Jenny Lewis (Opening for Harry Styles) - Love On Tour - Atlanta, GA - 10/28/21 - State Farm Arena

If there's one thing that could be said of our modern era, it's that nothing exists in isolation.

One could even say that nothing goes in just one direction anymore—instead, things are moving in multiple directions, operating in loops, often meeting at crossroads. For a long time, at least in the music industry, things appeared to be stratified, separated by genre, linear visions, and arbitrary categories. Rock artists toured with rock artists; indie stars opened for indie stars. Patrician music lovers looked down on pop-lovers, and pop-lovers bullied indieheads. Success could be purchased with a record deal and marked by a position on a top chart. Gender was divided between a man and a woman. Feminism was disconnected from race and class.

Times are changing. Pop, like fashion, has become fluid and multidimensional. Elton John can collaborate with Young Thug. Lady Gaga can ricochet from electronica to folk and back. Harry Styles has become a bisexual icon and a truly great songwriter, capable of drawing from multiple genres to create nuanced and political pop music.

And now he's going on tour with Jenny Lewis, Koffee, and King Princess. They'll all be opening for him on different stops on his 2020 "Love on Tour" tour, which will begin in April.


A little background: Jenny Lewis is an iconic songwriter who fronted the band Rilo Kiley before creating a body of intensely powerful solo work. Koffee is a singer-songwriter, rapper, and musician from Jamaica who's generated a huge amount of buzz in a short time by putting a fresh and experimental spin on reggae. King Princess is a dream pop star who may or may not be capitalizing on queer aesthetics but still embodies an inspiringly out and proud image.

Styles' choice of openers is brilliant because it brings together so many different devoted and passionate fan-bases. Queer fans will relish the chance to dance along to King Princess, while indie traditionalists and older millennials will come for Jenny Lewis, and Gen-Z fans of cutting-edge music will show up for Koffee. All these musicians are bound together by one common thread: Their music is really, really good. And isn't that what matters in the end?

Rilo Kiley - A Better Son/Daughterwww.youtube.com


King Princess - 1950www.youtube.com


Koffee - Toast (Official Video)www.youtube.com

Unfortunately, the existing tickets sold out with stunning speed and cost an exorbitant amount of money, sadly prohibiting many of Styles' fans from enjoying the experience. (Many of them feel scammed). If Styles were to truly embrace the ethos of his commitment to breaking down all genres and boundaries, he'd make his concerts free, but alas, one can only dream... Until then, let us keep listening to our descriptively titled crossover Spotify playlists (shoutout to "Creamy" and "Pollen"), saying "okay" to Boomers who insist that there are only two genders, checking Co-Star for evidence of discernible meaning, and praying for the day when everything and everyone will truly be free.

Harry Styles - Sign of the Times (Video)www.youtube.com

Louis Tomlinson, previously of One Direction fame, just released his new single "We Made It."

The pop star announced his debut solo album, entitled Walls and dropping January 31, 2020, the day before releasing the song. The music video follows a young couple through the formation of their relationship and the eventual hardships they face, as Tomlinson sort of just looks on and narrates like a creepy, British fairy godmother. It seems as if maybe Tomlinson could only be bothered to go to one day of filming, so they shot the video without him and then just inserted shots of him singing with his hands in his pockets in front of vaguely similar scenery.

But the video aside, it's a song so wholly unremarkable that every time you read the name you may find yourself singing the far superior "Love It If We Made It" by The 1975 in your head—even if you're still literally listening to Tomlinson's song. It offers a repetitive, almost NSYNC-like rhythm and rhyming scheme, with lyrics that a robot could have written in its spare time. Unfortunately, it seems Tomlinson has taken his love of early 2000's British rock and channeled it into the creation of tepid, noncommittal music that sounds like someone trying to imitate The Wombats trying to imitate The Arctic Monkeys. It's so many levels removed from the kind of edgy, punch-you-in-the-face, British rock it's desperately trying to be that it ends up sounding like nothing at all.

MUSIC

Why Music Hates Trump: Prince's "Purple Rain" and Pop's War with the President

Using "Purple Rain" is a particularly low blow. Did anyone really expect anything different from Trump?

Prince

Uncredited/AP/Shutterstock

Donald Trump used Prince's music at a campaign rally, and Prince's estate is not happy about it.

Over a year ago, Trump promised Prince's estate that he would not use any of the late artist's music for his campaign events. But yesterday, "Purple Rain" boomed across the crowds as Trump took to the stage in Minneapolis. In response, Prince's estate posted a photo of a letter that confirmed the President's vow to refrain from using the songs.

Prince fans are as outraged as his estate. As the song played in Minneapolis, protests broke out in the theatre across the street from the rally, which is where the song's original music video was filmed. Now Twitter and the Internet are ablaze with anger, though as usual, the President will likely face no consequences for his blatant disregard of the law and all moral decency.

Prince died in April 2016, months before Trump was elected, but one would imagine that the singer—who openly discussed AIDS, criticized the machismo of the space race, supported Black Lives Matter, and relentlessly fought corporate interests in the music industry—wouldn't approve of 45, to say the least.

