Posted: 24 Oct 2019 04:56 PM PDT

This is one of those places you go for Instagram. The Manhattan Bridge looms, immediate and substantial, over a cobblestone street, framed on either side by a pair of old brick buildings; if you're standing in the right spot, you can see the Empire State Building through one of the bridge's uprights. Imagine a woman, young and ambivalent, staring into the middle distance, white sneakers aglow in the dawn, bridge overhead. This area of Brooklyn, once home to abandoned factories and warehouses, now hosts an annual festival for $3,000 German cameras.

A couple weeks ago in New Mexico, a few thousand people in suburban Albuquerque were waiting for the president, the one show we're always watching.

The time between when you enter a Trump rally and when he finally concludes can be long. You might come in from a bright desert evening, as the crowd did that night, and exit into a pitch-black thunderstorm. In between, you wait for Trump, indoors, without windows, listening to the same 20 songs selected by Trump, from Tina Turner to Andrew Lloyd Webber — that are, like anything else selected by Trump, booming into your brain.

Eventually, to kill time, people at the Santa Ana Star Center did the wave. Seven thousand people rose and fell in red hats and T-shirts — to Luciano Pavarotti's performance of "Nessun dorma" from a Puccini opera. People raised "Latinos for Trump" signs. A group of teens let out long Woooooooos. Pavarotti wailed in Italian. The wave continued right into the playlist's next track, "Hey Jude."

"Is there any place more fun and exciting," the president asked later that night, "than a Trump rally?"

Trump inspires weird scenes like this from the lovers and haters alike. Pull up YouTube now and you can watch him perform a poem in different cities and in different years, sometimes in reading glasses and sometimes without, sometimes dedicated with cruelty and spite to Syrian refugees and sometimes to the US–Mexico border. Despite the provenance of "The Snake" (an R&B song from 1968), the lyrics have that Classic Tragedy vibe that matches Trump's acid edge id. "'Oh, shut up, silly woman,' said the reptile with a grin," goes the poem. "You knew damn well I was a snake before you let me in."

He's the man for a moment of algorithmic timelines.

But the algorithm didn't used to rule all. Most of the basic experiences on our phones didn't even exist 10 years ago. In 2010, Instagram launched and the messaging app WhatsApp came to both Android and iOS; in 2011, Snapchat opened for business and Spotify came to the US; in 2013, the workplace chat system Slack launched. When Pew first began collecting data on the subject in 2011, 35% of US adults owned smartphones; in 2019, 81% do. Here at the decade's end, there are 1 billion global Instagram users.

The early part of the decade was about building the systems. And though Twitter preceded this decade, the platform came to political and cultural prominence in the 2010s. Initially, information flowed in chronological order, unfiltered, strictly concise, and mostly from strangers, which distinguished the platform from the more insular and curated Facebook. During the 2012 election, Barack Obama's presidential campaign formalized a kind of faux-intimate voice — personal messages, initialed by the candidate — that retained a corporate distance. But that kind of fakery couldn't hold; as the decade progressed and platforms like Twitter shifted from novel experiences into assumed foundations for business, media, and culture, the nature of what we put into the platforms also changed.

This isn't contained to Twitter: The internet has finally and firmly moved from being an obscure gathering for nerds to the foundation for most communication. Linguist Gretchen McCulloch traces that history in Because Internet, her recent book that is particularly interested in the different waves of users — people who started using email at work in the '90s, for instance, or millennials who grew up chatting on instant messaging apps — and how those platforms or users have affected language. These generational differences can manifest in small but familiar ways; McCulloch explores why people who are long accustomed to chat and text use line breaks for timing and emphasis, and intuit information left unsaid in an ellipsis. (Hey are you around…) She contends that a younger generation of users over the last decade, who've never known an internet without Facebook or YouTube, have turned to a phone experience that emphasizes control over context: disappearing messages, live video, using second and third accounts for specialization and privacy.

As the 2010s went on, the platforms adopted the live and the disappearing and attempted to reach you with what you care about most — to make the experience less disorienting by focusing on what garners the most attention. During the 2016 election, Instagram added the ephemeral stories and shifted to an algorithmic timeline. "If your favorite musician shares a video from last night's concert, it will be waiting for you when you wake up, no matter how many accounts you follow or what time zone you live in," reads the corporate unveiling, a cheerful promise of permanent detachment from the clock in favor of what you (are thought to) care about.

