Month: November 2020

The Jrue Holiday trade market appears to be heating up in the lead-up to the 2020 NBA Draft. Last week, word came out that a handful of contenders are interested in a move for the veteran guard, with the New Orleans Pelicans “openly discussing” trying to find him a new team. Now, a new report indicates that a team with aspirations of making it to the postseason want to get in on the fun.

Marc Stein of the New York Times reports that the Atlanta Hawks have their sights set on a potential multi-team trade for Holiday, and are willing to part with the No. 6 pick in the upcoming Draft to make it happen.

Atlanta is a fascinating landing spot for Holiday. The team has plenty of money to spend this summer and can make his contract fit — Stein notes that it would probably be a year-long rental — and while he’s nominally a point guard, he’s perfectly comfortable playing off the ball. This makes him a snug fit next to Trae Young while also taking some defensive duties away from Young, which has never been a strength of his.

A Hawks team with those two in the backcourt, a frontcourt duo of John Collins and Clint Capela, and a handful of promising youngsters on the wings (Kevin Huerter, De’Andre Hunter, Cam Reddish) would be fun to watch. Whether it would be a playoff team is a different question, but depending on what they’d have to give up, it stands to reason that Holiday would get them closer to that goal.

Netflix has released the official trailer for its unusual upcoming docuseries, We Are the Champions, which focuses on the highly competitive world of some very unusual activities. Narrated by The Office‘s Rainn Wilson, who serves as executive producer, the trailer offers a brief glimpse at such unorthodox contests as Cheese Rolling, Dog Dancing, Chili Eating, and Frog Jumping along with a look at the fiercely determined individuals who strive to be the best at them. Although, some of them seem to have some doubts about dedicating their lives to rolling down a hill after a block of cheese or destroying their entire face by suffering through some super intense chili.

“As a self-proclaimed expert on the unconventional, I’m excited to introduce viewers to these small-world competitors with big-world dreams because, in this time, we could all use a hero—be it a dancing dog or the world Yo-Yo champion,” Wilson told Variety when We Are the Champions was first announced back in October.

Here’s the official synopsis:

From executive producer Rainn Wilson, We Are the Champions explores the quirkiest, most charming, and oddly inspirational competitions you never knew existed. Each episode follows a unique competition, providing a window into a world of determined, passionate, and incredibly skilled competitors who put it all on the line to become heroes in their own extraordinary worlds. Featured competitions include Cheese Rolling, Chili Eating, Fantasy Hair Styling, Yo-Yo, Dog Dancing and Frog Jumping.

We Are The Champions starts streaming November 17 on Netflix.

As the live entertainment shutdown continues, artists must continue finding creative ways to boost their income. While some, like Cardi B and Tyga, adopted the OnlyFans approach, and others like Blimes And Gab or Run The Jewels, rely on TV money from song placements and sponsored concerts, others are innovating any way they can. Take LA rapper Blueface, who rode high last year on the success of his single “Thotiana” but has nowhere to perform it now.

To offset the loss of performance revenue, it appears Blueface has listed his “Blue Girls Club” mansion on Airbnb — with three bedrooms and two-and-half baths — for $2,500 a night. The mansion itself has been the site of Blueface’s latest project which is incidentally also hosted on his OnlyFans: an unofficial reboot of the popular Vh1 reality show Bad Girls Club, which seems like mostly an excuse for Blueface to hang out in the house with a group of uninhibited women and watch them get into fights. However, he maintains on his social media that he has not added them to his boastful total of women he’s had sex with.

For what it’s worth, Blueface isn’t the only rap star making use of Airbnb. In September, Will Smith gave fans the opportunity to stay at his Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air mansion.

Demi Lovato turned in perhaps the defining song of the election season when she released “Commander In Chief,” which asked big questions and offered scathing criticisms of Donald Trump. Lovato was a guest on Late Night With Seth Meyers yesterday, and on the show, she revealed that the song was inspired by another political tune: Pink’s 2006 single “Dear Mr. President.”

