Cameron was able to spend three hours there. And, of course, he captured video and took many photos—he is a Hollywood filmmaker, after all.
The extreme pressures took a toll on his equipment, though. Already a subscriber? Sign in. Thanks for reading Scientific American. Create your free account or Sign in to continue. See Subscription Options. As Ian Cohen wrote in a profile:. As with so many things in his life, he has it both ways.
As Laura Snapes wrote in her review of Golden Hour :. Golden Hour is filled with these awed revelations, undercut with enough anxiety—and, more than once, snappy in-the-pocket disco—to keep Musgraves from floating off into a fever dream.
As Jazz Monroe wrote in a profile:. After sneering at the gentrifiers who swagger down local backstreets, though, he checks himself, finding a sense of empathy. Is it when they benefit you, now that all these hipsters are employing us to play?
Well, what a fucking hypocrite you are. Chart-topping dance-club diva. Warholian pop-art star. Avant-grotesque performance artist. Oscar-nominated actress and Oscar-winning balladeer. Protest singer.
Old-school standards crooner. Metallica frontwoman : Few artists in history have reinvented themselves as many times as Lady Gaga, and fewer still have done it as successfully. The world is a weirder, more boundary-free place with her in it. She hatched herself from a semi-translucent egg at the Grammys. Her repeated and earnest disavowal of anything remotely normative was and remains plainly empowering for anyone sitting at home alone in her room, feeling like a true weirdo.
The idea was always to fracture and reestablish a hierarchy. Lauryn Hill is one of the most idolized rappers of all time and an incredibly magnetizing singer who conveys resilience and heartache with every word. On her solo debut, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill , she found her truest, most sacred self and honored that person with everything she had: She celebrated the birth of her child, freed herself from exploitative relationships, and grappled with how her celebrity status impacted her art.
Miseducation went on to win five Grammys, sold over 10 million copies, and made Hill the first female rapper to earn a diamond record. The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill is a declaration of independence. And it is a love letter to the liberated self, the maternal self and to God.
It is an album of junctures: Between adolescence and adulthood, between Lauryn as one third of the Fugees and Lauryn as a woman on her own, between being a child and being a parent. She conceived of the album at 22, single and pregnant with her firstborn. At her best Lauryn Hill flirts with legitimate prophet status, digging to her deepest to harness the power greater than herself; a power we all need to survive and overcome.
She offers it to us. Startlingly prolific mixtape innovator. Originator of the Based freestyle. Leader of his own cult. Early Black Lives Matter supporter. College lecturer. Emoji tycoon. Cat lover. His benevolent cult-leader persona—a Zenned-out internet addict in tiny pants with a direct line to the wise and mysterious Based God—has certainly laid the groundwork for a generation of social media myth-builders.
From her beginnings as a Biggie protege and member of Junior M. At the height of her career, Kim courted controversy with her sexually explicit, take-no-prisoners rhymes. Only in recent years, as women in rap ushered in a renaissance, has the music world more accurately attributed Kim as a primary source. As Clover Hope wrote in a excerpt from her book The Motherlode :.
Kim brought a raw sexual energy to the genre and became the model for a generation of female rappers caught in a battle between owning their sexuality and exploiting it. She made the new concept of a female rapper—with a sexy visual to go with their music—not a choice but a necessity. As Matthew Strauss wrote in It was difficult to know Lil Peep.
You could say he was sad or depressed. He had a lot of tattoos. He sang and rapped about drugs. He died tragically young. Lil Uzi Vert has quickly become one of the most important rappers of the last decade, not just a product of a transitional moment in hip-hop but a defining star of it. The following year, he broke out with his debut tape for them, Luv Is Rage. The tape became one of the first landmarks for a diverse, exciting rap scene that was emerging on SoundCloud.
The other day she spoke too truthfully in an interview and accidentally insulted Taylor Swift; Katy Perry asked her to tour with her and—politely but firmly—she said no. The message is clear: Lorde has introduced herself to the world as someone who gives very few fucks. A cult indie rock band should form in some out-of-the way place and seem like a secret club that would want you as a member.
