This piece carries a content warning for descriptions of sexual harassment and assault.

Claire had been working at a record label for just a few months when she went to a show with a senior colleague. She wasn’t keen to drink, she says, but her coworker insisted—just like he had repeatedly asked her to hang out until she agreed for this show. As a young employee, Claire (who asked not to use her real name) worried she couldn’t afford to offend him or seem disinterested, lest she hurt her standing at the company.

Claire doesn’t remember how much she drank that night, and doesn’t know why he then drove them to his house instead of meeting up with their coworkers as planned. She does remember her face pressed up against the car window as he tried to kiss her. Claire says she told her coworker no and pushed him away. But once again, she says, he insisted.

Sluggish and nauseous, she asked to use the bathroom in order to get away. Once inside, Claire says, her coworker sexually assaulted her. Afterwards, she was panicked and frightened—not only of her coworker, but of how the incident might affect her career.

“I didn’t want to be ‘sexual harassment girl,’” she told me. “I thought people wouldn’t want to hire me because they wouldn’t understand, and think I’m being over-sensitive to something that was just normal in the music industry.”

Stories like Claire’s are now being re-examined in light of the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements, which have affected hundreds of workplaces, including VICE. Over the past two years, I spoke to more than two dozen women in the music industry about their experiences with sexual harassment and misconduct over the course of their careers. They are artists and publicists, assistants and executives, spanning both the major-label and independent music worlds, and across multiple genres. Some have publicly come forward with accusations, while many spoke to me on condition of anonymity, citing fear of retaliation or of damaging their careers. (Other women declined to talk to me altogether, citing non-disclosure agreements.) Taken together, their accounts indicate how deeply the problem is embedded in the music industry, thanks not only to workplace cultures and attitudes but also the labor conditions on which the business is built.

The women who spoke to me described working in a boys’ club where deals are sealed over late-night drinks and at backstage parties. They told stories of powerful men who took advantage of their positions, and explained the risks inherent in speaking out against them. They detailed an industry beset by financial pressure and fierce competition, increasingly reliant on a freelance workforce vulnerable to gaps in labor protections. Music’s misconduct problem doesn't stem from any one of these factors alone—it's a perfect storm that clears a path for sexual abuse to continue unabated. Blocking that path will require reckoning with the very nature of music and the industry and cultures that surround it.

“I didn’t want to be ‘sexual harassment girl,’” Claire said. “I thought people wouldn’t want to hire me because they wouldn’t understand, and think I’m being over-sensitive to something that was just normal in the music industry.”

Throughout pop music history, victims of sexual misconduct and abuse, many of them young women and girls, have often been overlooked by fans, executives, and the media, their stories dismissed amidst, and even canonized as, rock star behavior. When David Bowie died in 2016, he was alternately eulogized as an “icon for sexual liberation” and decried as a statutory rapist for sleeping with underage fans.

Even in the post-#MeToo era, fans and industry professionals have continued to support and elevate the careers of men who are accused of harassment, assault, and abuse. Two weeks after the Weinstein scandal erupted, Caroline, a Capitol Music Group subsidiary, signed a reported $6 million deal with the rapper XXXTentacion, who had been charged with allegedly attacking and strangling his then-pregnant girlfriend in 2016. (When contacted by Noisey late last year, a publicist for XXXTentacion confirmed the deal was on but said the amount was undisclosed.) He pleaded not guilty in December, and is still awaiting trial; his second album, ?, featuring Joey Bada$$ and Travis Barker, comes out Friday. Another rapper, 6ix9ine, continued his rise in the charts even as Jezebel confirmed in December that he pleaded guilty to the use of a child in a sexual performance in 2015. His sentencing hearing has been pushed back multiple times and is now scheduled for April 10; meanwhile, his debut album reached No. 4 on the Billboard 200 this month. A jury ruled last summer that radio DJ David Mueller had groped Taylor Swift in 2013; by January, he had a new job at a country music station in Mississippi, whose CEO said he "tend[ed] to believe" Mueller, not Swift.

The music world continues to project expectations that women are valued primarily as objects, not human beings: Hit music videos still feature women as little more than sexual accoutrements for their male stars, and female artists’ appearances remain a disproportionate focus of critical essays and reviews. Behind the scenes, especially when it comes to the power brokers who actually control the industry, music is still overwhelmingly a boys’ club, too.

Every woman I spoke with described working in a male-dominated environment at some point in her career.

“You have to be one of the guys,” said Claire. “I once had a boss tell me that I should learn golf and watch The Sopranos, because that’s what the men in the industry did. He wasn’t wrong. It’s all men for the most part, and I have to be able to hang with them.”

Little consolidated data is available about the gender breakdown of the American music industry, but Census Bureau data points to an imbalance: within the sound recording industry, for example, which includes record labels and publishing groups, women make up 28 percent of the workforce. The workforce tends to skew even more male at the highest levels. Recent reports from the UK and Australia found that women remain underrepresented there; according to a 2016 survey by the UK Music Diversity Taskforce, women occupy 30 percent of senior executive positions and 40 percent of senior management positions, despite comprising more than half of entry-level roles.

Of the 20 executives on the board of the Recording Industry Association of America, four are women. The 2017 Billboard Power 100 List, which ranks the most influential members of the music business, includes just eight women. The publication continues to publish a separate annual list highlighting female power players, though there is no list distinctly for men. And a new report from USC’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative found that from 2013 to 2018, women made up only 9.3 percent of Grammy nominees.

“You have to be one of the guys,” Claire says. “I once had a boss tell me that I should learn golf and watch The Sopranos, because that’s what the men in the industry did. He wasn’t wrong. It’s all men for the most part, and I have to be able to hang with them.”

All these numbers have real-world implications for women in music. A 2016 report from a US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission task force identified a number of risk factors for workplace harassment, including a lack of diversity and significant power disparities. Other studies have have found that both women and men are more likely to be targeted in male-dominated environments that emphasize traditional gender roles.

Women just starting out in a male-dominated industry like music may find their career advancement at the mercy of the men in charge—a situation some of those men take advantage of.

“In music, oftentimes you have women who are working closely with a producer or manager or someone who has a lot of control over their careers, so they don’t necessarily have options of not working close to them or not responding to advances,” said Ginger Clark, a psychology professor at USC’s Rossier School of Education who specializes in women’s issues and trauma like sexual abuse. “So it creates the perfect environment for this sort of thing to take place.”

Illustration by Meaghan Garvey

Careers in music, by their nature, demand a mix of business and pleasure, marked by an often all-consuming lifestyle where days at the office can give way to late nights going to shows, working events, and schmoozing over drinks.

“The morning banter would be, ‘Oh, I was so hungover—I was out till whenever partying with an artist or client,’” said a former music licensing assistant for an independent record company. “That’s how you get ahead, that’s how you bond: Because you were drunk till 2 AM. That’s the witching hour when the deals are sealed. If you’re the lame-o who goes home at 10 when the show ends and don’t go backstage and hang out, then you’re not in the inner circle.” The employee, who requested anonymity because she still works in the music industry and didn’t want to harm her career, said she was sexually assaulted by a coworker on one such night.

The blurring of work and partying can breed opportunities for misconduct—alcohol use in particular is a much studied and discussed component in many cases of sexual assault, and another risk factor cited in the EEOC report about harassment—but the culture is hard to change overnight.

“You come from a college environment where the way that you socialized is drinking, and then it carries into your work environment,” the former licensing assistant said. “It doesn’t stop at a certain age in music. It’s an island of lost boys where everybody is the same age forever.”

Early in her career as an A&R scout, Eve, who requested a pseudonym for fear of harm to her career, says she was taken under the wing of a powerful executive at a large company where she one day hoped to work. She says they would often meet for dinner at his hotel, and then spend time talking on the roof, and then his room. Eve says that such hotel room meetings were common in the A&R world, but at the end of one such night, the executive—who was married—expressed his desire to kiss her.

“I just sat still like, ‘If I don’t move, no one can see me,’” Eve recalled. Unsure how to respond, she says she played the comment off as a compliment and excused herself. “From there, I knew that that dynamic was included in the relationship.”

Her mentor continued sending her flirtatious texts and inviting her to spend time alone at hotels. Though their relationship never crossed the line into physical intimacy, Eve says she felt she had to tolerate his open displays of attraction, flirting back and putting up with his inappropriate comments and behavior for fear of losing the knowledge and opportunities he afforded her.

“There was an innate feeling that if I were to tell him that I was offended, or set a boundary, that he would never call me again and just disappear back into the ether of the inner circle, and I would never see it again,” she said. “He had big power in that job to change my life. I don't even know if I'd be where I am right now if I didn't have what he showed me.”

But after several months, Eve felt the dynamic had become too complicated. When she called him to confront him about her discomfort and the inappropriate nature of the relationship, she says he became withdrawn and didn’t want to discuss it. They stopped speaking shortly thereafter.

“It doesn’t stop at a certain age in music," said a former licensing assistant. "It’s an island of lost boys where everybody is the same age forever.”

A majority of the women who spoke to me described feeling like they needed to put up with harassment in order to keep their jobs or further their careers. And all of the women who said they chose to report misconduct, either through formal or informal channels, told me that doing so had little effect.

“These men have created a myth that they're the only ones that can do this,” industry veteran Dorothy Carvello told me. “So if you have a guy running a company, [for] example, and he's created an enormous amount of revenue, the corporate people feel like, ‘Oh this guy's delivering for us. So what, he does a few things. It's cheaper in the long run to keep him. We need him. Who else are we gonna get?’"

Carvello said she was hired at age 24 as secretary to Atlantic Records co-founder Ahmet Ertegun in 1987; after helping sign heavy metal band Skid Row, she said she became the first woman in the label’s A&R department the following year. In a guest column for Variety last fall, Carvello alleged that Ertegun sexually assaulted her in 1988, and that when she informally complained about the incident to two senior execs, they told her she was “free to leave.” (Atlantic’s parent company, Warner Music, declined to comment about the allegation, but directed me to a recent Billboard article addressing the company’s HR policy and plans.) Carvello plans to share her story in a forthcoming book, Anything For A Hit: An A&R Woman’s Story of Surviving the Music Industry, out in September 2018 via Chicago Review Press.

According to the EEOC task force, so-called “superstar” harassers can tempt companies to ignore misconduct because they believe losing the employee—such as a powerful executive or chart-topping artist—would be too costly. Employers, its report said, “may wager that the likelihood or cost of a complaint of misbehavior is relatively low and outweighed by the superstar's productivity.”

That gamble may look more even more enticing in an industry that has undergone an extraordinary amount of upheaval in the past 20 years. Following a series of mergers dating back to 1998, the “Big Six” major labels that once ruled the industry—Warner Music Group, EMI, PolyGram, Sony Music, MCA, and BMG—are today the “Big Three”: Sony BMG, Universal Music Group, and Warner Music Group. Between 1999 and 2009, total revenue from US recorded music sales fell by 50 percent, which forced companies to diversify their income streams with sources like streaming services and music licensing deals, while navigating the simultaneous growth of the live event business, which now accounts for more than half of the industry's overall revenue. With the help of streaming and other digital services, the record industry has recovered, bringing in an overall revenue of $7.7 billion in 2016—its highest earnings since 2009—but that’s still little more than one-third of its inflation-adjusted peak of $21 billion in 1999.

“When your business is relationships, there are so many gray areas,” said a former label publicist. “We know what the obvious things are, but what are the not obvious things? When does flirtation become harassment? There is no road map.”

In such a hyper-competitive, financially precarious environment, speaking out can be perceived by victims as too risky.

“[The music industry] is all about who you know and reputation. That's how you stay in the business,” the former licensing assistant told me. Having witnessed layoffs in the wake of mergers and the recession, she added, “You can have a job in music one day, and you don’t the next day. It's hard to find a new one after you're fired from the industry, because it's really that small.”

