CNN
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Adam Sandler will always Chris Farley.

More than twenty years after Farley’s death, Sandler still gets sad when he sings the “Chris Farley Song,” a song he wrote for his late friend and comedian, who died in December 1997 of a drug overdose at age 33.

Sandler told the “Happy Sad Confused” podcast that his musical tribute still makes him emotional. He performed the song as part of his Netflix special “Adam Sandler: 100% Fresh” and sang it on “SNL” when he hosted in May 2019.

“The first few times, we played that song, I would tear up and I couldn’t really sing it well because I’d get so emotional, and then I felt it and was able to get it out there,” Sandler said on the podcast. “It’s weird, but when that song starts, I go, ‘Oh f–k, alright, don’t cry and don’t do that’ still. I’ve sang it maybe a hundred times already, but it rocks me.”

Sandler added, “I think it’s because we show a video of Chris and I see his face.” He also said “hearing the crowd go nuts for Farley” makes him happy.

“Every show I do, by far the biggest applause of the night is talking about Farley and any time I mention his name, the audience goes nuts. It feels great,” he said.

Editor’s Note: Featuring the good, the bad and the ugly, ‘Look of the Week’ is a regular series dedicated to unpacking the most talked about outfit of the last seven days.

CNN
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Bringing the second day of this year’s Coachella to a close, K-Pop girl group Blackpink made history Saturday night when they became the first Asian act to ever headline the festival. To a crowd of, reportedly, over 125,000 people, Jennie, Jisoo, Lisa and Rosé used the ground-breaking moment to pay homage to Korean heritage by arriving onstage in hanboks: a traditional type of dress.

While the garments were shrugged off a few seconds into their opening track, “Pink Venom,” revealing each member’s custom black and pink Dolce and Gabbana outfit, fans across the world had already received the message. Screenshots of the moment quickly spread among Blackpink superfans, otherwise known as Blinks. “The way they stepped onto the biggest western stage in hanboks … literally proved their place at the top of the industry,” tweeted one Blink. “Blackpink really are in a league of their own.”

Another called the group “Korea’s cultural delegation” on Instagram, in reference to not only the hanboks but other visual cues incorporated into their show, such as one of the stage backdrops featuring an angular tiled roof reminiscent of traditional Korean architecture.

In recent years, Blackpink have enjoyed a meteoric rise to global fame. According to Guinness World Records, they are currently the most streamed female group on Spotify, and have the most-viewed music YouTube channel. Last year, they were the first female K-Pop group to reach number 1 in the UK and US album charts, and in 2020 their track “How You Like That” became the most viewed video on YouTube in 24 hours. (The group also wore modernized hanboks, designed by Kim Danha, in one of the music video’s scenes.) Their landmark set over the weekend was in fact a follow-up to another milestone: In 2019, they became the first female K-Pop group to ever play at Coachella or any other US festival.

From the iconic Jean Paul Gaultier cone bra worn by Madonna for her 1990 Blond Ambition tour to Geri “Ginger Spice” Halliwell’s Union Jack mini dress, the right stage costume can live on forever in public memory. Particularly when worn at a career-defining moment. During another watershed Coachella performance — Beyonce’s 2018 headline set — the singer’s custom Balmain collegiate-style yellow hoodie was a joyful nod to Black culture, specifically historically Black colleagues and universities.

The group’s four black hanboks were custom created by South Korean pattern design brand OUWR and traditional Korean dressmakers Kumdanje. Inspired by the Cheol-lik silhouette, each garment was hand-embroidered with metallic traditional Korean motifs, including dan-cheong patterns and peonies (a symbol of royalty in Korea). “It was our pleasure and such an honor to be able to show the beautiful values of Korea and Hanbok together,” the designers wrote in a combined Instagram post. “Blackpink showed the beauty of Korea and dazzled the world.”

In Korea, hanboks are still worn for special occasions and often seen on TV dramas. Many designers in the country have also created contemporary takes that are incorporated into everyday wear. At Seoul Fashion Week, JULYCOLUMN’s Fall-Winter 2023 collection drew on the hanbok’s voluminous silhouette to create shirts and structured jackets. Last September, Korean label BlueTamburin brought the garment to a Western audience by exclusively using traditional hanbok fabric to create its Spring-Summer 2023 collection at Milan Fashion Week.

Whether you’re a devoted Blink or not, the looks marked a moment of Asian visibility, recognition of traditional craftsmanship and a powerful example of feeling seen through fashion — representing Korean culture and symbolically embracing both its past and future.

