By Sam Anderson / Illustration by Río Delcan La Rocca and Pablo Delcan We all know, deep in the marrow of our animated American bones, what a Disney megahit sounds like. It is slow and rising and inspirational — a bubble designed to lift us up, octave by octave, to a better place. It’s all about altitude: High notes and high emotions are belted out at high volume, often by characters who rise, literally, high above their surroundings. Elsa the ice princess sings “Let It Go” while climbing to the tippy-top of the tallest peak in a vast winter landscape. Aladdin and Princess Jasmine harmonize “A Whole New World” at cruising altitude, on a magic carpet, whipping past minarets. Disney’s signature ballads tend to be anthems of individual elevation — heroes transcending society. As Elsa puts it, “No right, no wrong, no rules for me — I’m free!”
Well, not the newest Disney megahit. “We Don’t Talk About Bruno, ” the breakout song from the animated film “Encanto, ” is the company’s biggest musical success since the old juggernauts of the 1990s. And yet “Bruno” sounds nothing like “A Whole New World” or “Can You Feel the Love Tonight?” or “Colors of the Wind.” It is not an uplifting aria or a yearning lament. “Bruno” is tense and busy — a crowded, convulsing, percussive, down-in-the-weeds medley sung, in shifts, by society itself. Instead of elevating us above the crowd, “Bruno” drops us right down into the anxious fray. It is the opposite of escapism. So why is it such a hit? Read More
“Encanto” tells the story of the enchanted Madrigals, an ordinary human family blessed with magical powers. They live in utopian harmony, employing their gifts (superhearing, superstrength, etc.) to help nearby villagers — until their perfect world starts to crack. (Because it’s Disney, literal cracks rip across the house and landscape.) In the resulting chaos, everyone begins to fixate on a forbidden subject: Bruno, the family outcast. Bruno’s power was prophecy. He was a truth-teller, but people didn’t want to hear the truth. So he disappeared. For years he has been only an absence, a taboo, a raw nerve at the center of their world.
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Right from its title, “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” is self-contradictory — immediately and obsessively, it does the thing it says it’s not doing. One by one, major and minor characters do talk about Bruno, listing his various prophecies and purported crimes (“he sees your dreams and feasts on your screams”) in a conspiratorial tone. These voices pile up and overlap until the song becomes a huge ensemble showstopper, à la “One Day More” in “Les Misérables.” You’d need a crowd to sing it at karaoke. By the end, everybody is talking simultaneously about what supposedly nobody is talking about.
Lay it out like that, and you can see why “Bruno” is popular in 2022 America. It echoes an anxiety that dominates our society: the fraught rules of public discourse. Who is allowed to talk about what? What can we say in public, in private, in seriousness, in jest? Who gets to decide? These anxieties tend to burst out in a variety of flash points and buzzwords and panics:
. But it all reflects the same obsession. In a nation that prides itself on free speech, we devote approximately 90 percent of our speech to adjudicating the rules of our speech. We talk ceaselessly about our talking.
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In the 1990s, the classic Disney fantasy of individual escapism might still, just barely, have made sense. But here in our agitated new century, it’s hard to imagine a single voice rising above the fray. Climb to the peak of a mountain, singing at the top of your lungs, and you’ll most likely find a crowd already there, arguing. We can, at most, hope to be one small voice in the chorus, doing our best not to be drowned out, discussing the discussion of the discussion. And “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” is our great, noisy, troubled anthem.
I am a fan, and I want all the smoke. I want all fight and no flight. Pure delirium. I crave even the weariness that comes with bracing for attack, my armor as heavy as the volume is high. That’s how I got into rap, when it was new: as an early-’80s middle schooler arguing against Led Zeppelin’s decade-old “Stairway to Heaven” for class song. Back then, Cheryl Lynn, Chuck Brown, and Rufus and Chaka churned alongside Donna Summer and Funkadelic, and even the Knack’s “My Sharona” sounded Black — but it was Sugarhill Gang’s 1979 “Rapper’s Delight” that put the playground on tilt. I mean, somebody Black named Big Bank Hank was calling himself a “grandmaster”! My Los Angeles school was multiracial because of mandatory busing, and our student body could (on its best days) feel in line with Sugarhill’s Wonder Mike rapping, “I’d like to say Hello/To the Black and the white/The red and the brown/The purple and yellow.” My logic: Going with Zepp’s grandiosity meant clinging to a reality that no longer existed. We were, suddenly, a “generation, ” with our own things. We could say: This is who we are. This is why we matter. Rap said that. Read More
I still want to fight you. That’s why, these days, it’s straight to Moneybagg Yo for me. He’s from the part of South Memphis that my Memphis friend says is home to strip malls with no stores, big industrial parks and people trying mightily to make a life. Moneybagg’s Walker Homes neighborhood is a place you probably have no business being if you don’t have people over there. So you see why a person with the harmonious name DeMario DeWayne White Jr. might start off his persona-building by calling himself Moneybagg, and end up making a little ditty called “Time Today.”
