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The show was, unequivocally, going off.
In time with the beat, columns of fire blasted from a complicated and expensive-looking stage setup as a litany of dance hits blasted through the speakers of Los Angeles’ Kia Forum, where more than 15,000 people and their approximately 30,000 ears were gathered to hear the music.
Drunk girls traded compliments in line for the bathroom while staffers trying to prevent fire hazards cajoled people to dance in their seats instead of the aisles. It was a proper arena rager, a de facto badge of success for any artist, but particularly so in the world of dance music.
At the center of it all, John Summit — tanned, smiling, his shirt unbuttoned to a chest level that suggested a regular workout routine — threw up heart hands while manning the cockpit of CDJs before him. It was Nov. 16, 2024, the final evening of the producer’s sold-out three-night run at the Forum, shows executed by a 130-person team working overtime. It was just one of the very big moments of Summit’s biggest year to date, and while the set wasn’t even done yet, in his mind it was already over.
“I got too comfortable by the end,” he reflects three months later, “and I was like, ‘This show is done. This is the last one.’ And not because it wasn’t great. I think it was excellent. But I don’t want to write the same movie twice.”
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John Summit performs at Billboard Presents THE STAGE at SXSW at Moody Amphitheater at Waterloo Park in Austin on March 15. Get your tickets here.
This sentiment embodies three essential truths about Summit. First and most obviously, that the 30-year-old Illinois native has accomplished quite a lot since emerging from the froth of internet buzz over the last five years. Second, that Summit possesses an almost strangely intense drive, a kind of stubborn single-mindedness that propels him forward even when the thing he has spent a year working on is still happening around him. And third: Summit’s tendency to most often describe his life not in terms of music but cinema. His big shows and capital B bangers are, for example, “big-budget projects, like Marvel,” whereas his smaller, clubbier sets “are A24,” he says, referencing the lauded indie studio. He compares the beginning of his sold-out Madison Square Garden show last summer to an action film, calling the pyro-heavy moment “basically me blowing up onstage. It was very Michael Bay-esque.”
Surveying the public-facing landscape of Summit’s life helps to explain his tendency to process it all in leading-man terms. Through an alchemy of talent, will, hard work and smart decision-making, Summit and his team have pulled off one of dance music’s rarest feats: becoming a hard-ticket juggernaut with a signature sound, big-ass hits and intergenerational appeal.
At the Garden, says Wasserman’s Daisy Hoffman, who represents Summit alongside Ben Shprits, “older adult fans” intermingled with younger ones. “I have 35-year-old friends with kids who are doing a girls’ trip to Vail [Colo.] for his show there, while my 25-year-old sister is following his every move on TikTok.”
A DJ achieving this kind of broad appeal is, today, a bit like spotting a snow leopard in the wild. “It’s very rare,” Shprits says. “It is extremely rare.”
OFY top, Lost ‘N Found pants, Tercero Jewelry necklace and rings.
Ysa Pérez
But it’s also not a fluke: Summit is a confident and adorable hustler with high standards and an intense Midwestern work ethic. “I’m delusional,” he says on a recent balmy Wednesday afternoon in Miami, where he moved to in 2020 to try and make it as a DJ. “I thought the first track I ever made was amazing.”
Since his first release in 2017, he has steadily attracted other believers, with his sprawling business now populated by managers, agents, accountants, label operators, radio pluggers, marketers, production designers, social media experts and the videographer who silently and ceaselessly captures footage as Summit shows me around Miami, a city where he has not only made it, but where he now avoids “super-glamorous spots where I feel like people are just staring at me the whole time.”
Dance superstardom has changed him. Whereas his social channels used to be plastered with drunken shenanigans, Summit now posts a lot about exercising. Hours before we meet, he shares an image of a yoga mat on the balcony of the waterfront condo he bought two years ago. While we chat, he talks about his need for consistent sleep (he tucks in at midnight and wakes up at seven) and more than once references his “personal growth journey.” But while Summit is Evolving with a capital E, his tenacity remains unaltered. After releasing his debut album, Comfort in Chaos, last July, he’s already at work on its follow-up. This summer, he’ll also headline festivals including Movement, Lightning in a Bottle and Bonnaroo; launch an Ibiza residency; and play shows in Australia, Europe and beyond.
“I’m hustling harder than I’ve ever hustled before,” he says, his Chicago accent strong. “The shows are only getting bigger and not just bigger, but better. The team is growing. My record label is growing. I’m working on a second album already, whereas I think most dance artists, especially house artists, don’t even do albums. Every year is crazier and crazier. It would be stupid to slow down when it’s snowballing.”
And yet it all occasionally leaves his head spinning. For example, Summit compares spending the holidays in his native Naperville, Ill., to the end of The Lord of the Rings, when Frodo Baggins returns to the Shire after risking life and limb to destroy the One Ring and finds that while his idyllic homeland is the same as when he left it, he — fundamentally transformed by his quest — is not. “I’ve had the craziest life, toured the whole world, had many adventures and late nights, got into some bad situations,” Summit says. “Then I come back home and everything is the exact same.”
One can see how opening Christmas presents in your parents’ living room in the suburbs might seem surreal after playing for hundreds of thousands of people across multiple continents. But it was in Naperville and nearby Chicago where Summit — then a “kind of nerdy runner” born John Schuster — was first exposed to dance music. It happened while seeing deadmau5 at Lollapalooza in 2011, an experience Summit, then 16, has equated to a sort of spiritual awakening. His subsequent journeys through SoundCloud were exacerbated by a high school love interest. “At first, I was just making music to impress my girlfriend at the time,” he says. “She liked all these DJs, and I was like, ‘I can f–king do this.’ ”
OFY top, Lost ‘N Found pants, Rick Owens shoes, Tercero Jewelry necklace and rings.
Ysa Pérez
Summit got serious about DJ’ing and producing while a student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. By 2017, he had graduated with a master’s degree in accounting and was working at Ernst & Young while making music in his off-hours. (And, he admits, often during work hours, too.) He sent “dozens of demos” to a flurry of labels, focusing on esteemed U.K. imprints like Toolroom and Defected Records, which specialize in the house and tech house styles he was making.
“It’s no different than applying for 100 jobs when you’re out of college,” Summit says matter-of-factly of sending out demos. Eventually, a few small labels replied with feedback on how he could improve, and by 2018, they had signed a few of his tracks. By this time, Summit was in touch with a young manager named Holt Harmon, who was working with Summit on the release of a track he had made with an artist Harmon was then working with. The pair clicked.
“I had a call with Holt about, like, ‘How is this getting distributed? What’s the marketing strategy?’ I went very exec mode on him,” Summit says. “I think he was like, ‘Oh, this kid’s not just good at music. He gets it and he’s not lazy.’ I thought the same about him.”
Summit became the third artist signed to Metatone, the management company Harmon co-founded alongside Parker Cohen in 2018. But as things picked up for Summit, the pandemic hit. By now, Summit had been fired from Ernst & Young and was back living with his parents. But what might have seemed like a roadblock became something else.
“People saw the pandemic as a time to take their foot off the gas,” Shprits says. “And here you’ve got a 20-something guy on the verge of taking the next step in his career who saw it as an opportunity to do the opposite.”
In the basement, Summit made music and was extremely online, posting production tutorials, doing livestreams and winning people over with what Shprits calls his “unfiltered” personality. (“I would pay $500 to slap a warm bag of wine at a music festival right now,” Summit tweeted in May 2020, the deep days of the pandemic.) By the end of 2020, he had gone from livestreaming from Naperville to playing a b2b set with Gorgon City broadcast from a Chicago rooftop, racking up millions of views and likes along the way with this, as well as other self-deprecating, unapologetic and funny content. You couldn’t help but root for the guy.
Around this time, Summit moved to America’s dance music capital, Miami, with the goal of playing an extended set at the influential nightclub Space. “People didn’t see me as a serious DJ,” he says. “They saw me as someone who might have blown up on TikTok or something. Then I was doing these eight- to 10-hour sets of pretty underground music, not even playing a big vocal record until four or five hours in, kind of just proving like, ‘Yeah, I’m a f–king DJ.’ That was my version of taking on a very serious role.”
The method acting worked. When clubs reopened across the United States, Summit was suddenly selling out 500-capacity rooms in far-flung cities like Tempe, Ariz., often in seconds. He and his team focused on playing as much as they could, wherever they could, and venues eventually got bigger as the social media reach grew. His single and EP releases were largely house and tech house tracks, with his output helping propel the latter subgenre to increasingly bigger audiences, particularly as Summit experimented with bigger and more vocal-forward records, the kind that typically have maximum crossover potential.