Twitter had built its business on the ordered timeline, but it too introduced algorithmic weighting that same spring. "Someday soon, the tweets you see will be a little more interesting, and the tweets you miss won't be as important," a former Twitter employee wrote at the time. "And guess what: You won't even notice. You won't! You think you will, but you won't."

The new Twitter feed transformed how a user perceived something going viral; while a viral tweet used to get a few thousand retweets, it would now get tens of thousands — or even hundreds of thousands — of retweets. Powered by the new algorithmic weighting, the platform's new quote-tweet function further turned Twitter into an ever-escalating, ever-nesting series of warring comments, dunks, and owns. Memes take hold, then disappear. One link of breaking news might hang suspended in your feed, hurtling through time like when astronauts do zero-gravity somersaults. You might see this as it happens — or 6, 9, 15, 22 hours later.

Trump's racism, excess, nihilism, humor, and all the rest make him the ideal host for such a system — destroying forever that antiseptic corporate voice. But what Trump does best is reveal the nature of people and institutions. Even when Trump is gone, we'll still have the algorithms; whether it's that track from 2009 crossing from TikTok to Spotify, or a politician going live on Instagram, or whatever is happening on your phone right now — we've already adapted, and the next thing will be built on that shifting foundation.

Change like this can be overwhelming. The first run of Black Mirror, the dystopian British show that rose and fell inside Netflix, featured an episode about the relentless fragments that people now accumulate. Filmed in 2011, "The Entire History of You" takes an existing technology (the archival breadth of our phones), applies the logical conclusion (in the episode, people receive implants to track their every interaction for later playback), and sets both against a simple Greek tragedy–style story (a husband suspects his wife has betrayed him, and is driven mad by jealousy). The wife, hair over her eyes like a veil, reaches up to replay her memories for her husband.

Even in 2011, the episode presaged the now ever-present dialogue about cutting back, dropping out, and disconnecting: At a dinner, the table marvels at a woman who, without regret, has risked her memory and her eyesight to remove her implant.

The dynamic of overload and disorientation, and the final cathartic break from them, isn't isolated to Black Mirror — it's a dominant theme of the last five years of culture.

In real life, in the wake of the election, Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Instagram have talked about screentime limits, mute functions, preventing harassment and abuse — clawing back control. How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell's case for reasserting yourself in the tangible world, has become the centerpiece for essays and takes about cutting back and seeing, again, reality free from the algorithmic commodification of the personal. There are the essays about quitting Twitter, or the inherent avarice of Instagram, or reclaiming the life beyond the external presentation of self.

But people always seem to come back.

"This watch tells time," begins a recent ad for the Apple Watch that then lists off all the other non-time-telling functions the item can do, from taking phone calls to playing music to performing an eletrocardiogram, before looping back around one last time at the end to say "This watch tells time."

The introduction of this watch (that tells time) in 2015 deepened a kind of existential dilemma for the other kind of watches, which merely tell time. What purpose does a machine serve when the commodity that machine produced is all around us? "Why Men Are Wearing Watches That Don't Tell Time," read a Wall Street Journal headline a few years ago, like a riddle, above an old black-and-white photo of Andy Warhol wearing a Swatch.

Some men, the Journal reported, buy vintage mechanical watches but never get them serviced or repaired, or even wind them — they simply leave the watches dead. Stories like this can't apply to that many people, but even if it's just one man, somewhere right now, he walks this earth with a beautiful, broken watch.

Over the last decade, there have been little niche resurgences for items like this: record players, for instance, which promise tangible craftsmanship, and an audio experience that can't be replicated in the digital. For $41.98, you can buy a lime green vinyl copy of Lana Del Rey's new album and listen to her describe the end of the world and promise that she's signing off before whispering at the very last moment "I hope the livestream's almost on…" in perfect offline clarity. It's hard to shake, however, the idea that these machines are simply counting off something that no longer needs counting, and trying to reassert the physicality of something no longer physical, detached and distinct from where all things meet.

We all know what's changed — what's really happened in the 2010s. It's beneath that bridge in Brooklyn and it's at the Trump rally in New Mexico, where exiting fans stopped to take selfies with the president speaking behind them in the distance. The man with the broken watch knows, the people who can't quit know, and so does Lana Del Rey: The internet is no longer a place you go. Who we are on the phone and in the walking world have merged.

