The Weeknd debuted his slow-burning record After Hours last month. The singer followed the album’s release with a gory visual accompanying the track “In Your Eyes.” Now, the singer returns with a cinematic and less gruesome video for “Until I Bleed Out.”
The video is a visual depiction of what it feels like to get the spins. A rotating camera shows The Weeknd sporting his usual After Hours get-up, a red suit and a bloody nose. The camera pauses to show the singer surrounded by falling confetti and colorful balloons in a grand mansion. Partygoers laugh and drink around him, but The Weeknd remains too disoriented to join in. The Weeknd finally collapses, but the stage continues to spin, leaving the singer to try to make it out on his own.
Ahead of the video’s release, The Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights” topped the Billboard Hot 100 charts for a second week in a row. The song managed to knock Roddy Ricch’s “The Box” out of its longstanding spot at No. 1. “The Box” had an impressive 11 weeks at the top slot, but The Weeknd’s After Hours single took the coveted spot on the charts.
While some artists have chosen to postpone releases due to the coronavirus, others are pushing forward and offering solace from the isolation with entertaining tunes. This week in pop music, especially, saw some unexpected releases. Lindsay Lohan aims to make her comeback with a club-ready single, Frank Ocean dropped a surprise track in Spanish, and Troye Sivan unveiled his first single of 2020.
Each week, Uproxx rounds up the best new releases. Listen up.
Lindsay Lohan — “Back To Me”
Lindsay Lohan made an unexpected return to music this week. After sharing a snippet of the new song on social media, the actor/singer debuted “Back To Me” in all its pop-laden glory. While she’s had some turbulence in her personal life in the last few years, “Back To Me” proves Lohan has a certain knack for pop music. A buoyant hook and vibrant percussion make Lohan’s single destined for dance floors everywhere.
Frank Ocean — “Cayendo”
The ever-disappearing Frank Ocean also made a return this week with two new singles. Following his 2019 track “In My Room,” “Cayendo” arrives as a distinct pivot. It is, after all, the first of Frank’s songs to be sung in Spanish. Resounding guitar fills a sonic backdrop for Ocean’s thoughtful croonings on the reflective track.
Troye Sivan — “Take Yourself Home”
After teasing a leak to fans when he was bored in quarantine, Troye Sivan released his first single of the new year. “Take Yourself Home” arrives a slow-burning track to showcase his rise to fame in just a few short years. Under a gentle beat, Sivan’s captivating vocals are at the forefront of the track, detailing his introspective lyricism.
Karol G & Anuel AA — “Follow”
Latin pop sensations Karol G and Anuel AA made their relationship public with single “Follow,” which arrived alongside a heartfelt self-quarantine video. The couple recorded the track while stuck at home in Miami, detailing their blossoming relationship. “While at home under quarantine, we couldn’t stop making music,” Karol G said in a statement. “We wanted to create a song that was cool and fresh for our fans with a video that shows how we are overcoming the reality that we are all going through.”
Empress Of — “Bit Of Rain”
Indie-pop artist Empress Of released her lively record I’m Your Empress Of. “Bit Of Rain” arrives as the record’s second track and sets the electric tone of the effort. Wonky keys provide a backdrop to Empress Of’s captivating lyrical delivery. In an interview with Uproxx, Empress Of said her album’s distinct sound arises out of having a lack of collaborators: “I made a lot of these beats while touring my second album, Us. I made a lot of them on airplanes and tour sprinters and green rooms, so I didn’t have that same collaborative process as like, Us. It was just out of necessity, because I wanted to say these things.”
Yaeji — “When I Grow Up”
Queens-born Korean producer Yaeji unveiled her hotly-anticipated mixtape What We Drew this week. While much of the tape furthers Yaeji’s impressive catalog, “When I Grow Up” stands out as a captivating number. Yaeji turns her mic check into a hard-hitting beat while her timorous vocals narrate in a mix of Korean and English. In a statement, Yaeji said the track is a reflection on her childhood: “‘When I Grow Up’ is a song of two perspectives talking with each other. one is me from my childhood, wondering what it would be like when i become an adult. the other is me as an adult, breaking the truth to young me.”
Clara Mae — “Run Into You”
Swedish singer-songwriter Clara Mae offers a luminous new anthem “Run Into You.” The singer’s captivating tenor floats above cascading synths and a catchy, stomping backbeat on the lovelorn single. “What if tomorrow we’re strangers?” Mae wonders with emotive yearning in the track’s lyrics.
Bazzi — “Renee’s Song”
Following his break-out track “Paradise” that arrived as last summer’s unofficial anthem, Bazzi is showing his softer side with the ballad “Renee’s Song.” The song is devoted to his girlfriend, who he celebrated a two-year anniversary with. In a heartfelt note posted to social media, Bazzi attributed his success to his significant other: “my love – you’ve stood by my side through everything for two years. i wrote this for you & i hope you feel like the only girl in the world today…”
Diana Gordon — “Wasted Youth”
Diana Gordon released the EP Wasted Youth after teasing a new era for several weeks. In a statement, Gordon said “Wasted Youth” is a chronicle of her experience with men: “‘Wasted Youth’ is mostly about my love life and experiences with men. I didn’t have my father to learn from, so his absence was a great opportunity to learn from life. Most of the songs represent my phases of maturity and the types of men I was attracting at those times: from fuck boys with bad intentions that seemed good and tortured artists to intelligent, well-spoken savants.”
Soko — “Are You A Magician?”
French singer, songwriter, actor Soko announced her third full-length album Feel Feelings with her second single of 2020. “Are You A Magician?” deals with projecting internalized fantasies onto a relationship, and the disappointment that follows when the pristine image crumbles. The song’s accompanying video is more whimsical than its lyrics, with Soko saying in a statement that she wanted to create a specific persona: “The goal for me was to be a like a Victorian goth sailor moon princess who listens to Kate Bush a little too much.”
Some of the artists covered here are Warner Music Artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
“Oi. Oi,” calls Jock in the throaty register I’ve come to recognize as his “crocodile voice.”
He splashes the water next to the dock with the top of his baseball cap, keeping his eyes trained on the edge of the lagoon 50 or 60 yards away. “Oi. Oi.”
A faint shape materializes on the surface of the greenish water, shimmering in the reflected afternoon sunlight. It’s there just long enough to recognize — long snout, twin hillocks for the eyes, the faint, irregular outline of a long tail — before it disappears again, completely invisible.
“Oi. Oi.”
Jock, his eyes still locked somewhere in the middle distance, steps back from the edge of the dock. I’m looking the same direction, a few steps back from a sign reading: DANGER CROCODILES. Please remain at least one metre away from the water’s edge at all times unless accompanied by a staff member.
I don’t need to be told twice. When the crocodile guide steps back from the edge of the dock, it probably means something. A few seconds later, there’s a loud clang as the crocodile’s… head? snout? slams into the dock with enough force to push one of the tire bumpers sideways, generating a big splash. You know that scene in a horror movie where the still unseen antagonist suddenly slams into the boat/car/house/door? It’s standard imagery and for good reason: it’s the moment when an abstract threat takes physical form. “Maybe I’m just overthinking this. Maybe it’s all in my head” you silently wonder to yourself, and then CLANG! The internal monologue vanishes and you smash cut back into the present.
The croc is finally fully visible as it glides slowly around a corner of a slip. It’s probably most terrifying in this form, visible just underneath a foot or two of water — the better to magnify its massive size. The saltwater crocodile is the largest reptile on Earth, the males up to 20 feet when fully grown. This one, Jock tells us, is named Otis. He’s not tame or captive, just familiar in these parts — a local. After maneuvering around the corner of the dock, Otis swims slowly towards its backside. There are steps down into the water back there, leading to a fenced in area underneath the water. Jock tells us we can “swim with the crocodiles” in it — sort of like a lower-tech, chainlink version of a shark cage. I’m already closer to a live crocodile than I ever planned on being in my life, and being underwater with one is the stuff of nightmares. Thanks but no thanks, Jocko!
Baki, a TV personality and GoPro ambassador from Malaysia who’s on the tour with us, volunteers to go into the cage. I guess that’s how you become a GoPro ambassador. As Baki descends the steps I’m full of nervous energy, compelled to fill the silence even though I have nothing worthwhile to contribute. “Is the water cold?” I hear myself asking, idiotically.
