Nate Haduch

This post was originally published following Beyoncé’s groundbreaking 2018 Coachella-headlining performance. We are revisiting it again today in honor of Beychella coming to Netflix a year later in her new feature film, Homecoming.

“When I was brought up, I was taught in American history books that Africa had no history, and that neither had I. I was a savage about whom the least said the better, who had been saved by Europe, and who had been brought to America.” —James Baldwin

“My job is to somehow make them curious enough, or persuade them, by hook or crook, to get more aware of themselves, and where they came from, and what they are into, and what is already there, and to bring it out.” —Nina Simone

“Citizens of the universe, recording angels, we have returned to claim the pyramids.” —George Clinton

It was apparent that Beyoncé was playing for keeps in her Saturday Coachella set just seconds in, when she arrived, bejeweled in an Egyptian queen’s garb, to lead a New Orleans–style second line down the walkway to the festival’s main stage, which was outfitted with a seating rig shaped like university stadium bleachers and a lighting rig shaped like a pyramid, while a marching band gave Rebirth Brass Band’s “Do Watcha Wanna” a maudlin, ragtime twist. Had she simply continued marching past the stage to a jet and flown home, we would still have been left with a powerful statement about black unity.

Before a single note was sung, Beyoncé’s entrance threaded the majesty of ancient African royalty through bittersweet bayou jazz funerals, ’70s funk’s Afrofuturism, modern-day trap insouciance, and a dab of gospel by way of her band’s tease of the new Knowles-Carter classic “Family Feud,” whose sample was lifted from the Clark Sisters’ devotional warm-up “Ha Ya (Eternal Life).” “Beychella” illustrated through dance, dress, and brash musicology that pride and perseverance are the through line adjoining the last few thousands of years of black history. We never know how or if we’re going to reach the future, but we get there. That’s the story of Alvin Ailey’s Revelations, of Marlon Riggs’s Tongues Untied, of Parliament’s Mothership Connection, of Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust, of Lemonade, of Moonlight, and of Black Panther. We might hit an impasse, but we’re going to make it. Black life is rough. Black art is the salve.

In a nearly two-hour set that called upon what looked to be hundreds of players and dancers, Beyoncé celebrated black beauty through a stage as deliberately crowded with black faces as Kanye West’s fiery, all-black Brit Awards spectacle. She made her own show at the Super Bowl, which is believed to be a musician’s biggest stage, look small. She brought up her sister, husband, and childhood friends. For extra credit, she recast her formidable catalogue of pop, rap, and R&B hits in the spirit, swagger, and iconography of historically black colleges and universities’ vibrant halftime shows. Miles of brass gave the inspirational Lemonade highlight “Freedom” extra heft and teased melodic intricacies out of Dangerously in Love’s “Me, Myself, and I” that were frankly muffled on the original record. The band and dancers bested, crushed, and deconstructed the singer’s studio recordings, and made a strong case for more recent songs that drew divided reactions outside of the fandom. Extra players elevated the twerk jam “7/11,” the DJ Khaled collaboration “Top Off,” and the J Balvin collaboration “Mi Gente” to new heights.

Elsewhere, the set list was a death-defying mix of big hits, deep cuts, loosies, surprising covers, and meaningful shards of black history. Early in the evening, Bey sang “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” then broke into “Formation.” “Don’t Hurt Yourself” cut in notes from Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” and Malcolm X’s fierce defense of black womanhood. Lemonade’s “Sorry” hit a grinding halt at “Suck on my balls!” and launched into a skit perched halfway between a Kappa probate and a scene out of Spike Lee’s ’80s HBCU musical School Daze. “Drunk in Love” paused to have two dancers do a romantic routine to Nina Simone’s “Lilac Wine,” then resumed the first song, then broke into an impassioned “Swag Surf” in time for the infamous “surfboard!” line. “Bow Down/I Been On” staged a showdown between shirtless, krumping male dancers in shiny black pants edging closer and closer toward the camera, like a rapper playing tricks with Hype Williams’s fish-eye lens in the ’90s.

“Beychella” toyed with time like it toyed with music. Costume changes were masked in style; as Bey made it down from the crane where she sang “Drunk in Love” above the crowd, her “pledges” led a spirited sing-along to 4’s “Party” with a breathtaking baton toss and elite moves from dancers Laurent and Larry Bourgeois, better known to the hive as “Les Twins.” Any show that can keep the energy sky-high during a necessary break between songs is the stuff of legend. (The disorienting smoke and moving lights of Kanye West’s groundbreaking Saint Pablo tour, which arguably set some technological precedents for this show as well as recent Kendrick Lamar, Weeknd, and Drake tours, were achieved through some awkward mid-show silence. Post Malone, who headlined Coachella’s Sahara stage Saturday night, fumbled for a whole minute moving a stool and an acoustic guitar and lighting a cigarette.)