While the industry has consolidated—the major labels hold an estimated 69 percent of the $15.7 billion global recorded music market—the music business at large is also distinctly fragmented, a decentralized constellation of artists, labels, publishers, managers, and promoters, that amounts to an expanding network of peer relationships. There is no single governing body to set industry-wide standards or codes of conduct. Women I interviewed said that this lack of a centralized authority can make it difficult to know where they should turn when faced with workplace harassment.

“When your business is relationships, there are so many gray areas,” said a former label publicist who asked to remain anonymous due to privacy concerns. “We know what the obvious things are, but what are the not obvious things? When does flirtation become harassment? There is no road map.”

There are federal protections against workplace sexual harassment under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits employment discrimination based on sex, race, and other factors, but an individual is generally only protected if she or he is considered an employee, rather than a contractor or partner, at the time any alleged discrimination takes place. Many men and women in the music business don’t fall under that umbrella.

Additionally, many of the peer relationships common in the music industry—like a booking agent and a manager, or a journalist and a publicist—don’t necessarily meet the federal criteria for “employer-employee” relationships, leaving a gap in coverage for freelancers and staffers alike (some state legislatures—like in California, where much of the music industry is concentrated—have instituted additional protections).

“If there’s no employer-employee relationship between the worker and the publicist, or the worker and the artist for whom the publicist works, or if a person is a freelancer for their publication, it’s not clear if they have any recourse,” said Corbett Anderson, assistant legal counsel for the EEOC.

Independent (meaning self-employed or freelance) workers have long been a part of the music industry—the term “gig economy” is thought to be borrowed from musicians—but their share of the workforce is growing considerably. From 2007 to 2017, the number of self-employed and freelance jobs among musical groups, artists, and related workers rose by 112 percent, while salaried employee jobs dropped by 11 percent, according to government data compiled for Noisey by Emsi, a labor market analysis firm. In the same time period, freelance jobs in the sound recording industries sector, which includes record labels, publishers, and studios, increased by 30 percent, while employee positions decreased by 22 percent.

“The music industry, like the rest of the economy, has seen rapid growth in contract workers and freelancers in recent decades,” said Alan Kreuger, a Princeton economist and co-founder of the Music Industry Research Association. “[First,] record companies have been under intense competitive pressure to reduce costs because rampant piracy and file-sharing cut into revenues; and second, technology has made it easier for parts of music jobs to be outsourced and carried out remotely.”

Of the women I interviewed, those who experienced harassment as freelancers or by third parties they encountered in the course of their work spoke about not knowing where to turn for help, or if doing so was an option.

"There's a lot of confusion over what is the boundary and with whom. If I go out to [a drink meeting] with a publicist or a manager and he sexually harasses me, who do I tell?" — Rebecca Haithcoat

This includes freelance reporters tasked with covering the industry. Contracts for freelance reporters may offer the freelancer company support services such as HR, but music journalists I spoke to said it's not always clear what support is available if they experience harassment, how to access it, or who to talk to if they're working for multiple companies at once. And if a reporter is doing work without a contract in place—meeting an industry source, building relationships, or while doing the research necessary to get a story in the first place—they're likely on their own.

"There's a lot of confusion over what is the boundary and with whom," said Rebecca Haithcoat, a freelance music journalist, who has contributed to Noisey. "If I go out to [a drink meeting] with a publicist or a manager and he sexually harasses me, who do I tell?"

Others I spoke with said the insecure nature of freelancing makes speaking out too great a risk, particularly among younger workers who may rely on such work as an entry point into the industry.

Kate, a former freelance music writer who now works in A&R and asked to use a pseudonym, says the precarious nature of freelance work made her afraid to speak out when a well-known musician pressured her to have sex with him before an interview. She was 21 at the time. Kate says she excused herself to the restroom and left. Though she eventually told the festival publicist who had invited her to the event about what happened, she never told her editor.

“This was my main source of income, and the reason I was able to meet people and get assignments—I didn’t want people to think I was difficult. You can easily feel isolated. I was scared that [the musician] was gonna take some revenge on me, or publicly discount everything that I said in order to save his career.”

Even full-time employees may be reluctant to come forward with claims, although that’s not unique to the music industry. According to studies cited in the 2016 EEOC report, at least one in four women say they have experienced workplace sexual harassment, but only around 30 percent of those people will talk to a supervisor, manager, or union representative. Even fewer—between 6 and 13 percent—ever make a formal complaint.

Illustration by Meaghan Garvey

Most large businesses and organizations in the music industry—including the Big Three—have sexual harassment policies in place, but how strongly those policies are enforced has been called into question. A 2016 employee sexual harassment lawsuit against Sony Music Holdings, Inc. for example, claimed that “the Company’s failure to address Plaintiff’s complaint of harassment is consistent with its lackadaisical approach to human resources generally.” The case was settled out of court in February last year.

Workers in the music industry told me that some smaller companies and labels they'd worked for did not have policies or resources in place specifically to address sexual misconduct. Title VII protections only extend to businesses with 15 employees or more, and don’t require businesses to have a sexual harassment policy (though some states have their own policies).

Of course, with sexual assault, a crime has been committed, regardless of company policy or employment status. Even so, women often don’t press criminal charges: between 2005–10, 64 percent of rape and sexual assault victims in the US didn’t go to the police, according to the Justice Department, and more than a third of those women cited either fear of retaliation or the belief that the police can’t or won’t help them as the primary reason.

Multiple women I interviewed mentioned that they believed that taking action meant risking their own careers. Some said they’ve declined to report misconduct because they feared losing opportunities or being blacklisted.

“Coming forward, you think that HR is gonna take care of you. I learned that really, they just don’t want to get sued,” Claire said. “He was the type of guy who would cause trouble a lot. Me, I’m a young girl. They thought, She’s not gonna sue us.”

Claire, the woman who says she was assaulted by a senior colleague at the now-defunct label, told me that she initially declined to report the incident because she feared that it would affect her reputation. When she eventually did go to HR, she says she was faced with questioning and skepticism rather than support.

“I was like, why am I being questioned?” she said. “They said our stories didn’t match up—‘We can’t do anything about it. We don’t have any proof.’” Even after a third person came forward and corroborated details of her story, Claire says HR dismissed the story as unreliable. Her coworker continued to work at the company, Claire says, although he was required to undergo sexual harassment training.

“I just remember feeling like, I don’t even know what I could do to get them to believe me. At one point, I got so upset that I said I didn’t know if I wanted to work there, and they said, ‘Yeah, that would probably be best.’”

Claire says the experience of reporting the assault was almost as traumatic as the assault itself. “Coming forward, you think that HR is gonna take care of you. I learned that really, they just don’t want to get sued,” she said. “He was the type of guy who would cause trouble a lot. Me, I’m a young girl. They thought, She’s not gonna sue us.”

They were right: Claire stayed on with the company for another year, at which point the company closed. She says the industry’s culture of toxicity and secrecy eventually led her to leave the business altogether, which was not unique among the women I spoke to.

Stories like Claire’s have continued to emerge in the music industry, and will likely continue to do so. Speaking out may be a critical first step toward instilling change, as evidenced by the global groundswell of the #MeToo movement and sweeping anti-harassment action plan put forth this month by more than 300 female members of the entertainment industry.

Experts say that the wider and more frequent that these conversations become, the more likely they are to reshape behaviors.

“On a psychological level, collective outcry—whether online or in real life—changes deeply ingrained ways of thinking on the individual level,” said Karen North, a psychologist and director of USC Annenberg's Digital Social Media program.

“By engaging with social media’s presentation of an opinion, even if it's just a ‘like’ or share, you are taking a baby step toward convincing yourself that you feel the same way, or that you feel more strongly than you thought you did.”

But after decades of intermittent attention and allegations that have emerged only to be forgotten, the recent public outcry drives home an uncomfortable truth for the business: Those in power need to be doing more.

“Grassroots activism is great, but if the people that actually hold power don’t care, or don’t take you seriously, or don’t listen to you, then the ways that sexism gets upheld don’t change,” said Shawna Potter, vocalist for feminist punk outfit War on Women and co-founder of Safer Scenes, which distributed information about bystander intervention tactics at last summer’s Vans Warped Tour to help combat harassment at music venues and events. The tour is also partnered with the sexual abuse non-profit A Voice for the Innocent, which provides a platform for victims to share stories and connect with local support resources.

Warped Tour has been embroiled in its own sexual misconduct controversies, though founder Kevin Lyman denies that they contributed to last year’s announcement that the tour will see its final run in 2018. “We address things the best way we possibly can as a tour that is not part of these bands’ lives all the time—they come together with us for eight weeks a year,” Lyman told Noisey about the challenges of confronting a problem as culturally widespread as sexual abuse.

“Grassroots activism is great, but if the people that actually hold power don’t care, or don’t take you seriously, or don’t listen to you, then the ways that sexism gets upheld don’t change." — Shawna Potter

Warped Tour, alongside Chicago’s Riot Fest and Coachella collaborators Do LaB, are among the organizations and festivals taking measures to fight sexual misconduct by teaming up with harm reduction groups like Safer Scenes, Between Friends, and Rape Victim Advocates. Together, they’ve worked to equip fans, artists, and staff with counseling, bystander intervention workshops, and codes of conduct.

“You need clear policies in place from the get-go that everyone can point to, and there should also be a channel to report instances of gender-based harassment and violence that is unrelated to the person in charge,” Potter said. “If someone complains, you need to already have clear steps [about] what to do after that. That’s gonna be different for different arenas, but it means actually following through and taking it seriously.”

Preventing sexual harassment and assault is also good for business: Loss of productivity, absenteeism, and an increased likelihood of turnover are among the economic costs cited in a 2007 meta-analysis of data from workplace sexual harassment studies. The report estimates that sexual harassment costs organizations $22,500 a year in lost productivity for every worker affected, not even taking into account any lawyer fees or settlements.

In the long term, combating sexual abuse and harassment in the music industry requires preventing it from happening in the first place. This means making a healthy, respectful working environment a business priority through stronger leadership, increased diversity, and greater accountability. Above all, it requires fostering workplace cultures that support the people, and not just the dollars, that define the American music industry.

Andrea Domanick is Noisey's West Coast editor. Follow her on Twitter. If you have witnessed or experienced misconduct in music and want to share your story, e-mail her confidentially at andrea.domanick@vice.com.

This article originally appeared on Noisey US.

Run the Jewels have dropped a new video for RTJ3 cut "Oh Mama," but rather than starring Killer Mike and El-P, the clip has fellow beloved Adult Swim compatriots Rick and Morty (of the titular series) as suited-up, Tarantino-esque badasses going on typically dimension-hopping escapades covered in alien goop and vomit and blah blah blah blah.

Look, I get it. Rick and Morty garners lots of love because it manages to combine Family Guy-ish general gross-out humour with dark character arcs and the theoretical science of speculative fiction. Many people who haven't experienced The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (which found the absurdist comedy in astrophysics decades before R&M did) or literally any sci-fi anime (Neon Genesis Evangelion is just as psychological and just as loopy) find this show mind-blowing and that's fine! I think the art is ugly and the jokes aren't for me but if Rick and Morty is your introduction to how heady ideas like time paradoxes and parallel universes can be incorporated into enjoyable fiction, by all means have fun and let this show serve as a gateway to other properties that get you that same fix.

