By Charlotte Hope, @charlottehope
Emma Watson is a Feminist
There’s very little disparaging I can actually say about this but I feel it should probably be brought up. Emma Watson (Hermione, for those of you who don’t know) is the UN Women’s Goodwill Ambassador and is the face and spokesperson for a new campaign called ‘He for She’. Make of Watson in the Harry Potter series what you will – it’s hard to say she didn’t deliver a powerful and interesting speech on Saturday. She spoke for nearly 15 minutes and I’ve watched it – she barely looks at her notes. That’s impressive even if you’re not on board with the message of her speech.
The speech was punctuated with supportive applause from various people in the audience. She even knowingly characterised herself as ‘this Harry Potter girl’. Certain media outlets seem to have missed the point entirely and used the speech as an opportunity to comment on Watson’s makeup and outfit. What a wonderful way to belittle the content of what could and should be a pivotal moment in gender equality’s history. Luckily, if Twitter is anything to go by (which of course it is) most people seem to have cottoned on to the importance of this speech and the eloquence with which it was delivered. I’m very interested to see how this campaign grows.
Robin Thicke didn’t write Blurred Lines
From rousing feminist rhetoric to, well, the opposite. Robin Thicke, ladies and gentlemen! Marvin Gaye’s children are suing Thicke and those involved in the 2013 hit Blurred Lines, claiming it’s a rip off of Got to Give it Up. Happily, this has landed Thicke (and less happily Pharrell) in court to testify and we’ve learned – shock! – that he had almost no part in the writing of the song, claiming he was high on Vicodin and drunk at the time it was made. Damningly, some of the evidence mounted against Thicke was an interview he gave to GQ magazine last year claiming the song in question was his favourite and he said, allegedly, that he and Pharrell should ‘make something with that groove’.
We first need to get over the fact that those were words he not only said but then admitted he said. Make something with that groove, honestly. Anyway, Thicke’s defence is that he was high and drunk every time he gave an interview last year and that the song is very much a product of Pharrell’s genius brain. Is anyone surprised? I am not surprised. This really could be the nail in the coffin of Thicke’s already waning career.
Taylor Swift continues to be a darling
Oh, Taylor Swift. Remember when she gave some unsuspecting fans $90 for a Chipotle? Of course you do, because I covered it in this Column, which presumably you commit to lifelong memory. Childhood memories don’t matter; delete them. This is the good stuff. I digress. Lovely Taylor Swift released Shake it Off a couple of weeks ago to much hype on the radio/Twitter/Facebook/any media. It marks a departure from country/pop music to fully fledged catchy pop music. Her album, 1989, is released soon and to add to the growing list of reasons she can’t actually be a real person but must be a unicorn fairy stuffed into an adorable human suit she invited her fans to her actual house to listen to it.
Said fans were allowed to share all the pictures of themselves with Swift, most of which were them hugging her, and were given heaps of 1989 freebies to take home and, presumably, sleep upon as they dream dreams that can’t even come close to what actually happened to them. They held her animals, you guys. That really is next level celebrity interaction. I’m not even a fan of her, particularly, but I’m desperately jealous of every single one of the fans in the polaroids. Oh, yeah, they’re polaroids because she’s so cute. It’s enough to turn any wizened old cynic into an optimist.