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LOS ANGELES — Amanda Kloots is not surprised that she’s famous.You don’t move to New York from Ohio at 18, go to countless thanks-but-no-thanks auditions, dust yourself off again and again, or practice tap dance nightly on your small apartment bathroom floor in case a spot in the ensemble for “42nd Street” or the Rockettes opens because you think you are best suited to a life of quiet anonymity. More
Using cinematic tools other comics overlook, the star (who is also the director, editor and cameraman) trains a glaring spotlight on internet life mid-pandemic.One of the most encouraging developments in comedy over the past decade has been the growing directorial ambition of stand-up specials. It’s folly to duplicate the feel of a live set, so why not fully adjust to the screen and try to make something as visually ambitious as a feature? More
Cameos by Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga and the K-pop group BTS mysteriously disappeared from the special when it aired on Chinese streaming sites. Online, fans suspected censorship.In China, the reunion episode of “Friends” was all about grudges.The problem wasn’t “Friends,” but the friends of “Friends.” More
His YouTube posts dissected issues of Indian life, especially gender inequality. He died of complications of Covid-19 after lamenting his hospital treatment.Rahul Vohra began his acting career in the theater and later worked in low-budget films and television ads. But he was fascinated by the role technology played in shaping conversations about society, so he turned to video blogging.After he and Jyoti Tiwari married in December, she joined him in producing short, scripted videos in Hindi about issues like gender disparity, rising gas prices and the difficulties of working from home during the pandemic. Several have received more than 1 million views, and Mr. Vohra swiftly became one of India’s most popular YouTube stars.In one video, titled “Story of a Woman,” he asks for a cup of tea from his wife, who is played by an actress and is seen lost in thought after a long day of housework.“I am not a robot,” she says.“You only stay at home; what else do you do?” Mr. Vohra asks. She challenges him to do household chores for a day, telling him that then he would understand what she had meant. After accepting the challenge, he’s soon seen struggling and tiring within hours.“Even if I am sick, I had to do this work every day,” the wife says. “In reverse I ask for nothing, just a bit of respect and love.”Mr. Vohra died of complications of Covid-19 on May 9 at a hospital in New Delhi, Ms. Tiwari said. He was 35.He had fallen ill in New Delhi’s second wave of the pandemic, when much of the country’s health care system was overwhelmed. He found himself making desperate calls to his wife from his hospital bed, telling her that he feared he would die. She called the hospital for help but received little attention, she said. He was eventually moved to another hospital and died there.His videos struck a chord with young and middle-class Indians. “There was something about him which touched the lives of people,” a friend, Ankur Seth, said. “He spread positivity around even in dark times.”Rahul Vohra was born into a middle-class family in New Delhi on Jan. 27, 1986. His father, Suresh Vohra, works in a manufacturing firm, and his mother, Bimla Vohra, is a homemaker. Along with his wife and parents, he is survived by a sister, Neeru Vohra.Mr. Vohra received a degree in commerce from Delhi University. A talented performer from a young age, he was then offered a place at the prestigious Asmita Theater Group school in New Delhi.Two days after he died, Ms. Tiwari, 29, a writer for YouTube videos, found on her husband’s phone a video of him struggling to breathe and complaining about the poor quality of medical care at the hospital where he had initially been admitted. She posted it on Instagram with the hashtag #justiceforirahulvohra.“This is extremely valuable right now,” he said in the video, referring to his oxygen mask. “Without it patients get giddy and suffer.”In another post the day before he died, on his Facebook page, he wrote, “I would have lived had I received better treatment.” He tagged Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has been severely criticized for his handling of the pandemic.“My Rahul has left us, everyone knows that but, no one knows how he left us,” Ms. Tiwari wrote on Instagram. “I hope my husband will get justice.” More
8 Ways a Modern Civil Rights Movement Moved the CultureFrom music to movies, canceled podcasts to toppled monuments, our writers take stock of the culture we shared in the year after George Floyd’s murder.Richard A. ChanceBlack Squares, Mass-Producedby Amanda HessThe ‘Reply All’ Meltdownby Reggie UgwuRacism Became the Genreby Wesley MorrisSongs of Pain and Defianceby Joe CoscarelliThe Many Faces of George Floydby Maya PhillipsRevisiting Monuments, Revisiting Historyby Jason FaragoOur Bookshelves, Ourselves?by Lauren ChristensenMaking Museums Move Fasterby Holland CotterMay 20, 2021On May 25, 2020, George Floyd was murdered under the knee of a white police officer, who is now in prison. Even so, a year later — after Americans protested and posted black squares on social media; after calls for the convictions of the officers who killed