Month: November 2020

Despite what trade machine screenshots from across NBA Twitter might have you believe, Bradley Beal is still not on the trade block, at least according to a recent interview from Washington general manager Tommy Sheppard.

Sheppard appeared on The Lowe Post with ESPN’s Zach Lowe this week and when was asked at the beginning of the interview about Beal’s status with the franchise, Sheppard said, “We’re building this team around Bradley Beal. He’s a tremendous human being. He’s a tremendous player. He’s exactly what we want to have here with the Washington Wizards.”

For those wondering why the Wizards are hanging onto Beal, it mostly seems to center around the fact that they believe they are a better team than they showed in 2020. Sheppard noted that Washington was without John Wall last season and struggled pretty heavily with injuries overall, which partially explains why they fell to the ninth seed and couldn’t even make it into the Eastern Conference play-in game in the Bubble.

“(Beal) carried the franchise through some difficult times,” Sheppard said.

If the Wizards change their minds, Beal is at least technically allowed to be dealt now. Last fall, he signed a one-year extension with the team that effectively took him off the trade market for all of the 2019-20 season. This summer, he has said publicly that he may need to start wielding his leverage to force the Wizards to be more competitive.

For a certain generation of hip-hop heads, BET’s Rap City (and later, Rap City: Tha Basement) were staples in their diet of new rap videos. New Jersey rapper Russ, who is promoting a star-studded new EP titled Chomp, resurrects the nostalgic Basement Booth set — complete with a cameo from Big Tigger(!) — for his first video from the EP, “Who Wants What” featuring Ab-Soul.

Russ provides a nostalgic, crate-digging beat reminiscent of the early ’90s New York hip-hop heyday as he and Ab-Soul roam the booth with a classic set-up from Big Tigger. During his verse, Russ throws a subtle salute to Cam’ron, whose money-counting antics during his 2001 freestyle became a fan-favorite and a lasting image in the minds of hip-hop fans who continue to share grainy videos of it on social media to this day.

Ab-Soul does what he came to do as well, spitting a ferocious flurry of punchlines that will leave permanent fingerprints on rewind buttons everywhere (I know how dated that reference is but, in this case, it works). The video is also cleverly mixed so that the track continues to play even as we get to listen in to Tigger’s reactions to some of the juicier lines.

Russ teased Chomp via Instagram yesterday, sharing a tracklist that includes Benny The Butcher, Black Thought, Busta Rhymes, DJ Premier, and Kxng Crooked. No release date was shared but such a tape could go a long way toward revamping — or at least justifying — Russ’ holier-than-thou image.

Watch the “Who Wants What” video above.

As cases of COVID-19 continue to surge across the country, many communities are facing renewed efforts at social distancing and/or shelter-in-place orders to try and stem the tide of the deadly virus that has killed nearly a quarter-million Americans.

This had been one of the biggest sticking points around the decision of when to start the new NBA season, as the league faced the dilemma of holding games without fans or losing upwards of a $1 billion in revenue if it postponed play for a couple months while waiting for a potential vaccine.

With the 2020-21 season set to tip off on Dec. 22, there still isn’t much clarity about what the fan situation will be, although the Lakers announced last week that won’t be permitting fans at Staples Center when the season opens. The Warriors on the other hand, have reportedly submitted a bold plan that would allow 50 percent capacity at their home games.

Via Ramona Shelburne of ESPN:

Lacob said the Warriors are prepared to spend upward of $30 million to test every fan, Warriors employee and player with the most accurate form of COVID-19 testing for each home game or day they come to Chase Center.

“I not only want to get this done and show the world how we can do it now, I’m willing to spend the money to do it,” said Lacob, who holds a master’s degree in public health from UCLA and built his fortune as a venture capitalist in biotechnology. “This is a serious, serious problem. It cannot go on for multiple years … because if this were to go on for several years, the NBA is no more.