They should have a cute name and use punctuation in funny ways and they should sing and shout their songs in a way that demands you sing and shout along. All hail Los Campesinos! Gareth Campesinos! For a decade, nearly every word that has come out of the Los Campesinos! Like that time he sang of an awkward hookup that was blown when a girl upchucked all over his rented tuxedo; or when he recounted that early heartbreak when he got wasted, ate too many potato chips, and then deposited the greasy snack right back onto a soccer field.
They are essential experiences, embarrassments that turn into collective elation once they hit open air. Because, for all its indecency, throwing up makes us feel better. Low emerged in with a sound so unusual that it inspired its own subgenre: slowcore.
But while many lesser acts sprung from such minimalist origins have ended up repeating themselves, Low have remained dynamic, resilient, and surprising, as evidenced by their breathtakingly experimental album Double Negative.
Rich Juzwiak wrote of the record:. Double Negative would knock listeners on their asses coming from any band at any time, but it is extraordinary that Low is doing such challenging, relevant work 25 years into their career. The album is like a discovery of a new mutation of still-recognizable DNA. The London-born child of Sri Lankan refugees, M. Always contradictory, often inflammatory, M.
She was the very first hipster pop star for a generation that has now created a space for many of them, from Robyn to Grimes to FKA twigs. Simply: For all her zigging and zagging, M. Between and , M83 issued three increasingly ambitious and successful electro-pop classics that used big synths to make big music about big feelings. As Devon Maloney wrote in a profile:. Gonzalez has spent years capturing his own nostalgia on record, trying to make it breathe and soar and thrill.
All of his wistful fantasies came to life. In , a Canadian punk who used to go by the name Makeout Videotape crashed indie rock and made his mark as both a grinning prankster and a melancholy janglelord. You have to take the whole thing—the guy who shows up in videos and onstage, and the person singing these songs—together. Mac Miller accomplished a great deal in his short time on Earth, but he was always in the process of becoming.
Artistically, he never stayed in one place for long, and his life and work were filled with paradoxes—he rapped about the ache of loneliness while building a loving community, and he could make an infectious banger out of his struggle with substance abuse and depression. Each record dug a little deeper and brought a new sense of possibility, which made his death at age 26 that much more tragic. Another damn white rapper. Did we not learn our lesson from Asher Roth? S mixtape in Eventually, the murmurs of a Wiz Khalifa co-sign gave me the motivation I needed to go on my cruddy family desktop and download the tape to my iPod classic.
And shit. I came across some of his music videos, and this clean shaven, brightly smiling kid only three or four years older than me was really spitting. Soon enough, I watched Mac change, navigate life, and fight to not lose himself, all while feeling those same feelings myself.
In the past 25 years, Madlib has risen to eminence as the underground rap polymath of a generation. Both shared a magpie eye for vintage sounds, but Madlib showed little interest in translating his jaundiced vision into pop, instead coveting the attic-y and moth-bitten. His resulting body of work—released via a toy box of alter-egos like Yesterdays New Quintet and the helium-voiced rapper Quasimoto—is a sprawling, singular genre unto itself.
Listening to music can be a way of making it. Few artists understand this better than Madlib. Across dozens of releases and nearly as many alter egos, the West Coast hip-hop producer, DJ, multi-instrumentalist, and de facto archivist born Otis Jackson Jr.
Madlib places these moments at the center of our attention, stuttering and alive, their significance impossible to ignore for those of us who might miss it otherwise. Cue up one of his beats side-by-side with its source material and you may be surprised at the similarity. But such an attempt at demystification would miss the point of his music. Some producers specialize in manipulating their samples until they are unrecognizable; for Madlib, the hearing itself—the noticing—is as important as whatever happens after that.
The Magnetic Fields redefined, if not single-handedly invented, dead-pan indie pop. In fact, its place near the end of the album almost signals—more than the impact of the breakup—his growing mastery as a songwriter. It suggests that our deepest wisdom can be located in our most personal thoughts. His music builds a sensuous world around the endless, perhaps fruitless, pursuit of monogamy, even when the idea of a minute groove was and still is quaint and foreign.
