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I’ll Take Your Questions Now, the new book from Stephanie Grisham, former White House press secretary and chief of staff for Melania Trump, keeps on yielding the goods. For our current discussion purposes, there’s plenty of dish about Stormy Daniels and Melania Trump, separately and apart. For one thing, Graham wrote that she was forced to hear Trump whine about Stormy’s claim that his penis looked like a “toadstool,” along with details of Melania caring so little about the 2020 presidential election that she slept through results night. And we’d already seen that curious moment ^^^ when Melania exited Air Force One for the last time, showing that she has no f*cks left to give by changing into an objectively horrid dress and refusing to pose for photos.

So, what gives when the Stormy and Melania parts of Graham’s book intersect? Oh boy. Graham, who worked closely with Melania, revealed that the former First Lady was much more ticked off about the alleged affair than she let on. In fact, she apparently took joy in attempting to humiliate him (that Air Force One moment is a big one in retrospect), in revenge for her humiliation. Via Washington Post:

The airing of Trump’s alleged affair with porn star Stormy Daniels is what “unleashed” Melania Trump to start publicly contradicting or ignoring her husband — trying to embarrass him as he had embarrassed her. She walked into his first State of the Union address arm-in-arm with a handsome military aide Grisham had hand-selected because, Melania said, the floors of the Capitol were too slippery.

“I laughed to myself because I’d seen the woman navigate dirt roads in her heels,” Grisham writes.

And when Grisham drafted a tweet for Melania requesting privacy, saying she was concentrating on being a mother, wife and first lady, she had Grisham remove the word “wife.”

Graham does note, however, that this was more of a matter of pride for Melania, who didn’t seem to be emotionally affected about the Stormy affair. Mind you, Melania apparently didn’t buy Donald’s denials but didn’t care, either, while declaring, “This is Donald’s problem. He got himself into this mess. He can fix it by himself.” Yup.

There’s more Melania dish where that came from. Graham’s book did yield word that Jared Kushner was nicknamed “the Slim Reaper” because he tended to f*ck things up and expected people to fix them for him, and Melania’s reported nickname was pretty telling, too. The Secret Service enjoyed calling her “Rapunzel,” a label that stuck “because she rarely left her tower, a.k.a the White House residence.” She was apparently the easiest Trump to monitor, too, because this freed up agents to “spend more time with their families.” This, of course, brings to mind that report that Don Jr. got cucked when a Secret Service agent had a fling with Vanessa Trump. Yeah, this family is a real party, but it sounds like (other than the money stuff) Melania has checked out.

(Via Washington Post)

The irony of Sopranos creator David Chase is that for all he seems to mythologize movies, long considering television the “inferior medium” (to the point that he originally envisioned The Sopranos as a film), even when he gets the chance to write a film, he can’t help but write a TV show. It was true in Not Fade Away, his 2013 directorial debut starring James Gandolfini, and it’s true in The Many Saints Of Newark, co-written by Chase and Lawrence Conner, directed by Alan Taylor and starring James Gandolfini’s son, Michael.

How successful it is depends somewhat on the context in which you evaluate it. It offers compelling scenes and leaves us wanting more, but it doesn’t answer many questions. Which raises the question of what it’s meant to be: a final chapter, or the first chapter of something new?

The posters for Many Saints scream “WHO MADE TONY SOPRANO,” a question Many Saints not only doesn’t answer but doesn’t even seem all that interested in answering. But I’m not here to review the marketing, in some ways the best thing a movie ad can do is get you into a theater under false pretenses (see: The Green Knight, one of my favorite films this year). Instead, Many Saints offers a story about Dickie Moltisanti, father of Christopher, ersatz uncle of Tony, and whose surname translates to the “many saints” of the title. Ayy, I got molti santi over here! Madonn’.

Dickie (played by Alessandro Nivola) is a Tony Soprano-like figure in his own right. He’s struggling to succeed in a brutal criminal milieu while maintaining a family, trying to balance interpersonal tenderness and professional ruthlessness. Yet wouldn’t you know it, the two seem to have a way of intermingling.

