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The Austin 100: Madame Gandhi

Madame Gandhi.
Courtesy of the artist
Madame Gandhi.

Hometown: Los Angeles, California

Genre: Electronic

Why We're Excited: Madame Gandhi doesn't exactly make her intentions a mystery: The hyphen-rich vocalist-percussionist-speaker-producer-activist's vibe isn't so much "singer-songwriter" as "icon of empowerment." Her frenetic odes to feminism, fluidity and freedom — carried off with the assistance of an entirely female or nonbinary band — mash together fragments of electro-pop, trap, Afrobeat and R&B, carried off with endless swagger.

Listen to Madame Gandhi's "Top Knot Turn Up"

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Stephen Thompson is a writer, editor and reviewer for NPR Music, where he speaks into any microphone that will have him and appears as a frequent panelist on All Songs Considered. Since 2010, Thompson has been a fixture on the NPR roundtable podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour, which he created and developed with NPR correspondent Linda Holmes. In 2008, he and Bob Boilen created the NPR Music video series Tiny Desk Concerts, in which musicians perform at Boilen's desk. (To be more specific, Thompson had the idea, which took seconds, while Boilen created the series, which took years. Thompson will insist upon equal billing until the day he dies.)