“I was thinking about the music that’s out there right now, and I was like, ‘Why isn’t anyone talking about what’s happening?’ In the ’60s and ’70s, when anything political would happen, music was such a key element to help people process and get through it. So I was like, ‘You know, I really need to step up my lyrics and make it about something other than just my life.’ So I started making more music that is less about me and more about the broad scope of what’s going on in the world, and one of the songs that we came up with was ‘Commander In Chief.’ And it was inspired by Pink’s ‘Dear Mr. President,’ you know, back however many years ago that came out, and I wanted to do like a newer version.”

Lovato previously expressed her disappointment at how close the election is, writing on Twitter, “Kind of terribly sad how close this election was. After this year and especially this summer it should’ve been a landslide. I don’t get it. Truly. I’m not losing hope. My faith is strong. Just very disappointed at how close this is. Like…. really y’all?”

Watch the full interview above.

In a time when some sort of norm-shattering event is happening by the minute, it’s downright impressive that people are still having at a laugh at Rudy Giuliani holding a Trump campaign event at Four Seasons Total Landscaping instead of the Four Seasons hotel. The viral moment has had considerable staying power, and according to NPR’s David Greene, people are still calling the sex shop next door, Fantasy Island, and asking, “Is Rudy there?” several times a day.

While the event has been a merchandising boon for Four Seasons Total Landscaping, who’s already selling T-shirts, Fantasy Island didn’t capitalize on the viral moment yet. But owner Bernie D’Angelo did tell Slate that he is enjoying the hilarity of it all, and it has been brought a huge amount of hits to the store’s Facebook page. “We could never afford advertising like this,” he said. “This is worldwide. I don’t know if I’ll ever trend like this ever again.”

D’Angelo particularly enjoyed the delicious irony of the viral event. Via Slate:

“What are the odds, you know? Donald Trump starts out playing around with Stormy Daniels, and next thing you know, one of his final hurrahs is going to be down the street from an adult bookstore that’s been there for 40 years. You can’t write this stuff. Basically, I was pretty much in awe of the funniness of the whole situation.”

While this all sounds pretty embarrassing for Giuliani, at least nobody’s talking about him sticking his hand down his pants in Borat 2. Silver linings, right?

(Via David Greene on Twitter, Slate)

This time last month, no one knew if the actress playing Borat’s daughter in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm was named Maria Bakalova or Irina Nowak. Now, Maria Bakalova (that’s the real one) is getting legitimate Oscar consideration. There’s a lot to like in the Borat sequel, but her performance is one thing to love. Bakalova, who was raised in Bulgaria, got involved with the project after her friend told her about “an open call for the lead role in a Hollywood movie. And I was like, that’s not possible. We are Bulgarians. Nobody can actually see us in lead roles,” she told the New York Times. Bakalova was convinced that she was being set up for a “human trafficking situation,” but nope, it turns out she was auditioning for the co-lead of a major (and undercover) Hollywood movie.

Bakalova and star Sacha Baron Cohen instantly clicked (“He’s my nonbiological father and he will be like that forever”) and he taught her a trick for not breaking character, an important skill for when you’re talking to real people about swallowing babies:

“When Sacha starts doing his thing, and you’re right next to him, he has this super serious face. I have to act like it’s the most normal thing ever. But he’s so funny. There were moments when the scene was extremely funny and you just can’t stop laughing. It’s bad, because people were able to realize that it’s a joke. He taught me a trick to cross my fingers, to put pressure on my fingers, to stop laughing.”

Rudy Giuliani was probably crossing his fingers, too: “Please don’t let Borat 2 come out, please don’t let Borat 2 come out, please don’t let Borat 2 come out.” Sorry, Rudy!

(Via New York Times)

The Houston Rockets are in the midst of a gigantic franchise overhaul this offseason. The team parted ways with head coach Mike D’Antoni, while longtime executive Daryl Morey left at the end of this season. The former was replaced with highly-respected first-time coach Stephen Silas, and the latter was replaced internally by Rafael Stone, but Houston’s remaining two stalwarts have some concerns.

According to Tim MacMahon of ESPN, James Harden and Russell Westbrook have both expressed some reservations “about the direction of the franchise through direct conversations or discussions with their representatives and the Rockets’ front office.” The Rockets have reportedly tried to assuage those concerns, and neither has requested a trade or anything like that yet.

