Search Results for: SNL

Jason Sudeikis Is Having One Hell of a Year

Longreads Pick

“He got famous playing a certain kind of funny guy on SNL, but when Jason Sudeikis invented Ted Lasso, the sensitive soccer coach with the earnest mustache, the actor found a different gear—and a surprise hit. Now, ahead of the show’s second season, Sudeikis discusses his wild ride of a year and how he’s learning to pay closer attention to what the universe is telling him.”

Author: Zach Baron
Source: GQ
Published: Jul 13, 2021
Length: 20 minutes (5,000 words)

Shelved: Jeff Buckley’s Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk

Frans Schellekens / Getty

Tom Maxwell | Longreads | February 2019 | 14 minutes (3,966 words)

 

On the evening of May 29, 1997, singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley and his roadie Keith Foti picked their way down the steep, weedy bank to Wolf River Harbor in Memphis, Tennessee. Buckley, wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and heavy Doc Martens boots, waded into the water singing Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love.” After about 15 minutes, a boat passed. Concerned about their boom box getting wet, Foti moved it out of harm’s way. When he turned back around, Buckley was gone with the undertow. His body wouldn’t be found for days. He was 30 years old.

Jeff Buckley had mastered that most singular of instruments: his own voice. Possessing the same incredible range as opera icon Pavarotti, his phrasing could be anguished or exquisite; his breath control was phenomenal. Beyond that, he was the soul of eclecticism: Raised on prog rock, he dabbled in hair metal, gospel, country, and soul. Once, during a live performance, he improvised in the ecstatic style of Qawwali devotional singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan — someone Buckley once described as “my Elvis” — over the riff from Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

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Hanif Abdurraqib on Loving A Tribe Called Quest

Hanif Abdurraqib by Kate Sweeney / University of Texas Press

Jonny Auping  | Longreads | February 2019 | 20 minutes (5,266 words)

Hanif Abdurraqib claims that he “wasn’t interested in writing the definitive book on A Tribe Called Quest.” What he produced instead was much more powerful. Abdurraqib’s recently released book, Go Ahead In the Rain: Notes To A Tribe Called Quest, does provide a history of the revolutionary rap group, but more importantly it’s a memoir of listening and feeling, a deeply personal book unafraid to pair music criticism with intimate reflections.

A Tribe Called Quest debuted in 1990 with the album People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm, an eclectic layering of samples produced by the group’s de facto leader, Q-Tip, and rhymed over with quirky stories and confident punch lines. Their first three albums, all released by 1993, are considered hip-hop canon and three of the most influential albums of the past 30 years across any genre.

A Tribe Called Quest’s 2016 comeback album seemed destined to debut amidst doomed circumstances. Phife Dawg, the group’s swaggering and quick-witted lyricist, had died of diabetes between the making of the album and it’s release. Three days before the album came out Donald Trump won a shocking presidential election. No singles had been released prior to We’ve Got it From Here…Thank You 4 Your Service, but it turned out to be powerful response to the politics of the time, a prophetic pushback against inequality, as well as a statement of the group’s place in popular culture. Pitchfork called the album, “the first time in their career that the entire group was at their peak.”

You could argue that Go Ahead In the Rain is the type of dream project that anyone who has ever felt immense fandom — or even love — for a particular music would want to write. It’s a tribute to a group, and who doesn’t enjoy explaining why their favorite should also be your favorite? But Abdurraqib earns the authority to actually pull it off, not just through his elegant writing but also by having the courage to use Tribe’s music to examine his own place in the world and reckon with what he discovered. Read more…

Of Blackness and ‘Beauty’

Young Woman with Peonies by Frédéric Bazille, 1870 / The New Press

Morgan Jerkins | Longreads | January 2019 | 12 minutes (2,731 words)

Back in 2013, Miley Cyrus was in the hip-hop phase of her career, during which she consorted with rappers and attempted to twerk for more notoriety. The hit pieces calling out her cultural appropriation were ubiquitous. Everyone had an opinion on her new gimmick, including sociologist Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom, who wrote an essay for Slate on the dangers of Miley’s now infamous MTV performance and inserted herself into the narrative by calling herself unattractive. The comments, some of which she included in her collection Thick: And Other Essays were “brutal.” White women were upset with her for believing that she was unattractive when in their eyes, she was the opposite, and black women were upset with her for what they assumed was self-hatred on display. Both groups, as far as McMillan Cottom was concerned, were wrong. Both were aghast that she would call the devil by its name in broad daylight. What she explains in one of the most compelling sections of Thick is that beauty is about capital and power. Predominant standards of beauty center the white female body, and as a dark-skinned black woman, she exists outside that kind of beauty. That’s not to say that she did not find herself beautiful by black standards, in the circles in which she travels — at the historically black institution of which she is an alumna, or Rudean’s, a legendary joint for black North Carolinians. However, beauty as we know it in Western civilization is exclusionary. It is not meant for everyone.

