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mirrorballhughes · 7 months

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I MISS YOU IM SORRY

luke hughes x adelaide hunter

starting us off with a good old instagram edit, some text messages and a lil in real life !! so enjoy :)

adelaidehunter

liked by stormallen, jackhughes, _quinnhughes and 115,130 others

adelaidehunter AHHH. words can not express how excited i am to say MY DEBUT ALBUM “good riddance” is out june 21st!!! ALSO “where do we go now?” is out TONIGHT AT MIDNIGHT!!

its difficult to imagine these songs living anywhere other than my most secret places, but rutger is my biggest supporter and reminded me that holding space for brutal honesty in songwriting is kind of the whole point.

i feel an unbelievable amount of gratitude for the opportunity to have made this album. writing this record allowed me to grow up in ways i needed to. it forced me to reflect and be accountable. it allowed me to walk away from versions of myself that i no longer recognize. it allowed me to let go.

also a big shoutout to my sister thats not blood, storm. shes one of the few people in this world capable of making others feel safe to their core when they are exploring the parts of themselves that are most raw. storm is rare and generous. im so glad you are my roommate, but fuck the canes btw!! ;)

thank you all for the support!!! im so nervous. im so relieved. i hope with my whole heart that theres something in here that makes you feel less alone. ill be thanking you all for the rest of my life for taking this record and making it yours!!! JUNE TWENTY FIRST!! AHHH see you at midnight!! <3

tagged: stormallen, rutgermcgroarty

COMMENTS

_quinnhughes Della!! I’m so proud of you! Cant waif to celebrate with you :)

adelaidehunter QUNNIIE!! thank you. see u soon

jackhughes Adds so proud of you.

adelaidehunter thx jacks. see u soon :)

user2 this album is gonna be so good.

user5 anyone think its gonna be about luke…

user6 u might be on to something..

user10 but his brothers commented??

user13 they are family friends, grew up together.

User30 Oh ik that tension in their summer lake house is gonna go CRAZY.

rutgermcgroarty STAR IS SHINNING !!

adelaidehunter thx!

stormallen MY GIRL!! I CANF WAIT TO LISTEN ( already have)

rutgermcgroarty yeah me too u arent special!

edwards.73 HEY I HEARD IT ASWELL!!

umichhockey i think we all heard it🙄

adelaidehunter I LOVE U STORMY!!

mackie.samo are we ignoring the fact that adel went out of her way to reply using the umich account?

luca.fantilli its lemonade she can do what she wants!

adamfantilli mackie dont be a hater now, ur just mad that u missed the listening party!!

umichhockey thx you fantilli twins!! :)

luca.fantilli we arent twins lemonade

adamfantilli last time i stick up for you.

adelaidehunter NOOO IM SORRY🙁💔

dylanduke25 good riddance: said to express relief at being free of a troublesome or unwanted person or thing.

user5 DYLAN???

adelaidehunter LMAOOO. duker thats crazy

seamuscasey26 DUDE THATS FOUL.

markestapa addieeeee LETS GO?? Im screaming at u

adelaidehunter IM NOT even WITH U??

markestapa okay.. u might be

user1303 WHAT.

lhughes_06 cant wait to listen. proud of you adelaide.

user3343 THE “ADELAIDE” HURT ME.

user559 shes definitely not replying to this!

caleb.hunter um im ur biggest supporter???

adelaidehunter thats true! i love u

user34 IM GGIGLING AHE TOTALLY SKIPPED OVER LUJES COMMENT.

user32 UR SO RIGHT OH MY GOD SHE DEFINITELY SAW IT

hughes hunter moment !!

quinn: caleb just got here. now where are u della??

jack: YEAAAH. where are u missy???

quinn: jack. we arent playing bad cop good cop.

jack: i know that??

quinn: god ur annoying

adelaide: im pulling in right now.

enough fighting please.

IN REAL LIFE!!

adelaide just parked her car, grabbing her bags from her car. she took in her surroundings, taking a deep breath in and out. the hughes hunter lake house was always her favorite place to be. something about this time seems different. the blonde let go of the negative energy before walking to the door. she opened the door, backing up feeling the door handle opening up from the inside.

“oh. hey adelaide. thought u were the pizza guy.” the youngest hughes brother was standing at the door, causing adelaide to go mute. “QUINN MOVE! IM TRYING TO GET TO THE DOOR. CALEB STOP HIM!” she heard the middle hughes brother say. “here do you want me to help you-“ the curly haired boy asked, “no its fine thanks.” the blonde spoke quietly walking into the house carrying her stuff in. “ADDS!! move LUKE!” jack said causing luke to move out of his way, the youngest brother was stood there admiring the girl.

luke checked up on adelaide a lot. always watching her stories, seeing her posts just never reached out. luke noticed how her hair still had little bits of brown in it from when she dyed her hair right after the two broke up. luke watched the two interact hugging each other and smiling. luke wished that was him. “shes my sister, why didnt i get the first hug?” caleb spoke as him and quinn finally moved over to where the group was. “she likes me more thats why cal.” jack said causing adelaide to roll her eyes, giving her brother a hug then hugged quinn. her and luke locked eyes, the three guys standing there noticed the love spark that were still there between the two.

the blonde girl broke the eye contact, “ill be back down. i gotta get unpacked.” she said shooting a small smile to the group of guys who nodded. there was a knock at the door, “great timing! the pizza here as well!” quinn smiled pushing luke to get the door as he was impatiently waiting for it. addie made her way upstairs smiling trying to make this lake house vacation will as best as she could.

caleb was at her door, seeing as though she finished packing. “you okay?” that caught adelaides attention, “im fine why wouldnt i be?” she said sitting down on her bed caleb following after her. “um i dont know, maybe its because of some certain boy downstairs? who you have been friends with since forever and then ended up to-“ “okay enough!” she said causing her older brother to laugh. “okay fine sorry! but if you ever wanna talk just let me know. im here for you, a.” the glasses wearing boy said, as the two hugged each other.

the hunter siblings went downstairs sitting at the bar with the hughes brothers already digging into the pizza. “so della how excited are you for your album and song release?” the oldest hughes brother asked, causing luke to feel smaller and tense. he was there when adelaide was writing the music, she told him about some of the songs. but once they brought up, luke knew she had to have some gut wrenching song written about him. sure he was nervous, but he would always be proud of her for any and all of her accomplishments.

“oh! im so excited, but nervous. it does feel good to have it released out to the world instead of being stuck inside with just me.” she said looking over at luke whos head was low, then brought her attention to grabbing some pizza. “so “where do we go now?”whats that gonna be about?” jack asked knowing most of her songs had meaning, jack always adored adds music he has to be her biggest supporter. “its basically me reflecting back on all the little white lies in a one-sided love that beamed as bright red flags, finally leading to ending things. and the question of where they should go, start afresh or not, looms over this delicate ballad, though remains unanswered.” she said causing luke to look up and then quickly brought his head down. “oh well i cant wait to hear it! any songs about our good man luke here?” jack asked causing luke to look up and glare at the older boy. adelaids face flushed, “you dont need to answer that a. jack is just picking.” caleb said sending the boy a wtf look.

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lovesongbracket · 1 year

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Reminder: Vote based on the song, not the artist or specific recording! The tracks referenced are the original artist, aside from a few rare cases where a cover is the most widely known.

Lyrics, videos, info, and notable covers under the cut. (Spotify playlist available in pinned post)

Lay All Your Love On Me

Written By: Björn Ulvaeus & Benny Andersson

Artist: ABBA

Released: 1981

Cover included: Amanda Seyfried & Dominic Cooper for Mamma Mia!, 2008

“Lay All Your Love On Me” explores the high emotions and passions that can emerge when falling in love, and documents one woman’s shift into erratic behaviors as she falls under the spell of her new lover. The song hit number one in the US dance charts in 1981, but has lasted in popularity over the years, becoming an ABBA staple. It was featured in the band’s jukebox musical (and its movie adaption), Mamma Mia, and in 2006 was named the 60th greatest dance song of all time by Slant magazine.

[Verse 1] I wasn't jealous before we met Now every woman I see is a potential threat And I'm possessive, it isn't nice You've heard me saying that smoking was my only vice [Pre-Chorus] But now it isn't true Now everything is new And all I've learned has overturned I beg of you [Chorus] Don't go wasting your emotion Lay all your love on me [Verse 2] It was like shooting a sitting duck A little small talk, a smile, and baby, I was stuck I still don't know what you've done with me A grown-up woman should never fall so easily [Pre-Chorus] I feel a kind of fear When I don't have you near Unsatisfied, I skip my pride I beg you, dear [Chorus] Don't go wasting your emotion Lay all your love on me Don't go sharing your devotion Lay all your love on me [Verse 3] I've had a few little love affairs They didn't last very long and they've been pretty scarce I used to think that was sensible It makes the truth even more incomprehensible [Pre-Chorus] 'Cause everything is new And everything is you And all I've learned has overturned What can I do? [Chorus] Don't go wasting your emotion Lay all your love on me Don't go sharing your devotion Lay all your love on me Don't go wasting your emotion Lay all your love on me Don't go sharing your devotion Lay all your love on me Don't go wasting your emotion Lay all your love on me

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Demolition Lovers

Written By: Matt Pelissier, Mikey Way, Ray Toro & Gerard Way

Artist: My Chemical Romance

Released: 2002

The Demolition Lovers are the couple seen on the cover for MCR’s next album, Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge. This song, along with much of the album, is a prequel to the story of Three Cheers… in which a man makes a deal with the devil to get his dead lover back by killing 1,000 evil men and giving the devil their souls in exchange for her. This song is most likely where the lover dies. The two “Demolition Lovers” are featured on the cover of the album.

