Month: November 2020

Latin pop star Bad Bunny is primarily thought of as a reggaeton artist but his versatile style is becoming increasingly harder to define by the day — especially after the release of his new album El Último Tour Del Mundo. He released the new album just today with very little promotion but it’s already running up its streams and turning the perception of Bad Bunny upside down. Appearing solo on The Tonight Show to celebrate the release, Bad Bunny goes full Juice WRLD, blending pop, punk, and trap for a DIY performance of “Yo Visto Así.”

Bad Bunny was recently diagnosed with COVID-19, which already forced him to cancel one performance at the American Music Awards, but he refused to let that stop him from appearing on The Tonight Show. Instead, he played the whole set from his home, sitting on a couch with a guitar, digital drum set, and his mic, splicing together the three different takes for a cool rendition of the defiant anthem in which he plays his own backup band.

Bunny also interviewed with host Jimmy Fallon via video call — isn’t technology great? — explaining his role on Narcos: Mexico and breaking down the album art for El Último Tour Del Mundo.

Watch Bad Bunny’s The Tonight Show performance above.

When it comes to the new Academy Awards diversity rules that aren’t even set to take effect until 2024, Andy Samberg doesn’t want to hear any complaints. The actor delivered a blunt message to Academy voters who have already started griping about the rules change, which Samberg feels are easy to implement. In fact, they’re a little too easy, which makes the pushback all the more frustrating to the Brooklyn 99 star.

Via Variety:

Samberg says “the parameters if you look at them closely… you can have the “whitest” cast in the history of cinema and still very easily meet them by just doing a few key roles behind the camera. People who have problems with it can f*ck off.”

Following Parasite sweeping the 2020 Oscars, the new rules were announced in September 2020 as part of the Academy’s efforts to drive much needed diversity in the film community. As Samberg notes, the standards are not that hard to meet, so there shouldn’t be any issues. You can take a look at a breakdown of the new changes via the Oscars website:

– Nominees must, to the tune of at least 30% of a cast, include actors from underrepresented groups in “significant” roles;
– Same percentage as the above, but in regards to a nominated film’s behind-the scenes players, including both leadership and crew;
– Paid apprenticeships and internships (industry opportunities) must clearly be a priority for nominated films; and
– Audience development teams (marketing, publicity, and distribution) must also prioritize significant representation.

Samberg made the comments while promoting his latest film, Palm Springs, which is currently available to stream on Hulu.

(Via Variety)

The world lost the widely influential musician John Prine this year, but his memory still lives on through his iconic music. Kurt Vile paid tribute to the late singer with his recent EP Speed, Sound, Lonely KV. Now, Vile brings his cover of Prine’s 1986 “Speed Of The Sound Of Loneliness” to Late Night With Seth Meyers.

Armed with just his acoustic guitar, Vile offered a soulful rendition of Prine’s song for Thanksgiving. Introducing Vile to the stage, Meyers said the track resonates with those who can’t be with their families this holiday season: “My family loved John Prine and we booked this act because we thought it’d be the perfect song to listen to together on our couch. But now we can’t be together, and it was unplanned, but this is a perfect for anyone who’s not with their loved ones this year.”

Along with covering Prine’s song on his EP, Vile was also able to collaborate with the singer on the track “How Lucky.” Speaking about experience, Vile said: “The truth is John was my hero for a long time when he came into The Butcher Shoppe to recut one of his deepest classics with me. And, man, I was floating and flying and I couldn’t hear anything he told me while he was there till after he was gone for the night. A couple nights later we were playing ‘How Lucky’ together again; this time onstage at the Grand Ole Opry on New Year’s Eve at the turn of 2020. Nothing like seeing John and his band of musical brothers and family and friends playing into the new decade in front of an adoring audience on that stage in Nashville, TN… and, yup, that’s just how lucky we all got that night.”

Watch Kurt Vile perform “Speed Of The Sound Of Loneliness” on Late Night With Seth Meyers above.

Speed, Sound, Lonely KV is out now via Matador. Get it here.

Click to download here.

On the latest Pod Yourself A Gun, Gloria throws things, the Russian gets away, and “the poo ass was dog.” This week Matt and Vince are thankful for their guest, Jack O’Brien from the Daily Zeitgeist, and season 3 episode 11 of The Sopranos, Pine Barrens.

This episode is so good, it’s a cliché to bring it up. As Jack points out during the podcast, saying “Pine Barrens” is your favorite Sopranos episode is like saying Michael Jordan is your favorite basketball player. It’s not a bad choice but come on — try to surprise me.