Using "Purple Rain" is a particularly low blow. The Trump team's decision to play the song is arguably as insensitive as the time the president played Pharrell Williams' "Happy" mere hours after a gunman killed 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue.

"Purple Rain" is Prince's number one hit, inextricable from his legacy and persona. It's a song about forgiveness and love and the expansive force that truly great music can be. One needs only to watch the first moments of the song's music video to comprehend the force of the song's meaning; you can see it written all over Prince's face.

Prince - Purple Rain (Official Video)www.youtube.com

On the other hand, Trump—as an entity, a symbol, and a politician—is fundamentally hollow, a cheap mutation of garish American greed and corruption. He never fails to dig his claws deeper into all that seems to mean something in this world, and he never expresses an ounce of remorse or empathy.

Using "Purple Rain" in a campaign rally is far from the worst thing Trump has done—encouraging white supremacy and xenophobia, imprisoning innocent children, and denying climate change are contenders for that prize—but it does symbolize something powerful. It also reveals exactly why Trump and music exist in polar opposition to each other. Music is about truth, connection, artistry, and empathy, all of which Trump lacks the ability to understand.

What makes Trump so incompatible with music? Perhaps it's that Trump as an entity is essentially atonal and dissonant. There's no harmony to his way of operating, no beat or rhythm or reason to the spaces he and his administration and supporters occupy. There's no emotional consistency and no resonance to his existence. He stands in opposition to everything that music is and all that musicians tend to stand for (unless you're Kid Rock or Kanye West, tragically). It can't be a coincidence that in The Art of the Deal, he wrote that in second grade, "I punched my music teacher because I didn't think he knew anything about music and I almost got expelled."

Is anyone surprised that this man doesn't respect Prince's legacy enough to refrain from using his work against his will? Has Trump ever granted anyone that decency?

In general, musicians want nothing to do with the president. Who could forget the struggle he underwent to garner support for his inauguration, and everything that's happened since? Just this week, in her Vogue cover story, Rihanna attacked Trump in a discussion about gun violence in America. She said, "Put an Arab man with that same weapon in that same Walmart and there is no way that Trump would sit there and address it publicly as a mental health problem. The most mentally ill human being in America right now seems to be the president."

So many other musicians have asked Trump not to use their music that it would be impossible to list them all here. Adele, Elton John, R.E.M., Pharell Williams, Axl Rose, The Rolling Stones, and many more have told him to keep his paws off their work, and hundreds of others have denounced him in their music and personal statements.

Even if Trump did possess an atom of musicality or knew how to listen to a sound other than the grating industrial noise that certainly fills his own brain, "Purple Rain" would be a strange song choice to use for a campaign rally. When describing the song, Prince said that "'Purple Rain' pertains to the end of the world and being with the one you love and letting your faith/god guide you through the purple rain." In another song, "1999," he associated a purple sky with a kind of final apocalyptic revelation, singing, "Could have sworn it was Judgment Day, the sky was all purple."

It sometimes does seem that Trump is a steward of some kind of apocalypse, indicative of some sort of breaking point. It's likely that his rise represents a rupture in American democracy as we know it, marking a final ending to what we knew and the beginning of something else. This could be a very positive thing, if the anger he's churned up carves out space for new visions of justice and equity in the form of the downfall of corrupt corporate interests, or it could mark our further descent into the end times. Either way, none of this makes Trump's use of "Purple Rain" any less troubling. All we can hope for is that Trump and all he stands for faces Judgment Day sooner rather than later.

MUSIC

Louis Tomlinson Wants to Be in Oasis So Bad

"Kill My Mind" is an Oasis rip off in the least flattering way.

Louis Tomlinson wants us to know that he's been listening to rock music.

Louis Tomlinson - Kill My Mind (Official Lyric Video)www.youtube.com

In an awkward 2017 profile with The Guardian, the former One Direction member described himself as "forgettable" and endorsed the idea that he was the "lowliest" member of the group, citing the fact that he never had a single vocal solo during his time with the band. "I'm trying to work out why it is that I'm [doing this]," he said, as a few offerings off his upcoming solo album played in the background. So he did what any uninspired artist would do: he went back to his "roots" and listened to the music he grew up with. "I grew up loving bands," Tomlinson told MTV. "Because I'm from the north of England naturally everyone's obsessed with Oasis and Arctic Monkeys." Consequently, Tomlinson's new single, "Kill My Mind," sounds like a mediocre tribute to early aughts British rock.

"Kill My Mind" is melodically reminiscent of a 2006 Arctic Monkeys B-side, while lyrics like, "kept me living from the last time, from a prison of a past life," attempt to carry the metaphorical significance of an Oasis record, but mostly just don't make any sense. Tomlinson's attempt at a low nasally growl when he sings, "and you hate me, and I want more," just sounds like Liam Gallagher mimicry. Thematically, Tomlinson's wish-washy narrative makes it sound like he's trying to appear more prolific and rock-and-roll-esque than he actually is. Even the lyric video shows a cartoon Tomlinson directly copying the outfit and stance of Liam Gallagher during an Oasis performance. All of it feels fraudulent, none of it is compelling, and all of it suggests Tomlinson would rather be a third Gallagher brother than himself.