The latest installment in Bloomsbury’s 33 ⅓ series, this book will be released on October 20.

Most people will tell you that Donny Hathaway’s true home as an artist was not the studio but the stage. “The live Donny was the most moving Donny, the most unadorned and direct Donny,” states writer David Ritz. The singer Leroy Hutson, who was Hathaway’s best friend, concurs that he “was most comfortable in live performance and literally at his best.” That’s why his 1972 album Donny Hathaway Live holds a privileged place among his small but stunning constellation of recordings.

For artists like Hathaway, whose art is forged within African American sacred and jazz traditions, the idea that live settings offer greater freedom than the studio is familiar. But what does that freedom actually sound like? What models of black community, intimacy and joy was Hathaway creating in performance? These questions draw us toward that elusive nexus between rehearsal and improvisation, spirit and practice, intuition and craft. Here we can see that, far from the stereotype of the instinctive soul artist driven by pure emotion, Hathaway was driven by a desire for musical training that would allow him to express his ideas and impulses in the moment, thus making each performance a new act of creation.

That this process involved as much pleasure as pain is an unexplored facet of Hathaway’s art. As Hutson says, “Few people really knew of the fun side to Donny. He was almost always in a work environment … and rarely able to just be his fun-loving self.” Hathaway’s mental illness and early death often and understandably obscure the “fun-loving” Hathaway. But you can hear so much joy in the music, especially when he is playing it live.

One moment will serve as an illustration. It comes from a performance that wasn’t included on Donny Hathaway Live, although it was recorded at one of the sets from which Atlantic drew songs for the album. After his band had left the stage at Los Angeles’s Troubadour one night, Hathaway returned alone to play “A Song for You” as an encore. Although the recording would not be released until after his death, it is one of his most inspired performances.

First recorded by Leon Russell in 1970, “A Song for You” was covered by so many other singers that it became a pop standard by the end of the decade. Yet Hathaway maximizes the song’s emotional and melodic potential so that the original feels like a cover of his version. Russell’s recording is marked by intricate piano, unorthodox phrasings and Ray Charles-meets-Willie Nelson vocal stylings. Hathaway maintains Russell’s complex piano work but recreates the haunting ballad in his own image. This is the image of someone with a deep well of almost ancestral feeling; someone deeply vulnerable to love, struggle and musical beauty; someone who trusted himself as a musician; and someone who can seem, in retrospect, to have sensed that he wouldn’t have much time to do his best work with and for his fans.

His studio recording of the song, which appears on his 1971 self-titled album, features a dramatic string and woodwind arrangement by Arif Mardin — delicate flutes and tremolo strings — and a rather odd structure. That version opens with an intricate glissando down the keyboard, a descending series of minor thirds that scholar Mark Anthony Neal calls a “tear-drop intro.” Hathaway repeats this glissando midway through the song. Then comes a modulation that sounds like a coda but instead moves into a second instrumental section that unexpectedly opens onto the last verse.

Four months after that version was released, Hathaway brought the song to the Troubadour. By now, he had restructured it to intensify its drama. So with this performance he was reinterpreting not only Russell but also himself.

As he starts his encore performance, his piano glissando draws whoops from the crowd. (This was typical, according to Mardin, who says the audience recognized most songs “from the first two notes of the introduction.”) For anyone who might not know it, one man in the crowd shouts, “A Song for You!” until another person calls for order: “Settle down!” Sounding unruffled, Hathaway launches into a performance that embodies transcendence — of his immediate surroundings, with all their distractions, but also of the audience’s expectations and perhaps even of his own.

The whole performance is so stunning that it’s hard to believe it was captured on tape. But it’s the out-of-time interlude that stands out. “And if my words don’t come together,” Hathaway sings, “listen to the melody, ’cause my love is in there, hiding…” As in the studio version, he plays the tear-drop piano line, but he slows it down and draws it into a complex chord that heightens the tension. Then, having set himself up, he vaults into the heart of the song:

I-hiii-iiiii l-uhh-ve you — I love you in a place … where there’s no space or time.

He stretches the “I” up, accenting the lift and the heft of it — “I-hi” — before turning it up and around with an impossibly lovely melisma. He’s at the top of his range but with room to maneuver, so that it seems he could suspend the “I” indefinitely if it were not just as important to sing the words that make the “I”‘s drama make sense: “love you.” The crowd erupts as he completes the statement.

At some point between the studio version and the live recording, Hathaway seems to have realized that this “I love you” was the core of his performance. Whereas, in the studio version, this moment appears as an unexpected verse after an instrumental section, in this pared-down performance it is the crown jewel, set between the piano glissando and the song’s denouement.

Hathaway’s out-of-time delivery of “I love you” brilliantly enacts what the lyrics describe, musically moving the expression of love into a “place where there’s no space or time.” This love is so deep that it exceeds and subtends any one person’s lifetime. But that is not to say it is romantic or idealized. The “love you” brings the suspended “I” back down to earth, into the song’s timing and harmonic tension. And Hathaway sings the phrase emphatically; as in songs like “I Love You More than You’ll Ever Know” and “I Know it’s You,” he sounds like he’s trying to convince someone. (His wife Eulalah recalled, “He would tease me at his shows, smiling at me and saying, ‘You know that’s for you.’ I’d say, ‘Yeah, right!’ He was cool.”) We might view this grounded, ancestral love through the lens of the black blues tradition. In this tradition, with which Hathaway identified, love is devoid of romantic illusions. But Hathaway’s “I” dives down to meet that love anyway. He thus evokes the lover’s willingness to struggle, which is a kind of clear-eyed, illusion-less magic.

The studio version of the song doesn’t prepare you for that “I love you,” which always makes me wonder if Hathaway surprised himself with that one. Did he consider that moment “a moment”? To write about him is to ask such questions, which are not only about his art but about his interior life and wellbeing. Yet Hathaway’s own comments from this period convey his abiding confidence, suggesting that he knew what he could do and that no amount of sudden brilliance would have surprised him. As he told a reporter for the U.K. newspaper Disc and Music Echo in August of 1971 (perhaps during the Troubadour sets), “My ambition is to get standing ovations everywhere I play. I’m working to have a performance so effective as to really carry the audience on a ride.” This is the voice of a young genius with an ego and the skills to back it up. As Atlantic Records publicist Barbara Harris recalls, fans would come up to him after his shows and “people were just kind of … speechless. They couldn’t believe what they had just heard.”

Hathaway used several techniques to elicit that response. A singer who had been working a crowd since his gospel wonder-child days, he was not above using tactics that musicians call “getting house” — what musicologist Aaron Johnson describes as “showy technical devices such as flashy keyboard runs” or “the extension and prolongation of musical cadences to create tension and excitement.” We hear this in “A Song for You” when, in Johnson’s words, “Hathaway milks [the piano glissando] for all the expectation he can wring from it.” What’s more, Hathaway possessed a technique or a gift called “vocal crying.” As Hutson explains, he “was able to make the listener ‘feel his heart’ in his singing and playing” in a way that could make people cry. Hathaway understood all of this.

Nevertheless, live performance always leaves something to chance, and soul music especially embodies a mixture of spirit and craft — long, intensive rehearsal for the spontaneous moment that by definition surprises not only the listener but also the artist. Hathaway “carried his audiences on a ride,” as planned, but he also rode their energy. And what makes his Live album so special is that it records the love he received in the process. What Neal says of his performance of “A Song for You” could be said of the album as a whole: it was “a living testament to the love shared between one performer and his audience.” If it wasn’t enough to sustain him, it’s still good to hear.

Emily J. Lordi is an associate professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and the author of Black Resonance: Iconic Women Singers and African American Literature. She is currently writing a book about soul.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Only Wald didn’t say that rock was destroyed, but that rock and roll was — and the difference is not merely academic. Rock, in the words of critic Robert Christgau, is “rock and roll made conscious of itself as an art form.” Prior to the June 1967 release of The Beatles‘ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, “rock and roll” meant any and everything formally tied to the mid-fifties explosion led commercially by Elvis Presley — doo-wop, surf music, Motown, the British Invasion, James Brown. “We were influenced by early rock and roll … which was not black,” Daryl Hall of Hall & Oates told Musician magazine in 1982 (cited in a Stephen Thomas Erlewine piece for Cuepoint). “It was integrated music. There was no difference between black and white.” As Jack Hamilton points out in his forthcoming Just Around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imaginary, the term “rock,” by itself, was almost nonexistent before Sgt. Pepper; afterward, it almost exclusively denoted white men with guitars.

It also denoted an equally important marketplace turn: 1966 was the last year that seven-inch singles outsold twelve-inch LPs, and albums remained king through the digital age, when individual-track downloads finally surpassed full-lengths in 2008. Two new books by British rock critics, each keyed to specific years, act as a before-and-after of how “rock and roll” calcifying into “rock” acted in terms of who had access to it as the primary, envelope-pushing musical form of the moment.

1966: The Year the Decade Exploded, by Jon Savage, author of the definitive punk rock history England’s Dreaming, is a heavily researched deep dive into both the year’s U.S.-U.K. pop landscape and their attendant sociopolitical ferment, keyed near-entirely to a nonstop parade of hits and duds, many first encountered via pirate radio, which bubbled up as an alternative to the pop-unfriendly BBC and was largely gone by 1968. Never a Dull Moment: 1971 — The Year That Rock Exploded, by David Hepworth, veteran of numerous British rock mags (most recently, the late, lamented monthly The Word), is a breezier but still expansive overview of the high-water mark of rock’s album-oriented maturity, a year Hepworth calls “the busiest, most creative, most interesting, and longest-resounding year of [the rock] era.”

Both books are structured similarly: twelve chapters apiece, one per month, keyed to specific recordings but moving well beyond them. Hepworth is a looser stylist; occasionally too loose, as when he correctly cites the November 1971 release date of Sly and the Family Stone‘s There’s a Riot Goin’ On, only to say many pages later that it “had just been released” at the time of the riots at New York’s Attica State Prison that September. But he’s also sharp and zingy. When he notes, “The year 1971 was the age of the Marshall stack, of mutually assured tinnitus,” or observes that Yes’s lyrics “had to be celestial poetry because they clearly made no sense on this earth,” his mix of garrulousness and dry wit makes Never a Dull Moment a zip to read.

Savage is a more careful stylist and fact-gatherer; not only is 1966: The Year the Decade Exploded (we’ll refer to it by its subtitle from here on) twice as long as Hepworth’s book, it’s far more densely packed. “Primary sources have been used wherever possible in order to eradicate hindsight and to reconstruct the mood of the time,” Savage notes — a stark contrast to Hepworth, for whom hindsight is very much the point. “If any of my children were to be cast away in the year 1971, they would be lost,” Hepworth writes. “However, they would feel entirely at home with the records that were made that year.” That couldn’t be further from what Savage prizes — the constant sense of present tense surprise captured by his carefully cultivated archival diggings.

One reason The Year the Decade Exploded is so much longer than Never a Dull Moment is that the latter is primarily fascinated by rock culture — record labels’ marketing plans or lack thereof, the U.K. live circuit, the day-to-day life of the artists behind the classic albums on which Hepworth focuses. Savage, on the other hand, casts his historical net wide, focusing on everything from nuclear paranoia (keyed to Birmingham, U.K., rockers The Ugly’s’ obscure “A Quiet Explosion,” the kickoff of the January chapter) to Vietnam (via Sgt. Barry Sadler’s number-one “The Ballad of the Green Berets,” March) to Andy Warhol (The Velvet Underground‘s “I’ll Be Your Mirror,” June). He links soul music — Wilson Pickett‘s atomic “Land of 1,000 Dances,” James Brown, Motown — to the rise of Black Power a lot more doggedly than your typical highlight-reel skim, and does the same for the still deeply underground gay rights movement by focusing on the Tornados’ archly campy “Do You Come Here Often?” — produced by Joe Meek, London’s kitchen-sink answer to Phil Spector and a gay man who committed a murder-suicide in February 1967, taking his landlady with him.

If one of the key tenets of rock is that singles are kids’ stuff while albums where the real meat is, The Year the Decade Exploded wipes away that silly myth repeatedly: Savage’s 45s have as much vaulting, widescreen ambition as the albums Hepworth valorizes. (Being British, Savage uses “pop” rather than “rock and roll,” but the meaning is basically the same.) Take The Who, a band that in very different ways is central to both Savage and Hepworth’s books. In the mid-sixties, The Who were London’s archetypal singles band — by choice, not happenstance. “Before we even approached the idea of making an album that was an expression of our own feelings . . . we believed only in singles,” Pete Townshend wrote in Rolling Stone about the band’s 1971 45s compilation Meaty, Beaty, Big and Bouncy. “In the top ten records and pirate radio. We, I repeat, believed only in singles.”

