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Press: “It’s a New Day”: THR Drama Actress Roundtable

THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER: Gillian Anderson had been dreading this. A tripod had arrived at her home in the U.K., along with a mess of lights and, really, just the thought of having to sit through an hour-plus on Zoom had her practically reeling. But then the woman who stuns as Margaret Thatcher in the most recent season of Netflix’s The Crown got talking — about pigeonholing and pay equity, about grieving and giving oneself over — and soon she didn’t want to stop talking. And neither did anyone else — The Queen’s Gambit‘s Anya Taylor-Joy, Pose‘s Mj Rodriguez, Genius: Aretha‘s Cynthia Erivo, WandaVision’s Elizabeth Olsen and Ratched‘s Sarah Paulson — at THR’s annual (virtual) Drama Actress Roundtable.

Let’s start easy. Complete this sentence: On set, I’m the one who is most likely to be …

GILLIAN ANDERSON Hiding in a corner. (Laughter.)

ANYA TAYLOR-JOY Pacing whilst moving my hands like this (waving above) trying to figure out what it is that I’m doing.

SARAH PAULSON Bossing everyone around.

ELIZABETH OLSEN Probably trying to make the crew laugh.

At the same time, you’re also inhabiting characters for long stretches and often they require you to go to dark or heavy places. What happens when a director yells, “Cut”? Do they come home with you?

MJ RODRIGUEZ I try to separate myself from Blanca as much as possible, especially [because we’re] dealing with immense trauma. So, when I go home, it’s Michaela Jaé going home, and I bring Blanca to the set. It’s easier that way because it can weigh on you otherwise and wash off on your family.

TAYLOR-JOY I wish I had as much control over it. For me, there are some characters that you can very easily snap in and out of and then there are other ones like Beth in The Queen’s Gambit. I’d worked back-to-back on two projects with one day off in between, so by the time I got to filming the show, I was exhausted and there was no energy to create a barrier. And that was potentially the toughest thing about the show, because it was a wonderful experience as an actor to be able to not have to reach for any emotion, but then you also have to go through the psychological warfare of figuring out, “Why do I feel so awful in the morning?” Like, “What is happening?” And then you go, “Oh, it’s not my feelings,” but I have to sit in them all day and I have to be aware enough to go, “You are not depressed, the character is depressed, and at some point that will leave you.” But I do think a bath every single night — being able to have the visual representation of washing yourself clean of something — helps.

OLSEN Regardless of what exactly the day requires of you, emotionally, you’re just tired. And so you try to be patient and professional and kind, and then when you go home, that’s when your fuse is just … smaller. (Laughter.)

TAYLOR-JOY You should date us, we’re fabulous.

CYNTHIA ERIVO I did, it was a real ugly cry. After playing [Harriet Tubman in the 2019 film], I went straight to see my mother in London and I don’t know what happened, but I just broke. You know the visual representation of shattering glass? That was what was happening to me. All the stuff I had to dig through to play her, all that heartbreaking stuff didn’t leave me when I finished, and it took time to just dissipate. And it was the same with Aretha — unfortunately, the pandemic hit when we were in the middle of shooting, so I couldn’t completely get rid of her during the six-month hiatus, and then I had to go right back into playing her. And it’s little things, like mannerisms, that stick with you. The lilt in her voice when she’s speaking to people. Like, that’s not me but I was stuck with that for a bit. And I was recording an album at the same time, so there was no space between one and the other. It took me a while before I could listen to an Aretha song again.

ANDERSON I certainly had that experience doing X-Files for nine seasons. I had a good couple of mini breakdowns during that, and at the end, could not talk about it, could not see it, could not see pictures, could not. I needed to immerse immediately in theater in another country. And then after a while, I was able to embrace it again, but when I started to embrace it, it was almost like I separated myself so much that I was looking at the image as if it was another person. When you immerse yourself so entirely as we can and we do for such long periods of time, there’s not going to be no consequence to that. Of course, there’s going to be consequence to that.

TAYLOR-JOY May I pose a question to the group?

Please do.

TAYLOR-JOY It’s so wonderful hearing you two talk about this, because I’ve always felt really crazy for the depressions that you go into after you leave a character and not being able to necessarily connect with yourself. And I’m really curious to hear what your relationship is with something being seen. Because when I first started working, I convinced myself that filmmaking was a very private practice with a private group of people and that no one was ever going to see it. And I thought I’d grow out of that, and I haven’t. Every project I have to sit myself down about two months after it’s finished and go, “People are going to see this and have access to it whenever they want.” How do you guys work [handle that]? Because for Queen’s Gambit, I had to go through a grieving period. It was grief, genuinely, to think, “Oh goodness, this thing that I loved so much is not mine anymore.”

ANDERSON I had that experience after doing Blanche in Streetcar [Named Desire] here in the U.K. and then in New York.

OLSEN I saw your last performance in New York. You were fabulous.

PAULSON Fucking phenomenal.

ANDERSON I felt like I’d lost my best friend. I was grieving. Some friends of mine in New York had a brunch for me the weekend after [I finished my run], and I arrived like a complete wreck. It was so profound. I also knew it was unlikely I was going to do it again because I knew that I’d probably lose my mind. I got really close. Like, I’d survived by the skin of my teeth and if I did it again out of ego or attachment or not wanting to let her go, there would be consequences. So I knew it was the end, and it was so sad.

ERIVO Do you know what’s so crazy? I listen to you and I’m like, “Oh my God, that’s what was happening to me during The Color Purple.” It was the last show and I started grieving in the show, knowing that it was coming to an end. There’s one last song and I couldn’t get through it. And then the show ends and I buckled under the sadness of it. But there was no way I could have continued playing Celie on that stage. It [had been] 14 months and I had to let her go. The line between me and her had disappeared. But to answer your question, Anya, I’ve never had an issue with people seeing things. I usually have an issue seeing it after it’s done.

PAULSON This happened when I did Marcia Clark [for The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story]. I felt a profound connection to her and I felt protective of her, and the experience had been so tectonic plate-shifting for me, both as a performer and as a human, and I thought, “If I watch it, I’m going to pick apart everything.” She was left-handed, so every time I use my right hand, I’m going to think, “God damn it, why did they use that?” So, the only way to protect myself from that is to detach from what the world will experience with it. And I’ve maintained that for a long time now — I really don’t watch [things I’m in] because I don’t have the strength, first of all, to bear the sight of my face and, also, I find it really confronting. The preciousness of the thing you were creating with these other people is what I want to be the indelible thing for me and not how it was edited.

TAYLOR-JOY Mm-hmm.

PAULSON All that does is make me furious because I don’t have the power to go in and go, “Hi, um, could you choose take six? It’s infinitely better.” (Laughter.) And when you don’t have that ability and you’re at the mercy of someone else’s opinion of what is the finest work that you’ve done, which doesn’t always line up with what you feel, it’s really jarring and you feel so powerless to do anything about it. So, I have to just sage it all out and let my experience be the only thing that governs the way I feel about it.

RODRIGUEZ When the first two seasons of Pose came out, I didn’t watch them at first because I was just so nervous about how the world would receive it. It was a story that a lot of people haven’t gotten to see, and it was a whole bunch of trans women of color finally getting their shot. It’s a lot of responsibility. And on top of that, it’s a story that’s filled with trauma and things that a lot of us trans women have gone through, so it was hard for me to watch all of those things back.

Gillian, in your career you’ve also been a champion for pay equity. But even as you were promoting a book you co-authored on female empowerment a few years ago, you acknowledged that you were nervous speaking up about being paid less than your male co-star. What do you think you were scared of, and how have the conversations for you changed since?

ANDERSON I just need to point out that I first fought for pay equity way back when it was audacious by anybody’s standards, because I was a nobody when we started to do that series. But when I really spoke up about it was when it happened again, four or five years ago, after the career I’d already had post-X-Files. We were going back to do another season and Fox came to me to offer, I don’t know, a 10th of what my co-star [David Duchovny] was being offered. That was the point where I was like, “Fuck this. I’m actually going to talk about this [publicly].” And since then, it hasn’t really come up. I mean, I haven’t worked with a lot of men, so that hasn’t been an issue. (Laughs.) I’m certainly tuned to it, and were it something now, I’d address it. But I have so much admiration for anyone who stands up for their right either to be paid or to be hired, period. And look, they weren’t going to fire me on The X-Files. The stakes weren’t that high. I put my foot down, not because the stakes weren’t high, but if they were going to fire me, some people were going to have some things to say about that. It’s very different for a young woman going into a job situation with a boss who’s overbearing and asking for a pay raise.

Sure, you had leverage.

ANDERSON Yeah.

For the rest of you, when have you spoken up in your careers?

ERIVO I mean, the obvious is I’m a Black woman, and that has a lot to do with how you’re paid, how you’re hired, if you’re hired, the way you’re hired — it affects everything. I’m lucky enough to have a team behind me that is brave enough to ask the questions I’d like asked: What I’m being paid compared to the leading man in the show, or if I’m being paid a lot less, whether or not they are willing to come up so it becomes equal. And about little things in my contract that just make it easier to exist on a set. For me, it’s about having the guts to stick with it and to keep asking and keep fighting. And there are definitely times where you’re like, “I am so exhausted from asking the same thing.” Like, if we could please have this makeup artist with me because usually there are no Black makeup artists on a set and you’re the only one who needs one, and I’ve had to have that fight every single time I’ve gone onto a set: “I need to hire these two people because they are the only people that understand how to do my face or my hair.” It isn’t about vanity, it’s about making sure that whoever I’m playing is represented in the right way because they understand how to work with my skin tone and my hair. But you keep sticking with it because it’s not just me having my way, it’s me being able to employ two other people. And then maybe I’m asking, “Can we have a DP who understands lighting that works on my skin tone?” So it’s constantly being OK with asking the questions. And there is a bit of fear, like, “Am I going to be seen as difficult?” And yes, there are times where I’ve had someone say they’ve heard I was difficult, but usually, it’s because I’ve asked a question that will make for a better surrounding or a better show. And if I keep asking the questions and if other ladies like myself keep asking the questions, and we keep trying to better our spaces, it just becomes the norm — because at some point it has to just become the norm.

Elizabeth, I believe you had a saying in your house growing up, “No is a full sentence.” When do you find you use it?

OLSEN I use it a lot. (Laughs.) I use it when I’m on set. I mean, I want to be a part of every department when I’m on set. I want to understand the schedule. I want to understand everything. I produced a TV show [Sorry for Your Loss] that didn’t get too much light of day because it was on Facebook, which, whatever … but as a producer on it, it was really important for me to be a voice of everything you’re saying, Cynthia, and have heads of departments feel like and look like the freakin’ world. And just from having a taste of that for two seasons, I can’t [go back]. So when I go to do Dr. Strange 2 in England, I guess I use it when I just can’t shake it even though [the production is] so much bigger than me. I don’t know, my opinions are vast and everyone hears them, from the first AD to the EP. I think I’m like a representative of anyone having a hard time on set. … (Laughs.)

PAULSON You’re the Equity rep, I love it.

OLSEN Oh my God. (Laughter.)

When you think about your careers, is there someone else’s that you look at and go, “Ooh, yeah, I’d love that”?

OLSEN Gillian’s, Sarah’s …

ERIVO Yeah, Sarah, you’re that for me. You’re fucking incredible.

PAULSON You saying that to me makes me want to cry because sometimes you feel like you’re doing this in a bubble and you don’t even know if anything you’re doing ever has any meaning or impact to anyone.

ERIVO It does. From my heart, it does. And I hope I get to work with you one day.

PAULSON I’d give my eyeteeth. (Laughs.) For me, it’s Gillian — somebody being on a TV program for a long time that’s wildly successful and then retreats to another country to be onstage, to reconnect yourself to the very things that inspired you and made you want to be a part of this. It all gets very confusing in terms of how to navigate [this business]because you do want to make a living, but you also want to follow your heart. And there does come a time where you can become quite depleted from the constant output without any input. And if you’re a woman of a certain age, which I certainly am, I feel like I’ve got one foot on one window frame and I’ve got the other one over here and I’m just trying to insist that they stay open for as long as possible. And some of that is beyond my control, but when I look at Gillian’s career I just go, “Well, I want that.”

ANDERSON Thank you for saying that. On the one hand, I feel like there is some degree of design, but I’ve also never really gone after things. And when I finished with X-Files, I didn’t know if I wanted to be on a set again ever. So aside from having grown up in the U.K. and wanting to go back, I knew it would take time before I could, if I was going to. And in London, you could move between theater and TV, and that was always my dream. But every actor has the thing that they’d want more than the thing that they have, and I’m a cinephile, and so I [wonder], “Why do I keep doing TV? All I want to do is do film.” And I’m still doing TV. (Laughs.) But I’ve had such amazing opportunities that, coming from Scully, I even questioned people, like, “Why are you offering this to me? What makes you think that I can do this?” I’ll also say that as soon as you have kids, kids are the priority. So, I say to people, “I’m gonna be such a pain in the ass for you to hire. But if you think I’m this person, I’m gonna need to work during this period of time and then have time with my kids. And it’s going to be expensive for you. If you are willing to do that, then I’m your girl, and if you’re not, you need to find somebody else.”

Anya, Queen’s Gambit became a global juggernaut. How have your opportunities and choices changed? Is there pressure to strike while the iron is hot?

TAYLOR-JOY I think I’ve always followed character and only recently did I start following directors as well, but it’s always been about, “Do I feel like I’m the right person to tell this story? Do I think I can tell this story correctly?” And if you look at something like Queen’s Gambit, it was not supposed to be the white-hot show; it’s a show about a girl that plays chess for seven hours, but I felt so compelled to tell that story. So, it sounds cheesy, but I really just keep following my heart. OK, wait, I take that back. Something I’m also learning is that you give yourself to this person for three to six months, and I never used to think about this before, but now I start thinking, “Am I ready to give up my life for this person? Do I need to tell this story so badly that I’m going to do that?” I try not to think about what other people will think, because it’s your life at the end of the day. And as we all know, you’re that [character] every hour of the day, and when you go home it’s difficult to let go of them, so you have to really love them.

Mj, you’ve talked about how significant this show was for you and for the visibility of the trans community. How have the opportunities being presented to you post-Pose changed?

RODRIGUEZ In the middle of the third season, I started figuring out my worth, and it’s scary. I was nervous. I didn’t expect to actually book my next job after Pose.

ERIVO I did.

PAULSON We all did.

RODRIGUEZ And see, that’s my insecurity and that’s something I have to fix. I didn’t think it was possible. To get an opportunity like Pose and have myself centered in the story and to end it with hope, and then to get another opportunity with an iconic actress [an Apple TV+ comedy co-starring Maya Rudolph] was surreal. But if I’m still feeling the need for protection as far as my Blackness, my Latina-ness and my trans-ness go, that means there is more work to be done.

Are there doors still not open to the rest of you? Parts you’d love to play if only Hollywood would see you that way?

PAULSON No one has asked me to do a comedy, and I’m a little frustrated about that.

ERIVO And you’re funny as fuck.

PAULSON I spend a lot of time in these worlds where I’m either running or crying or screaming or playing a real person and trying to get their physicality, and I’d really like to do a nice road picture with me and a couple of chicks.

ANDERSON Ooh, I’ll go with you!

PAULSON How about all of us just in a road movie — like, get a Winnebago and let’s go?

ERIVO I’m down.

RODRIGUEZ Yeah, count me in.

ANDERSON I’m 53, Sarah, and I’ve really only been offered comedy in the last three years of my life, and I don’t think that’s because I’m any funnier than I used to be. I think a lot of it is that people just couldn’t fathom it, whether it was that Scully was still in their minds or it was someone else, because I’ve played a lot of dark characters, too. And so they just weren’t coming. And then came [Netflix comedy] Sex Education — and I passed when it first came to me because I didn’t think it was right. It was my partner who proverbially dug it out of the trash.

ERIVO I’ve yet to see a Call Me by Your Name for a Black woman, I have yet to see a piece that allows a woman of color to be sensual and soft and loving and be loved. I’ve just not seen it, and I desperately want to experience that, just because I want to be able to be in that space of vulnerability and lilt. I really want to do that. And that hasn’t come my way. A comedy hasn’t come my way either.

RODRIGUEZ Same. It’s been so hard when it comes to trans women being loved in a sensual way, and I’d love to do something like that.

Elizabeth and Anya, to Sarah’s point, Hollywood likes to keep actors in a lane. How have you avoided that kind of pigeonholing in your careers to date?

TAYLOR-JOY I’ve been saved from a lot of things in my life from pure innocence and naivete, genuinely. My first movie was called The Witch, I got a script immediately afterward that was about, you guessed it, a witch, and I figured, “Wow, why do they want to see me do this again?” So, I was immediately like, “Can I not do anymore witch movies, please?” And my agent was like, “OK. Sure, whatever you say.” I wonder how many people agree with me here because I certainly want to please, but in order to please, I don’t have to give up myself, and actually it’s more important to please myself than it is to please anybody else. I’m giving my heart, my body, my soul, everything to this character, I’m not going to do something because somebody wants me to do it. That doesn’t make any sense and, also, it makes me miserable and then I can’t do my best work. And so if I feel the opportunities that are being given to me aren’t the right ones, then I have to stick my neck out and go, “Hey, I think I could maybe do this, if you’ll give me the opportunity to try.”

How about you, Elizabeth?

OLSEN [In the beginning,] I was just trying so hard to not be put in a box that that’s what was guiding my choices. I knew that I didn’t want to be an actor who was thought of as “youthful and beautiful” and whatever that attachment people like to put onto young women, and so I did everything in my power not [to be seen as] that. But I didn’t have my own pillars of why I wanted to do things beyond just the character. That started to solidify only in the last five years. So I made a lot of odd decisions [after theater school at NYU] because I didn’t know enough about film and the machine of it. Right, Sarah? You were there for that time. We were in Martha Marcy May Marlene, and I remember someone asked me, “You had Sarah Paulson with you, didn’t you know it could be a film people saw?” And I was like …

PAULSON You were like, “Who the fuck is Sarah Paulson?” (Laughter.)

OLSEN No, but independent cinema to me was just, like, going to Quad Cinema in New York and seeing a movie. The theater world is all I understood. So I feel like a moron for going back to theater only once in 10 years. And this conversation with Gillian right now is inspiring.

In light of Elizabeth’s concern about the trap of being perceived as “youthful and beautiful,” how would you all complete this sentence: I wish our male counterparts also had to …

OLSEN Deal with lighting and hair and makeup before doing press. I don’t know what I’m doing.

ERIVO Deal with people believing that you’ve lost your sexuality after the age of 30.

TAYLOR-JOY Had an understanding of what it was like to walk into a room and sometimes have to enforce yourself for people to take you seriously. That ability to just walk into a room and go, “I am valid, I own my space and everybody respects me” — it would be good if they knew what it was like to not have that.

ERIVO And on the flip side, to not have to deal with walking into the room and trying to make sure people aren’t scared of you when you get there.

What do you all know now that you wish you could have told yourself at the beginning of your career?

PAULSON I would like to have told myself that I didn’t need to excise myself from the experience. I was very focused on looking at other actors who had careers that I admired when I was first starting out and wondering what it was about them that made it possible for them to be chosen or employed and I’d often try, in an audition or a social setting, to mimic what I imagined was the desired effect, taking me out of the scenario. And there’s this beautiful Martha Graham-to-Agnes de Mille letter that I used to keep in a dressing room any time I was doing a play, about how there is only one you in all of time and space and that what you see and how you experience things is unique to you. And if you block it, the world will not have it. And as a young person, I thought, “Mute me, mute my opinions, my thoughts, my assessments and try to fill it with other things,” and now I think it’s the exact opposite, so I wish I had known that earlier. But I’ll take knowing it now [over] never knowing it at all.

RODRIGUEZ I would have told my younger self that my existence is worth it. When I was younger, I tried to fit into this mold of what a woman should do — you know, keep your legs crossed, always bow down to a man. But we don’t have to live in that world anymore. It’s a new day.

It is, and that’s a good place to end. Thank you all for sharing your time and your stories.

ERIVO I know we’re supposed to finish, but do you know what’s occurred to me as I’ve listened to every one of you? I remember where I was when I watched every single one of you — and I remember what I was dealing with or going through. I was watching you, Sarah, when I was shooting Aretha. I was watching you, Elizabeth, when I was in London on my own, and you, Anya, when I was in Atlanta. Mj, I remember watching a season of Pose while I was shooting The Outsider. And Gillian, I watched you when I was in a hotel with my partner outside of London. And I remember what happened. And so your performances aren’t just brilliant, your performances get to be Post-its in all of our lives, and so I thank you for that.

PAULSON That’s a very beautiful way to put it …

ANDERSON It also brings us back full circle to what Anya said at the beginning, which is, “Oh my God, I have to keep reminding myself that people are going to watch this.” But actually, thank God that people are watching it, because we’ve touched each other’s lives and numerous other people’s lives just by focusing on the thing that we love most.

TAYLOR-JOY And the importance of these conversations is the honesty, because it’s very easy for us to get locked into our own heads of this as an individual experience — “There’s something wrong with me,” or “Everybody else is doing really great and nobody else grieves their characters,” or whatever your version of that is in whatever industry you’re in. But having honest conversations with people who are willing to be vulnerable just makes me feel so much less alone.

PAULSON The next time you feel that way, text me. I’ll remind you. I’d also like to say that there’s this [perception] of women being pitted against one another and not being there for one another, and this conversation is diametrically opposed, in that what we are actually saying is that each of us has been buoyed by and inspired by the work of everyone here. So, I may not watch anything I do, but I sure as hell am watching all of you.

