Beyoncé takes the Grammys, so everything is not the worst
Plus Lady Gaga on trans rights, Chappell Roan demands health insurance, and more hot resistance in the links roundup
Were you, like me, floored when you remembered that Cowboy Carter was released just last March?
When Kamala was still the VP, and “Freedom” wasn’t yet a campaign song.
When the DOGE didn’t exist, and college boys weren’t running a shadow government.
And did you, like me, have a moment of joy and relief when this incredible artist won Album of the Year, and became the first Black woman to win Best Country Album?
The most hopeful words I heard all week:
“I just want to encourage people to do what they’re passionate about,” she told the crowd. “And to stay persistent.”
The Grammys swept me up in other ways too.
Lady Gaga took a moment to remind us that trans people cannot be erased.
“Trans people are not invisible. Trans people deserve love. The queer community deserves to be lifted up.”
Chappell Roan, who won Best New Artist, used her speech to call out record labels for not providing health care.
“I told myself, if I ever won a Grammy and I got to stand up here in front of the most powerful people in music, I would demand that labels and the industry profiting millions of dollars off of artists would offer a livable wage and health care, especially to developing artists.
“If my label would have prioritized artists’ health, I could have been provided care by a company I was giving everything to.
Labels, we got you. But do you got us?”
It was a relief to hear pop songs that had me singing through my tears, and to, for a moment, turn my attention away from the trauma of rising tyranny.
More links to help stay afloat:
Lane wrote “What has DEI accomplished? I mean besides equity” about anti-DEI attacks as re-segregation rhetoric, and how minorities and women can cause plane crashes now…? icymi.
Back in 2017, as the threat of Trump 1.0 was starting to emerge, a slim book called “On Tyranny,” by an historian of Eastern Europe, offered a way for people to start to resist.
“Do not obey in advance,” was one of its slogans.
(Side note: is exactly what some hospitals have already begun to do — obeying Executive Orders whose legality will surely be contested — when they stopped providing care to trans kids).
But the writer Soraya Chemaly points out the ways that autocracy relies on repression in our private lives, as well as in the public sphere.
“Authoritarians are — irony upon irony — obsessed with our identities and '“private” lives. Consider that intimate violence is a critical component of machofascist authoritarian power everywhere,” she writes.
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