Nate Haduch

Chris Redd and Pete Davidson’s hip-hop ode to trees did not play in its entirety during SNL’s live airing. But many people digest the show over the week, sketch-by-sketch. Redd wrote “Trees” to have staying power, because the message of enthusiastic but ill-informed environmentalism is important.

In the video, Redd and Davidson (and a mute thug with a recycling symbol neck tattoo) kidnap Beck Bennett to teach him about the very real dangers of climate change. At the end, Al Gore blooms out of a daisy and gives the gang a thumbs-up. Gore actually recorded the footage himself at the request of his buddy Pete Davidson. How does Pete Davidson know Al Gore? Unclear.

Redd has used music to address other serious issues on the show: “Friendos” looked at the real work that goes into sustaining adult friendships, and Emmy-winning “Come Back Barack” gave voice to the country’s yearning for a sane leader. He spoke with Vulture about how to sneak issues into music, and why all rap is character work.

How has the response been, now that people have seen the entire sketch?
Now that I know they’ve seen the sketch. I didn’t even know at first [that it got interrupted], because in the studio they played the whole thing. We thought everybody saw it. But it’s been good. There have been a lot of tree organizations that have been tweeting it. And Al Gore tweeted it, which was really fun. People have been loving it. I didn’t realize so many people loved trees.

How long have you loved trees?
My whole life, Bethy! My whole life I’ve loved trees! I’m really big on the Earth and the health of it. My grandma was somebody who had a garden and grew plants all the time. It’s not like I’m a part of 1,000 organizations, I’m not going to lie like that, but it’s something I’ve been conscious of for a long time. With climate change, we’re seeing these reports about what we need to do to keep the Earth healthy. We’ve got to do something to make people think about it a little more, even if we have to be dumb in the sketch to do it.

Tell me about the process of writing a rap for comedy. How does that work?
It’s similar to how I used to write regular rap, only this is more successful, because I’m embracing the comedy of it. What I usually like to do is find beats that will speak to me a little bit that make me think I can write something to it — I like what the beat feels like, what the vibe is. Then it’s finding the words that you want to say, and writing those first. Then you figure out what style to bring to those words to make them fit. What’s most interesting to me is people love the verse where I talk about planting the tree. But none of those words rhyme, at all. Not one. There’s no rhyming in there. But it’s the style that makes it seem like it’s rhyming. People are like “That’s crazy!” It’s crazy that y’all think it’s rhyming, because it’s not. But that’s what’s fun about comedy. You have room to not have to be perfect.

Some comedic rappers like to sound silly or goofy. I like to make it sound as much like real rap as possible, and have silly little things about it. That’s where the comedy lives — the visuals and not rhyming, or talking about something over and over. [It’s] where the perspective comes from, and not a silly voice over a beat. Even though I like that, too.

There’s totally room for both. Where did the beat come from?
This guy Johnny Juliano made the beat. He is a producer that I had found randomly online years ago, when I first started writing raps. I have another beat by him that I’ll try to get on the show later this year. [Him and] this other guy, SuperStar O, were like the dream team producing squad. Johnny was really consistent about hard-hitting beats with sounds you wouldn’t think to put in a hip-hop record, which I always like. He did a couple of Wiz Khalifa’s early mixtape stuff. When I sent my stuff to him back then, he didn’t really respond. And then, years later, I’m thinking about how I want to do this song about trees. It had been ten years. And then I found that beat and recorded a real rough [demo] of it with Pete and sent it back to him. He was like, “Is this the real Chris Redd?” I was like, “Yeah! I’ve been buying beats off you for years!” And he was like, “Oh, for real? Now I know.” I had been a fan of his for a long time, and by the time I reached out for this song, he was a fan of me. It just became a very cool relationship.

Where did you get the Al Gore thumbs-up footage?
Al Gore sent that to us. He personally sent that to us, and we have other footage of him doing weird climate quotes and stuff. Pete has this, um … Pete … Pete’s very plugged in to people, man. He knows a lot of people at weird levels. Certain people make sense, but then it’s like, “I know Al Gore.” He reached out to see if he could send a video over the summer. We were all like, “Pete, how do you know Al Gore?”

Wait, what? How … did Pete tell you how he knew Al Gore?
Pete would have to tell you the story, I don’t really remember it. I didn’t even believe him until we got the video. That’s just how the universe works sometimes, man. Sometimes Pete knows Al Gore. Sometimes it snows in summertime. I didn’t even get too deep into it. I think they did some event together, some logical thing. But for me, I like the mystery. Some things you don’t want to know.

