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  • Forget Me Now: Ariana Grande’s Eternal Sunshine Enters the Canon of Pop Icon Divorce Albums

    Forget Me Now: Ariana Grande’s Eternal Sunshine Enters the Canon of Pop Icon Divorce Albums

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    Thanks to Taylor Swift’s ever-increasing monopoly on the subject, if there’s anyone who flies increasingly under the radar for writing and singing about love/breakups apart from Jennifer Lopez, it’s Ariana Grande. With her 2019 album, thank u, next, she reminded listeners of her premier status as a pop singer who serves as “an expert” on love—both falling in and out of it. With 2020’s Positions, Grande stumbled just a little bit as she ostensibly struggled to strike the perfect balance between the newly-minted “lockdown pop” genre and maintaining the sound and style that people had grown accustomed to with both Sweetener and thank u, next. On her seventh album, Eternal Sunshine, Grande (from the wreckage of divorce) marries the auditory and lyrical elements of her three previous records, adding just a dash of “Glinda whimsy” into the mix (indeed, it’s quite obvious that her time filming a musical like Wicked had an effect on her vocal and sonic stylings—sort of like it did on Madonna with Evita). 

    Most essential to the album, however, is the running theme that centers around Michel Gondry’s 2004 film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (written by none other than Charlie Kaufman). In terms of titles being continuously repurposed with each new generation that’s inspired by them, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was itself taken from a line in Alexander Pope’s 1717 poem, “Eloisa to Abelard.” On that note, Grande could have just as well made this a double album, with one side titled Ariana to Dalton and Ariana to Ethan. Instead, she chooses to “let listeners decide” between what’s real and what’s fabricated/embellished on the record. In other words, she’s not one to confess which parts were pulled from fiction and which from reality. As she told Zane Lowe during her Apple Music interview for the album, “You can pull from your truth, you can pull from a concept, you can pull from a film, from a story you’re telling, from a story about a relationship that your friend told you [this being a version of what Taylor Swift did for “You Belong With Me”]. From, you know, art is really…it can come from anywhere.” A very evasive answer, even if a true one (and also, try telling that to plagiarism fundamentalists). In Grande’s case, Gondry’s film serves as the “lovely costume” she wears to tell the story on this record. One that commences with “intro (end of the world).”

    It is, thus, right out the gate that one can feel the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind influence, being that Montauk is famously known as “The End of the World” due to its geographical location at the tip of Long Island, complete with craggy cliffs that are ripe for jumping from. Less romantically, though, it’s also sometimes referred to as “The Last Resort”—that is, the last option on Long Island once you get to it (unless you plan on turning right back around). This is the nickname that perhaps more closely applies to some of what Grande endured during her brief marriage to Dalton Gomez before causing a stir with her Ethan Slater dalliance. So it is that the first line she provides on Eternal Sunshine is the question: “Uh/How can I tell if I’m in the right relationship?/Aren’t you really supposed to know that shit?/Feel it in your bones and own that shit?/I don’t know/Then I had this interaction/I’ve been thinking ‘bout for like five weeks/Wonder if he’s thinking ‘bout it too and smiling/Wonder if he knows that that’s been what’s inspiring me/Wonder if he’s judging me like I am right now.” 

    Those versed in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind can immediately hear that, more than talking about herself and Slater, Grande is talking about Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet) and Joel Barish (Jim Carrey). The “interaction” in question easily speaking to both the first actual time Clementine and Joel met and the time they meet by “happenstance” on a train to Montauk (and also the train back from it) after their memories of one another have been erased. Concluding the intro with a verse that highlights the album’s key image, “sunshine,” Grande croons, “If the sun refused to shine/Baby, would I still be your lover?/Would you want me there?/If the moon went dark tonight/And if it all ended tomorrow/Would I be the one on your mind, your mind, your mind?/And if it all ended tomorrow/Would you be the one on mine?” (Way to channel Lana Del Rey’s choir confusing “mine” with “mind” on “The Grants.”) 

    Starting and ending that intro with a question should give listeners plenty of insight into her cryptic “Caterpillar-meet-the-Cheshire-Cat from Alice in Wonderland” mood. But the answer to whether Dalton Gomez would be on her mind if it all ended tomorrow is an overt no based on the second track, “bye” (much more final sounding than k bye for now). A seeming lyrical homage to Ariana favorite *NSYNC (how dare she support Justin after Britney’s memoir unveilings though) and their 2000 hit, “Bye Bye Bye,” as well as Beyoncé’s 2016 bop, “Sorry,” during which she illustriously urges, “Tell him, ‘Boy bye.’” Grande turns that into, “Bye-bye/Boy, bye/Bye-bye/It’s over, it’s over, oh yeah/Bye-bye/I’m taking what’s mine.” And what’s “hers,” in this scenario, is her mind, heart and soul (a concept that tracks based on Grande’s ethereal, hippie-dippy nature). Besides, as she points out, “This ain’t the first time/I’ve been hostage to these tears [a double allusion to “no tears left to cry” and the event that inspired it: the Manchester Arena bombing]/I can’t believe I’m finally moving through my fears/At least I know how hard we tried, both you and me/Didn’t we?/Didn’t we?” In keeping with the thank u, next precedent of peppering her friends on the album, she then references one of her besties, Courtney Chipolone, in the pre-chorus, “So I grab my stuff/Courtney just pulled up in the driveway/It’s time.” 

    And yet, even though she can acknowledge “it’s time,” her hesitation is tantamount to Ross Geller’s (David Schwimmer) not wanting to be divorced three times. And, considering Grande once announced, “One day I’ll walk down the aisle…/Only wanna do it once, real bad/Gon’ make that shit last,” it’s no wonder she has a hint of “Geller Syndrome.” Because, turns out, Grande fell prey to being a Hollywood cliche all too soon. Thus, the song “don’t wanna break up again” (a contrast to “break up with your girlfriend, i’m bored”). Which speaks so savagely of her marriage to Gomez that she refers to it as a “situationship,” as in: “This situationship has to end/But I just can’t refuse/I don’t wanna break up again, baby.” One might interpret as her trying to break things off with Slater before the media or anyone else finds out, but the Gomez allusions are clear in verses like, “I made it so easy/Spent so much on therapy/Blamed my own codependency/But you didn’t even try/When you finally did, it was at the wrong time.”

    Elsewhere, she goes back to her self-love motif (the one most clearly established on “thank u, next”) with the pronouncement, “Won’t abandon me again for you and I.” A slight Beyoncé nod (from yet another Lemonade track, “Don’t Hurt Yourself”) also comes again in the form of: “I’m to much for you/So I really gotta do/The thing I don’t wanna do.” And that is: break the fuck up in favor of a Munchkin. But, one supposes she’s been kinder about the break up in her lyrics than, say, Miley Cyrus (with singles like “Slide Away” and “Flowers”) as she waxes poetically, “Just one kiss goodbye/With tears in our eyes/Hope you won’t regret me/Hope you’ll still think fondly of our little life.” This, too, is kinder than what Clementine might say to Joel on the matter. 

    On that note, the next interlude on the record (because “intro [end of the world]” kind of counts as one, too), “Saturn Returns Interlude” (or what No Doubt would call Return of Saturn), is reminiscent of the voicemail left by Grande’s friend and tour director Doug Middlebrook just before leading into “in my head” on thank u, next. This time, it’s astrologer Diana Garland giving the wake-up call. Using these snippets of other people’s words, in both cases, serves as Grande’s way of processing the end of a relationship, de facto the end of an era. And how she will proceed into a new one with a more “awake” state of mind. In truth, “Saturn Returns Interlude” is less homage to the dreamy state of losing one’s memory as presented in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind than it is an homage to the dreamy state Dorothy Gale (Judy Garland) exists in upon entering the Land of Oz (because, yeah, Wicked is all over this record as well). Eventually, though, Dorothy wakes up from her literal dream. With no need of listening to the surreal astrological counsel of Garland as she explains, When we’re all born, Saturn’s somewhere/And the Saturn cycle takes around about twenty-nine years/That’s when we gotta wake up and smell the coffee/Because if we’ve just been sort of relying on our cleverness Or relying,you know, just kind of floating along/Saturn comes along and hits you over the head/Hits you over the head, hits you over the head, and says, ‘Wake up’/It’s time for you to get real about life and sort out who you really are.”

    Her words than become warped and echo-y as the interlude ends with, “Wake up. Get real” before leading into the eponymous “Eternal Sunshine.” A song that seems to shed light on what happens after the twenty-ninth year, when that “Saturn smackdown” hits, particularly if you’re Adele or Ariana—because, indeed, Grande is giving us her pithy divorce album the same way Adele did back in 2021 with 30 (released, trickily, when she was thirty-three). Or Madonna with 1989’s Like A Prayer, for that matter (released when she was thirty years old, so yeah, the return of Saturn theory tracks on monumental personal growth shifts that lead to inevitable relationship schisms). 

    Once again produced by Max Martin (along with Shintaro Yasuda and DaviDior), the R&B-infused sound remains something of a surprise coming from the “auteur producer,” better known for his deftness at crafting more pop-oriented melodies. Even so, he seems at home in Grande’s genre landscape, which patently favors house and R&B throughout. Opening with the lines, “I don’t care what people say, we both know I couldn’t change you,” Middlebrook’s aforementioned warning comes to mind: “Here’s the thing: you’re in love with a version of a person that you’ve created in your head, that you are trying to but cannot fix. The only thing you can fix is yourself.” And even that’s often too tall of an order sometimes. Still, Grande keeps expressing the desire to try. Though that can come in unexpected ways—like wanting to “wipe her mind” of the memories of Gomez. Another interesting tidbit presented in the song is the idea that perhaps Gomez was stepping out on Grande long before she did on him, this being alluded to in the lyrics, “Hope you feel alright when you’re with her/I found a good boy and he’s on my side.” This latest “good boy” (which makes Ethan Slater seem decidedly canine…in addition to his already-present associations of being Munckin-like and kind of gay), however, might end up eventually being branded as her “eternal sunshine.” Because when Grande says, “You’re just my eternal sunshine,” it isn’t exactly a compliment, so much as a declaration that this is now a person (read: man) she wants to forget ever existed for her own self-preservation. 

    Although delivered in an expectedly “chirpy” way, there’s an air of resentment in Grande’s lyrics, including, “I showed you all my demons, all my lies/Yet you played me like Atari.” After name-checking that “vintage” video game, it’s entirely possible the company could release a limited-edition “Ari Atari” (for optimal “brand synergy”)—but if Monopoly didn’t capitalize on “monopoly,” then probably not. As for the use of that brand as an actual word, it translates to mean “to hit a target” in Japanese. And Grande was very much “hit” by her marriage to Gomez, as much as she was “hit” by Cupid’s arrow when it came to Slater. This being the presumed theme of “supernatural” (incidentally, Madonna has a song titled this that was written during/for her own divorce album, Like A Prayer, and it now appears on the thirtieth anniversary edition of it). 

    Switching to a more ebullient state of mind, Grande sings, “It’s like supernatural/This love’s possessin’ me, but I don’t mind at all/It’s like supernatural/It’s takin’ over me, don’t wanna fight the fall/It’s like supernatural.” Unfortunately, she can’t see fit to stop there, continuing, “Need your hands all up on my body/Like the moon needs thе stars/Nothin’ еlse felt this way inside me/Boy, let’s go too far [this extending into breaking up a marriage]/I want you to come claim it, I do/What are you waiting for?/Yeah, I want you to name it, I do/Want you to make it yours.” It might be “sweet” were it not for the image of Slater, among other things, claiming and naming Grande’s pussy. 

    Perhaps sensing she’s gotten too personal, Grande then transitions into the more playful, more nebulous “true story”—the song she joked to Zane Lowe is “an untrue story based on all untrue events” (to reiterate, she’s in her “Caterpillar-meet-the-Cheshire-Cat from Alice in Wonderland” mood). To heighten that sense of playfulness, Martin provides Grande with something resembling a near-parody of a 90s R&B beat—making “true story” an ideal amuse-bouche before “the boy is mine.” Seeming to address, once more, the scandal she caused over her relationship with Slater, Grande asserts, “I’ll play the villain if you need me to [how very Lisa from Girl, Interrupted]/I know how this goes, yeah/I’ll be the one you pay to see, play thе scene/Roll the camеras, please.” These lyrics regarding acting out scenes not only appearing yet again after she sang (of Gomez), “So now we play separate scenes” on “eternal sunshine,” but also playing into the dual idea that she’s reenacting Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind for her own art and living her life in a fishbowl wherein, eventually, it has to be asked how much one is performing for the omnipresent cameras. That conditioning that comes with being expected to be always “on” (even when one is as open about mental health as Grande). 

    The caricature of 90s R&B then continues on “the boy is mine,” which is something like a follow-up to an unreleased Grande track called “fantasize” (side note: on “true story,” Grande deliberately wields that word in the line, “This is a true story about all the lies/You fantasize/‘Bout you and I.” The song (intended as a girl group parody for a TV show [could it have been Girls 5eva?]) offers more lyrical variations on NSYNC’s “Bye Bye Bye” with the lines, “I won’t keep waiting/I’m out the door/Bye, bye, bye.” On “the boy is mine,” however, Grande is choosing to remain all in. Doubling down on her avowal that the boy is hers, Grande claims, “I don’t wanna cause no scene/I’m usually so unproblematic/So independent.” Surely she’s being sardonic in the same way as Truman Capote (Tom Hollander) is by telling Babe Paley (Naomi Watts) in Capote vs. The Swans, “I’m famous for my discretion.”  Whether or not she’s joking, Grande wants listeners to know that she’s just giving the “bad girl anthem” fans want as opposed to acknowledging anew her Slater/homewrecker controversy. That said, Grande is certain to sound her most Brandy-esque (the same way she does for most of the Positions album) as she sings, “Somethin’ about him is made for somebody like me/Baby, come over, come over/And God knows I’m tryin’, but there’s just no use in denying/The boy is mine.” 

    Soon, the lyrics become rather reminiscent of “break up with your girlfriend, i’m bored” (both lyrically and sonically, even though it’s supposed to “interpolate” the original Brandy and Monica version). This most apparent in braggadocious projections such as, “I can’t wait to try him/Le-let’s get intertwined/The stars, they aligned/The boy is minе/Watch me take my time.” As though to say, “It’s only a matter of” before she gets her object of desire. Or, as Madonna-channeling-Breathless Mahoney said on “Sooner or Later,” “Sooner or later there’s nowhere to hide/Baby, it’s time, so why waste it in chatter?/Let’s settle the matter/Baby, you’re mine on a platter I always get my man” and “If you’re on my list, it’s just a question of when.”

    And, even if that man on her list happens to be “taken,” Grande has the (im)perfect response for her detractors by way of “yes, and?”—the latest song to join the ranks of the “clapback at the critics” genre. What’s more, its video, too, pays tribute to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind by way of indicating that the “art space” (a.k.a. warehouse-looking joint) she’s performing in is in Montauk. But when she demands of her critics with arrogant confidence, “Why do you care so much/Whose dick I ride?” she fails to take into account that many might care for the simple purpose of avoiding STDs.

    The upbeat defiance of “yes, and?” is subsequently contrasted by “we can’t be friends (wait for your love),” the second single from Eternal Sunshine. As she gives her best imitation of Robyn on Body Talk (courtesy of Martin and ILYA being extremely well-versed in such Swedish-helmed Europop), Grande paints the bittersweet portrait of a woman who is a clear believer in the message of When Harry Met Sally. And, once more, it’s a song that can double as a depiction of her relationship dynamics with both Gomez and Slater. For it’s a track that’s capable of speaking to not wanting to be friends with an ex (let alone an ex-husband) and not wanting to stay in the friend zone at the outset of a dynamic. Thus, “We can’t be friends/But I’d like to just pretend/You cling to your papers and pens/Wait until you like me again.” And while the part about “clinging to papers and pens” sounds like a decided real estate agent dig and/or reference to divorce papers, there’s also an element that gives a nod to Grande not wanting to pretend that she didn’t feel attracted to Slater despite the taboo (in every way) nature of such a yearning. 

    The jury seems to lean more toward “we can’t be friends (wait for your love)” being about Gomez, if the transition into “i wish i hated you” is anything to go by. Reverting to the dreamy-sounding aura listeners heard on “Saturn Returns Interlude” and “eternal sunshine,” the melancholic tone is the most “divorce-y context” of the album. As such, Grande commences it with the verse, “Hung all my clothes in the closet you made/Your shoes still in boxes, I send them your way/Hoping life brings you no new pain.” Then, for the coup de grace of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind references, Grande says, “I rearrange my memories/I try to rewrite our life.” Mostly, by trying to delude herself into thinking it never happened. Because, like Don Draper said, “It will shock you how much this never happened.” Memory’s funny like that, a tool for self-preservation as much as it is self-harm. As the most musically sparse song on the record (thanks to production help from ILYA) it stands out as a “little gem” in the vein of “pov” from Positions.

    In fact, the entire end of the album has that “little gem” feel, changing sonic tack as well on “imperfect for you” (a personal favorite of Grande’s). As the second to last song, it signals Grande’s complete transition away from her relationship with Gomez and into the “delightful” abyss of her new one with Slater. Who is directly referenced with the urging, “Throw your guitar and your clothes in the backseat/My love, they don’t understand.” Grande describes how, upon meeting him, “Now I just can’t go where you don’t go” (which smacks of Tove Lo singing, “Come whatever, now or never/I follow you anywhere you go/Yeah, wherever, doesn’t matter/I follow you anywhere you go/Stay together, you make me better”).  

    Grande also addresses the appeal of Slater in terms of assuaging her ubiquitous anxiety, remarking (from both her and Slater’s perspective), “And usually, I’m/Fucked up, anxious, too much/But I’ll love you like you need me to/Imperfect for you/Messy, completely distressed/But I’m not like that since I met you/Imperfect for you.” 

    Having expunged her memory of Gomez by the end of Eternal Sunshine, it leaves the door wide open (no sexual innuendo intended) for Slater to be fully focused on for “ordinary things” featuring Nonna (not a rapper, but rather, Ari’s grandma, Marjorie Grande, who also cameos on thank u, next just before “bloodline”). Blissing out on the idea that, “No matter what we do/There’s never gonna be an ordinary thing/No ordinary things with you/It’s funny, but it’s true,” the most important takeaway is what Grande concludes the song with in wielding a recording of her grandma (of which she has many). That piece of wisdom at last answering the question she posed at the beginning of the record: “How can I tell if I’m in the right relationship?”

    Per “Nonna,” the answer is simple: “Never go to bed without kissin’ goodnight. That’s the worst thing to do, don’t ever, ever do that. And if you can’t, and if you don’t feel comfortable doing it, you’re in the wrong place, get out.” The thing is, there’s probably a few relationships one will have in their life where they can feel comfortable not going to bed without “kissin’ goodnight.” In which case, the question actually still remains. 

    So maybe it’s better to extrapolate one other brief kernel from Eternal Sunshine. Specifically the one on “we can’t be friends (wait for you)” where there remains a hint of the sologamist as Grande self-soothes, “Me and my truth, we sit in silence/Baby girl, it’s just me and you.” Sounds a lot like the way she talks to herself on “thank u, next,” assuring, “I met someone else/We havin’ better discussions/I know they say I move on too fast/But this one gon’ last/‘Cause her name is Ari/And I’m so good with that.”

    As for the men that provide an “interlude” in between the core relationship she has with herself, well, they certainly offer solid gold inspiration no matter what they look like. And besides, as Grande also says on the abovementioned song, “I don’t wanna argue, but I don’t wanna bite/My tongue, yeah, I think I’d rather die/You got me misunderstood/But at least I look this good.” Amen. Now please resume the recitation of your Eternal Sunshine hymnal without wondering why Grande failed to include, “I’m just a fucked-up girl who’s lookin’ for my own peace of mind; don’t assign me yours” somewhere on the record. Alas, Halsey already did that on 2020’s Manic (in addition to naming one of the songs on it “clementine”).

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    Genna Rivieccio

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  • Joining An 00s-Related Trend in Declaring What Amounts to “That Wasn’t Me, That Was Patricia,” Jennifer Lopez Says “J. Lo” Was Just A Larger-Than-Life Character

    Joining An 00s-Related Trend in Declaring What Amounts to “That Wasn’t Me, That Was Patricia,” Jennifer Lopez Says “J. Lo” Was Just A Larger-Than-Life Character

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    Like Paris Hilton saying she was “playing a character” (specifically, that of a dumb blonde) during her early to mid-00s heyday, Jennifer Lopez is the latest aughts figure to join that bandwagon. This “revelation” arrives in her documentary, The Greatest Love Story Never Told, a companion piece to This Is Me…Now: A Love Story—itself a companion piece to This Is Me…Now the record. Her announcement of this comes about thirty minutes into the film, as she’s getting her hair styled (complete with clip-on bangs). The man “doing her up” declares, “There’s J. Lo.” Lopez confirms, “There she is.” This assertion that the alter ego of Jennifer Lopez is someone entirely different serves as a launchpad for Lopez to then narrate that the persona of “J. Lo” was a “larger-than-life character” she created to fulfill the ultimate fantasy of who she always wanted to become: rich, famous and powerful. A girl from the Bronx who done good. 

    As director Jason B. Bergh (who also brought us another J. Lo documentary, Halftime, in 2022) then cuts to images and footage of Lopez from that prime era of “J. Lo,” Lopez explains, “J. Lo was created back then, with those first three albums. This Is Me…Then, ‘Jenny From the Block’ and all that. In a way, she’s kind of a larger-than-life character. It was really me becoming who I always dreamt of being.” Alas, once the impossible dream/expectation becomes a reality, there’s a certain existential crisis that tends to occur. One that is unique to the world of celebrity and something that Taylor Swift spoke on in her own “intimate documentary,” Miss Americana. For Swift, the pivotal moment of her existential dread showed up at the 2016 Grammys, with the singer recalling, “I had won Album of the Year at the Grammys for a second time, which I never thought was a possibility. And I remembered thinking afterward, ‘Oh my god, that was all you wanted. Oh god, that was all you wanted, that was all you focused on.’ You get to the mountaintop and you look around and you’re like, ‘Oh god, what now?’” 