If you haven’t seen it in a while, you might remember this Steve Buscemi-directed episode as the one where Paulie and Chris get lost in the woods. What you might not remember are Gloria’s London broil toss and Jackie Jr.’s Scrabble prowess. If last week’s episode was a reminder that The Sopranos is a soap opera, this week’s episode is a reminder that it is also a sitcom, because it’s got jokes.

Are some of the jokes too sitcom-y? Vince says yes. I say VA FANGOOL, Vince. What happened to Valery? Don’t ask David Chase. What is the geopolitical significance of Paulie’s satin finish manicure? Listen now to find out.

If you’re not going to share your Tic Tacs, at least share a five star review on Apple Podcasts. (-written by Brent Flyberg)

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This Thanksgiving holiday turned out to be a weird one for many reasons. Not only did the pandemic make “gathering” a very bad idea for Americans, but the soon-to-no-longer-be-president threw a Twitter tantrum about “National Security” possibly being threatened by Twitter’s “this claim about election fraud is disputed”-style warnings. And maybe he was complaining about certain unflattering trends. It’s a long story (as with all things this year), but this happened after he addressed reporters from behind a tiny desk, which led to the rise of the #DiaperDon and #TrumpTantrum hashtags. Is this reality? Of course it is, but this whole situation needs some parsing out.

No official statements have surfaced to explain why Trump (or someone on his team) decided that he should address the press from behind a child-sized piece of furniture, but it happened. This is where he stated, in response to questions about whether he’d leave the White House peacefully in January 2021, “Certainly I will, and you know that.” He still has not conceded but told reporters that he’d leave office if the Electoral College did their thing and confirmed Joe Biden’s victory. Still, Trump (baselessly) added, “If they do, they’ve made a mistake… this election was a fraud.”

Oh, and here’s that tiny desk in action.

From behind this miniature piece of furniture, Trump railed at a reporter, “I’m the president of the United States. Don’t ever talk to the president that way!” (SNL will have so much fun with this.) The #DiaperDon and #TrumpTantrum hashtags were born.

Trump, of course, tweeted all day and night, and he also did a lot of retweeting, so there’s no telling whether he was upset about these hashtags, but who knows? He first complained about how how wished a Happy Thanksgiving to the armed forces, yet the “Fake News Media” allegedly muddled his “real message,” which is that “the 2020 Election was RIGGED, and that I WON!”

The Twitter tantrum continued. Trump complained, “Twitter is sending out totally false ‘Trends’ that have absolutely nothing to do with what is really trending in the world. They make it up, and only negative ‘stuff.’”

Trump appeared to argue that “National Security” was somehow under siege:

As The Hill notes, Trump and the GOP wish to repeal Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which they believe “allows social media companies to discriminate against conservative content on their websites, although such content is often amplified.” Whether Trump is upset that his tweets are being marked with warnings, or he doesn’t like unflattering hashtags, who knows? Probably both.

Jay-Z is cutting a deal with Netflix. The rapper is reportedly planning to be the executive producer on an upcoming Netflix thriller titled Forty Acres, a big screen adaptation of a 2014 book by Dwayne Alexander.

Deadline was the first to report about the project, saying the film is still in its developing stages and describing it as a crossover between Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Tom Cruise’s 1993 film The Firm. Apparently, Forty Acres follows the story of a civil rights attorney who is suddenly forced to fight for his life when he joins an elite Black organization with a terrifying secret.

This isn’t the only project that the rapper has signed up to executive produce this year. It was announced in August that Jay-Z will be producing the upcoming six-part series Women Of The Movement. Airing on ABC, the series centers around influential women in the civil rights movement, starting with Emmett Till’s mother Mamie Till Mobley who dedicated her life to seeking justice after the murder of her son in 1955.

The film is the latest entrepreneurial endeavor that Hov has hopped on. In the last few months alone, the rapper backed an at-home workout equipment start-up and broke ground on his own cannabis brand.

Guyanese rapper Saint JHN bypassed Kanye West‘s approval to get a verse on his raunchy new song “Smack DVD,” revealing in the stripper-filled visualizer that Kanye probably won’t see it until it’s officially out. The tongue-in-cheek message plays out via title cards on a blank screen during Kanye’s verse, informing viewers that Kanye didn’t get approval on the video and jokingly asking for “some Yeezys in a colorway for not a cult.”

