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There might not be a more appropriate and straightforward way to open an American Western than with a scene of a white settler tracing the foundations of the house he wants to build on some seemingly available plot of land. The colonial question at the heart of the genre is thus immediately introduced in Horizon: An American Saga—Chapter 1, the first film in Kevin Costner’s epic four-movie series (the second installment has already been shot) that he produced (at great cost to himself), cowrote, directed, and starred in. Costner’s perspective on that question, however, isn’t entirely clear in that opening sequence, but it does end with the settler and his young child being killed by Apaches who are defending their territory, highlighting their rightful anger. In this sequence, a rousing old-fashioned score, plenty of cross-fades, and an orange sunset give the brutal encounter the look of a monumental, foundational, almost elemental event, like a big bang—a natural, terribly meaningful catastrophe.
It is through such small yet symbolic stories that Costner starts to paint his very large and detailed picture of pre– and post–Civil War America. Jumping from one setting to another, the filmmaker introduces us to various archetypes of the American West, from the English settlers too posh and sophisticated to do any work while traveling on the Santa Fe Trail (Ella Hunt and Tom Payne), to the housewife with a dark secret (Jena Malone) and her naive husband (Michael Angarano) hoping to get rich through gold, to the foulmouthed sex worker (Abbey Lee) whom everyone despises, except for the hero (Costner, naturally), who finds himself protecting her. In a series of extended vignettes, their personal dramas unfold and sometimes intersect, with occasional time jumps to speed things up and show the consequences of their decisions. None of these stories are particularly original or compelling, retreading old tropes and recalling television both visually and structurally. (It’s hard not to think of Yellowstone, the Western series starring Costner; it was during that show’s hiatus that he made this film.) For instance, the past of the housewife, Ellen, comes back to haunt her when we learn that she once was a sex worker herself and killed a powerful criminal who had abused her: The idea that the Wild West allowed for self-reinvention but was also fueled by the exploitation of women is a staple of the genre—and could still be interesting to explore—but Costner struggles to keep all his plates spinning at once, offering only a quick glance at one prototypical story before moving on to the next one. Instead of making us feel the unbearable weight of history through this amalgamation of survival tales—or creating at least a sense of time and place—this first “episode” indeed functions as a technically efficient but not very appealing series pilot, setting the scene but not giving its protagonists enough room for us to get invested in them.
Making an American Western in 2024 means coming after a long line of films, the first succession of which established the genre’s often white supremacist and pro-colonial codes. Later, revisionist Westerns adapted these tropes to suit different eras, taking into account changing mentalities about the romanticization of America’s violent past and materialistic tendencies (think of The Wild Bunch and its explosive, balletic, devastating gunfights, or the spaghetti Western For a Few Dollars More), and, eventually, the oppressed were put at the center of the narrative, be they women or Indigenous people themselves. (Killers of the Flower Moon is the most recent example, but Soldier Blue from 1970 may be the most strident.) Costner, however, doesn’t seem all that interested in looking back with a critical eye, and he’s also not trying to tell a story about the past that could be relevant today. Instead, he’s aiming for the timelessness of myth and adopts a centrist approach: Colonialism was an unstoppable engine that everyone, Indigenous or white, was simply caught up in. After a deadly Apache attack, First Lieutenant Trent Gephardt (Sam Worthington, who seems determined to act in projects that will be made over several years or decades of his life) has to remind the surviving white settlers that this land is not, in fact, simply where they live, but that it belongs to Indigenous people; still, the pioneers refuse to leave. Costner spends time on the unwelcome inhabitants and their sorrow and helplessness but also cuts to the Apaches—they, too, are having internal disagreements about whether this attack was ultimately necessary. Yet if these two points of view could allow for some interesting ambiguity, revealing the moral dilemmas and doubts of people on both sides, in Costner’s vision, the two parties are stuck in a dynamic that is completely outside their control and has a will of its own—rather than one born of the colonizers’ endless thirst for more land. (Costner’s production company is in fact called Territory Pictures Entertainment.) No one is really responsible. Playing a blasé colonel, Danny Huston puts it bluntly: “Let this place do what it’s done since time immemorial.” But isn’t this time still relatively fresh in the Apaches’ memory?
This idea of a manifest destiny that pushes for colonization, whether its participants approve of it or not, appears as much in the film’s aesthetics as it does in its narrative. Costner’s camera repeatedly focuses on and emphasizes old-fashioned and at times offensive clichés of the genre: a dying white man refusing to let an Apache take his violin, thus defending civilization against barbarism until his last breath; a priest solemnly digging graves for fallen pilgrims on Apache ground; men working hard to build infrastructure where there was once only nature; a teenage son choosing to fight back against the Indigenous alongside his father rather than hiding with his mother and sister. To quote Vampire Weekend: “Untrue, unkind, and unnatural, how the cruel, with time, becomes classical.” If his old-school conservatism wasn’t apparent enough, the filmmaker also gives his actors cheesy dialogue that even John Wayne couldn’t have made cool. (“It’s what drove us across the ocean to this country in the first place: hope.”) Whether they’re full of threat or flirtatious (as between Sienna Miller’s widow, Frances Kittredge, and Gephardt), conversations tend to be tedious exchanges of witty comebacks, with no one saying what they really mean until they’ve exhausted all possible innuendos and the scene just cries out for a resolution—an unintentional parody of the typically charming repartee of the best cowboys of the silver screen, from Wayne to Jimmy Stewart to Montgomery Clift. So far in the film series, only Luke Wilson and Michael Rooker come across as believable men of the time, the former thanks to his Southern drawl and natural ease, the latter because of his ability to find depth and emotion in the otherwise one-dimensional, obedient, and kind sergeant he must play.
But what about Costner the actor? Naturally, he plays the strong, silent type—always his strongest suit—as Hayes Ellison, a straight shooter who accidentally gets involved in the revenge campaign that threatens Ellen because of her past rebellion. Although he only appears after about an hour of exposition, the humility of that delay vanishes almost instantaneously. As he gets off his horse, Marigold (the sex worker played by Lee) lays eyes on him and, for no apparent reason other than the fact that he’s the film’s protagonist, decides to try seducing him again and again—despite his repeated rejection and almost offensive disinterest—instead of trying her luck with any of the other men who just got into town. In one of the film’s most successful and enjoyable scenes, however, Ellison lets Marigold do all the talking, his silence pushing her to almost turn double entendres into just plain sex talk. Here, Lee is showing much more range and playfulness than she’s ever had the chance to as an actress, so it’s particularly disappointing that Costner later gives the two of them a completely lifeless and preposterous sex scene in which she tells him, word for word, “You just lay there,” and he does so, looking almost bored as this beautiful woman half his age does all the work.
With its hubris, traditionalism, and sprawling, messy structure, Horizon feels like a relic of the 1990s, back when Costner was at his peak and he could indeed almost just lay there and be perceived as the masculine ideal. There is still a chance that Chapter 2 will reveal a deeper questioning of the American past and, by the same token, the more toxic aspects of masculinity tied to colonialism and violence. Still, considering how far and with how much conviction Costner has pushed it here, it seems unlikely that the cheesy style of this opus will be abandoned for something that’s more grounded and that spends less time glorifying both its star and conservative ideas of property, national identity, women, and progress. After all, the horizon always appears to stay at the same place.