How is it different to be writing and performing a sketch versus just facilitating someone else’s words? As a cast member who also writes, how are those two things different?
It was my dream to rap. So when I make a rap song that works, and I wrote it, it feels like all of the things I worked for are coming to fruition. Everyone can see my idea, and I have more ownership over it. There’s a joy about other people’s words, too. It’s the difference between hanging out with your kid and hanging out with your nephew, you know what I mean? There’s still love, but I love my kid a little more because it’s my kid. There’s more ownership in it, and you see your words working. It’s the same when it doesn’t work. That hurts more because it’s my words, it’s my fault.

The difference between your kid going to jail and your nephew going to jail.
[Laughs.] Exactly! You know what, I love my nephew, and I’m going to be there for him, but hey. Ain’t my kid. I did what I could.

In the video you say you like doing character work. What do you specifically like about it?
I like getting lost in the character and figuring out what that character wants and needs. I love doing voices. I’ve been a people-watcher my whole life, and so I picked up all these different character mannerisms. Growing up, my family was very wild. Outlandish. I don’t really have to go far to channel people. I just like to play in that world, where you can figure out everything. Question everything, and be silly. Be hard, but love something soft. I just like playing opposites. I have a wild imagination, and this seems like the best way to get it out.

How is it different writing rap for a character versus something that is supposed to be coming from you?
For me, rap is always kind of in-character. For some people it’s a lighter veil, and others are a complete character. A lighter veil would be Common, but a complete character to me is Eminem. And I love both of those artists. But writing a character, there’s a ton more freedom in that. You can do anything, say anything, go anywhere, and it’s all in that character. It doesn’t have to really be coming from you. When it’s coming from you, people have to know your perspective, have to know where you’re come from. They have to know when you’re joking, if you’re serious. I think I like the freedom of writing for a character, because you can go more places. I like saying crazier things, and characters are a good way to hide.

That’s interesting because climate change isn’t crazy. What benefit did you find in using a character to talk about something so real as the fact that there might not be an inhabitable planet in 20 years?
Rap makes a certain demographic of people listen to something and actually care about it a little bit more. I’m not done talking about it. That character, the gangster environmentalist, is a character I like to do a lot. I think a good way to get people to continue thinking about [climate change] is music. Music hangs with you a long time — way longer than a joke most of the time. We put that [report] in it pretty immediately, because that happened, too. While we’re all talking about what Taylor Swift thinks and all these other things are going on, like, yo: They did say we could lose our Earth in about 12 years, and we need to talk about that. The only clear information in the song is Alex’s part when he’s the doctor, running down these very real things you need to do. And then as we continue to talk about these things, find other ways to talk about these issues, we can have that. But I feel like music is always a way to sneak some good information into people’s ears, even if they don’t want to hear it. Because you have a lot of people that don’t believe it, but love rap. The more they listen to it, the more they think about it, and maybe look some stuff up. At least that’s what I do.

Socially conscious hip-hop kind of goes through phases of popularity. Would you say it’s on the way back up?
Yeah, I think so — with the likes of Kendrick Lamar, people that are making it cool. Kendrick is cool, but he’s also saying very, very real things all the time. J. Cole and him, these are some of the biggest artists out and they’re very conscious of what’s going on in the streets, what’s going on with the world, the government. They’re talking about this stuff; they’re not shying away from it. But then you have a whole subsection of music: of Migos and the Lil Yachties, so many other people that don’t talk about that at all. I think you need both things. And so I’m in my lane, comedy, where I can bounce around between those two things and throw stuff in there. Not every song is going to be a ballad or ode to something real, but I think that there’s a way to do it. I like to be socially conscious, so I think there’s a way to do it and have fun with these important issues.

Sophie Calle is a 64-year-old French conceptual artist who, while being interviewed for a T Magazine profile last year, appeared to be pregnant. It turned out she was in midst of pretending to carry and give birth to her cat, Souris, who died back in 2014. As NPR reports, that cat … More »

Disturbed singer David Draiman recently had his signature chin piercing removed, as … More »

According to TMZ, Pete Davidson and Ariana Grande have called off their engagement and broken up. An unnamed source told the outlet that the two decided to separate over the weekend, reportedly because now was not a good time for their relationship to continue.

