At least she didn't draw a teardrop tattoo under her eye in mascara.
Sadly, this incredibly petty song is the apotheosis of an incredibly boring album. I get it; divorce is hard. But the grace and humor seem to have fled her this time around. Even Ye is more self-reflective on his divorce album, especially compared to this song. Mind your own biscuits, Kacey!
Amazing that a person with the same user name as the website he's promoting, whose only comments are thrice saying the same comment in this board, happened to have found this website! What are the odds?
Thug is my favorite rapper, but that Rolls-Royce video is so cringey. It makes Phoebe Bridgers's faux-guitar smashing on SNL look like G.G. Allin. I remember my high school in West Virginia did a pre-prom event in about 1993 where the administration had a car towed in from the junk yard and the students were supposed to bash it with baseball bats to demonstrate the effects of drunk driving. They were definitely better at swinging baseball bats than Thug or Gunna.
Against all odds, like a bizarre majority of the cringey things Thug does, the album is really good.
Ha, yes, I too noticed the casual mention of "a spring 1977 tour stop at Cornell University." To Deadheads, it's an understatement on par with saying "Bob Dylan played a set in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1965 to a folk-music crowd" or "Nirvana played a festival called Reading in England in late summer 1992."
I couldn't agree more about Kane's being a way, way, way better rapper who lacks KRS's catalog.
But how about Spud Webb doing 360s in Sunday School clothes! Mickey Mantle playing stickball! John Madden drawing up plays on the blacktop! Where has this video been all my life?
Yes! People seems to do this very regularly -- stream HBO Max for a month or two and catch up on their programming, then switch to Netflix or Hulu and do the same, etc.
I haven't tried Apple TV, but it looks like they have a 7-day free trial, then it's $5/month after that. Chris is correct that it's cheaper than going to the movies. The arthouse near me is charging $12/ticket to see this Velvets movie this weekend.
I've never been to a movie by myself, but with the wife and kid out of town this weekend I may just check this one out since the college football lineup is weak tea on Saturday . . .
This is on balance my least favorite Beatles album, but I'll still be consuming an edible the size of a pumpkin and watching the movie, stomach protruding and lips glazed with leftover gravy, the day it comes out
Contemporary country radio is actually one of the MOST female-oriented formats in terms of listenership. It seems at least possible that radio programmers are paying attention to those listeners and are giving them what they want, which is 90% male artists. It's a business driven by the bottom line that for decades has produced mountains of data about their listeners so that they can make money through advertising. That's their whole business model.
Pop and adult contemporary radio stations have the highest percentage of female listeners. Maybe the fact that only 10% of artists on country radio are women has to do with so many successful female country singers' move toward the even-more-female-friendly pop and adult contemporary formats as soon as possible, Kacey Musgraves and Taylor Swift being prime examples.
I don't know who this C-suite stuffed-suit Mabe person is, but if she thinks the Grammys stand against "building roadblocks for artists who dare to fight the system," then I must respectfully disagree with her paradigm about the corporate music business in general.
Ha, this is all an academic parlor game, and I'm glad that you got a kick out of it. My ridiculous comparison, for the record, was a breathy, blowy sax solo to a trade wind.
I have read countless interviews with artists where they're offered a critical interpretation of their work and they say, "Huh, I never realized it, but maybe that was what I was trying to get at in this piece." (The Stones' contemporary John Lennon, for one, actually really liked reading critical interpretations of his lyrics because they helped him uncover what they meant to him, and he was the one who wrote them!) Again, they're creating songs, not essays. God knows they're better at songs that I hack like me is at an essay. But Keith did say straight up that the song is about the horrors of slavery. It seems fair to interpret it as such.
The Rolling Stones are artists/musicians, not post-Freudian feminist literary critics/philosophers from the Ivy League like Julia Kristeva. They express themselves in songs, not in essays, books, or comment sections. I doubt many artists at all could express themselves in those formats. They deal in feelings, not logical expression.
I did say that slavery-related art *from a conscientious perspective* takes horror as a given. That rules out schlock.