The February ’66-released “Substitute” remains the band’s masterpiece. “At the start of the instrumental break — which, against type, features only John Entwistle’s bass guitar — [drummer Keith] Moon wallops the hell out of the floor toms in a performance so manic, or drug-deranged, that he had no memory of it after the event,” Savage writes. “I like the blatantness of pop, the speed, the urgency,” the band’s manager Chris Stamp said in a March 1966 quote that Savage cites: “There’s either success or failure — it’s no use bollockin’ about.”

By contrast, Hepworth lauds the band’s 1971 album Who’s Next for being ambitious but not getting carried away. The album’s songs had been intended for an amorphous epic Townshend called “Lifehouse”: “[It] was supposed to be a film, a multimedia epic, a unique collaboration between performer and audience, and, on some level, a ‘crowd-sourced’ piece of art in which the band would facilitate the audience in reaching a new level of consciousness,” Hepworth writes. To him, the secret hero of Who’s Next is associate producer Glyn Johns, who convinced Townshend to abandon the cumbersome, formless “Lifehouse” and instead concentrate on the songs he’d written: “One of the things that made Glyn Johns a production genius was his lack of interest in how things were supposed to work and his readiness to understand how things did work.”

If the kind of runaway ambition of a “Lifehouse” was a path to potential incoherence, though, the type of if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it clamping down that led to Who’s Next also lay the groundwork for a wholesale rejection of difference on the part of the largely male, working class rock audience. True, the “heritage rock” industry of Britain (of which Hepworth is part — he helped launch Mojo, the UK’s heritage-rock house organ, in the mid-nineties) isn’t quite the monolith of American classic-rock radio, particularly in the country’s middle, whose flat lands are rendered even flatter thanks to forty ceaseless years of programming the exact same records. But for a Yank, many of the albums Hepworth rightly celebrates — Led Zeppelin IV, The Rolling Stones‘ Sticky Fingers, Jethro Tull‘s Aqualung — can nevertheless be difficult to hear freshly, even aided by a sympathetic reading of his insightful contextualizing. By contrast, the fabulous double-CD 1966 soundtrack Savage compiled for Ace Records never stops surprising, not least due to the sequencing — mostly chronological, but not always. Yes, “Baba O’Riley” is still amazing, but somehow less so on the 1,001st play, especially when roughly 900 of them weren’t voluntary. By contrast, Savage’s inclusion of “Substitute” can still feel revelatory — not least because the song gets extra ballast by Savage leading into it with New Orleans R&B singer Robert Parker’s horn-led party jam “Barefootin’.”

The advantage of the albums central to Hepworth’s book is that they could provide their own context, not to mention that their subjects were hardly shy of vaulting ambition. Led Zeppelin, for example, would have been unimaginable in 1966; it was barely imaginable five years later. “It was customary in 1971 … to release an album as soon as humanly possible,” Hepworth writes. “There was no machine to prime, no marketing scheme to be perfected, no budget to be hammered out, no accompanying image to be developed … no complex hullabaloo to be orchestrated.” Zeppelin didn’t operate that way: Hepworth notes a November 1971 issue of Billboard featured a four-page ad for fellow hard rockers Grand Funk Railroad’s E Pluribus Funk that included “color portraits of all three members of the band,” which compared to the mysterious, band-less cover art of Led Zeppelin IV made Grand Funk appear “gauche and needy.”

The sheer size of the band’s sound was made for arenas and high-end stereos, not transistor radios. When the band was booked to play Madison Square Garden (which it did for the first time on September 19, 1970), Hepworth notes a fellow musician’s double take: “He simply didn’t believe bands could play venues that big.” A festival like Woodstock was one thing; but for the most part, selling out large halls was a rarity in this era, never mind arenas. In the U.K., college halls were the venues of choice (in particular, the University of Leeds, as in the Who’s 1970 Live at Leeds), and as Hepworth points out, drugs were difficult to find and pubs shut down well before the concerts did: “Hence, audiences were overwhelmingly sober.” Merchandise — the full lines of T-shirts, buttons, canvas bags, and other branded gewgaws that now make up so much of the touring musician’s bottom line — basically didn’t yet exist.”

The kind of hard rock Led Zeppelin (and Grand Funk) embodied engendered a hard retreat, both into softer music — such as Carole King‘s Tapestry, 1971’s commercial behemoth and, as Hepworth points out, one of the only big albums of the era selling in large quantities to young women — and the past. One of Hepworth’s key arguments is that in 1971 the marketing of the musical past, in the form of reissues and concerts full of old material, was something “the record business hadn’t yet woken up to,” though that would change in short order. Hepworth’s prime examples are Elvis Presley, already retreating from his 1968 comeback, and The Beach Boys, whose 1971 album Surf’s Up featured a title track that added new overdubs to a Brian Wilson solo-piano performance from 1966; Hepworth calls it “probably the first case of a band making a tribute album to itself.”

Only five years earlier, The Beach Boys had been in rock and roll’s first rank, thanks to the critical (and, in the U.K., commercial) success of Pet Sounds but even more so to “Good Vibrations,” a single that many considered 1966’s most forward thinking. “It was technological yet emotional, sensual and spiritual, with an immediate physical impact and a deeper metaphysical meaning,” Savage writes. But as he also points out, the heady futurism of 1966’s pop incurred its own reactionary streak: Savage’s nostalgia-themed October chapter is keyed to the New Vaudeville Band’s Dixieland throwback “Winchester Cathedral,” which the Grammy Awards naturally named Best Contemporary [R&R] Recording in 1967, beating among others, “Good Vibrations.”

Savage notes that The Beach Boys’ record “spanned both R&B and psychedelia — the biggest new trends of the year.” The Year the Decade Exploded spends lots of time on soul music, particularly its emergence in the U.K., but it could have spent lots more. (Savage notes that he left Jamaican music out nearly entirely for reasons of focus — and, no doubt considering how much research he already did here, sanity.) By contrast, Hepworth doesn’t write enough about R&B because he doesn’t. He does offer a long consideration of Motown, keyed to Marvin Gaye‘s What’s Going On (a good album, not a great one, he says, and I agree), but it feels very surface-level; there’s an uncomfortable component to a line like, “There was nothing Berry [Gordy] did that didn’t have at least some element of social climbing about it,” even though at root it’s basically correct.

What’s more amazing — suspicious, even — is that Hepworth merely grazes some of the most important soul of not only the year but the entire decade. Al Green didn’t release an album in 1971, but “Let’s Stay Together,” issued that November, ahead of the 1972 album of the same title, was a key component of the overall sweetening of R&B then occurring. At the other end of the spectrum, in 1971 James Brown left the indie label King for multinational Polydor, founded the People Records label, and that March lost his band that was anchored by Bootsy Collins and hired another that was led by trombonist Fred Wesley. With the latter unit Brown recorded this third live album at Harlem’s Apollo, Revolution of the Mind, shelving a Bootsy-driven show taped in Paris (eventually issued in 1992 as Love Power Peace). And he churned out no fewer than five R&B top-ten hits. Surely this is worth more than an aside that one of them, “Hot Pants (She Got to Use What She Got to Get What She Wants),” “encapsulates his trademark marriage of carnal and mercantile” — not to mention that both Revolution of the Mind and the Hot Pants album deserve a place on Hepworth’s listing of 1971’s 100 crucial albums far more than, oh, the self-titled debut of soft-rock simpletons America.

And what about Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain, which also makes Hepworth’s 100 album listing but is otherwise absent from the text, one of Never a Dull Moment‘s most curious omissions. (To be fair, both Green and Brown have tracks in Hepworth’s chapter-ending suggested playlists.) Maggot Brain‘s title track has one of the most legendary backstories of 1971 or any other year: George Clinton told guitarist Eddie Hazel to “Play like your mother died,” and Hazel responded with a ten-minute psychedelic blues solo as searing as Hendrix’s “Star Spangled Banner.” Also, Oedipal psychodrama from a disintegrating counterculture by a bunch of African-American hippie rock and rollers who’d go on to be the most sampled band of all time — how much resonance do you want, anyway? That’s the problem with “rock”: Once seemingly expansive as the sun, with time it’s become clearer how limited a worldview it ultimately is.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Say you’re an up-and-coming singer-songwriter and you’re looking for an audience. You’ve got an active presence on social media, a deal with a major label and a proven sound that, while a little dated, probably would have sold reasonably well if it had come out around the peak of the late-’90s/early-’00s bubblegum pop era.

Oh, except you don’t really exist. Your supposed label has never heard of you (because you don’t exist) and your songs are pretty much all Jessica Simpson songs. No, not covers of Jessica Simpson songs — actual recordings that were released on Columbia Records in 2001 and newly posted to iTunes, Amazon, Spotify and Tidal with new titles. Because you don’t exist.

That’s the story of Lucia Cole, as far as I can tell. I say “as far as I can tell” because, well, Lucia Cole seems not to exist and is, at this moment, quickly vanishing from the Internet. But on May 28, an artist by that name released an album called Innocence on iTunes, supposedly through Republic Records, which is owned by Universal Music Group, one of the three remaining major record labels.

Earlier this week, the blog Pop Culture Died In 2009 pointed out that these songs by “Lucia Cole” were, yes, actually just Jessica Simpson songs, re-uploaded to iTunes with different titles. That was one of many fabrications (these were uncovered and collected over the last few days by fan sites, Twitter users like @LeonButura, pop music message boards like ATRL.net and the Pop Culture Died In 2009 Tumblr). The story got picked up on other gossip blogs, many of which took a congratulatory tone. Call it a scam, call it a highly orchestrated art project, call it a hall of fame-level catfish — it was a dedicated act of role-playing.

When a colleague tipped me off to the story yesterday, the first thing I did was listen to Cole’s songs side by side with the Jessica Simpson songs, which are easy to identify, despite the fact that they’re all album cuts rather than singles, because the song titles are identical or remarkably similar: Simpson’s “What’s It Gonna Be” from the 2001 album Irresistible became Cole’s “Gonna Be”; Simpson’s “For Your Love” became Cole’s “Your Love”; “Forever In Your Eyes” and “His Eye Is On The Sparrow” became “Forever In Your Eyes” and “His Eye Is On The Sparrow.”

I called Republic Records, the supposed home of Lucia Cole, at 4:00 p.m. To zero surprise, a spokesperson confirmed that nobody by that name is signed to the label. By 8:30 p.m., all of Cole’s music had been removed from iTunes. It was, at the time this was written, still available on Amazon, Spotify and Tidal.

(UPDATE at 7:15 a.m. EDT, July 18: Amazon has removed Cole’s music from its store.)

Cole’s Wikipedia page was deleted earlier this week. Her Twitter feed is protected and she has not responded to requests for comment. An email sent to the contact address on her Twitter page was returned as undeliverable.

For the last six weeks, whoever uploaded those songs has been committing a theft of intellectual property so brazen it made me wonder how the album could possibly have made it into the iTunes store without some kind of red flag going up. SoundCloud employs software that can scan uploaded music and flag songs that sound too similar to copyrighted material already in the database.

I emailed Apple to ask about iTunes’ process for verifying content and label affiliations, but have received no official comment yet.

We shouldn’t be surprised by hoaxes, unverified assertions and lies on the Internet, but this fiction gets weirder and more elaborate the deeper into it you dig. Below are a few highlights from the short career of Lucia Cole, a.k.a. whoever was pretending to be Lucia Cole by stealing songs from old Jessica Simpson albums and photos from a model’s Instagram account.

• Lucia Cole’s ironically named Twitter feed, @trulylucia, has more than 64,000 followers.
• There’s at least one interview with Cole posted online, which either means that bloggers and journalists fell for the hoax without doing any fact checking or websites just don’t care whether the words they publish are true.
• Shaquille O’Neal endorsed her album on Twitter, saying, “Can you say new Mariah Carey? It’s fire”

Let’s end on an appropriately ambivalent note. According to a Soundscan report, no song by Lucia Cole has sold more than five copies. But the apparent ease with which this stunt was pulled off, and the length of time it took to come down lead to an inevitable question: How many more Lucia Coles are out there?

