Xbox Game Pass is a good deal, but did it really need the free publicity?Image: Microsoft
Fact: If you cover games, someone will call you a “shill” at some point. Over the weekend, a contingent of games-focused writers and influencers pushed back on that claim by plastering Twitter with tongue-in-cheek posts about the purported value of Xbox Game Pass, Microsoft’s subscription-based games-on-demand service. The moment quickly went viral. And then it died a swift death, after several official Xbox Twitter accounts got in on the action:
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You know how it goes. Once the brands join the party, the party stops.
As for how it started, Forbes traces the initial meme to IGN’s Destin Legarie. “Twitter is convinced that so many of us are just paid to advertise Xbox Game Pass,” Legarie wrote in a tweet on Saturday afternoon. “That’s crazy!!! Almost as crazy as having access to hundreds of games and day 1 releases for only $9.99/month and if you’re new you can even get 3 months right now for only $1!”
Others followed suit.
“‘Tony, Microsoft’s paying you to talk about Game Pass,’” writer Tony Polanco said in a tweet. “I’m not being paid... but with all the money I save from Game Pass each month, maybe I am.”
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“Found a lot of salty fanboys to block in the last 24 hours, I wonder why?,” Windows Central’s Jez Corden wrote in a tweet. “One thing I’m not wondering about is whether or not XBOX GAME PASS is incredible value. Hundreds of games starting at $9.99! Absolutely crazy value!”
“The ‘rumors’ I’m hearing about creators being paid to promote Game Pass are ridiculous…,” content creator Joseph Moran wrote in a tweet appended with the #ad hashtag. “Just as ridiculous as Xbox putting their first-party games like Halo day & date on the service for the low starting price of $9.99 a month!”
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All of these tweets—and others like it—ended up turning the whole meme into a bonafide viral marketing stunt for Xbox Game Pass. “Xbox Game Pass” started trending on Twitter. Xbox higher-ups Phil Spencer and Aaron Greenberg offered their public approval.
To be clear, it is highly unlikely that many of these tweets were paid for by Microsoft. FTC regulations require social media users to plainly mark paid advertisements as paid advertisements—via text that reads “ad,” “paid,” “spon,” “sponcon,” or something to that end—and will hand down serious ramifications for those who don’t. Most of the tweets in the meme du jour don’t have that indicator. But some do, which muddies the waters. (Kotaku reached out to an Xbox representative about whether or not any tweets of this nature were paid for by Microsoft. At press time, the representative was still looking into it.)
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It’s also fairly obvious that the whole charade started as a sarcastic pushback to an insidious subset of the gaming readership. The insinuation—or the often blatant claim—that cash-loaded companies will pay you, the journalist who covers video games, significant sums under the table. You write positively about Xbox Game Pass, people will say you’re in Microsoft’s pocket. You say that a Sony-published game is among the best of the year, and you’re in Sony’s pocket. No matter what, you can’t win. The impulse to set the record straight is natural.
But it’s also poking a bear. Just scroll through the quote tweets on Legarie’s original post: Some people understand that the line is a bit, because it very obviously is. Others don’t get the joke, or, in bad faith, pretend not to. Plus, this whole meme really only resulted in one thing: Xbox Game Pass—an enormously popular service that’s used by 23 million people and recently received spotlight treatment on the industry’s biggest stage—scoring a weekend of (almost certainly free) publicity.
The mineral pyrite has long been called fool’s gold, its metallic yellow crystals tricking miners into thinking they’d struck real gold. It is not without its uses – the compound creates sparks when hit with steel which can be used to start a fire – but it has always been seen as worthless next to its coveted cousin.
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Now, scientists have discovered that the mineral, made of iron and sulfur, actually contains a type of gold hidden within its crystal structure. Research suggests that extracting this gold could be more sustainable than current energy-intensive gold-mining processes.
Fool’s gold is found inside rocks beneath the Earth’s surface, sometimes near real gold deposits. The mineral has a crystalline structure, which grows over the years and stretches within the rock. Each time the crystals stretch and twist, they break the bonds of nearby atoms. When these bonds are remade, they can sometimes contain small imperfections, areas called ‘dislocations’ that are each around 100,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair.
