Latest news with #TheNarcissist
Extra.ie
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Extra.ie
The Battle of Britpop lives on as Blur fire cheeky dig during Oasis reunion tour
No, you haven't transported back in time by 30 years — Blur have fired a cheeky dig at Oasis in 2025 after the latter kicked off their reunion tour. The Britpop bands were at odds at the height of their powers in the 90s, with people being asked which band they prefer and the chart battle between the bands, amid jibes between the Gallagher brothers' northern band and Damon Albarn's Blur, who were considered to represent the south. Tensions cooled between the two bands, with Noel Gallagher and Damon Albarn becoming friends over the last few years; but as Oasis kicked off their reunion tour for their first gig in 16 years, Blur's official social media channels couldn't help but get a cheeky dig in by sharing a video of them performing The Narcissist at Wembley Stadium. The band shared the clip on YouTube, and announced that their entire Wembley show was available to stream online, on Twitter (X) — although some fans thought the timing was hilariously awkward. 'Not today lads, not today,' one person wrote, while another joked 'not today babe, not today.' Others thought the timing was hilarious — with one person writing 'big fan of the timing on this tweet,' with another sharing a video of the Gallaghers at the BRIT awards when they took a cheeky dig at Blur while accepting an award. Oasis and Blur were embroiled in a Britpop 'rivalry,' with the pair going on a chart battle in 1995 and a football match in 1996. Pic: Avalon/Getty Images Being the two biggest bands in the UK in the 1990s, Oasis and Blur engaged in cheeky jibes throughout 1995, with Oasis calling Blur 'Chas and Dave chimney sweep music,' while Blur compared Oasis to Status Quo. The rivalry, which was egged on by the British press, culminated in 'The Battle of Britpop' which saw Blur's song Country House beating out Roll With It by Oasis which sold 279,000 copies to the Manchester band's 216,000. The winners performed the number one single on Top of the Pops, with bassist Alex James wearing an Oasis t-shirt in a nod to their adversaries. However, things cooled down between the bands, and Noel Gallagher and Damon Albarn have become friends; with Noel admittedly calling the faux-battle 's**t' and thinking that the bigger chart race should've been between Cigarettes and Alcohol by Oasis vs Girls and Boys by Blur. Oasis kicked off their reunion tour in Cardiff on Friday. Pic: Samir Hussein/WireImage After Oasis split in 2009 following the huge bust-up between Noel and Liam, Noel went on to perform with Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds — and even performed with Damon, who went on to found Gorillaz, at a Teenage Cancer Trust gig in 2013. As for Oasis, the brothers finally kissed and made up and announced a reunion tour; which kicked off in Cardiff's Principality Stadium on Friday (July 4).
The Guardian
19-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The ultimate flex? The activist artist posting his workouts in the name of narcissism
Whenever a new Instagram post goes up of Peter Drew, shirtless and flexing his muscles, you could be forgiven for wondering if that's a smirk on his face. For six months, the Adelaide artist has baited his followers, dropping hints about a new project that seems to revolve around his newly pumped physique. He calls it The Narcissist: a self-portrait. Over one video, he even turned some fans' incredulous comments into lyrics, sung by a sweet female voice over acoustic guitar: 'Does he want art fans to leave?' / 'You look terrible' / 'By aspiring to some masculine ideal aren't you just simply supporting it, not really interrogating the phenomenon or making a statement about it?' At first take, Drew has done a 180. He's left behind the activist work he's best known for: the Aussie Posters project, which the former graffiti artist began in 2016 travelling around the country to fly-post colourised archival photographs of non-British migrants, taken during the White Australia policy, overlaid with the word 'AUSSIE'. The series, which posited a pluralistic vision of national identity, earned him much praise. Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning But has Drew really changed tack with his flexing? For a while now he's been pondering the connection between activism and narcissism, including in his 2019 book Poster Boy: A Memoir of Art and Politics. 'I want to gently raise the question: do you think this culture of activism has an element of narcissism?' he says to Guardian Australia. 'On reflection, what I wanted out of the posters was personal transformation. I wanted to change something about myself I was very uncomfortable with, and I saw these political causes as a vehicle for my personal desire. But I had to hide that as I was doing it.' Drew found working out to be a useful metaphor for his activism persona. 