    For Lopez, that moment likely came with the success of her sophomore album, titled, what else, J.Lo. Released on January 23, 2001, just three days before her then-latest movie, The Wedding Planner, the chart success of the album was further complemented by the fact that The Wedding Planner would top the box office at the same time. An unprecedented coup for a woman who was very much proving her status as a triple threat: actress, singer, dancer. (Way more impressive than Lauryn Hill boasting, “Rapper-slash-actress/More powerful than two Cleopatras.) Remaining her highest-selling record to date, J.Lo did establish that larger-than-life persona Lopez refers to in Greatest Love Story Never Told. It also provided a jumping-off point for her to create entire lifestyle brands around it (similarly to Paris Hilton, who has presently branched out into cookware), from J.Lo by Jennifer Lopez to Glow by JLo—not to mention the recent establishment of her skincare line, JLo Beauty (because everyone who’s anyone has a skincare and/or makeup line now). What’s more, even before Paris Hilton tapped into her highly profitable The Simple Life “character” (which the world wasn’t officially introduced to until December of 2003), Lopez was setting the trend on what it meant to, let’s say, “become the character you always thought you could be.” The avatar of yourself that would sub in for the less glamorous version. This being part of why it’s rather ironic that one of J.Lo’s most well-known singles was titled “I’m Real.” 

    But, in the end, Lopez appears to want to clarify, there was nothing truly real about “J. Lo” all along. Though, like the portmanteau “Bennifer,” her personal nickname did establish another trend in shortening fellow celebrity names in an equivalent fashion (e.g., J. Law for Jennifer Lawrence). Not to mention Bennifer serving as the genesis for subsequent celebrity couple monikers, including TomKat, Brangelina, Kimye and, more recently, Traylor. Lopez herself even had another couple name with Alexander Rodriguez: J-Rod. (So much for Ben Affleck being a “special” exception for her with Bennifer.) But the artifice of Persona (that’s right, with a capital p) fortified by such names that ultimately function as distancing-from-mere-mortality alter egos seemed, by and by, too much for Lopez to live up to the pressure of. Or so she would have her audience believe in Greatest Love Story Never Told, further expounding, “This Is Me…Now is about truth. And facing the truth of who you really are and embracing that. And the truth is, I’m not the same as I was twenty years ago.” Granted, this isn’t exactly “revelatory,” as few, if any, people stay the same after the passage of two decades, but it is meant to tie into the idea that the construct of “J. Lo” never really existed.

    Just as “Britney, bitch” or Paris “That’s Hot” Hilton never did. These latter two 00s personalities also appeared to suffer the same plight as Lopez when she describes, “I was always very much about show business. Put your best foot forward, don’t let them see when you’re suffering, don’t let them see when you’re hurt… Like, that’s what my life was. But then I realized that I wasn’t being kind of authentic to myself” (emphasis on the Freudian slip choice of words “kind of”—because, in the present climate, “kind of authentic” is better than full-stop inauthentic). The same epiphany eventually descended upon Hilton and Spears (finally “allowed” to be authentically herself after being freed from her oppressive and never-should-have-happened conservatorship). 

    And while some are still calling bullshit on J. Lo’s so-called authenticity with This Is Me…Now (see: The New York Times headline, “Jennifer Lopez and This Is Me…Now: Is She For Real?”), but it can at least be said that perhaps she’s angling closer to (some iteration of) the truth about who she really is. Or, rather, as close to “the truth” that a celebrity who’s been, for so long, larger-than-life can get. Or, as occasional J. Lo nemesis, Madonna, once put it, “I am going through the layers and revealing myself. I am on a journey, an adventure that’s constantly changing shape.” In the erstwhile J. Lo’s case, however, that shape remains consistently curvaceous.

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    Genna Rivieccio

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  • Selena Gomez’s “Love On” Can Act As Both Sequel or Prequel to “Single Soon”

    Selena Gomez’s “Love On” Can Act As Both Sequel or Prequel to “Single Soon”

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    As Selena Gomez continues to give listeners a sonic sample of what might constitute her next album, it’s plain to see she’s been in a “playful” mood of late. And it arguably started back up again with “Single Soon” (for, although her collaboration with Rema on a remix of “Calm Down” was playful enough, it was followed up by the melancholic aura of “My Mind & Me”). With “Love On,” Gomez expands on the universe of l’amour that she dissects on “Single Soon,” the former being interpretable as either a prequel or sequel to the narrative presented on the latter (even if unintentional—though if it were Gomez’s bestie, Taylor Swift, doing it, it would be very intentional indeed). 

    As for the “Love On” video, Gomez finds herself in familiar territory: lauding the French (which isn’t always an act that many are willing to partake in). Something she also did in the 2018 video for “Back To You,” a blatant homage to Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot Le Fou, with Gomez embodying the Anna Karina role of Marianne Renoir. In a similar fashion to that visual, “Love On” also starts with wistful-sounding, “old-timey” French music as the camera pans across a stairway inside the Villa de Leon in Malibu. A stairway filled with couples of all colors and creeds kissing while a nostalgic voice sets the French tone with, “Qu’est-ce que je vais te nommer? Amour. Amour tendre.” We then see Gomez amid the sea of couples with her own “man”: a French bulldog she holds in her arms while wearing a Del Reyian black bow in her hair and a bright pink dress. The first of many “couture pieces” we’ll see in the video, appropriately directed by Frenchman ​​Gregory “Greg” Ohrel. The next one, as a matter of fact, is a blue halter dress paired with a cocktail hat as Gomez sits out on a balcony overlooking the Pacific Ocean amid other “merrymakers” who are drinking, what else, cocktails. The statue of a naked man behind them is also sure to remind viewers that they’re in France—by way of Los Angeles. Because, as Gomez herself stated, the video was inspired by the two months she spent living there while working on the “musical crime comedy” Emilia Perez. And yet, there’s something decidedly more “South of France” than there is “Parisian” about the visuals. 

    In another scene, Gomez gets meta with a close-up on the Ramon Casas painting entitled “After the Ball,” followed by a pan-down of her lying in the same position with a book and a black dress, just like the exhausted woman in the painting. In contrast to the reason why she might be exhausted in “Single Soon” (her emotions drained from having the same arguments over and over again), any reason she might be drained in “Love On” is likely to be strictly physical, if you take one’s meaning. Though she appears to have plenty of time for rest and relaxation as Ohrel then cuts to a scene of her in a white bathrobe and towel around her head (it’s very Madonna in “Vogue”), it’s probably just so she can restore her energy so as to “turn her love on” again. These days, that love is turned on for record producer Benny Blanco, a clear inspiration for the track (even if Gomez started working on it with co-songwriter Julia Michaels a while back). 

    As such, Gomez has plenty of lascivious lyrics, including, “I deserve an applause for/Keepin’ you up late/‘Til you can see straight.” This being reminiscent of Ariana Grande on “34+35” singing, “Watchin’ movies, but we ain’t seen a thing tonight/I don’t wanna keep you up/But show me, can you keep it up?” This in addition to Gomez channeling Grande on that song when the latter declares, “Baby, you might need a seatbelt when I ride it.” For Gomez, that translates to, “I’m a rollercoaster ride, baby, jump on.” Elsewhere, Gomez favors the Fifth Harmony method of making work analogies that double as sexual ones in the form of: “Clock in, baby, get to work/Night shift, but with all the perks/Time stamping when you fell in love/Time can’t mess with us.” And, because sex and food go hand in hand when it comes to indulgence and desire, there’s plenty of food play in the song and video, too. Chiefly, when we’re given a POV shot from the croissant’s perspective as Gomez downs it like a dick (after dipping it in her coffee, bien sûr). There’s also another scene involving ballerinas and French fries (the ultimate dichotomy). Lyrically, the main “foodism” consists of Gomez chirping, “Why are we conversing over this/Steak tartare, when we could be/Somewhere other than here/Making out in the back of a car?/Or in the back of a bar.” Gomez seemingly does have a thing for ditching the first location and doing something involving a car (if the “Back To You” video is anything to go by). 

    She’s also fond of ditching one outfit for another as we see her change into a retro-inspired look out of the 60s in a form-fitting, rainbow-striped mini dress and high ponytail before then switching into a balletcore frock and topping her head off with yet another ribbon (this one white)—surely Del Rey can’t abide. As night falls on the balcony, Gomez continues to radiate her effusiveness now that her love has been “activated,” dancing casually in a yellow gown with the fabric bunched into a rose shape at the center. Being that this is such a fashion-heavy video, it’s only right that one of the lyrics should be, “If you think about fallin’/Got you covered like garments.” 

    Needless to say, with Gomez being a Cancer, once her love is turned on, it might become overly smothering for some people (save for Tauruses, who can never get enough displays of love and devotion, especially if conveyed through decadence and food). Though maybe not a Pisces like Benny Blanco… If it does, however, Gomez can always revert back to her Sex and the City-esque single girl anthem, “Single Soon”—both prequel and sequel to a song like “Love On,” which speaks so overtly about the romantic, sex-drenched beginnings of relationships rather than the ends. Even though the French are skilled in talking about le fin de l’amour in their art as well (a skill that Taylor Swift, unfortunately, riffed on for the “ME!” video—so thank dieu Gomez came along to rectify that visual for her “better half”).

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    Genna Rivieccio

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  • Olivia Rodrigo and the Myth of “Kennedy Class,” Or: The Kennedy Fallacy

    Olivia Rodrigo and the Myth of “Kennedy Class,” Or: The Kennedy Fallacy

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    In keeping with the tradition of elevating the Kennedys to the height of glamor in American politics (which should be telling of how “glamorous” American politics is), Olivia Rodrigo’s opening track for Guts, “all-american bitch,” wields a more than somewhat false simile. Specifically, “I got class and integrity/Just like a goddamn Kennedy, I swear.” But, unless this line is meant to be facetious (as many of the others in the song are), Rodrigo seems as misinformed as she was about which short story collection of Joan Didion’s she actually took inspiration from in coming up with the title for this song. For it’s no secret now (as it scarcely was then) that the Kennedy name/presidency was mired in crookedness (though only Marilyn can truly say if that applied to JFK’s dick as well as his code of ethics).

    From the rumors of John’s patriarch, Joseph Kennedy Sr., pulling the necessary strings to nudge then-mayor of Chicago Richard Daley to, let’s say, influence certain Cook County ballot boxes to using the Secret Service to ferry his various mistresses in and out of bedrooms, the Kennedy name—particularly in its primary association with “Jack”—hardly equates with class or integrity. And definitely not discretion. Indeed, JFK was about as discreet as Miss Monroe’s Jean Louis gown at his forty-fifth birthday celebration/Democratic Party fundraising gala in 1962. A spectacle that occurred mere months before JFK probably killed her (with some help from RFK, perhaps—and Teddy, per a slightly offensive 1985 SNL sketch in which Madonna plays Marilyn…this being only fair considering she would end up sleeping with John Jr.). A “conspiracy theory” that certainly wouldn’t be classy if it turned out to be true. But even if it’s not (which remains debatable to many), there are still plenty of other ways in which JFK hardly radiated class. The same went for the rest of his “clan” (as the Irish like to call families—particularly families of a storied and extensive lineage). Whether it was RFK’s own affair with Marilyn (and Jackie, for that matter) or Ted Kennedy leaving the scene of the crime he committed by driving himself and RFK campaign staffer Mary Jo Kopechne off the road while drunk.

    Yes, the infamous Chappaquiddick “incident” was one of the most peak examples of true “Kennedy class.” Kopechne, incidentally, was moved to enter the political realm in the first place after seeing the JFK inauguration speech during which he pontificated, “…my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” Soon after, Kennedy would bilk the country and its highest office of all the privilege he could get out of it. And what Kopechne ended up doing “for Teddy” rather than her country, unfortunately, was dying. Though, of course, JFK could say the same.

    Luckily for Joe Sr., he still had plenty of children to bet on in the race called Building an American Dynasty. And at the top of the list after Joe Jr.’s death was Jack. A man whose penchant for instinctively sweeping any wrongdoing beneath the rug was not much better than what Teddy exhibited with Chappaquiddick (hence, taking hours to report the accident, and Mary Jo’s death along with it). But what was to be expected of the Kennedy sons when it came to shirking transparency at all costs? They learned from the best burier of secrets and shame, after all: Joe Sr. Better known as the brainchild behind pushing for his daughter, Rosemary, to get a lobotomy because she was prone to having seizures and erratic/violent mood swings. Being that this was 1941, slapping her with the then-current panacea of a lobotomy was, sadly, par for the course. She was just twenty-three when the procedure ended up incapacitating her and preventing her from speaking in a way that could be understood as anything other than gibberish. So what else would Joe Sr. do but clean up the “mess” he made by burying Rosemary’s existence (hiding her whereabouts for decades) in a Wisconsin institution for the disabled? Never mind that Joe Sr. was the one who did the disabling by trying to “fix” a person who wasn’t broken. Again, real fuckin’ “classy.”

    When it comes to the generation of children Joseph Sr. begat, it was apparent that they (particularly the men) were taking a page out of the lawless, devil-may-care playbook he had nonverbally written for them. Most notably when it came to his propensity for stepping outside of his marriage with a celebrity. Even at a time when the very concept of “celebrity” was still germinal in its movie star iteration. Nonetheless, during the silent movie era, there were few bigger precursors to major stardom than Gloria Swanson. And after being among the few to actually increase his bank balance in the wake of the 1929 stock market crash, Joe Sr. found himself orbiting the Hollywood scene, buying up stakes in studios and theaters to build on his “portfolio” of wealth.

    It was during this time that he encountered Swanson (in the days before she became Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard)…and proceeded to ruin her life. Not just by ousting her husband at the time, Henri de la Falaise, but also by defrauding her out of millions of dollars after becoming her business manager, in addition to her paramour. It was when Joe decided to gift her with a Cadillac and expense it on her production company’s account that she finally had to call him out. A move that reportedly sent him out the door without ever speaking to her again. With this in mind, John’s behavior toward Marilyn almost looks positively princely (Rodrigo influencer Lana Del Rey also seemed to think the same of his behavior toward Jackie, if the 2012 video for “National Anthem” is anything to go by).

    As the third generation of Kennedys (this being counted from the start of Joe Sr.) rose to prominence, it became quickly apparent that boorish behavior was something that ran in the blood. For JFK’s lone son, John Jr., had his own predilection for extramarital affairs. Only rather than being the married one in the scenario, he preferred to be the paramour. Specifically, to Madonna, who was “legally bound” to Sean Penn at the time of their tryst in 1988. Though Madonna might remind that Penn was a bit of a stick in the mud when it came to having any fun or lapping up the spotlight that went with the territory of being a major celebrity. Made more major by being “attached” to one of the biggest stars in the world. And rather than repelling JFK Jr., as it did Sean, the former seemed to be all the more titillated because of her Marilyn Monroe-level fame…not to mention aesthetic. And yes, Madonna was already well-known for paying homage to one of the twentieth century’s greatest icons early on in her career.

    Perhaps most famously when she re-created the famed “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend” sequence from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes for her “Material Girl” video in 1985. Funnily enough, it was Sean who met and fell in love with Madonna on that set—not John Jr. But that didn’t mean Marilyn’s specter wouldn’t still haunt their eventual relationship. After all, Jackie insisted John call off his romance not because Madonna was a married woman, but because she was way too much of a Marilyn fangirl. With “class” like this, Jackie really had become a full-blown Kennedy.

    Even those roundaboutly connected to the Kennedys couldn’t seem to avoid the taint of uncouthness and/or sexual impropriety. One such prime example being Andrew Cuomo. Married to Kerry Kennedy for fifteen years (from 1990 to 2005), his descent into shame may have taken decades to occur, but when it happened, oh how it happened big. In a scandal that broke at the end of 2020 (just when Cuomo was riding high on praise [most of it self-given] for his handling of the pandemic). In the end, Attorney General Letitia James released the findings of an independent investigative report that stated Cuomo sexually harassed eleven women during his tenure as New York governor (and who knows how many others before that?). Needless to say, some standard-issue male Kennedy bullshit rubbed off on him. That, and probably working within the Clinton administration. Bill himself being a “renowned” acolyte of JFK—managing to get his picture taken with the OG presidential philanderer in 1963.

    While marriage to a Kennedy might turn you corrupt (or at least cause you to compromise some of your erstwhile ironclad “principles) if you weren’t already, being a Kennedy male appeared to all but assure that you could be born into a “high class” and still have no class at all. Most markedly when it came to the treatment of women. Another case in point: William Kennedy Smith, the son of Jean Kennedy/nephew of JFK. Smith was acquitted of a rape charge in 1991 despite potential reams of evidence against him. Evidence that also would have included the testimonies of three women stating on record that Smith had sexually assaulted them in the past. Their testimonies were deemed by Judge Mary Lupo to be inadmissible. After all, American “justice” stipulates that you should only be on trial for the crime you’ve committed, not the many others you’ve committed in the past and gotten away with.

    Then there was Michael LeMoyne Kennedy, son to Bobby. He, too, was another predatory Kennedy. A fact that came to light in 1997, two years before John Jr. died in a plane crash. But Michael had his own crash to deal with after being accused of having an affair with his children’s babysitter. Which wouldn’t be quite so bad if the affair hadn’t started when she was the Lolita age of fourteen. In typical “Kennedy clout” fashion, Michael evaded being charged with statutory rape in part because the three polygraph tests he took were conducted by companies that the Kennedys directly employed. Perhaps the only form of “justice,” then, could come in the skiing accident that resulted in his death at the end of 1997.

    And so, when Olivia Rodrigo perpetuates this bizarre and totally inaccurate trope about the Kennedys having class and integrity, well, it doesn’t bode well for Gen Z unlearning the undeserved association the Kennedys seem to have with “sophistication” and “glamor” in American politics. Something Gloria Swanson, who suffered the fallout of being collateral damage when it came to Kennedy ambition and entitlement, was unafraid to speak on. But that was after decades of silence and being almost on the verge of death. For she would only confess to her affair with Joe Sr. just three years before she passed away, releasing her autobiography (ghostwritten, of course) in 1980.

    “He was not very sophisticated insofar as knowing the right thing to do,” Swanson would “diplomatically” tell Barbara Walters in a 1981 interview promoting the book, called Swanson on Swanson. She then ominously added, “This man accomplished anything he wanted, including putting his son in the White House.” It was an inherited trait, this bulldozing version of “class.” Except that, in America, having class doesn’t really mean you have to be magnanimous. In fact, quite the opposite—it just means you have to be willing to do whatever it takes to secure your fortune.

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    Genna Rivieccio

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  • Miley Cyrus Is In Her No-Frills Music Video Era With “Doctor (Work It Out)”

    Miley Cyrus Is In Her No-Frills Music Video Era With “Doctor (Work It Out)”

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    As is the case with Lana Del Rey, Miley Cyrus is undoubtedly sitting on a lot of previously unreleased content that’s actually widely available online (e.g., in Del Rey’s latest instance of officially releasing a song that was formerly “from the vault,” there was “Say Yes to Heaven”). And, also like Del Rey, Cyrus is accustomed to some of that content leaking on the internet and then being treated as though it’s part of the “canon” (hear: “Nightmare” and “Last Goodbye”). As for “Doctor (Work It Out),” it was originally an outtake from 2013’s Bangerz. Ironically, it was when Cyrus released that album that she said of her previous output, “Right now, when people go to iTunes and listen to my old music, it’s so irritating to me because I can’t just erase that stuff and start over.” Evidently, though, she didn’t want to erase “Doctor (Work It Out),” instead reviving it not so much because it went viral on TikTok or anything, but because, according to her, “…it just felt like it was so serendipitous, and there were so many alignments and so many moments that made me know that now was the perfect time. And then sometimes things in our past make more sense in our present than they ever did then.”

    Now featuring an even more polished sound from Pharrell Williams (who was already producing the song way back when), the rhythm and bassline is quintessentially him. Awash in sonic twangs and disjointedness, Cyrus seems to have been waiting for this moment to usher in her “Olivia Newton-John meets Cher” era, which she already debuted at the Grammy Awards—most notably during her performance of “Flowers.” But there’s one other diva that the “Doctor (Work It Out)” video seems to be borrowing from and that’s Beyoncé. Specifically, the Beyoncé of the “Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)” video—which itself famously “borrows” from a formerly obscure Bob Fosse-choreographed performance for The Ed Sullivan Show called “Mexican Breakfast.” Apart from “Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)” also being a “parentheses title,” it shares visual similarities to what Miley’s doing with her own choreo—not to mention keeping the backdrop blank so as to showcase solely Miley (and her moves).  

    Once again directed by Jacob Bixenman (Cyrus’ go-to for the past few videos), Cyrus is, in many ways, picking up where she left off visually with the sparse “Used To Be Young” (or even the pared-down black-and-white video for Endless Summer Vacation’s second single, “River”—yet another Miley jam chock full of thinly-veiled sexual euphemisms). Except, instead of the black backdrop that she stands in front of while staring into the camera and singing about “being old” in earnest, “Doctor (Work It Out)” goes for the “peppier” color of white to accent the ebullience of the single. Because, yes, there’s nothing more “exuberant” than songs laden with medical-related sexual innuendos. Just ask Jennifer Lopez, who took advantage of that niche musical genre on 2019’s “Medicine” featuring French Montana (who also appeared on the Bangerz track “FU”). Or Carol Douglas, the OG of “sexy” songs using doctors/medical terms as analogies and euphemisms on 1974’s “Doctor’s Orders.” Except, in Miley’s world of medicine, things are much more overt in their salaciousness and far less romantic than the sentiments of Douglas. For example, on the chorus for “Doctor (Work It Out),” Cyrus belts, “I could be your doctor (I could be your doctor)/And I could be your nurse/I think I see the problem/It’s only gon’ get worse (uh, uh)/A midnight medication/Just show me where it hurts (uh)/I need to rock you, baby/Before your body bursts.” Hmmm, wonder what part of the body could possibly “burst” in a scenario like this. 

    What’s more, Miley clearly intends something else apart from the surface meaning of “workin’ it out” when she sings, “I feel like workin’ it out/If that’s somethin’ you wanna do.” In contrast, somebody like Anitta would be more direct with lyrics such as, “We can go right, we can go left/Stay up all night in the argument/Nah, I’d rather have sex.” Obviously, so would Cyrus, she’s just less direct about it (in true American fashion). Wanting to ensure she doesn’t put herself out there before she’s really certain she’s going to get some reciprocation. Ergo, the question, “Are you on the fence?/Stop playing on the side/Are you on the fence?/Don’t waste my damn time (don’t waste my damn time)/Are you on the fence?” She then transitions into even more tawdry, innuendo-laden lyrics with the assurance, “I’ll slip but I won’t slide/Don’t gotta be forever/Just together for the night.” Every man’s favorite promise—especially by 2013 standards, when this song was originally intended for release. 

    Cyrus channels Del Rey in other ways on this track besides the aforementioned by repurposing lyrics of the past into her own. Namely, taking from Def Leppard’s key lyric from “Pour Some Sugar On Me” by singing, “You’re my lover (you’re my lover)/I show you sympathy/Take your sugar (take your sugar)/And pour it into me.” Incidentally, one version of the “Pour Some Sugar On Me” video also prominently features a sledgehammer and a wrecking ball…though not quite so integrally as the device was to Cyrus’ “Wrecking Ball” video. Which was, technically, another “simplistic” visual (directed by none other than the problematic and then-pervasive Terry Richardson) from Cyrus featuring an austere white background (granted, “Doctor [Work It Out]” has multiple color changes for its backdrop, including pink, black, white and gray) in between those infamous shots of her riding the wrecking ball. The director’s cut of the video, however, is just a close-up shot of Cyrus’ face as she sings her ballad all teary-eyed and snot-nosed (a more than slight nod to Sinead O’Connor in the video for “Nothing Compares 2 U”).

    The fact that a similar form of starkness and simplicity has shown up again back-to-back for “Used To Be Young” and “Doctor (Work It Out)” appears to signal that Cyrus is presently in her “no-frills” era (or “no fucks given,” if you prefer). And even though she at least bothers to put on a wannabe Bob Mackie gown (in truth, it’s a Roberto Cavalli mini dress that looks reminiscent of the vintage Mackie dress she wore to the Grammys), it’s plain to see she wants to keep her visuals decidedly “bare bones” (while also trying to conjure bare boners). Instead, her focus is on the movements she’s making—confident, cool and casual.  

    To the point of being “effortlessly seductive,” of all her previous collaborations with Williams (each one appearing on Bangerz), “4×4,” “#GetItRight,” “Rooting for My Baby” and “On My Own,” “#GetItRight” is the only track that comes close to matching the lasciviousness of “Doctor (Work It Out).” Case in point, Cyrus declaring, “I feel a surge coming over me/I feel it all around my thighs/And chills going up my legs/This is the worst coming out of me/When I came, felt like I could die.” Later, for good measure, she adds, “Don’t you wanna fuel this fire/Before it’s gone?”

    Thus, in many ways, “Doctor (Work It Out)” comes across like the long-lost sister to that particular Williams-produced song. There’s even a bit of foreshadowing to “Flowers” on “#GetItRight,” with Cyrus musing, “You make flowers grow under my bed, yeah.” With any luck, “Doctor (Work It Out)” might have the same effect on your own bed…if you happen to be a gay man.

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    Genna Rivieccio

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  • The “Toxic” Video for a New, Less Glamorous Era: Charli XCX’s “Von Dutch”

    The “Toxic” Video for a New, Less Glamorous Era: Charli XCX’s “Von Dutch”

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    Although Charli XCX’s first album, True Romance, wasn’t released until 2013, she has always exuded the sonic and visual aura of being a daughter of the 00s. And there was no more significant “mother” in that decade than Britney Spears, who kicked off the aughts with her iconic “Oops!…I Did It Again” video and album. By 2004, however, Spears seemed determined to one-up herself with the video for “Toxic,” arguably among her most well-known visuals after “…Baby One More Time,”  “Oops!…I Did It Again”  and “I’m A Slave 4 U.” In it, Spears channels Pan Am-era chic in a flight attendant uniform that one would have never seen in the “friendly” skies of the 00s, let alone now. 

    But even more than her 60s-inspired flight attendant ensemble, it was her literal nude look that stood out in the eyes of viewers. As Spears confirmed in an interview (something she seems to have thrown a peace sign up on altogether since the conservatorship ended) from 2016 with Jonathan Ross, it was simply crystals/mini diamonds (or “hand diamonds,” as she called them) glued onto her body and paired with a white G-string. And voilà, immortal look achieved. 

    With the video released at the beginning of 2004, it would eventually serve as a reminder of 00s “polish” and decadence in the years before the 2008 financial crisis. In the months just leading up to it, Spears would release the less polished (visual-wise) video for “Gimme More,” the lead single from 2007’s Blackout. After that, she would unleash the moody, clapback-at-the-critics song, “Piece of Me”—which would become such a signature that she named her Vegas residency in its honor. It is the theme of that particular song which Charli XCX seeks to repurpose on “Von Dutch” (a title in keeping with her 00s reverence). Accordingly, the Torso-directed video commences with XCX being stalked by paparazzi at the airport (Charles de Gaulle, to be exact—because Charli is just so Euro).

    As she walks past the proverbial vultures with her aloofness and sunglasses as a shield, she then whips her shades off, along with her skirt (so she can sport just her underwear and tights underneath), and gets right into the first verse: “It’s okay to just admit that you’re jealous of me/Yeah I heard you talk about me, that’s the word on the street/You’re obsessin’ [that accusation lending the song un certain Mariah flair], just confess it/Put your hands up/It’s obvious I’m your number one.” (This also channeling, incidentally, a lyric Goldfrapp sings on 2005’s, what else, “Number 1”.) 

    From the start, it’s apparent that XCX is much less apologetic than Spears was on “Piece of Me” as she sang with more than a slightly sardonic tinge, “I’m Miss Bad Media Karma/Another day, another drama/Guess I can’t see no harm in workin’ and bein’ a mama.” Charli, rather than inserting semi-apologetic caveats in her lyrics, declares full-stop, “​​I’m just living that life Von Dutch, cult classic, but I still pop/I get money, you get mad because the bank’s shut/Yeah, I know your little secret, put your hands up/It’s so obvious I’m your number one.” In the spirit of another 00s piece of pop culture that has inspired of late, Mean Girls, there are many aspects of “Von Dutch” that mirror the content of Renée Rapp and Megan Thee Stallion’s “Not My Fault.” Wherein the former boasts, “It’s not my fault/You gotta pay what I get for free/It’s not my fault/You’re like, you’re like, you’re like in love with me.” According to Charli, nor is it her fault either. She’s “just livin’ that life, Von dutch, cult classic, but I still pop.” 

    Even when forced to mingle among the hoi polloi at the airport. Because, again, these are not the glamorous days of Britney’s “Toxic” video, during which she plays an international spy who also happens to be on a mission to poison her ex-boyfriend. For Charli, it’s less about the destination and more about the journey as she treats the entire airport and, subsequently, the airplane like her runway. Or, more to the point, as any “TikToker” would if CDG had agreed to shut down the terminal for them so they could dance and mug for the camera to their heart’s content without judgment (not that such a worry has ever stopped an “influencer” from annoying people in the public space before). Not to mention providing an empty plane to “bop around” on before making one’s way out onto the wing to do a jig there as well. And, as though to highlight the differences between 2004 Britney on an airplane and 2024 Charli on one, the latter takes the drink cart she’s pushing and violently shoves it down on the floor without a second thought. A stark contrast to Spears sexily pushing her own champagne-filled cart down the aisle on her airplane to “serve with a smile” that hides her ulterior motives.

    But back to the TikTok video flavor, funnily enough, XCX seems to shade that ilk with the line, “Do that littlе dance, without it, you’d be namelеss.” Something in the tone of the lyrics also giving Amy Winehouse on “Fuck Me Pumps” when she jibes, “Don’t be mad at me, ‘cause you’re pushing thirty/And your old tricks no longer work” (how ahead of her time she was on Gen Z-level ageism…along with Lily Allen on “22”). This all further speaking to how XCX is ready to drench herself in the 00s…much as the rest of the pop culture-obsessed set has done of late. But XCX is additionally bringing more than a dash of her “Tumblr sleaze” into the equation, hence breaking the fourth wall by slamming her head against the camera to mimic the effect of beating the shit out of someone—whoever her collective nemesis is, in this case. 

    She then grabs onto an automatic floor-cleaning machine and holds on for a bit before jumping the turnstile at a boarding gate like it’s merely a subway stop. On the empty plane (an Airbus A380), XCX continues her visceral, “anti-‘Toxic’” performance, pursued by the invisible antagonist she keeps fighting back with bratty (her next album is titled Brat, after all) panache. Or perhaps “anti” isn’t the word so much as “antithesis of.” Because there is nothing rehearsed-feeling or, as mentioned, polished about this the way there was in “Toxic.” This, to reemphasize, echoing the fact that all sense of glamor and being able to put up a veneer of elegance and sophistication has dissipated in our post-Empire world. Indeed, XCX is effectively putting a spotlight on the motif of how fucking shitty it is to travel now compared to 2004 (easier and less dehumanizing that year than now, despite the world coming fresh off 9/11). 

    Elsewhere in the lyrics of the song, XCX takes a page from Olivia Rodrigo branding her ex as a “fame fucker” on “vampire” (since fame, after all, is supposedly accessible to everyone now). Thus, Charli jabs at her haters, “Why you lying? You won’t fuck unless he’s famous.” It’s a long way from Britney touting, “I’m Mrs. Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous (you want a piece of me)/I’m Mrs. Oh My God That Britney’s Shameless (you want a piece of me).” Where Spears was forced to give up those pieces of herself to the public mostly against her will, Charli is of an era wherein everyone is willing and ready to whore it all out for the sake of fame (and hopefully, the added and often correlative bonus of money). Doing it for the hallowed “benefit” of being able to say you’re “famous”—or rather, “viral.” That word so evocative of a disease…which is precisely what fame has become. A bug that everyone wants to catch like corona at a party in 2020 Tuscaloosa. Because if you’re not trying to get famous while the world burns around you, you might not have a chance to enjoy the perks before it’s burned entirely. Thanks, in part, to jumbo jets like the one so prominently featured in XCX’s video (and yes, Charli is no stranger to promoting fossil fuels in her songs [including “Vroom Vroom” and “Speed Drive”] and visuals [e.g., “2999”]).

    It’s hard to put much “Toxic”-level varnish on this bleak human condition of the next generation. Maybe that’s why, by the end, XCX is as triumphant as she is run ragged, coasting along the conveyor belt of the baggage claim with the rest of the damaged, overly jostled goods.

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    Genna Rivieccio

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  • Mondo Bullshittio #48: Removing the Fire Crotch Line From Mean Girls 2024

    Mondo Bullshittio #48: Removing the Fire Crotch Line From Mean Girls 2024

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    In a series called Mondo Bullshittio, let’s talk about some of the most glaring hypocrisies and faux pas in pop culture…and all that it affects.

    As though to further confirm that Mean Girls has entered into the so-called woke era, the latest development in its digital release ultimately comes as no shock. For the “slight alteration” caters to a particular person’s sensitivities, which is what life after the early twenty-first century has been all about. Pandering, bowing, capitulating, etc. Even to the very celebrities that were once so readily fed to the wolves in the era of “Lindsay Lohan supremacy.” An era that, as many know, was very short-lived once Lohan buckled under the scrutiny of child/teen fame and proceeded to pull a Miley before Miley even did. In fact, it could be argued that Lohan (in addition to Britney Spears) paved the way for women like Miley Cyrus to have their “rebellious” (read: normal reaction to their situation and lifestyle opportunities) “phase” with far less flak. Because, believe it or not, Cyrus was far less shat upon in her “shedding the Hannah Montana persona” days than Lohan or Spears in the mid-00s. 

    Although there were “attempts” on Lohan’s part to make a comeback (something she’s been announcing since she started to fall off after Herbie: Fully Loaded), it seemed no matter what movie she made it was 1) rather bad (even if bad in the gay-loving camp sort of way) and 2) totally mitigated by her latest drug-addled hijinks. In 2006, when the infamous “fire crotch” line that served to sting Lohan (even, when she least expected it, in 2024) came to light, it was caused by the unholy matrimony of the internet and celebrity-obsessed culture. Thus, the existence of a video like the one of Brandon Davis (who no one except Paris and Lindsay remember) calling Lohan a fire crotch could be immortalized in the annals of pop culture. But it was so much more specific than that mere “epithet,” still often used to demean the female ginger. No, Davis got extremely passionate about Lohan’s fire crotch, egged on by Paris Hilton to deliver his epic monologue on the subject while drunkenly sauntering through the streets of Hollywood after going to Hyde Lounge (the height of “seeing and being seen” in 00s LA). In fact, Davis wasn’t even naming names until Hilton goaded, “Who has a fire crotch?”

    And that’s when Davis let it rip: “Lindsay Lohan has got the stinkiest, fuckin’ sweaty orange vagina anyone has ever seen. I haven’t seen it! But it shits out freckles, it’s orange and it fucking smells like diarrhea.” Elsewhere in the tirade, Davis adds, “The truth is, her movie bombed and her pussy is orange. Nobody would fuck her with a ten-foot pole” and, again, “Lindsay Lohan is a fire crotch. And she has freckles coming out of her vagina.” There’s no doubt that Lohan saw the footage of this at some point. Or was at least informed of it. Indeed, 2006 was the year of bandying insults for Paris and Lindsay, with the latter calling her a cunt on camera and then immediately taking it back to say, “Paris is my friend.” In any case, it seemed no coincidence that Lohan dyed her hair a dark shade of brown that year, almost as though to deny her ginger-ness altogether. Though, in the present, she’s obviously decided to fully embrace it by starring in a Netflix movie (yet another one) called Irish Wish (which surely has to be better than Falling For Christmas…a feat that’s not difficult to achieve). Parading that red hair of hers for good “Irish roots” measure. Perhaps if Davis ever sees the movie, he might be severely triggered again. 

    Just as Lohan was by the term “fire crotch” being wielded in Mean Girls 2024 by none other than Coach’s new-fangled/erstwhile Regina George, Megan Thee Stallion (who also offered her services for the lead single from the soundtrack, “Not My Fault”). The line, no doubt written by Tina Fey, comes up after Regina (Renée Rapp) falls with a major thud onstage at the Winter Talent Show (something that, of course, doesn’t happen in the original movie) and a barrage of TikTok videos commenting on the literal and metaphorical fall is unleashed. Among the commenters speaking in favor of Cady (Angourie Rice, taking on Lohan’s part) “saving the performance” is Megan Thee Stallion, who declares, “Okay so, somebody sent me this look and I was like, ‘Hot girls, we are going back to red!’ Y2K fire crotch is back!”

    But, as Lohan has decreed, it apparently isn’t (even though the drama she created about the phrase being used resulted in her making far more headlines than she’s lately been accustomed to). Or at least, that “hurtful” two-word moniker isn’t…even if the look itself (for her) is. In fact, Lohan was very “disappointed” (as Ms. Norbury would say) in the use of that “slur” in the movie, taking her back to a place, emotionally speaking, that she didn’t want to revisit. Not just 2006, but also her cellblock in 2010, for it was also reported that fellow inmates would chant that nickname at her. Per a July 25, 2010 report from Intelligencer, “Lindsay Lohan has reportedly been brought to tears in jail because…inmates have been calling her ‘fire crotch.’” But hey, like the show says, “Orange is the new black.” Or maybe, like “fetch,” Lohan can’t seem to make it happen. But what she could make happen was airing her sentiments about the line out there for everyone to hear (well, everyone who’s still interested in 00s pop culture…so yeah, everyone). Except, instead of releasing a statement herself, she had her “representative” announce, “​​Lindsay was very hurt and disappointed by the reference in the film.” 

    Be that as it may, “hurt feelings” being a reason to stifle an artistic choice or a certain breed of humor is a dangerous habit to form. And yet, it is a habit that has appeared to become a “best practice” in recent years, as we’ve also seen Taylor Swift eliminate the word “fat” from her “Anti-Hero” music video and Beyoncé remove the word “spaz” from her lyrics. All of these things done pretty much instantaneously upon the expression of offense. Designed to blot out the fact that it ever happened (in true Orwellian fashion).

    With the removal of Megan Thee Stallion’s “shady” comment, however, Mean Girls 2024 becomes the complete version of its overly-sanitized self—including changing “fugly slut” to “fugly cow.” Because Lohan forbid we should have any hurt feelings. And yet, even when the steps to “eradicate” the potential for such hurt occurs, most people know full well that we still live in a world of mean girls (and boys). Alas, in “girl world” (run by little boys posing as men), all the fighting continues to be “sneaky.”

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    Genna Rivieccio

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  • Sacramento Media Slept on Madonna Gracing the Town With Her Presence for the First Time in Concert

    Sacramento Media Slept on Madonna Gracing the Town With Her Presence for the First Time in Concert

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    It should have been something momentous to the locals. But perhaps when Madonna said long ago of Chicago (in Truth or Dare), “We’re in a conservative town,” she was foreshadowing her debut in Sacramento, a city that people still often forget is California’s capital (so much so that the recent primary debate was held in Los Angeles rather than the state’s supposed “political hub”). Prior to arriving on February 24th for her first concert ever in the city, Madonna’s only notable connection to the town was dating someone who was from it (Ahlamalik Williams) before moving on to another. Apart from that, Madonna’s “allegiance” to Sacramento appeared to be nonexistent. Until her arrival at the Golden 1 Center for The Celebration Tour. And yet, this once-in-a-blue-moon event did not seem to move any of the scant few print media outlets that might actually cover entertainment. These being, essentially, the Sacramento Bee and Sacramento News & Review. Though, for some reason, the latter found it newsworthy to announce, “Billy Idol and partner in crime, Stevie Stevens, to play Thunder Valley on Feb. 9.”

    Sure, the town was “good” enough about announcing the pop star’s presence here and there on radio stations and the news, but it was the fact that no one even bothered to make space in their publication to review the show that was most shocking (especially since, as mentioned, there’s really not that many publications, so one could have easily made it a priority). Because, again, this bia has never seen fit to show up in Sacramento. It truly is an occasion. She’s gone to fucking Fresno (back in 2006) before ever choosing to grace the capital with her presence. To tap into the market of the NorCal area outside of San Francisco, Madonna has usually instead performed in San Jose (which she seemed to swap out this time around in favor of Sacramento). Though, during her second tour, Who’s That Girl, she opted for Mountain View, about forty-five minutes south of San Francisco (to San Jose’s roughly fifty-five). Granted, most musicians rarely actually “opt” for anything, so much as they’re told by tour managers what will work best for the roster of dates and the markets they want to tap into. Sacramento never entered the equation for Madonna at any point on these previous tours. Indeed, the most “curveball” city on her round of U.S. dates over the years was probably East Troy, Wisconsin and Richfield, Ohio (both during the Who’s That Girl Tour). 

    Even “small towns” (in the same spirit as Sacramento being deemed small) like St. Paul and Pittsburgh could be bothered to give M a review during her The Celebration Tour stops there (and yes, she’s been to both of those places many times on her tours before). And they did so immediately after the show, whether good or bad. In St. Paul’s case, the reviews (that’s right, reviews plural) were generally favorable, save for the errant shade-drenched comment (e.g., “the show told Madonna’s story—her version of it, anyway—through a loosely chronological series of acts” and “she never broke a sweat, despite some occasionally murky sound and the sweltering eighty-degree heat in the arena that’s apparently one of Madonna’s contractual demands”). By and large, the main critique of Madonna live is the fact that she is always, but always, tardy to her own party. Hence, the St. Paul review that stated, “Some may excuse Madonna as she’s always been like this, but others are correct to note that it’s pointless and even rude to stage a tardy weeknight concert attended almost entirely by Gen Xers and Boomers.” The appearance of that generational pool tracks considering Madonna is one of the few artists a person can document their own life’s “eras” through (with Taylor Swift coming up the rear). The clientele at the Sacramento show, per a Reddit deep dive (because, to reiterate, there was no coverage of the event in any of the town’s media), seemed to lean more toward the boomer category, with one user stating, “I was quite impressed with the age range of Sacramento fans. Way WAY more baby boomers than I’ve seen at her shows in San Jose, Oakland, Fresno, LA, Vegas…and a huge number of them dressed up in Susan outfits, Like A Virgin wedding dresses etc etc. I did not expect that from my fellow Sacramentans—a very pleasant surprise.” 

    Unfortunately, there was no surprise about the lack of attention given to the event in Sacramento’s so-called mainstream media. Which is ironic in a way because Sacramento actually suits Madonna solely because, somewhere inside, she’s still a Midwestern girl. She can still “relate” to such a place known for being “simple” and perhaps “old-fashioned.” And yes, Sacramento is frequently called “the Midwest of California” (a line immortalized in Lady Bird). Madonna, to be sure, wasn’t so different from Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson (Saoirse Ronan) in her bid “get the hell out of Michigan.” The way Lady Bird phrases such a desire is: “I have to get out of Sacramento… It’s soul killing.”

    Part of the reason both Madonna and Lady Bird so intensely craved to escape from their respective middling hometowns was to stave off the aura of ordinariness they felt radiating from them—especially if they got trapped staying there. In truth, despite Madonna not being “for everyone,” her popularity and impact means that, at least on the surface, she ought to be “pedestrian” enough to appeal to Sacramentans. Just not, for whatever reason, the city’s media outlets. Yet everywhere else along the way, Madonna’s performance at [insert city here] managed to snag national (and even international) news headlines—most recently, from Pamela Anderson joining her onstage for the vogue ball in Vancouver to “falling off” her chair (a.k.a. being forced off it due to circumstances out of her control) in Seattle. The lone date to emanate nothing but the sound of crickets has been Sacramento. And that’s extremely telling for a number of reasons. For a start, the town’s aforementioned conservatism. For another, a certain lack of appreciation for that which is more “cosmopolitan.” No wonder there was more coverage about a Mardi Gras parade that took place the same weekend than the first- (and probably only) time appearance of Madonna performing live. 

    Thus, without any information about the show on mainstream outlets, it took a fair amount of trolling to find out that Detox was the person M chose to bring up onstage during the vogue ball (in keeping with her recent parade of RuPaul’s Drag Race contestants joining her onstage, thanks to the “in” Bob the Drag Queen has with everyone). A coup for someone so well-known as a fan—though perhaps not to the extent of fellow Drag Race alum Venus D-Lite, who spent hundreds of thousands on plastic surgery to help perfect his Madonna impersonator look. 

    But yes, Detox must be a fan indeed to have flown out to Sacramento…since, clearly, there was no one else famous readily on hand to pluck from the crowd the way there will be in San Francisco and L.A. Not even the state’s own governor, Gavin Newsom. And. it says something that there is no one famous from the arts that can be easily dug up for such an occasion. Any talent that does crop up in the town ultimately flees. And the lack of coverage about something so auspicious speaks to a larger truth about the city continuing to thumb its nose at anything “weird” or “overly” artistic. This, in part, being why the few creative types who are born here tend to leave (see: Joan Didion, Molly Ringwald and Greta Gerwig). What motivation is there to stay? 

