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Black Thought once called J Dilla the greatest hip-hop producer of all time but if you asked the average hip-hop fan, they might not be able to name one song the Detroit beatmaker produced. That’s something that’s hard to countenance, let alone, contemplate as a longtime fan of not only hip-hop but of the unique, groundbreaking style that Dilla pioneered.

Enter Dan Charnas. A hip-hop everyman who’s worked in radio and as a label executive (he even produced my beloved Golden Age musical drama, The Breaks, which was gone too soon), Charnas is a veteran of both the culture and the industry of hip-hop whose 2010 book The Big Payback is a vital read for any adherent of either the culture or the industry. In fact, I consider it required reading for any hip-hop journalist and side-eye anyone who tries to write about the business behind the music without reading it.

Charnas’ new book, Dilla Time, seeks to correct the egregious oversight mentioned above regarding the trailblazing producer by not only biographing Dilla’s life and career but also by breaking down the musical science behind his greatest innovation – what Charnas calls “Dilla time.” This is the distinctive time signature of Dilla’s drum programming which backed rap styles like The Pharcyde’s “Runnin’,” A Tribe Called Quest’s “Word Play,” Q-Tip’s solo album Amplified, Common’s Like Water For Chocolate, Slum Village’s Fantastic, Vol. 2, and many, many more pivotal projects from across the hip-hop and neo-soul landscape, as well as inspiring everyone from Pharrell Williams to Kanye West to Drake.

And if that greatly abridged list still doesn’t impress you with the impact that Dilla had on music, consider that you’ve likely heard his innovations without ever knowing it. Anyone who tunes into the Lofi Girl YouTube radio station to bob their head along to “Beats To Study To” is hearing J Dilla. His sound is ubiquitous but has been divorced from his legacy. Dilla Time aims to fix that. During a Zoom call with Charnas, we discussed that titanic but overlooked legacy, the importance of pairing art with science, and why this kind of storytelling is so critical to ensuring the accuracy of hip-hop’s historical record.

Just from jump, that first chapter is enough to tell me that this book is a banger and a half. First of all, any story involving Questlove is going to be good, right? Quest stories are great. The way you preface the story of Dilla Detroit Hip-Hop with this idea of something being wrong is fascinating to me. Why was that where you wanted to start with the story of J Dilla?

Well, that’s where I started, right? The book started that way because in many ways that was my starting point. I went in the summer of 1999 to Detroit for the very first time to work with him. Me and Chino XL flew out. We drove out to Conant Gardens down to The Basement. Dilla is there. You know, Chino puts his arm around me like, “Yo, you don’t understand. This kid. He’s been harassing me to come work with you.” Chino is kind of standing with J by the NPC behind the bar, and I get the nerve to ask “So how do you get your bass tones?”, and Chino is right next to him. Chino says, “Don’t tell him.”

Six months later, I’m back in LA. And of course, we’re mixing the album and my listening environment is my car. So I’m taking the discs or the cassettes out to my car to listen to them just so I can hear how they sound. So Chino had done this song with James called “Don’t Say A Word” and it’s on the album. You can hear it. I’m listening to the track and I’m like, “What’s going on with those drums?” Like, “Are those high hats swung? Something’s wrong here. What’s going on?” So it was that moment I literally took it into my studio and put it up on the digital audio workstation, lined the waveforms up with the grid, and realized the high hats were not swung. They were right on time but they sound swung because he’s shifting the snare earlier. Why is he doing that? How’s he doing that? And so my initial reaction mirrors the reactions of a lot of different folks, and some people say, “It’s wrong but I like it.”

Something that the book does that I think is absolutely spectacular is the diagram representing regular time, swing time, and Dilla time, comparing it to a map of Detroit. Honestly, Dan, that’s Dilla-level thinking.

You needed to see it, right? It’s difficult to write about music well, but I can show you. That is one of the things where it’s like, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” When I first started teaching a little segment on Dilla to my pop music history course, when I first started teaching in 2013, 2014… I teach like a hundred really important key figures in the last a hundred years of pop music. Innovators, influencers… so Dilla was one of them. Mostly because I knew that these kids actually liked this kind of stuff. And I had been sort of secretly pissed for years listening to people described Dilla’s genius as only “he turned off the quantized function.”

So you know, a lot of projects just start with, “Yo, gotta do something about this sh*t.” So that was the beginning of the J Dilla lecture, and then the J Dilla course in 2017. And then after that, I was like, “Alright, I guess I’m going to do this sh*t.” And it really started as a tiny book about musical science. And a colleague of mine had this incredible visual system for representing rhythm that required no musical notation. I want anybody to be able [to grasp the concept].. I mean, that’s what I was trying to do with The Big Payback. I don’t care if it’s hip-hop. It’s a great story, well told. That’s what I’m trying to do. I just want everybody to be able to understand the genius. Even if you don’t know what a breakbeat is. I’m going to tell you what a breakbeat is.

I always ask this because I know that everybody gets bored answering the same questions over and over again, bringing up the same stories over and over again. Is there anything that you’ve ever wanted to talk about in an interview that no one’s ever asked?

I guess the other is that you have to understand that what JD did, his genius was completely unprotected by law. He was a master at sampling. And yet, the legality of master use is such that he could create this amazing piece of art. And if the owners of the master and the owners of the song that was sampled, don’t want to license what he did, he couldn’t put it out.