According to new research, these tiny dislocations can actually contain gold particles.
“Our research shows that gold can be captured when the crystals are being twisted during their history,” said the lead researcher of the new study, Dr Denis Fougerouse from Curtin’s School of Earth and Planetary Sciences.
This gold is quite different to the gold of your wedding band or filling: it’s known as ‘invisible’ gold because it is in such small quantities that it cannot be detected by a microscope. Instead, an instrument called an atom probe is needed to analyse the tiny amounts found within pyrite’s crystal structure.
“[Invisible] gold is not as valuable as “free gold” where the gold is available by simple physical separation,” explained Fougerouse, “but it is still profitable with the right infrastructures, and just as precious as any other kind of gold.”
Read more about gold:
Gold has also been found in fool’s gold in the form of an alloy, where the pyrite and gold atoms are mixed together.
“It is possible that the gold used to make the jewellery you wear could have been extracted from pyrite originally,” said Fougerouse. But to extract the gold from these minerals, however, miners need to use large reactors that require huge amounts of energy to run.
Fougerouse and the team hope that their new discovery could lead to better, more environmentally-friendly ways to mine gold. They have come up with a (yet untested) process for leaching the gold particles from the pyrite crystals, and even suggest using bacteria to ‘attack’ the dislocations to break down the crystal structure and release the gold.
It would be foolish to think our future fillings and wedding rings will be made from pyrite’s ‘invisible gold’, however.
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“Pyrite is a very common mineral and only pyrites that crystallised in the right geological setting will host significant gold,” said Fougerouse. “Some pyrites still live up to their reputation of fool’s gold!”
Amy is the Editorial Assistant at BBC Science Focus and looks after all things books, culture and media. She is also a regular interviewer on the Science Focus Podcast. Her interests range from natural history and wildlife, to women in STEM and accessibility tech.
From motivating us to sweat it out and aim for a killer waistline like hers to making us double down with laughter in the same breath, Deepika Padukone set us hard relating with her latest set of fitness and intimate pictures. Flaunting killer abs as she aced Yoga’s Chakrasana, Deepika made sure to peg it with a hilarious twist as she gives fitness freaks a glimpse of her “expectation vs reality” workout mode.
Taking to her social media handle, Deepika shared two pictures one from her gym studio and the other from a cosy living area. The first picture featured the Bollywood star donning a black sports bra, teamed with a pair of black tights and accessorised with a smartwatch with hair pulled back into a bun to ace the athleisure look as she nailed the backbend exercise.
The following picture features the diva in a white crop top knotted at the waist and teamed with a pair of high-waist denim jeans as she snuggled on a cushion and slept away peacefully. Deepika wittily captioned the pictures, “Expectation v/s Reality (sic)” which is basically all of us on a Monday.
In less than half an hours, the pictures set the Internet on fire and grabbed over 4 lakh likes while still going strong.
Want to give Chakrasana a try? Here are some of its benefits to motivate you:
Chakrasana gives great flexibility to the spine. Perform this only when your stomach and bowels are empty.
It not only strengthens the buttocks, abdomen, vertebral column, human back, wrist, leg and arm but also sharpens the eyesight and reduces the stress and tension in the body. This exercise is especially beneficial for asthma patients since it expands the chest and the lungs get more oxygen.
RICHMOND, Va. – VDOT is getting creative with humorous highway signs to prevent bad habits, and its latest electronic message is getting national attention.
A sign on Interstate 95 near Richmond reads “Driving fast and furious? That’s Ludacris.”
It ended up catching the attention of the rapper and actor, who responded on Instagram with “Virginia, I love you back!”
One VDOT district shared it on Twitter while referencing some of his hit songs, writing please don’t “Act A Fool” on our roads and be sure to “Get Back” down to the posted speed limit.
They’ve been using these catchy safety slogans for years with hints for other movies like “Star Wars” and “A Christmas Story” all in an effort to make people pay attention behind the wheel.
