Sam Richards 

Fargo 2 is go and Jake Gyllenhaal wants a job – plus the rest of today’s breaking pop culture news

Keep refreshing for regular updates from what is sure to be a momentous day in pop culture history! We've got scorching hot news on Guide covers stars of the recent past (Jake Gyllenhaal, Adam Driver) and the near future (FKA Twigs), plus loads of other nonsense
  
  

fargo
Will Fargo 2 feature a young Malvo? Photograph: FX/Chris Large Photograph: Network FX/Chris Large

That's yer lot

Right, time to wrap this thing up. Utopia's on telly tonight, which is all you really need to know, although there are also programmes about bees, running, cycling and Geordies.

I'll leave you with this giddy electronic pop confection from Fryars. Byee.

Mistaken For Berningers

Oh, this is clever. Remember we told you about the excellent, funny, heartwarming documentary concerning The National's Matt Berninger and his deadbeat brother Tom? Well now Bored To Death's Tad Danson and Zak Galifianakis have reunited to pretend to turn Mistaken For Strangers into a stage play.

I particularly love the bit where Matt turns up to teach Ted how to crowd-walk. "You actually are climbing over seats with people in them?"

A Touch Too Much

Spoof detective show A Touch Of Cloth is far from the best thing Charlie Brooker's ever written, so I'm a bit surprised to see it back for a third series. This new trailer seems unlikely to convert the sceptics, despite the addition of Karen Gillen to the cast.

Have we got it wrong? Is Cloth a modern comedy classic that deserves a gushing Guide cover feature? Let us know.

Lockdown your aerial

I haven't posted any Kanye-related stuff yet today, so here's a cover of Love Lockdown by Oxford indie-R&B band Glass Animals. Sensibly, they've chosen not to append it with a ten-minute Auto-Tune rant about how the fashion industry is racist.

Stoned to say the least

ICYMI, stoner metal legends Sleep have reformed to release their first track in ten years. It's satisfyingly heavy.

To be fair to Sleep, they are not so much stoners as full-on weed evangelists (ganjalists?) making megalithic hymns to the marijuana God.

It got me thinking about the best weed songs of all-time, as in songs about weed rather than merely songs that sound better stoned, which would probably be all songs. Here are my nominations:

Most rap songs about weed adopt a simple narrative: I like weed and therefore I smoke a lot of it. Superficially Stay Fly is no different, but not only does it feature each member of the Mafia (plus Young Buck, 8Ball and MJG) detailing their own preferred method of getting zonked, there's an unmistakably nihilistic undertone to the whole affair, emphasised by the paranoid headrush of the beat and the way that the rappers are reduced to dead-eyed robotic tokers on the chorus. Not "I wanna get high" but "I gotta stay high", "til I die" no less.

Just an absolutely killer song, with seemingly cryptic lyrics about Becker and Fagen's old college – until Fagen revealed in 2006 that there'd been a heavy-handed drugs raid on his dorm in 1969, and while the college agreed to bail out all the students, they refused to bail out Fagen's girlfriend who was visiting at the time. Hence their resolution never to return.

"You introduced me to my mind" – deep, Ozzy, deep.

You might recognise this one from a famous 80s cover version. Love the fact that Musical Youth basically snuck a song about dope-smoking onto Blue Peter.

Over to you readers, any advance on this lot?

"I don't care about silly voices"

Not much to say about this video, it's just Steve Coogan messing around for two minutes.

Not safe for twerk

A few eye-catching new pop videos here. Just a bit of a shame about the songs.

First off, Basement Jaxx's new single comes accompanied by a wry short film of Japanese boffins developing a robotic twerking bum. It's a decent pop-house tune, certainly very of-the-moment, but a bit generic and lacking in essential Jaxxiness.

Mumford-alikes Dry The River appear to have ditched the fiddle for new single Everlasting Light but I'm still not sold on their wan indie wares. The judo-themed vid is quite cool, however.

R&B visionary FKA Twigs is about to be everywhere (not least on the Guide cover in a couple of weeks) and here she is cavorting with a snake in the video for a sultry new track she's produced for Chicago cloud rapper Lucki Eck$.

Gissa job

Over the weekend, a video resume entitled "Hard Worker Seeking Employment" was posted on Craigslist by a slightly intense young man looking suspiciously like Jake Gyllenhaal.

Of course, it was a (not very) stealth trailer for Gyllenhaal's new movie Nightcrawler, the directorial debut of Bourne Legacy scriptwriter Dan Gilroy. Jake's particularly skilled at playing intense young men, perhaps because he is one himself, as we discovered when we interviewed him last year.

Further details on Nightcrawler are scant but Jake's character is apparently a driven freelance crime journalist who gets sucked into LA's seedy underworld. It may be the only time you see the words "driven" and "freelance journalist" in the same sentence (only joking, Guide writers).

"No good ever came from a piece of cherry pie"

Yesterday, Fargo showrunner Noah Hawley was on some kind of FX press junket talking about Fargo Season 2. We already knew it was going to be a new standalone story within the Fargo universe, but excitingly Hawley revealed that it would revolve around a young Lou Solverson (Molly's dad) and the terrible events he recounted to Malvo in Season 1's most gripping scene.

That clip doesn't show the whole tense exchange so just to refresh your memory, Lou started telling Malvo about when he was a state trooper in Sioux Falls in 1979 and witnessed "bodies… one after another. Probably if you stacked them high, could’ve climbed to the second floor. I saw something that year I ain’t ever seen before or ever since. I’d call it animal except animals only kill for food.”

Malvo's unflinching reaction suggested that both characters knew exactly what he talking about, leaving the underlying impression that perhaps Malvo was responsible for the Sioux Falls carnage (I also thought, with all the apple pie business, that we were meant to view this as some kind of Christ vs the Devil face-off).

Anyway, Hawley confirmed that Season 2 wouldn't feature Allison Tolman because Molly was only 4 years old in 1979. But he didn't say anything about Billy Bob Thornton (or anyone else) playing a young Malvo, so that door is being left tantalisingly ajar.

Turtle power

Morning all. If, like me, you prefer the lyrics of a movie theme tune to provide some kind of biographical summary of the characters in said film, you'll be reasonably satisfied with Juicy J, Wiz Khalifa and Ty Dolla $ign's effort for the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film.

As an aside, when did the heroes in a half-shell get so mean?

By providing a musical jump-off for Michelangelo, Donatello and co, Juicy, Ty and Wiz follow in the grand tradition of, er, Vanilla Ice and Partners In Kryme.

 

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