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The Guardian
17-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Jim Legxacy: Black British Music review
On Father, the first single to be taken from Jim Legxacy's third mixtape, the listener is offered a vivid image from the author's past. The teenage James Olaloye, as he was then, is on the streets of Lewisham, the south-east London borough where he grew up. He is 'rolling up a blunt, scheming for the funds … trying to come up off the roads on my own two / I never had a father'. Inevitably, this means he's up to no good: 'Making money off a phone … a key's what they want.' It's a familiar scenario in the world of UK rap, a genre in which you seldom want for bleak descriptions of the life its stars have left behind on often deprived council estates. But in the case of Father, it comes with a small, but striking detail. 'On the block,' he attests, 'I was listening to Mitski.' The self-examining sad-girl alt-pop of Mitski is an intriguing accompaniment for the lifestyle he's describing. But in Jim Legxacy's case, it makes sense. His rise has been a deeply unorthodox one, buoyed up by music that suggests he is almost entirely uninterested in the way things are usually done. You would broadly have described his 2021 mixtape Citadel as UK rap, but it sounded like UK rap that was fraying at the edges: the backing tracks frequently unravelling; his aggressive flow occasionally dropping out of the mix entirely, or suddenly scrambled until unintelligible. His contemptuous boasts were abruptly disrupted by guitar-driven tracks on which the mask slipped and he sang, in a sweet, plaintive voice, lyrics expressing a strikingly raw vulnerability that seemed to have more to do with emo than hip-hop. In 2023, Homeless N*gga Pop Music leaned even further into the latter mode. Featuring more singing than rapping, it pitched grumbling electric guitars against chattering Afrobeats-inspired rhythms and Miley Cyrus samples, the overall mood heartbroken and despairing. It really didn't sound like anything else, including Sprinter, the huge hit single Legxacy co-wrote and co-produced for Central Cee and Dave the same year. You might expect his debut mixtape for an actual label to be even more heartsore and introspective, not least because the first track, Context, details what has happened to Legxacy since Homeless N*gga Pop Music's release: his sister died, his mother suffered two strokes, his track Candy Reign (!) was removed from streaming services after a copyright dispute. These events clearly have an impact on the record. But the adversity seems to have spurred him on. Black British Music is brighter, poppier, bolder in its stylistic leaps, lurching without warning from idiosyncratic pop R&B – laced with sped-up vocal samples that inevitably evoke Kanye West's early 'chipmunk soul' productions – to the alt-rock of '06 Wayne Rooney. The song New David Bowie tempers a series of head-scrambling musical jump cuts with a succession of nagging hooks. It feels like the work of someone who has grown up with the all-you-can-eat buffet of streaming as standard, hurling contrasting ideas and inspirations at you in a way that recalls someone continually pressing fast-forward in a state of excitement. There are booming, distorted beats worthy of the Chemical Brothers, a hint of Frank Ocean about Legxacy's vocals, staccato strings on SOS, bedroom pop on Dexters Phone Call, the latter a collaboration with singer-songwriter Dexter in the Newsagent. It's a risky approach. That it doesn't result in an annoying mess comes down to Legxacy's skills as a producer, which allow him to weave it all into something coherent, and to his songwriting. He turns out to be far more adept at nagging melodies than you might have thought given the hazier approach of his previous mixtapes. There's often something unplaceable and confounding about the results: the cascade of keyboards, vintage soul samples, restless beats and panicked-sounding rapping on the amazingly titled I Just Banged a Snus in Canada Water contrives to be thrillingly intense and euphorically poppy at the same time. A voiceover regularly booms out between and even during tracks, telling you how wonderful the music you're listening to is: 'Somebody tell that bastard to turn that mediocre bullshit off – we're listening to Jim Legxacy now.' It's surplus to requirements: a unique world constructed out of an array of musical fragments, the mixtape doesn't need cheerleading. But perhaps Legxacy does. 'I've always been scared of being myself,' he sings over the acoustic guitars and scraping strings of Issues of Trust. Without wishing to minimise the difficulties he's overcome – or indeed what he has to say about Black masculinity, a regular theme in his work – you hear that line amid Black British Music's giddy rush of sound and think: you could have fooled me. Jessie Murph – Heroin An orchestrated ballad that starts out stately, as if Lana Del Rey relocated to the deep south, but then takes off into raw-throated catharsis, to stunning effect.