Of course, the show has now become associated with a certain type of devoted internet fan, a usually male libertarian who praises R&M for its science elements and claims that those who dislike the show don't understand it because their IQs aren't high enough. Upon posting this blog I'll probably have a sniveling horde of these Jordan Peterson-worshipping types nipping at my Twitter timeline insisting that I "just don't get it." Not all of Rick and Morty's fans are the bro-y neckbeards who threw online and real-life tantrums at McDonald's after they didn't properly partake in that Szechuan sauce viral marketing campaign, but they're the ones who are the loudest. The fact that both RTJ and Logic, high-profile hip-hop acts, are using Rick and Morty to market their music about a full year after the show has become irreversibly tied to its worst adherents and become something of a punchline about pseudo-intellectuals just looks like another case of jumping onto what's broadly popular too late.

That being said, "Oh Mama" still goes and the partnership between RTJ and Rick and Morty is just good brand synergy, seeing as Adult Swim was integral in getting Killer Mike and El-P working together in the first place and thusly made the world that much of a better place for doing so. The duo (RTJ, not R&M) are even headlining the inaugural Adult Swim Fest that's happening this October, which should be pretty tight. Given that history, this video isn't nearly as embarrassing as Logic using a self-referential Rick and Morty skit as his album intro. You can watch the video for "Oh Mama" above.

Phil is on Twitter and really doesn't give a shit if he doesn't have a certain level of IQ or whatever.

This article originally appeared on Noisey CA.

The self-proclaimed "Dean of American Rock Critics," Robert Christgau was one of the pioneers of music criticism as we know it. He was the music editor at theVillage Voice for almost four decades where he created the trusted annual Pazz & Jop Poll. He was one of the first mainstream critics to write about hip-hop and the only one to review Simon & Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Water with one word: "Melodic." On top of his columns, he has published six books, including his 2015 autobiography, Going Into the City . He currently teaches at New York University. Every week, we publish Expert Witness, his long-running critical column. To read more about his career, read his welcome post; for four decades of critical reviews, check out his regularly updated website.

Ezra Furman: Transangelic Exodus (Bella Union) The frenetic escape saga "Suck the Blood From My Wound" sets an emotional pace the album can't possibly sustain, but an underlying metaphor provides all the momentum it needs—the angel Furman is on the run with has had serious wing surgery and the authorities mean to get him for it. So in picaresque desperation Furman and/or his half-tinfoil lover/confederate hide out in a beach house and spend a sleepless night in an Arkansas trailer park, recite a prayer in Hebrew and steal a dress from Goodwill. Furman remains vulnerable yet indomitable throughout, indulging an appetite for life that respects both its sanctity and its friability. Think of him as an alternate version of your better self. A MINUS

Car Seat Headrest: Twin Fantasy (Matador) In case you haven't been keeping score, this is a re-recording of what Will Toledo fans consider his Bandcamp masterpiece: an associative suite or bunch of 10 songs ranging in length from 1:30 to 16:11 that circle around his teenage crush on a guy who could be a fond memory or an educational fabrication. At 71:41, the new version is 11 instrumental minutes longer; at 25, its creator is a phlegmier, more masculine singer who's clearly not a teen anymore. But he now leads a band capable of rendering his quest in a hi-fi that illuminates both its seriousness and its sense of play. Young admirers reminded of their own existential confusions have every right to feel poignant about them. But so do obervers pleased to be merely touched. My favorite track is the shortest, which goes, in its entirety: "Stop smoking, we love you/And we don't want you to die." A MINUS

Walter Martin: Reminisce Bar & Grill (Ile Flottante) More pretty good indie-rock songs about a satisfying enough indie-rock life ("Too Cold to Waterski," "I Went Alone on a Solo Australian Tour") *

Born Ruffians: Uncle, Duke and the Chief (Yep Roc) Cheeky boy-os grow up, concoct tunes to match ("Forget Me," "Fade to Black") *

Follow Robert Christgau on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Noisey US.

During a festival held at Stockholm venue Södra Teatern last month, oft-controversial black thrashers Destroyer 666 took aim at #MeToo, the global movement against sexual violence and misogyny that’s become a powerful agent of societal change. To be more precise, the band directed their ire at #KilltheKing, a #MeToo-inspired campaign launched by a trio of women-led Swedish organizations to combat harassment, abuse, and misogyny in their local metal scene. Destroyer 666 had been singled out in #KilltheKing’s initial statement of intent as an example of the toxic masculinity that pervades the metal scene as a whole, something that triggered frontman Keith “K.K. Warslut” Destroyer’s temper once he and his bandmates hit the stage in the movement’s hometown. Swedish newspaper StockholmDirekt were the first to report on what happened next, and provided Noisey with an English translation of their account.

According to StockholmDirekt, the burly frontman went off on both the movement and the women themselves, yelling into the mic that, “Some women in this country have a problem with us. I know what they need. Hard dick! Fuck these political cunt suckers. This song is dedicated to the cunts in Kill the King.”

After StockholmDirekt’s report was published, Södra Teatern publicly apologized, and denounced the band's remarks; according to the booking agent there, the gig was not booked by the venue itself, but via a local promoter with ties to Destroyer 666—who, according to Johanna Carlberg, chief of communication at Södra Teatern, will not be welcomed back to play again in the future. Noisey reached out to the band’s label, Season of Mist, for comment, but have yet to receive a response as of press time.

Since then, Destroyer 666 have been kicked off a March 16 show at San Francisco’s DNA Lounge, where they’d been scheduled to open for Swedish black metallers Watain on their ongoing North American tour. As Brooklyn Vegan reports, the show was pulled after organizers caught wind of the Stockholm incident; following that development, the show was moved to another venue at Watain’s request so the two touring partners could play together as planned. Destroyer 666’s Facebook statement on the matter was customarily combative, ending with a succinct, “Fuck them all! No surrender!”

As the Destroyer 666 drama continues to play out (and will invariably continue to percolate as the tour progresses across the States to its final date at NYC’s Gramercy Theatre on March 31) the women thrust into the center of the firestorm have remained sanguine, and resolute.

“It came in no way as a surprise that Destroyer 666 made complete fools out of themselves like this,” Emelie Draper, a spokesperson for Swedish anti-racist group Heavy Metal Against Racism and co-organizer of #KilltheKing told StockholmDirekt following the band’s vile outburst. “It is a shame they make such mediocre music that they need to fill out their sets with crying over our existence. However, this can be seen as an evidence on why #killtheking is around and will continue to be around, and that our message has reached out.”

When I called another #KilltheKing organizer, Emmy Sjöström of the Heavy Metal Action Night festival series, at home in Stockholm a week later, she explained why they’d brought up Destroyer 666 in the first place, citing the band as a sort of avatar for everything their nascent movement is fighting against.

“We mentioned Destroyer 666 in the initial text because they are just a clear example,” she told me via Skype. “KK puking all other everybody, especially women, and having him play Stockholm and obviously the uprising, he knows we exist and we’ve bugged him enough to take time from his gig to bash us. He’s really just doing the things that we’re calling him out for, and digging his own grave for us.”

Sjöström is not alone in this battle. She’s joined by a crew of other Swedish metalhead women from Dear Darkness, a feminist metal Instagram community, and Draper’s comrades in Heavy Metal Against Racism, a group that fights against racism, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia via social media and real-world organizing. According to Sjöström, the women were inspired by the rise of Sweden’s #MeToo movement, and saw parallels between those discussions and in what they’d experienced as lifelong metal fans and members of the Swedish metal community. Others have joined them, too; metal journalist Sofia Bergström shared her own experiences with metal misogyny in an editorial for Swedish daily newspaper Aftonbladet, citing #KilltheKing as her inspiration to speak out, and 1, 381 people signed the original #KilltheKing petition.

“The #metoo revolution grew very big in Sweden very fast, with numerous petitions in several areas,” Dear Darkness spokesperson Frida Calderon explains. “Women within the music business founded their own petition, and we tapped into that and set out our own petition for the hard rock and metal scene—as this scene is always marginalized in general and for women and nonbinary people in particular. There is a strong culture of silence, and we needed to lift the lid off and let the women finally speak.”

“We were like, this has happened to us as well in the metal community,” Sjöström tells me. “We should start our own uprising, because it’s really bad. We’re sick and tired as hell of it, so let’s kill the king. So we launched the uprising, telling people now is the time to end this male dominance; now is the time to starting treating women and nonbinary individuals as equals. Enough is enough. Kill the king.”

In January 2018, they made their move.

They posted a #KilltheKing manifesto on social media on January 11, calling out bands like Destroyer 666, Pentagram, and Venom Inc in the process. It attracted immediate attention, and Sjöström says that the initial reaction they saw was very positive, with a lot of women and nonbinary people reaching out to thank them for taking initiative and speaking up about endemic issues. Though they dealt with some social media backlash (“People on Facebook that don’t even have their name or face showing, telling us we are silly bitches and stay at home, all that regular bullshit, but we just delete and ignore it,” Sjöström laughs) and angry responses from misogynist metal fans who resented the women for speaking up or saw their favorite bands names in survivor testimonies, the amount of positive attention they received inspired them to push further, and expand #KilltheKing outside of their hometown into its own global, metal-specific movement.

They’ve moving fast, too. While Heavy Metal Action Night and Heavy Metal Against Racism will continue to fight beneath the banner of #KilltheKing and the three groups are working in solidarity with one another, Dear Darkness have recently splintered off into a new project. A recent post on the Dear Darkness page announced the creation of a new hashtag, a new name, and a new campaign: #MetalToo.

“The #metoo and #killltheking movement must continue to include all people—all genders, all nationalities, all countries,” the post reads. “We must unite across borders, women, nonbinary, and men, to work for an equal hard rock and metal scene together. A scene where we can all share the love for the music on equal and safe terms, as a team. It’s the music that unites us, and it’s the music that should hold us together.”

As part of this next phase of awareness-raising, #MetalToo has been collecting stories from women around the world about the ways that sexual violence, harassment, gatekeeping, and misogyny have affected their lives as metal fans. These anonymous testimonies are highlighted on the Dear Darkness Instagram page, and include a number of sickening sexual assaults allegedly committed by band members and other metal fans alike. Aftonbladet has also printed over 20 of the testimonies #MetalToo had collected, as well as a rallying cry from the group itself.

“One of the things we did was start a secret Facebook group for women and nonbinary people, a safe space where you can share your story—tell us what happened to you and have other people, women, and non-men just listen and support you,” Sjöström says. “The stories that have come up in the group are horrifying; stories of violence, rape, sexual assault. It happens at every festival in Sweden; every show, something has happened that should not have happened ever to anyone. Reading these stories– and for me, having first-hand experience—it tears you apart, because people don’t take you seriously. ‘Ah, come on, you’re in Sweden for Chrissakes. Nothing ever happens in Sweden.’ Yes, it does.”

According to Sjöström, the chilly Scandinavian country’s reputation for gender equality, social welfare, high living standards, and overall happiness can often serve as a smokescreen, obscuring the very real issues lurking beneath all the fawning press, clean energy, and cheeky, Trump-trolling Twitter posts.

“Sweden is seen as an equal country, and in theory, that might be so, but not in real life,” she says. “In the metal community, we always have to prove our worth, more than any dude has had to do anywhere, anytime. We are getting sick and tired of it. We just want to be a part of the scene on the same terms as everybody else. We want to go to shows, we want to get drunk, you know? We love the music just as much as any dude does. We just want to be a part of it on equal terms.”

“We have always known these attitudes permeate our entire global society and the metal scene is not an exception to that, especially since it’s a male-dominated community,” Calderon adds. “Swedish people have a long history of speaking up against injustice, and that is what have led us this far. The women in the generations before ours demanded paid parental care, birth control, childcare, and free abortions, and have been a huge part in founding the society we have today. We knew we had to do this.”

The name for the original campaign, #KilltheKing, was coined by Heavy Metal Against Racism. When I speak with another of the group’s spokespeople, Banesa Martinez, a longtime metal DJ, she emphasizes the intersectional nature of the movement’s rebellion, and the way structural racism filters down into the metal community via mainstream Swedish society.

