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      Neil Young calls for empathy for Capitol attackers: 'We are not enemies'

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      Neil Young has called for empathy towards those who stormed the US Capitol building in Washington DC, arguing they had been “manipulated” into doing so.In a message posted to his website, Young writes:
      I feel empathy for the people who have been so manipulated and had their beliefs used as political weapons. I may be among them. I wish internet news was two-sided. Both sides represented on the same programs. Social media, at the hands of powerful people – influencers, amplifying lies and untruths, is crippling our belief system, turning us against one another. We are not enemies. We must find a way home.
      The veteran rock star has long been critical of Donald Trump, and until recently was suing for using his songs during political rallies. In his new message, he again criticised the outgoing president, saying he “has betrayed the people, exaggerated and amplified the truth to foment hatred”, but said his feelings are now “beyond” Trump.“Resentment of the Democratic party among the insurrectionists at the Capitol was rampant. We don’t need this hate,” he wrote. “We need discussion and solutions. Respect for one another’s beliefs. Not hatred … With social media, issues are turned to psychological weapons and used to gather hatred in support of one side or the other. This is what Donald J Trump has as his legacy.”He also criticised the “double standard” that saw heavy crackdowns against Black Lives Matter protesters in Washington in 2020, and relatively light policing of last week’s Capitol breach.During the 2020 presidential campaign, Young initially backed Bernie Sanders, but also voiced support for Joe Biden after he won the Democratic nomination, saying Biden would bring “compassion and empathy” back to the White House.Last week, Young sold a 50% stake in his entire songwriting catalogue to the publishing company Hipgnosis for an undisclosed fee thought to be around $150m. More

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      Kanye West announces 'Kanye 2024' as he fails to make election impact

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      Kanye West has suggested he will run for president in 2024, following his failed bid this year.
      Alongside a photo of him next to an electoral map filled with Republican and Democrat wins, he tweeted “welp”, an expression of disappointment. He added: “Kanye 2024”.

      ye
      (@kanyewest)
      WELP KANYE 2024 🕊 pic.twitter.com/tJOZcxdArb

      November 4, 2020

      West was a latecomer to the 2020 race, announcing his candidacy in July. Initially focusing on abortion and faith, he later drew up a 10-point platform, calling for support for the environment and arts, an anti-interventionist foreign policy, and reforms to the legal system and policing.
      He struggled to make it to the ballots of many states, including some that legally barred him from appearing, and encouraged supporters to write him on to their ballot papers. Across the 12 states whose ballots he appeared on, he won fewer than 60,000 votes. He found most success in Tennessee, winning more than 10,000 votes, 0.3% of the state’s total.
      As he cast his own vote, West said he had never previously voted in a presidential election. He tweeted: “God is so good. Today I am voting for the first time in my life for the President of the United States, and it’s for someone I truly trust … me.” More

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      Lady Gaga attacks Trump's 'grab' remarks at Joe Biden rally

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      Lady Gaga gave an impassioned message of support for Joe Biden as America heads to the polls, making reference to Donald Trump’s history of crude sexual remarks and alleged sexual assaults.“Vote like your life depends on it, or vote like your children’s lives depends on it, because they do,” she told a rally in Pennsylvania. “Everybody, no matter how you identify, now is your chance to vote against Donald Trump, a man who believes his fame gives him the right to grab one of your daughters, or sisters, or mothers or wives by any part of their bodies … Vote for Joe. He’s a good person.”Her words referred to Trump’s infamous 2005 boast that “when you’re a star, they let you do it … Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything”.Trump referred to Gaga at his own Pennsylvania rally, saying she “is not too good … I could tell you stories about Lady Gaga. I know a lot of stories.”On Sunday, Trump’s communications director Tim Murtagh tweeted: “Nothing exposes Biden’s disdain for the forgotten working men & women of PA like campaigning with anti-fracking activist Lady Gaga. This desperate effort to drum up enthusiasm is actually a sharp stick in the eye for 600,000 Pennsylvanians who work in the fracking industry.” Gaga responded: “I’m glad to be living rent free in your head.”At his Pennsylvania rally, Trump also criticised Jon Boni Jovi, Jay-Z, and LeBron James, who won the 2020 NBA championship with the LA Lakers in October. “I didn’t watch one shot, I got bored, back forth, back forth,” Trump said. “You know why? When they don’t respect our country, when they don’t respect our flag, nobody wants to watch”, a reference to the kneeling protests James and his team made on their return in July.James later endorsed Biden on Instagram, saying: “We need everything to change and it all starts tomorrow.” More

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      Demi Lovato has made the most damning protest song of the Trump era

