Videos by Ryan McGinley for The New York Times. Lettering by Ben Grandgenett.

Introduction

Women in this world are taught to believe that every problem must have a buyable solution. Not sleeping well? Get a lavender-vanilla pillow spray. Overrun with stress? Buy a skin-care routine. The market is rife with solace for sale — a product on offer for anything that ails. This past year, our own systemic subjugation was no exception. With a former beauty-pageant owner in the White House, Clinton in Chappaqua and high-profile men being exposed for their crimes, feminism reached its most shoppable form: pink pussy hats, enamel pins of vulvae, shirts that proclaimed “The Future Is Female.” These trinkets and tchotchkes brought comfort to their owners, but as a political response, they felt comically feeble. In a culture that tolerates violence against women, denies our health- and child-care needs and polices our sexual conduct and bodies, why would empowerment ever look cute?

Cardi B’s “Bodak Yellow” arrived as a valuable 3 minutes 44 seconds of frankness in a year of feminist pandering. The song debuted on June 16 and climbed the charts until it reached the top, spending three weeks at No. 1. It opens with a sparse and foreboding beat — the trap-music answer to the “Twilight Zone” theme. Cardi begins with an outright provocation: “Lil [expletive], you can’t [expletive] with me if you wanted to.” Her tone is confident in a way that feels easy. To paraphrase one commenter on YouTube: It’s a song that will make you want to fire your own boss.

Credit Video by Ryan McGinley for The New York Times

Cardi B, 25, grew up in the Bronx and worked her way to independence as a stripper. She first appeared in the public eye when she started posting charismatic videos on Instagram: infinitely watchable micromonologues on everything from dating, love, family and friends to media, terrorism, grammar, orthodontics and the finer points of three kinds of oral sex. As a public figure, her image is capacious, a mix of the bawdy antics of Fran Drescher and the quotable wisdom of Ecclesiastes. Cardi embodied these contradictions with ease, while other stars floundered. With public declarations of empowerment in fashion, many defaulted to a vapid middle ground, positioning themselves as generically “relatable” (Jennifer Lawrence) or taking a stand for wan concepts like love (Kendall Jenner).

Ryan McGinley for The New York Times

Compare “Bodak Yellow” with Rachel Platten’s “Fight Song” — the soundtrack to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Over swelling piano, Platten strings together blithe imagery about hearts, voices, friends and oceans. By avoiding precision, she tries to please us all. When she gets to the chorus, she belts out: “This is my fight song/Take-back-my-life song/Prove-I’m-alright song/My power’s turned on/Starting right now I’ll be strong.” Is it a song about a breakup? About asking for a raise? About electing a woman president, or all of the above? Who could say? The hook is perfectly pitched for group singing, but Platten seems afraid to offend. What kind of anthem runs on nervous trepidation? In “Fight Song,” empowerment is just another pursuit in which women must bend over backward for approval.

Cardi B, by contrast, does not speak on behalf of womankind. On “Bodak Yellow,” she talks about herself and herself only: her Louboutins, her mixtapes, her checks from the television mogul Mona Scott-Young. (Between dancing and rapping, Cardi honed her persona on Scott-Young’s VH1 reality show, “Love & Hip Hop.”) “I’m a boss, you a worker,” Cardi raps. When she deigns to think of other women at all, it’s only to write them off as a nonissue: Other women pay to party, while she gets paid to party. These sentiments are far from Platten’s brand of rising-tide empowerment; here, Cardi has the only ship. If the song does not toe any feminist party line, then it certainly empowers more than many things that do. Nobody listens to “Bodak Yellow” and imagines herself as the girl who pays to party.

From the beginning, rap has performed this kind of alchemy, turning systemic disadvantage into power. In “Bodak Yellow,” just one person emerges victorious: Cardi B. And like the best writers, she conjures this power from specificity and verisimilitude. Anyone who follows Cardi online can vouch that the contents of the song are largely true: She used to dance for money but no longer does; at one point she did, in fact, “fix her teeth.” And they know that her persona was constant from the start — always silly, always angry, always sexy, always smart, always fed up, petty or exhausted. If her brand of bravado feels distinctly female, then it’s only from doing what rappers have always done — starting from a place of truth. Female rappers have done this before, but never for an audience so desperate to be spoken to directly.

“Bodak Yellow” does not seem to care whether you think it’s an anthem. In a world where women reflexively say “sorry” for walking past other women in the hall, Cardi knows that the truest act of power is exercising the right to remain silent. “If I see you and I don’t speak, that means I don’t [expletive] with you,” she raps. Other anthems aim to please; Cardi’s conjures a world in which women don’t need to please anyone at all. ♦

Ryan McGinley for The New York Times

Jamie Lauren Keiles is a writer in Queens. Ryan McGinley is an American photographer whose work is in permanent museum collections around the world.

Videographer/Editor: Steven Rico. Stylist: Kollin Carter. Hair: Ursula Stephen. Makeup: Erika La’ Pearl.

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During the 2017 Grammy Awards telecast, Katy Perry performed a single from her first new album in four years, called “Chained to the Rhythm.” Built around the bright slosh of resort reggae, it was as much a frozen daiquiri as a song. Wearing a white tuxedo-with-bustier number and a shaggy blond bob, Perry sang lines like “So comfortable, we’re living in a bubble, bubble” and “We think we’re free,” yet “we’re all chained to the rhythm.” On her right sleeve was a spangled band that read “resist” — a tribute to the inaugural Women’s March, which had just taken place. The picket fence she stood behind came straight from the song and sat on a cantilevered stage that revealed Skip Marley, one of Bob’s grandkids. He rapped while she did jumps and thrusts. When it was all over, they stood together, their arms up in solidarity, before a projection of the words “We the People.”

Perry was, as they say, in a mood. Her candidate had just lost the presidency, and she wanted us to know she was bewildered and mad as hell. Only she didn’t sound mad. She sounded like Katy Perry — mad sunny, hella happy. But she was trying — trying to emote for the country, trying to indict our complacency, trying to matter.

Perry kept trying. In anticipation of the June release of her fifth album, “Witness,” Perry embarked on a daffy foray into stunt therapy, an awkward conflation of self-interrogation and self-indulgence. She spent a long weekend mansion-bound and live-streamed, repositioning herself as emerging from a state of cluelessness. Do I appropriate when I dress like a geisha or wear cornrows? And, like, what do I do with that? In a comical chat with the Black Lives Matter activist and podcaster DeRay Mckesson, she sat on a white couch in a heavenly white space whose mailing address might as well as have been “the Cloud.” Her legs crossed, her heart open, she confessed that the long, fraught history of black grooming was news to her. A friend had to set her straight. “She told me about the power in black women’s hair, and how beautiful it is, and the struggle,” Perry said. “And I listened, and I heard, and I didn’t know.”

That admission echoes the conflicted silliness of “Chained to the Rhythm.” The song both works and works against itself. That kiddie-pool Caribbean sound evokes 1980s radio without overtly invoking any of it. The pinballing, steel-drum-ish twinkle arrives just faintly enough that it seems to be coming through a blown speaker, perfect for Perry’s singing to surf it until the chorus. This is a low-calorie version of the island life that pop has been touring for decades, which is clever, because it obliquely winks at what the song is too meek to look at head on — the way some white artists and listeners love black culture without necessarily seeing black people, their politics or their pain. That, of course, nudges the song’s chain imagery — and the way it evokes Grace Jones’s 1985 hit “Slave to the Rhythm” — into tone-deafness. It doesn’t bring to mind white complacency as much as actual black bondage, a clumsy move that is its own kind of complacency.

The live-streamed therapy, the plea of ignorance, the delight of the actual song — they all land near the center of the Katy Perry vexation matrix. Perry might be the most naturally likable pop star we have. Who else has her ungovernable goofiness? Her greatest songs are called “Teenage Dream” and “Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)” and “Firework.” Some of her very good songs are called “Birthday” and “This Is How We Do.” Once, at the 2015 Super Bowl halftime show, she managed to both resurrect Missy Elliott and make a star of a dancing shark. Some singers are acrobatic. Katy Perry is aerobic.

Nobody this good at plastic flowers should be this bad at thorns. That conversation with Mckesson was meant to exonerate her of obliviousness. But if that’s true, why do the pleading from a spa? She was discussing her wish to better understand her place in the world without any proof that she has actually understood. What it sounds like Perry wanted was for other people to do her work for her. If nonwhite people don’t show her where the racial guardrails are, how can the accident report blame her? Maybe that’s somebody trying to be a better ally, but it also sounds a lot like somebody asking for a chauffeur. ♦

Wesley Morris is a staff writer for the magazine, a critic at large for The Times and co-host of the podcast “Still Processing.”

Opening photograph: Lester Cohen/Getty Images.

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The first time I heard the most interesting newish band in the English-speaking world was at a sort of music-video party in North Carolina. I don’t know how to describe it, really. My friend who ran it, Grayballz (the only name by which I’ve ever known him), who is a kind of impresario and community organizer and actor in commercials and purveyor of herb, put it together for a film festival. He likes videos, music videos like we used to watch on MTV and still can on YouTube. Grayballz thinks the form is alive and underappreciated. In a big room there were about 20 fancy TV screens. It was dark in the room, with strange purple laser lighting. I think there was fog involved. What I remember clearly, though, is one of the videos Grayballz had chosen. I saw it without knowing the name of the band or anything about them, not what country they were from, nothing. The video showed a kid who looked either European or Southern Ohioan. He was wearing a tracksuit and had a sort of severe thuggish haircut, bangs chopped straight across his forehead. He was bleeding from part of his face, as if he’d fallen or been cut in a fight. And running. Just running down a road. At a certain point he stopped and performed a remarkable improvised-looking dance. That’s all. But the music is the reason I remember. The music was pulsing and upbeat, possibly electronica or some kind of dance music, but soulful and kind of rocking. Falsetto notes skipped above an urgent melody line. The song was called “Shame.” The words went, “Nothing but a barefaced lie,/Is all you [expletives] can hold onto./I suggest you downgrade fast,/before it’s a shame on you.”

When they wrote that, had they been thinking about any particular group of [expletives]? It sounded so personal.

“Yes,” said Alloysious, or Ally, Massaquoi, one of the frontmen in a band where everyone is the frontman (except for the drummer they play with, Steven, who by being the one person who is not a frontman seems at times the most conspicuous person onstage.)

“Will you tell me who the [expletives] were?” I asked.

“No,” Ally said.

He was born in Liberia and has memories from there but moved to Edinburgh, Scotland, when he was 4. We were in the basement of the building (a former brothel) where Young Fathers record in Leith, which used to be a little town outside of Edinburgh but is now essentially a neighborhood, a 20-minute bus ride from the city.

Two black guys from African immigrant families, a white guy from Scotland, all of them Scots: Young Fathers. By one account, they called themselves that because when they were very young — the three founding members got together when they were only about 14 — people told them they were too serious. The name was meant to make fun of that quality in themselves while at the same time embracing and declaring it. (More frequently they say it comes from the coincidence that they are named after their fathers.)

Earlier that morning, G. — Graham Hastings, “the white guy in the band” — met me at the house where he grew up in Drylaw. It was council-estates, working-class housing. He took me back to the bedroom where Young Fathers were born: inside a cabinet, or a sort of wardrobe thing. They would actually climb into it Narnia-style, to cut tracks, doing vocals over beats that G. was creating with a forgotten computer program called eJay. “[Expletive] little beats,” G. said. “Little loops like a jigsaw puzzle.” In those days Young Fathers had been almost like a boy band. They all danced in sync. When they performed at hip-hop nights, people had no idea what they were doing. Yet strangely, given their youth, Young Fathers knew.

I asked what it meant to them, being from Edinburgh. Were they an “Edinburgh band”? They said yes but in a no sort of way. They explained that Edinburgh essentially has no popular-music scene. “Edinburgh is literally a quiet city,” he continued. “People start up venues. Then somebody complains about the noise, and they shut it down. I’ve been in studios where a guy has come in with a meter, a sound meter.”

Mainly Young Fathers loved this about Edinburgh: its relative indifference to their success. That gave them a bubble to work in, to be themselves in, so they just kept doing that. When I asked G. what had led to his production style, which is special for its starkness, for the diversity of the sonic worlds he’s able to create with a few machines, he answered, “It was basically just not knowing much about what was happening.” When Young Fathers won the Mercury Prize in 2014 for “Dead,” the BBC remarked that “almost no one owns this album.”

From left: Graham Hastings, Alloysious Massaquoi and Kayus Bankole of Young Fathers. Jack Davison for The New York Times

From the beginning, people told them they were strange. What was the white guy doing with those two black guys? Were they from Africa or something? What kind of music was it? (“Pop,” Young Fathers say. They prefer that term because it is meaningless.) Even in London it might have been harder to imagine. There are a lot more black people, for one thing — these two Afro-Scottish pop musicians would not have been forced to make common cause with this local white dude. “The identity of being a Londoner,” Ally said, “solidifies the culture.”

It has proved trickier to wield this tool, of provincialism-as-strength, when it comes to race. Especially with American audiences. Politically, the Fathers are engaged and informed, but their political statements tend not to track with what we are used to hearing here. This is another reason to value them. The socio-racial reality in which they were raised is both similar to and different from ours, in such a way that they are in a unique position to see the profound insanity of American race-obsession, “insanity” as in popular delusions and the madness of crowds. Scotland can be plenty racist, they assured me. Alloysious and Kayus Bankole even said they sometimes prefer the open, ugly racism of the States over a kind so silent and polite it keeps you wondering. “It can make you paranoid,” Ally said, rubbing his hands on his head. It was true, though, that you had more breathing room here (neighborhoods weren’t organized racially, for one thing). At the same time, through their love of hip-hop, they grew up immersed in American popular culture. This is especially true for Kayus, who lived for some years in Maryland. He described the weirdness of arriving there and finding himself forced — or not forced, really, but compelled — to conceive of his musical choices as racial. I’m a black kid, therefore I like X. There was a thrill in it. There was also a mental straitjacket. Whereas in Edinburgh, his musical choices could be just that. Lou Reed’s “Berlin” was one of his favorite records.

Young Fathers have a remarkable song on their last record titled “Old Rock n Roll.” I’m somehow both captivated and offended by it, but more the former than the latter, and the latter feels more and more creatively disturbed. The video for it was shot in Malawi, in a village. Alloysious and Kayus are dancing with the villagers and looking into the camera, doing rock-star things. The beat is sort of chugging, with a tinkle of dissonant notes that repeats, but there’s a propulsive African thing behind it. The first verse grunts and groans: “I’m tired of playing the good black .../I’m tired of having to hold back .../I’m tired of blaming the white man/His indiscretion don’t betray him/A black man can play him.”

For an American, it is instructively defamiliarizing to be talking with an African-born black man and have him open his mouth and say something in a full-on “Braveheart”-level brogue. There are YouTube videos of old “white” women speaking in thick Jamaican patois that have the same effect on me. A thing you thought was racial, an accent, turns out not to be. And in the moment of that correction, you can feel the texture of human nature. Like with the music . . . I’m not sure a white man can be fully legit, writing these things in 2018. In the spirit of Young Fathers, I will resist the impulse to suppress them. The band’s attitude seems to be: If it’s human, it’s allowed in. Ideology comes second. Take the line, “I’m tired of blaming the white man.” To an American it sounds like a selling out of the civil rights movement! But outside the vortex of our national politics, it’s ... what? I don’t know. A human thought? A thought that would occur to any person who yearns to know what it feels like to exist outside a psychological matrix based on bogus and scientifically nonexistent racial categories? Maybe! “Personality taking precedence over candor,” Kayus said, an excellent phrase that for him summed up the band’s attitude. They admitted it was complicated, how a line could change in crossing a border, but said they were more into stoking the conversation than being careful. “That song ends with a question mark,” Ally said.

