Month: June 2021

Despite announcing the special event only two days ago, a Wawa convenience store in Upper Darby, PA had a massive line wrapped around the building and down the street on Thursday morning as fans showed up in droves for “Mare of Easttown Day.” The new Wawa location that recently opened where the hit HBO series took place outside of Philly offered free coffee and “Wawa Delco” T-shirts to the first 100 customers through the door. More importantly, those customers got the first crack at the new “Mare of Easttown Spicy Cheesesteak,” which is a limited time homage to “how spicy the show is,” including Kate Winslet‘s character love of canned cheese. The Mare-themed sandwich will only be available until June 17.

As chronicled by The Philadelphia Inquirer‘s Stephanie Farr, the “Mare of Easttown Day” was clearly a huge draw for both hoagie-loving Pennsylvanians, of which there are many, and fans of the show.

It was also a pretty big day for local residents who love free T-shirts.

According to Farr, Mare of Easttown fans traveled to the Upper Darby Wawa from as far away as Nashville, and some were even offering cash for one of the free T-shirts, but so far, none of the lucky recipients were parting with their treasure.

While Mare of Easttown‘s Philly suburb setting helped draw increased attention to the convenience store chain, the Wawa frenzy exploded in early May after Winslet raved about her first visit to the fabled hoagie purveyor.

“It almost felt like a mythical place … Wawa,” Winslet told The LA Times‘ Envelope podcast. “By the time I got there, I was like, ‘It’s real!’ Walking into a Wawa ultimately felt like, it was kind of an honor, in a funny way, because to me that was the heart of Delco. So to finally walk through the door of a Wawa; I don’t know why I felt like, ‘Oh, yes, I’m here, I belong. This is where it’s at. Wawa.’”

(Via Stephanie Farr on Twitter)

Two months after the death of Digital Underground frontman Shock G, his cause of death has been revealed. TMZ reports the Hillsborough County Medical Examiner determined that Shock G died from an accidental overdose of fentanyl, alcohol, and methamphetamine. In April, he was discovered unresponsive at a Tampa hotel after missing his checkout time.

As a founding member of Digital Underground, Shock G was one of hip-hop’s party rap pioneers, best known for their songs “Doowutchyalike” and “The Humpty Dance,” as well as their role in launching the career of the late, great Tupac Shakur, who was a backup dancer for the group in the early ’90s. They later returned the favor by appearing on ‘Pac’s breakout hit, “I Get Around” when he went solo in 1993.

Shock’s death was confirmed by Digital Underground co-founder Chopmaster J, who posted a fond memorial on Instagram. “34 years ago almost to the day we had a wild idea we can be a hip hop band and take on the world through it all the dream became a reality and the reality became a nightmare for some,” he wrote. “And now he’s awaken from the fame long live shock G Aka Humpty Hump and Rest In Peace my Brotha Greg Jacobs!!! #digitalunderground.”

The Lego Batman Movie is not only the best Lego movie, it’s also one of the best comic book movies of the 2010s. There was supposed to be a sequel that would bring back Will Arnett and Michael Cera as Batman and Robin, as well as Zach Galifianakis as Joker, but when the rights to the Lego franchise transferred from Warner Bros., which owns Batman and his Rogues Gallery, to Universal Pictures, it was effectively canceled.

This is a shame because The Lego Batman Movie 2 sounds really good.

In an interview with Screencrush, The Lego Batman Movie and The Tomorrow War director Chris McKay confirmed that Community and Rick and Morty co-creator “Dan Harmon and some of Dan Harmon’s team” finished a draft, which he compared to, of all movies, The Godfather Part II. “Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer” is an accurate summation of Batman and Joker’s relationship.

“It was a story about the Justice League and where Batman was in terms of the Justice League now, and the struggles they were going through, as well as flashing back to how the Justice League came together. [It also featured] Batman and Superman’s relationship, as well as Batman’s relationship to a lot of the other members of the Justice League. And there was a really great part for Robin,” McKay said, adding, “I wish there was a way for us to go do that movie, because that would have been a lot of fun.”

I vow to personally fund The Lego Batman Movie 2, as long as Universal accepts my $100 million bill being in Lego form.

(Via Screencrush)

Infinite has some of the most intense dumb guy energy of any movie in recent years, and I mean that as a high compliment.

For a long time it seems sci-fi action movies have consisted of either massive franchises like Fast and Furious and Mission Impossible, attempts at brainy sci-fi like Tenet, or meat-and-potatoes, old-guy-beats-up-bad-guys movies like Taken. Whatever happened to goofy, high-concept schlock that introduced elaborate mythologies that could only be solved through equally elaborate martial arts and gunplay? I’m talking your Limitlesses, your Lucys, your Equilibriums — movies with complex conceits, laughable dialogue, and endlessly watchable action. Enter Infinite, which asks, what if Marky Mark played a reincarnated samurai?

Infinite, available to stream on Paramount+ and directed by Antoine Fuqua (Training Day, The Equalizer, Shooter), is entertainingly goofy, and dumb mostly in the right ways. You may not entirely buy in, but when you’ve got Mark Wahlberg jumping his motorcyle onto a cargo plane mid-air and stabbing the wing with a sword, do you really need to?

