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In the same way every pro sports championship run looks a little different, so do the ways teams integrate music into their winning formulas. For some, it’s finding the perfect locker room jam; for others, its giving new meaning to the music of a hometown hero.
But for all of them, music provides an X factor that could well make the difference on game day.
Boston Celtics2024 NBA Champions
BIA at halftime of game two of the 2024 NBA Finals in Boston on June 9, 2024.
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Widely considered the most successful franchise in NBA history, the Celtics called on their community during the 2023-24 season when competing for their now league-leading 18th championship. For the season’s marketing campaign, Different Here, “We wanted to focus on showcasing local musical artists and what makes Boston’s culture different,” says Carley Lenahan, Celtics director of live production and entertainment. “Connecting with our community and fans is integral to the support they show the Celtics, and the support and energy from our fans during a championship run is everything.”
On opening night of the 2023-24 season, the Celtics launched their Local Artist Halftime Series with performances by Boston-based hip-hop stars Esoteric and Latrell James and Roxbury native Oompa. “During a championship run, the home court advantage is key to a successful series, and we understand how important it is that the players can feed off the atmosphere and energy in the arena,” Lenahan says. Throughout the season, the nine artists from the Boston area were featured across seven Local Artist Halftime Series shows, culminating in Medford, Mass., native BIA’s performance at game two of the NBA Finals.
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“As a lifelong Celtics fan, I’ve been going to games since I was 10,” BIA says. “The opportunity to perform my music on the iconic parquet floor in front of my hometown crowd and my all-time favorite team was truly an honor and a full-circle moment.”
Kansas City Chiefs2023 and 2024 Super Bowl Winners
Mecole Hardman Jr. (second from right) celebrates with Patrick Mahomes (right), Travis Kelce (second from left) and Jawaan Taylor (far left) after catching the game-winning touchdown pass at the 2024 Super Bowl LVIII in Las Vegas on Feb. 11, 2024.
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Many sports franchises lean on hometown artists to galvanize their teams, but the Kansas City Chiefs find musical inspiration in a different place: their locker room.
Amid the run-ups to the Chiefs’ back-to-back Super Bowl wins in 2023 and 2024, artists like 50 Cent, Future and YoungBoy Never Broke Again were constantly on shuffle to motivate the team during marquee postseason matchups. “I feel like in-season, it’s kind of a variety. We got multiple artists [that we listen to] depending on who is new and who is hot then,” Chiefs All-Pro cornerback Trent McDuffie says. “The postseason, we get back to the classics. We go old school.”
According to McDuffie, one new song has made its way through the cracks since the team won it all last year: BossMan Dlow’s “Get In With Me,” which has become a beloved anthem for players and coaches alike in the locker room. A close second? “Tweaker,” the current viral hit from LiAngelo “G3 GELO” Ball (himself a former pro-baller). But only two players have the privilege of managing the team’s turn-up tunes. “We’re strict on who can control the aux,” McDuffie says. “Most of the time, it’s either Jawaan Taylor or Chris Jones.”
Los Angeles Dodgers2024 MLB World Series Winners
Ice Cube opened game two of the 2024 World Series in Los Angeles on Oct. 26, 2024.
Harry How/Getty Images
The 2024 MLB World Series faceoff between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the New York Yankees couldn’t have been more high stakes. And to commemorate the East-West matchup between two of the biggest sports markets, the MLB tapped two beloved music stars — New York native Fat Joe and Los Angeles icon Ice Cube — to perform at their respective home fields.
Following a 1-0 series lead against the Yankees, Cube performed his 1993 classic “It Was a Good Day” from the pitcher’s mound at Dodger Stadium. Rocking Dodgers gear from head to toe, his performance enlivened the home team, which not only secured a game-two win but the overall series in five games. All-Star Kiké Hernández thanked Cube during the team’s championship celebration at Dodger Stadium, telling the thousands of fans in attendance, “Ice Cube came out with his performance in game two, and we didn’t even play [because] we already won it.”
“As a lifelong Dodgers fan who grew up watching them battle from the ’70s to the ’80s, that was a next-level dream come true,” Ice Cube tells Billboard. “To feel the energy of 52,000 fans going wild was otherworldly and contagious. You could feel it in the air. The crowd, the players — everybody was hyped. It was the perfect recipe for a win, and we all knew it at that moment.”
New York Liberty2024 WNBA Champions
Fat Joe at halftime of game five of the 2024 WNBA Finals in New York on Oct. 20, 2024.
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Following a devastating championship loss the year prior, the WNBA team entered the 2024 season determined to bounce back — and understood the critical role its fans would play in that journey. Those hometown supporters turned out to include not only the spirited crowds flocking to Barclays Center for games, but local hip-hop legends like Fat Joe, Ja Rule and Jadakiss.
“Everything we do needs to have a through line of authenticity,” says Liberty chief brand officer Shana Stephenson, who spent the season recruiting homegrown New York talent to perform at home games. “Sometimes, there might be a pop artist who is a big name at the moment, but I might not want to book them because I don’t know if our crowd will resonate with their sound.”
After dominating the regular season and securing home court advantage throughout the WNBA playoffs, Stephenson leveraged her love for hip-hop to propel the team’s championship run. With its title hopes hanging in the balance, Stephenson enlisted the help of Liberty fan and basketball aficionado Fat Joe to ignite the energy for the crucial game five.
“Everybody knows ‘Lean Back,’ right? My dad can sing it. He leans back when it comes on. That’s an anthem,” Stephenson says.
In the end, her plan was a key element in helping the team achieve its historic championship win in October. “That’s the beautiful thing about music and sports: It can unite people in a beautiful and powerful way,” Fat Joe says. “One time for the Liberty Ladies.”
This story appears in the Feb. 8, 2025, issue of BIllboard.
When WWE Superstar Damian Priest learned that one of the biggest matches of his career would be held in Puerto Rico, he was overjoyed. For Priest, who was raised in Vega Baja, a small town just 26 miles from San Juan, it was more than a match — it was a long-awaited homecoming. But for this no-holds-barred San Juan Street Fight, the former World Heavyweight Champion would be lacing up his boots to face an unusual opponent: one of music’s brightest stars and arguably Puerto Rico’s favorite son, Bad Bunny.
“Here he is doing all these moves and being able to take them,” Priest recalls of the May 6, 2023, barn burner, where he lost by pinfall. “The fact that he could take all these hits and get back up — and I know he was in a lot of pain — that drive to succeed and entertain, he has it, like we all do.”
Bad Bunny actually made his WWE debut in January 2021, at the Royal Rumble in St. Petersburg, Fla., where he faced off against former WWE and UFC heavyweight champion Brock Lesnar. That April, he showcased more daredevil moves and aerial tactics — and turned skeptics into believers — at WrestleMania. And since then, he has continued to solidify his heavyweight status in the wrestling world with his unwavering passion for the craft.
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“Music and WWE have always run parallel,” Priest says. “When I describe how to make it in this business through the grind and the struggle, it’s always easier to explain it to musicians because they get it. It’s the same grind. You start performing in front of little to nobody in these greasy clubs, try to get noticed and then build up a reputation and a bit of a following. Hopefully, you get noticed by a record label or an artist who puts you on a tour, [and] it’s the same thing here.”
Bad Bunny and Damian Priest wrestle during the WWE Backlash at Coliseo de Puerto Rico José Miguel Agrelot on May 6, 2023 in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
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Though the WWE has been around for 70 years, the wrestling conglomerate is enjoying a renaissance — and the music industry has played a significant role in its post-pandemic resurgence. WWE president Nick Khan, who joined the company in 2020, has been at the forefront, connecting the dots between music and the WWE by bringing artists like Bad Bunny, Travis Scott, Metro Boomin, Cardi B, Meek Mill, Jelly Roll and Sexyy Red to collaborate with the company. Whether through actual matches, live TV segments or commercials for future premium live events, the strategic pairing has brought a fresh and diverse audience to WWE while elevating these artists’ status in the wrestling world.
In early January, WWE officially partnered with Netflix to present Monday Night Raw, its 34-year-old flagship show and the longest-running weekly episodic program without reruns in TV history. (The show most recently aired on USA Network from 2005 through the end of 2024.) The three-hour star-packed extravaganza featured wrestling immortals The Rock, John Cena and Hulk Hogan, and celebrities from Vanessa Hudgens and Tiffany Haddish to Travis Scott, Wale and Blxst attended. But unlike his peers, Scott wasn’t just a spectator — he escorted WWE Superstar Jey Uso ahead of his match. Scott — whom WWE chief content officer Paul Levesque (aka wrestler Triple H) gifted a Hardcore Championship belt during the rapper’s ComplexCon performance last November — wore the title draped around his shoulders and fed off the crowd’s electric energy as his own “Fein” reverberated throughout Los Angeles’ Intuit Dome. Sunglasses on and joint in hand, Scott sauntered out alongside Uso with the aura of a ’90s wrestler — a picture-perfect moment for both stars.
“The energy out there was crazy,” Scott tells Billboard. “I was talking to Triple H and was like, ‘Yo. This s–t is wild.’ In my shows, I try to create that maximum energy level and have the people feel they can reach the highest level of ecstasy as far as being happy and free. And in those environments — things like wrestling, and even in sports where the characters can be so free and create this livelihood for kids, adults and families — it’s dope.”
“When I found out I was coming out with Travis, I asked him, ‘Are you ready? Because this s–t is about to pop off,’ ” Uso adds. “I just didn’t expect that the brother was about to light one up before we walked out. He can do what he wants to do.”