***

It hinges on the use of rapid PCR (polymerase chain reaction) tests or equivalent amplification technologies that can detect traces of the virus’ genetic material in nasal or throat swabs within 15 minutes and are far more accurate than rapid antigen tests, which look for a protein that is present on the surface of the virus that is shed.

In the Orlando Bubble, the NBA used a different version of the tests that reportedly had greater accuracy but took longer to return results, about 24 hours. Lacob is one of the league’s wealthier owners, and it’s unclear whether other teams around the NBA would be willing or able to spend the money for similar plans.

The Warriors’ plan would also be aligned with the requirements the league out to teams earlier this week for potentially allowing fans, which include some version of rapid-response testing for fans who would be seated near the court. Other teams around the country would also be governed by local social distancing rules for large gatherings, but if approved, the Warriors’ plan could help pave the way for getting at least a semblance of normalcy back into the coming season.

(Via ESPN)

Longtime baseball executive Kim Ng was hired Friday by the Miami Marlins, making her the first female general manager among any of America’s four major sports leagues and the first Asian-American GM in baseball history.

The news was announced in a press release by the Marlins on Friday.

“This challenge is one I don’t take lightly,” Ng said in a statement. “When I got into this business, it seemed unlikely a woman would lead a Major League team, but I am dogged in the pursuit of my goals. My goal is now to bring Championship baseball to Miami. I am both humbled and eager to continue building the winning culture our fans expect and deserve.”

Women have begun to get opportunities among the highest positions in front offices across sports, while professional women’s leagues like the WNBA and NWSL have long had women in top jobs. But Ng’s combination of experience and the fact that she has worked across baseball, including in the league office for nine seasons, make her both a groundbreaking and sound hire at the same time.

The Marlins are coming off a surprisingly strong season in which they fortunately avoided any major damage after a team-wide coronavirus outbreak to make the playoffs. Recently-hired manager Don Mattingly was named National League Manager of the Year. Budding superstars Miguel Rojas and Brian Anderson present a nice starting point for Ng as she makes history in the general manager’s seat.

Earlier this year, Soccer Mommy released Color Theory, her second album and her most polished-sounding effort yet. On a production level, Sophie Allison has come a long way since her early Bandcamp days, but now she has offered something for fans who still appreciate her more DIY aesthetic: Out of nowhere, Allison has shared a collection of demos of some Color Theory songs, titled Color Theory (Selected Demos).

The six-track release includes demo versions of “Circle The Drain,” “Royal Screw Up,” “Yellow Is The Color Of Her Eyes,” “Gray Light,” “Stain,” and “Crawling In My Skin,” and the more humble nature of the recordings is a real throwback. She also shared a video for the “Royal Screw Up” demo, which comes across as a lo-fi home video that features footage of Allison’s house and surrounding area. Allison said of the clip, “I made this video by driving around and exploring a little bit of Nashville. Most of the footage is from my house or my favorite nearby nature spots.”

After releasing Color Theory in February, Allison recruited some musical peers for a series of collaborations, including Beabadoobee and MGMT’s Andrew VanWyngarden.

Watch the “Royal Screw Up” video above, stream Color Theory (Selected Demos) below, and revisit our review of Color Theory here. There’s also a deluxe binder edition of Color Theory (Selected Demos) available for pre-order, so check that out here.

It’s a good thing Big Mouth is one of the funniest shows on TV, otherwise it might be too painful to watch as an adult. The Netflix animated series brings back repressed memories of middle school, including hormones hitting you like the bus hits Regina George in Mean Girls and feeling shame for the first time. Season 4 adds a new emotion to the equation: anxiety in the form of Tito the Mosquito, voiced by Maria Bamford. The new season “focuses on anxiety; the anxiety of growing up, of figuring out who you are, discovering yourself, accepting yourself,” according to Netflix. “In the great Big Mouth tradition, the show continues to explore human sexuality and everything around it, including racial and sexual identity, love in all its forms, and having the Hugest Period Ever.”

