You can watch my fat ass twist, Beyoncé: Paula’s pop week at a glance

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Unfortunately I have to pick up exactly where I left off last time, I have to put our pop queens through the wringer again, even if someone told me recently that I criticize women too often. But the thing is: I’m not that interested in pop men, I only have expertise in pop women. You can’t go to the Korean embassy and tell them to analyze French politics. You probably can, the comparison is totally wrong, what I’m trying to say: I don’t know what Drake, Bad Bunny and Ed Sheeran are doing right now (all I know is that Justin Bieber sold music rights to Blackstone). But I know what some pop women are doing right now and what is too often dismissed as feminist and I think it’s stupid.

Fatigue of the week: Beyoncé announced her tour and I couldn’t care less*

On the one hand, my lack of interest is due to the fact that Beyoncé has once again done something questionable. As you all know, she performed at a hotel opening in Dubai for a lot of money, millions of dollars. Not only does it sound totally off the mark politically, it’s also kind of trashy. hotel opening? Not exactly the artistic stroke of genius that one is used to from the form of her performances – which only supports the thesis that she only did it for the money. These private concerts, which bring millions to pop stars, are nothing new, almost all the big names have done it, whether at weddings, birthdays or company parties.

It gets piquant where the double standard jumps in your face. J.Lo sang for the Turkmen dictator Berdimuhamedow, Nelly Furtado for the Gaddafis, Beyoncé in Dubai – all three are women whose fans are mainly women and queers, all three present themselves as allies, as fighters for justice, as good people. And we fall for something like that, yes, also because they are women. No matter how privileged women are, women are of course always victims of patriarchy, but they can also be accomplices and of course rich pop stars are capitalists.

But times have changed and things don’t just slip through as easily as they used to. Beyoncé was heavily criticized for her performance on social media. And it got funny too.

Tickets go on sale next week, Ticketmaster olé, and I already know how that’s going to go. Probably not like the Taylor Swift debacle, or the Depeche Mode debacle, or all the debacles, because I’m sure you’ve learned from it now, but what’s back is a nine-day advance notice including a countdown on the Ticketmaster page to really cheer on the hype and then it will be ready on the 10th, you can get tickets for 100 euros for the very back corner or for 500 euros you can just traipse through the backstage area. There will be a lot of specials, like the big stars always do now, because you can still dig deeper and deeper into the pockets of the fans. And after three years of Corona, they are still grateful.

And there will still be people who see pop star women in particular as underdogs, as those who have to be lifted up, with whom one has to show unconditional solidarity. And of course it’s a constant contradiction that you have to endure as a left-wing pop fan: the music is fantastic and it’s nice that it brings a lot of people together, but the people and the system behind it are exploitative and also dangerous. The musicians are not powerless against this, as is so often done, on the contrary, they have it in their hands whether they perform for assholes, whether they sell us unhealthy creams, exploit the insecurities of young girls or sell us stupid packages. Taylor Swift has wriggled out again, she’s one of us, she has nothing to do with the whole system, she just makes her music.

*I think I could care less, otherwise I wouldn’t write about it here and if a card…let’s say falls at my feet, I don’t know how I would react…

Podcast Pick of the Week: “Sounds Like A Cult”

The transition to my podcast recommendation, which I’ve wanted to make here for ages, couldn’t be more perfect, most of you probably already know it by now. As the title says perfectly, “Sounds Like A Cult” is about phenomena that somehow feel like a cult. Isa Medina and Amanda Montell primarily discuss pop culture and capitalist excesses, it’s about Starbucks, Skincare or the cult of Taylor Swift, in which not everything just happens by chance, who is not only a likeable artist, but also ( !) a calculating business woman. The nice thing about the podcast is that the two moderators are not cool about the phenomena, but are taken in by them just as much as we are.

Internet of the week: The cause of Pantera at Rock am Ring and in the park

Everything has really already been said about “The cause of Pantera at Rock am Ring und im Park”, I couldn’t really warm to the subject because these two festivals are, to put it mildly, generally the absolute horror place for me. I always think these are right-wing rock festivals anyway. It is an absolutely distant and horrible world of men, for whose honor it would not be enough to uninvite a band, but to dig up everyone and then the whole area, like Lützi, to dig through the whole area again and fill it up again, so that something nice and good can flourish there.

RaR and RiP now woke, that won’t work. That’s why I had to smile a lot when I read the comments on the Pantera unloading. The festival fans’ problem wasn’t something with freedom of speech or that they can’t see their amazing band now, no! The problem was that the announcement was gendered. It’s all so wonderfully stupid. Maybe that’s why the tweet has since been deleted.

Series of the Week: That ’90s Show

I’ve only watched one show in the past two weeks, but it’s one I’ve been waiting for forever: It’s the sequel to one of my absolute favorite shows, That ’70s Show. The story of the reboot: Kitty and Red Forman, the best couple ever we know from the ’70s show, get a holiday visit from their granddaughter Leia, Eric and Donna’s 14-year-old daughter. She makes friends in the neighborhood and hangs out with them in the legendary Wisconsin basement, just like her parents did twenty years before. There people smoke weed, kiss and argue, plans are made and films are watched, only now in the nineties. There are cameos from all but one of the old main cast, but I don’t want to spoil it.

But you can tell that it has always been the performances of the Forman parents (played by Debra Jo Rupp and Kurtwood Smith) that have carried the series. But the new “kids” are also cool, especially Leia (Callie Haverda) and Nate (Maxwell Acee Donovan), who have already acquired complex personalities, while the others are still running around as clichés a bit too much. Hopefully season two will change that and hopefully there will be one at all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F36HBFGxWkg

Album of the week: Sam Smith – “Gloria”

I’ve always liked Sam Smith, but more remotely. Music never really got to me. Then I heard about the disgusting reactions to the video for “I’m Not Here To Make Friends” (how brilliant to pounce on a song with that title) and pricked up my ears again.

There was not only criticism for “oversexualization”, which often comes from people who have no problem watching violent straight porn on a regular basis and for whom it’s always too much only with queer people, but of course there was also fat shaming again, because fat people are fat people kindly have to hide at home. On the one hand I’m biased and I think Sam Smith has never looked better, but of course I’m also angry because fat phobia doesn’t just come from the right and from the usual suspicious corners of society, but is also deeply rooted in queer and feminist people. The very smart activist Matt Bernstein addressed just that:

That being said: With GLORIA, Sam Smith has released a great pop album that is full of instant catchy tunes and beautiful ballads. Above all, I would like to recommend “No God” to you, which blew me away immediately and whose lyrics could be aimed entirely at the haters.

That’s it, bye!

What happened until now? Here is an overview of all pop column texts.

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