Y’all yelled about it, and we heard you! Today, Jomi and Steve will dive into a few of the many shows and movies in the world of fandom that you have suggested we watch, including From, Slow Horses, and The Wild Robot. Later, producer Kerm joins to discuss some of our favorite recently released comic books!
Hosts: Jomi Adeniran and Steve Ahlman
Producer: Jonathan Kermah
Additional Production Support: Arjuna Ramgopal
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Jomi Adeniran
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In a spring and summer that has been dominated by female artists, Nora and Nathan talk about some of the male artists that have managed to break through on the charts: Post Malone, Zach Bryan, and Eminem. They discuss Post Malone’s forthcoming country album and what it tells us about the evolution of Nashville’s music scene (1:00), Zach Bryan’s The Great American Bar Scene and his rebellion against the music industry (27:16), and Eminem’s The Death of Slim Shady (Coup de Grâce) and whether the rapper has the capacity to shock anymore (53:48).
Hosts: Nora Princiotti and Nathan Hubbard
Producer: Kaya McMullen
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Nora Princiotti
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Matt is joined by Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw to look at what the future holds for Paramount now that David Ellison has purchased the legacy media company from Shari Redstone. They discuss what will happen to Paramount’s assets—including CBS, Pluto, Paramount+—their movie strategy, and ultimately whether a new, young, tech-focused CEO can not only keep Paramount alive, but help it flourish (02:22). Matt finishes the show with a prediction about the upcoming criminal trial of Alec Baldwin in the Rust case (25:57).
For a 20 percent discount on Matt’s Hollywood insider newsletter, What I’m Hearing …, click this link: puck.news/thetown
Email us your thoughts! thetown@spotify.com
Host: Matt Belloni
Guest: Lucas Shaw
Producers: Craig Horlbeck and Jessie Lopez
Theme Song: Devon Renaldo
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Matthew Belloni
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Rachel Lindsay and Jodi Walker kick off today’s Morally Corrupt by discussing the torso-themed Summer House reunion looks, Amir’s demand that his girlfriend be part of Summer House: Martha’s Vineyard, and Something About Her’s grand opening (2:04). Then, Rachel and Jodi recap Summer House Season 8, Episode 14 (15:45) and break down The Valley Season 1, Episode 10 (40:56).
Host: Rachel Lindsay
Guest: Jodi Walker
Producer: Devon Baroldi
Theme: Devon Renaldo
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We weren’t very kind to Amy Winehouse when she walked among us. She was a tremendous singer with a mesmerizing style, a strange case of a 21st-century pop star who was largely influenced by postwar jazz. She was also an alcoholic and, in her later years, a connoisseur of harder drugs, including heroin and crack cocaine. We know this much about Amy Winehouse because The Sun published photos of her at home in East London, smoking crack, sure enough, on a famous front page with the splashy headline “Amy on Crack.” The tabloids tracked her emaciation in real time, swarming her at every smoke break and liquor run, running a barefoot woman down as if they were chasing a wet rat all over London, New York City, and Miami. Ultimately, Amy Winehouse recorded only two albums, her striking debut, Frank, and her legendary breakout, Back to Black, the latter selling millions of copies, winning a ton of awards, and setting her up for still more massive success in the long run. But Winehouse died from alcohol poisoning, alone in her flat, at age 27, five years after Back to Black, and so she became the sort of icon who now arouses great defensiveness in all corners—only now it’s too late for anyone to protect her in any real way.
So now we have the obligatory biopic, Back to Black, directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson (Fifty Shades of Grey, A Million Little Pieces). Fans of Winehouse have been dreading this thing for months. The trailers seemed treacherous. Here you have the opportunity to produce a biopic about the edgiest pop singer of the century so far, and yet you’ve got Marisa Abela seeming so perfectly harmless, in the baddest of signs, in the lead role. What also doesn’t help is the very existence of Asif Kapadia’s excellent 2015 documentary, Amy, full of home video footage and passionate interviews with her family, friends, and peers. Back to Black, by comparison, seemed cartoonish. This, many feared, would be Disney’s Amy Winehouse: a pretty, sappy, plastic bit of hagiography turning her into one of those chibi caricatures of famous people that you see in children’s books. A disgrace, surely.
Really, though, Back to Black isn’t bad. We might’ve braced ourselves for something exceptionally awful, but no, Back to Black is perfectly mediocre and otherwise unremarkable, as far as these things go. It’s unsatisfying only so far as biopics, in general, are almost inherently irritating: It’s trite, it’s formulaic, and it’s conspicuously easy on key figures with keen interest in not coming off too poorly in the story of a woman who clearly wasn’t served very well by the company she kept. The two most controversial men in her life were her father, Mitch Winehouse, who notoriously discouraged her from entering rehab to address her alcoholism a couple of years after Frank; and her ex-husband, Blake Fielder-Civil, who introduced the singer to hard drugs circa Back to Black. Nearly a decade ago, Mitch trashed the Amy documentary and told those filmmakers to their faces, “You should be ashamed of yourselves,” presumably due to the film’s characterization of him as self-absorbed and negligent in the face of his daughter’s disorders.
Back to Black, as a biopic, was going to have be a more diplomatic project; Taylor-Johnson met Mitch and Janis Winehouse, and the director ultimately won the family’s approval. Back to Black isn’t entirely uncritical of Mitch but rather depicts him as a loving father who was understandably blinded by the limelight and too proud of his daughter to see the darker signs. Blake Fielder-Civil wasn’t involved in the making of Back to Black, but the biopic nonetheless spares him much blame for the hard drugs and physical violence in his relationship with Amy. What Back to Black says about Fielder-Civil is more or less what he’s said about himself in recent years: He was a bad influence, yes, but he tried to distance himself from Winehouse and ultimately divorced her in July 2009—nearly three years after the Back to Black album and two years before her death—hoping to “set her free.” With this biopic, Taylor-Johnson seems to have a similar agenda—to finally end the cycle of recriminations about the death of Amy Winehouse and instead treat the world to a more sentimental and straightforwardly enjoyable overview of her life and her music.
But who ever wanted to see that? Fans of Winehouse, if anything, might’ve found themselves wishing, perversely, to see something as startling and ugly as the contemporary tabloid coverage, something as irreverent as “Stronger Than Me,” something as righteous as “Rehab,” something as intense as “You Sent Me Flying” or, well, “Back to Black.” Amy is grainy and candid and argumentative, and that’s all about right, but of course that’s a documentary. As a biopic, Back to Black is somewhat hamstrung by the absence of the real Winehouse and its need to be significantly less demoralizing and infuriating than the real story, which culminated with one of the greatest singers of her generation dying alone, watching YouTube, on the losing end of alcohol addiction and also bulimia. The trailers, to the movie’s detriment, show a lot of scenes of the singer in her late teens, the years when she’s less recognizable as the tattooed, beehived icon she’d become, but really, this is who Winehouse was, too. Abela sells both the musical wonderment and jazz geekery of Winehouse in her formative years as well as the bruised and bleary disillusionment of her 20s, as she slathered herself in booze and tattoos, in the years after Frank and Blake. Together, Abela and Jack O’Connell, as Amy and Blake, do a decently captivating dance as two troubled lovers who clung to each other in all the wrong ways and for all the wrong reasons. It just isn’t enough for the audience. It was never going to be enough.
Ultimately, the pre- and post-release grumbling about Back to Black isn’t owing to any egregious failure of Taylor-Johnson or whether or not Abela physically resembles the character so much as it speaks to a mean grief, persisting to this day, for Winehouse. It’s a grief to be rehashed but never relieved by a biopic such as this. We miss plenty of troubled entertainers who died too young, of course, but Winehouse especially rubbed her fate in our faces. Her biggest song was “Rehab,” for chrissakes. She was a dead woman walking through volleys of camera flashes for five years. She made her pain so plain and so integral to her music, yet it was ultimately something to be mocked and gawked at. The tabloids made her out to be some goddamned alien. The late-night comedians reduced her to a punch line. No one’s ever going to feel good about any of this, biopic or not. Amy Winehouse deserved better than just pop sainthood. She deserved so much more than Back to Black, even if it didn’t really do anything wrong. One day, we—so far as the collective consumers of popular entertainment and celebrity metaculture can be addressed as such—will be at peace about Amy Winehouse. But no time soon. We’re still mad about the girl.
Justin Charity
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I Saw the TV Glow is, on its surface, a movie about identity and teenage isolation. But it’s also about how we attach those ideas to art and entertainment consumption during our formative years. And on yet another level, A24’s new psychological coming-of-age drama is about the mediums through which art and entertainment are passed down. Largely set in the ’90s, the movie revolves around two teens, Owen and Maddy, who bond over a surreal YA television show called The Pink Opaque. (Think: Buffy meets A Trip to the Moon.) But Owen’s parents forbid him from watching—“Isn’t that a show for girls?” asks Owen’s dad, played by Fred Durst—so he can only consume the series in secretive ways. Specifically: VHS dubs of The Pink Opaque that Maddy makes for Owen and hides in the high school dark room. It’s a relic from the pre-streaming era that should feel familiar to older millennials—the idea that a piece of physical media could change your life.
It’s fitting, then, that A24 and director Jane Schoenbrun have staked a large part of the movie’s experience on another relic of the pre-streaming era: the compilation soundtrack. The I Saw the TV Glow OST is the type of project you don’t see much of in 2024. It’s a who’s who of indie music mixed with a handful of rising artists, all providing original recordings. The album, which was released on May 10 through A24 Music, features stars such as Phoebe Bridgers and Caroline Polachek alongside critical darlings Bartees Strange and L’Rain, plus exciting (relative) newcomers such as Sadurn and King Woman. On its own, it may be one of the best collections of songs you’ll hear all year. But tied to Schoenbrun’s tale of identity repression and awakening, the tracks take on vivid life. (Certain songs are inextricable from specific scenes—like Polachek’s “Starburned and Unkissed” playing as handwritten notes cover the screen, or Maria BC’s haunting “Taper” playing during Maddy’s set-piece monologue.)
For Schoenbrun, this marriage of sight and sound was always the vision for I Saw the TV Glow, which releases wide on Friday. The hope was to make something similar to the soundtracks for Donnie Darko, The Doom Generation, and John Hughes’s most famous movies—all indelible, and all inspirations Schoenbrun cites. (This was in addition to commissioning a gorgeous score by Alex G, who also worked on Schoenbrun’s last film, 2021’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair.) The director—a self-described music nerd who grew up escaping to punk shows in New York City—even went as far as to make individualized playlists for artists to give them a sense of Schoenbrun’s thinking. “I knew that there was a sort of ground level of sad girl lesbian shit that I love and felt in line with the film, but I didn’t want it to just be that,” Schoenbrun says. “A great soundtrack needs to explore outwards, in the way that the Drab Majesty song does or the Proper song does. If it was just one thing 16 times, people would get bored really quickly. But if it was 16 things that all feel a piece of themselves, it could stand the test of time.”
That approach pays off throughout the film, like during King Woman’s visceral in-movie performance of “Psychic Wound” (a moment that will make any self-respecting Twin Peaks fan recall the Roadhouse performances) or yeule’s cover of Broken Social Scene’s “Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl,” which appears twice in I Saw the TV Glow. (It’s perhaps fitting that BSS’s 2002 original had another soundtrack moment in 2010, when it was featured in Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World.) Ultimately, despite the “various artists” label, the I Saw the TV Glow soundtrack feels like a cohesive document—a testament to not only how the movie ties the songs together, but also the work that Schoenbrun, A24, and music supervisors Chris Swanson and Jessica Berndt put into it.
“I didn’t want it to be the dumb soundtrack of pop-rock cover songs of ’70s hits or whatever,” Schoenbrun says. “I didn’t want it to become pastiche or an exercise for anybody, but I think I knew I was playing within this lineage of the Mallrats soundtrack or the Buffy original soundtrack. I wanted to create this thing that could conjure that memory. Because so much of what the film is trying to do is conjure that era of media.”