Just what 2020 needed, more anxiety! I could be incensed at Big Mouth making 2020 even more anxious than it already is, but I could never be mad at you, Coach Steve.

Other newcomers to the show include Zach Galifianakis as Gratitoad, “who is there to help our crew cope with their anxiety and not let it completely own them,” and Seth Rogen, Josie Totah, Lena Waithe, Quinta Brunson, John Oliver, Sterling K. Brown, Paul Giamatti, Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle. Ayo Edebiri, the new voice of Missy, will take over for Jenny Slate in the penultimate episode and for the rest of the series.

Big Mouth season four premieres on December 4.

After initially teasing the remix of his celebratory single “Nah Nah Nah” at the end of October, Kanye West shared the full song today with verses from guest rappers 2 Chainz and DaBaby. It’s mixed a little better than the version Kanye previously posted on his Twitter and in line with Kanye’s new policy, the swear words have been removed from DaBaby and Chainz’s verses.

Kanye put out the original version of “Nah Nah Nah” as a response to his elation over election polling results that turned out to be falsified. Of course, Kanye’s 2020 bid for President was unsuccessful, both in its stated goal of putting the mercurial producer in the White House and in its ulterior motive of peeling votes away from the Joe Biden campaign. It was Kanye’s first new music in a while and might be his last for the foreseeable future, as he insisted he wouldn’t release any new music until he got out of his original record deal.

This is despite the insistence of Abou “Bu” Thiam, Kanye’s current manager, that he’s making the best music of his life (which is, let’s be real here, debatable at best). However, Kanye has found time to contribute to many of his friends’ projects, like Ty Dolla Sign’s Featuring Ty Dolla Sign and a rumored full-length project with 2 Chainz, who dropped his long-awaited So Help Me God today.

Listen to the “Nah Nah Nah” remix above.

On March 3, 2010, Madison Hamburg’s life changed forever. His mother, Barbara, had been brutally murdered outside her Connecticut home. Law enforcement first suspected the crime to be one of passion in what inexplicably became a cold case. Madison, who at the time was a college sophomore, began to investigate his mom’s death, at first only intending to use his camera footage for a documentary class team project. Yet as he told me during a phone call, the project grew from a planned short to encompass something so massive this his professor “basically promised that he’d give me an ‘A’ if I promised that I’d never stop working on it.” Well, Madison kept his word, which led to more years of interviews and countless hours of footage. This has resulted in his directorial debut in what’s now an HBO four-part docuseries, Murder At Middle Beach.

I’ve watched the entirety of this docuseries, and let’s just say that there are several twists that even Madison didn’t see coming. Talking with him about the project was quite an experience, too. And I mention this next part only for context on the gravity of the situation: on the day I spoke with Madison, I also interviewed a high-profile actor. We’re talking about a Golden Globe-and-BAFTA-winning gentleman who’s acted in dozens of successful movies. After the day was said and done, I realized that, strangely, I was actually more nervous about interviewing Madison Hamburg than the A-list actor.

It felt daunting to speak with the young filmmaker who may have actually ended up interviewing his mother’s killer. He uncovered and dove into risky situations during his search for the truth. He turned over stones that a lot of us probably couldn’t stomach. It’s mind-boggling to fathom how Madison kept it together for the entirety of this project. And to this date, Barbara Hamburg’s murder remains unsolved. Did it have something to do with her estranged husband, whose financial dealings were highly suspect, or can the murder be tied to a pyramid scheme (known as the “Gifting Tables”) for which multiple fellow participants were convicted in a Ponzi scheme after Barbara’s death?

A lot of what transpires in this docuseries feels surreal, along with being heartbreaking, but Madison rolled camera on all of it. He also persisted in bringing his mother’s story to audiences, finally finding a breakthrough a connection with the late-Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia screenwriter and longtime collaborator, Ron Nyswaner, who came on board as an executive producer. That led to Nyswaner telling Madison (as he related to me), “Jonathan Demme changed my life in one phone call, and I’m gonna try to do the same for you.” Madison then relocated to L.A., where he edited the project and eventually partnered with Jigsaw Productions before landing a deal with HBO.

