Machine Gun Kelly's "Cliché" has TikTok in a dance frenzy
Why it matters: The Cleveland entertainer's latest single, "Cliché," made the cover of Spotify's New Music Friday playlist last week and has launched a social media trend.
It could soon join songs like "Bad Things" and "My Ex's Best Friend" as one of MGK's biggest hits to date.
The intrigue:"Cliché" takes its inspiration from the glory days of MTV's "Total Request Live."
The music video is loaded with intentionally corny lyrics, boy band dance moves and a closing rain sequence the "Step Up" movie franchise would be proud of.
What they're saying:""If 'TRL' in the nineties was still going … it would be up there," Machine Gun Kelly said while walking the red carpet at Sunday's American Music Awards.
The 35-year-old, who just had a baby with actress Megan Fox, will continue his nostalgia trip by performing at the Warped Tour 30th anniversary shows in Washington, D.C. next month and Orlando in November.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Time Business News
an hour ago
- Time Business News
Is Your Playlist Putting You in Danger?
While most drivers rely on music to set the tone for their commute or road trip, a new study from The Fitch Law Firm reveals that your playlist may be doing more than keeping you entertained; it could be quietly raising your risk of an accident. By analyzing data from top driving playlists on Spotify and Apple Music alongside research on tempo, volume, and cognitive distraction, the law firm's new report highlights the under-discussed link between music and road safety. With 97% of drivers saying they listen to music in the car, this is no niche concern, it's a public safety issue hiding in plain sight. Music has long been known to affect human physiology. The Fitch Law Firm's report draws on research showing that tempo and volume directly influence heart rate, mood, and reaction time—three core components of safe driving. Here's what the data says: Slow-tempo music (60–80 BPM) helps regulate breathing, reduce anxiety, and stabilize speed. (60–80 BPM) helps regulate breathing, reduce anxiety, and stabilize speed. Fast-tempo music (120+ BPM) increases heart rate and may cause unconscious speeding. (120+ BPM) increases heart rate and may cause unconscious speeding. Emotionally intense songs, especially those tied to personal memories, can pull mental focus away from the road. 'Many people build road trip playlists for energy,' said a spokesperson from The Fitch Law Firm. 'But the same energy that gets you hyped can also impair your judgment. That's a real concern when you're operating a 3,000-pound vehicle.' An analysis of the most-played driving songs reveals that many of them far exceed the ideal tempo for safe driving. High-BPM hits like: 'Blinding Lights' by The Weeknd (191 BPM) 'As It Was' by Harry Styles (174 BPM) 'Stay' by The Kid LAROI & Justin Bieber (170 BPM) can subconsciously prompt faster acceleration and more aggressive maneuvering. In contrast, songs like: 'Hey Ya' by OutKast (80 BPM) 'Ride' by Twenty One Pilots (74 BPM) fall within the safe BPM range recommended by driving psychologists and safety experts. Distracted driving is one of the leading causes of crashes in the U.S. In 2022, 3,308 people lost their lives due to distraction-related collisions, according to federal data. While phones and food are commonly cited culprits, music is often ignored, despite being a triple-threat when it comes to distraction: Manual : Adjusting volume or skipping tracks removes hands from the wheel. : Adjusting volume or skipping tracks removes hands from the wheel. Visual : Glancing at a screen or stereo steals eyes from the road. : Glancing at a screen or stereo steals eyes from the road. Cognitive: Singing along or reacting emotionally shifts mental focus away from driving. 'Changing a song doesn't seem dangerous, but it ticks all three boxes of distracted driving,' the spokesperson explained. 'And yet, most drivers don't think twice about it.' Studies have shown that fast-paced music increases the likelihood of speeding, tailgating, and running red lights. Drivers often synchronize their movements with rhythm without realizing it, leading to unintentional speeding or late braking. High-energy music has been linked to: Increased lane changes Missed traffic signals Lower awareness of pedestrians and cyclists In contrast, moderate-tempo music encourages consistency in speed and smoother decision-making. Volume is another critical factor. The study found that: Drivers listening to music over 80 decibels (dB) experienced a 20% delay in reaction time . experienced a . At 55–70 dB , drivers performed better in tests involving braking, focus, and hazard detection. , drivers performed better in tests involving braking, focus, and hazard detection. Loud music also diminishes awareness of emergency sirens, honks, and road cues. With modern cars capable of hitting 90+ dB, it's easier than ever to exceed safe listening levels without realizing it. The future of safer in-car listening may lie in AI technology. The Fitch Law Firm notes that emerging systems are beginning to curate playlists based on: Driving conditions (e.g., highway vs. city) (e.g., highway vs. city) Driver behavior (e.g., frequent braking or speeding) (e.g., frequent braking or speeding) Biometric data (e.g., heart rate and stress levels) 'Adaptive playlists that calm the driver in traffic or slow the tempo during high speeds could be a game-changer,' the report states. The firm recommends the following to help drivers stay focused and alert: Keep BPM between 60–80 for a calm and steady pace. for a calm and steady pace. Set playlists before the trip to avoid mid-drive interaction. to avoid mid-drive interaction. Avoid songs tied to emotional events , which can trigger cognitive distraction. , which can trigger cognitive distraction. Limit volume to 70 dB or less for better awareness. for better awareness. Use driving-friendly apps or voice assistants to minimize manual input. 'Music can turn a mundane drive into a great experience,' said the firm's spokesperson. 'But it can also turn a minor distraction into a deadly one if we're not careful. Being mindful about what you listen to and how loud, isn't just smart, it's potentially lifesaving.' With millions of drivers hitting the road, The Fitch Law Firm urges all travelers to take a second look at their soundtracks and consider whether that high-energy song is worth the added risk. TIME BUSINESS NEWS