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      How do you solve a problem like Donald? Like Nixon, Reagan and Thatcher before him, President Trump has been a great catalyst for protest in the arts but his villainy is so absurd and flamboyant that it is hard to attack him without stating the obvious. Assaulting him head-on is like staring into the sun. It is no surprise that his most effective satirist is the comedian Sarah Cooper, who lip-syncs to his own words rather than writing her own.In music, to sing about the US these past four years is to allude to the elephant in the White House. Trump’s influence is often oblique: his presence seeps into records like poison gas. In songs such as Childish Gambino’s This Is America, Kendrick Lamar’s XXX, the 1975’s Love It If We Made It or Hurray for the Riff Raff’s Pa’lante, he is mentioned briefly or not at all. So who would have predicted that one of the most powerful songs about Trump – Demi Lovato’s Commander in Chief – would come so late in the day, and be so direct?It’s not that it’s unusual for a mainstream pop artist to speak out at the risk of losing fans. The likes of Beyoncé, Taylor Swift and Katy Perry have been moved to take political positions and even channel them into songs, such as Swift’s Miss Americana & the Heartbreak Prince or Lana Del Rey’s Looking for America. Lovato, who describes herself as “a queer, Hispanic woman”, has previously been vocal about issues such as mental health and body image: her most recent hit was called OK Not to Be OK. Still, there is something wonderfully unexpected and bold about the moral clarity of her latest song that she debuted at the Billboard music awards last night. I’ve listened to nothing else since.Produced by Eren Cannata and Billie Eilish’s brother Finneas, the song sounds like a heartbreak ballad. In a sense that’s what it is, as it expresses the emotional pain of the Trump era, and 2020 in particular. While it’s not without lyrical flourishes (“Fighting fires with flyers and praying for rain”), it is largely plain-spoken and direct, conveying grief, resilience and disgust. Lovato has said that she has often thought of writing Trump a letter, or sitting down with him to ask him why he behaves the way he does, but that a song opens these questions up to everybody: “I’m not the only one / That’s been affected and resented every story you’ve spun / And I’m a lucky one / ’Cause there are people worse off that have suffered enough.” In the arrestingly stark video, a diverse range of Americans lip-sync the song before Lovato takes over for the final minute.Commander in Chief opens with a wholesome, relatable line about the values that we are supposedly taught (unless our father is Fred Trump) when we are young. It’s not really partisan. Lovato the protest singer is an exasperated everywoman, interrogating Trump’s failings as a human being as much as a politician: his corruption, his vanity, his carelessness, his sadism. The line, “Do you get off on pain?” reminds me of Adam Serwer’s classic 2018 Atlantic essay, The Cruelty Is the Point. She gets to the fundamental incomprehensibility of Trump’s callousness: “Honestly, if I did the things you do, I couldn’t sleep, seriously.” The gospel-elevated bridge rises above the president’s toxic headspace and turns to the summer’s Black Lives Matter protests: “We’ll be in the streets while you’re bunkering down.” The final line of the chorus (“How does it feel to still be able to breathe?”) references both Covid-19, which has killed more than 215,000 Americans on Trump’s watch, and the BLM slogan “I can’t breathe”. More

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      'I have a sense of urgency': Sufjan Stevens wakes from the American dream

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      The Oscars were an ordeal for Sufjan Stevens. “Honestly, one of the most traumatising experiences of my entire life,” the songwriter half-laughs, half-groans. The event was, he says, “a horrifying Scientology end-of-year prom” representative of “everything I hate about America and popular culture”.He had never paid much attention to them before being nominated in 2018. Mystery of Love – his bittersweet folk ballad, written for Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name – was up for best original song and Stevens had been invited to perform. His devoted fans celebrated this appearance as a moment of long-overdue mainstream recognition for the spotlight-shy then-42-year-old; 26 million viewers were watching at home, after all. But for the artist himself, shrinking into his pink-and-black striped blazer as Hollywood A-listers schmoozed around him, there was not much to celebrate. “I didn’t want to have anything to do with that world and that culture,” he says. “I don’t want to be part of any room full of adults hemming and hawing over plastic trophies.”Stevens has spent his career adjusting his work to help avoid such rooms. The Detroit-born composer is an indie household name, with St Vincent, Moses Sumney (both of whom joined him onstage at the Oscars) and the National among his peers. He has fans in hip-hop, too: Kendrick Lamar and Mac Miller have both sampled him, while in 2011, Donald Glover proclaimed himself “the only black kid at the Sufjan concert” in a verse from Fire Fly telegraphing his sensitivity. More

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      Coups, lies, dirty tricks: The Police's Stewart Copeland on his CIA agent father

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      In 1986, a 69-year-old Miles Axe Copeland Jr gave a memorable interview to Rolling Stone magazine. His three sons were all music industry powerhouses – Stewart played drums in the Police, Miles III was their manager and Ian their booking agent – and Miles himself had been a jazz trumpet-player in his youth. But the interview wasn’t about music. The subject was his days as the CIA’s man in the Middle East between 1947 and 1957, during which time he dined with President Nasser of Egypt, partied with the Soviet spy Kim Philby and, as a pioneer of “dirty tricks”, played a part in removing the leaders of Syria and Iran. Inconveniently for his youngest son, he concluded the interview by implying that the Police were a psy-ops outfit who played shows to “70,000 young minds open to whatever the Police decide to put into them”.“You know it got old Sting on a bad day,” Stewart says, tickled by the memory. “He knew my father very well, and he regrets it now but he took adversely the suggestion that he was a CIA pawn.” More

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      How US K-pop fans became a political force to be reckoned with

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      How US K-pop fans became a political force to be reckoned with Expect more online raids of the kind that drowned out a racist BLM backlash and humiliated Donald Trump, experts say Empty seats at Donald Trump’s rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, after K-pop fans registered for tickets with no intention of attending. Photograph: Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty […] More