Once upon a time, if an artist was booked to do a residency in Las Vegas, it meant they were getting older, past their prime, or otherwise washed up. Not so, these days.
After hit makers like Adele, Christina Aguilera, and Usher made Las Vegas a hotspot for performers at the heights of their careers, more acts than ever are looking to get in on the action — including, reportedly, Beyoncé.
According to The New York Post, the Las Vegas Sphere owner James Dolan (who also owns Madison Square Garden and the Knicks basketball team) is in talks with the Renaissance singer to have her own residency at the brand-new venue when U2’s own run ends next year.
The Post notes that both Jay-Z, Beyoncé’s husband, and her mom, Tina Knowles, have toured the Sphere, but her team wants $10 million for the residency — the same amount U2 earned for their own 36-date stay. While this would seem to be good for the venue’s operators, because of the upfront payments, they could actually make much less money than they would for a usual concert. The majority of the Sphere’s revenue comes from suite sales and advertising on the LED exterior of the venue, and it’s already lost a little under $100 million since it was completed and opened earlier this year.
Still, a Beyoncé residency would be nothing to shake a stick at, as her fans have already proven they’ll collectively shell out the GDP of a small country to see the Queen live.
Each week our staff of film and TV experts surveys the entertainment landscape to select the ten best new/newish shows available for you to stream at home. We put a lot of thought into our selections, and our debates on what to include and what not to include can sometimes get a little heated and feelings may get hurt, but so be it, this is an important service for you, our readers. With that said, here are our selections for this week.
What we have on our hands here is a Bachelor spinoff about an older gentleman looking for love from a group of similarly aged ladies. Which is… honestly kind of adorable. Good for them. And good for us, too, especially if one of the episodes features a date where they eat dinner at a diner at 4:45 and then go watch an episode of Columbo in matching recliners. This was written as a joke but honestly sounds kind of wonderful. That’s true love right there, people.
Robert Kirkman’s other most beloved comic book series proved that Amazon really is doing superheroes and supervillains better than anyone else right now. When this round of episodes begins, Mark Grayson (Steven Yeun) will need to fully reckon with the implications of that climactic fight in the sky with his dad, Omni-Man (J.K. Simmons). Additionally, his love life will receive new wrinkles, and Walton Goggins will be back, meaning that the man who would be Boyd Crowder again is achieving TV supremacy with every passing year. New characters shall be portrayed by Ben Schwartz and Tatiana Maslany.
Kristen Stewart’s gay ghost hunting show has everything: slayances, spook-kikis, haunted strip clubs, and comedian Roz Hernandez snacking on donuts while she yells at homophobic poltergeists. The group – a hodgepodge of paranormal experts that includes a psychic, a witch, and a tarot card reader – road trips across the country in this docuseries produced by the Queer Eye creators, chatting it up with demonic entities and benevolent spooks to get to the root of some very real, very human problems. If there’s a better way to spend your weekend than watching a group of well-dressed Queer spiritualists commune with the dead while cracking jokes and busting stereotypes, we don’t want to know about it.
— This movie stars Sandra Oh and Awkwafina and Will Ferrell, which is a good start
— This is the official summary: “Anne and her estranged train-wreck of a sister, Jenny, must work together to help cover their mother’s gambling debts. When Anne’s beloved dog is kidnapped, they set out on a wild cross-country trek to get the cash.”
Rick and Morty used to take notoriously long breaks between seasons, but not this time. Season seven of the animated sci-fi comedy series returns less than a year after the season six finale. There have been big changes behind the scenes, however: co-creator Justin Roiland, who also voiced the title characters, was fired from the show. Tricky line to straddle going forward, but the show has rarely let us down before.
Rap Sh!t has returned for a second season which means there is a new batch of episodes that follow the consistently entertaining lives of Shawna and Mia as they rise up the ranks in Miami’s rap scene. Season one of the Issa Rae-led series was all about establishing their rap careers, and now in season two, the duo looks to take things beyond South Beach. With new heights come new struggles as Shawna and Mia will have their integrity tested over and over again in exchange for quick success. Through it all, you can expect to laugh and cheer on the duo all while enjoying the show’s stellar soundtrack which features appearances from real-life hip-hop stars and up-and-coming acts who fit the show’s aesthetic.
— A biopic of Civil Rights leader Bayard Rustin, who helped MLK organize the 1963 March on Washington but whose efforts were minimized at the time and therefore largely forgotten since because he was openly gay at a time when that was not convenient for public figures
— From Higher Ground, the production company helmed by Barack and Michelle Obama
— Loaded with talent like Colman Domingo and Chris Rock and Jeffrey Wright and Audra McDonald
Emily Blunt portrays a down-on-her-luck single mom who launches a new career alongside Chris Evans’ pharmaceutical sales rep. Not a great idea, ultimately, given that she becomes involved in a racketeering scheme. And of course, she begins to realize that this company’s success is coming at a ghastly price for humanity. This is a dramatized version of the rise and fall of Insys Therapeutics, which no longer exists, and yeah, you will definitely find out why.
Apple TV+’s Fingernails turns love into an equation that can only be solved by, you guessed it, AI. Jessie Buckley plays Anna, a woman in a long term, algorithmically-sound relationship with Ryan (The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White) that’s been verified and sterilized by something called The Love Test – a machine that demands a couple’s fingernails in order to qualify their relationship’s percentage of success. When Anna meets her new co-worker Amir (Riz Ahmed), numbers give way to actual chemistry, causing her to doubt everything she thought she knew about love. It’s probably the most interesting soft-fi romance drama you’ll see this year.
Nearly every actor from the original, cult-favorite Scott Pilgrim film is back for this anime-inspired Netflix series that also functions as a clever remix. Is it as good as the actual run of sequels we should have been given over the last 15 years? Noting could be, but it comes close, leaning on its all-world voice cast and the very specific charm that drove the film and Bryan Lee O’Malley’s original graphic novels.
