Month: August 2020

The Brooklyn Nets season came to an end on Sunday when they were dispatched by the Toronto Raptors in a 150-122 drubbing, the culmination of a widely expected first round sweep. As a result, the Nets coaching search can now begin in earnest and the team has a very interesting decision to make.

Jacque Vaughn guided the team on interim status through the end of the regular season and the restart in the Bubble, with an especially impressive showing from the team in Orlando as they went 5-3 in the seeding round, almost took the Blazers out of the playoffs, and battled in Game 2 with the Raptors before ultimately being overwhelmed by the talent disparity. Vaughn was always going to be a candidate, but the expectation was the Nets would flame out of the seeding round with a shorthanded roster and all but remove him from consideration. Now, however, he has a pretty strong point of reference for what he can do. The main problem is, it’s showed he can get a lot out of a scrappy group, not coach a pair of superstars who wield significant power in the hiring process.

As such, other top candidates for the job include Tyronn Lue, who coached Kyrie Irving in Cleveland during their championship season, but on Monday Shams Charania of The Athletic reported an even bigger fish has the eyes of Irving and Kevin Durant — and thus, the Nets as well. Per Shams, Gregg Popovich is the “dream candidate” of Brooklyn and they will at least try to gain permission to talk with the Hall of Fame coach.

The first priority of the Nets’ coaching search has become clear: They plan to seriously explore the possibilities with Popovich, sources tell The Athletic.

…

He is a favorite of Nets star Kevin Durant, league sources say, even dating as far back as the Oklahoma City Thunder’s coaching search process in 2015 (which ultimately concluded with the hire of Billy Donovan). There is known to be tremendous mutual respect between Popovich and KD. Durant’s presence and voice is powerful within the Nets’ franchise, and Popovich represents a bonding candidate between the two-time Finals MVP and Brooklyn’s front office. ESPN reported on Sunday evening that Durant and Irving have shown an interest in Popovich.

If your first thought was, “there’s no way Pop is leaving the Spurs for the Nets,” then you’re in the majority. It seems, for sure, to be an incredible long shot for the Nets to not only get a meeting with Pop but to convince him to leave and match whatever the Spurs require in compensation in return. Charania even called it a “pipe dream” in the piece, but it seems to be one Brooklyn’s willing to pursue. A lot of that pursuit seems to be simply proving to your two superstars that you’ll try anything for them, including making a potential Godfather offer to the league’s most legendary coach.

What this also indicates is maybe not the best of things for whoever the Nets do hire. If Durant is making a strong internal push for Pop, one has to wonder what coach he’d be happy enough with that isn’t Pop. Any coach who comes into the Nets was always going to have immense pressure to make them a contender immediately, but add in the pressure of “not Gregg Popovich” as a checkmark in the cons section for your biggest star and you better make quite the early impression to gain some stability in your new role.

If you were hoping to visit a museum-like exhibition of Game of Thrones props, you’re out of luck. The cast has already ransacked every item from the HBO series. Emilia Clarke has a Targaryen flag (even if she wanted one of Daenerys’ wigs), Maisie Williams owns Arya’s jacket, and Kit Harington “borrowed” a Jon Snow statue (lol) from the Winterfell crypt. But Sophie Turner has them beat: she’s got a throne.

Over the weekend, Turner shared a photo of Sansa Stark’s throne from the Game of Thrones series finale on Instagram. “Welcome home,” she wrote. Look, I realize she and husband Joe Jonas just had a baby and all — congratulations, etc. — but that throne is the most important addition to the Turner/Jonas household this year:

Turner reunited with the actual throne Sansa Stark sat in at the very end of the show’s finale after being crowned Queen of the North… The photo sees the wooden throne featuring the House Stark crest and dire wolves, which Turner placed right below her stairs. (Turner also has a dire wolf tattoo on the back of her arm.) The photo was also shared by Jonas, who is a die-hard GoT fan.

Is it wrong to go to a friend’s house under the guise of wanting to “meet the baby” when, actually, you just want to sit on a TV prop throne? Asking for a friend (Kevin Jonas).