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This is a song that will straighten your spine. It will give you the patience to take a breath and blink slowly and move without fear through any space, from back alleys to sports bars with hockey on all 11 screens. “Time Today” is the Top 40 lead single from Moneybagg’s “A Gangsta’s Pain, ” which went to No. 1 on the Billboard 200 album chart. There’s also a version of it that went meme-platinum, last year, as an audio clip on TikTok, lip-synced by users aching to join the Great Resignation:
The production, from Real Red (Jorres Nelson) and YC (Christopher Pearson), is an intoxicating grind. In the original song, two minutes of Moneybagg’s merciless monotone, he says that he can get gangsta (clocking out) or keep it cordial (professional), but he still doesn’t like anybody. Some received the song as a message to Moneybagg’s “haters.” Perhaps. But lines like “The hate be so real, the love be fake/Be bumpin’ they gums and bumpin’ my tape” — those lyrics do double duty as a chin-jut at day-trippers who love Black culture and loathe Black people.
Because rap, despite having been around for more than 40 years, is still full of songs in which rappers introduce themselves as if the genre were still new. One of the most harrowing comes from YoungBoy Never Broke Again. He’s a Baton Rouge rapper, born Kentrell Gaulden. His rap name is a news release, and a promise on which, so far, he is making good. YoungBoy’s notorious for landing a No. 1 album while in jail awaiting trial on federal gun charges. Take his 2018 song “I Am Who They Say I Am, ” featuring Kevin Gates and Quando Rondo. Each of his words melts into the next, so you might hear this differently — but in my mind, YoungBoy raps, “I’m are who you say I am, ” affirming a state of being both singular and plural.
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Kentrell is a kid of 22 who dropped out of school in the ninth grade. He told The Fader in 2017 that the grandmother who raised him for a time died of heart disease. In a 2018 conversation with the media personality DJ Akademiks, Gaulden said, “I ain’t never had no daddy, and I ain’t never had no mama — and my mama living!” In “I Am, ” he raps that he’s a thug — “from the trenches/Never had a heart/Drug dealer, contract killer.” Raps that “I look for my mama when I try to look inside my woman.” Raps that he “upgraded from nobody/To the one who the man.” I rap along to the awful audacity of YoungBoy, with his ankle monitor and probation violation, because I need to know what strikes chords in the soul of my 17-year-old nephew, with his devoted parents and 4.33 G.P.A.
I put on BIA’s 2021 hit “Whole Lotta Money” just to hear her say, “I put on my jewelry/Just to go to the bodega.” It echoes Drake’s “I wear every single chain/Even when I’m in the house” from his six-times-platinum “Started From the Bottom” (2013). And that, in turn, recalls the thick bike chain the rapper Treach, from Naughty by Nature, often wore around
This is a song that will straighten your spine. It will give you the patience to take a breath and blink slowly and move without fear through any space, from back alleys to sports bars with hockey on all 11 screens. “Time Today” is the Top 40 lead single from Moneybagg’s “A Gangsta’s Pain, ” which went to No. 1 on the Billboard 200 album chart. There’s also a version of it that went meme-platinum, last year, as an audio clip on TikTok, lip-synced by users aching to join the Great Resignation:
The production, from Real Red (Jorres Nelson) and YC (Christopher Pearson), is an intoxicating grind. In the original song, two minutes of Moneybagg’s merciless monotone, he says that he can get gangsta (clocking out) or keep it cordial (professional), but he still doesn’t like anybody. Some received the song as a message to Moneybagg’s “haters.” Perhaps. But lines like “The hate be so real, the love be fake/Be bumpin’ they gums and bumpin’ my tape” — those lyrics do double duty as a chin-jut at day-trippers who love Black culture and loathe Black people.
Because rap, despite having been around for more than 40 years, is still full of songs in which rappers introduce themselves as if the genre were still new. One of the most harrowing comes from YoungBoy Never Broke Again. He’s a Baton Rouge rapper, born Kentrell Gaulden. His rap name is a news release, and a promise on which, so far, he is making good. YoungBoy’s notorious for landing a No. 1 album while in jail awaiting trial on federal gun charges. Take his 2018 song “I Am Who They Say I Am, ” featuring Kevin Gates and Quando Rondo. Each of his words melts into the next, so you might hear this differently — but in my mind, YoungBoy raps, “I’m are who you say I am, ” affirming a state of being both singular and plural.
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Kentrell is a kid of 22 who dropped out of school in the ninth grade. He told The Fader in 2017 that the grandmother who raised him for a time died of heart disease. In a 2018 conversation with the media personality DJ Akademiks, Gaulden said, “I ain’t never had no daddy, and I ain’t never had no mama — and my mama living!” In “I Am, ” he raps that he’s a thug — “from the trenches/Never had a heart/Drug dealer, contract killer.” Raps that “I look for my mama when I try to look inside my woman.” Raps that he “upgraded from nobody/To the one who the man.” I rap along to the awful audacity of YoungBoy, with his ankle monitor and probation violation, because I need to know what strikes chords in the soul of my 17-year-old nephew, with his devoted parents and 4.33 G.P.A.
I put on BIA’s 2021 hit “Whole Lotta Money” just to hear her say, “I put on my jewelry/Just to go to the bodega.” It echoes Drake’s “I wear every single chain/Even when I’m in the house” from his six-times-platinum “Started From the Bottom” (2013). And that, in turn, recalls the thick bike chain the rapper Treach, from Naughty by Nature, often wore around
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