Much like the plot of the movie, the existence of this soundtrack seems both sentimental and unfamiliar. (Or, as Taja Cheek—who records under the name L’Rain and contributed the song “Green” to the project—tells me, “very nostalgic, but also really kind of fresh and new.”) While these types of compilation albums used to be the norm, the movie and music industries have shied away from them in the new economic and streaming realities. And in some cases, that’s maybe not a bad thing—the fewer blockbuster soundtracks, the fewer Godzilla-style abominations we have to deal with. But that also means fewer—if any—Doom Generations or Above the Rims or Empire Records. And that maybe means a world where original music doesn’t matter as much to a movie unless it’s a score by one of the few dozen composers who get regular work.
So the question becomes: If I Saw the TV Glow and its accompanying album succeed, do they have the potential to become almost a real-life extension of the Maddy-Owen VHS experience? Meaning: Could they pass down the soundtrack experience, making it easier for other filmmakers and studios to take similar risks? Because in this case, the medium is as fascinating as what it contains—and how it connects to the past.
A24
For Swanson, one of the TV Glow music supervisors and the cofounder of indie music powerhouse Secretly Group, it was Pump Up the Volume. (“Pump Up the Volume actually made me want to start my own pirate radio station,” he says. “I was convinced that was my destiny.”) For Billboard writer Andrew Unterberger, it was not only beloved albums like the Singles and Kids OSTs, but also strange artifacts like the one for The Cable Guy. (“A couple hits from it, but do I actually remember any of those being in that movie? Maybe one, maybe two.”) For L’Rain—one of the stars of the I Saw the TV Glow album—it was Whitney Houston’s Waiting to Exhale. (“Just like, ‘Wow, look at all of these very famous women that are contributing to the soundtrack.’”) For veteran music supervisor Liz Gallacher, it was one of the forever classics: Pretty in Pink and all the Smiths and Echo & the Bunnymen that entailed. (“My absolute hero is John Hughes,” she says. “The way that he used music, it just spoke to me so much when I was younger.”)
Everyone interviewed for this pointed to a soundtrack or two that they’ve fallen in love with. Many were filled with original songs. Some, like the Wes Anderson soundtracks that longtime music supervisor Zach Cowie highlighted, became beloved for introducing new generations to long-overlooked songs. (Personally speaking, I can trace my Nico and Velvet Underground love back to this scene.) But the soundtracks that everyone cited share a common thread: They are all, by this point, decades old.
It’s tempting to dismiss that as a function of age—most people I spoke with grew up in the ’80s or ’90s, after all. But digging into data unearths an unavoidable reality: There are far fewer movie soundtrack albums that break through these days, and the ones that do often bear little resemblance to the ones that held cultural real estate throughout the ’80s, ’90s, and early 2000s.
The Ringer examined Billboard’s year-end top 100 albums list for every year going back to 1978, the year that Saturday Night Fever and Grease finished no. 1 and no. 2, respectively (the Apex Mountain for John Travolta and Italian Americans dancing on-screen). That year, four movie soundtrack albums placed in the list: those two, plus the one for the musical-comedy Thank God It’s Friday and the movie FM, which featured Steely Dan’s eponymous hit. For the next decade-plus, the number stayed roughly in that ballpark besides a few fallow periods (just one soundtrack album placed in the top 100 in 1983: Flashdance) and sporadic spikes (seven made it the following year, including Flashdance again, but also Purple Rain, Footloose, and, naturally, The Big Chill). But the numbers take off starting in the mid-1990s: 10 make the list in 1994, nine in 1995, 12 in 1997, and a whopping 13 in 1998. (Possibly 14, depending on how you classify Spiceworld.)
If you grew up in the era, you’re undoubtedly familiar with how seemingly every movie had an accompanying “soundtrack”—typically a mix of songs that would appear in the movie alongside others totally unrelated to it, which were included under the loose “inspired by the motion picture” banner. Track lists were often filled with loosies from marquee artists and whatever new artist the label was looking to promote. Some were overfilled behemoths that doubled as a testament to record industry gluttony—everyone remembers Batman Forever for Seal’s no. 1 hit “Kiss From a Rose,” but what about U2, Method Man, and Sunny Day Real Estate?—while others became beloved documents of a sound or era. (See: how Singles helped codify the sound of grunge and Above the Rim solidified Death Row’s place in the industry and gave us “Regulate” in the process.) Sometimes, the soundtrack’s notoriety far eclipsed the movie it was allegedly inspired by. (It’s long been a joke around these parts that no one has actually seen the movie Judgment Night despite the notoriety of its rap-rock mashups, but the same could be said of High School High and The Show and their influential hip-hop soundtracks.)
Where so many of the popular soundtracks of the ’70s and ’80s came from movies explicitly about music—Purple Rain, Footloose, Saturday Night Fever—these ’90s OSTs were often different. Slightly craven—but in some ways, no less essential. How else do you explain something like the album that accompanied Bulworth? “There weren’t movies about music or about characters that were particularly interested in music,” says Unterberger, the Billboard journalist. “Or there weren’t musical situations necessarily in the movie, but they still had to have these sorts of big-ticket soundtracks. … They weren’t always the most artistically lofty collections of music, but they were a lot of fun.”
It was good business for the labels in the era when you could charge $17.99 for a CD and not have to worry about much beyond a hit song or two. (Also, for the movie studios, they doubled as good promotion: What better way to promote Batman Forever than to have clips of Jim Carrey’s Riddler pop up between shirtless shots of Seal every hour on MTV?) But these albums also provided something for the listener: a way to deepen their connection with the film. Gallacher—a music supervisor who has worked on movies such as The Full Monty, 24 Hour Party People, and Bend It Like Beckham—says that, at their best, these kinds of soundtracks were an extension of the filmgoing experience that could be popped into a Walkman or six-CD changer for months or years afterward. “There was an element back in the day of people wanting a sort of souvenir of the movie,” she says. “You could put things together like compilation albums in a way, and people felt like that was a souvenir of the movie.”
Of course, like many things in the music industry, the bottom fell out of the movie soundtrack market over the next decade. As downloads—first illegal and then through iTunes and other digital marketplaces—began to erode the idea of the album, these types of compilations began to fade. In 1999, the year Napster debuted, nine soundtracks finished in Billboard’s year-end top 100. The years immediately after hovered between three and five albums. And even when the numbers have reached similar heights as the ’90s—like in 2008, when eight movie soundtracks made the year-end list—those figures were buoyed by albums aimed at decidedly younger audiences. (In other words, lots of High School Musical and Cheetah Girls.) In more recent years, as streaming has replaced downloads and plays have become the primary means of measuring an album’s success, kids’ movies have often been the only reliable chart producers. (Moana, for example, made the year-end top 100 each year from 2017 to 2021. And in 2021, it was the only soundtrack to earn that distinction.) Twenty years after Garden State, the idea that something like its accompanying album could break through seems far-fetched. If a song will change your life, odds are it’s not coming from a soundtrack.
I was struck by the streaming aspect recently when I got out of a screening of Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast, a time-warping love story that uses the music of Roy Orbison, Visage, and Frankie Valli to staggering effect. Its soundtrack is a different concern from I Saw the TV Glow’s—where TV Glow uses only brand-new recordings, The Beast recontextualizes older songs, not unlike a Wes Anderson or Quentin Tarantino movie. Shortly after the QR code credits rolled, several of the tracks were still rattling around in my brain. Twenty years ago, I may have driven straight from the theater to the store to buy The Beast’s soundtrack. Instead, before I had even started my engine, I found a playlist of the songs in the movie—one put together not by the studio or a record label, but by a user named “filmlinc”—and gave it a like. (And here seems like as good of a place as any to note that Spotify is The Ringer’s parent company.)
The process isn’t exactly novel—this is what music consumption is for most people in 2024. But given the difficulty and expense that comes with acquiring the rights for these songs—especially at a time when old music is more in demand than new music—these kinds of compilation soundtracks functionally don’t exist as a commercial or physical product. (The Beast’s does exist in a truncated form, with Bonello’s original score packaged alongside a few of the synced tracks.) For Zach Cowie, a music supervisor who’s worked on Master of None and American Fiction, that intangibility has made these kinds of compilations feel fleeting and disposable. “We all know what the cover of the Forrest Gump soundtrack looks like,” Cowie says. “Because somebody you knew had it if you didn’t have it. Having them be physical objects I think is what established this moment that we’re talking about.”
Even for Gallacher, who’s seen soundtracks she’s worked on receive gold plaques or achieve cult status, it’s an evolution that makes sense. “No one wants a compilation anymore of music from a movie,” Gallacher says. “They can just go and listen to their favorite songs anytime on Spotify. They don’t need that. People will put playlists on.”
It’s fair to say that few shed tears over the death of the Forrest Gump–style soundtrack—which charged consumers upwards of $30 for the privilege of hearing Joan Baez and Creedence back-to-back. The overall decline in the market has, however, had a knock-on effect on compilation soundtracks filled with original music—like ones from Singles or I Saw the TV Glow. Looking at the Billboard charts reveals how rare of a commodity they’ve become. Besides kids’ flicks, the types of OSTs that have tended to make the year-end top 100 recently either are tied to music-centric films (La La Land, A Star Is Born) or have been helmed by a headlining superstar musician. (But even those are rare: Kendrick Lamar’s platinum-certified Black Panther soundtrack was certainly the exception, not the rule.)
Ones for smaller movies are practically nonexistent—and even when they do exist, they gain less traction. Unterberger recalls a soundtrack to the film The Turning, which came out in January 2020. The movie and its music came and went with barely anyone noticing. This happened even though the soundtrack possessed an ethos similar to I Saw the TV Glow’s—The Turning’s album boasted the likes of Mitski, Empress Of, and a living legend (and friend of The Ringer) in Courtney Love. From Unterberger’s vantage point, however, The Turning lacked one thing that TV Glow has: a sense of intentionality with the music. “It was actually one of my favorite albums of that year, and it felt coherent as a soundtrack,” Unterberger says of The Turning. “But it seemed to have very little to do with the movie—it didn’t seem to really feed off of the movie in any way that I could tell just by listening to it. And it didn’t really get a lot of attention.”
To that end, I Saw the TV Glow has something in common with the biggest non-franchise movie of the past few years: Barbie. (The truly opaque pink.) While the two movies couldn’t feel more different in terms of scale and subject—other than some of Barbie’s broad-strokes platitudes about identity and gender—Greta Gerwig’s movie also made the music feel integral. Helmed by a trio of producers including Mark Ronson, Barbie the Album recruited some of the biggest stars to make music specifically for the film, and many of those songs became the backbone of some of the film’s biggest moments. (“I’m Just Ken,” anyone?) The album spawned two top-10 singles—Dua Lipa’s “Dance the Night” and Nicki Minaj and Ice Spice’s “Barbie World”—and won Billie Eilish and Finneas a few pieces of hardware to go along with the Mattel plastic.
Cowie credits the creators of Barbie for not only enlisting the artists they did, but also making the songs feel organic in the universe of the film. The audience, he says, can typically tell when the approach is thoughtful. And that counts for something in a music-discovery landscape increasingly dominated by the algorithm and hivemind curation. “It was the best possible thing to support the world that they were building,” Cowie says of Barbie. “And people paid attention to that. But what made that happen is the fact that everyone in the world saw that movie. If the music was an afterthought, no one would talk about the music.”
Barring a (welcome) miracle, I Saw the TV Glow likely won’t be the type of movie that everyone in the world goes to see. But it is one that’s sure to develop a dedicated following—the Donnie Darko and Twin Peaks comparisons go deeper than the musical moments. And that’s part of the reason Schoenbrun took the “mixtape approach” to this soundtrack. They wanted to create moments and heighten story beats, but they also wanted to produce something that felt “made lovingly”—“distinctive from a Spotify playlist or a YouTube recommendation.” (Or, put another way: They wanted something that felt like the result of “angry sex between capitalism and art-making.”)
“There’s something very human about it, and there’s something that’s not disposable,” Schoenbrun says. “There’s something that feels lovingly prepared. The handmade nature of it—the physicality of it, even if it’s not literally physical—is a big part of the appeal.”
