Month: November 2020

Riverside, California rapper Hook has an unconventional flow and a quirky ear for beats. As she puts it on her new song “Take You Home,” “I’m a rapper but I don’t have to rhyme,” furthering her boast by claiming “I could literally get on a track / Whisper, yell — it’s still a hit.” Borrowing a sample of Lisa Lisa’s 1984 hit “I Wonder If I Take You Home,” she does a lot more than that, reeling off a relentless stream of stinging punchlines with an ear-to-ear grin the whole time.

Hook has been prolific in her relatively short time producing and releasing music, counting no less than six projects since 2019 on her Genius profile, including three in 2020 (Crashed My Car, Pretty Bitty: The Mixtape, and I Love You 2, Hook). While she might not be a household name — yet — she’s got the reckless, devil-may-care attitude that has propelled many a rule-breaking rebel to meme-making stardom and she’s racked up an impressive list of co-signers among the left-of-center collection of rappers that includes Father and Zack Fox.

She’s every bit as scathingly funny as they are and she’s offering up something new and different, which can be a help or a hindrance, depending on what you’re looking for. Either way, she’s working with a recipe that will grab eyeballs and attention, which is half the battle these days anyway.

Watch Hook’s bubbly UPROXX Sessions performance above.

UPROXX Sessions is Uproxx’s performance show featuring the hottest up-and-coming acts you should keep an eye on. Featuring creative direction from LA promotion collective, Ham On Everything, and taking place on our “bathroom” set designed and painted by Julian Gross, UPROXX Sessions is a showcase of some of our favorite performers, who just might soon be yours, too..

As the NBA prepares for a potentially massive financial windfall in 2021, Shams Charania of The Athletic reported on Thursday that the league is hoping to host fans next season, likely in suites and courtside, as a means of maintaining social distance while also boosting revenue a bit.

As Charania notes, these fans would be asked to wear masks, stay distanced from one another, and potentially even get tested prior to entry. Charania also reports the capacity would likely be subject to the public health guidelines in each market, as well as the potential availability of a vaccine.

For a league that prioritized full safety in its Bubble over the summer and pushed back its reset many weeks in order to develop protocols, it would be a big leap to integrate the wildcard element of fans as soon as December or January. What this mostly shows is just how desperate the financial situation is, just as it was a driving force for the NFL when fans were allowed into pro football games in late summer.

It’s too early to know exactly what this will look like, but the league and players’ union are clearly moving toward an agreement here, and fans attending games would be an unexpected twist should both sides agree.

After a controversial and ultimately decent theatrical release, Tenet will be arriving on home video just in time for the holidays. The time-bending Christopher Nolan film will release on 4K, Blu Ray, DVD and digital on Dec. 15. Via Deadline:

The Tenet 4K UHD combo pack and Blu-ray will also have the hour-long featurette “Looking at the World in a New Way: The Making of Tenet” which will explore the development and production of the film as told by the cast and crew. Tenet will retail for $44.95 on 4K UHD, $35.99 on Blu-ray and $28.98 on DVD.

Warner Bros. and Nolan faced an onslaught of criticism after releasing the film theatrically in the middle of a pandemic. While the film performed well overseas, it’s American box office take is just north of $50 million, and that’s after being in theaters since August. To put things in perspective, a blockbuster movie of Tenet‘s caliber would normally expect to do $100 million on its opening weekend (although it did score $333 million at the global box office)

However, Nolan stated that he is “thrilled” with Tenet‘s performances given the circumstances, and he recently said that he fears the wrong lessons are being learned from the film’s unorthodox release.

“Rather than looking at where the film has worked well and how that can provide them with much needed revenue,” Nolan told the Los Angeles Times. “They’re looking at where it hasn’t lived up to pre-COVID expectations and will start using that as an excuse to make exhibition take all the losses from the pandemic instead of getting in the game and adapting — or rebuilding our business, in other words.”

Fortunately, American audiences will soon to get to see if Tenet was worth all of the hype and intense discussion when the film is more safely available to watch in December.

(Via Deadline)

The best new hip-hop albums coming out this week include projects from Bree Runway, Doe Beezy & Southside, Nav & Wheezy, and Phora.

It’s been a wild week in a truly wild year but as we approach the holiday season, the new hip-hop album release train has slowed down to give everybody a bit of a break. With only a handful of new projects dropping — and a rumored deluxe version of The Kid Laroi’s debut F*ck Love — we’re nearing the time to take stock of what has turned out to be one of rap’s most prolific years, even despite the pandemic and live entertainment shutdown. Fortunately, with so few projects dropping, there may actually be enough time to not only listen to this week’s slate of releases but also catch up on some of the previous ones.

Here are all the best new hip-hop albums coming out this week.

