Thefader 105 aug sep16 guccimane charlixcx by areckyy

5 Shows, 1 Summer. For more information visit thefader.com/stubhub

DJ KHALED

rocawear.com

Letter from the Editor

24 28 31 34 38

GEN F Lil Uzi Vert Elysia Crampton Show Me the Body Jorja Smith Mozzy

44 48 52 54

FADE IN Glossier Fig Collective Period Fashion Dad Hats

JORJA SMITH PHOTOGRAPHY FRANCESCA ALLEN.

“I don’t like to write about myself. I like listening to people.” Jorja Smith

Jorja Smith CONTENTS

Jeep.com

FEATURES Gucci Mane At home with an iconic artist on another comeback.

Charli XCX A pop star fully commits to herself.

Deso Dogg The life and rumored death of a German rapper turned jihadist.

Joanne the Scammer In Florida with Branden Miller, the real-life man behind the scam.

108 SheLovesMeechie and Yvng Quan Two dancers model flowing menswear for fall.

Gucci Mane

APPENDIX 126 Stockist 128 Back Page Gucci Mane photography Geordie Wood. Charli XCX photography Renata Raksha, styling Lisa Katnic, hair Dylan Chavles, makeup Jeffrey Baum at Jed Root, Pilar Noire at Nailing Hollywood.

CONTENTS

GUCCI MANE PHOTOGRAPHY GEORDIE WOOD.

FADE OUT 119 Stan Accounts 122 Celebrity Kid Style 124 Black and Loud

BEIGE

Not on your itinerary. Designed for those who love open spaces, open thinking and open expression, this is where travel creates possibilities. Where style is necessary. Connectivity keeps up with you. Social scenes are vibrant. And the only direction is forward. This is Aloft Hotels. Different. By Design. Book now at alofthotels.com 100+ hotels around the globe

Â&#x2039; 6WDUZRRG +RWHOV 5HVRUWV :RUOGZLGH ,QF $OO 5LJKWV 5HVHUYHG 3UHIHUUHG *XHVW 63* $ORIW DQG WKHLU ORJRV DUH WKH WUDGHPDUNV RI 6WDUZRRG +RWHOV 5HVRUWV :RUOGZLGH ,QF RU LWV DIÂ½ OLDWHV

FOUNDING PUBLISHERS Rob Stone & Jon Cohen

PRESIDENT & PUBLISHER Andy Cohn

EDITORIAL EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Naomi Zeichner

CONTENT VP, CONTENT Joseph Patel

SALES ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER Graham Heth

MARKETING VP, MARKETING Kate Carrington

DEPUTY EDITOR Duncan Cooper

SOCIAL MEDIA EDITOR Blaire Monroe

VP, BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT Malcolm Campbell

MARKETING DIRECTOR Jenny Peck

SENIOR EDITOR Jason Parham

ASSOCIATE SOCIAL MEDIA EDITOR Nazuk Kochhar

VP, DIGITAL Mark Oltarsh

MARKETING MANAGER Alexandra Blalock

ACCOUNT MANAGER Arpan Somani

ASSOCIATE MARKETING MANAGER Bobby Taylor

UK EDITOR Owen Myers CANADA EDITOR Anupa Mistry MANAGING EDITOR Ruth Saxelby NEWS EDITOR Myles Tanzer SENIOR WRITERS Amos Barshad Rawiya Kameir ASSOCIATE EDITORS Aimee Cliff Patrick D. McDermott STAFF WRITER Liz Raiss EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Leah Mandel EDITORIAL FELLOW Lakin Starling WRITERS Lawrence Burney, Laur M. Jackson, Eternity Martis, Haley Mlotek, Andrew Nosnitsky COPY EDITOR Jessie Taylor EDITORIAL INTERNS Sydney Oltarsh Bilecek, Nyle Daniels, Mimi Hong, Polly Irungu, Marisa Joachim, Tyler Jones, Paul McLaren, Luna Olavarría Gallegos, Nina Posner, Imani Randolph, Evan Siegel, Zoey Smith, Adrian Thomas, Steffanee Wang, Amanda Yolanda

AUDIENCE DEVELOPMENT MANAGER Andy Nystrom

VIDEO SENIOR VIDEO PRODUCER Rob Semmer VIDEO PRODUCER Scott Perry

DIRECTOR, AD OPS & DIGITAL MARKETING John Majer ADVERTISING OPERATIONS MANAGER John Khalil ADVERTISING COORDINATOR Jeremin Gil

PRODUCTION COORDINATOR Madison LaClair VIDEO EDITOR Christopher Jones

CANADA SALES Dave Harris dave@thefader.com

ASSISTANT VIDEO EDITOR Sam Balaban

Erikson Herman erikson@thefader.com

ART CREATIVE DIRECTORS Everything Type Company

Jay Lorencz jay@thefader.com

MARKETING COORDINATOR Payton Anderson

PUBLIC RELATIONS SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT Steph Lund MANAGER Katie Cummings

BUSINESS & LEGAL AFFAIRS CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER Anthony Holland CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER Chris Lanzaro SVP, CLIENT SERVICES Patrick Schmidt

PHOTO DIRECTORS Emily Keegin Frank Seidlitz

DIRECTOR, BUSINESS & LEGAL AFFAIRS David Schrager, Esq.

PHOTO EDITOR Yael Malka PHOTOGRAPHERS/ ILLUSTRATORS Francesca Allen, Rachel Chandler, Chris DeLorenzo, Maximilian Hoell, Elizabeth Moch, Dan Monick, Corey Olson, Cait Opperman, Faye Orlove, Renata Raksha, Daria Kobayashi Ritch, Gunner Stahl, Cara Stricker, Geordie Wood CONTRIBUTING DESIGNER Houman Momtazian

THE FADER FAMILY Lawrence Ajayi, Alvin Akinti, Aaron Bastinelli, Madison Bullard, Matt Carlson, Adam C. Cohen, Evan Cohen, Alex Darling, Joe Dawson, Maya Dufeu, Daniel Ellern, Robert English, Sarah Fleisher, Kalani Fujimori, Fiona Ghobrial, Ben Gomori, Adam Hanim, Gianni Jacklone, Monika Julien, Benjamin Julia, Kamdem Kamsutchom, Evan Kenney, Erica Mack, Erica Mapa, Rob Mathie, Andy McGrath, Leonardo Miyai, Juliana Morganti, David Passey, Shawn Perry, Alberto Porto, Jason Rawlins, David Rosenfeld, Molly Ruggere, Bryson Russell, Patrick Schmidt, Malena Silva, Kellyn Slone, Chloe Slobotkin, Jah Spice, Caitlin Stevens, Craig Tamber, Jeff Tammes, Doug Timothy, Tacie Van Liew, Brad Worrell

NEWSSTAND DISTRIBUTION Curtis Circulation Company

The FADER, Inc. 71 West 23rd Street, Floor 13, New York, NY 10010 P 212.741.7100 / F 212.741.4747 info@thefader.com

The FADER is published six times a year Subscriptions: 1 Year (6 Issues) US $29.99 Canada $59.99 / International $99.99. All Rates In US Dollars / Subscription Inquiries: subscriptions@thefader.com.

SUBSCRIPTIONS Felicia Hill

MASTHEAD

In search of #LikeaBoss

Kamaiyah at the FADER FORT 2016. Captured by Getty Images Photographer Roger Kisby.

Wish Upon a Scam Recently, I turned 29. To celebrate, I gifted myself an almost prohibitively expensive facial serum that claims to brighten skin and protect it from the surrounding world. You could, I guess, call the purchase an attempt to reproduce in reality the fictional appearance of my face on Snapchat, where a range of beauty filters smooth over blemishes, enlarge eyes, thin the nose and jaw, and warm or lighten the tone of skin. (The app also offers a rotating stable of filters that distort your appearance comically, which I feel less drawn to.) With its built-in ephemerality, Snapchat is commonly understood as a place to enjoy being yourself, flaws and all. But given the tools, apparently, I’d rather appear in public with no flaws. On first glance, that impulse seems like a totally bad thing — like one that indicates I’ve fallen prey to narrow standards of beauty, or a general pressure to look young and good. And, in fact, it might be. But I take pleasure in filtering my face because the result feels familiar, even when it looks uncanny. I know I don’t actually look digitally airbrushed, but after years of subtly manipulating my appearance online, I am used to imagining myself as a more alluring version of myself. Snapchat’s too-perfect version of me is transparently false, which makes it feel, to me, almost more honest than a candid photo. For this year’s Fall Fashion issue, we spent time with a group of people trying to see and bring to life their idealized selves. After three years in the federal pen and a life of unrivaled fuckery, Gucci Mane is adapting to sobriety and outrunning his legend. In Los Angeles, following two albums of carefully manufactured cool, Charli XCX is trying out her true self — someone who just wants to have fun. Joanne the Scammer, the fictional creation of Florida loner Branden Miller, is a product of Miller’s reckoning with his own identity and a reflection of how isolating the

world can be. And in Germany, friends of Denis Cuspert, the jihadist formerly known as rapper Deso Dogg, reflect on Cuspert’s failures, and how they propelled him to seek a life of terror and intimidation. In all of their stories, there’s some wishful thinking — that the best possible versions of ourselves are the ones people will see. Just like I play around with the idea of appearing faultless, Gucci imagines he will remain sober, Charli envisions an intellectual life as a “dumb” pop star, Denis Cuspert wishes to feel righteous and strong, and Joanne scams herself into lasting cultural relevance. The truth is probably more complicated, and certainly subject to change: to maintain sobriety can be a daily struggle, making pop music does not necessarily make anyone more popular, jihadists hurt people in their quest to make the world better, and even scammers get scammed. “You have a sickness,” my partner told me recently, referring to my habit of almost constantly taking selfies with my iPhone camera. Unlike what I do on Snapchat, these pictures have no filters and no setup. I think I take them because I’m bored, or to literally check in on what I look like: if my hair has fallen in the right place, or if that expensive serum is doing anything. Or maybe I take them because I am trying to figure out who I am, so that as it changes, I don’t lose track, and can maintain control. I don’t post these selfies on the internet, or send them to a group chat. I don’t share them with anyone. Naomi Zeichner Editor-in-chief

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

In search of great

Twin Peaks at the FADER FORT 2016. Captured by Getty Images Photographer Roger Kisby.

ILLUSTRATION BY CHRISTOPHER DELORENZO

GEN F Artists to Know Now

The rockstar of post-Obama rap Story by Jason Parham Photography by Rachel Chandler

GEN F

Lil Uzi

V e r t

Lil Uzi Vert feigned disinterest, twisting

highs of their relationship. That feeling of

WORK THIS OUT… WE WERE ROOTING

his face and shaking his head, a bright

new love, as affirmed in the song, pushed

FOR YALL!!!!”). Less than an hour later, he

mop of magenta-tipped dreads. “I hate

the Philadelphia-born rager to truly open

released an inky lament called “Stole Your

interviews,” he said. Uzi, 21, claims he

up for the first time. Paradise, it’s some-

Love” on SoundCloud, which contemplat-

doesn’t let many people into his private

where that I never been before, he confess-

ed the rigors of intimacy and dating.

life, and when we met on the edges of

es on the blissful hook. We lip lock until our

But that was days ago, and, for now, the

Weehawken, New Jersey — a Hudson

lips are swollen/ Live in the moment good

past is just that. “She helps me with every-

River-lined town where he was staying

times are golden/ I’m not gonna lie you got

thing,” Uzi clarified. Brittany, who’s origi-

the night during a tour stop — he was not

me open.

nally from Los Angeles, introduced him to a

so willing to speak freely. And why should

The pair’s relationship, which is well-

pescatarian lifestyle and provides creative

he? “I don’t trust nobody. Nobody. Not

documented across social media, has

assistance on shoots and music videos.

even the people around me,” he said, his

been going on for about a year now, and

Their co-dependence revealed itself in our

hometown friend Spike in earshot. “They

on the day of our interview, they’d recently

time together: she was part of the reason

just the people that I’m a little bit more fa-

gotten back together after a week-long

we fought against evening rush-hour traf-

miliar with. You can get familiar with peo-

split. “I was being a little extra,” was all Uzi

fic into Manhattan to get to Dover Street

ple’s ways; you can learn people. But you

would divulge about the rift. Just days pri-

Market, the New York City clothing empo-

don’t ever let your guard down.”

or, he punctuated the initial break in a soli-

rium launched by Commes des Garçons

That’s not all true, of course. There

tary tweet: the word “Single” was followed

founder Rei Kawakubo in 2013, before it

is one recent exception: Brittany Byrd,

by a two-heart emoji and the copyright

closed for the night.

his girlfriend and creative muse. On

symbol (one user, @siarah_, expressed

Uzi loves to shop, and he browsed

“Paradise,” the airy bonus cut from his

a pretty unanimous sentiment among

through Raf Simons and Hood By Air gar-

2015 LUV Is RAGE mixtape, Uzi maps the

fans: “NIGGA CALL BRITT RIGHT NOW &

ments in a relaxed, unhurried manner, even as high school-aged hypebeasts prodded him for a photo. He checked in with Brittany via text on multiple occasions (she was getting her hair done) and made sure his assistant D. Rich sent her the address to the restaurant he planned to go to next and all the pertinent details for his show that night at Irving Plaza. An hour after we entered Dover Street, Uzi had spent just north of $5,000 and paid for nearly everything in $100 bills. He decamped with four bags full of various threads from Supreme, Vetements, and UNDERCOVER — at least half of which were for Brittany. Lil Uzi Vert wasn’t always a high-powered wavemaker with Super Mario tattoos and a fondness for girls who study design at Parsons. He was born Symere Woods, on the last day of July in 1994. Growing up in the Francisville neighborhood of North Philly — “the 1600 block, Ridge Avenue” — his boyhood was defined by video games like Mat Hoffman’s Pro BMX and the cartoons CatDog and Franklin. Uzi only ever held one job, working at Bottom Dollar for “like three or four days” before quitting. He wasn’t a star student in school, and took the job so his mom wouldn’t kick him out of the house. “I knew that wasn’t for me. I was like, Ew, I can’t work here,” he recalled, the creases in his face made visible by the memory. He would bounce between four public high schools — Sayre, Northeast,

GEN F

Olney, and Camelot; “I was just bad,” he acknowledged — before falling into rap his senior year. That was around 2012, the period after A$AP Rocky released his murky debut album and Big Sean’s Finally Famous found a devoted fan base among newly minted college bros. Both releases, despite Rocky and Sean hailing from northern cities, embraced styles typically associated with the South, an approach a young Symere would later tap into in his own unique way. Things began to take off in 2014 when Don Cannon heard the eponymous solo track “Uzi” — a Charlie Heat-backed, barrel-blasting allegory of survival — while driving to Atlantic City. Cannon linked Uzi with DJ Drama, another Philly native, and signed the rap upstart with Generation Now, their imprint under Atlantic. Though Uzi had already released two mixtapes, it wasn’t until he recorded the DJ Carnageproduced “WYDW” with A$AP Ferg and Rich the Kid that he finally reached a considerable audience. The 16-track LUV Is RAGE followed — “Can I tell you a secret? [That’s] a project that I really worked on,” he said — and featured a guest verse from his idol Wiz Khalifa. “I don’t really get starstruck, because I am a star,” said Uzi, “but I kind of got starstruck when I met Wiz.” But it was Lil Uzi Vert Vs. The World, which came out last April, that solidified the fact that Uzi had become a rare vessel

(“That’s my bro right there”) have home-

fortunate he is and that he’d be nothing

for the kind of sound Atlanta’s ascendant

town advantage, Uzi is just as beloved in

without his fans, so he gives them his all: the

rap scene has bolstered over the last half-

and beyond Atlanta’s borders. But why?

delicious, dizzying hooks, the multichro-

decade. You know it when you hear it: the

Maybe it’s because his personality is tai-

matic music videos, the Instagrams of him

seesawing beats; the gliding hooks that

lor-made for the kind of bipolarity today’s

and Brittany. Success is merely the result

feel like they’re rising out of some dark,

rap often embraces: in conversation he’s

of his constant labor. The immeasurable

hazy hell; the erupting bursts of lyricism

chameleon-like, moving between ex-

support, the headlining U.S. tour without

that twist and turn before suddenly dis-

tremes, distant and walled-off and then

a major-label release in sight, the hospi-

solving; the tales of endless nights and

instantly endearingly open and engaged

tality from Atlanta rappers and the home

lost loves and unpardonable fuckups. Uzi

to the point where you begin to wonder if

he moved to last fall in North Druid Hills —

has a wunderkind-like proficiency for this

you could actually be friends. It could also

none of it, it seems, has gone to his head.

particular style, and he knows it. When

be that he considers himself a rockstar

Later, as the van barreled down

asked how he feels about being associ-

more than anything, and embodies that

Lexington Avenue toward 15th Street, the

ated with the new contingent of weirdo

motif completely — a new kind of avatar

thick hum of traffic dissipating, Uzi felt

Southern hip-hop, he answered without

for a more evolved, post-Obama, post-

at ease. The partition, for now, had come

hesitation. “Everybody get everything

trap sound. It may have taken root in the

down. “I don’t plan nothing, I just do it,” he

from each other,” he said. “Nobody really

South, but through Uzi, the music could

said, speaking to his serendipitous last

makes up nothing. You just see it, you like

infinitely transmorph.

two years. “You know who plan? Old peo-

it, and you do it. And if you do it the best, that’s all that matters.”

It’s also possible that Uzi has emerged

ple. I don’t want to be old.”

from the pack simply because he grinds

Even though kindred spirits like Lil

really fucking hard. In our day together, it

Yachty, Playboi Carti, and Young Thug

becomes clear that he understands how

GEN F

Elysia Crampton Looking for hope amid chaos Story by Patrick D. McDermott Photography by Daria Kobayashi Ritch

“I had this poem stuck in my head the other day,” Elysia Crampton said recently during a visit to Manhattan. The electronic composer is small-framed, with sharp cheekbones and a smile that’ll make your knees wobbly. “I was eating a mango with my boyfriend, and the poem was just moving in my head like a song — but there was no melody,” the 30-year-old remembered. The text she was talking about was CaribbeanAmerican poet June Jordan’s Reagan-era epic “From Sea to Shining Sea,” although when Crampton said the title, it sounded more like “From She to Shining She.” Crampton, a California-born BolivianAmerican who currently lives with family in a rural town near Sacramento, finds inspiration in what she calls the “movement” of non-musical art, meaning the work’s structural form rather than its content. “There’s the husk of the movie — the way it’s directed, and the way the camera moves through it,” she said. “I feel like that has its own poetics.” As a musician, her own productions are concerned with exploring form, too, from the transportive mash-ups she made as E+E back in 2013 to the world-swallowing instrumentals she now releases under her own name. “That sort of movement is really attractive to me, and I want to reproduce it,” she said. “It comes from so many things, not just film or poetry. It’s just from, like, being in the world.” When we met, Crampton was sitting on a couch inside a fourth-floor conference room on the Upper West Side.

GEN F

“ The poem was just moving in my head like a song — but there was no melody.”

The nondescript room was a makeshift

visible than ever. It’s helping her, a trans

backstage area for the David Rubenstein

Latinx woman, not just survive, but thrive.

Atrium, a leafy public space where

“I’m really happy for my friends, and my

Crampton had just put on a multidisci-

work ethic is better,” Crampton said, pick-

plinary performance. For about 45 min-

ing up a very small bottle of Jägermeister,

utes, she deployed, among other things:

which she told me is her favorite. “I’m able

guttural Spanish-language screams, his-

to navigate capitalist, imperialist society

torical images showing violence against

better,” she explained, noting that by em-

trans women, and aggressively beautiful

bracing some aspects of it (computers for

electronic music that, at points, sounded

composing music, planes for travel), she’s

like the score to an off-kilter adventure

able to negotiate a future. It’s a paradox,

movie. On stage, she wore a leather jacket,

she told me. Those things are limiting and

a beet-red tank top, and military dog tags

exclusive, but they’re also the gateway to

inscribed with the logo for NON, the re-

her freedom.

cord label co-founded by her friend Chino

Crampton’s outlook reminds me of the

Amobi. A lot of the live mix sounded like

gorgeous final section of June Jordan’s

music from her new full-length album,

poem, the same one she had stuck in her

Demon City, a delirium-inducing project

head. It was published in 1983 by Barbara

that she wrote and recorded alongside four

Smith and Audre Lorde’s feminist press,

kindred producers: Amobi, Rabit, Lexxi,

but feels as relevant as ever.

and Why Be. “They were always already informing

This is a good time. This is the

my work,” she explained of her choice to

best time. This is the only time to

make something collaborative. “Whether I

come together. Fractious. Kicking.

acknowledge it on an album or press state-

Spilling. Burly. Whirling. Raucous.

ment, they’re there.” While each of these

Messy. Free. Exploding like the seeds

electronic provocateurs has their own

of a natural disorder.

distinct voice, they all pull from a dissociative, in-your-face sonic palette in order to

Crampton’s work similarly suggests

reflect and disrupt modern life, to show

that hope can be found in even the most

how our world can be simultaneously pret-

dire of socio-political situations, and

ty and straight-up terrifying. They make

that friendship is survival’s closest ally. If

some of the most punk music imagin-

the “natural disorder” that Jordan wrote

able, even though it almost never includes

about had a sound, it would probably be

guitars. On “Children of Hell,” a song that

a lot like the music of Elysia Crampton.

