- Words Notion Staff
Rated Reads this week takes a look at Latitude Festival's questionable headline choices, Kanye West's 'Donda 2' rollout, and the wild west of celebrity NFT regulation.
Phoebe Bridgers should be headlining Latitude Festival – not Snow Patrol
Latitude Festival has unveiled its lineup for its 2022 edition this coming July in Suffolk, but the roster of artists isn’t satisfying everyone. Roisin O’Connor picks up on one particular flaw in this year’s Latitude, which are its questionable priorities on the headliners. Opinions probably vary on when Snow Patrol hit their peak, but most would argue it happened a little while before Phoebe Bridgers arrived on the scene. Yet the former is higher on the bill than the latter. Go figure.
Believe it or not, a new Kanye West album is out. No, seriously, believe it. It’s not on any of your favourite streaming services, but it is on the Stem Player, a device you can pick up for a cool £200. Ye’s unique release strategy for ‘Donda 2’ has allowed him to take control of every aspect of an album’s rollout, which apparently extends to releasing the songs in unfinished form and updating them as and when. The Ringer takes a look at an album that seems to exemplify the ethos of latter-era Ye: it’s less about the music, and more about the guy releasing it.
If you’ve seen one of your favourite celebrities starting to post pictures of strange ape creatures on social media in the past few months and have been uncertain exactly what is going on, you’re not alone. NFTs are a new frontier of confusing celebrity investment shenanigans, and as Wired notes, the big names responsible for selling them to their fans are having to skirt around plenty of complicated regulation. When it comes to ugly ape avatars, nothing is simple.
Alana Haim: ‘All the big loves of my life have been a f***ing rollercoaster. I’d love one that isn’t’
You know how some people are just unfairly talented? A clear culprit of this injustice is Alana Haim, whose musical talent as one third of Haim has been known for almost a decade, but who emerged with the film Licorice Pizza as an extremely good actress too. At The Independent, Adam White sits down with the multihyphenate to chat turning 30, working with collaborator Paul Thomas Anderson and messy love affairs.
The tragic passing of venerated fashion designer Virgil Abloh late last year was mourned around the world, all the more because Abloh was still creating enthusiastically in his last years. One of his chief legacies was the brand Off-White, and at I-D, Joe Bobowicz takes a look back at a sequence of collections that encapsulated Abloh’s unique perspective on fashion, and on what we all lost when we lost him.