| How to entertain yourself this weekend. |
Notes, chords, words and repeating percussive sounds, in an aesthetically-pleasing order—what’s not to love? —Alex Pappademas, culture director |
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It’s Friday, it’s summer, and folks, music has done it again. Best art form? We’re saying it. (Second-best art form? You guessed it: Those giant airbrushed murals of life-size whales. So majestic!) While we’re “spinning,” as it were, the Addison Rae album (she does a pretty good Lana but an even better Madonna, turns out—shout out to Bedtime Stories-era Madonna specifically), the new Turnstile (gnarly), and the new Ethel Cain and Big Thief singles, we figured we’d bring a few of this week’s best GQ music stories to your attention. Music! You could be playing some right now, while reading this newsletter!
First up: Oh, y’know, just the biggest rap-world news story of the week. Did Universal Music Group tell Clipse to ask Kendrick Lamar to censor his verse on the forthcoming Clipse song “Chains and Whips” in order to avoid antagonizing Kendrick’s mortal enemy (and fellow UMG recording artist) Drake? So says Clipse’s Pusha T, in this profile of the reunited and resurgent coke-rap kingpins by GQ’s own Frazier Tharpe, who also got Pusha to go on record about the “foolishness” he witnessed during his stint in Kanye’s orbit. Apart from all that, though, this is also a moving story about two legends linking back up after far too long—and, if the new single “Ace Trumpets” is any indication, wiping the floor with their competition, as well. (And if you’re still hungry for beef, check out this week’s edition of Frazier’s Tap In column, in which Frazier shares bonus features from the interview, including the Thornton brothers saying sorry-not-sorry for deriding Frazier’s Audi.)
Speaking of sibling acts: Ben Allen journeyed over the hills to Ventura Boulevard to meet the Haim triplets—Este, Alana and Danielle—in their ancestral homeland, the Valley, and finds them in a very Clipse-like mood, vis-a-vis the haters. “I could look back,” Alana says, “at every single one of our albums and go, Fuck, so many people were like ‘Don’t do that’, ‘Don’t do that’, and we always stuck to our guns. Now we’re just like, ‘Fuck off. If you’re not gonna believe in us, we can believe in ourselves. Fuck off!’” Also on Haim’s list of opps: The guy who broke up with Este out of concern that their children would inherit her Type 1 diabetes and some knucklehead commenter who accused the band of miming a festival performance because their guitars didn’t appear to be plugged in. “It’s like, my dog, we’re playing with wireless,” says Danielle. “Are you a fucking idiot?”
In other, less overtly adversarial news: GQ’s own Site Director Nick Catucci weighs in on the ever-fluctuating definition of “dad rock.” Once a descriptor for the creative activities of Jeffrey Scott Tweedy and his boomer antecedents, these days the “dad rock” tag is applied no less often to artists who exist at an intersection of youthful precocity and tradition-conscious old-before-their-timeness, like M.J. Lenderman, Wednesday, Cameron Winter, and Friendship—whose new album Caveman Wakes Up has the best song about a creepy housemate playing Resident Evil in your living room you’re going to hear today.
And and and! GQ’s Matthew Roberson digs into the unlikely success story that is Governors Ball, a scrappy indie-rock festival that’s become a New York institution. Chris Black talks to music-video legend Mike Mills about directing Saoirse Ronan in Talking Heads’ first-ever video for their classic 1977 anxiety anthem “Psycho Killer.” And the guy from All-American Rejects started an OnlyFans. What the hell—sure.
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