There’s a funny moment in the “Old Rock n Roll” video when they cut to Graham in a field. You’ve been wondering where he was the whole time. I guess having the white dude dancing around in the African village was a step too far even for Young Fathers. But at a certain point in the song, you see G. sort of thrashing around by himself in a field. The verse he is chanting goes: “Old rock and roll/It’s not what you’ve been sold./Congo Square is open for business./I was there, as God is my witness.”

Congo Square in New Orleans: where the slaves were allowed to play music together on Sundays. Resulting in: many of the most excellent parts of American popular music, which has been a global music for two centuries. Congo Square is one of the wellsprings. What did it mean to say it was “open for business”? That the old system was alive inside the new. That we were being lied to about something.

Jack Davison for The New York Times

The new Young Fathers’ album, “Cocoa Sugar,” is an Edinburgh record in the special sense defined by the band: It doesn’t care. It doesn’t sound as if it was made in preparation for an oncoming rush of fame. As a result, it’s relaxed enough to feel its instincts. Check out “Fee Fi,” the second song. What sounds like a visiting female rapper is Kayus rapping in drag. The attack is slithery, a baby-talk voice that wants you dead: “Nice set of knives, gimme a slice/I like your flesh, I know what’s best/You can be my cause of death, dressed in Sunday’s best.”

Young Fathers are changing. Ally mentioned chameleons three times. Whatever happens commercially, they have made the record they wanted to make for 2018, with no detectable compromises. As far as that goes, they are still in the cabinet. ♦

John Jeremiah Sullivan is a contributing writer for the magazine.

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In 2013, during an appearance at Temple University, the actor Will Smith shared an anecdote about his younger child, Willow, an actress who had made an unexpected turn to music. Her debut single, “Whip My Hair,” an addictive pop song about originality and nonconformity, became a hit a few years earlier, and Smith now wanted her to star in a remake of “Annie” that he was co-producing with Jay-Z and others. According to Smith, Willow looked at him and said: “Daddy, I have a better idea. How about I just be 12?’”

Willow was asking for the chance to be a kid, and for the next few years, she did exactly that. Even as her entire family somehow became even more famous, she turned inward. Her Instagram feed showed her on road trips, at sleepovers, climbing trees, hanging out with friends on the beach. In one of my favorite photographs, she’s in TriBeCa, wearing a backpack and hugging an inflatable globe, grinning in an un-self-conscious way, her face and shoulders scrunched with the unrestrained delight that few famous girls display in public.

Two years later, she returned to music with a full-length album called “Ardipithecus,” whose sound echoed the SoundCloud trends of the time, minimalist vocals paired with drum-machine beats, but it’s “The 1st” from 2017 that feels like her true debut. In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Willow explained that she named the album for the tidal wave of new experiences happening in her life, both musical and, in her words, “human social situations,” like falling in and out of love. “The 1st” is both an archive of her teenage years (the album was released on her 17th birthday) and a session on the therapist’s couch.

The album opens with trilling violins and a tender confessional: “Hey, Mom, I met a boy.” The banality is immediately a relief — though not boring; not even close. If SZA made an album for the wandering existentialism of your 20s, Willow scored the soundtrack of the time right before that. To listen to this album is to witness a metamorphosis from girl to young woman. Willow cycles through personas in sound the way other teenagers might swap hairstyles or silhouettes, but the effect feels honest and fresh, a reminder of what it’s like to shape-shift by trying on a new pair of clothes or falling into a new group of friends. “Human Leech” is a grungy anthem of regret and anger, “Lonely Road” an emo tribute to independence and the instrumental “An Awkward Life of an Awkward Girl” feels like a preppy piano recital. The album ranges around, reinventing itself with every turn. It’s the lyrical version of a newly born colt getting its earth-side legs. “The 1st” isn’t always smooth, but it’s mesmerizing.

Willow learned how to play guitar for the album. It wasn’t easy, she has said, but it taught her about yielding to life’s difficulties. “You start to become friends with the process,” she said in the Rolling Stone interview. The fruits of that labor are most apparent on the song “Warm Honey.” The song opens with a confident guitar riff, then breaks into a relaxed and steady rhythm that begs to be blasted in a car while driving with the windows down, hair — or tears — streaming in the wind. Willow’s voice starts in a falsetto, luxuriating in the remains of her prepubescent vocal register. “My self never seems like enough,” she sings in a plaintive whine. Her voice strengthens as she gets wistful. “I’ll be walking for miles, searching for miles, trying to find myself.” By the time she reaches the end of the song, she’s belting with her full diaphragm in a yell on the verge of primal: “I know it’s never enough.” It’s the overwrought language typical of any teenager, but it’s also exactly what makes her music so appealing. An adult should know better, but teenagers are allowed, even celebrated for, their strength of feeling.

Willow has always been a spiritual precog, interrogating our concept of reality and pursuing enlightenment with her brother, Jaden, and this song is appropriately trippy, casually referencing light beams and third eyes. Once you get to the end, a mantra appears in a hypnotic loop. “But then I realized, I don’t exist.” It’s an offering — Willow as teacher, eager to share the lessons of her preternaturally prodigious adolescence with anyone else who might be lost on the journey of trying to find themselves.

Willow said that Alanis Morissette was an inspiration; Tracy Chapman and Fiona Apple also seem to be aesthetic forebears — all women who made careers raising the consciousness of other young women, showing them alternatives beyond the processed filter of pop culture. Willow is now making her own contribution to that canon. There’s no easy point to “The 1st,” no pithy conclusion, beyond leaning into your self and whatever you find there. It’s an album that mines feelings and creates some along the way. That’s what our teenage years are about, after all: becoming friends with the process. ♦

Jenna Wortham is a staff writer for the magazine and co-host of the podcast “Still Processing.”

Photograph by Jun Sato/Getty Images.

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It’s the niceness that grabs you first, makes you suspicious of her — and once you’ve determined that it’s real, it can make listening to her like watching an Olympic performance and holding your breath with every jump. The first time she showed up on my doorstep, in 1988, she was on the cover of “Idlewild,” an album by her duo, Everything but the Girl, on a label that was also Madonna’s. But while Madonna once sang-scowled a song called “Love Don’t Live Here Anymore,” Tracey Thorn was singing a gentle, grammatical soul ballad called “Love Is Here Where I Live.” How was a singer like her ever going to survive?

But survive she did, turning modesty into an asset. There would be the occasional commercial juggernaut; a club mix of “Missing,” E.B.T.G.’s Magdalene-at-the-tomb lament, was a surprise No.2 pop hit in 1996. But becoming a star on the level of Madonna or Beyoncé was probably never in the cards for a former post-punk androgyne with a catholicity of tastes (a short bridge for her between Stevie Wonder and Morrissey). With Ben Watt, her musical and life partner, she flowed her deep voice — deliciously plummy, little aches lurking — into multiple tributaries: jazz, dance, alt-folk. Along the way she became the darling of a large coterie of fans who came to expect that she would softly but firmly pull back the skin of her songs, letting hypnotic melodies — as in “Protection,” her collaboration with Massive Attack in which she essentially midwifed trip-hop — leak out a trickle at a time.

Thorn is 55 now, and her latest release, “Record,” pumps some vigor in a career that had seemed to be downshifting. (Since her last album of all-new material, in 2010, she has written two books and put out a Christmas collection, sure signs of a career summing itself up.) The synthscape of the new album pays homage to vintage New Order and Pet Shop Boys tracks, and despite the modern feminista stance of the lyrics, you can’t help thinking, initially, that the route she has taken to artistic rejuvenation is nostalgia. On the album’s closer, “Dancefloor,” she sings of “where I’d like to be,” with “some drinks inside of me, someone whispering it’s quarter after 3.” Is she looking up into a disco ball and seeing a rearview mirror?

But the past spins into the present in the song’s C section, where, oddly enough, Thorn name-checks tracks she loved in her youth — David Bowie’s “Golden Years,” Evelyn (Champagne) King’s “Shame,” Chic’s “Good Times.” Though these songs are four decades old, she knows that they can still turn the dance floor into a place of liberation and communion. (They’re part of a canon, she told me recently.) Then she hears someone else singing, “and I realize it’s me. It’s me.” And not just literally Thorn, but also her musical progeny, like the xx and St. Vincent. Her trademark vulnerability surfaces again, only this time it’s nothing less than a portal to renewable joy. ♦

Rob Hoerburger is the copy chief of the magazine. His first novel will be published in 2018.

Photograph by Hamish Brown/Getty Images.

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Did you know that in the time of two-factor authentication, encrypted-texting apps and “finstagrams” (secret Instagram accounts that only a select few friends know about), there are people who take their most private, intimate collection of music, title it “Sex Playlist” and leave it on Spotify for everyone to find? I do, because some nights, all nosy and obsessed with self-improvement, I trawl Spotify for insight into the human condition. Each playlist is a window into people’s idiosyncratic formulations of what’s sexy and what it takes for them to feel that way. It’s a horny kibitzer’s dream.

The thing about peeking into people’s intellectual sex windows, though, is that you can end up rattled. It’s chilling to discover that someone would prefer “Untitled (How Does It Feel)” not by D’Angelo but by Matt Bomer, redone for the “Magic Mike XXL” soundtrack, and that I could accidentally have sex with this person one day. According to Spotify, the most common songs on people’s sex playlists — that is, on playlists that contain some variation of “Sex Playlist” in the title — are all on the nose. (And yes, Spotify tracks this; don’t be surprised to find ads like LIVE WITH THE CONFIDENCE OF THE 11 PEOPLE WHOSE SEX PLAYLISTS ARE JUST GINUWINE’S “PONY” OVER AND OVER AGAIN sometime soon.) Six of the top 10 songs contain the word “sex” in the title: “Birthday Sex,” by Jeremih, is the most common, along with “Sex on Fire,” by Kings of Leon (No.6), and “Sexual Healing,” by Marvin Gaye (No.8) — proving that most people build their lists simply by typing “sex” into the search bar. Recently, I spotted a version of “Hallelujah” by the a cappella YouTube sensation Pentatonix on a playlist called “20 Best Christmas Songs to Have Sex To.” Someone, somewhere apparently has peppy, classic, all-American sex to Gene Kelly’s “Singin’ in the Rain,” and someone else has managed to scrub the single-take, treadmill-choreographed viral music video from her head and use OK Go’s “Here It Goes Again” as a tool of seduction.

Hours of research and a rich, fulfilling personal life have led me to this: The ideal sex playlist should gesture at a mood without demanding it. It isn’t a necessary accessory to an action — if anything, it’s the soundtrack to the prelude. A sex playlist is not really meant for what happens in the bedroom (kitchen/living room/car), but whatever happens to get you there — the background noise to a shared cigarette on the couch or two more beers from the fridge, a balm to the nervous energy coloring the room like a stain. The best music is vaguely unrecognizable, something you almost certainly don’t know the words to. Chief among all: The songs can’t be about having sex. (Close your eyes and imagine actually having sex to a song like “I’ll Make Love to You.” Does death suddenly seem attractive?) According to Spotify, the second-most-common sex playlist song is “Sex With Me,” by Rihanna, in which she purrs, “Sex with me is amazing/with her it’ll feel all right.” You cannot have sex to this song, because even if it makes you feel like Rihanna, it’s still fundamentally about Rihanna talking about how she’s better than you.

Here’s a song that works: “Anita,” by Smino, a 26-year-old rapper from St. Louis. At its core, it’s a song about yearning — not about having sex but about wanting it, the musical equivalent of two knees too close to each other on rickety bar stools. The song is built around the idea that if you try hard enough, the name “Anita” and the plea “I need her” can and do rhyme. His supplication, impossible to replicate yourself without scrunching your eyes and curling your hands into a fist, feels like a homage to the way Gaye performs desire: the way he emphasizes the middle of a word or drags out vowels, his way of begging for more.

Smino’s entire first album, “blkswn,” is moony and goofy and comfortably youthful — another track starts, “I got a pizza on the way, bay-bay/I’m trying to lay, lay/little lady, aye” — but “Anita” is the standout. It’s faintly galactic, all video-gamey beeps and boops, with the overlay between Smino and Jean Deaux, the vocalist, representative of what can go right when two people are in perfect rhythm. It’s appealingly unobtrusive, warm and indistinct, able to melt into any background it finds itself in. And if — in the midst of a little action — you happen to catch that it’s playing, all you’ll think is: This is nice. ♦

Jazmine Hughes is an editor for NYT Magazine Labs.

Photograph by Michael Salisbury.

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Early one arctic February evening, at a grimy Sheraton in suburban Maryland, the singer and songwriter SZA was wandering around her hotel room, pantsless, awaiting the arrival of the doctor her assistant, Amber, had been researching online. (“I Googled and Yelped him as much as I could, and all the reviews are good,” Amber said, nervously.) They’d been through this routine a few times before, when the singer’s voice abandoned her or her body went on strike. Like the time before SZA played “Saturday Night Live” late in the fall, six months after her debut album, “Ctrl,” was released. And again a few weeks ago, before she was set to shoot a Mastercard commercial in New York, then fly to Chicago for a show, then to Hawaii for more shows, then back to New York to perform at the Grammys, where she was nominated for five awards, the most for any woman this year.

That time, though, she was actually sick. This time the 27-year-old felt physically fine; her voice just wouldn’t work. Earlier in the afternoon, she had to go out and explain this to the crowd of fans gathered at NPR’s “Tiny Desk” studio set in Washington. “As soon as I get a shot in my booty, I’ll be fine,” she insisted, drawing a sympathetic laugh from the crowd. Later in the night, she would try to open up her throat by hot-boxing her hotel bathroom with a blend of eucalyptus steam and weed smoke. But first, cortisone.

“I don’t have pants on, let’s get right to it,” SZA rasped, greeting the doctor at the door in an oversize Harley Davidson T-shirt and sweat socks. He asked where she was from (Maplewood, N.J.) and for her real name (Solána Rowe) and, as he sorted through a pouch of vials, what “SZA” — pronounced like “sizzah” — stood for. “It’s an acronym derived from the Supreme Alphabet,” she said, with practiced poise. “Each letter stands for a different ideology.” The singer grew up in a conservative Muslim household, though she’s now more spiritually omnivorous than she was as a child. “Every now and again I might feel like, yo, I just need some straight-up Jesus today,” she told me later. “Or sometimes I feel like there’s a sura that can bring me into a really great space, or I just need the right meditation, or I need to talk to my mom.”

The doctor loaded up his syringe. “Okey-doke: buttocks,” he commanded. SZA lifted the hem of her T-shirt and bent over slightly. Afterward, as the doctor packed up his gear, he reiterated how important it was that SZA rest her voice for a few days. She laughed. “I might be getting worse,” she said with a bright smile, “but I’m not mentally acknowledging anything.”

Credit Video by Ryan McGinley for The New York Times

If you believe SZA’s own words, it’s a miracle her critically adored, commercially successful breakthrough album ever was released. “I actually quit,” she tweeted back in October 2016. Her manager, she wrote, “can release my album if he ever feels like it. Y’all be blessed.” This was after she had put out a couple of promising EPs and become the first woman signed to Top Dawg Entertainment, also home to Kendrick Lamar. She was seen as a kid sister to the tight-knit, supermasculine Top Dawg crew — and as her generation’s prime contender to carry the torch of R.&B. greats like Lauryn Hill, one of the most famous graduates of SZA’s own New Jersey high school. SZA’s music is unabashedly emotive; she writes with explicit candor about sex; with her cascading pile of hair and tendency to sing with her eyes closed and one hand outstretched, Streisand-style, she is the picture of the classic soul diva. But SZA was also born in 1990 and is a product of a post-internet culture, armed with the staggering diversity of reference points and influences that is the hallmark of the millennial mind. Like the music of Frank Ocean, her lone generational peer, her work feels deconstructed: imagistic, casual-seeming sketches that in their scattered imprecision convey the 24-7 slide-show feeling of modern life with breathtaking accuracy.

