good shit roundup

“Things that make you go ‘HMMM’” -my grandma

Truthout

“Atlanta Was a Constitution-Free Zone During “Stop Cop City” Week of Action”

By Candice Bernd

March 2023

TLDR; in January, Atlanta police murdered Tortuguita, the first environmental activist ever killed on U.S. soil. Tort was a forest defender, a group of environmental and abolitionist activists defending an expanse of Atlanta forest against the construction of Cop City, a gazillion (90 million) dollar training facility for police, including an entire replica city, that essentially everyone except both most recent mayors and the city council denounce as an explosive expansion of the police state, detrimental in innumerable ways to the largely Black surrounding community, and an ecological disaster. A couple weeks back was the “Stop Cop City” Week of Action, at which a protest festival—headlined by Atlanta’s own Faye Webster and Zack Fox*, holy fuck I wish I was there—was “kettled” and tear gassed by police—never mind—after a group broke away from the concert and burned some construction equipment. Police indiscriminately arrested 35 concertgoers regardless of their involvement and are still holding 23 of them on domestic terrorism, and possibly RICO, charges. Everyone in Atlanta went to the show, almost went, or knows someone who almost went. Anyone protesting cop city appears to be at risk of police targeting. Throughout the week they cracked down on dissent in less bombastic but equally suppressive ways, which Bernd documents.

*We’re being serious rn but I would be derelict of duty if I didn’t direct you to this masterpiece. Do your part, dip your balls into some thousand island dressing 

Pitchfork

“11 Songs That Define Chicago Drill, the Decade’s Most Important Rap Subgenre”

By Alphonse Pierre

2019

“Boy’s a liar Pt. 2” and the Like..? EP go hard as fuck. Perhaps surprising to her new pop apostles, they also did not spring forth fully formed from Ice Spice’s gorgeous carrot top. Rather, she’s the most strikingly poppy embodiment of drill, the rap subgenre with a rich, complex, and hyper-regional yet globetrotting history originating in Chicago (partially and infamously in Chief Keef’s grandma’s basement). If you fuck with the tunes, you should also know that drill, like its southern sibling, is being surveilled and targeted by police…also on RICO grounds. Probably a coincidence.

P.S. More on this in the upcoming YSL case and lyrics-as-evidence explainer.

P.P.S. If you like hip hop and/or good music journalism, follow Alphonse Pierre. His Pitchfork column fucks. 

The Verge

“The scary truth about AI copyright is nobody knows what will happen next”

By James Vincent 

November 2022

What are Rihanna’s rights if an AI trained entirely on Rihanna songs makes its own simulacrum of a Rihanna song??

Tablet Mag

“The Class Politics of Instagram Face”

By Grazie Sophia Christie

February 2023

Excellent rumination. My inflation-nonadjusted two cents are that the tidal turn on Instagram Face is a great case study of the pressure on women to appear effortless and perform repulsion at visible and classed effort. Have rich face, not trying-to-become-rich face, even though the only way you can have rich face is by trying, trying a lot. The premium on effortlessness fucks us because it forcibly shoves in the cellar, flailing and screaming, the amount of capital and labor women are demanded to invest in living up to cultural expectations, depoliticizing and naturalizing that capital and labor, and making us much, much more compliant and uncritical in being milked for all we’re worth.

“More chune for your headtop”-Patois folk hero Drake

Be Good by Pom Pom Squad

I got a tattoo of this song’s title last week because I simply find it arrestingly and commemorably* beautiful**. The old-school wall-of-sound orchestral instrumentation that swings into the track and expands up to the rafters conjures and breathes contemporary life into the descriptor “lush.” It brought sense to these uncertain times to learn that frontwoman Mia Berrin had written it after a period of listening exclusively to Motown tracks. Check out Death of a Cheerleader, the exceptional and critically lauded Pom Pom Squad sophomore album it rolls the credits on, to see how the group deftly steps between 60s technicolor and girlcore pop-punk. Or if short on time, how the “Be Good” celestial riff gets hummed over by a buzzing amp sound in the album’s overture, “Soundcheck.”

And, fucking tarnation, in reading up right exactly now on what Mia has to say about the track, I just learned that it’s gay. I’m not a sapphic music supremacist. But then why is sapphic music sooooooo good eeeeeeevery time? Short nails all the better to bang out sick bass riffs with, I guess. 

*first word coinage on the blog. Mark this date for the archives. 

**bonus that anytime I look at the tattoo my inside-brain speakers start playing the little Sandman riff, turning my arm into one of Spotify’s scannable song barcodes

Featured on: pomegranate. Think: cancer moon, richly lit bedroom at night, lighting incense, sprawling on the bed, smoking, melancholy covered up with sexy. Melancholy wearing sexy like prop mustache glasses.

videos

“Arrival: Time Is An Illusion” by CJ The X

Everything CJ makes goes—to outfit repeat—hard as fuck. Their videos are, if you can believe this characterization of feature-film-length, theoretically dense art criticism video essays, nonstop thrill rides. They speak eight hundred miles a minute, most often with an alcoholic bevvy in one hand and gesticulating wildly with the other, about the philosophy of good and bad art, the existential neurosis of Victorious character Cat Valentine, and, most insistently, Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug and Cat Noir. This particular ATV ride of an analysis centers the film Arrival and the book it’s based on, Story of Your Life, peeling back tender truths about time and its unfolding over our lives whether we like it or not. 

Banger moment: At one point, CJ prompts viewers to look around at their surroundings wherever they’re watching the video, then envision where they were and who they were with this day a few years back. As the almost-all-of-us who have been through a breakup and/or—I’m an “and,” get fucked snowflakes—a death in the past few years might, I did in fact, how do you say, burst into tears. At 20:39, though, CJ lent value to the memory k-holing by giving viewers the comfort of the randomness of time via the mantra that a shameful past event and desirable future both “happened, will happen, and are happening right now.” It brought me great solace that thanks to the nonlinearity of time, the past and people we don’t want to forget are always with us, and our comparatively-omniscient future selves are always keeping us company.

P.S. Ugh, was that gay?