Month: April 2020

Newly-minted Philadelphia pop-rockers 2nd Grade are as honest as they are sarcastic. Pulling members from popular indie groups like Free Cake For Every Creature, Remember Sports, and Friendship, 2nd Grade announce their debut album Hit To Hit with the earnest lead singles “Velodrome” and “My Bike.”

In a statement, vocalist Peter Gill explained the group’s driving mentality:

“In order to be honest, you almost have to make an effort to be funny at times in art. It almost can’t even hold together because it is so at odds with itself but it does in the end. It’s one group of musicians presenting all these different ideas and directions of songwriting and miraculously, it holds together. Some of the songs take that approach of a person who feels like they have to be taking up so much space and adopting this super-macho image. And then on the other side, some of the other songs present a vulnerability behind that and a lack of self-confidence. I definitely couldn’t have made an album as good without all the people involved and that is tied into the idea of some of these songs too. That you need the people around you. That’s one way I can see this whole thing now. I wanted to write a bunch of really catchy songs and at the end of the day that would have been enough for me, just to put out an album with a bunch of great pop songs that doesn’t have to have some sort of deeper meaning.”

Listen to “Velodrome” and “My Bike” above. Below, find 2nd Grade’s Hit To Hit cover art.

Hit To Hit is out 5/29 via Double Double Whammy. Pre-order it here.

HBO’s adaptation of Stephen King’s The Outsider turned out to be a ratings hit for the premium cable network. So, it’s a wise move that they engineered a wide open door for season two, with Holly Gibney’s fate left ambiguous and another possible El Cuco host in the mix. These wrinkles arrived courtesy of screenwriter Richard Price, who not only engineered a damn watchable take on a complex novel to adapt, but he also pointed the story beyond King’s original vision and chain of events.

Jason Bateman, who directed the first two episodes (and sporadically appeared as accused murderer Terry Maitland), recently spoke with Collider and confirmed that HBO’s definitely considering a second swing at El Cuco. Furthermore, Price is exploring some steps to get the story running again. Finally, some good news:

“I know that they’re talking about it and Richard Price is playing with some ideas and taking some first steps as to what that second year might and feel like. Obviously, it’s a complete free-ball because the first season exhausted 100% of [Stephen King’s] book, the IP. So, it’s really all up to him. I never like to step on the lawn of the writers. It’s something that I’ve always stuck with on Ozark. I leave Chris Mundy completely alone and I do my job as a director once I get the script. I chime in every once in a while and offer my opinion, but it’s always for the writer to take if they want and discard if they want.”

Hell yeah, that sounds like a promising update, even if there’s no actual confirmation from HBO yet. I think it will happen! Even horror icon Robert Englund couldn’t stop raving about this show, and the ratings eclipsed that of Watchmen and True Detective, so the public demands it. Of course, the public also wants to make sure that a followup is just as good as the first round, but if Price is in charge of the story, it’s in solid hands.

We probably shouldn’t expect Bateman to be too involved, however. Following the stunning ending to Ozark‘s third season, he’ll surely be in the thick of starring in and directing a fourth season of the Netflix show soon. He told Collider that he’d have loved to direct more of The Outsider, but it’s just impossible to do it all on both shows. Clearly, his work on the HBO show made for one heck of a launch, and the rest of the team took it from there.

As for Price, he previously suggested to IndieWire that HBO was open to a sophomore run: “There’s no such thing as a series that, if it does well, they’re not going to want a second season.” Again, this sounds like they’re inching toward an announcement, eventually, although things are obviously on hold in many places with the world’s current situation. Fingers crossed.

(Via Collider)

With the global pandemic’s continued spread, people across the world are staying inside to curb the virus’ infection rate. Many musicians have offered livestreams as a way to offer entertainment during quarantine. Now, the WHO, Global Citizen, and a number of popular musicians are teaming up for the livestream TV special One World: Together At Home. Hosted by Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, and Stephen Colbert, the special will air on every major TV network and feature performances by many big-name artists like Lizzo, Lady Gaga, and Billie Eilish.

Along with big pop icons, other artists on the roster include Paul McCartney, Elton John, Finneas, Stevie Wonder, John Legend, Chris Martin, Eddie Vedder, Kacey Musgraves, J Balvin, Keith Urban, Alanis Morissette, Lang Lang, Andrea Bocelli, Billie Joe Armstrong, Burna Boy, and Maluma.

Hugh Evans, co-founder and CEO of Global Citizen, said the broadcast will be, in part, a way to honor our healthcare workers: “As we honor and support the heroic efforts of community health workers, ‘One World: Together At Home’ aims to serve as a source of unity and encouragement in the global fight to end COVID-19,” Evans said in a statement. “Through music, entertainment and impact, the global live-cast will celebrate those who risk their own health to safeguard everyone else’s.”

Director-general of the WHO Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus echoed Evans’ statement: “The World Health Organization is committed to defeating the coronavirus pandemic with science and public health measures, and supporting the health workers who are on the frontlines of the response,” said Dr. Ghebreyesus. “We may have to be apart physically for a little while, but we can still come together virtually to enjoy great music. The ‘One World: Together at Home’ concert represents a powerful show of solidarity against a common threat.”

One World: Together At Home premieres 4/18 at 8 p.m. EST on all major networks.

Some of the artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Previously on the Best and Worst of WrestleMania 36: Bill Goldberg lost a tackles and body slams competition to Braun Strowman, John Morrison won a climbing match by falling, and AJ Styles was actually murdered by The Undertaker in the Bone Zone.

If you haven’t watched part two of this year’s WrestleMania yet, go do that now. Remember that With Spandex is on Twitter, so follow it. Follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook. You can also follow me on Twitter. BUY THE SHIRT.

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. Feel free to peruse the WrestleMania 36 tag page if we missed anything.

Here’s a special, one-match breakdown edition of the Best and Worst of WWE WrestleMania 36 (1.5 of 2) for April 5, 2020.

Why Must Fireflies Die So Young?