His watershed moment came when he released “Where You Are,” a collaboration with power-lunged British singer-songwriter Hayla, in March 2023. “Before putting it out, I was like, ‘This is going to f–k up my entire career because this is a headliner, main-stage song,’ ” he says. “Very few DJs had become successful in the pop lane. It was like, ‘Am I ready for this challenge?’ Then I was like, ‘F–k it. Let’s do it.’ ”
“Where You Are” spent 26 weeks on Billboard’s Hot Dance/Electronic Songs chart; now has 298.7 million on-demand official global streams, according to Luminate; and was selected as a favorite song of 2023 by another Chicagoland resident, Barack Obama. By December 2023, Summit sold out Los Angeles’ BMO Stadium, moving 21,700 tickets and grossing $1.7 million, according to Billboard Boxscore.
“Where You Are” and other subsequent belters from Comfort in Chaos have, along with Summit’s general presence in the scene, agitated the dance world’s perpetual push-pull between the commercial and underground, a turf war that has long found artists wanting to play the biggest shows and have the biggest hits without losing the credibility and cool factor of dance’s less overtly capitalist sectors. But Summit wants to do both.
“John’s been very vocal about wanting to bring the underground to a large scale while bringing a production level that no one’s ever seen with this style of music,” Shprits says. “That’s always been the guiding light.”
But even if you’re playing music with underground origins, it’s not necessarily accurate to call yourself an underground artist while playing from atop a laser-shooting platform at the center of a sold-out arena. This is why Summit created Experts Only, the name of both the label on which he, in partnership with Darkroom Records, releases his own and other artists’ music and a party series where he plays lesser-known music (“I feel like I have to be very on the forefront with the records,” he says) for smaller crowds in tighter spaces.
“I look at John Summit and Experts Only as two different things,” Summit says. “John Summit is this grand display, a huge-budget production that shows my art and music from the album, whereas Experts Only is a party brand where me and DJ [friends] do cooler underground cuts … You hear so many artists who blew up that are like, ‘I hate playing my big song every night.’ They wish they could play more experimental stuff. I’m getting the best of both worlds.”
Doing both has broadened Summit’s appeal. The underground thing, Shprits says, is “generally attractive to an older demographic that’s experienced with electronic music. Then he has this amazing ability to craft songs that attract your high school and college demographic. Take all of that and then combine it with the personality, the packaging and the A&R’ing from the management and label side, it’s like the perfect big bang.”
And yet, Summit questions what the “hipster snob” John Schuster might think of it all. He recalls firing off “hypercritical” tweets at main-stage dance giants back in the EDM era; he preferred the heady vibes of Michigan’s beloved dance/jam festival Electric Forest and deep cuts like Shiba San’s 2014 house classic, “Okay.” “Now I’m here in those same shoes getting as much s–t talked about me. I think that’s maybe why I can get through it without getting too offended, because that was me doing the s–t-talking.”
CUBEL x The Room jacket and pants, Lost ‘N Found tee, Rick Owens shoes, Tercero Jewelry rings.
Ysa Pérez
But when you read most every social media comment, as Summit says he does, the ability to laugh off insults is helped by what he calls “a good supporting cast.” (He screenshots particularly egregious remarks and sends them to the inner circle for diffusion.) Taking a team approach to his career “is way less lonely,” with every person on the team not only bringing “a Swiss Army knife” of abilities, but together creating a perpetual group hang that’s the antidote to the cycle of loneliness, depression and addiction that has historically plagued dance artists.
Still, he is John Summit of the John Summit project, and his vision is specific. Here in Miami, he has ideas for how he wants to be photographed and filmed. He likes a lot of prep and knowing what the plan is. He’s agreeable and charming. You could also call him bossy — or just someone who knows what he wants.
“For better or for worse, I challenge people around me as much as possible to be at their greatest,” he says. “I’m ever-evolving, and everyone has to be ever-evolving around me.” Cohen says that among the team, Summit is often referred as “the third manager.” Shprits acknowledges that “at many times, John has challenged us to understand where he was going with this and to meet him.”
Summit isn’t quite sure where the drive comes from. “I was fortunate to have a very normal upbringing,” he says, and his parents (his father is a commercial airline pilot and his mother a real estate agent) “are like, ‘You’re doing great. You don’t have to keep pushing.’ I don’t come from an incredibly successful artistic family. There’s no mounting pressure.” At least, not from outside sources.
“This is one of the most competitive industries in the world,” he continues. “I can’t let off the gas because the second I do, someone else is going to steam ahead. I’m going to try my best and try to be the best. Otherwise, what’s the point?”
So, for the foreseeable future, Summit shall keep gunning it. After Comfort in Chaos hit No. 39 on the Billboard 200, he’s now at work on a follow-up album that he wants to be “bigger and better.” While he didn’t get any 2025 Grammy nominations after campaigning for them, he says that just gives him “something to strive for.” And while dance music isn’t even a genre that necessitates albums, Summit sees them as meaningful: “I look at some of the greatest artists over the last generations, where album after album, they try to outdo themselves, reinvent themselves.” He takes cues not only from musicians but high-achieving athletes and, naturally, actors, calling Timothée Chalamet’s recent run “f–king incredible” and particularly inspiring.
For the next album, he’s interested in releasing a short movie alongside it. A recent rewatch of the 2014 film Whiplash inspired him to buy a drum kit and, maybe, play percussion on some of his new music. While he “shot my shot” with pop stars like Charli xcx and Dua Lipa by tweeting at them asking to work together (no collaborations have resulted), he says working with this type of artist “is not needed in my career,” given the strong roster of vocalists with “raw talent” like Hayla, Julia Church and more that he has surrounded himself with. He regularly brings out these vocalists during big shows and “f–king loves it” when they get a huge crowd reaction.
Plus, having tried working with a few pop stars, he finds bumping into their limited schedules “very diva-like. And as a diva myself,” he says with a laugh, “there’s only room for one of us.”
OFY top and tee, Lost ‘N Found x Levi’s pants, Rick Owens x Dr. Martens shoes, Tercero Jewelry rings.
Ysa Pérez
As writing gets underway, he’s also finding that he has grown up a bit since the days when his tagline was “My life is a bender.” (“My bender era walked so brat could run,” he tweets while we have lunch; the sentiment gets 2,500 likes before the plates are cleared.) Comfort in Chaos explored deeper topics than partying, and he says making it was a huge leap in his maturation. A song like his 2022 “In Chicago” (sample lyric: “I’m drunk, I’m high and I’m in Chicago”) “is basically like LMFAO,” he says. “It’s like my ‘Party Rock [Anthem].’ ” Comfort in Chaos, on the other hand, was largely about love and longing. When asked about this subject matter, he acknowledges that “I’m a lover boy” but demurs when asked to expand, saying only, “I tell it through the music, not in interviews.” (If anyone wants to read the tea leaves, the lyrics of Summit’s most recent song, the moody indie dance track “Focus,” inquire, “How’d we get so lost inside of this room?/Watching you turn into someone I never knew/I remember love, but it’s slipping out of view.”)
While Summit works out these big feelings in his new music, he’ll also spend the rest of 2025 headlining major U.S. festivals and touring the world; he and his team are particularly focused on international expansion this year. Outside of Ibiza, he says “there’s really no money” in international shows, but adds that revenue isn’t the point: “I’m young and hungry, and I want to showcase my art with the world.”
It’s all a wild ride, a summer popcorn blockbuster, a journey to Mordor and back. It’s the kind of stuff Summit sometimes thinks about after the workday ends, when “I take an edible and think, ‘Holy s–t, this world is crazy.’ But then I wake up in the morning, snap out of it and get back to it.”
This story appears in the March 8, 2025, issue of Billboard.
From the moment she blasted onto the pop scene in 2008, Lady Gaga became a lightning rod for public speculation.
Every inch of her persona — her outfits, her lyrics, her anatomy — was scrutinized by fans, critics and media outlets alike. When new projects were announced, speculation would follow; what would Gaga do this time? When some of those projects fell commercially short of the stratospheric bar she’d set at the foundation of her career, that speculation curdled into declarations: Gaga’s reign as pop music’s paragon must be over.
Nearly two decades after that industry-reshaping debut, the pop icon is still struggling to manage the weight of those expectations. “Ever since my first album, I did listen to what people would say. ‘Will she outdo herself? Can she top herself? Can she live up to this? She needs to evolve, she hasn’t changed enough,’” Gaga tells Billboard. “There was a lot of noise.”
