Month: October 2020

Earlier this week, Netflix made the disappointing decision to cancel GLOW, one of the streaming service’s best shows. There are multiple reasons why the wrestling drama may have been axed, including that it was an expensive series that faced high additional, COVID-related costs for its large cast and that Netflix might be prioritizing new subscribers over existing users, but whatever the reason, GLOW is gone.

Unless Netflix listens to Marc Maron’s pitch for a wrap-up movie.

“Let us wrap it up in a two-hour Netflix movie. Give the showrunners and the cast and the writers the chance to finish the story in a movie, right? Then it’s all fine. That would take the financial pressure off and the writers could play it out, we could shoot it out,” the WTF podcast host said in an Instagram video. “The thing about shooting a movie is that when you have the whole shooting script you can be economical about your shooting. I think they could do it in less time than it would take to shoot the show.”

I like this idea. But you know what would be even better? A Kimmy vs. the Reverend-style interactive special. Every option ends with GLOW-bot offering drugs. Betty Gilpin, who deserved an Emmy (or three) for her performance as Debbie “Liberty Belle” Eagan, also eulogized GLOW, calling it “the best job I’ll ever have… In a world with so much wickedness, I am so very grateful I got to spend three years in Oz. And in a real backhanded All About Eve move, in this metaphor I’m going to cast myself as Dorothy and Alison Brie as the Scarecrow. Because, of course, I’m going to miss you most of all.”

Please make the GLOW movie, Netflix.

(Via IndieWire)

Chadwick Boseman’s death at age 43 stunned the world, including Spike Lee. The Da 5 Bloods director previously revealed that he never suspected that anything was amiss with Boseman’s health. And that’s how the actor who embodied King T’Challa wanted it, since he shielded virtually everyone from news of his Stage 3 diagnosis in 2016 (while superhero-ing in Captain America: Civil War all the way to Avengers: Endgame). While speaking with Variety, Spike Lee has revisited Boseman’s passing in light of his resolute devotion on his set.

The Da 5 Bloods helmer discussed how shocked he was to hear the news, and Lee has rewatched the film since the tragic happening. He now feels that Chadwick was “a ghost already” during a very recognizable scene in the movie, and “that was God sending heavenly light on Chadwick.” Lee does, however, understand why Boseman did not alert anyone of his condition, and he respects the decision. Quite simply, Boseman didn’t want his director to dilute anything that happened in the film:

“I didn’t know Chad was sick. He did not look well, but my mind never took that he had cancer. It was a very strenuous shoot. I mean, we all didn’t get to Vietnam until the end of the movie at Ho Chi Minh City. But that other stuff, the jungle stuff, was shot in Thailand. It was 100 degrees every day. It was also at that time the worst air pollution in the world. I understand why Chadwick didn’t tell me because he didn’t want me to take it easy. If I had known, I wouldn’t have made him do the stuff. And I respect him for that.”

The profile’s chock full of insight, including Lee’s musings on what could happen if Trump loses the election. In summary, Lee stops short of predicting any election outcome, but he does believe that “a civil war” could follow if Trump doesn’t win a second term. Considering what we’ve seen from POTUS this week, that doesn’t feel like a far-fetched scenario. Read the full Variety interview here.

(Via Variety)

Cardi B and Offset’s relationship has had its share of ups and downs, and since they’re both prominent rappers, much of the drama has played out in the public eye. The latest development is that Cardi filed for divorce from Offset. It’s been less than a month since that news was revealed, and Cardi is ready to see herself as a single woman again.

Yesterday, she shared a photo of herself in a red, horned costume and wrote, “Single,bad and rich.I do the controlling.” Offset saw the picture and offered a subtle reaction: As HotNewHipHop reports, Offset is among the users who liked the post. The publication also notes that Offset did not like Cardi’s similar follow-up post, which makes no mention of her relationship status.

