Five Obsessions covers five of my favorite songs each month. Some new, some old. Some new to me, some revisited. Published in the middle of every month (typically on the second Saturday).
You can listen to the running list of Applied Science favorites in the Spotify playlist below and read about this week’s specific picks below that.
Quadry - “My Little Revolution…Ms Lucy”
Quadry is the rare rapper with an ability to match technical process with evocative turns of phrase, the processing of trauma and lived experience coursing through every tightly wound bar. The evidence of things not seen haunts his voice. “My Little Revolution…Ms Lucy,” the opener on his new album Ask A Magnolia, compacts the greatest hits of his style into two and a half minutes.
Elmiene / Dijon - “Big Mike’s”
Sometimes we speak of covers as a kind of cheating. Less resonant. Less important. As if authorship and performance deserve different premiums. We prize singer songwriters. “True” auteurs. The soul-bearing types whose lyrics and voices intertwine in service of something higher. It can be easy to write off covers and famous interpolations. They pose safe bets, music’s equivalent to Hollywood’s famous IP fetish.
Bold faced economic incentives and perceived creative bankruptcy tend to obscure the emotional value that reinterpretation can bring to an existing composition. A great voice delivering another’s words can cut deeper when they’re truly felt. What’s more, a great cover can serve as an entry point to an unfamiliar original, each version highlighting different aspects of a great song.
While listening to a set of live recordings by emerging British singer Elmiene, I encountered “Big Mike’s” for the first time. I’d missed Dijon’s original when it came out during the pandemic. Elmiene’s live cover is unlikely to become a charting hit like some of the other songs mentioned above. Both versions are absolutely brilliant. While Dijon’s mushroom soul makes “Big Mike’s” pop and distort with the energy of the slowest part of a radioactive L.A. summer day, Elmiene imbues the same source with a confessional tone, melting the world away from him and his love. Elmiene’s more direct delivery highlights the honest beauty of Dijon’s words, setting previously muted details authored by one of this generation’s best songwriters in high relief.
(Worth noting as well that Elmiene has proven a serious knack for special covers early in his career, with last year’s cover of Jeff Buckley’s “Lover You Should Have Come Over” giving a previous example of his eclecticism.)
Tyler, the Creator - “NOID”
In last month’s Numbers on the Board, I marked Tyler’s steady rise from internet rap sensation to chart topper. With his most recent album CHROMAKOPIA, he has completed a rare ascent, achieving traditional stardom without bending to convention. No big radio hits. No catering to safe commerciality in his musical choices. No ill-advised features or ill-fitting brand collaborations. With the exception of his fourth album Cherry Bomb, Tyler has grown in popularity and esteem with each project, expanding his production palette, maturing lyrically, exploring new visual aesthetics, and conquering conventional media platforms few rappers of his generation have accessed.
With such success comes greater notoriety. Notoriety breeds unwanted attention. Paranoia breeds in the festering heat of unwanted attention.
CHROMAKOPIA’s lead single “NOID” echoes Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” (from classic album Paranoid) in its sparse, fuzzy guitar-driven track. Its lyrics feel like an addition to a great canon of paranoiac pop. A worthy entry point to an album about figuring out how to grow up now that you have little left to prove to the public.
A related tangent. Years ago, I noticed a thread running through Michael Jackson’s music. A spine of different sorts of paranoia. Distrust of lovers (“This Place Hotel,” “Billie Jean,” “Chicago,” “Dangerous”). Distrust of friends, acquaintances, and onlookers (“Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin”). Distrust of self (“Man in the Mirror”). Distrust of the media (“Scream,” “Leave Me Alone,” “Tabloid Junkie,” “Xscape”). Distrust of the very fabric of reality (“Thriller,” “Stranger In Moscow”). Many of these forms of fear intersect and overlap, spinning up a web of suspicion that inextricably tangled Jackson’s life and art.
As this particular strain evolves over Jackson’s catalog, one could map its changes to the evolution of surveillance technology, the rapid multiplication of 24-hour-media sources, the politicization of everything, and, ultimately, the elevation of fame to the central religion of American life. There is at least an essay and perhaps more in charting these historical shifts from the late ‘70s through the early 2000s against the course of Jackson’s music. For now, there is at very least this playlist I made.
Phoenix James - “digital” / “contact high”
Though singer/producer Phoenix James’ available catalog is limited, her recent singles “Digital” and “Contact High” point to the polarities of her soulful continuum. “Digital” channels Prince at his high pitched, alter ego-embodying oddity. “Contact High” hews traditional, emitting a warmth that calls back to artists like India Arie.
Of “Digital,” James told me it was “originally a writing exercise.”
“Oftentimes when I find myself a little stuck, I’ll give myself a prompt, and about an hour and a half on a timer to write a song,” she said via a text message relayed by her manager. “When I started the beat on ‘Digital’ I had no idea what it was going to be.”
“I started reflecting on relationships I’d seen in Miami with social media obsessed people using the portrayal of their relationships and friendships as social currency,” she continues “and the way it feels to be on the receiving end of that experience.”
“Contact High” bears none of the automatist quirks of “Digital.” It feels far more the product of low lit studios smoked with incense, expanding and contracting with the flow of a late night jam. Both songs show the remarkable potential of a 21-year-old talent already in motion.
Empty Shell Casing - “charlatan”
I imagine 95% of the people reading this newsletter are probably going to hate self-proclaimed “fort worth thug metal” band Empty Shell Casing and turn off “Charlatan” after a few seconds. For those of us that spend significant portions of our teens (also our thirties) listening to Korn, Rage Against the Machine, and Slipknot, the punishing, full throated, drop D tuned rage of “Charlatan” should feel like a well worn, favorite outfit.