And it is high time that we develop a compulsory licensing for master use. We have a compulsory license for publishing. In other words, if I write the song and I put it out, “Rocket Man” by Elton John and Bernie Taupin. If Aaron, you want to do your cover version of that — I’m not sure I would buy that cover version — but let’s say you want to put it out, they couldn’t stop you. Nobody could stop you from f*cking up that song because there is something called a compulsory mechanical license that says, “As long as you pay Elton John and Bernie Taupin the statutory rate, Aaron gets to remake ‘Rocket Man.’ And I’m going to expect you to do that version, post it on the internet. But again, what I’m saying is we don’t have a process like that for master use. But we have Shazam.

If nobody takes away anything else, what is the one thing you want people to take away from this book about J Dilla, about music, about hip-hop, about just America?

I don’t know if I can boil it down to one thing, but I will say that the prime directive of this book was to actually explain how this beat maker created a new time feel that didn’t really exist before him. And to say it definitively and to put his name on it, because I saw him becoming a footnote in his accomplishments.

“Lo-fi beats to study to,” and Lord knows they’re everywhere. I was in the office getting my booster shot, in the office, put on the TV, the lo-fi beats and the little girl, bobbing her head. And I was just like, “This is crazy.”

And I don’t even know what that means, because Jay Dee’s stuff…

It wasn’t lo-fi at all.

Donuts, my God, that is incredible sound.

Dilla Time is out now via Macmillan Publishers. You can get it here.

Just five years since being founded, Uncle Nearest Tennessee Whiskey has become one of the most awarded and beloved whiskeys in the game. Fawn Weaver and the descendants of Nearest Green (who helped Jack Daniel create his iconic Tennessee whiskey brand) started Uncle Nearest to celebrate Black heritage in the spirits world and create a space for the next generation of BIPOC creators and tastemakers to rise in the spirits industry.

Marc Farrell is one of those creators and tastemakers. Farrell started a rum company in the Caribbean to harness his heritage with rum while also helping move the industry past its problematic past. Or, in Farrell’s own words, he wanted to make a rum that is “a departure from pirates and plantations.”

Now Farrell’s Ten To One and Weaver’s Uncle Nearest have teamed up to make a special release for Black History Month. The new expression was created to honor and celebrate “the many black spirits pioneers whose contributions to the industry have been largely forgotten.” Let’s see what’s in the bottle!

Ten To One x Uncle Nearest Bourbon Cask Finish Caribbean Dark Rum

ABV: 43%

Average Price: $75

The Rum:

Ten To One source their rum from Barbados, Dominica, Trinidad, and Jamaica. A collection of eight-year-old barrels are then expertly blended and then re-barreled into Uncle Nearest’s Tennessee whiskey barrels, which held their 1856 expression.

Once the juice is just right, it’s proofed and bottled as-is with no additives or coloring.

Tasting Notes:

The nose opens with a very bourbon vibe — rich buttery toffee that leads towards a spicy and nutty banana bread — before a good dose of oak char arrives with a slightly tart berry note and some dry pecan shells. The palate opens with a soft sense of vanilla pudding and muscovado sugar syrup next to stewed apples with a touch of clove and anise, a light sense of pecans, and a little bit more of that oak char.

The finish dips into a light sense of watery proofing before shooting back up with a spicy matrix of peppercorns, cinnamon, and allspice next to burnt green sugar canes and a note of almost overripe red berry with a hint of tobacco buzz.

The Bottle:

The bottle is a cross between a stubby and a port bottle with a solid wooden stopper. The label is elegant and eye-catching (especially because its rum and there are no pirates) without being overfilled with information.

Bottom Line:

This is 100 percent a bourbon drinkers’ rum. It feels very “Tennessee whiskey by way of a subtle and dark rum” — which is good, if that’s what you’re looking for. It drinks fine as an on the rocks sipper but feels more like a solid cocktail base.

I’m going to try this in an old fashioned and go from there. A rum cocktail like a rum and Coke made with this might also reveal some interesting nuance.

Ranking:

88/100 — This is solid. Though this did feel more like a whiskey than a rum at times (which is kind of the point with the finish). I did wish there was a little more rum funk or something unique to rum in there at the end of the day.

Patrick Wilson is a man of many talents—foremost among them is his seeming ability to just roll with sh*t. And yes, we do mean that literally. When randomly asked about the worst thing he’s ever put in his mouth, the Moonfall star had no qualms about admitting that he has probably consumed his fair share of dog feces over the years, as Celebretainment reports.

“I’m sure, in my quest to clean up dog crap, then I have licked the bag to open the bag and then it’s on my hand and I have dog shit in there, too,” Wilson replied, in what seemed to be far too detailed a response to be completely off the cuff. But the dog daddy seems to be OK with it. “It is what it is!,” he says.

Gross things are no match for the man who played Nite Owl in Zack Snyder’s Watchmen (2009). In an interview with Empire Magazine, when asked about the worst smell in the world (leave Wilson alone, people!), the Emmy-nominated actor replied that, “You’re talking to a guy that spends a good portion of the week cleaning up dog sh*t in his yard. But I’m sort of immune to that now. Vomit in a dirty bar bathroom perhaps? I’ll hurl just thinking about it.”

Patrick Wilson: Movie star, Broadway actor, vomit hater, dog poop aficionado. Is there anything this man can’t do?

(Via Celebretainment)

After teasing the video for his new song “Diet Coke” via Elliott Wilson’s Twitter, Pusha T has released the full video in all its glory. In the video, Pusha is joined by Kanye West, who vibes out in the background as Pusha performs the song with his usual wild-eyed enthusiasm. Aesthetically, it’s a clean look, shot in black and white in front of a white backdrop that keeps the focus resolutely on the two stars. The white background also works thematically, if you get my drift.

