Because this is apparently a week that involves a lot of me lowering my head slowly and deliberately to my desk a la Peggy Olson, First Lady Michelle Obama decided to trot out some very old talking points in her commencement address to the 2013 graduating class at Bowie State University:

“Today, instead of walking miles every day to school, they’re sitting on couches for hours, playing video games, watching TV. Instead of dreaming of being a teacher or a lawyer or a business leader, they’re fantasizing about being a baller or a rapper,” Obama continued. “Right now, one in three African American students are dropping out of high school, only one in five African Americans between the ages of 25 and 29 has gotten a college degree.”

But priorities should change, she said, because “getting an education is as important if not more important than it was back when this university was founded.”

While those statistics are absolutely worrisome, I’m pretty sure that the challenges of preparing a competitive resume, getting equal access to standardized test prep, navigating the admissions process, and managing the cost of financial aid are also relevant issues to this conversation. Some of those barriers have been priorities for her husband’s administration. Mrs. Obama acknowledged the odds that a number of the graduates faced to get to and complete their educations Bowie State, though she focused on the cost of tuition and difficult family situations more than other structural issues that might affect students’ abilities to get access to a college education. And she framed their success as a matter of personal will and determination. I can also see why she might have wanted to continue a conversation of long standing within African-American communities given the setting, and as part of her larger, and important historical lesson about the obstacles that black students have faced to get educated in America.

But this particular talking point, which both Mrs. Obama and the President use relatively frequently, could do more to address the structural elements that prop up a culture that values athletics over academics. Personal motivations may be a problem, but the massive public investment in college athletic facilities, the fact that coaches are some states highest-paid public employees, and the allocation of both scholarship money and admissions spots to athletes who are unlikely to complete their academic degrees before entering professional drafts. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to dismantle “the slander that a black child with a book is trying to act white,” but I’m not sure the fantasy career aspirations of black children are the only, or even the main thing, at issue here.

And if we’re going to talk personal motivations, wanting to be “a baller or a rapper” is not a dream that’s solely the property of African-Americans. America has three major televised singing competitions right now, American Idol, The Voice, and X-Factor, all of which promise that it’s possible to rise from anonymity to remarkable fame and a career in music, and the first of which actually became notorious for airing auditions of people who had neither the skills to realistically pursue their aspirations, nor the self-knowledge to recognize the gap between their abilities and their ambitions. Participation is hardly limited to African-American singers by design or choice. There are plenty of white folks who hope to make it big in the manner of Taylor Swift in the same way African-American boys might be dreaming of growing up to become Jay-Z.

The same is more true for sports than Mrs. Obama’s remarks would suggest. In Division I men’s basketball, 1,443, or 27 percent, of the 5,265 players who participated in the 2011-2012 season were white, while 3,158, or 59 percent were African-American. During that same season, in Division I baseball, the figures were most striking. 8,304, or 82 percent of the 10,093 players, were white that season. Clearly, in the college athletic programs that feed into careers in professional sports, there’s a great deal of white interest and participation, even if it isn’t evenly distributed by sport. Miami Heat star LeBron James may be an argument for skipping college in pursuit of a professional athletic career right out of high school, but so is Washington Nationals left-fielder Bryce Harper, who earned a GED and didn’t even finish high school in a classroom setting, all so he could focus on baseball instead, even though the idea that any ordinary person could emulate either of their paths is equally improbable.
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Given that Beyonce Knowles-Carter both had two musical partners in Destiny’s Child—Kelly Rowland and Michelle Williams—before she went out on her own as a solo act, and a younger sister, Solange Knowles, who is also a musician, it’s fascinating to hear Rowland sing about the difficulties of living in Knowles-Carter’s orbit in “Dirty Laundry.” What makes the song particularly interesting though is the way it chronicles the ups and downs of Rowland’s relationship with Knowles-Carter as it tracks with what Rowland says was an abusive relationship with an unnamed man, during which Knowles-Carter’s fame and success were both causes for resentment, a lifeline for Rowland, and something her ex-boyfriend invoked as part of his efforts to isolate her and dominate her affections. “He hittin the window like it was me, until it shattered / He pulled me out, he said, “Don’t nobody love you but me / Not your mama, not your daddy and especially not Bey” / He turned me against my sister,” Rowland sings on the track, in which she also describes feeling some relief that Knowles-Carter’s fame eclipsed hers, and describes a call from Knowles-Carter that encouraged her to leave the man who was abusing her:

Given Knowles-Carter’s obsessive curation of her own image, “Dirty Laundry” may be the most genuinely revealing look at her behavior and artistic circle in years. It certainly tells us more about Knowles-Carter than Beyonce: Life Is But A Dream, the documentary she co-directed and for which she provided much of the archival footage, that aired on HBO earlier this spring. Knowing that Knowles-Carter remains personally close to at least one member of Destiny’s Child cuts through the tabloid rumors about feuds and reunions. And knowing that Rowland survived an abusive relationship lends context to her efforts to establish herself as an artist independent of both the musical legacy of Destiny’s Child and Knowles-Carter’s considerable shadow.