The Guardian
17-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Jim Legxacy: Black British Music review
On Father, the first single to be taken from Jim Legxacy's third mixtape, the listener is offered a vivid image from the author's past. The teenage James Olaloye, as he was then, is on the streets of Lewisham, the south-east London borough where he grew up. He is 'rolling up a blunt, scheming for the funds … trying to come up off the roads on my own two / I never had a father'. Inevitably, this means he's up to no good: 'Making money off a phone … a key's what they want.' It's a familiar scenario in the world of UK rap, a genre in which you seldom want for bleak descriptions of the life its stars have left behind on often deprived council estates. But in the case of Father, it comes with a small, but striking detail. 'On the block,' he attests, 'I was listening to Mitski.' The self-examining sad-girl alt-pop of Mitski is an intriguing accompaniment for the lifestyle he's describing. But in Jim Legxacy's case, it makes sense. His rise has been a deeply unorthodox one, buoyed up by music that suggests he is almost entirely uninterested in the way things are usually done. You would broadly have described his 2021 mixtape Citadel as UK rap, but it sounded like UK rap that was fraying at the edges: the backing tracks frequently unravelling; his aggressive flow occasionally dropping out of the mix entirely, or suddenly scrambled until unintelligible. His contemptuous boasts were abruptly disrupted by guitar-driven tracks on which the mask slipped and he sang, in a sweet, plaintive voice, lyrics expressing a strikingly raw vulnerability that seemed to have more to do with emo than hip-hop. In 2023, Homeless N*gga Pop Music leaned even further into the latter mode. Featuring more singing than rapping, it pitched grumbling electric guitars against chattering Afrobeats-inspired rhythms and Miley Cyrus samples, the overall mood heartbroken and despairing. It really didn't sound like anything else, including Sprinter, the huge hit single Legxacy co-wrote and co-produced for Central Cee and Dave the same year. You might expect his debut mixtape for an actual label to be even more heartsore and introspective, not least because the first track, Context, details what has happened to Legxacy since Homeless N*gga Pop Music's release: his sister died, his mother suffered two strokes, his track Candy Reign (!) was removed from streaming services after a copyright dispute. These events clearly have an impact on the record. But the adversity seems to have spurred him on. Black British Music is brighter, poppier, bolder in its stylistic leaps, lurching without warning from idiosyncratic pop R&B – laced with sped-up vocal samples that inevitably evoke Kanye West's early 'chipmunk soul' productions – to the alt-rock of '06 Wayne Rooney. The song New David Bowie tempers a series of head-scrambling musical jump cuts with a succession of nagging hooks. It feels like the work of someone who has grown up with the all-you-can-eat buffet of streaming as standard, hurling contrasting ideas and inspirations at you in a way that recalls someone continually pressing fast-forward in a state of excitement. There are booming, distorted beats worthy of the Chemical Brothers, a hint of Frank Ocean about Legxacy's vocals, staccato strings on SOS, bedroom pop on Dexters Phone Call, the latter a collaboration with singer-songwriter Dexter in the Newsagent. It's a risky approach. That it doesn't result in an annoying mess comes down to Legxacy's skills as a producer, which allow him to weave it all into something coherent, and to his songwriting. He turns out to be far more adept at nagging melodies than you might have thought given the hazier approach of his previous mixtapes. There's often something unplaceable and confounding about the results: the cascade of keyboards, vintage soul samples, restless beats and panicked-sounding rapping on the amazingly titled I Just Banged a Snus in Canada Water contrives to be thrillingly intense and euphorically poppy at the same time. A voiceover regularly booms out between and even during tracks, telling you how wonderful the music you're listening to is: 'Somebody tell that bastard to turn that mediocre bullshit off – we're listening to Jim Legxacy now.' It's surplus to requirements: a unique world constructed out of an array of musical fragments, the mixtape doesn't need cheerleading. But perhaps Legxacy does. 'I've always been scared of being myself,' he sings over the acoustic guitars and scraping strings of Issues of Trust. Without wishing to minimise the difficulties he's overcome – or indeed what he has to say about Black masculinity, a regular theme in his work – you hear that line amid Black British Music's giddy rush of sound and think: you could have fooled me. Jessie Murph – Heroin An orchestrated ballad that starts out stately, as if Lana Del Rey relocated to the deep south, but then takes off into raw-throated catharsis, to stunning effect.
