Pop

Sabrina Carpenter, who will for the first time this week be hosting NBC’s Saturday Night Live, continues to be a cause of controversy. Over the summer, the five-foot, honey-voiced singer revealed the cover for her newly released album, Man’s Best Friend. It shows her wearing a black minidress on her hands and knees, while a faceless man holds a handful of her hair. The image immediately stirred outrage online. Those who usually find themselves on the side of unfettered female sexual liberation called the cover regressive, degrading, and submissive toward the male gaze. Some fans defended the image, arguing that Carpenter was clearly satirizing incompetent and controlling men as well as her portrayal by the media as a “sex obsessed” pop star.

As I wrote a few weeks ago, there is a marvelous opportunity to bond with one’s children when you both conceive an interest, even an obsession, with the same musical act. Once upon a time, it might have been the Beatles, or Bowie or Madonna: now, it’s Taylor Swift, the all-conquering pop songstress who has not only taken over the world, but has made yet more untold millions with her concert film Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour. In practice, most of those seeing it will not have been able to get tickets to see her three-and-half-hour live show, so this slightly abbreviated version (a mere two and three quarter hours) will have to do. And my seven-year old daughter Rose is a Swiftie par excellence. We are going to have fun, I declare, and she rolls her eyes and says, “If you say so, Dad.

Over the weekend, singing sensations Miley Cyrus and Shakira brought the "diss track" — a song whose primary purpose is to disparage someone else — back into the mainstream. Both artists chose to target their ex-husbands. Shakira’s new song, which was released last week, racked up 63 million views in the first twenty-four hours following its release. It has since been viewed more than 142 million times, making it the most watched new Latin song in YouTube’s history. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CocEMWdc7Ck Last year the Colombian singer split from former soccer player Gerard Piqué, her husband of more than a decade.

"I’ve had an extraordinary life, I must make an extraordinary film," Madonna told Variety in July, as she described her decision to helm her own biopic as a "preemptive strike" against the men who wanted to tell her story. That was last summer, when there were reports of a months-long "Madonna bootcamp" led by casting director Carmen Cuba, which included eleven-hour choreography sessions, where everyone from Florence Pugh, Alexa Demie, Bebe Rexha, Odessa Young and Sky Ferreira auditioned to play the "Material Girl." Madonna said she wanted the role to go to someone who could "convey the incredible journey that life has taken me on as an artist, a musician, a dancer...the focus of this film will always be music.

Half an hour or so into the new Whitney Houston biopic, I Wanna Dance with Somebody, two bros sitting next to me asked, “Why is gay Whitney in Black Panther?” They were in the wrong movie, but based on the other audience members screaming at the screen, the lone straight men weren’t alone in finding director Kasi Lemmons’s new film shocking. Sony promoted I Wanna Dance with Somebody as the feel-good biopic of the year. The trailer starts with the hook of the titular song and goes on to show Houston (Naomi Ackie) dancing to “How Will I Know” and singing her iconic rendition of the “Star-Spangled Banner” at the Super Bowl. Houston rarely speaks, but when she does, she talks about music: “My dream,” she purrs, “sing how I want to sing.

Taylor Swift's album Red, her fourth, originally dropped my first semester at college. It was Swift's first full foray into pop and she matched the change in genre with a new signature appearance; bright red lips and glossy, straight hair with bangs to replace her sweeping curly blonde 'do. Red's exploration of deep love and subsequent heartbreak, plus Taylor's personal reinvention, felt like a comfort during my own transition into adulthood. Swift announced last week that she would be dropping the "Taylor's Version" of Red earlier than expected. The re-release is part of a project Swift has undertaken to re-record all of her masters after her former label sold them out from under her to Scooter Braun.

As a fitfully employed, freelance hack, there are few jobs I consider beneath me. I’ve peered anxiously over the boundary wall of Eric Clapton’s English estate to the approaching noise of guard dogs to see if Clapton might care to supply an impromptu quote or two in lieu of the formal interview his management had aggressively denied me. I’ve been informed by a source close to Roman Polanski that he considered me a ‘nosy fellow’ — enough, perhaps, to give pause to anyone who happens to recall the director using that same phrase to Jack Nicholson immediately prior to inserting his flick-knife in Nicholson’s left nostril in a scene from Chinatown.

As a Taylor Swift fan, I’ve greeted the past year’s cornucopia of fresh content with joy and gratitude. Every day, I wake up and wonder: will there be a new Taylor Swift album today? With astounding frequency, there is! The latest entry into the T. Swift COVID-era canon, following folklore and evermore, is the re-recording of her 2008 smash-hit album Fearless, now available as a 27-track pop-country marathon known as Taylor’s Version. Of course, the original Fearless was also, strictly speaking, ‘Taylor’s Version’. But the master recordings of that album, which can be monetized through lucrative avenues like sampling and commercials, belonged to the label she signed with as a teenager, who refused to sell them back to her.

In June, a 20-year-old man called Jahseh Onfroy was murdered after leaving a motorcycle dealership in Deerfield Beach, Florida. Onfroy was a rapper, who recorded under the name XXXTentacion, and he had become extraordinarily successful — his two albums had reached No. 2 and No. 1 in the US, despite moderate sales, because of the amount of online plays they had received. The day after he died, my social-media timelines were full of music writers discussing his death, and the tenor — from those with kids, at least — was clear. Post after post noted that XXXTentacion was a nasty piece of work, and few should mourn him, yet the writer’s 13- or 14- or 15-year-old was devastated by his death. XXXTentacion was, it is true, a nasty piece of work.

Early in 1987, a middle-aged woman approached me on the record counter of the Slough branch of Boots. ‘What do you have by Ladysmith Black Mambazo?’ she demanded. Nothing. Boots in Slough wasn’t big on South African isicathamiya choral music. ‘Well,’ she suggested, ‘you really ought to get their records in. They’re going to be huge.’ She was wrong, but I knew why she was so sure. Ladysmith Black Mambazo had been among the standout guests on Paul Simon’s Graceland, released a few months before. Graceland made Simon, by my reckoning, the first pop star who had emerged from the rock’n’roll era to make a major cultural impact across three decades. By the 1980s, the Stones had become just a touring machine.

‘I like your shirt today,’ Sir Ray Davies says to the waiter who brings his glass of water to the table outside a café in Highgate. ‘How’s your girlfriend?’ It turns out the girlfriend is no longer the girlfriend. ‘You broke up? You know, that happens. It’ll be OK. You’ll meet somebody else.’ He pauses and then says something that runs through my head for days after our interview. ‘She’ll meet somebody else.’ It’s true, of course; she will. And it’s a human thing to say: both parties to the relationship will move on. But it’s also delivered with a hint of claws. Who wants to be told, fresh from a break-up, that their ex will soon be hooking up with another partner?

Kanye West is more than halfway in to the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame — if his politics don’t block the way. This extraordinary rapper-producer first won over a worldwide audience with the 2004 anthem ‘Jesus Walks’, disrupted hip-hop’s bling-bling materialism with the us-vs-them challenge of his Jay-Z collaboration Watch the Throne, and then released the confounding My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, which rightly became the most highly acclaimed hip-hop album this century. He went on to make controversial public art with his ‘New Slaves’ video, which was projected in 66 locations around the world (called Orwellian by admirers and dumbfounded detractors).