Archives August 2023

After weeks of rumors and speculation regarding when—if ever—Taylor Swift would endorse vice president and 2024 Democratic nominee Kamala Harris for president, the singer-songwriter finally did so with a bang on Tuesday night, signaling her support for the Democratic candidate on social media shortly after Harris’s debate with former president and 2024 Republican nominee Donald Trump.

Posting a photo of herself and her cat to Instagram (a pointed reference to J.D. Vance’s viral invocation of the specter of the “childless cat lady”), Swift wrote: “I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the 2024 Presidential Election. I’m voting for @kamalaharris because she fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them.”

She went on: “I think she is a steady-handed, gifted leader and I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos. I was so heartened and impressed by her selection of running mate @timwalz, who has been standing up for LGBTQ+ rights, IVF, and a woman’s right to her own body for decades.” In addition to decrying Trump’s use of predatory AI to give the false impression that Swift had endorsed him, Swift also urged her followers to make sure they’re registered to vote in the 2024 election, linking to the Vote.gov website from her Instagram stories.

I’m not saying Taylor Swift is going to singlehandedly save democracy or anything, but…have you seen the power of the Swifties for Kamala? With her loyal fan army behind her, it seems entirely possible that Swift actually will have some effect on this election. Harris’s running mate Tim Walz, for one, certainly seems to think so, praising Swift’s message shortly after she posted it.

“I’m grateful to Taylor Swift, and I say that as a cat owner,” he told Rachel Maddow late on Tuesday. “That was eloquent and clear and that’s the type of courage we need in America.”

Some girls want to be known, while others prefer to remain obscure. Scottish-born singer and producer Sophie was for the girls who wanted to hide behind the mixer board while still crafting their own magic—and Sophie, her posthumous record, attempts to reconcile both of those ideals.

Known for the crunchy, glitchy production on her hard-hitting songs, Sophie cultivated an intensely private public profile, remaining all but unknown beyond her stage name before she came out as trans in 2017. She was a producer, in charge of her own image and sound, yet what she emanated more than anything was a kind of angelic alienism. Sophie only released one studio album—the highly acclaimed, Grammy-nominated Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides (2018)—and a mixtape during her lifetime, and both were heavily instrumental, with several songs featuring a single phrase repeated over and over, stretched almost to its linguistic limits, until robotic clamor and distortion took over. Her very earliest releases, like 2015’s “BIPP” and “Lemonade,” just floated in the ether for a while, with no one quite knowing their context or creator. (In 2021, Vince Staples recalled that some speculated Sophie was just another A.G. Cook project.) The 2017 visual for “It’s Okay to Cry”—which marked the first time most fans saw Sophie’s face—placed her before an ever-changing backdrop of clouds, rainbows, and a night sky full of stars, embracing a neither here-nor-there-ness, while the viciously playful video for “Faceshopping” from 2018 revels in wild manipulations of her visage. Harron Walker has previously written about the “dissociative” element in Sophie’s music, the way that it crystallizes being both present and absent at the same time, in the same body. Sophie channeled a more angelic plane, where bodies move in and out of visibility under the flashing club lights.

Liam Payne, the singer and songwriter who drew international fame as a member of British boy band One Direction, died on Wednesday at the age of 31 after falling from the third floor of a hotel in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The circumstances of Payne‘s fall have not yet been confirmed, but an outpouring of grief from fellow celebrities and fans alike has already met the news of his passing on social media.

Occasionally, when Remi Wolf talks about her new album, Big Ideas, she lulls herself into autopilot, her body operating with no input from her brain. During a recent meeting, as she discusses studio logistics in her syrupy alto (“We worked at Electric Lady in New York, we worked at Conway in LA…”), she reaches across the table and snags a french fry off my plate.

“Do you want any ketchup?” I ask her.

Immediately, the spell is broken, leaving Wolf in a state of pure shock. She shrieks with laughter. “I’m sorry, I’m just, like, talking and eating your fries!” she says. “I was just…mind empty.”

There is a funny dissonance between 28-year-old Wolf’s cherubic face—with a halo of dark curls to match—and her tendency to pepper her sentences with “fucking” and “dude.” (She also has a wonderfully eclectic sense of style: for our lunch, she wears a long-sleeve tie-dyed shirt, a pearl choker with a large silver pendant, and mini platform Uggs.) It’s eminently likable: Striding into the Hollywood diner where we sat down together, she’s greeted with a wide grin and a warm “Welcome back!” from our waitress. Wolf has turned this unassuming restaurant into her office recently, taking meetings with various label executives ahead of her album’s release on July 12. “I wish she was here for this interview,” she says of one waitress who, unprompted, told Wolf—and a table full of execs—about her handmade “Lorena Bobbitt Rules!” T-shirt. “She was like, ‘Do you guys want more coffee? Also, I made this shirt. She chopped off her boyfriend’s penis.’ And we were just like, ‘Cool.’”

