1989’s lead single is an aggressively upbeat Max Martin-assisted number called “Shake It Off.” It’s roughly 28 per cent meme (if you’ve managed to avoid “haters gonna hate” image macros over the last four or five years, I envy you), and 72 per cent cliché. This is a pop song, so there’s no sense in criticizing the latter assertion, but I feel justified in positing that the former is a whole new level of annoying. But that’s not important. What’s important is the song’s lyrics and how they play into the larger problems with Swift’s image: who she is as a pop star, and how she handles that.

Swift has always had a penchant for self-mythologizing, her early music heavy on fairy tale endings (sometimes literally, as in the case of “Love Story”) and floaty white dresses. But in the past few years (specifically since that infamous Kanye interruption), instead of growing up and entering reality, she has cultivated a public identity for herself as the infallible victim of reality.

Get a load of the opening lines to “Shake It Off:” “I stay out too late/Got nothing in my brain/That’s what people say.” No one says that. The general consensus among music fans is that Swift has a good head on her shoulders. She plays guitar and she writes her own songs, as opposed to many other pop stars who don’t. That’s deserving of respect. Of course, it’s bad practice to assume the writer of a song and its speaker are one and the same, but ignoring the parallels between her lyrics and her image would make me an irresponsible speculative rock critic.

To be fair, she has gotten a raw deal in the press in a lot of ways – not surprising, given that she’s a woman. Her antics as a perceived serial dater have earned her some pretty vitriolic coverage that would not even come close to a problem if she were a man. But is she using her influence to critique the way women are depicted in the press? No. Swift is above that. Instead of criticizing mainstream media or power structures, she turns any “haters” into her individual villains.

A lot of the flack Swift receives doesn’t even have much to do with her individual persona, and is instead a byproduct of her role as a celebrity. The Faustian bargain of pop stardom states that all celebrities are vulnerable to criticism in exchange for riches beyond most people’s wildest dreams. Fair? That’s debatable. Negotiable? Not really. You can’t have one without the other. You can’t be a pop diva who sells millions without getting picked on once in a while. And Swift, let me tell you something: we don’t feel all that bad for you when it happens. Whoever said money doesn’t buy happiness had obviously never been without money. Money buys security guards, expensive food and clothes, fame and regard, exotic vacations… The list goes on.

Additionally, Swift is a thin, conventionally attractive, straight, white woman. She adheres, for the most part, to patriarchal standards of beauty and behaviour. No, there’s nothing wrong with that, so sit down already. This does, however, mean that she’s in a position of considerable privilege, and she’s got plenty of power to create and perpetuate harmful images, naturally leaving her open to scrutiny and harsh analysis.

Why, then, does she feel the need to set up straw men and make it personal? In most cases, Swift just doesn’t take criticism. Or even jokes. One may recall an incident last year in which Tina Fey and Amy Poehler lobbed a softball insult at her dating habits while hosting the Golden Globe Awards. She responded to this in a Vanity Fair profile, primly citing a Madeleine Albright quote that goes something like, “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.” She seemed to miss the irony that Swift is not here for women in the music industry, or women in general. She is here for herself.

This is especially pertinent in light of the music video for “Shake It Off.” Oh, the music video. The clip flicks through a number of musical scenarios, with Swift slotted into the lead role – she’s a prima ballerina here, a cheerleader there. A rhythmic gymnast. And, of course, a hip hop dancer. Dressed in black-girl drag (Daisy Dukes and gold chains), she is surrounded by the anonymously twerking asses of her backup dancers, largely women of colour. It should be mentioned that all of the ballerinas were white, shot elegantly, and from the front. Racist? Racist. She’s apparently learned nothing from the media kerfuffles spurred in the past year by fellow appropriation-happy artists Miley Cyrus and Lily Allen. And if her reaction to Fey and Poehler is any indication, she’ll respond about as well as the others did when someone tries to call her out on this.

“Why can’t everyone just be nice?” she seems to be asking, right in those opening lines. “I’m being such a big girl, taking the high road,” she implies with the chorus of “players gonna play” and “haters gonna hate,” once that first question has gotten old. What Swift is doing sounds suspiciously similar to something defined as “smarm” by Tom Scocca in a Gawker article on the subject from last December; it’s incredibly long but still worth your time.

“What is smarm, exactly? Smarm is a kind of performance – an assumption of the forms of seriousness, of virtue, of constructiveness, without the substance. Smarm,” he writes, “is concerned with appropriateness and with tone. Smarm disapproves. Smarm would rather talk about anything other than smarm. Why, smarm asks, can’t everyone just be nicer?”

He defines “smarm” in opposition to “snark,” a reactionary tactic of the oppressed, the young, the angry. Those without power. Those who, according to Swift, should stop talking shit about Swift.

A few years ago, a slightly different Swift plucked at a banjo and sang a very similar song to “Shake It Off.” “Someday I’ll be living in a big old city/And all you’re ever gonna be is mean/Someday I’ll be big enough so you can’t hit me/And all you’re ever gonna be is mean.” This sounds nothing like smarm. Maybe it’s because this bully seems to have done tangible harm. In “Mean,” both speaker and attacker are on a level playing field. We can assume that neither have over 44 million followers on Twitter.

When you’re the underdog, a little bit of self-righteousness is understandable. No one’s gonna begrudge you that. Taylor’s not the underdog anymore. She can close the Twitter window on her expensive laptop, call her agent, and buy an island or something. But she still feels the need to let us know that she’s the bigger person, that she’s taking the high road, and that all we’re ever gonna be is mean.

1989 comes out on October 27 from Big Machine Records. If you’re feeling brave, the video for “Shake it Off” is available for viewing on YouTube.

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While plenty of academics have tried, most layfolk don’t attempt to define “cool.” It’s enough to know it when you see it. Kanye West is “cool,” OneRepublic less so. The Velvet Underground is, The Partridge Family isn’t. But while “cool,” as both a construct and a slang term, has proved surprisingly durable over multiple decades, its offshoots don’t have as much staying power. Try calling one of your friends “radical” or “gnarly” in 2014, and watch them snicker. The latest iteration is “swag.”

Of the Top 40 set, the figure most associated with term “swag” is one Justin Bieber, the international teen idol who has spent the last year or so publicly engaging in behaviour that some pop culture observers might describe as “being the worst.” His fascination with the phrase/general concept of swag acted as a bridge between the two phases of his career – from Beatle-mopped, puppy-dog-eyed crooner to tattooed, debauched wannabe-Chris Brown with a semi-permanent squint. He’ll serve as a useful microcosm.

An important note: Bieber is white, and “swag” was not his invention. The term is directly lifted from black American hip hop. His (and his ‘handlers’) likeliest introduction would be from rap behemoths like Drake or Jay Z, but there’s an entire subgenre called “swag rap,” exemplified by collective Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All (OFWGKTA), famous for their fusion of hip hop with influences from both do-it-yourself punk culture and the weirder corners of the internet. Another candidate is Lil B, the Based God himself, who you almost certainly know from Twitter. Some have called swag rap a successor to the socially conscious, anti-mainstream, subgenre of backpack rap of the previous decade (crossover successes from this movement include Kid Cudi, Lupe Fiasco, and even Yeezus himself). While swag rap isn’t as rigorous in its rejection of the mainstream and its capitalist trappings, both movements can be seen as a reaction to the blatantly materialistic leanings of the gangsta rap that came before them.

It appears that the specifics of this history have found their way to Mr. Bieber. Bieber seems to have little interest in OFWGKTA’s surreal digital class clown vibe. His swag seems to largely involve layered hoodies, jewelry, and certain vaguely-defined affectations. “I’m very influenced by black culture, but I don’t think of it as black or white,” Bieber told the Hollywood Reporter. “It’s not me trying to act or pose in a certain way. It’s a lifestyle – like a suaveness or a swag, per se.” He famously employed a “swag coach,” another white man (Ryan Good, assigned by Usher, officially titled “tour manager”) to teach him different “swaggerific things to do,” in the words of the Toronto Star. But no aspect of swag intrigued him like the word itself. At certain points, it seemed Bieber has become a swag Pokémon, incapable of saying much beyond his borrowed catchphrase (see the masterfully crafted lyrics to “Boyfriend”: “Swag, swag, swag on you/Chillin’ by the fire while we eating fondue”).

Hip hop isn’t the only aspect of black American culture to be pillaged for sexy new vocabulary. A small cache of slang that’s recently emerged into the mainstream can be clearly traced to an extremely specific area: the black queer community of New York City. Years ago, “throwing shade” (to talk trash about someone) was something said by black drag queens, and not too many others. Now it has a starring role in E! Online and Gawker headlines. Your mom probably understands it. Currently in the process of making this journey to white straight North America are “getting life,” (to receive accolades) and the noun “kiki,” which refers to a very specific type of gossip session among friends. But you probably knew that. The Scissor Sisters wrote a song about it, aptly titled “Let’s Have A Kiki.”

There’s no point in going into detail regarding white appropriation of black “coolness,” especially with regard to music – it’s an old story and many of us already know the specifics. Led Zeppelin stole from Muddy Waters; before them, Elvis stole from everyone. “Cool” was born in black culture, specifically jazz, and appropriated by the white mainstream, presumably thirsty for a type of perceived authenticity that could only be found in the cultural product of those who have been oppressed.