Boston Globe
an hour ago
- Boston Globe
Is it art or just one big hoax? This rising AI band could be both
Of this year. How is it possible that one group of musicians could be so prolific? That's easy. The Velvet Sundown isn't a band at all; it's a cryptic product of artificial intelligence that has amassed nearly 1.4 million monthly Spotify listeners. When the band's brocade-wallpaper music first materialized on streaming services little more than a month ago, many listeners were intrigued. Who were these guys? Judging by a playlist image of the group on Spotify, four air-brushed looking dudes with middle parts in their hair and mellow vibes in their genes. Where did they come from? (Clearly a mythical, middle-of-the-road California from the era of the Ford Pinto.) Advertisement After a brief online campaign insisting that this was a real band, a man calling himself Andrew Frelon appeared to come clean, claiming that the Velvet Sundown phenomenon is an 'art hoax.' Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 'We live in a world now where things that are fake have sometimes even more impact than things that are real,' Frelon, who called himself the band's spokesperson, Ironically, it turns out, we have to ask if Frelon himself was for real. After Rolling Stone interviewed the 'spokesperson,' the X account that claims to speak for the 'real' Velvet Sundown Advertisement 'Someone is attempting to hijack the identity of The Velvet Sundown by releasing unauthorized interviews, publishing unrelated photos, and creating fake profiles claiming to represent us,' the post read in part. It gets weirder. The self-professed spokesperson with the assumed name recently published a piece on Whoever is behind the band and whatever their intent, for Berklee College of Music professor Jonathan Wyner, the music is forgettable. 'My initial thought was, I don't really understand what the big deal is, because it's really not very good,' he told the Globe. A 'I generally approach this technology as a way to workshop an idea or create a demo,' Wyner said. 'I'm not so interested in representing that as the final version of something.' 'But I don't necessarily have a hard ethical or moral stance on that,' Wyner added. 'I'm not going to say that people shouldn't enjoy it.' So far it's likely the curiosity factor, more than any deep enthusiasm for the music, that has driven the kind of streaming numbers feeding the buzz about this 'band.' The project's most popular song, 'Dust on the Wind,' is typical of the plug-and-play Mad Libs quality of the lyrics: 'Smoke will clear/ Truth won't bend/ Let the song fight/ 'Til the end,' sings the band's gently drawling 'frontman,' credited as Mellotron player Gabe Farrow. Advertisement This is certainly not the first time the music industry has grappled with deception. Wyner said he was disappointed as a kid when he learned that Musician Nathan Richer is a member of the Lowell-based band Burp. and studied sound recording technology at UMass Lowell. In one class, he learned about the Like a lot of his friends, Richer listened to the Velvet Sundown's music when he first heard about it a few weeks ago. 'I feel like there's so much generic rock music already out there,' he said. 'The difference [between that and the Velvet Sundown] is pretty much nothing.' He said he has no problem with an AI user prompting a music creation platform such as There should be a disclaimer, he said: 'Hey, this is an experiment I'm doing.' In the studio, Richer sometimes uses AI-driven stem splitters to separate the components of an audio file. (That's the technology that was used to isolate the late John Lennon's vocals from a rough demo tape 'If you're using AI to influence your own creativity, then I feel there's almost zero wrong with that,' Richer said. 'But I do have a lot of worries about the sanctity of art. If you're convoluting what is truth, that's what I'm most scared about.' Advertisement The Boston-based musician and author Damon Krukowski has studiously avoided engaging with the Velvet Sundown's fast-growing catalog. But as an avowed critic of streaming services and their impact on working musicians, he sees the inevitability of computer-produced music as one more example of the mounting impediments to the creative sector's livelihood. 'AI is the least of it, in many ways — or anyway it's consistent with the anti-artist, pro-capital way that these platforms function as a whole,' Krukowski wrote in an email. 'I am very engaged with trying to establish regulation for these platforms through the Living Wage for Musicians Act, which would create a direct payment to human recording artists from streaming for the first time. It's insane that we don't have that already.' Richer said he recently listened to a podcast episode in which the hosts discussed a sitcom that was created by feeding an AI tool with thousands of hours of classic TV shows. The hosts, he said, were exasperated with the result, 'because it was good.' Previous attempts, he said, had been funny 'because they were bad. But when it has the ability to analyze millions of hours of human content, it can be so close that it's frightening.' That explains plenty about how the Velvet Sundown 'kerfuffle' (as Krukowski called it) has inspired such an outpouring of commentary. The music is not good… but it is also not altogether bad. 'The fire that Napster and then Spotify created has been building,' said Wyner, the Berklee professor. 'And AI-generated music is about to pour gas on that fire. In terms of flooding the market with quasi-listenable music, fast — from that perspective, I'm alarmed.' Advertisement
