Month: July 2020

Those of us who grew up in the Alanis Morissette angst era and followed her through her transformation into a more enlightened version of herself may be thrilled to know she has a new album out. Such Pretty Forks in the Road is her first album in eight years—and the first since two of her three children were born.

Anyone who’s been working from home with kids knows that we’re all in the same frequently interrupted boat. Such is the pandemic life. But we’ve also seen how those very human moments when kids insert themselves into life are some of the most real and precious. And that reality comes shining through in Morissette’s Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon performance of her new song, “Ablaze,” which is, not so ironically, a song about her children. As she sings, it’s clear that she’s still got the chops that made her famous. It’s also clear that her 4-year-old daughter, Onyx, just sees her mommy as mommy and not as the iconic pop star that she is. The performance is lovely and sweet, and hearing Onyx’s little voice and seeing her put her hand over her mom’s mouth as she sings is just too adorably real.

Enjoy:

Alanis Morissette: Ablaze (TV Debut)

www.youtube.com

As one commenter on Reddit wrote, “Keeping in tune with a baby on your hand while she’s talking to you can’t be easy. She nailed it.” Indeed, she did. Welcome back, Alanis. Thanks for releasing an album right when we need it the most.

Sometimes you have to laugh when you really want to cry.

Rex Chapman shared a TikTok video from Australian creator Blake Pavey, in which he “checks in” with different countries regarding their coronavirus numbers, and it is sadly hilarious—especially if you’re an American.

We all know that we’re in a global pandemic, and that every country has been impacted by the virus in varying degrees. But the U.S. is in a league of our own when it comes to our national response to the outbreak, leading the world in cases. In fact, we account for nearly a quarter of the world’s cases and a quarter of the world’s deaths, despite only being about 5% of the world’s population. So much winning!

Pavey takes us around to various countries in his video, with some cute quips and one-liners. But when he gets to the U.S. and our “2600…an hour” count. Oh my. I mean, it’s hilarious, yet not. Like, it’s so unbelievably absurd that it’s laughable, even though tens of thousands of people per day being diagnosed with a potentially deadly disease with no cure and no vaccine is really no laughing matter.

Like I said, sometimes you have to laugh when you really want to cry.

Other countries must be looking at the United States like we have our heads on backwards. “I have rights. I ain’t wearin’ a mask,” unfortunately sums up far too many Americans’ attitudes about mitigating the biggest public health crisis in a century. Between the anti-maskers, the it’s-a-hoaxers, the Bill Gates conspiracy theorists, the hydroxychloroquine cultists, and the demon semen doctors muddying the waters, the U.S. is a hot freakin’ mess.

HA HA HA. It’s all so hilarious I need a box of tissues for all the tears.

At least a few of the original Scream crew members will get back together for the series reboot. Courteney Cox has reportedly signed on to reprise her role as Gale Weathers for the fifth edition of the Scream franchise. The original thriller directed by the late Wes Craven hit theaters in 1996, and now we know that at least two of the film’s original star-studded cast will return for the upcoming Part 5.

On Friday, Hollywood Reporter confirmed a report from Deadline, which adds Cox to the list of Scream originals that include David Arquette, who signed on to the project back in May:

Courteney Cox is set to reprise her role as the dogged news reporter Gale Weathers for Spyglass Media Group and Paramount Pictures as they relaunch the Scream franchise.

Cox joins the previously announced David Arquette, who also returns as Dewey Riley. Scream as a horror franchise generated four movies, including the original 1996 slasher horror movie, with all directed by the late Wes Craven and together grossing over $600 million in worldwide box office receipts.

The movie, which will be directed by the horror duo Matthew Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (Ready Or Not) is slated to film in Wilmington, North Carolina once casting is complete. Whether others from the Scream series will return isn’t clear, but there’s certainly value in honoring the franchise’s past with some very familiar faces.

