Taylor Swift released her new single “Me!” featuring Panic! at the Disco’s Brendon Urie along with a fantasy-themed music video at midnight Friday morning after much anticipation from fans. The singer announced the song and video release on Instagram after a week of cryptic posts, including a mysterious countdown clock and a colorful Nashville butterfly mural captioned with the April 26 release date.
Taylor Swift attends the Time 100 Gala, celebrating the 100 most influential people in the world, at Frederick P. Rose Hall, Jazz at Lincoln Center on Tuesday, April 23, 2019, in New York. (Associated Press)
The video, which Twift co-directed, begins as a pink snake, whose light pastel coloring does not match its more sinister demeanor, slithers along a multicolored brick road. The serpent lunges forward until suddenly bursting into hundreds of small butterflies.
Swift and her love interest, Urie, dramatically argue in French then proceed to chase each other in a cat-and-mouse-like romance through a CGI fantasy world, swearing that they’ll never find another like “Me!”
Light pinks, baby blues and butterflies from the video filled up the 29-year-old's Instagram.
Swift spoke about her new music in an interview with ABC.
“Me is a song about embracing your individuality, and really celebrating it, and owning it,” Swift said. “With a pop song we have the ability to get a melody stuck in people’s heads and I just want it to be one that makes them feel better about themselves.”
“I can’t believe how much they care, “ Swift said of her fans who’ve been following her every social media move. “It makes it more fun for me to create music videos knowing they’ll care about little Easter eggs or clues or hints.”
Swift’s previous album, 2017’s "Reputation," topped Billboard charts throughout last year. The singer sold out concerts around the world, touring for most of 2018, Entertainment Weekly reported. Most recently, the country-turned-pop star has also been working on a big-screen adaptation of "Cats."
Swift wrote "ME!" with Urie and co-producer Joel Little, the New Zealander best known for producing Lorde's 2013 debut album, "Pure Heroine." He has also worked on hits for Imagine Dragons and Khalid.
Taylor Swift released her new single “Me!” featuring Panic! at the Disco’s Brendon Urie along with a fantasy-themed music video at midnight Friday morning after much anticipation from fans. The singer announced the song and video release on Instagram after a week of cryptic posts, including a mysterious countdown clock and a colorful Nashville butterfly mural captioned with the April 26 release date.
Taylor Swift attends the Time 100 Gala, celebrating the 100 most influential people in the world, at Frederick P. Rose Hall, Jazz at Lincoln Center on Tuesday, April 23, 2019, in New York. (Associated Press)
The video, which Twift co-directed, begins as a pink snake, whose light pastel coloring does not match its more sinister demeanor, slithers along a multicolored brick road. The serpent lunges forward until suddenly bursting into hundreds of small butterflies.
Swift and her love interest, Urie, dramatically argue in French then proceed to chase each other in a cat-and-mouse-like romance through a CGI fantasy world, swearing that they’ll never find another like “Me!”
Light pinks, baby blues and butterflies from the video filled up the 29-year-old's Instagram.
Swift spoke about her new music in an interview with ABC.
“Me is a song about embracing your individuality, and really celebrating it, and owning it,” Swift said. “With a pop song we have the ability to get a melody stuck in people’s heads and I just want it to be one that makes them feel better about themselves.”
“I can’t believe how much they care, “ Swift said of her fans who’ve been following her every social media move. “It makes it more fun for me to create music videos knowing they’ll care about little Easter eggs or clues or hints.”
Swift’s previous album, 2017’s "Reputation," topped Billboard charts throughout last year. The singer sold out concerts around the world, touring for most of 2018, Entertainment Weekly reported. Most recently, the country-turned-pop star has also been working on a big-screen adaptation of "Cats."
Swift wrote "ME!" with Urie and co-producer Joel Little, the New Zealander best known for producing Lorde's 2013 debut album, "Pure Heroine." He has also worked on hits for Imagine Dragons and Khalid.