Press: “It’s a New Day”: THR Drama Actress Roundtable was originally published on Elizabeth Olsen Source • Your source for everything Elizabeth Olsen

here is my ranking of every umbrella academy musical moment!!

i lack proper word choice so you will be seeing the words “good” and “scene” repeatedly

spoilers below!!

1. run boy run - i knew this was gonna come in first the moment i started making this list. the first time i saw this scene i almost threw up bc it hit so hard. i think i’ve watched it over 50 times and it just hurts every damn time. there was never a more perfect song choice in the rest of the show. basically, this scene is the reason run boy run is my top song of the decade.

2. istanbul - no fight scene will ever top this. this song goes so well with the scene and for what? i get whiplash everytime i hear istanbul now

3. the walker - i love the bank scene with all my heart, it’s so fun and the song just works with it

4. saturday night - the way this song is introduced is SO GOOD!! i was in love with it. i used to watch the part where they all run in a line in the lines religiously

5. my way - i had a freak out when the umbrella academy account posted this and then i watched it and freaked out even more. watching the siblings come together to use their powers and doing it with this song playing was perfect, especially the part when the bombs dropped

6. in the heat of the moment - what can i say, i’m a sucker for scenes of five in the apocalypse. i don’t know why i like this scene so much but it might be the song. anyways

7. mary - THIS SCENE IS SO SAD HGSDAGHJ first time i cried watching umbrella academy… and the song is so fucking good

8. the order of death - this scene gave me goosebumps i stg it’s so good

9. golden brown - i fell in love with this scene and this song the first time i watched it and i really can’t explain why. it just hits different

10. soul kitchen - i love this scene so much that it hurts. i hate saying this but the vibes are off the charts. until dave fucking dies

11. kill of the night - i love five that’s all i have to say

12. right back where we started - i love how they did this! the song choice + the way they displayed the years was great

13. all die young - sad montage #3 this scene HITS and i can’t explain why

14. i’m a man - diego and reginald fighting was something i didn’t know i needed to see

15. hazy shade of winter - just reminds me of umbrella academy so it must be ranked high

16. sinnerman - just goes so damn hard i love it

17. i think we’re alone now - one of those scenes where everyone loves it but i just don’t as much? i still enjoy it but it’s not my fav. ranked high just because it’s iconic lol

18. memory bound - such a good song and i love watching diego and klaus bond/fight to it. really fits the scene too

19. sister of pearl - my smile gets so fucking big when i watch this part i love ben so m much and the song works so well

20. phantom of the opera medley - slaps so hard such a good scene

21. twistin’ the night away - aww cute i loved this

22. pepper - was def not expecting this scene but i loved it

23. this year’s love - rlly gonna make me cry like that huh, song is kinda basic though

24. picture book - fun intro, good song

25. comin’ home baby - so fun i love it and the song fits

26. sunny - the transitions in this scene are god tier also klaus having a sugar mommy lmao

27. rocket fuel - i really like this scene?? idk why

28. happy together - good cover idk what else to say i just enjoy it

29. renegade - would’ve loved to see this as a five fight scene but this was great too

30. i was made for lovin’ you - cool fight cool song

31. shingaling - underrated this scene is so good

32. never tear us apart - also makes me sad but not as much as run boy run - still a great scene

33. hold on, i’m comin’ - i love seeing allison use her power and this song fits really well

34. polk salad annie - this was really conflicting bc five killing the commission is one of my favorite scenes of the whole show but i don’t really like the song so it goes in the middle

35. sunshine, lollipops and rainbows - again with the upbeat songs to fight scenes and it works so well, especially with the setting they’re in

36. everybody (backstreet’s back) - i also didn’t know where to put this one. great scene i just wish they would’ve used this song in a different scene with all of the siblings fighting

37. lost woman - cute lil vanya in a cute lil montage. i did enjoy seeing all of the siblings reading her book

38. here comes the end - again love the song just wish it was somewhere else

39. major tom - i like the song with the scene but i don’t care that much about pogo’s backstory

40. love is blue - solid scene

41. exit music (for a film) - sad montage #1! don’t get me wrong i love radiohead and this song but i guess it just didn’t hit as hard as it could’ve

42. don’t stop me now - don’t kill me i just didn’t really enjoy this specific song with the scene,, i did like this fight though

43. one - cool song but i hate harold. also could’ve easily been a luther song

44. i’ll never do you wrong - actually kind of made me sad

45. lundi matin - i really enjoyed this for some reason

46. dancing in the moonlight - cool scene if you can get past the fucking incest

47. we’re through - i really like this song there’s just not much of a scene to go with it

48. in hell i’ll be in good company - i don’t have much to say about this but the song slaps

49. won’t be long - allison + aretha franklin is a good combo

50. hello - THIS MADE ME LAUGH SO HARD SORRY!!! it wasn’t the cover itself, the cover was great, it was just the scene as a whole

51. crazy - the cover just felt like a weird choice to me

52. bibbidi-bobbidi-boo - cool i just didn’t really care

53. stay with me - baddie cha-cha also i love mary j. blige

54. dancing with myself - clever little shits

55. mad about you - sad montage #2 that’s all i have to say

56. unwind yourself - funny but i don’t care for the song

57. barracuda - i like the song but i don’t think it was needed

58. blood like lemonade - there’s nothing wrong with the scene but the song kinda annoys me sometimes

59. goody two shoes - it’s fine lol i don’t really have many thoughts

60. they call me a fool - visit i’ll make it easy

61. i’ll make it easy - i never even remember when this plays but i know that the song is fine

62. bad guy - i’m so sorry i just did not like this song choice

63. stormy weather - emmy did so good i just don’t really care for it

64. something on your mind - this song pisses me off and you can barely hear it lol

65. (feels like) heaven - i actually love this song so putting it down here hurts but it just plays on the radio

66. wicked games - i hate this song so much

My November playlist is complete from Aretha Franklin to Blood Incatation, and I guarantee there’s at least something in here you’ll love. Thanks for listening!

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Don't Start Now - Dua Lipa: Dua Lipa said disco lives. I absolutely love this song, it’s rock solid disco without being throwback or ironic about it. The way this song starts with the first line of the chorus and then launches into the verse and only gives you the full chorus later feels like that thing movie trailers do now where they give you a little trailer before the trailer for some reason. It’s also something I’ve never heard before, and it gives the song a very fun structure in the intro where it has two different levels of elevation it can drop down to before the bass properly drops in. I think Dua Lipa understands something fundamental about being a pop singer: literally the only thing you have to do is make bangers. She has basically zero personality and was criticised massively around New Rules for having zero stage presence (which she's definitely gotten better at since) but I kind of like it like that - she's just an unknowable blank canvas that's not particularly interested in any kind of narrative, she just makes bangers.

Mirage (Don't Stop) - Jessie Ware: Jessie Ware has been putting out some extremely good singles since her last album and this song is another. It’s the kind of smooth neo-soul that Jungle is pioneering but the way this song is structured is really beautiful; it gives the ‘don’t stop moving’ part a lot of space early on before it really gets to take hold and take over the second half of the song - it gives the whole song this feeling of disco evolution and the song going on and on and changing rather than static pop.

What A Fool Believes - Aretha Franklin: I can’t believe I’ve never heard Aretha’s version of What A Fool Believes before. It’s amazing. It’s the best kind of cover where you just basically do the song exactly the same but better in every single way. Push the tempo slightly, put big brass in it, make the bass hot as hell, sing the hell out of it, add a sax solo obviously. She takes such liberty with the rhythm of the vocals and it gives this whole song this great swooping and diving energy that just uplifts in such a beautiful way.

Walking Into Sunshine (Larry Levan 12” Mix) - Central Line: Something I love about this song is the crowd noise that breaks in with a ‘woo’ near the beginning. It’s such a strange little detail that instantly injects so much life and love into the track. It positions it at a party rather than a studio from the outset and somehow that mindset carries through the whole rest of the song even though the crowd noise only lasts a couple of seconds until they reconvene right at the very end.

Freedom - Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five: There was a time in the history of rap music where some kind of government mandate demanded that every song go for at least 7 minutes, so you ended up with great songs like this where they spend a good couple minutes in the middle killing time by going through everyone’s star sign and then asking the crowd their star sign too. Also they appear to have recorded their own kazoos on the track over the kazoos in the sample, which is a lesson in good production everyone take.

Freedom Funk It Up Freedom - Freedom: I was looking up where the sample on that Grandmaster Flash song Freedom was from and it turns out it’s from this band called Freedom. Easy enough. This isn’t the song Freedom samples though, this is Freedom’s other song Freedom Funk It Up Freedom. It’s fucking hot and contains maybe the livest crowd I’ve ever heard, they are just going absolutely nuts the whole time and it only helps the energy of the song which is already off the charts.

Set Guitars To Kill (Live) - And So I Watch You From Afar: For the 10th anniversary of their debut album, And So I Watch You From Afar just played the whole thing front ot back and put it out as a live album, and it’s amazing. They’re an instrumental band that’s always emphasised the rock part of post-rock, in the same space as bands like 65daysofstatic and Russian Circles but not so self-serious about it, just big honking rock and roll tunes with a surprising depth and complexity to them that never get bogged down in ambient buildups or the other space-making trappings of post-rock. Their debut album has always been my favourite of theirs because it felt the most ‘live’ and wasn’t as cleanly produced as their subsequent releases (which are still very good), and so this live version feels sort of like a definitive version for me, like this is how it was always meant to sound but they didn’t have enough fans to do the ‘woo!’ part properly yet, which is one of the most purely joyful moments in music.

Bullet The Blue Sky (Live) - U2: I saw U2 this week for the second time in my life and guess what: they’re still great. Even though they’re old as fuck and Bono is getting stranger and stranger they’ve still got it. They have a very good bit of stage design going with this current tour where for a big chunk of it they’re out on a little platform in the middle of everyone with no screens or fancy lights and it’s one of the most effective ways I’ve seen of making an arena show feel like an actual intimate experience. I was a million miles away and Bono looked like an ant more than usual but the energy still came across. Then, when they do the Joshua Tree Start To Finish part of the show they have big visuals for every song but it’s still pretty light on actual cameras on the band, which I think works really well - a sort of best of both worlds where you get the arena show but the actual band performance. This song was a highlight for me, and they’ve somehow managed to make it even more ferocious now than ever before. It got extremely noisy, far noisier than you’d ever expect from U2 at least and really amped up the swirling energy that I’ve always loved about this song. People accuse U2's politics of being too wide ranging, and it's well founded they're the prototypical 'heal the world' rock stars - even in this song and the way they've repurposed its messages to fit various political causes over the years they've tried to dilute it, but this feels to me like a song that you can't wash the meaning out of no matter how hard you try. It's one of the best and most direct criticisms of American evil put to song, and it's an arena song that doesn't particularly have an arena melody to it. Especially in the Joshua Tree/Rattle And Hum era, U2 have always been captivated by the American mythos but have never been able to completely ingratiate themselves as an American Rock Band because they're not and I think that point of difference in identity has them uniquely positioned to criticise the American mythos as well. They can have it both ways because they can't fully have it, so in this song the circle of American violence is complete in the women and children who run from the American fighter planes into the arms of America as refugees. Bono's actually mad, which is a nice change of pace from love healing the world.

Gingerly - Enemies: I love this Enemies album so much. A sweet spot between post-rock and midwest emo math guitar, and listening to it now this song really stood out in a way it hasn’t before. It turns up at a good spot in the album just as you might be getting tired of the twinkly clean guitars that characterise the rest of it and burns a hole in the speaker with that distorted bass and siren guitar sound.

You Look Certain (I’m Not So Sure) - WXAXRXP Session - Mount Kimbie: I think every band should get the chance to re-record their album a year or two after they’ve put it out, once they’ve had a chance to really sit with the songs for a while and figure out exactly how they work because this version is just so much better than the album version (which was already great!). The guitar sound is so much bigger, properly leaning into the post-punk idea they were only exploring on the album, and the vocals are so much stronger and more up front which makes it feel so much more like a full song than an experiment. This whole Warp Session EP is fantastic and I’ve been listening to it on repeat, it’s so great that they’ve morphed from this insular electronic duo into a proper band over the years and I'm excited to see where they'll take it next.

Peace To All Freaks - of Montreal: The new of Montreal single is great. Embracing an 80s dance vibe and immediately turning his back on it in the opening lines and not going out because he needs to educate himself instead. I love this song, an unironic and non-cheesy rallying against negativity which is a lot harder to do with earnesty than they make it sound here.

Taipei - Social Climbers: Thankyou to my friend and yours agrifuture for this recommendation. Social Climbers played an odd and paranoid version of art rock in the early 80s that on this song at least sounds more like modern opera trying to fit itself to a rock band than anything else. I can also say with confidence this is the only song I’ve ever heard where someone sends a quiche back in the middle of it.

Mad Eyed Screamer - The Creatures: I’ve never gotten much into Siouxie And The Bashees, they're probably somewhere on my list of bands to have a deep three week long obsession with somewhere in the future, but for now my biggest exposure to them is the time The Weeknd sampled them. I am, however, deeply interested in this drums and vocals only side project that Siouxie Sioux formed with her then-partner Budgie. I’m a big fan of any kind of restricted composition like this and I love this song. It’s so busy and the amount of reverb and extra percussion going on makes for this extremely chaotic, noisy vision of what is essentially a folk song in its lyric and melody.

Black Magic - Jarvis Cocker: I found out that the main guitar part in this song is sampled from Crimson & Clover by Tommy James and The Shondells. Which is something I don’t think I’ve ever seen before, a rock song like this built around a sample. Not exactly sampling in order to recontextualise across genres or approaches but sampling to recontextualise in a lateral, parallel approach. I love this song because his delivery is so feverish and impassioned it really does feel like he’s seen beyond the veil and come back without the language or capacity to explain what he saw, only the passion.

Year In Pictures - Dick Diver: Every year since this album came out it's shown up somewhere in my Spotify most listened list at the end of the year. It's surprising because I don't think of it as one of my all time favourites when it definitely is, it's such an easy listen that it just comes and goes pleasantly. This song is kind of about that feeling I guess, of things just happening and time just passing pleasantly enough year on year, everthing in its own time while the past disappears and doesn't matter anymore. "Whatever happens, I think everything will"

Heart - Bertie Blackman: I love the percussion in this song, the same propulsive clapping-centred beat that makes Single Ladies so good with the dark grinding bass underneath it that just pulses malevolently until the gearshift of the chorus where it morphs immediately into this 60s soul version of itself, with the ooh la la backing vocals and everthing, and that disonnance between the two styles drives the song for me. Where the verse lays out the evil plainly and the music matches, the chorus accentuates it in wide eyed irony "I know there's something sick with what I've been sold" sung with a smile and showgirl backing vocals.

Love Lockdown - Kanye West: Something I think we’re all learning as Kanye loses his mind completely on the world stage is that Kanye has always been insane. He has always had an unnervingly powerful self-belief and unwavering vision that has up until recently been what made him such a unique and era-defining artist. After the radical directions of MBDTF and Yeezus it’s sort of hard to remember just how radical 808s And Heartbreaks was at the time because unlike the self aware harshness and strangeness of the other two it was also so pop adjacent, because of its 80s synthpop influence but also because of the way it (and T-Pain) impacted all other pop music of the time. The instrumentation on this song is still so staggering, even just the pitched kick at the centre I could listen to on loop forever I think.

It Might Be Time - Tame Impala: Absolutely cannot wait for the new Tame Impala if this and Patience are any indication. The absolutely huge blown out drums on this are so good and remind me of something I’ve been trying to place for weeks and can’t. Maybe a Chemical Brothers song or some kind of big beat era thing. I think of Kevin Parker and Adam Granduciel from The War On Drugs as the same kind of guys, absolute craftsmen studio nerds that are completely obsessed with sound but unlike most other guys of that genre are actually great songwriters as well. Long haired studio hermits that emerge every few years to bless us all.

Never Again - Kelly Clarkson: I’ve been trying to decide whether this or Since U Been Gone is a better song and I’ve settled on this having the superior verses and Since U Been Gone the better chorus. The absolute venom in the lyrics is incredible. “I hope the ring you gave to her turns her finger green.  I hope when you’re in bed with her you think of me” is like.. the most metal opening I’ve ever heard. She literally sings “You’ll die together, but alone” in the second verse, jesus christ.

Giant Swan - The Blood Brothers: I found out recently from reading the wiki article on screamo (which like almost all wiki articles about music genres is about 60% artists claiming that genres are fake and critics coining new genre names half in jest) that The Blood Brothers were apparently part of a screamo subgenre called Sass, which is a term I have never heard before in my life and certainly never heard in the heyday of the style. You learn something every day I suppose. “It originated as an opposing style of hardcore punk to the machismo in heavy hardcore scenes. It takes influence from genres such as post-punk, new wave, disco, electronic, dance-punk, emoviolence, grindcore, metalcore and heavy hardcore. The genre is characterized by often incorporating overtly flamboyant mannerisms, erotic lyrics featuring sexual tension, and a lisping vocal style. The genre is also noted for its "spastic edge", blast beats, chaotic guitars, danceable beats and the use of synthesizers.” My understanding is that when emo went mainstream and the split between ‘emo’ as a music and ‘scene’ as a fashion occurred, this is the music that emerged from the middle ground. Turning against the masculinity of their screamo forebears and toward the queer aesthetics of scene, the resulting style was still furious and violent but furious with a light cabaret (but like, if cabaret was good and not just a guy in a top hat emoting, a different style of emo that Panic! At The Disco famously pioneered) and violent in a psychedelic, surreal way that set it apart from the depressed and black aesthetics of the rest of emo. I love The Blood Brothers and have never found another band like them in terms of lyrical inventiveness and sheer vocal insanity, the characteristic shrill falsetto that sporadically turns to screams is an amazing choice that’s incredible it works at all. This song especially stands out as unique even amongst the chaos of their discography. The loping lounge feel in the first half, coupled with the properly surreal description of the giant swan in the lyrics establishes such an strange and dark cabaret mood that makes this song so oddly singular to me.

The Ripper - The Used: I really appreciate the production on this whole album, it is so overdone and hyperactive that it creates this irrepressible momentum because something is always happening. The songs themselves are incredibly compressed in structure and extremely hook heavy, and it feels like to counteract and complement that approach they‘ve been gone over bar by bar finding every possible spot to add interest. Dynamics shifting, drums filtering and then revealing themselves, choirs appearing from this air for two lines. Guitar squeals fly in and out in the background and the bass suddenly becomes extremely chunky in parts. The whole mix gets sucked down a black hole and then a little glockenspiel outlines the vocal melody in the background for a second leading back into a huge chorus. Everything happen in this short song. It’s an interesting approach that can be overwhelming, but it has undeniable results.

Ilana - Mdou Moctar: Mdou Moctar rocks because he takes a big power chord riff like the one at the start of this song that could just as easily start a Thin Lizzy song and then immediately discards it and twists a melting solo that crosses time and space for the rest of the song instead.

Ancestral Recall (feat. Saul Williams) - Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah: The press release for this album says: “In its inception, Ancestral Recall was built as a map to de-colonialize sound; to challenge previously held misconceptions about some cultures of music; to codify a new folkloric tradition and begin the work of creating a national set of rhythms; rhythms rooted in the synergy between West African, First Nation, African Diaspora/Caribbean rhythms and their marriage to rhythmic templates found in trap music, alt-rock, and other modern forms. It is time we created a sound that dispels singular narratives of entire peoples and looks to finally represent the wealth of narratives found throughout the American experience. One that shows that all forms of expression in sound are valid, as all people are." All that and a bit of spoken word at the start that sounds like Hannibal Buress’ Morpheus Walruses rap and I’m sold. I’m such a fan of jazz like this that purposefully opens itself up to the influence of the modern world and modern tradition, and the percussion work across this album in particular is so unique and really does what he set out to do in my opinion, bringing the rhythms of tradition into a modern context seamlessly.

Spider Hole - Billy Woods & Kenny Segal: I only found out about Billy Woods this month and I’m surprised I’ve never heard of him before because he feels like the middle of the venn diagram between Earl Sweatshirt, Aesop Rock and Death Grips. This flat out sounds like a Death Grips song played at half speed. The justified paranoia and anger that runs through this whole album is palpable and jumbled, centring around a feeling of lashing out in a moment of hopelessness because you don’t know what else you can do. "4 million USD hovering over some mud huts, it's nuts, it's not the heat it's the dust" is one of the most evocative lines of the year for me.

El Toro Combo Meal (feat. Mavi) - Earl Sweatshirt: When this new earl EP came out I listened to it 4 times in a row because it is just so compulsively brilliant. He’s refining his style more and more with every release and he’s honed it to this fine point now where every song is so super dense in its lyrical content and production that a full length release would almost be too much. There’s just so much to absorb here. Mavi’s verse is incredible too. I’ve never heard of him before but I’m a big supporter now. The beats too, through this whole EP are the kind that sound like a radio stuck between stations - looping snatches of vocals and drums drowned out in tape hiss where the beat is only a suggestion that Mavi and Earl both glide over on some sort of metric modulation and only land every now and then just to take off again.

Drug Dealer - Slowthai: Slowthai is so full of fire on this song it's scary. Facing a dead end future down and screaming that something's gotta change, and that he's the one to do it.

Lighthouse (feat. Rico Nasty, Slowthai and ICECOLDBISHOP) - Take A Daytrip: I have never heard of Take A Daytrip before this song but doing some research it turns out I have heard them, because they produced Panini by Lil Nas X. I have also never heard of ICECOLDBISHOP before but the way he brings an absolutely deranged verse on this song has made me an instant fan. I love this trio of features: three out there, huge personality voices at the outer limits of mainstream rap that in their oddness complement each other perfectly.

