Features
Page: 9
Former A&M Records executive Derek Taylor captured the sound of Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66 in a few well-chosen phrases in in his liner notes to the group’s first album for the label. Taylor wrote excitedly about its “delicately-mixed blend of pianistic jazz, subtle Latin nuances, cool minor chords, a danceable beat, gentle laughter and a little sex.”
With all that going for it, how could it miss?
Mendes, who died on Thursday Sept. 5 at age 83, had the kind of career artists dream about. He had enormous success in the 1960s fronting Sergio Mendes & Brasil ’66, which had three top 10 albums on the Billboard 200 and two top 10 hits on the Billboard Hot 100. But Mendes’ success didn’t end when that group’s fortunes cooled. He enjoyed periodic comebacks and periods of rediscovery for decades to come.
He had a big comeback in 1983 with the Barry Mann & Cynthia Weil power ballad “Never Gonna Let You Go,” which reached the top five on the Hot 100. He enjoyed another rediscovery in 2006 when his album Timeless, which he co-produced with will.i.am, reached No. 44 on the Billboard 200 and received a pair of Grammy nods. (The album featured such guest artists as The Black Eyed Peas, Erykah Badu, Stevie Wonder, John Legend and Justin Timberlake.) In 2012, he was nominated for an Oscar for best original song for a song he co-wrote for the film Rio.
Mendes won a Grammy for best world music album for his 1992 album Brasileiro and two Latin Grammys for best Brazilian contemporary pop album for Bom Tempo and Timeless. He received a lifetime achievement award from the Latin Recording Academy in 2005.
In 1966, Mendes came to the attention of Herb Alpert, co-founder of A&M Records, and one of the top-selling album artists of the 1960s. Alpert produced the group’s first three albums, all of which went gold. Alpert also took Brasil ’66 on tour with him and even wrote an enthusiastic recommendation that appeared on the back cover of their debut album: “One afternoon recently, a friend of mine called to ask if I wanted to hear a new group. From the first note I was grinning like a kid who’d just found a new toy.” That album remained on the Billboard 200 for more than two years (a rarity in those days) and was voted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2012.
Alpert was a close friend of Mendes’ for nearly 60 years. “Sergio Mendes, my brother from another country, passed away quietly and peacefully,” Alpert said in a statement on Friday. “He was a true friend and extremely gifted musician who brought Brazilian music in all its iterations to the entire world with elegance and joy.” (Another bond between the two musicians: Lani Hall, to whom Alpert has been married since 1973, was one of two female singers in Sergio Mendes & Brasil ’66.)
The group’s sound was cool, yet hot, and brimming with confidence. Still, it was a new sound in 1966, so new that A&M took no chances and supplied parenthetical phonetic spellings for five song titles on the album, including “Mais Qu Nada (Ma-sh Kay Nada).” That pronunciation gambit may seem quaint in an era when Bad Bunny gives acceptance speeches on general-audience award shows in Spanish, but, hey, baby steps. One generation paves the way for the next.
The group’s music was often featured in “lounge music” compilations of pop songs from the 1960s, which were a forerunner to today’s “yacht rock” collections of pop songs from the 1970s and 1980s. Some people, it seems, can only enjoy pop music if they’re being ironic about it. (But they’re listening, so I’ll take it.)
Here are 10 Mendes tracks which will remind you of his greatness or give you a good place to start in exploring this talented and innovative musician.
I wrote the liner notes for a CD compilation, Sergio Mendes & Brasil ’66-86, which was released in 1987 amid A&M’s 25th anniversary celebration. This piece draws some material from those notes.
“Acode” (2008)
After weeks of climbing the charts and drawing groundbreaking crowds to her performances, Chappell Roan had to get something off of her chest.
Addressing her audience of over 3 million followers in a frank pair of TikTok videos, the “Pink Pony Club” singer stared directly into her camera, eschewed the typical dynamics of artist-to-fan communication, and laid everything bare. “I don’t care that abuse and harassment, stalking, whatever, is a normal thing to do to people who are famous or a little famous,” she said, her voice breaking. “I don’t give a f–k if you think it’s selfish of me to say no for a photo, or for your time, or for a hug. That’s not normal, that’s weird. It’s weird how people think that you know a person just because you see them online.”
While Roan disabled comments on her videos, that didn’t stop the oncoming discourse from consuming online spaces. A majority of the messages across X, TikTok and Instagram were affirmations, supporting the singer for taking a strong position; a vocal minority of others offered comments that bore a striking similarity to the ones Roan called out in her videos. Some users said Roan wasn’t “cut out” for pop stardom. Others proclaimed that being a pop star required a “sacrifice” of personal privacy. More still suggested that Roan should “be a little more open” to photos with fans in public.
The debates about what is expected of pop stars when it comes to interacting with fans forces the question — at what point does genuine appreciation for an artist’s work cross the line into inappropriate behavior?
Trending on Billboard
Nick Bobetsky, Roan’s manager, puts it simply on a call with Billboard: “It’s about artists setting boundaries. The majority of fans don’t cross that line, but there are some who just don’t respect those boundaries. And it’s not even really all about fans — it’s about human boundaries.”
When she first read Roan’s statement, artist manager Kristina Russo says she felt something within her “relax.” Russo has worked with pop singer-songwriter GAYLE since the “abcdefu” singer was 14 years old, and says that preparing her client for inappropriate fan behavior has always been one of the hardest parts of her job.
“I had like a whole other purpose, aside from wanting to make her dreams a reality,” Russo says. “It was like an experiment — ‘Can you raise a young person up in this industry who can also maintain their humanity and their personal autonomy?’ Seeing [Chappell] talk about this made me feel like we were on the right path.”
Why do some fans feel a need to be so close with an artist who doesn’t know them? “A fan I interviewed once said, ‘I have stage four cancer, and when I go to my chemotherapy, I take my iPod with my Josh Groban music because it makes me feel better,’” explains Dr. Gayle Stever, an associate professor of psychology at Empire State University and the author of The Psychology of Celebrity who has spent her career studying fan behavior, embedding with fandoms across the cultural gamut. “[The fan was] seeking to be near this person through their work … and her proximity to this person and their work in turn gives her comfort.”
What Stever is talking about is a phenomenon in which a person develops a close relationship with someone — often a media figure or celebrity — who does not know them in return. That one-sided relationship can develop over time, as a fan begins to derive feelings of comfort and security from a figure and their work, which then forms what she refers to a “parasocial attachment.”
The concept of the parasocial relationship has become a major talking point online. The phrase is often deployed by those criticizing what they deem to be irregular behavior, in order to paint certain fans as weird and off-putting. But Dr. Stever makes it clear that parasocial relationships are a feature, not a bug, when it comes to human behavior — and no one is immune to forming a one-sided bond.
“As humans, we are biologically hard-wired to create connections with people from infancy,” she says. “So whether we want to admit it or not, we all form connections with familiar people in media all the time.”
It’s also not a new concept in the music industry. Back in the mid-60’s, news broadcasts around the world touted the onset of “Beatlemania” as the Fab Four rose to public prominence. In the decades following, stars like Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen, Madonna, Prince and dozens more found themselves garnering massive, mobilized fan bases. Soon after, fans began to give themselves their own branding — the Beliebers, Little Monsters and others became veritable fan armies all marching under the same flag.
Robert Thompson, the director of Syracuse University’s Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture, points out that these types of fan-celebrity relationships go back even further in history. “We can look at the Roman Empire and the fandom that went on for gladiators — there’s old graffiti of the top gladiators at the time, and the fans were carving stuff into buildings and furniture,” he says. “I suspect that as long as we’ve had people performing in any way, we have had relationships with those performers.”
So why, in 2024, does it feel like we’ve reached a fever pitch in terms of boundary-crossing fan interactions?
One factor is how the advent of the internet has fundamentally changed the way that fans and artists interact with one another. Ryan Star, a recording artist and the CEO and co-founder of social-audio platform Stationhead, says that with the internet came a complete upending of the way the industry thought about fan engagement.
“Social [media] became everything, where music was almost secondary to it,” Star says. “If you were a rock star [pre-internet], there was a disconnect where [fans] couldn’t relate to you. Now, you suddenly have a hyper-connection between fans and artists thanks to social media.”
Bobetsky agrees, adding that artists don’t have much of a choice when it comes to using networking platforms like X and TikTok. “Whether an artist leans into it or not, they’re generally on social media,” he says. “That heightens the personal connection that fans feel. That’s an amazing part of modern culture, that people can have that, but I think that in particular feels new, where you’ve got this more personal connection with fans broadcast at the broadest potential level.”
Colette Patnaude Nelson, a manager for artists like Conan Gray and J. Maya, knows firsthand how fundamentally social media has changed the course of fan-artist interactions. “I started my career representing YouTubers — I’ve watched the social interaction between audiences and influencers or artists just intensify,” she says.
But Stever posits that fan dynamics, be they online or in-person, have remained largely unchanged throughout the history of modern pop culture. “Every single one of these things we’re talking about, I saw pre-internet,” she says. “What you had was the same kind of fans doing the same kind of things.”
What the internet has done for fans, Stever says, is remove most barriers for entry. Where pre-internet fandoms would have to meet in-person — at conventions, concerts or elsewhere — today’s fans have direct access at all hours to others with similar points of view. Some fandoms of the past required payment in order to be a member of a fan club; now, fans can organize independently without money changing hands.