Otis the croc slowly opens his mouth as he approaches the dock. And then… he just kind of floats there motionless for a while. It’s almost as if his operating software has frozen and he needs a reboot. Perhaps this is strategic. The better to lull you into a false sense of security. The instinct to run away competes with the instinct to bop him on the snout just to make sure he’s still alive. I have a distant memory of throwing pennies at the alligators at the Exploratorium as a child. The croc’s inscrutability amplifies the fear. Crocodiles aren’t just deadly killing machines — sharks, big cats, hippos, wolves, etc. all possess that ability — it’s also that they don’t seem to have thoughts in the same way, lacking legible emotions, or consciousness as our mammalian brains understand them.
Top End Safari Camp
Remember when Werner Herzog looked into the eyes of a grizzly and saw only “Za cold indeefference of nature”? Crocs are the embodiment of that, old testament nature. They seem as likely to sit there, still as a rock, as to strike at you with lightning speed. It’s the unknowability as much as the teeth.
Otis sits there with his mouth open for one, two, five minutes. Jock leaves him be, Baki steps out of the chain tank, and our group piles onto the Top End Safari Camp fan boat.
Jock, who’s about 25, drift races the flat bottom boat around the wetlands of Australia’s Northern Territory, fishtailing around stands of reeds and bouncing over logs where puddles and trickles meet rivers and massive crocs lounge on the banks (and presumably lie hidden under the surface). We’ve arrived during the dry season, but there are high water marks halfway up the scrubby trees lining the tributaries showing where the wet season levels would be — 10 feet over our heads. In a few months, the whole place would be a giant lake.
Jock stops the boat in a narrow waterway where a medium-sized croc lies half-submerged next to the bank. The boat, which is essentially an open platform with a waist-high chain railing around it, is nearly touching the croc, which is at least 10 feet long. Jock gestures to its head while describing features of its anatomy, standing right next to it. He’s almost touching it. And then he does touch it, right on the head.
This is the guy I had let fly me around in a helicopter less than an hour earlier. It was my second helicopter flight ever. I’d gone up with a tour company in Kauai about six months earlier, and when I did, there were hours of tourism board warnings — telling us to take Dramamine, putting us on a scale, arranging us by weight — plus a full safety briefing. In Australia, we got into a small, five-seat helicopter with no doors and the safety briefing consisted of the 25-year-old pilot explaining, “Yeah, mate, weah gonna go up in the choppah” in his nasally North Queensland strine. (All of this was before Kobe Bryant.)
Now I was watching the same guy touch a live crocodile’s eyes and nostrils to demonstrate “the only soft pahts of his skull.” When you imagine who you want flying you around in a helicopter or piloting a fan boat through a crocodile-infested swamp, you hope it’s someone for whom “safety” is his middle name. I’m not sure this type of person exists in Australia, where most of the men are named Jock.
The rest of the skull is made of bone, apparently. Jock, it seems, knows this particular crocodile as well, which is missing part of its lower jaw from a fight. Jock shows us this by physically lifting up the crocodile’s snout until it moves its head out of the way, damn near grabbing it by the teeth. After this demonstration, Jock climbs back into the driver’s seat of the fan boat, sliding us around the narrow waterways like a giant watery quad bike. Hey sure, no worries, mate.
Top End Safari Camp
Next, Jock pilots us to the middle of a wider waterway for an encounter with a bigger, friskier croc. We glide to a stop and he starts doing his crocodile call again, lightly slapping the water with the top of his camouflage baseball cap. “Oi… Oi…”
Once again, the croc seems to materialize 20 or 30 feet away, then disappear, only to reappear again about 10 feet away. Is there a way to compare crocodiles to Romulan warships without sounding like a huge nerd? Anyway, that’s what they’re like, materializing and dematerializing as if by cloaking device, all physical exertion basically invisible.
Jock tells me to hand him my camera. I unlock my iPhone for him and he starts filming, leaning over the railing on the flat-bottom fan boat. The croc swims toward him. Jock isn’t holding food, or luring the croc like a matador with a red cloth. No, the croc is coming for him. He is the bait. As it gets close, the croc lunges out of the water to about waist height with jaws open wide, snapping at the phone in a perfect Instagram moment before disappearing back into the water. Holy shit.
After I’d posted the video, a friend of mine sent me a link to a story about his childhood neighbor, a doctor on a medical mission to Africa who’d been plucked off his canoe during safari trip in Botswana. A Nile crocodile (much deadlier than Australian saltwater crocs in terms of body count) had leapt from the water, snatched the man from the canoe, and pulled him under to eat him. His wife of 18 months, riding in the canoe behind, witnessed the entire thing.
I hadn’t known that story at the time, of course, but even so, I wasn’t nearly as afraid as I would’ve imagined myself being. Jock, along with his boss at Top End Safari Tours, Matt Wright, whose wife was having a baby when we visited, collects crocodile eggs as part of a wide-ranging conservation effort (as profiled in Nat Geo’s Monster Croc Wrangler). The tours are only one aspect of the business.
As theoretically terrifying as being around a giant crocodile should be, I found myself unable to generate much panic around someone so thoroughly sanguine. Jock had a preternatural chill about him that was so all-encompassing as to be oddly contagious. All Australians seem to possess this to some degree, even the other 99.99% of them who want absolutely nothing to do with crocodiles. A people that treat virtually any life event with a good-natured shrug was a big part of why I found the place so captivating. It’s a hard place to worry.
Top End Safari Camp
This was my first trip to Australia in almost 17 years. I’d first come in the early aughts for a semester abroad, my first real trip outside the country, excluding day trips to Mexico. The 14 hours from San Francisco to Sydney was one of my first plane rides, crossing the international dateline and losing an entire day along the way. Imagine that, an entire day, just poof, wiped from the calendar.
I know everyone falls in love with the place where they studied abroad to some extent, returning with an insufferably faux-worldly air and adopted new vernacular — “oh cheerio, chaps, is this the way to the metro?” But, and go with me here… for me it went further than that. Partly because I had arrived as a virginal, not-quite-formed human and left as something much closer to the adult I would one day become, sure, but partly because of the place itself.
For as much as Australia is the most preposterous country on Earth, there was a palpable sense of community like I’d never experienced. Not like a hand-holding, stranger-hugging kind of community, more a good-naturedly needling, piss-taking kind of community, where Americans were casually referred to as “seppos” (as in septic tank, as in generally full of shit). It reminded me of my own family, where love is often expressed in the form of a roast. Australia is a country of eye-rollers, of rib elbowers, of ball busters. They don’t let you get away with the casual peacocking that’s so common in the US. Perhaps as a result, you do meet fewer insufferable people there. It’s hard to go to a bar in Australia and not leave with at least one new acquaintance.
I hadn’t even considered the possibility of travel abroad until I met an Australian exchange student playing rugby. He was a lunatic, who would hector people into drinking, sing unimaginably vulgar songs and regularly pass out stark naked on disgusting beer-encrusted floors. He once got us thrown out of a cab ride for repeatedly and affectionately (?) calling the driver “cabbage.” “Oi, cabbage!” he’d yell. To which the cab driver, for whatever reason, took great offense. This feral Australian regaled us with tales of a magical place where one could do this all the time. A place called the University of Queensland.
On my first afternoon at St. John’s, the small Anglican sub-college at UQ (a glorified dorm, essentially) I walked into the dining hall. I’d arrived at the tail end of a semester break so there were only a handful of people there, and I did what I would’ve normally done in a dining hall back home — found an empty table. This, I was soon informed, was not how things were done.
There, you took whatever the next open seat was and filled up each table one by one. In this way, it wasn’t long before all 200-odd students pretty much knew each other by name (or nickname, as often as not). They had other weird traditions too. If you said the word “tea” or “coffee” in any context, you had to bring tea or coffee for the whole table. It was strange and Harry Potter-ish (for “formal dinners” on weeknights, you had to wear a black robe like a judge), and the food was usually terrible, but despite the bewilderingly foreign trappings, I soon found a college experience much closer to the one I’d always had in my head. Not beaches and bikinis maybe (those Girls Gone Wild commercials corrupted expectations for an entire generation), but a more communal experience where everyone sort of knows each other and people acquire familiar nicknames through constant ball-busting and drunken hijinks. It was a place that, at that time in my life, felt right in some deep way.
