Biju Belinky

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Being an emo in the mid-2000s was intense. Not only were our fringes so heavy we could barely see, but we also paid a lot of attention to social divisions. Unlike now, when teens are more into streetwear than subculture, you were either an emo or a normie. You either listened to My Chemical Romance or Justin Timberlake. Which is why I’d have never envisioned myself as I am now: a twenty-something who still wears a lot of eyeliner, but is so deep into K-pop that my great-aunt sends me newspaper cutouts about BTS in the post from Brazil.

Illustration by Lord Izzy for VICE / part of the column “INTO THE K-POP WORLD”

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From honest plea to punchline: why Brazilians give so much of a shit about pop stars visiting their country.

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Do you know BTS? In case you don’t, or have chosen to wilfully ignore them so far, here’s a quick rundown: they’re a seven-member K-pop group from South Korea, whose music treads the line between multiple musical genres, from EDM to hip-hop. The band is composed of Kim Namjoon (RM), Kim Seokjin (Jin), Min Yoongi (SUGA), Jung Hoseok (J-Hope), Park Jimin (Jimin), Kim Taehyung (V) and Jeon Jungkook (Jungkook). They write, produce and are directly involved in the creative process of all their albums, having won multiple awards, both in their home country and internationally. They were the first K-pop group to win a major American award and to speak at the United Nations. They have more than once been directly tweeted by the president of South Korea. And although they have been actively performing since 2013, this Tuesday marked their first-ever performance in the UK.

Photo via BIGHIT

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The year is 1968. The place, Brazil. The military took over the government almost four years ago, and for the past few months, its dictatorial repression has been getting stronger. Meetings of over three people in public spaces are considered to be potentially political and therefore, suspicious. Many cities have a curfew in place. People are regularly arrested for displaying “subversive tendencies” with no further explanation offered. Any piece of music, writing, film, or theatre has to be run past a censor prior to release.

PHOTO BY Ludmila Bernardi

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The internet is full of death. Not just in its news cycles or its serial killer documentaries, but also in the hidden corners – in the content that preys on humanity’s natural morbid curiosity, asking if you want to know which celebrity might’ve predicted their own death. It’s in the allure of the Dark Web, and all the horrendous things it holds – the alleged torture livestreams, supposed contracted killers and domains predicting sudden damnation. It’s in the abandoned profiles of those who have passed, always online for the bereaved to pour their hearts into, like a cross between therapy and a failed séance.

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Writer Biju Belinky explains why the revolutionary artistic movement of Tropicália is so important to Brazilian culture. Tropicália encouraged political resistance against Brazil’s authoritarian military dictatorship during the late 60s and had a lasting impact on the culture of Brazil and beyond.

Image: Gilberto Gil in performance. Credit: David Redfern/Redferns/Getty Images

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WHAT DO YOU DO WHEN YOU FIND YOURSELF TRAPPED WITH A PARTNER WHO THINKS YOUR ILLNESS IS THE HOTTEST THING ABOUT YOU? 

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Forget what you heard before: The Damned were the first UK band to release a punk single. Their 1976 track "New Rose" – which was released one month before the Sex Pistols' "Anarchy in the UK" on Stiff Records – is equal parts snarling and strange. "Is she really going out with him?" mutters singer Dave Vanian, before Captain Sensible and Rat Scabies lurch into a cacophony of unearthly, frantic rhythms. Their debut album, Damned Damned Damned, arrived soon after, becoming the first album released by a UK punk group – and as we all know, a new era swiftly bloomed.

PHOTO BY JOHN INGHAM

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"I would never have been able to talk in front of people if I hadn't been a skinhead," says Gavin Watson, smoking a roll-up in a cloudy beer garden just outside London. Now wearing a dark trench coat and flat cap instead of boots and braces, he is friendly, quite intense, and extremely into playing Dark Souls on the Playstation.