Social media has also inexorably concentrated the power of fan bases, to the point where they now inherently compete with one another. Swifties, Barbs, Stylers, Team Drizzy, ARMY and others can now not only show support for their favorite artists, but defend them against other fan groups. “Nowadays, there is almost a sense that one of the ways one expresses fandom online is to protect the border, to take the wagons and defend your territory,” Thompson says. “The blessing about everything opening up is that it is opened up to all kinds of other voices who were either silenced or stigmatized before. The curse is that it opens it up to everybody, and we’ve seen the manifestation of that with the spread of hate speech and false information online and among fandoms.”
That’s part of why Star wanted to create an online platform that prioritized community building over tribalism among fans. At Stationhead, fans are able to join channels corresponding to the artists they adore, and essentially stream music with fellow fans. Occasionally, the artists themselves will host listening parties for fans on the platform, solidifying their own base while silently promoting a healthier, less-fraught online dynamic.
Star points out that other social platforms, despite benefitting from artists’ presence on them, were not “purpose-built” to support artist-fan relationships. Stationhead, by contrast, was built with that relationship in mind. “When fans all come together to listen and the artist is there too [on a Stationhead channel], it is like kind of a live event,” he explains. “Joining that without being a fan would be like going to a concert for someone you didn’t like — why would you be there?”
Creating a sense of community and safety among fans is important — but as Roan pointed out in a follow-up Instagram post to her original videos, artists’ safety and well-being also has to be considered. “Women do not owe you a reason why they don’t want to be touched or talked to,” she wrote. “I am specifically talking about predatory behavior (disguised as ‘superfan’ behavior) that has been normalized because of the way women who are well-known have been treated in the past.”
As unwelcome behavior toward artists persists, many in the music industry believe that it is within an artist’s best interests to stay silent about unwanted interactions. One artist manager, who spoke to Billboard on the condition of anonymity, described Roan’s comments as “a thought best kept in her head.
“The relationship with fans is incredibly precious. Fans are hard-earned — especially from artists who are relatively new to the pop space — and pop fans especially are ruthless,” they added. “[Saying what Roan said] definitely comes across as a ‘biting the hand that feeds you’ situation.”
Russo fundamentally disagrees with that notion, saying the only way to help mitigate the surrounding circumstances of toxic behavior is to have hard conversations with fans. “Unfortunately, that is the training we receive in this industry — put up with the things that you’re not comfortable with in order to do well. Which is why what Chappell said fuels me as a manager,” she says. “The only way to change things like this is to talk about them. If somebody is telling you how to treat them, listen.”
So what can realistically be done to help artists dealing with inappropriate fan behavior? For starters, Stever says there is a danger of painting all fans as boundary-crossers — what she refers to as “homogeneity of the out group” (“I know, it’s very jargon-y,” she quips). “The psychological tendency is to treat a group of people as if they’re all the same,” she adds. “The reality is that the vast majority of fans are just as appalled at this [behavior] as [Chappell] is.”
The same concept applies to artists: Bobetsky claims that any industry-spanning “solution” to toxic behavior is virtually impossible, because different artists prioritize different aspects of their jobs. “Some seek the fame, some seek the celebrity — others, like Chappell, are all about music and message, and about being an artist,” he explains.
With that understanding, Patnaude Nelson says a good industry-wide starting point would be to normalize letting artists say “no” to certain opportunities. “Not everyone has to do a meet-and-greet at a show — that’s not something that we should press upon every single artist,” she offers. “We can’t control fans, but what we can do is be supportive of our artists and listen to them.”
For Russo, eliminating boundaries for artists to access mental health professionals is a must. “My dream is to have a psychologist on the road,” she says. “I would love if, structurally, we can make that a thing worked into artists’ deals.”
But Bobetsky is quick to point out that real change has to start at fans’ level. “I understand why we put artists on a pedestal, because we all find a sense of self through our favorite artist,” he says. “But I think you have to remind yourself that, as superhuman as you may consider your favorite artist, they are a person, and that person deserves boundaries.
“Take the advice I give my four-year-old, fans,” he adds. “Behave in a way that you’d want someone to behave around you.”
As Democrats rally around Vice President Kamala Harris in the wake of both President Biden’s exit from the race and the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump, the American flag – and all the different forms of patriotism that it symbolizes – has been thrust back into the center of cultural discourse. Of course, these events have also occurred in a year that has boasted several musical releases that both muddy and call into question the dynamic between Americana iconography and Black musicians and entertainers.
The complications of this dynamic have been a mainstay in pop culture conversations this year since Queen Bey first revealed the Cowboy Carter album cover (March 29). But her album is just the latest in a series of releases from Black R&B and hip-hop stars that incorporate Americana imagery in a way that departs from how that iconography was implemented in prior decades.
As the country enters the home stretch of the 2024 presidential election, what are we to make of some of our biggest contemporary Black entertainers in hip-hop and R&B — Beyoncé, Sexyy Red and Lil Uzi Vert, among others – holding onto the American flag amid a triad of global cataclysms, and ahead of an unbelievably consequential presidential election?
Trending on Billboard
When Black artists incorporate the American flag in their work, it is rarely as a mere decoration; they are almost always calling on some kind of history by way of irony or subversion. Whether or not that actually lands is a different conversation, but to take the use of the flag at face value as a blind, uncritical embrace of American patriotism is often too simplistic of a reading.
Though recent uses of the flag by Black musicians have drawn ire both online and in real life, the practice stretches back generations. In 1971, Sly and the Family Stone topped the Billboard 200 with There’s a Riot Goin’ On, which originally featured an album cover that replaced the stars of the American flag with nine-point stars emblazoned across a black (not blue) background. That LP’s title was a direct response to the question posed in the title of Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, released six months earlier. Altering the classic look of the flag to complement the album’s bleak outlook on the turbulence of the 1960s in the face of a rising Black Power Movement, There’s a Riot Goin’ On is a prime example of Black musicians using the American flag to explore the questions of belonging and ownership in regard to “Americanness.”
That question – an eternal inquiry in the story of Black Americans – is the anchor for most of hip-hop’s relationship with the American flag. The Sugarhill Gang, whose landmark single “Rapper’s Delight” helped bring hip-hop to America’s mainstream, placed their faces over the stars of the American flag on the cover for their third studio album, 1983’s Rappin’ Down Town. Released the same year that Guion S. Bluford, the first African American astronaut, reached space, Rappin’ Down Town found the rap group embracing their Americanness to access the country’s interstellar advances, through which they envisioned a life of liberation and autonomy with songs like “Space Race.”
The ‘90s found rappers doubling down on their critiques of America through visual and lyrical subversions of the flag. As the golden age of hip-hop, the ’90s were the decade in which hip-hop canoodled with capitalism without all of the cracks showing. While Puff Daddy and Bad Boy took a blinged-out approach to both the music and the business, other ’90s hip-hop acts were still subverting Americana iconography on their own terms. Miami rap group 2 Live Crew kicked off the decade with 1990’s Banned in the U.S.A: the first album in history to bear the RIAA-standard parental advisory sticker. Banned found 2 Live Crew leaning on Americana aesthetics to double down on their claim to Americanness during a time in which they were being forced out of that label – both culturally and legally – due to the vulgarity of their music.
Despite the country’s attempt to police and other Black expressions of sexuality, 2 Live Crew called on the flag to offer a critique of the tension between their Blackness and Americanness. Four years later on 1994’s “Aintnuttin Buttersong,” Public Enemy offered cutting lyrical critiques of the flag and all that it represents, with Chuck D spitting, “The stars is what we saw when our ass got beat/ Stripes is for the whip marks in our back/ The white is for the obvious, ain’t no black in that flag.”
Less than a year before Dipset’s new eagle logo took over their output, OutKast posed in front of a black-and-white American flag for their Stankonia album cover. Now one of the most iconic photos in hip-hop history, that cover’s black-and-white reimagining of the flag immediately situated the duo’s embrace of Americana as an intentional choice of irony and critique. The album’s title – the name of a fantasy place where “you can open yourself up and be free to express anything,” according to André 3000 – works in tandem with the group’s altering of the flag. The “stank” of Black American musical genres like gospel, funk and hip-hop course through the record, providing OutKast with the necessary tools to illustrate a space of true liberation for Black people outside of the gaze of white America. Whether they were ironically dressing themselves in the country’s colors or explicitly subverting the flag’s likeness, the ‘00s found rappers using the flag to explore the dichotomy of white and Black America at the turn of the century.
By the time the 2000s rolled around, it was practically impossible to think about the use of American iconography outside of the context of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Dipset’s musical and aesthetic relationship with America has been well-documented: While dousing themselves in red, white and blue and stars and stripes, the New York rap crew favorably compared themselves to Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. Writer and critic Andre Gee writes, “That ‘them and us’ mindset [in regard to white vs. Black America] is what paved the way for Dipset to simultaneously be victims but feel detached enough to harbor twisted esteem for the entities who had stuck one to ‘the man.’”
The 2010s, still aglow in the shimmer of the Obama years, found the historic president’s success reflected in hip-hop’s relationship with the flag. With a Black man finally reaching the highest office in the land, two of hip-hop’s defining icons fully leaned into bootstrap ideology with art that played up the idea that, if you work hard enough, you too can access the financial spoils of the American dream regardless of your skin color. Jay-Z and Ye’s (formerly Kanye West) Watch the Throne was a total exaltation of wealth, from its gilded album cover to its lavish sonics.
