Music Reviews

Lana Del Rey Releases New Single

Our review of the new melancholy ballad.

Lana Del Rey proves once again that she is the queen of spooky lo-fi piano ballads. Her new single,"Hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have - but I have it" is as lyrically dense as the long-winded title suggests, beautifully following Del Rey through a consideration of fame, family, and womanhood. But what sets the song apart is the juxtaposition of the timeless ballad style sung in Del Rey's lilting voice, and the modern violence of her words.

It's an objectively pretty song, but more importantly, it commits to its own theatricality whole heartedly. It's perfectly stylized teenage angst forcing every listener to feel something of the pubescent-glory of a 15-year-old girl weeping into her pink bed spread, mourning everything and nothing. Its absurdly melodramatic, and yet somehow earnest and hopeful too.

Among the best lines are:

"I've been tearing around in my fucking nightgown/24/7 Sylvia Plath"

"Shaking my ass is the only thing that's/Got this black narcissist off my back/She couldn't care less, and I never cared more/So there's no more to say about that"

"Servin' up God in a burnt coffee pot for the triad/Hello, it's the most famous woman you know on the iPad/Calling from beyond the grave, I just wanna say, 'Hi, Dad.'"

Each line is written so informally they sound like viral tweets, but what the song lacks in grandiose language, it more than makes up for in concentration of feeling. Paired with the spooky, airy soundscape and perfectly minimal production, the poetry of the single creates an inescapable swell of nostalgia.

"Hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have - but I have it" clads you in a silk, victorian-style nightgown, places you in a candle lit room with a baby grand piano...but then it covers the baby grand in lines of coke, hangs Taylor Lautner posters and cosmo clippings on the walls, and adds a strobe light. It's the perfect absurd teen anthem for this particular moment in time, and leaves us in anticipation of Lana Del Rey's upcoming album, Norman Fucking Rockwell, expected out sometime this year.


Brooke Ivey Johnson is a Brooklyn based writer, playwright, and human woman. To read more of her work visit her blog or follow her twitter @BrookeIJohnson.



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MUSIC

"Hot Girl Summer" vs. "Summertime Sadness": Lies the Internet Told Me

Megan Thee Stallion told us it's hot girl summer, but what happens when you're not hot?

Megan Thee Stallion - Hot Girl Summer ft. Nicki Minaj & Ty Dolla $ign

If you haven't heard, we're in the midst of Hot Girl Summer.

The term was coined by rapper Megan Thee Stallion, who created an alter ego named "Hot Girl Meg" to accompany the release of her debut mixtape, Fever. Following its release on May 17, the term "hot girl" quickly took off online, becoming a symbol of a metamorphosis into an upgraded, more confident version of oneself.

Stallion later elaborated on the phrase's connotations, clarifying that it was meant to be gender-neutral. "So it's just basically about women and men being unapologetically them, just having a good-ass time, hyping up your friends, doing you, not giving a damn about what nobody gotta say about it," she said. "You definitely have to be a person that could be like the life of the party, and … you know, just a bad bitch."

In typical Internet fashion, the term's message of carefree hyper-sexual-liberation didn't hold up for long against the online world's nihilistic bend. Quickly, Hot Girl Summer memes—those quiet, wry expressions of our online collective consciousness—began cropping up. Though many of them featured photos of people celebrating their own radiant auras, more lamented the failure of Hot Girl Summer, revealing the disappointment lingering just beneath the the term's glossy surface. Refracted through memes, the phrase revealed its own fragility: "me tweeting 'hot girl summer' and then sitting in my room texting 'haha hey what r u doin'" read one. Another, more sobering message: "who was I kidding? I was never meant to have a hot girl summer lmaooo likeee I'm too loving." Another: "how am I supposed to have a hot girl summer with $5?"


Apparently, "hot girl summer" can be shattered by a sad album, or by falling in love.

Sure enough, "hot girl summer" has become a polarizing term that feels liberating for some but promises much to others while actually exacerbating their own self-consciousness and uncertainty.



Predictably, several weeks after Megan Thee Stallion set Hot Girl Summer into motion, Lana Del Rey's 2012 hit "Summertime Sadness" returned to the charts.

"Summertime Sadness" offers a marked alternative to the "hot girl" way of life. While "hot girl summer" connotes unconditional self-love and radical abandon, "summertime sadness" permits languorous hours lying beneath one's fan, mourning anything: the state of the world, one's love life, or lack of funds. "Hot girl summer" is exuberant, brash, performative. "Summertime Sadness" is depressed, tongue-in-cheek, firmly planted in the shade. If "hot girl summer" embodies the untouchable glam of stars of the early aughts, like Britney and Beyoncé, "summertime sadness" is the domain of Lana Del Rey, Lorde, Halsey, and their decidedly anti-pop ethos.

Together, these two divergent summertime pathways highlight a contrast that is very specific to the Internet. The online sphere thrives on polarization, and often a single scroll through recent posts reveals both performative ecstasy and equally performative, exaggerated depressive sentiments. The Internet has always thrived on these kinds of contrasts, as by nature it is well-suited to black-and-white thinking. People are either "cancelled" or deified. There is no such thing as "neutral" or "middle-of-the-road." One is either perpetually bikini-clad and living out a Hot Girl Summer or fully surrendering to the rip tide of summertime sadness. There is no in between.