Bonus: “This Is Halloween”
The spooky season has come and gone for most of the world. Not so in the Shaughnessy-Tanners household, where “This Is Halloween” remains my two year old’s most requested song (in spite of the fact that he has never seen The Nightmare Before Christmas).
(source: Fortune, David M. Benett/Dave Benett/Getty Images for Spotify)
“Numbers on the Board” is a monthly column inspired by Walt Hickey’s Numlock News, adapting that format for the music business. A dive into the numbers headlining and defining stories of interest.
Another milestone in a career year for a generational artist. At this point, there’s little more to add to the story of Kendrick Lamar’s resurgent superstardom.
In the beginning of October, Lamar’s “Not Like Us” broke the Billboard Hot Rap Songs chart record with 21 consecutive weeks at number one. It just finished its 24th week in the top spot. While ascendant songs by GloRilla and something from Tyler, the Creator’s new album CHROMAKOPIA might challenge, it feels like “Not Like Us” will continue to create distance from previous record holder Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” (20 weeks).
A brief thought on the nature of this sort of record. While musical achievement in the streaming age feels a bit like home run tallies during baseball’s steroid era (i.e. inflated), there is something objectively impressive about holding people’s attention long enough to top a chart for 46% of a year. With a Super Bowl performance on the horizon it seems “Not Like Us” could simply continue its reign, already achieving a cultural permeation that feels greater than almost any of Lamar’s other big songs. Such dominance is especially impressive in an age of tremendous noise and short-lived hits (though, perhaps, this is the paradox that allows a superstar with a signature hit to dominate in an otherwise noisy landscape surrounded by less memorable songs).
$397.20 - Spotify hits record high share price / The unbearable lightness of laying off 1500 employees
A few weeks ago, a friend of mine sent me a screenshot of a bespectacled Daniel Ek next to the headline “Spotify CEO Daniel Ek surprised by how much laying off 1,500 employees negatively affected the streaming giant’s operations” (the image that leads this edition of this column).
Naturally, I thought this was a joke.
Alas, it was an actual article from April 2024. (Ironically, this article is behind a paywall and, no, I am not subscribing to find out about Ek’s surprise. It is far funnier imagining.)
As I put the finishing touches on this edition, Spotify had touched a record stock price of $397.20 a share on October 29th, with analysts predicting room to grow. This bullish outlook must owe in part to Spotify’s rising audiobook market share, a new strength alongside their dominance in music and podcasting. The company that resurrected the recorded music business is now simply an audio hub with a mass of paying users.
Of course, in America growth alone cannot inspire runaway investor confidence. Nothing juices stock prices like finding fat to cut from the ol’ P&L, pensions, vested stock, and general livelihoods be damned. The ironies abound: While layoffs affected app functionality and daily operations, it’s clear that neither of those things has proven mission critical to the generation of shareholder value.
In July, I looked at the trend of festival cancellations in England and the broader raft of concerns underlying an uncertain live market. Costs form one of the least controllable problems facing well-established festivals and upstarts alike. When considering them in July’s Numbers on the Boards, I mostly thought of infrastructure and labor costs. I thought less about talent.
Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw broke the news that Kendrick Lamar and Rihanna both turned down Coachella headlining spots in 2025. The former is playing the Super Bowl and planning “a tour of major stadiums” after, in conjunction with rumors of new music. The latter is Rihanna and doesn’t need to do a fucking thing. Shaw expands:
“Yet booking A-list acts has grown harder in recent years. While major musicians headline festivals for lucrative paydays, the biggest acts in the world today can now make more on their own. Promoters and ticketing companies have figured out how to increase prices to record highs. While Coachella pays headliners $8 million to $12 million for the two weekends, Beyonce and Taylor Swift now gross as much as $15 million a night – and with better profits.”
This sort of cost inefficiency further reinforces my belief that the next five to 10 years will see a rise in niche festivals and smaller enterprises that attempt to recapture the original spirit of Coachella in all its scrappy, genre-mixing glory.
84% - proportion of TikTok users following small and mid-tier accounts 75% of popular songs on TikTok started with a creator marketing campaign
It is hardly breaking news that the current media landscape has a far more disjointed feel than in almost any decade since the dawn of television (perhaps the beginning of the concept of modern monoculture). Two statistics about TikTok bring stark light to what might have seemed contradictory notions even a decade back:
While big media outlets still matter, they are battling for space in the same way every creator, big and small, seeks attention in the current climate. The phrase “attention economy” has dominated media thinking for the last decade, but to see that borne out numerically by Pew Research Center’s analysis (pictured above) makes our present fragmentation crystal clear.
Regardless of how fragmented TikTok is, it is the new broadcast media. And, like all broadcast platforms before it, it’s going to be subject to heavy amounts of money getting poured into any and every thing promoted on the platform. Exhibit A: Billboard’s report that 75% of popular songs on TikTok began with some sort of paid marketing campaign.
On the one hand, these statistics mean that big IP owners (major labels, movie studios, video game publishers) don’t control the same dominant distribution channels that they used to, suggesting a more democratic, organic environment for virality. On the other hand, these entities and their proxies (digital agencies/marketing companies, managers, agents) still pay vast sums to promote content containing their IP, leading to dispersal of funds into many more hands (individual “creators,” small “publications,” and all manner of other non-traditional channels on TikTok and similar platforms).
