept album about the anthropomorphic Goddess of climate Change: A psychedelic, space-dwelling demon/ beauty-Queen who relishes the end of the world," she wrote, adding, "She's composed of Ivory and Oil."

Regarding her inspiration behind the character, Grimes (who now goes by c) explained, "Climate change is something I'm only ever confronted with in a sad/ guilty way…. Reading news and what not. So my goal is to make climate change fun...(I mean, everybody loves a good villain… re: the joker, Queen Beryl)...so maybe it'll be a bit easier to look at if it can exist as a character and not just abstract doom."

Other musicians have tried different approaches to create popular music that raises awareness about climate change. Recently, the artist Maureen Lupo Lilanda collaborated with other Zambian musicians on a song called "Samalilani." The track was released alongside a video comprised of dire scenes of ecological catastrophe—charcoal burning, charred tree stumps, flames devouring a rainforest. Together, the song and film make a powerful, chilling statement.

Theresa N'gambi, James Sakala, Maureen Lilanda, Pompi & Shaps Mutambo - Samalilani (Official Video)www.youtube.com

"It occurred to me that things were changing," Lilanda said of her inspiration behind the song, noting the severe changes she noticed in the Zambian countryside, which a lack of rainfall had turned from a lush, verdant landscape to a barren desert over the course of her lifetime. "Once I understood it, it felt imperative that I change the mindset," she added.

"Samililani" was a collaboration with National Geographic-led initiative Conservation Music, a project led by geographer and musician Alex Paullin. His nonprofit, which has traveled all over Africa in an effort to work with musicians and artists on raising awareness about climate change, has also collaborated with a Zambian reggae group and collective called Yes Rasta! to craft a climate change protest song called "Sons of October."

Sons of October - Yes Rasta! | Zambian musicians teach climate change solutions!www.youtube.com

With its unique ability to access the deepest and most terrifying of human emotions, music is an important and largely untapped resource that might be instrumental in the fight against climate change. "There isn't any other tool [besides music] that you can use that is as effective," Paullin said of his mission. Indeed, music could be vital in helping us collectively move past a state of paralysis or chosen ignorance, into a more unified mindset that will allow us to band together to enact real change.

Before any of this happens, the music needs to be written. Luckily, from an aesthetic perspective, climate change is rich territory. Since time immemorial, artists have waxed rhapsodic about the beauty and power of the natural world, and the threat of its decline creates the kind of existential tension that has long inspired truly masterful works of art.

All this isn't to say that climate change protest music doesn't exist. If you do some digging, you'll find that there actually is a fair amount of music about climate change and environmentalism, stretching back nearly a century. A lot of the greatest music about climate change comes from the 1960s—before anyone knew the true extent of the damage we inflicting on our world in by ceaselessly pumping fossil fuels into the atmosphere. One prescient track is Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi," which still frequently plays on radio stations, having long ago solidified its place as an environmentalist's anthem.

Big Yellow Taxi - Joni Mitchellwww.youtube.com

The early 2000s saw another wave of climate-change-inspired music. Increasingly alarming scientific reports had metalheads taking note: Metallica's song "Blackened" and Black Sabbath's "War Pigs" both explore environmental decline. A few of pop's brightest stars had something to say, too—in 2009, Selena Gomez, Miley Cyrus, Demi Lovato, and the Jonas Brothers collaborated on a song called "Send It On" which donated its proceeds to environmental organizations. More recently, artists including Radiohead and Jack Johnson have been actively writing and speaking out about climate change, as have plenty of indie or lesser-known musicians.


Metallica - Blackenedwww.youtube.com


But the majority of new climate change-inspired music has received little significant commercial attention. Among the outliers are ANOHNI's "4 Degrees" and AURORA's "The Seed," both of which are promising hints at more to come. Weyes Blood's critically acclaimed new album is rife with meditations on climate anxiety, and activists Jimmy and Sid have also been steadily creating innovative protest songs, like many diverse musicians from around the world. Still, much of the most widely publicized recent climate change protest art has, ironically, been created by scientists. For example, in 2015, a young scientist composed a piece for a string quartet based on 133 years of climate change data. While projects like this one are impressive, they are also complex and somewhat inaccessible for those of us who are not scientifically inclined—and certainly, they are not as likely to gain media traction as, say, a song that features Lady Gaga or Beyoncé.