Rich Girl - Michie One & Louchie Lou: Something I learned this month was that Rich Girl by Gwen Stefani isn't a direct rip of If I Were A Rich Man from Fiddler On The Roof, it actually samples this song which acts as a sort of bridge between the two, and I think there's something interesting in the transfer of intention between the three songs, lyrically and musically. In the original his conception of a rich man is someone who can afford to have lots of ducks and geese, eat well and have enough time to pray because he doesn't have to work, then in the Michie One & Louchie Lou version rich is being able to feed your family and start a school (as well as play the horses and never lose), and in the Gwen Stefani version rich is having a house in Hollywood and London, clearing out designer stores, and buying four Harajuku girls and naming them Love, Angel, Music and Baby. It spirals up mercilessly from geese to, I guess, human trafficking. Musically there's a transformation as well, where the jewishness of the 'daidle daidle deedle daidle dumb' in the orginal is changed to a 'na na na na na' in this version and only a part of the original melodic lilt remains, a part that is completely ironed out in the Gwen Stefani version's 'na na na na na's. The downsides of wealth morph too, in the original it's simply not a part of God's plan, in this version it can't buy love, is the root of all evil (is a  worldwide thing / rich is getting richer while the poor are getting stink) and only leads to more trouble (you reap but you never did sow / rich today you could be poor tomorrow / mind your back and watch your enemies grow) but in the Gwen Stefani version being rich is amazing on its own and the only thing that can top it is your love.

Santa Teresa - EOB: Tricked into enjoying ambient side projects once again. Ed O'Brien from Radiohead's new side project came up on my Discover Weekly without me realising it was him and I absolutely loved it. It’s expansive and cinematic and nice in a way that feels rare in ambient experimental stuff like this, to not be morose or depressing and gloomy for its own sake. It’s sharp and angular, or as sharp and angular as a song as slow moving as this can be and reminds me in part of HEALTH’s Max Payne 3 soundtrack, and Emma Ruth Rundle’s Electric Guitar One which are both masterpieces on their own.

Rough Sleeper - Burial: Reading Mark Fisher’s Ghosts Of My Life I was pleasantly surprised to see his Burial interview in there that I remember reading years and years ago before I knew who Mark Fisher was. I’ve thought of parts of that article here and there ever since and finally placing it in the wider context of Mark’s work was very satisfying, it’s funny how people come back to you in different forms over your lifetime. I don’t listen to Burial much now, or at least not as much as I used to at the height of my depression a few years ago where he was on near constant repeat and as a result his music became completely waterlogged with the feeling of that time and I couldn’t listen to him at all for a while without the memories completely marring any appreciation. But time passes as it does and it’s a nice feeling to finally be able to listen to Untrue again and not have it be so permanently soaked with memories of the worst time of my life, and now with a different mindset and viewpoint I can really see different sides of his music. Where before all I could hear was the bleak and empty future haunted by the ghosts of the past, now new colours appear - a warmth of hazy, pleasant memory and imagination. Reds and oranges creep into the black and grey and this song can feel like staying under covers while it storms outside instead of standing in the rain.

Night MXCMPV1 P74 - Venetian Snares & Daniel Lanois: I really don’t think I’ll ever hear another album like this in my life. The push and pull of the humanity of Lanois’ pedal steel and the digital nightmare of Venetian Snares percussion is just so engaging, and the moments where they overlap and move together in harmony contrast so beautifully with the times they feel like they’re playing two different songs altogether. Then they overlap, the effects overpower the steel guitar and it moves into a leaping angular digital realm and the percussion coalesces into an altogether human rush, or as human as Venetian Snares can be.

Were You There When They Crucified My Lord - Marisa Anderson: I can't find the quote but somewhere when she was doing interviews about this album Traditional And Public Domain songs, Marisa Anderson said part of the reason she likes traditional songs so much is because when she was coming up and playing in cafes around town she mistakenly thought she'd have to pay royalties if she did covers of popular songs, so she only did public domain songs instead.

Were You There When They Crucified My Lord - Johnny Cash: Another side of Were You There When They Crucified My Lord, one that expands magically into an amazing many-layered harmony led by June’s high and lonesome howl.

See That My Grave's Kept Clean - Blind Lemon Jefferson: Jefferson was buried at Wortham Negro Cemetery in 1929. His grave was unmarked until 1967, when a Texas historical marker was erected in the general area of his plot; however, the precise location of the grave is still unknown. By 1996, the cemetery and marker were in poor condition, and a new granite headstone was erected in 1997. The inscription reads: "Lord, it's one kind favour I'll ask of you, see that my grave is kept clean." In 2007, the cemetery's name was changed to Blind Lemon Memorial Cemetery, and his gravesite is kept clean by a cemetery committee in Wortham.

The Giza Power Plant - Blood Incantation: What I find so appealing about Blood Incantation is how dedicated they are. Zealots to the cult of being long haired death metal guys who wholeheartedly and sincerely believe in interdimensional aliens and the pyramids being the remnants of an ancient advanced technology. The dedication extends to them being maybe some of the best players in the genre I’ve ever heard, and them recording this whole album analog live in studio is such a feat of performance that adds another layer of intensity to this already extremely intense music.

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An Unlikely Love: Perfect Again (Rafael Barba x Anna Stein)

AN: Prompt #156 from 200 Prompts from @drink-it-write-it (“He stares at you every time you look away.”)

Also, I’ve decided to start adding songs to go with these stories. For the previous ones, here is a list (these will all take you to Youtube).

Post-Script: “My Shot” from Hamilton Admissions: “Tiny Voice” by Lexi Walker Unspoken: “Tale as Old as Time” from Beauty and the Beast Redemption: “Skin” by Rihanna

Tagging: @thatesqcrush @madpanda75 @misssirenlove @danahart1 @nikkijmorgan @ele-esposito @dianilaws @sunnyfortomorrow @mommakat32 @lucifersadvisor @gibbs274 @oliviamariathegirl @evee87 @tropes-and-tales @garturbo @delia26 @neely1177 @jennisdirtyimagines @lostintech0011001 @letty-o @lucifersadvisor @sunnyfortomorrow @literallyprentissstwin

Song: “You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman” by Aretha Franklin

~*~*~*~

“So, I’m guessing I won’t be seeing you for a few weeks?” Rafael stirred the salsa that was simmering on the stove as Anna sat on the other side of the breakfast bar, hunched over a book.

She barely looked up. “Maybe.”

He smiled. “Well, your exams are coming up, aren’t they?”

“Mmhmm,” she mumbled absently.

“I guess I’m going to have to hang out with Carisi to fill the time.”

She turned the page. “Fine by me.”

He was entertained by this little game. “And then I’ll do a striptease across the squad room.”

“That’s good.” Then, as if she had snapped out of a trance, her head jerked up. “Wait—what did you say?”

He laughed and checked the beans, which were almost ready to mash. “I see how it is. You ignore me until you hear the word striptease. Then I have your attention.”

She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. “I’m sorry. I was just—”

He smirked. “More interested in the Rule Against Perpetuities than in me?” He walked around the counter to stand behind her, wrapping his arms around her waist. “It’s okay. It has that mysterious and sexy vibe.” He pulled her sweatshirt—well, actually, his sweatshirt—aside and nuzzled against her neck.

“You keep doing that and it won’t get any less mysterious to me,” she whimpered, reaching her hand up and around her head to caress the back of his head. “Or I’ll just get turned on in the middle of the exam.”

“Nobody understands that rule.” He gave her a quick nip on her earlobe but released her from his grip and went back to the food. “In some states, you can’t actually be sued for using it wrong.”

“I wish that applied to civil procedure, too. I will never understand Pennoyer.”

He cracked two eggs into a skillet that had once held tortillas. “More stuff you will never use. I do, however, expect you to get a perfect score on your criminal law exam.”

“What happens if I disappoint you?”

He glanced up at her and saw that her face had fallen just slightly. Despite her notoriously great poker face, the longer he was with her, the more he was able to read her micro expressions. “Mi corazón, I was kidding.” He tilted the pan to redistribute the oil and then went back to the beans. “You could never disappoint me.”

She sighed. “I’m worried I’m going to disappoint myself.”

“How?”

“I worked really hard to get into school. And I’ve worked really hard all semester to keep up with the work. It’s a lot harder than I thought it would be.”

“Si, pero you’ve come this far. Exams are just regurgitation of what you’ve been discussing all semester,” he replied. “I promise, the hard stuff is what you do in class. And if it makes you feel any better, how you do in law school—or even on the bar exam—doesn’t tell you how you’ll be as a lawyer.”

She brightened a bit. “Really?”

“Yeah, I mean, look at Carisi—”

“Raf, you know that’s not nice!” she scolded. “Sonny is a perfectly fine attorney.”

He finished plating their dinner. “Sorry. I’m just saying that some of the best attorneys I know were only average in school. It doesn’t mean anything.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Oh yeah? And how did you do in law school?” It was a rhetorical question. She knew perfectly well how he’d done.

He pushed a plate across the counter from her and sat down next to her with his own. This was where they usually ate together; the dining room table had other uses. “Don’t compare yourself with me, Anna. Don’t compare yourself with anyone. You deserve to be a lawyer more than anyone else I know. And I will be as proud of you the day you take that oath as I am right now just for working as hard as you are.”

“Are you sure you won’t be disappointed if I—”

He set his fork down and took her hands in his. “The only way you could disappoint me, Anna, is if you’re so worried about the lawyer you’ll be that you forget about being the woman you are.”

She dipped her head for a second and then kissed him. “Thank you. I needed to hear that.” She took a bite of the huevos rancheros he had prepared and sighed. “Jesus, this is delicious. Is there anything you’re not good at?”

He thought for a second. “Stripping?”

When she threw her head back and laughed, he knew he had broken through the wall of negligence and consideration, theories and rules. After her shower, he caught her singing along to Disney soundtracks in the bedroom as she blow-dried her hair. When she saw him watching her, she motioned for him to join her one-woman concert, creating the perfect harmony. And for the rest of the night, Anna was his Anna again, and there was no way he could ever be disappointed with that.

***

The day grades were posted on the school’s intranet, Anna had to wait all day to check them because she wanted Rafael to be with her when she did. And of course, that had to be the day he got home late; a trial had run over and then he had to meet with the squad regarding a new case that had just come in. By the time he arrived at her apartment, she was clawing the walls. When they finally sat down to look, she couldn’t do it—she made him open up the website and look for her while she paced between the couch and her kitchen counter.

“Well?” she asked, impatiently.

His face betrayed nothing. He took a deep breath and looked up at her from behind her laptop screen. “Do you want the bad news or the good news first?”

Her heart fell into her stomach. This was torture. She prepared to hear that she had done poorly enough that she wouldn’t be able to return for the next semester. “Just get the bad news over with, I guess.”

“Well,” he continued, “you’re probably going to want to get very drunk.”

“Oh God,” she said, walking to her liquor cabinet. “Do I want wine or scotch?”

His face started to twitch. “Don’t you want the good news?”

She turned back. “Oh. Well, I guess that couldn’t hurt. What’s the good news?”

He stood up. “The good news is that you’re going to want to get very drunk celebrating with a bunch of people, because, mi corazón, your GPA is a 3.0.”

Her ears filled with the sound of her own heartbeat. She wasn’t even sure she had heard him correctly. “I’m sorry, did you say—”

A wide grin stretched across his face. “I did!” He threw his arms around her waist and spun her around. “You did so well, Anna! I’m so proud of you.”

But her face was not what he had expected it would be. She didn’t look as happy as he thought she would have. Although she was smiling, it wasn’t the genuine smile he loved so much. She pulled herself out of his arms and sat on the couch to examine the grades more closely. She had an A in criminal law—no surprise there—and another in torts. But civil procedure and property had been her downfall: she’d only managed to pull C’s in those two classes. Her eyebrows pinched together. What happened? she wondered.

Rafael, however, seemed thrilled with her work, and she didn’t want to dampen his mood with her own. She would have plenty of time to analyze what had gone wrong when she was alone. So she put on the happiest face she could muster and stood up to face him again.

“Thank you, honey,” she said. “I appreciate how supportive you’ve been all this time.”

He smiled at her and tilted his head. “Are you all right? You seem a bit—”

“Oh, no, I’m fine!” she said, a little too emphatically. “It’s just kind of one of those adrenaline things. You know, anticipation and then…”

He squinted at her just a bit and took her hands. “I love you. We should go celebrate.”

She shook her head. “Oh, Raf, I’m not—I mean, it’s late, and I’m kind of tired. Stressful day, you know? Can we just—”

“Chinese?” he offered. “You may even be able to convince me to watch the new version of Beauty and the Beast.”

“Sure.”

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

She kissed him on the cheek. “I’m fine, Raf. Really.” Then she went into the kitchen to find the menu for their favorite Chinese place down the street, leaving a trail of lies in her wake.

***

A week later, just before Christmas, Rafael had a surprise for Anna. Between his work schedule and a two-day migraine she’d had, they hadn’t had time to celebrate properly. Getting the squad together was like herding cats, but he had managed to do it. He organized a small get-together at Forlini’s with them, plus a couple of Anna’s friends, to celebrate the successful end of Anna’s first semester of law school. The night of the party, he arranged for the two of them to Uber from his apartment to the restaurant, as if it were just another date night. Anna didn’t ask too many questions, although she was surprised that he suggested Forlini’s, as it was where he usually went to drown his sorrows after a tough loss.

“I’d like to start associating this place with good things,” he said to her as they exited the car.

“Gotcha. I’m kind of excited to go here, to be honest. Maybe I’ll start feeling like I might actually become a lawyer someday.”

Over the last week, Anna had made a few offhanded comments like that, and it concerned him slightly. Ever since grades came out, she hadn’t quite been herself. He assumed it was the migraine and also the post-exam comedown, but something seemed a bit off. He tried to put the thought out of his mind; he wanted tonight to be all about her and her success. After all, they had celebrated enough of his victories.

“Surprise!”

To Anna’s utter and complete shock, she entered the main dining room to find Olivia, Fin, Sonny, Amanda, and three of her friends gathered around a long table, cheering and shouting congratulations. She had no idea how to react at first—she hadn’t been expecting this at all.

“Holy sh—what are you all—”

Sonny came around the table to high-five her. “Rafael thought it would be a good idea to celebrate. He said you did really great your first semester!”

“Yeah, a 3.0? That’s better than I ever did, even in high school,” Fin added.

“No shock there,” Amanda said, elbowing him playfully. He gave her a faux glare.

As everyone else around the table offered their congratulations, Anna was aghast. She had no idea how to react to this. She knew that everyone gathered around this table was there to celebrate her, and that they all genuinely believed she’d done well. But all week, she had been turning the semester over in her head, trying to figure out how she had done so poorly in civ pro and property, and how she could have done better in her other classes. As soon as she got back to school, she planned to ask for copies of her essays, after which she would spend a great deal of time reviewing them and making notes on what she had missed. For now, though, she didn’t want to disappoint all these people who had made time out of their busy schedules to come together on her account. So she plastered a smile on her face and thanked each of them individually before they all sat down to dinner.

All through dinner, Rafael barely stopped touching her. He would squeeze her leg under the table or hold her hand while they waited for their next course. They made small talk with her friends, who would later tell Anna that they couldn’t believe he was as old as he was because he was so handsome, and, of course, they asked all about how she was liking law school. She gave the appropriate answers, told them what she knew they wanted to hear. After a while, though, she knew her façade was starting to falter, so she excused herself to the bar to get another glass of wine.

“I’ll go with you,” Amanda said, signaling to her empty glass. “If I’m paying a sitter, I might as well live it up.” While they were waiting for their drinks, Amanda glanced backward at the table. Rafael was sitting at the end of the table facing the bar, and although there was conversation going on all around him, his eyes were focused on Anna. He was clearly trying to be subtle; his eyes occasionally darted back to someone else’s face, and he would take a sip of his scotch. But inevitably, his bright green gaze would land back on his girlfriend, like he was worried that if he looked away too long, she would disappear. “He stares at you every time you look away,” she finally said.

“Excuse me?”

Amanda smiled and leaned toward Anna, lowering her voice conspiratorially. “If you looked over your shoulder right now, you’d see it. He’s so proud of you. And Barba is never proud of anyone. He barely said congratulations to Carisi when he passed the damn bar exam.”

“I don’t know why,” Anna said sadly.

“Because he thinks Carisi is enough of a puppy dog and doesn’t need any more encouragement.”

“No, that’s not what I meant. I mean, I don’t know why he’s proud of me. I didn’t do as well as I’d hoped.”

Amanda played with her empty glass. “A 3.0 is pretty damn good if you ask me.”

“I’m dating Rafael Magna-Cum-Laude-At-Harvard-Law-School Barba,” Anna said. “The guy who started as a poor kid in the Bronx and moved up to be—well, look at him.” She gestured to Rafael, in his three-piece suit, now debating the latest gun control measure in the state legislature with Sonny. “How the hell do I live up to that?”

Amanda set her glass on the counter. “Does he make you feel like you have to live up to something? Because that’s not what that stare says to me.”

Anna didn’t say anything for a long while, and then she looked at the usually cynical blonde. “So, detective, what does that stare say to you, then?”

“Look, I’m no romantic,” Amanda began, “but I’ve known Barba for years now, and I can tell you right now that I have never seen him look at anyone the way he looks at you—especially when he knows you’re not looking. It’s like a compulsion or something.”

Anna felt a flush wash over her skin. Suddenly, she was very aware of the pair of eyes on her from across the room. It wasn’t creepy; on the contrary, he looked at her the way she always hoped someone would look at her. But she still couldn’t shake the idea that she hadn’t earned that look, that she had somehow failed to live up to what Rafael Barba deserved in a partner.

Just then, their drinks appeared on the bar. “Thank you, Amanda,” she said, bracing herself for round two.

“No problem. And for what it’s worth? Carisi only got a 2.9 his first semester.”

***

“Did you have fun?” Rafael asked as he shut her apartment door behind them.

Anna stepped out of her painfully high heels, suddenly becoming shorter than him again. “Yeah. I’m just surprised you were able to get everyone together!”

He loosened his tie. “It wasn’t easy, believe me. Not that they didn’t want to come, but, you know, kids, grandkids, that kind of thing. You should be very aware of how much they care about you.”

“You mean how much they care about you,” she muttered, heading to the kitchen for a glass of water.

“What does that mean?”

“What are you, a bat?”

“Don’t deflect. What’s wrong, Anna? Something’s been off all week, and I can’t figure out what. Did I do something wrong?”

“No,” she said, a hint of sadness in her voice. “That’s the problem.”

“Well, now I’m very confused.” He took her by the hand and led her into the living room, pulling her onto the couch with him. “Sit. Breathe. Explain.”

She sighed deeply. “It’s not easy being your girlfriend sometimes, you know.”

He laughed a little. “I could have told you that months ago. In fact, I think I did tell you that.”

She shook her head. “No, it’s not—it’s not that you’re doing something wrong. You’re easy to be with, actually—a lot easier than you think you are.”

“That’s an argument for another day. What’s not easy, then?”

She tried to look away, but he turned her head back gently. “Do you remember when we were just barely together, and you asked me why I chose you?”

He nodded. “That was the first time you said you loved me. How could I forget that?”

She gave him a sad smile. “Well, as easy as it seemed for me to say that, it wasn’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because,” she replied, “I had the same question for you.”

It was his turn to be aghast. His eyes widened and he took her hands in his. “Why in the world would you have to question that? If anyone should be insecure, it’s me. But I know you love me. So why do you doubt that I love you?”

“It’s not that I doubt that you love me, Raf. It’s that I don’t know why. And last week just made it worse.”

His brow furrowed in confusion. “What happened last week that would make you wonder—” He stopped. “Oh, Amor, you don’t mean your grades.”

A tear fell from her eye and she tore one of her hands away from his to wipe it away. “I told you I was afraid of disappointing you, and myself. My grades were—well—not what I expected.”

“Mi amor, it is so common for your first semester of law school to be imperfect. And you did remarkably well, especially considering you also have a job.”

“You did remarkably well. I’m just…average. And when I look at you, when I see you in court, when you sit there and debate gun control with Sonny, it becomes all the more apparent to me that you could do so much better, and—”

“Anna, listen to me. There is nothing better than you. I could look for it and I wouldn’t find it because it doesn’t exist. You could work at McDonald’s for all I care. You are not your career. I know I make it seem like that’s a lifestyle, but if you haven’t noticed, I’m not the most well-adjusted person.” He gave her a small smile, trying to make her laugh, but she didn’t.

“I just wanted to make you proud of me.”

“I’m proud of you every day. Why do you think I can’t stop touching you when we’re out? It’s not that I’m trying to tell the world that you’re mine.”

She wiped another tear away. “No? Then what is it?”

“It’s that I want everyone to know that I’m yours,” he said. “I want people to know that you chose me. I told you, Anna. The only way you could ever disappoint me is by forgetting who you are in favor of what you’re becoming. And you shouldn’t be disappointed in yourself, either. What you’ve accomplished in the last two years is nothing short of amazing, and if I have to tell you that every day, I will, until you believe me.”

She looked up into his now-watery eyes, and in that moment, she was so grateful for having a partner who was just that—her partner. He never made her feel silly for having feelings or that she had to be something more than what she was. And then she thought about what Amanda had said about him staring at her, and suddenly she realized that her insecurity wasn’t coming from him. It was only coming from inside her head.

To his great relief, she finally broke into a smile. “You know what really would make me feel better?”

“What’s that?” he asked.

“Seeing if you really are good at stripping.”

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/music-black-culture-appropriation.html

I'd encourage all of you to read -- actually read -- the reported essays in the #1619project. If these ideas or facts are new to you, if they upset you or make you uncomfortable, if they challenge your idea of America, ask yourself: why?

For centuries, black music, forged in bondage, has been the sound of complete artistic freedom. No wonder everybody is always stealing it.