We first meet Dickie when he goes to greet his father, Aldo “Hollywood Dick” Moltisanti, played by Ray Liotta, as he disembarks from the boat back from Italy. Aldo appears hale but wizened, with a brand new wife in tow: Guiseppina, played by Michela De Rossi, the provolone queen of Napoli. She’s Dickie’s new stepmother, but younger than him, amplifying the Freudian implications. These initial scenes are all narrated, incidentally, by Dickie’s future son, Christopher (Michael Imperioli) from beyond the grave. Chase has said in interviews that he included Chrissy’s narration as a way to help the audience get situated in the story, and it does feel tacked on in that way, though good just to hear Michael Imperioli’s voice.

There are bigger storytelling challenges than trying to remember who in Many Saints is kin to who in The Sopranos. One of the unspoken tenets of The Sopranos was to never make the mafia look too cool. As Orson Welles once said of The Godfather, “Meyer Lansky was a boring man. Hyman Roth is who he should have been! They all should have been like that, and none of them were. The Godfather was the glorification of a bunch of bums who never existed.”

Welles’ Anglo snobbery aside, there is something about the process of turning people into cinema that tends to make them seem cooler and more larger than life than they actually were, even when the creator doesn’t intend it. Chase always took great pains to counter this, to make sure we never forgot that his subjects were not the heroes of the story; that regardless of how funny or occasional insightful they might be, they were still a bunch of petty, venal, selfish, murderous bums. Chase would often make it so unflattering, to the point that his own actors, naturally attached to the characters they’d been playing for the better part of a decade, would push back.

Steven Van Zandt (E-Street band member and famous menage a trois enjoyer), to cite just one example, had to be coaxed and cajoled into shooting the scene in season five in which his character Silvio Dante executes a crawling Adriana La Cerva shortly after calling her a cunt. Yet Chase was right that it was important: Silvio is at his heart the kind of guy who could cold-bloodedly murder a loved one the minute she threatened his status, no matter how reasonable his advice could sometimes seem. To make him less complicated would’ve made him less interesting.

This presents an even bigger problem in The Many Saints of Newark, which takes place not during the mafia-after-the-fall period of the dawn of the 21st century, but during an otherwise halcyon era when the mafia wasn’t far removed from its heyday. It’s much harder to not to make these characters look cool when they’re wearing Mad Men suits and driving big long cars with fins on the tails. Chase and Taylor seem to know this, and Many Saints attempts to square the circle by having the characters act even more violently, more racistly, more misogynistically than their Sopranos descendants. Sometimes it works, sometimes it feels… almost a little defensive.

Johnny Boy Soprano, for instance, played by Jon Bernthal (a character I would’ve liked to see a bit more from, though that’s true of most Jon Bernthal characters) nearly ruins his welcome home party because he’s so angry that a black family has moved to their block while he was away. These broader explorations in Many Saints — this is where the racism came from! — feel a little forced compared to the more compelling specifics of Johnny Boy’s strange relationship with Livia (Vera Farmiga), or Junior’s place in the family (as a sort of disregarded intellectual), and the main story about Dickie Moltisanti.

Most of that main Dickie story involves his convoluted relationship with his father’s new Italian bride as she struggles to make it in America. But there’s also his black friend from childhood, Harold McBrayer (played by Leslie Odom Jr.) who used to run the mafia’s numbers racket in the black neighborhoods, but has become inspired by the civil rights movement to maybe set out on his own. There’s even a brief appearance by an actor playing Frank Lucas, the Harlem heroin king played by Denzel Washington in American Gangster. This is all reasonably entertaining to watch, but you might rightly wonder what it all adds up to. Being able to just float down a plot tributary for a while and see where it goes is something TV shows can do much better than movies.

Basically the entire conceit of the Sopranos episode from whence Many Saints springs is that even in the midst of the Newark Race Riots, Tony’s main memory of the day was not getting to go to the amusement park with his father. That’s actually a more salient comment on race, and on Tony’s particular psychology, than Chase retelling the origin story of the Harlem heroin trade in The Many Saints of Newark.