Bill and Juliet share their insights on the most pivotal episodes throughout Brenda and Brandon’s season-long MVP run before breaking down the tumultuous Mardi Gras finale in full
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Nora and Nathan talk about the third studio album from Billie Eilish: Hit Me Hard and Soft. They discuss how Eilish is displaying new vocal ranges in songs like “The Greatest” and “Birds of a Feather” (17:32), her continued collaboration with her brother Finneas and whether or not she might branch out in the future (45:14), and how many songs on this album are about her discomfort with celebrity as a young artist (56:03).
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Bryan sits down with the writer to discuss various elements of his career
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We weren’t very kind to Amy Winehouse when she walked among us. She was a tremendous singer with a mesmerizing style, a strange case of a 21st-century pop star who was largely influenced by postwar jazz. She was also an alcoholic and, in her later years, a connoisseur of harder drugs, including heroin and crack cocaine. We know this much about Amy Winehouse because The Sun published photos of her at home in East London, smoking crack, sure enough, on a famous front page with the splashy headline “Amy on Crack.” The tabloids tracked her emaciation in real time, swarming her at every smoke break and liquor run, running a barefoot woman down as if they were chasing a wet rat all over London, New York City, and Miami. Ultimately, Amy Winehouse recorded only two albums, her striking debut, Frank, and her legendary breakout, Back to Black, the latter selling millions of copies, winning a ton of awards, and setting her up for still more massive success in the long run. But Winehouse died from alcohol poisoning, alone in her flat, at age 27, five years after Back to Black, and so she became the sort of icon who now arouses great defensiveness in all corners—only now it’s too late for anyone to protect her in any real way.
So now we have the obligatory biopic, Back to Black, directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson (Fifty Shades of Grey, A Million Little Pieces). Fans of Winehouse have been dreading this thing for months. The trailers seemed treacherous. Here you have the opportunity to produce a biopic about the edgiest pop singer of the century so far, and yet you’ve got Marisa Abela seeming so perfectly harmless, in the baddest of signs, in the lead role. What also doesn’t help is the very existence of Asif Kapadia’s excellent 2015 documentary, Amy, full of home video footage and passionate interviews with her family, friends, and peers. Back to Black, by comparison, seemed cartoonish. This, many feared, would be Disney’s Amy Winehouse: a pretty, sappy, plastic bit of hagiography turning her into one of those chibi caricatures of famous people that you see in children’s books. A disgrace, surely.
Really, though, Back to Black isn’t bad. We might’ve braced ourselves for something exceptionally awful, but no, Back to Black is perfectly mediocre and otherwise unremarkable, as far as these things go. It’s unsatisfying only so far as biopics, in general, are almost inherently irritating: It’s trite, it’s formulaic, and it’s conspicuously easy on key figures with keen interest in not coming off too poorly in the story of a woman who clearly wasn’t served very well by the company she kept. The two most controversial men in her life were her father, Mitch Winehouse, who notoriously discouraged her from entering rehab to address her alcoholism a couple of years after Frank; and her ex-husband, Blake Fielder-Civil, who introduced the singer to hard drugs circa Back to Black. Nearly a decade ago, Mitch trashed the Amy documentary and told those filmmakers to their faces, “You should be ashamed of yourselves,” presumably due to the film’s characterization of him as self-absorbed and negligent in the face of his daughter’s disorders.
Back to Black, as a biopic, was going to have be a more diplomatic project; Taylor-Johnson met Mitch and Janis Winehouse, and the director ultimately won the family’s approval. Back to Black isn’t entirely uncritical of Mitch but rather depicts him as a loving father who was understandably blinded by the limelight and too proud of his daughter to see the darker signs. Blake Fielder-Civil wasn’t involved in the making of Back to Black, but the biopic nonetheless spares him much blame for the hard drugs and physical violence in his relationship with Amy. What Back to Black says about Fielder-Civil is more or less what he’s said about himself in recent years: He was a bad influence, yes, but he tried to distance himself from Winehouse and ultimately divorced her in July 2009—nearly three years after the Back to Black album and two years before her death—hoping to “set her free.” With this biopic, Taylor-Johnson seems to have a similar agenda—to finally end the cycle of recriminations about the death of Amy Winehouse and instead treat the world to a more sentimental and straightforwardly enjoyable overview of her life and her music.
But who ever wanted to see that? Fans of Winehouse, if anything, might’ve found themselves wishing, perversely, to see something as startling and ugly as the contemporary tabloid coverage, something as irreverent as “Stronger Than Me,” something as righteous as “Rehab,” something as intense as “You Sent Me Flying” or, well, “Back to Black.” Amy is grainy and candid and argumentative, and that’s all about right, but of course that’s a documentary. As a biopic, Back to Black is somewhat hamstrung by the absence of the real Winehouse and its need to be significantly less demoralizing and infuriating than the real story, which culminated with one of the greatest singers of her generation dying alone, watching YouTube, on the losing end of alcohol addiction and also bulimia. The trailers, to the movie’s detriment, show a lot of scenes of the singer in her late teens, the years when she’s less recognizable as the tattooed, beehived icon she’d become, but really, this is who Winehouse was, too. Abela sells both the musical wonderment and jazz geekery of Winehouse in her formative years as well as the bruised and bleary disillusionment of her 20s, as she slathered herself in booze and tattoos, in the years after Frank and Blake. Together, Abela and Jack O’Connell, as Amy and Blake, do a decently captivating dance as two troubled lovers who clung to each other in all the wrong ways and for all the wrong reasons. It just isn’t enough for the audience. It was never going to be enough.
Ultimately, the pre- and post-release grumbling about Back to Black isn’t owing to any egregious failure of Taylor-Johnson or whether or not Abela physically resembles the character so much as it speaks to a mean grief, persisting to this day, for Winehouse. It’s a grief to be rehashed but never relieved by a biopic such as this. We miss plenty of troubled entertainers who died too young, of course, but Winehouse especially rubbed her fate in our faces. Her biggest song was “Rehab,” for chrissakes. She was a dead woman walking through volleys of camera flashes for five years. She made her pain so plain and so integral to her music, yet it was ultimately something to be mocked and gawked at. The tabloids made her out to be some goddamned alien. The late-night comedians reduced her to a punch line. No one’s ever going to feel good about any of this, biopic or not. Amy Winehouse deserved better than just pop sainthood. She deserved so much more than Back to Black, even if it didn’t really do anything wrong. One day, we—so far as the collective consumers of popular entertainment and celebrity metaculture can be addressed as such—will be at peace about Amy Winehouse. But no time soon. We’re still mad about the girl.