In an age of hyper-produced pop stars, and given the myth that trauma creates great art, it’s easy to forget how artistic confidence and personal stability can be related. Knowles-Carter fired her father Matthew as her manager, and appears to have had a falling-out with him, but she’s also in a long-term, stable relationship with a partner, Jay-Z, who appears supportive of her career and her family. Solange Knowles, who’s found professional success by hopping genres so she isn’t in competition with her sister, finding a musical style that matches her vocal capabilities and her strengths as a small-club performer, married and had her first child at 17, moved to Idaho with her husband, and divorced shortly thereafter. Rowland, who for a time split her efforts pursuing a career in acting while continuing to make music, also appears to have had personal difficulties that weren’t widely known until now. Or, as she puts it on “Dirty Laundry,” “I swear y’all don’t know the half of this industry.”

I have a long-standing fondness for folk music such that I would have been happy to watch a feature-length version of the Greenwich Village section of I’m Not There, so I’m curious to see how the Joel and Ethan Coen’s movie about the same period, Inside Llewyn Davis, tracking the career of fictional folksinger of the same name, looks in its entirety:

Watching this trailer, I was particularly struck by Carey Mulligan’s character, who maybe is Davis’ girlfriend, current or former, but at minimum is a frustrated truth-teller who is acutely aware of Davis’s weaknesses. This clip reminded me of something Emily Nussbaum wrote earlier this year about “a time when the legendary wildness of male New York intellectuals and artists was made possible by middle-class girlfriends who paid the rent and absorbed hipness from the kitchen. As Joyce Johnson, Jack Kerouac’s onetime girlfriend, observed in her scathing memoir Minor Characters, an account of kohl-eyed Barnard coeds fleeing to Greenwich Village, ‘Even a very young woman can achieve old-ladyhood, become the mainstay of someone else’s self-destructive genius.’”

Elizabeth Olsen is playing another character like this in Kill Your Darlings, the account of Allen Ginsberg’s friendship with Lucien Carr at Columbia, leading up to the period when Carr killed David Kammerer. She’s Edie Parker, who eventually married Jack Kerouac, also a character in the movie, for a brief period while he was imprisoned. And while she’s less angry than Mulligan’s character appears to be, she embodies the awfulness of standing by while people who think they’re geniuses self-indulge and self-destruct. It’s irritating to constantly put women in the position of having to be the in-text reminders to the audience that what male characters think is badass is not necessarily so. But better that, I suppose, than a straight-forward lionization of self-absorption. And at least Mulligan’s character gets to be an artist, too.

Last week, a controversy exploded over a new Mountain Dew ad created and directed by the rapper Tyler the Creator, one of the most visible figures in the hip-hop collective Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All, which Syracuse University professor Boyce Watkins—who is himself black—suggested was one of the most racist bits ad spots he’d ever seen:

If anything, I think the ad is nominally anti-racist. The cop initially tries to steer the victim to identify a black man in a do-rag as her attacker, which seems more like criticism of him for getting it wrong than an embrace of the idea that black men are criminals. And the entire joke of the spot is that a goat in a suit is much more threatening than a lineup of large black friends. I don’t think necessarily think it’s reasonable for Tyler to expect viewers of a Mountain Dew spot that’s aimed at a broad audience rather than at Odd Future’s core audience to know that the men he cast in the lineup are his friends, or that the goat is, in fact, Felicia The Goat, a bit of ongoing schtick. Even without that, I think the text of the add is reasonably clear, and while not that racist, it’s not particularly uproarious, either.

