Two members of Toronto’s rap community were reportedly shot and killed on Saturday night in a downtown incident involving multiple victims. A CP24 report says the shooting happened outside Cube Nightclub in the area of Queen Street West and Peter Street, in the city’s Entertainment District, shortly before 8 p.m. Police said the suspects may have fled in a black SUV or a white car following the chaotic daylight attack. Two males and one female were rushed to hospital in serious to critical condition, with the two men being pronounced dead shortly after.

Members of the hip-hop community and associates say the deceased was Smoke Dawg, an up-and-coming rapper who was part of the music collective Halal Gang. As well as Koba Prime, from the rap collective, Prime. The two groups regularly came together to form supergroup Full Circle.

The crew rose to attention two years ago with the coming-of-age Toronto anthem "Still" that indoctrinated the "Ginobli Dance" into a viral phenomenon and local anthem "Trap House." Smoke Dawg was regarded by artists like ASAP Ferg, Skepta and Drake. Drake brought Smoke Dawg on the Boy Meets World European tour.

Koba Prime was an affiliate of the Prime collective, fronted by Jimmy and Donnie Prime and Jay Whiss. The group is a key component of downtown Toronto’s sound, known for working with artists like Murda Beatz and coining the “the 6” moniker for the city.

It's impossible to factor how much of a loss this is. Smoke was instrumental in the rise of current Toronto rap, documenting the struggles of the street life in the city. In a recent Noisey video, Smoke Dawg's family surrounded him with words of encouragement: "Just focus on your music. Like they say go hard, keep making music, and keep shining." Let us never forget the family and friends still in pain who mourn him and do our due diligence to respect them during this time.

This article originally appeared on Noisey CA.

Weezer’s cover of Toto’s iconic soft-rock track “Africa” just keeps… existing! Since its birth as an online campaign by a 14-year-old, Weezer have hit the Billboard Hot 100 for the first time in nearly a decade, performed the track on Kimmel, and, perhaps most unlikely of all, proven their cultural relevance through the covering of a 36-year-old track. Today, the saga continues: Weezer have announced the release of an “Africa” 7” to be released––where else––exclusively at Urban Outfitters, the home of meme-vinyl.

But here’s the thing: the bright green vinyl, currently available for pre-order, is already sold out. The teens sure do love those memes, and #WeezerCoverAfrica is no exception. Maybe you can get another meme item instead, like the High School Musical soundtrack. Or Scorpion.

Shaad D'Souza is Noisey's Australian editor. Follow him on Twitter.

It’s 2AM on a Friday, and I’m about to experience Karnage live for the first time. No, not the terrible Freshers’ Week pub crawl – one of grime’s rising new talents. The lights dim in this sweaty, east London basement and the host yells just two words: “IT’S KARNAGE!” Within seconds, 21-year-old Karnage Kills is blazing his way through an electrifying rework of a Stormzy freestyle as the crowd – mostly young, beautiful queer kids – scream in unison: “TELL MY MAN SHUT UP!”

Karnage weaves through the venue, switching between different beats and flows before ending with “Hoe Diaries,” his homage to Tink’s “ ABC Fantasies:“ “Be a ho, be a ho, be a ho bitch / be that ho that be chasing that real big dick!” As he lingers on this last line, he grins and flicks his long, black braids, then ducks backstage.

This cheeky, nonchalant attitude is characteristic of Karnage, a gay grime artist whose presence on the scene feels – and this is no exaggeration – revolutionary. Musically, he spits verbal one-two punches, delivering one slick punchline after another. But visually, he’s unapologetically femme – think impossibly short denim shorts, waist-length weaves and a signature slip of lipgloss. His presence in grime – a genre he describes as “hyper-masculine” – is anomalous to say the least, and it’s led to an unjustifiable lack of recognition from men in the industry.

But he’s unperturbed. “I was raised to speak my mind and tell the truth so, as an adult, I don’t care about saying certain things,” he says over the phone. We’ve met occasionally in the past, but this hour-long chat is the most in-depth talk we’ve had so far; refreshingly, there’s no media training, plenty of filthy jokes and anecdotes laced with honesty and his trademark wit. “There’s nothing anyone could throw back in my face, you know? I know who I am, and I look after myself.”

He wears his femininity like a badge of honour, but never more so than on brand-new single “Timberlands”. “I just remember always wanting a pair when I was at school,” he says, laughing, “so it just rolled off my tongue.” But the reference feels subversive; Timberlands obviously carry both hip-hop history and masculine connotations, so it feels radical for Karnage to fuck his sugar daddy (played by Aiden Shaw) in a two-piece PVC outfit and Timbs while his waist-length braids swing.

Karnage knows that his femme appearance can cause confusion. “People call me ‘she’ – they genuinely think I’m a woman. Don’t get me wrong, I know that’s what I put out there, but it can get annoying. It’s not so bad when I’m out on the queer scene, but I’ve been escorted out of male toilets by security in ‘straight’ clubs before. Then, there are those photo ID scanners – you know the ones that show your picture? I was out for my mum’s birthday, and young me pops up. So this security guards looks at me with my long, curly wig, looks down and then looks back up. We all just found it hysterical.”

His rightfully unapologetic feminine style can also stir up homophobia, especially in comments sections. Recently, he released blistering track, “Level Up,” on grime channel P110. Within minutes, “WTF is this batty boy doing?” reactions appeared. “It doesn’t bother me – if anything, it just makes me realise my profile is growing,” he says. “But the truth is that, if I was straight, I would be further along than I am now; I know that being gay and femme is going to get in the way of me being successful quickly, but my flow and bars are being taken seriously. I’m being compared to a lot of straight rappers, and I know I’m often on par with, or even better than them.”

Recently, his sound has shifted to prove this. Late last year, he dropped the fiery “You Ain’t Bad”, a relentless freestyle designed to flex his lyrical skills – “They told me I don’t fit the criteria / Just ‘cause of my outer exterior / just look at the way I ride the beat compared to them man, I’m clearly superior.” These lyrics read as a mission statement, as well as a swift ‘fuck you’ to anyone doubting his skills. “Hoe Diaries,” on the other hand, is three minutes of absolute filth accompanied by an endearing, iPhone-lensed video shot near the aptly-named Cock Lane, in London. Despite the explicit lyrics, the track garnered acclaim, with fans sometimes singing the infectious chorus at him as he walked to the shops. “Even straight people were like, ‘I’m not down with this gay shit, but this a banger, though!’”

It’s crucial to highlight that hip-hop is often singled out for its homophobia, usually with racially-charged language. Country, rock and pop stars have apologised for, or denied using, homophobic language while some record execs may not know what to do with queer artists. “That’s why I think the industry needs more people like me – to address people’s perceptions of what it means to be gay, and what it means to be male as well. Not everyone has a fade and wears baggy clothes!”

Karnage wasn’t always so radical. Born in Middlesex and raised in Seven Sisters, north London, he lived vicariously through his mother’s music taste. “I listen to what she listened to, and that could be anything from bashment – Mavado, Gyptian, Vybz Kartel – to Céline Dion. Now, my taste is more like Fantasia and Jhené Aiko.” He discovered his own musical skills when a Year 7 music teacher asked him to name his talent. “I couldn’t think of one, and that really got to me! So we tried a few things, and singing was one. My teacher was like, ‘Oh my god, you can really sing!’ So I started performing in assemblies, that kind of thing.”

His focus shifted a few years later when his voice broke and he started rapping. “Up until that point, I had been getting into a lot of fights,” he recalls. “I really felt pressure to be what other people wanted me to be. Part of me did just think, ‘Shit, if I don’t do something then I’m going to end up stuck, like everyone else.” So he used his newly-discovered rap skills, quickly amassing a back catalogue of tracks with the help of his producer, TK: “We met on Gumtree – can you believe that??”

Within months, he’d gone from putting together a catalogue of material with TK to being spotted by Hakeem Kazeem, co-organiser of London club night Batty Mama, to being booked and busy almost every weekend. “I was living with my nan at the time, so she would get used to seeing me leave in these crazy outfits,” he chuckles. Although she’s supportive, he says his grandma doesn’t listen to his music. In his own words, he writes about everything from people that did him wrong to sucking dick. “Well, when I was growing up I really repressed myself,” he explains, “So now I just do whatever I want!”

It’s working. Karnage occupies a unique niche in the grime scene; on the one hand, he has a presence on huge channels like P110 and earns regular respect from straight fans, but on the other, he’s renowned as a fixture of London’s queer nightlife scene. It’s reductive to describe him as a ‘queer rapper’ – the whole tag is bullshit, as it sets aside artists whose skills aren’t dictated by their sexuality. But his ability to switch between hyper-sexual and ‘traditional’ rapid-fire bars is unique. Sweaty, queer kids, who might feel out of place at a grime show, fill his audiences whereas his online presence is tracked by grime heads who also may be listening to a gay, femme artist for the first time.

