Volume 20 Issue 8
"Motorola Queen"
Here are the lyrics to the long-lost classic “Motorola Queen” by the completely unknown white 80s hip-hop artist, Rat Tail, whose current whereabouts are unknown. It was transcribed from a cassette tape discovered last November, wrapped in a ball of...
What's the Frequency, Iasos?
If you’ve ever had a near-death experience, chances are you’ve been fortunate enough—depending on how you look at it—to hear music that sounds identical to the blissed-out tones produced by the mononymous minstrel Iasos.
House of Jealous Lovers
Between 1969 and 1981, the Bandit soul and funk label put out some of the choicest cuts Chicago’s South Side had to offer. It was run by Arrow Brown, a charismatic, womanizing hustler. I got in touch with Tridia to find out the real story of Arrow—one...
Searching for Eternal Life on David Copperfield's Private Island
A black winged creature flew into the room and fluttered about erratically. "A bat!" I screamed. Transylvanian thoughts caromed through my mind. "No... wait! It's a fucking moth!" Raf shouted, as it hurtled to a stop upside down in a corner where the...
Friends in Low Places
'Frog' and 'Fisherman' welcomed me into their world of panhandling hustles and bicycle crack deals.
The Place Women Go to Get Raped
Yasmine’s story goes like this: Men enclosed a circle around her, ripped her clothes, beat her, dragged her through the streets, while penetrating her with their fingers and knives.
When Are We Going to Finally Colonize Space?
The Earth is doomed, and the only question is how long humanity has left. Fortunately, we have options: in the past few years there’s been a flurry of potentially habitable planets discovered. To learn more about our future on other planets, we talked...
The End of High-Low
By now, to say that highbrow and lowbrow—or high culture and low culture—form a false dichotomy is pretty, you know, obvs. Maybe we’ve felt it to be true for a while, that the idea of high and low as discrete and opposed units of whatever—of product or...