This wasn’t the first time Uso had rubbed shoulders with a hip-hop superstar. Last April, at WrestleMania 40, he and Lil Wayne walked down the entranceway together at Philadelphia’s Lincoln Financial Field before a roaring crowd as the rapper’s “A Milli” and Uso’s entrance theme, “Main Event Ish,” played. It was a surreal moment for Uso: Before his WWE debut in 2007, he’d wrestled on the independent circuit alongside his twin brother, Jimmy, and they’d chosen Wayne’s 2004 hit “Go DJ” as their entrance music.
“We all grew up on Wayne in the late ’90s and early 2000s,” Uso says. “I’m talking about when he was with Hot Boyz and all that. It’s crazy how life comes full circle.” Before they walked out, Uso even cajoled Wayne into wearing some Uso merchandise: “He was real dope and cool with everything. He asked if I needed anything from him, and I said, ‘S–t, brother. Can you wear these “YEET” glasses for me? Here, put these on.’ ”
As artists rush to step inside the squared circle, wrestlers are moving with similar intention toward recording studios. Compelling entrance songs are vital in developing their characters, and since the ’90s, revered WWE Superstars like “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, The Rock and The Undertaker have placed fans in a choke hold with not only their iconic visual presentation but also their magnetic theme music. At the heart of those entrance songs is former WWE composer Jim Johnston, who used popular ’90s genres like hip-hop and rock to create songs based on the wrestlers’ characters.
For Austin, famously known as “The Texas Rattlesnake,” his hard-rocking entrance song, “I Won’t Do What You Tell Me,” became known for its glass-shattering sound effects. Austin didn’t record vocals for it, but Cena, whose earlier wrestling persona was a punchline-driven rapper, stepped inside the booth and rapped his “The Time Is Now.” That bold move paved the way for future superstars like Uso and Priest to infuse their entrances with their own personalities, adding a fun new element for fans to enjoy.
“It helps to have someone like [Slayer’s] Kerry King play guitar on my track,” says Priest, whose character has a darker, goth-like personality. “It’s pretty cool. While doing my own vocals on my song is pretty simple, it’s cool because it comes from me and what I wanted to say and feel during certain moments. People can bop their heads to it, and it adds to that aura.”
Bad Bunny, representing Latino World Order, takes the ring as he prepares to wrestle Dominik Mysterio during the WWE SmackDown at Coliseo de Puerto Rico José Miguel Agrelot on May 5, 2023 in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
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Uso’s hip-hop-influenced “Main Event Ish” is arguably the WWE’s most popular entrance song, with a simple but fiery hook (“It’s just me, Uce”), his unbridled energy and sharp ad-libs. His signature wave — now a staple at all WWE shows where he’s competing, in which he climbs the top rope and waves his hands up and down, controlling the crowd like a hip-hop maestro — accompanies the song.
“I flew to New York one day, sat [down with the writing team], put it together, knocked it out and it was on TV the next week,” Uso says of the track. “I knew I wanted to get on there and bring the energy. We always been musical, my whole family. We got hidden talents the world don’t know about.”
And as WWE enters WrestleMania season — with arguably its deepest roster since the ’90s — more musicians are looking to walk down the entrance ramp and pose a challenge, just like Bad Bunny first did four years ago. Fortunately for Bad Bunny, he had a great teacher in Priest, who, prior to their one-on-one showdown in Puerto Rico, served as his in-ring mentor and tag-team partner at WrestleMania 37, where they were victorious.
“A good match with another good wrestler is expected,” Priest says. “What I did with Bad Bunny was magic because nobody expected it. That’s not something you get to do all the time. I don’t know if I’ll ever get that chance again.”
This story appears in the Feb. 8, 2025, issue of Billboard.
Late last year, The Cut’s Cat Zhang ran an explainer on the word “khia” — a phrase that exploded in popularity online as longtime left-of-center artists (Chappell Roan, Tinashe, Charli XCX, etc.) had major mainstream moments after years of build-up and fan anticipation. As host of music podcast Pop Pantheon DJ Louie XIV relays in Zhang’s piece, “A ‘khia’ is a pop girl who people talk about, but who no one seems to care about culturally.” This definition works: It specifies the group of performers most likely to be hounded with the term (women in popular music), and its focus on cultural conversation nods to “khia” being a status that an artist can shift in and out of.
Out of “khia” spawned the “khia asylum,” a figurative purgatory for pop girls who are lighting up neither the charts nor social media timelines. Their albums get greeted with limited fanfare and only their most dedicated stans seem to care about anything they’re doing. But artists aren’t locked in the “khia asylum” forever. With the right single or era, an artist can escape the khia asylum they’re supposedly stuck in, like Charli (Brat) and Tinashe (“Nasty”) did last year. Nonetheless, an underperforming album or run of singles can render even seemingly infallible artists to the khia asylum – like, say, post-Radical Optimism Dua Lipa.
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Zhang’s explainer is a great snapshot of the zaniness of online communities built on the constant dissection of pop culture, but it unfortunately belies the racist roots of how terms like “khia” come to be, and who and what they’re now most used to describe. “Khia” was first levied as an insult online back in 2014; Nicki Minaj stan accounts sneered at a fan’s overwhelmed reaction to meeting the real-life Khia herself. In the years that followed, the tweet became more of a meme than the individual term “khia,” but that started to change last year – especially as debates over the merits of different kinds of hip-hop dominated mainstream discourse.
“Khia” isn’t just a random word, though — it’s the first given name of Billboard-charting rapper Khia, most famous for her 2002 Billboard Hot 100-charting cult classic “My Neck, My Back” (No. 42) and her 2006 “So Excited” collaboration with Janet Jackson (No. 90). According to Luminate, “My Neck, My Back” has earned over 217.9 million official on-demand U.S. streams, while its parent album, the RIAA Gold-certified Thug Misses, has shifted over 618,000 U.S. album sales and reached No. 33 on the Billboard 200. But the numbers are the least interesting thing about Khia and “My Neck, My Back.” Her infectious flow and effusive lyrical ode to cunnilingus and anilingus are key building blocks for the p—y rap subgenre; she and her music have served as an enduring reference point for some of the biggest female rappers of this current class.
In 2017, two-time Grammy-nominated rapper Saweetie freestyled over “My Neck” for her debut single, “Icy Girl,” which eventually reached No. 16 on Rhythmic Airplay. The same year, Miami rap duo City Girls called on Khia’s classic for their own debut single, “F–k Dat N—a,” which later served as the fifth single from Quality Control’s Control the Streets, Volume 1 compilation. During this year’s Grammy telecast (Feb. 2), Dove aired a commercial soundtracked by a remake of “My Neck” courtesy of Grammy-nominated rapper Chika. In the past decade, the song’s influence has even stretched outside of hip-hop, with artists like Miley Cyrus and Elle King delivering covers of the X-rated anthem. Many artists dream of putting out just one song that achieves a fraction of the commercial success and cultural resonance of “My Neck, My Back” — and yet the name of the artist behind that very song has now become synonymous with being an act of little to no viability or significance. (A representative for Khia did not respond to Billboard‘s request for comment at the time of publication.)
That’s not right. Knowing how sinister this industry can be to Black female artists, it’s wholly disrespectful to condense Khia’s career and impact into a euphemism for flopping. Not only is she an artist who’s greatly contributed to her genre and left an undeniable legacy, but she’s also a person. And that’s her real birth name, by the way. To strip her name from her and contort it into a term that is most often used to degrade artists who look like her is simply dehumanizing. The fact that so many users weren’t even hip to the correct pronunciation of her name says it all.
“Khia” isn’t the only problematic term that’s recently gained popularity online. Some of these phrases have been percolating for years, but they’ve started popping up more frequently in the wake of Lamar’s triumph over Drake last year and Doechii’s Alligator Bites Never Heal-fueled mainstream rise. Throughout their careers, both Lamar and Doechii – former and current TDE affiliates, respectively – have been vocal about their deep love and respect for the roots of hip-hop and the importance of protecting its sanctity. Inside and outside of their music, they, for many, exemplify the essence of hip-hop for later generations.
In “Man at the Garden” (No. 9), a Hot 100 top 10 hit from his late 2024 surprise album GNX, Lamar soliloquizes, “How annoying, does it angers me to know the lames can speak/ On the origins of the game I breathe? That’s insane to me.” Last year, Doechii – after smartly introducing her mixtape with a single that uses boom bap to call out the hypocrisy of male rap gatekeepers and fans – wrote on X: “Don’t let these people brainwash you into disconnecting from the soul of hip hop by convincing you it isn’t cool or it’s ‘too deep.’” Nonetheless, in recent months, their mutual conscientiousness – and use of explicitly Black genres like jazz and boom bap — has been perceived as being condescending, preachy and just plain unfun, giving way to the continued use of insulting terms meant to specifically disparage their devotion to hip-hop traditions.
One of the more unfortunate things about discussing anything online this deep in the Internet Age is that everything gets flattened. And that really sucks for our more dynamic artists. Through the beef, Lamar became generally representative of traditional, lyricism-centered hip-hop, while Drake became the poster child for more fun, danceable, easily digestible tunes. Of course, the full scope of both of their catalogs is far more nuanced, but both rappers played into those perceptions during their beef.“Euphoria” finds Lamar promising Drake, “Keep makin’ me dance, wavin’ my hand, and it won’t be no threat,” and in “Family Matters,” Drizzy describes K.Dot’s style as, “Always rappin’ like you ’bout to get the slaves freed.” That “Family Matters” line, in part, gave way to the increased use of another gross term – this time, one used to describe music that embodies the foundational spirit of hip-hop.
