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- story THE FADER
Having lived and worked in New York City just long enough that I barely even notice
anymore when a giant rat swaggers across the subway platform but totally
freak out when a certain goat cheese isn’t in stock at the farmer’s market, I
find myself less and less in tune with the rest of America with every passing
day. This place does that to people, it seems. But I’ve lived in 12 cities and visited
47 states in my life—Oregon, Washington and Alaska, the holdouts—taken
countless road trips across the country and seen just about every historically
significant landmark on the map. This has always been a great source of pride
for me, a unique experience thanks to parents with a wanderlust not seen
since Genghis Khan. It actually worries me that one day I might wake up and
be nothing but another New Yorker.
Six years ago, I took my last cross-country road trip, from Washington, DC,
to Los Angeles, California. I drove down the southern Atlantic coast, turned in
to Atlanta, went down through New Orleans and San Antonio, then back up
through El Paso, Las Cruces, Flagstaff and the desert, before finally reaching
the Pacific Ocean. Along the way, I met a bunch of gas station attendants,
even more bartenders and one disoriented young couple who’d just rolled
their pickup truck off the side of the highway. I had a long conversation with a
voodoo doll in the French Quarter, talked to myself for several hours in White
Sands and stayed in the Michael J. Fox room at the Hotel Monte Vista. I have
pictures of all this if you want to see them. My dog, Mookie Wilson, was with
me, and because he had his head out the passenger window the whole trip,
we ended up talking to people every time we stopped. Of all those people
along those 3,477 miles, not one told us to get out of town. In fact, I felt like we
could have stayed in any of the hundreds of places we drove through for as
long as we wanted.
Hopefully, reading this issue, you’ll feel the same way. Along with Peter
van Agtmael’s and Victoria Sambunaris’ stunningly disparate portraits of
America, our covers feature stories on two disparate Americans: Justin Vernon
bka Bon Iver, from Eau Claire, Wisconsin; and Dam-Funk, from Los Angeles,
California. Each has a bond with his place of birth that both reflects normal
loyalty and transcends it. Dam never really left LA but is trying to bring its vast
diversity together through time-capsule boogie, and Vernon came back to Eau
Claire to prove its worth to the rest of the country with his particular brand of
indecipherable folk rock. Both are heady aspirations, but wildly inspiring. As
someone who’s never really had a hometown but been all over, they make me
think about the places I’ve been and where I am now, whether I want to ride
for this city or try to reconnect with another one. Maybe the only way to find
out is to grab the dog and some beef jerky and head out on the open road.
—PETER MACIA
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- story THE FADER
When I was four, my dad let me walk in front of him holding the bar on the lawnmower while he cut the front yard of our little house outside Dallas, Texas. I probably begged him for hours, if not days, to let me do this. That night, I went to bed wheezing, unable to take even shallow breaths, and was rushed to the emergency room. I slept in a tent for a hot minute after that and don’t recall it being all that bad (lots of ice cream), I just remember my mom sitting there the whole time. My dad must have felt terrible, but he shouldn’t have, because I was psyched to push that stupid lawnmower—though I definitely abused this trauma as an excuse not to mow the family lawn on many, many subsequent Saturdays. Remember the tent, Dad! Ironically, I ended up being a landscaper about 20 years later for a solid chunk of time, a weird, wandering choice frowned upon by both of my parents, but a choice that taught me a fair share of the lessons that still inform everything I do every day.
That story—how a seemingly trivial parental decision can change a life forever, in both good ways and bad—resonates a lot in this issue. Our two covers feature artists who’ve taken oddly parallel paths to get here. Drake, whose distant father and uncle are professional musicians, has clearly leaned on his mother and grandmother for stability during a rocket rise to near superstardom. Christopher Owens, who along with JR White makes Girls, has a distant father who is an amateur musician, and he clearly owes everything he’s become to his mother’s mistakes. Drake’s and Owens’ trajectories are wildly different, but their origins and destinations appear eerily similar. And each writes songs about loving and dreaming with a similar refreshing honesty, particularly on Girl’s anthemic “Hellhole Ratrace” in which Owens sings I don’t wanna cry my whole life through/ No, I wanna do some laughing too/ So come on, come on, come on, come on, and laugh with me and Drake’s “Successful” with his lyric, In person I am everything and more/ I’m everywhere these other niggas never been before/ But inside I’m treading water steady trying to swim to shore/ I’m on a shopping spree to get whatever is in store. One rising up from the bottomless pits, the other seemingly descending from the stars. Maybe they’ll meet on a future Super Bowl halftime show that I can watch with a child I’ll hopefully have by then and say, “By the way, [child’s name], don’t ever, ever ask Gramps to mow the lawn. He has no idea what
he’s doing.”