(Via Yahoo!)

When Beyonce released her visual album, Black Is King, to Disney+ a month ago, one of the segments that immediately stood out to fans on Twitter and Instagram was the uplifting video for the song “Brown Skin Girl.” Centering on a Black debutante pageant — a tradition in majority Black areas of the South United States such as Louisiana, where Beyonce has roots — the video was praised for showing Black women celebrating their beauty on their own terms.

Now, that video is available to watch for all, as Beyonce breaks out the clip as a standalone video and shares it to YouTube. All her fans can now enjoy the video, without having to subscribe to Disney+ or fast forward to the video in the longer film. Beyonce previously shared a more personal video for “Brown Skin Girl” on its original release as part of her Lion King: The Gift album released to help promote the live-action remake of the Disney classic. She re-released the album as a deluxe version in conjunction with the Black Is King debut. The song quickly became a fan favorite, even finding its way onto Michelle Obama’s recently released Spotify playlist highlighting her own faves.

Watch Beyonce’s new “Brown Skin Girl” video above.

Black Is King is available for streaming now on Disney+. Watch it here.

The Killers’ new album Imploding The Mirage has only been out for a few days, but already, Brandon Flowers is discussing plans for a new album. In fact, he has revealed that he and the group aim to have a new full-length release out in less than a year from now.

Speaking with NME, Flowers said:

“You know when people just say that? Every time someone makes a record they say that they have 50 songs and they’re going to release another record. We really are. We’re going to release another one in about 10 months. We’ve already gone back into the studio with [producer Jonathon Rado] and [producer Shawn Everett]. We did a week in Northern California. I had a lot of time on my hands. Before, I’d normally be gearing up to tour, all of that time has gone back into writing more songs. It’s been pretty fruitful.”

Flowers went on to explain more about how not touring right away has been a creative advantage for him, saying, “I’m not writing a quarantine album or anything like that. You kind of just start hitting your stride when you’re finishing a record. You’re writing lyrics, you’re mixing everything, you’re in it — then you go on tour. It’s interesting to not be going on tour and having any of that stuff taking up my brain. I just went right back to the piano. I was already exercising my songwriting muscles so a lot of it came very quickly. Something powerful happened when I shut off the part of my brain that runs towards the grind and just started running towards the creative part of my brain.”

Read more from the interview here.

There is a lot to process in the first trailer for The Batman: Robert Pattinson looking like I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning-era Conor Oberst; the Nirvana song; the Fast and Furious-style Batmobile; Zoe Kravitz’s Catwoman debut; Colin Farrell as the Penguin… or maybe it’s Richard Kind? That would be inspired casting! But don’t overlook this scene.

This shot, one of the few in the trailer that you can see without turning the screen brightness all the way up, shows Jim Gordon (played by Jeffrey Wright) discovering a card left behind by the Riddler (Paul Dano) for Batman at a crime scene. “What does a liar do when he’s dead?” the inside reads, followed by a series of symbols.

Batman has some world’s greatest detective competition, because someone thinks they have decoded the message. “So hyped for Matt Reeve’s Batman Movie, I decided to solve The Riddler’s code,” Andrew Lane wrote on Twitter. He explained his process:

“I first analyzed the different symbols and found the ones that were reoccurring throughout the code. From here, I had two thought processes. I had a feeling that The Riddler may use the word “Batman” so I solved the first part as Batman. This didn’t work because the symbols that I substituted with letters in the first phrase didn’t line up with the same symbols in the second one. So I went to my next thought process, which was replacing the matching symbols in the first phrase with “E” since it is the most used letter in the English language. Then the matching consecutive letters in the second phrase I replaced with a double “L”, because it is the most commonly used consecutive letters in the English language. Then I used the riddle on the right side of the card and the substituted letters to figure out the rest.”

What’s the answer to the riddle? “He lies still,” which, as Lane tweeted, “is a double entendre, because he is literally lying still due to death and also continues to lie after death.” Hm, I prefer, “Riddle me this, riddle me that, who’s afraid of the big, black bat” but this one’s good, too. The Batman is scheduled to come out on October 1, 2021.

