In the second half of today’s episode, we talk to an artist who has taken the concept of music as medicine to a whole new level. Alex sees his job as guiding the scientific community toward new data that could change how we understand the value of pop-music lyrics - “laying the railroad ties,” as he puts it. “People like to point at pop music as a source of problems, not a source of solutions,” he says. Alex’s research, and research like it, opens up the possibility that pop artists are an underestimated asset when it comes to mental-health messaging. In today’s episode, we walk through one of those studies with him and learn how influential lyrical content can be - even when you’re not paying super-close attention. candidate at the University of North Carolina’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media who has authored a bunch of studies on mental health and popular music. It made her want to know more about the impact of those lyrics, so she dug around and found an academic who studies that very thing: Alex Kresovich, a Ph.D. When Megan hit an especially low point earlier this year, she noticed something in the music she was listening to: Über-popular artists making explicit references to the state of their mental health and the things they do to cope with it.
That’s the subject of today’s episode, brought to you by our producer Megan Lubin. Other days, woof, it can be tough to see the light. Sometimes, it’s comforting to consider how universal that overwhelming sense of blah is. Speaking to Apple Music in 2017, he described himself as an alien, but the reality is more interesting: He’s of the earth, he’s here, he’s now.It.
LIL UZI VERT XO TOUR LLIF3 FULL PERFORMANCE FREE
Guess he had to find something to do with the free time. After the massive success of 2017’s Luv Is Rage 2, Uzi announced that he’d deleted all works-in-progress and was retiring, only to surface in 2020 with the almost mythically anticipated Eternal Atake, following the album about a week later with a Deluxe Edition that doubled its length.
Like Thug, Uzi is a distinctive rapper (the stage name was given, not taken), but the key to his sound is melody, mixing post-trap rumble with the candied hooks of pop-punk and neon surfaces of EDM for a style that splits the starkness of modern hip-hop into prismatic color. But definitely not a rapper in the traditional sense.īorn Symere Woods in North Philadelphia in 1994, Uzi first started rapping to one-up a classmate, quickly making the leap to national relevance through features with Young Thug and Migos while building a tight-knit collective of producers and collaborators, known as Working on Dying, at home. That he could turn a line as bleak as “Push me to the edge/All my friends are dead” (“XO TOUR Llif3”) into a singalong only made him more vital-here was a guy feeling the pain and packaging it in style. Where previous generations of rappers leveraged influence through the boardroom (Jay Z: “I’m not a businessman/I’m a business, man”), Uzi represents a generation fluent in fashion and social media, not just a recording artist but a kind of creative director whose personality and sense of world-building telegraphs almost as loudly as the music. Lil Uzi Vert told us upfront, in his intro to Playboi Carti’s “wokeuplikethis*”: “I’m a rockstar.” The metaphor wasn’t about dominance so much as it was about flamboyance, for Uzi as a purse-carrying, post-Kanye MC raised on anime and Marilyn Manson, whose indifference toward hip-hop orthodoxy made him a punk to some and a hero to more.