In an Instagram Live broadcast last month, Cardi revealed her reasoning for filing for divorce, saying, “I just got tired of f*cking arguing. I got tired of not seeing things eye to eye. When you feel like it’s just not the same anymore, before you actually get cheated on, I’d rather just leave. […] Nothing crazy out of this world happened, sometimes people really do grow apart. I been with this man for four years. I have a kid with this man, I have a household with this man… sometimes you’re just tired of the arguments and the build-up. You get tired sometimes and before something happens, you leave.”

Cardi B is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

The RX is Uproxx Music’s stamp of approval for the best albums, songs, and music stories throughout the year. Inclusion in this category is the highest distinction we can bestow, and signals the most important music being released throughout the year. The RX is the music you need, right now.

“Every day is Groundhog’s Day now,” John Ross sings on a track from A Billion Little Lights, the excellent new album by one of indie’s best and most underrated bands, Wild Pink, due out in February. When Ross wrote that lyric, he wasn’t anticipating a pandemic — he was referring to the cyclical nature of touring life, and perhaps also hinting at a darker reality about how America’s past tends to linger in the background of our present.

On previous Wild Pink albums, Ross wrote sensitive story songs about millennial ennui set to surging synth-based rock, producing a rich, stirring sound that evoked a cross between Death Cab For Cutie and Lost In The Dream. Ross’ own tastes, though, tend to skew toward the daddiest regions of classic rock, particularly singer-songwriters like Tom Petty, Jackson Browne, and Paul Simon. For A Billion Little Lights, he made a Spotify playlist that acted as a sonic mood board for the record that touched on Celtic-tinged Irish rockers (Van Morrison, The Pogues, The Waterboys), singer-songwriter country (Townes Van Zandt), and unfashionable ’80s and ’90s entries by legacy acts (Rod Stewart, Bob Seger).

What Ross was chasing was a big, lush sound that integrated Americana instrumentation like pedal-steel guitar and fiddle into his usual synth-rock mix. For a while, the music fed into a concept that Ross initially conceived about a massive double-album exploring the history of the American West. Eventually, he pared back this idea into a relatively conventional (and concept-free) LP, though you can still hear traces of his original ambitions in cinematic, futurist-rustic tunes like “Track Mud” and “Oversharers Anonymous.” In the latter song, Ross time-travels 200 years in the space of a single verse, leaping from a road trip on a modern highway to the buffalo-strewn plains of the Wild West.

If there’s a statement there about the consequences of Manifest Destiny — and how the tragedies that paved the way for modern conveniences can’t be so easily set aside, even centuries later — Ross is reluctant to elaborate. In our previous conversations, I’ve found Ross to be a thoughtful if also reticent interview subject. While A Billion Little Lights is his most ambitious and overall best work, infused with deep lyrical craft and impeccable melodies that set Wild Pink apart from the indie-dude pack, Ross isn’t one to necessarily tip his hand when it comes to discussing his thematic obsessions. But he does admit that’s he’s rightfully proud of the album.

“I wanted to have something very lush and just bigger than anything that I’d done before,” he said. “And I got to play with amazing players, that was my favorite part.”

Ross discussed A Billion Little Lights in a phone interview and a subsequent email exchange.

When we spoke back in 2018, you mentioned that you were working on a concept album about the American West. This album is obviously not that. What happened to that idea?

The initial idea back in 2018 was to make a double LP about the West, and the idea definitely evolved beyond that. The album took two years to make — way longer than I’ve ever spent on an album and in that time, it had a lot of room to grow. At its core though, it’s an album I will always associate with the West: I recorded a lot of it in LA and more than a few songs are about the West and inspired by some books and TV I was consuming about the subject. I wanted to make a lush, expansive album which the West certainly is. Before too long though I felt like I was starting to get boxed in by that idea and so I took off those parameters for myself. I just wanted to make something maximal and huge in scope – this album totally builds off the self-titled and Yolk In The Fur in that regard. Basically, I wanted to explore.

What exactly is it about the West that intrigues you?