But what it does provide is an interesting exercise in interpretation and intergenerational communication. Tyler, in a long and intriguing interview with Billboard, said that he believed his differences with Watkins, who later said he believed Tyler’s intentions had not been malign, stemmed from a generation gap. “The things that he had to experience with racism and stereotypes and being a black man in this country, is different from mine,” he told Billboard. “I grew up in a generation where there’s white kids listening to rap and black kids playing hockey, breaking the norms and everything.” And he suggested that he was disappointed by Watkins’ negative interpretation of his work, in part because he believed that it would make it harder for black artists to get access to the kinds of opportunities that Mountain Dew gave him:

He has to realize that it’s a different generation now. He’s way older than me; he’s old enough to be my father. So I totally get why he would think that, but I also don’t understand why in life are you trying to point out the negatives. It’s a young black man who got out of the ‘hood and made something of himself, who’s now working with big, white-owned corporations. Not even in front of the camera acting silly, but directing it. I’m trying to be one of the directors. But instead of looking at the positivity from that, he’s trying to boycott Mountain Dew. Now that he’s doing that, not only is it messing up opportunities for me, but also maybe opportunities for another young black male who maybe looks up to me and wants to do that in the future. It’s ludicrous.

He’s not necessarily wrong that seeing creatively challenging partnerships attract negative attention may make it harder for artists to work with large corporations in the future. But one of the things I find intriguing about Tyler’s arguments is that they reflect a generational gap that I don’t think he’s acknowledging. Watkins may have experienced more direct racism that Tyler has personally. But it might also be that Tyler is less skeptical about corporate interests and corporate power than older people, and more willing to view corporate investment as a sign that racism is irrelevant or non-operative in this case. Making money is nice, but a corporation’s willingness to write a check to a woman or a person of color isn’t necessarily proof positive that said corporation is definitively anti-sexist or anti-racist. And whatever Tyler’s intentions were in making the ad, his interpretation of what he was giving Mountain Dew isn’t necessarily the same as the corporate interpretation of what they were getting from him.

I’m with Tyler that getting more women and people of color in a position to get money from large corporate interests, in part so they can finance their own products and win more freedom from the corporations who govern their day-to-day creative lives. But I also don’t see much of a problem with asking questions about why those corporations want to be in business with certain artists and what the results of their collaborations are. Writing a check buys you product. But that money doesn’t go to the general public. And it doesn’t buy anyone the ability to opt out of the critical conversation.

Justin Bieber has had what might be politely termed an awkward spring so far, whether he was joking about whether Anne Frank would have been a fan of his—an idea brilliantly satirized in the New Yorker by Yoni Brenner, who sketched out a vision of World War II in which the Nazis are defeated by Belieberism—and ran into trouble with his pet monkey. But as The Hollywood Reporter notes, he appears to have gotten one gesture of international cooperation right:

Amid an international tour plagued with missteps, Justin Bieber is being recognized for doing good during Thursday’s concert in Turkey. The pop star paused twice during his Istanbul performance to honor Azan–the Islamic call to prayer Muslims observe five times daily. “I’m not a Justin Bieber fan but as a Muslim, I got a lot of respect for him cos of what he did,” one Twitter user posted user after E! Online first reported the news. Wrote another, “You can hate all you want, but he earned my respect.” Later adding: “Muslim performers don’t even do what you did.”

There’s a lot of talk about a culture war without the boundaries of the United States itself. But American culture—or in this case, hybrid Canadian-American cultural products—is also a powerful export internationally. If Woodie Guthrie’s guitar was a machine that killed fascists, teenybop pop can produce earworms that transcend religious practice, national origin, and gender. Bieber’s gesture of respect is a proffer of sorts, a suggestion that religious practice and pop music can coexist—and that Christians are perfectly capable of being respectful of the practices of people of other faith traditions—and those who say it can’t are putting quarrels in the mouths of Western artists. If there’s an international culture war underway, a side that offers both the possibility of devotion and opportunities for pleasure may have one up on a party that shuts many participants out of both.

It’s not quite as aggressively science fictional as her phenomenal video about a droid auction-slash-rock-concert for “Many Moons,” which she released more than four years ago, but the video for Janelle Monae’s excellent collaboration with Erykah Badu “Q.U.E.E.N.” is a reminder of just how important her contributions to science fiction—as well as to music—have been since she broke out onto the national scene:

Monae is hardly the first musician to situate her musical persona in science fiction. Psychadelia gave us Jefferson Starship. George Clinton has a long and deep engagement with spaceship iconography and science fiction more broadly. On “Roses,” a caustic anti-love song with no other particularly science fictional elements from his The Love Below album, Andre 3000 entreated the woman being addressed in the track to “come back down to Mars.” When you read music as narrative fiction, locations beyond Earth and times far removed from ours are common settings. But in a few short years, and across multiple songs and videos, Monae has created a particularly coherent universe full of robots sold as luxury goods to decadent, exceedingly well-dressed droids and rebels, institutions that house revolutionary figures, some of whom can walk through walls, and electrifying musical performances.