We should, of course, note that the Biebs declared swag to be “played out” sometime in the fall of last year. He’s grown up, moved on, presumably. He can do that, as a white pop artist: take up aspects of cultures not his own, use them to further his own success, then discard them at will. Not even just the mainstream, if we’re to be honest; white rapper Iggy Azalea wears saris in her music videos, and indie rock group Vampire Weekend rode to fame on gussied-up afropop. Pop cultural cool is a museum in the truest sense – full of cultural artifacts “curated” (stolen) from disparate cultures by the privileged oppressor.

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For much of his career, Burial (William Emmanuel Bevan on his driver’s license) has had a reputation for making music that evokes a very specific emotional palette. His sound is abrasive, and in the past has made me feel cold and scared. There is a particular mood for listening to Burial, usually a solitary one.

With Rival Dealer, his newest three-song EP, Burial attempts to reinvent his music and try something different. All of the echoing gloom fans loved him for is still there, but for the first time his sound is uplifting and more hopeful. Vocals take the stage in this EP with prominence like never before, some of them exploring themes of LGBTQ-based bullying.

The first song and title track is a traditionally Burial-sounding song. The urgency of “Rival Dealer” is unmistakable and there seems to be a sort of battle between the airy vocals and the beats, each terrified of the other. “You are not alone,” a haunting echo, is heard often in all three songs. The last two minutes of the title track peel away to a synth lullaby, segueing flawlessly into the melodic “Hiders.” This ballad slowly rises into a heartbreaking ode to loneliness, repeating “you don’t want to be alone” in a pained voice.

The third and final song, “Come Down to Us,” is the climax of the album. It begins with a hollow church chorus and transitions within the minute into a psychedelic sitar loop blended with an auto-tuned gospel voice. Burial’s soft, muddy beats resonate subtly and add a sonic depth to the song, creating a warm and quieter atmosphere. “Come Down to Us” changes yet again and becomes a strong, twinkling sweep of synth, yet still remains deeply rooted in the ground.

Burial ends this masterpiece with one final statement, though this time non-musical. He samples The Matrix and Cloud Atlas co-director Lana Wachowski’s Human Rights Campaign speech from last year, “Without examples, without models I began to believe voices in my head […] that I will never be lovable,” bringing the EP to a close. The emotional progression of the songs – from fear to isolation to acceptance – almost resembles a concept album. With experimentation, Burial has widened his range while maintaining his classic sound. It pays off, and Rival Dealer gives listeners a newfound intrigue for his future work.

–Christian Favreau

Frankie Cosmos – pure suburb
Unsigned

Described by lead singer Greta Kline as “the pride soldiers show when they are returning home from battle victorious,” Frankie Cosmos returns after 45 digital albums (many of which consist of six to ten tracks, some of which are as short as 18 seconds) with pure suburb. The release of pure suburb is an exercise in setting vulnerability and honesty to music.

The backbone of the album is the stripped-down quality of the vocals and the revealing honesty in her lyrics. The album opens with “ballad of freedom” as Kline croons in multitracked third person “She feels in between/feeling and nothing.” Each track that follows is a raw narrative of Cosmos’ love for her dog, New York, and Ronnie Mystery (a pseudonym for Kline’s bandmate and partner Aaron Maine). The instrumentation takes a back seat to the vocals – quietly strummed guitar, purring organ, almost no percussion. It follows a tradition of twee indie pop, somewhat precious, but at least emotionally true. Most of these tracks would be right at home on the Juno soundtrack. Closing with “your name,” Kline reflects on the candid nature of musicality with “Your name is so great, I make the mistake of making it known,” then proceeds to burst into a chorus chanting, “oh Ronnie, oh oh oh Ronnie.”

The only flaw in the short and addictive tracklist of Frankie Cosmos’ pure suburb is that 17 minutes of audio leave you craving more. The songs evoke a connection with the listener that can only be reached through hearing such sincerity in narratives set to soft acoustics, such as in “bottom lip.” Kline’s personal character is so present in every track, and with lyrics like “Talk to me, I’ll tell you a gooey never ending story,” it even feels as though she’s singing directly to you. The melodies are simple but reverberate with deliberation as Kline gently nudges the boundaries of the minimalistic indie rock genre.

–Gelila Bedada

The Venetia Fair – Basically Just Does Karaoke
Unsigned

On their Facebook page, Boston hardcore combo The Venetia Fair claims that they aim to make music that is “theatric, chaotic, catchy, and sometimes a little silly but not too silly because it’s also serious business.” This translates to a sound not unlike a messier, less-ambitious Panic! At The Disco.

Well, maybe just a different kind of ambitious. Where Panic! makes frequent attempts at sonic evolution like their classic-rock forebears, The Venetia Fair seems content to record a cover album that invites unfavourable comparisons to those same musical giants. The first three tracks are unassailable classics of pop music: “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen, “Come on Eileen” by Dexys Midnight Runners, and “Rock Lobster” by the B-52s; all venerated and overplayed, fixtures on the sort of “100 Best Songs of All Time According to Baby Boomers” countdowns that VH1 used to air.

But apparently The Venetia Fair wants to hear them again. Unsurprisingly, they’ve got nothing to add to “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Their take on “Lobster” is weirdly dark, somehow managing to keep the song’s original campy feel, but siphon out the fun.

The back half of the album consists of slightly less venerated source material, but little improvement. Their cover of Green Day’s multipart pop-punk suite “Jesus of Suburbia” lacks the drive and dynamics of the original. “Camouflage, Camouflage,” originally by post-hardcore favourites The Blood Brothers, is short of a credible sense of urgency and mania.

Strangely enough, it’s “Come on Eileen” that’s served the best by The Venetia Fair’s puckish spirit. The original already had a bit of messy, bar-band energy to it, and isn’t hurt by a little extra volume. Not that this is a new revelation: the Dropkick Murphys have been doing celtic folk-via-hardcore punk for close to two decades now. Maybe that’s the problem with The Venetia Fair: they’re not selling anything you can’t buy better down the street. If you’re looking for a hardcore pastiche of Queen, there’s Foxy Shazam, and dramatic, kitchen-sink emo is far from rare these days. Basically consists of the worst types of cover: not bad, but exactly competent enough to make a listener long for the original.

–Hillary Pasternak

Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings – Give the People What They Want
Daptone

Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings is an 11-piece band whose fifth album, Give the People What They Want, does just that. Press “play” and snappy, toe-tapping tunes pour forth, peppered with Jones’ smooth, soulful, and strong vocals. The first of the ten songs on the album, “Retreat!,” contrary to its title, surges forward into this melodious and fun retro-chic musical world. Saxophones, drums, trumpet, electric guitars, and tambourine complement Jones and her backup singers’ peppy interjections.

The second track, “Stranger to My Happiness,” features Jones’ reprimands to the person who “stole [her] heart away.” This turned out to be bitterly ironic, as the song itself stole my heart away by really bringing the soul. Here’s a challenge: don’t dance, I dare you. The total 1960s-influenced ditty “Making Up and Breaking Up Over Again” is absolutely repetitive and catchy. You’ll feel like a co-conspirator with “Get Up and Get Out,” as Jones croons, “No one can know that you are here” to her on-again, off-again lover. The ninth track, “People Don’t Get What They Deserve,” brings the cool with its punch, staccato sax riffs, building crescendos, and a chorus that almost reads (or, in this case, sings) like a line from Queen’s anthemic “We Will Rock You.” If the proverbs have taught us anything, it’s that “Cheaters never prosper,” a lesson Jones reiterates in this ninth song.

If you haven’t picked up on this yet, Jones has a really powerful and supple voice. The album experience is like listening to The Supremes circa 2014, but much, much richer timbre-wise, and more tonally satisfying. Soulfully warm and comforting, like the aural equivalent of a deep dish of mac and cheese, this funky album is the perfect antidote to the dreary days of January. So what are you waiting for? Get the funk onto your feet.

– Reba Wilson

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I’m not talking about Top 40. The Top 40 is the Top 40, and it always will be. 2013 didn’t bring us much of anything new in the realm of the hyper-popular. There were club-oriented hip hop tracks, shiny power ballads, upbeat self-empowerment pop anthems, and more anonymous electro-bangers than you could shake a Moog at. We had a few pleasant surprises – the rise of a certain curly-haired Kiwi teenager, a last minute video pipe-bomb of a R&B masterpiece, a fox-ear-adorned novelty hit.

We North Americans like to tell ourselves that the new year is a time for new things, so why limit that philosophy to a gym membership? Why not extend this inevitably temporary enthusiasm to the realm of pop culture? Let’s get rid of something that’s been hanging around for years, that we all know needs to be put out at the curb: the music snob.

A music snob is not a hipster, if that’s what you’re thinking, though the two categories often intersect. Hipsterism is an aesthetic, a lifestyle for some. Snobbery is a mindset. The internet is littered with references to the term “music snob,” but few attempts to definitively describe it (although if you’re looking for a concise, zeitgeist-y laugh, go see what UrbanDictionary.com has to say on the subject). Suffice to say, a music snob is defined by their taste, taste which is obviously, self-evidently better than yours. If you listen to Led Zeppelin, they like Blue Cheer. If you’re into 2Pac, they want to know how you haven’t heard of Kool Keith.

