Sabrina Carpenter has apologized after sparking backlash for mistaking a Coachella fan’s traditional Arabic cheer for yodeling, which she described as “weird.”
The Grammy winner was performing her first headlining show at Coachella on Friday night when an audience member suddenly let out a high-pitched cry called a zaghrouta.
“My apologies i didn’t see this person with my eyes and couldn’t hear clearly,” Carpenter wrote Saturday on X. “My reaction was pure confusion, sarcasm and not ill intended. Could have handled it better!”
She continued: “Now i know what a Zaghrouta is! I welcome all cheers and yodels from here on out.”
What happened?
The misunderstanding took place between songs. As applause for her previous number, “Please, Please, Please,” faded and Carpenter sat down at the piano for her next number, someone in the crowd suddenly let out a loud trill.
“I think I heard someone yodel,” Carpenter said into the microphone. “Is that what you’re doing? I don’t like it.”
“It’s my culture,” a voice from the audience shouted.
“That’s your culture … is yodeling?” Carpenter responded with a quizzical frown.
“It’s a call, it’s a call of celebration,” the audience member could be heard saying.
“Is this Burning Man? What’s going on? This is weird,” Carpenter replied, before continuing her next song,“We Almost Broke Up Again Last Night.” It was the singer’s first live performance of the single from her new album, “Man’s Best Friend.”
What was the public response?
Carpenter made the public statement after an online uproar. Her apology on X was a quote reply to a post calling her reaction to the fan’s cheer “insensitive and Islamophobic.”
The singer was “mad disrespectful for mocking the zaghrouta,” wrote another X user. “What’s worse is the blatant racism that followed and the laughs of the audience,” they continued.
Carpenter’s apology was generally well-received online, with somefans thanking her for taking accountability. Carpenter’s representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Carpenter has gone from a child actor known for her role as Maya on Disney’s “Girl Meets World” to pop stardom in the past few years. During her debut at Coachella in 2024, she vowed to return as a headliner. Her Coachella show on Friday was an elaborate Hollywood-themed production — dubbed “Sabrinawood” — packed with references to classic movies, including a dance from 1987’s “Dirty Dancing,” and celebrity cameos.
What is a zaghrouta?
A zaghrouta is a loud, rhythmic sound made by quickly moving the tongue while letting out a high-pitched cry.
Shakira, who was born and raised in Colombia and has Lebanese roots, previously made headlines in 2020 for letting out a zaghrouta during the Super Bowl LIV halftime show.
Nesreen Akhtarkhavari, an associate professor and director of Arabic studies at DePaul University in Chicago, told the Chicago Tribune at the time that the ululation is a Middle Eastern expression of joy made during weddings, sporting events and protests.
After spending her first two seasons with the Chicago Sky, the two-time All Star has been traded to the Atlanta Dream in exchange for first-round picks in 2027 and 2028, the teams announced Monday morning. Atlanta also receives the option to swap second-round picks with Chicago in 2028.
“An Angel’s DREAM,” Reese posted on X. “ATL WHAT UP?!”
Reese was already a star before coming to the WNBA after helping Louisiana State win the national championship over Caitlin Clark and Iowa in 2023 and leading the Tigers back to the Elite Eight the following year.
Selected by Chicago with the seventh overall pick in the 2024 draft, Reese finished as runner-up to Clark in rookie-of-the-year voting and led the league in rebounds per game in each of her first two seasons. Overall, she has averaged 14.1 points and 12.9 rebounds a game.
The Sky have gone 23-61 and missed the playoffs both seasons since drafting Reese. On Sept. 3, the Chicago Tribune published quotes from the star player that indicated her frustration with the team’s inability to build a winning roster and an inclination to leave if the organization isn’t able to get it right.
“I’d like to be here for my career, but if things don’t pan out, obviously I might have to move in a different direction and do what’s best for me,” Reese told the Tribune.
After the Sky’s 88-64 victory over the Connecticut Sun that night, Reese told reporters she had apologized to her teammates about the article.