It’s late evening on March 21 as I sit wide-eyed, waiting in anticipation to listen to Heavy, the fourth album from Top Dawg Entertainment’s R&B reserve SiR. Now, two decades after being founded, TDE remains one of the few modern rap labels that can still generate excitement surrounding artist releases, regardless of who it is. Think of the pure chaos and aggression that comes with the bass on ScHoolBoy Q’s “Ride Out” (from 2016’s Blank Face LP)as he paints the picture of cutthroat confrontation that comes with life as a Hoover Gangster Crip. Think of the foggy and damn near divine Crooklin and D. Sanders–produced instrumental on Isaiah Rashad’s SZA-featured “Stuck in the Mud,” off the vibe that is The Sun’s Tirade, where Rashad details his struggles with substance abuse. Or think of the dreamy soundscape where SZA softly sings of her failed relationships and insecurities on her 2017 album, Ctrl.
That is to say, when it was time to press play on Heavy, I was ready to hear SiR sashay through his latest romantic entanglements with dulcet vocals over airy instrumentals. But then I found out that verse dropped.
TDE’s former franchise player, co-founder of media company pgLang, and arguably best rapper alive Kendrick Lamar seized any and all attention in music and Twitter town hall conversation when he shook the earth’s tectonic plates with a guest spot on Future and Metro Boomin’s “Like That,” where he took aim at the other two members of hip-hop’s “Big Three,” fellow rap megastars Drake and J. Cole. On an album laced with subliminals directed toward the Champagne Papi, Kendrick’s verse opened the floodgates for what may be hip-hop’s last great beef. In one night, SiR’s underwhelming fourth project with TDE felt like it came and went.
Very few rappers today carry the gravitas to shift the paradigm with a single verse. Time and time again, Kendrick has proved capable of this, dating back to his now-iconic verse on Big Sean’s 2013 record “Control,” where he attempted to raise the bar of competition in the rap game. With “Like That” as the kickstarter, Kendrick both incited and won the Great War between him and Drake. For those questioning who’s the top emcee between the two rap heavyweights, Kendrick answered the question over the course of four diss tracks viciously dissecting Drake, from the eerie character study “Meet the Grahams” to the indisputable L.A. bop that is “Not Like Us.” The once “good kid” solidified his legacy as the best rapper of his generation with a decisive victory before Drake could even drop “The Heart Part 6.”
On “Push Ups,” Drake dragged Kendrick’s current relationship with TDE founder Anthony “Top Dawg” Tiffith into their personal beef, taking shots at Top Dawg when attempting to belittle Kendrick’s pockets with, “Extortion baby, whole career you been shook up / ’Cause Top told you drop and give me 50 like some push-ups.” But where Drake may have been attempting to open a wound, the end result may have actually exposed how tight K.Dot and his former employers still are. Kendrick was quick to establish that there’s still love and respect for Top while refuting those claims on his first official full diss record, “Euphoria,” when he remarked, “Aye, Top Dawg, who the fuck they think they playin’ with? / Extortion my middle name as soon as you jump off of that plane, bitch.” This moment and the overwhelming support by TDE artists on social media was a reminder that Top Dawg Entertainment is a family, at least by outside appearances. Yet, when “Euphoria” was put on streaming, the copyright reading “Kendrick Lamar, under exclusive license to Interscope Records,” also a reminder that the relationship with TDE is strictly familial.
Even if extortion seems like an exaggeration, rumors were circulating of Kendrick leaving TDE well before he announced that 2022’s Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers would be his final project for the label. While breaking rap streaming records with “Euphoria”—and later, again, with “Not Like Us”—Kendrick made it clear that he no longer needs the same level of support of the label that signed him at 16 years old. The only label he answers to now is Interscope under a new direct licensing agreement, shedding his ties with Dr. Dre’s Aftermath imprint, too. (Kendrick originally signed a joint deal with Interscope and Aftermath ahead of the release of good kid, m.A.A.d city.) Publicly, Punch (President of TDE and manager of SZA) and Top treated Kendrick like their baby bird leaving the nest by giving Kendrick their blessing to leave TDE and focus on pgLang, but Kendrick’s 2022 departure from TDE marked the end of their 18-year transformation from mom-and-pop record label to a rap empire. How does one continue to grow their empire after losing the fulcrum that held everything together for all those years?
With Kendrick on the front lines winning a Pulitzer Prize and 17 Grammys while dropping undeniable rap classics bearing TDE’s name for all those years—alongside strong outings from his label siblings ScHoolboy Q, Jay Rock, Ab-Soul, SZA, and Isaiah Rashad—the TDE stamp on an artist’s release carries the same weight as a film with the A24 logo flashing at the start of its trailer. Whether that’s seeing Top Dawg sharing 2019 TDE signee Zacari’s single “Don’t Trip” like a Bat signal marking the young singer’s official arrival after he spent years leaving his vocal trail on a plethora of TDE songs. Or seeing newcomer Ray Vaughn on L.A. Leakers sporting a TDE chain under his yellow puffy as he raps his ass off about the night he met Top and Snoop Dogg. Or when “Top Dawg Entertainment” flashes in the opening credits of Doechii’s “Alter Ego” music video, which featured the Tampa-born artist taking viewers through the swamp waters of Florida in a visual that feels so foreign to the L.A.-centric label. When that TDE logo pops up, listeners expect a certain level of hip-hop excellence to follow, even if today’s TDE vastly differs from its earlier incarnation.
In a 2022 interview with Mic, Punch discusses how things have changed since the early days of TDE. The label used to have more synergy amongst its artists, whether that was ScHoolboy Q’s handwriting being included on Kendrick’s good kid album cover or Kendrick showing out on ScHoolboy’s quadruple-platinum single “Collard Greens” less than a year later. You would often see TDE move as a unit, like during their 2013 BET Hip-Hop Awards cypher. Today, the extent of TDE synergy comes in the form of the occasional labelmate guest spot that feels less like artists intertwining styles and more like filling in an open 16 bars or hook on a song. Even Punch admits he is far less hands-on with the newer TDE artists. “With those first guys, I’m in there with them every single day, engineering. We started together and came up together. But a lot of the new artists now are coming into a situation that was already built. They have their own teams, and I just come in when they need,” he said.
Outside of Kendrick’s departure, there have been other signs of mild turbulence within the label. In the past, TDE’s current franchise cornerstone and undeniable megastar SZA has cried for help via Twitter—using words like “hostile” when describing her delayed album and occasionally contentious working relationship with Punch—although these statements would often get deleted at some point. Carson, California, rapper Reason seems like he’s been doing everything in his power to get kicked off the label ever since joining in 2018, whether that’s getting into an argument on a podcast with co-president of TDE and son of Top himself, Moosa, or rapping over Drake beats days after the Toronto rapper accused one of TDE’s presidents of extortion.
When comparing TDE to some of the most iconic rap labels of the past, it’s easy to imagine that losing their first superstar is officially where the decline starts. Death Row’s best days were behind them after Tupac Shakur died in 1996, and Bad Boy was never the same after the Notorious B.I.G.’s death the following year. But the untimely loss of those two greats doesn’t fully explain why those labels fell. At Death Row, Dr. Dre had already walked out the doors before Tupac’s murder, but ultimately, Suge Knight going to prison is what led to Interscope dropping the label. At Bad Boy, Mase appeared to be the one to fill the void Biggie left, going quadruple-platinum in 1997 with his debut album Harlem World,before stepping away from music in pursuit of a higher calling from religion. While this wasn’t the end of Bad Boy, it likely played a factor in Bad Boy being unable to pay back and fulfill the $50 million advance from Arista Records based on good faith earned by a lucrative 1997. Simply losing their breadwinner didn’t do those iconic labels in; a flawed infrastructure and unforeseen circumstances sank their respective ships.