All of this hard work is paying off. He recently performed on a Birmingham Pride line-up with Ms Banks (“she grabbed my hand and shouted my name!”), and partied with Nadia Rose on her birthday (“by invite, bitch! I didn’t even crash it!”) He praises the women for showing him love, “because, let’s be real, who wants to shout out the gay rapper? It doesn’t go down well with grime-heads, you know? It’s ultimately not what grime culture wants, but I’m here – and I’m not going anywhere.”

You can find Jake on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Noisey UK.

I remember being at a house party in 2007, where I plugged the speakers into my iPod and played Skepta and Plastician’s classic grime collab “Intensive Snare.” It received roars of approval from my mates – but strict, finger-wagging disgust from the hosts of the party. The song was changed and I was lectured for “putting on badman music.” The event recently took on a whole new meaning when a couple of years ago, while scrolling through my Instagram feed, I was surprised to see the same group who had hosted the party posting a selfie at a Skepta performance.

Music and people’s tastes evolve. The fact grime, and its flag-bearers such as Skepta, Wiley and Stormzy, have since risen to higher prominence and are now celebrated as cultural treasures is a positive thing. But still, accounting for any teenage frustration I might have felt at being usurped as DJ, and the implicit racism of the language I was dealt, something about the incident at that party, and the subsequent U-turn by its hosts, has always sat so awkwardly in my mind’s rearview. More specifically, I take issue with the contradictory way the music was so intensely looked-down upon in one instance, and yet suddenly welcomed as cool in the next.

Last Friday, J Hus appeared in court after being arrested and charged with possession of a knife in his hometown of Stratford, east London. The event has injected uncertainty into the likelihood of Hus’ performances at festivals this summer, including London’s Wireless on 7 July. It has also been reproduced as news across mainstream media outlets by publications who would not usually hone in so closely to report on the life of a UK rapper. This includes a bizarre feature about Hus in The Sun, which features a section explaining the type of knife he was accused of carrying and then another section detailing the lyrics of “Dark Vader”, a single off his Big Spang EP released last month, as if to connect the two.

This type of reaction to Hus’ situation is indicative of a broader set of problems prevalent within British society, specifically in how our media reports on, and makes sense of, the complex, troubled realities that exist behind certain underground and urban music. All of these problems are bound by a contradictory thread of privilege, and the blind willingness of those in relative positions of power to appropriate ethnic minority subcultures as and when, and how, they see fit.

The first problem is that while the arrest of someone of Hus’ stature – a MOBO-award winner with a top 10 single under his belt, and a pioneer of London’s current fusion of diasporic black musical genres – is significant news, it does not exist in a social vacuum. Much of the response to his alleged crime uses language that ultimately – without full context – frames him as an individual agent who is devoid of sense, throwing away his music career.

The fact is that, like a disproportionate number of young people from pressured, impoverished backgrounds, and single-parent homes in the inner-city, Hus will have overcome a huge set of barriers to get to where he is today. By succeeding in music, he will have managed to transcend many of the financial trappings and behaviours of his challenging past. But that does not mean he will have, by simply becoming famous, escaped a context in which claustrophobia and paranoia reign supreme for many of the most vulnerable young adults in London. For many people, particularly those from poor ethnic minority backgrounds, growing up is more about subsistence and survival than thriving in a society which is not only failing, but actively demonises them. In fact, Hus’ fame, especially while spending time in the area he grew-up in, will have made him even more of a target and increased the propensity of someone wanting to harm him.

The second problem is that the widespread, if shallow, reporting on the incident has demonstrated that many publications are more reactive to negative news about otherwise successful London MCs, than positive stories about their impressive rise. The Daily Mail were, of course, one of the publications to report about Hus’ arrest, despite having a comprehensively poor history of demonising anyone who doesn’t adhere to traditional, narrow, white types of British culture, especially when it comes to music. The paper has repeatedly attacked Stormzy, for example, arguing that he ought to show “gratitude” to the British government for having grown up as an immigrant in London, after he denounced Theresa May for the neglect shown to Grenfell Tower’s residents last year at the Brit awards, and even claiming his music fuels the use of skunk. There is such a multitude of inspiring, positive stories to tell about the success of young musicians from different backgrounds. Yet as is so often the case in the haphazard and partisan way the British media interprets youth culture, negativity tends to reign supreme.

The third problem relates to my experience at the house party over a decade ago. The way grime was contradictorily dismissed as a challenge to the comfortable, middle-class norms of the social environment I was in, but then embraced as a source of entertainment a decade later, is comparable to the dismissal of reporting with any nuance on Hus’ actions. When peripheral types of music fit neatly into mainstream cultural consumption, when they are seen as relevant and positively edgy, or when the behaviours of their artists can be appropriated for clickable, newsworthy content, the media quickly forget about the difficult circumstances from which its artists often come. Instead, when those circumstances – in this case Hus’ perceived need to arm himself – confront the accepted understanding of how urban music ought to behave, or sound, or be characterised, they are simplified, demonised and dealt shallow analysis.

The moral panic about the alleged link between drill music and rising youth violence in London that has shaken media centres and living rooms across the UK is a case-in-point. I have written about how, more than anything else, drill is a cry for help from a generation of young men who have been shut-out of British society on every level, and have thus taken to creating their own emotional outlet. But with its balaclavas, lyrics about extreme violence and generally provocative tone, the music has become an easy target for the media, legal and political establishments to explain away a worsening epidemic of violence in the capital (rather than seek to understand and cure its root causes using a public health approach).

However, it was not long ago that Big Shaq’s novelty song “Man’s Not Hot”, which uses one of the most famous drill beats, 67’s “Let’s Lurk”, nearly became Christmas number one. It has since been watched 277 million times on YouTube. Although in jest, it refers to many of the themes explored in the majority of drill songs: including drug-dealing, guns and misogynistic showboating. So it appears, in this case, that while (black) urban music culture is packaged in ridicule and parody, undermining the seriousness of how neglected, bleak and desperate the lives of many young men making it can be, the mass media and British population at-large are perfectly willing to embrace it.

Unless people are able to consume and enjoy underground subcultural produce at arms length, without having to think about the difficult or challenging reality that it is often sourced from, it is rarely given a balanced hearing. We require more from our media in its engagement with the roots of music culture and the lives of artists who contribute towards it. Because simply cherry-picking surface level aspects of artistic expression, without properly trying to understand and be compassionate about its deeper social complexities – the very complexities that often make music as exciting and progressive as it is – will only further demarcate cultural boundaries in our patchwork society.

You can find Ciaran on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Noisey UK.

Billy Corgan, a once-masterful songwriter who now peddles bizarre conspiracy theories and deliberately makes people think he's a dumbass, has a Smashing Pumpkins reunion on the go right now. Former bassist D'arcy Wretzky isn't involved, but James Iha and Jimmy Chamberlain are back in the fold, and their first single together since 2000's Machina/The Machines of God, last month's "Solara," actually rekindled a little of their former grandeur. The most recent stop on their bumpy comeback trail was a house party in Studio City, Los Angeles, this past weekend—a show at the same house in which they filmed parts of the video for "1979." To really capture the spirit of the 1990s, the whole thing got shut down by police after the neighbors complained.

To emphasize just how far Corgan and Co. have come since their rebellious heydays, the LAPD let them finish their set (though the band were forced to cut things off before a planned encore of "Cherub Rock"). And because Corgan is "not anti-anything except establishment," a man who finds "institutions and systems suspicious," he was full of praise for the cops who showed up. "Great times in LaLa," he wrote on Instagram. "Appreciation to those that came out to the Troubador [sic]. And apologies to those in Studio City for the disturbance of our nihilistic noize. 'Twas a full moon and something just gets into the blood. And respect to the police, who let us finish the set. Mendacious as our conclusion was."

There weren't supposed to be any phones at the event, but a few chunks of footage made it out the other side. Watch it all below. Punk lives.

Follow Alex Robert Ross on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Noisey UK.

