The Euro leg of the Anti World Tour seems a little... overly ambitious
But I've lost perspective of Rhenna her career. It very much feels like she's over, but that's also what it felt like going into Loud. Perks of being a popstar no one rlllllly cares about deep down but won't admit cuz she's pretty and has good style and this cool **** you attitude, and she's released like a million smashes, and omg who knows maybe she'll release another? It's like she's the spare popstar you have in ur pocket to play with if you feel like it
I was willing to bet this post made sense in your head until I read that last sentence. This isn't 2009 honey.
In 2015 it became clear that Lana Del Rey's aesthetic wasn't just "a phase," and "High by the Beach" is a song that only she could have sung. For every trite platitude—"lights, camera, acción"—there's an equal and opposite profundity ("You could be a bad mother****er/ But that don't make you a man"). While "Getting high by the beach" is a vision not totally consistent with the manicured sad-girl aesthetic that has become LDR’s trademark, it's also a vision she executes perfectly—what could've been a painfully-literal complainers' anthem sounds breezy and somehow dignified. It’s moody and literal, sure, but it sounds, for once, like Lana has nothing to prove.
Rihanna - “Bitch Better Have My Money
If, in 2015, women of a certain age and circumstance find themselves being consistently thwarted by any one behavior, it’s instinctive, nonsensical apologizing. Earlier this year, "Inside Amy Schumer" featured a skit—"I’m Sorry"— in which a panel of highly decorated women dependably and repeatedly sorry’d for things that were plainly not their fault: Dude brings you a cup of coffee when you asked for water? **** an apology, friend! Thus, when Rihanna released "Bitch Better Have My Money"—arguably the least apologetic song of the millennium, if not in the whole of recorded music—it felt like a revelation, a corrective, a necessary and instructive text. Rihanna has never been much for equivocating (if she believes "top" and "car" rhyme, who are we to suggest otherwise?), and her agenda here is straightforward: Pay me what you owe me. Don’t act like you forgot. She flatly delivers her demands over a big, echoing beat; her Barbadian patois imbues the words with an unexpected loveliness. It’s hard to imagine any other contemporary artist delivering these lyrics quite so convincingly, or with such beautiful bile. —Amanda Petrusich
Sometimes I like to treat myself to a Missy Elliott video mini-marathon. I watch as many clips as I can stand in the middle of my workday before my fidgeting can no longer be contained in an office chair (usually three or four). I was reminded I was overdue for a Missy session the first time I watched the video for "WTF (Where They From), Elliott's first single in years. The first time I watched it, I could feel the grin spread across my face, and then I watched it again. And again. You can measure the success of a Missy Elliott single by the force of its liberating glee, and she was having more fun here, sounding freer and more invincible, than she has since 2007's "Lose Control".
And it's not a bad quality to have. Gives her shelf life.
No one wants it.
