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A strange thing you learn about American popular music, if you look back far enough, is that for a long time it didn’t much have “genres” — it had ethnicities. Vaudeville acts, for instance, had tunes for just about every major immigrant group: the Italian number, the Yiddish number, the Irish one, the Chinese. Some were sung in a spirit of abuse; others were written or performed by members of those groups themselves. And of course there were the minstrel shows, in which people with mocking, cork-painted faces sang what they pretended were the songs of Southern former slaves. This was how we reckoned with our melting pot: crudely, obliviously, maybe with a nice tune and a beat you could dance to.

Sometime in the 1950s, the mainstream saw its last great gasp of this habit. A nation that considered itself very space-age and worldly enjoyed quaint spins on sentimental Italian music (“That’s Amore” and its pizza pies) and Trinidadian calypso songs about hard, simple labor (“Day-O” and its bananas). You had your “Latin” numbers, your Hawaiian ones, your “Asian” songs — light ethnic pastiches laid out cheerily, like an international buffet that serves falafel one day and schnitzel the next, never too bothered about how accurate the recipes are.

There was a simple notion behind all this stuff, and it was the belief that music, like food, came from someplace, and from some people. Even when it was played in a condescending ethnic-joke burlesque of who those people actually were — even when it was pretty aggressively racist — the notion remained: Different styles sprang from different people. Then all of this changed, and we decided to start thinking of pop music not as a folk tradition but as an art; we started to picture musicians as people who invented sounds and styles, making intellectual decisions about their work.

But music is still, pretty obviously, tied to people. How else do you create a situation in which, after decades of hip-hop’s being the main engine of pop music, it can still be a little complicated when nonblack people rap? That vexed thing we call “identity” leans its considerable weight on all kinds of questions: which sounds comfort us or excite us; where and how we listen to them; how we move our bodies as they play. Watch a mere silhouette of a human being dancing to music, and you can immediately guess things about who they are and where they came from.

In 2017, identity is the topic at the absolute center of our conversations about music. There may be times when this fact grates at us, when it feels as though there must be other dimensions of the world to attend to; “surely,” you moan, “there are songs that speak to basic human emotions in ways that transcend the particulars of who we are!” But if you look through the essays in this magazine, you may notice two things. One is that, unbidden and according to no plan, they find themselves continually reckoning with questions of identity. The other is that they’re doing this because the musicians are, too.

A Japanese-American musician writes a song called “Your Best American Girl.” An R.&B. singer titles one “F.U.B.U.” — or, “for us, by us.” Are you part of her “us”? The house music in Kanye West’s “Fade”: Does it make you picture the black Chicagoans who helped invent it or the club-going Europeans who embraced it? How does it work when a queer woman matches the sexual braggadocio of male rappers, when L.G.B.T. activists sing a country song for a restaurant chain that once fired gay employees, when Leonard Cohen revisits his childhood religious inheritance?

This is what we talk about now, the music-makers and the music-listeners both. Not the fine details of genre and style — everyone, allegedly, listens to everything now — but the networks of identity that float within them. Maybe decades ago you could aim your songs at a mass market, but music does not really have one of those anymore. Artists have to figure out whom they’re speaking to and where they’re speaking from. The rest of us do the same. For better or worse, it’s all identity now. ♦

Nitsuh Abebe is a story editor for the magazine.

Loving Adele shouldn’t be that hard. When a chorus brings her voice to its cruising altitude, it’s like you’re up there, flying with it. Down here, on earth, where her third album, “25,” made Adele the top-selling artist of 2015 and 2016, she has that realness we say we value in the people we elevate to stardom; last month, during the Grammys telecast, she cursed as she interrupted a laconic version of George Michael’s “Fastlove” in order to get the tempo right.

But even Adele knows that loving Adele is complicated. At the Grammys, “25” won album of the year, and a poignant portion of her acceptance speech was a tribute to Beyoncé, whose album “Lemonade” broke the cultural Richter scale — and didn’t win any of the big awards. The moment was poignant because it was earnest: Adele stood just a few feet in front of the woman she called her “idol” and spoke of how “Lemonade” had empowered her and “my black friends.” This was the sort of candor you usually have to wait for Kanye West to deliver, only with none of West’s biliousness, recrimination and, however myopic, sense of history. Adele didn’t have to acknowledge that history — of a white industry’s crowning preference for white artists. She was living it.

