The power of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” is that Dolly Parton sounds powerless. The guitar riff prickles nervously; the melody pleads in the manner of a hungry pet; Parton sings, in a trembling tone, about the woman who could and very well might take her man. It’s a love song to Jolene herself, expressing the sort of love a supplicant shows their god—desperate, fearful, needy for mercy.
But Beyoncé doesn’t do powerless.
The funny thing about the concept of cancel culture is that its popularization coincided with the demise of the mechanisms through which a person might truly be exiled from public life. The mainstream is now fractured into pieces; former gatekeepers in the media and entertainment industry are constantly undermined; the internet has created anarchic new routes for public figures to reach an audience.
Divorce is the hot cultural topic of the year, judging by 2024’s most-discussed memoir, magazine column, and 50-part, eight-hour TikTok series titled “Who TF Did I Marry?” The specifics of each tale differ—unhappy families and all that—but they all share something: a pretense of public service. Lyz Lenz warns women that the institution of marriage is sexist; Emily Gould practices radical honesty about mental health; Reesa Teesa exposes a dating-app scammer.
Must songs written for movies be serious? Each year the Oscar for Best Original Song nominations over-index on hushed ballads and motivational anthems—music that’s built sturdily, predictably, for utilitarian purposes. “I’m Just Ken,” the Barbie track performed by the actor Ryan Gosling, takes that tradition and skews it. Part piano confessional and part prog-metal rockout, it’s a deeply silly song about self-seriousness.
To call a person as legendary as Joni Mitchell underrated might seem silly—but last year, the Rolling Stone co-founder Jann Wenner chose to not include her or any other women in a book about rock ‘n’ roll history called The Masters. Defending his selection of only interviews with white male musicians, Wenner told The New York Times that Mitchell was simply not a “philosopher of rock ‘n’ roll.
Were anyone in denial that this would be an election year ruled by conflict and nonsense, a wake-up call came in the form of Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve With Ryan Seacrest. Performing on the variety show, the rock band Green Day changed one line from their 2004 song “American Idiot”: “I’m not a part of a redneck agenda” became “I’m not part of the MAGA agenda.” Thus was born the first culture skirmish of 2024.
Social media lit up with salutes from the left and complaints from the right.
The word indie has lost a lot of its credibility over the years. A term that’s supposed to signal nonconformity is now a bland aesthetic label, evoking microbrews and mason jars. Many supposedly indie institutions have allied with corporations, such as when Pitchfork, the music-reviewing website known for catapulting obscure bands and tearing down big ones, was bought by Condé Nast, the glossy media company, in 2015.
Over the decades, as it evolved from a slur into a term of tribal pride, the word queer was converted by academics into a verb. To queer a text is to look for hidden, un-straight meaning—to theorize that sexual repression shapes Holden Caulfield’s bad attitude and Nick Carraway’s unreliable narration. Typically, readers queer a work through their interpretation. What the author really meant is, in many cases, unknowable; the text and its effect are what matters most.
When the hip-hop legend André 3000 confused the world by releasing an album of experimental flute music earlier this year, he offered a simple explanation for why he’s stopped rapping: “I’m 48 years old,” he told GQ. He gave examples of personal concerns that he found lyrically unusable: “I got to go get a colonoscopy’ … ‘My eyesight is going bad.
Confession: The Beyoncé concert I attended this past summer was pretty good but not, as Oprah described it, “the most extraordinary thing I’ve ever seen.” Naturally, the expectations are high for any show by the most spectacular artist of my lifetime. Beyoncé’s previous solo arena tour, in 2016, made for a peak concertgoing experience: Even from the nosebleeds, she seemed huge, and impossibly important.
Taylor Swift’s 1989 reminds me of 2014, the year of its release, which is to say that it reminds me of Tinder. That’s when the dating app, founded two years earlier, settled into ultra-popularity: It was logging 1 billion “swipes” a day as singles smudged their thumbs over pictures of strangers, judging and being judged. Tinder turned the classic, nervous thrill of the dating experience into a game, one that millions of people could play at once.
Before she decided to sue Lizzo for sexual harassment, assault, and a number of other offenses earlier this year, the backup dancer Arianna Davis wondered if she was blowing her concerns with her work environment out of proportion. Touring with the widely beloved rapper and singer, she had witnessed some bizarre things: The lawsuit she filed with two other dancers includes the words “bananas protruding from the performers’ vaginas.
We’ve just lived through what Vulture has labeled “Silly Song Summer,” during which onomatopoeias (Kylie Minogue’s “Padam Padam”), farcical film ballads (Barbie’s “I’m Just Ken,” The Super Mario Bros. Movie’s “Peaches”), and a Eurodance satire (Kyle Gordon a.k.a. D.J. Crazy Times’s “Planet of the Bass”) went viral.
Have you ever loved a song without knowing what it means? That rarely happens when I listen to Olivia Rodrigo. The 20-year-old pop star has conquered the world by singing about unruly emotions with the precision of a court reporter. The songs on her new album, Guts, offer tidy thesis statements about the nature of heartbreak, declaring, “Love’s embarrassing” (on “Love Is Embarrassing”) or “Love is never logical” (on “Logical”).
Smash Mouth has long been, as its guitarist, Greg Camp, once said, “a band that you can make fun of.” The pop-rock group’s signature hit, 1999’s “All Star,” combines the sounds of DJ scratches, glockenspiel, and a white dude rapping that he “ain’t the sharpest tool in the shed.” Fashionwise, the band tended to dress for a funky night at the bowling alley.
