In April, We Got Sick of 'Thrift Shop'
Our month-by-month retrospective of 2013 continues with April, when Bruno Mars knocked out Macklemore and Amy Schumer complimented us.
.The Year That Was, 2013 is far too large of a topic to tackle all at once, even when only focusing on the pop culture aspects. Breaking things down month-by-month feels like the smarter call. We'll be working our way through the year one month at a time, remembering the songs, films, TV, and other fun/horrifying stuff that we may well have already forgotten.
The #1 Song
Call this a transition month between a winter dominated by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, moving towards a summer that saw a great deal of chart jostling. "Thrift Shop" dominated the charts for the first part of the month, but eventually, we had all popped enough tags (cool slang for removing price tags from clothing). Crooner Bruno Mars's "When I Was Your Man" hit #1 mid-month, followed shortly by "Just Give Me a Reason" by Pink, featuring fun.'s Nate Ruess.
The #1 Movie
The honor goes to 42, in which Chadwick Boseman plays legendary black baseball player Jackie Robinson. The biopic beat out series favorites like Scary Movie 5 and a 3D anniversary re-release Jurassic Park. While 42 hasn't gotten awards season buzz, it certainly seems to have helped Boseman's career — he is set to play James Brown in another upcoming biopic.
The Month in TV
Netflix premiered another original show in April, Hemlock Grove, though it didn't quite capture the Internet's attention in the way that House of Cards and Orange is the New Black did this year. Those shows were met with enthusiasm and (generally) praise. Hemlock Grove was called "scary bad" and a "shockingly inane misstep." So, no, not entirely a success.
April also brought us the premiere of Inside Amy Schumer, a delightfully raunchy sketch comedy show from, you guessed it, comedian Amy Schumer. Remember "Compliments"? New Yorker TV critic Emily Nussbaum called the program one of her favorites of 2013.
Also ...
Rebel Wilson hosted the MTV Movie Awards on the 14th, which brought us Aubrey Plaza's weird stage crash and Snoop Dogg's insistence that Miley Cyrus is "one of the greatest musicians of all time." Selena Gomez wore a bindi while performing "Come & Get It," which upset some people.
The Flaming Lips and James Blake both released very good albums in April: The Terror and Overgrown, respectively. New Kids On The Block released 10, meaning that Beyonce and New Kids on the Block released albums in the same calendar year, meaning we are all one people, and generational divides now no longer matter. Also, Fall Out Boy saved rock and roll (they released an album called Save Rock and Roll).