“Made In America,” the eleventh track on the LP, is perhaps the exact turning point in mainstream hip-hop’s relationship with the flag and Americanness: While their overall vision of Americana still retained notes of Blackness — “I pledge allegiance to my grandma/ For that banana pudding, our piece of Americana/ Our apple pie was supplied through Arm & Hammer,” Jay spits — “Made In America” finds the two stars proclaiming that they’ve “made it” because they’ve figured out how to achieve financial success through the country’s existing capitalist framework. They leave no room for the possibility of a life beyond the American capitalist project, à la OutKast, and instead happily settle for a life in which wealth is the master key to Americanness. Watch the Throne was the culmination of capitalism’s swallowing of hip-hop, forever changing how far critiques and subversion of Americana iconography can travel, at least on the broadest of mainstream levels.
“You can say a whole lot about [Jay-Z and Beyoncé],” says author, academic and cultural critic Dr. Mark Anthony Neal, of 21st century Black music’s reigning power couple. “The one thing that [continues to] resonate is that they are capitalists, and there’s no stronger brand in the U.S. than the actual American flag, so they need to tap into it at some point.”
The shadow of Watch the Throne continued to loom over album releases from a younger generation of rappers – like A$AP Rocky’s Long.Live.A$AP (2013), which features him with an American flag draped over his shoulders – but political turmoil later in the decade opened up a bit of space for a return to the critiques of the ‘90s and ‘00s. In 2017, the first year of former President Trump’s first term, Brooklyn rapper Joey Bada$$ dropped All-Amerikkkan Badass – an LP chiefly concerned with unpacking the atrocities of the American project – which featured an album cover that replaced the red, white and blue of the flag with the paisley print of bandanas.
Just as Trump’s 2016 victory influenced an onslaught of music across genres, so did the 2021 insurrection on the U.S. Capitol after the 34-time felon refused to accept the results of the 2020 presidential election. Last year, Lil Uzi Vert’s Pink Tape debuted atop the Billboard 200 in July, becoming the first hip-hop album to top the chart in 2023 and ending the chart’s longest gap between No. 1 rap albums in nearly 30 years. The LP’s cover is reminiscent of Stankonia’s, with Uzi posing in front of an American flag with pink stripes and stars emblazoned across a black background. Arriving in the wake of the insurrection and bearing a sound heavily influenced by rage rap, metal and punk, Pink Tape offers a starkly dystopian imagining of America; the official album trailer finds Uzi dancing and somersaulting their way through a fleet of warriors in what appears to be a crumbling city. What does it look like when an empire begins to fall? Visually and aesthetically, that’s the question Uzi seems to be posing with Pink Tape — but lyrically, the album doesn’t really engage with that inquiry. This combination of loaded visual imagery and comparatively empty lyrical imagery signals a new evolution in hip-hop’s relationship with Americana iconography: Uzi is aware of the essentially limitless capital of the brand of the American flag, and they incorporated it all the way to a No. 1 album.
At the end of 2023, breakout star Sexyy Red released a deluxe version of her Hood Hottest Princess mixtape, with an opening track titled “Sexyy Red for President.” By the time she released the follow-up, 2024’s In Sexyy We Trust, the St. Louis rapper doubled down on the patriotic imagery, incorporating the flag, U.S. currency, the Secret Service, the Oval Office and even Trump’s MAGA hat template into her live performance sets, album artwork, merchandise and social media presence. Of course, this all came several months after she claimed that the hood “loves” Trump because of his pandemic-era stimulus checks.
The meaning behind Sexyy’s use of Americana iconography is a bit more coherent: She’s drawing a thread between the way Trump’s cult of personality allows his supporters to embrace the vilest forms of their prejudices and the way her music and devil-may-care persona inspire her listeners to be their most ratchet, liberated selves. The issue with this thread is that it requires a latent acceptance of all the –isms and –ists that come with this specific brand of Trumpist Americana. Like Uzi, nothing in Sexyy’s lyrics provides any sort of critique that can balance the unconditional embrace of this imagery that her visuals suggest. Ultimately, Sexyy’s use of Americana ideology is yet another example of hip-hop artists understanding the potential capital of the brand of the American flag and accessing it with little regard for their role in promoting and normalizing the most sinister parts of its symbolism.
“I don’t know Lil Uzi or Sexyy Red’s brand of America, and if we are being entirely honest, we don’t entirely know Beyoncé’s either,” reminds critic and author Gerrick Kennedy. “We can infer, certainly, having looked at her usage of the imagery over the years. [Many] of those moments can be read as simply overt patriotism. I think about her performing under an American flag that was altered to the Pan-African flag colors, or the dress she wore with a black and white American flag as the train. Again, one could project meaning onto these moments, but with the absence of her telling you directly it’s simply projection.”
Of course, it would be impossible to talk about contemporary mainstream Black R&B/hip-hop artists using the American flag in their art without lending serious discussion to Beyoncé. Queen Bey boldly waved an unaltered American flag on the album cover for her country, Western and Americana-indebted Cowboy Carter LP earlier this year. The record explored the oft-whitewashed roots of country music by exploring her own cultural background, from Louisiana to Texas.
Led by a historic Billboard Hot 100 chart-topper in “Texas Hold ‘Em,” the LP also platformed several rising Black country stars, including Shaboozey, Brittney Spencer and Tanner Adell. Cowboy Carter opens with a literal “American Requiem” and closes with “Amen,” in which she sings, “This house was built with blood and bone/ And it crumbled, yes, it crumbled/ The statues they made were beautiful/ But they were lies of stone.” In the Tina Turner-nodding “Ya Ya,” Queen Bey belts, “My family lived and died in America/ Good ol’ USA, s–t/ Whole lotta red in that white and blue/ History can’t be erased.” Lyrically, the album does a fine job of getting across her critiques of the country’s violently anti-Black history.
While Beyoncé was drawing on the specific look of a Texan rodeo queen – a nod to her hometown of Houston – her artistic intent was ultimately muddied by her position as a global billionaire institution. She’s shedding light on a specific sliver of Black American culture, yet she’s also intentionally reaching for the biggest brand in her home market by embracing the flag and remaining silent on local and global political happenings. These two truths don’t necessarily cancel each other out, but they do complicate readings of the album cover and the effectiveness of subversion at that level of global stardom. A critique that calls out anti-Blackness without taking into account its very real global ramifications – especially from an artist who has previously done so – will always ring a bit hollow. Perhaps, Beyoncé’s version of critique is unlikely to get more nuanced than her calling the U.S. a “big, bold, beautiful, complicated” nation, as she did while introducing Team USA to the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics through a rework of “Ya Ya.”
“Subversion, like art, is subjective. What one person believes is subversive, another may not,” contends Kennedy. “Beyoncé spurred an avalanche of dialogue by putting part of the flag on the Cowboy Carter cover, but without her directly offering her POV around the usage, it’s left to interpretation. Someone will read it as a nod to the rich Black cowboy tradition from her native Texas. Someone will read it as [a] reclamation of the flag’s symbolism. Someone will see it as a critique on racism and imperialism. Someone will see it as a moment of patriotism. It could be all, or none, of those things.”
To paraphrase Vice President Harris, nothing falls out of a coconut tree, and everything exists in a greater context. It’s why the Cowboy Carter cover courted so much controversy, arriving mere months after a major kerfuffle over Israeli screenings of Beyoncé’s Renaissance tour documentary.
“We still have to understand how this comes across at this particular time,” reminds cultural critic and writer Hanna Phifer. “We’re living in such a regressive time where a lot of rights are being [repealed and] people all over the world are being slaughtered in the name of America and American imperialism. If you are going to align yourself with this symbolism, this is what you are aligning yourself with.”
As long as America exists, there will be artists who want access to its iconography, artists who find it important to critique the empire and artists who prioritize capital just as much as art, if not more. As mainstream hip-hop has gotten more and more intertwined with capitalism, artists have continued to reach for the flag in ways that feel more like they’re simply trying to access the brand of America rather than offering leveled, contextualized critiques of the empire and what it stands for. (None of the artists, creative directors, or photographers discussed here responded to Billboard’s requests for comment about their respective uses of Americana iconography).
But is our current climate even properly equipped to give mainstream Black artists that space to make those kinds of critiques?
“Frankly, I don’t believe we are in a culture where mainstream artists have the space to offer critique, especially mainstream Black artists,” says Kennedy. “Part of the discourse around Beyoncé’s usage of the imagery is rooted in the belief that she’s too rich and disconnected [from] the community to actually understand why anyone would feel a way about her having an American flag on the cover of her album. Who are we to tell Beyoncé how she can or can’t use that imagery? How is that our individual right any more than it is hers to pose on a white horse with the flag if that’s what she wants to do?”
As hip-hop enters its second half-century and continues to exist amid late-stage pop capitalism, artists continue to wade into murky waters with their flag use, yet they do so in provocative ways that, at best, help incite helpful and necessary conversations. If only they were willing to go a bit further with it. And such is the evergreen tension between what an artist wants to do regarding their usage of such loaded iconography, and what we, as consumers and supporters, may want them to do — especially when they share our hue.
“You’re never going to have mainstream Black artists that will critique the left from the further left,” Dr. Neal argues. “That makes you a fringe artist, that makes you Chuck D, in a kind of way. There’s a place for those artists, but those are never the mainstream ones.”
“I’m like a dirty s–thead raver. I come from throwing illegal parties — and not that long ago.”
So says The Blessed Madonna over Zoom one evening from her home in London — roughly 4,000 miles from the Chicago club scene where she made her name, and just as far from her native Kentucky, where she grew up “poor as hell” and first immersed herself in the scene. “Then when you’re talking to people who work in offices about what they think about your music, and suddenly there’s actual money involved,” she continues, “that just seems crazy.”
