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In the Substack app for you this week: an ongoing Barbie chat. A bonus newsletter for the paid list, since I was on vacation last week: “Gwyneth Should Meet The Aliens.”
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Azealia Banks, devoted Hung Up readers will recall, is always either radically right or radically wrong. There is no in between, no middle ground, no kinda-sorta. Her faucet of truth never runs just lukewarm. Don’t let her eye of Sauron touch you — she read Matty Healy so thoroughly that even Taylor Swift recognized he had to be dumped pronto.
This week Banks turned her attention to her fellow LaGuardia High School album Nicki Minaj. (“In the name of LaGuardia,” Banks even demands, and fellow barb and LaGuardia alum Timothée Chalamet’s ears perked up.) What exactly is the going on with House Minaj these days? The Queen’s career is in a state of disrepair: Minaj contributed an okay collab with Ice Spice to the Barbie soundtrack. Her followup to 2018’s Queen is slated for release in October. A documentary (that appears to have been dropped by HBO/HBO Max) is permanently forthcoming. There’s also the carousel of beefs with women rappers she likes until she decides they haven’t been appropriately adoring (Cardi B, Meg, Yung Miami, Latto, Ice Spice next), when she went anti-vax based on “evidence” from her cousin’s friends testicles’ HIPAA violation, and lest we forget the registered sex offender husband who is always on the verge of house arrest. But Minaj is still the reigning rapper, in my mind, male or female.
In a rousing series of Instagram slides, Banks took Minaj to task: “[The Barbie song] really was Nicki’s moment. But sis really doesn’t understand that she’s gonna have to continuously be forced to acknowledge new rap girls and be used as a marketing pawn until she separates fully from any and all associations/relations with sex offenders,” Banks said. “Like she’s gonna spend the rest of her career doing lame collabs and having trash beef because of the sex offender shit. For someone seemingly so smart you think this would be obvious.”
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It’s a convincing piece of industry analysis and star management; this is more tough love than shade. Minaj is one of Banks’s favorite subjects, and she truly seems to want to see Nicki win. “This next album will really determine whether or not you win the war so I hope you make every move possible to share all the ghetto hood rat aesthetics off and REALLY EAT THIS POP SHIT THE FUCK UP,” she continued. And then, a truly stellar parenthetical: “(Including divorcing that man … who is obviously an enabler some unseen enemy sent back in to make sure you stay on that shit until they get rid of you. I’m sorry but no man who loves you is gonna let you sit around on instalive and screamed misinformed obscenities at the top of your lungs while his kid is in the other room. That man was sent to MAKE SURE YOU DESTROY YOURSELF and you need to realize this asap.)”
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“You won't find reasonable men on the tops of tall mountains,” Hunter S. Thompson once wrote. The line crossed my mind recently when I was one hour into a strenuous two hour hike I was told was just “a nice hike to lunch.” Hunter Harris says: “You won’t find reasonable Barbz,” and the sentence just ends there, meaning that is the complete thought. And yet! Azealia Banks, when she’s right, is always very right.
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Due Diligence
End of [His] Time: Miss Tina and Richard Lawson are getting divorced. I can’t tell you what to do, but I would not advise you to search “Richard Lawson likes” on Twitter. (TMZ)
Add the Emmys to the list of casualties of the AMPTP’s refusal to give members of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA a fair contract already. (Variety)
I will never not be nosy about the friendship breakup between Selena Gomez and her friend/organ donor, the actress Francia Raisa. (Raisa gave Gomez one of her kidneys in 2017. She unfollowed Gomez in November, after Selena told Rolling Stone that Taylor Swift was her only friend in Hollywood.) This week, Raisa deflected TMZ’s questions about this Instagram posted by Selener:
Some personal news: I have started watching RHONY.
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Lilly Jay Will Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night
Somewhere in Los Angeles, a haggard publicist is doing damn near long division to figure out the exact perfect timeline of Ariana Grande’s romantic life. Grande is divorcing the random Los Angeles realtor she married during the pandemic (real name: Dalton Gomez), and has embarked on a relationship with her Wicked co-star Ethan Slater, who just filed for divorce from his wife on … Wednesday.
Some version of a timeline: Ariana and Gomez married in May 2021. In December 2022, Grande began shooting the (inexplicably, two) film adaptations of Wicked in London. By January 2023, according to TMZ, Grande and Gomez had separated. (Gomez has tried to launch something of a media blitz of his own, getting the word out to People that he is “very religious” and was “committed to making it work.”) When TMZ reported that Grande and Slater were dating, the site timed the relationship as starting “several months ago.” Sometime during the production of Wicked, presumably before Grade and Slater started dating, the “break up with your girlfriend, i’m bored” singer hung out with Slater, his now-estranged wife Lilly Jay, and their infant.
But in a radical return to the celebrity antics of Julia Roberts’ A Low Vera t-shirt and Billy Crudup leaving (seven months pregnant) Mary-Louise Parker for (24-year-old) Claire Danes, Lilly Jay is not going quietly. While Slater files for divorce, Jay appeals to the court of public opinion, spoke candidly to Page Six and the Daily Mail. “[Ariana’s] the story really. Not a girl’s girl. My family is just collateral damage,” she told Page Six. (Not a girl’s girl is very 2014 white feminist to me, but I appreciate her candor.) To the Daily Mail: “I am focused on rebuilding a life for our son. This is what I am trying to do and this is my only focus.”
Mind you, all this fussing is over this man:
https://twitter.com/ethansaslater/status/1244474814410174467
Yeah you just have to click. That is the man at the center of a stan war … Broadway’s own SpongeBob SquarePants. The real winner in all of this is Cynthia Erivo, who no longer has the most chaotic relationship history of the Wicked cast.
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Speaking of Divorced Men
Tom Brady and Irina Shayk are doing it, and Bradley Cooper is losing the idgaf battle about it. The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White went on a run.
That little triangle tattoo … there is something so $52,000 a year liberal arts school about it … oh he’s a hoe for real.
That’s all this week! Thank you for reading. This weekend Remy and I are practicing loose leash walking and starting Full Circle, the new Steven Soderbergh show on Max. Have a good weekend!
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