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      in Music

      Billie Eilish, Lorde and More Are Singing Out About Body Image

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      Billie Eilish, Charli XCX and Lorde are among a group of young women who are revealing, in their music, the pressure they have felt to look thin.Taken together, the first two song titles on Billie Eilish’s third album, “Hit Me Hard and Soft,” form a provocative pair: “Skinny” and “Lunch.”“People say I look happy/Just because I got skinny,” Eilish sings on the opener, her melancholic croon accompanied by a single, murky guitar. “But the old me is still me and maybe the real me,” she adds, “and I think she’s pretty.”That lyric is a gut punch. It’s also indicative of a subtle shift among the current generation of female pop stars, who have recently been acknowledging — often in stark, striking and possibly triggering language — the pressure they have felt to look thin.Taylor Swift, who first opened up about her past struggles with disordered eating in a powerful sequence in her 2020 documentary, “Miss Americana,” sings about it on her 2022 track “You’re on Your Own, Kid,” a compassionate ode to her younger self: “I hosted parties and starved my body, like I’d be saved by the perfect kiss.” Last month, in a guest appearance on the remix of Charli XCX’s “Girl, So Confusing,” Lorde confessed that fluctuations in her weight had led her to stay out of the public eye. “For the last couple years, I’ve been at war in my body,” she sings, heartbreakingly. “I tried to starve myself thinner, and then I gained all the weight back.”For several years, conversations about weight in mainstream pop have centered around an artist bold enough to speak up about it and absorb the stinging backlash: Lizzo. In her lyrics, on social media, and in her shapewear line, the singer and rapper has played up self-love, becoming a face of the body positivity movement. Earlier this year, however, she told The New York Times that she had “evolved into body neutrality.” “I’m not going to lie and say I love my body every day,” she said.Part of the vitriol Lizzo has faced is rooted in racism, and it is impossible to divorce a dialogue about body image from race, and the different ways Black, brown and white bodies are dissected, denigrated and idolized. Latto recently spoke out about how online criticism led her to have plastic surgery at 21 to enhance her buttocks. Last year the rapper, who is biracial, said, “When I didn’t have my surgery, they’re like, ‘Oh, she shaped like her white side.’” SZA, speaking to Elle about her own, similar, procedure (which she sang about on her hit 2022 album, “SOS”), said, “I didn’t succumb to industry pressure. I succumbed to my own eyes in the mirror.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      The Voices of A.I. Are Telling Us a Lot

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      What does artificial intelligence sound like? Hollywood has been imagining it for decades. Now A.I. developers are cribbing from the movies, crafting voices for real machines based on dated cinematic fantasies of how machines should talk.Last month, OpenAI revealed upgrades to its artificially intelligent chatbot. ChatGPT, the company said, was learning how to hear, see and converse in a naturalistic voice — one that sounded much like the disembodied operating system voiced by Scarlett Johansson in the 2013 Spike Jonze movie “Her.”ChatGPT’s voice, called Sky, also had a husky timbre, a soothing affect and a sexy edge. She was agreeable and self-effacing; she sounded like she was game for anything. After Sky’s debut, Johansson expressed displeasure at the “eerily similar” sound, and said that she had previously declined OpenAI’s request that she voice the bot. The company protested that Sky was voiced by a “different professional actress,” but agreed to pause her voice in deference to Johansson. Bereft OpenAI users have started a petition to bring her back. More