When it came time for her to embark on creating her seventh studio album, that noise hadn’t gone away. Fans, who had dubbed the untitled project “LG7,” were sharing wishlists of what they wanted to see Gaga do next. What genre would she tackle this time? Would there be high-profile features? Could the long-awaited continuation of “Telephone” finally materialize?
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Sitting in a New York hotel’s conference room, Gaga’s shoulders relax. “Taking the pressure off myself helped me to value what I feel really matters about me as a person,” she says, her face softening. “When you put your artistry first, and then you take the other stuff away … it gave me so much dignity. And I didn’t realize how much I was craving that.”
Mayhem, Gaga’s long-awaited new album (out Friday, March 7 via Interscope Records), doesn’t concern itself with expectations. It does play with them, though, changing up the sonic and thematic spaces it occupies before it can be boiled down into a single idea. In a musical landscape concerned with “album eras,” Mayhem refuses to be easily categorized. Ranging from grinding industrial techno one moment to soulful, heartfelt balladry the next, Mayhem makes its title a thesis statement — the throughline is disorder.
That pandemonium was established early in the process of making the album, thanks to Gaga’s own sense of experimentation in the studio. When setting out to write and record her new project, the singer says she found herself taking a piecemeal approach to her creative process, a welcome change from past efforts.
“There have been times in my career where I had an idea in terms of how to conceptually approach a record. But I would say that this album, from start to finish, was like pieces coming together,” she says. “I did not want to turn it into anything artificial, I really wanted to allow myself to just follow the music. By doing that, it started to slowly remind me of my earlier work.”
As she began piecing her music together, Gaga created a mantra for her work on the album: “Go with the chaos.” Instead of laboring under the expectation of finding a sonic or thematic subject, she instead opted to embrace the tumult itself and see where it took her.
Part of that process involved bringing in a new suite of collaborators — working closely with co-executive producer Andrew Watt and collaborators like Cirkut and Gesaffelstein, Gaga went about crafting an album that sounded like her while still bringing something fresh to the mix. As Cirkut explained to Billboard in November 2024, that wasn’t always easy to balance in the studio. “Do you do something so different that you move away from the things that you are known for?” he asked. “But if you just do the same thing that you’ve been known for, does that end up feeling like a ‘more-of-the-same’ type situation?”
Gaga says that she found herself leaning hard into her own intuition during the recording process. “I think what I look for in collaborators are people that will uphold me as a woman in the studio and follow my vision,” she explains. “I tried musically to work with people that I could push myself with — so that it wouldn’t be exactly what you’ve heard from me before, but there is the DNA of my approach to pop music.”
That approach to her pop sound pays off in spades throughout Mayhem. On early highlight “Perfect Celebrity,” Gaga takes the ruminations on fame that she made a career out of and twists the knife that little bit deeper. Serving as a kind of mirror image to 2009’s “Paparazzi,” “Perfect Celebrity” puts much of the onus back on Gaga as she examines why she fought for fame so vigorously. “I’m made of plastic like a human doll/ You push and pull me, I don’t hurt at all,” she sings. “I talk in circles because my brain it aches/ You say ‘I love you,’ I disintegrate.”
“I had this feeling inside myself of, ‘You can’t write about that. You can’t show this part of yourself.’ And then I was like, ‘No … embrace it, what do you want to say?’” Gaga recalls of the writing process. “It became complicated so quickly; owning that I wanted to be a star, and that it did bring a lot of complication to my life. So then, it’s also that anger that I felt towards myself, that I brought this on myself.”
She takes a beat before continuing. “I was nervous to put it on the album. But part of Mayhem is that I just put it all out there,” she says.
That’s not to say all of Mayhem is shrouded in darkness — later tracks on the album, like the campy disco banger “Zombieboy,” show Gaga shrugging off that self-seriousness to embrace pure pop hedonism. “Part of my personal mayhem is that it’s fun, and that’s why I keep doing it,” she says. “That’s what makes it complicated — it is dark, and it pulls me away from myself, but it’s also the best time. It’s that point where you’re at the party, and you’re totally numbing out, and you’ve fully accepted that by the morning you are not going to feel well, but you’re fully in it.”
As experimental and twisted as Mayhem gets, it’s clear that the early teases of the album have struck a chord with global audiences. “Die With a Smile,” the project’s closing track featuring Bruno Mars, spent five weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 — that’s the second longest stay any of the star’s singles have held in the chart’s top slot, just one week behind her 2011 behemoth “Born This Way.” Meanwhile, “Abracadabra” debuted at No. 1 on the Hot Dance/Pop Songs chart — where it remained for three weeks, — and continues to float around the Hot 100’s top 40.
Gaga is still in awe at both tracks’ immediate success. “I am really grateful, and I am really beside myself,” she says. “I never expect anything like this, because you never know, all you can do is your best. This is really a true honor and privilege.”
Along with becoming one of the biggest hits of her career, “Die With a Smile” also earned Gaga her 14th Grammy — she took home the 2025 trophy for best pop duo/group performance alongside Mars. When she took to the stage at the February ceremony, though, Gaga made sure that she shared her win with the trans community, reminding the audience at home that “trans people are not invisible” and that they “deserve love.”
Looking at the current administration’s ongoing attacks against the trans community, Gaga doesn’t mince her words. “I think it is abysmal, and horrible, and violent and wrong,” she offers, matter-of-factly. “I just want to extend all of my love and gratitude to the trans community for showing us so much strength and love.”
She often shares that same sentiment about her fanbase, the Little Monsters, whom Gaga credits with “having this conversation [with me] through art and fashion and politics for a long time.” While her fans have always been active and outspoken in their support for her, Mother Monster has noticed a shift in her following as of late.
“I’ve seen Little Monsters be so amazing for almost 20 years. I haven’t seen us like this in a long time,” she says, pointing to the swath of videos fans have shared across apps like TikTok and Instagram learning her choreography and creating new art out of her music. “Between the dancing, the makeup. the hair, the costumes, it gives me so much life, and I am really honored. All I ever want to do is make something that you press play and you feel good for the duration of the record, and maybe you play it again.”
That activation on her base’s part may have something to do with a similar activation on the singer’s part — fans on TikTok have noticed how frequently Gaga comments on fan-made videos, with some even referring to the phenomenon as “conjuring” Gaga.
“That is me,” Gaga confirms about her TikTok comments, smiling. “That’s the way we always were — it just wasn’t to this extent, because we didn’t have the same tools to talk to each other.” After a pause, a look of incredulity crosses Gaga’s face. “I just … how could I not? I always say that I have the best seat in the house, because I get to watch the fans.”
With her fans fired up for a new album, her singles finding massive global success and her meticulously-crafted album ready to release, Gaga takes one last look at a career’s worth of expectations before dismissing them. “I do think that I felt a lot of pressure, over the years, to prove myself as a musician,” she says. “And that sometimes stopped me from having fun. So, I tried to have a lot of fun making this record.”
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The Jazz and Soul music giant Roy Ayers has passed away. He was 84.
Variety reports that the Jazz vibraphonist’s family confirmed that he passed away on Tuesday, March 4, after a “long illness.”
“It is with great sadness that the family of legendary vibraphonist, composer, and producer Roy Ayers announce his passing which occurred on March 4, 2025 in New York City after a long illness,” reads the Ayers family’s statement. “He lived a beautiful 84 years and will be sorely missed. A celebration of Roy’s life will be forthcoming.”
Ayers is perhaps best known for his song “Everybody Loves The Sunshine,” from his 1976 album of the same name, which has been sampled countless times by Hip-Hop and R&B musicians. Ayers often credited Mary J. Blige’s 1994 “My Life,” which liberally samples the aforementioned song, with reviving his career and enriching his bank account.
Also a composer and record producer, Ayers’ deep and rich catalog of music has long been mined for samples that got flipped into new beats that hipped a new generation of listeners to his grooves. Some of those recognizable songs include “We Live In Brooklyn, Baby,” “Searching,” and “Running Away,” where were in turn chopped and massaged into new works from the like of Pete Rock & CL Smooth, Mos Def, Kendrick Lamar. A Tribe Called Quest and many, many more. Also notable was Ayers’ crafting of the soundtrack to the Blaxploitation classic Coffy, which stars Pam Grier.
One of this writers favorites was Ayers connecting with The Roots on their “Proceed II.”
