Month: October 2020

Everyone remembers Meyers Leonard shotgunning Coors Lights in about three seconds flat in the NBA Bubble this summer, and now it appears Leonard scored a sponsorship from Coors Light in the process.

In a new story from Anthony Chieng at the Miami Herald, Leonard discussed his fall road trip plans, which include riding with his wife and dog across the country in a massive bus painted on both sides with the Coors Light logo — Leonard made sure to note on Twitter that he will not actually be driving the RV. They will visit family in Illinois, Leonard said, before making their final stop in Golden, Colorado, where Coors Light is headquartered.

“It’s literally a match made in heaven, that’s the way I’ll put it,” Leonard told Chieng. “I love Coors Light. That’s what we drink where I’m from.”

As Leonard tells it, he downed a couple Coors Lights with his Heat teammates after every postseason win in the Bubble. Leonard also hopes to stick around with those same teammates moving forward, so long as he and the Miami front office can come to an agreement on a role and salary that suits him.

Leonard told Chieng of the Herald that he wants to win and play 20-25 minutes, which history has shown is unlikely. When Leonard was in Portland last year, the Trail Blazers were depleted by the conference finals and forced to put Leonard into the starting lineup, where he was attacked repeatedly by the Warriors in a sweep. He was then taken out of Miami’s starting lineup when they came to the Bubble.

Free agency may not be as nice as the summer Coors Light bus ride for Leonard and his family, but you can rest assured wherever he ends up the mountains will be blue.

Australian electronic duo The Avalanches announced a new era of music through a series of cryptic billboards this February, shortly following up with an official announcement of their third LP We Will Always Love You. Offering another taste of the project, The Avalanches share their shimmering Leon Bridges collaboration “Interstellar Love.”

Like much of the album, “Interstellar Love” was inspired by Carl Sagan and his wife, Ann Druyan. Druyan served as Creative Director in charge of curating the Golden Record, the vinyl record NASA launched into space to be found by otherworldly beings. Sagan and Druyan recorded themselves and added it onto the Golden Record, forever solidifying their own “interstellar love.”

About their work with Bridges, The Avalanches’ Robbie Chater said, “Leon is an incredible singer, with just the most beautiful voice. He’s from Texas but we both happened to be in LA at the same time, which was lucky as he was on my all-time wish list. When we were in the studio, I told him the story about Ann Druyan and Carl Sagan and how her love-struck brain waves were sent out into space on the Voyager’s Golden Record. And this song came out of that.”

Listen to “Interstellar Love” above.

We Will Always Love You is out 12/11 via Astralwerks. Pre-order it here.

Halsey is one of the most beloved and successful pop stars we have, and it turns out she has many talents outside of music. She has recently become a star of basketball Twitter, she’s a poet, and over the past couple days, she has been flexing some impressive costume make-up skills just in time for Halloween.

She got spooky with her showing yesterday, when she shared a photo of herself that looked otherwise normal except for the illusion that her right eye had been gorily gouged out of her head, like a more sinister version of her Manic album art. She captioned her post, “MANIC, but make it Horror.” Somebody asked Halsey if she did the make-up herself, to which Halsey enthusiastically replied, “yes!!!!”

She followed that up today with a make-up job inspired by the titular Corpse Bride from the Tim Burton movie. She quoted a line from the film in her caption, writing, “It takes my breath away! Well it would if I had any…”

Halsey then took a bit of time to explain her make-up background. She wrote in one tweet, “a lil FAQ: yes I do my own makeup. yes I did break out afterwards lmao.” She then responded to somebody who asked how she learned to do make-up like that, writing, “Honestly I was obsessed with the show Face Off in high school and learned how to do a lot of SFX with YouTube tutorials! Combined with having to learn on the fly for music videos and stuff. Like all the SFX for the injuries in the [Hopeless Fountain Kingdom] era videos are done by me!”

Beyond this, it’s been a busy October for Halsey: She interviewed Bernie Sanders and performed at the CMT Music Awards.

In the weeks leading up to the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton appeared on web series Between Two Ferns, where host Zach Galifianakis grilled her with tough questions like, “When you see how well it works for Donald Trump, do you ever think to yourself, oh, I should be more racist?” The video was a hit with over 24 million views, as was the 2014 episode with Barack Obama, but when asked if Donald Trump would ever appear on Ferns, the Baskets star replied, “Doing it the other way doesn’t interest me. He’s the kind of guy who likes attention — bad attention or good attention. So you’re dealing with a psychosis there that’s a little weird. I wouldn’t have somebody on that’s so mentally challenged. I feel like I’d be taking advantage of him. And you can print that.”

It was printed, and apparently caught the eye of the big man himself.

The New York Times reports that the Trump administration, led by Michael R. Caputo, the assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services, wanted to make a $265 million “star-studded campaign to lift American spirits” during the pandemic. But “they sought to exclude celebrities who had supported gay rights or same-sex marriage or who had publicly disparaged President Trump. The actor Zach Galifianakis, for instance, was apparently passed over because he had declined to have Mr. Trump on his talk show Between Two Ferns.”

