Spider-Man: No Way Home is out now in theaters and racking up records as one of the most popular movies not just in the series but of the last several years. It’s already crossed the billion-dollar threshold and is being credited with helping save movie theaters after a rough couple of years, and now that it’s been out for a little over a week, fans are sharing their reactions and debating some of the film’s plot points. Those fans include Long Beach rapper Vince Staples, who has — as usual — some uniquely funny takes on some of the film’s action.
Here’s why I give you a chance to click the little “X” in the corner or hit [command+w] or close your laptop or — come on guys, there are hundreds of ways to avoid spoilers. If this “ruins” the movie for you, blame yourself.
Vince was less than enthused about the death of one character in particular, demanding a role in the Marvel Cinematic Universe for the sole purpose of revenge. “Oh it’s up,” he wrote. “They just flipped Aunt May in the lobby!” This development led to more of Staples’ signature snark as he promised, “They need me in the MCU if they tryna have some real get bacc. Where is the vengeance?” He then made his bid for a role in a potential future film and gave a pretty solid reason: “Put me in X-Men I’m marking everything out,” he vowed. “[On the] Dead homies.”
While there aren’t many characters in the X-Men comics that match Vince’s physique, that shouldn’t be a bar from giving him a role; after all, half of the Eternalswere recast as people of color, and cape films have shuffled characters’ appearances before. Just imagine Vince Staples as Wolverine. Now, that I’d gladly pay to watch.
Musicians are major players in the realm of social media, and that remained true in 2021: A good chunk of the most-liked Instagram posts from the past year were by musicians or were music-related.
Ariana Grande has the top post among musicians and the second most-liked one overall, as a May 26 post featuring photos from her wedding with Dalton Gomez has over 26 million likes (according to Wikipedia, with data accurate as of December 23 and updated by Uproxx on December 27 for this post). It could be argued, though, that Billie Eilish actually fared better on the list: While the aforementioned Grande post is her only one in the top ten, Eilish has two posts on the list, the most among musicians. A post revealing her blonde hair ranks at No. 4 with 23 million likes and a photo from her Vogue photoshoot is No. 6 with 22.1 million likes.
Other musicians make cameos on the list as well. Kylie Jenner’s pregnancy announcement post from September, in which she tagged Travis Scott, is No. 3 with 24.6 million likes. Meanwhile, Iron Shore Mermaid, a professional mermaid performer, had a post in the top ten, a video set to The Kid Laroi and Justin Bieber’s “Stay.”
Cristiano Ronaldo and Georgina Rodriguez had the honor of having the year’s top post, as their pregnancy announcement racked up over 32 million likes since it was shared in late October. Meanwhile, Lionel Messi had three posts in the top ten, making him the person with the most top-ten posts this year.
In terms of the people involved, this year’s list looks similar to the 2020 ranks, as Ronaldo, Messi, Grande, and Jenner all had some of last year’s top posts, too.
Check out the top ten list of the year’s most-liked Instagram posts below.
Earlier this morning, the nominees for the 79th Annual Golden Globe Awards were announced in Los Angeles and to great surprise, Hollywood Foreign Press President Helen Hoehner gave way to an illustrious Southern Californian to read off the first half of nominations, saying, “And now to help me announce the 79th Annual Golden Globe nominees, please welcome a special guest… Snoop Dogg.”
Out came the lanky six-foot-four-inch rapper with a red “Murder” beanie on his head, an asymmetrical paisley button down shirt, modest-sized gold medallion, and of course, Locs sunglasses. First off, big shouts to Snoop Dogg for getting up in time to appear in front of a screen by 6 a.m. That’s a father of four right there, people.
But for all the jabs Snoop Dogg has received for mispronouncing a couple names (“Ben Uhffleck… Ben Affleck. My fault… sorry about that, Ben.”), he actually totally nails all or most of some pretty difficult names. He pronounced Dune director Denis Villeneuve’s name with very stout French pronunciation of a hard “e” at the end. He then showed his versatility in the love language by pronouncing The French Dispatch composer Alexandre Desplat’s name with a soft “t.”
Of course there were moments of hilarity, like the way he said Pose actress Michaela J. Rodirguez’s last name like it was one of the homies from the block (“Rordriguezz!”) or how he delivered the title of the musical Tick, Tick…Boom! like it was the punctuation to a song lyric.