Rest in powerful peace Roy Ayers.
This story is developing.
If there’s a current “big three” when it comes to different styles of Caribbean music, it’s probably reggae, dancehall and soca. Between Buju Banton’s Stateside return and Vybz Kartel’s release from prison and subsequent Freedom Street bonanza, reggae and dancehall, respectively, earned much-needed boosts to their global profiles thanks to the massive legacy of those Jamaican giants. Now, it’s soca’s turn – and Trinidad is leading the charge.
Led by a slew of joyous, anthemic hits – including leading road march contenders from Bunji Garlin (“Carry It”) and Machel Montano’s (“Pardy”) – this season’s soca anthems are connecting with audiences in a very special way. After soca band Kes played a sold-out concert at New York’s Brooklyn Paramount last year (Dec. 14), the crowd spilled out into the streets, belting out Destra and Montano’s classic “It’s Carnival,” despite the sub-20-degree weather. Last month, Montano timed the release of “Pardy” for the same week he made history with the first-ever soca set for NPR’s Tiny Desk concert series.
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Meanwhile, Trinidadian-born rap megastar Nicki Minaj joined forces with Trinidad Killa for a soca-flavored track called “Eskimo,” and she recently teased a remix of Garlin’s infectious “Carry It.” And, of course, there’s no legitimate discussion of 2025 soca that doesn’t include Yung Bredda’s “The Greatest Bend Over” and Full Blown’s culture-quaking “Big Links” riddim.
On March 3 and 4, tens of thousands of revelers will parade in the streets across Trinidad, honoring the centuries-old Afrocentric celebrations that evolved into today’s Carnival festivities. In addition to the liberating mayhem of J’ouvert morning’s Stink & Dutty Mas and the extravagant costumes of Pretty Mas, Trinidad Carnival also incorporates traditional elements steeped in the island’s rich and sacred history. The national stickfighting competition honors Kalinda martial art and the annual reenactment of the Kambulé riots – a series of 1880s protests against colonial police’s efforts to restrict certain freedoms and aspects of culture – keep history at the center of the celebration.
Of course, music is also an integral part of Trinidad Carnival, with a slew of competitions providing unforgettable entertainment, including Calypso Monarch, Soca Monarch, the King and Queen of the Bands, Panorama, the Carnival Road March. Before the winners of those competitions are decided – particularly Soca Monarch and the Carnival Road March – producers and artists spent the months leading up to Carnival dropping their best swings at the season’s defining soca anthems.
On Sunday (March 2), Montano, who already boasts six International Soca Monarch wins and 10 Road March victories, won his first-ever Chutney Soca Monarch title with “Pepper Vine.” Montano came up short at Calypso Monarch, landing in fifth place with “Bet Meh” behind Helon Francis’ “To Whom It May Be” — as did Yung Bredda, who placed third with “We Rise,” his first-ever showing at a Calypso Monarch final.
Bredda has quickly emerged as one of the defining voices of soca this year with “The Greatest Bend Over,” his take on Full Blown’s “Big Links” riddim, which dropped late last year (Dec. 2, 2024). A Trini star who plays both soca and calypso music, Beedd recently appeared in Billboard’s weekly “Trending Up” column thanks to the steadily rising Stateside streaming totals for “Bend Over.” His sweet, perfect-for-all-ages track is joined by contributions from Montana (“The Truth”) and Kes (“No Sweetness”), as well as “Good Spirits,” the first song penned to the riddim and a notable step into the spotlight for Full Blown as recording artists.
“One day we were messing with some different melodies and exchanging ideas; I would do the music and Kevon would do the writing,” recalls Kory Hart, one-half of Full Blown, from the very studio in which the sibling duo crafted the “Big Links” riddim. “The public sees the highs more than anything else, but we’ve been through a lot of difficult periods. That’s where ‘Good Spirits’ really came from.”
After cutting “Good Spirits,” the brothers decided to make it a riddim because “it helps when people see a big name like Machel Montano as the lead artist.” Full Blown — the Trini sibling production duo of Kory and Kevon Hart — has been working with Montano for over 15 years now, so their collaboration was as natural as it was inevitably great. A later session with Kes at producer Tano’s studio led to “No Sweetness,” which would have been the final song on the riddim if not for the duo’s nagging feeling that they needed Yung Bredda on it as well. Full Blown initially brought the 24-year-old entertainer to the studio “because [they] wanted somebody who would write their own song, so that [they] wouldn’t have to do so.”
Once he heard the riddim, Bredda wanted the duo to write the song, so the collaboration was “put on the shelf for a second.” After sitting with the riddim for a few more weeks, Kevon started sketching out an idea for “The Greatest Bend Over” while his brother was out, and Kory helped structure the song when he returned. Accented by its notable incorporation of zess, a Trinidadian dancehall subgenre, the composition and resounding success of the “Big Links” riddim epitomize Full Blown’s commitment to crafting soca that’s steeped in tradition and unafraid to push forward into new sonic territories.
“The introduction is dominated by the tabla, a percussion instrument that’s the identifying mark of zess,” explains Hart. “It would be a typical groovy soca beat without it. Zess has a very large following among the youth in Trinidad, but [those artists] have been struggling to be accepted by mainstream Trini music – which is soca. For us, this was a very clever way of combining the two and showing the Zess artists that they do what we do, just in a different way.”
In addition to the “Big Links” riddim, Lady Lava’s “Ring Finger” is also making waves across the Caribbean diaspora. A Trini recording artist and poet, Lady Lava has been making music since 2008, cultivating a unique lane characterized by lyrics of female empowerment. With her career back on the upswing after a down period marked by the quick succession of her first pregnancy and the COVID-19 pandemic, Lady Lava is seizing her moment – and courting new fans like Grammy-winning rapper Cardi B.
“You don’t have a ring, then you don’t have a mister,” she proclaims over Aaron Duncan’s thumping “Summer Steam” riddim. A musical reminder to never let a no-good man pull the wool over your eyes, “Ring Finger” is a soca anthem for women by a woman – one that stands out from the scores of odes to wining women sung by male soca artists.
It’s that feminist bent that’s allowed “Ring Finger” to enjoy such marked longevity: The song was a local hit when it first dropped in summer 2024, but TikTok virality over the fall and the winter kept wind in its sails. The official “Ring Finger” TikTok sound plays in over 22,000 posts, and the audio from a live performance soundtracks a further 13,000 posts. Last month (Feb. 19), Lava graced On the Radar with “Ring Finger,” marking a rare soca number on the buzzy live performance platform. By infusing contemporary soca instrumentation with brash lyricism sourced from her poetry background and the femme-forward approach of female dancehall giants like ’90s and ‘00s hitmaker Lady Saw, Lady Lava is ushering in a new era of soca for a younger audience.
“I still write a poem about everything,” she says. “If I wanted to tell somebody something, I would write it in a poem. Music is me putting poem to riddims, that’s how my style of writing does be like that. I like to rhyme and use metaphors and compare things that totally don’t have anything to do with each other just to get people thinking.”
Getting people to think beyond grooving to the music is also the primary goal for Tendaji, a Trinidadian singer, songwriter, and music who bridges traditional calypso and modern soca. With a musical profile anchored by the drums and lavways (call-and-response chants) that soundtracked stickfighting competition, Tendanji is perhaps one of the most fearless Trinidad recording artists when it comes to centering history in the music.
His most recent release, “Doh Cry,” features a music video that showcases the stickfighting tradition in a cinematic, black-and-white aesthetic. At the end of the song, Tendaji calls out the names of stickfighting warriors of eras past, including King Kali, King Bara, King David and King Stokely, honoring their influence and highlighting how stickfighting connects the Trinidad of today to its Afro-Indigenous roots. He built the song with Rishi Mahato of Maha Productions, a prominent chutney music producer who brought some of those elements to the “strongly African, strongly Jouvay energy” of “Doh Kry,” a reminder that “Trinidad is not just one sound,” as Tendaji stresses.
“There’s a lot of music out there for Pretty Feathers Mass. There’s a lot of music out there to wine and jam on Carnival Tuesday, but there ain’t nothing for the jab jab, the blue devils, the stick fighters, etc.” he says. “When Carnival Monday comes, we ain’t looking for flowers music. We want to get into character. We want to go down inside weself. Carnival has a ritualistic element, and because of my history and involvement in the character mas so much, I try to make music that reps them as well.”