Say hiiiii to your mother for meeeeeeee!

Infinite begins with a premise fit for YA fiction: there are people living among us who can remember all of their past lives, and the particular sets of skills they acquired during those past lives. Those people are known as “the infinite,” and they are divided into two warring factions: the “believers,” who would use their powers to benefit humanity, and “nihilists,” who consider their total recall powers a burden and humanity a virus. No, the script, by Ian Shorr, Todd Stein, and D. Eric Maikranz, is not big on nuance. (Sidenote: I like to imagine that “D. Eric” was originally named Deric).

Luckily, Infinite is long on incorporating elements of other movies in entertaining ways. Wahlberg plays Evan McCauley, a schizophrenic ex-bouncer who’s having trouble finding work on account of the documented history of schizophrenia. What he lacks in a consistent paycheck he makes up for in the ability to forge razor-sharp samurai swords like a 15th century Japanese blacksmith. “Are there things that you can just do, and you don’t know why?” Wahlberg narrates out loud, while pounding red hot steel with a sledgehammer somewhere in New York City.

In one of the first scenes, McCauley trades one of his Hattori Hanzo blades to a Drexel Spivey-esque drug dealer in exchange for the unnamed pills he needs to silence the vivid dreams of his past lives. It eventually turns into a crime scene, McCauley’s sword raises some eyebrows at the police station, and the next thing he knows he’s sitting across an interrogation table from the movie’s head bad guy, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor. “Bathhurst,” it turns out, has been tracking Wahlberg’s character, Treadway (McCauley being only his latest name) across lifetimes in order to recover a device called “The Egg.” Bathhurst needs the egg to “unwind DNA” and end all life on Earth.

The bad guy who wants to destroy all life in the universe has, obviously, become a bit of a cliché thanks to virtually every Marvel movie. Yet the new twist here, that the bad guy instantly reincarnates with a memory of all of his past lives every time he dies, hates humanity and himself, and essentially can’t commit suicide without taking all life with him, is kind of a fun one. What do you want? I want me to die, Mr. Bond.

Wahlberg’s character, meanwhile, is basically Jason Bourne and Quaid from Total Recall, realizing that he’s not crazy and actually the key to saving the universe one remembered skill at a time. But with an added Cloud Atlas twist that his abilities aren’t just chopsocky and gunplay. They might be something he learned in an 8th century Tibetan monastery or on board a 17th-century pirate ship. It sounds a little like a skill Jared Leto might claim after a few days of meditation in a yurt.

Leto actually might’ve been a better casting choice. Wahlberg is surprisingly useless in a role that should’ve been a slam dunk. Oddly, in a tailor-made dumb guy movie, which would’ve been perfectly suited to the kind of meathead wonder Wahlberg brought to Boogie Nights and The Fighter, he looks instead like he’s doing a Ryan Reynolds impression in a failed audition for the next Joss Whedon picture. He’s reduced to spouting gee-whiz exposition, eyes bugging as he shouts “Holy shit, that felt freakin’ real!” and “You’re talking about reincarnation!” like an over-caffeinated Redditor. This is a guy who can forge a samurai sword in his apartment and jump on planes with a motorcycle, why did they make him such a cringe dork? Past lives? Hecka freakin’ cool, you guys!

For a movie that spent so much time developing an entire mythology and universe, very little seems to have gone into what the characters want or why they need to go from place to place. Bathhurst has to go to Scotland to unleash his egg thingy and then he takes it on a plane for some reason. The motivations are nonsensical, but Infinite is consistently ridiculous enough to work as spectacle. Bathhurst, for instance, has a gun that sucks souls. How do you “kill” a guy who’s constantly getting reincarnated and respawning as a different dude? Download his consciousness to a thumb drive and keep his soul in your futuristic Trapper Keeper, of course.

One henchman, played by Icelandic actor Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson, has a haircut so idiotic — ICE spiker on top, Lestat the Vampire on the sides — that he looks sort of like someone dosed Jack Dorsey’s raw water with HGH.

But dumb stuff isn’t prohibitive in a dumb guy action movie, provided the action is shot well. And Inifinite is. When Mark Wahlberg has to stick-fight reincarnated Egyptian pharoahs or cripple a cargo jet by stabbing it in the wing, the camera isn’t shaking around.

Infinite‘s psuedo-religious conflict, between “believers” and “nihilists” is something Christopher Nolan, or James Cameron, or The Wachowskis might’ve tried to turn into something legitimately profound. I’m not sure Fuqua is even attempting that. But even when they mostly don’t pay off, the boldness of the choices is consistently entertaining. Say hi to your sensei for me.

‘Infinite’ is available June 10th on Paramount+. Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can access his archive of reviews here.

In 2018, Migos, the pioneering trap trio from North Atlanta, were everywhere. After opening the year with the release of the hotly anticipated follow-up to their debut album Culture, they became an omnipresent force in pop culture. They featured in ads for everything from sneakers to video games, they performed at NBA All-Star Weekend, they even got their own potato chips.