'There's a generation of people that are marching towards being more political, especially artists, and they don't see the cost of it,' he says. 'You have to become a figurehead of certainty that embodies the audience's desire. And the longer you stay in that persona, the more stuck you become.' The Narcissist has two lives: online and in the gallery. Drew has been posting videos of his bodybuilding regime: bulking (putting on muscle) for months, then cutting calories to reveal the definition. In March, he'll present an exhibition of the project at Peter Walker Fine Art in Adelaide. He'll be displaying a 20kg bronze helmet he made, and large-scale photographs of himself with it. He's also created posters of himself as the Gaddi Torso, a Hellenistic sculpture that dates to the second century BCE, but looks as ripped as any raw-meat gnawing, peptide-pimping bro today. This article includes content provided by Instagram. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. To view this content, click 'Allow and continue'. Drew hasn't been immune to that kind of modern influence. He took notice of internet culture commentator Joshua Citarella, who, for three months in 2021, embarked on an auto-experiment called Hyper-masculinity, 'to try every internet folklore male improvement technique and see if it changed my beliefs'. Drew's Narcissist project also calls to mind Cassils, the transgender artist who transformed into a bodybuilder for a work called CUTS: A Traditional Sculpture (2011-2013), gaining 23 pounds of muscle in 23 weeks – which was itself a nod to Eleanor Antin's 1972 work Carving: A Traditional Sculpture, in which the artist crash-dieted for 45 days. Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion There's also a lineage from Sidney Nolan's Ned Kelly paintings. 'The bronze [helmet] started in part as a reference to that: what is this persona that I've adopted, and part of it is this idea of being an outlaw because of the street art being illegal,' says Drew. Originally, Drew had called his new project Muscle Man, envisaging that it would be a commentary on masculinity. As he details in his memoir, he loved taking risks as a child: entering abandoned buildings, competing with other graffiti artists for notoriety, sometimes rumbling with the men in his family. But then the idea of using the body to explore narcissism aesthetically rose to the fore. 'On some level it's the biblical thing of the flesh versus the spirit,' he says. 'The flesh is suspect and anti-egalitarian in a way. I work out, I get stronger. I'm stronger than you. It's about individual achievement, whereas on the more collectivist side there's this real intellectual contempt for the flesh. It's left over from Puritans and the priesthood, but it carries over now into academics and collectivist thought.' In a sense, Drew has been beta testing this concept on his Instagram audience, and while that's something he's never tried before – up until now he's enjoyed working completely alone – he's quite enjoying jousting with his followers and the feeling of 'bordering on cringe'. 'Half the point is finding that tension. I'm digging at that and provoking it,' he says. 'That's what it's all about with any art, that social dynamic. There's an in-group and there's an out-group. People feel like they're included and other people feel like they're excluded. Some people just don't get it, because they like my political posters and they see me working out as being the polar opposite – then they don't really know how to articulate that. Then you get one or two people who are academics, and they do know how to articulate why they dislike what I'm doing. I like engaging with them on that level, because I think about things in that way as well.' Drew is used to criticism. Not everyone chimed with his Aussie Posters. He'd wanted to make one of the subjects, hawker Monga Khan, whose picture was taken in 1916, a folk hero. But writing in the literary journal Overland, Reena Gupta objected to 'the assumption that white Australians have the right to 'direct the traffic' by assuming a managerial role over their non-white counterparts'. This time Drew has opted for self-portraiture, though what true transformation will occur through The Narcissist is yet to be seen: 'The nature of self-portraiture is that the artist inevitably shows a part of themselves that they're not really conscious of.' The only thing he's certain of is that it's far harder for an artist with a political body of work to try something new than, say, David Bowie or Madonna, because they can expect less creative freedom. 'With artists entering into activism, they take on this veneer of authenticity,' Drew says. 'It's a trap, in a way, because people expect you to enter into it and all the baggage that comes with it. You have to take on the whole shopping list of political views, and your role is not to be curious. You're not allowed to play around with it. And then what's the point of being an artist?' The Narcissist is on at Peter Walker Fine Art in Adelaide, 13-29 March