    With the dates of 2006’s Confessions Tour being the most “love” Madonna ever showed to Northern California by turning up in both San Jose and Fresno, she tended to keep her distance after that, throwing a bone to Oakland for the 2001’s Drowned World Tour and 2008’s Sticky and Sweet Tour and elsewhere sticking to San Jose for 2004’s Reinvention Tour, 2012’s MDNA Tour and 2015’s Rebel Heart Tour. For the more intimate Madame X Tour, three dates were scheduled at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Theater. Bringing us up to the present with Madonna’s lone “cameo” to date in Sacramento. And one wouldn’t be surprised if it was her last based on the total non-reaction. 

    In 1993, Madonna threw up her biggest middle finger yet to pretty much all cities in the U.S. after the major backlash against her “hyper-sexuality” a.k.a. the trifecta of the Sex book, Erotica and Body of Evidence. Thus, The Girlie Show only played U.S. dates in New York, Philadelphia and Auburn Hills, of all places, near her hometown of Detroit. That Madonna was so willing to bypass the West Coast altogether is indicative of her long-standing lack of affinity with it. Apart from her “80s L.A. years” with Sean Penn, one doesn’t much associate her with the state. Sure, she’s always had property in Los Angeles, but she’s never made it a secret that New York is her preference. So maybe one could say that Californians, especially “salt of the earth” ones like those in Sacramento, can sense a certain emotional distance from her. Therefore, why should they revere her with a major acknowledgement/review? Or having the town named after her for a day à la “Swiftie Clara.” The answer is that this is still someone who changed the shape of the culture, especially in a place as repressed as Sacramento. Someone whose impact is significant, and so should their first-time performance in such a town be. Alas, it clearly wasn’t.

    Incidentally, during the time of The Girlie Show, Madonna stated, “Taking the adventure one step further is to play in front of a different audience every night. dealing with different cultures, different expectations, different ways of expressing pleasure and bewilderment—this to me is the ultimate thrill. The ultimate risk. And I love taking risks. You may have heard that about me.” Perhaps she couldn’t have known just how big a risk it was to gamble on coming to Sacramento and expecting to find anything like the “royal treatment” for her trouble, let alone a review. Even if a bad one, as would be expected from the likes of Sacramentan reviewers of the same Midwestern mentality as St. Paulites.

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    Genna Rivieccio

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  • Forget About Eyes Without A Face, It’s Time to Bow to the Girl With No Face (Not to be Confused With Madonna’s Character in Dick Tracy)

    Forget About Eyes Without A Face, It’s Time to Bow to the Girl With No Face (Not to be Confused With Madonna’s Character in Dick Tracy)

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    It’s been an entire presidential term since the last time Allie X released an album. The record in question, Cape God, came at an all too apropos moment in the culture: the era of lockdowns. As though intuiting the arrival of an “at-home glaze,” Allie X (real name: Alexandra Ashley Hughes) had taken inspiration from Steven Okazaki’s 2015 documentary Heroin: Cape Cod, USA for the Cape God universe. But if Cape God was all about the inevitable decay of one’s drug-induced malaise, Girl With No Face seems to capture the apex of a drug high before the crash. That moment just after a snort in the bathroom of some dark, debauched club. Alas, since clubs aren’t really all that dark and debauched anymore, Allie X has naturally seen fit to retreat into the past, during one of the inarguable best times for club culture: the 80s. 

    To set the mood of the record and bring her listener into this new sonic landscape she’s established, Allie X appropriately commences with “Weird World.” Unsurprisingly, X remarked that she began working on this song during the pandemic, a time for many people (especially white people) when the proverbial “mask” was peeled back on just about everything to reveal a very scary face of things indeed. As for the mask-centric cover art, which features Allie X’s exterior mask cracked down the center, it speaks to the chanteuse’s sentiment, “I feel like there was a sort of death that happened, like an erasure of maybe previous identities, and rather than emerging with a fully-formed new identity, I feel like I’m still in progress, I’m figuring it out. I like the idea that masks are flexible in that way. They’re a protection.” In addition to being a way to conceal—because, sometimes, concealment is protection. But there is often no protection from this world that is so weird, as Allie X describes it, opening the song with the verse, “Oh, the light shines through the linen/Der morgen beginnt singen/I don’t want to dream anymore/Oh, they tell me that I’m stubborn/Treffe meine wahl im zorn/I don’t want to dream anymore.” The German portion meaning, “The morning begins singing/Make my choice in anger.” Something that’s difficult not to do when we live in a world where the choice is between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. And yet, Allie X commented on the freedom of ceasing to pretend the world is anything other than a totally fucked-up place, which is why, in turn, there are so many fucked-up people in it—mirror reflections of the system that upholds the globe (while simultaneously pushing it toward collapse). As Allie X put it, “The ‘weird world’ is this idea of seeing things as they actually are, and how that can actually be an empowering moment, even though it’s a sad moment.”

    And, because it’s a kind of sadness that many don’t want to experience, they prefer to remain in denial, insisting the world isn’t “weird” at all. So it is that Allie X sings in the chorus, “I know nobody wants to hear this, but/I live in a weird world/Yeah, it’s sad but it’s true/Maybe you can’t see it/But you live in one too/I used to be a dream girl/But the world interfered/At least now I know why/Now I know why/Now I know I’m weird.” And that’s because, that’s right, the world is. The uptempo, synth-drenched rhythms change tack slightly on the record’s namesake, “Girl With No Face,” which features a more OMD meets Kraftwerk tinge (there are definitely notes of OMD’s “Messages” as Allie X starts off with her “ooo-ooo-ooos”). With the album’s overall hints of early Madonna (we’re talking the self-titled debut), perhaps it’s only right that Allie X should unwittingly (?) make an esoteric reference to Madonna’s character in Dick Tracy: No Face a.k.a. “The Blank.” That is, when she wasn’t Breathless Mahoney. The song and album title also feel like a clear nod to Billy Idol’s “Eyes Without A Face,” that song title itself taken from the 1960 French horror movie of the same name. Allie X’s sonic tones on the record do mirror some of what’s in that particular Idol single, but “Girl With No Face” is more sonically erratic than that, with the synths becoming screeching and violent around the one-minute, fifty-three-second mark as Allie X sings, “She has no friends/Up on the catwalk/And she is sharp/So shut your talk-talk/If you behave you get to play/But don’t be greedy, she can spot a fake.” Which is probably easier for Allie X to do in her current home of Los Angeles. A town that, in many ways, seemed to embrace the post-punk and new wave movements in music and fashion with more gusto than its rival city of New York.

    But neither of these were the real muse behind the sound of Girl With No Face, as Allie X explained that the UK music scene during this period was one of the key influences on the record. She also added, “The movement I’m talking about, punk to post-punk, really did happen in the UK. Some would argue New York City, but that doesn’t interest me as much.” Thank fucking god someone has some sense about not being that interested in NYC. Because, as she said, she can spot the fakes—and there’s nothing faker than NYC new wave. It was all about that UK shit. Indeed, Allie X noted of getting in touch with her British roots again, “My dad is from the UK. He’s from Coventry. As a kid, I went there a lot and always felt this real connection to my uncles, aunts and cousins over there. I’ve always been the kid that would get made fun of for being weird, and going there, I felt like they all understood me and we had the same sense of humor and I really belonged… I’ve rekindled my love and connection for the UK as I’ve made this [record] and reconnected with a lot of my family whom I hadn’t seen in so long.” 

    Being that “Girl With No Face” is something like the “thesis” of the album, the true jumping-off point for the concept, it makes sense that Allie X would say of this “alter ego,” of sorts, “She’s my invisible muse—my cunty muse!” And cunty she is, if one is to go by the warning, “Torment the girl, she can ruin your world/Don’t get in her way.” The attitude of the girl with no face is perhaps so pronounced because one can project whatever they want onto her, and usually, expressionless women are presumed to be bitches anyway (perhaps why “bitchy” Madonna was cast as No Face…apart from having an “in” with the director). There’s even a dash of Edwyn Collins’ only signature, “A Girl Like You,” when Allie X declares, “Say, ‘I never met a girl like you,’” adding in the outro, “I never met a girl like you/Like you/I’m the girl with no face/And you never need a face.” Not when no one’s really looking at anybody anyway. And, as the next song indicates, nor do you really need any tits. 

    As the third single from the album, “Off With Her Tits” (a phrase one could easily envision a different kind of queen shouting in a fit of rage) brings with it a tempo that becomes more straightforwardly upbeat again. And one would have to be “upbeat” to sneak in the fear-inducing lyrics, “Off with her tits/I gotta fix/This one little bit/Or l’ll throw a fit/Now off with her tits.” Although Allie X preferred to keep it less direct with regard to what the song is about, it can easily serve a dual interpretation. On the one hand, it’s clearly about a woman’s tits getting in the way of her being “taken seriously,” instead appraised for her body rather than her wit (i.e., “Go take the piss/I’m flat with a wit/Not soft full of shit/Now off with her tits”). On the other (and considering Allie X’s fanbase), it feels like it can directly address some of the transgender dysphoria that can occur when one doesn’t identify with the body of a woman. The fact that even women weigh in on other women’s tits with a misogynistic viewpoint plays into the verse, “Then I called the doctor/Said, ‘Miss what can you do?’/She told me she’d cut them off/I said, ‘Sign me up for June’/I went to the teller/Took out 10K in cash/She said, ‘Bitch are you joking? I wish I had that rack.’” Not Allie X, who wants to be valued for her intellect before her body. Luckily for her, gay men can appreciate both.

    And speaking of gays, the following track is dedicated to a particular couple that came to see a show of hers at the Bowery Ballroom in 2018: “John and Jonathan.” Amused by the similarity of their names when they introduced themselves after the concert, Allie X remarked that she might write a song about them one day. Of course, John and Jonathan thought, “Yeah, right.” But, lo and behold, the inspiration did hit a few years later. And to the overt tune of  Kraftwerk’s 1978 single, “The Model.” Infused with just a touch more disco flair as Allie X paints the picture, “John and Jonathan are on the town/John and Jonathan, they go up, they go down/At the Bowery, in line they wait/They will stay all night then wake at eight.” Although it seems to initially be a frothy rumination on two “cosmopolitan” gay men, Allie X soon makes it an interior reflection about the weirdness of fame as she asks, “But how will I know if they care for me?/Do I believe what they say?/When I’m on stage they all cheer for me/I must soak up the praise/And save it for a rainy day/Dear John and Jonathan/Who am I to you?” That last line touching on the inherently parasocial nature between fan and star. Except that, in John and Jonathan’s case, at least Allie X actually does know who they are. 

    As for whether or not “Galina” still knows who Allie X is, well, that’s less apparent. And for those few who thought track five on Girl With No Face was a misspelling of the Italian word for “hen,” they might be either relieved or disappointed to learn that it’s actually about a Russian woman named Galina who worked at the naturopathic clinic in Toronto where Allie X would seek some alleviation for the eczema on her inner elbows. Per Allie X, Galina, for many years, “made this cream in her kitchen that worked better than steroids. She would always say, ‘It cost me more to make this than I’m charging you. I get this man in the Swiss Alps to gather these herbs and I make you this cream.’ She was pretty old, so I always worried: ‘What happens when Galina retires? It’s not like this is some patented product.’ So sure enough, in the summer of 2022, I returned to the clinic, and I was like, ‘Could I place an order for the cream from Galina?’ And the lady was like, ‘Oh, Galina has retired.’ And I was like, ‘What!?! Did she tell anyone the recipe?‘ And she was like, ‘No, she won’t tell. There’s nothing we can do—Galina has lost her memory.’” Thus, in the words of Joni Mitchell, “Don’t know what you got till it’s gone.” What’s more, something about that story smacks of how so many things get lost when one generation starts to die out. Of course, Allie X, being an L.A. Lady now, renders the deep message with a tinge more shallowness in the jaunty tune that goes, “Galina, wake up I’m running out of luck/And I get so ugly without you/Now, open your eyes/Help me make it through the night/Galina, wake up Galina, wake up/Know you don’t give a fuck/Fear, you’ll take the answers to your gravе/You could open your eyes/Hеlp me make it through the night/Galina, please, wake up.”

    Allie X’s urgent need for Galina back in her life not because she actually cares all that much about her as a person, but because she needs her “goods” to look her best acknowledges the generally transactional nature between human beings (which has only worsened in the years since the 1980s, the decade Allie X is communing with). Her concern for her own appearance rather than Galina’s well-being further manifests in the lines, “My hand’s turnin’ dry and red/She keeps sleepin’ in her bed/My face crackin’ in the light/Her lips part, the tiniest smile.”

    Reiterating the Kraftwerk influence on the record, the following track, “Hardware/Software,” correlates easily to Kraftwerk’s “Computer Love” (and the entire Computer World album). To boot, Allie X’s construction of the song is very akin to the Kraftwerk style in that it leans heavily on the music itself, with only two verses, the latter of which includes, “My hardware is getting too fast/I need to slow down, honey, wanna make it last/And my software is kicking me in the gut/It’s gonna get me soft like a pillow top/I wanna line my bed with a mountain of debt/I wanna earn my face on the internet/I wanna kill, kill, kill ‘til my world is dead/And I can’t stop thinking ‘bout all of that.” Needless to say, Allie X’s lyrics are slightly more sex- and violence-drenched. Ah, and talking of violence, the track that follows is the New Order-y (“Blue Monday,” of course) “Black Eye.” Though the opening gives a dash of Kilo’s “Cocaine” (recently sampled in Beyoncé’s “America Has A Problem”), it’s really all about the “Blue Monday” feels for the majority of the song, with Allie X addressing she’s a bit of a masochist when it comes to rolling with life’s punches, so to speak (hence, the black eye metaphor). Although some might initially be quick to accuse this of being some sort of anti-woke, “he hit me and it felt like a kiss” song, it is, instead, very much on-brand for the message of the album, which is to never let other people (and the hardships they can so often cause you) get in your way or stop you from achieving your dreams and goals. Thus, Allie X gives herself the pep talk, of sorts, “Oh, hit me, hit me with that super pain/‘Cause a hit feels like I’m dancin’ in the rain/Gimme that beat/There’s no need to cry, it’s just a black eye, yeah/Hit me, hit me with that super bass (Nicki Minaj would tend to agree)/‘Cause I want tonight to slap me in the face/Gimme that beat/There’s no need to cry, it’s just a black eye, yeah.”

    The accompanying video, directed by none other than Allie X (which is in keeping with the fact that she also produced the entire Girl With No Face album), offers the surreal, visceral visuals one would expect of such a song, without hitting the viewer over the head (violence pun intended) with the actual image of Allie X being punched in the eye. But for those who have never slept on Allie X’s brilliance, this is no surprise. For those who have, she brings listeners the tongue-in-cheek “You Slept On Me.” Sonically, it pays clear homage to Michael Sembello’s Flashdance staple, “Maniac.” But lyrically, the best way to describe it is: Sparks and Charli XCX birthed a song together and the result was, “I held my tonguе for about long enough/It’s about damn time that I spoke up/I’m an icon, honey, this isn’t a chore/And I need to make money so give me yours/You missed my debut then my renaissance/You missed my late romantic, my veridict au France/Now I’m a modern bitch and I’m getting tough/Better make it up, kids, enough’s enough/Oh, what a shame/It’s clear to see/You’ve been so dumb sleeping on me.” Allie X continues to unleash the “cunty muse” she was referring to vis-à-vis her Girl With No Face persona by concluding, “You’ve been eating Krispy Kreme/You’ve been praising Paula Deen/There’s no point trying to disagree/Just get in line, you tired queen/Yeah, yeah.” Ah, the dangerous risk Allie X took by “insulting” her primary fanbase. 

    Taking us out of the 80s for a moment to channel a Labrinth-esque vocal intro, Allie X then dips right back into the decade with the “goth pop” (her words) tone of “Saddest Smile.” And, of all the songs on Girl With No Face, this is the one that perhaps most closely encapsulates a key “mood board” she used as inspiration for the “feel” of the album: Uli Edel’s Christiane F. (side note: that means Madonna is even more roundaboutly embedded in this project via the fact that Edel also directed Body of Evidence). The languor and theme of the song exists almost as though in deliberate negation of what Ariana Grande and MARINA talk about on “fake smile” and “Highly Emotional People,” respectively, for Allie X instead insists that things are as they always were, and we must suppress our emotions in order to be even vaguely accepted in society. Ergo, “When I’m sad, I don’t cry/I put on my saddest smile” and “No one wants to see you soften/So we have to harden ’til we can turn to dust.” A bleak and honest thought, one put far more bluntly than Allie X euphemistically saying this world is fucked on the opening track, “Weird World.”

    The tempo picks up again on the defiant “Staying Power,” an anthem of divergence from the norm. It’s repetitive sound seems designed to highlight Allie X’s insistence, “I don’t sing for straight men ’cause they just ruin the world/Wanna be good daughter but I pushed my mom away/Wanna be good patient but my doctor makes me pay/Wanna save the baby but I threw away the bath/My body’s weak, my mind is bleak, there’s one thing that I have/Staying power, I’ve got the power/The world can hurt me, I don’t mind.” This, too, channels her sentiments on “Black Eye,” which is essentially Jennifer Love-Hewitt saying, “What are you waiting for? Huh?! What are you waiting for?!” in song form. It’s a taunt and a challenge to the world, the universe to throw its worst at Allie X because 1) she can take it and 2) she’s got, that’s right, staying power.

    This jubilant declaration of strength (however sardonic) persists on the album’s finale, “Truly Dreams.” And this song, too, is a blender of nods to 80s signatures, an explosion of pastiche. One that can best be characterized as: Siouxie Sioux’s “Hong Kong Garden” sound with a dash of the way Debbie Harry chants “Dreamin’” on Blondies’s song of the same name and, of course, a lilt that majorly channels Kate Bush. Whatever homage the listener can hear in it, the most important takeaway is her message in the chorus: “I keep dreaming/And if it’s not enough then/I’ll just keep my hopes and dreaming/With all my might, just listen/Truly dreams never die/They never die/(Never die, baby, can never die).” Because the real death in this life is when one gives up on their dreams. The body’s expiration after that is just incidental. And even if one feels as unseen, as invisible as the Girl With No Face, it doesn’t mean they can’t still serve cunt just like Allie X’s alter ego (and Breathless Mahoney as “The Blank”).

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    Genna Rivieccio

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  • Death Becomes Her: The Ultimate Female Aging Commentary

    Death Becomes Her: The Ultimate Female Aging Commentary

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    In the early 90s, Hollywood was becoming more self-aware of its own ageism. Perhaps in a manner not seen since Billy Wilder’s groundbreaking 1950 film, Sunset Boulevard. The first movie of its kind to truly lambast “the biz” in a manner that had never been done before. So damning, in fact, that the luminaries of Hollywood were not ready for it, with Louis B. Mayer reportedly yelling at Wilder, “You bastard! You have disgraced the industry that made you and fed you! You should be tarred and feathered and run out of Hollywood!” In the wake of its release, other “anti-Hollywood” movies would follow, including 1952’s The Star, with Bette Davis in the lead role that smacked of Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) in terms of the whole “aging, irrelevant star clings to former glory that can never be recaptured” angle. Tellingly, the movie came out eight months after Singin’ in the Rain the same year (as did The Bad and the Beautiful, the story of an insufferable producer named Jonathan Shields [Kirk Douglas]). This, too, being a condemning tale of how fickle and merciless the industry is when it comes to tossing out “irrelevant women” without a second thought. After all, movies aren’t about making “art” (contrary to the MGM saying, “Ars gratia artis” a.k.a. “Art for art’s sake”)—they’re about the bottom line.

    Perhaps the industry didn’t want to allow an entire genre to be carved out about itself right away, because it wasn’t really until the 90s that self-referential movies of a meta, satirical nature started coming out again. 1992 being the year of both The Player and Death Becomes Her. Then there was Swimming With Sharks in 1994, the tale of a dastardly movie mogul named Buddy Ackerman (the then socially acceptable Kevin Spacey) and the new assistant he abuses daily. Barton Fink and Bowfinger would provide bookends to the decade as well, each coming out in 1991 and 1999, respectively. Additionally, Hollywood provided the mid-90s “romp” Get Shorty and, two years later, another pièce de résistance of the genre via 1997’s L.A. Confidential. But out of all of them, Death Becomes Her was the most tailored release vis-à-vis addressing the lengths a woman feels she must go to in order to stay looking “forever young.”

    Of course, a resurgence in self-mockery didn’t mean Hollywood was actually going to do anything about its ageist proclivities in terms of making a significant change—a.k.a. rendering the industry as more friendly to the “aged.” To be clear, in Hollywood, “aged” means pretty much any number over thirty. Even to this day. The only thing women, actresses or otherwise, have on their side at the moment is the advancement of various anti-aging “remedies” (i.e., expensive creams and/or plastic surgery). But even those “tactics” tend to end up doing her a disservice as she can be equally as ribbed for her attempts at looking younger (see: the malignment of Madonna after her 2023 Grammys appearance). As Madeline Ashton (Meryl Streep) is by the time we reach the midpoint of Death Becomes Her. On her last legs as a “viable” (read: fuckable) actress, her long-time frenemy (but really just enemy), Helen Sharp (Goldie Hawn), comes to see her at the beginning of the film, written by Martin Donovan and David Koepp, and directed by Robert Zemeckis. Because perhaps no one understands better than men just how much women are valued for their youth and looks above all else.

    Commencing in 1978, Death Becomes Her wastes no time in introducing its audience to the rampant ageism not only against women in general, but women in the entertainment industry in particular. Zemeckis sets the scene on Madeline’s opening night performance of Songbird!, a Broadway adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ Sweet Bird of Youth (in truth, one wonders if Williams didn’t get his own inspiration from Sunset Boulevard). The irony here being that the part of Alexandra del Lago a.k.a. Princess Kosmonopolis was written for Tallulah Bankhead, who would have been fifty-four years old when the play first came out in 1956. Not exactly the “age group” Madeline would want to be associated with, and yet, a job is a job.

    After the audience lambasts her as they walk out, with such commentary as, “Madeline Ashton! Talk about waking the dead,” we’re given a glimpse of her supposedly cringeworthy (no more than usual for something meant to be set in the 70s) performance before Zemeckis cuts to her in her dressing room, staring at herself in the mirror as she reworks a famed lullaby into: “Wrinkled, wrinkled little star…hope they never see the scars.” Her lament over watching her youth fade is augmented tenfold as a result of being damned to see that youthful version of herself forever immortalized onscreen. Constantly making her yearn to be that girl again, as opposed to appreciating what she had when she had it. The same parallel can be found in Norma Desmond, with her boy toy/hired personal screenwriter, Joe Gillis (William Holden), observing the way she watches herself so lovingly onscreen. This prompts Joe to remark in a voiceover, “…she was still sleepwalking along the giddy heights of a lost career—plain crazy when it came to that one subject: her celluloid self.” The only “real” self, as far as Norma (and her delusions) is concerned.

