How about instead of discussing her outfit in a piece about a live performance, we discuss her performance? Stereogum is generally pretty good at not leaning into all this crap where female artists are judged on their entire look as well as their music (or sometimes instead of their music) but this seems pretty icky. Father John Misty, Win Butler, Devon Welsh have all worn some weird stuff and they never seem to be questioned. Let's have fun reading good journalism that doesn't succumb to sexist double standards!
Listening to this, I kinda feel the same as when I heard the studio version of Black Skinhead; it's fucking mental, but it doesn't capture the tension or excitement of the videos of him performing it. That being said, that vocoder at the start gives me chills. Brilliant.
Great evaluation. Even if there's no 'Hold On, We're Going Home' moment, every time I listen to this album it makes me feel like I'm about to piss myself from pure joy.
But for real, this is a very, very strange new direction for Rihanna especially after she posted a studio video of some crazy electronic production.
That's a huge hook though.
I don't remember there being this much outrage when there was a premature evaluation of the leak of Taylor Swift's latest album. Being against leaks is great, but not so great when it's done on a case by case basis.
Apart from one or two tracks, this is.. really solid? Definitely not as good as RTJ2 but I appreciate someone actually thinking about this enough to write about it.
That being said, why should we have to compare this to RTJ2? Something released for free by two rap visionaries will always be insanely different to something released by a big-budget pop artist (even if she is on an indie). Within it's own sphere, 1989 is just as huge and crazy and innovative as RTJ2.
Yeah, totally. I'd assume the extra lead time means a few more TV appearances, new marketing campaign, maybe another promo single or two. Good on her for getting to the level where she can get on the charts for her own music, not just writing (very good songs) for other pop stars.
I went to Arcade Fire's show as part of this same series, and they didn't seem to have this VIP system; it must have been just the bigger bands. That being said, a week later I saw Kanye at part of Wireless festival and the VIP/GA divide was ridiculous. Quite literally half the area in front of the stage was fenced off for VIPs, despite it only being about 1/4 full for the entire day. Not even a metre away from this area was the GA section, which was horrendously overpacked, to the point where at least 40 people had to be lifted out before Kanye and a girl wet her pants because she couldn't move far enough to get out of the crowd. A really terrible situation.
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