Crampton made with Amobi, a sparse reggaeton melody slithers forward while a noisy groundswell — featuring space lasers, evil genius laughter, and syncopated explosions — climbs purposefully toward cathartic pandamonium. Crampton has been calling Demon City’s surreal aesthetic “severo,” the Spanish word for severe. “I tried to come up with [a name] that was broad and openended,” she said. “I didn’t want it to be like, Oh, OK, severo is a bunch of murder samples thrown together with some car sounds and an ambient track. The genre can still evolve, because our sound is still evolving too.” Making Demon City has been an inspiring experience, Crampton said, and she’s excited for whatever’s next. Her art, and the art made by her collaborators, is more

GEN F

The New York City punk band Show Me the Body teetered over the edge of a dodgy roof in Chinatown. It was a blindingly bright summer afternoon, and frontman Julian Cashwan Pratt, 22, had just had his hair cut nearly to the skin in a makeshift art gallery/barber shop one floor below us. The band passed around a joint — fleetly rolled by drummer Noah Cohen-Corbett, 20, on top of a Bernie Sanders-stickered laptop — and kicked around music video ideas. Pratt was thinking it’d be cool to walk into the John Varvatos store, the high-end men’s retailer built on the bones of the former punk sanctuary CBGB, “and, like, puke all over all the clothes.” A consensus was quickly reached: if fake vomit is going to be used, black food coloring would be best. A few blocks from here there’s a littleknown small business called Imperial Ballroom. It’s usually a dance studio where stern Ukrainians teach Chinese retirees the waltz. A few days later, Show Me the Body played a record release party there for their wondrous, intense fulllength debut, Body War, and effectively cross-checked the unsuspecting Imperial Ballroom into the boards. Body War is a thorny, bizarre document. For one, the racousness is built around Pratt’s harshly distorted banjo riffs. There are samples of the band’s own demos, manipulated until they sound like bleeping emergency sirens. There are effect pedals, abused to the point of sacrifice. “Some of the best shit comes from fucking machines up,” said bassist Harlan Steed, 21. “When shit sounds like it’s

Show Me the Body

breaking, I’m usually very excited.”

New York kids strive to make punk as hectic as their city.

are part of the collective Letter Racer —

There are moments of gorgeous clarity within the cacophony, too, like when the band slows everything down and Pratt speaks directly. Songs like these feel influenced equally by Show Me the Body’s pals in the N.Y.C. rap crew Ratking — both groups and crackle-voiced troubadours like Archy Marshall. At his best, Pratt can sound like he’s reluctantly working his mouth around some heretofore unsayable ache. Grow out in the East/ Learn to eat and fight, he sings on “Metallic Taste.” Read/ And sight death stares that keep me up at night.

Story by Amos Barshad Photography by Max Hoell

“We have to find discordance within harmony,” Pratt said, sidling up to a

GEN F

“If it sounds right I should wanna both fight to it and fuck to it.” —Julian Cashwan Pratt

mission statement. “Find the horror within

where a sprawl of tourists was waiting to

finished chewing and smiled. “I think it’s

the pop song. Find the terror within the shit

sample the goods. Our own chances didn’t

Emily Dickinson.”

that everyone will feel.” Or, if you prefer

look good. But then a grinning waiter spot-

Show Me the Body is one of those

succinctness: “If it sounds right I should

ted Pratt and clapped him on the back;

bands that truly feels like they could have

wanna both fight to it and fuck to it.”

minutes later we had a prime table in the

only come from here, from this city. The

clamoring dining room and three bamboo

gawky-cool clothes, ill-fitting black jeans

steamers of soup dumplings.

and freebie Sherwin Williams T-shirts.

Pratt and Steed first started screwing around together as stoned freshmen in music class at Manhattan’s Elisabeth

Pratt, by way of explanation, talked of

Spare talk of buddies crashing at Martha

Irwin, a pioneering progressive high

a cousin’s super-rich girlfriend’s dad who

Plimpton’s loft, tour managers jetting off

school (former students include Angela

was head of all the produce that came into

to London with the daughters of pop stars.

Davis and Robert De Niro). Early on they

New York. “Super fucked-up dude, goes

Cutting the line at the dope dumpling spot

called themselves U-Lock Justice, a

to South America with mad guns and shit.

because you quasi-know the gun-running

cheeky term for bicycle vigilantism. Show

Anyway, her mom used to come in here

one-time produce king of Manhattan. Just

Me the Body has allusions to redress, too:

and give everyone a red New Year’s enve-

down the road is a little park where Pratt

it’s a loose translation of habeas corpus,

lope.” Chopsticks in hand, Pratt explained

used to take early-morning “pay what you

the legal recourse under which one can re-

that he recruited Cohen-Corbett, a native

can” kung fu lessons.

port unlawful imprisonment.

of Western Massachusetts, during an ill-

Shruggingly, they embody the idea that

As Show Me the Body, they’ve attained

begotten stint at Hampshire College. “I

this is New York and there are possibilities

both an aura of mystery and a passionate

got there and I realized all I wanna do is

everywhere, if you know where to look. One

following: they don’t talk to press much

write poetry,” Pratt recalled. Mouth full, he

day, the band promises, they’ll record a

and generally avoid the city’s traditional

told a story.

whole album’s worth of vocals through the

venues, choosing instead to pack bridge

“The first time we played this track

speakers of an MTA conductor. “Everybody

underpasses and alleys with sweaty kids

‘Space Faithful,’ me and Harlan thought

in New York’s got something to sell,” Pratt

who get to feel like they’re something be-

we were on acid: we both got this grip in

said, sounding endearingly, precocious-

tween extended crew-members and fans.

the back of our skull. A year later I was

ly, like a curmudgeon. “I feel like we got

Back on the roof, joint stubbed out,

talking to some girl and she showed me

something to build. I’m hyped for that. I’m

Cohen-Corbett announced, “Yo, let’s hit

this Emily Dickinson quote: ‘I know po-

down to fight for it.”

the dim sum spot.” We trekked down the

etry is happening when I feel the skin be-

roof ladder and out to Joe’s Shanghai,

ing ripped off the back of my skull.’” He

GEN F

I N N O V AT I V E L E I S U R E . N E T

Jorja Smith A British teen fights apathy with soul.

The day before the U.K. voted to leave the European Union, Jorja Smith tapped her long, shimmering pink acrylics on her MacBook as she searched online for a specific Jean-Michel Basquiat painting. Like many 19-year-olds, she punctuates references by reaching for Google to illustrate her point. The 1983 piece in question is titled “Leeches,” and it’s classic Basquiat — a sprawling, grotesque critique of greed. Finding it, she zoomed in on the section she liked most: a scrawl that says POWER + MONEY (VALUE). “The people who are the most powerful and have the most money sometimes don’t value other people,” she explained. She stared at the messy picture for a moment. “It interests me because it’s hard to understand. There’s so much going on.” Smith has been performing since the age of 8 and writing songs since 11, amassing a broad catalog of mostly un-

Story by Aimee Cliff Photography Francesca Allen

released tracks that skew from pop to modern soul. One of the earliest songs

GEN F

ROBIN AND ANDRÃ&#x2030;A MCBRIDE ENTREPRENEURS

LIFE IS A SPORT. WE ARE THE UTILITY. BE UNSTOPPABLE.

THE FORD EXPLORER

she remembers writing was called “High Street,” about when all the stores in her hometown of Walsall, in the midwest of England, closed during the economic recession of the late-’00s, leaving behind a hollow ghost town. Walsall is a run-down place, Smith said, with “a lot of creative people, but not many possibilities.” Before Smith’s family settled there, her mom was a jewelry maker who spent her twenties in London, and her Jamaican-born father was the lead singer of a neo-soul vocal group called 2nd Naicha. They raised her on a diet of reggae, rock, and soul, which she countered with her own love of funky house and dubstep. Her dad, she said, realized she had a talent when he heard her sing “Silent Night” in church. And it’s easy to hear why; her voice can silence a room. It’s jazzy, and mixed with the cockiness and slang of London, not entirely unlike that of her hero, Amy Winehouse. Smith’s father encouraged her to learn piano, and she later won a music scholarship to a prestigious local school where she picked up the oboe and took classical singing lessons. From her early teens, she harbored faith that music would offer her a route out of Walsall. When a friend filmed her singing Alex Clare’s 2011 U.K. hit “Too Close” and uploaded it to YouTube, the video was passed around school so much that older girls would stop her in the halls and demand that she start singing. She was 15 when the clip was sent to her current managers, who contacted her from London. They kept in touch, and by the time she finished her exams, she had written upwards of 70 songs. licensing document that, until 2008, re-

interview, following the results of the

shifts at Starbucks to write more songs,

quired event promoters to inform the po-

referendum, Cameron resigned. In retro-

avoiding clubs and burying herself in

lice of the ethnic makeup of their intended

spect, it’s clear that the campaign leaders

her Tumblr feed and the surreal movies

audiences. It often led the police to shut

did very little to engage young voices in the

of Wong Kar Wai. But things didn’t stay

down music events simply because of a

national debate surrounding the E.U. ref-

low-key for long. In January 2016, she fi-

majority black audience.

erendum — even young voices as outspo-

nally self-released her debut single, “Blue

While talking about “Blue Lights,”

ken and passionate as Smith’s. The result

Lights,” a song that uniquely mixes grime’s

Smith once again reached for a visual

was that an older voting population ulti-

grit with a softer plea for empathy. It quick-

reference point and pulled up U.K. MC

mately decided the future of the country.

ly hit regular rotation on local London ra-

Ghetts’s video “Rebel,” which opens with

Smith, who mostly writes songs about the

dio. Taking its refrain from Dizzee Rascal’s

a shot of a young boy watching David

experiences of her peers, told me: “I don’t

2007 political statement “Sirens,” Smith’s

Cameron on the TV, and is soundtracked

like to write about myself. I like listening

“Blue Lights” was inspired by “the black

by a chorus that demands answers from

to people.” In turn, it seems like now is the

stereotype” and by Form 696, a mandatory

the prime minister. Two days after our

right time to start listening to her.

GEN F

STYLIST CONNOR GAFFE, MAKE UP CAROL LOPEZ REID.

After graduation, Smith moved to London, where she would rush home after

WWW.HIGHBREWCOFFEE.COM

Mozzy Staying true to Sacramento while aiming for the world Story by Lawrence Burney Photography by Dan Monick

While incarcerated in 2014, Mozzy made

For the past year, Mozzy, 28, has been

a list of things he wanted when he got

enjoying each and every second of life in

out: an SUV, two or three chains, a cool

Los Angeles. His new place is six hours

little duck-off spot, $50,000 in cash, and

from his hometown neighborhood of

$50,000 in the bank. Shortly after his

Oak Park, where his time in the street

release, the Sacramento-born rapper

provided him with an abundance of sto-

blew past all of those, thanks to income

ries to tell through song. Born Timothy

from album sales, song features, and

Patterson, Mozzy has been rapping since

show money. So he set new goals, includ-

the age of 14, first making a name for

ing plans to continue feverishly releas-

himself in Sacramento as Lil Tim. While

ing music, to solidify his greatness, and

his parents dealt with addiction and their

to ensure a secure future for his daugh-

own incarceration, he was raised by his

ter. “My hunger is everlasting,” he said

grandmother, who owned multiple prop-

from his Hollywood porch during a recent

erties around Sacramento. Even after

FaceTime conversation. “I’m foaming at

he built relative buzz at home, he didn’t

the mouth. I believe it belongs to me.”

think a sustainable music career was in

GEN F

the cards. “Don’t nobody feel this hun-

On the minimal, clap-filled track, he looks

a nigga couldn’t do.” After soaking up the

ger,” he said, like he was placing himself

back on his time selling drugs and pimp-

track’s success, he’s been having some

back in that time. “Don’t nobody recog-

ing, confessing that the dirt he’s done is

new revelations about what he wants for

nize this talent. Don’t nobody recognize

weighing on his conscience, while assur-

his career. “It’s bigger than Oak Park,” he

this sincerity.”

ing you that he’ll still go into attack mode

says. “It’s bigger than Sacramento. It’s

Things took a turn when, after getting

if necessary. He raps the word “narrate”

bigger than California.” Not too long ago,

out of prison, Mozzy began channelling

where others would say “snitching,” and

Mozzy would have been satisfied with

his feelings of hopelessness into “some

“humans” instead of “people,” small

being a regional superstar like one of his

gangsta shit.” Inspired by his grand-

tweaks that make his stories feel fresh.

all-time favorite rappers, the now-slain

mother’s tireless hard work, he buckled

The song, which has racked up over 5 mil-

Bay Area native The Jacka, who released

down and released four solo projects

lion YouTube views, changed Mozzy’s life.

over ten solo albums and dozens of col-

and a hit single, all in 2015. “Bladadah,”

“Life been different since ‘Bladadah’

laborative projects, including two with

named after the Sacramento slang word

dropped,” he said as his friends choked on

Freeway toward the end of his life. But

for pistol, perfectly displays the contrast

weed smoke in the background. “I can do

now — with the opportunities, money, and

of Mozzy’s gruff voice and nimble delivery.

shit for my daughter that once upon a time

ticket out of the hood that his recent work ethic has afforded him — Mozzy’s gunning for “that Jigga and Kanye paper.” Mozzy has already dropped two solo albums in 2016: Beautiful Struggle and Mandatory Check. On the former’s title track, he raps, I’m doing this for my daughter/ She don’t never get to see her mama ‘cause me and her got our little problems/ It is what it is/ I thank God I ain’t use a condom ‘cause this little girl the reason why I’m poppin’. Mozzy projects the same sobering, almost-too-personal vulnerability that has made artists like Boosie such treasures to their fans. At the same time, Mozzy stays distinct by blocking out the sounds of the contemporary rap landscape, sticking to West Coast regional production and honing in on the little things that make his offline community tick, no matter how bleak or brutal. “I ain’t really into all the extracurricular activity,” he said. “I’m smooth with a Honda Accord. Feel me? Toyota Camry, nigga.” Still unsigned, Mozzy is locked in on becoming an even more productive artist as a means to liberate his family and friends from Oak Park. “I can’t believe I spent my whole life there and thought it was turnt up,” he said with a smile that, within seconds, turned to stone. “I just wanna take all my niggas with me like, This ain’t it bruh. We out here sacrificing our life for this? It’s bigger when you see the world.” He paused to ask a friend to grab scissors, presumably to clip the blunt he was rolling. “I live outside the struggle right now,” he said, peering into the camera, pushing back the dreads draping down his forehead. “My days damn near all be the same.”

GEN F

THE HEART OF YOUR

STUDIO

M-TRACK 2X2M 2 - I N / 2 - O U T 2 4 / 19 2 U S B A U D I O / M I D I I N T E R F A C E Featuring Noblesse Oblige

Watch the video at m-audio.com

rocawear.com

DON BENJAMIN

42 The myth of cool girl makeup 46 Korean fashion comes to New York 50 The end of period shame 52 Why dad hats are trending

How the internetâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s coolest beauty brand makes skincare look effortless.

Story by Haley Mlotek Illustration by Frank J. MondragĂłn FADE IN

Her name was Josephine Esther Mentzer, but only until she decided otherwise. Her father, Max Mentzer, called her “Estee,” lifting the vowels after biting down on that middle consonant. Later she paired her father’s pronunciation with an accent aigu to make it sound French. Her husband, Joseph Lauter, made his “T” a “D” to match. In 1948, they began selling four modest skincare products — a cleansing oil, lotion, and two deep moisturizers — at Saks New York; almost 60 years later, Estée Lauder Companies Inc. reports revenues over $10 billion. Before Lauder, there was Helena Rubinstein, who sold her own brand of cold cream from her Australian salon beginning in 1902. She liked to wear a lab coat while she spoke to customers, believing it made her look and sound more scientifically authoritative. And before Rubinstein, there was David H. McConnell; in 1886 he sold hand-mixed perfumes door-to-door in New York. A year later, he hired Persis Foster Eames Albee, who suggested business might be better if they hired women to sell directly to other women. In 1928, McConnell renamed the company Avon, and the women became “Avon Ladies.” They soon proved that rose-infused oils would sell by pretty much any name, if a nice woman came by to personally tell you how sweet they smelled. A century and change later, in 2010, Emily Weiss was 25 and spending time with her family on a beach. She told them she wanted to start a blog, although it wouldn’t be a blog, exactly, it would be more of an online magazine, and it wouldn’t be about her, but it would have the kind of beauty writing she wanted to read. She called it Into The Gloss, and its most popular feature was “The Top Shelf,” for which Weiss talked to friends and models and fashion industry favorites about their skincare and makeup routines. Within a year, she quit her job assisting Vogue’s then-style director to run Into The Gloss full-time. And in October 2014, she launched Glossier (pronounced like “dossier”), her own brand of skincare products. It launched with four essentials, the sorts of items frequently recommended by the women featured in Top Shelf: a priming

moisturizer, rosewater face mist, skin tint, and lip balm. This year, Glossier’s product line expanded to include an eyebrow gel, four lipsticks, cream concealer, a highlighting stick, face wash, and two masks. The highest-priced item tops out at $30. In her five-year anniversary post for Into The Gloss last year, Weiss wrote that she started out with her apartment, her cat, and spotty wi-fi; as of this writing, her company takes up three floors of a building in SoHo, has 45 employees working on the site and the brand, $10.4 million in venture capital funding, 1.5 million unique monthly page views on Into The Gloss, a Snapchat following that is, according to Weiss, larger than BuzzFeed’s, and a soldout lipstick with a waitlist of over 18,000 anticipatory customers. The wi-fi, Weiss said, remains pretty spotty. In a golden age for content, venture capital-backed businesses often dabble in blogs, using them as promotional ventures to supplement the company’s real work. Weiss inverted that, using Into The Gloss as the foundation for Glossier, turning the transparent, conversational feel of its content into the kind of consumer insight no amount of money can buy. Glossier has nearly 300,000 followers on Instagram, but Weiss calls Into The Gloss the company’s largest social channel. “The comments we get on there are consistently in the hundreds, and we really use the feedback to shape everything we do, from product development to marketing campaigns.” Products are sent swaddled in bubblegum-pink bubble wrap pouches, and every order comes with a sheet of stickers that features a mix of palm trees, cherries, happy faces, and Glossier’s logos. Girls love stickers, the deliveries wink. Girls just want to have fun, the pink-and-white palette and coy copy sing. And, of course, they also want glowing skin. Glossier has thrived by targeting the midpoint between cheap cult favorites and luxury treats: its hypoallergenic, cruelty-free formulas welcome all kinds of customer requirements, ranging from the physical to the moral and financial. Embryolisse’s Lait-Crème Concentré, the moisturizer recommended by makeup artists all over the world, was frequently seen on the Into The Gloss profiles

of models and actresses; the Glossier Priming Moisturizer is, in my opinion, a better, lighter version of the same product. The Elizabeth Arden Eight Hour Cream was frequently invoked as a favorite intensive salve for lips, dry spots, and cuticles; the Glossier Balm Dotcom is a close cousin of the same formula, but without the punishing medicinal smell. Both products are priced comparably. “We believe Glossier is more than just beauty or beauty products. It’s a way of life,” Weiss told me over email, listing French pharmacy skincare, perfumer Le Labo, and Ralph Lauren as particular sources of inspiration — wholesome brands, and within reach for the majority of cosmetic consumers. Glossier understands the conventions of beauty writing and marketing well enough to gently mock them, and set itself apart. Of her employees, Weiss wrote, “We’re all feminists and we’re all ﬁred up about the movement we’re leading.” The movement Weiss refers to is a new version of the friend-centric economy best exempliﬁed by Avon: young women rely on their immediate circle of friends as focus groups whose insights and retweets can help them sell their products, brands, and ideologies directly to their peers. Glossier launched on social media before it had a stand-alone e-commerce site, and sees most of its business from repeat customers and direct referral traffic, suggesting a core community that is loyal, and a wider one still growing. The model is a technologically sophisticated update to Albee’s Avon Ladies: rather than go doorto-door, Weiss goes screen-to-screen. Weiss says Glossier is for a girl who is both like her and like people who inspire her. But Glossier also actively solicits information from women who are inspired by Weiss, who deliver their thoughts through clicks and comments in a very friendly feedback loop. At the beginning of 2015, Weiss asked readers to leave comments on Into The Gloss about the qualities that would make a perfect face wash; when the Milky Jelly Cleanser was released in 2016, the site posted a long oral history detailing how customer ideas shaped their research and development. “Since the teamwork we did on Glossier

FADE IN

“They’re so well-marketed that you want to believe.” —Kelli

Milky Jelly Cleanser did so well, we’re hoping you’re game to help us out again,” read a new post at the beginning of 2016, which asked readers to weigh in on a future heavy-duty moisturizer. As they work out new products, the demand for existing Glossier items has far outpaced the company’s literal growth. In a conciliatory dispatch this winter, the company explained that “beauty products take a crazy long time to make” and promised a complete restock soon: “We hope that you’ll bear with us in the meantime and continue to support Glossier. We couldn’t (and wouldn’t) do it without you.” The apology was direct, intimate, and devoted — professional transparency made to feel personal. It sounded almost like an email you’d get from a friend cancelling dinner plans at the last minute. And that was probably the point: what’s a delayed shipment between friends? Like any business owner, Weiss hopes Glossier’s community will expand to as many people as possible. “Anyone can be a Glossier girl,” she said. “They’re our readers, our editors, our friends. They have freckles, pores, scars. Our girl doesn’t need our products, but she chooses them because they make her feel great — simple as that.” I know lots of people who want to be a Glossier girl. Many of them read Into The Gloss before using Glossier, and have felt seen, noticed, and known by Glossier’s marketing, in a way so targeted it’s almost eerie. Stephanie, 28, works in Toronto as a production manager for a line of simple streetwear. She told me she started using Glossier products as a fan of Into The Gloss, describing it as “chasing after that effortlessly cool, beautiful face.” She has found them to be “actually really good,” and singled out the Priming Moisturizer in particular, saying it smoothes the surface of her skin before applying makeup like no other product does. By contrast, Kelli, 30, an editor for a digital women’s lifestyle magazine, called Glossier products “very well-marketed” but ultimately “mediocre.” The lipsticks are “incredibly shitty, and I think anyone being honest with themselves will agree,” she said. “They’re so well-marketed that you want to believe, because the idea of minimalist

makeup that encourages you to be in your own skin is so appealing.” But she’s still drawn to new drops. “I want the intel to effortless beauty too,” she said. Sandwiched in between glowing reviews on Twitter and across multiple makeup forums, there are also users complaining that the priming moisturizer made them break out, that the cleanser is just “rosescented Cetaphil,” and that the makeup products are designed for people with already-perfect skin. On the spectrum of products I’ve tried (a healthy sweep through most of Sephora), Glossier is neither entirely worthy of its aspirational status nor unworthy of its place on my bathroom counter. I’m a devoted user of their brow gel and moisturizer, and I particularly like the Perfecting Skin Tint, although my shade has been sold out for months. I’ve taken to rationing usage for occasions, like daytime dates or stressful work meetings, when I want my skin to impress under scrutiny. As makeup, it promises to mimic the effects of impeccable skincare; as skincare, it promises to replace the need for makeup entirely. These are laudable, if unrealistic, goals, loaded with the conventional hopes and traditional ideals of beauty. In actuality, Glossier is a literal combination of ﬁnely sourced emollients, extracts, and waxes that promises the same ethereal effects beauty purveyors have been promising for, like, ever. Today, I like the way it looks on my face. Tomorrow, another brand might start telling a newer story that will make me feel differently. For now, Glossier’s place is secure: in 2016, Weiss reports, Glossier will see a 600 percent increase in sales from the previous year. As I was writing this piece, the Generation G lipstick was restocked after months of being unavailable. The next day, I counted three boxes with return addresses from Glossier in the mailroom of my Brooklyn apartment building.