Altogether, Murder On Middle Beach is Madison’s attempt to solve the mystery of his mother’s death while absolving multiple people that he loves and also hoping to repair his fractured family. It’s a heck of a watch that will keep you guessing until the end and beyond. Ahead of Sunday night’s HBO premiere, Madison was gracious enough to tell us how it all came together (and how he kept it together).

After watching you interview so many people for this docuseries, it feels odd to be asking you the questions. Is it strange for you, too?

I think that in order to create the opportunities in order to make this, I’ve answered questions for a while now, so it’s not too weird for me. I think I have a different context, obviously, being the one who was asking questions.

HBO’s been beefing up their true-crime library. How did you pitch your specific project?

Well, what was really hard was the angle. Because with true crime, the knee-jerk idea is how “big was the story?” and “how brutal was the murder?” and what’s the angle here? But we were really pitching a story of identity and telling a story through the victim and family’s perspective, so it was a really hard thing to pitch, and that’s kind-of outside the conventions of true crime. And I’m so grateful that Lisa Heller, who we pitched to at HBO, saw that potential. The rest is sort-of history.

A lot of this project became about learning who your mother is, and about getting to know your father. Was there anything in particular that surprised you most?

Thank you for recognizing that. I think that when I started this, I didn’t really know what I was looking for, but what surprised me the most was that my mom was a… human being and a person.

Yeah, as kids, we tend to view our parents as almost mythological creatures, if that makes sense.

Yeah. And when she died. I didn’t know the stressors that she was protecting me from, and the life that she had and kind-of the greyness of her morality. So, I didn’t really know Barbara. The film becomes a lot about discovering who she was and that influencing my own identity. So, the biggest thing that surprised me, which sounds kind of silly [laughs], is that my mom was not just “Mom.” She was a person.

You made some really gutsy moves with hidden recording devices over the years. Were you ever afraid of getting busted by a subject?

Uhhhh, yes! But after eight years, you kind-of forget it’s there. It’s tough. You wanna be nonchalant about it but also need to have the questions ready and be very strategic. I got better at it over the years and learned the legalities of it, a lot more clearly over the years, but yeah, I think that one thing that surprised me is that there are certain people who just kind-of like put up with the really sharper, intense questions that I was asking and were not aware that I was recording. And they never thought to ask that, if I was. Part of me always felt like they may have been recording themselves or, I don’t know! It’s tough. That was a really tough thing… I always looked at those ethical decisions like it was for the greater good. And there’s a lot of deciding whether or not things are worth it.

On a larger scale, there’s a point near the end when you were questioning whether what you were uncovering would endanger your life. Was there ever a point when you really thought you should be looking over your shoulder?

Yeah, the making of the documentary was like an 8-year double life that I was living. I didn’t tell a lot of my friends about it. A lot of people that I worked with didn’t even know what had happened to my mom, so digging into leads in areas that could have led to my mom’s death is scary. If you’re a serial-killer murderer or a sociopath murderer, usually a murder is a solution to a problem done by people who are in desperate situations. And now that it’s public, I feel a little less scared for my own safety because I don’t know that coming after me would necessarily solve a problem anymore.

One of the wilder aspects of this project is that there’s a decent chance that you actually interviewed the person who murdered your mother. How conscious were you of that possibility?

I’ve been pretty careful not to judge any theories or just not say, “I think this person could have done it.” But of course that ran through my head, and that’s part of what I set out to alleviate, those underlying distrusts, you know, not being able to trust family members and people who should be part of my family structure and support system, completely 100%. And trying to exonerate them, so I can have some semblance of normal family connection.

To this date, the case remains unsolved, but you received a late-breaking records dump following a successful Freedom Of Information Act request. You’re still digging through those files, but are you seeing any hope for a resolution?