And the coherence of her music video universe isn’t the only thing striking about Monae’s ouvre, or that marks her as a science fictional thinker. As I wrote on Wednesday, Hollywood tends to portray technology and our loss of control of it—or misuse of it—as a major factor in the creation of radically altered future. Monae’s music videos frequently operate from the premise that cultural tools are at least as powerful as technical or physical ones.

In the video for “Many Moons,” Cindi Mayweather, an android who Monae presents as an alter ego, gives an electrifying performance at an auction of extraordinarily expensive androids. Her music, which makes reference to a wide range of social and political issues, is initially treated as dance music for frenzied, regimented revelers. But when her performance literally shorts her out, what was intended as a classy backdrop to an ugly transaction disrupts it. The musician becomes an activist through her passionate dedication to her performance. In the introduction to “Q.U.E.E.N.” a voiceover explains that visitors are at a museum where revolutionaries who disrupted society with music have been archived for public consumption. They’re resurrected by a record snuck into the facility, which frees Monae’s character to ask questions that begin in the personal, like “Am I a freak for dancing around? / Am I a freak for getting down?” and move to the political: “I asked a question like this / ‘Are we a lost generation of our people?’ / Add us to equations but they’ll never make us equal. / She who writes the movie owns the script and the sequel. / So why ain’t the stealing of my rights made illegal? / They keep us underground working hard for the greedy, / But when it’s time pay they turn around and call us needy.”

Monae isn’t the only person with the idea that cultural power can create dramatic inflection points in the evolution of the future. Jennifer Egan’s novel A Visit From The Goon Squad culminates in a concert by an artist who begins the book as an extraordinarily broken man and reemerges as a children’s musician. The concert starts as a marketing gig for one of the characters in the novel, but it turns into an astonishing experience that united two generations, one similar to the Millenials, and the one that followed, who have embraced digital communication but rejected drug use and tattoos. It’s an amazing conclusion to the novel in part because it’s strikingly different from much of what we see in science fiction in a number of ways: it’s set in the near-future instead of far off, it’s hopeful instead of apocalyptic, and it’s collective and artistic instead of individual and technological.

To a certain extent, the place where Egan ends is the one from which Monae blasts off. Given Monae’s extraordinarily precise sense of visual style, the concepts she’s pulled together and expressed with directors with a range of visual styles, and the way her lyrics would fit in larger narrative settings, I’d love to see what planet she’d land on if she had the opportunity to tell stories over 120 minutes instead of six of them.

This post discusses plot details of the season finale of The Americans.

And so, we end where we began, with the music. Back in the first episode of The Americans, when Phillip and Elizabeth made love in their car after dumping the body of the man who raped Elizabeth during her training in the Soviet Union, “In The Air Tonight,” a distinctly unromantic song was unsettlingly perfect for that tentatively romantic moment—and as a frame for the rest of the season. “I’ve seen your face before my friend, but I don’t know if you know who I am,” Phil Collins sings in perhaps his most famous single. “Well I was there and I saw what you did, I saw it with my own two eyes / So you can wipe off that grin, I know where you’ve been / It’s all been a pack of lies…I know the reason why you keep your silence up, / oh no you don’t fool me / Well the hurt doesn’t show, but the pain still grows / It’s no stranger to you and me.”

The Americans is deeply concerned with questions of complicity, intimacy, and the difference between them, and fittingly for a show interested in those questions, it’s often its best when the camera is lingering on two people, capturing the claustrophobia or wide-open possibility that marks their relationship at any given moment. When The Americans began, Elizabeth and Phillip were the only pair who were both complicit and intimate, in murder and in marriage. But by the end of the show, their children Paige and Henry had attacked a man who may have meant them no harm and fled from the scene, and their neighbor Stan had become entangled with Nina, a staffer at the Rezidentura, at considerable cost to his own marriage. The characters on The Americans draw charmed, poisoned circles around themselves and their collaborators and lovers, and not just because some of them are spies or cops. It’s almost a condition of adulthood, the show argues, to have secrets, and a test of true intimacy to share the full extent of those ugly secrets with another person, and to accept that they won’t reject you for them. Stan’s inability to share his secrets with Sandra dooms his marriage. And it’s an expression of truly withering contempt for Claudia to tell Elizabeth “I know you better than you know yourself. And you don’t know me at all.”

