Cold Tonight, Warmer Afternoons This Weekend | November 28th Forecast
THAT’S RIGHT. IT’S ACTUALLY MUCH NEEDED RAIN. BUT TODAY, COMPLETELY DRY AND COLD. BUT WE WILL WARM UP THIS WEEKEND, THOUGH, SO THAT’S WHY I’M SHOWING YOU THE SEVEN-DAY OFF THE TOP TO SHOW YOU SOME OF THESE CHANGES THAT ARE ON THE WAY. THEN, AS JASON JUST MENTIONED, NEXT WEEK WE WILL SEE SOME RAIN SHOWERS AS WE ARE WATCHING OUR NEXT AREA OF LOW PRESSURE THAT’S GOING TO BE COMING IN FROM THE WEST, BRINGING US THAT UPTICK IN RAIN. LET’S LOOK AHEAD FOR THE WEEKEND. SO TODAY, SUNNY AND COLD, NOT ANY HUGE CHANGES TODAY OTHER THAN THAT. BUT TOMORROW THOUGH WE WILL START TO SEE MORE OF AN ONSHORE WIND, MEANING A WIND COMING OUT OF THE EAST. AND THAT COULD BRING A COUPLE COASTAL RAIN SHOWERS FOR OUR BEACH LINE SPOTS. AND THEN AS WE HEAD INTO SUNDAY, WE’RE GOING TO SEE AN UPTICK IN MOISTURE. AND THAT’S GOING TO BRING JUST A FEW RAIN SHOWERS ON SUNDAY. NOTHING HUGE. I ONLY HAVE A 20% CHANCE OF RAIN IN. AND THEN WE START TO SEE THOSE RAIN CHANCES INCREASE FOR MONDAY AND TUESDAY OF NEXT WEEK. TODAY IT’S REALLY ALL ABOUT THE COLD AND THAT WIND. HERE’S A LIVE LOOK FROM OUR TOWER CAMERA NETWORK AT LAKE MONROE IN SANFORD THIS MORNING TO SEE HOW GUSTY THOSE WINDS ARE AS CREATING VERY CHOPPY CONDITIONS. THIS VIEW COURTESY OF OUR FRIENDS VENUE 520. THEY’RE ON THE WATER IN SANFORD, AND RIGHT NOW WE’RE IN THE LOW 60S IN SANFORD, 61 THERE IN SANFORD, 58 STILL IN THE VILLAGES, 57 IN OCALA AND 60 IN NEW SMYRNA BEACH. EVEN THOUGH IT’S SUNNY OUT THIS AFTERNOON, YOU’RE REALLY WANT TO GO OUTSIDE, BUT YOU’LL STILL NEED THOSE JACKETS BECAUSE THE WINDS ARE REALLY GUSTY OUT OF THE NORTH AT 10 TO 20MPH. AND THAT JUST ADDS THAT EXTRA BITE IN THE AIR. SO AGAIN, IF YOU’RE HEADING OUTSIDE, EVEN THOUGH IT’S SUNNY, IT WOULDN’T HURT TO GRAB THAT JACKET. HERE’S A LOOK AT THE SATELLITE AND RADAR. YOU WON’T NEED THE RAIN GEAR, BUT AGAIN, THOSE BLUSTERY CONDITIONS ARE GOING TO MAKE THINGS A BIT COLDER STILL THIS AFTERNOON. SO IF YOU’RE HEADING OUT AND ABOUT, WE’RE ONLY GOING TO SEE A HIGH IN THE LOW 60S IN DAYTONA BEACH TODAY, ABOUT MIDDLE 60S FOR INLAND SPOTS. AND AS WE HEAD INTO TOMORROW MORNING, IT’S GOING TO BE ANOTHER COLD ONE WITH LOWS IN THE 40S AND 50S. NOT AS COLD AS THIS MORNING, BUT YOU’LL STILL NEED A JACKET. AND THEN BY TOMORROW AFTERNOON, HIGHS WILL CLIMB INTO THE LOW 70S, AND THEN WE CLIMB TO AROUND 80 DEGREES ON SUNDAY. SO WE START TO SEE MILD CONDITIONS RETURN THIS UPCOMING WEEKEND. AND AGAIN, WE’RE WATCHING THIS LOW PRESSURE SYSTEM THAT’S GOING TO BE COMING IN FROM THE WEST. SO YOU CAN SEE AS IT SWINGS ON THROUGH. THIS WILL BRING SOME RAIN SHOWERS AND EVEN SOME RUMBLES OF THUNDER ON MONDAY NIGHT INTO TUESDAY. THIS WILL QUICKLY MOVE ON OUT BY WEDNESDAY, AND WE’LL SEE A RETURN OF SOME DRIER CONDITIONS. RIGHT NOW. NOT LOOKING A WHOLE TON OF RAIN. MOST LOCATIONS ABOUT A QUARTER OF AN INCH OR POSSIBLY EVEN LESS. WE’LL WATCH THE TRENDS FOR YOU, BUT IT IS DEFINITELY SOME RAIN THAT WE COULD USE HERE IN CENTRAL FLORIDA. ONCE AGAIN, HERE’S A LOOK AT YOUR CENTRAL FLORIDA CERTIFIED MOST ACCURATE WEATHER FORECAST, MILD CONDITIONS, AND A WARM UP
Cold Tonight, Warmer Afternoons This Weekend | November 28th Forecast
Editor’s note, September 17, 2024: This piece was originally published on August 20, 2019, when the seventh episode of Break Stuff: The Story of Woodstock ’99 was released. To mark the recent 25th anniversary of the festival, The Ringer is resurfacing Break Stuff on its own dedicated Spotify feed.
In 1999, a music festival in upstate New York became a social experiment. There were riots, looting, and numerous assaults, all set to a soundtrack of the era’s most aggressive rock bands. Incredibly, this was the third iteration of Woodstock, a festival originally known for peace, love, and hippie idealism. But Woodstock ’99 revealed some hard truths behind the myths of the 1960s and the danger that nostalgia can engender.
Below is an excerpt from the seventh episode of Break Stuff. Find the series here, and check back each Tuesday and Thursday through September 19 for new episodes.
By early Sunday morning, on Woodstock ’99’s final day, many attendees were still trying to sleep off the previous night’s partying. But the media people covering the festival were up with the sun. In the harsh light of day, Griffiss Air Force Base looked like a wasteland.
“We got there before anybody had started playing, before anybody had left their tents,” says Dave Holmes, an on-air host for MTV in 1999. “I got a photograph from the stage of the entire lawn, the main viewing area, and it was just a sea of trash and one single person face down asleep. Not on a sleeping bag, just on the grass. It was just him and a thousand hot dog wrappers and red Solo cups and napkins for as far as the eye can see. And that is my enduring image of Woodstock ’99.”