The news comes just five months after the couple announced that they were dating and had gotten engaged. Their romance was very public, with dates to the VMAs, PDA-filled Instagram posts, a pet pig, matching tattoos, and most recently, a few jokes from Pete Davidson on Saturday Night Live about their relationship.

The last few months have been especially challenging for Grande, who canceled her tour and several scheduled appearances after the death of her longtime friend and former boyfriend Mac Miller. This weekend she canceled a scheduled performance at a benefit gala to fight cancer, and her manager Scooter Braun says she needed “more time.”

Neither has publicly commented on the reports of a breakup, though earlier this week it was reported that Pete Davidson covered his tattoo of bunny ears with a heart. TMZ’s source said that they still love each other and might get back together in the future.

The late Leonard Cohen was at least as well known for his poetry as for his legendary songwriting. He has a new posthumous book called The Flame: Poems Notebooks Lyrics Drawings out now, and the collection includes a poem called "Kanye West Is Not Picasso." … More »

The nominees list for the 2019 inductees to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was released this week. Below are the candidates, ranked in order of merit. For background on the hall and its procedures, and all the previous inductees, click here.

Roxy Music

Given that they’ve been eligible for 20 years, this is the most glaring omission in the hall’s history. Roxy was one of the most challenging bands of its time, mixing glam, art rock, and some species of European chanteuserie (courtesy of leader Bryan Ferry) layered with postmodern rock imagery, a decayed, regretful sexuality, and venturesome soundscapes (courtesy of founding member Brian Eno). Brassy early releases gave way to several art-rock classics (Country Life, Stranded) and then shifted around the time of Manifesto into haute global pop in Flesh & Blood and Avalon that arguably has never been equaled.

Radiohead

The debate about Radiohead is whether they are a transformative, pantheonic band, worthy of immediate entry to the hall, or just a really great one. I think they are at least as great as R.E.M., say, which got in on its first year. This is the band’s second year of eligibility. I think they are a top-tier band, musically adventurous, and innovative in all sorts of ways. I can still remember where I was the first time I heard “Paranoid Android.”

To its credit, the nominating committee went for them, despite the fact that the members of Radiohead have disparaged the hall repeatedly, and have already said they won’t be coming to the induction ceremony. Hard to believe the members of the voting committee, now said to be 1,000 strong, could decide that Radiohead is not a hall of fame band, but perhaps they won’t given the band’s position. From the point of view of the organizers of the induction ceremony, this means one less big-ticket headliner.

Janet Jackson

Some will say she’s only a pop artist, which in a way she is, but she is also a great R&B star. Besides that, she has a story — marshaling the talent to break out of the rut of her early albums (and, more importantly, away from her benighted family) and finding the collaborators she needed in Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. Besides the statement of independence that was Control, she scaled things up for Rhythm Nation 1814, which rocks substantively and confidently to this day. She ultimately made a few years of the era her own, against some significant competition, including Prince, Springsteen, Madonna, and — who am I forgetting? — her brother.

Kraftwerk

The industrial Germanic sound is much favored in some critical conclaves. I think it’s great — and an early, arguably the Ur-influence on the electronic music that would dominate the ’80s and ’90s.

Todd Rundgren

Rundgren is a consummate pop craftsman and yet still a rock artiste. He’s cool enough to have one of his earliest songs, “Open My Eyes,” from his first band Nazz, be included in Lenny Kaye’s history of garage rock, Nuggets. In the 1970s, he was a quirky auteur, writing, producing, and performing pop hits that never quite made it to the top ten but stay with us to this day — “Hello It’s Me,” “I Saw the Light,” “We Gotta Get You a Woman,” “Can We Still Be Friends” — even while experimenting musically in all sorts of ways, from space-rock excursions with Utopia to filling one side of an album with perfect note-for-note covers of rock classics like “If Six Was Nine” and “Good Vibrations.” But: He dressed glam — he made an appearance on The Midnight Special done up like a gay butterfly — and the hall gets uncomfortable with boys who dress up like girls, and Rundgren has remained on the outside while all sort of Spinal Tap-y manly men in spandex have been ushered in — not to mention much less talented acts from the same era, like Bill Withers, Cat Stevens, even Laura Nyro. And as I wrote in my ranking of the hall acts earlier this year, he’s also produced more than a handful of signal rock albums, including New York Dolls, We’re an American Band, Bat Out of Hell, Wave, Skylarking, and Forever Now .