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A24
Schoenbrun, of course, had the vision for what they wanted the I Saw the TV Glow soundtrack to be. It also helped that they had a willing partner in their studio to make it happen.
There’s no shortage of praise being heaped upon A24, which has grown in the past decade from a scrappy, small indie to one of the most recognizable names in film on the back of its creatives-first mindset. But it’s worth calling out its approach to music as a microcosm of that. Arguably no movie company has put such a focus on sonic backdrops in recent years as the one responsible for Uncut Gems and its Daniel Lopatin score and the 4K restoration of the Talking Heads’ classic concert film, Stop Making Sense. (Speaking of, you can preorder the SMS tribute album featuring Paramore and Lorde, among others, right now.) The company has even gone as far as to form its own label, A24 Music (which, like its embrace of T-shirt maker Online Ceramics, can be seen as good business and great branding as much as it is a means of producing art).
Schoenbrun says that many of their early conversations with the studio revolved around the idea of making an all-original compilation that both worked inside of the movie and also stood on its own outside of it. They’re not confident that would’ve been possible at a studio that either (1) didn’t have the same track record of prestige and success as A24 or (2) was inherently more risk averse because of the costs associated with these types of projects. “A lot of other studios operating at the level of A24 or above the level of A24, financially, just don’t have any room to take a shot on something coming from a place of love, rather than a place of like, ‘Well, if we have these 16 artists on the soundtrack, our data tells us that it’s going to get this many streams on Spotify and make us this much money in sales or whatever,’” Schoenbrun says. “And I think A24 has made its name and staked its brand on finding people like me, who have a lot of love and want to make something with that love, and I think that is a process that is inherently at odds with the other thing.”
A24 representatives declined to comment for this article, but others—both ones who have worked with the company and ones who haven’t—were complimentary of the way it tackles music and how it fits into the overall mission. “I love A24 because that’s the kind of studio that would allow something like that to happen,” Cowie says. “I just love their artist-first thing. I don’t think you’d be able to do this at another studio.”
For Swanson, who co-supervised the music on I Saw the TV Glow, what made the music feel important was the simple fact that Schoenbrun and A24 treated it as though it was. On other projects with other studios, the soundtrack often comes last, as counterintuitive as it may seem. That never felt like the case here, Swanson says. “They embed their music department in with the creative force, the producers, and director of the films early enough that they’re employing their credibility, their budget,” he says. “It’s not uncommon for music supervisors to be relegated to a postproduction role after most of the money’s been spent. The filmmaker isn’t less aspirational about music. It’s just by virtue of it being dealt with last, you’ve got to find the change in the couch cushions. That these combos are starting so early is a game changer.”
All of this made I Saw the TV Glow a unique project for Swanson and Berndt, who co-supervised the music with him. Supervising work typically involves making playlists and sourcing songs, Berndt says. This time, it was collaborating closely with Schoenbrun. “We’ve certainly taken early meetings on projects not too far from this where they want to do a bunch of original songs,” Berndt says. “They want to create real soundtrack moments with some commissioned songs. And it’s pretty rare that it can actually happen. Obviously, it takes budget, time, creativity, the right timeline for artists to be able to have the capacity to create music like this for a film. And we just got really lucky that we could actually make it happen.”
And that work shows up on the screen. Berndt and Swanson both point to the two on-screen performances—one by Sloppy Jane and Phoebe Bridgers, another by King Woman. Where live performances in movies can often come across as forced, these feel organic. And more importantly, they also help push the narrative forward. “It’s like, at this point, everything is going to shift for Owen,” Berndt says. “It’s like this moment of, ‘Oh, Maddy’s back, this is great.’ It’s like, ‘Where have you been? Tell me everything.’ And then your whole world is changing with what Maddy is telling Owen. And just that beautiful moment of these wonderful performances happening both in the forefront and then in the background of their heavy conversation is just the most beautiful moment in shifting the way the rest of the film is going to go.”
It’s scenes like that that have the potential to make the I Saw the TV Glow soundtrack resonate like so many of the projects from decades ago. The album likely won’t reach Saturday Night Fever heights—though, admittedly, it was never designed to—but it’s not hard to imagine it could become an object of cultish devotion, like a Donnie Darko or Gregg Araki soundtrack. And if this record does catch on, it’s possible we’ll see a world where studios take more shots like this. We may not be looking at a full-on resurgence of compilation soundtracks, but projects like TV Glow and Barbie show that with the proper care and creativity, there’s still a market for them. “It’s getting attention—the music for it—before the movie’s even happened,” says Cowie. “Anything that draws attention to this age-old thing still having some power is so great. … What would be so rad is if this does come out and it continues to have the reception it has before it’s even out. That opens the doors wider at all the other studios because it’s proof that this can still work.”
That would be a happy accident for Schoenbrun. Ultimately, their hopes are that the soundtrack and the movie each become portals into different worlds: the movie as a means of discovering artists such as L’Rain and Maria BC, the music as a means of leading people to seek out the on-screen lives of Owen and Maddy. And if more people discover a nostalgic medium in the process, all the better.
“I’m really hoping that, when people watch the movie and discover the music—or vice versa, listen to the soundtrack and then go discover the movie—that this level of handmade care and sharing something, it comes through.”
Justin Sayles
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Ever since watching the Fallout show, I can’t get enough of it. The show was my introduction to its world, and the ending only inspired me to dive deeper in the worlds of the video games that inspired the show. Everything from the evils of Vault-Tec to the eccentric characters fascinated me. Clearly I’m not alone — the game series received an influx of players following the release of the show — but not everyone can commit to playing the games. It can be a massive time investment and even require hundreds of mods to play. Luckily for me, I’ve found a great way to experience the games without actually playing them: Watching clips on TikTok.
I can already hear the groans from seasoned fans — that’s valid! — since watching short videos about specific quests, locations, or characters doesn’t at all replace actually playing the game. But now I get to see a highlight reel from the people who put those hundreds of hours into the game and learn about the series in way that’s tailored towards the viewers of the show. For example, the video below shows an undetonated bomb in Fallout 3’s Megaton and discusses theories on who first dropped the bombs — which the show directly addresses.
Clips like the above allow me to learn about the world as it’s presented in the game series and can also give additional information about the lore of the game. Sure, I could go and read Wikis on the game, but that’s just not as fun. In the below clip, we can learn about a guy who runs the radio — a role played by Fred Armisen in the show — and what happens if you kill the radio guy in the game. (Spoilers: It’s funny.)
Even if I were to put the time and effort into the games, it wouldn’t guarantee that I’ll get to go and see everything I want in a perfect way. Like, I could play, but I might not know how funny the result would be if I killed the radio host. In other examples, people have just been really good at highlighting goofy moments. The clip below talks about a mysterious cult that formed around the Gravitron theme park ride.
People also just pull hilarious stunts in the games that I wouldn’t have the time or patience to pull off. Like this person, who collects dozens of Protectrons to defend against an invasion from the The Brotherhood of Steel in Fallout 4.
Prior to the show, I might have scrolled past these videos, and TikTok’s algorithm might have taken that as a sign I wasn’t interested in that content. However, now, the show has given me just enough knowledge to contextualize the big moments shown in the clips. The videos hit a sweet spot where I know enough to understand the clips and can recognize certain sects or recurring characters, but I don’t know so much that none of it surprises me. All in all, it’s been an enjoyable way to learn more about the games, and I’d recommend poking around on TikTok if you’re looking to scratch that Fallout itch.
Ana Diaz
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At Polygon, a lot of us are fans of sitting down to a movie with as little upfront information as possible, for the feeling of discovery. But sometimes, it helps to know a few things going in, whether it’s an interesting fact about the movie’s history or just knowing how many end-credits scenes to wait for. Here are four things we think you should know about Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers before watching.
Photo: Niko Tavernise/Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures
The simple title doesn’t offer much clarity. But broadly, and without spoilers: Challengers follows a complicated relationship between three people. Zendaya, who also produced the movie, plays Tashi, a former teenage tennis superstar. In a story that jumps back and forth in time, she meets best friends and tennis partners Art (West Side Story’s Mike Faist) and Patrick (The Crown’s Josh O’Connor), dates both of them, marries one of them and becomes his tennis coach, then pits them against each other in an epic tennis match for complicated personal reasons that take most of the movie to unpack.
The movie starts at that match, when all three of them are in their 30s. Then it loops back to their teen years, and jumps around in time to explore what happened between the threesome’s first meeting and the present, more than a decade later.
No, there’s nothing after the credits — meaning no further information about the aftermath of that final match. Director Luca Guadagnino (Call Me by Your Name, Bones and All) and writer Justin Kuritzkes leave that up to fanfiction writers. We like to think that aftermath resembles the climactic scene in one of Kuritzkes’ favorite movies, Y Tu Mamá También, which… well, if you know, you know.
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Image: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures/Everett Collection
The scoring rules for tennis are a little complicated, and it’s worth boning up on them before the movie if you want to fully understand the action and the specific setbacks and triumphs Art and Patrick face. (Video gamers who’ve played a lot of Wii Sports tennis or any of the many other tennis sims may be way ahead of the game here.)
The two men are competing in a Challengers match, one of the qualifier events the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) uses to determine who goes on to professional-level competition. When the movie starts, Art is already a pro-level player, qualified for the biggest events in the sport, like Wimbledon and the U.S. Open. Patrick is trying to qualify to play at that level.
The key terms to understand: The two men are pitted against each other in a match, which typically means three or five sets. A set is a series of games, played until one player has won at least six cumulative games and has won at least two more games than their opponent has. The winner of a game is whichever player scores four points first, except when the game is tied at three points each. We’ll get into that below.
Points have their own designations in tennis: love (zero points), 15 (one point), 30 (two points), and 40 (three points). Tennis has multiple officiants, but the one seated above the match, known as the chair umpire, serves as a referee, calling the score and any faults or penalties that would change the score. For instance, if the chair umpire calls a score of “love-30,” that means one player has zero points and the other has two. When both players have the same number of points, the score is called as “all,” as in “15-all,” meaning each player has one point.
A game that hits a tied score of 40-all has its own special word, “deuce.” In a deuce situation, a player needs to score two points in a row to win. That means a four-point game might go on for a dozen points. Whoever scored the most recent point in a deuce game after the score was tied is said to have “advantage,” since they’re halfway to winning — so if player A scores one point in a deuce game, they have advantage, but if player B then scores a point, the score goes back to 40-all, with player B now having advantage. There are several ways to score points in tennis apart from successfully getting a ball past the other player. An opponent might surrender points via a fault. Or the chair umpire might assess penalty points for an opponent’s unsportsmanlike conduct, including swearing, throwing things, delaying a match, and more.
Yes, all this is relevant in Challengers, especially for understanding why Art and Patrick play so many games against each other, and why some of those games go on so long.
Sure. It’s pretty clear when one of the players is on the upswing and the other is losing, just from their responses. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ aggressive, driving score for the film spikes up the excitement and makes it clear when big, important things are happening. But being able to read the on-screen match scoring and follow what’s going on in individual games will give you a lot more nuance about the status of a given game and the overall match.
They’re often hitting real balls on real courts, but plenty of effects and editing trickery were involved in making the games look seamless. Zendaya, Faist, and O’Connor all went through extensive training to make sure their forms on the court were convincing. But as Zendaya has pointed out in interviews, she’d never played tennis before, and she faced a steep learning curve, giving a credible performance as a world-class tennis prodigy.
Polygon sure recommends it! It’s a playful, sexy, tense story, part romance and part compelling sports drama. From our review:
Luca Guadagnino’s sweaty, panting sports-and-sex romantic drama Challengers feel[s] like a thumbed nose (or a raised middle finger) aimed at American Puritanism and an increasingly sex-negative culture. Challengers is a sharp and snappy movie, full of big emotions expressed through fast-paced dialogue in some scenes and through silent, sensual physicality in others, all shot with creative verve and aggressive in-your-face energy. Everyone in this movie is chasing sex and success, and conflating those things with each other in unashamedly provocative ways.