The spread of that secret-keeping like a disease makes Peter Gabriel’s “Games Without Frontiers,” his scathing critique of international affairs, a triply appropriate song to close out The Americans‘ first season, and not just because Gabriel’s description of figures “Dressing up in costumes, playing silly games,” is a great shout-out to the Jennings’ wig collection. “Hans plays with Lotte, Lotte plays with Jane / Jane plays with Willi, Willi is happy again,” he sings. “Suki plays with Leo, Sacha plays with Britt / Adolf builts a bonfire, Enrico plays with it.” The description of spreading nuclear knowledge in that first verse is the perfect conclusion to an episode that reveals that Elizabeth and Phillip have been risking themselves for information that is truly “incredibilis,” and that the world is gearing up for an arms raced based on clever fantasy rather than substance. Just as countries cascade into the game, The Americans‘ characters have been pulled into deception, whether as a condition of their jobs, or because adulthood is a disease that infects us all with secrecy. And for a show that depicts its main characters having a lot of unprotected—both physically and emotionally—sex with people not their primary partners in the years before AIDS became a visible public health catastrophe, there’s something chilling about the viral nature of the song.
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The musician Grimes, at the conclusion of her world tour, has written a terrific post on her Tumblr that’s basically a catalogue of the things she finds exhausting about being a woman in the industry she’s in. I’ve reproduced most of it here because it’s so striking:

i dont want to be molested at shows or on the street by people who perceive me as an object that exists for their personal satisfaction

i dont want to live in a world where im gonna have to start employing body guards because this kind of behavior is so commonplace and accepted and I’m pissed that when I express concern over my own safety it’s often ignored until people see firsthand what happens and then they apologize for not taking me seriously after the fact…

I’m tired of men who aren’t professional or even accomplished musicians continually offering to ‘help me out’ (without being asked), as if i did this by accident and i’m gonna flounder without them. or as if the fact that I’m a woman makes me incapable of using technology. I have never seen this kind of thing happen to any of my male peers

I’m tired of the weird insistence that i need a band or i need to work with outside producers (and I’m eternally grateful to the people who don’t do this)

im tired of being considered vapid for liking pop music or caring about fashion as if these things inherently lack substance or as if the things i enjoy somehow make me a lesser person

im tired of being congratulated for being thin because i can more easily fit into sample sizes from the runway

im tired of people i love betraying me so they can get credit or money

I’m sad that it’s uncool or offensive to talk about environmental or human rights issues

I’m tired of creeps on message boards discussing whether or not they’d “fuck” me

I’m tired of people harassing my dancers and treating them like they aren’t human beings

I’m sad that my desire to be treated as an equal and as a human being is interpreted as hatred of men, rather than a request to be included and respected (I have four brothers and many male best friends and a dad and i promise i do not hate men at all, nor do i believe that all men are sexist or that all men behave in the ways described above)

Her objections break down into a very clear dichotomy. In Grimes’ experience, she’s expected to be one of two things. The men who grope her, or her dancers, or who assume she has no real input in creating her music and that someone else must be behind it—and that they could be that someone else—or who discuss her as if she’s a merely penetrate-able object, or women who treat her like a conveniently-sized clothes rack assume a kind of emptiness to her. Her lack of agency is a plus for them: if she can’t have opinions, she also doesn’t have consent to give that would interfere with people’s actions or fantasies, opinions about her body that would prevent stylists from treating her a blank palette, or a distinct creative vision that might get in the way of other people using her as a vessel for their own musical ideas.
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Like many of you, I’d imagine, I grew up listening to Raffi Cavoukian, the Egyptian-born Canadian children’s musician singing songs like “Baby Beluga” and “Down By The Bay”—I even have dim memories of going to see him in concert. He’s recently embarked on his first tour in ten years, and now, as both a Canadian and an advocate for children, he’s speaking out about the suicide of Rehtaeh Parsons, who hanged herself at 17 after she experienced bullying and social isolation after she was allegedly sexually assaulted and a picture of the assault distributed online—and about rape culture more broadly.

In a series of tweets today, Raffi wrote:

The idea that men have a role to play in reducing sexual assault isn’t new, of course. But there’s something particularly powerful about hearing Raffi, who’s both an advocate for children and someone whose music has always been predicated on the theory that children have the ability to absorb big ideas about the world and their place in it, say that rape culture is unacceptable. If we’re going to teach boys more actively about gender roles and respectful and consensual sexuality, that’s a process that’s going to require a foundation to be constructed fairly early in childhood. That’s not to say that we need to start sex education at five. But if we’re going teach boys about the huge range of things they can be in the same way we’ve reexamined roles and options for girls, and if we’re going to try to shift the perception of what values make a person a real man, someone like Raffi, who knows how to speak to children directly and uncondescendingly, will need to be part of the conversation.