The Video Music Awards, your yearly reminder that MTV does in fact continue to play music videos, are scheduled for August 20, when we’ll see Cardi B, Beyoncé, JAY-Z, Bruno Mars, Drake, Childish Gambino, and more compete for Moonpeople and bragging rights. The complete list of nominations is now out, with The Carters…
Finally, a Taylor Swift beef worth talking about. Over the weekend, songwriter Allee Willis, a member of the Songwriters Hall of Fame and co-writer of Earth, Wind & Fire’s 1978 nonsense-word ass-shaker “September,” addressed Swift’s recent cover of the song. She did so at her one-woman show in Detroit, where Willis…
If the Grammys are out of touch, the iHeartRadio awards are almost too in touch, celebrating the most popular of popular music and rejecting stuff that’s unnecessarily hip or cool. It’s a show, in other words, that can award Maroon 5 with Best Duo/Group Of The Year in 2018 even though Migos was also nominated. Of…
A U.S. District Judge has ruled to dismiss a recent lawsuit against Taylor Swift, in which songwriters Nathan Butler and Sean Hall alleged that her hit song “Shake It Off” ripped off the lyrics to 3LW’s “Playas Gon’ Play,” which the pair wrote for the ’90s girl group. Butler and Hall’s argument centered on the idea…
Last September, we reported that Taylor Swift was being drawn back into court yet again, this time over the lyrics to her 2014 smash hit “Shake It Off.” The lawsuit in question came from songwriters Sean Hall and Nathan Butler, who claimed that Swift ripped off the lyrics to 3LW’s “Playas Gon’ Play”—which they…
It’s a New Year, and with it comes the opportunity for a fresh start—to take a hard and unflinching look at the areas in our lives that could stand to be improved, then to immediately give up on that and start thinking about how pop culture can better distract us from our problems. In what has become an annual…
At the end of last week, Taylor Swift launched The Swift Life, a social media app meant to act as an oasis from the tumultuous, politics-laden world of the internet, a place where fans of Taylor Swift could peaceably discuss and fawn over their favorite thing: Taylor Swift. Unfortunately, as The Daily Beast reports, …
It’s a hard, ugly world out there, friends. California’s on fire, most of our entertainment heroes are secret monsters, and the American political landscape is lorded over by a leering gremlin with all the goodwill, competence, and skin tone of a slowly rotting carrot. Not everybody had a dismal 2017, though; in…
Because we all used to be with it, but then they changed what “it” was, it’s okay to not be in the know as to the current crop of pop stars. That’s one of the reasons this segment from James Corden’s Late Late Show is so helpful; in it, Corden takes over as the general manager of Inglewood’s The Forum for its…
Ensuring that there’s really no part of this story where he doesn’t come off as some species of skeezy dick, former DJ David Mueller says he’s now mailed Taylor Swift the $1 he owed her—but possibly with an optional, obnoxious twist. Said debt came about as part of damages Swift demanded from him earlier this year,…
In a year that saw new albums from Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, HAIM, and Lorde, Ed Sheeran’s Divide has somehow nabbed the title of most-streamed Spotify album of 2017. As MTV News reports, Sheeran also beat Drake, The Weeknd, Calvin Harris, and The Chainsmokers, but it looks like it was mostly on the strength of one…
Listen, no offense to Taylor Swift—building a $280 million media empire at 27 years old is an impressive achievement—but, no matter how many shades darker she takes her lipstick, she will never be “pirate queen of the South China Sea” badass. Over the weekend, this point was made over and over again, in a rare moment…
We have a new highest-paid woman in music, and it’s someone who seems like she was born to take this top spot: Beyoncé. According to Forbes’ annual list, she raked in $105 million in the past year (before taxes) thanks to the success of Lemonade and her Formation World Tour—which made a quarter of a billion dollars…
“I might Elizabeth Taylor this thing. You don’t know.”
The definitive song of the first era of Taylor Swift’s career is 2008’s “Love Story,” a heart-in-throat Dashboard Confessional anthem that has the artistic audacity to re-envision Romeo And Juliet with a happy ending. Swift was going through a typically Swiftian tough relationship at the time, and connected, like many…
Good news for anybody excited for the new Taylor Swift album, Reputation (or just excited for the media blitz preceding the album to subside): It’s finally arrived tonight, after numerous music videos, leaks, robot horses, zombie costumes, and just, so, so many snakes.
Taylor Swift’s new album Reputation should drop at midnight tonight, preceded by a string of high-concept singles and videos. These have rekindled a conversation about the ongoing ambiguity as to the pop star’s political beliefs—she doggedly refused to state who she voted for in the last election—and her semi-ironic…
Yesterday, the ACLU came to the defense of a music blog that had called on Taylor Swift to denounce white supremacists, an assertion that inspired a threatening letter from the pop star’s lawyers. Today, a new party entered the fray: yes, it’s our good friend Father John Misty, here to do the Father John Misty thing…
The ACLU has announced that it’s stepping up to defend Meghan Herning, an editor for PopFront who recently received a threatening letter from Taylor Swift and her attorney over a blog post called “Swiftly to the alt-right: Taylor subtly gets the lower case kkk in formation.” The piece was about how white supremacists…
As 2017 winds to a close, after a year that’s seen the release of thousands of albums—an unusually large number of which are quite good!—it seems almost unthinkable that November would still have more to give. But with new records from the likes of Björk, Angel Olsen, Shamir, Sharon Jones, and more still in the…
