BlackBook

Give The People What They Want is the entirely spot-on title of Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings newest album, due in August—you’d be hard pressed to find a more universally crowd-pleasing ensemble. The eleven-piece(!) outfit took a year to record in Bushwick after an extended tour of I Learned The Hard Way, and their lead-off single, “Retreat!” is anything but.

I don’t read a lot of young adult fiction, but when I found out my friend Rachel Shukert was penning a trilogy of novels about young Hollywood starlets in the 1930s, I knew it was right up my alley. Known for her two hilarious memoirs, Have You No Shame and Everything Is Going to Be Great, as well as the fantastic recaps of the ill-fated Smash on Vulture, Shukert brings an astounding voice to her writing, one that is both irreverently raucous and sweetly endearing. Starstruck, Shukert’s first foray into fiction, embodies all of her traits, and it’s a fantastic look at the Golden Age of Hollywood.

I imagine that Amy Poehler and Tina Fey typically ignore the things that other people say about them, in print no less, but I suppose when a 23-year-old suggests that you'll burn in hell, it's time to make a statement. "Aw, I feel bad if she was upset," Poehler told The Hollywood Reporter. "I am a feminist, and she is a young and talented girl. That being said, I do agree I am going to hell. But for other reasons. Mostly boring tax stuff." Meanwhile, Fey spoke to Entertainment Tonight, and her response to Swift's notion that she was a woman-hating monster from hell was as follows: "If anyone was going to get mad at us, I thought it would be James Cameron. I did not see that one coming. It was a joke. It was a lighthearted joke." Meanwhile, no one has bothered asking Michael J. Fox's son how he feels.

"There's a special place in hell for women who don't help other women," Katie Couric apparently told Taylor Swift once, which Swift reveals in this month's Vanity Fair cover story while giving a metaphoric side-eye to Amy Poehler and Tina Fey. This is, of course, in response to Poehler and Fey joking about Swift's love life at the Golden Globes back in January (when they told her to stay away from Michael J. Fox's son). Can't you just imagine those two fortysomething mean girls Tina and Amy calling each other this morning, giggling and scribbling over Taylor's face in their burn books? I bet one of them will call to apologize, but the other one will be listening in on a sneaky three-way call. It's kind of a shame, huh, that Tina Fey and Amy Poehler care so much about Taylor Swift. Ugh, they are probably JUST JEALOUS. 

Perhaps someone should throw a few million dollars Samuel L. Jackson's way to do a spoken-word covers album. As far as I'm concerned, that shit will sell like hotcakes. And naturally, the Django Unchained star's "cover" of Taylor Swift's "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together," which he "performed" after stopping by London's Capital Radio, would be the first single. While Swift's version was heartfelt and full of emotion (in her way, you know), Jackson's is, in his usual fashion, fairly blasé and unaffected. Fuck emotions, motherfucker! Listen to Jackson's version after the jump.

Taylor Swift and One Direction’s Harry Styles have broken up. I, for one, haven’t been this devastated since Taylor Swift broke up with that Kennedy kid. Alas, at least this means Swift will have enough material for at least three songs on her next album. (I’m guessing she’s been drafting some lyrics on that boat.) I’m hoping at least one of them is about Styles’s second set of nipples. (It’d be a good dig in a song called “I Could Never Love You (As Much As You Love Yourself)”) [NY Daily News, Gawker]

If you worked in the BlackBook office, you would know that we occasionally enjoy discussing Taylor Swift. Like much of the rest of the world, we are enthralled by her love life. Personally, I'm not mad if her jams come on the radio; when it comes to the slew of men she parades around with, however, I have an issue. Girl, Tay Tay, can ya keep it in your pants for a second? We've seen her jump from Jonas to Mayer to Lautner to Jake and, more recently, Kennedy to Harry Styles, or, as I like to call him, "the hot one" from One Direction. Excuse me while I remind myself I am a grown woman well past her teens. 

How many times have you heard some old person complain about what the kids are listening to these days? (Oh, yesterday, from me?) It's a certainty, like death and taxes, that popular music will only cause the furrowed brows of the cool kids of yesteryear to become more creased, their now wrinkled hands forming into limp fists raised slightly in the air as the loose skin on those arms shake with a ferocity only matched by the senility so depressingly spouting from their typing fingers. Do not dare hush them! They have opinions, and they are always correct! Ladies and gentlemen, Michael Musto has something to say about the current state of pop music! 

I can't keep up with who Taylor Swift is dating anymore because I exhausted that section of my brain—the one that pays attention to the fickle romantic couplings of people I don't know—back in middle school, when the girls "hooked up" (read: did not have sex) with a guy one week and then were caught holding hands with someone else at the skating rink the following Friday. Tiring, right?! All I wanted to do was sit at home and listen to showtunes and think confusing things about Paul Rudd in Clueless. Not much has changed, to be honest, but I can tell you one thing: this Taylor Swift gal is exhausting the hell out of me.

I know, right?