Weeks away from the release of her debut album, Godspeed, the 46-year-old artist born Marea Stamper is in the midst of such madness. After years of releasing remixes and singles on independent labels, including her own We Still Believe imprint, The Blessed Madonna signed with Major Recordings/Warner Records during the pandemic. The move placed an artist with subversive tendencies — sharing political opinions on social media, still frequenting illegal parties — squarely within the industry.
“Somebody has to get inside,” she says. “And if I’m to be put inside this system that has all these levers of power, my job is to be a little shard of glass in somebody’s foot.”
Trending on Billboard
Out Oct. 11, Godspeed — 24 tracks long, culled down from more than 100 hours of music — started during the pandemic. During this time, The Blessed Madonna would diagram songs she considered perfect, breaking down Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Born To Run” to their essential elements to better understand their power.
This self-taught music theory continued during what the producer calls “super-lockdown,” when she was confined to her London home due to her virally triggered asthma. During that time, she had been tasked with transforming Dua Lipa’s 2020 album, Future Nostalgia, into the Club Future Nostalgia “megamix” — a project in which she welcomed everyone from dance legend Moodymann to Madonna herself.
Unable to work with a studio engineer, The Blessed Madonna handled all of the technical aspects of the megamix herself, poring over YouTube tutorials and getting instructions from friends over the phone. Then, sadly in the midst of it all, her father died of COVID-19. She had to ID his body over email. “It was f–king awful,” she recalls. The ordeal not only elevated her ability to “get the thing out of my head that I wanted to say,” but reinforced her goal of making a dance record that wasn’t just excellent, but personal.
On Godspeed, The Blessed Madonna and a gaggle of collaborators she calls “the God squad” deliver fresh, soulful, often joyous and occasionally challenging takes on club music. Kylie Minogue sings about being “six deep in the bathroom stall” on the piano-laced party anthem “Edge of Saturday Night.” (RAYE was originally set to feature but had to drop out as her own career blew up.) Chicago house royalty Jamie Principle purrs about nights in the city’s mythical Warehouse on “We Still Believe.” And her late dad expresses how her success “fills my heart up with joy” in a voice message sampled on “Somebody’s Daughter.” In interludes, she and her collaborators giggle through unscripted silliness caught on hot mics.
“I feel like most dance records have nothing of the maker in them,” The Blessed Madonna says. “They’re kind of, like, engineered in a lab … But somebody has to make a decision.”
[embedded content]
So she decided to make the antithesis to what she often hears while moving through the world as a heavily touring DJ. “There are songs I only hear in the Uber and I can’t tell them apart, and I don’t know who any of the girls are, and they’re all Auto-Tuned into the f–king grave,” she says. “That is bad for art, and bad art is bad for culture and for thinking.”
Writing sessions happened across London, Chicago, Los Angeles and at Imogen Heap’s home in Essex, England. There, The Blessed Madonna and her husband, along with a group that included electronic duo Joy (Anonymous), gathered over the 2021 holidays. The pair appears on “Carry Me Higher.”
She is also friends with Fred again.., with whom she collaborated in 2021 on “Marea (We’ve Lost Dancing),” a hit that reached No. 33 on Billboard’s Hot Dance/Electronic Songs chart and soundtracked the final scene in 2022’s Academy Award-nominated Triangle of Sadness. The Blessed Madonna says witnessing “the Beatlemania that exploded around Fred” (whom she calls “so smart, so good at what he does and also so nice that it sort of makes you want to kill him, because it’s all real”) made her question her own goals. “I thought, ‘Am I supposed to want that?’ And I had a little breakdown,” she recalls. “I was like, ‘Is this record going where I want it to go? Am I reinforcing the status quo in dance music or am I pushing back against it?’
“We’re all just supposed to get rich and go to Ibiza and stop caring about politics and saying things that will upset people,” she continues. But for a self-described “s–thead raver,” that fate is unlikely.
This story appears in the Aug. 24, 2024, issue of Billboard.
I’m not getting too stressed about bridge lyrics,” says Benjmn, 29. “Because there’s like a 100% chance it’s going to get translated.”
The Los Angeles-based topliner is closing in on his ninth straight hour of songwriting today. And like the 10 other lyricists and producers Universal Music Publishing Group has assembled at Arcade Studios in New York, he won’t stop until he’s achieved perfection. Benjmn, who has written for acts like ENHYPEN and Le Sserafim before, and his cohorts here are all proven K-pop hit-makers, so they’re well aware that much of today’s work will be rewritten in Korean. Still, he and his collaborators on this particular track — 31-year-old SAAY from South Korea and 34-year-old Sandra Wikstrom from Sweden — will continue fine-tuning their already pristine bridge for at least 15 more minutes before moving on. Are there enough syllables? Is it dragging? Can the melody be more expansive?
They know that the punchier the lyrics, the likelier it is that major K-pop labels like HYBE, JYP Entertainment and SM Entertainment will pick up their demos for artists to record. Their current target is a boy band on the rise that UMPG knows is looking for its next hit, although the track — a swaggering dance tune tentatively titled “GLUE” — may very well go to another of the ever-proliferating K-pop groups. (Because of the unpredictable nature of where songs end up and the prejudices a label may have if it sees a song title publicly attached to other acts, UMPG declines to comment on the precise artists for whom the musicians have gathered.)
The three rainy days these writers and producers will spend here mark just the second-ever international K-pop camp UMPG has held in the United States as it pushes to capitalize on the opportunities the genre offers its roster of talent, rounding up its most experienced creatives from all over the world and charging them with completing three songs a day in small groups. After the camp concludes, UMPG Korea senior creative A&R executive Yena Kim will pitch the nine finished tracks to the big three labels, which constantly send her hyperspecific briefs outlining what they’re looking for and for whom; for now, she walks from room to room ensuring everyone understands their assignments.
Trending on Billboard
“Ultimately, we want releases,” explains UMPG’s head of its global creative group, David Gray. “We can sign K-pop writers and say, ‘Go get us K-pop cuts.’ But we can also be proactive and creative. Let’s put our best K-pop writers together, bring them briefs from Korea and keep it small, focused and strategic so we have the best chance of getting results.”
Benjmn (left) records vocals for an R&B-inspired demo produced by Sam Klempner.
Nina Westervelt
Jeppe London (left) and Lauritz Emil work on a song with guitars.
Nina Westervelt
On day one of camp, delirium is already setting in. “We should do a song called ‘Jet Lag,’ ” Benjmn jokes before he, SAAY and Wikstrom start spitting out catchy rap bars seemingly effortlessly, despite their lack of sleep. “Jet lag, jet lag, gotta go get bags/All around the world, I’m getting whiplash,” they sing, taking turns adding lines.
Down the hall, 28-year-old BLVSH from Germany and London-based Josh McClelland, 27, are writing for the same boy band, penning a punk-rock heartbreak anthem called “Close the Door.” Producer duo Jeppe London, 28, and Lauritz Emil, 26, both from Denmark, speak in rapid-fire Danish while recording electric guitar passes to find a sweet spot between Demi Lovato and Linkin Park, both of whom label SM sent as references. The room’s shared credits include tracks for BTS, ENHYPEN, NCT and TWICE, and an expertise in the subtleties of writing for K-pop artists shows.
“You’re looking for fun keywords instead of poetic structure,” explains BLVSH, who earned a No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 last year for her work on Jimin’s “Like Crazy.” “It’s more [about] attention-grabbing visuals and hooky words.”
They also labor over how pleasing each syllable sounds, the cadence and differentiation of each line, whether the melodies will sit in the band members’ varying vocal ranges and how easily choreographers will be able to pair the lyrics with snappy dance moves — all elements they say they don’t necessarily think about when writing for other genres, as many of them started out writing outside K-pop. Phonetics are key, even if most lyrics do end up getting reworked by translators, who generally earn a 12.5% split in royalties when the song is finished; BLVSH and McClelland say Korean labels are more likely to bite when they can imagine from the get-go how a song will sound once translated, which is why the writers make sure to infuse their demos with sharp consonants to mimic the Korean language. (For example: Saying a love interest looks “picturesque” grabs their ears far more than a simple “pretty” or “good.”)
SAAY (left) listens to a demo while BLVSH tinkers on piano.
Nina Westervelt
Max Thulin produces a track in Logic Pro.
Nina Westervelt
It’s also why the writers focus less on storytelling and more on a certain vibe or attitude in their songs, which they strive to convey even when recording their demos. By nature, many of them are far less extroverted than the acts they write for, so it’s entertaining to watch Benjmn cringe as he listens to a take of himself singing with Justin Bieber-esque sultriness, or to see 31-year-old Feli Ferraro of Los Angeles intuitively flip her hair and pop her hips while recording sexy-confident raps for a song called “8” that’ll be sent off to a brand-new girl group SM is developing (the campers know nothing of its top-secret lineup).
The songwriters aren’t fazed when translators alter the meaning of their lyrics; they understand it’s an often necessary part of ensuring they still rhyme and flow well in Korean. Still, it’s always ideal artistically when their work stays as close to the original as possible — and there are ways of increasing the chances that it does: As McClelland puts it, “Let’s make sure this lyric is fire.”
Toward the end of the day, everyone takes a short break to mingle and eat dinner; last year, UMPG learned that the ever-diligent writers prefer bringing in meals to avoid taking time away from their songs, and tonight’s comes from Joe’s Home of Soup Dumplings. SAAY and Wikstrom excitedly make plans to visit the Times Square Disney store while they’re in town. But there’s minimal time for this kind of pleasant catchup. A mountain of empty plastic containers in their wake, everyone instinctively filters back into their respective rooms.
