With HBO’s controversial new show The Idol just days from its long-awaited premiere, the show’s star, The Weeknd (aka Abel Tesfaye), announced the release of the latest single from its accompanying soundtrack, The Idol, Vol. 1. While he didn’t reveal the song’s title, he did share the names of its guest features. Appropriately for the dark theme of the show, Playboi Carti will appear alongside the original pop idol, Madonna, on the song, which comes out on Friday, June 2, ahead of the show’s June 4 premiere.
Although the first few episodes of the show were panned at Cannes Film Festival, the show’s co-creators Tesfaye and Sam Levinson remain convinced that the controversy is only going to lead to one of the most-watched shows in HBO history. Meanwhile, Levinson and co-star Lily-Rose Depp insisted that the show is not about Britney Spears; Madonna’s presence on the soundtrack makes it clear that the series’ perspective is inspired by many pop stars over the years.
The Weeknd said that the soundtrack was inspired by artists like Prince and Pink Floyd, so it’ll be interesting to see what that’ll sound like with the artists involved. The Weeknd previously released the Future-featuring song “Double Fantasy” from the soundtrack, so perhaps that can give listeners some idea of what to expect.
Earlier this week, Tyler The Creator caused a stir when he made a cameo appearance in Baby Keem and Kendrick Lamar’s grainy video for “The Hillbillies.” Clowning around with the cousins in front of the Dodger Stadium entrance, Tyler went right up to the camera to show off a button on his shirt reading “Camp Flog Gnaw 2023,” seemingly announcing the impending return of his lauded music festival for the first time since 2019. Today, that announcement has been confirmed with an official press release revealing the dates of the festival’s return to Dodger Stadium: November 11 and 12, 2023.
Camp Flog Gnaw, which had become pretty much the live version of the Tyler-inspired Pollen playlist on Spotify, was home to one of the most impressive alternative hip-hop and R&B lineups around. Featured artists in previous years have included Tyler’s inspirations and collaborators like ASAP Rocky, Billie Eilish, Brockhampton, Erykah Badu, Flatbush Zombies, HER, The Internet, Jaden Smith, Juice WRLD, Kid Cudi, Lauryn Hill, Raphael Saadiq, Solange, Summer Walker, SZA, Thundercat, Willow Smith, and Vince Staples. Even Drake made a (somewhat poorly received) surprise appearance.
However, the festival had to be canceled in 2020 due to the pandemic, and since then, Tyler’s hectic schedule has kept him too busy to plan and curate the festival. Now, with a pair of Grammys under his belt, a lucrative tour in the rearview, and a little more free time on his hands, it seems he’s had the opportunity to back on Camp activity planning. Advanced sale for Camp Flog Gnaw 2023 tickets begins this Friday, June 2 at noon. You can get more information at campfloggnaw.com.
Less than a month after the Kremlin claimed that Vladimir Putin was the subject of a failed assassination attempt by drones, CNN reported that another “wave of drone strikes” hit Moscow. Ukraine denied responsibility for the attacks, and the true origins remain a mystery, although the attacks hit Putin where it might count most: a wealthy suburb, which is surely going to raise more ire from oligarchs. In fact, Russian billionaires have already been lashing out over this war and referring to Putin as “Satan,” and this won’t help matters.
As well, Putin has been dealing with weekly rounds of mockery from the head of his private army, the Wagner Group’s Yevgeny Prigozhin, and now, Russian State TV talking heads are at odds on whether to keep supporting this war (as they’ve undoubtedly been told to do), but everyone seems to agree that they don’t see the war’s objective. The Daily Beast rounds up the latest conflicting panels by these talking heads, which appears to have come to a head regarding what Russian “victory” would look like. There are no winners here:
The Monday broadcast, too, featured a rare moment of brutal honesty on Russian state television, with one panelist offering up a particularly grim prophecy about Putin’s end game.
“What would victory look like? We can see it by looking at Bakhmut, the city where 70,000 people used to live, with children and kindergartens. It was simply wiped off the face of the earth. Everyone who could escape from there did just that,” former state Duma deputy Boris Nadezhdin said, appearing exasperated.
All of this rhetoric follows shortly after Putin’s sad annual “Victory Day” parade to mark the 1945 victory over Nazi Germany. This year, in in the wake of his own troops abandoning tanks in Ukraine, Putin only had one sad little tank for his big parade. Likewise, his troops have been stuck using aged ammo that could potentially “explode in your face” at any given moment. Seems like it’s long past time to hang up those boots that have been on the ground.
A final note: rumors have persisted that the Wagner Group wants overthrow Putin, yet Prigozhin recently went on record to say that it’s not true, although to be fair, he changes his tune so much that it’s hard to keep track.