This is why algorithmic time is so disorienting and why it bends your mind. Everything good, bad, and complicated flows through our phones, and for those not living some hippie Walden trip, we operate inside a technological experience that moves forward and back, and pulls you with it. Using a phone is tied up with the relentless, perpendicular feeling of living through the Trump presidency: the algorithms that are never quite with you in the moment, the imperishable supply of new Instagram stories, the scrolling through what you said six hours ago, the four new texts, the absence of texts, that text from three days ago that has warmed up your entire life, the four versions of the same news alert. You can find yourself wondering why you're seeing this now — or knowing too well why it is so. You can feel amazing and awful — exult in and be repelled by life — in the space of seconds. The thing you must say, the thing you've been waiting for — it's always there, pulling you back under again and again and again. Who can remember anything anymore? ●

The 200 Best Songs of the 2010s - Pitchfork

Posted: 07 Oct 2019 12:00 AM PDT

"Cranes" is a soft-power anthem for frightening times, noncoercive yet still inspiring. It's the product of Solange working through the trauma, sadness, and disappointment of being a black woman in this society. It's the song you hear when you break through to the other side—when you are stepping firmly into joy and identity—and it's musically structured to mimic the journey: airy and peaceful and ponderous, sometimes a little bit fragile, but bold in its choices. There's so much space around Solange's calm, and the song's jazzy, soulful rhythms are carefully selected to evoke a whole history of black musicians, black culture, and black spirituality. It's notable that Solange never belts, and the climax of "Cranes" isn't a noisy ascension but a quiet one, right at the end: her voice, delicately scaling the mountain to reach Minnie Ripperton heights.

At a time when power is something loud and dangerous and brash, "Cranes in the Sky" is an atypical song of revolution. It will be played endlessly, hopefully in less toxic times—not during rallies, or when a candidate walks onstage, but in quiet moments when we need to reflect, recharge, and rediscover our own beauty. –Allison P. Davis

Listen: Solange, "Cranes in the Sky"

Dead Oceans

7.

Mitski: "Your Best American Girl" (2016)

Sometimes, love isn't enough. On "Your Best American Girl," despite how Mitski strives and stretches to fit into the world of her "all-American boy," it doesn't quite work. The Japanese-American indie rocker feels the pull of her heritage and the traditions her parents raised her with, and must accept they are incompatible with his.

Puberty 2, Mitski's fourth album, runs deep with such moments of questioning, as she navigates themes of loneliness, depression, and lust. Love isn't the deus ex machina to solve any of them; that's the stuff of blonder romantic heroines onscreen. Instead, she offers rougher truths, and none wiser than in this song: Over grandly ringing arena guitars and the kind of distortion that can drown out saner thoughts, Mitski elegantly releases her love, in a sad yet prideful push, valuing herself above tempting conformity. How did her Captain America take this? Did he object? We'll never know, because his voice and thoughts are not heard. This song is not about his experience. It's about hers. –Stacey Anderson

Listen: Mitski, "Your Best American Girl"

Self-released

6.

Azealia Banks: "212" (2011)

"212" launched the force that is Azealia Banks by way of the sweet-voiced theater nerd's sneer of, "I'ma ruin you, cunt." It's a ratatat MC in the Harlem tradition, twisting her claymation cadences around a frothy house beat. It's a New Yorker's goodbye to New York, an overdue star's coming-out party, and a warning to herself. (It was also a YouTube smash before the industry knew what to do with those.) Flipping a previously obscure Belgian dance track, Azealia Banks was one of the decade's first to recognize that the sound of vogue culture would reverberate far beyond the city. Celebrated French-Canadian producers Lunice and Jacques Greene make cameos in the unforgettable black-and-white video, but only cameos: "212" felt like pure Banks, the unfiltered arrival of a fiery new voice. And although her personal controversies have largely overshadowed her music by now, this singular track can still raze anything that dares get in its way. –Marc Hogan

Listen: Azealia Banks, "212"

Self-released

5.

Frank Ocean: "Thinkin Bout You" (2012)

On December 27th, 2011, in the thin air of a commercial airliner flying back to Los Angeles, Frank Ocean typed a few hundred words that slowly darkened the glow of a laptop screen. They told the story of his first love—a man—and that nameless summer longing that whistles through us all. He kept his thoughts private for awhile, and instead posted a cryptic message on his Tumblr: "fuck. that was hard to write." When he did publish his writing, an open letter, it was on July 4th the following year, still three years before the U.S. Supreme Court would strike down the ban on same-sex marriage, but just days before he surprise-released his official debut, Channel Orange. "I feel like a free man," Ocean concluded in the letter. "If I listen closely.. I can hear the sky falling, too." What an unprecedented act of bravery in the history of black music, of queer music, of all music; he opened the door so that we could at once pour ourselves into his light. It was the lens through which we listened to Channel Orange, and no song echoes the love, the glow, the tectonic impact of Frank Ocean more than "Thinkin Bout You."