    But Madeline isn’t so naïve. The Hollywood of the 70s and beyond would hardly allow her to be. Which is why she knows that when Helen reemerges after a seven-year disappearance from the public eye to throw a book party (taking place in then-present 1992) that Madeline’s been invited to—very deliberately—she’s fully aware she needs to look her best. Knows that it’s an opportunity to prove, once again, that she’s “superior” to Helen, if for no other reason than because she’s still “the hot one.” What she can’t fathom is that the entire motive for Helen to put on the fête is because she wants to parade just how amazing she looks and how well she’s doing to an ever-dwindling-in-importance Madeline (reminding the latter of as much when she tells her condescendingly at the party, “Gosh, I’m glad you came. I didn’t know if you would. I spoke to my PR woman and she said, ‘Madeline Ashton goes to the opening of an envelope’”).

    Even before arriving and realizing that she’s been outdone aesthetically by Helen, she senses the urgency of needing to go to her med spa and seek another treatment. But when her “specialist” refuses to give her the procedure she wants again so soon and instead offers a collagen buff, Madeline retorts, “Collagen buff? You might as well tell me to wash my face with soap and water.” Trying her best to keep her customer calm, the aesthetician then offers to do her makeup. Madeline balks, “Makeup is pointless! It does nothing anymore!” Not for “mature skin,” as it’s “politely” called in the world of foundation and concealer. She then verbally lashes the youthful aesthetician with, “You stand there with your twenty-two-year-old skin and your tits like rocks!” In other words, this bitch couldn’t possibly understand what Madeline is going through (but oh, how she’s going to). The scent of Madeline’s desperation is evidently potent enough for Roy Franklin (William Frankfather), the owner of the spa, to materialize out of nowhere in the same room and slip her a business card that contains only an address in elegant script: 1091 Rue la Fleur. Never mind the fact that L.A. doesn’t have French street names, the decision to name it after a flower is entirely pointed. After all, flowers are frequently used as metaphors (especially in poetry) to represent the “budding” of a girl’s youth (a gross phrase, to be sure) followed by the eventual decaying of that bloom. The one that makes her ultimately repugnant to men (and women) of all ages.

    Even so, Madeline persists in doggedly ignoring this reality—able to do so with the perk of having enough cash to pay a boy toy…à la Norma Desmond. Dakota (Adam Storke), however, is growing weary of Madeline’s cloying nature. This much is apparent when she shows up at his door unannounced looking for false comfort in the wake of Helen’s book party. Unfortunately for her self-esteem level, she finds that he’s with another (younger) woman. When she acts upset about it, he finally snaps, “I’m sick of this shit, you know that? I am doing you a favor here.” She asks incredulously, “Doing me a favor? I gave you—” “Yeah, you gave, I gave. Big deal! Somebody told me we look ridiculous together. How do you think that makes me feel? You never think about my feelings. Go find someone your own age, Madeline!” If Joe Gillis had been a colder sort, he might have said the same thing to Norma…except he knew all too well of her suicidal inclinations at the drop of a hat.

    With Dakota’s scathing rejection being the last straw, Madeline gives in to going to the address she was slipped at her med spa. A house that belongs to one, Lisle von Rhuman (Isabella Rossellini). To Madeline’s surprise, Lisle is already expecting her, having her muscular lackeys invite her in and then diving into her philosophical ruminations on aging, such as, “We are creatures of the spring, you and I… You’re scared as hell—of yourself, of the body you thought you once knew.” The one that’s changing and mutating like some kind of cruel science experiment. As Iona (Annie Potts) in Pretty in Pink laments, “Oh, why can’t we start old and get younger?” (otherwise known as: Benjamin Button’s disease).

    Lisle continues to make strange overtures as she caresses Madeline’s hand and muses, “So warm, so full of life. And already it ebbs away from you. This is life’s ultimate cruelty. It offers us the taste of youth and vitality…and then makes us witness our own decay.” With no amount of money ever being able to truly stave off that degeneration.

    Even our early forebears couldn’t help but be concerned with aesthetics amid basic survival concerns, considering the first plastic surgery procedures have been documented all the way back to ancient Egypt. And that’s really saying something when taking into account the lifespan for most people at that juncture. A majority was prone to dying young, with the average life expectancy in ancient Egypt being nineteen years old (which certainly meets the “die young” criterion presented in the book and movie version of Logan’s Run). Richies, like the pharaohs, however, could typically count on a longer lifespan (quelle surprise), usually between thirty-five and forty years old. And obviously, they would want to look their best while outliving the hoi polloi. There is something to be said for that same desire in the celebrity set, our modern version of the pharaohs, one supposes. They, too, are youth-obsessed for the same two-pronged reason: 1) being in the public eye means perpetual scrutiny/people seeking out flaws as a means to belittle the work itself and 2) they want the commoner to understand that they are not the same. Even if, as some would like to speculate, “I don’t think people want perfection out of celebrities anymore. I think they want celebrities that they can see themselves in.”

    But truthfully, the fact that Death Becomes Her remains as pertinent now as it ever was is a testament to that theory being another lie some prefer to tell themselves. That the film has also become a cult classic in the queer community additionally speaks to the gerascophobia of the gays. Per Peaches Christ, who has remade Death Becomes Her as Drag Becomes Her, “Let’s face it, gay men especially have this issue. It’s actually a real issue. It’s a real darkness in our community where we don’t talk a lot about the ageism that exists among us. And it’s a real thing.” But let’s not get it twisted: no one has it worse than women when it comes to aging and being cast out by (male-dominated) society as a result. So obviously, Madeline and Helen would take the potion offered by Lisle, regardless of what the potential ramifications might be—which is that they effectively turn themselves into non-bloodsucking vampires.

    While Helen’s motives for doing it stem largely from her competitive history with Madeline and wanting to prove that the only thing Madeline ever had as an advantage is her looks (now fading), Madeline’s drive to take the potion is emblematic of what spurs most actresses (and pop stars). They’re all clamoring to remain seen (as they were) amid fresher, newer “talent” entering the fray. And “being seen” has only become even more of a challenge in the attention span-decimated present. As for Ernest (Bruce Willis), who the duo tries to convince to take the potion as well so that he can patch them up for eternity (he’s a plastic surgeon-turned-reconstructive mortician), he doesn’t want anything to do with immortality. Thus, he tells Lisle, “I don’t wanna live forever. It sounds good, but what am I gonna do? What if I get bored? What if I get lonely? Who am I gonna hang around with, Madeline and Helen?” Lisle sticks to the crux of the sales pitch by reminding, “But you never grow old.” Ernest bemoans, “But everybody else will. I’ll have to watch everyone around me die. I don’t think this is right. This is not a dream. This is a nightmare.” Or, as the first verse of Thomas Moore’s “The Last Rose of Summer” goes, “‘Tis the last rose of summer,/Left blooming alone;/All her lovely companions/Are faded and gone;/No flower of her kindred,/No rose-bud is nigh,/To reflect back her blushes/Or give sigh for sigh!”

     So sure, staying young and vibrant has its pluses, but, in the end, caving to vanity means you’ll end up stuck with someone as narcissistic and soulless as the Hollywood machine itself. And the way Madeline and Helen end up in the final scene, it doesn’t appear as though the price they’ve paid for “youth” has been worth the fine-print consequences.

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    Genna Rivieccio

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  • As Usual, It’s Overblown News When Madonna Falls, But Her Latest Tumble Is Yet Another Metaphor for How She Lives (to Tell)

    As Usual, It’s Overblown News When Madonna Falls, But Her Latest Tumble Is Yet Another Metaphor for How She Lives (to Tell)

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    While some pop stars are “allowed” to trip or fall (e.g., Taylor Swift on the top of her precious “Folklore cabin” during The Eras Tour) without it making the overly judgmental rounds on multiple news outlets, Madonna has not been permitted the same luxury for quite some time. Certainly not when she took her last “international incident” of a tumble at the 2015 BRIT Awards (resulting in various ageist memes including the one about her needing a stairlift at her “advanced” age). A fall that was, once again, not something she herself was in control of, but rather, a consequence of an Armani cape tied too tightly around her neck so that it didn’t come off easily at the planned moment, prompting her dancers to whip her backwards like a ragdoll. 

    In the newest edition of “Madonna ‘falls,’” it was yet again a dancer-related mishap, with Daniele Sibilli as the “culprit” who actually stumbled (in extremely thin stilettos, mind you) while dragging Madonna across the stage on her “Open Your Heart” chair—this being the song she was singing for a Seattle audience at the February 18th performance of The Celebration Tour when it happened. Unlike during the “Living for Love” mishap at the BRIT Awards, Madonna wasn’t fazed enough by the fall from her chair to stop singing her verse, continuing on as she toppled from seat to stage, legs up in the air for a few seconds as she did so (something about it smacking of Guy Ritchie’s denouement for 2001’s BMW short, Star). 

    For a moment, she does try to go on singing as though nothing happened, thinking better of it and making a deliberate attempt to force out her laughter (after all, this is the same woman who had an early demo called “Laugh to Keep From Crying”). Because this is M’s way of publicly announcing that she’s fine, it’s all good. Of course, most fans know from her last majorly publicized fall that she doesn’t do too well with any sign of imperfection, least of all in her live performances, always rehearsed to the nth degree (this probably being why the protocol in place should she fall was for everyone else to just keep going).

    After the BRIT Awards debacle, when Madonna went on The Ellen DeGeneres Show to promote Rebel Heart and its lead single, DeGeneres asked, “Can we talk about the fall?” (As was DeGeneres’ way with guests to kind of make them feel like shit.) Madonna was quick to point out, “I didn’t fall. I was yanked.” And it is important to make the distinction that in both of these highly publicized falls, Madonna was collateral damage in the error of something or someone else (a combination of both, if you will). In the case of that performance of “Living for Love,” her cape had been tied too tightly at the neck to be yanked off from her shoulders in the same way as was initially rehearsed. This resulting in her falling backward down some very steep steps. But even then, and for as much more drastic and potentially harmful as that fall was, Madonna still didn’t stop her performance. A consummate believer in the philosophy: “the show must go on.”

    After collecting herself, she then continued as though nothing happened, taking the opportunity to prove what a beautiful and well-choreographed piece it was (with the camera flashing to a then freshly married Kimye marveling at it for further proof). And ironically, right after the fall, she even had to sing the lines, “Took me to heaven/Let me fall down” and “Lifted me up and watched me stumble.” On The Jonathan Ross Show that aired a few weeks later, Madonna told him, “I’m never writing lyrics like that again!” Fearing she had somehow “conjured it.” 

    The one thing everyone who interviewed her about it could agree on, though, was that she damn well knew how to take a tumble, something she herself also noted with pride to Ross when she said, “I know how to fall. I’ve fallen off my horse many times and I’ve got good core strength.” This is why, as she told DeGeneres about the BRIT Awards, Madonna cried not because of being in pain, but because of humiliation. She also said her first thought was not even about her own well-being but, rather, “Shit, I made a mistake” and “I wanna start over.”

    Such devout commitment to the art and the work echoes the even more extreme example of her nearly dying over the summer of 2023 and waking from a coma with her first thought being (after her children, she says) the fans who bought tickets to see the show she had been rehearsing through for months. Rehearsals that, many say, she was pushing herself too hard in, leading to the fever that led to the ignored bacterial infection that led to her hospitalization. So yeah, being such a perfectionist to the point of compromising her health, these snafus known as falls could easily be glossed over instead of blown way out of proportion as an even worse media slight to someone who so rarely “fucks up” (which is why people are eager to see her do so). And again, these were not even her fuck-ups, the media just wants to paint it that way for the purposes of their tireless anti-Madonna campaign as related to her age. Spinning the story as though the fall somehow correlated to her being in her sixties. 

    So (un)naturally, every outlet from Us Weekly to Page Six to People to Entertainment Weekly to the Daily Mail had a headline to offer about Madonna’s fall-off from the chair. And of course each headline chooses to conveniently omit that she didn’t “fall”—her dancer tripped, causing the chair he was carrying to teeter and make M fall off of it. But no, that’s not the angle anyone wants to sell. Instead, an entity like The Blast wants to promote, “Madonna, 65, Suffers From a Chair Fall During Her Concert in Seattle.” 

    Despite these attempts at demeanment, she’s still going to, as she said in “Living for Love,” “pick up my crown/Put it back on my head.” Which is, as she’s shown the masses time and time again, what she will always do when she falls, whether literally or metaphorically. This being, in the end, the mark of a true success rather than a failure.

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    Genna Rivieccio

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  • Cringe Overload, Yet Somehow J. Lo’s Best Album: This Is Me…Now

    Cringe Overload, Yet Somehow J. Lo’s Best Album: This Is Me…Now

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    Long before Taylor Swift became the so-called queen of dissecting romance and prattling on about fairytale love, there was Jennifer Lopez. A woman who has flown under the radar as both a pop star and a pop star who consistently talks about love and her relationships perhaps precisely because she’s not a gringa. As Lopez herself stated when her last album, A.K.A., was released, “[Love is] my motivation. It’s what I think about. That’s who I am at the essence… if you listen to my albums, they were always about love. I’ve always sung about love. It was always love in a certain way: a fairytale type of way; I was hoping, praying, and wishing for that.” In Ben Affleck, it would appear, she’s found it…again. Because, yes, Lopez wants to make it abundantly clear that Affleck was always the one. And that all the men who came after were merely her attempts to mend the heartbreak that never fully repaired itself…until now. 

    Indeed, the full-circle trajectory of the couple known as Bennifer has been something that celebrity gossip mongers have been deeply invested in. Perhaps because not since Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor has a couple been so known for getting back together after breaking up. While Burton and Taylor actually managed to get married (and divorce) twice, Jen and Ben never made it down the aisle the first time around when they got engaged, back in November of 2002. From that moment forward, the paparazzi and the tabloids ramped up their coverage of the couple, reporting on everything from Ben’s “strip club antics” to their “box office bomb,” Gigli. (In truth, one kind of hopes they actually will make another proper movie together to redeem themselves of that.) Then there was the “postponement” of their wedding, at which time the couple cited lack of privacy and fear of the ceremony being ruined as a viable reason to cancel the original date (mind you, such fears never stopped Madonna and Sean Penn on August 16, 1985). But to the paps, that was a sign of smoke leading to a major dumpster fire: their relationship. It then seemed to become a chicken or egg situation as to whether the press fueled the breakup or if the engagement, ergo the relationship, was inevitably doomed to collapse. 

    At least until both Jen and Ben found themselves single again at the same time in April of 2021, with Jennifer fresh off another cast-aside engagement, this time to Alexander Rodriguez. Ben, meanwhile had dipped his toe back in the waters of Latina mamis by dating/quarantining with Ana de Armas in 2020. But the relationship fizzled out as the pandemic lockdowns did, with the couple calling it quits in January of 2021, just a few months before J. Lo and A. Rod would do the same. Ironically enough, de Armas cited the intense media scrutiny involved in being with Affleck/living in L.A. as a major reason for the split. Enter J. Lo, no stranger to such levels of scrutiny. In fact, it was possibly because of how lily-livered de Armas was about the press that Affleck was perhaps inspired to provide a “rave” quote about Lopez for InStyle, leading him, in turn, reach out to his old flame via email in early ‘21. A thread that kept going until the two finally just started “hanging out” again. Pulling the old “just friends” line. Or, as Olivia Rodrigo would put it, “Yes, I know that’s he’s my ex/But can’t two people reconnect/I only see him as a friend/The biggest lie I ever said.” As it was for Lopez, who quickly noticed the same “spark” was still there, just waiting to be fully rekindled. If for no other reason than it might at least rekindle her dormant muse, so clearly only awakened when in true love.

    This is perhaps why, after the release of her lowest-selling album in 2014, the aforementioned A.K.A., she decided to hit pause on recording a new LP for ten years, relying instead on releasing a single every so often to keep her name in the charts. Which worked effectively enough… She could even distract herself with being a Serious Actress for a while (including in 2019’s Hustlers), but it seemed making another album was beckoning to her, lying just beneath the surface until something monumental could “activate” “the muse.” And while most pop stars (*cough cough* Taylor Swift) find their best inspiration in heartache, Lopez can only seem to thrive musically when love is the source, as opposed to the embittered tone that embodies many an album by women. Not to say men don’t have just as many embittered songs post-breakup (here’s looking at you, Justin Timberlake), but they simply don’t get the same “audit” when it comes to their lyrical content. 

    As for Lopez, she doesn’t seem to mind how much critics accuse her of being a foolish romantic, and she makes that much apparent by commencing the album with the eponymous “This Is Me…Now.” Incidentally, it was this song and “Greatest Love Story Never Told” that Lopez wrote on the first day of working on the record. And so, with the opening lines, “I watched my mother miss out on her life/All those could-have-beens became her sacrifice/But here in the darkness/It’s not the future nor the past/And ‘cause it’s meant to be with you, boy, it will last,” Lopez establishes her “love thesis,” if you will. One that posits, as she told Zane Lowe during their Apple Music interview, “True love exists and some things last forever.” Though, again, that’s but a leap of faith on her part vis-à-vis Ben Affleck. Who, while not “directly” in her accompanying film inspired by the album (because no, it’s not “mere” visual album as Beyoncé would “lazily” do), appears as a “running motif” newscaster spouting J. Lo-isms like, “We have no love for each other, we have no love for ourselves.” Funnily enough, that’s the angle the film is going for: you have to be happy alone and “in love” with yourself in order to experience that with someone else. It’s a well-worn trope but Lopez dusts it off quite nicely for the purposes of this record. Immediately evident in her opening song with optimistic lyrics that include, “Now we know what it takes for our ever after.” She also speaks to the film version’s message about being at peace on your own via the line, “Had to heal my heart/But I love who I am lately.”

    Lyrical tie-ins to the movie also abound when she sings, “When I was a girl, they’d ask me what I’d be/A woman in love is what I grew up wanting to be.” This being repurposed as a voiceover at the beginning of the film when she announces, “So when I was a little girl, whenever someone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, my answer was always…in love.” Yes, it’s very cheeseball, but somehow Lopez manages to carry it off in a way that’s slightly less cringe than Gwen Stefani and Blake Shelton singing “Purple Irises.” Probably only because Affleck isn’t singing on the track with her (though, based on that Dunkin’ Donuts commercial, he would if he could). 

    The second track, “To Be Yours,” is more uptempo, with production from Rogét Chahayed, Angel Lopez, Andrew Wansel, Carter Lang, Sam Wish and Yeti Beats. It also finds Lopez sampling lyrically from The Carpenters when she asks, “Don’t you remember you told me you loved me?” This after setting up the sample of “Superstar” with the verse, “Long ago and oh so far away, babe/Met this superstar and then he changed my life.” That “long ago” time she met him was in 2001, two years after Britney Spears, per her account, made out with Affleck when she was still underage (seventeen). Spears casually dropped this bomb in one of her many reminiscing, non sequitur Instagram posts by putting up a picture of her, Affleck and, more random still, Diane Warren featuring the caption, “Cool pic of me and Ben Affleck and Diane Warren years ago! He’s such an amazing actor. Did I fail to mention I made out with Ben that night… I honestly forgot… damn that’s crazy! Wish I could tell you guys the story that happened before that! Oh dear, I’m just being a gossip girl!” Which, to be honest, comes across like he date raped her or something. If Lopez didn’t already have a sample of Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me A River” at the end of “This Is Me…Now,” this surely would have been reason enough to add it as a shade-drenched response to Spears. And yet, Britney wasn’t the one who did wrong in the end, it was Affleck. Which is perhaps why he clammed up days after the post (one that Spears quickly deleted for even more dramatic cachet) when a paparazzo asked him if it was true about Britney. Before that moment, though, he was all smiles, eager to lap up the attention. 

    So one supposes if Lopez can stay “Mad in Love,” the title of track three on the record, should it ever come out in more detail just what, exactly, happened between Spears and Affleck, then maybe, yeah, it is real. Something she keeps insisting on while singing, “Two decades later and it still hit the same/Won’t lose you, won’t lose you, won’t lose you.” No matter what Spears tries to say, apparently. Elsewhere she channels the Lana Del Rey (not to mention Belinda Carlisle) lyrics, “Heaven is a place on Earth with you” when she notes, “If heaven is a place/Came back into my life, you opened up the gates.” Unfortunately, the most memorable lines come in the form of, “We in the Hills, couple goals/Yeah, we really that cute/Lookin’ like twenty-two [not quite, but anyway…]/We keep stuntin’/Keep it one hunnid/Gettin’ rich off love/Like I’m gettin’ this money.” Apart from the dated 00s-era slang, while she might have meant it to come off as “metaphorical,” the truth is that the relationship does bring both of them more money. Because their “perfect union” generates more public interest and curiosity about them. Something that both parties, ostensibly, “Can’t Get Enough” of. This being the fourth song on the This Is Me…Now journey.

    As the only “video” Lopez chose to release as an extrapolation from the album’s associated film, it was meant to give viewers a snapshot of the record’s vibe and themes. Number one being Lopez’s predilection for serial monogamy. Thus, she riffs on her reputation by soundtracking this song to her various weddings to different men. Sampling (as Sean Paul and Sasha did in 2002) from Alton Ellis’ 1967 song, “I’m Still in Love With You” (which he sang, creepily enough, with his sister, Hortense [some Finneas and Billie type of shit]), Lopez assures, while attired in her wedding dress, “Can’t nothin’ take me out my zone” (this, too, feels weirdly Britney-coded considering her 2003 album was called In the Zone). And also, of course, “I’m still in love/With you, boy.” But she’s in love with a lot of boys, see. At least in the two-decade period before “reconvening” with Affleck. 

    Even before Affleck, Lopez was known for being a “relationship girl.” When 1999’s On the 6 was released, she was with Puff Daddy (before he became Diddy, the known rapist/sexual assaulter). Even after his involvement in a nightclub shooting that led to her own arrest simply for being in his proximity. Before Diddy, she had just finalized the divorce from her first husband, Ojani Noa. So yeah, Lopez has really never been single for long. Yet she was still able to sing tracks like “Feelin’ So Good” in her less self-loving days.