The long-stroke idealization of sex as intimate connection ran counter to romance-challenged, freaky-sex tunes storming the charts around the same time, like R. As Rawiya Kameir wrote in Offset, Quavo, and Takeoff must have realized early on in life that repetition is the mother of all learning. The Migos became mainstream stars. The song itself is a perfect distillation of everything that makes the Migos irresistible: a Gucci Mane-derived gift for quotables, a sizzling Metro Boomin beat, ad-libs for days, and an ear for perfectly placed guest stars—in this case, a before-he-was-huge Lil Uzi Vert, rapping about falling asleep in a jacuzzi.
Soon enough, the Migos were matching chart feats once set by the Beatles, cementing their status as generational titans. As hip-hop became the dominant force in popular culture—and Atlanta, the dominant force in hip-hop—trap-inspired production suffused the mainstream. Mike WiLL went on to produce many of the most popular songs of the s, as he adapted his immersive, detailed instrumentals and thundering beats across hip-hop and pop. Mike WiLL Made-It, so named by Gucci Mane in the thick of his prolific mixtape run, has expanded his repertoire with radical pivots—zany psychedelic trips and chic pop promenades.
When WiLL shared instrumentals from his discography, it was a dizzying flex, a colorful mosaic of pop-trap stems that omitted key moments by mistake. There are so many jams he forgets some. The album delves into that harrowing moment in the vanity mirror when you realize what others see does not match your reflection. How can they think you are so big when you are actually so small?
His funk- and soul-sampling productions are as deep as house music gets, by turns playful, sensual, and militant. Rather than positing a break from the past, he explicitly positions himself within established traditions—soul music, roller disco, the black church.
In a Red Bull Music Academy lecture in , he confessed to having made a track on the demo equipment at Guitar Center once, when he was young and broke. That Dixon spent the entire lecture having his afro combed out only contributed to his mystique: part trickster, part philosopher, and all keeper of the flame. Singer-songwriter Moses Sumney broke through in the mids with a quavering, powerful voice and shapeshifting music that draws on folk and avant-garde pop.
In , the Los Angeles-based artist released his debut, Aromanticism , a stirring take on intimacy that defined his equally lonesome and sensuous sound. His interpretation of greyness is not just the kind of cloudiness that sometimes marks his temperament, but the kind that rejects binaries, that asserts that life is not lived in blacks or whites but in the gloriously complex in-betweens.
The album is sprawling and yet tight, dense but accessible, an elevated version of the things that have become his signatures in recent years: artful lyricism, conceptual depth, playful vocals and melodies, unexpected sweeps of soundscape. He, it seems, wants neither, and both. Fronted by vocalist Matt Berninger, whose baritone mumble often accompanies the kind of unromantic adult anxieties rarely found in rock music, the Cincinnati transplants outlasted many of their peers in the Brooklyn art community of the s.
Like R. The fact that no one can talk about the National without invoking their dependability might feel a bit unfair to them, or at least a bit tired. Consistency is not boring. Consistency is a miracle, a small act of defiance against entropy.
Berninger has compared the band to a marriage, as all band members do, but their music feels particularly devoted to the quotidian nature of lifelong unions, the way that your success is measured in time, how each year together turns your commitment into its own kind of monument. Renowned for her indomitable singing, she has always demonstrated an equally commanding voice as a songwriter, spelunking further and further into the human condition. As Sam Sodomosky wrote in his review of Hell-On :.
She sings of bloodshed and mystery and revenge, but in her albums there are also pleas for basic compassion that are intimate and deeply felt. Mangum sings about himself and the people he knows. Instead of mountaintops and oceans, he sets his songs in bedrooms and public parks. His characters smoke cigarettes and hate themselves for being horny.
They break up and hook up and yearn for each other like teenagers. Hailing from Vancouver, British Columbia, the New Pornographers barrelled onto the scene at the turn of the century with the type of ecstatic power-pop anthems that other indie rock bands were often too self-conscious or belligerently difficult to offer up.
The term is usually reserved for one-off vanity projects by famous people with too much time on their hands. And besides, the results of the supergroup collaboration are almost invariably doomed to be regarded as secondary and inconsequential. You listen to his Old Testament-style narratives and hear love, murder, anguish, and lust, featuring people who are gripped by anguish and angry at God.