At the end of their performance, and having addressed the audience between numbers in English throughout their two-hour-long performance, Blackpink finished their set in Korean: “Until now, it has been Jennie, Jisoo, Lisa, and Rosé Blackpink. Thank you.”

Top image: Blackpink performing at the first weekend of Coachella 2023, shortly after removing their hanboks.

CNN
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There’s a reason why Christine McVie was considered the heart of Fleetwood Mac.

The band’s keyboardist, who died Wednesday after a brief illness at the age of 79, was also the writer of some of the group’s most beloved songs.

Here are just five of those tunes:

This one is tied to some drama.

Fleetwood Mac is known for, in part, their tumultuous relationships, especially when it came to romantic ones.

Band members Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham had a thing that ended badly and McVie was famously married to, and then divorced from, their other bandmate, John McVie.

He reportedly thought the song, with its lyrics “Sweet wonderful you/You make me happy with the things you do/Oh, can it be so/This feeling follows me wherever I go,” was about their dog as the McVies were married at the time.

But it turns out Christine McVie had penned the love song in honor of the band’s lighting director with whom she had an affair.

Another tune from their famed “Rumours” album.

“Don’t Stop” proved to be a hopeful anthem for the future, which was so meaningful to former President Bill Clinton that he used it as his 1992 campaign anthem.

On Wednesday he tweeted a tribute to McVie.

“I’m saddened by the passing of Christine McVie. “Don’t Stop” was my ’92 campaign theme song – it perfectly captured the mood of a nation eager for better days,” he tweeted. “I’m grateful to Christine & Fleetwood Mac for entrusting us with such a meaningful song. I will miss her.”

This one was actually a solo song for McVie.

The first single off of her self-titled solo album, it sounds like it could be a Fleetwood Mac song with it’s buoyant rhythm and the infectious chorus, “Ooh, I got a love/I got somebody/This love got a hold on me.”

Plus Buckingham plays guitar on this one, giving it even more of a Fleetwood Mac vibe.

“Say You Love Me” is a jaunty tune that has become a mainstay on rock and easy listening radio stations.

She reflected on the sweet harmonies, she, Nicks and Buckingham achieve on the tune in a 1990 interview.

“The first time I started playing ‘Say You Love Me’ and I reached the chorus, they started singing with me and fell right into it,” Performing Songwriter magazine reported her saying. “I heard this incredible sound, our three voices … and my skin turned to gooseflesh.”

It feels right that so many on social media used this song to pay tribute to McVie after her passing.

The ballad she wrote has been pointed to as the perfect remembrance of someone lost.

Playing it now after her death seems haunting as she pours her heart into the opening lyrics, “For you, there’ll be no more crying/For you, the sun will be shining/And I feel that when I’m with you/It’s alright, I know it’s right.”

CNN
 — 

Throughout the various personal turmoils for which the members of Fleetwood Mac are known, one relationship buoyed the band for decades: the friendship between its two frontwomen, Christine McVie and Stevie Nicks.

McVie joined the band in 1970 during one of its early lineup changes and for years was its only woman. When Nicks was added to the lineup in 1975, the two became fast friends.

Theirs was not a competitive relationship, but a sisterly one – both women were gifted songwriters responsible for crafting many of the band’s best-known tunes. Though the two grew apart in the 1980s amid Nicks’ worsening drug addiction and the band’s growing internal tension, they came back together when McVie returned to Fleetwood Mac in 2014.

At a concert in London, shortly before McVie officially rejoined the band, Nicks dedicated the song “Landslide” to her “mentor. Big sister. Best friend.” And at the show’s end, McVie was there, accompanying her bandmates for “Don’t Stop.”

“I never want her to ever go out of my life again, and that has nothing to do with music and everything to do with her and I as friends,” Nicks told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune in 2015.

On Wednesday, McVie, the band’s “songbird,” died after a brief illness at age 79. Below, revisit McVie’s and Nicks’ years-long relationship as bandmates, best friends and “sisters.”

McVie and Nicks hit it off from the start

The story of Nicks joining Fleetwood Mac is legend now: Band founder and drummer Mick Fleetwood wanted to recruit guitarist Lindsey Buckingham, who stipulated that he would only join if his girlfriend and musician Nicks could join, too. McVie cast the deciding vote, and the rest is history.

“It was critical that I got on with her because I’d never played with another girl,” McVie told the Guardian in 2013. “But I liked her instantly. She was funny and nice but also there was no competition. We were completely different on the stage to each other and we wrote differently too.”

Throughout the band’s many personal complications – McVie married and divorced Fleetwood Mac bassist John McVie and had an affair with the band’s lighting director, while Nicks had rollercoaster romances with Buckingham and Fleetwood – they were each other’s center.