By Wesley Morris | August 14, 2019 | New York Times | Posted August 18, 2019 7:52 PM ET |

I’ve got a friend who’s an incurable Pandora guy, and one Saturday while we were making dinner, he found a station called Yacht Rock. “A tongue-in-cheek name for the breezy sounds of late ’70s/early ’80s soft rock” is Pandora’s definition, accompanied by an exhortation to “put on your Dockers, pull up a deck chair and relax.” With a single exception, the passengers aboard the yacht were all dudes. With two exceptions, they were all white. But as the hours passed and dozens of songs accrued, the sound gravitated toward a familiar quality that I couldn’t give language to but could practically taste: an earnest Christian yearning that would reach, for a moment, into Baptist rawness, into a known warmth. I had to laugh — not because as a category Yacht Rock is absurd, but because what I tasted in that absurdity was black.

I started putting each track under investigation. Which artists would saunter up to the racial border? And which could do their sauntering without violating it? I could hear degrees of blackness in the choir-loft certitude of Doobie Brothers-era Michael McDonald on “What a Fool Believes”; in the rubber-band soul of Steely Dan’s “Do It Again”; in the malt-liquor misery of Ace’s “How Long” and the toy-boat wistfulness of Little River Band’s “Reminiscing.”

Then Kenny Loggins’s “This Is It”arrived and took things far beyond the line. “This Is It” was a hit in 1979 and has the requisite smoothness to keep the yacht rocking. But Loggins delivers the lyrics in a desperate stage whisper, like someone determined to make the kind of love that doesn’t wake the baby. What bowls you over is the intensity of his yearning — teary in the verses, snarling during the chorus. He sounds as if he’s baring it all yet begging to wring himself out even more.

Playing black-music detective that day, I laughed out of bafflement and embarrassment and exhilaration. It’s the conflation of pride and chagrin I’ve always felt anytime a white person inhabits blackness with gusto. It’s: You have to hand it to her. It’s: Go, white boy. Go, white boy. Go. But it’s also: Here we go again. The problem is rich. If blackness can draw all of this ornate literariness out of Steely Dan and all this psychotic origami out of Eminem; if it can make Teena Marie sing everything — “Square Biz,” “Revolution,”“Portuguese Love,” “Lovergirl” — like she knows her way around a pack of Newports; if it can turn the chorus of Carly Simon’s “You Belong to Me” into a gospel hymn; if it can animate the swagger in the sardonic vulnerabilities of Amy Winehouse; if it can surface as unexpectedly as it does in the angelic angst of a singer as seemingly green as Ben Platt; if it’s the reason Nu Shooz’s “I Can’t Wait”remains the whitest jam at the blackest parties, then it’s proof of how deeply it matters to the music of being alive in America, alive to America.

It’s proof, too, that American music has been fated to thrive in an elaborate tangle almost from the beginning. Americans have made a political investment in a myth of racial separateness, the idea that art forms can be either “white” or “black” in character when aspects of many are at least both. The purity that separation struggles to maintain? This country’s music is an advertisement for 400 years of the opposite: centuries of “amalgamation” and “miscegenation” as they long ago called it, of all manner of interracial collaboration conducted with dismaying ranges of consent.

“White,” “Western,” “classical” music is the overarching basis for lots of American pop songs. Chromatic-chord harmony, clean timbre of voice and instrument: These are the ingredients for some of the hugely singable harmonies of the Beatles, the Eagles, Simon and Fleetwood Mac, something choral, “pure,” largely ungrained. Black music is a completely different story. It brims with call and response, layers of syncopation and this rougher element called “noise,” unique sounds that arise from the particular hue and timbre of an instrument — Little Richard’s woos and knuckled keyboard zooms. The dusky heat of Miles Davis’s trumpeting. Patti LaBelle’s emotional police siren. DMX’s scorched-earth bark. The visceral stank of Etta James, Aretha Franklin, live-in-concert Whitney Houston and Prince on electric guitar.

But there’s something even more fundamental, too. My friend Delvyn Case, a musician who teaches at Wheaton College, explained in an email that improvisation is one of the most crucial elements in what we think of as black music: “The raising of individual creativity/expression to the highest place within the aesthetic world of a song.” Without improvisation, a listener is seduced into the composition of the song itself and not the distorting or deviating elements that noise creates. Particular to black American music is the architecture to create a means by which singers and musicians can be completely free, free in the only way that would have been possible on a plantation: through art, through music — music no one “composed” (because enslaved people were denied literacy), music born of feeling, of play, of exhaustion, of hope.

What you’re hearing in black music is a miracle of sound, an experience that can really happen only once — not just melisma, glissandi, the rasp of a sax, breakbeats or sampling but the mood or inspiration from which those moments arise. The attempt to rerecord it seems, if you think about it, like a fool’s errand. You’re not capturing the arrangement of notes, per se. You’re catching the spirit.

And the spirit travels from host to host, racially indiscriminate about where it settles, selective only about who can withstand being possessed by it. The rockin’ backwoods blues so bewitched Elvis Presley that he believed he’d been called by blackness. Chuck Berry sculpted rock ’n’ roll with uproarious guitar riffs and lascivious winks at whiteness. Mick Jagger and Robert Plant and Steve Winwood and Janis Joplin and the Beatles jumped, jived and wailed the black blues. Tina Turner wrested it all back, tripling the octane in some of their songs. Since the 1830s, the historian Ann Douglas writes in “Terrible Honesty,” her history of popular culture in the 1920s, “American entertainment, whatever the state of American society, has always been integrated, if only by theft and parody.” What we’ve been dealing with ever since is more than a catchall word like “appropriation” can approximate. The truth is more bounteous and more spiritual than that, more confused. That confusion is the DNA of the American sound.

It’s in the wink-wink costume funk of Beck’s “Midnite Vultures” from 1999, an album whose kicky nonsense deprecations circle back to the popular culture of 150 years earlier. It’s in the dead-serious, nostalgic dance-floor schmaltz of Bruno Mars. It’s in what we once called “blue-eyed soul,” a term I’ve never known what to do with, because its most convincing practitioners — the Bee-Gees, Michael McDonald, Hall & Oates, Simply Red, George Michael, Taylor Dayne, Lisa Stansfield, Adele — never winked at black people, so black people rarely batted an eyelash. Flaws and all, these are homeowners as opposed to renters. No matter what, though, a kind of gentrification tends to set in, underscoring that black people have often been rendered unnecessary to attempt blackness. Take Billboard’s Top 10 songs of 2013: It’s mostly nonblack artists strongly identified with black music, for real and for kicks: Robin Thicke, Miley Cyrus, Justin Timberlake, Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, the dude who made “The Harlem Shake.”

Sometimes all the inexorable mixing leaves me longing for something with roots that no one can rip all the way out. This is to say that when we’re talking about black music, we’re talking about horns, drums, keyboards and guitars doing the unthinkable together. We’re also talking about what the borrowers and collaborators don’t want to or can’t lift — centuries of weight, of atrocity we’ve never sufficiently worked through, the blackness you know is beyond theft because it’s too real, too rich, too heavy to steal.

Blackness was on the move before my ancestors were legally free to be. It was on the move before my ancestors even knew what they had. It was on the move because white people were moving it. And the white person most frequently identified as its prime mover is Thomas Dartmouth Rice, a New Yorker who performed as T.D. Rice and, in acclaim, was lusted after as “Daddy” Rice, “the negro par excellence.” Rice was a minstrel, which by the 1830s, when his stardom was at its most refulgent, meant he painted his face with burned cork to approximate those of the enslaved black people he was imitating.

In 1830, Rice was a nobody actor in his early 20s, touring with a theater company in Cincinnati (or Louisville; historians don’t know for sure), when, the story goes, he saw a decrepit, possibly disfigured old black man singing while grooming a horse on the property of a white man whose last name was Crow. On went the light bulb. Rice took in the tune and the movements but failed, it seems, to take down the old man’s name. So in his song based on the horse groomer, he renamed him: “Weel about and turn about jus so/Ebery time I weel about, I jump Jim Crow.” And just like that, Rice had invented the fellow who would become the mascot for two centuries of legalized racism.

That night, Rice made himself up to look like the old black man — or something like him, because Rice’s get-up most likely concocted skin blacker than any actual black person’s and a gibberish dialect meant to imply black speech. Rice had turned the old man’s melody and hobbled movements into a song-and-dance routine that no white audience had ever experienced before. What they saw caused a permanent sensation. He reportedly won 20 encores.

Rice repeated the act again, night after night, for audiences so profoundly rocked that he was frequently mobbed duringperformances. Across the Ohio River, not an arduous distance from all that adulation, was Boone County, Ky., whose population would have been largely enslaved Africans. As they were being worked, sometimes to death, white people, desperate with anticipation, were paying to see them depicted at play.

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Other performers came and conquered, particularly the Virginia Minstrels, who exploded in 1843, burned brightly then burned out after only months. In their wake, P.T. Barnum made a habit of booking other troupes for his American Museum; when he was short on performers, he blacked up himself. By the 1840s, minstrel acts were taking over concert halls, doing wildly clamored-for residencies in Boston, New York and Philadelphia.

A blackface minstrel would sing, dance, play music, give speeches and cut up for white audiences, almost exclusively in the North, at least initially. Blackface was used for mock operas and political monologues (they called them stump speeches), skits, gender parodies and dances. Before the minstrel show gave it a reliable home, blackface was the entertainment between acts of conventional plays. Its stars were the Elvis, the Beatles, the ’NSync of the 19th century. The performers were beloved and so, especially, were their songs.

During minstrelsy’s heyday, white songwriters like Stephen Foster wrote the tunes that minstrels sang, tunes we continue to sing. Edwin Pearce Christy’s group the Christy Minstrels formed a band — banjo, fiddle, bone castanets, tambourine — that would lay the groundwork for American popular music, from bluegrass to Motown. Some of these instruments had come from Africa; on a plantation, the banjo’s body would have been a desiccated gourd. In “Doo-Dah!” his book on Foster’s work and life, Ken Emerson writes that the fiddle and banjo were paired for the melody, while the bones “chattered” and the tambourine “thumped and jingled a beat that is still heard ’round the world.”

But the sounds made with these instruments could be only imagined as black, because the first wave of minstrels were Northerners who’d never been meaningfully South. They played Irish melodies and used Western choral harmonies, not the proto-gospel call-and-response music that would make life on a plantation that much more bearable. Black artists were on the scene, like the pioneer bandleader Frank Johnsonand the borderline-mythical Old Corn Meal, who started as a street vendor and wound up the first black man to perform, as himself, on a white New Orleans stage. His stuff was copied by George Nichols, who took up blackface after a start in plain-old clowning. Yet as often as not, blackface minstrelsy tethered black people and black life to white musical structures, like the polka, which was having a moment in 1848. The mixing was already well underway: Europe plus slavery plus the circus, times harmony, comedy and drama, equals Americana.

And the muses for so many of the songs were enslaved Americans, people the songwriters had never met, whose enslavement they rarely opposed and instead sentimentalized. Foster’s minstrel-show staple “Old Uncle Ned,” for instance, warmly if disrespectfully eulogizes the enslaved the way you might a salaried worker or an uncle:

Den lay down de shubble and de hoe,

Hang up de fiddle and de bow:

No more hard work for poor Old Ned —

He’s gone whar de good Niggas go,

No more hard work for poor Old Ned —

He’s gone whar de good Niggas go.

Such an affectionate showcase for poor old (enslaved, soon-to-be-dead) Uncle Ned was as essential as “air,” in the white critic Bayard Taylor’s 1850 assessment; songs like this were the “true expressions of the more popular side of the national character,” a force that follows “the American in all its emigrations, colonizations and conquests, as certainly as the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving Day.” He’s not wrong. Minstrelsy’s peak stretched from the 1840s to the 1870s, years when the country was as its most violently and legislatively ambivalent about slavery and Negroes; years that included the Civil War and Reconstruction, the ferocious rhetorical ascent of Frederick Douglass, John Brown’s botched instigation of a black insurrection at Harpers Ferry and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

Minstrelsy’s ascent also coincided with the publication, in 1852, of “Uncle Tom's Cabin,” a polarizing landmark that minstrels adapted for the stage, arguing for and, in simply remaining faithful to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, against slavery. These adaptations, known as U.T.C.s, took over the art form until the end of the Civil War. Perhaps minstrelsy’s popularity could be (generously) read as the urge to escape a reckoning. But a good time predicated upon the presentation of other humans as stupid, docile, dangerous with lust and enamored of their bondage? It was an escape into slavery’s fun house.

What blackface minstrelsy gave the country during this period was an entertainment of skill, ribaldry and polemics. But it also lent racism a stage upon which existential fear could become jubilation, contempt could become fantasy. Paradoxically, its dehumanizing bent let white audiences feel more human. They could experience loathing as desire, contempt as adoration, repulsion as lust. They could weep for overworked Uncle Ned as surely as they could ignore his lashed back or his body as it swung from a tree.

But where did this leave a black performer? If blackface was the country’s cultural juggernaut, who would pay Negroes money to perform as themselves? When they were hired, it was only in a pinch. Once, P.T. Barnum needed a replacement for John Diamond, his star white minstrel. In a New York City dance hall, Barnum found a boy, who, it was reported at the time, could outdo Diamond (and Diamond was good). The boy, of course, was genuinely black. And his being actually black would have rendered him an outrageous blight on a white consumer’s narrow presumptions. As Thomas Low Nichols would write in his 1864 compendium, “Forty Years of American Life,” “There was not an audience in America that would not have resented, in a very energetic fashion, the insult of being asked to look at the dancing of a real negro.” So Barnum “greased the little ‘nigger’s’ face and rubbed it over with a new blacking of burned cork, painted his thick lips vermilion, put on a woolly wig over his tight curled locks and brought him out as ‘the champion nigger-dancer of the world.’ ” This child might have been William Henry Lane, whose stage name was Juba. And, as Juba, Lane was persuasive enough that Barnum could pass him off as a white person in blackface. He ceased being a real black boy in order to become Barnum’s minstrel Pinocchio.

After the Civil War, black performers had taken up minstrelsy, too, corking themselves, for both white and black audiences — with a straight face or a wink, depending on who was looking. Black troupes invented important new dances with blue-ribbon names (the buck-and-wing, the Virginia essence, the stop-time). But these were unhappy innovations. Custom obligated black performers to fulfill an audience’s expectations, expectations that white performers had established. A black minstrel was impersonating the impersonation of himself. Think, for a moment, about the talent required to pull that off. According to Henry T. Sampson’s book, “Blacks in Blackface,” there were no sets or effects, so the black blackface minstrel show was “a developer of ability because the artist was placed on his own.” How’s that for being twice as good? Yet that no-frills excellence could curdle into an entirely other, utterly degrading double consciousness, one that predates, predicts and probably informs W.E.B. DuBois’s more self-consciously dignified rendering.

American popular culture was doomed to cycles not only of questioned ownership, challenged authenticity, dubious propriety and legitimate cultural self-preservation but also to the prison of black respectability, which, with brutal irony, could itself entail a kind of appropriation. It meant comportment in a manner that seemed less black and more white. It meant the appearance of refinement and polish. It meant the cognitive dissonance of, say, Nat King Cole’s being very black and sounding — to white America, anyway, with his frictionless baritone and diction as crisp as a hospital corner — suitably white. He was perfect for radio, yet when he got a TV show of his own, it was abruptly canceled, his brown skin being too much for even the black and white of a 1955 television set. There was, perhaps, not a white audience in America, particularly in the South, that would not have resented, in a very energetic fashion, the insult of being asked to look at the majestic singing of a real Negro.

The modern conundrum of the black performer’s seeming respectable, among black people, began, in part, as a problem of white blackface minstrels’ disrespectful blackness. Frederick Douglass wrote that they were “the filthy scum of white society.” It’s that scum that’s given us pause over everybody from Bert Williams and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson to Flavor Flav and Kanye West. Is their blackness an act? Is the act under white control? Just this year, Harold E. Doley Jr., an affluent black Republican in his 70s, was quoted in The Times lamenting West and his alignment with Donald Trump as a “bad and embarrassing minstrel show” that “served to only drive black people away from the G.O.P.”

But it’s from that scum that a robust, post-minstrel black American theater sprung as a new, black audience hungered for actual, uncorked black people. Without that scum, I’m not sure we get an event as shatteringly epochal as the reign of Motown Records. Motown was a full-scale integration of Western, classical orchestral ideas (strings, horns, woodwinds) with the instincts of both the black church (rhythm sections, gospel harmonies, hand claps) and juke joint Saturday nights (rhythm sections, guitars, vigor). Pure yet “noisy.” Black men in Armani. Black women in ball gowns. Stables of black writers, producers and musicians. Backup singers solving social equations with geometric choreography. And just in time for the hegemony of the American teenager.

Even now it feels like an assault on the music made a hundred years before it. Motown specialized in love songs. But its stars, those songs and their performance of them were declarations of war on the insults of the past and present. The scratchy piccolo at the start of a Four Tops hitwas, in its way, a raised fist. Respectability wasn’t a problem with Motown; respectability was its point. How radically optimistic a feat of antiminstrelsy, for it’s as glamorous a blackness as this country has ever mass-produced and devoured.

The proliferation of black music across the planet — the proliferation, in so many senses, of being black — constitutes a magnificent joke on American racism. It also confirms the attraction that someone like Rice had to that black man grooming the horse. But something about that desire warps and perverts its source, lampoons and cheapens it even in adoration. Loving black culture has never meant loving black people, too. Loving black culture risks loving the life out of it.

And yet doesn’t that attraction make sense? This is the music of a people who have survived, who not only won't stop but also can’t be stopped. Music by a people whose major innovations — jazz, funk, hip-hop — have been about progress, about the future, about getting as far away from nostalgia as time will allow, music that’s thought deeply about the allure of outer space and robotics, music whose promise and possibility, whose rawness, humor and carnality call out to everybody — to other black people, to kids in working class England and middle-class Indonesia. If freedom's ringing, who on Earth wouldn't also want to rock the bell?

In 1845, J.K. Kennard, a critic for the newspaper The Knickerbocker, hyperventilated about the blackening of America. Except he was talking about blackface minstrels doing the blackening. Nonetheless, Kennard could see things for what they were:

“Who are our true rulers? The negro poets, to be sure! Do they not set the fashion, and give laws to the public taste? Let one of them, in the swamps of Carolina, compose a new song, and it no sooner reaches the ear of a white amateur, than it is written down, amended, (that is, almost spoilt,) printed, and then put upon a course of rapid dissemination, to cease only with the utmost bounds of Anglo-Saxondom, perhaps of the world.”

What a panicked clairvoyant! The fear of black culture — or “black culture” — was more than a fear of black people themselves. It was an anxiety over white obsolescence. Kennard’s anxiety over black influence sounds as ambivalent as Lorde’s, when, all the way from her native New Zealand, she tsk-ed rap culture’s extravagance on “Royals,”her hit from 2013, while recognizing, both in the song’s hip-hop production and its appetite for a particular sort of blackness, that maybe she’s too far gone:

Every song’s like gold teeth, Grey Goose, trippin’ in the bathroom

Bloodstains, ball gowns, trashin’ the hotel room

We don’t care, we’re driving Cadillacs in our dreams

But everybody’s like Cristal, Maybach, diamonds on your timepiece

Jet planes, islands, tigers on a gold leash

We don’t care, we aren’t caught up in your love affair

Beneath Kennard’s warnings must have lurked an awareness that his white brethren had already fallen under this spell of blackness, that nothing would stop its spread to teenage girls in 21st-century Auckland, that the men who “infest our promenades and our concert halls like a colony of beetles” (as a contemporary of Kennard’s put it) weren’t black people at all but white people just like him — beetles and, eventually, Beatles. Our first most original art form arose from our original sin, and some white people have always been worried that the primacy of black music would be a kind of karmic punishment for that sin. The work has been to free this country from paranoia’s bondage, to truly embrace the amplitude of integration. I don’t know how we’re doing.

Last spring, “Old Town Road,” a silly, drowsy ditty by the Atlanta songwriter Lil Nas X, was essentially banished from country radio. Lil Nas sounds black, as does the trap beat he’s droning over. But there’s definitely a twang to him that goes with the opening bars of faint banjo and Lil Nas’s lil’ cowboy fantasy. The song snowballed into a phenomenon. All kinds of people — cops, soldiers, dozens of dapper black promgoers — posted dances to it on YouTube and TikTok. Then a crazy thing happened. It charted — not just on Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart, either. In April, it showed up on both its Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart and its Hot Country Songs chart. A first. And, for now at least, a last.

The gatekeepers of country radio  refused to play the song; they didn’t explain why. Then, Billboard determined that the song failed to “embrace enough elements of today’s country music to chart in its current version.” This doesn’t warrant translation, but let’s be thorough, anyway: The song is too black for certain white people.

But by that point it had already captured the nation’s imagination and tapped into the confused thrill of integrated culture. A black kid hadn’t really merged white music with black, he’d just taken up the American birthright of cultural synthesis. The mixing feels historical. Here, for instance, in the song’s sample of a Nine Inch Nails track is a banjo, the musical spine of the minstrel era. Perhaps Lil Nas was too American. Other country artists of the genre seemed to sense this. White singers recorded pretty tributes in support, and one, Billy Ray Cyrus, performed his on a remix with Lil Nas X himself.

The newer version lays Cyrus’s casual grit alongside Lil Nas’s lackadaisical wonder. It’s been No.1 on Billboard’s all-genre Hot 100 singles chart since April, setting a record. And the bottomless glee over the whole thing makes me laugh, too — not in a surprised, yacht-rock way but as proof of what a fine mess this place is. One person's sign of progress remains another’s symbol of encroachment.  Screw the history. Get off my land.