In the midst of the current rap game, TDE is in rare air. Drake’s OVO Sound is at times more focused on propping up Drake and who Drake loves right now than building the genuine camaraderie (and roster of heatmakers) of a TDE, and while J. Cole’s Dreamville stable has a lot of promise, they haven’t touched the commercial success of TDE’s best. In this era, you may not even think of TDE’s journey or what going from independent to world-renowned means anymore; you’ve come to know TDE as an institution for dope Black music.
Now 20 years old, Top Dawg Entertainment doesn’t show signs of a sharp fall-off just yet. First and foremost, they have SZA, whose latest album, SOS, achieved meteoric commercial, critical, and Grammy success with songs like the Billboard Hot 100 chart-topping, five-times-platinum single “Kill Bill.” TDE not only has a compilation album on the way celebrating their anniversary, but Black Hippy member and original TDE rapper Jay Rock also has his fourth album, Eastside Johnny*, on the horizon. ScHoolboy Q’s latest (and most critically acclaimed) album, Blue Lips,is a testament to TDE’s ability to churn out premium bodies of work. And even with Kendrick’s “Like That” verse overshadowing SiR’s Heavy, songs like “Only Human” reflect the singer’s growth as an artist leaning more into his vulnerability. However, the real test for TDE’s prolonged success comes in developing the roster’s future. How much time is needed to turn the Ray Vaughns, Doechiis, and (checks notes to see if he’s still signed) Reasons of the label into stars? And as Isaiah Rashad continues to grow creatively with each new release, one has to imagine he has greater potential working with Warner Records and a sober mind.
Those concerns, for now, feel like minor cracks in a well-oiled machine, with SZA’s superstardom being the engine that keeps it all running—although we hope that talk of her next album, the long-awaited Lana, getting a release sometime in the near future doesn’t have you losing sleep at night. For TDE to keep the empire standing, they must appease their queen. In a 2017 OTHERtone interview, Jimmy Iovine praised the way TDE built a buzz around SZA, leading to TDE’s joint deal for SZA with RCA being a 70-30 split in TDE’s favor. Yet still, SZA has spoken about issues with her situation. How much time is there until SZA’s deal with RCA is up, allowing her to fly out of the nest like Kendrick? And will TDE be prepared if that day comes sooner than expected?
At TDE’s peak—somewhere within that 2016-18 era—every single one of their artists dropped a project, and their franchise player Kendrick Lamar made pit stops on almost every single release, bolstering them up through Damn., culminating with Black Panther: The Album and The Championship Tour. What’s stopping TDE from restoring the feeling with a SZA-centered label renaissance, fueled by guest spots propelling her labelmates’ albums into another stratosphere with divine vocals alone? Top and Punch have proven time and time again that they know when it’s time to strike. And for SiR’s sake, let’s hope Kendrick gives TDE a heads-up next time he plans on starting a rap beef around the time of a TDE release.
It’s House of R, mon amis. Mal and Jo are here to give you their thoughts on the season finale, and the season as a whole, of the highly regarded X-Men ’97 (00:00), and what their hopes for the new season may be!
Be sure to check out tickets for the Ringer Residency in Los Angeles this summer!
Hosts: Mallory Rubin and Joanna Robinson Senior Producer: Steve Ahlman Additional Production: Arjuna Ramgopal Social: Jomi Adeniran
I Saw the TV Glow is, on its surface, a movie about identity and teenage isolation. But it’s also about how we attach those ideas to art and entertainment consumption during our formative years. And on yet another level, A24’s new psychological coming-of-age drama is about the mediums through which art and entertainment are passed down. Largely set in the ’90s, the movie revolves around two teens, Owen and Maddy, who bond over a surreal YA television show called The Pink Opaque. (Think: Buffy meets A Trip to the Moon.) But Owen’s parents forbid him from watching—“Isn’t that a show for girls?” asks Owen’s dad, played by Fred Durst—so he can only consume the series in secretive ways. Specifically: VHS dubs of The Pink Opaque that Maddy makes for Owen and hides in the high school dark room. It’s a relic from the pre-streaming era that should feel familiar to older millennials—the idea that a piece of physical media could change your life.
It’s fitting, then, that A24 and director Jane Schoenbrun have staked a large part of the movie’s experience on another relic of the pre-streaming era: the compilation soundtrack. The I Saw the TV Glow OST is the type of project you don’t see much of in 2024. It’s a who’s who of indie music mixed with a handful of rising artists, all providing original recordings. The album, which was released on May 10 through A24 Music, features stars such as Phoebe Bridgers and Caroline Polachek alongside critical darlings Bartees Strange and L’Rain, plus exciting (relative) newcomers such as Sadurn and King Woman. On its own, it may be one of the best collections of songs you’ll hear all year. But tied to Schoenbrun’s tale of identity repression and awakening, the tracks take on vivid life. (Certain songs are inextricable from specific scenes—like Polachek’s “Starburned and Unkissed” playing as handwritten notes cover the screen, or Maria BC’s haunting “Taper” playing during Maddy’s set-piece monologue.)
For Schoenbrun, this marriage of sight and sound was always the vision for I Saw the TV Glow, which releases wide on Friday. The hope was to make something similar to the soundtracks for Donnie Darko, The Doom Generation, and John Hughes’s most famous movies—all indelible, and all inspirations Schoenbrun cites. (This was in addition to commissioning a gorgeous score by Alex G, who also worked on Schoenbrun’s last film, 2021’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair.) The director—a self-described music nerd who grew up escaping to punk shows in New York City—even went as far as to make individualized playlists for artists to give them a sense of Schoenbrun’s thinking. “I knew that there was a sort of ground level of sad girl lesbian shit that I love and felt in line with the film, but I didn’t want it to just be that,” Schoenbrun says. “A great soundtrack needs to explore outwards, in the way that the Drab Majesty song does or the Proper song does. If it was just one thing 16 times, people would get bored really quickly. But if it was 16 things that all feel a piece of themselves, it could stand the test of time.”
That approach pays off throughout the film, like during King Woman’s visceral in-movie performance of “Psychic Wound” (a moment that will make any self-respecting Twin Peaks fan recall the Roadhouse performances) or yeule’s cover of Broken Social Scene’s “Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl,” which appears twice in I Saw the TV Glow. (It’s perhaps fitting that BSS’s 2002 original had another soundtrack moment in 2010, when it was featured in Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World.) Ultimately, despite the “various artists” label, the I Saw the TV Glow soundtrack feels like a cohesive document—a testament to not only how the movie ties the songs together, but also the work that Schoenbrun, A24, and music supervisors Chris Swanson and Jessica Berndt put into it.
“I didn’t want it to be the dumb soundtrack of pop-rock cover songs of ’70s hits or whatever,” Schoenbrun says. “I didn’t want it to become pastiche or an exercise for anybody, but I think I knew I was playing within this lineage of the Mallrats soundtrack or the Buffy original soundtrack. I wanted to create this thing that could conjure that memory. Because so much of what the film is trying to do is conjure that era of media.”
