Over the weekend, rap fans received a pleasant-ish surprise when Jay Electronica’s Just Blaze-produced, long-shelved debut album Act II: The Patents Of Nobility leaked online, just months after the elusive New Orleans rapper released his collaborative album with Jay-Z. Fans had long given up hope of hearing the long-promised Act II, which gestated for nearly a decade before being mysteriously vaulted by Jay El, Just Blaze, and Roc Nation. Instead, Jay Electronica released A Written Testimony as his debut album, a move some fans criticized for its heavy reliance on Jay-Z’s participation.
However, fans have seemingly responded much more positively to Act II. As a leak and without the pressure of the “debut album” tag, it’s possible that Act II is avoiding the level of scrutiny it might have had otherwise, which was the source of Jay Electronica’s anxiety about releasing it, to begin with. Just Blaze confirmed that the leak was legitimate, although he clarified the leaked version wasn’t the “final” version of the album.
Started to make the rounds a few days ago then went full on last night. Just checked a bit of it. It’s not the final version at all but yeah.. it’s real
That didn’t stop Jay Elec from giving thanks to his hardcore fans who downloaded or streamed the leaked project. “All praise is due to Allah,” he wrote. “Thank y’all so much, man. Y’all got me over here crying.” As is his way, he eventually deleted the tweets but HipHopDX saved a few screenshots, which you can see below.
Jay El also promised that the album would eventually make its way to Tidal pending sample clearances. Jay’s manager Lawrence “Law” Parker uploaded the project to his SoundCloud for the time being and tweeted a link.
Donald Trump’s secretive and bizarre coronavirus diagnosis behavior has included hospitalization and a series of bizarre medical briefings and mixed messages. Both are coming from both the White House and the doctors who are fighting to keep the president from succumbing to a disease that’s killed more than 209,000 Americans this year. It’s also a major campaign issue, as Trump has sent out a “ROID RAGE” rant and even left the hospital to greet well-wishers as he tries to control the optics of his testing positive for a virus he long downplayed. The latest of those bizarre campaign moments, however, came from a surrogate arguing that Trump is best suited for the presidency because his Democratic opponent hasn’t caught COVID-19 yet.
As caught by Raw Story, Trump campaign aide Erin Perrine told Fox News host Sandra Smith on Monday that Joe Biden’s lack of “firsthand experience” with COVID-19 is evidence that Trump is better suited for the next four years in office, essentially saying the president’s “more rigorous” schedule proves he’s more fit for the job.
“Firsthand experience is always going to change how someone relates to something that’s been happening,” Perrine opined. “The president has coronavirus right now, he is battling it head on, as toughly, as only President Trump can. And of course that’s going to change the way that he speaks of it because it will be a firsthand experience.”
As Smith pointed out, the president’s experience with COVID-19 has not been a campaign peg for the Trump administration until recent days when the president himself contracted the disease. Trump himself said in a video message that he had gone to “school” on the disease, suggesting he knew more about coronavirus than others who had read it in a “book.”
““I learned a lot about Covid. I learned it by really going to school. This is the real school. This isn’t the let’s-read-the-books school,” Trump said. “And I get it. And I understand it. And it’s a very interesting thing and I’m going to be letting you know about it.”
And his surrogate doubled down on that rhetoric on Monday, saying those “firsthand experiences” with coronavirus is something that Joe Biden doesn’t have:
“It’s been law and order and it’s been the economy,” Smith said. “Does this become a key issue in the campaign?”
“He’s talked about it all,” Perrine replied. “And listen, he has experience as commander-in-chief, he has experience as a businessman, he has experience — now — fighting the coronavirus as an individual. Those firsthand experiences, Joe Biden, he doesn’t have those.”
In hindsight, framing a positive COVID-19 diagnosis (and an opponent’s lack of a diagnosis) seems inevitable from this campaign, despite how bizarre it is. Trump’s obsessive insistence on controlling the message of his diagnosis is all about optics, because despite the very serious medical condition of the president, the march to election day will continue and votes will be cast. Whether voters will see Joe Biden’s concern with safety and inability to contract a deadly virus as a bad thing is uncertain, but clearly, Donald Trump and his team will try their best to convince voters of that in the coming days.
Phoebe Bridgers has become a dominating force over a short period of time as a musician, and now she is ready to explore a new music industry frontier: Today, she announced that she has launched her own label, Saddest Factory, a Dead Oceans imprint.
In a new Billboard interview, she noted, “It’s always been a dream of mine to have a label, because I’m also such a music fan.” She also discussed launching her label during the pandemic, saying, “One of my favorite things about this time is that everybody is listening to records faster, making tons of playlists, and doing dance parties in their houses. I felt like if there’s cool stuff, I want to get it going and get it out to people as fast as possible.”