So don’t listen to anyone who makes the condescending claim that Snoop Dogg was “butchering so many of the nominees’ names that it was hard to tell who actually got nominated.” Because he was absolutely himself and he did a fine job at the mundane task before him.
Watch Snoop Dogg announcing the 79th Annual Golden Globe Nominees above.
The Golden Globes celebrate the best in TV and movies, but the music world usually finds its way into the proceedings, too. The nominees for the 2022 event were announced this morning, and sure enough, some of the biggest names in music are on the list.
Lady Gaga scored a huge nomination thanks to her work on House Of Gucci, as she’s up for Best Performance By An Actress In A Motion Picture, Drama. On the flip side, Alana Haim got a nomination for Best Performance By An Actress In A Motion Picture, Musical Or Comedy for her breakout starring role in Licorice Pizza.
When it comes to music-specific awards, Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood locked up a nomination for Best Original Score for The Power Of The Dog. As for Best Original Song, Motion Picture, the field is packed with familiar names: Beyoncé (for “Be Alive” from King Richard), Lin-Manuel Miranda (“Dos Orugitas” from Encanto), Van Morrison (“Down To Joy” from Belfast), Jennifer Hudson (“Here I Am (Singing My Was Home)” from Respect), and Billie Eilish (“No Time To Die” from No Time To Die).
Meanwhile, a few music-adjacent projects are up for Best Motion Picture, Comedy Or Musical: Cyrano (Aaron and Bryce Dessner composed the film’s score), Don’t Look Up (Kid Cudi and Ariana Grande have roles in the movie), and Licorice Pizza.
The latest Netflix movie, the Jennifer Lawrence- and Leonardi DiCaprio-starring Don’t Look Up, is out today, and music fans have surely heard by now that Ariana Grande and Kid Cudi have roles, playing music power couple Riley Bina and DJ Chello, respectively. They shared “Just Look Up,” the song they made for the film, last week, and now that the movie is out, they’ve shared the scene from the film in which they perform it live.
The scene shows Grande’s character performing the song with a grand stage set-up that doesn’t look dissimilar to something she’d present on one of her tours. Grande wears a white outfit with feather-like protrusions sticking out of her torso, and Cudi’s character later joins her on stage with a complementary white jacket. All the while, Lawrence and DiCaprio’s characters are watching from the side of the stage, as one brief shot shows.
Of all modern music stars, Grande and Cudi are among the ones with the most acting experience. Before music, Grande was best known for playing the character Cat Valentine in two Nickelodeon series, Victorious and Sam & Cat. Meanwhile, Cudi has been in the main cast of shows like How To Make It In America, Comedy Bang! Bang!, and We Are Who We Are.
Watch Cudi and Grande perform “Just Look Up” above.
You’ve likely heard Bobby Krlic’s sound, even if you don’t immediately recognize his name.
It’s unnerving, the music Krlic creates – a sonic mélange of oppressive bass and teeth-clenching drone metal that brews a heady mixture of dreamy hypnosis and sinister pandemonium. Krlic’s melodies are the sort that belong in horror movies, building an audible sense of dread as main characters unwittingly confront death or the demonic… or Swedish cults.
It’s a good thing then that the musician, producer, and composer can count director Ari Aster as a fan. The pair connected on Aster’s recent horror hit Midsommar, with Krlic crafting the movie’s soundtrack and scoring some of the most unsettling images we’ve seen on film in a long time.
But he didn’t begin his career expecting to match wailing strings and orchestral wind instruments to stories about unlucky tourists. In fact, he can chart his love affair with music to his early childhood. Krlic remembers having a guitar in his hand by age six. His parents, both musicians, encouraged him to follow his artistic passions. He played in different bands in high school and, by the time he reached college, he knew that music was what he wanted to study and perfect. Even then, however, Krlic wasn’t sure there’d be a space for his experimental sound.
“I kind of imagined that the music I made was probably too strange,” Krlic tells us. But that didn’t stop him from pursuing it. In fact, it made him that much more determined to forge his own path in the industry, reaching out to production houses and eventually dropping his own album under the stage name The Haxan Cloak.