The British soft-rock singer-songwriter Will Westerman has been putting out hooky, haunting singles since the late 2010s. But it took until 2020 for him to finally release his debut full-length album, Your Hero Is Not Dead. While I like that record, he really turned a corner with this month’s An Inbuilt Fault, which takes the central idea of his project — “What if Sting made a Bon Iver record?” — and makes it sound as smooth and strange as that description suggests. I would love for somebody to give this guy $2 million and access to the studio cats who made Gaucho so we can see what he really can do.
2. Bar Italia, Tracey Denim
The wave of post-punk bands that have poured out of the U.K. in the past several years have tended to lean on the most guttural, talk-y, and dissonant aspects of the music, like Mark E. Smith himself took a massive piss in their cereal bowls every morning. Fortunately, this London band takes an alternate route, favoring the sleek and sexy side of esoteric art rock. On Tracey Denim, I hear echoes of The Cure, early aughts Radiohead, and the underrated Baltimore indie outfit Lower Dens. A very cool record.
3. En Attendant Ana, Principia
This under-the-radar French band has the trappings of a ’60s-inspired garage-rock outfit. But because they’re French, it comes out sounding cleaner and breezier, with plenty of chiming guitars and cool bass and drum sounds. Think Alvvays but with less fuzz. This album actually dropped in February, but it didn’t come across my radar until this month. And that seems appropriate, as this is a late spring album all the way.
4. Paul Simon, Seven Psalms
After announcing his retirement from touring in 2018, this iconic singer-songwriter has mostly stayed out of the public spotlight. But now he’s back with one of his most unusual records, a 33-minute block of music that is separated into seven different movements intended to be taken in all at once. As you might expect from an 81-year-old artist, Simon has mortality on the brain, a subject that also recurs throughout later albums like 2011’s exemplary So Beautiful Or So What. On that record, he writes playfully about the afterlife. But here, his conversations with God feel extra charged, even as the music — with extrapolates his bedrock folk style with quasi-classical flourishes — remains melodic and soothing. A man who once sang sardonically of “angels in the architecture,” Simon now earnestly seeks the comfort of those heavenly creatures on Seven Psalms.
5. Tinariwen, Amatssou
The most reliable brand in Tuareg “desert rock,” Tinariwen has built an American audience by collaborating with stateside rock musicians. That continues on Amatssou, with the most crucial guest star, producer Daniel Lanois, providing the patented atmosphere that he has brought to albums by everybody from Bob Dylan to U2 to Emmylou Harris. The result is a record that can sit comfortably with the rest of their vaunted catalog while also drifting a bit from their familiar yet potent formula.
6. Mandy, Indiana, I’ve Seen A Way
These feisty Europeans — there are three Brits and one Parisian — kick up quite the foreboding blast of noise on their debut album, I’ve Seen A Way. Dance grooves and pulsating synths collide with scratchy sonics and largely intelligible vocals that nevertheless communicate a sense of exciting doom and gloom. I suspect that music coordinators for dark prestige dramas looking for a shortcut to sonically convey mental and emotional disintegration are going to have a field day with this record.
7. Mark McGuire, A Pocketful Of Rain
Originally released as a double cassette and CD-R in 2009, this underground cult favorite was recently given fresh exposure via a reissue from the small indie label Husky Pants. Best known as a member of the aughts-era electronic duo Emeralds, McGuire applies the principles of hypnotic ambient music to the guitar, creating a beguiling web of loops and repetitive riffs that take on a meditative quality over the course of several minutes. There are also very short one-minute tracks that come and go quickly while leaving a last impression. The overall album, however, like Paul Simon’s Seven Psalms, feels like it is best appreciated if taken in all at once.
8. Charlotte Cornfield, Could Have Done Anything
This month’s “this is slowly growing on me and might eventually end up overtaking music I thought I liked more” album. This low-key Canadian singer-songwriter cannily combines the usual piano and acoustic guitar instrumentation with subtle electronic touches, a testament to the deft production of Josh Kaufman. Like Kaufman’s band Bonny Light Horseman, Cornfield is skilled at building songs that start simply and then build to emotionally satisfying payoffs without seeming to build much at all. Instead, her songs unfold like flower blossoms, as if you have already heard them dozens of times before. It’s a measured, unflashy style that quietly awes the more time you spend with it.
We finally have an update on Lil Uzi Vert‘s borderline-mythical The Pink Tape. According to one of Uzi’s collaborators, it seems as though we may have to wait just a little bit longer.
Yesterday (May 30), fans on Instagram demanded an answer from Uzi’s producer, Lyle.
One fan questioned the quality of the songs, but Lyle Leduff immediately shut it down.
“songs are great,” Leduff said. “But they wanna make sure it’s right and not rush it. We all know y’all ready for it but we wanna make sure it’s a classic and not just a bunch of random songs.”