You have to search long and hard to find a punk rocker who has aged so gracefully. People die in Nick Cave songs. They get wiped out in floods, zapped in electric chairs, and mowed down en masse in saloon shoot-outs. But in the years since his celebrated debut, Space Is Only Noise , he has pushed himself far beyond those origins, turning his hand to experimental soundtrack projects, heady psychedelic rock, and more.
Sirens , his ambient-leaning follow-up, conceived partly in reaction to the rise of Donald Trump, illuminated the cyclical nature of power and the illusion of democracy. Can we get out of this abstract bubble? How can we resist?
She tweets about ways to organize, runs a book club, and releases music that dreams of revolution. As Rawiya Kameir wrote in a essay that touched on how artists are grappling with issues of social justice today:.
But instead of becoming defensive and issuing a Notes-app apology, she engaged with the ideas she was challenged with, did her own research, and publicly admitted she was wrong—much like she did when she discovered her original stage name included an offensive slur.
In that twin vulnerability and accountability, I see a model for what it might look like for artists and the general public to engage with one another in a meaningful way.
In a profile, Mike Powell wrote :. His early recordings are dim, insular pieces of music characterized by handmade cassette loops, percolating keyboard arpeggios played on an old Roland Juno he inherited from his dad, and washes of ambience that sound like third-hand field recordings of weather on other planets. Returnal, released in , had a bigger, cleaner, and more conventionally epic sound.
The foggy, loop-based follow-up Replica sounded like a deliberate reaction: Toy-like and repetitive instead of open-ended, made over the course of a few feverish days using micro-samples from old commercials, an album conceived of almost as a game instead of some oceanic chunk of personal expression.
That these artists were an average of 5-and-a-half years old when Riot! Mike Hadreas began Perfume Genius in the shadows, with two albums of delicate piano melodies, vocals buried beneath clouds of feedback, and heart-rending honesty about the hardships of living and loving as a queer person. While as an artist, his catalog is a grab bag, his production work both solo and with partner Chad Hugo as the Neptunes has spanned generations, from the era of N.
Just listen to this supercut of songs that feature his signature four-count intro to be reminded of his decades-long consistency. As Carrie Battan wrote in Pharrell Williams occupies the sideline of culture so compellingly that it often becomes its own unique stage. With his hushed voice and his faith that every fleeting thought and passing emotion might reveal a deeper truth, Phil Elverum of the Microphones and Mount Eerie brought new intimacy to indie rock. But his essential approach has been remarkably consistent and speaks to the power of simplicity—if you look deeply enough and say something true, a quiet melody and basic chord progression is all you need to get it across.
The album sounds like an Elverum work. The music is low and murmuring. His voice is hushed and conversational. The theme of impermanence can still be felt. Unlike many works about grief, though, there is no glance towards redemptive larger meaning, which makes it all the more bracing. Listening to it is like pressing your hand against ice and leaving it there.
In his review of that album, Sam Sodomsky wrote :. Phoebe Bridgers is a master of collapse. The year-old California native writes songs for those moments when things fall apart, when language fails, when you long for so much distance that you need a spaceship to reach it. While Punisher is only her second full-length collection as a solo artist, Bridgers has already established a distinct worldview. It can be sad, but she is also the first to call bullshit on letting one emotion consume her.
Across the s, Phoenix honed their sophisticated take on arena rock music enough to actually start headlining arenas around the world. In his review of that breakthrough album, Ryan Dombal wrote :. The issue of thematic directness is especially important to Phoenix—this is an established indie band writing songs about love that are armed with hooks primed for a mainstream embrace. Flaunting a devil-may-care style marked by squeaking ad-libs and a delivery that made it sound like he was rapping while chewing gum, Playboi Carti helped lay a foundation for a community of rappers on SoundCloud in the s.
He also pissed off a lot of hip-hop fans who were taught to respect traditional lyricism above all else. Being a great rapper has never been a prerequisite for making great rap music, but few rappers have ever tested that premise quite as aggressively as Playboi Carti.
On his self-titled debut , the twitchy Atlanta rapper compensated for his shortcomings as a lyricist with vision and spirit, bouncing his sticky ad-libs off of gloopy, gummy beats that played out with the insane logic of a Double Dare obstacle course. Die Lit is all cream filling, no Oreo. In November , before he even had any music out, Pop Smoke appeared on the YouTube channel of New York street rap interviewer Melz TV with the confidence of a comic book villain promising he would soon take over Brooklyn.
