Annie: There Are Legends Of People Born With The Gift Of Making Music So True, It Can Pierce The Veil

Yugo Takano by Vladimir Marti for Icon Magazine June 2024

How do you approach unrequited effort in friendship?

I don’t really measure effort in friendships. There is the connection and there is the life it fits into which is often busy and overwhelming. I don’t befriend people who I feel are subtly mean or have anything but pure love towards me, so with that as the foundation I never think about effort in that way because I trust that the intention is always pure. When the trust cracks, I distance myself, no hard feelings.

Nour Lwasi by Esra Sam for Grazia International Magazine April 2025

America is fascist because America is racist and has been since its founding. I’m sorry liberals and fellow white people but you can’t blame Russia on why America sucks. That’s letting yourself off too easy. No, America sucks because your neighbors can easily be rallied up into racist mobs. No Russia required, because this is a problem that predates any of our hostility towards Russia.

Also for fucks sake, the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Putin is only in office because the west performed a coup in Yeltsin’s favor and Putin was part of his cabinet. Just like with Saddam and Bin Laden, we created our own enemies from shattered alliances we formed against communism. I really want to believe that none of you are so illiterate you don’t know Russia has been capitalist for thirty years.

the vigour and furor with which some people are repulsed at the mere existence of a "social script" is just pure ableism. you sound exhausting to have to communicate with

my homegirl wrote a really salient essay on substack about how reliance on algorithms ultimately stifles modern day listener’s curiosity and the livelihood of music artists themselves.

open.substack.com

Your Algorithm Hates the B-Sides

Notes About Streaming from a Music Listener

i def recommend giving it a read and reflecting on your own music listening practices and habits. a favorite paragraph of mine that speaks further to the evidence that we living in a dystopia today:

“Algorithmic curation has consumed every facet of people’s lives —they search for information on AI run search engines, they exclusively buy products on social media platforms that push hundreds of ads based on the posts they engage with, they build virtual communities amongst like-minded, aesthetically aligned and desirable online users. A revival of pre-streaming label street teams and independent CD pushers would fail for many reasons, one being that they’d find the streets desolate and empty.”

James Baldwin, A Transition Interview, 1972

i think a big part of the current wave of antifeminist rhetoric among women is that people just cannot accept the idea that liberating yourself is uncomfortable. like of course it feels Wrong to see something you've internalised as normal/necessary (like wearing makeup 24/7) be challenged, that's because you've internalised it. and it will feel ostracising to go against the status quo once you question the things you've internalised. but the discomfort is part of it. you have to move past the fear response and look at the bigger picture.