Nile Rodgers is bringing disco back. Again. It's About Time, his first new album with Chic in 26 years, is out on September 14, and he's got an unlikely group of young musicians—everyone from Vic Mensa to Danny L Harle—alongside him this time. They've gravitated towards Rodgers because he's made an indelible, neon-pink mark on modern pop music (something you can dive into right here). He's a Dance Music Hall of Fame Inductee, a Rock 'N' Roll Hall of Fame Inductee, and a Grammy winner. And now he's got another honor to add to his list—he's been appointed Chairman of the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

"I am truly honored and beyond humbled to be elected by such an esteemed group as this illustrious board," Rodgers said in a statement to Billboard. "I will try and serve with all my heart. I hope I can make you half as proud of me as I am to even sit in the room with you who've done so much for the furtherance of composition. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to serve the songwriting community."

Rodgers, who was inducted into the SHOF in 2016, succeeds Philadelphia soul legends Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff. His term will run for three years.

Follow Alex Robert Ross on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Noisey US.

Sun’s out, buns out, y’all. Ahead of Independence Day, musician-activist Madame Gandhi is here with a new banger to remind you that amidst all the dark chaos, the future is still sure as heck female. Today Noisey is pleased to present “Top Knot Turn Up,” a party-ready track from the ex-M.I.A drummer that celebrates all the ladies and others who put their hair up to get down to work.

The song combines a Brazilian trap beat, courtesy of producer Ruxell, and some fat percussion from Madame Gandhi, who layers up her feminist bars on top of it all: “Please do not trouble me when I am focused / The future is female (you already know this) / I’m fighting against the corruption on SCOTUS / Turned up in my top knot since when I first wrote this.”

“‘Top Knot Turn Up’ is this idea of when we as people who identify as women put our hair up in a bun, it sends the signal, ‘Don't come and flirt with me, don't trouble me, don't try to underestimate me,’” Gandhi tells Noisey. “I put my hair up back and it's like a lace-up, you know? It's a call to action. Put your hair up in a bun and get shit done today.”

We sat down with Madame Gandhi to talk about the story behind the song, American identity, and getting political on the dance floor.

Noisey: What was the original concept behind “Top Knot Turn Up”?
Kiran Gandhi: “Top Knot Turn Up” was a song that birthed was two years ago. I was playing a show in Mexico City, and I posted a photo of me at the show at the drums, with tons of lighting and hundreds of people in the audience. My friend who vogues for Fka Twigs, whose name is Jamel Prodigy, commented "Top knot turn up," and I was like, this is my life. Twenty four/seven. I put my hair up in a bun and I get hella shit done. Just like millions of women and people all around the world. The symbolism of us, as women, having our hair down when they go out and we're on a date, and we're flirting or whatever and we're playing our feminine B-side—there is just as much femininity as when we put our hair up in a bun. That’s like, I'm here to report. I'm here to take care of my kids. I'm here to run a meeting. I'm here to play the drums.

Even from childhood, my parents used to be like, "Please, can you put your hair down? We ought to see your nice beautiful hair." And I was like, I would put it down if I wasn't doing anything, but it looks like 24/7 I happen to be doing stuff! When Trump unfortunately won this election, that's when I was like, I have to write this song, because we're actually watching, with the Women's March, and with the United State of Women that is now happening, and with Michelle Obama is speaking out, millions of women all around the world are organizing and saying, "If you threaten our rights, we're going to organize." So I logged this idea of writing a song that was like a unifying call to action. We're not here anymore to look pretty. We still gonna look pretty, actually, when we put our hair up in a bun. But I just thought no one has written a song about this part of the female experience, which is so relatable, you know?

Totally. Let's talk about your choices with the album art.
I wanted it to be irreverent to the American flag. The more I travel, the more gratitude I have of certain kinds of freedoms that being American enables me, especially as from an immigrant family from India. They value this life for us. But I also see the enormous criticism that I have of living with irresponsible wealth and power and privilege, and using our power exploitatively against the rest of the world and using privilege to elevate ourselves at the expense of others. And these are aspects of the American brand that I don't subscribe to. So the album cover sort of references the American flag. And then my actual bun is turned up and spray painted. It has a female symbol in it. It has lots of triangles in it, because to me triangles represent our anatomy.

It’s funny because as we’re getting more into this, I realized I’m unconsciously putting my hair up. Like I’m focusing more. Long hair obviously isn’t specific to women-identifying people, but I love the up-or-down as a representation of the spectrum of femininity, and of gender. Sometimes it's not just a convenience thing, but like look at my face .
Yes! Exactly. And on a more nuanced note, it's a bit of like performing gender at different times. We might get told we “look like a boy,” as if that was the worst thing ever. But actually a bun is the most feminine thing. To be like my bun is up, I'm in the workplace. If my hair is down, I'm here to party. To me it was always a signaling effect.

Can you talk a little more about the lyrics?
I wrote the lyrics on the cover of the album as well, because I liked the idea of the record cover also being a journal entry. The thing that makes me a good public speaker is that I'm very cerebral, but that often times can be a mouthful for when you're trying to write a turn up song. So I remember being like, how do I say what I want to say? Not being so cerebral about it. I don't know if we achieved that all the way because I am who I am. But the song, the lyrics were really carefully written over the course of a year. And when I would perform the song live, I would try out different lyrics to see which ones resonated.

And what did you find from that?
It used to be some other more cerebral, heady lyrics, and then I changed it to hit all of the rhythmic elements of the beat, as a drummer, and with my words. And that just got people more hyped. That's what you want—more people to start their day like fuck this day, I wanted them to listen to "Top Knot Turn Up" and be like, yes, today I'm changing my life. You know?

How does rhythm plays into the delivery of a lyrical message or ideal for you? People can be wary of lyrics that are too “on the nose,” so how did you think about what would make this song effective and make it hit?
The beat that I chose was a collaboration with a Brazilian trap artist named Ruxell. I had been listening to Brazilian trap music being like, this music goes so hard, you can't help but dance when you listen to this. I wanted to take a Brazilian trap song, but not have the artwork be like, a female ass, and like the music being like "Come fuck me." Cause that's the lyrics of a lot of Brazilian trap music. So my main thing has always been like, damn, I want to turn up because all this music is so good, but I don't want to turn to the sound of my own oppression.

So instead I was like, what if we take the same concept where the beats are amazing, and we write something that's a little bit more honest to the female experience and we get to turn up, and not in a way that is to misogyny, but instead to something celebratory that a lot of people experienced, right? So I partnered with Ruxell, who is an amazing Virgo artist, a young up-and-coming producer in Brazil, and he sent over the original sketches of the beat and then I took that and just added a lot more and fattened it up with my drums. There's three layers of drums in it and that are added, plus live vocal percussion and then actual bongos and cowbells, and then my lyrics. I want to give this as as a gift to my audience to say here's a really danceable, fun rhythm, but we're not talking about assess and fucking only, we're talking about something nuanced in the female experience. And not that rapping about fucking is bad! It's just that most of the time when they're rapping about sex, it somehow ends up being at our expense. It's not like a joyful portrayal of sex, it's a violent portrayal, or a very vulgar portrayal of our sexuality.

Did you have any concern about how the song’s lyrics might be received when you were writing them, or how they’d fit with the style of the music?
I wrote and I almost changed this line, but I kept it: "This is a song about getting the work done / Hair up in a bun, that's the most fun / Hearing myself think when I go for a run / Or maybe I'm practicing the drums / Or maybe I'm writing in the sun." And I wrote those lyrics like, these are very cerebral. But to your point, I think that's a very feminist concept. Virginia Woolf used to talk about a room for one's own, just spending time every week alone. And I think as women, with social media culture, we feel insecure to just be in our own energy, like as if we're missing something. Well, what if we were actually the best thing going on? Just be with your own energy! So I kept that idea in there because I was like, this is important for young people of any gender to be like, "I'm dope. If you want to have dinner with me, you should be so lucky. Otherwise, I'll just have dinner with myself, I'll run with myself. It's fine." And that's radical.

Andrea Domanick is Noisey's West Coast editor. Follow her on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Noisey US.

There is no definitive version of Rainbow Chan. The Sydney-based singer and producer creates music across multiple identities and streams as a way of keeping sane. Rainbow Chan, her main project, finds her singing heartache-ridden pop songs set over glitchy samples. But there’s also her experimental, techno-adjacent music she makes as Chunyin; her newest project DIN, a club-ready collaboration with Moon Holiday, aka Alex Ward; and Rainbow Chan the visual artist, whose art and installation work plays with ideas of authenticity and knock-offs. She’s less concerned with one coherent identity than she is communicating her art across multiple levels.

When I call her, though, it's to talk about the latest Rainbow Chan single “Promises”, a sugary ode to new feelings and new places. “Promises” is part of a forthcoming album, still in the works, written off the back of Rainbow’s travels across Hong Kong, Taiwan and China last year. Amid her constant processing of culture and family history, Rainbow notes that this feels like the first time she’s writing from a hopeful and celebratory space, rather than the personal heartbreak and sadness we heard in her 2016 album Spacings.