—PETER MACIA
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- story THE FADER
In the past, we’ve dedicated this issue to fallen idols—Miles Davis, Nina Simone, Jerry Garcia, Aaliyah—and tried to reshape or recapture what makes them important to our generation. All of which has been very respectful and provided reason enough to get trashed on jazz cigarettes and dip tie-dyes in the office while blasting luxuriously reissued box sets. But right now, New York City, and presumably the rest of the country since we don’t really pay attention, is in a sorry state. Our favorite (other) magazines, newspapers, stockbrokers, stockbrokees, good word writers, neat thing designers, crush creators, milkshake makers and baby mothers are scraping the bottom of the proverbial peanut butter jar. The good times are tapped out, so we’ve taken it upon ourselves to zap them back to life via the uptight lank and nerd swagger of the white shocked funk master: David Byrne. As iconic as any other we’ve chosen, Byrne is a symbol of New York City survival—molding Talking Heads in a barren Queens warehouse during the low point late ’70s, operating a one-man global inspiration outfit out of the most covetous Manhattan loft we’ve ever seen in the high rent late ’00s. Today, Byrne remains the principled, curious, generous and acceptably eccentric cosmopolitan we all aspire to be. He lives downtown, has fabulous friends, can do whatever he wants and say whatever he feels. What he chooses to do and say is make art, make music, design bike racks, build interactive sound sculptures, collaborate like crazy and defend humanity on his online journal. He is us. He is New York. And New York, to us, is everything.
Though Byrne has forsaken our always-under-construction, fare-hiked and service-cut subway system for bicycles and fresh air, we still see him as a central station on the (musical) map: for proof, check out the “life map” rendered by urban cartographers Zero Per Zero with Grizzly Bear, Michael Bell-Smith, Theophilus London, Micachu and The Shapes and the Dutty Artz collective, all posted at the nearest ends of Byrne’s creative lines and laying the tracks for further expansion. These new artists are extending his vision into the—we hope—utopian future (which, judging by their addresses, will be headquartered in Brooklyn). Lest we forget the past, we also asked one of the key figures of the downtown New York arts scene, writer/musician/denizen of radness Vivien Goldman, to write a personal essay about Byrne’s place as the American ambassador of the beat. And naturally, since he was around kicking it with the Rockettes for a couple of monumental Radio City shows this spring, we interviewed the man himself, and he opened up and let us into his brain. Totally not weird in there! You might even say he’s normal, if he wasn’t such an extraordinary example of the benefits and rewards of being a decent human being.
PETER MACIA
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- story THE FADER
Whether it’s due to an astrological shift, under-stimulation or seasonal mood disorder, many folks around these parts have decided recently that the summer of 2009 needs to be the “Summer of Love.” They have put the phrase on party fliers and birthday invitations, and some of you may have received an email from a FADER staffer with “Summer of Love ’09” in the subject line or signature. This was probably a business email and you probably thought it was weird, so sorry, we’re on a mission. But don’t get all excited thinking it’s going to be hook-up HQ on the 13th floor—we are talking platonically. So much heaviness has happened in the last year that we’ve decided to spend the entire solstice soaking up as much love from friends and family as possible, grilling wieners (real and vegan) and watching sunsets. In light of that, we’ve chosen to focus this issue on people who are making it happen by sticking together. On one cover we have the united French front of Phoenix, whose new album, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, was crafted in the same basement where they jammed as teenagers many moons ago. If you do not find yourself jumping for joy while playing it in the coming months, you are probably an insufferable robot.
On the flip side, we collaged Diplo, Switch, Popo, Sega and Maluca, bka Major Lazer and the Mad Decent new vanguard, because they are the scrappiest family we have seen in a long time and are about to roll through your party with the most functionally dysfunctional mess of Latin spunk, domineering riddims, jerky bro thrash and hyperactive bass the world has ever known. We also sent the inscrutable Dee Dee of Dum Dum Girls on a California road trip to hang with her buds Crocodiles, Wavves and Family Time Records and went down to Atlanta to see how Young Dro plans to support Grand Hustle and the swag movement. Not to mention, there are three Coppolas directly or indirectly involved with this issue, and Jason Schwartzman supposedly really wants one of our Panda Bear hats. Someone call Talia Shire and Nick Cage. We’re having a picnic up in here!