“I’ve always had an attitude of, if somebody says no, I’ll just keep trying until somebody eventually says yes,” he explains.
Eventually, people did start to say yes. A lot.
Krlic has produced music for everyone from Troye Sivan to Khalid. In 2013, he got a call from famed film composer Atticus Ross to work on scoring a couple of movies, which led to work crafting the sound of popular TV shows like Snowpiercer and The Alienist. He’s released more music under The Haxan Cloak, and his work with Aster on Midsommar has earned him plenty of acclaim – and an Ivor Novello award.
To hear Krlic talk about his wholly original sound is to hear an artist testing his own limits. He often refers to music as simply “a conversation” and he sees his role as a composer in a very serviceable, almost utilitarian way.
“I see music and art and culture as just this ongoing conversation, one that I would love to, in any small way, keep contributing to and keep pushing forward,” Krlic says. “I try and concern myself with something that I want to see or hear, that I’m not seeing or hearing currently. That doesn’t mean that it has to be this grandiose thing, it just means no one’s doing that like I want to.”
He’s built his own sonic style by staying true to his creative instincts, even if that means challenging the status quo and breaking some rules. Actually, when it comes to Krlic’s music, it’s about breaking all the rules. That, in part, is why being chosen as one of The Next 9 by Porsche seems to humble him so much. When asked what that kind of recognition means for his art, he’s quiet, thoughtful, and intentional with an answer.
“Being part of The Next 9, I think what we’re really talking about is a shift of the culture,” Krlic begins. “I think it’s people who are not concerned with the here and now, they’re just concerned with what’s next and what hasn’t been seen yet.”
Krlic’s urge to create art that defies convention isn’t about earning clout for himself as a musician and composer. Being noticed by a brand like Porsche is flattering of course, but his deeper desire is to inspire more artists to embrace the things that make them original and make their art meaningful.
“You can be utterly true to yourself and you can still resonate with people,” Krlic says. “I view music, art, film, culture, and fashion as a way of bringing people together and asking questions. That’s what I hope I’m doing.”
For more on The Next 9 series, check out our hub page.
Around five hours into Peter Jackson‘s eight-hour epic The Beatles: Get Back, we see Michael Lindsay-Hogg – the director of the 1970 film Get Back who was responsible for all of this footage existing in the first place – with a distressed look on his face and he kind of sighs and says, “I don’t know what story I’m telling anymore.” His biggest problem, which he fully admits, is, if everyone is being honest, he’s got, on film, the most intimate portrait of the most famous band in the world. And of course when he says this out loud all The Beatles seem into the idea of just “putting it all out there,” but Lindsay-Hogg has that look on his face that he knows this will never happen. There’s no way anyone is going to see what really happened for at least 50 years. (It would take almost 53.)
The Let It Be sessions are infamously legendary. And every Beatles fan has dreamed about being given access to the vault with approximately 60 hours of footage from this time period. The fact that it’s never been released just fueled the idea that it must be The Beatles at their worst, constantly at each other’s throats. And the Let It Be film that came out in 1970 didn’t help. At only 80 minutes, it is basically just the songs preformed, inter-spliced with a few “fly on the wall” moments with not much context. (This movie is pretty hard to find. A couple years ago I had to buy a bootleg off of eBay.)
The most notorious scene involves Paul and George while rehearsing “Two of Us” (a very pleasant song that, somehow, always seems to be surrounded by drama in both the original Let It Be and Get Back). Paul McCartney is trying to tell George Harrison what he wants and adds an aside that he knows this annoys George. George fires back, “You don’t annoy me anymore,” with the “anymore” part being extra pointed. Now, when you take into account that the film was released right about the time The Beatles broke up, everyone just assumed every interaction was like this. There’s a scene in Get Back, late in the sessions, when Paul and John Lennon are singing “Two of Us” as ventriloquists, both trying to outdo each other as to keep their smiling teeth together and not move their lips as they sing. They are having a blast. It shows a portrait of two people who, yes, can get on each other’s nerves. But these are obviously two people who still genuinely like each other.