We went to the West Coast for the first time in 2018. We did this West Coast and European tour and I was writing a lot at that time, which is where I think that that idea for this Western-inspired album started. [As a child], I had an aunt in LA and I would go visit in the summers and I just thought it was amazing. And we’d just go to really cool record stores and restaurants. I never lived there, so I never had a chance to fall out of love with it.

In the song “Pacific City,” you reference Michael Mann’s Heat in the opening lyric. That’s an iconic LA movie.

Oh, it’s a total LA movie. That and Chinatown are my favorite LA movies. It’s Pacino at a really weird, late stage in his career. Maybe not even late, but just a weird time, he’s over the top.

One of my favorite songs on the album is “Oversharers Anonymous,” in which you appear to jump from the present to the distant past in the space of a single verse. You sing about hunting buffalo at one point.

It’s like a daydream. I wrote a lot of that driving around here, upstate, thinking about this book called The Earth Is Weeping. It’s just an awesome, epic, history book about the West. I also loved Ken Burns’ The West, I was watching that as well. There wasn’t any intention to jump around in time and space but it definitely feels like a daydream now that you mention it. Things that are early on in the song are definitely in the present, driving on the Taconic Parkway. And then we jump to another time period.

I don’t know exactly what this album is about — it has grown outside the boundaries I set for it. I enjoy a little mystery though and I think it serves this album. Making music is escapism and I get lost in the albums I make while I’m in the process of making them, this one especially. It’s a fantasy world where I can be somewhere else when I’m listening. There are old western elements as well as heavily electronic ones. And as you noticed, at one point the lyrics are in the front seat of a car driving down a highway in upstate New York and the next they’re transported back 200 years to the plains and prairies of the West. It’s pretty non-linear and nebulous, which I find appealing. The songs I’m most satisfied with happen to be when I don’t fully understand them.

Musically, you use a lot of pedal steel and fiddle on the record, which also evokes the West. You’re almost flirting with country music at times.

I didn’t want to make a country record or anything like that but I love certain elements of country, like pedal steel, for sure. And fiddle. But I wouldn’t call this a country record or anything. Even from the beginning, that wasn’t the idea.

Pedal steel is definitely one of my favorite instruments and I met an incredible pedal steel player, Mike Renner. He was in Magnolia Electric Company, he plays around with a lot of bands now, and I actually recorded part of the record with him in Philly. And he just became an enormous part of the sound for this record.

As far as fiddle goes, there’s Townes Van Zandt and the song “If I Needed You.” That one song has been, more than anything else musically, probably the biggest inspiration for this record. The fiddle on that song, at the end, I think really stuck out with me. I’ll listen to one song on repeat for days and weeks at a time, nonstop. It just totally got under my skin.

In the song “Bigger Than Christmas,” you talk about The Pogues, which comes out of left field. How did you get into them?

I don’t know why they came up. I think maybe I was watching a video of Joe Strummer sitting in with the band and then just kind of went down a rabbit hole. Right now, I’m deeper into “Rhythm Of My Heart” by Rod Stewart.

Really?

It’s such a beautiful song. I want to find a way, whenever we tour again, to do some kind of rendition of it during our set. It’s just so beautiful. I think the chorus is just amazing. And there’s this kind of Celtic Irish thing running through that song, through the Townes song, obviously through The Pogues. There’s something to that for this record too, traditional Irish melodies, whether I’m aware of it or not. Using, or just hinting at, something like that.

A Billion Little Lights is out February 19, 2021 via Royal Mountain Records. Get it here.

Bryson Tiller locked up one of the biggest names in music for his new album Anniversary, as Drake collaborated with him on “Outta Time.” A collaboration between the two has been rumored since the Trapsoul days in 2015, but now Tiller has explained why it took so long to get on a track with Drake.

Drake was originally meant to appear on Trapsoul, but plans fell through. That’s what Tiller revealed in a new Genius interview, saying, “We didn’t get to make that happen, obviously, but this is dope to come back five years later, full circle, and do it.”

