Month: September 2020

Following last week’s reveal of the Boba Fett Adidas Top Ten Hi, Adidas has revealed the latest addition to its group of silhouettes celebrating the 40th Anniversary of the Empire Strikes Back, The Darth Vader Superstar. Oh wait, no sorry, they’re not actually called the Darth Vader Superstar, Adidas has chosen to oddly dub these kicks “Superstar Star Wars Shoes.” Last week’s release was officially named the “Top Ten Hi Boba Fett.” But these? They get the generic name.

That’s probably because, while both the Darth Vader Superstar and the Boba Fett would’ve never made it on our weekly roundup of the best sneakers. The Vaders aren’t nearly as cool as the Fetts. The Fetts were full of small fan-servicey details that reflected their namesake in a really cool way — they even came with a pouch! But the Vader Superstar does little to reflect the sith lord they’re named after aside from dress the sneaker in matte black leather.

Admittedly, we do like the stitching on the upper and the reflective three-stripes that are meant to resemble the lines and detailing in Vader’s suit. But, we would’ve liked to see Adidas lean more into functional design details rather than using more obvious signifiers like the imperial insignia on the heel tab, or the tongue portrait of Vader.

In another head-scratching move, Adidas also replaced the Superstar’s iconic shell toe with a toe box shaped like Darth Vader’s mask and helmet. Finally, the “Superstar Star Wars Shoes” feature translucent outsoles revealing the words “I Am Your Father.” Which, sure, is no doubt the most iconic line from Empire Strikes Back, but to print it on the bottom of a shoe? Hilarious.

It’s a shame that of the full collection, which has so far featured a Luke Skywalker Stan Smith, Stormtrooper NMD R1, Lando Calrissian NMD RI V2, and a Boba Fest Top Ten Hi, the Darth Vader Superstar — ahem Superstar Star Wars Shoes — are the weakest by far.

Vader deserved better than this. He killed the Emperor! Oh, wait…

The Darth Vader Superstar is set to drop on September 17th for a retail price of $120. Pick up a pair at the Adidas webstore.

The best new hip-hop albums coming out this week include projects from Ashton Travis, Big Sean, Blxst, Lil Durk, and Phil Augusta Jackson.

After last week’s ultra loaded New Music Friday, this week we’re getting a little bit of a reprieve with only five projects, most of them (relatively) short. The quick runtimes of newcomers Asthon Travis, Blxst, and Phil Augusta Jackson’s projects leave plenty of time to chew through the mega sized Detroit 2, which has a whopping 21 tracks.

Even if a few of those are “stories” like the interludes from the original Detroit mixtape, it’s still a schedule clearer, for sure — especially with all the rewinding we’ll all be doing to catch all the double entendres sure to infest “Friday Night Cypher.” We don’t know much about Lil Durk’s project, other than it’s likely being released to spite Windy City enemy Tekashi 69, whose own project TattleTales is also coming out this Friday. As you can see, it’s not represented on this list, for reasons which should be obvious.

Here are all the best new hip-hop albums coming out this week.

Ashton Travis — Phoenix Mode (EP)

Signed to Def Jam early last year, he’s a singer/rapper combo from Houston whose style pays homage to both old school legends like DJ Screw and contemporary stars like Don Toliver and Travis Scott (for whom he is supposedly named). A Howard University dropout, the crooner addresses relationship issues and personal growth with smooth vocals, sticky melodies, and woozy instrumentals. His debut is well-worth the playthrough.

Big Sean — Detroit 2

The obvious highlight of the week, Sean returns to what many consider his best project (which, tragically, is still somehow not available on streaming services) for inspiration, landing upon an extensive tracklist packed to the brim with both high-profile features and close friends coming through to pay homage to his long-awaited comeback. Sean considers himself in the best mindstate of his recent life, so don’t be surprised if this one lives up to expectations and finally shushes the critics.

Blxst — No Love Lost

West Coast native Blxst has low-key been all over the place this year, dropping both well-received solo singles and featuring on underground hits from local faves and fellow newcomers like Eric Bellinger, Bino Rideaux, and 1TakeJay. With a laid-back, melodic style, this sing-rapping hybrid artist is positioning himself to follow in the footsteps of favored chorus composers Bellinger and Ty Dolla Sign. His debut is one you’ll be returning to a whole bunch in the future, guaranteed.

