It's been over two years since we entered the world of "Owls." In our last adventure, the 6 God had a bout with Eminem (and, weirdly, Joe Budden). Now, we return to our hero after the release of 'Scorpion,' a project that's longer than the 'Lion King,' and meet a the boy/man who is now ready to introduce the world to his son, thanks to Pusha T. Read parts one, two, and three of "Owls: A Drake Story."

*Today, we find the light-skinned Keith Sweat in the OVO studios, a smile beaming across his face. His son Adonis watches him from a playpen as he paces around in front of him. 40 and PartyNextDoor sit on different couches and use there phones, hoping Drake won't speak for a while longer.*

Drake: A toast, my good men, to the successful release of another OVO classic. Every night before I lay my head on literally the silkest pillowcase ever made, I imagine life without the broskis and immediately get depressed.
40: No problem, fam.
PND: Thanks, I guess.
Adonis: Dadadadadaaaa
Drake: That's right. Your dada is the king of North America.
Drake: Wait, Party, what do you mean "I guess"?
PND: I mean, a successful release? That Pusha T thing wasn't a success.
Drake: *chuckles* It wasn't? What has Pusha T done since people stopped asking him about my kid? Go back under Kanye's titties, probably.
PND: But Sophie, dude. Have you seen her paintings?
Drake: Oh god, never.
PND: My nigga, you should have. You might not have nut in her.

*Drake picks up Adonis*

Drake: Please, not in front of my son, man. This is why I was hiding the world from him.
40: Yo, Tiffany Haddish talked about that time you stood her up on Jada Pinkett Smith's facebook show.
Drake: The one that's like everyday struggle for the Oprah Winfrey Network? Man, come on. How is it standing her up if I told her I was cancelling? Let me see, jeez.

*Drake reads the article in 40s phone*

Drake: Wow, so I made her miss out on a bag, huh? Wait a second.

*Drake puts Adonis in a playpen before making a call on his phone. He clears his throat when someone picks up.*

Drake: Tiff! How are you.
Tiffany: I knew you was gonna call me. What you want?
Drake: I just wanted to see how you were doing. We still gotta reschedule that dinner date.
Tiff: Whatever. You act like you the first nigga to stand me up because he had to go take care of a son he didn't tell anybody about.
Drake: See, haha, this is why you're a comedian.
Tiffany: I wasn't being funny. We can reschedule the date, but I want a dick pic.
Drake: Tiffany, I'm a father, now. That's a poor example to set, you know?
Tiffany: I'm not gonna show the picture to your son or something. So you don't have no meat pics sitting in your phone?
Drake: This is inappropriate really. I'm uncomfortable.
Tiffany: You don't wanna go to dinner with me then because ima jump on your damn face.
Drake: *blushes* Okay, wow, let's take a step back here. We can go to dinner and we'll discuss all of that stuff. I sincerely apologize if I disrespected you or hurt your feelings.
Tiffany: *laughs heartily* Oh, goodness. Imagine my feelings being hurt by a light-skinned man. Nigga, you the comedian.
Drake: Yeah, hahaha. That's great to hear from a fellow SNL host.
Tiffany: Yeah, we fellows alright. How about ima give you my schedule and you let me know when you get a babysitter.
Drake: Haaa, that works.
Tiffany: Alright, bye. You distracting me from getting my feet licked.
Drake: Okay, buh-bye.

*Drake hangs up and hands Adonis his phone*

Drake: I think I'm going to cancel again.
40: Yeah, she's dating Common anyway.
Drake: Gross.
PND: You should probably settle down, fam. Getting cuffed is hot now. You saw Jay and Beyonce album.
Drake: Oh, the one where she talks about forgiving him for cheating? Yeah, that's what the streets want.
PND: I mean, technically Push already brought the drama out in the open. Side B is a good start, but you should embrace the family part.
Drake: Not with Sophie, though.
PND: No, not her.
Drake: Hmm, I know who to call.

*Drake takes his phone back from Adonis and wipes the spit off with his OVO shirt. He makes a phone call and waits pensively.*

Drake: Yo, Fewch. What's good, broski?
Future: Shit, nigga. Sipping muddy allat shit youknowmahwave nigga.
Drake: Ay man, I wanted to ask for advice.
Future: About bitches?
Drake: . . . Technically. About kids.
Future: I don't know shit about kids, man.
Drake: That's it. Teach me how to not care.
Future: Care about what?
Drake: My kid.
Future: You got a kid?
Drake: Yes. I. . . You didn't listen to Scorpion?
Future: Nigga how imagihyou advice about kids?
Drake: Because you have kids.
Future: Oh, shit. . . Heh. . . Yeah, sometimes. Shit, nigga, I don't know. I be sending money to em, they mamas leave me alone, shit go swimmingly. A nigga be swimming.
Drake: So basically what I've been doing?
Future: You be rapping about him and shit though. You dug a hole. Shoulda ignored it.
Drake: Drat.
Future: Yeah, you need to goan head raise him. Khaled do that shit, it look fun.
Drake: You know what, Khaled and Asahd do have fun.

*Drake looks at his son like he's a puppy or something*

Drake: You're right, man. Ima talk to you later.
Future: Don't rush.

*Drake hangs up his phone and picks his son up. He examines him like he just took him out of the packaging*

Drake: I'm a dad, you guys.
PND: Nigga, we knew since last year.
Drake: Yeah, but this time Im for real real. Not for play play.
Drake: 40, get some beats ready, I think that's gonna be a song.

*Drake's phone buzzes in his pocket and he answers it without looking*

Drake: The radiant owl of the six, at your service.
Pusha T: "I'm light-skinned but I'm still a dark nigga"? Really, Aubrey?
Drake: Terrence. I can't believe you called before paying my invoice.
Pusha T: I wanted to congratulate you on your new album. You showed so much growth. You've matured. I bet your holding your son right now.

*Drake hands Adonis to PartyNextDoor*

Drake: I wish, but I'm too busy embracing success. I see your recent hug with success was quite brief. What was it called? Indy 500?
Pusha T: That's adorable. Anyway, Kanye wanted to know if you're still sending those reference tracks over.
Drake: For "Calabasas Angels" and "Russell Simmons is Innocent"? Yeah, I'm sending them.
Pusha T: He's not really gonna name it that. The Russell Simmon one.
Drake: Those were the file names.
Pusha T: Eughck. But in a bad way. Look, man. No hard feelings with the Adidon thing but Adidas is for GOOD Music. You should go to Under Armour or some shit.
Drake: Are you serious?
Pusha T: It's not chess, it's jenga.
Drake: That doesn't even make. . . You know what, just tell me one thing: How did you find out about it?
Pusha T: Oh, your boy Abel told me everything.
Drake: Wow. Where do you even see him?
Pusha T: You could say we share common interests. We have a mutually beneficial friendship. La cosa nostra. Mi casa su casa. Medellin. Colombia. Uruguay. Oaxaca.
Drake: Yes, coke, I get it.
Pusha T: It was nice chatting with you, Adonis Sr. but I have a label to run. Valee just got asked for 37 new features and Desiigner is shooting a video in an abandoned toys r us.
Drake: Aw, man, remember when people cared about your features? They would be like "Oh, man, I wonder what this verse will be about!"
Pusha T: Go change your bastard.

*Pusha T hangs up in Drake's ear. Drake makes an angry Amy Poehler face at the phone*

Drake: Virginia Williams!
40: I don't think he heard you.
Drake: Please tell me what else you think, Noah. Since we're sharing thoughts, please give me more of them.
PND: So. . . I kinda want to hear that Russell Simmons joint.
Drake: . . . No you don't. I promise.

This article originally appeared on Noisey US.

Megan Mitchell has recently been working as an archivist at a medical library, cataloging audio recordings of the human body doing things that the human brain only deals with passively. She's been listening to beating hearts and wheezing lungs, clips that sound jarring out of context. She's downloaded them all, and she plans to use them as foundations for her compositions in the future. "Even if you're working with the most dull subject matter, you're going to come across something that surprises you and reengages your intellectual fervor for whatever it is you're dealing with," she says over the phone from her home in Oakland as something metallic clanks in the background.

What engages Mitchell is decay. Disambiguation, her debut album as Cruel Diagonals (premiering below), is a captivatingly eerie wash of experimental electronic music. Each of its radon-heavy songs grew out of field recordings that Mitchell captured in the Pacific Northwest, usually by "activating the space," banging on a rusting sheet or swiping at a metal plate. The sounds that thrum through the tracks were recorded in abandoned environments—partly because they provide her with more interesting acoustics, partly because she got used to them growing up near a naval base in Alameda, California. On Disambiguation, noises either crawl into the mix and leave before the listener has a chance to guess at their origins, or they mingle to the point that focusing on anything else is impossible.

Mitchell sometimes splices these snippets of decomposition into a rhythm, but if there's "something really interesting tonally," she uses it as a "jumping-off point" for a melody. A classically trained vocalist, she has a crystalline voice that wouldn't sound out of place at a midnight mass. And while she's been "trying find a way to challenge myself so I don't just sound pretty," she doesn't augment her voice here. Instead she uses it as a disruptive force, swirling around diminished minor keys. Mitchell's presence only ever makes a passage more disquieting. Dave Segal writes in the liner notes that the record "could only constitute pop in a world where Simone De Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre appear on late-night TV talk shows." But if Jimmy Fallon reanimated the dead, Mitchell's music would still be oblique.

Lonely, too. "Enmeshed" is almost atonally placid, briefly broken up by an insistent rhythm at the front of the mix, before it falls into 20 seconds of silence. The album closes with a spoken-word section that Mitchell delivers cold and despairing: "I give myself / It isn't enough / Submission by omission." Mitchell was responding to "an extreme feeling of alienation, of just dealing with depression." She says that she has this "detached necessity[...] this compulsion to retreat and to not be part of a larger community, because I find it exhausting."

