The Friday Dispatch
Rufus Wainwright, Kate Nash, Wolfgang Tilmans, Skrillex and Jonatan Leandoer96
Rufus Wainwright’s requiem
For Rufus Wainwright, as for so many, the pandemic years were a period of prolific creative output. With an unusual amount of free time on his hands and the release of his ninth studio album, Unfollow the Rules, pushed back, Wainwright was finally able to carve out the space to dedicate himself to art forms he had previously only dabbled in. From these efforts came both Opening Night, a musical, and Dream Requiem, a composition inspired by Byron’s poem Darkness.
In many ways, the pandemic itself uncomfortably mimicked Byron’s text. An apocalyptic story that describes ecological breakdown and pits man against one another, it was written in 1816, the Year Without a Summer. A volcanic eruption in Indonesia cast the Northern Hemisphere into darkness and led to an agricultural disaster. “They did think it was in fact the end of the world and that everything was over,” says Wainwright. “I’m not saying that's gonna happen tomorrow, but we're definitely on some sort of precipice now where we have to address these possible outcomes and the poem really lays a kind of vision that if we're not mindful, we're heading straight for it.”
With lines like, “All earth was but one thought—and that was death,” tackling the poem in the context of recent events certainly feels far too close for comfort. “With the Requiem Mass, obviously it is about death but that's also about new beginnings. We can only really come to life again once we've died, metaphorically,” Wainwright explains. “I think requiems have that pull because it's going right for the jugular. The Latin text itself is amazing too, because it's all about redemption and about forgiveness and about salvation and damnation and also paradise, so it's very current.”
After its world debut in Paris, Dream Requiem will continue with further dates around the globe, including LA’s Disney Hall next year. The Paris performance will be broadcast live on the France Musique website and ARTE Concert, and the concert will be recorded for release in autumn. But for Wainwright, now that the players have been signed off, he’s happy to sit on the sidelines and watch the show unfold. As he says, he’s just planning to “take somewhat the position of the dead composer and just kind of sit back and see what people come up with.”
Kate Nash steps out into a new world
It’s been almost 17 years since Kate Nash released her debut album, Made of Bricks, which she describes as being “like my child.” And while Nash herself might be almost two decades into her music career, new audiences are flocking to her fanbase and her catalogue in droves. This surprise renaissance, Nash explains, is thanks, in part, to TikTok, which has allowed her to connect with a new generation of young people.
Many of the people on TikTok coming across Nash, now 36, weren’t even born when Made of Bricks was released, but through the app they’ve become fans. There are certainly parallels between this and the way in which Nash and many of her contemporaries — Arctic Monkeys and Lily Allen among them — gained popularity through sites such as Myspace in the mid-2000s.
“I feel like I need to explain who I am and to talk about my story, and it's funny because every time I do that, people are like, ‘You don't need to explain who you are,’ and I'm like ‘I do, because every time I do, it gets more views and it reaches people,’” she laughs.
Nash actually toured Made of Bricks for its tenth anniversary in 2017, something she describes as “very healing” due to the negative associations she’d attached to the album.
“When I was coming out in 2007, older men in journalism would be like, ‘Oh, silly little teenage girl writing in her fucking diary, how boring. We want men who talk about real things like being drunk and girls,” she remarks dryly. “But I’m talking about being drunk and boys. Like, what?”
Though her past critics might not have been ideal, Nash describes her fanbase itself as “the best in the world.” Whether newcomer or die hard, Nash’s appreciation for those who have tenderly championed her creativity is undeniable.
Wolfgang Tillmans on Boy George and Culture Club
I first encountered Boy George and Culture Club in 1983, when I was 14 and a half. It was Easter and I was on my first trip to London. My mother had been on an exchange programme in 1955 with a school in Beckenham, in South London, and became lifelong friends with one of the students there. So when my siblings and I were teenagers, we were all sent to Aunt Valerie and Uncle Rick to improve our English.