Most end up staying until 10 p.m. There’s more work to be done.
From a publisher’s perspective, everything changed for global K-pop in 2020. That’s when BTS earned its first Hot 100 No. 1 with “Dynamite” — and the genre “exploded, that’s for sure,” quips Daniella Rasho, international A&R executive at UMPG U.S., who oversees the camp alongside Yena Kim.
“People have seen what BTS has done,” she continues. “Now every K-pop label is like, ‘I’m going to have the next BTS. I’m going to have the next one that goes global or is on U.S. radio.’ ”
“[Korean] labels are aiming for hits on the Billboard charts,” Kim adds. “The artists, most of them now all speak English, as well as local A&Rs. The whole thing is changing. It wasn’t like this five to six years ago.”
As K-pop’s global reach has expanded, so too has foreign songwriters’ interest in the genre, which rapidly transformed from one of the least popular international markets for songwriters to one of the most competitive. It’s an appealing space: Western pop stars are often inclined to stick with the same close circle of collaborators, but K-pop labels are quite open to taking songs from outsiders. Thanks to K-pop fans’ propensity for buying multiple physical variants of singles and albums, the royalty checks for songwriters and producers tend to be higher, too.
Western stars like Taylor Swift have also prioritized writing their own music, while K-pop fans value the glossy, high-production performances their idols have spent years training to execute more than the names on a song’s billing, allowing more space for career songwriters to notch credits. Rasho has a theory as to why: “American audiences want to relate to pop stars. For K-pop, people want to be them.”
Front row, from left: Jeppe London, Celine Svanback, Feli Ferraro, Benjmn and Max Thulin. Middle row, from left: Sandra Wikstrom, SAAY, Sam Klempner and BLVSH. Back row: Josh McClelland (left) and Lauritz Emil.
Nina Westervelt
SAAY (left) with Sandra Wikstrom who reads lyrics off her phone.
Nina Westervelt
Plus, the campers say that K-pop labels are in some ways more forgiving than their Western counterparts. They’re used to receiving detailed feedback on their demos and getting ample opportunity to rewrite or add parts to a song, and Ferraro explains that some will “Frankenstein” pieces of different submissions together to achieve the desired result. “They’ll find a home for it,” says the Connecticut native, who co-wrote “Run BTS” and Le Sserafim’s “Unforgiven.” “It doesn’t feel like you’re wasting your time at all.”
Seeing the many opportunities K-pop presents for its roster, UMPG has sprung into action over the past few years organizing writing sessions all over the world. Kim handpicked each creative at this year’s camp based not just on skill, but also on who would be most suited to the song briefs at hand — “Specific labels like some writing styles more than others,” Rasho explains — and who would get along best as collaborators.
Figuring out the latter is an art in itself. At last year’s camp, Gray recalls that “there were tears” during a creative dispute over a song that would turn out to be TWICE soloist NAYEON’s “Something.” It ended up being one of the most high-profile releases the inaugural camp created, with the EP it was on, NA, reaching No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Album Sales chart in June.
Next, Kim tailored small groups around who could best match the demands of the individual briefs, which reflect just how tuned in to global trends K-pop labels are. JYP requested a solo song akin to Tate McRae’s “Greedy” for a member of one of its girl groups, while others cited Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso,” Chappell Roan, Caroline Polachek and Charli xcx’s brat as references.
K-pop’s sonic evolution is a big reason why UMPG’s approach, gathering writers from all over the world, works so well. Swedish and British producers like Max Thulin, 30, and Sam Klempner, respectively, “bring their experimental, cool sounds,” while Germans are masters of “fun, electronic pop,” Rasho says.
“The U.S. writers come and do their rap thing — they have that swagger,” she continues. “They bring out something new and different in each other. They bring the best of their territories, too.”
Celine Svanback records vocals for a girl-group demo.
Nina Westervelt
Celine Svanback and Josh McClelland records vocals.
Nina Westervelt
Only at the end of camp, when all of their songs are finished, do the writers let UMPG treat them to dinner offsite — Cecconi’s on Broadway. Over drinks, McClelland jokes that Universal saved money on hotels by having two couples present. Benjmn and Ferraro are married, and Emil is engaged to fellow Dane Celine Svanback, 28; both couples met in past writing sessions. But aside from a few others from the same close-knit territories who’ve worked together before, like McClelland and Klempner, it’s the first time many of the campers have met — although, in the course of conversation, Benjmn and Thulin realize they share credits on a previous song created remotely, Le Sserafim’s “Eve, Psyche & the Bluebeard’s Wife.”
Most of them, it seems, fell into the K-pop world unintentionally, whether they were headhunted by labels or indoctrinated at the nudging of UMPG. It wasn’t the first choice for many but now, it’s become perhaps their best avenue to flex their creative muscles, writing pop, hip-hop, rock and R&B all under the ever-expanding K-pop umbrella.
“It’s not just one sound,” says Wikstrom, who never did come up for air long enough to visit the Disney store. “That’s what I really love — you’re not tied to anything. I used to think, ‘No, I don’t want to do K-pop. I don’t even know what K-pop is.’
“Then, I realized,” she continues, her eyes widening. “K-pop is everything.”
This story will appear in the Aug. 24, 2024, issue of Billboard.
Spring of 2022 brought out the superstars: Over the course of three consecutive weeks, Future released I Never Liked You, Bad Bunny put out Un Verano Sin Ti, and Kendrick Lamar returned from a five-year break with Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers. Future and Lamar launched four songs apiece in the Billboard Hot 100‘s top 10 during their albums’ debut weeks, while Bad Bunny scored three.
But few of these tracks endured. Nine of them fell out of the top 10 in their second week on the chart. A month later, Future’s “Wait for U,” a melancholy hip-hop ballad with Drake and Tems, served as the only lasting reminder of this blockbuster spurt in the top 10.
That July, Steve Lacy carved out a notably different path on the Hot 100. He is not nearly as well-known as Future, Bad Bunny, or Lamar; as a result, his breezy new wave single “Bad Habit” debuted on the Hot 100 in the lowest possible position. It climbed the chart for five weeks before reaching the top 10. It then remained there for 18 weeks, ultimately peaking at No. 1.
Trending on Billboard
Songs like “Bad Habit” are becoming hard to find — 75% of 2024’s top 10 hits debuted in that lofty environment as of the third week of July. Ironically, though, the tracks that launch on the upper reaches of the Hot 100, like Future’s “Puffin On Zootiez” and Lamar’s “N95,” tend to be easy come, easy go. They don’t remain as long as the hits which take time to get into that exclusive atmosphere.
Since 2000, the average single that debuts in the top 10 hangs there for roughly six weeks. In contrast, tracks that take two to eight weeks to ascend to that position linger for more than 11 weeks.
This dynamic has become more extreme in the heart of the streaming era. Since 2015, singles that start out in the top 10 last 6.3 weeks on average, while tracks that take two to four weeks to reach the top 10 last more than twice as long — 12.7 weeks. And songs that take five to eight weeks to ascend to the top 10 do even better, lasting for an average of 13-plus weeks.
Singles that erupt high on the chart and then sink immediately are maybe thought of as viral one-offs — tracks plucked out of obscurity, usually by the masses on TikTok, incorporated into millions of videos, streamed by curious listeners, and then discarded. In truth, most of these short-lived top 10 hits are album cuts from superstars like Taylor Swift and Drake.
When artists with large followings release new full-lengths, it’s now common for many of the tracks on the album to debut immediately on the Hot 100 — as devoted fans engage with it for the first time and play it all the way through, sometimes more than once. Listeners have always been eager to devour new releases from their favorite acts, but this activity wasn’t trackable on a song level before the adoption of streaming, other than via sales or occasional radio play courtesy of individual DJs who happened to like a particular album cut.
The initial burst of post-release-week enthusiasm — the thrill of the new — is very difficult to sustain, however, and many of these songs depart the upper reaches of the Hot 100 rapidly. From 2000 to 2015, around 13% of top 10s fell out of the top 10 after one week; that number has rocketed upward, topping 40% in each of the last four years.
Gaining listeners’ interest is hard enough at a time when there is unprecedented competition for attention. Holding on to that attention for extended periods, or building it over time, may be even harder.
Songs that manage this tend to look a lot like singles from the pre-streaming era, in that they have sustained promotion campaigns behind them. The influence of radio on their trajectory is often especially noticeable.
While streams and sales of sought-after projects typically bunch up near a release date and then diminish, airplay tends to rise over time, as more stations see a song working and start to play it, and then play it more often, in tandem with label promotion. A similar progression happens with radio formats, which will often plunder successful tracks from each other, further amplifying their impact on the chart.
“A lot of times, the pop format will just look at other formats and see what’s bubbling up — like a Hozier or a Noah Kahan — and then say, ‘You know what, that feels like a pop record, let’s give it a shot,'” explains Tom Poleman, chief programming officer at iHeartMedia. “Then you can make something a super mass record.”
Many young executives believe airplay has little to no impact on streaming levels, but radio’s slow-burn timeline helps songs climb the Hot 100 — and sustain their position near the top. In fact, from a label’s point of view, this is one of airplay’s primary remaining benefits, as radio continues to face increased competition from streaming services and short-form video platforms. (Some executives also believe airplay can help artists sell tickets and earn brand deals.)
Take Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy):” When it skipped from No. 2 to No. 1 on the Hot 100 dated July 27, streams and sales were down — 6% and 24%, respectively, according to Luminate — but radio listening was up 11%. Shaboozey’s hit drew 77.2 million in airplay audience, as compared to 39 million official streams and 16,000 sales.