Taken in a vacuum, neither of these statistics is particularly interesting. Taken together, they are a snapshot of an unprecedented media reality, one in which platforms are conduits controlled by their users, where programming is (ostensibly) not shaped by a central hub of decision makers, and where money flows freely and with little regulation to those capable of drawing attention. This landscape has largely dictated the nature of music marketing in the last few years and seems to be peaking in its efficacy. Conversations with A&R’s and marketers alike point to a general “no one knows anything” attitude across the business. At the same time, 2024 has been littered with more traditional success stories. While new stars Shaboozey, Chappell Roan, Sabrina Carpenter, and Benson Boone have seen their hit songs bolstered by social media, they have all put out tons of music over many years, toured extensively, and, in the case of the first three, been dropped by or moved on from their previous labels before achieving stratospheric hits.
When a business or set of ecosystemic conditions are this fragmented, it typically means consolidation and/or regulation are around the corner. With TikTok under continual scrutiny from the US government, the latter wouldn’t surprise me.
I’m more curious about the former.
It is easy to imagine what the reunification of television looks like. In the coming years, companies like Apple or Amazon could cut bait on unprofitable film/TV studio businesses and push to become aggregation solutions for the disparate apps and services that “unbundled” cable. These existing incumbents that could use their distributive might to force the hands of content owners, setting a logical (though perhaps farfetched) path to consolidation. It is much harder to imagine how TikTok coalesces into the new radio, unless we simply admit that the non-interactive broadcast paradigm is dead and gone forever. Terrestrial radio’s much prophesied slow death has not yet come to bear, so I doubt social media will replace it within the decade.
On November 8th, 2010, I saw Odd Future perform their first New York show at The Studio at Webster Hall. Packed into a tiny underground annex for the venerable, a bursting crowd screamed almost every word back at Tyler, the Creator and his band of Los Angeles rogues. In the age before I had a camera phone, my only keepsake was a massively oversized white OFWGKTA (an unwieldy acronym for the rallying cry “Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All”) t shirt I snatched from mid-air in a hail of merch flung from the stage.
At some point in the evening, Tyler shouted “Fuck every label and magazine here, suck my dick!” to a room bordered by the many A&R’s and magazines who would chase him in the coming months, invoking a set of corporatized zombies as exactly the sort of perceived enemy that fires up a crowd of diehards.
To date, Tyler and his loose collective had built a rabid following through free mixtapes, downloadable from their Tumblr. Earl Sweatshirt, one of the pillar members of Odd Future’s moment, was missing. (Reported to either be in juvenile detention or grounded at home, it turned out Earl had been sent to a Samoan boarding school by his mother after the release of his profoundly vulgar, viral mixtape EARL). “Free Earl” and “Fuck Steve Harvey!” chants rang throughout the night. A pre-show DJ set by Nick Catchdubs nearly set off a riot with Waka Flocka’s “Hard in Da Paint” and The Diplomat’s “Dipset Anthem.” Hip-Hop existed in a kind of chaotic transition, with single-focused artists like Flo Rida dominating sales, album-oriented artists like Kanye West reshaping culture, and artists like Lil Wayne and Drake bouncing between jaw-dropping raps and treacly pop in equal measure. Blogs and the nascent rap internet secured many emergent artists major label deals, but few managed to break through commercially after signing.
To glimpse Odd Future from that crowd was to see something that felt like a grand beginning. And yet, their music was abrasive, raw, and often hateful (their early projects are particularly homophobic and rife with punky provocations like “kill people, burn shit, fuck school” and references to themselves as Black Nazis, a topic I wrote about in 2012 and one that I could certainly discuss today with greater insight). Their aesthetics defied mainstream gloss. Their music sounded like a cross between Eminem, MF DOOM, and Pharrell’s more experimental tendencies, hardly the stuff of major label mood boards in an era dominated by Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, and the Bar Mitzvah-fied version of the Black Eyed Peas. They had sold out a 150 person venue. Could they sell albums?
Next week, Tyler is set for the biggest first week sales of his career as his new album CHROMAKOPIA lands somewhere between 250,000 and 300,000 units. With the exception of his third studio album Cherry Bomb, each of his seven albums has had a bigger first week than the one before it. His last two albums (IGOR and Call Me If You Get Lost) each debuted at #1 on the Billboard Album chart. CHROMAKOPIA will likely do the same. His is an arc like few others in music, a lesson in world-building and commitment to a singular vision worth studying (though profoundly difficult to emulate). While Odd Future disintegrated and only launched two superstars (Tyler and Frank Ocean), its legacy remains a lesson in audience cultivation, embodied in Tyler’s ever-more popular music, his clothing empire, and his festival, Camp Flog Gnaw, now in its 10th year.
A still from the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine,” my two year old’s current obsession (source: Variety).
Five Obsessions covers five of my favorite songs each month. Some new, some old. Some new to me, some revisited. Published in the middle of every month (typically on the second Saturday).
You can listen to the running list of Applied Science favorites in the Spotify playlist below and read about this week’s specific picks below that.