Anticipation was high for the interminably forthcoming “Ctrl,” and SZA’s tweet generated a flurry of news. But these “I quit” moments — an impulsive stomping of the foot when things don’t feel right — are actually pretty common for the singer. SZA and her team even have a name for the phenomenon: “Elmo-ing,” after the alternately excited and terrified red Muppet. They might pull up to a red carpet and find the singer refusing to get out of the car: “I just can’t, because I’m deeply Elmo-ing,” she says. “It’s a social-anxiety thing where it’s like you don’t recognize yourself.” Her manager, Terrence Henderson, known as Punch — president of T.D.E., which his cousin Anthony Tiffith, known as Top Dawg, founded in Compton, Calif. — explains it in comic-book terms. “SZA’s like Jean Gray, so I guess I play the Professor X role,” he says. “She’s definitely a Level 5 mutant. You can’t control it. You just got to try to contain it.”

“Ctrl” was released in June 2017 only because Punch refused to let SZA work on it anymore. “One day they just wouldn’t let us go back to the studio,” she says. And though the record’s wildly positive reception should feel like a fairy tale of validation — it has been certified platinum, fueled a sold-out tour and earned her endorsements with Gap and Nike, not to mention all those Grammy nominations — SZA still fixates on the “two more weeks” she wanted in the studio. The thing is, Punch says, “she comes from a background where she was teased a lot, so she developed a lot of insecurities early on. She just doesn’t see herself like the rest of us see her.”

Self-doubt may actually be SZA’s superpower. In an era of aggressively cultivated self-confidence — of squads and scars that are beautiful and sometimes performative hashtag feminism — SZA has broken through singing songs that exult in self-doubt, desperation and insecurity. On “Supermodel,” a song about an ex who leaves for a “prettier” woman, she laments, “Why am I so easy to forget like that?” On “Drew Barrymore,” she sings:

I’m so ashamed of myself think I need therapy

I’m sorry I’m not more attractive

I’m sorry I’m not more ladylike

I’m sorry I don’t shave my legs at night

Her obvious forebears may be girl groups like the Crystals and the Shangri-Las. But unlike those artists, who were made abject by their desire and imprisoned by the gender politics of their era, SZA’s insecurities are refracted through the ensuing decades of cultural and social progress — through waves of feminism and the civil rights movement, through Madonna and riot grrrl and Sasha Fierce. She wears her old-school insecurity with a decidedly modern bravery, expressing her own self-loathing with such clarity and conviction that it comes across as self-love.

Her success gets at a complicated truth: Neediness and regret are not merely the products of some pre-woke world in which women weren’t given the space to be self-actualized superheroes. They’re part of the experience of being human. SZA’s Grammys performance took place two weeks before “Fifty Shades Freed” became the No. 1 movie in America, and while her music has little in common with that film, both are clearly giving women something they want, something they aren’t getting elsewhere and often feel ashamed for desiring in the first place. Some feel women should have evolved beyond the retrograde parody of male-female desire the “Fifty Shades” franchise reflects, a more nuanced and sophisticated version of which runs through SZA’s music. But SZA isn’t ashamed or confined by needing to feel hot enough to keep her man; she is legitimately freed by the act of expressing it. After more than a decade of pop’s relentless calls to self-love, admitting you sometimes hate yourself — admitting you’re “lonely enough to let you treat me like this,” as SZA sings on “Drew Barrymore” — is a relief, an act of rebellion.

Ryan McGinley for The New York Times

Onstage at the Fillmore outside Washington back in February, SZA asked the crowd if high school was as brutal for them as it was for her. They whooped loudly. The crowd looked to be mostly middle-class, arty black kids in their late teens and 20s — the sort you might see portrayed on Issa Rae’s “Insecure,” the second season of which featured a lot of SZA’s music. (The album, Rae once tweeted, made her wish she had a bathtub, weed, candles and a temporary man.) But SZA’s reach is as diverse as her influences. When she played the full album to the producer Mark Ronson and Kevin Parker of the band Tame Impala — who are working on an album together and had SZA in the studio as a potential collaborator — Ronson says the two stared at each other in amazement. “Sure enough,” he says, SZA went on to become “the coolest name to drop, the music that everybody loves, even people who aren’t necessarily into R.&B. She just became the thing.”

SZA’s calls to the outcasts feel believable because rejection — real and imagined — is still such an evident part of her life. Backstage after the show at the Fillmore, she cataloged some of the embarrassing things she has done to avoid interacting with her own heroes. “I told Beyoncé I had to go poop,” she said. This was the first time they met, and SZA did not in fact need the bathroom. “I just said, ‘I really need to poop and find weed,’ and she was like, ‘... O.K.’ If I put my foot in my mouth early, then I remove the risk — we all know I might do something worse.” This is the self SZA sees: a hyperactive weirdo whose inner monologue — flitting, as it did during the days I spent around her, from the various types of dog dander to face serums that smell like urine to astrology — always threatens to mark her as the kind of reject she says she was as a teenager.

One of SZA’s oldest and closest friends, Ashley, started out as one of her bullies. “She was a grade ahead of me, and she was really cool and really pretty and had all the new clothes, and her brother was older and really cool,” SZA says. Even after they made peace, “it would still be weird. Like, the girls she would have me hang with would spit in my face or try to fight me.” She was a 10-year-old in a head scarf in a New Jersey commuter town when the twin towers fell. Later, it was her weight that marked her for abuse. In her early 20s, SZA was carrying more than 200 pounds on her 5-foot-4 frame; she has posted photos on Instagram.

On paper, the singer had as much of a shot at a smooth adolescence as any young person of color in an affluent American neighborhood. She lives in Los Angeles now, but she often stays in her childhood home when she’s on the East Coast, and she speaks about the backyard, with its “two big maples and a cherry tree,” with wistful sweetness. As a child, she was close to both parents — her Muslim father, who worked for CNN, and her Christian mother, an executive at a nonprofit. But she also says she has attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and didn’t take medication for it until she was in college. “My mother just doesn’t believe in it,” she says. “I’m black, so it’s like nobody going to no doctors for ADHD. ‘Sit your ass down and pray, you’ll be fine.’” When she was a kid, activities were her Ritalin: science camp, horseback-riding camp, church camp, softball, dance, cheerleading, track. As a high school sophomore, she was one of the top gymnasts in the state, but she soon grew “too tall and too thick” to stay competitive. “It was like, aerodynamically speaking, I kind of need to be a little slimmer and a little shorter if I really want to pop the way I want to pop,” she recalls, shrugging. “And if I can’t win, I don’t want to play.”

When I suggested to her mother, Audrey Rowe, that raising SZA couldn’t have been the smoothest experience, she laughed and said: “That’s an understatement.” Pushing her to focus on a college education, as her parents had, was an uphill battle. “She is brilliant,” Rowe says, but when it came to dictating her path, “I should have known better with that Scorpio.” SZA’s success has wound up feeling like a vindication for both of them. Rowe used to wonder if she was giving her daughter too much space — “but she’s the kind of spirit,” she says now, “that almost demands that.”

Ryan McGinley for The New York Times

At Madison Square Garden, a few days before the Grammys, Punch sat in a bank of chairs reserved for the country group Little Big Town and watched SZA rehearse. It wasn’t going well. I asked if this was the worst part — watching her anxiety, so pronounced that it sometimes seems capable of taking physical form, emerge on one of the biggest stages in the world. He chuckled. “Not for me no more,” he said. He has learned to steer clear in moments like this. “I used to try to figure out ways to fix every single thing she’d complain about, but now it’s like. ...” He trailed off. She doesn’t really want it fixed? “Right.” The anxiety is fuel? “Definitely fuel,” he affirmed. “And I believe in her talent so much I know she’s going to kill it no matter what happens before.”

SZA really has become the kid sister of the T.D.E. club. “The clubhouse is the studio,” Punch says, “and she comes in doing cartwheels and handstands — she gets away with murder!” So much so that Punch has started teasing the boss, Top Dawg: “I be like, ‘Bro, you’re getting soft.’ Because he gives her anything she asks for and he never gives it to the guys.”

It’s different, managing a woman, and not just because Punch has found himself in meetings with skin-care brands or in line to buy tampons. “With the guys, I can call them and be like, ‘Hey, we got an interview in 30 minutes, get dressed.’” He snaps his fingers. “I tried that with her before. It didn’t work so well.” And she doesn’t care about the same things; the types of internet comments that T.D.E.’s rappers can laugh at, Punch says, might really bother her. “It’s not to say that my guys don’t have insecurities; everybody has them, they just manifest in different ways.” Jay Rock, for example, is most concerned with “what his projects think — his neighborhood.” And when I ask who Kendrick Lamar is trying to impress, Punch muses: “At this point, he fightin’ the mirror.”

Some part of SZA is still trying to get mean girls to be nice to her, whereas Lamar, who was already a rap prodigy in high school, grew up the king of his realm. “And even going deeper with him,” Punch says, “his confidence, like, he’s been shot at coming home from high school, you know what I mean? That’s the alternative to making these records. We all come up that way, and she didn’t. She’s from the suburbs. So our tough love is a little different from hers.” She has, in his estimation, adapted. “She’s grown so much,” he says. “She learned our world as well.”

Punch remembers meeting SZA for the first time, at a 2011 performance by Lamar; she was there helping with merchandise. “She looked very distinctive,” he says. Much to her parents’ dismay, SZA had dropped out of college by that time, having cycled through “like four different schools” and almost as many majors. She put her short attention span to practical use, pogoing from marketing gigs to retail jobs, bartending at a series of strip clubs, sleeping on friends’ couches. The day after the concert, she was delivering some swag to the guys’ hotel and asked her friend Ashley to come along. But when they met Punch in the lobby, Ashley didn’t even take her earbuds out. “She was low key being rude,” SZA says. Finally, somewhat annoyed, Punch asked Ashley what she was listening to. “And she’s like, ‘It’s her!’” Punch says. “‘You didn’t know she sings?’”

“I don’t know, there’s no segue that makes sense, I don’t have one for you,” SZA told me at the Sheraton, post-cortisone, as we sat on the floor of her bathroom and watched the air fill up with steam. “It just happened.” First a boy she liked was making music with her brother and asked her to sing something, so she gave it a shot. Through a long series of aimless coincidences, she found herself onstage, billed as “Dylan,” covering an Amy Winehouse song at a showcase held by the production duo Christian Rich. She was still thinking she would find her way to a career in the environmental sciences, or maybe fashion, but songs were also pouring out haphazardly: She would simply steal beats she found on YouTube, sing over them and throw them back online. “I didn’t really have any aspirations,” she says.

It was Punch, at first, who had the aspirations: As soon as he grabbed one of Ashley’s earbuds and heard SZA’s tossed-off home recordings, he was sold. “Her voice was very distinctive,” he remembers. “So already the look is distinctive, and the voice is distinctive, and then she approached her lyrics like a lyricist, like a rapper.” Ronson was struck by that same quality. “Even if she was just speaking these lyrics, she would still be the best M.C. out there,” he says. “And she’s singing.”

It was the day after the Grammys that SZA woke up sick, a start to the troubles that would eventually have her searching for doctors who do house calls. Her performance on the show, though riveting, felt subdued. And she wound up losing all five of the awards for which she was nominated.

Those losses weren’t entirely surprising. We may live in a pop world ruled by the likes of Beyoncé and Rihanna, but women are wildly underrepresented when it comes to the Grammys’ most prestigious awards. No black woman has won Album of the Year since Lauryn Hill in 1999. When the hype over SZA’s five nominations ended in a shutout, it felt to many like yet another example of the Grammys’ trading on the cultural power and influence of women of color without ultimately recognizing their work. And then, backstage at the awards, Neil Portnow, president of the Recording Academy, told Variety that women have only to “step up” if they want to be musicians, engineers, producers or executives. SZA had met Portnow and liked him. “He was a chillaxed dude with mad cool trinkets in his office and hella cool stories about said trinkets,” she remembers. His comments left her “hurt and confused” — “and then it made me feel like, damn, were you thinking that about me when we met? Were you looking down at me?”

But part of the benefit of being so haunted by your own doubts is that you have little room to indulge other people’s. As she sat on the floor of that musty hotel bathroom, dirty makeup sponges and discarded false eyelashes on the counter, a battered copy of a devotional text called “Jesus Calling” on the tile next to the toilet, her voice shot, SZA was jubilant in a way I had not yet seen. The chaos inspired her. As she and her 21-year-old creative director, Sage Adams, passed a joint back and forth, giggling conspiratorially, I asked what I might learn if I stayed out on the road with them for another week or two. SZA’s eyes widened. “There will be so many moments that I’ve never been through before!” she exclaimed, her brow furrowing. “I’m going through mad first times, and you want to be like, ‘It’s my first time — give me a break!’” She paused and took a long drag. “Actually, I don’t need a break. I just got my second wind.” ♦

Lizzy Goodman is a journalist and the author of “Meet Me in the Bathroom.

Videographer/Editor: Steven Rico. Stylist: Dianne Garcia. Hair: Randy Stodghill. Makeup: Raoul Alejandre.

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A human mouth can’t accurately reproduce the sound a gun makes, but I love to hear rappers try. No matter how serious the context, there’s something whimsical about the effort. My favorite gun sound is ScHoolboy Q’s “yawk yawk yawk”; it calls to mind a bird more than a firearm, and ScHoolboy’s startling, louder-than-the-verse delivery of it amuses me. The same is true of Waka Flocka Flame’s redundant “bow bow bow,” which often appears on tracks that feature actual gunshots. Kendrick Lamar’s go-to “doot doot doot doot” is hilarious because of Lamar’s earnestness — he wants so badly for you to feel the urgency. With the exception of ScHoolboy, it’s unclear whether the intention is for me to feel concerned that the rappers in question are familiar enough with the sounds of violence to impersonate them or for me to laugh. Men don’t like it when you laugh at the wrong thing.

So it was with relief that I happened upon “Mans Not Hot,” a song by Big Shaq, a character played by the Ghanaian-British comedian Michael Dapaah. Here are over-the-top gunshot onomatopoeia begging to be lampooned, even dragged out for maximum enjoyment. “The ting goes skrrrrra/Pap, pap, ka-ka-ka/Skidiki pap-pap/And a pu-pu-pudrrr boom.” It’s highly doubtful these noises mimic any real-world firearm, but Dapaah knows what good poets know: Sound matters just as much as meaning.

In a video for Genius, Big Shaq explained the conceit of the song: “Man’s not emotional, man don’t cry, there’s a lot of things man don’t do.” Indeed there are. “Mans Not Hot” highlights the sort of posturing that young men adopt when they’re worried someone might find them uncool or, worse yet, soft. There’s the disdain for men who express fear, even when being shot at (“when the ting went quack quack quack/you man were duckin”); the expectation for women to flock to them (“if she ain’t on it, I ghost”); the resolution to stay cool, figuratively and literally (“The girl told me take off your jacket/I said, ‘Babes, mans not hot’”). It’s a funny, softer take on #masculinitysofragile, a perennial Twitter conversation about the myriad ways heterosexual men limit themselves to adhere to a rigid set of gender expectations.

“Mans Not Hot” takes aim at rap tropes themselves, but unlike straightforward parody songs — say, Chris Rock’s “Champagne” — it’s believable enough that if you’re not up on your memes, you may think Big Shaq is just another over-the-top rap personality prone to wisecracks. Quality production helps. The beat derives from a song called “Lets Lurk,” by the London group 67 and the veteran rapper Giggs, but if “Lets Lurk” sticks to the genre expectations of British grime — driving bass, regimental snares, tightly wound, innuendo-laden lyrics about holding guns and moving drugs — “Mans Not Hot” is its goofy younger brother, refusing to take himself so seriously.