I’m a friend and member of Survivors of Homicide, which is an amazing support group in Connecticut for people who have loved ones who have been murdered. When you’re going through anything like this, it’s extremely difficult for family because the transparency with law enforcement in Connecticut is really… opague. It’s easy to lose that trust, but as a family member who’s going after “who the murderer is,” it sometimes can be like a fool’s errand, but what the more immediate challenge that you can face is taking it up with the process, and making sure that was done correctly. Especially nowadays, it’s very hard to get away with murder, so with long-term cold cases and unresolved murders, more likely than not, something went wrong in the process. And as a family member, being privy to that is extremely gratifying.

With the Unsolved Mysteries revival leading to tips, one can only hope that this series will do the same.

Yes, and also, at least for me, since I’ve investigated this for so long, [the new records] make my work… it provides a level of transparency. I guess I never had any finality to my mom’s death. I came home and didn’t see her. Nobody told me any details of the crime, and so it was like a movie where all of a sudden, my mom’s dead, and everyone’s just saying it to me, but nobody’s telling me how. I didn’t have that sense of finality, and I think that going through the steps and also seeing some of what the police were doing, it makes my world a little clearer. That existential sort-of crisis has started to fade away.

We’re out of time, Madison. I hope that law enforcement finally ends up moving on this case, for you and for your family.

Thank you so much. I really hope so, too.

HBO’s ‘Murder On Middle Beach’ debuts on November 15 at 10:00pm EST.

I regret to inform you that Meghan McCain, of all people, did a good meme. For only the second time in seven decades, Arizona went blue in the presidential election, with the New York Times reporting that President-elect Joe Biden is beating Donald Trump by over 11,000 votes. That’s enough to call it. “That Arizona — the home of the late Senator John McCain and Senator Barry Goldwater, a founder of the 20th century conservative political movement and the 1964 Republican presidential nominee — was in play for Democrats at all is remarkable,” the Times wrote. “Before the state voted for Mr. Clinton, the last Democrat it had supported for president was Harry S. Truman in 1948.”

Speaking of John McCain, there was no love lost between the late-senator and the president. “He’s a war hero ’cause he was captured,” Trump said about McCain in 2015. “I like people that weren’t captured.” He also allegedly called McCain a “f*cking loser,” and although Trump denied the report, there’s always a tweet. Here’s another tweet:

The View host, who compared herself Daenerys Targaryen around this time last year, shared a meme of her dad with the text, “I like people who don’t lose Arizona,” adding, “In light of tonight’s news…. sorry I had to, the meme is too funny.” When reached for comment about McCain’s tweet, Trump, well, couldn’t be reached for comment.

Now who’s the loser.

(Via Mediaite)

Ahead of their murky late-night performance of Savage Mode II standouts “Runnin’” and “Mr. Right Now,” 21 Savage and Metro Boomin paid homage to the late King Von, with 21 Savage saying, “The world lost a legend.” The performance itself took place on a dimly light stage set under a bridge or a pier (or soundstage cleverly dressed to look like the underside of one) surrounded by water with flashing LED strips fixed to the support pillars.

The performance was 21 Savage’s first on The Tonight Show since 2019 when he rapped his I Am > I Was hit “A Lot” complete with a new verse criticizing ICE just weeks before he was arrested and held in ICE detention for a long-expired visa. He had a tumultuous year after that as he fought against deportation; to date, no news has been released about his pending court date and in 2020, the coronavirus pandemic has backed up court proceedings seemingly indefinitely.

That didn’t stop Savage and Metro from reuniting for the sequel to their fan-favorite mixtape or keep Savage from making a fair number of appearances on other artists’ projects, including Lil Uzi Vert’s LUV Vs. The World 2, Summer Walker’s “Secret,” Gucci Mane’s So Icy Summer, Mulatto’s “Pull Up,” and T.I.’s The L.I.B.R.A.

Watch 21 Savage and Metro Boomin perform on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon above.