Phife Dawg from A Tribe Called Quest spoke for a great many of us when he said “I used to have a crush on Dawn from En Vogue.” I actually had a crush on everyone from En Vogue, though. Dawn, Maxine, Cindy, and Terry. They were incredible singers, of course, but good gracious were they fine.

It wasn’t until recently, while watching VH1′s 40 Greatest R&B Songs of the 90s, that I realized how much of my early musical taste was dictated by my prepubescent sex drive. At the age of five, Chilli from TLC was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, and thus became my first crush, and thus TLC became my favorite group. The sight of Mariah Carey in shorts in the video for “One Sweet Day” was enough for me wear out a song that, today, I wouldn’t take two seconds to listen to. Aaliyah showed me what it meant to be a sly seductress and that’s all I’ve ever wanted since. And Janet Jackson… well, she was Janet Jackson.

It’s terribly shallow, but En Vogue wasn’t any different. I listened to their songs on the radio, but what made me a fan was seeing their videos on MTV. Which is why its taken me this long to truly appreciate their musical contribution.

In the present, we remember the early-mid 90s in black music for the proliferation of hip-hop. The genre was going from novel fad to legitimate pop mainstay. We also remember this time for the national exposure to police brutality in urban neighborhoods, via the Rodney King tape/trial/uprising. Hip-hop had predicted such an incident for years, and now everyone wanted to hear what rappers like Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, and more had to say.

Lost in the current remembrance of the time is that R&B acts were delivering some strong material, particularly the women. Enter En Vogue. They had a big hit with “Hold On” from their 1990 debut album Born to Sing, and went platinum. Their success spawned a cluster of imitators, and over the next few years a number of “girl groups” would appear, including SWV, Xscape, and others. It was like a new sub-genre of R&B music.

Dawn, Maxine, Cindy, and Terry wouldn’t limit themselves. Their follow-up album, 1992′s Funky Divas went triple platinum and in a lot of ways was a precursor to the sonic experimentation of latter day Erykah Badu, Janelle Monae, Nicki Minaj, etc. Funky Divas managed to find the space between funk and in-your-face sexiness of their forebear Betty Davis, the polished sophistication of Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis’ R&B, the aggressiveness in MC Lyte’s emceeing, and a secret desire to be Nirvana. All that, and their voices still managed to sound like they were honed by days, months, and years belting out choir solos in a black Baptist church.

“Free Your Mind” is a hard-rock inspired track of the type we often say we wish pop stars would release more of, one with a message about prejudice (with some nice shots at slut-shaming). “My Lovin’” finds them asserting their worth to would-be suitors that simply are never gonna get it. On “Giving Him Something He Can Feel” they reinterpret the Curtis Mayfield penned, Aretha Franklin performed song from the original Sparkle soundtrack and put their own stamp on it. They delivered the traditional R&B and hip-hop inflected tracks with equal ease and comfort.

They had the misfortune of releasing this album two years before TLC would become the biggest girl group of all-time with their attention-stealing/genre-defining album CrazySexyCool. After that, there was TLC and everyone else. En Vogue primarily became known as the women who sang “Whatta Man” with Salt-N-Pepa.

It’s a discredit to their legacy, as they deserve so much more recognition for the trail they blazed. Their recent re-break-up via Twitter isn’t doing much to help re-imagine that legacy either. It’s unfortunate, but the bright side? Man, they are still fine.

Football is upon us again. The college football season kicked off over Labor Day weekend (it wasn’t a good start for this Kentucky Wildcats fan), and the NFL season will start in New York tonight, when the reigning world champion New York Giants take on the Dallas Cowboys.

It has been seven months since we last saw football, but that doesn’t mean there hasn’t been a bevy of gridiron news over the offseason. Plenty of other media outlets have dissected roster moves, schedules, and stat projections in an attempt to predict how both the college and NFL seasons will play out. At ThinkProgress, we’ve compiled a different type of season preview, one that looks at the issues, on field and off, that will be a part of this football season:

The Penn State Scandal: Perhaps no story was more prominent in college football this summer than the Jerry Sandusky rape scandal that enveloped Penn State University and its former coaching staff. Legendary Penn State coach Joe Paterno died before the scandal played out, but that didn’t stop the story from dominating the summer news cycle. Sandusky was found guilty on 45 of 48 charges relating to child rape. The Penn State story was ultimately a story of empathy, of shame, and of misplaced priorities, and it was made worse when the NCAA punished the Nittany Lions’ football program in a rushed, hypocritical move that seemed more tuned to making it seem right rather than fixing the problems that led to the scandal. Penn State lost its first game of the season Saturday, but as the specter of the Sandusky scandal hangs over Happy Valley — he’s yet to be sentenced, the school is facing accreditation questions — we’re still learning about what happened and how it did.