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

PC Music out of London has become one of the most divisive new labels in dance music. Though a thoroughly underground label — one that doesn’t even really charge for its releases, it just throws them up for free download on its SoundCloud page — it is invested in the poppiest pop of modern history. The songs are packed with ultra bright sounds and winkingly saccharine lyrics that make them infectious but almost inhuman. There’s a sense of detached maximalism to them.

PC Music artists’ influences include current radio dominators, polished American R&B from the 1990s, trance, K-pop and J-pop, as well as club cheese of indeterminate European origin. But all these references don’t necessarily come together easily in their off-kilter songs. They sometimes feel like a Tumblr page filled with so many reblogs and customizations that they’ve been rendered incomprehensible. But maybe that’s the point.

It is also an incredibly secretive label that often seems to be purposefully obscuring the facts and whose artists rarely give interviews. Still, the audience and recognition for acts including A.G. Cook (PC Music’s founder), Hannah Diamond, Kane West and GFOTY (Girlfriend of the Year) continues to grow. The label is also affiliated with SOPHIE, a producer who has put out two successful singles on the Numbers label, but nothing so far (at least under the SOPHIE name) on PC Music. SOPHIE recently teamed with A.G. Cook for a project called QT, which will be put out on the British mega-indie XL Records.

With a project as high-minded and confusing as PC Music, are we really getting good music, or are we just getting a lot of ideas? Eric Ducker discussed whether the sounds of PC Music can be appreciated even if you don’t know the context with Alex Frank, the Deputy Culture Editor at VOGUE.com.

What are the concrete facts you know about PC Music?

Like most of the world, very little. It’s kind of an inscrutable universe. I know it’s a label and, dare I say, a subculture that’s going on in London at the moment

Does that make you want to learn more about it or do you like that it’s inscrutable?

I suppose I’m used to mystery in electronic music. But I guess in the case of PC Music, the secrecy sometimes feels so intentional and directional that it almost makes me want to explore why they’re so interested in confusing us.

Do you think they’re hiding something, or is it just a game?

My sense is that it’s just a game, a game we’re all so good at playing now. Messing around with identity on the Internet is fun! And then when they started getting attention from being mysterious, maybe it just made them want to do it even more.

Right. When considering what they could potentially be hiding, I don’t think they are older people adopting the mannerisms/tactics of 1990s kids and I don’t think they are established artists trying new pseudonyms. The only thing I think of that they might be trying to obscure is that there may be less involvement from actual women then they seem to be presenting and that a lot the female voices they use are created through computer processing.

That certainly seems true. SOPHIE is a dude. QT’s voice is probably a dude, too

If there are not as many women involved as it seems, is that troublesome?

Maybe, especially because so much of the aesthetic is sort of an electronically camp take on “girliness” and cuteness. But I’m also of the school that instead of vilifying, I’d be more interested in exploring just why a bunch of young adult males would want to put on internet drag for the sake of some songs.

So, why do you think they would? They’re probably not going to give the answer.

There’s so many answers to that question, one of which is just the simple answer that so much of the pop music that is ultimately the most important, at least since Madonna, is made by women. So if you’re doing a campy take on pop, maybe that’s the natural place to start. My question is: Does that make them drag queens?

I don’t know. Maybe they see a voice as just an instrument that can be manipulated to achieve they sound they want. Positive K pitch-shifted his voice on his biggest hit, “I Gotta Man,” so it sounded like he was rapping back and forth with a woman, then used actual women for the videos and performances. I wouldn’t consider him a drag queen. Then there’s stuff like C&C Music Factory where they would use one woman’s voice for recordings and they have another woman lip sync in videos. That’s a manipulation, too.

Totally. I wonder if the entire point of PC Music is that there is no vocalist at all. Girl, boy, robot — maybe the pitch shift is just meant to highlight how there’s no need for a human at all. They’re drawing attention to the artificiality, which seems to be their entire raison d’être. Porter Robinson used a computer speaking software for some of the tracks on his new album, and seemed really proud of that. Ultimately that’s a direction I’d love to see explored even more in music, just stripping away any notion of “the human” seems like an interesting project.

Let’s backtrack here. Do you like the stuff on PC Music as music, or is it just an interesting project?

Ha, that question really seems to be at the heart of what PC Music is all about, and I don’t know if the music and the idea of the project are easily separable. But just the pure music streaming through my iPhone headphones as I walk down the street? Yes, I like it. Not all of it, of course, but a fair amount of it is enjoyable to me. It definitely is a stretch, musically, but I don’t know if it’s as much of one as people are making it out to be. I mean haven’t we been here before, to some extent, with Unicorn Kid and chiptune?

Do you find the PC Music a progression of that? Are they just doing the same idea in just a different way or is the conversation moving?

The conversation is moving, partly because PC Music is such a pastiche of so many things that came before it — not just Unicorn Kid and chiptune, but Ryan Trecartin movies, Grimes, Ariana Grande — in a way that’s totally contemporary. PC Music is new in what references from the past it puts together and how it frames that collage.

Hypothetically, let’s say you grew up in a family of strict rockists who dictated everything you listened to and you never heard any of the Europop, J-pop, K-pop, 1990s American pop R&B or anything else that PC Music references, but you still had the capacity for objective and critical listening. If you were given a playlist that mixed up PC Music’s influences with PC Music’s own recordings, do you think you’d like or appreciate the PC Music stuff as much as the originals?

The answer to that is probably no. Like, is Frankenstein more beautiful then the people’s whose body parts were assembled to create him? No. Ace of Base is more palatably enjoyable than PC Music. Mariah Carey is more palatably enjoyable than PC Music. Even Kyary Pamyu Pamyu is a little easier on the ears. But that doesn’t make PC Music bad, just difficult.

But that’s the question with all music now, right? Can the content be appreciated without the context? I’m sure there are people who can do that, but the culture of music is what interests me the most.

Well, what interests you about the culture of PC Music?

Unlike most pop music I like, it doesn’t make me want to dance or sing along, but I like listening to some of it because it’s like listening to a bunch of funny jokes.

Yes! I asked my friend Julianne Escobedo Shepherd if PC Music is like “Weird Al” Yankovic for hipsters — the idea that it’s an inside joke that we can all be in on, but that’s still catchy and fun to listen to. She said that the precise difference is that Weird Al isn’t cynical and that PC Music is cynical.

Cynical in what sense?

Cynical in the sense that PC Music’s manipulation is possibly just too manipulated. It’s like trend forecasting to an almost scary degree. As in: If you combine these X, Y and Z nostalgia points that the internet cares about so much, you’re going to have a hit. It’s like seeing what’s culturally trending, combining them all together and of course that’ll hit big.

So as a listener are you supposed to laugh at their approach or the fact you’re responding to it?

You’re supposed to be proud of yourself for being in on the joke, on knowing the references. That’s the wink-wink. PC Music is almost a double-wink. It’s having the ironic edge of the wink, but taking it one step further and letting us know that you even know that being IRONIC is lame. I hate to say it’s post-ironic — because I hate when people say post-racial or post-gay or WHATEVER — but that’s what this is, right? It’s incorporated the laugh track right into the beat.

I’m also incredibly interested in what PC Music’s relationship to the larger music industry is, in the sense that it feels like the antidote to the post-Disclosure house music that is now everywhere. PC Music is like the anti-Kiesza.

Whereas Disclosure is hoping to revive electronic music’s history of soulfulness, and in doing so has brought house music back to a gigantic audience, PC Music is kind of saying that electronic music is still an insider’s club. If Disclosure is now played at every wedding party in New York City, PC Music is saying, “No, this music is for weirdos.”

They’re saying dance music should be insider?

Yes, I think so. Sure, it embraces pop as like an aesthetic tool, but this is difficult music. This is not likely to get DJed at a Meatpacking District club, it’s just not.

Did you go see SOPHIE at MoMA PS 1’s Warm Up a couple weekends ago?

I did not, and it’s funny that he played on the same day as Skrillex, another person who divided the world into two camps — one who said he’s ruining music, one who said he’s great.

From what I read, it sounds like SOPHIE was aggressively un-fun, while Skrillex took an opposite, very crowd-pleasing approach

Which is super interesting, and makes me wonder, is PC Music the second coming of Salem?

Uh oh.

Salem was met with similar confusion. They were sort of extreme amalgamation of what was happening in music that was aggressively cynical and un-fun.

Most people’s complaint with Salem was that in the end, underneath all the layers, was nothing substantitive. Did you feel that way?

Well, I hope I don’t sound like a cheesy dime store Oscar Wilde, but I don’t know how much I care if there is something substantive underneath. I like surfaces, sometimes. I don’t think music always has to have more than a nice surface. The layers can be the best part.

Let’s talk about QT, the new project from PC Music head A.G. Cook and SOPHIE. Only one song is out, but I guess the concept is that QT is combination singer and energy drink. It seems like it’s a riff on Hatsune Miku, Japan’s virtual pop star. The project is coming out on XL Records, and they have that Adele money now, so I’m curious if those resources are going to take Cook and SOPHIE’s ideas to crazy levels or if it will ruin them, because the PC Music stuff has been purposefully so low budget.

I hope this doesn’t come back to haunt me, but I think there’s no fear that QT and SOPHIE will ever be crushingly-famous, no matter what label they are on. They would have to seriously temper their sound if that were ever to happen. But maybe they will? My dream would be to have Miley Cyrus collaborate with PC Music. I know they’re working with Kyary Pamyu Pamyu on something, but I think if they could bridge their sound to Miley or Katy Perry they might have something.

But I will say one thing: I wonder if the kind of incessant peppiness that is at the heart of PC Music is already on its way out. Their labelmate on XL, FKA Twigs, is transgressive, like them, but in a totally different way. She does music so seductively, slowly, and something about her moodiness feels right at the moment. That’s what so funny about PC Music, everyone is labeling them as so forward thinking, but actually, they’re making commentary on the past five years or so of peppy Dr. Luke pop, J-Pop, Katy Perry, Miley Cyrus. I wonder if people are kind of sick of peppy pop music and are ready for something a little darker. There’s only so much cuteness that one culture can take, right? Ariana Grande might be proving me wrong though by having a No. 1 album this summer.

Maybe they’re so on trend they’re actually behind trend. Which ultimately is avant-garde, right?

Yes, being behind trend is the new being on trend. I hate myself for saying that, but maybe it’s true. Look, there’s space in the world of electronic music for both Twigs and PC Music. Twigs reads as almost insanely authentic in a classic sense, and that’s really worked for her. Authenticity still works. Songwriting and feeling and emotion and sexiness still works. It still moves people. PC Music is a different thing and there’s space in the world for different things. But in its calculation, in its manipulation, in its almost soullessness, [PC Music has] hit upon something incredibly intellectual. But I wonder if people even want their music to be intellectual.

People may not want their pop music to be intellectual, but they do want it to be emotional.

Yeah, I think they do. And maybe that’s because we’re still caught in the 20th century. We’re still wedded to old ideas about what music is supposed to be and we’re not ready for PC Music, in a way. Maybe PC Music is helping push us forward, to start to get comfortable with uncanny sounds. It’s uncanny pop. It’s pushing us towards inhuman music.

This summer people were all in a stink about discovering that track of Britney Spears singing without Auto-Tune, and I just thought, “Who cares? The song is great!” (By the way, I think Britney Spears is the original cyborg pop star, and perhaps PC Music’s most important influence, but that’s another story.) But I also understand why people were mad. We’re still human enough that we want our songs to feel real, whatever “real” means. It’s a feeling, you know it when you hear it. Or you think you know it when you hear it.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Last month, Let’s Talk About Love was reissued with a set of new essays by writers like Nick Hornby, Krist Novaselic, James Franco and NPR Music’s own Ann Powers. The timing couldn’t have been better. In 2014, nothing starts a fight more quickly than a huge pop song. Ann and Carl exchanged notes on why.

• Part One: Is There A Crisis In Music Criticism?
• Part Two: Why Do People Have Beef With Poptimism? Because It’s Winning
• Part Three: Five Rules For New Pop Criticism
• Part Four: Don’t Front
• Part Five: Music We All Love Has Done Way More Harm Than Miley Ever Will

PART ONE: Is There A Crisis In Music Criticism?

Hello Carl!

First off, congrats on the new edition of Let’s Talk About Love, now subtitled “Why Other People Have Such Bad Taste.” I’m proud to be a part of that volume! But I have to ask you: Have you been working a particularly effective marketing campaign for the book? Every week lately a new argument erupts about musical taste and listening practices — exactly what you examine so artfully in your book.