FADE IN

BACK TO THE FLUTURE

� J O H N�F LU EVO G�S H O E S VANCOUVER��SEATTLE��BOSTON��TORONTO��NEW�YORK��SAN�FRANCISCO��CHICAGO��LOS�ANGELES MONTRÉAL��PORTLAND��QUÉBEC��CALGARY��WASHINGTON��DC��MINNEAPOLIS��DENVER��OTTAWA

FLU EVO G �CO M

Korean fashion comes to New York

Story by Liz Raiss Photography by Yael Malka FADE IN

When New York gets you down, it’s comforting to know there are

still places to hide — like through the window onto a rickety old

Left T-shirt BIANCA CHANDON,

fire escape, six floors above the world. For the fashion-forward,

jeans and shoes AMI, jacket SUPREME.

another escapist wonderland is Fig Collective, a low-profile,

Middle T-shirt GOSHA RUBCHINSKIY,

appointment-only shop in Brooklyn. The Bushwick boutique,

jeans ANDERSSON BELLE, boots

which also sells clothes online, is one of the only places in the

MARGIELA, jacket VINTAGE.

world where you can find a select handful of young, largely uni-

Right T-shirt DIME, jacket SUPREME,

sex brands from the founders’ native South Korea: companies

flannel RAG & BONE, pants RICK OWENS,

like Ader Error, VEI-8, and Bouton that specialize in a specific

shoes Y-3.

kind of uncool cool. Jeans feature a slight wing at the ankle and, perhaps, a simple word like “RUN” embroidered above the knee.

Above

Black bomber jackets zip up over a bright blue inset panel. Even

Left Jacket THIS IS NEVER THAT,

a humble striped shirt has extra-long sleeves, with holes for

pants and belt ADER ERROR, shoes Y-3.

convenience about the wrist. In their adopted home, three of Fig

Middle Jeans, T-shirt and longsleeve

Collective’s four members (the crew’s film director Seungbum

ADER ERROR, shoes AMI.

Hong, 29, is not pictured) wear a mixture of the American and

Right Dress ZARA, jacket ADER ERROR,

South Korean brands they love.

shoes NIKE.

FADE IN

Yongjae Kim, 33, creative director

Sungjune Jang, 29, photographer

Janne Chung, 33, design director and stylist

FADE IN

MyMusicRx programs engage hospitalized kids of all ages and diagnoses to relieve stress, anxiety, and perception of pain. You can help us deliver the healing power of music to over , 00 kids at 2 pediatric hospitals across the country. Learn more at MyMusicRx.org.

The end of period shame Story by Ruth Saxelby Illustration by Faye Orlove

There is a song on Jenny Hval’s new album, Blood Bitch, where the Norwegian artist slowly intones, Smells like warm winter. The lyric, from “Untamed Region,” refers to the blood the song’s protagonist ﬁnds on her bed, and dips her ﬁnger into, when she wakes up. “There’s been so much talk in Scandinavia about the menstrual cup,” Hval said over Skype from her hometown of Oslo. The line was inspired by online discussions about the experience of using

a cup, which isn’t doused in chemicals like disposable period products such as tampons and pads. “People were describing what [their] blood smelled like when there was no tampon or pad, and it was so different.” Hval’s sensual song denounces the shame surrounding menstruation; the scent of expelled cells is recast as something relatable rather than a telltale sign of a millennia-old taboo. In a world where girls are taught from a young age

FADE IN

that periods are supposed to be hidden — not just unobservable and unsmellable, but also unspoken of — the song presents an image of a woman who is not just unperturbed by her own blood, but emboldened by it. I have big dreams, she says. And blood powers. Hval isn’t the only one shifting perceptions about periods into undeniably cooler territory. The past 18 months have seen a number of artists, activists, politicians, and entrepreneurs take radical strides toward dismantling menstrual stigma in a variety of ways. While feminist artists have been exploring the taboo for decades, today’s efforts are breaking out of the fringes and going mainstream. In March 2015, Toronto artist Rupi Kaur posted a picture from her photography series period. on Instagram. It depicted a clothed woman lying on a bed, her back to the camera, with a bloodstain on both her sweatpants and the sheet. Kaur’s work broke the code of silence surrounding periods, and Instagram responded by deleting the photo. Undeterred, Kaur took to Facebook and Tumblr to write about the censorship, and the story went viral. (Instagram later apologized and reinstated the post.) To Kiran Gandhi, a musician and activist who made headlines in August 2015 for running the London Marathon while bleeding freely, Kaur’s work is an act of “radical activism.” So, too, is the work of other artists helping nudge periods into the light: Argentinian artist Fannie Sosa incorporates menstrual cup advocation into her video work and teachings, while Los Angeles illustrator Faye Orlove included a diagram showing how to insert a tampon in her animated video for Mitski’s “Townie” earlier this year. “I like to confront boys with the ‘grossness’ of [periods] because I think it’s this cliché that girls are scared of violence and blood,” Orlove said in a phone call. “Do you even realize how much blood we’re confronted with regularly?” Acts like these, which force a conversation around periods, are crucial to combating stigma. “The truth is that most social change doesn’t happen unless society is forced to question its problematic norms,” Gandhi said over Skype from her home in

Los Angeles. “That’s why radical activism is so crucial: because it gives the media something to write about, it gives the people something to gossip about, and it gives people on Facebook a very tangible anchor around which to have this discussion.” When the public starts talking about something — like it did last August, using #PeriodsAreNotAnInsult on Twitter in response to Donald Trump’s comment that Fox News host Megyn Kelly must have “blood coming out of her wherever” because she was tough on him during a GOP debate — commerce is never far behind. And that’s a good thing, believes Gandhi; product innovation is just as important to eradicating the period taboo as activism, access to education, and policy change. Because, along with the freedom that innovation brings, product marketing budgets are a powerful tool to reach people on a massive scale. That’s what happened in the fall of 2015 when Thinx, a line of period-proof underwear, plastered Facebook and N.Y.C.’s subways with ads that looked more like pages from a fashion magazine. It wasn’t just the photos but the accompanying text: “For women who have periods.” It turned out that the M.T.A. had originally refused the ads (no one had ever said “period” on the subway before), so Thinx went straight to the press. The media response forced the M.T.A.’s hand. “The way we’ve been talking about periods is no longer clinical, medical, or academic,” explained Miki Agrawal, the New York entrepreneur who founded Thinx, over the phone. “It’s actually relatable. It’s like texting your best girlfriend. Because [Thinx] talks about it without embarrassment, it gives permission to others to talk about it in the same way.” Gone are the days of pad and tampon ads featuring blue liquid, a sanitized stand-in for rustred blood. “The entire period space has been so tired and so lame,” Agrawal said. “[Now] it’s artful, it’s beautiful, and it’s culturally relevant.” A fresh, modern look has also been important to Lunette, a menstrual cup brand founded in Finland in 2005 and now sold in over 40 countries around the world. Lunette’s founder Heli Kurjanen told me that the company’s clean and

simple packaging has won it a lot of fans in transgender men: “There are lots of customers, especially from the U.S., that thank us that we don’t really focus on gender that much.” The more we talk about periods, the less shameful we feel; and the less shameful we feel, the more powerful we are. That can translate to action: in July 2015, the Canadian government scrapped the “tampon tax” — shorthand for the sales tax added to feminine hygiene products because they were categorized as “luxury” items. In America, the 40 states that still tax tampons, pads, and menstrual cups are actively being challenged by campaigners. In a Facebook post this June, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio shouted out Council member Julissa Ferreras-Copeland’s hard work for menstrual equality, and announced that New York “is now the largest city in the country to guarantee free tampons and pads at public schools, shelters, and correctional facilities.” “Women’s health is an economic issue,” Hillary Clinton wrote on Facebook in response. “Every woman deserves access to affordable menstrual products. Bravo, New York.” If Clinton wins the presidential election this November, maybe the U.S.A. will wave goodbye to the tampon tax once and for all. In the wake of so much progress around periods, it’s easy to forget there’s a lot more work to do. “The strongest blood in the universe is probably menstrual blood,” Hval told me. “But at the same time, it’s always being stripped of power.” As Gandhi pointed out, we need art that works as activism to stir up uncomfortable conversations, as well as policy change to push forward innovation and take the conversation wide: it’s a cycle, just like the one that half the world’s population knows as intimately as their heartbeat. The coolest bit? In shrugging off our hangups, we’re not just helping crush a taboo; we’re raising a middle ﬁnger to the patriarchy and shaping a different future.

FADE IN

How dad hats became status symbols for everyone Story by Lakin Starling Photography by Corey Olsen

In a brilliant synergy of trends and timing, 2 Chainz reportedly grossed close to $2 million in 30 days last December by selling sweaters emblazoned with a “Dabbin’ Santa.” Portions of proceeds went to 2 Chainz’s T.R.U. Foundation charity, which helped out a disabled Atlanta veteran with rent and furniture and donated a car to another local family after a house ﬁre. The success inspired another merch venture, CEO Millionaires. “When you hit that second comma, it’s a big deal,” said Charlie Jabaley, 2 Chainz’s

manager, who co-owns CEO Millionaires. “Entrepreneurs are the new rock stars. With CEO, we wanted to sell that culture, and we wanted to help and inﬂuence these kids.” Launched on New Year’s Day, the Millionaires web store sells a line of products featuring its hustle-inspiring “CEO,000,000” slogan. There are shirts, hoodies, and no less than nine caps, all advertised as “Dad Hats.” “I noticed dad hats were a trend back in December,” said Jabaley, 28, who also helped popular gossip site The Shade

FADE IN

AMERICA’S ORIGINAL CRAFT VODKA

WINE ENTHUSIAST RATINGS SCORE OUT OF 100 POINTS

PTS

My American vodka beats the giant imports every day. Try American! It’s better.

“It’s the only kind of hat accepted by all the classes of society.” —Alexandre Daillance

Room launch a web store. “So I’m like, This term? I’m going to blow it out of the water.” If a catchy name like “dad hat” makes for a fresh marketing opportunity, the actual hats are nothing new. They’re cotton baseball caps with adjustable back straps, the kind that actual dads, kids on sports teams, and thrift store shoppers have worn for decades. Often found in solid colors and embellished at the front seam with a simple design, they’re more lowkey than snapbacks, fitteds, and trucker hats. But like each of those styles once did, dad hats are currently enjoying a flash of cultural ubiquity. They’re a favorite of everyday socialites looking to breeze through a bad hair day and of musicians enjoying a low profile, like Rihanna and Bryson Tiller, whose face is regularly obfuscated behind a brim. Perhaps dad hats have become so pervasive because they’re inexpensive to produce. NASASEASONS, a line of hats inscribed with funny phrases that are designed by a French teenager named Alexandre Daillance and four of his friends, sell online and at the Paris boutique Colette for $50 to $70. But they cost just $7 to make, Daillance said. The hats 2 Chainz and Jabaley sell under yet another label, Trapavelli, are priced at $28 and produced quickly. They’re intended to be sold (and then replaced with another dad hat) just as fast, drawing in customers with designs that reference up-to-the-minute memes, like Crying Jordan, or one that actually just says the words “Dad Hat.” For the trend-engaged, purchasing a fresh dad hat might be more fun and affordable than collecting the latest Jordans or designer purses. And a good one can be like a real-life, wearable Instagram caption, topping an outfit with a wink. “My collections started from my parties,” Daillance said. “All my best friends were hooking up with people, but didn’t want to hang out with them after. I came up with ‘I came to break hearts,’ and that was really successful, so I did ‘Single for the night.’” A hat is covetable, he said, when it conveys originality: “It should be simple but not something that already exists. Where you’re like, ‘Oh, that’s cool, I never saw that before.’” The basic form of a dad hat is notably unoriginal, which makes in-

teresting logos and phrases pop out even more by contrast. The blank canvas of a dad hat has also become a billboard onto which someone can broadcast their participation in a social movement. Looking to give his peers a way to celebrate their blackness after a string of protests over campus racism led to the resignation of the president of the University of Missouri last fall, student DeMontaz Brown launched a line of hats embroidered with the word “melanin” and sold them on his own webshop, MyMelanin. Ayda Gebrerufael’s BrainsByG hats honor her Eritrean heritage, with designs memorializing the country’s independence and 1991, and are meant to be worn as symbols of African pride. A couple years ago, I thought about launching a website to showcase people in music and culture with empowering stories about overcoming adversity. But last year I started selling dad hats instead. Embroidered with the words “get free,” they spread the message of resilience and liberation I once hoped a site could express. A manufacturer provides both the hat and its embroidering for $7 and I sell them for $20. But making a profit isn’t as rewarding for me as when people tell me that wearing the hat makes them feel good, or when I see that someone’s worn one to a Black Lives Matter protest or on a trip abroad. It seems dad hats have become popular because they’re as functional and flexible as the generation that has revived them. Accessible to both buy and sell, endlessly customizable, and unisex, they have the potential to express both comradery and individuality. If trucker hats were a symbol of working people ironically popularized by ostentatious, overspending celebrities, dad hats are aspirational and universal, offering people from all walks of life an opportunity to feel cool. “I come from a high society type of class, and hats were not accepted,” NASASEASONS designer Daillance said. “But hats with just a color and the logo, they’ve been worn so much by rich people, it’s the only kind of hat accepted by all the classes of society. No matter who you are, it will be fine if you wear it.”

FADE IN

G u c c i GUCCI MANE is one of our eraâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s greatest artists, but he is also a real person. And what that real person wants to do now is record rap songs with his friends.

Story by Andrew Nosnitsky Photography by Geordie Wood

F r e e

GUCCI MANE

ucci Mane moves rather deliberately for a guy who has nowhere to go. At 6’2” he has the presence of a much taller man, and when he walks it’s with an urgent lurch, fluid and reserved at the same time. Perhaps it’s a manner befitting of someone who has spent the past three years in a federal penitentiary. “Life in prison was hell,” says the 36-year-old rapper born Radric Davis. He’d been serving time on two counts of firearm possession as a felon. “It was a maximum security prison and it was a lot of violence. People were dying every week. [But] I think it helped me to get to the point I’m at now, to drive me out from the drugs. It gave me time to reflect, it made a lot of relationships that were toxic in my life just fall away.” For the next three months, Gucci will be on house arrest, holed up in his deceptively cavernous mini-mansion in Marietta, Georgia, about 30 minutes northwest of downtown Atlanta. The place is predictably gorgeous. There are minor shades of Scarface in his winding staircase, and Gucci seems most comfortable when he’s leaning over the balcony, overlooking two-story windows that reveal an ornate pool in the backyard. Downstairs, kettlebell weights and a power tower surround an immaculate white baby grand piano. A brand new white Maybach sits in the garage, as do dozens of empty designer shoe boxes and a slightly worn letterman jacket emblazoned with the logo for his 1017 Brick Squad imprint. This is the life that more than a decade of producing some of the grimiest trap rap ever committed to tape has earned Gucci Mane. And while he’s trapped in the house for the time being, he’s been making the most of his motionlessness, finalizing plans for Everybody Looking, his fifth major label album and first since 2010’s The Appeal. The industry has changed dramatically in his absence — the mixtape gray market that he built his career on has almost entirely evaporated, with artists now negotiating exclusive streaming rights with major tech firms — but Gucci’s still doing Gucci. Ever the model of efficiency, he says he recorded Everybody Looking in the first six days following his homecoming. “And on the seventh day I rested,” he says, “like the Lord.”

here are two truths that need to be acknowledged before we go any further, both oft-disputed but mostly by haters and nutjobs and nutjob haters. 1) Gucci Mane is one of the greatest rappers of the 21st century. 2) Gucci Mane is not a human clone who was planted by the United States government. Gucci is an acquired taste, to be certain. Partially, that’s owing to his choice of subject matter. He’s notoriously single-minded, even by street rap standards. Hundreds of his

tracks, across dozens of mixtapes throughout the second half of the ’00s, are centered on uncut, hedonistic streettalking. No passing nods to social consciousness, no cloying end-of-album tracks about how much he loves his mother. Just a perpetual barrage of wordplay about what he has and what he’s sold and what he would do to anyone who tried to separate him from those things. “Braggadocio,” he explains. “That’s what I like — I’m doper than everybody, I’m fresher than everybody, I’m the illest. That’s really me. I never really made music to make people try to feel sad. I don’t want people to feel sorry for me. I want them to feel powerful, I want them to feel aggressive, I want them to feel invincible. I want to hear the fuckery. I want to hear the shit that people probably think, ‘This ain’t good to be played around kids.’” What Gucci’s music lacks in compassion and introspection, he has more than compensated for with sheer style. He was born in Bessemer, Alabama, a small city located just southwest of Birmingham, and still carries an accent. This, multiplied by an Atlanta-learned swagger acquired when his family moved there when he was a kid, has left him with a distinctive and malleable mush-mouthed flow, deceptively simple from a distance but revealing new rhythmic dimensions upon closer inspection. This has proven to be a gift and a curse — it’s likely allowed him to sneak more complicated cadences into tracks with crossover appeal, but has also drawn him the ire of rap fans raised on more conservative, East Coast tongues, who deride him as insufficiently “lyrical.” Like E-40 or Cam’ron before him, Gucci is a lyricist obsessed with the elasticity of language, constantly finding new ways to say the same things over and over again, hanging on to every sound and synonym with a palpable joy. “I think I was a born poet, honestly,” he says. “My mind just works in a unique way. Always since I was a little kid, I’d see words and make them rhyme.” So much of his appeal depends not on what he’s saying but on the angle at which words fall out of his mouth — his strained emphasis on certain unexpected syllables, his sideways pronunciations. Check the ’08 mixtape classic “Bachelor Pad,” on which he turned standard-issue sex romp boasts into full-on verbal gymnastics: Lil’ mama’s a monster/ Thunder in her pajamas / My johnson in her tonsils/ Then I shove it in her ster-num. While Gucci’s hood stardom never translated to the same level of crossover success that contemporaries (and rivals) like T.I. or Young Jeezy did, his modern-day resonance dwarfs theirs. He’s directly mentored two generations of trap rappers: his original Brick Squad affiliates Waka Flocka Flame and OJ da Juiceman, who took over Atlanta rap around 2009, and then Young Thug and Migos, both alumni of around-the-clock, circa-2013 sessions at his Brick Factory studio, and who have redefined the genre again in his absence.

GUCCI MANE

“A lot of artists have a problem with putting other people on, and people don’t embrace them [when they do it] because it ain’t genuine,” Gucci says. “I’m always trying to help people. I wouldn’t give a damn if I get four artists right now and all of them burn me. I’mma get me four more, because I feel like the more people I help, the more good I do. No matter what a person does, helping somebody can never hurt me.” Far beyond Atlanta, the likes of Chief Keef and Fetty Wap have cited him as their primary inspiration, and more than a few less-interesting rappers have built careers around aping his slack-jawed style and a scant couple of his many flows. “I like that the kids embrace me. I feel proud, I’m flattered,” Gucci says, eschewing any old world biter-shaming and citing his simplicity as the draw. “I think I’m the easiest to imitate. I can’t imitate Eminem. And they can’t imitate Eminem, but they can imitate Gucci. Is Eminem good? Yes. Do I recognize he’s super talented? Hell yeah! But do I want to play that when I jump in my Maybach?” Despite an enormous creative footprint, his career has been full of ups and downs, often marred by legal troubles. For every major album release it seemed like he had a coinciding criminal incident. He killed a man who broke into his home, an act that was later ruled as self-defense. He allegedly pushed a woman out of a moving car. After a court-appointed stay in a mental facility, he resurfaced with an ice cream cone tattooed on his face. And so on, and such and such. The last of these ordeals would happen in the fall of 2013, first prefigured by a series of bizarre Twitter rants in which he threw friends and peers like Nicki Minaj and Drake under the bus in the most vulgar terms possible. He apologized shortly thereafter, attributing the outburst to his prescription cough syrup addiction and announcing plans to go to rehab, but he would never make it there. Instead, he was arrested a few days later, after yet more odd behavior prompted a friend to call the police. They found him at an East Atlanta intersection where he began screaming at them. And with a loaded handgun concealed on his person. “I done had a history of violence, a history of just erratic behavior,” Gucci says now. “I had a history of drug abuse and drug addiction. All of it ties [together]. It’s just a spiral of destructive behavior.” The 2013 breakdown landed Gucci back in prison, but his visibility only grew while he was away, particularly on social media, where #freegucci hashtags and assorted fan art ruled the digital landscape. This new crossover fame likely had as much to do with his mythology as it did with his music, if not more so. More than two dozen full-length mixtapes cobbled together from the Brick Factory recordings were released while he was in prison, but very little of it seemed to connect much further than his original core audience. Gucci’s reckless persona appears to translate better to the social media sphere than his actual recordings.