Rob Sheffield, who covered the festival for Rolling Stone, was also up early that morning, surveying the damage.
“Everybody was really pretty used up and burned out by Sunday morning,” he says. “I hadn’t done a drug all weekend and I felt like the wrath of God so I can just imagine how people who were literally hungover were feeling.
“I slept on a pile of pizza boxes. Pizza boxes were a very good surface to sleep on because pizza boxes are white. And, uh, because they’re white, you could tell if they’d been urinated on or not. Which makes them very very useful if you’re looking for something to sleep on. Because every flat surface there had been so thoroughly urinated on.”
The music on Saturday culminated with some of the loudest and most aggressive bands of the entire festival: Metallica, Rage Against the Machine, and Limp Bizkit. Sunday, however, started on a much different foot musically. Wearing sunglasses and his signature black hat, Willie Nelson attempted to bring a little mellowness back to the festival.
“His set begins with ‘Whiskey River,’” Sheffield says. “And that was one of the great musical moments of the weekend, ’cause I just remember everybody really kind of breathing a sigh of relief. Willie is going to take care of us. Willie is the smart sane adult in the room at this point—not the promoters, definitely not the security people.”
But the laid-back feeling Nelson brought to Woodstock ’99 was short-lived. Not long after Willie Nelson left the stage in clouds of marijuana smoke, another smart, sane adult—Elvis Costello—came out.
Now, I love Elvis Costello. I am a rock critic, after all. I think he’s one of the great singer-songwriters of the ’70s and ’80s. But Woodstock ’99 wasn’t exactly his crowd. In the video, you can see people throwing water bottles at Elvis before he’s even reached the chorus of his first song.
“Elvis Costello, he really tried, but he was with an acoustic guitar and was playing for the most part for a non–Elvis Costello–cultist kind of crowd,” Sheffield says. “He began with a deep cut from Spike, ‘Pads, Paws, and Claws,’ and it was just a preposterously bad performance that was self-indulgent in a rock star kind of way. It was just really kind of abrasive and aggravating for people. … The collective angst level of the crowd got a little uglier.”
The bad feeling that Rob picked up on during Elvis Costello’s set was also felt by Jake Hafner, a 23-year-old Syracuse man hired to work for the festival’s Peace Patrol. Jake and his fellow guards were already struggling to contend with a depleted security force. By Sunday, many of Jake’s coworkers had already been fired; others simply quit once they were inside the base in order to join the party. But when Jake showed up for his shift on Sunday afternoon, the tension in the air was even sharper and more intense.
“It would get a little closer to the edge every night,” he says. “By Sunday when we showed up for work we all knew collectively that something was going to happen that night. It was just in the air. You could just feel it.”
That feeling in the air might have just been sheer exhaustion. Many people were operating on very little sleep by then. During the previous night, security guards had given up on policing the campgrounds where many attendees stayed.
“They had stopped sending ambulances or cops into that area because as soon as they would enter in there they would just get pelted with rocks and mud and everything. It was kind of like a no man’s zone,” Hafner says. “So they stopped sending people in there altogether. And I believe that was where a lot of the really bad stuff happened.”
One member of Woodstock’s medical team who did venture into the campgrounds on Sunday morning was Dave Konig, an EMT.
“When you went through the campground, a little bit it reminded you of a refugee camp from the movies,” Konig says. “That there had been some sort of big battle and there’s just trash all over, things burnt all over from the night before, from whatever campfires had gone on. So you just saw that breakdown of both the structure and civility amongst people. Yeah, it was definitely palpable Sunday morning. But yet people still went to the stages.”
While most attendees were still able to maintain some semblance of sanity, Dave does remember encountering a man in the campgrounds who had clearly gone off the deep end. I say “clearly” because the man was completely naked and seemed like he was hopped up on some combination of drugs. He was so out of it that he was destroying every tent in sight.
Finally, one of Dave’s coworkers decided to intervene.
“I remember this guy stepped up to, to, this naked man,” Konig says. “He gave this guy a right hook like Muhammad Ali. He just hooked him so hard. The guy’s head snapped to the right. And then … he was like the Terminator—it just slowly turned back and then he looked at the guy who had just hit him and he was just like, ‘Rawr!’ And … everybody just tackled him at that point. We tackled him. We got him restrained, sedated, and brought him in.”
The rising tension was getting to MTV’s Holmes. Festival attendees had been abusive to the music channel’s hosts and camera crews since Friday. Someone even threw a bottle of urine at TRL host Carson Daly.
By Sunday, the MTV contingent was thoroughly rattled.
“Even before the rioting—that’s a fun way to start a sentence, even before the rioting—it seemed like this was not going to be remembered as a successful festival,” says Holmes. “When we got back to the Air Force base the next day, all anybody was talking about was how scared they were the night before. A lot of the cameramen and the production people were up in this tower that, like, could have been brought down like a scene from Game of Thrones in the middle of the show. People were understandably a little nervous that Sunday.”
That tension boiled over during a press conference in the afternoon. Someone from MTV confronted Woodstock ’99 promoter John Scher over the festival’s failure to control the most violent attendees:
“MTV News was forced to get off of home base, we felt it was too dangerous,” the reporter said. There were people throwing glass bottles everywhere. MTV tower people had to be evacuated.
“Calm down,” Scher responded.
“In all of the concerts I’ve seen, I have never seen anything quite so out of hand as this. It was violent, it was dangerous, it was hostile,” the reporter continued. “My question for you is why did no one from either security or the organization walk out to Fred Durst and say, ‘Man, can you ask these kids to chill?’ I talked to kids later who were petrified out there.”
The confrontation was a rare sour note for Scher at that point in the festival. As far as he and other organizers were concerned, Woodstock ’99 was going along swimmingly. All of the tensions that seemed obvious to those on the ground weren’t apparent to the people running the festival.
“Right after that, I took a walk from the press tent to the stage and this woman journalist, I can’t remember her name, but she walked and said, ‘Can we talk?’” Scher says now. “And at one point we stopped and she said, ‘This is unbelievable. This is the greatest thing. If you put this many people at any other kind of event, it never would have gone that well.’ She said it was just amazing. And then it all blew up over the next couple of hours.”
It turns out that the expectations were way out of whack. What was actually in the works was a candlelight vigil organized by an anti-gun group. By Sunday afternoon, they were handing out candles to attendees.
“And the peace candles became the kindling for the fires that became part of the riot,” says Brian Hiatt, a journalist who covered Woodstock ’99 and later did a yearlong investigation into the festival.