And oh yeah, what of Tony in all of this? Michael Gandolfini, playing the teenage version of his father, eventually does get some screen time, and it’s exciting when he does. Not necessarily because Tony’s is the most interesting storyline in Many Saints (it isn’t) but because Gandolfini might be its most exciting actor. Genetics have freed him from the burden of having to do an impression of the last actor who played his character. Meanwhile the other actors playing known quantities exist on a sort of continuum, of interesting inspiration to reductive impression, from Billy Magnussen’s enjoyably subtle Paulie Walnuts to Corey Stoll’s solid but occasionally on-the-nose Junior to John Magaro’s thoroughly obnoxious Silvio, more a collection of tics than a human being. Remember how he cocks his head when he talks and shrugs a lot? Remember?? Ay! Oh! Not for nuttin’, T, but…

Gandolfini, who was also brilliant playing Chris Bauer’s weird pervert son on David Simon’s criminally underrated The Deuce, plays young Tony as a sort of more innocent, muscle-cars-and-hard-rock twist on Robert Iler’s AJ: perhaps a little too soft for the world he’s been born into, torn between the ease and brutality of life as a criminal vs. the patience and diligence it would require to go straight. Young Tony isn’t exactly what you’d expect, but it fits.

The Sopranos has always been, in its own way, about the weight of generations. Dicky Moltisanti’s generation squirmed under the expectations of the old country “Mustache Petes” who raised them, with their clannishness, blood feuds, and superstitions. That mode of living was no longer really applicable to guys like Dicky’s environments, yet having experienced that, they nonetheless attempted to instill their own set of corporatized crime values in their own counterculture sons, who were in turn growing up in a world just as different as their fathers’ worlds were from their grandfathers’. It wouldn’t be entirely incorrect to argue that this type of generational conflict is and has always been David Chase’s “one weird trick.” Though in some ways it’s the only story there is. In Many Saints, Chase proves he can shift it from time period to time period without it losing much relevance.

Yet Chase seems to struggle with expectations in his own right. Many Saints is much more intriguing if you imagine it as an audition for something more. As a definitive, stand-alone product, it’s a little scattered and doesn’t breathe like the Sopranos does. Though, you imagine, as a TV show, maybe it could. Chase seems to rebel against expectations that Many Saints be “a Sopranos movie” only to end it with a prequel cliché so lame and corny that everyone I’ve described it to immediately laughed and rolled their eyes.

Still, David Chase has a way of being interesting because of his flaws rather than in spite of them. Like his most famous creation, Tony Soprano, he can’t help but to reflexively rebel against the set of values he’s been handed, even when it doesn’t always serve him.

‘The Many Saints Of Newark’ hits theaters and HBO Max October 1st. Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can access his archive of reviews here.

Earlier this week, R. Kelly was officially convicted of sex crimes after years of accusations. Multiple people came forward to testify against the disgraced R&B singer in court and Kelly was found guilty of racketeering and eight violations of an anti-sex trafficking law. Immediately following the guilty verdict, Kelly is now apparently an unwelcome face in certain parts of Louisiana.

After being found guilty of sex crimes, R. Kelly’s honorary “key to the city” in Baton Rouge has been revoked, according to a recent report from TMZ. Apparently, the same official who granted the singer the honor back in 2013, Baton Rouge Metro Council member Denise Marcelle, is rescinding the key and “regrets” even awarding R. Kelly with it in the first place. Though there had allegations against the singer when he was given the key, Marcelle told TMZ she didn’t do much research about the case and only knew he had been acquitted in 2008.

The Baton Rouge “key to the city” is actually a $250 plaque. Per TMZ’s report, the plaque won’t be physically taken from the singer’s possession, but all of its honor will be stripped. Of course, it’s not likely that R. Kelly will even be able to travel to Baton Rouge any time soon, seeing as he faces a mandatory minimum sentence of ten years and could even be sentenced to life in prison.

Apple is having a very good month—and we’re not even talking about the release of the Apple iPhone 13. Less than two weeks after winning seven Emmy Awards for Apple TV+’s Ted Lasso, Apple Studios emerged the victor in an all-out bidding war for Jon Watts’ highly coveted, though still-yet-unnamed, new thriller that’s set to star George Clooney and Brad Pitt.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Apple Studios went head-to-head with some of Hollywood’s biggest players, including Sony, Netflix, and Lionsgate, to secure the rights to the film, which will see Clooney and Pitt playing two set-in-their-own-ways fixers who are assigned to the same job. The film will mark the first time the pair have appeared onscreen together since the Coen brothers’ 2008 film, Burn After Reading.