Much like the plot of the movie, the existence of this soundtrack seems both sentimental and unfamiliar. (Or, as Taja Cheek—who records under the name L’Rain and contributed the song “Green” to the project—tells me, “very nostalgic, but also really kind of fresh and new.”) While these types of compilation albums used to be the norm, the movie and music industries have shied away from them in the new economic and streaming realities. And in some cases, that’s maybe not a bad thing—the fewer blockbuster soundtracks, the fewer Godzilla-style abominations we have to deal with. But that also means fewer—if any—Doom Generations or Above the Rims or Empire Records. And that maybe means a world where original music doesn’t matter as much to a movie unless it’s a score by one of the few dozen composers who get regular work.
So the question becomes: If I Saw the TV Glow and its accompanying album succeed, do they have the potential to become almost a real-life extension of the Maddy-Owen VHS experience? Meaning: Could they pass down the soundtrack experience, making it easier for other filmmakers and studios to take similar risks? Because in this case, the medium is as fascinating as what it contains—and how it connects to the past.
A24
For Swanson, one of the TV Glow music supervisors and the cofounder of indie music powerhouse Secretly Group, it was Pump Up the Volume. (“Pump Up the Volume actually made me want to start my own pirate radio station,” he says. “I was convinced that was my destiny.”) For Billboard writer Andrew Unterberger, it was not only beloved albums like the Singles and Kids OSTs, but also strange artifacts like the one for The Cable Guy. (“A couple hits from it, but do I actually remember any of those being in that movie? Maybe one, maybe two.”) For L’Rain—one of the stars of the I Saw the TV Glow album—it was Whitney Houston’s Waiting to Exhale. (“Just like, ‘Wow, look at all of these very famous women that are contributing to the soundtrack.’”) For veteran music supervisor Liz Gallacher, it was one of the forever classics: Pretty in Pink and all the Smiths and Echo & the Bunnymen that entailed. (“My absolute hero is John Hughes,” she says. “The way that he used music, it just spoke to me so much when I was younger.”)
Everyone interviewed for this pointed to a soundtrack or two that they’ve fallen in love with. Many were filled with original songs. Some, like the Wes Anderson soundtracks that longtime music supervisor Zach Cowie highlighted, became beloved for introducing new generations to long-overlooked songs. (Personally speaking, I can trace my Nico and Velvet Underground love back to this scene.) But the soundtracks that everyone cited share a common thread: They are all, by this point, decades old.
It’s tempting to dismiss that as a function of age—most people I spoke with grew up in the ’80s or ’90s, after all. But digging into data unearths an unavoidable reality: There are far fewer movie soundtrack albums that break through these days, and the ones that do often bear little resemblance to the ones that held cultural real estate throughout the ’80s, ’90s, and early 2000s.
The Ringer examined Billboard’s year-end top 100 albums list for every year going back to 1978, the year that Saturday Night Fever and Grease finished no. 1 and no. 2, respectively (the Apex Mountain for John Travolta and Italian Americans dancing on-screen). That year, four movie soundtrack albums placed in the list: those two, plus the one for the musical-comedy Thank God It’s Friday and the movie FM, which featured Steely Dan’s eponymous hit. For the next decade-plus, the number stayed roughly in that ballpark besides a few fallow periods (just one soundtrack album placed in the top 100 in 1983: Flashdance) and sporadic spikes (seven made it the following year, including Flashdance again, but also Purple Rain, Footloose, and, naturally, The Big Chill). But the numbers take off starting in the mid-1990s: 10 make the list in 1994, nine in 1995, 12 in 1997, and a whopping 13 in 1998. (Possibly 14, depending on how you classify Spiceworld.)
If you grew up in the era, you’re undoubtedly familiar with how seemingly every movie had an accompanying “soundtrack”—typically a mix of songs that would appear in the movie alongside others totally unrelated to it, which were included under the loose “inspired by the motion picture” banner. Track lists were often filled with loosies from marquee artists and whatever new artist the label was looking to promote. Some were overfilled behemoths that doubled as a testament to record industry gluttony—everyone remembers Batman Forever for Seal’s no. 1 hit “Kiss From a Rose,” but what about U2, Method Man, and Sunny Day Real Estate?—while others became beloved documents of a sound or era. (See: how Singles helped codify the sound of grunge and Above the Rim solidified Death Row’s place in the industry and gave us “Regulate” in the process.) Sometimes, the soundtrack’s notoriety far eclipsed the movie it was allegedly inspired by. (It’s long been a joke around these parts that no one has actually seen the movie Judgment Night despite the notoriety of its rap-rock mashups, but the same could be said of High School High and The Show and their influential hip-hop soundtracks.)
Where so many of the popular soundtracks of the ’70s and ’80s came from movies explicitly about music—Purple Rain, Footloose, Saturday Night Fever—these ’90s OSTs were often different. Slightly craven—but in some ways, no less essential. How else do you explain something like the album that accompanied Bulworth? “There weren’t movies about music or about characters that were particularly interested in music,” says Unterberger, the Billboard journalist. “Or there weren’t musical situations necessarily in the movie, but they still had to have these sorts of big-ticket soundtracks. … They weren’t always the most artistically lofty collections of music, but they were a lot of fun.”
It was good business for the labels in the era when you could charge $17.99 for a CD and not have to worry about much beyond a hit song or two. (Also, for the movie studios, they doubled as good promotion: What better way to promote Batman Forever than to have clips of Jim Carrey’s Riddler pop up between shirtless shots of Seal every hour on MTV?) But these albums also provided something for the listener: a way to deepen their connection with the film. Gallacher—a music supervisor who has worked on movies such as The Full Monty, 24 Hour Party People, and Bend It Like Beckham—says that, at their best, these kinds of soundtracks were an extension of the filmgoing experience that could be popped into a Walkman or six-CD changer for months or years afterward. “There was an element back in the day of people wanting a sort of souvenir of the movie,” she says. “You could put things together like compilation albums in a way, and people felt like that was a souvenir of the movie.”
Of course, like many things in the music industry, the bottom fell out of the movie soundtrack market over the next decade. As downloads—first illegal and then through iTunes and other digital marketplaces—began to erode the idea of the album, these types of compilations began to fade. In 1999, the year Napster debuted, nine soundtracks finished in Billboard’s year-end top 100. The years immediately after hovered between three and five albums. And even when the numbers have reached similar heights as the ’90s—like in 2008, when eight movie soundtracks made the year-end list—those figures were buoyed by albums aimed at decidedly younger audiences. (In other words, lots of High School Musical and Cheetah Girls.) In more recent years, as streaming has replaced downloads and plays have become the primary means of measuring an album’s success, kids’ movies have often been the only reliable chart producers. (Moana, for example, made the year-end top 100 each year from 2017 to 2021. And in 2021, it was the only soundtrack to earn that distinction.) Twenty years after Garden State, the idea that something like its accompanying album could break through seems far-fetched. If a song will change your life, odds are it’s not coming from a soundtrack.