Lil Durk — The Voice

Durk already released a well-received project earlier this year, as well as a deluxe edition, so his abrupt announcement for this project seemed to come out of nowhere. However, he’s currently receiving the greatest mainstream attention of his surprisingly long career thanks to placements with Nas on King’s Disease and with Drake on the overnight hit “Laugh Now Cry Later,” netting Durk his first No. 2 single ever. Why not strike while the iron is hot? While his plans of thwarting Tekashi 69 with only a week’s notice seem… unlikely… he’s a consistent force, so we feel comfortable putting this here, even with so little information (not even an album cover!).

Phil Augusta Jackson — The Redondo Tape (EP)

Yes, this one is a little bit of a left-field inclusion, but when one of Insecure‘s executive producers announces an EP, you have to at least give it the one curiosity play. Knowing this, Jackson capitalizes on The Redondo Tape, offering a flurry of competent rhymes, some down-to-earth perspective, and yes, I do have a little bit of local bias as well. If you read this column with any regularity, you know I rep my stomping grounds — New Yorkers have done it for years. But hey, Jackson turns out to be a versatile, engaging artist in his own right and it’s clear he knows his stuff from the Insecure soundtracks he helps to curate every season, so hopefully, your curiosity is piqued as well — and satisfied.

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

The fallout between Kyrie Irving and the Boston Celtics in 2019 was pretty ugly, but that doesn’t mean the relationships between Irving and his former teammates went away. In a new interview with Shams Charania at The Athletic, young Celtics superstar Jayson Tatum explained the influence Irving has on him to this day.

“Ky is like my big brother,” Tatum told Charania. “We still talk to this day, and we’ve talked a few times this playoffs. He always encourages me to be special. Having that relationship with him and having somebody like him in my ear at a young age, it means a lot.”

As Tatum tells it, despite Irving ultimately choosing to leave Boston to join the Nets in free agency last summer, Irving still reached out to Tatum on his way out to let him know it was his time to lead the Celtics. That connection has lasted into 2020, as Tatum still receives feedback and support from Irving from afar.

The bond between the two is not the only topic Tatum opens up on. Tatum also details how gratifying it was to finally make an All-Star team this season and the confidence it gave him. Not surprisingly, Tatum vaulted up to 26.6 points per game post-All-Star break and improved his three-point shooting dramatically, filling out his game in a manner that could take the Celtics to another level.

Through it all, Tatum told Charania he also learned to do things — as a player and leader — his own way.

“You can steal from a lot of different guys — Ky, Kobe (Bryant) — but you have to do it your own way. I’m one of the youngest guys on this team but I know the role I have. I know how these guys view me and they value what I have to say.”

Thanks in large part to Tatum’s improvements, the Celtics are up 2-0 over the Raptors in the East semifinals as Tatum has averaged 27.5 points per game across the first two contests of the series.

Jennifer Lopez has been in the entertainment business for over two decades, so she’s used to meeting big-name celebrities. But the same can’t be said for J. Lo’s daughter, who was absolutely starstruck upon meeting her idol Billie Eilish. Lopez revealed that seeing her daughter’s reaction made her have a newfound appreciation for her own fans.

Lopez recently sat down with her fiancé Alex Rodriguez on his podcast The Corp With A-Rod And Big Cat. During the interview, Lopez recounted the time her and her daughter saw Eilish in concert.

“Emme, my daughter is in love with her. We had a real moment at the Billie Eilish concert that was like, ‘Oh my god, we’re bonding right now. It’s amazing,’” Lopez said. “I was just on tour and she was on tour with me. Right at the end of the tour, we went to go see Billie Eilish. Every night, I was doing meet-and-greets with my fans. Every night they cry and they hug you and you get used to it, it’s a beautiful thing. […] And then I watch my daughter freak out over Billie Eilish.”