Rufus featuring Chaka Khan

Classy funk-pop outfit from the 1970s. Khan is an awesome presence and had a solo latter-day hit, but I don’t think her or the band’s work warrants inclusion.

The Cure

The omission of Joy Division and New Order looms over the hall; I don’t know whether it’s the shortage of women in the nominating and voting process or just the in-clubby nature of the nominating committee, but the lack of respect for dance music is inexplicable. “Love Will Tear Us Apart” is one of the greatest rock singles of all time, and New Order’s ’80s works, timelessly orchestrated and produced, were formidable underground dance music presences in the 1980s. They kept at it and the world came to them and they ended up global superstars. The band’s lyrics sometimes come across as dorky, I take the point; but you also have to agree that at least three of their actual albums — Power, Corruption and Lies, Low-Life, and Brotherhood — are substantive works peppered with good songs.

Anyway, I go into such detail to note that the one good argument against the Cure is that as far as electronic acts of the era goes, they are less important than JD/NO. In their favor: They were around British punk when it was created, and quickly emerged as among the first post-punk bands, boasting brainy compositions (an early song was based on Camus’s The Stranger, and titled, uncompromisingly, “Killing an Arab”) and killer hooks (like the ones in “Boys Don’t Cry”). Their albums got better and better (not the typical rock dynamic) and scaled up to big sales, and the band eventually played a few stadiums. And at a time when a lot of traditional rock bands were still putting on old-school shows, Cure concerts were sonic and visual extravaganzas.

John Prine

Prine is a postmodern folkie with a minor critical corner. I think he veers into dorkiness and an unstable absurdism, but you can’t gainsay the uncompromising singularity of his songs. That said, there’s not that many great ones. Seems odd that there are people pushing him when songwriters like Warren Zevon, Gram Parsons, and even Dolly Parton and Willie Nelson are not in yet.

Devo

The cover of “Satisfaction” was as post-punk as it got, and there were one or two other serious songs, but it was hard to take them seriously. “Whip It” was a big novelty single and then the novelty wore off. Leader Mark Mothersbaugh has gone on to do notable film soundtrack work.

MC5

Like the Stooges, MC5 are much beloved of punk lifers, and certainly a candidate as an early punk progenitor. The band was the ferocious embodiment of the most revolutionary and romanticized edges of the antiwar movement in the late 1960s. “Kick Out the Jams” is quite a song. I think they are something of a footnote at this point but, as I said, much beloved of punk lifers.

The Zombies

A semi-distinctive British invasion outfit, delivering an early semi-psychedelic hit “She’s Not There” (which predated the Yardbirds’ semi-simlair “For Your Love”), and later one called “Time of the Season.” Fans like the overlooked second album Odessey and Oracle, complete with misspelled word “odyssey,” but truth be told this is a highly twee work that’s hard to listen to, outside of a decent song or two by Rod Argent, who went on to some moderate solo success. And that’s the band’s career! Compare that to the Hollies, who recorded 15 or 20 albums and had hits for more than a decade. This is a minor band.

Rage Against the Machine

They rock very hard and who doesn’t like Tom Morello’s guitar playing? I like Marxist rock as much as the next guy, but I want songs too.

Stevie Nicks

Fleetwood Mac was inducted way back in 1998, so Nicks is already in the hall, which she deserves to be. Her solo career includes one-and-a-half decent hits (“Edge of Seventeen” [the one about the “white wing dove”] and “Stand Back”) and a couple of duets, which are fine but full of ’80s production gassiness. You can even throw in the pre-Fleetwod Mac Buckingham Nicks album, which I still have on LP (it was never released on DVD), to which she contributes a few markedly awesome songs, like “Long Distance Winner”; but there’s nothing remotely in Nicks’s solo career that warrants induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a solo artist. And if you think she deserves to be in because the hall hasn’t inducted enough women, let’s start with the B-52’s and the Go-Gos and move on to the Carpenters, Carole King (in as a songwriter, not a performer), Lucinda Williams, Parton, and PJ Harvey. And that’s not to mention Diana Ross, whose (un-inducted) solo career post-Supremes is far more impressive than Nicks’s post–Fleetwood Mac, and that goes double for Tina Turner’s post–Ike and Tina.