The video’s release completes an immaculate rollout for Pusha’s first solo single since his 2018, Kanye-produced album Daytona plugged him back into the forefront of rap fans’ collective consciousness as one of the rappers that most bear watching in the streaming era. Daytona was a critical hit, considered by many to be the best rap album of 2018, while its heat-seeking intro Infrared sparked the career redefining feud between Pusha T and Drake.

And while Pusha refocused his efforts since then on establishing himself as more of a force on the business side of hip-hop, fans haven’t stopped clamoring for more new music from the Virginia veteran. While he’s given periodic updates that point to multiple projects with the likes of Tyler The Creator and Madlib, he guarantees that his next project (from which “Diet Coke” presumably hails) will absolutely top his last.

Watch Pusha T’s “Diet Coke” video featuring Kanye West above.

People who decide not to have children are often unfairly judged by those who chose a different life path. People with children can be especially judgmental to women who’ve decided to opt out of motherhood.

“You will regret it!” is one of the most common phrases lobbed at those who choose to remain childless. Why do people think they’ll have such awful regrets? Because they often say they’ll wind up “lonely and sad” when they’re older.

They also say that life without children is without purpose and that when the childless get older they’ll have no one to take care of them. One of the most patronizing critiques thrown at childless women is that they will never “feel complete” unless they have a child.

However, a lot of these critiques say more about the person doling them out than the person who decides to remain childless. Maybe, just maybe, their life is fulfilling enough without having to reproduce. Maybe, just maybe, they can have a life full of purpose without caring for any offspring.

Maybe the question should be: What’s lacking in your life that you need a child to feel complete?

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Studies show that some people regret being childless when they get older, but they’re in the minority. An Australian researcher found that a quarter of child-free women came to regret the decision once they were past child-bearing age and began contemplating old age alone.

People revealed the reasons they’ve decided to be childless in an article by The Upshot. The top answers were the desire for more leisure time, the need to find a partner and the inability to afford child care. A big reason that many women decide not to have children is that motherhood feels like more of a choice these days, instead of a foregone conclusion as it was in previous decades.

Reddit user u/ADreamyNightOwl asked a “serious” question about being childless to the AskReddit subforum and received a lot of honest answers. They asked “People over 50 that chose to be childfree, do you regret your decision? Why or why not?”

The people who responded are overwhelmingly happy with their decision not to have children. A surprising number said they felt positive about their decision because they thought they’d be a lousy parent. Others said they were happy to have been able to enjoy more free time than their friends and family members who had kids.

Here are some of the best responses to the Askreddit question.

1. Never had any desire.

“I explain it to people like this – you know that feeling you get where you just can’t wait to teach your kid how to play baseball? or whatever it is you want to share with them? I don’t have that. Its basically a lack of parental instinct. Having children was never something I aspired to. My SO is the same way.

“Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against children. And I get really angry at people who harm them or mistreat them. I just never wanted my own.” — IBeTrippin

2. No desire. No regrets.

“Nope. It was never something I wanted. No regrets.” — BornaCrone

3. Mixed feelings.

“I have mixed feelings. I don’t care much for children and I think it would have been disastrous for us to have them. I was also able to retire at 52. Pretty sure that wouldn’t have happened with kids. So yeah, absolutely the right decision.
But I love my family and I do wonder what it would be like to have my own, to teach my child the things I know and not to be without someone who cares about me at the time of my death.

“But again, absolutely the right decision and at 55 I’m very happy NOT to have them. This is reinforced every time I’m exposed to other people’s kids.” — ProfessorOzone

4. They never visit.

“My wife worked at a nursing home for years. Imagine seeing for years that over 95% of old people never have family visit. Till they die and people want a piece of the pie. This when I learned that the whole ‘well who is gonna visit you or take care of you when you’re older’ line is complete bullshit. We decided to not have kids ever after that. Made great friends and saw the world. No regrets.” — joevilla1369

5. It wasn’t an option.

“I don’t necessarily regret not having them, but I regret the fact that I wasn’t in a healthy enough relationship where I felt I COULD have children. I regret not being stronger to leave the abuse earlier, if I had been stronger, I think maybe I could have had the choice at least. So yeah… I have regrets.” — MaerakiStudioMe

6. Grandkids are cooler.

“No. I knew what I was getting into when I agreed to marry my husband. He had two sons from his first marriage and a vasectomy. He was worried because I was so young (comparatively, he’s 10 years older). I did think it over seriously and concluded that a life with him compared to a life without him but (perhaps!) with a baby I didn’t even have yet was what I wanted. It worked out for us, we’ve been together for 26 years. As a bonus I have 9 grandchildren. All the fun without the work of the raising!” — Zublor

7. I’d be a bad parent.

“Not one bit. I have never believed that I would be a good parent. I have a short temper, and while I don’t think I would have been physically abusive, my words and tone of voice would be harsh in a very similar way to my own father. I wasn’t happy growing up with that kind parent and I wouldn’t want to subject any child to that kind of parenting.” — Videoman7189

8. I’d rather be the cool aunt and uncle.

“No and I found a partner who feels the same. We are the cool aunt and uncle.” — laudinum

9. Loneliness is underrated.

“54 yrs.old. I’ve lived the past 30 years alone. Presently my dog and I are chillin’ in a nice hotel on a spur of the moment vacation. I’d maybe be a grandfather by now?! I can’t imagine what it would be like to have family. I picture a life lived more “normally” sometimes. All sunshine and roses, white picket fence, etc. but I realize real life isn’t like that. No I don’t regret being childfree or wifefree for that matter. My life can be boring at times but then I look back at all the drama that comes with relationships and think I’ve dodged a bullet. I spent 20 years trying to find a wife to start a family. Then I realized the clock had run out, so fuck it, all the money I’d saved for my future family would be spent on myself. Hmmmmm…what do I want to buy myself for Christmas?” — Hermits_Truth

10. No diaper changes and no regrets.

“Nope. I never had the urge to change diapers or lose sleep, free time and most of my earnings. Other people’s kids are great. Mostly because they are other people’s. When people ask ‘Who will take care of you when you’re old’ I tell them that when I’m 75 I will adopt a 40-year-old.” — fwubglubbel

11. Zero desire.

“I’m 55 (F) and never wanted children. I just don’t much like them, and 20+ years of motherhood sounded (and still sounds) like a prison sentence. Maternal af when it comes to cats and dogs, but small humans? No chance.

