Music

In her 1999 book, “When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip-Hop Feminist Breaks It Down,” the cultural critic Joan Morgan describes eloquently the ways in which racism often makes it difficult for black women to call out sexism within their own communities. “I needed a feminism that would allow us to continue loving ourselves and the brothers who hurt us without letting race loyalty buy us early tombstones,” she wrote.She reiterates that sentiment in “On the Record,” a wrenching new documentary by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering, streaming on HBO Max. The film details the allegations of sexual assault against the music mogul Russell Simmons, but its scope is much wider: It explores the particular (and often overlooked) struggles of black women in the #MeToo movement. At its center is Drew Dixon, 48, who says Simmons raped her in 1995 while she was a rising A&R executive at his pioneering company, Def Jam Records. Dixon didn’t speak publicly about the incident for more than two decades, fearing that challenging the “godfather of hip-hop” would amount to a betrayal of her community. “I didn’t want to let the culture down,” she says poignantly. “I love the culture. I loved Russell, too.”“On the Record” closely follows Dixon before, during and after her decision to go public with her accusations in a December 2017 article in The New York Times. It also weaves in the testimonies of seven other women who say they were raped by Simmons — including the writer Jenny Lumet, the former assistant and model Sil Lai Abrams and the hip-hop artist Sherri Hines. (Simmons has denied all accusations of nonconsensual sex and described his life as “devoid of violence” in a written response to the filmmakers.)[embedded content]The stories of these women hit the familiar beats of the countless #MeToo narratives that have emerged since the reckoning of Harvey Weinstein three years ago: abuses of power, derailed careers, fearful silences, doubts and dismissals. But for black women who have been assaulted by black men, the quest for justice is intersectional. It involves negotiations between solidarity and salvation.The film communicates these complex ideas with quiet, forceful emotional clarity. It’s the latest in Dick and Ziering’s formidable oeuvre of documentaries on the subject: Their previous collaborations, like “The Invisible War,” about sexual assault in the military, and “The Hunting Ground,” about rape on college campuses, provoked strong, polarized reactions and substantive policy changes. “On the Record” is a relatively modest film — more character study than exposé — but it has already attracted considerable controversy. Shortly before it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January, Oprah Winfrey, one of its executive producers, dropped out, citing creative differences, and the filmmakers lost their distribution deal with Apple TV and moved to HBO Max.Amid speculation that Simmons might have pressured Winfrey to withdraw, she told The Times that she continued to stand by the women in the film but felt that their stories hadn’t been sufficiently “elevated,” and that the film lacked an appropriately broad context that took in the “debauchery” of the music business at the time. Winfrey’s concerns about the narrow focus and selective context don’t seem misplaced, but these strike me as strengths rather than shortcomings. “On the Record” is not a work of journalism. Most of the accusations have been reported on extensively in the last two years in various publications. What the film does is bring these accounts to living, breathing and moving life, taking us beyond the media cycles of allegation and denial to a survivor’s intimate confrontations with cultural pressures and trauma.Dixon makes for a stirring and charismatic protagonist, her face lighting up with joy as she describes walking the streets of Brooklyn with Biggie Smalls and putting together a Grammy-winning record with Method Man and Mary J. Blige. When the harassment began, she thought her talent would protect her from danger. “I am an executive with value, and he’s a businessperson,” she says. When she’s proved wrong, it’s a crushing lesson: Misogyny razes all ideas of value and worth, even in seemingly meritocratic settings.A few years later, while working a different job at Arista Records, Dixon is confronted by this reality all over again. When she rebuffed the advances of L.A. Reid, then the chief executive, she says he punished her by passing on two up-and-coming artists she had scouted: Kanye West and John