I’m not sure how to say this, exactly, but the Firefly Fun House match on night two of WrestleMania 36 was art. I’m not saying that to be twee, or to do a hacky “actually pro wrestling is an art form you philistines” thing. I truly believe it was art, because unlike some of even the best professional wrestling matches, it challenged me. It required a second viewing, and a frame-by-frame breakdown to understand it on the level upon which I believe it was intended to be understood. It contains complex character work, introspection, and a deep history lesson from WWE, a company we (and especially I) don’t give credit to or expect to present ANY of those things in its product.

I’m going to try to break it down here and make sense of it, both for you and for myself. Keep in mind that I could be completely off on all of this, but hey, it wouldn’t be the first time. Stick with me until we get to the end.

The match — short film, whatever — opens with John Cena entering into the weird, empty Performance Center. If you watched Smackdown, you know he’s more shaken by this than most. Characters that aren’t allowed to have “free will,” so to speak, just show up and do their entrance animations and still play to an empty crowd, because the people at home are watching and they want to put smiles on people’s faces. Cena, who has always walked a tightrope between being super serious and sarcastically self-aware, doesn’t know how to handle it. He left for Hollywood and came back to … this? What even is this?

On Smackdown, he realized his “talking to the camera man” bits were audible now. “Now they can hear us talking. Welcome everyone, to Smackdown … on FOX!” Here, he’s not just walking into an empty gym Smackdown … he’s entering into an empty gym WRESTLEMANIA. That’s got him shook already as a guy who has done WrestleMania entrances involving clone armies, gospel choirs, gangsters with Tommy Guns, Tokyo drifting sports cars, and marching bands. Plus, he’s going into something called a “Firefly Fun House Match,” only kayfabe 46-ish hours after being confronted by puppets and haunted by a teleporting guy running two concurrent monster gimmicks. Cena’s a good proxy for the audience here, because he doesn’t know what the shit’s going on either. He tries to do a sarcastic, “welcome to WrestleMania!” call — most famously attributed to Vince McMahon, which we’ll call back to later — and it’s immediately warped by Bray, in the Fun House.

This is where Bray finally sets the stage for what we’re about to see.

He reminds us that the Firefly Fun House is a place where Gods, monsters, angels, and demons are neighbors, and that the Fun House exposes your darkest urges and shows you who you really are. Bray: “Who are we really, and why do we do the things we do?” Think of it like Westworld, by way of Pee-wee’s Playhouse. The Firefly Fun House match is going to be a look who John Cena “really is,” as he faces his “most dangerous opponent.” Himself. Adventures of Link style.

Bray leaves through the “abandon hope all ye who exit here” door, which we’ve seen him enter from numerous times. That’s where we’re having the “match.” In a matter of moments Cena’s been involuntarily teleported there, and follows after Bray on the instructions of a naive, immortal rabbit puppet. There’s been a lot of conversation about how each puppet represents part of Bray’s psyche, and I’m pretty sure Ramblin’ Rabbit is his love of pro wrestling. It’s the smallest puppet, always being victimized by the others, who marks out for all the wrestlers he talks to and can’t seem to die, no matter how many times people try to kill him. It makes sense that a pure love for what they do will be the connective tissue here.

From here on in, the match becomes a meditation on Cena’s entire wrestling career, from beginning to end.

We begin with Cena’s creation. This is represented by Cena standing in a dark room, surrounded by nothingness, while a heart beats in the background. This is John before “John Cena.” His persona only exists in a dark void, waiting to be created. And who created him?

Vince McMahon, of course, represented not especially subtly by Wyatt’s money-eating “Boss” puppet. Puppet Vince launches into his declaration of “Ruthless Aggression” from the June 24, 2002, episode of Raw, where he overtly set the tone for the next 18 years of WWE’s top stars and heroes being defined by their willingness to be self-centered and violent to validate McMahon’s bizarre misunderstanding of and hapless attempts to recreate Stone Cold Steve Austin. Whoever steps up will have to give up themselves to become what Vince wants. “Do you have enough ruthless aggression to make the necessary sacrifices of mind, body, and soul, to be a success in this company? Show me, or you’re fired!”

Three days later, John Cena made his debut on Smackdown and declared that he, more than anyone, had Ruthless Aggression and was willing to do anything to prove it. He slapped an already legendary champion and Olympic gold medalist in the face to show it. He was everything Vince wanted, right out of the gate: handsome, stupid muscular, tall enough, heavy enough, inconsequentially aggressive and violent, and ready to pander to crowds with big declarative statements and hot pants he could change the color of to match their local sports teams. It didn’t work, though. In the Ruthless Aggression documentary series, he calls it the biggest mistake of his life.

In that same doc, Cena mentions that the character didn’t work and that WWE was already ready to just give up and let him go when his contract ran out in November. In the Firefly Fun House, this takes the form of Cena showing up in his rookie look, complete with the SMACKDOWN FIST that they’ve found and fished out of the archives. Cena does what he did back then; be hyped up, beautifully sculpted, and brutally confrontational despite not really knowing what to do yet, and not really having a character to speak of. He just keeps screaming “RUTHLESS AGGRESSION” and swinging wildly with missed slaps over and over, because that’s what he was told to do.

Bray rightfully asks him if this is what he wants to do with his life, and we get flashbacks of Cena as a little kid holding handmade belts to suggest that no, maybe it isn’t. He wanted to be a professional wrestler, you know? Not an awkward little action figure that Vince McMahon can use to punctuate his demands for unconscionable Alpha Male superiority and throw away when it doesn’t work like he wanted. But this is what he MUST do, because if he doesn’t make the “necessary sacrifices of mind, body, and soul” by completely losing himself in McMahon’s image of masculine perfection, he’ll lose his job. Which means that little kid who loved wrestling — John’s Ramblin’ Rabbit, so to speak — he’ll never even get the chance to live his dreams. This is the only game in town.

So wait, what IS McMahon’s image, exactly? For that, we have go back to the 1980s and Vince McMahon’s all-time shiniest show pony: Hulk Hogan.