These arguments often focus on music writing, yet they resonate in ways that any ardent music lover would understand. Here’s a refresher on a few of the disputes, in case they didn’t clog up our readers’ Facebook feeds the way they did ours: The new blog My Husband’s Stupid Record Collection plays on longstanding ideas about nerdy male record collectors and the women who (barely) tolerate them. A debate between the writer/musician Rick Moody and the musician/writer Dean Wareham about Daft Punk played on ancient tensions about the nature of, ahem, authenticity. A couple of prominent essays decrying music writers’ interest in the Top 40 bubbled under with questions about what it even means to care deeply about music in a world where corporate pop rules the airwaves and endless distraction dominates the Web.

Some concerns are realistic: Writers like us, who’ve devoted years to becoming culturally knowledgeable, are losing jobs to unpaid bloggers, and peer-to-peer recommendation on streaming services eliminates the need for radio disc jockeys and record clerks. Authority has lost its mojo. But more ineffable dread is in the air, reflecting the rise of technologies that make things easy, and easy to treat lightly. Music-making by machine has opened up that practice in wonderful ways, but what about the value of hard musical work? I’m not mourning the diminishment of record-collector obsessiveness, but without hard listening — hours and hours of focus on a few songs, until they become part of you — does loving music become a trivial pursuit? Does the dexterity involved in surfing the huge waves of available sounds make going deep obsolete?

That’s a line of despair I don’t buy, a new version of the moldy-fig attitude that greeted the jitterbuggers and The Beatles and Madonna and hip-hop in decades past. But I can’t figure out why it’s resonating now. This is a moment of great empowerment for music lovers. So much is available. Technology constantly offers new tools to enable and organize musical appreciation. And everyone can be a critic, after all, posting playlists and YouTube responses, blogging and Tumbling, telling the world that this is my jam.

So why the whiff of fear right now — not revolving around the music industry falling apart or musicians being able to pay their health insurance, but about more philosophical matters of meaning and authority? Perhaps it’s a reaction to the clamor so many soundwaves creates, an attempt to contain the uncontainable.

But I also think we all feel exposed. In her book Alone Together, the sociologist Sherry Turkle mentions music as a source of worry for teens on social media; they’re worried that if they “like” the wrong bands — State Radio instead of Spoon is one kid’s example — they’ll lose the respect of their peers. This resonated with me. Shaming is back in style when we talk about music. A line from your book keeps coming into my mind: “Shame has a way of throwing you back upon your own existence, on the unbearable truth that you are identical with you, that you are your limits.” In this vastly open moment when an average person could lose herself in virtually any musical experience, why is the conversation about music so concernt with limits — and with shame?

Looking forward to your insights,

AKP

PART TWO: Why Do People Have Beef With Poptimism? Because It’s Winning

Hi Ann,

Thanks so much for inviting me to kick around this can with you, in some ways rusty, in others barely unsealed, always full of wriggly worms — earworms, clickbait and many other species. You’re right that I could hardly have arranged for a better moment for the expansion of my book (including your wonderful essay) to appear, with all the passionate fights breaking out about what makes music merit attention.

My new Afterword is partly about the issues you raise: how technology and the millennial generation, among other factors, have altered the skyline of taste. I even speculate if it’s possible to conceive of a “post-taste” society, in which hardly anyone maintains a loyalty to any aesthetic guidelines, and we just surf from meme to meme.

So it’s startling to witness all these cases — to your examples, add this 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair poll (highly skewed questions and all) — that make it sound like little has changed since I first went through my own version of ex-rock-snob-rehab under the guiding star of Céline Dion. We still have this spectacle of people (mostly straight white men of a certain age) angry that we treat music made with drum machines, or for dance floors, or with rapping (unless it’s “political”), or by Beyoncé with the same respect and depth of thought we’d devote to anthems sung by bands of guys with guitars. It seems like this month we’re gonna ponder like it’s 1999.

But that glimpse is deceptive. Look at the actual music-criticism world, and you’ll see Saul Austerlitz in the Times Magazine is right about one thing: Pro-pop forces dominate. There’s you at NPR, me at Slate, Jody Rosen at New York magazine/Vulture, Jon Caramanica and his colleagues in the NYT proper, Sasha Frere-Jones at The New Yorker and more at nearly every other prominent mainstream venue you could mention. Even Pitchfork, once a redoubt of indie-rock obscurantism, now devotes generous space to dance, pop, hip-hop and other forms.

And that reflects the range of enthusiasms held by a typical music-loving North American under, say, 35 (whom I suspect is poorly represented in any poll sponsored by 60 Minutes, the former location of Andy Rooney’s lawn). As remarked on the Grantland Pop Culture podcast last week, generations who grew up with Napster, iPods, MySpace, streaming services and YouTube are bound to have sampled and imprinted on wider sounds than people who got into music by inheriting records from their older brothers.

Not to say there aren’t still hip-hop heads, rockers, folkies, metalheads, noise freaks, ravers and indie introverts alongside the BeyHive, Beliebers and Bangerz, each with their own niche sites and networks. But I bet most of them are more aware of other styles and genres than their likes would’ve been a decade ago.

Therefore, I have to call what we’re hearing from the anti-pop authors a backlash, sour grapes from people just noticing that a cultural battle is over and they “lost.” We can sympathize with their sense of bewilderment and status vertigo — the way we can with “men’s rights” activists, for instance — without letting ourselves be trolled into rehashing the “disco sucks” debate. Let’s not be sore winners.

But yes, theirs is a magnified variety of the insecurity and resentment we all feel on some level. It’s about the music, videos, tweets and updates that flood toward us in near-infinite quantities at light speed (I always think of the prescient phrase the pre-punk band Pere Ubu coined in the 1970s: “Datapanik in the Year Zero“).

But more than that, in a globalized, polycultural, multilateral, warming, mass-migrating world, we have urgent questions such as, “Where is the center?” “Which information matters?” “Who benefits?” “What does that make me?” They’re the same anxieties that have powered the polarization of American political camps.

A painful thing about encountering otherness — even in the form of music you don’t get or identify with — is that it makes you aware of your own smallness, your vulnerability and, yes, thus your shame. It undercuts any fantasy that your own lifestyle, traits and priorities might be universal — it tells you that you’re specifically bounded by your own context, while other realms may be indifferent to your existence.

If you’re straight, white, relatively well-off, cis-male, Anglo-American or any combination thereof, that can be particularly disorienting, coming from a culture that used to pretend reality did revolve around you. But even those who aren’t privileged or rock revanchists have to cope with these global realignments. Perhaps one challenge is to find pleasures in the tensions rather than lashing back.

So a question to ask at this point, Ann, is where our pro-pop POV does have blind spots, as any dominant perspective does. What might we be missing out on, as writers and listeners, that might be vital to decoding, critiquing and simply soundtracking this planet in transition (and peril)? Are we suffering from over-consensus? Why? Oh, and with the anniversary of the death of the leader of arguably the last essential rock band, allow me to add: Is there a role left there for rock?

Adieu to déjà vu,

Carl

PART THREE: Five Rules For New Pop Criticism

Carl,

I appreciate a challenge. And you pose exactly the right one by asking me to identify poptimism’s blind spots. By the way, though I know some people think the term’s silly, I like “poptimism” — because it sounds so pop, like something out of a cheerful ad campaign or a self-help book. Its silliness checks ego. In the spirit of self-help, I’ll offer my suggestions in list form: Five Ways to Be a Better Poptimist. These pointers apply to writers, but also might be useful to any fan who goes to see tUnE-yArDs on Friday night and cranks Pink in the gym Saturday morning.

1. Don’t insist that pop be hip. A good chunk of mainstream music gains inspiration from more cutting-edge stuff — always has. (Remember when The Monkees went psychedelic?) But plenty of it plays by other rules: It could be rooted in Christian contemporary music, emo, or soft rock. That doesn’t make it less meaningful; it just takes work to understand these other legacies. It’s cool if you find John Legend corny, but respect that for millions his grounding in group harmony singing and Bacharach balladry signals sophistication. Respect values other than your own.

2. Understand that selling records is the point. The major players in creating mainstream pop don’t care about integrity, in the restrictive sense. They’re collaborators, and they’re interested in making money. So yes, Dr. Luke encourages his ingénue protégés to trade in feminine stereotypes (sometimes in highly questionable ways), and Avicii goes for obvious beats. Great pop sneaks in subtleties to enrich and even sometimes undermine the obvious elements that make a song pop out of the radio. Appreciating that requires an adjustment of one’s aesthetics. Recognize the value in familiarity and big gestures.

3. Acknowledge that the assembly line is a cornerstone of pop. Since the days of Tin Pan Alley, pop’s spirit has been one of energizing collaboration and seat-by-the-pants innovation. There’s little room in this game for purist notions of artistic integrity. “We Can’t Stop” has seven writers and was originally intended for Rihanna. What’s interesting about the song is how it transformed in the process of becoming Miley Cyrus’s signature. Know the limits of this kind of production while also noticing where the soul can slip in.

4. Physically connect with the mainstream, but don’t presume you know what its different corners are all about. Lindsay Zoladz recently wrote on her Tumblr about attending a Miley concert and realizing that — at least sometimes — she wanted to write for the Bangerz, Miley’s devotees, not for her fellow Pitchfork nerds. I applaud her insistence that music obsessives need to look outside the confines of their own tribe and learn from non-fetishists. But the desire to identify can sometimes obscure that “otherness” you mention, even for poptimists. As enriching as it is to feel good in a crowd of strangers, it’s equally useful to go where things are less comfortable. For every charming fan you might meet at a non-hipster show, there’s a drunk one, and one whose political views are really different than your own, and one who (if you go see Kirk Franklin or Mary J. Blige) might ask you to pray with them. As you’ve said, encountering the other can be difficult — for poptimists too. It should be difficult. Insight comes from wrestling with the awkwardness.

5. Go beyond Beyonce. I think we all need to acknowledge that King Bey is not your average diva-bear, and that putting her on a best-list is not an adventurous move. Assignment for all poptimists: have an opinion about the Jason DeRulo album that drops today.

I’ve rambled on with my unsolicited advice, and now there’s no room to talk about rock! I hope we can take that up in the next round. One thought: in his excellent feature on EMA — whose album The Future’s Void is one of my 2014 faves — Sasha Frere-Jones almost calls her music rock, but instead says it’s a “hairy, occasionally digital beast.” I like that phrase. It sounds like what Jimi Hendrix would play now. In other words, to trace where rock went, we have to agree on what it is. And that isn’t easy.

Enlighten me,

AKP

PART FOUR: Don’t Front

Ann,

What a fantastic list of pop self-improvement tips. By the way, I’m touched by your defense of “poptimism” as a term, but it seems like too many people are put off by the neologism. It sounds a little dated to me now, like a slogan from a past generation’s protest movement, and its positive-thinking vibe misleads people like Saul Austerlitz to assume it means unthinking approval of all things pop, rather than just being open-minded and critically engaged. “Rockism,” on the other hand, still seems useful as an umbrella term for Austerlitz and his ilk’s biases.

“Wrestling with the awkwardness” and respecting non-hip values brings me back to another few thoughts about shame, music and identity. Perhaps it’s because music as an art form is so fundamentally abstract — a vibration in the air that produces a sound in the brain, rising almost like a thought — that it makes us feel so tentative and unsure about its status and its meanings. So it gets surrounded with visible signs like fashion and photographs, ranked by charts every week and annual lists, straining to make a form so ineffably mobile to hold still.

Writing my book about taste and Céline Dion, and discussing it later, I’m always aware of a tinge of embarrassment that I’m talking about an artist so feminine, flashy, lush and sentimental. I have an impulse to rush to explain that she’s only a case study for the sake of a bigger intellectual project. It’s as if I sense my stock in the sexual marketplace dropping. But if I’m mindful of that shame and can sit with it, it’s valuable — it confers a humility that nurtures the patience and non-judgment to encounter strangers and intimates alike on something closer to their own terms, without reflex posturing. It might seem like a weird exercise, but it’s an experience I really recommend.

In the current argument about pop, though, a few friends have confessed that what they now find difficult isn’t discussing either superstar phenomena or arty outliers, but the uncomfortably in-between. One person said he’d never tell anyone at a cultural-studies conference that he was really into Beck‘s sedate new album; another admitted he didn’t want others to know he liked Foster the People, saying, “The middlebrow is always the most abject.” Big pop is brashly bright, but second-tier pop can seem earnest and ingratiating, as if it’s trying too hard. I do think there’s a tendency right now to write guitar bands off as either meatheads or dully self-involved white boys, and while there’s some justice to redressing their past overestimation that way, it can also be a bit sweeping and self-congratulatory.