“We feel like with the creative messages people tend to take note of this. Anything that we can do to tie into popular culture or what people can relate to is certainly a way to get those safety messages out there and hopefully change driver behavior,” said Jason bond, VDOT spokesperson.
“F-9: The Fast Saga” hit move theaters last week, 20 years after the first film in the series was released.
Being in a cartoon is a lot like being in hell. No matter how often Daffy Duck gets shot in the face, the animators bless him with a full recovery, so that he can get back to being tortured as soon as possible. Daffy isn’t so different from the sinners in Dante’s Inferno, perpetually drowned in shit or roasted or boiled, or Lucifer in Book I of Milton’s Paradise Lost, chained in fire. I am not the first to notice this: The Daffy-Lucifer connection inspired John Ashbery to write his poem “Daffy Duck in Hollywood” (1975), and John Berger based one of his finest essays on the secret kinship of Walt Disney and Francis Bacon. Of course, being in a cartoon looks more fun than being trapped in a glass cage or a fiery lake, but, as Milton’s Lucifer knew, agony can be fun, too.
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The cartoonist Gary Panter knows his Milton, and his Dante, and his Looney Tunes, and his Disney, and like Ashbery he knows how to whisk them together into one sweet-and-sour dish. Taken one at a time, his drawings have the hasty, half-assed crudeness of middle school textbook marginalia. In aggregate they become as dark and dense as a Chaim Soutine beef carcass. Few characters die in his debut comic book, first published in 1988 and newly reissued by New York Review Comics, but they put up with gunfire, stabs, melted faces, electrocution, an army of giant cockroaches, and a nuclear blast. The collection plausibly could have been called Life in Hell if Panter’s close friend Matt Groening hadn’t already used that title for his own comic strip. Instead it’s called Jimbo: Adventures in Paradise.
Who is Jimbo? “Punk everyman” is the usual description; another might be “Bart Simpson, if he’d aged along with his TV show while huffing glue and working out twice a day.” Jimbo has Dwayne Johnson’s body and Bart’s haircut (or rather, Bart has Jimbo’s; Groening drew the character in homage to Panter—even now someone’s probably banging out a dissertation on other links between the “Simpsons” and Jimbo universes). He also looks great in a kilt. He’s been a regular in Panter’s drawings since the 1970s, when the artist arrived in Los Angeles and began developing what he’s described as his aesthetic of “rambling coherence.” Jimbo is the coherent part, the hero whose jaunty, unkillable sameness guides us through the chaos of everything else.
When I say everything else, I mean everything else. Adventures in Paradise has a plot, but only in the sense that Burroughs’s Naked Lunch or Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition have plots—better to say it has needle skips, lurches, cutaways that never cut back. At the beginning of the book, Jimbo is in the Martian metropolis of Dal-Tokyo—think of the real Tokyo, then add robots and spray everything with gunk—but it’s hard to tell if he remains there. He climbs down a sewer, discovers an underground club, takes a pill, and wakes up in bed some time later. Is he still on Mars? Was he ever? By page twenty, we might as well be in Durant, Oklahoma, where Panter was born, or Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, where I suspect Panter would like to go when he dies. Jimbo visits a fast-food restaurant that reads his mind (saves you the stress of choosing); later, he’s arrested for being too poor to buy the fast food he never actually ordered. He flees civilization to live in a wigwam and play noble savage, but by the book’s end, the Bomb has gone off and there’s no civilization left to flee.
Is this paradise? The easy answer is no, of course not, Panter’s kidding—then again, kidding lets you get away with telling the truth. The heavy-metal-Inferno on the right-hand side of Bosch’s triptych has always delighted me more than the Muzak Eden on the left, and I would guess Panter (not to mention Bosch) feels the same way. His Dal Tokyo may be hectic and gross, but it’s also lively and comic and kinetic and crawling with ideas. Like the director Terry Gilliam, whose film Brazil was released a few years before Adventures in Paradise, Panter wears allusion on his sleeve, so that even at their gloomiest, his creations throb with the joy of their influences. The mind-reading burger joint would make Philip K. Dick proud, the quasi-connected vignette structure is pure Burroughs, the furious clutter and cross-hatching owe a student loan–sized debt to Robert Crumb and the San Francisco underground. Paradoxically, the result of all this borrowing is a true original—a reminder, too, that late twentieth-century American culture was so rich even its dystopian nightmares were feasts.
