“I’m a Capricorn so I don’t have dreams,” Aja says. It’s a Saturday night, and the nonbinary rapper is sitting behind the board of a studio at Brewery Recording in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, playing finished cuts and just-recorded demos of their new album in a grape-purple turtleneck and matching fitted cap. …
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Bradford Cox was 16 years old when he wrote his autobiography for the first time. “The title was The Burden of Time Is Fucked,” he says. It was more like a zine, really —the product of a lonely, queer, working-class kid in Athens, Georgia, reaching out to a future self. …
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In 1994, a 26-year-old R. Kelly married a 15-year-old Aaliyah. In 2001, a sex tape of R. Kelly allegedly urinating on a 14-year-old girl was released to the press. The “Pied Piper of R&B” has been accused of statutory rape, sexual coercion and even maintaining a “sex cult” full of …
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O ne day in the summer of 2017, Daniel Hernandez, better known as the rapper Tekashi 6ix9ine, appeared outside a Brooklyn row house to shoot the video that would make him a star, and eventually ruin his life. Against the menacing strains of his viral hit “Gummo,” he and a …
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On December 20th, JoJo gave herself the best possible 28th birthday present: a reclaimed narrative. That day, the pop singer reissued 2004’sJoJo and 2006’sThe High Road — the early albums that made her a teenage superstar, before she plunged into what she has previously described as a “personal hell” of …
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