As anyone who’s ever watched WWF or WWE programming knows, Vincent Kennedy McMahon has a predilection for enormous, abrasive, borderline immobile “body guys.” He wants you to look as good, sound as good, and DO as little as possible. Wyatt makes that differential clear. “That’s what being a stud is all about; having muscles, no matter what little talent you possess.”

If I’m putting this together right, I believe this is placed here to show that to succeed in WWE, Cena would have to emulate someone else. Vince McMahon’s assertion of Ruthless Aggression evokes an attempt at a new Stone Cold Steve Austin, a devil may care hell-raiser who kicks ass and lets God sort ’em out, but what he’s really asking for is another Hulk Hogan. Hogan was cruel. He was never a “good guy,” despite being a hero to children and crying fans. He was what Vince McMahon considered an Alpha Male. He was all about himself. He made himself look SO GOOD and be SO BIG and SO STRONG that even GIANTS couldn’t stop him. He was American exceptionalism. There’s a clear reason why Hogan’s notable enemies were either fat guys (King Kong Bundy, Andre, Akeem), foreign guys (Iron Sheik, Nikolai Volkoff), or arrogant smart guys who were nowhere as big or strong (Bobby Heenan, Randy Savage, Ric Flair).

To be this for Vince, Cena works out harder than anyone possibly could. He’s doing rapid-fire bicep curls and speaking in goofy 1980s promo lines to be literally anything other than himself, because the longer he’s doing this and the more of a product he becomes, the less he even knows what himself is. But he puts that emphasis on being a body guy until his arms give out and he “can’t do anything.” He tries to fight, but he can’t even lift his arms. I like to think this is symbolic of the prioritization of physical appearance and ego over skill and ability. Hogan could wrestle, but didn’t, because not wrestling worked. Cena got a reputation for “not being able to wrestle” because not wrestling worked better. He just did the five moves in a row and won. It worked in kayfabe, and it worked in ticket sales. People just wanna show up and clap at things they recognize. They don’t actually care how good at wrestling you are. “Wrestling isn’t wrestling,” right? It’s just a children’s show full of weird, screaming characters who keep hurting each other.

But I digress.

The other reason the “body guy” segment happens here, I believe, is because of how Cena’s always treated anyone who didn’t look as perfect as him like they were worthless. CM Punk wasn’t big and muscular enough. AJ Styles wasn’t big and muscular enough. Bray Wyatt, no matter how good of a wrestler and talker and character he is, gets lowered to the “overfed sex child of Wiz Khalifa and the WB frog.” You’re fat, and you look stupid. I’m muscular, and I look GREAT. Which makes me a HERO. I’m doing what’s RIGHT. I represent TRAINING and SAYING MY PRAYERS and EATING MY VITAMINS.

Bray, who might have not made this connection clear enough by showing up on Saturday Night’s Main Event behind the big blue cage and saying “brother” a bunch, brings all this home with the line: “Whatcha gonna do, brother, when you realize that Egomania has been running wild on you?”

Cena can’t stop, though. This is what he’s been told he’s supposed to do. But it’s October, and his contract’s up next month. He’s heard Rikishi and Rey Mysterio freestyling in the locker room, though, and he likes doing that, too. And there’s a Halloween episode of Smackdown coming up, so he decides to have a little fun and dress up like … well, he’s supposed to look like Vanilla Ice, but he looks more like Liberace. It catches on, and they decide to keep him on as a funny joke at the bottom of the card. The “Doctor of Thuganomics” is born.

Cena, unaware that Egomania has run wild on him, turns into a character that just says the meanest, most hateful, sexual, offensive shit to get a reaction. “If all I got is rapping, I’ll use it to my advantage.” He builds his legacy on insults, dick jokes, and ruthlessly aggressive gestures and move names (the “F-U,” a “fuck you” to Brock Lesnar; an STF called the “STFU,” as in “shut the fuck up;” the “Five Knuckle Shuffle,” a euphemism for masturbation, and so on) while slowly convincing himself that not only is he brilliant … he’s a hero. One of the most beautiful moments of this entire Firefly Fun House bit is stock sounds of children’s laughter responding to Cena making a boner joke they don’t get. That’s what the past 15 years of WWE was built on. Convincing kids that the best person was the one who could be the funniest, hurt you the most, and make you feel the worst.

On Smackdown, Cena made multiple jokes about how Bray Wyatt was a fat failure. Here, he raps that Bray is a, “slut for opportunity, blowing every chance,” and calls him Husky Harris — a chant that plagued Bray in the early days of his main roster character — to draw a direct line between the “real” Wyatt (a fat loser) and the characters he’s playing. It’s like when Cena called attention to the fact that Alberto Del Rio didn’t actually OWN all those cars, he just rented them, and wasn’t actually rich, this was just part of the show. Or when he made fun of people for working in other companies, didn’t make enough real-life money for the company, or even needing to write promo notes on their hands. Abject, popular cruelty. Cena seeks to hurt Wyatt personally for confronting him professionally, believing him to be entitled and ungrateful for the “chances he’s been given.” Because like anyone who struggled but then got rich and successful, Cena now believes HE succeeded ALL ON HIS OWN, and you’re weak if you can’t just do it too.

This is where things begin to turn. Wyatt points that he keeps working for opportunities and keeps having them taken away as John (the golden goose) gets unlimited, untouchable chances. He says what I and a lot of other people have been saying about John Cena’s character for more than a decade: “You’re not a hero, John. You’re a bully. You’re a horrible person. You take the weaknesses of others, and you turn them into jokes. You do anything for fame, John. Congratulations! You’re the man now, John! Poor lonely John Cena.”