    To that point, the “Feelin’ So Good” vibes of “not.going.anywhere.” is aided by an opening verse from either Fat Joe or someone doing their best to mimic him that goes, “This that brand new Jenny/You know how we rockin’ this time around.” Indeed, it echoes Fat Joe’s tone when he raps, “We got artist of the year rhymin’ here/Grammy nominations and platinum plus/Ain’t nothin’ baby, all I want in life.” And all J. Lo wants in life is to make her devotion to Affleck known, as well as his devotion to her, further manifested in her dulcet assurances, “Now I’m not going anywhere/Eternally yours, I don’t feel that fading,” complete with just the faintest sonic tinge of Jagged Edge (who happen to be featured on J. Lo’s signature, “Jenny From the Block”) and Nelly’s 2001 hit, “Where the Party At?” Just as much as she doesn’t feel the sounds of the early 00s fading either, with “Rebound” strongly emulating the generic amalgamation of 1999-2000 bops from the likes of Brandy, Destiny’s Child, Blaque and 702. And if anyone knows something about the “Rebound,” it’s, again, J. Lo, not Taylor Swift.

    This, too, is a song that makes the cut for being included in the parallel film, with Lopez choosing to feature it after getting into a particularly weird fight with a Libra (yes, the zodiac is very important to the narrative) because she “dares” to call him “meticulous.” From there, things start to get very reminiscent of the plot of Enough as Lopez realizes she’s gotten into an abusive dynamic for the sake of trying to forget about the person she’s still actually in love with. Lamenting, “I can’t force the love when I’m only thinkin’ of him” and “I only ran into your arms/While runnin’ from the pain,” Lopez acknowledges her shortcomings with regard to paying the price for her seeming incapability of being alone. Because, as she says, “Let you take advantage, so I could fill that space/Just another classic case/Got me on that rebound, rebound, rebound.”

    However, as Lopez reiterates throughout the record, all the pain of those subsequent relationships was worth it if it meant being part of a larger journey back toward Affleck (feel free to vomit now). What’s more, while Lopez was merciless in choosing to bring listeners a “Dear Ben, Pt. II,” she was kind enough to make it much more bearable than This Is Me…Then’s “Dear Ben.” A song that J. Lo had no qualms about releasing despite the lyrics, “My lust, my love, my man/My child [weird], my friend, my king.” With the follow-up to this “love letter,” Lopez has the presence of mind to make it uptempo, with production help from Roget Rogét Chahayed, Angel Lopez, Jeff “Gitty” Gitelman and Bernard “Harv” Harvey. Perhaps knowing better now than to brand Affleck as “perfect,” Lopez instead offers, “And you remind me why you are/The man I chose.” Later, she muses in wonder, “Oh, this is my life.” Lana Del Rey said pretty much the same thing with less enthusiasm on “Groupie Love”: “This is my life, you by my side.”

    Because the Puerto Rican fairytale that frames the intro of This Is Me…Now: A Love Story is about a man named Taroo who ends up being turned into a hummingbird after his beloved, Alida, is transformed by a god into a red flower (that’s a whole other backstory), it’s only logical for Lopez to have a song called “Hummingbird” on the album. A creature that becomes a primary talisman on Lopez’s endless quest to find true love in the visual narrative. To complement that visual, Lopez sings in earnest, “I just wanna be the wings to help you fly/‘Cause you help me be the best version of me/And all I wanna do is help you be the best version of you.” She even has the cornball audacity to quote the Corinthians cliche, “Love is patient, love is kind” before adding, “It’s safe to say what’s on your mind.” Hopefully, Affleck doesn’t fall for that trap. 

    At least this time around (which also happens to be a song title on the album), Lopez knows better than to assume true love means it will be all “Hearts and Flowers.” This track being arguably one of the best (and most danceable on the record). Which is why she opts to play it early on in the film, when a “heart rupture” (her own, obvs) is about to occur at the Heart Factory where she works. Watching the giant heart fail as it runs out of its “petal supply” (because in Lopez’s world of magical realism, flower petals run hearts), Lopez doesn’t exactly “grieve,” but rather, reacts to the literal heartbreak by dancing through the pain. What would amount to, in the years that followed Ben, throwing herself into her art (in addition to the latest relationship). Triumphantly singing, “The most priceless glass is stained/It ain’t all hearts and flowers, it ain’t all hearts and flowers.” In other words, as she announces in a different part of the song, “Before you see my life and say I live the dream/Remember everything ain’t always what it seems.” This, one imagines, also applies to the way in which she doth declare her love for Affleck too much. Anyway…“Hearts and Flowers” is additionally notable for its callback to “Jenny From the Block” as Lopez asserts, “They see it’s the same ol’ Jenny, wanna block me.” Of course, as this album is meant to announce, no one, paparazzi or otherwise, could block her if they tried.

    Nonetheless, Lopez isn’t opposed to admitting to her frailties, as she explores on the emotional ballad, “Broken Like Me.” With its musical sparseness, Lopez’s belting tone is allowed to shine through as she recalls (presumably of that time in her life after her breakup with Affleck), “I thought my life was over/I thought Hell could be real/Was all I on my own/Or did you ever feel/Broken like me, broken like me?/Searching for love/In all that you see?” It is when she finally decides to go to a Love Addicts Anonymous meeting (as recommended by her “therapist,” Fat Joe) that the opportunity for this song to play arises, with Lopez confessing her pattern of behavior to the circle of strangers. She’s also able to emphasize the oft-repeated message in the film about how she never loved herself enough, always channeling that lack and enthusiasm into a man instead of her own person. Thus, she rues, “Couldn’t look in the mirror/Afraid what I’d see/‘Cause I still loved, loved you more than me.” The point she’s making about discounting herself as someone worthy of self-love appears again when she has an encounter with her younger self (in a dream, naturally) in the Bronx, the little girl she once was approaching her to rebuke, “I didn’t get enough love. From you. You left me alone!… You love everybody else but me!” 

    Such a revelation might be briefly “too real,” so Lopez picks up the tempo again on the album with  “This Time Around,” a jaunty, self-assured track. One that promises how, because she and Affleck are older and wiser now, nothing can hold them back from their happily ever after, not even the press. Singing with the jubilance that appears on most of the records, Lopez says, “I’ve been waitin’ so long/Finally found it/Ain’t no way, baby, we can live without it/All that bullshit just don’t phase us/All the hate couldn’t break us.” The chorus then vows, “This time around, we gon’ doi it right/We gon’ do this shit for the rest of our life.” So yeah, not like she’s putting as much pressure as possible on this relationship…which, to be sure, is definitely a mistake she made the first time around. 

    Even so, there’s something to be said for the fact that the two actually got married in the era of Bennifer 2.0, the wedding recounted in Lopez’s ambient “Midnight Trip to Vegas.” And even if the average bride can’t relate to Lopez fretting, “Is this what we’ve been dreaming of?/It’s crowded with families and agents/Room reservations, which destination/Paps, helicopters, event of the ages/Caught in the matrix,” perhaps the everywoman can at least relate to the idea of a “quickie” wedding in Vegas. All the stresses and pressures of a conventional ceremony pared down to the barest of bones (and, if you’re still lucky enough, an Elvis impersonator somewhere in the background…though sometimes one wonders who would really want the specter of an abuser presiding over their nuptials). At another moment, Lopez pulls a Britney during “Me Against the Music” when she says, “It’s just me against the music,” but Madonna then negates that by chiming in, “And me.” In a similar fashion, Lopez tells Ben, “Just me and you, baby,” quickly adding, “Throw the kids in the back of the pink Cadillac.” Something of a “boner killer,” to be sure. Though Lopez and Affleck will likely say that having kids in the present, even if from separate marriages, is what has given them the “maturity” to be able to last in a way they didn’t have the emotional capacity to before. 

    So it is that Lopez concludes her grand opus to love (and Ben Affleck) with “Greatest Love Story Never Told.” It’s here that Lopez takes her Cringe-o-Meter a bit too far by cooing to Ben, “Missing your body/Climbing on top of me/Slippin’ inside of me/Way that I ride it, bodies aligning, look at our timing.” Ummm, TMI much? And yes, probably way too heteronormative for the present generation to really relate to. Which is perhaps the main snag in Lopez’s update to This Is Me…Then. It presumes that the masses still want to be sold this story about true love. Even if Lopez is modern enough to know she ought to sprinkle in the RuPaul-ian sentiment, “If you don’t love yourself, how the hell you gonna love anybody else?”

    As for Lopez, she’s commented of her reunion with Ben, “I don’t know that I recommend this for everybody. Sometimes you outgrow each other, or you just grow differently. The two of us, we lost each other and found each other. Not to discredit anything in between that happened, because all those things were real too. All we’ve ever wanted was to kind of come to a place of peace in our lives where we really felt that type of love that you feel when you’re very young and wonder if you can have that again. Does it exist? Is it real?” For now, it appears to be for Lopez and Affleck, with the former being reactivated in her musical life thanks to the latter’s reemergence in her life. And it all started with the lead single from Marry Me, “On My Way,” which gave a strong preview of what This Is Me…Now would entail. This extended to a clip show of Bennifer posing as a music video to promote the single. So much for imagining Owen Wilson as Lopez’s beau. 

    On some level, the cynics will speculate as to whether or not the This Is Me…Now project is some bid for Lopez to keep making herself “relatable” (with the searching for true love part, not the marrying a major celebrity part). Spears herself said it best about Lopez before blowing the lid off Affleck’s garden-variety predatoriness (by Hollywood standards), commenting in her memoir, “I actually envy the people who know how to make fame work for them, because I hide from it. I get very shy. For example, Jennifer Lopez, from the beginning, struck me as someone who was very good at being famous—at indulging people’s interest in her but knowing where to draw lines. She always handled herself well. She always carried herself with dignity.” Unless, of course, Affleck somehow manages to fuck that up for her (again, this is the cynic a.k.a. realist rearing its “ugly” head). 

    But even if he does, he has still clearly served a worthy purpose. For J. Lo has never been known as the type of singer to provide much in the way of pithy or thought-provoking records, or even records that you could actually listen to from start to finish. But, finally, This Is Me…Now is that album for Lopez. And it only took about twenty-five years in the music industry to get here. So thanks, Ben. Even if you do turn out to be just another stepping stone in the J. Lo odyssey.

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    Genna Rivieccio

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  • With “Training Season,” Dua Lipa Effectively Asks the Sheryl Crow Question, “Are You Strong Enough to Be My Man?”

    With “Training Season,” Dua Lipa Effectively Asks the Sheryl Crow Question, “Are You Strong Enough to Be My Man?”

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    After the musical vibe established by the Tame Impala (a.k.a. Kevin Parker)-produced “Houdini,” Dua Lipa persists in giving us a sonic sample of what her third album will be like. Once again co-produced by Kevin Parker and Danny L Harle (known for his work with Caroline Polachek), “Training Season” continues the 70s psychedelic motif of “Houdini” with perhaps even more attitude. Indeed, the song was reportedly inspired by a slew of middling dates that made Lipa realize such truisms as, “Don’t wanna have to teach you how to love me right/I hope it hits me like an arrow/Someone with some potential/Is it too much to ask for, who understands?” 

    The answer, based on the clientele she’s endured in the past, is a resounding yes. It is too much to ask for (particularly now, when the chicness of polyamory has given men even more incentive to flit around like little birds). And it’s a question that Sheryl Crow effectively demanded long ago on her 1994 single, “Strong Enough,” during which she sings, “I’d be the last to help you understand/Are you strong enough to be my man?” There are other portions of the track that also mirror Lipa’s frustration with the landscape of available men (though, in Crow’s case, she seems to be addressing just one man in particular), namely when Crow laments, “Nothing’s true and nothing’s right/So let me be alone tonight/‘Cause you can’t change the way I am/Are you strong enough to be my man?” What Lipa rues, however, isn’t that she can’t change, but that none of the men around her are capable of doing so…at least not without needing to be, that’s right, trained. And, obviously, Lipa is so over that at this stage in her life. 

    To that end, she diverges from Crow urging, “Lie to me/I promise I’ll believe/Lie to me/But please don’t leave.” In contrast, Lipa would urge her mediocre suitors to bugger right off. Because, as she states quite plainly, “Need someone to hold me close/Deeper than I’ve ever known/Whose love feels like a rodeo/Knows just how to take control/When I’m vulnerable He’s straight talking to my soul/(If that ain’t you, then let me know, yeah)/Conversation overload.” The rodeo theme is something Lipa glommed onto long before Beyoncé came along to graft the “ghetto fabulous cowgirl” look from Madonna’s Music era. In fact, it’s an aesthetic she acknowledged in the 2021 video for Future Nostalgia’s “Love Again.” 

    Rodeo or not, though, based on Lipa’s unending assortment of bland (not just blind) dates at the coffee shop in the accompanying video directed by Vincent Haycock (known mostly for directing Lana Del Rey’s “West Coast,” as well as numerous videos for Florence + the Machine), there is no such “conversation overload” to be had. And if there is, it’s certainly not anything of a scintillating variety. 

    To underscore that grim dating reality, Lipa opens the video with a series of apologetic messages on her phone’s answering machine (again emphasizing that she’s in a retro mood) from various fuckboys who have bored her in the past. That she’s posted up in a date setting—the proverbial coffee shop—that is known for being the “safe approach” to first or blind dates only amplifies the general lack of expectation she has for any of these gits. And there’s quite a large lot of them as the video progresses, whether huddled outside staring at her through the window like she’s an animal in a zoo (clearly a fame metaphor), ogling her from inside the cafe or generally peacocking around each other as they vie for Lipa’s attention. 

    Alas, none of them can seem to hold her interest for very long, prompting her to head to the bathroom at one point to languidly reapply her lipstick. If anyone else can relate to Lindsay Lohan as Elizabeth Taylor screaming, “I’m bored! I’m so bored!,” it’s Dua Lipa in this video. Even so, she keeps staying at the coffee shop, hoping that even just one of these suitors might be strong (and interesting) enough to be her man as they all start to swirl around her like rabid, wild animals. 

    To her advantage, she’s accustomed to such frenzy. To her dismay, none of the blokes can deliver even a modicum of what she’s looking for. Hence, her automated outbox message recording at the end of the video declaring, “The mailbox is full and cannot accept any messages at this time. Goodbye.”

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    Genna Rivieccio

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  • Mondo Bullshittio #47: Madonna Not Being on the “yes, and?” Remix, Or: Mariah Carey Not Only Brings Nothing to the “yes, and?” Remix, But She Also Sounds Like An AI Version of Herself

    Mondo Bullshittio #47: Madonna Not Being on the “yes, and?” Remix, Or: Mariah Carey Not Only Brings Nothing to the “yes, and?” Remix, But She Also Sounds Like An AI Version of Herself

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    In a series called Mondo Bullshittio, let’s talk about some of the most glaring hypocrisies and faux pas in pop culture…and all that it affects.

    As Mariah Carey has been trending with “the kids” these days (mainly because Miley Cyrus bowed down to her while being presented with the Grammy for Best Pop Solo Performance, even though Carey announced her name as “Mirey” instead of “Miley”), it’s only natural that Ariana Grande should return to collaborating with her (having previously featured on yet another remix in 2020…for Carey’s 2010 song, “Oh Santa!”). Except that, well, it’s not really natural at all for a remix of “yes, and?,” which, if anything, should include contributing vocals from Madonna, the pop star that Grande borrows most heavily from for the single (apart from Paula Abdul…but only for the accompanying music video’s visuals). Because, needless to say, “yes, and?” is extremely influenced by “Vogue.” Which Madonna herself borrowed from the gay Black and Latino community of ballroom dancers in the late 80s. Because, as many are still aware, Madonna was the only mainstream artist at that time willing to showcase, promote and generally associate with gay men during a period when it was anathema to do so thanks to the AIDS pandemic. We all know Mariah damn sure wasn’t doing that shit, especially since she was doing her best at the outset of her career to not be branded as a Black artist, least of all liberally associate in public with gay Black people.

    Accordingly, Mariah, while Blacker than Madonna (obviously), doesn’t really have a place to comfortably assert herself within the spirit of this song. Not just because it’s evident that she’s struggling to find a moment on the remix where her vocals can actually shine (without fully upstaging Grande’s—though upstaging has never seemed to be a problem for Carey), but because she also comes across like an AI-sounding version of herself. Perhaps in a bid not to be compared to Grande, Carey goes a few octaves lower than we’re used to hearing as Grande hits all of her usual high notes. Sure, the two harmonize at the beginning for an effect that could bring all the dolphins to shore, but, as the song commences, Carey gets totally lost in the shuffle of Grande’s dominating voice. 

    While the point of adding Carey into the equation might have been, among other reasons (apart from making certain gay men splooge), to highlight their comparable vocal stylings and talents, the result is, instead, underscoring Grande’s vocal prowess compared to her “mentor’s.” An effect, as many snarky critics would be quick to point out, that wouldn’t have happened with the likes of Madonna contributing to the track. And no, it’s not “just” because she doesn’t have the same vocal range as Carey, but because her voice is different enough from Grande’s to actually complement it. And since the implications of a remix are that a song is actually going to stand apart from its original with either different music or a collaborator that’s noticeable (as was the case on Grande’s “34+35 Remix”), “yes, and?” falls short in many regards. 

    Being that Carey’s genre range has never gone far beyond the limits of “adult contemporary,” pop and R&B (while allowing occasional rap features on her pop songs), she seems totally at sixes and sevens when tasked with blending in seamlessly to the dance-centric rhythms of house music. Her one additional verse contribution also lands flatly with regard to “serving,” and, indeed, even reads like it was generated by AI as well: “I’m so done with sharing/This hypocrisy with you/Baby, you have been rejected/Go back, no more pretending, bye.” It’s almost like a bad imitation, lyrically, of Beyoncé shouting, “Tell him, ‘Boy, bye’” on “Sorry.” 

    The fact that nearly every outlet that’s reviewed the original “yes, and?” has called out the noticeable homage Grande gives to Madonna on this song adds to the overall feeling of how thudding this remix sounds. Because, (yours) truly, if anyone was going to help with the remix, it ought to have been Madonna. Carey could have easily been put on ice (something she’s used to vis-à-vis Christmas storage) for a different remix of another song that might have actually worked better for her vocals. What’s more, while Grande may have already paid the ultimate compliment to Madonna by casting her as God for the “God Is A Woman” video, that Grande selected someone for “yes, and?” who has been so blatant about her contempt for the Queen of Pop in the past (as recently as all the shade thrown in her autobiography, The Meaning of Mariah Carey) is yet another pouring of salt in the wound of not “tapping” M to be involved with this homage to “Vogue” more directly.

    In any case, perhaps Madonna is still too busy with The Celebration Tour/riding high on the success of her feature on The Weeknd’s “Popular” to be concerned with this rather overt slight/misjudgment.

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    Genna Rivieccio

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  • For Taylor Swift, “God I Love the English” No Longer Applies

    For Taylor Swift, “God I Love the English” No Longer Applies

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    Having recently opted for “all-American boy” Travis Kelce, it seems the days of Swift’s fetish for British men are over. Though, for a while there, it was going quite strong, starting with Harry Styles in his One Direction era. Swift then moved on to Calvin Harris (who would probably specify he’s Scottish, not British—but still), then Tom Hiddleston, then Joe Alwyn. The latter British bloke being her longest relationship at approximately six years (though maybe less, if one is to go by “You’re Losing Me” being written in early December of 2021). Even so, Swift didn’t seem to be fully convinced she was entirely “over” British peen, briefly dabbling with The 1975’s Matty Healy before quickly realizing how damaging he was to her “brand.” In fact, Ice Spice’s involvement in the entire dalliance (with comments Healy made about Ice Spice on a podcast quickly resurfacing during their time together) appears to be something Swift is still making up for now (after already giving her a feature on a “remix” of “Karma”), carting her along into the multimillion-dollar box (a.k.a. suite) seats she enjoyed while watching “her man” play in the Super Bowl. 

    And what she’s also apparently making up for is all that lost time without some good old-fashioned American dick in her life. We’re talking the kind of sausage that is as American as they come: an Ohio-born football player for the NFL. As for Kelce’s own recently-ended long-term relationship, it was with sports and fashion influencer Kayla Nicole Brown. Having been with her for five years (albeit on-again, off-again), it seems as though Kelce, too, wanted to make an about-face, “type”-wise. Because yes, Taylor Swift is about as far from a Black woman as you can get. Nonetheless, she’s been doing her best to get as close to one as possible by way of Ice Spice, who is clearly spicing up Taylor’s fucking life more than Travis Kelce. A man that has only served to bland-ify it with his Americanness and general lack of a “cosmopolitan” nature (let’s put it this way: he isn’t going to be putting a dress on or reading aloud from a book of Romantic poetry anytime soon). What her British boyfriends all possessed, even if only by sheer virtue of actually being in the arts as opposed to being football players. And that’s not a trait to be overlooked. For, as Swift saw forever crystallized in a meme of Kelce screaming like a wild animal in his coach’s face, it’s no good when someone has that much sports-driven testosterone coursing through their veins. You never know when it’s going to cause a rage flare-up. Though perhaps Kelce knows better than to fly into one around Swift, lest he risk having his temper tantrum immortalized in a song. 

    Although Swift isn’t a stranger to dating the all-American boy, including Joe Jonas and a Kennedy (Conor), Kelce is arguably the biggest cliche of what that trope represents. And it’s unlikely that, with future boyfriends, Swift will be able to ever top such a stereotype of what it means to “be American.” Unless, of course, she should decide to go the Lana Del Rey route and date a cop. But no, not even Swift could make cops “chic.” Football, on the other hand, is something easy to breathe life into once more (especially through a highly publicized end-of-game kiss, delivered in a Hollywood ending fashion). After all, it’s no secret that, in the U.S., all of life is just an extended metaphor for high school. Where the jock and the thin blonde girl are treated as royalty while the rest of the “student body” merely looks on with the requisite amount of awe and reverence. Thus, although some might have been growing fed up with Swift’s British bloke fetish, at least what could be said for it was that it didn’t reinforce the already barely latent idea that all the world’s a high school, and those with the “objectively” good looks and wealth are the ones who will be perennially rewarded by society’s capitalist values. 

    And yet, what’s also rather ironic about Swift’s sudden one-eighty toward embracing the cheerleader role in her football player boyfriend’s life is that she, at one point, viewed herself as someone who was not “football player’s girlfriend” material. In truth, it was the very song about this “difficulty” of hers that put her on the map beyond just the country music radio scene: “You Belong With Me.” In the accompanying music video, Swift plays the so-called dweeb (mainly because she has giant black-rimmed glasses holding her back from being seen as the “hot” girl) who lives across from her “cute” friend. Who, quel choc, happens to be a football player that she can’t seem to attain. Not only because she’s a “nerd,” but because he already has a cheerleader girlfriend (also played by Swift, in a very bad brunette wig…let’s just say she’s not sporting the same quality hair as Rachel McAdams in her ten-thousand-dollar [some even say twenty-thousand-dollar] wig for Mean Girls). Thus, “Nerd” Swift is relegated to the sidelines in a far crueler way than she is now, forced to watch the object of her affection look out toward Brunette Swift instead of her, all bedecked in her marching band attire. 