    • 163 Shares189 Views

      in Television

      Alec and Hilaria Baldwin and Their 7 Children Get a Reality TV Series

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      “We’re inviting you into our home,” the actor, who is set to stand trial next month on an involuntary manslaughter charge, said as he announced a show about his family on TLC.Speaking with Alec Baldwin on his podcast last year, the talk show host Kelly Ripa made a pitch for him and his wife: “When I think about you and Hilaria and your seven young kids — now, I know what you’re going to say, but just go with me — this has reality TV written all over it,” she said.He didn’t dismiss the idea. In fact, he said the couple had already received pitches, and made one or two themselves.And on Tuesday, Baldwin, who is scheduled to stand trial next month on a charge of involuntary manslaughter in the fatal shooting of a cinematographer on the set of the film “Rust,” announced that a reality show featuring the couple and their “seven growing kids” would be coming next year to TLC. Its working title is “The Baldwins.”“We’re inviting you into our home to experience the ups and downs, the good, the bad, the wild and the crazy,” Alec Baldwin said in a video announcement with Hilaria that he posted to Instagram on Tuesday, interspersed with footage from inside their busy home.The announcement of the new show comes at a delicate time for Baldwin, 66, as he prepares to go on trial in New Mexico in the “Rust” shooting. Baldwin, who has pleaded not guilty in the case, has denied responsibility for the death of the cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, who was killed when a gun that he was rehearsing with, which was not supposed to be loaded with live ammunition, fired a real bullet that struck her. Baldwin’s lawyers are continuing to seek the case’s dismissal, placing blame for the tragedy on the movie’s armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, who was convicted in March of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to 18 months in prison.Lawyers for Baldwin, who had a starring role in the western, have written in court papers that the tragedy has made it difficult for the actor to get work.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 188 Shares159 Views

      in Music

      In New TikTok Trend, Parents Dance Like It’s the ’80s and Bring Down the House

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      Videos of parents demonstrating their moves have been a surprise hit on a site where youth rules — perhaps because the trend isn’t played for laughs.TikTok can add a new skill to its résumé: disco time machine.The social platform, normally populated with an endless scroll of Gen Z-ers dancing — mostly in short choreographed routines that have been practiced and perfected — has recently been infused with the energy of a surprising demographic: their Gen X parents.In the viral videos, parents are asked by their adult children to dance as they would have back in the day to the 1984 sonic ear worm “Smalltown Boy,” by the British synth-pop band Bronski Beat. Most posts are tagged #momdancechallenge, #daddancechallenge or #80sdancechallenge, and they have racked up tens of millions of views.The reactions have been perhaps unexpected, because instead of going for laughs, the videos are cool, like really cool, serving as a portal to another era: when dance was more often improvisational and spontaneous, when people felt the beat and found the rhythm organically, moving without the constraints of a horizontal aspect ratio.When Valerie Martinez, 23, asked her mother, Yeanne Velazquez, 58, to participate, it was before the challenge had gone viral, and they had not prepared at all. “I didn’t even play the song for her before,” Martinez said in a phone interview this week alongside her mother. But Martinez was sure Velazquez would deliver, because her mother is always dancing, she said.It was nostalgic for Velazquez, who said that when the song was popular, she was about 19 and would go dancing in the one or two clubs in Puerto Rico, where she lived. Now she and her daughter live in Florida.

      @thatpersianqt she ate with this one I fear #fyp #foryou #80s #80sdancechallenge #momsoftiktok #80smusic ♬ Smalltown Boy – Bronski Beat

      @_miamimonkey Do we all have the same mom? 😂 I thought y’all were joking until I had her do it blindly 😂 @Savvy Sandy #fyp #foryou #foryoupage #80sdancemoves #80smusic ♬ Smalltown Boy – Bronski Beat We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Television