“I can’t get behind that slave music Kendrick make,” one user wrote on X three days after GNX – widely considered to be the Compton rapper’s least conceptual LP – dropped. When Lamar released “Watch the Party Die,” his first post-“Not Like Us” song, on Instagram, another user facetiously posted, “What was Kendrick talking about in that diss ion feel like listening to slave music right now…” Because Kendrick explored the cross-generational and cross-cultural impact of slavery on records like 2015’s To Pimp a Butterfly, suddenly all of his music was “slave music.” Butterfly also houses the Grammy-winning “Alright,” one of the biggest protest anthems of the Black Lives Matter era; in one X post that’s been viewed over 20.5 million times a user dismissed Kendrick’s entirely catalog on the basis of that song, writing, “Drake held us down for 15 summers and [y’all] turned on him for a guy that make protest music.”
After Doechii went viral for a self-choreographed Late Show performance of “Denial Is a River” and “Boiled Peanuts,” another user wrote, “Making [that] Harriet Tubman music is the cheat code to getting respected in rap.” That post – which racked up over 8.4 million views — caused such a fracas that even Ebro Darden, host of Apple Music’s Rap Life podcast, commented: “When you get into uplifting Black people… don’t we continue to be reminded that [the mainstream] don’t want that from Black people – specifically in hip-hop? And then [people are] calling it ‘Harriet Tubman rap,’ like, what? [That sector of the world] exists but allowing that to shape our conversations around what we as hip-hop deem to be spectacular… we’re playing ourselves.”
There are plenty of other terms like these entering too-common usage: “plantation tunes,” “Negro spiritual music,” “Mufasa music,” “twerk slay mama music,” etc. At the top of the new year, an X fan account wrote, “Watching Doechii become a shea butter artist is actually sad”; here, the term “shea butter” is a dog whistle for Black Americans in online circles. Some of these terms spawned from intracommunal discussions that spilled over into general online conversation, and others are likely to have been pushed by bot accounts – often specifically targeting dark-skinned Black artists. None of them are helpful or interesting descriptors for music, and all of them are disrespectful to Black history.
It is absolutely disgusting to invoke Harriet Tubman’s name or anything related to the Transatlantic slave trade as a way to disregard and denigrate Black artists and their work. One of the gravest sins in human history, the centuries of death, rape, cannibalism, subjugation, exploitation and discrimination of Black people by way of the slave trade and its heinous offspring are horrors that we will never completely understand. Those ancestors are to be venerated and eternally respected, not used as shorthand for the disparagement of their descendants’ art, which often explicitly exalts their history.
The first couplet of Alligator Bites is “Let’s start the story backwards/ I’m dead, she’s dead, just another Black Lives Mattered”; by track three, Doechii’s naming songs after boiled peanuts, a popular snack in the Southern U.S. brought to the region via enslaved Black people from West Africa. People often point to Butterfly as Lamar’s opus in terms of sociopolitical commentary, but we can also just give GNX’s “Reincarnated” a spin: Over a sample of 2Pac’s “Made N—az,” Lamar connects the lives and stories of (presumably) blues singer-songwriter and guitarist John Lee Hooker, a Billie Holiday-esque Chitlin Circuit character, Lucifer and himself. History and legacy drive key aspects of both Lamar and Doechii’s recent releases; it’s particularly sinister and sickening to flip those artistic choices as ploys for approval from white critics and awards bodies.
And let’s say either artist really was making music informed by work songs and Negro spirituals. What’s wrong with that? Why is that a bad thing — especially when those songs provided the foundation for the evolution of American music in the centuries that followed? All these terms do is reduce Black experiences into inaccurate archetypes and further devalue the Black roots of countless genres. And once it became fair game to make light of slavery, it became easier to introduce more of these bits of coded language into contemporary discourse.
A Pitchfork review of In Pieces, Chlöe’s 2023 debut solo album, described “Have Mercy,” her debut solo single, as “a song from the Empire soundtrack… something Lucious Lyon would come up with.” From that point, “Empire music” became a popular online term to describe Chlöe’s sound – which largely comprises of the same uptempo R&B-pop tracks people endlessly moan and groan for across social media. If “Empire music” was code for dismissing uptempo contemporary R&B from Black female artists, “lash tech music” was code for dismissing its downtempo counterpart. People have used the term to describe music from Summer Walker, Jhené Aiko, Chlöe, and even Skilla Baby’s songs dedicated to his female fanbase.
Granted, both of these terms primarily originated in Black circles. A Black writer reviewed In Pieces for Pitchfork, and a lot of Black lash techs really did listen to a lot of Summer Walker and the like. The issue is that there are no real community boundaries in online discourse – particularly on platforms like X (formerly Twitter) – so non-Black users then adopt these phrases (often hiding behind profile pictures of Black celebrities or fictional characters) with an incomplete understanding of the irony and humor Black people use amongst themselves. “Empire music” and “lash tech music” became outright pejoratives instead of unserious inside jokes.
The “Empire music” phenomenon is particularly interesting – because the show spawned legitimate Billboard hits. The first season’s soundtrack peaked atop the Billboard 200 and a handful of its songs landed on the Hot 100, including the Estelle-assisted “Conqueror” at No. 42. The soundtrack even finished at No. 9 on Billboard’s 2015 Year-End Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums ranking. And while the music wasn’t necessarily paradigm-shifting and made for TV – which is arguably the real joke of the “Empire music” quip — it clearly connected with audiences. Once users unfamiliar with Empire’s cultural cachet got a hold of the term, the irony and humor were permanently replaced by disdain disproportionately geared toward Black women in R&B and pop. The term became an additional tool of limitation in an industry that goes out of its way to obstruct Black women’s potential.
In response to an X user’s New Year’s wish for “more uptempo R&B” in 2025, rising pop star Jae Stephens wrote “No one will do it [because] everyone’s quick to label it ‘empire/star music!’” It’s heartbreaking to read those words from a burgeoning Black pop star, especially when a white pop girl like Tate McRae can drop uptempo R&B-inflected pop bangers and be hailed as Top 40’s next messiah by the very same crowds that will write off Black pop girls with the aforementioned dog whistles.
Last year, we watched the CMAs completely ignore Cowboy Carter while celebrating F-1 Trillion, Post Malone’s country crossover album from the same year. We saw, at the highest level, how Black artists – and Black women, in particular – are denied the ability to move through genres as freely as their white peers. Chlöe, whose music traverses a range of genres, touched on this in a Nylon cover story last year as well. “Any music I do will easily and quickly be categorized as R&B because I’m a Black woman,” she said. “If someone who didn’t have my skin tone made the same music, it would be in the pop categories.” Why continue to use verbiage that not only disrespects their art, but also makes it harder for Black pop stars to break into and thrive in predominantly white top 40 spaces?
It was a wonderfully discombobulating experience reading this X post from Stephens. “Give a khia a chance,” she wrote to Charli XCX in a post quoting Pop Crave’s observation that “Hello Goodbye” is the only Brat song without a remix. That wasn’t the first or last time Stephens had used the term – and who can blame her? It’s a popular term that’ll help her visibility in the algorithm – but what does it say about the state of music, its business and accompanying discourse if we are at the point where a rising Black female pop star is using a term that bastardizes the given name of Black female rapper (even if ironically) in an attempt to gain more notoriety amongst pop listeners? It’s easy to disregard these terms and discussion of their respective merits as “chronically online,” but how we discuss music and artists on the Internet has a direct impact on how we discuss them in real life, which, to a degree, then influences which artists the industry chooses to support.
Above all, “khia,” “slave trade music” and the like are simply unintelligent ways to describe music. We deserve better and smarter conversation from ourselves – especially when we have so many Black and non-white mainstream artists putting out art that deserves genuine, thorough consideration and can’t be easily summarized or dismissed with insulting and derogatory terms like these. We have access to far too much music history to settle for grounding our experiences and responses to music in such thinly veiled racist coded language.
When BLACKPINK was gearing up for its highly anticipated debut in 2016, rising creative director SINXITY was adamant the group needed an unexpected sound to distinguish itself. Alongside the group’s explosive EDM-trap banger “BOOMBAYAH,” the young exec at YG Entertainment pushed for a secondary, simultaneous single in the minimalist-yet-emotionally tinged “Whistle” to show their wider, “magical” range to distinguish them from YG’s other female outfit, 2NE1. Nearly a decade later, BLACKPINK remains one of the most successful acts from South Korea, and SINXITY is overseeing a new female quartet made for the global stage while emphasizing that “identity and diversity are important.”
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Seven years after exiting YG Entertainment and launching AXIS as a multi-operational label, production house and creative incubator for internationally minded projects, SINXITY (neé SJ Shin) is the executive producer for the freshly debuted cosmosy. The act consists of four Japanese singers who trained in Korea under the K-pop system and sing in a mix of English, Japanese and Korean to appeal to the global pop market. Two members, De_Hana and Kamión, rose to recognition after competing on Produce 101 Japan The Girls (a local spin-off of the Korean singing competition series that created Billboard Japan Hot 100 chart-toppers JO1, INI and ME:I), are joined by relative newcomers Himesha and A’mei, respectively the eldest and youngest member, who trained in dance since childhood (while idolizing the likes of British superstar Dua Lipa and BLACKPINK’s Thai icon Lisa).
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Executing the internationally minded group brings NTT Docomo Studio & Live (the entertainment wing of Japan’s major mobile carrier) together with Sony Music Korea (the Seoul-based label that recently signed multilingual Monsta X member I.M in 2022 for his solo work). The move isn’t entirely without precedence with XG (the Japanese girl group based in South Korea that sings in English with a mix of U.S., Japanese and Korean management), or the likes of HYBE’s KATSEYE and JYP Entertainment’s VCHA girl groups (both Los Angeles-based acts sing in English but have performed across Asia and the Americas). Leading all of cosmosy’s creative and professional decisions, SINXITY proudly says this is a group where the members’ “natural talent should be what’s emphasized.”