It often takes us the longest to stop punishing the merely good artists for not being geniuses, but eventually we do — Hall & Oates just got into the Rock Hall of Fame, for instance, but a decade ago people were still snickering at their 1980s blue-eyed soul-pop, no doubt in shame over having liked it for a while. I wonder if we can learn to skip that middle step? I’ve admired you for having the maturity to attend to the communal virtues of Mumford and Sons and other neo-folk bands I find icky, for instance. I suspect I dislike them partly because I grew up with 1970s Catholic folk-guitar masses, so such jangly uplift choral music strikes me as oppressively naïve.

Which may lead us to another pro-pop pointer: Beware your own self-projections. We talk a lot about how taste is aspirational — that people are drawn to music that makes them feel more sophisticated, popular, worldly, etc. But taste also can be defensive: We often reject not only music that reminds us of classes of people we look down on, but music that evokes attributes we dislike in ourselves. (I discussed this dynamic at the end of this piece about my antipathy for The National.) A little bit of self-skepticism is great, but too much can be unhealthy.

At the same time it is important in exploring unfamiliar genres and fan communities to always be yourself. We want to meet and learn from people not like us, and allow ourselves to be changed in the process, but that doesn’t mean appropriating their experiences. Suburban teens posing as gangsters are always the most obvious example. In the recent New Yorker profile of Hot 97 hip-hop DJ Peter Rosenberg, I loved the tale of how he introduced himself to the station boss with the DJ name he’d been using, “PMD,” and was upbraided, “No, you’re Rosenberg.” As a white, Jewish aficionado of a black-based music, Rosenberg gradually made it a rule only to talk about things he actually knew, like music and sports, and not pretend to understand dealing cocaine, or living in the projects. That’s a step in being a conscientious traveler rather than a foolish or exploitive interloper: Don’t front.

After all, genuine causes for shame are riddled through pop history: American popular culture has its deepest roots in slavery, the blackface minstrel show, ethnic vaudeville comedy, brothels and burlesque, religious revival movements, rural poverty, urban segregation, mob-run clubs and labels, wheeler-dealer rip-offs and plenty of other not-so-pretty chapters. Cultural theft, pandering, shock and other crass moves are bound up with pop innovation and creativity. Be critical, but don’t get on high horses, because very few of our artistic heroes can be disentangled from those dubious, sometimes tragic associations.

Which leads me to another aphorism: Always connect, to misquote E.M. Forster. When an artist seems inexplicable to you, compare them with analogous figures from contexts you do understand. It was hugely helpful for me to think of Céline Dion in the lineage of the 19th-century parlor song, light opera and variety-show entertainment from the stage to radio to early television both here and in Europe, for example. If Kanye West seems obnoxious, remember egotistical, style-violating provocateurs like Little Richard or Marlene Dietrich or even Bob Dylan raising hackles in the past. But also look at linkage points within and between genres — in contemporary global pop, for instance, it’s often really illuminating to follow major writer-producers like Max Martin, Dr. Luke, etc., in their work with myriad artists to get a sense of the methodology and craftsmanship behind the hits. But be mindful of the differences too.

In pop, after all, there are only two constants — change and resistance to change. Rock fans right now are in denial that rock’s becoming a vintage, heritage music, just like jazz, blues, soul, funk and other period forms. Even rap might be heading the same way. That doesn’t mean great work can’t be done there, but it will face the puzzle of how to honor its inheritance while speaking to new circumstances. It may never again be where the main cultural heat is, except as a hybrid ingredient. But there’s no shame in that.

Carl

PART FIVE: Music We All Love Has Done Way More Harm Than Miley Ever Will

Dear Carl,

I’m excited about the Handbook for Better Pop Listening we’ve assembled during this chat! Maybe it can be included in the next editions of Let’s Talk About Love. And I really appreciate you bringing up another subject some might find academic — American music’s deep historical roots in transgressions much more serious than the mild deceptions of Auto-Tune. Obviously, minstrelsy stands out, but beyond that one (once hugely popular) phenomenon, the many ways of belittling others through caricature and uncredited imitation that our rock and pop heroes have devised. The one-year anniversary of Twerkgate is almost upon us, and the crucial discussion about racism and cultural absorption it inspired has been shelved, it seems, to make room for less truly troubling forms of self-analysis — not to mention an endless stream of videos made by kids happy to take up Miley’s directives.

But the great thing about popular music, I think, is that it connects so deeply with our bodies that it can move us in new directions. For every time music has been used to promote misunderstanding and oppression, there are many more when it’s lifted people up, making them feel better within themselves and helping them better understand others whose differences they feared. I know that on one level, music is abstract — like a thought, as you say. But it’s also like a feeling, a real sensual and emotional pull. Music can make you feel like a room without a roof. When that’s happening, all the categories we build as thinkers recede, and whatever sound made it happen is glorious.

Love, not just talk,

AKP

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Barclays Stadium might be an athletic venue, but for the four nights that Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter performed there last summer, it became a coliseum of glitter, sequins and gold lamé. Justin Bieber calls his fans Beliebers, Lady Gaga calls hers the Little Monsters, and Beyoncé calls her most hardcore fans the “BeyHive.” As they clogged and crammed Atlantic Avenue, all trying to get to their Queen, the description never seemed more accurate.

Not everyone at the concert was a woman, and not everyone was bedazzled, but it was pretty remarkable how many of them were. At a Beyoncé concert are swarms, literally swarms, of women. There are some men there too, of course, but the women, and by this I mean every kind of woman you can imagine, they come invincible. They stride four abreast. They henpeck and flirt with the guards. They twerk in front of food kiosks while they wait in line to order snacks. They wear their best outfits — baggy vests and baseball caps, to dresses tight enough to look like bondage. They feel it. A Beyoncé concert is like one epic Beyoncé video. One can’t help but get into the fantasy. It is about the community. And even though it was a hot night in the city, inside Barclays the women were being nothing short of congenial. In the elevator going down to another level, I danced with two supersassy Delta sorors to “Blurred Lines” as it played over the loudspeaker. They high-fived me when we exited. In another concourse, I watched a rambunctious group of blonde women in six-inch heels buy shots and eat huge hamburgers under unforgiving stadium lighting, totally not giving a f- – – about their appetites or their table manners because at a Beyoncé concert absolutely none of that matters. If you wanted to evade security and crash a section that was closer to the stage, it was all good. If you couldn’t make up your mind about whether you wanted that really expensive T-shirt with a half-naked, bent-over Beyoncé emblazoned on its front, you could take your time because chances were the person behind you was giddy with the same excitement and indecision too. There was no judgment, because a Beyoncé concert is a world run totally by girls, and by that I mean women.

At this point, you don’t have to be a Beyoncé fan to acknowledge that Beyoncé Knowles-Carter, age 32, is the clear contender for the title of the hardest working woman in pop music. I was not left particularly breathless by her Super Bowl show, nor did I race to see it. I own only one of her albums, the one I think is her best until her most recent, B’Day, but over the years, ever since a friend gave me a pass to attend her intimate Roseland show in 2011 where backstage I watched a breathless, drenched Beyonce walk off stage like it was nothing, I’ve been forced to concede that, love her or not, there can be little doubt that Beyoncé is a behemoth of work ethic and sweat in nude salsa-dancer tights. She is the sort of woman who in between a 132-date world tour found time to record an entire album in absolute secret, film 17 music videos, and organize it all through her own fledgling company, Parkwood Entertainment, instead of her established record label, Columbia Records.

Over the years, Beyoncé has razored off friends and group members who slowed her down. She has become a dancer, a wife and a mother. And of late, Beyoncé has become a cultural lightning rod whose obsessive fans tell us loads about how conversations around sexuality and race still pervade American pop music. People care about Beyoncé for the same reason Camille Paglia and bell hooks cared about Madonna. If Madonna exemplified white female sexuality and independence coming into its own, Beyoncé shows her fans what it means for a black woman to put on the performance of a lifetime.

Like all superfans, the BeyHive to some extent thrives off the sense that their bond to the object of their affection is intimate and specific even when it is not. What is specific with someone like Beyoncé, the now equal-earning, if not out-earning, wife of a man worth a half-billion dollars, who obtained that money with her own blood, sweat and tears as a teenager in a girl group, and later out-Svengali-ed her looming, impresario father, broke off and eclipsed her groupmates to become one of the world’s most top-selling solo artists, is that her fans feel like they have been there for her success. They are proud of her. They have watched her grow up and watched her win. Beyoncé’s totemic status with the BeyHive is legendary. The Hive is fiercely protective of its Queen Bee. Besides Beyoncé’s concerts, the foremost apiary of the BeyHive is on the Internet, on Twitter. On Twitter, you can find the Hive massive and worldwide: the bugged out French teenagers, the Brazilians tweeting from Rio, the white boys in the Midwest with Broadway dreams, connected by their love of Beyoncé, all speaking in a lexicon that makes them sound like both the forefront of the beekeeping movement and the ultimate Beyoncé fans. If you insult Beyoncé on Twitter, the Hive will insult you until you rue the day you were born, or regret the day you canceled your gym membership.

After following one Hive member’s Twitter feed for hours (and discerning that she lives in the Deep South and is married despite being very young, and that she mostly tweets about three things: going to the casino, Beyoncé’s sales numbers and fighting with her husband for more money to feed her Beyoncé habit), I timidly sent her a message over Twitter: “Can I ask you a question?”

I was timid because her timeline revealed that she had spent her morning trying to get a Best Buy employee fired because he slipped her a link to download the album for free. This infuriated her. How will Beyoncé outsell Taylor Swift, Katy Perry and the “competition” with people like this, she wondered. Sometime the next day, she (I’ll call her “Angela”) followed me back. Angela wrote that she was down to talk with me about being a part of The BeyHive but with one condition: It had to be positive. She said she was all about positivity — something that seemed mildly ironic since for the last 48 hours she had made light of Rihanna for being a victim of domestic violence, mocked Taylor Swift’s flat ass and dissed anyone who admitted they were a fan of Tamar Braxton.

But as we corresponded back and forth, I watched her tweets take a kinder tone, so I agreed to her request and asked for her phone number. She wrote back that her phone was dying. So without thinking I sent her my number and told her to call me. When an hour passed without reply, I sent her another note, and I got a reply that revealed the tone had clearly changed. Angela was now highly pissed. “Who are you? Are you pulling my leg?” She wanted to know why’d I want to interview her. I wrote back and explained I’m a writer. Before I could finish she sent me another note: “I’m blocking you.” Her anger was almost palpable. I sent her a link to my work, and a few minutes passed. No reply, but when I checked her timeline again, I almost passed out. She had taken my information and posted a screenshot of it to all of her followers — not just her followers, but also the entire BeyHive, because she had captioned her tweets with that hashtag: #BEYHIVE

Of late, the Hive has gotten a bad name; everybody knows that they have a reputation for stunts like this. But what seemed less obvious, at least to me, was why they took their love affair with Beyoncé so seriously and exerted so much effort and so much venom in its defense.

Back at Barclays, this time months later, I stood outside, in the winter, at Beyoncé’s last show in Brooklyn and tried to get some of her fans to talk with me. I started with groups. People with “go-for-it” Beyoncé-like style. High heels. Studded loafers. Fur vests. Red talons. I approached one group of young ladies with Lady Godiva-long weaves and asked them if they would answer a few questions for a piece I’m working on.

“No, boo, no questions,” their “leader” said, holding her phone to her face like I was paparazzi. “We are late for the show.”

She herded her girls along. It didn’t matter that we both knew the show didn’t start for an hour. TMZ taught her well. After a few attempts like this, I gave up and decided to try the only people who couldn’t walk away from me: the security guards. At the least crowded entrance door I asked a guard, “What sort of fan comes to the Beyoncé show?” This guard, a middle-aged black woman, looked around furtively, and then she pointed to herself and then back to me without saying a word.

“Mostly black girls?” I inferred and whispered it back to her.

“Oh, yeah,” she said. She had a heavy Caribbean accent. Then her face got grave and she nodded, like the answer was apparent but also a secret. “It’s a mixture, yeah, but, yeah, it’s mostly us here.”

When I tried to verify this assessment of the crowd with another guard, who was also a middle-aged black woman, she balked, “Are you kidding me?” She laughed proudly. “Oh no! No way! No way! White people love Beyoncé. The gay guys? Please! Beyoncé? She is international.” She would not stop laughing, and before I could ask her something else, she walked away still scoffing at me and shaking her head.