Whether through composition, lyrics or presentation, Full Blown, Lady Lava and Tendaji are all making incredible strides in defining the future of soca – especially as the genre eyes a potential global crossover moment off the back of this season’s biggest hits. Notting Hill Carnival is still several months away, for example, but “The Greatest Bend Over” has already gotten so much traction in the U.K. that it would have entered the country’s Afrobeats charts, had it fit the appropriate sonic profile, according to a phone conversation Full Blown had with BBC Radio 1Xtra personnel two weeks ago. All three acts agree that the “crossover” will happen with foreign listeners meeting Trini soca artists on their turf. The era of concessions is over.
“I think we’re getting braver in terms of saying things the way we say it. I don’t know if Afrobeats’ [success] helped with that, but we sing it all the time down here and don’t even know what they’re saying all the time. But it sounds good,” says Hart. “I think the same thing will happen with us and our Trini dialect. Our ‘crossover hits’ have been very few and far between. We’re starting to see that soca has more appeal.”
As the music industry marches further into this era of increased globalization, different styles and genres that may have taken a backseat in past eras now have an opportunity to lead the charge. Trinidad is churning out soca hits that will hopefully lay the foundation for future bouyon crossover hits from St. Lucia and Dominica.
“Even the Jamaicans — who, oftentimes, we wish we were in their shoes so we could have our genres recognized — are looking to soca now because they believe that soca is the next thing,” Hart proclaims. “Our confidence is building; we’re finding our voice and our space and realizing that if we keep it up consistently, the world will catch up to us eventually.”
Anotr were worried. The Dutch dance duo had gained a following with a fleet, flinty style — “that minimal tech-house sound, a little edgy, a little gritty,” says Abel Balder, a singer who has collaborated with the pair. But in the summer of 2022, Anotr were readying new music that veered in another direction: Bubbly and openhearted, with scraps of live guitar and hand-played bass lines.
“The first few months of having the music out, we didn’t put it on Beatport,” says Oguzhan Guney, one half of the duo. “And we didn’t send it out to people because we were afraid of getting judged. We were super concerned about it.”
The attempt at stealth wasn’t entirely successful: The songs, which eventually appeared on the album The Reset, were still judged — just not the way Anotr expected. They were braced for rejection; instead, “everybody started asking us to play the new stuff” during club gigs, says Jesse van der Heijden, Guney’s partner in the group. One track, “Relax My Eyes,” became a streaming hit, with more than 225 million plays on Spotify alone. As van der Heijden puts it happily, “it’s good to be proved wrong.”
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The genial duo stripped away even more of the armor on its latest album, On a Trip, released at the end of January. While there are still songs aimed at clubs, the album sees a duo known for making dance music sometimes abandon the form altogether: “We started making music that wasn’t necessarily four on the floor,” van der Heijden says.
Once again, listeners seem happy to follow Anotr on its adventures: “How You Feel,” a giddy, sensual nu-disco single, is nearing 50 million streams on Spotify. Balder has a theory about the duo’s success: “A lot of people who go to these more edgy club nights, deep down inside, want a hug,” he says. “Maybe they didn’t know they were looking for that. And then Anotr came, and they’re like, ‘You know what? The joy and the lightness, this is what you guys need.’”
Anotr debuted on Defected Records, a dance music institution, in 2015. For years it produced stern, unflagging rhythmic workouts, sometimes moistening the dry beats with fragments of vocal samples. During the pandemic, however, the two became conscious of a gulf between the songs they were playing at home and the tracks they were producing. “We were listening to jazz, funk, soul,” Guney remembers. “[We thought], why not try to bring those two cultures together?”
Anotr is not the first artist from the dance world to move from a programmed, sample-heavy approach to one that is heavier on live instrumentation. Daft Punk built its towering reputation as shrewd samplers before famously discarding that approach in favor of human players on Random Access Memories. Crazy P also started as a pair of sample-happy producers but later morphed: “We effectively wanted to be like a disco band,” co-founder Jim Baron told Billboard.
The inflection point for Anotr was a 2022 song titled “Vertigo.” The track was created with Balder, who had been doing sessions with the duo for years. They always got along well personally, but often landed far apart musically; Balder’s attempts to add “borderline-cheesy melodies” were always politely rebuffed. Until that year, when the duo was reenergized by its ambition to bring more funk, soul, and jazz into its productions.
The pair recorded a racing rhythm track punctured by keening electric guitar; feeling a little reckless, Balder offered to sing on the track, even though he had never cut vocals before. By way of explanation, he remembers that “it was around 3 a.m., and we were on the couch getting high.”
Anotr has enjoyed a number of creative breakthroughs in this state. “Relax My Eyes” was made over the course of a couple days during which the two took “long walks, smoked a lot of weed, and took mushrooms.” (Such psychedelic mushrooms feature prominently in the press release announcing the album, almost as if they were a high-profile executive producer.) Van der Heijden believes the duo has “never been as high” as they were when recording “24 (Turn It Up)(+6).” “We took a lot of shrooms, smoked a lot of weed, and the instrumental already felt really right,” he remembers.
In February 2022, when Anotr debuted “Vertigo” during a boat party off the coast of Uruguay, Balder didn’t expect much. But the audience on the boat “exploded — people kept coming up to all of us saying, ‘Wow, that track is amazing.’”
“Vertigo” came out on The Reset, and several tracks from On a Trip giddily improve upon that template. “How You Feel” channels impassioned Euro-disco, with guitars that flicker like candlelight and come-hither vocals from Leven Kali. That one proved to be so effective ANOTR basically remade it as “Currency,” a deft bilingual collaboration with Cimafunk and Pame. “24 (Turn It Up)(+6)” evokes David Morales’ singles from 20 years ago like “Here I Am.”
At the same time, Guney says, “we wanted to do something more downtempo and more straight-from-the-heart, instead of only feel-good music.” “Care for You” and “Bad Trip” are both stuttering, loungey funk. “Don’t Understand” also gives a cold shoulder to the pounding beats that underpin most dance tracks, and “Can’t Let It Go” is a melancholy ballad. Mushrooms sometimes helped the duo write more candid lyrics: “You’re taking these psychedelics,” Guney explains, “and they basically enhance what you feel from the inside, so you can’t hide your emotions anymore.”
In January, Anotr were in a familiar place — nervous about putting out new music. “It’s a lot of fun trying new things until the moment where you actually know that you need to share it, and anxiety creeps up,” van der Heijden says. “But after we’ve released it, we can see people still f— with this.”
The duo has already embarked on a country-hopping tour that takes it from Australia to South America to the U.S. and then back to Europe, with upcoming U.S. dates including March shows at Brooklyn Storehouse in Chicago’s Radius. “Now,” van der Heijden adds, “we know we can actually do anything we want.”
Depending on when you were first introduced to DPR IAN throughout his decade-plus career in entertainment so far, it may be smart to check on how exactly to address the Australian multi-hyphenate.
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Born Christian Yu in Sydney, Australia, in 1990, and known by his Korean name Barom, the future star introduced his first moniker by uploading dance videos to YouTube as B Boy B.yu — a nickname thought up by his mother to remind him to always “be you” or, in young Barom’s case, “B yu”). After high school, he embraced an unexpected swerve to debut in the K-pop industry as Rome, the leader of the boy band C-Clown. When the group split, he reclaimed Christian and used +IAN after directing music videos for the likes of BIGBANG’s Taeyang and iKON’s Bobby, before ultimately landing on his DPR IAN stage name as part of he and his Dream Perfect Regime’s independent, creative musical movement.
But for a friendly conversation like the first episode of Billboard’s The Crossover Convo, he says Ian is “perfect.”
“There are so many eras that I’ve been through and pertaining to those eras is where a lot of those names came out,” DPR IAN explains to Billboard. “Having it all laid out like that really puts a lot of things into perspective. I’ve really just been on the run and on the fly, and I haven’t been able to process a lot of these things; it’s been quite the journey.”
With a musical journey that began with a childhood obsession with progressive-music icons like Daft Punk and Moby, embracing British-pop icons like The Beatles and Spice Girls, to diving into new genres on multifaceted projects like vocalizing over icy EDM on “Do or Die” with DPR ARCTIC, while delivering a psychedelic rock experience for “Diamonds + and Pearls” on the Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings soundtrack, that features a diverse roster of superstars like Simu Lu, Anderson .Paak, DJ Snake, Saweetie, Swae Lee, BIBI, 21 Savage, Mark Tuan of GOT7 and many more.