10. Please Don’t Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain (Peacock)
PEACOCK
The blurring of the barrier between comedy and drama has been good for all of us, but occasionally we just need someone to throw a bunch of weird, wild, crap at the screen without there needing to be a message or a point. Please Don’t Destroy: The Treasure Of Foggy Mountain (a film about some 20somethings getting lost in the woods while hunting for treasure), feels like exactly that kind of film, leaning toward comedy chaos with the Please Don’t Destroy comedy trio (of SNL digital short fame), Bowen Yang, Meg Statler, and late night comedy GOAT Conan O’Brien.
Taylor Sheridan currently has 6666 in the works on the Yellowstone side, but first, he’s taking viewers back to the real Old West. David Oyelowo portrays the legendary Black U.S. Deputy Marshal. This series will harken back to the Post-Reconstruction era, in which Bass Reeves became a notorious frontier hero by capturing thousands of the most frightening criminals in the land. Oyelowo will be accompanied by Dennis Quaid, Garrett Hedlund, and Donald Sutherland.
The seventh season of Big Mouth ties Orange is the New Black and Grace and Frankie as Netflix’s longest-running scripted series (it will break the record in its eighth and final season). Not bad for an animated show about horny teenagers and hormone monsters. Guest stars this season include Megan Thee Stallion, Lupita Nyong’o, and Pulitzer Prize winner Lin-Manuel Miranda as a pubic hair. Good show.
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters stars Kurt Russell and Godzilla and… are you already sold? You should be. The first live-action TV show in the MonsterVerse — which also includes Kong: Skull Island and Godzilla vs. Kong — makes you care as much about the humans, including Kurt and his son Wyatt, as Godzilla and his “Titan” friends. In an up-and-down year for genre shows, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters is a highlight.
There are cringe comedies and then there’s Showtime’s The Curse, a limited series about a married pair of alt-HGTV home flippers gentrifying their New Mexico neighborhood via eco-friendly monstrosities and calling it philanthropy. Created by two masters of squirm – Benny Safdie and Nathan Fielder – the show is a voyeuristic exercise that tests fans’ capacity for second-hand embarrassment as its main characters, the affluent Asher (Fielder) and Whitney (a shockingly unlikable Emma Stone) bulldoze the soul of their small, impoverished community with just a few reality TV cameras and a staggering amount of white privilege. It’s the best, most uncomfortable TV show you’ll watch this year.
Mike Flanagan fans, get ready. The Haunting of Hill House and Midnight Mass showrunner is back along with Carla Gugino, who will spook your soul right out of your bod and deliver a “consequential” evening to “a collection of stunted hearts” that is the Usher family. Yikes. Do not expect a literal adaptation of the Edgar Allen Poe short story. The story focuses here on the hell created by ruthless siblings Roderick and Madeline Usher, who built Fortunato Pharmaceuticals into an empire of wealth, privilege, and power. Horrible secrets shall surface when the heirs to the Usher dynasty start dying at the hands of a mysterious woman, portrayed with glee by Gugino.
Somehow, Joel Kinnaman has now been physically transformed to barely look like Joel Kinnaman while still starring in this alternate-history space-race series, and in the year 2003, the Earth’s nations are competing like hell to capture and mine asteroids full of precious minerals. That doesn’t sound ominous at all, and of course, there’s still plenty of beefing between nations after Happy Valley has grown in size on Mars’ surface.
There’s some Glass Onion flavor to this mystery series that follows Darby (Emma Corrin) accepting an invitation to visit a reclusive billionaire with an assortment of other guests. One of the lucky participants will be not-so-lucky and end up dead, and at that point, Darby must use her amateur-sleuth abilities (including hacking and being a typically astute Gen Z-er) to solve the case before anyone else ends up dead. Along with Corrin (The Crown), this show also stars Harris Dickinson of the upcoming The Iron Claw and Clive Owen, who is already so many projects and yet who should be in more.
David Fincher — director of movies like Fight Club and The Social Network — is back with another uplifting tale about a well-adjusted dude. From the official description: “Solitary, cold, methodical and unencumbered by scruples or regrets, a killer waits in the shadows, watching for his next target. Yet, the longer he waits, the more he thinks he’s losing his mind, if not his cool.” Jokes aside, Fincher does these kinds of movies as well as anyone and usually makes them compelling, so give it a go if you want to spend a few hours with a murderous sociopath in the safest possible way.
The final season of this royal soap opera is upon us, and this half-season confronts the royal elephant in the room while finally giving Diana her due during an exploration of her final year of life. Sadly, the world already knows how a car chase between the paparazzi and Diana/Dodi Fayed ended, but the show pulls off these four episodes with stunning grace. So much could have gone wrong here with the recounting and dramatization of tragic events that shook the world, but Netflix does the thing here. Not an easy feat for sure.
33For decades, fans have loved Dolly Parton, both for her great country hits and her outspoken attitude. It’s for this reason that some have wondered if she’d ever try running for President, given she is a pretty unifying figure.
During a new interview with Metro tied to her album Rockstar, Parton was posed with the question of whether she’d consider heading for the White House. The topic started given that Parton’s “World On Fire” single found her upset with the current politicians.
“No,” she said. “I don’t think anybody could actually do a great job at that. I think we’ve had enough ‘boobs’ in the White House.”
“I would have no interest in politics,” she added. “I try to do my thing through my songs, through the way I accept people, and the way I try to make a difference. I’m not smart enough to be in politics, or maybe I’m too smart.”
Parton also made it clear that she is not at all qualified for politics, as she continued to point out that her job is to melt hearts and inspire change through music.
