Unmanageable

Sky Ferreira was always too weird for mainstream pop. The others—Miley, Taylor, Lana—they understood the math. You can be provocative as long as you’re also easy to like. Sky had the songs, she had the look, but something about her stayed genuinely unmanageable. Chaotic. Genuinely strange in a way that doesn’t map to a demographic.

So she got arrested this week. Her and Zachary Cole Smith from DIIV, caught with drugs. Fans are calling them the new Cobain and Love, which is both absurd and maybe not entirely wrong. There’s something in that refusal to stay in control, to maintain the image, that feels closer to actual rock and roll than whatever careful shit everyone else does.

Then the GQ shoot—Alasdair McLellan photographed her topless for the British edition. It’s the kind of image that either kills you in mainstream pop or proves something true about your relationship to the image. For Sky, it probably just locks the whole thing in place.

She’s playing Pitchfork in Paris in late October with Hot Chip, The Knife, and Panda Bear. That’s the audience for her—people who don’t need her to be likeable. Whether the arrest stops her from showing up, I don’t know. But she’s not performing rebellion the way everyone else does. She’s just living it, and there’s something real in that. It’s weird to find that refreshing, but I do.