People of color are constantly stigmatized for their names, whether from biased hiring managers or teachers who butcher pronunciation while reading attendance sheets. These moments are often demeaning, like one of the most fundamental elements of someone's identity is burdensome or atypical. But on “Flicker,” the latest single from the Japanese-British artist Rina Sawayama, such experiences are transformed into an ecstatic, self-assured pop song meant to uplift people who, in her words, are “misunderstood for who [they] truly are.”
“Flicker” reflects on Sawayama’s experience of having a “difficult” name herself; in the process, she subtly critiques social constructs that dictate what a “normal” name is. Over fluorescent synths and jittery drums, she urges listeners to take pride in their names and remember that they are better than the homogeneous faces on TV screens. “They flicker but they ain’t gonna shine like us,” she croons in the catchy, jubilant chorus, establishing that this is a song specifically for her community. People of color are so often expected to minimize their differences for those unwilling to engage with experiences unlike their own. With “Flicker,” Rina shines in spite of that pressure.
, Download New Movie Your heroes have covered the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band since they first heard it. Just days after its release in the spring of 1967, Jimi Hendrix shocked a London crowd with the album’s opening theme with half of the Fab Four in attendance . Joe Cocker turned its affable second track, “With a Little Help from My Friends,” into soul-baring treacle a year later, while Elton John shouted out its lysergic third beauty, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” in the mid-1970s with John Lennon’s help. And so it goes down the tracklist and across generations and genres. At this point, it’s daunting to name an idea more passé than covering these songs, as omnipresent as oxygen or as eternal as Paul McCartney ’s avuncular charm. It’s a good thing, then, that A Day in the Life: Impressions of Pepper is not actually a Beatles cover album. Sure, its 13 tracks sync with the sequence of Sgt. Pepper’s , and you can hear traces of that totemic record in every piece
, Download New Movie Apple gave everyone a glimpse at the future of the iPhone with last year's iPhone X, positioning it at the top of its lineup. With a “notch” and Face ID, the iPhone X was the iPhone of the future, and it came with a price tag that required you to pay EMIs well into the future. The iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus were meant to be the more accessible offerings, continuing Apple's “business as usual” model of delivering solid, incremental updates at prices that were only marginally higher than their predecessors. With 2018, however, it seems the future is here, as Apple has gone all-in with the iPhone X ( Review ) design language across the entire lineup. For the second year in a row, we get not two but three new iPhone models, but this time, they all look pretty much the same — like the iPhone X, but at different sizes. Physically, the iPhone XR sits between the iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max . It's priced in iPhone 8 Plus territory, which means Apple has elim
, Download New Movie In 2005, when Steven Spielberg asked Michael Bay to direct the first ever live-action Transformers film, he dismissed it as a “ stupid toy movie ” and deemed the first draft of the script as “ too kiddie ”. Bay would come around on the former after he learnt about the Transformers mythology from the makers Hasbro, but he didn't budge on the latter aspect and asked the film's writers to increase the role of the military, which they did. The move away from being a kid-oriented movie, along with Bay's penchant for action sequences that defied comprehension and overtly-convoluted plots, would prove to be the franchise's repeated undoing critically, even as the various instalments ate up the box office. The new Transformers prequel spin-off Bumblebee , from Kubo and the Two Strings director Travis Knight working off a script by writer Christina Hodson — she's working on two upcoming DC movies, Birds of Prey and Batgirl — is exactly what Transformer
Comments
Post a Comment