“[These problems are] ranging from employment issues, segregation, racial profiling and medical care, and are issues that will be talked about even more in the coming months since we have an established racist party that is gaining more political ground,” she explains, referencing an anti-immigration nationalist party, the Sweden Democrats, who will participate in the country’s next general election on September 9, 2018. The party was founded in 1988 by a SS veteran, a neo-Nazi, and a racist skinhead.

Martinez goes on to note the ways that Sweden’s feminist-friendly image often glosses over the social issues so integral to #KilltheKing’s fight. “The main targets are Muslims but the number of hate crimes have increased in Sweden, [with] attacks on homes for asylum seekers and synagogues,” she says. “Organizations working with issues related to domestic violence don’t get enough government funding, and we are still struggling with unjust treatment of rape victims in our courts. Female homicide victims by a man she already knows, in her home, are still high by Swedish standards. The matter of getting gender confirmation surgery takes years to be approved, if you even get approved.”

Growing up, she remembers seeing Nazis openly in attendance at black metal shows; when she was older, she confronted them face-to-face, and was “beaten down at a festival by a group of confrontative local racists, all wearing steel-toe boots.” For Martinez (and for all of the women involved), this fight is clearly a personal one.

Calderon says that the three groups came together on their own, and quickly formed a bond around their shared mission as well as their shared experiences growing up as girls and then young women in the Swedish metal world. All three women Noisey spoke with remember getting into metal as preteens, but feeling like they were never fully accepted despite their passionate love for the music itself; they were often punished for their refusal to conform to expected feminine gender roles, derided as “groupies” or challenged to prove their metal knowledge.

“Growing up as a girl on a small Baltic island in a typical middle class community, I basically had to hide my music preferences to be somewhat accepted,” Calderon remembers. “I was considered a tomboy, and was afraid that my musical preference added to that image, as growing up as a girl means that my utmost mission was to please the patriarchal structures of being cute, pleasing, attractive and adaptable. It wasn’t “girly” enough to wear big heavy metal band t-shirts, Dr Martens boots and no makeup – and that was not popular amongst the boys, to say the least. Today I’d say that the metal scene is not even to be considered a subculture anymore, but a huge global music community; I’d hope this has made it easier for non-males to feel comfortable in their music preference, but instead the sexism and fixation on appearance is much more obvious.”

So what’s next for #MetalToo? Global domination, preferably. That’s the coalition’s goal, anyway, and they’ve already laid the groundwork to launch #KilltheKing chapters in different countries. Calderon encourages those interested in joining #KilltheKing to get involved via the hashtag, by signing the coalition’s petitions, by sharing personal stories (anonymity is guaranteed), and by forming their own local groups to continue the fight against heavy metal sexism, misogyny, and sexual violence.

“The spirit of the uprising was clear—to share the stories, support each other, and truly find out that it’s not our individual choices or faults, but that there is a structural problem hailing from the destructive male gender role, and how it affects its surrounding in so many levels of our lives,” Martinez says. “That tries its best hold us back, oppress and diminish through social structures, societies’ rigid rules and terms, and the norms that control the way we perceive ourselves and those around us. When the first stories started to pour into #KilltheKing, we weren't so surprised about the horrid experiences that were shared—but about the magnitude, the number of people sharing similar stories, and some that chose to share the name of the predators and their bands/venues had been one of many other victims. That made us all work even harder and more focused on the path we had chosen.”

“A lot of women have reached out to us from outside of Sweden, saying, ‘Fuck, we need this too!’” Sjöström adds. It sounds as though an increasing number of women and nonbinary metalheads have reached that same boiling point that preceded Sjöström and her Swedish metal sisters’ foray into activism.

“When you’ve been a part of the scene for over 10 years, all that stuff that happens to you just builds up and you think, ‘Is this the way I should be treated? Do I want to live my life this way?’ I just got more angry,” she explains. “I saw all the sexism and misogyny within the scene and people were accepting it, because, ‘That’s the way it is, don’t care about it.’ Well, I have to care about it, because it’s my life. I got really pissed off, and I found other women who were also really pissed off, and now we are pissed off together!

“Metal has always been about going against the grain,” Sjöström concludes. “If you look at what happens around the world, it’s this toxic masculinity taking over everywhere, racism and misogyny everywhere. It is metal’s place to stand up against that. If you want to be metal and anti-establishment, you should not just play into that role of being this ‘alpha male.’ You should fucking go with us, because this is obviously something that is provocative to people, and metal is supposed to be provocative. In that sense, we are doing everything right.”

Kim Kelly is an editor at Noisey; follow her on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Noisey US.

Sigur Rós have made such cosmic music for so many years that the idea of them being bound by such earthly and dull ideas as taxes is baffling, but lo and behold, they are not entirely immune. As initially reported by several Icelandic newspapers and aggregated by the Reykjavik Grapevine, members of the band had about 800 million Icelandic krónur ($8 million USD) worth of their assets frozen by Iceland's Directorate of Tax Investigations for alleged tax evasion. While it's kind of baller to see that Jónsi owns "thirteen properties" and "two motorcycles," tax evasion is objectively not baller.

Fortunately, this story has a happy but still kind of confusing ending. According to Sigur Ros drummer Georg Hólm, the charges were the result of an accounting mishap, saying to Icelandic paper Morgunblaðið that "it turned out [our accountant] hadn’t handed in the right documents at the right time. This is nothing but a complete mess that we had no knowledge of until we were notified by the Commissioner.” A statement provided to Noisey by representatives for Sigur Ros, confirms that not only was the investigation the result of human error, but that the band has paid off the debt entirely and are cleared of all charges. The statement follows in full:

Sigur Rós have nothing to hide and have fully complied relevant information to the director of tax investigations (SRS) to resolve any and all issues. The band had an accounting relationship with PWC in Iceland from the beginning of their career until 2012, when they followed their long-standing accountant to his new venture Ryni Endurskodun. Late in 2014 the band were alerted that they had not filed correct tax returns for some years during the period 2010-2014. Part of the tax returns during that period were not filed correctly and that is not disputed by the band. This notification from the SRS was a surprise to the band as its members were all along in good faith that their tax returns were being submitted correctly by the accountant handling their affairs. This was disappointing to Sigur Rós and its members as they have from the beginning emphasized that their tax returns ought to be filed correctly in Iceland.

The band moved to accountancy firm, Virtus, at the start of 2015 to begin the process of getting their tax returns into correct form in accordance with the law. The band understand the SRS’s need to do their job, but would have preferred something less heavy-handed than the asset freeze. Especially because the bands members have from the start of the investigation co-operated fully with the directorate, submitted all information requested by the authorities and there was no need to freeze the assets of the members of Sigur Rós. This is in accordance with the opinion of the lawyers of Sigur Rós at LOGOS legal services.

There are several jokes you could make about the band being from Iceland and having their assets literally frozen but I'm not going to make them.

Phil is on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Noisey CA.

When Saweetie comes through your headphones on the intro track to High Maintenance, her voice is delicate but her message, though brief, is probably exactly what you needed to hear. “You know what sis, get into your bag, stay focused, and leave these bumass niggas alone.” It sets the tone for the ride she takes you on for the next 22 minutes, which sways on the borders of bravado and beauty.

The 9-track EP is a promising introduction to the Bay Area rapper following the release of “ICY GRL,” an interpolation of Khia’s “My Neck, My Back,” that garnered over 10 million views before she inked a deal with Warner Bros. Then known for her car raps, freestyles she recorded in her car over notable rap beats, she used social media as a vehicle to push her music. “ICY GRL” definitely feels like the result of a drunken girl’s night of shit talking. At the time of the recording, Saweetie was a recent graduate from USC with just a mattress in her apartment, prophesying the life she wanted to live. “It’s very unlikely, my wrist ain’t looking icy,” she says on the record, which became not only a prediction but an integral part of her brand.

Though she’s building her brand of being icy and high maintenance, she’s redefining the perception that those ideals are just skin deep. Colloquialisms aside, both traits have negative connotations when tacked to women as a labels, but Saweetie reclaims the ownership of those words throughout her debut. “Icy is a mindstate,” Saweetie tells me over the phone. “I wanted to create a positive mindset for myself and through that I was able to attract everything that I said in that song.”

Aside from a couple of pre-released tracks, the EP was her first chance at creating full songs with original production. The growth she’s displayed in a matter of months is evident as she deviates from the freeform style she possessed to constructing catchy hooks and experimenting with her voice’s texture.

The EP she's created seems crafted as a warm and varied rejoinder to anyone who'd label her with the record's title. Her new single, “B.A.N,” which revels in the victory of shedding the deadweight of a trifling old flame, hits hard for anyone who doubted that the 24-year-old could come with aggression. Her cousin Zaytoven lends his production talents to “Agua,” an ode to her penchant for the finer things, including a drippy wrist. She interchanges flows, borrowing from those old and new. Drawing from the stylings of a Bay Area pioneer Too $hort, High Maintenance fuses her Sacramento upbringing with a treasure hunt of hip-hop homages ranging from “hot boy” references to cadences lifted from Dem Franchize Boyz. Saweetie even tries her hand at singing on “Too Many,” a melodic closer about the less glamorous part of the relationships she’s forged thus far, followed by a heartfelt voicemail from her best friend of 11 years who is happy as hell she caught Saweetie’s song on the radio.

It covers a whole lot of ground, far more than you'd expect in just 9 tracks, suggesting that her time as the official Icy Girl isn't temporary.

Stream High Maintenance below.

Kristin Corry is a staff writer at Noisey. Follow her on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Noisey US.

It's Delta Week on Noisey Australia! To celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of her seminal debut Innocent Eyes, we'll be running Delta Goodrem-related writing every day.

So, off the bat, you probably have some questions: It’s 2018, why is anyone talking about Delta Goodrem? Specifically, why is Noisey writing about a Delta Goodrem song released this year? Or even this decade! Hasn’t Delta been irrelevant to most people since 2003? Well, here’s the thing: last month Delta quietly released “Think About You,” a chill, on-trend ode to fucking that’s probably her best song since Innocent Eyes, and definitely one of the best Australian pop songs released so far this year, except maybe Kylie’s “Dancing,” which doesn’t fully count because, let’s face it, Kylie didn’t even care enough about Australia to come back for Mardi Gras!!!!!!! So, yes: Delta’s “Think About You,” a song about how much Delta Goodrem loves to fuck, is the best Australian pop song released in 2018 so far.

This is surprising –– I was vaguely shocked to find that Delta was still releasing music, to be completely honest –– especially considering A) Her diminishing returns in recent years, and B) The fact that none of Delta’s music has ever really been very sexy. (The closest she’s come is an album cover where she looks great but also like she’s morphing into a tiger! But more on that later.)

Delta started out with a bang: in 2003, aged eighteen, she released Australia’s most successful album of the noughties (Innocent Eyes, which spawned five number one singles), before being diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma a couple of months later. But she’s a trooper, Our Delta: in remission by 2004, she released Mistaken Identity later that year, which eventually went five times platinum.

Her cultural power was waning by 2007, but Delta, the star’s third album, still achieved a 3x Platinum certification. In 2012, she released Child of the Universe, which was minorly controversial for the fact its lead single, “Sitting On Top of the World” sounded exactly like Arcade Fire’s “Rebellion (Lies)”. Child of the Universe was also her least commercially successful record. It’s probably best we just skim over that period.

In 2016, she attempted a comeback with “Wings,” which achieved surprising if moderate success, and Wings of the Wild, which has a cover that my colleague Katherine Gillespie described as having “sexy Animorphs vibes,” just to give you an idea of how bad it is. The cover was not a commercial tie-in with the Australian season of Cats, in which Delta played Grizabella. (She was widely criticised for this role, with one critic describing her performance as “weirdly contrived.”)

