#brendon urie you will rue the day

[st4rrmii]

Ben still listens to oldschool panic! But always gets pissed after because of how badly it went to shit (me too)

[thedancingsoldier]

My Top Song for The Second Half of 2019

⚠️Warning Long Post⚠️

Sam Smith: How Do You Sleep?= Lies, LIES. Lying out your teeth. The question is how do you sleep when you lie to me? This song is addictive to me. Sam Smith speaks in this song wondering how does this person sleep with all the lies that he’s been told? Sam Smith regrets staying in the relationship with this person as long as he did because he also couldn’t stay away from this person. But now he realizes he has to leave and he hopes that the love that he left, keeps this person up at night. Because he’s done. It doesn’t help that the beat is infectious and Sam Smiths voice just floats. I literally just melt into this song, and I lose myself.

Charlie Puth: I Warned Myself= This song sounds like a hook-up that went terribly wrong. In this song Charlie Puth explains how he met this person who was in a relationship with somebody else oversees. Charlie actually liked this person, so with him being skeptical, he went along with the shenanigans anyway. Later this person threatened to kill him, if he told anybody about what they did together. With that being said, Charlie regrets going about the whole thing, and blames himself and this person for messing with his heart.

Keiynan Lonsdale: Rainbow Dragon= This song is a mix of everything, but it is ultimately a message of excelling for yourself, excelling for the world, getting back up from when you fell, and changing this world for the better. Keiynan delivers some shade to the politicians as well, which is always great. One line stuck out to me, “if I can slay, you can slay too b***h.” It’s simple but powerful in its own way.

Rat City: Deliriously Good= This song is a basic admiration for a girl that Rat City finds “deliriously good”. This song makes me smile every time I listen to it, or hear it in the distance even when the volume is too low for anyone else to hear it. The beat is so disco, so retro with that modern electronic dance flavor attached to it. I can’t get enough of this song. It’s doesn’t help that Rat City made a trilogy of videos not to match the lyrics of the songs but as a story with the songs just being background music. It’s good background music though. And good marketing and good production. So kudos to Rat City for that.

Jax Jones, Martin Solveig, Madison Beer & Europa: All Day All Night - Jax Jones & Martin Solveig Presents Europa= This song speaks about another toxic relationship. The singer Madison Beer speaks of getting no sleep because of this person she can’t stop thinking about, and that she fell in love with and that she’s tired of it. This person just left her out of the blue, and never came back. Jax Jones, Martin Solveig and Europa collaborated on this song, and they did it beautifully. It’s perfectly electronic dance music, with some tropical house influence. It’s perfect.

Camila Cabello: Shameless= This song can be interpreted in so many different ways. One way I interpreted this song was, it’s one person expressing their love for the other person. Going all out with it. The other side thanks to @camrencabregui on the comment section of genius.com. They see it as a lgbt relationship. Being all out with their love and shouting it from the rooftops, not caring what anyone thinks. Either way it’s needing someone more than you want them. It’s loving someone shamelessly and with pure love in your heart.

Bebe Rexha: You Can’t Stop The Girl (From Disney’s “Maleficent: Mistress of Evil”)= Side note, I’m so glad Bebe Rexha released this song. It reminds me of her earlier songs that she came out with. And the message is as powerful as ever. It’s so Disney and that’s what makes it great and so influential. It’s breaking that glass ceiling, that still not totally broken. It’s accomplishing your dreams, and not letting anyone stop you.

Charlie Puth: Cheating On You= With this song, Charlie Puth states, on the album cover for this single, “This song is not about a person, it’s about a feeling I’ve never had.” I love that he puts that out there. It’s a song anyone relate to. It’s about both parties of a relationship leaving each other. But, one person is still attached to the other. Even, when this person meets a different person, it doesn’t feel right. This person hasn’t moved on enough to feel love for another person, other than the person they fell in love with in the first place. This song is a masterpiece.

Zedd: Good Thing (with Kehlani)= This song is an introverts theme song. Honestly it is. It basically states that the alone time this person has is already serene and perfect. To broaden this persons horizons the other view that someone else shows them, has to be better than this persons world. And according to this person, everything, and everybody else has yet to excel against that.

Yuna: Forevermore= The Malaysian artist that broadened my horizons on music. Somehow, they managed to fuse Malaysian influences with modern influences and subtle funk influences as well. It’s truly spectacular. The song talks about reaching for the stars. Finding that strength and sticking with it no matter how scared you are or how scary it gets.

