Wednesday, March 30, 2016

Gwen Stefani on Spirituality, Insecurity, Pharrell and ‘Truth’

Music

Gwen Stefani on Spirituality, Insecurity, Pharrell and ‘Truth’

By CARYN GANZMARCH 18, 2016

Gwen Stefani Credit Emily Berl for The New York Times

In the 10 years since Gwen Stefani last released a solo album, she has had two sons, returned to No Doubt, become a TV personality and watched as her life “was literally blown up.” In an interview at her Beverly Hills home for an in-depth feature article, Ms. Stefani, 46, spoke candidly (and plentifully) about the circumstances that led her to make her most personal album yet — “This Is What the Truth Feels Like” (Interscope), out Friday — and how spirituality and the guidance of Pharrell Williams have shaped her artistic process. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.

On the immediacy of “This Is What the Truth Feels Like”:

“I’m so blessed because I’ve been able to do this process a bunch of times now, but actually not as many as I should have — I haven’t put out that many records in my lifetime, really — but this is the fastest I’ve ever written a record and it’s the first time I’ve ever written a record about being happy and the first time I’ve ever written a record that is in real time. Everything that’s happening, it happened like, right now. The last five songs I wrote in January.”

On the aftermath of learning her life had “blown up”:

“I didn’t know what to do. It was this huge secret, because I was like, wow, my kids. What’s going to happen to them if they find this out? What’s going to happen if NBC finds this out? This is crazy, this is not who I am, this is not my life. And so there was like six months of hell.

“I stayed in this house and tried to figure it out. And prayed and prayed and prayed and prayed. And didn’t really do anything. I was like, why do I have to do anything fast? This is a serious disaster. And at one point when my girlfriend was here — Sophie Muller, she’s one of my best friends who I do all my videos with, she’s super creative and talented and super opinionated — I remember sitting there and being so embarrassed that this happened, and feeling like, you know what, I’m not going to look back and go, whoa, my life fell apart. Like I can’t. That’s not who I am. And I was like, I’ve got to do something, I’ve got to prove to Sophie, I’ve got to show someone that this happened for a reason, for me to do something creative.”

On foreshadowing and feeling insecure:

“There was a lot of spiritual exorcising going on back, even before I knew this was going to happen. I look at it like God’s plan, or God’s work for me. ‘Cause it’s too weird, and the older you get the more weird it gets — you see the connections, especially someone like me, where extraordinary things have happened to a not extraordinary person, like a regular person, and it keeps blowing my mind.

“I recorded a song called ‘Baby Don’t Lie’ which was originally titled ‘Baby Don’t Cry.’ I was like, ‘Baby Don’t Lie’ sounds more like something of my story. I wrote the bridge in it not knowing what was to come — subconsciously I knew. I mean, come on, go back and listen to that song. You’ll be like, what the hell?

“In some ways I almost feel like it happened for a reason, for me to write the music, and that is my purpose. And I think that along the journey of being me, believe it or not, you get insecure and you lose your confidence and you compete with yourself.”

On the transition from No Doubt to a solo album:

“I did the ‘Rock Steady’ record, which was a magical time because I wasn’t married yet, I was really free with the writing, the band was very supportive of collaborating outside. It was just one of those prime moments, and it just felt like everything just switched on to something great. And then we decided to take our break, because we just never had. Years and years of never stopping. I was like, ah, yes, my window has come! I don’t even know where it came from. I was so creative and clear about what I wanted. I knew exactly the music I wanted to make, I knew what it was going to look like, I wanted to do this world of Harajuku, and I was just so inspired.”

On spirituality and songwriting:

“It’s not a button you press. I feel like it’s really a spiritual thing, because if you are in the room — there’s not one person in that room that’s not blown away by what’s happening.

“[Returning to the studio to write ‘Red Flag’] I just felt so spiritual. I know that it’s weird to talk about spirituality publicly, because it’s such a personal thing, and I know that some people, it offends them. But I can say my own journey, and what I believe and what I feel and what I’ve seen, the miracles I’ve seen — it’s quite real for me. It was right there in the room. It was magic, and everybody felt the magic of this music being made. It was so pure.”

On her artistic relationship with Pharrell Williams:

“He’s one of those people who always points me in the right direction. It’s not like we’ve ever been that close, it’s just that he’s so intense and he has such amazing advice and he makes you think. Some of the stuff he said to me in my lifetime really made a huge impact, and of course the music we made together is incredible.

