Ann-Derrick Gaillot

There are no illusions as to what YouTube users are looking for when they click on titles that hold the promise of catastrophe. It’s why a video called “Pencil Stuck in My Eye Prank” has nearly 13 million views, why some of the platform’s most popular vloggers have taken baths in liquids like hot sauce, and why a video of a woman stomping grapes and then falling and injuring herself was an early viral hit on the video-sharing platform.
In recent weeks, a legion of YouTubers big and small have...

On March 20, 1989, the Oprah Winfrey–produced miniseries The Women of Brewster Place gave American television its first black lesbian couple. Already introduced the night before to the stories of Mattie Michael (Winfrey), Etta Mae (Jackée Harry), Ciel (Lynn Whitfield), and Kiswana (Robin Givens) — four black women who end up at a tenement on dead-end Brewster Place as a last resort — about 49 million people tuned in to see the end of their saga. Moments into that two-hour episode, Mattie, Ett...

Close to midway through poet and singer-songwriter Jamila Woods’s new album, Legacy! Legacy!, comes a crunchy rock song named for a fellow Chicagoan of note, the blues legend Muddy Waters. On “Muddy,” over dragging, distorted electric-guitar riffs emulating the grittiness of Waters’s signature slide-guitar sound, Woods reminisces on his ability to cause a ruckus and spawn imitators. In that evocation, she offers an antidote to the threat of black alienation. “They say now / More than ever / I...

On Florist’s third studio album, the band’s creative force, Emily Sprague, begins with an exercise in self-soothing. “Emily, just know that you’re not as alone as you feel in the dark,” she sings, her voice echoing and fraying amid a guitar line that shifts from mournful to optimistic. It’s rare for musicians to address themselves by name in their songs, so the line is jolting in its directness. Though Sprague is alone, singing a song to herself, her highly personal message is rooted in an ea...

In December 2014, D’Angelo released his third studio album, Black Messiah. It was a timeless reflection on love and survival within the maelstrom of American racism that nevertheless inspired one mostly prosaic, and slightly demanding, question from critics and fans: What took him so long?
Journalist Tavis Smiley basically asked D’Angelo as much in a rare interview nine months later. “I’m always writing and learning. It’s about growth,” the reclusive legend said of what he did in the 14 years...

Recording a perfect cassette mixtape from the radio requires careful tuning, commercial dodging, and the technical dexterity of leaping to your radio’s speaker to catch a beloved song midair. The playback of this now dated practice can be disarming by today’s standards, each song carrying the specific atmosphere of the room it was recorded in, songs cut off or captured in media res, wrenched from their contexts, an incohesive whole. On his new Blood Orange release, Angel’s Pulse, British sing...

The New York City psych-rock quartet’s debut full-length beckons the listener with dreamy keyboards, twinkling guitar, and a recognizable buzz of stoic anxiety.
Obituaries and biographies often give the illusion that lives unfold along ever-advancing, if wandering, timelines. In fact, those forward trajectories are made up of millions of tiny spirals—routines followed, patterns performed, habits fallen into. Most days are slightly deviating copies of one another, with periodic breaths of nove...

When ambient singer and composer Ana Roxanne originally recorded and released the unusually named six-song collection ~~~ in 2015, she did it alone, without any formal announcement or fanfare, keeping the deeply personal work largely to herself for fear of the reaction. Soon after, she moved away from her hometown of Oakland to Los Angeles. A friend passed her album along to producer Matthewdavid, who was looking for artists to perform at a daytime ambient series in a park. He reached out and...

When chef Megon Dee-Cave moved to Portland, Oregon, with her family in 2016, she did it with the goal of learning more about cannabis. Five years earlier, when she owned her own bakery in Baltimore, customers began inquiring about edibles, which led her to experiment with combining cannabis and food for the first time. Once in Portland, she immersed herself in the recreational industry, only to find she was one of a small number of black people involved. “A lot of times I was the only fem...

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 ...