The Precocious are Deserving of our Praise

"Over the years, homoeroticism has probably ghostwritten more rap shit than Jay-Z and Mad Skillz combined, as the logical by-product of a cultural investment in the dick that runs deeper than vaginas (see Saafir's "Worship the D"). But in mainstream hip-hop, actually being gay is relegated to life either "on the DL" or as a spectator/dick-rider. Which may be why the making-gay of DMX's musical signifiers happens on Xiu Xiu's Fabulous Muscles, enabled by a white suburbanite for whom spectatorship is existential."

Rajiv Jaswa is the future of music writing.

"Of the composers I heard, the one who seem best poised for a major career is Nico Muhly, twenty-two-year-old, spiky-haired, healthily irreverent student of Corigliano’s at Juilliard... On a recent afternoon, he enjoyed motets b William Byrd, Khia’s salacious hip-hop track “My Neck, My Back,” John Adams’s “Chin Gates,” and Wagner’s “Götterdämmerung”—the last for a school paper."

Nico Muhly is the future of music.