In his reporting, Hiatt discovered that attendees had been setting fires all over the grounds throughout the weekend. And yet nobody ever seemed to get in trouble for it.
“As they put out those fires, the attendees were already threatening to make more fire,” Hiatt says. “They said, ‘We’ll burn anything.’ The threats were, ‘You can’t stop us. If you stop us, it’ll start somewhere else.’”
As late afternoon turned into early evening, the crowd grew increasingly disgruntled and unruly. And then, one of the most popular rock bands of the era showed up on stage: Creed. At Woodstock ’99, they were received like rock royalty.
However, Creed guitarist Mark Tremonti remembers Woodstock ’99 as kind of a terrifying experience.
“Back then in ’99, we’d only been kind of a professional touring band for about two years, so I didn’t have the stage confidence that I have now,” he says. “So it was I just remember it being such a large and intimidating type of setting.”
Soon after Creed left the stage, Woodstock ’99 would descend into riots. But Tremonti can’t recall feeling any premonitions. After Creed it was time for that night’s big headliner—the Red Hot Chili Peppers. The band was riding high again that summer after years of inaction. The album Californication,which became the band’s best-selling record, came out the previous month.
Their performance was supposed to mark the festival’s triumphant climax. And the band was primed for the decadent atmosphere. No one more than Flea, who came out wearing his bass guitar … and no clothes.
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“It seemed like they were playing very well,” Sheffield says. “It was really a beautiful Chili Peppers set. They were coming off Californication. They had the best songs of their career, and they were playing at the peak of their career. So it’s weirdly incongruous. That’s when the violence and the crowd got really, really ugly.”
After playing for about an hour, the Chili Peppers left the stage. Before they could come back for their planned encore, the chasm between the stage and the audience suddenly collapsed. John Scher himself came out to warn the audience.
“As you can see, if you look behind you, we have a bit of a problem,” he said.
The problem was a bonfire raging on the horizon. Actually, the word “bonfire” doesn’t do justice to this wild inferno. In a video posted on YouTube, it looks like a small cabin that’s been totally engulfed in flames. But in the chaotic context of Woodstock ’99, it didn’t seem out of place at first.
Even with part of the festival now on fire, the show didn’t immediately end. When the Chili Peppers came back out, singer Anthony Kiedis commented sardonically on the situation.
“Holy shit, it’s Apocalypse Now out there. Make way for the fire trucks!” he said
And then they proceeded to play a cover of “Fire” by Jimi Hendrix. I think that this was supposed to be part of the festival’s grand finale—a callback to one of the biggest stars of the original festival, coupled with the candlelight vigil that was now a full-on blaze.
As I tried to login and download Minecraft after years of not playing I’m hit with the news the my Mojang account that I purchased over a decade ago back when the beta was up is no longer valid. not only that but a new copy is almost triple what I paid originally. This is outrageous, this is unfair.
Workers install cooling fans on a supercomputer that will train Tesla’s new Autopilot. The supercomputer will consist of 50 thousand Nvidia H100 accelerators. Such a data center requires approximately 75 megawatts of electricity. Located in a gigafactory in Texas.
Supper clubs have become a point of Midwestern pride, evoking a brandy old fashioned hulking slab of prime rib, or a crispy filet of fried fish. But they aren’t entirely products of the Central Time Zone.
Credit for the first supper club goes to Beverly Hills, where a Milwaukee native opened the first supper club in the 1920s, blending aspects of entertainment, dining, and a cocktail lounge. Fans of the movie Swingers (starring Chicago-area native Vince Vaughn) will understand. Apologies for getting the Squirrel Nut Zippers stuck in your head. For those unaware, YouTube it if you dare.
Though it’s not new in Chicago (For instance, Untitled Supper Club opened back in 2012 in River North), a pair of Prohibition-era supper clubs have recently debuted. Each is taking a swing at the genre. In South Loop, the owners of Entree, the meal kit service that debuted in 2022 inside the former home of Michelin-starred Acadia, have rechristened its space as Oliver’s, giving the area a sorely needed sit-down restaurant at 1639 S. Wabash. Neither offer relish trays, a staple at Midwestern supper clubs. Folks also won’t find taxidermy on display.
In River North, the duo behind Mino’s Italian in suburban Winnetka has opened Charlie Martin’s at 736 N. Clark Street. At Mino’s, the group has revived an urban favorite from years ago — the take-and-bake pies Chicagoans enjoyed from HomeMade Pizza Co., a chain founded in 1997 and closed in 2014.
Velvet seating and vintage artwork meant to remind visitors of the 1930s is what visitors to Oliver’s will find. While Entree’s goal, according to co-founder Jason Weingarten was “trying to solve dinner time for busy people,” Oliver’s is to “make people happy” and to give back to a community that would constantly ask if the dining room would ever open to the public (they’ve held pop-ups and private events).
Weingarten touts the resume of his culinary director, Alex Carnovale; he’s not bashful about mentioning his chef’s time at Thomas Keller’s French Laundry.
Carnovale gushes about the martini, garnished with a golden Beluga caviar-stuffed Castelvetrano olive. These types of touches are meant to show customers that Oliver’s isn’t serving the same product as Entree. They have a patio, and will eventually open the entire dining room; they’ve only debuted the bar area. Carnovale expects to expand the menu when they unveil the new space. A thick burger and a roasted chicken from a notable Pennsylvania farm are some of the current headlights. Publican Quality Bread sourdough, griddled in beef fat — battered in whipped egg yolk, creme fraiche, and truffle — and served with compound butter with caramelized shallots, thyme, and garlic, is “a great way to eat some bread and butter” with a glass of wine.
The chef says his philosophy is not to do too much: “I think the more you touch ingredients along the way they start to deteriorate,” Carnovale says.
The rising popularity of women’s basketball and the Chicago Sky, with stars like Angel Reese, coupled with a need for more options near McCormick Place, have Oliver’s staff excited about the future.
“It’ll be really interesting to see what happens to the South Loop over the next couple of years as we figure out what happens with the Bears and the White Sox, specifically,” Weingarten says.
While Oliver’s owners say they’re celebrating the 1930s, Charlie Martin’s flashes forward a few decades to the ‘50s and ‘60s. The central difference between the periods is Prohibition’s end in 1933. Veteran Chicago chef Matt Williams, who worked at Hogsalt, helms the kitchen here, inside a space where restaurants like Marvel opened.
Williams plays all the hits with an oyster bar (including a shellfish tower), crab cakes, and a whole-roaster Dover sole. There are a few steaks on the menu, from a dry-aged bone-in ribeye and steak frites.