Los Angeles Times
18-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
How Jensen McRae became L.A.'s next great songwriter
Jensen McRae is still chewing over something her therapist told her during their first session together. 'I was talking about how sensitive I am and how I was feeling all these feelings,' the 27-year-old singer and songwriter recalls, 'and she was like, 'You have yet to describe a feeling to me — everything you've described is a thought.'' McRae's eyes widen behind her stylish glasses. 'That destroyed me. She said, 'Feelings are in your body. Thoughts are in your head.' 'This was like six years ago, and I think about it constantly.' A proudly bookish Los Angeles native whose academic ambitions took her to the competitive Harvard-Westlake School, McRae wrote her first song at around age 8; by the time she was a teenager, music had become her way to cope with the cruelty of the world. Yet when she looks back at the stuff she wrote when she was younger, what strikes her isn't that it was too raw — it's that it wasn't raw enough. 'I think I was trying to intellectualize my feelings to get away from being vulnerable,' she says. 'Now I know there's room for both — there's a way to be intellectually rigorous about my sensitivity.' Indeed there is, as McRae demonstrates on her knockout of a sophomore album, 'I Don't Know How But They Found Me!' Released in April by the respected indie label Dead Oceans (whose other acts include Mitski and Phoebe Bridgers), the LP documents the dissolution of two romantic relationships in gleaming acoustic pop songs that use gut-punch emotional detail to ponder complicated ideas of gender, privilege and abuse. In 'Massachusetts,' a snippet of which blew up when she posted it on TikTok in 2023, she captures the private universe she shared with an ex, while 'Let Me Be Wrong' thrums with an overachiever's desperation: 'Something twisted in my chest says I'm good but not the best,' she sings, the rhyme so neat that you can almost see her awaiting the listener's approving nod. 'I Can Change Him' is an unsparing account of the narrator's savior complex that McRae was tempted to leave off the album until her team convinced her otherwise. 'I think of myself as an evolved and self-actualized woman,' she says with a laugh. 'So the admission that I thought it would be my love that transforms this person — I mean, it's super embarrassing.' Then there's 'Savannah,' which lays out the lasting damage left behind after a breakup, and the chilling 'Daffodils,' in which McRae sings about a guy who 'steals base while I sleep.' McRae's songs don't flinch from trauma, but they can also be very funny. 'I'd like to blame the drugs,' she sings, longing for toxic old comforts in a song called 'I Don't Do Drugs.' And here's how she brings the guy in 'I Can Change Him' to life in just a few lines: Same old eight-dollar cologneSame old he can't be aloneSame old cigarettes he rollsSame old Cozmo's 'Plastic Soul' Asked whether she'd rather make someone laugh or cry, McRae needs no time to think. 'I'm always proud when I make someone cry,' she says as she sits on a park bench in Silver Lake on a recent afternoon. 'But more important to me than being the sad girl is that I'm funny — that's way more important to my identity.' She smiles. 'I've definitely made dark jokes where people are like, 'That's horrible that you think you can joke about that,'' she says. 'I'm like, 'It's my thing — the sad thing happened to me.'' McRae's music has attracted some famous fans. In 2024 she opened for Noah Kahan on tour, and she recently jammed with Justin Bieber at his place after the former teen idol reached out on Instagram with kind words about 'Massachusetts.' Last month, McRae — a graduate of USC's Thornton School of Music — played a pair of packed hometown shows at the El Rey where she introduced 'Savannah' by telling the crowd, 'You are not defined by the worst thing that ever happened to you.' 'Jensen is extremely … if I say the word 'gifted,' you'll be like, 'okay' — but she truly is a gifted individual,' says Patrice Rushen, the veteran jazz and R&B musician who mentored McRae as chair of the Thornton School's popular music program. (Among the classics McRae learned to perform during her studies was Rushen's 1982 'Forget Me Nots.') Rushen praises the depth and precision of McRae's songwriting — 'her ability to see beyond what's right in front of her and to find just the right word or texture in her storytelling.' 