The origin story of “Mans Not Hot” is a weird one. It begins on Charlie Sloth’s “Fire in the Booth,” a segment on a BBC radio show. Dapaah appeared first as a nervous, overly earnest character called MC Quakez, who struggled to deliver a freestyle verse despite the encouragement of a hype man called Shakes. It was at this point that Dapaah switched into another character, Roadman Shaq — “roadman” being slang for a London street type — and took over the mic. The standout moment of Shaq’s subsequent performance was that litany of implausible yet unforgettable gun-onomatopoeias. An in-studio video went viral; Dapaah capitalized on the moment by replacing the “Roadman” in his moniker with the more universal “Big” and releasing an actual song.

In an interview on American radio’s “The Breakfast Club” back in October, Dapaah had an awkward exchange with one of the hosts, Charlamagne Tha God. “Mans Not Hot” had finally grabbed listeners’ attention across the pond, and Dapaah was trying to explain that he’s not actually a rapper; he just plays one from time to time. “I don’t go to every single place as Big Shaq,” he said, “because I don’t want people to think that’s all that I do.” Charlamagne was scandalized, insisting that Dapaah should have never broken character because, in his estimation, more women would sleep with Big Shaq than with Michael Dapaah.

Maybe. In 2018, what we consider authentic and what we deem an act seem less important than what can attract and sustain attention. Consider the 14-year-old rapper Bhad Bhabie, née Danielle Bregoli, who harnessed an internet-famous appearance on “Dr. Phil” into an actual record deal and enthusiastic actual listeners. Never mind that she works with co-writers and has no previous experience; she’s a rapper now because she says she is. On “The Breakfast Club,” Dapaah’s aims felt old-school by comparison: He wanted to embody a thing to poke fun at it, without being consumed by it. But then, last fall, he signed a record deal with Island Records UK.

Time will tell whether Big Shaq’s origin story will recede. What I can report is that a few days before the new year, I was at a nightclub in Nairobi, the sort of place that feels cringe-worthy — abundant empty space, picnic tables with bottle service — until suddenly the dance floor is full and you’ve sweat through your shirt. Around midnight, the DJ dropped the opening of “Mans Not Hot” with Dapaah’s voice booming, “Yo!” A gasp of recognition went up. Some dancers grinned, clearly enjoying a meme-turned-hit with the requisite sarcasm. But others, mostly men — the Nairobi equivalent of roadmen, maybe — weren’t laughing. They had their fingers in the air as Dapaah’s artificial baritone rattled off his fake gun sounds. It didn’t seem they were in on the joke, much less aware that they might be the butt of said joke. To them, Big Shaq was just another rapper giving them an excuse to look tough in the club. ♦

Angela Flournoy is the author of the novel “The Turner House.

Photograph by Joseph Okpako/Getty Images

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Upon first listen, I’m not quite sure that I know what’s happening in IU’s “Palette” — a song sung almost entirely in Korean — only that I love it. There are a few words in English (“hot pink,” “pajamas,” “lipstick”), but it’s the chorus that reveals something recognizable: “I like it, I’m 25,” she sings breathily above a groovy bass line that sounds more R.&B. than anything. “Ooh, I got this, I’m truly fine.” (I doubt that. Has anyone ever been “truly fine”?) The music video shows IU in flux between youthful long hair and a modern bob, performing maturity by doing things like choosing a purple shade over baby pink, wearing stodgy striped pajamas and listening to vinyl. We’ve all been through this phase before — someone’s having some growing pains.

In a way, Lee Ji-eun — she goes by “IU,” meaning “I” and “you” — reminds me of Britney Spears, both for being a young solo star holding her own among a wave of trendy pop groups and for her midcareer rejection of ingenuousness. (IU’s fans call her Nation’s Little Sister, a title she has since rebuffed. No word on whether she’ll shave her head.) By the Spears metric, then, IU is probably in her “Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman” phase: She’s going through the age-old ritual of defining her womanhood in front of millions of fans. I was 16 when Spears released her classic single of pubescent angst — I, too, was neither a girl nor a woman, just an insecure teenager looking to glom onto someone else’s liminality to make mine less intimidating. So when I heard “Palette” for the first time — and figured out what it meant — it offered the same sort of emotional salve that Spears once did. Not knowing the words only helped — it allowed me to project myself inside her aspirations of maturity.

The Korean pop music that most appealed to the West used to be sort of manic — like “Gangnam Style,” the ebullient, hugely viral 2012 song — but IU is one of K-pop’s rare chart-topping singer-songwriters, and her proficiency of introspection is compelling because she’s almost able to slowly crack away at the genre’s clichés. I listen to a lot of K-pop, and all the songs seem as if they’re written by 17-year-olds who love good jams and bad lyrics. It can feel so superficial — “Your heart will be filled with my image/You’ll look for me even when you’re dreaming,” goes one of my favorite Red Velvet songs. But IU emits an authenticity I haven’t found elsewhere. She’s honest, singing in Korean: “Oh, why is that? I like things that are a little old-fashioned, filled palettes rather than paintings, journals and times I was asleep.”

It makes me feel the way I did when I first heard Britney sing “feels like I’m caught in the middle.” But Britney’s now 36, and I’m 31: proudly gravitating toward bridge, half-marathons and cottage cheese — my version of IU’s old-man PJs. IU and I are each obsessed about growing older, but I can give her some elderly advice: You’ll cry growing pains all the way there, but when you’re finally an adult, you’ll still feel like your 16-year-old self — no bob haircuts or record players can change that. Either way, we’re each going to be truly fine. ♦

Lindsey Weber is a freelance writer and editor living in Brooklyn. She co-hosts the pop-culture podcast “Who? Weekly.”

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Although he had pretty much quit smoking, Jason Isbell stood on the sidewalk in Troy, N.Y., six hours before a show across the Hudson River, in Albany, enjoying the one daily cigarette he’d been allowing himself since falling off the wagon not long ago.

This was relevant for two reasons. One is that, three days earlier, in late January, Isbell won a Grammy for “If We Were Vampires,” in the Best American Roots Song category. (He and his group, the 400 Unit, also took home the Best Americana Album award for “The Nashville Sound.”) In the song’s titular couplet, Isbell sings: “If we were vampires and death was a joke/We’d go out on the sidewalk and smoke” — an image that suggested itself because he’d just quit and was thirsting, mightily. “It wasn’t subliminal, that line,” he recalled. “It was the absolute foremost thing on my mind. I wanted a cigarette.”

The other reason, most Isbell fans know: his personal and artistic narrative of addiction and recovery, specifically to and from alcohol, which he quit five-plus years ago after being forced out of the critically lauded, Alabama-rooted Southern rock band Drive-By Truckers. Sobered, he found a successful solo career and recognition as one of America’s most inspired songwriters, a triumph that informs both his lyrics and his working-class-hero persona.

The title of “Vampires,” with its echoes of Buffy and Bela Lugosi and “Twilight,” is actually a bit of a feint. “Vampires” is a quietly gripping song about mortality. It contrasts simple, unshakable images of human need — a “hand searching slow in the dark,” “nails leaving love’s watermark,” the urge to hold on to another — with the immortal undead, who can afford to laugh at those of us whose days are numbered. The scene recalls the restless spirits in George Saunders’s recent “Lincoln in the Bardo” (a novel Isbell adores and whose author he’s now friendly with), and the idle amaranths of Jim Jarmusch’s “Only Lovers Left Alive” (a film Isbell also admires).

His song, however, was spurred by something more prosaic. One afternoon, Isbell was sitting on his bed, watching the reality show “Hoarders” — recovery narratives, basically. His wife, Amanda Shires, and bandmate and also a gifted singer/songwriter, was annoyed; she was working hard in another room, trying to finish her poetry M.F.A. from the prestigious program at Sewanee. “You’re making your record next week,” she scolded. “You need to be writing. Anybody can watch ‘Hoarders.’” Chastened, Isbell turned off the set, and after a few hours of work he announced that he’d finished a song, which he then played for Shires, haltingly. “He started crying,” Shires recalled. “Then he said: ‘I’m an idiot. I’m crying at my own song.’”

The chorus repeats:

It’s knowing that this can’t go on forever

Likely one of us will have to spend some days

alone

Maybe we’ll get 40 years together

But one day I’ll be gone, or one day you’ll

be gone

When they write, Shires and Isbell act as each other’s sounding board and editor, reviewing word choices and refining their work. This time, though, Shires said: “That’s perfect. You don’t need to touch it.”

After lunch at Troy Kitchen — a business incubator in a revitalized neighborhood that lets cooks develop restaurant models as food stalls — Isbell and I headed for Collar City Sweet Shoppe. A former iron-and-steel town, Troy is known as the Collar City for its standing in the detachable-shirt-collar trade. “It reminds me of Birmingham a lot,” Isbell says, referring to the once-booming steel city in his home state of Alabama. “Birmingham was a big deal for a time. But then the business went elsewhere.”

Isbell’s upbringing was working class. His parents had him in their teens; his father painted houses. Isbell is finally doing well for himself, and it shows in his presentation: hair trimmed, stylish sunglasses, neat beige overcoat, wool Stetson ivy cap and immaculate bright-purple terry-cloth Tretorn hightops, which, he noted, were designed by a fellow Southerner and musician, André Benjamin, of Outkast. Isbell’s roots, though, are still evident in his songs. In “Vampires,” he rhymes the central conceit of “maybe time running out is a gift” with “I’ll work hard till the end of my shift.”

He also considers broader contexts. “Hope the High Road,” from “The Nashville Sound,” stakes out emotional common ground in a divided country. (“I know you’re tired and you ain’t sleeping well/Uninspired and likely mad as hell” are lines that likely resonate on both sides of the aisle.) Another song on the album, “White Man’s World,” is about privilege and demonstrates how vexed it has become to hear the phrase “white man,” which seems to get more traction as a supremacist’s affirmation or an activist’s pejorative than as a simple statement of fact. “And therein lies the point,” Isbell said, chuckling. “That’s why you have to say those words. And it’s interesting to me how often the ‘man’ part goes unnoticed in that song. I’m talking about, among other things, the way women’s issues and the issues of black people intersect, y’know? I’m singing just as much about one as the other.”

Isbell tours states red and blue, playing cities large and small. At the Palace Theater that night, following a set by James McMurtry — one of Isbell’s songwriting heroes — a gentleman, seemingly a few drinks in, hollered at the empty stage: “Hurry up! I gotta be at work tomorrow!” Soon Isbell emerged with the 400 Unit, a Southern version of the E Street Band: airtight, versatile, featuring a hotshot guitarist (Sadler Vaden) and the bandleader’s mate (Shires, in this case on fiddle). The couple sang “Vampires,” looking into each other’s eyes. On the Truckers’ song “Decoration Day,” five voices rose in unison on the line “I got dead brothers in East Tennessee.” During “White Man’s World,” a few people in the overwhelmingly white male audience ducked out, for whatever reasons; those remaining sat curiously still. Isbell hopes to open a few minds in his audiences, which seem split between presumably liberal indie-rock stalwarts and presumably conservative mainstream country fans. But he concedes that, like many of us, he still lives and works in a bubble, and if certain fans are put off, so be it. “If somebody decides to get up and walk out on that song,” he says, “I don’t really care, y’know?”

Backstage in their cramped, shared dressing room after the show, Shires removed her makeup with a cleansing pad; Isbell managed to wedge his head into the tiny sink, rinsing sweat and Kevin Murphy styling cream out of his hair. He was looking forward to a day off the next day — his 39th birthday. He was scheduled to be in Providence, R.I., where his plan was simply to relax and maybe shoot some pool. Back when he was drinking, he often played for money, but when he got clean, pool halls became “a little bit of a trigger,” so for a time he avoided them.

There’ll be cake, of course, with his bandmates, his wife and their young daughter, Mercy. Thanks to a nanny and a dedicated “family bus,” Mercy can travel with her parents when they’re on the road together, though they weigh the pros and cons of touring with their little girl. On the downside, there are the risks of hours spent in motor vehicles. On the up, there’s all that beauty and human diversity to experience in the wide world. Mercy is just 2, but “she’ll remember things,” Shires said, especially “all the different kinds of people she’ll meet.”

Isbell agreed. After all, our kids’ minds are the ones most available to us for opening. Maybe she won’t be so scared, “like everybody in America is,” he said, “because she’s meeting all kinds of people.” ♦

Will Hermes is the author of “Love Goes to Buildings on Fire.” He is currently writing a book about Lou Reed.

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In 2009 — the year that Taylor Swift’s ballad “Love Story” rose up the pop charts — the CMT Music Awards opened with a parody of the song. A rap parody. It was called “Thug Story.” Dubbing herself “T-Sweezy,” Swift posed with T-Pain in front of fancy cars and threw indiscriminate hand gestures. She rapped about knitting sweaters, baking cookies and living with her parents. She wore a diamond-plated grill.

Small white women improbably rapping has been a popular genre of comedy video; now Swift has casually transformed it into a legitimate pursuit. On her latest album, “Reputation,” Swift raps again, and it is a testament to her strange cultural position that people seem mostly fine with this — even at a time when debates over racial appropriation rage, when actual white nationalists have claimed Swift as their chosen pop star and when her rep is still reeling from the night on Snapchat when Kim Kardashian branded Swift as a double-crossing snake out to bite Kanye West.

Could it be that Swift is somehow too plainly white to be credibly accused of “acting black”? She is a country-crossover artist and the 28-year-old forever-bard to teenage white girls everywhere. That used to mean singing morality plays about football games, her dad and mean boyfriends. But look at the Billboard charts: Today’s pop music is, ultimately, a black idiom, and any white person who intends to be a pop star must find some way of negotiating that fact. You can adopt black styles, or you can pointedly reject them, or you can do what Swift has done — judiciously pick her way through hip-hop’s sonic creations in a way that serves to reinforce her naïfish white-girl brand.

Swift has never been a standout singer, but she is pop’s great enunciator, and her “rap” performance is seeded with white-girl affectations that blunt its edges. Swift has always positioned herself as an underdog, even as she rose to become a music-industry monolith, and charging into hip-hop allows her to reassume that gawky posture. So before she begins her verse on “Ready for It,” we hear her primly clear her throat. Her rap voice is giddy, careening on the verge of laughter, as if she were self-consciously barely pulling it off. On “End Game,” she drops into her Valley-girl lilt (“I swear I don’t love the drama”) before sliding back into the digitized cadence she uses to pose as straight R.&B. (“... it loves me”).

That song exists in the middle distance between professional hip-hop track and white-girl fan tribute. Swift brings in the rapper Future for a verse, then gives another to fellow not-rapper Ed Sheeran, a white artist also working around the edges of black pop sounds. The vibe is reinforced by the video, in which Swift plays at executing vaguely urban dance moves on a boat with Future before retiring to giggly bopping with Sheeran at a karaoke bar. She incorporates just enough elements of black music into her brand, and deploys them just cannily enough, to skate through this pop moment basically unscathed. Financially, anyway — the album sold more than a million copies in its first week.

But after reigning atop the music industry for a decade, her whole project suddenly feels under review. Her defensive girlishness no longer sits well; her political flavorlessness seems suspect; and when she does speak out, it’s over petty personal slights. It used to feel, reading the party line of pop criticism, that disliking Swift made you a little bit sexist — in an industry that remolds young women to its specifications, Swift represented the rare pop star who seemed to write her own story line. But for all her crossover success, the songwriting skills that made her a country girl-power icon don’t translate so easily to hip-hop-dominated pop, where it’s increasingly pointless to center an artist whose talents don’t chiefly lie in rapping, singing or dancing. Swift herself hasn’t changed, but now embracing her too eagerly reads as somehow racially oblivious. The mockery has broken wide open on black Twitter, where dunking on her “unseasoned chicken” whiteness has emerged as a cherished pastime. Swift can still extract great returns by leaning into her lucrative brand, but as the cultural winds shift around her, its value is at risk of depreciating.