Breonna Taylor and other Black Americans went unanswered — the question remains: After the most significant civil rights movement in the lifetime of many of us, how much has changed? When the dust settles, what of the uprising persists?One answer just might lie in the art. From “Judas and the Black Messiah” to H.E.R.’s “I Can’t Breathe,” from the canceling of podcasts to the toppling of monuments to oppression, from “White Fragility” to Ibram X. Kendi’s “How to Be an Antiracist”: Thanks to the culture we shared in a year unlike any other, the world looks, for better or worse, at least a little different.AMANDA HESSBlack Squares, Mass-ProducedRichard A. ChanceOne day last June, black squares fell across Instagram at a terrific speed. Instagram is a visual medium, and when tens of millions of users uploaded a blank image to their grids, it said something. But what? Did the black square announce allegiance to a protest movement against the police? Was it a simple nod of respect toward George Floyd, a kind of funeral veil thrown over the digital home of the selfie? Was it a circus of white discomfort, a mass announcement that white people felt like they ought to say something about racism, but they definitely didn’t know what? Or was it more calculated than that — a reputational strategy to shield the posters from their own reckoning?The black squares grew out of a provocation from a pair of young Black music executives. Under the name #TheShowMustBePaused, Brianna Agyemang and Jamila Thomas called out the hypocrisy endemic to the American culture industry: “I don’t want to sit on your Zoom calls talking about the black artists who are making you so much money, if you fail to address what’s happening to black people right now,” they wrote in a series of statements. “The show can’t just go on, as our people are being hunted and killed.” In its demand to improve the working conditions of Black creatives, the pause recalled the radical tradition of the labor strike.But as the idea washed across social media, its pointed message eroded. In the days leading up to the pause, brands translated its ideas into palatable corporate innuendos about “solidarity,” “diversity” and “inclusion.” The statements all seemed to be rendered in white text on black backgrounds, as if they had been mass produced in the same crisis conference room. Soon the day of action came to be known as Blackout Tuesday, with its central iconography of the black square, named after the default shape of an Instagram post.There was something suspicious about the eagerness with which the symbol of protest was taken up by entities, like N.F.L. teams, that had previously squashed Black Lives Matter activism in their ranks. #TheShowMustBePaused had been animated by its specificity: two Black women risking their careers by speaking out against racism in their industry. When millions of people joined in, the context was diluted to the point of inscrutability; the act was so popular that it came to feel perfunctory, as if everyone with a social media account was now engaging in a bit of crisis control for their personal brands. By the time the trend reached a Canadian Garfield-themed restaurant — which posted a baffling image of the cartoon cat’s eyes squinting languidly atop a black square — the movement had been recast as a farce. The campaign had come full circle: What began as a protest of corporate appropriation of Black culture became another Black cultural artifact for brands to exploit for their own ends.REGGIE UGWUThe ‘Reply All’ MeltdownPodcasts are good for going deep. They unfold unhurriedly, at the speed of a cocktail conversation, or a bedtime story. Most, to some degree, are serialized, leaving a trail of bread crumbs to draw in the listener. Over the last year, as media institutions around the country were attempting to take a deeper look at themselves, re-examining their roles in perpetuating racist narratives, few were under more scrutiny than the food magazine Bon Appetít, the subject of a multipart series that premiered in February from the celebrated internet and culture podcast “Reply All.” The series, “The Test Kitchen,” was a kind of post-mortem, investigating why the magazine had seemed to self-destruct in the wake of the protests in June, when photos resurfaced of its editor in a racially stereotyped costume. But “Reply All” hadn’t looked deep enough. After the second of four planned episodes aired, several Black former employees of the company that produces the show, Gimlet Media, cried hypocrisy. They accused Gimlet, and senior staffers of “Reply All” specifically, of the same kinds of transgressions that had plagued Bon Appetít. Within days, the series was canceled and the staffers had stepped down. It was a cautionary tale that reverberated across the industry: Reporting on racial equity is one thing, practicing it is another.WESLEY MORRISRacism Became the GenreRichard A. ChanceFor more than 30 years, when a slain Black American ushers in national tragedy, anyone looking for explanatory art could always find clarity in “Do the Right Thing.” Spike Lee released his first masterpiece in 1989, in the wake of killings in New York City. The film’s depiction of one block in a Brooklyn neighborhood and its climactic implosion pivots on gentrification, police brutality and systemic injustice that Lee refuses to name. Therein