      How the Language of TV is Influencing How We See Ourselves

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      TikTok has spawned a curious new way of understanding ordinary life: villain arcs, main character energy and seasons. Last summer, I was struck by a video I came across on TikTok. In it, a 20-something flops faceup onto her bed. Her roots are grown out, her eyeliner is heavy and her gaze, vaguely forlorn, is intensified by a key light tinted blue. Her hand gropes around the adjacent night stand to silence her vibrating phone. Then the Netflix logo flashes, followed by a credit line: “A life written and directed by Beatrice Harrods.” A stop-motion sequence follows the passage of time: a vase of chrysanthemums, then roses; one candle, then another; an unfurling rug and the text “Season 2.” Cut back to Harrods: Her roots are touched up, and her gaze, now pointed at the camera, seems to relish being watched.You see a lot of this on TikTok now: videos that describe ordinary life using the language of television. Scroll through, and you’ll find users charting the different “seasons” of their lives or highlighting the emergence of plot “arcs.” You may find users referring to the people in their lives as “casts” — including both passing encounters with “paid extras” and recurring appearances by “guest stars.” A friend’s unexpected appearance might be tagged “NOO! Ur not in this episode” or described, as one user had it, as the moment “when someone from Season 2 of my life somehow crosses over into Season 4.”There is a certain permeability between art and life, and pleasure in perceiving it: We take satisfaction in recognizing our lives in onscreen plot lines, as we thrill to real-life moments that feel “just like a movie.” But TikTok’s video-based format has wildly amplified the impulse to collapse the distance between the two and imagine yourself as an onscreen character. The app’s tools make it easy for people to film and edit footage of themselves, narrating their own stories in breezy narrative beats — making life look like an episode of television. The result is a perfect ecosystem for watching and being watched, where once-passive audiences are encouraged to see themselves as the writers, directors and stars of their own motion pictures. Perhaps there is therapeutic value in conceptualizing your life as a coherent story — one you can not only analyze but direct. One key piece of televisual jargon that has thrived online feels especially suited to this purpose. The “canon event” describes a crucial, sometimes traumatic occurrence that activates or shapes a person’s character. This kind of thinking may be related to therapy, but it has since been extrapolated wholesale into Hollywood tropes. Last year, the popularity of “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” — with its talk of critical “canon events” shaping the lives of heroes — inspired TikTok users to embrace the term. But in the transition from big to palm-size screen, the idea became a deadpan punchline, identifying not superheroic origin stories but the formative trials of ordinary youth. One video applied the term to “every teenage girl getting into her first situationship with a medium ugly guy that bears a striking resemblance to the rat from Flushed Away.”The challenge, for a narcissist, is to realize that we are all our own protagonists.There’s a related genre of video that encourages viewers to use the visual language of TV to romanticize their lives. This often involves footage of quotidian activities — waiting for the subway, restocking a fridge, pouring a beverage — elevated through production techniques: flattering close-ups, curated props, the amateur’s equivalent of dedicated hair, wardrobe and makeup departments. By reframing mundane activities as the well-lit choreography of a story’s protagonist, these videos render the everyday with a kind of glamour and gravity. If all the world is now a set, “main characters” like these are rewarded by the attention economy — a fact that has inspired some users to turn “main-character energy” into something like a life philosophy. One woman, in the first of 22 “episodes” dedicated to proselytizing her “seasons theory” on TikTok, described how she improved “Season 3” of her life by asking herself what Serena van der Woodsen and Carrie Bradshaw would do. (Those main characters, of “Gossip Girl” and “Sex and the City,” narrativized their own lives for a blog and a newspaper column.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Television

      ‘Black Twitter’ Review: Hulu’s Docuseries Doubles as a Snapshot of Recent History

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      Hulu’s docuseries on a social-media subculture doubles as a serious snapshot of recent history.Who created Twitter?On one level, the business level, the Wikipedia level, the answer is simple: Twitter, a social-media service allowing users to post brief messages, was founded in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone and Evan Williams.But on the level of culture, the people who “create” a social platform — that is, who decide what it’s for, what it can do, how it feels — are the people who use it. “Black Twitter: A People’s History,” which arrives on Hulu on Thursday, argues that it was Black users who, as much or more than anyone, gave Twitter its voice.A couple of caveats are useful here. Though Twitter, now called X, is a global infosystem with worldwide effects, the three-part documentary, based on a Wired oral history by Jason Parham, focuses mainly on Twitter as an American phenomenon. And Black Twitter, the series is careful to point out, isn’t a monolith or formal group but the more general phenomenon of Blackness and Black culture manifesting online.“Black Twitter” treats the network not mainly as technology or business but as a cultural artifact — a platform, even an art form, for commentary, community and comedy. Twitter, it argues, is another part of American culture, like music and food, that Black Americans defined by coming to it from the margins.“In the same way that we took our lamentations and made gospel music, we took a site like Twitter and we made it a storytelling forum,” Meredith Clark, a journalism professor undertaking an archive of Black Twitter, says in the documentary. Or as the comedian Baratunde Thurston pithily puts it: “We repurposed Twitter the way we repurposed chitlins.”This scaffolding of ideas elevates “Black Twitter” above the kind of remember-this-remember-that pop-history documentary that it can resemble on the surface. Appropriate to its subject, it tells its story in a series of small bites. It stitches together interviews with academics, journalists, entertainers, viral stars and figures from business and politics with a nimble narration by the director, Prentice Penny.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 88 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      The Kendrick Lamar vs. Drake Beef, Explained