Tiller said that he and Drake had tried to collaborate for years, but his mental state kept holding him back: “About eight, nine months ago… me and him have always sent each other ideas. I was supposed to be on More Life; At that time, I was just in a terrible mental space. I really couldn’t deliver the proper Bryson Tiller verse for a Drake album. […] It just wasn’t there at all. So I ended up not getting on the project.”

Drake recorded a verse for Tiller’s current unreleased Serenity project, but again, he was hesitant to put Drake on the song, saying, “I was like, ‘Wow, you sound amazing on this.’ […] I sat on it for a while, and I kind of found myself in the same place that I was when we first started collaborating. […] I don’t wanna even come on a song if I’m not really feeling it. […] I kind of was just sitting on it for a while.”

Finally, Tiller decided to put the Drake song in his new album. He described contacting Drake about it, saying, “I was like, ‘Yo, can I use it on my album?’ [Drake] was like, ‘Yeah. Let’s go. Let’s go. I’m hype.’ So, that’s how that happened.”

Watch the full interview here.

Conan has Paul Rudd playing the same clip from Mac and Me every time he’s on. David Letterman had Bill Murray’s elaborate entrances. And Seth Meyers has Timothy Olyphant consistently (and hilariously) upending the late-night format. Or as the Late Night host put it during Tuesday’s episode, “Usually I don’t get through my introduction of you because usually when you’re here in person you come out and interrupt me.”

Olyphant was there (“there” being “at his house in a Van Halen jersey“) to promote Fargo, but first, he had to walk off camera and make himself an adult beverage. He then took out a list of FX-approved talking points, such as, “Since Fargo is a limited series, FX does not use the word ‘seasons’ to describe the show. Please use ‘installment’ or ‘year,’” and explained why every project is the best project until the next best project:

“What we do generally is we get the job and before that job airs we tell everybody the show’s amazing. ‘It’s the best work I’ve ever done.’ And then we go get another job and we get that job based on the job you just did and you’re saying it’s the best work you’ve ever done. And then when that job comes out and it sucks, it’s fine because you already got another job and that job’s amazing, it’s the best work you’ve ever done.”

And what does Olyphant think of Fargo? “It’s amazing. It’s the best work I’ve ever done” (but seriously, season four, I mean, installment four is very good). If you only watch one late-night segment this week, make it the one above. Then watch the clip below, where Olyphant discusses his bizarre dream where Donald Trump was Steve Buscemi.

Despite reports that Donald Trump Jr. found his COVID-stricken father’s motorcade behavior to be “crazy,” it appears that he’s onboard with his dad mercilessly shutting down stimulus talks. That move occurred a day after the president — who was pumped full of steroids (dexamethasone) to treat the virus — unloaded a deluge of all-caps tweets that caused “ROID RAGE” to trend. With the president literally tweeting on steroids, it was no leap of logic to guess that he was feeling side effects, which is a dangerous thing for someone who’s leading a pandemic response.

Don Jr., however, brushed off a “roid rage” question from Steve Doocy. He did not deny the roid rage, of course, he simply defended his dad by accusing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (who he’d already tweeted about while saying that she didn’t care about the American people) of having “substance issues.”

“Nancy has her own substance issues according to the press and according to the media,” Don Jr. declared. “I won’t get into that. It’s obviously nonsense. The reality is this: Nancy Pelosi was trying to stack literally, probably a trillion dollars of excess nonsense to bailout Democrat cities… as part of that package while the American taxpayer gets to foot the bill for her radical agenda.”

Well, it looks like Don Jr. is gonna ride this train after all. After his Fox & Friends visit, the president’s eldest son popped back to Twitter with this strange campaign video, which directs people to the “Hunt The Vote” website. According to Jr., Trump “has done more for the American Outdoorsmen than any President since Roosevelt.”

It feels like a good time to revisit that Meditative Hunter photo. What a long four years this has been.