    By the end of the video, though, Swift, in the style of a true high school rom-com formula, takes off her glasses, puts on a form-fitting gown and shows up to the prom so that the football player dude can see how “hot” she actually is without her dweeb costume. Naturally, the two end up together. And Swift ostensibly admitted that she was never born for the “unpopular girl” role. Yet she held off for this long on returning to Brunette Taylor status by giving in fully to the high school fantasy/fairytale she conveyed to us long ago in 2008 (though the single and video were released in 2009). One she perhaps tried to stave off for several years with British men, assuring listeners at one point, “God I love the English” on Lover’s “London Boy.” Ultimately, however, Swift has succumbed to her most puerile desires from the Fearless era in seeking out the validating comfort of the all-American jock. And there’s no doubt that Matty Healy helped give her the final push back in that direction. With The Tortured Poets Department slated to be a scathing spotlight on her years spent with Alwyn, listeners will soon know even more about why Swift has returned to preferring her own Uh-muhr-ih-cuhn breed. Cemented by featuring a song on the album called “So Long, London.” De facto “Hello ‘Murica.”

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    Genna Rivieccio

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  • Lisa Frankenstein: Mary Shelley With a (Tanning Bed) Shock of Heathers

    Lisa Frankenstein: Mary Shelley With a (Tanning Bed) Shock of Heathers

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    For those seeking to dig up their long-buried romantic side, Lisa Frankenstein arrives at the perfect time: Valentine’s Day. And, although it was released during what was called the worst box office weekend for movies since Covid, one can only hope that the receipts will pick up (or at least stay the same) for screenwriter Diablo Cody’s latest signature offering in the coming weeks. Not to mention picking up for the sake of director Zelda Williams’ (yes, Robin Williams’ daughter) debut feature (having previously directed the short films, Shrimp and Kappa Kappa Die), who has just as much riding on the success of the film as Cody. Except that “success,” when applied to a movie like Lisa Frankenstein, can definitely not be measured in box office returns, so much as “finding its audience.” 

    When Cody hoped that would happen with 2009’s now-respected horror-comedy, Jennifer’s Body, it didn’t. And that was, in large part, due to some very poorly-executed marketing plans, ones that relied heavily on playing up Megan Fox’s “sexiness” rather than the actual story. While JB might have been maligned at the time (just as Lisa Frankenstein is now), Cody stated, “If people hadn’t rediscovered Jennifer’s Body, I would not have written Lisa Frankenstein. With that whole area, that genre, I kind of felt unwelcome in it, because I had flopped so hard on my last attempt.” Thank “God” those feelings went away, and Cody was able to bring us another campy “coming-of-rage” (as Lisa Frankenstein is called) tale that reworks Mary Shelley’s classic to the advantage of a teen girl in the “mad scientist” role. 

    Except, in true underlying discriminatory fashion, Lisa doesn’t create her monster through science (so much for a chem lab scene), but rather, by simple wishing…while tripped out on PCP-laced alcohol. From there, a Victorian-inspired dream sequence ensues (giving the likes of Yorgos Lanthimos and Michel Gondry a run for their money), featuring Lisa (Kathryn Newton) in a dress that reflects the 1800s period she’s flashing back to…minus the giant Pabst Blue Ribbon logo painted on the front of it. In fact, the hand-painted logo on that dress is what got costume designer Meagan McLaughlin the job. And it seemed to be the job of a lifetime in terms of getting to rework some of her favorite looks from the decade, which are overtly inspired by both Madonna and Winona Ryder (80s queens on opposite aesthetic spectrums, yet somehow two sides of the same coin, kind of like horror and comedy). 

    Considering that Cody was recently working on a script with Madonna for her since-shelved biopic, perhaps it’s fair to say that the pop star has remained on Cody’s brain—which undoubtedly shines through in this movie. McLaughlin (whose meticulous attention to detail on the wardrobe front cannot be underestimated) also admitted she was “obsessed with Madonna in 1984, and you don’t grow out of that obsession. [That’s why] there’s a hint of Madonna-esque Like a Virgin fashion in [the movie].” More than just a hint, mind you. Except Lisa appears mostly in black lace rather than white. As for the obvious Tim Burton flair of the film (including the house and neighborhood exteriors), it’s in large part because of how much Lisa reminds one of Ryder’s characters in Beetlejuice and Heathers, with McLaughlin adding, “Winona Ryder is a huge influence for me in that period, and we were absolutely inspired by her costumes in Beetlejuice and Heathers. I had taken a screenshot from Heathers of Winona in a gray top with a black skirt with suspenders, and that inspired one of Lisa’s looks…” 

    And if Lisa is Winona Ryder-inspired, then there’s no denying the Creature (Cole Sprouse) is heavily Johnny Depp-inspired. Particularly his Edward Scissorhands era (which also included Ryder). A mood board for the costumes looked not only to Buster Keaton, but, surely, also Depp in his early 90s movies. After all, 1989 was on the cusp of that decade, and it took until at least 1995 to fully shake an all-out 80s tinge that still lingered heavily in most people’s sartorial choices. And, talking of 1989, that was also the year Heathers was released in theaters and changed the landscape of teen movies forever. Particularly when it came to actually speaking candidly (and comically) on what it meant to be a teen girl. For the satirical purposes of Daniel Waters’ script, the murderous rage so many women at that age feel became literal as Veronica Sawyer (Ryder) becomes involved with a rebellious “James Dean type,” named, appropriately, J.D. (Christian Slater), who is willing to carry out the murders she otherwise wouldn’t. Hence, the indelible voiceover of Veronica saying, “Dear Diary, my teen angst bullshit has a body count.” Other absurdist lines delivered glibly include, “Great pâté, Mom, but I gotta motor if I wanna be ready for that funeral” and “Did you have a brain tumor for breakfast?” (that one delivered by Heather Chandler, not Veronica). Lisa begins to deliver such outlandish lines in a similarly blasé manner. That’s all part of the genre. And so is the hormonally-driven lust of crushing hard over a boy. 

    For Lisa, the J.D. in her life turns out to be the Creature, who immediately becomes emotionally attached to his “maker,” defending her at all costs from anyone he sees affecting her negatively. At the top of that list is her new stepmother, the Nurse Ratched-esque Janet (Carla Gugino, relishing a villainous role as usual). Convinced she’s the source for all that is good and holy in Lisa and her father Dale’s (Joe Chrest) life, Janet has little patience for what she perceives as Lisa’s “acting out” ways. And it isn’t long before she makes it her mission to paint Lisa as “crazy” enough to be locked up, which would leave her with Dale and her own perfect cheerleader daughter, Taffy (Liza Soberano). 

    Surprisingly, though, Taffy is actually nice to Lisa, making it a point to treat her like a real sister, defending her from naysayers and taking her out to parties. Including the first “rager” of the year, where she encounters the “cerebral” (“He’s in a wheelchair?” Taffy asks in regard to that word) boy she’s been crushing on, Michael Trent (Henry Eikenberry). And also, unfortunately, his girlfriend, Tamara (Joey Harris). The latter being the Goth Lite that Lisa will soon outdo with her own theatrical aesthetics (ones clearly inspired by the bands she loves: Bauhaus, The Cure, Joy Division, etc.—the only nod to “goth” [before it got rebranded as “emo”] missing from that era is The Smiths). It’s Tamara that fucks her over with the old reverse psychology trap of handing her a cup, quickly retracting it and saying something to the effect of, “Silly me, I should’ve known better to than to think you knew how to party.” Lisa then takes the cup from her, not wanting to come across like a prude in front of Michael. She might have been better off upholding her “virginal” image, though, because the PCP is about to take her on a wild ride. 

    To that end, without her hallucinogenic journey, she not only wouldn’t have seen what an asshole her lab partner, Doug (Bryce Romero), is as he puts his hand on her chest after pretending he just wants to “help” her, but she also wouldn’t have been able to “astral project,” so to speak, to the Creature’s gravesite and work the “magic” that will set him free, liberate him from the ground. 

    “I wish I was with you,” Lisa tells the bust atop his gravestone while imagining herself in the bachelors’ graveyard. When that wish actually comes true (because apparently it’s as simple as “ask and you shall receive,” paired with a lightning bolt jolt), she explains to the Creature that what she really meant by that was she wanted to be dead, too (how very Lana Del Rey declaring, “I wish I was dead already”). Down there in the ground with him because the living are such assholes. Her bluntness prompts him to start crying, leading Lisa to the realization that she must do everything in her power so that he doesn’t cry again because his tears smell fouler than the corpse itself. And even when he starts to look more and more like a viable character from Less Than Zero, his stench still doesn’t go away. Such is the drawback of “building a boyfriend” out of a dead body. Or, as the various taglines go, “If you can’t meet your perfect boyfriend…make him,” “Dig up someone special” and “She’s slaying. He’s decaying” (side note: Cody was gunning for a tagline that went, “You always dismember your first”). Harsher critics of Lisa Frankenstein will accuse the movie itself of decaying from the very first scene. Indeed, less open-minded reviews have touted such scathing assessments in their titles as, “Lisa Frankenstein Will Make You Miss Tim Burton. A Lot.” or “Lisa Frankenstein: There’s nothing animated about this corpse comedy.”

     “Corpse comedy” being, in truth, a genre that really only Weekend at Bernie’s can lay claim to. “Zom-com” is, instead, the term that’s been bandied around to describe a film like this. And it also applies to 2013’s Warm Bodies, which riffs on Romeo and Juliet. In a sense, the Frankenstein story is a kind of Romeo and Juliet narrative…when the gender of the “Dr. Frankenstein” in the equation is swapped and the “monster” she’s created starts to fall in love with her. As for the “mechanism” used to keep bringing the Creature more and more to life (therefore, more and more “on her wavelength”—no crimped hair pun intended), Cody might have gotten some inspo from another 80s-loving movie: Hot Tub Time Machine. Sure, the tanning bed might not be a portal through the decades (like Back to the Future’s Delorean as well), but it’s an equally 80s-centric “luxury” that ends up being wielded for paranormal purposes. 

    With the boon of the tanning bed to bring a jolt of  life to his new limbs, the only obstacle for the Creature in securing Lisa’s love is the aforementioned Michael Trent, who reels the anti-heroine in with his compliments of her poetry (macabre, of course). He’s the editor-in-chief of the high school lit mag, after all, so he must have taste (in fact, his self-aggrandizement over that taste will come into play in a big way later on, when Lisa has the revelation that only he can have taste in “cool” things, not his girlfriend of the moment). Second to that, the Creature is dealing with just one more noticeable, er, deficit: he’s missing a few key parts. Namely, a hand, an ear and what some women would arguably call the most important appendage of all. Though Lisa assures him that’s actually the thing that least makes a man, well, a man. Nonetheless, that doesn’t stop her from admitting she no longer wants to be like a virgin. She wants to fuck, and soon. Especially with her and the Creature’s body count piling higher by the day (they’re sort of like Dexter Morgan in that they justify their killings by deeming their victims as “bad people”).

    Lisa knows it’s only a matter of time until the police come after her. Which feels like a full-circle moment considering her own mother was brutally killed by an ax murderer (a detail and flashback that seems like Cody’s nod to 80s slasher movies in general). Now she’s the one toting an ax around town, at one point trying to convince herself that she might be able to kill her own creation. But she could never—not just because he’s become both an extension of her and her best friend, but because they’ve obviously fallen in love somewhere along the distorted line between the land of the living and the land of the dead. 

    Starting with Lisa’s visits to Bachelor’s Grove cemetery, as a matter of fact. And while Victorians don’t actually seem to have a tradition of burying single men in their own special cemetery, there does happen to be a supposedly haunted graveyard called that in Illinois (that has nothing to do with a “bachelors only clientele,” mind you). Cody herself is from said state, specifically the Chicago suburb of Lemont. And, being that so many 80s movies are centered on suburban teen angst (thanks, in large part to Cody’s unwitting mentor, John Hughes, a fellow former suburban teen who spent his adolescence in the Chicago suburb of Northbrook), it’s evident Cody knows how to convey that in Lisa Frankenstein. And also, of course, Jennifer’s Body. In point of fact, Cody has said that she would like to think Lisa and Jennifer exist in the same cinematic universe (additionally mentioning her hope of rebooting the film as a TV series). 

    Sort of the way it seems, unspokenly, that all of John Hughes’ teen movies do. One of which, Weird Science, Cody cites as a particular influence on Lisa Frankenstein (though not Lisa Frank, who founded her company of the same name in 1979 and subsequently served as a school supplies-oriented mascot for a generation of girls). Indeed, the “revived” woman (actually created from a computer and a doll) in Weird Science was named Lisa. This being one of those quintessential 80s names for girls. And what’s even more quintessential about the 80s, as Cody reminds us, is that romantic devotion was revitalized to an almost Victorian extent (as manifested in the music of some of the aforementioned bands). 

    Accordingly, Lisa writes the Creature a “farewell” note that reads, “Death is temporary. I’ll love you forever.” To be sure, Lisa Frankenstein mirrors that level of wistfulness and romanticness (something Mary Shelley knew all about) for its entirety. The kind of romance we’ve, by now, been taught to mock or write off as being of the “Billy Bob and Angelina variety.” Intense to the point of vials of blood being involved. Or, in this case, limbs. Thus, the intensity of Lisa and the Creature’s bond is only further cemented when the latter cuts off a certain boy’s dick and has her sew it on his own Ken doll-esque area. Needless to say, it definitely helps that Lisa happens to be a skilled seamstress. 

    In the final moments of Lisa Frankenstein, the viewer is treated to the sight of a now-capable-of-speaking Creature reading aloud from a book of Percy Shelley’s poems (namely, “To Mary”) on a bench (in a manner that sort of mimics the bench-reading scene from Notting Hill). As he reads, a bandaged-up, undead Lisa rests “comfortably” on his lap. The Frankenstein roles have now reversed, in a fashion similar to what happens at the end of Frankenhooker (which, although released in 1990, very much smacks of the year it was actually filmed: 1989). Except that Lisa is no longer the one truly in control. Perhaps this is a subtle statement, on Cody’s part, about what happens when a woman falls in love: she ends up surrendering some (if not all) of her power. Unless the guy, like J.D. in Heathers, proves himself to be a complete twat and a girl has to take that power back, Veronica Sawyer-style.

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    Genna Rivieccio

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  • Beyoncé’s Recent White-ification Now Makes Plenty of Sense in the Wake of Her Country Album Announcement

    Beyoncé’s Recent White-ification Now Makes Plenty of Sense in the Wake of Her Country Album Announcement

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    At the end of a Verizon commercial during the Super Bowl on February 11th, Beyoncé announced that the world was ready for her new music to drop (thanks, of course, to the strong internet network that only Verizon can provide). And while some might have hoped that Renaissance Act II might be a continuation of the house flavor she repurposed from artists like Robin S. and, yes, even Madonna, on Renaissance, it is instead slated to be a country album. This declared on the heels of Lana Del Rey making a similar announcement about “going country” for her next record, titled, what else, Lasso. Because, yeah, what the U.S. needs now is more people confirming it’s a place for shitkickers. 

    Many might have speculated Beyoncé was going to keep running with this cowgirl shtick for Act II, but perhaps thought said shtick might also maintain the house stylings present on Act I. Those with a more perspicacious eye, however, could have detected a genre shift based on Yoncé’s “color shift” in recent months. And what with frequently citing Michael Jackson as an influence, it can come as no surprise that Bey has also taken apparent inspiration from his propensity for skin lightening. As a woman who, like Jackson, has forged her empire on Blackness and what it means to be Black, the increased and not so gradual bleaching of her skin feels particularly traitorous. After all, this is the same woman who has a song called “Brown Skinned Girl.”

    These days, though, she’s looking light taupe at best and “tan for a white person” at worst. But now, with the confirmation of her transition to country (because everyone must presently copy the “old Taylor” for some reason), her whitening suddenly makes all the sense in the world. After all, country is still the whitest genre you know, no matter how much Beyoncé tries to “funk-ify” it (to use a white person’s euphemism), or how much she might later bill it as “reclaiming the Black origins of the genre” (as was her intention with “taking back” house music for Renaissance). Doing her best to show us that she can with the first two offerings she’s revealed from the record, “Texas Hold ‘Em” and “16 Carriages.” It is the former that many are attempting to bill as a “Daddy Lessons” redux. But no, it’s so much less listenable than that. And “Daddy Lessons” (a recent appropriate favorite of Britney Spears to dance in her living room to) is, obviously, more tolerable because it serves as an irreverent sonic divergence from the rest of Lemonade, which, to be frank, is the most country-sounding Beyoncé should ever allow herself to get (complete with Jack White helping her out on “Don’t Hurt Yourself”). 

    As for “16 Carriages,” it is a slowed-down “ballad”—or, more accurately, Beyoncé finding a way to play up her “rough” childhood spent seeking fame and essentially being pimped out (after being “invested in”) by her parents in a manner similar to the abovementioned Spears. With regard to the lyrics, “Sixteen carriages driving away/While I watch them ride with my fears away/To the summer sunset on a holy night/On a long back road, all the tears I fight,” that word, “carriage,” can refer both to the tour buses she rode while still in the germinal days of Destiny’s Child as well as the “country-centric” type of carriage that refers to the frame of a gun supporting its barrel. And yes, needless to say, Beyoncé already packs a pistol, of sorts, for her “Texas Hold ‘Em” visualizer, featuring three minutes and fifty-seven seconds of the whitest version of Yoncé yet forming her thumb, index and middle finger into a gun as sparks shoot out of it. All while wearing tights with black underwear over them and little else up top. A pair of reflective sunglasses with a winding snake over one of the lenses rounds out the look with a “Swiftian flair” (since everyone knows snakes have been “her thing” since Reputation…even if they were Britney Spears’ first by sheer virtue of the “I’m A Slave 4 U” performance at the 2001 VMAs).

    The trailer for the album itself is a nod to Texas, displaying an overt homage to Paris, Texas (again, more Lana Del Rey shit on Beyoncé’s part) not only via the desolate desert landscape with its many electrical towers, but also the Harry Dean Stanton-esque man in the red baseball hat (though some conspiracy theorists might interpret its presence as some kind of subliminal “support” for Trump). So again, some super white references. The opening to the trailer itself harkens back to the vibe of Beyoncé driving away in the Pussy Wagon with Lady Gaga in the video for 2010’s “Telephone,” with Beyoncé capitulating to playing sidekick at a time of “Gaga supremacy.” But Bey doesn’t seem intent on staying in the Lone Star State by any means, slamming on the gas pedal as she approaches a billboard of herself waving what appears to be goodbye, rather than hello. The “hoedown” tone of the song commences with the lines, “This ain’t Texas, ain’t no hold ‘em” in a manner that smacks, in its own way, of Elton John declaring, “You know you can’t hold me forever.” Beyoncé certainly seemed to feel that way about her home state, jumping at the chance to ascend the ladder of fame as she drifted further and further from whence she came (no rhyme intended). Physically and emotionally. 

    And yet, once a person like her reaches such a stature, there’s nothing left to do but “look back.” Reflect on the roots that one abandoned in order to mine “fresh” material. Even though, as usual, Beyoncé is incapable of writing a song entirely on her own. Just as, of late, she seems to be incapable of coming up with an original idea, “persona-wise.” For it’s only too familiar, this “disco-fied cowgirl” thing she has going on. Or, let’s say, “ghetto fabulous” (though it’s probably no longer allowed). This also being the aesthetic Madonna already gave us in 2000 with Music. Indeed, even Madonna has moved beyond the look she herself cultivated by stripping it down to a more conventional cowboy appearance (minus the massive, cartoonish cowboy hats she and Bob the Drag Queen sport) for Act III of The Celebration Tour, which hinges thematically on “Don’t Tell Me,” her most cowboy-oriented visual of Music. And, as a Midwestern gal, returning to this aspect of herself makes sense. Some might say it does for Beyoncé, too. As a “Texan gal.” But we all know she wasn’t exactly vibing (least of all in 80s-era America) with the hoedown life or “hick culture” (an oxymoron, to be sure) until now, when it served her “musical inspiration” purpose. 

    Funnily enough, in 2016, as Beyoncé was starting to fully embrace her Blackness as a “brand” with the release of “Formation,” there was an SNL sketch that made fun of how white people were finally starting to realize she was Black. Now, it seems the tables have turned again, and Bey has gone back to her pandering-to-whites roots. Not only by releasing a country record, but by literally becoming white. And, to quote another lyric from “Texas Hold ‘Em,” “That shit ain’t pretty.”

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    Genna Rivieccio

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  • All of Us Strangers: If M. Night Shyamalan Was Queer and Romantic and British and Gen X (and Still Any Good)

    All of Us Strangers: If M. Night Shyamalan Was Queer and Romantic and British and Gen X (and Still Any Good)

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    A writer is an essentially lonely person. Someone, in fact, who usually prefers to be alone. Except when they start to realize that perhaps they became a writer precisely because of that inherent loneliness in the first place. This seems to be the case for the mononymous Adam (Andrew Scott), living practically alone in a new building that still has yet to lease out any of its apartments to fresh tenants. The apartment tower seems to lie just out of reach of London, though Adam and his soon-to-be-lover, Harry (Paul Mescal), keep referring to how they live “in” London. Indeed, Adam admits that he’s the last of his friends to remain “in” the city, with everyone else surrendering to the inevitable move to the country, where they can properly raise their families. Adam, being a gay man, automatically counts himself out from “that life.” The so-called conventional one, that is. Because, even for as “modern” as these times are supposed to be, there are still so many judgments and limitations projected onto the LGBTQIA+ community. And for a man of Adam’s generation (X), there remains so many lingering insecurities about his sexuality as a result of a childhood spent not only in the “wrong” era to be gay, but the wrong place as well. For Thatcher-run Britain wasn’t exactly open and inviting to the homo set (any more than Reagan-run America was). 

    Which is why homosexuality started to feel like an “underground movement” rather than a mere sexual preference. The illicit nature of it, particularly in the late 70s and early 80s, served as a means to condition many gay men to get off on the secrecy and anonymity aspects of it more than the sex act itself. Not quite knowing how to “function” sexually once things became slightly less taboo. This is the transitional mind fuck Gen X gay men were subjected to, enduring the repression of sexuality in the 80s, the AIDS scare that lasted from the beginning of that decade and well into the mid-90s and the sudden about-face toward total gender and sexual fluidity in the twenty-first century. It would be enough to give anyone sexuality whiplash, particularly a British person, with their background so fundamentally steeped in stodginess and restraint. This is the place Adam (whose biblical name feels deliberately tongue-in-cheek [no BJ pantomime intended]) is coming from. And it’s compounded by the fact that he’s partially “stuck” at the age he was when his mother (Claire Foy) and father (Jamie Bell) both died in a car accident on Christmas Eve of 1987 (this year is also significant as it’s when the book the film is based on, Strangers by Taichi Yamada, was released).

