NPR News

"You're bouncing off the atmosphere."

Early in director Damien Chazelle's First Man, this is one of the cautions given to Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) during his pilot training, years before he walked on the moon. That idea of the barrier between Earth and space, the violence of making the journey through it and the almost mystical experience of being on the other side of it forms the spine of the film.

One of art's greatest qualities is its ability to give voice to the voiceless. When rendered in song, little-heard stories can find broad audiences, bridging gaps and building connection between disparate communities and lines of thought. The phrase "now more than ever" is wildly overused these days, but songs of this nature have taken on a heightened significance as divides across class, race, gender and party lines have grown wider and deeper since the 2016 presidential election.

Phony Ppl has grown a lot. Three years removed from the band's last album, Yesterday's Tomorrow, the five piece has undergone a lineup change, inked a deal with 300 Entertainment and refined its genre-jumping sound. Now, the Brooklyn-based group of friends returns with mō'zā-ik.

Alyssa Edwards (née Justin Dwayne Lee Johnson) is a lot.

She has to be; she's a drag queen. Being a lot comes with the lace-front wig. A drag queen who isn't a lot is no drag queen at all; she's food without flavor, art without color, Cher without Auto-tune. It's the difference, more specifically, between a fierce and fabulous queen like RuPaul and that one jock in high school who slapped on a Halloween store wig and stuffed himself into his girlfriend's cheerleading outfit for school spirit day.