resides its power. Invisible strings pull at its characters. They’re helpless against the inferno that engulfs their home — fate, in the classical sense.The murder of George Floyd last Memorial Day left a considerably vaster wake; tragedy didn’t simply grip the nation, it shook the country, hard. This time, anyone looking for explanatory art received almost satirical algorithmic advice. Here, for instance, is “The Help.” Once again, Lee’s film felt most apt. But other television shows and movies have flooded the breach of what seems right to call the Floyd era, a period in which the status has been vigorously de-quo’ed with respect to a centuries-old racism that white Americans, suddenly, realized was as elemental for this country as fire. It’s mostly work that was made before last May but seemed to anticipate the mood since Floyd’s death crystallized ancient dismay.On HBO, there was “Lovecraft Country,” a fantasy series that premiered in August and roves the 1950s-era United States along with the Korean War, outer space and an assortment of moments in the distant past. Recently, “Them” arrived on Amazon and gleefully turns ’50s racial integration into a horror series set in a white suburb. At least two movies were made about government agencies harassing — and, in Fred Hampton’s case, shooting to death as he slept — prominent Black Americans. Before these were movies like “The Hate U Give,” about a teenager drawn to protest after the police gun down her friend; and “Queen & Slim,” in which two cop-killers go on the lam and somehow fall in love. That’s for starters.Some of this work can be as lyrical as Lee’s. Yet despite its reliance upon metaphor and genre, it feels predicated upon a kind of moral literalism — or perhaps simply obviousness. The pervasion of racism oppresses the characters, the plots and maybe even us. That, of course, is how racism operates. But here it leaves no room for ideas or personalities to declare themselves. The sense of doom is totalizing and deadening. Characters can’t meaningfully connect or think without the intrusion of ghosts, monsters or the F.B.I.This isn’t to say that there’s no way to imagine wedding American crisis and magic realism. A couple of years ago, “Watchmen” fused the fight against white supremacy with superhero myths. The conflation never felt gratuitous because its makers seemed to deeply understand what they were up to and took their time fully revealing that to us. Too often, the crisis invites opportunism.In the 1970s, as Black nationalism became the dominant Black political mode, something amazing happened to American movies. They got Blacker. Before 1968, there had basically been Sidney Poitier changing the country on his own; then a galaxy of other faces materialized alongside his. But pretty swiftly, it became clear — courtesy of both gems and dross — that criminality, heroic and otherwise, would preoccupy most of these movies, many of them made by Black men. “Blaxploitation” they called it, in part for its nearsightedness.A similar monomania is back for this latest boom in Black screen expression. The crime now is discrimination deployed in order to make the past at home in the present and the present indistinguishable from the past. Continuums bend into loops. The characters feel largely like victims. And the work can feel as exploitative of an audience’s hunger to watch itself as the ’70s stuff — but without the humor, haywire electricity or invigorating loucheness. (Boy, do you do miss those now.) Here, too, are pandering and cut corners; here is leaning on genre presets that render atrocity redundant.Some of this work is trying to capture the surrealism of racism that Jordan Peele invented for “Get Out.” But while that movie introduced to popular culture a critique of white covetousness of Black personhood, it was also about the fear of the loss of oneself, about the plunge into a “sunken place” that results in racial lobotomy. The scares are external. More crucially, they’re existential.Within a year, George Floyd has become an irrevocable symbol of tragedy, reckoning and reform. That kind of transfiguration snuffs out the complexity of his everyday humanity. It’s akin to the flattening done by some popular art, where the premium’s placed not so much on characters (or, for that matter, character) but on concepts and theses; history lessons and did-you-knows. That’s why people remain drawn to Peele’s film and especially to Lee’s. There’s human mystery in them: Why are we like this? People are their genre.JOE COSCARELLISongs of Pain and DefianceDaBaby was defiant. Noname incensed and gutted in just 70 seconds. Lil Baby frustrated, overflowing, ambivalent. Beyoncé opted for exuberance. The music that flowed from young Black artists in the days, weeks and months after the murder of George Floyd — and the killings of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and too many others — represented a spectrum from beauty to pain, resilience to exhaustion, but never resignation. These were songs for demonstration or for the solitude of headphones — even for the Billboard charts, the Grammys, the club. “This a new vanguard,” Noname rapped, softly yet insistent. “I’m the new vanguard.”MAYA PHILLIPSThe Many Faces of George FloydRichard A. ChanceWhat does it mean to be the face of a movement? And what does it cost?Chances are