Four hundred years ago, more than 20 kidnapped Africans arrived in Virginia. They were put to work and put through hell. Twenty became millions, and some of those people found — somehow — deliverance in the power of music. Lil Nas X has descended from those millions and appears to be a believer in deliverance. The verses of his song flirt with Western kitsch, what young black internetters branded, with adorable idiosyncrasy and a deep sense of history, the “yee-haw agenda.” But once the song reaches its chorus (“I’m gonna take my horse to the Old Town Road, and ride til I can’t no more”), I don’t hear a kid in an outfit. I hear a cry of ancestry. He’s a westward-bound refugee; he’s an Exoduster. And Cyrus is down for the ride. Musically, they both know: This land is their land.

Wesley Morris is a staff writer for the magazine, a critic at large for The New York Times and a co-host of the podcast “Still Processing.” He was awarded the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for criticism.

Source photograph of Beyoncé: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images; Holiday: Paul Hoeffler/Redferns, via Getty Images; Turner: Gai Terrell/Redferns, via Getty Images; Richards: Chris Walter/WireImage, via Getty Images; Lamar: Bennett Raglin/Getty Images

Top new tracks

2022 is shaping up to be an amazing year for music. First week of this year and we had a Gunna and The Weeknd release, now we have some comeback singles from artists I personally did not expect to hear from and a beautiful project from Gilli a Danish artist, who has reached new highs. 

For this week I’ll start listen the top tracks as usual, but you will also get an additional post explaining just why you should listen to Gilli’s new album, both for those who speak Danish, but more important those who don’t.

Without further ado, here are the top new tracks of this week.

Creepy, crazy, Kanye. With an incredible disturbing cover Kanye speaks on his recent divorce with Kim Kardashian, while also warning Pete Davidson that he will beat him up (which apparently has led to Davidson upping his security). What's so intriguing about Ye's level of fame and presence in the public eye is, for him to make a song about his divorce he doesn't not have to make any expositions, we, the audience, already know what he is talking about.

The song itself has a very low-key instrumental set-up, almost reminiscent of 2012 Kendrick Lamar. It's really stripped back, giving space to the heavy subject of the song - still with very Ye-esque lines such as:

I don't negotiate with therapists

I very much just put the latest releases on, without any thoughts, but this song really caught me. I have personally not listened to a lot of 21 Savage on his own, but I don't think I've ever heard one of his features which I didn't like. The song begins with a soft sample, Aretha Franklin's One Step Ahead (this is not the first time it has been sampled in rap) which lays a beautiful contrast to the classic hip-hop beat and straight shooting lyrics of JID and 21 Savage. I personally am not the biggest fan of Baby Tate's feature on this song, it didn't feel as though it added much to the song, too many cooks...

Some nice and chill afro-beats, this is another song for your araba, cruising and listening on the way home from work or on the way to the beach - that is, if you live somewhere where you can go to the beach in January.

Here is some very classically Danish pop music. While the song is a beautiful example of radio music, I very much added this because of the line Du ik' til de bløde fyre, så jeg er al dente som en pastaskrue which translates to you're not into the soft guys, so I'm al dente like a pasta screw. What a beautifully stupid line.

I saw this album was the most streamed album released in January 14th - 16th, and when this song came onto my playlist I wasn't surprised by it's success.

Cordae is a 24 year old rapper from North Carolina. The sound reminds me of J. Cole and somewhat Nas, so let this east coast hip-hop hit you like a fresh breeze.

Lastly we have a comeback from Stromae ??? Insanity. Now, okay, Stromae did actually release a single back in October, but it definitely did not reach the same highs as his new single L'enfer has reached.

Now is Stromae back with weird straight hair? yes. Do I blame his him for this? also yes. Nonetheless, the Belgian artist comes through with a somber song. I don't speak any French, so I have no clue what he sings about, but I feel like it's deep. Is it? Please if you speak French, let me know if it's deep or it it's in fact just French.

50 Year Flashback: 10 Big Songs From June 1968

June 1968 was a hell of a time in America and on the rest of the planet too. The Vietnam War was yielding more casualties than ever, there were two devastating political assassinations and there was unrest in the streets. The Summer of Love already seemed like a distant memory, but on the positive side, the Rock Revolution was in full swing and music was exploding off in new directions. FM Rock radio was still in its infancy, meaning that Top 40 was still the main medium for new music, and so here are some of the big Top 40 hits from June 1968 in no particular order:

  Mrs. Robinson – Simon And Garfunkel

It’s hard to separate this song from The Graduate, the generation-defining movie in which it played a central role, a conflation that surely enhanced the song’s appeal among all the boring, self-centered and disaffected Benjamin Braddocks and Elaine Robinsons of the day.

  MacArthur Park – Richard Harris

In 1992 humorist Dave Barry conducted a readers’ poll that named this the Worst Song of All Time, but we think there are plenty worse. Sure it’s ridiculously overblown and overwrought, but songwriter Jimmy Webb deliberately set out to make it that way in the name of artistic innovation, since overblown and overwrought were still fresh Rock concepts back then.

  Yummy, Yummy, Yummy – Ohio Express

Haven’t heard this one in years and it’s not quite as bad as we remembered it, although the lead singer still sounds like a goat. You’ve got to figure that 50+ years of hearing crappy bubblegum music tends to inure one to its horrors.

  Tighten Up – Archie Bell & The Drells

By the time this reached #1 Archie Bell had been drafted into the Army and was already seriously injured overseas. Neither he nor anyone else could have predicted that this simple song – the whole thing is like a two-minute intro – would top the charts, but like all huge hits it had that inexplicable something that people find irresistible.

  Jumpin’ Jack Flash – Rolling Stones

The Stones were at a creative and a career crossroads, coming off the LSD-addled mediocrity of Their Satanic Majesties Request and needing to re-establish their standing on the Rock scene. This song did a lot more than that. If Mick and Keith were sons of the Blues, then Jumpin’ Jack Flash – the character – became the holy spirit of the Rolling Stones, and God saw that it was a gas, gas, gas.

  Tip Toe Thru’ The Tulips With Me – Tiny Tim

A lot of people badly needed an escape from the troubles of the day, and Tiny Tim provided a departure as far away from the norm as you could possibly get. More proof that when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

  Sky Pilot – Eric Burden And The Animals

Anti-war songs were common by this point, but a wicked guitar solo fading into the real sounds of war was a wrinkle that gave and still gives this song a powerful punch. This was the last we would ever hear from the Animals, and it was a pretty strong way to make an exit.

  Mony Mony – Tommy James and the Shondells

I remember one night around this time in 1968, I was just a little kid and my amazing big sister Peggy let me tag along in the back seat on a run with her boyfriend to the local burger shack. He was driving a 1966 white Chevy Impala convertible with red interior, top down on a beautiful warm starry night when this song came on the radio, cranked up loud, and I was never the same after that, in a good way.

  Reach Out Of The Darkness – Friend & Lover

The husband-and-wife team of Jim and Cathy Post threw three song fragments together and somehow managed to catch the zeitgeist of the day – well it was groovy that people were finally getting together – but many people thought they were singing “freak out in the darkness”, which would have been even groovier.

  I’d Like To Get To Know You – Spanky And Our Gang

This one is a real cultural artifact, it’s almost as if 1968 is the only year it could have been made. They called it “sunshine pop”, and it is certainly that (Spanky McFarlane could really sing), but the real highlight is the semi-psychedelic breakdown in the last part of the song, because in 1968 even the poppiest of pop songs wanted to be just a little bit trippy too.

  Other Big Hits In June 1968 Include:

A Beautiful Morning — Rascals Think — Aretha Franklin This Guy’s in Love — Herb Alpert Ain’t Nothing Like The Real Thing — Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell Angel Of The Morning — Merrilee Rush Love Is All Around — The Troggs Stoned Soul Picnic — The 5th Dimension The Horse — Cliff Nobles & Co.

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Sympathy For The Devil (part 5)

summary: Set in 1978, Bill a young yet accomplish cop takes on the crime in New York City. Nervous yet excited to take on his first big task at his new department and prove himself. He soon finds out his partner is everything he had least expected.

warnings: strong language, mentions of sex acts, mentions of drugs

also if you’re seeing this for the first time you can read part one here and if you need to catch up on previous chapters go here.

tags: @kikilikes @itsbillskarsgard @imaginingyournotsolikelyfuture

The sun was setting when Bill finally woke up, sleeping off the night before. He turned over and saw Star awake taking her rollers out. Chain of Fools by Aretha Franklin was playing loudly on the radio and she was charismatically lip-syncing along in the mirror in front of her. He watched her hips sway in the pink dress as she quickly lit a cigarette before taking the last roller out of her hair. She went back to lip-syncing Aretha’s break down in the song, dramatically putting her cigarette back in her mouth. It sat burning between her lips while she doused her bleached curls with an aerosol hairspray can.

“You’re gonna start a fire like that,” Bill said groggily, a hint of a smile in his voice.

Star jumped, “Oh god,” she gasped, clutching her chest. “You saw me?” Bill replied with a nod. “That’s embarrassing…”

“Did you take a nap?” He sat up.

“Yeah, but I had to fix my hair, it was too flat. You know you mumble a lot in your sleep? I never noticed but I’m a real heavy sleeper so,” she shrugged.

“Just mumble? No words?” He sat up.

“None, that I made out. Anyway, are we going to work today? It’s gonna get dark real soon,” she pointed at the window.

“Nah, we should take a break. Last night was, a lot. And we’ve been hustling hard for a full week now. We went on strong enough, can’t push it.”

“Alright boss. So, drinks then?”

“And food, I feel fuckin’ empty,” he groaned as he stretched.

“The stuff will do it, to ya.” …

After eating, Bill found a little bar further away from anywhere they have been. At least together, he was close to his apartment, actually. After last night, he just wanted a little familiarity before going back at it again. They walked in, passing the quarter pool tables and taking a seat at the bar together. Star held her hand out for her money. Bill was holding on to it for safekeeping at her request. This was her get outta dodge money, she didn’t want to risk spending it on stupid stuff. Bill gave her a ten dollar note and she began to happily wave the bartender over. She was happy, that for once, she could do something nice for someone who was just as nice to her.

“Two of whatever you got on draft and two shot’s of Jack Daniels, please.” She slid the ten to the bald bartender.

“Jack Daniels?” He raised his brows at her.

“I can afford it,” she chuckled. They tapped shot glasses and just before she shot it back, Bill stopped her.

“Like this,” he tapped her glass again, “And then tap the bottom to the table,” she followed his actions, “And drink.” They tilted their heads back together.

“Didn’t know that was a thing?” Star said wincing at the bitter drink. “Me and Benny would just drink out the bottle.”

“Benny, uh, that was your guy?”

“Yeah,” she took a sip from her beer. “And, I know you’re gonna ask why he’s locked up. It was an illegal firearm charge. If you’re takin’ care of someone that does what I do, you gotta pack heat. You know, like yesterday. It comes handy.”

Bill nodded. “I actually wasn’t going to ask why he’s in jail, though. I was going to ask if he’s the one that got you to do what you do.”

“Oh, kinda, yeah. I was trying to do it on my own first and he saw me one day. Told me I was doin’ it all wrong and showed me the turf I work at today. He took care of me real good, that guy.”

“Did he have other girls? Like that Randi guy, he had almost ten.”

“No, at least I don’t think so? I was his only one. We both hustled and did what we had to, to get by. I miss him from time to time,” she sighed wistfully. “I wrote him but I don’t think he ever got it? Or maybe it got lost in the post, not sure…” she paused, glancing away in thought. “Wait, now that you mention it, there was another girl, but she didn’t do what I did? She would just come by a lot, to talk to him… oh shit.” She said as Benny’s unfaithfulness dawned on her. “Well, fuck me then. Never mind, I don’t miss him.” She took a gulp of her beer.

“Let me buy us a shot for that then? Sorry, Star. I was just trying to get a little work in, I didn’t mean to dredge anything up,” he said apologetically.

“Aw, it’s okay,” she waved it off. “He’s in jail what’s he gonna do for me anymore?”

They took their shot just like Bill instructed earlier. Star began to brainstorm new jobs Bill could take on as she promised. He didn’t want to leave his job but it was fun for her so he went along with it. They went through the pros and cons of all sorts of jobs, one that stuck, was a fireman. Star thought he would be really great at it.

“Have you seen the fires in the Bronx?” She said. “There are places torched up every other day. You’d be real busy,” she took a sip of her beer.

“Ah, maybe, maybe. Was there anything you wanted to be when you grew up?”

Star thought for a moment. “Mm, not really? I wasn’t really good at anything,” she shrugged. “My mom was a waitress, I figure, I would be doing that if I still lived in Atlantic City.”

“C’mon there is something you’re good at? Think a little harder,” he lightly nudged her with his elbow.

“Well… in school one of the only classes I aced, besides P.E., was Home Ec. I was really good at the cooking and baking. Especially the baking, I made some blueberry muffins. My teacher let me only have one before taking it to the break lounge so all teachers could eat them. They all would talk to me about them forever after.”

“See, something. You can be a baker, have your own little pastry shop?”

Star laughed lightly, “Sure, maybe in another life.”

“You said, uh, your mom was a waitress? What did your dad do?” He was worried he if he was annoying by asking her question after question. She didn’t seem bothered which then made him wonder if anyone had ever taken an interest in her like this at all?

“I think, he worked in an auto shop. I’m pretty sure. I remember he’d come home smelling like grease and booze. He took off when I was about four or so. My mom said, he went to Indiana with some girl, apparently. I don’t know? I kinda stopped listenin’ to her ‘cause she’d rant on about how no good he was and stuff. It bummed me out,” she shrugged. “Can you quit frowning?” She looked up at Bill. Even sitting down he was much taller. “I don’t like it when you do that. We’re just talking.”

“Sorry. Didn’t realize I was,” he bit his lip. “Another shot?”

Star nearly choked on her third shot. “Okay, enough of the whiskey. I don’t like the stuff, really.”

“Then why’d you get Jack?” He chuckled lightly.

“’Cause,” she took a quick sip of her beer to get rid of the taste of the liquor. “I heard you on the phone a few days ago talkin’ about it. You said you liked it.”

“You didn’t have to do that. I would have drunk whatever, it’s your money. What do you like I’ll get it for you?”

“No, no more,” she shook her head. “Just beer. But next time, I like peach schnapps, okay?” She smiled. “Anyway, I know what your dad does. What about your mom?”

“Just a housewife.”

“Oh, never mind the pastry shop. I’d like that job. I’ll make all my muffins in my own kitchen. That’s a real dream.” Star felt the shot go right to her head then. She was secretly a lightweight. “No brothers or sisters?”

“I got both, plus some. And you?”

“Just me. I was too much to handle apparently,” she said making Bill laugh. “I suppose I have half-siblings in Indiana, don’t know?” And she really didn’t care.

They talked about other miscellaneous things, commenting and critiquing a bar patrons song choices on the jukebox. Discussing, or more so arguing, about disco music. Bill argued that it wasn’t real music, real music was The Rolling Stones. To which Star agreed but begged to differ, regardless. They were both tipsy just enjoying each other’s company for once.

“I’m surprised you’re still wearing the dress I got you,” he laughed.

“Why?” She said looked down at it. “It’s the cleanest thing I got. The judge liked it, he even said so.”

“And you still hate it? I only really got it for you ‘cause I knew you wouldn’t like it.”

“Aww, I knew it!” She smacked his arm while he laughed. “That’s really the meanest thing you’ve done to me so far. Actually, the meanest thing any ones done to me ever. I look like a dork!”

“Oh c’mon!” He playfully pouted.

“It’s growing on me a little,” she admitted, “but still.”

“Are you almost done with your beer?” He said after downing the rest of his draft. “I wanna stop by somewhere.” …

Bill led her down the block he lived on. It felt nice to be home, he missed it and he missed his cat. He made sure to look over his shoulder everyone once in a while. He wasn’t supposed to do this. But he just wanted some extra clothes to take.

“Where are we going?” Star said growing impatient, having to nearly jog to keep up with his long strides.

“Right, here,” he pointed at his building. He lived right on the first floor of the place.

“Who lives here?” When she saw him pull out a pair of keys from his jacket pocket, she knew. “Oh no…” she looked up and down the corridor, paranoid. “Are you dumb?”

“Shhh,” he said opening his door, pulling her in.

“Bill, this is so stupid! What if someone’s watching us?”

“It’ll only be for a second. I need some damn underwear. Is that a crime?”

“I swear, Bill. If you blow our cover, I’m blaming it all on you.”

“Blame it on me then. Don’t stand there come on,” he motioned for her to follow him.

His place was nice and simple. He had all the necessities. He didn’t really fuss with decorating but he did have a poster of the iconic, Stones ‘hot lips’ logo near his record player. Star could see him living in the space with just his cat, a record on and that was it. Seemed so lonely… She followed him to his room where his big fat, black cat laid on his bed.

“Minx,” he said petting her and kissing her fluffy head. “You miss me?” The cat meowed and then snapped it’s head at Star looking at her with wide skeptical eyes. “Oh don’t worry,” he cooed at the cat. “She’s my friend.”

“Nice place,” she said sitting at the edge of his bed as he gathered clothing. The cat jumped on her lap snuggling against her. “I usually don’t get invited to people’s places, you know? They always think I’m gonna steal from them,” she scratched behind Minx's ears.

“Steal? Well, I’m not really worried about that. I don’t have anything good to take.”

“Those records in your living room could make a pretty penny. Or even those mirrored side lamps.”

Bill paused, glancing at her, “Really? You scoped my place out that fast?” He chuckled.

“I can’t help it,” she laughed with him. “Besides, if you weren’t drunk right now you’d remember that I’m a criminal.”

“I trust you won’t steal from me, Star. And don’t call yourself a criminal. Sure, you’ve done things but that’s not who you are.”

Star rolled her eyes, stubbornly. “Got your stuff already? I’d like to leave as soon as possible, please.”

“Hold your horses almost done,” he stuffed some socks in his gym bag. “Okay, let’s go.”

“You’re freakin’ cats heavy, I can’t get up,” Star said struggling. She didn’t want to push the cat off her, this was someone’s pet, not an alley cat.

Bill gently nudged Minx a few times to get the lazy cat off her lap. Minx usually hated anyone that wasn’t him. It took a while for her to warm to people but she sat on Star’s lap without a problem. He knew it was dumb to bring her to his home. Sure, he needed clothes but talking to her all night and listening to her stories he wanted to show her that there was such thing a stable home. He wanted her to see that he trusted her. …

Bill thought it was best that they stay low for a few days, considering the names and locations they acquired from the weekend. Still, they worked Star’s turf but cut the time down by half and she didn’t press jawns with so many questions. Their partnership had faded into friendship. They got each other now, it made work effortless almost.

They spent a whole day at a laundry mat, playing on the pinball machine and drinking sodas, while their clothes washed. Since all her clothes were in the wash, Star had to borrow a shirt and Bill’s long sweatpants. She had to tie off the shirt and the waistband of the sweats was rolled up, yet they still sat precariously on her hips. And because of that, they went to a department store the next day so she can purchase a few outfits with her money. Bill had to steer her away from the more skimpy clothing so she’d get something a bit more normal.

He waited outside the dressing room for almost 10 minutes before he hollered for her. “Are you gonna show me what any of it looks like?”

“Oh… well, I just I tried everything but the dress. Hold on.” A few minutes later she walked out in a flowing white boho dress. “Is this a ‘nice, normal’ dress to you?” She mocked his voice.

He smiled. “You don’t like it? It looks good.”

“I think with the hat it looks better,” she reached inside her dressing room for a tan floppy brim hat, putting it on. Bill nodded, approving.

She left the store in the outfit and although Bill tried his best to get her to find more modest wear she still managed to sneak a few things in her purchase. They walked down the street, both in style, to Central Park close by. Where they ate hot pretzels by the Harlem Meer watching kids feed ducks in the water. Close by, B Boy’s were setting up their boom box and laying out flat pieces of cardboard to dance on for quick tips.

“So,” Star said with a full mouth as they sat on a bench that just cleared up. “are we layin’ low tomorrow too or it is back to work?”

“We actually have to go by the station tomorrow in the morning.”

“Ugh,” she groaned. “Why? Are we in trouble?”

“No,” Bill laughed after taking a sip of his Cola. “Don’t think so? I think they have some info to share with us.”

“Well… how’s that not suspicious? Your place and now we’re gonna just hang out at the police station?”

“Relax. They have a whole scheme to get us there, apparently. We’re getting arrested,” he playfully, rolled his eyes. “Stan was tellin’ me all about it on the hotel phone while you were in the bathroom.”

“They’re cuffin’ you an all?” Star laughed amused at the thought. Bill smirked, nodding. “Wow, I can’t wait.” …

Sure enough the next morning they were working on their turf like always. Star lingered in the car, she seemed nervous. Bill assured her it was all fake, it wasn’t for real. But it didn’t seem to ease her.

“I promise this isn’t gonna blow our cover,” he assured again. “Like I said, I won’t let nothin’ happen to you.”

“You’re gonna be with me the whole time, right?”

“Yeah, pretty sure they’re gonna be talkin’ to both of us.”

“Okay…” she bit her lip, still apprehensive.

“If they take you somewhere else, I have a friend in there, she’s a secretary. Her names Patricia, she the oldest out of the bunch there.”

“Oh, yeah… I know her, she’s real nice,” she said finally relaxing a bit.

“Yeah, she helped me get this job. You ready?” Star responded with a nod. “Okay, we’ll be fine, alright.”

Star finally got out the car lingering around her corner, making no effort to talk to any potential customers walking by her. Ten minutes later, an NYPD squad car went swooping around the corner. Sirens blaring and wheels squealing to a halt, right in front of Star. Bill watched from in the car as the deputy in the passenger seat got out and yanked Star’s arm, immediately cuffing her wrists. The driver, who Bill knew as Roger, walked over to the Pinto.