After she lays her hip-hop tracks at the top of “Reputation,” she returns to a more recognizably Swiftian approach in the second half of the album. And in the song that most directly addresses her ongoing feud with West — “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things” — she summons her whitest cadence yet, affecting an upper-crust accent as she complains: “So why’d you have to rain on my parade?/I’m shaking my head/I’m locking the gates.” The song is about casting a back-stabbing friend out of her Gatsbyesque mansion — her Rhode Island compound, perhaps, where she holds her elite Fourth of July parties — and instead of slipping back into a rap rhythm for the chorus, she leads a head-cheerleader chant: “This is why we can’t have nice things darling/Because you break them/I had to take them away.” Swift is still acting like a teenager, but here she reduces West to a child. It’s classic Swift, as broadly catchy as it is self-serving, and in 2018 it feels a little desperate too. Swift is still in the pop mansion, but lately it feels as if she is standing at its threshold. One misstep could get her voted out. ♦

Amanda Hess is a David Carr fellow at The New York Times.

Photograph by Kevin Mazur/Getty Images.

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Young people are terrible and defiant, and each successive generation finds new, innovative ways to offend their elders. A healthy attitude accepts that some phenomena are bound to remain beyond your understanding, but when these feelings of revulsion do not dissipate, every adult must consider the worst possible scenario — that after years of resisting inertia, you might finally be out of touch. It was with this spirit that I patiently tried to wrap my head around Jake Paul, the insanely popular YouTube star who has built a rabid following of almost 14 million viewers, and who makes me acutely aware that my millennial generation is getting up there in years.

Nearly every day, Paul records a lengthy video detailing his moneyed, rabble-rousing Southern California life. He and his friends — a collective called Team 10 — try to buy luxury automobiles using pennies, prank their friends and family, get asinine tattoos for fun. Paul, 21, comes off as an affable and annoying frat brother leading rush week; his channel is essentially a reality show about his life, and when he isn’t following through on concepts like “INSANE DEAD BODY PRANK ON TEAM 10,” most of the time he riffs manically for the camera.

In a May 30 video titled “You Won’t Believe What We Did,” he laid out a self-imposed challenge to record a rap song and film a video in one day, which he claimed might be the first time in history. (This feels untrue, but who knows?) He recruited a producer and a studio, and found a mansion in the hills and a glamorous car for the shoot, while documenting and narrating the whole process. Paul laid down a track, and true to his word, he uploaded a finished product, titled “It’s Everyday Bro,” within hours. In another era — say, four years ago — this might have been a curio released to a niche fan base; in 2017, it racked up millions of plays and actually hit the Hot 100, as Billboard now incorporates digital streams when calculating chart position.

On “It’s Everyday Bro,” Paul sounds like what he was: a first-time rapper writing his bars with the help of a punishing, self-imposed time restraint. He raps mostly in the parlance of media-drunk teenagers, referencing his impressive YouTube statistics and laying down a challenge to PewDiePie, owner of the most popular YouTube channel in the world. He frequently falls off the rinky-dink beat, and his brash, boyish voice hovers at a dull monotone through the entire song. Rap metaphors need not always be complex or even particularly clever if they’re sold by a charismatic personality, but he sounds like an automated voice assistant when dropping clunkers like “We chew ’em like it’s gum.”

The presence of several other Team 10 members only turns “It’s Everyday Bro” into the wackest posse cut ever recorded. There is Nick Crompton, a James Corden-esque Brit with a gravity-defying haircut who raps, bewilderingly, that “England is my city.” (His rhymes were written by the geographically challenged Paul.) There is Chance Sutton, who strikes an oddly villainous tone when rapping about his social-media following; the sole woman, Tessa Brooks, who admonishes her haters for eating at Panera; and the Martinez twins, handsome Spanish brothers who plead with Donald Trump for a visa. It’s standard hip-hop braggadocio filtered through every negative stereotype about the amoral vapidity of Generation Z, performed by amateur musicians who sound as if they’re doing karaoke. And again, it charted.

“It’s Everyday Bro” is exceedingly unpleasant to the point that it actually lowered the bar for every song I heard for the rest of the year; all I would have to think was, It’s not as bad as “It’s Everyday Bro,” and that would be enough to pardon anything. Paul is hardly the first entertainer to be loved by the kids for unclear reasons, but he is somewhat novel in the fact that his product is himself — and that before YouTube, he could have never become successful in this specific, multidisciplinary way. And if you peek down the wormhole of original YouTube material, which is increasingly produced by these narcissistic personalities, it’s easy to understand the growing panic as parents finally realize whom their kids have been learning from. (Paul’s older brother, Logan, who is also a YouTube star, recently came under fire for filming his crew gawking at a dead body in Japanese’s famous suicide forest and, well, using a Taser on a dead rat.)

Paul’s brazen annexation of chart space puts every millennial adult in the unenviable position of becoming a cultural reactionary, passing judgment on the youth, like the uptight authority figures we never thought we’d become. But his success potentially augurs a future where every teenage-ish idol with decent engagement numbers will be enticed to write some raps — no matter how bad — and reap the potential rewards. (The teenager Danielle Bregoli, who went viral for being rude on “Dr. Phil” and turned this into a sizable Instagram following, is signed to Atlantic as the rapper Bhad Bhabie.) In the future that we’ve built, the critics don’t matter; the only important thing is finding a way to give your fans what they want, whether it’s a video blog or a new song. If it beggars belief that someone like Jake Paul can inspire such unending devotion, this confusion is the point. “They said we couldn’t do it,” Paul says during the video about the making of “It’s Everyday Bro.” “Oh — we’re going to do it.” Though he never clarifies this, it’s obvious who “they” are — me, you, the rest of the adults and all the haters. ♦

Jeremy Gordon is the culture editor at The Outline.

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For the half of the year that the singer, songwriter and pop savant Charli XCX lives in Los Angeles and not her native London, she stays in an old Tudor-style house up a canyon in Hollywood. When I arrived there on a recent Monday morning, one of her housemates — an old high school friend named Katie Rowley, whom everyone calls Twiggy — greeted me at the downstairs gate. After showing me around the house, she made us tea. Charli was busy around the corner, in the breakfast nook. While we waited for her, Twiggy told a story about Charli’s sports career.

In high school, they were on the same netball team. Netball, Twiggy explained, is a bit like basketball, only most players can’t move around the whole court — your position dictates where you can go. Charli played midfield and was very good, and she was moved up to a wing attack position. “So she could score more?” I ventured.

“Not really,” Twiggy said. “She was best at setting up goals. Assisting? Assists.”

This made perfect sense: Charli is excellent at assists. Five years ago, when she was just 19, she wrote a song about smashing cars and partying and not caring, which she decided not to record herself, because, she said, it didn’t feel particularly cool to her at the time, or like something she would want on her album. The song, “I Love It,” was recorded by Icona Pop instead (Charli did backup vocals) and went to the Top 10 nearly everywhere. Charli then co-wrote Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy,” which went to No. 1 the next year, in 2014. Charli had a hit of her own soon after, with a song called “Boom Clap,” which was also a kind of assist; it soundtracked key moments in the film “The Fault in Our Stars.”

The song helped her break through as a solo artist, but it marked her. For a while, Charli told me, she was known as the “‘Boom Clap’ girl,” which she found exasperating. But having a hit like that helped her better understand her own relationship to fame and success. She canceled a tour and began logging more and more studio time, writing constantly — for Gwen Stefani, Rihanna and, more recently, Blondie — while surrounding herself with producers who made the kind of music she heard at 4 a.m. when she’d been out dancing all night. “I write plenty of songs that are technically good, but they are not songs I would like to go out and listen to,” she explained. “I like going to really weird clubs, so I guess I’m not going to do nice radio songs. Maybe that’s selfish. But it’s difficult to be convinced into something.”

There’s an old story in pop, about young artists (women, usually) shaped by the studio Svengalis (men, always) who are the real, not-so-secret geniuses behind the acts. Charli, in many ways, is both the genius behind and the one in front, writing songs and shaping sounds for herself and for others. But the studio, and what happens inside it, are misunderstood by the rest of us, she said. When I asked her what she thought people often got wrong, she pointed to the popular idea that hits are, essentially, written by committee.

“The song starts from one or two people,” she said. “And,” she added, “really big pop artists, someone like Taylor” — Swift — “or Katy” — Perry — “people often underestimate how much they bring to the table. There are so many production credits.”

Charli has always juggled pop instincts with her slightly stranger, less crowd-friendly inclinations — with the kind of sounds she encountered at 4 a.m. at the weird clubs, or what she considered cool, which is often, almost by definition, at odds with what is popular. For much of her career, these twinned tendencies toward and away from pop have been in conflict. She wrote megahits while her albums were indie darlings. But last year felt like a true arrival, or emergence, where song and sound were perfectly married. She had collided what had been in conflict, that yin and yang of the cool/weird and the popular, and found a new sound. In December, she released a mixtape called “Pop 2.” This was on the heels of another mixtape she released in March, and in July, a single called “Boys,” plus a video she co-directed for it that contains a who’s who of scene-y men and brilliantly flips the usual music-video male gaze upon itself. Later in the summer, she and her frequent collaborator and producer A.G. Cook cut an entire album’s worth of songs they didn’t release, just because.

Like everything on “Pop 2,” the December mixtape’s enigmatic title — a sequel, but to what? — was a collaboration, suggested to her by Tommy Cash, an Estonian rapper who is one of the mixtape’s many guests. Charli also made tracks with CupcakKe, a Chicago rapper; Pabllo Vittar, a Brazilian drag queen; and Kim Petras, a transgender German singer and model. Only two of the 10 tracks on “Pop 2” feature no other voice but Charli’s, and even then, she often sounds obscured, her voice bubbling in the depths of a stew of synths and autotune, as though the record, recorded in New York and Los Angeles, were then shot into the farthest reaches of the galaxy, where members of some advanced alien species remastered it to their liking. There is no good reason “Pop 2” should hang together — the varied sounds, the different artists, the way the songs often warp significantly to accommodate the different artists’ different styles — except that at the center of it all is Charli XCX.

“I think I’ve realized I really gravitate to people who are very extreme,” she told me, by way of explaining the range of her collaborators on the project and in her life right now. We were sitting out in the courtyard; inside, Twiggy was D.J.-ing, and Charli occasionally muttered to herself the words to the hip-hop songs Twiggy was playing, almost like a mantra. “I don’t like vagueness in artistry,” she continued. “I’ve been there before, because I’ve been vague or unsure.”

I remarked that she seemed more interested in the process of song-making than in the result.

“That’s it,” she said. “I just really love being in the studio and hate everything else. I don’t really write songs in the house. I like going places.”

By which she meant: the studio. She was going back later that day, with Cook and Petras. She’d been going five or six days a week since early January, writing at least a song a day. I asked her if there was a song on “Pop 2” that she felt was especially indicative of things to come — different songs on the mixtape seemed to point toward distinctly different possible pop futures. “There’s a song called ‘Track 10,’” she began, then stopped and started talking about another track, the album’s single, “Out of My Head.”

Of the two songs, “Track 10” is the one I find more sonically interesting, beginning almost as a lullaby before it expands its sound to something dark, dense and foreboding, the twinkle of the lullaby remaining all along. It’s a weird, wonderful track, and perfectly Charli; it’s also one of the two with no guests, just her. But Charli wanted to highlight the more dance-friendly number, which features Tove Lo and Alma, Swedish and Finnish singer-songwriters, who dominate the first verse, the hook and the chorus, all before Charli even arrives to sing. She also wanted to talk about Sophie, one of the track’s producers and a frequent collaborator. She couldn’t help herself. It was just in her nature. She was a wing attack. She gave assists. ♦

Ryan Bradley is a writer in Los Angeles.

Photograph by Gabriel Olsen/Getty Images

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Gucci Mane pulled up to a Miami recording studio in his McLaren 720S, a six-figure supercar the color of Smurf skin. It was a recent purchase, and he’d been documenting it on Instagram with the doting relentlessness of a new dad: Minutes before he arrived, I saw a video of the suede-accented cabin on my phone, posted while he drove over. After the Atlanta-bred rapper, who is 38 and was born Radric Davis, backed into a spot, I asked him, “What do they call that color?” He replied: “Glacier Blue. Matter of fact, Glacier Boy Blue. Print that!” McLaren, a British company, does offer the 720S in a shade called Glacier White but markets Gucci’s paint job under the name Fistral Blue, after a bay off the coast of Cornwall. Maybe he knew this and just didn’t care: Glacier is one of Gucci Mane’s favored slang terms for the enormous pieces of diamond jewelry he likes to wear, and he’d been teasing fans about a forthcoming project called “Glacier Boyz” — why miss an opportunity to plug it?

Inside the studio, framed plaques commemorated platinum certifications for LPs recorded on the premises: Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours”; Britney Spears’s “Blackout.” No album by Gucci Mane, who has been putting out music since the early 2000s, has ever earned such a plaque, and yet his sprawling discography, consisting of some 100 albums and mixtapes, has helped make him a fringe legend with an outsize influence on hip-hop’s center. Drake, Nicki Minaj and Kanye West are among the stars he counts as fans and collaborators; Migos, Young Thug and 21 Savage are among the younger chart-toppers who owe him debts. “My flow,” Gucci Mane told me, “is the most copied flow in the world!”

Gucci Mane is also a recovering drug addict, busy rebuilding a life he came close to destroying. He rapped recently about his dedication to swimming and meditating, arranged a live BET broadcast of his wedding — all-white dress code, 10-foot-tall cake encrusted with crystals, at least one ceremonial sword — to the lifestyle entrepreneur Keyshia Ka’oir and entered into a movie deal with Paramount tied to his best-selling “Autobiography of Gucci Mane.” On Twitter, having admired the motivational writing — and, no doubt, the lucrative hustle — of Deepak Chopra and Tony Robbins, he assumes the voice of a life coach: “It’s not too late to be great!” “Let’s rebuild the world!” Also: “I’m a GOD!”

Credit Video by Ryan McGinley for The New York Times

This is a different Gucci Mane from the one who rose to prominence a decade ago. A series of assault and weapons- and drug-possession convictions put him behind bars for years at a time; he lost his major-label contract with Atlantic. In Gucci Mane’s telling, the main cause of his troubles was the woozy cocktail of soda and promethazine-codeine cough syrup known as “lean.” It made him violently paranoid, constipated him severely and, nonetheless, became “something I required to operate.” In a strange way, his addiction was inextricable from his appeal. He created mixtapes high, offsetting grimy drug-dealing vignettes and brags of sexual domination with virtuosic wordplay and off-kilter humor. He went on engrossingly candid, unabashedly nasty Twitter tirades. In 2011, he tattooed his face with a triple-scoop ice cream cone topped with lightning bolts — a move that, in its combination of whimsy and possible derangement, inspired a queasy titillation in fans uncertain whether to be concerned or delighted.

Given all this, Gucci’s present-day wholesomeness stands as one of the most improbable reinventions in hip-hop history. One thing that old Gucci and rehabilitated Gucci share, though, is a feverish productivity; in the last year and a half alone — re-signed to Atlantic — he has put out six albums. The latest is the excellent “El Gato: The Human Glacier,” which took him only two days to make, collaborating with the young producer Southside. “He’s in one room making beats, and I’m in another room recording,” Gucci said. The album is bracingly spare in its music and confrontational in its lyrics — an ambience established on “Rich Ass Junkie,” the opener, which revolves around a trippy, funereal electric-organ melody. “Rich ass junkie, rich ass junkie,” Gucci chants, first identifying himself, then identifying his clientele: “Riding around the city serving rich ass junkies.”

Addicts commonly figure into hip-hop lyrics, but typically as objects, not subjects. Gucci led me into a recording room, sat beside a mixing board and recounted the song’s creation. “I was freestyling, and that’s when you say the realest things ever — no restraints. When I used to be in the hood sometimes, I’d be serving crack, and the crackhead would tell us, ‘Damn, y’all too high.’”

