Emerald Fennell's Promising Young Woman , one of this year's best-picture Oscar nominees, has shiny happy music. A lot of shiny happy music. More than you'd expect in a story about an angry young woman, tormented by the rape of a friend in med-school a decade earlier, and out to get some form of revenge.
And yet, not only is the music fun and hummable, it also somehow manages to be central to the sinuous quality of this dark, hard-to-read film.
The very first scene sets the tone. The song is Charli XCX's catchy " Boys ", with lyrics that go " I was busy dreaming 'bout boys / Head is spinning thinking 'bout boys " — an upbeat tune that you'd associate with a party where everyone is having (innocent?) fun. The opening visuals show us some of this playing out in a nightclub, and in the first 10 or 12 shots all we see are dancing men — or, rather, fragments of dancing men. They are mostly dressed in semi-formal clothes (an after-office get-together?), swaying, drinking beer, high-fiving, slapping their own butts.
With no woman in these initial frames, for a few seconds you might think it's a stag party or a gay bar. Whatever the case, in COVID-19 lockdown time, a scene like this carries an extra wistful charge — and I say that as someone who isn't into big noisy parties (and definitely not into dancing at parties).
But as the main narrative begins, danger signs appear. The first words of regular dialogue we hear are "F*** her. Yeah, f*** her."
It's from a conversation between three men, discussing a woman colleague who has presumably complained about unequal workplace treatment. One of the guys (he seems the decent, sensitive one of the three) points out that their colleague has missed out on some client meetings since women aren't allowed to play at the golf club. But the other two shush him up.
Then their attention is drawn to a woman sprawled out on a couch, seemingly sloshed out of her mind. New jibes follow.
As it happens, it is the "decent" guy — the one reluctant to badmouth his colleague, or to leer at this woman — who goes up to check on her. You might be lulled into thinking he is acting out of gallant concern and nothing else, but that illusion soon evaporates; this isn't a film that trusts in the ability of men to be nice when they think no one's keeping an eye on them.
It's hard to properly discuss Promising Young Woman without providing spoilers, but I'll keep it general. What it's okay for you to know is that the woman in that opening scene is Cassie (Carey Mulligan) and that her mission is to seek out predators (including, or especially, men who don't think of themselves as predatory) and give them a nasty shock.
Behind Girls5eva's Catchy, Laugh-Out-Loud Fake Pop Songs
If Peacock's new musical-comedy series Girls5eva were a painting, it'd still be wet, says its creator Meredith Scardino (a former writer and producer on Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt ) over the phone a day after its debut. "Like, we just finished it."
The freshman series — which follows the members of a forgotten late-'90s girl group as they stage an implausible comeback after their sole hit is sampled by a Gen-Z rapper named Lil Stinker — was filmed entirely in the heart of the pandemic. According to Scardino, a first-time showrunner, the postproduction timeline for the Tina Fey and Robert Carlock co-executive-produced sitcom was "very ambitious," shooting eight episodes in four months under strict COVID-19 protocols, with principal photography wrapping up in early February.
Beyond merely finishing the episodes in time to air them, creators wanted to release the Girls5eva soundtrack in tandem with the show's early-May premiere, meaning its stars — Sara Bareilles, Renée Elise Goldsberry , Busy Philipps, and Paula Pell — had to get into the studio quickly. The immediate problem: There were very few studios in New York (where the show filmed) that were COVID-19 compliant. Once they did find a safe studio, the Soundtrack Group in Manhattan, the women weren't allowed to sing in the same room together.
"We would come into the studio but we'd all be on Zooms," says Jeff Richmond, Fey's husband who composed the music for 30 Rock and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, as well as wrote, composed, and produced most of Girls5eva 's music with Scardino. Each actress recorded her part piecemeal. "We'd be like, 'Oh, we have this part of this song done, so you're going to sing this today,'" he says. "They'd have 30 or 40 minutes to do it and then we'd have to move on to the next thing."
Somehow, though, all of Girls5eva's constraints feel rather fitting for a show about five women who, on the cusp of Y2K, were Frankensteined together by a guy who is just a step above the Ponzi-scheming boy-band manager Lou Pearlman .
