So there I was being dismissive about Selena Gomez’s music, and then this leaks, and it’s really good (the Britney-written “Whiplash” is pretty great too).
I was thinking about the word “rizz”, and how weird it is that we have a recent word that if I wanted to explain to e.g. my parents I would have to describe as a synonym for “braggadocio”, a word I figured nobody had used for at least 50 years. So I checked the ngram, and it turns out there’s been a steady uptick in the use of “braggadicio” since 1980 (in which case why do we even need the word “rizz”, TBH).
Ideologically correct Niche, you love to see it
The relatively poor chart performance of Leigh-Anne Pinnock’s solo debut (not even cracking the top 10) must have come as a disappointment, and more disappointingly to me marks a setback for the ongoing UK garage revival. But the song is great.
Goncharov coming third in tumblr's top 100 movies of 2023 is so damn funny. Imagine being a film studio exec who spent millions making some of the other 97 movies listed below it only to be beaten by a film that cost exactly zero dollars to make and doesn't exist
This is why the studios have started deleting their films before release, they’re desperate to create the next Goncharov
People often talk about country music as storytelling, but I think I like it best when it’s not telling stories, but crafting vignettes: precisely drawn instants that crystalise a character or a mood.
Holly Humberstone has made the classic error of releasing a pretty good album with one absolutely transcendent track that completely overshadows the rest. “Don’t make me stand outside in the pouring rain / With a freshly ripped human heart from my rib cage / And a boombox, how pathetic, babe” is such a great combination of self-dramatisation and self-deprecation (Morrissey could never).
Not to be all lesbian yearning on the lesbian yearning website but
An argument could be made that Perfect Picture’s themes of authenticity IRL vs. URL, photos and screens, is a bit of backsliding towards the less interesting parts of 90s pomo (the sort of thing that started getting written when academics who'ld read too much Baudrillard got their first modem). But the tunes do bang, and Diamond’s not-quite-flat affect is appropriate, and her lyrics rather more carefully mine the ambiguity of presentation than people could in the 90s (when online and offline really did seem meaningfully distinct).
bloomsberries
