If you’re not paying attention to hip hop right now you’re missing kind of an important cultural moment. The Tyler, The Creator album, Flower Boy, that just debuted at #2, barely behind Lana Del Ray’s new album? It’s basically a coming out album, where he stopped with the fictional narratives and vulgar alter egos of his earlier albums and put the real, vulnerable side of himself out there. People have picked apart specific lines and verses from the album ad nauseam, but it suffices to say that one of the big, overarching themes of Flower Boy is the loneliness and isolation of the closet, and it’s got the best début of any hip hop album that dropped last week.
Category Archives: Pop Culture
RIP Carrie Fisher
We talk about representation in media, and I think it matters that my first princess wasn’t someone in a castle waiting to be rescued by a prince, it was Princess Leia being a badass. Yes, Princess Leia got captured by Jabba, but she got captured while she was the one playing the hero and rescuing of Han Solo. Then she rescued herself by strangling Jabba with her chains, which is seriously badass.
On public mourning when Evangelical culture kept you in the dark
My Twitter feed is full of remembrances from queer people tweeting about how much George Michael meant to them as kids, watching his videos and recognizing something of themselves in him. They all have these memories of his music as the soundtrack of their youth, while meanwhile the soundtrack of my teen years was Steve Taylor singing about how much God hates me.