Between Two Ferns co-creator Scott Aukerman had an appropriate response:

And don’t even get Trump started on The Hangover not taking place in Trump Hotel.

(Via the New York Times)

A community cookout turns into a scene of terror in the video for Dinner Party‘s “Freeze Tag” featuring Cordae, Phoelix, and Snoop Dogg. Filmed in Los Angeles’ Crenshaw district, the video sees a vibrant neighborhood on a summer evening react as an unseen threat moves through the street, prompting kids playing to drop their games and run inside and disrupting other activities. Finally, when one child points out the threat, the POV changes to show that it was a police officer all along as he chases down the witnesses and pushes one face-first into the ground.

Dinner Party is the crossover project from 9th Wonder, Kamasi Washington, Robert Glasper, and Terrace Martin, and while only Martin makes an appearance in the video, Cordae’s verse mirrors the bone-chilling visuals, even as the mellow instrumental suggests better days ahead. Cordae recently tackled similar subject matter at the BET Hip-Hop Awards, opening the show with a forceful freestyle that reflected his activist streak. He’s proven himself to be a favorite of soul and jazz standard-bearers, appearing on Glasper’s 2019 mixtape F*ck Yo Feelings and on Stevie Wonder’s new single “Can’t Put It In The Hands Of Fate” with Busta Rhymes, Chika, and Rapsody.

Watch the “Freeze Tag” video above.

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

The Girl Scouts of America earned a merit badge in Social Media Disasters on Wednesday when the organization expressed support for Amy Coney Barrett‘s highly controversial confirmation to the Supreme Court. The tweet featured Barrett in a Girl Scouted themed image next to female justices Sandra Day O’Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan. “Congratulations Amy Coney Barrett on becoming the 5th woman appointed to the Supreme Court since its inception in 1789,” the caption read.

After facing intense backlash from social media users who pointed out the extremely partisan nature of Barrett’s nomination along with her anti-choice views on reproductive rights, the Girl Scouts deleted the tweet and issued the following apology:

Earlier today, we shared a post highlighting the five women who have been appointed to the Supreme Court. It was quickly viewed as a political and partisan statement which was not our intent and we have removed the post. Girl Scouts of the USA is a nonpolitical, nonpartisan organization. We are neither red nor blue, but Girl Scout GREEN. We are here to lift up girls and women.

But by the time the Girl Scouts walked back the Barrett tweet, calls for a Thin Mints boycott had gone viral, in part due to Zach Braff:

Braff was soon joined by others who vowed to get their Girl Scout cookie fix from other sources in protest:

After watching recipes for Thin Mints go viral, this last tweet pretty much sums up 2020:

Two years after the release of her acclaimed debut album Flow State, Tash Sultana signaled the beginning of a new era in recent months with a handful of playful singles. Now, the Australian singer returns with an official announcement of her sophomore album alongside a jazzy new single.

Tash’s “Willow Tree” was recorded with rising artist Jerome Farah and offers a reflection on the importance of mindfulness, something the singer has been trying to do more of lately. “I didn’t realize that I needed to create a space and home for myself to feel like a person again,” Tash said about the song. “I just went inward and found a really peaceful place and wrote an album, and I feel really happy with it.”

“Willow Tree,” along with her previous single “Greed,” will arrive on Tash’s impending sophomore album Terra Firma. Speaking about the album’s meaning as a whole, Tash said no good will ever come from comparing your success to somebody else’s:

“There ain’t no fast pass up the mountain and you’ve got to clock the hours in to achieve the things you want in life. You can’t just skip the entire middle section of your journey to try and rush to the finish line. Whatever that may be for you. There is no use comparing yourself to someone else’s success. It’s your time when it’s meant to be and it’s only meant to be if you get up day and night and strive for the things you want. No one’s going to serve it to you on a golden platter, you’ve got to get it yourself.”

Listen to “Willow Tree” above.

Terra Firma is out 2/19/2021 via Mom + Pop. Pre-order it here.

Even before he became president, Donald Trump was known for his unhindered use of Twitter. He and his many press secretaries have lauded the president’s frequently used and abused social media account as his way of connecting directly with the people, but if you scroll through his feed, it usually seems more like a venue for him to brag, bully people, and air his grievances. Oh, and lie a whole bunch.

Then there is Steak-umm, the anti-Trump Twitter account. And by “anti-Trump” I don’t mean against Trump, but rather the opposite of Trump. Instead of griping and sharing falsehoods that constantly need fact-checking while being the single biggest source of coronavirus misinformation, Steak-umm use their account to share helpful tips for avoiding misinformation in the midst of a confusing pandemic, to explain psychological concepts like “cognitive dissonance” and “dualism,” and to encourage people to really examine and think about things before sharing them.

In other words, Trump tweets conspiracy theories while Steak-umm tweets about how to not fall for conspiracy theories.

That’s right, this wisdom is coming from a frozen sliced steak brand. Welcome to 2020, y’all.

