Month: September 2020

Queendom Come is the leading lady on BeatKing‘s viral TikTok hit “Then Leave” and it isn’t the first time Queen has set off a record with her infectious hook either. Clubgod Zilla and Queen bubbled on the Billboard charts with their rump-shaking anthem “U Ain’t Bout That Life” back in 2012 and years later their magical twerking formula still seems to work as evident by the love Cardi B, Lizzo, and countless other celebrities have shown to her hook dealing art.

In fact, she gives credit to Cardi for shooting the songs streaming numbers up towards tremendous proportions after the Grammy award-winning rap star posted a TikTok of her reciting “Then Leave”‘s hypnotizing hook, “Get that head, get that bread, then leave. Peace out!,” before Offset bogarts his way into the frame to rap BeatKing’s part. The moment consequently went viral.

“We just start hitting those mills on YouTube every week,” she recalled during our Fall Music Preview Instagram Live Q&A on Friday (September 11). “We would go up like an extra mill. Even her post got more than 14 million views on her post just from seeing that from people who may have never heard it maybe. Then they really tapped in after that.”

Now as everyone has their eye on Queen, the Houston-based rapper is getting ready to share her solo talent with the world and is preparing to release a freestyle on Tuesday (September 15) in the form of a music video with cameos from YBN Almighty Jay and Lil Jairmy. Of course, this song will be backed by another BeatKing production.

“BeatKing has been saying in a lot of his interviews, ‘Queen, she can rap, rap so don’t get it twisted,’” she said. “She’s the hook dealer but she’s also pretty good on the music and I appreciate that. So, we were in the lab again and he cooked up a track and he was like, ‘Nah this you. You need to get on this, you need to rap.’ Shout out to him again, he can pull the best out of you when you’re in there vibing and I stepped on it.”

Check out the full interview with Queendom Come below.

Chris Hemsworth has declared that he won’t be done playing Thor after Thor: Love And Thunder, but before the MCU gets production underway again, he’s (fortunately) down under where wise people are getting cases of you-know-what under control again. He popped up over the weekend on a weather report for Australia’s The Today Show, for which he forecast a mostly-sunny day with (sadly, given the context) no thunder to be found. While meteorologist Lauren Phillips may have been aware that he was on the scene, her colleagues clearly had no idea.

“I’m in the horse capital of Australia, but I was yet to find a horse, so I thought I should open it up to one of the horse studs,” Phillips told hosts Rebecca Maddern and Richard Wilkins before Hemsworth popped into view. Wilkins stayed understated while observing the demi-god before his eyes, but Maddern was clearly stunned, and who could blame her? Nothing can spice up an otherwise uneventful bout of weather like an A-lister.

According to News.com.au, the booking happened with almost zero notice, to the point where a group of competitive cheerleaders got sidelined and rescheduled for a later date. One father of two cheer members wasn’t pleased, but one can’t blame Hemsworth for the scheduling mess-up. According to Entertainment Tonight, he had been attempting to spread the word for a conservation cause, and producers ran with that ball. Hopefully, they’ll make good with the cheerleaders soon, too.

Aside from acting, Jason Momoa has also been known to slap some bass. He celebrated his 41st birthday in August, and to mark the occasion, Fender sent him a custom Fender Precision Bass. Now he’s living out the dream of any bass player who is serious about their craft: Momoa recently spent some time with Primus leader Les Claypool, who is commonly regarded as one of the best bassists to ever play the instrument.

Over the weekend, Momoa shared a gallery of photos and videos of himself hanging out with Claypool, writing, “I AM MADLY IN LOVE WITH THIS OHANA. mahalo nui loa for taking us in and sharing your home. truly been the most amazing week so many beautiful things to come creating some amazing works of art with friends can’t wait to share our stories. #ontheroam. aloha j.” In the photos and clips, the pair was fishing, going on nature walks, and of course, playing some music.