“I really want to open up a new path for the girls for them to be able to do a lot of different genres and try different concepts,” he shares during an afternoon video call when he’s taking a break from putting the final touches on cosmosy’s first music video before it goes live at midnight. “Inevitably, people are gonna compare the girls to groups like XG, NiziU, and the other Japanese girl groups, but I want to do something for them that is new and different. Whether it’s K-pop, J-pop, pop, hip-hop, R&B, I want to incorporate various music genres and create a new path for them.”
SINXITY and cosmosy both describe the group as having a “girlish crush” concept, inspired by the girl crush image that K-pop acts like BLACKPINK, ITZY, and (G)I-DLE embody with cosmosy peppering in additional sprinkles of mystique, innocence and even a little devilishness blended into “a group that has never existed before,” according to De_Hana.
“Unlike the typical girl crush everyone knows, our concept includes both cool and cute elements,” explains Kamión, an Osaka native who spent time studying abroad. “There is also a touch of mystery, which evokes the atmosphere of Japanese horror or anime.” Meanwhile, Himesha and A’mei use “mysterious” to describe the group.
After unveiling cosmosy’s debut single “zigy=zigy” alongside its music video on New Year’s Eve, the track was released globally on Feb. 7 to kick off the first of multiple digital singles the act will drop throughout the year with an EP potentially eyed for spring. With Korean television appearances and fashion-magazine features on the horizon, SINXITY emphasizes that as important as new cosmosy content is, the next, urgent priority is to meet fans in person.
“They’re super talented, really pretty, such nice and charming girls; I really want people and fans to meet them directly,” the producer adds. “The key factor is how to meet core fans.”
Showing up to work as one’s true self and connecting to others authentically is personally important for SINXITY, who says he’s finally at ease in a professional environment where he’s comfortable to fully focus his energy on the work at hand.
“The Korean entertainment industry has become safer than in the past,” he shares. “Because I am gay, identity and diversity are very important to me and something I’m trying to build on…it’s still not widely accepted to be in the LGBT community since there are restrictions and laws for gay people, but it’s more accepted and it’s a safer, better space compared to others. But it’s still not a thing to come out and be openly gay.”
Noting the three women assisting him during this video call in Seoul, SINXITY estimates that 90 percent of the crew that works with cosmosy are women. That’s a rarity in Korean entertainment, and an even bigger percentage than AXIS’ division focused on producing Boy Love (also known as BL) television, the popular genre of same-sex drama series that boasts majority female audiences. With works including the 2022 breakout hit Semantic Error and FC Soldout currently airing, SINXITY and AXIS are inevitably shifting the norms of what and how Korean-pop entertainment operates simply in the name of creativity — and openly support other industry shakers.
“I’ve worked overseas, I’ve done a lot of projects with YG in Japan and Korea,” says SINXITY, who also worked with YG Entertainment’s actors roster during his time. “I have a unique identity, so I can’t help but talk about it and share myself here anyway. I just want to be free to create, reach more people and show them even more in these creative areas.”
SINXITY smiles before asking to include an additional note before the call wraps and he goes back to color-correcting the “zigy=zigy” video.
“One more thing: wait for NewJeans and stand up for Min Hee-jin,” SINXITY says, with a visibly surprised translator noting that he may be the first Korean executive to support the embattled former CEO of ADOR publicly. “I really admire Min Hee-jin and respect her. She’s the one and only best producer in this K-pop industry, so I really [want to] stand with her and really pray for NewJeans to have more free activities. We’re in some of the same networks, but I’m really just a fan. She’s really the one-and-only qualified producer.”
Asked to define her career so far — a career that has already seen the release of 10th anniversary editions of two pivotal albums, 2012’s Tramp and 2014’s Are We There — Sharon Van Etten says, “For me, it’s not about growing, it’s about sustaining, and I think there’s an art to that. I don’t want to do this next thing bigger or get to this next big level. It’s more about different challenges along the way.”
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With the Feb. 7 release of her seventh album, Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory, the singer-songwriter aces the challenge she set for herself while writing and recording the record: collaborating with other musicians in the process.
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Although Van Etten, 43, has worked with an array of artists that includes Angel Olsen, Courtney Barnett, Josh Homme and Ezra Furman, “I’ve been on a journey of self-discovery with how I feel about my own music and analyzing why it took me so long to trust other people with that safe space,” she tells Billboard on a Zoom call from her Los Angeles home. “I think a big part of that was when I first began writing songs, a lot of it was hiding [my music] from a boyfriend who I was scared of who didn’t like my music… I had to hide the fact that I played music or would play open mic, so it became a safe space for me. As I learned to let other people in — even just performing with me, that was a big step. This is another step of opening up and being vulnerable. I had a lot of people help me in the writing process to grow as a creative person and not be the sole owner of the performances.”
The name of the band she put together for the album and upcoming tour — Devra Hoff on bass and vocals, Jorge Balbi on drums and machines, and Teeny Lieberson on synth, piano, guitar and vocals — is a tongue-in-cheek reference to psychological research on the emotional bonds formed between individuals, especially infants and their mothers. Van Etten elaborates on the name later in this interview, but it’s not an arbitrary choice. She is the mother of a seven-year-old son and has intermittently worked towards a psychology degree with the intention of becoming a therapist.
Van Etten’s collaboration with The Attachment Theory, which was co-produced by Marta Salogni (Björk, Depeche Mode, Porridge Radio) and recorded at The Church Studios in London, advances farther into the electronic territory she explored on her last two albums. Chilled, angular ‘80s-style synth and sharp, punchy drums offset the warmth of Van Etten’s crystalline and lissome vocals, and when they meet at a song’s crescendo — as they do on “Live Forever” and “Afterlife”— it’s a real headrush.
The lyrics on this album take a few spins to absorb, in part because Van Etten doesn’t sand down the sharp corners of her subjects. One of indie music’s most sensitive empaths, she takes on the complexity of relationships (a recurring theme in her music), parenthood’s inevitable connection to the specter of mortality, and embracing what is arguably a new facet of diversity and inclusion in post-election America: the desire to coexist with those in our lives whose social and political perspectives are antithetical to ours.
How did The Attachment Theory come together?
The band has grown over the years in different ways. Devra Hoff started playing with me for warmup shows in 2018 for Remind Me Tomorrow. After Devra, Jorge Balbi joined the band. I met Jorge through Charley Damski. He was part of the writing process of this record and now plays with Lana Del Rey. I met Teeny Lieberson years ago through New York circles. She was in Here We Go Magic, she was in Teen. She has an amazing project under her own moniker, Lou Tides. It’s been shapeshifting over the years as I’ve been evolving from folk to rock to more alternative post-punk influences. The synthesizer drum-meets-machines-type marriage has been part of my listening over the years, and it’s been really fulfilling to play these songs in this way.
How did you settle on the name?
Everybody asks me, is that a psychological reference? Obviously, it’s a joke at that. I had a bandmate have a knee-jerk reaction against it, because of their actual relationship with their parents. So, we had this agreement that we’re not going to talk about attachment styles. But everyone ended up agreeing with me that we’re all from very different places and we have all these different experiences, but how incredible is it that we can come together and make something so beautiful. Also, when we’re on the road, we become a family. We have sibling connectivity tissue. They’re my chosen family. That’s something that people don’t always understand. When you go on tour, it’s fun, but it’s also really hard. But I have this family [of band members], and I know they have my back, and I have theirs. That’s a big part of why our band works, and why I trust them so deeply.
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You have increasingly used synthesizers in your music, but I was also wondering if recording at The Church, which Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart once owned and where they recorded Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) influenced the sound.
The songs were already written before we went to that studio, but they definitely led to us wanting to be, number one, in a room where we could be in a like space. Number two, I definitely wanted to record in London, and three, it’s one of Marta Salogni’s favorite studios. Number four, the history of the space concreted our decision to work there. In recording there, we definitely conjured the spirits. We all but had seances in there. You can feel the energy as soon as you approach the building.
Why did you want to record in London?
The demos really spoke to us as being all these U.K.-based influences, like Procure, Joy Division, Kate Bush. Yes, there are other influences in there — like Nine Inch Nails, and I can hear Pylon. That era to me is deeply rooted in the U.K., and I’ve never worked overseas. I’ve never had a destination record. It’s always been the New York area, L.A. area. And I wanted to push myself to try new things. I try to do something different every time I make a record.
Where was your head at when you were writing these lyrics?
The writing process started when I was still on the road with We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong. That was our first tour back after COVID. Also, life things were happening. I was thinking about aging parents, being an older parent and feeling distance from my family, while also having conversations with my band. For the first time, I found myself writing lyrics that weren’t just about my personal life but about conversations that we were having as a group. I tend to write very much alone. I usually already have the structure and ideas for instrumentation, and then I share them with other people. In this process, since we were writing together, it wasn’t just about structure. It was about subject matter, and one of the articles I read while we were writing was this article about the process of reverse aging and the technology there.
There was this study done in the U.K on mice. By injecting them with this serum it replicated cells and helped regenerate cells. I think they proved that after the age of 50 you can reverse aging with this technology. But if you take it beforehand it could have the reverse effect. And so, the movie Death Becomes Her came right into my mind. I was having this conversation with Devra, and we started talking about, “If you could live forever, would you? And what kind of world would that be?” After that conversation, we wrote “Live Forever” in one sitting.
Based on personal experience, when you become a parent, mortality looms large in your head. My son is an adult now, and doing fine, but I worry about what happens when I’m gone — and even before that, how do I not become a burden to him when old age kicks in?
It’s a reality. I learned a new term recently, called the Sandwich Generation. Since people are having kids later in life, they’re in the position of being working parents while taking care of their own parents. You’re kind of caught in the middle. We’re asking these bigger questions in our lives, not just of ourselves but where our responsibilities lie.