“I know you’re her pimp, so get the fuck out,” he said with a slight smirk on over his act.

Bill got out, putting his arms behind his back. This job was full of firsts for him. Even if it was a fake arrest, he couldn’t help feeling like he’d actually done something bad. It was nerve-wracking. The cold metal of the cuffs locked around his wrists and he just felt like the scum of the earth. He had done this to plenty of people in Newark and now he was getting a taste of his own medicine.

PART SIX

Replies!

Beneath the cut

On Posing:

Thanks to @strangetomato​, @retromaisie​, and @katatty-main​ for your responses about the posing ‘jump’ issue. I was using the Freezer clock for some of the sims, but not all of them, so I will make myself be more diligent with that and hopefully that will improve matters. Pretty sure it was idle animations causing the jumps, based on what you were saying as I did have Free Will off and time frozen with the Clock.

@esmeiolanthe​ and @holleyberry​ - I think you guys were talking about a different issue when you are physically moving the sims into place and they jump into the hands of a nearby sim. That wasn’t happening as I had them all on OMSPs. The issue I was having was them jumping out of the pose when already in place, but thanks for the help :)

On my GOS Challenge House:

@barbiepinklady replied to your photo “I did a challenge on GOS =)”

Beautiful House! any chance you put it for download?

Thank you so much! I won’t be putting this one up for download, because there’s a ton of CC in there and a lot of it I got from installing lots, so I’m not even sure where it’s from or what the creator’s terms are and you’d likely end up with a lot of missing Master textures and stuff. Also I’m not sure parts of it are entirely playable *cough* the kitchen *cough* because I used MoveObjects etc to arrange stuff and I haven’t playtested the house at all. I’m fully expecting to have to rearrange everything when I move a sim into it. x.x Feel free to copy/recreate it though. I do that all the time ;)

On Strangetown:

@didilysims replied to your photoset “Diamonds Bowling Alley, Strangetown Layout was inspired by a ts3...”

This looks so great! I'm a terrible bowler but I always enjoy going...and I would love to bowl here!

Thank you, although I feel like most of the credit should go to MsPoodle as I copied so much from her. I enjoyed getting that retro feel of Strangetown in there though =D

katatty-main replied to your photoset “Tri-Fruhm Alum Stella Terrano and Monica Bratford (from henceforth the...”

i use the hack to make npcs & townies apartment neighbours instead!

Yes that is (hopefully) how I'll be setting up my new hood, as I set it up completely clean, it currently has zero sims. I will be creating some townies for the apartment lots when I get onto sim building.

as for the noise thing, i think the trick is to put bedrooms on a side of the building that isnt joined onto a neighobur's wall? if that makes sense

The noise is coming through from the neighbour's living room into the Terranos' kitchen so it's not bedroom-related. I'll have to look into it more. Or not have posh apartments directly next to each other. I think the noise makes sense in lower-rent places, but the Terranos' place is meant to be nice and fairly up-market. xD

@dramallamadingdang replied to your photoset “Tri-Fruhm Alum Stella Terrano and Monica Bratford (from henceforth the...”

I use probably the same hack that Katatty uses for the townie apartment neighbors, and I also completely nuke neighbor noise b/c I got sick of it: http://modthesims.info/download.php?t=577082 But if you don't want to do that, you can hang pictures on every wall. (Invisible recolors are good for this, obviously.) Then the noise emitter can't generate.

I will probably get sick of it after a while so thanks for that link! At the moment it's still new to me so I'm all 'ooooh noise :D'. I think I'll have to play around with various tricks so I can maintain it in some but not all. =)

@littleblondesim replied to your photoset “Again, I failed to take pics. =/ Stella and Monica, both Knowledge...”

Yups about the witches! I just had a sim become a witch the "normal" way for the first time. You just have to make friends with one of the High Witches (either good or bad) and then eventually there will be an option to ask to be shown the way of the path of either darkness or light, depending on which witch you asked.

I'm looking forward to Monica finally getting there. She's wanted to be a witch since she first saw one back in LFT and it'll be nice to have some Good to balance Olive's Evil.

dramallamadingdang replied to your photo “and this week in outtakes: General Buzz! When I switched over to...”

If this was my game, I'd have him keep that hair and wear it with pride. But, y'know, I'm weird that way. :)

Hahahahaha, I fear that he would somehow crawl out of the game and come to exact his revenge on me!

On my new hood:

@eddysims replied to your photo “Another one of the church”

This is adorable ~<3

@eulaliasims replied to your photo “Another one of the church”

Pretty! I like the details on the tower. :D

Thank you both! It took quite a while to get it to a state I was happy with while using little CC. I spent ages trying to use the normal spire roof and failing before realising I could use the mansard roof pieces.

dramallamadingdang replied to your photoset “WIP shots of a residential lot, based on the Kims House/Shop from...”

It's all...sunshiney! Like it'd be impossible to be unhappy in that house :)

Hahah, it is pretty yellow. Also it has really nice surroundings as it’s right next door to the town’s park. Not sure yet who is going to live there, so we’ll see how happy they are ;)

littleblondesim replied to your photoset “WIP shots of a residential lot, based on the Kims House/Shop from...”

This is absolutely charming!

littleblondesim replied to your photoset “This one is based on a real-life house/shop from Kent, CT.”

You are killing it with these houses!

Awh thank you! I really enjoy looking at pictures of real-life places (or tv show scenery) and simmifying them xD and I like the way this hood is developing. It’s nicely different from Strangetown. Hopefully I can stick with it!

On The Getting to know me meme:

eulaliasims replied to your post “Getting to know me meme”

I think Numb might be stuck in my head now too, haha.

Hah, it is nearly always stuck in my head. I catch myself humming or singing it without realising.

dramallamadingdang replied to your post “Getting to know me meme”

Thumbs up for your solo musician choices. Adele I can take or leave, but Aretha, Ella, and Billie are (or were, sadly) all freakin' goddesses. :)

I have a real love affair with Jazz/Easy Listening music which started with my Nana's music collection, matured at Uni when I sang in a Jazz Band and then fully blossomed with the Fallout games which is my other long-term gaming addiction alongside sims.

Prince and Denise - What's This Strange Relationship

New Post has been published on http://princeandvanity.net/prince-and-denise-whats-this-strange-relationship/

Prince and Denise - What's This Strange Relationship

An excerpt from Denise’s book “Blame It On Vanity” was posted by Denise on her Facebook in September 2012. If you ever wondered about Prince’s Strange Relationship song, here’s what Denise had to say in her book.

Metaphorically speaking!

Chapter 21

So shall I be thrown back in time to speak of the adolescent scuffling, of many a juvenile heart, the competitiveness that strikes like the claws of a cat or the tall tale being somewhat of a novice now told with less enthusiasm, having been coughed up by gossiping proficients, professing insane truths, having sucked it out of a bottle? Not being accustomed to strutting with a steel heart, my tears roared out and poured down like rain and I missed terribly a life of which I had not yet beheld. Who and what was I becoming and to whom did I belong? And what of the piercing screams of dialogue gone rotten, and, arguments pushed away like leftovers in a moldy box? It was needful to live through life’s galloping changes grouped to a people that were growing, cutting back our stinkweed; falling down but waiting to be watered and having an unquenchable thirst for stardom. One remembers the pleasures, if one verily agreed with the pleasure. Most assuredly; and do bear with me a little in my past folly however with folly henceforth came my brokenhearted-ness and the dismantling of the titled song, “What’s This Strange Relationship.”

-Denise-

Blame It On Vanity 

Visit the  Blame It On Vanity  official website to order Denise’s Blame It On Vanity book… read more.

    Strange Relationship Lyrics – 1987

“Strange Relationship”

I guess U know me well, I don’t like winter But I seem 2 get a kick out of doing U cold Oh, what the hell, U always surrender What’s this strange relationship that we hold on 2? Baby I just can’t stand 2 see U happy More than that I hate 2 see U sad Honey if U left me I just might do something rash What’s this strange relationship? (ship, ship, ship)I came and took your love, I took your body I took all the self respect U ever had I took U 4 a ride and baby I’m sorry The more U love me sugar, the more it makes me madBaby I just can’t stand 2 see U happy More than that I hate 2 see U sad Honey if U left me I just might do something rash What’s this strange relationship? (ship, ship, ship)Isn’t it a shame this ain’t a movie Then U could rewrite my every line I’ll take all the blame, yo baby I’m sorry But I didn’t like the way U where, so I had 2 make U mineBaby I just can’t stand 2 see U happy More than that I hate 2 see U sad Honey if U left me I just might do something rash What’s this strange relationship? (ship, ship, ship)

Mmmmm, my strange relationship Can’t live with U, can’t live without U That’s all about.. Do U know? (strange relationship) I think U and I got a (strange relationship) What’s this strange relationship? Yeah, yeah [repeated to fade]

These lyrics were obtained from: AZ Lyrics website.

Prince and the Princess

Prince and Denise on Rolling Stone Magazine cover

Prince and Denise/Vanity, being nearly the same age, were both young and free back in the early 80s. They came into each other lives at a time when Prince was close to his prime in super-stardom and Denise was trying to get there. She once said in an interview with Donnie Simpson in 1985 that she never thought she was a good singer. She wasn’t a Diana Ross or an Aretha Franklin, but that she wouldn’t have gotten into the business if she didn’t think there was some talent there. She was quite the talented and creative artist, writer, actor, and most importantly, became a dedicated woman of God. Even though they were, at some point in their lives, not just deeply in love, their love/hate relationship was intense. They were both headstrong individuals who believed to be one another in another life. Denise stated that they were so close it became scary.

Did you know that Denise originally wrote the lyrics for Nasty Girls and that Prince added on to the lyrics? This information I read from the content that her brother-in-law shared that belonged to Denise and was in Denise’s handwriting.

I just couldn’t imagine such a closeness between Prince and Denise, where she even stated that their shadows measured to be the same, as well! They were one another in another life, they were practically attached to each other, she was rumored to have tried on his coat when he first met her and it was a perfect fit, they felt they were each other’s mirror–hence the name he christened her: Vanity, they lived parallel lives throughout the years, had the same creative style… Really, how close can you get?

I’ve read where some have stated that Denise said they (her and Prince) have waken before from having the same dream. I’ve read plenty rumors that I cannot confirm to be accurate–including a rumor that Prince was trying to get back with Denise even into the 90s. That information went from this world when Prince and Denise passed and is only known to God. Some things are better left that way and gone with the wind.

I’ve read many of places about songs that Vanity inspired that Prince had written–including songs such as: Strange Relationship, When Doves Cry, a portion of Purple Rain, Adore, The Beautiful Ones, and many more that were recorded during their time together (Dirty Mind era/Controversy era/1999 era/Purple Rain era) .

Dez Dickerson – My Time With Prince

According to Dez’s book: My Time With Prince (released in 2003), Prince was so involved with Vanity he felt that Prince was putting Vanity before his very own, longtime band. So, it goes like this—Vanity came in and changed Prince in such a way that didn’t sit well with Dez, apparently. It has also been rumored that others took a disliking to Denise or was jealous of Denise because it was like Denise came in among a tight-knit, well-talented band that were like best friends with Prince, and Prince hardly knew Denise, before all of a sudden, she was christened Vanity and it was him and Vanity against the world. Prince had gotten himself a second traveling bus for him and his newfound lover to smooch on–you know, a tad bit more privacy away from prying eyes. He later broke up with the beautiful Susan Moonsie to be with Vanity.

He was so in love with Vanity he had to have been hit by several of cupid’s arrows, the moment he saw Denise in 80/81 American Music Awards. I am not sure of the AMA date, but it was stated on Denise’s obituary that they met in 1980 at the American Music Awards. Denise also stated that Prince was tenaciously pursuing her and calling her agent often to get her to be with him. Our man was trying hard. Can’t knock him for loving the women.

Back to Dez’s book… I cannot say if what Dez felt was justifiable or not, but nonetheless, he clearly seem to have been hurt by it at some point. I believe he’s pass that by now, of course.

Please take note that those words I used regarding Dez’s book were my own way of putting it from Dez’s words. I did not quote his book verbatim. I repeat, those were NOT Dez’s exact words in his book.

As Prince stated during his Denise tribute on his Piano and a Microphone tour–they were deeply in love with one another and as much as they love they fought.

Can’t stand to be with you, can’t stand to be without you.

What a strange relationship it was.

  However deep their love was, Denise wanted to reach her dreams as much as Prince wanted to reach/live his. In her eyes, she had to make the decision to let go of the only person she ever loved, the person she loved deeply, so that she could pursue the dreams she had for Denise, to take the next step towards her reaching her dreams. This, according to Denise, could not have happened had she chose to stay for Purple Rain and Prince.

Mayte Garcia – The Most Beautiful

According to Mayte’s The Most Beautiful book, Prince stated to Mayte that Vanity asked for more money to do Purple Rain (Denise said in an interview that she was offered just 5,000 to do the lead in Purple Rain) and when he didn’t agree with what she wanted, she said she wasn’t doing the movie and quit… broke his heart. Denise stated in an interview that she asked for more money because she needed an excuse to leave Prince. Denise, whom was the original star cast of Purple Rain (Prince and Vanity love-story that Appollonia took on in Purple Rain after Vanity), alongside of Prince, had chosen to leave Prince and Purple Rain to set a path–a path she said she always wanted to take towards becoming who she wanted to be. No purple but plenty of rain must’ve followed. It was pouring hard for dear Vanity. She admitted to wanting to die during her heavy cocaine use days. She was lost, deep with anger from her past, and was never happy–that is, until God came in and intervened on that day she was in the emergency room and nearly lost her life. That day changed Denise forever.

Prince Interview – Jet Magazine1997

“Everyone thought I was going to marry Vanity. She is where I am… connected with her spirit.“

Prince – Jet Magazine

One can only assume what this meant to Prince. To me, however, this means he truly wanted to marry her at some point and others knew so, as well. But, when I think of what it meant to Denise, I believe that she was purely focus on living for Christ. She had shed her Vanity character and, as Prince once stated about himself, she didn’t want to look back nor go back to Vanity. Yes, Denise loved Prince with a deep passion but God was more… so much more. She felt that God is what brought her happiness, that God was the reason for her being able to forgive the ones that wronged and abused her, for being able to live through her near death experience, that resulted from the overuse of cocaine, and that it was by God’s grace that she lived over 23 more years without a kidney inside of her. Denise was dearly devoted to Christ and her Christianity. Rightfully so. Prince later became a Jehovah Witness and was reportedly so until the end, as far I I know.

A few things anyone must consider, when it involved Prince and Denise

Denise might have (might have) chose not to marry Prince because she was focused on her life with Christ. It seems this would explain why Prince and Denise didn’t marry and/or why he stated to Jet Magazine that everyone thought he was going to marry Vanity but she was connected with her spirit. In my eyes, I see Denise deciding against any marriage proposal from Prince (if there was one) because of her religion alone. She stated before that God was her husband. This did not negate the fact that she loved Prince. It is possible she simply loved God more, that she didn’t see a future such as marriage between her and Prince, and chose to remain friends-only with him. She had already married and divorced a professional football player that turned for the worse before the interview Prince did with Jet took place. Denise may have decided marriage wasn’t for her. No one will ever know for certain.

I do not believe it was ever about what Prince wanted when it involved marrying Denise. Many have asked if Denise was the one Prince loved more than the other women, or was the one that held his heart, if they were soulmates, why didn’t he marry her? No one, it seems, thought about if it was Denise who chose not to marry Prince, instead of the other way around. Denise was already deeply devoted to God before Prince chose to live the Christian life. She stated she left her past behind. She said that she was no longer Vanity and she was out of the music industry and film industry for good. Prince was still there. This would have likely interfered with Denise’s plans to leave it all behind for the sake of living purely for Christ. Could you imagine an Evangelist married to a man that was still strutting around with that pop-and-lock and spouting those sultry, te amo, mi amor lyrics about what he can do for a woman? I haven’t necessarily contemplated whether his performance was of any approval towards any Christians–but I do believe, sincerely, that Denise wouldn’t have been ok with that. Prince stated in an interview that his musical talent was a God-given gift that he was not going to stop doing.

Prince and Denise were not entirely with the same beliefs when it involved Christianity. To my understanding, a Jehovah Witness does not believe in hell, whereas in Denise’s religion, she believed in Satan and hell. Denise’s religion believes in the God-given of speaking in tongues, whereas Jehovah Witnesses do not. There are several conflicts between the two religions. And with that, I do not see how a marriage between them would have worked. I doubt either were going to let go of each other’s religion for another. They were both too deeply involved in their religion. Simply put, it wasn’t meant to be–no more than with the women he proposed to and didn’t marry, not even with the two women that he did marry because they divorced. Prince and Denise were brought into each  other’s lives for a reason–be it a reason only God knows.

  Prince and Denise’s love/hate relationship they’ve both admitted to having was indeed a Strange Relationship.

  I have much love for both Prince and Denise and wish them both heaven.

      PrinceAndVanity.net Administrator

Please know that I am not a Prince/Vanity “stan“. I did not create this website because I believe Denise was his one, true love, or that they were soulmates or “mirrored” each other. I do not have an educated knowledge about soulmates nor astronomy-related stuff that I’ve seen people discussing, but I do believed a lot of things they did, for whatever reason, parallel each other. However, this is not why this website exist. I created this website in support for Prince and in support for Denise, not in support of a love interest. Prince already stated to the world what he and Denise were to one another and Denise stated so as well. This website does not exist to convince you of what you (if you are familiar with Prince and Denise) should already know. I’ve no doubt about what I already feel in my heart that I know. What I know is that Prince and Denise loved one another deeply, I do know that Prince and Denise did communicate for a while after their breakup during the Purple Rain era, I do know that Prince and Denise will never be forgotten. I do not favor any one person that was involved with Prince over another. I truly believe Prince had some love for every one he was in a relationship with. I believe that these people that were in his life were all beautiful in their own way inside/out.

  Writing

I studied in college to become a novelist. I later changed my interest from Literature to studying for a degree in Medical Science (Medical Sonography) and later that changed to studying in Graphic Design, Web Development and Photography. Yes, I was indecisive but interested in each subject. I couldn’t pursue all, so I had to give up some, unfortunately. In other words, I have no degree in Literature and is a bit rusty with my editing, so to speak. However, I am a writer and love to write. There are plenty writers out there in this world, but I’ve yet to find a book by an  author written about Prince with a decent amount of content written about Denise. Denise may have been in the spotlight for a brief time, but she was indeed a huge part of Prince during his prime in the Purple Rain era and before he made it to stardom–dating back to the Dirty Mind era. Purple Rain contained some details about Prince’s real life situations that he was involved in with his parents, with his band, with his proteges… with Vanity.

  A Mission

I intend to write about Denise, as much as I can, and what I can about her history from the start (before Prince, during, and after) in as much detail as I can gather and will do so over time (only with any help and input from anyone with valid knowledge and is willing to add their input). In honesty, I cannot do this alone. Yet, I feel like I must write because I do feel that her story deserves justice. There are books out there from authors that are not delivering accurate information about Denise or is either misleading readers or purposely wrote the book in favor of particularly people that were involved in Prince’s life. Alex Hahn and Laura Tiebert is an example of such authors. Nikki Sixx even exaggerated on some information regarding Denise, according to Tommy Lee. There are also many ex-lovers of Prince, who have had a brief fling with him, one being a Mi-Ling Stone Poole , evin+Devasquez&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8″>Devin Devasquez, and God knows who else, adding their portion (some from a second-hand source) into the clan of old-friends-for-sale–getting while the getting is hot. Denise was not this.

You will not find such information in Denise’s book that paints Prince in a bad light such as Mayte Garcia’s book. Denise never went on a forum and spilling everything there is to spill about Prince’s sexual life, how he is in bed, or what size he is, such as what Robin Power has done. I do not have anything against people choosing to tell their story in return for monetary gain–as long as their story being told is the truth, nothing but the truth, and nothing but the whole truth. Could one assume second-hand input to be the whole truth or maybe a half of the truth? If I chose to write about Denise, I do not want nothing but the truth. Being that Denise didn’t give away the gossip that some people wanted her to do, such as a tell-all book that she was offered a heavily sum of money to do, there is room for others to just speculate and throw out whatever rumors that want about her.

Denise’s life should not be remembered as someone that Prince briefly slept with that became a cocaine addict. What comes to your mind if someone speaks about Vanity or Denise? You think of the Rolling Stone Magazine cover that a lot of people are throwing on t-shirts, in art, shoes, cups, and the likes? Some even had the nerve to say she lost it all when she became a Christian. What? Denise’s life did not begin and end with Prince. Denise was already a star before Prince. She had already played characters in movies before she met Prince. She also had a beautiful life of her own, filled with happiness, after she became closer to God. A good start to knowing Denise and the life she had as Vanity is right on the Blame It On Vanity website. Check it out!

My self-motivational interest in writing about Denise is entirely voluntary–filled with upmost inspiration from what I’ve learned thus far about Denise.

  I thank you for taking the time to read this article I posted on the www.princeandvanity.net website.

