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So: Do you make room for transient joy? Does it impede your deep thoughts, or does it inspire them, like a spark to wick?

Ocean is a storyteller at heart, and Orange is so compelling in large part because it’s never entirely clear from what perspective his stories are coming, or where they’re leading. Like all great writers, Ocean’s narratives are wholly fictional and half-true — autobiographies on their way to becoming lies

On the collaboration between the Norwegian writer-producers Stargate and songwriter Ester Dean, who have written tons of hits for Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, Beyonce, and others.

Her flow, including the corny hashtag raps and the growls and all the other forms of play that make her simultaneously so old school and so fresh, have already shifted the zeitgeist and inspired a new generation of pop lovers in one short year. Now it's time for her to figure out how to step up to sound like she what she says on the album’s third track: “I Am Your Leader.”

Nicki employs street hardness as a signifier of how great she is at rapping, not as an attempt to actually convince anybody that she's "hood" or any of that authenticity nonsense. She's successfully occupying the trap, ground zero for hardness, and calling its inhabitants "bitches," all to prove that she is the consummate rhyming bad-ass.

‘Once upon a time, dance pop was about self-affirmation, and the thing being affirmed was usually some sort of identity—ethnicity, gender, sometimes class, and maybe even sexuality. The Nicki generation seizes a whole new subject for pop: not who you are and how you made it, but the meaning and experience of celebrity once you have it. In place of identity, these prima donnas are performing fame. And doing it with what you might even call “taste”: an idiosyncratic aesthetic vision for everyday life, one that has nothing to do with where they’ve been and everything to do with synthetic aspiration. Minaj isn’t being inauthentic about celebrity—celebrity is the most authentic thing about her.’

‘2011 indeed was a remarkable year for the pop body in all of its beautiful, ugly, complex, and grotesque forms.’

Nitsuh explores the Black Eyed Peas iPad app, and why so much party pop music — which is so often aspirational — has been sounding “rote and blanched of purpose”.

Humanizing and well-written. Spoiler: she doesn't have a penis.