Rockets owner Tilman Fertitta, recently promoted general manager Rafael Stone and recently hired head coach Stephen Silas have emphasized that the franchise remains committed to fielding a contender while featuring the two perennial All-Stars in their primes. However, the concerns expressed by Harden and Westbrook that Houston’s window as a contender could be closing has left the organization fearful that the superstars’ commitment to remaining with the Rockets could be wavering.

Although neither player has requested a trade at this point, that scenario has become a plausible eventual possibility.

Houston’s defining characteristic in recent years has been going all-in to win, which has led to them spending a ton of money and getting rid of draft capital to build a contender. It also meant going all-in on their hyper small-ball, which had its merits but left the current roster without all that much in the form of big men.

As long as Harden is around, the Rockets will probably be in a good place, even if they go through an overhaul and Westbrook declines as he ages and starts losing the explosiveness that made him unguardable in his heyday. Still, this seems like a situation worth monitoring, especially if things go south in Houston this year.

Eels (the project of Mark Oliver Everett) have remained consistently productive over the past couple decades and beyond. The group usually pumps out an album at least once every two or three years, and now they’re back with their thirteenth record, Earth To Dora. The album came out in October, and today, they have brought renewed attention to it with a video for “Are We Alright Again,” which stars Jon Hamm.

In the clip, Hamm plays a dedicated Eels fan, rocking an Eels t-shirt as he sits down next to a vinyl copy of the band’s 2010 album End Times. With a drink in hand, Hamm puts on some headphones, listens to “Are We Alright Again,” and takes a load off. He gets a little too relaxed, though, as he doesn’t notice a group of thieves entering his home. The robbers think their plan has been foiled as they notice Hamm in the room, but they manage to strip the place clean and make a getaway before Hamm realizes everything he owns is gone.

The band says of the video and song, “A typical Eels fan finds solace in Eels music. The feel-good hit of the feel-worst year.” Meanwhile, this is Hamm’s second music video in recent days, as he also popped up in Jeff Tweedy’s “Gwendolyn” clip from last month.

Watch the “Are We Alright Again” video above.

Earth To Dora is out now E Works/PIAS Recordings. Get it here.

Soon after the country went into lockdown in March, I found myself listening obsessively to Lou Reed.

I’ve been a fan for years, of course. A music critic without intimate knowledge of the Velvet Underground has to turn in their gun and badge, post-haste. But I had never fully explored every dark nook and kinky cranny of Reed’s solo catalogue. Which is strange, because I am fascinated by deeply flawed albums that are both enhanced and undone by the perversity of their creators. And virtually nobody in rock history is more perverse, or has more deeply flawed and highly fascinating records, than sweet Lou.

Given that 2020 has been, shall we say, a bit of a soul-crushing horror show, opting to spend time with the likes of Berlin and The Bells and Magic And Loss even Growing Up In Public and Ecstasy — I’m telling you, I went deep this year — might seem counterintuitive. Lou Reed, after all, is responsible for writing some of the grimmest and most disturbing rock songs ever. Berlin — his 1973 concept album about two drug addicts and lovers who descend into a depraved, chemical-addled mania — is probably the most depressing rock album ever made. It literally uses the sounds of screaming, hysterical children as backing vocals on a track. And that’s not even the darkest song on Berlin! That distinction belongs to “The Bed,” a first-person account of one of the protagonists taking her own life by slitting her wrists. Are we having fun yet??

If this seems like the opposite of anxiety-easing, escapist entertainment, consider that 2020 is one of the few years in which the bleakness of Lou Reed’s songs didn’t seem quite so foreboding. The heightened reality and melodrama of Berlin truly was preferable to the banal grind of government indifference slowly snuffing out the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. At least the tragedies of Lou Reed are imbued with poetry and twisted beauty. There was nothing artful about real life in 2020; it was just grueling, dumb, and cruel.

As I worked my way through Lou’s discography, warming myself over their white-hot mix of extreme misanthropy and sneaky humanism, one record was waiting for me at the end of the line. The most formidable one at all, his 2011 collaboration with Metallica and unwitting 87-minute swan song, Lulu.

If you know Lulu, you likely remember it as a punchline. Upon release, Lulu was widely reviled, quickly gaining a reputation as one of the most hated albums of the early 21st century. Listening to it now, it’s not hard to see why Lulu turned so many people off. The juxtaposition of Reed’s raspy, monotone rumble and James Hetfield’s overdriven arena-rock howling is so jarring that it borders on comic, a sensation underscored by the bludgeoning, melody-averse music and the near-spoken word song structures. It’s all pushed to the breaking point by running times that stretch as long as 20 minutes.