Today, we're premiering "Promises", a taste of Rainbow Chan's upcoming record. We spoke to Rainbow about bursting her own exotic expectations of travel and writing songs that push a female agenda. Listen to "Promises", and check out a photoshoot by Sydney-based photographer Jonno Revanche, below.

Noisey: “Promises” speaks of brief romances and unmet expectations. What mindset were you in when you were writing this song?
Rainbow Chan: In the last year or so I took a step back from trying to push myself too much [with making] pop music and figuring out my place in the music industry. It was getting exhausting. I’d been doing a lot of visual art and teaching (I’m a music teacher at Sydney Uni) and those different avenues led me to go overseas to do some workshops and tour.

I was in Hong Kong, Taiwan and China and it just got me thinking about the allure of a new city and how that can open your mind up to the possibility of new beginnings. But it's also a projection of your own frustrations, a yearning to belong to someone, to a city. The song is about the promise of a new city, the promise of escaping, the promise of an emoji someone sends you and you're like ‘oh my god, they like me’. But really we're all a little bit lost.

You were born in Hong Kong and spent your early years there. Was it easy to go back?
I really only spent the first six years of my life in Hong Kong. It's always been this bubble I go back to briefly to see family, so for me, it's this nostalgic time capsule. I didn’t really get to experience Hong Kong as a young person or adult. But this trip felt like the first time I had an opportunity to perform and bring my art and conversations into a creative realm there. It was like this homecoming, being able to connect with people on my own and not just through family.

At the end of it, I also realised the illusion of magic in a new place. As soon as you settle in, you realise the world is still moving in the same direction. Everyone’s wearing the same brands, listening to the same music. My internalisation of a magical, nostalgic place [was] just an act of construction.

I suddenly felt like I didn't have to choose anymore, between deciding whether I am from Australia or Hong Kong. I have the privilege and access to be flexible across these different spaces and geographies. It made me more interested in making music that speaks to that.

You recently began learning and documenting the traditional folk songs of your mum’s native Weitou language (an indigenous language of Hong Kong). Can you tell me about this process and how it filters into your wider body of work?
It started at the end of last year when I was working towards my first solo exhibition at Firstdraft in Woolloomooloo, which was a collaboration with my mum. Growing up, we never spoke Weitou. My dad’s not from the Weitou tradition, but I always heard my mum speaking it to her sisters. She was teaching me songs, telling me her life story and it just opened up this entire pool of knowledge I had no idea about. A lot of the project was connected to her language––words that couldn’t be translated directly into Cantonese or English.

I was thinking about how different dialects across the world are going to be lost and [how I can] hopefully be a part of a trend among young people who see the ramifications of globalisation and want to protect individual cultures and identities before it’s too late. I see this as a long form project across many disciplines for me, because I think it needs to be sustained, not just me putting it in a pop song and never talking about it again.

What do these meditations on loss and culture look like so far for your upcoming record?
I’ve been playing with Weitou folk songs because a lot of the content is quite feminist. Only men were taught to read and write, so women in the village passed down their knowledge through storytelling and songs. A lot of the songs I’ve been making implicitly push this agenda of the female voice, experience and struggles.

I have a few songs that are re-imaginings of Weitou folk songs but with a modern dance beat behind it. I’m trying to delicately find a balance and not make it a tokenistic gesture. At the same time I want to create something on my own terms, from what I understand to be the culture, but almost fragment it to the point where people wouldn’t even know it. I don’t want to give too much away as it’s still forming but I’ll more explicitly play with ideas of tradition, technology and traversing different landscapes on the record.

For some of the songs, I’m trying to write in Cantonese and Mandarin. It made me more interested in trying to incorporate fluid identity signifiers that are true to me, and true to a lot of people’s experiences. Australia is so monolingual but it’s such a norm for the rest of the world to be bi-lingual and tri-lingual––to consume other cultures in a very normal, everyday way. I want to make this upcoming album a landscape that speaks to a world that’s outside of an Australian body.

You’ve put out a consistent stream of music in the past few years. When do you feel most creative?
The easiest one is heartbreak because you have so much pain that you don't know how to deal and the only way I feel that I can process it is to mourn, grieve and expel this all-consuming energy and anxiety into something beautiful and relatable to other people. That’s quite healing.

But recently I haven't been sad or experienced heartbreak. I went through a really big break-up and focused on self-care and building a really strong network of women and like people around me that believe in my work and me as a person. I feel like this album is the first time I've really written a lot of positive music where I'm celebrating things. I’m just really savouring this nice moment in my life where I feel really grateful for things and I’m writing songs on this feeling.

I feel very hopeful in the sense that I'm seeing more and more visibility of different voices out there. I feel like this album will contribute to a wider conversation about whose voices should we be hearing more of.

Being one of the few visible Asian women in Australian music, how do you feel about others seeing you as a representative?
I used to really struggle with that. It all started with bedroom music, DIY demos and all of a sudden people were reading larger themes into my work. In my early 20s, I didn't have enough life experience to deal with what that means, but as I get older and since I became a music teacher it makes me realise pop music doesn’t have to be this self-indulgent thing. I didn’t know any Chinese singers, performers or actors when I was growing up, so for someone to see themselves in me is really flattering. To be able to add my stories to the world is a real privilege and honour and makes me want to keep doing this, to open the door for other people to keep doing it.

Emma Do is a writer from Melbourne. Follow her on Twitter.

Jonno Revanche is a Sydney-based photographer and writer. Follow them on Instagram.

Alice Skye and Emily Wurramara are in soft contrast to each other, and this soft contrast makes for the perfect joint tour. Emily is an island woman, hailing from Groote Eylandt, Alice a landlocked Wergaia and Wemba Wemba river woman. Alice, who opens their set, seemingly spends most of her time in her head, and her music forces you to get in yours. More than once, I catch her staring at her keyboard or at the ceiling, and wonder what she could be thinking about with a room full of people staring at her. I am not sentimental, but towards the end of Alice’s performance in Brisbane, I found myself in tears. She was singing a song about a Gariwerd, a particular mountain range from my home. Her debut album, Friends with Feelings, is melancholy and haunting, but doesn’t leave you feeling depleted. It’s hopeful, too. The same can be said for Emily’s music: while I found myself crying to Alice’s set, during Emily’s I found myself dancing. Emily’s album Milyakburra isn’t without pain or reflection, but it’s upbeat. Songs like “Yimenda-Papaguneray (Turtle Song)” evoke joy and movement. Her set itself is a frenzy: there’s constant dancing in the audience, and Emily swaps between acoustic and electric guitars.

This duality between them both is, in some ways, revolutionary. Both musicians occupy joy and pain and refusing to choose between the two. Together they beckon the listener to hear and see them as humans capable of complexity. Alice herself acknowledges this in her song “Poetry By Text” when she says “Let me tell you about science and art.” Mainstream audiences rarely see complex black women. Particularly in entertainment, black women are often positioned as palatable rather than political, which is why we see black artists like Jessica Mauboy singing the national anthem or performing in Eurovision. It’s difficult to garner mainstream support and be explicitly, publicly pro-black at the same time.

Nobody is immune to this: even Beyonce had to work over fifteen years in the industry before she could tell us to “fuck a false arrest,” and load her film clips with political imagery. Black women are rarely afforded complexity or encouraged to be complex. They are expected to perform a safe type of blackness and not make audiences feel uncomfortable. Neither Alice nor Emily are interested in this. Halfway through her set, Emily stops performing to speak to the audience. She calls for quiet, and starts talking about her home. She sings about Groote Eylandt’s fight and victory against BP, and forces the predominantly white crowd to wrap their tongues around her language. Alice has almost lost her voice by the time she’s performing, but still performs anyway. She still wanted to give back to the audience that had shown up for her. There are some notes she can’t reach, her voice straining, but she seemingly isn’t interested in being perfect: instead, she’s striving for something authentic, to be seen just as she is. Despite their differences, there is much Emily and Alice have in common. Their voices, despite Alice losing hers, are both beautiful. I have not seen anyone force a room into stillness the way Alice does. I have not seen a room come together the way they do when Emily is singing.

Both of these women are incredible performers, and these shows together are the first time they’re touring as mothers. If they’re nervous, you can’t tell. These two women may be incredible black performers, and black women may seem themselves reflected deeply in their music, but Alice and Emily are for everybody. The two embody sisterhood, clearly quite affectionate in the way they join each other onstage and embrace during the show. This sort of love between black women is also revolutionary. Witnessing them perform together is like being around the table listening to your aunties tell their yarns. It’s special: it feels warm in your heart, and when it’s over you aren't quite ready to leave yet.

