The Weekender #9: Your Must Hear, Watch, & Read Guide
The Weekender #9: Your Must Hear, Watch, & Read Guide
The weekend itinerary includes the 100 best songs of 2024, Couchella, The Masters, Ripley, Conan O'Brien, and much more!
The Weekender is a curated listening, watching, and reading experience to give your weekend a sensory upgrade. Subscribe to get The Weekender in your inbox free every Friday.
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What to Listen to This Weekend
The Best Songs of 2024 Playlist
Stream: Spotify | Apple Music
Typically, this space highlights new album recommendations, but this week we're excited to share our constantly updated Best Songs of 2024 Playlist, now featuring over 100 songs! Featuring over six hours of new music, dive in, hit shuffle, and discover your next favorite jam!
What to Watch This Weekend
Couchella
Stream: YouTube
Coachella weekend 1 is this Friday-Sunday, and it will be streaming live on YouTube! The stream starts at 4 PM PDT. All six stages will be streamed across both weekends; watch up to four stages live at the same time in multi-view from your TV.
Tonight’s headliners include Lana Del Rey and Justice, tomorrow we have Tyler, the Creator and No Doubt, and while Sunday’s headliner is Doja Cat, I’ll be very interested in catching the three hour B3B set from Jamie xx, Caribou (Daphni), and Floating Points.
The Masters
Stream: Masters.com
Hello friends, it’s Masters weekend! Break out the pimento cheese, peach ice cream, and Arnold Palmers (John Dalys if you add vodka) for golf’s Super Bowl. You can watch The Masters completely free at Masters.com and CBSSports.com.
This will also be the final announcing broadcast for 83 year old Verne Lundquist, who’s been on the call since 1983. He famously served as the soundtrack for Tiger Woods' iconic chip-in; the zoom-in on the ball was worth over $20M in free advertising for Nike.
My brother does an impression of what he dubs the Verne chortle. About a decade ago, he captured Verne's distinctive laugh, uploaded it to YouTube, and shared it with me as a meme reaction. Astonishingly, this video between my brother and I has now amassed 77,000 views.
Ripley
Stream: Netflix
Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel The Talented Mr. Ripley is the rare book that’s received three well-done adaptations: the 1960 French thriller Purple Noon, the 1999 Matt Damon-starring The Talented Mr. Ripley, and now Ripley, an eight episode series for Netflix.
Ripley is one of the most beautifully shot shows I’ve ever seen, filmed in a brightly-lit black-and-white. Robert Elswit, the director of photography who won a Best Cinematography Oscar for There Will Be Blood, combines 1940-1950’s film noir with German expressionism for some jaw dropping shots.
Conan O’Brien on Hot Ones
Stream: YouTube
The legendary Conan O’Brien faced the wings of death for perhaps the most impressive Hot Ones ever. What he does with Da Bomb and the last few wings is diabolical. Honestly, they might as well end the show now; it won’t get any better than this.
Conan O’Brien Must Go, a travel show where Conan goes to Norway, Thailand, Argentina, and Ireland, arrives on MAX next Thursday.
What to Read This Weekend
Can rap beef exist when no one agrees on what's being fought for? by Sheldon Pearce for NPR
Last week, tensions flared among Kendrick Lamar, Drake, and J. Cole, often referred to as the "big three" of rap, leading to a series of diss tracks.
After taking shots at Kendrick on new track “Seven Minute Drill,” J. Cole quickly denounced his own song, calling it “the lamest shit I’ve ever done. I felt conflicted 'cause I know I don't really feel no way but the world wanna see blood.”
NPR’s Sheldon Pearce does a great job questioning the purpose and impact of rap battles today, where the stakes are unclear, and the competition seems more about spectacle and positioning than substantive musical or cultural claims.
If that feels like an anticlimactic outcome for hip-hop's reigning titans squaring off, blame it on the context-flattening effect of our current social reality. Rap purists and pop number-crunchers are all wading around in the same murky discourse soup, and a lot of the metrics that used to feel like a given are looser now, superimposing a shape on something gray and amorphous. It figures, then, that the truest means of ascent is to try and to get to the top of the trending list, and to stay as long as possible; the only thing of equal value to everyone is collective attention.
Hey thanks for visiting The Wax Museum. We’ll be back next week with a new vinyl feature and our Record Store Day preview!
If you like what you read, forward this newsletter to a few friends who need their weekend upgraded! 🙌