They released their respective solo albums over the course of that year, then, in 2019, they announced a year-long delay on the third iteration of their Culture series — a delay which became longer than expected as a global pandemic shut down the entertainment industry. And now, after an unintended hiatus, they are set to finally release Culture III this week.

As they’ve rolled out the release over the last month, though, a frisson of concern has shot through the social media chatter surrounding the release. Its lead single, “Straightenin,” was buried in its release week by an avalanche of content from the likes of 21 Savage, J. Cole, and Nicki Minaj. Their Michael Jordan-parodying release date announcement made barely a splash.

When they revealed the album’s cover art, the overwhelming reaction on social media was negative and responses to the 18-song tracklist released a day later expressed more excitement for the featured artists than the fact that Migos was returning. When the album drops, it’ll have to directly compete for ears with Chicago upstart Polo G, whose reception and buzz have been much warmer over the past several months.

All of which begs the question: Do Migos still represent the culture? In the three years since they last released a Culture album, the pop culture landscape has seen multiple massive shifts, but the group itself has been buffeted by the winds of change since then, as well. Aside from the lukewarm critical reaction seen toward their solo efforts, Migos have been largely absent from playlists and radio, supplanted by a new crop of artists who do many of the same things.

While Offset, Quavo, and Takeoff often credit themselves with creating — or at least popularizing — the “triplet” flow, North Carolina rapper DaBaby has taken the baton and dashed away with it over the past two years. In that time, he’s received backlash for never changing his cadence and adjusted accordingly. If a newer artist is already facing criticism for never switching it up, how will an 18-song project from the flow’s foremost purveyors hold up under scrutiny?

Meanwhile, the members’ respective personal lives have dominated headlines as much as their business moves and new music has. Offset married Cardi B, then nearly divorced her twice. Public opinion seemed to sway to Cardi’s side both times, with rumors swirling that Offset was unfaithful and his rapper wife was fed up.

Quavo, meanwhile, had a high-profile romance of his own with Bay Area rising star Saweetie. They too had a very public falling out, with Saweetie tweeting, “I’m single. I’ve endured too much betrayal and hurt behind the scenes for a false narrative to be circulating that degrades my character. Presents don’t band-aid scars and the love isn’t real when the intimacy is given to other women.”

Quavo tried to defend himself by tweeting, “You are not the woman I thought you were. I wish you nothing but the best.” However, when a video of the couple having a violent altercation in the elevator at Saweetie’s North Hollywood apartment surfaced, the footage painted him in a less-than-positive light. The couple didn’t face charges for the fight, but seeing the cracks in the facade the two had put up in public didn’t do either of them any favors.

Takeoff got it the worst of all. Rather than be romantically linked to another rapper, he was accused of sexual battery and sued by the alleged victim. He denied the accusation through his attorney, calling the allegations a “money grab,” and has since remained mum on the incident, although he’s always been the least public of the three Migos, to the point he didn’t even have a separate Wikipedia page until recently.

Now, we know that mistreatment of women has never seemed to stop rap fans from consuming their faves’ new music (if anything, it’s starting to feel like a prerequisite for cultivating an intensely loyal fan base). But with all three members of the band landing in varying degrees of hot water over the past three years, it’s fair to question whether their brand has been irreparably tarnished.

And competing for listeners with Polo G — pretty much the paragon for the modern hitmaking style of melodic, traumatized rap dominating playlists lately — puts Migos in a precarious position. If the album fails to connect with listeners or appears to underperform, it could signal that their moment is over, leading to a domino effect of reduced returns on future projects. Lord knows hip-hop fans’ attention spans have gotten shorter than ever, so one slip could be all it takes for the masses to move on.

But, even with all that, Migos have one thing on their side: An established, successful brand in a rap landscape where branding often seems paramount to the music or even to fans’ receptions. Drake fatigue appeared to be setting in, then he sold out multiple Nike collaborations and took over the summer with “Laugh Now Cry Later.” Nicki appeared to be done after Queen but finally put Beam Me Up Scotty on DSPs and reclaimed her crown.

Even Cardi B has been the subject of near nonstop backlash, commenting that fans turned on her in the year since releasing her paradigm-shifting debut album, only to drop “WAP” and “Up” to remind them that she can make a hit practically in her sleep. Migos may be a bit further removed from “Stir Fry” and “Walk It Talk It,” but as we’ve seen several times over the years, if one miss can break you, then one hit revitalize a flagging career.

Though it remains to be seen if there’s a “Bad And Boujee” redux among the tracks on Culture III, the tracklist does show that they’re still in tune with the culture. Late rappers Juice WRLD and Pop Smoke both appear, courting their outspoken fanbases, Cardi B and Drake are always good for a hit, and Polo G, Migos’ most apparent competition on Friday, appears as well, proving the trio at least knows what they’re getting into.

The culture is always moving forward; the challenge any artist has is to evolve and grow with it. With a year off to work on their latest project, Migos had a chance to slow down and take in the changes, while figuring out how best to adjust to them. Now, all that remains to be seen is if they can continue to lead or if the culture has passed them by.