“I wrote him [in 2014], because my boys were obsessed with ‘Happy,’ and he wrote me back saying, ‘Do you want to come play at Coachella?’ And I said, well, I just literally gave birth. I stayed up all night thinking, God, maybe if I wore a black jumpsuit. Maybe, I could do it. After you have a baby you so want to get back. The first time I left the house was to go walk onstage and do ‘Hollaback Girl.’ I got a tour bus and brought the kids out to Coachella so they could see I was friends with Pharrell and show off to them. And then I got the call about ‘The Voice,’ and they were like, by the way, Pharrell is doing it. I was like, what? You know what, yeah! I want to do it.”

On Fetty Wap:

“I said, I want to work with Fetty Wap so bad — I want to do something in hip-hop, I want to see what would come out of that. And he’s the only one, his voice is so unique and crazy and my kids are obsessed with him.

“The last song I wrote was the Fetty Wap song. I wrote ‘Asking for It’ for him to be on. Weeks are going by, he’s not responding. Nobody can get ahold of his manager. I was doing a show in Toronto and it was my last day, I had to turn my record in or else it was a wrap. We were calling everyone we knew, Jimmy Iovine, Irving [Azoff] — I was like, if you can just get me on the phone with him I can beg him, we can just be human about it.

“I was about to go onstage and my A&R guy wrote to me, ‘He did it.’ I was driving to the airport and hooked it up to the Bluetooth and I was like, I can’t believe I got Fetty Wap on the record and it sounds so incredible. I have no idea what he’s saying but I don’t care.”

On the future:

“Everyone wants to know, what are you going to do, what’s the future, what do you think? None of us know. Why would you waste your time thinking about that and missing out on this, right here. I really have typically enjoyed this part of the process of putting out music, which is investigating it and thinking about it. Unless you go to therapy in real life, you don’t get asked questions about yourself and you don’t analyze it and think about it. Another blessing of being famous is you get to do this.”

On feeling protective of her “Truth”:

“I feel defensive about the music. Because people make whatever they want up about me whenever they feel like it, which is hilarious to me. But at the end of the day, I’m putting something out that is — I didn’t do it for you, to be honest, I did it for myself, to save myself. I did it because I feel like it was my responsibility, like that is what I was called to do, spiritually, and I’m so grateful for it. But if I put it out there, and someone’s going to analyze it, criticize it, whatever they’re going to do, which they will, it’s almost like I feel defensive like, what are you going to do? I’m just telling you what happened. That’s it. And how can you judge that? This is my life.”

On ageism in pop:

“I definitely thought about it in the last couple of years. It’s a natural thing to think about, your evolution. I had a lyric, ‘Born to blossom, bloom to perish,’ and how in nature you see it all the time. We’re just born to die. You can think of it like it’s a tragedy or you can think about it like, you’re gaining something all the time and you’re losing something all the time, but you’re finding out what is the truth, what is important. You’re searching and it just gets more intense.

“I don’t have a lot of negative things to say about how I’ve been treated. I’ve been so lucky. I’ve always lived in a man’s world. My opinion counts. I’ve just had a really blessed position, and I’m conscious of it. And there have been moments where I’ve felt the other way.

“I feel like I’m mature enough at this point to understand that everyone is there for a purpose and be open enough to listen to everyone’s opinion and truly step outside of my own selfishness and insecurities and ego. So along the way [making this album] I was checking myself, because I think as you get older and have a longer career, you don’t want to be that person who didn’t listen and got caught up in yourself. You can be that way, especially when you have a lot of success.

“At the end of the day when [the label] wanted me to put 10 songs on the record, I was like, I agree. Those Michael Jackson records are nine songs. Cut out the fat. Give them the best of the best. And I tried real hard. And then I kept thinking, well gosh, these good songs don’t feel as good without those [other] songs. It needs the whole story. So I added 12 and I felt like, oh my God, the story’s there.”

Calculate Your Economic Risk

Gray Matter

By MARK R. RANK and THOMAS A. HIRSCHL MARCH 18, 2016

TWO economic issues loom especially large in the United States today: widespread economic insecurity and soaring levels of income inequality. These are not just issues of interest to academics and policy makers; they are a prime concern of ordinary citizens. “How much economic risk do I face in the future?” you may wonder. “How does my risk differ from that of others?”