The name of the label is a play on the word “satisfactory,” first made on Twitter in 2019 by Bridgers’ former Sloppy Jane bandmate Haley Dahl. Bridgers seems to have received no resistance when asking Secretly Group (the parent group of Dead Oceans) about her getting her own imprint, as she notes, “I brought it up, like, ‘Can I have a label?’ And they were like, ‘Yeah, totally.’”
Bridgers hasn’t revealed any of the artists signed to the label yet, but an announcement is expected to arrive soon. She doesn’t envision Saddest Factory sticking to any one genre in particular, as she says, “If I like it and I listen to it for pleasure, then other people will like it and listen to it for pleasure. I don’t think I have any ethos other than, ‘Am I jealous?’” She also noted in press materials, “The vision of the label is simple: good songs, regardless of genre.”
Additionally, she talked about the flexibility having her own label provides: “I haven’t felt this yet, but maybe at some point I’ll want to take a step back from the every two years album cycle and want to do other sh*t, like produce or just put out records. Music is always going to be in the forefront of my brain. I just want to explore.”
Bridgers launched the label’s website today, which is formatted like a Mac desktop and is brimming with personality and Easter eggs. Notably, there’s also a link for artists to submit their music to the label, so check out the site here.
Keeping up with 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 new tunes from 21 Savage, Blackpink, Romy, and YG. Yeah, it was a great week for new music. Check out the highlights below.
21 Savage And Metro Boomin — Savage Mode II
21 Savage and Metro Boomin’s original Savage Mode was beloved in 2016, so the pair decided to run it back with a sequel, Savage Made II. The duo really made their handful of features count, as the album features Drake, Young Thug, and a whole lot of Morgan Freeman.
Megan Thee Stallion and Young Thug — “Don’t Stop”
Megan is fresh off what was surely one of the biggest thrills of her career: Being the musical guest on Saturday Night Live. Ahead of that, though, she took advantage of the increased exposure to drop a new song (and cinematically referential video) with Young Thug, “Don’t Stop.”
Bryson Tiller — Anniversary
October 2 marked the fifth anniversary of Tiller’s debut album, Trapsoul. Naturally, an album released on that exact day five years later titled Anniversary is heavily referential to it. The focus only drifts from Tiller once, when Drake pops up on “Outta Time.”
YG — My Life 4Hunnid
YG has been on an annual album release schedule since 2018, and with just a few months left in 2020, he returned with My Life 4Hunnid. He got a number of friends to help him out with this one, including Lil Wayne, Ty Dolla Sign, Gunna, Lil Tjay, Lil Mosey, Calboy, Tay2x, and D3.
Bartees Strange — Live Forever
Strange recently told Uproxx about how he decided to let his real tastes shine through on his new album, saying, “I hear this song one way, a rock song with a hip-hop verse and a pop chorus, but no one’s going to get that so I need to just make it a rock song. I’ve always tried to walk myself back to make it more digestible for other people. And with this record I was just like, ‘I’m just going to make the stuff I like. These are the sounds that come natural to me.”‘
Blackpink — The Album
Blackpink are one of the leaders of the K-pop movement, and they did it all without a proper album. They changed that last week, though, with The Album, which, aside from their universally understandable pop sound, makes an appeal to English-language speakers with guest spots from Cardi B and Selena Gomez.
Dua Lipa — “Levitating” Feat. DaBaby
Dua Lipa has remixed and re-worked Future Nostalgia in just about every way and at just about every opportunity possible since its release. That’s great because it’s a superlative album, and she refreshed one of its strongest songs last week, “Levitating,” by adding DaBaby to it.
Beabadoobee — “How Was Your Day?”
A lot of things about being a touring musician are great, but it can put a strain on relationships. That’s something Beabadoobee addresses on “How Was Your Day?,” which she describes as “a track that explores all the relationships I neglected when I was away from home.” She also noted of the raw track, “I wanted to emphasize the rawness of the lyrics with the song sonically which is why I recorded it on a four-track with all the little mistakes and vocal wobbles included.”
Denzel Curry — “Live From The Abyss”
Curry decided to take advantage of the charitable Bandcamp Fridays initiative by dropping a new Bandcamp-exclusive track, “Live From The Abyss” (to benefit Dream Defenders). The track sees Curry rapping about Black-positive themes, with lyrics like, “I’m screamin’, ‘Black is beautiful,’ views are probably anti-race / I can see the fear in your eyes when you look in my face.”
