Issue №50 | 29 June 2020 | ‘What’s Your Pleasure?’
Issue №50 | 29 June 2020 | ‘What’s Your Pleasure?’
Hello friends. After a particularly rainy weekend, we’ve got a smorgasbord of cultural choices for you. We’ve basically been festering inside, taking full advantage of our lack of social lives.
Although the ‘roadmap’ out of lockdown is looking pretty disastrous, there’s no denying we’ve been able to enjoy a wealth of brilliant content during lockdown. Freya’s still working her way through Normal People, granting herself one episode a week. Eking out a season like this is actually providing a rather vintage viewing experience. It’s tantalising.
Enjoy the issue. If you feel so obliging, do buy us a cup of coffee. Cafés are opening up again and we’d love to indulge in a cappuccino. Freya and Alex
What Alex has been up to this week: This Friday, he was like a kid in a sweet shop with new releases by Haim, Arca and Jessie Ware to tuck into. Also, Empire Magazine Editor Editor-in-Chief Terri White has published an excerpt of her new autobiography in the Guardian. It’s great.
What Freya has been up to this week: Read André Leon Talley’s The Chiffon Trenches, a memoir about Talley’s career in fashion, specifically his years at Vogue. Was left feeling disappointed at how tone deaf the whole book was. It did nothing to reassess the clichés of the fashion industry, and the trivial ‘people politics’ was given far more space than some of the far more interesting, knottier subjects.
Hear
A couple of albums…
Venezualan record producer, singer-songwriter, DJ and mixing engineer Arca is a fascinating artist.
From her involvement in the early days of deconstructed club music in the early 2010s to her pioneering work in electronic music in more recent years, she’s always been one step ahead.
In her fourth and latest album, she combines her angular electronic sound — which always has harmonic sprinkles of her homeland — with other progressive guest artists such as Rosalia, Björk and SOPHIE, to create soundworlds that constantly subvert usual pop traits.
While this album might not be everyone’s cup of tea, it gives a real insight into electronic music’s trajectory, and will no doubt be a solid blueprint for artists in years to come. Alex
Standout tracks: ‘KLK’, ‘Riquiquí’, ‘Nonbinary’
So often, lesser-known artists of colour are overlooked in favour of their white counterparts, meaning that many end up slipping — unjustly — under the radar.
We want to use our platform to continue to share albums by artists of colour that you might have missed from recent years. 2016 was a great year for black artists, with Beyonce, Frank Ocean, Skepta, Danny Brown and Solange dominating the charts with their critically acclaimed albums.
This hip-hop mixtape by Fatimah Nyeema Warne (otherwise known as Noname) was another boundary-breaking release from that year.
From the off, it bursts to life with thought-provoking spoken word, catchy hooks and gospel and soul harmonies, which are underpinned by gorgeous, smoot production.
In her conversation-esque lyrics the Chicago rapper ruminates on topics that include teenage nostalgia, fame and death, but always through an optimistic lens. Alex
Standout tracks: ‘Yesterday’, ‘All I Need’, ‘Bye Bye Baby’
A couple of podcasts…
If you haven’t yet seen Seahorse — the tender and beautiful documentary film about Freddy McConnell, the Guardian journalist and trans man who started his own family by giving birth himself, rather than using a surrogate — I implore you to do so. If this is a concept that jars with you in any way, then it’s even more important that you watch it. It completely changed the way I view the gendered body and the myriad ways life can be created.
Since releasing the film, Freddy McConnell has created a new podcast for BBC Sounds in which he talks to other queer people about the ways they started their families.
Standout episode: A-Team, in which Freddy meets Harriet and Meegan, a lesbian couple who attempt every possible method of trying for a baby. It’s a painful but vital listen. Freya
Reply All: #162 The Least You Could Do
Focusing on stories about technology and humans, Gimlet’s Reply All podcast is genius. You might have heard about it earlier this year when this episode went viral, in which the team recreated a guy’s earworm and did months of research to track down the song.