Black people have never been necessary to make black music. But it has become obligatory for white artists who do (and who win prizes for it) to pay a public contrition tax to their black peers, whether it’s Adele to Beyoncé or, three years earlier, Macklemore texting (then publicizing) an apology to Kendrick Lamar for having won (with Ryan Lewis) the Grammys in the rap category. That’s the future of music: recognizing, in the present, that you’re permanently indentured to the past.

Setting aside its enormous sales, “25” is not the artistically catholic landmark that “Lemonade” is but an old-fashioned record, built around the bloom and flare of Adele’s singing. Some of the hooks, though, could catch a whale. And isn’t whaling pop’s whole point?

Yes, certain cultural institutions have a habit of setting traps that trigger trauma. But when it’s just me and Adele — very good Adele, catchy-as-hell Adele — the triggers lock. “Send My Love (to Your New Lover),” the second track on “25,” makes you mad that we live in a world where what happens at the Grammys can’t not matter. It makes you mad that we put a political price tag on this kind of perfection. I must have danced to this song 200 times, in blocks of repeats. (Why doesn’t this woman make more fast songs?)

It starts with her saying, “Just the guitar. O.K., cool.” Then comes the rhythmic plink of a guitar Lindsey Buckingham might have picked. The plink is married to a kick drum’s heartbeat. Then comes The Voice, at a low smolder, the smoke still rising from a crater of disillusionment. By the prechorus, her voice is flanked by other Adeles swooping in, on multiple tracks, to dispel the dismay of having dated someone with cold feet and to wish the best for this person’s next girlfriend. “Send my love to your new lover. Treat her better,” she sings, going up a note and adding an extra, addictive breath to “lover.”

Is this a black song? It moves in dance-hall time. The swelling repetitions are chillingly churchy. And the voice itself has what can be only called soul. It’s in the pews, the rafters and the aisles. I love this song because it makes me feel strong — as strong as singing “We gon’ slay” any time Beyoncé does. In other words, “Send My Love” sets out to catch a whale. This song makes me feel ridiculous for reacting to institutional biases that pressure us into calling Adele a trespasser. All I want to do when I hear it is call her Ishmael.♦

Wesley Morris is a critic at large for The Times and a staff writer for the magazine.

It wasn’t an email from God, but it was close. Leonard Cohen had written to ask if Gideon Zelermyer, the cantor of Congregation Shaar Hashomayim near Montreal — Cohen’s childhood synagogue — was interested in recording with him.

Zelermyer was soon sitting inside the synagogue’s sanctuary with a few members of Shaar’s all-male choir, playing with different arrangements for “You Want It Darker,” the title track of Cohen’s 14th and final studio album. Some of the words Cohen had given them to work with were familiar; they were borrowed from two of Judaism’s holiest prayers. One is the Kaddish, recited by mourners after the death of a loved one. The other is the High Holy Days prayer Hineni — literally, “Here I am” — a personal entreaty to God, the worshiper asking plaintively for mercy. The choir’s voices are the first sounds you hear on the album, their ethereal harmonics giving way to sparse instrumentation and Cohen’s weary, subterranean growl, then returning to back up the song’s choruses and final movement.

This was hardly the first time that Cohen had drawn on his Judaism for his music. Though he had a complicated relationship with his religious inheritance, it provided a natural vocabulary for him; it was what he knew, and its stories of human suffering and, occasionally, redemption suited his poet’s pull toward the existential. But never before have Cohen’s biblical references felt so charged, so dark, so pointed. “Magnified, sanctified, be thy holy name,” he sings. “Vilified, crucified, in the human frame. A million candles burning for the help that never came. You want it darker.” Then, echoing the words that Abraham spoke as he answered God’s command to sacrifice his only son: “Hineni, I’m ready, my Lord.”

You can’t listen to these words without thinking about the fact that Cohen was dying when he recorded them. It’s one thing to meditate on faith and mortality when death is an abstraction. It is surely another when you can feel it bearing down on you. And yet the choir’s harmonies manage to transform the song, lifting Cohen’s solitary struggle into something universal, even eternal.

