I’ve been sitting on this cover until it felt appropriate, and I think this is that time. In My Bed is all about sleeping with a long-time flame who the singer wants to just use for sex, though the flame feels differently. To zoom in on some lines, these ones encapsulate the message pretty well: “The only time I hold your hand / Is to get the angle right” (oof). The Amy Winehouse original is obviously funky and dark, and the Deepthroat Choir version strips the Amy away entirely: it’s a whole new beast performed by an all-female a cappella group (well, plus percussion), which I acknowledge is not the most exciting set of words, but the vocal arrangement unearths some interesting harmonic components that get lost in the original, and also hew the song into something raw and much more impactful. Now, for our lingering questions about their name: you’d expect there to be a manifesto behind the name Deepthroat Choir, but it’s nowhere to be found. So just jump right in and then take your warranted break from a cappella for another 5 years.
I want to take this moment to amplify a piece of news that you’d think would be louder: Missed Connections are no more. Not, as you might think, a defeated reaction to all the tinderers of the world, the shut-down of the Craigslist section where you could place false hope that you’d ever see that intriguing person from the subway again comes in response to a new bill passed by the House that places liability for, uh, illicit companionship-seeking, on the platform rather than the individual (so if people are using a website as a platform to arrange sex work, then it’s now the website’s fault). You know minimalist Craigslist isn’t going to suddenly invest in tech to root out prosti-posts in their personals section, so rather than to accept legal liability they’re just killing the personals altogether, Missed Connections and all. So if I’m reading the situation correctly, Trump killed Missed Connections. Right? Which means all you gems who actually did meet someone this way have further cemented your place in history: artifacts of an internet relic brought down by the man. An even better story for your grandkids.
Yeah, so that whole Zuckerberg-on-Capitol-hill thing? Just after Facebook announced they’d be restricting access to data from third-party apps this week, tinder users had a moment of trouble logging in, and ABC News is very excited about the possibility that the two are linked. ‘If Tinder relies so heavily on Facebook info,’ the thinking goes, ‘of COURSE they’re affected by Facebook’s new data-sharing restrictions.’ But there’s really no evidence of causality beyond hunches and timing. So did we catch a bug, or do we all just like to feel included?
Let’s pause to welcome a new sex brand to the playing field: meet Maude, the Everlane of condoms (and lube and vibrators…). In a space where stuff tends to be extra gendered– super graphic dildos, KY for him *and* her, etc.– Maude is using that #minimalist aesthetic to neuter sexcessories so everyone can use them without thinking twice about what specific sex organs they might be attracted to. And in perhaps the most noble pursuit of all, they’ve taken some liberties in naming their products: take a close look and you’ll see the condoms are labeled ‘rise,’ and lube, ‘shine’. So if you’re on the fence on ditching Trojan for something new, just think of your consumer dollars continuing to fund that copywriter. Bravo.