Next week is the 10th anniversary of Bon Iver, the second album by the Wisconsin-based band who remains one of the most popular and artistically significant indie acts of the early 21st century. Bon Iver was the LP that solidified their status after the sleeper success of 2007’s For Emma, Forever Ago, eventually garnering the band the Best New Artist Grammy.

At the time many might have suspected that the head of Bon Iver, Justin Vernon, had peaked at that very moment. But in the past decade, he’s proven to be one of the least predictable and most adventurous artists of his generation, putting out albums that initially confound listeners but eventually shifting their tastes in decisive ways. While Bon Iver’s catalogue is relatively small — including four studio albums and one 1 EP in the past 14 years — Vernon has made each release count. Nearly everything the band has put out feels essential.

This makes counting down my favorite Bon Iver songs a little tricky. Many of these tracks I prefer in the context of their albums. Nevertheless, I am prepared to list my top 25 Bon Iver songs. After all we’re in Milwaukee, so off your feet as we dive deep into this band’s career.

25. “Creature Fear”

Justin Vernon is one of the most influential indie singer-songwriters of the last 15 years, and that distinction goes back to his 2007 debut, For Emma, Forever Ago. Before that record, a bearded, guitar-slinging dude from the upper midwest was expected to adhere to conventions laid down by the likes of Bruce Springsteen and John Prine, in which plainspoken, narrative-driven lyrics are relayed with a solidly masculine twang. Vernon completely subverted that. Instead of utilizing a manly growl, Vernon sang pained, free-associative wails from his upper register. And those sounds as well as the feelings they evoked took precedence over literal-minded lyrics. As Vernon explained to me in 2008, “With these songs, I was creating sounds first. I would create a space for the vocals, then transcribe vocal sounds and listen to what it sounded like. I would get lyric ideas from the sound of the voice. And I was actually able to pull out more meaningful stuff, personally speaking, because of that.”

Now, it must be acknowledged that Bon Iver lyrics often read as gibberish on the page. Take this verse from “Creature Fear”: “I was teased by your blouse / Spit out by your mouth / I was loud by your lowered / Seminary sold.” I have no idea what “I was teased by your blouse” means as a combination of words when I read them. But when I hear those words, I somehow understand that Vernon is suffering from an existential crisis, and he’s working through it in real time as this song unfolds, and it’s unclear whether he will ever find a way out to the other side. This isn’t songwriting, perhaps, as much as it is a magic trick. I don’t know how Vernon pulls this off. I just know that he does.

24. “Woods”

Even though the songs on For Emma, Forever Ago don’t really conform to the musical conservatism of modern Americana, the album’s signifiers — the cabin, the woods, the sensitive songs about heartbreak — caused critics and fans to put it in that camp anyway. So Vernon kept on rebelling against it on his next release, the 2009 EP Blood Bank. Much of the album resembles the fractured art-folk of the debut, but the final track truly set Bon Iver — and indie rock generally — on a new course. On “Woods,” Vernon experimented with Autotune, the symbol of aughts-era mainstream pop that the era’s indie partisans were most likely to uphold as the ultimate betrayal of musical authenticity. And now here was the guy being celebrated as an avatar for authenticity essentially disregarding such a distinction, in the process hastening the obsolescence of the pop-vs.-indie binary. (It’s not quite Dylan going electric, but it’s in the ballpark.) In Vernon’s hands, Autotune went from an instrument used to ensure musical perfection to one that exaggerated and sharpened psychic turmoil, rubbing raw the trappings of modernity until it disintegrated like malfunctioning circuitry in your eardrums.

23. “715 – CRΣΣKS”

By the time of 2016’s 22, A Million, nobody was confusing Vernon for a backwater folkie. Though that album’s exercise in Autotune perversion comes from a similar place as “Woods.” What separates “715 – CRΣΣKS” is Vernon’s amped-up anguish. “There was a lot of anger in there,” Vernon once said of 22, A Million, and you hear that fury in this abrasive, affecting track.

22. “10 d E A T h b R E a s T ⚄ ⚄”

On some days, 22, A Million is my favorite Bon Iver album. (On other days, one of the other Bon Iver records is my favorite.) Certainly, it’s the one that feels the most like a self-contained piece of work. Being very much a “geriatric millennial,” Vernon is among the few artists to make a “‘provocative’ and ‘difficult’ followup to a highly successful album” album — which was once common in the alt-rock era — in the modern age. But even by the standards of In Utero or Kid A, 22, A Million is a uniquely barbed peek inside the mind of a man who is slowly going crazy in the midst of becoming famous. This makes the record an experience akin to a first-person 3D movie.

Again in keeping with geriatric millennial values, you have to take 22, A Million in as a piece in order for it to really pay off. Which is only a problem if you’re trying to make, say, a silly ranking of songs, as the individual tracks from 22, A Million tend to shine less brightly when taken out of context. (“It sounds like one long song” isn’t always a compliment for a record, but it is for 22, A Million.) On the album, “10 d E A T h b R E a s T ⚄ ⚄” is part of a mini-suite on Side 1 that appears to reflect unsparingly on a recent breakup. (Even Bon Iver’s anti-Bon Iver record has the key elements of a Bon Iver record.) Removed from the LP, it sounds a lot like an attempt to rip-off off Yeezus. Either way, the sound of Justin Vernon’s consciousness melting into oblivion is gripping.