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      The two rappers had circled one another for more than a decade, but their attacks turned relentless and very personal in a slew of tracks released over the weekend.The long-building and increasingly testy rap beef between Kendrick Lamar and Drake exploded into full-bore acrimony and unverifiable accusations over the weekend with the rapid-fire release of multiple songs littered with attacks regarding race, appropriation, sexual and physical abuse, body image, misogyny, hypocrisy, generational trauma and more.Most relentless was Lamar, a Pulitzer Prize winner from Compton who tends toward the isolated and considered but has now released four verbose and conceptual diss tracks — totaling more than 20 minutes of new music — targeting Drake in the last week, including three since Friday.Each racked up millions of streams and the three that were made available commercially — “Euphoria,” “Meet the Grahams” and “Not Like Us” — are expected to land near the top of next week’s Billboard singles chart, while seeming to, at least momentarily, shift the public perception of Drake, long a maestro of the online public arena and meme ecosystem.In between, on Friday night, Drake released his own broadside against Lamar — plus a smattering of other recent challengers — in a teasing Instagram interlude plus a three-part track and elaborate music video titled “Family Matters,” in which he referred to his rival as a fake activist and attempted to expose friction and alleged abuse in Lamar’s romantic relationship.But that song was followed within half an hour by Lamar’s “Meet the Grahams,” an ominous extended address to the parents and young son of Drake, born Aubrey Graham, in which Lamar refers to his rival rapper as a liar and “pervert” who “should die” in order to make the world safer for women.Lamar also seemed to assert that Drake had more than a decade ago fathered a secret daughter — echoing the big reveal of his son from Drake’s last headline rap beef — a claim Drake quickly denied on Instagram before hitting back in another song on Sunday. (Neither man has addressed the full array of rapped allegations directly.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 150 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Eurovision Fans Are Hungry for News. These Superfans Are Here to Help.