(Via Deadline & Hollywood Reporter)

Major League Baseball’s bad news got even worse on Friday, as more positive tests lead to more postponements. Now, according to a report, commissioner Rob Manfred admitted that the already belated and brief season may be in jeopardy if MLB cannot get its COVID-19 outbreaks under control.

The St. Louis Cardinals postponed games on Friday after positive coronavirus tests, adding to the growing list of teams that have experienced positive tests while attempting to play the season in home cities without a so-called bubble like the NHL, NBA, WNBA, MLS, and NWSL have instituted in recent months. Serious concerns about outbreaks have impacted teams’ abilities to field full MLB rosters, which have seen the Miami Marlins postpone a slate of games and the league institute new rules on the fly, such as the ability to make up games later in the year with 7-inning doubleheaders.

Despite these adjustments, the bad news keeps coming for baseball. More teams are undergoing contact tracing and testing as they hope they have not been exposed to the COVID-19 pandemic which has killed more than 150,000 Americans.

On Friday, ESPN’s Jeff Passan reported that even Manfred has admitted to officials that the coming days are crucial to baseball’s future in 2020, and canceling the season altogether is a real possibility.

Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred told MLB Players Association executive director Tony Clark on Friday that if the sport doesn’t do a better job of managing the coronavirus, it could shut down for the season, sources familiar with the conversation told ESPN.

The story cited some “bad decisions” being made by players off the field, which would imply that players are exposing themselves to risk of exposure by going into public places. There’s also concern expressed from local health officials about congregating on the field, a lack of mask use, and players spitting and touching hands, which have been shown on camera during games — one rule the league instituted to try and prevent pitchers from doing this was letting them take a wet rag onto the mound with them. As the story notes, with more test results due back in the coming days, it could be a simple numbers game that would require Manfred to pull the plug on the season.

Should another outbreak materialize, Manfred, who has the power to shut down the season, could move in that direction. Multiple players briefed on the call fear the season could be shut down as soon as Monday if positive tests jump or if players continue not to strictly abide by the league’s protocols.

It would be an embarrassing debacle for baseball to struggle with its Players Association to get a season together in the first place, only to have it fall apart in less than a fortnight. But it also speaks to the seriousness of the COVID-19 pandemic and its uncontrollable spread in America. MLB clearly didn’t put in place enough safety measures to keep its players from bringing the virus to baseball. And now it seems possible that it will end the season well before a champion is crowned for 2020.

For as long as they’ve resided at the top of the trap world, it’s surprising that Future and Lil Uzi Vert have worked together on just a few occasions. Their first collaboration arrived with 2016’s “Too Much Sauce,” the standout single from Future and DJ Esco’s Porject E.T. tape. The single was widely celebrated by fans and became one of the anthems of that summer. A month later, Lil Uzi Vert would return the favor and all on Future for their “Seven Million” track which appeared on Lil Uzi’s The Perfect Luv Tape project. Since then, their collaborations have come far and few, but tonight the hip-hop stars deliver a new batch of songs to fans.

The two songs, “Over Your Head” and “Patek” arrive a week removed from the announcement of a joint project. In the trailer for their upcoming video, Future and Lil Uzi sit together and contemplate their next move before the video cuts out and reveals the newly-released video would be directed by Hype Williams. After seeing Future and Lil Uzi shooting a music video together, many fans were divided as to what would be arriving. Some believed it was a new collaboration, while others believed it was a visual for “All Bad” off Future’s High Off Life album, however, it was soon revealed that Lil Uzi Vert was simply making a cameo for Future’s “Posted With Demons” video.

The project also aims to continue the momentum Future and Lil Uzi Vert have carried throughout the year. Working together for “Wassup” as well as “All Bad,” both artists have landed No. 1 projects with Future’s High Off Life and Lil Uzi Vert’s Eternal Atakedeluxe version.

Listen to the video for “Patek” and “Over Your Head” above.Lil Uzi Vert is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

The New Orleans Pelicans gradually increased how many minutes Zion Williamson played when he made his NBA debut earlier this year following knee surgery. The team decided to take a similar approach during his first game in the league’s Orlando bubble on Thursday night, and apparently, the decision didn’t sit particularly well with the No. 1 pick in the 2019 NBA Draft.