Lyle responded to another fan, assuring that The Pink Tape, and Uzi’s new music in general, will be worth the wait. He revealed that Uzi has been going hard in the studio and improving his craft day by day. There’s no telling as to when the tape may see the light of day, but it seems like Uzi is gearing up to drop their magnum opus.
“[Uzi] records 5 [songs] a day for the most part,” said Lyle. “Bruh still gets better and better. Its hard to scale down 1500+ songs to an album.”
The world of NBA player podcasts keeps growing, and a recent addition to the rotation is Podcast P with Paul George. The Los Angeles Clippers wing is pretty good at getting big names in the world of basketball to come onto his pod and have really entertaining conversations — my personal favorite so far is the one where Karl-Anthony Towns revealed that “Big Purr” is a nickname that he hates, which made George really want to call him Big Purr over and over.
On his most recent episode, a sit-down with reigning WNBA MVP A’ja Wilson of the Las Vegas Aces, we learned something fun about George: He apparently does one hell of a Charles Barkley impression. George was asked to do his impression, which involves saying the names of athletes just a little incorrectly while sounding exactly like Chuck. Everyone on set, including Wilson, found the bit hilarious.
George then shared the 100 percent correct opinion that his favorite Barkley impression comes from “the dude from Good Burger,” which is Kenan Thompson’s one from Saturday Night Live. Anyway, I hope that George has Shaquille O’Neal on his podcast sooner rather than later and does his Barkley impression, because I feel like he’d really enjoy it.
Yesterday, Grimes was revealed to be among the signees on a short statement from the Center For AI Safety (CAIS) that warned of AI posing an extinction threat to humanity.
Others putting their support behind it included OpenAI and DeepMind’s executives and various AI researchers, according to Ars Technica.
“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war,” the brief statement read. CAIS also noted in a press release that they want to “put guardrails in place and set up institutions so that AI risks don’t catch us off guard.”
“We need to be having the conversations that nuclear scientists were having before the creation of the atomic bomb,” Dan Hendrycks, CAIS’ director, added.
The move is a notable one, as Grimes has been a notable supporter of AI over the past few months. The musician encouraged others to use her voice for new AI music and even started her own platform where they could do it on. From there, the first GrimesAI collaboration with another artist, Kito, was released.
She also said that she wouldn’t mind if the AI use of her voice continued posthumously.
“If I was dead I’d really like people to do it,” Grimes previously shared. “But I’m not sure everyone would agree. I feel like maybe Prince would’ve been up for it. If it was one of his friends doing it maybe. It’s a tricky one.”
“The Lakes,” a bonus track from Folklore, isn’t one of Taylor Swift‘s best-known songs. Unless you’re a Swiftie, and every song of hers is her best-known song (except “Me!” which still hasn’t played during the Eras Tour). But if one of the three contestants on Tuesday’s episode of Jeopardy! had known “The Lakes,” they would have gone home that much richer.
The category in Final Jeopardy was “Literary Groups.” The clue: “Windermere, Thirlmere & Grasmere are 3 of the sites that helped give a 19th-century literary group this name.” None of the contestants, Diandra D’Alessio, Nathan Dennis, and Ilhana Redzovic (who ultimately won), correctly guessed the answer, which was, what is the Lake Poets. They also revealed themselves as non-Swifties, as the name “Windermere” appears in “The Lakes” (“Take me to the Lakes where all the poets went to die / I don’t belong and, my beloved, neither do you / Those Windermere peaks look like a perfect place to cry”).
As noted by Entertainment Weekly, “Though the answer eluded the players, fans of Swift’s were quick to point out the answer on Twitter.” One wrote, “Got final jeopardy right thanks to @taylorswift13! All the contestants need to have a tutorial from the lyrics of Professor Swift,” while another added, “Thank you Taylor Swift, because of you I got final jeopardy right tonight.”
Tonight’s Jeopardy question reminded me of a Taylor Swift song so I started humming it but I didn’t know the answer. Well the answer was part of the title of that song. …Taylor tried to tell me, but I didn’t listen. When I told my gf this she groaned so loud the cat jumped
— Matt (Taylor’s Version) (@MattIsATwitNow) May 31, 2023
Me swearing up and down for some reason I know the jeopardy final clue. And can’t figure out why. John looking at me bewildered
… Taylor swift is why.
The Lakes talks about Windermere peaks and she talks about the poets going there to die.
Like any good comic book tale, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse was faced with an almost impossible task: Live up to the Oscar-nominated, groundbreaking spectacle of 2018’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. According to the first batch of reviews, the sequel amazingly gets the job done, and somehow, with even more style.
Across the Spider-Verse, which brings back Miles Morales for another multiversal adventure, is racking up near-universal acclaim with the only complaint being that fans will have to wait a year for the second part of this tale that once again pushes the boundaries of animation and redefines what makes a great comic book movie in these days of superhero fatigue.