Watts first made a name for himself as the co-writer and director of Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017); he has since gone on to direct Spider-Man: Far From Home (2018) and Spider-Man: No Way Home, which is set for release on December 17, 2021. Watts will write, produce, and direct the film, with a producing assist from Clooney’s Smokehouse Pictures and Pitt’s Plan B Entertainment. While the film will surely become a big event for Apple TV+, Deadline reports that the deal also includes a “robust theatrical release.”

As The Hollywood Reporter notes, the Clooney-Pitt-Watts trifecta is just the latest in a series of major names who’ve opted to sign on with the still-new Apple Studios. In recent months, the tech behemoth’s distribution arm has used its deep pockets to lure the likes of Martin Scorsese for his Killers of the Flower Moon, starring Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio; Antoine Fuqua’s Emancipation, with Will Smith; and Spirited, a musical adaptation of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, featuring Will Ferrell, Ryan Reynolds, and Octavia Spencer.

“Haven’t heard the price tag, but I’m sure it falls in line with a lot of the recent deals for star packages,” Mike Fleming Jr. wrote for Deadline. “I have heard that between Clooney and Pitt, they left an eight-figure sum on the table to ensure the theatrical release component.” No release date has been scheduled.

(Via The Hollywood Reporter)

Back when Venom came out in 2018, I didn’t think it was a good movie, but I made it clear how much I enjoyed the experience. To the point this lead to many discussions throughout that day reviews published about what my Rotten Tomatoes score should be. The argument was I clearly enjoyed myself, so why wouldn’t it be a positive review? This was actually a fair point. But I couldn’t get myself to actually recommend Venom to any other human beings, unless it was a midnight Rocky Horror Picture Show, “go with a bunch of friends and laugh” situation.

Also, re-reading my 2018 review, I forgot just how much plot there was in that movie. All I remember now is Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) and Venom (also played by Tom Hardy) arguing. But there’s a whole plot involving spaceships and experiments on humans and Eddie Brock as a kind of independent video blogger that is all nonsense. The key to that movie is Eddie and Venom arguing and acting like a loon. To the point it’s no secret that Tom Hardy and director Ruben Fleischer didn’t, let’s say, see eye to eye about pretty much everything to do with this movie. From the outside looking in it seems like Fleischer wanted the movie to have a plot, which, on the surface, makes sense. And Tom Hardy didn’t care about the plot and wanted to, instead, do unscripted scenes flailing around inside a lobster tank. (I remember interviewing Fleischer for this movie and him doing everything he could to contain his disdain for that particular scene.) So what we were seeing on screen was pure behind-the-scenes chaos. I still contend it wasn’t a “good movie,” but it was, no doubt about it, interesting. And there aren’t a lot of interesting big-budget movies these days, so maybe I underrated it. Also, it made a whole bunch of money.

This brings us to Venom: Let There Be Carnage. This will come as a surprise to no one, but Ruben Fleischer did not come back to direct and has been replaced by Andy Serkis. Serkis does two very smart things in this movie: one, he sides with Tom Hardy that this movie should just be insane and not at all care about such things as “plot.” (I say this is smart because if Serkis wants to make more of these movies, agreeing with Hardy seems to be a key to that.) And, two, he admits the aforementioned lobster scene is his “jumping-off point.”

So what we get in Venom: Let There Be Carnage is another display of chaos on screen, but a more controlled chaos. Or, if not controlled, let’s say more “endorsed” chaos. Hardy gets to run free in this movie and do pretty much anything he wants with the approval of his director. And I’m exaggerating a bit, there is sort of a plot, but it takes a backseat to Eddie and Venom bickering.

When this movie starts Eddie and his alien symbiote, Venom, are basically a married couple who argue all the time. Venom is mad because he wants to go out and eat people’s brains because that’s his favorite food. Eddie argues that would be bad, and besides, he’s bought Venom live chickens to eat instead. But Venom doesn’t want to eat the chickens because he’s become attached to them and looks at them now as pets. The arguing gets worse and worse and eventually results in Eddie and Venom coming to blows and breaking up. Which later results in Venom, sans Eddie, going to a rave party and, while wearing glow sticks, giving a speech to the crowd about how much he wishes Eddie were there. (It’s truly remarkable that none of what I just wrote is made up and is actually all in the movie.)

