That’s the reminder scrawled into the Oct. 31 box of the wall calendar in the bedroom of Sabrina Spellman.
Yes, “Spellman.” She’s a witch, and her name … is “Spellman.”
Look, just reconcile yourself to the fact that your tolerance for on-the-nose nomenclature (Sabrina’s mentor is called Miss Wardwell, the local ophthalmologist is Doctor Spector, etc.) is gonna get severely tested. That’s due in part to Chilling Adventures of Sabrina’s roots in the sunlit, kid-friendly, primary-color world of Archie Comics. (The Netflix series is technically an adaptation of a decidedly not-for-kids Sabrina comic of the same name launched in 2014 from the publisher’s Archie Horror imprint, which was written by series creator Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa with art by Robert Hack.)
Similarly epi-nasal are the Riverdale-adjacent series’ music cues, which: oof. Think of a song with the word “magic” in the lyrics, and odds are good that it — or at least a cover of it — is gonna get dredged up at some point during these first 10 episodes. Clearly, the show’s music supervisor rules with a hammy fist.
But let’s go back to that calendar entry.
“Sweet Sixteen/Dark Baptism.”
That right there is Chilling Adventures of Sabrina’s mission statement, distilled to its essence. (It’s also a pretty solid joke, just on its face.)
If you’re on board — really, really on board — for both halves of it, you’re going to enjoy the series, which got picked up for a second season months before this first season dropped.
My grandpa lives in clarksdale, Mississippi and HATES white people with a passion. I grew up listening to stories like this. His cousins had to flee to Chicago in the 60s for trying to fight a group of white landowners who wanted to hang them for trying to leave the land they worked on.
Slavery turned into “share cropping” if you kept your slaves ignorant and isolated then they didn’t know they had been freed. This went on well into the 60’s the fucking 60’s these people are still alive dealing with this type of shit in the deep south.
My friend said to “fact check” this and I’m like…black ppl are literally saying they were kept as slaves what is there to fact check. Anyway, sharecropping was still slavery as far as I’m concerned.
“Fact check this” in this specific context means, “Find some white academics who say it is true because we do not trust black folks living the experience.”
After years of rumor and speculation, Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter V is scheduled to arrive the night of Sept. 27 — Wayne’s 36th birthday — along with a decade’s worth of baggage.
To help put Tha Carter V in proper context, here are five key factors in the recent life of the man who made it:
1. Legal Trouble
“I’m a gangsta, Miss Katie.” Lil Wayne uttered those infamous words to Katie Couric in his 2009 interview on CBS.
“I don’t take nothing from no one,” he added. “I do what I wanna do.“
That mentality would eventually catch up with him: He racked up drug possession charges in Arizona, Atlanta, even an arrest in Idaho. But it was New York’s tough gun laws that eventually landed him in one of the nation’s most notorious correctional facilities. Following a conviction on weapons charges after a July 2007 arrest, he was sentenced to serve eight months on Rikers Island.
Wayne’s unique set of label and legal woes leading up to Tha Carter V is the largest pillar in the conversation, not just because it has delayed the record, but also because it threatened to dismantle one of rap’s most formidable modern-day dynasties. After two years of revised release dates, delays and loosies, Wayne vented his frustration with Cash Money in a string of tweets in December 2014. After that, things escalated quickly.
”I’m up in the studio, me and my drank.“ Lil Wayne’s health has become as much a part of his narrative as his music. His recreational drug use, specifically of the codeine cocktail lean, became a popular topic in his lyrics — but there’s been speculation that an addiction to the drink has threatened to destroy him more than once.
Wayne has been hospitalized for seizures, a common symptom of codeine overdose, more than five times in the last six years, on one occasion leading TMZ to prematurely report he was near death and receiving last rites. Soon after that 2013 incident, the rapper said in an interview that dehydration and epilepsy are the reason for his health scares, not codeine dependency.
4. Influence
”Young Money militia, and I am the commissioner.“ Even though it’s been nearly a decade since the last Carter, Wayne’s lyrical approach has had influence on rappers into the 2010s: His scratchy, smoker’s-tone linguistics, his use of metaphor and phrasing, his bending of syllables. And Wayne’s business sense has undoubtedly built out the dynasty of his Cash Money imprint Young Money. Drake and Nicki Minaj, Young Money signees coached by Weezy himself, have cultivated careers not only as rap titans but as pop stars, who have redefined how profitable hip-hop can be.
5. Relevance
Wayne’s cult status is transcendent at this point: He’s the antihero hip-hop has been rooting for and it’s time to see if this album will live up to the hype. Maybe there’s no way it can at this point. But between commercial reception and critical response, Wayne’s return to relevance will be unstoppable in 2018 — even if only for one week.
After years in proverbial hip-hop purgatory, Lil Wayne has finally released his long-awaited album Tha Carter V, just after his 36th birthday.
Few aspects of the album sound like hip-hop-circa-2012, when the project was first teased. It’s clear from the beat production, the subject matter in Wayne’s verses and the array of rappers listed as featured artists that this isn’t a body of music that’s been collecting dust on a self somewhere in the Cash Money offices all these years; as trap and rap-rock beats have become the dominating sound of hip-hop in the last four years, Wayne kept his ears open.
Features on the 23-track album range from long-established names Snoop Dogg, Kendrick Lamar and Wayne’s Young Money signee Nicki Minaj to culture-leading hypebeasts like Travis Scott and the late XXXTentacion.
Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock’s debut album, “It Takes Two”, was released 30 years ago this month. It contains one of the most defining singles in hip-hop, anchored by the unmistakable hook: “It takes two to make a thing go right / It takes two to make it outta sight.“
The epochal riff is a sample from Lyn Collins 1972 single "Think (About It).” Collins died in 2005, but thanks to this hip-hop rework of her single, her name is canonized in music history.
The original “Think (About It)” begins with a message for the guys — specifically the kind of guys who stay out late and assumed their woman would sit quietly at home and just take care of things. Collins’ message, essentially, was that women don’t need you.
Jonah Hill and Emma Stone star in a new, 10-part Netflix series about the psychological exploration of alternative realities and identities. Critic David Bianculli says Maniac is “a blast.”