Saying the moment made her have an “out of body experience,” Lopez continued: “She walked in the room after the concert, and my daughter goes [gasps with hand over her mouth]. And I looked at her, and I’m like, ‘What’s the matter?’ and she’s, literally, the tears because since she’s eight years old, and how she’s twelve, she’s idolized this girl. For whatever reason, her songs and the words she says she connects to, and she loves her style.” Lopez explained. “It was a mind-blowing experience. It made me appreciate what I do more, my fans more, what Billie did for my daughter,” she added. “All of it, it was like a full circle moment. We love Billie.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Lopez said performing at the Super Bowl halftime show was the was of the most “high-stress moments” of her whole career:

“Leading up to it, I think I was more nervous than on the day. For me, preparation meets the moment. I was so prepared, that in the moment, I was just ready to go. It was like a thoroughbred in the gates, like, ‘Please let me out of the gates, please let me go.’ […] But leading up to it was probably the most nerve-wracking, and Alex can attest to this, most high-stress moments of my whole career. I could never have imaged it would be so stressful. And I think it’s because everybody understands the weight of it, and that fact that it’s 100 percent live and a thousand different things could go wrong.”

Watch Lopez’s full interview on The Corp With A-Rod And Big Cat above and hear her gush about Eilish around the 35-minute mark.

With the exception of his Batman trilogy, director Christopher Nolan has only made one movie with multiple words in the title. There’s The Prestige, then there’s everything else, including his three most recent films, Interstellar, Dunkirk, and Tenet. You could chalk this weird fact up to being a coincidence, but this is Nolan we’re talking about. There was a fake rumor that he bans chairs from his sets because “if [people are] sitting, they’re not working,” as Anne Hathaway put it, and everyone believed it. Nothing is under-thought.

“For me, titles are very tricky to be too self-conscious about. You’re looking for a way of expressing something about the film. To a certain extent, it’s a branding exercise on larger-scale films. I’ve always gravitated towards the simplest version of something that gets it across,” Nolan explained on the ReelBlend podcast. He then gave an example:

“Following, I think when I wrote that script, it was The Following, so we got rid of the The and stripped that down. I think that was the beginning of my interest in trying to make things as short and a pithy as possible, really. But it’s all instinct at the end of the day.”

“Drop the ‘The.’ Just Following. It’s cleaner” — Justin Timberlake to Christopher Nolan in 1998, probably.

(Via CinemaBlend)

Glen Taylor’s quest to sell the Minnesota Timberwolves has continued throughout the summer, but a new bid is apparently in the works that brings one of sports’ other notorious owners into play. A new report from Scott Soshnick of Sportico indicates Jimmy Haslam, the owner of the Cleveland Browns, is exploring the possibility of purchasing the Timberwolves.

This in addition to previous reports linking former Memphis Grizzlies part-owner Daniel Straus, who Sportico also reported was interested in the Timberwolves. While Haslam’s management struggles in Cleveland are well-documented, he is worth an estimated $2.9 billion and would be in the upper-half of the league in terms of wealth. The same is also true of Taylor, who has run the franchise more like a small-market team than his spending power would indicate.

However, the likelihood of anything being imminent seems rather low. Tom Withers of the AP reports that while Haslem was presented with buying the team, it was one of several potential deals put in front of him.

Many of the same problems of indecision and putting faith in the wrong leaders that have held the Timberwolves back also plague the Browns, making Haslam a curious candidate if Timberwolves fans are seeking a turnaround in the team’s fortune after one playoff berth in the past 16 years. Among the other suitors for the Timberwolves is Kevin Garnett, whom the local Pioneer Press reported in July would put forward about $200 million in a potential bid and likely run the basketball operations for the team.

Jeopardy! is officially returning with all-new episodes in September, which is great news for fans of the beloved quiz show and anyone desperately hoping for the slightest sense of normalcy. The 37th season will start airing on September 14 and with Alex Trebek reminding contestants to answer in the form of a question. Like most of America, the beloved host has been stuck at home, so he’s particularly excited for a change of scenery when he returns to his old stomping grounds.

“I feel good, and I feel excited because once again JEOPARDY! has demonstrated that it’s at the forefront of television programming,” Trebek said in a statement. “I believe we are the first quiz show to come back on the air in the COVID-19 era. On a personal level, I’m excited because it gets me out of the house. It gives me something to do on a regular basis, and I was missing that.”

Naturally, Trebek’s return is a welcomed and encouraging piece of news. The host has been making headlines for his ongoing cancer battle, which led to a bleak moment in late July when Trebek was reported as saying that he would stop his experimental cancer treatment if he wasn’t seeing results. Fearing the worst, fans reached out with concern that Trebek was losing his fight with Stage IV pancreatic cancer, and he quickly set the record straight that he was going through a rough patch when he made those remarks.