Big Ideas continues Wolf’s strong track record of clear-as-a-bell vocals, funky production, and vibrant lyricism. While her first LP, Juno, was produced entirely in a bedroom at the height of the COVID pademic, Wolf jumped at the chance to record Big Ideas in hallowed studios like Electric Lady, whose rich history she hoped would bleed into the music. On the new album, she paints vivid scenes of coughing up frogs and spending a loved-up Halloween in Chicago over zany guitar riffs and synths. Also present are pronounced jazz and disco influences, dialed up to match the album’s energetic spirit.

One recurring theme in Wolf’s music is her fluid sexuality. Since her first EP, You’re a Dog! (2019), she has referred to both men and women as the subjects of her desire (and, often, frustration). “When I first entered the music industry, it was a fight to be seen,” she says. In the early years of her career, she admits that she was reluctant to be branded as an LGBTQ+ artist. “I’m just trying to be myself. I’m writing a lot about my literal life experiences,” she says. She worried that a label would not only push her into a box but force her to speak for more than just herself. “I have no authority on anything, really—on gender politics, on queer politics. I don’t have anything to say other than you do you, and I’m gonna do me.” In the five years since You’re a Dog!, however, she feels that attitudes toward sexuality—and queerness in particular—have shifted “to a place where it’s like, who gives a fuck?” she says. “We don’t have to make it a big deal—which I love.”

Having reshaped the zeitgeist in her slime-green, that-bitch image (and announced she’ll be kickstarting London Fashion Week with an H&M-sponsored rave), Charli XCX is packing her Parliaments and heading to Hollywood, where she’s joining the cast of Gregg Araki’s contribution to the burgeoning May-December canon, I Want Your Sex.

Penned by Vogue columnist Karley Sciortino (and named after George Michael’s chart-topping 1987 hit), the film will center on Olivia Wilde’s Erika Tracy, a fictional artist with the cultural heft of Marina Abramović, who begins an affair with her much younger employee, Elliot (Cooper Hoffman). (If you’re wondering why you recognize Cooper’s name, he played Gary Valentine opposite Alana Haim in Licorice Pizza—and, yes, he is Philip Seymour Hoffman’s son.) For a while, Elliot is thrilled to be Erika’s “gentle lover with a heart of gold,” but their romance soon veers into Adrian Lyne territory as “Erika takes him on a journey more profound than he ever could have imagined, into a world of sex, obsession, power, betrayal and murder.” Baby, you’ve been so unkind, indeed. No word yet on which sort of role Charli will be playing, but I hope she gets to wear a bodysuit as good as Kathy Jeung’s in George’s softporn ’80s music video.

It’s Faces of Death, though, that will mark Charli’s formal screen debut alongside Barbie Ferreira, Dacre Montgomery, and Josie Totah. Helmed by How to Blow Up a Pipeline’s Daniel Goldhaber, the project is inspired by the wildly controversial 1978 shockumentary of the same name, which opens with an alleged pathologist, Dr. Francis B. Gross (Michael Carr), introducing a series of videos depicting gruesome deaths—some of which were staged, some of which were real. “For the first time in cinema history, the greatest fear of all mankind will be graphically exposed,” boasted the trailer. “Now, a motion picture dares to take you beyond the threshold of the living.” Inevitably, it became a viral hit, with millions of VHS copies sold across the country, making it the defining film of the decade’s “video nasty” craze. Mercifully, Goldhaber has no plans to recreate the mondo movie (whose horrifically graphic imagery saw it banned in dozens of countries, including the UK). Instead, he’s taking a meta approach, with his plot shadowing a content moderator for a YouTube-esque site who stumbles upon a group recreating scenes from the ’70s hit for their followers.

Interestingly, Charli personally reached out to Goldhaber about a role in the movie, and he isn’t the only writer-director she’s approached about a collaboration in recent months. Earlier this (Brat) summer, she also decamped to Poland to shoot yet another film she’s apparently co-written with Slave Play’s Jeremy O Harris. Good thing she already has enough movie-star sunglasses to see her through at least a dozen paparazzi-filled press tours.