Alexandra Fiorentino-Swinton

2024 marks the 50th anniversary of "T.S.O.P. (The Sounds of Philadelphia)," an anthem that defined Philly soul and an entire era of Black art and culture.

On “GUTS,” wedged between bedroom pop ballads and angsty rock anthems, is a sharp three-act ode to Rodrigo’s teen idol journey.

As disco’s greatest champion, Donna Summer redefined what it meant to be a pop star in a post-Motown world. In celebration of Summer’s continued legacy, GRAMMY.com dives into how the singer’s 1970s oeuvre changed music and stardom forever.

From my born-in-2000 pop cultural vantage point, life may move pretty fast, but there isn’t really a chance, as Ferris Bueller theorized, that “I’ll miss it if I don’t look around.” The “feedification” of social life implies infinitude — feed, after all, is not only a noun but an active verb. It’s the ability to mediate your life into consumable packages (with the helping hand of platforms built to encourage you to do so) to be used for social or economic capital.

The name on everybody’s lips is currently “Gen Z.” Perhaps the most over-defined, over-marketed, and over-exposed generation in human history, everyone wants a piece of us (word to Britney). When social media supplanted TV as the primary form of youth media, it rapidly eroded lines between different media-consuming communities. Now, wherever we go, the rest of the world follows—from our exodus from Facebook to Instagram as tweens, our affair with Snapchat as teens, and our dominance of TikTok.

One of the early-aughts archetypes that gets praised today is that of the teen comedienne—think Lindsay Lohan, Raven-Symoné, or any number of girls featured in the now mythical 2003 Vanity Fair profile, “Teen Engines: Riding with the Kid Culture.” But before any of them, there was Amanda Bynes. Twenty-five years ago, Bynes made her debut on Nickelodeon’s sketch comedy show All That, inadvertently kicking off a renaissance of tween and teen TV and film.

The late ‘90s embraced a new space age as it saw the possibility for the millennium to either end the world in a crash of binary code or actualize the idyllic future the late 1960s and ‘70s had promised but failed to produce. Unlike the ‘60s space age, utopia was to be realized not by looking to the stars, but by means of an equally intangible future of extreme connectivity via the Web 2.0.

Olivia Rodrigo’s latest single, “Good 4 U,” comes from a long lineage of teen girl pop rock—that 2007 Radio Disney sound, as fellow young rocker Willow Smith put it. The 18-year-old Rodrigo’s trio of singles have garnered praise for paying homage to her female Disney Channel predecessors, who similarly explored the emotional spectrum of girlhood through their music, chronicling its cheesy jubilance, frustration, pettiness, adventurousness, and confusion.

Missy Elliott worked to curate a personal and professional environment founded on sisterhood, and her then-novel outlook diffused across her friends and collaborators.

UChicago’s Weston Game Lab was pleased to welcome Dr. Kishonna Gray to speak about her work on intersectionality and social issues within digital media, particularly in the gamer community. Dr. Gray is a groundbreaker in the digital studies field, with work featured in publications such as the New York Times, Engadget, The Guardian, BET, and Sociology Compass. She spoke on how black bodies are configured inside of technological structures and the steps being made to create equity in these spaces. UChicago Arts sat down with her after the presentation to learn more about her work.

A Hilary Duff-aissance was inevitable. "With Love," a single off her fifth album Dignity, has gone viral on TikTok for the lackluster (or interpretive, depending on who you ask) choreography Duff deployed when performing the song live. Chock-full of robotic arm movements, it's an accessible dance for the rhythmically challenged (and perhaps a brilliant deconstruction of pop star expectations in the wake of dancing Britney Spears-alikes that flooded the market of the time).

It’s reassuring to navigate life off of a script you’ve written for yourself. But it’s also okay to throw the script in the bin and step away for a bit.

An unanticipated oracle of our times, Soulja Boy has been equipped to make the isolation required of the current public health situation work since 2008. Kiss Me Thru The Phone is a responsible, self-quarantining anthem—he wants to get with his girl but acknowledges that he can’t right now, even though he misses her! He then offers some fantastic alternatives to physical interaction like calling and texting. (America, take notes.)

Though the current public health situation has scattered UChicago students around the globe, many RSOs (Registered Student Organizations) have carried on remotely. UChicago has a vast range of artistic student activities and the dedicated members of these organizations have found innovative ways to do what they love despite necessary physical limitations. Dancers, singers, and creatives of all creeds have utilized technology to stay connected with their peers and create collaborative art. UChicago Arts spoke to a few students about the remote artistic endeavors they’ve taken part in.

A multimedia exploration of selfhood—and the journey to define it in the most confining and draining of environments—is the throughline of Faces of Resilience, on view at the Barnes Foundation from July 8 through August 22, 2022. Presented in partnership with Mural Arts Philadelphia, the exhibit features work created by members of the organization’s Guild restorative justice program.