The surprisingly good cast of Tom Hooper’s adaptation of Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats is about to get even more surprisingly good, because Variety is reporting that Idris Elba is “in final negotiations” to join what will surely be a big, weird musical. The film version of the iconic Broadway show already has Ian…
Suggesting that not even “the people” give an actual fuck about what the people want anymore, last night’s American Music Awards ended up being the least-watched outing in the popular-vote-based event’s history. Not even the pull of a Cardi B performance, or the final, inescapable cultural ascendancy of Taylor Swift,…
Reminding us all that there’s nothing the American people love more than democracy, apple pie, and music videos where a perky blonde lady transforms into a robot anime princess, Taylor Swift has once again been judged the queen of American music by the American Music Awards. The populist answer to those pesky critical…
Taylor Swift sent the dregs of 4chan into an existential tizzy yesterday by revealing herself to not be a closet white nationalist. In an Instagram post, the traditionally apolitical pop star came out in support of democrats Phil Breseden and Jim Cooper, both of whom are running in Tennessee’s US Senate race. If…
Taylor Swift is a modern pop icon, but, in a social and political climate that expects its celebrities to wield their massive influence with care, she’s been criticized for prioritizing glamour pics of her lavish lifestyle over any kind of opinion on the issues currently afflicting the country. It’s not that fans want…
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…