you know what George Floyd looks like. Whether or not you watched the video of his death, you’ll have seen his face not just on the news but in the streets: on murals, on posters, on masks, on T-shirts.It’s not uncommon for an image of the dead to become public domain — images help us memorialize, humanize, remember. And yet in the past year, George Floyd has been omnipresent.In a mural in Houston he wears a hoodie and a pair of angel wings, the words “Forever breathing in our hearts” forming a yellow halo above his head. There are tributes in Brooklyn, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and even Berlin and the West Bank. Often, he’s placed against a heavenly backdrop of clouds. Or he’s part of a collage: In a mural by the artist Jorit in Naples, Italy, Floyd cries tears of blood next to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X.Part of the intention here was to reinforce Floyd’s innocence — to assert his place as the victim of a tragedy, to humanize him and spotlight the killings of Black Americans at the hands of the police. And in many ways that campaign was successful: We know Floyd’s name, we recognize his face, and his death incited powerful national protests.But there’s danger in the proliferation of an image; the individual isn’t the same as the image, and that individual can be lost in the very movement his image comes to represent. That once as a kid, Floyd wrote that he wanted to be a Supreme Court justice, that in high school he had the nickname “Big Friendly,” that he spent some time homeless — an image can’t account for these details or replace the work they do in realizing the enormity of a human life. As soon as Floyd became the face of a movement — even one that called for citizens to remember the victims as individual people with individual lives (“Say Their Names”) — he nevertheless became synecdochal, a symbol of Black America.Browse Etsy and Redbubble and Amazon and Teepublic: You’ll see George Floyd’s face on T-shirts and throw pillows and socks. What began as a tribute can quickly transform into a brand. Blackness is too often commodified already — slavery being our nation’s earliest and cruelest example — so the sale of a Black man’s image is an unfortunate continuation of that tradition.But this also raises the question: Why George Floyd? Which isn’t to say he is not worthy of memorial, but in a country that so routinely kills its Black citizens, where the list of names goes on ad infinitum, what faces get remembered, and why?Before Floyd, the image of Trayvon Martin in his hoodie — and sometimes the hoodie on its own, divorced from its wearer — seemed to appear everywhere. And when Breonna Taylor was killed, artists and volunteers painted a 7,000-square-foot mural to her in Annapolis, Md.The increase in surveillance — police body cams, iPhone videos from witnesses — thankfully helps allow for more accountability of police officers facing Black citizens. Yet it also presents the question of how “photogenic” a fatality is: Do we see the person’s face? How much footage do we have of the event? Did we hear their last words?Can a tragedy be recreated into artwork, or the poster image of a movement, or sold as a souvenir? Though not always intentional, the cruel alchemy of circumstances — including the manner of death, the publicity around it and the cultural temperature of the moment — characterizes how iconic a Black victim will be.On the striking June 2020 cover of The New Yorker, illustrated by Kadir Nelson, George Floyd’s face interrupts part of the magazine logo, and the silhouette of his body contains the images of other Black figures recently past or long gone: Ahmaud Arbery, Laquan McDonald, Alton Sterling, Rosa Parks, Medgar Evers, Emmett Till, Rodney King.It’s a beautiful piece of art, and works to restore dignity to Floyd’s image, which many of us first saw in that infamous video of his death. And yet so many faces on that cover are unfamiliar, and so many political messages and manners of death (some brutal, some natural) are conflated, as though they’re all Black martyrs to equivalent circumstances.But these lives and deaths weren’t at all the same. And Floyd’s image, retrofitted as a receptacle for the others, shouldn’t be made to hold the weight of every Black tragedy that came before. It’s essential that we pay attention to context, to the traditions of American oppression, and yet that shouldn’t overshadow each individual loss — each face, each character.It’s difficult to hold the same space for both grief and protest, art and commodity. One always seems to obscure the other. Even as the image of George Floyd stays with us, we must remember how many faces are forgotten. When we build an afterlife for the dead — from murals, shirts and signs — we may lose sight of the very lives we try to honor.JASON FARAGORevisiting Monuments, Revisiting HistoryRichard A. ChanceIn July 2018, a year after a white supremacist rally in nearby Charlottesville, Va., left a woman dead, a blue-ribbon commission advised the mayor of Richmond on what to do with the capital’s Confederate statues: integrate them into “a holistic narrative” that “acknowledges the emotional realities the Monument Avenue statues represent.” Well, they sure got that. In the days following George Floyd’s murder, protesters ringed Richmond’s Robert E. Lee memorial with