Chester Watson
ex-Atlanta Rapper Denies that Fish Climb Trees
Struggles to Remember Dreams
He Finds Peace in the Countryside
Hip-hop was born in urban parks and apartment projects, but there’s also a pastoral tradition in rap that long predates Kanye West’s flight to Wyoming. Earl Sweatshirt’s mother shipped him off to reform school on a remote Pacific island at a pivotal early point in the Odd Future boy genius’s career. Upon his return, Earl became one of the most influential lyricists in rap history. One of his young fans was a teenage skater and ballet dancer named Chester Watson, who’s now a lanky 26-year-old responsible for a decade’s-worth of his own brain-shifting hip-hop.
The title of Watson’s latest album, Fish Don’t Climb Trees, combines two images from the rural town an hour and half outside of Atlanta where the underground rap star spends much of his time these days. The record’s name refers to “being underestimated or counted out,” he told me, with tantalizingly little elaboration. Maybe fish can climb …
The Resurrection of Judee Sill
Skinny Girl In Glasses announces ‘This Song or Suicide’
Makes lasting music for the ages
Overdoses on heroin and cocaine
Los Angeles, 1971. God has decided to speak through Judee Sill, a skinny girl with round glasses and a rap sheet. Between holding up gas stations and liquor stores, dealing and scoring junk, turning tricks, forging checks, and sleeping in a ’55 Cadillac (in shifts with four others), her training as the reform school organist paid off. This would be the year of her debut on Asylum Records, an asylum indeed.
She hailed from Studio City, California and moved around. Her stepfather, whom she called "mean, dumb, narrow-minded" was an Oscar-winning animator for Tom and Jerry. Her hard-to-classify accent — SoCal with a twang — evoked the Bakersfield sound and the Cane Ridge Revival. Listen to any of her songs, and it’s clear she did not quite adapt to Earth. Her life could have been material for a film by PT Anderson or the Coen Brothers, but Judee Sill actually happened. Nearly a decade in the …
On Falconry
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. reveals life-long love affair with birds of prey
Hunts from the sky, partners with predators
Atavistic hobby fuels Dem. Presidential run
Bobby Kennedy Jr. is the first environmental activist with a legitimate shot at winning a major-party nomination for President. He has made preserving and cleaning up the environment his life’s work, rescuing the Hudson River from polluters and turning it into the centerpiece of the country’s healthiest watershed and winning billions of dollars in fines from corporate polluters in hundreds of lawsuits that have served as a powerful counterweight to avarice and greed.
Kennedy’s emergence this summer as a dark-horse challenger to Biden only surprised people who make a habit of not paying attention. To them, Kennedy was a marginal weirdo and probably a nut, an aging Prince Hal who had disqualified himself from serious politics by tilting at too many windmills to count. Most recently, Kennedy had made a name for himself as an “anti-vaxxer,” a designation that signifies a worrying inclination to question large …