But even when it seems discordant, Disambiguation is searching for some sort of order. The interplay between her voice and the decay beneath it is one half-resolution. "It was my attempt at trying to make sense of incorporating these really metallic, jarring, grainy, lo-fi textures and field recordings with my voice, [and] kind of meeting in the middle" she says. That ideal props the album up thematically. In library sciences, "disambiguation" is the process used to differentiate between two homonyms. It's a way of defining a term (or a person) and avoiding any confusion. In the wake of the presidential election, that became a political endeavor. "I was really trying to hone in on the disambiguation project as a non-library sciences term," she says. "As an ability to sort out what makes sense or what is fact,' whatever that even means any more, versus straight-up lies."

Still, this isn't a direct record. Mitchell's lyrics are often inaudible, and when the rhythms do come together on, say, the mottled and muted techno of "Render Arcane," they're quietly sinister rather than furious. "I think that, in itself, the tension that exists in the sonic elements of the album are reflective of the tensions that I was feeling at the time of composing it as well. It's a sense-making thing."

This is part of what Mitchell describes as a "Type A compulsion to curate things." Since graduating with a master's degree in Library and Information Sciences from the University of Washington, she's worked as the audio archivist for Randall Dunn (a founding member of Masters of Bukkake as well as a producer for Sunn O))), Boris, and Earth), and she's spent the last three years running Many Many Women, an index of over 1000 non-male musicians who create avant-garde, improvised, and unconventional music. She's about to work on fleshing out her research essay about "a more equitable music canonization," arguing that archivists should "actively seek marginalized and underrepresented artists for inclusion in curated music collections." Mitchell is always organizing, always reworking and reanalyzing.

It's here that Cruel Diagonals really intersects with Megan Mitchell the archivist. "What strikes me as being most fascinating and intellectually engaging is that the material is endless, right? There's some statistic out there that says we'll never get through even the backlog of material we've created as humankind, which should be pretty obvious. It's just that it's constant." So are the sounds she can pull out of an abandoned building. It's just a matter of listening to them properly.

Follow Alex Robert Ross on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Noisey US.

The great thing about music not making sense anymore is that we have underground figures collaborating with mainstream giants on the regular. Grimes wrote for Rihanna, while Tame Impala's Kevin Parker has now become an in-demand hip-hop collaborator. You can add Oneohtrix Point Never's Daniel Lopatin to that list, as he was floating ideas to Usher back in 2016. The song never got made, but now the demo that Lopatin worked has now surfaced, courtesy of the artist himself.

Via Twitter, Lopatin has provided a link to a SendSpace download of the demo file. It turns out that it's an early version of "The Station," the electro-grunge highlight off the latest OPN album Age Of. The key difference is that instead of Lopatin's vocals, there's a synth lead laying out what Usher would have been singing. Knowing that this was proposed for one of R&B's all-time greats actually makes the final song even weirder, as it's wild to imagine Usher's famous voice gliding over this sparse, dystopian soundscape. You can download the demo below and find Lopatin's tweet providing background info.

Phil is on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Noisey CA.

Streaming king Drake has beaten The Beatles' record for the most songs in the Billboard Hot 100 top ten at any given time. In the latest chart––the first since the release of Scorpion, Drake's new album––a whopping seven Drake tracks make appearances in the chart's top ten.

At the top of the chart, "Nice For What" returns to number one, while "Nonstop", "God's Plan", "In My Feelings", "I'm Upset", "Emotionless" and "Don't Matter To Me" populate the rest of the chart. Of those tracks, "Nonstop", "In My Feelings", "Emotionless", and "Don't Matter To Me" are making their debuts.

This is cool and all, but let's be real here: Without Spotify's bonkers Drake-mania over the last week, there's probably no way Drake would have all these top-10 singles. Of course, by the same token, you could say that there was less competition back when the Beatles were making music, and that without radio pluggers and label influence shaping the charts, they wouldn't have their top tens. I guess the real winner here is industry corruption!

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

Whitney Houston’s singing voice, at its peak, could consistently knock you back. But when it drifts out, disembodied, at the start of Whitney—Kevin Macdonald’s new documentary on her life, out last Friday—it slices to the bone. You hear her talking, as though absentmindedly. “I’m always running from this giant; I’m always running from this big man,” she says. “I know I can make it. My mother always says, ‘well you know, that’s nothing but the devil. He’s just trying to get you. He just wants your soul.’” At this point she laughs, and the dread of her unknowing premonition about the end of her life jars against her momentary glee. “And in a sense it’s true. It’s been several times the devil has tried to get me. But he never gets me. And it’s funny: when I wake up, I’m always exhausted from running.”

By now, every possible angle on Whitney’s demise has been poked at and picked over. Her drug use had turned into a punchline before she died. People squawked “crack is wack” on school playgrounds, imitating the now-infamous quote from her shaky Diane Sawyer interview in 2002. She turned into a meme in death, too. Weeks before Macdonald’s Whitney reached cinemas last weekend, Kanye West reportedly paid $85,000 to use a 2006 paparazzi shot of drugs paraphernalia strewn around the sink in Houston’s bathroom as the cover art for Pusha T’s Daytona album. In all of these narratives, Houston became yet another model of the “female tragic icon” form. It broadly invalidates those women’s work, using the trajectory of their success or the weight of their talent as a ramp up towards breathtaking decline.

It would be interesting, wouldn’t it, for a film about a woman artist to spend a substantial amount of time on her creative output. Whitney does some of that. It impressively splices together unseen and intimate footage of Houston and her husband Bobby Brown, interviews with her family and staff, plus archive footage from her music videos, live performances, award show appearances, and so on. To be fair, it is tightly edited and intent on hammering home a story about what she meant as a black crossover American sweetheart in the 80s and 90s.

But besides a section devoted to the arrangement of Houston’s incredible (and yes, pre-recorded) “Star Spangled Banner” performance at the 1991 Super Bowl, most of her artistry is whipped past in flickering montages. Netflix’s What Happened Miss Simone, for example, didn’t do too badly in this respect. The 2015 film focused on Nina Simone’s studious work ethic and the years she spent pushing herself as a classical pianist in the face of a deeply racist society that doubted her accomplishments, before diving into the murk of her mental health struggles. But Simone, a legend as she was, was never strictly a pop artist along the lines of someone like Houston.

We’ve already written about how Nick Broomfield’s 2017 Whitney documentary, Whitney: Can I Be Me illuminates the gendered mindfuck of the pop industry (see also: Asif Kapadia’s Amy, distributed by the same production company as Whitney). Women in pop are built up to be torn down in a way that doesn’t allow them to be messy, contradictory figures. And so Whitney will probably disappoint fans who wanted a documentary on her life that also digs deep into her music. Instead, you’ll walk away learning about: her inner struggles; her family’s homophobia in the face of her relationship with close friend and confidant Robyn Crawford (who’s spoken about, but not interviewed); a shocking revelation from her childhood that implicitly speaks to her choice to self-medicate with drugs as she grew older; her shortcomings as a mother who tried to raise her kid on tour. But, it becomes fairly clear that Macdonald didn’t know much about Houston before he made the doc. And I mean that he didn’t seem to know much about her music, in any way beyond an engagement with her hits and a sense of the scale of her stardom.

A recent interview Macdonald gave Simon Mayo, for BBC Radio 5 Live, flags this up. When producer Simon Chin asked Macdonald whether he’d want to make a film about Houston, Macdonald said his response was: “‘No, not really—I’m not that interested in Whitney Houston.” Chin convinced him to “meet a couple of people” at Sundance before discarding the idea. And when Macdonald met Whitney’s agent, Nicole David, she put forward the idea of Houston as an enigma, a person whose tragically short life hadn’t yet been explained. “It was that, simply, that made me think, ‘gosh, that’s an interesting story.’ Of course, it turned into a kind of investigation film and I suppose that’s the structure I’ve given it. In a way, I’m the psychotherapist/detective, you could say.” So, even considering how much of Houston’s life has already been trawled through —again, Broomfield’s doc came out last year—Macdonald’s goal appears to have been to dig deeper to try and uncover some sort of explanation for why Houston died young. With that, the idea of this being a celebration of her musical contributions floats softly out the window.

I’m in no position to pretend to be objective about this: Whitney Houston was the first pop star who truly captivated my attention as a child in the 90s. For gangly black girls like myself, she represented someone who looked like they could have grown up down the road (or in my case, in the suburbs of Botswana’s capital city, Gaborone) but sang like no one I’d ever heard. She was a vocalist, through and through—something that’s not really a focus in pop now, and wasn’t before she made it so. Plenty of newer pop singers in 2018 don’t have to be particularly breathtaking to be successful. Billie Eilish. Bebe Rexha. Rita Ora. They all sing in a certain style—some version of a breathiness and an affected way of chewing over vowels—but they don’t belt from their chests as Houston once did.

Though this film is hugely affecting, I can’t help but feel like it missed the opportunity to really unpack the significance of Houston’s artistry and ability. She was able to emote using her voice in a way that can be hard to put into words – and a documentary on her life could have attempted that in more depth. As an instrument, the voice can be downgraded as being somehow less important (see: unpacking what it means to be “just” a singer). Vocalists who don't also accompany themselves on guitar or piano or some sort of Real Instrument may be considered empty-headed puppets, while they wield an instrument inside their own bodies. Posthumously, Houston risks being undervalued in that way. Sure, she wasn’t a songwriter. But she was a one-of-a-kind vocalist. That’s why Whitney’s darkest moments arise from how drug use towards the end of her life shredded her voice into ribbons, making it crack and squeak where it once ran rich and thick from between her vocal cords.

Rather than focus on this, Whitney tries to work backwards to figure out how that voice was lost. But we’ll never know. We’ll never know which version of Houston’s story was true. We’ll never fully understand how a life with so much promise and talent ended so early. Sure, Macdonald can use interviews and old footage to trace a path to that answer, turning Houston’s life into some sort of slightly voyeuristic true crime pastiche. But fans can live with the unknowable, settling into the comfort of Houston’s voice instead. It smacks you over the head, as a bellowed long note or a quivering vibrato in her head voice. And that'll be the case, even as the questions about her mysteries swirl in your mind.

You can find Tshepo on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Noisey UK.

This article originally appeared on Noisey UK.