Upon visiting Australia in the early nineties for his book The Happy Isles Of Oceania, Paul Theroux, one of our greatest and most crotchety travel writers, put it slightly less charitably:
Australians (it seemed to me) were people who appeared to be at ease when in fact they were simply controlling their emotions, and being on good behavior, because the slightest relaxation of this stiffened vigilance would have them howling. They were like people who had only recently been domesticated, like youths in their late teens sitting among adults, rather upright and formal and wooden, because as soon as they loosen their grip or have one beer too many they slip into leering familiarity and all hell breaks loose. What you took to be good manners was simply the forced, self-conscious behavior of someone holding on. Much of the time Australians had the exaggerated and unconvincing manners of drunks pretending to be sober.
Suffice it to say, the place got into me. I felt genuine grief when I had to leave.
I spent much of my unhappy, professionally demoralizing twenties (the mid-aughts were awful, especially if you weren’t a mortgage broker) scheming of ways to go back as I bumbled through a series of crappy jobs — porn editor, barista, copywriter for an SEO company, copywriter for a college loan company, waiter at a hotel, copywriter for a porny social media network… Most of these I got fired from. I thought I’d maybe go to graduate school there. Instead, I got into a more “prestigious” program in New York, where I’d applied basically on a whim.
So I moved to New York. I got another degree. I got a job. I moved back to California. Australia receded to a lower rung in my personal origin story, a collection of fun stories. Was that all it was, a mirage?
Vince Mancini
17 years later, one of my good friends from high school invited me to his wedding outside Melbourne. He’d stayed in Fresno County where we’d grown up, working for a hotel chain. He had frequent conference calls with a coworker in Australia, and like the plot of some rom-com, they fell in love. After a few trips back and forth, a lot of Skyping, and eventually a proposal, he moved in with her father in a Melbourne suburb while they looked for place to live. The bride’s mother died of cancer just a few months before the wedding, which, again, seems like an almost too on-the-nose beat from a rom-com, a cheap way to add depth, if only it wasn’t true.
It was a wedding I couldn’t miss. I never imagined that a family of Australians would one day merge with a family from Reedley, California, one of the least cosmopolitan places on Earth. Or more to the point: I always assumed that if someone from our podunk town ever moved to Australia, it would be me.
I brought along my girlfriend, who, just to bring things full circle, is also from my hometown, and still lives nearby. We’d reconnected on a trip home. We both thought it’d be a fun little fling at the time and… yadda yadda yadda… it turned out to be much more. I’d done what I never imagined I’d do and come back home, while my friend had become an expat. Amazing what love can do, isn’t it? It was almost like we’d switched lives. Only instead of being upset about it, as some earlier version of me undoubtedly would’ve been, I was thrilled. That’s a part of growing up, probably, when you stop micromanaging the arc of your own story and let the universe have its say.
When I was planning for the trip, we’d been dating a few months. Serious, but with an ending still unwritten. By the time we were preparing to leave, I’d managed to put together a side safari to the Northern Territory complete with a helicopter ride. We’d been dating for almost a year. I knew she was “the one,” a concept I’d never before believed in. I realized that if I didn’t propose on this trip, anything else would be a letdown.
Our first stop in Australia was Melbourne, to visit Dan, an old friend from the dorms in Queensland who I’ve kept in touch with over the years and have now visited in six cities around the globe. Australians are obnoxiously worldly like that. Before Melbourne, I’d gone to stay with him in London and in Helsinki, where he’d met his Finnish wife, Pia. They’re one of my favorite couples, even if we only see each other every four or five years these days. My first memory of Pia was waking up in a hungover haze on their couch in Helsinki with Pia looming over me as I took my first confused blinks of daylight in Europe. “Do you like your eggs poached or fried?” she asked in her sing-songy accent (Finnish words sound like raccoon chatter, it’s hilarious).
Which is to say, they’re perfect hosts. When I first visited them in Finland, Pia spoke mostly flawless English, as most Scandinavians do, but peppered with the peculiar Australianisms she’d picked up from Dan, who grew up in North Queensland — which is sort of like the Alabama of Australia. She’d call a toilet a dunny, a quilt a doona, an ice chest an eski, and once described a friend being made fun of as “they were taking the piss right in his face.”
Vince Mancini
After years of living in Australia, the accent is even fainter and the Aussie-isms serve only to make her sound more like a local. They now live in a delightful suburb outside Melbourne, where most of the houses are made of tan bricks and the architecture looks a little like New Orleans meets the far east. Lots of the buildings have multi-level decks with decorative metalwork on the front, with the odd pagoda-like attachment thrown in. Dan and Pia had a spacious, open home set in a landscape of rolling hills and swaying eucalyptus where they live with their two precocious, rom-com-ready toddlers. Why do children with accents always seem smarter? (To be fair, these kids were bilingual so they actually probably were smarter).
I introduced them to my girlfriend. They let us sleep off our jetlag. We went for a jog at dusk and chased the grey kangaroos that forage in the morning and evening hours with our cameraphones like tourists. Australia exists now for me as this strange combination of the exotic and the familiar, inhabiting both memory and imagination, where I can still get excited about wild marsupials and knowingly point out quirks of the local palate, like the savory pastries (meat pies, sausage rolls) Aussies eat with ketchup (to-mah-to sauce, in local parlance). That Melbourne is so much like Northern California where I’d spent most of the past decade — a temperate cosmopolitan city on the bay surrounded by wine country — only deepened the sense of funhouse mirror deja vu.
Dan and Pia left the kids with their Mamma Mia-singing nanny (Australians fucking love ABBA, to an off-putting degree) and the wine flowed, even though it was a school night. Dan sagely advised that we have a few beers before we got into the wine. We reminisced about our rowdy college days and commiserated about becoming boring suburban parents (at this point I was essentially living with my girlfriend and her six-year-old). There was the time Dan took me to my first cricket match, Australia vs. England, at the Gabba in Brisbane, where we smuggled in a bladder of boxed wine (“goon” in the local tongue) and got threatened by some heavily tattooed fellow cricket goers, who thought Dan’s “the queen takes it up the bum” song crossed the line of acceptable fan behavior. Later we stopped at a McDonald’s (“Maccas”) where Dan broke a plastic broom over my head right as I tried to take my first bite, something I thought was a hilarious joke, then and now. Like many of his countrymen, Dan has a contagious and irrepressible mischievousness, another thing that charmed me about the place.
A few days later we left Dan and Pia’s for the wedding in Daylesford, a few hours away, driving an Aussie rental car on the left, trying not to hit curbs and cursing every time we hit the wipers instead of the blinker out of habit (which was often). The scenery alternated between rolling hills and dense eucalyptus forests. It began to rain and we passed pastureland where the sheep had turned reddish-brown from the mud. We’d rented a one-room cottage near the wedding with a botanical garden right out the back door. We arrived early in the evening and built a fire. When we woke up the next morning we discovered it had started snowing during the night. We opened the back gates into a garden blanketed in white, a winter wonderland in August.
It was a cold day for a wedding. The snow had turned into rain. We all packed into a cozy, wooden event space that felt like a secular chapel. Waiters walked around pouring wine and champagne, and, in true Australian fashion, never let my glass fall below the halfway mark. There were emotional speeches about the bride’s mother. The couple danced their first dance to Otis Redding.
We collected food and sightseeing recommendations from the wedding guests and, when we explained that we were headed up to Darwin for a safari soon, a few said, just as Dan had, that it would be a great place to experience “the real Australia.” Funny that even in one of the most urbanized countries in the world, where more than 80% of the population lives in big cities, the capital of Australia’s most rural territory, the one that’s most overtly an outlier, is still broadly considered the most “Australian.”
Australians have always been complicit in their own myth-making, going back to Crocodile Dundee. The film was co-written by its star, Paul Hogan, who had already starred in the Australian Tourism Board’s “Come and say G’day” campaign by that point, popularizing the phrase “put another shrimp on the barbie” to a generation of Americans (and another who experienced it second hand via Dumb and Dumber).
These days, you’ll occasionally hear an older Australian say “g’day” (“How ya goin’?” is far more common, and essentially ubiquitous) but they love to complain about being associated with “shrimp on the barbie.” It’s clearly inaccurate, they’ll point out. An Australian would never say “shrimp” to describe a crustacean large enough to be grilled, always “prawn.”
The other explanation for Australians positioning their rural places as most central to their identity is that they’re doing the same thing that Americans have: get nostalgic about the land they occupy as it existed before they conquered it. That’s the less fun version. Though somewhat understandable. Lots of places have skyscrapers and bridges. Not many have kangaroos and crocodiles.