The Shang-Chi soundtrack peaked at No. 160 on the Billboard 200 in 2021, but IAN built upon the chart momentum with his 2022 full-length Moodswings in to Order (peaking at No. 146 on the chart), which was soon surpassed by Dear Insanity EP from 2023 (No. 138).
But IAN says the music’s personal impact on listeners is more important than how much they buy or consume it.
“I’ve never really expected any of that as I was starting this,” he says in reaction to his organic chart rise. “Even if it affects one person and if it’s enough to change one person’s world for the better, that was enough for me.”
For the premiere episode of The Crossover Convo, take a journey through DPR IAN’s music history and look out for the next star to go through their global-pop music journey next month.
02/14/2025
Countless chart smashes have had the ideal tempo of 100-120 BPM over the years.
02/14/2025
Ask the members of Horsegirl — Nora Cheng, 21, Penelope Lowenstein, 20, and Gigi Reece, 22 — to describe each other using a single word, and it quickly becomes apparent that their hive mind is strong.
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“I would say that Penelope is strong-willed,” says Reece, the band’s drummer.
“I was going to say that!” Cheng, Horsegirl’s guitarist and vocalist, interjects.
“You a–hole!” Reece replies with a laugh, then adds, “I would say Nora is charming.”
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“I was going to use charming for you,” Cheng says to Reece. “Strong-willed and charming in their own special ways.”
Lowenstein shakes things up. “For Gigi, I’m going to say hilarious, and Nora, I would say, is quirky.”
Cheng: “Are you serious?”
Lowenstein: “Yep.”
Cheng: “Okay, Penelope — rude.”
Lowenstein: “Dude, quirky is sweet.”
Spend some time with the Chicago-spawned indie rockers, and you’ll conclude that all three are strong-willed, charming, quirky, wicked smart and in sync. Although Reece is Zooming in separately from Cheng and Lowenstein, who are roommates and finishing up their studies at New York University, they bounce ideas, jokes and opinions off each other with the kind of joyous ease and musicality that defines their new album, Phonetics On and On, which Matador Records will release on Feb. 14.
The album’s sound has been described as “spacious” compared to the fuzzy, saturated ’90s-style tones of their 2022 debut, Versions of Modern Performance. It is: Phonetics On and On — which was produced by Cate Le Bon and recorded at Wilco‘s headquarters and recording studio — is also lyrically and musically elemental in a way that inspires playing it on repeat. “Julie,” “2468” and “Switch Over” are among the reptile-brain pleasers — fun to sing, hard to forget — that are certain to grow Horsegirl’s fan base in the coming weeks.
Below, the trio talks about the making of Phonetics, as well as some song inspirations, and about the differences between trying to be creative in New York and in Chicago.
Where were your heads at when you were making this album?
Reece: We were thinking a lot about this period of adjusting to something new, and adjusting to something new with each other. We came from a place of being so close – in high school we were almost inseparable, and so similar as people. I feel like we’ve all gone on our own tracks, and we’ve been adjusting to those changes.
Are you all in New York?
Reece: Yeah, I live 15 minutes away from them.
Lowenstein: We were grappling with a change of place which had brought us a lot closer together, as you were saying, Gigi. I also think we had just toured on the first record for a whole summer and experienced together what being in a professional band was like. I think we were feeling really excited to reconnect with what the band is separate from all the noise — to tune everything out and find something on our own, which maybe has to do with the different sound that we ended up naturally coming across.
Cheng: Yeah, I think that a lot of the character of this album was from that break. We did a lot of growing up and having new experiences in that time just by nature of how old we were. That’s definitely part of that record.
Phonetics is the study of speech sounds. How did you arrive at that title for the album?
Lowenstein: We were really excited about using the rudiments of language, and the first things that you’re taught when you’re taught language and reading. Lyrically and instrumentally we wanted to go back to the building blocks, both in the “dah, dah, dahs” and the “do, do, dos ” of grade school and in the standard tuning of the guitar — the open E and open A chords — which were things that we were not excited about in the same way as teenagers. We thought there was something exciting about trying to make a rock record or something dancy or experimental or poppy out of those components that make up every song.
Reece: We were sitting together being like, “OK, we need a title.” We had “On and On” as something that we wanted to be part of it, and we were like, “OK, we just need a great word before that.” The reason we were drawn towards using “On and On” was because of the way those sounds went with the repetition that’s on the record. “Phonetics” immediately seemed like the perfect word.
Is the song “Julie” about an actual person?
Lowenstein: Yeah. Someone I had a crush on back in the day.
Reece: Julie is me.
Seriously?
Reece: No. I was just thinking earlier today that it would be funny if I said that.
Does Julie know the song is about her?
Lowenstein: I don’t know how into it I want to get — I wish I could tell you what you want — but Julie is me. The song is about a boy, and I feel like, yes, they know. But I’m not dying to get, I don’t know…
Granular?
Lowenstein: Yeah, totally. If you know, you know, I would say.
In terms of repetition, I also noticed that the line, “they walk in twos” appears twice. Is there any symbolism to that?
Lowenstein: It kind of happened by accident, but it was also the idea to connect two songs — one of which, “2468,” is about phonetics. Writing a rock song with repetition and basic elements. Then, the song “In Twos” is like a classic love song, with more standard lyrics. We all might have different ideas around this, but I loved the idea of connecting these two types of songs.
Reece: As we were making the record, we were thinking about the ways that different songs played off each other. The lyrics for “2468” weren’t written until we got into the studio, so it was really a moment of let’s be self-referential. It feels like it was intentional even though it was a moment that could have just passed us by.
This album is sparer compared to the last album. How much of that was your decision and how much was Cate Le Bon’s influence?
Reece: In retrospect, if I wasn’t in Horsegirl, I’d be like “Oh, my god, Horsegirl got spacious because of Cate Le Bon.” But it really was that we chose Cate Le Bon because we had so much space in the songs we were writing and demoing. We were also experimenting more with percussion than we had before. We were playing on a glockenspiel and different tambourines and different shakers. We were clearly getting at something very playful, and our songwriting had more space in it. That was intentional. In that regard, Cate made perfect sense. She didn’t have to push us very much in terms of that because we got there on the same page about it.
Cheng: She carried our vision.
Lowenstein: She gave us confidence about our vision. When the three of us are united in an idea, no one is telling us otherwise. But because we admire this woman beyond anything else we were able to make weirder decisions with a lot of confidence because she was like, this sounds really good you guys.
Cheng: Her outside perspective was very valuable. In the studio, I had this feeling that Cate can see the future. She understands how this can work out.
Reece: We were like, “Cate is Cate. She knows everything.”
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Why did you go back to Chicago to record the album when you were all here in New York?
Lowenstein: Part of it was just straight up logistics. We’re in school, and we wanted to do it during winter break. It’s nice to go home and see your family. But I also think we wanted an environment where you can tap out of everything else going on in New York. It would be crazy to imagine going to the studio and then social life resumes. We wanted to turn all of that off, and there’s nothing like going back to where the three of us are from and staying with your family. That kind of rhythm of life is really conducive to cozy, creative energy which is what we wanted. And Chicago is just — it’s really grounding for us to go home there. And we’re very lucky that Cate was down to go to Chicago in the worst month to possibly be in Chicago.
I read that the heat had to be turned off there so it wouldn’t interfere with recording?
Reece: It was so cold, but the opportunity to record at The Loft made perfect sense for us. It felt really cozy, even though we had to turn the heat off. The Wilco team seems to function like a huge family with offices. All the pieces fit together. Cate had already recorded there.
You are a truly collaborative band. That’s not easy. How do you write lyrics, for example?
Lowenstein: We are truly collaborative, which I think is rare, and I realize that the longer we’ve been in this, how rare it is. Lyrically, we work individually. The lyrics that I sing, I wrote. The lyrics Nora sings, she wrote. But the fact that we’re often singing at the same time I think speaks to [our collaborative] nature. Also, we’ve lived together so we know what each other is talking about. When we are writing lyrics, we will ask each other for advice. I think it’s sweet that both of us singing together is such a part of Horsegirl. Even though the lyrics are individual, the melodies are completely collaborative. It all comes from a place of joy, playing together which has always, I think, been the core of this band.
You’ve said in the past that you’ll return to Chicago after school is finished. Do you still feel that way?
All three: Yeah.
Why come to New York at all?