Keeping up with the best new music can be exhausting, even impossible. From the weekly album releases to standalone singles dropping on a daily basis, the amount of music is so vast it’s easy for something to slip through the cracks. Even following along with the Uproxx recommendations on a daily basis can be a lot to ask, so every Monday we’re offering up this rundown of the best new music this week.

This week saw Jay-Z and Pharrell show their support of Black-owned businesses and The Killers make a winning return. Yeah, it was a great week for the best new music. Check out the highlights below.

Pharrell and Jay-Z — “Entrepreneur”

Jay-Z drew some ire for his lyrics on the Pharrell collaboration ‘Entrepreneur” before the track even came out, as he took shots at “Black Twitter.” The full song, though, sees Jay offer words of encouragement for prospective entrepreneurs, with insightful lyrics like, “If you can’t buy the building, at least stock the shelf.”

Nas — King’s Disease

Nas did a good job of drumming up attention for his new project by including a Doja Cat diss on King’s Disease, his first album since 2018’s Nasir. As for non-Nas artists who are actually on the album, he recruited Anderson .Paak, Big Sean, Lil Durk, and others for guest spots.

The Killers — Imploding The Mirage

The pandemic forced this album to arrive later than it was originally meant to, but at last, it’s here. Uproxx’s Steven Hyden wrote of the release, “Imploding The Mirage is just plain fun, at a time when ‘fun’ feels like the opposite of pain and more like a balm.”

BTS — “Dynamite”

BTS have been known to obliterate a record or two in their day, and of course, their first English-language song, “Dynamite,” did just that. The visual racked up a seemingly impossible amount of views in its first hour, a further testament that the strongest military force on Earth may just be the BTS Army.

Mulatto — Queen Of Da Souf

Mulatto told Uproxx of her burgeoning career, which was just punctuated by Queen Of Da Souf, “From the jump, I was like, ‘I know I’m here to say.’ Nobody can convince me otherwise. I know what God put me on this earth to do, and I know my purpose. I don’t believe in that blackballing or burning bridges. You keep it real and you work hard and you pray hard, it’s going to happen to you, and I’m living proof of that.”

Vic Mensa — V Tape

Vic Mensa has spent time in recent years delving into more rocking territory with his side project 93Punx, but now he’s back to hip-hop. V Tape is his first all-rap project since 2018’s Hooligans EP, and it is surely a flashback for fans who remember Mensa as a 2014 XXL Freshman.

Internet Money — “Thrusting” Feat. Future and Swae Lee

Swae Lee and Future last linked up on “Buckets,” from the 2018 Rae Sremmurd album SR3MM, but now they’ve gotten back together. This time, they have assisted Internet Money on “Thrusting,” a dancehall-inspired track featuring R&B-flavored contributions from Future.

Baha Banks — “Shake That Ass” Feat. Chance The Rapper

Chance The Rapper is happily married, but he still spits lines like, “Throw that left cheek on the beat, let me beat / Let me find out you a freak,” on “Shake That Ass.” Chance is guesting here on Baha Banks’ track, and the feature is a great look for the newcomer rapper.

Phoenix — “Identical”

The French group hasn’t been the most active in recent years, but they made a welcomed return last week. “Identical” is the band’s first new song in two years, and it arrived with news that a new album was on the way, which the band described as “all over the place.”

Duckwrth — Supergood

After making a name for himself online over the past handful of years, Duckwrth has arrived with his major-label debut album. As Uproxx’s Aaron Williams notes of the project, it “combines soulful grooves to upbeat dance production and savvy, sexy rhymes that set him apart from just about everyone else in the game today.”

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

The start of the Republican National Convention is currently being overshadowed by a surprise announcement: Kellyanne Conway is leaving the White House. As Counselor to the President (and inventor of the Bowling Green Massacre), she’s lasted a lot longer than most Trump administration officials, but something had to give. And it looks like conflict at home may have been the straw that convinced her to quit.