I was struck by the streaming aspect recently when I got out of a screening of Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast, a time-warping love story that uses the music of Roy Orbison, Visage, and Frankie Valli to staggering effect. Its soundtrack is a different concern from I Saw the TV Glow’s—where TV Glow uses only brand-new recordings, The Beast recontextualizes older songs, not unlike a Wes Anderson or Quentin Tarantino movie. Shortly after the QR code credits rolled, several of the tracks were still rattling around in my brain. Twenty years ago, I may have driven straight from the theater to the store to buy The Beast’s soundtrack. Instead, before I had even started my engine, I found a playlist of the songs in the movie—one put together not by the studio or a record label, but by a user named “filmlinc”—and gave it a like. (And here seems like as good of a place as any to note that Spotify is The Ringer’s parent company.)
The process isn’t exactly novel—this is what music consumption is for most people in 2024. But given the difficulty and expense that comes with acquiring the rights for these songs—especially at a time when old music is more in demand than new music—these kinds of compilation soundtracks functionally don’t exist as a commercial or physical product. (The Beast’s does exist in a truncated form, with Bonello’s original score packaged alongside a few of the synced tracks.) For Zach Cowie, a music supervisor who’s worked on Master of None and American Fiction, that intangibility has made these kinds of compilations feel fleeting and disposable. “We all know what the cover of the Forrest Gump soundtrack looks like,” Cowie says. “Because somebody you knew had it if you didn’t have it. Having them be physical objects I think is what established this moment that we’re talking about.”
Even for Gallacher, who’s seen soundtracks she’s worked on receive gold plaques or achieve cult status, it’s an evolution that makes sense. “No one wants a compilation anymore of music from a movie,” Gallacher says. “They can just go and listen to their favorite songs anytime on Spotify. They don’t need that. People will put playlists on.”
It’s fair to say that few shed tears over the death of the Forrest Gump–style soundtrack—which charged consumers upwards of $30 for the privilege of hearing Joan Baez and Creedence back-to-back. The overall decline in the market has, however, had a knock-on effect on compilation soundtracks filled with original music—like ones from Singles or I Saw the TV Glow. Looking at the Billboard charts reveals how rare of a commodity they’ve become. Besides kids’ flicks, the types of OSTs that have tended to make the year-end top 100 recently either are tied to music-centric films (La La Land, A Star Is Born) or have been helmed by a headlining superstar musician. (But even those are rare: Kendrick Lamar’s platinum-certified Black Panther soundtrack was certainly the exception, not the rule.)
Ones for smaller movies are practically nonexistent—and even when they do exist, they gain less traction. Unterberger recalls a soundtrack to the film The Turning, which came out in January 2020. The movie and its music came and went with barely anyone noticing. This happened even though the soundtrack possessed an ethos similar to I Saw the TV Glow’s—The Turning’s album boasted the likes of Mitski, Empress Of, and a living legend (and friend of The Ringer) in Courtney Love. From Unterberger’s vantage point, however, The Turning lacked one thing that TV Glow has: a sense of intentionality with the music. “It was actually one of my favorite albums of that year, and it felt coherent as a soundtrack,” Unterberger says of The Turning. “But it seemed to have very little to do with the movie—it didn’t seem to really feed off of the movie in any way that I could tell just by listening to it. And it didn’t really get a lot of attention.”
To that end, I Saw the TV Glow has something in common with the biggest non-franchise movie of the past few years: Barbie. (The truly opaque pink.) While the two movies couldn’t feel more different in terms of scale and subject—other than some of Barbie’s broad-strokes platitudes about identity and gender—Greta Gerwig’s movie also made the music feel integral. Helmed by a trio of producers including Mark Ronson, Barbie the Album recruited some of the biggest stars to make music specifically for the film, and many of those songs became the backbone of some of the film’s biggest moments. (“I’m Just Ken,” anyone?) The album spawned two top-10 singles—Dua Lipa’s “Dance the Night” and Nicki Minaj and Ice Spice’s “Barbie World”—and won Billie Eilish and Finneas a few pieces of hardware to go along with the Mattel plastic.
Cowie credits the creators of Barbie for not only enlisting the artists they did, but also making the songs feel organic in the universe of the film. The audience, he says, can typically tell when the approach is thoughtful. And that counts for something in a music-discovery landscape increasingly dominated by the algorithm and hivemind curation. “It was the best possible thing to support the world that they were building,” Cowie says of Barbie. “And people paid attention to that. But what made that happen is the fact that everyone in the world saw that movie. If the music was an afterthought, no one would talk about the music.”
Barring a (welcome) miracle, I Saw the TV Glow likely won’t be the type of movie that everyone in the world goes to see. But it is one that’s sure to develop a dedicated following—the Donnie Darko and Twin Peaks comparisons go deeper than the musical moments. And that’s part of the reason Schoenbrun took the “mixtape approach” to this soundtrack. They wanted to create moments and heighten story beats, but they also wanted to produce something that felt “made lovingly”—“distinctive from a Spotify playlist or a YouTube recommendation.” (Or, put another way: They wanted something that felt like the result of “angry sex between capitalism and art-making.”)
“There’s something very human about it, and there’s something that’s not disposable,” Schoenbrun says. “There’s something that feels lovingly prepared. The handmade nature of it—the physicality of it, even if it’s not literally physical—is a big part of the appeal.”
A24
Schoenbrun, of course, had the vision for what they wanted the I Saw the TV Glow soundtrack to be. It also helped that they had a willing partner in their studio to make it happen.
There’s no shortage of praise being heaped upon A24, which has grown in the past decade from a scrappy, small indie to one of the most recognizable names in film on the back of its creatives-first mindset. But it’s worth calling out its approach to music as a microcosm of that. Arguably no movie company has put such a focus on sonic backdrops in recent years as the one responsible for Uncut Gems and its Daniel Lopatin score and the 4K restoration of the Talking Heads’ classic concert film, Stop Making Sense. (Speaking of, you can preorder the SMS tribute album featuring Paramore and Lorde, among others, right now.) The company has even gone as far as to form its own label, A24 Music (which, like its embrace of T-shirt maker Online Ceramics, can be seen as good business and great branding as much as it is a means of producing art).
Schoenbrun says that many of their early conversations with the studio revolved around the idea of making an all-original compilation that both worked inside of the movie and also stood on its own outside of it. They’re not confident that would’ve been possible at a studio that either (1) didn’t have the same track record of prestige and success as A24 or (2) was inherently more risk averse because of the costs associated with these types of projects. “A lot of other studios operating at the level of A24 or above the level of A24, financially, just don’t have any room to take a shot on something coming from a place of love, rather than a place of like, ‘Well, if we have these 16 artists on the soundtrack, our data tells us that it’s going to get this many streams on Spotify and make us this much money in sales or whatever,’” Schoenbrun says. “And I think A24 has made its name and staked its brand on finding people like me, who have a lot of love and want to make something with that love, and I think that is a process that is inherently at odds with the other thing.”
A24 representatives declined to comment for this article, but others—both ones who have worked with the company and ones who haven’t—were complimentary of the way it tackles music and how it fits into the overall mission. “I love A24 because that’s the kind of studio that would allow something like that to happen,” Cowie says. “I just love their artist-first thing. I don’t think you’d be able to do this at another studio.”