[Verse 1] Hand in mine, into your icy blues And then I'd say to you, "We could take to the highway With this trunk of ammunition, too" I'd end my days with you, in a hail of bullets [Chorus] I'm trying, I'm trying To let you know just how much you mean to me And after all the things We put each other through and [Verse 2] I would drive on to the end with you A liquor store or two keeps the gas tank full And I feel like there's nothing left to do But prove myself to you, and we'll keep it running [Chorus] But this time, I mean it I'll let you know just how much you mean to me As snow falls on desert sky Until the end of everything I'm trying, I'm trying To let you know how much you mean As days fade and nights grow And we grow cold [Post-Chorus] Until the end, until this pool of blood Until this, I mean this, I mean this, until the end of [Chorus] I'm trying, I'm trying To let you know how much you mean As days fade and nights grow And we grow cold But this time, we'll show them We'll show them all how much we mean As snow falls on desert sky Until the end of every… [Interlude] All we are, all we are is bullets, I mean this All we are, all we are is bullets, I mean this All we are, all we are is bullets, I mean this All we are, all we are is bullets, I mean this [Guitar Solo] [Bridge] As lead rains will pass on through Our phantoms forever, forever Like scarecrows that fuel this flame We're burning forever and ever Know how much I want to show you You're the only one Like a bed of roses There's a dozen reasons in this gun [Outro] And as we're falling down, and in this pool of blood And as we're touching hands, and as we're falling down And in this pool of blood, and as we're falling down I'll see your eyes, and in this pool of blood I'll meet your eyes, I mean this forever!

youtube

#polls #poll tournament #poll bracket #tournament #bracket #lovesongbracket #round5 #lay all your love on me #abba #demolition lovers #my chemical romance #Youtube

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jmdbjk · 1 year

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The gut punch.

Hobi’s eyes in this Weverse live... them knowing that we don’t know all the things... how do they keep it all together? This inevitable situation they must grapple with and work through and come out the other side. Hobi visited with his family recently. We thought something might be up but then a little time passed and we continued to skip along merrily, unaware... and now here we are.

I am so glad Jimin visited Hobi during his bday live... it’s always so bittersweet when we can look back at things and say “they knew it then and they had to act like everything was ok.”

Time has a weird way of simultaneously accelerating and grinding to a halt depending on what we are applying it to. As a year, 2023 is moving right along...it’s already almost March! Grass is growing! Sun is shining! Mosquitos are back!

Seems like we were just watching Hobi at New Year’s Rockin’ Eve trying not to slip on that cold, rainy stage. Seems like we were just frantic to know where is Jimin!? And WHEN was Jimin’s album coming?? We knew it had to be soon... and then the release date dropped and now Jimin is all over the place. And we still have photo folios coming at us. And the Suga/Agust D tour coming... and now Hobi’s On the Street! and the ball is rolling faster and faster. Time is spinning, spinning faster...

And then we think about Jin. The Astronaut was released 4 months ago. Jinnie has been gone just a little over 2 months, yet it seems like he’s been gone for months upon months. Time slows down so much when I think about how long its been since we’ve seen Jin in real time.

I thought after these few months of Jin being gone, the next announcement wouldn’t hurt so bad but this really hurts. It was like a gut punch.

Y’all... I’m not sure how I will handle it when we get the “Hello, this is BigHit Music” for Jimin’s enlistment announcement. I never in a million years would have guessed “who is that blonde cutie” would turn into needing to take a week off work to cope with him enlisting in the military. Please, make it make sense.

I keep thinking about Jimin trying to keep us and himself grounded by saying things like “we’re not celebrities (who enjoy red carpet events)” and “I am just a goofy friend in sweatpants who loves soju.” At his essence, yes, that’s who he is. Unfortunately, we don’t have the privilege of seeing any hints of his real life because the hatefulness that exists in the world has taken that away from us.

But Jimin reminds us from time to time that he is just a regular guy who enjoys simple pleasures.

What he does show us is Jimin of BTS. The idols’ idol. He is always wanting to show us his good side. He wants to always be “pretty” for us. He works hard at his job and he does it very well. Like...he’s the best there is in the industry.

We know he’s working himself into the ground with his solo work. When it is his time to enlist, he will leave knowing he’s put his heart and soul, blood, sweat and tears into it. I went back and re-read his Weverse article from June of last year. He said back then that he did not want to spend this next year being half-assed with what he was doing. He was going to do it “properly.”

We’ve heard several of the members state how hard Jimin’s been working. We’ve heard it from the mouths of people who have worked with him as well. His solo work will be just as amazing as he is.

There is a gap in Jimin’s album promo map... to allow for Yoongi’s concert ticket sales and for Hobi’s On the Street release. We get confused regarding the timing of all of their activities. There are lots of moving parts we don’t know about. And solos and mantis screaming unrealistically about unfairness and mistreatment add to the confusion, regardless of how it’s all carefully planned out as best as possible and regardless how many times the members each implore us to trust them. More than ever, it is imperative to ignore the haters and the people trying to misdirect our attention.

We do not know the reasons for, or the how or the why each member decides when they will go ahead and enlist. That is a very personal and private thing for them. They make the decision according to what is best for themselves. We are not entitled to know their reasons for that decision. There are a lot of things they consider and they plan everything the best they can with every other member’s plans for enlistment and solo work because they respect each other. Also, the company can see the big picture as to how to give everything the best chance for the best outcome. Is it all perfect? No. Humans are involved. They simply asked us to trust them.

The exact timing of enlistment maybe hasn't been set in stone for each of them since last year but they are weighing and considering all the moving parts and they pretty much know, if not the day they will set it in motion, at least the very small window when they will. I think all of the releases and timings of it all have been planned as best as possible regarding all this and the solos and mantis can scream mistreatment and unfairness all they want but this is real fucking life. Wheels within wheels are constantly turning... yes. They asked us to trust them.

I think we should be grateful for everything they’ve done and the sacrifices they’ve made because truthfully, they owe none of that to us with the way parts of this fandom move.

Do you believe they are strong individuals? Do you feel they are reliable? Have they ever let us down? They asked us for our trust and our blessing.

Let’s give it to them unconditionally.

We’ve seen hints of Joonie working...will it be a parting gift too?

And these Weverse conversations they have amongst each other will eventually turn into their group conversations and we will collectively lose our minds when they happen. Time rolls on without regard to our feelings.

#this roller coaster ride is brutal #I love all of them so much #i think there is a possibility we will not see Jimin for 2 birthdays #bts military service #instagram is going to get silent if JK doesnt wipe his feed again

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kingstylesdaily · 2 years

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The Truth About Harry Styles’ Hairline – and 9 Other Secrets We Learned Hanging Out With Pop’s Leading Man

Here are a few things — including Styles' favorite books, his thoughts on Joni Mitchell, and who he wants to work with — that didn't make our September cover story.

BY BRITTANY SPANOS

OVER THE PAST several months, I crisscrossed the world, following Harry Styles as he rolled out his impressive, game-changing third album, Harry’s House, and played explosive, sold-out shows for hundreds of thousands of fans from Coachella to New York to London. We finally sat down in Hamburg for a long conversation that spanned his career and personal life, and later caught up on the phone while he was in Italy.

During our interviews, he revealed his thoughts on fame, relationships, how toxic the internet can be, what he does in his downtime, and a whole lot more. You can read most of what he had to say in Rolling Stone’s September cover story, but he shared so much that we couldn’t fit it all in. Here are 10 more things you learn when you’re spending time with pop’s leading man.

No, Harry Styles is not bald.

After a DeuxMoi blind item claimed an A-list male pop artist and occasional actor was secretly balding and wearing a hair piece, a few TikTok conspiracists began speculating that Styles might be the star in question: Few people are more A list than Styles, and he’s been in a several movies, including Dunkirk and the upcoming film Don’t Worry Darling, directed by his girlfriend Olivia Wilde. Fans started zooming in on pictures of his hair, wondering if it might actually be a toupee.

Styles laughed it off and said he didn’t even know his hairline was a topic of discussion until his friend and collaborator Tom Hull (a.k.a Kid Harpoon) told him about it.

“He’s completely obsessed with it,” Styles says of Hull. “He won’t stop sending me messages about [people] trying to work out if I’m bald.”

Styles confirms he’s not bald yet. “What is it with baldness? … It skips a generation or something, right? If your grandad’s bald then you’ll be bald? Well, my granddad wasn’t bald, so fingers crossed.”

The success of “Watermelon Sugar” started with a bunch of little kids and took him by surprise.

Styles noticed that “Watermelon Sugar” — the mega-hit from his 2019 album, Fine Line — seemed to be connecting with his tiniest fans first. “Sometimes you’ll meet people and they’ll be like, ‘Oh, can you meet my child? They’re a massive fan,’ and the child’s like 18 months old. This person’s a massive fan?” Styles says. “And I remember someone coming up to me at a party with their son, who was really small, and he started singing ‘Watermelon Sugar,’ and I was like, ‘Oh, OK.’”

The videos kept coming. “‘Watermelon Sugar’ was probably the most amount of videos I’d had from friends sending me pictures of their kids singing it, like videos of them just dancing around,” Styles says. “It wasn’t a single when we put [it] out. It was just like, ‘OK, interesting … this is a high volume of videos of small children singing the song.’”

From there, it blew up in a way Styles wasn’t expecting. The song took off during the pandemic, and even though people couldn’t go out, they were still showing the track love. “We couldn’t do anything, and it kind of just did its thing. I think it was a really nice reminder that songs have the power,” he says. “It’s timing, and if people connect with it, and how people are feeling, and what they feel like they want … that part of it feels like it’s just really lucky.”

He wants to keep working with Dev Hynes.

Hynes and Styles have been working together a lot lately. Hynes was the surprise guest and musical director for Styles’ 2021 Grammy performance of “Watermelon Sugar,” and he went on to play cello on “Boyfriends.” Currently, he’s opening for Styles’ 15-show Madison Square Garden residency, performing under his stage name Blood Orange.

Styles wants to keep the relationship going. “I think the way he works is really special. I’ve definitely felt very lucky that he played on the album,” he says. “I hope we can do some more stuff together going forward at some point.”

He’s open to having proper features on a future album, but only if it happens organically.

While Styles has worked and performed with plenty of intriguing artists, he’s never had a real feature or collaboration on his albums. “I would do it if it happened organically — if I wrote a song with someone and that’s why we wanted to do it,” he says. “I want to put out stuff exactly the way that I want it to be.”

He says “collaborating for the sake of it” isn’t something he wants to do. “But if it happened in an organic way, then I’d definitely be open to it,” he explains. “I really like disappearing to go make music, and I don’t necessarily expect someone to come with me into that process in such a massive way. Maybe one day.”

Steve Lacy and Paolo Nutini made two of his current favorite albums.

Lacy’s Gemini Rights and Nutini’s Last Night in the Bittersweet, both released this year, have been recent favorites for Styles. After reading Haruki Murakami’s Absolutely on Music: Conversations with Seiji Ozawa, Styles also got into classical pianist Glenn Gould, who Murakami and Ozawa talk about in the book. (“I tried to listen to stuff as they were discussing, which was fun.”)

