I always enjoy a new Mean Tweets segment from the US chatshow Jimmy Kimmel Live!, in which celebrities read out the horrible things people have said about them on the internet, over REM’s Everybody Hurts, and affect either an amused gameface or an expression of genuine pain and hurt that makes me wonder if anyone explained the concept to them in the first place. It never quite plumbs the true depths of the internet – somehow, the racist, misogynistic, homophobic threats of death and violence don’t play for laughs – but because these tweets are as witty as they are cutting, it creates a sort of safe space for the puncturing of celebrity hubris.
I thought of Mean Tweets when I watched footage of Drake being booed off stage last week, because my initial reaction tapped into that same sense of stage-managed schadenfreude. I am not proud of it – it’s just unusual to see that one of the biggest music stars in the world is not immune to having a bad night. When he appeared as the surprise headliner at Tyler, the Creator’s Camp Flog Gnaw festival in Los Angeles, he faced a clearly unimpressed crowd, who had apparently been expecting Frank Ocean instead (that is the problem with a surprise). In the clip doing the rounds, Drake makes a plea: “I’m here for you tonight. If you wanna keep going, I will keep going tonight,” he offers, to which the crowd boos and yells “no”. In the end, he concedes defeat. “I go by the name of Drake, it’s been love, thank you for having me.”
Any satisfaction in knowing that even Drake can tank, however, dissipated long before the short clip was done. As a former music journalist, I have seen full on-stage tantrums in response to far less serious audience infractions than this, but Drake took it on the chin. “Plot twist,” he later joked on Instagram. “I just signed a 10-year residency at Camp Flog Gnaw.”
Though I seem to be in a minority of music fans, I have never been desperately convinced by Drake’s brand of poor-me rap, but this made me like him more than I ever have. Drake gave it a go, acknowledged that he was not the problem and made a classy exit. The crowd emerged with less dignity.
The rabid devotion of today’s fans is wild, but booing one of the world’s biggest names because he wasn’t the secret surprise you were hoping for is spoilt and entitled. Still, on the plus side, Drake is definitely going to get an album out of it or, at the very least, some great Mean Tweet material.
Nandi Bushell: drummer girl finds Nirvana
Nandi Bushell: high-hats off to her. Photograph: Argos
In a week that saw Rod Stewart giving an exclusive interview to Railway Modeller Magazine, talking through the astonishingly intricate model railway city that he has been working on for 25 years, with such dedication that he would book an extra hotel room on tour to accommodate his modelling work, you’d think the award for “most enjoyable story” would have been tied up. But apologies, Rod. A video of a little drummer girl playing along to Nirvana has beaten you to it.
Nandi Bushell is a nine-year-old drummer who recently starred in the Argos Christmas ad, where she finds her dad playing a miniature drum kit to Simple Minds, then joins him in a dream-like, stadium-esque fantasy drum-off. (It’s nowhere near as sad as the dragon one.) Last week, a clip of her playing along to Breed hit the internet. She has the best facial contortions since Este from Haim’s bass face and screams along with pure, untethered happiness.
“Nirvana are in my top five bands so far,” she (or her parents, who manage her Twitter account) wrote. The “so far” is almost as delightful as the video itself, because it says, simply, that there is so much more to come.
Emilia Clarke: bah humbug to critics of Last Christmas
Emilia Clarke and Emma Thompson, her co-star in the much lambasted movie. Photograph: Nils Jorgensen/REX/Shutterstock
It is standard entertainer-speak to claim to not read reviews, though it is obviously easier in principle than in practice, because I have done countless interviews with famous people who make this claim grandly and yet somehow have intimate and furious knowledge of every review that’s ever mentioned them.
Last week, Emilia Clarke told the BBC that she had stopped reading about herself roughly a year into Game of Thrones. “If someone says something really good, if you get a 15 million-star review, someone will tell you, and if you get a ‘one-star coal in the rectum’, someone’s going to tell you,” she said, referring to Rolling Stone’s particularly festive excoriation of her latest film, Last Christmas.
Last Christmas has been getting fairly terrible reviews, but I’d like to stick my head above the snowy parapet, wearing an elf hat, and say that, actually, I enjoyed it quite a lot and have a sneaking suspicion that any Christmas film risks being called a turkey simply due to its seasonal slot. (There is a small chance that festive cheer has simply come early for me, because I also discovered that Let It Snow, Netflix’s new Christmas film, is a perfectly reasonable way of wasting a rainy November afternoon and I’m sorry to admit this publicly, but the John Lewis ad made me cry.)
Clarke has emerged from seven years of glowering in a blond wig as an excellent comedian and I would watch Emma Thompson chew the scenery in a DFS advert. Critics appear to have been upset by the admittedly bananas plot twist. It would be Grinch-like to spoil it, but it really is based on George Michael’s lyrics. I revelled in the audacious silliness of it and I suspect it would be even more loved after several large eggnogs.
• Rebecca Nicholson is an Observer columnist
