Ann-Derrick Gaillot

Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a folk classic that came to the world stage with a perspective crystallized in society’s margins.
A spotlight comes up on Tracy Chapman as she moves into the a capella song “Behind the Wall.” She sings from the point of view of a neighbor hearing a woman screaming in the apartment next door. Her trembling contralto soars and then, just as quickl...

Despite the alarming disparities in VC funding being well publicized, pitch rooms are still unwelcoming and inaccessible to black and brown women.
For several years now it’s been public knowledge that there’s glaring inequality in the world of venture capital. On the one side are firms made up overwhelmingly of white men and on the other, the companies they invest in, which studies show are overwhelmingly founded by white men. Women of color are waging an uphill battle to address what’s broke...

These days, it's never too early to recount the recent past. So it's fitting, then, that just 20 months after the massive Fyre Festival debacle, we're treated to not one, but two documentaries premiering on competing streaming services in the same week. That Hulu surprise dropped its film, Fyre Fraud, only days before Netflix's anticipated FYRE was set to premiere shows what a hot media commodity this already well-known story was, and still is. Both movies, for all that they cover, are imperf...

The tenets of sisterhood are timeless and sacred, as nourishing and binding as they are impossible to pin down. Sisterhood is governed by love, committed to self-preservation, and holds up friendship and mutual support above all other communal wants and goals. On its debut full-length album Sistahs, punk band Big Joanie present sisterhood as a microcosm of black feminist liberation. Pairing DIY aesthetics—worn-in cassette-tape hiss and other audio imperfections—with playful instrumental flour...

I’ve never before started a television show thinking, “I hope this works.” But that’s exactly the mindset that I had when I began watching the six-part Lifetime docuseries Surviving R. Kelly. It’s a desperate and naive feeling to put even small hopes of social change on a commercial mass-media product, but I couldn’t help searching for the shot, the piece of tearful testimony, the miserable detail that would finally convince millions of Americans to care about black women ...

Our criminal justice system doesn’t always give second chances. But it should, says Ashley Nellis, of The Sentencing Project.
Do you believe that everyone has the potential to change? That everyone deserves a second chance? That it’s never too late to become a better person?
If so, your operating ethos is opposite to that of the U.S. justice system, where over 200,000 incarcerated people are serving life sentences.
More than 17,000 are doing so for nonviolent crimes, and about 12,000 are doin...

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 ...