As a culture we have a tremendously difficult time with black women who are overwhelmingly honest about what the world has done to them. One of the first examples McMillan Cottom refers to is the SNL Weekend Update bit where Leslie Jones speaks of her desirability on a plantation vis-à-vis in the modern age:

“The way we view black beauty has changed,” Jones said. “See, I’m single right now, but back in the slave days, I would have never been single. I’m six feet tall and I’m strong, Colin. Strong! I mean, look at me, I’m a mandingo … I’m just saying that back in the slave days, my love life would have been way better. Massah would have hooked me up with the best brotha on the plantation. … I would be the No. 1 slave draft pick. Now, I can’t even get a brotha to take me out for a cheap dinner. I mean, damn. Can a b—– get a beef bowl?”

As McMillan Cottom points out, “It is full of personal pain that results from a structural reality that a woman like Jones — almost six feet tall, dark-complexioned, short-haired, black American — embodies.” Like McMillan Cottom, Jones was vilified by the public. People missed the point entirely. No one in white American culture enjoys it when a black woman lays bare her injuries. This entire section of the book gave me new language for a terrible, old feeling. While I am not dark-skinned, I have felt the pressure, like many other black girls and women, to adhere to a white female standard of beauty. Sure, I can look at my mother’s brown skin, or watch the black film canon for solace, but white female beauty is all-encompassing and terroristic. No one can walk can peruse the magazine aisle at a grocery store or flip through the options on a TV subscription service without being reminded that white women are at the center. Macmillan Cottom writes, “Beauty has an aesthetic, but it is not the same as aesthetics, not when it can be embodied, controlled by powerful interests, and when it can be commodified.” What better way to set the standard than through visual art?
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Stories to Read in 2019

Here are stories from 2018 that captured Longreads editors’ imaginations as deserving of ongoing attention. If you like these, you can sign up to receive our weekly email every Friday.

Danielle Jackson
Writer and contributing editor, Longreads

Always Open, The Eureka Hotel (Jamey Hatley, Strange Horizons)

The July 30 issue of Strange Horizons, a monthly journal dedicated to speculative fiction, focused on narratives of the southeastern United States, and were all written by indigenous authors and other writers of color. In the stories they selected and nurtured, editors Sheree Renee Thomas, Erin Roberts, and Rasha Abdulhadi brought to light a multiciplicitious South, ripe with the region’s “history, music, food, language,” yet sensitive to the hauntings and challenges still left unresolved.

My favorite story of the issue, “Always Open, the Eureka Hotel,” by Memphis-born writer Jamey Hatley, is an innovative, life-stirring feat of storytelling that resists the boundaries of genre and the page itself to dive deep into the interiors of its characters, into the heart and marrow of a place. A young Black girl in Jim Crow Mississippi has been caught in an affair with a mysterious, blues-playing lover; her protective father and brother drive her North, toward Chicago, away from the trouble her lover can bring. Guided by the Negro Motorist Green Book and the Negro Yearbook and Directory, the family journeys through sundown towns and has a menacing encounter with a white police officer. Their stop in Memphis at the Eureka Hotel changes the young girl’s life: “You thought you were hungry for what your lover could teach you, but you were hungry for yourself.”

Based on deep research (with thorough footnotes!) into Southern foodways, the traditions of conjure and rootwork, and the queer history of the blues, Hatley has created a world in between the real one and a fictional one, between now and the past, to reveal something truer about the South and feminine longing and hope than anything I’ve read in a long time.

