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2024 Grammy Awards Recap

New Taylor, snubs everywhere, and lots of outfits
Biggest moments at the 2024 Grammys

The 66th annual Grammy Awards were last night at the Crypto.com Arena in the not-so-sunny Los Angeles, California. As storms raged outside the arena, I tuned in for close to five hours of red carpet coverage and the sparkling ceremony to watch music's biggest night and make my own judgments.

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It feels like it's been a minute since the last Weekend Playlist...hasn't it? I hope everyone enjoyed their holidays and maybe took some much-needed time off work and socials. Sadly, we're in the dead of winter, which means I'm losing steam quickly.

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Frontpage Popular News

Too Early 2024 Grammy Predictions

The end of the year calls for reflection — hence our 2023 Popdust Music Awards, celebrating all of the terrific music we reveled in last year. And now, the beginning of the year is a time of anticipation. For that, they are 2024 Artists to Watch, which also means that Awards Season is right around the corner.

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Mother Mary Cast

Anne Hathaway by Anthony Harvey/Shutterstock & Michaela Coel By Fred Duval/Shutterstock

There are some things you know instinctively: when to avoid an empty subway car, when to cut a toxic person right out of your life, and when you’ve decided to adopt a movie as your entire personality before you’ve even seen it.

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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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