It’s terrifying how optimistic that era’s pessimism now seems. In Adventures in Paradise’s view of the future, we’re all fucked, to be sure, but at least we get to go to Mars, hang out with sentient robots, expand, accelerate, etc. The last four decades seems to have brought something like a great lowering of expectations, which David Graeber described like so: “A timid, bureaucratic spirit suffuses every aspect of cultural life. It comes festooned in a language of creativity, initiative, and entrepreneurialism. But the language is meaningless. . . . The greatest and most powerful nation that has ever existed has spent the last decades telling its citizens they can no longer contemplate fantastic collective enterprises.” Graeber singled out scientists and politicians for their contracting imaginations, but the creative class isn’t exempt— just look at the extraordinary success of Marvel Studios, the company whose fizzling pyrotechnics and brand-management-disguised-as-entertainment are a shadow of the American comic-book tradition to which Gary Panter has added so much.
Before comic books stiffened into graphic novels and graphic novels swelled into superhero movies and superhero movies became plain old movies, there was the Defender. Founded in 1905, the Chicago Defender was one of the country’s leading Black newspapers for over a century, until it went online-only in 2019. If you were a Black cartoonist living in the Midwest, it was the place you wanted to be published, at first because it was one of the few places that did publish Black comics and later because it was the most prestigious. Now that all comics, not just Black-authored ones, are going the way of the dodo, the DVD, and the Defender’s print edition, we at least have some handsome anthologies to look forward to.
Cartoons from the Defender form the backbone of It’s Life As I See It: Black Cartoonists in Chicago, 1940–1980, another essential volume from New York Review Comics. The title is taken from the caption of a 1970 single-panel by Charles Johnson, the closest thing to a household name in the world of Black cartooning, even if his fame has more to do with his 1990 novel Middle Passage and his MacArthur Fellowship than with his art. The panel in question shows a white art critic, a Black painter with a big Afro, and his latest painting, which is completely, stubbornly, unapologetically black. Another cartoon from the same year has a Klansman saying his nightly prayers: “Give me the strength to eliminate the inferior people ruining my nation.” The Klansman gets an immortal reply from the heavens—“Sho ‘nuff boss!”—for which they should have given Johnson his Genius Grant then and there.
Artists of a belittled race, practicing a belittled art form, living in a belittled city (third is a long, long way from first or second)—small wonder that belittlement is a near-constant theme of this book. Tom Floyd’s series Integration Is a Bitch!, from 1969, is a splendid fish-out-of-water comedy, about a Black employee and his new, white(-collar) office. Everyone’s a little too delighted to have him there—the secretary burbles about the “nice colored man” who cuts her grass, the president sports a kufi, and so on. Later, the Black employee gets his revenge by applauding, in a movie theater packed with white people, at a scene where an African tribesman ties an explorer to a tree.
Defining a Black cartoon aesthetic is a mug’s game, for which the exceptions necessarily outnumber the examples. (As if to underscore the point, this book’s title is an unreliable predictor of its contents; several comics were drawn after 1980, and one was drawn in 1990). All the same, every publication has a house style. The early Mad magazine staffers, nearly all of them big-city Jews, pioneered a dense, dirty, detail-infested strip in which nothing fit in or stuck out (“chicken fat” was editor Harvey Kurtzman’s inimitable, appropriately Semitic term). Judging from this anthology, cartoonists for the Defender (and Jet, and Ebony, and Negro Digest) favored sparser compositions, a comedy of isolation rather than clutter. Even when the images are cluttered, the eye is directed to one area, usually wherever the Black figure stands. When you’re the only Black person in one of these panels, which is pretty often, you triumph by owning your one-of-a-kindness, standing out in style. Hence clapping for the African tribesman, hence painting the white canvas black, hence cutting loose at a tight-assed WASP soiree, hence many of the best jokes in this book.