Anyway, the point of all this is that somehow, in 2018, Delta Goodrem has released her best single in roughly fifteen years. “Think About You” sounds expensive and cool and straight up relevant in a way that Australian pop music almost never does.

The song is Delta’s first straight-up sex jam. Nearly every lyric is about fucking, although always in a pretty PG way, because this song has to be played on breakfast radio. Delta sings “I’ve got a feeling you know what I wanna do,” and the implication is clear. That’s right, folks: Delta fucks.

Over clean, minimal production that sounds like it was pulled straight from Selena Gomez’s Revival (a smart, mature and surprisingly tasteful record), Delta tells the subject of the song “I think about you naked when I’m looking at you.” I think about you naked when I’m looking at you. It’s kinda genius, right? I think about you naked when I’m looking at you! It’s so goddamn simple conceptually, but it’s flirty and stupid and fun in ways that Delta’s music generally isn’t. It’s probably a result of Delta just having more fun with her life this year: she recently debuted a new hairstyle incorporating some deeply questionable dreadlocks, which probably isn’t the best look for a pop star in 2018, but I’m glad she’s mixing things up!

It’s a beautiful, weird, horny jam, and hopefully signals a comeback for Delta. Enjoy.

Follow Shaad on Twitter.

It's Monday and it's freezing so probability states you're probably feeling a bit shit. That, my sad friend, is OK: we all feel rubbish sometimes, and that is human. It's also fine because I happen to know about something that might make you feel a bit better, in the form of Four Tet's first BBC Essential Mix since way back in 2010. It is, happily, a cracker.

Introduced by Pete Tong as an artist who actually needs no introduction, the producer also known as Kieran Hebden leads you through a chilled out, meandering two hours, stopping off at Britney (with a snippet of her much-underrated "Slumber Party"), Selena Gomez ("Bad Liar," otherwise known as the best pop song recorded in recent memory), Bicep, and the late Ursula K. Le Guin (which, yes). It's a perfectly curated musical moment, that will lift you out of a Monday malaise as soon as you hear Destiny's Child's "Lose My Breath" kick in, to be honest.

Listen to the mix via the BBC here, and feel much, much better.

Follow Noisey on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Noisey UK.

You know what my first thought upon hearing "Gucci Gang" was? I never want to hear this song again. You know what someone else's thought was? This song is way too short, lets make this thing 43 minutes long. And so by the will of the lord, a 43 minute long version of Gucci Gang now exists.

Presenting, the 43 minute long version of "Gucci Gang":

Perhaps you can meditate to this like a buddhist monk tuned into a tibetan singing bowl. Maybe the repetitiveness of the track will get you into a zone, ready to hyper-focus like you've dropped an instant-release Adderall. Or you could think this is meaningless, a big piece of trash dumped into the sewer of the internet. Whatever you think though, these are the facts. This mix features the following artists:

- Lil Pump

- Lil Wayne

- YBN Nahmir

- Dave East

- Waka Flocka Flame

- Merkules

- Joyner Lucas

- King Los

- Deen Squad

- Bart Baker

- King Yella

- Bandit Gang Marco

- August Alsina

- Vybz Kartel

- Gucci Mane

- Bad Bunny

- 21 Savage

- J Balvin

- French Montana

- Ozuna

Now here's a link to the mix again in case it's taken you 43 minutes to read the above piece of writing, or if you want to play it back to back for 86 minutes and would like to switch things up a bit.

You can find Ryan on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Noisey UK.

It’s eleven in the morning and I’m sat in The Tankard, an Irish pub a few minutes down from Elephant and Castle in south London, nursing a beer with the local day drinkers. It’s the kind of chintzy establishment where the tables are lacquered with decades of spillages, the buttons on the off-colour slot machine are worn in, and the regulars spill tobacco over their trousers while watching the horse racing. On the one hand it’s a fitting (if slightly tenuous) location to meet with the Dublin born rapper Rejjie Snow; on the other it’s an error – he stopped drinking five months ago.

“I had a rough night last night, I’m trying to get back to life,” he explains when he arrives, clutching a plastic blue off-licence bag traditionally reserved for tinnies but that instead holds a smoothie. It’s the night after the BRIT Awards and Rejjie had been out until 6AM – not so much partying as catching up with old friends. In the last year or so, he’s floated from coast to coast writing for his debut album Dear Annie, moving between Los Angeles, New York, Paris and London, where he lives and shares a flat just up the road with a stranger he met on Spare Room.

As many of Rejjie’s fans will be aware, Dear Annie has been teased for years – nearly half a decade – before emerging this February in a stream of colourful jazz and soul ("23"), telling stories of love and lust (“Egyptian Luvr”) that sound as though they’ve been beamed down from a flower garden somewhere above the clouds (“Spaceships”). Though the existence of the record seemed like a troll at times – akin to this generation’s Jay Electronica debut or Dr Dre’s Detox, being spoken about but never actually released – the real reason for the delay is that Rejjie’s journey toward releasing Dear Annie is couched in demise, fear, destruction and loss that all came before ultimately culminating in positive personal growth and discovery.

Day ones will remember Rejjie when he went as Lecs Luther, releasing his debut track “Dia Dhuit” to YouTube in August 2011. Label offers quickly followed, as did music video premieres on this website, and a deal with Elton John’s management company. Back then, Rejjie was 18 years old and still finding his place in the world. Or to put it more bluntly, he was coming to terms with growing up as a black man in Ireland. “When I lived in Dublin it was hard to be myself out there. I’ve had identity issues my whole life: I had a lot of stuff in me I couldn’t fully get out or vent or express,” he says, speaking with the calm assured tone of someone now comfortable in themselves, who has developed a lot in seven years.

As a teen – whether through watching music videos by American artists on YouTube, spraying graffiti across Dublin’s streets, tattooing his skin or learning to breakdance (he went to a stage school on the weekends and also knows his way around a pair of tap shoes), Rejjie wanted to “be somebody”, it just wasn’t clear at that young age in Dublin who that “somebody” was. It was only when he moved to London a few years ago – a multicultural city that is the exact opposite of Dublin – that he started to feel “more me”. And pretty soon after setting up house, he flowed into the sea of south London’s music scene: hanging out and freestyling with King Krule (who has an uncredited feature on “The Wonderful World of Annie”) and making songs with Loyle Carner and Jesse James Solomon.

Still, he was young and in his early twenties, and the pressure of creating an album became a lot, too much too soon. Though Rejjie released tracks here and there – 2015’s silky smooth tune “All Around The World” is one particular stand-out – it was signing a deal with the American label 300 Entertainment (Young Thug, Fetty Wap, etc) that made him get into the studio and finish his debut album. It was a release he spoke into existence many years ago on Twitter, frequently telling fans Dear Annie was on the way, but which ended up being preceded by one-off singles and 2017 mixtape The Moon & You instead. It was kind of like how his label mate Young Thug is yet to release HiTunes.

“I made music but didn’t know the right time to release it,” Rejjie says of the time it took for Dear Annie to materialise. Looking from the outside in though – and having interviewed Rejjie several times over the course of his career, as well as hanging out casually – I get the sense that releasing a debut record loomed too large, that it wasn’t something Rejjie was ready for, that he still needed to figure himself out and see where he fell in the world. “I’m over all that now though,” he says, when I put this to him. And overcoming fear wasn’t the only roadblock to the record’s release either. In the last two years Rejjie lost three close friends. “It was really close to home and there was a lot of confusion. That shit fucked me up a little bit and for a while I didn’t want to make music or jet away to do shows. I needed to find the time within myself. But that’s hard…. Because if I’m not doing shows I’m not making money, and it was frustrating to think about making an album during that time.”

Speaking today however – and with Dear Annie living and breathing – it’s clear Rejjie is on the other side. Or at the least he’s smiling. “Going through that process [of loss], you learn a lot of shit doesn’t matter. I learned what’s important in life: family, love, friends. Those are the things I really hold onto now.” For a moment we pause, talking about some other things, of how reading the book Widow Basquiat – an exploration of the self-destructive artist as seen through the eyes of his muse, Suzanne – helped him go through things. Then he continues: “I really love life now, and people. I’m a lot more understanding for people’s feelings now. Before that I used to push people off and not want to know them and be super negative. It was always an image thing, a masculinity thing, and now I feel like I’m over that shit – I’m unapologetically myself.”

Part of Rejjie’s journey of self-discovery also involves learning more about and accepting his heritage. Years ago, outside of rap, Rejjie went by the name Alex Butler; now he goes by his birth name of Alex Anyaegbunam. His mother is Irish, his father is Nigerian, part of the Igbo tribe, and his grandfather is a Nigerian judge who worked in one way or another to free Fela Kuti from jail. These roots are something Rejjie wants to explore more in the future, already talking about a second record he’s naming Uncle Thomas, which he says “will deal with being a black man in a white man’s world.”

“I’m really interested in learning more about where my dad is from. I always brushed it off because I thought I was Irish and that was it, I didn’t want to be anything else. But talking to him… I really want to go back there now as a 24-year-old and experience all that culture. I think it will lend itself into my music a lot.”

Last week, Rejjie Snow played the Roundhouse. The north London venue is large – I’ve seen everyone from Rick Ross to Taking Back Sunday play here – so it’s a good representation of how far he has come. Three years earlier he was playing in the Old Blue Last, a small pub in east London; now he’s heading up a bill that includes Ebeneezer, Slowthai and Wiki, and performing to around 5,000 people. Most of them are a similar age to Rejjie, if not younger, the kind of kids you imagine to spend time on Wavey Garms. In fact, some of the crowd are so young, two of them ask me to buy them alcohol. Clearly, like Lil Yachty, Rejjie Snow is another king of the teens, a prince of the fashion-obsessed Snapchat era.

From the drunken notes that sit on my iPhone, the Roundhouse performance went something like this – “It’s almost like Dipset but with love instead of cocaine. Vibes instead of rolling dice.”; “[his DJ] Skinny [Macho, the man behind record label Bone Soda] is wearing a fur hat and orange coat”; “Party people let's do this shit let's go”; “Bucket hat glasses blue lights pimp bounce”. Essentially what I can decipher from this with a sober mind is: Rejjie Snow puts on a gig with positive vibes, quirky yet cool dress sense, which sounds and looks like a classic rap show through and through. Considering he’s only just released his debut album and is already playing such a large venue, there’s a sense the next record from Rejjie could propel him toward somewhere special. That said, that’s also not something to think about right now. Music will come, when it feels right, when Rejjie is ready.

As it stands, the best part of this journey and Dear Annie is that it sounds like Rejjie Snow has found himself. In his earlier years he could be found rapping in an American accent but now the Irish inflections in his voice come through. Though the record is informed by a selection of source material – soul, Bootsy Collins, Ramp, all coming together to create something “that would be on the radio in the 70s” – it’s the first record that also feels unequivocally and fearlessly Rejjie Snow. Off record, he’s chilled out now. He meditates, takes yoga classes, believes in love. He wants to move back to Dublin at some point, he says. Ultimately, the weight of a debut record off his back, he’s entering a new chapter: “I never set out to do this. It was all luck. It’s all for a reason too.” Guinness or fruit-based smoothie in hand, that’s something to drink to.

You can find Ryan on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Noisey UK.

There was a time when Saturday mornings meant catching up on cartoons or new episodes of Soul Train. Migos put their spin on the iconic music television show this weekend by transforming it into "Culture Ride" for the new visual for "Walk It Talk It." With Jamie Foxx as Ron Delirious, ruffled blouses, and the infamous Soul Train Scramble board, the spirit of former host Don Cornelius was in full effect throughout the grainy footage. Quavo, Offset, and Takeoff trade their usual flex—dripping in ice—for afros and synchronized mic play, and the Northside trio does it mighty well. But it's their collaborator Drake who comes in rare form as he makes his entrance down the Soul Train line, dusting off dance moves he'd taken a break from since "Hotline Bling."