Partners Glenn Deutsch, Eric Fosse, and Audrey Fosse are city folks at heart, and though they opened in Winnetka, they say they yearned a return to Chicago. Eric Fosse also opened Guildhall in suburban Glencoe.
Deutsch feels the restaurant’s “small, intimate environment” will resonate with diners. There’s a little mystery when visitors approach the entrance: “Once you walk, in you’ve found a comfortable place and unique environment.”
There are 60 seats and plenty of red leather booths. The soundtrack is mostly jazz. The drinks are mostly riffs on classics. Charlie’s Martini is made with Sipsmith gin, St. George Basil Eau de Vie, Lillet Blanc, and extra virgin olive oil.
Fosse is proud of the food, saying they’re weaving modern techniques into classic supper club fare. The result is “exceptional” he says.
Now empty dog bed. Had to put down my 14 y.o dog I raised from puppy ’cause of tumor. Decided that it’s better to let go instead of trying surgery that most likely would’ve been fatal anyway ’cause of old age. Now my other dog is searching for his cousin frantically without avail.
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.
Sony has delisted Helldivers 2 in more than 170 countries that don’t have dedicated regions in PSN, which was the main argument against the change. These countries no longer have the ability to buy the game or activate a retail key. Steam is refunding the game even with more than 100hrs of playtime.
Discworld is one of those strange series that you simply cannot explain to somebody who has not read it before. Sir Terry Pratchett was the greatest fantasy writer of his time, perhaps of all time, and reading his books while I was homeless was one of the few things that brought me enough joy to keep going some days.
If you think Alan Cumming, host of the U.S. version of The Traitors, gives off “guy who killed someone” vibes, he’ll laugh — you’re picking up what he’s putting down. It’s why, in episode 8 of season 2, when he sent the contestants off on their mission, he gleefully turned to the camera and said, “And they were never seen again.”
“I said that many times, on every task,” Cumming admits. “I wanted that to be my new catchphrase, but they only used it a couple times.”
This is exactly why the team behind Peacock’s hit reality game show wanted Cummings in the first place, even if he didn’t understand it at first. He met with producers, initially, out of confusion and curiosity.
“I couldn’t understand why they would want me to do it. Then I realized they wanted a sort of character. And I said, ‘Do you mean you want it to be sort of like a James Bond villain?’”
The answer was an enthusiastic yes. And suddenly Cumming could see the whole persona: “He’s the sort of Scottish Laird, and he’s kind of Machiavellian, [and] brings all these people here,” Cumming says. The look would be a sort of “dandy” Scottish tartan. Cumming’s dog could even come with, so the actor could menacingly pet her while staring down contestants.
“I really love this character. And it’s funny, life just flings these things at you that you never would have seen coming. I never thought I would be hosting a big, successful competition reality show in Scotland and a castle with a bunch of reality stars. I mean — you couldn’t make it up. But I obviously go out going through life open to certain things. I’ve always been quite eclectic. And these things come to me and actually, this one I really, really enjoy.”
And it’s a role he takes really seriously. As he gets ready in the morning he listens in on the players’ breakfast discussion, watching on a big screen so he can “really feel a part of it” as he gets ready to make his big entrance. “It’s good for me to understand, when I walk into the room, the mood of the room and the atmosphere,” Cumming says.
Cumming is often around the castle, but not with the contestants — after his breakfast entrance he usually has a little break when he can look over scripts for the next day, then he and the players go to film the mission. After that, the contestants hang out and Cumming has another break (he says he’s usually eating or walking Lala the dog), but stays briefed on what’s happening. “When the roundtable comes it really does feel like this big theatrical moment because they all go in and they play this scary music in real life,” Cumming says. “It’s like these little performative spurts. And in between I’m trying to keep an eye on what’s happening and trying to get an understanding of how the wind is blowing.”
Even still, he’s just as on the edge of his seat as the rest of us. He likes to maintain a distance between himself and the cast (he feels his character should always have “quite a stern, daddy demeanor” that leaves the contestants scared), and Cumming has been surprised by how things went once he got into the room. “That’s what’s great about the games — there was a person I thought was doing really well, a faithful, and was going to help tear the whole thing apart. And people turned on them. It was like hyenas going for a baby elephant, it really was. I was gobsmacked.”
While he wouldn’t say who that was about, he would say some of the contestants he’s most surprised by: Bergie (when he became the MVP of the graveyard challenge), Phaedra (he appreciates her showmanship and the way it provides her cover), and Parvati (he hadn’t watched Survivor, and she seemed like a “sweet little thing with a hairband”).
But even with a closer view, he’s just as eager to let it all play out as the rest of us. Well, sort of — at least the rest of us don’t live in fear about bumping the wrong shoulder when selecting traitors at the roundtable.
The Traitors season 2 (the U.S. version) airs new episodes on Peacock every Thursday at 6 p.m. PST/9 p.m. EST.
Something that always stuns me are the ways dedicated players find ways to push the limits of the games they play. Whether it’s Animal Crossing designers who know the perfect way to line up buildings to fake certain perspectives, or a Tears of the Kingdom player who created an ultra-fast flying machine by holding the fan up in a particular way, I’ve always appreciated the commitment and creativity that goes into pushing a game to its limit. I was doing the rounds on Reddit when I saw something that truly astounded me: Reddit user Scalhoun03 created a completely wind-powered airship in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.
The airship requires no energy to fly — meaning no Zonai charges or energy cells are needed to run it. It can fly through the air and sustain sustain flight at high altitudes seemingly indefinitely. The original post shows the ship flying through the skies of Hyrule with no input or energy. It’s only interrupted at the end when Scalhoun03 said they accidentally bumped the control stick. You can see a video of the build in action below.
The contraption appears to defy the laws of (Zelda) physics itself. Energy cells are a crucial and foundational aspect to building machines in the game. If you want to use Zonai devices like a fan or flame emitter, you have to increase Link’s maximum energy cell capacity. This is why you see so many of the top builders with big, long rows of tiny battery icons as they run their massive machines.
So how does a ship fly with no Zonai charges or any energy elements? According to its creator, its propulsion relies upon a twisting forced generating by its steering stick. “Basically it uses the steering stick’s energy to power the props. When you move the steering stick it puts a twisting force on the entire build. This force is transfered to the wagon wheel axles thus running the [propellors],” Scalhoun03 said via Reddit DMs.
Getting the materials required a journey of its own across Hyrule. Scalhoun03 scrounged up propellers from Gemimik Shrine in the Akkala Highlands region and journeyed to the Depths to collect the raft and rails. Then came the actual building.