I brought up the once-paradigmatic hip-hop figure of the unflappable hustler — never under the influence, always in control — epitomized by New York dealers-turned-rappers like Jay-Z and 50 Cent. “That’s the difference between New York and Down South,” Gucci replied. He mentioned Pimp C, the iconic Houston MC who died in his sleep after a lean overdose and whose 1992 song with UGK “Feel Like I’m the One Who’s Doin’ Dope” is a gory fantasia of debilitating drug use. He named other Southern rappers: “B.G. been talking about doing drugs. Juvenile. Soulja Slim. Geto Boys. It’s been going on, self-medication, and that’s the people I admired coming up, because they were talking about stuff you knew was authentic.”

Gucci cites an aversion to “preachy” sentimentality, which isn’t the same as saying his music is without moral dimension. Last year he rapped about serving a pregnant woman in his adolescence: “feeding crack rock to a baby,” as he phrased it, “when you really just a baby.” He assured me that this story was true; ditto a related anecdote on “Rich Ass Junkie” in which he wonders about the ethics of selling to a heroin addict: “Dog food in her veins/’Cause I’m the one that’s serving her, am I the one to blame?” In an ad-lib, he hastily answers, “No!” but he told me that he doesn’t think the answer’s so simple: “I knew it was wrong, even then. It ain’t nothing you proud to do. But it was survival.”

Ryan McGinley for The New York Times

In his memoir, Gucci paints frequently unflattering self-portraits: betraying a benefactor’s trust; lying to his mother about his drug-dealing; serving time after a woman accused him, in 2011, of soliciting her for sex before shoving her from a moving car. (Gucci pleaded guilty to criminal charges but has disputed her account. In light of this episode, there remain aspects of his comeback-era persona that are impossible to blithely cheer on — as when, elsewhere on “El Gato,” he centers an entire chorus on a coercive if absurdist act of oral sex so extreme it results in “strep throat.”) I asked him if he wrote his book, in part, to unburden himself of long-held guilt. He frowned, searching for a different way to put it. “I used to hide so many things I’d done, because I was scared I was gonna go to jail. When I walked out the feds in 2016, I was like, I’m not doing that dance anymore.”

“Rich Ass Junkie” is, in an understated way, a document of that kind of grappling. Gucci acknowledged that before his last prison stint, “I never would have done a song like ‘Rich Ass Junkie’” — a song, that is, identifying himself outright as a fiend. He told me: “Jail made me accept that I’m not the toothless junkie, but I’m still locked up. Might never get out because of things I did. That’s a failure, not a success.” He excused himself and made for a vocal booth. He would not tell me what he’d come to work on, saying only, “I’m here to make some money.” On my way out, I passed his 720S, glowing Glacier Boy Blue in the sunlight. ♦

Jonah Weiner is a contributing writer for the magazine.

Videographer: Kenny Suleimanagich. Editor: Steven Rico. Stylist: Jason Rembert. Groomer: Marcos (Reggae) Smith.

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For a brief time, I lived near a black gospel church on the southeast side of Columbus, Ohio. When I say I lived near it, I mean that I lived above it, and this is how I knew that it was a black gospel church. I would be awakened on Sunday mornings by a uniform trembling of the floor — the kind that comes only when people clap their hands in unison or stomp their feet in a chorus of sound, when the wave of praise hits every spirit at once and has to find a way out. My mattress was on the floor, and I was sometimes sprawled across it diagonally or sometimes sprawled across it with my clothes from the night before still on. When the floor trembles with something holy and the vibrations rise into a body that is unholy, it is easy to convince yourself that you are being saved.

“Claws in Your Back,” a song by Julien Baker, entered me the same way the vibrations from the church I lived above entered me, making me feel whole in a way I didn’t know I needed to. The song anchors Baker’s 2017 album, “Turn Out The Lights,” a slow meditation on darkness peppered with small spots of triumph. Baker is a 22-year-old singer from Memphis who grew up in the church. She still believes in God (she has a tattoo across her wrists that says “Dios Existe”), but she paints God as a complicated figure in a complicated life. Baker is openly gay, and inside her work is a tension between belief and doubt — the joy of praise and the sometimes plain sadness of living. There’s a refreshing lack of shame in her music.

In “Claws in Your Back,” Baker talks about the idea of suicide as an invisible, but always hovering, animal: “So try to stay calm, ’cause nobody knows/The violent partner you carry around/With claws in your back, ripping your clothes/And listing your failures out loud.” At the end of the song’s first verse, she sings, “I’m conducting an experiment on how it feels to die,” and then there is a full seven-second beat before she concludes the thought: “or stay alive.” That interval of silence defines the stakes for the song: She is fighting through whatever is holding her underwater, grappling with the choice of whether to stay in this world or leave it.

Baker sounds as if she believes she is singing to a higher power that might actually answer her back. Her voice pulls the stars down and makes you think they are each named for a moment you cherished but thought you would never touch again. There was a time, when I was growing up, when contemporary Christian music relied on thinly vague sentiments to find a home on the popular charts. Bands like Lifehouse wrote love songs to a God who could also be a wife who could also be a mother. The God in Julien Baker’s songs is God, very plainly. But she is trying to stretch the possibilities of what that can mean.

If we are to believe that faith is a choice and love is a choice and somewhere in between is the rigor of staying alive when you don’t have the will to, then Baker is one of the best nontraditional gospel singers of her generation. It is the tension at the root of this song — at the root of so many of her songs — that acts as the church she is praying in. Religion can be freedom, but it can also be a haunting, or a trauma. It is one thing to say, “I believe in God,” and it is another to say, “I believe in God, and that doesn’t stop me from looking for exits some days.” “Claws in Your Back” is triumphant because it rests on a choice: Baker deciding she wants to stick around after all, but not before tracking through all of the reasons she might not. She is uninterested in the burying of pain for the sake of universal uplift. The uplift is simply the survival of pain, which isn’t promised.

The best love songs to God are the ones that divide the idea of God into whatever listeners think they can digest. I believe in God sometimes, but I believe in God the most when I imagine a God who has my mother’s laugh. I believe in a God who doesn’t want to get out of bed some mornings. A God who holds the old leather jackets of her dead friends and sits in a pile of old records on the floor of whatever heaven looks like. I believe in a God who comes home after a long night of being less than holy and sprawls out in a bed wearing the same clothes he went out in, and I believe in a God who is jarred awake by the floor rumbling with the weight of people praising his name. A wall of many hands clapping because of what his presence moved them to do.

I once saw Baker sing a song called “Rejoice” live, in a room in Tennessee that was packed with people silently receiving the song. They breathed in the notes with what seemed like one breath, while Baker stood onstage, barely moving, but for her fingers along the strings of her guitar, her head down and her hair over her eyes. The performance ended with her pushing the limits of her voice to sing the word “rejoice” over and over again, bending it beyond its inclination toward a type of gospel-driven deliverance and making the word a door that everyone could walk through and feel clean. It’s the kind of word that — when sung by the right person in the right room — can make the work of staying alive not feel like work at all. ♦

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, an essayist and a cultural critic from Ohio.

Photograph by Eva O’Leary for The New York Times.

Correction: March 14, 2018. A headline with an earlier version of this article misspelled the first name of its subject. As the article correctly noted, she is Julien Baker, not Julian.

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Five years ago, Dante Sanders-Houston was studying electrical and computer engineering at Northern Illinois University, hoping to one day build his own musical instruments. He had already spent the better part of a decade producing his own music as DJ Taye, much of it under the tutelage of DJs Rashad and Spinn, leading figures in Chicago’s footwork scene. Footwork is both a style of dancing and the hyperadrenalized electronic music that goes with it, a rush of tangling rhythms and alien synth tones; it’s a true Chicago creation, born of South Side roller rinks, house parties and black teenage ingenuity.

Rashad, back then, was about to release an album that would help take that music far beyond its home turf, spearheading a whole crossover moment. He and Spinn were playing high-profile festivals and tours; Vice was releasing documentaries about footwork dance crews; it was starting to seem like necessary listening for anyone in search of electronic music’s cutting edge. When Rashad’s “Double Cup” came out in 2013, the album’s cover was an aerial view of the city itself, Chicago’s orange streetlights illuminating its sprawling grid. Footwork looked like a way up.

Credit Video by Mamadi Doumbouya for The New York Times

Only six months after “Double Cup” was released, though, Rashad was found dead from an accidental overdose on the city’s West Side. Taye had left school by then; he’d spent time working in a stockroom and was DJing around the area. At the same time, Hyperdub, the British label that released “Double Cup,” was beginning to ask Taye for more tracks — and, eventually, a full album. It was Rashad who had connected Taye with the label in the first place. “It felt meaningful,” Taye says. “I would call it bittersweet now.” It felt like a door opening: “There it is — but how hard can you walk through it? Because there’s no going back.”

Taye grew up in Harvey, Ill., a suburb some 20 miles south of Chicago’s downtown Loop. He first encountered footwork as a style of dancing in third or fourth grade; a few years later, he and a friend found an unlabeled CD of footwork music and were struck by what he calls “the rawness and ruggedness of it.” It sent him digging for more music online, and by junior high he was making his own, using a free version of the FruityLoops production software and his great-grandmother’s computer. He was 16 when he met Rashad and Spinn at a dance battle and only slightly older when he joined the ranks of their Teklife crew — still too young to even get into the clubs where the pair would DJ. But he remembers noticing that footwork was frequently taking the two of them to London, far from the South Side where they all grew up.

In the years since Rashad’s death, some of that big wave of global interest in footwork has receded. Rashad had set his sights on something grand and accessible, tempering footwork’s frenzy with the sound of R.&B., making it more legible to new audiences — but there was, initially, no apparent heir to those ambitions. Beyond Rashad was a labyrinthine scene that aimed its music in a lot of different directions but rarely tried to court the uninitiated at the club.

Mamadi Doumbouya for The New York Times

Except, perhaps, for Taye, who felt — still feels — an obligation to fulfill Rashad’s unrealized goal of bringing Chicago to the world. “This is what I have to do,” he says. “I feel like so many things are telling me this is what I have to do. All paths lead to it.” On the 23-year-old’s debut album, “Still Trippin’,” released this month, the ambition is palpable. “There is a gap,” he says, “between footwork and some of Chicago’s rappers being the biggest rappers in the world.” The album’s first single, “Trippin’,” is an attempt to bridge that gap, using Taye’s voice to build one of the finest pop propositions that footwork has yet created — and, he says, to “keep the elevation going” and “do what Rashad was pushing for.”

Writing and producing the record took Taye more than two years. There were sessions in New York, Berlin and Dallas and months spent in Los Angeles after Taye found himself “going through some things” in his own neighborhood. But the album was ultimately assembled back in Harvey, with Taye cloistered in his childhood bedroom-turned-studio, adjacent to the kitchen, from which his Tupac-loving mother could hear the music taking shape. The result is potent, slippery and hypnotic — and the seamless infusion of hip-hop Taye has brought to it really does have the potential to open footwork up to a bigger audience than it has ever courted before. His aims are lofty ones. But there are only three people, he says, whose opinions of his music have ever truly mattered to him: “Rashad, Spinn and my mom.” ♦

Jessica Hopper is a Chicago-based music critic and author. Her memoir, “Night Moves,” will be published this fall.

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Trap music, a bassy, triple-time variant of rap, produces endless smoking anthems, ardent paeans to procuring and enjoying herb and the lifestyle that surrounds it. “Krippy Kush,” named after a particularly superior strain of cannabis, is a statement single from the reggaetonero-turned-trap-artist Farruko that rides on a hook from the mischievous 24-year-old Puerto Rican star Bad Bunny. It’s a blast in this genre of hazy joy, a Spanish-language expression of an inalienable right to high-grade weed that smuggles in a deeper message.

Bad Bunny’s charms are considerable. His chorus comes across in hypnotic technicolor — “Los maliantes quieren krippy, krippy krippy krippy” (“The gangsters want krippy, krippy, krippy”) — purring the word “krippy” and then whooping the word “kush.” In the original video, released in August, Bad Bunny crouched atop the counter of a Florida bagel joint wearing a canary-yellow jacket, magnetically rapping while nursing a lollipop. Farruko, equally lively in slime-green braids and a button-down resembling a vintage Trapper Keeper, added his verse while riding in a Jeep packed with women. The song embraces a sort of lawlessness-light, with braggy chatter about importing pot via such conventional means as FedEx — the shipping charged to Farruko’s love’s ex, a cost-saving stunt.

But unlike the early era of Snoop Dogg or the later one of Wiz Khalifa — each of whom Bad Bunny name-checks in his verse — rapping about herb-smoking is not as renegade as it once was. Recreational use has been legalized across the West Coast, as well as in Alaska, Colorado, Maine and Massachusetts. In Puerto Rico, medical marijuana was formally legalized last July, a shift Bad Bunny commemorates by boasting that he signed the law himself.

The song’s adherence to its weed-rap lineage reveals something about how young Latin musicians relate to their peers who rap in English — and how they influence them. When the mainlanders 21 Savage, Travis Scott and Nicki Minaj appeared on the “Krippy Kush” remix, it was part of a larger trend of the so-called mainstream recognizing a hit Latin track — the musical and cultural story that, after the ubiquitous hit “Despacito,” defined Latin crossover in 2017. But it also showed a disconnect between English-speaking listeners (who are increasingly used to hearing Spanish on the radio) and the music industry that serves them (which can’t seem to accept its Latin counterpart as an inextricable part of itself). That “Despacito” lost all three of the Grammys it was nominated for — but won four at the separate-and-not-so-equal Latin Grammys, including Record and Song of the Year — is evidence of the depth of that disconnect.

Farruko and Bad Bunny are influenced by mainland acts like Migos and Rae Sremmurd, but they also draw from — and aspire to — a bigger stage. As young Spanish-speaking artists have shown countless times, internet platforms are a good way to circumvent the American mainstream altogether and aim instead for the world. On that level, “Krippy Kush” is about something far larger than getting faded. Its purveyors may be kooky-eyed off blunts — “Dos Phillies, se queda bizca” (“Two Phillies and she’s cross-eyed”), as Bad Bunny puts it — but their flamboyant self-sufficiency is as cleareyed as can be. ♦

Julianne Escobedo Shepherd is the deputy editor at Jezebel.

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There was a moment, somewhere in the middle of the 1990s, when people thought new technology was transforming music, totally and completely. The whole concept of genre, they said, was finished, shattered to pieces by samplers and the clever postmodern collage artists who used them. Of course, they had absolutely no idea what was coming. It wasn’t boundary-crossing musicians who would wind up blowing pop to bits. It was the internet and the MP3 and, eventually, the streaming-audio platform — those were the developments that would, just a few years later, explode everything into infinite constellations of code and sound, with peculiar and vertiginous results.

One of the most singular of those results is a 23-year-old named Archy Marshall, the London singer and guitarist who has, over the last decade, risen to modest success and immodest acclaim as King Krule. This disproportion is understandable; his music is both exceedingly good and exceedingly strange. Marshall is part of an age cohort that grew up with no memory of a musical monoculture, or a world in which powerful record labels made sure that everything fit into a marketable cultural slot. The very idea of “collage” — the self-conscious blending of disparate things — means little to them, because they have so little reason to see things as disparate in the first place. The music that streams endlessly in their direction is organized not by a record store’s genre-filing system but by recommendation algorithms, those strange, roving intelligences that both shape and are shaped by tastes, gradually building digital dossiers on each user’s unique aesthetics.

Credit Video by Ryan McGinley for The New York Times

And this is the context that explains how King Krule’s music can sound so old yet feel so young. Marshall is a graffiti-writing city kid who cultivates the air of a squalid lounge singer in some forgotten marble lobby. He’s a guitar prodigy who barely touches his guitar, an electronic-music nodder who’s handy with jazz melody, a lo-fi punk who loves clean guitar sounds and frilly horns. It’s as if an endless playlist loaded with clashing search terms malfunctioned, melted and turned into a real boy. Even his singing voice seems incongruous — a low, coarse jumble of croaks and mumbles and croons, all coming from a slight-framed, flame-haired kid.