Drake's dancing usually is enough to spawn a shitload of memes, but it's not likely that his routine in "Walk It Talk It" will—simply because he hit the steps in an uninspired way. Though corny, the choreography in "Hotline Bling" showed us Drake in a way we hadn't seen before, but this video gave me a serious case of déjà vu. For those of us blessed enough to know Drake back when he was Jimmy Brooks on the Canadian show Degrassi: The Next Generation over 15 years ago, you definitely have seen those moves before. The Michael Jackson kick and the wig are enough to launch me into my pre-teen days of watching him when he was just Aubrey Graham. He blends just about every dance move he's ever tried publicly into a nostalgia-trip greatest hits on "Culture Ride's" stage.

Drake knew he didn't fully commit the moment that kick went midair, so he used a hair flip to distract us. Also may be unfair to assess, but his 15-year-old kick on Degrassi was much more fluid than 31-year-old Drake.

Sir, what exactly do we call this move? This has "Hotline Bling" written all over it.

But then again, look at that wig, which deserves its own moment. It's clear he isn't taking any of this too seriously, which is what all the best Drake moments are made of anyway. At least he didn't rip his pants again.

Kristin Corry is a staff writer for Noisey. Follow her on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Noisey US.

Drake is a master of knowing how to meme himself. He's so naturally talented at it that even "God's Plan," a video meant to be a genuine display of generosity, ended up as a meme that signifies over-the-top kindness. So it goes that the recent, Soul Train-styled video for Migos' "Walk It Talk It" is the latest opportunity for Drake to consciously make himself look like a dork, wearing a long, vaguely Jheri-curled wig that bizarrely makes him resemble "Weird Al" Yankovic or Chris Cornell instead of Rick James as was likely intended.

A few days earlier, though, Aubrey also hopped onto N.E.R.D. and Rihanna's "Lemon," a song which was already both fire and trash at the same time thanks to a no-nonsense, funky Pharrell beat but a baffling, exaggeratedly nonsensical Pharrell performance. Drake's new, equally stilted opening verse further enhances that quality, somehow unique to Pharrell-helmed songs of the late decade.

Both of these pieces of Drake content are very entertaining, but one is definitely much funnier than the other. Let's take a look:

"Walk It Talk It"

This video is so fucking great. Unscrambling the board to reveal "Dat Way" is iconic. It is every meme you could make about a Migos song, but it's officially by the Migos themselves. Drake's turn as a 70s loverman rules because very few rappers get as earnestly into their performances as he does, which has reflected in his "I'm going in" facial expressions throughout the years.

"Fuckin' Problems" (2012)

A Travis Scott Concert (2017)

"Walk It Talk It" (2018)

Obviously, the wig improves these faces, so what was already pretty amusing goes up to "hilarious," especially when you factor in his awkward shimmies.

"Lemon" Remix

So, firstly, Drake chooses to imitate Rihanna's curt, staccato original flow, which is already snicker-worthy because he doesn't sound nearly as tough as she does. He talks about 3D-printing money and "having opinions" (yeah dude, opinions are rock star) and his pass-off of "you know what P about to say" deflates because Pharrell's hook is just him saying "bath salts" over and over again. But in between this uneventful beginning and ending there is a magical moment at exactly 31 seconds in. I'm going to link to the timestamped portion below because it's just that good.

"So you SEEEEEE."

So. You. See.

Those three words are a self-contained three-act play of intentional hilarity. Even the brief rest before that line starts is brilliant, creating expectations only to have them dashed. Drake leans into the line with drama it absolutely doesn't deserve, and it is sick as hell. "So you SEEEEEE" is what you actually sound like when you try to rap "off the dome" to impress your friends at a party. It's miles funnier than the wig, and it's relatable, too, which is the mark of true comedy. Perhaps Drake is our foremost generational voice; not through his music, but his gags.

Phil is on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Noisey CA.

When Donald Trump addressed the United Nations last year, he mockingly threatened to exterminate a country and it sucked, like everything else he does. In what will likely be the polar opposite of that event, Pitbull is speaking at the UN on March 22 as part of World Water Day and will address the need for clean water worldwide, an issue you'd think we as humans would have figured out by now, but apparently not. Seeing as the bar for a good UN speech has been lowered so thoroughly, Mr. 305 should have no problem making the General Assembly feel much more at ease, as though they've just listened to fist-pump classic "Give Me Everything."

Pitbull is the current Global Ambassador for Clean Water Here, a UN-affiliated initiative that seeks to "improve the world’s access to sustainable safe drinking water by raising awareness, supporting research & solutions, and advocating for underserved communities both in the US and abroad," according to their site. He's among many celebrities, including P!nk and Bruno Mars, who have thrown their support behind the organization. While the cynics among you may think, "oh great, here's another pop star adopting a cause to look good," Pitbull's activism is the real deal and he's been doing it for years. He opened a charter school in his beloved hometown of Miami, lent his private jet to transport cancer patients out of hurricane-wrecked Puerto Rico, and perhaps attempted to reason with Betsy DeVos to not make American children stupider. Also, how dare you suggest that he's not aware of environmentalist causes, as the proof of his rap game Al Gore status is below:

He was trying to warn us this whole time but we didn't listen.

Maybe the solution was in front of our eyes this whole time. Perhaps one man, armed with nothing but irrepressible charisma and a hearty "¡Dale!" can save the world. In any case, you can read more about Pitbull's upcoming address here.

Phil is on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Noisey CA.

SXSW 2018 felt different. Gone were the huge brand activations (nobody performed on top of a giant Snickers bar), so much of the week felt like it was collectively and genuinely focused on the music (and the tacos and margs, ehhh?). Even though walking down 6th Street was nearly impossible anytime after 8 PM, much of the week felt smaller and more intimate than recent years. Will it stay that way? No, probably not (capitalism is a cruel mistress, etc.), but we had a good time anyway. Here’s the best and worst shit Noisey saw at SXSW 2018.

Not Many Musicians Much More Famous Than Rae Sremmurd
A trend set by SXSW over the last five years is that you don’t really know what is going to happen, who is going to show up, or what shows are going to get announced at the last minute (*whispers* I heard Drake is playing on top of a human pyramid sponsored by Soylent featuring Kanye, Jay Z, and Lil Pump, and then Lana is doing a secret set inside of a Doritos bag), but this year, there was none of that shit. And honestly? That was great. The most famous rappers hanging around were Swae Lee and Slim Jimmy, and considering those two dudes kick ass, it was the best of both worlds. Even though there’s nothing quite like a 13-minute Drake set, the lack of focus on the stars allowed us to enjoy artists that actually felt emerging in a genuine way. —Eric Sundermann

Andrew W.K.’s Extreme and Genuine Love of Music
Party-positive possessor of eternal youth Andrew WK played a handful of sets around Austin last week. Having only seen one of them—at 2 PM, outdoors on an overcast Saturday—I believe that he could have played from Monday until Sunday without pausing. The band would have sustained the party, and the party would have sustained the band, and no energy would have been lost. The 38-year-old opened his set with "Music Is Worth Living For," in which he pumped his right fist between each four-note piano riff. He spent a lot of time replacing microphones, all of which were too weak to cope with constantly being stuffed down the his pants. He closed his set by counting down from 80, slowing down towards the end for dramatic effect—it was funny at first but compelling by the time he got to 30. That led into "Party Hard," of course, which rules. Andrew WK still sincerely believes that partying will save lives and then save the world. I now absolutely believe that to be true. —Alex Robert Ross

Andrew W.K. Photo by Lorne Thomson/Redferns/Getty

Smino’s Beautiful Voice
Smino performed at our showcase, so we’re going to gas ourselves up a little bit and say that we made a really good choice here, but also who cares because Smino fucking killed it. After coming off a tour with SZA, it’s clear that the St. Louis rapper has learned how to navigate the stage and has figured out his sound—a blend of R&B, hip-hop, and good hair—works in 2018. I’m really looking forward to seeing what his next project is like. —ES

Xylouris White Blowing Our Minds with a Lute
I didn’t expect my favorite SXSW set to come from two 50-something guys on drums and a Cretan lute. Then again, those two guys are Jim White, former drummer of Dirty Three with Warren Ellis and Mick Turner, and Greek avant-garde singer and musician Giorgos Xylouris; their new album, Mother, was produced by Fugazi’s Guy Picciotto. What erupted over the next 40 minutes or so at their Sunday night Bella Union set was tremendous, their eyes locked on each other as they culled from rock, Greek folk, psychedelic, jazz, and even techno for a freewheeling sound greater than the sum of its parts. I didn’t know either instrument could sound like that. It’s what live music is all about, baby. —Andrea Domanick

Valee Sitting on a Counter in a Mansion in Middle Austin Next to a Giant Pile of Dominos Pizza Boxes Before Doing “Shell” at 3 AM
Valee was one of the buzziest rappers at SXSW this year, playing something like 78 showcases in about a three-hour period, but each time the G.O.O.D. Music took the stage he brought a very cool and refreshing energy. My favorite was the performance he did in slippers (yes, slippers) in at a random mansion party where kids were sneaking in by jumping the fence in back, climbing the deck, and stealing wine from the cellar. —ES

Valee. Photo by Steve Rogers Photography/Getty Images

My Uber Driver Teaching Me About a Genre of Music He Created Called “Spicy Rock”
Ricardo was my second Uber driver, the one who picked me up after I went to the wrong hotel from the airport on Tuesday night. "You are actually very lucky," he said as I hauled my suitcase into the back of his SUV and tried to smile politely through the jet lag. "This is the best Uber in Austin."

I want to tell you that Ricardo was lying. He was not. He didn't spend long on small talk before he moved in for the kill. "Do you like rock music?" he asked first. (Sure I do). "Do you like The Beatles?" (I'm aware of their work). "Do you like The Red Hot Chili Peppers?" (Yes, I have a soul). He pressed a button on his center console and told me that, if I liked all of that, I would love this. "I am in a band too," he said. A video screen folded down from above, and I could still see Ricardo's goateed smile in the rearview mirror when the video started to play. It opened with some text:

"In a planet far, far away... there was a band delivering Spicy Music and Hot Sauce… Their first mission was… Make America Hot Again!"

There's not enough space for me to tell you about Makenka's video for "Cuerpo de Guitarra," but there is enough space for me to share the video itself, taken directly from www.MakeAmericaHot.com. I can tell you that Ricardo calls their brand of music "Spicy Rock." I can tell you that Makenka has their own line of hot sauce. And I can tell you that, while I stared at a bottle of the stuff in the backseat of his Honda, he told me something that I'd never considered before: "America was already great. We just want to make it spicy." —ARR

Ought and Goat Girl Making Post-Punk Cool Again
Post-punk’s gotten kind of screwed over since its early 00s revival, quickly devolving into a wave of too-on-the-nose Joy Division knockoffs that matched the genre in style rather than substance. Montreal’s Ought and South London’s Goat Girl are giving post-punk its teeth back, stripped of campy synths and pretension, and armed instead with the politicized vigor and knuckle-cracking ingenuity that made the genre so powerful to begin with. —AD

Goat Girl. Photo via Getty Images.

Standing in a Circle and Drinking Beers
People will tell you that SXSW is about the music, about connecting, about linking, about building, but really, SXSW is about standing in a circle drinking with your friends and drinking beers.