“The hardest part was finding the balance to keep the props spinning without interfering. The props have to be in the right positions or they hit each other. When building with auto built parts you have to be careful about how you break them off or they disappear. The raft is an auto built part and if the props are in the wrong places you risk breaking your raft.”
Scalhoun03 emphasized how important the Hyrule Engineering subreddit and larger community was in the process of building the ship. Throughout its design, others contributed their own innovations that helped the builder hone in on its design. For example, YouTuber KingX discovered a person could build a machine that launches without any “catalyst,” like rockets or sending a ship off the side of a floating island. Others would provide feedback on clips.
“Without the suggestions of the community, things like this are a lot more difficult to make. The community has given me motivation to keep working on powerless flight builds and I hope everyone can try them out and have fun flying around Hyrule without having to worry about anything except having fun flying!”
I just panicked and said yes to a brutal logging job that will probably make me want to kill myself again because they offered me lots of money and a truck. It’s been an honor **** posting with you 18 hours a day, I’ll be around, just less. *salutes*
Rob Harvilla, Chris Ryan, and our intrepid host Yasi Salek converge onstage at the Teragram Ballroom in Los Angeles, California, to do a live draft episode in honor of Rob’s fantastic new book 60 Songs That Explain the ’90s. A heartwarming and funny evening from start to finish that we are so happy to share with all of you.
Host: Yasi Salek Guests: Rob Harvilla, Chris Ryan, and Rob’s mom Producers: Jesse Miller-Gordon, Jonathan Kermah, and Justin Sayles Audio Editor: Adrian Bridges Theme Song: Bethany Cosentino
60 Songs That Explain the ’90s is back for its final stretch run (and a brand-new book!). Join TheRinger’s Rob Harvilla as he treks through the soundtrack of his youth, one song (and embarrassing anecdote) at a time. Follow and listen for free on Spotify. In Episode 110 of 60 Songs That Explain the ’90s—yep, you read that right—we’re covering Sublime’s “Santeria.” Read an excerpt below.
All the way up to the mega-huge self-titled Sublime record in ’96, the album that comes out two months after Bradley Nowell dies, Sublime are never famous in real time. When you listen to Sublime, the dudes singing and playing for you, those dudes aren’t famous yet. They don’t know that they’re gonna be famous. They don’t know that the ’96 Sublime record is gonna sell 6 million copies in America. It’s a little heartbreaking, listening to Sublime, what you know that they don’t. Sublime’s first official-official album comes out in 1992. It’s called 40oz. to Freedom. We got a super-important Sublime collaborator, Marshall Goodman, a.k.a. Ras M.G., playing drums on a lot of it because Bud Gaugh’s got his own problems. This record’s famous—it sells 2 million copies in America—but it doesn’t blow up right away. Or, really, it doesn’t blow up fast enough to do Bradley Nowell any good.
This song is called “Badfish.” This is a top-tier Sublime hit, actually. This is maybe, probably, presumably a song about Bradley battling heroin addiction. “Badfish” is also the song that makes me think, if only for a split second, of Jimmy Buffett. Bradley and Jimmy. The clown princes of Margaritaville. Two barefoot bards of good-time partying, all libido and id and conspicuous overconsumption, but with a not-so-hidden soulfulness, a grace to them even at their bawdiest. Shrewd songwriters with hidden depths. Bradley and Jimmy—and Jimmy’s still present tense too—they don’t specialize in super-sad songs that deceive you by sounding all happy; they write happy and anthemic songs where the shrewd undercurrent of sadness somehow only amplifies the happiness, the anthemicness. The pain, the struggle driving “Badfish” doesn’t make it sound painful. The struggle just makes it sound better.
Yasi really likes that line: Ain’t got no quarrels with god. The use, the deployment of the word quarrels there. Yes. Great word. But don’t skip over Ain’t got no time to grow old. That’s—OK, that one’s a little painful.
Despite the fact that, again, Sublime are very much not huge or even “successful” yet—they’re not even on a major label yet—even so, 40oz. to Freedom has Greatest Hits energy. It feels monumental if only in retrospect. “Badfish” and “Ball and Chain” (love that one) and “Let’s Go Get Stoned” and “Don’t Push” are all back. Sublime’s covers of “Hope” by the Descendents and the Grateful Dead’s “Scarlet Begonias” are here, and this is the only record I’m aware of that covers both the Descendents and the Grateful Dead. “Smoke Two Joints” is here. “Smoke Two Joints” is a cover, also. “Smoke Two Joints” was written and recorded by the Toyes, a reggae band that started in Hawaii but later moved to Oregon. Tough break. Great song, great cover. When Bradley Nowell sings, “I smoke two joints before I smoke two joints / And then I smoke two more,” you believe him. But then again, you believe him when he sings anything.
This might be my favorite song on 40oz. to Freedom, if you want the truth. Ask him how he knows about hamburgers and Elijah Muhammad and the welfare state. Go ahead, ask him: He wants you to know why he knows. The song is called “KRS-One.” It is probably the best quote, unquote rock song about a rapper, ever. Just the delicacy of this song. The sweetness. The earnestness. Bradley just loves listening to KRS-One and wants to shout out everything he’s learned about by listening to KRS-One. And I love listening to him talk about why he loves listening to KRS-One; I even love when Bradley slips back into reggae patois while he does it.
He knows. He knows you know he just sang the words, We don’t want to pay no money fi hear the same old sound. He sells the fi there, somehow, maybe. Or maybe not. Or maybe you could also ask, Who’s “we,” Bradley? in the line Watch and we’ll take hip-hop to a higher ground. But even here, there’s a difference between wrapping yourself in the flag of KRS-One, so to speak, and simply waving KRS-One’s flag on KRS-One’s behalf. Not that this is the song on this record that unnerves everyone. At first, 40oz. to Freedom isn’t a disaster, exactly, but it doesn’t sell a ton. It doesn’t push Sublime to the next level. It doesn’t work, really, and it especially does not help Bradley Nowell in his very public battle with drugs. The next Sublime record is called Robbin’ the Hood. It’s from 1994, it’s four-track recordings, it’s lo-fi in the extreme, it’s experimental, it has a theoretically visionary sample-heavy beat-tape vibe, it’s got Gwen Stefani for less than two minutes, and it features several interludes from a schizophrenic gentleman named Raleigh that unfortunately last way longer than two minutes. There’s a lot going on, and pretty much all of it is baffling, but it’s all more intriguing than maybe you remember. Here’s a little throwaway tune called “Lincoln Highway Dub.”