He’s also got Kendrick Lamar’s Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers on repeat (“It’s one of those albums where if I’m going to listen to it, I know I want to listen to it in its entirety. I’m not dipping in and out,” he says), and has been playing lots of the English rock band Wolf Alice, who opened for most of his European tour dates.

He’s thrilled that he got to spend time with Joni Mitchell.

Over the past couple of years, Mitchell has convened special groups of artists for salons she co-hosts with Brandi Carlile. Styles has been a longtime fan of Mitchell’s and was one of the lucky few to get an invite. According to

Maggie Rogers

, he even sang Mitchell’s “River” at one of those gatherings.

“I can’t claim to know her that well,” Styles says. “It’s one of those things where if you listen to her music, you feel like you know her very well. And then you realize that you don’t. But it was definitely really special to meet her. It’s one of those, for me, where you meet people like that and just realize how important songs are.”

One of his favorite books is Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking.

Styles is famously well-read, and he found himself particularly struck by the Didion classic. “I think that was the first book I read twice,” he says. Recently, he’s also been moved by Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning and Alain de Botton’s The Architecture of Happiness, both gifted to him by a friend. He’s also been reading Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad.

He can’t believe how loud people got singing the “Leave America” line.

During his European and U.K. tour dates, fans found one way to express how unhappy they were that Styles had been in the U.S. and that they’d had to wait so long to see him. During “As It Was,” they began screaming out the “Leave America” line from the bridge. It became so loud that Styles stopped singing it himself and let the stadiums take care of it for him.

“They’re definitely reaching some decibels,” he joked just a few days before wrapping the dates overseas. “It seems to be getting louder and louder right as I’m about to head back to tour America. So I’m intrigued as to what exactly will be shouted at that section when I’m in America.”

It was hard to fit “Fine Line” into his set list.

Styles performed his second album’s epic, fan-favorite closer at the first couple of shows of his U.K. dates, but he found it didn’t fit with the set. “If I’m honest, it’s really difficult to place in the set now because there’s songs that I would like to play there,” he explained at the time. The nearly seven-minute, slow-building track originally followed softer ballads “Matilda” and “Boyfriends. “We played it at the first couple shows, and when I played it, it just felt like this moment is just a bit too long, energy-wise.”

Removing it was a tough call because of how much he loves the song. “It’s one of my favorites on the album. Because the new album had come out, it felt strange to close the set with it because it’s from a different album. Everywhere we’ve put it in the set, it feels squeezed in. But I love the song still. It’s not like I’ve changed my mind on that one,” he said.

But after he took it out, fans across U.K. and Europe spent most of the tour begging him via signs, tweets, and endless TikToks to put it back in. “I’m going to play it before the end of the tour,” he promised Rolling Stone. He made good on the promise when he sang it for the crowd in Lisbon, at the European tour closer.

His friends are a mix of childhood and work pals.

Over the years, Styles has been able to keep a few of his school friends by his side. Most of his closest friends are people he met after moving to London at the beginning of his career. He describes these past two summers as some of his favorites, since he was been able to catch up with family and old friends in London.

He’s also thankful that he’s so close to many of his colleagues. “With touring and making albums and stuff, you get so close with people and you spend so much time with each other,” he says. “My relationship with the people that I work with is, I would consider, a pretty unique one. I think a lot of the people that I work with are the same people that I choose to spend time with outside of work.”

In his off-months, he focuses on quality time with his friends. As he’s gotten older, he’s realized how important that is to him: “My favorite experiences over the last several years are when it’s with a group of great people. You can go to a shitty restaurant with your favorite group of people and that’s a way better meal than having dinner with people you don’t like in the nicest restaurant.”

via rolling stone

#kingstylesdaily #Harry Styles #hs: rolling stone 2022 #august 2022

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inflammatory · 2 months

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The 80s. Everyone was young and quick. Not a single album missed. Then the decade passed and some weird vibes got into them and right before Bruce Dickinson left to take some laps making mid solo material they put out FEAR OF THE DARK, a toss-up between the perfect classic maiden guns and some weird bar rock type shit that you could probably safely fuck to without tearing a muscle. Strangely enough, in my opinion this combination made for the perfect ENTRY LEVEL GATEWAY ALBUM, especially for listeners who haven’t yet found the sound of metal quite their cup of tea. Opens with a typical skin ripping gallop track, finds its arguable apex with six minutes of AFRAID TO SHOOT STRANGERS, slowburning into the most hypnotic melodic riffs they ever did. Gems like JUDAS BE MY GUIDE are hidden at the back of a slightly inflated tracklist. They make you listen to the absolute skip that is WEEKEND WARRIOR before you even get to the historical title track. Not Maiden’s best. But the magic that is there still strikes awe. I believe it was for FOTD that they picked up Janick Gers on guitar, who contributes some really fantastic freewheeling lead slop. Think solos that sound like he’s being chased by a murderer simultaneously.

Settling into their sound, a listener must of course sink teeth into the satanic panic classic THE NUMBER OF THE BEAST. A very chewy forty minutes. This was 1982 where Dickinson, the voice you hear on most of the relevant albums, just arrived. And he immediately displays his chops. See title track for one iconic blood curdling shriek. Maiden makes quick work of this album, and saves their very best for last with HALLOWED BE THY NAME, the song that personally first pulled me into the band. They make seven minutes feel like two. To get there, however, Iron Maiden has written some silly shit that they will first subject you to (22 ACACIA AVENUE, skippable). Many members of the band contribute lyrics, but Steve Harris, behind both the band and the bass gallop that made it, oftentimes writes songs that veer comedic.

So we get to SOMEWHERE IN TIME, another rich 80s classic album that keeps gateway listenability by being sweet on melodies and having no overly outrageous Steve Harris lyric moments. On ALEXANDER THE GREAT he does have Dickinson read off a Wikipedia page, ostensibly. But it’s amazing either way. This album also sports WASTED YEARS, considered Maiden mainstream for good reason.

But forget entry level listening. We want to cut to the very pinnacle of Iron Maiden output. Rest and relaxation after 1986’s SOMEWHERE IN TIME creates SEVENTH SON OF A SEVENTH SON in 1988. The idea of a concept album they waltzed with previously appears fully realised, operatically spotless, SYNTHS. There is no Gers slop here. This is the crystallised daddy of modern prog. Dreamy but white hot. Back to back to back, they put CAN I PLAY WITH MADNESS, THE EVIL THAT MEN DO, and the ten minute title track together. It is for this reason that the first acoustic guitars crawled out from the ocean and evolved pickups and tone switches.

…You could probably also listen to Powerslave. They’re quick on that one too.

For later there is the earlier KILLERS. This has Paul Di’Anno before they swapped him for Dickinson. He’s got a grit to his voice that Dickinson doesn’t have, which works perfect for the songs they were putting out. See MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE, one which should catapult this album to classic status by itself. I hear the basis for a lot of modern J-rock/metal in this one. Couldn’t explain it to you, but it’s in the melody. And I honestly love the Di’Anno sound. I would’ve put him with guitarist Gers for maximum impact. Too bad they’re star-crossed by a decade. Fun fact about Di’Anno is that Rob Halford of Judas Priest once tried to hit. He did not succeed.

End notes: Yeah, the Trooper is good and you’ve probably heard it, but it’s carrying its album.

#iron maiden #please listen to iron maiden. But also remember you don’t like them as much as I do

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the1975attheirverybest · 10 months

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oooooh fav lyrics??? fuck thats hard. i will not explain why because i want to seem somewhat cool still and not like a total fucking nerd (despite having incredibly in depth reasonings)

The 1975 - ok this is Album has some interesting lyrics because its before he had it all figured out and i fucking love it for that, theres so many fucking contenders for fav lyrics (including all of anobrain, antichrist or The city) the entire abum is just so mmmmm. but if i had to pick an absolute fav id say

"I put your mother through hell, don't you mind I hate your brother as well, don't you mind, don't you mind Oh I was thinking bout killing myself, don't you mind I love you, don't you mind, don't you mind"

and i know i know its a verse but it isnt complete otherwise. Plus i have it tattooed on me so i feel like i had to.

I Like it when you sleep for you are so beautiful yet so unaware of it - once again mmm chefs kiss of an album no skips (theyve never made a bad album) and lyricaly very beautiful, i could absolutely nerd out about all of their catalogue tbh. but for this i am excluding Nana and She lays down because theyre...just perfect, and also i sob.

so it would have to be

"And if I believe you Will that make it stop? If I told you I need you Is that what you want?"

"Before you go (please don't go), turn the big light off"

its really easy and tempting to put ballad on here but i think thats because his performance style for it is so visceral and while lyrically its beautiful still i cant imagine myself enjoying them if they were sung by someone else because they need the guts behind it ya know.

A brief enquiry into online relationships - delicious as always matthew thank you this day for our daily bread.

so its either

"I can show you the photographs of you getting on with life I've had dreams where there's blood on you" thank you for referencing the bible matthew very cool.

"You build it to a high to say goodbye Because you're not the same as them" because it is like a fucking gut punch

notes on a conditional form - seasoned to perfection. difficult because Guys is on this album and its so sweet but i dont think its my fav lyrically, for no particular reason. same for roadkill although "i pissed myself on a texan intersection" always has a place in my heart.

"I'm in love, but I'm feeling low For I am just a footprint in the snow" did you need to fucking wreck me or is that just for funsies huh?

"Don't wanna bore you with my frail state of mind "Oh, winner, winner, that's your biggest lie I'm sure that you're fine" I haven't told a lie in quite some time (Quite some time) "You know we'll leave if you keep lying Don't lie behind your (Frail state of mind)"

Being funny in a foreign language - i take 0 slander for this album because its just as brilliant as the others. so first all of part of the band is fucking art and so im excluding it because it should be all of our favs.

"I've been suicidal, you've been gone for weeks If I'm undecided, will you decide for me?W

and

"'Cause, baby, I'll do anything that you wanna I'll try anything that you wanna I'll find myself in the moonlight 'Cause, baby, I want everything that you wanna And I've tried to just be me, like, a thousand times But you're on my mind"

sorry its so long and i couldnt pick just 1 (not a libra but still indecisive) in order to remain seeming somewhat cool and not a total nerd ive refrained from explaining each choice but yeah.

Welllllll……did you HAVE to bring up “Me” AND “Frail State of Mind”?!? Are you trying to make me cry? Cuz it’s almost working.