  One Love

  Images were obtained from: Ebony.com/Pinterest.com/WennerMedia.com (Rolingstone.com Prince/Vanity iconic magazine cover)/Amazon.com

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Idina Menzel World Tour Concert Review - 5.20.17 Atlantic City, NJ

I went to my 3rd Idina concert in AC last night and it was amazing! I wrote a review. It’s not really coherent but it’s as much as I can remember. it’s under the cut because there are some spoilers (for those who don’t want to see any). I didn’t explain every little thing, just the main highlights. I don’t have pics because the lighting was bad, but I do have a short clip of “For Good” that I’ll post. (I already posted part of Let It Go, I’ll post the full one too)

SETLIST:

Queen of Swords

Small World

Seasons of Love

Don't Rain on My Parade (Funny Girl)

Everybody Knows

Cake / Black Dog (Led Zeppelin)

I'm Not That Girl

Perfect Story

Wind Beneath My Wings (Bette Midler)

Defying Gravity

I Do

Bridge Over Troubled Water (Simon & Garfunkel)

Rocksteady (Aretha Franklin)

No Day But Today

Dear Prudence (Beatles) / Do You Want to Build A Snowman?

For Good

Let It Go

Encore:

Every Time We Say Goodbye (Cole Porter)

I See You

--

The crowd was actually pretty tame. A LOT of older adults. The median age was probably 40. I expected to see a lot teens and kids but OH WELL, not complaining. i wish everyone would’ve been a little more LIT though. Idina was trying to get the crowd hyped and they were kinda eh.

SHE CAME OUT ON TIME!! At 8:07. I expected 8:30 so I was glad. When she came out, I lost my shit as always. This is the 7th time I’ve seen her live and 3rd concert and I still die every time. She was wearing the black jumpsuit thing from the Carmel/Japan shows and it looked HOT on her. I LOVED QUEEN OF SWORDS!!! ESPECIALLY THE DRUMMING. My 15 yr. old self died bc I used to think I would be an aspiring drummer one day (still do). This song is sooo good live, omg. And i was def singing along (NOT SORRY).

All of the songs from idina. were REALLY GOOD LIVE. It almost makes me wish it were a live album instead. I think it was the band/sound mixing that made it sound really good. Small world/Everybody Knows were never my favorite songs and based on what I’ve seen her sing from TV appearances they were ehhh but I really enjoyed both songs in person. A LOT.

Idina was casually talking about AC and said “I won 600 bucks at the casino” I was like YEAH, LIKE YOU NEED IT. OOOOKAY.

I was actually really glad to hear Seasons of Love, even though I’ve heard it sung live many times (not by Idina though). Only thing is, I wish it was later in the set? It just seemed like it was out of place. Also, at the beginning of the song, it sounded like echo was from the OBCR recording which was cool. I was surprised she remembered the words to this song, because she always forgot them at the BCEFA fundraiser for If/Then. But she NAILED the high note at the end of the song!!!

During “Don’t Rain on My Parade” before she sang “HEY THERE...HERE I AM” she said, “Where are we from? Jersey or Philly” (EVERYONE WHO COMES TO SOUTH JERSEY FOR A CONCERT ASKS THAT QUESTION) and a bunch of us (including me) screamed “JERSEY” (thank god). Then, someone said Long Island and she said, “YOU CAME TO AC FROM THERE?” AHAHAHA.

Also during DROMP the fringe from her jacket was hanging and she gave it to someone. it was pretty funny.

When introducing the song Cake, she talked about Aaron and “Since you last saw me, I got engaged. After getting divorced you never think that someone could love you again.” It was sweet.

CAKE WAS AMAZINGGGG LIVE. AS IF I DIDNT ALREADY LOVE IT FROM THE ALBUM. I’m so glad she put it in the set. I also loved the projections in the background during the whole concert. She was ROCKIN OUT and was classic rocker Idina! She rocked out so hard, that she said her face was hurting and she shouldn’t wear heavy metal earrings while singing a heavy metal song. After this, she turned to her guitarist and said “You don’t have that problem, fish.” She also said she needed a better bra and touched her boobs. 

I really liked the Wind Beneath My Wings/DG mashup. I’ve heard Defying Gravity live 100 times and I’m sick of it, but the smoke, cape, and background set really added something to it. It made me like the song again. I also loved hearing some Beaches music too! The riffs on BOTH songs were amazing as always! She forgot the words to DG too. OF ALL SONGS.

OKAY, SO I CANT BELIEVE IM SAYING THIS. BUT “I DO” WAS ONE OF THE BEST PARTS OF THIS CONCERT. And this was the song I avoided listening to because of my anxiety. But I had some weird feeling that I’d have a revelation and love the song while hearing it live, and I DID. Toward the end of the song, Idina had this angry breakdown. I can’t explain it. She kept singing “I Do” and spinning around with her arms out while still holding the cape and swinging it around. Like, you could tell she was angry. But in a good way. She was letting it ALL OUT and being vulnerable and it was the greatest thing I’ve ever seen.

I liked the cover of Rocksteady. It was different. I was sick of her old covers so it was nice to hear something new. Her weird dancing during this song was hilarious! ALSO, PROPS TO VANESSA BRYAN. THAT WOMAN IS A SINGER!!! I was afraid of her having backup singers bc they usually overpower her, but they didn’t at all! The whole band was great. I liked it better than the last tour where she had an orchestra. I think it consumes her too much.

Clearly Idina knew that a lot of her audience members were repeat attenders, so she explained how she always likes to sing No Day But Today because it reminds her to live in the moment and she talked a little about Jonathan. I always love this part of her shows because it shows that she still acknowledges her humble beginnings. During the part where she holds the mic to the audience to sing “no day but today” like 2 people sang (I swear I could hear my own voice) so that was lame but after she said “thank you, that sounded really beautiful” and I was like OOOOOKAY THEN.

There was one part in the show (I can’t remember when) where Idina was like “I’m always keepin it real” I’n like HECK YEAHHH (that probably didn’t need to be written down but it was funny) EDIT: It was when she was moving her stool. And she said “I move my own furniture.” Then, she said her manager Burt made a request for the stool to come out from the stage like Beyonce (obviously kidding)

The Dear Prudence/Do You Wanna Build A Snowman mashup was interesting. I wasn’t thrilled about Idina singing another frozen song but it wasn’t a bad mashup and didn’t bother me as much as I expected.

I also thought “Let It Go” would piss me off but only 6 kids came up and it seemed a lot more organized than what I’ve seen at other shows. It was hilarious because Idina said (about the kids’ parents) “THESE ARE THE PARENTS WHO BRING THEIR KIDS TO A CASINO AT NIGHT” and I died. And I think one of the kids had the same bday as her? (Or maybe an audience member?) So she said “Yeah but you’re 30 years younger!” She took a selfie with all of the kids when they were done singing and it was cute. Then said they were all gonna play craps after the show. When the kids were going back to their parents, she was SO SALTY. I LOVED IT. She said to the parents, PUT THE PHONES DOWN AND TAKE YOUR KIDS.” HAHAH. EDIT: the boy (who was about 15) actually said to HER that he’s 30 years younger and she mimicked him.

Random side note: when I was on line for the bathroom after the concert, two of the kids who sang with her were walking the other way and they seemed so excited that they got to go up on stage. So even if I get pissed about Frozen and Idina giving all of the attention to the kids, hearing them say that was priceless.

The “I See You” fan videos were a nice addition and not what I was expecting at all. It was a great way to end the concert and I’m glad there was some fan input in there. I really liked when she talked about the African saying, how one person says “I see you” and the other person says, “I see you, I’m here.” That was beautiful.

There was a lot I probably forgot or didn’t talk about, but it was a great concert. Much more fast-paced and streamlined than last time. (The run time was about 2 hours by the way, maybe even less. It ended a little before 10). There wasn’t a lot of chatter in between songs which kind of sucked, but it reminded me a lot more of the intimate concerts from back in the day. Idina seemed so happy to be there and free, and she really seems like she’s in a good place now. And I liked that a lot. I think it’s illegal to like a performer this much and I can’t wait to see her live again!

Klaine Valentines Challenge - “Tell Me Your Secrets, And Ask Me Your Questions” (Rated NC17)

It's Monday morning, and Kurt is still reeling from his phenomenal weekend with Blaine. But it's time to get back to life as normal. Except, after today, life will be anything but normal ... (3149 words)

Warning - this chapter is where it gets angsty. Please don't hate me. I promise, everything turns out okay in the end :) I don't want to give anything away, but there is a mention of violence and blood, so if you guys are squeamish, just stop reading when Kurt touches his shoulder.

Written for the Klaine Valentines Challenge Prompt Day Thirteen "Yellow" by Coldplay.

Chapter 4 of the story “Come up to Meet You”

Chapter 1 - Come up to Meet You

Chapter 2 - Nobody Said It Was Easy

Chapter 3 - You Don’t Know How Lovely You Are

Read on AO3.

Kurt tugs on his windbreaker, sluggishly marching down the stairs from his cozy, comfortable loft to the harsh, grey outdoors. He grumbles and moans theatrically along the way, which makes his downstairs neighbor, returning from her own morning jog, chuckle.

“Getting started a little late this morning, aren’t we, Mr. Hummel?” she teases.

“Don’t start with me, Mrs. Hildabreg. We can’t all be sprightly, energetic 63-year-olds, you know.”

“83 last May, dear.”

“So you keep telling me, but I don’t believe it. You still training for the Ironman Triathlon?”

“You know it.”

Kurt reluctantly leaves Mrs. Hildabreg behind, even though the scent of fresh baked cinnamon buns floods the hall the moment she opens her door, their sinful aroma luring him back. Kurt knows that if he’s willing to spill a little tea about the goings on at Vogue, she’d be more than happy to offer him one. He’s dodged many a morning jog that way before. If it wasn’t for his afternoon Spin class and his evening yoga, he’d be done for. But besides her genius baking skills, he enjoys their talks. Mrs. Hildabreg adopted him as her bestie after his left for L.A.. Lonely people can sense loneliness in others, it seems, so they tend to cling together like the last few Cheerios in the bowl.

But Kurt has to be strong this once. He doesn’t want to go on a morning jog, but he needs to get back in the swing. He indulged too much this weekend. Not on sweets. On Blaine. Kurt spent too much time in bed with Blaine sleeping late and too little time on his calisthenics.

That’s okay. He figures the amount of cardio he got having sex makes up for it.

Kurt sticks his earbuds in his ears and fiddles with his iPod to keep his mind off the impending cold. He feels it creeping into the hallway underneath the front door the closer he gets. It’s almost foreboding the way it sneaks up on him. He skips through the menu to his “Diva Playlist”, needing his carefully constructed mixture of Beyoncé, Aretha, and Whitney to get his heart pumping. Icy air hits him like a wall the second he steps out the door of his building and onto the sidewalk, but at the same time, he feels his phone buzz in his pocket. He pulls it out, already knowing who it’s going to be.

And that makes his chest feel instantly warm.

From: Blaine

So, when do I get to see you again?

Kurt reads this ridiculous message, sent by his adorably ridiculous boyfriend, and smiles.

From: Kurt

You just saw me this weekend. A lot of me, I might add. Aren’t you tired of me yet?

Kurt steps out of the doorway as he waits for a reply. He could swear someone had wanted to get by. He feels eyes on him, but no one walks past.

From: Blaine

Not at all. Need to see you. All the time. I miss you when you’re not around.

Kurt giggles. He’s about to send back a message about this obsession of Blaine’s being unhealthy, but he changes gears. He doesn’t want Blaine to think for one second that he equates Blaine’s cute comments with the aggravating messages Blaine still gets from his catfisher.

From: Kurt

Well, that makes two of us, which is why I’m having dinner with you tonight.

Kurt doesn’t think Blaine waits half a minute between getting his message, reading it, and sending a reply.

From: Blaine

Not soon enough.

Kurt can’t judge Blaine on the speed in which he replies since Kurt is already typing a response, having anticipated Blaine’s answer.

From: Kurt

What if I tell you that you get to have me for dessert?

There’s an actual pause between messages. Kurt can imagine the look on Blaine’s face when that message comes through.

From: Blaine

I can wait.

Kurt laughs out loud, that warmth in his chest spreading out to his limbs. If he had to sum up how he feels in one word, it would be yellow. Yes, with all of the romantic, evocative words in the English language, he picks one as juvenile yellow. Other words might fight to take its place and come close, but yellow fits so perfectly. Yellow makes Kurt think of spring and the sun, and he feels like the sun is shining just for him. The stars, too. And even though he’s exhausted right now, he feels beautiful, happy and energetic, like he can run and jump and swim for miles. He feels desired and safe and loved. Blaine brought that into his life.

Blaine makes him feel this way.

“Kurt? Kurt Hummel?”

Kurt pulls an earbud from his ear when he hears his name, a bizarre sense of déjà vu looming over him. He looks up, searching for a face to match the voice. There’s quite a few people out and about at this hour of the morning. It’s Monday, and most everyone in New York is on their way to work. But Kurt’s eyes are immediately drawn to the only other person standing around. He’s propped against a lamp post, smoking a cigarette, flicking the end with his thumb like a nervous tick though he seems far from nervous. He’s about Blaine’s height, with wavy brown hair, and deep set cognac eyes.

They would be beautiful eyes, Kurt thinks, if they weren’t glaring at him like this man wants to take Kurt’s head off.

“Kurt Hummel?” the man repeats again, tossing the cigarette butt to the floor, not bothering to crush it.

Kurt looks him over from head to toe. He doesn’t know how long the man has been standing there, but Kurt gets the impression from the mess of discarded butts littering the ground at his feet that he’s been there a while 

Kurt hopes he’s not another victim of the catfisher. Kurt only has one heart, and he’s already given it away.

But Kurt thinks not. The way the man stares, Kurt doesn’t want to give him an answer.

“That’s me,” Kurt says anyway since it’s obvious this man already knows. Why would he wait out here in the cold otherwise? “And you are …?

“Eli.” He leaves it at that. No last name. No other identifying information. Just Eli.

Kurt doesn’t remember ever meeting an Eli.

“Do I know you?” Kurt asks.

“No,” Eli says. Annoyed, he pushes off the lamp post. “But you know my boyfriend.”

“Your boyfriend?” Kurt scrunches his nose, confused, but realization dawns fast. “You’re … you’re him, aren’t you? The person who’s been catfishing Blaine.”

“I haven’t been catfishing him,” Eli sneers. “I’ve been trying to contact him, but he won’t talk to me anymore. He won’t talk to me because of you. You took him away from me.”

“I didn’t take him away from you. He was never yours to begin with.”

It hits Kurt after snapping that he should watch his tone. He doesn’t want to provoke this man. Kurt doesn’t know whether or not he’s dangerous. Everything about Eli unnerves Kurt - his constant running a hand through his hair, his eyes darting left and right as people walk by, shifting on his feet as if he’s preparing to barrel forward but only barely stopping himself.

But it’s the way he slides his hand to the back of his waist band - like he’s reaching for something beneath his jacket - that has the hairs at the nape of Kurt’s neck bristling.

Kurt wants to look this man in the eyes, wants to show Eli that he won’t be bullied, but his eyes drift to that hand every time it moves.

“That’s not true,” Eli argues. “We’ve been together … in real life. We’ve met. We’ve even been intimate.”

“I have a hard time believing that,” Kurt says with a scornful laugh, but the minute the words leave his mouth, he knows they’re true. That’s how the catfisher got Blaine’s number. It wasn’t some random person lifting it off of his notice on the bulletin boards.

Blaine actually knows him.

“We were both lonely,” Eli explains, “both in pain. We understand each other. I need him and he needs me, so you need to back off.”

“Excuse me? I need to what now?” Kurt blurts out, anger continuing on where common sense might have stepped down. He can’t help himself. On the one hand, Kurt knows he’s putting himself in harm’s way if this man intends on attacking him. On the other hand, how dare Eli? How dare he show up at Kurt’s home, of all places, and try to drive a wedge in his new, wonderful relationship? “If the two of you need each other so badly, understand each other, then why have you been lying to him? And using my face to do it? Which, by the way, makes you one of my least favorite people in the world.”

“That’s just a … it’s a big misunderstanding. A joke that went too far,” Eli demands, taking that step forward that Kurt has been dreading. Kurt’s outside his building with his back against the wall. The two of them might be physically matched, but this definitely puts Kurt at a disadvantage. One too many run-ins with high school bullies taught him to never let anyone back him up against a wall. “I had him first!”

“Are you calling dibs? What are you? Twelve?” Kurt feels this argument escalating but he can’t stop it. He doesn’t want to. He wants this man to make a move so that he and Blaine will have something to show the police. Maybe a black eye and a broken nose along with a handful of witnesses will finally get them off their asses to do something about Eli.

Eli takes another step forward, hands balled into fists, and Kurt braces himself. This is it. Eli’s going to punch him. Kurt sees a few people cross the street in his direction, eyes popping open as they take notice. Excellent. Kurt just has to make sure that his head doesn’t hit the wall behind him and knock him out. But mid-lunge, Eli stops. His hands relax. He stands upright, takes a casual step back, and crosses his arms over his chest. Kurt sees the man’s train of thought switch tracks, his expression go from livid to haughty in a blink. The transformation is expert … and terrifying. “Come on, Kurt,” he says, and even his voice sounds changed. “You work at Vogue, surrounded by handsome models. You can probably have a different guy every night if you wanted. You don’t really want my sloppy seconds, do you?”

“So, you’re slut shaming Blaine now? Is that it? That’s how much you need him? He’s a grown man! What he did before he met me doesn’t concern me … except maybe making sure he doesn’t have anything contagious.” Kurt tosses that remark in to re-stoke Eli’s ire. If he can only get Eli to take a swing at him … “Besides, I have him now.” Kurt doesn’t know what gets into him. This plan is crazy! He should stop now and call the police. But he’s so wrapped up in his venom for this man that he just wants to bury his needles into him. “I’ve been having him all weekend long.”

Kurt licks his lips and gives Eli a wink.

Eli’s eyes go from calculating slits to furious saucers. “You’re lying!”

“You saw the picture. You tell me.”

“Blaine wouldn’t go for someone as trashy and vulgar as you!”

“Is that why you picked my picture? Huh? From the millions of people in New York that you could pretend to be, you picked me because I’m trashy and vulgar? You don’t get to have it both ways, Eli. You don’t get to use my face and then insult me. And guess what? If I am trashy and vulgar, then Blaine likes trashy and vulgar because he’s going out with me. Me! Not you. Me.” Eli opens his mouth to interject. Kurt doesn’t give him the chance. “Blaine Anderson is an amazing, incredible man. I don’t know why the two of you aren’t together, and I don’t care, but you might know that for yourself if you were honest with him. But you can’t even be honest with yourself. Lesson learned. You’ll know for next time, but not with Blaine. Because I’m not giving him up for anything in the world.”

“Fine.” Eli’s face becomes hard, his mouth a grim line. “You want him so badly, you can have him.”

“Like I need your permission. I’m out of here. And like I said before, kindly fuck off.” Kurt rolls his eyes and storms off. He knows he shouldn’t. A voice in his head is screaming at him - Don’t turn your back on him! Don’t leave without calling the police! He knows where you live! He’ll be back! He'll break in! But his plan isn’t working. There’s too much adrenaline pumping through Kurt’s body right now, and he needs to get away.

He needs to put some distance between them before he does something rash.

He has a life to live, and he can’t derail it for this one disturbed man.

“Great. Fine. You guys win. Are you happy now?” Kurt hears the words closing in behind him, a persistent mumble in Eli’s grating voice. “You got an amazing, incredible man, and Blaine got the man of his dreams ... that doesn’t mean he gets to keep you.”

Kurt, phone still in hand, finally starts calling the police. That’s what he should have done from the beginning. He knows he’ll hear about that later – from the cops, from his dad, from Blaine. He’ll hear about it when this is all a distant memory. He’ll recount the story of coming out of his building to see Eli standing there, eyes set to kill, and he and Blaine will have a laugh about crazy exes. Blaine will tell him everything, tell him how he had to leave Eli because Eli is sick, he’s toxic. And if Blaine hadn’t been 100% certain of his decision to leave the man before, the catfishing and the stalking proved it. And thank God he got out of there before anything serious happened.

“9-1-1. What’s your emergency?”

“Yeah, hi, my name is Kurt Hummel. I live in Bushwick, and I’m being chased down the street by my boyfriend’s ex …”

Kurt listens for the operator, but something drowns her out - a loud noise, like a jogger running into a metal trash can, then a scream. Probably the person who hit the trash can, Kurt thinks. Something hits his right shoulder, hard enough to knock him forward a step. Rocks. The asshole’s throwing rocks. What does he think that’s going to accomplish? It's definitely getting people’s attention because Kurt hears random yells of, “What the …?”, “Look out!”, “Oh my God! Stop him!” and “He’s bleeding!”

He’s bleeding? Kurt stutters another step. He feels warm and wet run down his arm, an ache in his shoulder he was about to write off to the cold morning and his stiff, sex-strained joints. He puts his left hand up to his right shoulder to investigate. His shoulder screams the second he touches it. Kurt drops his phone. He’d tried to wrap his fingers around it, but they wouldn’t work, and he just can’t seem to hold it anymore.

He pulls his left hand away and sees it. He knew it was there – his mind did, but his eyes hadn’t seen it yet. Blood. And the second his eyes see it, his brain confirms it, and a crippling pain spirals down his arm and through his chest. He tries to take another step, but he can’t, not even stuttered ones. Instead, his knees give out and he falls, the world spinning by on only half speed as he plummets to the ground. He hears more screams. One of them may be his own. He’s not sure. But there are plenty of them to go around so one of them must be. He hears running footsteps, and something that might be another trash can knock over, only it’s not a trash can. Kurt knows it’s not. He knows it never was.

“Out of the way! Out of the way! I’m a doctor,” he hears, or does he hear it? Is it his mind replaying the last movie he saw where someone got hurt and a doctor ran out of the crowd to help? Do doctors do that in real life, or is that just a Hollywood thing?

“Did anyone see what happened?”

A coat is draped over his legs, but he only feels the pressure. Not the warmth. His legs have gone numb. His mind is going numb. His shoulder burns like someone has stuck a poker inside it and is tearing it apart. The rest of him feels nauseous, more and more dizzy and sick with every heartbeat pushing a new river of blood down his arm.