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      A cottage industry of blogs and social media accounts, run by Eurovision obsessives in their spare time, satisfies a seemingly endless demand.Magnus Bormark, a longtime rock guitarist in Norway, said his band had gotten used to releasing music with little publicity. So nothing prepared him for the onslaught of attention since the band, Gåte, was selected to represent Norway at this year’s Eurovision Song Contest.The phones have not stopped ringing, Bormark said — not just with calls from reporters from mainstream media outlets, but also from the independent bloggers, YouTubers and podcast hosts who provide Eurovision superfans with nonstop coverage of Eurovision gossip, backstage drama and news about the contest.Casual Eurovision observers may tune in once a year to watch the competition, in which acts representing 37 countries compete in the world’s most watched cultural event. But for true fans, Eurovision is a year-round celebration of pop music, and since the winner is decided by viewer votes as well as juries of music industry professionals, fan media hype can help boost those artists’ profiles.The rise of websites and social media accounts dedicated to Eurovision news follows a broader trend in media, where nontraditional media organizations, like fan sites, podcasts, newsletters, new video formats and publications dedicated to niche interests, are expanding in size and influence.Members of the band Gåte, representing Norway at this year’s song contest, have been surprised by the attention they have received from Eurovision fans.Per Ole Hagen/Redferns, via Getty ImagesA report published last year by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found that TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat users paid more attention to social media personalities, influencers and celebrities than journalists when it came to news.“Someone can sit in their bedroom, being passionate about Eurovision, but suddenly they have 40,000 followers,” Bormark said.One of the most followed Eurovision news sites, Wiwibloggs, was founded by William Lee Adams, a Vietnamese American journalist who works for the BBC.“The fan media is sort of covering this year round, breathlessly, because they recognize that it’s an underserved topic,” said Adams, whose site’s YouTube channel got more than 20 million view last year. “This is the World Cup of music, this is the Olympics on steroids, and it deserves attention.”A lot has changed since Adams founded the site 15 years ago. At the Eurovision Song Contest in Baku, Azerbaijan in 2012, Adams said he and a friend, dressed in hot pink pants and tight white shirts, were among a small number people in the media room who were not representing traditional outlets.“Things kind of snowballed from there,” he said. Today, Wiwibloggs has a volunteer staff of more than 40 writers, editors, videographers and graphic designers from 30 countries.As a Eurovison blogger, Lucas has attended the competition many times.Alyssa Schukar for The New York TimesThis year, about 300 members of the fan media, representing nearly 200 publications, social media channels and podcasts, are registered to cover the Eurovision finals in Malmo, Sweden. Another 200 fan journalists have access to the competition’s online media room, according to the European Broadcasting Union or E.B.U., which oversees the event. That’s in addition to the more than 750 journalists from traditional media outlets expected to attend, including one reporter from The New York Times.Alesia Lucas, a Eurovision commentator from the Washington, D.C., area, said she started a YouTube channel in 2015 as a way to find with other people who were passionate about Eurovision — not easy for an American. As her audience has grown, so has the role of bloggers in setting the tone of conversations about the artists, she said.“We start banging the drum earlier than even the E.B.U. to start getting Eurovision back into the zeitgeist and highlight the moments that are notable,” said Lucas, who uses the name Alesia Michelle for her YouTube channel. She records content at 6 a.m., before her daughter wakes up, and edits video after she’s finished her day job of handling communications for a labor union.The Eurovision commentator Gabe Milne produces videos for his YouTube channel when he’s not at his day job at London City Hall. “Often I’ll do eight or nine hours there, come home, and then spend six or seven hours of research, getting everything ready,” he said. Compared to past years, “you’re seeing a lot more professional-style content,” he said.Lucas records content at 6 a.m., before her daughter wakes up, and edits video after she’s finished her day job of handling communications for a labor union. Alyssa Schukar for The New York TimesYet fan media has mostly stayed away from a topic that mainstream media outlets have covered extensively: a campaign to exclude Israel from the competition because of the mounting civilian death toll in Gaza.“We’re not journalists,” said Tom Davitt, an Irish physical therapist who records Eurovision YouTube videos on evenings and weekends. “We’re not even amateur journalists, we’re just amateur content creators, so wading into this kind of stuff — we’re just not trained for it.”While reporters from mainstream media outlets tend to be impartial observers of the competition, many fan media are not aiming for neutrality. When USA Today hired a dedicated Taylor Swift reporter who was also a self-proclaimed Swiftie, it raised questions: Is it possible for a fan to maintain objectivity? Would someone who is not a fan understand the subject well enough to cover it?Charlie Beckett, the head of a think tank focused on journalism at the London School of Economics, said objectivity was not the goal in Eurovision.“The whole point of Eurovision is that you’re incredibly biased according to your nationality and which singer you like,” Beckett said. The growing numbers of fan media sites reflected the growth in hype around Eurovision, even nearly 70 years after its first edition. “It seems to ride out any kind of fashion reversal,” he said.Lucas, from the D.C. area, said that while mainstream media outlets report on Eurovision as a circus, it was now more mainstream than people credit. “Yeah, it’s camp, a little bit,” she said, “but you can’t tell me that Katy Perry’s halftime show was not camp either.” More