Regarding this take and Mick's non-articulation of it, "Brown Sugar" is a Jagger/Richards composition, and Keith is on record in this very article stating outright that the song is about the horrors of slavery.
Art is obviously open to interpretation, which is the good/bad thing about it. Mick wrote most of this song, and it seems likely from what I've read that he was talking about black tar heroin, which he was equally repulsed by and drawn toward (again, the terrible allure of evil).
We disagree about this song, obviously, but I personally think it's one of the most complex and deep hit songs I've ever heard, and I was someone who for many years dismissed it as horny shock/schlock rock myself until I actually started noticing what they're saying and how they're saying it (I think Bobby Keys's sax solo, when it blows in like a trade wind carrying human cargo out of the middle passage, is what made my interpretation come to life for me). Again, this is just my own interpretation of it.
Isn't horror implied in any song/discussion about chattel slavery? Is it possible to make art about slavery from any sort of conscientious perspective without the institution's horrors being an essential part of it?
Mick's implication of himself is what qualifies this as coming from a conscientious perspective, as I see it. Along with his and his band's long-running admiration of Black culture and appreciation of the Black experience.
Like the rest of their oeuvre, the song seems to me to be about the dual nature of humankind and the ecstatic allure of evil. And they're not letting anyone, certainly not themselves, off the hook in the implications of that allure. They're playing the devil's music, after all. They're just willing to go all-in on actual evil here; that's true art, as I see it (feel free to disagree -- obviously the celebratory nature of the song is what I think reinforces their message about the allure, but it's tough for others to stomach, I'm sure.)
I just read Julie Kristeva's "Powers of Horror," and one of the few points I actually understood is that true horror comes from its closeness to us. The truly abject is barely separate from ourselves, so we try our best to keep it at arm's length because it's so uncomfortable to realize that its separation from us is ambiguous at best (bodily fluids and functions have literally been inside us and become disgusting at the moment that they becomes separate). "Brown Sugar" forces us to look at chattel slavery's relationship to us, "us" being Europeans, white people, men, rock and roll, etc. Sounds like horror to me, especially for a band that has taken Black music, forged from the horrors of slavery, and profited from it, and artistically improved up on it (again, that is my opinion; feel free to disagree).
Agreed! I just looked it up, and he was the postseason MVP of that last World Series they won for god's sake, and they treat him like he's an embarrassing blot upon their stupid fucking pinstriped uniforms! And he's literally not just from Manhattan, but from Washington Heights, aka "Little Dominican Republic"!
I am guessing you weren't a big fan of her A-Rod phase either?
(Side note: As a Washington fan, if I could travel back in time and tell a circa-2005 version of myself that two of my favorite sports commenters on TV would be Alex Rodriguez and Tony Romo, I'd have punched myself in my own nuts)
In what sense has her legacy been destroyed? Her music fucking slays (not all of it, obviously -- she's been making records for four decades) and always will. She's a trailblazer like no other and always will be. Criticizing Madonna for "gaffes" implies at least the slightest propensity for shame or some ability for her to give a shit. Father time is undefeated, that is true, but that is what legacies are for.
Never change, Madge! Laugh at her antics, but here we are talking about them/her. Sexualization of women in their 60s represents a whole new frontier of transgression. She is still the tar baby when it comes to public attention.
I think it's Charles Cross's "Heavier Than Heaven" that includes a scene where Nirvana is recording Nevermind and the band takes a bunch of mushrooms one night and goes to the beach and Kurt keeps running around exclaiming how the White Album is the best album ever made. I believe Butch Vig had been trying to convince him that double-tracking his vocals was okay because John Lennon used to love his voice double-tracked.
I'm solidly with Dave Grohl in maintaining that Macca made the most interesting music in that band, but it's no surprise that they were all Beatles geeks. Paul is the shit!
I am good with the vaccine mandates, but I do think it's a little too easy for most of us commenters who are college-educated and work white-collar jobs, most of which we can do remotely or in a closed office, to shrug off the hassle of wearing masks all day.