It’s tempting, with every week bringing news of another august periodical snuffed or lobotomized, to celebrate the old print Defender for having existed at all, though there’s a difference between celebrating and idealizing. The Defender gave Black cartoonists an audience and a steady-ish paycheck, but it also forced them to work quickly and sparsely and answer to a roomful of publishers who weren’t hired for their sparkling senses of humor.
Not by accident, the most ravishing cartoons in It’s Life As I See It were self-published. The Defender ran Turtel Onli’s Afrofuturist adventure NOG, Protector of the Pyramids for three months in 1979; after that, he ran it himself. Entire pages of the comic border on abstraction—one panel shows “a traveling spectrum of organic energy” that looks like a roaring, whooshing mirage—so more often than not it’s the sheer momentum of the compositions that pushes you from page to page. Yaoundé Olu’s “Life in America” (1982) has a cutesier, more subtly malevolent style that fits the hollow cheer of the Reagan era only too well.
Olu and Onli seem to have made the same deduction around the same time: If the legacy players are barely paying us a living wage for a watered-down version of our work, why not do everything ourselves and see what happens? Right about now, all working, thinking people should be asking themselves that question, for such is life in America. Or hell. Or paradise.
The new documentary Julia Scotti: Funny That Way, begins with senior trans standup comedienne Julia Scotti reflecting on her 69 years and an arduous but ultimately fulfilling journey to embrace her female gender identity.
“Just a baby born male who never felt quite right,” Scotti observes, adding modestly, “It isn’t much to speak of, but it is my life.”
The film, by first-time director Susan Sandler, documents the path Scott took to a later-in-life resurgence of her comedy career, a flourishing that could only come through self-acceptance. The documentary, released by 1091 Pictures as Pride Month kicked off, is available on streaming platforms, including iTunes, Apple TV, Google Play, Amazon Prime Video, Vimeo, and Vudu.
“Originally from Fairview, New Jersey, for the first 48 years she was better known as comedian Rick Scotti,” Julia writes on her website. “She toured the country, appearing at venues all over the United States and Canada, both as a headliner in comedy clubs and as an opening act for artists such as Lou Rawls, Chicago, and Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons.”
Then, in her 40s, came the growing realization that “something is terribly wrong.” She says, “I couldn’t avoid my truth anymore.” By 50 she had made her transition, but set aside her standup career for a decade. Then she got back into it, and became a breakout star on the reality competition series America’s Got Talent.
Now, at 69, Scotti tours regularly, and she has reconnected with her son and daughter after a long and painful estrangement. Her children appear in the documentary, an indication of the healing that has transpired for children and parent alike.
DEADLINE: What was the process like having a documentary made about you? Were there any aspects of your experience you hesitated to share?
Julia Scotti: So much of the success or failure of any project depends on all members of the team trusting each other. Susan and I bonded early on, and even though I’ve been known to have a trust issue or two, she allayed my fears. If there was anything that made me uncomfortable, I let her know and we worked through the issue.
DEADLINE: Susan, how did you become familiar with Julia Scotti and when did you decide to make a film about her?
Director Susan Sandler1091 Pictures
Susan Sandler: I saw Julia headlining a bill on Nantucket. She was wildly funny, high energy, dangerous and gutsy. We hung out after the performance and just connected. I offered to help her with a one woman show that she was considering, and we began these long phone calls into the night as I drew her out on biographical threads. I asked about archival materials—and she hinted at a cache of old performance footage—and then I learned that her kids had just come back into her life after a 15-year estrangement. All my nerve endings said this is a documentary. So I just dove in. I had no idea it would consume five years of my life. But, of course, I was utterly charmed by her—and I never looked back.
DEADLINE: As a first-time director, what were the biggest challenges you encountered making the documentary?