LL Cool J

LL has always had a coterie who claim he’s some sort of talent, but he’s really just a hack entertainer. There’s nothing wrong with that, but hacks don’t belong in the rock hall of fame. It didn’t have to be this way: Midway into his early career he teamed up with Marly Marl and made one terrific song, “Mama Said Knock You Out,” on a record, Walking Like a Panther, that showed promise of substance. But that was just for a moment, and after that he drifted back into pop–slash–hip-hop novelty-tinged numbers, with nothing in his recorded oeuvre I can think of offhand that bears listening to today. And even by a hack’s standards, his smarmy hostings of the Grammys are pretty extreme. LL seems to have a PR machine that works overtime — how else to explain his being the recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors two years ago? Were there really people sitting around the Honors’ offices saying, “Yeah we gotta get the host of Lip Sync Battle in!” Forgive me for quoting my own tweet: “I would bet you my prized oversized [Public Enemy] Fear of a Black Planet poster that LL has a team of people holding not one but a series of meetings to decide which stupid hat he wears to the Grammys.”

Def Leppard

Def Leppard were an overproduced, oddly anonymous lite-metal aggregation that had a couple of massive-selling albums in the mid-1980s. I don’t have a problem with dumb rock bands being in the hall — where’s Grand Funk Railroad, for example? — but if these guys had suddenly disappeared the only people who would have noticed besides their immediate families would have been Mercury Records’ accountants.

I spoke to hall founder Jann Wenner and current CEO Joel Peresman earlier this year. They both flatly denied any messing around with voting procedures. We have to take them at their word. But still: When I look over the current nominating-committee membership — the Rolling Stone critics; industry vets like Seymour Stein and Bill Flanagan; artists like Robbie Robertson, Questlove and Tom Morello; a few people I know slightly or have met over the years — I think, who among these people would advocate for an unheralded, critically ignored band like Def Leppard? There are about 30 members of the nominating committee right now, and, if as I’ve been told, each member gets to advocate for two acts, that’s 60 total in the mix for each year’s nominations. Are Little Steven, or Paul Shaffer, or the Patti Smith Group’s Lenny Kaye really making the case for these lunkheads, or even just nodding along in agreement as someone else makes the case? (“They need to be an advocate,” Peresman told me of the nominators. “They need to tell a story to sell to the others in the room.”) Now, it’s possible that the nomination group’s charter has explicitly shifted over the years, that the impetus isn’t just recognizing artistic excellence as the group has always claimed but also specifically “including popular acts that will spur attendance at the Rock Hall Museum in Cleveland.” That’s fine, but the organization should acknowledge that publicly if that’s the new standard. Based on the recent years, one lumpen crowd-pleaser with a fan base to fill an arena (Kiss, Journey, Bon Jovi, etc., etc.) generally gets in. 2019 could be Def Leppard’s year.

If you didn't mistakenly think the title of St. Vincent's 2017 album, MASSEDUCTION, was "Mass Education" at some point during the rollout campaign then you are a much better reader than me. To cushion my ego, St. Vincent has released a reimagining of the album titled MassEducation. This new version of the album … More »

Kanye West and T.I. have been working together for many, many years; West produced a track on T.I.'s classic 2003 album Trap Muzik. And they've kept working together until very recently. On the strange, meta, generally bad song "Ye Vs. The People," which West released less than six months ago, T.I. takes West … More »

Mandy Moore, national treasure, was once married to Ryan Adams, national pot-stirrer, and in a recent interview with Glamour, she spoke candidly — but with no ill will! — about their divorce. “I don’t feel guilty for it. I don’t fault myself for it. When people said, ‘I’m sorry,’ I was like, ‘No. Sorry would have been had I stayed in a very unhealthy situation.’ I didn’t,” she said. “I found my way out. And when I did, things opened back up again.” Moore is now engaged to a different rock dude and is TV married to perfect male specimen, Jack Pearson, so you could say her life is peachy. Meanwhile, Adams is bitter. Catching wind of a pull quote from that interview, via Perez Hilton, in which Moore also said their marriage was “not the smartest decision. I didn’t choose the right person,” he has responded on Twitter how only your douchebag liberal-arts-major ex would.