I had the best luck with a young guy guard, who caught my eye because he was beaming like he had the best job in the world, and for that night maybe he did. He really didn’t want to talk. He was distracted, involved in doing his “job,” watching the crowd of women closely, but he tried his best to answer me.

Is the Hive mostly black girls? He repeated the question. “Man, the crowd is all sorts of people, look around,” he said. And he was right. To our left there was a vent of passengers pouring from the LIRR subway station with hordes of bridge and tunnel middle-aged moms and white girls in Uggs.

“See, there are all sorts,” he said confidently, and then he smiled, revealing a large chipped tooth. “The black girls, though? They just dress up, they get way, way more into it, so they stand out more. Because they take it seriously.”

It is true: There are all sorts of Hive members. But to me the ones with the best language, the ones whose Twitter feeds I couldn’t stop reading, were the black girls. What is interesting is that they are also a part of the demographic of black women who are now also being taken to task and called empty, subjective words like “toxic,” for their use and approbation of a technological space that is supposed to be open to all: Black Twitter. But the Hive, to some extent, and Black Twitter at large, is what happens when you don’t have real access to mainstream media, when there are so few black icons who speak to the realities of black life, and when last year (for the first time ever in Billboard‘s history) no black artist had a No. 1 hit song. It is no wonder then that so many young women and men of color, indeed, take it more seriously.

On the day the Hive will never forget, the Beyoncé album’s release day, I was in Chicago. I had longstanding plans to review Beyoncé’s concert that night at the home of the Bulls, United Center. It was bitterly cold. Before I went to the concert I checked Twitter, and there one Hive member, a young black girl, was tweeting joyfully about having tickets to the concert that night. Intermixed with her joy was anger. She said she couldn’t believe her family would “f- – – her over” like this. She had been kicked out of her home by an aunt. Later she would complain about the cold in Chicago. She was a college student who often tweeted maudlin to heartbreaking tweets about struggling all her life and going “Christmas shopping with no money.” That night it was below freezing in Chicago. When my sister and I stood outside and waited for our cab it was so cold I wanted to cry. Once inside United Center, as we waited for the show to start, I asked people questions: How much were their tickets? The girls beside us had spent $500. When I watched the Hive on Twitter, the only time they risked treason of their Queen was to complain about the high cost of showing their love. Didn’t she realize how expensive it was becoming to be devoted? Now, in retrospect, I realize somewhere in that crowd of thousands of people there was a girl without a home in the middle of winter to whom tickets to Beyoncé meant the entire world.

In Life Is But a Dream, Beyoncé’s film-length selfie/documentary, she leaps into the waters of the South of France and shows off her voluminous wedding dress. At one point we are shown a still-sexy silhouette of her pregnant belly — causing Beyoncé to lament that she can’t understand how someone could ever believe that she and Jay Z used a surrogate to have their child. Where did they come up with this? She asks incredulously. These rumors, these crazy legends, these stories? But Beyoncé’s parents are from that same pit of the American South that birthed not just the ragging rhythms and 2/4 meter her band interpolates into the finale of the Mrs. Carter show but also the most magical realism this country has ever seen. Beyoncé, who claims her Southern Creole heritage big time, must know that men and women like her mother and father come from a people who tell stories, people who dream big, hope huge and often invoke the devil or the supernatural as explanations for things outside their grasp or their understanding of reality. The thing Beyoncé doesn’t understand about all of the rumors surrounding her is that in the great tradition of that kind of storytelling, the thing beyond our grasp and most people’s realities is her. Beyoncé, either out of naïveté or innocence, is the last to accept what most people think — that she is not like us.

In her video for “Partition” Beyoncé slithers around her husband, a man who proves talent wins everything and capitalism can buy all if one accepts the blindfold it comes with, and she looks fantastic. In bell hooks’ essay “Selling Hot Pussy,” hooks writes about Tina Turner’s long, blond wig and her hot-to-trot savage sexuality as an inversion of “old imagery” to “place herself in the role of the dominator.” But as right as hooks is, about the blond hair and everything else, for an hour or so it is nice to watch Beyoncé’s visual album and consider the pleasure of a black woman who is able to express her sexuality without being called a ho, a video girl, a freak, a gold-digger or words worse. She can do what most of us cannot.

In 2011, a study released by the Violence Policy Center revealed that black women were murdered by men “at a rate of 2.61 per 100,000 in single victim/single offender incidents,” whereas with white women, the rate was 0.99 per 100,000. This seems like a slight difference but not when the popular perception of black women and girls is that they are antagonistic, “toxic,” tough, brassy and impossible to hurt.

Pop music, like most things in America, has an especially hard time with black women and their bodies, from Miley Cyrus’ use of them in her tired Jump Jim Crow antics to the condemnation of Rihanna’s wonderful wild. Rihanna is a popular target for the BeyHive, a person they often humiliate, maybe just because she is another big-deal black girl in pop music. Almost daily they post pictures of her beaten, swollen bruised face after Chris Brown’s vicious attack. It is gross and unforgivable, and something that could be reined in if Beyoncé actually communicated with her Hive regularly (she does not). But of late I’ve come to think that it speaks to something important about the BeyHive: I’m not certain they really hate Rihanna, or find joy in her hurt — instead I think what they really hate is that Rihanna knows firsthand, like so many women and girls, and perhaps like so many of them, that being violently hit by a man doesn’t ever feel like a kiss. It feels the opposite. It is a humiliation that is impossible to forget. So what I think the Hive hates about Rihanna is that there is no fun, no fantasy in that kind of knowledge of womanhood, just a reflection of the real but all-too-often silent life they too must wade through as young women of color in America.

And then there is Beyoncé. Who, like most black women, must work hard but, unlike most black women and girls, is endlessly well-defended. She will never be homeless. She will never be broken. She has no discernible dirty laundry. While her fans’ lives might be pocked with disappointments and failures, somehow their Queen’s life has largely avoided this. There are people who like to say hyperbolic, vapid things like, if you hate Beyoncé you must hate your life. Beyoncé is such a symbol of triumph that these people are willing to overlook her extremely problematic ties to the worst forms of capitalism (Pepsi, Wal-Mart and Barneys). But recently I’ve come to realize how much the Hive’s deep, at times blind investment in her isn’t so much about loving her one ton of talent but rather their defense of her place on the pedestal. They are in love with what she transmutes. What she is allowed to be. And Beyoncé does this more earnestly than the majority of singers today: she performs for them, shows them what a woman in successful control of her life sounds like. This is why they root for her. She gives her fans hope — as Tina Turner once did for women in the ’80s — a sense that they, too, might win at life and vanquish the hurt. Beyoncé is the rare exception who has beaten the odds, despite her being a woman, and despite her being a black woman.

A few days after Beyoncé’s album came out I was invited to join more than 40 women in a conference call about the album. Did I come in love? Adrienne Maree Brown, the facilitator of the call, asked me when I revealed I was on assignment. I replied that I came in sisterhood. Which is the word that kept circling in my head as I listened, almost awed into silence by these women, many of them women of color, who just wanted to be rapturous over the black woman who almost shut down Christmas. For one hour all that these women wanted was a private space to say “Beyoncé is my sister and I love her.”

Is Beyoncé a feminist? Is she a womanist? I don’t know. To me she is a cyborg. “Cyborg writing,” Donna Haraway tells us, “is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other.” What I appreciate about Beyoncé is that I understand and recognize the tools seized. This is not to say that these aspects in Beyoncé align neatly — they are indeed confusing — but they demand a right that is so often denied black women: the right to be a human, a character with many identities, many aspects, attitudes, vulnerabilities, joys, heartbreaks and realities. This is why, in many ways, the best and the most important videos on Beyonce’s new album aren’t the ones where she shows her perfected flesh while blithely singing that pretty hurts; they are instead the series of behind-the-scenes videos called the “Self-Titled” features where she shows us how she constructs her music, her package, her production. This is where she explains how she breastfed her daughter while in the studio, expresses her deep respect and devotion to her mother and sister and talks about her unbridled desire for her husband as a young wife. Twenty years ago, Donna Haraway wrote in her “Cyborg Manifesto” that she would rather be a cyborg than a goddess. She also wrote that “women of colour might be understood as a cyborg identity, a potent subjectivity synthesized from fusions of outsider identities.” If Beyoncé, who wears her engagement ring over a robotic glove in her “Single Ladies” video, doesn’t embody this sort of fusion, I don’t know who does. Women like her, Tina Turner and Josephine Baker show us the necessity of constantly remastering how you are seen by others, how you are understood, and, in the choreography of that dance of dominance and submission, they show us that the performance of a lifetime is one that you must do in the world, in practice and not just in theory, with all eyes on you.

So here is one more moment from that show in Chicago, at United Center, where Michael Jordan once soared across the court and made millions of boys and girls believe they could do something mythic and magical: Beyoncé was attached to a holster by members of her all-female band and lifted into the sky. The crowd sighed. In a blue sequined jumpsuit with blond hair that makes her look like them and yet still totally ours, Beyoncé set soar. The white man in front of me started to fan himself. It was indeed surreal. The Queen Bee had made the stadium into her hive, turned her skeptics into believers, and made everyone go hoarse singing her anthems: “If I Were a Boy,” “Survivor,” “Run The World (Girls).” I am not a Beyoncé fan but I felt like crying tears of joy all three times I saw the Mrs. Carter show. Because while other pop stars may sing about throwing some glitter on it and making it rain, only Beyoncé could literally soar over us, climb up over our heads and our real lives, climb over her kingdom, to actually throw down over us what looks like bits of pollen, golden confetti, and make it rain bits of her dream all over her fans who love her so, and who would do anything for their Queen.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Samba is typically heard on U.S. cable news exactly once a year as ambient audio in the background of coverage of the yearly Carnival celebrations in big Brazilian cities like Rio, Sao Paulo, Bahia and Recife. The stock news footage usually involves outlandish floats created by the large competitive samba schools — spectacles involving thousands of dancers in costume, as well as hundreds of drummers and musicians. At the big Rio competition, the schools perform in front of a massive audience — tickets to the Sambadrome can cost over $1,000 — and vie for honors in many different categories like best song, etc.

That’s the tourist version of samba, and it only represents a small slice of an incredible thriving music culture. There’s a parallel samba universe that goes on all year long, on neighborhood streets and small clubs and little kiosks by the beach. This goes by various names — samba de roda (samba wheel) is the most common term, but it’s also known as “samba popular” or “roots samba.” It involves as few as five or six musicians, sitting around facing each other at what looks like a conference room table, playing cherished samba hits from years past as well as original compositions. The audience stands surrounding the table, often completely encircling the musicians. If you see a random cluster of people and hear drumming, there’s usually samba going on. Nobody is standing still, however; the throngs are usually dancing and singing along. In the Sambadrome, you simply watch; on the street, there’s no show biz. Everyday people expect to participate.

Ivan Milanez is one of the elders of what might be described as a growing “roots samba” movement. I caught him in several different groups, in a tiny bar in the Lapa nightclub district of Rio, and when I interviewed him later, he explained that he believes playing in clubs is an act of “cultural resistance” because so much of samba culture in Rio is geared to tourists. In his group and others, the crucial distinguishing characteristic is obviously size — if the samba schools are symphony orchestras, these roots samba groups are like string quartets. There is nothing like the thundering clap-clap-clap sounds made by 250 or more drummers, of course, but when the scale is reduced, it’s possible to hear more of the nuances of the rhythm, and how the individual instruments fit together and interact. Of course, many of the musicians who play in smaller groups are part of a big samba school as well — as a result, some of these ensembles have a zinging, supercharged energy. But that’s not all. The roots samba groups play samba as it’s been done since the 1930s, and that means there’s usually a crisp chordal rhythm provided by the high-pitched, ukulele-like four-string cavaquinho, and then scampering single-note runs from the acoustic guitar. Though some of the nuances of samba have changed over the decades, the core rhythm and the basic outlines remain constant.

Another difference between the samba schools and their smaller counterparts: tempo. In the Sambadrome, everything is super-fast, paced for maximum dazzle. The schools have a fixed amount of time for the overall presentation, and are judged not only on their overall time, but if the song started and ended at the same tempo. Over the years, competitive samba has become faster and faster — one of the directors of the Tijuca school, who goes by the name CasaGrande, lamented that the demands of the “show” element have pushed tempos into the realm of frantic. When you hear samba de roda, the music can be much slower, more relaxed — it’s music made for a slow couples dance. They crank out fast samba, too, and it just flies along as though propelled by breeze. Just as happens in jazz, there’s a much wider range of tempos and grooves that’s possible with a small group.