Cohen once said that he did not think of himself as a religious person, but his life was in many ways an extended spiritual journey. Buddhism, Scientology, kabbalah, Hare Krishna, Hinduism — Cohen sampled them all. Yet in his final years, he found himself drawn back to the 171-year-old synagogue where he had become a bar mitzvah, where both his grandfather and great-grandfather served as presidents, where a photograph of his Hebrew-school class taken in 1949 still hangs on the wall. Cohen was living in Los Angeles, but a cousin in Montreal sent him a recording of Zelermyer and his choir, reuniting Cohen with sounds that had never stopped echoing in his head. He and the cantor struck up an email correspondence. “May your voice reach that Place and bring down the blessings,” Cohen wrote Zelermyer in 2008, before the High Holy Days. (“He can’t write anything normally, can he?” the cantor remembers thinking.) And then several years later came the note, asking for help with a new record. As Cohen put it, “I’m looking for a sound like the Shaar choir and cantor of my youth.”

In October, the record-release event for “You Want It Darker” was held at the residence of the Canadian consul general in Los Angeles. Zelermyer was seated with the other V.I.P.s in the front row. It was the first time he had met Cohen in person. It would also be the last. Weeks later, Cohen’s coffin was lowered into the earth at Shaar Hashomayim’s cemetery. Zelermyer stood next to Cohen’s family as they recited the Kaddish.♦

Jonathan Mahler is a staff writer for the magazine.

When Missy Elliott divines the future in her science-fiction-inflected videos, she never envisions dystopia. Even in the oversize jacket bearing the slogan “Save the Humans” that she wears in the video for “I’m Better,” her optimism supersedes the plea. Positivity feels like an intrinsic part of her message and her temperament, and in a climate of uncertainty and fear, “I’m Better” is an alien message of hope, full of sneaky inspiration meant to help us get up in the morning, rise-and-grind style. “It’s another day, another chance,” the Miami producer Lamb raps, helping Elliott out on the chorus. “I wake up, I wanna dance. So as long as I got my friends ... I’m better, I’m better, I’m better!”

Released in the last week of January, the signature futurism of “I’m Better” was a welcome jolt. The beat is so stark it’s almost jarring, with a tiptoeing synth melody that makes Elliott sound like some kind of gumshoe on the case, tracking down dudes in the act of creeping. Characteristically slick, the video features dancers in headgear that mimics light-therapy acne masks. Elliott gleams in outlandish feathered adornment and lip gloss the color of a vinyl record, delivering cheeky brags about her coterie of admirers, who watch her “like he watchin’ ‘Scandal’ — but I’m just here with my girls.”

Elliott’s approach has always been an antidote to conservatism, both within music and sometimes outside it. She’s unwilling to abide by any perceived rules of language. For years, she has bent rhythmic parameters and willfully warped nouns so that they rhyme, as if to prove that there’s always another, probably far cooler way of going about life and language than the rest of us have recognized. On “I’m Better,” she rhymes the Spanish word for “fire” with an English word for a car — “He say I’m hot, I’m so fue-eh-go/Pull up on him in my veh-heh-co.” These tricks carry such uncomplicated joy that they give us permission to celebrate too. “He say I’m pretty, I’m pretty, you must be from Brazil, I must be from México,” she concludes, rhyming the Spanish pronunciation — and giving dap to those of us with origins in the global South, who could use the shout-out these days.

“I’m Better” also positions Elliott in the American South, the Virginia of her upbringing, as well as Orlando, Miami, Atlanta. Its sound adheres to current trends in Southern hip-hop — which is curious, because Elliott sets trends but rarely follows them. Yet by employing the syrupy, stripped-down delivery so many young Southern rappers favor, she establishes a lineage, from her work to theirs: Stylistically, it is difficult to imagine a Migos without a Missy Elliott.

For Elliott to position herself within a style that’s popular and yet often derided, usually by Northerners and hip-hop fans over the age of 25 — for her to sprinkle her flavor on the 2017 iteration of music made for the subwoofers in your Jeep — does a real service to youth culture. More than most rappers, she seems to bend time to her will. And if she can’t stop it, she will swerve around it.♦

Julianne Escobedo Shepherd is the culture editor for Jezebel.

I spent a large chunk of 2016 trying to talk to Future. I hounded and pressed his P.R. team. Around the top of the year, my nagging paid off; as instructed, I flew from New York to London for an audience with the rapper. I was set to join his tour and follow him for a few days through Europe. Very soon, I would find, things would not break my way.