Kellyanne tweeted out her resignation letter to stress that the resignation was her call, and she added, “[F]or my beloved children, it will be less drama, more mama.” She also wrote that she and her husband, George, will unite on getting their four children (middle-through-high-school age) rolling with remote schooling. It’s an undertaking that she acknowledged “requires a level of attention and vigilance that is as unusual as these times.”

The announcement comes days after Kellyanne and George’s 15-year-old daughter, Claudia, took to Twitter with her own announcement: she’s seeking emancipation from her parents. Claudia began by criticizing her mother’s decision to speak at the RNC.

“i’m devasted that my mother is actually speaking at the RNC like DEVASTATED beyond compare,” she tweeted. “i’m officially pushing for emancipation. buckle up because this is probably going to be public one way or another, unfortunately. welcome to my life.”

Claudia then declared that “my mother’s job ruined my life… watching her children suffer. selfish. it’s all about money and fame.” The teenager then suggested that the emancipation isn’t truly due to Kellyanne’s job but, instead, “because of years of childhood trauma and abuse.”

Late on Sunday night, George Conway announced his decision to leave the Lincoln Project “to devote more time to family matters.”

Neither Kellyanne nor George have publicly addressed Claudia’s tweets or stated mission for emancipation.

HBO’s Lovecraft Country is ambitious and astounding and will undoubtedly blow your expectations away. Created by Misha Green, who’s working with Matt Ruff’s 1950s-set dark-fantasy novel as source material, the show counts horror visionary Jordan Peele and sci-fi maestro J.J. Abrams as executive producers. The show is full of literary and musical references, along with monsters, both in-your-face and and figurative; we’ll discuss the resulting symbolism on a weekly basis.

Last week’s Lovecraft Country episode shone light on “sundown towns,” which still aren’t entirely a thing of the past in the U.S. in our current times. In the 1950s, though, they were raging. Atticus, Leti, and George found these towns and counties full of figurative horrors (tied to racism) and, in the forests nearby, literal horrors (in the form of the monstrous Shaggoths). The episode introduced us to a variety of literary references (in particular, the appallingly racist legacy of H.P. Lovecraft) and kicked off one of the show’s major themes: Black history and horror are often interchangeable terms.

This week in “Whitey’s On The Moon,” the traveling trio wakes up in the manor in Ardham. Leti and George are oblivious to the trauma of the prior evening, Atticus gets forced into a cult ceremony, and we’ve got some musical/spoken-word references that form the backbone of the episode. We probably need to address this matter first.

– No one wants to see a snake, especially like this

Amid more Shaggoths in the woods and Braithwaite consciously enduring surgery to sacrifice an organ for his cult’s dinner party, we see this slithering out of Atticus 2.0’s pants. What madness. I keep chuckling to myself while thinking of Jonathan Majors and Jurnee Smollett acting out this scene while pretending that a cartoonish phallic symbol is darting across the bed, but oh yes, symbolism. This moment echoes the Garden of Eden painting on the wall with a snake about to invade a vagina. We hear Atticus and Leti talk about how the Bible is full of demons, but these stories aren’t as horrifying as human-inflicted atrocities. Or are they? We talked last week about how Atticus’ beloved pulp novels are meant as escapism but inevitably mirror his reality. Here, instead of art mirroring life, we witness the opposite coming out of his pants.

Of course, this isn’t the real Atticus in Leti’s room. Both of them, along with George, are all enduring different planes of demonic reality. Atticus relives a bad memory from the Korean War, and George dances with a ghost from the past before discovering a hidden room and a book about the “Order of the Ancient” group. On the way, he pulled a copy of House on the Borderland (by William Hope Hodgson and, notably, the edition from the Arkham House, which also published Lovecraft) out of the wall. Yep, another literary reference: the book holds plenty of parallels to the trio’s situation, including a weird remote house and otherworldly dimensions that induce hallucinations. Also, there are scary humanoid creatures, and the house collapses, much like during this episode.

Damn, this show has layers.

– “Whitey On The Moon” and (attempting to be) in the Garden Of Eden

Lovecraft Country sure doesn’t shy away from climactic scenes that deal comeuppance to racists. Of course, Braithwaite is refusing to heed history’s lessons, long after the manor burned down during a similar ceremony. This doesn’t end up going well for him.