'I adored her as a student,' Rushen adds. McRae was born in Santa Monica and grew up in Woodland Hills in a tight-knit family; her dad is Black and her mom is Jewish, and she has two brothers — the older of whom is her business manager, the younger of whom plays keyboard in her road band. The singer describes herself as both a goody two-shoes and a teacher's pet, which she affectionately blames on her father, a lawyer who went to UCLA and Harvard Law School. 'He was born in 1965 — his birth certificate says 'Negro' on it, which is crazy,' she says. 'His whole life, it was: 'You have to be twice as good to get half as far.' And even though I was born in the '90s, that was still kind of instilled in us. 'Especially being at Harvard-Westlake,' she adds. 'I was one of the few Black kids, and I didn't want to be underestimated. Now, I find being underestimated kind of funny because I have so much confidence in my own ability that when someone thinks I'm not gifted in whatever way, I'm like, 'Oh, you'll find out you're wrong soon enough.'' Having absorbed the songwriting fundamentals of James Taylor, Sara Bareilles and Taylor Swift, McRae entered USC in 2015 and played her first gig — 'the first one that wasn't a school talent show,' she clarifies — at L.A.'s Hotel Cafe after her freshman year. 'I don't know if my mom knows this, but I told her not to come,' she recalls with a laugh. 'I was like, 'I'm 18 — I'm grown up now — and I'm gonna be hanging with all these cool people.'' In fact, her audience that night consisted of only the bartender and the other acts on the bill. Her creative breakthrough came when she wrote her song 'White Boy' when she was 20. It's about feeling invisible, and McRae knew she'd achieved something because 'when I finished it, I was like, 'I can never play this in front of anyone.'' A few years later, during the COVID-19 pandemic, she fired off a jokey tweet imagining that Bridgers would soon write a song about 'hooking up in the car while waiting in line to get vaccinated at dodger stadium'; the post went viral, racking up shares from thousands of people, including Bridgers. 'I had to put my phone in a drawer because it was buzzing so much,' says McRae, who ended up writing the song herself and calling it 'Immune.' For 'I Don't Know How But They Found Me!' — the title borrows a line of dialogue from 'Back to the Future' — McRae sought a lusher sound than she got on her folky 2022 debut; she recorded the album in North Carolina with the producer Brad Cook, who's also worked with Bon Iver and Waxahatchee and who helped fill out the songs with appealing traces of turn-of-the-millennium pop by Avril Lavigne and Ashlee Simpson. As a singer, McRae can expertly control the sob in her voice, as in 'Tuesday,' a stark piano ballad about a betrayal made all the more painful by how little it meant to the traitor. At the El Rey, McRae doubled down on that theme in a florid yet intimate rendition of 'I Can't Make You Love Me,' the Mike Reid/Allen Shamblin tune that Bonnie Raitt turned into one of pop's greatest anthems of dejection. What did McRae learn about songwriting at USC? She mentions a technique called 'toggling,' which one professor illustrated using John Mayer's 'Why Georgia.' 'The first line is, 'I'm driving up '85 in the kind of morning that lasts all afternoon,'' McRae says. 'That's a description of the outside world. Then the next line is, 'I'm just stuck inside the gloom,' toggling back to the internal emotion. That's something I pay attention to now. If I'm writing a verse, I'll do scene-setting, scene-setting, scene-setting, then how do I feel about it?' McRae is particularly good at dropping the listener into a scenario, as in 'Savannah,' which starts: 'There is an intersection in your college town with your name on it.' To get to that kind of intriguing specificity, she'll sometimes write six or eight lines of a verse, to discard the first few — 'Those are often just filler words,' she says — and 'rearrange the rest so that whatever I had at the end goes at the top. Now I have to beat that.' For all her craft, McRae knows that songwriting is just one of the skills required of any aspiring pop star. She loves performing on the road, though touring has become 'physically punishing,' as she puts it, since she was diagnosed a few years ago with a thyroid condition and chronic hives, both of which have led to a severely restricted diet. She recently posted a TikTok in which she detailed her regimen of medications — one attempt, she says, to bring some visibility to the topic of chronic illness. (That said, McRae admits to being unsettled by the DM she received the other day from a fan who recognized her at her allergist's office: 'They're like, 'Hey, I saw you — I was going in to get my shots too.'') McRae views social media more broadly as 'a factory that I clock into and clock out of.' She's well aware that it's what enabled her to start building an audience. And she's hardly anti-phone. 