Speaking of parenthood, in “Southern Life (What It Must Be Like), you sing, “My hands are shaking as a mother trying to raise her son right.” Can you talk a little bit about the meaning of that song?
Devra Hoff is the bandmate that I talk to about lyrics. She helped me write the song “Something Ain’t Right” I remember her saying, “Be careful with these lyrics because people are going to think you hate on the South.” I’m like, “I don’t hate on the South!” She’s like, “I know you but you’re going to have to speak to this idea because people are going to ask.
And here we are.
I have in-laws from the South. I lived in Tennessee. It was a major turning point in my life, and it changed me for good and bad. I’m a Jersey Girl moving to Tennessee, and I learned very quickly what the South was. As I tell my son all the time, it’s a different kind of diversity when you have to be around people that don’t have the same ideals as you. You don’t avoid it. You try to surround yourself with people of all different ideologies and hopefully have discourse. I think about my upbringing. I think about where I’ve lived over the course of my life, and the different people that I’ve met. It’s learning how to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. That’s really what “Southern Life” is. It’s the other side.
I’m also struck by the lyrics to “Trouble.”: “I don’t want to lose your love against your will/ Blow you kisses and take a pill/ To kill.”
It’s semi-connected to “Southern Life.” Without defining it too much, the narrative is that same feeling of when you go back home, you’re visiting family and there are things you just can’t talk about — things that in my past define the experiences I’ve had in my life that I’m not able to talk about with people that know me better than anyone. It’s like this burning hole.
You’ve put your finger on something elusive that I think a lot of people feel. I was born in Ohio and moved to New York City when I was young. I know exactly that feeling when I go back to visit.
I feel like that with other friends, where there’s always this place where you can’t go with them. And it hurts. You don’t share it, out of respect for the other person sometimes. It’s some kind of love, but it comes with pain and discomfort.
I’ve noticed that you are connecting more often to your fans in a direct way through emails, posts and playlists. What’s your perspective on the way social media has changed promoting your music?
I listen to the people that I work with. I trust all my circles — label, management, publicists. We’ve been working together for 12 years or something, and I feel like we’re all trying to learn and change and adapt. A lot of it is about authenticity and speaking to people like a real person. Being a parent and working, I also feel like who has the time to constantly engage in this way. I want to do it authentically but then if you share too much it’s also security stuff. You don’t always want people to know where you are and exactly when you’re there. I have to learn how to walk this line of being authentic and protective.
I also don’t want to bombard people. After attempting to be a publicist back in the day, I don’t want to be that fly in your ear. I want to have something to say and not just to pop up in your stories or whatever. I also want to share things that I’m interested in and to shine a light on things I think are special. But it’s time consuming, and sometimes I want to say, “F–k it all. I’m going to make music, there will be an album, I will tour it, and I exist.”
I don’t know if it’s my age or just the feeling of losing time as I get older. How much time is spent in the sharing process is daunting. I know how the industry works enough to be like, I’m not Beyoncé; I can’t just put out a record and be like, “I’ll see you.” And not only do I need to make a living for family, but also my band and everyone I work with. There’s a team of 40-50 people depending on me to back it up.
You’re doing three shows in the States at the beginning of February, then heading to Europe?
Yes. I’m doing my first three warmup shows in Westerly, Rhode Island, Woodstock [N.Y.] and my first headline Jersey show at the Stone Pony in Asbury Park. There will be so many Van Ettens there. I’m just warning you. I’m looking forward to connecting with fans again, and I get to play with my friend, [Jessica Larrabee] She Keeps Bees, who I came up with in the early New York Days. Then we’ll go to Europe because since the record was made in the U.K., I wanted to quickly go there and honor them. The U.K. and Europe run is only like two weeks. Then we come back and do a full U.S. tour.
Will there be jamming?
[Laughs.] There will definitely be jamming, and as we get more comfortable with these songs in a live setting, and I’ll have a shred or two.
Your collaboration with Ezra Furman on Sinéad O’Connor’s “Feel So Different” for the Transa album is quite beautiful. How did that come about?
It was wild because at the time, I had just been sent this manuscript for Allyson McCabe’s book, Why Sinéad O’Connor Matters. When I was reading it, Sinéad was still alive, and I gave a quote for the back of the book, which was from the perspective of how the industry basically abandoned her. Anyway, I’ve been a fan of her work and covered “Black Boys on Mopeds” when I was on tour for Remind Me Tomorrow.
Then the Red Hot Organization reached out to me to do a collaboration with somebody, for Transa. They were partnering artists with people in the LGBTQ community, and Ezra and I have been in the same circles for a long time. Though we have high-fived on the internet over the years, we’ve never met in person. I felt like her punk rock ethos and vulnerability, and being a parent, would be creatively a perfect match. She was open, and I sent her that song immediately because I felt like in the climate of the world today it was almost like a plea. While we were recording it back and forth long distance, we found out Sinéad had died. So, I felt like this was not just for the LGBTQ community and a plea to the world. It was also a prayer for Sinéad.
You’re at a point in your career where you’re celebrating the significant anniversaries of landmark albums for you. How do you feel about that, and that up-and-coming artists like Nülifer Yanya are now citing you as an inspiration?
I mean, some days I don’t feel that old, and I don’t feel like I’ve done enough yet to really reflect. I know that in general it’s going to get harder and harder for me to do music in the way that I wish I could, but I also feel like I’m not near the end of creating and hopefully I’m not even halfway through my career.
Someone had asked me recently about writing a memoir, and I’m like, “I’m not that old — I don’t have an arc yet.” For me I’m on the slow ramp. I’m like, “How much longer can I do this and how can I challenge myself?” If younger artists are inspired by whatever it is I do, then that’s amazing. I’m inspired by so many people that have been doing it way longer than me.
Dressed to the nines, bottle-blonde hair coiffed, black cab parked across the street. Rebecca Lucy Taylor — a.k.a. Self Esteem — is stepping outside the front door of her London flat, heading to “one of them fancy ‘dos,” when mild calamity strikes. Attached to the collar of her gown is a large, grey, electromagnetic security tag – one that would take a delicate operation to remove. Grey skies and a dash of brolly-ruining wind certainly aren’t helping the situation, either.
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“I just stood there like, ‘F–k this. When will it not be like this?,” she says, recalling the memory. To help illustrate what it felt like in the moment, Taylor talks with her palms pressed against her head. “I have a saying for times like this, like when you get toilet paper on your shoe: ‘That’s very Self Esteem.’
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“There’s part of my ego that wants to tell myself all of this is not a f–king joke,” the Rotheram-raised artist continues. ”But then I also can’t help but be present in reality. What would have helped me was if one of the indie girls I used to look up to and be intimidated by had just… farted, or something. That would have been amazing!”
Taylor has learned how to take such indignities with humour and good grace. There was the time, she says, that she walked the BRITs red carpet to a muted response. Or when her sublime second LP Prioritise Pleasure narrowly missed out on the Official U.K. Charts’ top 10 in 2021, landing at No. 11. (“That was the most ‘me’ thing ever.”) Leaving the following year’s Mercury Prize ceremony – which was already hastily rescheduled following the passing of Queen Elizabeth II – empty-handed, meanwhile, was “another ‘no, not quite you’ moment.’” When asked in a subsequent Standard interview about what she collects for a hobby, Taylor playfully responded: “Awards you get for being nominated for something, but not quite winning them.”
There was a time back there, shortly after the pandemic began to wind down, when Taylor was everywhere in the U.K.’s music press. Prioritise Pleasure, with its big, ambitiously constructed choruses that contextualized vivid emotional flashpoints in Taylor’s life, was met with unanimously glowing reviews, leading to its author being subjected immediately to weighty predictions about her future. Along with Taylor’s rich voice, the record shone through its fluorescent electro flourishes and euphoric pop feel. Predecessor Compliments Please (2019) was much more of a cult concern, introducing a promising new star content looming in the wings.
Taylor has gone from existing as an underground darling to being recognized as a pre-eminent alt-pop icon. Though her singles rarely scale the charts, they remain ubiquitous at major festivals (Glastonbury, Green Man, Parklife) and in safe spaces for her devout LGBTQ+ following. There are many jobs, too, that comprise her career – she’s also a West End actress (Cabaret), video director, theatre composer (Prima Facie), panelist, radio host, TV personality – to the point that it feels like she’s hardly disappeared since her last record. This level of graft and visibility has earned her widespread industry recognition and a dazzling public reputation.
“There’s long been this weird underdog [reputation] that has echoed around me,” she says.
This back-and-forth internal monologue plays out through her forthcoming third LP, A Complicated Woman (due April 25). It contains plenty of epic, thrillingly weird music that only Taylor could create: songs about transcending fear and blowing up your life set against glowing choral melodies (“Focus Is Power”) and thumping club beats (“Mother”).
“Musically, my album sounds mental,” she jokes. “Sometimes, I think, ‘You f–king idiot. You should have just made a shoegaze album that would do well on [radio station BBC] 6Music.”
Across the new record, there’s a sense that Taylor is reckoning with her humor, dreams and anxieties while charting the next stage of her evolution. By the time she returned home after the Prioritise Pleasure tour, she says she found her world had changed, and not in the way you usually associate with an acclaimed album. “Not having a day off in almost two years” had left her feeling burnt out, and she was unable to commit to any hobbies or day-to-day routines.
At the start of creating A Complicated Woman, Taylor felt alienated from her own feelings – a strange paradox, perhaps, for an artist who has never minced her lyrics and one whose powerful live shows, for many, feel like akin to a spiritual reverie. “For me, this has absolutely been the hardest album yet,” she says. “I was saying ‘yes’ to every offer that came my way, so it was written from a place of almost being against my will. It felt like teeth being pulled at times. It was difficult and complicated.”