What is hard to get over is everything we’ve always heard about this era of The Beatles is now just … here. Like, want to know what it was like? Well, now you can travel back in time to January 1969 and spend eight hours with them. This is how I engaged with the material. Other than, every so often, a few written out captioning explaining what is happening, there’s no modern voiceover or talking heads. For people who maybe don’t care that much about The Beatles and are looking for a more straightforward documentary, this might get tedious. You know, maybe by the 15th time the band rehearses “Get Back,” I could see the more casual fan thinking, why am I watching this? But, for me, I was transported back just to observe. I literally felt like I was there as a frustrated Paul started strumming his bass trying to come up with anything new and, slowly, you can hear the formation of “Get Back” start to emerge. It’s like watching one of those miracle of lifetime lapse videos of a flower blooming. It’s incredible to watch McCartney literally just make up one of the most famous songs of all time in real-time.
Another fascinating aspect is the presence of Yoko Ono during all of this. Much has been assumed about her relationship with the rest of the band and the repercussions, but, again here, we get to see it. And, yes, she’s always there. And if I’m Paul McCartney, yeah, I can see how someone bringing their significant other to work every day might be a little disruptive. And you can tell sometimes he’s annoyed. But there’s no real blowup or anger. For the most part, she’s just there, sitting next to John, not saying much. Sometimes when the band is jamming she will scream into the microphone. On a day John is late, Paul is asked point-blank about her presence and he says John and Yoko want to basically merge as one, and to do that they have to be around each other at all times and who is he to say they can’t do that. He goes as far to say, “she’s okay, honestly.” And admits if he pushes things, John would choose Yoko over The Beatles and, as the defacto leader of the band, he’ll take John and Yoko over no John at all.
And this all leads to another interesting development. Most Beatles fans know that when the band formed it was John Lennon’s band. And as the years went on, Paul’s influence became greater and by the time Let It Be happens, Paul’s the one running the show. And running it without a manager since Brian Epstein died, so he’s also doing that. It’s weird, Paul gets some criticisms for this era but Get Back puts all this in better context. Yeah, he can be a jerk sometimes, but he’s the only one in the band trying to keep the band together. Ringo Starr had already quit and come back during their previous album. George quits and comes back during this one. And John looks, honestly, pretty content, but also it’s obvious he has no interest in a leadership role.
After George quits, Paul and John go to a cafeteria to have a private meeting, but didn’t realize there’s a hidden microphone in the room. And we get to hear the whole conversation. And it’s fascinating. It’s Paul basically saying he has to be the leader because John doesn’t want to be the leader and admitting that his leadership style has pissed off George, as John gives Paul advice on how to be a better leader. What’s interesting is both men are frustrated, but voices are never raised. If there were ever a time the two would be at “each other’s throats,” this would probably be the time. But, instead, it’s constructive. And, again, a peek behind The Beatles curtain and it’s unbelievably fascinating.
Get Back is not about a band breaking up. It’s about a band trying to save itself, but ultimately fails. The whole idea of a rooftop concert is to do something new and exciting. After that performance, which would be their last together, the idea is that is just the beginning. They start talking about more ideas for popup concerts. But what Get Back deftly shows is that the seeds are already planted for a breakup. Even after George returns, he’s frustrated because he doesn’t get enough of his songs on the album and says he has a lot of songs built up. And had contemplated selling them off but, instead, now wants to make a solo album separate from The Beatles. John has become enchanted with Allen Klein, the manager of The Rolling Stones. And Klein wants to manage The Beatles and John is pushing the others hard about this, but the rest of them seem, at the best, nonplussed about this idea.
(I know some people won’t like what Jackson has done with the film, making it look modern. And to be honest I usually don’t like that either. When I buy a 4K disc of a movie, I want it to look grainy. One of the worst 4K discs is Terminator 2, which has so much digital noise reduction applied it looks like it was filmed on an iPhone. It’s terrible. But what Jackson does with Get Back doesn’t bother me. He’s doing something else here. He’s not restoring an existing movie, he’s making a new thing. And I do think the aesthetic he comes up with here does help immerse a viewer. Put it this way: if Jackson did this to, say, The Frighteners, I would not like this. But, here, I get what he’s doing and, for me, it works.)
