Given how much talking, yelling and singing are correlated with Covid transmission, I wonder if any artists are going to try and improve safety by asking their audiences to clap and/or stomp instead of cheering and singing along?
This isn't my favorite Charli, but she honestly can do no wrong. A relatively forgettable Charli single is miles better than almost anything else currently on the charts.
Isn't basing your opinion based on doing the opposite of what everyone else is doing just as disingenuous as basing it based on aligning with what everyone else is doing?
I admit, as a Ruston Kelly stan, those "breadwinner" lyrics make me suck my teeth. Not a good look for either of them. This is the first time I've been listening to a breakup album coming out where I'm familiar with both parties beforehand and have predispositions to one party over the other, and I'm feeling like I as the listener am probably just going to lose by listening to this album and feeling annoyed by both of them.
Dang, I have such distinct memories of sneaking out of my bedroom window to go see Electric Six when I was a teenager. My friends and I all got super grounded, but it was worth it.
I actually agree with you that the focus on DaBaby's homophobia and not his misogynistic violence - and the fact that Chris Brown's involvement is being downplayed - is evidence that people in this comment section and in the modern music internet space generally don't take violence against women of color seriously. It does make me roll my eyes that DaBaby's homophobic words get mass criticism while actual violence against women (mostly brown or Black women) gets downplayed - and I say that as a member of the LGBT+ community. Does no one remember Kanye doing a gross simulated revenge porn music video for "Famous" against Amber Rose without her consent?
That said, through your posts here longitudinally, you do have a major axe to grind against white women and tend to pin all white fragility stuff on them, as if white men aren't also purveyors of racism.
Some people (particularly writers and indie visual artists) rely on Twitter to promote their work and make a living. Some people use Twitter to socialize with their communities, particularly if they don't live somewhere where they can be with likeminded people. Some people log off twitter and find that the mob goes after their friends and loved ones on their social media. Some people log off Twitter and then Twitter responds by doxxing them or trying to get them fired.
I don't have a Twitter, but I could imagine it being really psychologically damaging to have your means of socializing and livelihood turned into a toxic pit of people wishing death on you, and then to find out that even logging off doesn't keep people from attacking your friends on their accounts or trying to harass you by phone.
Eh. I used to love Kanye a long time ago. I can't feel any particular emotion except disgust about Kanye dragging his mother's memory out to promote an album featuring people who rape and beat women because it's contrary or whatever. It makes everything about this ring like a hollow PR stunt.
In what universe is not rhyming "party" with "party" twice a complicated rhyme scheme? Was Pitbull going for Poet Laureate when he rhymed "body" with "party" on all those songs?
I imagine most people who say it "isn't real" do it because the people most often bitching about cancel cultures are the ones for whom it actually isn't real, your Kanyes, your Trumps, your Ben Shapiros, etc. The conceptualization of cancel culture that Kanye's talking about is actually fictitious.
The discussion of how twitter mobs affect people making Youtube criticisms of Disney films is also important, but is besides the point to what Kanye's talking about.
I actually just watched both of those videos this week! Great stuff.
"Cancel culture" in the lives of people who make their modest living on social media writing think-pieces and making Youtube videos is so, so different than "cancel culture" as applied to pop superstars like Kanye West or billionaires like Trump. Both things can be true at once: Twitter is a toxic hive of bad faith actors willing to "cancel" people over perceived slights with mob harassment and that mainly falls on already marginalized people, and once someone has enough political or cultural clout they become too big to fail and cancel culture no longer affects them negatively and becomes just a dog-whistle for right-wing fans.
Yeah, no, forget Kanye. Stop giving him a platform when he just wants to share it with Trump, Manson, Chris Brown and other misogynistic sexual abusers.
Also, "If you’ve ever loved Kanye West, I don’t see how you could be immune to this." Lines where he rhymed "party" with "party" with "party" and "life" with "life"? I can find a hundred better songs about missing one's deceased mother.
For real. It's so depressing to see people going "fuck Kanye, believe survivors, except here's how you turn this bloated turd into a streamlined masterpiece/the guitars in "Jail" really slap/whatever."
For real. Have any masked outdoor concerts with vaccine/negative test requirements been connected to any substantial outbreaks? The protests last year, outdoor, masked and pre-vaccination, weren't connected to measurable outbreaks. Research is showing that movie theaters are pretty safe due to the amount of ventilation and the fact that people aren't talking. Studies are showing that public transit is generally pretty safe.
