As the year rounds off and the decade goes with it, I think that celebrities owe it to us to instigate a sort of “best of” retrospective news cycle, so we can remember the good times and move into the 2020s unencumbered. How long has it been, for instance, since Cheryl Cole gave us a divorce? Is there time for Agyness Deyn to have another little run-out before the decade is over? What about Robin Thicke? Remember him? There was that year we were all mad at him, constantly, and then he went away. That was six years ago. Your body is crumbling from underneath you. Your hair turns grey in your head. The sands of time trickle beneath the skeleton that lives inside your body. And, as the mourners assemble around your casket, as the green grass cedes to the grey sky above, a wind rustles gently in the trees, whispering: what rhymes with hug me?
Anyway, this is why I am angry at Drake and Kylie Jenner, who – at a time when we are deserving of the fat of the hog – serve us up with thin gruel: a weeks-long are-they-aren’t-they? speculative dating story to limp to the end of the year with. Here are some headlines that should sum up the information that you want: “Are Kylie Jenner and Drake Dating?’ (Harper’s Bazaar); “Kylie Jenner and Drake Aren’t ‘in a Relationship” (People); “Why Drake and Kylie Jenner’s Relationship Is ‘Complicated’” (Cosmopolitan). In conclusion: I think Drake and Kylie Jenner have, at least once in their lives, met. That’s about all I am confident in saying at the moment.
Drake’s an odd beast, isn’t he? Pathologically the least-cool cool man alive, he suffers from what is known in medical circles as Liam Payne syndrome. It’s a disease in which the victim can display all of the markers of sexual allure, charisma, riches and success – washboard abs, a perfectly symmetrical face, that rare and intangible model-like ability to wear anything and make it look good on them, expensive watches, flying first class in Gucci sunglasses, a broodingly masculine Instagram aesthetic – but something is just not quite adding up when you consider the whole of them, some remainder that maths geniuses can’t quite crowbar back in to the equation.
Drake has the net worth of a small country, produces the best move-your-ass music of the last decade, has perfect teeth and a litany of supermodels in his sexual history, but … how to put this? In primary school we had a kid who used to bring in a full-sized chocolate bar every morning and gift it to anyone who would promise to be friends enough with him that they could hang out together at break time: a Twix, for example, a Double Decker, a Crunchie. Now imagine that guy made Hotline Bling.
Jenner, meanwhile, is slowly morphing into a performance art piece: how can you at once reveal every facet of yourself to everyone yet also tell them nothing at all? How can your face, smooth and perfect and emotionless, be the one that also has so many intrinsic angles to it that everyone can somehow find something to project a part of themselves on to? Jenner is a sort of moving, breathing Mona Lisa: an enigmatic smile, a quiet stare, a multibillion-dollar lip-gloss line, everything and nothing all at once.
Drake and Jenner do, if nothing else, make some kind of sense together. It’s the school nerd taking his anime pillow to the prom, only on the budget of a Mars Rover launch. Sadly, I don’t think there is much life to this one – the union is too tactical, too pragmatic, like Henry VIII ordering an available queen from mainland Europe, a romantic pairing with the allure of a consortium taking over a mid-sized Premier League football club – but the point of these things isn’t that they are meant to be genuine, or hot, but to make us, the scum, feel a strange pining feeling, as if we are somehow missing out.
The idea that Drake is shacked up with an inscrutable billionairess is meant to make you feel like you have missed your chance with him. That Jenner is supposedly booed up with Drake is meant to make us stop idly running the fantasy that she might notice us and scoop us up into her world. “Those guardian pieces lol” Kylie Jenner DMs me, from her verified account. “i love how they are always over wordcount and no one in the comments section gets the jokes. the way u get like 8 RTs only when u post them from ur twitter. so good! would u like to move to LA with me and i will keep u like a pig?”
This is all these stories are: a reminder that the rarefied elite exist, and that they breathe different oxygen to us and move around in different nightclubs, and we are still here, down in the dirt, waiting desperately for a Robin Thicke comeback. In many ways, this is exactly the end-of-decade celebrity story we deserve. Eat your gruel.
Pizza, with a side order of retribution
With celebrity news in short supply, it is good of disgraced Papa John’s founder John Schnatter to come out with a good old-fashioned erratic interview to close the year. A quick recap of Schnatter’s CV: founded Papa John’s in 1984; was the face of the pizza chain’s advertising campaign for years; two confidential settlements to women (1999 and 2009). Then, in 2017, it started to unravel.
After controversial statements about the NFL ant-racist kneeling protests, he stepped down as CEO. Then, in 2018, he stepped down as chairman after it emerged he had made a racial slur in a conference call. Now, in his first major interview since it all went down, Schnatter has told the Kentucky TV station WDRB that: 1) He did use the slur, but only to demonstrate how much he hated racism (!) and 2) The quality of the pizzas had drastically declined since he left the company, and he would know because “I’ve had over 40 pizzas in the last 30 days” (!!). He then closed the interview by saying: “Stay tuned, the day of reckoning will come. The record will be straight.” When asked why not just set the record straight now, during an interview ostensibly arranged to set the record straight, he simply chuckled and repeated, “Stay tuned” (!!!).
I’m not up on my Nostradamus, but was there anything in his predictions about a flood of marinara sauce sent to shame mankind? Because I am mildly scared that John Schnatter is an olde worlde god trapped in the body of an offcuts Stallone brother and, by allowing the quality of Papa John’s toppings to dip, humanity has angered him. There will be retribution in 2020, just you wait. Just you wait and see.