“Either way, I’m not qualified for that type of a job,” she shared. “But I’m pretty qualified to do what I do, which is to point people in the right direction, to write about it in songs or speak about things.”
Emerald Fennell isn’t having any of that talk about any kind of pressure to deliver with her second film, Saltburn. She says the standards she sets for herself are so far and beyond what anyone could come up with anyway. Though, not a lot of filmmakers had the success she did with her first movie, Promising Young Woman. It’s hard to judge based on box office since it was a 2020 release, but it does seem like a movie everyone has now seen. And then there are the accolades, which include an Oscar nomination for Best Picture and an Oscar win for Best Original Screenplay. It might not get to her standards, but there is certainly anticipation for a second film.
With Saltburn, set in 2006, Fennell introduces us to Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan, who is fantastic). At first, Oliver seems nice enough (this becomes an interesting point of contention in the interview ahead), but does tell some untruths to win the friendship and affection of his Oxford classmate Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi). Over break Felix invites Oliver to spend time at his parents’ estate, Saltburn, where Oliver’s deceptions, let’s say, start to escalate. Though, there’s one pretty amazing scene where Keoghan’s Oliver Quick dances fully naked throughout Saltburn and looks like he’s having the time of his life.
But is Oliver Quick nice at first? Or is he just vulnerable, which makes him seem nice? Is Emerald Fennell nice? Or does she want to be the villain? Let’s find out.
I remember being at the premiere of Promising Young Woman at Sundance in 2020. When you introduced the movie I remember thinking, “Well she seems nice,” not knowing yet what that movie would be or the the kind of movies you’d be unleashing onto the world.
Yeah, but isn’t it really an important part of the process that I seem really nice?
But I’m under the impression you are nice. I’ve never heard a bad word about you.
Well, I spend a great deal of my time making people think that I’m nice.
I see.
I mean, look, no, it’s interesting for you to say because I think that’s so much about everything that I’m interested in, is how slippery all that is.
Slippery is a good word.
And how much of what we do is presenting ourselves in a certain way. I mean, look, to be honest, I am quite nice, which is actually very boring. I do try to be a reasonably decent person. But everything that I like to do is to sort of … the weaponized charm of the captains is not something I’m unfamiliar with.
I mean, to your point, Oliver Quick seems nice too, at first.
Does he?
Kind of.
But does he? Does he seem nice?
Well…
Or does he seem vulnerable?
Well, that’s interesting because I think vulnerability can create a sense that they are nice.
Sure. But he’s not nice.
He’s not nice. No, he’s not. I read him wrong. I was off base on him. He is not nice.
But what I mean is that isn’t it all a question of framing? Because, actually, the first moment we meet him, we know he’s a liar.
Sure, but…
We know he’s probably not nice from that opening moment of the movie. And then, actually, what we are shown is not him, but other people’s reaction to him. He himself is always a kind of an enigmatic presence-
But we do feel for him though, at first.
Totally, we feel for him. Absolutely.
Because we’ve all been in those positions where we want to be liked. And maybe you say something that’s not 100 percent true to get someone to like you.
Oh, a thousand percent. I suppose the thing is that it’s always really interesting, it’s always about why we give people a sort of moral judgment. But, actually, it’s interestingly not necessarily based on fact. But that’s why I hope, it’s why it’s so fun making the movie is all the things – it’s like we think of Felix as being really nice, such a nice guy, when actually in every scene he does something really shitty. From genetic or spoiled or capricious … or racist. But we leave thinking he’s nice. So yeah, I mean, that’s the fun of it, really.
I don’t know how much you think about this, but you’re in a really interesting position because very few people have the success that you had with your first movie. And now Saltburn is only your second feature film but there are expectations.
No, because I also have the highest possible standards, making it excruciatingly difficult. I myself am only interested in making the best possible thing. So, the external expectation is nothing compared to the excruciating nightmare-ish burning kind of self-motivation that I have. So, I think really early on, the response from Promising Young Woman was so incredible. It was so out of all context. It was just incredible that really quite early on, I sort of had to just say, “I can only just make the things I want to make.” And if people like them, that’s incredible. And if they don’t, there’s nothing I can do about that. I can only really try and make something that I believe is really, really good and that I really like. Otherwise, I think you just drive yourself completely mad.
You’ve mentioned seeing Barry Keoghan in The Killing of a Sacred Deer and knowing you wanted to work with him. He’s really terrific in this. He reminds me of a young Dustin Hoffman in this.
Interesting. I think he’s a kind of Robert Mitchum to me.
Oh, that’s interesting.
He’s got that kind of charisma, which is unmatched. It’s unmatched. He is an unprecedented person. It’s not just of our time, but I think of any time. I’ve never really seen anyone like Barry. I like to go in really, really, really close – love the closest closeups. And I’ve never … Barry is exactly what I always wanted Oliver to be, which was somebody that we can try and get inside and we will never, ever know, the closer you get.
Well, he seems fearless. I don’t think it’s giving anything away to say he does a very interesting dance at one point in this movie. I don’t think a lot of actors would do that.
I think that’s the thing about this movie – and the whole cast, honestly, and the whole crew – it’s we were all dedicated. We all wanted to make the thing that provokes a physical response as much as an emotional or intellectual one. This movie is a physical experience, I think. And Barry is one of the greatest physical actors. All of them are. That’s why I loved working with him so much, we are just, both of us, determined to jump off a cliff, even if it means we end up smashed on the rocks on the bottom. Or even if that is, in fact, the most interesting outcome: to be smashed up on the rocks. That’s what we want. And so, working with him is so thrilling because we’re always pushing each other to be more interesting, more difficult, more complicated, more excruciating. All of that stuff.