I don't need to wear a mask for 8+ hours/day, so it's no big deal to me if other people have to -- even if those people are super-active young kids or people who work with their hands or on their feet all day. Asking other people to sacrifice is always very very easy.
I have a 1st grader here in California, and honestly you don't have to be a MAGA person to be disturbed at his having to wear a mask all day every day. That can't be good for his social development, especially since he hasn't been in a normal social environment since he was in preschool (he has no siblings and his family members all live far away). I see the effects and they're not good.
The officer who killed Pharrell's cousin is Black himself, so it's a leap to suggest racist intent (not necessarily saying that wasn't the case). But at what point are we going to take body cameras seriously? I mean come on, the family is suing the city for $50 million dollars -- I really don't understand why municipalities don't realize the financial incentives for recording actions like this, if they're not going to realize the ethical incentives. If they're going to spend the $ to defend these cops, don't they understand that having a record of the incident would be pretty useful? The taxpayers are getting fucked here, if nothing else. One would also think that the involved cops would want to clear their names before the incidents make national news over lawsuits. Much easier to do with a video of the incident.
I am bad with tech., so you lost me at VPN, but I am trying to avoid fooling around with something like that and then the next thing you know I'm getting doxxed and fired from my post or whatever. Thanks, though, I appreciate the response!
Yes, I remember assigning the shorter article-length version of that (from the Atlantic or New Yorker or something like that) a few years ago. Interesting stuff! I actually saw him as a talking head just last night when I was watching the 30 for 30 about the 1986 Mets.
That is what I assumed. I can't figure out how to get onto 8kun, though. It may be that my school and/or web provider has restricted access to that site?
I've spent the last three days looking for QAnon primary sources. I'm not very technologically adept, but I figured I could stumble into a Reddit thread or something pretty quickly. I've certainly found plenty of such places that debunk or ridicule QAnon, but I can't find the arguments of actual believers.
A colleague in my department just sent me a PDF with the Twitter feeds of a dozen people spreading conspiracy theories about Covid and the vaccines, so I'm probably okay with that.
The sad irony about all the shadow-banning is that it just increases the conspiratorial mindset, i.e., "The message we're spreading is too threatening to the powers-that-be, so they're silencing us." It has its own weird logical ecosystem that sustains itself the more it is pushed to the margins. (I'm not sure that applies to R. Kelly and his videos on YouTube, but if his defenders start storming the Capitol, we'll know for sure.)
I get the outrage, obviously, but I guess I'm not sure how a YouTube channel of an imprisoned man has "the potential to cause widespread harm"? How does this protect users?
I'm not trolling, but I'm teaching a class about conspiracy theories and the topic of shadow-bans/de-platforming is one that I've been looking into (after trying and failing to find primary sources advocating for anti-vax and QAnon), and I'm curious about the thought process behind this.
Yes, I am a hetero who finds Kacey Musgraves very attractive. It didn't occur to my wife or me that she was naked, even for a moment.
This could have been because neither performance and neither song were very interesting. I am really disappointed in her new album, personally. I was hoping watching the SNL performances would help me get into it, but it seems very self-righteous and boring to me compared with her other work, all of which I've loved. Some of the songs are unnecessarily mean-spirited, and not in a very interesting way. I'm hopeful that she'll bounce back next time.
If it weren't for capitalism, her family would likely still be bowing down to a feudal landlord in France somewhere, or dying on the guillotine at the hands of some pitchfork-wielding peasants who are slightly poorer and thus much more resentful.
Speaking of resentment, she gets some very personal criticism in these pages that maybe tip some commenters' hands. She is a woman and an artist and is successful and also is pretty smart -- she did study neuroscience at McGill (did you? I most certainly did not). But commenters should keep referring to her as hopelessly confused in her embrace of capitalism, and they should keep doing it from their first-world privilege which results from capitalism, and keep doing it from their incredibly expensive technological gadgets/commodities while she is off making art. But it is she who is confused?
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