When I was in 8th grade back at the beginning of 2017, my most anticipated project was easily Playboi Carti’s first mixtape. It wasn’t just the music that was alluring to me – it was also all the cosigns stacked around his image before a single song from the project had even dropped: A$AP Rocky signing him to be a part of the A$AP Mob, his ties to Ian Connor, his close friendships with Lil Uzi Vert and Lil Yachty, an unreleased collaboration with Frank Ocean, modeling for Yeezy Season 5, the...

8.5 million people live in New York City and nearly 60,500 of those people go to NYU. In 2021, one of them flew 9,400 miles from Kuala Lumpur to get there. Another flew 4,970 miles from Honolulu. Together they traveled more than 14,000 miles to end up in the same library, at the same table, pretending to study. They never really studied. “We would end up just listening to music or scrolling through Spotify together,” Natalya recalls, laughing a little at the memory. The textbooks stayed...

Photos by Dylan Nguyen It’s a Tuesday night at the Cornerstone in Berkeley, California. First in line is a 14 year old kid who brought his mom as a chaperone. The line behind him goes almost to the end of the block. This past Sunday, ezcodylee made his Rolling Loud debut in front of thousands. Two days later, the ceiling is low and the stage is close enough to touch. Max Vukovic, 23, came with his ezcodylee shirt on, listening to the artist long enough to have an opinion about what it means...