Chris Haynes of Yahoo Sports, who is down in the bubble, appeared on The Dan Patrick Show to discuss how things in the bubble are going. Patrick asked him about the lack of Williamson on Thursday — he played 15 minutes in a 106-104 loss and scored 13 points on 6-for-8 shooting — and as Haynes tells it, the youngster was “pissed.”

“I’ll say this, Zion was pissed,” Haynes said. “Like, he wanted to play. And obviously, I think members of the Pelicans feel like if he was able to go down the stretch or play significant minutes, that they would’ve got the win last night.”

Haynes explained the reasoning behind the decision. Basically, the team wanted to use Williamson — who had to leave the bubble for a good portion of the ramp-up to playing — in “3-4 minute spurts,” and that he was not on any sort of formal minutes restriction. This logic, we can probably assume, won’t be the case as the bubble goes on and the Pelicans play games against other teams with whom they’re battling for the 8-seed in the Western Conference. After a tilt against the Clippers on Saturday, four of their remaining six games are against other teams at the bottom of the West, while the other two are against the Orlando Magic and the hobbled Washington Wizards.

Murder hornets are doing their best to take back the apocalyptic spotlight in 2020, as officials in the state of Washington are apparently on the hunt for a Asian giant hornet nest before the invasive species can get a grip on life in America.

For at least a few days, murder hornets seemed to be the next great American catastrophe as the giant flying insects reportedly had been spotted on the North American continent for the first time. The invasive species is a huge threat to ordinary-sized bees and hornets, as it’s a terrifying predatory insect that can — as the name suggests, although it’s rare — kill humans if stung.

Given the state of everything else in the world, though, news of the murder hornets’ inevitable descent on America was barely a blip on the meme radar when the report that they had been spotted on the West coast made its way around the internet back in May. But Friday gave us a report from the Washington State Department of Agriculture that confirmed its employees had trapped an Asian giant hornet and were working to locate more of the huge predators:

The hornet was found in a WSDA trap set near Birch Bay in Whatcom County. WSDA trappers checked the bottle trap on July 14 and submitted the contents for processing at WSDA’s entomology lab. The hornet was identified during processing on July 29. This was the first hornet to be detected in a trap, rather than found in the environment as the state’s five previous confirmed sightings were.

“This is encouraging because it means we know that the traps work,” Sven Spichiger, managing entomologist for the department said. “But it also means we have work to do.”

In fact, the hunt is on for the nest where that hornet was from, which officials are hoping to find before more queens can breed and branch out to make new colonies. The next step in this murder hornet hunt is far more exciting: using special traps and infrared cameras to get the hornets alive, then tag them so they can follow the little buggers back to their home to destroy it once and for all:

WSDA hopes to find and destroy the nest by mid-September before the colony would begin creating new reproducing queens and drones. Until that time, the colony will only contain the queen and worker Asian giant hornets. Destroying the nest before new queens emerge and mate will prevent the spread of this invasive pest.

It’s odd to imagine that the gigantic hornet that can absolutely kill you isn’t as biologically significant as the one hiding away in said nest, but it’s true. If the murder hornet manhunt is successful before the fall, there’s a chance the species’ spread in North American can be slowed significantly. So many threats to existence, so little time.

(Via Wa.gov & CNN)

While the talk of the bubble has been the league’s efforts to center Zion Williamson as well as the Pelicans’ involvement as a way of giving fans exposure to a young star, but quietly, the Dallas Mavericks and Luka Doncic are just as interesting and have far more of a chance to make a run in Orlando.

The Mavericks’ historic offense was one of the nicest things to behold in the NBA this season, as Doncic turned in a season that will earn him MVP votes and Kristaps Porzingis developed into an awesome copilot. The middle of the Western Conference is jumbled, leaving the Mavericks a path toward, potentially, a top-four seed. This will be our first taste of Doncic in the playoffs, and nobody should count Dallas out as a tough second-round opponent.

