Beats: pop culture (music, TV, film), education, media representation, gender and body politics, Cuba
Shiv Roy’s pregnancy reveals the heart of ‘Succession’
Critics have long debated whether the HBO show “Succession,” created by Jesse Armstrong and concluding its run on Sunday, is fundamentally a drama or a comedy. In its earlier episodes, the comedic and satirical elements were what...
Brendan Fraser’s Best Actor Win for ‘The Whale’ Is Fatphobia at Its Worst
Going into this year’s Oscars, I had a bad feeling that the Academy voters would give Best Actor to Brendan Fraser. Fraser was nominated for The Whale, a movie that many critics have characterized as a deeply harmful portrayal of a fat person. When he did end up winning the award, the whole room stood up to congratulate him. As I watched at home, I looked around at the audience on-screen and saw a sea of thin people—who likely have no idea what it’s like to be fat—vigorously applauding a non-...
How Culture Club's Debut Album Envisioned A More Inclusive World
Forty years after its release, Culture Club's 'Kissing To Be Clever' is a study in optimism, Caribbean influence in pop and the power of image on MTV.
The "second British invasion" was well underway in the U.S. when Culture Club’s debut album, Kissing To Be Clever, was released in late 1982. In Britain, punk had given way to new wave, synth pop, and the androgynous-leaning New Romantic fashion movement, pioneered by David Bowie and Roxy Music. Musically, groups like the Police and the Clash w...
How to do away with copaganda: Three Emmy-nominated shows to watch with an abolitionist lens
These reviews are a part of pop justice, Scalawag's newsletter exploring the intersection of popular culture and justice—namely through abolition. Sign up here.
By Kaitlin Fontana
One of the abiding strengths of HBO's Barry—a dark comedy series about a hitman who, after tracking a mark to an acting class, decides he wants to be an actor himself—is that it has never taken policing all that seriously. From the jump, its cop characters have fallen somewhere on a spectrum of goofy dummies to hapl...
Cuba’s Music Industry Is Having a #MeToo Moment
On April 18, one of Cuba’s most prominent musicians, José Luis Cortés, died suddenly at the age of 70 after suffering a stroke. Known by his nickname, “El Tosco” (“the rough guy”), Cortés founded the dance band NG La Banda, one of the pioneers of the Cuban salsa style called timba, the most popular genre on the island from the late 1980s to the mid-aughts.
But Cortés was also known for his machismo, both in his music and life. In 2019, Dianelys Alfonso, known as “La Diosa” (“the goddess”)—a s...
What Does Amber Heard’s Defamation Verdict Mean for the Bi Community?
Many misleading tropes about bisexual women, such as that they’re confused, deceptive or sexually voracious, were on full display.
When psychologist Dawn Hughes took the stand during the defamation trial initiated by Johnny Depp against his ex-wife Amber Heard, she testified to the court that Heard’s bisexuality was a point of contention during the actors’ tumultuous marriage. Hughes gave examples: Heard had “faced scrutiny” in her interactions with women and, on one occasion, Depp allegedly ...
For The Record: How 'Wyclef Jean Presents The Carnival' Expanded The Boundaries Of Hip-Hop
Released in June 1997, 'Wyclef Jean Presents The Carnival' was both distinctly of its time and revolutionary in the way it employed Caribbean musical influences. GRAMMY.com revisits Jean's solo debut in For The Record.
Twenty-five years ago, on the heels of one of the most successful, critically beloved hip-hop albums of all time, the Fugees shocked the world by breaking up. The fallout from the romantic relationship between Lauryn Hill and Wyclef Jean was too much to bear, so the trio went t...
Composer Selene Saint-Aimé Celebrates Martinican Womanhood
The Haitian Creole term potomitan has many meanings for the Martinique-born bassist, singer, and composer Sélène Saint-Aimé. In Haiti, it refers to the central pillar in a vodou temple, around which ceremonies are performed; but it’s also a metaphor for women’s roles: “the mother, who holds together the family and society,” says Saint-Aimé, “but who’s not respected as she should be.” For her, the term also applies to the core group of musicians with whom she collaborated on her second album o...
I Refuse to ‘Punish’ My Son Anymore
The early weeks of the pandemic marked a low point for my relationship with my son, who was almost 8 years old then. His school was abruptly closed, first for three weeks, then for the rest of the year. I worked from home and my husband was an essential worker who had to continue going to his workplace, so the burden of continuing some semblance of education for my son fell entirely on me. My son’s teacher offered no remote instruction — only packets of busy work. Many days, my son refused to...
What’s behind Cuba’s recent historic protests?
On July 11, protests broke out simultaneously in various Cuban cities and towns, spurred on by the collapse of the healthcare system due to the pandemic and a severe economic crisis. The socialist government, headed since 2018 by Miguel Díaz-Canel—Raúl Castro’s handpicked successor—responded with police repression, the detention of hundreds of protesters, and by cutting off internet access across the island.
Since then, Cuban protesters have been given summary trials without legal representat...
Amaru Tribe, “Between Two Worlds / Entre Dos Mundos”
Amaru Tribe’s new album Between Two Worlds / Entre Dos Mundos is likely an allusion to the Melbourne-based trio’s hybrid identities: Oscar Jimenez and Katherine Gailer were born in Colombia and Cristian Saavedra hails from Chile. Both the name of the group—amaru is a highly revered, mythical two-headed serpent in Incan mythology—and its iconography reference indigenous culture, though the sounds are also thoroughly modern.
This 'Sex and the City' character is teaching us an important lesson about divorce
On last week's episode of "And Just Like That," the HBO Max reboot of "Sex and the City," Miranda Hobbes (played by Cynthia Nixon) blew up her marriage.
I could see it coming from a mile away, particularly after her steamy extramarital encounter a few episodes earlier with Che Diaz (Sara Ramirez) in Carrie Bradshaw's kitc...
How School Closures Made Me Question My Progressive Politics
June 26, 2020, was the day I went public with just how angry I was about my son’s school closing down for Covid, and my life hasn’t been the same since.
I had begun to sense a difference between my own feelings and those of my mom’s text group, which included nine of us whose kids had gone to preschool together since they were 2 years old; the kids were 8 at the time. These were the parents of my son’s closest friends. We even had a name for our group, the “mamigas”— as most of us were either...
The angst and chaos of motherhood: Pamela Adlon’s ‘Better Things’ has a moment in S.F.
The critically acclaimed FX series “Better Things” pays a visit to San Francisco in the sixth episode of its fifth and final season, but don’t expect to see much of the city.
The Los Angeles-based show, created by, directed by and starring Pamela Adlon and based on her life as a single mother of three daughters, follows working actor Sam Fox (Adlon) and her attempts to strike a balance between her career, raising three children — Max (Mikey Madison), Frankie (Hannah Alligood) and Duke (Olivia...
Some teachers are worried about the long-term effects of masking
Since schools reopened this fall, many parents have turned their attention to school mask mandates, frustrated by the continuing refrains of “kids are resilient.” In fact, plenty of kids and parents think indefinite masking is a big deal — whether because they make it harder for kids to breathe or to communicate with teachers. There’s been a general refusal by Democrats to acknowledge that prolonged masking has any downsides, despite the obvious barrier they present to int...