Tasha Robinson
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Long before anyone heard a note, Taylor Swift’s new album caused controversy among the grammarians.
The fuss was about the title, The Tortured Poets Department, and its conspicuously absent apostrophe. Should “poets” not have been possessive? If it had been, was the singular or plural more appropriate? Was this a mistake? Or by design? English teachers, grammar hobbyists, and the standards editor of The New York Times weighed in. There is, they said, no intrinsically correct answer—just one that differs based on the album title’s intended meaning. The Tortured Poet’s Department, for example, would imply a department belonging to a singular tortured poet, and perhaps her place of work or where one could go to find her. The Tortured Poets’ Department would suggest a similar situation, just with all the tortured poets. In omitting the apostrophe altogether, it’s the authors themselves who go under the microscope in The Tortured Poets Department—though perhaps the singular would have been most appropriate.
Few pop stars make their authorial voices as central to their work as Taylor Swift. She broke out in country music, a genre in which storytelling is fundamental. She writes her own songs, which are personal and, increasingly, meta-textual, in the sense that she has begun to tell stories about fame and its inherent self-mythologizing. In the best parts of The Tortured Poets Department, Swift advances this work, writing about herself not just as Taylor Swift the person but as Taylor Swift the performance. “This town is fake, but you’re the real thing,” coos an industry insider to a young Swift in “Clara Bow,” the closing track of the double album’s first half. But the Swift who wrote the song knows that “the real thing” is itself a sham when the job is telling tales. The Tortured Poets Department is full of its own stories—of goodbyes and getaways and ghosting—but its central character is Taylor Swift—author. And it’s consumed by whether or not she is a reliable narrator.
What does it mean to write your own life? On “How Did It End,” Swift processes a breakup through the need to explain it—to worried friends and eager gossipers alike—and sees the story become theirs before she’s even figured out the true answer for herself. “Come one, come all, it’s happening again,” she sings, announcing her own heartbreak. In the first verse, Swift’s use of “we” as she explores what went wrong seems to include just herself and her former partner. But by the second, the circle extends to friends, then cousins, then people around town. By the end, they’ve all drawn their conclusions—despite the fact that Swift herself is still asking the titular question.
Perhaps less subtly, “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” underscores that what we see from Swift is often an illusion. “Lights, camera, bitch, smile—even if you want to die,” she sings, over poppy production that evokes the closing numbers of her blockbuster Eras Tour. This song is a statement about an emotionally turbulent period in her life, sure, and you feel for her, but it’s also about what it means to be a performer and a professional—and a good one. “Try and come for my job,” Swift says, tossed off, at the end of the track. If you read the separation of the personal and professional selves on the song as healthy, it’s really a song about competence. Swift is practically begging her audience to understand that she is vocationally required to put on a show.
If some stories on The Tortured Poets Department are merely delusive, others are outright dangerous. On “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived,” the most eviscerating track of the album (and possibly of Swift’s career), she wonders if an ex who love bombed, then ghosted, her, was a secret assassin or an author writing a tell-all—with both possibilities presented as equally vicious. On “The Bolter,” having “the best stories” means having the scar tissue from a collection of bygone relationships. It’s a far cheerier song than “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived,” but it still suggests that a collection of tales to share over brunch is not much of a consolation prize.
The song “The Albatross,” an ethereal, if somewhat dozy, tune from the 2 a.m. release, draws a particularly poetic—and meta-textual—connection. In it, Swift references the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” in which a sailor on a boat caught off course shoots an albatross that was flying overhead. The ship’s crew comes to view the bird as a curse, and forces the mariner to wear its corpse around his neck as a reminder of his bad deed.
It’s an epic poem—626 lines long. In its time, it was criticized both for its wordiness and its inscrutability. Some scholars have argued it has no singular moral; others have said it has no moral at all.
In Tortured Poets, Swift likewise asks a lot of her audience. The album begs a close read and rewards fourth, fifth, sixth, and 16th listens. Many songs have third verses, unusual for pop tune packaging. The double album runs over an Easter egg–packed two hours. Swift has more than enough fans who want to do this homework—and who feel rewarded by the excavation—to set streaming record after record. But for those outside her core fan base who don’t, it does become somewhat illegible. In the relatively lukewarm critical reception to the album, a main critique is its lack of concision. (Even as someone who enjoys the record, I tend to prefer its clear and declarative moments over its most intricate—I’ll take a line like “I hope it’s shitty in the Black Dog,” for instance, over the slant rhymes of “Fresh Out the Slammer.”) An album about the author’s own writing suggests some required reading to even make sense of the premise.
The second half of the double album ends with “The Manuscript,” a piano ballad that reads a lot like the story of Swift recording the 10-minute version of “All Too Well,” and turning that story into a short film, which she did in 2021. One could read TTPD as a whole as a reference to Swift’s need to write to move past events in her life, but “The Manuscript” is the only song on the record that tells that story.
And the years passed
Like scenes of a show
The Professor said to write what you know
Lookin’ backwards
Might be the only way to move forward
The song ends with Swift shedding herself of the entire ordeal. “Now and then I reread the manuscript,” she sings. “But the story isn’t mine anymore.” Ending on that sentiment feels intentional. It’s possible to overthink these things—I’m reminded of a story the musician and author Michelle Zauner has told about meeting Swift at a Grammys after-party in 2023 and asking her a carefully-constructed question about parallels between her song “invisible string” and Ernest Hemingway’s writing.
“OK, English major!” Swift said, then walked away.
Maybe it’s not that deep. Or maybe Swift had had two cosmos and didn’t feel like chatting. But it’s also possible that history’s most personal pop star actually does want some veil of mystery between Taylor Swift and Taylor Swift. She has shared quite a lot over the years, and it’s possible to read TTPD as a reflection on what it means to have written your entire life into art and commerce. Sometimes, Swift seems to find that the answer is catharsis. But more often, it sounds like the real person is no match for the storybook version. The pen can heal, she seems to say. But it can also be the instrument of torture itself.
Nora Princiotti
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You knew deep down it was real. When the rough version of Drake’s “Push Ups” leaked online Saturday afternoon, the big question at first was: Was it actually AI? If it was, it would mean someone random had just penned a pretty competent diss track aimed at Kendrick Lamar, Metro Boomin, and a half dozen other rap luminaries. If it wasn’t, it would mean that Aubrey had finally taken the gloves off and was ready to chip a nail. Sure, there were a few lines anyone steeped in Drake lore could’ve gotten off. But AI could never get that specific in its barbs, and AI certainly could never replicate that patented Drake sigh.
A few hours later, Drake confirmed as much by releasing the full, finished track. He swapped out the beat—the rough cut evoked Tupac’s classic “Hit ’Em Up,” while the final paid homage to Biggie’s “What’s Beef?”—and cut a few lines aimed at Rozay (though the Teflon Don didn’t forget; more on that later). But it was all there: the response the rap world had been waiting on since Kendrick Lamar poked the Canadian bear three weeks ago on “Like That.”
It’s admittedly not the nuclear detonation Joe Budden promised, but “Push Ups (Drop and Give Me 50)” makes it clear that Drake is up for the fight that rap fans have been waiting on for a generation. He landed disses about Kendrick’s height and former label situation, threw some petty shade at Future and Metro, and then chucked a few grenades at the Weeknd and his team. But if you’ve been anywhere near your For You page this weekend, then you know there’s so much more. (J. Cole behind enemy lines? Nose jobs? Dockers? French Montana? Ja Morant?!) Let’s take a look at the fallout and figure out where things sit—and more importantly, where they could go from here. First up …
Chances are, if you’re reading this, it’s too late for me to explain. But it’s worth recapping how rap’s cold war erupted into a full-blown civil war (and on the weekend Alex Garland released Civil War, naturally). My colleague Justin Charity already ran through a timeline of the Drake-Kendrick feud, which for a decade resulted in little more than subliminal shots and KTT2 fanfic. But the simmering beef was tossed into the fire in March thanks to two unlikely provocateurs: Future and Metro Boomin. The former had seemingly taken offense to a For All the Dogs track that most fans had assumed was a tribute to Drake’s one-time collaborator. (Turns out rapping about how your buddy only sleeps with taken women is not a compliment, though you could forgive us for assuming the man behind “Fuck Russell” would consider it a good thing.) In the case of Metro, the superproducer behind a handful of Drake’s biggest hits started poking Aubrey late last year over award shows, of all things. Back then, Drake responded with some of his typical tough-guy posturing, but then tweets were deleted and everyone put it on the back burner.
But never underestimate the pettiness of two men who name albums stuff like WE DON’T TRUST YOU and WE STILL DON’T TRUST YOU. The former came out last month and contains “Like That,” which includes the Archduke Ferdinand moment of this war. On the surface, Kendrick Lamar’s guest verse on “Like That” isn’t a diss on the level of, say, “Takeover” or “The Bridge Is Over.” But it took direct aim at Drake and J. Cole—seemingly for the sin of implying on For All the Dogs’ “First Person Shooter” that the two of them and Kendrick make up rap’s Big Three. (Like all good rap beefs, this one seems to be built on the smallest of slights; shout-out to the mic on LL Cool J’s arm.) “Like That” is light on specifics and heavy on old-school rap-battle bragging. (Fitting for the Rodney-O & Joe Cooley–sampling beat.) But what it lacks in pointedness, it makes up for with audaciousness: Here was Kendrick finally taking shots at an artist who’s been too big to fail for too long.
But beyond giving Rap Twitter enough fodder for a few lifetimes, “Like That” did a few other things:
The list of assumed Aubrey allies who pumped up “Like That” is shocking: Rick Ross! Travis Scott! LeBron James! But this is what years of subliminal disses and bad vibes will get you. Last Friday, Future and Metro released WE STILL DON’T TRUST YOU, and while there was no one seismic “Like That” moment, the 25-track album was littered with guests taking shots at Drake. The Weeknd made fun of him for having leaks in his camp and having “shooters making TikToks.” (Over an Isley Brothers sample!) Rihanna’s babies’ father showed up to brag about securing the very thing Drake’s always coveted. And maybe most damningly, J. Cole showed up on the Disc 1 closer, “Red Leather.” Jermaine didn’t diss his tour mate, and it’s unclear when he actually recorded the verse. But given what transpired a week earlier—when Cole released a tepid diss song about Kendrick, then apologized two nights later, saying he was confused and misled—the Dreamville head’s mere presence felt like Future and Metro were holding an enemy combatant hostage. Which, let’s hope not, because we already know Cole is the type to break under questioning.
As my buddy Jeff Weiss said: Apologizing is a sign that Cole is a mature, thoughtful human. And it’s also the reason we never want to hear his music again.
Everyone should commend J Cole for being a mature, empathetic, rational, and emotionally attuned human being. This is also why I never wanted to listen to his music.
— Otto Von Biz Markie (@Passionweiss) April 8, 2024
A reminder that any time you have Jadakiss asking “why?” you’re not in a good place.
For weeks, the most we had heard from Drake was him making trigger fingers at the giant Travis Scott facsimile he brought on tour for “SICKO MODE” performances. (Anytime you’re screaming at a floating animatronic head you paid for, you are officially Down Bad.) But Drake broke his relative silence on Saturday with “Push Ups (Drop and Give Me 50).”
And honestly, it’s fairly impressive, especially when you consider the initial wave of AI rumors—and especially when considering “Like That” has Drake on the defensive for one of the few times in his career. A self-described “20 v. 1,” “Push Ups” takes on almost everyone who had dared come at him in recent weeks. (A$AP Rocky seemingly goes ignored, which says more about Rocky than Drake.) The barbs at Future are mild (“Your first no. 1, I had to put it in your hand” … OK, and?), and Drake swats Metro Boomin away like an annoying gnat with a MIDI controller. (Giving the producer only the tossed-off diss “Shut your ho ass up and make some drums” feels like the modern-day equivalent of Jay-Z giving his lesser rivals only half a bar on “Takeover.”) But the shots at Rick Ross, the Weeknd, and Kendrick are more pointed—and all work to varying degrees. Let’s take those in reverse order.
