In 2017, Yoko Ono began working with producer Michael De Luca and Bohemian Rhapsody co-writer Anthony McCarten to develop a film about her relationship with John Lennon, a story that we noted at the time would have to at least partially involve Lennon being a dick to his first wife. Rather than detailing some of…
On her 2007 album How To Win!, stand-up comedian Maria Bamford tells a joke about her mother telling her she looks “mentally ill” without makeup. “Now, when I go home, I’m certain to wear thick green eyeshadow and a line of lipstick around my lips,” Bamford says, before asking in a quivering voice, “Baby look pretty…
The backlash against R. Kelly over allegations that he has kept women imprisoned in an abusive sex cult swelled earlier this year, culminating in Spotify’s decision to remove his music from its streaming service as part of a new “hateful conduct” policy. That policy was reversed in less than a month, but that didn’t…
Gorillaz is a cartoon band led by a guy named 2-D who happens to sing remarkably similar to Blur frontman Damon Albarn, which may have something to do with the fact that Albarn co-created Gorillaz and does most of the singing, but Albarn made the connection between the two bands a bit more obvious this weekend at the…
Ah, advertising: The grand pursuit of selling human emotions back to the people who feel them. At its best, a great ad is a form of Don Draper-esque high art; more often, though, it’s a crude copy of something real, a notion that’s heavily emphasized whenever the commercial in question features an actual crude copy of…
There’s a lot of music out there. To help you cut through all the noise, every week The A.V. Club is rounding up A-Sides, five recent releases we think are worth your time.
You know how it is: It’s late October, the jack-o-lanterns are out, and you’re looking for extra places around the house to get all spookied up. Cobwebs in the bathroom? Check. Skeletons in the closet? On point. But what about the top drawer in your nightstand? You know the one we mean; the one you’re always terrified…
As reported by Pitchfork, Pusha T recently appeared on The Joe Budden Podcast and offered some new information about how he found out that Drake had a secret son—which became an important factor in the brutal feud that Pusha T waged against Drake over the summer. The common assumption was that Pusha heard about…
Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers, and Lucy Dacus make records that seemingly flaunt their loneliness to make the listener feel less alone. Devastatingly honest, each singer-songwriter’s most recent record—Baker’s Turn Out The Lights, Bridgers’ Stranger In The Alps, and Dacus’ Historian, all out in the past year or…
It’s the end of an aesthetically questionable era for metal band Disturbed, as singer David Draiman has revealed to German news outlet Deutsche Welle (via Stereogum) that he has removed his weird chin piercings. For decades, the otherwise unassuming Draiman has used his chin piercings (which typically look like weird…
Bob Dylan’s 1975 album Blood On The Tracks is already sort of a story about Dylan’s crumbling marriage to his first wife, but it sounds like Call Me By Your Name and Suspiria director Luca Guadagnino is going to turn it into an actual story by adapting the album into a movie. That news came up during a long profile on…
After criticizing Asif Kapadia’s Amy Winehouse documentary for being “misleading,” and “contain[ing] some basic untruths,” Mitch Winehouse, father of the late neo-soul singer, has announced he will co-executive produce a biopic about his daughter. According to The Guardian, the Winehouse family has signed a deal to…
Amazon’s celebrated Emmy-winner Transparent has been in flux for almost a year now, ever since multiple women involved in the show’s production accused star Jeffrey Tambor of sexual harassment. Tambor has since been fired and/or loudly quit the series, which has been forced to decide where to go in the absence of its…
As with so many places where entertainment and emotion intersect, rap beefs exist in a weird, semi-real space. On the one hand, they’re pure marketing moves—a way for two performers to raise each other’s profiles, show off their lyrical cleverness, and hopefully sell a few extra albums. But they’re also often the…
Let’s start with a dark, furtive confession: Divorced of its association with millions of repeats, remixes, and sound clips of Mike Myers screaming “Donkey!”, Smash Mouth’s hit anthem “All Star” is still a pretty damn catchy song. Relentlessly bright and fast-paced, it’s an earworm for a reason, even if its been so…
A 2013 article in The Atlantic asked a very good, non-rhetorical question: “Why is Sweden so good at pop music?” The fascinating article outlined some potential answers—prioritization of melodies, government support of artistic endeavors, a supportive community, embrace of cutting-edge technology and sounds—but missed…
There’s a lot of music out there. To help you cut through all the noise, every week The A.V. Club is rounding up A-Sides, five recent releases we think are worth your time.
Relationships fail for millions of different and valid reasons that are entirely unknowable to anyone but the couple themselves. Trying to explain what those reasons are, exactly, is difficult. How do you describe why the spark began to fade or which seemingly minor argument was suddenly a bridge too far? Well, if…
According to Variety, Hulu has given a straight-to-series order to Wu-Tang: An American Saga, a 10-episode drama about how a guy living in ‘90s New York named Bobby Diggs became RZA and formed the iconic Wu-Tang Clan rap group. The series will be written by both RZA and Alex Tse, the writer behind the recent SuperFly …
And to think: Just a few years ago, none of us had ever even heard of low-rent supervillain Billy McFarland, the guy who managed to trap a bunch of sense-light, disposable-income-heavy music fans on an island like it was his own, personal, Blink-182-adjacent Hunger Games. We’re talking, of course, about Fyre Festival,…