Like the Spice Girls and Britney Spears before them, the fictional band's songs were imagined by Scardino as being written by men 15 to 20 years their senior. The novice songwriter looked to bring that same middle-age-man energy to Girls5eva's early tunes. "I wanted to write in a way that felt as if they were churned out by a pop machine," she says . "They were just handed stuff in the studio and it was like, 'Can you say this quickly? We have 20 minutes.'"
Despite the Herculean task in front of the show's creative team, all nine songs on the Girls5eva soundtrack are really catchy. "Not in a Kars4Kids way ?" Scardino asks with concern, referencing the torturous Kidz-Bop-on-steroids commercial jingle. No, more like in a Lay's potato chips way. I betcha can't listen just once to these bops that make good on the earworms of the late '90s/early aughts.
Here, in the words of Scardino and Richmond, are the stories behind the unabashedly whimsical music of Girls5eva.
The most popular groups of the late '90s (hello, *NSYNC, B*Witched, and 5ive) all "used dollar signs and numbers, and had weird ways of spelling things," Scardino says. "I wanted to play with that." But the titular band's name wasn't actually a nod to a certain fictional band that had their own MTV series around the turn of the millennium. "People say Girls5eva reminds them a little of 2gether ," she says. "I've never even heard of that band. I don't know how it snuck by me, but I will be looking it up."
Best Bridges of the 21st Century: Billboard Top 100 | Billboard
The bridge holds a special place in the hearts of music fans. It's not the most immediate part of a song, nor usually the stickiest or most recognizable -- in fact, it might be the toughest part for you to remember at karaoke. But very often, it's the part that ends up being the most revealing, the hardest hitting, the least shakeable. If nothing else, it's the most singular part of a song, appearing after the second chorus like a late-breaking curveball and usually not returning until you go back and play the song all over again.
But in contemporary pop music, the bridge might be disappearing. Not totally, of course: Pop songs will almost always have opportunity for a late-arriving breakdown section that offers some sort of new element to contrast from the first couple verses and choruses, before hitting you once more with the main hook. "I think it is such a key part of pop song form," says David Penn, co-founder of Hit Songs Deconstructed , which provides compositional analytics for top 10 Hot 100 hits. "You have to provide that departure, [because] you can do so much with it... it's such a component to pop songwriting that I don't see it going anywhere at all."
In the more clipped era of streaming and TikTok, though, the fully fleshed-out, narrative-oriented bridge -- what Penn and Hit Songs Deconstructed refers to as a "storytelling bridge" -- might be a somewhat endangered species. As the song length of the average hit continues to shrink , there may just not be the same kind of room for the bigger bridges of earlier pop eras. "It might not be as pronounced as it was in the past," Penn says of the future of the classic storytelling bridge. "But in some manifestation, [the bridge] will always serve as a role. Because otherwise, the song can wind up being too predictable, or too one-dimensional. You need to provide that variation to keep the listener engaged."
For bridge purists, there is hope to be found in a few of the biggest pop hits of 2021: most notably, Olivia Rodrigo 's Billboard Hot 100-topping "Drivers License," whose bridge towers so mightily over the rest of the song that it even got specifically shouted out in the February SNL skit centered around the song. "A bridge is a great example of taking a song that's really good and making it great," Rodrigo says. "And just giving it that extra sort of intensity, and bringing in something that hasn't been said before." (Both she and collaborator Dan Nigro are avowed students and supporters of the bridge, saying they "never cop out" when writing one together.)
To salute the shot in the arm our latest cover star has given the bridge form -- and to highlight some of the other best examples of recent years -- Billboard is counting down our 100 favorite song bridges of the 21st century. What makes a bridge at all, let alone a good bridge, is of course subjective, and we had to make some tough calls about what song sections do and don't count as bridges. The only hard-and-fast rules we used were that the bridge has to occur after at least one chorus (though in a few rare cases, they come before the second verse), has to include some vocal element (though not all have lyrics, strictly speaking), has to introduce new musical and/or thematic elements to the song, and has to be followed by some kind of return of the song's main refrain.