It started, as so many niche stories do nowadays, on Reddit. An r/hiphopheads post two weeks ago picked up on a resemblance between Childish Gambino’s recent massive single “This Is America” and lesser-known New Jersey rapper Jase Harley’s “American Pharoah.” The main issue? The fact that Harley’s single came out in March 2016. Soon, people on Twitter picked up on the subreddit thread. Suggestions of foul play and plagiarism spread, until Gambino’s manager Fam Udeorji posted a now-deleted tweet of his own: “‘This Is America’ is three years old, and we have ProTools files to prove it but fuck you and your moms.” Hit the brakes on the thinkpieces, then.

That this similarity even picked up so much attention tells its own story. Yes, people would want to latch onto a potential underdog tale, but there also seems to be a growing awareness, in people working outside the industry, of what constitutes plagiarism in music. High-profile cases boost a layman understanding of these complication – most notably the Marvin Gaye Estate versus Robin Thicke and Pharrell’s “Blurred Lines.” But these kinds of song similarities are more common than you might think. You’ll probably know a really basic example: TV ads that sound sort of like a hit – a White Stripes “Seven Nation Army” advertising a betting shop, that just does not sound like Jack White played guitar on it, for example.

Within what’s known as sync, the portion of the music industry that deals with putting music to picture, clients will often fall in love with a track that they can’t afford. And then they’ll ask for something that has similar elements. Sound-a-likes (songs that actively try to replicate the key elements of a song) are especially risky; Eminem successfully sued New Zealand’s National party last year for using a replica of “Lose Yourself” in a campaign video. After the clattering impact of Kanye’s Yeezus in 2013, “Got anything that sounds like ‘Black Skinhead’?” became such a common request that it's turned into something of an industry in-joke. It was the name of the UK sync community’s Fantasy Football League last season.

I spoke to four people working in sync to get their perspective and find out how they stay on-trend, while toeing that blurred line between being using the reference track as a starting point and plagiarising it.

Phil Stubbs – Director Of Sales and Marketing at BMG Production Music UK

Not crossing the line between influence and plagiarism is a hard thing to balance because we’re in the business of creating music for productions as opposed to charts. Some media producers and editors are au fait with music, but the vast majority of them aren’t necessarily musical. When they try to describe a track, they’re not always going to say, “I want a 4/4 beat and a crescendo here.” What you’re doing with music for picture is capturing a feeling, so the easiest way to describe it is to say “I want something like this song” because it has the pace, feel and mood that they’re after. We actively try to avoid making a copy because it’s not necessarily that track they want, it’s what it encapsulates. If someone wants a particular genre we have to provide an authentic version of that, so we’ll use the same recording techniques or studios or instrumentation as the people in that scene. Obviously when it sounds authentic you run the risk of it sounding similar to certain artists, but that’s not why it’s being created. The Eminem case was just a bit stupid – when you’re listening to it you can hear it was a deliberate rip off.

The average person on the street could think two tracks sound similar, but if you look closely at the key, the notes and the progression in legal terms it might be fine. There are very few musicologists out there and they’re kept busy because there’s always somebody suing for copyright infringement. Blurred Lines was such a high profile case and has certainly generated wider interest. These things have always been going on but it’s definitely getting more heat from the press now.

Sabrina Di Giulio – Former Creative Development Manager at Massive Music

I feel like avoiding plagiarism often comes down to educating and managing the expectations of the brand, agency or production company that have their heart set on the sound of a familiar commercial track. The sooner you can do that, the less likely it is that you'll have to worry about being too close to the original. It’s a great help to lead the brand, agency or production company to focus on some of the more vague yet important aspects of the track – things like BPM, key instrumentation or the emotion it evokes – rather than specific identifiable elements or melodies that could ultimately get the music supervisor and composer in trouble. I haven't directly experienced greater caution in the wake of the high-profile lawsuits, but I can imagine music supervisors and producers tread much more carefully before they hit the submit and send button.

Vin McCreith – Composer

Any brief I've ever seen usually has something like "references for inspiration purposes only – we do not want a soundalike" in big letters across the top. At the end of the day, we're here to help the brand look good and plagiarism is definitely not a good look. Creatively, I'm just not interested in recreating someone else’s work and I'd rather my pitch be completely surprising and "wrong" than exactly what was expected and "right". Maybe it's not the soundest business strategy short term, but as the composer I feel a duty to fight on the music’s behalf, and I feel like that can only serve me (and by extension, the client) in the long term. I'll take the BPM from the temp track and use that as my jumping off point. After that I rarely refer back to the reference. The future implications of cases like “Blurred Lines” and the “Thinking Out Loud” one definitely come up in pub conversations, but anyone who knows music can spot a rip off and those aren’t ripoffs. It's an over enthusiastic legal team trying to generate extra revenue for an estate.

When I was younger I used to obsess over sounding too much like someone else. Eventually you crack the code and start making music that is completely unique that nobody has ever heard before, then you realise it’s because nobody ever wanted to hear it, and with good reason! When your uniqueness and your influences are in balance, that's when you find your voice. The fact is that music isn't created in a vacuum. It builds on the past, from folk to blues to rock and roll to disco, punk, ad infinitum. As a composer you are the sum total of the genres, idioms, vibes, feels, grooves and everything else you've heard since you were born. You spit it out the best you can and hope some of it goes on to feed the next generation.

Craig Beck – Former Head of Production at Universal Production Music

This kind of thing has been going on forever. I worked in advertising doing mixing for years and it was going on back then. Every now and again I’d get asked to compose something that sounded like the Black Keys or whoever, but I didn’t want to do that. I don’t want to put myself in the firing line just because they’re not willing to pay a big sync fee, but advertising agencies don’t care as long as they’re keeping the client happy. Back then, you were almost able to run the gauntlet of whether someone would catch you. With the detection software these days, if you do something completely similar in key or tempo or whatever it could probably be picked up and someone would just have to put the two pieces together and say “Hang on a sec we didn’t do a sync deal on this.”

We had a conference a few years ago where a musicologist came and gave us a rundown of what crossing the line was. He ended basically by saying that if it goes to court and you have a jury of people who aren’t musically minded, when you play the two tracks next to each other it almost doesn’t matter what the professional opinion is, they’ll just think ‘Oh yes that does sound similar.’ In our department I got asked to check tracks a lot to see if they were too close, but honestly if in doubt send it to the musicologist. I think it’s a bit tricky with music because if you take lyrics out of the equation and strip it down to the melody, the bed and the foundation then that’s a bit different from copying text word for word. I don’t think you can own a feel, a style or a mood in that way.

You can find Hattie on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Noisey UK.

Junun—the collaboration between Radiohead guitarist Johnny Greenwood, Israeli composer Shye Ben Tzur, and Indian ensemble the Rajasthan Express—were the musical guest's on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert last night. The eight-piece band (it's been a 21-piece in the past) performed the title track from their self-titled 2015 album. As they were on the album, the Rajasthan Express were the driving force, with Ben Tzur's guitar barely audible and Greenwood's bass only simmering beneath the blaring horns. It's well worth watching at the top of the page. And if you've got tickets to see Radiohead on their tour of the United States—hey, nerds!—you ought to turn up early for Junun's support slot.

Follow Alex Robert Ross on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Noisey US.

Birds In Row’s video for “I Don’t Dance” depicts two performers putting on a three-minute display of graceful ballet moves intertwined with explosive martial arts attacks, which is a pretty apt visual representation of the French hardcore trio's sound. The band lays down shocks of intensely abrasive screamo that flare out from a more melodic base. That’s the way Birds In Row’s forthcoming album, We Already Lost the World, goes for nine songs: Intense bursts of catharsis violently kicking against a serene foundation, resulting in one of the heaviest albums this year.

We Already Lost the World is out July 13 via Deathwish Inc. Watch the beautifully choreographed video above and pre-order the album here.

Birds In Row is on tour soon with Converge, Neurosis, and Portrayal of Guilt. Dates below.

July 17 Albuquerque, NM @ Sunshine Theatre *
July 18 Denver, CO @ Ogden Theatre *
July 19 Lawrence, KS @ Granada Theater *
July 20 Dallas, TX @ Canton Hall *
July 21 Austin, TX @ Emo’s *
July 22 Wichita Falls, TX @ Stick’s Place ^
July 24 St. Louis, MO @ Fubar ^
July 25 Chicago, IL @ Subterranean ^
July 26 Syracuse, NY @ Spark Art Space ^
July 27 Oakdale, NY @ Shaker Pub ^
July 28 Portland, ME @ Geno’s ^
July 29 Boston, MA @ O’Briens ^
July 31 Brooklyn, NY @ Kingsland ^
August 1 Montclair, NJ @ Meatlocker ^
August 2 Philadelphia, PA @ Kung Fu Necktie ^
August 3 Falls Church, VA @ VFW 9274 ^
August 4 Columbia, SC @ New Brookland Tavern ^
August 5 Richmond, VA @ Strange Matter ^
August 6 Baltimore, MD @ Ottobar ^

* w/ Neurosis & Converge
^ w/ Portrayal Of Guilt

This article originally appeared on Noisey US.

JPEGMAFIA's Veteran is still one of my favorite albums so far this year, a glitchy, wild mini-opus that crawled out of the internet's deepest recesses armed with fantasies about Morrissey's death. He's put another single out since then as well, the Heno.-featuring "Does This Ski Mask Make Me Look Fat," a twisted, slow-jammed anti-anti-revolutionary anthem. Now, true to form, he's back with a fucking Backstreet Boys cover. Sort of. "Millennium Freestyle" has him crooning romantically through the intro before barking that you can't have his master tapes, then looping back on himself to contort the chorus of "I Want It That Way."

This is his way of announcing The Reverse Christopher Columbus Tour. "I’m going around the world regentrifying every city, one by one," he wrote on Twitter. It'll kick off in Vancouver, BC, in late August, running through the US before coming over to Europe at the end of October. Check out all the dates below.

Follow Alex Robert Ross on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Noisey US.

Mudhoney are back again. Five years on from the surprisingly thrilling Vanishing Point, the band have announced a new album, Digital Garbage, due out via Sub Pop on September 28. They've also released the first single from the record. "Paranoid Core" is a snarled, unadorned blues-rock burst that has Mark Arm assuming the voice of the heartless fuckers who run the country. "Robots and aliens / Stealing jobs / They're bringing drugs / They'll rape your mom," Arm sings. "I stoke the fire in your paranoid core / I feed on your fear."

