Pop Culture Mondays/4.22.24
The POETS Edition
Happy Monday, my darling pop culture junkies. And Happy Passover to everyone. Especially the Jewish students at Columbia who are dealing with a living nightmare. WHAT A WORLD. I think Alexis Ohanian put it perfectly:
But we need an escape from all of this for a few minutes, so that’s what I will aim to do. We need a little bit of candy to escape the darkness. AND BOY DO WE HAVE CANDY!! I don’t even know where to start to be honest. We have Taylor Swift’s new album…well, double album…which I will get to. We have TikTok, who may be going away, which will be sad for me. We have weird sexism with Caitlin Clark and the media and some funny takes on the Nike track & field uniforms. We have BABY REINDEER. We have viral cookies…some good, some bad. We have Keith McNally being gross. And MORE.
If you missed last week’s pod, in which I waxed poetic about Zendaya and her new movie, CHALLENGERS, please check it out.
And go see Challengers…as I talked about in the pod, it is the STRANGEST movie, and I don't mean that in a bad way. AT all. I just cannot put it into a genre! It’s not a romance, but it is in a dark sort of way. It’s like a homoerotic yet straight romance or is a sports drama? I CANNOT FIGURE IT OUT. Go see it and tell me. But Zendaya? Sensational.
Grab some 🍬 and some 🎧 and enjoy!
31 SONGS!
I am not going to lie…part of the reason I am so late today is that I sat here for like an hour trying to come up with a good headline where I could hide another word in it, but I am not nearly as clever as TayTay. I am not here to review the album but rather to tell you what all the buzz is about in case you have been living under a rock. But also to explain what some of the controversy is and everything in between.
So first, the setup. You MAY remember that I was critical of TayTay in how she announced this album, The Tortured Poets Department while accepting a Grammy. It just felt weird and gross and a rare misstep for her. But we moved on. We all knew the album was dropping at 12 AM ET, Friday, April 19th. That meant 9 PM for us people on the West Coast. So I played the entire album (or so I thought), and I found songs that I really loved, like “So Long London,” which made me cry and was clearly a song around the end of her relationship with her former fiancee.
I am not here to decide everything and map this song back to her other London song, written when she was happy in a relationship with her English man, “London Boy.” This was WAY boppier.
You can do the work on that. But the thing we all noticed immediately was that Poets (or as the kids are calling it, TTPD, which I love since my company is called The New New Thing and we call it TNNT, so YEAH ) — was more of a Folklore and Evermore vibe than a Lover vibe…meaning it was more mellow and introspective and not POP per se.
I was curious what the reviews would be like and what my friends thought, and I went to bed feeling proud of myself for being like a 14-year-old listening to the whole thing and trying to dissect songs.
Only to wake up to the news that there was another album. Wait whut? I was SO confused. YES, at 2 AM ET (11 PM PT and just after I finished what I thought was the whole album), Taylor dropped a whole other album, basically. A DOUBLE ALBUM. What was I to do?
I LISTENED TO IT. And I was dumbstruck just by the sheer volume of it. Also, maybe I was slightly jealous that everything I had fantasized about since I was a teenager, in exacting revenge on bullies in my life or ex-boyfriends over the years, was seemingly played out by Miss Swift. OUR GIRL DID IT.
What would the response be??
BOY did SOME of the media have a hard time with this! The reviewers were salivating. Paste Magazine posted a negative review but by an anonymous writer for fear of retribution (or as a marketing thing ME THINKS.) Though they claimed safety issues…cause the Swifties are scary!
The New York Times announced Taylor needed an editor. Ok, pot…meet kettle.
But I digress.
SHE WROTE A DISS TRACK. Taking down Kim Kardashian, which, in case you are not aware, stems from the time when Kim was married to Kanye, and they claimed Taylor gave them the OK to include the lyric about her in his song and released a recorded phone conversation that IN FACT was edited. She has spoken about it before in the press, and the pain was clearly still there, but now it’s a song and not in a subtle way by looking at the spelling of the track:
This was the sort of thing my mom would tell me to write out and put it under my pillow and sleep on it and then the next day either tear it up or burn it.
BUT WHAT FUN IS THAT??
I stand by this wholeheartedly.
And there were other songs that seemed coded to be about people like musician Matty Healy, lead singer of the 1975 in this brutal song:
GIRL. If I could write revenge take-down pop songs on ex-boyfriends, I would be writing for MONTHS FFS. Here for it.
But the responses/memes to the whole album have been hilarious.
