Has anyone fact-checked those Miley/Liam rumours? 🕵️♀️
➕ TikTok's wild rumour making machine, a plane crash in Nepal, & do you call a documentary a doco?
Happy Rāhina (Monday) angels!!! Coming to you after a weekend that I really feel should have left me refreshed, yet I’m still typing this between yawns - nothing that my first cuppa of the day can’t fix tho!! How was your weekend? How are you? What are your quests this week??? Come talk with me in our Substack chat about it all - I miss you!! Me? My weekend was gorg and slow. It started on Saturday by waking up (with no alarm - one of life’s small pleasures), grabbing a cup of coffee from the pot that Flo had made (another pleasure) and reading Bel’s first edish of ‘No News Is Good News’ (a HUGE pleasure)- which was GORG!! It was so nice seeing all your cute responses to her first 🧃solo🧃 quill of the year in here - damn she’s good (and you can experience this bliss by becoming a paid supporter!!) I spent the rest of Saturday doing adult things: I bought a mattress topper and some wine glasses (essench), changed my sheets, did my washing - all that good stuff. I took a stroll with Flo through our local park, and then we went to see M3GAN (I can confirm it’s… fine but the best bits were defs things I’d already seen on TikTok which is more a fault of this generashe and less a fault of the movie.)
I’d set aside Sunday to do some work on a Very Spesh Project (one that you’ll know about after I’ve teased it for an annoying amount of time) and felt that there was no better place to go and clear my head / start working on it than the beach. As per, my willing accomplice Flo jumped in the car with me (she sounds like a dog here, confirming she is a real person - still very yappy and cute tho) and we headed to Piha, where we played in the waves like kids, she went for a run, I worked on this thing, we got cones on the beach… it was bliss.
I also finished two books this weekend! House of Kwa by Mimi Kwa (which I recommend and paying subs get a review of this in our book list) and The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. I’ve been reading the latter for about six months now - it’s a book about grief, which means it’s one I’ve been picking up and putting down as I need it. I found it to be comforting - but not in a sappy way at all - which is what I need out of a book on that subject (no pity, just the reminder that these feelings that I’ve got are universal - isn’t that what we all want?) Now I’ve started a book which I am ABSOLUTELY LOVING (and am on route to finishing already 🥺) called ‘Watching Women & Girls’ by Danielle Pender, and like I said, if you want a review of that I’ll be writing it in our book list!!
If you want access to our bumper reading list OR Bel’s Saturday newsy ‘No News Is Good News’ you know what to do!!
Have you ever been stalked online or IRL following a breakup?
Miley dropped a new single and the rumours are bananas
Caroline Polachek does NOT want to be Gen Z’s Kate Bush
At least 68 people are dead after a plane crashed in Nepal
Six-year-old Virginia boy’s backpack was searched before he shot his teacher
Do you call a documentary a doco?
Have you ever been stalked online or IRL following a breakup?
Still working on this cool project about break-ups for you, and as per, we want this to be based on your experiences!!! So! My next question for you! Have you ever been stalked online, or in real life, following a breakup? Or have you done the stalking? Major or minor - I need your stories!! Drop em here if you feel comfy sharing my babies xxx
Miley dropped a new single and the rumours are bananas
So Miley Cyrus just dropped her new song ‘Flowers’ (on Liam Hemsworth’s birthday actually), and unfortunately as a huge Miley stan… I can’t like it. Not because of its contents, or the rumours surrounding it (which I’ll get into in a sec) but because it’s AN INTERPOLATION OF ‘WHEN I WAS YOUR MAN’ BY BRUNO MARS AND I CANNOT STAND HIS MUSIC (except for the sexy sounds of Silk Sonic of course.)
An interpolation (to jog your memory) is when you recreate the melody of another song (not like sampling where you just copy and paste the original) into your OWN song, and often change the lyrics. So the chorus of Miley’s ‘Flowers’ follows the tune of ‘When I Was Your Man,’ and the lyrics seem to ‘answer’ Bruno’s, see:
Miley’s:
I can buy myself flowers / Write my name in the sand
Talk to myself for hours / Say things you don't understand
I can take myself dancing / And I can hold my own hand
Yeah, I can love me better than you can
Bruno’s:
That I should've bought you flowers / And held your hand
Shoulda gave you all my hours / When I had the chance
Take you to every party 'cause all you wanted to do was dance
Now my baby's dancin' / But she's dancin' with another man
Now, about those rumours…
If you read the rest of the lyrics you can see some pretty clear insights into Miley’s relationship breakdown with Liam Hemsworth (there are even mentions of the house that they owned together burning down), but those references don’t seem to be enough for TikTok users (and then subsequently, Twitter users) who have created a bunch of their own unconfirmed rumours to run with. The two main ones I’m seeing are:
That she filmed the music video inside the house where he “cheated on her with 14 other girls”
That Liam dedicated ‘When I Was Your Man’ to her at her wedding (which makes NO sense because the song is all about not being good enough in a relationship)
Here’s one TikTok that lays out all these rumours as fact:
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and a tweet:
Like I said before - HUGE Miley fan over here - and I really hope these rumours AREN’T true (I’m also glad she’s making BANK of this release, thanks in part to these rumours) but it’s just wild to be seeing all of these spreading without an ounce of truth (which you can literally find out with one Google search.) Be careful out there folks!!