And then there’s the lyrics, which even by Lou Reed standards are extremely despairing, dwelling unyieldingly on sex, violence, obsession, self-hatred, self-degradation, and death. (Reed based his words on the work of 19th-century German expressionist playwright Frank Wedekind, who is about as much fun as you would expect from a writer described as a “19th-century German expressionist playwright.”) The record’s first track, “Brandenburg Gate,” immediately lays down the gauntlet with these opening lines: “I would cut my legs and tits off / When I think of Boris Karloff and Kinski.” One of my favorite lyrics occurs in the song “Little Dog,” when Reed warbles, “If you got the money you can go to the top / The female dog don’t care what you got / As long as you can raise that / Little doggie face to a cold hearted pussy / You could have a taste.” Lulu, as you can see, was not made to produce radio hits.

Given Reed’s reputation as a contrarian, it was easy to reduce Lulu to a mere provocation, as if he were actually daring people to hate it. And hating Lulu is precisely what many people did. Pitchfork gave it a 1.0, calling it “exhaustingly tedious” and openly musing over whether it already deserved to be considered the worst album of all time. Writing for Grantland, Chuck Klosterman dismantled Lulu in hilarious fashion, summing it up as “an elderly misanthrope reciting paradoxical aphorisms over a collection of repetitive, adrenalized sludge licks” before arguing that a theoretical album in which “the Red Hot Chili Peppers acoustically covered the 12 worst Primus songs for Starbucks” would be preferable.

The metal community was even more flummoxed by Lulu. Blabbermouth.net was representative of the reaction: “Lulu is a catastrophic failure on almost every level,” the website declared, “a project that could quite possibly do irreparable harm to Metallica’s career.” Reed himself later claimed that Metallica’s fans had threatened to shoot him, though he characteristically claimed to not care. “I don’t have any fans left. After Metal Machine Music, they all fled. Who cares? I’m essentially in this for the fun of it.” As with all things Lou Reed, this is either an example of extremely dry humor or a completely earnest statement devoid of irony — or both things simultaneously.

Over at Metacritic, which compiles composite scores of reviews, Lulu has a score of 45 — pretty bad, but not exactly all time bad. In truth, some outlets were kind to the album, like Rolling Stone (Lou Reed is “still his own rock ‘n’ roll animal”) and The Atlantic, which dared to say that Lulu was “actually excellent.” If you dig deep enough, you will find albums about which nothing positive has ever been written, like Limp Bizkit’s Results May Vary — which, with a Metacritic score of 33, is critically despised even by Limp Bizkit standards — or Playing With Fire, the 2006 debut by Britney Spears’ ex Kevin Federline that has a Metacritic score of just 15.

But Lulu nevertheless stands out as a famously hated record because Lou Reed is one of the most acclaimed songwriters in rock history, and Metallica is the single most successful metal band of all time. Nobody expected greatness from Limp Bizkit or Kevin Federline, and they probably didn’t from Lou Reed and Metallica, weirdly together on the same record. But combining an important songwriter with the world’s most popular metal band was irresistible for rubberneckers in the music press. This wasn’t a run-of-the-mill misfire made by mediocre talents. Lulu appeared to be an instant classic of hubristic miscalculation, a larger-than-life turkey that was just too fun to not hate.

You might still feel that way. But I’m here to say that Lulu deserves to be reassessed, and not only because David Bowie once called it a masterpiece. In terms of rock albums, it’s a complete original. There’s still no record I can think of that’s quite like it in either Reed or Metallica’s catalogues. And yet it also feels like an unheralded but appropriate capstone on Reed’s historically uncompromising career.

A crucial mistake that many people made with initially engaging with Lulu — including me — is thinking of it as being as much of a Metallica record as a Lou Reed one. The likelihood that you will dislike Lulu goes up exponentially if you regard it as a Metallica album. It doesn’t have any of the attributes that you would associate with the kinetic radio rock of Metallica or Master Of Puppets or even the Load/Reload albums. Those records are packaged with wall-to-wall musical napalm bombs, designed to detonate upon immediate impact with immediate riffs and invigorating hooks.

