BEYONCÉ: A LIVING LEGEND: She’s the only person to have their first six albums debut at Number 1 in the US, she’s the most nominated woman in Grammy history and she’s the highest paid black artist of all time. Now the ‘Formation’ hitmaker is the first woman to have three of their albums surpass one billion Spotify streams.
The singer’s 2011 album 4 has now hit the one billion mark on the streaming service, seven years after its release.
According to stats, 4’s most popular tracks include “Run the World (Girls)” and “Love On Top” which together accounts for a huge 400 million streams.
In doing so, it joins I Am… Sasha Fierce and BEYONCÉ, as one of the three albums to have a billion collective streams on the service.
I am not questioning the validity of Taylor’s experience or her story. I am not doing what Lena Dunham did to Aurora Perrineau. What I have a problem with is what Taylor is being positioned as the face of a movement by being placed on this cover, because she won a lawsuit. She lost nothing when others have lost everything when they break silence, but don’t get visibility. Just look at Ke$ha, whose abuser was her record label boss. She took him to court and lost everything, including her career. She broke silence when there was zero room for it and got shamed into hiding. He even put a gag order on her. Why is she not on the cover?
Why is Tarana Burke not on this cover, when she’s been doing this work for 10 years? Yes, she is on the inside and gets to tell her story but she deserves to be on this cover, because if there is a face for the movement, hers is it.
What about, say, Terry Crews, who is a man who decided to break silence and that shit was major. In this culture of toxic masculinity, men speaking up about their victimhood is revolutionary.
Don’t tell me she is here for any reason besides the fact that she’s Taylor, and all the Peak Caucasity that comes with that. They want to sell magazines and she is a recognizable face. Yet and still, this gives me all the pause. Taylor is constantly being rubbed on the head for people doing her wrong, and has built her career on it. I wish TIME Magazine would have given someone else the time to be empathized with so visibly. I wish others’ stories could be told with this space.
I give love to the silence breakers, and for those who try to break silence and have their mouths covered. THEY are the ones we need to hear from the most. Those who are most marginalized
For decades, the celebrated male film directors who “provoke” and abuse actors, supposedly in service of their art, have been given the benefit of the doubt over the women who suffer on their film sets.
Shelley Duvall won Best Actress at Cannes in 1977 for her part in Robert Altman’s 3 Women, but her performance as Wendy Torrance in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, three years later, was criticized so harshly that it would ultimately overshadow everything else she accomplished in her career — even as the film has been used to bolster the claim that Kubrick is one of cinema’s greatest artists. Duvall, playing opposite Jack Nicholson as a woman tormented by her husband’s mounting, murderous rage, was nominated for worst performance at that year’s Razzies; Stephen King, who wrote the original novel, once said, “Shelley Duvall as Wendy is really one of the most misogynistic characters ever put on film. She’s basically just there to scream and be stupid and that’s not the woman that I wrote about.”
But as she explained in her own words, Duvall’s acting wasn’t a mistake, but rather a performance precisely engineered by Kubrick, who intentionally created a horrific environment for her:
“Going through day after day of excruciating work was almost unbearable. … I had to cry 12 hours a day, all day long, the last nine months straight, five or six days a week. … After all that work, hardly anyone even criticized my performance in it, even to mention it, it seemed like. The reviews were all about Kubrick, like I wasn’t there.”
Nicholson has corroborated this description, calling Duvall’s task on set “the toughest job [of] any actor that I’ve seen.” There is even visual proof of that torment in the documentary Making “The Shining,” which was directed by Kubrick’s daughter Vivian and shows the director asking others on set not to show Duvall sympathy. Yet, despite this clear evidence of verbal and emotional abuse, Stanley Kubrick’s reputation as an “auteur” has remained mostly untouched.
In fact, the Duvall incident — and the way in which Kubrick controlled his set — has been wrapped into the mythic aura surrounding him and his film, casually inserted into lists like “25 Things You Might Not Know About The Shining,” alongside trivia like its record-breaking number of takes. Director Saul Metzstein once said of Kubrick that “his films are amazing, and there’s something in them which you couldn’t get unless you were being unbelievably particular and methodical. You need some sort of obsessiveness to make that stuff.” Not only is Kubrick considered one of the most influential directors of all time, but The Shining, specifically, was named the 46th best-directed film ever by the Directors Guild of America.
The implication of all this acclaim is that there was a “method” to Kubrick tormenting Duvall, and that even if it hurt her, the ends justified the means. From von Trier, who once said that watching Nicole Kidman wear a dog collar with a bell on it while shooting Dogville gave him “personal pleasure,” to Hitchcock, who sexually harassed Tippi Hedren while making a film about sexual violence, a man directing can rationalize almost any behavior toward women if what emerges as a final product is something beautiful in the eyes of other men.
Taylor Swift is in trouble with the ACLU of Northern California, which on Monday sent a letter to her regarding her defamation threats made against a local blogger. The blogger in question, PopFron…
just so we’re clear, shes not suing the white supremacists who are calling her an aryan goddess or icon. shes suing someone bringing attention to her passive at best support of white supremacists
“You know what I find interesting? A white supremacist wrote a lengthy op ed about Taylor Swift being the “perfect Aryan goddess” who secretly put Nazi symbols in her lyrics and videos and she didn’t go after him. Breitbart spent hours tweeting her song lyrics when Look What You Made Me Do came out, and that’s an alt-right publication famous for its white nationalist followers and has millions of readers…but she didn’t denounce them. No. She goes after a blog that has less than 1000 followers on Twitter. You know how Trump got more upset at that ESPN anchor for calling him a white supremacist than David Duke and Nazis for proclaiming that he’s “one of them”? Yeah. Same thing.“
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