Romy — “Lifetime”
Earlier this year, The xx’s Romy declared her intention to release her first solo album, and last week, she got one step closer to realizing that with a new solo single, “Lifetime.” The guitarist’s fresh song might not be what you expect for a guitarist’s solo single, but is instead more indebted to the dance influence of The xx’s recent material.
Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
Jhené Aiko debuted her new song “Vote” on last night’s animated season premiere of Black-ish, not just imploring listeners to follow through but also empathizing with the obstacles many potential voters may face on Election Day. The first half of the episode finds Junior losing faith in the institutions of democracy as he faces his first election. Younger sister Diane throws on Aiko’s animated clip in an effort to impress the importance of voting on her brother. You can view the clip here at 14:39.
“Vote” expresses Aiko’s character’s desire to “focus on my vote,” but juxtaposes her civic-mindedness with the pressures many people will face. “I ain’t got no time, I gotta work,” Jhené croons. “Rent is comin’ up, I need this cash / Plus I got a couple terminations in my past / Gotta ask my bosses for a day off / But if I do, I know might get laid off.” As the song plays, the animated characters in the clip face the removal of mailboxes for absentee voting, phony voter guides being passed out by dubious individuals, and bosses who don’t follow laws that require them to allow employees to visit polling places. It’s an ugly reality that some politicians are relying on tactics like these to keep their positions of power, as voter suppression efforts have reportedly increased across the nation.
Listen to Jhené Aiko’s “Vote” above and find more voting information here.
The creative teams behind Game of Thrones and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia are on friendly terms. Sunny creator Rob McElhenney appeared in the final season of the HBO mega-hit, while Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss wrote an episode of Sunny, season nine’s “Flowers for Charlie” (they also have a cameo in “The Gang Goes to a Water Park”). But those two, who have a nine-figure deal with Netflix, also played a cruel (but amusing) prank on McElhenney while Thrones was still on.
As detailed by the AV Club, James Hibberd’s Game of Thrones oral history Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon includes a passage about Matt Shakman, a long-time Sunny director who was hired to helm “The Spoils of War” and “Eastwatch” for Thrones on McElhenney’s recommendation. Benioff and Weiss “thought it would be funny if we told Rob that it was not working out with Matt and that he was a total disaster.” The bit lasted for multiple emails, with the showrunners informing the Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet star that they had to “step in and take over the episode because it’s turned into such a mess.”
“I forgot about that!” Shakman says. “That was the darkest practical joke. Rob was legitimately tortured about it. He was so concerned for me and was like, ‘What can I do? Who can I talk to?’ It went on for way too long.”
That’s some Dennis Reynolds-level commitment to a cruel joke. Literally. A few years ago, Glenn Howerton revealed that he once sent Danny DeVito a fake script that even Mantis Toboggan thought went too far. “We basically just took a spec script that somebody sent us, and just took out Danny’s storyline and put in a different storyline where he ends up going to jail,” he wrote. “The first thing that happens is he goes to jail and gets raped. Then he joins the white supremacists to protect him, and they do at first and then they rape him. Then he goes to the prison guards and asks for help, and they rape him. And we sent him the script for April Fools Day and made it look all legit. And that was the first time he called us and was like, I can’t do this guys.”
Benioff and Weiss’ prank is, somehow, more mean. And you know what? Respect.
Perhaps no other modern politician has been interviewed by more musicians than Bernie Sanders has. He chatted with Killer Mike in 2019, and he and Cardi B have talked on a number of occasions. Now he has added Halsey to his list, as the two recently sat down (virtually, of course) for a conversation, video of which Halsey shared over the weekend.
The video is billed as the first episode of a series with the two. The conversation was filmed on September 30, which was the day after Joe Biden and Donald Trump’s first presidential debate, so the two expressed disappointment over how that went. The topic of this episode was “Greed & The Wealth Tax,” so Halsey made her views clear on that, saying, “Despite being in the 1 percent, I support the wealth tax because I believe that the people who oppose it are motivated by greed. The amount of income that I have doesn’t even make a drop in the bucket compared to these billionaires, but I wake up every single day and I never want anything, I never need anything in this small bracket of wealth that I exist in.”
Back in March, when Sanders was still running for president, Halsey gave him her full endorsement, saying in a video, “Bernie has been fighting for me since before I was alive. A queer woman in a multi-racial family who was raised poor in an American suburb. A woman who got into the college of her dreams and couldn’t afford to go. A person physically tormented by a reproductive health disorder that I couldn’t afford to treat. A person who has repeatedly needed access to medical assistance, housing assistance, financial assistance, abortion, all before 21 years old just so I could stay alive. Now I’m considered fortunate, lucky even then, comparatively to the rest of the working class of America. And now my financial privilege protects me from the effects of marginalization that would have previously been fatal for me. So today, I fight for her too. That girl, who wasn’t protected.”