AURORA - The Seedwww.youtube.com

Scientific proof of climate change has been public knowledge for a long time, but clearly facts and figures have not been enough to spark widespread cultural and political action. What we need now is a never-before-seen level of collective support and unity, and this can only happen if climate change becomes an intersectional cultural movement.

Most likely, the next decade will be defined by intense protests across the globe. As activists flood the streets of London, as movements like Sunrise pack Washington, D.C. offices and chant their slogans to the sky during nationwide strikes, and as young kids stand before behemoth politicians and fossil fuel executives and ask them to stop destroying their futures, at the very least, they ought to have inspiring music to accompany them.

So for all its absurdity, Lil Dicky's "Earth" is, at least, a promising indication that climate change is being recognized by some of pop culture's most influential figures. In light of the literally apocalyptic threat that we collectively face—and considering the massive organizational efforts it will take to even start to heal some of the wounds we have inflicted on the earth—it has to be just the beginning.



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


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MUSIC

A Brand-New Song, and All the Snippets Lana Del Rey Has Released from "Norman F**king Rockwell"

Fans are calling this the "messiest" Lana era ever. But it also could be the best, judging by the quality of the music. Here's everything we know.

Photo by M. on Unsplash

In January 2019, Lana Del Rey told the world that her sixth album, Norman F**king Rockwell, was complete.

Since then, she's teased dozens of songs and visual clips—but the album's release date remains elusive, infuriating legions of devoted fans.

It's unclear whether the album is still undergoing a prolonged period of revision, if she's decided to scrap the whole thing, or if it's all beyond her control, though it's always hard to know with Del Rey, who has never been one to follow rules. Still, she's certainly given fans a fair amount of teasers to hold them over in the interim. Here's a timeline of every quote, whispered clip, and blurry visual we have so far.

In January 2018, in an interview withPitchfork, Lana mentioned that one of her newest songs was called "Bartender," and described it as "super weird."

Then on February 25, Del Rey uploaded a video that featured her hanging out with Jack Antonoff, prompting later-confirmed suspicion that they were working together on a new project.

On February 28, Del Rey visited the Ryan Seacrest Foundation, where she began writing a song called "Starry Eyed" on ukulele, which she promised to finish and dedicate to the foundation; it's also unclear whether this song will be on the album.

Live in Seacrest Studios with Lana Del Reywww.youtube.com

On March 5, 2018, Del Rey first teased the lyrics of a song called "Happiness is a Butterfly," a lullaby-like sigh of a track that has continued to reappear throughout Norman Fucking Rockwell's forked pathway to release. On March 30, she released a snippet of the song on Instagram, which she later removed and then un-archived.

On June 12, MTV released a list of upcoming albums, which featured an obviously false March 29 release date for Norman Fucking Rockwell.

A few months later, Del Rey teased and then premiered the psychedelic, Leonard-Cohen-quoting "Mariner's Apartment Complex," which was released on September 12.


Lana Del Rey - Mariners Apartment Complexwww.youtube.com

Then on September 18, she released the equally trippy, luxurious "Venice Bitch" on an interview with Zane Lowe for Beats 1. [links] Regarding the song's length, Del Rey said, "I played it for my managers and I was like, 'Yeah, I think this is the single I want to put out.' And they were like, 'It's 10 minutes long. Are you kidding me? It's called 'Venice Bitch.' Like, Why do you do this to us? Can you make a three-minute normal pop song?' I was like, 'Well, end of summer, some people just wanna drive around for 10 minutes [and] get lost in some electric guitar.'"

Lana Del Rey - Venice Bitchwww.youtube.com

In the same Zane Lowe interview, Del Rey also said, "Working with Jack [Antonoff], I was in a little bit of a lighter mood because he was so funny. So the title track is called 'Norman Fucking Rockwell' and it's kind of about this guy who is such a genius artist but he thinks he's the shit and he knows it and he, like, won't shut up talking about it… I just like the title track so much that I was like, 'OK, I definitely want the record to also be called that."