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How Famous Women Clean Up After Men

Evan Agostini, Invision, AP / Jordan Strauss, Invision, AP / Evan Agostini, Invision, AP

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | December 2018 | 8 minutes (2,007 words)

She looks like your mom. The way she does when you’ve fucked up. She’s already shaking her head before he comes out. He knows he’s done something wrong. She does too. And when he finally shows up her anger is as hot as the arterial hue of the set around her. “Take Me Back Cardi,” says the flower display he has rolled out into the middle of her performance — a request, but not really. This is a declaration, the kind of display you see in a children’s parade. Because that’s what this is: infantile and garish and impersonal. And when Offset advances, his head bowed, holding a bouquet of white flowers I could never afford, his wife, mid-concert, is not having it. You can’t hear her, but you can see her holding up that index finger, and you can read those lips: “Stop.” But the damage is done.

Though the circumstances vary, within days of each other three famous men — Offset, Pete Davidson, and Kanye West — expressed what could be uncharitably characterized as the male version of hysteria (prostacea?) this past weekend. And in each case, the women who love them — Cardi B, Ariana Grande, and Kim Kardashian West, respectively — bore part of the burden. All three of these famous women showed up to defuse the situation, whether they were still with the man in question or not. Because, despite their celebrity and their power, social mores restrict all of them to a familiar script: when men act up, women clean up.

        * * *

It took less than a year for Offset to fuck up. In December 2017, a sex tape surfaced purportedly showing him in bed with a woman who was not his wife. In a Rolling Stone cover story published soon after (he appeared alongside his group, Migos), he refused to discuss it. “It’s my real life,” he said. “It ain’t no gig. It ain’t no fucking game, you know what I’m saying?” What Offset was saying was that he could choose not to say anything, while his fiancée was bombarded with questions — “didnt he cheat on u like 14 times (this year)? ” “yoooo why is cardi b still with loser ass offset how many times does he need to cheat on you sis”  — about why she continued to be with an unfaithful deadbeat. And it was said wife, Cardi B, who finally addressed it in her Cosmopolitan cover. “I’m going to take my time, and I’m going to decide,” she said. “It’s not right, what he fucking did—but people don’t know what I did, ’cause I ain’t no angel.” But she wasn’t the one with a (reportedly) leaked sex tape. And the issue wasn’t really misbehavior. It was that a man in a public relationship was once again messing up and leaving the woman to tidy up after him.

Nor did it seem entirely true that Offset didn’t consider it a “fucking game.” Earlier this month, Cardi B posted a video on Instagram stating that the couple had split. She spoke diplomatically — “I guess we just grew out of love” — and praised her ex despite the circumstances. Offest issued a glib comment in response, “Y’all won,” which appeared to shift the onus from him to the public. A few days later he tweeted at this nebulous populace again: “FUCK YALL I MISS CARDI.” He then posted a birthday video in which he stated his one wish was to reunite with Cardi B along with one of those I’m-sorry-you-felt-bad non-apologies: “I want to apologize to you Cardi, you know I embarrassed you, I made you a little crazy,” “I apologize for breaking your heart.”

A day later Offset crashed his wife’s gig headlining the Rolling Loud festival (she was the first woman to do so). “All of my wrongs have been made public,” he tweeted, “i figure it’s only right that my apologies are made public too.” The calculus smacked inconsiderate — Offset seemed to be only thinking about himself, how gracious he was being, and not about Cardi B, how his intrusion affected her, how it interrupted her work, how it dumped his emotional distress on her doorstep. That was for her to worry about.

The predominant public reaction to Offset was that he was being manipulative, swiping the spotlight and interrupting a woman on the job — “It’s toxic because it is somebody who has created the negativity in the situation trying to control the situation,” actress Amanda Seales said on Instagram — while a minority of famous men, including 50 Cent, The Game, and John Mayer, argued that Cardi B should take him back. Once again, she was left to handle the fallout. Even before she had removed her costume, the exhausted “Be Careful” rapper went on Instagram live backstage to defend her ex. “Even though I’m hurt and I’m like going through a fucked up stage right now,” she said, “I don’t want nobody fucking talking crazy about my baby father neither.” That same night, she posted another video in which she mentioned Pete Davidson, who had written what many assumed to be a suicide note earlier in the day: “I wouldn’t want my baby father to have that feeling because of millions of people be bashing him every day.”