Sandler: Julia gave me incredible access—she let me dig into the back of her closet and shared everything. Not just archival footage, she gave me deeply personal journals, every piece of writing, everything that allowed me to create a living portrait of the person she was and the person she longed to become. I’m so grateful for that trust. I’ve spent most of my career as a screenwriter and playwright building fiction from true stories, and I discovered that I absolutely loved finding the story in the editing room, building structure from the messy complexity of truth. I had wonderful advice from some brilliant editors that I teach with at NYU including Sam Pollard and [the late] Lewis Erskine (our consulting editor.) Penny Falk was another great influence—Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work was a touchstone and Penny’s notes were invaluable.
DEADLINE: What was it like performing standup for the first time as Julia?
Julia Scotti1091 Pictures
Scotti: Frightening and liberating at the same time. I’d been away from comedy for 10 years and that night I just kept telling myself that if this didn’t go well, I’d never have to see these people (the audience) again. It was never my intention to go back to full time performing.
DEADLINE: How has your sense of humor changed since your transition, or has it changed? Are you a better comic now that you are living your authentic self?
Scotti: My sense of humor hasn’t changed. What makes me laugh is what winds up on stage. Sometimes it’s silly, smart, or even socially critical. All those things are part of me. What has changed is my willingness to show myself to an audience without fear. So, that in itself has made me a better comedian.
DEADLINE: You say at one point in the film, “I both bless and curse the day I became aware of who and what I was.” Can you explain what you meant?
Scotti: You can’t avoid your truth. I would not have chosen to live my life as trans if I’d been able to do so. But once you understand who you are, whether you’re ambivalent about it or not, you need to embrace it or you will lose your mind. It took me a long time to learn to love myself. Thus, the “blessing and curse.”
DEADLINE: Susan, tell me about the animated sequences that you created for the film.
Julia Scotti: Funny That Way1091 Pictures
Sandler: Julia spins stories that beg to be animated. I worked with a wonderful animator, Sam Roth, first on creating the essence of animated Julia, then I landed on stories that carried important narrative threads and where the animation could offer relief from some of the darker places we travel.
DEADLINE: What kind of reactions to the film have you received?
Sandler: Audiences have fallen in love with Julia, her openness, vulnerability, her unstoppable humor and resilience are such an appealing package. And, of course, they want more of her. That’s what we keep hearing—“give her series, give her an acting career.” I’d love to see that happen. I think she’s our next Betty White.
DEADLINE: You perform around the country and don’t avoid “conservative” areas. What is it like to perform in conservative parts of the U.S. and why do you choose to do that?
Scotti: I go where I’m booked because the venue believes that there are people who would like to see me perform. I don’t really care for the color of the state. If people want to come to my show, I welcome them. If they don’t, that’s fine too. America is all about freedom after all, isn’t it?
DEADLINE: What is it like to be an out trans person at this time in America? We see growing visibility of trans people, and growing acceptance (arguably), but with that has come a conservative backlash.
Scotti: Personally, being out helps me sleep at night, because I never have to worry about being “outed.” Nationally, it’s both an exciting and dangerous time to be trans. We are finally emerging as more than just a fringe group. There are lots and lots of us out there and we are being recognized for the contributions we make to America in every field. As for the conservatives not accepting us, that will fade away over time. You can’t sustain hate for the sake of hating. Sooner or later, they are going to meet and get to know a trans person, and when they do, they’ll see that we’re human beings just like them.
Julia Scotti performing as Rick Scotti before her transition1091 Pictures/Showtime
DEADLINE: You discuss this in the film, but what is it like for you to see old footage of yourself doing comedy sets where you made what most people would now consider homophobic and transphobic jokes?
Scotti: Of course, it’s abhorrent to me now. I know that back then, I was really struggling to figure out what was going on inside of me. I responded in the only way I knew how: by being uber “manly,” or what I thought that entailed. I’ve spoken to others who said that they also had that kind of response. It’s weird, often hurtful, what we humans will do to avoid our truth.
DEADLINE: Susan, what do you think viewers—be they LGBTQ or not—can learn from Julia’s story?