“And I’m very happy to be childless. Cannot imagine my life any other way.” — GrowlKitty

12. D.I.N.K.

“Dual income no kids = great lifestyle!” — EggOntheRun

13. Some regrets

“Over 50 and child free. My only regret is that my wife would have been a great mother, and sometimes I feel like I deprived her of that, even though we both agreed we didn’t want kids. Sometimes I wonder if I pushed her into that decision. She works with the elderly every day and sees a lot of lonely folks so it gets to her sometimes. I was always afraid I’d screw up the parenting thing, so I was never really interested in the idea. I’m a loner by nature though.” — Johnny-Virgil

Pablo Larraín’s Spencer is Oscar bait. It’s a biopic about a beloved historical figure, Princess Diana of Wales. Its star, Kristen Stewart, is going through something of a redemption arc, which Oscar voters loved when Matthew McConaughey did it. Stewart, who started acting as a child, is decades into her career and over a decade into proving herself as a serious performer. With her months-long campaign for Spencer, Stewart is not trying to reinvent her image, but trying to earn well-deserved, long-overdue recognition among her peers who still associate the actress with a vampire franchise she starred in when she was a teenager into her early 20s; the same reputation that her Twilight co-star Robert Pattinson easily earned. Spencer is also an extremely expressive film. It’s beautifully shot and carefully lit, with landscapes as glamorous as its costumes. The visuals are in stark contrast with the story, which centers on Diana’s internal struggle with her marriage, being in the royal family, and her eating disorder. It looks like the fantasy royal life you imagine, but the reality is quite the opposite. Larraín’s film is not a standard biopic, though – it’s more of a slice of Diana’s complicated, lonely life.

Stewart and Spencer check every box on the Oscar to-do list with big, green, and perfect checkmarks. But Stewart, who kicked off awards season as a favorite for the Best Actress Oscar, has slowly become as unlikely to win an Oscar as Bradley Cooper, or a pre-The Revenant Leonardo Dicaprio. Although Stewart was just nominated in the Best Actress category for Spencer, she is the least likely to win among the other nominees. How did Stewart go from most obvious frontrunner to so left in the dust that it’s surprising she was even nominated? This has to do with several factors, including Hollywood’s obsession with itself, Stewart’s career (and everyone’s relationship to it), as well as the difference between what critics/film fans like compared to Hollywood and Academy voters.

When Spencer premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September 2021, critics swooned over Stewart’s performance. For years, critics and film fans have been working to give Stewart her due. Before her Twilight career, she was a child actress who worked with David Fincher in Panic Room (2002), and years later had a memorable role in 2007’s Into the Wild. Her post-Twilight career gets more impressive with every role, with her quiet performing style building and maturing. Stewart played Julianne Moore’s daughter in 2014’s Still Alice in a small but rousing performance opposite an Oscar-winning performance from Moore. In Stewart’s unsettling, emotionally raw but refined performance 2016’s Personal Shopper, Stewart established what most critics already knew: she is as good as the rest of them and better than some.

In Spencer, which follows Princess Diana as she decides to end her marriage with Prince Charles while on a Christmas holiday, Stewart disappears into Diana, fluctuating between extreme moods as a result of her isolation within the royal family. Stewart portrays Diana as an extremely sad, trapped woman. She has what anyone would consider an enviable life: she is part of the British royal family so she has everything — more beautiful things and surroundings than most people could ever imagine. But she is almost imprisoned by her status, in a loveless marriage with a man who openly loves another woman, and the only joy she experiences is through her children. Stewart plays these emotions naturally, assimilating from intense pain in scenes with her husband and his family to the intoxicating joy Diana was known for in scenes with her young sons, William and Harry. It’s the kind of performance that makes you forget who the actor is, and that the character has been played by other actresses (and very recently). Most importantly, Stewart does not try to make Diana feel special. The best part of Stewart’s performance is that she allows Princess Diana to be rather ordinary, which establishes a necessary connection with the audience.

Over the past few months as other films came out and the conversation shifted from critic chatter to actual awards show voters, Stewart’s chances for an Oscar grew smaller. Stewart went from shoo-in to, “she’s lucky if she even gets nominated.” The front-runners for best actress among the nominees are now Olivia Colman (The Lost Daughter) and Nicole Kidman (Being the Ricardos), and Penelope Cruz (Parallel Mothers), with previous winner Nicole Kidman the most likely winner for an average performance at best, if I’m being generous. Compared to Stewart, these actresses have more pull within Hollywood circles and, therefore, Academy voters. All of them have won before, which makes them more favorable to voters, who tend to go with what they’re comfortable with, even as the voting pool expands. Stewart, although decades into her acting career, does not run in the same circles. She’s also not from a Hollywood family, which favors actors more than they’ll ever admit. And up until this point, she has never been taken very seriously as an actress on this scale, rarely given the chance to mingle at awards shows like her peers. Stewart has been in a constant state of proving herself, and she’s gone ignored.