“To be in a band with another girl who was this amazing musician – (McVie) kind of instantly became my best friend,” Nicks told the New Yorker earlier this year. “Christine was a whole other ballgame. She liked hanging out with the guys. She was just more comfortable with men than I had ever been.”

The two protected each other, Nicks said, in a male-dominated industry: “We made a pact, in the very beginning, that we would never be treated with disrespect by all the male musicians in the community.

“I would say to her, ‘Together, we are a serious force of nature, and it will give us the strength to maneuver the waters that are ahead of us,’” Nicks told the New Yorker.

The band succeeds but McVie and Nicks grow distant

“Rumours” was the band’s greatest success to date when it was released in 1977. But the band’s relationships with each other were deteriorating, save for the one between McVie and Nicks. While the pair were enduring breakups with their significant others, Nicks and McVie spent their time offstage together.

The Guardian asked McVie if she was trying to offset the band’s tumult with her songs on “Rumours,” including the lighthearted “You Make Lovin’ Fun” and optimistic “Don’t Stop.” She said she likely had been.

As multiple members’ drug use intensified, the band’s dynamic grew tense. McVie distanced herself from the group in 1984 amid her bandmates’ addictions, telling the Guardian she was “just sick of it.” Nicks, meanwhile, was becoming dependent on cocaine.

McVie told Rolling Stone that year that she’d grown apart from Nicks: “She seems to have developed her own fantasy world, somehow, which I’m not part of. We don’t socialize much.”

In 1986, Nicks checked into the Betty Ford Center to treat her addiction, though she later became addicted to Klonopin, which she said claimed years of her life. She quit the prescription drug in the 1990s.

After recording some solo works, McVie returned to Fleetwood Mac for their 1987 album “Tango in the Night,” and two of her songs on that record – “Little Lies” and “Everywhere” – became major hits. But Nicks departed the band soon after, and the band’s best-known lineup wouldn’t officially reunite until 1997 for “The Dance” tour and subsequent live album.

The reunion was short-lived: After the band was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1998, McVie officially quit Fleetwood Mac, citing a fear of flying and exhaustion of life on the road.

McVie returns to Fleetwood Mac – and to Nicks’ side

In the 2010s, after more than a decade of retirement, McVie toyed with returning to performing. She officially rejoined Fleetwood Mac after calling Fleetwood himself and gauging what her return would mean for the group.

“Fortunately Stevie was dying for me to come back, as were the rest of the band,” she told the Arts Desk.

In 2015, a year after she’d rejoined Fleetwood Mac, McVie hit the road with her bandmates. Touring with the group was tiring but fun, the first time they’d performed together in years.

“I’m only here for Stevie,” she told the New Yorker that year.

Nicks concurred: “When we went on the road, I realized what an amazing friend she’d been of mine that I had lost and didn’t realize the whole consequences of it till now,” she told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune in 2015.

During that tour, McVie wore a silver chain that Nicks had given her – a “metaphor,” McVie told the New Yorker, “that the chain of the band will never be broken. Not by me, anyways. Not again by me.”

McVie told the Arts Desk in 2016 that she and Nicks were “better friends now than (they) were 16 years ago.”

Touring with Buckingham and Fleetwood could quickly get tumultuous for Nicks, McVie said, due to their shared history. “But with me in there, it gave Stevie the chance to get her breath back and not have this constant thing going on with Lindsey: her sister was back,” she said.

Their mutual praise continued: In 2019, McVie said Nicks was “just unbelievable” onstage: “The more I see her perform on stage the better I think she is. She holds the fort.”

When their 2018-2019 tour ended, though – without Buckingham, who was fired – the band “kind of broke up,” McVie told Rolling Stone earlier this year. She added that she didn’t speak with Nicks as often as she did when they toured together.

As for a reunion, McVie told Rolling Stone that while it wasn’t off the table, she wasn’t feeling “physically up for it.”

“I’m getting a bit long in the teeth here,” she said. “I’m quite happy being at home. I don’t know if I ever want to tour again. It’s bloody hard work.”

News of McVie’s death rattled Nicks, who wrote that she had only found out McVie was sick days earlier. She called McVie her “best friend in the whole world since the first day of 1975.”

On her social media accounts, Nicks shared a handwritten note containing lyrics from the Haim song “Hallelujah,” some of which discusses grief and the loss of a best friend.

“See you on the other side, my love,” Nicks wrote. “Don’t forget me – Always, Stevie.”

CNN
 — 

Brendan Lawlor is a man of his word.

In October 2020, the Irishman told CNN Sport he hoped to “keep the ball rolling” for the next generation of golfers with disabilities.

