September 14, 2018

You’ll Want to Blast This Defiant Late-Summer Anthem All Weekend

Our Instagram “Friday Find” spotlights three singers on one fierce track.

(E News/AdMedia/Kathy Hutchins)

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There’s a new weekly series for you over on our Instagram feed, “Friday Find.” Each week, we’ll spotlight a song, artist, or record we have on repeat as the weekend blasts off, in a bid to introduce emerging, diverse acts to your music libraries.

This week: Body Count (Remix), by Jessie Reyez, featuring Normani and Kehlani (Single, FMLY, August, 2018.)

Why we’re into it: A defiant late-summer protest anthem for anyone who has felt shamed in a relationship of any kind, “Body Count” raises a big ol’ middle finger to slut-shaming and judgy body norms.

But the big draw is Reyez’s collaborators: First up there’s Normani, best known for her contribution to Fifth Harmony (the now defunct pop girl group), forcefully addressing the silly sexist crap women sometimes endure in relationships: “Funny how you think I need you but honestly, I don’t need anything,” she rasps. “You funny, boy/You were birthed by a woman, show some fucking respect.”

Then enters Kehlani, Oakland-born and queer, jumping into the second verse: “I dodge dick for some pussy, something that we can agree on,” she sings. When Reyes joins Kehlani for the chorus, the blissful, cheesy, but oh-so-wonderful love-is-love anthem comes together for a truly universal message: “Time won’t let you stay young/So, we don’t care what they say/We gon’ love who we wanna love.”

Three women, one incredible track. Check it out. We also want to hear from you in the Instagram comments: your suggestions for next week’s pick, or just a simple emoji showing how the music makes you feel. Have a great, pop-tastic weekend.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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