Kendrick is admittedly a tough person to diss. He’s a critically beloved, Pulitzer-winning artist who keeps his business to himself (unless he’s having double-album-long therapy sessions). Sure, he’s prone to theater-kid dramatics—the “alien voice/jazz beat” jokes were flying all weekend—but his track record is mostly unimpeachable. (That’s something J. Cole learned the hard way when he tried to lightly critique Kendrick’s catalog on “7 Minute Drill.”) But on “Push Ups” Drake did about as well as you could reasonably expect, especially assuming this is simply his opening salvo.
The easiest, most obvious jokes come at the expense of the famously short Kendrick’s height. (Most notably, “How the fuck you big steppin’ with a size seven men’s on?”—a pretty great punch line, if I do say so myself.) Those have caused a lot of moralizing, as though Drake should be above schoolyard-bully-style insults. But it ignores the reality that rap beef has always revolved around—and often been at its best when it leans into—childish name-calling. (Let’s never forget that “Ether”—widely considered one of the best diss tracks ever, to the point that the title has been a go-to verb in these kinds of battles—includes a reference to “Gay-Z and Cock-A-Fella Records.”)
But some of the other lines land pretty hard. For Drake—one of the biggest pop stars in history—to mock Kendrick for doing songs with Maroon 5 and Taylor Swift seems like a silly proposition on the surface. But it works because (1) Drake has never stooped to those specific levels of pandering, (2) Drake isn’t a Pulitzer-winning artist who’s staked his reputation on high art, and (3) the bars are, simply put, pretty good. (“You better make it witty!”) The Prince/Michael Jackson lines—a response to Kendrick on “Like That,” which was a response to Drake on “First Person Shooter,” if you’re updating your flow chart at home—are inspired. (“What’s a prince to a king? He a son” is an entendre that would make my colleague and noted Kendrick lover Cole Cuchna at Dissect proud. Lest you forget, Jackson’s son is literally named Prince.) And of course, there’s the Whitney/Bodyguard line, which is a reference to not only the diamond-selling singer and her most famous movie role, but also seemingly an allusion to Kendrick’s partner, Whitney Alford. Assuming it is a double entendre—and there’s little reason to doubt that it is—it’s impossible not to recall that Whitney Houston’s character slept with her bodyguard. We have no evidence that anything happened in Kendrick’s life to evoke that line, and I’m struggling to find a suggestion of something happening outside of “Push Ups,” but Drake’s too savvy not to understand what he was doing.
You’d figure he’d know better by now! In 2018, after years of subliminals fired at him by Pusha T, Drake responded with “Duppy Freestyle.” Amid a bunch of lukewarm shots about Pusha lying about his drug-dealing prowess, Drake made one of the worst mistakes of his career. “I told you keep playin’ with my name / And I’ma let it ring on you like Virginia Williams,” he rapped, invoking Pusha’s then fiancée, now wife, and giving Push carte blanche to respond however he thought appropriate. Within days, we had “The Story of Adidon” and “you are hiding a child,” bullying Drake into being a father publicly. It’s a blemish that no number of no. 1 records can ever fully erase.
You know that somewhere, Pusha T and his private investigator are waiting to get tagged into this mess, but at the moment, we can only assume that Drake’s not playing border control yet again. We can also assume, however, that of everything Drake said about Kendrick, this will be the line that truly lights the fuse on this powder keg.
If there’s fault to be found with Drake’s response, it’s that the central premise falls apart under light scrutiny. The “drop and give me 50” hook is a slick reference to infamous shit talker Curtis Jackson. But it’s also a callback to a video on Kendrick’s burner Instagram of him doing push-ups. On yet another level, the implication is that Kendrick is splitting as much as 50 percent of his profits with Top Dawg Entertainment, the label he was signed to for 17 years. It’s a fairly clever conceit—“The way you doin’ splits, bitch, your pants might rip” is a little bit of a groaner, but that’s what you sign up for with Drake—however, it ignores reality. First, Kendrick famously left TDE in 2022 to start a new venture named pgLang (distributed by Columbia Records, which also makes the Interscope lines in “Push Ups” feel dated at best). Second, up through Scorpion, Drake was signed to Young Money, an imprint of Cash Money. The parent label, of course, is run by Birdman, and it was once sued by Lil Wayne for $51 million for violating his contract and withholding vast amounts of money. As Pusha once rapped—directly to Drake—“The M’s count different when Baby divide the pie.”
The lesson here: Let the rapper who is not in an exploitative contract cast the first stone.
In hindsight, one of the strangest quirks of 21st-century pop music is that two of the three biggest stars in the business come from Toronto. That should make them natural allies, if not friends—aren’t Canadians supposed to be nice?—but Drake and the Weeknd have been anything but. They collaborated in 2011 on Take Care’s “Crew Love,” which began life as a solo Weeknd song before Abel gifted it to Drake. (While possibly gifting him much more.) But from there, a rift began: The Weeknd signed with Republic instead of OVO (a move no one can fault him for when you look at his career next to, say, PartyNextDoor’s); rumors surfaced about Drake dating the Weeknd’s ex Bella Hadid; and despite some one-off collaborations and show appearances, they never seemed to like each other very much. (The Weeknd appears to be as much of a fan of the hiding-a-child line as we are at The Ringer.)
So all things told, it wasn’t a complete shock when the Weeknd popped up on WE STILL DON’T TRUST YOU last Friday, gleefully crooning not-so-veiled Drake disses on “All to Myself.” (It’s worth pausing again to highlight “they shooters making TikToks,” an honestly inspired slight that pretty much sums up the Drake experience.) But Aubrey responded in kind on “Push Ups.” He fires a few shots at the Weeknd’s manager, Cash, claiming that he used to be a “blunt runner” for Chubbs, Drake’s head of security. (Update your flow chart—we are deep into Canadian music politics.) And more pointedly, he implies the Weeknd is showering men with gifts in exchange for gifts. It doesn’t matter that Drake may be evolved enough to admit he gets his nails done. You know what they say: It’s not a real rap beef until someone gets homophobic.
This may have been the most surprising development of the past three weeks. After a handful of classic collabs between them over a dozen or so years, it turns out that Rick Ross and Drake just don’t like each other. In the wake of “Like That,” Rozay posted an IG story of him bumping Kendrick’s diss. So when it came time for “Push Ups,” Drake made it clear he couldn’t overlook: He made allusions to Ross’s time as a correctional officer, his age, and in the leaked early demo version of “Push Ups,” Ross’s relationship with Diddy, who is currently the subject of a sex trafficking investigation and several sexual misconduct and abuse lawsuits. That line didn’t make the final version of “Push Ups,” but Ross obviously didn’t take it lightly.
This was something first pointed out by the former host of The Ringer’s NO SKIPS podcast and esteemed rap journalist Brandon “Jinx” Jenkins: “Champagne Moments”—which Ross apparently recorded Saturday in the hours after “Push Ups” dropped—captured the spirit that most rap fans were looking for in this melee.
Maybe it was the fact that the song was spread through sketchy MP3 sites and Dat Piff’s YouTube channel. Or maybe it was the pure vitriol. But if you wanted real beef, you’ve finally got it. Over the course of three verses, the Boss of All Bosses mocks Drake for leaks in his camp, using ghostwriters (an old reliable), and getting put on only because of Lil Wayne, all while repeatedly calling Aubrey a “white boy.” (It’s complicated.) It’s the type of directness and specificity that “Like That” lacked—but it also, like any great Rick Ross song, sounds luxurious. The most damning bits of “Champagne Moments,” however, come during the spoken word outro, when Ross [deep breath] says Drake is wearing funny clothes at his shows to hide the fact his six-pack is gone, that he also wears Dockers with no underwear (???), and that he had a nose job “to make [his] nose smaller than [his] father nose,” all because he was ashamed of his race. (Like I said, it’s complicated.)
Before you go Googling “Drake nose job,” just know that Drake and his mother have been texting about it, and they seem to think it’s silly (and possibly racist).
I’m cackling at the thought of Drake having to explain who Rick Ross is to his mom the same way I would have to with mine. But bringing Sandi into this hasn’t stopped Rozay from doubling down.
Maybe the actual lesson is don’t ask Rick Ross to do push-ups, because that’s light work for him.
As is typically the case with French, on the fringes. During that lengthy outro, Ross said he got involved only because Drake had sent a cease-and-desist order to French Montana’s team to have a verse of his removed from February’s Mac & Cheese 5. Well, the C&D worked because it doesn’t appear on French’s mixtape. But we now have a Streisand-effect situation on our hands because the verse is online and people are paying attention. And boy …
the unreleased Drake verse that Rick Ross said Drake sent a cease and desist to French Montana to prevent it from dropping
it was “Splash Brothers” off Mac & Cheese 5 pic.twitter.com/HmcfpLDRlh
— SOUND (@itsavibe) April 14, 2024
The speculation is that Drake is alluding to Kim Kardashian, Kanye’s ex-wife. And while we have no firm evidence that happened, Kim’s voice does appear prominently on last year’s “Search & Rescue.” (It’s complicated, messy, and petty—the only big three Drake really cares about.)
Let’s just hope we can get J. Prince on the line before someone (read: Kanye) does something even more foolish. We shudder to think what disses his brain would come up with.
Of all the (alleged) targets on “Push Ups,” the most unexpected isn’t even a rapper or singer. Ja Morant—the NBA All-Star who has been suspended by the league twice for flashing guns on IG Live—seemingly caught a stray from Drake. Not that it was entirely undeserved, because …
It would seem Ja took time away from shoulder rehab to insert himself in the biggest rap feud of the decade.
Toward the end of “Push Ups,” Drake addresses the “hooper that be bustin’ out the griddy,” seemingly a reference to Ja’s preferred means of celebration. But Drake also references that “little heartbroken Twitter shit,” possibly an acknowledgment of the rumors that he went on a date with Ja’s ex Brooklyn Nikole. (One day, we’ll have a conversation about how women get used as pawns in these kinds of battles. But for now, I’ll just highlight how this puts Drake’s song in the lineage of another Jay-Z diss track, “Super Ugly”—the “me and the boy AI” song. Not exactly a proud lineage with that one.)
If Drake and Ja can’t settle this one on (proverbial) wax, maybe they can take it to the hardwood. At least then, maybe J. Cole can prove himself useful.
Quite possibly! While “Push Ups” wasn’t exactly nuclear, it was still effective—and easily the best song to come out of the battle so far. And yet it feels like Round 1 of this battle is a draw, at best. Despite being light on specifics, Kendrick’s “Like That” verse did more damage than Drake’s four-minute, tea-spilling response. The most memorable lines to come out of Saturday may have been from Ross’s monologue about Dockers and cosmetic surgery. And Future and Metro have dropped two of the three best albums of the year in less than a month. You have to assume Kendrick has something else lined up—Drake alluded to as much in the original leaked version of “Push Ups,” suggesting that K.Dot’s song was recorded four years ago—and at this point, you have to assume someone else will jump into this Royal Rumble. (Cut to Pusha in the corner rubbing his hands together like Birdman.) “Push Ups” showed Drake can play effective defense—and he needed to after the embarrassment of “Adidon” six years ago—but if this was his best shot, Kendrick may not need to even say much in response to walk away the winner. (Though if we’re to believe this ScHoolboy Q tweet, we may find out if that’s the case soon.)
Well, the easy answer is DJ Akademiks’s engagement. But none of these tracks are likely to change anyone’s mind. The Drake haters have already deemed the response trash, Aubrey’s Angels have already declared this the next “Hit ’Em Up,” and A$AP Rocky can’t even get a crumb of a response, but is still Rihanna’s partner. Maybe the actual winner is us because rap hasn’t been this fun in years. (For this writer, since the first time I heard the phrase “you are hiding a child,” if I’m being honest.) Just sit back and enjoy, because as Rick Ross promised, we’re only in the first quarter.