Before any normal proceedings, I have to acknowledge the untimely passing of Brownsville, Brooklyn rapper Ka. I wrote about Ka at great length last year. I have long admired his music, his commitment to a kind of pure artistry that treats commerce as a welcome byproduct but rarely an end in itself. A former firefighter by day, Ka spent the last two decades crafting on of rap’s singular catalogs, a labyrinth of poetic crime narratives and personal reflections imbued with the entire weight of the history. Great literature, religion, folklore, mythology, mysticism—all the world’s intellectual rivers seemed to flow through Ka at different times. Of his art, I wrote:
“Ka’s creative lineage takes root in the sort of music that inspired me as a teenager, sparking misguided designs on glory in this business: Hip-hop that didn’t need the validation of a Grammy stage. A devout student of the great rappers that preceded and surrounded him, Ka cuts the figure of an esoteric Chester Himes type, a grizzled griot conjuring criminals and antiheroes through shadows of myth and memory. On each of his albums, he plays the steely, sorrowful narrator, stitching together haunted details and jagged landscapes. He carries the spirit of Wu Tang that mingled the symbolic and literal, colliding street tales with imaginative iconography, coded language, Eastern philosophy, and an unmistakable sense of New York noir. In his confrontation with death’s ripples, Ka often recalls MF DOOM on Operation Doomsday; the weight of loss transformed both rappers, spurring them to write their respective ways through mourning. Invisible grief architecture underscores Ka’s catalog. His albums embody acts of processing, seeking the best ways to live life compromised by tragic conditions beyond one’s control. He sifts grand traditions to grapple eternal questions, plumbing Greek mythology (Orpheus and The Sirens), Japanese history and philosophy (Honor Killed the Samurai), and the Bible (Descendants of Cain) for language to resolve ageless pain. Every couplet coils as smoke, heavy and hardly there at all.”
His entire catalog takes on new weight in light of his passing, particularly “Borrowed Time,” a standout from his exceptional recent album The Thief Next to Jesus. RIP to one of the great rap talents.
Future - “Surfing A Tsunami”
Future’s finest moments are about as close as the hip-hop generation will ever get to watching one of the great jazz inventors at their peak. An artist endlessly exploring specific territory, constantly searching for new pockets in the same sprawling ocean, mining the trappings success for their darkest ore. At its best, Future’s music is as visceral, hypnotic, devastating, and exhilarating as anything in American canon, often at once. I can feel my wife rolling her eyes at this sentiment, but she too has seen the power of “March Madness” and “Thought It Was A Drought” to reduce grown men to rubble.
While his recent projects have rarely been as electrifying as the run that constituted his 2014-2016 pinnacle, Future still has the ability to reach thrilling heights and delve into casually avant garde (in that way, he is reminiscent of another Atlanta great, Gucci Mane, whose output was so prolific in the late aughts and early 2010s that its sheer volume often hid some of the most interesting rap music ever made).
“SURFING A TSUNAMI” from Future’s new album MIXTAPE PLUTO feels like the answer to the question “what would it sound like if Future remixed Brian Eno’s Music for Airports?” To most, it might just sound like another in a sea of same-y sounding Future songs, but it is, in its way, a new exploration of the languid bragging that makes material accumulation sound like a mournful flow state. Built around a hypnotic, constantly rising ambient lead and submerged, fluttering synhesizers, it is one of Future’s subtly oddest choices in the past half decade of releases. Yet it fits this album perfectly, a worthy entry alongside his most enduring performances and creative choices.
Bounty Killer - “Suicide or Murder”
It is easy to think of sampling primarily in its literal forms. Excising a piece of music from one place. Looping it or chopping it up using software or hardware. Reconstituting it in a new song. Sampling has been a key to the popular music landscape since the early ‘80s, an art as versatile as it is oft-abused.
Sampling is so much more than the literal movement of sounds from an existing sound recording to a new one. Sampling is time travel. Sampling is anthropology. Sampling is a conversation between artists, producers, and technologies. One could explore the metaphysics of sampling and get totally lost, thinking through all the collisions and allusions generated in the teleportation of sound from source to destination.
Early in October, I encountered dancehall legend Bounty Killer’s “Suicide or Murder.” I pressed play on it while perusing his catalog on Spotify, halting when I saw that the song featured Jeru The Damaja, a favorite rapper of my teenage years. A giddily disorienting discovery: “Suicide or Murder” bounces across a mash-up of the beats from Blahzay Blahzay’s “Danger” and Jeru’s classic “Come Clean,” alternating with instrumentals from Raekwon’s “Ice Cream” and KRS One’s “Rappers R N Danja.” In its construction, “Suicide or Murder” roughly resembles Ice Cube’s classic “Jackin For Beats,” making a patchwork of hot records of the era, prefiguring the mixtape culture that would make superstars of artists like 50 Cent and Lil Wayne as they snatched other artists’ beats and imagined them anew.
“Suicide or Murder” is like a mini soundclash, a loose echo of the Jamaican musical tradition of riddims that sees multiple artists recording new lyrics to the same backing track, a kind of indirect competition to see who can record the most enduring version. It is also a reminder of the proximity of hip-hop and dancehall culture in a period of time (1996) when the east coast of America still dominated hip-hop (Jeru the Damaja is from New York, a city with a considerable Jamaican and Caribbean population and musical lineage).
Mutant Academy - “Rock, Paper, Scissors”
I’ve been writing about sprawling Virginia rap collective Mutant Academy since I was getting paid to write (2016, if anyone from the IRS is reading). Comprising rappers Fly Anakin, Henny L.O., and Big Kahuna OG, and producers Foisey, Ewonee, Unlucky Bastards, Sycho Sid, Graymatter, Ohbliv, Mutant Academy and its constituent members have been churning out high quality rap music for a decade, revisiting classicist territory without delving into nostalgia with sickly sweetness. Their best music remains modern, urgent, listenable even if you don’t know the referents. Songs like “Rock, Paper, Scissors,” a standout from Mutant Academy’s new album Keep Holly Alive, highlight the groups’ knack for tightly wound, clever rapping over warm production, bookended by a sense of humor and buoyancy that resists the sort of crustiness so often typifying “underground” rap.
The Bug - “Brutalized (Headwrecked)”
Admittedly, I have a bit of a bemusing relationship with heavy music.