With all that in mind, let Billboard take you to the bridge with our list below, with a playlist of all 100 songs at the very bottom. (Before you ask, though: No, "SexyBack" isn't on here -- that's the pre-chorus you're taking us to, JT and Tim, not the bridge.)
The Part You Definitely Remember : That beginning to Swae Lee's interlude before Slxm Jxmmi's third verse, in which he gives the slyest of sly nods to the Beatles' "Day Tripper" before issuing one of hip-hop's great combo come-ons/warnings: "Your body like a work of art, baby/ Don't f--k with me, I'll break your heart, baby."
Why It Works : "Black Beatles" plays it perfectly with callbacks to its titular inspiration: Short, quick glances that enrich the song if you're Beatlemaniac enough to get them, and don't distract from the song's extremely 2016 perfection if you aren't. -- ANDREW UNTERBERGER
The Part You Definitely Remember : When Annie drops her cutesy delivery and speak-sings "I don't want to settle down" in a more serious, seductive tone , she really drives home the fact that she's probably not just talking about gum.
Review: St. Vincent Retreats To An Uncanny Past On 'Daddy's Home' : NPR
Daddy's Home (out May 14), Annie Clark's sixth album as St. Vincent, takes the sounds and sleaze of early-1970s New York as its aesthetic backdrop. Zackery Michael/Courtesy of the artist hide caption
There's a scene in Torrey Peters' new novel, Detransition, Baby , where two trans women argue over the enduring legacy of Candy Darling, one of the most memorable stars in Andy Warhol's orbit in late-'60s and early-'70s New York. One character asserts that she was little more than a muse, a blank canvas onto which men like Warhol and Lou Reed (who wrote about her in "Candy Says" and "Walk on the Wild Side") could project their fantasies: "just some helpless languid blonde waiting around for a man to save her and make her famous." In response, the other character lifts her skirt to reveal an enormous, photorealistic portrait of Darling's face tattooed across her thigh. A person's image, when separated from the person, can be tectonic in its meaning or appear as a cheap facsimile: It depends on how many times it's been replicated, the conditions of that replication, and, mostly, whom you ask.
Fourteen years after her first album as St. Vincent, Clark makes a sharp turn in time with Daddy's Home , her sixth. Until now, her music had largely tendriled toward the future. The early baroque-pop sound of 2007's Marry Me and 2009's Actor , inflected by stints playing guitar for Sufjan Stevens and The Polyphonic Spree, tautened on 2011's breakthrough Strange Mercy , an art-rock marvel whose tightly coiled melodies and bold, raucous guitar work earned St. Vincent a sure spot among the burgeoning millennial indie rock canon. She copiloted a suitably offbeat album, Love This Giant , alongside former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne in 2012; the fruits of their intergenerational conversation fed into her acclaimed 2014 self-titled LP, where Clark cast herself as a grey-haired cult leader basking in the fawning adoration of her followers. In 2017, she paired with Jack Antonoff — best known for co-producing albums by Lorde and Taylor Swift — for the neon-hued MASSEDUCTION , an exuberant study in the nuances of desire, of wanting and being wanted, seeing and being seen.
Throughout her work to date, Clark's guitar has served as a reliable duet partner, an instrument readily tortured into producing alien sound. There's the sputtering chainsaw rumble in the solo of the Strange Mercy single "Cruel," the detuned lead flaying the bridge to Actor 's "Marrow," the corroded trumpet call between verses on the self-titled's "Regret." Her guitar appears less as accompaniment to her singing than as a second voice, a wordless foil to her vivid, disarming lyrics.
On Daddy's Home , Clark retracts that probing tentacle and retreats deep into her dad's vinyl cabinet. She's aimed for period accuracy in the writing and production, furnishing her studio largely with instruments and equipment that were popular circa 1971 . Her guitar, formerly a squealing, squalling, animated force, shrinks back down to six strings and a handful of pickups, producing recognizably pearly tones à la George Harrison or Eric Clapton. As a teaser poster promised, the record can even be purchased on obsolete eight-track tape, a collector's item limited to a run of 500.
