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Jessica Boudreaux on Touring After Illness: “Cancer Made Me Realize I May Never Go Back”
In this new series, musicians open up about the issues that are important to them and their community. I spent my twenties on tour. And for the last few years, my band Summer Cannibals and I were consistently spending more time on the road than at home. Over the course of a decade I missed most of my nephews’ birthdays and trips with my family, my relationship was at a breaking point and my mental health was deteriorating due to a life-long anxiety disorder. But when you’re an artist there’s a narrative you’re sold: If you want this bad enough, you’ll do anything to get it. My band was always lucky to be offered great support slots with incredible musicians, but we never hit a groove with headlining. We never had the critical acclaim or the “buzz” we chased. But we believed we just needed ...
Brandi Carlile Is a Queer Icon — And She’s Making the Music Business Better, Too
Brandi Carlile is happy to expound upon bad wine. Bad wine gives her a hangover. The pretension of wine culture leaves a bad taste in her mouth. “Without sounding like I’m judging wine as a concept, it’s annoyingly bougie and culturally hetero,” she says with a laugh. “It’s like golf.” Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news So when it came to developing her own boutique wine label, XOBC, she knew what she did want. It would be a wine for folks who are “a little left of center.” Something a bit rugged — maybe for a camping trip, to be sipped out of a Solo cup — “but it’s not going to give you a f–king headache.” And like everything Carlile does, it wouldn’t just be good — it would do good, too. Because Carlile and her wife, Catherine Shepherd, ...
Danny Boyle Brings Anarchy to TV
London in the late 1970s was trash. Literally. Every street was lined with bags of refuse. Flies buzzed around moldy garbage that often sat for weeks at a time. The haulers were on strike. Prime Minister James Callaghan ignored the trade unions’ demands for higher pay. When pressed by the media over the widespread strikes, Callaghan remarked, “I don’t think that other people in the world would share the view that there is mounting chaos.” What a dolt. Meanwhile, around the city, in the abandoned warehouses and the seedy pubs, a noise was amplifying. At first it sounded like a simple eclectic hum. A single frequency crawling out into the world, learning to feed itself. And it did. This noise evolved into something we call a C major chord. Growing, the noise slithered its way to an A minor c...
The 10 Most Brutal Stunts in Jackass 4.5
Ever since 2002, the Jackass team has been responsible for some of the most brutal and hard-to-watch stunts on television. With six features and multiple spin-offs, the cast members have engaged in hundreds of stunts on camera, sometimes suffering serious injuries as a result. This year, the gang got back together after a long hiatus for Jackass Forever, and with it we got a brand new slate of horrific stunts. Not only that, but a new documentary, Jackass 4.5, gives us a behind-the-scenes look at the making of Jackass Forever, and, by extension, at the awful moments that took place in Jackass Forever. From a blindfold race to a condom filled with sewage, this doc has no shortage of cringe-worthy moments. But for now, here are the top 10. 10. Fire in the Hole <img aria-describedby="...
How Accurate Is the Sex Pistols Show Pistol? Here’s a Fact Check
This week’s release of Pistol, FX’s six-part limited series about the short existence of U.K. punk group Sex Pistols helmed by Oscar-winning director Danny Boyle, has been met with excitement by fans and some serious trepidation by critics. So far, reviews have been mixed (for the record, we liked it) but even among the pans, one aspect that nearly all the writers seem to approve of is the show’s attention to detail. The team behind Pistol went above and beyond to replicate the look and feel of mid-’70s London, the groundbreaking fashion designs of Vivienne Westwood, and the physical mannerisms of the real-life people being portrayed on screen. As for the story being told in Pistol — a group of striving lower-class Londoners who through sheer chutzpah and the machinations of their manager ...
The Best, The Mess & The Rest: Solid Sound Festival
Solid Sound Festival returned to the Berkshires for the biennial festival which saw fans literally of all ages making a trek to MASS MoCA to see Jeff Tweedy and company celebrate the release of their latest release, Cruel Country. We enlisted a Berkshires resident to document the show and his back still hurts from standing for seven hours straight each day and he now understands why so many people brought camping chairs to the main stage. Live and learn. The Best Wilco – Wilco kicked of their Friday night set with Jeff Tweedy warning, “We aren’t going to talk a lot tonight” and added that this would probably be the only time they would be playing these songs together in reference to the band’s nearly flawless rendition of their brand new 21-track double album, Cruel Country. While the...