Beyoncé is a performer who tries to play not only to the backs of the rooms she’s singing in, but to audiences at home, and, given the time, to the whole of the black diaspora. Her Coachella set was a stunningly balanced tribute to several permutations of blackness. “Baby Boy” cut in Dawn Penn’s “You Don’t Love Me (No, No, No)” and Sister Nancy’s “Bam Bam.” “Mi Gente” shouted out Puerto Rico. “Deja Vu” took notes from Afrobeat legend Fela Kuti’s “Zombie.” Nearly every region of American hip-hop got love, from nods to West Coast stars Kendrick Lamar and Tupac to healthy servings of Jay-Z hits for New York fans and twerk sessions to Southern classics like C-Murda’s “Down for My Niggas.” Beychella — as a love letter to singing, chanting, rapping, twerking, stepping, wining, popping, locking, krumping, and to black bodies of every size and pigmentation — made a case for the timelessness and resilience of black artistic expression.

It is a moment we will revisit for the rest of our lives, like Michael Jordan’s flu game, Michael Jackson’s 1993 Super Bowl statue act, or Sidney Poitier’s “Mr. Tibbs” speech from In the Heat of the Night. The Coachella show’s great care in making everyone from the hood to the HBCUs to the islands feel represented and appreciated, and the gobsmacking success in pulling it off, is testament to Beyoncé’s place in the lineage of black masters of the arts tasked with holding a mirror to the people and saying, “No matter what you’ve been told, you’re beautiful. You matter.” The only feeling more exciting than watching it again right now is the sense that she’s still out there somewhere, plotting even bigger moves.

An earlier version of this story said that Beyonce entered the stage to Parliament’s “Give Up the Funk (Tear the Roof Off the Sucker)”, it was actually Rebirth Brass Band’s “Do Watcha Wanna.”

Childish Gambino's "This Is America" has been one of the biggest music stories of the year. Premiered during Donald Glover's gig as host and musical guest on SNL, the song's eye-popping music video became a viral sensation, propelling "This Is America" to a #1 debut. In addition to being the centerpiece of a … More »

[Label: Posh Isolation | Cat#: PI209]

1. Music For Breakups (7:13)
2. Rush/Tinder (6:03)
3. Vanity Lights (First Crush) ft. Ecco2k (1:15)
4. (+46) Placing My IPhone X Facing Up To See When U Answer My Texts (4:16)
5. Stonewall Poem (2:04)
6. U Control the Ocean (Second Crush) (4:12)
7. OND_F.T.P. (3:51)
8. Love Economy/Anti Police Music (9:43)
9. Archive 1 “Spit Sugar Free Red Bull Into My Mouth” (9:54)
10. Blue Line 2 (112 Fridhemsplan) (5:45)
11. Rush/Wickr (4:49)
12. Archive 2 “Dm Excerpts Between @skaeliptom & @chloewise_” (3:25)
13. 5 Stars & Vanity Lights (4:20)
14. Final Crush (For 940524) (4:40)

For her "No Tears Left To Cry" video, Ariana Grande worked with Dave Meyers, one of the ruling video directors of the moment. She's teamed with Meyers again to visualize "The Light Is Coming," her new duet with Nicki Minaj from the upcoming album Sweetener (not to be confused with last week's Minaj/Grande duet … More »

Trust Beach House to make a standard-issue late-night TV promotional appearance feel like a druidic ritual. The Baltimore dream-pop greats just released the overwhelming new album 7, which may well be their best. And on last night's Kimmel, the performed the mythic, slow-bubbling "Drunk In LA," which is both a highlight of the album … More »

Take a listen to this short audio clip of a computerized voice speaking a single word repeated twice:

Do you hear it saying “Laurel” or “Yanny”? Opinions are mixed: some people report hearing “Laurel” and others “Yanny”. Both Vox and the NY Times took stabs at possible explanations.

Of course, in the grand tradition of internet reportage, we turned to a scientist to make this article legitimately newsworthy.

Dr. Jody Kreiman, a principal investigator at the voice perception laboratory at the University of California, Los Angeles, helpfully guessed on Tuesday afternoon that “the acoustic patterns for the utterance are midway between those for the two words.”