Season 2 of Amazon Prime’s The Boys has been a sh*t-stirring tornado filled with immortal Nazis and imploding politicians and laser-hot sex scenes, which is why my plan for chatting with newcomer Aya Cash (You’re The Worst) and returning player Colby Minifie was to keep things light. I wanted to lean into that superhero surrealist escapism with jokes about who would win in a fight between a speedboat and a humpback whale and ask what kind of fanfic erotica Cash’s mom might write if her character and Homelander get their happy ending. (Cash’s mom is actually an accomplished poet and novelist, so I’m guessing it’d be some high-level smut.)

What happened instead was a surprisingly in-depth chat on everything from toxic co-workers to intersectional feminism – although since this is The Boys we’re talking about, I should really stop being surprised by anything. Season 2 of the show has nailed the art of blending absurdist comedy with thought-provoking storytelling in a way that makes us both envious and terrified of creator Eric Kripke’s personal mindscape, so it’s only fair we reviewed some of the bigger storylines this time around with a sharper lens. I apologize for the lack of gill jokes in advance.

Here’s what Cash and Minifie had to say about where the show is heading, gender-swapping the main villain of Season 2, and what they’ve learned from playing in Kripke’s Suped-up sandbox.

So, Stormfront is a male character in the comics. What does swapping her gender add to the story this season?

Aya: I think for whatever reason we associate corrupt power with men, whether that’s earned or not. But we have seen women to do just as much damage and it’s often more insidious and more manipulative. So I think it’s a really interesting choice, especially dealing with the topics that we’re dealing with in terms of white supremacy that you’re using the face of… and I’m going to describe myself the way that [others have] a “young woman who’s hip to social media and memes and knows how to manipulate in a way that is obviously a very topical.” So I think that’s a really exciting way to exhibit this new form of Nazi-ism. I mean it’s the same thing. It’s the same sort of hate speech with a different language. I think having a woman do that is basically a reflection of the times as well, and the women that we’re seeing who are sort of saying, “I’m a strong woman and I believe this,” and people are listening to them. Eric Kripke has said that it’s Homelander’s worst nightmare, right? That this woman comes in and knows more than him. And Antony [Starr] would say Homelander is equal opportunity — he’s not necessarily misogynist, but I disagree with it. I think he is. Not Ant! Homelander.

Homelander is a lot of things, but mainly, he’s a giant assh*le. And Colby you deal with the brunt of that. Have you learned any tricks for managing toxic workplace environments you’d like to share?

Colby: [Laughs] Yes, I think there’s one tiny little moment in the first episode when Ashley half tries to be a little sexual with Homelander because I think she had an inkling that something was going on between him and Stillwell and that’s why the relationship was so good, and then she immediately gets shut down and she’s like, “Okay that’s not the way forward.” I don’t want me to make Ashley sound bad, but she really cares about her job and she will do anything to save her ass. So She’ll find any opportunity. She’s afraid for her life. I think what Ashley doesn’t really do yet, which I hope she will learn to… she takes everything very personally and she wants to do a good job for herself as much as for The Seven. When Homelander is hard on her, she takes it very personally. I think she just needs to remove that personal thing and just make it about the job, which is how I recommend dealing with assh*les.

I mean, it’s something that Stormfront’s definitely mastered this season. What does her rise to power within The Seven, and how she’s able to manipulate people say about our own cultural problem with misinformation right now?

Aya: Oh Lord, that’s a big question. Misinformation is [meant] to inspire paranoia, and it has won in our culture. Look, no one can become an expert on everything, right? We have to find people and sources that we trust and that has become harder and harder because of misinformation campaigns on many sides. It does damage to everyone. So whether you sort of get a kick out of someone spreading misinformation campaigns, because it aligns with your values, and you’re in on the joke — it does a disservice because nobody trusts anything anymore. And that was the goal for the people who have started manipulation of all media — to get the public not to trust anything or anyone. That’s a huge problem. So chaos is the goal and it’s much easier to incite chaos. Entropy is natural, so it’s much harder to create order. So she’s the bomb of disorder and lies that lands in The Seven and unfortunately that’s where we are in our world as well.

Stormfront is definitely a villain, but where do the people who enable her land? Should we learn something from people like Ashley who are just as happy to stay silent and let this sh*t happen?