Bree Runway — 2000and4eva

This Hackney, London genre masher gives off very strong Azealia Banks Music Vibes (as opposed to Azealia Banks Twitter Vibes, which are awful) by way of Lady Leshurr and “Super Bass” Nicki Minaj. Her song “Gucci” with Maliibu Miitch racked up a combined million views between its two videos on YouTube within the last two months, and her electro-influenced blend of hip-hop and pop is a sure mood booster for these troubled times.

Doe Beezy & Southside — Demons R Us

Freebandz-signed Doe Beezy takes a much more straightforward approach to his trap-centric bars than his boss Future, making him a perfect candidate for fans of Southern rap who prefer its purveyors enunciate. Southside is, of course, one of the foremost suppliers of menacing, cavernous trap sounds. Together, they have created a truly sinister-sounding crossover project designed to blow out trunks and put the streets on notice.

Nav & Wheezy — Emergency Tsunami

Teasing this joint mixtape with a cheeky trailer just a week before its intended release, Nav looks to — ahem — tide fans over between full-length releases. Linking up with “Turks” production partner Wheezy, who has had a productive year of his own knocking out bass-booming beats for everyone from DaBaby to Gunna to Lil Baby and Lil Uzi Vert, Nav will try to recreate the chemistry from his pair of Good Intentions collaborations with Wheezy, bringing along features like Lil Keed for the ride.

Phora — With Love 2

Newly released from his deal with Warner Records, Phora went right back to his winning formula last year with Bury Me With Dead Roses. The Orange County rapper’s unique crossover of rapid-fire flows with heartbroken, emotional rhymes proved to be intact and he’ll look to keep the trend going on With Love 2, the follow-up to the US Rap chart-topping 2016 mixtape that first put him on the map.

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

After undergoing surgery on his left knee in January to fix major lingering soreness, the NBA shutdown hit and Blake Griffin has effectively been away from competitive basketball for nearly a year. New Pistons general manager Troy Weaver quieted down the concern about Griffin’s continued rehab by telling reporters on Thursday that he fully expected Griffin to be available for the start of the 2020-21 season.

Throughout the offseason, there had been rumors that Griffin was doing well, and he spoke with reporters in June, telling them he felt “great” and had been fully working out individually for most of the summer. It wasn’t just that Griffin was recovering from his January surgery, but also an arthroscopic procedure last April, shortly after a a gutsy return in the 2019 playoffs.

With Griffin healthy, the Pistons not only get their best player back, but could turn Griffin into a genuinely interesting trade chip. While his health is a clear red flag and his salary is sizable, many of the players on the market, from Gordon Hayward to Andrew Wiggins to Chris Paul to Al Horford, also sit on huge salaries. This offseason could see one or two of those be flipped for one another, in which case Griffin could come into play.

No matter what Weaver sees as Griffin’s future with the team, it’s obviously promising to see him return to the court considering how much injuries have hampered him throughout his career.

With their Song Machine series, Gorillaz invite some of today’s popular artists to work with them on new music. Dropping last month, their record featured the likes of Aminé, Jpegmafia, and The Cure’s Robert Smith. The collection is littered with talent, and on Thursday, the group returned to share the video for their Beck-featuring track “The Valley Of The Pagans.”

Directed by Jamie Hewlett, their “Valley Of The Pagans” video sees Gorillaz travel through time and arrive in a post-apocalyptic version of LA. Over the course of several minutes, the group takes a Grand Theft Auto approach to driving, even leading the police on a high-speed chase throughout the city.

Ahead of their Beck collaboration, Gorillaz vocalist Damon Albarn revealed that they are working on an animated feature-length film about the band. “We signed contracts, we’ve begun scripts and stuff. Making an animated film that’s kind of abstract is quite a big risk for a movie studio because they’re very expensive,” he said in an interview with Bryce Segall on Radio.com’s New Arrivals show. “If you’re telling a slightly obtuse, weird story that only sometimes makes any sense, it’s quite difficult. That’s what we’ve discovered. But we will do it, we are doing it. I see a lot of people doing animated videos these days but I don’t think they really touch the quality of ours. We’re more in the world of Studio Ghibli.”

Watch Gorillaz and Beck in their “The Valley Of The Pagans” video above.

Song Machine, Season One: Strange Timez is out now via Parlophone/Atlantic. Get it here.

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

Do you remember what it was about Legos that you really enjoyed as a child? For many, it was perfectly re-creating the picture on the box. You would painstakingly follow the booklet, step-by-step, until you reach the very end and you have a perfect Lego creation, just as the makers intended. For the rest, there was a whole different kind of joy — you saw something greater, a chance to take these pieces and build something on your own. You built rocket ships, cars, and entire lego cities from nothing but the blocks they gave you. They gave you an opportunity at creativity, and you thrived in it.