This is a similar problem to that of Jodie Comer, another actress who delivered one of the best performances in 2021 for The Last Duel, who, like Stewart, simply does not have as much pull in Hollywood. In an ideal world, Stewart and Comer would be the undisputed frontrunners for Best Actress, in a race that no one could predict.

Unfortunately, there are still people who consider Stewart unworthy, apparently unable to separate an actor from a job. If I was judged by all the jobs I had in the teens and 20s . . . you know what, I actually don’t even want to imagine that. While there are still some who extend the same fervor toward Robert Pattinson (every time I tweet about him, a few Batman fans who hate him harass me), he quickly broke out of his Twilight association, becoming an indie/arthouse film darling.

Meanwhile, Stewart has been doing the same thing but is still working her ass off to prove she’s just as good. Awards shows are, for the most part, a popularity contest. The hottest person of the moment – rooted in likability but fueled by clever PR campaigns – is more likely to win than the person who actually deserved it for the individual work, creating a cycle of actors (or writers and directors) winning years later for the wrong thing. Gary Oldman won his first Oscar for Darkest Hour, an unremarkable film and performance led more by prosthetics than the actor himself. In 2016, Leonardo DiCaprio’s win for The Revenant was an ultimately unsatisfying conclusion to his extraordinary early acting career. In the Best Actress category, Kate Winslet finally won her first Oscar in a similarly disappointing fashion for The Reader in 2008. The following year, Sandra Bullock won for The Blind Side, which hurt her chances for a win for Gravity several years later, were career-based wins, meant to respect the body of work and the person more than the individual performance.

As this cycle continues, Kristin Stewart may get her comeuppance, in a few years or maybe in many. But as it so often goes, it will be for a performance that wasn’t as deserving as Spencer – an apologetic handout for willful ignorance of her previous work. If not Spencer, what will Kristen Stewart have to do to get some respect?

The relationship between cannabis and creativity is delicate and polarized. While weed can be an incredible tool, inspiring the artist while relaxing the mind into a flow state, it can also backfire. If you over-consume THC or choose the wrong strain to accompany you on your creative voyage, you can quickly find yourself transformed into a stagnant energy orb incapable of creating linear thought, much less conceptualizing art.

While different terpenes and cannabinoid combinations can affect creativity, energy levels, and calm the mind enough to focus, it’s ultimately a matter of personal preference when it comes to choosing a strain that makes you feel creative. Speaking personally, weed has always been a huge part of my creative process — mostly for better, sometimes for worse. I went to Pratt for fine art before finding my path in writing and have used weed extensively to create throughout my adolescence and into adult life. The perfect space to create, for me, is a mixture of feeling uplifted, inspired, and relaxed enough to skirt the anxiety that often accompanies procrastination.

The terpenes that seem to work for me are pinene (focus), limonene (energy), and terpinolene (inspiration), balanced by a lower percentage of myrcene (relaxing) or caryophyllene (anti-anxiety). I also have found that THC percentages below 25 percent tend to help keep my head in the game and my feet on the ground as opposed to super-strong strains that send you into orbit.

So, that’s what works for me. Now let’s see if we can figure out what works for you. Today, we’re ranking the creativity-inducing effects of five incredible strains hot on the market right now. Each of these would be a great place to start if you’re looking to up your game in the studio without accidentally spacing out and ordering a triple pepperoni pizza.

To rate these strains, I went to a beautiful park with lots of happy dogs running around under the Hollywood sign and experienced each of them through this super cool crystal ball pipe from Sackville and Co. It seemed appropriate for this kind of mystical undertaking. Here are the results!

5. Classic Jack by Source Cannabis

Price: $55 for 3.5g

The Strain:

Few strains are more iconic than the uplifting, cerebral Jack Herer. But we rarely see it anymore. This Classic Jack variety by cannabis veterans and one of my favorite indoor brands, Source Cannabis, does the original justice and then some.

Tasting Notes:

Like all Source flower, this weed looks insanely amazing. The nugs are grass green with big orange hairs frosted in trichomes. Smelling the jar, there are notes of bright lemon, deep forest, and pink pepper. It has a sharp, evergreen aroma like pine sap evaporating in the hot summer sun.

I loaded my crystal ball pipe and took a big hit as a dalmatian looked on, confused. I exhaled. There was lemon, pine, fruit that was at once sour and sweet, like sipping some kind of incredible and complex botanical beverage.

Bottom Line:

I felt inspired to create but also a little dreamy — which I think works for certain art forms better than others. With writing, I often need to be more focused, and sometimes the whimsical element can distract me from completing the creative task at hand. For more open-ended creation, however, I think this would be a perfect choice. That makes this is a great flower for creativity as long as you don’t get too distracted by having fun doing other things, because it’s good for that too.

It’s uplifting and energizing, but also dreamy and zoomy — perfect for visual artists whose work deals in whimsy like painters, sculptors, and illustrators.

4. Durban Poison by Rythm

Price: $55 for 3.5g

The Strain:

In its original form, Durban Poison is one of the only true sativas in existence. Beloved for its creative, energizing effects, today’s Durban Poison from Rythm follows suit with an electrifying strain that energizes the body and invigorates the mind.

Tasting Notes:

Upon the first whiff, I knew this was the kind of weed that wakes your ass up. There’s lemon, spicy, zingy, tangy — you literally feel uplifted just by smelling it. The nugs are bright, dense, and pretty, and, at one point, were probably gorgeous. The mechanical trimming process these corporate brands use tends to destroy the intricacies of bud structures and grinds off many of the trichomes that contain the psychoactive compounds that get you high.