Colby: Yeah, I think one of the most amazing things about this character is that [she’s] showing how caring so much about optics can poison good intentions. There are lines that Ashley says where she’s like, “We’re going to poll through the roof with millennials if we have this differently-abled member of The Seven who’s a person of color…,” You know, it’s just like, she cares so much about the optics in order to be popular and do well, and that can be really poisonous, if not done in the right way. I think Ashley is trying her best to do her job, and that can get in the way of actually doing what’s right.

It’s interesting that both of these flawed characters who are helping to push this really dangerous movement forward are white women, especially since race plays such an important role this season.

Aya: I think that’s a great observation. And I think that there are certain aspects that I don’t think I had even thought of when I was playing it, which shows my own blind spots in things. Someone wrote an article about white feminism and how exclusionary it’s been, and that this character coming on as a sort of white feminist and then is revealed to be a Nazi, is a commentary on that. I think that’s a really, really smart interpretation that the writers probably understood, that I didn’t. That’s an opportunity for me to think and to look at that within myself and in the ways that I’ve sort of espoused equality for women and whether that has been inclusive. So I hope that that conversation continues around things. I am not an expert in this, but I do feel like that illuminated something for me that I need to think about in terms of my own journey as a human being. That’s a good thing that the show brought and that this character has brought to me.

Well, this all ended up being much more serious than I planned. Not even one whale question. I’m truly sorry.

Aya: [laughs] We’ll DM you about the whale.

Amazon’s ‘The Boys’ streams episodes each Friday with the season finale coming on October 9.

Just like a number of other festivals have done this year, Austin City Limits was forced to cancel the 2020 installment of their festival due to the coronavirus pandemic. Opting for a cancellation rather than a postponement, which some festivals have chosen to do, Austin City Limits went ahead and announced the 2021 dates for their festival, hoping for a safe return from October 1 to 3 and October 8 to 11 next year. Despite the move to 2021, Austin City Limits isn’t allowing 2020 to end without an event. Ensuring the year sees a festival of sorts, Austin City Limits announced they will hold a 2020 festival headlined by Billie Eilish, Paul McCartney, and Radiohead that looks back at past Austin City Limits performances.

Taking place from October 9 to 11, Austin City Limits has teamed up with YouTube to hold the event this upcoming weekend. Fans of the festival will be able to relieve memorable moments from past years of the festival. Viewers can expect to see Willie Nelson, St. Vincent, Spoon, LCD Soundsystem, My Morning Jacket, The xx, Zhu, Gary Clark Jr., Sylvan Esso, Alabama Shakes, Juanes, Phoenix, Phish, and more during the Austin City Limits festival weekend. The festival is also partnering with Austin Parks Foundation, All Together ATX, Equal Justice Initiative, and When We All Vote for the 2020 event.

You can view the 2020 Austin City Limits festival lineup above.

Donald Trump is fresh out of the hospital after receiving treatment for COVID-19. By the president’s own account, he’s doing just fine, but he has been criticized for his still-cavalier approach to the virus. Last night, James Corden devoted a few minutes of The Late Late Show to perform a parody of the situation, which made Corden a trending topic on Twitter.

The video starts with a clip of Trump giving a status update on his health, which ends with him declaring, “Maybe I’m immune, I don’t know!” Corden, seated behind a piano, then launches into a performance of Paul McCartney’s “Maybe I’m Amazed,” but with new lyrics. The new Corden version of the song, re-titled “Maybe I’m Immune,” begins:

“Maybe I’m immune ’cause today I’m feeling so alive / Just don’t be afraid of the way I’m breathing / Maybe I’m immune, it’s OK to go out for a ride / with others trapped inside / Maybe you’re immune to the lies my doctors tell you / Maybe I’m a man and maybe I don’t wear a mask ’cause I don’t care about others / science I don’t really understand.”

Corden continued from there, and throughout the performance, Corden’s words were underscored by relevant clips of Trump and his associates.

Watch Corden sing “Maybe I’m Immune” above.