In 1983, it was my turn to go, and it was just five months after “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me” by Culture Club had come out. My friend Lutz and I had our eyes and hearts completely opened by that song. I realised that Culture Club were playing at the Dominion Theatre while we were there, and somehow I was lucky enough to get some returns. I remember, before the show, we went to the Burger King around the corner from the venue, went into the toilets and put Coca-Cola in our hair to make it spiky. A touch of afternoon punk.
For us, being huge Culture Club fans wasn’t about dressing up like Boy George, which was a huge thing among other fans. Somehow we were never into that. For us, he was just this really inspiring, strong-headed figure at the time. Of course, there were other popstars who were gay, but had to toe this line of not really saying it. At the time, if you were fully out, it was thought that being a popstar, a top ten artist, just wouldn’t work. That started to break down a bit in 1984, with Bronski Beat having a top ten hit and being an openly gay band. But the role that Boy George was playing was super exhilarating at the time. You knew how ‘dangerous’ he was, somehow, and the shock value of that.
It’s interesting when you read Culture Club stylistically, because even their typography was unique. The band themselves were a mix of Irish, English, Black and Jewish heritages, and all the symbolism they used was so fascinating in that it didn’t come with the typical art historical reference sheet. I think that’s what made a lot of the work of that period in the ‘80s so everlasting and exciting, because it really felt that people were free to mix and match anything they wanted to.
Culture Club are also probably the only band that I was a big fan of that I no longer felt passionate about after a few years. But Boy George continued through the decades. Culture Club were over by 1986, so there has been almost 40 years of his solo career, and there have been some real gems like “The Crying Game” and “Il Adore”. The latter song as whole perfectly captures the terror and pain and tears of the [AIDs crisis of the] ‘80s and ‘90s, and just about makes it bearable. I’d say that one can still enjoy it without bursting into tears, so that’s quite an achievement by Boy George.
As told to Alan Pedder
Three things to get excited about this week
The podcast: On back from the borderline, Mollie Adler unpacks pressing topics on mental health and psychology each week. In one of her latest episodes, however, she breaks down the fascinating psychology behind Taylor Swift mania. Using the puella archetype, she explains the allure of Swift and why the Swiftie fandom coalesced the way it did. It’s a fascinating listen for all interested in fan culture.
The debut: Earlier this month, Brooklyn-based indie artist Sofia Wolfson released her debut LP, Imposing on a Hometown. Leaning into self-deprication without succumbing to cliché, Wolfson’s masterful lyrics and DIY-esque production make for a strong first album showing.
The book: On Tuesday, Questlove released his highly anticipated book Hip-Hop Is History. Part history and part memoir, the book that masterfully traces the genre’s most important tracks (from the 70s to now) while also bringing the personal touch that can only be added by someone like himself, who has participated many of the genre’s defining moments.
Something Old, Something New
Every week, one of our writers or editors share their recommendations of two records they love - one from the past, one from the present. This week, Sophie L. Walker on Skrillex’s Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites (2010) and Jonatan Leandoer96 Sugar World (2024).
When a kid with snakebite piercings, an ear stretcher and a half-shaved head of long, black hair left his screamo band and turned to his laptop, the trajectory of EDM – and pop music itself – changed forever. And I won’t apologise for saying so. Created while Sonny Moore was effectively homeless, his second EP as Skrillex, Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites would embody the lawless, equalising force of an internet recklessly, violently, coming of age.
It's taken a while for this much-maligned debut to be acknowledged – and appreciated – for the scale of cultural disruption it caused. Consider this a small act of restoration. The project’s defining title track sounds like it’s at war: the monsters unleash nuclear disruption with bone-crunching bass which feels like an act of bomb detonation; the sprites slice through the noise with electronic shrieks and leave, in their wake, surprisingly gorgeous melodies. Skrillex rides the knife’s edge between the two, this volatile duet, before a teenage girl screams, “YES! Oh, my god!” – and everything shatters. It’s all about the drop. Chasing that headrush, the synaptic overload leading to physical release, became Skrillex’s calling card. His instincts from his hardcore beginnings to ignite mosh pits had transplanted directly to the dancefloor.