“The energy concentrations for Ya are similar to those for La,” she said. “N is similar to r; I is close to l.”

At first I thought the whole thing was a joke, like a circa-2018 rickroll. When I listened to the clip on my iPhone speakers and iMac speakers, I clearly heard “Yanny”. But then I plugged my headphones into my iMac and clearly heard “Laurel”. Weird! Even weirder: after unplugging my headphones and playing the clip again through my iMac speakers, I now heard “Laurel”. WTF? But then if I played it once more through the speakers, it turns back to “Yanny”. I’ve done this about 10 times and it happens this way every time: “Yanni” on speakers, “Laurel” on headphones, “Laurel” on speakers, “Yanny” on speakers. It’s like my brain remembers the “Laurel” it heard in the headphones, but only long enough to hear it exactly once through the speakers. FASCINATING.

See also the McGurk effect.

Update: Here’s a thread from psycholinguist Suzy Styles that explains what’s going on with this illusion.

In short, this #earllusion contains acoustic info from both names. ‘Yanny’ is clearer in the higher frequencies because of the clear signal for “y” sounds in F2. ‘Laurel’ is clearer in the low frequencies for F1. Play with your stereo settings and watch your brain switch tracks!

(via @wisekaren)

Update: Wired’s Louise Matsakis tracked down where the audio clip originated: a vocabulary.com definition for the word “laurel”.

On May 11, Katie Hetzel, a freshman at Flowery Branch High School in Georgia, was studying for her world literature class, where “laurel” was one of her vocabulary words. She looked it up on Vocabulary.com and played the audio. Instead of the word in front of her, she heard “yanny.”

“I asked my friends in my class and we all heard mixed things,” says Hetzel. She then posted the audio clip to her Instagram story. Soon, a senior at the same school, Fernando Castro, republished the clip to his Instagram story as a poll. “She recorded it and put it on her story then I remade the video and posted it,” Castro says. “Katie and I have been going back and forth and we both agree that we had equal credit on it.”

The audio clip in question was not constructed digitally…it was recorded by an opera singer in 2007.

“It’s an incredible story, it is a person, he is a member of the original cast of Cats on Broadway,” says Marc Tinkler, the CTO and cofounder of Vocabulary.com. He says that when the site first launched, they wanted to find individuals who had strong pronunciation, and could read words written in the international phonetic alphabet, a standardized representation of sounds in any spoken language. Many opera singers know how to read IPA, because they have to sing in languages they don’t speak.

Vocabulary.com has since added “yanny” to their site.

It’s a shame (but not surprising) that almost all of the social media coverage played up the Team Yanny vs Team Laurel aspect of this whole thing — “Which of Your Friends Is the Dumbest For Hearing ‘Yanny’” OMG CLICK HERE TO DRAG THEM ON SOCIAL — because the actual story and science are really interesting and will stay with you longer than you’ll be caught in public wearing that “team #yanny” tshirt you bought through someone’s Insta Story (swipe up!). (thx, liz)

Tags: audio   language   Louise Matsakis   Suzy Styles

It's been five months since anything came out under one of the Oh Sees' many names, which means that John Dwyer has been slacking, at least compared to his normal heavy flow of material. Last year, he released two albums associated with his San Francisco psych-rock project, Orc and Memory Of A … More »

The only song that experimental electronic composer Tim Hecker has given us since his great 2016 album Love Streams is "Veil Scans," which he released later that year as part of Adult Swim's Singles series. Now he's back with his first new material in nearly two years, and it's also being released as part … More »

A few months back, Kacey Musgraves released her excellent new album, Golden Hour, and she's been making the TV rounds pretty consistently. First up was "Space Cowboy" on Fallon, then "Slow Burn" on Colbert," followed by "High Horse" on Ellen. Last week, she made her Saturday Night Live debut. Last … More »

Kacey Musgraves made her Saturday Night Live debut last night, playing "High Horse" and "Slow Burn" from her most recent album Golden Hour, which we named Album Of The Week back in March. A sparkling horse saddle spun in place of a disco ball during the live rendition of "More »

Grimes is dating Elon Musk. You probably know this because you're reading this on the internet, which is currently saturated with think-pieces and memes about Grimes dating Elon Musk. The unlikely news broke earlier this week before the Met Gala, which they attended together. Art Angels and Musk-eteers (an obvious pun that nobody, to … More »

