An interview with musician Siavash Amini. Following U.S. sanctions, widespread protests, internet blackouts, and government crackdowns, COVID-19 is the latest calamity to befall Iran’s avant-garde.

Oregon once aimed to be the greenest state in America. Its leaders adopted the nation’s first bottle deposit. They controlled urban sprawl. They declared ocean beaches public property. But in the last four years, Oregon’s most powerful industries have killed, weakened or stalled efforts to deal with climate change, wolf recovery, disappearing bird habitat, cancer-causing diesel exhaust, dwindling groundwater, industrial air pollution, oil spill planning and weed killers sprayed from helicopters. What changed Oregon? Money. Lots and lots of money. […] The consequences of Oregon’s logging practices are clear. State and federal scientists have blamed major population declines in species including the coastal Coho salmon, northern spotted owl and marbled murrelet on timber harvesting and state policies governing it. The Oregon Department of Forestry found 242 plants and animals listed or at risk of listing under the Endangered Species Act as of 2012. The trend was getting worse. Then the state agency, whose mission includes promoting the timber industry, stopped publishing the numbers and deleted past reports from its website.

There’s nothing original in this tale and there’s ample evidence, beyond West, that humans were not built to withstand the weight of celebrity. But for black artists who rise to the heights of Jackson and West, the weight is more, because they come from communities in desperate need of champions. Kurt Cobain’s death was a great tragedy for his legions of fans. Tupac’s was a tragedy for an entire people. When brilliant black artists fall down on the stage, they don’t fall down alone. The story of West “drugged out,” as he put it, reduced by the media glare to liposuction, is not merely about how he feels about his body. It was that drugged-out West who appeared in that gaudy lobby, dead-eyed and blonde-haired, and by his very presence endorsed the agenda of Donald Trump. […] There is no separating the laughter from the groans, the drum from the slave ships, the tearing away of clothes, the being borne away, from the cunning need to hide all that made you human. And this is why the gift of black music, of black art, is unlike any other in America, because it is not simply a matter of singular talent, or even of tradition, or lineage, but of something more grand and monstrous. When Jackson sang and danced, when West samples or rhymes, they are tapping into a power formed under all the killing, all the beatings, all the rape and plunder that made America. The gift can never wholly belong to a singular artist, free of expectation and scrutiny, because the gift is no more solely theirs than the suffering that produced it. Michael Jackson did not invent the moonwalk. When West raps, “And I basically know now, we get racially profiled / Cuffed up and hosed down, pimped up and ho’d down,” the we is instructive. […] West calls his struggle the right to be a “free thinker,” and he is, indeed, championing a kind of freedom—a white freedom, freedom without consequence, freedom without criticism, freedom to be proud and ignorant; freedom to profit off a people in one moment and abandon them in the next; a Stand Your Ground freedom, freedom without responsibility, without hard memory; a Monticello without slavery, a Confederate freedom, the freedom of John C. Calhoun, not the freedom of Harriet Tubman, which calls you to risk your own; not the freedom of Nat Turner, which calls you to give even more, but a conqueror’s freedom, freedom of the strong built on antipathy or indifference to the weak, the freedom of rape buttons, pussy grabbers, and fuck you anyway, bitch; freedom of oil and invisible wars, the freedom of suburbs drawn with red lines, the white freedom of Calabasas.

I mean this reaction to poverty is not even mocking, or laughing. The have-nots hate the haves just for being themselves, glorious, glossy and rich; thus the haves needn’t, and won’t, even acknowledge that the have-nots exist, those gap-toothed ignorant peasants in their gross marabou-free clothes. They need to shut up, control themselves. Calm down.

All proceeds from Glassine's track will go toward the Otay Mesa Detention Resistance.

The singer and actress reflects on her two decades of silence and looks ahead to the new generation discovering her legacy.

The entirety of our conversation has been extracted from what essentially was Shaking the Habitual's PR campaign. The Knife talked about how thoroughly political the new album was, and a bunch of smart people patiently waited to see how those ideas were manifested. This is understandable, because The Knife seem like earnest people with important and indisputably unique perspectives. But it seems we've let Karin and Olof's rhetoric blend over into what we're hearing. There's nothing wrong with context, but we can't let the creative forces frame an album for our consumption.