Caroline Polachek does NOT want to be Gen Z’s Kate Bush
I was on Twitter this weekend looking for a livestream link to The 1975’s O2 show (yes, I’m that bitch) when I scrolled past Caroline Polachek (one of my fave artist’s ever) saying this:
And first of all so true bestie, you are this gens Caroline Polachek and we love you for it, but second of all, it made me do a lil bit of a deeper dive on her, where I came across this profile in The Guardian, where the comparison to Kate Bush was made pretty overtly. Obviously, you should go and read it yourself, but there are two parts that I found particularly interesting and wanted to bring to you. The first is about her Dad’s disappointment in her career:
The pair [Caroline and her Dad] had a complicated relationship. He was a professor of Chinese history at Columbia and Princeton universities, and later worked in finance. Despite the acclaim and success she earned in Chairlift and solo, she says he never came to see her play and “never approved” of her art, finding her music “too pop and too commercial, and therefore less authentic because it wasn’t insurrectionist or radical enough”.
The narrative that pop music (or ANY genre) as a rule can’t be radical irks me, but I don’t think that’s how too many people feel these days so I don’t feel like I need to dwell on it. The other part of the article I found interesting (for obvious reasons) was her take on fandom:
Sovereignty is one thing; privacy, an entirely different beast. Polachek is now one of the many niche pop stars with ardent stans tracking her every move. She says that she finds stan culture “so generative and creative” and is grateful for the “porous and emotional relationship” they share. But she is keenly aware of the toxicity it can generate. “There is so much deep-seated misogyny in stan culture and I think the idea of ownership is really toxic – the idea that because I have streamed your music, I own you and you owe me things,” she says. “I wouldn’t be the artist I am without my autonomy – I’ve never had a suggestion box, and I never will.”
She continues: “I think there’s this expectation that female pop musicians can be puppeteered by our fanbase, and I want nothing to do with it. I don’t envy bigger artists who have to contend with a really aggressive wall of voices telling them how to live their lives – I will reject that at all costs.”
Liv and I have talked at LENGTH on Culture Vulture about fandom and ownership, and how artists don’t actually owe us shit (except for idk??? creating the art we love them for in the first place???), but I’ve never really felt that it was isolated to female pop musicians as she suggests. Based on my fandom experiences, it’s certainly not just the gals who deal with this (look at the pedestal we put Harry Styles on!) Anyway, all of this is just food for thought that I wanted to share with you, coz that’s what we do around here!
PS, stream ‘Desire, I Want to Turn Into You’ on Feb 14th.
At least 68 people are dead after a plane crashed in Nepal
At least 68 people have been killed after a plane carrying 72 people crashed near an airport in central Nepal, during a flight from Kathmandu to the tourist town of Pokhara. The plane (as shown in multiple videos posted to social media) crashed on landing before catching fire.
Six-year-old Virginia boy’s backpack was searched before he shot his teacher
Content warning: gun violence.
Just wanted to update you all on this story (which we talked about on The Shit Show last week in case you missed it) - administrators at the school where a six-year-old shot his teacher “learned the child may have had a weapon before the shooting but did not find the 9mm handgun despite searching his bag.”
Michelle Prince, spokesperson for the Newport News school district said:
“I’m not able to comment on whether other searches may have occurred, except for the fact that the superintendent has shared that the student’s backpack was searched and nothing was found at the time.”
For more on this story you can read this or listen to this.
And before I go, you NEED to watch this if you haven’t already
Gen Z’s favourite reporter with the softest boi of all (and one of the many loves of my life) Andrew Garfield. Her awkward interviewing style mixed with his cheekiness is EVERYTHING.
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Today’s mundane poll:
#CoreCore videos are becoming more popular on TikTok. What exactly are they? (NBC)
My Week With a No-Needles Lip Filler (NY Mag)
Can true love exist anymore? The 1975’s Matty Healy isn’t sure (Rolling Stone)
THANK U FOR TALKING ABOUT MILEY- i am the biggest fan and i also feel the same way about the song!!!! glad i’m not alone
Ok but Amelia Dimz is so good as an interviewer! I hope we get to see her & Andrew Garfield do a proper chicken shop date!! Also Caroline Polachek is so right