This episode concerns itself with a particularly contemporary phenomenon: black people receiving ‘reparations’ from their white friends in the form of small Venmo payments.
It’s a fascinating deep dive into one of the more surprising responses to the BLM movement, and is essential listening for any white folk who aren’t quite sure how to engage with their black friends at the moment. Just because Twitter tells you to support black artists and creatives doesn’t mean you should send them a fiver to ‘buy themselves a coffee’. Freya
Read
A couple of articles…
On the Hotness of Not Getting Any by Soraya Roberts for Longreads
Why are we suddenly all so hot and heavy for Paul and Marianne in BBC’s Normal People and Ruby and Billy in HBO’s Run? Without mincing her words, Soraya Roberts believes that it’s because ‘Isolation is horny as fuck’.
In these shows, there is consent. There is equality. There is tension. It’s the TV equivalent of ‘edging’. After all, let’s think back to the beginning of lockdown. The shows that we were all obsessed with were Too Hot to Handle — a show in which contestants aren’t allowed to snog or be intimate — and Love is Blind, which paired up couples without letting them see or touch one another first.
Soraya Robert’s piece unpacks our TV habits during lockdown and what this means for our desires and sexual urges. Fascinating stuff. Freya
How K-Pop Stans Became A Force To Be Reckoned With by Will Bedingfield for Wired
Just so we’re all clear on this, a ‘stan’ (derived from an Eminem song of the same name) describes a person who is an obsessive fan of a celebrity.
Recently, K-Pop stans and Gen Zs all over the world joined forces to disrupt Donald Trump’s campaign rally in Oklahoma.
In this article for Wired, Will Bedingfield delves deeper into this group of music fans, their motives, group psychology and other forms of activism, which all stems for their love of K-Pop music and groups such as BTS and BLACKPINK.
Internet culture is truly alive at the moment, and with 6.1 billion tweets for #KpopTwitter in 2019 alone, it’s fascinating how huge online communities come together to permeate real world happenings. Alex
Dates for your diary
A round-up of upcoming virtual events to do from home…
Sorry lads, there’s not much on this week. Take the opportunity to catch up on the awe-inspiring I May Destroy You on the BBC iPlayer or listen to Perfume Genius’s stunning new album. You’re welcome.
Ongoing:
Pixar: The Art of Storytelling
This online course, run by Pixar, is a short course on how to best tell stories across all forms of media, particularly focusing on film. It’s lots of fun.
Catch-up:
Nadine Shah’s Payback with Laura Snapes
Singer Nadine Shah’s new album came out this week, and it’s great. Listen to it. Then watch her interview with Guardian music journalist and Alex’s favourite person in the world, Laura Snapes.
Friday:
6.30pm: At Home with Alan Rusbridger
The Guardian’s former editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger reflects on the tumultuous few years in which he was at the helm. His tenure overlapped with the phone-hacking scandal, WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden’s investigations, so there’ll be a lot to unpack. Free. Tickets here.
Cribs of the Week
Everyone needs a lockdown chateau, and this one has the perfect blend of a rough-and-ready-Dick-and-Angel-Strawbridge aesthetic (if you know, you know) and a chic, sophisticated eye for style.
After bingewatching all four seasons of The Durrells in a matter of days, Freya has her heart set on relocating to Greece. One could be very happy in this fortress-style house. Preferably with Spiro for company.
If there was ever a house to grab you by your apron strings and make you immediately regress to the status of 1960s housewife and host a swingers party, this is it. The proximity to the beach would help with nude sunbathing.
#Capitalism
Look, no-one needs a jumper emblazoned with the American flag right now, but if they did, Freya would recommend this one.
Alex’s love for fashion, running and Belgium all combine in this groovy t-shirt by a brand based in Mechelen, a cute little town wedged between Brussels and Antwerp.
Odds and Ends
Meredith from Grey’s Anatomy was a hero then, and is a bigger hero now.
Dripping like a knackered fridge.