All of it’s set to the radical 1970 Gil Scott-Heron poem, “Whitey On The Moon,” playing during the ceremony. (You might remember hearing it in 2018’s First Man movie — the Neil Armstrong biopic starring Ryan Gosling and directed by Damien Chazelle). The poem is a scathing indictment of the space race as an attempt to stir up patriotism during the Vietnam War and urban unrest at home. It also eviscerated the U.S. government for funneling money into the space program while economic inequality flourished. Today, the poem feels far too relevant after U.S. lawmakers pushed to include $1.75 billion in the stimulus bill to build new FBI headquarters while declining to extend a lifeline of federal unemployment for millions. (Yup, history repeating itself again.)

The poem’s place in this episode couldn’t be more appropriate, given that a whiter-than-white cult (which, as Christina tells Atticus, “would never fraternize with the Klan… they’re too poor”) makes a Black man (who served his country in war yet still suffers indignities while walking down a street or through a forest) endure a ritual and fuel their own space-y race. It’s a flat-out crazy scene, and in the end, Braithwaite gets what he deserves. In a fine twist, we see Atticus led to safety by his maternal ancestor, Hanna, who was the only survivor of the 1833 fire.

Atticus, as we learn during this episode, was in fact the last surviving ancestor of Titus Braithwaite (he’d impregnated Hanna), which apparently made Atticus the key to opening the Garden of Eden for the cult to achieve immortality. When the lodge crumbles to the ground again, Leti survives, but George does not (that one hurts!), although Montrose seems to be physically alright. Did Christina make it out alive, and what of William? As the rule goes, no bodies, no certain death.

– The Jeffersons and… Marilyn Manson

Like I wrote ahead of this season, this show’s soundtrack plays an important role in this show’s splatter-on-the-wall form of painting the story. None of this happens randomly or without careful consideration, and in this episode, two songs stand out. The first one, “Movin’ On Up,” holds a special place in pop culture as The Jeffersons theme song. Watching Leti and George dance to this song, completely unaware of what they saw the night before, is both a striking sight and a side-eye to how they’ve “finally got a piece of the pie.” Here, the dessert has been specifically tailored to keep both of them docile while the cult preys upon Atticus.

Then there’s a much less obvious piece of social commentary coming from “Killing Strangers.” Yes, that’d be the Marilyn Manson song featured in John Wick, where it simply sounded, you know, cool. Here, it’s both cool and terrifying when another invisible wall pops up, leading to Braithwhite shooting Leti and George. The song was inspired by the Vietnam War-acquired PTSD of Manson’s father, Hugh, and the lyrics speak to his struggle to readjust to civilian (and domestic) life after spraying the deadly Agent Orange poison and killing an untold number of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians. The residual trauma of Manson’s dad parallels the shell shock that Leti suspects is plaguing Atticus when she wonders if he’s lost it while rambling about monsters in the woods.

A few loose ends:

– The women of Lovecraft Country

Without getting into too much nuance here, it’s clear that Christina’s got a major beef against her dad, which is perfectly understandable, given that the cult’s as misogynist as they are racist. She’s angered that Atticus can wear one of the Order’s rings, simply because he was born male, which might tell us a lot about her motives. Christina is the one who apparently believed that Atticus would be useful during the ceremony, but was she actually setting up the cult to fail? We can’t rule out that possibility.

As far as the German Shepard-owning village meanie goes, I wonder how she ties into a possible scheme, since she was holding Montrose prisoner. Atticus also believed that her dog whistle sounded like the one that stopped the Shaggoth last week. We did see Christina stop those monsters outside the village this week with a whistle (in the process, she erased Leti and George’s memories), and there’s gotta be a connection between the two women that we haven’t heard about yet.

This seems like a good place to recall that Leti’s a badass. George didn’t forget.