Natalia Dyer and Charlie Heaton Reflect on “Massive” ‘Stranger Things’ Season 4 and Working With Robert Englund
It’s been almost three years since the third season of Stranger Things, but despite shooting through the COVID-19 pandemic, the show’s fourth and penultimate season has come back stronger than ever before, with a bigger and darker adventure for the Hawkins crew that harkens back to the dire tone of the franchise’s very first season. With increased stakes, the Netflix sensation also introduces a host of new and fun characters to help the Duffy brothers develop existing personalities before bringing the iconic series to its eventual conclusion. Netflix has now released the first six episodes of Season Four, and while the last three episodes of the season will arrive in July, it’s looking to be well worth the wait. Joining us at HYPEBEAST, Nancy Wheeler actress Natalia Dyer and Jonathon Byers...
Norm Macdonald’s Posthumous Nothing Special Is Unlike Any Other Comedy Performance — Review
It’s hard to imagine a comedy set like Norm Macdonald’s latest and last. Nothing Special, a title that manages the Norm-like feat of simultaneous irony and honesty, was recorded at Macdonald’s home, without an audience, during the pre-vaccine pandemic days of 2020. It’s performed in the style of a webcast; MacDonald has a microphone, but he’s sitting down, focusing mostly on his face, as if Zooming into his own special. The press materials boast that it was done in “one take,” which is both impressive, in that Macdonald appears to do 55 minutes of comedy more or less extemporaneously without any breaks for laughs, and obvious, in that he’s occasionally interrupted, by a ringing phone or a barking dog. The comic had been preparing material for his next Netflix special, but, as very few peop...
Why the Stranger Things Season 4 Villain Is the Show’s Best Yet
[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for Stranger Things, Season 4, Episode 7, “Chapter 7: The Massacre at Hawkins Lab.”] One of the biggest challenges faced by any storyteller, not just the folks behind Netflix’s Stranger Things is how to structure your reveals: Delay things too long and without enough explanation, and the viewer gets frustrated. Tell all too early, or drop one too many clues, and you’ll just annoy people. But while there are multiple secrets at the center of Stranger Things Season 4, Volume 1 (as we’re referring to the first seven episodes released over Memorial Day weekend), one of the most exciting aspects of the season is the fact that there’s one answer which unites nearly all of them. Season 4 of the Netflix hit splits up into largely four narratives: Fir...
Why Hybrid Work Without “Culture” is Just Not Enough
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Bob’s Burgers: The 50 Best Original Songs
When you’re watching an average episode of Bob’s Burgers, there are some fixtures of the programs you can always count on seeing: Series regulars like H. Jon Benjamin and Kristen Schaal, the conversational style of the dialogue, the burger-based puns. But just as prominent in this animated comedy are musical numbers. Though they’re not featured in every episode, Bob’s Burgers has frequently made time for individuals in its eclectic cast to break out into song. The members of the Belcher family and their friends and neighbors have such outsized personalities, it only makes sense that they’d only be able to express their emotions through similarly larger-than-life ditties. Across over 230 episodes, Bob’s Burgers has delivered countless memorable tunes, which makes it seemingly impossible to ...
Kraftwerk Kick Off North American “3D Tour” with Mesmerizing Concert in St. Louis: Review
The sheer diversity of the concertgoers who descended upon Kraftwerk’s tour kickoff at The Pageant in St. Louis is a testament to the genre-spanning influence of the German electronic music pioneers. Punks, goths, metalheads, record nerds, businessmen, hipsters young and old: The near-capacity audience was a true smattering of personalities that transcended age and scene. More than a few attendees were even sporting the band’s iconic red-polo-black-tie Man-Machine-era look. And they were all there to witness Kraftwerk’s “3D Tour” — an illustrious audio-visual experience commemorating the group’s 50th anniversary (get tickets here). Upon entering the venue, everyone was handed a pair of white Kraftwerk-branded 3D glasses. On the stage stood the band’s four iconic keyboard pedestals, cutting...