On the first night I found myself at a chicken shop called Nando’s, directly across the street from his overflowing concert venue, rather than backstage as planned. With great envy, I stared at the crowd flowing in as I munched my breast-and-wing combo.

Future had just sat down for an interview with the BBC’s Charlie Sloth, who asked him about his relationship with Blac Chyna, the Kardashian-affiliated reality-TV personality with whom he’d possibly been romantically involved. “Are yous two still cool?” Sloth asked, in a punchy London rumble. “We great,” Future responded, in his trademark flat-affect reserve.

Privately, though, the entreaty into his personal life enraged him. He declared an immediate media blackout. I was in line for his concert when I got the call from P.R.: The interview was decisively off. I spent a weekend eating delicious Pakistani food, watching Tottenham play Leicester City, hoping for a change of mind that never came.

At that point, Future was roughly two years into a radical public and artistic reimagining. It started in the fall of 2014, not long after his breakup with the R.&B. singer Ciara and the soft landing of his pop-friendly sophomore album, “Honest.” The failure became an important inflection point. Over the next few years, he created a swelling mass of music with a cloaking grandness to it: Take a step inside, and you were entombed. The songs were lean and incessant and almost completely devoid of any other voice but Future’s. And what that voice was intimating to us, from behind the thickest of blackout curtains, was that our man had given up on his conscience and that he was guzzling the prescription cough syrup Promethazine and downing Xanax and that he was having sex with women he did not really care about and that this was neither making him feel good nor bad but rather it was making him feel nothing.

And then, the really weird part: Suddenly, rightfully, Future was considered an artist who could not be ignored, our best next hope for rap-star transcendence. Embracing personal destruction took him there. Was it a meltdown or a rise? What were we to make of a man who made party music out of a death rattle? How should I know? I was stuck at Nando’s.

This February, after a period of uncharacteristic dormancy, Future — born Nayvadius Wilburn in 1983 in Atlanta — returned with a barrage. He released two albums in two weeks, and there are rumors of a third. On the heartbroken “HNDRXX,” he gushed and apologized and balladeered. Future has always had a cockeyed crooner alter-ego; here, it takes the whole stage, suggesting one tantalizing path forward for his discography. And on “Future,” he boasted and bragged and sounded weirdly content.

Take “Mask Off,” a down-tempo track built, by the elite producer Metro Boomin, around a bizarre but lovely woodwind sample. The song hints at a certain kind of violence and ruthlessness, the kind suggested by a criminal setting off into the night and choosing to leave the ski mask at home. And yet it’s the kind of song you would want the D.J. to slip on right when you’ve lost count of your drinks and you’re feeling buzzy and smiley and warm.

Historically, M.C.s have treated narcotics as product to be moved; today’s younger, party-happy rappers give drugs a gleeful knucklehead spin. But when Future describes his voluminous intake, he does so with all the zeal of a man popping open a days-of-the-week pill organizer. On the hook to “Mask Off,” Future rattles off drugs, unsentimentally: “Percocets/Molly, Percocets.” For him, sometimes the drugs are great; sometimes, not so much. On “Mask Off,” amid rhymes about how totally fun and good his life is, he calls Promethazine his “guillotine.”

It feels reductive to try to pin an artist down on the sins of his persona. Hip-hop’s greatest running trick has been blurring the lines of “real life” and art. But with the rate at which Future was rapping about drugs, one question was inevitably posed: Is this an addiction? If so, it was a new spin on a classic trope. The arc of pretty much every drug movie mimics the whiz-bang of the initial high and the eye-blackening horror of the inevitable comedown. Future’s music acknowledged that drug addiction isn’t that cinematically neat: It’s the high and the comedown over and over again.

After London, Future’s P.R. staff and I got back into our little dance. Emails, calls, texts, pleadings. Soon, I received word that Future was ready to talk again. It was in Toronto that we actually met, and where it was so cold that the streets had a kind of a permafrost hue. The pavement felt as if it could, at any point, shatter. For a few days, I tagged along with Future and his affable crew. The first order of business was an interview with a TV station on the 19th floor of a high-end hotel.

The interviewer, a friendly reporter in all black, was drinking a glass of white wine. She showed Future the tattoos on her arm; I couldn’t quite see them, but they were apparently inspired by his music. “Oh!” he said in delight, then waved away Shooter, his ever-present personal photographer. “Let us have this moment.” Apparently emboldened, the reporter shared more. “I’ve been drinking ’cause I’m nervous,” she told him. She had ended a long-term relationship, she said, because of his music.