Maybe it’s time for video games to do the same. We are in a time where gamers have seemingly more power than ever. Sandbox games like Grand Theft Auto, Yakuza, and Far Cry give you endless options and activities aside from the story. How you choose to approach every time you start up a save file is up to you. Sports games like Madden, NBA 2K, and FIFA give players the ability to create their own teams and logos, and fill them with their own players. In Fortnite, you can currently play as Iron Man and go eliminate She Hulk with Dr. Doom’s gauntlets.

But what if we could do even more? What if games just gave us the tools right away to do whatever we wanted? Forget giving us endless options in the constraints of the game itself, give us endless options with what we can build within those games. Imagine if in Grand Theft Auto 6, you could not only explore whatever fictional city the game had for you, but you could create your own? Think of a Battle Royale like Fortnite where you can change the rules or make your own map to fight it out on.

The truth is that there are games that are already doing this, while others have been doing this for as long as they have existed, but the technology is there now. Plus, the internet gives us the ability to share creations instantly. Gamers have endless creativity at their fingertips.

Ever since games were invented, players have been trying to push them to their limits by taking the tools and making something greater. Entire communities have been built around this. They even inspired one of the most popular games of the current generation of consoles: Mario Maker.

When emulators started to get popular in the mid-to-late 2000s, there were a lot of fans who just used them as an opportunity to play old games they missed out on during the NES and SNES era due to low carts produced or were seeking out the nostalgia from those old consoles that had been sold or broke over the years. Then there was another group: Hackers that took these old games and made their own creations with them, especially in Super Mario World.

For as popular a game as Super Mario World is on its own merits, it may be even more popular for what it did in the rom hacking community. Hackers took the game and made insanely challenging levels out of it to test the skills of themselves and their friends. One of the most famous of these is “Kaizo Mario,” a ridiculously hard rom hack that seemed impossible to beat without save states and some luck. Some people even went viral for their play-throughs of it.

As time went on, these hacks became more well known for not having particularly good level design in mind. Everyone was trying to make the next “Kaizo.” Eventually, the fad faded into a smaller community as fans at large explored other interests. Then, E3 2015 and the return of the Nintendo World Championships happened. It was something of an open secret that this sort of Mario game would be released, but its unveiling at E3 finally put things on display. Then, the World Championships featured a pair of players on going head-to-head on a Nintendo-built level, which captivated onlookers.

Mario Maker 1 may as well have been rom hack maker. But instead of hacking the game, Nintendo gave fans the tools to make their own levels. It was a level of freedom with their mascot franchise that Nintendo had never given fans before. This resulted was some truly creative levels by long-time fans of the series. It gave them an opportunity to explore their level creation skills and make whatever they wanted to appeal to whomever they wanted.

Nintendo makes Mario games that everyone can enjoy. Fans make games that their friends can enjoy — this has been the case since the first Mario game dropped decades ago, and it’s been the case ever since. Mario Maker 1 allowed everyone to take Mario to a new level and thanks to its emphasis on level creation has arguably led to one of the best tools in video games today.

Ever since Mario Maker‘s release, we have seen more publishers embrace the idea of letting fans create what they want with their video games. Think of games like Dreams, where the entire concept is built around players having close to free rein to do what they want. In Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1+ 2, Activision brought back the skate park creation tool that was originally unveiled in THPS2. The key difference here was that players can now share parks with each other, and the results are fantastic.

Eventually, those old lines get, well, old, and the high scores become impossible to reach if you continuously play the old courses. But with the park creation tool, there is now endless fun with the Tony Hawk remake. You can be done with it right now, but in two months, you are guaranteed to find some brand new courses to skate through. It has given players near-endless freedom to do what they want with their own parks.

This applies to the simulation worlds as well. The new PGA 2K21 only has so many golf courses you can master, but the course creation feature allows you to play as many as you want. Make a course of all Par 5s, or a course with nothing but hazards between you and the green. The ending point is really up to the player.

Animal Crossing has been moving towards giving the player more freedom to make choices for years and the Nintendo Switch version finally just went ahead and told the player they could design their island however they want. Roads, dirt paths, cliffs, waterfalls, rivers, and building spots are all completely up to the player. The only part of the game’s overall design that seems to be out of the player’s hands is where the town hall is. Everything around that is free for customization. This has resulted in every town being a unique experience for every player.

Perhaps nobody went as deep as Overwatch did when they unveiled their player creation tool, Workshop. Blizzard has a long history of allowing player creation. Anyone that played Warcraft when it was a real-time strategy game likely has years of memories creating their own maps to fight on and using other players’ created maps in online matches, but Overwatch took it a step further. The tool itself is difficult to understand and requires a lot of trial and error. Even some general idea of how basic game design works. As a result, the mode is difficult to master, but the possibilities with it are almost endless.