Momoa had a big rock and roll weekend even beyond the Claypool hang. He also posted photos of himself with legendary guitarist Slash, revealing that he interviewed Slash for Gibson, and that he was nervous to do it: “my first interview. f*ck i was nervous but it was so epic and chill hanging with this legend SLASH AND ME when it’s hand crafted and made in the USA i’m in. i’m so proud to support Gibson they stepped it up with their tribute to #ambassador Slash @slash and I got to talk to him about his core collection.”

Check out the photos and videos above and below.

It’s been incredible for music lovers to experience the recent resurgence of women in rap. This particular episode of Obsessed is dedicated to the “vast ocean” of bold women expressing themselves in a range of styles and moods.

Obsessed co-hosts Taylour Chanel and Britt Ellis start out the episode discussing their favorite women in rap, including “WAP” duo Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B. Both hosts have strong opinions about “WAP,” including the manner in which the colorful, Willy Wonka-themed video bolstered its appeal. Ellis notes that the track itself “is cool, but the music video is so visually appealing and fun… it contributed to [the song] going completely viral.”

Speaking of fun and appealing, the Obsessed ladies also speak with Blimes And Gab, the vibrant West Coast-based act who recently released their Talk About It album. The duo dish about their creative process, how their respective hometowns of San Francisco and Seattle shape their art, and which rap legends gave them kudos for their breakout “Come Correct” track. They also give disparately insightful answers about how they categorize the different subgenres of rap.

Check out the full episode above for more, including which artist Blimes credits for initiating the shift to honesty in mainstream rap.

As is always the case with a sports game, the first week of NBA 2K21‘s release was an opportunity for developers to gather feedback on the game from a much wider audience and then seek to address bugs and gameplay issues. The results of that arrived in the form of the first full patch for the game on Monday — there was already a shooting hotfix put in place on release weekend — that hopes to address some of the more significant issues people have had with the game thus far.

The biggest changes in the new patch are in regards to the Pro Stick shooting mechanics, starting with offering the ability to choose between the new aiming mechanic and the traditional shot timing mechanic.

New Pro Stick Aiming/Shot Timing selector. On your first boot, you will now have the option to choose between using the new Pro Stick Aiming mechanic or the traditional Shot Timing mechanic. Your settings file will be updated with the appropriate selection. As always, you can visit your settings at any time to update your shooting preference.

Enabled the ability to use Pro Stick Shot Aiming with the Shot Meter setting turned off.

Ideal Shot Aiming point now determined by how slowly or quickly the Pro Stick is initially deflected when starting a shot. A slow flick will move the ideal aim point to the left, while a fast flick will move the ideal point to the right, giving players more consistency with Pro Stick shooting.

There are a number of other gameplay tweaks in the new patch, which is available on Xbox One and PlayStation 4 today, including some animation changes (like getting rid of the double team indicator) and also allowing for floaters from further away and eliminating forced fadeaways after certain dribble moves. They also looked to fix weird hangs that were reported in various modes when entering and exiting areas in an effort to make gameplay smoother.

My personal favorite update listed (and you can check all the updates here) is this one: Andrew Wiggins now appears with updated facial hair to more accurately represent his appearance.

There will surely be more patches to come, but for now this will hopefully improve gameplay, particularly for those who have been frustrated with the new Pro Stick mechanics — and whoever was upset with Andrew Wiggins not looking enough like Andrew Wiggins.

HBO will remain in the Last Week Tonight business until at least 2023. The network has renewed the comedy news show for three more seasons, and host John Oliver is taking the renewal with a healthy dose of realism given the state of, well, everything.

“We’re all extremely happy to be able to continue to do our show on HBO for another three years, or until the end of the world, whichever comes first,” Oliver told The Hollywood Reporter.

Here’s the official statement from HBO chief content officer Casey Bloy:

“For the past seven years, John and his incredibly talented team have taken on topics that are both in the public mind and off the beaten path, always managing to shed new light on these subjects with intelligence and searing humor. We are beyond thrilled to continue this relationship for three more years.”

Like his counterpart Trevor Noah on The Daily Show, Oliver and Last Week Tonight have been a welcome voice of sanity and reason during the pandemic, which has seen everything from nationwide protests against police brutality to the rise of QAnon conspiracy theories in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election.