Several music sites later reported that these singles were "fan singles" and would not be on the actual album, though Del Rey has not confirmed this speculation.

Then on October 4, Del Rey posted an extended video of "How to Disappear," which she later deleted and subsequently unarchived.

On October 12, Del Rey posted a clip of her singing a song called "Cinnamon" on Instagram, which she later deleted and then reposted as well.

In response, a fan Instagram account posted a 2017 quote from an interview withPitchforkwhere Lana stated, "I had some people in my life that made me a worse person. I was not sure if I could step out of that box of familiarity, which was having a lot of people around me who had a lot of problems and feeling like that was home base. Because it's all I know. I spent my whole life reasoning with crazy people. I felt like everyone deserved a chance, but they don't. Sometimes you just have to step away without saying anything."

Del Rey commented on the post, "the quote [from Pitchfork] is a perfect quote to go along with cinnamon [sic]. Some people don't deserve a chance."

On October 30, Del Rey performed "How to Disappear" and "Venice Bitch" at an Apple special event in Brooklyn, a show that was widely praised by fans including CEO Tim Cook.

Lana Del Rey - How to Disappear and Venice Bitch Live at Apple Event 2018www.youtube.com

She also released the full audio for "How to Disappear."

On December 5, she officially announced the album's title at Jack Antonoff's concert for the Ally Foundation and performed two country songs which she announced would not be on the new album.

Lana Del Rey - Hey Blue Baby [Live at Ally Coalition Talent Show]www.youtube.com


Lana Del Rey and Jack Antonoff - Ally Coalition Talent Show “I Must Be Stupid For Feeling So Happy"www.youtube.com

On January 1, 2019, Del Rey posted a video of her singing along to a song called "In Your Car," featuring the lyrics "In your car / I'm a star / and I'm burning through you."

The next day, she posted the audio for her song "Hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have — but I have it."

Lana Del Rey - hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have - but i have itwww.youtube.com

Producer Jack Antonoff tweeted his support, advising fans to "listen at night alone."

Then on January 11, 2019, she released an extended clip of a video for "Happiness is a Butterfly," which used the same visuals she had previously released alongside teasers for "Mariner's Apartment Complex" and "Venice Bitch." The video, relatively dreary and mellow compared to Del Rey's earlier work, featured Ashley Rodriguez and Alexandria Kaye and was directed by Lana Del Rey's sister Chuck Grant.

On March 23, 2019, Del Rey performed "Mariner's Apartment Complex" live for the first time in New Orleans, taking to an onstage swing and thanking the audience for "indulging [her] little folk sensibility" in the process.

Lana Del Rey @ Buku 2019 (Mariners Apartment Complex, Video Games, High by the Beach)www.youtube.com

Most recently, on April 3, 2019, Del Rey posted a snippet of a song that fans have named "You Don't Ever Have To." Some fans speculated that it's a part of "In Your Car," but this remains unknown.

In the midst of it all, she also released a Gucci ad with Jared Leto and has been teasing a book of her poetry, periodically releasing haikus and typewritten pages and even putting out a call for indie bookstores who might want to sell it. When asked about the price, Del Rey said that the book will cost $1, because "my words are priceless."

It's anyone's guess as to when Norman F**king Rockwell will drop, but Del Rey has always been adept at draping all of her work in auras of mystery. She's a master of contrasts, always throwing critics for a loop by combining kitsch and rawness, strength and vulnerability, apathy and passion. She's also always been great at making us wonder about the extent to which her appearance and art have been meticulously manufactured.

Maybe she's leaving a paper trail of sorts that resembles her own fractured consciousness. Maybe she's painting our schizophrenic reality, one defined by upheaval and exponential technological innovation. Or maybe she's just a free spirit whose artistic vision "gets messy" when it comes in contact with reality, as a friend once said.

Regardless, judging by the quality of the fragments that we do have, when the album finally does appear, it'll have been worth the wait.


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


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Interviews

INTERVIEW | Chin-Wagging With Laura Paragano

The flair of "heartland surf rock."

Photo Courtesy Laura Paragano

San Francisco-based artist Laura Paragano recently dropped her debut album Strange Curses. Paragano describes her sound as "heartland surf rock."

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