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Kilo Kish and When Music Is Therapy
The best art is borne out of honesty. Whether that honesty manifests itself in an abstract expression or a concrete but indirect performance, art that is true to who the artist is is the more pure manifestation. It’s what drove me to become a writer: an aching need from a young age to find the…
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Dancing: An Explainer
Let’s first discuss what dancing is: Wikipedia says that dance is a performance art form consisting of purposefully selected sequences of human movement. This movement has aesthetic and symbolic value, and is acknowledged as dance by performers and observers within a particular culture. Seems simple enough, dancing is expression using the human body, often times reflective…
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Losing Your Loved One To Drugs
I didn’t appreciate A$AP Yams while he was alive. I wish I had. I wish I could pretend I stanned for his tumblr and that he became my internet guru like a number of kids who showed up to Yams day in NYC on MLK Monday (a full year after his death) or the ones…
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Sounds Of Blackness: The Year In Rap
At the End of The Sellout, Paul Beatty’s merciless satire of the intersection between black culture and America, there’s a moment when the main character stands up in a room full of other black people and poses the question: what exactly is “our” thing?” For much of 2015 we’ve seen a surplus of rappers grapple…
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But What Did It All Mean
As a millennial, excuse me Willennial, I have been a fan of Shia Labeouf since he was on the Disney Channel series Even Stevens. Back then, Shia was all spastic, silly ball of energy in a show that was weird, crass and always funny. I wanted a friend like Louis and, because I was a…
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Cover Boy: Ryan Adams’ “1989”
Ryan Adams released his promised remake of Taylor Swift’s 1989 this week. It’s a quiet, incredibly thought-out reinterpretation that feels as full of reverence for the original as nostalgia of the time period that album title refers. It’s also kind of a dadzbop record; an album that will appeal to people who don’t want to…
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Papal Weapon
The pope is in Washington, D.C. at the time of writing this. The streets of DC are chaotic, packed and noisy. The metro is a warzone where nobody can reasonably hope to make it to the other side unscathed. There’s also a baseball game later today and just the general aggravation of working in the…
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The Ultimate Song Power Rankings For What A Time To Be Alive
Drake and Future have been teasing the idea of a joint mixtape for awhile but, like any promise of a joint tape, it was mostly disregarded as a fan service-y tease. Then it was announced that there was indeed a record that had been put together that was expected to be released soon. Despite this,…
Israel Daramola
Critic and Writer. Israel has written reviews, features, interviews, scripts, and ads for a number of outlets and companies.
Israel Daramola 