Legend. (Reid has said he apologized if anything he had said or done had been “misinterpreted.”)Employing a plain, by-the-numbers style, Dick and Ziering make a deliberate choice to let their interviewees take center stage, contextualizing their stories with some archival images. These inserts can feel glib. One hasty sequence, which seems to support some of Winfrey’s reservations, starts with excerpts from rap videos to demonstrate the prevalence of sexism in hip-hop, then follows up with clips from songs by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones to clarify, rather awkwardly, that sexism isn’t confined to hip-hop.But these nominal bits of editorialization are supplemented by a superb cast of cultural commentators, who represent the real, intellectual force of “On the Record.” In addition to Morgan, they include Tarana Burke, the founder of the #MeToo movement, Kimberlé Crenshaw, the scholar behind the theory of intersectionality, and Kierna Mayo, the former editor of Ebony magazine.As Dixon and the other survivors describe their painful experiences of harassment and shame, the commentators situate them eloquently within the broader picture of African-American history and raise important questions that have often remained at the periphery of the #MeToo movement. They explain, for instance, how black women’s fear of speaking out against their abusers is rooted in the legacy of false rape accusations against black men — and that the criminal justice system offers little hope to communities that have long suffered its biases.The filmmakers do an admirable job of switching between these micro and macro perspectives in a tight and accessible 95 minutes. Their movie makes a sincere case for Dixon’s quiet plea to the camera: “It’s time for somebody to acknowledge the burden and the plunder of black women.”On the RecordNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. Watch on HBO Max. More

On a recent Friday, thousands of partygoers gathered on the rooftop of a popular Brooklyn club to hear a performance by Alice Glass, the former front woman of the Canadian electronic band Crystal Castles.The diverse group wore dark green camouflage, electric blue jumpsuits and pink hair, while they moshed with abandon before the multitiered stage.This dance party did not violate New York’s social distancing rules. It was a virtual concert that took place on Minecraft, the sandbox video game in which players create Lego-like worlds — in this case a reimagining of Elsewhere, an indie-music club in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn.The Minecraft club, which is called Elsewither, was a collaboration among Elsewhere; Open Pitt, an engineering group that specialize in virtual events; and Heav3n, a roving L.G.B.T.Q. party based in Los Angeles.“Gaming is about 10 years ahead of live music in terms of an interactive online experience,” said Jake Rosenthal, 32, a founder of Elsewhere. “Buying a ticket and a virtual ticket might be part of the new paradigm of being a music venue.”“When Elsewhere reopens, it’s going to be at some kind of limited capacity,” he said. “It’s a way to bring experimentation back to what we do.”ImageA screen shot of attendees of a digital party at Elsewither.About 2,400 Minecraft users visited Elsewither between 6 p.m. and midnight on May 8 to hear performances by Pussy Riot, the punk political band from Russia; Rina Sawayama, a Japanese R&B pop singer; Pabllo Vittar, a Brazilian drag queen; and 18 others. The audio was also streamed to more than 30,000 listeners over the gaming platform Twitch.At a time when Zoom party fatigue is real and the initial excitement of being able to see your favorite D.J.s spin from the comfort of your living room has worn off, video games have emerged as another means of hosting a party during the coronavirus shutdown.In late April, 100 Gecs, the electronic pop absurdist duo, hosted a virtual concert called #Square Garden on Minecraft featuring Charli XCX, Cashmere Cat, Benny Blanco and Kero Kero Bonito. And Travis Scott held a live concert on the video game Fortnite on April 23 and 25, reaching more than 12.3 million players. (The next Elsewither is scheduled for June 6.)Admission to Elsewither was free, but a $5 donation on Groundswell offered access to a V.I.P. room and to the artists’ conversations on Discord. After every set, the M.C. would command the audience to type slogans like “Down with Capitalism” and “Queer Rights,” and the chat stream would explode with a repeating chorus of all-capitalized phrases.While thousands logged on, only 20 to 30 avatars seemed to be in the hall at a given time. This was, in part, by design. An earlier attempt at a Minecraft music festival called Block by Blockwest crashed when too many tried to join. (It was successfully rescheduled for May 16 and attracted 5,000 users.)At Elsewither, no more than 100 people were allowed into any one server at a time, a setup much like having a bouncer at the door. “Technically, it was the smoothest event so far,” said Umru Rothenberg, a graphic designer with Open Pit. “We’ve ironed a lot of issues out.”For the musical artists, video game concerts lets them reach a wider audience, free of physical constraints. Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, a member of Pussy Riot, who does not normally play Minecraft, said she appreciated the party’s emphasis on an anticapitalist, pro-L.G.B.T.Q. agenda.“For queer kids in Russia, seeing a Russian band performing in this amazing online queer community is encouraging because they feel like they are represented somehow,” she said. “I think if I was able to log onto Minecraft and see a concert with this lineup, it would probably have changed my life in a lot of ways.” More

To mention the subgenre known grudgingly as “emo” is to argue about the term’s parameters or even its existence.Like a lot of underground rock in the mid-1980s, emo was simply an answer to the question, “What happens after hardcore?” The Replacements’ extremely drunk power pop was one direction; Hüsker Dü’s high-velocity, flower-power trio noise was another; Dinosaur Jr.’s pedal-stomping prairie rock was another.Emo was born around 1984 in the small, mostly middle-class punk scene in Washington, D.C., centered around Dischord Records. Punks like Ian MacKaye, formerly of the foundational hardcore band Minor Threat, needed to solve a problem: how to get violent skinheads to stop ruining shows. The solution: play something slower that they wouldn’t like — less breakneck, more melodic and less enraged punk rock with a certain heart-on-sleeve lyricism.These bands would have been totally fine being called “punk,” but according to MacKaye, the former Minor Threat bassist Brian Baker derisively applied the term “emocore” to the music; the word got picked up in the punk press and went everywhere. (The joke was on Baker: His band Dag Nasty is known as the godfather of a certain strand of emo.)Though perhaps obscure to a larger audience at the time, Rites of Spring, Embrace, Dag Nasty and Gray Matter were the moment’s big four bands out of Washington, all of whom loathed the term to varying degrees. The style mutated over the next decade or so in various punk scenes: San Diego, Chicago, New Jersey, Philadelphia. The riffs got heavier, the drumming more chaotic, the screaming more extreme. In the ’90s, major labels glommed onto underground rock (like Nirvana) and critics found their darlings (like Pavement), making emo seem ignored, ephemeral and still underground.It’s been said that the golden age of emo fandom is 19, which is true, to a point: There is always a new crop of kids to call their young bands “emo.” By about 1997, bands like the Promise Ring, a paragon of emo, seemed — to listeners who turned 19 some years earlier — sonically indistinguishable from indie rock. By 2020, “emo,” a predominately male, predominately white music of extreme earnestness, has been applied to a wide swath of artists that might seem unrecognizable to the music’s initial wave.For those who grew up in the greater D.C. area, (which musically includes Baltimore and Annapolis, Md., and all the way down the Virginia suburbs that wander toward Richmond) it seems perfectly obvious why emo started there: For about two weeks in the spring and two weeks in the fall, it’s blessed with weather so effortlessly romantic that the heart-bursting triumphalism on which the music was built seems a birthright. Here are 12 underknown bits of emo from that musically fertile region.Happy Go Licky, ‘Torso Butter’ (1987)When Rites of Spring ended, three members joined the guitarist Michael Hampton in a short-lived band called One Last Wish, which built on Rites’ melodicism. When that was done, all four Rites members — Guy Picciotto, Eddie Janney, Brendan Canty and Mike Fellows — got back together under the name Happy Go Licky and played a completely different music with nods to hip-hop, homemade tape loops, simpler riffs, slogans as lyrics and lots of guitar noise. It lasted less than a year and never cut a studio record, but its live tapes reveal a band thinking all the time about where to go next. A motto: “Nothing gets clean/’Till it’s called into