PETER MACIA
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- story THE FADER
When our annual Spring Style spectacular rolls around, we are pumped to indulge our fashion obsession in a more focused way than just intra-office debates about whose idea it was to rock desert boots first (mine!). The FADER is blessed with an amazing style team—Chioma Nnadi, Mobolaji Dawodu and Erin Hansen—whose tireless creative hustle and general pervasive awesomeness drove this issue’s meticulous selection of leathered man-bags and the binoculars style blowout shot in Santo Dominigo, Dominican Republic. Dawodu and frequent FADER contributor/award-collecting photojournalist Peter van Agtmael flew to the DR to kick it with some people they just, like, found on the street there, and though they neglected my eleventh-hour request for a bottle of mama juana (Dominican tree bark booze! Do not sleep!), they did return with a bangingly prescient look-see of the shorts, skirts and vests we’re fiending for as the sun finally shows its lovely mug.
FADER style comes from the same beehive as our music coverage: we are down for new-new, brain-busting fashions the world over, whether via designers—like the erudite downtowner Patrik Ervell, who creates classic menswear in super-unique fabrics—or folks far off the style mainline, like the Banda Jimenez, whose traditional crisp ensembles and handmade textiles pervade John Francis Peters’ photo essay shot in Teotitlan del Valle, Oaxaca, Mexico. The group came to us via wanderlusty back cover star Zach Condon, aka revered, clear-voiced songwriter Beirut, who collaborated with the ensemble for his bombastic and brass-laden new EP, March of the Zapotec. Matthew Schnipper delved into Condon’s back catalog and brain, uncovering an inquisitive dude whose endless interest in traditional folk-collaboration has previously taken him to the sounds of France and Eastern Europe, but has never immersed him into a culture as much as with this recording.
Meanwhile our front cover star, the mystic British-Pakistani chanteuse Natasha Khan, bka Bat for Lashes, is known for her personal style—can I just point out she is wearing a WOLF MASK as a beret? AMAZING—but we love her most for the voluminous songs she dredges from the deepest caverns of her heart. Writer Kim Taylor Bennett hung out with Khan in Brighton and London, where they discussed her gorgeous second album, but technically she also went on some sort of super intense spirit journey into Khan’s fantastical mindzone. In the piece, Khan is likened to “an unbridled unicorn,” an idea that has become our mid-year resolution because, let’s face it, who doesn’t aspire to be an unbridled unicorn? That or someone who can shoot lightning bolts from their hands. Either way, we are working hard and stealthily, as ever, to bring you the MAGIC.
JULIANNE ESCOBEDO SHEPHERD
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- story THE FADER
For the past eight years, FADER staffers have been writing prayerful emails to various non-denominational deities with subject lines like, “Why you playing us out like this?” and “Can I live?” Finally somebody checked their inbox. On January 20, we will have a new president—the one we voted for!—and we can’t help but feel like 2009 will usher in a total reboot of inspiration, creativity and ideation, not just in the United States but across the globe. Call it a renaissance of relief, or call it the hope we were betting on from jump with President Barack Obama. We always aspire to be better stewards of our country, better citizens of the world and now we believe we have a fighting chance to make things right again. It’s something like idealism, and we couldn’t be happier.
That’s why this issue is all about new beginnings. For our annual NOW issue, The FADER staff conjures our collective clairvoyance to feature the flaming hot heatseekers that will be emancipating our lives over the next year. While we’re always fainting-level excited about everything we cover, this issue has taken on special significance within the context. Things are all falling in place. Obama’s inauguration and Lost season premiere in the same week? BOOM! And just as synergistically, we realized all the artists we featured here are not just single entities working it out in the world, but are emblematic of the larger bubbling movements they exist within. Charles Hamilton’s fever pitch of quirky mixtapes, his likable casual flow and his copious ’90s baby references all exemplify both the rejuvenated Harlem and the ultra-creative way young rappers are evolving. Little Boots, aka Victoria Hesketh, is not only the singer/writer on the forefront of London’s burgeoning underground pop scene, she also acts as a fulcrum of remixes by several dance producers we are sweating right now—Fake Blood and Treasure Fingers among them. Electrik Red are our new idols (okay, mine), four self-motivated singer/dancers whose impressive pop&B reflects a new powerful woman movement (what up Michelle Obama!) and the interminable melodies of airwave-dominating songwriters The-Dream and Tricky Stewart. And what would the resurgence of the lo-fi world be without the semi-shrouded basement Bauhausisms of Blank Dogs? It’s all working out perfectly, and it couldn’t have come at a more appropriate or ridiculously awesome time.