Again, for casual fans, Get Back might be a bit much. Honestly, even for big fans of Beatles music, if you don’t care about the inner workings of the band and their personalities, it might, too, be a bit much. (There were times even I was like, okay, this seems a bit much. But when I think of this as more of a historical document than a piece of entertainment, I get why certain scenes were included. I get why Jackson decided that even some tedious scenes needed to be seen by the public instead of locked in a vault somewhere.) But if you want to go back in time to January 1969 and just hang out with The Beatles and see what that’s like, there is nothing that comes closer to this experience than Get Back.
‘The Beatles: Get Back’ begins streaming on Thanksgiving Day via Disney+. You can contact Mike Ryan directly on Twitter.
(Editor’s note: In honor of Thanksgiving, we’re recirculating this piece, originally published in 2016. We hope you enjoy it.)
The Last Waltz is a concert film directed by Martin Scorsese about a star-studded “retirement” show by The Band that occurred 40 years ago on Thanksgiving day in San Francisco. The co-stars are Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Muddy Waters, Dr. John, Neil Diamond, and about another half-dozen rock stars from the ’60s and ’70s. Every year around this time, I try to watch The Last Waltz at least once, in the way that people watch A Christmas Story or It’s a Wonderful Life whenever mid-December rolls around. I’ve come to regard The Last Waltz — and I preface this by offering sincere apologies to Planes, Trains, and Automobiles — as the greatest Thanksgiving movie ever. That’s not simply because The Last Waltz takes place on the holiday, but also because this film embodies what’s wonderful, horrible, hilarious, and moving about one of this country’s most sacred annual traditions, and how many of us manage to survive it. Other films have used Thanksgiving as a backdrop. But to me, The Last Waltz is Thanksgiving.
Allow me to recount the plot of The Last Waltz: A dysfunctional family of five brothers has decided to stop living together. Before they split up, they invite a coterie of friends dressed in colorful suits and floppy hats over for a holiday celebration. Despite years of pent-up resentment — the brother with the amazing voice loathes the brother with the amazing haircut, whom he views as disloyal and undermining — all parties agree to put these tensions aside and put on a good face in front of the guests.
The guest list at this party is truly a mixed bag. There is a wise old man from Mississippi. There is a beautiful blonde poet from the Hollywood hills. There is a jive-talking hipster from New Orleans. There is a coked-up Canadian hippie. There is a portly, purple-suited Irishman who mistakenly believes that he knows karate. And then there’s the Jewish rock star for Minnesota who can’t decide if he really wants to be there.
Thus far, it sounds like I’m describing a Wes Anderson film. And, in some ways, I am — beneath the formalism of the filmmaking is a whole lot of messiness.
On the surface, the party is lavish — there are chandeliers on loan from Gone with the Wind (really!) and the lighting is bold and theatrical and there are famous writers reciting indecipherable passages from Chaucer. Beyond the pomp and circumstance, however, it’s like the bowery. Nearly everyone is sneaking away to get smashed on booze and smuggled chemicals — this is out of habit, but also because family reunions tend to be fraught with tension. It is the most certain of all inalienable truths. The trio of sweet, soft-spoken brothers know that the brother with the amazing haircut will be overbearing and arrogant, and that the brother with the amazing voice will make his stirring but problematic case sympathizing with Southerners who lost the Civil War. And the sweet, soft-spoken ones will once again be caught hopelessly in the middle. You feel for them. Weird politics and flawed family dynamics – who can’t relate to dreading these things at this time of the year?
And yet — in spite of the resentments, and the betrayals, and the intensifying intoxication — everyone is able to come together and conjure a feeling of community. When they gather around to tell old family stories that have been told and re-told umpteen times — like the one about Jack Ruby, or the one about shoplifting bologna and cigarettes — the brothers pretend to laugh whenever the overbearing brother takes over the conversation. (The upside of being on stage is that you can turn off his microphone.) After a while, the laughs seem less forced. They’re faking it so well that they start to feel actual community and love and understanding. This is what The Last Waltz, and Thanksgiving, is all about.
Earlier this month, Robbie Robertson put out a memoir, Testimony, that concludes not long after The Last Waltz. (Condolences to anyone hoping for an in-depth, behind-the-scenes look at the making of 2011’s How To Become Clairvoyant.) My feelings about Testimony are as conflicted as they are about Robertson — he’s a great artist and an insufferable person, and Testimony similarly is artfully rendered and often hard to stomach.