Anyone who remembers what Prince Harry was like when he was younger will understand that he gave his family a lot of worries and headaches. The prince was constantly in the news for his crazy antics and being the total opposite of his more mature brother, Prince William.
However, Harry made a marvelous 180 in the past few years. As he is preparing to bring into the world his first child, we think it’s a good time to look back on Harry’s life in his youth to see just how long Queen Elizabeth has been waiting for her grandson to settle down.
Prince Harry was known as a wild child when he was young
Prince Harry and his brother | PA Images via Getty Images)
During his teenage years, news of Harry getting into trouble started surfacing. As a student, he was caught taking drugs and accused of enlisting a teacher’s help to cheat.
A few years later, his character came into question when he was photographed in a Nazi costume. As if that wasn’t enough, when Harry was in the military, he was also caught on tape calling his fellow soldiers “Paki” and “raghead.” Although he apologized for both incidents, they no doubt left a stain on his image.
At the turn of the decade, while William was settling down with his long-time girlfriend, Harry made headlines for his partying ways. Notably, in 2012, naked pictures of his wild night in Las Vegas surfaced in tabloid magazines around the world, causing the royal family lots of shame and embarrassment.
Prince Harry dated a party girl before meeting Meghan Markle
For much of his youth, Harry was known for being in a relationship with Chelsy Davy, the daughter of a Zimbabwean billionaire. While Davy studied law in London and had a stint at a prestigious firm, she was mostly known for having a party girl image in the media — not much different than Harry’s reputation.
The couple dated for several years before ultimately breaking up. Reportedly, it was because Davy did not want to bear the burdens of marrying into the royal family.
Prince Harry has turned into a serious family man with Meghan Markle
After many years of making negative headlines, though, Harry managed to turn his life around. In the past few years, he started taking on more work to represent the queen and support meaningful causes.
More importantly, Harry also fulfilled his dream of starting a family when he married American actress Meghan Markle. She, herself, has the same goal as well as a history of doing humanitarian work, which allows Harry to have some good influence around him.
Far from his days of putting on offensive acts, Harry is known today for promoting equality and human rights alongside his wife. He’s a feminist and Meghan, too, has expressed that she wants her child to be a feminist regardless of gender.
The couple is expecting their first child, which could be due any time soon, and Harry has been helping his wife a lot during her pregnancy. From setting up their new home to decreasing his workload to be there for her, Harry has been an exemplary model of a great husband and father.
Queen Elizabeth seems to really like Meghan Markle
It’s a given that, compared to before, these days Queen Elizabeth no longer has no worry about Harry — he has matured into a great man and is living a more meaningful life. The queen seems to also quite like having Meghan around. The former actress is a great companion to Harry and is taking her role in the royal family very seriously. No doubt Queen Elizabeth is proud of her grandson for how far he has come.
Sherk, who had appeared in TV offshoot "CSI: Cyber" and in movies including "Valentine's Day," died on Saturday, Bichir said on Instagram.
Bichir was nominated for the Best Actor Oscar for his role in "A Better Life" and starred in Quentin Tarantino's film "The Hateful Eight."
He also appeared alongside his wife in "The Bridge," an American remake of a Danish-Swedish drama series.
"It is with inconceivable pain that I announce that on April 20, 2019, our dearest Stefanie Sherk, my beloved and loving wife, passed away peacefully," Bichir wrote on Instagram.
"It has been the saddest and toughest time of our lives and we don't know how much time it will take for us to overcome this pain. Stefanie's beautiful, angelical and talented presence will be immensely missed," he added.
Bichir did not detail the circumstances surrounding Sherk's death.
The British tabloids are mad. They are mad because Meghan and Harry have drawn a set of firm boundaries around the birth of their child: They won’t be telling the public every last detail about the birth, and they certainlywon’t be posing on any hospital steps like Kate did in 2013, 2015, and 2018 as she and William left Lindo Wing. Instead, they’ll be producing their own photos, and sharing them later.