Vox
3 hours ago
- Vox
The steamy, subversive rise of the summer novel
is the host of Explain It to Me, your hotline for all your unanswered questions. She joined Vox in 2022 as a senior producer and then as host of The Weeds, Vox's policy podcast. As a kid, one of the highlights of my summer vacation was sitting underneath a tree in my grandmother's backyard and getting lost in a book. I don't get a three-month summer break anymore, but tucking away with a juicy novel when it's hot outside is a ritual I still return to. So what makes for a good summer read and how did this practice even emerge in the first place? That's what we set out to find out on this week's episode of Explain It to Me, Vox's weekly call-in podcast. Next Page Book recommendations — both old and new — that are worth your time, from senior correspondent and critic Constance Grady. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. To find the answer we spoke with Donna Harrington-Lueker, author of Books for Idle Hours: Nineteenth-Century Publishing and the Rise of Summer Reading. Summer reading is a practice she knows well. 'As a teenager, let's just say I was a bit bookish,' she says. 'That meant that when my family went for its one-week vacation a year — which was a big treat — they were on the beach and I was in some kind of a bunk bed with Moby Dick or Siddhartha.' Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. If you'd like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@ or call 1-800-618-8545. How did this idea of summer reading even start? Have we always grabbed books when it's hot out? No, not really. My research focused on the 19th century, and I started looking at newspaper articles, advertisements from book publishers, and the like. And I divided it into two periods: before the Civil War and after the Civil War. Before the Civil War, summer reading was constructed as a masculine practice. The idea was that men would get away from the heat and the pressures of their lives, and they should read something cool. So the essays of Charles Lamb; poetry was mentioned often as well. That all changes after the Civil War, when there's an increase in travel and tourism. The performance of summer leisure becomes an aspiration for a growing middle class, so you have many, many more people engaging in this practice. You have an increase in railroads as well. So you've got an easy way for people to get from point A to point B, and hotels begin to spring up. And as a result of that, publishers start really promoting summer reading. It takes a very specific form, and increasingly it becomes something that women do. It becomes a rather gendered space. Can you talk about that idea of performing leisure a little bit? I think that's really interesting. Publishers would advertise a variety of things as summer reading, but one of the central things was what I call the summer novel. It would be a novel that would be set in Saratoga Springs or Newport or Cape May, at a summer resort. Regardless of how wealthy or not people were, they always seemed to stay there for an entire summer as opposed to a week or a weekend. It would involve a courtship and over the course of the novel, two young people would meet, they would resolve their differences, they would visit various places, and at the end they would be married. By reading these, you'd get an idea of what these resorts were about, and you'd get an idea of how you performed leisure, what you did once you got there, and what the expectations were. So they were serving that purpose as well. There's also a good bit of fashion, so for the young woman, you'd get an idea of how you're supposed to dress. That's so interesting. So it sounds like it's serving the purpose of a mixture of a Hallmark movie with your romance but the drama and intrigue of White Lotus. Definitely the Hallmark characteristic of it. Absolutely. Were these books purely escapist, or did they get at larger themes too? One of the things that I found interesting was that yes, they are escapist in the sense of allowing you to experience another lifestyle, but they were very, very much kind of a liminal space, a space of betwixt in between. For young women especially, it's doing the cultural work of asking, 'What does it look like to have more freedoms as a young woman?' Because there was markedly more freedom — or at least as these books constructed it — during the summer and at summer resorts. You have women hiking and women going out on boats on their own and being unchaperoned, opening up vistas of freedom. Now, admittedly, at the end of all these, order is reasserted. People go back to their normal lives. Marriage as the ultimate institution of tradition gets reasserted. But for the space of the novel there are more freedoms. You have women hiking and women going out on boats on their own and being unchaperoned, opening up vistas of freedom. The novels weren't spaces that were necessarily completely out of touch either. There would be references to a very violent Pullman strike that appeared in one of the summer novels. In the preface to one about Saratoga Springs, there's questions about American imperialism. There's questions about treatment of Native Americans. And so when you take the book as a whole, it's nation-building in a way as well, and it's questioning that in some of them. What was the reaction to the rise of summer reading at the time? Was everyone just ecstatic that people were reading? The publishing industry had a very serious marketing challenge on its hands. Post-Civil War especially, you have rising literacy rates – especially among young women – but you have a very solid and profound discourse that says novel reading is evil, that it is dangerous, especially for young women. The fear was that it would be sexually arousing, that the morals would be questionable. And so you get a lot of criticism, especially among clerics and also a real fear of French novels. They were considered the most problematic. Do we still have a lot of these summer reading conventions in book publishing?