She picks up and puts down a cup of tea without drinking. “Though it also saw my defiance meet my depleting, ‘I want to give up’-ness, which I think you hear in the record,” she continues. “That’s how the whole [creative] process has been for me: a sense of ‘F–k this’ as well as me saying to myself, ‘Come on, woman!’”
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To hear Taylor discuss these contrasting mindsets feels very fitting. Because for A Complicated Woman, she has decided to embrace the mechanisms of the industry around her in a new way entirely. Having released her first two solo records via indie label Partisan [Idles, Laura Marling], she recently signed with Polydor, a move that places her on the brink of the big time – 15 years after she first started putting out music as one half of now-defunct indie duo Slow Club.
We meet in Universal’s north London HQ; after pulling Billboard UK in for a swaying bear-hug, Taylor slouches on a long sofa for our conversation, wearing a soft grey hoodie, trainers and a pinch of makeup. Despite her formidable onstage presence, Taylor radiates self-effacing candour and she is transparent about her business rationale.
“I feel as though I’ve done my end of the deal,” she says of her decision to step up to a major label. “What has been frustrating about the music industry for me is: I’ve done everything to the best of my ability and have worked flat out, and then my life has been spent watching artists supersede me over and over again. You know, I’m older now, so it doesn’t bother me – like, it all comes down to money and the people who can market you. I know now that getting signed doesn’t mean you’re gonna be a huge artist, but anything that helps bolster my work makes me feel hopeful.”
It’s this steadfast approach that has helped Taylor to understand the deeper roots of the unhappiness that cast a shadow over the road to album three. Having weathered a breakup and a more gradual, but eventually near-debilitating depression, she went into writing sessions wanting to rebuild herself after these experiences. Last summer, she enjoyed holidays in Dubrovnik and Crete, occasionally jotting down lyrics while she was away but otherwise remaining off-grid. In the capital, meanwhile, she remains heavily immersed in the arts and the world of drag, both of which have helped shape her musical M.O.
Later in the year, Taylor had an emotional epiphany while watching the Robbie Williams biopic Better Man. She’s effusive as she explains how its warts-and-all tale – which charts Williams’ working-class childhood in Stoke-on-Trent, through to the fallout of his departure from Take That and resulting substance abuse issues – stirred up feelings in her about her own journey, despite having gone through different hardships.
The film sees Williams, represented via a CGI monkey, start to reconnect with childhood friends after briefly hitting pause on his solo career. Taylor says that she recently made the same move, as part of wanting to envision a more sustainable future for herself in the industry. The resulting insights she’s gleaned about her relationships and mental health are encapsulated within A Complicated Woman’s core objective of accepting how it feels to be a flawed, vulnerable public person.
“None of this is about me wanting to be a c–-ty little pop star anymore. It’s sort of deeply embarrassing to me to remember the version of myself who wanted to be famous.” Taylor says. “This whole journey has taught me that what’s important is people and community. That’s what the music means to me.”
A Complicated Woman’s conclusion seems to be that hope is still worth fighting for. The melodies are adventurous, and the contradictions of Taylor’s inner psyche loom large, as she confronts both her shadow self and ego. A loud, nail-paint emoji-esque articulation of desire and asserting agency in the bedroom, “69” finds her looser and more liberated than ever. And then there are more poignant tracks like “The Curse,” which navigates despair and exhaustion with an unvarnished frankness.
Recording the latter in the height of 2024’s Brat summer – where Charli XCX’s “365 partygirl” energy felt ubiquitous – caused a minor moral dilemma for Taylor, she laughs: “I felt so embarrassed when I was making my album. I f–king love Brat, but there I was in the studio making my songs like, ‘Get up and try your best! Maybe try and drink less!’”
Taylor is looking forward to seeing her own personal ambitions evolve as her profile continues to rise. Maintaining a private life is at the top of the agenda, and she wants to remain engaged with and curious about what’s around the corner. New opportunities are keeping her “booked and blessed,” while she is working towards buying a flat and has also written a new book.
In the pipeline is A Complicated Woman Live, a “quasi-theatrical” performance art show. Directed by the Tony award-winning Tom Scutt, the run (Apr. 16-19) will see Taylor perform tracks from her back catalogue at London’s Duke of York Theatre. She remains tight-lipped about what the set-up will look like, beyond that she sees it as “my version of [David Byrne’s] American Utopia,” and will be backed by an 11-women band.
“I want women to leave these shows and go, ‘I’m not scared about getting older, f–cking bring it on,’” says Taylor. “I want queer people to feel like that too. And I want straight men to feel really worried and scared.”
Taylor will enter this new era, too, with a stronger self-preservationist streak. Her hope is to keep the goalposts firmly in one place, knowing that she feels at peace with her relative obscurity on the world stage. “Everyone’s telling me, ‘You should go to America,’” she says with a sigh. “Obviously it’d be nice because of the sheer money there is to be made out there, but Slow Club toured America so many times. I can’t go back to playing to like, 50 people!”
Well, remember Better Man? Robbie didn’t ever quite crack the States, Billboard UK posits. “Exactly,” Taylor responds. She smiles. “And that’s okay.”
The shimmering high point of Crazy P’s 2024 album Any Signs of Love is a song called “Human After All.” It’s a showcase for lead singer Danielle Moore, who erects small towers of harmonies, repeatedly layering her burnished, breathy voice over a motoring beat. While the bottom of the track is pure, high-octane propulsion, the top is fluffy and lavish, like a racecar covered in frosting.
“She loved looping herself up, and she loved the idea of creating something dynamic from lines which are just looping over and over,” says Jim Baron, one of Crazy P’s co-founders. They had tried the effect years before, on 2011’s “Wecanonlybewhoweare,” but wanted to take another crack at it. “You get all these counterpoints from all these different lines working together, tracked up, to give a really smooth sort of feel,” Baron continues. “She loved that.”
Moore had been Crazy P’s singer for more than two decades. She died at age 52 in August, roughly three months before “Human After All” came out on Any Signs of Love. (In January, her family said the cause of death was suicide.) “Danielle is irreplaceable,” Baron says solemnly — she was not only a cool-but-stirring presence on club-ready gems like “Give It Up” and “Cruel Mistress” and “Clouds,” but a dynamic performer who scaled the DJ booth to dance and sing as co-founder Chris Todd played behind her at a 2023 show in Brooklyn.
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Crazy P started roughly 30 years ago when Baron and Todd were introduced by mutual friends at the University of Nottingham. The two shared a multi-instrumentalist background — over the years, they’ve got credits for playing bass, guitar, keyboards, and more — and a taste for house music.
When they met, it was an energizing time in the U.K. for house heads. “We’d had a lot of brilliant American releases, but there was no real U.K. scene in the early 1990s,” Baron says. “It wasn’t until the mid-1990s that we got our act together.” Both men gravitated towards labels like Paper Recordings — who would later release their first two albums, when they went by Crazy Penis — and Nuphonic, companies which specialized in a sound Baron describes as “still underground, but with more of a more disco-y tinge.”
The pair wanted their music to sound like it was played live. There was just one problem: They didn’t have the equipment to make that happen. Luckily, thanks to technological advances, “sampling had become a bit more affordable,” Todd says. So they “pilfered some record shops” — a much cheaper endeavor in the 1990s than it is today — to find material to slice and dice, creating the building blocks for their productions.
Their debut album, 1999’s A Nice Hot Bath With, was appealingly loose, if a little meandering. But determining what the live Crazy P experience would look like proved challenging. “We had done a couple of tentative gigs where it was me and Jim basically taking our studio out to the club,” Todd explains. “We did about two of those and realized that’s not really the way forward.”
Around this time, Todd and Baron met Moore going out in Manchester. “We would end up going back to her house for the after party,” Todd remembers. “She was a personality and a talent — she would sing often.”
They subsequently decided to invite Moore to join the group as a vocalist, along with another on-and-off collaborator, Tim Davies, on bass and Matt Klose, a friend from college, on drums. “We effectively wanted to be like a disco band,” Baron says. “And you’re never going to successfully do that with two blokes.”
The Wicked Is Music was their first album to feature contributions from all the newcomers, and also the first where the group cracked the code on dancefloor heaters. Opener “There’s a Better Place” pairs a frisky bass line with an excerpt from Gene Wilder’s Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory song “Pure Imagination,” adding a fantastical edge to the driving beat. Better still: “You Are We,” a house cut, crisp and sweet as a candied apple, which pulls its vocals from “Until,” the heartwrenching final track from the Bee Gees’ 1979 album Spirits Having Flown.
Adding Moore and co. gave Crazy P a new way to write songs, and a different arsenal of sounds to draw from. Some of the group’s most enduring tracks remained sample-based house: “Like a Fool” (2015), with its commanding beat and rueful vocal, could have appeared on The Wicked Is Music right after “You Are We.”
“Night Rain” (2019) on the other hand, requires live-band textures to summon the spirit of late 1970s Los Angeles studio pop, seamless and casually virtuosic. And “Heartbreaker” (2011) exists somewhere between those poles: The vocals are samples of two dynamite singers, Aretha Franklin and James Brown, but the bass line sounds like something from a stadium rock show. (Baron, who played the riff, hears New Order.)
“The samples were still a part” of Crazy P’s sound, Baron acknowledges, “but we had the means to record everything that we wanted to.” “We started getting together and jamming in the studio,” Todd adds.
This proved an early test for Moore — one that she passed with flying colors. “It’s so difficult to set up in a room as a singer and jam [with a band],” Baron notes. But Moore “had a real talent for it. We’ve had a few of those four-hour, five-hour sessions where you come out and the song is kind of done. I haven’t worked with many singers who can do that. She was always quick off the mark with melody and lyrics.”