    Our introduction to Adam is one of palpable loneliness as writer-director Andrew Haigh (known for Weekend and Looking, among other things) shows him staring longingly out of his floor-to-ceiling glass window at the outline of London. Which is, again, just beyond his reach. The city hasn’t fully expanded to his neck of the woods quite yet, though with rising prices and a shortage of housing, London will make it to his “outskirts” soon enough. The building, in fact, was actually shot in East London’s Stratford. Which is at least forty-five minutes’ worth of travel into Central London. His perennial position as an outsider is thus solidified to viewers geographically as well. This “outsiderness” extends even to his chosen profession as a writer (though, as he says, not a “proper” writer, but one for TV). This being the most voyeuristic kind of profession there is. A skill rooted in observation and recording. Never being quite “in the story” yourself, though constantly trying to put “a version” of who you think you are in it. That Adam chooses to write scripts wherein he can control the narrative also has Psych 101 implications. Since he couldn’t control the death of his parents or the way in which he was treated by homophobes in his youth. But he can control everything in the scenarios he comes up with on the page. 

    Unlike trying to control Harry’s direct approach one evening after seeing Adam so many times staring up at his window from down below. This being the umpteenth time he’s done so after a false fire alarm goes off and Adam is the only person (out of two) foolish enough to fall for it by vacating the building. Knocking on his door once Adam goes back inside and essentially begging to, er, enter, Harry makes a final effort to win Adam over by riffing on Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “The Power of Love” with the line, “There’s vampires at my door.” This specifically alludes to the lyrics, “I’ll protect you from the hooded claw/Keep the vampires from your door.” While Harry likely wouldn’t have any idea what that song is (if we’re to go by Mescal’s own cusping between millennial and Gen Z age of twenty-eight), it’s nice to think that he could be attuned enough with British pop music’s past to make such a casual reference. To that end, there is a moment where he tells Adam he wants to “watch old episodes of Top of the Pops from before I was born” with him. Sit on the couch eating takeaway together like a right proper couple that’s surrendered fully to the dull comfort of monogamy. Because, yes, even the gays have settled for it by now. Gotten used to the idea that monogamy is for everyone. Even though, as Henry Willson (Jim Parsons) in Hollywood put it, “Sure, holding a guy’s hand in public, walking down the street, you know, you wait for a brick in the back of the head. It doesn’t come. Well, then, before you know it, your guy wants to play house. Have you ever spent a Saturday picking out some cheerful, daffodil-colored linoleum for the kitchen? I have, Ernie. And it is enough to make you wistful for the days of secretive sodomy.”

    Adam is not necessarily “that type of gay,” but he is very clearly still imbued with the “gay guilt” of his generation. This being one of the reasons why he refuses Harry’s initial forward advances. That and, well, his heart sort of had to close entirely after his parents died. An automatic defense mechanism against ever attaching again. What with getting so badly burned the first time around via every person’s most formative attachment: the one with their parents. This is why Adam seeks so desperately to return to the past—the only known period in his life where he still had two (theoretical) protectors. 

    While Adam tries to wrap himself as much as possible up into the past by writing about it in screenplay form, he doesn’t seem to realize that he’s been trapped in it for quite some time. Perpetually locked inside that traumatic period of his life. Not just because of his parents’ death, but because losing them, in a certain sense, kept him frozen in a false identity. That is, a false hetero identity. One that didn’t allow him to ever fully be himself, or rather, be known as his true self. Because, although it’s “liberating,” in a way, to lose your parents and be forever free of any judgments they might have over you, it also means that you’ll never know if that formerly hidden part of yourself might have actually been accepted and embraced. As Haigh stated, “What I’ve always been interested in doing, and especially with this [film], is talking about queerness in relationship to family, and how complicated it can be in relationship to family…especially if you grew up in a generation of the 80s and into the early 90s, where it was very different than it is now—thank God.” And yet, there are times when it doesn’t seem that different. And the fact that a still-young Harry can recall his own childhood being rife with anti-gay sentiments (“It’s probably why we hate [the word] ‘gay’ so much now. It was always like, ‘Your haircut’s gay.’ Or, ‘The sofa’s gay.’ ‘Your trainers are gay, your school bag’s gay’”) speaks to how “drastic change” didn’t occur until very recently (something the present generation of twinks takes endlessly for granted). 

    This is part of why, when Adam tells his mother about his sexuality, she can’t believe he would actually “choose” such a life. Such a lonely life, at that. Still trapped in her 1987 Britain mentality, she asks, “Aren’t people nasty to you?” He assures, “No, no. Things are different now.” She asks again, “So they aren’t nasty?” He shrugs, “Not allowed, anyway.” But, of course, as Trump supporters (and Trump himself) have shown, people always find ways of getting around things that “aren’t allowed.” When Adam also informs her that men and women can marry the same sex now, she balks, “Isn’t that like having your cake and eating it?” Turns out, his confession to Mother isn’t going as well as he thought. Is actually bringing him a worse kind of pain than before. Compounded by her saying, “Oh God, what about this awful, ghastly disease? I’ve seen the adverts on the…on the news and with the gravestone.” “Everything is different now,” he insists again. Or so we would like to believe…

    In an interview with Time, Haigh addressed one of the criticisms the LGBTQIA+ community has accused the movie of, which is that it reemphasizes the notion (which was only just starting to slightly go away) that being queer is the most isolating and alienating experience a person could have. But Haigh feels differently about the underlying message of his film, stating, “I understand that that can be an interpretation. Personally, I don’t feel that. There is hope in the fact that he has understood that, basically, he is capable of being in love and being loved and being there for someone else that might need him in that moment. By the end of the film, to me, it is basically saying that what is important in life is love in whatever way you manage to find that, whether it’s in a relationship, whether it’s with your parents, whether it’s with a friend. You go through life finding love, losing love, and finding it again.” And Adam has found it again, however ephemerally, with his spectral parents.

    As for Adam’s mother, the more she thinks about it, the more his gayness makes sense to her. He was so “odd” and “sensitive,” after all. And apparently always trying to run away. When she asks where he was trying to run away, he tells her that he reckons London. Making him yet another Bronski Beat cliche. Luckily, Haigh stops short of featuring “Smalltown Boy” in the movie, instead opting for a “less overt” queer band in the form of Pet Shop Boys. Who have never much talked about their sexuality (why bother when all of their music is dripping with the subject and “lifestyle”). But as recently as their latest single, “Loneliness,” it’s clear the duo knows all about the distinct kind of loneliness that a man such as Adam suffers from. A loneliness that his mother is also convinced gay men are more prone to, even if, as Adam asserts, “Everything is different now.”

    The past itself is, alas, as much of a ghost as his parents are. And it’s a kind of haunting that Adam seems to relish for its unique sting of pain-pleasure. For example, listening to Fine Young Cannibals’ “Johnny Come Home” as he writes, “EXT. SUBURBAN HOUSE, 1987” on his computer, it’s easy to see that the past is the present for Adam. As it is for many other people who prefer not to admit that to themselves. Even Adam tries not to fully admit it aloud, brushing aside Harry’s heartfelt apology when he finds out that Adam’s parents died in a car accident just before he turned twelve. “It was a long time ago,” he tells Harry. “Yeah, I don’t think that matters,” Harry replies. And it doesn’t. For trauma and woundedness never really go away. Especially when ceaselessly suppressed. 

    And yes, listening to the music from his childhood is a key part of crawling into the “comfortable” pain of his youth. Comfortable because it is familiar. Seeing his room just as it was when he was a preteen leads him to thumb through records like Erasure’s Circus and Frankie Goes to Hollywoood’s Welcome to the Pleasuredome (which “The Power of Love” appears on). Even when Adam goes out to a club with Harry, the song playing for the dance floor, Joe Smooth’s “Promised Land,” is straight out of 1987. Everywhere he goes, that year, that time in his life haunts him. At one point during post-coital candor, he muses to Harry, “Things are better now, of course they are, but…it doesn’t take much to make you feel the way you felt.” It reiterates what he already told his mother, but with the admission that, if you grow up a certain way, are conditioned to have a certain “look over your shoulder” response to people, it doesn’t ever truly dissipate. Even in the late 90s, when things were starting to shift more palpably, especially with AIDS “calming down,” a Gen X man like Adam was never truly going to feel “safe” enough to be “himself.” 

    Talking of the 90s, Haigh’s decision to include 1997’s “Death of a Party” by Blur as the soundtrack to a very trippy portion of the club sequence is also pointed. For, in addition to Blur speaking about the end of Britpop’s reign, this song has long been regarded as a metaphor for AIDS. After all, gay men were only too happy to party in the late 70s and early 80s…until an unknown disease, a “mysterious illness” started making people—primarily “fags”—drop like flies. So much for the “party.” A word Madonna famously included as part of an AIDS awareness insert placed among the liner notes of her Like A Prayer album with the phrase, “AIDS Is No Party!” In other words, don’t think you can go around fucking freely as you used to in the days before the novel virus. With AIDS came yet more cannon fodder for suppression. To turn inward and avoid one’s desires altogether. As Adam seemed to do, telling Harry, “I’d always felt lonely, even before [my parents died]. This was a new feeling. Like, uh, terror. That I’d always be alone now. And then, as I got older, that feeling just…solidified. It just, uh, it did not…” He motions toward his heart after trailing off, finishing the thought with, “…here all the time.” Harry looks at him with teary-eyed empathy, prompting Adam to continue, “And then losing them just got tangled up with all the other stuff. Like being gay. Just feeling like…the future doesn’t matter.” Of course, it also felt like it didn’t matter when, as a gay man, death was all around. Pervasive. Perhaps, in some sense, Adam could even associate his parents’ death with the “gay disease” that caused everyone who came into contact with “queers” to die. 

    Getting the chance to tell his parents—even if only their ghosts—who he really is proves to be, if not “cathartic” then at least a release. When Adam’s father tells his son that he’s proud of him, Adam replies, “I haven’t done anything to be proud of. I’ve just muddled through.” His father rebuts, “No, but you got through it. Some tough times, I’m sure, and…you’re still here.” Even this, too, feels like a nod to the generation of gay men who were not only mercilessly ridiculed, but also forced to watch so many of their own fall prey to the cruelest kind of death. To survive through something like that would, of course, serve as a lingering trauma unto itself. Indeed, there are times when the viewer might think that Adam himself is a ghost who doesn’t know it yet (Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense-style), that maybe his telltale “fever” was a symptom he had while dying of AIDS. But no, that’s not the Shyamalan-oriented element here. Instead, Adam is subjected to a much more heartbreaking fate. 

    One that only Frankie Goes to Hollywood (“The Power of Love” is a subliminal essence during the tripped-out club scene as well, its presence seemingly omni—a punctuating motif to cut through the loneliness) can try to even vaguely soothe. The band’s lead singer, Holly Johnson, was himself diagnosed with HIV in 1991. But it was even before then that he sang on “The Power of Love,” “Dreams are like angels/They keep bad at bay, bad at bay/Love is the light/Scaring darkness away/I’m so in love with you/Purge the soul/Make love your goal.” Even when you’ve been burned in such an inexplicably horrible way by it in the past.

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    Genna Rivieccio

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  • Get Caught in Caroline Polachek and Weyes Blood’s Ethereal “Butterfly Net”

    Get Caught in Caroline Polachek and Weyes Blood’s Ethereal “Butterfly Net”

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    Continuing the dreamy motifs presented on Desire, I Want to Turn Into You, Caroline Polachek has given listeners another taste of one of the bonus tracks from her forthcoming deluxe edition of the album. And who better to help her with that task than the equally dreamy stylings of Weyes Blood? Assisting with a reworked version of track ten on the record, “Butterfly Net” (co-produced with Danny L Harle), Weyes Blood layers the sonic offering with her own rich vocals for an effect that’s altogether ethereal. 

    As part of the Everasking Edition of Desire…, Polachek chooses a fitting song to punctuate the date she’s choosing to re-release the record: Valentine’s Day. Just as she did the same for the original version of the record. On the remixed version of “Butterfly Net” (once again co-produced by Danny L Harle), there are marked distinctions. Not just because of Weyes Blood’s presence, but the entire reworked sound. Alone in Polachek’s hands, the song is actually less bittersweet, and more tinged with a Beth Orton vibe. The music, too, is more stripped down on the original. And while the remix might initially sound almost a capella, it builds toward a burst of decidedly 90s-inspired power ballad glory—but with a more acoustic emphasis.

    Toward the end of the three-minute mark, a repeated, siren-like chant speaks to the mermaid-esque cover art of the single. Displaying Weyes Blood and Polachek “caught” in what looks more like a fishing net than a butterfly net, positioned and aesthetically styled in such a way that it’s almost as though you can’t tell where one chanteuse begins and the other ends. This all being punctuated by a black background that lends a somber air to it, a note of finality. What’s more, the two look like something out of Lana Del Rey’s “Music to Watch Boys To” video (complete with their donning of headphones), you know, the underwater scenes that also got repurposed for the “Freak” video. 

    As a love song that speaks not to “being caught” by someone else, but rather, to trying to “catch [their] light,” it makes an ideal addition to the annals of “love gone wrong” tracks. Even if it is not as straightforward as other songs of that genre (e.g., Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me A River,” Eamon’s “Fuck It” and Taylor Swift’s “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” among many other “love gone wrong” numbers by her). When Polachek and Weyes Blood sing in harmony, “There you were/With your mirror/Shining the world all over me/There I was/With my butterfly net/Trying to catch your light,” there is the implication that the song refers to two people who can never quite “align.” Whether that means emotionally or physically—or both—the result is the same: an unbearable poignancy. A keen sense of regret over not having been able to make something work. 

    Then again, some people can satisfy themselves with the idea that “at least” something was able to work out for a while, at a certain time and place in one’s life. Even if not “forever,” as the monogamist propaganda so often leads us to believe. Indeed, there’s a few other songs on Desire, I Want to Turn Into You that acknowledge the disconnect between romantic expectation versus reality. And yet, a song like “Fly to You” featuring Grimes and Dido explores the kind of love that is more resilient, able to bounce back from various fights and mood swings. Less lyrically abstract than “Butterfly Net,” Polachek asks on “Fly to You,” “Will you still love me after the bend?/Remember what’s gone before, not loaded with regret/Ooh, I fly to you/After all the tears, you’re all I need.” It’s a sharp contrast to the conceptual sentiments of “Butterfly Net,” especially with Polachek and Weyes Blood singing the lyrics, “Faithful inertia/Her bullet doesn’t slow/It seeks and finds me/How far it goes/Heaven help me/Take this bag of wings/And drown it in the Thames/And wake tomorrow/Hollow/Hardly forgetting.”

    These symbolic lyrics are also in contrast to another more exuberant song that leads up to the original “Butterfly Net,” “Blood and Butter.” And yet, Polachek still knows how to allude to the intermixed pain and pleasure of love as she croons, “Let me dive through your face to the sweetest kind of pain/Call you up/Nothing to say/No, I don’t need no entertaining/When the world/Is a bed” and “Look how I forget who I was/Before I was the way I am with you.” This latter statement can double as being either “good” or “bad.” Falling into the latter category when one loses their entire sense of identity in a relationship. 

    That Polachek chose “Butterfly Net” as the song from Desire… to rework (and not just because she had already performed it live a few times with Weyes Blood) seems telling of her, er, desire to return to a song that is more ambiguous about love everlasting (not everasking). On the one hand, it seems she’s saying that she has found the person who will “last,” manifest in the verse, “I collected stupid ashes/So that after you’d gone/I could hold onto somеthing/But you stayed unwavering/Through evеry false goodbye/Unsubsiding/Pining/For now and for never” (the “for never” being indicative of her unfaltering realism). On the other, some irrepressible part of her knows she should still continue to remain on her guard about falling fully prey to such notions, with Weyes Blood joining her for the bridge that goes, “Oh, if only/The umbrella of the sky/Could wrap us up and up/That’s where I’d zoom in close/Dilated as your eyes/Until then, I’ll keep it brief.” Then there is that oft-repeated line about trying to catch someone’s light, as though, instead, all they’re ever met with is a series of near misses while trapped in darkness (which is what the single’s cover art alludes to). 

    In effect, the re-release of “Butterfly Net” not only highlights the larger themes of Desire…, but also makes one realize that Polachek could easily add another bonus track to the Everasking Edition that provides a riff on The Verve’s “Bittersweet Symphony” that goes, “‘Cause it’s a bittersweet symphony that’s love/Try to make someone want you forever/You’re a slave to the feeling then you get shoved.”

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    Genna Rivieccio

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  • The Introvert’s Conundrum When Pitted Against the Extrovert’s Will

    The Introvert’s Conundrum When Pitted Against the Extrovert’s Will

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    Taylor Swift did a couple things in the span of one award acceptance on Grammy night that elicited polarized reactions. And, considering that Swift, in her role as America’s sweetheart, rarely does anything to polarize people, it was a big deal. Some may automatically assume that what one is referring to is her blatant disregard for Celine Dion’s presence on the stage as she stood there awkwardly waiting to be acknowledged in some way, any way by the Album of the Year winner when she walked up to collect her bounty (which was in stark contrast to how Miley Cyrus gushed over Mariah Carey during her entire acceptance speech for Best Pop Solo Performance). Instead, Swift acted like a frat boy only paying attention to his “homies” as she hugged those she deemed partly responsible for her album’s success. 

    Obviously, Dion wasn’t someone she put in that category. But Lana Del Rey, clearly, was. Which is why Swift performed another polarizing act in one fell swoop by forcefully taking Del Rey onstage with her. Not just because she contributed vocals to “Snow on the Beach” that were initially undetectable until Swift released yet another version of Midnights (ergo, another money grab), but because, per Swift’s assessment, “I think so many female artists would not be where they are and would not have the inspiration they have if it weren’t for the work that she’s done.” 

    She’s not saying that she’s one of those artists, of course. For, after all, Swift was “on the scene,” fame-wise, years before Del Rey, with no one to look to for inspiration except Shania Twain and Faith Hill (and it shows). But at least she can acknowledge that musicians such as Billie Eilish weren’t exactly trying to emulate her. Or Dion, for that matter. Certainly not Swift, who kept looking behind her while onstage at anyone else she could thank except for Dion, grasping at, “I wanna say thank you to Serban Ghenea, Sam Dew, Soundwave…Lana Del Rey, who is hiding.” Ah yes, as most introverted people who didn’t want to be dragged onto a stage in a very public venue against their will tend to do. Something she made crystal clear with her resisting body language. But Swift seemed to realize at the last second that it might behoove her to take LDR up onstage to prove her female solidarity shtick was genuine, knowing full well that many fans of Del Rey’s were praying (and perhaps foolishly assuming) she would win for Did You Know That There’s A Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd, since she couldn’t even manage to snag any of the other awards she was nominated for, namely Best Pop Duo/Group Performance (for her collaboration with Jon Batiste on “Candy Necklace”), Song of the Year (for “A&W”), Best Alternative Music Album and Best Alternative Music Performance. Thus, briefly remembering the way in which Lana fans treat her like Jesus far more than Taylor’s do, she did a “cover your ass” move by bringing Del Rey onstage. To think otherwise, is more than slightly naive. 

    Before having this “calculated” revelation, Swift momentarily forgot she was at the same table as Del Rey so she could embrace Jack Antonoff, the man who seems to be perennially serving as the middle of a female musician sandwich. But especially this female musician sandwich. The camera itself juggled (or “toggled between,” if you prefer) getting reaction shots of both Del Rey and Antonoff when the award was announced. And watching Del Rey herself juggle the emotions of being upset over losing (for there’s no denying that she genuinely believed this would be the album that would finally get recognized) and trying to bounce back quickly so she can be happy for her friend, it’s apparent that the last thing she wants to do is have to grapple with those conflicting emotions in front of not just an entire room of people, but an entire nation of them watching at home. 

    As Antonoff presumes to take the credit for it all by leading the way to the stage, Del Rey tries to laugh off Swift’s attempt at pulling her up there, trying to resist at the same time so that Swift gets the message: no, this isn’t really what I want to do. Swift, being the alpha that she is, doesn’t take no for an answer and continues to drag her until Del Rey stops fighting it so that the optics on the whole awkward situation don’t look so bad. And, well, very uncomfortable. Because it is uncomfortable to have to watch someone doing something they obviously don’t want to. And when introverts are feeling low, they certainly don’t want to have to have those emotions broadcast, literally, to millions of people. Yet, the dichotomy is that, without Swift doing what she did, Del Rey would have stayed under the radar to a whole slew of people in the “flyover states.” The states, in fact, that she likes visiting the most. 

    With this conundrum in mind, there’s a joke about introverts that gets bandied around sometimes, something to the effect of: “Any introvert you ever met was because they were friends with an extrovert.” Del Rey suffered that phenomenon and then some at the 2024 Grammys, enduring the introvert’s dilemma of hating attention but also wanting to be given credit when it’s due. 

    Pulled onto the stage by a woman with nothing but “good intentions,” it was as though Del Rey became the victim of her own spouted lines from 2020, in the wake of her “question for the culture”: “I’m sorry that a couple of the girls I talked to, who were mentioned in that post, have a super different opinion of my insight, especially because we’ve been so close for so long. But it really, again, makes you reach into the depth of your own heart and say, ‘Am I good-intentioned?’ And of course, for me, the answer is always yes.” Naturally, that’s going to be the answer from anyone’s subjective viewpoint, no matter what they’re doing. Even Putin and Netanyahu think what they’re doing is “good-intentioned” when they reach into the depth of their own “hearts” and ask if they are. 

    At another point, Swift gushed of Del Rey, “I think that she’s a legacy artist, a legend in her prime right now. I’m so lucky to know you and to be your friend.” This adding to a vibe that only served to make Del Rey look pitiable and pathetic rather than praiseworthy. As though Swift was putting more of a highlight on what a “loser” Del Rey was for not getting the award rather than how “cool” she is. With Swift being of the Never Been Kissed philosophy, “All you need is for one person to think you’re cool, and you’re in.” But based on some of the winners that night (and throughout the ceremony’s past), does Del Rey really want to be deemed “cool” by the Recording Academy?

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    Genna Rivieccio

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