ROSTER

J.J. Barea
Jalen Brunson
Trey Burke
Willie Cauley-Stein
Antonius Cleveland (two-way)
Seth Curry
Luka Doncic
Dorian Finney-Smith
Tim Hardaway Jr.
Justin Jackson
Michael Kidd-Gilchrist
Maxi Kleber
Courtney Lee
Boban Marjanovic
Kristaps Porzingis
Dwight Powell
Josh Reaves (two-way)
Delon Wright

STANDINGS

1. Los Angeles Lakers: 49-14
2. Los Angeles Clippers: 44-20 (5.5)
3. Denver Nuggets: 43-22 (7.0)
4. Utah Jazz: 41-23 (8.5)
5. OKC Thunder: 40-24 (9.5)
6. Houston Rockets: 40-24 (9.5)
7. Dallas Mavericks: 40-27 (11.0)
8. Memphis Grizzlies: 32-33 (18.0)
9. Portland Trail Blazers: 29-37 (21.5)
10. New Orleans Pelicans: 28-36 (21.5)
11. Sacramento Kings: 28-36 (21.5)
12. San Antonio Spurs: 27-36 (22.0)
13. Phoenix Suns: 26-39 (24.0)

SCHEDULE

Friday, July 31 — 9 p.m. ET — vs. Houston Rockets
Sunday, Aug. 2 — 9 p.m. ET — vs. Phoenix Suns
Tuesday, Aug. 4 — 2:30 p.m. ET — vs. Sacramento Kings
Thursday, Aug. 6 — 6:30 p.m. ET — vs. Los Angeles Clippers
Saturday, Aug. 8 — 8:30 p.m. ET — vs. Milwaukee Bucks
Monday, Aug. 10 — 3 p.m. ET — vs. Utah Jazz
Tuesday, Aug. 11 — 5 p.m. ET — vs. Portland Trail Blazers
Thursday, Aug. 13 — Time TBD — vs. Phoenix Suns

WHAT DOES SUCCESS LOOK LIKE?

Winning a playoff series. Despite Dallas’ historically efficient offense and MVP-caliber play from Luka Doncic, the Mavericks are still a young team, meaning there’s no pressure to barnstorm the league right away. In the short-term, they can look to climb the standings, perhaps as high as the fourth seed, if they steal games from Houston and Utah during the seeding round.

What’s most impressive about the Mavericks’ offense is that there’s no sorcery involved in making it go. With Doncic running the show and shooters and finishers at every position, Dallas has built a scoring machine that is hard to stop. While Utah or Houston is certainly more experienced and star-studded than Dallas, it would not be a shock for Doncic, Porzingis and a bunch of shooters to be precisely the recipe for the Mavericks to make a surprise appearance in the second round.

X-FACTOR

Kristaps Porzingis: Throughout February and March, Porzingis finally started to look like the player we all remembered, and the guy the Mavs thought they were getting when they gave up two first-round picks for him at the trade deadline in 2019. Porzingis averaged 24.5 points per game in 14 games after Feb. 1, and Dallas scored 130 points per 100 possessions when he was on the floor in the month of February. If not for a cold shooting streak going into the hiatus, Porzingis might have even had some All-NBA steam.

Yet Dallas’ best lineup, which outscored opponents by 34.8 points per 100 possessions, has traditional rim-running big man Powell in the frontcourt in place of Porzingis. Sure, the same lineup with Porzingis instead of Powell is nearly as good, but head coach Rick Carlisle has not trusted to play as many minutes. Porzingis has long struggled to defend in the post because of his thin frame and injury history, which is why Powell is so useful to the Mavs. The team clearly made it work during the regular season, but to get the five best players on the floor at once and juice the offense even more, Porzingis will likely have to play center more in the playoffs. Whether he can do that right now will likely help decide how far the Mavericks go this year.