We arrived in steamy Darwin fresh from snowy Daylesford. In the taxi line, I noticed a blonde woman who looked both extremely pregnant and, generously speaking, about 55 years old. Maybe she was actually only 40 but had lived some kind of rugged, crocodile dundee-esque lifestyle? When you’re traveling, every stranger’s face seems to tell a story.
Top End Safari Camp
The next morning, the sun broke over the estuary across from the balcony of our hotel (which, in true Australian fashion, doubled as a casino). It was low tide and we walked out onto the beach towards the water until the sand turned to disgusting slimy muck. We went for a walk on the city side, strolling past banyans, with their dangling creepers, periwinkle-flowered jacaranda trees, and the occasional wild mango tree. I have an enduring sense memory of that northern Australian sun, and when it hit my skin, I was instantly transported back to Queensland. Back to walking home past lines of pale anglo school children in their old fashioned uniforms and elaborate skin cancer-mitigating hats — wide-brimmed straw boaters, or baseball caps with neck flaps. The sun in the Northern Territory feels closer somehow, more intense.
Jock eventually arrived at the hotel to pick us up in the tour minibus. We drove around Darwin picking up the other tour-goers, which eventually included Denise and Grahame, a retired couple from Queensland traveling around Australia on holiday, Rob, a single train conductor from eastern Victoria, and Baki, the aforementioned GoPro ambassador.
We got to talking, naturally, about crocodiles. Grahame and Denise pulled up a cell phone picture of a statue in Queensland, supposedly a life-sized replica of a giant crocodile shot by a woman in the 1950s — 8.6 meters long (just over 28 feet) according to later Googling, which does seem unnecessarily large. We oohed and ahhed and just at the perfect pause in the proceedings, Grahame drawled, “Apparently she used her husband as bait!”
Grahame, it would turn out, is an enthusiastic and capable purveyor of dad humor. In my experience, all Australian men are stocked with a copious but finite number of dad jokes in the womb, which they deploy frequently and skillfully over the course of their lifetimes until their supply of dad jokes is eventually all used up and they return to the red Earth, to become food for the grass on which the kangaroos and wallabies graze, beginning the cycle anew. On breezy days you can hear the wind whisper through the gum trees: “Oi, mate, workin’ hahd or hahdly workin?”
Grahame found out my girlfriend was a nurse and immediately exclaimed, “You’re a nurse? ‘ave a look at me toe!”
“Toe,” by the way, in Australian strine, like all O words, comes with an elongated, faint but distinct “oy” or “o’er” sound at the end. Toe becomes “tooooeey,” no becomes “noooooii” or “nooooo’er,” and so forth. Say it with me: “Ooo’er nooooiii! Dooooin’t goooy ta Utar!”
It’s the central feature of the dialect, along with the wildly inventive slang — something virtually every travel writer from Bill Bryson to Paul Theroux to Bruce Chatwin to William Finnegan has correctly identified as one of Australia’s most important cultural contributions (Theroux called Australian English “one of Australia’s glories and its greatest art form”).
Grahame put his sandaled foot up on the picnic table where we were having lunch, and sure enough, the third toe on his right foot was completely black and blue. He said he’d been watching “Hawoyi Foive Oooih” before bed and ended up doing “karate kicks in me dreams.” He’d walloped the side of his caravan and voila, purple toe. Denise had since wisely banned him from watching Hawaii Five-0 before bedtime.
The rural honky-tonk restaurant where we were eating, in Berry Springs, had some small crocodiles in a tank (you can order all manner of crocodile meat there to eat as well, which to me just tastes sort of like dry turkey). Jock showed us pictures of the albino crocodile that he’d found with Matt Wright, that Wright had let him keep as a pet. The word “pet” kept tripping me up, and I had to know: what does “pet” actually mean as it relates to what will eventually become a giant, potentially man-eating reptile? Does it… show affection? Recognize you as its owner?
“Nah, mate, he’ll grab ya,” answered Jock matter-of-factly. “Theah’s no love theah.”
I asked about some of the particulars of Wright’s conservation work, which involves collecting eggs, most of which would die in the wild, and raising them on farms, where they can then be sold for the skin and meat. It’s a valuable trade that proponents say marries conservation and commerce. A crocodile expert interviewed by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation called the Northern Territory “a world-leading model for helping poor communities via conservation.”
That work apparently involves sneaking around croc-infested swamps yoinking eggs from giant croc mothers. Not exactly my ideal profession, but that being said a lot of things sound preferable to the politics of digital media and online advertising. I asked Jock what they do if a croc comes after them. “Ya just stick the bloody crate in theyah mouths,” he told me, as if life is just a simple matter of following Looney Tunes rules. Duh, just stick the crate in the crocodile’s open mouth. If someone pulled a gun on me I would simply plug the barrel with my index finger and smirk.
We found out Grahame and Denise had been married for 40 years. “What’s your secret?” my girlfriend asked.
“Dad, I’m pregnant!” said Grahame.
Later that night at the campsite when it was getting dark, Grahame warned, “Don’t carry two lanterns — the roos ‘ll think yer a car and jump out in front of ya!”
Truly a master of his craft. When we sat around the campfire after dinner, we went around the circle drinking and telling jokes. “Why did the cane toad cross the road?” Grahame asked. “To see his flatmate!”
Bad dirty jokes are an area in which I felt like I had much to contribute, so I started in with the one about the couple at the nursing home. They were too old for sex so when they wanted to get intimate, they’d sit next to each other in their wheelchairs and the woman would hold the man’s penis. One day, she came back from a trip to the hair salon, only to find the man with a different woman holding his penis. “This is unbelievable!” she raged. “What does she have that I haven’t got?”
“…Parkinson’s,” said the man.
It went over pretty well, though less so with Grahame, who only chuckled politely. “Oy’ve got Pahkinson’s,” he said after a beat. A one upper ’til the end.
Vince Mancini
On the way to the campsite, we stopped at the Berry Springs Recreation area, which from the parking lot (carpark) looks like a glorified rest stop bathroom — the dry scrub indistinguishable from the miles and miles of same around it, extending to the horizon. But after a two-minute hike (past a sign that warned that the area is closed in the wet season because “increased water levels allow Saltwater Crocodiles to move into the area”), we found ourselves in paradise. Gentle springs feeding clear, warm bathing pools, with striped fish swimming languidly around your feet while bright green birds dive-bomb out of the trees to catch bugs above the water’s surface on their way back up to another perch. I never imagined I could feel so relaxed swimming in an area with a beware of crocodiles sign.
We piled back into the van for the trip out to the campsite, but not before a stop at the Sandpalms Roadhouse Tropical Motel, an extremely Australian establishment that combines bottleshop, tackle store, pub, restaurant, and campsite. It felt straight out of Crocodile Dundee. Every vehicle seemed to have a snorkel (which are sometimes an affectation in Australia, the same way mud flaps and big deer whackers on pick-up trucks that never leave the suburbs are in the US) and gnarled men in short shorts sat around outdoor tables drinking beer from stubbies and telling tales. There was a flatbed truck in the parking lot with a vanity plate reading “GNFISHN”. We were there stocking up on drinks for the evening. The beer selection was extensive and I had to consult the barwoman on which beers were regular beer and which were “mid-strength,” the Aussie near beer (or “session ale,” in craft brew-speak) designed for the all-day drinker. A tour guide for a different company sidled up to join the conversation. “They all drink mid-strength beahs heah. Oy tell ’em they could just drink full strength and go home at 11.”
I asked what the crowd at the Sandpalms is usually like. Locals? Farmers? Tourists? Fishermen? The tour guide shrugged and waved me away. “Ah, they’re piss tanks.”
Eventually, we headed back to our campsite. The Top End Safari Camp, more glamping than camping, consists of a cluster of white tents shaped like garlic bulbs set in a clearing amongst massive cathedral termite mounds, craggy sand formations two or three times the height of a person. We flopped around the tent taking silly pictures and then my girlfriend started to unpack. I realized it was probably go-time for proposal planning. I surreptitiously pocketed the ring, which I’d smuggled into the country inside a sock (forever grateful Qantas didn’t lose my luggage) and stuck it into the pocket of my swim shorts, hoping it didn’t make too obvious a bulge. I told her I was heading to the bathroom and went back to Jock and our other guide, Faye, to try to gameplan.