Lulu is determinedly not that. On that album, Metallica lumbers extemporaneously, latching upon a single punishing riff and pounding it over and over (and over and over). The songs aren’t catchy, they are knowingly painful while also maliciously seeking to dispense pain. This is that say, Lulu is a Lou Reed record through and through, in which Metallica is utilized strictly as a backing band to convey their patron’s vibe and musical ideas. When heard in the context of Reed’s work — specifically albums like Berlin and Metal Machine Music as well as the longer, rambling, and more theatrical tracks on late-period LPs like 2000’s Ecstasy — Lulu seems less like an odd curveball and more like a natural progression.

An underrated aspect of Reed’s music is how he blurs the line between extremely grotesque narratives and deadpan comedy in a manner that is more akin to the films of David Lynch than rock ‘n’ roll songs (or the commercial metal of Metallica). Take one of the album’s best tracks, “Pumping Blood,” which is so gory and outré that it goes beyond regular horror and into pitch-black comedy (while also being pretty horrific). “Blood in the foyer, the bathroom, the tea room, the kitchen, with her knives splayed,” Reed sings, “I will swallow your sharpest cutter / Like a colored man’s dick.” This, again, is an album that goes out of its way to offend mainstream sensibilities. But behind the bluster and the provocation are Reed’s most open expressions of vulnerability ever on record.

The one song on Lulu that even haters like Pitchfork and Klosterman copped to kinda sorta liking is the final track, “Junior Dad.” It is also, certainly not coincidentally, the most melodic and accessible number, even though it drones on (there is a literal extended drone at the end of the song) for more than 19 minutes. Over a lovely “Fade To Black”-style creep, Reed sings not about blood or copulating dogs but his own deepest, darkest fears and desires. It’s the unexpected tenderness after a grueling stroll through hell, a moment of grace that feels like a deathbed confession, a man looking up to heaven and wondering if there is a place for him there. “Would you come to me if I was half drowning? / An arm above the last wave? / Would you come to me? Would you pull me up? / Would the effort really hurt you? / Is it unfair to ask you, to help pull me up?”

I wonder if Lulu would have been received differently had Lou Reed died immediately after it was released — like David Bowie right after Blackstar — rather than two years later. Heard now, it has an undeniable melancholy that it didn’t have in 2011, because the end-of-life reflective aspects of the record are so much more apparent.

“I’ll always remember his fragility,” Lars Ulrich wrote after Reed died in 2013. In a piece for the Guardian, he revealed that Reed — as he was with most people — was stand-offish with Metallica initially. It was only after he learned to trust his collaborators that he let his guard down.

“When people talk, it comes from their brain; I don’t know where his words came from, but they came from somewhere else,” Ulrich concluded. “Emotional, physical, everything – it really resonated with me. I wanted to give him strength, and I think Metallica gave him strength. His being was so beautiful once that guard went away, and it was childlike.”

That heart behind the tough facade is what I connect with on Lulu, and it’s why the album feels better suited to 2020 than perhaps it was to 2011. In a year in which we’ve all experienced so much pain and loss, I take solace from a record that confronts the worst parts of being alive head on, in a manner that is so fearless and stubbornly vital that it reminds me of the best parts of being alive.

Paul McCartney and Bob Dylan are two of the most respected and continually loved musical icons from their era. They’re both all-time greats, but the former Beatle admits that in some ways, he wishes he was more like Dylan.

McCartney was asked about Dylan’s new album Rough And Rowdy Ways in a recent interview and he responded, “I always like what he does. Sometimes I wish I was a bit more like Bob. He’s legendary… and doesn’t give a sh*t! But I’m not like that. His new album? I thought it was really good. He writes really well. I love his singing — he came through the standards albums like a total crooner. But, yeah, I like his new stuff. People ask me who I’m a fan of and Bob Dylan and Neil Young always make the list.”

This comes not long after McCartney told Sean Lennon about how much Dylan influenced The Beatles early on in their run, saying, “We certainly got a lot from Dylan and I know I had one of his first LPs at home before The Beatles. I used to play that quite a lot so I was steeped in him and I think your dad was too, but that was just one of the influences.”