Plenty of professors, including ourselves, analyze economic risk and publish the results in academic journals and other scholarly outlets. But Americans in general might also benefit from a tool that could help them personalize the vast amount of data that we have analyzed on this issue. So we constructed an economic risk calculator, now available at riskcalculator.org, that allows you to assess your chances of experiencing poverty in the next five, 10 or 15 years.

The idea behind our approach is similar to the idea behind a doctor’s ability to predict your risk of heart disease. Using several pieces of information (blood pressure, cholesterol, etc.), your doctor can make a reasonable estimate of your chances of having a heart attack in the next 10 years. These numbers are based on statistical patterns derived from a very large sample of families that make up the Framingham Heart Study, the longitudinal study of cardiovascular health that began in 1948.

Our predictions of economic risk work in a similar way. Using hundreds of thousands of case records taken from a longitudinal study of Americans that began in 1968, we estimate the likelihood — based on factors like race, education, marital status and age — of an individual’s falling below the official poverty line during the next five, 10 or 15 years. (The poverty line for a family of four in 2015 was approximately $24,000.)

We have discovered that, for many Americans, the future risk of poverty is far from trivial. Take someone who might be thought of as having a relatively low probability of poverty: an American who is in his or her later 30s, white, not married, with an education beyond high school. It turns out that the 15-year risk of poverty for such a person is actually 32 percent. In other words, one-third of such individuals will experience at least one year below the poverty line in the not-so-distant future.

If we project across a longer span of adulthood, it appears that a clear majority of Americans will experience poverty. For example, in earlier research we estimated that between the ages of 20 and 75, nearly 60 percent of Americans will spend at least one year below the official poverty line, and three-quarters will experience a year below 150 percent of the poverty line.

In addition, our risk calculator helps underscore how vast the inequalities in the United States actually are. Race, education, marital status and age make a huge difference in terms of who is more or less likely to experience poverty. For example, the five-year risk of poverty is 5 percent for an American who is 45 to 49, white and married, with an education beyond high school. In contrast, the five-year risk for an individual who is 25 to 29, nonwhite and unmarried, with an education of high school or less is a whopping 72 percent.

The gap between the haves and have-nots in the United States is now greater than it has been in decades. Our economic risk projections illustrate just how profound these demographic fault lines are likely to be in the future. As the country becomes increasingly nonwhite in the years ahead, with millions of young Americans priced out of higher education and less likely to marry, the percentage of the population experiencing poverty is certain to grow. The “opportunity structure,” in particular the labor market, has been stacked against these groups for some time. Furthermore, our social policies, such as health care, housing and educational reforms, have done little to address the systemic disadvantages embedded in American society.

We are in danger of becoming an economically polarized society in which a small percentage of the population is free from economic risk, while a vast majority of Americans will encounter poverty as a normal part of life.

With our calculator, Americans can for the first time examine their own economic vulnerability. Our hope is that such information will be both sobering and a clarion call to action.

Review: In ‘Everybody Wants Some!!,’ Casual Sex and Casual Philosophizing

Movies

Review: In ‘Everybody Wants Some!!,’ Casual Sex and Casual Philosophizing

Everybody Wants Some!!

NYT Critics’ Pick

By A. O. SCOTTMARCH 29, 2016

From left, Austin Amelio, Tanner Kalina (seated), Forrest Vickery, Tyler Hoechlin and Ryan Guzman in “Everybody Wants Some!!” Credit Van Redin/Paramount Pictures

“Everybody Wants Some!!” is many things — a baseball caper, a sex farce, a campus romance, a campus bromance — but the film’s real claim to distinction may be that it’s the least suspenseful ticking-clock movie ever. We start out counting down the days and hours over the last long weekend before the beginning of the fall semester at a Texas college, and at the end of the movie (spoiler alert? are you kidding me?) it’s time for class.

The professor, who is only the second or third responsible adult to appear onscreen, writes a thought-provoking quotation on the board: “Frontiers are where you find them.” I’m not sure where else they are supposed to be, but since the writer and director of “Everybody Wants Some!!” is Richard Linklater, there’s no harm in accepting an invitation to some casual philosophizing. That’s what the characters in his movies tend to do, even the ballplayers in this one. And though their days are spent in pursuit of sex, beer and other delights, the movie does have an undertow of profundity.