Noisey: Thank you for last week. I found myself being really introspective and inside myself for your set Alice and then your set Em got me outside my head. Was that something you two thought about? The light and shade of your music together?
Alice Skye: I hadn’t really thought about it before but I love that.

Emily Wurramara: Not at all! That’s actually really interesting and beautiful you felt that way.

Alice: A big thing about the tour was highlighting our similarities but also the differences between us. So I love that we offer different things when it comes to bein’ live.

How did you two meet?
Emily: We met in Adelaide for a festival two years ago.

Alice: It was cute. Em, I remember you messaging me on Insta.

What did she say?
Alice: [She said] "Come to my hotel room I'm in number 315," so I go up and I'm knockin’ on room 315 forever and no answer. Then [she] messaged me, "Shit, sorry, room 513 lol."

Emily: Yes! Then I realised I gave her the wrong room number.

Why did you message her Em?
Emily: Well, I really was inspired by Alice and being at the same show I was like “Omg we have to hang out,” I loved her presence, her vibes, and she just had such a welcoming personality. I really vibed with her at the show. And then when we hung out [and] it was just like kicking back with another sister.

I guess in your industry it must be so hard to find other black woman on your same wavelength and when you find them you have to really latch on.
Emily: Oh definitely! It’s so hard to come across sisters in the industry who just “get it”.

Alice: Totally. I find the music industry so fucken scary, so having someone that gets what it's like to be young and be female and be black is life changing, honestly.

I was talking to a tidda yesterday and she was talking about the pressure to feel perfect, and present as palatable.
Alice: Yes! I was talking to another sister about how when you're young and perceived as kind of sweet and nice, as soon as you stand up for yourself people think you're being a "bitch" or being rude as but you're just trying to look out for yourself. I get that heaps cause I've always been a serial people-pleaser––but now I’m learning to say no and have boundaries for myself, and some people don't like it.

Emily: It really feels like a sisterhood.

Alice: Totally, I was so proud of you Em when you asked those people to just give you a minute on stage to talk. It was fucking deadly.

Emily: You honestly feel that! You are constantly pleasing other people, and you constantly have to remind yourself that you’re only human. You can only do so much. Seriously though, I can’t stand when people [talk during performances], our music tells stories and if you’re there, you’re there to listen, to feel and to share.

Alice: Yeah, I find it so emotionally taxing to perform. which sometimes makes me feel like "Why am I choosing to do this?"

Why do you do it? When does it feel worth it?
Alice: Without music I wouldn't be able to process stuff. I'm not good at communicating my feelings with people, so I spend a lotta time in my own head and writing was just a way of getting that out. Being able to connect with people like Em has made it so worth it and just connect with people who find my music helpful for them.

Emily: For me, music started when I went back home and saw there were no female singers or songwriters so I was like pretty much, “Fuck it, I’m gonna do it.”

How did you learn to play?
Emily: I’m self taught in guitar, keyboard and ukulele, but I learnt saxophone, violin and flute. It’s what I had to do to prove myself to my community and the men back home, I remember two years ago I went back and my uncle handed me an electric and was like “If you play this like I do then you can jump on stage,” so I did.

That's so cool. What about you Alice?
Alice: I started playing piano real young cause my big sister was learning and I just wanted to be like her.

Are you excited for Sydney?
Alice: I'm stressed as hell about it trying to organise everything. No one ever tells you how stressful being an artist is.

Emily: It’s so stressful, the things you have to organise! But I’m so excited for Sydney!

Alice: Yeah I'm excited! I already miss ya Em so can't bloody wait.

You must get so close touring, experiencing these wild and fun times together.
Alice: I've never toured before so playing shows where people have come actually to see you and not by accident or to see someone you're supporting is really cool.

Emily: It’s great, Alice is literally like my long lost sis. We talk about everything, and to be able to share this tour with such an iconic artist and human being is my absolute honour. Australia needs to see this, we’re two young Indigenous women doing what we love. And you’re killing it sis!

Alice: You’re killin it!

Is this your first tour as a mum, Em?
Emily: It is sis, and it’s so hard leaving bub at home but I’m not just doing it for me and her. I feel I have a responsibility to be a role model for all the young women around the world especially in my community, it’s heavy but shit needs to be done.

You make it look easy but I'm sure it's fucken tough. Not to mention all the other things that come with being a black mother.
Emily: It’s so tough! The amount of stereotypes and things people say so easily, it can hurt but you’ve just got to deal with it.

Alice: Well since we're on the note of Em and how much of a rockstar mum she is, [she's] the highlight of the tour for me.

Emily: Stop, I love you.

Alice: I was just lying in bed with Em and little K'iigari and watching Em sing to her and just laid there and cried. It was so beautiful. I’m not good at shoutouts but I love my mum and my sisters and women are amazing.

Emily: Aw, I can’t wait to see you! Shoutout to all the young sisters out there, your ancestors got your back.

Follow Nayuka on Twitter.

Less than 4% of New Zealanders can speak Maori, the indigenous language of the country. There are heaps of places trying to preserve and revive the language, but one source sticks out like a sore thumb: Alien Weaponry, the thrash metal band raging out over New Zealand’s colonial past.

In Thrash Metal and Te Reo Maori, VICE New Zealand’s new episode of Zealandia, VICE meets with Alien Weaponry in the build up to the release of their first album, from the garage on the de Jong family farm where brothers Henry (drums) and Lewis (vocals and guitar) and their friend Ethan Trembath (bass) rehearse, to catching the bus to high school, working at the local mechanics and bringing in the washing for mum.

We also road trip to Lake Rotoiti for an overnight visit to Otaramarae where the brothers reconnect with their iwi [tribes] Ngāti Pikiao and Ngāti Raukawa. It’s a chance for the band to immerse themselves in the culture and history at the core of their music, and consider their personal part in the resurgence of te reo Māori as the language struggles for survival.

Watch the fascinating new episode of Zealandia below:

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Richard Swift, the singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer known for his work with The Shins and The Black Keys as well as for his meticulously crafted solo albums, died this morning in Tacoma, Washington, Pitchfork reports. He was 41. No immediate cause of death was confirmed, but Swift had recently been hospitalized with a "life-threatening" medical condition.

Swift's released his first EP, The Novelist, in 2003, and re-released it alongside his debut mini-album Walking Without Effort after signing to Secretly Canadian in 2005. He became a fixture in the indie rock scene, releasing a clutch of cult-adored EPs and records. The last of those, 2009's The Atlantic Ocean LP, featured contributions from Mark Ronson, Ryan Adams, and Sean Lennon.

He joined The Shins as in 2011 and played with The Black Keys as a touring guitarist in 2014 before joining the Dan Auerbach-fronted garage rock band The Arcs, with whom he released one album, 2015's Yours, Dreamily,. He worked as a producer on records for Tennis, Tijuana Panthers, Kevin Morby, Foxygen, and many others. Swift's collaboration with Damien Jurado, Other People's Songs Volume One, was released in 2013.

"Today the world lost one of the most talented musicians I know," Auerback wrote on Instagram. "I will miss you my friend."

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This article originally appeared on Noisey US.

Ted Hughes was a bit of a bastard. This is the proclamation Muncie Girls vocalist and bass player Lande Hekt and I make when we begin our interview. I’m telling her about how my high school writing class teacher asked me to participate in a lecture competition, one where I presented Sylvia Plath’s works, and she would present on Plath’s husband, Ted Hughes, with the class deciding who was the better poet. Sylvia Plath’s husband was infamously awful to her, and not exactly the greatest poet, in my deeply important opinion, but—as men usually get to be—was successful anyway.

It is no secret that the Exeter, UK, punk band, which includes Hekt, Dean McMullen, and Luke Ellis, often draws inspiration from the American poet and novelist Sylvia Plath’s works and then craft eardrum-shaking rock songs from them. "Gas Mark 4" from their stunning debut, From Caplan to Belsize, is a referential of The Bell Jar, Plath’s first and most famous novel. The group is readying the release of their sophomore, Fixed Ideals, out August 31 via Buzz Records. At 13 tracks in length (cut down from a hefty recorded 19, Hekt says) it doesn’t feel long or linger too much. This album, too, is a nod to the poet. In Plath’s poem "Sonnet: To Eva," one stanza, in particular, struck a chord within Hekt:

Not man nor demigod could put together
The scraps of rusted reverie, the wheels
Of notched tin platitudes concerning weather,
Perfume, politics, and fixed ideals.

