Ask anybody how they listen to music, and the majority of their answers will probably be Spotify, Apple Music, or some other online streaming service. Thirty years ago, if you wanted to listen to a specific song on demand, you would have to go to a record store and buy a copy of the album or wait for it to be played on the radio. Since then, the way we consume music has constantly evolved. In the early 2000s, digital music downloads were invented, and streaming services like YouTube, Pandora, and Soundcloud followed soon after. Some record stores survived, as a lot of people still wanted to buy physical copies of albums. Mixtapes, however, found themselves in a perilous situation. They didn’t find their home online immediately like mainstream album releases did, but the advent of streaming services meant that many did not want to buy mixtapes from the corner, or wait for them in the mail. Mixtapes eventually found their home on digital platforms, but for a while, their future was unclear. DJs who made a living making and selling these tapes had to find a way to adapt, or risk being lost to obscurity.
When looking at art, it’s hard to fully understand what the intention behind a piece of artwork is, without looking at the artist. When women during the Baroque period began painting women filled with rage and disdain, how much of that was for the simple demand for art, and how much of that was a projection of themselves? Artist Tatyana Fazlalizadeh pondered this in her book “Stop Telling Women to Smile: Stories of Street Harassment and How We’re Taking Back Our Power.” She asked the Rumpus, “What would it look like to explore my identity within my artwork based not on what people have done to me based on those identities, but based instead on what I love and I celebrate within those identities?” The main focus of Fazlalizadeh’s book is sexual harassment against women, the project beginning in Brooklyn, where she is based.