PHOTO BY GAVIN WATSON

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“Am I attracted to my favourite members? Yes, the same way I’d be attracted to a handsome dude I’d see on the bus,” says Emma, a 24-year-old French, queer fan of K-pop boyband SHINee. “You can sometimes daydream about it, but fantasising a whole romantic relationship with them would be ridiculous.”

llustration by / Part of the column “Into the K-pop World”

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As a subculture, goth is easy to recognise, but tricky to pin down. Ask the average passer-by and they might just picture some dude in a mesh vest, platform boots and a Slipknot wallet chain. Ask your mum and she may unearth an old photo from the 80s where she’s in winged eyeliner and backcombed Siouxsie Sioux hair. Go to Camden Market and you might bump into some cybergoths decked out in colourful latex, surgical masks and tube hair extensions. My point being, unlike the colour black, there are endless types of goth, each incarnation from various times and places, dating all the way back to 1967 when some bloke used the word to describe The Doors.

Photo: Bekky Lonsdale for Noisey

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A couple of days ago, the Huffington Post Queer Voices Twitter account shared an article they’d published on adult diaper kinks. It was met with confusion by many of the account’s followers, with people expressing their discomfort at the publication’s choice to include kink as an inherent part of the queer umbrella.

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In the late 60s, the whole Western world was undergoing a cultural shift. The USA was bombing Vietnam as young people smoking weed were demanding peace and love, and in the UK, busybodies were being haunted by pirate radios propagating rock n roll and miniskirts. When you look at Brazil, however, the situation was even more radical. Swiftly entering the thralls of a far-right dictatorship, Brazil’s pop culture scenario was going through a major upheaval.

For many at the time, Brazil’s political situation caused them to run away to London or American cities in order to not “disappear” or be tortured. Although as the 60s folded into the 70s, this climate of fear and repression made way for one of the most playful and culturally subversive movements in modern Latin America – the Tropicália movement.

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Chris Killip is driven by an obsession with his subject matters, and a level of determination that goes beyond what some would call reasonable. It’s thanks to this that he found his vocation, dropping everything to become a photographer before ever having used a camera before. It’s also thanks to this outlook that In Flagrante came into existence, one of the most in-depth documentations of the devastating effects that the deindustrialisation process of the 1970s had on communities in the north of England.

PHOTO BY CHRIS KILLIP

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Heroin is no stranger to the limelight. From the generation-defining drug-addled cult cinema creations of the 90s, to the 70s ever-escalating heroin scene portrayed in underground documentaries, the film industry’s morbid interest for glamourizing drug addiction is not exactly low-key.

That being said, Hollywood’s narrative when it comes to portraying addiction is, like many other narratives – mental health, for example – visibly white centered or male. Usually when women are a part of it, they are portrayed as assets to the main character, playing the burdened mother to the addicted child or the desperate girlfriend sucked into a whirlwind of narcotics for love.

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Speaking to John Lydon as a former teenage punk is quite a daunting prospect. I mean, I have one of his lyrics permanently engraved on my skin, so I'm trying my best to be confident while dialling his US number.

Fuelled with a disposition to question everything from an early age and always ever so theatrical, Lydon basically invented the sneer when fronting the Sex Pistols, got a record discussed in Parliament and continued to revolutionise music as the frontman of Public Image Limited, a creative process he describes as "exploring landscapes, scenery and tapestries of the mind", rather than just stringing words together.

PiL's 'Metal Box' and 'Album' will be re-released with extras on the 28th of October, but now he talks about ghosts, Trump's possible new drug patent (The "trump bump") and Wuthering Heights.

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Anton Newcombe has been living in Berlin for nearly a decade, but his Californian accent is still thick. When I call him up he's all West Coast chill, telling me he keeps a mental list of people to send good vibes and bad vibes to. I am apparently on the good list.