The sample was drawn from Speedstackinggirl’s YouTube channel, who had just set a personal best. Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites, as a project, inspired a new era of sound sampling culture where anyone armed with a laptop and a production software could access and reinvent the internet’s limitless and ever-expanding archive. The project is reckless, hedonistic and accelerated to keep pace with the rapidly developing decade it stood on the precipice of. Unintentionally, Skrillex led the charge of then-emergent US dubstep scene: a garish, testosterone-fuelled reimagination of its far more subterranean, internal UK originator. It was a sound that was rejected and parodied by dubstep purists, who separated themselves from the commercial blow-out by drawing a line between themselves and ‘brostep’.
The scope of Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites has been misunderstood, too. “With You, Friends (Long Drive)” is an interval of surprising tenderness. He is capable of quiet tension as much as all-guns-blazing maximalism. The vocals are chopped, distorted to oblivion, and yet it makes their feeling no less sincere. The livewire synth melodies tie your heart in knots in a different way to the stark, unaltered piano that he also makes space for. And “Scatta”, featuring British hip-hop group Foreign Beggars, is both a love letter to dubstep’s motherland and yet Skrillex warps it beyond recognition. Therein lies the thrill. Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites Sprites is so much more than noise.Breaking through in the late noughties, we’ve been covering Savoir Adore on Best Fit for almost fifteen years. I first discovered them in the era of the blogosphere, their early single “Bodies” hooking me in with its sparring girl/boy vocals and rush of synth-pop chorus. Over the years they’ve always been the steady underdog, releasing a string of rich and escapist dream-pop records to a loyal fanbase.
I am completely sick with love Sugar World, the latest from the visionary Swedish rapper Yung Lean’s side project, jonatan leandoer96. When the name Yung Lean still arrives with the burden of novelty-rap, shackled forever to the meme-fuel of “Ginseng Strip 2002” which he posted on YouTube when he was fifteen years-old, his other musical wanderings - jonatan leandoer96 and Död Mark – replicate the thrill and limitless potential of being a stranger in an unfamiliar land.
jonatan leandoer96 is a home for haunting piano ballads in the vein of his defining – and, I’d wager, most beautiful work – “Agony”. There is, and has always been, something altogether heartbreaking about his voice and the lonely clouds of sound from which he builds his world. In my mind, he conjures Siberian winters; vast, empty landscapes, concrete brutalism and still extracts a curious romance from it all (see: “Hotel in Minsk”). But for Sugar World, he plays a character. In the video for “Blue Light”, he is a crooner dressed entirely in white down to his gloved hands, performing at a wedding which is garish in a way only the 80s could be. It begins with syrupy sentimentality, the dim lights smudged like a dream sequence, and soon begins to unravel: flies land on the food, glasses begin to smash, the bride cries. And he will not leave. It’s another translation of what makes Yung Lean so enticing.
His voice is imperfect, and its ropey falsetto is countered by its genuine emotion that no amount of training could replicate. Sugar World is the soundtrack to a prom of flushed cheeks and stepping on feet. He slurs his words as if he’s had five drinks too many, but even in his clumsiness, they are felt so deeply. From his dressing-up box, he pulls out “Swedish Elvis Storm” - an uncanny reinvention of The King far past his prime. Then, with the indulgent, all-American guitar riffs of “Nightmare Amusement Park”, he takes on shades of The Boss. But it’s all warped through that particular, Scandinavian lens through which he once transformed rap music as a teenager that still feels like something strikingly authentic.
When I listened to “Open (Copenhagen Freestyle)”, I was reminded more of what is so magnetic about Yung Lean: how he can say so little – at one point literally mumbling – and still somehow feel my heart shatter because of it.
Listen to the week in new music by following our Discovery playlist
Dropping at midnight every Thursday, follow our playlist for a taste of the best new music from the most exciting breaking artists – 20 new tracks, top-loaded from the last five days in music and on repeat in the Best Fit office right now.
Leading the selection this week are new tracks from Jensen McRae, GRÓA, October and The Eyes, and coverstars Hello Mary.