JULIANNE ESCOBEDO SHEPHERD
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- story THE FADER
In the ten years since this magazine was founded, The FADER has always been about looking ahead, being fearlessly enthused about breaking-out musicians and artists and filmmakers and um, even pastry chefs (issue 20!), when they are at their rawest, fightingest, experimentalest selves. We like the scrappy, dangerous, instinctual and real. With this issue—our anniversary—we laud folks who are totally FADER in essence: people hungry with curiosity, who pull likeminded artists into their orbits, in the same style as curators in a gallery or the selectors behind the decks.
If there is one person who has embodied the FADER spirit throughout his career, it is the biggest pop star in the galaxy, our cover artist, the honorable Kanye West. Kanye was featured in FADER 20 (his first cover) in black and white with a backpack, just about to emit world tremors with College Dropout. Now, with his charisma on lightspeed, his orange Mars specs strapped tight, he looks like he is ready to warp into the fifth dimension, since he has already ostensibly conquered the world. This time, rap’s most relevant artist has taken an awesome risk: to hang up the flow for a minute and start singing electricky heartbreak ballads. His numerology said so. Online Editor Peter Macia went to Kanye’s LA home and, after they stopped talking about HTML, discovered we all (you and I) have everything in common with the down-to-earth and otherworldly Kanyeezy. According to our star chart, this means 808’s and Heartbreak is either the third or first best album since the beginning of time.
If you have a monocle handy you might notice that a quote from our Kanye story almost perfectly matches one from Randy Randall of No Age, our back cover stars and favorite riffmonsters. Both complain about the boundaries put upon them as artists and as people. Each is talking about populism, that music should be inclusive as much as it can be. No Age practices this by leaving no child behind, playing all ages shows so kids can be liberated by love and punk, while Kanye makes hooks as memorable as your own name. Inclusion, too, is a FADER value to infinity. We believe that no culture should be separate, that everyone should have access, that we all should be together. So let’s celebrate.
JULIANNE ESCOBEDO SHEPHERD
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- story THE FADER
As much as we at The FADER consider ourselves a global magazine, we’re still undeniably heche en los Estados Unidos. But we didn’t come to our annual Photo Special with a pre-determined plan to pull together an issue so completely focused upon America Today. Still, by a perfect confluence of timing, projects and the synchronized superconsciouses of our esteemed photographers and Creative Director/Photo Special curator Phil Bicker, that’s exactly what happened. Through a series of beautiful and sometimes harrowing photographic essays, we’ve spotlighted the important domestic issues that will not only inform our votes in November, but guide our concerns for our country: immigration, political refugees, the stateside AIDS crisis (particularly among young women of color), homelessness, poverty and, as ever, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
At first it felt heavy, in theory, maybe too depressing or too much at once. But when we saw the photos, we felt terrific. Proud. Moved. The essays are presented as truthfully as possible. And far from being some grim missive from doomsday, they underscored the necessity of our generation to have an unwavering, fighting hope for our future. It’s not idealism so much as the old “rock bottom” adage, but these flicks lit the fire. This is our reality right now. Still we are pulling for change.
But then, if our cover stars get their way, our future will not be burdened with such archaic trappings as “state-issued paper money” or “electricity.” TV on the Radio are releasing the most dazzling music of their career, a deeply funky, transcendent statement album that, in part, meditates on the insanity of modern science. Edwin “Stats” Houghton accompanied the band to a Williamsburg laundromat to unearth the answers. He emerged, smelling like Downy, with the best TVOTR story I have ever read. As the band eulogize the Brooklyn where they were (and remain) kings, we also learn they are waiting for the night to fall—as in, readying themselves for The Final Countdown. And like the denouement of a good novel, back cover stars Brightblack Morning Light show how we’ll all be living if the apocalypse truly does come: off the grid, smoking hash at dawn, eating food from the garden and making room-encompassing soul-dirges on the Rhodes. Writer Charles Homans and photographer Jason Nocito (who shot both cover stories) took a four-wheel-drive and their own water out to rural New Mexico, where they slept under the stars on Brightblack’s property and figured out why these two Luddites are actually our future. Both bands, with their sanguine outlook and philosopher’s gaze, are perfect emblems of the Young Republic we’ve constructed in this issue of The FADER, wherein a grim disposition and an actual rainbow bookend a country in turmoil. We just have to hold on a little longer, friends.
