We’ve Got A File On You features interviews in which artists share the stories behind the extracurricular activities that dot their careers: acting gigs, guest appearances, random internet ephemera, etc.

We’ve Got A File On You features interviews in which artists share the stories behind the extracurricular activities that dot their careers: acting gigs, guest appearances, random internet ephemera, etc.

One of my favorite books as a kid was a novel called The Ordinary Princess by M.M. Kaye. It was sort of a spin on Sleeping Beauty, only instead of a royal baby being cursed with an eventual long nap, The Ordinary Princess was about a princess who, unlike her older, blonde, more beautiful siblings, receives the “gift” of being “ordinary.” That means “mousy” brown hair, freckles, and a disinterest in silky princess dresses. She’s pretty much the family embarrassment, so eventually the princess moves out of her castle, gets a job as a maid in another castle, meets a prince who’s also pretending not to be a royalty, and they fall in love and get married, etc. (I swear I’m going somewhere with this, so stay with me.)

You can only cling to your big wheel for so long before adult life comes for you. For proof, look no further than the massively successful pop-rock duo Twenty One Pilots.

Logic came out of retirement last month to team up with the legendary hip-hop producer Madlib in a new project they’re calling MadGic. The duo’s debut single, “Mars Only pt. 3,” seemed to suggest that they had recorded an entire album together in lockdown. And now, they’ve shared another new track called “Raddest Dad,” which again references an album: “Not a single hook on the album/ I came back to spit now,” Logic raps.

Logic’s retirement didn’t last long. After supposedly getting out of the game last year, the Maryland rapper and Pokémon card collector returned earlier this month with the new single “Tired In Malibu.” And now he’s teamed up with the great hip-hop producer Madlib to form a new duo called MadGic. “Logic and Madlib is MadGic, your catalogue tragic/ Fuck a underground, fuck a pop sound/ Made this whole album in a lockdown, hip hop is our town,” Logic raps on their new track “Mars Only pt. 3”; listen below.

Taylor Swift did it. She actually went through with it. For nearly two years now — ever since her former record label Big Machine sold its catalog, including the master recordings for her first six albums, to music industry mogul Scooter Braun — she’s been talking about re-recording those albums as a fuck-you and an assertion of control. If she couldn’t own the rights to the recordings that made her one of the most successful musical artists of all time, at least she could undercut their value and present her loyal fan base with a way to enjoy that music without benefitting her nemeses. With last Friday’s release of Fearless (Taylor’s Version), that plan is officially underway.

Logic supposedly retired from the rap game after releasing his new album No Pressure, which means he has more time to focus on his real passion:
Pokémon cards. And the former rapper just spent some of that time -- and a lot of money -- to purchase an extremely rare Pokémon card.

Everything about Blackpink is huge and emphatic and in your face. The crushing titanium beats, the severe top-of-the-lungs melodies and swaggering rap bars, the ostentatious eye-catching outfits, the bombastically busy and colorful music videos, the radical empowerment messaging, even the all-caps album titles: This is K-pop -- a genre not known for its subtlety -- taken to its wildest, most maximalist extremes. Blackpink seem to be having fun with it too, flaunting and taunting their way across each bedazzled-spaceship video set. When the girl group dropped their KILL THIS LOVE EP ahead of a Coachella performance last year, I called it a throwback to a sleek and garish moment when "popular music as a whole was larger, and louder, than life" -- namely that early '10s era ruled by over-the-top sounds of Kesha and Lex Luger and Skrillex and Nicki Minaj and peak-opulence Kanye West. It was clear that they were going to be big in the fame-and-fortune sense and were already doing it big in just about every other capacity.

Dominic Fike was born at the end of 1995, and so was his musical aesthetic. Fike, a singer, guitarist, and rapper from Naples, Florida, looks like a hypermodern rap-adjacent pop star -- he has an Apple logo tattooed on his face where many people put a teardrop, rocks a loosely androgynous style highlighted by a bleach blond buzz cut, and is baby-faced enough that he could still pass for a teenager in a pinch -- yet he specializes in a blend of genres that collectively flash me back to Bill Clinton's second presidential term.

Jhené Aiko is a living legend. You wouldn't necessarily know it because Aiko has always been a moody and understated presence -- someone who lays back in the cut letting you come to her rather than making herself inescapable. She's never had a #1 album or a top 10 single, and no militant stan army has mobilized in her name to beat back online dissent. Yet Aiko, 32, has spent the past decade quietly building up a sterling catalog with a subtly massive influence. She's one of her generation's defining R&B singers and maybe the single most underrated star in music today.