“There’s a difference between lonely and lonesome,” Faye Webster muses halfway through her new album I Know I’m Funny haha, “But I’m both all the time.” It’s a cutting remark, not least because the 23-year-old Atlanta singer-songwriter rarely makes any observations – especially about herself – without sneaking in a casual “I guess,” “kind of,” or the the ever-reliable “haha” that gives the album title its bite. Having emerged as one of the most idiosyncratic indie artists of her generation, one whose natural blend of introspective folk-pop, alternative country, and vintage R&B on 2019’s breakthrough Atlanta Millionaires Club earned her critical acclaim and an inclusion on Obama’s annual year-end playlist, Webster has always had a gift for skirting the line between tragedy and comedy the same way she eschews genre. But as that lyric suggests, she’s also capable of examining the fine details that distinguish one mental state from another, even when they seem practically identical on the surface. Crying – like those two syllables you might add at the end of an embarrassingly honest text message – can mean different things in different contexts; Webster finds humour in the ambiguity, but on her latest album, she’s also vulnerable enough to try to unpack and even savour those contradictions.
It’s why, despite its smooth and relatively straightforward presentation, I Know I’m Funny haha serves as a strikingly layered and unguarded evocation of the artist’s character. Beyond giving voice to a sea of complicated and overwhelming emotions, she often finds funny and interesting ways of relaying them. There’s the simple novelty of actually hearing the words “haha” on the title track, or the brilliant way she stresses the need for someone to stay by spreading out the bossa nova groove of ‘Kind Of’; that song is almost double the length of any other on the LP, as if Webster wants you to sit with those feelings the same way she’s consumed by them, lacking a sense of clarity but not heart. On ‘A Dream With a Baseball Player’, a song about her teenage crush on Atlanta Braves outfielder Ronald Acuña Jr., the uncertainty expressed in the chorus – “How did I fall in love with someone/ I don’t know” – is delivered in such a way where the weight of the question might fall either on the fact that the person is a stranger or the act of falling in love itself, and the implications are devastating regardless.
Webster’s pensive, self-deprecating lyrics can have the effect of sucking the air out of the breeziest arrangements, but the atmosphere of her new album is marked by a newfound openness, even lightness. When she sings the titular words on the standout ‘In a Good Way’, as in “You make me want to cry/ In a good way,” there’s an element of surprise that makes the song instantly memorable. They emerge from Webster’s voice as if through a shell of hardened emotion, and at first, you might not fully believe her when she realizes she’s “capable of being happy right now.” But as she moves into the chorus, her delivery backed by equally subtle string embellishments, what comes out is not only genuine but also enchanting and heartbreaking (in the best way). The album is full of such small surprises, from the distorted guitar tone of ‘Cheers’ to the stirring melodies on ‘A Stranger’, but Webster and her band weave it all seamlessly together.
Obama favorite ‘Better Distractions’ might trick you into thinking these songs are little more than exactly that: distractions, a pleasant way to pass the time and fill one’s inescapable aloneness. Webster has said the album comes “from a less lonely place” than her previous material, a statement that rings true but mostly reveals how relative that scale is in the world she creates, one that’s as magical in its fullness as it is at its most punishingly empty. For Webster, songwriting seems to serve both as a means of emptying her thoughts and a vessel for emptiness itself, as showcased by the two final tracks on the album, the mei ehara-featuring ‘Overslept’ and the intimate closer ‘Half of Me’. On the first, she confesses that “At times my mind feels too full/ And I want to empty it,” yet the soothing, lullaby-like quality of the song seems to drown out that impulse.
But on ‘Half of Me’, mourning the numbing absence of a loved one, she pours out all her existential anxieties with painful honesty: “What am I doing now? What is the purpose of anything?” Even if only to express the full extent of her embarrassment, she thinks of the strangers sitting next to her while she’s crying on the way home. The ultimate “haha,” of course, is that her music nails the feeling of being a stranger to yourself – of wanting to cry at nothing and everything, of being upset over a song because you didn’t think of it first yet playing it on repeat just because – so what’s really the difference between her and them? If anything, you kinda feel bad that the strangers couldn’t have heard the song, because she did think of it first, and we all feel that way sometimes; in her words, we all steal each other’s thoughts. There’s something horrifying about that, and a comfort in it, too. Faye Webster knows it.
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