People who want to crack down on actual superspreader events should be getting in on prison, detention center and jail reform, just saying. That's where tons of people are getting infected. The Marshall Project released a study showing that California prisons had a positivity rate of 40% - 40%! See also: underregulated nursing homes and foodpacking facilities, poorly-ventilated restaurant kitchens (being a fry cook in 2020 was one of the deadliest careers in the country).
Fingerwagging at people who are adopting a harm reduction approach and going to masked, outdoor, vaccinated/negative-test events is just getting on a high horse and scapegoating individuals making sensible risk assessments instead of drawing attention to some of the actual, systemic causes of COVID continuing to spread. It gives people an outrage high, encourages an abstinence-only approach that's impossible to maintain longterm, and doesn't actually protect anyone.
Kanye West doesn't see women as people. He doesn't see sexual abuse of women as a big deal, and thinks anyone who does make a big deal about it is just outraged for the sake of being outraged, not angry on behalf of people whose bodies were violated. He thinks platforming and defending rapists is just being edgy and counterculture, not, you know, defending predators and sending a big "lol screw you" to the people they attacked. He thinks it's effectively the same as wearing baggy jeans to piss off your mom, only on a big public scale.
This isn't surprising after his years of misogyny, but I don't know what it'll take to actually cancel this guy already. I hope that Manson's victims manage to miss this in the news today.
Platforming people who commit sexual violence against women - Trump, Cosby, Manson - isn't cute contrarian edgelord antics unless you don't see the victims of those sexual violence as people.
I don't know why, after "BILL COSBY INNOCENT", I'm surprised by Kanye working with a known repeat sexual predator and sadist, but I anticipate way too many people excusing it because the new songs "slap" or whatever.
"Halsey had compiled one of the more rewarding discographies in the modern mainstream" is a very citation-needed statement for me. I've listened to their albums, and while a scant few tracks like "Strangers" are pretty legit, Halsey's batting average is like...one good song for every eight wretched, overdramatic self-pitying whinefests with half-hearted vocals. I'm going to give this one a try but I'm wary of any PE that tries to redeem songs like "Bad at Love" or "Walls Could Talk."
Thanks, Phospho (and everyone in this comment thread) - it actually prompted me to make an actual statement about it to some of my colleagues, which made me do some soul searching to clarify that the experience I'm having is not agender so much as multiple genders, so to me any pronoun validates and affirms at least part of my reality, and that's why there's none that feels "wrong" to me the way misgendering feels to so many.
As the frequently white-passing child of an Asian mother, I'm surprised and impressed by how thoughtful Halsey is about this complicated subject, and furious at Allure for misrepresenting Halsey's very considered and intimate relationship with her identity with something as noxious and narcissistic as a "people don't get me because I'm white" soundbite.
This is a lovely and thoughtful way of putting it, Phospho, and clarifies a lot to me - I initially went "but they said she/they, doesn't that mean she is acceptable?" despite being close to many NB people who use some iteration of she/they pronouns. I just always default to "they" with my she/they or he/they friends because I figure they're getting their societally-assigned pronouns enough everywhere else and am trying to balance it out. I also know others who use she/they as a way of letting friends know that among known company they prefer "they", but when speaking to strangers or speaking about them to strangers, they prefer "she" to preserve their privacy and avoid being outed.
I personally have switched to "any pronouns" professionally and socially, for completely separate reasons than you were initially at "he/they" - for me, it's largely a way to signal that I'm somewhere on the not-cis, not-binary normative spectrum but don't actually want to have a conversation about it with anyone, and as such, for me I really am agnostic to which pronoun people use. Learning to respect the intricacies of how people value their own pronouns when I'm extremely detached from mine has been a journey for many years and one I'm still on.
I've listened to both Forever and Like Author, Like Daughter so many times that the vinyls are scratched to shreds. I'm eagerly awaiting getting this one in the mail so I can listen to it while lighting candles and watching the moon. Nobody's doing it like Midwife right now. She's truly incredible. Listening to her music feels like coming home inside my body, like everything's just kind of connecting and settling.
Haven't really listened to Low much in the past, but am surprised that the rest of the comment section doesn't find this as jawdroppingly good as I do. Can't wait to listen to this over and over again.
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