I was thrilled to return to the terrific left-wing podcast Delete Your Account for another wide-ranging chat about pop culture in a Patreon-exclusive bonus episode! I joined co-hosts Roqayah Chamseddine and Kumars Salehi to talk about Janelle Monae, Westworld, Kanye West, Game of Thrones, Beyoncé & Jay Z, Solo & Star Wars, Roseanne, Drake vs. Pusha T, and much more. Go and subscribe and listen!

I started bowielovesbeyonce, my first tumblr, in February 2009. I always said that if the two of them ever took a picture together, I’d happily retire the tumblr, my work done. Tonight, searching for header image for the site’s mobile layout, I discovered that they’d taken two pictures together — at the Met Gala a year ago, and on the cover of Vanity Fair fourteen years ago, eight years before I even started this thing. I’m stunned and chagrined that I missed these photos for all this time, but still, I’m so happy to see Bowie and Beyoncé together. I love them both; they mean so much to me.

I’m going to go ahead and keep that promise to myself. It’s a shock to the system, coming coincidentally just one day after I decided to stop using twitter except for very minimal professional upkeep — I’ll have so much free time in my day (and free space on my dash) that I won’t even know what to do with. But this was the plan all along, and I want to see it through. And who knows: If David can come back after a decade of silence, anything is possible.

All thanks to David Bowie and Beyoncé Knowles-Carter, my very favorite pop stars of all time. You have given me a better life.

something i want to say

So I made that post about my favourite songs of 2012 (including taylor swift and gangnam style etc.) and people just hated on it.

I just don’t understand.

I mean, I do understand.  I have my own issues with ‘the industry,’ I have issues with how it’s hard to compete with a bunch of people with great connections, and that a lot of real artists get lost along the way because they dont have an ‘in.’ and that women feel pressured to act like strippers and its ok to make rape threats but its not ok to say your a feminist.  However, I don’t see why we have to hate something just because it’s successful, or assume that because it is successful it has no substance.

Like, how can you hate Beyonce?  Shes changing the world. She stands for people of colour and women everywhere succeeding in a stifling patriarchy without compromising her morals.  And she makes challenging, interesting art.  She’s always positive.  She is everything good.  And the fact that she is hugely successful is not a shitty thing.  It’s an important and amazing thing and she clearly works hard for it.

and I’m sorry, but I think it’s fucking incredible that a korean language song is the most popular thing on the planet.  Thats so good for humanity.  Psy wrote and produced gangnam style himself and directed the video HIMSELF.  No one made psy. psy is a genius and i dont think its so terrible that hes been recognized for this.  It also doesn’t make him evil.  His art is creating a generation of kids that will grow up seeing asian culture as being as valid as western culture which they currently don’t.  I know because I grew up in Vancouver and half my high school was korean or chinese and the kind of shit i heard all the time was horrible.  I used to walk around with my chinese boyfriend and people would yell slurs out of cars. Racism isn’t over.  Sexism isn’t over.  The only way things actually effect social change is by hitting the audience that perpetuates these ideas.  therefore, when a deserving artist blows up its good for everybody.

I’m tired of people telling me I’m ignorant for liking pop and hip hop, because I’m not.  I know whats up with music.  I have thoroughly investigated both mainstream and experimental music.  in fact, i was so dedicated to experimental music that I didn’t even bother to learn about pop and R&B until i was 21.  I put out multiple records on a label that was run by my friends and released my music on tape because it was the cheapest option.  so please don’t tell me that I haven’t been enlightened to the world of alternative music.

and yet I know very few adult males who consider themselves serious ‘music guys’ who don’t laugh when I say I like Mariah carey.

Why? because shes beautiful and people like her.  therefore she must be selling sex, right? so obviously her music is terrible, right?  ugh.

http://gawker.com/5930988/acquiescent-nothingness-incessantly-a-glossary-of-mariah-careys-10+cent-words

The first time I heard mariah carey it shattered the fabric of my existence and I started Grimes

—Claire Boucher/Grimes. She subsequently deleted the post and her entire tumblr.

We’ve got to do better.

Beyoncé – I Care

4 is the first Beyoncé album whose slow, serious songs I don’t automatically skip. Good thing, too, because it’s mostly slow-ish, serious-ish songs, as opposed to Dangerously in Love, which dumped them at the back end of album; I Am…Sasha Fierce, which gave them their own disc; and her best record, B’Day, which nearly excised them altogether. The up-tempo “Countdown” is getting a lot of attention right now, with its Franken-pop construction and inspired gibberish like “ME and my BOOF and my BOOF BOOF ridin'” (thus joining “Ra-ra ah-ah-ah, roma ro-ma-ma, gaga ooh-la-la” and “Mama say, mama sa, mama ma coo sa” in the annals of great pop nonsense), but the album’s undisputed highlights for me are the aforeblogged lovesexy scorcher of a ballad “1+1” and this song, in which Beyoncé addresses a lover’s indifference by attacking it with the nearest weapon to hand, her voice. Listen to the way she shouts “IIIII CARE!” in the chorus, or just plain screams at the end of it — it’s like Chris Cornell wailing into the abyss of Andrew Wood’s heroin overdose in “Times of Trouble” by Temple of the Dog. Sonically the two songs aren’t even all that dissimilar: state-of-the-art production that creates a nice melancholy purple cushion of air around the instrumentation, in “I Care”‘s case the tumbling drums in particular. Hell, in a world where Bey’s mashing up Prince and Kings of Leon and having freaking Tricky do the Sean Paul part in “Baby Boy” at Glastonbury, I wouldn’t be surprised if I woke up tomorrow to find out she’d covered it. It’d be a fine outlet for the sort of skill and conviction she displays here (like the way her voice warbles when she says she’s been “deserted” or the way she sings along to the guitar solo like she can’t bear to stop pouring out the emotion she’s feeling), and for her ever-sharpening taste for interesting arrangements (“I Care” and “I Miss You” are mostly synth tones and spare percussion; the latter just sort of disappears rather than ends the way proper commercial pop songs do; even the Diane Warren-penned “I Was Here” has some weird spectral Interpol guitar stretching out from the end of the chorus). She’s taking the sort of stuff that usually made for turgid one-listen mom-radio bait and making it lively and engrossing. Frankly there’s not much she can’t do at this point.

I admire how few concessions this song makes. I figured that after a few introductory measures they’d clean up and smooth out that guitar triplet, but nope, it stays fragile-sounding and rough around the edges the whole time. The expected “TICK two three TOCK two three” 6/8 slow-jam drum never really materializes, requiring you to lean into those rich-sounding chords, which are themselves constructed largely from a subtle interplay between piano and bass. Synth strings and a watery organ sound and a snippet of piano played backwards are sketched in here and there, but you really have to wait for them. Beyoncé’s vocals, to paraphrase her lyrics, pull you in close and won’t let you go — there’s simply no ignoring those big whooping “OO!” sounds at the end of each line, nor a chorus structured around the simple phrase “make love to me,” nor a final verse that sets this lovemaking up as an alternative to a world at war. And when the climax finally comes, all that pent-up energy isn’t diffused into a dully loud full-band finale with a full-fledged beat or whatever, but poured into a reach-for-the-sky guitar solo. Everything surrounding it stays relatively restrained; the guitar does the shouting. Then it all just kinda disappears. “1+1” is, fittingly, more than the sum of its parts, all of which are astutely selected and intelligently, unapologetically deployed to transport you to a more beautiful place for four minutes and thirty-five seconds at a time.