Music snobbery has been raised to an art form in the past decade or so, creating a monastic class of scholar, lurking in both dingy record stores and the deeper reaches of the internet, hoarding information about obscure EPs and side projects, arguing about who started which movement, who’s been unfairly ignored by history.

First, there’s the state of indie rock, which has been one of the traditional domains of the music snob since its inception in the 1980s. Or rather, the term “indie rock,” which now denotes a vague sensibility rather than the status of an artist’s representation, much the way “alternative” was bandied about in the 1990s. The ‘indie’ hit of the moment is “Sweater Weather” by the Neighbourhood, which sounds suspiciously like the product of a less treacly, alternate-timeline Maroon 5. “Gangster Nancy Sinatra” Lana del Rey is corporate to the bone, but so convincingly dressed up in underground tropes that no one seems to care. Or maybe they never cared in the first place. The question is moot, we’ve reached ironic singularity, a point where it’s possible to derive as much enjoyment from something considered objectively ‘bad’ as something objectively ‘good.’

Williamsburg is nearing the latter stages of the gentrification process. Pitchfork gets tens of millions of page views per month, and it’s getting hard to tell where ironic appreciation of pop music turns into sincere enjoyment. Even those perennial hipsters over at VICE have gotten in on the act, recently declaring mildly-rebellious pop princess Miley Cyrus to be “punk as fuck.” The underground culture has lost its ‘under.’ Garish hipster Dadaism, once the province of fringe acts, has made it into the music videos our younger sisters are watching.

What I’m saying is that taste is irrelevant at the moment. Loudly irrelevant. Those long, Talmudic arguments over credibility and ‘selling out’ have been rendered moot. We need to take off the sunglasses. Attitude-wise, we need less Velvet Underground, more Meatloaf, more Celine Dion, hell, more Billy Joel. I myself used to belong to this class of people who defined themselves in opposition to the masses of ‘sheeple’ who listened to pop radio on purpose. How dare they enjoy music specifically created to be enjoyed? How dare they give over their ears to the tyranny of Katy Perry? Looking back, it all smacks of an uncomfortable elitism. What right do I have to look down on someone for not devoting themselves to the ‘correct’ musicians, as determined by a bunch of largely white affluent urbanites with nothing better to do than barricade themselves in an ivory tower of basement shows and unfindable blogs?

I propose we strip away the outer trappings of the music snob to leave the creature hidden at its core exposed to the open air: the music geek. One who is not defined by attitude, but enthusiasm. A music snob might profess to an ironic appreciation for Miley Cyrus, her punk-rock majesty, but a geek can be an unabashed worshipper. Silly? Sure, but also sincere and enthusiastic. Really, what’s a snob but a geek with a few aggressive defense mechanisms? Using specialized knowledge as a method of declaring superiority before someone could use it to the opposite effect. Abandoning these protective measures in favour of vulnerability may not be easy, but possibly worth the risk in the end.

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If Kashka’s new album Bound was taken off of iTunes, it’s likely only her close relatives would notice. Most people would argue that being in the top ten albums on iTunes or having over 100,000 views on YouTube does not mean that your music is better in any way, but a certain amount of recognition often correlates with an artist’s significance. After all, a little fame does mean that you’ve managed to grab the public’s attention. And this is where Kashka falls short. Her music is not bad, it just doesn’t stand out enough to merit repeat listens or referrals among fans.

In Bound’s first track, “Never Had It,” her voice is soft and sweet, sounding a bit like a more acoustic Lorde. But once the track moves on from a string of “maybe I was a fool to…” murmurs, it’s only to get stuck in a never-ending repetition of “baby we never had it anyway” which makes you want to throw out Bound for good. There are original elements in some of her songs, as she blends guitar and piano sounds, using a tambourine to give it tempo. But then the beat will pick up in a familiar, pop-y way and begins to bring to mind upbeat trying-too-hard-to-be-indie elevator music mixed with a teenager’s Disney debut. There are two reviews online and one of them points out the “something modern” that can be found in the new album. It’s true that if you pay close attention to the background sounds you can glimpse that it was thought-through, but you have to be really looking for it. All in all, Kashka’s new album Bound is missing a voice of its own. Sadly, it’s the type of music that no one will remember.

-Rochelle Guillou

Various artists – Afrobeat Airways 2: Return Flight to Ghana, 1974-1983
Analog Africa

2010’s Afrobeat Airways: West African Shock Waves, Ghana & Togo 1972-1978, a compilation of rare tracks by Analog Africa’s Samy Ben Redjeb from afrobeat’s golden age, was an unexpected hit with the music press that year, and no wonder, considering the quality of the songs and extensive and interesting liner notes. If anything, the scope on Afrobeat Airways 2 is broader. It extends to 1983, and as such has a more varied sound, taking in cheesier 1980s tracks, like Tony Sarfo & The Funky Afrosibi’s “I Beg,” and Waza-Afriko 76’s “Gbei Kpakpa Hife Sika,” which even has some harmonica in it. This definitely isn’t a genre that gets much exposure in the West (aside from the influence Afro-pop has had on uber-white indie rockers Vampire Weekend).

Perhaps the only criticism that could be levelled at Afrobeat Airways 2 is that many of the artists from the first record appear on this one, like Ebo Taylor Jr., Uppers International, K. Frimpong, and The African Brothers – not to mention several incarnations of De Frank. With close to a decade’s worth of music to choose from, surely there are more than 15 artists out there worth showcasing. That said, the above were all titans of the scene, and the sheer quality of the tracks makes any attack on the selection a spurious one. Brass is present throughout (as is Doors-esque organ), but on opener Uppers International’s “Aja Wondo” it is particularly irresistible. The rhythm section of the songs is also wonderfully varied. The bass on Waza-Afriko 76’s “Gbei Kpakpa Hife Sika” is pushed to the fore, whilst the drums on Ios Issufu and His Moslems’ “Kana Soro” could have come from the heavier rock songs of the period. But the highlight has got to be Rob’s flawless “Loose Up Yourself,” which combines delicate guitar and outrageous levels of funk. The tracks on Afrobeat Airways 2 may be billed as rarities, but they nonetheless serve as a great introduction to the genre.

-Joseph Renshaw

Get Scared – Everyone’s Out to Get Me
Fearless Records

The emo of the previous decade was a strange beast. A generation of suburban bands took the sound of pop-punk, the aesthetics of goth rock, and the histrionic poetry from their high school diaries, and created a musical movement that was catharsis for a certain type of angsty teenager, and a useful punchline for everyone else. But that was in 2008. Decades ago in musical microtrend years.

Utah five-piece band Get Scared (Nicholas Matthews, Johnny Braddock, Adam Virostko, and Bradley “Lloyd” Iverson, and Dan Juarez), have apparently missed the bandwagon with their new release Everyone is Out to Get Me. They hail from the slightly goth strain of emo that borrows as much from 1980s metal as it does from hardcore. It’s a combination that’s worked before. The Used and From First to Last traded in similar tropes to great effect. But Get Scared is missing their undertone of real desperation. The vampiric undertones here are more Edward Cullen than Nosferatu.

Out to Get Me isn’t without its pleasures: “For You” is bouncy and pop-y. Like early My Chemical Romance, but maybe with a little added whine. Also erring on the side of accessibility is “Us In Motion,” which aims for big and romantic, with its swelling chorus and ringing wall-of-sound power chords. It’s when they aim to capture strains of depression and vindictive paranoia promised in the album’s title that Get Scared seem to get a bit stale, as if they don’t have much new to say on the subject.

If Out to Get Me had been released between seven and ten years ago, it could have been a bona fide hit, riding the coattails of flashier, more talented acts. But emo has had to evolve. Scene success stories like Fall Out Boy and AFI have made their comebacks recently, but they’ve done so by embracing new influences – hip hop beats and electronic dynamics. Unfortunately, there are no sign of that here.

-Hillary Pasternak

Blood Orange – Cupid Deluxe
Domino Records

Sultry, smooth, synthy, and hypnotic are all adjectives that describe British musician and songwriter Devonté Hynes’ most recent musical creation, the album Cupid Deluxe. With vocals from Samantha Urbani and elements borrowed from various genres – rap, jazz, and disco – the album is cool personified. Released November 18, Cupid Deluxe is part of a profusion of creative endeavours for Hynes; in the past he has written and produced music for artists such as Florence and the Machine and Solange Knowles.

Cupid Deluxe begins with a hypnotic beat and shuffling, reverb-laden percussion, including repeated riffs. Suddenly, suavely, Hynes’ voice pours in the lyrics of “Chamakay.” Next up is “You’re Not Good Enough,” a catchy 1980s funk tune with smooth vocals. Then “Uncle Ace” fills the room with sounds redolent of disco, updated for 2013. Vocals and jazzy saxophone solos combine with disco-inspired riffs to create a musical hodgepodge that can only be described as delicious.