graffiti, and soon after, they toppled a nearby statue of Jefferson Davis, dragging the Confederate president in the streets. Two Richmond artists began projecting images of Black heroes and victims on Lee’s plinth. By summer, as statues of Stonewall Jackson and other Confederates were dismantled, Monument Avenue had turned into a 24-hour protest, meeting point, cookout and dance party. It says a lot about the state of art today when so-called destruction has more aesthetic power than new painting and sculpture, but perhaps it’s best if we understand what happened in Richmond as its own kind of creation — as acts, that is, capable of reconstituting and not merely responding to our past. The statue of Lee still stands on Monument Avenue, ringed now by a protective fence. The statue of Jackson is at a sewage treatment plant.LAUREN CHRISTENSENOur Bookshelves, Ourselves?Richard A. ChanceAs protesters marched across the country last summer, reading lists were shared in living rooms and on social media, as a quieter effort toward change. If 2020 started off with vigorous debates over authenticity and “trauma porn,” with the publication of Jeanine Cummins’s novel “American Dirt” in January, it ended up in a very different place. Are we what we read? A glance at a selection of the books dealing explicitly with the subject of race that America sent to the New York Times best-seller list during this period of upheaval can offer a window into the shifting of our collective consciousness.“Such a Fun Age,” by Kiley Reid Before Karens were named, but not before they existed, Reid’s debut novel (which notched a monthslong spot on the list in January 2020) used the story of a young Black woman, her white boyfriend and her white employer to raise worthy questions about how even — especially? — so-called progressive, white liberals can end up using the Black people in their lives to demonstrate their own progressiveness.“How to Be an Anti-Racist,” by Ibram X. Kendi On June 14, 2020 — less than three weeks after the murder of George Floyd — Kendi’s 2019 book returned to the list once again, and stayed there. (Robin DiAngelo’s blockbuster 2018 book “White Fragility” had already been on the list, a first stop for many white readers aiming to learn how to Talk About Race.) There’s no such thing as being nonracist, the book argues: There are only racists and those who actively oppose racist ideas and policies in their everyday lives. Readers sought out Kendi’s words as many Americans started to take a new, overdue look at our complicity in systemic injustice.“The Vanishing Half,” by Brit Bennett Bennett published her second novel on June 2, and it remains a best seller today. Following decades in the lives of identical, light-skinned Black twins raised in a small town in Jim Crow-era Louisiana, Bennett’s multigenerational story asks: If race is a construct, who does and does not get to choose theirs?“Caste,” by Isabel Wilkerson In August, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author published her first book in a decade, comparing anti-Black racism in America to the Hindu treatment of untouchables and the extermination of Jews in Nazi Germany. Years in the making, this best seller offered a global, historical, cross-cultural context for the civil rights movement that had begun only months before it hit shelves.“The Hate U Give,” by Angie Thomas This novel about a teenager who witnesses a police officer kill her childhood friend debuted at the top of the young adult list when it was published in 2017. Thomas’s inspiration in writing it had been the fatal shooting of Oscar Grant III, an unarmed 22-year-old Black man, in Oakland, Calif., in 2009. While it speaks directly to our current moment, “The Hate U Give” has also spoken to many before, spending 214 weeks on the list in the past four years.HOLLAND COTTERMaking Museums Move FasterIt was a rough year for art museums, a year of forced consciousness-raising and reckoning. Covid-19 shut them down, raising the specter of financial disaster. Black Lives Matter activism presented them with a different, subtler threat: total irrelevance. In the wake of the murder in Minneapolis of George Floyd, it became clear that the visual culture that counted now wasn’t to be found in the galleries of elite-and-proud institutions. It was online, on city walls, in the street. Museums got the message and scrambled to respond. But, unpracticed in civil engagement, they flailed and embarrassed themselves. Hastily issued declarations of anti-racist solidarity came across as the too-little-too-late gestures they were. When, last summer, the Whitney Museum of American Art tried to hustle up a show of new activist work but failed to pay some of the artists involved, the effort was met with outrage. But there have been encouraging developments. In April, the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Ky., opened a major exhibition dedicated to the memory of Breonna Taylor. The show was assembled in just four months — overnight, in museum time — setting a benchmark for how museums can be activists of history, not just custodians. In New York City, a post-lockdown Guggenheim Museum has temporarily transformed itself into what feels like an old-style alternative space, filling its galleries with politically timely work. And in Washington, D.C., the conservative National Gallery of Art recently announced change where it really counts: internally. A leadership team that was, until very recently, 100 percent white is now composed of more than half people of color. If this is the start of a new normal, I more than welcome it. I have zero nostalgia for the old one. More