JULIANNE ESCOBEDO SHEPHERD
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- story THE FADER
People tend to get bummed out around fall, what with the unceremonious dismissal of the vitamin D replenishing force known as “sun” and the looming threat of school/work/taxes/social life-debilitating blizzards, but we at The FADER like to take this opportunity to celebrate what we hate about summer. No good prime time. Peer encouragement to drink tasteless beer. Jerks wearing flip flops on the subway (ew). Lame relationships wrought by seasonal delusion. Tan lines. Furthermore, autumn is the time when the BEST CLOTHES HAPPEN, which is why our superstar style team rallied together for our annual Fall Fashion Spectacular. And, lest ye doth be twisted, it is indeed spectacular. Mobolaji and photographer Tierney rolled out to the mountainous mountains of dry Idaho (obviously) to delve into the rugged style climate in America’s thirty-ninth most populous state (it’s true!). Meanwhile at FADER HQ, Chioma and Erin were scouring the world’s merch tables for stylish bandwear that transcends the dude-in-rock-tee archetype and is elegant enough to land a heavy-ro wardrobe spot. We invest in synergy, see? No Age won unanimously, but can I just honorable-mention my Keyshia Cole tee with a silver dagger stabbed in
a heart? Yeah I think they were more going for subtle.
We also kept it real fashiony on the music side, cause this b is like a badminton game with no losers. I delved, somewhat disastrously, into the world of young Brooklyn voguers…disastrously because in the process of writing the story I Naomi Campbelled myself (fell in a towering shoe, y’all) and dislocated my elbow. Thank you Fort Greene Hospital ER for the assist, I’ll never forget you, don’t ever change. I’m typing this with one hand. While I was getting morphine shots from Dr. Hallaj, Pete was in Sweden and Stats was in JA for our respective cover stories on the inscrutable magic of pop situationists The Tough Alliance (they look like the Funny Games dudes but no killing) and future-tense iconic dancehall fierce force Busy Signal. In Sweden, Pete also attended a bachelor party.
We also got mega lucky and discovered Felipe Delerme. This masterful purveyor of brainframe and pen-fencing spent real time in Dallas, ninth largest U.S. city FYI, for our D-Town scene piece. He is also SO terrific and so FADER, we immediately hired him. Yay Felipe! We expect you to be enjoying jazz lunch and Bonobo’s vegetarian nut meat with a quickness.
So DUDES, don’t get sad cause you got to deflate your pool and drag out the wellies from the dark part of the closet. Fall means electricity and everything is happening with The FADER. Entrez-vous.
JULIANNE ESCOBEDO SHEPHERD
43
- story THE FADER
With the clarity and precision of a finely crafted silver bell, we at the FADER offices ring in the new year with a look forward to the music and movements that’ll be turning us upside down for the rest of the year, bka the Now issue. If you take a look at your well-maintained FADER archive, you’ll see that previous Now covers have been dedicated to the newbies, juniors, NORE, and up & comers-yet one of this year’s stars has sold over ten million albums and the other was crowned “the Stevie Wonder of Soca” when he was, like, floating in amniotic fluid. So yes, dudes are almost legends, but it’s their wildly unique, dynamic careers that make them kingpins for our marquee issue of the year. Damon Albarn has shown himself to be one of the most creative artists of our generation: rather than piggybacking off his acclaim as frontman for Blur and becoming a magnet for paparazzi douchebaggery, dude invented a cartoon band called the Gorillaz, then dug up rare gems from the African subcontinent through his label with the UK’s Honest Jon’s recordshop. Albarn’s latest project, an untitled band with music senseis Tony Allen on drums and Paul Simonon on guitar, is basically a shoe-in for Wild, Bra-Tossing Success-but it’s based on Albarn’s collective body of work (and the outrageous goodness therein) that we choose to celebrate him as the face of all that’s interesting and relevant Right Now.
The same holds true for Trinidad’s Machel Montano. You may not have heard of him, or he might be your favorite star evar, and either way, you need to get with the rest of the world and tune in to Soca. The import, embrace and crosspollination of Caribbean music upstream to communities in Boston, Detroit, Chicago, LA and beyond is something we’ve been harping on for years now-Soca has made its way north and Montano is its Official Ambassador (he even has a Pepsi trading card to prove it!). The man has been at it since he was seven years old and, if it’s even possible to do such a thing before all your adult teeth are in, has been killing ever since. Montano will be turning it out throughout the upcoming Carnival season, so if you live in a place where people listen to music, be on the lookout. Make sure not to get too shook off those two stories, though: we’ve got Lindsey Caldwell’s feature on LA’s new electrified soul, an Eddie Stats profile on Miami’s black-Chinese dancehall powerhouse and Non-Format’s zooted-out interpretation of Nas’s new album. It’s the dawn of impulsive, unheard of, totally improper, perfectly radical new soundsystems-and you can trust that we’ll be right in step.
ALEX WAGNER