I don’t dress like the sort of person you typically associate with “heavy” anything. I prefer to exercise to podcasts, so I don’t use heavy music for an aural adrenaline rush. I have been in precisely one mosh pit. I left it after a matter of seconds, unscathed if sweatier.
Since high school, I’ve loved a wide variety of heavy music. My college discovery of The Bug (aka Kevin Martin) led me down a path previously unimagined—the rhythms of dub reggae and dancehall run ragged across brutal 808s and jagged synths. Martin’s seminal “Poison Dart” and “Skeng” were as hypnotic as they were pummeling, prefiguring the prevalence of dubstep as a sonic assault someone might want to dance to.
“Brutalized (Headwrecked)” from the Martin’s Machines I-V (a collection of instrumental pieces he produced specifically for his lives shows) embodies this ethos of groovy brutality, sounding like a bit of cutting room floor score for a night club scene where things turn violent in a John Wick or Blade film.
Elmiene - “Light Work”
I’m not going to tap dance around reasons here. I just like this song a lot. Elmiene has a great voice. The production sets the perfect groove for his particular brand of soulful longing. I listened to it four times straight when I first heard it.
Bonus: The Beatles - “Got To Get You Into My Life”
Recently, my two year old son has become obsessed with The Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine.” We’re not just talking “listen once or twice a day” obsessed. We’re talking “the only song played in the car for a full hour” obsessed. We’re talking “sing it to him every night before bed” obsessed. We’re talking “don’t even think about putting on another song” obsessed.
One morning, driving back from a doctor’s appointment, I thought I’d tempt fate. Revolver has been my favorite Beatles album since I first discovered it in 9th grade. “Yellow Submarine” has been my least favorite song on it for equal time. At the risk of setting off a temper tantrum only Ringo’s aquatic adventure could quell, I attempted to find another song that could equally hold my son’s attention.
Enter “Got To Get You Into My Life,” long a favorite for its hat tip-to Motown production and peak Paul McCartney songwriting, an anthem of puppy dog desire he’d already perfected by the age of 24.
“Got To Get You Into My Life” has it all. Persistent rhythm. Exciting horn arrangement. Perfectly placed “oooo” in the pre-chorus that has become the way my son identifies the song (he’ll either say “play ‘oooo’ song” or just sing “oooo” to me, expecting me to sing it back, which, of course, I pretty much always do). Along with Revolver-opener “Taxman,” “Got To Get You Into My Life” has the power to temporarily lift the tyranny of “Yellow Submarine.”
…but the submarine always finds a way to ride again. Hopefully he discovers Future soon.
Kendrick Lamar standing in front of an American flag in the announcement video for his Super Bowl LIX performance.
“Numbers on the Board” is a monthly column inspired by Walt Hickey’s Numlock News, adapting that format for the music business. A dive into the numbers headlining and defining stories of interest.
14 - The number of different rappers who’ve played Super Bowl
When 2024 began, Kendrick Lamar would have seemed a longshot to headline the 2025 Super Bowl halftime show.
While Lamar is one of the most critically decorated, commercially successful rappers ever, he has often chosen the path of greater resistance in comparison to peers like Future, J. Cole, Travis Scott, and Drake (to say nothing of Kanye West, his only true analog from a critical standpoint, but whose creative and personal choices often confound).
On the heels of Lamar’s platinum-selling, hit-spawning, critical darling major label debut good kid, M.A.A.D city, he defied expectation with the densely constructed To Pimp A Butterfly, as much a masterpiece as a question mark. TPAB’s greatest commercial success is “Alright,” a mid-album song that evolved into a rallying cry for the Black Lives Matter movement in the middle of the last decade, outliving the rest of the album in the public imagination.
Lamar re-asserted his singular critical and commercial appeal with 2017’s DAMN., a thematically weighty album anchored by the biggest hits of his career to date. DAMN. famously earned Lamar the first (and only) Pulitzer Prize won by any rapper. It is the album where he assumed the mantle—the chosen poet who could also pack a dance floor. Regardless of his numerous, well-articulated protestations against being some sort of rap messiah, DAMN. seemed to rebut even its own author for a time. 2018 served a victory lap in the form of the Black Panther soundtrack, a full length set of songs Lamar executive produced and featured on heavily. It became nearly as big a sensation as the film itself, spawning three massive hits.
Four years later, Lamar returned with Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers, a double album rooted in Lamar’s self-discovery through therapy, a 73 minute exorcism with little unity in terms of sound or lyrical themes. In the run up to Morale and wake that followed, Lamar delivered scattered singles with his cousin and frequent collaborator Baby Keem, songs like “Family Ties” and “The Hillbillies” (itself the name of their informal group). These songs alongside Morale suggested Lamar’s exhaustion with the perception projected onto him and, in part, shaped by his output, a rejection of the titles “voice of a generation,” “the chosen one,” “the best rapper alive.”
And then came “Like That.”
Six songs into Metro Boomin and Future’s March 2024 album We Don’t Trust You, “Like That” feints with a prototypically languorous opening verse from Future, setting absolutely no expectation for the Kendrick feature that ripped open a long festering beef with Drake.
Weeks later, the salacious back and forth between Lamar and Drake built to perhaps the singular commercial crescendo of Lamar’s career: “Not Like Us.”
When Lamar posted a YouTube video of him leading a football drill in front of a massive American flag to announce himself as the Super Bowl LIX headliner, it felt simultaneously stunning and inevitable. The final act in a play that began with “Like That” (Or did it begin with “Buried Alive Interlude?” Or with “Control?”).