Reece: We had something so special in Chicago, but we didn’t want to remain stagnant in that. That we left at such an exciting time that came with a lot of growing pains. But I think that it made us make the record we made and brought us so much closer together. It helped us realize things about life and being a musician and being young women and being friends with each other. Maybe that would have happened if we didn’t move to New York, but I think that we wanted to come somewhere that felt bigger than Chicago because we felt very comfortable in Chicago. We needed to push ourselves.
Lowenstein: If I still lived in the same city as my family and my dear friends, I wouldn’t have been pushed to develop in the ways that I have moving away from home. I am glad that we made that choice instead of the tour-tour-tour-go-live-at-home kind of grind that you can get into when you become professional at 17. The move was important in our development as people, which impacts the music. But Chicago is a special city.
Do you feel it’s harder to be creative in New York than where you’re from?
Reece: Oh my god, yes. That’s also a huge part of why we won’t live here much longer. It is unsustainable unless you have the means for it. As indie rockers it is not our reality, at least at this point. It makes sense to come here to study and to have these experiences at this young age, but later into our 20s we want to get more into sustainable living and creative practices. Also, it’s harder to be creative in New York, just because of the social environment of it. There’s so many people, so many different cliques. In Chicago it felt like we have this scene, and it feels like an umbrella for a lot of people. Here, it feels like there’s a million different little sections. It’s hard to break in, and it feels like everybody doesn’t want to come together. Which kind of breaks my heart sometimes.
Lowenstein: It’s hard to come together here.
Reece: Yes. And then that inherently gets a little competitive. We are much more for friendly competition [as a form of] motivation.
Are you celebrities at NYU? Do your fellow students say, “That’s Horsegirl!” on campus?
Lowenstein: It doesn’t feel like we’re well known. If we are, well known, people are cool-guying us left and right. I mean, there have been moments where I had to miss class to play Coachella or something, and my teachers are like, “Wait, what?” Then my classmates are like, “Oh, I’ve heard of you,” or whatever. But beyond that, no one cares at all which is I think so healthy and important. I feel very thankful for that separation in my life. [To Cheng] Do you agree?
Cheng: Yeah, totally.
Lowenstein: Nora and I have had several classes together now at this point.
Cheng: People just think that we’re roommate friends. They don’t know about the other dimension to it. I accidentally started playing one of our songs on full blast yesterday.
Lowenstein: Last night Nora did secretly leak a Horsegirl song to the class. No one cared. It’s humbling. It’s like no one cares — and it’s important to remember that as an indie rocker. Otherwise, you start to get a big head.
Reece: When all three of us walk around, then things get a little weird. Especially if we’re at a show or something. But genuinely, these are my best friends. These are who I want to go to things with. So, it’s like — everyone else is making it weird.
Where do you see yourself in a couple of years where you’re done with school and you’re back in Chicago? Have you thought about how Horsegirl evolves?
Lowenstein: This band has been such a source of joy and creativity for us that once we graduate, we [want to] tour for real in a way that we decided not to when we chose to go to school. It’s important for us to do that and to try to live off of this, but also continue to preserve how fun it is and put our friendship first.
I also think, “Maybe one day I’ll just be a Chicago public school English teacher” — which would be a great life. Or I’ve recently been like, “Maybe I’ll go to grad school.” I don’t really know. I feel like we have a lot of different lives. Or maybe we’ll Yo La Tengo it, and be like a touring indie rock band forever.
As long as we all still feel like it’s fun. I feel like we could continue to play music together forever — just take it down a notch professionally — and I would be totally happy with that. Or maybe we’ll take it up a notch professionally. I think we’re all happy to ride it in any direction, and get another job if there needs to be another job.
Reece: Our ultimate plan is that we just want to remain friends and remain in each other’s lives in this familial way. Because there’s nobody else I have gone through or will go through what I’ve gone through with Penelope and Nora. What we have as friends is something that is really worth holding onto. If the band or anything starts to get in the way of that, then that would be the time for a change.
Are you able to support yourselves solely with your music at this point?
Cheng: It depends on the season. Penelope and I are still in school, so we are grateful to still be supported by our families.
Lowenstein: Gigi has a side job.
Reece: Oh yeah. I’m a babysitter. The most rock-and-roll babysitter in Brooklyn.
You’re on one of the most legendary indie labels of all time. Have you gotten advice from any of Matador’s veteran artists?
Reece: Advice, no. We also honestly haven’t met that many other people. But we played a Hanukkah show with Yo La Tengo, and we kicked it in the green room with them for a little bit. I felt like that was one of the most special moments we have had, because Yo La Tengo was the band we’ve all seen live the most, and it’s what we wanted to be when we started our band.
Lowenstein: Those guys knew how much their band meant to us, and they let us sit on the stairs of the stage, so we were visible from the audience. They were really thoughtful in how they treated us. They have been doing it for so long, and for the Hanukkah shows, they are playing night to night to night, and there was still such joy between the three of them.
It can be hard on tour to even introduce yourselves to the local opener who you’re running in and out. Their behavior was advice enough in terms of, I would really love to age like that as a musician. I would love to be thoughtful through and through until the very end. I hope that we can. It is challenging on tour and in this industry to maintain that. But it’s important.
“The revolution ‘bout to be televised, you picked the right time but the wrong guy,” proclaimed Kendrick Lamar atop the hood of a black GNX at the onset of his Super Bowl LIX halftime show performance on Sunday night (Feb. 9).
Lamar’s referencing (and revising) of Gil-Scott Heron’s landmark 1971 recording “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” and his misgivings at being propped up as a leader in this century’s fight for justice cast his halftime performance squarely in the “I am not your savior” light of 2022’s Grammy-winning Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers. But his performance also tested the limits of how much we should praise and applaud subtly subversive imagery during an increasingly fascistic period that calls for more drastic measures, let alone bigger and bolder statements. His rousing, technically impressive performance also raised the question of how much revolution Kendrick could possibly hope to represent, spark, or speak for while being platformed on a stage meant first and foremost to serve the pre-existing establishment.
Three short years after performing cuts from his first two major label studio albums at the Dr. Dre-curated 2022 Super Bowl halftime show, Lamar was named the first solo rapper to ever headline the show. Entering the Superdome as rap’s undisputed king following last year’s explosive and historic battle with Drake, Lamar also boasted five of the 30 biggest songs in America on that week’s Hot 100. His GNX album remained parked in the uppermost reaches of the Billboard 200, and his forthcoming SZA-assisted Grand National joint tour will take him to stadiums across North America (and now the U.K. and Europe) for the very first time. And, of course, there’s also the matter of the prior Sunday’s Grammys (Feb. 2), which found Lamar sweeping all five categories he was nominated in for “Not Like Us,” including record and song of the year – his first General Field wins, and just the second time a hip-hop song has triumphed in either category.
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With 13,000 voting members of the Record Academy crowning a vicious diss track the best-written and produced song of the year, Lamar entered new territory for a rapper. With the self-deconstructing Mr. Morale in his rearview and the Super Bowl on the horizon, Lamar would bring his career-long battle between his politics, his celebrity and his personhood to his biggest stage yet – the final boss level of the video game that would unfold throughout his performance, if you’re willing to extend him that much credit.
In the first 30 seconds of his set, Lamar established his “great American game” metaphor in several different ways. As the camera captured a wide shot of the audience light displays in the stadium, the field lit up in the square-triangle-X-circle button combo of a standard PlayStation controller. The visual helped him move from set to set intentionally – only the two SZA collaborations are performed on the button stages – while also driving home the fact that we’re all getting played by America, some of us in multiple ways at the same time.
But no matter how big e-sports and video games get, this is the Super Bowl — and we’re on a football field, a setting that has an unsettling yet unmistakable connection to the slave plantation. “The power relationship that had been established on the plantation has not changed,” journalist William C. Rhoden writes of professional sports in his illuminating book Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete. “Even if the circumstances around it have.” In a 2018 episode of The Shop, LeBron James called NFL team owners “old white men” who have a “slave mentality” towards players. Three years later, in his 2021 Colin in Black and White Netflix series, former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick likened the NFL draft to slavery. From the slave plantation to mass incarceration, one of America’s favorite pastimes – or games, if you will – is figuring out how to exploit and control Black labor. Later in Kendrick’s show, the set morphed into a prison yard, again underscoring that history.
Here’s the thing: nearly a decade after Ava DuVernay’s prison-industrial complex-explaining 13th documentary and half a decade after summer 2020 protests following the murder of George Floyd seemed to signal a cultural tipping point, the imagery of scores of Black male dancers forming an American flag – albeit one split down the middle, with Kendrick as something of a neoliberal aisle-crossing Moses figure in the center – feels more tired and trite than poignant. If that’s too harsh a reading, perhaps you could say that Lamar is levying his braggadocio against both the NFL and America. He’s telling these institutions to “be humble,” while explicitly centering the Black men who provide them their strength, notoriety and wealth.