Songs like “No Right Thing” and “On The Line” are more laid back, with the latter offering up a R&B vibe. Smooth saxophone and a woman talking in a French accent update “Chosen,” which might otherwise resemble a 1980s pop ballad. The album takes a digression through rap ballads “Clipped on” and “High Street.” The latter, about gaining inspiration from the streets and persevering on the path of musicianship, is a cleverly worded and intelligent song. The lyrics are most important here, instrumentals serving as a backbone.

Some films make you laugh and cry; this album does the musical equivalent, as it takes you on a genre-instigated tour of an array of feelings. Despite this variety, Blood Orange’s sound is consistently able to captivate.

– Reba Wilson

The post The Daily reviews appeared first on The McGill Daily.

This doesn’t seem to be the case for many of my friends though. Not that I am some university unicorn; I am by no means alone in this singles’ boat. And it seems perfectly plausible to me that, over the course of my relatively short life, I have remained single. I only started to question why this is when I realized that I am somewhat behind when it comes to dating.

I often wonder how others see me. I’ve been called pretty, and hot. I’ve also been called a bitch, and I’ve been called a slut (though not in so many words). One friend commented, “You go through guys like you go through drinks.” Upon seeing my surprise, he said that it’s “fine” because he’s the same way. That’s one impression of me, I suppose. There’s no denying that I’m flirty.

I once mentioned that I feel “backwards,” to a friend. In high school, relationships were commonplace but I wanted nothing of the sort. Now, in university, I see these same people gladly partaking in hook-up culture, with a ‘been there, done that’ attitude toward anything serious. Have I missed a step? As with sex, the thought that comes to mind is, “When it finally does happen, I’m not going to know how to do it right.”

Earlier this year a gropey young man at a club was asking me why I don’t have a boyfriend. “You’re pretty,” he said, implying that all good-looking people must have partners. He’s not the first to draw such a conclusion, and at this point the sweet coating of flattery is starting to wear thin. There was once a day when I was too wrapped up in the ludicrous idea of a person being “too attractive” to be single to really wonder about this question’s repercussions. Today however, I know that this isn’t just another backhanded compliment. What I see now is a very specific judgment, based on my relationship status. It’s made worse by the fact that the asker always points out my looks, ruling it out as a reason for my loneliness. This leaves my personality and behaviour as the culprits.

At this point it’s just easier for me to lie about my relationship status. Otherwise the dreaded question will follow: “Why don’t you have a boyfriend?” I may as well be asked what’s wrong with me. It’s a disguised insult, which I hope will someday cease being a part of my life. I would like to live in a society where the frequently asked question is not “Why don’t you have a boyfriend?” but rather, “Why do you feel you need a boyfriend?”; where two is not always better than one; and where being single is not just okay, it’s goddamn fantastic.

* * *

Media discussion of young women and their sex lives generally come in two flavours these days: micro and macro. Writing in the former category will usually take the form of an opinion piece or a report on the newest findings from the seemingly endless studies on relationships that magazines seem to love. In the latter category, we have shouty reactions to these pieces online (see: Jezebel).

Blogs like Jezebel and The Hairpin lead the shouting initiative, usually, with social media and the blogosphere providing the momentum to keep it going. It usually goes pretty quick (sometimes it can go longer: just look at the comment-section havoc wrought by Kate Bolick’s piece in The Atlantic two years ago, on how hard it is to be a single lady). By the time you read this article, the frenzy for the latest instance of this will already be over.

This time around, it was Emily Yoffe over at Slate who displayed a phenomenally fuzzy notion of the meaning of ‘victim-blaming’ by telling college girls that while it certainly isn’t their fault if they get sexually assaulted while drunk, it is their fault for being drunk in the first place. Yoffe’s article was published on October 15, and the ensuing media shitstorm peaked within a week or two. The internet has now moved on, but this is going to happen again soon. It always does.

Personal narrative is a powerful tool in the journalistic arsenal, perfect for bringing political issues down to a warmer, more personal level. But most of the widest-reaching media outlets don’t seem to understand how to use it. There’s a vague idea that it’s good for women’s issues (“women are emotional, right?”), and sometimes the editors will even go so far as to think maybe it’s good to have women writing about women’s issues, but the thinking seems to stop there. Writing about the college hookup scene? How about a middle-aged woman?

This isn’t to say outsiders have nothing to offer, but promoting their analysis over the firsthand accounts of people directly involved in the issue is all kinds of wrong and disrespectful. So at The Daily, if we use our space to publish an opinion about a young woman’s sex life, it’s going to be written by a young woman, as the above narrative was. And it’s going to come to a point about those old feminist chestnuts: choice and bodily agency. She wants to be single, she wants to be proud of it, and so she will be.

But we’re not done being angry yet, folks. Not by a long shot. Because contrary to those aforementioned publications’ publishing practices, personal narratives are not just for the white middle-class women whose voices are most often amplified and discussed by the internet feminism machine. They’re also for voices not so easily heard, not so well distributed – they’re not hard to find if you’re looking. The virtual world is full of blogs and online zines that consist of nothing but material from people who bring up statistics and interview subjects featured in articles written by privileged Atlantic staffers: lower-income parents detailing exactly how they use their food stamps, hijabis chronicling their bafflement at the stupid questions they have to answer from white girls.

So, yeah, we are saying there’s journalistic value in a blog. Sure, the internet’s Sturgeon’s Law-esque (that’s the “90 per cent of everything is crap” one) tendencies have given the blogosphere a bad name. But where else can you find pure, unadulterated learned experience? There are microaggressions to chronicle and evolving opinions and discussions to archive. It’s fascinating, it’s important, it’s worthy of wider exposure. Why are we using our mainstream media to tell girls what to do with their bodies, when we could be using it to tell each other stories? And, you know, maybe learn something new.

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Matador / Other People

After a rather forgettable three-song EP, producer Nicolas Jaar and guitarist Dave Harrington team up once again for their debut album, Psychic.

The journey into Harrington and Jaar’s ambient world begins with “Golden Arrow.” Its slow, varied build, lasting a total of 11 minutes, may not be a casual listener’s favourite song, but its importance to the album as a whole is immeasurable. Not only does “Golden Arrow” act as an apt introduction to the atmospheric album, it also gives insight as to where Jaar is heading as an artist. Harrington’s experimental guitar riffs, jumping back and forth from bouncy to mellow, complement Jaar’s organ-like production, creating a perfectly full and haunting sound.

The album hits other high points with “Heart” and “Paper Trails,” both featuring a mix of soft, feel-good guitar licks with airy vocals and synth. Shortly after, the album loses its momentum. “Freak Go Home” is similar to “Golden Arrow,” although it lacks a sense of direction. To be fair, there are brief redeeming moments within the song, but, as a whole, it doesn’t keep up with the rest of the album. In fact, it’s not until the very end that Psychic proves itself to be one of the strongest albums released this year, tying up all loose ends with its poppy, echoing beats. The song “Metatron” concludes listeners’ short visit into the duo’s minds in a nicely satisfying way.

Psychic takes listeners on a journey, one that is sometimes lively and sometimes dark and unpleasant; as Jaar puts it, “the project’s called Darkside for a reason.” Psychic attempts to pack so much into a short time, triggering conflicting emotional responses within a single song, which may leave some feeling a little disoriented. This album may not please all first-time listeners, but for those who give it a chance, it’s an experience worth having.

-Christian Favreau

Lazer Kitty – Moons

Unsound America

Described as a Seattle “experimental-improvisational-space-rock trio who make soundtracks for the cosmos,” Lazer Kitty’s newest album Moons is nothing short of ethereal. The trio’s soundscape, inventive and textured, illustrates a cosmic sound infused with full bodied swells of synth punctuated with a crashing wash of cymbals.

Transporting listeners into the dark caverns of space, Moons feels like floating in zero gravity as breathtaking nebula swirl before your eyes. The album, sound-packed with a crossfire of synth waves, puncturing drums, and heavy bass, is designed for the fantastical mind. Although initially alienating, Moons grows increasingly more mesmerizing with each listen. The rippling instrumentals are mysterious and hypnotic, the abstract synth noises wander and rove, but not without intent.

From beginning to end, Moons offers a kaleidoscopic eccentricity. Opening with “Hyperion,” the extraterrestrial vibes launch into a funky melody – an eight minute escape into a galaxy far, far away. Guiding us into a lyricless space odyssey, track melts into track. “Dino Wipeout,” as the title suggests, has an ominous vibe, the guitar sombre but ending on a calming note. The celestial mood  combines a progressive rock rhythm that tinges “Pilgrimage” with indie psychedelic undertones and strikes a mystical groove in “Titan.” But, with other tracks on Moons, the band has deviated far from anything resembling a straightforward song, which leaves tracks like “Luna” and “Io” resembling something of a thought experiment. This album is most certainly for the audacious but earth-bound listener, with moments of cohesion, but  leaves more to be desired in terms of substance. The music doesn’t demand our attention, but it is these unfocused elements of Moons that make for perfect background, catering to a crowd that can appreciate the intangible yet abstract quality.

-Gelila Bedada

Blue Sky Black Death – Glaciers

Fake Four

Glaciers’ first track, “I” (Blue Sky Black Death is anything but creative with its track titles), plunges listeners right into its own world with a slightly cheesy 1980s-soundtrack-gone-dark sound. Sporadic vocals and echoing sound effects make Glaciers’ sound, like its cover art looks, eerily intriguing. At times beautifully engaging, Glaciers is an album with highs and lows, a compelling musical exploration that fails to reach as far as it could.