Soon, his roaring voice could be heard on every block in New York City, from the row houses of Canarsie to apartment complexes up in the Bronx, and well beyond.
As Alphonse Pierre wrote of that moment:. Have you ever had an NYPD officer throw you against the wall and aggressively pat you down in search of drugs you never had? Have you ever made that eye contact with an officer where you can just tell they think nothing of you? It openly unifies and helps define our current rebellion. Those same qualities also defined the music of Prodigy and Havoc, a duo who helped form the vocabulary and bedrock of New York rap in the s.
Prodigy in particular stood firm in this authenticity throughout his solo career, until his death in The Infamous marked the moment that the language in gangsta rap shifted from corner scrambles and specific vendettas to all-out war, endless and impersonal.
During their astonishing s run, Clipse released several classic albums and mixtapes, perfecting a coke rap aesthetic that was thoroughly catchy and hardcore. With musical partners the Neptunes, Clipse have crafted 12 unrelenting tales of desperation and distribution, glamour and gloating. Lyrically, the album is spare and incisive—wordplay abounds but the punches are quick and devastating—and musically, Malice and Pusha-T have arguably snatched the best dozen Neptunes tracks in years.
As the Roots were navigating new commercial success at the turn of the millennium, Quest was already looking for ways to be more than just a drummer. Moore wrote :. Before the sessions for Things Fall Apart began, drummer and bandleader? He was spending time with Voodoo engineer Russell Elevado, learning new ways to manipulate sound to give his own music a more granular, less studied feel. The best rap of that era had to feel at least a little gritty: Though the Notorious B. Realizing he needed to improve as a producer,?
Over the course of three albums before breaking up in , the New York dance-punk band matured into beatific and magisterial art-rockers. As Ryan Schreiber wrote when naming Echoes the number one album of Treble-charged guitars attacked like guard dogs and back alley killers, lunging out with knives drawn and stabbing furiously. When this era enjoys its renaissance in 15 years, we will remember this album: Nothing says more. As the mainstream American music industry opens its arms more widely to Spanish-language music, more work remains to be done.
As the internet homogenizes individual music cultures into a big, studio-quantized mish-mash, how do musicians retain the singularity of the hyper-local, often dissipating histories of their cultures? It is one of the most exciting and passionately composed albums to appear not only in the global bass tradition but in the pop and experimental spheres this year.
And they just might be the only group that can pull off pointed political statements and then remix them using nothing but noises made by cats. As Nate Patrin wrote in The connection makes a kind of retroactive sense going back to their early s solo debuts, Fantastic Damage and Monster. Both albums seethed with the anxious funk of retrofuture s-and-synths production that rattled trunks and cages with unrestrained intensity.
And both portrayed the artists as out-of-control forces trying their damnedest to stay true to friends, family, and hip-hop while confronting disenfranchisement, abuse, and cynicism. That their creators would gravitate towards collaboration makes even more sense now than it does with hindsight in mind, as the hooks to the head of Cancer for Cure and R. Music shared not just a producer and a timeframe, but the kind of catharsis-fueled defiance that career no-sellout vets live and breathe.
No excuse to relax here. Inventory, options and pricing are all subject to change. All pricing reflects Nissan Rebates, Programs, and Incentives in the dealership zip code See Dealer for complete details. How it Works. Step 1 Select a car from inventory. Step 2 Personalize your monthly payment. Step 3 Get a KBB? Step 4 Secure credit pre-approval. Watch Video.
Each series offers a personal guide with insights on one of the park's many highlights. We recommend you download all of the episodes in a series before beginning your tour, as cell service is limited in the park. You may also download episodes from or subscribe to the Lassen Audio Tours podcast through iTunes or any podcast manager. A podcast hosted by park rangers featuring audio stories from Lassen Volcanic National Park.
Download and listen to all episodes here , or subscribe to the show on iTunes. Episode 0: Alpha Codes. Audio Transcript. There are more than park units managed by the National Park Service -- as of this recording -- and sixty of these carry the most venerable and widely recognized designation: that of the National Park.
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