Saltburn is set in 2006. So no iPhones or real social media. If it were set today someone would put on Instagram that this Oliver Quick guy was acting weird.
But think about catfishing today. Think about how slippery all of our identities are now.
Oh yeah, that’s true.
Because I actually thought so much about this film. I’ve been thinking about Saltburn for seven or eight years now, but it makes total sense to me that it was written during COVID, where there was never a time that we were more voyeuristic. And more obsessively looking at other people’s lives and more incapable of touching. We were forbidden from touching each other. Fluid was terrifying. We were bleaching our groceries. And so, this is just honestly a film about looking at people and not being able to touch them. But at the same time, everyone is engaged profoundly in what Oliver is engaged in now.
No, that kind of just hit me. I was in New York City during COVID and it was obviously pretty bad. And I think that’s why this movie hit me the way it did. And I didn’t realize that until you just said that, but that makes perfect sense.
Yeah, sort of longing to touch and what happens when you can’t touch the thing you want to touch, what that does to you. It makes you completely insane.
And you know what? Despite what you were trying to convince me, I do think you’re nice.
Oh, good. No, I am nice, unfortunately. It’s really boring. But I am nice. I wish I was a villain! I’m not.
‘Saltburn’ opens in select theaters this weekend. You can contact Mike Ryan directly on Twitter.
“I’ve been interested in winds for a long time, so it was just a natural progression for me to go into flutes,” André 3000 said in a statement. “I just like messing with instruments, and I gravitated mostly toward wind.”
According to Sony’s pre-save link, New Blue Sun will be available on Apple Music, Amazon Music, and Spotify.
Check out the artwork and tracklist below.
Epic Records
1. “I Swear, I Really Wanted To Make A ‘Rap’ Album But This Is Literally The Way The Wind Blew Me This Time”
2. “The Slang Word P(*)ssy Rolls Off The Tongue With Far Better Ease Than The Proper Word Vagina. Do You Agree?”
3. “That Night In Hawaii When I Turned Into A Panther And Started Making These Low Register Purring Tones That I Couldn’t Control … Sh¥t Was Wild”
4. “BuyPoloDisorder’s Daughter Wears A 3000 Button Down Embroidered”
5. “Ninety Three ‘Til Infinity And Beyoncé”
6. “Ghandi, Dalai Lama, Your Lord & Savior J.C. / Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, And John Wayne Gacy”
7. “Ants To You, Gods To Who?”
8. “Dreams Once Buried Beneath The Dungeon Floor Slowly Sprout Into Undying Gardens”
Jimmy Kimmel sort of came to Donald Trump‘s defense after the former president was accused of using Nazi terminology. Although, by the time the late night host was done, Trump was more roasted than vindicated. Kimmel’s backhanded argument that the former president isn’t copying Hitler came while addressing Joe Biden‘s reaction to Trump’s increasingly antisemitic rhetoric.
“Biden, last night, weighed in on the furor over recent comments by Donald Trump vowing to root out what he called the ‘vermin’ in our country, which is everyone who opposes him,” Kimmel quipped. “Joe pointed out that vermin is a specific word with a specific meaning that echoes the language of Nazi Germany.”
Kimmel, however, isn’t fully convinced that Trump is like Hitler, and the late night host offered a pretty compelling case.
“I know a lot of people have been comparing Trump to Hitler lately, but there are some major differences between them,” Kimmel said. “For instance, Hitler was married to a woman who who loved him.”
After landing the zinger, Kimmel laid out his brutal argument for what he thinks Trump is really doing.
“I get why people believe Trump is intentionally using words that Nazis used. I just don’t agree that he is,” Kimmel said before dropping his thesis. “In order to know what words the Nazis used, you’d have to read, OK? You’d have to have some basic knowledge of history. Trump thinks Frederick Douglas is alive and doing an amazing job. He thinks Lincoln invented the Town Car, OK? He isn’t echoing Nazi terminology. He’s coming up with it all on his own. And you have to give credit where credit is due.”
This weekend, I will do something I swore I would never do for most of my life: Attend a concert by The Eagles. Throughout my teens, twenties, and a big chunk of my thirties, I loathed the laidback troubadours of decadent 1970s Los Angeles with great gusto. I despised them for all of the usual kneejerk reasons that people hate the Eagles: they did not rock, they espoused problematic opinions about women (witchy or not), they epitomized the smug and unearned superiority of baby boomers, they were played way too much on FM radio, they were responsible for the monumentally terrible song “Get Over It,” etc.
But in my late 30s — around the time I regrettably printed the words “Don Henley sucks” at the start of my second book — my opinion changed. The 2013 documentary History Of Eagles had a lot to do with it — a band willing to make themselves look this unlikable somehow made them more likable to me. Each time Glenn Frey fired one of his guitar players with increasing ruthlessness, a growing percentage of my heart was won over. I couldn’t help myself. The Eagles were Sid, and I was Nancy. After that, I could no longer live with the fallacy of disliking the Eagles when they weren’t all that different (musically, philosophically, cocaine-ically) from other boomer rock acts from the late ’70s L.A. era: Fleetwood Mac, Warren Zevon, Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt … and Steely Dan.
I forgot to mention that my interest in seeing the Eagles on this tour — which is advertised as their last, but in classic classic-rock fashion will continue for at least the next few years — was due in part to the inclusion of Steely Dan as the opener. Alas, health problems have sidelined the 75-year-old Donald Fagen, so the Dan are replaced on my bill by the Doobie Brothers. (I’m hoping against hope that “Michael McDonald Does The Backing Vocals For ‘Peg’” will be slotted on the Doobies’ set list.) When the tour was announced earlier this year, there was some predictable griping about the pairing, with some loud groans about how the Eaglesshould be opening for Steely Dan, man. This underlined the unexpected (and already much-discussed) rehabilitation of Steely Dan among non-boomer audiences. Two decades after they upset Eminem and Radiohead at the 2001 Grammys, Fagen and his late partner Walter Becker have become extremely meme-able musical godheads for millennials and zoomers, a fate that seems like it will never be possible for the Eagles.