Starcrawler Spitting Blood and Humping Trees
Starcrawler caught my ears a couple times while en route to other shows, and I regret not staying longer. They’re all manic yelps and big-ass, unapologetic riffs; they have a song called “Pussy Tower”; and frontperson Arrow De Wilde, clad in a corset, moves like she’s drunk off of bat blood and Cherie Currie’s spit. Any given moment might see her doing back bends, rolling on the stage, grinding on a tree, and smearing fake blood on her face, before spitting it onto the crowd to alternating disgust and delight. In less capable hands, it would be corny, but Starcrawler just makes it a hell of a lot of fun—less an ode to forebears like Ozzy, than a revitalization that puts some lifeblood back into long-anemic guitar music. —AD

Starcrawler. Photo via Getty Images

Missing Soccer Mommy Like a Bunch of Chumps
Soccer Mommy’s Clean is collectively one of Noisey’s favorite releases of the year so far, yet somehow none of us made it by one of her showcases in Austin. We’re sorry. Seriously. No other way to say it: we’re fucking losers for this one. —ES

Rolling Stone ’s David Fricke Still Doing the Damn Thing
Shout out to legendary senior writer David Fricke hanging out at a bar on 6th Street, waiting to catch Ezra Furman’s set at 2AM on the final night of SXSW. To anyone in the industry who’s ever complained about being tired by having to go to shows all week long, this 65-year-old legend just shut you up.

Knox Fortune’s Smile
I mean, look at that guy.

Lucy Dacus’s Incredibly Beautiful Guitar ( This One ) Sounding Incredibly Beautiful
Historian is a record that’s great for introspection and Thinking About Your Life™, but it’s also the perfect kind of music for a late afternoon outdoor set in Texas after you’ve been drinking for a few hours (coincidentally also the perfect time to do some introspection). Lucy Dacus’s music can feel like a bit of a slow burn, but the layered, aching guitars sound like they’re a lost recording session from every influential guitarist from the 90s. It’s great. —ES

Lucy Dacus. Photo by Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images.

Smokepurpp and Blocboy JB Just Kind of Hanging Around Everywhere
Not really sure what to write here. Artists, they’re just like us!

Mozzy Generally Kicking Ass
Remember when Kendrick Lamar won a Grammy earlier this year, and the first thing he did was shout out Mozzy? The rapper is carrying that momentum, as he’s just released another EP called Spiritual Conversations, and performed across Austin with about 30 guys on stage each time. Anytime a set causes you to turn to your friend next to you and spend the next 30 minutes talking about how rap music is the best genre of music, you know that shit is good. —ES

Photo by Ryan Muir, Courtesy of The Fader

St Patrick's Day in Texas, Where Apparently Everyone Is Irish
It's a ridiculous spectacle anyway. If you want to get drunk at breakfast and act like an asshole, you don't need to wear green and make shit up about the Old Country. This year, as always, I learned things I didn't want to know. Here's one that I discovered before going to watch Lucy Dacus at Cheer Up Charlie's: Notre Dame's motto is "God, Country, Notre Dame." I didn't want to know that! The impossible crowds on 6th Street were doubled up by fuckers in plastic beads all day, and it made me yearn for SantaCon. —ARR

A Famous Rapper Not Washing His Hands in the Men’s Room

Vundabar’s Brandon Hagen Playing a Vape
Vundabar’s new album Smell Smoke tackles the dystopian inversion of the American dream, but onstage they’re the class clowns—shaking their butts, pantomiming, and generally whipping the crowd into recklessness. During one set, singer/guitarist Brandon Hagen, spying smoke clouds in the crowd, grabbed a fan’s vape and proceeded to stunt with it in time with his guitar solo. Vape naysh! —AD

Rico Nasty’s Hair
Here for the return of liberty spikes. —AD

Photo by Johnny Nunez/WireImage/Getty

Kicking Ourselves for Somehow Not Catching Either of JPEGMafia's Sets
I'm still trying to get my head around Barrington Devaughn Hendricks, the New York-raised rapper who moved to Alabama, enlisted in the army (where he served in Kuwait, Iraq, Germany, and Japan), then wound up in Baltimore where he makes contrarian, punkish, internet-addled hip-hop. I bet he has an incredible live show. I bet everyone got tired of me saying we should go see one of his shows. I regret sitting in my hotel room, exhausted, watching SportsCenter instead of going to watch his show on Thursday. I should be fired immediately. —ARR

The Vicious Joy of Shame and IDLES
There’s a lot to be pissed off about right now. But being pissed off doesn’t mean being an asshole, as South London’s Shame and Bristol’s IDLES would like to remind you. Both bands play like they’re daring you to punch them in the face, because, well, that’s a lot of what being alive right now feels like. But they’re also wise enough to understand that we’re in it together; get caught shoving or fighting, as one guy did during Shame’s set at Noisey's showcase, and they’ll stop the show to kick you out. “You say it's going forwards / But I feel it flowing backwards / In a time of such injustice / How can you not want to be heard?” Shame’s Charlie Steen shouts on “Friction.” This is all-inclusive ire: visceral, joyous, and honest—lightning rods for collective rage, forged from love. —AD

IDLES. Photo by Chris Saucedo via Getty Images.

Water
Almost nobody at SXSW is actually from Texas or anywhere really nearby, so all the local wisdom you hear is third-hand at best. My favorite one is: "It's dry here, so you should drink water." True! But also, shut up. You just put back six Lone Stars and a whiskey soda before inhaling four carnitas tacos, and it's 7 PM on a Wednesday—water isn't an auto-detox, nor is it the salad you so desperately need. Water is good, and you ought to drink it where possible; it tastes fucking amazing when you haven't so much as considered its existence for two days; it makes up a lot of the human body, and the human body is worth maintaining in some sense. But also, again: shut up. Eat some lettuce or something. Get some sleep. —ARR

Noisey is tired but not as tired as they expected they'd be. Follow Noisey on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Noisey US.

Cardi B has remained relatively quiet since her Grammy noms and performance with Bruno Mars earlier this year, but after revealing that her debut album will be arriving in April it looks like Cardi season will be in full effect again. Today, she appeared on the cover of Cosmopolitan, and in an interview she spoke on how she's been able to remain sane under fame's lens and why it's important that all women are treated with the same amount of respect.

In the interview, Cardi didn't shy away from her past as a stripper and she never has. For her, respect is respect regardless of your occupation. "...Y'all don't respect me because of it, and y'all going to respect these strippers from now on," she says.

Elsewhere, she explains that in the midst of the #MeToo movement, the conversation around sexual misconduct has almost exclusively favored affluent women—and that she believes the same respect should be afforded to all women. The Bronx rapper also expressed some skepticism about the men who are vocal in the movement.“These producers and directors, they’re not woke," she says. "They’re scared."

A lot of video vixens have spoke about this and nobody gives a fuck. When I was trying to be a vixen, people were like, ‘You want to be on the cover of this magazine?’ Then they pull their dicks out. I bet if one of these women stands up and talks about it, people are going to say, ‘So what? You’re a ho. It don’t matter.’

She also revealed her choice to continue her engagement to Offset, following rumors of infidelity.

It’s like everybody is coming down my neck, like, ‘Why are you not leaving him? You have low self-esteem.’ I don’t have low self-esteem. Bitch, I know I look good. I know I’m rich, I know I’m talented. I know I could get any man I want—any basketball player, football player. But I want to work out my shit with my man, and I don’t got to explain why. I’m not your property. This is my life.

Life has changed and Cardi is anything but the regular degular girl she once branded herself as. Her position in fame's crosshairs means life isn't the same for her anymore, and that is taking some getting used to.

I don’t want to sound like I’m ungrateful, but it’s exhausting. I love my career now, but it’s like my spirit was happier before. When I was dancing, I had so much fun. I felt powerful in the club. I felt free.

Cardi doesn't seem to be at a loss for words and with a debut album on the horizon, it seems like she has a lot of ammo to let loose in the booth. Read the full interview at Cosmopolitan.

Kristin Corry is a staff writer at Noisey. Follow her on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Noisey US.

Run The Jewels often say things like “punches is thrown until you’re frontless” or “I put the pistol on that poodle and I shot that bitch” but when it comes to the crowds at their live shows, the duo take a strict pacifist approach. In a new video produced for the Your Choice initiative, El-P and Killer Mike explain their two rules for the crowds at their live shows.

The rules are:

1) The audience is part of the Run The Jewels community. That means if you’re jumping around, losing your mind, throwing your scrawny bodies up against each other, make sure you look around and make sure that you see if anybody’s feeling like they’re in some trouble, move them to safety, especially in the mosh pit.

2) Keep your hands to yourself. No fights in the crowd and don’t touch women in inappropriate ways.

What happens if you don’t abide by these rules? Well, Killer Mike will punch you in the face! And while I’m sure there are some Run The Jewels fans who would literally pay to have Killer Mike punch them in the face, hopefully these rules will be followed to the letter. In all, the guidelines are pretty simple, right? Wild how it’s just so goddamn easy to not be a dick in a crowd, but somehow artists still have to issue rules to their fans!

Your Choice is an initiative designed to create safer spaces at live music events. The campaign is spearheaded by Secret Sounds, who found themselves in hot water recently after arguing that their festival lineups were more gender-diverse than people were making them out to be. Many venues, festivals, promoters and musicians have signed on to support Your Choice’s cause, including POND's Nick Allbrook, The Avalanches, Dark Mofo, Groovin The Moo, Future Classic, and a swag more. View the full list at Your Choice’s website.

Follow Noisey on Twitter.

It's Delta Week on Noisey Australia! To celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of her seminal debut Innocent Eyes, we'll be running Delta Goodrem-related writing every day.

It’s Delta Goodrem Week here at Noisey Australia, and we’ve been doing some research into the iconic Australian pop star’s back catalogue. This has unearthed some fascinating discoveries, including the fact that 1 in 20 Australians owns a copy of Delta’s debut album Innocent Eyes. That's a ludicrous amount of people!

According to the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA, the body that puts on the ARIA Awards) Delta’s debut, released when she was just 18, is currently 14 times Platinum. That means that 1.2 million copies of the record have been sold in Australia. Given the current population of Australia is somewhere around 24 million people, we can safely assume around 1 in 20 Australians owns a copy of Innocent Eyes!

The only albums that have outsold Delta’s record are Come On Over by Shania Twain (1.26 million copies, 1 in 19 Australians), John Farnham’s Whispering Jack (1.68 million copies, 1 in 14 Australians) and Meat Loaf’s Bat Out Of Hell (1.75 million copies, 1 in 13 Australians).

Look around you: in all likelihood, someone within your vicinity owns a copy of Innocent Eyes. Or, even more likely, a copy of Meat Loaf’s Bat Out Of Hell! Maybe it’s your boss, maybe it’s your teacher, maybe it’s your partner. Hell, maybe it’s you! Delta’s touched the lives of five percent of all Australians. And we’re better off for it.

Follow Shaad on Twitter.

Let us go back, for a moment, to London in 2007. Kate Moss had just launched her first Topshop collection, meaning that everyone and their nan was wearing low rise jeans and those scrawny neck scarfs. School kids were blasting tinny versions of JME’s “Serious” off Motorola flip phones on buses. Amy Winehouse could still be found pouring herself pints at The Hawley Arms pub in Camden. Ballet pumps were a thing, as was smoking inside pubs and venues up until July. And then there was Kate Nash, swirling among all of this with her debut album Made Of Bricks – a modern day pop classic that gave us “Foundations”, “Pumpkin Soup” and “Birds”, all delivered in a voice that sounded like your mate leaving an overly long answering message on the house phone alongside some piano plonks. It was sick.

Fast forward to now, though, and everything’s changed, including the place Kate Nash occupies in music. Just before releasing her third album, the riot grrl-influenced Girl Talk in 2013, Nash was unceremoniously dropped by Universal Music over text. While that could have been enough to break some artists, she stuck a middle finger up and continued, finding herself a supportive all-women band to tour with and releasing her music via Kickstarter. Since then, she’s joined the cast of acclaimed women wrestling series GLOW on Netflix and been repeatedly vocal about toxicity in the industry. And five years after her last, she’s releasing album Yesterday Was Forever, a 14-track collection of energetic indie pop tracks that sit between the fizzing, sunny sound of LA (where she sometimes lives) to the raucous, DIY style of previous records.

