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| | | 'People love to feel part of the process': how the TikTok teaser turbo-charged the song of the summer race | | by Shaad D'Souza Aug 1, 2022 | | By teasing fans with new song snippets, artists such as Rosalía are minting hits before the finished single is even out – but will this viral power fade once the industry catches on? This week, the Spanish pop superstar Rosalía released a new song called Despechá. It’s a zippy, zingy track – a kind of minimalist take on merengue and mambo that finds her rapping and singing about fickle fame and even more fickle boys over bright piano chords and a flinty, industrial beat. It’s only been officially out for a couple of days, but in Spain it has been the song of the summer for weeks. Go to any Rosalía concert and you’ll find tens of thousands of fans singing along; speak to people on the street, and they’ll likely have heard it too. This is not a Josie and the Pussycats-style brainwashing situation, but another example of the way TikTok is fundamentally changing the way we interact with music. Where songs used to worm their way into the cultural psyche – and, as with Glass Animals’ slow-rising Heat Waves, sometimes still do – they can now reach full societal saturation before they are officially released. Continue reading... | | | | | | | Fadia's Tree review – emotional portrait of a refugee dreaming of home | | by Peter Bradshaw Aug 1, 2022 | | A Palestinian refugee’s plaintive yearning for her homeland is explored in this sensitive, sombre documentary that also has thoughts about friendship, politics and birds Artist and film-maker Sarah Beddington makes her feature documentary debut with this record of her friendship with Fadia Loubani, a Palestinian woman in Bourj el-Barajneh in Beirut, one of the 58 UN refugee camps. Loubani’s story is fraught with drama and sadness: when she was a much younger woman – and a widow – her extended family had the chance to get refugee status and EU citizenship in Denmark, but bureaucratic qualifications meant her children would only be eligible if she sent them on alone without her. She chose instead to keep them with her, closer to that yearned-for Palestinian homeland which is just a few miles away but behind grim barriers. Loubani’s friendship with Beddington is complicated by history (someone on camera here is annoyed to hear that she is British, on account of the British Mandate and the Balfour Declaration) but she tells Beddington about her family’s home village of Sa’Sa’, right on the Lebanese border, and the family legend of a mulberry tree near their house. It becomes Beddington’s mission to locate this tree on her behalf. The story of Fadia’s tree (perhaps inspired by Eran Riklis’s 2008 film Lemon Tree) is interleaved with thoughts on birds: the Palestinian ornithologist Sami Backleh is interviewed and the film ponders the freedom of birds to go where they like, to ignore the walls and barriers below, and indeed to alight in whatever trees they want. Continue reading... | | | | | |
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