Huh. That sounds familiar. I may actually not get around to “Santeria” here today. Is that OK? Are people gonna get pissed at me? They might. Sublime’s biggest songs are so huge, are so ubiquitous, that I never need to hear them again, externally, because they’ve been stuck in my head for 30 years. In a broader sense, I’m never not listening to Sublime. I don’t know if there’s any point to elaborating on that, but—OK. So, look: Robbin’ the Hood is not designed to push Sublime to the next level, to put it mildly. What pushes Sublime to the next level, in August of 1994, is that a famous DJ named Tazy Phyllipz plays “Date Rape” on the famous L.A. rock station KROQ, and the phone lines blow up, and soon “Date Rape” is the biggest song on KROQ, which means that rock radio stations nationwide pick up on it, which is how I hear it in fuckin’ Ohio, and that’s what pushes Sublime to the next level. Yeah, this is a story of a single DJ at a single radio station plucking a random song from obscurity, and that song blows up in a manner so absolute that we even remember the DJ’s name now.
Sublime get signed to a major label, to the MCA subsidiary Gasoline Alley, but also Bradley goes to rehab. Sublime start recording in Redondo Beach with David Kahne, who’s worked with Fishbone and Tony Bennett (separately), but that flames out, so they also record with Paul Leary, he of the Butthole Surfers, at Willie Nelson’s Pedernales Studios in Austin. Sublime nail down their biggest, most enduring hits—“Santeria,” “Wrong Way,” “Doin’ Time,” “What I Got”—but they also leave a trail of destruction and consternation. Sublime’s self-titled album comes out in July 1996, and those songs slowly but surely make Sublime super-famous, finally, but Bradley is already gone, and we’ll spend the rest of our lives listening to Bradley singing about himself in the present tense.
60 Songs That Explain the ’90s is back for its final stretch run. (And a brand-new book!) Join TheRinger’s Rob Harvilla as he treks through the soundtrack of his youth, one song (and embarrassing anecdote) at a time. Follow and listen for free on Spotify. In Episode 108 of 60 Songs That Explain the ’90s—yep, you read that right—we’re covering Portishead’s “Glory Box.” Read an excerpt below. And if you’re in Los Angeles on November 16, check out the 60 Songs and Bandsplaincrossover event celebrating Rob’s new book.
What is this voice? What is the deal with Beth Gibbons? How would you describe Beth’s diction here? Playful? Caustic? Bright? Malicious? Theatrical? All of ’em? None of ’em? Who do you hear? You hear Billie Holiday? You hear Dusty Springfield? You hear a Disney villain? You hear a Bond girl? You hear a Bond villain? No, Mr. Cupid, I expect you to die!
What does Beth Gibbons think about Beth Gibbons? “I’m not technically a very good singer. If anyone says I am, I know they don’t know what they’re talking about. If I wanted to be, I’d have to give up smoking and have lessons.” That’s Beth in a 1998 book called Seven Years of Plenty: A Handbook of Irrefutable Pop Greatness 1991-1998, by Ben Thompson. 1991 to 1998 is eight years, but OK. Portishead consists primarily of three people. You got Beth. You got Geoff Barrow, on lots of stuff but primarily on turntables. And you got Adrian Utley, primarily on guitar. Beth and Geoff meet while participating in an Enterprise Allowance Scheme. I’m going to be honest with you and say that I got really excited by the word Scheme. I pictured Beth and Geoff meeting while devising, y’know, an Ocean’s Eleven–style audacious crime spree. Right? I pictured a stylish caper. I pictured Beth and Geoff hanging upside down and stealing the Pink Panther diamond or whatever. Right? How appropriate, given this band’s flagrant old spy movie vibe, the Mission: Impossible of it all.
But, no. No. The Enterprise Allowance Scheme was an ’80s Margaret Thatcher–era British political thing that gave young people extra government money if they set up a small business. That’s boring. That’s so boring. But Beth and Geoff meet, and they do set up, in a manner of speaking, a small business called Portishead, a band named after the town near Bristol where Geoff grew up. A town that Geoff once described to SPIN magazine by saying, “I really don’t like the place. It’s a place you can go to and die.” And then Beth says, “That’s why we named ourselves after it.” That’s funny. C’mon. She’s a little playful. The first song they work on together is called “It Could Be Sweet.” Dig the feature-length, majestic, tragic arc of the word nothing here.
Perhaps you’re like me, and you can close your eyes and clearly picture the cover of Portishead’s 1994 debut album, Dummy: It’s a quite striking, almost nauseating blue, with a blurry photo of Beth sitting in a chair in a fancy dress with blood on her face and hooked up to an IV, looking disconcertingly dazed. Perhaps you’re like me and you were not previously aware that this cover photo of Beth is a still from a short film Portishead devised and, perhaps to their chagrin, starred in called To Kill a Dead Man. Adrian plays an oily businessman type, Geoff plays a dirtbag assassin type, Beth plays a femme fatale type. They’re all not great actors, necessarily—Beth, maybe, though, if she took lessons and smoked more—but they’re all extremely well cast. Let’s leave it at that, actually.
The drums on “It Could Be Sweet,” though. The precise and bone-dry psh psh psh psh of the cymbals, the dollhouse-tea-set delicacy of it all. It’s a minor technical marvel; it’s a marvelous major triumph of vibe. Looking back on this song while talking to BBC 6 in 2010, Geoff says, “It wasn’t soul, but then, it kind of was. And it wasn’t overtly jazzy. And it wasn’t folk. But she brought this adultness to the track. And all of a sudden it was—this is actually real. And she’s singing about things that she obviously cares about.” You can find that quote in a cool Trash Theory video about “Glory Box” as well.
So this is real. Geoff is somewhat of a studio veteran by the time Portishead kicks off; in fact he was a tape operator at Coach House Studio in Bristol when Massive Attack was making Blue Lines. Geoff has said that he was a lousy tape op, but he made great tea. That’s gonna about do it for Geoff and self-deprecation. Geoff once told Melody Maker, “Ambient music has never particularly appealed to me. Push ‘Go’ on a synthesizer. Make some noise. Put some delay on it, and put a couple sheep noises on it. I’m not into it.” Rude! I believe Geoff’s got some specific targets in mind, there. The KLF would like a word, Geoff. But let’s leave that at that, as well, actually. Sheep noises will not suffice, then, in terms of a hook.
And this is how Dummy, this is how Portishead first reaches me in 1994, an alt-rockin’ midwestern teenager with no ambient sheep music experience, only a little Massive Attack experience, and for that matter very little cool old spy movie experience. Portishead first reaches me via the single “Sour Times,” which has a recognizable retro-futuristic cool old junk drawer feel that makes a lot of sense if you’ve spent 1994 getting heavy into Beck, or Stereolab, or, like, “A Girl Like You” by Edwyn Collins. You remember that shit? Is that a sacrilegious comparison from Portishead’s perspective? Too bad.
