Pop-Culture | Posted by Kayleigh Bolingbroke on 07/31/2017
On Chester Bennington’s Death, Masculinity, And Mental Illness
Chester Bennington
Chester Bennington, the frontman of Linkin Park, was a rock legend, an important cultural icon, and a man who, like many, suffered from depression. On July 20, the 41-year-old took his own life.
Bennington, who was just 20 years old when Linkin Park was formed in 1996, spent much of his adult life in the spotlight—yet he never kept his struggle with depression a secret. In 2015 he opened up about his depression to music magazine Rock Sound: “I literally hated life and I was like, ‘I don’t want to have feelings. I want to be a sociopath. I don’t want to care what other people feel like. I want to feel nothing.’” He spoke openly about the root causes of his depression with Kerrang in …
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Pop-Culture | Posted by Gabby Catalano on 07/3/2017
Examining The Gender Imbalance At Music Festivals
Why are music festivals still so male dominated?
It was 2014 and I was getting ready to soak up the sun and enjoy an alternative rock music festival in Boston. As I browsed the lineup—which included big names like Bleachers, Twenty One Pilots, The Killers, and Childish Gambino—I asked myself: Where are the women? I’ve been to countless festivals over the years and have constantly asked myself that same question. I’ve always been madly in love with indie rock music, underground artists, and the entire festival scene, but it’s never been clear that the love is returned.
Although 50 percent of the 32 million people in the U.S. who attend music festivals are women, the gender of the performers at them hardly reflect their viewers. Coachella’s 2016 lineup included 168 …
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Pop-Culture | Posted by Kadin Burnett on 06/19/2017
Why The Rihanna-Lupita-Ava-Issa Buddy Comedy Is So Important
We can’t wait for their buddy comedy
It started as an innocent, clever, and creative tweet. A picture of Rihanna and Lupita Nyong’o sitting next to one another at a fashion show in 2014 was making its rounds on the Internet. The duo look as if they could be on the catwalk themselves: Both were clad in big sunglasses, and Rihanna sported a furry coat while Nyong’o wore a white-collared burgundy sweater. One imaginative Twitter user, @1800SADGAL, responded to the picture: “Rihanna looks like she scams rich white men and lupita is the computer smart best friend that helps plan the scans.”
Spelling mistakes aside, the reply was retweeted almost 10,000 times, and garnered over 200,000 likes. It even got the attention of both Rihanna and Nyong’o. The actress responded …
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Pop-Culture | Posted by Farha Khalidi on 06/12/2017
How Hailee Steinfeld’s “Most Girls” Pushes Back On Toxic Female Competition
Credit: Vevo/YouTube
“You’re not like most girls,” a boy tells Hailee Steinfeld in the music video for her latest single, “Most Girls.” He tells her this sincerely, but ignorantly; Hailee gets visibly uncomfortable by this “compliment” and tells him that she has to go. She rushes away from the unnamed, now irrelevant man.
The man, like so many other men who have uttered this classic backhanded compliment, doesn’t understand why it would make women cringe. They don’t see the hidden bitterness in those words because on the surface it seems sweet to tell a girl she is unique. But this “compliment” perpetuates the toxicity of female competition. It maintains that in order for a woman to be great, she must be distanced from every other woman—specifically elevated above …
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Pop-Culture | Posted by Kadin Burnett on 05/22/2017
What The First Black ‘Bachelorette’ Will Mean To Viewers
Credit: Facebook
Over its 15 years on the air, The Bachelor franchise has had some of the most aggravatingly attractive, square jawed, toned, and tantalizing contestants a producer could dream of. Every season, a sea of white faces, usually decorated with an occasional pinch of color, descend upon the Bachelor Mansion to drunkenly vie for the immediate and undying attention of one beautifully sculpted white person. But now, for its 34th season (which starts tonight), the franchise has finally stemmed its wave of “caucasity” by casting its first black bachelorette, Rachel Lindsay.
Until this point, the past decade and a half of The Bachelor franchise flirted far less with diversity than its contestants flirted with each other. Aside from the tanning-bed aficionados, non-white contestants have been rare, and the show’s …
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Pop-Culture | Posted by Kadin Burnett on 03/14/2017
The Brilliance Of ‘Get Out’
‘Get Out’
*Spoiler Alert*: This review contains details about the plot of the movie.
The film Get Out opens on a single shot that, just like the film as a whole, manages to brilliantly capitalize on horror tropes to illuminate the terror of racial stereotypes and racism. Terror in suburbia is a staple of the horror genre—a staple Get Out immediately subverts by opening on a masked figure stalking an unwitting victim—a black man. The shot is followed immediately by a credits montage set to “Redbone” by Childish Gambino—a song that recounts a sinister and manipulative dishonest relationship and warns the victim to “stay woke,” and in turn foreshadows the relationship at the center of the film. This artful scene is just one of many that prove Get Out to …
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Feminism, Pop-Culture | Posted by Faatimah Solomon on 12/12/2016
The Exploitation Of Women Of Color In Music Videos Needs To End
Taylor Swift’s ‘Shake It Off’ music video
As a black feminist who is usually conscious of how normalized our misogynistic and often racist pop culture is, I am mostly displeased by the portrayal of black women in music videos. From Taylor Swift to Jason Derulo, artists across genres and of all identities seemingly fail to recognize that the fetishization of black women’s bodies in their music videos translates into their hyper-sexualizaiton in the real-world.
This treatment is first and foremost evident in the stereotypes about black women these music videos frequently perpetuate. Such stereotypes propagated about black women include the “angry Black woman,” the “sassy Black woman,” and the “hypersexual Jezebel.” But perhaps the most typical caricature of Black women is the sassy, finger-snapping, gum-popping, grill-wearing, twerking woman. And …
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Feminism, Pop-Culture | Posted by Kayleigh Bolingbroke on 12/5/2016
This New Music Video Powerfully Took On Police Brutality
YG in One Time Comin’
In 2012, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was shot by neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman. He was later acquitted of the crime. Two years later, Eric Garner was killed after being placed in a chokehold by police officers, and Michael Brown had been shot to death by a white police officer in Missouri just a month later. Their deaths, along with far too many others, did not represent a new phenomenon, but did awaken a newly powerful, social media-based iteration of a movement for justice: Black Lives Matter.
At least 263 African-Americans in the US died due to police brutality in 2016 alone. The number seems to only grow, and this fact hasn’t gone unnoticed by the media. Over the past two years, Twitter has been …
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