So fans were a bit confused when a new Mane came home from prison, physically and mentally. For one, he swapped out his once-signature potbelly for a six-pack, having knocked a good 75 pounds from his frame. The dramatic weight loss caused many of the tattoos that cover most of his body to change shape. Even his iconic ice cream cone began to fade some, rendering it difficult to see in certain lighting. When he jumped back onto social media, his frequent Snapchat and Instagram posts painted him as sober and almost disconcertingly happy, flashing a white and toothy grin while hanging out blissfully with his fiancée, the model Keyshia Ka’oir. When he spoke to his followers, gone too was the Alabama drawl that has so long defined his raps, and in its place was an affected tone falling somewhere between the British limo driver from the Grey Poupon commercials and a full-on mechanical man. There is an inherent air of irony to this voice, sounding something like a bratty child doing an over-the-top take on what he imagines a good kid to sound like. This would make sense given the circumstances of Gucci’s life at the moment. Everybody is looking, including, presumably, his PO, so he needs to be on his absolute best behavior. (If you’ve been listening to Gucci for a while you’ll know that the alternate accent isn’t entirely new — he employed a similar voice and persona on the interludes of the 2009 mixtape The Cold War: Great BRRRitain.) But these changes were enough to get the crackpots cracking. In a usual internet case of reverse Occam’s razor, several people began to speculate that this new Gucci was, in fact, a clone, possibly planted by the CIA for reasons unknown. When Gucci outlined his lunch plans for the day — “Just fruit, veggies and water, very light” — one Facebook user commented, “This nigga on snapchat talking about ‘I want a fruit salad.’ NIGGA The REAL Gucci don’t want no fucking FRUIT SALAD. Bitch he like activists [sic] slushes …” That post has received more than 15,000 shares. As with everything that happens on the internet, the clone talk is more a running gag than a genuine conspiracy theory, and Gucci rightfully took it in stride when he heard the allegations. On Snapchat he made a formal nonstatement in his fully stilted robot voice: “I am hearing that Gucci is a clone… I will neither support nor deny those accusations.” He elaborated later, in a day-to-day conversational tone a lot closer to his old accent, if just a tiny bit sharper: “It’s funny to me. I guess people ain’t used to me being healthy and taking care of myself and being happy, so I can understand why they shocked… I embrace it. A clone is like perfection. If I look like a machine or a robot then I’m doing something well.” Joke or not, consider this — how tragic is it that so much of the world is, in effect, rooting for the delinquency of a great artist? Why treat healthy living and sobriety as a punchline or even a betrayal? It’s one thing to find pleasure

GUCCI MANE

“I don’t want people to feel sorry for me. I want them to feel powerful, I want them to feel aggressive, I want them to feel invincible.”

through fuckery in music, it’s another to wish a lifetime of fuckery on an actual human being who is seemingly working his hardest to transcend it. “What’s the use in having all the money if you gonna die and be unhealthy and be sick or diabetic or fat as hell?” Gucci says. “What you gonna do then? Fallin’ out, having seizures. That ain’t what I need to be, that ain’t the future I want. When I was on drugs so bad, I talked different. When I was smoking weed, a damn near pound of weed every day, I was congested. When I was drinking lean like crazy every day, I was out my mind. I was always sophisticated, but it ain’t even sophisticated now — it’s just a sober, a more conscious Gucci. And people probably ain’t used to it. It took a minute for me to get used to it. But they’re gonna have to get used to it because it’s here to stay.” ucci remembers being just 7 or 8 when his brother, six years his senior, introduced him to rap music by way of LL Cool J. When he was in the fourth grade, in 1989, he snuck to the ﬂea market and for $5 bought his own ﬁrst cassette, 2 Live Crew’s As Nasty As They Wanna Be, on the strength of its raunchy cover alone. “These guys [were] talking about head, pussy, cock,” he says. “My mother found the tape and she was like, ‘You bought this?!’ She sat on the porch and played it outside, just to embarrass me,” he continues. “Every time somebody would come to the house [she’d be] like, ‘Oh yeah, you know that’s Radric’s tape right there.’ I wouldn’t even come out the house the whole day because I didn’t want anybody to see me or know that I was listening to stuff like that.” Later that year his father, from whom Gucci Mane inherited his nickname, moved the family to the Mountain Park Apartments on the east side of Atlanta. Across the street was a split-screen metaphor of Gucci’s life to follow: a record store run by Edward J, a pioneering bass DJ, and, next to it, a car wash that doubled as an open-air drug market. “My dad was like the breadwinner of the house, but he was just the most street guy I ever met,” he says. “Everything he did, all the money he got, he got it out the street. [In Alabama] I was naive to that, [but] as soon as I got to Georgia I went outside and seen the streets. The streets was always around me [there]. It just changed my whole perspective on life.” As the ’90s progressed, he was drawn to the music of street-minded Memphis rappers like Kingpin Skinny Pimp, Project Pat, and Tommy Wright III, and to the real-life street culture that surrounded him in Atlanta. He did well in school, well enough to earn a scholarship to Georgia Perimeter College, but was busted on a drug charge before classes started. The judge actually deferred Gucci’s 90-day sentence so he could attend for one semester, but he never

connected with the college lifestyle and ended up literally flipping his books for brick money. Even before then, Gucci had begun to think about transitioning toward a legal hustle. “I remember the Hot Boyz album coming out, I remember listening to Birdman and Mannie Fresh, and it inspired me,” he said. “I wanted to be behind the scenes of the music.” Gucci agreed to bankroll the rap aspirations of a neighborhood friend’s younger brother, and this meant buying beats from Zaytoven, a barber/producer who had recently moved to Atlanta from the Bay Area. “I’m like 19, [and the rapper is] 14. I’m selling weed, selling dope, and the little boy smoke weed,” remembers Gucci. “He came to the studio like three times. He’s trying to write stuff. He’s talking about the trap but he don’t really know what he’s saying. He’s lying. And the numbers ain’t adding right. And I’m telling him, ‘Nah, what you saying… just say this.’ And Zay observing this.” “On the fifth session, [the kid] didn’t come again,” he continues. “But me and his brother there. So Zay say — I guess cause Zay didn’t want to lose the deposit, and he had been watching me — ‘Why don’t you try it?’ I didn’t try that day, but that kinda put the seed into me.” After his arrest, and its ensuing 90-day jail stint, Gucci made the decision to focus on rhyming. “I can’t be standing on the corner no more because I had pleaded first offender, so that mean if I don’t get in trouble it’s off my record. I think I had wrote like 14 or 15 raps while I was locked up. When I got out, I recorded all those 15 raps, and that was my first CD.” He pressed up 1,000 copies of Str8 Drop Records Presents Gucci Mane La Flare and sold them for $10 each out of the trap. When the initial run sold out, he took the album to Guyanese bootleggers on the west side of Atlanta and let them handle distribution for him. The rest of Gucci’s history lives in his discography. He linked with local label Big Cat Records and released his proper debut, Trap House, in 2005. That relationship eventually soured and dissolved into his current, perpetually offand-on-again situation with Atlantic. But even when he was recording high-profile collaborations with the likes of Mariah Carey and Lil Wayne, he always kept one foot in the independent hustle. And this was where he shined brightest. To truly understand Gucci Mane, one has to indulge his ’06-’09 mixtape hot streak. The 20 or so full-length tapes he released during this period represent one of the most remarkable runs in the history of the genre, matched perhaps only by Wayne’s similar run from a few years prior. He recorded 2007’s No Pad, No Pencil in just two or three days (depending on who you ask), off the top of his head and with all the beats provided on the spot by a then-unknown 17-year-old producer by the name of Mike Will. He says the 2008 street hit “Photoshoot,” on which he switches flows and rhymes over an off-time reversal of the beat halfway

GUCCI MANE

through his third verse, was entirely improvised from top to bottom, hook and all. When asked about the line of thought behind this creative model, Gucci turns into a motivational speaker. “You gotta detach from the outcome,” he says. “You can’t overthink it, whatever it is. You just gotta do it. Put it out there and have faith it gonna be right. Everything you make is good.” Many rappers flood the mixtape circuit early in their careers as a way to ease into a unified, more professional style. Gucci did it because simply he had too many ideas to ever settle down. At his peak, nearly every song seemed to have its own distinct angle, each of them brimming with flows and concepts. And while he made some creative missteps in the years since — 2010’s The Appeal, for instance, will go down mostly as a botched crossover effort — he thinks his recent life choices are only set to make him sharper. “I used to think that I had to be high to record, but

now I know I don’t,” he says. “Being sober I can feel shit. I can feel again now.” aturally, Gucci has had a studio installed in the house. Its contents are state-of-the-art except, perhaps tellingly, the vocal booth, which is rigged up old-school bedroom style, the mic in the middle of a small, maybe 8’ x 4’ closet with comforters hanging from the wall to soundproof it. A TV stand has been repurposed as a storage space for dozens of neatly folded pieces of yellow legal paper: all the lyrics sheets Gucci wrote during his prison stay. Though Everybody Looking has been nearly complete for a few weeks now, minus some continued post-production tweaks from Mike Will, Gucci is already headed back into the booth today. He talks abstractly about the “next project”

GUCCI MANE

but isn’t clear about what that is or when it will emerge. It seems like he’s just working because work is what he does. When he enters the studio, Sean Paine, his in-house engineer since the Brick Factory days, is already sitting at the console, dressed in all black with a cap pulled low. “You got them beats from Zay?” Gucci asks. “Let’s go through some.” Sean plays an instrumental for a few measures, but Gucci passes. The second one, with a classic, carnival-style Zaytoven bounce, will work. Gucci grabs a page from his lyric stash with the words “Gangsta Story” scribbled at the top in red pen. He sits down in a desk chair, looks it over as he leans all the way back, and bobs his head to the track. After about one minute he announces, “Alright, c’mon,” to no one in particular, then proceeds into the makeshift booth, closing the door behind him. On mic, he crumples up the sheet for dramatic effect and announces his presence with a Slick Rick Heeere we go, before launching into a cautionary tale that would make The Ruler himself proud. It’s a rare narrative track from Gucci, reminiscent of “Timothy” from the Great BRRRitain tape but considerably

more complicated — full of petty crimes, crumbling reputations, courtroom stabbings, and star-crossed baby mommas. The ﬂow echoes his pitter-patter on 2009’s “Frowney Face” but feels looser in delivery. It only takes Gucci a few takes to get the track down, then he commands “Ad-lib!” into the mic. Sean hits record again and Gucci delivers: “NO NUTS! GO! DAMN! WOOH! BLAOW! SHH! HUH!” He emerges from the booth a mere 25 minutes after he entered. By now Zaytoven and Mike Will have arrived, Mike in Jordan sweats and a white tee, Zay in a faux-cutoff tee with full sleeves mimicking dragon tattoos and two diamond crosses not unlike the pair Gucci is wearing. “Zay’s beats be like a blank canvas!” says Gucci, visibly psyched to play the ﬁnished track to his guys. Mike concurs: “He know your pocket.” Gucci then breaks down the entire narrative — it’s based in truth but the names have been changed — and ends up talking more quickly than he raps. “It’s a horrible story… but it sound good on a Zay beat!” A couple of Frankenstein-ed punch-ins later and the track is done. As if on cue, Mike has already made his way over to the MPC and starts laying down an uptempo, almost Miami

GUCCI MANE

bass-inspired drum loop. Very quickly he turns a rudimentary scratch track complex with stuttering hi-hats and a rolling, water droplet bassline. He tags Zay in, who stares intently at the MPC for a minute before hitting the keys and playing around with a melody on top. While they work, Sean passes Gucci a small pad and Gooch gets to it. Zay asks, “What we namin’ it?” and Gucci responds, “Side Door.” The four of them move briskly and quietly, apart from the thump they’re creating. Any creative conversation is sparse, and purely utilitarian, all one-word commands and sentence fragments. Mostly it seems like they are communicating via mindmeld and shared musical passion. In the few down moments, they crack jokes and make small talk. The night before, the Golden State Warriors had lost the NBA Finals to the Cleveland Cavaliers, blowing a two game lead. Mike lightweight mocks Steph Curry in the wake of his choke act but Gucci defends him, offering up the Yodalike koan, “Frustration is basketball.” In just 10 minutes they’ve completed the beat, with Mike’s uptempo drum track blown out by Zay’s meandering, almost New Agey melody. Mike compares it to 2Pac’s “Ambitionz Az a Ridah.” Gucci preemptively declares it a classic, to which Mike half-hesitantly rebukes, “Not much thought put into it.” Gucci isn’t buying this: “That’s the most in-pocket you can get.” He paces around the room a little longer, eyeing his pad, mumbles “OK,” and lumbers back into the booth. At one point Ka’oir comes upstairs and sneaks into the booth. He greets her with a “Hey beautiful” before closing the door behind the two of them. She’ll remain for the duration of his verse, but he immediately gets back to rhyming. As he does, Zay begins disconnecting the MPC and keyboard, transporting them into a second studio across the hall so he can continue making beats. “Gotta keep cooking.” Gucci makes an on-the-spot decision to freestyle the second verse. When he’s done, he leaves the booth beaming with pride and quoting the bars that he just invented: “Guwop, why you got a fo-fo? You on Billboard/ Desert Eagle on me but I still kick it like a ﬁeld goal.” They brieﬂy discuss the strategy of splitting between freestyle and written verses. “You laid down the foundation,” says Mike. “That shit a hybrid.” “Your bounce is in the freestyle,” adds Sean as he begins to mix the track down. “The knowledge is in the written.” In about 90 minutes they’ve completed two entire songs. They are good songs, too. Maybe even great ones.

wo days later, the whole crew reconvenes at the house to ﬁlm a video for “Guwop Home,” a celebratory single from Everybody Looking that features Young Thug on the hook. Making the most out of Gucci’s limited situation, they’ve moved the entire studio

poolside. Sean, Zay, and Mike Will are all in attendance, mock manning the boards and frolicking in general. Thug, however, has yet to be accounted for. Everything moves at a crawl, as video shoots usually do, a dramatic shift from Gucci’s normal pace. A throng of scantily clad women alternate between getting oiled down in the shade and melting in the 90 degree Atlanta heat. In the down time, Zay sits inside at the piano and plays idly, revealing the hidden layers of sophistication in his usual style. Gucci is characteristically friendly to everyone, greeting the pool cleaner with roughly the same warmth that he offers to famous Canadian rapper Drake, who makes a brief surprise visit to pay his respects to the Trap God and check out some of the new album. They discuss plans for a future collaboration, with Drake joking, “I gotta make some calls and get you into Canada!” Shortly after Drake leaves, Young Thug shows, only about five hours late. Still, his arrival marks a joyous occasion. It’s the two rappers’ first time seeing each other since Gucci’s come home — Thug recorded his contribution to the song remotely — and their elation fills the air. Gucci stomps over from the opposite side of the pool with a childlike bellow, “My friend is here! I’m so happy now!” They hug, their respective chains clanking. A few minutes later when they reenact their reunion for social media, Gucci adds, “This is a great day!” Thug, who in the years since Gucci went in has blossomed from a promising cult favorite into one of the most brilliant rap stars breathing, reminisces fondly on the time spent with his mentor in the Brick Factory. “He taught me everything,” Thug says. “Most definitely he taught me don’t never stop. He was rapping every day, all day and all night. He’ll be mad at me if I’d leave the ‘yo [the studio]. He’d be like, ‘Man, you dead broke and you goddamn running around and I’m up a whole lot of millions and I’m working every day. How the hell that look?’” Gucci chimes in, cheesing: “I’d tell Thug all the time, ‘Where you goin?! You see me in here every day, why you goin’ so soon?’” And Thug is unfazed by the many changes in his old friend: “I don’t give a fuck. He could be seven hundred pounds, he could be two pounds. Either way it go, he’s still Guwop,” he says. “I’m wit it. He gonna be fat, I’m gonna get fat too, fuck it. He gonna be skinny, I’m gonna be skinny.” They chop it up for a few minutes more, both of them still wearing ear-to-ear grins as Gucci gives Thug a quick tour of his new digs. Then they get down to business with the video shoot. There’s nowhere to go and work to be done.

GUCCI MANE

“You can’t overthink it, whatever it is. You just gotta do it. Put it out there and have faith it gonna be right. Everything you make is good.”

At Home with Gucci Mane

Photography by Gunner Stahl GUCCI MANE

GUCCI MANE

Shame CHARLI XCX used to be afraid of making straight-up pop music, even though that’s what she always loved. She’s not scared anymore.

Story by Duncan Cooper Photography by Renata Raksha Styling by Lisa Katnic

L e s s

JACKET, SKIRT, AND BOOTS OPENING CEREMONY, EARRINGS HOT TOPIC, CHOKER STYLIST’S OWN, HAIR CLIPS CLAIRE’S.

DRESS JULIA CLANCEY, BOOTS MAYA SHOES OF HOLLYWOOD, LACES BIZZY B.

don’t think being healthy is really fun,” Charli XCX says, as she cracks into her third vegetable juice in three days. “I don’t think not partying is really fun, either.” But here she is, 23 years old at an upscale café in Los Angeles, the city where she now lives part of the time, powering through the final day of a month dedicated to trying something new: avoiding alcohol, exercising regularly, and eating sugar-free. “Very un-XCX,” she says. The occasion of our meeting is Charli’s third studio album, which, though still untitled, she says is finished and scheduled for a 2017 release. For her first LP, 2013’s True Religion, she took a writer from Grantland bar-hopping and, the next night, kicked off a sweaty concert by announcing, “God, I’m so hungover.” Her second album, Sucker, released the following year, was commemorated by a Complex story that ended with her drunk-dialing the reporter. And so it is with what seems like genuine semi-embarrassment that she realizes that this story is going to involve juice. “I’m really bummed that you’re hanging out with me this week because literally until the beginning of June I’d never done that shit,” she says. “But when you start getting asked to go to more events and award shows, and you’re on display as an object — I just began to think about it more. For some reason the Daily Mail likes to write about me, and I got sucked into reading it. No matter who you are, sometimes it hurts when people are like, ‘You’re a fat bitch.’ It just made something click in my brain, and I’m not really quite sure what it is. I don’t think to own my pop star-ness or whatever means I have to go to the fucking gym, but now I’m having juice so that’s just cool.” Wellness never made anybody a pop star, but a pop star, more than ever, is what Charli is trying to be. “I want to make the best pop album of 2017,” she says. If she can pull it off, it’ll actualize a childhood dream: “I really just wanted to be Britney Spears when I was younger.” You’d be forgiven for missing that reference point on her first two albums, though. Charli has always written big, catchy, emotional hooks, but she’s often backtracked on their boldness with dense, clunky production. Alt-pop with an emphasis on alt, her sound until now has seemed practically designed to protect her from accusations of making what some might call the wrong kind of pop: party-obsessed, super-slick, and blithely commercial. Maybe it’s just getting older and becoming more comfortable in her own skin. But with a combination of the confidence won by critical acclaim, and the self-awareness of someone who’s used to being criticized, this master of saying fuck it has finally said fuck it about her music, too. For the first time, Charli XCX has recorded an album that’s as fun to listen to as she’s always wanted her life to seem fun to live. Making it has taken some hard work — she’s just not sure she wants you to know that.

“I

harli was born Charlotte Aitchison, in 1992, to a Scottish father and Indian mother. Back in the ’70s, her dad had been a party promoter with a disco club in Bishop’s Stortford, the town where Charli grew up an hour north of London. Her parents actually met at his club, she says, at a New Year’s Eve party while he, dressed like John Travolta from Saturday Night Fever, was changing a beer barrel at midnight. For Charli, though, home was a quiet place. Her attempts to lead friends in playground versions of Spice Girls songs were a bust, and the only band at her school played Guns N’ Roses covers. She dated their young lead singer for a while, but as a teen she began to focus her musical interests far elsewhere: on a trashy, neon party-world she was discovering online through artists like Uffie and the French label Ed Banger. At 14, Charli started making beats on a Yamaha keyboard and posted her first songs to Myspace. “I was rapping about dinosaurs and teddy bears and that whole world of, like, cuteness, you know?” she says now. “Some of it was fucking terrible.” Some of it was pretty compelling, too, like her song “Art Bitch,” with tricky lyrics that consist entirely of backhanded compliments to a popular artsy teen; the song is an eternal puzzle, because as a listener you can never quite tell if Charli is meant to seem justified in her condescension or pathetically jealous. In any case, before long her music caught the attention of a local party guy named Chaz Cool, of the band The Coolness, who invited her to play some raves of her own. “My first one and the best one I ever did was when I was 15,” she says, “in a peanut factory in Hackney. I went with my parents and we stayed until 6 a.m. My dad was real into it. There was loads of people dressed up as zebras. It was like a real drug scene, party scene, and I’d only seen that on Skins. I played at two in the morning, then three weeks later I turned 16 and signed a deal.” One of the reasons Charli says she decided to go with Asylum Records, a subsidiary of Atlantic, was because she got along so well with the man who signed her, Ed Howard, and his wife, Miranda Cooper, who was part of the songwriting team behind tracks for Girls Aloud and Sugababes. Though those titan British girl groups of the 2000s were very much a product of the pop music machine, Charli was initially uncomfortable with being a part of that world. “When you’re 16 and you sign and you go through rounds with producers, that kind of factory way where you go in and you meet someone and you do a song and you leave — you don’t really know who you are,” she says. “Even though I think I wrote some really fucking good songs in that time, it sounded like everybody else. I didn’t know what I sounded like yet.” It took a few years of detours — including an abandoned stint at the Slade School of Fine Art, which hit either its high or low point when Charli did a performance art piece where

CHARLI XCX

SHIRT AND SHOES OPENING CEREMONY, SKIRT KENZO, EARRINGS ALDO, HAIR CLIPS CLAIRE’S, JACKET AND SOCKS STYLIST’S OWN.