He really was a kid when he got started: a 15-year-old, but one who seemed beamed in from another planet. Nothing he did on his 2010 breakthrough single, “Out Getting Ribs,” was particularly or intentionally otherworldly — the whole thing was basically just his voice and an electric guitar — and yet it sounded deeply esoteric, as if it had emerged from some secret place or time nobody else was aware of. He released it using the name Zoo Kid, and the song appeared again in 2013 on the saturnine “6 Feet Beneath the Moon,” Marshall’s first full-length album, released under the name King Krule when he was 19. “The Ooz,” as sprawling as that debut was spare, followed last year. In its shaggy opening song, “Biscuit Town,” Marshall rhymes “Coca-Cola,” “Ebola” and “bipolar,” which is a pretty good summary of his conceptual terrain — the sweet and the sick all awkwardly fogged together. The album sprawls, and he fixates on decline, depredation and depression. Wherever Biscuit Town is, it clearly occupies the same world as “Logos,” in which Marshall, over a cool-jazz snap, describes vistas of urban decay: “The bookie’s shut, all bets are blown/The license bust, the shops are closed/I caught my mum, she stumbles home/Through open ground, back to broken homes.”

Ryan McGinley for The New York Times

Even the album’s most intelligible songs, like “Dum Surfer,” obey the same mystifying rubric — they seem not so much flexible with categories as oblivious to them. Try to imagine a crowd this song might be addressed to, and you may wind up picturing a cartoon mix of zoot-suited jazz goons, mod rockers, brawling punks, rap backpackers and track-suited soccer hooligans; the whole thing seems to belong in some invented space like the roadhouse from “Twin Peaks,” where bikers and loggers gathered, for some reason, to listen to dreamy art-pop. This is the single, the one he’s trotting out for late-night TV appearances. The world he creates is flagrantly ersatz, all inside his head. But that’s part of why it feels so pungently real: We’re all most individual, most ourselves, in our fantasies.

It used to be that musicians would combine different ideas deliberately and self-consciously, making music they knew we’d celebrate as intriguingly eclectic. But Marshall seems like an early representative of a fundamentally different tradition: It’s less as if he has chosen a wild combination of styles and ideas and more as if he has just bodied one forth, as if it existed all along and he simply found it. It’s someplace dark and subterranean, where everything sheds its cultural pedigree and blurs together in a private world beyond common references.

Marshall says he has been influenced by everyone from Chet Baker and Dirty Beaches to the 1930s arranger and composer Einar Aaron Swan, but a recommendation engine’s insensate variety, its undifferentiated choice — that might be his tribe’s signal influence. This, after all, is what every streaming platform and music-recommendation engine is trying to accomplish: to personalize categories ever more finely, parsing and curating and homing in on our tastes until, eventually, we have each become a genre of one. ♦

Ryan McGinley for The New York Times

Brian Howe is an editor at Indy Week and a writer for Pitchfork and Spin. Videographer: Jahqira Henry. Editor: Steven Rico.

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If you only listened to “Territory” by the French electronic duo the Blaze, you might come away wondering why it inspired such devotion: 10 million streams on YouTube, 10 million more on Spotify. It would be reasonable to ask: The band is practically unknown, and the song’s distorted lyrics bear the syntactic markings of English as a second language. Perhaps as a result, they are banal to the point of self-parody: “There’s nobody like my mom/There’s no place like my home since I was born.” And yet, the first time I heard it, before the track was finished, I was fighting back tears.

That’s because the 5-minute-37-second video accompanying the minimal ode to the euphoria of homecoming is another experience entirely. Mainstream pop acts no longer need music videos to generate buzz, but the Blaze, comprising the cousins Guillaume and Jonathan Alric, 35 and 28 respectively, are also talented filmmakers, and they have deliberately tailored their musical production toward ambitious, provocative visual shorts. In January 2016, they notched a breakout success with the video for their debut single, “Virile,” a sparse depiction of a night of substance-fuelled revelry between two men, apparently of North African descent, that is provocative for the emotional sensitivity and homoerotic frisson it so matter-of-factly transmits. The two men, who present as conventionally macho and straight, smoke, dance, rap, slap-box and embrace with a joyful intensity that is infectious and in no way presaged by the lyrics that occasion it. Thirteen months later, the Alrics uploaded “Territory” to YouTube, and the video blasted off from where “Virile” had landed. The viral success of the clip, as well as plaudits from on high — the director of “Moonlight,” Barry Jenkins, described it on Twitter as “THE best piece of art I’ve seen in 2017” — is a reminder that the medium is simultaneously anachronistic and as timelessly urgent as the need to tell stories itself.

Like “Virile,” the song can hold its own — conjuring a dolorous-yet-warm four-to-the-floor rhythm embellished by sharp, surgical synths — but it’s inextricable, to an unusual degree, from the visual narrative that animates it. The video doesn’t just complement the lyrical content so much as stand in for it, filling in the layers of ambiguity and feeling the song can only crudely sketch. “Territory” tells the story of a young man (perhaps a boxer) who has crossed the Mediterranean (almost certainly from France) to rejoin his family in Algiers for (what seems to be) a funeral. There is no dialogue or subtitles; everything the viewer comes to understand is conveyed with marvelous economy through the body — longing and contented glances, sorrowful and exuberant tears, bear hugs, feverish dancing, shadowboxing, hookah-smoking, furious sprinting across the beach.

The plot emerges over repeat viewings: the young man’s family, spanning four generations, sleeping together in a single room; the young man sitting on a rooftop with five others as they prostrate themselves in prayer — he stays off to the side as the sun rises over their backs, his absence having changed him; a hallucinatory finale where his open-air workout morphs into a gorilla dance that at once terrifies and delights his relatives looking on. As a display, it is also terribly fragile, evocative of the predicament of the protagonist, whose status as an immigrant marks him as barbaric — racaille — over there, and yet his time in the West has led him, paradoxically, to play up this imposed thuggishness when he’s back home. In either place, it seems, he is doomed to be a foreigner. And so a demand for recognition in the deepest Hegelian sense emerges through this knuckle-dragging prance — an awesome act of desperation that ends with a literal thumping of the chest.

If they are depicted at all, young men from the Arab world tend to be drawn through a reductive set of assumptions. The Alrics — not North African themselves — did something rare indeed, but something that the best art must always do: render the “other,” in all his eccentric specificity, universally knowable. I can’t count the number of op-eds and reports I’ve read about the challenges confronting immigrants in Europe, but I know I’ve rarely been moved like this. “Territory” is revelatory — doubly so because it still manages to make you want to dance. ♦

Thomas Chatterton Williams is a contributing writer for the magazine.

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Since the beginning of Lana Del Rey’s career, we’ve listened to her lust after fast cars, “money, power, glory” and older men — the archetypal rich, powerful kind we expect to find in troubling headlines. A lyric from 2012 sure sounds like “Harvey’s in the sky with diamonds,” and while it went down on the lyric sheet without the name, she recently told MTV that she’d had a “Harvey Weinstein/Harry Winston type of character in mind.” She created a character for herself as well: a midcentury Hollywood lounge singer who has been sent to the future to show us the meaning of sadness, as if it were a lesson that could be learned. In her melancholy world, to love is to live, so to love the wrong person is to be “born to die.” In 2014’s “Ultraviolence,” three years after Beyoncé sang about girls running the world, Del Rey was borrowing the infamous lyric in a Crystals song from 1962 — “He hit me and it felt like a kiss ” — before rhyming “sirens” with “violins,” mixing up pain and beauty, letting one become the other. As with the Harvey line, she no longer sings the “he hit me” part.

Can women still be “good” feminists if they are willing to ride along with this romanticized violence? Del Rey always seemed uninterested in that question. She often surrounded herself with American flags, as though anchoring her persona in a tradition of national icons; she said in interviews that she worshiped Elvis and Marilyn Monroe. If self-destruction was her favorite muse, America was her favorite backdrop. In the video for 2012’s “Ride,” she wrapped the flag around her shoulders, hoisted it above her head and then rode off on the back of a man’s motorcycle. She went wherever her men went, proudly waving the flag of her own submission.

But on her 2017 album, “Lust for Life,” there’s something different. Del Rey’s old album covers featured her trademark sad-girl pout; on this one, the woman who once told The Guardian that “I wish I was dead already” was smiling into the camera, flowers in her hair. And on the album’s second-to-last song, “Change,” some of that fatalism seems to be melting away. “There’s somethin’ in the wind, I can feel it blowin’ in,” she begins. “It’s comin’ in softly on the wings of a bomb.” And, later: “Change is a powerful thing, I feel it comin’ in me.” She has always had a tendency to lean on those who came before her, and now she’s not-so-subtly pointing to Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” and Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come.” Yes, she takes a moment to doubt herself (“Lately, I’ve been thinkin’ it’s just someone else’s job to care”), and we still see everything through the romantic tint of her glasses, the bomb arriving “softly” and with wings. Still: She sees something coming.

Maybe it’s just that lately it has gone out of fashion to view violence, fatalism and apolitical ennui with any sort of affection. Before anyone could blame her for refusing to engage, Del Rey began to write songs that acknowledged the present. She even told Pitchfork that she was retiring her American flag visuals on tour in the era of Trump: “I’d rather have static.” In “Change,” she ponders the possibility that personal evolution could be a political move, her lyrics switching from speaking for herself (“I’ll be able to be honest, capable”) to, perhaps, speaking for everyone: “There’s a change gonna come, I don’t know where or when/But whenever it does, we’ll be here for it.” She becomes, in essence, an extremely unlikely protest songwriter — not exactly calling anyone to arms, but trying to understand something, however haltingly, about how transformation begins. ♦

Chelsea Hodson is the author of a soon-to-be-published book of essays, “Tonight I’m Someone Else.” She teaches writing at Catapult in New York.

Photo by Rich Fury/Invision, via Associated Press

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On shows like “The Voice” or “American Idol,” stardom is presented as a meritocracy that a panel of judges identify. On a 2012 episode of “The X Factor,” Simon Cowell, Demi Lovato, Britney Spears and the record producer L.A. Reid selected five solo contestants who had failed to impress them on their singular merit and forced them into the open girl-group spot in American pop music, and they eventually called it Fifth Harmony.

Historically, the interpersonal dynamics of girl groups are marked by public-facing sisterhood and a war for power behind the scenes. In Fifth Harmony, the contractual unity never felt fully believable: Each woman sang her parts as if she were trying to sing her way out of the group. Most of the members stuck with the glossy vocal runs of Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey, the style that characterizes most successful reality-show singing, but Camila Cabello’s nasal voice and vocal contortions stuck out like a weird thumb. Cabello, the ensemble’s 21-year-old wild card, made almost inexplicable vocal choices, more in tune with the mannerisms of singers like Halsey or Lorde than with her group members. When she stepped out with a feature on Machine Gun Kelly’s bizarre, Bonnie-and-Clyde themed “Bad Things” and it became a hit, it seemed easy enough for her to leave the group. The beleaguered foursome’s 2017 MTV Video Music Awards performance featured a decoy quite obviously intended to be Cabello, who flung herself off the stage. They still go by Fifth Harmony.

If there are two things pop music — and reality-show competitions and Simon Cowell, too — demand, it’s individuality and ruthlessness. On “Havana” — not far from where Cabello was born — she finally acts out without her peers being in the way: She favors theatrical flourishes like death drops from her head voice to her lower register, full of vocal fry. Unlike in Fifth Harmony, her voice wiggles in through the front door of “Havana,” extending a leg up on the honky-tonk piano in order to expertly ride a beat built around a Westworldian riff and an Afro-Cuban rhythm.

If “Havana” proves anything, it’s that you don’t necessarily need talent to make it big; you just need a lot of ambition and a certain ruthlessness. You have to be willing to cut your squad. It’s the kind of fun and frothy pop-culture breakup that satisfies a thirst for drama without serious consequences. ♦

Molly Lambert is a Talk columnist for the magazine.

Photograph by Natalia Mantini

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Billie Eilish doesn’t like to smile. “I like to be in control of how I look and how I feel and how I act,” the 16-year-old Los Angeles native once told Billboard, “and the obligation is to smile back at someone if they smile at you.” Listening to “dont smile at me,” her debut EP, feels like stumbling down a rabbit hole of delectable rage.

Eilish, a singer and songwriter with a perennially stern expression and silver hair, insists on thwarting the feminine pleasantries typically demanded of teenage girls. I first discovered her after listening to her viral 2015 single, “Ocean Eyes,” which she originally uploaded to SoundCloud as a class project. Soon, the track, produced by her brother, amassed over three million listens.

Her first album feels otherworldly: solidly electro-pop, her gentle voice juxtaposed with dark lyrics. The upbeat “Bellyache” — written from the perspective of a satisfied killer — starts out sweet, with Eilish reverberating over a whimsical beat and conjuring a classic image of disaffected teendom: “Sittin’ all alone/Mouth full of gum/In the driveway.” But then she vacillates between the emotional carnage of teenage girlhood and actual bloodshed, turning typical victim-and-murderer tropes on their heads. It’s not hard to imagine Eilish smirking as she sings through the grisliness: “My friends aren’t far/In the back of my car/Lay their bodies.” The video for the song portrays her as a road-tripping Little Red Riding Hood, the vermilion cloak now acid yellow. She’s lost — or running away — on a strip of empty road instead of the woods, herself the murderous wolf.

Our culture demands that young girls crave validation, but Eilish and her cast of characters feel no such thing. There are no apologies in her songs about the disappointments of love — only poetic quips about potential lovers tripping over knives or the subject of a song remorselessly burning the car of an ex-flame. Her music feels familiar — who hasn’t felt teenage angst and melancholia? — but she doesn’t easily fit into any of the predefined categories for teenage artists: bubble-gum pop, emo, love-obsessed chanteuse.

Eilish’s most obvious peer is Lorde, another young woman who controlled the reins of her artistic vision at a young age. Both are interested in verisimilitude: Girlhood doesn’t necessarily mean sunshine or heart emojis or sugar-sweet music. (And Eilish’s approach, however familiar, works; her coming North American tour sold out in an hour.)

When I was a teenager, I didn’t lean into my inclination for melancholia and anger — I was too afraid of how others viewed me. I never kept diaries, because I was afraid of their being found and my innermost thoughts being uncovered. I wish I had come across music like this, that held anger and adolescence in the same hand: It might’ve made me feel better, even if just for a few minutes. ♦

Diamond Sharp is a writer and poet from Chicago.

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A woozy, stop-start rat-a-tat of idle, context-free rap chatter “Flex Like Ouu” is catchy in the same way that toddlers are adorable even when they throw up on your shirt. Lil Pump, a.k.a. Gazzy Garcia — an elfin, 17-year-old South Florida rapper with pink dreads and braces — has recorded more popular songs, including the No. 3 pop smash “Gucci Gang,” which was spoofed twice on “Saturday Night Live.” But “Flex Like Ouu” better captures Pump’s ephemeral charisma. It also embodies the scene that spawned him — the mind-numbed, infinitely boyish D.I.Y. rap movement most often referred to as “SoundCloud rap,” for the popular audiostreaming platform that gave it life.

This is how we find stars now: by trawling online. Pump is a viral gremlin, spouting his catchphrase “ESSSKEDDDAAAAT!” (“Let’s get it!”) in whatever virtual space you find him. You can see him on Instagram staring blankly from a series of hotel rooms, wearing a Versace bathrobe over his Gucci chest tattoo; or on YouTube, seemingly firing a gun out of a parked car’s window; or bragging about his expensive gear to an unimpressed older woman in a hotel hallway; or reminiscing, in overblown language that practically begs for a polygraph, about punching a girl in seventh grade because she threw gum in his hair. In this way, his origin story is similar to his fellow SoundCloud hooligans XXXTentacion (who created an early buzz with YouTube videos of himself getting in fights) and Tekashi 6ix9ine (who tantalized fashion blogs with his provocative, customized clothing).