They had already been prepped a bit. I asked if there was a point in the helicopter tour when he could maybe just hover a bit. I pictured us floating gently in the air, framed over a beautiful Australian sunset like some antipodean Viagra ad (“antipodean” is a fun word you can use whenever writing about Australia), when I could make a short little speech over the headsets and I could give her the ring and everyone would clap and maybe some of them would tear up, touched personally by the obvious depth and purity of our love. I also imagined proposing in the helicopter would be cool and memorable and heartfelt without having to do the whole getting-down-on-one-knee thing, which always seemed so cheesy.
“Yeah, mate, oy reckon oy’ll put yous down neah the termoite mounds,” Jock proposed.
Or, yeah, I could do it near the termite mounds. It’s important to be flexible. Jock seemed adamant on this point and the man seemed to know his business.
***
They set it up so that our tour group of six would ride the helicopter in two separate groups, with our group consisting just of Jock, my girlfriend and I, and Faye, who brought along her own camera. As we lifted off, it immediately became obvious why my plan for a gently floating proposal would not have been possible. The helicopter was wide open on both sides, like the whirlybird version of a four-wheeler, and Jock piloted it accordingly, swooping around in big S-shaped arcs and drift sliding it through the air. It was like we were jet skiing in the sky. Which makes it sound scary, but again, if you ever want to learn to relax just surround yourself with a few Australians who steal crocodile eggs for a living.
The scenery was breathtaking. We flew around flat, grassy marshes and winding streams, with white cockatoos flapping around stands of skeletal gum trees, trying to get as many pictures and videos as we could, with vice-like grips on our cell phones to keep them from flying off into space and bonking some croc on the nose. Jock eventually set us down in a field of the aforementioned termite mounds, a stunning otherworldly landscape of golden grass studded with reddish, 20-foot tall natural obelisks beneath a vivid blue sky and burnt orange setting sun.
We hopped out of the helicopter and I started in with the mini-speech I’d been running through in my head. How I’d never believed in the concept of “the one” before I met her, and so forth. I won’t nauseate you with the details. “What is even happening right now!” she said, putting her hands to her face.
Realizing I couldn’t really avoid it, I got down on one knee. Again, it’s important to be flexible. No one cried, but if you want that reaction, probably don’t propose on a foreign continent after a helicopter ride between crocodile tours. Adrenaline tends to neutralize introspection. Otherwise, it was a pretty amazing day.
As we floated back into the dying orange daylight, I took in the scenery. I realized that even if I’d never live out my youthful dream of life as a romantic expat writer, this country that I love so much would always be part of our story. I hadn’t married into an Australian family, but I had found a way to rig it so that the place would always be as important to her as it is to me.
Top End Safari Camp
A portion of this trip was hosted by Top End Safari Camp. For the Uproxx Press Trip Policy see here.
R. Kelly is remaining right where he is, despite a request for early release from prison. In March, Kelly filed for early release, claiming concern over the potential spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus in the MCC Chicago detention facility where he currently awaits trial for a plethora of crimes including sex trafficking. While his concerns aren’t completely unfounded — Meek Mill has pushed governors to adopt his safety plan for prisons to contain an outbreak, while Tekashi 69 was actually granted a release this month — a federal judge did not deem Kelly to be at any increased risk of contracting the virus.
Judge Ann M. Donnelly explains in court documents obtained by Complex that “While I am sympathetic to the defendant’s understandable anxiety about COVID-19, he has not established compelling reasons warranting his release. At present, there are no confirmed cases of COVID-19 at the MCC in Chicago.” Furthermore, she writes, “The Bureau of Prisons has announced emergency measures to protect inmates and staff, including suspending all legal and social visits, suspending inmate facility transfers, making soap available to inmates, screening and testing inmates and staff, and modifying operations at detention facilities like the MCC to maximize social distancing.”
She also notes that Kelly is 53 years old, well younger than the age group of “older adults” considered high-risk by the CDC. Finally, Donnelly also considers Kelly a flight risk because of his established history of bribing and intimidating witnesses. As she reminds the court, Kelly “is currently in custody because of the risks that he will flee or attempt to obstruct, threaten or intimidate prospective witnesses. The defendant has not explained how those risks have changed.”
Donnelly rejected Kelly’s claims that he needs to be in face-to-face contact with his lawyers as well. MCC has suspended visiting hours — which actually is a smart move to help prevent an outbreak — but Kelly can contact his attorneys via email or phone. Meanwhile, his original trial date has likely been postponed because of coronavirus safety measures, so his legal team should have even more time to prepare their case (which may not even help him much, as he faces similar charges in a half-dozen jurisdictions). For the time being, it looks like R. Kelly will just have to get comfortable being on lockdown.
With Jay and Silent Bob Reboot out of the way, Kevin Smith is gearing up to wrap-up his “True North Trilogy” of Canadian-based films. After years of radio silence, Smith has finally delivered an update on Moose Jaws, which will cap off his series of strange, offbeat films that started in 2014 with Tusk followed by 2016’s Yoga Hosers.
In a recent online Q&A to help fans and himself pass the time while self-isolated, Smith sounded very optimistic about the prospect of getting Moose Jaws in front of a camera once the global pandemic simmers down. Via Bloody Disgusting:
“Moose Jaws is the movie I’m doing that’s Jaws but with a moose instead of a shark. It’s so weird that you bring it up. We have a phone call about it with some of the folks that we made Reboot with next week. A conference call. So yeah, it may be bubbling back to life. Wouldn’t that be nice? Head up to the Canadian outdoors, spread far apart from everybody, making movies. One day, when we’re allowed to do that sort of thing again. So yeah, movement on Moose Jaws!”
Smith first announced Moose Jaws at San Diego Comic-Con all the way back in 2014 and has been teasing bits and pieces about the film in the six years since. In 2015, he teased that the film would feature the death of one of his beloved View Askew characters. (We won’t spoil it for you, but you can click the link to find out.) And in 2016, Smith elevated the film to a passion project that could be his magnum opus, according to Comic Book:
“Moose Jaws is like, it’s my favorite thing I’ve ever written,” he said at Sundance in 2016. “This is a f-ckin’ fan film. This is like pouring my heart out on a page. I love Jaws, and I love Canada, and I combined the two of them. So the whole thing is beat-for-beat Jaws, up until the third act. In the third act it becomes Godzilla, Destroy All Monsters, Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan, and ends with Return of the Jedi. It’s pretty magical.”
If you got an hour to spare, you can watch Smith’s full Q&A below:
Previously on the Best and Worst of Raw: We experienced a WrestleMania that was Just Too Big For One Night featuring a new WWE Champion, The O.C. summoning an army of druids to do their bidding before AJ Styles was murdered by burial, and Edge defeated Randy Orton in a Last Man Standing match with a Conchairto on top of a production truck, which made it hurt more.
One more thing: Hit those share buttons! Spread the word about the column on Facebook, Twitter and whatever else you use. Be sure to leave us a comment in our comment section below as well. I know we always ask this, and that this part is copy and pasted in every week, but we appreciate it every week. Up next is Money in the Bank, unless it isn’t.
And now, the Best and Worst of WWE Raw for April 6, 2020.
The Most Fear-Inducing 10 Minutes Of Raw You’ve Ever Experienced
Forget anything Bray Wyatt, The Undertaker, or Papa Shango ever did; the most scared I’ve ever been watching Raw is when Big Show randomly turned up with a referee and goaded Drew McIntyre into a bonus WWE Championship match “after WrestleMania.” That shit turned me into young Jenny from Forrest Gump. Dear God, make me a bird so I can fly far, far away from here.
So at the end of Raw we go to the footage, and Drew McIntyre makes a full entrance, in full gear, “20 minutes after WrestleMania” to do an interview in the ring. This is already such an absurd scenario I can’t even put it into words. Why are they doing an in-ring interview when the show’s off the air? For the ambiance? Who was that big entrance for? Were they taping this for Raw and just forgot to take down all the WrestleMania graphics, and halfway through it were like, “shit,” but sunken cost kept them from starting over? Regardless, Drew starts talking about the match he had with Brock Lesnar less than half an hour ago, and he’s interrupted by ♫ weeeEEEeellllll ♫
I felt like I was watching my life flash before my eyes. They wouldn’t have put this in the main event and referred to it as “shocking” so many times if Show didn’t win, right? And oh no, Big Show has that Netflix sitcom debuting this week, WWE would totally put the title on a guy with a new TV show so he could have it when he goes on talk shows or whatever, wouldn’t they? Even if they’re doing talk shows via webcam right now, Show could still have a big glittery WWE logo on his shoulder. And oh no, WWE would definitely spend forever treating McIntyre’s championship win like a quest to legitimize his entire life’s work only to “shockingly” yank it away from him 30 minutes later. AND OH NO, WRESTLEMANIA IX. OH NO.