Clark began work on the album after her father, convicted of a multi-million dollar stock manipulation scheme , was released from a near-decade's stint in prison. In the music's browns and oranges, its carefully manicured sleaze, Clark excavates competing desires for love, stability and bad behavior. She looks to her lineage — both her literal parents and the artists she considers her ancestors — in order to stabilize herself, to fix her sprawled longing in a legible sequence. On early single "The Melting of the Sun," she supplies capsule vignettes of the many women in her personal pantheon, from Joni Mitchell to Tori Amos to Nina Simone, and then turns the lens back on herself: "Who'm I trying to be? / A benzo beauty queen?"
In its formal qualities, Daddy's Home is faithfully cemented in its frequently romanticized era. The press release situates its stories between the years 1971 and 1975 in downtown New York, though it also bears the hallmarks of certain earlier works: the electric sitar of B.J. Thomas's 1968 hit "Hooked on a Feeling," the searching psychedelic guitar of George Harrison's 1970 post-Beatles debut, All Things Must Pass . Musical and vocal gestures plug tightly into the classics: The way Clark drags her voice across the word "pain" on "Pay Your Way in Pain" echoes David Bowie's treatment of " fame ." The vocal harmonies from her backup singers — including Donny Hathaway's daughter Kenya Hathaway , whose presence casts another shadow of a dad — recall the tight-knit interplay of The Pointer Sisters. (This marks the first time Clark has made use of backing singers on a solo album rather than overdubbing her own harmonies.) Clark says she spent time picking apart the harmonic complexities of Stevie Wonder's 1973 song "Golden Lady," trying to apply the lessons of its satisfying key shift to her own writing. The production is warm and analog and frustratingly minimal, more in line with Antonoff's recent work in tightly laminated negative space than the lush and vibrant atmospheres of Clark's professed influences.
The funk, soul, R&B and rock that coursed through the early '70s pop charts tended toward abundance, stacking elements on top of each other to the point where it seemed they might topple but instead locked together in beautiful cohesion. New recording technologies, new genre explorations, and the momentum of concurrent social movements gave much of the period's music an optimistic fervor, a sense of collective anticipation behind corners not yet turned. There is palpable excitement in the voices of Wonder, Sly Stone, Chaka Khan and other future-minded performers recorded in this stretch of time.
WATCH 'The Sparks Brothers' Doc Trailer From Edgar Wright
You up, Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, or do we need to throw some glitter and mustaches in your face? In the trailer for The Sparks Brothers , director Edgar Wright gives the criminally underrated and objectively hilarious American pop-rock band Sparks their due, with dozens of famous people showing up to talk about how much they're obsessed with brothers Ron and Russell Mael. "All pop music is rearranged Sparks, that's the truth," Jack Antonoff says. "There are throwaway riffs that other bands have built whole careers out of," Patton Oswalt adds. The culture just wasn't there yet — until now. The Sparks Brothers will be released in theaters June 18.
Did you know that these Hollywood celebrities are also K-pop fans?
The former WWE star is a huge fan of BTS and J-Hope is his favourite band member. He has been seen gushing about the band and why he likes it in many interviews, including one during The Late Late Show with James Co rden .
BTS and John Cena have been responding to each other in a series of supportive tweets that went viral.
Academy Award-winning actress Emma Stone is also a K-pop lover. In a 2015 interview with Conan O'Brien, Stone shared that Korean pop music is her latest obsession and she is a big fan of South Korean girl band 2NE1. She further added that she discovered the band during the Spiderman movie premiere in Seoul and her favourite 2NE1 song is “I am the Best.”
Actor Ryan Reynolds is a serious K-pop band EXO fan and he even joked about being a part of the group when he posted a picture with six out of nine EXO members. The actor bumped into EXO stars when he was in Seoul for the premiere of his Netflix film 6 Underground .
The EXO star and South Korean rapper Chanyeol reciprocated the affection by posting a selfie with the Deadpool star.
Back in 2018, the Canadian actor shocked the audience when he made a surprise appearance on the Korean singing competition show King of Masked Singer as a contestant and performed a rendition of “Tomorrow” from the musical Annie .