Meanwhile, Cletus Kasady (Woody Harrelson) is on death row and wants Eddie to visit him for a final interview. Why Eddie? It doesn’t matter. The point is Eddie has to be there so that some symbiote blood gets into Cletus, which turns him into Carnage. Carnage then hunts for his girlfriend, a woman named Shriek (Naomie Harris) who has the power to make very loud noises when she screams. Why does she have this power? It is not explained and I am thankful for that. I just accept that she has this power. Anyway, at the end, they all fight! (Michelle Williams and Reid Scott are back, too, and offer some good comic relief. Basically, they sit back and look at Eddie and Venom and wonder what on Earth is going on with these two? But I would bet Williams was not on set for longer than a week.)

Look, I’m all in for these movies. Yes, this movie is so stupid! But that seems to be the point. And Serkis knows the heart of these movies is the relationship between Eddie and Venom. These two losers who, often, call each other losers. These Venom movies really should be a slog. Think back on Spider-Man 3 and how Venom was used in that movie. He was just “a monster.” And Sam Raimi has been pretty clear over the years that he never wanted to use Venom in the first place. But these movies have kind of cracked the Venom code by making it a love story between Eddie and Venom. Oh, and by making it as ridiculous as humanly possible. I’d watch ten more Venom movies.

You can contact Mike Ryan directly on Twitter.

The worst person you know (Ted Cruz) just made a great point (#FreeBritney).

“Every so often, an individual case of injustice captures the nation’s attention, and it opens our eyes to issues that are by no means unique to that individual, but that previously had remained hidden from the public,” the Texas senator said. “That’s what has happened with Britney Spears, one of the most iconic American pop stars of all time, who has been under a California conservatorship since 2008. The case has captured the attention of the world. I count myself emphatically in the free Britney camp.”

Jimmy Kimmel, Cruz’s longtime nemesis, thinks there’s something fishy about this.

“Since when is Ted Cruz in favor of women making their own decisions?” Kimmel wondered during Wednesday’s episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live! “He is so desperate to get one celebrity to like him. Forget it, Ted. Even Kirstie Alley thinks you’re a dick.” Also, as the Intercept pointed out, Cruz’s motivation to free Britney Spears is purely selfish:

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, used the pop star’s suffering as a grounds for his own fundraising, sending out texts that call Spears “a victim of toxic gov’t overreach & censorship.”

The last time these two interacted, Cruz was challenging “tough guy” Kimmel to a one-on-one basketball game. “Rematch, punk?” the senator tweeted. Kimmel’s response: “Oh Ted… you get so sad after you masturbate.”

You can watch the Jimmy Kimmel Live! monologue above.

Though Taylor Swift and Lena Dunham are both used to having their love life scrutinized, it was a happy ending for the latter that brought the pair back together recently. No, Taylor Swift didn’t tie the knot to her longtime boyfriend Joe Alwyn (at least, not to our knowledge), but Lena is now happily married in what Vouge, who covered the event, called a “whirlwind romance.” Well, sometimes it be like that. After a lengthy courtship with Jack Antonoff, Dunham and the Bleachers frontman eventually split, and Dunham wasn’t publicly involved with anyone for a few years.

But that changed earlier this summer when Dunham confirmed she was dating Peruvian musician Luis Felber (who performs as Attawalpa), the pair debuted their relationship on a red carpet in August at a screening of Zola and decided to tie the knot earlier this week. Taylor, for her part, seems to support the relationship and was one of eight (!) bridesmaids in the ceremony. Though she’s clearly remained quite close with Jack Antonoff — he helped work on both her most recent records, folklore and evermore — she’s also kept a strong relationship with Lena. Now, that’s a great friend. Check out more photos of the wedding below courtesy of Vogue.