Player Safety: Player safety is again a major issue in football, as thousands of former players are suing the NFL over the links between concussions and long-term brain injuries. The issue shot back to the forefront when Junior Seau, a former All-Pro linebacker, and O.J. Murdock, a wide receiver for the Tennessee Titans, committed suicides two months apart. Both were believed to be suffering from depression possibly caused by concussions and head trauma. The NFL last week asked a federal judge to dismiss the concussion lawsuit, and today, it announced that it was donating $30 million to help research concussions and brain trauma in football and the military. Alyssa wrote earlier this year that the NFL could learn from gymnastics on head and brain injuries, and given that the dangers of the game are becoming more and more evident, I’ve started to wonder if I can keep watching.

Labor Rights: Last year, the NFL jeopardized its opening weeks by locking out players in a contentious labor battle. This year, it’s the officials who are locked out, in a labor fight that looks a lot like those we’ve seen throughout corporate America. The league announced last week that it would use replacement refs for at least the first week of the season, a decision that “flies in the face” of efforts to make the game safer, NFL Players Association head DeMaurice Smith told ThinkProgress. An agreement doesn’t seem close, even though the two sides aren’t far apart, but there is one positive: Shannon Eastin will likely become the first woman to ever referee an NFL game this weekend. The NFL, it seems, is content to wait out the officials in hopes that they will accede to the league’s demands. The league is also facing a labor (and safety) issue when it comes to the Bounty Scandal that erupted last season and has left the New Orleans Saints without head coach Sean Payton and star linebacker Jonathan Vilma. Labor rights in college football are also gaining attention, as people like historian Taylor Branch fight to give players a voice in the system that exploits their “amateurism” to make millions of dollars.

LGBT Rights: The NFL added sexual orientation to its non-discrimination policy in 2011 and it kept making strides toward equality over the offseason. Former NFL player Wade Davis came out as gay in June, telling CNN that he wished he’d have come out while he was playing. “I now understand the impact that would have had,” Davis said. While there is still no openly gay NFL player, an array of players have made it clear that they wouldn’t mind playing with an openly gay teammate, creating a gradual but welcome shift in an atmosphere that made players like Davis scared to acknowledge their sexuality. In August, the San Francisco 49ers became the first NFL team to produce an “It Gets Better” video.

Taxpayer Exploitation: Right and left, football is turning to taxpayers to finance its biggest shows. The Bowl Championship Series, which runs college football’s postseason, announced plans for a playoff that will start after the 2013 college season. Unfortunately, the playoff only reinforces the worst aspect of the the bowl system: that it rips off local taxpayers and public universities in the name of charity. NFL teams have gotten in on the act too. Taxpayers will finance a new stadium for the Minnesota Vikings, Santa Clara is footing the bill for the San Francisco 49ers’ new palace, and the Atlanta Falcons are asking for either a new stadium or major upgrades to existing facilities. Overall, 30 of the NFL’s 31 stadiums received some form of taxpayer financing — MetLife Stadium, the site of tonight’s opener, is the only exception — a major giveaway to a league in which all 32 teams are among the world’s 50 most valuable franchises. Through a political donation, meanwhile, the Arizona Cardinals showed us how Citizens United will help teams get even more money out of taxpayers.

I spent a good chunk of my long weekend in a nostalgia-fueled fugue state, watching back-to-back-to-back-to-back episodes of Batman: The Animated Series. It’s a fascinating show to watch as an adult, as the show’s best episodes are full of highly, sometimes eerily subversive social commentary that was largely invisible to my five year old self. Batman aficionados are of course used to a dark Gotham, but the show’s Saturday Morning Cartoon status meant that the disturbing text in some comics and the Nolan movies becomes subtext in the cartoon. I’d argue that makes it one of the purest distillations of a quintessentially Batman approach to social commentary.