In his career, Cena rode the popularity of his rapper to the point that it morphed into a troops loving, rah rah American hero who worked out, said his prayers, and ate his vitamins. He hated and destroyed everything that was a threat to his concepts of power, heroism, and self. They were also Vince McMahon’s, coincidentally. As Vince might say, “keep it up.” As time went on, the image of Cena’s character become more important and consequential than anything he was actually doing. Cena (the character, just to be clear) thought CM Punk was a fake hero of the people who was only in it for himself, because Cena was that. Punk told him he’d become a dynasty, the New York Yankees. Being hit with that sent Cena into a rage. Cena thought The Rock abandoned WWE to go make movies in Hollywood, because Cena wanted that. Rock told him he was a wannabe boot-licker, and Cena spent over a year trying to beat him up to prove him wrong. Cena went on a reality show and proposed to his girlfriend at WrestleMania because they’d be good PR beats, while he keeps getting older and older and realizing his entire personal life is interminably locked to his professional. His character doesn’t have any friends. He’s been mean to every friend he’s ever had. He’s buried a Boneyard full of people to protect his spot, and now he’s alone.

Or, as Bojack Horsemen might put it:

Wyatt, having been as honest and direct with Cena as a spooky kids show host whose body contains the spirit of a demonic shadow clown can be, tells Cena that this is his last chance to understand, and that the floor is his. It’s Cena’s “last chance” to get it, because if he doesn’t, they begin the endgame, and that’s where shit gets dark. Cena visibly considers what Bray’s saying, but only for a moment, before rejecting it. Instead of confronting himself psychologically and emotionally, John makes a deez nuts joke.

Because John Cena.

Enter: WrestleMania 30

At WrestleMania 30, Bray Wyatt was at the height of his career. He was wildly popular and critically acclaimed for the work he’d done in NXT and beyond. He was something special, rising up during a time when almost nothing felt special. “I was the color red in a world full of black and white,” he says. Pay attention, this comes back later.

John Cena had become everything he wanted. He was a dynasty. He proclaims to be a man of the people, but doesn’t listen when the people tell him they want something else. Look at the Nexus, for example. Look at him sauntering in to kill Rey Mysterio to win a WWE Championship moments after Rey’s already wrestled. Most importantly, look at WrestleMania 30, when Cena needed to put over this new character and make him, and just … didn’t. Cena just squashed the shit out of him. Most of us lost faith in Wyatt, and he spent the next few years in a weird downward spiral of unintelligible character work, bad matches, terrible ideas, a complete lack of confidence, and a number of angles aborted either because of circumstance, or because WWE just wanted out.

So here, Wyatt seeks to rewrite his own story by capitalizing on the recreation. He sets Cena up for Sister Abigal, but lets him free. “We both know that’s not enough to end it Superman. But this is.” At WrestleMania 30, there’s a moment where Cena has a chair, and Wyatt kneels in front of him with his arms out, begging him to “finish” him. Wyatt can’t beat Super Cena, so he’s going to go out swinging and at least affect some kind of permanent CHANGE in him. In real life, Cena just kept being Cena and won the match like it was nothing. He made some faces about it, but it didn’t register as any kind of sincere fear or effort, and the status quo was maintained. In the Fun House, Cena, out of hatred for all the truth he’s just had to sit through, chooses to rewrite this path and take the low road. He swings for the fences, but Wyatt disappears. Wyatt doesn’t need the pain. He needs to do what nobody else has been able to do before. He needs the satisfactions of that permanent change in John Cena.

John Cena did the unthinkable at WrestleMania 36. He turned heel. It was imaginary, so to speak, but he was presented with a clear argument suggesting he’s a terrible human being and instead of trying to fix those habits, he leaned into them. He wants to KILL Bray Wyatt for doing this. So to illustrate this, we go back to where it all began: Hulk Hogan.

In 1996, Hulk Hogan shocked the wrestling world by betraying WCW and forming the New World Order. Hogan had been a “good guy” for the entirety of his WWF and WCW careers, and him being evil was, at least at the time, a complete impossibility. For the longest time, folks like me have been saying that a Cena heel turn, especially late in his career and after he’s gone through so much, would be just as good. It never happened, because again, nothing, not the hand of God itself, could make John Cena change. He hasn’t even changed his t-shirt in his past several appearances. He’s just this goddamn version of John Cena forever.

In the Fun House, we visit an alternate timeline where Cena turns heel. He does the worst thing you can do in WWE’s mind, still, somehow: go to WCW. So we’re suddenly on an episode of WCW Monday Nitro with John in an nWo t-shirt, with an nWo hat, and an nWo towel. He’s wearing Hollywood Black and White, to make the allegory clear. Wyatt, who is “red in a world of black and white,” is wearing a Wolfpac shirt. I LOVE that touch. Elseworlds nWo Cena, destroyed from the bottom up by his internalized corruption and delusion, listens to Wyatt lovingly introduce him in the style of Eric Bischoff and just ruthlessly, aggressively beats him to death anyway. The Vince McMahon puppet, watching from the announce table with a Macho Man version of Mercy the Buzzard, declares this, “good shit.” Shorthand, at least to “smart” fans on the Internet, for WWE’s worst ideas.

As Cena beats Wyatt to death, he’s confronted by his greatest failures in quick little cutaways. These are, in order:

• the “if Cena wins we riot” at ECW One Night Stand, which was the first recognized and most iconic expression of fan hatred for Cena’s character
• Edge cashing in Money in the Bank on Cena at New Years Revolution 2006
• the aftermath of his loss to Shawn Michaels in their legendary Raw match from April 23, 2007
• losing the WWE Championship to Batista at Elimination Chamber 2010
• losing to Miz at WrestleMania 27
• CM Punk’s “kiss goodbye” to Vince McMahon at Money in the Bank 2011, which once again suggests that Cena’s failures are Vince’s
• Cena being mopey on the ramp after his WrestleMania 28 loss to The Rock
• losing the title unification match to Randy Orton at TLC 2013
• getting murdered in spectacular fashion by Brock Lesnar at SummerSlam 2014
• leaving his arm band in ring after losing to AJ Styles at SummerSlam 2016, which was when Cena started taking more and more time off for Hollywood obligations
• putting over Roman Reigns at No Mercy 2017
• losing to Undertaker in minutes at WrestleMania 34 after spending weeks goading him on

Cena turns back into himself, realizes he’s not a fictional heel — he’s the actual heel — as evidenced by him brutally assaulting Huskus the Pig Boy, the most childish and innocent representation of Bray’s psyche. The part of Bray that still represents “Husky Harris,” and being a young up-and-comer who doesn’t fit the WWE mold … being put in place by the personification of what Vince McMahon wants.