Hekt says, "a line will inspire me to write a song. I think a lot of the time I end up lifting a line or referencing [a book]. It sounds like I’ve intentionally written the song with a nod to it but actually what I’ve done is… just kind of jogged my creativity." "Fig Tree" on Fixed Ideals is another nod to Plath—this time the more infamous scene in The Bell Jar where Esther Greenwood conjures a scene of figs representing choices that she, in her young life, faces and, if wrongly selected, could face failure.

Punk and literature have harmoniously lived together throughout rock history; a notable example of a living legend, a punk poet-prophet, of sorts, Patti Smith, whose work as both a writer and musician are symbiotic, informing the other. (Hekt herself has often been compared to Smith as a sort of hybrid of both her with Veruca Salt’s 90s grunge sound—the highest of compliments.) "I think that punk and literature… you need to have an attitude where you’re critiquing things. You’re not taking things as they come," Hekt explains. Which is why it appeals to her when she’s writing songs. "I feel like… writing and literature are challenging most things people tend to—not most people but people who aren’t so creative—tend to accept. I think if you have that frame of mind naturally you’re going to be drawn to those things and maybe that’s why people tend to be into both things."

With criticism and punk music, so often comes the insertion of politics, something Muncie Girls have faced with their earlier EPs and debut. And that’s fine! That was their goal. While From Caplan to Belsize was more overtly political, Hekt says she felt like she said all she needed to say on that record. "The songs aren’t as clean-cut" on Fixed Ideals, she says. "I’m trying to make a connection with how politics affects us—or me personally—and how it can affect people’s way of life and relationship and everything. So, I would say it’s a really political record, but it’s not as clear in the sense that, yeah, there’s not one song about feminism; there’s not one song about the Tory government. It’s more like those themes creep in everywhere." (Opening track, "Jeremy," for example is about Hekt’s father who is right-wing.)

On the track "Falling Down," Hekt wrote more personally about drinking, which she hasn’t done for almost a year. "'Falling Down' is funnily enough… I didn’t know what it was about," she says with a laugh. "This happens a bit where I’ll write a song and not know what it’s about until, like, months later. But it turns out to be about is drinking. It’s about a hangover, which I didn’t realize. There’s a line in it: "Go to bed / Wake up smart." So it’s kind of like talking about having a hangover and waking up the next day and knowing not to do it again." The track is surprisingly tender, while at the same a bit biting about some dumb shit we usually do to get through our youth. The song sounds fuller, largely due to the three-piece trying their hand at a four-piece without any additional person. Hekt learned guitar in addition to playing bass. It’s a smart, pop punk tune—jaunty and cheeky, almost, with an earnest and infectious chorus that is absolutely sure to get stuck in your head.

Hekt also tells me that the songs on Fixed Ideals often deal, too, with the ways people can disappoint you—rather, "how it feels when people choose to let us down." Which brings me back to literature. Books, like music, help us sort through the knotted mess that is the human existence. Plath wrote of her own internal turmoil, both inherited and besieged upon her; of the ways, the world and the people in it confused her or wanted to minimize her. Muncie Girls' "Falling Down,” and Fixed Ideals as a whole, tap into that same energy too but the feeling is inherently positive in the end. When it feels like the world is letting you down, there is, blissfully, somehow a great deal of comfort knowing you’re not alone with that and that there are resources to help you figure it out.

Sarah reads. A lot. Follow her on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Noisey US.

For a few weeks of the year, you can get a slice of Trinidad in Jamaica. Through the annual Jamaica Carnival, an event that replicates Carnival in Trinidad while still integrating aspects of Jamaican culture, soca heads, carnival chasers and feterans from around the world make their way to the island in April for unlimited bouts of wining, jabbing and revelry. For a night Sabina Park, in the nation’s capital, Kingston, was host to the Carnival Thursday festivities, an amalgamation of soca, dancehall and a generous open bar. TRIBE: Ignite, a travelling party borne of Trinidadian mas camp TRIBE—the group of people who design and create theme-based costumes for Carnival—had arranged a Caribbean music lover’s dream lineup that included Kes the Band, Machel Montano, Ding Dong, Alison Hinds and Nailah Blackman. She came out in bold, red blazer, with electrifyingly contagious energy, performing hits from the current soca season, one of them being ‘Baila Mami’.

Though Blackman has years of experience as an artist, and given that fact that she’s (literally) soca royalty, her foray into the limelight was by way of a collaborative single for 2017 Carnival, "Workout," which was made in part with lead singer Kees Dieffenthaller of Kes the Band. In 2016, Dieffenthaller saw the artist performing her single "Cigarettes" on YouTube (the video has since been deleted) and they both created "Workout" to be entered into last year’s International Soca Monarch: Trinidad’s annual, highly competitive music showcase where winners receive a cash prize, the title of best soca record, bragging rights and a high probability of a successful music career. Though the record moved on to the finals, it did not win, but afforded the artist an immense amount of exposure and opportunities. Blackman, who was only 19 at the time, had gone through a major shift in a short amount of time, having worked with various producers when she was 15, meeting her current manager/producer, Anson Soverall, at 17, and then performing during Trinidad Carnival alongside a soca behemoth like Kes two years later. “It was only late 2016 when I was like, ‘I really wanna do sokah’ and that was when ‘Workout’ was born the following year for carnival. Everything changed cause...I used to perform a lot in wine bars and in very intimate settings in Trinidad,” she shares with me. For Blackman, it’s beyond just doing soca. It’s about coming to terms with a destiny she feels compelled to fulfill.

The Blackman name is well-known in soca circles: Calypsonian powerhouse Abbi Blackman, who is Nailah’s mother, soca artist Marge Blackman, is Nailah’s aunt and producer Isaac Blackman, Nailah’s uncle, are just few names on a long list of heavy-hitters that she shares a bloodline with. It’s all in the family for the Blackmans, and that’s evident in the music they produce with and amongst one another. For example, the artist explains that her aunt teamed up with consecutive three-time International Soca Monarch winner, Aaron “Voice” St. Louis, to create "Full of Vibe," which was produced by her uncle. The family works collaboratively and their dynamic shines through by way of how lovingly she speaks about the relationship she has with her mom. “She’d always want to write my song before I wrote my own songs. She would make my outfits, write my [music], teach me my performance and [was] basically my life coach in general”, she laughs. “There are so many moments. I just don’t know where to choose from but she was just so involved in everything that I did music-wise”.

Nailah sees her mom’s history as an artist as inspiring. At just 14 years old, Abbi Blackman won the National Calypso Queen contest with her record "Young and Moving On," except no one knew she was that young. She eagerly snuck into the contest by telling organizers she was much older but had a desire to showcase her talent. That she did and has had a successful music career since. Nailah chuckles while sharing, as this is one of her favourite memories of her mother.

On the day that we speak, she's landed in Tampa Bay to perform at the city’s Carnival and had flown from New York where she performed on a cruise alongside fellow T & T artist, Patrice Roberts. Tampa will be a brief stop before she makes her way back into the Caribbean and then to California to perform at Hollywood Carnival and to continue the rest of her tour. It’s been non-stop for the artist, especially with the success of ‘Workout’, but she has a larger goal in mind, and it’s one that’s informed by her late grandfather, Calypsonian legend and father of soca/sokah, Garfield “Lord Shorty” Blackman, affectionately known as Ras Shorty I.

Blackman shares her family history with me. Historically, Trinidad and Tobago’s primary demographics have been comprised of Afro and Indo-folk. Her grandfather, who was the son of an Afro-Barbadian and Indo-African woman, grew up in Lengua Village, a town in southern Trinidad populated by many Indo-Trinidadians, who were descendants of the country’s indentured labourers. Her grandfather had always been involved in music and Blackman shares, “He had been thinking about sokah music from before he even knew that it was sokah music, for so long.” Though he felt connected to his Afro and Indo roots, he still felt isolated because of the huge racial divide in the country and in his immediate predominantly Indo community. In addition, Jamaican reggae music as well as soul and R&B from the U.S began to popularize among the country’s young people. While he was successful with Calypso, he felt like there was still a better way of engaging and empowering Trinbago’s youth and thought music would be a good way to draw on sounds from the two cultural groups. Nailah’s tone changes, likely adopting the same frustrations her grandfather took on, as she shares the visions he had for the genre. Explaining her grandfather’s desire for unity, she says, “He wanted to make a music that was completely Trinidad and he called it ‘sokah’ because it is the soul of calypso, and the ‘-kah’ represented ‘divine’ in Hindi. K-A-H, that’s how it was spelled. So he called it sokah: S-O-K-A-H. ” An interview with Lord Shorty in 1997 also mentions the etymology of the word, ‘-kah’, being the first letter of the Indian alphabet.