But while Oliver has been making headlines with his scathing takedowns of Fox News personality Tucker Carlson, who recently defended white teen vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse, the Last Week Tonight host has also brought some levity to the proceedings. Most notably his “feud” with Danbury, Connecticut. After he made an off-handed joke about the town, the mayor threatened to rename a sewage plant after Oliver, who was immediately on board with this hilarious rivalry. Oliver even went so far as to promise a donation to charity if the town went through with it, and sure enough, the John Oliver Memorial Sewer Plant is now waiting for the host to show up for a ribbon-cutting.

“Come up to Danbury and sit on your throne,” the mayor told Oliver in a video roasting the late night host.

(Via Hollywood Reporter)

NLE Choppa wants fans to skip the McDonald’s Travis Scott meal in favor of a plant-based diet, tweeting “go eat some vegetables” as the burger chain sees a surge in Quarter Pounder sales thanks to the “Sicko Mode” rapper’s most enthusiastic fans. The 17-year-old Memphis rapper is turning over a new leaf just as the 28-year-old Houston rapper is flexing with his McDonald’s collab, claiming he will no longer rap about violence and tweeting a lot like Jaden Smith once did at the same age.

The 2020 XXL Freshman made his opinion clear over the weekend, posting tweet encouraging fans to switch up their diets. “Eat healthy man,” he wrote. “That food y’all eating can f*cc with your mental too.” He followed up by recommending followers “Put them Travis Scott burgers down go to the farmers market go eat some vegetables! Eat plant based foods!”

Of course, Travis Scott fans — and fans of fast food in general, I guess, took none too kindly to NLE Choppa’s suggestions. His replies were quickly swamped by a backlash from Twitter jokesters who promptly compared the sandwich to his music. However, there were also plenty of supportive tweets, proving that folks on Twitter can argue about just about anything.

See some of the responses to NLE Choppa’s diet advice above and check out the best, worst, and weirdest items from the Travis Scott/McDonald’s collab collection here.

NLE Choppa is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Concrete Cowboy, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, falls into that category of movie where the subject matter is so interesting I just want to know more. In this case – and we’ve seen examples during the protests over the last few months – Black cowboys in the middle of large cities. It’s something, admittedly, I just didn’t know much about and the site of people riding horses in heavily populated urban areas seems unusual, but it has a long history and Ricky Staub’s Concrete Cowboy does a good job of filling in that history.

Based in part on the book Ghetto Cowboy by Greg Neri, Cole (Caleb Washington, who you probably know best from Stranger Things) is headed down a bleak path after one too many run-ins with trouble and the police. His mother, at her wits’ end, decides Cole should spend the summer in Philadelphia with his father, Harp (Idris Elba). Harp is part of a local group, the Fletcher Street Urban Riding Club, who own and tend horses in Philadelphia. (Many of the actual members of Fletcher Street Riding Club appear in the film to varying, understandable degrees of acting talent that range from, “well, that’s nice they are in this,” to, “oh, I would have bet money that was an actor.”)

The plot of Concrete Cowboy itself doesn’t offer a ton of surprises, and it probably plays out a lot like you think it will. Cole still winds up finding trouble in Philadelphia. Idris Elba’s Harp takes the tough love approach, demanding Cole stop hanging out with certain friends. Then, later, he encourages him to start taking care of the horses in the stables and learn some responsibility. When one of the horses escapes to a local softball field – with a couple of dozen very surprised white, softball playing city-dwellers standing around, not knowing quite what to do – it’s Cole who approaches the scared and feisty animal to bring it back.

So, yes, it’s a movie about a somewhat estranged father reconnecting with his son over their eventual shared love of the horses. A particular scene stood out, as members of the urban horse riding community are all hanging out in a city field, drinking beers and sharing tales of the past. This is also when we meet Leroy (Method Man), a local sheriff who is very much a part of the local community. And his character just underscores how important it is for members of the police to actually know and live in the community they serve – a point that comes into play later in the film. But it’s during this scene that we hear about the history of the Black cowboy and how Hollywood erased their legacy. That even the Lone Ranger was a Black man (Bass Reeves), but as we know became a white guy in hundreds of radio and television installments. But it’s this legacy of the Black cowboy that’s still alive today with these urban cowboy clubs.