I mean, bestill my credible-information-and-verifiable-data-loving heart.

This whole thread ^^ is worth reading. It’s pinned to the top of their Twitter page.

Meanwhile:

(Side note: The one and only thing POTUS and Steak-umm seem to share is a complete disregard for capitalization rules. Trump capitalizes words totally randomly, while Steak-umm capitalizes pretty much nothing. It’s a world gone mad, I say. As a former English teacher, this haphazard capitalizing is all just incredibly painful.)

Anyway, moving on…this tweet right here is 100% truth, as evidenced by every comment section on the internet:

Scientists have even taken notice of the company’s Twitter account as it tackles coronavirus misinformation.

Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University in New York, is one of many infectious disease experts studying the coronavirus. She learned about Steak-umm’s tweets through an online group of fellow scientists.

“It’s really important that people are being informed and are able to look for good information themselves — but also to remember that we’re all going through this together, and we’re all human beings, and we’re all experiencing a really difficult time,” she told Business Insider. “It’s very unusual to see the corporate account for a brand of frozen processed meat sort of marrying those two concepts.”

But that’s exactly what Steak-umm does. While some of us feel tempted to take a “Why are people such idiots?!” approach when we see people acting like fools in a pandemic, Steak-umm explains the answer to that question in a way that doesn’t blame, but encourages thoughtful processing of information. (Which of course will be ignored or rejected by said idiots, but it sure makes some of us feel good to see such eloquence and intelligence, especially in the cesspool of social media.)

Also unlike the Tweeter-in-Chief, Steak-umm is remarkably self-aware and able to provide an honest and transparent reflection of the benefits it derives from tweeting the way it does.

Like, whoa.

And they’re right. People are buying their product because they like their social media statements.

Not all of Steak-umm’s tweets are filled with civilization-saving gems of wisdom, of course. I mean, there’s this:

And this silliness, beeflings.

They also get cute with certain spellings, always writing the word “meet” as “meat” and “mistake” as “misteak.”

If you don’t usually buy your meat in the frozen convenience food section and aren’t familiar with Steak-umm, this tweet describes the brand perfectly:

Thank you, Steak-umm (and their social media manager, Nathan), for fighting the good fight and adding something of value to the Twitter world.

Steak-umm bless, indeed.

Netflix’s The Crown will introduce two new adversarial pairings in Season 4, and a recently released teaser previewed the upcoming Princess Diana/Prince Charles debacle. The new trailer, however, zeroes in on what happens when there are “two women running the show,” which prompts Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, to cluck his tongue while Queen Elizabeth remarks that it might be exactly what England needs. That’s the introduction to Gillian Anderson as Prime Minister Margaret “Iron Lady” Thatcher, who will square off against the long-standing sensibilities of Olivia Colman’s royal incarnation.

The season picks up in the late 1970s with both the House of Windsor and Downing Street feeling fissures begin to appear, some as a direct result of Thatcher’s divisive policies as the country heads into the Falklands War. And of course, there’s a lot more brewing underneath the surface while the country’s press relishes highlighting the tensions between the two women, who have a lot in common but many differences as well. Gillian Anderson is grabbing onto those distinctive tones (which were partially down to throat lozenges) coming out of Thatcher’s mouth, and Colman’s pulling off the apparently-neutral-but-manuevering-behind-the-scenes vibe quite well.

Meanwhile, the Windsors would love to distract the public with a fairytale by marrying off 30-year-old Prince Charles (Josh Charles) to someone not-scandalous, which is where Emma Corrin’s Princess Diana comes into play. We all realize how that ended up (tragically), but at least we can guess that Helena Bonham Carter will continue to lighten the mood (relatively speaking) as the bawdy Princess Margaret.

The Crown Season 4 will stream on November 15.

Lil Baby may not have come up big at the recent 2020 BET Hip-Hop Awards but he isn’t sweating it. Instead, he says he remains focused on getting paid — which has been the theme of much of his social media activity over the past year.

While fans were seemingly miffed when Lil Baby wasn’t selected for Hip-Hop Artist of the Year — Megan Thee Stallion won that award instead — the Atlanta rapper merely quoted his own verse from Gunna’s “Blindfold” in an Instagram post: “I Like Getting Millions, Ain Trippin About Awards.”

His response was mirrored by his frequent collaborator DaBaby, who could arguably be said to have had an even worse night at the Awards. Despite being the most-nominated artist with 12 nods, including double nominations for Album Of The Year, he didn’t take home a single trophy. However, he was unfazed, tweeting his congratulations to the winners and telling them they deserved the awards.

Lil Baby isn’t one for tweeting all that much but when he does, it’s usually about money. Earlier this year, he joked that he’d be offended if anyone offered less that $100,000 for a feature, which may explain why he responded to Kanye’s claim that he turned down a collab. He was understandably much more upset over Walmart offering fake 4PF chains on its website since he wouldn’t get his cut. Maybe if BET Hip-Hop Awards came with a check, he’d be a little more invested.

Check out Uproxx’s review for his fan-favorite album, My Turn, here.