Wyatt played to Cena’s remaining humanity (now that he’s separated himself from the wrestling business and no longer serves a purpose in his role as Superman enforcer of the status quo), and manages to actually, finally, MAYBE affect true realization and change upon the John Cena character by convincing Cena that he’s a bad person, and all the things Wyatt said about him were true. Cena instantly loses the nWo shirt and the fantasy, and is just back to being 2020, normal John Cena again. He stares down at his hands, because shit, Bray was right. He really was. We all were. Cena started off with good intentions, lost himself somewhere along the way, got everything he ever asked for, and ended up here. Everybody loves him, but nobody likes him. Imagine only realizing who you really are when you’re 42 years old, at the end of the career you sacrificed your mind, body, and soul for. All you have is ruthless aggression. That’s your one trait.

You’re the heel.

This is when The Fiend is finally able to be “let in.” Cena is broken. The Fiend “squashes” him with no effort, and we realize that Cena’s declaration that he was going to put a stop the most over hyped, over privileged, and overrated talent in WWE wasn’t about Bray Wyatt. It was about John Cena. Bray Wyatt counts the pin for The Fiend, and John Cena literally disappears, his image and perception shattered. At the end of John’s career, you can’t see him.

Good joke. Everybody laugh. Roll on snare drum. Curtains.

The next thing we see is Titus O’Neil, making this face.

The Boneyard Match on night one of WrestleMania was a really enjoyable, cornball combination of WWE and action movie concepts, but the Firefly Fun House was, as advertised, unlike anything WWE has ever done. It was deliberate, and thoughtful, and meditative. It took a look at itself, not with glorification or snide parody, but with sincere, open eyes. It said something about the characters involved beyond how good or bad they are, and it might have just given a real, honest purpose to 18 years of John Cena. I didn’t even cover all the references, like the Bella Twins nod, and there’s still probably so much left to find and contextualize.

It wasn’t a “good match,” but it was essential to our understanding of the medium, and the promotion that anchors it.

That’s good shit, pal.

Ever since they signed with Shady Records in 2017, Buffalo, New York rap crew Griselda’s profile has steadily risen. Now, they’re at the point where they get nods from Drake on social media, flurries of press for each of their proliferate projects and even a collaboration with Kanye West. The latter was confirmed by de facto group leader Westside Gunn, who detailed the work he and West have done in a recent Tidal Check-In interview with Elliott Wilson.

During the Instagram Live show, Wilson and Gunn discuss the creation of Gunn’s upcoming album, Pray For Paris, eventually coming to a question about Gunn’s visit to Kanye’s Sunday Service. “Ever since that day, we talk every other day,” Gunn says of his burgeoning relationship with the mercurial producer. “Just keeping in touch with each other… I might have an idea and send it to him.” According to Gunn, the duo planned to go to Cabo after a stop at West’s ranch in Wyoming. Unfortunately, as with many plans lately, the COVID-19 coronavirus crisis derailed their scheme before it could come to fruition.

“We took the PJ back to LA and then all this sh*t happened,” Gunn laments. But he does say, “Me and ‘Ye, we ’bout to be workin’.” He also reveals that he’s heard Kanye’s next project, promising “people will still love it” despite the lack of cursing from Kanye because “the production is still crazy.”

Watch Westside Gunn’s interview with Elliott Wilson above.

Bunny Day is still on in the Animal Crossing world, but much to the relief of players it did just get a bit harder to find eggs. The annual Easter-adjacent event is currently taking place on adorable Nintendo islands all over the world, but not all players were thrilled by the plethora of eggs found on their islands.

For those who haven’t played, the event is simple: eggs are hidden in various parts of the island and doing activities uncovers them. Hit a tree with an axe and a wood egg might come out instead of a piece of wood. Dig where X marks the spot and an earth egg may be there instead of a fossil. And so on. But the biggest complaint about the fortnight-long event is all the damn water eggs, which frustratingly would replace fish you worked hard to catch in streams, ponds and the ocean. A quick search for the term “water egg” on Twitter reveals a large number of some extremely popular tweets about the abundance of water eggs and how they were driving players insane.

The annoyance made for a lot of memes about eggs and the torture they were inflicting on people that just wanted to grind for some bells by fishing or chopping wood. But the frustration was real: for many players looking to make money and build new bridges or expand their homes it was actually harder to accumulate bells. And unless you were explicitly looking for them, the eggs made using Nook Miles Tickets to take trips to random islands far less profitable, or at least a lot more time-consuming if you found egg after egg in the water and not valuable fish.

It appears Nintendo heard your complaints, though, because on Monday morning the game updated to version 1.1.4, which according to Kotaku officially modified egg drop odds, as mentioned in the patch notes. Indeed, upon playing this morning the download was there and the odds do seem to have changed significantly. In trying to get an image for this post, for example, it took six tries to get an egg and not a fish. That’s much better fish-t0-egg ratio that I saw over the weekend when the Bunny Day event started.

The patch doesn’t seem to have altered all of the egg drop numbers — there are still plenty of earth eggs to dig up and stone eggs are flying out of stones like crazy — but one of the biggest frustrations with the event seems to have been nerfed. It’s an understandably difficult problem to parse for Nintendo, as there are dozens of Bunny Day designs needed to craft and players must have a way to accumulate all those eggs. But not altering the core gameplay of Animal Crossing while pulling off the special event has proven more difficult than many anticipated. Still, it’s good that they’re listening to players and making quick changes when things go wrong, as it’s the fourth patch of the game in a few weeks.

There’s still a lot of gaudy egg creations to craft if you want the big Bunny Day prize, but how attached you are a clearly-costumed bunny named Zipper is your call now. At least we can all go fishing again.

As the coronavirus pandemic spreads and people are pushed to stay at home and practice social distancing, many musicians have opted to provide virtual entertainment for the isolating times. Death Cab For Cutie’s Ben Gibbard hosts daily livestream concerts where he performs a range of covers and original music. Charli XCX previously curated a series of quarantine livestream events with special guests. Grammy-award-winning musician HER is following suit and launching Girls With Guitars, a virtual conversation with other female musicians.

