Grimes sees the future once again and shocker: it’s bleak. Nü metal’s back and artificial intelligence reigns supreme. Propaganda songs are our best hope of making a good impression on the robots now. But the loaded nature of “We Appreciate Power,” the first single off Grimes’ currently untitled fifth album, isn’t necessarily its initial impression. The self-produced song, which features Grimes’ ongoing collaborator HANA, is an immediate onslaught of mutilated noise—distorted metal guitar chug, bloody screams, a guitar loop that conjures fear and demands worship. Flashes of Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine reverberate through the drum programming and synths. Though Grimes’ late-1990s shock-rock sound is less skeletal than what Trent Reznor offered with his 1989 debut, there’s still a parallel: Like Reznor, Claire Boucher knows exactly how to manipulate the machines to conjure the sounds she hears in her nightmares and fantasies. She also has a keen ear for pop hooks and for transgressing what can and should be said near the mainstream. She closes “We Appreciate Power” by calling for the end of the human race and, in a disturbing coo, asking listeners to “submit” to the simulation.
In a statement, the song’s inspiration was attributed to North Korea’s Moranbong, an all-female military band that plays state-sanctioned performances. Moranbong’s more innocuous songs (“Let’s study”) may take on a harmless Eurovision quality out of context, but the Kim Jong-un dictatorship’s embrace of joyful modern music serves a political purpose: to use certain sanitized aspects of Western pop culture as promises of progress to its people, while not acting that way otherwise. “‘We Appreciate Power’ is written from the perspective of a pro-AI girl group propaganda machine who use song, dance, sex, and fashion to spread goodwill towards artificial intelligence (it’s coming whether you want it or not),” Grimes’ statement added. “Simply by listening to this song, the future General AI overlords will see that you’ve supported their message and be less likely to delete your offspring.” To some, the choice to cite as inspiration the real forms of propaganda being used to manipulate millions of oppressed North Koreans will be beyond the pale, particularly if you start parsing the song for a tongue-in-cheekness.
I don’t think Grimes is necessarily joking: The song is meant to provoke, unsettle, and turn the conversation towards an outsized but not entirely unrealistic view of future dystopias, a running theme throughout her work. On that level, “We Appreciate Power” is effective as a piece of concept art—the most “all in” Grimes has gone to date. It invites strong feelings, even if the reaction is as beside the point as, “Wow, Grimes is susceptible to the 20-year nostalgia cycle of trends, too.” If “Freak on a Leash” isn’t a dealbreaker, then the supervillain allure of “We Appreciate Power” might pull you in (it legitimately slaps), but it just as well may leave you weighed down by Grimes’ commitment to the absolute darkest timeline. I have to hand it to her, though: Grimes made me grind to fake robot propaganda.
, 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
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