“I think the language is taken out of context,” she said, “and I really didn’t intentionally mean to put down my teammates, because they’ve been through this with me throughout the whole year. They’ve busted their ass, just how I bust my ass, they showed up for me through thick and thin, and in the locker room when nobody could see anything.”
Reese did not play for Chicago again. She was suspended half a game for her comments, which were deemed “detrimental to the team,” served a separate mandatory one-game suspension by the WNBA for receiving eight technical fouls during the season and missed the final three games of the season with what was listed as a back injury.
The Sky said in a statement Monday that the “trade is designed to achieve roster balance and represents a great opportunity for all parties.”
“Angel has achieved many record-breaking milestones in her first two years in the WNBA and has been a competitive force for the Sky,” the team wrote. “We are thankful for her many important contributions to this league and this game, and we know she will continue to have a big impact on the court and beyond.”
Reese joins an Atlanta team that went 30-14 and finished first in the Eastern Conference before losing to the Indiana Fever in the first round of the playoffs. The roster includes Allisha Gray, who finished fourth in the MVP voting last season, as well as sixth player of the year Naz Hillmon and All-Star Brionna Jones.
“Angel is a dynamic talent and a perfect fit for what we are building in Atlanta,” Dream general manager Dan Padover said in a statement. “She has already proven herself as one of the most impactful players in the league, and her competitiveness, production and drive to win align seamlessly with our vision. This is an exciting moment for our organization and our fans.”
CHICAGO — Edward Cabrera pitched six shutout innings, Ian Happ hit a solo homer and the Chicago Cubs beat the Angels 7-2 on Monday night.
Cabrera gave up one hit and walked one in his Chicago debut, delighting the crowd of 36,702 on a picturesque night at Wrigley Field. The 6-foot-5 right-hander was acquired in a January trade with Miami.
Carson Kelly and Moisés Ballesteros each drove in two runs for the Cubs (2-2) in the opener of a three-game series.
Yoán Moncada hit a two-run homer for the Angels (2-3) in their third consecutive loss. Ryan Johnson (0-1) yielded six runs and seven hits over 3⅓ innings in his first career start.
Angels star Mike Trout went 0 for 4 with two strikeouts after collecting six hits and walking seven times over the first four games of the season.
Johnson struggled with his control in the first, walking the bases loaded. Pete Crow-Armstrong reached on an 11-pitch walk ahead of Nico Hoerner’s sacrifice fly. Kelly made it 3-0 with a two-out fly ball that landed just out of the reach of a lunging Trout in shallow right-center for a two-run single.
The Cubs added three more in the third. Happ extended his homer streak to three games, and Ballesteros grounded a two-run single into right field.
Cabrera (1-0) struck out five while throwing 80 pitches, 49 for strikes. Colin Rea worked three innings for his first save of the season, striking out Moncada with two runners on for the final out.
Neither Alexander Straus nor Mark Parsons were around when Angel City played its first NWSL game in 2022. But they didn’t miss much; in four years the team had one winning season and made just one playoff appearance.
So Straus, in his first full season as coach, and Parsons, 15 months into his job as sporting director, decided to raze the club and its sad history and start over. That break from the past couldn’t have been much clearer than it was in the opening game of the team’s fifth season Sunday, one which ended in a 4-0 rout of the Chicago Stars.
Three of the goals — from Evelyn Shores, Ary Borges and Maiara Niehues — came from players who weren’t on the roster at the start of last season. Borges also picked up her first Angel City assist.
The performance was the most dominant in club history and the margin of victory matched Angel City’s largest ever. It was also the team’s first season-opening win since 2022.
“There is a little bit of a new beginning,” Straus said.
“We’re a completely different organization than we were at the end of last year,” Parsons added.
Angel City proved that when teenager Kennedy Fuller opened the scoring in the 33rd minute, dribbling up the right wing and into the box before driving a right-footed shot off Chicago keeper Alyssa Naeher and just inside the near post.