Reviewing B:TAS over at the A.V. Club, Oliver Sava makes a perceptive point: Batman’s most enduring and effective villains work as characters because they represent a twisted version of an element of Batman’s identity. For example, Two-Face embodies the inherent risks in developing a dual identity and The Scarecrow is a perversion of Batman’s use of fear as a weapon against Gotham’s criminals. The Joker headlines the supervillain pantheon because he is Batman’s polar opposite, sharing only an obsessive, ingenious commitment to the struggle for Gotham’s soul. By reflecting evil versions of Batman’s identity, Sava suggests Batman’s opponents sharpen the viewer’s understanding of their hero’s psychology. The villains are the windows into Batman’s soul.

This approach to the relationship between hero and villains parallels a broader approach to the relationship between Gotham and the real world. Gotham is a disfigured version of our reality, where concerns like crime and terrorism are intensified and altered in order to give us some insight into their real-world equivalents. Christopher Nolan’s films, as I’ve argued, used several different variants of this funhouse mirror approach to make a broad-based argument for the moral worth of liberal democracy. While The Dark Knight trilogy deals in a broad dramatic arc, B:TAS applies the twisting tactic in micro-moments, the lack of serialization allowing for short explorations of particular topics. While not every episode of the show pulls off this trick effectively, and the weaker ones don’t even try, the show is at its best when it uses Gotham’s bizarre environs as a means of making us think about very real problems.

Perhaps one of the most affecting of these episodes is “Harley and Ivy,” an episode focusing on the relationship between the Joker’s lieutenant/girlfriend Harley Quinn and ecoterrorist Poison Ivy. After a near-miss escape from Batman, the Joker blames Harley, ultimately throwing her (literally) out of the gang. A dejected Quinn accidentally meets up with Ivy, and the two become friends and successful crime partners. The Joker and Harley dance around getting back together, and everything culminates a free-for-all fight with Batman at Ivy’s home base.

The thematic crux of the episode is the Joker and Harley’s abusive, one-sided relationship. B:TAS’ Joker straddles the traditional divide between depicting the Clown Prince as a playful prankster or a psychopath, but this episode tones down the character’s cartoonish characteristics, casting the Joker in the all-to-real role of a violent and dominating boyfriend. Over the course of the episode, he verbally abuses Harley, physically throws her out of their residence, taps her phone to find where she’s living, and then ambushes her and attempts to poison the friend (Ivy) who’s protecting her. Quinn, for her part, is hopelessly infatuated with her abuser. She pines over him and seems to truly believe his wheedling compliments represent sincere emotion, even as Ivy (who’s cast as an outspoken second-wave feminist) tells Quinn again and again that he’s only going to keep hurting her.

That this terrible psychodrama is obvious only to the show’s adult viewers is part of the point. Domestic violence is a crime that hides in plain sight, something that people outside the relationship often either miss or choose to ignore. The abusive structure of the Joker-Quinn relationship being obvious to adults but invisible to the show’s young audience reminds the adult viewer of how societal blindness perpetuates actual instances of horrific abuse.

Further, the fact that both the victim and her support network are violent criminals serves to metaphorically undermine the sort of victim-blaming that’s sadly common in conversations about domestic violence. Harley and Ivy nearly kill Batman and commit several robberies over the course of the episode, but these crimes seem entirely irrelevant to the nature of the former’s relationship with the Joker. The Joker’s abuse seems no less horrific in light of Harley’s criminal predilections; his violence is not a consequence of her actions. No one is “asking for it.”

The central relationship in “Harley and Ivy,” then, uses the fact that we’re watching a children’s show with fantastic characters as means of exploring deeply rooted social phenomenon surrounding domestic violence. It’s a perfect execution of the funhouse mirror strategy that pervades Batman stories, and exemplifies one of the many ways in which speculative fiction can be used to cause us to check our basic assumptions about the world around us.

National Football League Commissioner Roger Goodell announced this morning that the league is donating $30 million to the National Institutes of Health’s Neurology Institute to study concussions and related brain injuries in football players and members of the military, two groups who have been the subject of public safety scrutiny in recent years.