Labrinth & Zendaya: All For Us - from the HBO Original Series “Euphoria”= This song is based off of the show on HBO called Euphoria starring Zendaya and Storm Reid. It’s a also a remix from the original that’s on Labrinth’s 2019 album “Imagination & The Misfit Kid”. In the show (From Genius.com), the main character of the show is Rue (Zendaya), a 17-year-old recovering drug addict struggling to find her place in the world. While her father was in the hospital, she began taking his medication. To cope with his death, she started to abuse drugs and ultimately became an addict, realizing she can’t find happiness or love without the drugs. The song takes cues from a bunch of sources, from the subtle trap beat in the background, to the choir that slowly builds and barges in at the “climax” of the song. It’s a really great song.

Emeli Sandé: Honest= This song attacked me in a good way. And it kept attacking me. And it will probably attack you too. To be honest. It simply states, “stop acting as if you can’t be honest to yourself”. Live in the present. Dont live in the past so much that you forget what is happening now in the present. Emeli Sandé did what? THAT. Honestly explaining this song does not do it justice. You’ll have to listen to this song to get it. And once you’ve done that, listen to it again, and again.

Selena Gomez: Look At Her Now= Rising from the ashes. Being in a relationship that was bad for you, and coming out of it learning about yourself more and growing from that negative experience. That is what this song is talking about. Self-preservation & resilience. On top of a beat that’s infectious. And a voice that’s soothing to the ears.

James Arthur: Quite Miss Home= You know how some songs make you want to cry? This song did that. It’s about being away from those you love. Missing them while your away. It’s really self-explanatory. But it’s a beautiful song. My side of the story is too long to tell, but this song’s chorus basically covers that.

Panic! At The Disco: Into The Unknown - from “Frozen 2”= To get this song you will have to watch or go see Disney’s Frozen 2. But I will tell you this song is the ultimate challenge song if you want to try to hit any notes that seem impossible to hit. Brendon Urie goes higher than I’ve ever heard him. I’m pretty sure his fans have heard him hit these notes, but not me. It’s incredible.

Billie Eilish: everything i wanted= This one is about a dream that Billie had. According to Billie, in the dream she committed suicide and no one cared and everyone came out and said that they didn’t like her anyway. I love that this song about a dream she had. It’s different than anything I’ve heard this year. And the melody is so perfectly blended together with the vocals. It’s captivating, honestly. Billie also molds together her relationship with her brother and how close they are in this song. And how they have each others backs no matter what happens. Billie and her brother wrote this song. Another reason why i love this song.

Taylor Swift: Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince= After finally listening to Taylor Swift’s newest album, I found a couple of gems that I come back to jam to or meditate to. Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince is one of them that caught my attention. According to Taylor, “this song is about our disillusionment with our crazy world of politics and inequality, set in a metaphorical high school.” On the surface it’s about, finding someone who sees who you really are through all the noise that everyone else is spouting about you. I felt it was a very compelling and complex story to write. That’s why I love this song. I love a song that takes me a while to decipher. It makes me think. I love that!

Taylor Swift: Daylight= Chills. I get true chills when I listen to this song. Another song that I get lost in, and another song that caught my attention from Taylor’s album, because of how the melody and the lyrics and the meaning sucks me in. It’s the last song on her album “Lover”. And she did it so right. With this song it’s like she sees, like the title implies, daylight. Reading the lyrics of the song, it’s Taylor talking about herself, but also it can be a message to everyone else. Forgive yourself. Forgive yourself for your past mistakes, for past situations that may not have ended in the way you wanted or envisioned them to end. Look at the bright side, and see that you can grow from that, and from that, rebuild a better you.

Labrinth: Something’s Got To Give= Normally, when I hear a remix of a song. I tend to go with the remix rather than the original. But this song, I went with both. Because the beat got me, the message got me, and Labrinths masterful mixing and production got me as well. I love a song that, beat-wise, can take me on a rollercoaster. I love a song even better when there’s a great message tied to it. Labrinths talks of when going on faith and the going gets tough, you’ve got to give a little more. Going for your dreams and never giving up no matter how hard it gets. It’s bass heavy, it’s message heavy. It’s everything I hoped for in a song. And it’s something I think almost everyone will love as well.

