- Words Notion Staff
Rated Reads this week takes a look at the anti-aestheticisation of Instagram, the BRITs' struggle to stay relevant and comedy's latest existential crisis.
Worthy winners aside, the BRITs is struggling to keep pace with modern pop
This week’s BRITs marked a feast of contemporary British talent, from Adele to Sam Fender to Holly Humberstone to Little Simz to Dave, but Alexis Petridis at The Guardian argues that the awards ceremony is failing to stay up to date with current trends, in spite of all the TikTok voting and exclusive NFTs that were laid on for “younger audiences” to invest in. It’s difficult keeping pace with all those zoomers and their Snapchats.
Comedy. It’s about making people laugh, right? Wrong. Well, mostly. Stand-up has become far more of a complicated medium in recent years, caught between confessional monologues and traditional joke telling. Also, there’s the whole lengthy existential crisis about the spectre of ‘cancel culture’ threatening comedians’ rights to be racist. Aja Romano unpacks the difficult layers of what it means to be funny in distinctly unfunny times for Vox.
A Hallowed London Jazz Club Comes to Life Onscreen
Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club has been a staple venue for the jazz scene in London for decades, and was a true hotspot for some of the genre’s finest days in the 1960s. The New York Times has the latest on a new documentary that sheds a light on both the nightclub and its reclusive owner, whose connections brought the club to the top of the pile in London.