But Drew wins. And it’s okay. Breathe, it’s okay.
I hated this in every way a fan can hate a wrestling match, I think, but goddamn, was it effective. I was MORTIFIED. It had 100% of my anxious attention, and got my brain racing thinking about timelines where THE BIG SHOW is WWE Champion in 20 by God 20. It just felt so plausible, and so weirdly arranged. Can you imagine another sports league doing a secret, additional championship match after a 3-hour show dedicated to that championship and then not telling you anything about it for 24 hours? They report “WWE Superstar comments on BUILDING MOMENTUM before Smackdown” or whatever on WWE.com seconds after it happens as BREAKING NEWS, and they’ll call up Sports Illustrated because they’re putting Cousin Luke from the Bushwhackers into the Hall of Fame, but a second, sudden WrestleMania main event isn’t a thing they want to tell people about until late the next day?
Secret, Easter egg main-events are an interesting concept, but I think The Hulkster ruined that for everybody back in ’93. The WrestleMania everyone agrees is the worst ever in a walk probably isn’t the one you want to be teasing and emulating. But it’s all good. No need to turn into a bird and fly away. But don’t scare me like that.
The Raw After WrestleMania, With No Fans
WWE Network
FUCK YOUR BEACH BALLS
To me, the Raw after WrestleMania with no fans feels even stranger than WrestleMania with no fans. The “Raw after WrestleMania” is the one where smart crowds and/or aggressively self-aggrandizing crowds (depending on your point of view) “go to the polls,” so to speak, and loudly, musically tell WWE what they like and don’t like. It’s the show where Roman Reigns will get booed for eight minutes before he can speak, or the beach balls come out, or Randy Orton and Sheamus get relentlessly heckled for having a boring match. It’s become almost more of an “event” than Mania, so watching it go down in an empty gym was a real phantom limb situation for me.
That said, one thing remained from the Raw after WrestleMania playbook: “call ups.” Or, if you want to pretend like they actually think NXT is a “third brand” now and not just a vanity project masquerading as developmental, a lateral move.
Bianca Belair
A solid 30 minutes of hour one is dedicated to the arrival of Bianca Belair. At WrestleMania, the Street Profits won a Raw Tag Team Championship match against Angel Garza and Austin Theory but got attacked afterward, so Bianca made the save to even up the odds and beat up Zelina Vega. On Raw, the Street Profits win a Raw Tag Team Championship match against Angel Garza and Austin Theory (by disqualification this time, so it’s DIFFERENT) but get attacked afterward, so Bianca makes the save (slowly this time, with a full entrance, because it’s DIFFERENT) to even up the odds and beat up Zelina Vega. I don’t know why they did Bianca’s main roster debut the same way twice. Also, shout-out to Zelina Vega for being the best manager of all time. She got a team who’d never even had a 2-on-2 tag team match a Tag Team Championship match at Wrestle fucking Mania, and when they lost, she got them a rematch the next night. Lord knows they’ll probably get another shot next week. That’s efficiency.
Anyway, hey dawg, we heard you like Teddy Long tag TEAM match announcements, so we put a Teddy Long tag team match announcement in your Teddy Long tag team match announcement. Bianca making the save crashes Raw to break, and we come back to her vs. Vega one-on-one. Bianca’s been taught to always speak to the hard cam, so we get a funny bit where she’s cutting a promo on Vega to the camera while Vega’s standing behind her. It’s like at WrestleMania when the Profits picked her up and showed her to all four sides of the arena, like you might if any fans were actually in there. The one-on-one between the women ends in a disqualification as well, or some kind of no contest, at least, with the tag teams at ringside getting into a fight. So we crash to break again, and we come back to a six-person tag.
Long story short, Raw replayed a match from WrestleMania with two non-conclusive finishes in a row and had Zelina Vega’s team lose three matches in half an hour. Bianca and the Profits looked good, at least. When quarantine’s over, Austin Theory goes back into cryogenic storage.
Apollo Crews
The best and most surprising thing about Monday’s Raw for me was the Raw re-debut of Apollo Crews, and the fact that he had a 28 minute, competitive match against Aleister Black. Hell yeah, Apollo Crews. Dude’s been underworked, undervalued, and underappreciated since he debuted without a character or anything to do down in NXT.
I’m interested in how this match would’ve played out in front of a real Raw after WrestleMania crowd. Could they have even done it? I could see that crowd being really into an epic, 30-minute, TakeOver-style match between a wrestler they like (Black) and a wrestler they could (Crews), but I could just as easily see them dumping on it for being too long. Would a shorter, more intense match have played better? Would they have even CONSIDERED giving Crews 30 minutes of Raw to work and show off what he can do if we weren’t under quarantine? Regardless, if Raw’s plan going forward is to fill the three hours with longer, more competitive matches featuring stars who haven’t gotten an opportunity to look like anything but a jobber piece of shit for the past few years, I’m into it. Can we get that Crews, Akira Tozawa, and Ricochet faction going already?
One fun note here: this match was killing me with the micromanaged announce team mandate where they have to say a wrestler’s WWE Superstar’s entire name every time they’re mentioned. That becomes a real chore in long, one-on-one matches. “Aleister Black now working on the leg of Apollo Crews. What does Apollo Crews have to do to get back into this if Apollo Crews wants to win? Those kicks from Aleister Black are part of Aleister Black’s arsenal, and if Aleister Black keeps kicking Apollo Crews’ leg, how will Apollo Crews stay standing?” It felt like a vacation any time they just called them “Black” or “Crews.” There should be an asterisk on that mandate that if the match is longer than three minutes, you’re allowed to use a more conversational tone. Shit sounds like prerecorded commentary from the video games.
Nia Jax
The most important roster realignment of the night is probably the return of Nia Jax, who is back from double knee surgery with Paige’s finisher, presumably to keep her from throwing so many leg drops and risking knee damage. Jax’s return victim is Deonna Purrazzo, who is a good worker who got signed at the worst time and is stuck doing non-stop enhancement duties for two rosters in the same building at the same time.
I was hoping Jax would come back with some alterations to her presentation and character — and I thought it was an odd choice to announce her return via graphic (with an old picture) instead of just letting it be a surprise for the viewers — but she’s more or less the same as she was last time we saw her. So [shrug]. Happy to see her healthy again, at least. Returns during quarantine are hard to quantify anyway.
Also On This Episode
Asuka opens the show trying to rehab two straight losses to Alexa Bliss by tapping out Liv Morgan. Liv’s a lot better than she was during their first meeting, which was 50 seconds of televised manslaughter. Or, as Asuka herself noted, “To put it bluntly, [Liv Morgan] was so evolved. I am really surprised about that.”
Seth Rollins had a 270-pound man jump off a comically oversized sign and mash him through a table two days ago, but he’s not even going to CONSIDER selling that during this Denzel Dejournette squash. Not that I want the guy to come out in a body cast or anything, but damn, a little wincing would’ve been nice. Spectacular, violent acts that end up in highlight reels for years should at least have some mild, temporary consequences, you know? The Hardy Boyz used to sell ladder matches like they’d walked down the ramp straight from intensive care.
Brendan Vink continues to capitalize on his proximity to Winter Park and willingness to compete during a pandemic by getting another TV match. This one’s a loss to Humberto Carrillo, who is finally allowed to wrestle someone other than Andrade or Angel Garza for the first time in months. This is the first Raw match he’s had not involving one or both of those guys since December. Vink is still a “from NXT” despite having had two matches on Raw, and only one ever on NXT TV.
Speaking of NXT, Ricochet and Cedric Alexander (who are now a “hot new tag team,” because what else are they gonna do?) get a quick win over Danny Burch and Oney Lorcan that would’ve ripped down there. Ricoced has some good, high speed, tandem cruiserweight offense that would really pop if the main roster put more emphasis on tag team wrestling and put them in competitive matches against established duos that either compliment or constructively contrast with it, so here’s hoping a post-WrestleMania Raw without a lot else to do turns its tag team division turn into something valued and substantial.