For Swanson, who co-supervised the music on I Saw the TV Glow, what made the music feel important was the simple fact that Schoenbrun and A24 treated it as though it was. On other projects with other studios, the soundtrack often comes last, as counterintuitive as it may seem. That never felt like the case here, Swanson says. “They embed their music department in with the creative force, the producers, and director of the films early enough that they’re employing their credibility, their budget,” he says. “It’s not uncommon for music supervisors to be relegated to a postproduction role after most of the money’s been spent. The filmmaker isn’t less aspirational about music. It’s just by virtue of it being dealt with last, you’ve got to find the change in the couch cushions. That these combos are starting so early is a game changer.”
All of this made I Saw the TV Glow a unique project for Swanson and Berndt, who co-supervised the music with him. Supervising work typically involves making playlists and sourcing songs, Berndt says. This time, it was collaborating closely with Schoenbrun. “We’ve certainly taken early meetings on projects not too far from this where they want to do a bunch of original songs,” Berndt says. “They want to create real soundtrack moments with some commissioned songs. And it’s pretty rare that it can actually happen. Obviously, it takes budget, time, creativity, the right timeline for artists to be able to have the capacity to create music like this for a film. And we just got really lucky that we could actually make it happen.”
And that work shows up on the screen. Berndt and Swanson both point to the two on-screen performances—one by Sloppy Jane and Phoebe Bridgers, another by King Woman. Where live performances in movies can often come across as forced, these feel organic. And more importantly, they also help push the narrative forward. “It’s like, at this point, everything is going to shift for Owen,” Berndt says. “It’s like this moment of, ‘Oh, Maddy’s back, this is great.’ It’s like, ‘Where have you been? Tell me everything.’ And then your whole world is changing with what Maddy is telling Owen. And just that beautiful moment of these wonderful performances happening both in the forefront and then in the background of their heavy conversation is just the most beautiful moment in shifting the way the rest of the film is going to go.”
It’s scenes like that that have the potential to make the I Saw the TV Glow soundtrack resonate like so many of the projects from decades ago. The album likely won’t reach Saturday Night Fever heights—though, admittedly, it was never designed to—but it’s not hard to imagine it could become an object of cultish devotion, like a Donnie Darko or Gregg Araki soundtrack. And if this record does catch on, it’s possible we’ll see a world where studios take more shots like this. We may not be looking at a full-on resurgence of compilation soundtracks, but projects like TV Glow and Barbie show that with the proper care and creativity, there’s still a market for them. “It’s getting attention—the music for it—before the movie’s even happened,” says Cowie. “Anything that draws attention to this age-old thing still having some power is so great. … What would be so rad is if this does come out and it continues to have the reception it has before it’s even out. That opens the doors wider at all the other studios because it’s proof that this can still work.”
That would be a happy accident for Schoenbrun. Ultimately, their hopes are that the soundtrack and the movie each become portals into different worlds: the movie as a means of discovering artists such as L’Rain and Maria BC, the music as a means of leading people to seek out the on-screen lives of Owen and Maddy. And if more people discover a nostalgic medium in the process, all the better.
“I’m really hoping that, when people watch the movie and discover the music—or vice versa, listen to the soundtrack and then go discover the movie—that this level of handmade care and sharing something, it comes through.”
Nora and Nathan check in on the newly revamped Eras Tour set list. They talk about the new Tortured Poets Department section of the show and which songs Taylor Swift chose to include (1:00), which songs she decided to cut in order to make room (36:12), and why she might have decided to change up the show even though tickets have already been sold out (48:39).
Hosts: Nora Princiotti and Nathan Hubbard Producer: Kaya McMullen
Sean and Amanda are joined by Van Lathan to discuss the new installment in the Planet of the Apes franchise, the enduring power of the Apes IP, and how it relates to modern IP storytelling (1:00). Finally, they rank the 10 films in the franchise (1:05:00).
Hosts: Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins Guest: Van Lathan Senior Producer: Bobby Wagner
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Live from YouTube, The Ringer’s Bill Simmons, Chris Ryan, Sean Fennessey, and Van Lathan learn that it’s not show friends, it’s show business after rewatching Cameron Crowe’s 1996 classic Jerry Maguire, starring Tom Cruise, Cuba Gooding Jr., and Renee Zellweger.
This is the pod of a killer, Bella! Joanna is joined by friends and vampire experts Kristin Russo and Jenny Owen Youngs to give you an intensive tropes course on vampires (07:32). From Twilight to Dracula and familiars to fatal attractions, they are here to teach you everything you need to know about the eternal creatures of the night that are seen throughout fiction.
Plus, Chris and Andy remember the legendary engineer and producer, Steve Albini, who passed away this week
Chris and Andy remember the legendary engineer and producer, Steve Albini, who passed away this week (1:00). They then talk of news that the third season of The Bear will be out this June (13:25) and that Shogun will be getting a second season (18:30). Next, they talk about Disney and Warner Bros. reaching a deal to offer a Disney+, Hulu, and Max bundle (28:44), before diving into their new favorite delight on Netflix: John Mulaney’s quasi-late-night show, Everybody’s in L.A. (36:33).
Hosts: Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald Producer: Kaya McMullen
Rachel Lindsay and Callie Curry begin today’s Morally Corrupt by discussing the recent news that Dorit and PK Kemsley are separating (1:07), before sharing their reactions to The Real Housewives of New Jersey Season 14 premiere (6:14). They then break down Season 8, Episode 12 of Summer House (23:02). Rachel is then joined by Jodi Walker to discuss Season 1, Episode 8 of The Valley (36:45) as well as the Vanderpump Rules Season 11 finale (1:02:16).
Gov. Kristi Noem’s book didn’t officially drop until May 7, but a torrent of headlines made the rollout troublesome for the South Dakotan.
First, there was the story about Noem shooting her 14-month-old dog Cricket, which angered animal lovers, gathered wall-to-wall headlines (including from PolitiFact) and prompted jokes on late-night television, including “Saturday Night Live” in its May 4 “Weekend Update” segment.
Then came three anecdotes about her foreign policy experience that multiple news outlets have reported as false. In her book, “No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward,” Noem wrote about meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un during her 2013 to 2015 congressional stint on the House Armed Services Committee, canceling a 2023 meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron and having a phone conversation with former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley that Noem deemed threatening.
Noem said May 5 on CBS’ “Face the Nation” that the Kim Jong Un anecdote “shouldn’t have been in the book.” In a statement several outlets picked up, Noem’s spokesperson, Ian Fury, said, “It was brought to our attention that the upcoming book ‘No Going Back’ has two small errors. This has been communicated to the ghostwriter and editor.” PolltiFact contacted the publisher, Center Street Books, for comment about whether the errors will delay the book’s rollout and what might happen with the audiobook, which Business Insider says Noem recorded with the Kim Jong Un story. We got no reply.
PolitiFact reviewed two of the questioned anecdotes in Noem’s book. As Noem stated, the Kim story was scrubbed from the Kindle edition we bought May 7; we reviewed that excerpt in other coverage of this story.
