Delete Your Account, No. 33: Buy 'Joanne' On iTunes
Delete Your Account is a weekly column that takes the hot air out of celebrities and their social media shenanigans. Every Friday, I will decide whether or not each perpetrator should delete their accounts and never grace the internet again. This week, Lady Gaga takes to Twitter like Uma Thurman in Kill Bill, Jonah Peretti needs to chill with his Harriet Beecher Stowe fanfic, Gregg Sulkin better loosen that wrist and grab himself, and Jazmine Sullivan is out here curving ghosts.
LADY GAGA
First things first: Lady Gaga’s latest album, Joanne, is brilliant, incredible, amazing, showstopping, and spectacular. She is giving me “I once went to a hoedown and I’m admitting it” aesthetics, and I am alllll the way here for it like seven brides have been promised to me and six of my brothers. “Come to Mama” is probably my favorite; I hope it’s a single so I can sing that shit at karaoke. “Angel Down,” which Gaga has stated was inspired by Trayvon Martin, is beautiful. “Dancin’ in Circles” is the sequel to my favorite Gaga song, “So Happy I Could Die,” that I’ve always wanted. “John Wayne” is bonkers and I want to line dance and star in the high school production of Footloose that I was never cast in thanks to our hating-ass drama director. “Hey Girl,” a “Bennie and the Jets” homage, made me bond with an ex who I hated until a week ago, so LOOK AT GOD. But enough about this album. It’s good, but it’s not at A Seat at the Table or Lemonade-levels of reaffirming my blackness, so let’s get back to the matter at hand.
Lady Gaga is back with a vengeance. Not only is she promoting her album with some limited dive bar stops (not a single one has come to Los Angeles, by the way, and I have not been invited if one is forthcoming, which is HELLA RUDE), but she is also dragging her detractors left and right like Hillary Clinton’s interns are running her social media. First, she (rather tamely) responded with a bit of shade toward the Nicotine Addicts, after one Alex Pall told Rolling Stone that “Perfect Illusion,” the lead single on Joanne, “sucks.”
But the party didn’t stop there. The next target on her hit list was Patrick Carney of The Black Keys. On Vice News Tonight, Carney, who’s never met a White Stripes song he didn’t want to repurpose, said of “Perfect Illusion”: “I’m lost because the guitar at the top of the song sounds so shitty. It sounds like Hulk Hogan is playing the guitar.” Before Gaga could respond to Carney and drag him in between his barista shifts at Stumptown Coffee, her producer, Mark Ronson, chimed in:
Ronson is out here not only coming for Carney, but also reminding him that he doesn’t know shit about making hit singles. Which, technically, is true, since The Black Keys have never topped No. 64 on the Billboard Hot 100. Gaga for her part says that Carney couldn’t even stand to have a guitar death match with the guitarists in her coven, without the niceties. Because, well, damn, she’s all out of fucks to give.
And honestly, shouldn’t she be? I’m no Little Monster by any means, but I do ride for Gaga’s music. I think she’s an inventive, exciting artist who is often an easy target. Mostly, those people making fun of her are unfunny people who return to the same Artpop well or pit her against Madonna, because, well, Twitter wouldn’t have any users if people who can’t tell a joke weren’t allowed to post on the platform. But what’s even worse is that Gaga has to put up with the shitty opinions of men in the record industry who feel the need to chime in on what they think of her songs. Which isn’t to say I don’t like The Black Keys. I like them a lot. And I even listen to one of The Cigarette Smokers’s songs on iTunes because it has Daya in it and I love her. But there’s a way to say you don’t particularly care for a song — in a funny and shady way too! — rather than merely saying, “it sucks,” or “it sounds shitty.” I have a feeling both guys know this, however, since they responded in good fun to Gaga clapping back at them on Twitter.
I will say, however, that while you’re allowed to clap back at fellow artists if they come for you (because we’re artists and we’re sensitive about our shit!), if you get a review you disagree with you should probably just chill. Gaga went on a Twitterstorm after Jon Caramanica’s scathing New York Times review of Joanne went up and honestly, how many of her fans who already stole money from the cash register at their part-time Zara jobs to pay for the Joanne Ball even know what the New York Times is? If you’re gonna dabble in country music, Gaga, then sometimes you gotta know when to fold ’em.
SHOULD GAGA DELETE HER ACCOUNT? Nah, girl, she needs Twitter for that Joanne promo. #BuyJoanneOniTunes
JONAH PERETTI
Before I get into this, let me full disclosure y’all that this man used to sign my paychecks (figuratively — I have direct deposit, I’m not a Love & Hip Hop cast member); I worked at BuzzFeed from 2014 to 2015. Now, moving on: Does Jonah Peretti know his ass has a company to run? Does he know that it does not involve tweeting about mulatto cocks from the terminal at Burbank Airport?
