Spencer Kornhaber

The Super Bowl halftime show is an opportunity for big, dumb fun: explosions, laser shows, left sharks. But big, dumb fun isn’t Kendrick Lamar’s thing. The 37-year-old Los Angeles rapper and Pulitzer Prize winner prefers subtlety, smarts, and fun that’s tinged by danger and unease. Amid tough, tense circumstances, he put on a tough, tense—and quite satisfying—show.
The event framed itself in self conscious terms. “This is the great American game,” Samuel L.

Maybe we need new emotions. The human experience has changed a lot lately: Creativity can be outsourced to AI, culture lives in flickering fragments on screens, and we social animals are spending tons of time alone. Perhaps the words we use to describe basic, primordial feelings—joy, sadness, anger, and those other names for Inside Out characters—no longer suffice. Perhaps that’s why we’ve been bombarded with so many neologisms to describe mind states, like brain rot, or Eusexua.

The first great image of the second Donald Trump administration emerged last night at a Washington, D.C., basketball arena, where the soon-to-be-inaugurated president danced with the Village People. After Trump finished one of his classic stem-winding speeches, he was joined by five hunks of disco infamy: the bare-armed construction worker, the denim-crotched cowboy, the chaps-wearing biker, the befringed Native American chief, and the vinyl-booted cop.

The gift of Bob Dylan’s music is to make the world seem weirder, or rather to reveal the world to be as strange as it really is. He sings of life as a flow of jumbled-up signs and sensations, some real and some not, carrying meaning beyond words. Even at his most strident, he wheezes out an anti-narrative: Thou shalt not simplify, classify, categorize.
A Complete Unknown, James Mangold’s biopic focused on the bard’s early career, understands this—and betrays it.

Mid is a perfect bit of new slang for a culture in which quantity is crushing quality, in which you can stream endlessly and feel nothing. What’s also fitting is that the word has become a favorite diss in the rap world, the musical genre that has helped pioneer what mediocrity means today. To be clear: Hip-hop is our era’s most dynamic art form.

Death was in the discourse leading up to Friday night’s boxing match between Jake Paul and Mike Tyson. Marketing the fight, the two combatants repeatedly threatened to kill each other; a Netflix promo documentary referenced the bitten and bloodied ear Tyson left Evander Holyfield with in a 1997 match; social-media chatter reveled in the possibility that Paul, one of the internet’s favorite villains, would be murdered on air.

Nick Cave, one of the most physically expressive figures in rock and roll, was looking at me with suspicion. His eyebrows climbed the considerable expanse of his forehead; his slender frame tensed defensively in his pin-striped suit. I think he thought I was trying to get him canceled.
What I was really trying to do was get him to talk about being a man.

Voters gave America’s rudest man permission to return to the White House; what else have they given permission to? Michael Che has one idea. “So y’all gonna let a man with 34 felonies lead the free world and be the president of the United States?” he asked during last night’s “Weekend Update.” “That’s it. I’m listening to R. Kelly again.

With his hat low over his eyes, and the sharpness in his voice sheathed, Eminem seemed slightly less than amped to be at the Kamala Harris campaign rally last Tuesday in Michigan. In a minute-and-15-second speech with nary a punch line or pun, the 52-year-old rapper saluted Detroit, voting, and freedom, and closed with all the passion of an HR professional giving a benefits update: “Here to tell you much more about that, President Barack Obama.

A Nashville musician once offered Kris Kristofferson some feedback on “Me and Bobby McGee,” the 1971 Janis Joplin smash Kristofferson had written. The musician loved the song’s storytelling about young lovers on the road. But, he asked, “why do you have to put that philosophy in there?”
“That philosophy” was the line “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.
The last time The Atlantic put a modern pop star on its cover was 2008, when Britney Spears, clad in oversize sunglasses, occupied a piece of media real estate usually devoted to probing the fate of democracy. Her appearance shocked many readers.

My friends gave me a bit of grief for the headline of one of my recent articles: “The ‘Espresso’ Theory of Gender Relations.” The title, admittedly, was a bit heady for a story about a catchy song full of beverage-related puns. Was I overintellectualizing pop, which is supposed to be the dumbest music of all?
Nah. Sabrina Carpenter, who sings the smash “Espresso”—and its follow-up hit, “Please Please Please”—deserves to be taken seriously.

Back in 2016, when Donald Trump was first performing open-brain surgery on the American psyche, it became common to say that politics had become the new national entertainment. Cable news was a reality show, rallies were WWE matches, and the #Resistance was comparable to the Rebel Alliance. Then, during the Biden administration, the quiet governance of a comparatively boring president seemed to potentially indicate another paradigm shift.

Well, that was a nice idea in theory. Paris held the first-ever Olympics opening ceremony to take place outside a stadium—and on one of the loveliest settings in the world, the Seine. Athletes paraded not by foot but by boat, waving flags from sleek cruising pontoons, as pageantry unfolded on bridges and riverbanks. The aquatic format promised to do more than just showcase the architectural beauty of Paris or convey the magic of strolling across the Pont Neuf with fresh bread in hand.

The men dominating the Billboard Hot 100 this summer are doing traditional male things: picking fights, playing guitar, bellowing about being saved or sabotaged by the opposite sex. Meanwhile, what are the women of popular music up to? Being brats.
Brat may sound like an insult; Hollywood’s “Brat Pack” certainly didn’t appreciate the term in 1985.