Tensions between protecting and capitalizing on the image of the famous Australian beach town have exploded over a new reality show.BYRON BAY, Australia — The moral quandaries of life as an Instagram influencer in the famously idyllic town of Byron Bay are not lost on Ruby Tuesday Matthews.Ms. Matthews, 27, peddles more than vegan moisturizers, probiotic powders and conflict-free diamonds to her 228,000 followers. She is also selling an enviable lifestyle set against the backdrop of her Australian hometown’s crystalline coves and umbrellaed poolsides.It’s part of the image-making that has helped transform Byron Bay — for better or worse — from a sleepy beach town drawing surfers and hippies into a globally renowned destination for the affluent and digitally savvy.“I do kind of have moments where I’m like, ‘Am I exploiting this town that I live in?” Ms. Matthews said recently as she sat at The Farm, a sprawling agritourism enterprise that embodies the town’s wellness ethos. “But at the same time, it’s my job. It puts food on the table for my children.”The tensions between leveraging and protecting Byron Bay’s reputation, always simmering in this age of entrepreneurial social media, exploded last month when Netflix announced plans for a reality show, “Byron Baes,” that will follow “hot Instagrammers living their best lives.”Local residents said the show would be a tawdry misrepresentation of the town and demanded that Netflix cancel the project. One woman started a petition drive that has gathered more than 9,000 signatures and organized a “paddle out” — a surfer’s memorial usually reserved for commemorating deaths — in revolt.Byron Bay is the most expensive place to live in Australia, with a median house price of $1.8 million.Mullumbimby, a town near Byron Bay. The announcement of the new show from Netflix has raised questions about who is entitled to capitalize on the cult of Byron Bay.Several store owners, many of whom have substantial Instagram presences, have refused permits that would allow Netflix to record on their premises. A number of influencers who were approached by the show also said they had decided not to take part. More
A musical battle, the hit webcast suggests, is really just a pretext for a party and an occasion to appreciate something.Steve Harvey, the comedian and game-show host, is not prone to understatement, least of all when it comes to bespoke men’s wear. This past Easter Sunday, he appeared on a studio stage wearing a custom satin suit in a violet hue previously unknown to science. Harvey was there to host an episode of the popular webcast Verzuz, a musical competition in which famous artists face off to determine who has the better catalog. The episode was a big one, a showdown of soul legends pitting the Isley Brothers against Earth, Wind & Fire, and Harvey’s words were as loud as his suit: This would be, he announced, “the most epic Verzuz of all time.”Onstage, Ron and Ernie Isley sat facing their counterparts, Earth, Wind & Fire’s Philip Bailey, Verdine White and Ralph Johnson. It was indeed an unusual matchup. Verzuz battles typically feature artists — rappers, R&B singers, influential producers — who have made their name in the past few decades. But Earth, Wind & Fire’s debut album arrived in stores 50 years ago; the Isley Brothers’ first hit, “Shout,” was released in 1959, when Steve Harvey was a toddler. Now 64, he faced the camera to address younger music fans. “Ask your mama about this here music,” he said. “If you don’t know their music, it’s ’cause you don’t know nothing about music. So sit down and learn.”Pop music has always gone hand in hand with strong opinions and heated debates — including the kinds of generational cleavages that inspire finger-wagging lectures. There are times when fans stake personal identities on their favorite records or genres, or sustain fierce debates over rival artists: Beatles or Stones, Michael Jackson or Prince, Nicki or Cardi. Arguing about music may well be as primal a human endeavor as making it. Verzuz is based on this principle. The title evokes a heavyweight bout, and the episodes unfold like a boxing match: Each round presents a track from each artist, with viewers encouraged to pick the victor on a song-by-song basis.The format has links to feisty musical blood sports: jazz’s cutting contests, Jamaican sound clashes, rap battles. But Verzuz has emerged as the warmest and fuzziest musical phenomenon of the past year, one of the internet’s most reliable suppliers of good vibes. Verzuz began on Instagram Live during the early weeks of the pandemic, with a battle between its co-founders, the hip-hop producers Timbaland and Swizz Beatz. That first webcast, which stretched for five hours, was a novelty: an odd combination of a Zoom conference call, a D.J. set and a languid late-night hang. Timbaland played one of his hits (Aaliyah’s “One in a Million”), Swizz Beatz answered with one of his (DMX’s “Ruff Ryders’ Anthem”). The scrolling comments filled with emojis and exclamations (“Timbo range too much for swizz”). The interface