If the great American game has always been the ruthless exploitation of Black people, then the great Black American game is finding ways to continue to exist and thrive in America despite all the contradictions that brings. This is the tension that complicates Lamar’s halftime performance and, ultimately, makes it one of the most compelling ones in the tradition’s history. Can subversive images of Black Americana and calls for “revolution” hold any water when they’re broadcast on the country’s most commercialized and capitalistic stage?
In a nod to the Uncle Sam character of 2015’s To Pimp a Butterfly and the Dolomedes character in Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq (2015), Lamar tapped America’s favorite Black uncle to narrate the show. Oscar-nominated acting legend Samuel L. Jackson – dressed as Uncle Sam, the centuries-old personification of America — played a nervous elder preoccupied with the false promise of respectability politics, serving as narrator and helping the set transition between its two modes: GNX-induced myopia and classic crowd-pleasers like “Humble” and “DNA.” Together, Lamar and Jackson blended Uncle Sam with Uncle Tom, a term originating from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin that refers to Black Americans who willingly betray their community in favor of bowing to white Americans.
But before Lamar and Jackson extrapolate that discography tension for a larger commentary on being Black in America, Lamar momentarily sidesteps the game metaphor in the set design, opting to begin rapping an extended snippet of an unreleased GNX track.
Once Lamar descended from the car’s hood to begin “Squabble Up” — his most recent GNX Hot 100 chart-topper – he finally introduced the meatiest part of his “great American game” metaphor, navigating life while being Black in America. For Lamar, after spending most of his catalog exploring that tension in the context of his childhood and personal life, the Super Bowl was a chance to play with those contradictions in the context of his position as one of the preeminent artists and performers of our time. Guided and deterred by Uncle Sam Jackson’s pleas for hits like “Humble” and more palatable fare like “All the Stars,” Lamar’s setlist wove through his most universal anthems and chilly L.A.-heralding GNX deep cuts like “Peekaboo,” which featured some of the most impressive camerawork of the night. The theatrical approach was a fresh one for the Super Bowl halftime show — and a choice that saved the set from crumbling under the weight of its own subtlety.
After all, Uncle Sam Jackson dangled the point in front of 133.5 million viewers when he said: “Too loud! Too reckless! Too ghetto! Mr. Lamar, do you really know how to play the game? Then tighten up!”
By the time he got to “Man at the Garden,” Lamar’s backup dancers were dressed in red, white or blue monochromatic fits to assist his attempts at subverting the iconography of the American flag. During “Garden,” the group of men that surround Lamar don light wash jeans, white sweats, and no beanies – letting their afros, locs, and beaded braids shine alongside their golden grills. This is Black Americana through Lamar’s lens and it’s the most beautiful part of the show; the brotherhood and joy in this scene feel almost antithetical to how the world has been socialized to perceive Black male features and fashion. It’s not necessarily revolutionary, but it would be petty to not acknowledge the power of seeing this image of Black American men on a field that makes money off the battering of their bodies as a slew of white owners hold near-total control of the capital they generate.
Then again, what’s the value of this image if it’s being broadcast during an NFL-sanctioned performance? If the institution that’s allegedly being critiqued is willfully allowing that “critique” to air around the world, doesn’t it mean that they’re in on it? Or that they’ve deemed the critique too harmless of a threat to waste resources trying to thwart? The answer is clearly, “Yes” – as evidenced by the performer who was promptly tackled and detained by security after flashing the Flags of Palestine and Sudan during the performance; he’s now banned from NFL events and venues for life.
Of course, the song on everyone’s mind – including Lamar’s since he pulled two fake-outs set to the track – was “Not Like Us.” Uncle Sam Jackson tried his best to keep things “nice and calm” as “America wants,” but Lamar went for the jugular – because that’s what America really wants. This is the same country that elected a president (who was in attendance Sunday night) with chillingly fascistic tendencies, and the ones that turned “Not Like Us” into a billion-streaming multi-week chart-topper. He’s the first solo rapper to headline the Super Bowl halftime show and he kicked things off rapping unreleased music – clearly, Kendrick was not interested in following the usual headliner rules. And, yes, “Not Like Us” is his biggest pop hit, but it achieved that status while being a mid-battle diss track; K.Dot already reconfigured the pop game with the song’s success. So let the diss track ring.
And with a seismic medley of “Not Like Us” and “TV Off” — which featured a classic hip-hop moment in star producer Mustard’s surprise appearance – Lamar closed his show and declared “game over.” “It’s a cultural divide, Imma get it on the floor/ 40 acres and a mule, this is bigger than the music/ Yeah, they tried to rig the game, but you can’t fake influence,” Kendrick spat before finally launching into Drake-obliterating diss.
If this was just about the music, he would’ve played more hits. If this was just about Drake, he would’ve at least alluded to “Like That.” This was about seizing this historic moment to make as much of a statement as he could within the parameters set by the NFL, Apple Music, and the myriad networks airing the show. 160 years ago, Union General William Sherman proclaimed that plots of land no larger than 40 acres would be allotted to freed families. That promise was eventually reversed by President Andrew Johnson following the Civil War, and almost all of the reallocated land was returned to its pre-war white owners during Reconstruction. That shot to the heart of Black economic power and independence still rings today, and it’s a theme Kendrick explored heavily on Butterfly, hence the reappearance of that album’s Uncle Sam character.
When Lamar raps about the game being rigged and faking influence, he’s talking about shady music industry tactics, the very concept of the American dream, and, of course, Drake himself. And it’s that context – a Black American man who’s one of hip-hop’s most dedicated practitioners knocking out the Canadian actor-turned-rapper who helped change the face of hip-hop for better and for worse – that made the Super Bowl performance of “Not Like Us” such an astounding watch. Kendrick spent the past year telling us that he wanted to “watch the party die” because he feels hip-hop is under siege by people who aren’t part of the culture. On Sunday night, he was itching to get it back in blood on the Super Bowl stage.
After ripping through “TV Off,” Lamar flashed a s–t-eating grin and mimed clicking the power button on a TV remote. Immediately, the camera angle switches back to a wide shot of the stadium with the phrase “game over” written in lights. Kendrick told us he deserved it all, and he won it all. The Super Bowl halftime show game as we’ve come to know it is over, the Drake beef is over, the literal performance is over and the game of respectability politics that have hounded Black Americans for centuries are, in theory, now over.
But does it really work like that? Do any of these messages or images – like the “stars” of the American flag turning into brainwashed troops — really land when they’re being mounted during an event that consciously traded real action and change for the platitudes of musical and artistic representation? Don’t these images also lose their bite when they’re all rolled into a performance that is first and foremost an extended promotional spot for GNX (physical copies of the November release started shipping this weekend), SZA’s extended version of SOS: LANA (released hours before the halftime show) and their co-headlining Grand National Tour?
Maybe this all works if the “revolution” being televised is a Black capitalist rally. We’re aware Kendrick isn’t our savior, but if he’s going to televise self-proclaimed “revolutions,” are we in the wrong for expecting something more? And maybe that’s why he told us to “turn this TV off”; he made it clear from the onset that he was “the wrong guy” for this “revolution.” Lamar himself will not lead us to liberation – and he may never explicitly say anything or create any art that even gestures towards the harsh physical realities of that – but the images and covert messages in his performances (and his own pervasive commercial success) will hopefully spark something inside his younger viewers to begin their own self-liberation journeys in search for a brighter and more just future.
But doesn’t that sound like something we’ve been saying for too long? It’s definitely reminiscent of the conversation around Beyoncé’s 2016 Black Panther-nodding halftime performance. We can applaud Lamar for taking the risk to say anything at all within this moment of his peak commercial dominance, but we also don’t have to act as if it was genuinely revolutionary – because it simply can’t be in its present context. And that’s the conundrum Lamar had to maneuver as a Black performer in a historically white space on Sunday night.
Kendrick Lamar’s exploration of the great American game helped further expose the paradoxes of his own stardom and artistic ethos, but it also allowed him to revolutionize and remodel what can be done at a Super Bowl halftime show – even if none of it will actually set us free or give way to real, material change. He broke, rewrote and played by the rules all at the same time. And that’s the truest Black American game of all, finding a way to exist and thrive in a tsunami of contradictions.
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