We have the first contender for the Controversy of the Year Award. Surprise, It’s GRAMMYs! Okay, no one is surprised. No one, probably, even cares.

Still, the awards season has officially begun, and GRAMMYs has just announced nominations for its 63rd trophies' distribution night.

The list this year looks like someone put it through a randomizer of some sort. Beyonce’s leading the pack without even releasing an actual album this year. Coldplay‘s getting an “Album of the Year” despite not being relevant anymore. Why? Maybe it’s a tradition. Like royal privilege, or something. They’re British, for all that.

No Lady Gaga in the “General Field”. No Rina Sawayama. No Fiona Apple. No Lura Marling. No Run the Jewels. No Jessie Ware. No Shame. No Conscience. No Reason. …

Positions are like fingerprints you leave at a crime scene — they can tell a lot about you. The political you. The social you. The physical you.

Positions can be…no, positions are the basis of your identity.

What’s your position right now?

Mine is me sitting on a couch, listening to Ariana Grande’s new album “positions”, and trying to figure her out. It’s challenging, but it seems that for Grande positions are mostly about sex.

Why?

It’s a guess. 10 out of 14 songs on the album are directly or indirectly related to love-making — so, yes, my guess is: it’s mostly exclusively about sex. …

Ariana Grande is an enviably talented singer, and, seemingly, hardworking one — in the last few years she released two highly-successful albums, and her new long-play is on the way. The pop star has also been quite outspoken about supporting women rights and fighting against social oppression, both in her music and social media posts. Her song “God is a woman” — alongside its music video — is probably the most striking feminist anthem of the decade.

Last week, Grande released the new single “Positions” together with a politically-charged music video in which she appears as the commander-in-chief residing in the White House with her fellow “ministers”, mainly women of all colours and shapes, and a couple of gay men. It’s weird to put such an emphasis on the composition of Grande’s white house, but that’s what the singer and her team want people to pay attention to. …

It’s almost five years since Adele released “25”. She has been away for so long, and so many things have changed for her along the road. I wonder if it had much of an impact on her storytelling.

Now she’s back, hosting “Saturday Night Live” this week. Does it mean a new album is on the way? Are we getting more powerhouse ballads? Or less? Maybe she made a disco album like her fellow brit Jessie Ware?

Rumour has it she might drop new music this Halloween.

Whatever it is, Adele can surprise us. She did before.

Yes, she might be known the most for her personable love songs, but her music isn’t as homogenous as one might think — there’s more to it than melodrama. …

Today I stumbled on a news story in one Russian media outlet saying that Elliot Page came out as transgender. As it often happens in such cases, the comment section was horrendously ignorant: along the lines of “I’m tired of those sick people making public statements about their sickness” to “the next time what? transitioning to a dog or a cat?. There was literally no single comment showing support or empathy towards him. It’s sad — I thought — but something one could anticipate from Russian-speaking segment of the internet.

Then, I clicked on the Twitter tab, opened Page’s profile, and, gosh, the comment section there was… horrendously ignorant as well. People are coming up with some ingenious reasons to denounce Page’s transition and demonize him, from the traditional ones like “God made you a woman” to very strange ones like “I had a crush on Ellen Page and now you ruined it all.” The oddest thing I saw was how radical feminists claimed that by transitioning Page is now a privileged white heterosexual man and, thus, an enemy for feminism and for women. …

Do you ever feel like half of your life is being spent on reliving past experiences?

I do.

To dwell in the past is, probably, a bad habit to have, but I can’t help it: a tiny curator in my head likes to play old movies for me. Today he’s playing “Teenage Memories” — my coming of age story. The soundtrack to the film features five women. Confident, unapologetic women with a strong sense of self-worth.

These women taught me some important life lessons.

Here are five of them.

1. Your apples are as good as anyone else’s — they’re just different.

“Appletree” by Erykah Badu was the first soul song I’ve ever heard in my life. …

I’m not an American citizen and I’ve never been to the US — so why do I care about the presidential elections there? It’s hard to explain. Sometimes I get so emotionally involved in other countries’ elections that it feels like I’m there. Making the momentous decision that will change the way my future will look like in… in the future.

It’s like I care about people making good choices. If we all choose something better instead of something worse today, then tomorrow we will be living in a better world.

The fairytale no one asked me for. …

A bright ray of sun falls from the clear blue sky on my petite face. I wake up. I feel wholesome. I feel wholesome the way only a white paper could ever feel. If it could. But maybe it can? Do we really know what a white paper feels when we draw some obscure lines on it? I bet it hates it. I bet it wants to go back to the times when it had roots, and branches, and leaves. To the times when there was no white paper at all.

Sometimes I want the same. Sometimes I want to feel that very same ray of the sun warming my baby cheeks and my big brown eyes. There was no past. There was no future. Only the sun. A shiny dot stretching its way through time and space towards a predictable destination. …