“That quote from the book was written BEFORE my current regimen, and I was going through some bad times.” Trebek wrote in a statement posted to the Jeopardy! Twitter account. “My current numbers are very good, but we will have to be patient with this new immunotherapy program that I am on. But, if it were to stop being successful, I would return to my previous chemo treatment — NOT stop all treatment. I apologize for any confusion, and want everyone to know that I am optimisit about my current plan, and thank them for their concerns.”

The Zodiac Killer strikes again. In the midst of a pandemic and after stimulus negotiations ground to a halt, Ted Cruz and a gathering of GOP senators came together to try and ban an abortion pill. This is happening after Cruz’s Texas (and many other states) reduced abortion clinic access over the past several months, which has resulted in United Nations humans rights experts accusing states of “manipulating” the pandemic for the pro-Life cause. Cruz is doing nothing to discourage that appearance, since he fired off a letter (signed by about 20 GOP U.S. lawmakers) that asks the Food and Drug Administration to remove an abortion pill from the market due to it being an “imminent hazard to the public health” that poses a “significant threat of danger.”

Cruz also tweeted a link to promote the letter while declaring that “[p]regnancy is not a life-threatening illness, and the abortion pill does not cure or prevent any disease. Make no mistake, Mifeprex is a dangerous pill.”

Unlike what Cruz’s tweet claims, women still do die during childbirth and/or suffer severe harm over the course of pregnancy. USA Today carried out an investigation that attributes 700 U.S. deaths to childbirth each year, along with another 50,000 women who suffer lasting and severe harm. The publication further noted that “Black women in the U.S. are more than twice as likely to die during childbirth” while basing that finding upon CDC data. So clearly, Cruz’s tweet doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, and Twitter users have plenty of statistics to throw his way.

That includes the number of deaths from Viagra as opposed to the abortion pill:

In short order, Cruz and Viagra began trending side-by-side.

This led to lots of Viagra comebacks, jokes, and gross-out reactions.

And now, a word from Ron Perlman.

After Kanye West made a very public pivot to piety last year, the rapper’s newfound commitment to Christianity led him to ditch a few projects. Kanye infamously quit swearing and cut all cuss words from verses on his Jesus Is King album. The rapper also removed Young Thug’s verse from one of his song’s on the album after Thugger rapped about the devil. Now, one more scrapped project has resurfaced and this time, it’s an old video.

Eli Russell Linnetz, who collaborated on “Fade” and “Famous,” took to social media to share a previously-unreleased video he directed three years ago. The video accompanies Kanye and Tyga’s track “Feel Me,” and features some bizarre visuals. Linnetz managed to tap Kim Kardashian and Kylie Jenner to join the video’s shoot.

Linnetz explained to E! News the meaning behind the video’s final scene, which depicts a quasi-birth. “It features Kylie coming out of Kim’s vagina,” Linnetz said. “The metaphorical meaning being that there would be no Kylie without Kim.”

According to Linnetz, the shoot racked up a $1 million bill and was shot over the course of five months but never saw the light of day because Kylie and Tyga ended their relationship shortly thereafter.

Sharing the unreleased video to Instagram, Linnetz wrote: “i directed this three years ago. no ones ever seen it before.”

Watch the “Feel Me” video above.

Big Sean’s latest Detroit 2 teaser is “Body Language,” his sensuous rap ballad featuring girlfriend Jhene Aiko and backup vocals from rap’s go-to hook master, Ty Dolla Sign. This time, the video is a Tidal exclusive, so feel free to sign up, although it’s possible that he’ll release a longer cut of the 90-second clip to more services at a later date.

While Ty is featured on the song, the video is entirely focused on Sean and Jhene as they cruise the coast in their freshly washed whip. Cleverly shot from the backseat, the camera plays fly on the wall as the couple visits an auto wash, canoodling while the foam obscures them from outside view, then watches as they drive up the California coast to visit a beach house for some meditation, cuddling, and song writing. They wear matching tie-dye shirts the whole time; it’s almost too cute.

In a couple of days, we’ll find out if Sean’s unique strategy of releasing truncated videos like “Body Language” and “Don Life” with Lil Wayne will pay off — but to be quite honest, given the three-year gap between Detroit 2 and his last project, I Decided, fans are already probably champing at the bit to give this album a (few) spin(s).

Watch Big Sean’s “Body Language” video featuring Jhene Aiko on Tidal.