For the next two weeks, streaming and sales kept slipping, while airplay audience kept growing, albeit at a declining rate — up 10% in week three, and 6% in week four — and “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” stayed at No. 1. “Radio can still very much move the needle,” says J Grand, an A&R veteran. “Certainly not as much as a decade ago, but I don’t think the fall off is as precipitous as people are making it out to be.”
Promoting songs to radio is costly, however, and radio generally plays fewer current tracks than it used to. It’s good for commercially minded artists, then, that airplay is not the only way to extend a song’s life high on the charts. While the influence of music videos has lessened considerably in the age of TikTok, Reels, and YouTube Shorts, a well-placed clip can still ignite a single. (Though videos can be expensive too.)
Lamar’s “Not Like Us” sprang back to No. 1 nine weeks after it initially came out thanks to its music video, which was widely anticipated due to the avalanche of attention around his nasty public feud with Drake. Streams of “Not Like Us” jumped 20% and sales climbed 16% at a time when they would typically be falling.
And adding a star collaborator to a remix remains a tried-and-true technique for counteracting decaying chart position. Wizkid’s “Essence,” a swaying, flirty collaboration with Tems, grew gradually for months during 2021. “The people connecting first with the song in the States were largely either from Africa or the diaspora,” says John Fleckenstein, COO of RCA Records, which released and marketed the track. “We literally went city by city, focused on targeted radio and digital campaigns to get to those populations.”
But the big boost for “Essence” came when Justin Bieber joined the fight, appearing on a remix that August which bolstered streams, sales, and airplay all at once. Bieber’s presence catapulted the song from No. 44 on the Hot 100 to No. 16. In October, “Essence” glided into the top 10 — again with help from airplay, which kept climbing even as streams and sales decreased.
Engineering the long climb that eventually made “Essence” — or “Bad Habit” — inescapable is increasingly a lost art. But while the majority of top 10 Hot 100 hits now debut on the upper reaches of the chart, the danger of flaring brightly is burning out quickly. As Nick Bobetsky, who manages Chapell Roan, likes to say, “there’s much more meaning in momentum than in a moment.”
HipHopWired Featured Video
CLOSE
Source: Johnny Nunez / Getty
The late, great Phife Dawg famously rapped, “I’ll never let a statue tell me how nice I am,” on “Award Tour” off A Tribe Called Quest’s class Midnight Marauders album. The words still ring true over 30 years later when it comes to the Grammy Awards, which too often have been lacking when it comes to its respect for Hip-Hop culture.
Back in the day, the Grammys wouldn’t even air the Rap category winners during the proper show. To many, the slights still continue, like Jay-Z sitting in the front row only to go 0-8 in Grammy wins in 2018. Every year it’s a guarantee, the Hip-Hop heads will be upset, about something, justifiably so.
Needless to say, the Grammys’ relationship with the culture is still strained at best, with artists like Drake, Kendrick Lamar and Childish Gambino all essentially curving the show after being asked and passing on performing.
Considering the amount of Hip-Hop legends, who have dropped quality material, only to never take home a Grammy Award, you can’t blame them. Like Phife insinuated, a Grammy Award will never make you a great MC, but the acknowledgment would still be cool. And don’t get use started groups like the aforementioned A Tribe Called Quest or De La Soul or Public Enemy.
To be clear, we’re not taking anything away from stars whose shelves are littered with Grammys. We just wish the distribution of the accolades were more equitable.
As evidence, check out the eyebrow-raising list of Hip-Hop artists who have never won a Grammy in the gallery. It wouldn’t really be the Grammys if someone wasn’t getting snubbed, right?
—
Photo Getty
1. Yasiin Bey
Source:WENN
Yasiin Bey f/k/a as the Mighty Mos Def is already one of the greatest MC’s of all time. Not so much in Grammy land.
2. KRS-One
Source:Getty
Blastmaster KRS-One and Boogie Down Productions are legends. For shame.
3. Wale
Source:Warner Records
Wale has only one nomination to his name for Best Rap Song back in 2013 for “Lotus Flower Bomb.”
4. Rakim
Source:Getty
The R has been nominated a grand total of two times.
5. A Tribe Called Quest
Source:WENN.com
A Tribe Called Quest has come up blank after only four nominations. Two nominations in 1997, one nomination in 1999, and one in 2012. Q-Tip has a Grammy, but that’s thanks to a performance on “Galvanize” by the Chemical Brothers.
6. Scarface
Source:Getty
Brad Jordan is still a GOAT.
7. Snoop Dogg
Source:WENN.com
Despite 16 nominations, Snoop Dogg has always come up empty. He holds the record for third most Grammy nominations ever without a win across all genres.
8. Ice Cube
Source:WENN.com
O’Shea Jackson has been nominated just one time. Think about that.
9. Wu-Tang Clan
Source:Hip-Hop Wired
Despite being for the children, the Wu-Tang Clan has managed to snag only one Grammy nomination.
10. DMX
Source:WENN.com
DMX once dropped two critically acclaimed and commercially successful albums in one year. Nevertheless, he’s 0-3 in Grammy Awards.
11. Busta Rhymes
Source:Getty
The Dungeon Dragon has a dozen nominations to his name.
12. Redman
Source:Getty
Redman will go down in history as a GOAT, but he only has two Grammy nomination to his name. His buddy Method Man has one Grammy, though.
13. Mobb Deep
Source:Getty
The speakers of the Dunn Language. Rest in power Prodigy.
14. Tupac Shakur
Source:Getty
The legendary life of Tupac Shakur was cut short, but a posthumous award is way past due.
15. Public Enemy
Source:WENN.com
This is just disrespectful.
Forever No. 1 is a Billboard series that pays special tribute to the recently deceased artists who achieved the highest honor our charts have to offer — a Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 single — by taking an extended look back at the chart-topping songs that made them part of this exclusive club. Here, we honor the late Maurice Williams, who died on Aug. 5 at age 86, by looking at his lone No. 1, the doo-wop classic “Stay,” which he recorded as the frontman of Maurice Williams & the Zodiacs.
Maurice Williams & the Zodiacs meet the most common definition of one-hit wonders, as they had just one top 40 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 – but, boy, what a hit. Their doo-wop classic “Stay” reached No. 1 in November 1960, sandwiched between two other top-tier classics, Ray Charles’ “Georgia on My Mind” and Elvis Presley’s “Are You Lonesome To-night?.”
Trending on Billboard
Over backing chants of “Stay!” by his fellow group members, Williams carries much of the song and its plea to a girl to stay out longer than she is supposed to. Her Daddy and Mommy won’t mind, Williams argues, not entirely convincingly. Midway, he steps back and hands the lead to Henry Gaston for one of pop music’s most unforgettable falsetto shouts — “Oh, won’t you stay, just a little bit longer!”
Williams wrote the song in 1953 when he was just 15. The song was inspired by his crush on one Mary Shropshire. “[Mary] was the one I was trying to get to stay a little longer,” Williams told the North Carolina publication Our State in 2012. “Of course, she couldn’t.” (The more restrictive mores of the 1940s and 1950s inspired such other great pop songs as the Oscar-winning “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” and The Everly Brothers’ “Wake Up Little Susie.”)
“It took me about 30 minutes to write ‘Stay,’ then I threw it away,” Williams told ClassicsBands.com. “We were looking for songs to record as Maurice Williams & The Zodiacs. I was over at my girlfriend’s house playing the tape of songs I had written, when her little sister said, ‘Please do the song with the high voice in it.’ I knew she meant ‘Stay.’ She was about 12 years old and I said to myself, ‘She’s the age of record buying,’ and the rest is history. I thank God for her.”
The Zodiacs’ producer, Phil Gernhard, took the demo, along with some others, to New York City and played them for all the label reps that he knew. Al Silver of Herald Records was interested, but insisted that the song be re-recorded as the recording levels were too low. He also said that one line, “Let’s have another smoke,” would have to be removed for the song to be played on commercial radio.
[embedded content]
The track runs just 1:38. It is the shortest of the 1,174 singles that have reached No. 1 on the Hot 100. You could play the song in its entirety six times in the time it would take to play the longest-running No. 1 hit, Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well (Taylor’s Version)” (which runs 10:13, per the dominant version the week the song topped the Hot 100 in 2021) just once. But despite its historic brevity, the record never feels that short. It’s simply exactly as long as it needed to be to tell its story. It’s to the group’s and Gernhard’s credit that they didn’t pad it just to make it longer.
The song entered the Hot 100 at No. 86 on Oct. 3, 1960 – though in a gaffe, Williams was credited as a solo artist. The billing was changed to Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs in Week 2, when the record vaulted to No. 40. The record hit the top 10 on Nov. 7 (when another great R&B record, The Drifters’ “Save the Last Dance for Me,” was No. 1). Two weeks later, it reached No. 1.
“Stay” was only the third No. 1 in Hot 100 history (which commenced in August 1958) that was both written and recorded by a Black artist. It followed Lloyd Price’s “Stagger Lee” (which he co-wrote with Harold Logan) and Dave “Baby” Cortez’s instrumental smash “The Happy Organ” (which he co-wrote with Ken Wood).
Williams and the Zodiacs’ recording of “Stay” was the first major hit for producer Gernhard, who returned to the top five on the Hot 100 in the ’60s and ’70s as the producer of The Royal Guardmen’s novelty hit “Snoopy vs. the Red Baron,” Dion’s poignant “Abraham, Martin and John,” Lobo’s “Me and You and a Dog Named Boo” and “I’d Love You to Want Me,” Jim Stafford’s “Spiders and Snakes” and The Bellamy Brothers’ “Let Your Love Flow,” the latter, Gernhard’s second No. 1 on the Hot 100.