On the one hand, we simply don’t have a surplus of mathematically sound superstars to fill this particular spot. Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli surveyed the landscape of theoretical Super Bowl headliners on a June episode of Popcast about the diffuse landscape of modern stars. They smartly appraise pop music and media at present as too decentralized and distracted to produce multiple obvious choices to fill America’s prime performance slot.
On the other hand, you can say whatever you want about Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song” or Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso” (and “Please Please Please”) or Chappell Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe!,” but starting one weekend in May, Kendrick Lamar dominated the summer. He generated headlines. He sparked rumors. He played a raucous, sold out, rapidly assembled Juneteenth arena show at Los Angeles’ Forum. He made a song rank with accusations of pedophilia into a global hit. He vanquished the most popular rapper ever. Even if only for a moment. Even if only in fans’ minds. Even if none of this drama means anything and we’re all going to be happy the next time “One Dance” comes on at a party.
For that and for his years of undeniable greatness, Lamar becomes only the 14th rapper ever to play the Super Bowl, and only the fourth to headline it (though we’ll unpack these numbers below).
To put this achievement in perspective, consider the evolution of the Super Bowl halftime show.
There have been 58 Super Bowls, with 2025’s marking the 59th. The first nine featured college marching bands as half time performers.
Super Bowl 10 (1976) was the first Super Bowl to feature a non-marching band, with conservative youth group Up With People taking the reins.
Super Bowl 25 (1991) inaugurated the modern Super Bowl halftime show, featuring a performance from seminal boy band New Kids on the Block. Since that performance, the Super Bowl halftime show has existed in constant existential flux, attempting to scintillate with stars of the moment, honor legends who still matter, and, above all, avoid being the lowlight of the game by Monday morning.
Since 1991, eight Super Bowls have featured rappers as headline or guest performers (with some notable question marks):
Super Bowl XXXII (1998): Queen Latifah, special guest
Super Bowl XXXV (2001): Nelly, special guest
Super Bowl XXXVIII (2004): Nelly, Diddy, split headliners (alongside Janet Jackson, Kid Rock, Justin Timberlake, and Jessica Simpson)
Super Bowl XLV (2011): Black Eyed Peas, headliner (and only notionally a rap group, but we will let this slide for the purposes of this exercise and for anyone who owned physical copies of their first two albums, as this writer did)
Super Bowl LII (2019): Travis Scott, Big Boi, special guests
Super Bowl LIV (2020): Bad Bunny, special guest (regardless of what language he performs in, the man raps)
Super Bowl LVI (2022): Dr. Dre, headliner; Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Kendrick Lamar, special guests
Super Bowl LVIII (2024): Jermaine Dupri, Lil Jon, Ludacris, special guests
When Kendrick Lamar takes the stage on February ninth, Super Bowl LIX will become the ninth Super Bowl to feature a rapper at its core, to say nothing of whichever guests (if any) he brings out. It is worth noting, as many have, that Jay Z’s Roc Nation partnered with the NFL in 2019 and has worked to “modernize” the Super Bowl halftime show further for the first time since Up With People’s moral mission gave way to the gods of popular consumption.
A closer look at the stats for rappers since 1991:
Number of Rapper Headliners: 4 (5 if you count the Black Eyed Peas as rappers)
Number of Rappers billed as “special guests”: 8 (if you include Bad Bunny, which you should)
Number of Rappers who’ve played the Super Bowl twice: 2, Kendrick Lamar and Nelly
Number of Rappers booked for Super Bowl halftime show since Roc Nation partnership: 10 (11 if you count Lamar twice)
Number of Rappers to play the Super Bowl halftime show ever: 14 (16 if you count Nelly and Lamar twice each)
A final thought here. When Beyonce played the Super Bowl in 2016, she preceded it by releasing her confrontational, spectacular single “Formation.” Surrounding her performance, she was labeled anti-police, accused of far greater political acidity than almost any other artist worth nine figures. Lamar is a deeply political artist, one who has used numerous national television stages to express his message, to say nothing of his albums (DAMN’s Geraldo Rivera-sampling intro, the aforementioned “Alright,” gkMc anchor “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst”) and album covers (TPAB’s beatdown on the White House lawn), some of the most bluntly political hip-hop of the last decade.
The NFL is a league that famously ran Black quarterback Colin Kaepernick out of its ranks for kneeling during the national anthem to protest police brutality. NFL teams, owners, and ranking executives exhibit numerous behaviors that suggest a smoldering plantation mentality.
Lamar’s selection begs the question: Has anyone in the league office listened to “Alright,” or will they be hearing it for the first time on February ninth?
In 2019, I pondered what the industry might have looked like if it embraced a certain segment of music pirates as an archival force. This particular flavor of question pops up now and again when a beloved blog dies or a massive repository like DatPiff.com, home of many beloved hip-hop mixtapes that never saw commercial release, gets consigned to the Internet Archive.
According to a story in Wired (originally from Ars Technica), 20% of the hard drives that back up the music industry are failing, unreadable and irretrievable. Worse yet, this issue was largely avoidable and threatens to worsen. Per Wired:
“Knowing that hard drives will eventually fail is nothing new. Ars [Technica] wrote about the five stages of hard drive death, including denial, back in 2005. Last year, backup company Backblaze shared failure data on specific drives, showing that drives that fail tend to fail within three years, that no drive was totally exempt, and that time does, generally, wear down all drives. Google's server drive data showed in 2007 that HDD failure was mostly unpredictable, and that temperatures were not really the deciding factor.”
Who knows what is lost?
Master recordings and digitized sheet music, no doubt, but what else? Cover art? Contracts? Metadata? How deep will the rabbit hole go by the time the last failing hard drive can no longer be switched on?