The Canadian singer-songwriter loves the K-pop genre and is a fan of BTS. In an interview with Radio Disney in 2018, the “Stitches” singer talked about his obsession for K-pop and said, “Of course, I love BTS. I’m, like, obsessed with watching the videos of them dancing.” He met BTS during AMAs in 2017 and has shown interest in collaborating with the band.
American actress Chloë Grace Moretz stans K-pop and has shown her appreciation for MAMAMOO, CL, G-Dragon, and BIGBANG. She has also been to Korea several times for various promotions and during one of her stays, she became BFFs with Eric Nam.
Interestingly, her Twitter header is a picture of her photoshopped in the group picture of BTS from Grammys 2019.
Forum celebrates Xujiahui, the origin of Chinese 'red' films, songs - SHINE News
Xujiahui, the key commercial landmark in Shanghai's downtown, once served as the birthplace of China's revolutionary films and songs that inspired Chinese people for generations, experts said over the weekend.
The prosperous commercial hub features the Pathe Villa, where China's national anthem was recorded, as well as the Yinjiajiao area, where the Shanghai Film Group is based.
Classic left-wing movies such as the "Song of The Fishermen," the first award-winning Chinese film, "Children of Troubled Times," whose theme song later became China's national anthem, as well as "The Goddess" starring famous actress Ruan Lingyu, were produced at the site.
Inspiring films such as the "Angels on the Road" and "The Adventures of Sanmao the Waif" were also produced there, Xu told a public forum at the villa on Saturday.
Senior Chinese musicians, officials from the film company and experts introduced the film and music history of the Xujiahui area, while sharing their personal experiences on the site, on the monthly Hui Forum.
The audience was invited to the third floor of the Pathe Villa at 811 Hengshan Road, which has newly reopened to the public after a major facelift.
Some 5,300 visitors have been attracted to the villa since it was reopened on May 1, said Jiang Yan, deputy director of the Xuhui District Culture and Tourism Bureau. The bureau plans to further explore the revolutionary history of Xujiahui and publish a book titled "The Red Gene of Xujiahui" this year.
Chen's father Chen Gexin, known as the "father of China's pop music," once recorded a dozen classic songs he composed in the villa, Chen Gang said. They include the "Rose, Rose I Love You" and "Nightlife in Shanghai."
Cai Jiaqian, assistant general manager with the China Record Group Shanghai, said the classic song "Rose, Rose I Love You" was once listed among the top of the US pop music list, and has been promoted across the world from the villa.
Lubbock entertainment news in brief
Los Texmaniacs with special guest Augie Meyers are scheduled to perform at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, May 22, at the Cactus Theater, 1812 Buddy Holly Ave.
Max Baca and Los Texmaniacs are the Past, Present and Future of Conjunto music. Conjunto may be a familiar sound to residents of Texas, but its worldwide appeal can be surprising. Combine a hefty helping of Tex Mex conjunto, simmer with several parts Texas rock, add a daring dash of well-cured blues, and R&B riffs, and you've cooked up the tasty Grammy winning Los Texmaniacs groove.
Tickets are $35 for floor, rows A-D; $30 for floor rows E-M; $25 for standard balcony; and $60 for balcony box seats (includes concessions; present ticket at lobby counter before ordering).
Tickets may be purchased online at www.cactustheater.com or by visiting the box office during office hours Monday through Friday, 3-5:30 p.m.; and Saturdays and Sundays one hour before the scheduled show.
Horizon School of the Arts will present "Godspell" at Ragtown Gospel Theater on May 22 and 23. Both performances will be at 3 p.m.
Celebrating "Godspell's" 50th year of entertaining and inspiring audiences from Broadway all the way around the world and back, theater companies worldwide are presenting this international hit for all ages.
Tickets are $20, and are available on the Ragtown website at www.ragtown.com, or those interested may call the theater at 877-RAGTOWN (724-8696).
This Empty World is a new exhibit opening May 23 at the Museum of Texas Tech University, 3301 Fourth St.
The exhibit addresses the escalating destruction of the natural world at the hands of humankind, showing a world where, overwhelmed by runaway development, there is no longer space for animals to survive. The people in the photos are also often helplessly swept along by the relentless tide of progress.
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