21. “29 #Strafford APTS”

I’ve tried hard to refrain from talking about my own experience of living in Eau Claire in the late ’90s, for fear that it will come across as obnoxious. However, I can no longer hold myself back. Having lived in Eau Claire before it was known by indie heads as Bon Iver Land, I was aware of Strafford Apartments as a complex situated just down the street from the house I lived in during my junior year at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. I bring this up only to point out that even an album as surreal and druggy and insular as 22, A Million is still grounded in the reality of everyday life in northwestern Wisconsin. I can say from experience that Eau Claire is a very easy place to lose your mind, but there’s also enough space for you to eventually find it again without causing too much permanent damage.

20. “U (Man Like)”

When I lived in Eau Claire, there was an urban legend about how Ronald Reagan supposedly cut federal funding for mental institutions, which somehow caused a disproportionate number of eccentrics to be set loose on the city’s streets. As much as I want this to be true in order to support my thesis that Bon Iver’s music evokes the “weird, old heartland” aspect of living in that part of the country, it is almost certainly B.S. But here’s one thing I know for sure is true about Eau Claire: It’s a place where AOR radio rules. And because it’s a relatively isolated region, the stars of ’80s mainstream rock lingered there longer than they did in big cities. To the point where there was really nobody around to tell you that that stuff is supposed to be passé.

Even after Justin Vernon got famous, that influence never left him. So, when snarky music writers compared him to Bruce Hornsby around the time of the second Bon Iver record, he didn’t take it as the self-evident insult it apparently was supposed to be. (Why would he? Bruce Hornsby is great!) Instead, Vernon eventually absorbed Hornsby into Bon Iver, and together they made “U (Man Like),” a reimagining of AOR Eau Claire radio imbued with the region’s innate strangeness.

19. “Faith”

In the wake of 22, A Million, it seemed like Vernon was strapping dynamite at the feet of Bon Iver and lighting a match. But just three years later, upon the release of i,i, Vernon had seemingly arrived at a more settled place in terms of his own fame. He was now playing arenas, and that tour’s lavish setup — including eye-catching visuals devised by cool underground artists and a crystal-clear sound system promising 360-degree audio — made his band seem like a landlocked Pink Floyd. He was also writing songs like “Faith” that seemed custom-made for filling those cavernous spaces. Whereas in the past “Faith” might have stayed in its initial gear as an improvised guitar piece accented with odd synths and a disorienting string section, it now blossomed into a rousing U2-style anthem in which Vernon insists that “it’s time to brave” in a voice that demands to be heard by thousands of people.

18. “8 (circle)”

When I interviewed Justin Vernon in 2014 — roughly the midpoint between Bon Iver and 22, A Million — he said two things that proved to be prescient for the next record. The first was that he was no longer writing songs on a guitar, but rather an OP-1, a sampler-based synthesizer he called “the most important instrument that’s come into my life since I first picked up a guitar when I was 12 years old.” The second was that he wasn’t really writing songs per se. Instead, he was accumulating interesting moments discovered via the process of improvising for hours and hours. And yet by the time the album was released he was able to shape those moments into songs like “8 (circle),” which reimagines the stately backwoods prog of Bon Iver as a classic George Michael ballad.

17. “The Wolves (Act I and II)”

I think it’s reductive to suggest that Vernon spent the ’10s trying to escape the legacy of his first record, which swiftly garnered a mythology — lonely guy makes masterpiece in a cabin! — that will likely end up in the first graf of his obituary no matter what else he does in his career. But it is kind of shocking to go back to For Emma with ears attuned to Bon Iver’s later work and now hear the album as almost straight-forward and pop-friendly. Again, it should be stressed that it didn’t sound that way at the time. But the dual effects of early Obama-era nostalgia and Vernon’s accumulated left turns can make a song like “The Wolves (Act I and II)” seem as generous and even obvious as a Coldplay hit. For a guy who claims he made For Emma without any intention of the outside world ever hearing it, Vernon seemed to have a knack for crafting a climactic moment that was destined to inspire mass singalongs.

16. “Michicant”

Until recently, I was inclined to argue that the second Bon Iver album — which along with For Emma remains his most successful and accessible work — was a touch overrated. And then I revisited it earlier this year and was promptly humbled. If 22, A Million feels like the most complete Bon Iver album as far as being a complete visceral experience, Bon Iver is probably his best collection of songs. On “Michicant,” you hear Vernon fully coming into his own, taking the loner outsider balladry of the first record and blowing it out with an all-star supporting cast that includes ringers like pedal-steel wizard Greg Leisz and jacked-up sax man Colin Stetson.

