Given all the feminist hype for HBO star Lena Dunham, what she recently said about music is making her sound more like vintage Tipper Gore than a modern-day Gloria Steinem.
Dunham was speaking at Variety’s Power of Women 2015 lunch when she made the following comments attacking music (most notably hip-hop and rap), which she says, “celebrates the exploiters and hides the exploited.”
Which was the bigger insult to Hillary: that she might have committed hanky-panky with the handling of her email, or that she's a huge Barry Manilow fan?
On today's With All Due Respect, Mark Halperin mocked Hillary's decision to delete thousands of supposedly personal emails: "was she running out of server space because she was, like, downloading every Barry Manilow song?" John Heilemann was equally unimpressed, quoting someone who tweeted: "Nixon didn't burn the tapes but Hillary destroyed the emails." Ouch.
Over the years, the hip music critics have easily mocked the Grammy Awards for rewarding kitschy music. See: Milli Vanilli, Best New Artist. Oops. But that doesn’t mean Kanye West gets to declare himself the new dean of the rock critics like Robert Christgau.
Kanye threatened to storm on stage and take the Album of the Year award away from Beck and give it to Beyonce. Washington Post music critic Chris Richards actually applauded West’s antics on Thursday. His trash talk is apparently a treasure.
Leftist rock critic Greil Marcus claims that ever since Obama was elected, there’s been a widespread racist “loathing…that seeks out its targets.”
He even claimed "I don’t think it’s nuts that in a certain way, when that cop killed Michael Brown, and when George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin, they were killing Barack Obama."
Imagine a movie that 1) sympathetically portrays Occupy Wall Street and 2) features songs by “Weird Al” Yankovic. If you think 1) and 2) seem incongruous, you might get an argument from writer Lynn Stuart Parramore.
In a piece that ran Wednesday on Salon and originally appeared on AlterNet, Parramore claimed that Yankovic’s recent chart-topping album, Mandatory Fun, contains a “deeply moral theme…about how capitalism’s servants — narcissism, greed, vulgarity, and all-around douchiness — have to carry out its orders to beat us into a pulverized pulp of compliance.” She also exulted that in one of her favorite tracks, “Al skewers the corporate capitalism which promised us all the wonders of efficiency, harmony and prosperity, only to deliver us to Dilbert’s cubicle of despair.” From Parramore’s story (emphasis added):
Would right-wingers like a larger presence in mainstream news and entertainment media, or would they rather grumble about the MSM’s liberal bias while patronizing conservative media outlets? To American Prospect blogger Paul Waldman, it’s clear that the second is correct.
Waldman’s peg for his Wednesday post was a National Review piece by editor and publisher Adam Bellow on the need for a conservative counterculture that would produce novels, movies, music, and so on. Apropos of Bellow’s comment that it’s too bad righties have “hived ourselves off into our own politicized media bubble,” Waldman snipes that conservatives want very much to stay inside said bubble, even though it leaves them prone to “all kinds of pathological beliefs and behaviors.”
So how did Good Morning America open its Fourth of July show today? Fighter-jet flyover? Small-town Independence Day parade? Inspiring video of America's beauty from sea to shining sea? Guess again. GMA featured rapper Jason Derulo [I never heard of him either], jet skiing past the Statue of Liberty.
And which song did GMA place at the top of the list when it displayed a smartphone with Derulo's hits? Why, "Talk Dirty" [mistakenly entitled "Talking Dirty" by GMA]. A song so foul and misogynistic we couldn't possibly display the lyrics, but you can read them here if you like. View the video after the jump.
As you probably know, the 1980s were boom years for conservatives. Among the most prominent right-wingers back then: Ronald Reagan, Tom Clancy, Casey Kasem…
OK, Kasem, who died on June 15, actually was a staunch liberal, a supporter in that decade of Jesse Jackson and later of Dennis Kucinich. But during the ‘80s, wrote Scott Timberg in a Sunday piece for Salon, “we had a political and economic revolution, spearheaded by a one-time actor who was often massively popular, that did the same thing as” Kasem’s radio show, “American Top 40.”
The musical wreckage that is Jennifer Lopez’s latest album is one thing; the cultural wreckage that “A.K.A” reflects is another altogether.
J-Lo has risen from the American Idol judges’ table, but her attempt to regain her ‘Jenny From The Block’ glory days has taken a face plant on the pavement. According to ShowBizz 411, the album has only sold 30-35,000 copies during its debut week.
A darling of the lefty entertainment establishment has taken a prosthetic nose dive into hot water. At Macklemore’s May 16 Seattle performance at the opening of “Spectacle: The Music Video,” the rapper lionized for his pro-gay stance appeared on stage in a stereotypical Jewish costume, singing his hit, “Thrift Shop.”
Bad move for a guy celebrated for injecting “tolerance and acceptance and equal rights” into hip hop.
Buyer beware those promising a “Catholic education.”
St. Mary’s Institute (SMI) is the Catholic grade school in my wife’s New York hometown, Amsterdam. It is affiliated with St. Mary’s Catholic Church, whose pastor Father John Medwid pens the opening to the Saint Mary’s Institute annual newsletter.
The Washington Post carried a huge, almost life-size picture of Jay Carney’s head in the Style section on Friday. But it was designed as a pick-me-up for the embattled Obama spinner. It was a story about...Carney and his favorite rock band.
“Benghazi and the IRS have kept Carney scrambling, and he hasn’t had much time to listen to ‘English Little League,’ the latest album from the Ohio indie-rock band [Guided by Voices] he has affectionately name-dropped in more than one news briefing.” Critics want Carney canned, but the Post wants him to feel happy about the “beer-soaked brilliance” of his favorite rockers: