Kacey Musgraves, Drake's Feud, "Only Murders," & 9/11 Tributes
What I'm Reading, Watching, & Listening To This Week
Okay y’all EVERYBODY is releasing music this fall and I am OVERWHELMED. Just give me a new BTS album please and I will go back into my cave and live out my days in peace and sequins!! Alas, BTS doesn’t have a new album confirmed yet, but truly everyone. else. does.
So, this week we’re doing a deeper dive in the “Listening” section. Sorry for anyone who could care less about the music industry and skipped my Donda “review” [lol] last week! But I’ll cover more genres this time, I promise!
Also, I don’t want to get started without mentioning the 20th anniversary of September 11th tomorrow. There are countless beautiful stories out there reflecting on the past 20 years — the grief, failures, lessons, changes, mistakes, memories, and growth. At the end of today’s post, I share two of my favorite reads on the subject. If you’re feeling contemplative today and want to forego the pop culture stuff, go ahead and skip to the “Reading” section at the end.
Otherwise, here we go:
In the News
The new Matrix Resurrections trailer dropped last night! I might be fuzzy on how the first trilogy ended because I *checks notes* never finished it, but didn’t we like defeat the machines already????? What the hell is going on!??? Is this how the Greatest Generation feels when we ruin their nice things??? [But also it was kinda great. I never said I’m consistent.]
Trailer time again! The Don’t Look Up teaser dropped Wednesday! Remember how Adam McKay [Anchorman, The Big Short, Succession] is making a movie with every trendy actor currently breathing? Well, the trailer has me pretttttttttty excited, though movies this stacked don’t always work and Jennifer Lawrence’s wig looks capital B Bad. But give me “stress daddy” Leo and President Meryl Streep all day.
Harry Styles and Jennifer Aniston wore the same outfit so I’m retiring from pop culture coverage because what more could we ask for as a society???? No thoughts, head empty just Harry and Jen and a brown suit.
More Venice Film Festival Fashion!! In which “Bennifer” made their first red carpet appearance as an official couple—the second time around.
Watching — “Only Murders in the Building”
I just have to give a quick shout-out to a new show that didn’t make my “Fall TV Preview” but started last week and is CHARMING AS HELL. Only Murders in the Building is a TV show on Hulu with our beloved comedy uncles, Steve Martin and Martin Short.
Elevator pitch: Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez all live in the same building in New York City and find out they’re all obsessed with true crime podcasts. When someone ACTUALLY gets murdered in their building, they decide to start a true crime podcast together! But they don’t cover just ANY murders, they cover only murders IN the building.
Good, right???
I’ll say that I wasn’t sure about Selena in this, but she is a great foil for the two guys and they all draw each other out really well! It’s charming and warm and skewers all of us who enjoy learning about people’s murders for fun, and all our friends who thought it would be “easy to start a podcast.”
Listening — New Music
Obviously the biggest music news in the past two weeks has been Kanye’s and Drake’s new albums, which were released within days of each other, and which somehow we as a nation agreed to turn into an all-out feud. Oh wait, did I say “we as a nation”? I meant “THEY AS ARTISTS” CAN’T STOP BEING PETTY ABOUT IT. The beef goes back years. Apparently there’s a version of Drake’s amazing pop song “Nice for What” with a Kanye verse on it, but no one will ever get to hear it because of this dumb stupid evolutionary phenomenon called the MALE EGO.
Not being the biggest Drake fan myself [except for his always exceptional visits to SNL], I haven’t listened to his album, but I’ve heard that it — like Kanye’s — isn’t his best work. But honestly, they are two of the greatest artists in our generation, arguably of all time, and helped make hip-hop the dominant force in pop music, so can’t we all just get along with our bajillion-dollar Calabasas houses that are literally next to each other??
In other music news, some big names have been teasing albums for potentially the near future, including: Kendrick Lamar, Adele, Lizzo, SZA, and Lil Nas X [this one is actually really coming, September 17th!]. That’s a lot of music! Hopefully it’ll all be great!
OUT NOW:
I can only claim to be a marginal Kacey Musgraves fan, but I am a Millennial born in 1988 who drinks wine, knows all the words to The Chicks’ Wide Open Spaces album, loves a good drag show, and still cries when she listens to “Fancy.” So obviously I partake. My favorite Musgraves songs are Space Cowboy and Keep it To Yourself.
But honestly I was a little disappointed with the new album [don’t drag me!!]. It’s almost too mellow? This is her “divorce album” [sorry to make that sound so blasé] so I guess I should let it be exactly what it is — sad, vulnerable, searching for itself, listless yet insistent and unapolagetic. Overall there are definitely some catchy songs but I found myself just wanting to go relisten to Miranda Lambert’s divorce album, The Weight of These Wings, from 2016.
Aaliyah passed away tragically in 2001 after releasing this album. Since her death, her estate and her label have been in some massive insane legal dispute that meant NONE OF HER MUSIC has ever been available on streaming ! Not iTunes, not Spotify, not Tidal, nothing.
We just passed the 20th anniversary of her death—August 25th, 2001—so it’s quite a tribute to her brief but seismic legacy that we can finally stream her music.
In 2001 I was, to put it plainly, homeschooled AF [BY CHOICE], so I wasn’t super familiar with her music until later in life. But Aaliyah was such an icon that her impact pushed through even my Lord of the Rings-reading, Masterpiece Theatre-watching, Last of the Mohicans soundtrack-loving consciousness. Especially the hair over the one eye. Iconic.
A few more recently released mentions:
Chlöe - “Have Mercy” [single] — Chlöe, formerly of Chloe x Halle, dropped her debut single last night and the music video is causing excitement and pearl-clutching in equal measure. In it, she’s a sexy sorority Medusa luring frat boys to their deaths by, as Medusa does, turning them to stone. [I’m not gonna say frat boys deserve it but they dooooooo.] Children should not watch this. Neither should moms and dads.
Honestly, when her sister Halle [NOT her twin! I was today years old when I discovered this!] got cast in the new live-action Little Mermaid, I had a twinge of twin panic: “Oh no, what is Chloe going to do now that her almost-twin sister is in the movies??!”
Chlöe — with the umlaut now — answered.
Ari Lennox - “Pressure” [single] — This song is STEEEEEEEEEAMYYY!!!!!!!! 🥵 Perfect R&B number to get it on with.
Halsey - If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power [album] — Fact 1: Taylor Swift said she loves this album. Fact 2: I haven’t listened to it. But we BTS people stan Halsey because of Boy With Luv, so I WILL.
Madi Diaz - History of a Feeling [album] — If you like sad music, here is your sad music! My friend Erin’s friend Anna [shout out to Erin and Anna!] called it an “álbum” and all I have to say is YES !
Madi Diaz is getting talked about a lot now, but she’s been around a long time, according to my v in-the-know friend Eliza [shout out to Eliza!]!
This album is about a breakup and it’s everything you want in a breakup album including the much-shared sob-fest “Crying in Public.”
Reading — 9/11 Tributes
It’s the 20th anniversary of 9/11 tomorrow. It’s important how and why and what we choose to memorialize, and I thought both of these pieces were beautiful reflections on grief, love, self-inventory, and in the words of philosopher T. M. Scanlon [and also—because I promise to be honest here about where I *actually* learn things—Chidi in “The Good Place”], “what we owe to each other.”
I finished this article on an airplane and had to swap out facemasks because I was crying so much and had already used my one tiny napkin square to repeatedly blow my nose. [I’m the best to sit next to on airplanes.]
This long-form article is a masterpiece of writing, one of those things a journalist might look back on as a piece they were born to write. The author, Jennifer Senior, tells the story of a family friend, Bobby McIlvaine, and how his death on 9/11 has reverberated through his family and friends for the past 20 years.
It’s personal because she knew Bobby. It’s intimate, heartbreaking, but also vast — asking the biggest questions like “What are we here for?” and how do you live on when you’ve lost everything. It’s less about the specifics of 9/11, though those are definitely there, and more about grappling with grief and ultimately coming out on the other side.
What Does it Mean to “Never Forget”? - The New York Times
For much of my life, as an American who had not lived in New York, “never forget” meant a lot of specific things: keeping the memory of wonderful heroic people alive, yes — but also a rather dark sort of vengeful patriotism.
When I moved to New York and started hearing friends and coworkers tell me their personal stories of 9/11, it shifted. Here, 9/11 is the story of people’s families. The coworkers they sat next to every day. It feels intensely personal and yes communal, but not exactly national.
And, of course, on this 20th anniversary of 9/11 and the end of the 20-year war that followed, we have another meaning of “never forget” to grapple with. Can our failures — in the War in Afghanistan, in the way we harmed Muslim-American communities here, etc. — change the way we interact with the world?
Mostly this piece is a reflection on the personal stories from the day. I appreciated the nuance and reflectiveness.
Kacey Musgraves, Drake's Feud, "Only Murders," & 9/11 Tributes
Thought I commented on this?!? The Don't Look Up trailer made me SO FRIGGIN EXCITED, and also Leo's panic attack was so perfectly overblown and also I felt a little *too* seen.
Also, has Only Murders stayed good?! Needing a good show for laughs. Just finished re-watching New Girl....
You sold me on only murders in the building! Although if I was living in a building that had multiple murders I would be way more troubled and a lot less inspired to collaborate on a podcast