"My sense of humor is dark, and these are dark times," Arm said in a statement. "I suppose it’s only getting darker."

Listen to the track below.

Follow Alex Robert Ross on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Noisey US.

Will von Bolton was 25 years old the first time he smoked weed, and his life has never been the same since. It was von Bolton's first step on a journey that cost him his marriage, his possessions, and very nearly his sanity in order to write Loophole to Happiness, a 585-word book that he believes could be "the next Bible."

"Every thought I had felt profound. I'd literally been living 25 years, I smoke this joint and think completely different thoughts," von Bolton, who is an ex-musician who at the time was a creative director for a recording studio in Dallas, says of that first time getting high. It's a late afternoon in January and he's relaxing at his family's 1,500-acre ranch outside Killeen, Texas. "I started writing down every thought I had. I didn't know what was happening, but at the same time I wanted to reverse-engineer my own happiness."

Von Bolton hasn't stopped taking notes since, and now, 10 years later, the kitchen table inside the compound-style ranch house is full of his notebooks. Scrawled in red and black ink are mantras, mottos, sketches, and diagrams, page after page, spread across more than a dozen notebooks—and those are just the ones he's filled since finishing the Loophole to Happiness manuscript in the spring of 2016. The book was published January 1 by Clovercroft Publishing.

If von Bolton's story is one of excess, then the guiding principle of his book has been a rigid adherence to simplicity, clarity, and self-discipline. That's because he's built the framework of his thinking around the metaphor of a computer, or what he calls "an operating system for the mind."

"If you think of every Bible as a regional operating system, using that metaphor we now have of a computer to understand our brain, never before have we had a metaphor like this to understand the way we think," von Bolton says. "It's 150 pages, two to nine words a page. Every page represents a line of code. There are no geographical references, no time references, and very little abstract vocabulary. I want it to be timeless, so that somebody in 1,000 years will pick it up and go, 'Okay, this is still a relevant way to think.'"

Von Bolton has his believers, too. Among them is Ross Lynch, the former Disney star who played the titular role in last year's My Friend Dahmer biopic on serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. He got to know von Bolton when he was the touring photographer for Lynch's pop band, R5.

"I really admire Will for his mindfulness. He's really enlightened me as an individual to think about life in a different way," says Lynch, who, though more than 10 years his junior, would spend hours at a time talking philosophy with von Bolton on tour. "I think he's figured it out. You really have to turn off the rest of the world, sit down, really go into the process and devote yourself to whatever it is you're doing. I think he does that to an extreme that most people aren't capable of."

Dr. Daren Martin, a psychiatrist, motivational speaker, and author of books like A Company of Owners, refers to von Bolton's philosophy as "the E=mc² of happiness," comparing its simplicity to buddhist poetry. "It's such a big shift. It affects so many different areas [of life]. It really maps out, in very short order, a way to rewrite peoples' key thinking," says Martin. "He'll be the first to tell you there's some dark history in terms of the struggles he's had, so you know this book wasn't borne out of a vacuum."

There's little in von Bolton's demeanor to suggest a delusional, much less unstable, person. Quiet and thoughtful, his direct, often intent manner of speaking is peppered with the wheezing giggles of a stoner. He has long, stringy blonde hair, a patchy beard, and thick glasses that give his eyes a distorted, curious quality. As he walks outside and down a gravel path towards a smoldering fire pit, dressed in a puffy, black jacket and basketball shorts, von Bolton walks with a loose, absentminded gait, as though his mind is elsewhere and present all at once.

A self-described "fat kid" growing up in nearby Belton, a town of 20,000 people, von Bolton got into drumming, photography, and web development around age 10. In his late teens, he joined a metal band called Greatness in Tragedy, who signed to Austin label Brando Records. "We were a Christian band at first, then we went to the secular market. It was like going from $4,000 a week playing these camps to getting paid $50. It was that extreme of a shift," he says, with a wheezing laugh.

Once Greatness in Tragedy had fizzled out, von Bolton landed in Dallas, where he was tasked with creating a series of mini-documentaries about local musicians for the studio where he worked. It was during one of those recording sessions, in 2008, that he was introduced to marijuana. "I saw color in different ways. I heard music in 3D. It was so fucking crazy," von Bolton remembers. "I realized if I wrote these things down it would help me articulate them more and also help me understand them more."

Emboldened by the experience, von Bolton threw himself into his newfound enlightenment with an obsessiveness that bordered on mania. He figures he crossed that line five years later, when he began experimenting with mushrooms. "I ended up tripping on mushrooms for six days," he says. "I started feeling like I was in this god mode, this omniscience, like anything I want to know I'll focus on it and I can know it. So, like, 'I'm going to imagine I'm God for six days.' Then, 'I'm going to write the next Bible.'"

One of von Bolton's friends soon staged an intervention, and a second one was to come from his then-wife, Veda, a model whom he met after he'd started writing Loophole to Happiness. "A good friend of mine had just been hospitalized, institutionalized, and Veda had just seen that happen. It was a really heavy experience, and she saw me almost going there, too. So I get it," he says. "She looked at me like I was going fucking crazy, and in some ways I was." The couple's marriage unraveled and, on their fourth anniversary, they were officially divorced—an event he refers to as "the asteroid that almost took me out."

By that time, however, he'd dove headlong into his new career as a band photographer, first touring with Texas acts like Bowling for Soup and Jonathan Tyler & the Northern Lights, and then with R5. Traveling to 38 countries in two and a half years, he was a firsthand witness to the idol worship of the band's teenaged supporters, who even started fan pages for von Bolton.

"Every airport we landed at, we were a security risk," von Bolton says. On one trip to Buenos Aires, the band got escorted through crowds by guards toting M16s after a meet-and-greet was shut down by the fire marshal. Both von Bolton and one of the band members had their hair ripped out in the melee. "As we're driving away, we see the reflection of the white van in the windows. Someone had tagged the van—thousands of Twitter handles, 'I Love Ross' Sharpied all over," he says.

Those experiences on the road proved instructive. "Because I'm a documentary photographer, I'm always walking into a room of people that generally have their guards up slightly, and I'm going in there to infiltrate them," von Bolton says. "You have to be conscious of your presentation, because you realize you have one chance to really freak somebody out and make them not listen again." Likewise, his advertising background influenced the format of the book, with each page modeled after billboard tag lines. "If one line can change your life, if one thought can change your life, then a collection of those can reprogram it," he says.

For all the personal turmoil that went into its writing, Loophole to Happiness is devoid of any clear perspective or dogma, beyond having a stringent aesthetic sensibility. Phrases like "Do not chase applause" or "Lose self to find self" resonate clearly enough with von Bolton's own story, though the book could easily have been generated by a computer algorithm—a belief system based on a mathematical equation. The closest thing to a narrative arc is the progression of one thought to the next, although the pages could easily be read in any order, over any period of time: all in one sitting, or a page a day.

As such, Loophole to Happiness can be read as a series of stand-alone idioms with their own internal logic, or as a collection that speak to one another. A line like "Nothing costs nothing," for example, can be taken at face value, or by the opposite that it implies: everything costs something. That minimalism is reflected in the physical book—white with black text and no images—as well as in the release party he held in Dallas last December, which included interactive video, listening stations, and his own artwork, presented as though an Apple store had been transplanted to an art museum.

Dr. David Henderson, a psychiatrist and author of the book Finding Purpose Beyond Our Pain, is particularly drawn to von Bolton's aesthetic sensibility. "I see the book not as a prescription for happiness but rather a conversation piece around happiness, to get people talking and get people wondering—particularly to reach that niche of folks who may not necessarily pick up a self-help book but are going to read this piece of art, essentially," says Henderson. "He has the ability to stimulate conversation. Honestly, that's the essence of what I do every single day working with clients: getting people to open up."

In a clearer state of mind than he was while on mushrooms five years ago, von Bolton continues to return to the analogy of a Bible. "These cultures we grow up in, whether it's Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, whatever it is, they shape your metaphors. I use the messiah complex because I was brought up in a Christian culture," he says. Rather than a religious text, von Bolton references the Bible—and particularly, the teachings of Christ—as a collection of life lessons. "It's just all about rebranding. The Bible has 1200 pages. To me, those 1200 pages are the walls around the castle that contain all this valuable information you can get from it. If you think I'm crazy, well, if you have 10 minutes, you can read this book."

Since its publication, Loophole to Happiness has added an audiobook version, been translated into Arabic, and was recently released on vinyl. Yet the book is but one step in a larger plan for von Bolton, who has two more in the works and says he wants to "rebrand every degree of thinking." He's even sold his possessions and essentially lives out of his car, a black Toyota Prius, in order to travel the country, which has inspired him to revisit his own text. "It works," he says of the book. "I feel like I have my own testimonial now."

As the sun begins to set at the ranch, von Bolton rises from the fire pit and makes his way down a hill to the shore of the Lampasas River, which runs along the foot of the property. "I don't know what the fuck's going on before this or after this. That's why the book doesn't talk about before birth or the afterlife. It only address the things that we know," he says. If von Bolton is certain of anything, it's the desire to follow his own lead. "What a beautiful conclusion to come to: I am my own example," he says. "I think everyone should be their own example like that, their own messiah."

This article originally appeared on Noisey US.

The key M.O. in 90s rap production (especially by New York producers) was to take relaxed dinner jazz and transform it into the bleakest, toughest shit possible. Thanks to sites like whosampled.com, we can trace how a song becomes a sample, but it doesn't replicate the experience of being a beatmaker like Havoc or Madlib, listening to endless stacks of vinyl in search of that perfect break. A sample-oriented show on NTS Radio doesn't exactly provide that feeling, but it comes close, and furthermore provides a unique way to delve into the history of 90s rap production.