In person, Future provides no outward signs that you should approach him with confessionals. He’s imposingly tall and more than a little grave. He is also beautiful. (L.A. Reid, chairman of Epic Records, who signed Future, told me of their initial meeting: “Usually I ask people to audition. Future, I didn’t even want him to move. ‘Let’s get you signed while you’re sitting there looking like that.’ ”) But the TV reporter went for it, and it was brave. And almost immediately, Future went back to thumbing through his phone. He either hadn’t heard what she said or he chose to ignore it. After a few beats of silence he finally looked up. “Ay, what’s the name of this hotel?”

The next day, I finally had my chance to connect. We were upstairs at a middlebrow bistro with a lot of bare wood, and Future had just finished off an impromptu date. His partner had off-white blond hair tucked under an actually white baseball cap and was wearing a combination bodysuit/tunic (also white). She’d brought him a late Valentine’s Day gift, a nice puffy coat: “It’s that Chanel swag!” she announced. They ate sushi, chicken wings and steak salad. She told him that when she travels, she likes to stay at Airbnbs because that way you get “immersed” in local culture.

And I know this because during the totality of the date, the team and I were sitting at the adjoining table. Eventually his date left, and Future announced his verdict on the holiday, to grins from the crew: “Man this Valentine’s Day [expletive] a setup.”

Finally, we talked. I brought up London. He smiled. I guess you could call it a sheepish smile. I told him it really didn’t seem as if he wanted to do press at all. I asked him why he was going through with it. “I don’t wanna do it,” he said, maybe even relieved to say it out loud. “My publicist like: ‘Man, why you got a publicist if you don’t wanna do press?’ I’m trying to give you the real me, but they want me to be fake, so I’d rather not even say nothing.”

The conversation rolled on, meandered. It even clicked into gear at a few points. He talked about his itinerant childhood, how he never wanted to have a fixed address so no one with an antagonistic agenda would ever be able to find him. He talked about the love and care of the family members that sorted him out. He remembered the joy of playing “Racks,” an early hit, for the first time and how the D.J. loved it so much he didn’t want to give the CD back. And he said that it all, eventually, changed everything. “Back then, I had no feelings,” he told me. “It wasn’t until I started doing music that I started to really have a conscience.”

It was nice, and fleeting. But I never was able to get a hook into him. I never could formulate a question that made him want to really talk. When I called DJ Spinz, one of Future’s regular collaborators, he told me about Future’s work ethic, his remarkable ability to unfurl a whole song after 20 minutes of hearing a beat roll. But nothing he said felt as relevant as when he told me this: “Future doesn’t speak much.”

I was reminded of a moment back in London. I had stuck around after Nando’s long enough to try to finagle my way into the show. My move was to sidle close to the stage door, in the alley, hoping for an opening. It never came. Upon Future’s arrival, his luxury sedan idled until minutes before his set time. Then he exited the back seat and walked directly through the stage door, surrounded by an imposing security detail, with the massive hood of an arctic parka over his head. I never even saw his face.

I chased Future through two separate sovereign nations and walked away remembering one thing: I love rappers. They never break character.♦

Amos Barshad is a senior writer for The Fader magazine.

“A cappella is cool again,” declared the Cracker Barrel Twitter account, an unexpected authority on such matters, in October 2015. The occasion was a new sponsorship deal with Pentatonix, the astonishingly popular vocal quintet. Much like Cracker Barrel, Pentatonix is one of those cultural institutions whose existence you could go your whole life not noticing, until you do, when you realize it is everywhere. “3x Grammy Award Winning Multi-Platinum Selling Choir Nerds,” the group’s Twitter bio boasts, and it’s true: Over the course of almost six years, Pentatonix has sold more than six million records, put out the first a cappella album to debut at No. 1 on Billboard’s Top 200 chart and amassed over two billion YouTube views.

The third of those Grammys, for Best Country Duo/Group Performance, came in February, for a collaboration with Dolly Parton on a new version of her ’70s heartbreak classic, “Jolene.” The world has Cracker Barrel to thank for this team-up: Both Parton and Pentatonix have partnerships with the chain, which brought them together to record “Jolene” as a promotional single. The result sounds like a barbershop quartet singing at an old-timey barn raising. “We’re both very family-centric and very wholesome,” Kirstin Maldonado, the Pentatonix mezzo-soprano, said in 2015, explaining why the group’s image meshes so well with the brand’s, “and I think our demographics really integrate well.”