Ariana Grande is to Pete Davidson what Cardi B is to Offset. The 25-year-old pop star has been mythologized as a maternal figure ever since her response to the Manchester bombing. At that time, there was a patronizing tenor to the accolades she received about her grace, as though she were as responsible as the president to heal a nation. And she embodied that same spirit for her ex. In early December, Davidson, who was recently diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, posted an emotional message on Instagram about his state of mind in the wake of his split from Grande (they started dating in May, were engaged in June, and broke up in October). “I’m trying to understand how when something happens to a guy the whole entire world just trashes him without any facts or frame of reference,” he wrote. Grande, whose last boyfriend Mac Miller died in September of an accidental overdose, shared the note and politely reminded everyone to be kind, despite having just one month prior been annoyed with Davidson’s Saturday Night Live joke about their failed engagement. “i care deeply about pete and his health,” she wrote. “i’m asking you to please be gentler with others, even on the internet.” Then, just this past weekend, Davidson, who has been open about a past suicide attempt, set off alarms with another demonstrative Instagram post. “i really don’t want to be on this earth anymore,” it read. “i’m doing my best to stay here for you but i actually don’t know how much longer i can last.” Grande, who had been blocked by her ex on social media, rushed to the SNL set. “I know u have everyone u need and that’s not me, but i’m here too,” she tweeted. (Davidson reportedly refused to see her.)

Perhaps the most beleaguered constituent of celebrity coupledom is Kim Kardashian West, though she claims to simply be returning the favor: “He’s put himself up against the world for me when everyone told him, ‘You cannot date a girl with a sex tape. You cannot date a reality-show girl. This is gonna ruin your career.'” But even if a relationship can be measured as a series of transactions, she has paid off her debt to Kanye West multiple times over. Earlier this year Kardashian West defended her husband, who has claimed he was misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder, as a “free thinker” amid reports that his mental health was in disarray following a split with his manager and lawyer. When West more recently ranted on Twitter about Drake, claiming that the Canadian rapper had threatened him, his wife tweeted at said rapper, “Never threaten my husband or our family. He paved the way for there to be a Drake.” She has even defended West against mere trifles: after he was called out for using his phone at a Broadway show, Kardashian West explained that he was just taking notes. But her most labor-intensive support followed West’s controversial visit to the White House in October, red MAGA hat in tow. In an interview with CNN’s Van Jones, the reality megastar was tasked with interpreting her husband’s “confusing” meeting rather than talking about her own work. “I feel like he’s very misunderstood and the worst communicator,” she said. Jones praised her for her devotion, dubbing her “the Kanye translator.”

* * *

“I am not a babysitter or a mother,” Ariana Grande proclaimed in May. She tweeted the pronouncement after she was blamed for ex Mac Miller’s car accident (the charge: she had broken up with him and moved on to Davidson). Grande was not having it: “shaming / blaming women for a man’s inability to keep his shit together is a very major problem.” This problem will be familiar to those who are aware of the gendered reality of “emotional labor,” a term coined by sociologist Arlie Hochschild in 1983 to refer to the management of feelings in the context of paid employment (the service industry, for instance). Though the expression has become a catchall for every type of emotional admin performed by women, Grande is referring specifically to another Hochschild term, “emotion work”:  This is the support women provide, primarily in their close relationships, that causes needless distress to them. “In general, we gender emotions in our society by continuing to reinforce the false idea that women are always, naturally and biologically able to feel, express, and manage our emotions better than men,” sociologist Dr. Lisa Huebner told Gemma Hartley, who expanded this line of thinking in her 2018 book, Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward. “We find all kinds of ways in society to ensure that girls and women are responsible for emotions and, then, men get a pass.”

Within this paradigm, a number of famous women have defended not just their significant others but their male friends over #MeToo claims. Most recently, a number of actresses have emerged to support NCIS star Michael Weatherly over sexual harassment claims made by actress Eliza Dushku. Lena Dunham has also apologized for defending Girls writer Murray Miller against a sexual assault accusation after claiming “insider knowledge” she didn’t in fact possess. “I had actually internalized the dominant male agenda that asks us to defend it no matter what, protect it no matter what,” she wrote in The Hollywood Reporter, introducing the issue she guest edited. The converse rarely applies — unruly women, like Azealia Banks or Amanda Bynes, are rarely publicly defended by men. To this day, Sean Young is remembered primarily for her alleged harassment of James Woods in 1988 rather than her performances. Other women, like Lindsay Lohan and Amber Heard, must defend themselves. I’m sure there are men who have supported women who act out the way Cardi B supports Offset, Ariana Grande supports Pete Davidson, and Kim Kardashian West supports Kanye West, but I consume media for a living and I literally can’t think of any.