she danced with a bunch of hamburgers stuffed in her bikini — before she recorded her first album. In 2012, Charli started working with the producer Ariel Rechsthaid, feeling much appreciation for the comfortingly anti-factory studio he had in his backyard in L.A. Together they developed the busy sound of True Romance, which gestured equally to left-field EDM and ’80s gothic rock, and frequently buried her vocals in tricky effects. “I definitely felt like I was afraid when I wrote that record, and you can hear it,” Charli told Pitchfork a year after it was released. “I wanted to make a pop record, but I wanted to make it ‘cool.’” While True Romance was self-conscious to a fault, its sound was very of-the-time. Reviews compared Charli favorably to Grimes, and remixes connected her to a well-curated group of popular-yet-indie artists, including Blood Orange, Odd Future, and Jai Paul. The album wasn’t a blockbuster — in its first year, it sold just 12,000 copies in the U.S., according to Soundscan — but by then Charli had already proven her ability to write a hit. “I Love It,” a sneery track she’d off-handedly penned in a hotel room around the same time, far out-performed anything on her album when her demo was re-recorded by the group Icona Pop. There were memorable lyrics, like the generation-rallying You’re from the ’70s, but I’m a ’90s bitch, and it was the first song to feature what’s become a Charli XCX signature: a subtly catchy melody paired with the sort of easy hook that anyone can scream-sing along. I don’t care! I love it! But Charli initially distanced herself from the track, telling people that she’d given it away because it didn’t fit the vibe of her debut, or that the words didn’t mean anything, or that it just didn’t feel like her. Which made it all the more frustrating when, more than her album, it was the thing that people in the music business wanted her to recreate. “That song set me up in this factory of songwriting, which, at the time, I hated,” she says, “but now I love. Going into the studio and being asked to write over and over again for other artists, and kind of recapture that energy — that’s definitely how I enjoy working now, and what I enjoy about making music: that I can just go and do it really quickly. Now I just want to write songs like that all the time. I just want to work, like, top line, top line, top line, top line,” she says, referring to a song’s punchiest combo of melody and lyrics. In retrospect, Sucker was largely about working toward this realization. Shortly before she started making it, Charli once again landed a hit for someone else: Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy,” on which she wrote and sang the chorus. “Fancy” became the first single to go No. 1 on Billboard with Charli’s name attached, and the first big music video with her face in it, too, but its success, and more requests to reproduce it, triggered for her a minor crisis. “I wanted to get some energy and some aggression out,” she told the L.A. Times, so she fled to Sweden to record unfiltered punk songs with Patrik

Berger, the producer of “I Love It.” In the end, those demos and their scuzzy guitars would morph into parts of Sucker, which turned out sounding far more like Blur than Britney. In interviews, she said she had no intention of getting Sucker on pop radio. You joined my club/ Luke loves your stuff, she sang on the title track, a sarcastic reference to Dr. Luke and the industry’s embrace of her hits above her other music. At the same time, she worked on the album with a broader range of established pop producers and co-writers than she ever had before, including Steve Mac, a songwriter for Shakira and One Direction, and Stargate, a go-to production duo for Rihanna throughout her career. Intentional or not, it seemed almost inevitable when “Break the Rules” and “Boom Clap,” two songs from Sucker that kept up the sneery vocal style of “I Love It” and “Fancy,” became Charli’s first solo singles on Billboard’s Hot 100. The album sold twice as many copies in its first week as her debut did in its first year, and its music videos have earned combined YouTube plays of over 400 million. Thanks in part to the song’s placement in the schmalzy teen romance The Fault in Our Stars — a fitting home for a track about first kisses and fluttering hearts — “Boom Clap” became Charli’s first solo Top 10, but it was a turning point in her catalog long before then. After Charli wrote it, the song had initially been offered to the former Disney Channel star Hilary Duff, she told Popjustice in 2014. “And her people were like, ‘This is NOT cool enough for Hilary.’” Charli took that uncoolness, so anathema to her earlier and weaker music, and this time she owned it. She’s even come around on “I Love It,” now. “It’s easy to say that the songs you feel are the most you are your most successful songs,” she says, “but, like, I do feel like ‘Boom Clap’ and ‘I Love It,’ especially in terms of top line, are just the most me.” Once Charli felt she could engage the music business on her own terms, she stopped worrying and learned to love the pop machine. A big focus for Charli lately has been building out that business side. Last year, she hosted a BBC Three documentary called The F Word And Me, about the relationship between feminism and pop music, and was invited to Simon Cowell’s house to audition to be a judge on the U.K. version of The X Factor, though she thinks she freaked everyone out by talking too much about behind-the-scenes details. “I was really into the lighting, and how much say I would get over the stage show, and whether I could bring my own stylists in for the artists that I would be mentoring.” It was an inspiring experience nonetheless. “I just fucking like Simon Cowell,” she says. “He’s very talented at creating celebrity culture and TV shows, and he has an ear as well. I like his vibe and his ambition, and I think I have that. I like the idea of being like a female Simon Cowell.” Earlier this year, Charli started a record label under Atlantic, Vroom Vroom Recordings, and signed her former bassist’s solo project, CuckooLander, which she also

CHARLI XCX

manages. Now that she’s all about speed-jamming top lines, songwriting has become an even bigger focus, alternatingly fun and dead serious. She recently recorded a jokey demo with Rostam Batmanglij, formerly of Vampire Weekend, called “My Pussy Is the Freshest,” and says they’re not-sojokingly thinking about sending it to Nicki Minaj. “When it comes to songwriting for other people, I’ve become quite ruthless,” Charli says. “I see it as a creative outlet whilst I’m creating it, but after the song has been made, I wanna make money. I want the biggest artists to cut these songs, and I want them to be No. 1. When it comes to my own record, that shit doesn’t happen, so that’s where I think about what I believe to be artistic, what I believe to be beautiful.” Since 2013, her songwriting has been published by an imprint started by Stargate, but she just finished the process of switching to a publishing company of her own. She has set an ambitious goal of placing 20 songs with other artists this year, and says she’s got maybe 5 so far — it’s hard to say until they actually come out. Last year, she was asked into the studio with Rihanna to write songs for Anti, and then for the new album by Gwen Stefani, who is probably the closest pop ancestor to Charli’s vocal style and attitude, though her contributions didn’t make the cut for either. She has had other recent successes, though, like “Same Old Love” for Selena Gomez and will.i.am’s “Boys & Girls.” Charli actually learned an interesting lesson from will.i.am, something she’d failed to appreciate back when she was talking down on “I Love It.” “He was like, ‘It doesn’t matter what the verses say, just say anything in the verses and make the chorus really good,’” Charli remembers. “His verses are a vehicle to get to the chorus, and then he just says cool words. I listened to all of his songs, and I was like, Wow. he really sticks by this theory. This guy is a fucking genius!” harli is hoping to shoot the first music video for her upcoming album in a few weeks, so we head to Beverly Hills, to the home of Diane Martel, the director behind Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” and Robin Thicke’s controversial “Blurred Lines.” Martel insists on privacy, so while she and Charli make plans, I float in her pool. When Charli’s done, she comes in the water, which is surrounded by succulents and tropical trees. She says she wishes she hadn’t spent so much money on exotic plants when she moved into her house — she hadn’t realized you could just get ferns at IKEA. Beside the pool are a few inflatables that look like the donuts on The Simpsons, and Charli says that on her last tour Martel helped with set design. They created an inflatable zebra-print guitar that cost $10,000 — and another $10,000 to replace after Charli accidentally popped it.

That tour ended abruptly, at Charli’s behest. “As an artist I need to move quickly and write a lot to not feel restless,” she wrote in a summer 2015 Facebook post, cancelling half the dates midway through their run. “I am struggling to create whilst I’m on the road, and that is making me unhappy.” Six months earlier, she’d kicked off the album process by convening a recording session with “the whole like leftof-center pop gang in Sweden,” including Patrik Berger, Andrew Wyatt and Pontus Winnberg of the group Miike Snow, and the songwriter Noonie Bao. That crew was a bit familiar, so Charli cold-called someone she admired but had never met: SOPHIE, the British producer born Samuel Long who, along with his sometime collaborators at the PC Music label, was making a name by twisting bubblegum pop sounds into hyperactive, grotesquely sweet club music. In just two days, Charli and SOPHIE recorded three of the four songs that would make up her Vroom Vroom EP, released via her imprint in February 2016. The EP sounded like something SOPHIE would make: synth drops like guillotines, breakneck tempos, voices like Crazy Frog. “Vroom was like an assault,” Charli says. “Vroom was not us trying to appease anyone. I think my label got afraid, and I think a lot of people were confused. But I just felt that I wanted to — I just wanted to do that. That’s the scene I came from when I was younger, that club scene. That’s originally what I saw in SOPHIE, and I’d never actually made music that was representative of that.” Having successfully plumbed her antiestablishment teenage years — Vroom Vroom was the ﬁrst Charli project to sound as captivatingly off-putting as Uffie — she swung the pendulum of her career in the opposite direction. “I’m not going to sit here and say that I’m a good producer,” she says, “because I’m not, but I am a really good curator, and I know when that shit is gonna work.” Almost every track on her new album, she decided, would feature both SOPHIE and Stargate on production, like two sides of one super-brain. “I didn’t want to make just an album with SOPHIE, and I didn’t want to make just an album with Stargate,” Charli says. “I wanted to make an album with SOPHIE and Stargate. Sure, some of SOPHIE’s records are a little harsh and off-the-wall, but the goal is to be making progressive pop music. Stargate obviously come from a totally different world, but at the same time that’s also their aim, you know? That xylophone on their old Ne-Yo R&B shit, the way the handclaps were programmed? I know people are going to be like, ‘She wanted to make the album with SOPHIE, and her label said, You need to put it with Stargate to make this work.’ But it was never about putting SOPHIE in a pop environment and ﬂattening him out. It was knowing they could bounce really well, in a room together, working to each other’s strengths.” And they were all in one room — frequently alongside Noonie Bao and Bloodpop, the experimental beatmaker

CHARLI XCX

DRESS KENZO, SUNGLASSES AND BRACELET OPENING CEREMONY, RINGS MARGIELA, STOCKINGS ANITA BERG, SHOES VIVIENNE WESTWOOD.

“I was like, Uh, what am I doing? If I make a party record, I can go on tour and party every night.”

turned producer for Justin Bieber — for about ﬁve weeks. It was in Los Angeles, at Westlake’s Studio A, the same place Michael Jackson made Thriller. (Currently the only song on the album produced elsewhere was made by the Brian Eno collaborator Fred Gibson with contributions from SOPHIE added after the fact.) “I think I make my best music with Stargate,” Charli says, “just because they know how to edit my ideas in the quickest way. You could be the shittiest songwriter in the world and go in and do a scratch take with Stargate and they could cut it up and make a fucking hit. Which makes me sound kinda shitty, but I am good. I’m pretty good,” she laughs. Perhaps owing to how fast the album was recorded, the new songs are easily the most straightforward she’s ever made, and the most joyful-sounding too. One with the working title “Come to My Party” is exemplary: its name isn’t some play on words, it’s just a song where Charli invites you to a party. At least a half-dozen hooks and micro-hooks are stacked over the song’s three twinkling minutes, her words memorable if not especially deep. There’s the cheery, chanty part about how we’re all young and full of love; a pseudo-rap bit about working like a young Kardashian; and tag-team climaxes about self-reliance — I do what I wanna do, and I do it my way! — and unity, with an open invitation for all the boys and the barbies to come hang with Charli. SOPHIE and Stargate serve up clever chord changes to match every section, with ﬂourishes peppered throughout: a chopped-up intro and a robot saying “XCX,” pitched-up

background vocals like supportive Tweety birds, and an almost dubsteppy bassline that stretches out at the end. But never is anything but Charli’s voice on top. And what that voice is telling you, more clearly than ever before, is not that complicated. It’s telling you that it’s time to have fun. “I deﬁnitely think that this is the most pop-commercial album I’ve made, which I love because I’ve always loved popcommercial,” Charli says. “I’ve just never committed, I suppose. Instead I’ve always made breakup songs or really emo love songs. But I’ve never been fucked over by a guy, never been cheated on. That just comes from, like, romantic-style movies. I’ve always been very much the opposite of what I write about. Because I do like to party, and when I go out, I don’t like listening to love songs. Like, I skip them. I like watching DJs, I don’t want to watch bands. I realized that at the end of Sucker. I was like, Uh, what am I doing? If I make a party record, I can go on tour and party every night.” She still ﬁnds seriousness in that, though. “I think it’s harder to write really respected party music than it is to write a love song,” Charli says, “but I think I’ve done it. And if anybody ever is going to fucking say that SOPHIE’s party production is throwaway, they’re a fucking idiot. Because he’s someone who spends years creating sounds.” On the other hand, she says: “It’s also this whole thing of: it’s fun for people to think it’s dumb. And people who want to read into it more can get really deep in it.” In a phone call, A. G. Cook, the head of PC Music and also currently Charli’s creative director, expresses the same thing.

CHARLI XCX

“If the track’s really, really good, then it can be fun and stupid and progressive and interesting all at the same time,” he says. “I think Charli is probably the best proof that you can bring something to radio but also make it a little bit more… not even edgy, just sort of appreciating the fun, weird stupidity as well as the real craft.” SOPHIE emphasizes that craft, too, by way of rejecting the idea that his attraction to pop music is disingenuous, or ironic. “The kind of music that we get excited about needs to feel contemporary, and it needs to feel like an accelerated and personal version of our favorite music of the time,” he says, in a different phone call. “But there’s zero irony. Why would you bother to make something along that perspective? You’ve put so much time and effort and basically your whole life into creating something and standing by it. It’s from a place of wanting to make something we feel, and hope other people will feel, too.” Back in the days of Charli’s early idols, pop music and specifically female pop singers were often derided by critics as artificial and shallow. And whether it was predatory contracts or invasive paparazzi, these women were treated as disposable as their music was said to be. Almost 20 years later, few people are better equipped to debunk pop music’s supposed disposability than Charli. Which makes it all the more surprising that, in just another breath, she’s happy to hide the hard work of it. “I used to really care about my validity as a writer or as someone who’s going to be received well,” Charli says. “And now I don’t. The more I’ve grown up and the more I’ve become secure with myself, I’ve become comfortable with being questioned. I don’t mind if people think I’m a fake. I kind of like that more. It’s like, ‘Oh she doesn’t do anything, she’s vapid, she’s a projection of other people’s ideas.’ I’m playing with that now more than ever. Sometimes it’s like, I would rather talk about my boobs and the outfits that I just bought.” This is something Charli has always expressed in her carefree persona: it’s not her problem to prove she’s respectable. By going full fun-loving in her lyrics and production, and by embracing being called vapid for it, she is renewing that commitment. Charli doesn’t subscribe to the idea that some work is good and other work — like looking good or always seeming cheery, however unfairly demanded — is bad. “My one hope for 2017 is that Kylie Jenner becomes a pop star,” she says at one point. “Kylie and Paris Hilton would be my top people to write music for.” They didn’t put in Charli’s kind of time with music, grinding it out over hundreds of songwriting sessions, but they worked their asses of in other, less celebrated ways, and Charli wants her pop world to honor women like them. Got my good grades, now I wanna go dumb, she sings on one track on the album. Good girls don’t do that type of stuff, she sings on another. She might be referring to a nice Friday night, or she might be signing a new lease on her career.

he month of healthy living is set to end with a house party, and booze will be officially back in play. Earlier in the afternoon, Charli heads to a vintage clothing store to pick out an outfit for the night with Max Hershenow, a member of the electro-pop duo MS MR and, for the past few months, Charli’s roommate. Max asks an employee if they have any dog collars, but they can’t find one. She picks out a black mesh crop top that says “sex symbol” in silver stitch. That evening, Pringles and red cups and bottles cover a hardwood table in Charli’s house, a multimillion-dollar, maze-like Tudor deep in the Hollywood Hills, built in the 1920s with a steeply pitched roof and exposed timber frame. The sounds of Beyoncé and SOPHIE’s “Bipp” pour from her sanctuary-like home studio, which has arched windows on three sides and musical instruments hanging between them. On a central brick patio, string lights illuminate a small group of musicians and models and other good-looking people. Max strides in wearing a black dog collar; he borrowed it from Charli, who already owned one. Charli talks to a woman in a zombie T-shirt about the night they met Marilyn Manson, and to an older guy about a song she once tried making that sounded kind of like Def Leppard. If she ever revisits it, she wants to change one lyric, though, which is also the title: “Victimless Crime.” She’s not sure 14-year-old fans will know what that means. Every hour the party seems to double in size, spreading throughout the ground floor, into nook-and-cranny rooms lit by candles and around brick fireplaces that sprawl wide. The whole place is glamorous but homey — Charli says having Max around has really helped. When she first moved in by herself, in early 2015, weird things kept happening. Once, after she went away for a few weeks, she returned to find all the windows open, though the security system hadn’t been triggered. And people kept calling in the middle of the night, at one point threatening to send a cake with “Kill Yourself” written on top. Charli now admits there’s a certain charm in that image, so campy and odd, but she was nevertheless startled the day a big box showed up at her doorstep, unexpected. But the delivery, upon inspection, wasn’t a menacing dessert — it was a bunch of Taylor Swift merch. Charli had recently appeared onstage at one of Taylor’s concerts, where they duetted to “Boom Clap,” and the surprise was a thank you sent by the artist herself, a pop giant reaching down to someone figuring out how she might be one.

CHARLI XCX

JACKET 2ND DAY, SWEATER VIVIENNE WESTWOOD, CHOKER ERIN DANA, BOOTS BY PLEASER.

S o n g s The story of DESO DOGG, the German rapper who fled to Syria to sing for ISIS.

Story by Amos Barshad Illustration by Elisabeth Moch

War

ne summer day in 2013, the German jihadist Denis Cuspert was holed up in a home controlled by his fellow fighters in the Junud al-Sham militant organization when he was hit by shelling from the Syrian Air Force. He suffered a critical head injury, entered a coma for nearly a week, and was moved from hospital to hospital in search of a specialist to save his life. “My head was open and some parts of my brain were coming out,” he’d say in an interview posted online that fall. “The brothers cared about me a lot. And through the mercy of Allah, I woke up.” Upon his recovery, Junud al-Sham produced a neat, crisp bit of video starring Cuspert. Posing on a couch in a gray cardigan and a taqiyah skull cap, with a landscape of roughly beautiful hills behind him, he brags that he had grabbed his weapon and had been prepared to fire at the jets flying overhead when the bombs dropped. And with evident glee, he waves off the rumors of his death: “Praised is Allah! According to the media I have been murdered two or three times.” Cuspert had arrived in Syria earlier that year. Two years before, the Arab Spring — a wave of street protests in the name of civil liberties and democratization — had rattled the region and deposed longstanding autocrats in Egypt and Tunisia. In Syria, it prompted a civil war. On one side stood President Bashar al-Assad, who succeeded the 30-year rule of his father in 2000 and was holding on to power with determined, indiscriminate brutality. On the other was a confounding array of splintered rebel groups devoted to Assad’s ouster. Some rebel groups would come to be supported by the United States. Others, like Cuspert’s Junud al-Sham, were declared terrorist organizations: perverting the ideology of Islam to homicidal and draconian ends, their stated goal was the creation of a purported caliphate. Like other similar groups — most notoriously the Islamic State, which Cuspert would eventually join — Junud al-Sham were dedicated propagandists who produced a steady torrent of online content aimed at sweeping up would-be fighters. And to those ends, Denis Cuspert was a valuable asset nearly as soon as he stepped foot in Syria. Because, in his native Germany, Cuspert was already infamous. Just a few years prior, he was best known as the rapper Deso Dogg. As an MC, Cuspert was an obvious product of ’90s American hip-hop. With heavy chains, coiled rage, and a lean, muscular frame, often paraded shirtless in his music videos, he was clearly pinching a bit of Tupac (he named one album Alle Augen Auf Mich, a German translation of Pac’s All Eyez on Me) and a bit of Mobb Deep. But a few years before arriving in Syria, he’d left hip-hop behind. In Germany, he had helped create an organization dedicated to jihadist propaganda named Millatu Ibrahim, or Community of Abraham. In mosque sermons and media appearances, he spoke grandly of the plight of the Palestinians,

the drone attacks in Pakistan, and the sins of American imperialism. He presented himself as a reformed infidel (“Deso” even was short for “devil’s son”) who’d embraced the light. Though he left rap, Cuspert never abandoned music. He began instead singing songs in praise of the international jihad, what jihadists refer to as nasheeds. Traditionally, nasheeds are songs of uplift, mostly a cappella, about Islam, its practices, and its history. But these were songs about fighters-in-arms, about explosions, about mass murder. In one, a German-language adaptation of a jihadist anthem called “Qariban Qariba,” Cuspert declared, Enemies of Allah, we want your blood/ It tastes so wonderful. After leaving Germany, he reimagined himself with a new name. He was now Abu Talha al-Almani — Abu Talha the German. Thanks to Junud al-Sham and Islamic State videos, he became possibly the most prominent black man within jihadist ranks in Iraq and Syria. He was an ex-gangster rapper on the front lines, cheating death, singing songs of war. In videos, he was seen marching through the bloodied and at times decapitated victims of his fellow fighters; his job was to praise the massacring, and he took to it with fervor. “It comes as no surprise that even Abu Talha being rushed to the hospital after the air attack was captured on camera,” noted the Middle East Media Research Institute in a report after the incident in the summer of 2013. “Few jihadi alive today are as photographed or video-recorded as Cuspert.” In an email in June of this year, Isabelle Kalbitzer, a spokesperson for Berlin’s intelligence service Verfassungsschutz, wrote, “he was something like a pop star of jihad.” In October of 2015, two years after his coma-inducing incident, Cuspert was again reported to have been shelled. According to the Pentagon at the time, he was traveling in a pick-up truck on a road out of Raqqa when he was hit in a U.S. airstrike and killed. During the months that followed, ISIS continued to release videos featuring Cuspert. In them, he never explicitly refers to the October airstrike; the simple presumption was that the videos were made before his death. In recent months, however, online chatter — from institutions, academics, and semi-amateur online jihadist watchers alike — suggested that things weren’t as clear as they seemed. Verfassungsschutz, the Berlin intelligence service, went as far as to announce that they could not conclusively say Cuspert was dead. This echoed what was being spread by German-speaking ISIS supporters through social media: that Cuspert was alive. Then, in July of 2016, the Pentagon refuted their previous claims as to Cuspert’s death. While withholding their actual intelligence as classified, a spokesperson, Marine Major Adrian J.T. Rankine-Galloway, released the following statement to The FADER: “In Oct 2015, the Coalition” — the network of nations jointly fighting ISIS — “conducted an airstrike against operative Denis Cuspert, aka Deso Dogg and Abu Talha al-Almani.