[mastcomm]

‘Miss Americana’ Review: Taylor Swift, Scathingly Alone

“Miss Americana” is 85 minutes of translucence with Taylor Swift. There’s more in it — and more to it — than you usually get with these pop superstar portraits. I, at least, don’t recall loneliness being such a predominant condition for Swift’s peers as it is, here, for her. Not long after the movie doles out a deluxe rise-to-the-top montage, we hear Swift ask no one in particular, “Shouldn’t I have someone to call right now?” This from a woman who’s famous — notorious, actually — for her squad of besties. Otherwise, it’s lonely up there. Even the man she says she’s seeing is a figment in this movie, cropped from images, a hand-holding blur, a ghost.

On Grammy nomination day in the winter of 2018, a camera watches from a low angle as Swift sits in sweats alone on a sofa and hears from her publicist that her perturbed sixth album, “Reputation,” has been omitted from three of the big categories. She’s stoic. She’s almost palpably hurt. But Swift’s songwriting treats hurt as an elastic instrument, and she resolves in that moment of snubbing, “I just need to make a better record.” And the movie watches as she writes and records “Lover,” another album eventually rejected by the string-pullers at the Grammys.

Along the way, Swift does a lot of ruminating and recounting, a lot of arguing and apologizing on her own behalf. She’s rueful about sitting out the 2016 presidential election and failing to mobilize her millions of fans and followers against Donald Trump’s candidacy. So “Miss Americana” is also about an apolitical star waking up to herself as a woman and a citizen. She wants to spend her “good girl” credit to decry the scorched-earth-conservative Senate campaign that Marsha Blackburn was running in Tennessee, Swift’s adopted home. Her management team deems this unwise. The team, at that symbolic point, is two slouchy, old white men who counter their client’s raging passion with financial and prehistoric umbrage. Bob Hope and Bing wouldn’t let their politics dent ticket sales 50 percent. It’s part of strong stretch of the movie that argues that Swift’s own experience with a handsy (and consequently litigious) radio personality helped push her off the fence — a passage that culminates with the most stressful sending of an Instagram post you’re likely to see from a star.

Swift’s success rate as an activist is nominal; Blackburn is currently enduring impeachment arguments with 99 other senators. But what’s bracing about this film, which Lana Wilson directed, is the way it weds Swift’s loneliness and her arrival at empowerment. That’s at least how I’m receiving her support last summer of pro-gay legislation that culminated in the video for her hit “You Need to Calm Down.” It teemed with famous queer people, and watching its partial making in this movie made me understand that she was campaigning not just for gay rights, but possibly for new friends.

Swift is revealed as being surrounded by men of different generations. Some co-create her music. Some oversee her career. Only with the producer Jack Antonoff do we catch a spark of collaborative lightning. The few meaningful connections with women involve her mother and a visiting childhood friend (Abigail, the wronged protagonist of the Swift classic “Fifteen”) — and Wilson.

Her movie proceeds in a kind of vérité approach. It opens with an adult Swift awash in the declarations of her girlhood diaries and rarely departs from seeing the world as Swift does, and I left it with a new sympathy for a woman who polarizes people. The urge that notoriously overcame Kanye West, in 2009, to hijack her acceptance speech at the Video Music Awards stands in for a national vexation. And all she did that night was win. It’s the winning, of course, that vexes. But the movie conjures up that moment and her response to the press immediately after, and you feel like you’re watching a foundational trauma. Swift was 19.

At the other extreme is a different trauma, normal only for the famous: Folks who camp outside of Swift’s Manhattan apartment building and shriek as she exits; who, upon seeing her backstage, tearfully come apart; who so adore her that they need her as an unwitting accessory to their surprise marriage proposal. We’re supposed to call these people fans. But the ones who turn up here tend toward the most disturbing adulation. She tells the singer Brendon Urie that a man broke into her apartment and slept in her bed.

So a movie about Swift — a movie worth watching, anyway — that’s seeking to provide a little intimacy should proceed aware that not everybody wants to be close. Swift has incorporated rejection and disdain into her way of being. “Miss Americana” suggests a tenuous connection between Swift’s wading into her politics and the Dixie Chicks’ being drowned because of theirs, although Wilson’s movie doesn’t have the force or clarifying intent (or material) of “Shut Up and Sing,” Barbara Koppel’s very good documentary about what befell the Dixies.

Yet, the most absorbing parts of “Miss Americana” involve Swift’s reckoning with the disillusionment of dislike — not simply other people’s but her own. When she’s watching footage of herself on a video set and says “I have a really slappable face,” it’s a throwaway self-deprecation. But it’s also a shocking symptom of the toll of her strange public life.