[Rob hums guitar solo.] That’s right. That’s exactly how that guitar solo sounds. Too many poor-ass singers! Not enough poor-ass songs! That’s what he says there, right? Listen. There was a subset of 1994 alternative rock popular enough to sneak on the radio and MTV and yet ultra-cool and wily enough that I’d hear it and go, I don’t know how old this is. This is not the most sophisticated initial framework through which to receive Portishead, but, well, the statute of limitations expired on that, too. What elevates Dummy, what enshrines Dummy, is that you get all these warped old samples, you get that disorienting sense of timelessness, you get all these wonderful dusty old machines, but you get all the ghosts in those machines, too. All the ghosts are played by Beth Gibbons.
I dig the beat here, right? The alarm clock boom bap of it all. Adrian Utley’s less-is-more fuzzed-out guitar: bwwwwooowwww. But you also get Beth singing, wailing, moaning, declaiming whatever it is she’s saying there, on the song “Strangers.” I can’t think of another album that delivers quite the same sort of delightful whiplash pivot between cool detached post-human sounds and bone-chillingly extreme human frailty. This song is called “Numb.” You ever heard a cooler snare drum sound in your life? No, you have not.
However. Does the coolest snare drum sound she’s ever heard in her life make Beth Gibbons feel less lonely? No, it does not.
In my California years, my Bay Area years, one time I went to this super-cool San Francisco apartment open-mic night sorta living room concert deal, and this dude had just a microphone and a loop pedal—he was a beatboxer, right—and he did a full looped beatboxed version of Portishead’s “Wandering Star.” It is difficult, perhaps, to convey the exquisite desolation of Beth Gibbons’s vocal approach while beatboxing; I don’t know if I would recommend getting romantically involved with a Portishead-covering beatboxer. You’re living on the edge there, emotionally. You’re gonna end up living a Portishead song. I’m generalizing, but come on. But on the other hand, this dude did a great job this time, and thereafter, every time I go back to Dummy, “Wandering Star” sounds ever so slightly more human to me.
“Wandering Star” sounds more human to me now, but it also remains, like, wildly depressing, right? “The blackness/The darkness/Forever.” I have always heard Portishead primarily as primo moping music. Moping, whining, sulking, pouting. Being a grumpus. Not calling ladies on the phone. Feeling extravagantly sorry for oneself. Over-romanticizing one’s solitude, et cetera. This does not appear to be the way most people heard Dummy. The moping approach does not appear to be either of the top two approaches most people took to Dummy. Generally, you hear two things about this record. One: It is apparently stupendous background music. You’d hear it in restaurants, you’d hear it in both high- and not-as-high-end clothing boutiques, you’d hear it at the parties where all the girls were so they wouldn’t have been home even if I had tried to call them, which I didn’t. Dummy became not ambient music, exactly—not Lo-Fi Beats to Study To—but this record did prove compatible with a wide variety of activities and social situations. Put it that way.
Or! Or, put it the other way. People thought it was makeout music. Music for … smooching. Amorousness. Et cetera. On YouTube you can find footage of Geoff and Beth, on camera, in a church, being asked by a cheerful Canadian interviewer how they feel about Dummy being described as “the greatest shagging record of 1994.” That’s another way to put the other way to put it. That’s apparently the Canadian way to put it. They don’t shag in Canada. Do they? Don’t answer that. Do you find this music appropriate for, uh, smooching? Don’t answer that, either. I just have a very hard time imagining some suave Canadian dude being like, Hold on, baby, we need some music, yeah, let me put on some, yeah, all right, check this out, baby.
That song’s called “Biscuit.” I just googled “Do they shag in Canada,” and I got what I deserved. That’s all I have to say about that. “Biscuit” is the second-to-last song on Dummy. The last song is “Glory Box.”
Dig that slow-motion gnarly guitar, man. Phenomenal. Adrian Utley on guitar. The chopped-and-screwed Jimi Hendrix, they call him. Nobody calls him that. That is also dumb. That is Cheeto chamber–caliber dumb. Now, that line’s got makeout music overtones for some of you, perhaps, not unreasonably, but Beth’s focus, not surprisingly, is elsewhere.
Talking to The Independent on Sunday in 1994, Beth says, “The key line in the song really is Move over and give us some room, because I do think women are very much taken for granted. I’m more an easygoing than a rabid feminist, but women in general are very supportive to me. History has made them like that. And this is not something that is always reciprocated.” She elaborates on this theme after Adrian’s extra-rad guitar solo.
In 1995 Dummy won the prestigious Mercury Prize, awarded to the best album of the year from the United Kingdom or Ireland, beating out Oasis’s Definitely Maybe, Tricky’s Maxinquaye, PJ Harvey’s To Bring You My Love, and many other fine records, including a Van Morrison album I was unfamiliar with. I wouldn’t say Portishead recoiled from the spotlight, precisely, but Portishead put out a second album, self-titled, in 1997, in a vein similar to Dummy’sbut just a little harsher, sharper, less … what’s the word? Warm. It’s not as warm. It’s still pretty great, though. What it doesn’t have is a “Glory Box.”
To hear the full episode, click here. Subscribe here and check back every Wednesday for new episodes. And to preorder Rob’s new book, Songs That Explain the ’90s, visit the Hachette Book Group website.
60 Songs That Explain the ’90s is back for its final stretch run. (And a brand-new book!) Join TheRinger’s Rob Harvilla as he treks through the soundtrack of his youth, one song (and embarrassing anecdote) at a time. Follow and listen for free on Spotify. In Episode 107 of 60 Songs That Explain the ’90s—yep, you read that right—we’re covering the Cardigans’ “Lovefool.” Read an excerpt below. And if you’re in Los Angeles on November 16, check out the 60 Songs and Bandsplaincrossover event celebrating Rob’s new book.
The Cardigans form in Jönköping, Sweden, in 1992. The Cardigans consist of guitarist Peter Svensson, bassist Magnus Sveningsson, drummer Bengt Lagerberg, keyboardist Lars-Olof Johansson, and lead singer Nina Persson. Nina had never sung before, but Peter and Magnus were like, Trust us on this. Peter and Magnus both started out as metal dudes. They played in heavy metal bands—as did Max Martin, come to think of it—but they got sick of metal, and now they’d like to play in the poppiest pop band ever born. And the Cardigans will devote their lives to proving that pop and metal are quite tonally similar, at least the way they do it. They do that in a song called “Rise and Shine,” and this one’s called “Black Letter Day.”