After a couple of weeks worth of speculation, the music world has finally received the anticipated collaboration between Skylar Grey, Eminem, Polo G, and Mozzy. “Last One Standing” is a victorious track that finds the four artists celebrating their ability to overcome life’s obstacles. It was teased for multiple weeks with some believing that it would be Eminem’s return to music and even a sign that he had a new album on the way. However, that’s not the case as the new song finds Grey in the driver seat with the three rappers providing support for her message. The track will also appear on the upcoming soundtrack for Venom: Let There Be Carnage, a film that debuts in theaters on Friday, October 1.

Anticipation behind the track first began when Mozzy’s manager teased a collaboration with Eminem. Later on, in a pair of now-deleted tweets, Polo G informed his fans to stay tuned for something arriving on October 1. Skylar Grey tied it all together with a tease of her own on Twitter. “This month has been hellish,” she wrote. “But I see the light at the end… can’t wait for October 1st… mark your calendar.” Luckily for their fans, “Last One Standing” arrived a couple of days early.

While “Last One Standing” marks Grey’s first collaboration with Mozzy and Polo G, the track appears on the lengthy list of songs she and Eminem have done together. It includes “Black Magic,” “C’mon Let Me Ride,” “Kill For You,” “Asshole,” “Leaving Heaven,” and more.

You can press play on “Last One Standing” in the video above.

The rollout for Coldplay’s ninth studio album, Music Of The Spheres, has made it clear that this is a decidedly pop sound for the British band. With Max Martin on board helming production, the early singles like the sparkling “Higher Power” and the ten-and-a-half-minute closer “Coloratura,” but when they teamed up with one of the biggest K-Pop groups on the planet (the universe?), it became clear that they’re really in the pop game for real.

Debuting the massive collab, fittingly called “My Universe” last week, the two massive groups have now joined forces to create an accompanying video for the collaboration as well. According to a press release, the video is “set in the distant galaxy of The Spheres where music is forbidden, but BTS, Coldplay and an alien supergroup called Supernova 7 unite via hologram to defy the ban.” The hologram aspect probably made things a lot easier on everyone when it comes to filming during COVID-19, especially because BTS are often all the way across the planet in their native Korea. Anyone who loves Gorillaz-style virtual bands will be into the imagery here, all of which was helmed by director Dave Meyers. Check out the clip above and stay tuned for Music Of The Spheres dropping on October 15.

In the age of cord-cutting and ad-free subscription services, the mass culture experience of sitting through television ads, those once-universal generational touchstones (WAZZAAA! Less filling! Where’s the beef?!), have mostly gone the way of the Zune player. For me and probably many of us, it’s only during football season that the inescapable, unfast-forwardable television commercial resurfaces as a cultural phenomenon. It is kind of nice when so many demographics can come together and be annoyed by the same things.

Thus, it’s partly with a sense of nostalgia that I write that the “fancy like Applebee’s ad” absolutely has to go. I mean just look at this thing:

This must be the worst television commercial produced in a generation. It’s probably the worst ad since the Geico mandolin guys. Almost everything about it seems designed to make me grind my teeth into dust, and I hope I’m not alone when I say that everyone who made it should be in prison.

The 30-second spot consists of a series of real “heartland America” types — nurses! newlyweds! wakeboarders …an old man fashioning a kayak out of a log! — dancing to a song in which a blandly handsome white man rap-sings the Applebee’s menu. The lyrics go something like this:

Yeah, we fancy like Applebee’s… on a date night
Got that Bourbon Street steak with the Oreo shake
Get some whipped cream… on the top too
Two straws, one check, girl, I got you
Bougie like Natty… in the styrofoam
Squeak-squeakin’ in the truck bed all the way home
Some Alabama-jamma, she my Dixieland delight
Ayy, that’s how we do, how we do, fancy like, oh

Those lyrics were an especially easy pull, because believe it or not, this song actually once existed independent of the Applebee’s ad. Written and performed by stereotypical country man Walker Hayes, “Fancy Like” spent eight weeks (and counting) at number one on the Billboard Country Music charts. It racked up 50 million plays on Spotify, and that was all before Applebee’s decided to turn it into an annoyingly ubiquitous ad. You read that correctly: this motherfucker wrote an ode to Oreo shakes on spec!