But again: There is a lot hypocrisy here. Of all the artists I mentioned earlier, the most alike are the Eagles and Steely Dan. They are both hyper-proficient soft-rock acts that peaked commercially in the late ’70s. They both fizzled out in the early ’80s, and then reunited in the early ’90s. They are both led by male songwriting duos — in each instance, one guy is named Don and the other guy died in the late 2010s at the age of 67. They are both famous for writing about “the dark side of L.A.” in a manner that actually glamorizes (to the point of likely driving up the population of) America’s second-largest city. They are both managed by iconic “Satan” Irving Azoff. They both employed the services of Timothy B. Schmit, a man who seems too sweet for either band. Both bands were skeptical of punk, which is why expressing distaste for the Eagles and Steely Dan remains meaningful for a certain kind of aging Gen Xer fond of posting provocative opinions on social media. They were both sampled by landmark hip-hop albums in 1989 — 3 Feet High And Rising for Steely Dan, and Paul’s Boutiquefor the Eagles. I could go on. (And I will shortly.)
But none of this matters in the minds of the public. Steely Dan vs. The Eagles is a classic rivalry of ’70s rock. Let’s explore this further.
The Beef
I’m going to be brief here as this is well-trod territory. In the Steely Dan song “Everything You Did” from 1976’s The Royal Scam, Fagen sings, “Turn up the Eagles, the neighbors are listening.” This is allegedly a reference by Walter Becker to a real-life argument he had with his real-life girlfriend, who apparently really loved the Eagles. (Assuming the album she was playing was One Of These Nights, which would have been the newly released Eagles LP when the song was written, I wonder if she enjoyed “Lyin’ Eyes,” another “I don’t trust the woman in my life” track that feels like a sister number to “Everything You Did.”)
Later that year, the Eagles referenced Steely Dan in this “Hotel California” lyric: “They stab it with their steely knives / But they just can’t kill the beast.” It was meant as a tribute. Years later, in an interview Bob Costas, Frey praised Fagen and Becker for their cleverness, and credited them with inspiring the “weird” lyrics of their most famous song.
The Metaphor
In terms of actual personal animus, Steely Dan vs. The Eagles is not a real rivalry. But it absolutely is a real rivalry in the sense of these bands representing opposing ideas. The common shorthand for describing their dynamic is “nerds (Steely Dan) vs. jocks (the Eagles),” which is fine if also superficial. (It has a lot to do with the latter band literally sharing a name with a professional football team.) The reality is that we’re talking about two enormously rich old-guy rock bands. It’s just that one of them offers the listener plausible deniability of that fact. Donald Fagen and Walter Becker are insiders — feted with Grammys, surrounded by world-class session players, and ensconced in the finest recording studios on the planet — who have the cachet of outsider misfits. They fit in without seeming like they fit in. The Eagles meanwhile were always a hugely popular band that carried themselves like a hugely popular band. They want it known that they fit in.
Herein lies the central allegorical conflict posed by Steely Dan vs. The Eagles: Is it better to appear as though you tried to be successful on purpose, or like your success happened in spite of everything else about yourself?
The Case For Steely Dan
I like their music more. They are funnier, smarter, and weirder than the Eagles. Their albums are a lot more consistent. (“The Disco Strangler” would not have made Steely Dan’s garbage bin during the making of Gaucho.) They are less culturally ubiquitous — there is no Steely Dan song I have heard 1/100th as many times as “Take It Easy” or “Hotel California,” even though I have consciously set out to listen to Steely Dan 100 times more than the Eagles. Steely Dan doesn’t have the same amount of “bad boomer” baggage that the Eagles do. They have some “bad boomer” baggage, but it has thinned considerably in recent years. When I picture a typical Eagles fan, I like that person less than the individual conjured by the prompt “Steely Dan fan.” Based on this interview, Timothy B. Schmit even prefers Steely Dan, perhaps because Don Henley has held the Sword Of Damocles over his neck (financially speaking) for the past 45 years.
Above all, I like Steely Dan more because they are less obvious than the Eagles. Most bands on Earth are less obvious than the Eagles, but their obviousness is even more, well, obvious in relation to Steely Dan due to their shared subject matter. In a 2016 interview, Don Henley enumerated the following themes as central to Eagles songs: “Loss of innocence, the cost of naiveté, the perils of fame, of excess; exploration of the dark underbelly of the American dream, idealism realized and idealism thwarted, illusion versus reality, the difficulties of balancing loving relationships and work, trying to square the conflicting relationship between business and art; the corruption in politics, the fading away of the sixties dream of ‘peace, love and understanding.’” You can hear all of that stuff in the song “Hotel California.” It’s impossible to miss. There’s a hotel called California that represents the state of California (and California as a state of mind). This place could be heaven or hell, which we know because Don sings, “This could be heaven or this could be hell.” It evokes the spirit of 1969, though that might only refer to the Captain’s wine. (But it doesn’t. The song is clearly about the end of the sixties.) Finally, it all culminates with some instrumental fireworks from Joe Walsh and Don Felder, whose harmonized guitars represent the main character’s failure to escape his own nostalgia.
Now consider the Steely Dan song “Aja,” which is also about all of those things that Don listed. In “Aja,” the protagonist is in an opium den. This could also be heaven or hell, but Donald and Walter do not bother pointing this out. The main character is fixated on people on a hill. They may or may not be real. We never know for sure. These people never stare. They just don’t care. They’ve got time to burn. Because they are free. For the protagonist, they symbolize his own longing — for the past, for an unrealized version of himself, for all of his dreams that were never fulfilled. Finally, the song culminates with some instrumental fireworks from jazz saxophonist Wayne Shorter. No disrespect to Joe Walsh or Don Felder, but they are not Wayne Shorter.