Nailah states he made music for about nine years until he came out with his 1974 album, Endless Vibrations. This body of work is considered a canon in soca music, with Shorty’s fusion of calypso and Indian music and traditional instruments. “That was when he first launched sokah as a sound, as a genre and he explained the breakdown of everything in that album.” She sings a line from the single that shares the same name of the album, “ Change the musical structure make the soca sweeter jouvert morning...he was basically telling everybody to get on this new thing. This is the new calypso.”

Of course this was met with some resistance, however when another artist, Lord Kitchener came out with his 1976 hit, "Sugar Bum Bum," there was a shift. According to Blackman, once Kitchener started to do it, everyone did as well. There has been much tensions regarding the origins of the genre and many folks discredit the work of Lord Shorty but in a 1979 interview in Carnival Magazine, he is quoted saying, “I came up with the name [sokah]. I invented [sokah]. And I never spelt it s-o-c-a. It was s-o-k-a-h to reflect the East Indian influence.” Nailah shares that in an interview, a music journalist misspelled the word as s-o-c-a, which is how it is contemporarily referred to as. An additional explanation indicated that its etymology is from the s-o of the word ‘soul’ and the ‘c-a’ of the word ‘calypso’, from the understanding that “soca is the soul of calypso.”

With a much more demure mood, Blackman mentions, “Everybody started claiming that it was them who had did it and he just got so disheartened by it that he was like, 'You know what? Who God bless, no man curse,' and he just moved away from it all and changed his life.” Lord Shorty had a textured life in his youth, to say the least, but in the late 70s looked towards religion as a means for change. In addition to everything that had been going on in his music world, his best friend and frequent collaborator, Maestro, had died in a car crash. To heal, Lord Shorty moved to the remote hills of Piparo with his wife Claudette and 14 children, changed his name to Ras Shorty I and began to make more spiritual music—blending soca and gospel to create the genre Jamoo—until he died at age 58 in 2000 from bone cancer.

Nailah dotes on the aspirations of her grandfather saying, “When people carried on doing sokah, yeah, he was proud. He wanted them to do it [but] he didn’t like the way it was being done...they made it all about Carnival and all about wine and jam and he just felt like it was more than that. It had more substance and it was supposed to be international and it wasn’t. It stayed in the Caribbean circuit for a long time...he always felt like sokah music is an international music.”

Perhaps Nailah has the opportunity to carry the mantle of her family and grandfather. She was recently nominated in BET’s Viewer’s Choice: Best New International Act category, and though she did not win, she is excited about the possibilities of a much broader reach having this newly-found exposure. As she works alongside her manager, Anson, they have a global goal in mind that allows soca to be seen and heard beyond the Caribbean region and its far reaching diaspora. She states, “Anson and I, our goal when doing sokah was to make it known as an actual genre, as an international sound of music.”

As for her legacy, she sees herself as a cultural ambassador and takes responsibility as a role model to youth very seriously, especially through her efforts via Lah Lah Land. She’s worked on collaborating with other Caribbean artists, like her “Baddish” record with dancehall princess, Shenseea, in their and her newest record, an Anson-produced remix of her "Dangerous Boy" track, featuring reggae superstar, Tarrus Riley. Directed by Wade Roden, the colourful video follows the two artists in a around abandoned buildings until they end up at a night party.

Caribbean music has a tendency to flourish in its region and select regions abroad and for brief moments, make itself known in mainstream culture. I believe Nailah wants to change that. Soca is still a young genre and its potential for growth has no limits. Before we leave, she says something that resonates with me, “Once you kill a dream, you kill potential.” In every way, Nailah is a dreamer who had no desire to stay within what’s familiar. For her, allowing soca to be a mainstay is not just part of her responsibility as an artist, it is her fate.

Watch the premiere of "Dangerous Boy (Remix)," featuring Tarrus Riley on TIDAL; the first video available for both members and non-members.

Sharine Taylor is obnoxiously Jamaican, however she is temporarily politically Trinidadian until further notice. Follow her on Twitter .

This article originally appeared on Noisey CA.

It’s 11:30PM on a Thursday night at legendary east London club Metropolis, and Beyonce and Bollywood music are blaring out the speakers at exactly the same time.

Around 200 people – mostly 20-something queer people and young creatives, dressed in everything from traditional Indian attire to streetwear – have gathered on the dancefloor for ‘Hungama’, east London’s newest – and currently only – gay Bollywood night. While a significant proportion who’ve turned up are South Asian, the attendees appear to span a host of ethnicities, nationalities, faiths and styles. In other words, it feels like an inherently inclusive space, whatever angle you’re coming from.

The brainchild of London-based fashion and art curator Ryan Lanji, Hungama – which loosely translates to ‘chaos’ or ‘uproar’ in Urdu – was born after he noticed the lack of spaces and club nights allowing queer South Asian people the chance for their culture and sexuality to seamlessly co-exist. It’s also one of the only events in London to bring queer Asians together with the rest of the LGBTQ+ community, as they aren’t always one and the same.

“When I first moved to London eight years ago, I was very shaken in [LGBTQ+] spaces,” Ryan explains when I manage to grab a spare moment to chat with him by the bar. The club is heaving at this point, and we find ourselves having to shout over the music. “When you go to LGBTQ club nights, they can sometimes be fetishitic or kinky,” he continues. “The culture is very experiential and experimental. But this can be jarring for someone who’s grown up hiding who they are from their family, only to be thrust into a world where you can be anything you want.”

Hungama, then, is supposed to be the perfect “middle ground,” as Ryan tells me. “It gives people a stepping stone to come into this community. I think it allows people to think they haven’t run from their culture. I can only imagine someone who’s more reserved than me feeling completely out of depth and then becoming isolated because they’ve left their culture for trying to be who they are, then found themselves at the epicentre of debauchery, which some of the LGBTQ+ landscape can feel like.”

But this night feels like a melting pot of both worlds. Bollywood videos play on giant screens as 90s pop and hip-hop hits blare out nearby speakers. Attendees gyrate theatrically on poles and drag queens saunter around the room in 7-inch platforms. At midnight, dancer Raheem Mir takes to the stage in traditional attire, performing a classic Indian dance routine, with the crowd whooping and dancing throughout. In many ways, the frenetic yet celebratory energy actually feels of those seemingly never-ending Indian weddings, while also being tied to what you’d usually find at queer nights across the city. And the result feels pretty freeing.

“I used to be obsessed with Bollywood music but I’d left it to the wayside,” Ryan tells me, speaking about how it often feels like queer South Asians have to leave their culture behind once they come out. Ultimately, he hopes that attendees – a significant proportion of whom have come with their significant others – can dance to the music they grew up with alongside throwback chart hits, only this time with “our boyfriends or girlfriends and not wonder if we’ll ever get the chance to be loved for ourselves.” But he’s also keen to stress that Hungama is just like any other night in that it’s a place to let loose. “The night itself has organically become a party that celebrates being you, who you are, who you love and who you want to be.”

This approach is clearly working. The sticky dance-floor is heaving as it approaches 1:30AM, with no signs of slowing down. And as the night progresses, the crowd gets even more flamboyant, with dancers gyrating across the club space, sweat sticking to the walls and make-up dripping down faces. The rhetoric generally goes that nightlife in the capital – especially queer nightlife – is dead, but tonight, for a moment at least, that feels kind of off-the-mark.

A recent survey from Stonewall found that 51% of people of colour experience racism in LGBTQ+ communities, showing that it’s not nearly as progressive as it seems to an outsider. In a climate where anti-immigrant racism and Islamophobia – already rife in public life – persists in the LGBTQ+ community, it stands to reason that queer PoC like Ryan might choose to sacrifice their culture to come out. For many of the attendees I speak to tonight, it’s not uncommon.

“I would have killed to have gone somewhere like this growing up,” musician Leo Kalyan – who identifies as a gay Pakistani Muslim – tells me when we meet in the smoking area. “I was that person who thought they had to pick between their sexuality and culture. But our culture and sexuality don’t have to be mutually exclusive – they can come together. They can bond to create something new and futuristic.”

Sadek Ahmed – who identifies as a Bengali Muslim – echoes this sentiment. “You have all these queer nights but you don’t have one specialised to South Asians. You sort of feel subsided,” he sighs. But Hungama fuses the most vibrant aspects of his culture and sexuality, which led him here tonight. “Both the queer scene and Bollywood are flamboyant and the fact that they’re coming together is amazing. It’s flamboyance times a million!”

