Ann-Derrick Gaillot

On her latest album, Acrylic, the masked rapper celebrates the people and places that give her strength.
Leikeli47 may be known as one of hip-hop’s most secretive artists, but when she speaks it’s almost as if she's lifting her trademark mask. When she tells me over the phone, “I’m doing good, how bout yourself?” her accent takes me straight to Brooklyn's Bed-Stuy neighborhood. Though she’s been reticent to share personal details with the world, Leikeli47 sheds clues of her identity every tim...

Atlanta’s most energetic rapper is on fire.
The FADER's longstanding GEN F series profiles emerging artists to know now.
If LightSkinKeisha ever gets tired or quiet, it’s not something she’s shared with the world. She has shared everything else: her guiding life principles, romantic frustrations, her journey with braces and then veneers, the kind of goofy joking around one usually reserves for friends. But never weariness, and she wasn’t about to show it to me either. When I hop on Skype with...

In Paradise Rot, a young university student named Jo has her first queer sexual experience in an apartment slowly filling up with creeping moss and fungi. At its simplest, this debut novel by the Oslo-based musician Jenny Hval is about a libidinal awakening. But the book, drawing elements from pulpy romance novels, the Book of Genesis, and magical realism, is also the origin story of a world born of queer desire. As Jo and her roommate Carral grow closer and closer, their damp apartment becom...

Five years ago, local musician Fabi Reyna started what would become a revolution.
A guitar player since she was 9, she had long been frustrated by the lack of representation of female guitarists and women in the industry. Publications dedicated to the instrument abounded, but their portrayals of women rarely extended beyond the bikini-clad models of Guitar World’s annual Buyers Guide issue. Armed with her expertise with the instrument and the conviction that something needed to change, she cr...

Trauma is a creeping menace, taking root in the body and passed down through family lines. It’s a hard thing to describe without the aid of clinical studies, and an even harder one to visualize on screen. But in the film The Hate U Give, based on the young adult novel of the same name, trauma is almost its own character, a force that envelops each of the people we get to know.
There’s Starr, played by Amandla Stenberg, who while trying to balance her life in her underserved, African-American ...

The struggle to support oneself and its accompanying anguish are nothing new. But there’s something uniquely maddening about the financial anxiety Millennials must wrestle with today.
This story appears in VICE Magazine's Power and Privilege Issue. Click HERE to subscribe.
About a year after I graduated from a private liberal arts college, I found myself making small talk with my dentist as he scraped the gunk off the sides of my teeth. Thousands of dollars in debt but richer one bachelor’s d...

The Portland songwriter’s debut album, Mother of My Children, is a robust soundtrack to queer heartbreak.
When I meet Black Belt Eagle Scout at a cafe in Southeast Portland, she warns me that she hasn’t had her first cup of coffee yet. She speaks softly, but breaks into a laugh easily and often. Sometimes I can barely hear her over the indie rock humming from the cafe speakers, and other times, like when she is talking about social injustice or the joy her friends bring her, she inches up to ...

Mr. Personality, which aired on Fox for a scant five weeks in 2003, was a show about a single woman choosing between 20 men to find the love of her life. That was the standard part, accompanied by two stranger details: All the men had to wear masks (okay, kinky, but not so weird), and it was hosted by a post-Clinton scandal Monica Lewinsky (excuse me, what?).

Produced during the height of what some described as reality televsion’s “golden era,” Mr. Personality’s premise was simple, if gimmick...

Personalized recommendations, sponsored playlists, and the dominance of streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music have changed the experience of music discovery for all of us. Whereas magazines, zines, radio, and something called MTV once offered diverse avenues of exploration for music fans, followed by the heyday of music blogs and music piracy websites like Napster, the algorithm now looms over everyone. There is considerable reason to worry about what that means for up-and-coming a...

The television canon is based on what we bothered to preserve

In 1977, a radical show called All That Glitters aired on American television. Following a set of recurring characters working at a corporation called Globatron, the show poked fun at then-contemporary soap operas. The comedy imagined a world where women and men swapped positions in society — the women went to work and earned money; the men were sexually harassed, and expected to take charge of household duties and parenting. One o...

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, 44.7 million adults in the U.S. currently live with mental illness, 19.2 million of whom are receiving treatment in the form of counseling and prescription medication. Still, in casual conversation, the mentally ill are often derided. Phrases like “what are you, off your meds?” and “stop acting crazy” serve as reminders that mentally ill people are considered lesser beings. Such attitudes manifest in wider harms. About one in every five pe...