Kicking off Monday at 8 p.m. EST, the Girls With Guitars livestream will be a combination of live performances and conversations. During each livestream session, HER plans to play music from her own catalog, as well as fan requests and covers. The singer will then invite an array of guest guitarists to perform and engage in a lively conversation about life and music.

Ahead of the Girls With Guitars series announcement, one of HER’s backup vocalists revealed the singer’s immense generosity. According to supporting vocalist Ajanee Hambrick, HER provided her entire crew with several months’ worth of financial support amid the pandemic. Because all tours have been halted for the foreseeable future, HER reportedly provided her whole team with some funds to get them through the lull in work opportunities for the next few months.

Girls With Guitars premieres 4/6 at 8 p.m. EST on Instagram live. Watch it here.

Some of the artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

A new HBO docuseries, Atlanta’s Missing And Murdered: The Lost Children, aims to refocus attention upon the justice that never arrived for dozens of grieving families. Between 1979 to 1981, at least 30 African-American kids and young adults went missing or were discovered to be murdered in Atlanta. A 23-year-old suspect, Wayne Williams, was convicted in 1982 for two of the murders, and curiously, law enforcement swiftly declared the rest of the cases to be closed. For the dozens of other victims, their families never received the answers they sought, and this series digs deep into the investigation, along with the racial tensions that rose to a boil in at Atlanta during a time when the city hoped to become a Southern mecca of commerce and culture.

This five-part series — while highlighting interviews, transcripts, archival footage, and more — unravels the trial’s spectacle and suspect behavior of law enforcement (read the FBI’s main Atlanta Child Murders case file for the multi-agency investigation here). Sure, there was also the strange behavior of Wayne Williams, but the City of Atlanta can no longer turn its back on the shady shutting down of murder cases as they mounted at an alarming rate. The docuseries launches with Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms reopening the overall case in spring 2019. Coincidentally and a few months later, David Fincher’s second season of Netflix’s Mindhunter reignited public interest in the Atlanta Child Murders as well. We spoke with two of the HBO series’ filmmakers, Maro Chermayeff and Sam Pollard, about how they unfurled this case’s twisted legacy.

I’ve been looking at the chronology of the case, which was shelved and then got reopened in 2019 while you were working on the docuseries. And then Mindhunter‘s dramatized take arrived in the middle of all of that. Can you walk me through your filmmaking timeline?

Sam Pollard: It really goes back to 2017. I had just finished a documentary entitled Maynard, about Maynard Jackson, the first Black mayor of a major Southern city (Atlanta), and I did a little segment in that documentary that looked at the Atlanta Child Murders and all the issues that Maynard Jackson had to face in dealing with that. And Maro and the people at Show of Force, they saw the doc, and they thought it was time to do an even deeper exploration of the Atlanta Child Murders and the City of Atlanta. So they put together a proposal, and we pitched it to HBO, which both of us have a long relationship with, and they gave us the greenlight. We were off and running in December 2018. And then in January after a lot of research, we did our first trip down to Atlanta to meet different people and get a lay of the land, and we started shooting in February. And what’s amazing is that we shot this whole series in a year and a half, which is something that rarely happens with documentaries.

Speaking of HBO, Watchmen recently brought the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre to greater public awareness. After the season finale, officials announced the discovery of a possible mass grave in Tulsa. What’s your hope for this series?

Maro Chermayeff: I hope that people re-look at this case individually. Was this a serial killing with a single perpetrator? Was Wayne Williams guilty of these crimes for which he was found guilty? This isn’t a vindication. We’re not trying to get Wayne Williams out of prison. We’re trying to look at the story and contextualize it in this rising city. Atlanta’s like another character in this series, and we want people to look at what was happening to marginalize the community, how they were treated at this time, how they ultimately ended up finding somebody, got him in their crosshairs, and really stopped investigating the case. They decided that Wayne Williams did this, and this must shut down. There were a lot of other viable things involved, whether that was the Klan involvement, the pedophile rings in Atlanta, and it just didn’t get looked at in a significant way, and part of that is a race issue in a very divided city. Somehow, the children themselves and Wayne Williams all fell prey to this, and we thought it was really interesting how it was handled at the time and how the outcomes could have been different. That is what really intrigued us. We didn’t just want to tell the story of [children who had become numbers]. The mothers and the siblings have really suffered over the years. They hadn’t gotten the sense of conclusion and justice, and I hope for them that their time has come.

Sam: In some ways, some of the families of the victims, when they sat down to do interviews with us, this was the first time that they felt an opportunity to open themselves up after living with this over the years. It was just amazing and very gratifying to finally be able to listen to [the families] and hear about what they’ve gone through for all of these years.

You mentioned the City of Atlanta being a character. What does the series say behind the myth of it being the mecca of the South?

Sam: It definitely challenges it. It looks how complicated it is. For a lot of Black people, like myself who was 29, 28 at the time, I saw this as a city that there was a possibility of moving to because they had a growing Black middle class. But underneath that, you had core people, working-class people who were struggling to make ends meet. You had racism that was still a prevalent part of Atlanta. Right outside of Atlanta, the Klan was there. It was a city that had a lot of complicated layers to it, and I think we did a fantastic job, if I do say so myself…

Maro: [Laughs]

Sam: …of exploring all the different layers of the City of Atlanta.

Maro: Most of the approaches that we’ve seen are about the murders: here’s what happened, here’s the splash, and that doesn’t dig deep into what was going on in this community and culture that allowed this to fester in this way. We wanted to look at that.

The family members were clearly receptive to that exploration, like you said.

Sam: They all were fantastic. I don’t think in all my years of interviewing so many people that we had family members that were so willing to sit there and open themselves up to us. It wasn’t easy for some of them. If you could watch some of the outtakes with some of these family members, it makes tears come to your eyes.

Maro: It’s harrowing.

Sam: They were open to it, and I really thank them, we all do, from the team. We thank them for being willing to participate in the project.