PolitiFact also asked Fury and the House Armed Services Committee about the Kim anecdotes but didn’t hear back. A message to Macron’s office was not returned by publication. And the State Department, which we asked about both the Kim and Macron anecdotes, did not directly address the matter.
Politico and The Wall Street Journal had counted Noem among possible 2024 running mates for former President Donald Trump. Axios reported Trump praising Noem the weekend of May 4, saying she is, “Somebody that I love. She’s been with me, a supporter of mine and I’ve been a supporter of hers for a long time.” In the book, Noem praised Trump, writing, “Donald Trump and a few brave folks broke politics.”
The Kim anecdote
In advance copies of “No Going Back,” as covered by severalnewsoutlets, Noem wrote:
“Through my tenure on the House Armed Services Committee,I had the chance to travel to many countries to meet with world leaders. I remember when I met with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. I’m sure he underestimated me, having no clue about my experience staring down little tyrants (I’d been a children’s pastor, after all).”
The account doesn’t say when the purported meeting was.
On May 2, the Dakota Scout, an independent newspaper, reported that its review of congressional travel documents and outside sources showed no record of such a meeting. Over the weekend, other news outlets followed the story, reporting the anecdote was false.
Although Noem addressed the Kim anecdote on “Face the Nation,” she wouldn’t say whether she’d met with Kim. In a cross-talk filled back-and-forth discussion, host Margaret Brennan noted that when Noem served on the Armed Services Committee from 2013 to 2015, a female president led North Korea, not Kim.
HOST MARGARET BRENNAN: “You talk about meeting some world leaders and one specific one … Did you meet Kim Jong-un?”
GOV. KRISTI NOEM: Well, you know, as soon as this was brought to my attention, I certainly made some changes and looked at this — this passage. And I have met with many, many world leaders. I have traveled around the world. As soon as it was brought to my attention, we went forward and have made some edits.
BRENNAN: So, you did not meet with Kim Jong-un? That’s what you’re saying.
NOEM: No, I have met with many, many world leaders, many world leaders. … I’m not going to talk about my specific meetings with world leaders, I’m just not going to do that. This anecdote shouldn’t have been in the book. And as soon as it was brought to my attention, I made sure that that was adjusted.”
Later, came this exchange:
NOEM: Well, I think you need to remember, Margaret, and everybody needs to remember that I have worked on ag policy and federal policy for over 30 years. My time in serving and making policies in this country has been extensive and covered decades.
BRENNAN: Right, but you never went to North Korea.
NOEM: So, I make no specifics in this book. I talk about the fact that — yes, I have. I have been there.
BRENNAN: You went — you went to North Korea?
NOEM: I went to the DMZ (Korean demilitarized zone). And there are details — there details in this book that talk about going to the DMZ and specifics that I’m willing to share. There’s some specifics I’m not willing to share with you.
The Macron and Haley anecdotes
In the book, Noem also writes that she and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who until March was a Republican presidential candidate, chatted by phone in summer 2021.
Noem wrote that Haley said, “I’ve heard a lot of really good things about you. But I also want you to know that if I hear something bad … I will be sure to let you know.’”
Noem wrote that after the call, she called her assistant and said, “I’m pretty sure I was just threatened by Nikki Haley. It was clear that she wanted me to know that there was only room for one Republican woman in the spotlight.’”
Haley spokesperson Chaney Denton told PolitiFact Noem’s story about Haley was inaccurate in timing and character.
Denton said Noem and Haley had talked, but in 2020, not 2021, and added, “(Haley) called Governor Noem in 2020 to encourage her when she was criticized for keeping her state open during COVID,” Denton said in a statement. “How she would twist that into a threat is just plain weird.”
Noem also wrote that she canceled a November 2023 meeting with Macron in Paris.
“While in Paris, I was slated to meet with French President Emmanuel Macron,” Noem wrote. “However, the day before we were to meet he made what I considered a very pro-Hamas and anti-Israel comment to the press. So, I decided to cancel. There is no place for pro-Hamas rhetoric.”
PolitiFact contacted the French Embassy in Washington and Macron’s office in Paris for comment but received no reply. The Associated Press reported that Macron’s office said there had been no “direct invitation” for Noem to meet the French president, although Noem and Macron might have been invited to the same Paris event.
Are these images claiming to show Beyoncé at the 2024 Met Gala all up in your mind? If so, we have bad news: They’re fake.
“Beyoncé met gala 2024 ! Ate left no crumbs,” readtwo May 7 Facebook posts, showing four photos of Beyoncé in a cowboy hat, supposedly walking the 2024 Met Gala red carpet.
(Screenshot from Facebook)
These posts were flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)
But these aren’t real images of Beyoncé at the 2024 Met Gala; she skipped it.
A closer look at the images reveals that they were generated by artificial intelligence. The four photos show four different outfits.
They also show distorted features of photographers in the background, and the carpet in the fake photos didn’t match the 2024 gala’s green-and-cream carpet.
(Screenshot from Facebook)
The images’ flowers were also off. The ones used to decorate the 2024 Met Gala’s steps were white, not pink.
Zendaya attends The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute benefit gala celebrating the opening of the “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion” exhibition May 6, 2024, in New York. (AP)
In the days after the 2024 Met Gala on May 6, PolitiFact debunked several fake images of celebrities who didn’t attend the event, including singers Rihanna, Katy Perry and Lady Gaga.
These images of Beyoncé at the 2024 Met Gala aren’t real either. We rate that claim Pants on Fire!
PolitiFact Audience Engagement Producer Ellen Hine contributed to this report.
Sean and Amanda answer your questions about the 2024 box office, roasts, YouTube movie clips, repertory theaters, and more (1:00). Then, Sean is joined by Mean Pod Guy Adam Nayman to discuss an exciting new release, Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow, and its unique blend of body horror, nostalgia, and identity (1:15:00). Finally, Sean is joined by Schoenbrun to discuss the making of the movie, growing up hooked in to television, and what kinds of films they’re interested in making moving forward (1:45:00).
Hosts: Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins Guests: Jane Schoenbrun and Adam Nayman Senior Producer: Bobby Wagner
Midnight Boys together strong! The boys give their instant reactions to the new blockbuster Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (04:18). They look at the journey of our main character, Noa, and what it means to live in the shadow of Andy Serkis’s Caesar character.
Hosts: Charles Holmes, Van Lathan, Jomi Adeniran, and Steve Ahlman Senior Producer: Steve Ahlman Additional Production Support: Arjuna Ramgopal Social: Jomi Adeniran
Hello media consumers! On the Final Edition, Bryan is joined by Julia Turner—one of the hosts of Slate’s Culture Gabfest! They get into the following topics:
Jack Shafer’s story in Politico about “journalistic swagger” (1:20).
Ben Smith of Semafor’s interview with New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn regarding the 2024 election (20:26)
The Apple ad about the new thin iPad (32:56)
An Office spinoff, but for a newspaper company (35:26)
Reggie Miller has learned something from Bryan and other podcasters (40:00)
Kyle Chayka’s, of The New Yorker, story: “The Revenge of the Home Page” (42:59)
Then, David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline.
Host: Bryan Curtis Guest: Julia Turner Producer: Brian H. Waters
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