Month: December 2020

I’ve been doing an annual list of best podcasts for a few years now, and every year it changes a little bit. I like to think that the list evolves along with the medium, beginning as “best true crime” podcasts and now basically coming to encompass any serialized non-fiction (I’m not quite at a point where I can listen to fiction podcasts, maybe someday). For the most part, I just want a compelling story to listen to while I’m driving, cooking, gardening, etc. Sometimes that still means a murder mystery, but not always.

Which is to say, these are admittedly somewhat arbitrary parameters. They exclude a lot of great podcasts I listen to regularly (not to mention my own, not that they’d make the list anyway): Reply All, Chapo Trap House, Hardcore History, etc, and of course Uproxx’s podcasts, People’s Party and Indiecast. I don’t include those kinds of podcasts on the list simply because I wouldn’t want to just recite my same favorite handful of things every year. This is more a place for new, single-story podcasts, preferably with a beginning, middle, and end. Like a list of best movies, only for best podcasts, essentially.

A couple that didn’t make the list that I also enjoyed were The Gravy Train, about Toronto’s crack-smoking ex-mayor Rob Ford (I always wanted to know more about that story), which I couldn’t put on the list because it came out last year. Ditto the also-very-good Stay Free: The Story of The Clash, narrated by Chuck D from Public Enemy. That was a must-listen that somehow slipped under my radar when it came out. The first season of Uncover, Escaping NXIVM, came out in 2018, but I only heard about it this year, right in that sweet spot between having gotten entirely fed up enough with The Vow but before I stopped craving NXIVM content entirely. That was indispensable (I’ve heard Seduced is great but I don’t have Starz), not necessarily a top 10 podcast, but perfect for anyone who was getting really fed up with Mark Vicente’s bullshit.

Where was I? Oh right, the list. Fine, I’m finished prefacing.

10. Floodlines

Hurricane Katrina is one of those stories I assumed I knew but quickly realized I didn’t. Floodlines, hosted by Van R. Newkirk II, does a wonderful job of not just telling stories from in and around Hurricane Katrina (though it does do that) but trying to synthesize them into a fuller understanding of what actually happened, and what it means in the context of history. Just from an entertainment standpoint, it also mixes a bunch of different kinds of audio — host narration, interviews, music, period audio, diegetic sound — in a way that’s interesting, but doesn’t feel like the kind of too-busy soundscapes you get in some of the pulpier podcasts. You know, the ones that just kind of throw every relevant sound effect at the wall, where you enter the word “hatchet murder” to get a discount on Dude Wipes or whatever. Floodlines doesn’t “cheat,” in that way. In fact, it feels almost conspicuously non-cheatery, if that makes any sense. Performatively above cheap titillation, say. Floodlines is, essentially, the beau ideal of a public radio show.

9. Slow Burn: David Duke

If I remember correctly, some podcasting app recommended this season’s Slow Burn to me after I listed to The Gravy Train, and it was dead on. If Rob Ford was Canada’s early harbinger of Donald Trump’s brand of media circus populism, David Duke was an early harbinger of insurgent, white-washed white supremacy. It’s also another one of those stories you think you know but most likely only understand in the broadest strokes. Hosted by Slate’s national editor and a native Louisianan, Josh Levin, it comes in a very bingeable eight 50-ish minute episodes.

8. Dying For Sex

You know that scene in Fight Club where Edward Norton is at the cancer support group meeting and the bald lady gets up and says “I’m so close to the end and all I want to do is get laid one last time?” Dying For Sex is basically that, as a podcast. If only Chloe from Fight Club had had Tinder she might’ve found a use for all that lube and amyl nitrate. Hosted by Nikki Boyer, Dying For Sex is about Nikki’s best friend Molly’s sex life, and all the ways it grows and transforms as she gets closer to death and stops giving a shit (to reference a different 1999 movie, it’s a little like Office Space in that way). I had a friend and podcast co-host of my own die of cancer a few years back and Dying of Sex did occasionally get too real for me (not to mention making me wonder if I was a bad friend for not having nearly so many introspective conversations with my own friend), but for the most part, it’s personal in the best way, a podcast that goes where it goes because the hosts are who they are. Plus, who doesn’t want to hear weird stories about a stranger’s sex life?

7. Blowback

It’s consistently mind-blowing that people who spearheaded and cheerleaded the Iraq War are still regularly showing up as cable news pundits. And usually in the guise of “responsible adult.” Hey, uh… didn’t you help kill like half a million people? Short of putting those people in jail, the least you can do is remember their crimes, and for that we have Blowback, one of those “why the hell didn’t this exist before now” podcasts. Brendan James and Noah Kulwin deliver a thoroughly-researched, yet somehow non-didactic retelling of the 2003 invasion, its origins, aftermath, key players, and historical relevance. Very few podcasts combine historical and conversational, but Blowback manages it. If I have one criticism, it’s that they can be overly thorough in editing out silences, such that it can feel like an overwhelming torrent of information at times. It could “breathe” a little more. Anyway, I’m glad it exists and it should be required listening.

