“Unholy” by Sam Smith and Kim Petras has been a major song for the second half of this year after blowing up on TikTok in August and then finally being released this month. Today, they’re back with a video for the mischievous hit.
The video doesn’t hesitate to dive into the track’s intense themes of adultery. Not only is it as raunchy as possible without being explicit, but it’s also full of pearls and intricate dance choreography and smoke and poles. It’s the perfect accompaniment to a song that’s already so cinematic on its own.
About the song, Smith said, “‘Unholy’… was one of the most glorious creative moments I’ve ever had as an artist. I’ve never had so much fun making a record. It was so cathartic and freeing to experiment like this and throw out the rule book. It has also been an honor to work with Kim and get to witness her brilliance. This song is about liberating oneself from the clutches of others’ secrets…” Petras said that Smith “really believed in me and encouraged me to be totally myself” She added, “I feel so honored that they chose me to be on this song.”
Earlier this week, Jordan Peterson broke down crying (twice) after Piers Morgan asked him to comment on Olivia Wilde calling him a “pseudo-intellectual hero to the incel community” while revealing that Chris Pine’s character in Don’t Worry Darling is based on the former professor who made a name for himself by attacking the transgender community. Between tears Peterson referred to himself as a “net force for good” who reaches out to “lonesome” men who have been rejected by “very picky” women. It’s a specious description for Peterson’s controversial talking points, but it apparently made a believer out of Megyn Kelly.
While hosting the equally right-wing commentator, Ben Shapiro, Kelly launched into an impassioned defense of Peterson’s audience who get treated as “some sort of demon” because they turned to him for what Kelly claims are “mental health problems.” Kelly then blasted Wilde for going after Peterson with Don’t Worry Darling. Via The Wrap:
“So screw her! As somebody who was at the inception of the #MeToo movement, I think I can say what those of us who were there at the beginning. And by the way, Olivia Wilde, you were not one of them, OK? You were not there. It was about just stopping men from making sexual favors at the office, a condition of advancement…. It was never meant to bastardize men writ large. That’s what people like her are doing, and it’s having a serious negative effect.”
In Kelly’s defense, she did play a prominent role in bringing down Roger Ailes’ reign of terror at Fox News. However, her sudden concern for mental health (and feminism) ring hollow. Just last year, she blasted the U.S. Tennis Association for providing “quiet rooms” after Naomi Osaka withdrew from the French Open to protect her mental health.
“Good Lord please never let the snowflakes who need this sign up for our military,” Kelly tweeted. However, the tweet blew up in Kelly’s face when her replies were filled with people pointing out that the United States Marine Corps has been proving quiet rooms for over 20 years. Whoops.
Rudy was just one of the MAGA “doinks” Seth Meyers laid into on Thursday night, and how “they’re always on camera complaining about something extremely weird. Like Rudy, who recently went on his podcast to insist, once again, the election was stolen — and also complain that no one was inviting him on TV anymore.”
(That Rudy’s podcast is called “Common Sense” is a joke in and of itself.)
Rudy went off on a whole unhinged tangent, in which he claimed that “they want us ignored, they want us put in prison, they want all our property taken from us, [and] they don’t want to allow us to be employed.” (No, we don’t know who “they” is either.) But Rudy’s real problem was clearly that “they don’t want any television station to put us on, and they say so. And the television stations comply. That’s not fascism?” (FYI: we don’t know who “they” is either.)
Meyers took a minute to answer Rudy’s question and explain that, “no, it’s not [fascism]. I don’t think it’s fascism so much as not wanting to scare the children at home.”
And as far as “they” not wanting “us” to be employed? “Who’s ‘us,’” Meyers wanted to know. “They don’t want you employed. And you shouldn’t be employed. You’re 78. You should be retired and enjoying your golden years — just playing golf in your JNCO shorts.”
You can watch the full clip above, beginning around the 9:00 mark.
Kehlani has two more dates on the North American leg of their Blue Water Road Trip tour, and it appears that’s not the only thing coming to an end in the Platinum-certified artist’s life: Where does their relationship with 070 Shake stand?
A TikTok of Kehlani vibing in the club is making the rounds online.”Who’s newly single, y’all?” the DJ standing next to Kehlani says into microphone, and Kehlani throws their hands in the air. Fans are interpreting this as confirmation that Kehlani and 070 Shake have split.
Baybeeee Kehlani confirmed that break up so we can stop playing detective lmaopic.twitter.com/KRd4SKACI3
In June, Kehlani posted to Instagram in celebration of “6 years of friendship [and] almost 1 year of love” with Shake (real name Danielle Balbuena), but that post has since been deleted. (One fan also noticed that they no longer follow each other on Instagram.) The allegedly former couple had previously put their love on display in late May with Kehlani’s “melt” music video.