Goodell, joined by NIH’s Dr. Story Landis and Army chief of staff Gen. Raymond Odierno, announced the grant in an interview about concussion research and head trauma on the Today show this morning:

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The NFL’s leap into the realm of national concussion research is certainly welcome news, particularly at a time when American soldiers and football players are suffering head injuries at alarming rates. Almost a quarter-million American troops have returned home from Afghanistan and Iraq with traumatic brain injuries, and there were 190 reported concussions in 320 NFL games last season. Those numbers are almost certainly under-reported, as Odierno noted on NBC today. The grant, as Landis noted, “will accomplish a huge amount” of research toward traumatic brain injuries that are also a leading cause of death among children and the elderly.

While it’s welcome news, though, the NFL’s donation comes at an interesting time, a point NBC’s Matt Lauer failed to acknowledge in his interview with Goodell. The league is currently the subject of a class action lawsuit from more than 2,000 players who claim that it covered up research linking concussions sustained on the football field to chronic brain injuries. In the suit, former players claim that the league deliberately falsified the results of a study conducted in 1994, and the league’s concussion committee, for 15 years, denied that concussions could lead to chronic brain injuries. The NFL’s current head of the concussion research committee dismissed years of league research as bunk in 2011, telling Congress, “There was no science” in the claims that concussions and brain injuries weren’t linked. But right now, the league is trying to get the lawsuit dismissed on grounds that it is “preempted by federal labor law.”

Under Goodell, the NFL has instituted new player safety programs, including one to benefit players who suffer head injuries during their careers, but it has also come under fire from the NFL Players Association for its willingness to use replacement officials to start the 2012 season, a decision NFLPA Executive Director DeMaurice Smith said “flies in the face” of efforts to make the game safer for players.

Our troops, our children, our elderly, and our football players will benefit from research that comes from the NFL’s $30 million donation, and it is certainly encouraging that the NFL is putting at least some money where its mouth is on player safety and brain injuries. But that shouldn’t paper over the very real fight former players are having to get equal justice from a league that spent years failing to acknowledge — and potentially actively concealing — the threat of brain injuries on its fields.

Though I share some of Travis Waldron’s trepidation about the beginning of this football season, I have to admit I’m not ready to quit watching either, and that I’m excited for the season to begin. It’s not just that my co-manager and I crushed our fantasy draft, or that I need my Patriots back on the field to erase the memory of the Game That Shall Not Be Named. It’s also that, with mixed emotions, I’m looking forward to seeing Shannon Eastin take the field on Sunday, and the arrival of a woman in a position of authority in the closes thing America has to a common religion.

I hate that the first woman to referee an NFL preseason game and now possibly during the regular season–Eastin is scheduled to work the Lions-Rams game if the league and the referees don’t reach an agreement–got that opportunity because of a lockout. But the way her appearance in the preseason went has given me confidence that when a woman, maybe Eastin herself, makes it to the NFL without extenuating circumstances, things will go better than I could have hoped.

It would have been easy for players and coaches to point to Eastin in particular as an example of how the lockout was risking player safety. She, like many of the replacement officials, does not have the requisite experience to work as an NFL referee (though she is getting close), and as the first woman in her position might have been subject to additional scrutiny. But Eastin took care to reach out to the Green Bay Packers and San Diego Chargers before their preseason game in which she was the line judge, and the teams responded.

Both the Chargers’ coach Norv Turner and the Packers’ coach Mike McCarthy praised her pre- and in-game work. Chargers players shook her hand before play. Her one reviewed call was upheld. Everyone involved, in other words, behaved professionally, and with the recognition that history, even made under terrible compromises, is important. Given how poorly professional sports have treated female officials in the past–Major League Baseball has still never had a woman call a game–even when the only thing that made their debuts fraught was their gender, it’s miraculous that everyone involved in Eastin’s first game was able to separate a woman’s arrival in the NFL from the circumstances of her getting there.

I hope the NFL and the referees can reach an agreement quickly, given how little separates them. I hope, if that’s what she wants, that Shannon Eastin can work her way up to a regular job refereeing in the league. And I hope that once she gets there, she and the women who will join her, form a united front with the men who are locked out now.