This phenomenon is not restricted to celebrities, of course. It contaminates every realm, from politics (see Ashley and Brett Kavanaugh) to tech (see Grimes and Elon Musk). Emotion work implicates all women in the downfall of their significant others (when men triumph, women are rarely given the same credit) and monopolizes the time and energy they could be providing their own work — it compromises women not only personally but professionally. Which is not to say that emotion work should transcend gender: rather, it should not be the norm for anyone. By taking responsibility for our own behavior, we release those around us from a life of hard labor on our behalf. “The solution is not for men and women to share alienated work,” Hochschild told The Atlantic. “The solution is for men and women to share enchanted work. These are expressions of love.”

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

Interview: Simon Rich on Guilt, Humor Writing, and Being the Worst Person Ever

Jessica Gross | Longreads | Oct. 2014 | 17 minutes (4,290 words)

By the time Simon Rich graduated from Harvard, where he served as president of the Harvard Lampoon, he had a two-book deal from Random House. Less than a decade later, the humorist has written four short story collections and two comic novels. He also spent four years writing for Saturday Night Live (he was the youngest writer SNL ever hired) and about two years at Pixar, and is now at work on a film and a television series.

Rich’s level of productivity, impressive as it is, takes a backseat to the quality of his humor writing. His stories are crystalline, eccentric, and universally hilarious. Many of the stories in his new collection, Spoiled Brats are built on an unusual premise, or told from a surprising angle. In “Animals,” a hamster narrates his wretched existence as a class pet at an elementary school. In “Gifted,” a mother insists that her son—born as a monster, with horns and a tail—is exceptional. And in “Distractions,” a writer believes the whole world is out to get him, and they really are.

* * *

How old were you when you started actively, seriously writing?

Well, I always loved to write. As early as kindergarten, I plagiarized Roald Dahl stories that I would try to pass off as my own. But I think it sort of shifted around when I was 17. That’s when I started writing every single day, whether or not I had an idea. Until then, I would only sit down and write a story if one occurred to me, and then I started to wake up every single day and write for a few hours whether or not I had anything worthwhile to say.

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Interview: Simon Rich on Guilt, Humor Writing, and Being the Worst Person Ever

Longreads Pick

An interview with humorist Simon Rich on comedy, writing stories for the New Yorker vs. writing sketches for SNL, and his new book Spoiled Brats.

Source: Longreads
Published: Oct 14, 2014
Length: 17 minutes (4,290 words)

The Mysteries of Phil Hartman’s Creative Genius

Part of the reason Hartman remains fuzzy in our memories was his own doing. When he joined SNL’s cast in 1986, it was customary for a newcomer to declare he would be the next John Belushi. Hartman had a different ambition. He told the Los Angeles Times he wanted to be the next Dan Aykroyd.

But another part is the unusual nature of Hartman’s talent. Hartman was so good at playing smarmy, air-quoting, golden-voiced sharpies — “20 percent droid,” said the writer Robert Smigel — that it’s difficult to catalogue all the comic notes he left behind in the universe.

You know when Stephen Colbert jogs across the stage and gives the audience a significant look? Or when Ron Burgundy exclaims, “By the beard of Zeus!”? These aren’t quotations, or even conscious homages. But make no mistake. What you’re observing is Hartmanism — the art of being unctuous.

Bryan Curtis, in Grantland, on Saturday Night Live’s “glue,” the late Phil Hartman.

Read the story

Hartman’s original SNL audition:

Regrettable

Longreads Pick

What happened when the author re-reported Bob Woodward’s book on John Belushi:

“Of all the people I interviewed, SNL writer and current Sen. Al Franken, referencing his late comedy partner Tom Davis, offered the most apt description of Woodward’s one-sided approach to the drug use in Belushi’s story: ‘Tom Davis said the best thing about Wired,’ Franken told me. ‘He said it’s as if someone wrote a book about your college years and called it Puked. And all it was about was who puked, when they puked, what they ate before they puked and what they puked up. No one read Dostoevsky, no one studied math, no one fell in love, and nothing happened but people puking.'”

Source: Slate
Published: Mar 12, 2013
Length: 13 minutes (3,279 words)