Shores doubled the lead in the 53rd minute, heading in a Fuller corner for her second NWSL goal before Borges, a Brazilian international, made it 3-0 13 minutes later, jumping on a short goal kick by Naeher, then beating the keeper cleanly with a left-footed shot from the center of the box.
Niehues, another Brazilian international, closed the scoring in the 70th minute on a right-footed shot from the center of the box. Iceland’s Sveindis Jonsdottir got the assist on that goal. Of the four goal-scorers for Angel City, only Borges is over 21.
Angel City dominated the match statistically as much as it did on the field, outshooting Chicago 17-7 and putting six of those shots on target. Angel City keeper Angelina Anderson needed to make just two saves to record the clean sheet.
The announced crowd of 16,813 on a beautiful sun-splashed afternoon was the smallest for an Angel City opener.
AUSTIN, Texas — “The Sun Never Sets” is filmmaker Joe Swanberg’s 10th indie to premiere at SXSW but his first to play the event since 2017. The astonishing pace with which he made his early work — loose, idiosyncratic stories that were progenitors of the emergent style known as mumblecore — has slowed significantly, but also given way to a newfound maturity as both a person and an artist.
Introducing “The Sun Never Sets” at its world premiere on Friday night to a sold-out crowd at the Zach Theater, Swanberg called his latest “my favorite film I’ve ever made.” Shot on 35mm in Anchorage, the movie follows a 30-ish woman, Wendy (Dakota Fanning in a vibrant turn), torn between pursuing a fresh romance with a reckless old flame (Cory Michael Smith) or continuing on with the settled-in-his-ways divorced father of two (Jake Johnson) she’s been seeing for a few years.
Dakota Fanning in Joe Swanberg’s “The Sun Never Sets,” filmed in Alaska.
(SXSW)
“I guess this is what they tell you about getting older and doing this job longer,” said a thoughtful Swanberg in a video interview from his home in Chicago shortly before the South by Southwest festival. “You get better at it and you sort of mature and all of this.”
The film marks Swanberg’s fourth collaboration with Johnson, a partnership that goes back to 2013’s “Drinking Buddies.” (The actor partly financed the new project along with his brother.) Following completion of the third season of the Netflix anthology series “Easy” in 2019, for which he wrote and directed all the episodes, Swanberg was planning to take a break. A divorce and the pandemic caused that pause to grow even longer.
In the intervening years Swanberg produced a number of projects for other filmmakers, did some acting and opened a small video store in Chicago. Swanberg knew Anchorage-based producer Ashleigh Snead, who encouraged him to consider shooting something there. The scenic location would give Swanberg the opportunity to expand his visual style from his usual couches, bars and apartments of much of his work. (There still are a surprising number of scenes on couches and in bars.)
“Joe’s a real filmmaker,” says Johnson in a separate interview. “And I think sometimes he doesn’t get that credit because he can make movies with nothing. This is a real adult movie. This is a film about how complicated breakups are and how messy they get. And it’s in beautiful Alaska.”
Swanberg, center, on the set of “The Sun Never Sets.”
(SXSW)
Swanberg has now gone from someone making talky, provocative and at times controversial films about the lives of post-collegiate 20-somethings to exploring the nuances and specifics of being a 44-year-old divorced father of two still trying to figure out his place in the world. His original cohort of SXSW-affiliated filmmakers, many of whom also fell under the rubric of mumblecore — nobody much liked the name, but no one ever came up with anything better, so it stuck — included Greta Gerwig, Lena Dunham, Barry Jenkins, Ti West and others who have gone on to more conventional mainstream success.
But Swanberg doesn’t seem to feel left behind. Rather, he only sees doors opening.
“It’s gone so much better than I thought it was going to go for me,” he says. “I mean, when I was making these really tiny, sexually explicit 71-minute movies, I was like, I’m just grateful to be here. I can’t even believe these festivals are showing this work and it’s so cool that there’s a space for me in this ecosystem.
“And so to watch my friends go off to do these giant movies, to see Greta doing ‘Barbie’ and stuff like that, to me it just opens up the possibilities,” he adds. “Each time a friend of mine sets some new record or moves into some new space, I’m kind of like: Oh, that just opened up for all of us now.”