was wonky and the sound muddy, but the spectacle — musicians glimpsed through laptop cameras, grooving to their own records — was strange and thrilling, a more intimate encounter than showbiz normally permits. In a world that had ground to a halt, the two producers had hit upon a whole new way to stage a concert.Today, pop fandom marinates in online swamps similar to those that breed conspiracy theories and political extremism, with almost comically toxic results.A year later, Verzuz is somewhat spiffed up. It was recently acquired by TrillerNet, the parent company to a TikTok competitor, and has a sponsorship deal with Cîroc vodka and a partnership with Peloton. Competitors no longer stream in from remote locations on jittery Wi-Fi. But the show retains a gonzo charm, and a sense that unscripted weirdness may erupt at any moment. A battle between the dance-hall titans Beenie Man and Bounty Killer, livestreamed from Jamaica, was interrupted by the local police. (“There are 500,000 people watching us right now from all over the world,” Beenie Man told them. “Do you want to be that guy?”) The R&B star Ashanti was forced to stall when her adversary, Keyshia Cole, ran an hour late. The Wu-Tang Clan rappers Ghostface Killah and Raekwon finished off their battle singing and dancing to old disco hits.This shagginess extends to the competition itself. There’s no formal means of determining a Verzuz winner; victory is in the ear of the beholder. Viewers weigh in on social media, and journalists write recaps. But their judgments are, of course, subjective, maybe even beside the point. A musical battle, Verzuz suggests, is really a pretext for a party and an occasion for art appreciation. This has always been true: From the primeval pop hothouse of Tin Pan Alley, where songwriters vied to churn out hits, to today’s pop charts, dominated by hip-hop producers chasing novel sounds, one-upsmanship is often the motor of innovation, an engine of both musical art and commerce. Great songs, beloved albums, groundbreaking styles — all have resulted from musicians’ drive to outshine their colleagues.Competition is also a driving force in music fandom — for better or, often these days, for worse. Today, pop fandom marinates in online swamps similar to those that breed conspiracy theories and political extremism, with almost comically toxic results: Some super fans organize themselves into “armies” that devote disturbing amounts of energy to the coordinated harassment of anyone seen as speaking ill of their favorite stars.Arguing about music may well be as primal a human endeavor as making it.One of the subtler values of Verzuz is that it models a saner, more joyful, more pleasurable kind of musical advocacy and competition — in which trash is talked lovingly, both doled out and received in good humor. Here, too, there are politics of a different kind. Last summer, in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd, Verzuz held two “special editions”: a gospel episode titled “The Healing,” featuring the singers Kirk Franklin and Fred Hammond, and a Juneteenth celebration, with Alicia Keys and John Legend. Nearly every artist to appear on Verzuz is Black, and the show makes no concessions to any other audience; non-Black viewers enter its virtual spaces as eavesdroppers on an in-group conversation. The point of these battles is not to choose winners, but to luxuriate in the glories of the Black pop canon, and the community forged by that body of music. The critic Craig Jenkins, writing about a matchup between Gladys Knight and Patti LaBelle, rendered a pithy verdict that could be applied to the whole Verzuz enterprise: “Blackness won.”That was true again on Easter Sunday. Despite Steve Harvey’s best efforts to stir up intergenerational beef, the webcast was a showcase of musical continuity across the decades. (In the unlikely event that there were viewers unfamiliar with Earth, Wind & Fire or the Isleys, they would surely have recognized many of the songs, which have been copiously sampled and interpolated by hip-hop artists.) The episode ended in the only way it could have: with members of both groups gathered at the front of the stage, dancing and singing along to Earth, Wind & Fire’s celestial anthem “September,” abandoning all pretense that they were adversaries in musical battle. “Celebrate! Love!” shouted Philip Bailey. “Enjoy! Appreciate!”Source photographs by Raymond Boyd/Getty Images; Ebet Roberts/Redferns/Getty Images; Michael Putland/Getty Images.Jody Rosen is a contributing writer for the magazine and the author of “Two Wheels Good: The Bicycle on Planet Earth and Elsewhere,” to be published next year. He last wrote about the musical prodigy Jacob Collier. More