It’s weird I’ve always kinda thought of Oh Caroline as some of his simpler writing. Not in a bad way. Like “Me” is simple as well. Simplicity has its time and its place and can be wonderful. And it IS wonderful in Oh Caroline. But I’m a layers girlie, so maybe I haven’t been giving this one much attention *runs to listen to it*

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hldailyupdate · 2 years

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Here are a few things — including Styles' favorite books, his thoughts on Joni Mitchell, and who he wants to work with — that didn't make our September cover story.

No, Harry Styles is not bald. After a DeuxMoi blind item claimed an A-list male pop artist and occasional actor was secretly balding and wearing a hair piece, a few TikTok conspiracists began speculating that Styles might be the star in question: Few people are more A list than Styles, and he’s been in a several movies, including Dunkirk and the upcoming film Don’t Worry Darling, directed by his girlfriend Olivia Wilde. Fans started zooming in on pictures of his hair, wondering if it might actually be a toupee.

Styles laughed it off and said he didn’t even know his hairline was a topic of discussion until his friend and collaborator Tom Hull (a.k.a Kid Harpoon) told him about it.

“He’s completely obsessed with it,” Styles says of Hull. “He won’t stop sending me messages about [people] trying to work out if I’m bald.”

The success of “Watermelon Sugar” started with a bunch of little kids and took him by surprise. Styles noticed that “Watermelon Sugar” — the mega-hit from his 2019 album, Fine Line — seemed to be connecting with his tiniest fans first. “Sometimes you’ll meet people and they’ll be like, ‘Oh, can you meet my child? They’re a massive fan,’ and the child’s like 18 months old. This person’s a massive fan?” Styles says. “And I remember someone coming up to me at a party with their son, who was really small, and he started singing ‘Watermelon Sugar,’ and I was like, ‘Oh, OK.’”

He wants to keep working with Dev Hynes. Hynes and Styles have been working together a lot lately. Hynes was the surprise guest and musical director for Styles’ 2021 Grammy performance of “Watermelon Sugar,” and he went on to play cello on “Boyfriends.” Currently, he’s opening for Styles’ 15-show Madison Square Garden residency, performing under his stage name Blood Orange.

He’s open to having proper features on a future album, but only if it happens organically. While Styles has worked and performed with plenty of intriguing artists, he’s never had a real feature or collaboration on his albums. “I would do it if it happened organically — if I wrote a song with someone and that’s why we wanted to do it,” he says. “I want to put out stuff exactly the way that I want it to be.”

Steve Lacy and Paolo Nutini made two of his current favorite albums. Lacy’s Gemini Rights and Nutini’s Last Night in the Bittersweet, both released this year, have been recent favorites for Styles. After reading Haruki Murakami’s Absolutely on Music: Conversations with Seiji Ozawa, Styles also got into classical pianist Glenn Gould, who Murakami and Ozawa talk about in the book. (“I tried to listen to stuff as they were discussing, which was fun.”)

He’s thrilled that he got to spend time with Joni Mitchell. Over the past couple of years, Mitchell has convened special groups of artists for salons she co-hosts with Brandi Carlile. Styles has been a longtime fan of Mitchell’s and was one of the lucky few to get an invite. According to Maggie Rogers, he even sang Mitchell’s “River” at one of those gatherings.

One of his favorite books is Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. Styles is famously well-read, and he found himself particularly struck by the Didion classic. “I think that was the first book I read twice,” he says. Recently, he’s also been moved by Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning and Alain de Botton’s The Architecture of Happiness, both gifted to him by a friend. He’s also been reading Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad.

He can’t believe how loud people got singing the “Leave America” line. During his European and U.K. tour dates, fans found one way to express how unhappy they were that Styles had been in the U.S. and that they’d had to wait so long to see him. During “As It Was,” they began screaming out the “Leave America” line from the bridge. It became so loud that Styles stopped singing it himself and let the stadiums take care of it for him.

It was hard to fit “Fine Line” into his set list. Styles performed his second album’s epic, fan-favorite closer at the first couple of shows of his U.K. dates, but he found it didn’t fit with the set. “If I’m honest, it’s really difficult to place in the set now because there’s songs that I would like to play there,” he explained at the time. The nearly seven-minute, slow-building track originally followed softer ballads “Matilda” and “Boyfriends. “We played it at the first couple shows, and when I played it, it just felt like this moment is just a bit too long, energy-wise.”

His friends are a mix of childhood and work pals. Over the years, Styles has been able to keep a few of his school friends by his side. Most of his closest friends are people he met after moving to London at the beginning of his career. He describes these past two summers as some of his favorites, since he was been able to catch up with family and old friends in London.

#harry styles #harry update #rolling stone #article #august 2022

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good-morning-tucson · 7 months

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LITTLE BOY SHARES HIS THOUGHTS ON: THING A WEEK 1!

i plan on doing this for every joco album. at least the studio ones. i’ve done this for other artists so i got this. WHOOPEE!

see you all in hell - i kind of view this one as a bit of a nothing song given how it’s one of the automated voice sample ones. but it makes my brain feel really nice. thank you jonathan.

my monkey - i came around on this song big time. i like thinking of it as an argument, or post argument, or some kind of hardship and using it as a way to apologize to a partner or loved one of some sort. very cute.

w’s duty - man. i can’t come up with anything. ask me about this one later. 9/11.

shop vac - GOD DAMN. BOY HOWDY. shop vac makes me EVIL. i think it’s painfully good at describing what it sets out to, and as someone who was in a similar situation, it makes me want to cram a .44 in my skull in the nicest way. thanks mr. coulton!

baby got back - honestly. this one just makes me think of my best friend/gay lover aspen. joco’s baby got back is ingrained into my brain as aspencore. based and aspenpilled. aspenmaxxed. his mom was mad that it’s good.

someone is crazy - he was so real for this one. it would go crazy as a late night road trip song with some good pals. he was insanely real for this one. i really like how he frames the subject of the song and the language he uses to address them. have i mentioned how real he is?

brand new sucker - i like viewing this as both a breakup between two people, using creative language and such, and also just as like. a vampire or a blood sucking insect partner of some kind. he was CRAZY for “everybody says you shouldnt be a stranger but everybody likes it better that way”

sibling rivalry - i don’t have much to say? it makes me imagine two siblings that desperately want to reconnect and be close again but both have something stopping them from doing so? i dont know. it fills me with a weird amount of anxiety.

the town crotch - this one also grew on me a TON. the town crotch makes me long for something that never was and never will be. i think about the accompanying tidbit and joco being into tall and dangerous women frequently

podsafe christmas song - joco yelling got me feeling some type of way

My lawyer told me to apologize for that previous statement.

furry old lobster - this song makes my brain shut off. i like his voice in this. :)

drive - THIS SONG MAKES ME FREAK. i know its his least favorite song but oooooh little monkey brain is Thrilled with the Fun Music by the Funny Man. im sure if i could drive i would also feel like sexy

overall, thing a week 1 is pretty danged solid. no immediate skips, but only one of these songs (shop vac) is really outstanding to me. i think it’s definitely a great kick-off to thing a week as a whole, though.

#jonathan coulton #joco #thing a week 1

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fan-cam · 1 year

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2022 Wrap up (4 Top 5)

Hello and happy holidays! Over the last few weeks I have been pouring over lists of the top albums, songs and movies of 2022, thrilled to see what the world (or at least high budget magazines) are saying about these past twelve months. This year has felt a little more ‘normal’ (not really sure what that word means anymore, or if it even should exist) than the past two and as a result we have received a lot of exciting art.

If I love anything, its making lists. I love keeping track of what media I have consumed, things I need to buy, people I have been romantic with (zodiac signs included), and ranking my various ‘best of’s’. Below you will find 4 lists of my Top 5 of 2022; TV shows, movies, albums and songs. Each selection is deserving of its own several page deep-dive, but I limited myself to a one-sentence review of each as I know attention spans are quite fleeting these days (my own included). Please enjoy and share your own thoughts!

TV Shows:

HOT D, Season 1

Game of Thrones with a bigger budget, advanced technology and more feminism.

2. Rings of Power, Season 1

Like HOT D, Lord of the Rings but with more than just white men, and a $1M/minute budget (yes, you read that right).

3. Our Flag Means Death, Season 1

Taika Waititi’s new project about gay pirates—do I need to say anything more?

4. Derry Girls, Season 3

Martin Scorsese likes this show, so if my endorsement isn’t enough for you his should be.

5. The Summer I Turned Pretty, Season 1

I feel like most of my life is trying to get back to being a teenage girl and this show really did that for me.

Movies:

Bones and All, Luca Guadagnino

A coming of age cannibal love story that makes you scream, jump, plug your ears, cover your eyes, laugh and cry—what more could you want?

2. Aftersun, Charlotte Wells

Beautiful imagery, incapacitatingly sad plot (my favorite juxtaposition).

3. X, Ti West

A love letter to horror film, chock full of references that made me feel like all my years spent on horror amounted to something.

4. Bodies, Bodies, Bodies, Halina Rejin

I love blood, I love girls, I love a whodunit, I love jokes—this is my dream film, also Pete Davidson is in it.

5. Tar, Todd Field

This movie is making fun of high-brow art which is funny because this movie is loved by people who love high-brow art.

Albums:

Preacher’s Daughter, Ethel Cain

A 75-minute concept album tackling love, abuse, lots of God, sex and being cannibalized with memorizing vocals, quite the feat for a debut LP.

2. Being Funny in a Foreign Language, The 1975

From dick jokes and a pop song about incel mass shootings to devastating breakup anthems, this album makes you experience most emotions.

3. Renaissance, Beyoncé

This album proves that Beyoncé can literally do anything well; a disco-club-banger-no-skips album invocative of the 70s but that absolutely hits in 2022? No problem. (sorry, this is technically two sentences)

4. Motomami, ROSALIA

Being A Bad Bitch in a Foreign Language: I have no idea what she’s saying but the emotion she conveys through her voice and the flawlessly produced beats transcend language.

5. Caprisongs, FKA Twigs

Another club-banger of an album which deals with being both hot and sad at the same time, relatable.

Songs:

Part of the Band, The 1975

There is so much to say about this song but the ‘Vaccinista, tote bag chic baristas’ line changed my life and I haven’t been the same since.

2. Killer, FKA Twigs

She called this ‘a song for baddies with a tear in their eyes’ and I cannot say anything better.

3. Anti-Hero, Taylor Swift

Famous for being vulnerable, Taylor reaches a new level of honesty with this song, expressing the very unrelatable difficulties that come along with being Taylor Swift in an extremely relatable way.

