For Black Pop Stans, the Bare Minimum Is No Longer Enough
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Music Features
Black superfans have been erased from the story of pop for decades. Now, in looking for visibility and change, they've found each other
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Album Reviews
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Taylor Swift
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Her eighth album is a radical detour into the deepest collection of songs she's ever come up with
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Unfollow the Rules
Singer-songwriter's ninth album of original material is a stately pop throwback full of his signature vocal grandeur
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Columnists
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The Contagious Presidency
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Video
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Kadir Nelson’s Inspiration for the July Cover of Rolling Stone
Culture"I want everyone in this painting — particularly the African American women and children — to know that they matter," artist says
TV Reviews
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Brave New World
The Peacock original series, based on Aldous Huxley's 1932 dystopian novel, has pretty packaging but a hollow center
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P-Valley
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Perry Mason
HBO's new iteration of the classic courtroom hero gives him an origin no one asked for and ignores some key character developments
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Movie Reviews
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Palm Springs
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The Old Guard
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Irresistible
Steve Carell and Rose Byrne are partisan spin doctors who try to shape a small-town election —a nd deliver a scathing state-of-the-nation comedy
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Da 5 Bloods
Part war film and part heist thriller, the director's story of black veterans returning to old battlegrounds feels made for our current moment
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![<p>“People get annoyed with me, but I’m very poised. This is me – I’m relaxed. It’s annoying we have to explain something that is common sense. We just want to be treated equally. Why is there a debate?”</p>
<p> </p>
<p>“I have friends that are just now realizing it. It took 10 to 15 years for you to understand this and I’ve been right here. It’s exhausting to constantly be surrounded by all these experiences that I endured in my childhood. It’s like pulling my old skeletons out of the closet. I’ve been silenced for years and years and years and now it’s everywhere.”</p>
<p> </p>
<p>“I am mad at the system for having me think that when I protest I am doing something wrong. We’ve developed this slave mentality because we’ve been silenced for so long. The fact that we’ve [black people] been robbed of a proper social life. For example, I felt deprived from having a real dating relationship growing up — or even now. I was ‘too dark’ within my race and basically a sin to even consider attractive for white people and when you grow up with that for so long it just constantly chips and chips and chips at your self esteem. I know beautiful black girls who couldn’t get a date to prom, never had a boyfriend, and if they did they were second to last choice. This repeats through preschool to college, and a lot of black women like myself are desensitized to having a high standard or a high value of themselves due to this pattern and I tell people that’s the heart of racism.”</p>](https://www.rollingstone.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/amara.jpg?crop=3:2,smart&w=90)
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