A Manchester, UK DJ named Sameed hosts an untitled show on the popular online radio station that plays continuous mixes of sample sources from classic hip-hop. Each episode is themed around a producer or artist, like Mobb Deep, Madlib, or A Tribe Called Quest, and features no narration or context for the music being played, much of which is the lush 1970s jazz, soul, and funk these guys were fond of. For example, the Mobb Deep episode begins with Herbie Hancock's "Jessica," but doesn't make the connection between it and "Shook Ones Part II" explicit. Ditto goes for the episode focused on A Tribe Called Quest, wherein several classic rap songs pass by in their original, jam-oriented forms. If you know, you know. It's actually the best of both worlds: those familiar with the discographies of each artist will have fun trying to identify where each song was sampled, while those who aren't can enjoy an hour of supremely chilled-out jazz fusion. Win-win. You can listen to all the episodes of Sameed's NTS show here and listen to a few of the mixes below.

Phil is on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Noisey CA.

Years ago, while I was working with a music festival, I saw someone from the scene tweet that the festival’s safer spaces panel was hypocritical. After I offered to talk to this peer offline to learn more, he called me to pass on a story alleging that one of the festival’s organizers aggressively hit on a woman at another event. I took that call on my way to the festival site where I would almost certainly run into this organizer. It was disappointing to hear, and with a work agreement to finish, it put me in an awkward position that will be familiar to many: How could I associate with a “good” festival when there’s bad community talk about one of its leaders? The same question surfaced again following recent targeted efforts against two music community builders in Ontario.

In May, Rolf Klausener of The Acorn and Ottawa’s Arboretum Festival (where I’ve also taken on paid work in the past and Noisey has worked with prior) became the subject of a poster campaign “brought to you by Ottawa’s local women & allies who have your back” that yelled in all-caps “THIS GUY IS A BAD DATE” followed by “#STOPRAPECULTURE #METOO #TIMESUP.” The posters didn’t make specific allegations. Come June, Klausener resigned as Creative Director for Arboretum, and posted a statement on Facebook. “To the women I have affected, I am sorry for the emotional hurt I’ve caused you,” he wrote. “I have never been physically or verbally violent or engaged in non-consensual sex. However, I’m ashamed of the emotional harm I’ve caused.”

Beginning in late June, Jonathan Bunce aka Jonny Dovercourt of Toronto’s Wavelength concert series was accused of emotional abuse by former volunteer and staff member Dorice Tepley through a series of public Facebook posts. Lido Pimienta, winner of the Polaris Music Prize in 2017, further accused Bunce in a public Facebook post this month for disrespecting and failing to fairly compensate her throughout the planning of a show featuring Pimienta in 2014. There were no allegations of physical or sexual abuse. Last week, Bunce likewise stepped down from his role as Artistic Director at Wavelength.

As community-shaking as these revelations on Klausener and Bunce are, frankly, there are far more against other music community leaders through near-public whisper networks in every city with a scene. Let that sink in: every city. Learning that the leaders of spaces you’ve benefited from, found new favourite bands in, and affirmed your lifelong love of music through don’t live up to the projected togetherness and progressiveness of their own communities is fucking heartbreaking, yet it will happen again. Are the community structures they built still valid? The conflicting emotions behind this question can be distilled by a more direct, case-by-case test.

Is this:

a) an inclusive place
b) with safer space measures
c) that are transparent and evolving
d) and incorporate community input?

First, let’s make this clear: These items are non-exhaustive, but a start, and anyone’s personal choice to no longer support an organization for their own sake is valid. As much as the #MeToo movement came about as a means of organizing and supporting sexual harassment and abuse survivors, emotional abuse is likewise a form of violence that should be just as culturally reprehended. Women especially are conditioned to minimize all forms of negative treatment by men for patriarchal benefit, and emotional misconduct is no exception.

Likewise, the presence of emotional abuse and harm in a music community raises safety concerns. Venues, parties, and especially festivals tend to be packed with more alcohol, distractions, and strangers in one place than in the outside world. A study I’ve previously cited by The Ottawa Hospital found that 26 percent of sexual assault victims treated by their staff in 2013 had attended a mass gathering. With the risk of something going wrong already pronounced, it’s even more uncomfortable entering or supporting a music community whose leaders face allegations where people’s well-being have been jeopardized.

For that reason alone, a music community that doesn’t hold its leaders with misconduct allegations accountable by removing them entirely doesn’t deserve support in good conscience. No “scaling back duties” in place of defined action. No waiting for the end of an investigation. No victim blaming. A sense of safety is just as critical as physical safety, so while separating co-founders like Klausener and Bunce from their respective organizations is partly an action of optics, it does help rebuild a perception of security that can make or break someone’s decision to participate. But that’s only a step.

Pimienta made a follow-up public Facebook post after Wavelength announced that Bunce had stepped down. Their annual summer festival in Toronto, Camp Wavelength, is still going ahead in August. "END THIS FEST or at least rename the fest, change the entire ‘heads’ of the fest staff (coz they all friends with Jonny [Bunce]) - have a set fee that works for artists, pay them on time.” Pimienta raises a number of worthwhile considerations. If existing power structures that enable misconduct in music communities remain in place, fans and artists remain at actual or perceived risk of mistreatment. A process limited to cutting off one hydra head means two can grow back in its place. It’s crucial for Arboretum and Wavelength to make good on their statements about investigations within the concerned Facebook status routine, and it’s encouraging to see Arboretums’ latest update provide transparency in the process.

Communities can only survive their leaders through a transparent process that involves community input, results in a series of actionable items to promote inclusion (top-down, from diverse organizers at the table to diverse artists on the bill, please and thanks) and safer spaces, and informs every one of their ongoing progress. Groups from Project Soundcheck to The Dandelion Initiative provide festivals and venues with free—no excuses, they’re free!—education and training on methods like bystander intervention to help prevent abuse and harassment. But why wait? Music communities need to be this involved in their roadmap from day one.

Jill is on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Noisey CA.

The weather! It's been pretty scary lately, what with dozens of people literally being burned to death because of the extreme heat this summer. That's not to mention rising sea levels and ferocious tropical storms leading to widespread flooding. Luckily, your friendly local government agencies like the National Weather Service are here to let you know that your impending death by drowning can be avoided if you pay attention to this simple little country ditty:

The song was written and performed by a dude named Matt Hawk, whose official Facebook page says he's a singer/songwriter from Devine, Texas. I have no clue how the NWS picked him out of the crop of many amateur artists who submitted their music (or were they scouted? I don't know), but he really knocked it out of the park on this 30-second ode to not driving into water like a dumbass. Think about how lame this would've been if it were full-length. It's so much better as a snippet. It doesn't need much more than that to get the message across. As an aside, how terrifying is it that the American government has to warn people about the problem they are largely causing by hiring folks to write cheerfully catchy songs?

In its inoffensive infectiousness, rootsy trappings, and ominous portents of biblical doom, "Turn Around Don't Drown" is the one true song of summer 2018. Not Drake, not Cardi B, but Matt fucking Hawk. It's a future meme we can relate to because we all fear death, but love jams. Please keep playing this song so that you remember how not to die in a flood. It will not save you from anything else, but it will protect you from this specific fate.

Phil is on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Noisey CA.

Uncategorizable, future-facing artist GAIKA's debut album, Basic Volume, is out on July 27. It is, in his own words, "a collection of alchemical parables for all the Immigrants who wander the earth in search of themselves," and the industrial first single from the record, "Crown & Key," set that tone: "God save the roadmen, goons, and thugs / And the youths beggin' boots / Get their racks from drugs / Oh, and angels holdin' stocks for your blud," he howled through compression, "'Cause London City isn't built on God."

This morning, the Brixton-born musician released another new single, "Immigrant Sons (Pesos & Gas)." Co-produced by SOPHIE, it's a smoother and more approachable song, though it's still a call for rebellion beneath the beat. The video, produced by Paco Raberta, chops between placid scenes and armed militias. Watch it at the top of the page.

Follow Alex Robert Ross on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Noisey US.

Though he's currently embroiled in a dispute with his former record label, Donald Glover doesn't seem to be sweating it, as he's now made his second major release of the year following the mega-success of "This Is America." The latest Childish Gambino songs are a complete about-face from the drilling, heavy politics of that single, both of them literally containing the word "summer" in the title. This is totally fine.

"Summertime Magic" and "Feels Like Summer" are the kind of easily playlist-able pop singles that streaming services were built for, based on synthesized steel pans and easygoing grooves. They are almost aggressively breezy and somewhat interchangeable with each other, but it's nice to hear Gambino making simple music that doesn't have multiple levels of ironic/non-ironic meaning baked-in. It's also cool to hear him show off his capable singing once again. Both of the songs are available as one project called Summer Pack on streaming services, and you can also listen to them below.

Phil is on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Noisey CA.

America's Got Talent has had its fair share of bizarre performances. There was that one time someone juggled stun guns and the guy who used a chainsaw to cut an apple he held in his mouth blindfolded. Last night, the audition series found a favorite in an unlikely singer—Oscar, a three-year-old Golden Retriever.

"When I play the piano he can sing," said Pam, Oscar's owner. "He can hold a note. He can even do a vibrato and everything." Playing Johann Pachelbel's "Canon in D Major," Oscar wasted no time before he showed the crowd his vocal chops, with his back toward the audience, because who wouldn't be nervous? According to Pam, Oscar has been singing for a year and a half, and she doesn't doubt he'll start writing his own lyrics soon.

Oscar is honestly the best thing America's Got Talent's seen and eternal tough-ass Simon Cowell seems to think so too. "I've done this show for a long time and I've always said if we could find a dog who could sing, that would be everything to me," he said. Cowell was so smitten, he gave the dog a standing ovation, but not before taking a dig at Pam. "I think your piano playing isn't great, by the way. It could use a little practice, but we may have found our first singing dog."

If you're a dog owner, you may want to go back to the drawing board with how you train your dog. It's hard enough to get them to sit, pee where they're supposed to, and stop chewing on things other than their toys. Oscar is out here putting puppies to shame.

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

This article originally appeared on Noisey US.

I once had a friendly debate with a peer, an individualist type who loves Merle Haggard, straight shooting, and driving long distances over the out-west neo-dust bowl. Said peer was talking about what he considered the most “American” movies and he was listing True Grit and the like. I countered that protagonists in My Dinner With Andre and Killer of Sheep were as worthy of being an American archetype as any high plains drifter. Non-gangster urbanites may not lend themselves easily to any mythology, but we can wave the flag as hysterically as the next cow poker.