Beyoncé Remixed the Meaning of The Lion King - The Atlantic

Posted: 26 Jul 2019 12:00 AM PDT

When it was released in 1994, The Lion King was billed as Disney animation's first original story: No fairy tale inspired it. But in the development process, the creators noticed—and then played up—similarities to Shakespeare's Hamlet in the script they'd come up with. They thought about the Old Testament figures Joseph and Moses too. Some viewers called out similarities to the Japanese cartoon Kimba the White Lion. Others saw a resemblance between Simba and the 13th-century ruler often referred to as the Lion King of Mali. Still others who've seen the original or the 2019 remake think of the Egyptian myth of Horus. Or of Black Panther's T'Challa. Or of Game of Thrones' Jon Snow.

The Lion King resembles so many other works less because it is retelling an old story and more because it is telling a simple story, one that people across cultures can't help but see themselves in. It is about exile, awakening, and restoration; it is about growing up, death, and duty. Narratives of its kind are like some lightweight super-material, able to bend to multiple purposes, but not break. The 1994 Lion King radiated madcap whimsy and awe. The new one is serious and clenched. Both get their messages across.

No wonder that Beyoncé gravitated toward The Lion King. Fundamentally, she's a mythmaker. Again and again, she's taken universally fascinating narratives and refitted them so that they can be newly enjoyed up close, in the detail work, and from afar, as a whole picture. Her 2016 project Lemonade concerned an ultra-abstract, almost elemental story: sour turning sweet, lemons becoming lemonade. But it was also a tale about betrayal and reconciliation in marriage. It was also about the possibility of black families disarming centuries-old traps set for them. As music, it thrived on inversions and surprising alchemy: rock rages that felt good, swaying reggae that felt bad, forgiveness ballads disguised as breakup songs and vice versa.

The Lion King's remake presented Beyoncé with the chance to participate in a surefire cultural phenomenon without having to spend too much time in the voice-acting studio. But undoubtedly the social implications appealed too. The new Lion King takes what had largely been a white fantasy about Africa and repopulates it with black actors, somewhat in the manner that Beyoncé has used America's biggest stages—the Super Bowl, Coachella—to flip regressive race hierarchies. It also represented an opportunity to record music that uses the film's potent themes for Beyoncé's own purposes: connecting the spectacle of her own success to a greater whole.

Released a week after the official soundtrack's rerecordings of Hans Zimmer's 1994 score and Elton John's 1994 show tunes, Beyoncé's contribution, The Gift, is in the tradition of star-studded "soundtrack albums." Beyoncé (and her team) oversaw A&R and production, and she sings on most of the songs, and so it's not a stretch to consider The Gift a Beyoncé album—even if one major goal is spotlighting African talent. She called the project "sonic cinema," which may sound pretentious, but it's really a way of saying it's another of her sing-along exercises in storytelling and signifying.

The first song, "Bigger," is a restrained mood-setter on which she sings and raps over sustained organ chords and washes of cymbals. She's done tone poems like this before—more overtures than pop songs—but this one has the distinction of being straightforwardly inspirational and written in the second person. She's telling a "you" that you're "part of something way bigger": "Not just a speck in the universe / Not just some words in a Bible verse / You are the living word." As if to acknowledge the brazenness of her giving such a direct pep talk, she eventually sings, "I'm not just preachin'; I'm takin' my own advice." (Who says Beyoncé's not humble!)

The tie here with the movie is clear. The Lion King's first act follows a young scion being taught about the vast designs he's part of: royal succession (Simba will rule "everything the light touches") as well as the ecological and existential "circle of life." For "Bigger," Beyoncé is taking on the role of teacherly Mufasa, and you are Simba. That you, of course, can include the listener, but moreover, it refers to Beyoncé's own three kids. "I'll be the roots, you be the tree / Pass on the fruit that was given to me / Legacy, ah, we're part of something way bigger," she sings, sending her voice up into piercing trills and back down again. All of this is classic Beyoncé magic, going very wide and very personal at once.