The rapper’s new single, video and sneaker were merely the prelude to a brilliantly orchestrated main event: a virtuosic performance on Twitter.One after another, they came with venom for Lil Nas X. The basketball star Nick Young. The governor of South Dakota, Kristi Noem. The rapper Joyner Lucas. Candace Owens and various right-wing Twitter personalities. Greg Locke, a Tennessee pastor. Fox News. Nike.They were clueless. Blissful, almost — lambs blind to the slaughter they were hurtling toward.Lil Nas X was waiting for them all, barbs at his fingertips. For the last four days — since the release of his new single, “Montero (Call Me By Your Name),” its masterfully absurdist erotica video and then limited-edition sneakers called Satan Shoes — the 21-year-old rapper and digital prodigy has been using his Twitter account as a fly swatter, flattening one irritant after the next in a loud and uproarious display of internet-speed celebrity, executing a series of flawless pirouette dunks on the heads of his willing but bumbling antagonists.After Noem tweeted about his Satan Shoes, he groaned, “ur a whole governor and u on here tweeting about some damn shoes. do ur job!” Lucas suggested that the “Montero” video might not be appropriate for children, and Lil Nas X eye-rolled back, “i literally sing about lean & adultery in old town road. u decided to let your child listen. blame yourself.”In between target practice, Lil Nas X was reflective, too. “i spent my entire teenage years hating myself,” because of what Christianity taught about homosexuality, he wrote. “so i hope u are mad, stay mad, feel the same anger you teach us to have towards ourselves.”What “Montero” has caused — or rather, what Lil Nas X has engineered — is a good old-fashioned moral panic (or at least the performance of one), the sort of thing that had largely been left behind in the 1980s, but is tragically well-suited to the country’s current cultural discourse polarization. The song, the video, the shoes — they are bait.And “Montero” anticipates the kerfuffles it would cause. The true art here isn’t the music (that said, it’s one of Lil Nas X’s better songs) or the video (more on that below): it’s the effortlessness, the ease, the joy of his reactions to the reactions. It’s the sense that he is playing chess to everyone else’s lame checkers moves — he is simply faster, funnier and on firmer, more principled ground than his adversaries, who are at best, comically flimsy.No famous person is as adept as Lil Nas X at casually but thoroughly smacking down the ream of Twitter churls inevitably awakened by something like this — maybe Cardi B, or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He is a grade-A internet manipulator and, provided all the tools and resources typically reserved for long-established pop superstars, he is perfectly suited to dominate the moment. “Montero” may or may not top the Billboard Hot 100 next week, but it will be unrivaled in conversations started.“Montero” is a frisky song about lust; Lil Nas X has said it was inspired by a man he met and fell for. The video, which pivots from pastel pastoral to CGI gothic, is a wild, kaleidoscope romp of sexual self-acceptance, in which Lil Nas X pole dances his way down to hell, where he gives Satan a lap dance before killing him, stealing his horns and claiming them for himself.It is knowing and camp, and knowing about its campiness, meshing the testing-the-format provocations of the late-1980s video era with the big-budget pop-machine clips of the early 2000s. That it has awakened culture warriors uncomfortable with displays of gay male desire, or with playful representations of sin, means the video has done what it was meant to do.The same is true of the Satan Shoes he released in partnership with the company MSCHF — a Nike Air Max 97 customized with some lightly provocative references to Satan, priced at $1,018 a pair in a nod to Luke 10:18, a Bible passage about the fall of Satan from heaven. The shoes include, allegedly, a drop of human blood in the liquid that fills the soles.Lil Nas partnered with MSCHF to release Satan Shoes — a Nike Air Max 97 customized with some lightly provocative references to Satan.MSCHFSatanic iconography is perhaps the lowest hanging fruit of transgression, especially in a consumer product. But here, again, this was chum in the water — the discourse started by the shoes has been far more important than the shoes themselves. Nike disavowed them, and sued MSCHF for trademark infringement (but notably not Lil Nas X, a celebrity it might end up one day actually wanting to collaborate with). A sneaker YouTuber who was provided a pair of the shoes filmed himself throwing them down the trash chute in his apartment building. Lil Nas X, meanwhile, was posting uproarious memes about pleading for Nike’s forgiveness.Twitter is a performance space like any other, with an almost limitless audience: stans, enthusiasts, haters, trolls, skeptics, newbies. Lil Nas X has something for all of them. In his pre-“Old Town Road” life, he was an active Nicki Minaj stan, which meant he was a maestro of steering online conversation.And though he is now one of the most successful new pop stars of the past few years, that fundamental skill set remains. In recent days, he’s taunted the fast food chain Chick-fil-A (which is owned by religious conservatives); poked fun at the campaign Justin Bieber attempted to boost streams of his single “Yummy”; posted endless memes about his flirtations with the dark side, mock apologies for his transgressions and even headfake statements of anxiety that end as reminders to stream “Montero.”All of it is memorable — not simply because of the expert skill on display, but because it’s clear that Lil Nas X is not simply the performer of “Montero,” nor simply the star of its video, nor simply the inspiration for a sneaker. He’s the conductor of a symphony of thousands, maybe even millions. It’s Lil Nas X’s conversation, we’re all just talking in it. More