New York City malcontents Wilder Maker probably don’t want to be called “Americana” but to my thinking “indie” is a cruel slur and anyway Wilder Maker isn’t the boss of me. Made up of a bunch anti-cowboys (long hairs, women, Jews) who have done time in the wildly under-appreciated Debo Band, Jolie Holland, and appreciated about right Baroness, Wilder Maker makes down home Americana music for the city streets and walk-ups that frame them. Wry lyrics, sung sweetly (by Katie Von Schleicher) and Zimmerman-esque raggedly (by band leader Gabriel Birnbaum), that are buoyed by CCR grit and lurch, with enough no-wave sax/Television guitar touches to make sure the band’ll get beat up when it gets past Cleveland.

Wilder Maker made their debut last year with a single on Saddle Creek, and now have a full-length, Zion, that’s an album of diminished-but-still-kicking hope. Zion is a collection of Rock and Roll songs for subway ridin’ and cryin’, kicking against the pricks when you’re not giving them the rent; living, if you can call it that, in the city. The press kit calls it scorching and now that there’s no money on the music industry field, why would they lie?

Country fans love Emmylou Harris but, despite what the books tell you, they never really gave a shit about Gram Parsons, and that’s fine. While it’s good that the canon has abondondoned a bit of it’s arbitrary snobbishness, let’s not pretend that unpopular is necessarily the enemy of good. So, extending the thought to alt-country or whatever we’re calling it in the year of our lord 2018, don’t expect Wilder Maker to make it huge on the Wilco revival circuit anytime soon. Too angry and too odd, more red-headed step-child than stranger, Wilder Maker will have to make it through this mean old world on their own. But like The Mekons performing Fear and Whiskey on an off night in Chicago, they’ll undoubtedly muddle through somehow. I’d end on an Urban Cowboy joke but I can never make it past the first twenty minutes. And I’ve made it all the way through the very excellent Zion about a dozen times!

Wilder Maker’s Zion is out on New York City’s finest, Northern Spy Records, on July 13. Buy it before the dusty old dust fucks you up.

This article originally appeared on Noisey US.

Toronto is a special place, a petty place. Aggressive passive-aggression is common currency and the contributions of many a people, neighbourhood or area are regularly challenged, put down, or erased all together so that one can claim superiority over another. All of which can lead to trivial yet eternal arguments such as this: is the suburb of Brampton really a part of Toronto? Twenty-something SB, who asked that his real name not be used, Founder and President of 6ixBuzz TV and Co-Owner of North Block Entertainment laughs. “I think anything past ‘Sauga don’t really count. Brampton is Peel Region, but Sauga, Scarborough, North York, York Region that’s pretty much Toronto. Etobicoke is the furthest even. Rexdale counts too.” 6ixBuzz TV Co-owner and Founder of Artist Management firm North Block Entertainment Mustafa El Amin, a couple years his senior is far more diplomatic. “I don’t think it’s up to me [to decide] but Brampton is it’s own city and also a part of the Greater Toronto Area (GTA).”

Despite ample physical evidence proving that Brampton is in fact a part of the GTA, it has nevertheless become a running joke on the Toronto-focused hip-hop and entertainment blog 6ixBuzz TV. Numerous “Brampton takes the L” posts populate the page garnering impassioned defenses from Brampton locals like filmmaker Director X that are usually buried by commenters who’d rather ignore the truth. This very Toronto brand of ‘ends’ shaming, that refuses to acknowledge Brampton or, say, Mississauga while asserting dominance of its small borders is something 6ixBuzz instinctively understands. It’s a purely regional, for-us-by-us look at the Greater Toronto Area that shows how the city sees itself in the purest way possible: memes. The account regularly documents different touchstones of Torontonian life, like the miserable daily goings on of our ‘Transit of the Year’-winning public transit service; local artists repetitively flexing in condos and parking lots; and the slow takeover of Canadian geese and their impending civil war with the racoons for the streets. But it’s not all nonsense all the time, the page also covers serious events like police violence and the recent provincial election.

Since its inception last summer, 6ixBuzz has grown from having a sizeable youth base to becoming a phenomenon across the city and even country-wide. The 6ixBuzz name itself—not unlike WorldStarHipHop’s heyday—has become a verbal battle-cry of sorts signalling that something in one’s life, good or bad, will likely be shared for the rest of the city to see. And with over 360,000 followers and counting, many of whom include news outlets, politicians, waste yutes, over-active and ‘wutless’ sports IG accounts, and Drake, that’s a few too many witnessing someone at their lowest moments.

Screencap via 6ixBuzz TV

According to SB, a regular day at 6ixBuzz begins in the morning where he and three other bloggers comb through their email submissions and DMs, looking over feeds of artists and social media profiles, local and abroad. The four are in constant rotation, one always monitoring the feed if someone else is on road since they don't have a base of operations yet. Initially, he says the goal was five posts a day but eventually that grew to 15 to 20. “I try to be calculative of the amount of stuff we’re posting... but everyone just spams our DMs with tons of shit so it’s pretty easy to pick up fresh stuff right away,” he says. And the feedback is instant. For example, a random kid from Scarborough using Backwoods rolling paper as a band aid for his finger will garner hundreds of thousand of views in a matter of minutes.

When asked about the rabid fanbase and growth of the account, El Amin, now accustomed to regularly hearing passersby screaming “6IXBUZZ!” in public, says he didn’t completely understand it at first. “I thought it was just a page like Hood 2 Hood DVDs in Toronto or The Real Toronto. But as it got more exposure and I saw [SB’s] passion, my first thought was there’s a lack of voice to these communities—to the hip-hop culture and what surrounds it. And this is proving there’s nobody in that space and there’s a need for it.” He’s not wrong. Toronto’s media and entertainment industry has traditionally underserved its Black and POC, hip-hop and R&B communities.

Amidst a bevy of cancelled programs and services, however, there has existed independently created platforms and content with a focus on Black/hip-hop culture including the aforementioned guerilla rap doc The Real Toronto , social networking site TdotWire, which has now been gentrified, and the never-aired web reality series Only In The 6ix . God bless the dead. This is all to say: we don’t have much. El Amin feels they’re tapping into this unexplored lane. “I believe other platforms have attempted to [figure out] what the lens looks like as opposed to just having the lens. 6ixBuzz is just somebody from the community that has that experience and is giving a voice from their lens.”

Mustafa El Amin. Photo By Mr KOA.

Community is of paramount importance to El Amin, who is also the Founder and Executive Director of MyStand, a non-profit youth mentorship program that focuses specifically on Black youth. When we first meet, he’s leading a class with several people of varying age—from teens to young adults—along with Jebril “Fresh” Jalloh, owner of streetwear clothing line Get Fresh Clothing, who is telling a story about a then-unknown The Weeknd blasting House of Balloons to unsuspecting fans waiting in line at one of his first clothing pop ups.

The centre also happens to be the place that helped foster the birth of 6ixBuzz. “[SB] was actually one of the youth that was involved in MyStand but was not a regular mentee. He had his own barriers where he couldn’t really commit the time,” says El Amin. His work is divided between curriculum building; sorting out talks, events and dealing with drop-ins who come in to have frank conversations about life and how they can reach their current goals. When he was a teen, El- Amin started out as a rapper by the name of Goncept and eventually founded the music label North Block in 2006.

His career would come to a halt, however, due to a “number of barriers.” “I got in trouble with the law, [money issues] and it led me down a different path that I had to pull myself out of—and it was having my daughter, having a family, that kept me grounded,” El Amin says. “But I recognized many people didn’t have that so I decided to put music and North Block on hold and began my work in the social sector.” He’d start work through creative youth mentorship program The Remix Project, before joining as a youth outreach worker for resource centre Youth Action Network (YAN), ending his stint there as Managing Director. Eventually he’d strike a partnership with YAN and, utilizing his personal connections with producers Eestbound, Murda Beatz and his manager Cory Litwin, created MyStand in 2017. According to him, mentees apply to MyStand through an online application process that is distributed through fellow community and volunteer agencies. Through one of the mentees, SB applied so that by Fall of that year they’d be in regular contact with each other. “Our energies just connected and around that time he was already developing 6ixBuzz TV.”

SB says he was actually working on an earlier iteration of the account before then called Northbound Buzz, a page purely dedicated to random memes, but got bored and decided to quit the project. It would be “late June” of last year—though their earliest post dates back to April—that he and another friend would start 6ixBuzz as a way to get his foot in the door of the music industry and cover the underground artists he was following. “I remember telling my boys, ‘I’m gonna create a music platform.’ I only seen one at the time in Toronto called Canada Hip Hop TV, so I was like there’s an open lane for it and I’m just gonna see what I can create.” Initially, he says, 6ixBuzz pulled inspiration from popular US-based underground rap page Say Cheese TV. “I was like, ‘oh that’d be cool if we had one even just for Toronto, right?’ They post funny shit, post rapper news, a whole collage of stuff but as things developed [6ixBuzz] just ended up turning into more of a WorldStar than a music blog.”

SB would check in at MyStand intermittently to get guidance from El Amin about the account and his personal life. Meanwhile, the site would grow at a consistent pace before it ballooned from 50,000 to over 100,000 followers in January. By March, El Amin would be actively counseling SB on building a business infrastructure as it became clear this was going to be far bigger. “Everybody that I tried to talk to about it told me they were already on it, getting the same feeling I experienced… where it was strangely addictive,” says El Amin

“People get cheesed like, ‘oh, why are you giving this girl or this [person] clout?’ At the end of the day, you guys are engaging with this so why are you going to get angry?”

Part of the success of 6ixBuzz, SB believes, is that it’s a private account. “If we were public I feel a lot of people would just pree the stuff and watch everything but wouldn’t hit the follow button. It makes people intrigued in what’s going on, and that’s what people want—they want to feel like they’re part of a private group.” That and a strong initial following of rising underground artists like rapper LB (“He brought a lot of the youth to the Toronto music scene and a lot of them were the ones to catch on to 6ixBuzz in the beginning,” says SB) And, well, of course, Drake because ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

“People knew he followed because we put it on our [IG] story ‘shout out to Drake for following us’ a week prior,” says SB of the OVO leader’s follow in January. A week later, after they posted a tweet that said “a man proposed to his girlfriend in the stc food court while they were eating junior chickens... im tired of scarborough” Drake commented “East End Fairytale.” SB says that off the strength of his comment they gained nearly 10,000 followers that week and credits the rapper, who continues to comment on the page, for widening their already very respectable reach.