Still, though, it looked bomb.

As I smoked it, the flavor was woodsy and the color dark green came to mind. It had a pine flavor that was more woody than sharp. I exhaled and became immediately electric and sprang into action. It was a manic, prolific kind of creativity where you create a lot and edit it down later.

Bottom Line:

This is great for writers, thinkers, and people who really have to dive into the depths of their brains to create their art. This flower is deeply cerebral and physically uplifting — much better than coffee for someone keen to get shit done. Promoting laser focus and deep thought, this flower is great for being manically productive in a creative space.

3. Harmony Rose by Emerald Spirit Botanicals

Price: $65 for 7g

The Strain:

Harmony Rose by the fifth-generation family farm Emerald Spirit Botanicals is soul medicine that raises your vibration, making it perfect for elevating your artistic practice. While that might sound a little woo-woo to the average reader, I’m fucking serious. This shit is high-frequency earth magic and I will die on this hill.

Loose and fragrant, this is the kind of weed that makes you realize cannabis is a psychoactive flower. Harmony Rose is the antithesis to the small, rock-shaped nugs with astronomical THC percentages that are grown in a warehouse and make you feel like a zombie. This flower is free-flowing, low dose, and high in all the other chemical compounds that make you feel happy, healed, and good.

Just a quick educational side note: THC percentage refers to the percentage of the mass of the nug that is made up of the chemical THC. Meaning, when you have a flower that’s something astronomical like 35 percent, so much of the physical mass of that plant is being taken up by one chemical. All the other compounds that make you feel good are going way down to make room for the juiced-up THC. You lose the other colors in the rainbow of cannabinoids naturally present in the plant and narrow the scope of its healing powers dramatically. While a newbie might think they’re getting more bang for their buck, consumers of extremely high THC flower often experience anxiety, paranoia, and even freakouts.

Tasting Notes:

All of that said, Harmony Rose comes in at just 8.7 percent THC and 9.5 percent CBD. This is a 1:1 flower whose nugs are natural-looking and not dense. They’re purple, green, and orange. They look like what the cannabis plant produced prior to all this human intervention looked like. The smell is like delicate rose tea — beautiful and strong — without being overwhelming. Truly exquisite and difficult to define.

I packed a bowl and took a hit. The flavor is exactly like the smell: Sweet, musky, floral, delicious. Harmony Rose is all about the subtle art of elevation. Immediately, you feel better, brighter, and lifted.

Bottom Line:

The only way I can truly describe the high is that your vibe just gets way, way higher. The ideas flowed and I wasn’t judging myself or being critical. I was creating freely. This medicine brings you to a healing place where you’re eager to create, without fear or judgment.

Plus, you’re guaranteed not to freak out. So if you’re freakout-prone, this one’s for you.

2. Blood Orange by Aster Farms

Price: $30 for 3.5g

The Strain:

Blood Orange by the sun-grown, sustainable brand Aster Farms is one of my favorite strains of now. Not only is it incredible for reaching the creative flow state, but it also makes every day come alive with fun.

Tasting Notes:

This flower smells and tastes like blood oranges. They’re luscious, fragrant orange blossoms with a sour and savory tinge. The terpene profile on this strain is out of control. The smell, the taste, it’s overwhelmingly decadent. A complex and robust terpene profile is the most important thing when it comes to choosing your flower. The more terps, the more healing and nuanced the high. While some flower may look insane on the outside, it’s what you can’t see that really counts in my opinion. These nugs are dense, green, orange, fuzzy, earthy, and real.

Another way to determine great weed is if the smell of the terpene profile continues into the flavor of the weed as you smoke it and exhale. This, my friends, was a flavor explosion. It was as if my mouth was coated in an expensive blood-orange liqueur. It tasted natural and gorgeous, like the essence of fruit and sunshine.

“Orange orchards in the springtime,” “farmers market on a Sunday,” and “fancy steak dinner” were all scribbled in my notes.

Bottom line:

The high is focused, clear, and left me ready to take on the world with a playful bent. Blood Orange contains high levels of the terpene terpinolene, which is known as the creativity terpene. It’s cerebral and exciting, perfect for writing and coming up with ideas. Dreamy, calming, and inspiring.

This is a fantastic daytime flower that — aside from the official creativity test — I’ve been smoking at all times for the past couple of weeks.

1. Candy Cane by Moon Made Farms

Price: $100 for 14g

The Strain:

Candy Cane by the sun-grown Emerald Triangle brand Moon Made Farms blew my mind. It has become a life-changing flower for me in a lot of ways. Healing, inspiring, thoughtful, and deep, it allows you to transcend the physical realm and exist only in the ethereal space between body and mind where creativity occurs.

Tasting Notes:

This flower checks every box for me in the sensory department. The nugs are chunky, sparkly, crunchy, and perfect. Not too dense, they break apart easily into cascading tones of violet, deep purple, and orange with a hundred shades of green. It’s piney, woody, and peppery. Just smelling this flower helps relieve the anxiety that constantly plagues my body and mind.

The smell is perfectly aligned with flavor in this variety with a deep, woody flavor that melts anxiety on the exhale. There is an immediate head change. Your eyes get heavier but your mind comes alive.

Bottom Line:

I found this flower to be inspiring in a totally different way than I’m used to. Usually, I go for an intense sativa, but this is definitely something more languid. The body high is so relieving and euphoric. It’s almost like you don’t have a body at all and can completely focus your energy on what your mind is creating.