On House of the Dragon, time is precious. Episode by episode, time passed offscreen, whether it be six months or a year. Over the course of the first five episodes, a few years had passed within the show. These small but significant time jumps established ongoing rifts between the Taragaryen family – namely King Viserys, Daemon, and Rhaenyra – as well as the simmering tension between former besties Rhaenyra and Queen Alicent.
By episode six, the series jumps forward a decade, and in doing so recasts several actors — including the Rhaenyra and Alicent with, respectively, the excellent Emma D’Arcy and Olivia Cooke. In this episode, Rhaeneyra and Alicent, although the same at their core, are different people. Time has changed them like it does all of us. Rhaenyra, who always longed for a different life than a royal one, is reckless with her suitors and has several children. Alicent has followed in her father Otto Hightower’s footsteps by trying to have some power in King’s Landing.
The time jump isn’t getting the warmest welcome. It feels a bit like the audience was cheated out of years worth of content because we were robbed of watching Rhaenyra and Alicent become these people. But that’s not a con, that’s the point.
House of the Dragonisn’t interested in being like Game of Thrones, which followed the POV structure of George R.R. Martin’s books. Game of Thrones’ intimate, patient (until the end) narrative style invited the audience to engage more (and even too) deeply with the world of Westeros. The Dragon Show is also hardly the first television series to successfully use time jumps to accelerate the story and advance the characters. Between seasons and episodes, Mad Men jumped forward in time months or more. The gap in time lost with the characters made them even more mysterious and appealing: knowing that we missed months of Don Draper’s life kept the intrigue.
Another AMC show, Halt and Catch Fire, jumped ahead four years in its season three finale and in doing so, skipped major events in the characters’ lives. This skip got the characters exactly where they needed to be for the fourth and final season. For its final season, The Americans jumped forward in time from 1984 to 1987. Doing so didn’t rob the audience of character development. When the writing is incisive and the acting superb, witnessing every moment is unnecessary.
House of the Dragon has no interest in that: it breezes past the small moments and follows the broad strokes, making the show a bit easier to watch in that you can simply watch it and understand what’s happening and who is who without spending hours on the A Song of Ice and Fire Wiki. In essence, it is more of a television show. Personally I love that. Leading up to its premiere, I loudly told many people that I have no interest in engaging with House of the Dragon beyond its Sunday night slot. I’m thinking about it a little more than I wanted or expected, but I am not thinking about it so much that I’m losing sleep or brain cells.
House of the Dragon’s audacity to skip ten whole years shows confidence in itself. The writers knew that if it had given us that whale decade, or even some of it, the show would have become redundant. After already showing how things go wrong leading up to the inevitable war this show is about, seeing tensions rise and fall over and over might be illuminating, but redundant. In essence, the House of the Dragon time jumps have saved the audience a lot of energy. The show simply is what it is: a soapy family drama with dragons in it.
Quavo and Takeoff are now a week away from the release of their album Only Built For Infinity Links, and have shared its latest single, “Nothing Changed.” It’s exactly the sort of thumping trap banger you would expect to hear from the duo, with a beat produced by Marcel ’‘Mars’‘ Korkutata and longtime Migos collaborator DJ Durel. The two Atlanta rappers split the track evenly with their verses, spitting rapid-fire boasts, with Quavo name-dropping Batman and Takeoff using an extended “chains” rhyme scheme playing on their album’s title.
If anyone was hoping for a hint about the duo’s ongoing relationship with Offset, they’ll be disappointed, though. Through the three previously released singles — “Hotel Lobby,” “Us Vs. Them,” and “Big Stunna” — they’ve studiously avoided addressing the potential controversy regarding the trio’s potential breakup. The closest they’ve come was an interview explaining why Takeoff wasn’t on their 2017 hit “Bad And Boujee” — hardly a satisfactory explanation for the group’s current status questions.
In July, Quavo did give a promising perspective on the situation, though. “I feel like every group member has to establish themselves,” he told GQ. “Their own body of work. If not, you start losing members.” Maybe we will find out if that’s what’s happening with Migos when Only Built For Infinity Links arrives on October 7 via Motown.
Now that Taylor Swift is going full steam ahead on re-recording her first six albums (and gearing up for the October release of her tenth studio album, Midnights), Scooter Braun — who purchased her catalog from Big Machine Music Group owner Scott Borchetta in 2019 — apparently has some “regrets” about his deal.
During a new interview with Variety, Braun speaks about the deal. He eventually sold her catalog for a reported $300 million paycheck to an unnamed investment group in November 2020. “The regret I have is I made the assumption that everyone, once the deal was done, was going to have a conversation with me, see my intent, see my character and say, great, let’s be in business together,” Braun said in the new article.