I could have done a similar comparison of the Eagles’ “Life In The Fast Lane” (a song about life in the fast lane) and Steely Dan’s “Glamour Profession” (a better song about life in the fast lane) or the Eagles’ “The Sad Café” (a self-serious song about the end of an era) and Steely Dan’s “Black Cow” (a hilarious song about the end of an era). But I think I’ve made my point: The Eagles tell you what their songs are about, and Steely Dan shows you.
The Case For The Eagles
Lest it seem like I am knocking “Hotel California” let me be clear: I love “Hotel California.” I know I’m not supposed to say that. I am supposed to hate “Hotel California” because the Eagles suck and boomers are bad and The Big Lebowski is good and blah blah blah. But if you can set aside all of the baggage that comes with this song, and trick your mind into forgetting about all of the sports bars and hockey games and gas stations it has soundtracked in your life, you might come to the following conclusions: 1) The harmonized guitars rip; 2) The song’s central metaphor is sound; 3) You have probably quoted the line about how “you can check out anytime you like but you can never leave” at least once without realizing it; 4) The Eagles are good at writing “end of the innocence” songs.
(This is also true of Don Henley’s solo career, which is highlighted by the two finest songs of his entire oeuvre, “The Boys Of Summer” and — obviousness alert — “The End Of The Innocence.” Haters will give the credit to Mike Campbell and Bruce Hornsby, respectively, for writing the music on those tracks, but Don’s melodies and words on are tip-top. To quote Jeff Lebowski, “out on the road today I saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac” is true “that creep can roll, man” material.)
Let’s go back to the central allegorical conflict posed by Steely Dan vs. The Eagles: Is it better to appear as though you tried to be successful on purpose, or like your success happened in spite of everything else about yourself? Contrary to the “nerds vs. jocks” stereotype, Don Henley and Glenn Frey were not born-and-bred Southern Californians. And they were not born on third base. Don is from a tiny town in East Texas, and in this 2001 Charlie Rose interview he talks about being a small, sensitive kid who was bullied by the country boys in town because he was into books and music. And Frey is a Detroit native who cut his teeth as a teenager playing in garage bands before hooking up for a time with Bob Seger. (You can hear Glenn’s backing vocals on Seger’s immortal “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man.”) They were both Middle American kids who moved to Los Angeles in order to make their fortune, and they were willing to work their asses of to do it. Once they got rich, they could justifiably feel as though they earned it. So, why pretend otherwise?
Donald and Walter worked their asses off, too, but they were products of Bard College, as anyone who loves “My Old School” will tell you. Their smartypants sensibility is in line with a typical “elite college” mentality, where your social status is more secure, which means you can also afford to be noncommittal about your status. If the Eagles are the more obvious band, maybe it was because Don hustled for three and a half years at two low-prestige Texas schools — Stephen F. Austin State University and North Texas State University — and felt more urgency to prove his literary bonafides. (He not only read Henry David Thoreau, damn it, but he also saved Walden Woods!) Or maybe that obviousness comes from the proximity of the writers to their subject matter. I can picture Glenn Frey as one of the people in “Life In The Fast Lane.” I can also imagine him as a character in “Glamour Profession.” Steely Dan observed L.A. strivers and wrote about them, but the Eagles were the people in those songs.
What it comes down to is a matter of class — the more you need to be successful (because you have no other options in life) the more open and less ashamed you will be about seeking out. (And the most susceptible you will be to the excesses that come with that success.) On that count, I relate more to the Eagles than Steely Dan. I also believe in taking it to the limit one more time. Or more if that’s what it takes.
Who Won?
If you conduct an informal poll of extremely online people, Steely Dan wins in a landslide. If you ask the public at large, the Eagles win in a walk. This strikes me as just, and I suspect both parties would find it amenable.
This weekend, I will do something I swore I would never do for most of my life: Attend a concert by The Eagles. Throughout my teens, twenties, and a big chunk of my thirties, I loathed the laidback troubadours of decadent 1970s Los Angeles with great gusto. I despised them for all of the usual kneejerk reasons that people hate the Eagles: they did not rock, they espoused problematic opinions about women (witchy or not), they epitomized the smug and unearned superiority of baby boomers, they were played way too much on FM radio, they were responsible for the monumentally terrible song “Get Over It,” etc.
But in my late 30s — around the time I regrettably printed the words “Don Henley sucks” at the start of my second book — my opinion changed. The 2013 documentary History Of Eagles had a lot to do with it — a band willing to make themselves look this unlikable somehow made them more likable to me. Each time Glenn Frey fired one of his guitar players with increasing ruthlessness, a growing percentage of my heart was won over. I couldn’t help myself. The Eagles were Sid, and I was Nancy. After that, I could no longer live with the fallacy of disliking the Eagles when they weren’t all that different (musically, philosophically, cocaine-ically) from other boomer rock acts from the late ’70s L.A. era: Fleetwood Mac, Warren Zevon, Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt … and Steely Dan.
I forgot to mention that my interest in seeing the Eagles on this tour — which is advertised as their last, but in classic classic-rock fashion will continue for at least the next few years — was due in part to the inclusion of Steely Dan as the opener. Alas, health problems have sidelined the 75-year-old Donald Fagen, so the Dan are replaced on my bill by the Doobie Brothers. (I’m hoping against hope that “Michael McDonald Does The Backing Vocals For ‘Peg’” will be slotted on the Doobies’ set list.) When the tour was announced earlier this year, there was some predictable griping about the pairing, with some loud groans about how the Eaglesshould be opening for Steely Dan, man. This underlined the unexpected (and already much-discussed) rehabilitation of Steely Dan among non-boomer audiences. Two decades after they upset Eminem and Radiohead at the 2001 Grammys, Fagen and his late partner Walter Becker have become extremely meme-able musical godheads for millennials and zoomers, a fate that seems like it will never be possible for the Eagles.