Ariana Grande season is basically here. Grande has recorded a new album with Max Martin and Pharrell, and while she hasn't yet announced anything as concrete as a release date, the charm offensive has already begun. Grande has released the very good first single "No Tears Left To Cry," and she's dropped … More »

Paramore guested on Colbert last night and broke out "Rose-Colored Boy," a song off of their excellent 2017 release After Laughter. That LP landed on our Best Albums Of 2017 list, and it proved that Paramore continue to evolve with the times. More »

Veteran sonic visionaries Brian Eno and Kevin Shields, two giants of perspective-altering modern music production, teamed up for a single called "Only Once Away My Son" last year. They've just followed it with a new one called "The Weight Of History," which was released Saturday as a Record Store Day exclusive with the prior … More »

Smaller labels and organizations have been griping about the behemoth known as Record Store Day for a long while now. The latest to voice a complaint is the Chicago-based record label Numero Group, who published a statement today explaining why they were opting out of this year's event. "What started off … More »

Rapper Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN. has won the Pulitzer Prize for music. It’s the first non-classical or jazz work to win the award. The Pulitzer board on Monday called the album a work that captures the complexity of African-American life. Lamar has been praised and lauded for his deep lyrical content, remarkable live performances, and … More »

The party doesn’t stop on Confidence Man‘s irrepressibly upbeat debut Confident Music for Confident People.
The Australian quartet – fronted by duo Janet Planet and Sugar Bones and backed by synth man Reggie Goodchild and drummer Clarence McGuffie – do not relent over the course of 11 pulsating dance anthems, infusing each one with a heavy dose of campy, tongue-in-cheek fun like predecessors Scissor Sisters, Fischerspooner, LCD Soundsystem, and CSS.
Taking additional cues from late-’80s and early-’90s club kids like Tom Tom Club (“Bubblegum”) and Deee-Lite (“C.O.O.L. Party”), they focus on addictive rhythms, pulsing beats, and deceptively simple lyrical earworms…

105 MB  320 ** FLAC

…hypnotizing like raving snake-charmers. Much of the group’s allure is owed to their vocalists, who trade lines in a fashion that resembles a neon-washed update of Scissor Sisters’ Jake Shears and Ana Matronic.
On her own, Janet Planet is a scene-stealer, nonchalantly tossing out outrageous lines about boring boy-toys (“Boyfriend [Repeat]” and “Better Sit Down Boy”) and wild shindigs where she once saw someone stick a light bulb where it didn’t belong (“C.O.O.L. Party”). Meanwhile, Sugar Bones marries the deliveries of both Shears and LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy, most notably on the winking “Don’t You Know I’m in a Band,” the joyous closer “Fascination,” and the throbbing, Fatboy Slim-indebted “Catch My Breath.” From the synth drone and beat-pop on opener “Try Your Luck” to the disco glam rave-up of “All the Way,” it’s clear that Confidence Man have just one goal in mind: A sweaty, physical response to this throbbing, inspirational ear candy. Even if listeners lack that namesake self-assurance that the band seem to care so much about, by the end of Confident Music for Confident People, they might believe they can achieve anything with this album as their effortlessly cool soundtrack.

"Juicy Socks" is Cherry Glazerr’s first release since last year's Apocalipstick, their second album and first for Secretly Canadian. On that record, the California trio made their foray into guitar-heavy, psychedelic punk. The new single is heavier and certainly more beholden to '90s alt rock (think the Breeders or Plumtree). But Clem Creevy doesn’t stray … More »

Janelle Monáe's new album, Dirty Computer, is due at the end of the month. It's her first since 2013's The Electric Lady, and we've already heard singles "Make Me Feel" and "Django Jane," both of which came equipped with awesome videos. Since those tracks debuted, we learned that Prince worked on Dirty Computer, … More »

Damien Jurado's last LP, 2016's Visions Of Us On The Land, finished up a trilogy of albums that began in 2012 with Maraqopa. That means that The Horizon Just Laughed, which the Seattle singer-songwriter just announced today, is the start of a whole new chapter in his career. Fittingly, it's also the first self-produced album … More »

In Japan, where 27.3% of the population is 65 or older, elderly women are committing petty crimes like shoplifting in order to go to jail to find care and community that is increasingly denied them elsewhere. Japan’s jails are becoming nursing homes.

Why have so many otherwise law-abiding elderly women resorted to petty theft? Caring for Japanese seniors once fell to families and communities, but that’s changing. From 1980 to 2015, the number of seniors living alone increased more than sixfold, to almost 6 million. And a 2017 survey by Tokyo’s government found that more than half of seniors caught shoplifting live alone; 40 percent either don’t have family or rarely speak with relatives. These people often say they have no one to turn to when they need help.

