The Self-Conflict Zone
Hua Hsu | The New Yorker
“In the past, the impassive outlaw rapper and the gushing doe-eyed singer crossed paths only as a way of combining their genres’ respective charms for a hit single. Drake cracked the code: He collapsed the distance between these archetypes, seeming equally comfortable rhyming about dodging bullets and baring his insecurities in a come-hither hook.”
The Complete History of ‘Becky With the Good Hair,’ From the 1700s to Lemonade
Jennifer Swann | Fusion
“Some of us recognized it as the ultimate dig, a critique that is ambiguous yet sharply acute. Becky is white. Becky is basic. Becky is bitchy. Nobody likes her. We don’t need to know exactly who Becky is to understand the weight of the insult. Maybe she’s Rachel Roy or Rita Ora, as the tabloids have suggested, or maybe she’s a combination of women, or pure artistic fiction.”
Meet the First Superstars of the Beyoncé Generation
Jada Yuan | The Cut
“Chloe and Halle are a little new to the rhetoric—they pause when I ask if they consider themselves feminists, before Chloe answers, ‘Well, we’re women, so yeah!’—but perhaps that’s because they’ve grown up so soaked in the declarative independence OF Beyoncé that they don’t even recognize it. They are the first wave of young women raised with that believe-in-yourself-and-make-it-happen swagger. For them, female empowerment isn’t a choice they have to assert, and the record industry’s historical sexism feels like NBD. “
Why Jazz Will Always Be Relevant
Greg Tate | The Fader
“Because critics were so quick to label the album a black protest psalm, Butterfly hasn’t yet been fully recognized as the Bitches Brew of our time—an artist’s nuclear meltdown of this era’s dominant musical tropes into a definitive abstract-expressionist statement—one that We The People can feel, call and respond, rally around, freely quote, space out, get our wiggle on to, etc., etc.”
I Love Serial Entertainment and So Can You
Juliet Lapidos | The Awl
“The most demanding part of any narrative art form is the beginning, when everything—the style, the plot, the characters, perhaps even the universe in which the characters operate—is new. You must ask yourself: ‘What is this place? Who are the people? What are they after?’ Series minimize that period of difficulty relative to the total experience. You do the work once, and then you’re free and easy for aforementioned dozens or hundreds of hours of entertainment.”
California Notes
Joan Didion | The New York Review of Books
“I see now that the life I was raised to admire was infinitely romantic. The clothes chosen for me had a strong element of the Pre-Raphaelite, the medieval. Muted greens and ivories. Dusty roses. (Other people wore powder blue, red, white, navy, forest green, and Black Watch plaid. I thought of them as ‘conventional,’ but I envied them secretly. I was doomed to unconventionality.)”