She didn't like the Melvins or BladeRunner. Doomed from the start... If only I could remember the start lol

Ryan Adams (@TheRyanAdams) October 10, 2018

Update, October 12: Adams has apologized for his tweet, saying he was “trying to be funny” but that it “isn’t classy or ok [to] lessen what was.” Adams followed up his original tweet with a since-deleted post adding that he was too high to remember marrying Mandy Moore. “When someone told me we got married I thought they were joking. Then I realized how many painkillers I was taking,” Adams reportedly wrote. “Honestly there weren’t enough to numb the shock. Gollygooops.” Adams later tweeted a series of troubling messages on World Mental Health day, later reassuring fans that he is speaking with a grief/crisis counselor. Perez Hilton also apologized to Adams for causing him any pain.

I apologize for my remarks. I was trying to be funny. But I have and will always choose to remember the amazing moments. It isn't classy or ok lessen what was. I am happy for everyone and doing my best. Thank you for taking the high road, Perez. Wishing you & your fam well.

Ryan Adams (@TheRyanAdams) October 12, 2018

After Taylor Swift posted a rare politically charged Instagram post on Sunday, in which she urged her fans to vote in this year’s upcoming midterm elections, Vote.org has reportedly seen an unprecedented spike in new voter registrations.

“We are up to 65,000 registrations in a single 24-hour period since T. Swift’s post,” Kamari Guthrie, director of communications for Vote.org, told BuzzFeed News. That’s more than the amount of registrations from the entire month of August, which was 56,669, and more than a third of the 190,178 that registered throughout September.

In the post, Swift expressed support for two Democratic candidates running in her home state of Tennessee, writing, “Running for Senate in the state of Tennessee is a woman named Marsha Blackburn. As much as I have in the past and would like to continue voting for women in office, I cannot support Marsha Blackburn. Her voting record in Congress appalls and terrifies me.” She then cited Blackburn’s history of voting against gay rights and the Violence Against Women Act, adding, “These are not MY Tennessee values.”

In Tennessee, there has been a particularly large spike in voter registrations, Guthrie said. Nearly half of this month’s registrations — 2,144 of 5,183 — came within the last 36 hours. That’s already over twice the amount of the state’s new voter registrations from September, which was 2,811, and August, which saw only 951.

According to Guthrie, the Vote.org site has also seen a jump in the number of visitors since Sunday’s post, at 155,940 unique users — second only to the number on National Voter Registration Day. The site’s average amount of daily users is 14,078. “Thank God for Taylor Swift,” Guthrie said.

Some others weren’t too keen on Swift’s newfound political stance. The president, who has historically been a fan of the singer, told reporters on Monday that he likes her music, but “about 25 percent less now.”

The haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate.

As of Saturday, Kanye West appears to no longer be on Instagram and Twitter. West’s accounts both vanished following a period of intense controversy surrounding his support of Donald Trump, and some tweets he wrote on how we should change or do away with the 13th amendment. West also found himself on the receiving end of some very high-profile social media criticism. Chris Evans quote-tweeted him, writing, “There’s nothing more maddening than debating someone who doesn’t know history, doesn’t read books, and frames their myopia as virtue.” Meanwhile over on Instagram, Lana Del Rey commented on a picture of West he’d posted in a ‘Make America Great Again’ hat, writing “Trump becoming our president was a loss for the country but your support of him is a loss for the culture.”

West has also had a long and tumultuous relationship with Twitter in general, having previously criticized the platform for making people with fewer followers feel bad. However, it’s also entirely possible this move was made in an effort to buckle down and finally finish that album he told us was coming out last weekend.

This isn’t Banksy’s first time at the rodeo and even if it was, well, that rodeo would be covered in priceless graffiti. He knows when he needs to kick things up a notch, though. Like on Friday night, when Sotheby’s auctioned off the anonymous street artist’s famous 2006 work “Girl with a Balloon” for the equivalent of over $1.2 million. After the auction closed, an alarm reportedly sounded from the piece and the canvas slowly started to slide down … into a shredder mounted in the painting’s frame, ripping it into little strips, a truly wonderful Banksy moment you can see for yourself in the photos below.

“It appears we just got Banksy-ed,” Alex Branczik, Sotheby’s European director of contemporary art told the Art Newspaper. “He is arguably the greatest British street artist, and tonight we saw a little piece of Banksy genius.” Branczik also said he was “not in on the ruse,” which really takes it to that next level.