This news has been poorly received. “Keeping the nation in the dark over details, even after the birth, is a bad look for the royal couple,” wrote the Sun, according a roundup in the New York Times this week. “The public has a right to know about the lives of those largely funded by their taxes. You can accept that, or be private citizens. Not both.”
The royals and the British press have long had a close but dysfunctional relationship—one that vacillates between reverence and vitriol, access and repulsion. But with the arrival of Meghan Markle, that relationship has grown more strained. Though the British press covered the wedding with enthusiasm and excitement, the tabloids also provided a megaphone for all Meghan’s hideous relatives, and their coverage has often had ugly racist undertones. It is no wonder that Harry and Meghan would want to set boundaries.
But for royals, who fundamentally depend upon the media for their throne’s continued existence—there’s no such thing as a king without somebody seeing him as a king—boundaries are all but impossible. They always have been.
Even in the glory days of divine right—when the public considered the monarch appointed by God, someone whose touch could heal the sick—the royals always kept an eye on their public perception. The legal chain of custody for the English throne, in particular, has been less stable than magnets sold to tourists at Buckingham Palace gift shop tend to suggest; historically, a wildly unpopular king always risked rebellion from landed nobility, who with the right amount of muscle could scrape up somebody legitimate enough to make a play for the throne. And, too, the intimate matters of the monarch’s body were a matter of state importance; historically, the Home Secretary and other officials attended the births of new heirs, a legacy of the 17th century “warming pan scandal,” when rivals to the Stuarts suggested that James II’s son was in fact a pretender, smuggled into the queen’s bedchambers via a warming pan, to secure the succession.
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In the United Kingdom, over the course of several centuries the crown’s power waned, so that by the 19th century the country was a constitutional monarchy and Queen Victoria found herself with little formal control. To protect the crown, she and her consort Prince Albert enshrined the royal family as a symbol, the upright bourgeois heart of the great British nation, distributing the image through the burgeoning press of the era. This carefully crafted paradigm took the occasional hit—Victoria’s tomcatting son Prince Edward, the Wallis Simpson debacle and the couple’s attendant coziness with Nazis—but it has essentially dominated the monarchy’s playbook over for two centuries. Even after the antics and rancor of the ’80s and ’90s nearly decimated decades of careful branding work, the Windsors have managed to boomerang back to this basic model.
Yet this strategy relies on the media to distribute the all-important image. Victoria and Albert savvily shaped their likeness: the reason we picture Victoria as the cap-wearing imperial grandmother to a nation is that she propagated that particular look by embracing photography. (Speaking to the BBC History Extra podcast, historian Lucy Worsley speculated that in fact she may have opted for giant dresses to avoid wearing a corset, to avoid irritating an abdominal hernia sustained in childbirth.)
This is the reason for the annual Christmas radio address that gradually morphed into the television address; this is the reason for the royals’ enthusiastic embrace of social media. Buckingham Palace (i.e., the Queen’s staff), Clarence House (Prince Charles’s staff), and Kensington Palace (which handles the Cambridges and, until recently, Harry and Meghan as well) all embraced Instagram and Twitter long before Meghan, with her experience running the lifestyle website The Tig, arrived on the scene.
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Remember that Twitter video, posted by Kensington Palace, where Harry and Queen Elizabeth herself playfully beefed with the Obamas to promote the Invictus Games?
Like so many other celebrities, the Windsors have embraced the possibilities of social media to cut out the press and, as much as possible, to set their own narrative. Think of how frequently Kate has taken the official photos of her children that are distributed to papers across the world. It’s a careful curation of a public image that rivals that of Beyoncé.
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But unlike the Carter family, the royals need the media, fundamentally, in order to maintain what power remains to them, and ensure the continued existence of their throne. The monarchy is a fiction which continues to exist on certain terms; it’s a bargain that demands payment. Without the media, the royals are just random rich people born into an outdated hereditary system of power. A defunct royal title maybe gets you a byline in Vogue, but it doesn’t get you much real power on the world stage.