4. Hard Times, Ethel Cain

A song about a horrific topic, sung in the most ethereal way with stunning guitar accompaniment— once again, we love juxtaposition on this blog.

5. Weird Goodbyes, The National Ft. Bon Iver

The saddest lyrics you will ever hear, overlayed with a sick 808 beat.

#2022review #songsof2022 #moviesof2022 #albumsof2022 #tvshowsof2022 #tv #movies #films #music

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bambi-kinos · 2 years

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my impressions of Revolver (2022)

Re-posting from the McLennon Discord Server.

First listen through the remixed tracks reinforces my impression from when I was 9 years old. This album has its bright moments but it's very much a morbid album that is very obsessed with death and loss, it's borderline hateful without actually crossing into that territory. Now that I know what I know, I think this is also where you can hear John's mind slipping off the edge of that cliff, forget Janov, this is when his primal screaming started. Dude is ready to start hammering nails into his temples, he's vomiting blood all over these songs. Paul is trying to help but he just isn't strong enough. George wants them to push them along and Ringo is his background presence but you can feel John unraveling through out.

Revolver is a much more psychedelic album than Sgt. Pepper, it's actually vocalizing all the negative effects of LSD and other trippy drugs before John tried to throw that into reverse with Sgt. Pepper with the silly cellophane skies and marmalade flowers.

1) Taxman--

Lots of texture with the prominent bass and you can actually hear what Ringo is actually fucking doing. Want to have sex with this song. Don't have much to say about the actual message because I don't know much about that period of British politics, except that it's taking place close to the time that the Rolling Stones said "fuck this" and took off to France to record The Basement Tapes which is an indictment in of itself.

2) Eleanor Rigby--

Favorite trance since I was 8 and first saw Yellow Submarine. The melancholy and grimness + the movie visuals always sticks with me. I think I was listening to this on repeat in 5th grade when all of my physical and mental problems caught up with me in a big way.

"All the lonely people..." where do we come from? Where do we belong? This always troubled because I knew Paul was singing about me, even then. Something about the song is very grotesque. Paul observes lonely people like we are zoo exhibits and he's taking field notes on us. He doesn't know what to do with us but he can't look away. He doesn't feel bad for us, he's just fascinated by the display like an ME doing an autopsy.

Beautiful strings, can finally differentiate the cellos from the violins. (I dated a cellist, this is important to me.) Been wanting that for over 20 years. I didn't hear much vibrato on those strings!

3) I'm Only Sleeping--

Identified with this song when I heard it, still do. I didn't understand this song as a kid but I still heard the sadness behind it and it spoke to me.

Sick bassline, love you Paul.

4) Love You To--

Not much to say about this. Sitar sounds fantastic. I skipped this track as a kid a lot, still not feeling it.

5) Here, There And Everywhere

The backing vocals are so clear, love hearing their voices meld, it's a precursor to the beautiful vocal blending in And Your Bird Can Sing. THe counter harmony sounds wonderful for the few seconds they did it, I wish John had had a longer harmony.

6) Yellow Submarine--

SHRIEKS You can hear all four of them!!! It's so cute!!! And you can hear that Ringo put on an accent with the "cut the cable, cut the cable" bit!

7) She Said She Said--

This one drew me in as a kid and I couldn't explain why. I think this is a more interesting psychedelic song than Lucy. You can hear "never been born" which is nice because up until this moment I thought it was "never belonged."

When I was a kid I thought this song was about John planning how he was going to commit suicide. It's a very suicidal and self harming song to the point that listening to this makes me wonder if John felt the urge to hurt himself in more direct ways? This is the kind of song that you cut to during your ritualized self harm sessions. Not everyone plays Sarah McLachlan.

In addition to that shithead Fonda ruining George's trip (because the Fonda family are spoiled and self serving shits who can't think of anyone but themselves) I just hear a lot of self injury here, this is someone who regularly imagines killing himself and is always looking for new ways to hurt himself with the perpetual hope that this time will provide the offramp. I wonder if the acid gave John insight into his desire for his own death and hearing "I know what it's like to be dead" triggered something in him.

I just can't hear this as anything but a self harming manifesto. It's not the lyrics, it's the melody and the harmony and how John is singing.

8) Good Day Sunshine--

One of my favorites, a little punch of sunlight. Good thing sunshine fits into the [checks notes] black and white theme of the album!

9) And Your Bird Can Sing--

Supposedly this is loaded with symbolism from John but while I don't dispute it I also don't really get it.

This isn't loaded down like She Said She Said or the upcoming tracks or even Eleanor Rigby. It's a cute melancholic song in a major key with an upbeat tempo. I don't think it's that deep.

10) For No One--

Revolver is a sad album full of sad songs about loss and dying and this is one of them.

11) Doctor Robert--

Catchy song, no notes. I don't know enough about the lore behind this song to make a judgment.

12) I Want to Tell You--

"It's only me" oh John.

Lovely piano here, discordant but it's pleasing. 13) Got to Get You Into My Life--

Desperation personified but very honest singing from Paul. I think this one is an insight into how he actually feels the same way She Said She Said is for John. Paul is pouring a lot of emotion into the song but it's not easily recognizable like Oh, Darling is.

It actually reminds me of Every Breath You Take -- that song gets played at every single high school prom even though it's about a stalker but the musicality disguises the lyrics. IMO this song + She Said She Said have the opposite where the lyrics disguise the negative emotions behind the song.

14) Tomorrow Never Knows--

Revolver is a better psychedelic album than Sgt. Pepper because this is where John guts himself and pours his intestines out onto the table instead of Sgt. Pepper where they tried to backtrack on all the negative stuff here. I'm sorry for the imagery but this track is John gutting himself. There's no dumb crap about cellophane and marmalade trying to make it dreamier and cuter than it actually is. I always thought this was a deeply violent song and as a kid never understood why the singer was going on about love on such a creepy track especially since he starts yammering about death.

I still feel that but I think that's the point. The song is the sound of a man laughing at you while he slowly tears out the contents of his mouth and trying to tell you no this is love it's fine just turn your brain off there's nothing bad happening promise. When I was 9 I would sing along and found myself grabbing my own tongue without thinking about it.

And then the ragtime piano at the end? Bruh. I like it but it's whack.

Listening through the additional tracks of the work sessions, I like them but don't have any special insights about them. John and Paul are cute.

#the music #revolver 2022 #revolver #the beatles #my meta #beatles meta #john lennon #paul mccartney #mclennon server #mclennon server bros....#cw: self harm #cw: suicide

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maxwbryan · 2 years

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Tori Amos- Boys for Pele

For my first album review, it’s only fitting to start with my favorite- Boys for Pele by Tori Amos.

To describe this album simply, it is the best breakup album I’ve ever heard. It explores all of the intense emotions that come with a breakup. Throughout this album, Tori shows how a breakup can change your perception of the world, turn you into a shell of your former self, and dig up dirt from the past. Amos explains the album as ‘Taking the fire back from the men in her life.’ It’s named after Pele, a volcano goddess, who took sacrifices from men in Hawaiian mythology.

This album is disorienting and not for the faint of heart. It’s unafraid to get ugly. Amos utilizes the entire range of her voice and boasts a new plethora of instruments that she had never experimented with before, such as brass and harpsichord. The album's narrative follows the emotional journey she takes resulting from the breakup of her boyfriend, depicted through stories, flashbacks, hallucinations, and confessions. After a haunting opening track, the album explodes with rage and pain on the second song titled Blood Roses. This song introduces the pain she has experienced. From here, she explores her dark side on the next two tracks: Father Lucifer, where she meets with the devil, and Professional Widow, where she sings from the perspective of a woman exploiting a man for his money before convincing him to kill himself. After a short, comedic, yet profound interlude, the album continues with a track titled Marianne, which is about a girl she knew in school who died. This song introduces another layer to the album, the systematic mistreatment of women. It depicts this girl as the first of many victims of a misogynistic society. The album bounces around for the next few songs, exploring various topics such as desperation, loneliness, religious misogyny, trauma, self-fulfillment, etc.

The album then takes a turn with the track ‘Not the Red Baron.’ Throughout the album, Tori writes about women being hurt by men. In this track, however, she describes men falling victim to women. This song marks a distinct tone shift, where her emotions change from abstract to rational. In the proceeding three songs, she acknowledges the hurt and accepts it. She is no longer playing characters, telling stories, or sharing memories. She is confessing her pain. The penultimate track, Putting the Damage On, describes how her ex-boyfriend hurt her, but she still finds him beautiful. This heartbreaking track marks the point where her feelings are rationalized and she no longer views him as evil but simply a man who hurt her. Finally, the album concludes with the song Twinkle, ending the journey with peace acceptance, and a glimmer of hope.

This album is complex, ugly, messy, and unorganized, but that’s what makes it great. Humans are not perfect or rational when we are hurt. Boys for Pele represents these emotions beautifully and does not shy away from a single messy detail. Almost thirty years after its release, this album still resonates every time, making it my favorite album of all time.

Rating: 10/10 Favorite Track: Blood Roses, Putting the Damage On (I couldn’t choose) Skips: Every track is crucial to the album, but if I had to choose, In the Springtime of his Voodoo. Similar albums to listen to next: Lion and the Cobra by Sinead O’Connor, Little Earthquakes by Tori Amos.

#tori amos #boys for pele #album review #music review #album of the week #musichead

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luxurybrownbarbie · 2 months

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hi barbie!!

i am patiently awaiting the rest of your tortured poets department takes when you are ready to share them. thank you in advance!

sincerely,

your fellow intern 💌

Hi darling! 💛 I will give you my less “instant gut punch” and borderline trauma dumping takes here. 😭I’ll get into the Substack post in the morning (the funeral skipping lore is so much, I will dive into it more😭)! 💛

First, earnestly defending her right to date a nasty racist is certainly a choice. Hate the muse a lot! I feel like she’s kind of messed up her view of what criticism is and what it means? It’s not always baseless, Ms. Swift!

Anyway, further takes! The second half of the album is phenomenal. The first half is so sonically cohesive it almost becomes boring. For a while I could barely differentiate between each song.

From the first half, my top three (excluding So, Long London.) were:

Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?- The imagery in this song is incredible. She’s enraged. She’s dead. She’s a ghost. She’s haunting everyone. She’s a caged circus animal. It’s so visceral. The production works flawlessly with her lyrics. It’s literally like a score from a horror film. But I hate the way the song builds up to a natural crescendo and then she abruptly stops and slows it down again. It just feels too jarring for a song that flowed so perfectly from the beginning.