But I want to take it all back to the spirit of the early days, before GLOW and LA and Kickstarter. I want to take it back to London, pre-Instagram stories documenting nights out, to before most of the Overground was built and to when the East End was an affordable place to live and hang out. So I asked Kate Nash on a first date to Efes Pool Club in Dalston – which has been a staple here longer than we’ve both been alive – for old time’s sake. And that’s how I found myself, midday on a Monday, screaming “WHAT THE FUCK!” at the person who soundtracked my teen years as she potted yet another yellow ball and sprawled across the pool table to celebrate. Somewhere in between all of this, we had a chat.

Noisey: So what’s the best and worst date you’ve ever been on?
Kate Nash: The worst date I’ve been on was in LA with this guy I didn’t want to be on a date with – he was just trying to take me to all these places and impress me but it was so cheesy. And then the best date I’ve been on was with my boyfriend now. He was a friend of mine for over a decade and then we just met up for coffee this summer and it literally turned into a rom com.

Amazing. Are you into astrology? What’s your star sign?
Yes, I’m a Cancer! I’m very emotional and all about my home. It’s so fascinating to me… When I got my birth chart done I was told I could only communicate my emotions through song. I’ve never had a hard time believing in stuff like that, because we’re a fucking planet hanging in space. It might sound ridiculous, but so is everything. Like a ‘Saturn return’ is so real to me as well; when all the planets go back to where they were when you were born.

You’re 30, right? So you must have just been through your Saturn return recently… [Reader, if you don’t know, ‘Saturn return’ is seen as a time in which you’re faced with intense challenges and responsibilities before reaching full adulthood].
I did and it was hardcore. When I got my chart read, the guy was like, “Saturn is not fucking about, you’re going to be brought back to your roots and it will be really literal.” And I went to the set of GLOW that day and they said: “we’re going to dye your hair red” and I was like... they’re literally taking me back to my roots. It could not be more literal than that.

But what followed was a really important transformation. Everything I’ve been through in the last few years in relation to the music industry has been a personal struggle, so I felt like I needed to embrace and accept myself fully. And then there was the fact I was going on my Made of Bricks anniversary tour…

Revisiting that must have been such a strange experience. How was it playing those songs ten years later?
It was so magical and joyous. And those songs got to live in a way they didn’t before because I’m a happier and more confident performer now. I’m more comfortable in myself, which happens as you get older.

I could also enjoy that album in a way I hadn’t before. I didn’t realise it back then, but I wasn’t in a good relationship; I wasn’t being treated well by the industry; I was being attacked by the media and overworked. I didn’t have people representing me that cared about me. You just accept stuff until you see that there’s another way. These days, my band is so amazing and I’ve honed performance as a skill and I just fucking love it. And I’ve changed a lot. I was 16 when I wrote some of those songs. Being a teenage girl and going through that is really hard, but now I’m a woman, and I feel like being an advocate for teenage girls.

It’s crazy that you were so young when you wrote Made of Bricks because there’s a lot of wisdom buried in that record.
I wasn’t really aware of that at the time because I was writing and trying to connect to my emotions and situations. It’s funny, because you’re speaking about things you don’t really know about yet.

Totally. I also feel like you’ve had a fiercely loyal fan base over the years. Are there people at your shows that you recognise from the very beginning?
Yeah! But also, what I find amazing is that I still have teenagers on the front row. There are 16-year-olds that tell me that they heard Made of Bricks when they were six, which is so fucking weird and cool. I love that little kids can be into my music because I was trying to write stories. There was a lot of imagination in that first record.

I feel like since then all your albums have deviated from each other in terms of style. What does Yesterday Was Forever sound like to you?
This one feels like all three of them. It’s poppy, it’s got piano and guitar and the punky energy of the live show with the constructed element of the studio and I just found some great people to work with who could translate exactly what I’m about.

I’m surprised this pool club doesn’t do karaoke too. What’s your go-to karaoke song?
Eminem “Real Slim Shady” followed by Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart”.

Classic choices. If you were to invite three people to dinner – dead or alive – who would they be?
I’m actually studying Mycology at the moment – the study of mushrooms – so I would really like to have this guy called Paul Stamits there, because he’s a mycologist and a total science nerd. And then I would have Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda because they’re fucking amazing.

What food would you make everyone to eat?
Probably like a vegan feast. Lots of roast vegetables, rice, tahini and Tabasco…

Yum! If a crystal ball could tell you anything about your future, what would you ask it?
Even though I’m super into tarot and astrology, I don’t believe in knowing too much about the future. I do have so many questions about space and robots, though. Maybe I’d ask it how different technology is going to be in the next five to ten years.

That’s a really good question. I feel like if technology accelerates at the same pace it has done in the past decade, the future is going to look insane. Do you feel positive about it?
I’m right in the middle of ‘it’s pure evil’ and ‘it’s everything we need and it will save the world.’ It’s weirdly both. I think it’s great for my career, I think it’s important for spreading awareness and helping people feel less lonely and there are incredible things I’ve read recently about VR and pain and burns victims being put in cold environments to help relieve their pain. But I also get paranoid about my phone listening to me; there’s something so addictive and stress-inducing about it, which I don’t trust.

Yeah, sometimes I feel like our phones are alive, like they’re this presence – and that can be really intrusive.
Totally! Interestingly enough, there’s a lot out there about fungi and their networks – it’s called mycelium – and the way it works is really similar to the network of the Internet. Their make up is totally alien and weird, and under the microscope you can see it. But yeah, the internet feels like an observer, which is a strange energy to have around.

You’ve got a song on your new album called “My Little Alien.” Do you believe in aliens?
Definitely. We’ve been told this is an ever-expanding universe, so how could I not? The idea of being completely alone is so much scarier to me. But it’s hard to grasp it all… I can’t even begin to grasp concepts like the multiverse.

I completely agree. Now let’s bring it back to earth. Did you used to go out around here, in Dalston, back in the day?
Yeah I used to go to a lot of bars and clubs on this road. It’s changed a lot here, though. There are areas that have developed and feel more gentrified, but there’s also a lot of amazing vegan food options here. And the ‘cool’ areas have become ‘uncool’, but that’s natural of any area.

Have you ever been much of a partier?
Sort of. I love throwing parties and being sociable and dancing. But I also have this other homebody side and can become quite isolated and anxious. So if I haven’t gone out in ages then it’s hard to go out. But mainly I just love being with my friends and being surrounded by people I like. I’m not interested in going to ‘cool’ nights, though. I’d rather sit in Wetherspoons or a place like this with a bunch of mates. And I don’t drink anymore.

Oh, really?
Yeah, I stopped almost two years ago because of training for GLOW. I don’t have feelings on it being permanent – it’s just something I’m doing and I feel really healthy. I took the athleticism of GLOW really seriously, and then I tried Christmas sober, and then I did the tour and then I just felt really in tune with something different. I feel like I’m on this journey of mental health and physical health, and trying to face my issues in a different way and it’s been really helpful with that. In England there’s such a culture of getting fucked all the time, and I thought I’d miss it, but I found it easy. I’ve been around a lot of addicts in the music industry because it’s really encouraged to be fucked and for that to be a cool thing, but it’s not – it’s dangerous and can be bad for your mental health.

Absolutely. What advice would you give to young women coming into the music industry?
I’d say trust yourself and stick up for yourself. You have to learn how to use your voice because you’re an advocate for yourself and a lot of people won’t be. Don’t rush into a record deal, and get a good manager before you sign anything – the danger in signing too soon is that you might get trapped. As a young woman, remember you’re cooler than those people anyway, you’re the hot new thing, so realise that you have power and can build your own culture. Also just never give up on yourself because you’ll be challenged and have highs and lows, and know that at your lowest point you’ve got the strength to continue.

For me, my hardest moments have been really doubting myself, but then it’s been amazing knowing that I can come through and survive those moments. I’ve personally found it worth it, the feeling of being on stage and communicating with strangers in that way, it’s all worth it. But yeah: put yourself first and have boundaries, because people can be fuckfaces.

Hell yes! Thanks for hanging out.

You can find Daisy on Twitter and Chloe on Instagram.

'Yesterday Was Forever' comes out 30 March via Kate’s Kickstarter campaign.

This article originally appeared on Noisey UK.

Remember When is a Noisey column where we remember silly music things that once happened and laugh about them. It's pretty simple really.

In the pie chart of my brain, some ideas, concepts, and events take up unreasonably large chunks of space. Who or what is actually inside the Mr Blobby suit (Chris Evans? A genuinely malevolent poltergeist?) easily gets its own ten percent. The fact that "Sledgehammer" by Fifth Harmony remains as underrated as it is? Seven percent. Dog memes and Quorn vegan nuggets? Easily five percent each, if not more to be honest. But there's one thing that would probably get the largest pie slice of all, if I had to really consider it: the time Robbie Williams sanitised his hands on stage after touching the audience. For the uninitiated, welcome:

Robbie Williams, of course, is a British national institution. Imagining the UK without his influence feels almost impossible: there would be no "Rock DJ," no shit jokes about Gary Barlow being crap (a national pastime). And honestly, the above video kind of proves why he's so legendary: performing on literal television on New Year's Eve 2016, Robbie Williams went into the crowd, touching the shitmunchers who had come to watch him play, before getting back on stage and rubbing his hands with a bottle of sanitiser in full view of both camera and audience, doing this face:

Perhaps one of the greatest elements to this lies in the fact that, once this moment became A News Item, Robbie then had to address it. “It was only a bit of panto and then people go, ‘Oh, he fucking hates the general public’," he told NME last February. "I didn’t realise until the next day that it was a thing."

The real hilarity lies in the very idea of Robbie Williams, the man who released a Rat Pack-era covers album entitled Swing When You're Winning, pulling a move more appropriate for a Mariah-like figure. The grandeur on display here is utterly ridiculous, but isn't that the essence of Robbie? This, of course, is the man who tore off his own CGI skin in a music video: he is the master of going over the top but in a kind of distasteful way, that resonates with everyone who has ever fell on their arse dancing to "Toxic" in a pub (NOT me) (me). This moment is 100 percent pure Robbie – and even if you disagree with my analysis, it is also just extremely funny isn't it?

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This article originally appeared on Noisey UK.

Even if you're not familiar with Mazzy Star, it's quite possible that you'll know their biggest song "Fade Into You." It's a dreamy watercolour of a track that encompasses both what's so amazing about the band (their ability to create an entire landscape out of simple suggestion, basically), and how they'd come to have such a massive influence on the future of indie-rock and pop – their light touch can be felt on artists from Beach House to Lana Del Rey. On the song. Hope Sandoval's vocals float over the azure swimming pool conjured by the guitars, and the group's distinct propensity for setting a mood, exemplified here –and visible throughout their entire catalogue – means that since I got into them a while back, I've always hoped I'd be able to see it (feel it) exemplified before me within four walls.

It's now been announced that the lucky people of Sydney will get that opportunity. Mazzy Star will play their first live show since 2013 at the city's three week-long Vivid festival, which will also see shows from Ice Cube, St. Vincent, Cat Power (who'll celebrate the 20th anniversary of her album Moon Pix with a special show), and loads more. It's a stacked bill, to be sure, with Mazzy Star as a pretty incredible highlight – a rare appearance by an even more rare band. In our current landscape, where bedroom dream-pop is par for the course, it's easy to forget early influences like them, but their live return (which, hopefully, will extend further than this one show) is an excellent reminder, and also a great excuse to listen to So Tonight that I Might See and cry on the bus (that is, if you even needed one). See the full Vivid Sydney lineup here, and if you're not in Australia, join me in loudly complaining about that fact.

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This article originally appeared on Noisey UK.