question.”Fire Party, ‘Engine’ (1988)Too much of the first wave of emo, like too much rock music in general, was about men complaining about women. Fire Party was a corrective, four women whose work would seem fresh tomorrow, especially this nearly six-minute grinder, which stacks shakers on noisy bass and guitar, as the singer Amy Pickering declares, “I live a real life, the one I have now.”Shudder to Think, ‘Drop Dead Don’t Blink’ (1989)It’s astonishing to think this speedboat was an outtake for this quartet, which blended Craig Wedren’s near-operatic vibrato with complicated, sometimes hookless melodies. After an early, emo-punky LP for Sammich Records, the label run by MacKaye’s sister, Shudder to Think built an audience over three theater-kid punk records for Dischord. In 1994, it released “Pony Express Record” for the major label Epic, a deeply strange, beautifully recorded album that was largely ignored.Three, ‘Swann Street’ (1989)The acoustic opening reads as an old-school signal for sincerity, the singalong refrain invites everyone along, and the whole song is a perfect youthful fist pump. The singer and guitarist Geoff Turner (late of Gray Matter) seemed able to crank out these parts at will. And yes, the ginkgo trees that line various D.C. blocks do smell like dung.The Hated, ‘I Am a Rock’ (1990)Behold, arguably the most emo song that ever emo-ed. A thunderously savvy band from Annapolis covering a hit by a fellow middle-class outfit from 25 years earlier that also liked moping and books. This version should be laughable but sheer earnestness saves it; it’s a breathtaking tightrope walk.The Nation of Ulysses, ‘The Sound of Jazz to Come’ (1992)Quasi-academic and quasi-revolutionary manifestoes, hard bop suits, retro sleeve graphics, mod swagger, chaotic songcraft and a frenetic frontman with an almost Prince-esque scream: the Nation of Ulysses befuddled, annoyed, dazzled and slayed. Does anyone believe that Beto O’Rourke, a noted emo nerd and friend of the NOU fans At the Drive-In, named his son Ulysses after the guy in “The Odyssey”?Lungfish, ‘Broadcast’ (1992)Lungfish spawned a cult within the emo cult. The gnomic Baltimore crew was devoted to loping riffs, with a singer who sang like a mystic monk channeling transmissions from forgotten nature gods. The group just got more elliptical as time passed; this is a fairly straightforward anthem of hope after death, which runs into the album’s next song, “Descender,” about a vision too beautiful for this fallen world.Universal Order of Armageddon, ‘Visible Distance’ (1993)After the psychedelic Annapolis emo band Moss Icon ended, the guitarist Tonie Joy eventually put together this perfect next-gen emocore crew in Baltimore: the singer Colin Seven screamed, the drums of Brooks Headley (later a New York pastry chef/writer/restaurateur) rolled and slapped, and Joy’s riffs traded ring for roar.Ashes, ‘Resurrection’ (1993)Elena Ritchie’s voice provided a much-appreciated dreaminess where there would usually be male screaming; the layered harmonies add to this Bethesda, Md., band’s signature.Hose.got.cable, ‘Heraland’ (1993)This Richmond quartet excelled at something many of its heavier emo peers struggled with: killer hooks. Simple but devastating, this one was sung by its drummer, John Skaritza, who made it look easy and not ridiculous.Maximillian Colby, ‘What’s the Matter River?’ (1995)In the mid-90s, suburban Virginia hardcore kids were heading to college and starting a mess of bands that sounded like this crew from James Madison University: a slow, acidic meander of droning bass, distant guitar that suddenly snapped into focus and a singer tearing his throat out.Fugazi, ‘Glueman’ (1988)In 1987, MacKaye teamed up with Guy Picciotto and Brendan Canty from Rites of Spring and an untried bassist named Joe Lally to form Fugazi. The band knew exactly what it was getting into: The phrase “beyond emo” was hidden in a flyer for its first show. Its internationally famous work lasted until 2003, when it went on a hiatus. Of course, this band is far better known than the others on this playlist, but it is impossible to end with anything but this song, when the group was at its improvisational peak. MacKaye likes to define punk as “the free space” where ideas can flow without commercial concerns. Here, the musical space is about as free as punk gets: When that seesaw chord started, audiences knew they were about to witness an event as Picciotto threw himself into a near-trance. (This live video is from 1995.) And “Glueman” does provide a motto for emo’s whole worldview: “I spent it all.” More