'I love being on my phone,' she says. 'I literally was born in the right generation. But when it comes to constantly looking at images of myself, that's my business card or my portfolio — it's not actually me, the human being.' In January, she deleted TikTok during the brief outage related to President Trump's ban of the app. 'Then, of course, it came back right away, but I couldn't re-download it. So for a month I didn't have TikTok. As it turns out, I was fine.' Arguably better? 'Probably, yeah. I'm back on it now, obviously, because I have to do promo. At first I thought it was the loudest, most overstimulating thing in the world — I couldn't believe I used it. Then after a week, I was like, oh yeah, no, I'm reacclimated.'
Vox
09-05-2025
- Health
- Vox
Losing my hair sucked. Trying to regrow it has been even worse.
is a culture writer and editor based in Brooklyn, New York. Her latest book is Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop . I never appreciated how much I aspired toward conventional hotness until I got cancer and lost all my hair. As I underwent 12 rounds of chemotherapy in 2023 to treat advanced-stage Hodgkin lymphoma, I became measurably 'uglier': bald, muscle-free and inflated by steroids, with only three eyelashes to my name. The Mitski lyric 'But if I gave up on being pretty, I wouldn't know how to be alive' comes to mind. Ironically, as my hair fluttered to the ground like falling leaves during those early days of treatment, I realized that the wild, oft-frizzy hair I'd spent my whole life tussling with was central to my look. I tried my best to hold onto it. During my first few rounds of chemo, I opted to try a relatively new process called 'cold capping,' which is what it sounds like. The patient wears an ice-cold cap before, during, and after chemo, and for some, it can reduce the amount of hair loss during treatment by up to 50 percent. (New York recently became the first state to mandate insurance coverage of scalp cooling; I had to sink a chunk of my GoFundMe to afford it.) Today, Explained Understand the world with a daily explainer plus the most compelling stories of the day, compiled by news editor Sean Collins. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. The cap is, unfortunately, a torture device. Just 15 seconds into my first treatment with the freezing helmet latched to my head and with six more hours to go, the cold was unbearable. I took more Advil and Tylenol, and requested more Ativan, too. An hour later the nurse returned with the benzos and began pumping me with four types of poison, as I shivered on the most depressing floor in Murray Hill. Once I experienced the brutality of chemo, it became unimaginable to elect additional discomfort. The moment I stopped capping, the hair loss quickened, thinning out my wavy bob. Every day I asked myself: Is today the day I shave it? Would classic bald look better at this point? How much longer can I cling to hair normalcy? When I found clumps of hair caking the pillow on my hospital stretcher, I asked the emergency room doctor to buzz it. Why hair is so much more than that During the treatment, losing my hair was upsetting, but I had bigger problems, like cancer and sepsis. The post-chemo hair regrowth process — slow, uneven, patchy, lonely — has been more gutting because I'm supposed to be normal now. More than 80 million people in the US experience hair loss. In addition to affecting cancer patients, hair loss is also a common but rarely talked-about side effect of perimenopause and childbirth. While baldness, thinning, and hairline woes are more commonly associated with men, female pattern hair loss is estimated to impact 40 percent of women before age 50. Hair loss in women is more likely to be caused by medical conditions, medications, or psychological distress. Across the board, it has a significant impact on a patient's quality of life, but women are more likely to experience psychosocial problems as a result. 