Everything from his beginnings — Goblin and Wolf — to CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST had a moment in the sun that night. Every iteration of being a Tyler, The Creator fan was on full display.
The first Betty Davis song I ever heard was “Nasty Gal,” and I was floored. Here was a woman who sang with an authority and individuality deeper than I had ever heard before, who knew all of the influential players within punk and rock music — and who performed with platform boots and an Afro.
P Daddy celebrates its own absurdity, writing party anthems about feeling inadequate. The music often rejects rumination and accepts a strain of Camus-based-philosophy, asserting that one can find joy by embracing the absurdity of life. It seems that the music is telling you to embrace sorrow, but find joy despite it.
On March 10, I experienced the four-hour, sold-out, sixth annual Love Rocks NYC! show in the grandeur of New York City’s Beacon Theatre. Yet my perspective was far different from the rest of the audience. I studied the musicians, yes, but from their backs. As I hunched from my post as drum tech, securely hidden behind the kit and the congas, my eyes darted from the musicians I was working for to the faces of nearly 3,000 radiant music fans.
The music speaks for itself, but it wasn’t just about the beats. He made those beats until he physically couldn’t anymore; until the fingers that so elegantly graced each button on his MPC 3000 stood still. Dilla loved what he did more than anything else, and he rode off into the sunset while all of us were left bobbing our heads, with tears in our eyes.
Now, after two years of a global pandemic and the birth of his first child, Earl is back again with his latest album. Sick! feels like a natural step forward, without Earl forgetting what has brought him to this very moment.
Shrouded in mysterious origins, an indie-rock record was posted to 4chan at some point in the 2010s. For years, online communities have worked together to discover more about the band behind this mysterious CD, leading to what would eventually become the internet’s greatest musical mystery.
Since its birth in the early ‘90s, the riot grrrl movement has been criticized for being exclusive, and many of the earliest riot grrrl acts did follow a certain mold: white, American, cisgender, thin, English-speaking. Because of this exclusivity, many critics of the movement — and even its founders — have said riot grrrl is dead, and rightfully so. Others, like Larissa Oliveira, are less sure.
Truly sexy music seems like a thing of the archetypal 1980s. The luxe, nostalgia-addled hallucination of plastic-laminate luxury and brick glass, combined with cocaine and digital synthesis seems like a paradigmatic backdrop for hypersexually smooth music.