DESO DOGG

Because we are talking about intelligence, I really can’t speak in great detail about this. However I can tell you that, at the time of the strike, our assessment was one of a successful strike against Denis Cuspert. Since that assessment, there has been new information. It now appears that assessment was incorrect and Denis Cuspert survived.” enis Mamadou Gerhard Cuspert was born in Berlin on October 18, 1975. Cuspert’s biological father, a man named Richard Luc-Giffard, was a Ghanaian national who left the family when Cuspert was still a small child (not long after, Giffard was deported). Denis’s mother, Sigrid Cuspert, was a white German. She’d go on to marry an African-American G.I. from Savannah, Georgia. Together they had a child, Cuspert’s half-brother Jermaine. Years later, Jermaine would briefly rap, alongside Cuspert, under the name Lil’ Deso. Cuspert and his stepfather clashed often. When asked to describe his childhood, in an early interview with the newspaper Exberliner, Cuspert answered, “Really hard. With a belt and stuff. With grits and Rice-A-Roni. I had a tough time.” In the same interview, Cuspert also credited his stepfather with gifting him the N.W.A. tape that changed his life: “It was like, boom. In my head. Niggers for life. Niggers with attitude.” To one friend, a rapper named MC Bogy, Cuspert instead cited the more pop-friendly LL Cool J as his first favorite. He started petty thieving — his first boost was a toy car — and jacking tourists as a teen. Later, while in juvenile hall, he began rapping. He claimed to run with a crew called the 36 Boys, a street gang based in the Berlin neighborhood of Kreuzberg (postal district: 36) made up primarily of first-generation Turkish and Arab immigrants. The 36 Boys got in violent confrontations with neo-Nazi gangs and were obsessed with hip-hop transplanted directly from the American G.I.s prevalent in the city before the fall of the Berlin Wall. “I always fought for 36,” Cuspert told a Berlin reporter named Robert Rigney. “I bled for 36. I was stabbed for 36. Everything.” As an adult, he sold drugs and bragged to one hip-hop journalist that he’d done every crime besides “rape and pursesnatching.” In the early 2000s, after charges of aggravated assault, he bounced for years between a few Berlin prisons. Post-prison, Cuspert flailed. He continued selling drugs. At one point, he was briefly checked into a mental health institution. Gradually, the city’s hip-hop scene became an uneasy home. Working primarily with the Berlin label Streetlife Entertainment, Cuspert released his first solo albums Murda Cocctail Vol.1 and Schwarzer Engel. Initially, though, he was brought into the scene as showpiece muscle. The video for the mid-2000s track “NDW 2005” by the rapper Fler is a telling document of Berlin hip-hop. It kicks off with Fler on a rooftop in a massive fur-hooded parka

engaged in Saudi-style falconeering with a flapping bird of prey perched on his gloved forearm. Then a Fight Club-esque basement brawl ensues. Cuspert, who doesn’t rap on the song, is nonetheless present to walk menacingly through hallways. Like many international hip-hop scenes, Berlin’s was slow to break out of a deep indebtedness to American styles. The Berlin MCs — many of them Turkish, Arab, or white — may have never articulated it as such, but they coveted what they believed Cuspert represented. Cuspert often bragged of being one of the only true gangster rappers in Germany; he talked vaguely about his loyalty to and respect for “the streets.” On “NDW,” within a hodgepodge of borrowed cultural signifiers, there is one element specifically that the big and brawny Cuspert is lending: American-style hardness. Cuspert tended to obfuscate exactly when Islam came into his life, telling one interviewer he was born into the religion, then another that 2001 was his real entry year. But by his 2007 track “Wilkommen In Meiner Welt,” one of his best known, Cuspert had publicly embraced his faith. He talks of rising at dawn for the morning adhan, or call to prayer, and begs for absolution. I whisper softly to Allah, he raps, Please do not drop me! By those days, he was often fulfilling the Islamic pillar of salat by praying five times a day. He had two kids at this point, a son who lived with his mother in London and a daughter who lived with hers in Berlin. He was estranged from both Every day is a test, I’m sick of all this stress, he raps on “Wilkommen.” I am alone out there without my kids. Daniel Schieferdecker, the editor-in-chief of the Berlin hip-hop magazine Juice, interviewed Cuspert around this time. Schieferdecker recalls that Cuspert was polite and respectful, and offered him coffee and tea. In conversation, though, he could be grand: “I’m not a musician like everybody else. I want to write music history.” He was also, Schieferdecker says, a confused man, caught between hip-hop and his fledgling faith: “He said that he may have to leave the music business to get calmer, and that he tries to follow the lead of musicians like Cat Stevens who make music the Islamic way. He said that this might be his way, too.” Three years later, in February of 2010, the first public record of Cuspert stepping toward a violent interpretation of Islam emerged. It was a video, recorded at Berlin’s al-Nur Mosque, in which Cuspert engages in a conversation with an imam named Pierre Vogel. A broad white man with a thick red beard, and a one-time semi-professional boxer, Vogel is a controversial figure in Germany. He preaches an ultraconservative strand of Sunni Islam known as Salafism, which is both the official religion of Saudi Arabia — a staunch American ally — and the purported basis of the ideology of the Islamic State. Vogel is understood by some as a willing incubator of radicals, though in a Facebook post in 2014, he denied that he ever encouraged Cuspert to violence.

DESO DOGG

In their video conversation, Vogel praised Cuspert for moving away from hip-hop, which he and many Salafists consider haram: forbidden. At the same time, he was clearly fascinated by the character of Deso Dogg: during the course of their talk, Vogel imagines Cuspert leading an exodus of fellow ex-rappers into Islam. By the end of the year, Cuspert was pinging around Salafist mosques in Germany for seminars, providing emotional tellings of the story of his conversion. Still fumbling toward knowledge of Salafism, he came off as a peer to young audiences who were still learning themselves. He was a hit. ne afternoon in Berlin, I visit the home of MC Bogy, who was close to Cuspert in the mid-2000s. It’s a cramped studio apartment filled to the edges with dusty tchotchkes of Americana: a framed Big Pun triptych, likenesses of Ice T, and a string of still-in-the-packaging Tony Montana dolls to complement the Tony-Montana-holding-amicrophone tattoo that graces Bogy’s soft white belly. He’s wearing cargo sweatpants and a camouflage du-rag; he has a Mike Tyson-like Maori face tattoo. And he is unfailingly polite, providing me with coffee, juice, and a plate of fresh watermelon. For the next few hours, he speaks with great passion in halting English of his good friend Deso Dogg. He calls their union “like Steven Spielberg meeting Stephen King” — two titans, coming together. “We made much music together,” he says. “I’m very proud of that.” Cuspert wasn’t, Bogy insists, an angry person. Once, during a recording session, a rat scurried through the studio and Cuspert jumped to its defense. “He said, ‘It’s an African mouse.’ I don’t know why he decided it was an African mouse. He said, ‘Stop, stop, don’t kill the mouse. He’s from Africa, like me!’” Cuspert got his way, and gently guided the rat into the alley. Bogy shows me one of Deso Dogg’s old lyric sheets, with words written in a big sloping font across lined paper. It’s signed Abu Maleeq. Maleeq is Cuspert’s son’s name — Cuspert was naming himself, in traditional Arab conventions, “Father of Maleeq.” “I slept with him in the same rooms,” Bogy says. “We wore the same clothing. We went to other cities together — I went to the dope spot, smoked weed, took cocaine, fucked bitches. Look, I was addicted to drugs, and he always wanted to take me away from drugs. He helped me when I was sick, he always stood with me when I was drunk. I’m not seeing it with pink glasses on. He was always there for me.” Bogy converted to Islam as an adult, and says he would at times pray with Cuspert. He rails against Pierre Vogel, seeing the imam as the man who poisoned Cuspert’s mind. But he waves his and Cuspert’s shared faith off as too intimate to discuss. “You love your dick, I love my dick,” he says, grabbing

his crotch while pointing to mine as emphasis for the analogy. “But that’s private! That’s yours and that’s mine!” To explain what happened to his old friend, he reaches instead to the comfort of American culture. “Maybe in Germany people would kill me for what I say, yes? But for me, it’s a story like Anakin and Darth Vader.” In Star Wars, Anakin Skywalker is a fallen hero: touched by the forces of the Dark Side, he becomes the treacherous villain Darth Vader. I bring up the possibility — at the time of our conversation, unveriﬁed — that Cuspert was still alive. “I don’t know,” Bogy says. “But for me, I cry for him like he’s been dead a long time. He can’t come back. There’s no coming back.” Then, slapping my chest, he leaps up and hits play on an old Deso Dogg track. “Can we talk about music? Can we get a feel for the old Deso?” Looking close to tears that never come, Bogy pleads with me to see it his way. He knows he and Cuspert never sold a lot of records; he wants me to understand that that does not take away from what they did together. “The fucking press say he was a rapper with no success, that he was a loser. He was no loser! He was a good rapper! He had good homeboys! His heart was great and open!” y 2012, Cuspert had permanently left Berlin for the northwest German city of Solingen. Working with a man named Mohamed Mahmoud, who’d already been imprisoned in his native Austria for promotion of terrorism, Cuspert founded Millatu Ibrahim, the online propaganda organization. By then, Cuspert was already recording his violent combat nasheeds and dispersing them through Millatu Ibrahim. According to Benham Said, an analyst for the Verfassungsschutz intelligence service, it was at this point that “observers of the jihadi trend in Germany all became aware [of ] the increasing relevance of Denis Cuspert for the movement.” Within the Berlin scene, the rap music of Deso Dogg had been respectfully, tepidly received. There was local media attention, and shaky connections to the U.S.: he opened some shows in Germany for DMX around 2006 and once recorded, but never released, a song with a peripheral associate of 50 Cent’s named Spider Loc. Daniel Schieferdecker, the Juice editor, assumes Deso Dogg never made a living off his music. Vanessa Mason, a singer and onetime member of the German dance-pop group Real McCoy, collaborated with Cuspert. “I met him as a teenager, and he was feared by lots of others,” she says. “But I only knew him as a kind-hearted individual who was, I believe, searching for a family.” The rapper Kaisa, Cuspert’s labelmate and regular collaborator, knew Cuspert as a casually practicing, Friday-prayers

DESO DOGG

Muslim. “Back then, making music, going on tour, getting tattoos? Nobody thought …” He trails off, then picks up again. “He wasn’t angry all the time, of course not. But I think he was looking for something. He always wanted to be somebody. He wanted to be a leading role.” Abdul Kamouss is an imam who specializes in preaching to German-speaking Muslims like Cuspert. Before Cuspert left for Solingen, the two met at al-Nur Mosque, where Cuspert also met Pierre Vogel. Their conversations, Kamouss recalls, felt aimless: Cuspert was clearly more interested in politics than religion. To Kamouss, Cuspert intimated that he’d been briefly involved with a Berlin-based group with ties to Hezbollah, the radical militant organization that dominates Lebanon. It’s bizarre, if true: Shi’ite Hezbollah is a sworn enemy of the Sunni Islamic State, under whose flag Cuspert would wage war. Quickly, Cuspert grew frustrated with Kamouss and stopped coming around. “He started to drift, to look for something political,” Kamouss says, adding with a self-deprecating smile, “not me. I am a soft Muslim.” Later, watching Cuspert’s reinvention online as a prominent speaker and singer, Kamouss was horrified. “He was trying to be an image of himself, a persona,” Kamouss says. “He felt entitled. He had a sense of being important. With his charisma and his background as a creative person, it seduced the uninformed younger generation. They would not even realize that he is not trained, that he is teaching about things that are too complex for him to even touch.” Cuspert was an ex-con who’d lost years to prison. He was estranged from his children and their mothers. His rap career, and the image with which he’d chosen to define himself, had stalled out. And then, at 35 years old, he found himself, for the first time in his life, influential. From the outside, the rise appears to have been swift, and intoxicating. In a way, Kamouss sees Cuspert’s path as inevitable: he talks of Cuspert’s “psychological problems,” of Cuspert’s thirst for a “new life.” And yet in imagining one last conversation, Kamouss lifts clenched fists as if to shake him by the collar. “I would speak to him pointed, directed, so that he would get it,” he says. “I would sit with him and not let go.” ver the course of May 2012, Cuspert’s organization Millatu Ibrahim clashed with a local nativist political party in a series of protests and counter-protests rife with stone-throwings and stabbings. At the end of the month, in response to the clashes, Germany’s Federal Ministry of the Interior officially banned Millatu Ibrahim. Practically speaking, the move was somewhat ceremonial: Cuspert and his group could have likely skirted the decree by renaming themselves and continuing to produce videos. Instead, a month later, Cuspert boarded a plane.

His first stops were Mersa Matruh, in Egypt, and Darna, in Libya. There, according to a UN Security Council report, he received training in firearms with unidentified groups of militants. By 2013, he was in Syria fighting for Junud al-Sham. They clashed with Syrian government forces in Latakia, near the Turkish border, and raided villages of the Alawite minority, the support base of President Assad. In the same interview in which he gloats of cheating death, Cuspert talks briefly of his past life: “I only can say that this time when I was a musician, it was a gloomy time.” And yet he shows a flash of pride about his notoriety. “Just recently I met one brother, some weeks ago, who was new here to the Land of Honor, saying: ‘Oh really? Deso is here?’ And I was a little bit shocked that this thing has been deeply burnt into the minds of the people.” He also can’t help but talk in the tropes of hip-hop. “OK, first of all,” he says, sounding just a bit like he’s doing afternoon shoutouts at Hot 97, “I want to send my brothers from all the Lands of Honor with the best of greetings… ” Around this time Cuspert released a combat song called “al-Jannah, al-Jannah,” meaning “Paradise, Paradise.” In it, he fantasizes of his death as a suicide bomber back in his native West. The bomb in the crowd, pressing on the button, he sings in German. Right in the center or in the subway, with a smile directly to my Creator, pressing on the button, al-Jannah, al-Jannah. By the beginning of 2014, an indication perhaps of his outsized ambition in the world of jihad — or of his fickleness — Cuspert elected to leave Junud al-Sham for a larger organization. He pledged an oath, a bay’ah, to what was then known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. ISIS had self-appointed the capital of its caliphate in Raqqa, Syria. With extortion, torture, and unfathomable massacres, it was winning land and recruits. And within the jihadist world, for sheer output and reach, its propaganda network had no equal. And just as with Jund al-Sham, Cuspert was embraced by the ISIS content arm. The entity in charge of spreading Cuspert’s content was al-Hayat, the Islamic State’s English-language media division. It’s al-Hayat that publishes the Islamic State’s infamous magazine, Dabiq, and courts far-flung would-be jihadis through videos posted on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, and the Russian-founded messaging service Telegram. Naturally, Cuspert’s bay’ah video was recorded and disseminated. “My goal was to get famous with music,” he says in the hour-long video, an AK-47 bandied about for effect. “And when there would have been a big musical event, like the Grammys, I would have stood at the stage, I would have said: ‘There is no god but Allah! I hereby cancel my music career!’” As he talks, footage from his old music videos is spliced in. There he is, young Deso Dogg, never smiling, throwing punches and headbutts towards the camera lens. In the video, he talks of a car accident. He doesn’t say when it happened. He was driving fast on the way to a club

DESO DOGG

with a friend when the car skidded out. Both walked away, but for Cuspert, the near-death experience was an awakening. He understood now that, as a quasi-rap star, he was nothing according to Allah — a “poor soul, imprisoned between spotlights and groupies.” As Cuspert rails against his old world, we see photos of various vices seemingly plucked from online stock photo archives, or a lazy Google Images search: music festival revelers, a close-up of pills and powders, a man pouring a beer. It’s so clumsy as to be surreal. Then, Cuspert consummates his bay’ah. He sits on his knees in front of a green sheet, in camouflage. “My dream has been fulfilled,” he says. “Victory, or martyrdom. I will continue my work until a bullet or rocket shall hit me!” And as he’s wrapping up, at this purportedly hallowed moment, you can clearly hear the distinctive whistle-chirp noise of an incoming message. Someone in the room had not muted their Samsung Galaxy. After joining ISIS, Cuspert became a wandering mascot: over and over, in propaganda footage from ISIS battlefields throughout Syria — wherever atrocities occurred — there was the man now called Abu Talha al-Almani. “He was like Where’s Waldo,” says Alberto Fernandez, a former counterrorism specialist with the State Department. “He was popping up all over the place.” In one video, Cuspert talks of loot plundered from Kurds and Yazidis living near the town of Kobane. In another, he’s in Homs, in the wake of the grisly conquest of the al-Sha’er gas fields: he’s captured on video beating a dead body with a sandal. Later in 2014, he’s seen in Deir al-Zor, the site of a bloody massacre of Sunni Arab Shaitat tribe, brandishing a recently decapitated human head. Throughout his appearances, he kept producing his combat songs. The videos are calculatingly horrible: over images of prisoners in orange jumpsuits having their throats slashed, Cuspert sings of rolling heads and men with black masks, their “creed sharp as knives.” Don’t be sad my mother, he says in one song, “Fisabilillah.” Your son is rushing to Allah. Within the international network of jihadist propaganda, there have been the occasional “personalities.” But most are fleeting; they pop up for a month or two of rabble-rousing, then disappear. Like the rapper he once was, Cuspert, for a while, was practically taken on tour. In the video of the looting of Kobane, a fellow fighter even recognizes him on camera, and shouts out, there is Abu Talha! It seems that Cuspert was ultimately not a mastermind or general, but on-air talent.

n a recent summer night in Kreuzberg — the home of the notorious 36 Boys — I meet Muci Tosun. An original 36’er turned kickboxer, he proudly carries forth the name of his gang, which has produced such famous alums as the ﬁlmmaker Nico Celik and the celeb-

rity chef Tim Raeu. For a while, Tosun even ran a retail shop in Kreuzberg selling 36 Boys merchandise. It’s Ramadan, so we meet late, after the evening’s iftar meal. Tosun, stocky and snub-nosed, immediately denies Cuspert’s claims of 36 Boys membership: “He tried to set foot in the 36 Boys, we tried to support him a bit. We gave him the branded clothing. But he was never really a part of it.” Cuspert didn’t show up, Tosun says, until after his prison stints, meaning the early 2000s. Mostly, though, Tosun ignores my questions in favor of lightly pushing a new protégé on me: a 40-something, mildly portly, fair-haired man that makes schlager music — cheesy German party pop. His stage name, he happily tells me, is Dino Blondino. I assume Tosun is rejecting Cuspert after the fact. But, independently, the rapper Killa Hakan, another original 36’er, tells me the same: “The story of the 36 Boys was written in the ’90s. Deso Dogg came very much after that. He was a fan. He tried to be part of it, but everything was done. Deso was a little boy during the fights — he was never in the fights.” After a few more similar conversations, I come to believe that Cuspert’s involvement with the 36 Boys — which he shouted out, with pride, in his songs — may have been a feint toward grandness. The Berlin reporter Robert Rigney recalls meeting him one afternoon at Tosun’s 36 Boys shop. “I was talking to the guys about hip-hop,” Rigney tells me, “and some guy spoke up in the background and said, ‘Hip-hop is a war!’ And that was Deso.” No one I met in Berlin entertained the possibility that Cuspert had again survived an airstrike. But we didn’t talk about him as if he were dead, either; we talked about him as if he were too far gone to come back. If the Pentagon’s latest intelligence is correct — if Cuspert is still alive, and presumably still fighting for ISIS — then the friends and family that Cuspert left behind in Berlin will have to continue grappling with the strange legacy he continues to unspool. While in Berlin, I try unsuccessfully to get in contact with Cuspert’s mother, Sigrid. Once I’m back in New York, she responds to a message I’d sent her on Facebook. She is hesitant to talk at all. “I won’t speak to anyone about my son,” she declares at first. But the fact that I write for a music magazine seems to warm her up a tiny bit. Eventually, we chat briefly. She tells me that she met Cuspert’s stepfather at a disco, and that he passed away last year, from lung cancer. She says she last saw her son five years ago — right around the time he left Berlin for Solingen. “My whole family loved music,” she tells me. “My other son, I named him Jermaine because I’m a Jermaine Jackson fan. I have 200 CDs still. Oldies. Old soul.” And hip-hop, I ask? “I love hip-hop.” And your son’s hip-hop? “He makes music, but not war music,” she says.” And, “long time, he makes no more music. I have his CDs. But that’s the past.”

DESO DOGG

Rise and JOANNE THE SCAMMER lives for drama. Branden Miller is just trying to live.

Story by Patrick D. McDermott Photography by Cait Oppermann

S c a m

randen Miller collects fragrances. He’s got 25 in total, arranged carefully on top of a wooden dresser in his Daytona Beach, Florida, bedroom. The spread — which includes colognes, perfumes, and at least one unisex scent — is expensive, each glass bottle cast in its own sultry shape. “Would you like to smell some?” he asks. I say sure, and he starts ripping a piece of paper into small strips, placing them in a row on the dresser. “This is my favorite thing to do,” he says. Branden, 25, lives in a one-bedroom in a quiet gated complex 15 minutes from the Daytona shoreline. He shares the apartment with his long-term partner, Xavier, a long-limbed drug and alcohol counselor and graduate student he met on BGC, a pre-Grindr gay dating app geared toward black men. The apartment’s decor is mature. Hanging by the door, there’s a framed painting of a rainy Paris street. Leaf-like decals billow across the walls. “Everything in my house I bought with my porn money,” Branden tells me. He started doing porn when he was 18, and it paid his bills until recently. But his life changed in 2015, when he made a video in which he, wearing a blonde bob wig with brown roots, delivered a monologue in a husky half-whisper: “I just want to let you girls know that I’m a real messy bitch — a liar, a scammer. I love robbery and fraud. I’m a messy bitch who lives for drama.” Joanne the Scammer was born. Branden had performed in character online before. As Miss Prada — a transgender diva, trouble-making comic, and occasional prostitute — he’d amassed both fans and notoriety. But Joanne is his most successful invention so far. Today, Branden’s Joanne the Scammer Twitter account is, objectively, an internet sensation. It’s populated with endlessly clever missives, both video and text-based, about ripping people off, robbing, cheating, and lying. Some posts are outrageous, but others are strangely empowering. “Scam today before today scams you,” goes one recent tweet. In videos, Joanne wraps herself in gray fur, speaks in an exaggerated posh accent, sucks down Newport cigarettes, and runs up charges on other people’s PayPal accounts. She hacks, she steals, and she lies under oath. Joanne the Scammer is an egocentric criminal, and she wears her ﬂaws like an elegant necklace, paid for with embezzled funds. Branden’s life is less action-packed. At home, he keeps the curtains drawn, the AC on full-blast, and the lights low. Some of his hobbies include painting, giving himself facials, and hand-making dog toys out of socks and yarn. He doesn’t leave often — unless it’s Friday, when he goes shopping. After the scent-smelling session, we drive his Chrysler to a strip mall full of chain stores a couple miles away; it’s only Thursday, but he makes an exception. He’s dressed in sweatpants, a Polo cap, and white Air Jordan slides with socks. Colored contacts make his eyes a stormy, unnatural gray.