Saint JHN just released his third album, While the World Was Burning, a week ago via HITCO and his own Godd Complexx imprint. Ahead of the release, he planned to release a video for the single “Roses” with Future but instead canceled the shoot to donate the budget to charity. He did release the single “Gorgeous,” while the album itself features appearances from 6lack, A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie, DaBaby, JID, Kehlani, and Lil Uzi Vert. Kanye also appears on a song called “Pray 4 Me.”

The rapper has steadily increased in notoriety since changing his stage name to Saint JHN in 2016. After being cosigned by Solange Knowles, he featured on her sister Beyonce’s The Lion King: The Gift project, as well as Vic Mensa’s V Tape and “Famous” with Octavian.

Watch the “Smack DVD” visualizer above.

In a highly memorable moment a few weeks ago, Adam Driver stopped by the Last Week Tonight season finale, and he proceeded to “berate” John Oliver for spending the better part of 2020 basically begging the Kylo Ren actor to physically destroy him. The whole thing became an obsessive, if not downright outrageous, gag where Oliver referred to Driver as a “f*ckable redwood,” an “unwashed buffalo,” a “forlorn block,” and other oddly sexual names with menacing connotations. In short, it was all very weird, and Oliver will be the first to admit that.

While stopping by Late Night with Seth Meyers, Oliver revealed that the joke was initially just a weird idea from one of the writers, so they gave it a shot back in March, and the audience hated it. “It felt like only 40 percent enjoyed it,” Oliver said, and that’s when the obsession started forming. The writers doubled down on the gag, and once again, the audience wasn’t thrilled, which only fueled Oliver and the writers to push the joke even further. Finally, they realized they had to “put a ribbon” on the whole thing, and that’s when they hesitatingly reached out to Driver. As they feared, he was aware of the gag and found it “strange,” but he was also in.

As both Meyers and Oliver noted, Driver’s performance was incredible, and Oliver says it’s even more impressive because the two couldn’t even see each other. They were just using audio, and Oliver readily admits that “I was giving him nothing.” That’s how good Driver is at acting, and Oliver still can’t get over how jarring it is to see their separate sides of the screen in the final product.

You can watch Oliver describe the life and death of his Adam Driver obsession in the opening minutes above.

Miley Cyrus released her anticipated record Plastic Hearts on Friday. Because she couldn’t celebrate her album’s debut with a conventional release concert, the singer instead opted to host a variety show in a TikTok livestream. The show featured sketches, games, and a very convincing prank pulled on Iggy Azalea.

The prank started when Cyrus and Azalea were together in a dressing room. They were chatting about Cyrus’s new music when the room suddenly went up in smoke. A smoke alarm went off but Azalea realized the door was locked from the outside. In a moment of panic, Azalea opted to hide underneath her coat and shout “we can survive this” while Cyrus dialed 911. But just seconds later, Cyrus revealed the entire ordeal was nothing but a prank. Thankfully, no fire had actually started and neither of the musicians were in any real danger.

After a clip of the prank was posted on Twitter, Azalea made it clear she had no hard feelings about the incident. “I had called out and tried to open the door before that!” she wrote. “My plan was to get low, put covers over our head, while she called what I thought was 911.”

Watch a clip of the prank above.

Plastic Hearts is out now via RCA. Get it here.

(SPOILERS from The Mandalorian “Chapter 13: The Jedi” will be found below.)

As if the first live-action appearance of Rosario Dawson’s Ahsoka Tano wasn’t enough, Chapter 13 of The Mandalorian took several major steps towards pulling the bounty hunting series even deeper into the Star Wars universe. One of those steps is the revelation that Ahsoka is still searching for Grand Admiral Thrawn, who disappeared with her fellow Jedi Ezra Bridger during the season finale of Star Wars: Rebels. Without getting too deep into the weeds, Thrawn has been a major presence in Star Wars lore, going all the way back to the very early ’90s. In a nutshell, he was the Big Bad following the death of the Emperor. Obviously, Star Wars canon has changed since then, but Thrawn was reintroduced with all of his character traits still intact. And now his name drop in The Mandalorian opens up all kinds of possibilities, including the chance that he can still claim his place as the New Republic’s next major threat. There’s still 25 years to go until The Force Awakens, so that leaves lots of time to play with as Disney+ expands its live-action Star Wars offerings even further.

But we’re not the only ones nerding out over the big Thrawn reveal. Star Wars fans who’ve caught the latest The Mandalorian episode are absolutely freaking out at the chance of seeing a live-action version of the classic villain and all of the tantalizing story paths that come with it.

And for the extra Star Wars nerds out there, here’s a theory that could shed some new light on the final moments of Star Wars: Rebels.

It’s something to think about.