The Billboard Hot 100 Chart for the week ending on November 27, 1960.
Williams and the Zodiacs had two more Hot 100 hits in 1961, but both were minor – “I Remember” (No. 86) and “Come Along” (No. 83). The group had broken through near the tail-end of doo-wop’s peak. Few doo-wop artists outside of the 4 Seasons, which had doo-wop roots, had extensive pop careers as Motown and, starting in 1964, the British invasion took over. A 1965 Williams song, “May I,” seemed promising, but the group’s label, Vee-Jay, went bankrupt just as the song was coming out. “May I” would become a top 40 hit in March 1969 for a white pop group, Bill Deal & the Rhondels.
Williams had had that same frustrating experience, on a much bigger scale, in 1957, when his group The Gladiolas released the original version of “Little Darlin’” (which Williams also wrote). The Gladiolas’ version reached No. 11 on R&B Best-Sellers in Stores and No. 41 on the Billboard Top 100, a forerunner to the Hot 100. But as was common in that era, a cover version by a white group, The Diamonds, became the bigger hit. The Diamonds’ version logged eight weeks at No. 2 on Best Sellers in Stores, and appeared in the 1973 film American Graffiti – a nostalgic film which was perfectly timed as the Watergate scandal broke wide open. American Graffiti received an Oscar nod for best picture and was inducted into the National Film Registry in 1995. The double-disk soundtrack album, a first-rate oldies collection, reached the top 10 on the Billboard 200 in February 1974.
[embedded content]
“Stay” was memorably featured in two films – American Hot Wax, a 1978 film about legendary DJ Alan Freed, and the 1987 blockbuster Dirty Dancing, another nostalgic film that provided relief from the woes of that era, including Iran/Contra and AIDS. “Stay” was featured on the Dirty Dancing soundtrack, which topped the Billboard 200 for 18 nonconsecutive weeks.
Many artists have recorded successful cover versions of “Stay.” In November 1963, the song was released by The Hollies, whose bright, effervescent version shifted the focus from doo-wop to rock’n’roll. Their version reached No. 8 on the Official UK Singles Chart, becoming their first of 18 top 10 hits in their home country.
Two cover versions have reached the top 20 on the Hot 100 – one by the 4 Seasons in April 1964 (with Frankie Valli taking on Gaston’s falsetto part) and another by Jackson Browne in August 1978 (with David Lindley handling the falsetto vocals). Browne cleverly recast the song from a romantic plea to a performers’ plea to the audience to let them play a little longer. Instead of saying Mommy and Daddy won’t mind, he argues that the promoter, union and roadies won’t mind (again, not entirely convincingly!). Browne’s version directly followed his own song “The Load-Out” on his hit album Running on Empty, a No. 3 album on the Billboard 200 and a Grammy nominee for album of the year. That two-song coupling, which also featured vocalist Rosemary Butler, was recorded live at the Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland.
[embedded content]
There have been many other notable cover versions of the song. The Dave Clark Five recorded the song for their studio album Glad All Over, which reached No. 3 on the Billboard 200 in May 1964. Andrew Gold recorded a version of “Stay” for his 1976 album What’s Wrong with This Picture?, which also spawned his only top 10 hit on the Hot 100, “Lonely Boy.” Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band teamed with Browne, Butler and Tom Petty to record the song at the No Nukes concert at Madison Square Garden in September 1979. The recording appeared on a triple-disc album which made the top 20 on the Billboard 200 in January 1980.
Maurice Williams didn’t have enough hits to receive major honors. He’s not in the Songwriters Hall of Fame (despite writing two colossal hits). He and the Zodiacs haven’t even been nominated for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But the placement of “Little Darlin’” and “Stay” in such iconic films as American Graffiti and Dirty Dancing helps ensure that those songs will live on forever.
And Williams’ place in the Hot 100 record books seems secure: Even with hit songs getting shorter and shorter in the TikTok era, no one has yet passed Williams for his 98 seconds of pop perfection.
When we think about the first Woodstock Music and Art Fair we think about the hippies. The mud. The brown acid. The helicopters. The chaos that became a utopia and a definitive statement for the ideals of the 60s counterculture.
And, oh yeah, the music.
The artists — three days of ’em — were, of course, the primary draw to the festival, and Woodstock boasted a lineup of formidable names, some of which were already historic, others that were on their way there and some who would use the festival to launch their careers. “We wanted the biggest and the best, and we worked hard to get them,” the late Woodstock producer Michael Lang told us in 2009, while preparing to celebrate its 40th anniversary. He acknowledged that it took a minute for the festival to be viewed seriously by booking agents and managers, but once Creedence Clearwater Revival signed on, interest was stoked and the gets became easier.
Thirty-three bands played in total, and there was even an impressive list of could’ve-beens: Lang made a run at the Beatles, for instance, but could only get John Lennon to offer a basically non-existent Plastic Ono Band, which wound up making its debut a month later at the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival. Bob Dylan was invited but never showed. The Rolling Stones, Simon & Garfunkel, The Doors, The Moody Blues, The Guess Who, Led Zeppelin, Jethro Tull and Love were among acts that turned down offers. The Jeff Beck Group canceled its slated performance after breaking up shortly before it. Iron Butterfly attempted to change the day it would perform at the last minute and never made it to the site.
But nobody at Max Yasgur’s farm in Bethel, N.Y. was complaining about what they did get to hear.
“I guess by Saturday, when everybody had arrived or everybody who was gonna get there arrived, we knew that this was gonna be a historic moment,” Lang said. “Nobody ever thought about or how it would resonate, but we knew that this was extraordinary. I knew that we were all freaks and there were many of us out there and we were disbursed around the country and around the world really, so it was like a gathering of the tribes if you will.”
Through the Academy Award-winning 1970 documentary and an array of music releases — both individual titles and multi-disc compilations, including the Woodstock Back to the Garden — 50th Anniversary Experience in 2019 — we’ve come to know their sets well, which has kept a little whiff of The Garden fresh during the ensuing decades. They demonstrate that even amidst turbulent conditions, there were amazing — and also, again, historic — performances all the way through the extra, unplanned Monday morning.
With Woodstock turning 55 on Aug. 15, these are our picks for the 20 most iconic sets on that fateful weekend…
John Sebastian
Just under a week after President Biden’s disastrous debate performance – and one day before Independence Day – a “fancam” compiling Vice President Kamala Harris’ most memeable moments to Charli XCX’s brash electropop banger “Von Dutch.” Created by X user @ryanlong03, the clip combines clips of Harris proclaiming her love for Venn diagrams, quoting her mother’s idioms and dancing and laughing while Charli’s neon-green Brat filter flashes across the screen. “It’s so obvious I’m your number one,” Charli bellows across Easyfun’s blaring synths.
Unwittingly, the clip kicked off one of the most drastic shifts in public perception of a politician in recent memory. It also cemented a clear restructuring of the contemporary pop music hierarchy.
While Harris may not have always been people’s “number one” choice for the top of the Democratic ticket, pop music-driven memes have helped her ascend to that position in the minds of left-leaning online communities as she prepares to officially become the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, IL (Aug. 19-22). Along the road to the convention, the Harris campaign has tapped Megan Thee Stallion and Bon Iver for rally performances, used Beyoncé and Kendrick Lamar’s “Freedom” as their official campaign song, and adopted the aesthetic of Charli XCX’s Brat album – which prompted a hilarious explainer segment on CNN. Pop music has never been more ingrained in U.S. politics – and it’s giving real weight to the voices of America’s youngest and newest voters.
Amid several ongoing global catastrophes, the climate crisis and the fight to codify a woman’s right to choose, the country has been understandably shrouded in a dark cloud of tension and anxiety going into November. Add an assassination attempt on former President Trump on a Sunday afternoon and President Biden shockingly ending his re-election bid on the one that followed, and you’re left with an electorate that exists in the context of reality’s best attempt at recreating Shonda Rhimes’ most ridiculous Scandal storylines.
According to an October 2023 study from Tuft’s Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, Gen Z (ages 18-27 in 2024) boasts 41 million eligible voters, including 8.3 million newly eligible voters who have aged into the electorate since the 2022 midterm election. Those are election-shifting numbers, especially in a race as close as this year’s seems headed for. The youth vote is vital – it’s an area where Biden was significantly lagging – and those young voters have completely shifted the election landscape by processing their fears, anxiety and general amusement at the sheer absurdity of the times through this summer’s most culturally resonant pop releases.
How’d they do it? In part because, if music is the universal language, memes – especially music-driven memes – are the Gen Z language.
[embedded content]
As much as Brat revels in cheeky self-aggrandizement and party-girl reflections, Charli’s latest LP also grapples with some intensely personal ponderings. While her ruminations on potential motherhood, her position in the music industry and her personal grief aren’t necessarily the things causing the American electorate anxiety, her songs provide younger listeners a way to work through their own emotional anguish as it relates to their futures. Chappell Roan’s breakout album The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess has allowed for similar impact on its young fans. Roan’s debut album explores myriad moods, but the emotional turmoil of growing up as a lesbian in a small Midwestern town looms over the entire record – perhaps a much more real analog to the way Gen Z feels heading into November, as they chart paths for themselves in a country that feels increasingly detached from their concerns, from abortion rights to gun control.