His earlier work often featured raw sex scenes, sometimes featuring Swanberg himself. From practically the start of his career, well predating the #MeToo-era reckoning that began in 2017, Swanberg weathered accusations that he was exploitative and manipulative of his female performers. His stepback from productivity coincided with a moment when his explorations of sexual power dynamics fell out of favor. It would be easy to interpret that Swanberg preemptively soft-canceled himself to avoid a broader scandal. He doesn’t see it that way.
“Certainly in Chicago, where I’ve spent the last five years, I’m not unwelcome places,” he says, drawing a distinction between himself and “people who lose jobs or are capital-C canceled. But also my work has always pushed those boundaries and always attracted some amount of positive and negative attention.”
Though “The Sun Never Sets” has numerous kissing scenes, it doesn’t go too much further than that.
“I won’t do it,” Johnson says of more graphic scenes. “When I worked with Joe early on, I was like, ‘I love you, man — I’m not doing this.’”
For her part, Fanning had no reservations about working with Swanberg. He offered both Fanning and Smith the opportunity to work with an intimacy coordinator, but neither felt it was necessary.
“There was no planet where you’d ever be asked to do anything you were uncomfortable with,” Fanning says. “If there was ever a moment like, ‘I don’t want to do that,’ he’d be like, ‘Oh, then let’s not.’ There was a day where there was a scene and it was pouring rain outside. And we both looked at each other and he was like, ‘We’re not going to do it. The scene’s cut.’ He’s just open. And I just trusted him implicitly.”
Jake Johnson and Dakota Fanning in the movie “The Sun Never Sets.”
(SXSW)
Swanberg has long worked in an unusual style in which the script is essentially a detailed outline and the actors work to come up with their own dialogue during rehearsals. For “The Sun Never Sets,” Swanberg and Johnson developed the longest, most complete outline Swanberg has ever used, including some dialogue exchanges. Then the actors were allowed to make it their own.
Fanning recalled an early Zoom call with Swanberg and Johnson on which they explained the process.
“It’s still made like a real film,” Fanning says. “And Jake and Joe promised it’s not like we’re just flying by the seat of our pants: ‘You will know what to say, I promise.’ And then friends that know me asked, ‘Are you so nervous?’ And I was, but for some reason, I don’t know why, I just knew that it was going to be fine. And that just proved to be true.”
Even though it takes places in Anchorage, Swanberg calls “The Sun Never Sets” “extremely personal.”
“I was definitely writing a movie about a divorced mid-40s guy dating a younger person,” he says. “The questions of marriage and having children were sort of an amalgam of two real relationships that I merged into one onscreen.” He describes the material as “questions that I had and have about what my own relationships are going to look like post-divorce.”
That comes through in Fanning’s rich, layered performance, which might rank among the best of her already lengthy career. Swanberg’s style draws both an ease and an intensity from Fanning, who captures a woman at a pivotal moment of figuring out what she wants amid the emotional whirlwind she is going through. (At the film’s premiere, Fanning said, “I’ve never put so much of myself into a role before.”)
“I think the goal of Joe’s films, and I think at least my goal with this film, is trying to make everything feel real,” she says. “Things are just a mess some of the time.”
Dakota Fanning and Cory Michael Smith in “The Sun Never Sets.”
(SXSW)
Swanberg himself appears in a small role as the new husband of the ex-wife of Johnson’s character. And the characters of the two kids in the movie are named after the director’s own children. With a newfound maturity and emotional depth, Swanberg is continuing to make movies that are part diary, part generational markers.
“It’d be really cool in my 40s to make movies about characters in their 40s,” he says, “and in my 50s, 60s and 70s. It’d be neat to be making sexually explicit movies about 70-year-olds in their dating lives and sex lives and stuff. It’s really exciting to have movies about characters at this phase of their life, whether they’re finally settling down in their 40s or whether they’re getting out of relationships and reexamining their life. It’s where my head is at.” .