When Crazy P started work on Any Signs of Love, Moore wanted to incorporate “some tougher, edgier stuff,” as Baron puts it. “You want every record to develop from the last one,” he adds. “And she made a comment akin to, ‘Let’s stick it up ’em.’”
As a result, the synthesizers are noticeably chillier. The title track sounds like it was blessed by Giorgio Moroder in 1978, while “The Revolution Will Not Be Anything” incorporates some of the spidery textures of early Chicago house. The biting electronics come through all the more clearly because Crazy P pared back their production style. “Me and Toddy are famous for throwing the kitchen sink in there,” Baron says. “This record doesn’t sound like that. There’s loads of space in it.”
Any Signs of Love came out at the end of November. Todd and Baron are happy to share fond memories of working with Moore, but reticent when it comes to discussing her tragic death, and somber when asked about the group’s future without its longtime public face. (In addition to fronting Crazy P onstage, Moore often took the lead in interviews as well.) Releasing an album provides “a little bit of breathing space to work out what we’re going to do,” Todd says. “There’s no plan.”
He’s played a few DJ gigs back to back with Baron, including one seven-hour long set in Liverpool; “it’s been good to have something to focus on.” And the band has several festival gigs booked this summer, including Gottwood and Wild Wood in the U.K. and Love International in Croatia.
Whatever Crazy P becomes moving forward, Baron adds, “it will be different.”
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Kai Cenat — the eternally upbeat streamer whose profile has exploded in recent years to make him the most popular personality on the Amazon-owned Twitch platform — is taking a moment to think.
In the five years or so since he’s become a full-time content creator, Cenat has had some of the most famous hip-hop artists, athletes and actors come to his house to drop in and join the “chat,” the affectionate word he uses for any of the 700,000-plus people who subscribe to his channel. He’s thinking over whether he can recall a favorite moment among so many, but it’s tough. It wasn’t when SZA and Lizzo stopped by together in the fall, nor when NBA All-Star Kyrie Irving taught Cenat’s friends and family how to play basketball. It would be reasonable to think it might be one of the many times Kevin Hart, one of his idols, swung by to kick it during the holidays.
Sitting in the basement room of his mountainside Georgia mansion, the 23-year-old needs a beat or two to consider the options. The room is a temple of adolescence, with pictures of his favorite basketball players, vintage arcade machines like Pac-Man and a gaming racing wheel. He has a huge walk-in closet and a king-size bed, both of which are being used by his three-person styling team. The only part of the room that hints at some sort of professional living there is the desk at one end that contains the computer and camera setup that power his streaming empire. Dressed in a BAPE hoodie and stonewashed denim that make him look like he’s straddling sartorial eras, Cenat finally settles on an answer: The May weekend last year when Drake and Kendrick Lamar dropped a total of four songs, three of them back to back.
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“That was the most fun experience I’ve had,” he says with a smile bright enough to power a Tesla. “I’m not going to lie.” It’s tough to tell if he’s actually super excited or just trying to manage his constant and unbridled childlike energy.
“We never experienced something like that,” he explains. “It was a good week. Everybody had their opinions. I was literally hopping on stream and had like 60,000 viewers. As soon as they dropped, my s–t was spiked to like 100,000.”
When it came to the beef that ended up taking over hip-hop for the better part of 2024, most popular streamers took sides or called winners, and Cenat was no different. “I’m cool with Drake,” he says. “So people would expect me to be on Drake’s side.
“But I’m not going to lie,” he continues. “Kendrick won that battle. It was good. I loved every second of it. I was just appreciating the moment. Like, bro, we got bangers right now that’s dropping back to back and everybody’s talking about them. It was definitely fire.”
Kody Phillips top, Louis Vuitton pants, AMIRI hat, Jacob & Co. watch.
Andrew Hetherington
For a person who makes a living by staring straight into a camera for hours on end and connecting with strangers, appearing truthful and genuine is crucial — and it’s one of Cenat’s superpowers. It’s what has allowed him to not only become the most popular streamer on Twitch, but also the most popular streamer in hip-hop and, arguably, one of the most powerful people in all music. No other streamer has been able to corral as many artists to be a part of their online world as Cenat has — and very few have earned the cultural respect from fans and artists that he has. His words hold so much weight that he’s able to materially affect the careers of the superstars his fans care about. That’s why during that weekend in May, Drake told Cenat to “stay on stream” before dropping his “Family Matters” dis track — he knew a good review from the jovial streamer would bode well for him not only in his sales, but in his battle with Lamar. But it’s also why, after the streamer said Drake’s “The Heart Part 6” was weak, Drake allegedly blocked him.
That’s just one of many major moments Cenat has driven for music’s biggest stars over the past few years. He’s had spats with Nicki Minaj, Blueface and Ye, though he eventually made up with all of them. (Minaj even gifted him a pink throne that he proudly keeps in his bedroom and doesn’t let anyone sit on.) Most recently, while on a stream in early January, he panned Lil Baby’s highly anticipated fourth album, WHAM, even questioning why certain songs were added to it. WHAM trended on X — mainly due to jokes about Lil Baby being washed. While it’s unfair to attribute to Cenat the initial negative reaction Baby’s album received on social media, he had a significant hand in spreading the sentiment that it wasn’t Baby’s best work. That’s just the power Cenat holds in 2025: He’s a self-made institution. Like EF Hutton, when Cenat talks, people listen.
All of that has made him, for all intents and purposes, the closest thing Gen Z has to 106th & Park or TRL, the erstwhile midday live-music shows that used to air on BET and MTV and were appointment viewing for any fans wanting updates on their favorite artists. Cenat’s stream is now the main place to tune in to see artists having fun and feeling comfortable enough to let loose and relax. “Yeah, people will be saying that,” he says with an impish grin. “For everyone to come to play music or just have a fun interaction, it means a lot to me, honestly, because I didn’t think, out of everybody, they would want to come over to my house. I still haven’t got to like really let it sit in and really let it digest, but it does mean a lot to me, and I’m just having fun as I go on.”
Building a platform to rival the biggest cable music stations of the 1990s and early 2000s should take at least a decade — but it’s important to understand how quickly all this has happened. Cenat, who first started posting on YouTube in 2019, is not an overnight success. But considering how integral he’s become to the cultural fabric, you could be forgiven for thinking he’s been ingrained in the hip-hop internet landscape forever.
Before first appearing on the platform, the Bronx-born creator had moved to Georgia at a young age with his mother and siblings, living in a homeless shelter while his mother worked multiple jobs to create a better life for them. It was tough, but Cenat says with his trademark positivity that he doesn’t remember those times as rough or bad. The family eventually made its way back to New York, and Cenat enrolled at SUNY Morrisville to study business administration. In search of a creative outlet, he started posting funny skits on YouTube. For Cenat, the decision was a no-brainer: “I watched YouTubers growing up — that’s why I understand it so well.”
Andrew Hetherington
Andrew Hetherington
Mainly filmed in his dorm room and around campus, Cenat’s skits were low-rent affairs with minimal costumes or production where he came off as a slapstick comedian in the tradition of Martin Lawrence. His most viewed videos were his challenges, like the popular “Try Not To Laugh Challenge” that he still does to this day and clips like the Extreme Ding Dong Ditch series, which sounds crazy but was just Cenat and his friends playing the childhood game in different locations. They didn’t get massive traction, but they caught the eye of fellow Bronx-bred creator Fanum, who invited Cenat to join the AMP (Any Means Possible) collective of YouTube creators. Soon, Cenat was posting videos at an increasingly rapid pace, as well as appearing in clips by other AMP members.
By 2021, Cenat was ready to branch out from YouTube and grow his audience another way. He decided to try livestreaming and landed on Twitch, the platform Amazon acquired in 2014, as his new home. At the time, it was being used mainly by gamers to livestream gameplay while avid fans watched like a professional sport. Cenat enjoyed playing video games, but his first foray onto Twitch was through what are known as “just chatting” streams, where he’d sit down with a camera on his desk and, yep, just talk with his audience. By the end of his first day on Twitch, he had 5,000 followers. By the end of his first month, he had 70,000. The next month, 140,000 people tuned in.
Despite Cenat’s brand now being so closely associated with hip-hop, he didn’t start producing music content, really, until he started streaming. “When I started streaming, most of my content was blowing up based off me just reacting to different songs and listening to albums when they drop and just enjoying it for what it was and just saying, like, my opinions on it,” he remembers. “And then, like, people just loved it.”
In fact, he didn’t even listen to rap until he was a teenager. Growing up, “I did straight Michael Jackson up until high school” — which is when Cenat became a fan of a hometown hero who was then dominating the charts: A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie. “That was my real transition,” he says. “I went from Michael Jackson to A Boogie, and I explored from then on.”
His musical exploration has fueled his Twitch channel’s growth: Thanks to his Mafiathons — monthlong 24-hour streaming marathons that he’s held with some of the most famous names in music, sports and entertainment — Cenat now has the most subscribers on Twitch (728,535 at press time) and holds its record for the most concurrent streamers at 720,000. He’s now also one of the richest streamers in the world, according to Forbes, which estimates his 2024 earnings at around $8.5 million. (Cenat declined to comment on his earnings.)
Andrew Hetherington
His manager, John Nelson, credits these streaming marathons with cementing the Kai Cenat brand. “His first 24-hour stream [in January 2023] is really when his trajectory went off,” Nelson says. “And it’s interesting — I believe it was that one that ended with Ice Spice [on camera]. Funny, because both of them took off at that same time. Two New York kids. And, you know, they were both very popular then, but they weren’t the megastars that they are today.” Each of Cenat’s Mafiathons has helped him not only grow his audience but also break Twitch records; the most recent, in November, featured a who’s who of pop culture that included Serena Williams, GloRilla, Sexyy Red and Druski that helped him break the record for most subscribers, with more than 340,000 new people paying $5.99 to join Club Cenat.