15. “Hey, Ma”

After the first two Bon Iver albums, it was natural to assume that they would follow the path of a band like Wilco, another middle American art-rock institution that has made a career out of playing with bedrock American musical forms and twisting and updating them with modern technology. But while Bon Iver has done that to a degree, Vernon diverges from Jeff Tweedy in one crucial, generational aspect: His conversance with hip-hop culture. On “Hey, Ma,” his vocal delivery verges on rapping without actually taking the plunge. It’s more like he’s unconsciously channeling that cadence in the context of an aching electro-folk ballad because it just happens to be a part of his DNA as a lifetime listener of that music. Bon Iver can draw on that influence without making a point of drawing it, in the same way that Vernon can evoke Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music with a particular guitar strum or vocal affectation without ever being fully grounded in that tradition, either. This, more than anything, is what has allowed Bon Iver over the years to evolve while also growing their audience in a manner few of their aughts-era contemporaries have achieved.

14. “Wash.”

On one hand, it is true that Bon Iver has had a striking evolutionary arc over the course of their career. But it’s also true that Vernon’s aesthetic — deconstructing song forms and reassembling them in ways that feel simultaneously comforting and alien — was there from the beginning of the project. You can hear it in a song like “Wash.,” in which Vernon locates an unlikely new midpoint between Steve Reich and Gordon Lightfoot.

13. “33 ‘GOD’”

Before the release of 22, A Million, I was among a small coterie of journalists invited to Eau Claire for a press conference to promote the record. This was the peak of Vernon’s “faces are for friends” only period, and it was unclear whether this event would be the sum total of his 22, A Million interviews. The collection of journalists represented a mix of national and hyper-local publications. (I don’t remember if Rolling Stone was there, but I know for a fact that the Chippewa Herald was.) At the start of the press conference, Vernon admitted that he was nervous, though he eventually did seem to relax himself. Frankly, he was more interested in promoting his new hotel, which was hosting the event, than 22, A Million. I think about that press conference whenever I hear “33 ‘GOD,’” which includes a shoutout to the Ace Hotel chain and not his own hotel. Seems like a missed marketing opportunity, Justin.

12. “Lump Sum”

A beautiful song about plumbing. At least I think that’s what it’s about based on the closing verse: “All at once rushing from the sump-pump / Or so the story goes / Balance we won’t know / We will see when it gets warm, ah.”

11. “Towers”

I’m joking about the plumbing thing, of course. But for all the fun you can have stripping the words out of Bon Iver songs and examining them like court testimony — the exact wrong way to listen to this band, by the way — there really are lyrics with a resonance that go beyond conventional logic and toward articulating an indescribable feeling or sense memory. For instance, I have a special connection to “Towers” because Vernon is referencing my freshman-year dorm, in which I had encounters that resemble the romantic fumbling he describes in the lyrics. And I feel like this is an especially accurate depiction of my life back when I was rooming at Towers North on the UW-Eau Claire campus: “Oh, the sermons are the first to rest / Smoke on Sundays when you’re drunk and dressed.” Being “drunk and dressed” wasn’t my literal reality, but it also sort of was.

INTERMISSION

As a native Wisconsinite I must share perhaps the most crucial summit in recent Wisconsin history.

10. “Naeem”

Another absolute anthem from i,i. Before Covid, Vernon had a plan to tour Wisconsin in the run-up to the 2020 election in order to rally support away from the guy running for president who won the state in 2016. I suspect this is the song that would have really inspired people in that scenario. It’s a call to action — apparently against climate change — that Vernon howls like a gospel ballad. “Well, I won’t be angry long / Well, I can’t be angry long.” he sings, not long after the line about falling out of a bass boat. Now, that’s the sort of populism that midwesterners can believe in.

9. “Calgary”

Vernon felt particularly proud of this song upon the release of Bon Iver, calling it an “accomplishment” with a strong “form, a repetitive idea, and a good cadence.” In other words, it sounds like a hit. At the very least, “Calgary” suggests that Vernon could have taken a different career path where he veered into more typical singer-songwriter territory — think of him as the unkempt John Mayer or the freak-folk Ed Sheeran — and had a lot more success in the short run, though it likely would have burned him out over the long haul.

8. “Flume”

The first song on the first Bon Iver record was also the first step for Vernon toward a new musical identity. It was where he tried out his falsetto, an effect he had previously attempted but it “never landed,” as he put it to Pitchfork. But it sure landed on “Flume,” and as he explained to me in 2008, it made him feel freer as a vocalist. “I’ve been influenced by black singers and singers I couldn’t sound like,” he explained to me. “Whenever I tried to do a dark note or a bent note, I would just sound like Hootie And The Blowfish.” “Flume” has a similarly bluesy vibe, but Vernon’s vocal takes it to another place, away from cringe-y bar-band rock and toward a spookier and more introspective vibe.

7. “666 ʇ”

The most ravishing track from the furious and gnarly 22, A Million era. Also includes Vernon’s most mission statement-y lyric of all time: “It’s not for broader appeal / fuck the fashion of it, dear.”

6. “Blood Bank”

A rare instance of a Bon Iver song with a clear lyrical narrative: Two people give blood. They sit in a car. It’s cold. They make out. The end.