Watch the video above.
Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
NFL football is back and Lil Wayne is providing the soundtrack for Thursday night games on Amazon Prime Video with a new theme song fittingly titled “NFL.” The track is produced by Boi-1da and Illmind, features Young Money artists Gudda Gudda and HoodyBaby, and will kick off the season on Thursday, October 8 with the Chicago Bears/Tampa Bay Buccaneers game. The song’s lyric video features CGI versions of the rappers suited up for the game in an empty stadium.
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.
Blackpink are officially in your area.
Even though the K-pop girl group released a Japanese studio album named after that signature phrase back in 2018, mostly as a means of collecting all their singles to date, this past Friday marked their formal debut full-length, ceremoniously titled The Album. Kicking off said album with the highest-charting female K-pop single to date, “Ice Cream,” a collaboration with Selena Gomez released in late August, the record is already having a huge impact during a year where pop stadium tours have been placed on hold due to the pandemic.
Following the examples of Charli XCX and Taylor Swift before them, Blackpink wrote and recorded The Album during the pandemic, with all four members, Jennie (Kim), Lisa (Lalisa Manoban), Rosé (Chae-young Park), and Jisoo (Ji-soo Kim), singing in English, save a few Korean verses here and there. Though American and other English-speaking audiences are growing more and more accustomed to singing along to pop songs in other languages — due not just to the influx of Latinx pop, but other K-Pop groups like BTS — the increased accessibility of lyrics can’t hurt. Not that anything was holding them back in the first place, it’s almost hard to keep up with the speed at which the group’s songs break and set records when it comes to most streamed and most watched.
Aside from the success of their solo singles, like their record-breaking 2019 hit “Kill This Love,” or the widely-remixed and insanely-catchy “DDU-DU DDU-DU,” co-signs from American pop stars have been pouring in all year. After a huge feature on Lady Gaga’s Chromatica for the hypnotic single “Sour Candy” earlier this year, their Gomez-featuring hit “Ice Cream” includes co-writing credits from both Ariana Grande and Victoria Monét. The cherry on top, when it comes to massive guest stars, comes in the form of one Cardi B, the first rapper the group has collaborated with.
“Bet You Wanna” is a delicious, swaggering hit that combines an acoustic guitar, twinkling harmonies, and a top-form Cardi verse delivered in signature raunchy fashion. It’s no “WAP,” but even with all their own pull on the charts, it never hurts to have the reigning queen of hip-hop show up on your debut album. As The Grammys noted in an interview with the group around the project’s release, they’re often referred to as “the biggest girl group in the world,” and that’s not a title they take lightly. But the reason Blackpink is so easy to fall in love with is because of the obvious diva influences they wear on their sleeves, and because a thick layer of campiness helps confirm that though they’re deadly serious about making excellent pop music, they never take themselves too seriously.
It’s easy to imagine running back the beginning of the chorus on “Crazy Over You” to double-check if that’s another hidden Selena feature or Jennie and Jisoo, as even the phrasing is reminiscent of Gomez’s staccato pop hits (“Cut You Off,” “Let Me Get Me”). Elsewhere, the girls channel Lana Del Rey’s whisper-rap cadence on “Love To Hate Me” and borrow from Gaga’s signature sing-talk rhythms all over the record. None of these references ever come off as derivative or heavy-handed, as the group’s four vocalists often execute these stylistic choices better than the stars they’re drawing from.
Frequently bringing up the dichotomy between the two colors that make up their name in interviews, The Album is definitely full of darker moments that contrast with the campy and clubby technicolor pop elements. The record’s first song, “How You Like That,” relies heavily on trap beats and ominous, warped horns for the taunting chorus, and one of the project’s earliest singles, “Lovesick Girls,” is anything but hopeful when it comes to love. Pop music devoted to discussing toxic relationships never goes out of style, so all these songs hit harder than ever during a year marked by isolation and disappointment, but to their credit they’re never heavy enough to deter singing along at the top of your lungs.
What’s perhaps most interesting about Blackpink, though, isn’t the contemporary pop music they trade on, but the way they incorporate hip-hop. Even the most bubblegum-y songs here lean into a heavier beat or some simmering, trap-centric synths from time to time, anchoring this record in rap and R&B as much as pop, including a full-on rap verse from Lisa on “Love To Hate Me.” She’s no Cardi, but it’s not a bad verse by any means. As the post-internet globalization of music and flattening of genre leads us deeper and deeper into a new amalgam of styles and sounds, it’s possible that soon Blackpink won’t just be the biggest girl group in the world when it comes to pop, but hip-hop, too.
The Album is out now via YG Entertainment/Interscope Records. Get it here.
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