Now No. 1 in the World Ranking for Golfers with Disability, Lawlor has driven that ball across the fairway and over the summit – and it doesn’t look like it’s landing anytime soon.

Three years ago, he was acclimatizing to his new life as a professional athlete. Since then, the 25-year-old has become the first golfer with a disability to compete on the European Tour, won three disability events in a row through 2021, and rocketed to the top of the disability golf world rankings.

In recent weeks, he has helped Prince Harry improve his swing and headlined a landmark new Tour for disability golf – yet perhaps Lawlor’s most cherished moment came at the final trials for his country’s disability golf European Championships team.

“It’s pretty crazy – last year in Ireland we had no disability golfers and this year we had a final trial with seven players – all below three-handicap, which is amazing,” Lawlor told CNN.

“They all say, ‘we started this because … we saw you playing The Belfry (on Lawlor’s European Tour debut), we see you doing this,” he added. “It’s a feel-good feeling in your stomach when people try something because you’re creating the path for them.

“I don’t really care about rankings – I just want to go out and win as many events as I can, and change as many people’s lives as I can.”

From his hometown of Dundalk, north of Dublin, Lawlor was chatting ahead of the start of the inaugural Golf for the Disabled (G4D) Tour at the British Masters.

A four-time host of the Ryder Cup, in Warwickshire, England, The Belfry provided an iconic setting for the launch of the Tour, to be contested by the world’s 10 best-ranked golfers with disabilities in seven events across six countries.

Where disability events were once swallowed up between European Tour events, the new G4D Tour will run in association with – and across two days immediately prior to – the European Tour. With each tournament the subject of a full-length broadcast documentary on Sky Sports, disability golf is enjoying more exposure than ever before.

World No. 2 Kipp Popert was victorious in the maiden event, with Lawlor finishing four shots off the Englishman in fourth.

Watch: European Tour CEO on name change to DP World Tour

“If we can keep sending this message, if we can impact even 10 people’s lives, it’s massive,” said Lawlor, who already dreams of expanding the Tour to as many as 50 players. “This is going to have a roll-on effect for disability golf.”

Lawlor’s recent Belfry outing marked a return to the course he made headlines at in 2020 when he competed alongside major winners Danny Willett and Martin Kaymer – as well as former world No. 1 Lee Westwood – at the ISPS Handa UK Championship – the first time a golfer with a disability played in a professional European Tour event.

Born with Ellis-van Creveld syndrome, a rare genetic condition characterized by short limb dwarfism, Lawlor has no knuckles on the top of his fingers. While welcoming his platform as a leading disability golfer and the opportunities it brings, the Irishman is keen for himself and fellow players not to be defined by their disabilities.

“We’re getting these massive opportunities because we’re doing abnormal things – we shouldn’t be able to do what we can do with a golf club or a golf ball,” he said.

“So we’re getting these opportunities because we are disability athletes, but I don’t like it when people categorize you and put you in a disability category, because golf is for all – you play at any level.”

“That’s the beautiful thing about our game,” he added. “Yes, we play disability golf on a disability tour, but if you’re good enough to play on the European Tour with able-bodied golfers, you get that chance.”

Lawlor turned professional in September 2019 and signed with Modest! Golf Management, a company founded by fellow Irishman and singer-songwriter Niall Horan. An advocate for disability golf, the former One Direction star is now a close friend.

“He’s changed my life really – ever since I signed, he’s brought me some incredible endorsement deals and has really embraced disability golf,” Lawlor said. “He’s just a genuinely nice chap and he’d do anything to help you.”

And as if a hugely successful music career wasn’t enough, Horan is also an impressive golfer, currently playing off an eight-handicap.

Horan isn’t the only famous face to have picked up a club with Lawlor. In April, the Irishman dished out swing tips to the Duke of Sussex, Prince Harry, at The Hague in the Netherlands.

Lawlor was promoting the fifth edition of the Invictus Games, an international event for wounded serving and veteran military personnel, with Prince Harry a Patron of the Games’ Foundation.

Using a golf simulator room, Lawlor spent the day giving lessons to veterans from across the globe who shared their stories of various battles, both physical and mental.

Related: Steph Curry launches all-expenses paid golf tour for young underrepresented players

“These guys were trying out golf for the first time and making contact with the ball,” Lawlor said. “It only takes one person to get involved and start the game and that can get more people into it.”
And how was the Duke of Sussex’s swing? Not bad at all, Lawlor says.

“He grabbed the club and I just tweaked one or two things and he hit it really well,” Lawlor added. “He was a really nice guy.”