It wouldn’t stop there, though. 6ixBuzz grew their profile even more the next month after they posted a video of someone holding onto the back of what appeared to be a moving Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) subway train. (According to the person in the video, it didn’t take place on the TTC). The video was picked up by multiple Canadian news outlets and caused the TTC to launch an internal investigation into the joy rider. “I got nervous, I was like ‘oh, people are watching this shit like CP24, police and all that stuff. It was like, oh fuck, let’s chill for the day,” says SB. An unintended consequence of its large base and local focus are that minor events can quickly become major stories abroad, pulling to the surface a mix of diasporas, personalities and events intrinsic to the city. And perhaps, there’s no better example of this than the saga of one Sagittarius Shawty: a young woman from Kitchener, ON and not Toronto, who during the week of Valentine’s Day took to casually exposing men across the GTA who had cheated with her over Instagram Live and social media.

SB recalls his first time coming across her last December. “She’s just her own character, that girl. It started off with some video I remember getting [with her] in a fight at some hotel and she whipped a Henny bottle at some guy’s head. I never posted it because she had no shirt on—it was too inappropriate.”

He started paying more attention as thousands of people started to tune in to her live feed to see who’d be exposed next. “Then next thing you know this Kitchener girl starts having like 2,000 to 3,000 people [watching,] so I started checking in and she had everyone’s attention, so we just started posting her based off that because she was just causing crazy drama throughout the GTA. Like going on an exposing purge,” he says. “I wasn’t posting her exposings except the one, that [Daddy] Rambo guy, he was cool with the post. Every time someone gets embarrassed on 6ixBuzz, it’s not out of the blue, they’re aware they’re going to catch it.”

Sagittarius Shawty and her now iconic incredulous-sounding “Come on now” has since become a recurring staple on the page—but she’s not the only one. Others like Daddy Rambo, a du-rag adorning vessel of self-love and charismatic Eglinton West rapper Bizz “ERR GOD” Loc have become personalities within the 6ixBuzz canon. Each inadvertently takes on archetypal characters from the city viewers can instantly identify. Naturally, these figures also draw the ire of many in the comments section. “People get cheesed like, ‘oh, why are you giving this girl or this [person] clout?’ At the end of the day, you guys are engaging with this so why are you going to get angry?,” says SB.

Screencap via 6ixBuzz TV

As SB and I chat, the topic of an 11-second video of what appears to be a young man being assaulted by several cops on a balcony comes up. 6ixBuzz helped the video go viral, prompting Chief of the Toronto Police Service, Mark Saunders, to defend the actions of the officers in the video. The instant spotlight 6ixBuzz brings and how many parties, specifically police, monitor it still unnerves SB. “More times than not the police are the biggest fans of 6ixBuzz… so I mean, every once in a while we might throw in a crazy video but we try to keep things as wholesome as possible,” he says. “That’s why I also tell these rappers, don’t be up on the comments with all these fake accounts and going back and forth and all that because someone’s watching that shit for sure.” When asked if he feels some sense of responsibility over what he posts, he says, “I think of the consequences. We do have a social responsibility so I’m gonna remove a post before too much people see it or it gets out of hand. I’ve seen a lot of stuff I didn't post because it’s like crazy shit; like a homeless man jumping 20 flights of stairs, I can’t post that stuff. I don’t post if it’s something with a little kid or an immigrant or someone really mentally ill and all that stuff—I try not to do so.”

I bring up the account’s regular posting of ‘Bucktees,’ Toronto slang for homeless people, and how often the account displays their erratic behaviour for laughs. Where SB draws the line is not always clear. “I’ve seen a lot of homeless people so to me some of the videos they post aren’t really too much but I will see some comments saying you ‘shouldn’t really be posting it, it’s a homeless guy, leave him alone.’ So sometimes if I see a really bad video or my bloggers post something I’ll give them a page not to do it. But everything I’ve posted so far and everything that’s up right now to this day, I don’t think a line has been crossed… right now were doing good so we’re gonna keep at it.” To date, the account has only been briefly suspended for review last year which SB attributes to fake profiles and “hater shade.” But when they’ve previously posted things like the now deleted graphic aftermath of a car accident or puzzlingly, someone seconds away from being shot before a gun jams as a way to condemn Toronto’s rising gun violence, the criticism and outright disapproval they sometimes receive is warranted.

Mustafa and his mentees at MyStand. Photo By Tejas Panchal

As supervisor, El Amin is frank about the growing pains that comes with the platform and the content they cover. He says that over the last couple months they have started utilizing in-house legal counsel through his North Block company to navigate and flag issues. As well, he notes, through MyStand and 6ixBuzz they’ve taken an active role to partner up with Director X and others to talk to Toronto Mayor John Tory about how to combat the spike of violence in the city. I raise if he’s ever personally felt at odds between managing the not-always positive content on 6ixBuzz and his work in the volunteer sector. However, he’s resolute in his position that there can be a balance and believes wholeheartedly in building SB’s vision. “It’s like the news so I’m not here to say, ‘okay we shouldn’t have this’ and [6ixBuzz] isn’t here to just give media that’s selective for people to see but rather to transcribe the activities and the conversations happening in the city. And SB’s very savvy so when there’s serious things happening 6ixBuzz can talk about the subject and we’ve become that voice for the people,” says El Amin.

Though the proclamation is bold, if social interaction is anything to go by, 6ixBuzz has inadvertently become a de-facto resource for what’s happening locally and abroad. It also comes at a time when faith in traditional media is at an all time low, and decades-long suspicions in terms of how Blacks and POCs are covered, quoted, empathized with and treated in and out of newsrooms have become commonplace. That’s not to say 6ixBuzz has any interest in navigating a traditional media space—they’re not—but for SB and, specifically, El Amin it’s a much needed alternative for the things they saw in the culture being constantly underreported or ignored. “Growing up we struggled with a lack of media outlets, but now that I’m involved on the ground floor of this it’s exciting. It’s a reflection of how far the city has come and how far the culture has come for us Canadians.”

6ixBuzz has also inadvertently capitalized on the tail end of a still recent moment where Toronto is interested in itself. El Amin simmers on this concept when broached whether the outlet would have seen this success even five years ago. “I’m not gonna say it couldn’t have existed but realistically speaking we didn’t take as much pride in our culture,” he says. “I believe people [like Drake and The Weeknd] that definitely got that commercial success showed that there’s a culture that exists here, but the people on the come up that may not have had success also gave the look that there’s a culture bubbling under the culture. The wave that happened after is really what allowed for 6ixBuzz to come and instilled a lot of patriotism I’d say for a lack of a better word.” Even so, SB and El Amin are not content and have even bigger goals on the horizon.

“When I first started, of course I knew there was potential in the [hip-hop media] lane but I never really expected things to take off like they’ve been. So the future is for us is to help Canada’s music scene grow,” says SB. For El Amin it all comes down to servicing the people. “Obviously falling in line with my principles for MyStand but I want to really put the belief back in the creatives. We have a plethora of knowledge available to us now, so it’s a matter of how are we identifying it and how are we leveraging it for young Black creatives.” Right now though, they’re focusing on finalizing an official 6ixBuzz website which SB promises “will be no rules.” But in the meantime they have already expanded into merchandising with limited runs of T-shirts (unsurprisingly, one of the shirts reads ‘Brampton takes the L’) and are looking into creating original content and hosting concerts.

Nevertheless, the centering of Toronto’s rich culture of Somali, South Asian and Caribbean diasporas will likely continue to be to 6ixBuzz’s benefit as it continues to mine compelling, other times troubling, but always engaging content from these communities. It’s a page where you can reference birds who only eat jerk chicken and the uniformity of ‘Toronto hoodmanz’ without explanation.

As a human on the internet once said, “Did your parents immigrate here for you to sneak out of the house late at night and dagger wastemans at Luxys?” If this moral quandary doesn’t encapsulate the Toronto experience, I don't know what does. 6ixBuzz seems to get that.

Jabbari has never been to Luxys but would like to say R.I.P. TIME Nightclub Sundays. Don’t follow him on Twitter .

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

This article originally appeared on Noisey CA.

When Q Da Fool smiles, you can tell that he means it, but right now, he is trying very hard not to. The Largo, Maryland-born rapper reclines in a leather chair in the basement of VICE’s Brooklyn office, weighing some of his recent successes—including, but not limited to, collaborations with multiple generations of local legends like Shy Glizzy, Fat Trel, and Wale. This is a big deal for an artist from the area, an achievement that few can claim. The 21-year-old decided to be relaxed about it though.

“Two years ago, I never thought I’d do no songs with these niggas,” he says, rubbing his hands together. “Not ‘cause they too big—I just didn’t even think it was possible because I was a regular street nigga. Who the fuck wanna do a song with a street nigga? But I had to learn that when you real, and you showing niggas how you really is, you can do anything. It just opened my mind. Now I can call these niggas up to do a song whenever.”

He moves onto another subject, seemingly unphased. This is the image you must adopt on your first press tour when you’ve built your career around projecting a tough exterior. But if you want the truth about how he’s feeling about his sudden rise to one of the region’s most celebrated young talents, look back at a March video in which he flashes one of the famous Glizzy Gang chains gifted to him by Shy himself. As a nondescript instrumental plays in the background, he says, “Real niggas linking up. This my motherfucking brother.” And then, there’s that smile, pearly whites dancing in the dim neon of whatever studio he’s hanging in at the moment. It’s the sort of ear-to-ear grin you can’t contain, even if you desperately want to cling to a steelier image. He’s spilling over with joy, and he has every right to be.