She doesn't quite maintain so tight a web of connected meanings throughout. Much of The Lion King's plot turns on exile—Simba's estrangement from his birthright—but The Gift doesn't make super obvious how exactly Beyoncé, a star since age 18, relates to that theme. She could have shoehorned in her marital drama or journey toward greater creative independence, but instead, the middle portions of the album sport swaggering, triumphal fare. Her Jay-Z and Childish Gambino workout "Mood 4 Eva" comes with an intro suggesting it's a version of "Hakuna Matata," but the celebration that ensues isn't the no-worries kind: "When we walk up in the club I need them sirens goin' off / Then we can look up in the sky / The tears we cry let us know that we alive," Beyoncé bellows, sanctifying the impulse to turn up. While in the middle portion of the movie Simba avoids greatness, the song (and much of the album) is all about embracing it. Jay-Z compares himself to, among other black idols, Mansa Musa, a legendarily wealthy descendant of the Lion King of Mali.

Really, the exile preoccupying The Gift is mostly implied. It's political, spiritual, and demographic exile; it's racial disconnection and erasure. "This soundtrack is a love letter to Africa," Beyoncé said in a Robin Roberts interview, explaining why she set out to fill the album with voices from that continent. This "love letter" would seem to respond to the whiteness of the original Lion King soundscape—only "Circle of Life" featured African singers—as well as extend Beyoncé's interest in connecting her own work with wider black experiences. To be sure, it's a flawed attempt: The Gift bafflingly omits East African voices, despite The Lion King's deep debt to that region. But the African sounds that do make it in give the album its sense of purpose while also adding rich and varied textures.

The continent's influence is partly rendered in the music itself. On the mostly solo Beyoncé track "Find Your Way Back," for example, the airy guitar strums of Ghanaian highlife evoke a twilight between hope and melancholy. Later, the thrilling "My Power" dramatizes the climactic Scar-Simba battle to the punishing beat of gqom, South African house music. Throughout The Gift, the rhythmic trickiness of Nigerian Afrobeats and the lilt of Jamaican dembow not only widen the expected palette, but also serve as reminders of how much the African diaspora already shapes Western pop. To many Americans, the novelty of the arrangements will be noticeable, but not disorienting, as their drive-time radio has been trending toward these sounds already.

What's most exciting is the dynamism of the African voices. An early track, "Don't Jealous Me," showcases the Nigerian artists Tekno, Mr Eazi, and Yemi Alade, who each radiate intoxicating confidence across their varying vocal tones and cadences. On "Ja Ara E," the Nigerian star Burna Boy employs his smooth, sad delivery to vest lyrics about a search for "miraculous blessings" with a pungent sense of longing. The power of "My Power" owes in large part to an indomitable verse from Busiswa and a taunting, catchy one from Moonchild Sanelly, both of whom are from South Africa.

There are, however, times when the many higher goals of the album seem to short-circuit the songwriting. Beyoncé knows what an anthem sounds like, but most of the collaboration-heavy songs don't earn that label. Rather than accumulating energy, tracks such as the otherwise exciting "Don't Jealous Me" and the fluttery "Keys to the Kingdom" just rotate through verses and then, unceremoniously, end. It's likely no coincidence that the punchiest songs are the ones where she herself gets to connect the political, personal, and mythical themes of the project. For example, "Otherside" moves from beautiful to stunning when the Nigerian producer Bankulli enters by chanting in Yoruba and Beyoncé joins him, low and smoldering, in Swahili. "Mababu Katika Mawingu" goes their refrain, which translates to "grandfathers in the clouds"—a nod not only at a key Lion King scene, but also at the shared heritage that Beyoncé is trying to evoke and reclaim throughout the album.

The catchiest and sweetest track is "Brown Skin Girl," which has the Guyanese-American singer SAINt JHN and the Nigerian artist Wizkid join Beyoncé in trying to undo the stigmas of colorism. The breezy sing-along serves as an implicit rebuke to the years of questioning Beyoncé has received about her own relationship with her skin color, but she's not just managing her image here—she's doing social work with a personal edge. Blue Ivy, the target of her serenade, adorably sings the final verse, and the connection is clear: Her daughter is an heir to greatness as much as Simba is. Of course, anyone can find ways to plug into stories of destiny, as such stories have been told many ways—but never quite like this.

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