I really like how this part shows the way the deep freeze of a Wisconsin winter can suddenly turn romantic: “Then the snow started falling / We were stuck out in your car / You were rubbing both my hands / Chewing on a candy bar / You said, ‘Ain’t this just like the present / To be showing up like this?’ / As a moon waned to crescent / We started to kiss.” But it’s not just the words of “Blood Bank” that resemble a Springsteen song. This is Bon Iver at their chunkiest and most approachable. It’s their “beefy flannel-covered dude at the bar who has a really big heart” song.

5. “Beth/Rest”

The discourse about the concluding ballad from Bon Iver — is this “sincere” or “ironic”? — seems extremely lame and tiresome 10 years later. (I’m not proud to say I got caught up in it. To atone, I’m giving my album review the Zero Stars Reviews treatment and pointing it out for your mockery.) Recently, I started buying up cassettes and playing them on a cheap boom box in my office. I’ve been partial to boomer rock tapes from the late ’80s, as that music seems a little extra melancholy when it sounds slightly warbly and sonically uncertain. When I hear “Beth/Rest,” I suspect Vernon was trying to achieve that “slightly warbly and sonically uncertain” feeling from listening to late ’80s albums on cassette. (Bon Iver was never a chillwave band except on this song.) It took me 10 years but I can say now that he absolutely nailed it.

4. “Skinny Love”

A strange conundrum of Justin Vernon’s early career with Bon Iver is that even though the lyrics on For Emma are pretty vague and even nonsensical, he was still often put in the position of having to talk about the former lovers who inspired the songs. One of the album’s most gutting numbers, “Skinny Love,” was put under the most intense microscope. Though the reason this song connected with so many people really boils down to how the hoarseness of his vocal on the chorus sounds a lot like an exhausted voice at the end of a long, pointless argument that comes near the nadir of a faltering relationship.

3. “Holocene”

I was living in Milwaukee when Bon Iver dropped, and there was a minor kerfuffle in local media over an interview that Vernon did with Pitchfork in which he elaborated on the reference to Milwaukee in this song, in which he sings, “You’re laying waste to Halloween / You fucked it friend, it’s on its head, it struck the street / You’re in Milwaukee, off your feet.” In the interview, Vernon called Milwaukee “a dark, beer-drunk place” where adults get wasted on Halloween in order “to forget about their childhoods.” Some people took offense to that, but to this day I think it’s one of the more insightful things ever said about that town. (Hi Milwaukee, I still love you.) Anyway, getting upset about that lyric misses the point of a song that literally nods to rebirth and the rapid grow of new life. It’s about falling down and getting up again. Get off your feet indeed.

2. “Perth”

The huge-sounding opener from Bon Iver existed in an embryonic state before the release of the first Bon Iver record. But Vernon is wise to hold on to “Perth” until he had the wherewithal to really take it to another level. (“I already knew that whatever record I was going to make, ‘Perth’ was going to be the first track,” he told Pitchfork in 2011.) Vernon likened the spindly guitar lick to Neil Young, but it reminds me more of Joni Mitchell’s distinctive tone from the Hejira era, only blown out to arena-size scale by those punishing double kick drums. No matter Vernon’s image at the time as a sleepy, mild-mannered folkie memorably lampooned by Justin Timberlake on Saturday Night Live, “Perth” proved that Bon Iver could also, well, rawk.

1. “Re: Stacks”

Why is this my No. 1? Since we’re talking Bon Iver, I figure my explanation should be achingly personal and embarssingly emotional. In short, this is the one that instantly puts me in a place where I feel like I’m either about to cry or like I just did cry, even if I haven’t actually cried. I have a distinct memory of listening to this song once many, many times in a row while taking a train from Chicago to Milwaukee. Let me tell you: That trip was not a barrel of laughs! But it was the most cathartic experience with Amtrak I have ever had.

You could throw me a surprise birthday party where all of my loved ones showed up to hand me a Publisher’s Clearinghouse-sized check for $1 million, and if you played this song for me immediately after that, I’d probably get choked up. Is it dusty in here? Why do I feel like laying down for 35 years? Damn! You got me, Bon Iver! I am now too much of a mess to type any more words.

Sometimes, it feels like Taylor Swift is receiving some sort of award on a daily basis (and deservedly so). Heck, she was recognized at two different award ceremonies just yesterday: Her video for “The Best Day (Taylor’s Version)” won Best Family Feature at the CMT Music Awards, and during the National Music Publishers Association’s annual membership meeting yesterday, she was given the Songwriter Icon Award.

Video of Swift’s acceptance speech isn’t currently available online, but Variety shared a full transcript of Swift’s acceptance speech from the virtual event. She began by explaining why songwriting feels “so magical and mystical” to her:

“I’m really, really honored to be receiving this award because it honors the part of my job that is so magical and mystical to me, still. I love songwriting so much because there’s an element to it that is still really mysterious — like I think any songwriter will tell you, when you get an idea you’re not quite sure where it floated down from, but if you can grab onto that idea and turn it into something, a piece of music, that’s where craftsmanship comes in; that’s where you have the opportunity to learn and to nurture that craft, and I want to take a moment to thank the people who were my professors, my teachers, of the craft of songwriting.”