No classic matches in full this week, but we get a heavily clipped and video packaged-up version of the Boneyard Match. While it didn’t work for me on the same level the Firefly Fun House Match did, it’s still worth a watch and a read, and easily the best deleted scene from the 1995 movie version of Mortal Kombat WWE’s ever produced.
Best: Top 10 Comments Of The Week
AddMayne
this match is too big for just one hour
Clay Quartermain
Saxton: “if Drew can hold on for a few more minutes, the Big Show is due for a face turn!”
TRB
John Cena in the void: “What kind of jerk challenges someone to a title match right after they won?”
Zelina: “A family thing? Sounds great. Let me grab my husband”
Montez: “Request for smoke withdrawn”
Endy_Mion
Asuka: My tongue is green!
Liv: My tongue is blue!
Saxton: my tongue is—
Asuka rips it out of his head and throws it at Liv.
Uproxx applauds
Harry Longabaugh
So let’s imagine this is a normal Raw after Mania. Tonight we would see:
-Kevin Owens and Seth Rollins continuing to feud for another three months
-A Bobby Lashley face turn for some reason
-Dijakovic (no first name) debuting with a victory over Lucha House Party
-Viking Raiders cutting a “shoot” promo about how they’re going to be called War Machine whether we like it or not. [Note: still Erik and Ivar]
-Undisputed Era debuting to beat down new champ Drew McIntyre. McIntyre takes out Fish, Strong and O’Reilly fairly easily. Until brand new UE member DAVEY RICHARDS shows up to even the numbers!
-And in the post credits scene, AJ Styles gets dug out of his grave….by SHAWN MICHAELS who then superkicks him back into the hole, buries him once again. “See you next year, kiddo,” says HBK as Raw…rolls…on…
AJ Dusman
*Yesterday*
Me: Maybe the Boneyard and Firefly Fun House segments show a new WWE that is willing to take risks and try new things.
*Me tonight at 10:50pm*
Me: I’m an idiot.
Baron
Raw ends …and the next thing we see is:
WWE Network
Taylor Swish
The last time someone spent that much time trapped in a closet and came out with all kinds of aggression towards bald black men, R. Kelly made 33 songs about it.
CFCarboni
Rollins risen from the dead after one (kayfabe) night. He really is better than Jesus!
WWE
The weekend is officially done, so now I can collapse. Thank you for reading, sharing, leaving comments, participating in our open discussion threads, and everything else. We can’t do this without you, and we mean that.
Be sure you’ve read the Best and Worst of Smackdown, Best and Worst of WrestleMania 36 nights one and two, and the Firefly Fun House analysis special edition. We’ll see you throughout the week with hopefully more unexpected 30 minute matches, Charlotte Flair returning to NXT as Women’s Champion, and whatever they decide to do with a Braun Strowman-led Smackdown.
It is unclear whether or not HBO will be able to air Hard Knocks this year, as it’s impossible to know what things will look like in the coming months due to the COVID-19 pandemic. If it is able to happen, however, Adam Schefter of ESPN reports that HBO will try to do something a little different.
Schefter brings word that both Los Angeles squads, the Chargers and the Rams, are in line to appear on Hard Knocks this year, marking the first time that two teams get featured on the show — the Rams have been on it in the past, while this would mark the first time that the Chargers have gotten onto Hard Knocks. Both are sharing a new stadium during the 2020 season, and as Schefter laid out, that proximity to one another is something that would theoretically make putting two teams on the show a little easier.
No one yet knows whether training camp will be a go this summer because of the virus, but NFL Films must prepare as if it will. Being stationed in Los Angeles will give NFL Films the ability to embed itself with two NFL teams, a concept the show has not tried in the past.
Again, it all comes down to the ability to hold a training camp this year, something that is not guaranteed. The possibility of two legitimately interesting teams sharing this stage, though, is a fun one, and it would be cool to get a glimpse into the Chargers in the first year post-Philip Rivers, or the Rams as they look to get past last season’s disappointing campaign and make it back to the Super Bowl.
A dominant big man can paper over a number of cracks a college basketball team might have, especially when the NCAA Tournament rolls around and squads need someone who can lead them to victory by sheer force of will. If the 2020 edition of March Madness hadn’t been canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we’re willing to bet that two bigs, in particular, would have made quite the impact for their teams.
When Maryland was at its best this year, second-year big man Jalen Smith was usually at the center of everything. Smith can do it all on the basketball court and is a legitimately unguardable frontcourt player on his best days. If the Terps were going to be at their best in the tourney, it was going to be because Smith did an admirable impression of Danny Manning, the former Kansas star who led the Jayhawks to a national title and went down as one of the best players in the sport’s history. Even if Smith never becomes the No. 1 pick like Manning, Maryland just needed him to have a Manning-like impact for six games to win the NCAA Tournament, something he very well could have ended up doing.
USC had its ups and downs this year, but through everything, there was no denying that Onyeka Okongwu could just do things on the court to make the Trojans better. Like former UConn big man Emeka Okafor, Okongwu was a tenacious rebounder and defender whose ability to obliterate opposing big men in the paint brought his team to another level. The Trojans were a bubble squad this year — ESPN’s Joe Lunardi had them as the last team to get a first-round bye in his most recent Bracketology update — and if Okongwu could have played like Okafor, they had the potential to be a pleasant surprise come the second weekend.
It’s unclear what the future holds for Smith, who has not yet declared for the 2020 NBA Draft, while Okongwu is expected to be a lottery pick. Missing out on them doing their things during the tournament was unfortunate, but in a bit of good news, both of these big men should be household names in the world of basketball for a while.
Selena Gomez debuted her highly-anticipated comeback record Rare early this year. Since the record’s release, Gomez has been sitting on a few new tracks to share alongside the deluxe version of her record. But, amid the ongoing pandemic, Gomez has decided to attach a charitable component to her deluxe album. Gomez is donating to a COVID-19 relief fund and offering a portion of all her merch to benefit the charity.
Gomez explained her charitable actions in a social media post:
“Many of you know how excited I’ve been to release a song called ‘Boyfriend.’ It’s a lighthearted song about falling down and getting back up time and time again in love, but also know that you don’t need anyone other than yourself to be happy. We wrote it long before our current crisis, but in the context of today, I want to be clear that a boyfriend is nowhere near the top of my life of priorities. Just like the rest f the world, I’m praying for safety unity and recovery during this pandemic. Because of that, I’m personally donating to the Plus1 COVID-19 Relief Fund as well as donating $1 of every order in my official store to the fund starting now.”
The Rare (Deluxe) features three new songs from the pop singer. Along with the remainder of the 13-track record, Rare (Deluxe) includes the bonus tracks “Boyfriend,” “She,” and “Souvenir.”
Rare (Deluxe) is out 4/9 via Interscope. Pre-order it here.
Mozzy has the attention of the streets simply because he speaks the hood’s language. When Mozzy speaks, his words present themselves as bright, expressive stanzas, proving himself to be a great sermonizer in addition to a talented wordsmith.
Hailing from Sacramento’s toughest neighborhood Oak Park, where things have not always been so sweet for him, the now Grammy Award-nominated artist has always been one to look at the silver linings of conflicted situations. He’s so in love with the “beautiful struggle” that he used the title for two separate songs; in 2015, he titled a track from Bladadah “Beautiful Struggle” and the following year, he released a project of the same name with another song titled “Beautiful Struggle.”
Now, his new album Beyond Bulletproof is slated for release May 1 and its artwork is an ode to the forgotten souls of his community, including drug addicts, the homeless, and those lost because they have been socially defined by their past mistakes.
Mozzy is not afraid to embrace the ugly, and that is the energy his forthcoming album sits in. Even as the entire planet is on a worldwide lockdown and people are mandated to stay indoors as a way to avoid spreading and catching the debilitating coronavirus, Mozzy isn’t really tripping about this moment in time. “I’m in love with it,” he tells Uproxx over the phone.
“The effects it has on family members and just bringing everybody closer together and just pausing,” he continues. “It’s like I could just pause all the materialistic things. None of that sh*t really matter right now. It holds no substance and that’s the type of person I am, so I’m ecstatic about it.”
His journey is similar to that of Nipsey Hussle or Tupac Shakur in that both had goals of helping out their community through the knowledge held in their music. As he rhymes on “I Ain’t Perfect” from Beyond Bulletproof: “I’m returning to the slums to get my people right.”