According to the Financial Times, the vendor selling the piece acquired “Girl with a Balloon” directly from the artist himself. Said Sotheby’s in a statement, “We have talked with the successful purchaser who was surprise by the story. We are in discussion about next steps.” Several outlets have postulated that the stunt required Banksy (or an agent there of) to be in the room to remotely activate the shredder. Reports the Art Newspaper, “a man dressed in black sporting sunglasses and a hat was seen scuffling with security guards near the entrance to Sotheby’s shortly after the incident.”

Kanye West is performing on Saturday Night Live this weekend, maybe as a last-minute replacement for Ariana Grande. He also has plans to release a new album, Yandhi, to coincide with it. TMZ is now reporting that he'll bring some special guests along with him for the night, including Lil Pump, … More »

Apple revealed the new generation of iPhones today (the iPhone XS, XS Max, and XR) and it's with a heavy heart that I share this news: No more free dongle. The Verge reports that when you purchase your extremely large and expensive new phone you will no longer be given a Lightning-to-3.5mm adapter … More »

Poor Icona Pop. The shouty Swedish singing duo don't have much to hang their hat on, historically speaking. In the moment, I thought their 2013 debut album was pretty good, but time has mostly forgotten them. The one thing they could definitely claim is SEO dominance for the phrase "I Love It" thanks to the … More »

The Washington Post’s Ann Hornaday proposes a list of movies made in the 2000s that should be added to the canon of the best films ever made. Many of my favorites are on there — The Royal Tenenbaums, The Fog of War, Spirited Away, There Will Be Blood, Children of Men.

Alfonso Cuarón’s adaptation of the P.D. James novel evinced the perfect balance of technical prowess, propulsive storytelling, complex character development and timeliness when it was released in 2006. But its depiction of a dystopian near-future — what we ruefully now call the present — has proved to be not just visionary but prophetic. Its predictive value aside, it stands as a flawless movie — a masterwork of cinematic values at their purest, with each frame delivering emotion and information in equally compelling measure.

Dunkirk, from just last year, is a bold inclusion…I love that movie but it’ll be interesting to see how it holds up. You can compare this list with two older lists: Dissolve’s and BBC Culture’s.

Update: The NY Times did a similar list last year, with There Will Be Blood and Spirited Away taking the #1 and #2 spots. (thx, paul)

Tags: Ann Hornaday   best of   lists   movies

After the 2016 election, artist and writer Paul Chan wrote the following poem that he called “New No’s”.

No to racists
No to fascists
No to taxes funding racists and fascists

No mercy for rapists
No pity for bigots
No forgiveness for nativists
No to all those

No hope without rage
No rage without teeth
No separate peace
No easy feat

No to bounds by genders
No to clickbait as culture
No to news as truths
No to art as untruths

No anti-Semitic anything
No Islamophobic anything
No progress without others
No meaning without meaning

No means no
No means no
No means no
No means no

I ran across this several times at The Whitney; it’s part of their great exhibition An Incomplete History of Protest. The exhibition is closing next week and the poem is difficult to find online (Chan’s own publishing company, which was selling posters of the poem, seems to be defunct at the moment), so I wanted to preserve a copy here.

Update: The notable prior art for this piece includes Yvonne Rainer’s No Manifesto, Ad Reinhardt’s No War, and The No Manifesto for Poetry Readings and LISTSERVs and Magazine and ‘Open Versatile Spaces Where Cultural Production Flourishes’. (via @joeld)

Tags: Paul Chan   poetry

A Swiss company has designed a system for storing energy in concrete blocks. The blocks are lifted by a crane when surplus energy is available (say, when the Sun is shining or the wind blowing) and then, when energy is needed later, allowed to fall, turning turbines to generate electricity.

The innovation in Energy Vault’s plant is not the hardware. Cranes and motors have been around for decades, and companies like ABB and Siemens have optimized them for maximum efficiency. The round-trip efficiency of the system, which is the amount of energy recovered for every unit of energy used to lift the blocks, is about 85% — comparable to lithium-ion batteries which offer up to 90%.

Pedretti’s main work as the chief technology officer has been figuring out how to design software to automate contextually relevant operations, like hooking and unhooking concrete blocks, and to counteract pendulum-like movements during the lifting and lowering of those blocks.

The storage of energy in this way isn’t new…the ARES project uses hills and heavy trains to accomplish the same thing.