It’s the 1st qtr,
This gone be a good game.
Grab a seat.— Yung Rénzél (@RickRoss) April 13, 2024
J. Cole’s response to this whole mess is admirable on a personal level, but embarrassing on a competitive level. Yet his apology also highlights a few realities of the situation: (1) Aside from Metro, these are all men hovering around the age of 40, and (2) no one has said anything they can’t take back yet. (Well, maybe aside from Ricky.) “I’m a better rapper than you” or “you’re short” or “your last album wasn’t that great” isn’t exactly a lethal blow. And even when it does get extremely personal, there’s precedent for rappers burying the hatchet—it took a few years, but eventually Nas and Jay-Z became collaborators. For my money, I expect we’ll see Drake, Kendrick, and Cole playing nice on a song (produced by Metro) at some point in the distant future. (Hopefully not with Future, though—Nayvadius is too cool for that shit.)
But you know, even if this alleged Big Three won’t get on a track together, we always have AI to make that collaboration a (virtual) reality. By that time, it’ll probably even be able to get the Drake sigh right. It may even give us an answer to what J. Cole was thinking.
Justin Sayles
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Gross-out humor reached its apex in 2010’s Jackass 3D, when the boys slingshotted a ripened port-a-potty 100 feet into the air, and a bungee-cord bounce sent fecal matter splattering all over Steve-O — in glorious 3D, no less! That was it. There was nowhere else to go. Or so I believed.
Sasquatch Sunset has upended comedic history.
The new comedy from filmmaker brothers David and Nathan Zellner stars Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough, though you wouldn’t know it without seeing their names on the poster; they’re both outfitted in cryptid costumes that conceal everything but their eyes. It’s really them, movie stars, roaming the woods in big hairy prosthetics. Like the apes in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the movie’s small pack of four sasquatches is on the verge of a new phase of evolution as they unlock the possibilities of the world and their own bodies. This leads them to defecate without restraint, make feral love in the open, and occasionally fondle their dongs. No bodily function goes untapped in Sasquatch Sunset, which happens to be a meditative communion with North America’s glorious woodland.
Sasquatch Sunset is extreme even for the Zellners, who are experts in thwarting expectations and upending movie tropes. Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter, their biggest breakout, stars Rinko Kikuchi as a Tokyo office drone drawn to Minnesota, supposedly in search of the bag of money buried in the snow by the characters in the Coen brothers’ neo-noir Fargo. Twisting urban legend into fantastical docudrama, the film earned indie cult status by threading quirk through tragedy to spin up a genre-defying odyssey. Their follow-up, 2018’s Damsel, let Robert Pattinson, Mia Wasikowska, and a tiny horse go ham on the Western genre. While less successful as commentary, the romp was pure Zellners — wicked funny, experimental, and eye-catching. Sasquatch Sunset continues the arc, as the brothers both broaden their humor and find a way to be even less accessible.
There is no dialogue in Sasquatch Sunset, and little plot. More National Geographic documentary than Harry and the Hendersons, the film follows the four Bigfoots over a year as their senses blossom and urges take hold. Eisenberg and Keough’s sasquatches already have a son (Christophe Zajac-Denek of Twin Peaks: The Return), but the pack’s alpha male (Nathan Zellner) is randy. Through grunts and howls, the humanoids negotiate their societal norms, paving the way for Keough and Zellner’s sasquatches to graphically, as the Bloodhound Gang would put it, “do it like they do on the Discovery Channel.” Keough’s sasquatch winds up pregnant, Zellner’s has a sexual awakening, and Eisenberg ends up introspective, ruminating in silence as his companions bang, and staring off into the trees as if wondering whether there are any more of them out there.
Cinematographer Mike Gioulakis breathes life into Sasquatch Sunset’s quiet stillness with his sun-soaked landscapes — the California redwoods are as much of a far out, man spectacle as the infinity of the night sky. And as an examination of the dawn of man that still brushes up against the existence of modern(-ish) mankind, Sasquatch Sunset occasionally connects with something profound about how we became the violent, vulgar, curious, loving beings we should all admit we are.
Where viewers’ mileage will vary is in the aggressive punctuation of introspective moments with absolutely profane humor. I will never unsee Eisenberg’s sasquatch having an explosive diarrhea episode all over a street after eating the wrong kind of berries. Or watching Keough go ape on her dangling breasts to firehose milk in every direction. Or a sasquatch live birth. The practical effects in Sasquatch Sunset are… astounding.
Image: Bleecker Street
There is a point to all of this. While the Bigfoots live off the land, they know little about their surroundings. Everything is a “first” in the wild, and the Zellners want us to feel it. How do you eat a fish if you’ve never seen one before? The sasquatches pop a few like water balloons. How do you care for a baby without any instruction? Smack it until it burps. What the hell is a mountain lion? A sex object, at least at first. The Zellners are right to imagine their sasquatches’ quest for survival as complete chaos, walkouts be damned.
Reactions to Sasquatch Sunset’s Sundance Film Festival premiere called it everything from a masterpiece to an utter misfire. I can’t imagine the Zellners would want it any other way; their vision is clear, and zero concessions were made to tame the backwoods journey into a whimsical, Disney Plus-ready drama. No, this is how it would really be, and the laughs (horrors?) within might even make Steve-O squint.
Is Sasquatch Sunset a good movie? A bad one? I will say I approve of it. I wanted to vomit three or four times before the credits rolled, but in an era where even indie films can feel like four-quadrant efforts on the cheap, what a relief that something so aggressively sick and sweet exists.
Sasquatch Sunset opens in a few major cities on April 12, and expands to a nationwide release on April 19.
Matt Patches
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Star Wars Outlaws, the open-world adventure from Ubisoft and Massive Entertainment, launches Aug. 30 for PlayStation, Xbox, and PC. Players will take on the role of smuggler Kay Vess as they attempt to seek their fortune across a variety of new and classic locations in the Star Wars universe.
While Respawn Entertainment’s open-world Star Wars Jedi: Survivor puts forth an unforgiving melee combat system akin to Dark Souls, Outlaws seems to channel gameplay elements from the Uncharted franchise. This includes sneaking around, quickly resorting to shooting first if things go sideways, and of course, an ample supply of left hooks.
Image: Ubisoft / Massive Entertainment
There are a three versions of Star Wars Outlaws that are available for pre-order. In this post, we’ll dig into:
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Image: Ubisoft, Lucasfilm Ltd.
Pre-ordering the $69.99 standard edition of the game will get you access to the Kessel Runner Bonus Pack which grants exclusive cosmetics for your ship and speeder. The standard version of Star Wars Outlaws is available to pre-order through Ubisoft, PlayStation, Xbox, the Epic Games Store, and Best Buy. Like most recent Ubisoft launches, there’s no Steam version in sight.
If you intend to play the game on PC via the Ubisoft Connect store, digital retailer Gamesplanet is offering a small discount on pre-orders. Normally $69.99, you can get Star Wars Outlaws for $62.99.
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Image: Ubisoft, Lucasfilm Ltd.
If you want three days of early access to Star Wars Outlaws, you’ll need to pre-order the $109.99 Gold Edition. This version of the game also gets you access to the season pass, which is currently slated to include at least two pieces of post-launch DLC, in addition to the “Jabba’s Gambit” mission at launch. You can currently reserve this version of Star Wars Outlaws from Ubisoft, PlayStation, Xbox, the Epic Games Store, and Best Buy.
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Image: Ubisoft, Lucasfilm Ltd.
The digital-exclusive Ultimate Edition costs $129.99 and comes packaged with everything included in the cheaper versions. Additionally, this premium version includes additional cosmetics in the form of the Rogue Infiltrator and Sabacc Shark bundles, as well as a digital art book with concepts and storyboards from the game. Currently, you can reserve this version of the game from Ubisoft, PlayStation, Xbox, and the Epic Games Store.
Alternatively, if you want everything included with the Ultimate Edition but don’t want to pay the full price, you can subscribe to Ubisoft Plus for $17.99 a month. This plan grants you all the same benefits, including three-day early access, and is available on PC and consoles.
Alice Jovanée
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Two days before Rosenberg and Dip appear in front of a SOLD-OUT crowd in Philadelphia, they’re together in New York City to discuss their big takeaways from last night’s Raw. (00:00) After that, Dip airs some grievances about the luxury towel industry, solicits bagel recommendations in Saudi Arabia, and then pulls it together for a little mailbag (28:40).
Then, Big E joins Rosenberg for a chat intended to be about WrestleMania, but becomes a much more important conversation (43:55). Rosenberg and Big E each open up about their own mental health struggles, and Big E sheds light on how meditation and living in the present moment has helped him overcome his demons. The guys then finish out the conversation with a discussion concerning the Bray Wyatt documentary and how Wyatt’s sudden death changed Big E’s perspective on life (01:08:45).
Thanks to Snickers for helping Big E join the program.
We’ll see you Thursday.
Hosts: Peter Rosenberg and Dip
Guest: Big E
Producer: Troy Farkas
Subscribe: Spotify / Apple Podcasts / Stitcher / RSS
Peter Rosenberg
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Ben, Matt, and Justin ask and answer 10 questions raised by the success of ‘Palworld,’ the controversies it has caused, and more
Join Ben, Matt James, and Justin Charity as they delve into the biggest gaming phenomenon of the year: Palworld. They ask and answer 10 questions raised by the game’s success, including how Palworld became so popular (06:05), whether it’s more than just “Pokémon with guns,” the controversies it has caused, whether Palworld will be a mainstay or a flash in the pan (62:33), and more.
Host: Ben Lindbergh
Guests: Matt James and Justin Charity
Producer: Eduardo Ocampo
Additional Production: Arjuna Ramgopal
Photo Suggestions: Stills from Palworld
Subscribe: Spotify / Apple Podcasts
Ben Lindbergh
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Lil Dicky wants to be taken seriously. The rapper born Dave Burd released his first album in nearly a decade last week, titled Penith (The DAVE Soundtrack). As the name states, it doubles as the soundtrack to Dave, Burd’s TV show not-so-loosely based on his own life as a rapper. Together, the show and the music create a meta feedback loop. The FXX show chronicles Burd’s creation and promotion of an album called Penith. (“Penith,” naturally, is pronounced like “zenith” crossed with the word “penis.”)
In addition to writing and starring in his own comedy, Burd also created the music for the show. Now he is releasing the songs featured in the show as a real-life album. Appropriately, he gave it the same inappropriate name from the show: Penith. It’s art imitating life imitating art imitating dick jokes.
“I’m just over here redefining the alpha male,” Dicky raps on his new song, “HAHAHA,” a nearly uninterrupted three-minute verse intended to flex his rapping bona fides. Later on the album, on the song “No Fruits or Vegetables,” the chorus goes, “I don’t eat fruit or vegetables, no fruits or vegetable.” Burd is the alpha man-child. But Burd’s show is so good that the next phase of his career will be taken seriously.
Dave has perhaps the best celebrity cameos in a television show since Entourage. At various points, the show features Justin and Hailey Bieber, Kendall Jenner and Kourtney Kardashian, and Megan Fox and Machine Gun Kelly. But the star power isn’t as impressive as the way it is used. In Season 1, Dave learns that a young fan of his has died, and the kid’s parents ask Dave to perform at the memorial service. But when Dave arrives, he sees Macklemore showing up to a hero’s welcome. The parents ask Dave to cancel because their son liked Macklemore better. In Season 2, Dave releases a song called “Kareem Abdul-Jabbar” and is elated when Kareem reaches out to talk to him about the song. But to Dave’s horror, Kareem ends up interviewing him about white rappers appropriating Black culture for a profile in Time.
Burd’s greatest strength has been taking his weaknesses and making them his armor. His rap name is based on his insecurities about having hypospadias, a birth defect that led to a surgery that accidentally created a second hole in his penis. (When Burd explained that childhood trauma to The Ringer back in 2020, he explained that when he pees, he has to cover the second hole with his finger or it comes out “like a Super Soaker.”)