And so for Harry and Megan, the wedding was a whirlwind, but it was also the easy part—generating enormous goodwill and a triumphant, positive storyline for the family. But the narrative logic of the tabloids demands drama, and after the triumph comes the fall. Hence Harry and Meghan will spend the rest of their lives calculating how much access is the right amount of access; whether the bits they dole out will placate the media or simply encourage them to dig and dig and dig.
Cooper, who wrote, directed and played embattled musician Jack in the fourth remake of classic Hollywood tale “A Star is Born,” revealed to Ellen DeGeneres Thursday that he’s also been longing to sing with his leading Lady Gaga, who played rising star Ally, again in the near future.
“You know what I thought would be really cool to do maybe one night, is do a live reading of the movie, of the script, and sing all the songs as you’re reading the script at The Hollywood Bowl or something,” he says.
Gaga and Cooper sang “Shallow” together live just one other time, at the Academy Awards telecast in March, where they also took home the Oscar for Best Original Song for the track.
Cooper, who didn’t sing before making this movie, told DeGeneres he felt a lot of pressure to make sure the live show on Oscars night was just as moving as the film, so fans would know their musical talent wasn’t just movie magic.
“People will never watch the movie again if this [performance] is bad. Like, ‘they can’t do it.’ ”
He adds, “It was one of those things where this has to be great. It felt great.”
All of the movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe have an extra scene tacked onto the end credits of the movie. It's something fans have come to expect from the shared universe. However, that all changes with Avengers: Endgame, which hits theaters on April 26. There isn't a traditional mid-credit or end-credit sequence, but there is a little audio stinger at the end.
Avengers: Endgame marks the 22nd movie in the MCU and the first time in the shared film universe that will not have a visual sequence tacked on to the end, teasing what's next for Marvel. However, there may be a reason to stick around as there is an audio stinger at the end, when the Marvel logo appears. The metal hitting metal sound is open to interpretation, but it's been suggested it sounds like Tony Stark forging his first Iron Man armor. So as soon as the credits begin to roll, the choice is yours. You can leave the theater or stay through the credits to hear a noise that may or not mean anything for Phase 4.
Endgame is effectively the end of Phase 3 of the MCU, and as we learned last month, these films will be known as The Infinity Saga. As far as recent mid-credits and post-credit sequences go, Infinity War ended with Samuel L. Jackson's Nick Fury contacting Captain Marvel on a pager, Ant-Man and the Wasp left Paul Rudd's Scott Lang trapped in the Quantum Realm with his friends snapped to dust, and Captain Marvel showed us Brie Larson's Carol Danvers answering the pager's call in the present, meeting the Avengers. Additionally, there were a couple of comedic post-credit moments as well.
Some of these sequences give the audience a hint as to what's coming next. But with Endgame being the end of the 22-film journey, there's nothing left to tease before Phase 4 begins--although Marvel boss Kevin Feige has clarified that Spider-Man: Far From Home, not Endgame, is technically the end of Phase 3. So perhaps some hint as to what is to come will be delivered there, once the movie is released in July. Whatever transpires in Endgame, and when Far From Home is set, we know the movie will feature both Nick Fury and Tom Holland's Peter Parker, along with a variety of returning characters from Homecoming.
In our Endgame review, GameSpot's Mike Rougeau wrote, "Endgame is truly a love letter to the entire MCU--the whole thing." Additionally, enjoy our predictions of who will die in the video above, the latest teaser for the film, and the best ways to avoid spoilers for Endgame, which hits theaters on April 26.
If you can't wait for the end-credits to use the facilities, check out our guide on when to go pee. It's spoiler-safe, giving just vague allusions to what events to watch for when you step out to relieve yourself. At just over three hours long and the stakes being so high, no one will blame you if you need a quick bathroom trip.