Finally freed from the bindings of the physical realm, you are free to explore your mind and see what materializes from its depths. That makes this the perfect cannabis, in general, but also for creativity!

It’s nurtured by the sun! And the rain! And soil that is alive! Every psychoactive compound has been filled out to perfection. Your mind will be excited and your body relaxed. Seriously, try it for yourself and go make something wonderful.

Despite only being a first-time director, The Roots’ drummer Questlove has already entered rarified air as one of the nominees for the 2022 Academy Awards. he’s nominated for Best Original Documentary for his debut film, Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised), which captured the subversive energy and vibrant performances of the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival. The documentary is also nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Music Film, an impressive achievement for the veteran musician.

Questlove himself seemed pretty pumped about the new nomination online — to the point of incoherence. He tweeted out an unintelligible string of characters before he was able to compose himself enough to write a tweet genuinely expressing his excitement. “Oscar Nominated Film Director Questlove……I just need to see this in print,” he wrote.

Meanwhile, over on Instagram, he needed the help of some archival video to tell his followers “THIS IS HOW I FEEL.” “Man I’m so happy about this,” he wrote in the caption. “Thank you to every last soul that assisted in this journey from 1969 to tomorrow!!!”

Should Questlove win the category (out of a field that also includes Ascension, Attica, Flee, and Writing With Fire, he’ll be halfway to an EGOT — and with Black Thought’s musical Black No More still in the works, there’s time for Quest to attach his name and position himself for a potential Tony as well. Then all he’ll need is for John Oliver to take a season off and that EGOT’s in the bag.

The last we heard from Mxmtoon was her 2020 EPs Dawn and Dusk, as well as her contributions to the Life Is Strange: True Colors soundtrack in 2021. Now, she’s starting her 2022 with a new single, “Mona Lisa,” a jaunty, ukulele-led tune.

Mxmtoon says of the song:

“As someone who usually writes songs about other people, one of my ongoing questions is, ‘Will anyone ever write songs about me?’ Mona Lisa is about wanting to be the subject of the art for once instead of being the creator. I think we all daydream at some point in our lives of diving into our favorite stories and finding ourselves in the pages. We all deserve the chance to feel like we’re worthy of a spotlight every once in a while, and Mona Lisa is meant to express that sentiment exactly.”

As for what’s next for Mxmtoon, she says, “I hope to keep pushing myself and make something that feels really different. I want Mxmtoon to be a diverse sonic playground. Everything is open-ended for me right now, but I see that as being incredibly liberating and exciting.”

Listen to “Mona Lisa” above. Mxmtoon also announced some 2022 tour dates today, so find those below.

05/02 — Montreal, QC @ Fairmount
05/04 — Toronto, ON @ Danforth Music Hall
05/05 — Detroit, MI @ Majestic Theatre
05/07 — Chicago, IL @ House of Blues
05/08 — Minneapolis, MN @ Varsity Theatre
05/10 — Englewood, CO @ The Gothic
05/11 — Salt Lake City, UT @ Complex
05/13 — Vancouver, BC @ Vogue Theatre
05/14 — Portland, OR @ Wonder Ballroom
05/15 — Seattle, WA @ Showbox Market
05/17 — San Francisco, CA @ Regency
05/20 — Santa Ana, CA @ The Observatory
05/21 — Los Angeles, CA @ Fonda
05/24 — San Diego, CA @ House of Blues
05/25 — Phoenix, AZ @ The Van Buren
05/27 — Dallas, TX @ The Studio at The Factory
05/28 — Austin, TX @ Scoot Inn (Outdoors)
05/29 — Houston, TX @ White Oak Downstairs
05/31 — Orlando, FL @ Beacham
06/01 — Atlanta, GA @ The Loft
06/03 — Washington, DC @ 9:30 Club
06/05 — Philadelphia, PA @ Theatre of Living Arts
06/07 — New York, NY @ Webster Hall
06/10 — Boston, MA @ Royale

The RX is Uproxx Music’s stamp of approval for the best albums, songs, and music stories throughout the year. Inclusion in this category is the highest distinction we can bestow, and signals the most important music being released throughout the year. The RX is the music you need, right now.

When Big Thief called their debut album Masterpiece, I assumed it was meant to be ironic. Yes, I thought it was a great record — it was among my favorite albums of 2016. But many of the bands who make my favorite albums wind up slowly fading back to obscurity after briefly bubbling up. It’s the trajectory of 99.9 percent of the artists who are lucky enough to even get noticed in the first place. Surely, this modest, country-leaning indie rock band couldn’t really have such delusions of grandeur.

In the years since then, I’ve come to realize that Big Thief actually did indeed have such delusions. Also: maybe they weren’t delusions after all.

In their own humble way, Big Thief has aspired to greatness more than any other American rock band I can think of from the past decade. From the beginning, what distinguished them was that “intangible feeling that’s conjured when musicians with chemistry assemble in a room and become something greater than the sum of their respective parts,” as I put it upon the release of Masterpiece. It’s a cliche to liken a band to a family or a sports team — most bands are really marriages of convenience — though in the case of Big Thief these analogies don’t go far enough. They are more like a body, in which each part performs a specific task so that the life form can move, breathe, think and feel.

In their publicity photos, the members of Big Thief are always situated close together, to the point where they’re often literally falling over each other, as if they are attempting to physically merge. The body language here speaks volumes. Big Thief emerged during a period of indie rock in which Bandcamp auteurs summoned online followings and then formed bands in order to tour. In contrast, Big Thief represents the most endangered of modern pop anachronisms: A rock band with a real bond.