In reality, however, sharp binaries rarely hold up when they exit the screen and join the equally chaotic but much less starkly divided corporeal world. Both Hot Girl Summer and "summertime sadness" are aesthetically beautiful in the conceptual realm; both begin to glitch when used as blueprints for how to live.

After all, no human is capable of existing in a perpetual state of Hot Girl Summer—not even the bikini models, LA hustlers, and influencers whose online profiles embody the term, but who have quietly and consistently spoken out about the falsity, emptiness, and depression that tends to accompany their professions.

Similarly, not even the Internet's self-proclaimed sad girls exist in a perpetual, stagnant state of summertime sadness. When that sadness does arise, it is rarely of the languorous, vintage-styled sort that Del Rey's early career promoted. In this, "summertime sadness" is equally as hollow and ephemeral as Hot Girl Summer.

Lana Del Rey - Summertime Sadness (Official Music Video)www.youtube.com

Viewed this way, the two terms are far more similar than they initially seem. They are both designed to be surreal and cartoonishly dramatic. They both advocate for not really caring about anything, yet somehow simultaneously promote an all-consuming fixation on oneself.

In this, they both reflect social media as a whole. For all of the ways it promises to connect us, social media has become an echo chamber through which we perform and obsess over fixed, simplified, and ultimately nonexistent versions of ourselves."Hot girl summer" is about being single, feeling fantastic, and not giving a f*ck all at the same time; it connotes billboards, consumption, sugar, perma-smiles. "Summertime sadness" is about languishing inside one's own brain, clinging to a lost love, passively accepting a jaded worldview.

Still, both "hot girl summer" and "summertime sadness" have a time and a place, and they each make for great Instagram captions—but neither should suffice as a permanent way to spend one's summer months. Whereas the Internet thrives on isolated circuits of people with similar views, all-encompassing labels, and quick fixes, real life is far more defined by monotonous repetition, complex relationships, and murky questions that lack definitive answers.

In this corporeal reality, no one is a brand. No influencer is solely comprised of makeup and white teeth; most fitness models have cheat days; most online spiritual coaches don't constantly emanate love and incense; and most managers of depression meme accounts do not spend all of their time lying on piles of rotting pizza and dirty clothes (hopefully).

But it's only July; many summer nights still stretch out before us. When we find ourselves at the impasse between Hot Girl Summer and summertime sadness, perhaps we don't have to choose either path. Maybe we can make peace with the fact that we all have a little of both within us.

MUSIC

The Avener Talks Sophomore Album, New Single, and Life as a Deep House Icon

"I learn every day in the studio and things just evolve all the time."

It's been 5 years since Tristan Casara released one of the most successful debuts in the history of European Deep House.

Known by his fans as The Avener, the 32-year-old released his infectious debut The Wanderings of The Avener to massive critical acclaim. The album peaked at #2 on the French charts and has since gone triple platinum. The project's lead single, "Fade Out Lines," was streamed worldwide over 200 million times and was certified diamond earlier this year. "A lot of people say 'congratulations' now," Casara said in a 2015 interview with Universal Music Backstage, "so that's a new word for me...and I'm very thankful for that." Casara hasn't released another solo album since, but that doesn't mean he hasn't been busy. "Musical culture is an extraordinary pillar to reinforce one's producing skills," the DJ told Popdust. "I learned to never under-estimate the musical background that the last 50 years offer me."

He has spent the last five years experimenting with and reworking other artists' songs in his We Go Deep sessions, remixing everyone from Bob Dylan and Lana Del Ray to underground deep-house up-and-comers like Grand Garden and Erolflynn. "I learn every day in the studio and things just evolve all the time thanks to [all the possibilities] of computers and technology." Casara is soft-spoken and modest; his We Go Deep sessions denote his passion for pushing the limits of his craft.

The DJ finally released "Beautiful," the first single from his upcoming untitled sophomore album, this past May. "I didn't want to deconstruct the tracks I reworked in 'The Wanderings,'" he said. "[I wanted to] give them electronic modernity without losing that original texture." His latest single is drastically different from anything on "Wanderings" and is completely devoid of the southern blues and deep house fusion that encompassed the entirety of his debut record. "The songs differ from each other in a more harmonic vein," he said. "Some you can dance to, some you feel melancholic too." After being "locked up in the studio," he says his sophomore record will "finally be out later this year." While "Wanderings" catapulted Casara into deep house stardom, the DJ still just tries to make it about the work. "In 10 years I'll probably still be in my studio chair," he says. "But instead I'll be looking over the Carribean while I work."

FILM

The New "Charlie's Angels" Reboot Looks Like Another Male Gaze Fantasy

Charlie's Angels can't shed its core premise of badass women answering to a lazy man.

Charlie's Angels has always been a male gaze fantasy couched in faux female empowerment.

Unfortunately, the new Charlie's Angels seems no different. Watch the trailer here:

Set to a new collaborative single by Miley Cyrus, Ariana Grande, and Lana Del Ray with the apt lyrics "Don't call me angel / Don't call me angel," the Charlie's Angels reboot seems hellbent on subverting franchise expectations. But even with a female writer/director (Elizabeth Banks), Charlie's Angels can't shed its core premise of a group of cool, badass women ultimately answering to a mysterious man named Charlie. After all, this is CHARLIE'S Angels.

The reboot follows a new group of Angels played by Kristen Stewart, Ella Balinska, and Naomi Scott. Bosley is a woman now, played by Elizabeth Banks. And this time, they're going international...or whatever.

In 2019, the concept ofCharlie's Angels is extremely outdated. Even if the movie did somehow manage to successfully bring something close to female empowerment to the big screen, it's bothersome that in our wildest fantasies, we still can't imagine a world where these "Angels" don't work for Charlie––or where Ella Balinska's midriff is bared for the "plot." Even if the mysterious Charlie turned out to be a woman using a codename, it wouldn't change the movie's real selling point: "badass" sexy women performing for an intended male audience. Retire this franchise.

MUSIC

Natalie Portman Calls Moby "Creepy," He Responds By Getting Creepier

"I recently read a gossip piece wherein Natalie Portman said that we'd never dated. This confused me, as we did, in fact, date."

Natalie Portman

Photo by Fabio Mazzarella/Sintesi/SIPA/Shutterstock

It isn't unusual for celebrities to fake love for publicity.

It was revealed in 2017 that Drake and Jennifer Lopez orchestrated their relationship to appear more serious than it was, and Tom Hiddleston and Taylor Swift had a particularly clumsy PR relationship that backfired magnificently. Now, Moby, the 55-year-old Techno DJ whose once fruitful career has deteriorated into making ambient music for a sleep aid, is trying to play the same game. But this time, his counterpart isn't in on the hoax. "I was a bald binge-drinker who lived in an apartment that smelled like mildew and old bricks, and Natalie Portman was a beautiful movie star," Moby wrote in his latest memoir Then It Fell Apart. "But here she was in my dressing room, flirting with me." He goes on to describe a magical night of walking under "old oak trees" and holding hands before returning to Portman's dorm room. "After she fell asleep I carefully extracted myself from her arms and took a taxi back to my hotel."

In the opening lines of an interview with Bazaar, Portman took the opportunity to deny the relationship vehemently. "I was surprised to hear that he characterized the very short time that I knew him as dating, because my recollection is a much older man being creepy with me when I had just graduated high school." She went on to say that no fact-checking had been done by either Moby or his publisher prior to the book's publication, making this PR stunt "feel deliberate." She theorized that he had figured that tossing her name into his life story would help the book sell copies, which it inevitably did. Moby landed a slew of high-profile interviews as a result of the claims. He appeared coy when asked about the alleged fling on Wendy Williams, choosing to elaborate on the success of his record Play instead of answering. When Williams asked him point-blank to confirm the relationship, he went mum. Yet, after Portman's denial, Moby suddenly had a lot to say and was quick to push back, resharing an awkward photo with the actress and doubling down on his claim that they dated; he chose to completely ignore the other allegation that she was in high school at the time.

These exaggerated claims aren't the only ones Moby's made in his memoir. He also wrote that he hooked up with Lana Del Ray, put his bare penis on Donald Trump's leg during a party, and discussed Portman's hotness with Joe Perry at the VMAs. In a separate interview with The Guardian, Moby, who identifies as vegan, also said his drug addiction was so bad at one point that he "went out and bought $300-worth of cocaine, a case of vodka, and a big bag of McDonald's and put it all into a blender." In the same interview, he also claimed to have invented the iPhone. Separately, he said that he's had a "sevensome...or an eightsome," and he's, in all seriousness, said that one of his "major goals in life" was to just "start walking" in a random direction and see what happens.

Such outrageous feats of braggadocio paint the picture of an unfettered man pining to be a rockstar and remain in the spotlight. His history of fame-seeking is also deep-rooted in his music. Every single track off of his fifth and most popular album, Play, was sold and licensed to be used in commercials, a move that decimated his reputation in the Techno community. Yet, in the wake of #MeToo, Moby's inability to recognize the severity of Portman's accusations is disturbing and will no doubt bring a lot of Moby's crazy anecdotes into further question. "The trend toward PR relationships seems to have tailed off in a social media age," wrote VICE. "Which relies more on transparency and honesty than deception and manipulation." While Moby's claims would have generated a good amount of buzz 10 years ago, the same deceptive antics in 2019 paint a different picture, one of a washed-up white guy who wants to be cool more than empathetic and genuine.

Press Photo

Whether you're enjoying some warm weather or not as we sit on the cusp of spring, this week's releases are hot, hot, HOT!

RELEASE RADAR is here to give you the breakdown of your top singles, albums, and videos to check out as you head into your weekend. Get ready to jam out with some of our favorite up-and-coming artists, plus celebrate new stuff from those you already know and love.

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