What does Dixie mean, exactly? For nearly two centuries, the term has been broadly applied to the American South, specifically the states that seceded from the Union at the dawn of the Civil War. But depending on who you ask, you might get many different answers about Dixie's boundaries and its essential character. "Sociologically, climactically, historically, politically, topographically, and racially, Dixie is a quilt," wrote Washington Post editor Joel Garreau in his 1981 book The Nine Nations Of North America. "Rigid analysis of what constitutes Dixie can lead one to believe that it doesn't exist, and never did." Yet Garreau did not draw that conclusion. He recognized Dixie as less a place than a concept. "Like New England, Dixie is an idea that has been around a long time," Garreau wrote, "and people have had a lot of time to savor it, curse it, love it, and leave it."

Logic has announced that he's retiring, but not before putting out one final album. Next week, he'll release No Pressure, which was executive produced with No I.D., who also exec produced his 2014 debut studio album Under Pressure. "It’s been a great decade," Logic wrote in a tweet today announcing the album. "Now it's time to be a great father." (His wife gave birth to a child a few months back, shortly after Logic deleted all of his social media accounts.)

Christian rap is having a mini-moment.

About two months ago, Logic and Eminem, perhaps our two most famous splenetic-flow rappity-rappers, came together on the jackhammer syllable-onslaught collab "Homicide." The song sampled a viral 2018 video: The comedian Chris D'Elia's legit hilarious "you're using way too many napkins" Eminem impression. Eminem quoted a few lines from that impression in his verse, too. And today, Logic releases his "Homicide" video, which turns D'Elia's Eminem impression into something extremely literal.

The rush that comes with a perfect pop song is elusive but unmistakable. "Pop music" can mean many things, but there's a certain kind of monster jam that scans as POP MUSIC in neon lights, the kind that sends euphoria coursing through your nervous system and launches your body onto the dance floor. Big, bright hooks beam out over massive synthetic beats. The textures, the dynamics, and the composition are all impeccably designed for maximum satisfaction. To hear such a song executed at its best is to witness art and science colliding at impossibly high levels. It's breathtaking.

Sometimes you enter into a pop cultural universe late and have to work backwards to fill in the gaps. Maybe you've decided to binge several seasons of a popular TV show to participate in the discourse, or you've fallen headfirst into a musical subgenre and now have a whole canon to educate yourself on. Maybe you drifted away from a world you once knew well and now feel the sudden impulse to catch up. Or maybe you even developed an interest in something that actually matters, like environmental science or metaphysics, and end up maxing out your library card and diving down some deep YouTube holes. Whatever the subject, it was once peripheral to your own life, and suddenly it's not anymore.

With all due respect to her formative influences and one-time contemporaries Destiny's Child, Ciara is a survivor.

Logic may want to rethink his rap name. The superstar Maryland MC just began rolling out his new album Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind with the Eminem collab "Homicide." This much seems logical. What does not compute is the public stance Logic just took against sample clearance.

Today, Logic and Eminem, our two leading vein-bulging rappity-rappers, have come out with their a new collaboration. They've been teasing the new track "Homicide" for a while, and the final product sounds about what you'd expect: A whole lot of blurry Micro Machines ratatat rapping over a beat that sounds like a spooky scene from a Nickelodeon cartoon. Logic spends about one bar rapping in Auto-Tune to make fun of Auto-Tune rappers. Eminem promises to hit us with so many foul lines that we'll think he's a free throw. You already know the drill.

The name "youngblood" has a rich history in pop music. First there were the Youngbloods, the critically acclaimed folk-rockers best known for their 1967 hit "Get Together." Decades later along came the YoungBloodZ, the Atlanta rap duo best known for their 2003 smash "Damn!" alongside Lil Jon. Many others emerged along the way including Sydney Youngblood, Mary Youngblood, Gene Youngblood, Grant Youngblood, Conner Youngblood, Lonnie Youngblood, Alvin Youngblood Hart, Youngblood Supercult, Hal Galper & The Youngbloods, and various bands also adopting some variation of the Youngbloods moniker. Last year Australian pop-rockers 5 Seconds Of Summer scored their first top 10 hit with "Youngblood." And now we can add to that list the guy who sang, "I just wanna die for the hype/ Crucified like Jesus Christ," and immediately followed it with, "Yeah Polly, I just wanna suck on your lolly."

Shortly after the 2017 suicides of Soundgarden's Chris Cornell and Linkin Park's Chester Bennington, the air was thick with talk of clinical depression, artists and writers using their platforms to reassert that this illness is debilitating, serious and real.

Today, Logic's new novel Supermarket topped the New York Times' Paperback Trade Fiction Best Sellers list, making Logic the first rapper to write a NYT #1 best-seller. Supermarket unseated A.J. Finn’s The Woman In The Window, which held the #1 spot for three weeks.