Florida!!!- I’m a simple woman. Florence starts singing and whatever it is, I love it. I love the ambiguity of it all. I love the hooks, the paradox of your home being a place you’re a guest, a place where you’re a criminal, instead of the way we usually view home as a sanctuary. The production is incredible. It’s frenetic and frenzied. It’s jarring and loud. Florence’s backing vocals are incredible.

The Alchemy- It’s so atmospheric. It’s not even particularly well written compared to the other songs on the album, but the flow of the music just draws you in. The production brings this song to life. It feels like an early 2000s song you’d hear on the radio in the summer. Just great vibes.

From the second half my top three are:

How Did it End?- The mortifying ordeal of being known. The instrumental being stripped back for so much of the song gives it a haunting quality. The piano is the loudest instrument in the song, the absence of any other bold production tactics perfectly captures the soul baring essence of the song. It’s simple. She doesn’t know how it ended. She’s both asking and being asked.

The Prophecy- A classic case of hope vs. faith! She has hope that she will find love again. She doesn’t have faith in it. That’s why she’s begging. Hope is good, but faith is more tangible. The lines “I guess a lesser woman would’ve lost hope/A greater woman wouldn’t beg”, alone make this essential listening. She’s too proud to lose hope. She’s not proud enough to not beg.

Cassandra- Personally, I believe she telepathically connected her brain to Meghan Markle’s to write this. I don’t care about the lore or the whole story with K*nye and the Kardashians. “Blood’s thick, but nothing like a payroll?” “You can mark my words that I said it first /In a mourning warning no one heard?” It’s about being hung out to dry while knowing that you’re not the first woman this has happened to and you won’t be the last! The family will protect its own, not out of love but out of desire to protect its entrenched financial interests. It’s about the fact that you will be punished by both the men and women around you when you step out of line. They remain silent while she is tormented and when she’s vindicated. 10/10 song. Great storytelling.

What are your thoughts my fellow intern? 💌💛

#fromaseyewithlove #answered #.#substack posts #technically?

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Cover Story

THE O.G.

Ice-T was there at the beginning and helped shape what rap and hip-hop became. And you know what, he’s still there

Written By Kyle Eustice

| February 15, 2023 - 1:18 pm | Updated 3 days ago

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Home » Features » Cover Story » THE O.G.

Tracy Marrow was born in Newark, New Jersey, no one’s idea of Easy Street, and especially not in 1958. Newark hit its nadir in July 1967, when Tracy was nine (although by then his family had moved to another part of New Jersey) and the entire city was convulsed with race riots, stemming from systemic police brutality and harassment towards the Black community. Police brutality, as backdrop and theme, has perforated Tracy Marrow’s life. Or Ice-T, as he’s better known.

When he was in third grade, his mother Alice died from a heart attack, and he was raised by his father Solomon, who four years later also died of a heart attack. Thirteen-year-old orphan Tracy was sent to live first with an aunt nearby, then, propitiously, with an aunt in California, in View Park-Windsor Hills, a predominantly Black, upper-middle class neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles.

By eighth grade, he had moved to Crenshaw, where he attended Palms Junior High, a predominantly white school. From there he went to Crenshaw High School, where he got his first exposure to gangs. Crips and Bloods stalked the halls, forming a gauntlet repeated across South Central. Although never inducted, the future gangsta rapper was “affiliated” with the Crips. And he did petty crime to make extra cash on top of the social security benefits he started receiving at 17 from his father’s death.

Crenshaw High was where Tracy had his first experience performing music, joining a group called, quaintly, The Precious Few of Crenshaw High School. At 18, he became a father.

Photo Credit: Christian Witkin

After high school Tracy went into the Army, joining the 25th Infantry, where he discovered hip-hop when he heard one of his fellow soldiers blasting “Rapper’s Delight” by The Sugarhill Gang. Something clicked — maybe, he thought, he could go back to Los Angeles and start throwing rap parties in the same vein as local electro pioneers Uncle Jamm’s Army, who were famously minting money at the time.

It worked out better than that, as you know. He was the foremost pioneer of the West Coast gangsta rap sound. But he had more to say than just gangsta, and, like Public Enemy later on the East Coast, waxed politically, releasing the rebellious anthem, “Killers” in 1984.

“A man took an ad on T.V. / To enroll in the police academy,” he raps on the song. “He’s very talented, outstanding proof / From his clean-cut appearance to the shine on his boots / When it comes to graduation, he's number one / An expert with a rifle and also a gun / Three weeks on the beat and his weak nerves crack / And fires four warning shots into a kid's back.”

THERE’S NOT NOBODY IN L.A. THAT’S GONNA SAY ICE-T WASN'T FIRST.

ICE-T

You could call it prophetic.

His professional moniker came from a nickname his friends gave him when he got home from the army. He would entertain them by accurately reciting memorized passages of novels written by Iceberg Slim (itself a professional moniker, for a pimp-turned-writer called Robert Beck). His friends, who called Tracy “T,” would say “Kick some more of that Ice, T.”

In 1986, when rap was young, and still outside the mainstream, Ice-T released “6 ’N The Mornin’,” riddled with real accounts of criminal life. It was a big hit. A year later, he had a major label deal with Sire Records and a hot debut album, Rhyme Pays. It sold 500,000 copies, a huge amount for a rap record at the time.

His next album, Power, came out in 1988 and furthered his trajectory, but it was 1991’s O.G. Original Gangster, his fourth album, that defined the era and made Ice-T the undisputed godfather of gangsta rap. With songs such as “Escape from the Killing Fields,” a powerful rewrite of Public Enemy’s “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos,” and the Grammy-nominated “New Jack Hustler (Nino’s Theme),” featured in New Jack City, the 24-song LP painted a vivid picture of the carnage and devastation that comes from a life of crime.

Photo Credit: Jose Perez/Bauer-Griffin

Photo Credit: Stephen Lovekin

Photo Credit: Raymond Boyd

Photo Credit: Paul Natkin

Photo Credit: Raymond Boyd

Photo Credit: Metal Hammer Magazine

Photo Credit: Raymond Boyd

Photo Credit: Jose Perez/Bauer-Griffin

Photo Credit: Stephen Lovekin

Photo Credit: Raymond Boyd

Photo Credit: Paul Natkin

Photo Credit: Raymond Boyd

Photo Credit: Metal Hammer Magazine

Photo Credit: Raymond Boyd

Photo Credit: Jose Perez/Bauer-Griffin

Photo Credit: Stephen Lovekin

RIGHT WHEN I WAS GETTING READY TO GET INTO HIP-HOP, I WAS STILL IN THE STREETS. I WAS MAKING MONEY HUSTLING.

Part of what made Original Gangster so intriguing was its musical diversity. The way he rhymed on “Mind Over Matter” differed greatly from his cadence on “Mic Contract,” and what he did on “Body Count” — which he later adopted for the name of his rap-metal group — was the polar opposite of what he did on the spellbinding, chilling, spoken word track “Ya Shoulda Killed Me Last Year.”

Less than a year later, Body Count, the band, would substantially ruffle the feathers of police everywhere, the National Rifle Association, Time Warner Board member and NRA shill Charlton Heston, and CLEAT (Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas) with the release of the controversial, vastly misinterpreted “Cop Killer.” A song built on (understandable) rage, “Cop Killer” sparked boycotts across the country and precipitated Warner Music, buckling under the pressure, dropping Ice-T (and, trivia note, parent company Time Warner jettisoning Vibe magazine, because, you know, all those rappers look the same…).

For the last 24 years (while still releasing music), Ice-T has played Detective Odafin Tutuola on TV’s longest-running police drama, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. He got his first acting role in Breakin’ in 1984, when hip-hop was an exotic animal to most of America, and Ice was just in the right place at the right time. He had a more meaningful role in John Singleton’s classic New Jack City, as Detective Scotty Appleton.

In 2018, Body Count won a Grammy Award in the Best Metal Performance category, for “Black Hoodie.” And on Feb. 5th this year, he performed at the Grammys with other rap immortals, in a slightly early celebration of hip-hop’s 50th anniversary. On Feb. 17th., a day after his 65th birthday, when he can officially start receiving his own social security benefits, he’ll get his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

I interviewed him for this cover story at the toney and very discreet L’Ermitage Hotel in Beverly Hills, the day after his Grammy’s appearance.

Photo Credit: Christian Witkin

SEE, THEY THINK RAPPERS AND BLACK PEOPLE AREN'T CAPABLE OF MAKING ART. YOU HAVE TO BE THAT ANGRY BLACK MAN. I'M NOT TRYING TO KILL NO POLICE.

When did you realize you had a talent for rapping?

I used to write raps for the gangs in high school. I would write little slogans and raps for them before I even knew what hip-hop was. Saying rhymes has always been a part of Black culture. Hustlers would call it toasting.

Saying rhymes was something I knew how to do in high school, so when I went into the military after I got out of school, that's where I got turned on to hip-hop, because I was in there with cats from New York, and they had tapes and they were playing this new music and I was like, “What is this, you?” The first generation of hip-hop is unrecorded or tape-recorded hip-hop, before anyone ever made a record.

We're talking the DJ Hollywood era.

Right. But there was tapes going around of hip-hop and parties, so I got a taste of it very, very early. And then “King Tim III” by The Fatback Band came out, and they were rapping. Teena Marie had a little rap on a record, and then Sugarhill Gang came out. When that came out, I felt like I could do it, because I already had been writing rhymes. But my intention was to come out of the Army and throw parties. I had gotten a lot of stereo equipment in the military. I bought a bunch of equipment, and that was my plan — to come back and actually be like Uncle Jamm’s Army. There was a big underage a scene in L.A., like people who are 18 that aren't 21 who still want to party. So that's where those dances came in. That's what the scene was in L.A, and there was tons of money being made. Uncle Jamm’s was able to fill the L.A. Sports Arena several times. Like what a rave is now, yeah, they were doing it.

Egyptian Lover was one of the DJs, Bob Cat was a DJ, and I was the one of the only people they would let rap. I just started to get more attention from rapping than carrying all that equipment around. I hooked up with Evil and Henry, they were called the New York City Spin Masters, and they were some of the earliest DJs on the West Coast that could scratch, because they were really from Brooklyn. I saw them at a show, and I introduced myself and I said, “Man, you know, I want to go with you to your parties.” And they would hit three or four different house parties or situations at night. On the flyers, there would be four or five DJ crews. So they would go from one to the other. They wouldn't just stay at one. And I started traveling with them, and I would jump on and MC.