Newcombe's band, the Brian Jonestown Massacre, hasn't always been sea breeze and butterflies. In the legendary music documentary Dig! Newcombe is seen unravelling, sometimes violently, in a strange feud with The Dandy Warhols. But all that was over a decade ago, and Anton has been making music non-stop ever since. He still goes to the studio every day and makes it very clear that he works for the joy of working. "Inside me I have the building blocks of a whole life, so I don't need to be sad to be motivated to write sad songs, or any of that stuff," says.

Now, ahead of launching the band's 16th album, Third World Pyramid, he talks about being a dad, the ancient Chinese military treatise The Art of War and America's culture of fear.

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The 70s undoubtedly marked the Golden Age of underground music zines cataloguing subcultural movements. Without an avalanche of Tumblr accounts offering endless information on what your favourite band is wearing, Soundcloud recommendations about who to listen to next, or Twitter documenting your most-loved guitar player’s childhood fear, publications such as the pioneering DIY zine Sniffin’ Glue and groupie-focused Star found their way into the eager hands of music fans around the world. To celebrate a simpler time, here is our rundown of the five most iconic underground zines you might not have heard of, and where you can read them.

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You've probably read it in the news: Fewer people than ever are defining as heterosexual. Earlier this year an American trend forecasting study found that less than half of Gen Z identifies as straight, with over half of Americans aged from 13 to 20 claiming to be bisexual “to some degree”. Here in the UK, stats seem to match up. A YouGov survey from 2015found that 49% of British 18-24 year olds define themselves as something other than "straight".

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Most young bands cut their teeth in dingy bars and beer-drenched nightclubs; Cat's Eyes first gig took place in St. Peter's Basilica. In 2011, the joint project of classically trained musician Rachel Zeffira and the Horrors' Faris Badawan made its debut to a room full of bishops and bystanders, where they performed a hymnal-inspired rendition of their song "I Knew It Was Over." Since then, the dreamy indie-pop duo has made unusual—and near-impossible—concert locations their staple, proving that if nothing else, they don't like to turn their backs on a challenge.

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“This is a public problem, this is a public feeling and we require public healing,” yells an impassioned voice through the cobbled entrance to South East London’s Goldsmiths University, followed by multiple cheers.

Although it’s a cold Monday afternoon, around 50 students from different courses are lined up against the main wall of the college holding placards written in blood-red paint. They’re here to protest the university management’s response to sexual harassment claims. They’re not the first to do so, and unfortunately, they probably won’t be the last.

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Girls rule. But in a pop culture world saturated with straight white men and Spider-Man remakes, asserting yourself as an icon not solely defined by your cup size or tragic backstory can be difficult – but not impossible. From ball-and-chain wielding schoolgirls and hunted bounty hunters to ennui queens, here’s Dazed’s pre-Comic Con list of cult girls who have influenced the looks of generations.

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At the time of writing, students aged between 13 and 18 have autonomously occupied over 50 state schools in São Paulo, Brazil, with the number rising by the hour. The occupations started on November 9, following the announcement of a re-structuring of the state school system, which would involve the closure of 98 schools. The “E day” of the announcement, as it’s being called by Brazilian media, left 311,000 students and their parents without much knowledge of where their sons and daughters would be transferred to, and 74,000 teachers with uncertain destinies.

PHOTO BY LAURA VIANA

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“I felt cheated and I knew to the core of my being that life was unfair and boys had it easier than girls,” writes Viv Albertine of The Slits about her first period in her memoir Clothes Music Boys, “A burning ball of anger and rebelliousness started to grow within me. It’s fuelled a lot of my work.” And she’s not alone. Throughout the decades, female musicians and artists (with or without periods) have found different ways of using their anger to fuel their creativity. From punk trailblazer Poly Styrene screaming about her identity in 1978, to Kathleen Hanna in a bra bringing girls to the front at Bikini Kill gigs, to Nicki Minaj’s unapologetic reclaiming of black womanhood, proclaiming herself both a monster and a queen, we’ve been angry for a long time.