Blue Sky Black Death, hailing from Seattle, Washington, is a production duo composed of Kingston Maguire and Ian Taggart, better known, respectively, as Kingston and Young God. The duo is known for their unique artistic process, mixing live instrumentation and sampling to create a multi-genre, layered sound. Glaciers, their fourth album, has a musical fluidity reminiscent of Montreal-based art rock band Braids and electronic legend Burial, an intricate bubbly pop meets ambient dubstep.

The duo provides soothing ambient instrumentals, with echoing vocals that can be a touch overdone, like on “II.” “IV” features vocals bordering on the lackluster and repetitive, but redeems itself with textured instrumental layering – pretty much as pop as ambient electronic music can get. With only one of its five tracks under ten minutes, Glaciers lives up to the immersive goal of ambient music, sometimes to the point where a listener might actually forget they’re listening to anything distinctive. Only in “III” does Glaciers’ much-heralded hip hop sound truly take centre stage, giving the track a stronger rhythmic backbone. In fact, “III” is the album’s strongest track, combining the rest of the album’s light ethereal instrumentals with a solid bassline and vocal hip hop touches. Turning up the hip hop influence a notch higher would have given Glaciers the chance to flourish that much more as an explorative electronic album. As it is, Glaciers risks falling through its shaky foundation.

-Nathalie O’Neill

The This Many Boyfriends Club – Die or Get Rich Trying

Whatever happened to reverb? The alt-rock music of the 1980s and 1990s was dripping in the stuff. Sometimes it was used to dreamy and decadent effect by shoegaze and dream pop acts like My Bloody Valentine, sometimes to create avalanches of sonic aggression (see every grunge act ever). These days, listeners looking for layers of swirling fuzz to swaddle their ears generally steer toward the electronic end of the Pitchfork spectrum, where echoing, distorted synths are thick on the ground. But there are those that prefer their drone old school, originating from guitar strings rather than computer keys.

For this particular flavour of music geek, we have The This Many Boyfriends Club (Cas Kaplan, Andrew Miller, Lara Oundjian, Veronica Danger Winslow-Danger, and Evan Magoni, among them two McGill alumni and one current student), who clearly seek to revive the ancient age of reverb. The early 1990s indie-rock scene is writ large across their new EP Die or Get Rich Trying, in the intertwined boy-girl vocals, the burbling rumble of the bass, the alternating roar and jangle of the guitars. This is especially evident in the endearingly cluttered quality of This Many’s arrangements – everything seems to overlap a bit, as if each instrumental track is racing the others to a song’s finish line. At times, it seems that the band’s musical intake is entirely limited to the years between 1988 and 1992.

While This Many’s focus could be called narrow, there’s no questioning the fact that they know their little corner of the pop music universe exceptionally well. They’ve nailed the Pixies’ stop-start dynamics on opener “Alright,” and “The Swan” is essentially a slightly shouty My Bloody Valentine track with a bit of chugging guitar on the verses for texture. They manage to effectively straddle the reverb divide, using noise to channel punkish angst and ambient melody. Get Rich Trying clocks in at a skimpy 10:41 for five tracks, and it’s unlikely to garner a terribly wide audience. But anyone looking for alt rock nostalgia is going to find just the shot of adrenaline they need

–Hillary Pasternak

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“I’m so busy” has become a common humblebrag, both in conversation and in the social media echo chamber. “Yeah, sorry I couldn’t reply to your message. I’ve just been sooo busy lately.” (Check out #sobusy on Twitter sometime, if mingled desperation and smugness is your bag.) It’s at once an excuse and an invitation for commendation. The implication is that if one is busy, they are in demand, and their skills have been recognized by others and are being utilized. They are useful, and really, what could be better than being useful?

Allow me to condense a few centuries of philosophy and ideology into a ruthlessly simplified argument with myself:

What’s so great about being busy?

Well, you get stuff done.

Why do you need to get stuff done?

So I can get other stuff done.

Why do you need to get that stuff done?

So I can get things.

Why do you need things?

So I can be happy.

There it is. Things = happy. Busy = getting stuff done, in order to acquire things. Busy = happy. Now, that’s an ism, folks. I’m sure you can guess which one, but I’m not going to mention it here because it’ll get distracting. We’re not talking about isms, we’re talking about people.

This whole busy = things = happy equation wouldn’t be a problem if it weren’t for busy’s constant companion: tired. It takes a hell of a lot of energy to be available for email 24/7, cutting into your sleep time to write a paper, skipping lunch to organize a group project. Sure, you’re being useful, but you’ll run yourself into the ground. Maybe what we need to do is divorce ‘useful’ from ‘busy.’ Useful can be getting enough sleep. Useful can be doing fewer things, better. Useful can be taking care of your relationships with friends. Useful can be relaxing.

Why is this a problem now? Maybe we can blame it on the internet, because we do that with everything else. Granted, it was a lot harder to take so much of your work home with you (sometimes to bed with you) before laptops and smartphones became so widespread, but it would be lazy to just blame the little devil-boxes we surround ourselves with. They’re just symptoms. We created them specifically for efficiency. They exist so that there would never have to be a time when work is not a possibility.

Instant gratification, we’re taught, is a bad thing. It appears everywhere we look in our fast-paced ‘I want it yesterday’ modern culture, yet it’s something to be avoided at all costs, if we want to reap the more virtuous, satisfying rewards that come with hard work and sacrifice. Big rewards, we’re told. Those rewards are, you guessed it, the aforementioned ‘things.’

But more important than any of these complaints that I’ve dragged out of my privileged ass is the effect our glorification of work has on the people who have no choice but to be busy. People who work multiple jobs and hardly rest because things like procuring shelter and having enough to eat are generally essential to human survival. If we see exhaustion as the norm, we see no reason to help each other out.

And there are the stupid little human things that we can’t ignore, much as we’d like to. ‘Busy’ can push people away. When a friend you haven’t seen in a while asks how you’ve been, and you reply that you’ve been really you-know-what lately, they hear that you don’t have time to miss them. You’ve been too busy one-upping their accomplishments. And you probably don’t have time to hang out with them.

So tell you what: let’s violently reject ‘busy.’ Let’s all be lumps. Clear your schedule, cancel your plans, come over to my house. We’ll watch movies. We’ll cook something. We’ll tell terrible jokes. And we’ll be of no use to anyone whatsoever. There will be zero forward or upward motion. And you are going to be happy as fuck. Which is happier than a clam, in case you’re wondering.

Alright, no, I give. Ambition and work ethic are not bad things. But let’s stop allowing ourselves to think that they’re the only things worth our time. The number of people who know how ‘busy’ you are is not going to have any effect on your quality of life. So turn off your phone, go order a pint, and find something new to talk about.

Hillary Pasternak is a U1 History major and a Daily Culture editor. She can be reached at hillary.pasternak@gmail.com.

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Though often viewed from the outside as a boys’ club, there has always been a space for women in speculative fiction (an umbrella term used to refer to science fiction, fantasy, horror, and other fantastical flavours of fiction). Authors like Ursula K. Le Guin, Emma Bull, and Octavia E. Butler have been in the business for years, and they have all produced superb work. Yet none of them have ever managed to create a cultural phenomenon like the one that’s gripped mainstream young adult literature for a little less than a decade now. It took something a little fluffier to turn every middle school girl in North America into an obsessive fantasy fan.

It took Twilight, everyone’s favorite cultural punching bag. The ubiquitous vampire romance series gets a lot of criticism from readers and non-readers alike, and deserves much of it. The central character is given little personal agency, and her suitors are borderline abusive. But deeply flawed as it is, Stephenie Meyer’s series did something incredibly important: it opened the floodgates for a deluge of speculative fiction largely written by women, starring female protagonists, targeted at girls. As of now, the market is flooded with lady-centric fantasy and sci-fi: The Hunger Games, The Mortal Instruments, and Divergent, to name just the series that have been chosen for Hollywood’s mega-franchise marketing push.

Science fiction is associated in the mainstream with kitsch and special effects, but the most thoughtful examples of the genre use these to package explorations of abstract social, political, and philosophical concepts. Think of Star Trek; sure, we laugh at the rubber-suited aliens, the technobabble, and William Shatner’s scenery-chewing, but that’s not all that’s there. At the centre of that camp, there was usually a cool idea about time travel (Hugo award-winning episode “The City on the Edge of Forever”), or a theory about humanity’s conception of the divine (“Who Mourns for Adonais?”). Sci-fi makes it easier to think outside the box.

So sure, The Hunger Games has a distracting, easily-mockable love triangle at the forefront of its emotional story arc, and there’s no doubt that’s what drew in a good chunk of its readers. But we can’t ignore that this love triangle occurs in a post-apocalyptic North America, in the midst of a televised, gladiatorial-game that makes a neat mechanism for criticizing modern reality television. Katniss Everdeen, our heroine, is constantly aware of the camera’s eye. She even displays impressively savvy cynicism by playing up her relationship with one point of her love triangle to garner public sympathy and help survive. The ‘romance’ half of the paranormal romance genre is often disparaged, but when the intersection of love and dystopia can create such interesting, knotty problems for a reader to chew on, it doesn’t deserve the flack.

