Last month, a topic began trending on Twitter that seemed just a little out of the ordinary. It wasn’t a celebrity’s name, or the name of a place, or a natural disaster, or “Happy National Whatever-the-fuck” day. No one was sure exactly what it was, the specifics being so vague and the tweets just as confusing. It wasn’t until Phoebe Bridgers tweeted “five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred gecs” when I discovered the phrase for the first time.
Living in the local L.A. music scene, it’s easy to notice the inundation of new, local hip-hop talent coming out of the woodwork almost every day. It gets to a point where the kitchen becomes so cluttered, you can’t tell who is who or who’s making what anymore. The aim for the window to become groundbreaking and noticeable just feels like it’s ever-shrinking, also due to the fact that all these artists and producers have the same tool sets. They’re all using the same equipment and software, but it’s their approach that will ultimately determine if they’re filtered out among the significant ones.
Nestled deep inside a garden in Echo Park, an almost half-greenhouse, half-house cottage sits comfortably among what looks like an oasis. On a hot July Sunday afternoon, Carlos Ramirez, known as synth-wave artist Auragraph, takes us into what legit could be a hidden room of secrets: his studio.
The film starts with an interview of Rick Dalton (DiCaprio) and Cliff Booth (Pitt) on the set of the NBC show Bounty Law. The image of the two actors in the same frame alone is already worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The exuberance jumps off the screen, which is precisely what separates Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood from today’s blockbusters – its extravagant vision is one that is not necessarily done anymore (save maybe for franchises), but one that truly feels out of its time, and also feels like it’s of the time the film depicts. That’s what, essentially, is at the soul of this film: a time that has long died off where personality and name were enough for movies to make a buck.
Upon the announcement of their NTS Radio take over this past weekend, Warp Records scheduled certain hours of exclusive remixes, live performances, and unreleased material from just about every artist on their roster. Some artists curated mixes, others played exclusively new material. However, one name on that schedule did catch the attention of every Warp Records enthusiast.
There’s a line somewhere early on in HBO’s Chernobyl, in which Valery Legasov (Jared Harris) explains to Boris Shcherbina (Stellan Skarsgård) about how to put out the fire from the exploded nuclear reactor, in which Legasov states “You’re dealing with something that has never been seen before on this planet.” This line, essentially, is what encapsulates what’s so special about the HBO mini-series – the capability of human self-destruction, and the many layers of how the show can be analyzed.
The term listening party has always thrown me off. It’s almost a tease in the name itself – sometimes they’re cool experiences, other times they’re not as cool as they’re made out to be, maybe due to the host wanting a large turnout just so they can guarantee they’ll have a line that stretches around the block.
For the non-writers outside of the Hollywood sphere, there’s been a change happening lately that’ll likely impact how your favorite shows are made. Last month, the ATA (Association of Talent Agents) failed to update its policies in accordance with their contract with the WGA (Writer’s Guild of America), which expired on April 7th. As a result, the WGA asked its members to fire their agents if they did not comply with the WGA’s demands of a change of contract, which has to deal with how agents are paid via staffing and payments of their clients.
“The adults are talking!” exclaimed Julian Casablancas during a pause in the show. He’d revisit this phrase a few more times in the evening, but one could tell from the abrupt stop and the crowd chanting “New song! New song!” repeatedly, as well as roadies scrambling about trying to re-arrange the gear for an unexpected change in the set list, that the audience was in for a treat. “I’m gonna try my best on this one,” Casablancas confessed before the Strokes ripped into the new addition to their repertoire. “Are you not entertained?” he teased near the end of the new song.
An anomaly occurred just a little less than a month ago, when Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” charted on the Country Billboard chart. It was, at that time, maybe taken as a joke. But then you started listening to it… and you couldn’t really tell what the song was. Was it a country song, but made with hip-hop instruments? Or vice-versa? Regardless if it feels like a glazed-donut dipped into an orange 7/11 Big-Gulp, the song itself represents perhaps a new age in contemporary music.