There aren’t that many great studio recordings of this “roots samba” because part of what makes it go is the interaction between the musicians and the audience — as soon as one of these groups kicks into a well-known tune, you feel something like an electric surge running through the crowd. A group led by guitarist Moacyr Luz is one of the larger “roots samba” ones, they perform at an unusual weekly event called “The Worker’s Samba” that begins around 6 p.m. As you’d expect, in Rio and Bahia the nightlife doesn’t really get going until around 11 at night, preventing many folks who work dayjobs from participating. The samba social club “Renesancia” remedies that with a show that doesn’t cost a lot and is over by 9 or 10. Here, you couldn’t miss the connections between generations. There were kids with the image of the great samba composer Cartola on their t-shirts, and lots of youngsters playing percussion next to their fathers, apprenticing, so to speak. They all seem to know some of the big Carnival songs from the 1960s.

One of the most incredible things about samba is how it really does transcend age — one drummer told me “We get samba in the womb here” and you can tell. At some of the samba de roda events I caught, there were young people dancing with grandmothers, toddlers on their father’s shoulders, etc. It’s not uncommon to see very young drummers standing in the circle, contributing and learning at the same time.

One of the pioneering samba composers, Cartola, began writing songs in the 1930s, but was not recognized by the Rio public until a career resurgence in the 1960s. His music forms the template for roots samba. Among the biggest surprises for me was how much of this more subtle samba takes place in Rio, much of it for free and nearly all of it (even the cheesy stuff at the beach kiosks that’s aimed to tourists) executed at a high musical level. On any given night, there’s usually a choice of several well-known groups, either in clubs where they might play for 100 people, or in outdoor spaces like the historic site known as Pedro do Sal, which many consider the “birthplace” of samba. This weekly event was fairly incredible — it draws thousands of young Cariocas to the port zone of Rio, where they cram into a small cobblestone street for samba that’s funded by the government. (A sign for the event proclaimed, “Here, the samba is respected.”)

Among musicians, this notion of respecting samba seems to be gaining traction. Samba can be somewhat nostalgic anyway — it often expresses sadness over lost love or a lost way of life. But curiously there’s not much nostalgia in the performances — you sense that the musicians are immersed in the here-and-now business of making the song relevant to the present moment. Everywhere I went, I encountered musicians who are passionate about the small-group samba style — as a creative outlet, not just some folk heritage form that needs “preserving.” Though they are particular about the elements of the music, in a bit of a jazz-purist way, they’re not trying to freeze samba culture at any “golden age” point in time. This is huge, and unlike anything we have in the U.S.: In Brazil, the people are invested in samba because it activates memory, brings them back to a simpler time and all the things that music does. But when a performance starts, it’s not a looking-back exercise for the musicians or the listeners. When the older women lean their heads back and sing along, they’re remembering and forgetting at the same time. And in this way, the music is endlessly renewed each time.

I believe this is one reason the smaller-scale samba is growing — it’s old and new all at once. Rio is in the midst of incredible change, what with the World Cup this year and the Olympics in 2016. Some people I spoke with say that there’s increasing worry about the city losing its unique cultural identity, so people are holding on to every bit of carnival tradition, and samba, that most visible export, is a serious matter. Amongst the musicians I interviewed, many expressed concern that the tourist samba would completely overshadow the more low-key small-group approach that many musicians prefer to play. Some lament that the samba has gone completely commercial, and is in danger of losing its soul.

From one perspective, it’s a sign of a healthy art form that so many people are concerned about its future. Given how much samba is available, and how much of it is often free and played at a breathtaking level of musical accomplishment, it’s hard for an outsider to share that concern. Then again, it’s hard for an outsider to begin to fathom the place samba occupies in the Brazilian imagination. One shirt I saw several times sums it up: “Samba is Life!”

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Earlier this month, the largely unknown Queens, N.Y., rapper Shirt sent out a notice to his email list informing his subscribers that his “NY TIMES piece hit yesterday morning,” accompanied by a link. (He also tweeted the link with no comment.) Purportedly bylined by Times critic and hip-hop go-to guy Jon Caramanica, the piece was tellable as a fake — while Shirt convincingly re-created the Times‘ website and cut and pasted some of Caramanica’s phrases from published pieces, the prose, syntax and journalistic approach were off. One writer noted that the piece referred to an “e-mail,”whereas the Times style would be to render the word as “email,” sans hyphen. (There were also navigational quirks, if you actually cared to click around.)

As far as moves like these go, Shirt’s trick was sweetly middle of the road — it wasn’t the over-the-top corporate shakeover of Jay Z’s Samsung deal, the narcissistic subversiveness of Kanye’s “New Slaves” video projections, or the blindsiding release of Beyonce’s album-length surprise party. But it wasn’t the lowbrow move that most rappers of few resources make — Shirt didn’t self-servingly start a uninteresting beef, eagerly jump on the catchiest instrumental of the week or remake another artist’s album as a gimmick. (Though he did rap over Purity Ring’s debut album in 2012.) As he tweeted, “I promise you there’s a huge difference between doing ‘whatever it takes’ and doing some cold s- – – to get people talking.”

Part publicity trick and part propaganda, the phony article has been lauded as “the ultimate viral stunt” and dismissed as “so desperate for press” — with Fusion.net noting that “Shirt scored a pretty decent hit — hello, we’re talking about him now,” while Complex seemed surprised that it had written about him previously. But it’s all part of the noise of the cybersnake eating its own virtual tail. In the weeks since the stunt, the media and the conversation, even the insular conversation about the relationship between hip-hop artists and the media, has moved on. Not only has Drake retired (and most likely unretired) from giving interviews to the “evil press,” Kanye has threatened to physically assault journalists and Rick Ross has made at least one writer question his career choice. A long-held understanding in the music industry is that press doesn’t sell records or concert tickets, making it one of the most minor considerations after marketing, radio and video promotions. But the press, through the enchanting power of a good narrative, has always been able to build careers. And in these days when even records don’t sell records — the traditional campaigns don’t have the scope to infiltrate the multiple screens and splintered ways consumers experience music today — the publicity department, the redheaded stepchild of most record labels, is more important than it has been in decades, even as reliable news outlets wither and die.

Explaining himself in an interview with hip-hop blog NahRight, Shirt shared the motive behind his caper. “When people hear my s- – -, as far as fans and bloggers, they’re like, ‘This kid’s nasty,’ ” he shared. “I did something for [Peter] Rosenberg, and it did really well. But I’m not sure what it will take to ‘break through.’ A lot of people say it’s co-signs. That’s a little sad, but I get it. If Jay Z puts a link to the Times article, and he writes #newrules, I’m outta here.”

It’s an accurate and concise reading of hip-hop’s digital landscape. Despite the democratizing promises of Web 2.0 and the DIY-ism of social media, the reality is that the game has only changed guards, with bloggers and pre-established entities that have successfully shifted their brands to the Internet being the new gatekeepers. Aside from novelty acts and one-hit wonders, the Internet hasn’t produced any rap stars that have crossed over into the mainstream proper. It’s been a boon for ostensibly indie rappers like Mac Miller and allowed fringe acts like Odd Future to gain a niche foothold, while giving older rappers an extended lease on their careers — but the names atop hip-hop’s marquee (Jay Z, Kanye West, Lil Wayne, Drake, Nicki Minaj, Kendrick Lamar) owe their status to co-signs, being grandfathered in or major label push.

What the Internet has significantly produced is twofold. First, it’s given rise to midlevel stars like Wiz Khalifa, A$AP Rocky and Chief Keef, and a new underground of rappers like Curren$y, Migos and Azealia Banks who are bigger on computer screens, clubs and stages than on radio waves or Billboard charts. Second, and possibly more annoyingly, it’s created a class of derided “struggle rappers” who flood cyberspace with untold terabytes of music, videos and unrequested solicitations to assumed power players on Twitter in an effort to be heard. Where the former group creates a strong middle class that keeps the genre from becoming too bottom heavy, the latter group mostly contributes to the overall noise level by subsidizing the “content”-hungry sites that sometimes post dozens of entries per day.

It’s an incredible and almost impossible storm to break through, especially for an artist like Shirt. Previously known as T.Shirt, he’s an enjoyably nimble and abrasive rapper who has been paying his dues by remaining on the borders of the various hip-hop ecosystems that funnel new artists toward fan awareness. Though he’s largely straightforward as a rapper, he doesn’t collaborate with outsiders much, nor is he affiliated with any rap clique; he doesn’t release material in torrents and his artistic outlook feels most inspired by the downtown New York scene of the early ’90s. He makes atypical videos and songs and is decidedly SEO-unfriendly — his name is Shirt, his website is illrapper.com, his latest album is simply titled Rap. Given that he’s smart enough to kinda sorta fake The New York Times, one would think that he’s aware that his naming choices are likely to land him no earlier than Page 20 of a Google search. It’s an exact defiance of the common wisdom — today’s rappers tend to go for unique names or substitute a “$”for an “S” to be more searchable.

Another aspect of the stunt is that it’s an actual ruse — much more akin to those “news reports” selling weight loss supplements than an obvious promotion. Shirt even acknowledges this in the fake profile (which he wrote), quoting himself as saying, “I’ll f- – -ing fake a Times article” and acknowledging his (very SEO-worthy) shirtf- – -edrihanna.com campaign, which is a nod to famed New York graffiti legend Adam Cost’s “COST f- – -ed Madonna” run of the 1990s. “Like, ‘Look at the s- – – I’m pulling from,’ ” he said to NahRight. “It’s not just out of the blue. It’s not just to get attention. Yeah, I know the name of the game is to get people to look at your s- – -. But I’m doing things for a few different reasons. It’s cool to me. The s- – – that people do to promote albums is all over the place anyway. It ranges from the most crazy, f- – -ed up s- – -, to the most boring s- – -. So this is my entry point. Like, ‘Let’s really do some new s- – -.’ ”

This desire to do new s- – – rings true because in the material he’s released in the past four years — the albums, the singles, the videos — Shirt has never come off as starving for attention. He’s often smiling, seldom pensive and never portrayed (directly or indirectly) as desperate. He’s never quite laid out his endgame — putting one of his better albums on sale for $3 and making the rest available free; his music is without agenda. Does he want to become a major star? Does he want to be the next King of New York? Who knows. On “Never LOL” he rapped: “I don’t need rap, boy — I coulda did photography / I don’t need rap, man — f- – – it, it’s a mockery / It’s probably harder to make it in rap than hit the lottery / But I’ll be God-damned if I let it slip by me.” It’s as if he wants it and doesn’t want it at the same time.

While his stated goals are art and promotion (which, again, is in opposition to his Google-resistant titling), Shirt (perhaps unwittingly) has made telling commentary about the hip-hop journalism playing field. In the wake of his stunt, he’s generated more thoughtful digital ink than he has in four years of putting out actual product. It underscores his notion that the proper endorsement means more than the quality of music in becoming part of the public discussion, with the corollary being that deftly faking the proper endorsement can mean more than the endorsement itself — the press and attention Shirt garnered may actually have proved more valuable than an actual profile on the front page of the Times‘ website. In his role at the Times, Jon Caramanica doesn’t and hasn’t broken any artists; and the argument that any specific piece of journalism correlates to a marketplace bump is full of holes.

For one, these days, more than ever, the tail is wagging the dog. Most music blogs exist as echo chambers and de facto public relations platforms, while accredited journalists tend to churn out stories reflecting the trending topics on search engines and social networks. Shirt escaped the circular fray and elevated himself above dozens of rappers of equal skill, accessibility and resources in the battle to be chosen by a rap writer just by making his story hookier than those of his peers — no one wants to write about a boring person. In one move, he made himself both interesting and of the moment.

The idea that gimmicks may not sell records but they will get people talking is nothing new. This time, though, because of our abbreviated attention spans and compressed hype cycles, Shirt’s big splash came and went. Likewise, the Drake Rolling Stone kerfuffle was a hot topic for a day or two, before everyone went back to tearing through House of Cards like there was a prize at the bottom. Hip-hop has long led the way for music industry innovation — much like porn has for distribution and assimilation of technology. If the biggest stories (even the fake ones) now have a life span shorter than that of houseflies, the human psyche may never be the same. Shirt’s prank was a teachable moment about the nature of music journalism in this day and time. But it peaked and quickly disappeared with no real lessons learned.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Output is a club in Brooklyn, open one year, and the hub of Williamsburg’s increasingly robust dance-music presence. Their schedule is a who’s-who of the international DJ scene, either via the club’s own bookings or through external promoters such as Bryan Kasenic of The Bunker, which throws its parties regularly at Output; Q-Tip has a regular DJ gig there as well. Its no-photo policy and lack of promotional interviews, as well as its talent buys, clearly mark it as a destination spot, as does its Funktion-One sound system, widely (though not unanimously) considered the best in the biz.