Pentatonix’s music is indeed relentlessly wholesome — just five voices cooing and trilling and humming cheerily along. There is nothing dangerous or dark or threatening in their work, which consists mostly of chaste covers of pop hits and Christmas songs. No sex, only kissing. No bad behavior, no cursing and certainly no politics. The five members of Pentatonix, though, represent a rainbow coalition of historically marginalized groups. Maldonado, the group’s lone woman, is Hispanic. One of the male lead singers, Mitch Grassi, is openly gay. He and the other male lead, Scott Hoying, have a side-project YouTube series called “Superfruit,” which sells tank tops that say “Marriage Is So Gay.” Avi Kaplan, the basso profundo, is Jewish, and Kevin Olusola, the beat-boxer, is black and a practicing Seventh-day Adventist.

This “Sesame Street” version of American harmony makes the group’s association with Cracker Barrel — which has a history of discrimination — particularly fascinating. Despite looking like a United Colors of Benetton ad styled by the Kardashians, the members of Pentatonix sound like the jukebox at a heavily chaperoned sock hop; through them, Cracker Barrel can dip its toes in the waters of inclusion without fearing any backlash. Indeed, if you’re looking for criticism of Pentatonix, you’re more likely to find it on liberal music websites trashing its “nightmarishly hammy” sound (to quote Rolling Stone) than on conservative sites attacking its politics. Members have appeared on “All Things Considered” and “Fox and Friends,” and nobody batted an eye. Could it be that five choir nerds hold the secret to bridging a divided nation?♦

Amy Phillips is the news director for Pitchfork.

Of course it would be A Tribe Called Quest who gave the nation’s pop body politic its first acidly anthemic counterassault on Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant sentiments. This is, after all, the Golden Age vintage hip-hop band with respective Trinidadian-American and Muslim founders in Phife Dawg and Ali Shaheed Muhammad, one half of the original team; the one that gave dap to the plight of Haitian immigrants on its 1990 debut album, “People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm”; the group whose very name is a panegyric in praise of the hyphenated American dream. Of course they did it.

Their performance of that snarky resistance song — “We the People ....” — at last month’s Grammy Awards, alongside their Jamaican-American fellow traveler Busta Rhymes, didn’t just split ownership of the whole showcase with Beyoncé’s fertility-goddess spectacular. It had Busta addressing the president by a pungent new name: “Agent Orange.” Months earlier, their “Saturday Night Live” debut of the song (and its parent project, “We Got It From Here ... Thank You 4 Your Service”) came in the same week the president blustered his way into the Oval Office, lost the popular vote and set off a resistance movement in song and dance and sardonic album titling. That moment made New York rap iconoclasm — and A Tribe Called Quest — matter again in one epic, epochal heartbeat: Who else are you gonna call when the dirty work of radical-oppositional boom-bap needs to be done, live and direct, in irony-redolent rhyme?

By February, A Tribe Called Quest’s Grammy performance was sustaining the same Black Panther- and Public Enemy-powered momentum that Beyoncé brought to last year’s Super Bowl — the same kind in Kendrick Lamar’s own fire-breathing, flame-throwing, plantation-to-penitentiary salvo at last year’s Grammys.

To the extent that America’s current protest movement has provoked any pop paeans worthy of Bob Dylan or Curtis Mayfield, they have emerged out of Black Lives Matter — and in remarkably short order. It has been 31 months since “we the people” of Ferguson, and then Baltimore, inspired not just those cities’ urban commandos but a generation of youthful-and-truthful hip-hop and R.& B. standard-bearers. Whether the white alt-rock left will seize this moment’s baton as frankly or as fruitfully remains to be seen.

We need not hold our breath waiting, though. “We the People ....” is full of ready-to-rumble pushback. Its lyrics name and gather together all the targeted — Mexicanfolk, Muslimfolk, gayfolk, womenfolk, #BlackLivesMatterfolk — under one force field. And under one intersectional, Queens-bred guerrilla meal plan:

“We don’t believe you ’cause we the people

Are still here in the rear, ayo, we don’t need you

You in the ‘killing off good young nigga’ mood

When we get hungry we eat the same [expletive] food

The ramen noodle.”♦

Greg Tate is a writer and musician who lives in Harlem.