Questions of the profound lack of imagination for different forms of archivism will soon dead end in one, simple and blunt: How did we get here? How did we lose so much of the music that shaped us, our society, our creative output, our stars? Did we really think that digital means were more permanent than analog ones?
The likely answers, as ever, will be that hubris, laziness, and expediency led to half measures and imperfect solutions, depriving future generations of richer histories.
My first internship out of college was as a location scout for a film called Gods Behaving Badly that never saw official release. A mid-budget ($~30m) comedy, I was surprised and delighted when I arrived at my first day of work to find that the production had a green consultant. She brought bins for trash, recycling, and composting to every filming location, educated everyone from stars to surly teamsters as to what should go into which bin, and generally attempted to instill consciousness in the wasteful beast that is a set.
A large-scale music festival is like a film set on steroids, beer, adderall, and probably ketamine, depending on the featured genres. By the end of whatever unlucky weekend hosts it, the festival grounds have been violently trodden and churned with trash. Images of the catastrophic Woodstock ’99 spring to mind, a nightmare fondue of mud, feces, plastic, and fire. While we have larger environmental issues at hand than simply curbing festival waste, music is a phenomenally wasteful industry from top to bottom—recording studios, live shows, festivals, press junkets, or really any number of places that can consume power and play host to plastic trash.
Vaguely heartening news, then, that America’s largest promoter Live Nation is attempting to cut emissions by 50% by 2030. This goal takes root against the backdrop of popular festivals such as Lollapalooza turning to battery power for key electrical needs; from Billboard:
“Last month, the Lollapalooza 2024 mainstage was powered entirely by batteries, which kept the lights, sound and other power components on during performances by Chappell Roan, Megan Thee Stallion, SZA, The Killers and more. A rep for Lollapalooza tells Billboard that with this effort, the festival saw a 67% reduction in both fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions over prior years, when batteries had not been used. This equates to the sparing of 26 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions, or the equivalent to five homes’ electricity use for a year. The use of batteries also saved over 3,000 gallons of fuel. Lollapalooza says this initiative made it the first major U.S. festival to power its mainstage on a hybrid battery system.”
Efforts like those at Lolla are surely late in coming, but they are buoyed by the increasing quality and decreasing cost of more eco-friendly technologies. Conventional diesel generators are still about five times cheaper than lithium batteries, “batteries are rechargeable and built to work for a decade or longer, so buyers can spread the cost out over time,” Greg Landa (CEO of CES Power, the industry leader in mobile power for festivals) told Billboard.
If festivals can align mission with profitability and not lose performance, there could be a snowball effect in adoption. Climate change is one “political” cause artists seldom fear speaking up about, so it would be prudent business for promoters to move in sync with many of the performers who fill their stages.
This sort of decision-making hopefully represents a broader shift in the industry that sees non-profit organizations like REVERB (and its Billie Eilish-backed decarbonization project) and for-profit companies like Good Neighbor Music (an alternative vinyl company that uses entirely recycled, non-toxic materials for production; I am, admittedly, an advisor, in largest part because I believe in its mission) uniting economic imperatives with necessary environmental action.
I think often of the words of Nina Simone when weighing responsibility of artists in fraught social and political moments (so, perhaps, all moments):
“An artist's duty as far as I'm concerned is to reflect the times. I think that is true of painters, sculptors, poets, musicians. As far as I'm concerned it's their choice. But I choose to reflect the times and situations in which I find myself. That to me is my duty. And at this crucial time in our lives when everything is so desperate, when every day is a matter of survival, I don't think you can help but be involved.”
Somewhere in the last few decades—during America’s dumbing down, its move away from presence of public intellectuals like James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, Norman Mailer, Noam Chomsky (to name but a few), its governmentally sanctioned gutting of public education that left many kids bereft of music, literature, sciences, and arts—we drifted from the idea that artists should be mouthpieces for social change. We live now in the fading ebb of reverence for the politically charged art of the late sixties and early 70s. (There is much more to say on this subject, about both the changing landscape of the world and of entertainment media, but I think it can be most grimly summarized by Zadie Smith’s 2020 line from essay collection Intimations: “The people sometimes demand change, they rarely demand art.”)
Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz will not likely cause onlookers to confuse her for a star activist like, say, Muhammad Ali, who lost prime years of his career as a consequence of his conscientious objection to the Vietnam War. It also does not suddenly make most of her art overtly political or socially minded. It does mark an unusually firm stance from pop music’s most carefully considered billionaire, and perhaps points to the evolution of an artist whose politics were once inscrutable and who now more openly speaks up for causes she believes in (such as LGBTQ+ rights).
Swift’s outspokenness drove 400,000 people in a day to register to vote, likely many more in the long tail of her debate night Instagram post and the chatter around her endorsement. While we have been conditioned to see politics as impolite business for commercialized pop stars, it seems artists like Swift and Beyonce (who has lent her music to the Harris / Walz ticket without explicitly endorsing the Vice President) understand their fan bases to be entrenched enough to weather any politically-driven storms. Perhaps they also understand their artistic legacies as larger than the pure craven commercial concerns assumed of every pop star racing to join the ranks of the billionaire class. Swift’s endorsement of Harris has not affected her popularity or credibility with her audience in the slightest. While we can’t yet tell if the Swifties have the mass to move an election, one would hope that this sort of outspokenness inspires other artists of varying scales (though I recognize that, to a great degree, Swift’s unparalleled success at this stage of her nearly 18 year career insulates her from much real risk).