"I have taken out my Invisalign, and this is the album!" Billie Eilish announces at the outset of her debut album. The 17-year-old singer then collapses into hysterical laughter with a male cohort -- presumably her older brother, a fellow musician named Finneas O'Connell who's been her close collaborator ever since she made waves with debut single "Ocean Eyes" three years ago. It's an inauspicious way to be begin a collection of dark, stylish, futuristic pop music, but it also makes perfect sense. Eilish is a new kind of pop star for a generation born beyond Y2K, and her first LP evokes teenage living in all its modern complexities.

Logic wrote a book. Today, the hyper-wordy Maryland rapper publishes Supermarket, his debut novel. It's apparently a psychological thriller about a guy named Flynn who finds himself a job at a supermarket. And today, Logic has also surprise-released a new LP that's also called Supermarket. He says it's the soundtrack to his book. And that soundtrack includes a couple of tracks produced by Mac DeMarco. Given that Logic has a Mac DeMarco tattoo, I guess this makes as much sense as anything else.

Pop is dead; meet the new pop.

Logic is a big Mac DeMarco fan. The nerdy motivational rapper is such a big Mac DeMarco fan, in fact, that he had Salad Days, the title of Mac DeMarco's 2014 album, tattooed onto his body. And soon, Logic and Mac DeMarco are going to be working together.

In 2015, Twenty One Pilots were the biggest band you've never heard of. By the end of the following year, they were the biggest band, period.

Every few years, a major national publication will publish an overview of the Christian music industry. This week, Kelefa Sanneh has a good one in The New Yorker. Sanneh's history of Christian rock and pop begins way back in the 1950s, with Martin Luther King, Jr.'s advice-column exhortation that gospel and the devil's music should not mix. From there it moves at a measured pace into the present, highlighting the genre's origin in the '60s and '70s counterculture (the Larry Norman era), its softening and commercialization in the '80s and '90s (the Amy Grant era), and that post-Y2K moment when Christians were all over Warped Tour and mainstream rock radio (the Tooth & Nail Records era). As a church kid who grew up bumping Steven Curtis Chapman and the O.C. Supertones, I thought his analysis largely rang true. It's worth a read.

If it's meant to be, it'll be: Regarding Bebe Rexha's unlikely takeover of the country charts, this is both the savvy execution and the only explanation.

One of the foundational principles of being a teenager is posturing like you're cooler and more grown-up than you actually are. The budding career of Billie Eilish is this ruse writ large with a major-label budget, presented so convincingly you wonder whether it might actually be authentic.

Logic, the woke and nerdy Maryland rapper who claims one of the most fervently devoted audiences in hip-hop and the clout to get Adult Swim icons Rick & Morty on his album, is apparently a big fan of druggy, chilled-out indie-rock festival staples. He's such a big fan, in fact, that he's covering his body in tribute tattoos.

Ty Dolla $ign gets around. The R&B lothario releases quite a bit of his own music -- 11 full-lengths and two EPs since 2011, plus a joint project with Jeremih called MihTy dropping later this month -- but the collaborative section of his discography sprawls as endlessly as his native LA. At the end of 2016 I counted 45 guest features in total. In 2017 I could have easily published a similar list, and in 2018 he's been just as busy. Seemingly every artist in rap, pop, R&B, and even EDM recognizes Ty as the perfect seasoning for their project.

Charlie Puth is ridiculous, but more importantly, he is meticulous. His music is toothless, but his commitment to that music and its spoils is ruthless.

Drake announced a new album this week, and depending on its tracklist, it may already be eligible for gold certification -- never mind that it's not out for another two months.

Viewed one way, it's a pretty impressive flex: You're about to headline Coachella, and this is what you drop?

It takes real talent to create a song based on the premise that Chris Brown is the man and end up with something likable. For three minutes and 36 seconds -- or 5:21 if you're watching the music video, as more than 57 million people have so far -- that's the illusion "Freaky Friday" successfully sells. The track, which just debuted at #9 on Billboard's Hot 100 singles chart, is humorous, catchy, and contagiously fun, at least until you stop to think about it.

"God's Plan" rules the world. Drake's dominant single is #1 on Billboard's Hot 100 singles chart for an eighth straight week, and its ubiquity extends well beyond the United States. Although the song hasn't caught on in Asia or Africa and is only a minor hit in Latin America, it's the most popular track globally on Spotify and has topped the chart in Australia, Canada (obviously), Denmark, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, and Sweden, hitting the top 10 in Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Spain, and Switzerland. It also continues to be #1 in the UK, where it has been since its surprise premiere two months ago.