Once upon a time, media giants used to be afraid of the dick. But now they throw tweets to the shit and just fire off a “mulatto cock” at 1:42 in the goddamn afternoon. I’d like to know the purpose of this tweet in the first place, because it really seems to amount to... nothing? According to Peretti he was just sitting at the airport, reading his own site, and he was bewitched, bothered, and bewildered by the concept of Ivanka Trump being jarred by lewd language. Why? Because she had once told him that she wants to see some mulatto cocks! Not a quadroon cock, not a biracial cock, not even an inner-city cock that could get shot on the way to the grocery store if it doesn’t vote for Donald Trump. No, she wanted to see some MULATTO COCK.
While Ivanka has denied that she said anything about a mulatto cock, Peretti and his wife (who commented in the BuzzFeed article) insist otherwise. According to Peretti: “I have conversations with people all the time and I never share things said in private. I only shared this because I read the article and it felt like that experience was relevant.” My man, relevant to whom? Relevance implies that this has some sort of bearing on the 2016 election or that it’s newsworthy. If it was newsworthy, you would have had one of your reporters type it up and not just tweeted it like it was an afterthought. Is this something that Andrew Kaczynski was supposed to handle before he went to CNN? Did he decline to write up this particular Trump scoop and therefore your only resort was tweeting about it?
Because let me tell you something. There’s something... suspect about this tweet. Whether it’s true or not, it’s tantalizing only in that it put the penis of a mulatto (a half-black man) on display as something to be giggled about and memed and go viral. You don’t have to have worked at BuzzFeed to know that the minute someone in the organization tweets about “mulatto cocks,” everyone is going to stop working and start tweeting about how INSANE that crazy tweet about the MULATTO COCKS was. Ivanka hasn’t talked about grabbing dicks during this election cycle, so why is it news that she once discussed dicks? None of this has anything to do with news, which I suspect is why Peretti merely tweeted it so that its salacious nature would make it news. Because once it’s out there in the world, you can report on it and make it news. But before that, it’s just a shitty story that shouldn’t have been repeated.
For people who don’t seem to particularly care about black men in general, they sure seem to be obsessed with our dicks. Peretti found it amusing to tweet about black dick in a negative context, comedians like Amy Schumer and Chelsea Handler love talking about how much they want to have sex with black men, etc. But the one thing all of these discussions have in common is that they’re white people using black male genitalia as fodder in their jokes or their stupid media wars with socialites. But then again, is it any wonder that the man whose company released that “27 Questions Black People Have For Black People” video doesn’t think about black people beyond whether a drunk blonde at a bar wants to think about their dicks?
SHOULD JONAH DELETE HIS ACCOUNT? L-O-L. O-M-G. Y-E-S.
GREGG SULKIN
Why are all of these goddamn actors selling hats these days?! I’m not sure what prompted this ex-werewolf on a Disney Channel sitcom to get political, but this is... not the way. Yes, Donald Trump is out here advocating for sexual assault and grabbing women by the pussy, but the response isn’t to then be like, “You know what we should grab women by? THEIR BRAINS!!!!”
First of all, there’s nothing wrong with women’s genitalia. The problem is that women should not be assaulted. So by focusing on a woman’s “brain” instead of her vagina, it sends a message that women should be ashamed of their sexuality and more focused on having a brain for men to grab. But second, you really shouldn’t be grabbing any part of a woman, least of all their fucking brains, Hannibal Lecter. How creepy is that? How do you grab someone by the brain? It’s physically impossible in non–brain surgery settings.
Third... “females,” bruh? Don’t call women females. You’re not DMX.
We’re not done here yet, though. We need to talk about this daft website too.
I... I have so many questions. “Value her for who she is.” What if she’s a stripper? What if she’s a porn star? What if she just likes popping that pussy on a handstand when Juvenile’s “Back That Azz Up” comes on? A woman shouldn’t be devalued because she’s owning her sexuality. Most women know who they are already. And what they value is some damn consent before you touch their bodies. What they value is you keeping your hands to yourself. This weird, respectability politicking website seems like some creepy cult that wants to harvest women for their brains. Either that, or some young millennial church in Los Angeles that listens to Katy Perry’s debut Jesus album during Bible study.
Most apologies have the word “sorry” in them! Apologize by taking down your Jonestown website, fam.
SHOULD GREGG DELETE HIS ACCOUNT? Put down the brains and your iPhone.
JAZMINE SULLIVAN
SIS, I’M CACKLING.
Gospel singer Thomas “TC” Clay passed away on Saturday (October 15) and Jazmine Sullivan’s first response was to post on Facebook how she curved this dead man. Rather than speak fondly of his music, since she admittedly didn’t know him that well, she’d rather talk about how she turned down his advances and how even though he’s, you know, DEAD, he STILL HAS A CRUSH ON HER. I can’t even drag this. It’s so funny that I’ve been bursting into tears every time I’ve thought it about for the past few days.
Never mind that she also apparently went to the Mischa Barton School of Posting a Picture of Yourself When Reflecting on a Dead Man. This is honestly the funniest shit I’ve seen all week, and in a week that included Donald Trump getting booed at the Al Smith dinner, then eviscerated by Hillary Clinton, that’s saying a lot.
SHOULD JAZMINE DELETE HER ACCOUNT? Ask me when I stop laughing.