Why is all this important? A speculative fiction reader has to learn a new way of thinking, how to gather and synthesize information on the fly in order to understand a plot. Sci-fi helps us think big; fantasy is a way of examining the world as it could be, were it subject to a different set of rules untethered from our reality. Now, teenage girls are finding their way into these genres, twisting and stretching their minds to inhabit universes a few shades different than the one in which they make their home. They’re learning to think in ways that may, if we’re lucky, encourage them to explore fields that are sorely lacking a female influence.

That’s not to say that modern literary affairs are completely as they should be: The privileges and social conventions of our own society carry over into our fantastical media, in a form that is worryingly intact; it’s still pretty damn hard to find a protagonist who isn’t white, straight, and cisgender in the mainstream.  But it doesn’t have to stay like that. Science fiction has taught us to hope for wild, previously inconceivable change.

The post Why YA matters appeared first on The McGill Daily.

In a GQ interview earlier this year, Thicke offered invaluable insight into his writing process for the single: “[Pharell] and I would go back and forth where I’d sing a line and he’d be like, ‘Hey, hey, hey!’ We started acting like we were two old men on a porch hollering at girls like, ‘Hey, where you going, girl? Come over here!'”

Thicke’s made some noise about how the song was a parody of slobbering masculine behaviour, a “feminist movement within itself,” but that attempt at retroactive damage control sounds almost too silly to validate. Even if that was his intention in writing the song (somewhat doubtful, considering the above quote), few listeners were in on the joke. But you know, maybe we’ve got it wrong. Maybe this song is only being mistaken for a product of the rape culture it seeks to eradicate. Maybe its music video is a social statement. The clip features Thicke, Pharrell, and T.I. frolicking with plastic-clad models against a trendily off-white background. At intervals, the figures become obscured by oppressively of-the-moment hashtags – “#THICKE” and “#BLURRED LINES” – in red. When the camera cuts to a balloon arrangement reading “ROBIN THICKE HAS A BIG D—,” it’s quite obviously a reference to his “Desire to dismantle the patriarchy.” We all had it wrong, man. Those nipples in the unrated version were standing up for women’s rights. Maybe. Probably not.

To make matters worse, “Lines” is an entirely unnecessary song. There’s nothing here you can’t get elsewhere. If you’re interested in an ass-shaking, cowbell-studded groove, listen to “Got to Give it Up” by Marvin Gaye, from which Robin Thicke drew his “inspiration” (there’s a lawsuit brewing, in fact). If you prefer your 1970s throwbacks with a guest spot from Pharrell, listen to Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky.” You’ll get more of him.

I should hate this song. “Blurred Lines” has sleaze embedded in its DNA, an anthem for every creepy guy you’ve avoided eye contact with on public transportation or at a party. Most of its redeeming qualities were lifted wholesale from another, better track, adding another entry to that titanic ledger where they record instances of white people stealing work from black musicians. For the most part, I am not a fan of misogyny and cultural appropriation. Just not my thing. I should hate this song. Right?

But, well…I don’t. I listened to it frequently and on purpose throughout the summer, enough that I had T.I.’s gentleman-pervert guest spot (“One thing that I ask of you / Let me be the one you back that ass into”) memorized. I danced to it. My friends and I took great pleasure in blasting the song at top volume in my car, giddily awaiting the opportunity to bark “YOU THE HOTTEST BITCH IN THIS PLACE” into each other’s faces. We’re a pretty solidly feminist lot. The type that get called “killjoys” on the internet. What are we doing dancing as an overly-slick blue-eyed soul singer tries to holler at us from the passenger’s side of his best friend Pharrell’s ride? Shouldn’t we be running?

The truth of it is that music is not political. It doesn’t care about your deeply held personal convictions. Lyrics can be political, the people who make music certainly have their views, but the noise, the sounds that themselves compose beat and melody – the timbre of a singer’s voice, the thrum of a bassline, the crash of a snare drum – they don’t care about your feelings on the patriarchy. Noise is nature. And nature doesn’t care if you don’t like the words packaged with the vibrations. Nature wants you to shake what your evolutionary foremothers gave you. (This is all, of course, anecdotal. There’s plenty of actual, serious debate in the neurological field over whether musical taste is innate or acquired. This is not the place to find that.)

But we’re human beings. Most of us don’t live in nature. We live in society, because it’s in our nature to screw around with nature. And society has a bit of a problem with pushy, entitled men who know exactly what rhymes with “hug me,” mainly because they’ve grown up surrounded by endless books and movies and songs that argue that even as her lips say “no,” her eyes are saying “yes.” Nothing exists in a vacuum. Do I really want to give my YouTube views to one of these guys?

So how do we deal with this? There are plenty of folk out there who will probably just tell us to turn our brains off and dance. It’s just music. Don’t bring your “rape culture” into this. You’re depressing us. It’s hard to protest against that. Entertainment should be an escape for those who need it.

But maybe circle back around once you’ve had enough of escaping. Maybe look up the lyrics to your favorite songs. There’s no way to completely cleanse your cultural intake of material that doesn’t align with your politics unless you’re willing to take up residence in a cave and retreat completely from pop culture. Just know what you’re listening to, where it comes from. Talk about it. It’s not going to be easy. People will probably find you annoying, say that you’re making them “uncomfortable.” But if the patriarchy’s comfortable, it’ll never leave. Maybe it’s inevitable that we’re all beaten down by the inexorable, heaving waves of popular opinion. Maybe we will allow our pointy, angry edges to be sanded down. But that’s later. We’re young now, right? We’ve got energy. So sure, go dancing. But keep your brain turned on.

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As this music festival nears its seventh birthday, it seems that the name ‘Osheaga’ has permanently entered Montreal’s music vocabulary and is now walking the fine line to becoming a summertime cliché. With the promise of offering a “world-class European-style” event, the Osheaga music and arts festival stands as the largest festival of its kind in Canada. It will be taking place amongst the stunning greenery of Montreal’s Parc Jean-Drapeau on Île Sainte-Hélène.

This year’s headlining artists span a spectrum of musical genres. From indie rock to hip hop, the 2013 lineup brings together numerous favourites from around the globe, making it surely impossible to see it all. Headliners include The Cure, Phoenix, Mumford and Sons, Beach House, New Order, Vampire Weekend, and Kendrick Lamar, with many more such as Florence and the Machine and The Weeknd likely to be announced in the coming weeks.

Fresh and local bands not to be missed include electronic music group A Tribe Called Red, who blend instrumental hip hop, reggae, and dubstep-influenced dance music with elements of traditional First Nations music, particularly vocal drumming and chanting. From the international music scene, Osheaga has plucked artists such as American rapper and lyricist Azealia Banks, England’s folk punk singer-songwriter Frank Turner, and Ireland’s indietronica group Nightbox. The festival also caters to those sporting a twin fetish, featuring the indie rock sister act Tegan and Sara as well as the electro-house EC Twins.

With three-day festival passes starting at $235, and a range of corporate sponsors that reads like a brand-recognition eye exam (H&M, Bacardi, Coca Cola), this crown jewel of Canada’s mainstream-for-the-cool-kids music scene better deliver. Osheaga will run from August 2 to 4.

Piknic Electronik

Enjoy jamming to electronic beats? If so, keep your eyes (and ears of course) open for this year’s tenth edition of Piknic Electronik at Parc Jean-Drapeau. An electronic music fest that runs every summer from May to September, Piknic invites you to check out a host of DJs, both international and local, who play an eclectic array of beats every Sunday evening. Think of it as the warm-weather alternative to Igloofest, where you get to bask in the long-awaited heat of summer and admire a snow-free Montreal. And seeing as it’s a family-oriented event where all ages are welcome, kids, parents, and grandparents are all invited to jam along (granted, just how much fun they would be having is questionable). Whether you’re done with school for the year, done for life, or have the misfortune of taking summer classes, why not kick start the impending warm season with a visit to Piknic?

Piknic Electronik will run from May 19 to September 22. Tickets are $12.

MUTEK

On its website, MUTEK describes itself as an “international festival of digital creativity and electronic music.” The MUTEK festival will showcase “sound, music, and audio-visual art.” MUTEK aims to be at the forefront of innovation, supporting emerging voices and presenting festival-goers with unique audio and visual experiences. For its 14th edition, MUTEK will feature both local and international artists, from electronic stars to budding newcomers. The ‘mu’ in MUTEK derives from the word ‘mutation’, reflecting this festival’s effort to embrace and stimulate creativity. From house to IDM to instrumental hip hop, MUTEK spans a wide range of electronic styles.

Artists performing at MUTEK range from the straight-dance-based DJs of yesteryear to more pop, funk, and minimal artists. Matthew Herbert, a British electronic musician, will be performing at MUTEK for the first time since 2005. Herbert, as he’s commonly known, was a legendary figure on the 1990s house music circuit, and his set will likely reflect that. Jamie Lidell, whose output spans electronic dance and more traditional, vocal-based pop music, promises to be more conventionally accessible for those festival-goers who aren’t as used to club settings. Andy Stott from the UK and Moritz von Oswald from Germany will round out the bill with their moody, minimal techno. With shows performed in larger venues such as Metropolis and SAT, MUTEK promises to facilitate the mood with immersive visuals and enthusiastic crowds.