Yes, more than 720,000 people pay money to watch a 23-year-old talk about whatever comes to mind and prank his best friends. But why, exactly?
“I just think it’s the creativity,” Cenat says. “This is just the vibe I give off, like on my stream. I try to make it as fun as possible. And being able to, like, break ice with anybody who comes on.”
It’s the creativity, sure. But it’s the combination of that creativity with his comparatively radical sincerity that has endeared him to Fortune 500 companies like McDonald’s, T-Mobile and Nike. It’s also what drew the likes of Snoop Dogg, the veritable hip-hop pitchman who’s able to move between disparate worlds, to tap the young star to work together. And it’s the reason Hart, the blockbuster comedian who has mastered the art of multimodal content more than perhaps any other superstar, took a liking to him over any other streamer of the moment.
Cenat, much like Snoop and Hart, has built a brand on being genuinely unproblematic, which, combined with his affable demeanor, has appealed to an unusually large swath of people. Unlike several other popular streamers, he hasn’t delved into the incel echo chamber side of streaming culture that has, in part, been popularized by Twitch competitor Kick. The Australian-based streaming platform reportedly offered Cenat $60 million to switch to Kick, but he turned it down.
When asked why, Cenat struggles to articulate a clear metaphor. “Say, for example, you go to Steph [Curry] and you’re like, ‘Hey, man, we want you to be a running back [in] the NFL. You’re so good at basketball, but we want you to just leave everything behind right now and go to NFL football and be a running back,’ ” he says. “It doesn’t make sense! I’ve been on Twitch. I’ve built a core community. Kick is not my home. My home is definitely Twitch. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. That’s what I live by.”
Andrew Hetherington
Andrew Hetherington
And, unlike a number of popular streamers, he’s managed to stay clear of the political discourse that dominated the conversation in 2024. “It’s just because I don’t understand it. Some people say I should just do some research on it and, like, inform myself,” Cenat explains. “Now, I’m living in America, so it’s good to know what’s going on in politics. But like, I’m just not educated enough to speak on that.”
On the early January day I sit down with Cenat, Adin Ross, the superstar Kick streamer who famously interviewed President Donald Trump and gifted him a Tesla Cybertruck, made a statement apologizing for “raising a toxic community” on the platform and vowed to do better. “I want to rebuild,” Ross said. “I want to actually completely revamp and reset everything. I want to go back to stuff that matters. With that being said, every stream that I do, especially at this point, until I say something else, is going to be something that’s heartwarming and something that’s meaningful.”
Sounds a lot like Cenat, doesn’t it? He brushes off the idea. Cenat believes a fan base is a reflection of the creator. “So if you feed it nonsense, you’ll get nonsense. [Ross] realized what happened and now he’s trying to make a big change.”
But regardless of how he frames it, Cenat still has major clout. On Aug. 4, 2023, a full-on riot ensued in New York’s Union Square when he announced to his massive audience that, to celebrate his first streaming marathon, he would be giving away PlayStation 5 consoles and gift cards there. But he didn’t have a permit. Around 3 p.m., large crowds started to form in Union Square, and police took notice when people began to destroy public and private property. The New York Police Department called in 1,000 officers to the scene — and then all hell broke loose. Cars were destroyed, store windows were broken, and seven people were injured, including three NYPD officers. Over 60 people were arrested, half of them minors. It was a rare dark day for Cenat — but it proved just how big his brand and celebrity had gotten.
In 2023, Cenat and his small team — his assistant/production partner Brianna Lewis, his videographers and manager Nelson — traveled to Nigeria. And when they stopped by Makoko, a small, impoverished waterfront settlement on the outskirts of Lagos, they realized they were out of their depth.
The village didn’t have broadly available internet like the city itself, so Cenat couldn’t stream. But what really caught him off guard was the state of the Makoko Children Development Foundation School and Orphanage. “I went over [to Nigeria] just to go visit it, see how it is, and I went out where I just seen things that I was like, damn,” he says. He decided then and there to at least try to help improve the town. “I stumbled across this school that they had in this very small school building. These small classes and the kids were so eager to learn even in the condition that they were in. Don’t get me wrong: When I went to Nigeria, I seen beautiful parts. They got great big houses, fire cars — like, Nigeria is beautiful. [But] the place where I went to was Makoko.”
His first plan was to just fund some renovations to the school, but soon that didn’t feel like enough. So he decided to give 20% of his earnings from his November Mafiathon 2 to build a brand-new school in Makoko. “Hopefully it comes out exactly like what I’m imagining,” he says. “They said it’s going to be done this year probably, and I want to go back to Nigeria and see how it is and [have] like a grand opening. I want to be able to stream that.”
Andrew Hetherington
Cenat’s work in Makoko offers a window into how he envisions his future. He has dreams of doing more with the streaming format, but also, maybe, leaving it all together. Though he loves streaming, he wants to act in and direct movies. (Not TV, though: In his words, “No one watches TV anymore.”) Hart, whom he now calls a friend, has been helping him prepare for that next stage of his career; Cenat won’t share specifics, but says Hart has given him certain movies to watch and has been advising him. “I would love to be in movies and stuff; he definitely pushes me,” Cenat says. “He tries to connect me to the right people that direct and write movies and produce them.”
Would he leave streaming behind for Hollywood? Perhaps — but not right now. “Our good friend, [YouTube superstar] Mr. Beast, was like, ‘Why would you use something that you’re so good at to catapult you into another category? Just be completely dominant in the category that you’re in right now and just take over that.’ And I’m like, ‘Damn, he does make a good point.’ ”
His current solution to the conundrum: eschew Hollywood entirely and produce a movie on his own. “I want to be able to, like, put it out to the world,” he says. “I’m going to take a hit financially. But like, I want to be able to put it out to the world and just see if a company will pick it up.”
For the moment, Cenat remains laser focused on streaming. After all, his is one of the only streams that can genuinely help (or hurt) an artist’s career, at least in his mind. When Cenat panned GloRilla’s 2023 single “Cha Cha Cha” with Fivio Foreign, the Memphis MC blocked him on social media. He felt he was just being honest. “If there’s some bad music, I’m going to let you know it’s bad,” he says. However, according to Cenat, after their dustup, Glo glowed up. “We’re good friends now. And ever since I told her that one song was bad, she’s been making hits!” He’s not wrong. Ever since that spat, Glo has notched five songs in the top 40 on the Billboard Hot 100.
And when the biggest names in entertainment are DM’ing and texting you to ask to visit your crib and hop on your stream, what could possibly measure up next? Going bigger — even bigger than the movies. “I want to go to space!” Cenat exclaims. “I want to be the first human in space to float around, [stream] and talk my talk to my chat and then come back down to Earth.”
He’s serious, too. He wants to do everything he wanted to do as a kid, living and dreaming in that homeless shelter. “I want to have the whole Avengers on my stream one day,” he says with the enthusiasm of a middle schooler. “I really believe that’s going to happen one day.”
This story appears in the Jan. 25, 2025, issue of Billboard.
When Evan Lo walked onto an in-progress livestream by Kai Cenat, the Twitch juggernaut with some 15.8 million followers, and his influencer pal Fanum on Nov. 16, 2024, they received the guitar-wielding stranger with a friendly, split-second greeting. But when he began strumming the vibey opening chords of his viral track “Swimming,” the streamers halted. A look of starstruck bliss crossed Fanum’s face, while Cenat — after a quick online search to confirm his guest’s identity — began screaming: “Oh, my gosh! It’s him! Yo, you a GOAT!”
Flawed Mangoes photographed December 5, 2024 in New York.
Justin J Wee
The GOAT in question is better known as Flawed Mangoes, a Boston-based musician whose gently expressive guitar work and mesmerizing, ambient loops have soundtracked a slew of content creators’ motivational speeches and uplifting memes. Dubbed “hopecore,” this positivity-focused music has gained traction as a tonic to social media’s often toxic offerings — and based on his comment sections, Flawed Mangoes has helped many a bro tap into their sensitive side. Sure enough, before Lo left the livestream, he played that comfort-food instrumental while another guest, the Chicago rapper G Herbo, gave an inspirational speech — and Herbo’s young son was left wiping away tears.
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“It was so chaotic,” Lo says, chuckling. “Like, ‘Am I overwhelming this kid right now?’ But watching the video [later], it was a wholesome thing … It’s very surreal to think that people are actually having significant moments [with my music].”
Flawed Mangoes photographed December 5, 2024 in New York.
Justin J Wee
Justin J Wee
This digital cover story is part of Billboard’s Genre Now package, highlighting the artists pushing their musical genres forward — and even creating their own new ones.
Despite being a naturally “introverted, shy person,” the thoughtful, easy-going Lo is quietly embracing his status as hopecore’s de facto poster boy. “In my head, it was never ‘I want this to be motivational and inspiring,’ ” he says. “[My music is] toeing the line between melancholy and happy in that bittersweet sort of way. I guess a lot of people identified with both sides.” In his estimation, a Flawed Mangoes fan is someone looking to “slow down and take time” for personal wellness: “I think people who can relate to needing that sort of energy in their life tend to gravitate toward my music.”
After signing with APG Music in April and releasing EP The Unwavering Hand in September, the 27-year-old is getting more comfortable showing his face to the world. He’s even preparing to spotlight his own vocals on an upcoming album in 2025, though he’s quick to manage expectations. “What inspires me the most is hearing singers who clearly aren’t very good at singing but do it anyway and really commit. Their lack of formal singing training becomes a character of the music itself. That’s really inspiring to me as someone who’s a very mid singer,” he adds with a sheepish smile.
This story appears in the Jan. 11, 2025, issue of Billboard.
01/13/2025
There’s plenty of prospects to get excited about this year.
01/13/2025