Right now, Hungama seems to be part of a new wave of third generation South Asians redefining their self-image and celebrating the multiplicities of their identities. Burnt Roti Magazine, for instance, is a magazine centred on non-binary identities and bisexuality from a South Asian perspective, and they recently celebrated their third issue. Meanwhile, earlier this month, LGBTQ+ charity Imaan played host to the Big Gay Iftaar, bringing both the mainstream Muslim community together with its queer counterparts to observe Ramadan.

This is all cause for celebration. But I can’t help but think it’s a shame that events like this are still few and far between, especially for queer Asian people outside London, where nothing like this exists. On the way out, I ask Ryan if he would consider expanding the night to other UK cities like Birmingham, home to some of Britain’s biggest South Asian diasporic communities. “It would be nice to provide a place of fun and a place of belonging,” Ryan affirms in answer to my question. “You don’t have to be an ‘other’. You can just be you. There’ll be people out there who’ll come support that.”

Although Hungama serves as a refuge for queer Asians, Ryan insists that the night transcends beyond being simply a queer brown space: “it’s about people coming together unconditionally and accepting each other.”

You can follow Salma on Twitter and Bekky on Instagram.

This article originally appeared on Noisey UK.

I'd half-planned to post this on July 4 alongside a screed on America's colonial, imperialist, genocidal shames—but I'm on fucking vacation until the 10th, so decided to just share it with you as-is, and hope that you utilize Secret Cutter's wildly aggressive extreme metal sickness as the soundtrack to your block party or I.C.E. blockade.

There is something just so deliciously satisfying about this kind of willful genre-fucking; grind/sludge is sort of like powerviolence's bitter, heavier older brother, who's spent a bit more time studying chord progressions, pondering dynamics, and frying his brain, but is still an absolute miserable bastard. Pennsylvania trio Secret Cutter have mastered the style, which they make a point of shoving in your face on their ridiculously vicious new album, Quantum Eraser.

Deathwish Inc. and Holy Roar have teamed up to distribute the record in their respective territories come July 6, and I've got to say, it's probably the outright heaviest thing I've heard all year; they blast out gut punch after gut punch on songs like "4 1/2" and "Mantis" (which reminds me a bit of Lord Mantis, ironically enough) and shovel in malevolent grooves when the mood strikes. It rules.

Quantum Eraser was recorded by drummer Jared Stimpfl at Captured Recordings Studio (Jesus Piece, Ultra Mantis Black), mastered by Brad Boatright at Audiosiege (Integrity, Obituary), and completed with cover art by Thomas Hooper (Neurosis, Converge). Listen below, and preorder the physical jawn here.

Catch Secret Cutter live if you can:
7/13/2018 Lucky 13 Saloon – Brooklyn, NY w/ Hell To Pay, Phantom Pain
8/17/2018 The Trocadero (Upstairs) – Philadelphia, PA w/ Enemy Soil, Congenital Death

Kim Kelly is technically on vacation until July 10 but will still be posting bullshit on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Noisey US.

Lil Uzi Vert may have driven mainstream emo-rap into its darkest aesthetic recesses, but that doesn't mean he can stop grinning. Even in the video for "XO Tour Llif3," a clip that's set somewhere between a seance and a murder scene, he beams when he mimes "all my friends are dead." So in he and Young Thug's Occult-tinged, Twin Peaks-referencing new video for "Up," which you can watch at the top of the page, the really uneasy scenes only last a minute or so. Thugger curls his lip, prowls around a velvet-draped room, pays no attention to the checkerboard-painted, Black Lodge figures who flank him in a black and white-lined hallway. And then Uzi shows up, dressed in white shorts and a white cardigan, looking like he's been waiting all week to play a game of tennis. Undead dancers lay hands on him, but he just does a little shimmy towards the ceiling; he pretends to be confused by counting; he's just altogether thrilled to be hanging out with demons, because demons might want to party too. It's almost enough to distract a person from Young Thug's outfits here, but not quite—the highlight is a sequined rainbow zip-up that he dons towards the end.

Follow Alex Robert Ross on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Noisey US.

Twenty-three-year-old London-born R&B singer Ella Mai is slowly turning into a star in the US. She's signed to DJ Mustard's 10 Summers label, she's got an slinky and effervescent throwback pop collaboration with Ty Dolla $ign in her catalog, and her latest single "Boo'd Up" is currently sitting between Drake's "Nice for What" and Ariana Grande's "No Tears Left to Cry" on the Billboard Hot 100. But the "Boo'd Up" remix, released last night, is one of the surest statements yet that she's breaking through. It features Nicki Minaj and Quavo, pop-rap royalty, two artists who can almost guarantee a rising star a glimpse at a global breakthrough. And while it obviously lacks the effortless charm of the original, it does have Quavo getting romantic, in his way: "Let you on my life, get a sneak peek / Listen to my heart go beep-beep / When we boo'd up, she keep me out the street-streets / Hit it back-to-back, make me call her repeat."

Listen to the Boo'd Up remix at the top of the page.

Follow Alex Robert Ross on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Noisey US.

At the top of the year, Justin Timberlake drew from rural American imagery for his album Man of the Woods, resulting in lackluster sales by his lofty standards and an online discourse on white privilege. He now seems to be pulling a complete aesthetic 180 with his new single "SoulMate," a song so breezy and percolating that it sounds like a bottle of light craft beer learned how to sing and arrange music in Pro Tools.

The track's just about a one-night stand, seemingly set in the unidentified tropical locale pictured on the single art (it was recorded in the Bahamas, apparently). More important is the overall briskness of the song, so full of vibes that it basically evaporates. Also, that JT has seemingly abandoned further promoting Man of the Woods with any other singles in favour of dropping an unrelated, naked bid for Song of the Summer. It's a strong attempt, but there is no Bad Bunny or J Balvin on here, so let's see how it does. Listen to "SoulMate" above.

This article originally appeared on Noisey CA.

Jimmy Wopo's team have released a new single from the late Pittsburgh rapper, who was shot and killed last month. "Lane Life," which you can listen to above, is the first song from a full posthumous release, Muney Lane Muzik 2, which is set to come out later in the summer.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported last week that Wopo had stacks of new music ready for release before his death. Muney Lane Muzik 2, a Sonny Digital collaboration called Jimmy Digital were both set to go, as well as 50 other new songs.

Watch the video for "Lane Life" at the top of the page.

Follow Alex Robert Ross on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Noisey US.

Colonialism makes a good effort to stamp out any traces of First Nations people. The ongoing colonial project sees Indigenous people as a threat to its success, and for a queer black woman like Mojo Juju, this hostility is doubled. On her new single, the Naarm-based artist––born Mojo Ruiz de Luzuriaga––pushes back. "Native Tongue", which we're premiering today, is a powerful indictment of the structures that have tried to take Mojo Juju's culture away from her.

"My great granddaddy was Wiradjuri/ My father came here from the Philippine/ It's where I live, it's where I wanna be/ But you make me feel so ill at ease", she sings, anger and pain coursing through her patinaed voice. It's a quiet, haunted track that pushes to a thrilling, screeching finale, aided by backing vocals from the Pasefika Vitoria Choir and a warped, abrasive beat from Joel Ma, aka Joelistics. "Every time you cut me down I'm gonna come back fierce/ The time is through for being nice/ Let's call it what it is", she rages.

"Native Tongue", as much as it is a fighting song, is also one rooted in community and family. "I wrote this song about my own experience, but I also wrote it hoping that it might reach other mixed race and/or Indigenous people who have longed for deeper connection to their culture," Mojo Juju says of the track. "My Dad speaks Tagalog, Ilonggo, Spanish and English, but growing up we only ever spoke English in our home. I would hear him talking to his family on the phone, a mash up of all these languages and I thought it sounded really cool, but it never dawned on me until I was older, exactly how much I was missing out on.

"I also remember as a teenager, my Mum researching her family history in an effort to learn more about her Grandfather and her Wiradjuri heritage. Now as an adult, I understand her urge to know more about her roots and lament the fact that I don’t speak the languages of my forebears."

"Native Tongue" is the title track of Mojo Juju's upcoming album, out August 24th through ABC Music/Universal. Watch the song's stunning video, featuring Indigenous dance group Djuki Mala, below.

Mojo Juju Upcoming Shows:
JULY 6 –– NOCTURNAL, MELBOURNE MUSEUM (with Thelma Plum, Kaiit and Sovereign Trax)
AUGUST 8 – 11 –– ARTS CENTRE MELBOURNE

Shaad D'Souza is Noisey's Australian editor. Follow him on Twitter.