While watching Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse – which is very much on par with the first movie, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse – that won an Oscar and, somehow, came out five years ago – I did wonder how fine the line is between this being the immersive, wonderful experience it is, as opposed to something that just gives one a headache. I suspect it’s closer than we realize. I think that’s why I’m so amazed by these movies. On paper, these really probably shouldn’t work. “An ambitious mess,” would be the most likely headline. Instead, it’s one of the most, if not the most, immersive superhero stories going, pushing far beyond the boundaries of what superhero stories should and could be.
“Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” doesn’t just extend the tale of Miles Morales. The film advances that story into newly jacked-up realms of wow-ness that make it a genuine spiritual companion piece to the first film. That one spun our heads and then some; this one spins our heads even more (and would fans, including me, have it any other way?).
What sets this film apart from other superhero fare is its sheer commitment to authenticity. From the comic panel-like transitions to the dynamic action sequences, the movie exudes an organic love for its source material. It isn’t just a film but an experience and a nod to every Spider-Man fan who has ever flipped through the pages of a Marvel publication. The watercolor animation is a lustrous blend that swirls together to create something bold, enchanting, and innovative. It is a true step up from its predecessor, using a colorful palette that brings every frame to life as each scene appears as though it’s hand-painted.
Across the Spider-Verse vibrates with the same energy as its predecessor even when it feels more leaden with backstory. This chapter is the first of a planned two-part sequel to Into the Spider-Verse. Dividing the follow-up in half gives the screenplay, written by Phil Lord, Christopher Miller and David Callaham, more room to settle into the ridges and grooves of Miles’ story. The additional space proves to be both a gift and a curse as Across the Spider-Verse pulls us deeper into Miles’ world.
Looks, though, are merely a part of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse’s astonishing package. Staging a series of set pieces that are so swift and complex that trying to keep up is its own joy, the film leaves its blockbuster competition in the dust, buried beneath an avalanche of titanic urban-chaos action. The level of detailed planning and unhinged invention that must have gone into concocting these sequences is jaw-dropping. What ultimately matters, however, is the finished product, and what a product it is, with each milieu and chase, skirmish and rescue more distinctive and impressive than the last.
Like the work of a young artist who refuses to be restrained by the borders of the frame, “Across the Spider-Verse” is loaded with incredible imagery and fascinating ideas. It is a smart, thrilling piece of work that reminded me of other great part twos like “The Dark Knight” and “The Empire Strikes Back.” Like those films, it leaves viewers anxiously anticipating the next chapter (which will come in March 2024), and it earns its cliffhangers by grounding them in a story of young people refusing to submit to a concept of what a hero’s arc needs to be.
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse surges with visual inventiveness and vibrance in an undeniably strong evolution of the style established in Into the Spider-Verse. Miles and Gwen’s search for their place in the multiverse is relentless and exciting, almost to a fault, and though the plot is often an afterthought to the pure chaos of creation on display, strong performances and character arcs that feel true to the heroes we met last time help ensure that Across the Spider-Verse is a more-than-worthy follow-up to an all-time classic.
Truly, this couldn’t be real. How could it actually be possible that a sequel to a basically perfect movie could, itself, be so incredible? And yet, it wasn’t a dream. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is that incredible. It’s everything everyone loved about the first film, but more human, more complex, and more visually stunning. Directors Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K. Thompson lead a tour-de-force of filmmaking that transcends animation and will leave you heartbroken, breathless, and utterly dazzled.
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse swings into theaters on June 2.
At the moment, Jeff Bezos is building a house (well, he’s probably not personally hammering too many nails). As Page Six notes, the $175 million, 28,000-square-foot home is currently under construction in Beverly Hills. Since there’s still work to do on the building, Bezos and reported fiancée Lauren Sánchez need somewhere to stay, so they’ve apparently turned to Kenny G. It looks like Kenny is making a pretty penny off the arrangement, too.
TMZ reports that since March, Bezos and Sánchez have been renting Kenny G’s Malibu home. The cost: $600,000 per month. For reference, Zillow says the average value of a home in California (to buy, not rent) is about $728,000. What Bezos and Sánchez are paying doesn’t even include furniture: Kenny’s things are in storage and has been replaced with Bezos’ own stuff.
It’s not clear how long construction on Bezos’ home will last or how long he and Sánchez will rent from Kenny, but the annual rent adds up to $7.2 million. Bezos is worth about $114 billion, so the rent probably isn’t a huge deal for the Amazon founder.
Of Kenny’s property, TMZ notes, “The 5,500-square-foot house sits on 2 1/2 acres, with an enormous backyard, the obligatory pool, a screening room, recording studio, a 3,500-square-foot guesthouse, and a key to Little Dume Beach, one of the most exclusive beaches in the Bu.”
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