On the show, Burd’s craven, shameless desire for fame is spun into an episode in which an internet rumor that he is dead goes viral. When he sees that he is the no. 1 trending person on Twitter, he decides to hide at a motel and wait an extra day for his songs to reach no. 1 on Billboard before announcing that he is still alive (even to his parents).
With the help of Seinfeld writer and Curb Your Enthusiasm producer Jeff Schaffer, the show touches on a stunningly wide range of jokes and emotions. Burd’s friend and real-life hype man GaTa, who also plays himself, gives a genuine and stunning view into the relationship between childhood trauma and sex addiction. This is from the same show where Burd, who is Jewish, hallucinates a conversation where he teaches Anne Frank how to do the “Whip/Nae Nae” dance.
Burd’s next trick is blurring the lines between his TV show and his music. At the end of the second season, Burd buys an ad on a billboard in Los Angeles to announce his (then-fictitious) album, Penith. His plan in the episode is to tape himself, practically naked, to the billboard as the “t” in “Penith” like Jesus on the cross. But Ariana Grande releases a single the same day, and nobody shows up to see him. The image is now the real-life album cover for Penith.
(Incredibly, two years after that joke appeared on the show, Grande released a single on January 12, 2024, one week before Burd’s Penith album came out in real life. Art imitates life, etc.)
Burd is hoping to do what his show did and defy genre. For white guys with white-collar jobs who love rapping Drake lyrics alone to themselves in the car, Lil Dicky is the embodiment of the American dream. He had an excellent career at the powerhouse advertising firm Goodby, Silverstein & Partners working on campaigns like the NBA’s legendary playoff commercials. But Burd quit a potentially lucrative and relatively creative job to become a rapper. Wear your weaknesses like armor, and you too can quit your job to be a famous rapper who writes a TV show about his own life and then convinces Brad Pitt and Drake to be in a season finale. We sat down with Dave to discuss his new album, cold-emailing Brad Pitt to be in his show, what comes next, his custom sex doll, and why he does not eat fruits or vegetables at 35 years old.
What was the weirdest thing about making a show about your own life that you didn’t see coming?
Probably just the amount of people asking, “Is this true? Is that true?”
You want to do a rapid-fire true or false?
Sure.
Rick Ross lent you a chain, and then you got robbed. Is any of that true?
No, no, no, it’s not true. I’ve never experienced anything like that, but GaTa has had a chain get stolen and has had to go through steps to get it back. So it’s like part of the details of that were inspired by stuff that GaTa’s gone through, but I’ve never experienced that.
So do you have a stalker? Was that real?
No, I don’t have a stalker, thank God.
OK. Did you order an absurdly expensive custom sex doll?
Yeah.
What did it cost?
I got the $3,000 model. There were other models that I could have splurged on. There’s a scene in the show where I have sex with the sex doll and very much based on—please, for all the readers, just know that I didn’t bring this up; I was asked this question, and I’m not trying to be intentionally vulgar.
But the first time I did have sex with the sex doll, I just remember being shocked at how heavy it was. Literally. My favorite sexual position is girl on top. So I don’t know why I thought that that was the right thing to do with this 80-pound doll, but that’s where my head went for the first time I ever experienced it. Then it was so hard to get it positioned. I remember by the time I was actually in a position where I could start doing anything, I was so physically tired. The wig started to fall off of it. I remember thinking in my head as it was happening it felt so much like Ex Machina.
Pre-nut clarity?
I didn’t find the experience to be overwhelmingly positive. It was really tiring. But after that, I just immediately went and got on my laptop and started writing things down and details that I don’t want to forget. I remember thinking, “This is such a crazy scene for the show.” So there are times where I’m living life and I’m thinking, “Wow, this is a great scene for the show.”
So you do that a lot? You’ve basically been chronicling this stuff for years?
Even before I had the show, when I was just a rapper going on tour with GaTa, I was like, “I know I want to be a comedian. I know that this life that I’m living right now as I’m a rapper going around the road, it’s really funny.” I don’t have a great memory. I’m not going to leave it up to hoping I remember the insane thing that happened in Iowa. I just have to write it down. So I’ve been writing this stuff down for over a decade.
Did you actually match with Doja Cat on a dating app?
I have matched with Doja Cat.
What happened?
We matched, and we talked. She was very sweet, and we’re friends, but we matched during a time where we didn’t work out. It was always very difficult. I think I was shooting Season 1 or something, or I was just very much doing something and she was doing something. It just was friendly banter, but then I reached out to her for the show, and I was like, “Remember that time we matched?” She was like, “Yeah.” Then I was like, “I want to make an episode based on online texting.”
On the show, you cannot ride a bike. Was that true? And have you learned?
I learned when I was a kid. What’s the phrase? You can’t forget how to ride a bike. Well, I forgot. If you put me in a meadow and there’s a path, I can ride straight. I’m just not good at turning. I’m not comfortable on the road. I don’t know how people can ride. Then if there’s a stick, they get smacked by a car. So, no, I’m no more comfortable riding bikes. I’ve always been a Rollerblader. I’m still a Rollerblader. They always think Rollerblading is a bit or that I’m joking, but no.
On your song “No Fruits or Vegetables,” the chorus goes, “I don’t eat fruit or vegetables, no fruits or vegetable.” When you say no fruits or vegetables, are we talking zero?
I mean, look, 10 years ago, I hadn’t even tried fruits or vegetables.
How old are you?
I’m 35.
Hmm.
When I was 25, I had tried an apple, but I didn’t eat any fruits or vegetables. Today, I’ve tried—when I say tried, I’ve taken a single bite—I’ve tried a lot of them. But I don’t on a regular basis eat any fruits or vegetables. I will eat something like a Caesar salad or a kale Caesar salad. Besides that, no. There’s a lot I haven’t tried. I have never tried a cherry. I could really list endless things that I’ve never tried.
Are you worried about getting scurvy?
I worry about my health in the sense that I live a very high-stress life, and I know that my diet can’t be good. It’s not a good diet. So I don’t know if I worry about scurvy, but I worry about when I go and get my levels checked that they’re going to be like, “Oh my God. The inside of your body is like tar.”
Why didn’t you try stuff?
I think it’s a textural thing for me and my parents. I put this in the show too. I always blame them for not forcing these foods on me when I was young so I could grandfather them in and eat them today, but my mom always said it wasn’t worth ruining her own life. Apparently, I really objected.
While we’re separating fact from fiction, you have a Coca-Cola commercial where you call Jordan Poole the best stealer ever. Do you want to correct anything on the record?
Yeah. I didn’t write that line. I questioned it when it came out, and I just had to go along with corporate. I didn’t want to put up a stink. I think they only had so many players that could be featured. Of course, I was the guy writing these ads 15 years ago, so I empathize with their position. I don’t want to be the talent on set being like, “No,” but I didn’t write that line, and I know that he’s not. Blame Coca-Cola.
You did a video with Benny Blanco where, among many other things, you ordered an unsliced bagel and said, “I’ll slice it myself.” Was that a bit for the video? Or do you actually want to slice a bagel yourself when you get a bagel?
So I find that if you get the bagel sliced by the bagel place, they have that machine that goes like this [uses his hands to mimic a bagel-slicing machine]. The bagel ends up being very texturally flat. But if you use your own knife and you slice it in a human way, there’s a rigidity and fluffiness to the bagel that you wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. It’s not that difficult to slice a bagel. Whenever I order a bagel from a bagel place, I always say, “Untoasted, unsliced.”
You want to create your own texture, map your terrain, create your own landscape?
Right.
Speaking of your own terrain, your new album doubles as the soundtrack to your TV show. Is this an album, or is it a soundtrack?
I don’t know why it would have to be one or the other. I feel like it’s labeled as Penith (The DAVE Soundtrack) because the common theme of the music is they’re songs that have existed in the show. But my process for making music is whenever I get free time from the show, I then work really hard on making music. I make music to make music, and I think about it existing on an album one day. Or I think about various ways it could exist, and then it’s time to make the show again. The show is obviously about me, and I’m a rapper in the show. So there’s obviously a need for music in the show. So oftentimes some of my favorite work can get plucked up and put in the show.
It varies in the sense that sometimes I make songs that aren’t for the show at all, and then I’m like, “Oh, OK, we’re making the show. We need music. What’s good music that we could build around and put in the show?” Other times I do make music directly for the show. I didn’t envision my second album being a soundtrack album, but I think this is the right thing to do because I love all this music and I want to get it out as opposed to just waiting to finish whatever’s coming next. I want people to have music, and it’s been so long.
Why is the soundtrack to your TV show coming out eight months after the show ended?
I wasn’t going to put it out during the writers strike. You can’t really promote it and do anything like that, and I just needed to finish. Songs will enter the show in this demo, unmixed form. Maybe there’s not a second verse on some things that I want to add a second verse to maybe. So it’s like certain songs had to get finished, and not only finished, but then mixed and mastered. It’s the whole process. And then we want to shoot videos for it. So it’s like we have to like them. We got to edit the videos, and there’s a little bit of a production timeline. You got to realize I’m working on the show every day up until four days before that episode. So it’s like there’s no time to do all those things that I just mentioned until after I wrap on the season.
You cranked out a lot of TV in a very short amount of time. That’s in an era when people aren’t really doing that anymore. Meanwhile, you have not put out a huge amount of music. My editor always says, “Go where your effort takes you.” At this point, do you like making TV shows, movies, whatever more than the music?
Well, look, I’ll bring it back to the beginning of my career. I always wanted to be a comedian, and that was my grand vision. I started making music with the hope of being found as a comedic presence. Then I fell in love with making music and began making realer and realer music that didn’t even have to rely on being funny as much and started doing real tours. Then my initial dream of being a comedian took a back seat for a few years because I was really rolling with the momentum of music and just going on tour and doing all these things, and the comedy thing had to be put on hold. Then the TV show happened, and it takes up all my time in that way. Then the momentum happened there, and it really started rolling. I had less and less time to make music.
I think what happened was when the strike happened, I was able to finish this body of work, and I thought it was a really good idea. I designed this project to be the type of thing where even if you’ve never seen the show, you can listen to it and sit, and it flows really well, because I think it really is a real album. But in the process of doing that, I’ve re-fallen in love with music again. I’ve always been working on it whenever I can, but I’ve now really been able to start focusing on it without being pulled in all these different directions. If you’re asking me present-day today, what I’m focused on right now, it’s music today. Will that change? Of course. I’ve always loved film and TV, and I will always have a future in that.
Season 3 of Dave ended in May. I know it’s up in the air, but will there be more of the show?
I’m trying to operate under the mentality of focusing on one thing at a time. Like you said, I’ve put out just three seasons. The amount of work that it’s taken to get those three seasons to where it’s been, it has been so unbelievably strenuous to the point where I still feel like I just wrapped Season 3. I feel like I just finished that, and I’m sure, yes, eventually, the story of my life will continue. I’m not kidding when I say I’m really excited about being focused on music for the first time in a while.
Last time we talked about how you have hypospadias. Just wanted to follow up and confirm: You did not get the corrective surgery?
No, nothing as an adult, thank goodness. My dick still is fucked up in the sense that I am peeing out of two holes, but I shouldn’t be. So there is a surgery that could fix that that I could get. I’m just not trying to deal with that. I’d rather just piss on myself.
How long were you friends with Benny Blanco until he was like, “I want to watch you pee”? Because I know he’s seen you pee.
Oh, very soon [after meeting]. Me and Benny are just such instant soulmate friends that I feel like within four times of hanging out, our dynamic was that of best friend brothers. So I’m sure I showed him very early.
You guys do seem like long-lost friends. In one of the early episodes of the show, you’re pulling gum out of his ass or something. For people who perhaps don’t have a relationship like that, how would you describe that bromance, why you and Benny are like that?
Yeah, obviously it’s a foreign relationship to certain people, but I feel like other people can relate to it. It’s weird. I get stopped in the street, and some guys are like, “I got friends who were like that too.” Then other people would be like, “That’s the weirdest dynamic I’ve ever seen.” So it varies, but really it’s just we love each other, not romantically, but just as best friends. I’ve never met someone who I just hit it off with. So we make each other laugh nonstop. Then even if Benny was a plumber, we’d still be best friends.