Not only are Brat and Midwest Princess driven by anxiety, but they’re also arguably pop culture’s two defining albums of the summer of 2024. With constantly recirculated lyrics like “Bumpin that” and “Should we do a little line/ Should we do a little key,” Brat finds Charli XCX at the peak of her cultural pull. The album cover’s funky shade of green has become the unofficial hue of the year, Pantone be damned. In the same week Brat became the highest-peaking album of Charli’s career, reaching No. 3 on the Billboard 200, Chappell’s record reached the chart’s top 10 for the first time, eight months after its October 2023 release. Assisted by a coveted opening slot on Olivia Rodrigo’s Guts World Tour and a stage show that effortlessly converted fans at every festival she appeared at, Chappell launched six Billboard Hot 100 hits off Midwest Princess – nearly half of the album! — from “My Kink Is Karma” (No. 91) to “Hot to Go!” (No. 17). In July, Roan also earned her first career top ten hit with the standalone single “Good Luck, Babe!” (which has since climbed to No. 6).
To varying degrees, pop music has always reflected the general mood of the population. Through the cultural and commercial success of Brat and Midwest Princess, Gen Z has helped significant pockets of the left-leaning Internet channel their political anxiety into a somewhat ironic, but still largely genuine, embrace of a new candidate suddenly offering an escape from the absolutely miserable election cycle that the Biden-Trump rematch seemed to promise – and the Harris campaign has taken notice.
In its first post since turning the official Biden campaign TikTok account into “@kamalahq,” the Harris campaign used Roan’s “Femininomenon” to highlight her as a fresh, new alternative to Trump. The day after Harris officially announced her election bid, the X account for campaign headquarters rebranded to fit the Brat aesthetic. In the words of Charli herself, “Kamala IS brat.” In an age where politicians are who we paint them to be, Gen Z has used this summer’s biggest albums to fashion Harris into a candidate that they can truly throw their support behind – whether it’s solely because of the draw of the memes or because anything seems preferable to the looming threat of a second Trump presidency.
Instead of trying to create an image for Harris, her campaign has let Gen Z create an image for her, simultaneously reasserting itself as a key voting bloc and reshaping the relationship between pop music and politics. In this way, Charli and Chappell have helped cement a new standard for era-defining pop stardom. Neither of them has seen a single from their most recent albums reach the Hot 100’s top 10, and their songs aren’t exactly pulling multi-week reigns at No. 1 across different radio formats, either. Rather, they’ve captivated the zeitgeist through fresh idiosyncratic aesthetics and outward rejection of traditional pop fame. After all, part of Chappell’s appeal is her explicit disdain for her ever-rising notoriety, and Charli preceded Brat with an album that cheekily satirized what the ultra-commercialized version of herself would look and sound like.
As the electorate continues to welcome large swaths of new, younger voters, a shuffling has begun to occur in the pop music hierarchy. While artists like Beyoncé and Kendrick Lamar continue to enrapture younger listeners – both scored culture-shifting Hot 100 chart-toppers this year with “Texas Hold ‘Em” and “Not Like Us,” respectively – they also now appeal to a broader range of voters (age-wise) than they have in past presidential election cycles. Lamar, of course, made appearances on former President Barack Obama’s oft-memed summer and year-end playlists, and visited him in the Oval Office back in 2015 — but the years since the Obama administration have cast the rapper in a slightly different role. No longer an exclusively “hip” pick to attract young voters, Lamar, by virtue of his age and material, can reach scores of voters across age demographics.
The same goes for Queen Bey, who was riding high on the success of her Hot 100-topping “Single Ladies” when she performed at Obama’s first Inaugural Ball in 2009. In the years since, she’s performed the National Anthem at Obama’s second Inauguration (2013), played “Formation” at a rally for then-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton (2016) and took to her Instagram page to back President Biden (2020). At this point in her career, Beyoncé isn’t directly competing with flashy, younger stars like Roan — she’s something of an elder stateswoman at the intersection of pop culture, music and electoral politics. She’s still admired by the country’s youngest eligible voters, but she also commands the respect of Millennials, Gen Xers, and even some Boomers.
In this way, “Freedom,” her and Lamar’s 2016 Grammy-nominated anthem, was a natural pick for Harris’ official campaign song. The song has roots in the mid-2010s Black Lives Matter era, boasts a pair of artists whose blending of politics and music have been lauded (and critiqued for years) and gives the Harris campaign a way to temper the hyper-contemporary feel of their other musical choices. And, for what it’s worth, Bey and Kendrick – two respected Black music titans — are valuable and logical musical picks for a Black candidate whose campaign (at least at the very beginning) was largely defined by the white pop stars of the moment.
Then, there’s the Taylor Swift question. Under a special microscope this cycle because of her silence during past elections (she’s since expressed her regret for remaining mum in 2016 and endorsed the Democrats during the 2018 midterms), Ms. Americana has all eyes on her as November draws nearer. The historic success of her globe-conquering Eras Tour has packed out stadiums across the country. But will she remind her fans to vote? Will she tell them who to vote for? It shouldn’t really matter what Swift’s voting stance is, but it does – especially as political fandom becomes more and more insidious.
The Internet drives pop stardom and political fandom in the same way; choices are made on the basis of how invested a person is in a pop star’s or politician’s brand. In the same way that Swifties buy the umpteenth version of The Tortured Poets Department because they want to be as immersed in her brand as possible, Biden’s most steadfast supporters – who often cited their respect for his 50-year political career and him being an “honorable man” — refused to waver, despite polls showing that his appearance on the ticket could very well cost the Democrats the election. From pop stars to politicians, brand loyalty is the crux of how people engage with most things in America right now, and the 2024 election cycle is already solidifying that. Yes, there are millions of voters that are fully aware of the issues they are most passionate about – namely, gun control, abortion rights, the Gaza conflict and inflation – but the voices of voters who struggle with interacting with politicians solely as public servants who owe them (and not the other way around) are often just as loud, if not louder. The support the Harris-Walz ticket has been able to accrue is undoubtedly impressive, especially because, at press time, the ticket doesn’t even have a platform readily available on their official website.
In the days leading up to Harris officially taking over the top of the ticket, memes overlaying her trademark cackle over pop songs with laughing intros/outros (think: Beyoncé’s “Drunk in Love” or Kesha’s “Blow”) took over TikTok and Twitter. On TikTok, an AI-generated Beyoncé song that turns Harris’ “coconut” anecdote into an original track plays in over 1,000 videos. Inspired by the “Win With Black Women” Zoom calls that have helped raise millions of dollars for the Harris campaign – and spawned similar calls amongst other identity groups – Swifties launched an @Swifties4Kamala X account that touts over 53,000 followers. Some Swifties have even (jokingly) inquired if they can use a VPN to vote in the election from outside of the U.S. Harris’ recently announced running mate – Minnesota Governor Tim Walz – has already been branded as the “Midwestern prince” (Chappell) to Harris’ “brat” (Charli). In the days since Walz joined the ticket, a camo cap with a design nodding to a similar product from Chappell’s online store appeared on the official Harris-Walz campaign website. Call it the Stan Twitterfication of U.S. politics, a reimagining of the cult of personality.
Naturally, part of Stan Twitterfication is projecting entire identities onto people; hours after the announcement of Walz as Harris’ running mate, American activist David Hogg took to X to write, “Tim Walz 100000% stands at his doorstep when it’s raining and says ‘we needed this.’” The day prior, another X user wrote: “Walz strikes me as the type of VP candidate who runs on a platform of making sure everyone knows how to safely change their own spare tire, and I love him for that.”
Whether or not these sentiments are rooted in the reality of Walz’s character is irrelevant. What’s interesting – maybe even damning – is that the kneejerk reaction is to romanticize Walz as a sympathetic and easily understood character rather than assessing his record as a public servant. It’s not that far removed from conversations around pop musicians centering their likability and relatability over their musical, vocal and instrumental prowess. But that’s the name of the game now – and the Harris campaign is smartly leaning into it. From the concept of a politician being “someone you can knock back a few beers with” to the proliferation of online political memes post-2016, this has long been the case in politics. In this election, the scale has increased and feels uniquely defined by and catered to Gen Z for the very first time.
As the Harris-Walz ticket gears up for the home stretch of the 2024 election cycle, they’ll likely continue their pop music-informed strategy. It’s not a bad choice, but it’s one they should exercise with caution – especially because they’ve already selected songs that could have invited a bit more controversy than they have so far. Everyone wants a piece of Brat, but it’s objectively mind-boggling to watch the presidential campaign for a major American political party adopt the aesthetic of a British artist’s coke-positive album. Chappell Roan is the year’s breakout pop star, but using her music for the campaign’s TikTok was a bold choice considering Roan declined an invitation to perform at the White House’s Pride celebration this year, citing her disapproval of the administration’s stance on the conflict in Gaza and transgender rights.
In that vein, “Freedom” is a pitch-perfect anthem on paper, but in the context of both Beyoncé’s and Lamar’s respective silence on global Black liberation, as it relates to Gaza, it rings a bit hollow. There’s also the matter of Lamar’s unavoidably massive “Not Like Us” — which Harris spoofed during a BET Awards commercial preceding her candidacy (June 30) — a Drake diss that has thrust conversations around regionality, race, ethnicity and cultural preservation into the spotlight, as Harris’ own race has become the subject of asinine questioning by her opponents.
If they intend to continue down this path, the Harris-Walz team needs to have their finger on the cultural pulse, but they can’t make it too obvious that they do – that’s when the pandering becomes unbearable. However the Democratic ticket proceeds with this race, their moves for the next few months are sure to further solidify the fact that politics is the new pop music. Ultimately, they’ll likely have to maneuver this campaign like a pop album rollout to secure the “Femininomenon” that they’re promising.