“My team attempted to enter into negotiations with Scooter Braun,” Swift shared on social media in November 2020, when his sale of her catalog took place, seemingly without her knowledge or inclusion. “Scooter’s team wanted me to sign an ironclad NDA stating I would never say another word about Scooter Braun unless it was positive, before we could even look at the financial records of BMLG (which is always the first step in a purchase of this nature). So, I would have to sign a document that would silence me forever before I could even have a chance to bid on my own work.”
“He would never even quote my team a price. These master recordings were not for sale to me,” she continued.
Been getting a lot of questions about the recent sale of my old masters. I hope this clears things up. pic.twitter.com/sscKXp2ibD
Later in the article, Braun alleges that he too was under an NDA, seemingly referencing one from Borchetta, before also hinting at Swift. “When I did that deal, I was under a very strict NDA with the gentleman who owned it, and I couldn’t tell any artist,” he said. “I wasn’t allowed to. I wasn’t legally allowed to. What I told him was, hey, if any of the artists want to come back and buy into this, you have to let me know. And he shared a letter with me that’s out there publicly that – you know, the artist you’re referring to said, ‘I don’t want to participate in my masters. I’ve decided to, you know, not make this deal,’ blah, blah, blah. So that was the idea I was under.”
Continue scrolling for some internet reactions to Scooter Braun’s interview.
“D’Angelo would for sure be an Andrew Tate fan.” -Adrian Mcnair
If you’re within five miles of the Koreatown neighborhood in Los Angeles, you may have seen today’s guest on any of the dating apps, but today you can hear comedian and television writer Adrian McNair talk to Matt and Vince to talk about The Wire season one episode six, “The Wire.”
Discussing the titular episode of the series, we learn that Vince sometimes fantasizes about being a cop. Not because of the power, status, or license to drive drunk, but because they seem like they’re bros who look out for each other. Imagine showing up to work as bombed as Auggie Polk does. Are your coworkers going to cover your ass like McNulty and Kima do? And you get a gun? At this point no one expects police to do any actual good in the world, so if you do even the bare minimum you would get worshiped like a hero and huh okay maybe this show is copaganda in that it makes joining the force look more and more appealing every episode.
Settle a bet: Is Michael B. Jordan doing good acting in this episode or is he just talking fast? Put your response in a five-star review on Apple Podcasts.
Support the Pod: become a patron at patreon.com/Frotcast to get more bonus content than you could ever want. Sign up for the Pod Yourself a Shoutout tier to hear Vince give you a corner nickname on the podcast, like today’s newest members: The Onion Volcano, B-Squared, Lebowski, Hogan’s Heroes, Math Class, The Kizzer, The Wheeze, and Ghostbuster.
Contrary to what Kid Cudi has said multiple times in the promotional media tour for his new multimedia project Entergalactic, the practice of using a long-form visual film as a delivery system for new music has been around for decades. Almost from the time music videos became a way to market new singles, artists have pushed the boundaries of the format, resulting in short films, anthologies, and musical films.
Michael Jackson put out Moonwalker in 1988, pairing several of the singles from his album Bad with short films, concert footage, and archival clips. In it, he turns into a freaking robot; this sequence was later used as the basis for an arcade beat-’em-up video game. In 2003, Daft Punk turned their album Discovery into an anime, the clunkily titled Interstella 5555: The 5tory Of The 5ecret 5tar 5ystem. This film introduced narrative to the form, soundtracking each sequence with a song from the album to unspool the tale of a group of musical blue aliens thwarting an evil music manager (high cinema, this was not).
More recently, Beyonce’s musical anthology Black Is King, which was released on Disney Plus in 2020 as a visual companion to her 2019 album The Lion King: The Gift, is itself a musical companion to the live-action remake of The Lion King. It hybridized both approaches above, using a string of colorful but disparate music videos to pull together a loose narrative mirroring that of the original film, with an outcast monarch returning to claim his throne. Even Guapdad 4000 put together a short film for his album 1176 titled Stoop Kid earlier this year, plugging the project’s more emotive singles into a semi-autobiographical day-in-the-life coming-of-age tale.
I say all of that to say that Kid Cudi’s Entergalactic is not “groundbreaking” in the sense that it’s never been done before. However, what sets it apart is its beautiful animation, which is used in service of an old-school rom-com that film industry professionals are quick to tell us has nearly gone extinct. Despite Cudi’s insistence on calling it a “special” (artists, amirite?), it holds up as a movie in its own right. While watching it on Netflix, I could see myself paying the now-exorbitant price of a movie ticket, leaning back in the coziest seat in a darkened theater, and downing a bucket of popcorn after Nicole Kidman regales me with the wonders of taking in a film at AMC (and I don’t even like popcorn).
