If you’re not getting excited for Capital Pride, you must not have read this week’s Metro Weekly, which includes a cover interview with Icona Pop. The Swedish duo of redhead Caroline Hjelt and black-haired Aino Jawo will no doubt fire up the crowd performing current Billboard Top 10 hit “I Love It.” As discussed in the feature, the song has become a sensation in large part because of a pivotal scene in the HBO series Girls.
Certainly, there will be more love on hand than the duo got on a recent trip to the land of amore. “We went to Italy a couple of months ago, just for fun,” Hjelt shares. “We were just walking around with all of our ‘Icona Pop’ bags. People thought we were pretty cocky and weird.” No wonder: “Icona Pop” means “pop icon” in Italian. During a 30-minute interview the ladies came across as both sweet and smart, and also confident and ambitious — but those are hardly the same things as cocky and weird.
Among Icona Pop’s ambitions, or at least dreams, expressed to Metro Weekly: Collaborations with Prince, Tina Turner, Patti Smith and Asap Rocky. None of those artists, as far as we know, will appear on the duo’s debut album, due out later this year. “We can’t really tell you which people we’re [working with now]. We don’t want to jinx it,” says Jawo. “But we have some tricks up our sleeves.”
More immediately, Hjelt and Jawo are looking forward to a late summer headlining tourthrough North America — though no date in D.C., at least not yet — during which they’ll be able to play longer sets than on previous gigs opening for Marina and the Diamonds and Passion Pit.
But first up, after a performance at Governors Ball this Saturday, June 8, in New York, is the Capital Pride Festival. Hjelt says, “we’re very honored.”
“We’re expecting a lot of dancing, good movements,” adds Jawo. “And love.”
The weatherman said it would be hot Monday night, and he wasn’t lying. The torrid D.C. heat had the cowboys, gals, and dolls sweating out of their boots on night two of Beyoncé’s record-breaking Cowboy Carter Tour at Northwest Stadium, in Landover, Maryland.
Even the ever-cool Mrs. Carter must have been feeling the ninety-plus degrees. Bey and her dancers broke out boxer briefs and sports bras -- new custom crystal-beaded Calvin Klein, of course -- midway through her set and in plenty of time for a red-hot “Heated,” part of the show’s glorious return to Renaissance.
But Bey began, bless her, draped in a full feather cape by Elie Saab over a red, white, and blue spangled Saab bodysuit. Entering to the sound of a galloping horse and the crowd screaming her name, the head cowgirl in charge lit into “Ameriican Requiem,” a rock-and-soul call for the nation to live up to its ideals, off the singer’s Grammy-winning Cowboy Carter album.
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