(Note: I am also keenly aware that the above does not take into account the numerous smaller artists who have risked lost income, lost opportunity, and derision fighting for political and social causes in the social media era, most recently in the dark shadow of the suffering inflicted on Gaza by Israel.)
What MidJourney gave me when I typed the prompt “the MTV VMA's but the only artist being honored is Taylor Swift and the audience is all robots.” Welcome to the future, baby!
Five Obsessions covers five of my favorite songs each month. Some new, some old. Some new to me, some revisited. Published on the second Saturday of every month.
You can listen to the running list of Applied Science favorites in the Spotify playlist below and read about this week’s specific picks below that.
Brittany Howard - “Prove It To You”
Many great dance songs forge religion in miniature, spiking feverish devotion for minutes at a time, eyes-in-the-back-of-the-skull visions from another realm transmuted into writhing, sweating something on earth. Ecstasy, in any sense you choose. Often the best of these songs build on phrases that turn into mantras through repetition. “I Feel Love.”“Music Sounds Better With You.”“Feeling For You.”“My Love.” Verbal metronomes of the dance floor. Whispered epigraphs that bind people together, if just for a night.
Though my “party in an unmarked warehouse somewhere in South LA” days regrettably ended around the time my son took his first breaths, I can still appreciate a song that sounds like the right score for 3AM.
Brittany Howard’s “Prove It To You” intoxicates me because it hinges on a timeless, honest chorus: “All I wanna do is prove it to you.” It’s a set of words you could just as easily imagine from the mouth of Donna Summer in the ‘70s, or replicating themselves across French touch production in the ‘90s. It echoes a piece of James Baldwin writing advice, the directive to “write a sentence as clean as a bone.” The hook on “Prove It To You” embodies blunt longing without poetic fluff. It is a reminder of what a singular artist Howard is, how far a song of this nature seems from her breakthrough work as lead singer of the Alabama Shakes. Then again, white dance music has been mining Black voices and consigning them to anonymity since the dawn of disco. Why shouldn’t a powerhouse singer who embodies such a panoply of Black musical history be able to pull off a dance floor burner?
(While I love the album version of “Prove It To You,” something about Howard’s live performance on Fallon sends the songs message home even better to my mind.)
Asake - “uhh yeah”
As afrobeats and global music continues to morph, artists like Lagos’ Asake excite with creative risks that might prove frightening to American counterparts beset by the expectations of commerce. “Uhh Yeahh” is one such example of satisfying experimentation. Gritty. Pulsing. Hypnotic. Music better to be experienced than described.
producedbycpkshawn - “pop like this pt. 2”
For someone who spends so much time listening to music, consuming memes, and reading things on the internet, I also consider myself deeply “not online.” I have not had a Facebook or Instagram account for over half a decade. I have never had a TikTok account. I refuse the notion that a person needs to be terminally online in order to understand the ebbs and flows of cultural movements.
I found “pop like this pt. 2” (and its slowed and reverbed counterpart) because I was doing some Spotify “related artist” digging while obsessing over Cash Cobain’s “Problem.” I then started to see it pop up in a variety of YouTube shorts. Workout videos. Cooking videos. Then, ultimately, a variety of dance videos (often in the form of the full song “Yo Bunny” by Ugly Andz., a song which has had its own viral moment in the wake of “pop like this pt. 2” permeating corners of the audiovisual internet). I gathered from YouTube comments that a dance video by South African breakout artist Tyla either started (or, more likely, amplified), the track’s virality.
Typing the previous paragraph has made me feel impossibly old, but it’s easy to understand the appeal of a song that samples rapper Khia’s XXX-rated classic “My Neck My Back” to hypnotic effect, chopping its signature opening refrain to bits over a shotgun rhythm that has become typical of sexy drill, current Jersey Club, and various related subgenre mutations of hip-hop inflected dance music. It is as avant garde in its way as it is mesmerizing, jittery and exciting enough to inspire a tidal wave of home grown dance videos.
It is a reminder of the strange siloing power of the internet, turning bits of media new and old into the soundtracks of many people’s lives, wile other people hardly know such sounds even exist.
Cal Tjader - “Leyte”
My dad loved going places he wasn’t always supposed to be. He loved jetting uptown, far from the streets of Brownsville, Brooklyn where he grew up, to some of Harlem’s live music clubs. He loved dancing to Latin jazz. Tito Puente and Eddie Palmieri, Stan Getz and Celia Cruz. Most of all, he loved Cal Tjader.
I remember stumbling across “Leyte” on an old record of he’d saved in a collection that was not nearly as impressive as I hoped it would be when I dove head first into sampling as a 14 year old. Totally intoxicated by “Leyte” at the time, I hadn’t listened to it for years until a recent edition of Gino Sorcinelli’s excellent Micro-Chop newsletter. Tjader’s soulful, downtempo instrumental enchants me now as it did then, transporting me back to nights spent searching for the perfect loop, back further still to my father’s young years, spent god knows where doing who knows what, likely trying to impress a woman that wasn’t my mother with his dance moves.
Mustafa - “Old Life”
Some voices transmit the pain of lived experience in ways more powerful than word choice. Mustafa’s singular rasp has been one such voice for me since I first heard his 2020 single “Stay Alive,” but truly since its follow up “Air Forces” cemented his recitations of grief and love in my memory. While no other song in his catalog has hit me with the understated devastation of “Air Forces,” Mustafa continues to mold a style both definitively modern (particularly in lyrical choices that root most songs in the street life of modern Toronto) and curiously retro, as committed to folk sounds and folksy wisdom as the echoes of distant lands and teachings of ancient sages. On “Old Life,” Mustafa pulls off this blend once more, his voice the defining instrument.