'Hair is deeply tied to our identity, confidence, and even how we just move through the world.' 'Hair is deeply tied to our identity, confidence, and even how we just move through the world,' Dr. Asmi Berry, a board-certified dermatologist in Los Angeles, says. 'Our hair is one of the first things that people notice. So when a patient or anyone experiences hair loss, especially after something life-altering like chemo or pregnancy or a severe illness, it's not just physical. It could feel like you've lost a part of yourself and that has an emotional impact.' People often get 'chemo curls' after cancer treatment: Their hair grows back thicker and curlier, sometimes in a different color. My alleged curls sprouted up unevenly on my head, as I was now expected to find work, love, and normalcy. After I begged, my oncologist finally referred me to a dermatologist at the cancer hospital who prescribed me minoxidil (Rogaine), spironolactone (a heart medication that can help treat female pattern hair loss), a scalp solution, and a military-grade anti-fungal shampoo that turns hair into straw. Neither the anti-fungal shampoo, which is also used to treat athlete's foot and ringworm, nor the topical solution are FDA-approved for hair loss, but have shown promise as adjunctive therapies and are among many tools a dermatologist may use to help a patient. A picture of my scalp at the dermatologist. Courtesy of Maria Yagoda Unfortunately for me, the growth process has remained slow-going. I'm grateful, though, that the dermatologist was willing to help me try — that she took my distress seriously. 'It's just hair,' people with an abundance of it tell me. 'You're rocking the short look!' Imagine if the most traumatizing thing that ever happened to you were visible on your body, and people made upbeat comments about it. When I finally worked up the courage to post a wig-free photo on my Instagram Stories, after over a year of hiding, someone told me I looked like Stockard Channing's Rizzo from Grease — the famously mid-30s actress playing a high schooler whose hair I hate. The patchy science of hair regrowth This is all to say, I'm not surprised that people go on hair plug vacations to Turkey. ('First stop is always Istanbul!' as they say). Unfortunately, there are few solutions for hair regrowth that are guaranteed to be effective. 'My advice is just to look for treatments that are backed by science and clinical data,' Berry says. When people ask Lindy Segal, a beauty writer and author of the Gatekeeping newsletter, what hair growth products are 'worth it,' Segal's answer is always the same: minoxidil, also known as Rogaine. 'It's still the only FDA-approved ingredient for hair growth in those assigned female at birth,' Segal wrote in an email. Finasteride (Propecia) is the other FDA-approved medication to treat hair loss and pattern baldness, but only for men. 'There's some research that red light therapy could boost hair growth, but a $45 bottle of Rogaine is a safer financial bet than a $500 device,' Segal says. 'Girl math!' And the girl math can add up: There are myriad supplements and hair products boasting ingredients like biotin, collagen, and zinc on the market, and they're not all bogus. Oral biotin, for example, is quite safe to ingest and studies show it could help prevent hair loss — though there's not enough research to show that it encourages growth. When I first saw my dermatologist, she first had me do a ton of bloodwork, to try to identify any other root causes of both hair loss and slow regrowth (aside from, you know, 12 infusions of the most toxic substances on Earth.) I was very low in zinc and vitamin B6, both of which are important for hair growth, so she prescribed me supplements for those, along with all the other pills and potions we tried. 'I think what's really important in the whole conversation of hair loss is a root cause approach,' Berry says. 