And then there’s the ad itself, which consists of a food montage intercut with a series of people dancing to the Applebee’s song. If I had to choose a worst moment, I’d probably go with the triptych boomerang of the cowboy man butt shaking to the infectious Applebee’s music:

It’s honestly difficult to put my finger on what it is that’s so infuriating about being danced at by a man in a cowboy hat, I just know that I hate it. Am I being detained?? Please stop dancing at me! I should probably discuss this with a therapist.

The song also has first verse that you don’t hear in the commercial, which is arguably even more puke inducing:

Ayy
My girl is bangin’
She’s so low maintenance
Don’t need no champagne poppin’ entertainment
Take her to Wendy’s
Can’t keep her off me
She wanna dip me like them fries in her Frosty

She wanna “dip” you? Like… fries into ice cream? I’m not being deliberately obtuse here but I don’t even get it. “Dipping” sounds courtly, yet fries dunked in a milkshake is undeniably sexual imagery (are the fries your wiener? what body part does the dairy product represent?). PG porn is always the grossest porn. Of course, in terms of things that make this song and commercial so insufferable, that line wouldn’t even make the top 10.

Once upon a time, our corniest hip hop acts would name drop luxury brands in songs, presumably in the hopes of freebies or sponsorship deals. The Black Eyed Peas come to mind. I think Will.i.am is a professional techno futurist now so it seems to have worked out for him. This phenomenon has apparently come to country; only now it’s not Bentleys and Gucci they’re name dropping, it’s Oreo shakes and Frosties. It’s one thing to sell out for a $200,000 car, it’s another to do it for a fast casual milkshake.

And yet, a guy writing an ode to the Applebee’s menu on spec and immediately being rewarded with an Applebee’s ad deal is basically the beau ideal of a modern country song. The song is like a layer cake of corniness, which is perfect, because, I would argue, the only real defining characteristic of modern country is being corny. Hayes’ collaborator, a professional hitmaker named Shane McAnally, essentially admits as much.

“Those first two lines of the chorus — the perfection of ‘steak’ and ‘shake’ rhyming — it literally gave me chills,” McAnally says with a laugh. “Because I know how hard it is to make something sound dumb.”

There you have it: sounding dumb is a feature, not a bug.

Musically, there’s nothing even really “country” about this song. No fiddles or lap steel guitars, no shuffling beat or harmonies, etc. It’s basically a hip hop song with an 808 beat and scatty, rap-like rhymes, performed in a hybrid blaccent and redneck drawl, both delivered with equal fraudulence. (Is it redundant to point out that a guy singing about Applebee’s probably grew up in the suburbs? According to this profile his father owned a real estate business). And yet “Fancy Like” is undeniably a country song, based solely on the sentiment being expressed. A sentiment which goes, roughly, “don’t forget to drink your Ovaltine.”

But, of course, only in a very personal way. As Walker Hayes, tells it, Applebee’s had a very special place in his childhood memories, as the “splurge” restaurant.

“My dad could get fajitas, but none of us kids could,” Hayes told the LA Times earlier this month. “We had to get, like, a quesadilla. So if you saw a couple of Bourbon Street Steaks sizzle by, you were like, ‘Ooh, what’s that table celebrating tonight?’”

Aw yeah. Remember that? Quesadillas at the Applebee’s? Those were the days, huh? Hoo boy, that was a good one. Who else has some stories?

Country has long been a genre that prized paeans to half-remembered mass media myths — wide open spaces and lonesome cowboys and all of that. I don’t know if it’s infuriating or just sad that we so effectively killed the small town in America that country musicians are now writing love songs to the chain restaurants that replaced them. Great work, man, now do a song about the freeway system! Whom among us doesn’t remember that old saying, “it’s as American as a Skittles strawberry blast extreme apple pie sundae, new from DQ!”

DANCE ALONG, CHILDREN, AS WE SING THE HYMN OF OUR HOMOGENIZATION!

This commercial is delivered like a party anthem when everything about it is sad as hell. It makes me feel depressed, queasy, and old, in a way that has nothing to do with Applebee’s food. I grew up in the country eating at mediocre chain restaurants (to be fair, “Applebee’s” certainly has better rhyming potential than “Golden Corral”), I promise I’m not above it. In fact, Applebee’s, I will make you a deal. I will eat at your restaurants every day for a month if you stop playing this commercial forever. Please?

Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can access his archive of reviews here.