Passes for the entire five days of the festival are $200, with weekend passes running at $120. This year’s individual ticket prices have not been announced, but will probably range from completely free to $40. Individual tickets will go on sale April 9. MUTEK will run from May 29 to June 2.

Fringe Festival

Populism and the arts had a baby, and they called it the Fringe Festival. Created in 1947 by artists who, feeling they were being excluded from the Edinburgh International Festival, decided they were going to have their own party and none of you jerks are invited so there, this intercontinental phenomenon is now in its 21st year in Montreal. Artists from the worlds of music, comedy, dance, and theatre are selected by lottery (albeit a lottery slightly tweaked to favour Quebec artists), and given censorship-free run of venues in the Plateau Mont-Royal, Mile End, and downtown areas. This year Fringe will feature such colourfully-named acts as Fuck You! You fucking Perv! (a performance piece by artist Leslie Baker, involving confrontational tap dancing and off-colour humour), How to be a terrorist (a solo show by Jimmy Grzelak, which is about the Boy Scouts of America), and FASTER Presents: The Elephant in the Room (a “modern day musical fairytale”).

Prices will vary for individual events, but a three-day pass is available for $30. The Fringe Festival will run from June 4 to 24.

Festival International Nuits d’Afrique

Since 1987, the Festival International Nuits d’Afrique has brought together the best of old and new musical traditions from across Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America. This year, the festival will be taking place in venues dotted across Montreal. With a strong commitment to showcasing top artistic talent, the festival has brought together many of the world’s greatest and most passionate performers, enabling it to remain at the forefront of artistic creativity. This year, the festival is offering a record number of 91 shows and workshops produced and given by more than 500 artists from 32 countries. Nuits d’Afrique is an affordable way to experience the music, culture, and personality of dozens of countries around the globe without the airports and jet lag.

The festival lets you pick and choose which events to attend, with packages of three shows on sale for $70 and five shows for $100. For those travelers on a tighter budget, the festival will also be offering a selection of free concerts between July 19 and 21.

Festival TransAmériques 

The Festival TransAmériques (FTA) describes itself as “multilingual, hybrid, [and] festive.” Combining dance, performance art, and theatre, often in a single  performance, FTA evidences the collaborative potential of the contemporary art world. The FTA’s mission for community outreach means meetings with the festival’s featured artists, workshops, and free parties are also included in its programming.

FTA’s programming is not only entertaining, but often includes relevant social and political critique. Take “Dachshund UN,” a performance installation by Australian artist Bennett Miller, featuring volunteer dachshunds sitting at a model United Nations. Quirky, yes. But, according to Miller, also a representation of the interaction, unpredictability, and racial diversity of the actual UN. Or Johannesburg-based choreographer Robyn Orlin’s piece “Beauty remained for just a moment then returned gently to her starting position…” which offers a critique of South African society. Besides its inclusion of international artists, the FTA also showcases local talent such as Montreal performance artist Dana Michel, who will be presenting “Yellow Towel,” an exploration of stereotypes of black culture.

FTA events are mostly spread out across the Plateau Mont-Royal and downtown area in venues including Monument National, Centre Phi, and the outdoor Place des Festivals. Some of the shows can be pricey, with tickets up to $60, though festival-goers can purchase packages at discounted rates. FTA runs from May 22 to June 8.

Suoni Per Il Popolo

Does your music collection tend toward the obscure? Do the sounds of strange instruments – or normal instruments used in innovative ways – make you wide-eyed with awe? If the answer is yes, head out to music festival Suoni Per Il Popolo. Self-described as showcasing “avant garde” and “experimental”sounds, Suoni Per Il Popolo promises to deliver all of the strange and the obscure without any of the pretension.

Suoni Per Il Popolo will take place from June 5 to 22 throughout some of the city’s best small music venues, including Sala Rossa, Casa del Popolo, and Il Motore. The festival’s website organizes its artists by genre, ranging from “hip hop” to “contemporary classical” to “noise.” With many shows in the $10-20 range, it’s the ideal opportunity to catch a glimpse of something unique without shelling out too much hard-earned cash. If money is no object, there is also the $200 festival pass, providing unlimited access to experimental soundscapes for the entire eighteen days of Suoni.

For those who dig anything folksy, be sure to check out The Black Twig Pickers for a thorough dose of Appalachian-inspired harmonica and banjo. If dark, apocalyptic droning is more of your thing, San Francisco’s The Soft Moon will leave you equally impressed and unsettled. Nouveau jazz libre du Québec, formed in the 1960s, provides a not-so-quiet reaction to the Quiet Revolution.

If you’re not here during the summer, check out one of Suoni’s off-season shows. On April 30, He’s My Brother She’s My Sister will be playing at Casa del Popolo. This show should be perfect for anyone searching for a interesting mix: the band’s song “Clackin’ Heels” contains guitar, cello, multiple vocals, and the sound of one of the members tap dancing.

Elektra

If you want to spend the first week of May floating around a digital soundscape, check out Elektra, a Montreal festival of the digital arts happening from May 1-5. Two elements – “electronic music” and “visual creations” – fuse to form the basis of the festival. In its fourteenth year, the festival attracts acts from all over the world, but also strives to include local Montreal artists.

The festival’s goal is to explore the new opportunities that technological advances bring to digital art. This year’s theme, “ANTI/MATTER,” asks the visitor to dive into a profound philosophical pool of sound, graphics, and light. It is not merely a spectator event, as evidenced by one of the festival’s key components – the International Marketplace for Digital Arts. The IMDA is an opportunity for collaboration and inspiration, giving budding electronic musicians with a penchant for design a chance find like-minded artists.

One of this year’s headliners is ATOM, the mastermind also known as Uwe Schmidt. The German musician and composer, praised by Wikipedia as the “father of electrolatino, electrogospel and aciton (acid-reggaeton),” will perform his newest album, HD, accompanied with wild visuals. Schmidt describes his creation as “spiritual, musical and scientific” all at the same time. If you seek satisfaction for the mind, soul, and ears, make your way to ATOM on Friday, May 3.

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Though their pseudonym was originally given to them by a graffiti-artist friend who thought it would look cool as a tag, the moniker has grown up with the artist. These days, Invincible connects their name with something that might be considered the opposite of invincibility by hip hop’s mainstream.

“When you allow yourself to be vulnerable, and to be in tune with the parts of yourself that are vulnerable, then that’s how you strengthen them,” Invincible told The Daily earlier that day, clad in a keffiyeh and a Detroit baseball cap, clutching a mug of tea at Casa del Popolo. “Even in our communities, paying attention to the voices that are made most vulnerable at the intersections of the most impact of oppression, if we focus on that vulnerability, then that’s how we strengthen our collective whole.”

Invincible got an early start in hip hop, writing their first rhymes at the age of nine, and beginning to perform in their mid-teens. When asked for their early influences, Invincible drops a few names that you’ve probably heard of (Gang Starr, A Tribe Called Quest, MC Lyte), but says their real inspiration comes from the Detroit scene. Rappers like Slum Village, Proof, Royce da 5’9’’, Black Milk, and eLZhi, who is often called “Detroit’s best kept secret.”

They moved to New York at 17 to join the anti-misogynist hip hop collective ANOMOLIES, home to “some of the best MCs to ever hold a mic,” according to Invincible. “The goal of ANOMOLIES is not just to critique the representation of women and gender in hip hop…but to develop the music we’d like to see and the images we’d like to see and the spaces we’d like to see.” Though they’re not as involved in ANOMOLIES as they used to be, Invincible still considers them family, and has featured them in the track  “Ransom Notes” on Invincible’s 2008 release Shapeshifters. “[The goal is] to not just ask for a seat at the table, but create our own, what I like to call ‘parallel universes’ where we can develop opportunities that aren’t legitimizing or reinforcing the current power structures,” they said.

It’s easy to see how these ideals might have influenced Invincible’s work as an organizer, particularly with Detroit Summer, a youth-led community–building organization. Detroit Summer was Invincible’s gateway to activism. They began attending protests in their early twenties, and would eventually move on to help coordinate the program, working on projects such as the creation of Detroit Future Youth, a network of youth leadership organizations.

It was hard to escape the feeling that Invincible was trying to save the world in a few too many ways. Throughout the night, songs were dedicated to the support of female and trans* rappers and Palestinian independence. Invincible proclaims that “we are the leaders that we’ve been waiting for,” and later follows it up with a derivative of everyone’s favourite change-related Gandhi quote. Invincible has some useful things to say, but are they getting lost in the beats? They’re obviously not the first rapper to grapple with the change-the-world-vs.-throw-a-party dilemma, but they may be the first to do so on so many fronts.

This is, after all, a show put on by the Howl! Arts Collective, which consists of “cultural workers, artists, and activists working for social justice via artistic expression.” Nobody can say that the audience was unfamiliar with social justice. The hipster/activist crowd was a bit too relaxed and amiable that night for hardcore revolutionizing, or perhaps they were taking a night off. The show opened with No Bad Sound, featuring teenage spoken word poetry filled with platitudes about uniting and rising up. Not the most polished or original, but passionate, and impossible to dislike. Next came the nigh un-Google-able A K U A, whose enjoyable one-woman show produced some low-key, mildly trippy R&B entirely devoid of politics.