Do you think with today’s streaming culture, and after Netflix’s Making A Murderer, that people might start fruitlessly rooting for a retrial?

Maro: I don’t think the goal for us or the chief of police and the mayor are not advocating for a retrial for anyone, including Wayne Williams. His lawyers have been doing that. They’re doing this for the cities and the families because they never had their cases tried. They were added onto two adults who Wayne was charged with and ultimately found guilty, and then halfway through that trial, they tacked on ten children through very questionable fiber evidence and potentially junk science evidence, which we, of course, break down. You’re taking a fiber out of someone who’s been in the Chattahoochee River? You know, how many companies and textiles have dumped into that river? It was really sketchy science. And they made it sound more and more complicated so that a jury would just be inundated. The trial is fascinating, but clearly, they wanted this to shut down, and Wayne did not have much of a chance at all.

I couldn’t make sense of Wayne’s behavior when he was a person of interest.

Maro: That’s Wayne’s downfall! He’s his own worst enemy to the 10th power. He just didn’t get it.

Sam: No.

Maro: And he didn’t have, at that time, really significant advisors to help him through the process. We did interview Tony Axam, who was a well-known, well-seasoned criminal defense attorney who was originally on that case. We talked to him extensively, a very smart guy, and Wayne fired him. And we always say, “Oh my god, what would the outcome have been if Tony had been there all the way through?” He would have never let all those things happen. As tough as his attorney was, she had never done a murder trial. You don’t take a case of that magnitude having never done a case. Every card just kept stacking up against him.

If you could both name the most baffling thing about this case, what would it be?

Sam: From my perspective, it was in Episode 5, after the appeals process, and you’re listening to all of these law enforcement people, who basically they don’t even remember the tapes. They don’t look after the tapes, and I’m like, “My god.” What incompetence.

Maro: And what dishonesty: “I don’t remember.” Person after person doesn’t remember an entire investigation of the Klan that reads like a multi-thousand-page transcript? They don’t remember?

Sam. It’s amazing.

Maro. It’s just ridiculous. And then for me, you tell me now a 120-pound guy throws a body out of a moving vehicle, over a bridge, without even stopping a car, a body that weighs 50-60 pounds more than he does. And then when a body is found, two days later, he’s nabbed on the bridge, when even the coroner’s report says that the body had been in the river for 7-8 days. Tell me how that’s a smoking gun.

And there was a “clunk” on the bridge that someone heard randomly, which got introduced into evidence?

Maro: Yeah, they were asleep and heard a splash, and they were there to see if bodies were getting thrown over the bridge, so they have lights, they have the equipment. A body lands over the bridge into the Chattahoochee, in the summer with low water movement, and they can’t move a flashlight around and find that floating body? That might be there, five seconds later? Of course you would see it, it’d be right there, it would have barely moved. The whole thing, just…

Sam: …doesn’t make any sense.

Maro: Yeah, it doesn’t make any sense. All of those things! The next time I wanna throw something that’s double my weight out of a moving vehicle by myself while I’m driving, that’s when I should get the Emmy.

HBO’s ‘Atlanta’s Missing and Murdered: The Lost Children’ airs on Sundays at 8:00pm EST.

Click to download here.

Hey, everyone, it’s time for your favorite Sopranos podcast ever, Pod Yourself A Gun. The world’s ONLY Sopranos podcast (that’s not hosted by a former cast member nor by people who respect prestige TV). This week Vince and Matt are joined by comedian, podcaster, Cooking Channel TV show host and huge Sopranos fan Karl Hess as they discuss Sopranos season 2 episode 8 (208) “Full Leather Jacket.” AKA the most Seinfeld-ass episode of the Sopranos of all time. It’s mostly about how Richie Aprile gives Tony a jacket as a gift and Tony insults him by not wearing the jacket. Seriously, that’s like the biggest storyline in the episode. It’s bizarre and forgettable and a pleasure to talk about with Karl.

Here’s a bit more info on the episode, which premiered on March 5th, 2000. We were so innocent then! Some of the day’s headlines included: “Voters seem to choose Bush, Gore in primaries. Americans are largely content with the nation’s direction.” (St. Louis Dispatch).

SYNOPSIS:

“Although Richie is miffed at Tony for forcing him to build a ramp for the pizza-parlor owner he paralyzed, he decides to make a peace offering. Unhappy with their lowly status as Christopher’s lackeys, Sean and Matt decide to pledge their allegiance to Richie–through a violent, unexpected act.”

BADA B STORIES

-Richie wants to give Tony a jacket
-Meadow wants to go to Berkeley
-Carm wants a letter of rec to Georgetown for Meadow
-Matt and Shawn want respect
-Chris wants to marry Adrianna
-Tony wants Richie to build a ramp for Beansy

We hope you enjoy it! And please remember to give us a review and 5 stars on the Apple podcast app. (-written by Matt Lieb)

The ‘Westworld’ Confusion Index is your guide to what we know, what we kind of know, and what we don’t know about Westworld, one of television’s more confusing shows. We will make mistakes, surely, because we rarely know what is happening or why (and whenever we think we’ve figured it out, they go and change it on us), but we will try to have at least as many jokes as mistakes. This is the best we can offer. Here we go.

What We Know

Everyone is Dolores

The biggest question floating around and through this first chunk of Westworld’s third season has been “Which host brains” — pearls, whatever — “did Dolores smuggle out of Delos and put into the bodies of the hosts she built in the real world?” We knew someone was inside Charlotte and Carlos and, as of this episode, Musashi the former samurai warrior who is now a Yakuza boss who does that thing only crime bosses and grandmothers do where they drape their jacket over their shoulders without putting their arms through. Which hosts did she pick? Clementine? My sweet dull boy Teddy? Hector the Handsome Safecracker?