So to have your best friend who, when you meet this guy, you’re like, “Oh my God. That’s the guy who’s always meant to be my best friend in life,” and then he also happens to be the biggest music producer and best music producer in the world. It’s so fantastic to be able to work on this album with Benny, Penith. Literally, it’s like we’re finishing songs that I love while also sleeping over with your best friend. You’re not even a kid anymore, but it feels like you are. It’s really a joyous experience.
You repeatedly have said, “I will be the biggest star in the world.” You’re also one degree of separation removed from Taylor Swift [Editor’s note: Dave’s friend Benny is dating Taylor Swift’s friend Selena Gomez.] Deep down, when you’re watching this Taylor Swift Eras Tour, is any part of you like, “Damn, I got to do that”?
Not really. No, no, no. In my heart, I know that I’ll never be as big of a musician as Taylor Swift. It’s like ambitious, and she’s the biggest and best of all time. You know what I mean? So, yeah, I obviously have always believed in myself for sure. I think maybe 10 years ago or five years ago, we had our conversation, I would be more likely to say, “My desire is to be the biggest star in the world,” but I don’t even think that’s my actual desire anymore. I think my desire is to make the best stuff in the world and to feel really proud of the stuff that I make, and my desire is to be really, really happy in life.
But there are certain things that come along with being the biggest star in the world that I have no interest in experiencing for my fame. You know what I mean? You got to plan every single time you go outside, and I like the comfortable life I live of feeling like I have achieved the things that I want to achieve while not feeling burdened by a toxic level of fame that is truly damning to your life.
Some of Brad Pitt’s last words in the finale are explaining to you that fame is a prison.
I think Season 3 in a nutshell is it’s under the umbrella of looking for love and romance and then the bait and switch of realizing when you’re living in this endless loop of validation seeking, and then you’re not even truly loving yourself if every single moment is based on how you’re being received and whatnot. So the end message is there’s more to life than seeking validation. I think that’s a real valid lesson from Brad Pitt.
About the cameos: You’re just cold-emailing Brad Pitt?
I did cold-email Brad Pitt.
Will you send me a copy of that?
I won’t send you a copy. It’s between me and Brad, but it was really well-written, and I took my time with it. I didn’t write it in 20 minutes. I wrote it, and then I reread it the next day, and then I thought about it, and then I trimmed it. You only get one shot of Brad reading your email. People always say, “How do you get all the people in the show?” It’s a combination of two things. One, pretty much at this point, anyone who I’m getting in the show has seen the show and loves it. When I didn’t have a show, and I’m trying to get YG in a pilot for a show that he’s never seen, it’s a much harder sell to be like, “Trust me, it’s going to be great.” Now it doesn’t feel crazy to me to email Rachel McAdams and Brad Pitt, the biggest stars of our time, and be like, “Hey.”
Because what I find about the show is that it’s incredibly well-respected in the community of artists—I’ll say, the talent of L.A., the pool of actors, the musicians. It’s everyone’s favorite show, and I’m able to really sell them on it. Oftentimes that’s enough. But back in the day, I think when I moved to L.A. and I became friends with Benny, yeah, I think that it’s like our social circle, and I’m at a party, and I meet Kendall Jenner. I try to be a nice person whenever I’m meeting anybody. If someone likes you, they’re more likely to be like, “Yeah, I remember that guy. He’s cool.” But it depends. It’s just living life and meeting people when you meet them, but at this point, I really feel like it’s just the product speaks for itself.
People like Drake and Brad and Rachel and Killer Mike and Usher, these people, they love the show. There’s really no better feeling than having that belief of these people who are just icons, even to the point where I’ve grown up idolizing a lot of these people. Now they’re so willing to come play in my sandbox and trust me. There’s no more gratifying feeling that I’ve ever had than being on set with Brad Pitt, giving him notes, and him respecting what I’m saying. I can tell that he was looking at me the way he would look at any other director that he works with. This guy’s the biggest star of our time, working with my favorite directors of all time. I think that feeling as a filmmaker was so gratifying.
Last time we spoke, you told me the best day of your life was when you put out the video for your song “Ex-Boyfriend.” It was April 25, 2013. Ten years later, April 2023, you’re putting out Season 3 of a show about your life with Brad Pitt and Drake. So, with the utmost seriousness, I ask you, with everything you’ve done, 10 years from now, what would make you satisfied?
The truth of the matter is 10 years ago, if you asked me this question, I would’ve listed out all the things that I have achieved. When I describe 10 years from now, I’m not listing out, “I want an Oscar.” It’s more like, “I have kids and a family, and I’m married. Life is as good as it possibly can be, independent of all the art that I create.” The tricky thing about me is I’m so aware that wrapping your whole identity up in the art that you create is a never-ending cycle. There’s always more—there’s always improvements, things to do—and I try to infuse that in the show. Trying to be that lesson is something that I try to deal with on a day-to-day level.
Having said that, you’ve alluded to making movies next, including a screenplay about your childhood; you’ve said going through puberty with your condition was formative. Is that basically your next project? A movie about being a kid growing up with a messed-up dick?
[Laughs.] I think that I’ve said enough about the dick, if I’m being quite honest with you. There’s other TV series I’m developing, and I have a bunch of other things at play for sure. The future, there’s so many other things I want to do besides just make the show Dave and even just make music. I feel like I’m only getting started. I know I’ve been in this for 10 years, but I do feel like the things that I’ve done for 10 years have all been setups for the future. I don’t think I need to make another movie about [my penis].
I feel like so much of your stuff started with taking this insecurity about your penis and frankly wearing it like armor. Do you feel like you’ve grown up? Do you feel like you’re over it?
I’m not saying I’m over it in the sense that it’s not an important part of shaping who I am. I just think that I don’t need to make art about the same material every time. Do I feel like I’ve grown up? Yes and no. I definitely feel like the things that I’m saying now are different than the things I would’ve said five years ago, are different than the things I would’ve said 10 years ago. Do I feel any more ready to have children today than I did when I was 16 years old? No, I feel like I’m still a kid at heart, but I think a lot of people feel that way even when they have kids.
In 10 years, I’ll be 45 years old. My back’s starting to hurt. I want to figure out ways to make my back stop hurting. That’s one of my main priorities right now, is to fix my back this year. It’s not really answering your question, but do I feel grown-up? No, but I definitely feel like I’m actively growing up at all times. All you can do is just do that as things are thrown at you and as you live life. I don’t think I’ll ever feel grown-up until I’m dead. I think I’m about to enter the second half of my life. Maybe not half, but the middle of my life.
Well, it’ll be the middle third of your life as long as you start eating vegetables.
Yeah, I’m entering the second half if I don’t fix something.
Danny Heifetz
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In this special episode of Morally Corrupt, Rachel Lindsay talks to Jodi Walker all about her upcoming narrative podcast series An American Scandoval, which drops on the Ringer Reality TV feed December 26. Jodi dishes on what pushed her to create a narrative podcast about the exploits of Tom, Ariana and Raquel, what surprised her most during her reporting process, and what exactly made Scandoval such a huge moment in 2023 pop culture.
Host: Rachel Lindsay
Guest: Jodi Walker
Producers: Devon Baroldi
Theme Song: Devon Renaldo
Subscribe: Spotify
Rachel Lindsay
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After more than a decade, Rockstar Games will finally deliver a sequel to Grand Theft Auto 5, the multi-generational open-world crime spree that has sold more than 190 million copies. In December, GTA fans will get their first official look at the next Grand Theft Auto in trailer form, Rockstar has confirmed.
While Rockstar hasn’t given the next GTA game a proper name yet, it’s almost assuredly going to be titled Grand Theft Auto 6 (or Grand Theft Auto VI). And we know some details about GTA 6, after an unprecedented leak of the game in 2022. But thanks to Rockstar’s secrecy and the enormous task of following up one of the biggest games of all time, much about GTA 6 is still shrouded in mystery.
Here’s everything we do know about Grand Theft Auto 6 so far.
Rockstar hasn’t announced a release date yet for GTA 6, but parent company Take-Two Interactive might have revealed a release window for the next Grand Theft Auto game. In August, Take-Two told investors the company plans to see a “significant inflection point” during its 2025 fiscal year, which has been interpreted by analysts to mean that GTA 6 will be released sometime between April 1, 2024 and March 31, 2025. Obviously, that’s a pretty big window, but it could point to a 2024 release for GTA 6.
While GTA 6 may be targeting a 2024 launch, Rockstar is famous for delaying its biggest games in the name of polish. Its last major release, Red Dead Redemption 2, was publicly delayed three times. And back in 2013, Grand Theft Auto 5 saw a significant delay, slipping from its original spring release date to its ultimate September 2013 launch.
In other words, even if Rockstar gives us a release date or window by the end of 2023, history tells us that nothing is set in stone.
Rockstar co-founder and president Sam Houser has only confirmed an “early December” release for the first GTA 6 trailer. It may or may not coincide with The Game Awards 2023, which streams live on Dec. 7. It’s more likely that Rockstar will release the trailer on its own schedule, without competing with a bunch of other game announcements.
According to a massive leak of early gameplay videos and early reporting on the game, Grand Theft Auto 6 will be set in Vice City, the GTA version of Miami. That location was previously explored in 2002’s Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and that game’s 2006 prequel Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories. Those entries were set during the mid-1980s, but GTA 6 will reportedly tell a modern-day, Bonnie and Clyde-inspired story featuring two leads named Jason and Lucia, based on early gameplay videos. Lucia would be the GTA series’ first female lead playable protagonist in a mainline game.
In 2022, more than 90 videos of the in-development version of Grand Theft Auto 6 were published online at the message board GTAForums. The hacker responsible claimed to have accessed the videos — some 50 minutes in total footage — directly from Rockstar Games’ internal Slack.
The videos show robberies, gunplay, open-world driving, a police chase, a crowded nightclub scene, and conversations with full voice acting. The game footage was clearly not intended to be shown publicly, with debug programming elements visible on-screen at the time.
One of the longer videos showed the female player character robbing a diner, as well as threatening staff and customers, who react in fear to having a gun pulled on them. Then she and her male accomplice get in a shootout with police before jumping in the police patrol car and driving off. The game’s graphical treatment is quite realistic, but still consistent with GTA games’ style.
Reportedly since 2014, though Rockstar did not officially acknowledge the game’s existence until February 2022.
TBD, but PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X are a safe bet. Unlike previous Grand Theft Auto games, which saw staggered releases on consoles versus PC, it seems more likely than ever that Rockstar would release all versions of the game on the same day. But given Rockstar’s track record, the PC version could lag behind PlayStation and Xbox releases.
There’s also another platform coming that could be home to Grand Theft Auto 6: Nintendo’s Switch successor. Rockstar has embraced the Switch with releases like L.A. Noire, Red Dead Redemption, and Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy — The Definitive Edition, so don’t rule out an eventual release of GTA 6 on Switch 2.
Rockstar and publisher Take-Two haven’t announced a price point, but it seems likely that Grand Theft Auto 6 will carry a $69.99 price point, increasingly the standard for AAA video games with big budgets.
Don’t worry about those unfounded rumors that GTA 6 will cost $150, or will be priced per hour, based on misinterpreted comments from Take-Two boss Strauss Zelnick. There may be higher-priced premium or collector’s edition versions of GTA 6 that cost more than the industry-standard $69.99, but hold your horses (and your pre-orders) until Rockstar makes it official.
Rockstar hasn’t said, but given the massive popularity of GTA Online, which is also sold as a stand-alone experience, it will likely continue. Rockstar may have more grand ambitions for an online mode for GTA 6, and it may run two versions of the online experience for each game. The future of GTA Online is one of the biggest open questions — not to mention Rockstar’s trickiest needle to thread — when it comes to discussing GTA 6. Rockstar may very well keep those plans under wraps for the foreseeable future.
Michael McWhertor
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