In truth, there might be a bit of a disconnect between the performer onstage and their protest-happy Montreal audience.  “Protesting is different from doing revolutionary work,” Invincible told The Daily. “To me, protesting is one little part of things but some people confuse protesting for the whole thing.” And if Invincible can craft a show with a slightly more coherent message, there’s a good chance they’ll be able to recruit plenty more for the type of revolutionary organizing they’ve devoted their life to.

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At this juncture in human history, public opinion has oriented itself against most types of violence. Duels and fisticuffs for the lady’s honour have fallen out of fashion, the spanking of children is severely frowned upon, and aggression is often of the passive sort – the province of Twitter beefs. The world of sports is something of an island, the last place where it’s socially acceptable to physically express aggression, which is often encouraged. Concerns such as physical safety can fall by the wayside. Much ink has been spilled on the subject of concussions in hockey, especially since the reports that the recent deaths of NHL enforcers – players kept around for their skill as fighters rather than scorers – such as Derek Boogaard, Rick Rypien, and Wade Belak (all three died during the summer of 2011) could have been caused by chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). CTE is caused, unsurprisingly, by repeated blunt impacts to the head. While there’s been similar controversy regarding football (the attitudes of the college and professional football establishments toward their players have been compared to those of owners toward their dogs in dogfighting rings), that’s a bit of a different conversation. Impact is a main feature of football, an integral part of the game. In hockey, many head injuries are the result of spontaneous confrontation – not built into the game like hitting in football is, and therefore not regulated.

The lockout might have sparked a spike in player-on-player altercations, but the spectre of violence is hardly new to the NHL. It’s built into the game’s DNA, into the identity of fans and players. A bit of blood and chaos is seen as a good thing. A star player is hit, and retribution becomes a necessity for the entire team. Defenders of fights believe that fighting is a way to self-police the game; the threat of a fight prevents dirty hits on star players. And many believe that fighting energizes a team and unites the players, who know that their teammates will step up for them. Montreal and Vancouver fans express both the joy of victory and the sorrow of defeat with riots and flaming cars. Detroit Red Wings fans have been known to toss octopus corpses onto the ice during playoff games. There’s a feeling of solidarity that comes with this willing vulgarity. It’s become a large part of what outsiders see when they look at hockey, and hockey seems perversely proud of this. Even the more casual fans, such as my mother.

Perhaps as a consequence of this attitude, the NHL doesn’t seem terribly concerned with officially regulating fights. “The league position from [its hockey operations department] seems to be that it’s regulating itself and policing itself,” said Kevin Lowe, the Edmonton Oilers president of hockey operations, to the Globe and Mail. “I don’t think there will be any changes and it has to come from the players to push that agenda. From a management and hockey operations position we don’t want to see a change at this point.”

Maybe a bit scarier is the populist, give-the-people-what-they-want stance on this issue. According to NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman, “fans tell us they like the level of physicality in our game.” It’s not as big an issue for everyone, he says. “People need to take a deep breath and not overreact.” Despite a professed concern for player safety, hockey won’t take an anti-fight stance until they absolutely have to – liability-wise – and that day seems to be a long way off.

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For the longest time, it didn’t occur to me that this might be strange. I just assumed that this was how everyone else’s mind worked as well, and they’d all just figured out how to correct for it. I had missed that memo. It didn’t affect my life much in the early days: I was smart enough and the problem was quiet enough. I was spacey and fidgety, rather than flashily hyperactive. You all knew someone like me: shy, with a bit of an overactive imagination. Maybe more than a bit.

I was accustomed to spending a lot of time alone reading, or lost in my own head. I was used to talking to people my friends didn’t see, wandering through places that looked different to me than to my parents. Too many fantasy books and movies had warped my concept of reality a little: the fact that I was the only person seeing the ghostly orange lights along the New Jersey Turnpike didn’t mean they weren’t there. Wasn’t that just a sign that I was some type of chosen one? That I had a sixth sense of some type? Why are you laughing at me, mom? Adults found me amusingly precocious, and my peers were only a little bit wary. I made the best of it. Bring me a pretty rock at recess, and I’ll tell you a ghost story.

I would tell my father about the sea serpent that liked to coil itself at the bottom of our local pool, and he’d laugh. It became a sort of inside joke. He creatively christened it “Serpie” when I told him it didn’t have a name, and asked me for updates on its welfare on our drives back from swim practice. Happy to have someone listen to me, I’d make up stories about a friendlier, more active version of the monster. It would be boring to tell him the truth, how “Serpie” lurked in the deep end, dark body coiled and twisted, white eyes set in a head like a Chinese dragon, following me back and forth as I swam laps.
Trying to prove things like this to adults was never an option. History had taught me that they weren’t likely to take me seriously when I tried to talk about my more abstract thoughts, especially the semi-invisible things. Something completely invisible, such as my short attention span, didn’t have a chance. It was easier to let my parents and teachers think that I was lazy, that I was forgetful, that my head was in the clouds.

Then I got older. My letter for Hogwarts never came, and I was never swept onto a dragon’s back to save an alternate dimension from evil. My fantasy obsession subsided, and was eventually eclipsed by fixations with pop culture and history. At some point, I stopped seeing elves in the shrubbery. My grades dropped. That was what landed me in a psychiatrist’s office, being told that, among other things, I had Attention Deficit Disorder. I was given all the normal prescriptions, and it was a bit like someone had tied my soapy balloon to my wrist with a ribbon. It still slipped away from me, but recovering it was faster and easier.

In the beginning, this was a relief. To know that I wasn’t normal. To know that I wasn’t just lazy. I wasn’t shy about telling teachers. It wasn’t an excuse, in my mind, though it might have sounded that way sometimes. I felt I was just explaining. Giving a perfectly plausible reason as to why I couldn’t focus on a conversation, or finish a chapter of my textbook. But this was not something that the average high school teacher wants to hear. “Doesn’t everybody have that these days?” one math teacher asked me. The scenario felt familiar: Hillary talks about her view of the world, adult shrugs. Hillary keeps her mouth shut, wrestles with doubt, even though she knows something is a bit off. I’m aware that having ADD is a bit more plausible than seeing a cryptid in an indoor swimming pool, but the habit of doubt is just a little too well ingrained in me. Maybe there’s still a part of me that thinks my mind does work normally, and that my ADD diagnosis has more to do with whiny oversharing than genuine chemical imbalance. So no matter the great things I’ve heard about the office for students with disabilities – the workshops, the test services, the advocacy – I haven’t managed to stop by yet, because I’m not quite sure if there’s actually something wrong with me, or if I’m just imagining it.

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Thanks to the widespread internet access that’s come with the 21st century, we might never need those Tribunes to stay true to the spirit of direct democracy. Possible downside: now we all have to deal with the 24-hour squawk. And it’s not just about politics. Digital ink is spilled over the trivial and abstract. Anyone with a keyboard can become a cultural critic or philosopher. They can also vent their impotent, expletive-filled rage. This is the true nature of democracy: every voice a venue, regardless of coherence and usefulness.

But there’s only so far technology can take us. The media’s old guard (the big newspapers, magazines, and networks) still have something of a monopoly on respectability, and the appearance thereof. They’ve got the public trust, and more importantly, the name recognition. And the people they lend their clout to are the intellectual elite, whether they know what they’re talking about or not. Case in point: the trend piece. A print meditation that, more often than not, concerns the habits and tastes of youth, but is written by someone who hasn’t been young for quite a while.

Professor Christy Wampole of Princeton University, if we’re to believe her November trend piece for the New York Times, is not a fan of the Millennial generation’s worldview. “If irony is the ethos of our age – and it is – then the hipster is our archetype of ironic living.” She goes on to bemoan the perceived cultural markers of the class we call “hipster,” everything from digital photo filters (“Nostalgia needs time. One cannot accelerate meaningful remembrance.”) to a decline in the art of conversation (a particularly puzzling claim, for which no real explanation is offered). “Inwardness and narcissism now hold sway,” she wails, as if unaware how many times this very thing has been said of the young by the old throughout the ages.

This article is not written for hipsters, or even the people who have to deal with them on a regular basis. This is a middle-aged woman writing for others of middle age, disregarding everyone else. It’s a bit like sitting next to an elderly couple in a movie made with the 18 to 49 demographic in mind (i.e., just about all of them.) Often, the two will spend the movie whispering to each other: explaining plot points and references, recapping missed dialogue. They’re pooling resources to attempt to understand something spawned by a popular culture that isn’t their own. The couple can find this film interesting, but it’s unlikely they’ll ever consider it a defining work of their generation. They already have those. She writes with a whiff of smug nostalgia. “We did things right when I was young!”

So the technology’s caught up to Stasheff’s vision of completely democratic communication, but will the essentially hierarchal nature of our media ever manage the same? For the time being, it’s not likely. The view of the older, richer, and better-educated is still prized, whether they have the authority to speak on a subject or not.

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