'Figuring out, is the hair loss hormonal? Is there a nutritional component? Stress-induced? Getting a comprehensive evaluation by a dermatologist can really help with avoiding wasted time, money, or even hope on the wrong path.' Frustratingly, hair loss is also something that some doctors outside dermatology are quick to dismiss, regarding it as a problem of vanity. After giving birth to her 2-year-old son, my friend Alicia, a 35-year-old in North Carolina, watched in dismay as much of her hair came out (Vox is only using Alicia's first name so she can freely discuss a sensitive medical issue). When she brought the shedding up to her primary care physician, the doctor said, 'Oh, it looks fine to me!' and failed to refer her to a dermatologist. That's the big problem in the wild world of hair regrowth: Most stuff can't hurt. But most probably can't help. 'It was just a constant self-esteem bummer,' Alicia told me via text message. 'I just felt like no matter how I tied it back or what I did, I couldn't get it to look good. And there's no makeup or anything you can do for your hair.' The regrowth process was long, demoralizing, and expensive. 'I gave a lot of my money to Vegamour,' Alicia says. She thinks the Insta-friendly hair serum that contains turmeric, caffeine, and biotin helped, to some extent. Other well-advertised solutions that she bought seemed less effective for her hair, including growth supplements that contained biotin and acerola extract — a Brazilian fruit containing vitamin C that is supposed to help boost collagen production. That's the big problem in the wild world of hair regrowth: Most stuff can't hurt. But most probably can't help. One website selling Acelora as a hair supplement cites a 1954 study on scurvy, the vitamin C deficiency that can cause hair loss. I'm assuming, today, most people's hair loss is no longer scurvy-induced. An uptick in hair noise Like mine, Alicia's algorithm is plastered with hair growth ads boasting dubious claims. Indeed, it seems we are living in a time of unprecedented claims about hair. 'There's a lot of noise out there and people market in ways that are really psychologically triggering,' Berry says. Segal has also observed a distinct uptick in the noise. 'I've definitely noticed more products, brands, and general coverage targeted to hair growth for women in the last few years,' she says. She suspects some of it is related to the pandemic. Indeed, studies have indicated that roughly 20 percent of people who had Covid-19 later developed temporary hair shedding, usually starting a few months after recovering. It's best to be wary of any product that claims to regrow your hair 'instantly' or 'quickly.' Not to mention viral over-the-counter products can't help you with potential side effects: Nutrofol, for example, can perpetuate liver injury. I'll admit that, out of desperation, I've tried well-marketed hair regrowth products that aren't what you might call 'vetted.' Herbal oils, turmeric scalp elixirs, collagen powders, 'density' shampoos and conditioners, serums. I've lived in constant fear of more hair falling out, so I carefully ration hair brushing and washing, terrified to detach any more strands than inevitable. My first post-chemo blowout. Courtesy of Maria Yagoda A year and a half after finishing treatment, I worked up the courage to get my first blowout, which would involve brushing, washing, scrubbing, and hair blowing. The stylist showed me her comb and her hands after massaging my head. 'See? Only a couple hairs came out, which is normal,' she said. I'd expected a wig's worth. The blowout looked pretty, if thin. The varying lengths, caused by uneven regrowth, looked like cool, choppy layers. Patrice Grell Yursik, creator of the hair and beauty blog Afrobella, was diagnosed with multiple myeloma in January 2024. After bone marrow biopsies and weeks of hospitalization, she had a stem cell transplant, followed by chemotherapy, and she lost all her hair. Yursik is also in the regrowth phase. I asked her if she'd tried anything to encourage the process. 'My oncologist is very wary of the wellness industry and doesn't recommend any additional supplements or hair growth medicines for me at this time,' she wrote in a message, adding that she couldn't cold cap because her type of cancer is located in the bone marrow, 'so we didn't want to basically refrigerate my skull while I was trying to heal.' 'I've tried a few topical products, specifically scalp oils intended to stimulate growth,' she says. 'My hair is growing back super thick and coily at the roots, and it is absolutely fascinating. For someone who made so much of her name and identity around hair, it has been an unexpected education in learning to love myself at every stage of my new journey.'
