Trends of the week
The Internet is fine despite Kim Kardashian’s best efforts
MANILA, Philippines - Poor Kim Kardashian, ever the attention panhandler, agreeing to flash her butt on the cover of Paper magazine and promising to “break the Internet,” only to be greeted with a lot of tired smirks. No part of the sentence “Kim Kardashian poses butt-naked” is shocking anymore in 2014. It’s actually more shocking that none of the parties involved — the editors, Kim, her repulsive mother Kris Jenner — knew this. Now, she’s the butt of jokes and memes, as always, which means the Internet is still working fine, because it takes a lot to actually break it, like doing something beyond unexpected. I mean, she had a sex video that her own mother “produced” and “leaked,” for crying out loud. It’s impossible to try any harder than that.
Taylor Swift is kidding (we hope)
Taylor Swift has long been the poster child for teenage naiveté, building a career on relationship fairy tales that, when shattered by the realities of life and pubescent testosterone, inspired a career turn as revenge fantasy specialist. Her new album, “1989,” supposedly signals another career turn as a more mature, more hardened songwriter who’s into electronica and self-deprecation. The video for Blank Space sees Swift gleefully acknowledge the joke, except she takes it so far with her jarring femme fatale that the only laughter left in the end is the nervous kind. The last line of the chorus is especially Gone Girl-creepy: “I got a blank space baby and I’ll write your name.” Please don’t.
Christopher Nolan bends space-timejust to tell a pretty basic story
How do you get people buzzing about space-time, black holes, and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity for a solid week? Put out one of the more scientifically accurate science fiction movies ever made. Also: be Christopher Nolan. Interstellar rode a tidal wave of hype generated by the pull of Nolan’s gravity, promising to give big scientific ideas his full, elaborate, mind-bending treatment. It turned out to be a pretty fascinating lesson in theoretical physics, wrapped in a fairly vanilla Hollywood story about Americana. It’s a bit of a waste, considering that Interstellar has the most breathtakingly-accurate depiction of a black hole, that spectre of astrophysics long considered to be the holy grail of science, where everything ends or begins — matter, light, all meaning. Somewhere in its singularity is where science intersects with philosophy, and possibly religion. Nolan dives inside, and all he comes up with is a dad yelling at his daughter.
Internet in a furor over Nicki Minaj’s faux-Führer
Nicki Minaj’s lyric video for her new single Only, which explicitly explores her hypothetical sexual relations with guest rappers Drake and Lil Wayne, caused an uproar this week for reasons completely unrelated to the pornographic explicitness of the lyrics. What people are upset about is the Nazi-like imagery, with the logo for Lil Wayne’s record label Young Money emblazoned on armbands and flags like a cartoon swastika. The intention, I suppose, was to use totalitarian imagery to evoke the rappers’ domination of the rap world, or whatever, but the execution was clumsy. So Nicki has to wait for this to die down before people start talking about what she did intentionally, if that’s still interesting.
Macauley Culkin: Not dead
Death hoaxes are great in that they remind people that long-forgotten celebrities are still alive. This week’s victim/winner: Macauley Culkin, star of the first two Home Alone movies, and last seen as frontman of the Velvet Underground parody band Pizza Underground. Far from being offended, the former child star found the rumor funny and even tweeted a picture of himself pretending to be the eponymous dead dude in the movie Weekend at Bernies. He also reminded everyone that he’s on tour. With his joke band. Seriously. I told you death hoaxes are the best.
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What are your top trends this week?
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