It’s a wonderfully simple idea, a 19th century solution for a 21st century problem, with some help from the abundant natural resource that is gravity. When the local utility’s got surplus electricity, it powers up the electric motors that drag 9,600 tons of rock- and concrete-filled railcars up a 2,000-foot hill. When it’s got a deficit, 9,600 tons of railcar rumble down, and those motors generate electricity via regenerative braking — the same way your Prius does. Effectively, all the energy used to move the train up the hill is stored, and recouped when it comes back down.

There’s something really interesting about big kinetic machines operating as though they were computers, autonomous black boxes where data flows in and out that can operate anywhere with a bit of flat ground.

Tags: energy   science   video

Boots Riley has just gone through one of the most fascinating, heartening reinventions that we've seen in American public life in recent years. For decades, Riley was a Bay Area community organizer and the central rapper in the Coup, the long-running, criminally underappreciated, politically driven Oakland rap group. But now, Riley is a major auteur. More »

Tonight is the night we've all been waiting for, or, the night Kanye West and Jimmy Kimmel have been waiting for. After their faux-feud in 2013, the two developed a weird sort of bond. Kimmel spoke fondly of their tiff in his recent interview with GQ. Kanye, … More »

[Label: Warp | Cat#: none]

1. T69 Collapse (5:23)

In a recent study called The impact of the ‘open’ workspace on human collaboration, a pair of researchers tracked the digital and real life interactions of workers at a company that shifted to an open office plan before and after the shift. Here were the two key findings of the study:

Contrary to what’s predicted by the sociological literature, the 52 participants studied spent 72% less time interacting face-to-face after the shift to an open office layout. To make these numbers concrete: In the 15 days before the office redesign, participants accumulated an average of around 5.8 hours of face-to-face interaction per person per day. After the switch to the open layout, the same participants dropped to around 1.7 hours of face-to-face interaction per day.

At the same time, the shift to an open office significantly increased digital communication. After the redesign, participants sent 56% more emails (and were cc’d 41% more times), and the number of IM messages sent increased by 67%.

That’s a pretty dramatic shift…and productivity suffered. The authors theorized that the lack of physical boundaries in the open office made constructing social barriers necessary.

Like social insects which swarm within functionally-determined zones ‘partitioned’ by spatial boundaries (e.g. hives, nests or schools), human beings — despite their greater cognitive abilities — may also require boundaries to constrain their interactions, thereby reducing the potential for overload, distraction, bias, myopia and other symptoms of bounded rationality.

This jibes with my experience working in open offices. For almost 10 years, I worked in an open office plan at Buzzfeed. In the beginning, when there were just a few of us, the level of IRL interaction was high. But as the number of people in the office increased past a certain point, people spent more and more time at their desks, headphones on, ignoring everything but their screens. And yet companies keep doubling down on this…

Tags: working

Pusha-T released his latest album, Daytona, back in May. It includes seven tracks, one of which is the moody "Santeria," which features G.O.O.D. music's exciting rising star 070 Shake. More »

Ariana Grande debuted a new song off of her forthcoming album Sweetener last night. The track is called "God Is A Woman," and it is her fiancé Pete Davidson's favorite song on the LP in case you were wondering! … More »

Ariana Grande is getting ready to release her new album Sweetener in August. So far we've heard the dance-pop number "The Light Is Coming" and the now-inescapable “No Tears Left To Cry.” Today, Grande gives us "God Is A Woman." She announced its "surprise" release yesterday at midnight, which … More »

I remember the rush. The first time I heard "Intergalactic," the electro-fizz jam that was the first single from the Beastie Boys' 1998 album Hello Nasty, I was in my mom's minivan. The song was on the radio. (Alt-rock radio, of course; rap radio wouldn't touch the Beasties by then.) Mike D rapped the words … More »

Kendrick Lamar has reached the point in his career where he only does a few interviews a year, and where every interview is an event. Case in point: Kendrick is on the cover of the new issue of Vanity Fair. The cover story, from writer Lisa Robinson, includes secondary quotes from people like … More »

Vampire Weekend recently embarked on a summer tour with a new lineup. They played their first show in four years in Ojai, California at the end of May, where they teased a new song and Beatles cover. They transitioned from “Cape Cod Kwassa … More »

A new Drake song seeps into our collective subconscious. You hear it everywhere — at parties, coming out of car windows — usually played alongside a queue of classic Drake tracks. His music seems to integrate itself into whatever moment surrounds its release. The Drake Effect is impossible to ignore. More »