And when I say old-school rom-com, I mean a straight-up New York City, When Harry Met Sally, You’ve Got Mail, 27 Dresses classic of the genre — with some twists. For one, it centers Black folks in a way that a lot of standard-issue rom-coms do not. The central couple — Kid Cudi’s Jabari and Jessica Williams’ Meadow — is Black, their world revolves around a diverse array of characters (played by Cudi’s friends like Ty Dolla Sign, Vanessa Hudgens, Jaden Smith, and Timothée Chalamet, who inexplicably resembles Logic here), and their eccentric, artistic occupations. The film also indulges in many of the most sacred tropes of the genre but isn’t afraid to play with them.
For instance, there isn’t just one meet-cute: There are several near misses before Jabari and Meadow finally cross paths and set off on their love story. Their dates are highlighted by selections from the album; when Jabari meets Meadow for the first time, “Angel” significantly plays in the background. A bike ride through the city is backtracked by “Willing To Trust” with Ty Dolla Sign. Cudi and Williams display easy chemistry, while the animation — which has been compared to Spider-Man: Enter The Spider-Verse, although I find it more in line with Netflix’s equally excellent animated series Arcane — is as detailed as it is stylized, effectively conveying characters’ emotions while dazzling with psychedelic imagery and vivid color.
As far as the album goes, it falls somewhere in the middle of Cudi’s output; it’s nowhere as bland as Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven or Passion, Pain & Demon Slayin’ but fails to reach the heights of his debut Man On The Moon: The End Of Day or his most recent release, Man On The Moon III: The Chosen. The songwriting is almost painfully earnest — but why is that such a bad thing? A fun effect of releasing the album alongside a visual companion is that each forces the listener/viewer to consider itself in the light of the other. Where a cynical critic — i.e. most of us — would sneer down our noses at the album’s sincerity, the film’s theme skews that perspective. Because our heroes cannot find love unless they are willing to strip off their armor and be as vulnerable as Cudi is in his music. That he limits himself to his usual themes could be seen as creative timidity or, as with the crowd-pleasing tropes of romantic comedy, it could be seen as giving the people what they want.
Not every element of the movie or the album works well in concert with all the others — subplots involving Jabari’s anxiety about selling out at work and a dating app turning out to be a scam go nowhere after a lot of buildups. These subplots appear to attempt to inject social commentary into the film’s narrative, but they’re mostly pretty superficial and not very insightful. But since when do we come to Kid Cudi for social commentary? It’s okay that everything isn’t perfect; that’s one of the messages that has permeated Cudi’s music since day one. Now, it saturates his filmography, which like his music, has shown what a genre is capable of if only one is willing to take a chance.
Entergalactic is out now via Wicked Awesome/Republic. The special is now streaming on Netflix.
Jon Stewart left The Daily Show seven years ago, and it’s fair to say that the world looks completely different now. Those seven years have seen enormous strife and plenty of downs (and some ups) for mankind with Trevor Noah presiding as master of ceremonies on the satiric late-night show. And Noah kept things both funny and critical throughout the pandemic, the George Floyd protests, and so many more difficult sources of upheaval. This week (and apparently to the surprise of his staff, along with the Comedy Central audience), Noah announced that he’ll leave the gig where he dealt out the show’s brand of cultural commentary for seven years. What happened?
No immediate answers exist to that question, but one big factor would be that Noah signed a five-year contract in 2017, which means that he didn’t sign a renewal deal. There’s no telling whether this has to do with a personal choice or if ratings had any say in the matter, but Noah did guide people (with scathing humor) through the Trump administration and more. He also declared, “I realized that after the seven years, my time is up.” He then added, “But in the most beautiful way, honestly.” Here’s more:
“I’ve loved hosting this show. It’s been one of my greatest challenges. It’s been one of my greatest joys. I’ve loved trying to figure out how to make people laugh even when the stories are particularly sh*tty on the worst days.”
From there, Comedy Central issued a statement of gratitude towards Noah while pointing out that there’s “no timetable for his departure.” In other words, they’ve got the luxury of (some) time to figure out who might host next. Perhaps they’ll go Jeopardy! style and choose more than one host? There’s no telling, but Roy Wood, Jr., Desi Lydic, and Ronny Chieng are onboard as contributors, and a social media groundswell is building for Samantha Bee to take the reins. She possibly possesses the bandwidth (due to another recent programming development) to do so. There’s been no definitive word on that subject, and of course, there are plenty of The Daily Show contributors on hand if producers decide to promote from the inside. Or maybe they’ll even swing back to Jordan Klepper. Hopefully, we’ll hear more soon.
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