Since 2018 started, Q Da Fool’s name has become much more recognizable to people outside of DC, Maryland, and Northern Virginia. He worked his way to the forefront of his home region’s promising young talent, releasing nine mixtapes since 2015. Now, his hustle is paying dividends. In January, he teased a collaboration with Zaytoven before announcing the two had a joint tape in the works. Then in March, he released “BodyGuard,” a thumping track featuring Gucci Mane in which Fool’s vocal pitch—presumably from a mixture of excitement and urgency—reached previously uncharted territory. “Move like the mob, so we wearing Gucci / Don’t tweet it. Just squeeze it, nigga. Come and shoot me / I turn the whole show to a movie,” he passionately bellows on the song’s hook before continuing into a full on scream (to render it in anything but all-caps would fail to capture his enthusiasm): “FRESH OUTTA JAIL NOW I’M TURNED UP WITH GUCCI.”

“Two years ago, I never thought I’d do no songs with these niggas. Not ‘cause they too big—I just didn’t even think it was possible because I was a regular street nigga. Who the fuck wanna do a song with a street nigga?"

As an early listener of Fool, that song was a celebratory moment. There are few feelings like witnessing an artist you've watched grow seize the opportunity of a lifetime; you can vicariously feel the joy of leveling up. Soon after that, Roc Nation announced that they’d signed the rapper to a record deal. Now, with fellow DMV artists like Rico Nasty and GoldLink making their push for mainstream, pop-leaning stardom, Q Da Fool has a real chance at being the go-to storyteller for what on-the-ground life can be just outside of The District.

That summer afternoon in New York, the rapper born George Hundall rocked a grey striped kufi—his signature—a fitted black tee, grey sweats, and black Balenciaga sneakers. Right under his bottom lip was a tattoo that read “FOOL.” With him was Dolla, a tall, quiet, and clean-cut dude covered in tats who runs their label, Rich Shootas, and regularly pops up on Fool's social media accounts. “I’m learning not to give them too much,” Fool said in a textbook Maryland slur as we walked through the office. Since his signing, he’s scaled back on his impulse to drop songs at any given time, only releasing a few loose ones including high energy single “Straight” and “The Plug” a career-defining track produced by Zaytoven. “I used to always be geeked, like ‘The fans want more!’ But even when you give them more, they still gon’ ask for more.” For the first time in his short career, he’s learning how to selectively pace himself without the fear of falling out of people’s consciousness.

To the national audience, the Roc Nation signing may have seemed like a shock, but Fool’s legend has been growing in back home for the greater part of this decade.“When I was little, my aunts used to make me freestyle battle my cousins,” he told me, unconsciously swaying his chair from side to side. “When I got a little older, around 11 or 12, I used to be in the car and freestyling. That’s when I first started smoking weed.” Soon he was making music in studios, but Q Da Fool’s songcraft has always retained the feeling of those humble roots. One of the most special things about his music is that he often sounds like he’s still having an intimate exchange with a small group of people, whether that be on the most pounding drill-indebted songs or on more simple productions.

As a teenager, he was a member of popular local group Pakk Boyz who, like many kids across the country at that time, were empowered by the DIY approach to song and video making that helped Chief Keef and his fellow Chicago drill artists become international superstars. In production and lyrical content, the music was raw—mostly comprised of songs about doing dirty work around the way and calling out local rivals who inauthentically pushed a street narrative that didn’t stack up with their real lives.

That locally minded approach has held true for the solo work he’s released over the past few years as well. On the intro of his 2015 debut mixtape, Trap Fever, an 18-year-old Q Da Fool talked about coming home from an attempted murder case, even going as far as calling out a former friend who cooperated with police in order for him to be arrested. In between listing off the street laws that were broken at his expense, the song is mostly a rundown of the morals he holds dear to him and a promise—like many young street artists make—that even though he is a rapper, he’s tougher than actual rappers and is prepared to prove it. Around the same time, Fool was building alliances with fellow local rappers who would eventually go on to make cases for national pop stardom.

In the video for her 2016 breakout single “iCarly” another Maryland rapper and potential mainstream draw, Rico Nasty, waves glocks and assault rifles around Prince George’s County. And throughout the video, brandishing weaponry right along with her is a lesser known Q Da Fool who admittedly let Rico hold his guns and shoot the video at his spot. “That’s sis. She lit,” he said proudly, letting out one of the rare ear-to-ear smiles of the day. In a behind-the-scenes video from “iCarly” on Youtube, teenage Fool can be seen playfully freestyling while Rico and others egg on him.

“I didn’t even really get confident until I was inspired by Q Da Fool,” Rico admitted to me last year. “I had seen him in school. Then he was in and out of jail. When I reconnected with him, we did a song and he just inspired me because he was just real. It made me feel like, damn 'I can really be myself and people gonna respect that.' He’ll rap in front of everybody, any camera. He really got that shit—his fearlessness.” Even before anyone outside of Maryland and DC knew about Q Da Fool, his ability to be felt and heard by his community was already empowering those around him without him knowing. But he kept getting better regardless.

Q Da Fool with his friend and president of their Rich Shootas label, Dolla.

After he broke away from the Pakk Boyz, Q Da Fool established his own group (and now management company) of childhood friends and fellow artists called Rich Shootas. On 2017’s “Fell In Love,” he detailed what an average day in his neighborhood with the crew was like and how he found himself drawn to life in the street. “I don’t gotta talk ‘bout shit I did / Streets gonna tell you, vouch for how I live,” he rapped. From his 2017 mixtape I Empty Pistols, songs like “Stressin,” show him wailing about the sting of betrayal. On “Real,” he harmonizes through his regret of hurting the women in his life in one bar, then in another, mentions how he’s staking out his next robbery victim. Though he’s far from achieving the same level of fluidity, it’s not far off from artists like Future, a master at packing a multitude of microscopic storylines into one song.

So much of Q Da Fool’s music—which regularly jumps from conversational (“Fell In Love”) to frantic (“Turnt Up”) to heartfelt (“Tell”)—resonates because of his ability to fit tidbits of his personal journey into songs that would otherwise require nothing more than unconscious head knocking. And in a pool of peers who are getting by with nondescript street life filler, that skill is making him the new face of his region now that artists like Shy Glizzy, Rico Nasty, and GoldLink are no longer viewed as local.

“I didn’t even really get confident until I was inspired by Q Da Fool. I had seen him in school. Then he was in and out of jail. When I reconnected with him, we did a song and he just inspired me because he was just real. It made me feel like, damn 'I can really be myself and people gonna respect that.' He’ll rap in front of everybody, any camera. He really got that shit—his fearlessness.”- Rico Nasty

Q Da Fool’s story is one that’s still largely about reversing former transgressions, especially now that he has a chance at actually breaking out of his hometown. On social media, he projects an easy-going vision of newfound stardom. He’s laid back, hilariously playful with friends, and extremely focused for a 21-year-old. He, as noted, smiles a lot. Just last month, a funny video of Fool having a playful argument with a New Yorker while advocating for Maryland (“the nation of crabs” he fervently added) being the leading area of the East Coast, provided laughs to the DMV corner of the internet. That side comes through in fits and starts during our afternoon together—when more of his friends showed up at the office, he instantly went from reserved artist to joke-cracking guy happy to be away from home for a few days—but he was also a little more subdued, a little more hesitant, the sign of someone who isn’t quite comfortable in inherently awkward press situations just yet. You have to imagine that he will be soon.

Fool’s rise may seem out-of-nowhere to many, but the record deal and respect from peers is a vision he started to realize back when he was first gearing up to drop Trap Fever in 2015, even if he didn’t see it exactly panning out the way it has.

The DMV rap scene looked a lot different then. Shy Glizzy was pulling away from his peers as the area’s first potential post-Wale star with “Awwsome” making its rounds, snagging A$AP Rocky and 2 Chainz for a remix and inspiring Beyonce to incorporate it in a live performance. GoldLink was playing festival stages across the country and rolling out his second mixtape, And After That, We Didn’t Talk. The prospect of Fat Trel becoming a national star was starting to wane, but he still had backing from MMG. Their success implied that he could obtain something similar. “After I caught my case—my attempted murder—that’s when I popped off,” Q remembered. “I just felt like, I’m out here about to do ten years. That’s why when I came home, I was just going so dick hard. Some people think when they get a case they should chill out. My shit was completely opposite.”

Most notable of the lot is 2017’s 100 Round Goon, which is considered by many to be his best work to date and what started to help him break out of the local scene. It dropped after another short prison stint, and the urgency in Fool’s delivery was palpable throughout. On the hook of standout featured track “Catch Up,” he nearly screamed: “Make these niggas feel the pressure / 100 rounds, I’m toting extra,” as a warning to competitors. Then, in the video for his First Day Out freestyle “Right There,” he maneuvered through his Largo Road section of PG County while passionately rapping about being back in his hood and still not being over the shock of having a friend rat him out. The videos for both songs eclipsed the million-view mark (as did a handful of others), and it sent Q on a trajectory that ultimately ended with him signing to Roc Nation. In the coming months, Fool plans to release his Zaytoven-produced mixtape 100 Keys and 100 Round Goon 2, which he says should be out in December. “It’s not really about making singles or nothing like that,” he said he recently learned. “The only thing I be trying to do with the music now—it’s like football or basketball—I just go in that joint and it just elevate as time go on.”

When Q was getting ready to leave the office, he went outside to meet up with his Rich Shootas crew. His managers C Note and Dolla, who he grew up with in Largo, sat debating about what steakhouse they all wanted to hit for lunch, as Q and a few others passed joints around. Before parting ways, we talked about the challenges of transitioning from the streets to buying into a new, unfamiliar life as a professional artist surrounded by friends trying to make it out as well. ”My men, they don’t got my position,” he says leaning back against a parked car. “Those my brothers. I can’t just up and leave. I just gotta be smart and help my brothers the best I can. We trying to shoot videos every week. I’m trying to keep my men in the studio. Them niggas don’t wanna do this shit, but it is what it is, though.”

At moments, the pressures of being responsible for the success of so many others seemed to be weighing down on him. But he ended with sound reasoning for taking on such a daunting task: “I’m trying make sure all my niggas around me bosses just in case something happen to me.”

Lawrence Burney is a staff writer at Noisey. Follow him on Twitter.

Charlie Peacher is a Baltimore-based photographer. Follow him on Instagram.

This article originally appeared on Noisey US.