I have deeply mixed feelings about Output. The staff is very friendly, which is refreshing, and the music is loud and clear from all angles. There are lights and speakers throughout the rectangular venue, so even the upstairs, where soft benches line the two long sides, can and do function as dance floors, and the crowds tend toward the friendly as well. But it’s been assembled so carefully it feels antiseptic. It’s a tough place to feel truly at home in. There’s no grit, no sense that something unexpected might occur. There’s been a lot of overstatement in the passel of memorials for the recently shuttered DIY venue 285 Kent, but it’s easy to see why someone might have loved that hole. It’s harder to imagine anyone loving — not liking, loving — Output.

That isn’t nearly the case with its side venue, the Panther Room, where the second floor is way higher than the dance floor, like a lodge in the Pacific Northwest; it has a dozen times the character of the main room. It was partly because I’d first understood that Skrillex was playing the Panther Room that I wanted to see him there; the other was more purely voyeuristic, not to mention journalistic. It helps that I like Skrillex as a producer and DJ — his edition of BBC Radio 1’s Essential Mix was one of my favorite sets of last year. But in the end, I’m glad I saw him in the main room, because the smaller venue would have been unbearable. It was difficult enough at times to move through a space four times the Panther Room’s size.

The Output appearance was part of what Skrillex’s people, and thus the media, referred to as a “Brooklyn takeover,” meaning he was playing in a number of venues during Fashion Week — some secret parties, some not. (Output wasn’t one of the secret shows.) Often, this sort of event blitz lays the groundwork for a big upcoming album or its like, but for Skrillex, moves like these are the norm. He likes to hit-and-run, dropping in on each of the first two Holy Ship! EDM cruises unannounced and making a cameo during Alvin Risk’s set on the first weekend of last year’s Ultra Music Festival. (The two released a single together, “Try It Out,” this winter.)

It’s also, in a way, a demonstration of legitimacy. Yes, Skrillex can get hundreds of people to show up at a random warehouse with little notice; hell, Skrillex could sell out Madison Square Garden if he wanted to. But these hit-and-runs display him as a gigging DJ who likes to throw parties, and keeping things relatively low-key means he can mess around more than when he’s sitting in a hydraulic contraption cuing literal fireworks to go off. Legitimacy is the bulwark Output upholds, so seeing Skrillex there made far more sense than imagining the club booking, say, the cake-throwing Steve Aoki.

The night began with Tommie Sunshine, who played his first raves when Skrillex was five years old. He opened with some vintage sounding garage — whose pulsing, on-beat keyboard parts have a sensuous punch to them that, on that big system, revealed themselves as precursors to the body-centricity of wobbly dubstep bass, riffs traveling through the body as well as the ear. Sunshine spent an hour traveling through a lot of earlier house and garage before shifting gears, subtly but surely, to the EDM present, dot-connecting to new tracks like the Morse-code riffing “Gecko,” by Oliver Heldens, to the Disco Fries’ “Philtrum,” whose lockstep laser-bass drops had some enthusiastic dudes getting their Riverdance on upstairs around a quarter to midnight.

This is a good time to mention that this was, point blank, the nicest crowd I’ve been in for a long time — absolutely no attitude, everyone focused on the music and their friends, politeness the rule. Everyone seemed to genuinely be enjoying herself. I had wondered about this going in — a den of vanguard dance music hosting the most paradigmatic artist of the new dance mainstream; who would win the tug of war? The answer is no one, because no tug of war existed. Some people dressed up more than others, but in the main there was almost no flash, by which I mean neon. These were adults, not the younger kids you see at many of the big festivals (or, I’m told, the warehouse events Skrillex played elsewhere in Brooklyn). You could barely move on the dance floor, but elsewhere there was little of the harried jostling for position that usually accompanies a big show in a small space like this one — especially during Fashion Week.

Moreover, they were adults with jobs and lives outside the club. Often, what separates EDM fans from the folks who usually go to Output — Pitchfork writer Tim Finney once suggested the term “dahnce,” pronounced with a Euro or Aussie tinge, to differentiate the hipster-leaning stuff from the mainstream — is class. At Skrillex there was a noticeable thinning out around two a.m., halfway into his set. (It filled back up in a hurry, rest assured.) These were, in the main, ordinary people who liked this guy so much they were willing to stand out in the freezing rain for (at least) an hour to make sure they got in to see him. They came for a good time, and they got it.

That good time had two clear parts. Skrillex came on after the unfortunately named Bro Safari, whose trap-dubstep-etc. mélange was a lot more fully amalgamated than the headliner’s first hour (not to mention the more self-conscious variants on the same template a few months ago at the Brooklyn Electronic Music Festival). The first half of Skrillex’s set was full of new material that leaned on rough house beats far more than dubstep ones, and including plenty of quick cameos from obvious touchstones: the Prodigy’s 1996 “Firestarter,” (I think) Switch’s 2005 “A Bit Patchy,” Bingo Players’ 2011 “Cry (Just a Little),” and, from last year, A$AP Ferg and A$AP Rocky’s “Shabba” (which also popped up during Sunshine’s set) and Green Velvet’s “Bigger Than Prince” — all reliable thrills, anchoring a set with a lot of change-ups, little of it holding still for more than a minute or so.

None of it cohered like the Essential Mix or hit-you-like-a-kiss the way his Electric Zoo set in 2012 did; clearly it’s a work in progress. That’s the advantage of doing small shows for the diehards — you can figure things out in real time for a real crowd. The other advantage, especially for the diehards, is that the second half of Skrillex’s set was far more brutish and bass-heavy — filled with his big hits (“Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites,” “Bangarang,” his remix of Nero’s “Promises“), the way Neil Young might throw in “Heart of Gold” after six or seven previously unheard songs, a reward for letting the headliner stretch out.

It was a needed energy boost. The rivet-gun bass lines’ return certainly seemed to relieve some of the audience, including one guy on the second floor whose air-beatdown aggro dance looked like he’d learned it from the fight scene of an old Fleischer Brothers Popeye short. They also made it plain how uneven the Skrillex corpus is: “Bangarang,” yes now and forever (especially following TWRK’s “Badinga!” like it did Thursday); his Doors “collabo,” not so much. The latter anchored the set’s most cartoony stretch, full of bass lines woolly and willful as finger paintings. When they tightened up, those dubstep clichés breathed and gained force, like straightening a frame on a wall and bringing a room into focus.

Not that a regular-sized club with a super-sized headliner can be called “unfocused,” precisely — even with Skrillex getting on the mike too many times, an energy-diffuser in this context. (None of these folks needed his instruction to scream when the bass lines dropped.) But in a space that can feel too streamlined for its own good, Skrillex’s rambunctiousness was a tonic — just as it was an up to see someone who could remain an aloof pop phenomenon get his hands dirty for people willing to do the same for him. In the best possible way, they deserve each other.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

In early February 1963 — a year before the Beatles arrived in New York for The Ed Sullivan Show — Chicago DJ Dick Biondi spun a 45 from the small Vee-Jay label by a group whose name was misspelled B-E-A-T-T-L-E-S.

At the age of 83, Dick Biondi is still on the air at WLS-FM in Chicago. “I didn’t know what to think, because they were good,” he says. “Is this going to be a hit? I just played it and I liked it. And I got — not a lot of good comment, but I didn’t get any bad comment.”

Three months later, Biondi was fired, and he wound up at KRLA in Los Angeles. He played the record again there. “The phones started ringing, and the kids said, ‘Take that crap off and play the Beach Boys!’ ”

“Please Please Me” was a flop. A follow-up single, “From Me To You,” did a little better, but the Beatles version stalled when American Del Shannon, of “Runaway” fame, recorded and released his own version.

Before 1964, few British performers had made a dent in U.S. charts, so it wasn’t surprising that, given the choice to play an unknown British band or an American hitmaker’s version, most DJs went with Shannon, says Beatles historian Bruce Spizer.

“Back in the ’60s, particularly the early ’60s, we were by no means living in a global community,” he says. “Britain was this far-off, exotic place across the pond. And initially that probably worked against the Beatles in that it was considered, you know, foreign and nothing that we really need here.”

“Across the pond” the Beatles had already cracked the Top 10, but here Capitol Records, the major label with rights to distribute the Beatles in the U.S., passed on their next disc, too.

“She Loves You” wound up being released by the tiny Swan label out of Philadelphia in September 1963. Spizer says the label tried to get Dick Clark to spin it. American Bandstand was broadcast nationally out of Philadelphia. “He went ahead and had the record on his ‘rate a record’ segment. The records that did well would score in the 80s or 90s. ‘She Loves You’ scored in the low 70s.”

Another washout for the Beatles. The game changer for them came Halloween night 1963. The story goes that CBS variety show host Ed Sullivan just happened to be at London’s airport, when thousands of fans were awaiting the Beatles’ return from a tour of Sweden.

“Of course he’d never heard of the Beatles,” says Sullivan biographer Jerry Bowles, “but instantly he recognized that if they could get 3,000 screaming teenagers to show up at an airport in the middle of the night, they must be somebody.”

Five nights later, the Beatles got the attention of the international press by playing for an upper-crust British audience, including members of the royal family, at London’s Prince of Wales Theatre for the Royal Command Performance. Beatles manager Brian Epstein headed for New York the next day, and soon inked a deal with Sullivan. Major American newsmagazines and TV networks also did stories on the Beatles after that Royal Command Performance. One aired on CBS the morning of Nov. 22, 1963.

“Those are the Beatles and this is Beatleland, formerly known as Britain,” said the reporter, “where an epidemic known as Beatlemania has seized the teenage population, especially female.”

The story might very well have aired again that night, but at 1 p.m. CST, President John F. Kennedy died in Dallas. CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite decided to sit on the Beatles story for three weeks, while the country mourned the loss of JFK.

But by Dec. 10, Cronkite felt the country could use the diversion and re-aired the Beatles piece. Fourteen-year-old Marsha Albert of Silver Spring, Md., saw the broadcast and wrote WWDC radio requesting Beatles music. DJ Carroll James arranged to have a copy of the British release of “I Want To Hold Your Hand” hand-carried from England. He played it eight days before Christmas 1963.

The response in D.C., St. Louis and Chicago — where DJs got copies of the record from James — was so great that Capitol Records rush-released the single the day after Christmas. Beatles historian Spizer calls that move brilliant.

“Kids are not in school. And they listened to the radio in those days. There are no video games. Kids that have Christmas and Hanukkah money and Mommy and Daddy can take them to the record store, and the next thing you know ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ is a humongous hit in New York and other cities follow.”

Biondi and many others since have said America used the Beatles’ exuberance to chase away the clouds of JFK’s assassination. Since they weren’t from here, it seemed OK for the boisterous Brits to put an end to the mourning period. The Beatles were suddenly all over the radio everywhere. Capitol Records dumped a then unprecedented $50,000 into promotion, creating perhaps the first artist “street teams.”

“They were doing many creative things. Posters, all sorts of things. Giving away ‘Be a Beatle Booster’ buttons. Encouraging people to wear Beatle wigs,” says Spizer. “They got very much into it and really created the concept of marketing directly to the consumer, which of course is done all the time today, but at the time was revolutionary.”

And the Beatles’ U.S. arrival was still more than a month away. With the buzz building, NBC’s Jack Paar pulled a scoop on rival Ed Sullivan on Jan. 3 that almost derailed the Beatles express. Paar and Sullivan were fierce competitors, and Paar got Beatles performance footage from the BBC to air on his program ahead of Sullivan.

“The Beatles are an extraordinary act in England. I think they’re the biggest thing in England in 25 years,” said Paar in his report. “These guys have these crazy hairdos and when they wiggle their head and the hair goes, the girls go out of their minds.”

Sullivan was absolutely livid. And he contacted his European talent coordinator, Peter Prichard, and told him to cancel the Beatles. Fortunately a day or two later Sullivan realized that it would be a mistake to cancel the Beatles so he called up Prichard and canceled the cancellation.

And so, the Beatles arrived on Feb. 7, played two days later, and the story from there is burned into American consciousness.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.