Even women with a place to go describe feeling invisible. “They may have a house. They may have a family. But that doesn’t mean they have a place they feel at home,” says Yumi Muranaka, head warden of Iwakuni Women’s Prison, 30 miles outside Hiroshima. “They feel they are not understood. They feel they are only recognized as someone who gets the house chores done.”

All photos by Shiho Fukada. The first photo is of Mrs. F, aged 89, who stole “rice, strawberries, cold medicine”. She says: “I was living alone on welfare. I used to live with my daughter’s family and used all my savings taking care of an abusive and violent son-in-law.” The woman in the second photo recounts:

The first time I shoplifted was about 13 years ago. I wandered into a bookstore in town and stole a paperback novel. I was caught, taken to a police station, and questioned by the sweetest police officer. He was so kind. He listened to everything I wanted to say. I felt I was being heard for the first time in my life. In the end, he gently tapped on my shoulder and said, ‘I understand you were lonely, but don’t do this again.’

I can’t tell you how much I enjoy working in the prison factory. The other day, when I was complimented on how efficient and meticulous I was, I grasped the joy of working. I regret that I never worked. My life would have been different.

I enjoy my life in prison more. There are always people around, and I don’t feel lonely here. When I got out the second time, I promised that I wouldn’t go back. But when I was out, I couldn’t help feeling nostalgic.

Tags: crime   Japan   photography   Shiho Fukada

Right now, a whole lot of people use YouTube as a de facto music streaming service, searching for songs on the site rather than opening up Spotify or Apple Music. But YouTube is planning on launching its own paid music-subscription service in order to compete with Spotify and Apple Music. And in an effort … More »

In "Space Cowboy," Kacey Musgraves has herself one of this young year's finest singles. "Butterflies," released concurrently, is not bad either, but man, I just about break down weeping when she intones, "You can have your space, cowboy/ I ain't gonna fence you in." The melody is so gorgeously wistful, the wordplay so subtly … More »

Saturday Night Live began its 43rd season with a silly, silly show for a decidedly un-silly time. Puerto Rico continues to suffer through the aftereffects of a hurricane without federal aid. The president continues to wage war on professional athletes who oppose police brutality, and millions of poor children just lost their health coverage. SNL touched […]

In a new video series for Vox, Christophe Haubursin talks to Tristan Harris, a former Design Ethicist at Google, about how our phones and apps are designed to be addictive and some strategies for breaking their hold on us:

1. Turn off all non-human notifications.
2. Change your screen to grayscale.
3. Restrict your home screen to everyday tools.

Ezra Klein recently did an interview with Harris that includes more of his views on the ethics of technology, phones, and social media.

Silicon Valley is reckoning with having had a bad philosophical operating system. People in tech will say, “You told me, when I asked you what you wanted, that you wanted to go to the gym. That’s what you said. But then I handed you a box of doughnuts and you went for the doughnuts, so that must be what you really wanted.” The Facebook folks, that’s literally what they think. We offer people this other stuff, but then they always go for the outrage, or the autoplaying video, and that must be people’s most true preference.

Tags: Christophe Haubursin   Ezra Klein   Tristan Harris   video

Last year, Perfume Genius had a brush with reality TV show competition show fame when "Otherside" was featured in an episode of FOX's So You Think You Can Dance. Another song from his latest album, No Shape, made it on to the airwaves last week in Denmark, when a trio called Place On … More »

If you were to watch the trailer for Paul Thomas Anderson’s film Phantom Thread without ever having heard a good word about it, you might assume that it is a stately period drama about a man and a woman and many beautiful, beautiful dresses. Anyone familiar with Anderson and Daniel Day-Lewis’ track record together would … More »

These two teachers, Jerusha Willenborg of Mueller Elementary in Wichita, KS and Barry White Jr. of Ashley Park Elementary School in Charlotte, NC, both greet each of their students with a personalized handshake every day.

I love watching these. I can barely remember to shake with my right hand…no idea how the teachers memorize all that.

Tags: education

The last time Natalie Portman hosted Saturday Night Live was in 2006, when she appeared in a digital short written by the Lonely Island in which she rapped about "doin' 120, gettin' head while I'm swervin'," killing people, and cheating on tests at Harvard, aka a regular day in the life of Natalie Portman. Last … More »

A standout from JPEGMAFIA’s new album, Veteran