Watching Back to Black, the new Amy Winehouse biopic, made me want to look up footage of the late British singer to be reminded of her originality and her liveliness, which no work of fiction could hope to ever fully capture. But in the search process, I ended up staring, for an inordinate amount of time, at Funko Pop dolls. Winehouse has been sold in three versions of the ubiquitous collectible figurines.

Scapegoating is one of humankind’s primal rituals, dating back to the Book of Leviticus, in which God commanded the prophet Aaron to lay hands on a goat, confess the sins of his tribe, and then send the animal into the desert. Throughout centuries and across cultures, the historian René Girard once argued, warring factions have settled disputes by agreeing upon a figure to collectively blame—a resolution that is ugly and unfair but, more than anything, cathartic.

The power of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” is that Dolly Parton sounds powerless. The guitar riff prickles nervously; the melody pleads in the manner of a hungry pet; Parton sings, in a trembling tone, about the woman who could and very well might take her man. It’s a love song to Jolene herself, expressing the sort of love a supplicant shows their god—desperate, fearful, needy for mercy.
But Beyoncé doesn’t do powerless.

The funny thing about the concept of cancel culture is that its popularization coincided with the demise of the mechanisms through which a person might truly be exiled from public life. The mainstream is now fractured into pieces; former gatekeepers in the media and entertainment industry are constantly undermined; the internet has created anarchic new routes for public figures to reach an audience.

Divorce is the hot cultural topic of the year, judging by 2024’s most-discussed memoir, magazine column, and 50-part, eight-hour TikTok series titled “Who TF Did I Marry?” The specifics of each tale differ—unhappy families and all that—but they all share something: a pretense of public service. Lyz Lenz warns women that the institution of marriage is sexist; Emily Gould practices radical honesty about mental health; Reesa Teesa exposes a dating-app scammer.

Must songs written for movies be serious? Each year the Oscar for Best Original Song nominations over-index on hushed ballads and motivational anthems—music that’s built sturdily, predictably, for utilitarian purposes. “I’m Just Ken,” the Barbie track performed by the actor Ryan Gosling, takes that tradition and skews it. Part piano confessional and part prog-metal rockout, it’s a deeply silly song about self-seriousness.

To call a person as legendary as Joni Mitchell underrated might seem silly—but last year, the Rolling Stone co-founder Jann Wenner chose to not include her or any other women in a book about rock ‘n’ roll history called The Masters. Defending his selection of only interviews with white male musicians, Wenner told The New York Times that Mitchell was simply not a “philosopher of rock ‘n’ roll.

Were anyone in denial that this would be an election year ruled by conflict and nonsense, a wake-up call came in the form of Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve With Ryan Seacrest. Performing on the variety show, the rock band Green Day changed one line from their 2004 song “American Idiot”: “I’m not a part of a redneck agenda” became “I’m not part of the MAGA agenda.” Thus was born the first culture skirmish of 2024.
Social media lit up with salutes from the left and complaints from the right.

The word indie has lost a lot of its credibility over the years. A term that’s supposed to signal nonconformity is now a bland aesthetic label, evoking microbrews and mason jars. Many supposedly indie institutions have allied with corporations, such as when Pitchfork, the music-reviewing website known for catapulting obscure bands and tearing down big ones, was bought by Condé Nast, the glossy media company, in 2015.

Over the decades, as it evolved from a slur into a term of tribal pride, the word queer was converted by academics into a verb. To queer a text is to look for hidden, un-straight meaning—to theorize that sexual repression shapes Holden Caulfield’s bad attitude and Nick Carraway’s unreliable narration. Typically, readers queer a work through their interpretation. What the author really meant is, in many cases, unknowable; the text and its effect are what matters most.

When the hip-hop legend André 3000 confused the world by releasing an album of experimental flute music earlier this year, he offered a simple explanation for why he’s stopped rapping: “I’m 48 years old,” he told GQ. He gave examples of personal concerns that he found lyrically unusable: “I got to go get a colonoscopy’ … ‘My eyesight is going bad.

Confession: The Beyoncé concert I attended this past summer was pretty good but not, as Oprah described it, “the most extraordinary thing I’ve ever seen.” Naturally, the expectations are high for any show by the most spectacular artist of my lifetime. Beyoncé’s previous solo arena tour, in 2016, made for a peak concertgoing experience: Even from the nosebleeds, she seemed huge, and impossibly important.

Taylor Swift’s 1989 reminds me of 2014, the year of its release, which is to say that it reminds me of Tinder. That’s when the dating app, founded two years earlier, settled into ultra-popularity: It was logging 1 billion “swipes” a day as singles smudged their thumbs over pictures of strangers, judging and being judged. Tinder turned the classic, nervous thrill of the dating experience into a game, one that millions of people could play at once.

Before she decided to sue Lizzo for sexual harassment, assault, and a number of other offenses earlier this year, the backup dancer Arianna Davis wondered if she was blowing her concerns with her work environment out of proportion. Touring with the widely beloved rapper and singer, she had witnessed some bizarre things: The lawsuit she filed with two other dancers includes the words “bananas protruding from the performers’ vaginas.

We’ve just lived through what Vulture has labeled “Silly Song Summer,” during which onomatopoeias (Kylie Minogue’s “Padam Padam”), farcical film ballads (Barbie’s “I’m Just Ken,” The Super Mario Bros. Movie’s “Peaches”), and a Eurodance satire (Kyle Gordon a.k.a. D.J. Crazy Times’s “Planet of the Bass”) went viral.