As is my custom with rock memoirs, I’ve been reading Testimony out of order, in order to get to the parts that most interest me. The Last Waltz is near the top of that list. Robertson was the chief engineer of The Last Waltz — he conceived the concert, brought on Scorsese, and acted as the film’s producer. Unsurprisingly, his view of the concert is sanitized and romanticized — he goes into deep (perhaps unnecessary) detail about the conception and planning of the concert, recounting every personnel hire and rehearsal. Of course, every move is confirmation of Robertson’s genius.
For people that have seen The Last Waltz as many times as I have, Testimony will be interesting be default. Because I am one of those nerds who is curious about any and all minutia related to this concert, including what Van Morrison was wearing before the show. (“A beige trench coat,” Robertson writes, clearly less exciting than the extravagant purple jumpsuit he wore on stage.) For anyone else, however, Robertson might seem ponderous. He heaps praise upon the performers, particularly Neil Diamond, who in Robertson’s estimation performed “Dry Your Eyes” (which Robertson co-wrote) “like a sermon out of Elmer Gentry.” Robertson even spends a paragraph describing the Japanese bath in his San Francisco hotel room.
As for the other guys in The Band… well, Robertson admits that they weren’t as into the film as he was, but “they didn’t have the cinematic passion that I did.” Hm … sounds a little fishy, Robbie.
At that point, I decided it was best to chase what I was reading in Testimony with some passages from Levon Helm’s scathing 1993 book This Wheel’s On Fire, a dishier and more overtly nasty book than Testimony.
(Notice that I said “overtly” — Robertson isn’t above score settling, he just does it in a more magnanimous tone. For instance, when describing a disastrous 1970 gig at the Hollywood Bowl, Robertson hints that Helm’s heroin addiction adversely affected The Band’s performance, though he later diffuses the accusation by adding that Helm himself admitted as much after the show. Why Robertson chose to write about a forgotten concert — and throw Helm under the bus 46 years later — is a mystery. Though, perhaps, it does explain why he waited until after Helm died to write a book.)
In Testimony, Robertson claims that when he brought up the idea of a retirement concert to the guys in The Band, “no one was opposed to the idea.” Even Helm “knew we couldn’t continue with out live shows.” If Robertson really believes that, then I suggest that he read This Wheel’s On Fire. Helm’s take on The Last Waltz is unequivocal: “I didn’t want any part of it,” he writes. “I didn’t want to break up the band.”
In Helm’s version of events, Robertson pressed Helm about the dangers of the road, and how it took the lives of everyone from Hank Williams Sr. to Jimi Hendrix. “Every time I get on the plane I’m thinking about this stuff,” Helm recalls Robertson saying. “The whole thing just isn’t healthy anymore.”
“I’m not in it for my health,” Helm replies. “I’m a musician, and I wanna live the way I do.” (This quote later inspired the title of the heart-rending 2013 documentary, Ain’t in It for My Health: A Film about Levon Helm.)
Helm claims he only went along with The Last Waltz because management made it seem that he had no choice — whether that’s really true or if it speaks to the same self-defeating fatalism that caused Helm and the rest of the Band to slowly cede control to Robertson, it’s hard to say. Like so many families, the Band was undone by money problems. Robertson was credited as the Band’s primary songwriter, a distinction that Helm felt put too fine a point on the group’s collaborative process. At one time, these men freely pooled their talents and personal experiences for the common good. While Robertson technically wrote “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” the song’s authenticity and soul came from Helm. But that partnership was over by the time of The Last Waltz.
In The Last Waltz, Robertson’s dark proclamations about “the road” form the narrative, while Helm’s contrasting view goes unacknowledged. This inevitably influenced Helm’s view of the film. When Helm finally saw The Last Waltz, he “was in shock over how bad the movie was,” he writes in This Wheel’s On Fire. Helm hated how many overdubs there were. (In Helm’s book, the Band’s producer John Simon claims that the only tracks that weren’t re-recorded were Helm’s vocals and drums.) Helm hated that Scorsese (whom he refers to, hilariously, as “the dummy”) didn’t shoot the dress rehearsal or any of the pre-show festivities orchestrated by concert promoter Bill Graham, which he felt were some of the best parts of the event.