Her departure that day from her fan-barnacled building leads her to ruminate, minutes later, about the toll that level of attention has taken on her psyche. Swift confesses that, for some while, she couldn’t stand to see pictures of herself because she’d scrutinize rather than simply look; the scrutiny spurred an eating disorder. Here’s Swift personalizing the diseased nature of fame, a condition she’s considered with envy and rue in her songwriting, namely on “The Lucky One” from “Red,” a masterpiece album from 2012 that navigates stadium, dance floor and diary. (Swift philosophizes, at some late point, that stars are stuck at the age they became famous.)

A handful of scenes capture Swift rigorously refining songs for “Lover.” Occasionally, she senses she’s hit the jackpot, even when the result is a piece of pyrite like the album’s first single, “Me!,” a duet with Urie. Her elation over that song left me sad to have missed the moment she perfected gems like “You Belong With Me,” “22,” “Blank Space” and “Delicate.” We don’t see her working on the “Lover” track that gives the movie its title, “Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince,” a midtempo number about romantic and national disillusionment.

Now, the title stands alongside her, like a guileless declaration. But it’s one capacious enough to appreciate the meaning of her music’s sometimes gnarled migration from straight country to the structural and sonic priorities of R&B to “Lover,” which is, mostly, a stable, serious, pleasurable synthesis of all of these sounds, proof that the synthesis contains traces of American music histories. Basically, Americana.

This documentary isn’t as coherent as “Truth or Dare,” the Olympic standard for pop-star portraiture. But Madonna had found a coherent persona by the time of that movie. Swift is still eking hers out. Along with her music, she’s evolving.

That’s a part of the documentary’s assertion — her creative and personal maturity come with a cost, obviously. But its most exhilarating disclosure is that Swift finds herself determined to pay it. Some of the new music means to amplify her politics — “The Man” achieves that with hooky, witty, pleasingly obvious pique. You can see a woman who, despite having once recorded an album called “Speak Now,” never felt it was her place to say anything. Wilson has captured Swift at a convincing turning point, ready, perhaps, to say a lot more.

Taylor Swift: Miss Americana

Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes.

from WordPress https://mastcomm.com/miss-americana-review-taylor-swift-scathingly-alone/

[mastcomm]

‘Miss Americana’ Review: Taylor Swift, Scathingly Alone

“Miss Americana” is 85 minutes of translucence with Taylor Swift. There’s more in it — and more to it — than you usually get with these pop superstar portraits. I, at least, don’t recall loneliness being such a predominant condition for Swift’s peers as it is, here, for her. Not long after the movie doles out a deluxe rise-to-the-top montage, we hear Swift ask no one in particular, “Shouldn’t I have someone to call right now?” This from a woman who’s famous — notorious, actually — for her squad of besties. Otherwise, it’s lonely up there. Even the man she says she’s seeing is a figment in this movie, cropped from images, a hand-holding blur, a ghost.

On Grammy nomination day in the winter of 2018, a camera watches from a low angle as Swift sits in sweats alone on a sofa and hears from her publicist that her perturbed sixth album, “Reputation,” has been omitted from three of the big categories. She’s stoic. She’s almost palpably hurt. But Swift’s songwriting treats hurt as an elastic instrument, and she resolves in that moment of snubbing, “I just need to make a better record.” And the movie watches as she writes and records “Lover,” another album eventually rejected by the string-pullers at the Grammys.

Along the way, Swift does a lot of ruminating and recounting, a lot of arguing and apologizing on her own behalf. She’s rueful about sitting out the 2016 presidential election and failing to mobilize her millions of fans and followers against Donald Trump’s candidacy. So “Miss Americana” is also about an apolitical star waking up to herself as a woman and a citizen. She wants to spend her “good girl” credit to decry the scorched-earth-conservative Senate campaign that Marsha Blackburn was running in Tennessee, Swift’s adopted home. Her management team deems this unwise. The team, at that symbolic point, is two slouchy, old white men who counter their client’s raging passion with financial and prehistoric umbrage. Bob Hope and Bing wouldn’t let their politics dent ticket sales 50 percent. It’s part of strong stretch of the movie that argues that Swift’s own experience with a handsy (and consequently litigious) radio personality helped push her off the fence — a passage that culminates with the most stressful sending of an Instagram post you’re likely to see from a star.

Swift’s success rate as an activist is nominal; Blackburn is currently enduring impeachment arguments with 99 other senators. But what’s bracing about this film, which Lana Wilson directed, is the way it weds Swift’s loneliness and her arrival at empowerment. That’s at least how I’m receiving her support last summer of pro-gay legislation that culminated in the video for her hit “You Need to Calm Down.” It teemed with famous queer people, and watching its partial making in this movie made me understand that she was campaigning not just for gay rights, but possibly for new friends.