She then thanked some choice songwriting collaborators from throughout her career, including Liz Rose, Max Martin, Johan Shellback, Jack Antonoff, and Aaron Dessner. She also expressed how moved she has been and continues to be by the support she receives from fans, saying, “To the fans who are out there who care about my lyrics: you have no idea how much it means to me that you dissect them and copy them into your journals and care about the words that I write.”

Read Swift’s full speech here.

After giving Gossip Girl fans a brief taste of the new revival series coming to HBO Max, the streaming service dropped a full-length trailer that has all the dirt on the next generation. Taking place almost a decade after the events of the original series, Gossip Girl will focus on a new group of wealthy, over-privileged teens as their tangled love lives and dark secrets are turned against them by “Gossip Girl.” Only this time, the mysterious writer has taken their game to Instagram, leaving the blogging world in the past. But to ease fans into this latest iteration, Kristen Bell is back as the Gossip Girl narrator, and it’s anyone’s guess which of the new characters are pulling the strings this time. If it’s even one of them…

Here’s the official synopsis:

Developed by showrunner Joshua Safran, a writer and executive producer on the original series, this extension of the pop culture classic takes us back to the Upper East Side finding a new generation of New York private school teens being introduced to social surveillance nine years after the original blogger’s website went dark. The series is based on the bestselling novels by Cecily von Ziegesar and the original show, developed by Josh Schwartz & Stephanie Savage, which ran from 2007-2012 on The CW.

Starring Jordan Alexander, Eli Brown, Thomas Doherty, Tavi Gevinson, Emily Alyn Lind, Evan Mock, Zion Moreno, Whitney Peak and Savannah Lee Smith, the all-new Gossip Girl starts streaming Thursday, July 8 on HBO Max.

Fox News host Sean Hannity and the much maligned Senator Ted Cruz got together to explain the mysterious and shadowy world of cryptocurrency to the at-home audience, and oh boy. On one hand, sure, the Fox News audience has probably caught wind of all those Reddit-lurking younguns and their stock-market exploits, and they’d like to know what all of this Bitcoin and Dogecoin fuss is about. So at a certain point, the Fox News night-time guys needed to tackle the subject, and the results, so far, are entertaining.

Bless Hannity’s heart, he gave it a go, and he introduced his crypto talk by asking, “What is Bitcoin, what is blockchain, what is Doggy Coin?” It’s not a promising start, and it’s kind-of ridiculous, but he’s doing it anyway.

Although it would have been something if Hannity could have nabbed Elon Musk (he, as Anonymous put it last week, could possibly shed light on the market-manipulation, through crypto memes, in which he apparently partakes), Hannity pulled up the next dubious-best thing: Ted Cruz. And no, Cruz doesn’t understand crypto any more than Hannity does, but let’s not worry about details. Instead, let’s enjoy how Cruz attempted to explain why people are getting into crypto.

Long story short, according to Cruz (who also has no idea what crypto is but sees a lot of “potential” there), people are wanting to find alternatives to traditional money because of Biden putting the U.S. “on the verge of an inflation crisis” with federal spending: “We’re seeing lumber going up, we’re seeing homes going up, oil going up, gasoline going up.” Cruz ignores the fact that the rising prices of lumber, homes, and oil/gas are down to supply-and-demand issues, and he doesn’t seem to realize that Bitcoin has been popping for years, but Reddit and Elon Musk are pushing crypto into headlines. Yet, as Cruz admits about crypto, “To be honest, I don’t fully understand it.”

The same goes for Hannity. He imagines that although he’s debated the issue of crypto for “probably hundreds of hours” with friends, “I honestly still do not understand a lot about it.” Yet Hannity’s invested in crypto, as he admits below, and yes, this is real life.

For a long time, indie games were considered a niche and small side part of the gaming ecosystem as a whole. Then, as they became more popular, many considered them the future of gaming. Well, the future is here, because indie games are just as much a part of video games as any Triple-A title. Game of the year awards feature at least one or two indie nominations/winners every year, and these games are frequently pushing the industry in new directions.

One company, Panic, Inc. saw this happening and had an interesting idea: What if there was a console that was made exclusively for indie games? Thus, the Playdate was born. A mobile indie console with a crank on it. It’s also a clock! That may sound weird, but we promise it makes more sense when you see it in action.

Via Playdate:

Playdate is familiar, but unlike anything you’ve ever seen. It has a very special black and white screen – not backlit, but super reflective – that looks way more amazing than you’re probably imagining.

An exploded view of the internals of a Playdate device.
It also has a peppy little processor, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and a surprisingly loud loudspeaker. And when you’re not using it, the screen doesn’t turn off – it becomes a very nice low-power clock!

What’s cool about the Playdate is that, once someone owns one, they’ll receive 24 games over a 12 week period, all on the console itself. The idea of what the Playdate could be is very cool — if it does well, it could be a console that indie devs use to launch lesser-known titles instead of relying on overfilled markets like Steam or the Epic Games Store.

Unfortunately, it’s harder than ever to launch a new console these days. With the stranglehold that Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo have on the industry it’s going to take a big push, and maybe a little luck, for Playdate to succeed. Anyone that wants to get in on the ground floor of this console can do so in July.