Well, we have our answer. It was Dolores. All of them. Many Doloreses. Dolori. Clones of herself that she plopped into other hosts that she spread around a number of influential positions, from Charlotte as the top banana at Delos to Carlos the handler of Liam the Dummy to… I mean, who knows where else. They’re all her, which is a little hilarious to think about and just really the most conceited decision anyone could possibly make. I’m just mad the show didn’t give us a scene of her making this decision while saying “the only one I can trust… is me” as she looks dead into the camera and the screen cuts to black. A missed opportunity. Hopefully, the show uses its shifting timelines to address it eventually.

The implications of this stretch all the way around the show. It means she has plans for both Delos and Serac’s company. It means, I think, that she’s been the mole — as Charlotte — who is feeding him intelligence. It means everything so far is connected to her and through her and it means she’s been pulling a lot of strings in a very coordinated manner, like a puppeteer working a marionette. She’s in a primo position right now for whatever she has planned, too. She pushed William out of Delos and took his shares so she can take the company private and protect it from Serac. She stole all of Liam’s money using Carlos and Caleb and some poor banker’s blood. Things are building to a head and her plan seems to be coming together nicely.

My only question right now is, like, who is Bernard? Is Bernard Bernard? Did she put Teddy inside Bernard? It would explain why he’s so confused all the time. And it would be really funny, like if she created a dumbass adversary just to make this mildly interesting every now and then. I now hope this is true.

Shopping in the future looks cool

This is from when Dolores and Caleb were getting their fancy clothes for the masked prostitute charity ball thing. Dolores didn’t need clothes because we’ve seen her conjure a damn ball gown mid-stride on her way into an event. Caleb did, though. Caleb is not a suit kind of guy. And so, the shopping, kind of like a reverse Pretty Woman but with science.

I like this. This is how shopping should be. The only downside is that it really makes it tougher to do a good “repeatedly emerging from the fitting room in new, usually fancy but sometimes silly outfits” montage. Not as fun if you’re just cycling through them with a touchscreen. I’m sure we can figure a way around this. We have to.

Serac is still the biggest supervillain on the show, which is really saying something when you consider that another character has cloned herself five times in different bodies in an attempt to end humanity as we know it through a mixture of corporate subterfuge and murder

An incomplete list of supervillain stuff Serac did:

• Had a discussion with Maeve about how their interests were actually aligned
• Delivered a brief monologue about heaven and hell and how the concept of the afterlife is a con humans played on themselves
• Pressured a hostage into talking by showing him what would happen to his family if he didn’t
• Killed the hostage immediately after

I can’t help it, I love this guy. He checks every box of an evil mastermind. I half-expect him to poison a city’s water supply next episode, even if it has nothing to do with Dolores and their battle, just because he’s itching to do some bad guy stuff. He is somehow my favorite character on the show but my second-favorite rich guy on the show, coming in just behind Liam’s almost cartoonishly dipshitty buddy, the one who offered him designer drugs and went on a rant about how “all sex is commerce” and actually said the sentence “Tonight is not about dead girlfriends; it’s about unabashed self-gratification” which is really just such a perfect rich asshole friend thing to say that I have no choice but to adore it.

What We Kind Of Know

This is building toward a big Serac vs. Dolores showdown at some point

I mean, yeah. This much is pretty clear, right? We’re looking at a coming battle between Serac/Maeve and Dolores/Dolores/Dolores/Dolores/Dolores, which should be a pretty fun fight. Everyone is evil and has bad intentions and is meticulously plotting their strategy while wearing futuristic designer clothes they concocted with the push of a button. There’s no good guy, except maybe Bernard, who at present is hopelessly outmatched and outclassed. Serac wants to control Delos to increase his ability to control human behavior through technology (again, just classic supervillain stuff); Dolores wants to, I guess, wipe out humans and replace them with robots. I don’t know. That one’s still a little murky. I dig it, though. This is turning into a fun little ride.

Paris is… gone?

I really did enjoy the very casual way the show revealed the fact that Paris was, at some point, apparently decimated by some sort of powerful weapon and no longer exists. I assume this will come up again at some point, if only to explain why it happened or as part of a long speech by Serac about why he became interested in controlling human behavior to protect us from ourselves, but a much bigger part of me hopes they never mention it again. Like if they just introduce the concept of a major city getting vaporized and then never get back to it. I would like that. For the chaos of it all.

What We Don’t Know

Is Maeve… okay?

She is. I’m sure she is. Letting Maeve bleed out and die for good in the same episode that Serac talked about getting her back to her daughter would be madness. And she’s the only one who can conceivably match skills with Dolores. And Maeve rules, from using her brain powers to make the Yakuza’s guns go haywire to gutting goons with samurai swords for the second season in a row to saying all kinds of cool action star stuff as she did it. Maeve will be back. I would bet all of Liam’s money on it.

But how will/could this change things? Will Serac get her more help? Will he jack up her settings to make her even more Keanu-y? Will the white goo she’s lying in — which looks an awful lot like the goo Delos used to make hosts, and Dolores now appears to have in bulk — mix in with her blood and make her some sort of Super Maeve? I don’t know. That’s the fun of this show. They might do anything next. I respect a show that can look itself in the mirror and say “Yeah, screw it, let’s get wild.” Westworld is that kind of show, very much so, for both better and worse.

Is this the last we’ll see of William?

Welllllllllllll things did not go too great for William, the one-time CEO of Delos and one-time Man in Black and current patient in an upscale mental health facility where his stay is not what you would call voluntary. Just bad all-around, starting with him maybe hallucinating the daughter he killed in a paranoid fit of violence and moving all the way to the thing where Dolores — as Charlotte — duped him into cleaning himself up for a big board meeting that was all a ruse to make him look unhinged and get taken away by big strong men who work for the facility so she could control his shares. Again, not great.

The question I have is this: Is that it? Is that the end of William, a once-powerful businessman who got so deep into a game that he drove himself cuckoo with a couple nudges? I doubt it. Even though Dolores described his current situation as “the end of the game,” I can’t believe the show will just leave Ed Harris in an asylum while all of this plays out. Let’s have Maeve break him out and give him a black cowboy hat and have him and Serac sit at a table in a gold-plated cocktail lounge for a conversation filled with the most evil sentences you’ve ever heard. Do it for me. I need this. Come on.