Concrete Cowboy is a nice movie about fathers and sons and humanity and the legacy of why there are people riding horses in places you wouldn’t expect to see any horses. In fact, there should probably be more horses in cities. “Less cars, more horses” sounds like a pretty good campaign slogan. During the credits, the real-life members of the club share their personal stories about how the riding club changed their lives. One man can’t walk anymore, but he can still ride. (In the movie his character says this happened during an altercation over a street corner, a street corner that now hosts a Starbucks. “I’ll be in a wheelchair the rest of my life, all for nothing,” he says. I can only assume this story he tells in the movie is a true story.)

A movie like Concrete Cowboy seems to fit the theme of this particular Toronto Film Festival. It’s a movie that, probably, would get swallowed up a bit by all the usual huge films. But this year, thankfully, it’s getting some nice attention. And it’s further proof that, even in this virtual form, it’s a great thing that film festivals continued to push forward as best they could.

You can contact Mike Ryan directly on Twitter.

Billie Eilish is set to appear on the finale episode off Brian Baumgartner’s podcast about The Office, geeking out about her favorite show with a pair of its stars: Baumgarner and Steve Carell. An Oral History Of The Office has been streaming on Spotify for past 11 weeks, but tomorrow (Tuesday, September 15), the show comes to an end, bringing in the musical super fan for a discussion of The Office‘s legacy and lasting impact for a new generation of fans (Eilish herself was only 12 years old when the show finished its initial on-air run).

Eilish appears on the show via FaceTime call, gushing over the show and confessing she’s watched it 14 times (the episode was recorded earlier this year — since then, she’s completed another watch through). “Honestly, because I’ve been getting older, every time I watch it I understand something new because I started at [age] 12,” she admits. “Most of the things that I know are because of The Office. I swear to god.” She says she watches the show on her iPhone as an escape from day-to-day stress. “It takes me away from the reality of my life,” she says, “It’s a safe space.” Eilish previously appeared with Rainn Wilson (aka Dwight) answering quiz questions about show trivia.

The episode is also scheduled to include appearances from Jenna Fischer and John Krasinski, who played Pam and Jim, respectively. You can stream the full episode here on Tuesday, 9/15.

Story via Billboard.

Gabriel Garzón-Montano firmly believes that in this music industry pond that we play in, people have a tendency to box artists in. That the music you made the first time around is inextricably tied to your identity forever and if you veer away from that, it‘s seen as deviant and your motives come into question.

This mechanism haunted him following his 2014 debut EP, Bishouné, and his 2017 Stones Throw Records-released LP, Jardin. Both are gorgeous collections of newfangled R&B with international flair that often saw a hint of Garzón-Montano’s leaning into the roots of his Colombian heritage, but almost a hesitancy to cross over the whole way. This reluctance, he explains, has been grinding away at him until now.

“I got bored of the music I was making, to the point of debilitating depression,” Garzón-Montano says from his apartment in Brooklyn, the borough where he was born and raised. “I was having this identity crisis, beholden to this imaginary, paranoid mind-frame. We’re like 17-sided rocks as humans and they ask us to choose one of those and make it our whole identity. That is so reductive that eventually it bottoms out. So, I’m giving myself permission to try things.”

Now signed to indie-powerhouse Jagjaguwar, Garzón-Montano’s second LP, Agüita, is due out October 2. It sees the auteur flourishing comfortably in cross-cultural experimentations that he calls a “tasting menu” of his arsenal. On tracks like “Bloom” and “Moonless,” he takes a spiritual look at life and loss, namely on the latter, where he seeks to connect with the inner demons left behind by his mother’s passing when he was 17. Lead single “Someone” treads along a comfortable formula as his past work, with funky keys and bass billowing alongside his tongue-in-cheek bedroom imagery of love and longing.