– Finally, another nod to Tulsa’s place in Black history

Damon Lindelof’s reimagining of Alan Moore’s Watchmen put the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre on the map for a lot of viewers, and the city’s getting a Lovecraft Country shoutout for what appears to be less nefarious happenings. As George dances with the ghost of Dora, she muses about the good old days with Montrose and George near the home of Black Wall Street. It’s at that point in the episode when George really begins to suspect that the cult’s gotten into his head, but it also leads to the revelation that Dora is Tic’s mother, meaning that Montrose might not actually be his father. Montrose, of course, doesn’t take kindly to that conversation later, but there’s a slight hint that Montrose, despite being a d*ck to Atticus, does care about him like a son. Well, Montrose must now step into George’s shoes, so we’ll see how that goes in the future.

HBO’s ‘Lovecraft Country’ airs Sundays at 9:00pm EST.

Anybody who keeps tabs on the music world knows that BTS has a fervent fan base that helps them reach towering heights. The group’s new video for “Dynamite,” their first English-language single, unsurprisingly broke records. Now, some confirmed figures are in, and it turns out the group became the first to ever achieve a significant YouTube milestone: The “Dynamite” video had 101.1 million views in its first 24 hours in the site, which makes it the first video to eclipse 100 million in that time frame.

The previous record holder for most views in 24 hours was Blackpink’s “How You Like That” visual, which racked up 86.3 million views during that period. For further reference, the latest video from PewDiePie, the second most-subscribed-to YouTube user with 106 million subscribers, uploaded a new video 21 hours ago, and it currently has 3.2 million views (as of press time).

This is just the latest record the group achieved with their new video. It was previously reported that the visual got 10 million views in its first 21 minutes, the fastest time for a YouTube video to ever reach that height. Furthermore, during the video’s premiere, there were also between 3 to 4 million concurrent viewers, which of course was also another YouTube record broken.

Watch the “Dynamite” video here.

Succession was nominated this year for a whopping 18 Emmy awards, including Best Dramatic series and nine nominations for acting performances. Nicholas Braun, Kieran Culkin, Matthew Macfadyen, Sarah Snook, Brian Cox, and Jeremy Strong were all nominated, although all of the male nominees will have to face off against at least one other Succession actor in their category. (There were three other nominations in the guest actor categories for Harriet Walter, James Cromwell, and Cherry Jones).

While all the nominees are obviously wildly deserving, only one of those actors has gained a reputation for being a hardcore method actor. There are rumors that on the set, Jeremy Strong introduces himself as Kendall, the name of his character. There’s even some more absurd speculation that Strong, like his character, did meth, or at the very least, got wasted when his character was having substance abuse problems.

On this week’s episode of WTF with Marc Maron, Jeremy Strong’s Succession co-star, Kieran Culkin, talked about Jeremy Strong’s approach to acting, and how challenging it can sometimes be to work opposite him.

“With Jeremy, it’s complex. A lot of people immediately say he’s method, and he would say that he is not. But for all intents and purposes, I feel like he kind of is,” Culkin told Maron on the podcast. “The things is, he doesn’t want to know if the actor [opposite him] is going to do [blank], because that would mess him up. Sometimes, he doesn’t want you to say certain words. Like, don’t call it a ‘scene’ or things like that. It can be pretty particular sometimes.”

“Usually,” Culkin continues, “my job is to sort of poke fun at him and try to break down that little wall. Like, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, this SCENE? In this SCENE that we’re going to rehearse because it’s a F**KING TV SHOW?’ I like to do that to him, sometimes.”

“If ‘Kendall’ is in a really good place, then Jeremy is in a much better mood. If ‘Kendall’ is in a dark place, then it’s very much don’t talk to him. So, that has its own challenges, too.”

Culkin added, however, that he’s been acting for 30 years at this point, so he’s very good at navigating other people’s processes. He also added that Brian Cox and Sarah Snook are the least like their characters, and that Cox, in fact, is a “teddy bear.” However, though the extreme rumors about Jeremy Strong’s acting are obviously untrue, it’s clear that he does adopt some fairly hardcore method acting practices. On the other hand, at least he doesn’t give away live rats and dead pigs to his co-stars, as Jared Leto does, although gifting a “boar on the floor” to one of his castmates would have been a tremendously good prank.

Source: WTF with Marc Maron