But again: There is a lot hypocrisy here. Of all the artists I mentioned earlier, the most alike are the Eagles and Steely Dan. They are both hyper-proficient soft-rock acts that peaked commercially in the late ’70s. They both fizzled out in the early ’80s, and then reunited in the early ’90s. They are both led by male songwriting duos — in each instance, one guy is named Don and the other guy died in the late 2010s at the age of 67. They are both famous for writing about “the dark side of L.A.” in a manner that actually glamorizes (to the point of likely driving up the population of) America’s second-largest city. They are both managed by iconic “Satan” Irving Azoff. They both employed the services of Timothy B. Schmit, a man who seems too sweet for either band. Both bands were skeptical of punk, which is why expressing distaste for the Eagles and Steely Dan remains meaningful for a certain kind of aging Gen Xer fond of posting provocative opinions on social media. They were both sampled by landmark hip-hop albums in 1989 — 3 Feet High And Rising for Steely Dan, and Paul’s Boutiquefor the Eagles. I could go on. (And I will shortly.)
But none of this matters in the minds of the public. Steely Dan vs. The Eagles is a classic rivalry of ’70s rock. Let’s explore this further.
The Beef
I’m going to be brief here as this is well-trod territory. In the Steely Dan song “Everything You Did” from 1976’s The Royal Scam, Fagen sings, “Turn up the Eagles, the neighbors are listening.” This is allegedly a reference by Walter Becker to a real-life argument he had with his real-life girlfriend, who apparently really loved the Eagles. (Assuming the album she was playing was One Of These Nights, which would have been the newly released Eagles LP when the song was written, I wonder if she enjoyed “Lyin’ Eyes,” another “I don’t trust the woman in my life” track that feels like a sister number to “Everything You Did.”)
Later that year, the Eagles referenced Steely Dan in this “Hotel California” lyric: “They stab it with their steely knives / But they just can’t kill the beast.” It was meant as a tribute. Years later, in an interview Bob Costas, Frey praised Fagen and Becker for their cleverness, and credited them with inspiring the “weird” lyrics of their most famous song.
The Metaphor
In terms of actual personal animus, Steely Dan vs. The Eagles is not a real rivalry. But it absolutely is a real rivalry in the sense of these bands representing opposing ideas. The common shorthand for describing their dynamic is “nerds (Steely Dan) vs. jocks (the Eagles),” which is fine if also superficial. (It has a lot to do with the latter band literally sharing a name with a professional football team.) The reality is that we’re talking about two enormously rich old-guy rock bands. It’s just that one of them offers the listener plausible deniability of that fact. Donald Fagen and Walter Becker are insiders — feted with Grammys, surrounded by world-class session players, and ensconced in the finest recording studios on the planet — who have the cachet of outsider misfits. They fit in without seeming like they fit in. The Eagles meanwhile were always a hugely popular band that carried themselves like a hugely popular band. They want it known that they fit in.
Herein lies the central allegorical conflict posed by Steely Dan vs. The Eagles: Is it better to appear as though you tried to be successful on purpose, or like your success happened in spite of everything else about yourself?
The Case For Steely Dan
I like their music more. They are funnier, smarter, and weirder than the Eagles. Their albums are a lot more consistent. (“The Disco Strangler” would not have made Steely Dan’s garbage bin during the making of Gaucho.) They are less culturally ubiquitous — there is no Steely Dan song I have heard 1/100th as many times as “Take It Easy” or “Hotel California,” even though I have consciously set out to listen to Steely Dan 100 times more than the Eagles. Steely Dan doesn’t have the same amount of “bad boomer” baggage that the Eagles do. They have some “bad boomer” baggage, but it has thinned considerably in recent years. When I picture a typical Eagles fan, I like that person less than the individual conjured by the prompt “Steely Dan fan.” Based on this interview, Timothy B. Schmit even prefers Steely Dan, perhaps because Don Henley has held the Sword Of Damocles over his neck (financially speaking) for the past 45 years.
Above all, I like Steely Dan more because they are less obvious than the Eagles. Most bands on Earth are less obvious than the Eagles, but their obviousness is even more, well, obvious in relation to Steely Dan due to their shared subject matter. In a 2016 interview, Don Henley enumerated the following themes as central to Eagles songs: “Loss of innocence, the cost of naiveté, the perils of fame, of excess; exploration of the dark underbelly of the American dream, idealism realized and idealism thwarted, illusion versus reality, the difficulties of balancing loving relationships and work, trying to square the conflicting relationship between business and art; the corruption in politics, the fading away of the sixties dream of ‘peace, love and understanding.’” You can hear all of that stuff in the song “Hotel California.” It’s impossible to miss. There’s a hotel called California that represents the state of California (and California as a state of mind). This place could be heaven or hell, which we know because Don sings, “This could be heaven or this could be hell.” It evokes the spirit of 1969, though that might only refer to the Captain’s wine. (But it doesn’t. The song is clearly about the end of the sixties.) Finally, it all culminates with some instrumental fireworks from Joe Walsh and Don Felder, whose harmonized guitars represent the main character’s failure to escape his own nostalgia.