BIGGEST ON-COURT QUESTION

Will the small guards hold up? It’s Carlisle’s style to play two or three guards at all times, but with Doncic, typically under-sized lineups became more playable. Though Doncic isn’t a great defender, his size and play-making ability give Carlisle the freedom to tinker even more than he has in the past. The same is true of the front court, where the versatility of Porzingis and Kleber plus the athleticism and efficiency of Powell make the Mavs’ roster interchangeable and pretty fearsome.

That said, most of the team’s depth is made up of typical Carlisle pieces. Where physical, athletic forwards like Caron Butler and Shawn Marion used to be, now there is Finney-Smith, Jackson and Kidd-Gilchrist. And most intriguingly, Carlisle hasn’t strayed from his infatuation with extremely small guards, in this case Brunson and Curry.

Both had career years, with Curry scoring the post points per game of his career and shooting an insane 45.3 percent from deep. Brunson is about league-average from three but a smart play-maker and physical defender. Carlisle made it work in 2011 when Dallas won the title with Barea and Jason Kidd playing heavy minutes, but the league looked different back then, and Tyson Chandler was at the peak of his powers as a defensive anchor. This roster poses different challenges as well as opportunities, but Dallas’ 17th-ranked defense remains a question as long as Carlisle puts diminutive guys on the court as often as he does next to the defensively challenged core of Porzingis and Doncic.

Sometimes the best new R&B can be hard to find, but there are plenty of great rhythm and blues tunes to get into if you have the time to sift through the hundreds of newly released songs every week. So that R&B heads can focus on listening to what they really love in its true form, we’ll be offering a digest of the best new R&B jams that fans of the genre should hear every Friday.

This week, Brandy emerged with her new album B7, Kehlani released a sexy visual for her song “Can I” and Pink Sweats hopped on the remix to Mahalia’s Isolation Tapes track “BRB” for the remix. Check out the rest of the best new R&B this week below.

Brandy — B7

It’s been over 8 years since Brandy released her full-length album Two Eleven back in 2012 and this week she has arrived with her long overdue project, B7. The Grammy Award-winning R&B behemoth returned with 17 songs in tow and bearing features from Chance The Rapper on the previously released single “Baby Mama” and her daughter Sy’rai on “High Heels.” As one of the best singing voices in the music business, B7 is certainly worth the listen.

Kehlani — “Can I”

Kehlani‘s song “Can I” off It Was Good Until It Wasn’t quickly became a fan favorite upon the album’s release and this week the singer shared the cyber visual for the track (sans Tory Lanez in the name of protecting Megan Thee Stallion at all costs). Kehlani handpicked Lily Isabella, Tori Duncan, Aaliyah Ei, Zamara Fullilove, and Draya Logan as some of her favorite sex workers for the video as a way to bring awareness towards the decriminalization of sex work movement. It’s sexy, it’s vibrant, it’s creative, and it absolutely gets the message out there.

Mahalia — “BRB” Feat. Pink Sweats

Rising R&B sensation Mahalia tapped in with Pink Sweats for the remix to her Isolation Tapes EP track “BRB.” Pink Sweats’ vocals seamlessly glide across the record so fittingly and naturally. Mahalia and Sweats’ harmonizations are like butter, making the remix to “BRB” a true musical wonder.

Jorja Smith — “By Any Means”

Jorja Smith is all for the Black Lives Matter movement on her latest track “By Any Means.” The talented singer beautifully sings about fighting for equality and croons about the woes Black people across the world face. It’s the lead single off Roc Nation’s upcoming social justice album Reprise which is set to feature various artists lending their voice in musical protest.

Ye Ali — “Right Time”

Talented sing-songwriter Ye Ali came through with the late-night vibes on his latest track “Right Time” featuring Reggie Becton. It’s a sultry track that charms with his voice and captivates with his words of promise. Ye is fresh off the release of the deluxe version of Traphouse Jodeci 2 which introduced to fans 10 new tracks of R&B goodness.