During the years when the social-media platform MySpace ruled the internet—roughly 2005 to 2008—it fueled a cultural phenomenon known as the “Scene.” The term encompassed young people who liked to flat iron and dye their hair until their bangs resembled sheafs of carbon fiber. They wore skinny jeans and vampiric eyeshadow; they listened to energetic rock possessed with strident vulnerability (signature bands: Fall Out Boy, Dashboard Confessional, Panic! at the Disco).
One of the most uncompromising artists of the 21st century, Anohni Hegarty makes gorgeous music to warn humankind of its demise. Whether with gentle orchestration on the classic 2005 album I Am a Bird Now or with electronic beats on the 2016 release Hopelessness, her quavering voice has prophesied the death of herself, our species, and our planet with haunting, almost paralyzing, clarity.
For the past year or so, artists have marketed delirious new music by talking about the doldrums of lockdown. The signature example is Beyoncé’s Renaissance, a whirligig tour through gay, Black dance history that features the type-A superstar performing her wackiest vocals ever. Renaissance, Beyoncé wrote on Instagram, was born from dreaming of freedom at “a time when little else was moving.
Killer Mike is a man of contradictions. He has campaigned for Bernie Sanders and rapped about celebrating Ronald Reagan’s death; he also supports gun ownership and speaks warmly about Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp. Years ago, he renounced the Christian faith he was raised with, but his first solo album in a decade, Michael—whose cover is a childhood photo of Mike, adorned with devil horns and a halo—is laden with gospel choirs and biblical references.
Both slang for “super fan” and the title of a terrifying Eminem song, the term stan refers to a distinctly modern phenomenon depicted in the controversial new Amazon Prime series Swarm. In the horror-comedy created by Atlanta’s Donald Glover and Janine Nabers, a young woman takes lethal revenge on people who talk poorly about her favorite pop star.
Updated at 11:24 a.m. ET on March 19, 2023 Breaking: Taylor Swift is not simply a voice in our ears or an abstract concept to argue over at parties, but a flesh-and-blood being with a taste for sparkling pajamas and the stamina of a ram. All concerts are conjurings, turning the audience’s idea of a performer into a real thing, but last night’s kickoff of Taylor Swift’s Eras tour in Glendale, Arizona, heightened the amazement with Houdini-escapes-handcuffs physicality.
Breaking: Taylor Swift is not simply a voice in our ears or an abstract concept to argue over at parties, but a flesh-and-blood being with a taste for sparkling pajamas and the stamina of a ram. All concerts are conjurings, turning the audience’s idea of a performer into a real thing, but last night’s kickoff of Taylor Swift’s Eras tour in Glendale, Arizona, heightened the amazement with Houdini-escapes-handcuffs physicality.
One of the most popular songs in the world right now presents a musical riddle: Are you supposed to dance or nap? PinkPantheress’s “Boy’s a Liar Pt. 2,” featuring the rapper Ice Spice, sounds both fast and sluggish, new and old. It’s undeniably catchy and yet feels as fleeting as a mild dream. Another vexing fact: Liar is pronounced, in the chorus, “lee-yah.”Really, the No.
If you’d told any music connoisseur living in the year 1994 that one of the hottest albums of the year 2023 would sound like Pure Moods, the relaxing compilation CD then being sold on TV commercials for $17.99 (plus shipping and handling), that person might have laughed. But if you’d told me the same thing in 1994, I’d have said that the future sounded cool. I was 7 years old.
Red and white—conveying fire and blankness—were such perfect colors for Rihanna to strobe at us tonight. Over 18 years in the spotlight, the singer has left no doubt that she’s a woman of depth and range, with wild fascinations and gut-held convictions and a rich personal life. But by now, we should understand that she’s never going to show us all of that—because no artist ever could, and because she’s not going to bullshit us otherwise.
Sam Smith’s music defines the word inoffensive—so why does the singer inspire so many arguments? For more than a decade, Smith’s distinctive voice has soaked through the collective consciousness like the syrup in a rum cake. But that success has also triggered annoyance from across the cultural spectrum. As a nonbinary person, Smith has been treated as a punch line by right-wing media.
Were the meaning of life to be divined from any artifact produced in the year 2022, that artifact would be a Negroni Sbagliato. Or rather, it would be the sight of the actors Emma D’Arcy and Olivia Cooke, in a now-famous promotional video for HBO’s House of the Dragon, discussing their favorite cocktails. In the dishy tone of someone describing a sex dream, D’Arcy endorses the Negroni Sbagliato, which is like a negroni but, D’Arcy purrs, “with prosecco in it.
Happy holidays—the final great pop album of the year is all about loathing and misery! “Everything disgusting, conversation is so boring,” SZA sings on her long-awaited second album. She later adds, “I hate everybody, I hate everyone.”SZA’s music is often described as R&B, a style in which anger and sadness tend to flow from heartbreak. But the 33-year-old star doesn’t seem comfortable admitting she has a heart at all.
What was your line with Kanye West? If you never listened to what he had to say in the first place, you don’t get a medal: The rapper now known as Ye really did, at one time, merit attention for making some of the most forward-thinking art of this century. (Plus he was funny, in an actually-trying-to-be way.
This story contains major spoilers for Tár.As someone who writes about art and artists for a living, I confess that I find no question more exhausting than “Can we separate the art from the artist?” The only good answer is a frustrating one: “It depends.” So I went into Tár, Todd Field’s acclaimed movie starring Cate Blanchett, with some dread.