Now consider the Steely Dan song “Aja,” which is also about all of those things that Don listed. In “Aja,” the protagonist is in an opium den. This could also be heaven or hell, but Donald and Walter do not bother pointing this out. The main character is fixated on people on a hill. They may or may not be real. We never know for sure. These people never stare. They just don’t care. They’ve got time to burn. Because they are free. For the protagonist, they symbolize his own longing — for the past, for an unrealized version of himself, for all of his dreams that were never fulfilled. Finally, the song culminates with some instrumental fireworks from jazz saxophonist Wayne Shorter. No disrespect to Joe Walsh or Don Felder, but they are not Wayne Shorter.
I could have done a similar comparison of the Eagles’ “Life In The Fast Lane” (a song about life in the fast lane) and Steely Dan’s “Glamour Profession” (a better song about life in the fast lane) or the Eagles’ “The Sad Café” (a self-serious song about the end of an era) and Steely Dan’s “Black Cow” (a hilarious song about the end of an era). But I think I’ve made my point: The Eagles tell you what their songs are about, and Steely Dan shows you.
The Case For The Eagles
Lest it seem like I am knocking “Hotel California” let me be clear: I love “Hotel California.” I know I’m not supposed to say that. I am supposed to hate “Hotel California” because the Eagles suck and boomers are bad and The Big Lebowski is good and blah blah blah. But if you can set aside all of the baggage that comes with this song, and trick your mind into forgetting about all of the sports bars and hockey games and gas stations it has soundtracked in your life, you might come to the following conclusions: 1) The harmonized guitars rip; 2) The song’s central metaphor is sound; 3) You have probably quoted the line about how “you can check out anytime you like but you can never leave” at least once without realizing it; 4) The Eagles are good at writing “end of the innocence” songs.
(This is also true of Don Henley’s solo career, which is highlighted by the two finest songs of his entire oeuvre, “The Boys Of Summer” and — obviousness alert — “The End Of The Innocence.” Haters will give the credit to Mike Campbell and Bruce Hornsby, respectively, for writing the music on those tracks, but Don’s melodies and words on are tip-top. To quote Jeff Lebowski, “out on the road today I saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac” is true “that creep can roll, man” material.)
Let’s go back to the central allegorical conflict posed by Steely Dan vs. The Eagles: Is it better to appear as though you tried to be successful on purpose, or like your success happened in spite of everything else about yourself? Contrary to the “nerds vs. jocks” stereotype, Don Henley and Glenn Frey were not born-and-bred Southern Californians. And they were not born on third base. Don is from a tiny town in East Texas, and in this 2001 Charlie Rose interview he talks about being a small, sensitive kid who was bullied by the country boys in town because he was into books and music. And Frey is a Detroit native who cut his teeth as a teenager playing in garage bands before hooking up for a time with Bob Seger. (You can hear Glenn’s backing vocals on Seger’s immortal “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man.”) They were both Middle American kids who moved to Los Angeles in order to make their fortune, and they were willing to work their asses of to do it. Once they got rich, they could justifiably feel as though they earned it. So, why pretend otherwise?
Donald and Walter worked their asses off, too, but they were products of Bard College, as anyone who loves “My Old School” will tell you. Their smartypants sensibility is in line with a typical “elite college” mentality, where your social status is more secure, which means you can also afford to be noncommittal about your status. If the Eagles are the more obvious band, maybe it was because Don hustled for three and a half years at two low-prestige Texas schools — Stephen F. Austin State University and North Texas State University — and felt more urgency to prove his literary bonafides. (He not only read Henry David Thoreau, damn it, but he also saved Walden Woods!) Or maybe that obviousness comes from the proximity of the writers to their subject matter. I can picture Glenn Frey as one of the people in “Life In The Fast Lane.” I can also imagine him as a character in “Glamour Profession.” Steely Dan observed L.A. strivers and wrote about them, but the Eagles were the people in those songs.
What it comes down to is a matter of class — the more you need to be successful (because you have no other options in life) the more open and less ashamed you will be about seeking out. (And the most susceptible you will be to the excesses that come with that success.) On that count, I relate more to the Eagles than Steely Dan. I also believe in taking it to the limit one more time. Or more if that’s what it takes.
Who Won?
If you conduct an informal poll of extremely online people, Steely Dan wins in a landslide. If you ask the public at large, the Eagles win in a walk. This strikes me as just, and I suspect both parties would find it amenable.
As of this writing on Thursday morning, November 16, Drake has not revealed features nor a tracklist whatsoever. We could lean on the his past Scary Hours projects to make a hypothesis, but that doesn’t help because 2018’s Scary Hourshad no features, while 2021’s Scary Hours 2featured Lil Baby and Rick Ross. So, the third installment could go either way.
Who Produced Scary Hours 3?
According to the cinematic, orchestral-backed trailer posted to Drake’s Instagram, the credited Scary Hours 3 executive producers are Drake, OVO’s Noel Cadastre, and perennial NBA All-Star Kevin Durant, also recently revealed as a NOCTA campaign star.
Earlier this week, André 3000 announced that he’d be making his return with a brand new solo album titled New Blue Sun.
His album is set to drop this Friday, November 17 at midnight. For those who might be wondering, it also will likely be available to stream on Spotify, as it is listed being one of the options on the pre-save link from Sony.
It is also available for pre-order currently, but only as a digital download.
While Outkast fans might have been hoping for a rap record, he’s made it very clear that it won’t be what they expect. “I don’t want to troll people,” André said during a recent interview with NPR Music. “I don’t want people to think, ‘Oh, this André 3000 album is coming!’ And you play it and like, ‘Oh man, no verses.’ So even actually on the packaging, you’ll see it says, ‘Warning: no bars.’”
As for what the album will sound like, it has been described as “an entirely instrumental album centered around woodwinds; a celebratory piece of work in the form of a living, breathing, aural organism,” according to a statement. Basically, he won’t be giving any lyrics at all.
New Blue Sun is out 11/17 via Epic Records. Find more information here.
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