“The biggest thing for me is feeling seen, heard, and loved:” An interview with kJADE

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The cover art of On Everything I Love, kJADE’s second album, is an ethereal scene. Shedding a tear behind a fence and with a sword nearby, the pastels make her look like a saint on a stained glass window. Her music has this same quality, with the rapper laying down intimate and confessional verses over spacious and lush beats.  Her knack for storytelling and romantic melodies place her among artists like Liv.e or SALIMATA, the latter of which is featured on the standout track VIRGINIA IS FOR LOVERS. A few weeks after the release of On Everything I love, we sat down with kJADE for an interview, talking about performing and finding her strength, as well as her favorite songs and a sugar-free diet.

Gangster in a Dress: Queering of Hip-Hop and Young Thug

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Vogue magazine called the 2010s the decade when hip-hop’s wardrobe became more openly receptive to femininity. The thorny process of queering and reconceptualizing the unstable heteronormative image of Black hypermasculinity in African American popular culture neither begins nor ends with pioneering rapper Young Thug — yet he could have become its most important representative, if not for his own reluctance and conservative impulses holding him back.

“Keep the past close, but don’t let it consume you”: An Interview with A Place Called Hell

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godless god, the new album by A Place Called Hell, feels like a new beginning. The duo, made up of rapper Monzy The Terrible and producer Dylan Land, switched up their sound and dove head first into a mix of hardcore riffs and punchy raps. For seasoned fans, this change didn’t come out of nowhere. Tastes of Monzy’s metal musings were already present on their breakthrough last album, No Shimmering Heaven. But while Heaven only teased the sound, godless god puts it at the forefront. Shortly before the Halloween release of their latest album, I sat down with Monzy to talk about the album, their perspective on death, and bonded over our mutual love of The Body.

I listen as I am told. I listen as I say. DON’T TAP THE GLASS

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I listen as I am told. I listen as I say. DONT TAP THE GLASS. To answer to Tyler (and all other authors) with his own title so that they do not forget our privacy and the freedom to perceive and experience as we wish. DONT TAP THE GLASS will forever be a record of a time Tyler, The Creator wanted to move and invited us to join him. Whether we join in the dance while listening loudly or take away our own values and meanings from the work will be our free decision, beyond all manifestos and instructions.

The Elusive Citizen Kan(Y)e

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It is highly likely that many will attempt to interpret the rollercoaster life of the artist formerly known as Kanye Omari West (now Ye). His life’s trajectory may have already been foreshadowed by Orson Welles in his film Citizen Kane (1941). And thirteen years earlier, Sigmund Freud contributed to this task by analyzing the personality of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky.