MUSIC

13 of the Most Controversial Music Videos Ever

From Kanye West to Madonna, these gory and graphic clips got people talking — for better or for worse.

Photo by Gordon Cowie on Unsplash

Music videos are a perfect opportunity to expand the story of a song.

The best music videos can showcase killer choreography, Halloween-ready attire, or movie levels of cinematic gold; others can spark controversies, no matter how well-intended. Whether centered around copious bloodshed or near-pornographic nudity (sorry, Mom and Dad), there's one thing all controversial music videos have in common: They get people talking.

Here are 13 music videos released over the past 30-plus years that have sparked disputes. Watch at your own risk.

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TV News

The "30 Rock" Reunion "Upfront Event" Sounds Annoying as Hell

Fans are being deprived of a true 30 Rock reunion in favor of a weird meta-marketing event

Rockefeller Center NYC

Photo by Andy (Unsplash)

Update 7/15/2020: As it turns out, the promotional nature of the upcoming 30 Rock reunion special is not a hit with everyone.

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CULTURE

Elizabeth Banks and Busy Philipps Join Rally in DC to Defend Abortion Rights

The My Right My Decision rally in DC on Wednesday focused on the positives and success stories of abortion

The world is full of different kinds of suffering.

There are base physical pains—abdominal cramps, aching joints, tearing flesh. And then there are deeper, more crushing forms of spiritual and psychological anguish—the feeling of being inadequate to provide for a loved one, or that your mere existence has ruined another person's life. No one should have to live with that kind of pain. That's the idea behind a rally on Wednesday in Washington DC and an accompanying hashtag on Twitter, which both seek to celebrate and defend a powerful tool for the prevention of suffering: abortion.

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CULTURE

You Can't Change My Mind: Jon Hamm Can't Act

No one else sees it, and I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.

SNL

There's a well-known line in George Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman, in which a character claims, "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach."

Incidentally, did you know that Jon Hamm taught drama to eighth graders before he got into acting? In fact, before his breakout role as Don Draper in Mad Men, he thought of teaching as his safety net—a fallback position in case acting didn't work out. It would obviously be unfair to use that fact alone as evidence that Jon Hamm can't act, but I feel like being unfair, because no one seems to agree with me on this point.

jon hamm making a face

I've searched for validation on this, but googling "Jon Hamm bad actor" turns up pages of results about how great he is. And he certainly was great on Mad Men. That show was really well cast, and Jon Hamm can play a stoic, performative thinker as well as anyone. He even won an Emmy for it—along with dozens of nominations for every TV award on earth. So, somehow, I have to account for the fact that, unlike seemingly everyone else on Earth, when I see Hamm in anything besides Mad Men, he just seems like a guy doing some acting. I must be wrong, and yet…

jon hamm eyebrows30 Rock

He's not awful by any means. He can sell a line and he has good comedic timing, but there are all these small details—in his smile, in the way he uses his eyebrows, in the way he looks at his co-stars—that seem so intentional that I can't believe him, even when his line delivery is on point—and I'm not saying it always is. As Don Draper, it worked. Don was a performer himself—always pitching something, butting up against other male egos, and just generally living his life as an impostor. But am I really alone in finding his mannerisms jarring in his other work? The only explanation, as far as I can tell, is he's just too charming and sexy for anyone else to notice.

jon hamm being sexyInStyle

He's not just good-looking. That wouldn't be enough. He carries himself with a quiet self-assurance. He's calm, confident, unflappable, sexy. Most of us spend half our lives trying or pretending to be charming and sexy. When people see Jon Hamm doing it so effortlessly, they must misinterpret his natural abilities as a successful performance. That's the only explanation for the fact that all his little comedic cameos get so much praise, despite being the least convincing parts of whatever he's in.

jon hamm awesome

I'm not saying that Jon Hamm has to go back to teaching. If we're going to keep putting him in movies because he's charming and sexy—and honestly seems like a really nice guy—I can totally live with that. I just want the rest of the world to acknowledge that that's what we're doing so I can stop feeling like I'm taking crazy pills.

Otherwise, I'll eventually have to face up to the fact that I'm the one with the problem. That maybe the reason I can never find Jon Hamm convincing is that I just find it hard to believe that someone so charming and sexy could really exist, when I spend half my life badly failing to be those things. Please, God, no.

FILM

Kristen Stewart's "Charlie's Angels" Character Is "Definitely Gay"—But Is That Enough?

In "Charlie's Angels," our Bella has finally become a swan. That doesn't mean the film can escape some traps.

Charlie's Angels | First 10 Minutes | Kristen Stewart, Naomi Scott, Ella Balinska | ClipFlix

Kristen Stewart has the Internet in a tizzy thanks to her role in Charlie's Angels, and her performance as Sabrina has a lot of people questioning their sexuality (or celebrating what they already knew).

Thanks to the omnipotence of the Internet, Sabrina's queerness isn't in question. According to Out Magazine, in an interview with PrideSource, the director Elizabeth Banks confirmed that the character is "definitely gay in the movie."

That doesn't mean that Sabrina is exactly overt about her sexuality in the film, though—there are no lines in the script about her sexual orientation. According to Banks, this was purposeful. "When I cast [Kristen Stewart], I just wanted her to be… I just felt like she's almost the way Kristen is. I don't feel there is a label that fits her," she told Digital Spy. "The only thing that was important to me was to not label it as anything. It's fine if the media wants to label it, I think that's OK, but I didn't do that. I just let her be herself in the film."

Apparently, Stewart "wanted to be gay" in the movie, though she's also not hung up on labels. "I just think we're all kind of getting to a place where—I don't know, evolution's a weird thing—we're all becoming incredibly ambiguous," she said in an interview in which she also clarified that she doesn't exactly identify as bisexual anymore. "And it's this really gorgeous thing."

This philosophy feels aligned with our current moment, where the boundaries of sexuality, gender, and other paradigms are constantly blurring and shifting. On the other hand, there's a fine line between refusing labels as an act of protest and refusing labels as a way of ultimately obscuring identities, thus winding up back where we began.

Is Charlie's Angels queer-baiting? It's definitely going too far to say that a film is queer-baiting simply for coding a character as gay without explicitly addressing their orientation, but Banks's and the film's treatment of Sabrina's queerness still raises questions. How important are labels, and is our end goal to normalize them or disintegrate them completely?

In liberal Hollywood circles, perhaps it's enough to express queerness as an implicit character trait, but in a world that still threatens LGBTQ+ people's rights, there's a dearth of characters that are out and proud. On the other hand, queerness and relationships aren't anyone's entire identity, and they shouldn't have to be, onscreen or off.

Despite Banks' insistence that her film is newly "woke," Charlie's Angels has always toed the line between regressive and revolutionary. According to Vulture, "You could chart a mini arc of corporate feminism onto the Charlie's Angels franchise." The film is about three attractive women who are empowered because they do the bidding of an invisible commander, after all, and what could be more reminiscent of the corporate world's rapid consumption of the girl-boss illusion? A capitalist enterprise hasn't improved simply because it's being run by a woman, after all, and a film isn't feminist just because it features female characters in positions of power. "What's so depressing about the new film is that the most radical thing it can think to do to update this concept is to hint that Charlie has actually, this whole time, been a lady," the article continues.

Similarly, a film isn't pro-LGBTQ just because it tacitly implies a character's queerness. It's true that queerness is becoming more widely accepted and less stigmatized overall, though. (Stewart herself just gushed about wanting to propose to her girlfriend, Dylan Meyer). That means that we should be working towards representing more radical politics and more underrepresented identities onscreen, not just erasing all identity politics now that bisexuality has been subsumed into the realm of acceptable traits, and not just calling a film feminist because it stars a couple of women.

Feminist or not, Stewart's performance (and costume choice) are so strong that her character's existence is ultimately a victory even if the rest of the film falters. She's even been branded a Hollywood Chris, after all; maybe that even means that someday, our Hollywood Chrises won't be all white.