By the time of their second album, 2017’s Capacity, they had a signature sound. Whereas Masterpiece is more or less a rough and tumble alt-country record, Capacity showed them capable of playing with a quiet, unsettling intensity as singer-songwriter Adrianne Lenker sang intimate art-folk songs in a stage whisper. On stage, however, Big Thief tore those songs open, with Lenker and guitarist Buck Meek suddenly raining down torrents of squalling feedback after lulling the audience with 45 minutes of intimate beguilement, as bassist Max Oleartchik and drummer James Krivchenia somehow held it all together, like scotch tape around a tornado.

By 2019, they were indie stars, though there were also signs of strain. U.F.O.F. and Two Hands contain some of their very best and most beloved songs, but there was also a sense that Big Thief might slip into a formula of austere, mid-tempo and kind of same-y sounding singer-songwriter music. There was also their relentless work schedule of constant touring and prolific recording. Are they working too hard? I wondered. That drive for greatness seemed to be pushing them toward burnout. (Lenker has said that she was briefly hospitalized in 2020, in part, due to exhaustion from seven years of non-stop touring.)

The pandemic forced them to slow down. But it didn’t tamp down their ambition. Before Covid hit, Krivchenia had a genius idea: Let’s travel the country and record many, many songs in several different locations. It was the sort of gambit that conjures other great rock adventures like the Rolling Stones’ Exile On Main St. and Bob Dylan and The Band’s The Basement Tapes, though Big Thief sought to dream up their own creative utopias in four different corners of America, as if attempting to recover an idealized fantasy of what this country could be. As most of us hunkered down in our own private spaces, the members of Big Thief spent five months traveling to the Catskills in upstate New York, the Colorado Rockies, Topanga Canyon in Southern California, and Tucson, Arizona. That they did it during the shutdown in retrospect feels like a metaphor for a band that signifies so many old-world American attributes that now seem lost: kindness, community, adventurousness, empathy, good humor, guilelessness.

They recorded 45 songs in all, 20 of which are included on their staggering new double album, Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You. This may strike some as hyperbole but I don’t care because it’s true: As strong as the other Big Thief albums are, they feel like rough drafts for what they’ve finally achieved here. I’ve had a promo of Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You for a few months, and it already feels like the kind of album that’s destined to be handed down from generation to generation, like Automatic For The People or Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. It’s music I know I will reach for on epic road trips or in the midst of profound grief. An all-timer. A masterpiece. They really did it this time.

Turns out recording in different places with different engineers — Krivchenia is listed as the album’s producer — had real impact on the music. The seething Old Testament sermonizing of “Sparrow” has heavy Catskills vibes. The sweeping country rock of “Red Moon” (featuring excellent fiddle playing by Mat Davidson, among the small handful of non-band members appearing on the album) carries with it the dust of the Arizona desert. The stupendous “Simulation Swarm” is classic ’70s L.A. soft rock with one of the best guitar solos on any Big Thief album. The gorgeous title track evinces the restraint and simplicity endemic to their work with long-time producer Dom Monks on the previous records.

But honestly, every song here is terrific, which is a minor miracle for a band that sought out to (in Meek’s words) “lose our minds a bit.” Of course, I must cop to a personal bias in favor of bands — especially great bands — losing their minds a bit by letting it all hang out. The knock on double albums is that an expansive approach necessitates including songs that normally would have been left off. For those who are impatient with curveballs, experiments, and half-baked flashes of inspiration, this can make double LPs tedious.

In the case of Big Thief, however, this is exactly where Dragon thrives. Nothing is left un-hung out. Let me put it this way: It’s an album in which two different people are credited with playing “icicles” on a track. Though the eccentricities never get in the way of the songwriting, which is so consistently stellar that I will no longer entertain arguments about anyone from her generational cohort topping Lenker in that department. Only on a canvas this grand is she able to show all that she is capable of. The goofy back porch country philosophizing of “Spud Infinity.” The Ren-Faire flute-accented balladry of “No Reason.” The ethereal psychedelia of “Little Things.” The demo-like “Wake Me Up To Drive,” in which Lenker sums up her band’s M.O. over a drum machine and lo-fi indie-pop melody:

Wake me up to drive
Wake me up to drive
Even if I’m tired I don’t wanna miss the ride
Wake me up to drive
Wake me up to drive
Even if I’m tired I don’t wanna miss the ride

But this is not (as parts of U.F.O.F. and Two Hands seemed to be) merely an Adrianne Lenker solo record that the other members of Big Thief happen to play on. So much of the pleasure of listening to Dragon comes from appreciating the subtle and delicate ways in which this band works and plays together, whether it’s the excellent jam that closes “Little Things,” the surprisingly heavy rock groove that subsumes “Flower Of Blood,” or the way Meek’s voice rises to harmonize with Lenker on the chorus of the stunning love song “12000 Lines.”

We’ve all had our souls crushed by the monotony of the past few years. Stay inside. Dread your neighbors. Distrust everything you see. The drumbeat of negativity is deadening. I think that partly explains why this album moves me so much. The joie de vivre on display is invigorating. The prevailing message is: go outside, care about your neighbors, hope for the future, live. Even the songs that reference death look upon it not as an ending but as a reason to cherish life all the more, “like a door to a place we’ve never been before,” as Lenker sings on the gorgeous album-opener “Change.”

Life is hard. Loss is inevitable. You will be hurt. But only on an album this wide-eyed and open-hearted can the flip side also be articulated. On Dragon, Big Thief makes the case that loss and pain are also what make life worth living. Even if I’m tired I don’t wanna miss the ride. What matters in the end is that we are here for each other. I am grateful Big Thief is here for us.