Ulta doesn’t have the cologne he wants, so he picks out some $36 body cream made with Dead Sea salt instead. “Shower time is fun,” he says. “You sit there and you have your little moment.” The lady at the checkout counter asks if there’s a chip in his credit card. The card in his hand is scratched up, ancient-looking, and literally held together with tape. Deﬁnitely no chip. “What’s the deal with the chip anyway?” Branden asks her. “It’s supposed to be safer so people can’t steal your identity.” “Oh wow,” he says, giggling a little. Our next stop is Volusia Mall, a 93-acre, by-the-books shopping center. As we cross the hot asphalt toward Dillards, Branden tells me that buying fragrances makes him feel powerful. “I like to go in here like I’m not going to buy something, then prolong it, and buy something at the last minute,” he says. “It makes them think you don’t have money, then bam.” Today he’s on the hunt for Spicebomb, the masculine scent by Viktor&Rolf, makers of Flowerbomb. “When I’m buying perfume for Xavier, I lie and say it’s for my mom,” he tells me later. “Some things are too gay for me.” Since he’s picking up cologne, though, he doesn’t have to worry about that. He ﬁnds Spicebomb straight away, then eyes a Gucci scent he doesn’t have yet. He buys them both. randen grew up in Hopewell, a small city in Virginia. He was adopted as a baby by an older white couple: Buddy, who died of cancer when Branden was 12, and Veronica, a stay-at-home mom. Branden didn’t learn he was adopted until age 17, when a family friend broke the news. He doesn’t know much about his biological parents, except that they were black and Puerto Rican. “I read my adoption papers when I found out,” he says. “It said a lot about my mom, but not her name, nothing I could contact. On my dad’s side it was just like, ‘Black and tall.’” “I went to an all-black school, and people would say, ‘Branden, you’re black,’ or ‘Branden, you’re adopted,’” he says. “I was like, ‘No, actually I’m white.’” He laughs about it now, but remembers the discovery as traumatic. “That was tragic, I’m not going to lie. I found out I was adopted, and then I found out I was black. I was like, Oh shit, none of these people are really related to me at all! That was a fucking…” He stops for a second. “I thought I was white. I had white friends. I was a white person! I still have my moments where I’m like, Oh my God. That’s really awkward.” Once, he asked his mom why she hadn’t told him the truth. She said she was scared he’d run away. Branden says he was always interested in entertaining, and good at determining what worked. In one old photo, where he can’t be older than 9, he wears an unkempt black wig. One hand is on his hip, and the other held high in the

JOANNE THE SCAMMER

air, like a pint-sized homecoming queen waving from atop a parade float. “The wig was always a sign of funny for me,” he says. “I put the wig on and people laughed.” As a teenager, he’d go on his family’s computer to watch Chris Crocker, the pre-Vine performance artist who rose to prominence after his teary-eyed “Leave Britney Alone!” monologue went viral in 2007. Branden was a fan, but also convinced he could do better. “My goal was to upload a video on my dial-up computer and be funnier than Chris Crocker,” he says. “I thought I was going to blow up on YouTube, like him, because I thought I was funnier.” At school, he struggled with telling friends he was gay. Branden says he dressed “trade,” the nebulous slang term for a man who’s into guys but doesn’t advertise that fact. “I was very masculine. I had braids. I had girlfriends. I acted the whole part,” he says. “Not too many people knew I was gay. It’s really awkward, but they thought I was a ladies’ man.” He came out at 16, after his older sister found gay porn on the family computer. “I remember my mom saying to me, ‘God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve!’ Shit like that.” After finding out the truth about his birth parents and his race, Branden started playing around in drag. “I went to high school in drag with one of my friends and it shocked everyone,” he says. Before graduation, he dropped out. And for several months after, he dressed as a woman every day. “Creating the characters stemmed from me finding out I was adopted, and trying to run away from that,” he says. “I knew at the end of the day I wanted to be a man, but I just didn’t want to be myself. I felt like everything was a lie.” Branden’s never held down a conventional job. When Buddy died back in 2003, Veronica collected enough money to keep her kids happy. “Anything I asked for I got,” he says. “Thinking of going to work was scary for me. Even in school, I could never listen. I don’t like authority or being under someone, so I thought of ways to get easy money.” After leaving high school in 2008, Branden moved to Florida with his adoptive mom and started dating Xavier. He started doing porn not long after the move, signing up for a cam site after a one-off XXX video he posted got a bunch of attention. He typically acted straight, catering to viewers who fetishized gay-for-pay actors, like another character entirely. He performed for years and, sometimes, sold fake porn videos over Skype comprised of cobbled-together footage from other places on the internet. As a teenager, Branden created the Miss Prada character. She uploaded campy pop songs to SoundCloud and appeared in vulgar YouTube videos, sometimes professing her undying love to Chris Brown. “I’d double dutch in an eightlane highway for your dick,” she said once. In 2014, Branden overdosed during his first-ever hard drug experience. It started when a friend gave him a crystal of MDMA. “It made me say ‘I love you’ to people, which I never do,” he says. “One time I gave my dad something for

Christmas, and I said, ‘I love you’ and my mom said, ‘Buddy, Branden said he loved you!’ And he didn’t say nothing back.” Branden didn’t want the unselfconscious high to end, so he kept swallowing more. On the third day in a row of no sleep, while listening to P!NK in his bedroom, he sensed something was wrong and dialed 911. “I don’t know if that was from the anxiety or the overdosing, but I was in the hospital looking at some little girl running around like, I’m gonna die. I remember fighting myself to wake up, then I felt this really peaceful feeling, like, OK, I’m just gonna die.” He survived the night, but suffered through a serious bout of depression and anxiety in the incident’s wake. Irrationally afraid he was going to die, he would visit the hospital regularly, looking for someone to tell him he was going to be fine. He got better slowly, and kept making Miss Prada videos. Posted between shirtless selfies on Instagram, some of the clips racked up hundreds of thousands of views, but the success was inconsistent and he still relied on porn for income. Joanne came along at the right time: in pop culture, where her shamelessly messy persona was fated to resonate, and in Branden’s life, which badly needed a jump-start. Today, keeping her relevant is his only job. “I literally have the most boring life,” he tells me while using a PlayStation controller to flip through YouTube videos on the TV, often starting one for a few seconds and then switching to the next. “I don’t get along with people,” he says. “People are really cheesy to me.” His dogs, a shih tzu named Tank and a yorkie named Bella, scuffle at our feet. Most nights, Branden stays up late playing Grand Theft Auto, wreaking cyberhavoc as a rifle-wielding white woman in tight pants and a Spring Breakers ski mask. Elements of Joanne the Scammer are based on this character, Branden says. Los Santos, the name of the sprawling fictional city that debuted in GTA V, where you can be anyone and do anything, is tattooed on his forearm. At one point he switches to cable, pausing for a spell on Girl Meets World, the Disney Channel’s big-hearted reboot of the beloved ’90s sitcom Boy Meets World. “Her name’s Rowan,” he says, gesturing towards the show’s lead actress, Rowan Blanchard, a precocious Gen Z thinker with a sizable internet following of her own. “She tweets me, too.” Sky Ferreira, Jhené Aiko, and a host from The View have also paid their respects. “People would be shocked at my DMs,” Branden says. “Katy Perry said hello to me the other day — actually, she said ‘miss u bb gur.’ This is probably the one for me, though,” he says, holding out his iPhone for me to see. “She didn’t do nothing but send hearts, but it’s Solange Knowles.” Once he started getting recognition for his Joanne persona, near the end of 2015, Branden deleted the Tumblr where he hosted the majority of his X-rated pictures and videos. And as his porn money began to run out, he got a call about doing a photoshoot as Joanne, and then another asking him to appear in character at a party. Each paid

JOANNE THE SCAMMER

100

JOANNE THE SCAMMER

101

$1,000. “I was like, Oh shit, I’ve never made money without doing porn,” he remembers. “The porn customers are really nasty, and they don’t give a fuck about you,” he explains. “My fans now call me queen. They call me icon. They call me legend.” Out back, twin houseplants dangle from hooks over Branden’s porch, which is dotted with overflowing ashtrays. He smokes menthols, just like Joanne. For a while, we watch old Miss Prada videos on his phone. One is a homemade music video for Marilyn Manson’s “Dopeworld,” which Branden directed with a friend and edited himself. While definitely amateur-looking, it’s impressive: Branden has a sense for timing, splicing visuals and sound with a precision that creates something unnerving or funny or both. He applies the same skills to his Joanne the Scammer videos, which are typically shorter. Part of Joanne is improv, he says, but as with his economically phrased tweets, it takes an editor’s eye to ensure something will pop off. Joanne’s appeal appears to be a result of Branden’s technical gifts and of something less tangible: the character’s unhinged psyche, which connects with many on a spiritual level. “Knowing that someone is shifty and untrustworthy and that’s their calling card is very funny, but there’s also something deeper going on,” Chelsea Peretti, the comedian and Brooklyn Nine-Nine actress, tells me later over the phone. “I think women frequently are trying to be likable, and it’s so cathartic to see this female character that isn’t doing any of those things,” Peretti says. “Joanne the Scammer is 100 percent about her own gratification, and that’s appealing to women. Her attitude is like: what can I get from people? It’s your darkest, most self-centered self. You watch and you’re like, What if I just allowed myself to be that, full-time?” “Rules to live by: Only help women. Only Scam Men,” reads one Joanne tweet from May. But Joanne’s comedy doesn’t just click with women: for anyone, life in 2016 can feel like one giant scam. There’s a racist television personality in the throes of an alarmingly legitimate campaign to be the next president of the United States, and there’s a near-constant stream of bad news to make your head spin or your heart ache: just within a couple weeks, we’ve seen Brexit, terrorist attacks in France and Turkey, citizens killed by police and police killed by civilians. If it feels like everything’s falling apart as you helplessly watch, wondering if anyone is looking out for you or your future, it’s no surprise that you’d find some relief in Joanne. She’s a fiercely independent hot mess who goes to obscene, hilarious lengths to look out for herself. The creation of a recluse, Joanne is a byproduct of how frightening and lonely the world can feel. But she’s also an escape from it all, a funny-as-hell reminder to keep your guard up, to scam today before today scams you. Recently, I saw a photo of a teenager holding up her college diploma on graduation day. The caption? “Just pulled off my biggest scam yet.”

he next day, Branden is making instant ramen in his kitchen. He says he almost exclusively eats Popeye’s fried chicken, so this is a rare almosthome-cooked lunch. A few beams of Florida afternoon leak through the closed curtains, but otherwise you’d never know what time it was. “Did you see what happened?” he asks. Apparently, he’d tweeted a derogatory word for Mexicans a couple days before, and last night there was a firestorm of backlash. It’s not the first time he’s prompted critique. In postings that date back to 2011, he’s tweeted the word “tranny,” which is widely accepted as pejorative, especially when used by a cisgender man who dresses up as a woman for laughs. Joanne the Scammer calls herself Mexican-American and Caucasian, so her use of the n-word has been considered offputting, even though Branden is black and Latino. Between 2010 and 2015, when he was performing as Miss Prada, Branden tweeted jokes about rape and made tasteless comments about Chris Brown’s assault on Rihanna. He began to explain that Miss Prada was a fictional alter-ego, and not a real extension of his identity, in one notorious Instagram post from 2015, writing: “if you think I live my life as a transexual hooker with multiple std’s your crazy.” “I was trying to confirm, I guess in a very messy way, that I am not my character,” he says today of the post. Branden explains that he’s still learning about which words he should or should not say, and which mean-spirited sentiments are darkly funny and which ones cross the line. He tends to delete posts once he notices they’ve upset people. “I was completely un-knowledged at the time,” he says of his use of the “tranny” slur. “I would’ve never said it if I knew transgender was the modern term, because you got to be correct today.” Screenshots of his missteps, new and old, regularly flood his mentions. “I said a lot of stupid shit. I would base my comedy off of a lot of unpopular opinions. They didn’t understand I was a character then,” he says about the offending Miss Prada tweets. “According to them I’m a racist, I’m transphobic, I don’t like Beyoncé, I hate Rihanna, I support women-beaters, literally anything you could think of. I get called names because I say ‘nigga.’ People are like, ‘You’re not black, you can’t say that.’ In order for me to say I’m black, I have to say I have [adoption] papers.” He pauses to slurp some noodles into his mouth. “It’s irritating to kind of have to prove myself sometimes. It’s really aggravating. Some of my tweets are really sick, but I play a sick character. I don’t really want to explain myself and give them that satisfaction.” I ask him if he thinks Joanne is a good person. Scamming and identity theft are real crimes that negatively affect people all over the world every day — violations that wreck lives, not just credit scores. “No, I don’t,” he says with-

JOANNE THE SCAMMER

102

“I play a character that lets me do whatever I want. It’s the one time I can kind of be free.”

out pause. “I do think she has good intentions. She’s here to make you laugh. That’s why I get so upset. My intention isn’t to hurt anybody.” In a bizarre turning of the tables, Branden was the victim of a scam in May of this year, when a person posing as a Twitter employee swindled him out of his account information by promising to get him verified. “I thought it was sick, hilarious,” he says of the ordeal, throughout which he never broke character. “I’m busy with wine forgery right now babe. Can we chat later?” he wrote in one email to the reallife scammer, who demanded $500 in ransom. Branden never paid, and though all of his tweets were deleted, he laughs about it now. In the end Twitter verified his account. The internet’s a fickle place, and web-based fame is just as fleeting as any other kind. After Branden’s old idol Chris Crocker saw his notoriety dwindle, he made porn. “When they’re living for you, they’re really living for you — it’s like you’re walking on air,” Crocker tells me later, over the phone from Tennessee. “The thing is, there will be a point when people turn on you. It’s just the way the internet is.” He says he’s a big fan of Joanne the Scammer, and thinks Branden has a better chance to have a lasting career than he ever did. “Branden’s going to make mistakes — we all do,” Crocker says. “But how he feels about himself and his work can’t come from public responses. If it’s self-fulfilling, that’s how he’ll keep creating.” Branden’s tweets are more popular than ever right now, but like they say, nothing gold can stay. This doesn’t seem to bother Branden — Joanne might crave fame and fortune, but he’s just trying to live comfortably. He’d like to parlay his internet celebrity into a role in a movie or a book deal, whatever will get him enough money to buy a modest house in Florida and never have to work for someone else. So far, he’s been paid to record personal greetings as Joanne, collected $10,000 to appear in a makeover video with viral hairstylist Anthony Cuts, and signed a three-video deal with Super Deluxe, a web production company and distribution network. The first will be a parody of MTV Cribs starring Joanne and a “borrowed” L.A. mansion. “Whatever happens, I already feel like I’ve succeeded,” Branden says. “I’ve made so many people laugh — and that was the goal. You can be anything you want. I’m happy I went my own route, as I always do. I will never be forgotten.” Still, it must be daunting to know that there are people waiting for him to slip up. “That’s how it goes, though. People just don’t want you to succeed — at all,” Branden explains. “They know my past and they don’t feel that I’m worthy of being verified or talking to celebrities. I have to be funny at all times. If I say something not funny, the one thing — they don’t give me a second chance. I’m cancelled.” He stamps out his cigarette. “That just happens when you’re me.” Branden tells me he’s comfortable in his own skin, but online and in person he does things that suggest he still

struggles. “When you ask me if I’m gay, I say yes,” he says. “Do I ﬂaunt it? No.” He says the attitudes towards homosexuality that surrounded his Southern childhood are ingrained deep, and keep him from being open about his love life. “I was raised a certain way,” he says. “I never kiss my boyfriend in front of my mother. I never hold his hand. She knows we date, and she knows I love him, but I never do that in front of nobody, actually.” His words are a reminder that Earth is still a scary place to be yourself. Just days before we meet in Florida, 49 people were brutally murdered on Latin night at Pulse, a gay club in Orlando, 45 minutes from Branden’s apartment. It was the closest queer hotspot, and though he rarely goes clubbing, when he did, he went to Pulse. “It was an emotional day,” Branden remembers of the mass shooting’s aftermath. I ask if he considered tweeting something about it from the Joanne account. “To me, that is personal,” he says. “I don’t want my Twitter to be personal. I like to detach myself 100 percent.” For Branden, masquerading as someone he’s not provides a way to cope with — or maybe just circumvent — his feelings about his own identity. “It wasn’t my strategy, but it just so happens I play a character that allows me to do whatever I want,” he tells me. “It’s the one time I can be kind of free.” n our last day together, we venture to buy smokes at a nearby 7-Eleven, where a wide-framed, round-faced man with a crew cut is hovering near the drinks fridge. “I swear to God I thought that was George Zimmerman,” Branden says as he climbs back into the car, referring to the Florida man who shot and killed an unarmed black teenager named Trayvon Martin in 2012. “He killed that guy in Sanford, which is only 40 minutes from here. It was so fucked up. That’s why I stay in the house.” Before we return to his apartment, we pick up Oreo Blizzards from the local Dairy Queen. On the way home, Branden takes a few detours, like he’s trying to stretch the outing for as long as he can. He puts on “Hawaiian Tropic,” an unreleased Lana Del Rey song with lyrics about crystal meth and Elvis Presley. The street is lined with hunched-over palms, and there’s a small church on pretty much every block. One sign reads: GOD IS NOT LIMITED BY YOUR LIMITATIONS. “I went to my boyfriend’s church and saw people catch the Holy Ghost,” Branden says. “If I ever caught the Holy Ghost, I think I’d never be the same. I would never shut up about it. But they just do it and go home and continue to gossip.” So you’re probably not religious, I say. “I don’t buy it,” he says, laughing. “I have this really lame theory that when people die they become stars. It’s not a popular opinion, but it’s a good one.” He turns onto a road that looks just like the one before it. “When I die, I’m going to become a star.”

JOANNE THE SCAMMER

104

’

Fall’s fluid throwback layers, set into motion by SHELOVESMEECHIE and YVNG QUAN. Story and styling by Shibon Kennedy Photography by Cara Stricker

MEECHIE

107 â&#x2020;&#x2018; Coat DSQUARED2.

↑ Shirt BVNDO, pants TIM COPPENS, shoes TOPMAN. → Meechie’s hoodie BVNDO, Quan’s jacket FAITH CONNEXION. MEECHIE

108

↖ Shirt BVNDO × PPA, jacket SIKI IM / DEN IM, pants ACNE STUDIOS.

← Jacket OPENING CEREMONY, T-shirt BAJA EAST, pants GYPSY SPORT. ↑ Jacket and pants PATRIK ERVELL. MEECHIE

113

↑ Meechie’s hat TOKEN, jacket COLLINA STRADA, shoes BUSCEMI, hoodie and jeans MODEL’S OWN. Quan’s jacket HILFIGER EDITION, hoodie BVNDO, pants CARVEN, Shoes MODEL’S OWN.

MEECHIE

GROOMING COLBY SMITH AT JED ROOT, PHOTO ASSISTANT JONNIE HOKKLO, FASHION ASSISTANT PAULINE SENG, IAN MCRAE, SPECIAL THANKS TO ATTIC STUDIOS.

â&#x2020;&#x2018; Jacket STEVEN ALAN, shirt BVNDO, pants TIM COPPENS.

116

↑ Meechie’s hat TOKEN, jacket COLLINA STRADA, shoes BUSCEMI, hoodie and jeans MODEL’S OWN. Quan’s jacket HILFIGER EDITION, hoodie BVNDO, pants CARVEN, shoes MODEL’S OWN.