But it’s the second single, “Agüita,” that makes easily the boldest statement of Garzón-Montano’s career. A full-on cumbia hip-hop assault that’s sung in Spanish and produced entirely by Garzón-Montano, it’s not a far cry from mainstream reggaeton cuts like “Azul” by J. Balvin or Ozuna’s “Un Get.” But “Agüita” stands alone with a palpable chip on the shoulder and the pomp of a nascent phoenix trapped in a thick-shelled egg that they’ve been punching away at relentlessly inside, waiting to break through and soar into the world. And that process was a battle for Garzón-Montano, who insinuated that even though he was “turning 30 grand into $700,000,” on previous release cycles, that the industry hasn’t supported who he wanted to grow into as an artist.

“My biggest fear is that people are only lining up to do this thing that we know doesn’t work,” he says. “On a fundamental level, it scares me. And then I get just sidelined with that every time. I’m supposed to sing about what matters to heart, but at your convenience? Do you feel safe enough to listen to my emotions? Until you do something so shocking and unimaginable, that it feels like the only way to break that is through such intense planning and preparations that there are moments of delight and perversion; muscular and virtuosic control of aesthetic.”

The photography and visuals surrounding Garzón-Montano’s releases have always been committed to building that distinct aesthetic he refers to (the “Bombo Fabrika” video from 2017 is especially stunning), but it’s never pushed boundaries as provocatively as on the clip for “Agüita.” It opens with the shirtless star atop a water truck spraying a hose into the air that flamboyantly symbolizes and sexualizes the song’s aqueous theme and perhaps even introduces the new persona known simply as “GGM.” He then goes from getting a tattoo on the wheel of a tractor to a dirtbike sideshow in the crude Colombian metropolis of Medellín, before riding atop a white horse in the jungles of Pereira. As the video climaxes, Garzón-Montano dances alongside the fiercely choreographed Mulahttaz dance crew, with cuts from both a cityscape backdrop and a ring of bursting fire columns in the night.

Alongside songs on the album like “Muñeca” and “Mira My Look,” “Agüita” represents a transformation. One that was catalyzed by listening to Latino Urbano music and flat out feeling inspired by it all. “When I wake up, what do I want to hear, what makes me dance and gives me the feeling of victorious celebration?” he asks rhetorically.

“Agüita” ultimately came about when Garzón-Montano was covering Tierra Whack’s “Fruit Salad,” becoming enamored by the beat and stretching it out. He added bombastic hip-hop hi-hats in the style of Migos and Roddy Ricch, and the rimshot from his own track “Keep on Running,” then played with re-harmonizations of Whack’s stylistic hums at the end of syllables. He was energized, but at first, his reticence to attempt to make music outside of his pre-determined norm reared its head once again.

“After a while, I felt like I was singing this beautiful, amazing song by this woman giving me so much inspiration as if I couldn’t make something that could please me in this same way,” he says. “And when I realized that, I saw the problems there. That you’re going to live your life in a version that doesn’t do it. And the only thing I’ve ever seen anybody be truly passionate about is discrediting themselves.”

It’s as if being the child of artistically-minded Colombian and French parents — though growing up identifying as a “white” American — didn’t qualify Garzón-Montano to expand his horizons into new styles of music. Or if being part of an industry segment that catered to a certain audience didn’t allow him to cultivate new ones. But the self-proclaimed perfectionist has finally allowed himself to blossom in that sense and there’s now a diverse appeal that represents exactly who he is.

“My whole thesis is that culture is so up for debate and I’m proving that,” he says. “’Agüita’ is my first rap song and I produced the beat entirely by myself. And if you listen to my other music it sounds like a different person. So I thought that’d be at least a conversation point or at the very most, a huge problem for other people who do the same genres in any area that I do… But I busted my tender nutsack for three years and made the most beautiful music of my life and I’m so loving it. It’s total self-expression and it defied my expectation of me.”

Agüita is out October 2 via Jagjagwar. Get it here.