Swift is revealed as being surrounded by men of different generations. Some co-create her music. Some oversee her career. Only with the producer Jack Antonoff do we catch a spark of collaborative lightning. The few meaningful connections with women involve her mother and a visiting childhood friend (Abigail, the wronged protagonist of the Swift classic “Fifteen”) — and Wilson.

Her movie proceeds in a kind of vérité approach. It opens with an adult Swift awash in the declarations of her girlhood diaries and rarely departs from seeing the world as Swift does, and I left it with a new sympathy for a woman who polarizes people. The urge that notoriously overcame Kanye West, in 2009, to hijack her acceptance speech at the Video Music Awards stands in for a national vexation. And all she did that night was win. It’s the winning, of course, that vexes. But the movie conjures up that moment and her response to the press immediately after, and you feel like you’re watching a foundational trauma. Swift was 19.

At the other extreme is a different trauma, normal only for the famous: Folks who camp outside of Swift’s Manhattan apartment building and shriek as she exits; who, upon seeing her backstage, tearfully come apart; who so adore her that they need her as an unwitting accessory to their surprise marriage proposal. We’re supposed to call these people fans. But the ones who turn up here tend toward the most disturbing adulation. She tells the singer Brendon Urie that a man broke into her apartment and slept in her bed.

So a movie about Swift — a movie worth watching, anyway — that’s seeking to provide a little intimacy should proceed aware that not everybody wants to be close. Swift has incorporated rejection and disdain into her way of being. “Miss Americana” suggests a tenuous connection between Swift’s wading into her politics and the Dixie Chicks’ being drowned because of theirs, although Wilson’s movie doesn’t have the force or clarifying intent (or material) of “Shut Up and Sing,” Barbara Koppel’s very good documentary about what befell the Dixies.

Yet, the most absorbing parts of “Miss Americana” involve Swift’s reckoning with the disillusionment of dislike — not simply other people’s but her own. When she’s watching footage of herself on a video set and says “I have a really slappable face,” it’s a throwaway self-deprecation. But it’s also a shocking symptom of the toll of her strange public life.

Her departure that day from her fan-barnacled building leads her to ruminate, minutes later, about the toll that level of attention has taken on her psyche. Swift confesses that, for some while, she couldn’t stand to see pictures of herself because she’d scrutinize rather than simply look; the scrutiny spurred an eating disorder. Here’s Swift personalizing the diseased nature of fame, a condition she’s considered with envy and rue in her songwriting, namely on “The Lucky One” from “Red,” a masterpiece album from 2012 that navigates stadium, dance floor and diary. (Swift philosophizes, at some late point, that stars are stuck at the age they became famous.)

A handful of scenes capture Swift rigorously refining songs for “Lover.” Occasionally, she senses she’s hit the jackpot, even when the result is a piece of pyrite like the album’s first single, “Me!,” a duet with Urie. Her elation over that song left me sad to have missed the moment she perfected gems like “You Belong With Me,” “22,” “Blank Space” and “Delicate.” We don’t see her working on the “Lover” track that gives the movie its title, “Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince,” a midtempo number about romantic and national disillusionment.

Now, the title stands alongside her, like a guileless declaration. But it’s one capacious enough to appreciate the meaning of her music’s sometimes gnarled migration from straight country to the structural and sonic priorities of R&B to “Lover,” which is, mostly, a stable, serious, pleasurable synthesis of all of these sounds, proof that the synthesis contains traces of American music histories. Basically, Americana.

This documentary isn’t as coherent as “Truth or Dare,” the Olympic standard for pop-star portraiture. But Madonna had found a coherent persona by the time of that movie. Swift is still eking hers out. Along with her music, she’s evolving.

That’s a part of the documentary’s assertion — her creative and personal maturity come with a cost, obviously. But its most exhilarating disclosure is that Swift finds herself determined to pay it. Some of the new music means to amplify her politics — “The Man” achieves that with hooky, witty, pleasingly obvious pique. You can see a woman who, despite having once recorded an album called “Speak Now,” never felt it was her place to say anything. Wilson has captured Swift at a convincing turning point, ready, perhaps, to say a lot more.

Taylor Swift: Miss Americana

Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes.

from WordPress https://mastcomm.com/miss-americana-review-taylor-swift-scathingly-alone/