Shaking the Habitual is, inarguably, an achievement. It is the Knife's most political, ambitious, accomplished album, but in a strange way it also feels like its most personal: It provides a glimpse into the desires, intellectual enthusiasms and (unsurprisingly dense) reading list guiding one of music's most shadowy duos. At its most mesmerizing, its conceptual rigor and occasional inscrutability are overpowered by a disarming earnestness: It is a musical manifesto advocating for a better, fairer, weirder world. Shaking the Habitual feels not post-human but profoundly humanist, fueled by an unfashionable but profoundly refreshing faith in music's ability to hypnotize, to agitate, and to liberate.

Shaking the Habitual, like most of the music The Knife have made to date — along with singer Karin Dreijer Andersson's solo album as Fever Ray — is, at its core, very goth in its tone and themes. Relentlessly morbid, intentionally unsettling, and alluring in its romanticized bleakness. But despite this, it's pretty rare that you see anyone label The Knife as goth, perhaps because they've avoided the most obvious signifiers of the subculture every step of the way. The Knife aren't about goth as living in a permanent Halloween; they're about that connection between romance and horror. And those feelings are a big part of being engaged with social justice issues: the outrage directed at oppressors, the frustration with cultures that refuse to change, the unshakable fear that the world is only getting worse, the loneliness of feeling like a hated outsider, the thrill of finding a like-minded community. They've done this better than pretty much anyone else in music; it's just too bad that they went a bit too far in advertising it.

Karin: It's important to question my story and my way of telling it, too. It's good to ask questions instead of serving answers.

It’s all clues, loud and electrified. GY!BE dare you to personalize the brambly politics of the music, and on Allelujah!, they’re finally very, very clear on that point.

Canada has a new subterranean truth, and that truth is that the majority of Canadians are conservative thinkers. I can think of no better time for one of Canada’s most respected protest bands, living in one of Canada’s most progressive cities, to talk about health care, taxation, First Nations and Aboriginal rights, women’s rights, fucking anything but how “The gatekeepers gazed upon their kingdom and declared that it was good.” Which: yeah. And?

This entire debacle should be a reminder to the world why a secular society isn't just a lark or some unbearable burden on religious people who want to nose around in their employees' sex lives. A subset of religious people will always claim that their faith requires them to silence dissent and impose their values on others through government force, but we cannot be afraid to stand up to them, no matter how loudly they squall about having their feelings hurt. The Pussy Riot travesty is the logical end result of giving special legal consideration and privileges to religion.

Rappers are presented as violent, vulgar sexists and homophobes, and then they're not only expected to have fully-formed opinions on social issues, but progressive ones. This is an ugly update on the always implicit, often explicit demand that hip-hop, if it is to be lauded and celebrated, must espouse a strong, left-leaning political message.

Getting politics wrong and getting pop wrong.

Palin and Perry, sittin' in a tree. "She kisses a girl—sure, okay. She likes it—um, and? Oh, and she hopes her boyfriend doesn't mind, because sexual autonomy is inextricable from the male gaze, and that's fucking awesome. 'I Kissed a Girl' is infuriatingly ass-backward: cynical adherence to outdated values made into titillation, snide calculation dressed up as the underdog, the same old bullshit disguised as rebellion."

M.I.A. as modern protest music. "It’s safe to assume, for instance, that when M.I.A. says in 'Bamboo Banga' that she’s 'knocking on the door of your Hummer-Hummer,' that she’s not looking for a lift."

Bacharach's making a protest record with Dre. "Burt's pissed at the administration, concerned about the world he is leaving to his children, and you can feel it."

Using words from politician's speeches to cover popular songs.

"If we have a political message collectively as 'the books' it is a very simple one: listen with your whole self to the world you find yourself in. Cultivate your hearing so that when it comes time to make important decisions you will be well informed and

"The erosion of social conscience." Should musicians be uniting politically?

"One hundred percent of our and McSweeney's profits will go to non-profit progressive organizations."