We all make our own stories through these creation tools, endless opportunities to experience and endlessly replay these games. In a world where developers seem to constantly be trying to find ways to keep players engaged, maybe giving them the freedom of a painter with canvas is the way to do it. Give players the tools to make something spectacular. It started with rom hacks, and now, the developers are intentionally putting the tools in the hands of the players. They’ve dumped the Legos on the floor and are telling them to go make whatever they want. Maybe it’s time every game gives this a try as well.

Maluma had himself a Latin hit this summer with “Hawái,” which topped the Billboard Hot Latin Songs chart as well as charts in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Panama, and Spain. He also performed it at this year’s MTV VMAs. Now the song has gotten a second wind thanks to a remix featuring one of 2020’s biggest stars: The Weeknd.

The video begins with The Weeknd singing the song on a club stage, and he sings on his opening verse, “So now he’s your heaven / You’re lying to yourself and him to make me jealous / You put on such an act when you’re sleepin’ together / All this ’cause I said I don’t want marriage / I don’t want marriage.” On the hook, he gets some Spanish lyrics in, too.

Maluma recently said of the song, “This is one of my favorite tracks. It was written [by several of Maluma’s longtime collaborators] in a song camp in Hawaii. Then the song reached [songwriter/producer] Edgar Barrera and she showed it to me. I fell in love with the intro chorus and I wrote the verse. When I finished recording I called my management and said, ‘Boys, I have the first single.’ And that was the beginning of this Papi Juancho project. It was one of the few songs I recorded before COVID. And it’s a very real song, very from the heart, with good lyrics, and good content. Truth is, I get bored of the same old reggaeton. It’s good to add lyrical content to the songs.”

Watch the video for the “Hawái” remix above.

If it wasn’t obvious from the No Time to Die trailer, Lashana Lynch wants to make something clear: she is the new 007.

The Captain Marvel actress would be the first woman, let alone Black woman, to take on that title in the James Bond cinematic universe (also known as “movies”). When the news leaked last year and the worst people on the internet got mad about 007 not being a white dude, Lynch “deleted her social-media apps, meditated, and saw no one but family, while comforting herself with the knowledge that the aggressive comments were ultimately not personal,” according to Harper’s Bazaar.

“I am one Black woman – if it were another Black woman cast in the role, it would have been the same conversation, she would have got the same attacks, the same abuse,” she told the publication. “I just have to remind myself that the conversation is happening and that I’m a part of something that will be very, very revolutionary.”

No Time to Die takes place at least five years after Spectre, and it’s rumored that Lynch’s character Nomi has become the new 007 after James Bond retires from the spy game. Then they pull him back for One. Last. Job. (I assume.) She worked with co-writer Phoebe Waller-Bridge to ensure that Nomi has “a fresh female perspective” that was “subtly drawn, believable, perhaps even a little awkward.” Waller-Bridge is very good at that.

No Time to Die, which also stars Daniel Craig, Rami Malek, Ana de Armas, Léa Seydoux, and the voice of Paddington, is scheduled to open in April 2021.

(Via Harper’s Bazaar)

John Fetterman was already a legend, and now, he’s telling it like it is with the Trump campaign’s Pennsylvania tactics as the president continues to meltdown (and claim victory in states that he hasn’t won) while states flip blue. The tatted-up former small-town mayor may look like a DC villain (or as our own Brian Grubb put it, “Like The Undertaker had a poli sci degree,” and Fetterman has responded), but he’s a true man of the people. Much of his ink symbolizes his time as Braddock mayor, including the town’s zip code and (as he told the New York Times in 2011) “the dates of the five people we lost to senseless violence in Braddock since I took office.” Now, he’s Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor, and the president’s knocking down his doorstep while claiming that the election is being “stolen” — simply because votes are being counted.

Earlier this week, Fetterman described Trump as a “sad internet troll” due to his eagerness to spread misinformation. On Thursday, he appeared on MSNBC for an update on Trump’s desperate manueverings while the reelection slips further from his angry-fisted grasp. While assuring Stephanie Ruhle that ballot counting is “drawing to a close” and proceeding “smoothly,” the Democrat answered the anchor’s question about any possible “irregularities” with a spot-on response.

“You have the Trump campaign showing up on our corner in Philadelphia like some sad carnival barker, making outlandish claims,” Fetterman stated. “That’s the only problem.”

As he further relayed, “math is math,” and poll workers will continue to hammer away at more than 700,000 ballots that remain uncounted. He also believes that the results will “probably deliver our Commonwealth to the [former] vice president at this point, based on previous modeling of how those ballots have been performing with respect to, whether it’s for the [former] vice president, or the president.”

Also this week, Fetterman chatted with Fox Business, where he hilariously declared of the Trump team, “For them to claim they won is like me saying I have a full head of hair.” He self-deprecatingly tweeted about this, too.

Aaaand we’ve got a Lloyd Dobler reference. Someone get a boombox.