That’s how I started rapping around L.A.

Your first single, “The Coldest Rap/Cold Wind-Madness,” in 1983, preceded the World Class Wreckin' Cru with Dr. Dre and Egyptian Lover’s first album, On The Nile. Tell us about that time.

Photo Credit: Christian Witkin

ONLY THING THAT’S CHANGED IS CAMERA PHONES. RIGHT NOW YOU'RE SEEING IT—THAT’S IT. THE SAME BULLSHIT’S GOING ON. I THINK COPS ARE SLIGHTLY A LITTLE BIT MORE ACCOUNTABLE BECAUSE THEY KNOW THEY’RE BEING WATCHED.

There’s not nobody in L.A. that’s gonna say Ice-T wasn't first. There was other people out there at the time. There were groups like Disco Daddy and Captain Rap, but there wasn’t more serious music where people were like, “OK, this is cool.” My first record was done…I was at a beauty parlor called Good Fred’s — this is when I had the perm — and I would say rhymes to the girls, just rapping. A guy named Willie Strong walked in, and he owned VIP Records, the famous record store Snoop Dogg stood on in the “Doggystyle” video. It’s one of the most famous record stores in L.A. They had what they called Saturn Records. I don’t think any other record ever came out on Saturn Records. I think they created that label just for me. They said, “You want to make a record?” And I was like, “Sure.”

It was kind of like Run’s lyric: “So Larry put me inside his Cadillac / The chauffeur drove off, and we never came back.”

I went to this recording studio, and they had this music by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, and there was some people singing on the track. They pulled the vocals down and said, “rap.” And I basically made “The Coldest Rap” with all the raps I had in my head, like my walking-around raps and stuff I was saying to the girls.

I made a hook on the spot: “I’m a player, that’s all I know / On a summer day, I play in the snow,” which is a cocaine reference. “From the womb to the tomb, I run my game / I'm cold as ice, and I show no shame.” I made that up on the spot. “The ladies say I was heaven sent ‘cause I got more money than the U.S. Mint” — stuff I was already saying. That was “The Coldest Rap.” It was done in one take, and they said, “Cool.” I think I made maybe two, three hundred dollars on that record.

Well, you were getting paid for music. That had to be pretty cool.

At that time, there were no real rap scene, and it just put me in the game out here. That record led to me going to the Radio Club. There’s a guy that ran the Radio Club called Alex Jordan, or A.J., and another white cat called KK, basically by way of New York. They said, “Ice-T is the only person who got a rap record. Will he come and perform at this club?” I get a call and I'm like, “Yeah,” and I went there. That was a big moment because I walked into that club and everyone in that club knew my record.

Photo Credit: Christian Witkin

GANGSTA RAP IS THE PERSON SAYING, “I'M DONE ASKING FOR YOUR HELP. FUCK YOU. I'M GONNA TAKE IT. I'M GONNA DO IT MYSELF.”

See, what happens is, if they play your music in a particular place like a restaurant or a club every night, you become a star in that room. No one else knows it, but at that particular place, you're hot. And that was a moment where I went in there, I did my song, and everyone knew every word to that record. That was my first real taste of what fame was. I was like, “Oh, shit!”

Now, no one else on Earth knew two words to that record, but in that club, I was hot. That club was a cross of the upscale white kids that were just touching the hot hip-hop.

People were there like Malcolm McLaren. Madonna came in. I actually put Madonna on the stage. I had become the stage manager because I came there so much. They said, “Hey, you can run the rappers? Take them downstairs, audition them?” So Madonna came in, and they were like, “This is some new chick.” She had a single called “Physical Attraction.” There's a picture of me standing on stage with Madonna way back when she was a kid. She did well that night.

That’s where I started, and that led to being in the movie Breakin’. They had heard about this hip-hop scene that was popping in MacArthur Park at the Radio Club. They came in there and said, “We’re gonna use you guys as the dancers” — that’s where Shrimp and Shabba Doo and all them got picked up — “and you could be the rapper.” Then they gave us a chance to make a song, and we made “Reckless” [featuring Chris “The Glove” Taylor]. Eminem said that's the first rap record he ever heard.

“Killers” came out right after “Reckless.”

And what happened to “Reckless Rivalry” that was in Breakin’ 2? It remains unreleased as I understand.

Yeah, that was just a movie song. That was a song called “Go Off.” But The Glove and Afrika Islam scratching on it. Yeah, we need to hunt that record down! There was another record I did called “Combat” they still use in breaking competitions.

“Killers” is often considered your first political rap. What made you change course?

“Killers” was my version of Run-DMC, because I rap back and forth to myself like it was two rappers. So I rap one way, then the second verse sounded like how Run and them would rap. I think it was just coming off songs like “It's Like That” and “Hard Times” that had a little political undertone and things of that nature. I think that inspired me to do those songs.

I didn't start rapping until I was 27. It wasn’t like I started late, I was just that old when hip-hop started.

Was the Army where you realized you didn’t want to be entangled in street life anymore?

The Army wasn’t what made me want to get out of gang life. I was aware of gang life when I was in high school. At that point, I realized if you become part of a set, you immediately turn yourself into the enemy of the rest of the city. You're not in a gang, you’re from a gang. I wasn’t living in any of the neighborhoods that really had gangs. I was living in a View Park, which is like an upper middle class Black area above Crenshaw, on the west side. So I would go to Crenshaw, and that's where the gangs was, but I'm not from any of their neighborhoods. Now, Crenshaw is mostly connected to Rollin’ 60s. When I went there, they had Eight Tray Gangsters, Hoover Crips, Harlem Crips, which is the 30s, and they had some Bloods there.

I was just like, I can be affiliated with these gangs, but there's no way I should jump into no set because I'm not from they neighborhoods. I was aware of gang banging and understood the principles of it. Near the end of high school, I started hanging out with the hustlers and cats that were more about getting money, right? That's a whole other click of cats.

But when I came out in the Army, I was brought back into the crime world because my boys who were like small-time criminals when I left had now elevated to jewelry heists, and they had elevated to all kinds of other types of crimes. So I just fell back in with them. I'm doing that and on the weekends, I'm doing the rap shit.

At some point, you got into a car accident. You were admitted as a John Doe, right? Due to criminal activity you didn’t carry an ID.

Right when I was getting ready to get into hip-hop, I was still in the streets. I was making money hustling. I went to a club called Carolina West. It went from 9 p.m. to 9 a.m. Everybody knows when you come out of those clubs, your eyes aren’t working. Well, here I go, and I decided to drive home. I would close my eyes at the corner or at a stoplight, which is a bad idea. You can't close your eyes when you're in a car. I fell asleep and rolled right into an intersection. I was in a Porsche, got hit, and I was ejected into the passenger seat. Thank God I didn't have on a seatbelt because the accident broke the steering wheel off of the car, but I went into the passenger seat, so that put me in the hospital for 10 weeks. I had a broken pelvis, a broken femur, a broken foot — the whole left side of my body was smashed.

And they John Doe’d me ‘cause I didn't have an ID. When you in the streets hustling, you don't carry ID because you want to cap aliases so you can keep it moving. I didn't have that, and they didn't know who I was. I went to the county hospital and was in a bad position. Then one of my friend’s mothers was like, “Where’s Tracy? Where he at? We ain't seen him.” And she found me in the hospital some kind of way, and said, “Well, he's a vet.” She got me moved to a Veterans Hospital in Westwood, where it was much better, and I was able to heal.

How did that affect you mentally and emotionally? The D.O.C. fell asleep at the wheel, lost his voice, and his rapping career was over.

It just changed my life as far as what I was doing hustling ‘cause a lot of the stuff we were doing was basically parkour. We would take the jewels, and you’d have to catch us. It was very athletic and stuff, jumping over cats. So now I can't move, I can't run. It made me slow down a lot and forced me to focus on music. But no one had never made any money in music yet. Run and them hadn't even really bought cars yet. I’m coming from a zone where it's like, “Why you want to rap, man? You better get this money. Like, who the fuck wants to rap?" Like Grandmaster Flash said the other night [at the Grammys], this was just something that was entertainment for us. It was a pastime. It was not something you do to get paid. No one ever was gonna be a celebrity doing this shit.

How did losing both of your parents so young affect your ambition?

I think what happens when you lose your parents young, you just realize there's nobody to fall back on. There's no one who's supposed to take care of you. I think when I lost my moms in the third grade, I didn't get really cry or nothing. I didn't get it.

I'm from the age when you're a kid and somebody passes, they just take you off to the side, you end up with an aunt some place. You don't go to the funeral, you don't see nothing. You’re just isolated. And then I was with my pops for a while, and then in seventh grade when he passed, I was more like, “What’s going to happen to me?” They shipped me out to L.A. to live with his sister. And she was kind of like, “I'm taking care of you because I got to.” I knew early in life I was on my own. I don't have no brothers and sisters. I just realized there was no where to fall back to.

If I was fucked up, I was truly homeless. I was truly out there. And I got a lot of pride, so I would never would celebrate Christmas or any family holidays because I didn’t want to be in anyone else’s house over their holidays. That wasn’t my place to be in your Thanksgiving bullshit. So I ate a lot of Thanksgiving dinners at Denny’s and hamburger spots.

That kind of makes me sad, Ice.

It’s nothing to be sad about. It’s like, you can look at a poor person and be sad for him, but then to them it's their reality, so I don't feel any special way. And honestly, I went through what a lot of people my age still haven’t. They've still have their their parents. They’re still about to go through it. I got past that hump early.

Do you still think about your parents?

No. I was too young. What am I going to think about? My mother died when I was in third grade. I can't remember that much about her. I remember the night she died. I remember that. And then my father, I remember him disciplining me, but no, I don't think about them.

“6 ’N The Mornin’” was inspired by the Schoolly D single, “P.S.K. What Does It Mean?” It was made with a Roland TR-808. Tell us about making that song?

It was just me on the beat. My buddy Randy and I were messing with the 808. I had been inspired by Schoolly D, of course, because he changed the format when he sang about a gang. And I was like, “Oh, shit!” I didn't know that was OK. But when he did that, I said, “OK.” Like I said, I used to make these gangster raps, and so my boy was like, "Say that shit you be saying when it’s just us fucking around.”