Beyond this click-bait buffoonery, the music of Lil Pump and his fellow SoundCloud rappers is overwhelmingly defined by exhibitionistic, exorbitant self-medication. The scene has branded itself, inadvertently or not, as a space where kids can loudly boast about their irresponsible consumption of (mostly) prescription drugs. These substances can be divided into two main categories: 1) benzodiazepines, a.k.a. benzos, synthetic anxiety medications like Valium, Klonopin, Ativan or, most of all, Xanax, which has become as linked to the scene as heroin was with grunge; and 2) opioids, painkillers like Percocet, Vicodin, oxycodone, OxyContin, Roxicodone, prescription-grade codeine cough syrup and fentanyl, a powerful synthetic that is often used to re-invigorate stepped-on heroin.

The SoundCloud rap wave has become synonymous with substance abuse primarily because it is peopled by an optimal demographic for experimentation — young, male, often rootless or from dysfunctional families, lacking impulse control, novelty-seeking, attention-thirsty, susceptible to peer pressure. “They’re from the Pill Generation,” says Dr. Anna Lembke, chief of the Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic at Stanford University’s School of Medicine. Their age cohort has been prescribed behavior- and mood-regulating drugs from an early age. “It’s not a big deal for them to be, like, ‘Oh, this chemical changes the way you feel for the better, sure.’” Xanax is particularly mythologized, she says, because it’s so effective: It “rapidly takes away anxiety, takes away your worries, your future catastrophizing, your sense of consequences.”

The once-fringe scene’s absorption into pop culture has been almost instantaneous. Over the last two years, rappers who had been considered internet nuisances have become major-label artists, with responsibilities to match: recording, touring, adhering to a schedule. Xanax might seem to help with the pressure, but when taken excessively, or in combination with other drugs, the results can be tragic. Last November, Lil Peep, a.k.a. Gustav Ahr, the scene’s Kurt Cobain-esque pop hopeful — white, handsome, with a preternatural melodic gift — was found dead on his tour bus in Arizona, from an accidental overdose of Xanax and fentanyl. Traces of cocaine, marijuana and several different opioids were also reportedly found in his system.

As “XO Tour Llif3,” by the SoundCloud-adjacent rapper Lil Uzi Vert, haunted the pop charts last summer — “I might blow my brain out,” he rap-croons, “please, Xanny, make it go away” — the scene’s co-dependent relationship with drugs was in flux. In September, the Atlanta-based rapper Russ posted a photo of himself on Twitter wearing a T-shirt that read, “HOW MUCH XANS AND LEAN DO YOU HAVE TO DO BEFORE YOU REALIZE YOU’RE A [EXPLETIVE] LOSER.” The influential Chicago-born rapper Fredo Santana replied, “Until I can stop thinking bout my dead homies an the trauma that I been thru in my life that’s when I’ll stop.” On Jan. 19, Fredo Santana died in his California home from a seizure, after being hospitalized for liver and kidney failure believed to have been caused by his long-term addiction to codeine syrup. He was 27 years old.

After Pump signed to Warner Brothers Records last year, at 17, it was reported that his management company and label planned a party at a Los Angeles strip club where he was presented with a cake in the shape of a giant white Xanax tablet. Pump once tweeted “Xanax is the wave” and captioned an Instagram photo of himself holding a stack of bills with the line, “Pop a Xan & get rich.” But by New Year’s Day, Pump made a resolution on Instagram: “btw I don’t take Xanax no more.” In February, a TMZ video caught him leaving a juvenile detention center, reportedly after firing a handgun through the front door of the Los Angeles home he shares with his mother; Pump shouted, “ESSSKEDDDAAAAT” and rapped about popping Xans “in the past tense.” At a recent show, a rapper who goes by — no joke — Lil Xan felt compelled to formally renounce the drug. He also clarified that his “Xanarchy” fan club was, in fact, anti-Xanax and said that he would change his stage name.

All this called to mind two moments from “The Last Waltz,” Martin Scorsese’s drug-weary film memorializing the Band’s 1976 farewell live performance. The first involved Neil Young playing a keening version of “Helpless” with a hunk of cocaine lodged in his left nostril; the second was an interlude in which a drained Robbie Robertson explains his career as a touring musician. “The road was our school, our sense of survival,” he says: “It taught us all we know.” But, he adds, “you can press your luck. It’s a goddamn impossible way of life. “

These are the polar extremes at which musicians — and so many young people — tend to exist, in a hyperreal world of exalted risk-taking and self-mythologized fatalism that those of us at home envy, mock and consume. That’s why the SoundCloud rap scene can be so jarring to adult outsiders. It’s “The Last Waltz” gone virtual slapstick, full of bleary boys pratfalling to create an identity that can voyeuristically amuse us, at least in short bursts. (“Flex Like Ouu” runs 1:48.) They are test cases of what happens when a kid is fully immersed in the most severely volatile setting, right at the intersection of Big Pharma and Silicon Valley. This seemingly D.I.Y. world has been instantly powdered into a product that can be swallowed, when needed, to keep the now-corporate spectacle aglow. In a sense, the artists themselves have become the drugs. ♦

Charles Aaron is a writer and an editor who has written extensively about self-medication and music.

Photograph by Jerritt Clark/Getty Images.

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Musician couples make voyeurs of us all. We’ve watched Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s romance unfold in chapters, from the giddy courtship immortalized on their early duet “Crazy in Love” to the new parents’ kitchen tryst in a sequel, “Drunk in Love,” to the separate albums of adultery and reconciliation, “Lemonade” and “4:44.” Forty years ago, it was the back story as much as the hits that made Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours” a classic — two couples unraveling in the studio while the fifth wheel confronts his wife’s infidelity. Combine the extremes of passion or heartbreak with fans’ hunger for insight into the love lives of artists and celebrities, and a piece of music can wind up endowed with almost mythical power.

“Alan,” the song that ends “No Shape,” Mike Hadreas’s fourth album as Perfume Genius, is quieter but no less personal. Named for Alan Wyffels, Hadreas’s boyfriend and keyboardist for most of a decade, it is a vignette of domestic bliss. The couple met in A.A., and their partnership sustained them through recovery, through sobriety, through the rise of Perfume Genius. Their life together has stabilized enough for Hadreas to glance at the man dozing beside him and marvel, as he does on “Alan,” that “We sleep through the night.”

Hadreas has always been forthright about sexuality, both in his persona and in his songs. What’s new about “Alan” is its tranquillity. On Hadreas’s first three albums as Perfume Genius, queer pride and defiant effeminacy soothed the scars of homophobia; survival in a hostile world required daily reckonings with addiction, depression and disgust at what his own body had suffered. In 2012, YouTube banned a promotional clip for the album “Put Your Back N 2 It,” judging its shots of a hulking male porn star embracing the tiny Hadreas and applying makeup to the singer’s face to be “non family safe.” Perfume Genius returned two years later with the woozy glam single “Queen,” in which Hadreas boasts, “No family is safe/When I sashay.”

“No Shape” has its audacious moments (“Die 4 You” is a slow jam about erotic asphyxiation), but its collage of tender ballads and glittering anthems leans toward resilience, not transgression. It’s the view from the other side of the rainbow, where Hadreas isn’t as worried about being alone or powerless. “Alan” is the pot of gold at the end of that arc. “It’s about how if he truly needed me I would be there, and that wasn’t always true of me,” Hadreas told The Guardian last May. “There are a lot of songs about youth and young love, especially in relation to gayness; I wanted to make sacred the other side of that.” He and Wyffels often perform side by side at an electric piano, in a gesture whose guileless intimacy can make pop’s heterosexual couples look like strangers by comparison. But Hadreas plays “Alan” solo, unfurling his voice like a banner as he muses, “I’m here/How weird.” It’s a fitting update, and perhaps a callback, to an older gay-liberation chant. Five decades after Stonewall, Mike Hadreas is here, how weird — and he’s the one who’s still getting used to it. ♦

Judy Berman is a writer and an editor in Brooklyn.

Kieran Frost/Getty Images

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The song first bustled into earshot late in 2016. A remix, featuring the rapper Cardi B, began its rise to the Top 5 of Billboard’s Hot 100 early in 2018. But sonically — spiritually — “Finesse” is pure 1989. Bruno Mars’s records are exercises in time travel, evoking pop’s past at a subatomic level, down to the most microscopic fillips and filigrees. In “Finesse,” he conjures the heyday of new jack swing, that period in the late 1980s and early ’90s when hip-hop and R.&B. first joined forces, and majestic topiary hi-top fades crowned the heads of a new generation of black stars. Full of clattering drum-machine rhythms, lurching synthesizers and close-harmony background vocals, “Finesse” calls to mind old hits like Bobby Brown’s “Don’t Be Cruel.” Its bass line resembles the one in Michael Jackson’s “Remember the Time”; Cardi B delivers her rhymes in cadences borrowed from Salt-N-Pepa and Heavy D. But Mars is not merely collaging together scraps. “Finesse” doesn’t just sound like a long-lost new jack swing classic; it sounds like the new jack swing Platonic ideal. It’s an imitation so fine-tuned it makes the originals seem ersatz.

Nostalgia in pop music is usually polemical — a grumpy argument for the good ol’ over the bad new. But Mars is a nonideological revivalist. He neither worships the past nor scorns the present; nor is he ironic, a wise guy smirking at yesteryear’s kitsch. He regards the musical past with a fan’s affection and a connoisseur’s relish for minutiae. In “Finesse,” Mars’s mastery of detail extends to the lyrics, which revel in circa-1989 hip-hop hauteur. The chorus circles around a refrain, “We out here drippin’ in finesse/It don’t make no sense” — a period-perfect mixed metaphor, capped by a wink at its own goofiness.

Mars brings this exacting ear to everything he records. “Uptown Funk,” his 2014 smash with Mark Ronson, channeled the Gap Band and the Time. Elsewhere he has resurrected suave 1970s disco-soul, jittery new-wave rock, even dub reggae. In concert, he offers another throwback, leading a band that navigates tight grooves and intricate choreography like a ’60s soul revue. He’s a nimble singer, dancer and multi-instrumentalist who has internalized decades of pop moves and mannerisms. He was to the mannerisms born. He began performing in his family’s band as a preschooler in Hawaii, gaining fame on the Waikiki showroom circuit as “The World’s Youngest Elvis Impersonator.” Mars’s genius for mimicry has made him a juggernaut. Since 2010, he has had seven No. 1 singles; seven others have reached the Top 5.

Not everyone is a fan. When Mars swept the top prizes at the Grammy Awards in January, critics derided the results as music-biz conservatism. Justin Vernon, the singer-songwriter who records as Bon Iver, tweeted, “Mr Mars made a name in the INDUSTRY by making hits OUT of hits of yesteryear.” Mars’s old-fashioned musicianship is reassuring to industry graybeards who look at the Billboard charts and see “real music” under siege — Lil Uzi Vert aiming a catapult at the castle keep where Eric Clapton safeguards his Stratocasters.

But Mars is more progressive than his detractors claim. Like Barack Obama, he’s a mixed-race kid from Hawaii, a product of that state’s heady postcolonial cultural mix; he resists default racial-musical categorization. His version of “classic,” meanwhile, reflects the simple truth that hip-hop-inflected R.&B. long ago replaced rock as popular music’s lingua franca. He’s a canon-reformer, inscribing names like Teddy Riley and TLC in the Great American Songbook alongside the demigods of earlier eras.

Mars’s great sin, the transgression that brings disdain from some corners, is his insistence on fun above all. He’s content to lead the world’s greatest wedding band. His success shows that there is an appetite, in 2018, for ecumenical party anthems that inspire all-ages stampedes to the dance floor. “That’s What I Like,” Mars’s recent Song of the Year Grammy-winner, is modeled on early-’90s R. Kelly, but Mars sneaks in sputtering trap beats: a nod to the kids.

As for older fans, they constitute a boom market. Two generations reared on rap have slouched into middle age. One of America’s most popular new radio formats is Oldies Hip-Hop. Those listeners must have appreciated Mars’s rendition of “Finesse” at the Grammys, staged as a full-dress early-’90s period piece. As usual, the performance was expert, slick, charming. It was also oddly anonymous, a demonstration of virtuosity that left little impression of the virtuoso. Mars is the most egoless superstar in recent memory. Onstage with his band, he’s a lead singer, first among equals, not a spotlight-hogging solo artist. It’s another example of Mars’s savvy. The divas and divos who have dominated pop for 15 years are in commercial decline. Today’s young fans consume music via streaming playlists on mobile phones, a medium that favors songs over stars. In place of a plus-size personality, Mars offers his own playlist: impeccably made, irrefutably catchy, epoch-straddling hits that saturate our airwaves and datastreams. You could say we’re dripping in them. ♦

Jody Rosen is a contributing writer for the magazine.

Photograph by Mike Marsland/Getty Images

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‘When you sing the line ‘rocket’s red glare,’ fireworks are going to go off. Then, when you get to ‘O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave,’ an eagle named Challenger is going to take off and soar over the stadium.” Becky, my tour manager, was talking me through the mechanics of my gig on April 5. That day I am scheduled to sing the national anthem at the Minnesota Twins’ season opener in Minneapolis. “He’s a professional sports eagle,” Becky explained. “He has a website.”

Being invited to perform “The Star-Spangled Banner” is both flattering and frightening. On one hand, it’s exciting to be part of such a grand spectacle. On the other, that song is crazy hard to sing. I’ll have to begin on exactly the right note to make sure my voice can dip for the lowest pitches and reach for the high one — between me and the eagle, I’m not sure whose assignment is more acrobatic.

In addition to the musical concerns, there are other considerations. I’ve wondered if simply singing the anthem has become a loaded political statement, given the protests in the N.F.L. Back in 2016, quarterback Colin Kaepernick began kneeling during the anthem as a gesture of protest. He was motivated, he said, by social inequity and police brutality targeting people of color. Some Americans praised Kaepernick for moral tenacity in the face of likely censure from the league. Others criticized him for having disrespected the flag and, by extension, the military service of those who fought under it. Commentators took sides, dug in, got mad. The president got involved. For many months, national media were passionately concerned with the question Was this man listening to the song wrong?

It’s an unusual query. Normally we’re allowed to listen to music any way we like, as long as we don’t talk over the quiet parts and we keep our iPhones out of other people’s line of sight. But listening to the anthem is a scripted performance in itself, with stage directions (face the flag), prescribed postures (standing, right hand over heart) and even a wardrobe change (a bit of federal law advises men to “remove their headdress” for the performance).

During the ensuing controversy, Americans argued with one another about what exactly the flag symbolizes, what the anthem means and what kneeling signifies. Thinking about my own symbolic role in the ceremony, I’ve asked myself: Is there a way to perform this song that communicates respect to the veterans and also welcome to the activists — while still rooting the Twins to victory over the Mariners?

To prepare, I’ve read the words of “The Star-Spangled Banner” many times. I’ve read critical analyses of the Francis Scott Key poem from which they’re drawn. But it wasn’t until one recent night, reading the lyrics on my laptop, singing in my kitchen, that the punctuation really hit me. The part of the song that we sing at sporting events — it ends with a question mark: “Does that star-spangled banner yet wave/O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?” Whatever symbolic statement the anthem makes, it’s also literally posing a question: Did we survive that in one piece? A year and a half after a divisive election — with fresh strains on race relations, irreconcilable responses to gun violence and increasingly frequent political stalemates — we’re asking the same question in 2018.

Symbols aren’t neatly mandated — we can’t assign cultural significance to a flag or a song in the same way we set speed limits on federal highways. The meaning of a symbol is determined only by an organic, collective agreement, which can flex or drift as culture changes. The anthem is fixed absolutely for only one listener: Challenger the Eagle. I’m told that he has been trained to swoop, circle and dive and that at the end of every performance he alights on his trainer’s arm just as the final note — and its question mark — echoes through the stadium. ♦

Dessa is a rapper, a singer and a writer. Her book of essays, “My Own Devices,” will be published in September.

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