Will his heart push it all out? How much does he have left?

“Some guy just walked up behind him and shot him!”

“No, no, they were fighting, and then he shot him!”

“You! In the blue hat! Call 9-1-1!”

“I already called them!”

“Good. That’s good. Sir? Sir, can you hear me? What’s your name? Do you know who shot you? No, no, no, keep your eyes open. Look at me. Blink if you can hear me. Sir? Sir? Does anyone know who this man is?”

“I do!” an older woman’s voice cuts in, the scent of cinnamon buns and memories of long conversations following behind her. “Kurt! Kurt, what happened!? Kurt, talk to me, honey! Kurt! Kur …”

Kurt wants to say something, but the numbness in his head has traveled to his tongue, leaving his mouth dry and his lips heavy. If he could say something, he’d just scream. The intense pain in his shoulder seems to insist on it. But he can’t scream, because he can’t breathe. And if he could breathe, he’d just throw up, bile working its way up from his stomach as air fights to weave a pathway into his lungs. Shock sets in, and whatever his body’s doing, his mind doesn’t know. That connection has been severed, removing it too far from his conscious to concern him.

Kurt thinks that the world should go black, but it doesn’t. Instead, everything becomes too bright. Loud and bright. The sun, the sidewalk, the people, the sky. He blinks to bring the world back into focus, but it refuses. It wants to remain fuzzy, and Kurt can’t seem to convince it otherwise.

He closes his eyes to shut out the bright, expecting nice, soothing dark, but all he sees is yellow.

Memphis DJ Ashley Wimbush aka DJ Alpha Whiskey takes her talents to the lobby at Central Station this Friday night April 24 for an all-ladies soul music dance party—streaming live into your living room at 8:30 p.m. This is the second of four parties in the Memphis Music Hub DJ Series, which you can read more about here. See last week’s DJ Spanish Fly set in 360° Smell-O-Vision Magic here. This Friday night, I’ll share DJ Alpha Whiskey’s tunes via I Love Memphis accounts Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.  Photo by Gabrielle Duffie. All-Ladies Memphis Soul Dance Party This Friday Night Holly: I really want to know your story! But first, real quick—What can Memphis music fans from around the world expect during your set on Friday? Ashley: I’m going to spin classics from amazing women like Aretha Franklin, Carla Thomas, Anita Ward…women who paved the way for a lot of us female artists. I want listeners to feel the music as if they are at a real concert or show. I have records that will make you sing and dance nonstop! Holly: What can you tell us about the all-women soul theme? What does that mean to you? Ashley: I am happy that Memphis honors and recognizes female artists. These beautiful women inspire(ed) a lot of female artists to sing and pursue musical careers. Their voices were powerful and you felt every word they sang! I am very honored to be able to spin their records on Friday night and let world hear the Women of Soul!   View this post on Instagram   A post shared by Stax Museum (@staxmuseum) on Apr 1, 2020 at 9:27am PDT Why “Alpha Whiskey”? Holly: I know you’ve answered this question many times, but: where does your name come from? Ashley: My name is Ashley Wimbush and I am an Air Traffic Controller. We use the phonetic alphabet to communicate with one another and my initials are Alpha Whiskey. Alpha Whiskey also describes me as a person. I’m an Alpha female, who believes in empowering women to have confidence and faith. Whiskey gives you life if you drink responsibly and that’s what I do as a DJ. I bring energy and life to people through music. Music is a release. A Little Background Holly: Where are you from? How long have you lived in Memphis/how did you get here? Ashley: I was born and raised in Virginia. I’ve been here six years. Holly: How did you get started as DJ? Ashley: I’ve always wanted to be a DJ because I love music and dancing. In 2017 my boyfriend who is a Business and Marketing Consultant asked me if I wasn’t an ATCer what would I be doing and I told him DJing. He talked to me about the importance of having multiple streams of income and from there we started having long conversations about how I could start as a DJ. I purchased a DJ board and started practicing and getting feedback from friends. He saw how passionate I was and he connected me DJ KJ (@djkj1973) and  DJ Crystal Mercedes (@therunwaydj) here in Memphis and from there they gave me great tips and got me my 1st gig! After my first gig I started getting more opportunities, building my brand, and perfecting my craft.  Photo by Gabrielle Duffie. “Memphis has truly taught me what hustle, grit, and grind is.” Holly: How has Memphis music inspired your artistic career? Ashley: Memphis inspired my artistic career at a very young age. I grew up listening to Otis Redding, Johnnie Taylor, BB King,  Little Milton and Three 6 Mafia. I used to dance and embarrass my aunt whenever she played blues music in the car. I loved pretending to play the guitar (laughs). I would tell her I was going to be a guitar player one day. Learning how to play the guitar is still on my list of things to learn. Holly: How has Memphis as a city inspired your artistic career? Ashley: Memphis is such a great city. Sometimes, I almost forget that I wasn’t born here. There are so many talented artists in this city, and I am just happy that I am able to experience first hand. When I first got here I saw DJ Spaceage spinning at a bar near U of M and she had some great music playing. Then I heard Big Sue on the radio while driving and I loved her voice and mixes. I saw there were twin female DJs (DJ Tootz) doing great things and I had never seen that before, so when I met DJ Crystal Mercedes I knew there was already a great female DJ presence in Memphis I could reach out to for needed advice. Memphis has truly taught me what hustle, grit, and grind is, and I am so thankful.   View this post on Instagram   A post shared by Central Station Hotel (@centralstationmemphis) on Jan 19, 2020 at 1:21pm PST Ashley’s Inspirations Holly: Favorite Memphis music artists (or overall genre) and why? Ashley: Three 6 Mafia (their energy and beats appealed to me at a very young age)  Aretha Franklin (greatest soul singer) , The Bar-Kay’s (one of my favorite bands, they have great music my favorite is “Holy Ghost”) . I love 90s hip hop. I was born in 88 and I loved the beats, lyrics, and vibes during that time. Holly: You have three jobs [air traffic controller, DJ, model]. How do you manage it? Ashley: 2019 was my first year of consistent DJing, ATC, and modeling. I am off on weekends from my ATC job so I am able to DJ during that time. However I’m working on a more structured routine that allows me to be more productive. Holly: During non-pandemic times, how can Memphians experience DJ Alpha Whiskey? Ashley: I DJ every Saturday at Sage Memphis (noon – 4 p.m.) for brunch. Every other Sunday at The WKND for After Brunch (5 p.m. – 9 p.m.). I rotate Saturday nights with two other local DJs at Tailors Union (9 p.m. – 1 a.m.) for Old School Saturdays. I also DJ Private events such as birthdays and corporate events, etc. DJing In A Pandemic Holly: How have you been coping personally and professional during the pandemic? Ashley: I have been working on improving my brand and quality of life. This time has allowed me to focus on organizing, disciplining myself, and innovating. Professionally, I partnered with Phillip Ashley Chocolates to host Themed Live Tasting events every Friday via Zoom. Also, The She DJs wanted to make sure we still could provide relief to the world during these tough times. So we started Ladies Love Day Parties Live Edition via our SheDJs Memphis Facebook Page and SheDJs901 IG Page. Every Saturday we have a line up of female DJs spinning every hour. Until this pandemic hit I never went Live because I wasn’t comfortable but now I’m more comfortable and I hope to go live more in the future. Photo by Gabrielle Duffie Ashley’s Recommendations Holly: Go-to food and drink orders after a DJ set? Ashley: Central Station makes a special cocktail for me . I told the bartender I love St. Germaine liquor and they took care of the rest. It was delicious! I ordered three. Everything at Sage is delicious. My favorite is the soul waffle. The bartenders are amazing there as well. I’m always looking forward to their brunch on Saturday. When I finish DJing at the Wknd on Sundays I grab myself and my boyfriend a Yardbird flatbread and the honey hot shrimp or chicken wings. Once we get home, it’s on! Holly: How can people keep up with your projects? Ashley: I have a website www.djalphawhiskey.com where I post free mixes and sell Alpha Whiskey products and events. You can also follow my Facebook Page and Instagram Page @DJ Alpha Whiskey . Just For Fun: Meet Ashley 1. What’s always in your bag? Business cards 2. Guilty pleasure? I love to cook too so I’m always at the grocery store ( almost every day) 3. Go to outfit? Leggings/comfy graphic tee/ comfy sneakers (Nike or Puma) 4. How do you drink your coffee? I stopped drinking coffee beginning of January for health reasons but I loved French Truck Coffee with French vanilla cream and sugar. 5. Favorite song(s) right now? Tom Misch and Yussef Dayes ft. Freddie Gibbs “Nightrider” Photo by @circleoflifephotos Follow DJ Alpha Whiskey / Listen Live Memphis Music Hub DJ Series Feat. DJ Alpha Whiskey Friday, April 24 at 8:30 p.m. Live on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Rebroadcast in 360 on Wednesday, April 29. Follow Ashley: website: www.djalphawhiskey.com Facebook Page Instagram Page Are you a home owner in Memphis, with a broken garage door? Call ASAP garage door today at 901-461-0385 or checkout https://ift.tt/1B5z3Pc

https://ilovememphisblog.com/2020/04/memphian-to-meet-ashley-wimbush-aka-dj-alpha-whiskey/

30 Minute Experiment: Memory #30ME

Okay, let’s do this.  I’m sorry to keep mentioning #TimsTwitterListeningParties (okay, only my second mention, granted), but they’ve become an almost essential daily routine to help me get through this pandemic, as I spend two hours each evening listening to some great albums from the ‘80s and ‘90s (and some newer ones). Some I’ve heard and/or love but others are from bands I’ve either heard of or have known about but never really got into for one reason or another. But this isn’t a 30 Experiment about music... (sorry, Ted!) :)

No, this is going to be 30 minutes of me writing about memory and memories, and I’m not talking about the song from Cats, which was actually my favorite moment of that much-maligned movie from last year. (I’m still convinced JHud will win her second Oscar playing Aretha later this year.)

Although I’m not going to just start writing about music, as much as I love chatting about it, this is more about memory, and how listening to records that I never have listened to in full or heard before have been jogging up memories that have lain dormant for a long time.

I am someone who is forever fascinated by the human brain and how it works, something you’d know if you read my ramble about dreams around this same time last week. But even more interesting to me is how the brain’s memory banks works because it’s something that just doesn’t seem to have been explored to the extent in which I’m interested. The reason why memory has interested me so much was because of a movie I saw at the Oxford Film Festival four years ago. It was called Embers, directed by Claire Carée ,and while it was available to watch on Netflix for two years, it’s now only available to rent or buy on Amazon. 

The movie is about a virus that hits the globe that basically erases everyone’s memory from the day before, so you can go to sleep next to your wife or husband, you wake up and you have no idea who they are. It’s an interesting premise that Carée explores through a variety of individuals and situations, and it’s definitely world-building sci-fi but not in the way that requires tons of CGI. It’s a small and tender movie with great performances.

As I said, I first saw it at the Oxford Film Festival, and it was really interesting to hear Carée talk about how she researched the movie and the human brain and learned about conditions that affect the brain in a similar way as the virus. (Think of someone like the Guy Pearce character in Christopher Nolan’s Memento, an absolutely fantastic movie that I really should rewatch soon.)  Anyway, I listened Carée talk about the brain and memory at Oxford and then again when the movie played at the Brooklyn Film Festival, and what she said about memory has been something that’s been on my brain (so to speak) ever since.

It’s really interesting how memory works in terms of what we remember, how we remember things and when. We can think about some things that happened to us and even stew about them for years, but then there are other things, even some happy moments, that might pop into our head randomly. I’m not just talking about dreams, which seem to have their own way of messing with our minds, but just when you’re doing or watching something and you suddenly remember someone or something from your past that you hadn’t thought about in many years.

I’ll freely admit that I do not have a good memory even when it comes to things I’m supposed to do on any given day, and it’s why I’ve created so may methods of reminding myself to do things like these daily writing experiments. There’s a known cliché that the older you get, the harder it is for your brain to remember things, that memory is the first thing to go, etc, but I’m not sure that’s really the case. I remember listening to my father at length about his memories of his life going all the way back to his first 17 years living in Germany before Kristallnacht. He was probably in his 70s by then, yet his memory of events was so distinct and descriptive that it made you feel like you were actually there. There are many elderly people in their 70s and 80s and even 90s who can produce memories and share them when asked, so clearly the memory isn’t the first thing to go. If anything those memories are what the brains of older people are holding onto, and while I’m not quite THAT old yet, I do find that I’m remembering things from my past, particularly high school and my early days of NYC that I had pretty much forgotten about.  (To be fair, I did imbibe in quite a few recreational drugs post-high school, which I’m sure didn’t help.)

I want to go back to the listening parties I mentioned at the beginning of today’s writing experiment because it was really interesting to me how albums I had never heard before were bringing back so many memories. One of the album’s was Pulp’s Different Class from 1995 and the other was Suede’s Dog Man Star from 1994. Mind you, when I first moved to NYC in 1987, I was an enormous Anglophile, and I was spending most of my money on import records from England, buying the weekly trades like NME, Melody Maker and Sounds, keeping track of every new and hot band for many years. At one point I was even buying double copies of the magazines since I started collecting clippings of these bands... interviews, concert reviews, etc... and I still have a lot of these sitting in my storage space in the Bronx.

What was weird is that I never got into Suede or Pulp even though they were two of the hottest and biggest bands in England in those years, and I was trying to figure out why that might be. I realized and remembered then that in 1994 or 1995, I was busy working in the studio most of the time and then not making that much money otherwise, and I probably stopped buying so many import records and also stopped buying those magazines and doing the clippings that I was doing so much in the early ‘90s. Maybe it was because I was getting used to having less space but I think I also started collecting comic books around that time and that also took up time and space.  

I’m not sure why but it suddenly dawned on me why I started getting less into new music around that time, and I also realized that I probably started getting back into music around 1999 or 2000 when I was playing in a band and touring and probably got my first iPod on which I started to load my vast CD collection.

It’s just interesting to me to try to remember why at one point in my life, I just wasn’t listening to as much music as I’m suddenly listening to now, and again, that’s part of the wonder that is the human brain that it decides what you have access to at any given time. If you asked me right now to tell you some stories from high school, I couldn’t even BEGIN to tell you about it, and yet, I remember certain things if I REALLY put my entire brain into finding those memories. 

The fact that the human brain can do all the things required of our bodies and jobs and still store all those memories somewhere is endlessly fascinating to me but especially that listening to those two albums I mentioned suddenly made me think of a period in time that is now 25 years ago that I really don’t think about that much anymore. It’s also interesting to note (for those who read my recap/reboot piece yesterday) that this was also the period where I was working in the studio and making music, essentially my goal and dream and reason for moving to NYC in the first place. Again, I’m not quite sure I have the skill set or talent to go back into music-making, but it seems to all tie together.

Most of us seem to have a lot more free time now to think about things ... if my daily rambling doesn’t make it obvious ... but it’s strange and funny how few of us spend any time on a normal daily basis thinking about our past and memories we cherish when there’s so much in the here and now we have to think about. There’s so much about our own future and the future of those around us and of the planet that constantly takes up our brain power, which is necessary since so many of us are just struggling to survive and get through this that we can only think about what the future might bring.

Maybe the secret to all of this is in our own past, remembering what we did right, what we did wrong, what worked, what didn’t, when we were happy, when we weren’t -- I seem to remember in 1994 or 1995 having a mini-breakdown leading up to my 30th birthday, for instance, which may be another reason why I was too distracted to get into Pulp or Suede at the time --  and really trying to learn from our own past to insure that our future can be better and happier. 

I don’t now. As I said a few days ago, I’m not a scientist, but I’m also not a psychiatrist or a trained therapist. I just know how I’ve been getting through this awful time myself and sharing my daily thoughts on the subject in hopes that it might offer some self-enlightenment.

And with that... my time is up.

10 tips for being a successful choreographer

She rose to distinction during the 1970s subsequent to establishing the move bunch.

She proceeded to arrange various West End and Broadway musicals, movies and network shows and has been a judge on both Come in Dance choreographer in Mumbai Dancing thus You Think You Can Dance.

Here are her best 10 hints for being a choreographer.

1. Be resolved and arranged to make penances

It is completely essential to be resolved from the beginning. You need to realize that you need to move as much as you need to inhale in the event that you need to make a profession of it.

You need to really realize that and you must be set up to quit any pretense of everything to make that vocation occur. It truly is extreme and there is such a lot of rivalry. You will confront dismissal constantly and you need to make yourself sufficiently able to manage that and continue onward.

2. Start youthful

I experienced childhood in Mumbai and I began moving when I was just two years of age. When I was eight, moving was everything I could consider and it was all I needed to do. My folks couldn't manage the cost of all the wedding choreographer in Mumbai exercises that I needed and it was difficult.

You could generally, hear expressive dance music in our home being played on scratchy records on an old gramophone.

My mom kicked the bucket when I was 15 and it was her adoration for move and artful dance that motivated me and here and there lives inside me. She was so glad, however I don't think she at any point imagined that my moving would incorporate with the profession that I have had.

3. Hold your head up and don't be hesitant to appear as something else

We lived in Didsbury and I'll generally recall going to purchase my first pair of artful dance shoes with my mom. I can recollect retires and retires of wonderful pink expressive dance shoes, yet we just couldn't manage the cost of them.

And afterward on the base rack, there was a couple of splendid green expressive Sangeet choreographer in Mumbai. They were modest and they fitted me so I needed to get them! That approved of me, however I certainly needed pink ones.

At the point when I strolled into my absolute top of the line, it was loaded up with young ladies all in pink. The entire room gazed at me in my green shoes, however I simply held my head up and strolled in. I kind of figured that in the event that I could do that, at that point I really wanted to move and nothing was going to stop me.

4. Try not to take no for an answer

At the point when I was 16 I kept in touch with the chamber, to check whether I could get an award to contemplate move.

Moving isn't simply steps, it's utilizing the body to recount to a story with the development

They just offered awards to young ladies who were heading off to the Rhythm next and I needed to know why they wouldn't give an award to somebody who needed to examine in their old neighborhood.

I contended energetically and with the assistance of my auntie, I inevitably got my direction. Following four years of contemplating, I began to instruct Dance choreographer in Maharashtra. At the point when I was 23 my supervisor sent me to Mumbai for seven days to invest energy at another party school.

On my last day, I saw a sign for a class upon the divider that I'd never observed, it said 'Present-day American Jazz, Molly Molloy, 8pm'. That class made a huge difference and was the day my new life in Mumbai started.

5. Try not to surrender

At the point when movement ahead TV it appeared that each artist had a fixed grin stuck on to their face. I was making my living by encouraging Sangeet choreographer in Maharashtra, and I chose to shape my own move bunch that would have the voice of the road, and the voice of the clubs, hot, grumpy, and hot, hot, hot.

I took the best understudies from my group, transformed them into what I thought was the most blazing gathering in London, and for a long time, in spite of having a clique following, couldn't break into TV, everybody thought they were dreadfully attractive. It took one photo falling under the control of one chief searching for something new, and everything changed medium-term.

6. Gain from your errors

In the event that I could return in time and offer my more youthful self some guidance, it is be somewhat gentler and kinder. I was so aspiring for a large number of the understudies I worked with thus decided for them to succeed; that I requested everybody worked and propelled themselves similarly I propelled myself.

Thinking back I understand, it worked for some of them yet not others, however, I think my frame of mind in the manner I manage individuals has changed subsequent to having my youngsters, and now I search to discover another approach to find how to draw out the best in people around me.

7. Understand what's genuinely significant

I consume my time on earth tuning in to music, and I've been extremely fortunate in working with such a large number of various stars from when music recordings initially started

The manner in which that I found I was not proceeding on Strictly was not the manner in which I might want to have discovered, notwithstanding, I had undeniably progressively significant things to manage as my director was extremely sick and spent away the day preceding the news broke.

He wasn't only a director of 30 years, however a dear companion and somebody I relied upon so totally that it truly put everything into viewpoint. At times one needs to close entryways on things and not permit yourself to consider them.

8. There's constantly a way

I like to get the best out of individuals, and endeavor to utilize totally different strategies to do this, contingent upon how and what we are really going after.

I frequently find that individuals respond in various manners to a similar guidance, and if something isn't working I will regularly discover over the top or unordinary approaches to get it going.

Moving isn't simply steps, it's utilizing the body to recount to a story with the development. I like to create characters and utilize any clever thought I can to breath life into them and get what I need.

9. Truly tune in to your music

I consume my time on earth tuning in to music, and I've been fortunate in working with such huge numbers of various stars from when music recordings initially started and one could concoct and make unprecedented thoughts.

I worked with Aretha Franklin in Detroit, Robbie Williams here at home, Whitney Houston in New York, Elton John everywhere throughout the world, and with Queen in the most bizarre of spots; one being with 350 artists in Canary Wharf when it was a no man's land!

Music is so emotive, and I think the one video that consistently brings back the most grounded recollections and still blows my mind today was dealing with Duran's Wild Boys, attempting to make a bizarre universe of things to come. Let music take you to where you need to be.

10. Be prepared for anything

I'm enthusiastic about working in melodic theater, and I've had some exceptionally extreme slave drivers, however, I'm constantly appreciative to work with those I regard and can tune in to and gain from. Andrew Lloyd Webber really is an innovative virtuoso, working with him resembles being on a crazy ride, yet I love being on the ride.

As a choreographer, you must be prepared for anything, and I've been rollerskating for Starlight Express, head slamming for We Will Rock You, jiving for Grease, post moving for Flashdance, disco moving for Saturday Night Fever, ran down a mountain for The Sound of Music and moved down the yellow block street for the Wizard of Oz and that is to give some examples! So my recommendation is, be prepared for anything… !