Abby Jasmine — “Stay With Me”

Up-and-coming singer Abby Jasmine recently inked a partnership with Cinematic and this week she unleashed the visual to her latest track “Stay With Me.” Abby laments between being alone or being surrounded by a starting lineup of potential lovers. “The video is me reminiscing on a past relationship,” Jasmine told Paper Magazine. “Speaking to the interspersed clips that look like hazy memories. The good times and the bad, featuring some good old breakup remedies: tea and Hennessy — not together, of course.” “Stay With Me” follows the New York native’s previously released project Who Cares?

Mariah The Scientist — “Always And Forever” Feat. Lil Baby

Atlanta’s own Mariah The Scientist and Lil Baby vibe together on the singer’s second release of 2020, “Always And Forever.” It’s an honest song that speaks to love’s complications and staying down through it all. Co-directed by Mariah herself along with Kid Studio, the visual is set in the parking lot of ATL’s strip club sanctuary Magic City.

Jaz Karis — All Eyes On U EP

South London R&B singer Jaz Karis’ latest EP All Eyes On U is definitely one of this week’s must-listens. Her soulful and calming voice leads every track as her lyrics help to navigate the raw, instrumental tone on the 5-piece project. “Hold You” and “Issues” are among the stand out vibes that live on All Eyes On U.

Check out this week’s R&B picks, plus more on Uproxx’s Spotify playlist below.

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

Gamers are still reflecting on the sprawling story woven by The Last Of Us Part II, which hit the PS4 earlier this summer to much fanfare, but HBO has its own apocalyptic story in the works based on the Naughty Dog classic. And according to the showrunner, it will be even more expansive than the story told in the first game.

For some fans, HBO picking up The Last Of Us as a TV show sounds almost too good to be true. With Naughty Dog creative director Neil Druckmann writing and serving as executive producer, Chernobyl creator Craig Mazin in the same role also gives the prestige TV vehicle some serious experience in a dreary and compelling world.

There are a lot of questions about making the video game that’s more like a Peak TV show into just that, and we won’t know the result until we see it for ourselves. But Mazin did give some clues about what to expect when The Last Of Us finally happens for HBO. In an interview with BBC Radio 5 Live, Mazin said the show will “expand” on the plot of the first game, but it won’t “undo” anything that happened in the game itself.

“I think the one anxiety that fans of something have is when the property gets licensed to someone else, those people don’t really understand it, or are going to change it, or make it stupid,” Mazin said, via Den Of Geek. “In this case, I’m doing it with the guy who did it, and so the changes that we’re making are designed to fill things out and expand, not to undo, but rather to enhance.”

One of the obvious benefits about adapting The Last Of Us is getting to work with the one person who has had control over the series from the beginning. Mazin didn’t spoil anything from the original game, but one thing he noted was that, with the TV show, they would be able to include some things the game’s creators couldn’t manage to include, whether because it didn’t fit thematically or simply couldn’t be finished to their satisfaction due to the infamous crunch that comes with meeting deadlines for titles at Naughty Dog and the gaming industry at large. With a TV show and more time to make it happen, the show will inevitably see some different things brought to life:

“Neil, at one point, he’s like, ‘You know, there was one thing we were talking about for a while,’ and then he told me what it was. I was like, ‘Well, that’s going in. You couldn’t stop me from doing that.’ So we’re doing that,” Mazin said. “And there’s quite a few things like that where it’s not like, ‘Oh, we just decided, oh, wouldn’t it be cool if there was one episode where Joel and Ellie get on motorcycles and confront a motorcycle gang?’ That’s not what we do. There’s no episodic nonsense here. This is all pretty much curated. The things that are new and enhancing of the storyline we’re doing are connected in organic, serious ways that fans and newcomers alike will appreciate.”

Video games are a living art of sorts, and part of the experience of The Last Of Us was experiencing the game through its main two characters. Mazin said they don’t quite have an answer to that narratively, and he said that the experience of watching it all as a TV show will be very different. The interview is fascinating, and it seems like he and Druckmann are truly excited about the project. There are certainly a lot of gamers who are there with them.

(Via Den of Geek)