New York Times
21-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Japanese Breakfast's Shimmering Sadness, and 8 More New Songs
Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week's most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes) and at Apple Music here, and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs. Plucked string tones from all directions create a magical, shimmering cascade around Michelle Zauner's voice in 'Here Is Someone' from the new album by Japanese Breakfast, 'For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women).' The lyrics hint at tensions and anxieties, but the track radiates anticipation: 'Life is sad, but here is someone,' Zauner concludes. JON PARELES Marianne Faithfull, who died in January at 78, kept recording almost to the end. She brought every bit of her scratchy, ravaged, tenacious voice to 'Burning Moonlight,' a song she co-wrote that holds one of her last manifestoes: 'Burning moonlight to survive / Walking in fire is my life.' Acoustic guitars and tambourine connect the music to the 1960s, when she got her start; her singing holds all the decades of experience that followed. PARELES 'Letter From an Unknown Girlfriend' is from the Waterboys album due April 4, 'Life, Death and Dennis Hopper,' and was written by Mike Scott. But it is sung and played by Fiona Apple, alone at the piano, delivering a remembrance of an abusive boyfriend: 'I used to say no man would ever strike me,' it begins, 'And no man ever did 'til I met you.' She admits to the charm of the 'satyr running wild in you,' but her voice rises to a bitter, primal rasp as she recalls the worst. It's a stark, harrowing performance. PARELES Diffidence turns into resolve in the course of 'Sanctuary,' a waltzing duet from 'Every Dawn's a Mountain,' the new album by the Belgian songwriter Tamino-Amir Moharam Fouad. In separate verses, Tamino and Mitski sound fragile, contemplating uncertainty and loss; 'I reside in the ruins of the sanctuary,' Mitski sings. But when they connect — asking 'Is it late where you are?' — and harmonize, an orchestra rises behind them to offer hope. PARELES 'I'm a little crazy, but the world's insane,' the disturbed narrator of Morgan Wallen's new single contends. His character is a drug dealer who keeps a loaded gun nearby. He's sustaining himself 'on antidepressants and lukewarm beers' and yelling at his TV, 'but the news don't change.' Over steadfast acoustic guitar picking and lightly brushed drums, Wallen sings with chilling, sociopathic calm. PARELES The rhythm section from the African rock band Mdou Moctar — Ahmoudou Madassane, Mikey Coltun and Souleymane Ibrahim — has been recording on its own as Takaat, which means 'noise' in Tuareg; an EP is due in April. Takaat's first single, 'Amidinin' ('Friend'), keeps the modal riffing and six-beat propulsion of Mdou Moctar, but cranks up the guitar distortion, slathers on echo and unleashes the drums to sound even more ferocious. PARELES The Toronto-based vocalist and producer Debby Friday won the Polaris Music Prize for her sharp 2023 debut album, 'Good Luck.' She returns with the euphoric electro-pop single '1/17,' a dance-floor confessional that shows off yet another side of her multifaceted talent. 'I swear you're a sign,' Friday sings in an airy atmosphere punctured by percolating synths. The track builds layer atop gauzy layer until it explodes in a burst of club-ready catharsis. LINDSAY ZOLADZ The legacy of 1970s Stevie Wonder suffuses 'Crash,' with cushy chromatic chord changes and a loping synthesizer bass line supplied by the keyboard master (and co-producer) Greg Phillinganes. Saba raps a no-pressure come-on: 'Together we can make time go fast / And if it's late, I hope you might just crash.' And Kelly Rowland, joining in on choruses, sounds perfectly amenable. PARELES Jack Harlow and Doja Cat exchange flirty verses on 'Just Us,' a fast-paced track that forgoes catchy pop choruses and focuses instead on dexterous flows and winking wordplay. 'I know it sounds like Zack and Cody, this life's sweet,' Harlow raps, showing his age with a reference to a mid-2000s Disney Channel show. Corny? Maybe, but Doja's into it: 'You a softy, marshmallows and black coffee,' she counters affectionately. The video is full of celebrity cameos that prove how many people will pick up the phone when Harlow calls: Matt Damon, PinkPantheress, John Mayer and Nicholas Braun. Zack and Cody, alas, are nowhere to be found. ZOLADZ The long-running indie-rock band Deerhoof can be coy or oblique, but it's neither in 'Immigrant Songs,' a response to America's sudden, brutal xenophobia. Satomi Matsuzaki gives voice to unrecognized immigrant labor — drivers, cooks, entertainers — over guitars and drums that lilt and intertwine behind her. But for the second half of this seven-minute track, the instruments just scream. There's no more arguing or persuasion left. PARELES