Plus, Mozzy loves being amongst the people. Perhaps it’s why, as his fame and music have grown, he’s not rapping about materialistic things but about the mentality needed to elevate, as heard on the motivating “Overcame.” The Oak Park native is living proof that it’s possible and he was gingerly inspired by his late grandmother, Brenda Patterson-Usher, who raised him while she was a member of the Black Panther Party.
During our conversation, Mozzy opened up about the intentions behind Beyond Bulletproof, his choice to see a therapist following the passing of his grandmother, and why he loves burgeoning Chicago rap star Polo G.
You got your new album Beyond Bulletproof coming out May 1 and I saw that you have a new series of you speaking to a therapist. I know you just lost your grandmother, which has always been a big part of your music. When did you first realize it was time to see a therapist and that it was okay to do so?
I used to joke about it. I feel like my music has really, truly been a therapist throughout my whole life, as therapy for me. But it’s after losing Grams, after losing my grandmother, I really don’t have nobody that I could communicate with on that type of level. I’m very discreet about certain things with certain people and there’s not too many people that’s on her level. I don’t feel that comfort with that many people. Talking to a therapist and knowing that everything you say is confidential and the fact that she doesn’t know me, I don’t know her; so it’s a lack of judgment there. I just wanted to try it out. I felt like it’d benefit me in the space I’m in right now.
How did you go about finding the right therapist?
I left it up to my manager, but I told him I wanted an African-American lady. I wanted somebody who could understand me and understand the background and upbringing, and somebody who could really sympathize being a young African-American male who lives in America today.
And she has you doing those breathing exercises. Do you find yourself doing that now, pausing and breathing?
Not really. Finally, when I do Wiz’s Kush Up Challenge! I ain’t going to lie, I almost cracked up. I almost started laughing but I was trying to be very respectful. I didn’t want her to think I thought she was a bullshitter. So I held it in. I did good.
Well, how do you relax in those moments where you find yourself really just going off?
I’m really relaxed. I get in a mood, not necessarily with people unless I’m just really comfortable with someone and we have that vibe. But really I get in my real relaxed state of mind, just real calm. I calm everything down when I get on the freeway, when I’m in a car, when I’m by myself, when I’m entitled to cry, when I’m just entitled to freestyle. I’m entitled to do whatever I feel. I’m entitled to say what I feel. When I can yell, when I can let my grandmother know “I miss you.”
This shit hurt, this shit crazy. Sometimes this shit don’t even feel like it’s worth it because it ain’t everything I did it for. I was doing it so she could… I wanted to put a smile on her face. I wanted her to feel all the work and effort she put in. That’s like me putting in so much work, so much effort, and then I don’t really get to enjoy the fruits of my labor. It just feels unfair but I’m able to just release all that. I’m able to talk to the universe and just put that out there when I’m on a freeway.
You’ve mentioned before about how she was a great person in the community and always helping out. I see you’ve been doing that. Plus, your music has grown, it’s matured a lot and I hear you rapping about a different subject matter. Do you feel a responsibility to carry on that same legacy as her?
For sure. For sure. I seen Queen And Slim and he said, “As long as my family know my legacy, I’m Gucci and Gabbana.” That’s kind of like her. She wasn’t really worried about the world and outside of the world and me publicizing. She had plenty of times they do interviews to talk about me, even during the time she was very healthy. Just the discreteness within her, it wouldn’t let her do it. I respect that she didn’t have a funeral service. She kept it real close-knit, even though she’s a big dog and a pillar within the community.
She told us she didn’t want others to see us at our weakest hour. That’s why she dictated and directed it to be like that because she didn’t want the world to see us at our weakest hour and I respect it. That’s just the type of person she was. So, sure, carry her legacy within a family. But it’s just within me, period. It’s the way I live. Just the way I raise my daughters, my sincerity. Just taking everything … just doing things with passion, everything. Every little thing that I remember her just reiterating all the time. It come to light nowadays and I try to apply within my daily living.
Your song “I Ain’t Perfect” with Blxst shows it’s okay to not be perfect and no one on earth is, but you can always become a better person. What are some ways that you think that you’ve worked on becoming a better person?
Spending more time with my children, that always helps. It fulfills me. Looking out for people. Instead of looking out for a couple of people this month, we going to look out for 20 people. Even if it’s small, even if it’s minute. Just looking out for people. I’m taking it to the next level of looking out. Just going further with it. Reading; that always assists me. It helps mold me. Dedicating myself to my family. Understanding what a priority is. Understanding how to prioritize and just understanding that we are limited to time on this earth and so whatever it is that I want to accomplish, whether it’s with family, financially, socially, I got a bite down. I got to live within a moment. I got to do it right now, right now. Practicing living in the moment always help me.
I also want to talk about Polo G since he’s featured on the album too. I see him kind of taking those same steps that you, Nipsey Hussle, and G Herbo have. What’s your relationship with him?
Oh, that’s my boy. Polo G. That’s my dog. Pull up to the video shoots. You can invite me to a shoot or even invite me to an interview or whatever the case, and it could be in one of his slimiest, treacherous neighborhood and I’m a blow down on you. I’m going to pull up, I’m going to follow through with that commitment regardless of the potential dangers. I fuck with him heavy since 30. You understand me? It’s a lack of real n****s in this rap shit. A lot of n****s get big-headed when they reach a certain social status and I just got unlimited respect for the ones who still well-grounded in this shit, man, because it’s a little bit all the same.
I know this project’s about second chances, not really being perfect, and really introspective. What is a second chance you were given that you are most grateful for?
Life. Freedom. I feel like I was at a dark space in my life in 2014. One of the darkest. I had my daughter, I was fighting for custody, I was broke, I was living with granny and I’ve just had a lot of conflict. I was funking with the neighborhood, I was funking with the opposition. I just had a lot going on. I really didn’t care about life, I didn’t care about death. It’s crazy that I… because I could feel it, I could taste it, I could smell it right now. I recall just vividly being in that, under those circumstances.
I went to jail. I went to jail for something minute. I could’ve went to jail for something crazy, but I went to jail for something minute. I got full understanding that God function with me. It got to be God. It got to be a higher power and I got to be in his favor because it was just ugly. It was ugly for me and he set me down, temporarily, just momentarily type shit. He let me get my mind right. He gave me enough time. It wasn’t too little, it wasn’t too much. I came home and I got to work. It’s just blessings upon blessing. I’m grateful. Thankful.
Love it. What is the ultimate thing you want people to get out of Beyond Bulletproof and what do we have to look forward to in the future?
The definition of bulletproof love. I just want to stay up there. I feel like I’m the face of Beyond Bulletproof. I feel like I’m the face of bulletproof love. I just wanted to take it a step further and let them know it’s Beyond Bulletproof. I really believe this shit on and off cameras. I want the forgotten. I want the one’s that’s overlooked. I want them to feel like it’s their time to shine. That n**** talking about me, he’s talking about my life. This album — it’s for me. I want them to feel possessive of the album. I want them to feel like that motherfucker was painted direct specifically for them. I just want them to be able to utilize it as a therapy tool. Cry to it, laugh to it, smile to it, get mad to it. It’s a roller coaster of emotion. I want them to really experience it, you understand? In a 3D manner.
This is random, but I’m pretty sure you’re familiar with self-help books like Think & Grow Rich?
Oh yeah, for sure.
It sounds like, with your music and Nipsey Hussle and music like that… it sounds like your music is that for the hood?
That was the best way you could paint it. I know a lot of people get mad at me cause I ain’t been on that raw-raw hype lately. I ain’t been on that 1 Up Top Ahk. I ain’t really been on that hype. I’ve been on a more progressive hype. I’m on a more productive hype and more uplifting. I think it just got a lot more substance.
My core fanbase don’t really fuck with it like that, but it’s growth and development and I understand the process. I ain’t going to be great living in 2008. I can’t be great if I’m still living in 2008. I got to progress with the time and that’s what I’m doing. My music has always been my truth. Truthfully, right now this is how I feel. I don’t know if it’s because I got a bag or cause I live on a 50th floor or cause I could take any car I want to drive this week. I don’t know if that’s the case, but I’m just in a more uplifting spirit and that’s what you’re going to get out of this album.
Beyond Bulletproof is due 5/1 on Empire. Pre-order it here.
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