Like the quizzical slackers in “Slacker,” the boy in “Boyhood” and Celine and Jesse in the “Before” trilogy, the guys on the Southeast Texas State University baseball team are aware of the riddles and paradoxes of time. The strange rhythms of its passage, and the ways those can be captured and counterfeited on film are among Mr. Linklater’s abiding preoccupations. He has described “Everybody Wants Some!!,” which takes place in 1980, as a “spiritual sequel” to “Dazed and Confused,” his ’70s high school masterpiece. It’s also something of a sequel to “Boyhood,” since it picks up at almost exactly the life-cycle moment where that movie left off: a young man arrives at college, approaching an invisible frontier on the way to maturity.

Jake (Blake Jenner), a freshman pitcher, shows up at the team house with a crate full of LPs and an easy, slightly wary smile. He receives a mostly friendly welcome, though one guy is forthright about his distaste for pitchers. Jake’s roommate, wearing only underpants and cowboy boots, is talking on the phone with his girlfriend. The coach drops by to explain the rules — no women upstairs, no alcohol in the house — mostly so the audience can have the vicarious pleasure of watching as they’re broken.

Plot summary? The guys play Ping-Pong, practice baseball, tease one another mercilessly, smoke weed, listen to records and try to pick up girls, not really in that or any other order. There is mud-wrestling, half-naked Twister and a lot of casual sex. In the midst of it all, Jake pursues a crush on a theater major (Zoey Deutch), who invites him to a party. He gets to know his teammates, whose names are harder to keep track of than their defining attributes. There’s the sane one (J. Quinton Johnson), the vain one (Tyler Hoechlin), the philosopher (Glen Powell) and the “raw dog” (Juston Street), an arrogant fastballer with a ratty mustache and a hot temper. Also a secondary assortment of goofballs, dimwits and wingmen, each of whom gets at least one big play for the highlight reel.

The facial hair works along with the soundtrack, the cars and the clothes to conjure a 1980 that viewers who were around back then may find uncannily, even painfully realistic. “Everybody Wants Some!!,” which partakes of Mr. Linklater’s own recollections of Texas, baseball and college, unfolds in a mood of sweet, lascivious retrospect. Only four years of historical time separate it from “Dazed and Confused,” but the director is more than 20 years older now, and the greater distance shows. The high jinks in the earlier film were laced with anxiety and aggression: The pranks had a cruel edge, and there was a predatory vibe to some of the sexuality. When you are in your early 30s, as Mr. Linklater was back then, high school is not that far behind you.

Blake Jenner, left, and Glen Powell in “Everybody Wants Some!!” Credit Van Redin/Paramount Pictures

But when you are in your 50s, college is an almost mythically distant land, and “Everybody Wants Some!!” is more than just nostalgic. It’s downright utopian, a hormonal pastoral endowed with the innocent charm of a children’s book. There are plenty of movies about lust-addled youth, but it’s unusual to find one that feels truly wholesome. In college, one of Jake’s new pals explains, “The girls can be just as slutty as the guys,” and at this college, at least, the pursuit of pleasure proceeds without shame, risk or hard feelings. (The guys, by the way, are as vain as any gossip girls, primping endlessly before heading out to a club and admiring the curve-hugging tightness of their own jeans.) The premise is explained in the title, and everybody gets at least some of what they want.

Mr. Linklater has never been inclined to moralize, and he has banished all piety from this movie, along with any conflict larger than the occasional collision of male egos. There is no political correctness on this campus, and no politics of any kind beyond the adjacent Carter and Reagan voter-registration tables outside the campus dining hall. The film brushes ever so lightly against issues of race and class, but is finally more interested in how its characters are divided by taste, temperament and attitude.

For the most part they all get along, fellow citizens in a republic of horniness. The athletes, who at once embody and upend the stereotype of the shallow, sexually entitled jock, go to a disco, a country-and-western bar, a punk-rock show and various parties, and they have a good time wherever they are. It is impossible not to have a good time in their company. You can try to be judgmental or jealous, but the beer flows too freely and the camaraderie — which I guess you could call peer pressure — is just too strong.

“Everybody Wants Some!!” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Dude! Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes.

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Wednesday, March 30, 2016