(Those are the real lyrics, which are 🫣)
Shoutout to Mary Neely for sending me SO many of these amazing memes. And guys, there are a million more.
But lastly, just to link all the gens together and a nod to US OLDS by Miss Swift…she put in our fave poets in her new video:
ETHAN HAWKE AND JOSH CHARLES??
I cannot. Honestly, this killed me.
Girl knows her audience, my lord.
But also, this:
Ok, we have other stuff to get to…I know I missed some things, but you get the gist.
A LITTLE OF THIS, A LITTLE OF THAT:
I just want to go back to bed and watch TV for the rest of the day TBH. But I am here, finishing what I started! LOADS of other things to look at:
What The Zuck?
I will say, as soon as I saw this post on Insta, I screengrabbed it and sent to Kara Swisher with alarm emojis. I was like, “Zuck looks adorable and he’s wearing a necklace and did he get a stylist like WTF is happening? Baby is ALL GROWNS UP.”
And then…the Internet delivered a gift. Because CLEARLY, I was not the only one thinking this…
And I love how Zuck responded:
Cookies & Crookies:
There is always a viral dessert for some reason or another that pops up here and there. I mean, who can forget the CRONUT. And social media has helped push this along in ways we have never seen. Remeber the cookie dough moment we all experienced? Years ago I wrote about a store in New York that had lines around the block for their cookie dough which after I finally succumbed and stood in the line, made me feel ill and also HAD as it was just…well…cookie dough! And here we are again.
First up, we have CRUMBL COOKIES. I had never heard of them until seeing them all unfold on TikTok over the past year, really, because they were sending boxes of cookies to influencers.
Apparently, Crumbl is a franchise business with 981 stores around the US and Canada. HAVE YOU BEEN TO ONE? These never looked appealing to me as I saw more and more videos. So I was dying when this came out…sadly, I cannot share the video, but the screenshots give you an idea:
MOVING ON….to the CROOKIE:
These originated at Maison Louvard in Paris, and not only has everyone talking, but they got a write-up this weekend in the New York Times:
People are now making them at home or their own bakeries:
I am not going to lie. I am going to grab one when I am in Paris in May.
Baby Reindeer:
Everyone is talking about this show on socials. I resisted watching because I know the type of thing that gives me anxiety, and this is the type of thing that gives me anxiety. On top of it, this is a true story, and the writer and star of it are the ones it happened to. Making it more wild.
I watched this show. This was a HARD watch for me. I hate-watched this show. But you should, too, let’s be honest.
The reactions are in line with my response:
No, Chef:
It is old news to many by now, as this was a week ago, but it is worth mentioning. Keith McNally is a well-known chef with restaurants including legends like Balthazar, Pastis, Minetta Tavern, and others. He is also known to be quite opinionated and even more so since he had a stroke years ago. He defends his friends Woody Allen and Ghislaine Maxwell. He calls out bad guests on his Instagram and rants about this and that. Most of it is shrugged off by the public.
But this one was not.
He has since edited the post, but only recently. It stayed up quite a while. But here is what he said:
I have definitely called out some of Lauren Sanchez's outfit choices, but in a lighthearted and fun way, and more about Jeff B's transformation into his new Marvel Villain role. But this….this was another level. Plain misogyny. Straight-up sexism. It's just gross. And people responded.
Speaking of Misogyny…
Big week for Caitlin Clark. She got signed to Indiana Fever and has a huge Nike deal with a new sneaker. But a local Indian sports reporter really took it to another level of CREEPY:
I mean DAVE PORTNOY called him a sexist:
The writer apologized:
Apparently, nothing new here from this guy:
Sigh.
Speaking of some sports drama….
No one is talking about the dudes…the girls are just super high cut and the responses have been funny.
And the kids….
JUST WAIT:
WILL THIS BE AN M. NIGHT COMEBACK???
I don’t know, guys. The premise is intriguing. AND JOSH HARTNETT!!!
THAT IS IT, my darlings…
I was going to write all about how shows like Greys Anatomy and Girls are trending again but now with Gen Z because of streaming but well, now I have told you so you have that.
ALSO, have you heard of THIS SERIES OF BOOKS:
THIS is what everyone is talking about. Olds. Youngs. I mean, it is basically fairy porn, from what I understand. And I bought the whole series. It’s been a BIG topic on BookTok for a WHILE now…but sometimes, I am late to the game. I will report back next Monday!
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Have a fantastic week.
Xx,
Brooke