Most of all, Helm despised Robertson’s “world-weary angst” about the life of touring musicians. In Helm’s view, this was like a gangster trying to leave the mafia. Ultimately, Helm felt that Robertson sold out his former comrades. “To me,” Helm concludes, “it was unforgivable.”
All of this stuff composes the poisonous subtext of The Last Waltz. Perhaps it’s easier to enjoy the movie if you aren’t aware of it. Or if you stick with Testimony and ignore This Wheel’s On Fire. But for me, the subtext actually deepens the experience of watching The Last Waltz.
I don’t think the movie would be as rich if it was simply about an old ’60s rock group that decided to hang it up. The tension between the joyous performances and the embittered back-stage reality is what gives The Last Waltz its emotional and spiritual power. If Helm really hated being there, then his ecstatic yodeling at the end of “Up On Cripple Creek” is all the more remarkable. If Rick Danko was already focused on his solo career — when Scorsese tries to interview him in The Last Waltz, Danko instead plays the luminous “Sip The Wine” from 1977’s Rick Danko — then his definitive performance of “It Makes No Difference” is that much more awe-inspiring. If Richard Manuel already seemed to be on his last legs, as both Robertson and Helm suggest in their books, the courageous grit he lends to “The Shape I’m In” is flat-out heroic.
(Garth Hudson is the only member of The Band I have not yet directly referenced. I am the one billionth person to make this mistake when talking about The Band, but only because he was seemingly unbothered by the humanoid craziness surrounding him in The Last Waltz. To quote Ronnie Hawkins, Hudson was werrrd, a musical genius living in his own solar system.)
Perhaps Helm’s point of view made it into The Last Waltz after all. No matter what Robertson says about the impossibility of road life, the rest of the guys refute by showing. These musicians are so devoted to their craft that they can perform masterfully, no matter the circumstances. They are weary men who find the wherewithal to transcend their weariness and approach grace.
This is what keeps me coming back to The Last Waltz every Thanksgiving. It affirms the faith in the power of ritual to heal — at least temporarily — whatever is awkward or unresolved or plain broken about your familial bonds. Sometimes, that belief is just enough to make things okay for a little while.
It’s become fashionable, even profitable, to come out against what is known as “cancel culture.” Opponents to this practice, whose very existence is debatable, claim people, usually young progressives, destroy the lives of those who say or do things they problematic. Others argue it’s a fiction, invented by culture warlords to protect those who don’t want their controversial views called into question. So when Dave Chappelle, under fire for anti-trans comments, and Louis C.K., who confessed to multiple cases of sexual misconduct in 2017, wound up with Grammy nominations on Tuesday, some wondered if “cancel culture” was perhaps not as powerful, or as real, as some have claimed.
C.K., who’s been playing big shows again, wound up fêted with a Best Comedy Album nom for Sincerely Louis C.K. Meanwhile, fellow comic Chappelle received a nom not for comedy but for Best Spoken Word Album, for 8:46, which he released mid-pandemic, and which addressed the murder of George Floyd. That means he’ll be competing against no less than Barack Obama, for A Promised Land.
The two weren’t the only “cancelled” artists who wound up with Grammy nominations. Marilyn Manson, who’s facing sexual assault lawsuits from several women, wound up recognized for his work on Kanye West’s Donda. Kevin Hart, whose homophobic comments led to him withdrawing as host of the 2019 Oscars, will compete with C.K. for the comedy album Zero F***s Given.
Chappelle has not apologized for his anti-trans comments, which he’s made across numerous specials for Netflix. After his most recent controversial special, The Closer, dropped, he even told a roaring crowd, “If this is what being canceled is like, I love it.” Perhaps it was a joke on how “cancel culture” isn’t real, that it doesn’t destroy lives but make them stronger. Or perhaps he was just reveling in his infamy.
But when word broke out that C.K., Chappelle and other “cancelled” artists were being celebrated by a major awards body, some people on social media wondered if “cancel culture” was just a bunch of BS.
only one grammy nom each for dave chappelle, kevin hart, and louis CK!! cancel culture strikes again!!
(@Joonbug134340)