Amazon’s announcement that it has begun offering opportunities to riff off of the work of Kurt Vonnegut on its fan fiction licensing site, Kindle Worlds, has caused a stir. Rightly so. Amazon is The Man and Vonnegut tilted against The Man, as all great artists do.

Please explain what just happened.

I just finished my album Magic City!

What is your earliest memory?

I was about seven years old, and I used to record myself on this karaoke machine. I would play a tape and record myself in layers with all the harmonies. Some songs were made up. Some songs were covers. And then I would host my own music countdown show. The songs would be in order of which songs I thought were hot at the moment, and I would make my little brother and sisters listen to me and be the audience as I hosted. I was always at the top of the countdown. I’m sure it was really annoying for them, but even back then it’s what I wanted to do.

If you weren’t a musician, what other profession would you choose?

I always wanted to be a news anchor. In high school I was really into television production. I was the sports anchor on the daily school news broadcast. The short time I went to college that was my major.

So, there’s Katie Roiphe’s Newsweek cover story, in which she posits that today’s women are turning to SM lite en masse as a counter to modern-day independence and that the feminists who fret over such fantasies can suck it. And there’s the clamorous rebuttal coming from every quarter and arriving at more or less a consensus: click-mongering misogynist Katie Rophie misrepresents feminism, BDSM, and psychology, and is totally on crack.