There was a record by Beastie Boys called “Hold It Now, Hit It.” And it had this weird break in the song where it was like, “Hey, Leroy!” And then it came back on. So “6 ’N The Mornin,'” I wanted a break that had nothing to do with the record. That was what kind of influenced the way the beat was created, to where it would stop and then start. You know, “Word.” That was from the Beastie Boys.

I read that Licensed To Ill is one of your favorite albums.

Real talk. We’re all influenced by different things. So you say, “Man, I want to record what that does.” When we made the song, it was B-Side to a song called “Dog'n The Wax.” I made a record called “You Don't Quit” with Unknown DJ on Techno Hop Records. I was trying to get him to do one with Henry and Evil E, my DJs. And he was like, “Nah, you gotta give me another record.” So I did that. And then the B-Side was “6 ’N The Mornin’,”and like Chuck D says, the B-Side wins again.

It was a hit. We didn't look at it like a hit, but it hit.

Would you say that is what opened the floodgates to albums like Rhymes Paysand rapping about gang life, street life?

Oh, it opened up the floodgates to up my life and my ability to talk about things that I was comfortable with. You got to understand, early on, it was like, if I’mma rap, I'm feeling like I gotta rap about parties and shit. I didn't know how long I was going to be able to rap about that stuff because there's only so much content to that. But when they finally said, “Oh, OK. We can rock with this,” I’m like, “Oh, shit. They want to hear this shit?” If you listen to early records, I’m just beating around the bush with hip-hop.

And that was kind of the point you made in the LL Cool J feud — how many times can you say you're “bad” in one song?

Right, right, right. I always compare it to making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. If I came over your house, you made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, I ate it and I go, “Wow, this is so good, you should sell it.” You’re like, “Sell this?” You sell it and it’s a big hit. That’s how gangsta rap fell in my life ‘cause I got all these experiences, criminal shit I've been through, but I didn’t think it was available to use in music.

Then when I hit with “6 ’N The Mornin’,” I'm like, “Oh, this is gonna be easy. I’m in now.” Now, I know what they want to hear and I got a million of this shit. That was the birth of Ice-T. You know?

If you look at me in Breakin’, I'm trying to rap like rappers, like hip-hoppers. I'm trying to dress like them. One of the big moments in my life as far as how I looked was Russell Simmons. I did a party and I was in the crowd at a place called Casa Camino Real, and I was in my street clothes, you know, the way I dress. They called me on the stage, I got up there and I did my thing. Russell said, “That’s your look, man.” He said, “You ain't got to dress up like no rapper.” He said, “Just come out like that. They want to see that L.A. style. Do your shit.” And that's when I started back wearing the Fila and all the fly shit, you know?

I thought I had to dress like Melle Mel and them because I'm trying to be part of hip-hop. But Russell was like, “Nah, fuck that. Be you.”

Looking at older videos, you do look pretty cool, especially in “I’m Your Pusher.”

That's dressing like a L.A. drug dealer, but a rapper didn't dress like that.

In 1990, when you formed Body Count, Charlton Heston attacked you for making “violent” music, and caused Warner Bros Records to drop you from the label. At the exact same time, as the NRA spokesman, he was advocating for approval for a bullet nicknamed the “Cop Killer,” because it pierced police officers’ kevlar shields.

How ironic is that?

What was your reaction at the time, and how did you handle that?

We really didn't give a fuck about Charlton Heston. He was the least of our problems. I mean, we didn't give a fuck about him at all. I thought he was just trying to get publicity, you know, he's an actor. We were dealing with the real cops and the real government, people like that. That whole “Cop Killer” shit just went out of control. It started with one thing, and the next thing you know, I'm on the news with the president and I'm like, “Lord have mercy.” In the meantime, Black Flag had been making records about cops like “Police Story.” You got rock groups called Millions of Dead Cops. It was kind of like a weird moment where we were catching a lot of heat for something we didn't even think was so bad.

You suddenly became a target.

Yeah. We’re just doing rock music. We’re just talking that shit. They thought it was a call-to-action to kill police, and it couldn't have been further from that. It was a song about rage, somebody mad enough to go after the cops, a cop killer based on police brutality. But they were like, “You’re trying to tell people to go do it.”

See, they think rappers and Black people aren't capable of making art. You have to be that angry Black man. I'm not trying to kill no police. That was just a minute in time where they were just out of control and they were going after our head. It was supposed to be over for me at that point. They were trying to blackball me and blacklist me. I was never really worried about the cops as much as I was worried about running into a cop lover.

Oh, what would be the Blue Lives Matter guys today?

Anybody. You’re in a restaurant and you run into somebody who’s like, “My Dad’s a cop,” and they want to start some shit.

Did that ever happen?

No, no, it didn’t, but it could happen. And that's what happens with any kind of beef. Say for instance me and Method Man were fighting — which, Meth is one of my best friends — but for me to say that, I could run into some Wu-Tang Clan people and they like, “Oh, you got problems with Meth?” You can end up in some shit or an altercation. Whenever you got beef out there, you don't know how it's gonna come back at you.

In 1991, there was the Rodney King beating and the L.A. Riots. In 2023, the horrific police killing of Tyre Nichols in Memphis. Has anything really changed?

Only thing that’s changed is camera phones. Right now you're seeing it — that’s it. The same bullshit’s going on. I think cops are slightly a little bit more accountable because they know they’re being watched, but they still get off. It’s too much power. Until they put one of these cops on death row and let ‘em know people aren’t having it… from being a cop all this time on TV, I’ve figured it out. They fuck over who they think they can get away with fucking over. They fuck over people they think can’t fight back. When we’re on Law & Order and they go, “Oh, they're from the Upper East Side. Tread lightly," what they're really saying is these people got money and they can sue the shit out of us.

But if you're in the projects, it can go any kind of way because they can't do nothing. “Lay him on the ground, treat him like shit.” Only if you look up and say, “My father is the District Attorney,” you're not going to lay on that ground because they know you can fight back. They take advantage of people they don't think can fight back. It's not as much racism as, “Who can I get over on?” And like I said in “No Lives Matter,” Black and brown skin has always stood for poor.

But they’re not laying people down in gay communities. They’re not doing that. At the end of the day, they know who they're fucking with, you know what I'm saying? Don’t get me wrong — you could run into some racist cops out there. There’s racist people all over the world, but it's not that simple. It's like you saw those Black cops whip on that man in Memphis. They did it because they felt they could get away with it.

Do you think it was because of their race?

They got caught out there doing some dumb shit because apparently he was messing with one their girls, but I don’t know what the fuck they were thinking about. They knew they were getting filmed — like, what the fuck? It’s abuse of power. That’s all it is. When people say, “Ice, you don’t like cops.” Nah, I don’t like bullies. I don’t like racists. I don’t give a fuck what you are or what your job is. That’s it. Period. I’m not judging you because you’re the police.

You mentioned your Body Count song “No Lives Matter.” What do you think about the Black Lives Matter movement? Has it been effective?

I think the term has been effective. I don’t really know, ‘cause anything that’s moving positive, they’re gonna try to take it apart and say, “Oh, this is a problem, and the money’s not going here or there.”

I'm not connected to the organization, Black Lives Matter. I don't even know who runs it. I don't even know what their agenda is, but I have connected with the term. I heard a comedian say, “Can we just matter?” We matter. Black lives are important. Black lives matter. I mean, goddammit, can we have a little bit of something? Shit. Dogs' lives matter. You know? It’s the very least, and people are pissed at it. I tried to make it clear in my song that if we were talking about gay people, if that was the problem, then that would be the slogan. But right now, we talking about Black lives or women’s lives, if that's the topic. But don’t be mad. Don't try to claim every motherfuckin’ thing. Can we have the word? God damn!

Here we are, it’s Black History Month. What has hip-hop done well? Is there anything to improve?

I don’t know really if it can improve. Hip-hop just evolves, and it's just gonna continue to evolve. It'll fuck up. It'll right itself. Like any other organism, you know?

What has hip-hop done for you?

I like to say it saved my life because it derailed me from what I was doing, which was negative, and it gave me a chance to do something positive. Once I found out that just being me was a brand, I was able to express myself. Whereas somebody like Public Enemy comes from this militant area, gangsta rap is the person saying, “I'm done asking for your help. Fuck you. I'm gonna take it. I'm gonna do it myself.” If anybody goes, “Oh, well, that's bad?” Well, let's bring up the Kennedys or let's bring up the mafia. Like every motherfucker that came over here, some people weren't handed shit and they just had to go get it. So that gangster is absolutely negative. After some point people go, “You know what, I'm tired of marching. Yeah, we ready to get gangster.”

It goes into another type of energy. So when they saw N.W.A and us come, they were like, “Oh shit, these are motherfuckers that really ain't asking for help. They're going to take it.” And that energy is needed. We don't have to want to fight nobody. Somebody asked me one time, “What is gangsta? What is your gangsta?” I said, “I don't back up well.”

That’s a great answer.

I’m not out here trying to push the line. I’m not out here trying to do something, but when you tell me what I can’t do “or else,” I’m not that guy. That’s what I’m about. I’m not trying to be a bad guy, but I don’t back up.

I was asked yesterday what someone can expect from you, just as a person. The first thing that came to my mind was the word “humble.” How do you stay grounded?

You know what it is, though? You get what you give. Some people, like yourself, are very pleasant to talk to. So that's what you get back. Other people aren’t, and I can give them that, too. You know what I mean? So some people are assholes, so I can play that game. You know, my thing is like, I'm as nice as you let me be.

I'm trying to be nice. But if you want to go that over there, I'm very seasoned in that area too. Like, if you want to get stupid, I’m very well versed in being a motherfucker and a bitch ass… I’ll go there worse than you've ever thought. You don't have to be like that to good people. And let me tell you, the most dangerous people I've ever met are the nicest people I've ever met. It’s not the guy who's always talking tough. It’s the guy who will pull a picture of his kids out, but during dinner could pull your fucking eye out of your fucking head.

I interview a lot of West Coast gangster rappers, and they are always the most polite, but you're not going to mess with them.

Because they got that switch they can turn on and off. Appreciate the fact it’s off. What people do is they want to poke it. They want to poke the lion. They want to see it and it’s like, “Why?” People meet me and they’ll say, "You’re so nice," and I’ll say, “Well, you're not my enemy.”

SOMEBODY ASKED ME ONE TIME, “WHAT IS GANGSTA? WHAT IS YOUR GANGSTA?” I SAID, “I DON'T BACK UP WELL.”

Kyle Eustice