The pop star vowed on International Transgender Day of Visibility to match donations to groups that advocate for trans rights
On International Transgender Day of Visibility, Ariana Grande is using her star power to rally her millions of fans to support trans youth.
In an Instagram post on Thursday, the pop star announced the Protect & Defend Trans Youth Fund, which she founded with the fundraising platform Pledge.
Continue reading...Adam McKay’s celeb-packed Netflix comedy aims to be a farcical warning of climate change but broad potshots and a smug superiority tanks his message
When persuading someone to change their mind on a major topic, what’s being said isn’t always quite as important as how it’s said. If a person feels attacked or disrespected or condescended to, they’ll turn off their brain and block out the most rational, correct arguments on principle alone. Homo sapiens are odd, emotional creatures, more amenable to a convincing pitch than poorly presented rightness. It’s why we vote for the guy we’d gladly have as a drinking buddy over the somewhat alienating candidates with a firmer grasp on the issues. It’s why we feel heartbreak when the worst person we know makes a great point.
Adam McKay’s new satire Don’t Look Up, a last-ditch effort to get the citizens of Earth to give a damn about the imminent end of days spurred by the climate crisis, appears to be at least somewhat aware of this defect in human nature. It’s all about the difficulty of compelling the disinterested to care, in this instance about a gargantuan comet hurtling toward the Earth on a collision course of imminent obliteration, an emphatic if rather ill-suited, metaphor. (Everyone’s blasé about global heating in part because it’s so gradual, because it isn’t a force of instant destruction with a due date in an immediate future we’ll all live to see.) Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence portray astronomers Randall Mindy and Kate Dibiasky, flummoxed to find that no one’s all that alarmed about the “planet-killer” they’ve discovered – not the grinning daytime cable-news dummies played by Tyler Perry and Cate Blanchett, not the White House led by Trump-styled president Meryl Streep and not the American people.
Continue reading...Butterflies with Mariah, Bronski Beat in the Peak District, Snoop Dogg on a food delivery ad … our writers reveal the tracks that made 2020 bearable
When it came to lockdown comfort listening, there was something particularly appealing about lush symphonic soul made by artists such as Teddy Pendergrass and the Delfonics. But there was one record I reached for repeatedly: Black Moses by Isaac Hayes, and particularly the tracks arranged by Dale Warren. Their version of Burt Bacharach’s (They Long to Be) Close to You is an epic, spinning the original classic into a nine-minute dose of saccharine soul. But their cover of Going in Circles, another Warren exercise in expansion, is their masterpiece, reimagining the Friends of Distinction original as a seven-minute arrangement with stirring strings and beatific backing vocals that builds into a story about lost love that transcends the genre’s usual parameters. A perfect, if slightly meta, balm for the repetitive lockdown blues. Lanre Bakare
Continue reading...Singer reigns supreme in awards show filled with calls for social justice and recognition of Covid tragedy
Lady Gaga dominated an unusual year for the MTV Video Music awards, winning five awards in a strange and disconcerting evening.
The singer, who led the evening with nine nominations and wore a variety of masks through the night, accepted awards for artist of the year, song of the year, best cinematography and best collaboration for Rain on Me and the inaugural Tricon award, which recognizes an artist who is highly accomplished across three or more disciplines.
Continue reading...Returning to the sound of her maximalist electro-pop heyday, Gaga explores buried trauma, mental illness and the complexities of fame on this return to form
A criticism often levelled at Lady Gaga is that the fantastical imagery she constructs around her albums eclipses the music itself. But it’s a sliding scale – and one that certainly mattered less when she was knocking out undeniable dance-pop party starters like Poker Face and Just Dance, or cementing her status as pop’s freaky outlier on the twisted Bad Romance. That she appeared in alien-like form in that song’s video made perfect sense: here was a chameleonic pop superstar in the vein of Bowie, Prince and Madonna opening a portal to an escapist dimension. Later, it made sense that she would lean into the imagery of hair metal on 2011’s gloriously OTT, Springsteen-referencing Born This Way. Yet on 2013’s bloated Artpop – billed as an exploration of the “reverse Warholian” phenomenon in pop culture, whatever that may be, and featuring at least one performance in which she employed a “vomit artist” to puke green paint on her chest – the aesthetic felt more like desperate distraction tactics.
Continue reading...The singer-songwriter said ‘there has to be a place in feminism for women who look and act like me’, citing her lyrics on ‘submissive roles’
Lana Del Rey has hit out at the accusations that she “glamorises abuse” that have trailed her throughout her decade-long career. In a lengthy text post to her Instagram account, the 34-year-old singer criticised “female writers and alt singers” who she says have blamed her “minor lyrical exploration detailing my sometimes submissive or passive roles in my relationships” for “[setting] women back hundreds of years”.
She wrote: “In reality I’m just a glamorous person singing about the realities of what we are all now seeing are very prevalent emotionally abusive relationships all over the world.” She said she had been “honest and optimistic” about her “challenging” relationships: “News flash! That’s just how it is for many women.”
Continue reading...Singer was hoping for a Japanese translation of the title of her hit 7 Rings. Instead she ended up with a tattoo which means ‘small charcoal grill’
Too bad pop star Ariana Grande is vegan – she just tattooed an accidental homage to a Japanese barbeque grill on her palm.
The US singer’s attempt to ink an ode to her hit single 7 Rings backfired Wednesday after social media quickly chimed in to tell her the characters actually translated to “shichirin”: a small charcoal grill.
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