THE REALITY OF TEEN-RUN STAN A C C O U N T S By Laur M. Jackson A new generation of artist fandoms typifies our yearning for 24/7 access. In late June, just moments after the weekly update of the Billboard Top 200 was released, user @beyonseh tweeted: “drake sold less than the entire BB top 200 but due to streams, he remains number one…” Alongside a screenshot of sales totals for proof, @beyonseh attached an image of Beyoncé in front of an open MacBook. With her fist tucked underneath her chin, she peers at the screen with a slight smirk. As if seeing what we see, Beyoncé is amused. The message of her self-titled 2013 album, and her cultural dominance

in its wake, hangs in the air: It’s all about the single. The hype. The shade is real. Though the haunting melody of Eminem’s and Dido’s 2000 collaboration has nearly faded from popular culture, stans in 2016 look quite different from the tragic anti-hero who gave us their namesake. This generation has birthed an evolved class of artist fandoms: Little Monsters, Barbz, the Navy, and the Beyhive, among other uber-faithful supporters. In lieu of writing letters, these rabid fanbases track an artist’s every move. There are the conspiracy theorists, too, such as the sub-coalition of Directioners who believe Louis Tomlinson’s son is a decoy, but most stans deal in facts that are very tangible. They can name the designer

behind the iconic gold tunic Bey wore at 2011’s Glastonbury Festival in a heartbeat (Alexandre Vauthier) or recite all of 1989’s accolades without misstep. Stans are ruthless about what they know. More than any journalist, perhaps, they are the best historians, critics, and marketers an artist could ever hope for. “The more you love something or someone, the bigger the urge is to learn more,” Evan Cox, the 18-year-old behind @beyonseh, told me. His is a modest following in the realm of teen internet sensations — 21,500 followers — but Cox’s posts circulate widely. One of his most popular tweets was of footage from Beyoncé’s “Run the World (Girls)” performance at the 2011 Billboard Music

Illustration by Christopher DeLorenzo

FADE OUT

119

“Stans are the best historians, critics, and marketers an artist could ever hope for.” to be the most official unofficial fan source. Massive entities like @beyoncereigns (173,000 followers) and @ZayneJMNews (151,000) take on a corporate monotone on par with many singers’ own junkets. Unlike the many dime-a-dozen updaters, Cox and Jewel couple their unconditional stanhood with social media personas all their own. They share selﬁes along with professional photo spreads of their faves. Tweets about math homework and college applications are strewn between concert footage and Instagram captures. At a glance, their approach is not unlike that of any other user who tweets about the things that matter most to them. But scroll a bit further and it becomes apparent how their accounts deviate from self-absorption. As teens who are hyperaware of the worlds they generate and participate in online, Cox and Jewel understand stanning as something beyond a relationship between fan and artist, but a form of community management that comes with ethical responsibilities. How often were Directioners silent on Islamophobia aimed at Zayn? Just as misogynistic appraisals of the artist’s dating history run rampant amongst Swifties, many professed Bey fans will tweet an album cover but never say a word against misogynoir. Not so with these two. “I believe that it’s important as a big account to talk about these issues,” Cox said, whose proLGBT, pro-black, and pro-black women messages are weaved seamlessly into his account’s pro-Beyoncé imperative. His motives, however, are more personal than just Bey. “I think that it’s the fact that I have many people in my life who are heavily affected by the injustice that continuously happens from day to day, and I’m just sick of it.” Cox also runs @PocFashion, a photo catalog of fashion icons of color. Jewel said she sees parallels between

her and Zayn’s commitment to social issues. “He’s reserved, but quite outspoken when he needs to be even if he’ll receive hate for it.” As proof, she cited his infamous “#FreePalestine” tweet, for which he received death threats and no public support from his former bandmates. Being curator of your own community is by no means easy. Stan love is messy. “A lot of people on here are well into their twenties and thirties and do nothing but live to stir up drama and troll,” Jewel said. “I’ve been teased by grown men and women for being what they consider is too young for Twitter.” “There have been other Bey stans and other stanbases who have come for me, which I find weird,” Cox added. “[Someone] made a separate account so they could tell one of my mutuals that i liked a tweet against their fave that's a new type of obsession,” he tweeted in July. As for how often they personally instigate the inter-stan drama, both remained somewhat coy. That’s fitting for a Twitter culture that deals primarily in veiled slights and shady shenanigans. “When I’m bored I will reply just for the kii and the gag, but that’s about it because it usually takes too much energy,” Cox said. And according to Jewel, “Sometimes it’s just easier to block these people and move on.” Things are, of course, a bit cheekier on Twitter. “Ima always be here girl. You entered my mentions first ,” taunted Jewel in response to a user with girl group Little Mix in their handle. “imagine having to discredit your fave to impress other stans on the Internet,” Cox tweeted amidst an intra-Hive feud. “y’all need to stop hiding behind your bey usernames and avis thinking you won’t get dragged because you have one. i’ll still come for you.” As an outsider, the displays of fan bravado can seem petty, if not toxic. But what that evaluation of stan culture misses is the wider entertainment egosystem to which stans play a critical part. If debates cause ripples, and ripples keep things interesting, stans are responsible for composing a high-strung concentrate of love and competition that maintains the relevance of an artist even in the absence of their art. And, when the art does come, there’s a home for it to go to.

FADE OUT

120

Laur M. Jackson Awards, accompanied by the caption, “Me giving a powerpoint presentation on feminism at school.” In response to another user’s incredulity over the success of the tweet, which in its ﬁrst three months reached over 2 million people, Cox replied: “all my tweets do well sis idk why you're surprised… that’s what happens when you have real followers!” Stans are made and not born — and sometimes during great strife. Cox began tweeting in earnest in early 2013, what he considered “peak Beyhydration season.” “Beyoncé hadn’t done much of anything in what seemed like centuries,” he said. The drought became an opportunity for Cox to interact with an artist-based community as “a casual fan.” But the more active he became on Twitter, watering the seeds of his blossoming fandom with past interviews and performances from Bey’s career, “the more I started loving Beyoncé and understanding her and her fan base more deeply,” he explained. Later that year his following began to swell, which he attributes to the surprise release of Beyoncé in December. “The [general public] is more interested in artists right after they release content.” Aaliyah Jewel, @blackheaux, said her entrance to stan culture can be traced to a single event. “I started out as a personal/ humor account, and then one day I came across a gif of Zayn Malik and Harry Styles dancing.” She was only 14 years old at the time, but found herself “hooked,” moving from Tumblr to Twitter in 2013 and quickly gaining traction ﬁrst as a fan account for One Direction and then for Zayn after he left the group. Cox and Jewel, though, represent stan culture with a twist. They demonstrate an unavoidable truth of our time: teens often make the best e-strategists. Their tweets leave a digital signature quite distinct from the anonymous accounts jockeying

FIELD DAY X THE FADER 2016

Get your early bird tickets for 2017 www.fielddayfestivals.com Little Simz, Novelist, Mabel, Siobhan Bell, Loyle Carner, Frisco, & Nao / Photography: Samuel Bradley, Charlotte Patmore & Carolina Faruolo

By Liz Raiss

WHAT CELEBRITY C H I L D R E N REPRESENT NOW

The market for kidswear is big business, but its pintsized stars stand for something even bigger. It’s jarring to think that North West — admirer of mermaids, tutus, and the movie Frozen — is already 3 years old. Even Kim Kardashian, a meticulous historian of her family’s day-to-day life, can hardly seem to believe the passage of time. In a video posted to Instagram in June, Kim, aboard a yacht with her husband Kanye, gathered her squirming daughter on her lap and cooed, “Are you not gonna get any bigger? You’re not gonna get any taller?” North, clad in a printed one-piece swimsuit with red ruffles along the straps, happily gave in with a simple “K.” Fortunately for Kim, and for those of us who live for around-the-clock updates about celebrity children, large swathes of the internet essentially function as a North

Illustration by Christopher DeLorenzo

West scrapbook, an ever-expanding catalogue of her daily hairstyles, outfits, activities, and facial expressions. North is hardly the first person to undergo meticulous public scrutiny from the moment of birth. The eager, modern market for celebrity baby content took its current form in 2006, when Vanity Fair saw a 60 percent rise in sales after putting Suri Cruise on its September cover. Vanity Fair didn’t pay her parents Tom Cruise or Katie Holmes for the image, but two years later, when People wanted dibs on the first photos of Angelina Jolie’s and Brad Pitt’s twins, they came with cash in hand — a reported $14 million. Several famous offspring identifiable by their first names steadily trailed in their wake: Angelina and Brad’s child Shiloh, David and Victoria Beckham’s son Harper, and, of course, Beyoncé’s and Jay-Z’s daughter, Blue Ivy. Since then, the influence of celebrity children has extended beyond print journalism and into a blossoming, recession-proof economy: children’s wear.

According to a Global Industry Analysts report, the world’s children’s wear market is expected to balloon by 2020, pulling in an estimated $291 billion. GIA attributes this growth — a 50 percent increase from today’s levels — to recovering economies, increased disposable income, and a ﬂood of luxury brands entering the market. Winnie Aoki, the Australian-based designer responsible for the $2,000 dress Blue Ivy wore to her grandmother’s birthday, specializes in kid couture. Aoki crafts dresses from confectionery layers of tulle, sequins, and luxury fabrics under the label Mischka Aoki, named after her own 8-year-old daughter. The dresses, which can take up to 300 hours to craft, frequently come with ﬁve-digit price tags. According to her website, Aoki started the brand after she realized there weren’t any clothing options “good enough for her daughter”; for her, “clothes represent style and luxury at the same time.” While it may have been difficult to locate highend designer clothing for children in

FADE OUT

122

2008, when Mischka was born, the line’s explosive popularity — Aoki has dressed not just Blue Ivy, but North, Penelope Disick, and Suri — is an indicator of the steadily increasing desirability of luxury children’s wear. Since 2010, designers like Gucci, Dolce & Gabbana, Chloé, and Lanvin have launched pint-sized mini-labels (Baby Dior, founded in 1967, was ahead of the trend). Designer kids’ clothing often mimics its grown-up label’s defining aesthetics on a smaller scale, and smaller budget. A frothy pink crépe shift dress for your little one by the French label Chloé might cost $246, but that’s a relative steal compared to the $1,650 adult version. While the market for practical midlevel children’s clothing includes more casual brands like J.Crew’s Crewcuts or Bon-Ton, a trendier leader in that space has emerged in Kardashian Kids, launched in 2014 by Khloe, Kim, and Kourtney and carried everywhere from Toys-R-Us to Nordstrom. While not as cool as North’s customized Palace and Supreme streetwear, Kardashian Kids offers objectively of-the-moment clothes, miniaturized versions of what the Kardashians themselves wear, or, at least, wore in the early seasons of Keeping Up with the Kardashians. But these dip-dyed rompers, wet-look pleather leggings, and plush faux-fur capelets rarely top $30. Working alongside brands like Kardashian Kids is an Instagram community of fashion-minded parents known as “Instamoms” who tirelessly post colorful, high-contrast photos of their children posed in mid-level and designer clothes. Angelica Calad is one of them, a former fashion marketing major who runs @ Taylensmom, an IG account that has invited its 132,000 followers into the lives, and more specifically the wardrobes, of 3-year-old Taylen and her younger sister, Aleia. Calad, who employs a “full team” that includes a publicist for her two daughters, recently completed a day-long Snapchat takeover for Kardashian Kids, though she maintained she has never promoted clothing brands for cash. Instead, she said she makes money from companies like Amazon and Starbucks, which have tapped into Taylen’s influence via

sponsored posts that can run a brand up to thousands of dollars. “I don't charge any [fashion] brands because I truly believe in the reality of my page. I don't believe that my fashion sense needs to be sold.” Calad describes Taylen as “the largest kid influencer in the southeast region of Florida,” and though she dresses her girls for daily shoots, she insists each one has “their own little style.” “I know some people will be like, ‘Well how do you define somebody’s style at 6 months old?’” she said. “You don’t, but you do see the things that they’re comfortable in.” Which raises a more important question: who are these clothes even for? In Kids and Branding in a Digital World, published last year the media theorist Barrie Gunter argues that the success of designer diffusion lines “play[s] on the idea that parents are the source of earliest social learning for their kids,” thereby encouraging parents to project their own brand valuations onto their children. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as Gunter hypothesized, unless children become “overly sensitised to a need to be seen as trendy and fashionable and where self-identity is centrally defined in terms of commercial brand associations.” A few years ago, a 2010 study published in Psychology & Marketing found that children can identify child-oriented brands like McDonald’s or Disney and assign them value as young as 3 years old. Attention to clothing arises later, in tandem with puberty, when tweens begin to use clothing to attract romantic attention. So while it may affect children, the rapacious growth of the luxury and mid-level children’s wear industry, one that sometimes emphasizes form over function, is aimed squarely at parents, especially those who consider their kids to be avatars of their own wealth and success. Kim and Kanye have been subject to accusations of dressing their daughter according to their own agenda, but there have also been more serious criticisms, like that they are sexualizing her wardrobe. Somewhat paradoxically, there’s also been a substantial amount of noise about North’s gender-neutral streetwear ensembles in all-black. In October of 2014, gossip site Hollywood Life polled its “Hollymoms” with a serious inquiry:

“Do you think it’s strange that Kim and Kanye don’t dress Nori in pink?” Beyoncé faced a different set of accusations — grounded in racial bias — when a change.org petition regarding Blue Ivy’s afro, titled “Comb Her Hair,” made the internet rounds in 2014. Often, the way people talk about celebrity children, and celebrity parenting, reflects deeply-held prejudices. Yet these kids have the ability to gently (with their little hands and adorable chubby cheeks) push back against racial stereotypes and gender norms. Before Blue Ivy and save for Jaden Smith, no celebrity babies had afros because there were no black celebrity babies of this generation. Buried in the exultant praise for Shiloh Jolie-Pitt wearing a suit is the dark reality that up until only a couple years ago, Jolie and Pitt would have been widely raked across the coals for enabling their child’s nontraditional gender presentation. While the Instamom network and luxury children’s wear market can be exploitative (i.e. dressing their children in order to exhibit their own sense of style and financial security), it also facilitates an enduring fascination with its tiny celebrity beacons of social progress. Like a ford in the internet’s relentless river of outrage and tragedy, the ubiquitous North, Blue Ivy, and their ilk allow us to experience simple moments of joy. Perhaps more significantly, these children also provide us with newer, more flexible models of American childhood, ones not restrained by gendered clothing or Eurocentric standards of beauty. They don’t have straight blonde hair or blue eyes or size zero moms; they are quite simply, to millions of followers, carefree black kids. A coworker of mine who closely follows North’s daily movements explained how her initial affection was an extension of her appreciation of Kanye’s work: “I always thought the world would be a better place with more of him in it,” she said, “and North is more of him.” But ultimately, it was his daughter’s happiness, her serenity amidst chaos, that continued to endear her. “She looks like a happy little human — like someone I could’ve been in an alternate life.”

FADE OUT

123

THE BEING

POLITICS BLACK AND

OF LOUD

By Eternity Martis Black people have been profiled, policed, and even killed for the noise they make. But what if you listen to what they’re actually saying? I remember sitting in the school cafeteria during my last year at the University of Western Ontario in 2014. As usual, the space was noisy and full. My friends and I stood near the exit so that we could hear each other speak and, like many of our peers, we were talking and laughing — loudly. But unlike them, who were mostly white, we were being watched. It was as if time slowed down. The people in line for food all turned to stare at us with looks of concern and annoyance. On the other side of the room, several students peered up from their phones and conversations, gazing blankly. “I think people are watching us,” I said to my friends. But we already knew. As black women, being stared at in public for expressing a form of joy is so common that it’s surprising when it doesn’t happen. But there was something different about it that time. It was that our presence, a large group of black women, was made to feel unwelcome. I didn’t just feel judged. I sensed fear. Five months later, in Florida, Michael Dunn was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for shooting and killing Jordan Davis, a 17-year-old high schooler, who wouldn’t turn down the Lil’ Reese song playing in his friend’s SUV. In August 2015, a book club of 11 black women (including an 83-year-old grandmother) was kicked off a Napa Valley Train tour after they were deemed to be laughing too loud.

Around the same time, Peter Toh of Toronto’s AfroFest, an annual celebration of Afro-diasporic arts and culture, received an email from the City notifying him that its usual two-day permit would be canceled. The free outdoor festival, which has been running for 27 years and attracts over 100,000 visitors, would be forced to downsize to a single day for reasons involving time limits. But there was also another message buried in the City’s response: AfroFest was too loud. Over the past two years, I’ve watched as black people have been silenced, arrested, and even killed for the noise they make. Black people aren’t more or less loud than anyone else, and yet the noise we make is feared, scrutinized, and made public. Understanding why there’s such a sensitivity — and fear — of black noise is a complex and intricate question that doesn’t supply a simple answer. In the early 20th century, when jazz musicians like Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk began using harsh, clashing piano chords to express the pain of African-American oppression, critics felt the technique wasn't mainstream enough. The academic Paul Watkins has described how these artistic attempts at sharing the black experience have, literally, fallen on deaf ears: “The more rupturing or polyphonically disruptive … the more often such productions have historically been interpreted, often by white critics and listeners, as noise.” In 1968, following the historically signiﬁcant black uproar of the Civil Rights movement, James Brown released “Say It Loud — I’m Black And I’m Proud.” By the end of the decade, that track was part of the shift that led to people identifying as

“black” instead of “Negro.” Being unapologetically loud and black slowly replaced decades of chasing “respectability.” In the ’80s, rap groups N.W.A. and Public Enemy shouted political and racial messaging based on the black experience, once again drawing criticism from white critics and institutions for being too harsh and aggressive. In her 1994 book Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, Tricia Rose wrote that the continual struggle hip-hop engages in makes it “a noisy and powerful element of contemporary American popular culture which continues to draw a great deal of attention to itself.” The public narrative of this musical history coincides with policing the actions of regular folk living their lives: when it comes to parties, festivals, or just the everyday movement of black people, there is particular emphasis on noise. Each year, there are noise complaints surrounding the Toronto Caribbean Carnival. In London, residents living near the Notting Hill Carnival have complained about it being too loud and rowdy, which led to the use of decibel readers by city officials to police volume levels in the past. For years, Brooklyn residents have complained about noise when artists like Jay Z, Kanye West, and Rihanna perform at the Barclays Center. In 2014, insulated ceiling panels were installed at the venue, and a representative for the site’s developer told residents: “This isn’t happening during Barbra Streisand.” (The Barclays Center declined to comment for this story.) Venues including the Hersheypark Stadium in Pennsylvania and AT&T Park in California have received similar complaints, though there may be valid reasons

FADE OUT

124

why hip-hop is constantly targeted. “Bass travels an incredibly long distance and goes through walls and buildings, unlike treble sounds,” said Marshall Chasin, director of research and chief audiologist of the Musicians Clinics of Canada. “And hip-hop has a lot of bass, like reggae music. It’s difficult to stop some of the bass sounds from getting through.” Chasin also said that because hip-hop doesn’t have one consistent beat throughout a song, the “on/ off ” of the bass can be agitating to some. But, in terms of decibels, Chasin said other genres are just as culpable. “I wouldn’t say hip-hop is louder than classical — and you can have classical music that is as loud as rock.” He noted that rock concerts can peak at 120 dB, which is considered “extremely loud,” considering ear pain begins at 125 dB. If anything, rock concerts should also stand to breach noise bylaws, but even if they do, they rarely make headlines (an exception: a recent Auckland AC/DC show was so loud sound vibrations were picked up by seismographs, the instrument that measures earthquakes.) Chasin also pointed out another important factor to consider when it comes to volume complaints: personal preference. “If somebody just doesn’t like hip-hop, they’re going to be more aggravated with it than the music they like.” It was social media noise that helped AfroFest find its footing again: Toh

gathered thousands of signatories on a petition that circulated on Twitter and Facebook. In March, after additional protests by Black Lives Matter Toronto — routinely described in the media as “loud but peaceful” — AfroFest’s two-day permit was reinstated. But maybe it should never have been restricted in the ﬁrst place: the festival, which takes place in a 37-acre public park, received just eight noise complaints last year. According to James Dann, manager of waterfront parks for the City of Toronto, more complaints were made to other agencies. He said there’s no standard about how many complaints it takes to restrict an event. “If it’s one or two complaints, it’s not going to be an issue,” he said. “If we start getting multiple complaints through multiple agencies then we deﬁnitely follow up.” There’s still no evidence that AfroFest breached decibel levels. And what about the policing of “noise” outside of a music context? Danielle Phillips-Cunningham, an associate professor at Texas Women’s University, said the Napa Valley train incident is representative of how black women are viewed in public. “There’s always been this idea that women who are loud aren’t ‘ladylike,’ that black women are not the typical, white, pure, respectable woman,” she said. But how can a group of jovial women pose a safety threat?

Lisa Johnson, one of the 11 women kicked off the train, told me that since the incident she monitors her behavior in public. “We ﬁnd ourselves constantly checking like, ‘Are we being too loud?’” she said. “And it’s a shame that it’s come to that because laughter is about joy and feeling good.” “There’s always an association with us and anger, and that informs the perception that we’re loud and disruptive,” PhillipsCunningham said, adding that the stereotype of the angry black woman often puts us at a disadvantage. But it’s more than that: it’s readily believed, and reportedly caused two women in the book club to lose their jobs. People, and organizations, pathologize the mistreatment of black women because of a public perception that black people — women in particular — are inherently obnoxious, confrontational, verbally abusive, and loud. These fears mainly dwell in white spaces: public areas that reﬂect white, middle-class identity and values often to the exclusion of people of color. For me it was a university cafeteria, but it can be a music festival, a wine tour, or an entire gentrifying neighborhood. Last fall, the East Bay Express reported that new white residents of East Oakland, California, were using an app called Nextdoor to organize police complaints about black residents making noise in neighborhood parks. Around the same time, a local gospel choir in the area received a $3,500 nuisance fee because their choir practice was too loud. If white neighbors will call the police on black people singing bible hymns, there’s probably not much else we can do in Oakland besides breathe. If the perception of black noise — in music, in protest, or in celebration — is somehow threatening, then there must be an interrogation of what makes people fearful. Perhaps it’s fear of what will be revealed when you listen to what we’re actually saying. Black noise can easily be dismissed as antagonistic, abrasive, and futile, but it is survival. It forces people to acknowledge black experiences and oppression, and it’s loud even when no one wants to hear it. But the thing with noise is that even if you try, you can’t block it out. Eventually you have to listen.

Illustration by Christopher DeLorenzo

FADE OUT

125

STOCKIST

2ND DAY day.dk Acne Studios acnestudios.com Ader Error adererror.com Adidas Y-3 y-3.com AMI amiparis.fr Andersson Belle en.anderssonbell.com Anita Berg anitaberg-collection.de Baja East baja-east.com Bianca Chandon biancachandon.com Bizzy B bseductive.com Buscemi buscemi.com BVNDO bvndo.com Calvin Klein Collection calvinklein.com Carven carven.com Claire’s claires.com Julia Clancey juliaclancey.com Collina Strada collinastrada.com Dime dimemtl.com Dsquared2 dsquared2.com Erin Dana erindana.com Faith Connexion faith-connexion.com Gosha Rubchinskiy gosharubchinskiy.com Gypsy Sport gypsysportny.com Hilfiger Edition usa.tommy.com Hot Topic hottopic.com Christopher Kane christopherkane.com Kenzo kenzo.com Maison Margiela maisonmargiela.com Maya Shoes of Hollywood mayashoesusa.com Simon Miller simonmillerusa.com Nike nike.com Opening Ceremony openingceremony.com Patrik Ervell patrikervell.com Pleaser pleaserusa.com

↑ Quan’s jacket CALVIN KLEIN COLLECTION, pants CHRISTOPHER KANE, shoes BUSCEMI.

Rick Owens rickowens.eu SIKI IM / DEN IM sikiim.com Steven Alan stevenalan.com Supreme supremenewyork.com This Is Never That thisisneverthat.com Tim Coppens timcoppens.com Token token.paris

Meechie’s jacket CALVIN KLEIN COLLECTION, shirt TOKEN, pants SIMON MILLER.

Topman us.topman.com Vivienne Westwood viviennewestwood.com Zara zara.com

STOCKIST

126

PHOTOGRAPHY CAIT OPPERMAN.

Rag & Bone rag-bone.com

SUBSCRIBE.

1 year/6 issues for $29.99 thefader.com/subscribe

PHOTOGRAPHY GUNNER STAHL.

EVERY BUBBLE, A TINY AMBASSADOR OF QUALITY.