And here’s the whole ball game, really, with Nina Persson, lead singer of the Cardigans: She sings beautifully and exquisitely and elegantly and delicately even when she’s singing what could totally be Metallica lyrics. James Hetfield totally would’ve written and barked out a song called “Black Letter Day” if he’d thought of that title first. James Hetfield got so mad when he heard this song. The first Cardigans album, called Emmerdale, comes out in 1994; the album cover is a blurry photo of a dog. It’s an extremely 1994 album cover, I have to say. A blurry photo of a dog perfectly sums up the dominant vibe of alternative rock in 1994. Time for a piano ballad.
This song is called “After All,” and it sounds like Nina is singing directly into your ear, which means that the t in the word insanity is really going to pop when she sings the word insanity. Is she singing, “I’m scaring close to insanity”? Because if she is, James Hetfield is so pissed he didn’t think of that first. James Hetfield is pissed regardless, obviously. You want the chorus? Do you think you can handle the chorus? Well, let’s find out!
And this, too, is an extremely 1994-type vibe, yes? Tremendous darkness in a tremendously bright package. This bait-and-switch approach is not exclusive to the Cardigans, or exclusive to Sweden for that matter, but it feels exclusive, it feels fresh and freshly unsettling when the Cardigans do it. Talking in early 2023 with a newspaper called The New European, Nina says, “Isn’t it a universal thing, really? If you made stats, there are few pop or rock songs that are only bright—that’s very rare. The rest of them are dark! I’ve always had a hard time talking about the Scandinavian mentality, but I think it’s art in general. I think what we are drawn to—which might be a Scandinavian thing—is to sort of ‘Trojan Horse’ your product; put it in a costume of something that’s light and upbeat.” All right, so time for something light and upbeat. Name that tune!
And then the Trojan horse opens up and oh, shit, it’s the Cardigans’ cover of “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath” by Black Sabbath. Told ya pop and metal were quite tonally similar! Take it, Ozzy!
I feel as though Ozzy and Nina would really get along. I don’t think Nina Persson would bite the head off a bat or snort a line of ants or befoul the Alamo, but she sings as though she’s considering doing all of those things. All right, we got ourselves an intriguing and sweetly confrontational Swedish alt-rock band with sophisticated pop overtones; time for the second Cardigans album. You know the greatest feeling in the world? You wanna know my favorite thing? I’ve said this before, but I’m saying it again: It’s when you love a song, but you totally forget about that song, and then you hear that song again years and years later, and you fall in love with it for the first time but also simultaneously realize that you’d already fallen in love with it.
The second Cardigans album is called Life, it comes out in 1995, and we have leveled up in terms of brightness, cheeriness, catchiness, and also, possibly, subversion. There’s an exclamation point in this song title.
That song’s called “Hey! Get Out of My Way.” There’s Nina, on the cover of the Life album, smiling extra brightly, lying on her stomach in a powder-blue dress with furry sleeves, propped up on her elbows with a little sunflower pinkie ring, her feet crossed and dangling in the air, and she’s wearing ice skates, and it occurs to you, pretty immediately, that ice skates are just blades for your feet. Hey! Hey! Get out of her way. This song’s called “Tomorrow,” and it’s as close as Jönköping, Sweden, has ever gotten to Motown.
Is morning a sugar kiss, though, really? The Cardigans are not setting the world or the pop charts on fire at this point. But they are building toward something, and this precise three-year span, 1994 to 1996—post-grunge, pre–nü metal, post–alternative explosion, pre-Napster—this is a great time to be building toward something, pop subversion–wise. The third Cardigans record, released in 1996, is called First Band on the Moon. Nina, in a 2014 interview, says, “Every record we have made with the Cardigans has been a counter-reaction to the previous one. And by then we were really tired of everybody calling us cute, after having done sort of cute and ethereal—we felt like we weren’t easy listening. We weren’t taken serious. So we wanted to be taken seriously. We wanted to be sort of more gritty and rocking.”
As an added bonus, this song has the most Black Sabbath–esque guitar riff on this whole record. Get a load of how rad this guitar riff is:
Y’know how Black Sabbath–esque that guitar riff is? It’s the most Black Sabbath–esque guitar riff on an album where, just for emphasis, the Cardigans cover Black Sabbath again.
Yes, the Cardigans do “Iron Man,” and I used to play the Cardigans cover of “Iron Man” all the time on college radio, and I’d be just tremendously pleased with myself. As an added bonus, this record, First Band on the Moon,has another track that went semi-arbitrarily viral on TikTok in the spring of 2023, and I love it when semi-arbitrary ’90s songs go viral on TikTok; that doesn’t make me feel weird or old at all. It’s called “Step on Me,” and Nina means it literally.
That’s the sped-up TikTok version of “Step on Me.” I feel great. This phenomenon of speeding up songs for TikTok, I understand that perfectly. I don’t feel like my bones are grinding themselves to dust and blowing away in the wind at all. That quote of Nina’s, about wanting to be taken seriously and be more respected and gritty and rocking on this record, there’s one last part to that quote, actually. She says, “So we wanted to be taken seriously. We wanted to be sort of more gritty and rocking. But then we made ‘Lovefool’ on that record, so we like totally dug our grave.”
And maybe there is nothing that I could do. The mass appeal of “Lovefool” was immediately, painfully obvious to everyone, and that includes the band—this song’s mass appeal was painfully obvious while they were still writing it, before they sped it up. Talking to Billboard in 2016, Nina says, “We definitely were aware that it was a single and a catchy song when we wrote it, but the direction it took is not something we could have predicted. It wasn’t necessarily our character; it felt like a bit of a freak on the record—which, objectively, it still is. Before we recorded it, it was slower and more of a bossa nova. It’s quite a sad love song; the meaning of it is quite pathetic, really. But then when we were recording, by chance, our drummer started to play that kind of disco beat, and there was no way to get away from it after that.”
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Stella has started walking sideways, no bladder control and cant stand up straight anymore. Im worried its a brain tumor and that she doesnt have very long to live. Please, if praying is your thing, say something for either a recovery or a short easy passing. She was a blind rescue who was a torpedo for peoples legs and knocked many a man down but we love her very much and I will miss her when her time does come…
“David Fielding” was only paid $150 to play Zordon in 1993’s Power Rangers. He shared that he only showed up to work one day at the Power Rangers recording set, and he was never called back, Zordon was in every episode of Power Rangers in 1993.
I just learned that the original voice for Crash Bandicoot passed away earlier this year back in March. Dude didn’t just voice crash either he pretty much voice most of the original cast from N. Brio, N. Gin, Cortex(just crash 1) and tiny. RIP