There are two different ways you can keep up with pop. The first is by drifting along with the current, bobbing immersed in the changing of the charts — so lost from any point of reference on the shore that minor fluctuations (the downfall of an air horn, the outflow of a sound) hardly register. From there, in the tide, you don’t ask, “How did pop get here?” because you were with it the whole time. You, most likely, are in high school, or college, or somewhere that music flows like water all around. Pop, in such places, is understood by osmosis.

The rest of us — less lucky — must accept the second system. Somewhere along the way we get busy with work, or prioritize movies, or decide to have kids and look up to find we’ve lost the thread. We emerge from our hiatus and turn on the radio only to wonder, “How did pop get here?” We have no idea. It is then that we begin to study pop trends by rote — by reading reviews and listening to podcasts, by looking up songs on Shazam in the drugstore, by turning to Google to ask it: “Who is Lil Yachty?”

Before I heard Yachty’s music, I heard that he was awful. I heard he had no flow and couldn’t rap, was a meme and a poseur, wasn’t repping the culture. Wiz Khalifa called his style “mumble rap.” His sound, I heard, was dinky. When I finally relented and listened to “One Night” — Yachty’s top-charting song of last year — nothing I heard could dispel what I’d been told. Flow? Clumsy. Lyrics? Bland. The beat on the track was the inverse of a banger — tinny and thin, compulsively looping, like something churned out with a really cool toy. In a voice that was somehow both droning and singsong, the 19-year-old Atlantan wanly shrugged off commitment. It was an anthem for the player who can’t be tied down, run a thousand times though a Xerox machine. Catchy like a backing track in a commercial, it was sticky for all the texture it lacked. I listened on repeat with car-crash infatuation. It wasn’t good rap by any technical metric — or at least not by any metric I knew — but for some unknown reason, I wanted to like it. Like any pop émigré, I started to study.

The hip-hop establishment had little to offer. Ebro Darden of Hot 97 took to Twitter to whine about Yachty; ’90s production legend Pete Rock posted online, “He sucks mud on a rainy day!” Yachty, meanwhile, seemed to pay little mind to the genre conventions he’d supposedly betrayed. Of hip-hop forefathers Biggie and Tupac, he told Billboard, “I honestly couldn’t name five songs.” Instead, his influences were Fall Out Boy and Coldplay. He signed an endorsement deal with Target, alongside the Canadian pop star Carly Rae Jepsen. In Nautica shirts and plastic-beaded braids, he was an ungraceful hybrid of your grandpa and your niece. In the style of Warhol backstage at WrestleMania — awkward and quiet, but nonetheless enthused — he made the rounds, telling press outlets, “I’m not a rapper.” Instead, he claimed he was an artist, a brand. As old-schoolers and gatekeepers scratched their heads and wept, Yachty continued to rise through the ranks, buoyed by fans who had no trouble understanding.

His come-up was something straight outta LinkedIn, an origin uncaring toward the rap plot as we know it. Before releasing a single track — before perhaps even rapping a single bar — he spent a summer networking with influencers in New York, befriending the internet cool-teen Luka Sabbat and A$AP-affiliate-slash-stylist Ian Connor. It wasn’t a mixtape or even SoundCloud that brought “One Night” to fame but instead the track’s appearance in a viral comedy clip on YouTube.

The subsequent music video made a mockery of an older generation’s rap-vid fantasies. What begins as Yachty on a yacht with three women quickly descends into maritime madness — jump-cuts from hammerhead sharks and harpoons, to dress-up in wet suits and other nautical garb, to glitch-art graphics of slow-swimming fish, calling to mind the early days of home computers. It’s a sloppy pastiche of what’s cool right now: a surging nostalgia for the ’90s, blended with the net-art aesthetic of today, wrapped in the cachet of an Atlanta pedigree. It might all be a gimmick, but it doesn’t feel random. If rap music is founded on a process of layering — autobiography with references and samples — then Yachty does the same for the rap career itself, mixing what’s trending with the right group of friends and tying it together with the loose thread of a sound. If it isn’t good rap, then it’s the perfect kind of music for those of us barely treading water in the zeitgeist, who can’t understand new music by ear. Yachty had to do his research, just like the rest of us.♦

Jamie Lauren Keiles is a writer based in Los Angeles.