6. Death In The West

It’s nice that even in an era of mass consolidation in podcasting world, we can still get a podcast like Death In The West, a story about the 1917 murder of labor leader Frank Little in Butte, Montana. Death In The West, narrated by Zach Dundas and produced by a team of actual Montanans, is true crime, broadly speaking, but it’s also about the history of labor in the US and the history of the American West as a whole. Not so much the cowboys and Indians part, but about industrialization, predatory corporations, and local corruption. I don’t know how to say this in a way that doesn’t sound insufferably pretentious, but it also feels like Montana, aurally, in some way. It’s spare and straightforward, honest and forthright, and never “gilds the lily” with too many sound effects or attempts to overdramatize itself like so many podcasts do (I’ll never forget the time the host of Invisibilia made her interview subject shout “you don’t need eyes to see!” I stopped listening immediately and never went back). Granted I’m a sucker for the era of western populism, but Death In The West offers not only the facts of history, but the flavor too.

5. Conviction: American Panic

The Satanic Panic? Yes, please. What a bizarre thing to have happened. While it’s cute to relive a very strange pop-culture phenomenon that many of us vaguely remember, and replay old Geraldo clips of media types fretting over something that so plainly didn’t exist, Conviction: American Panic introduces us to a whole cast of people whose lives were actually ruined by this very stupid thing. American Panic is lurid in the obvious ways, but also: how do mass delusions happen? It’s worth understanding.

4. Chameleon: Hollywood Con Queen

There are few things more compelling than a podcast about a con man (see: Dirty John, et al), and in Chameleon, hosts Vanessa Grigoriadis and Josh Dean have found a doozy of a subject: it seems someone out there has been impersonating powerful women in the entertainment industry and luring gig crew members to Indonesia on their own dime with promises of a fake movie that never pan out. The victims are out weeks of their time and thousands of dollars of their money and the weirdest part is, no one can figure out whether the perpetrator of this fraud is even personally profiting from it. Chameleon comes armed with a hell of a weird story and plenty of recorded audio of the con-person at work, but the best part is, they set out to unmask a fraudster and by the final episode, they actually accomplish it. I’ve come to learn how rare that is in podcasting. It’s the podcast equivalent of calling your shot like Babe Ruth.

3. Dolly Parton’s America

I know, I know, Dolly Parton’s America *technically* came out in 2019 and I’m breaking my own rule by including it. But give me a break, the last episode went up on December 31st, no way was I going to finish it by last year’s deadline! Logistics aside, Dolly Parton’s America is simply a wonderful listen. As a person who is generally skeeved out by celebrity worship (look, I’m sure Keanu Reeves is great, but I’m not going to shit my pants every time he drops an incendiary truthbomb like “I love movies” in public), I was shocked at how much Jad Abumrad made me fall in love with Dolly Parton, a person about whom I previously knew very little. Now I’m thoroughly convinced that she’s one of our finest Americans.

2. Once Upon A Time In The Valley

Every year I make this list it seems I include at least one lurid tale from the world of porn. The surprising thing is that until now, no one had attempted to tell the most famously scandalous tale in the history of porn. That is, in 1986, the discovery that the most famous porn star in the world, Traci Lords, had been using a fake ID and had actually been underage during the filming of all of her movies — except for one. And that one, the only one it was still legal to sell and distribute, was the one that just so happened to have been shot by Lords’ own newly-created production company. Was Lord the innocent victim of the predatory porn industry the Meese commission made her out to be, or the calculating careerist who didn’t care who she stepped on along the way to fame that the porn industry made her out to be?

It can be hard to find porn industry reporting that isn’t biased in one of those two basic ways, but hosts Lili Anolik and Ashley West seem to make a pretty good-faith effort at it. They talk to everyone they can who was there at the time (all characters, as you might imagine), in a podcast that manages to be both seedy and romantic in a nostalgic way. The style of it can be overwhelming at times (the attempt at noir, the faux-extemporaneous dialogue between hosts), but I’ve never heard anyone give porn its proper due as an influence on pop culture, or connect porn’s influence to the rise of everyone from Kim Kardashian to Donald Trump. Once Upon A Time In The Valley is entertaining storytelling, but also smart analysis.

1. Tom Brown’s Body

Okay, I admit it, for all my talk of “it’s not just about true-crime anymore,” my top choice is a podcast with a classic “young dead body in a small town” hook. In 2016, a popular high school kid disappeared the night before Thanksgiving from Canadian, a small town in West Texas. At first, there isn’t even a body.

That sounds like fairly standard true crime fodder, so what makes Tom Brown’s Body, from Texas Monthly and Skip Hollandsworth, so endlessly engrossing? It’s probably the fact that every character seems to have a couple of layers of hidden weirdness. Tom Brown’s Body quickly becomes more than just a whodunnit, evolving into a wildly entertaining small-town noir where no one is quite on the level. That includes two key figures in the story: the town Sheriff, who seems to believe, against all logic, that Tom Brown has somehow killed and disappeared his own body, and the Sheriff’s nemesis, a fame-hungry private detective hired by the Browns, who manages to seem wildly untrustworthy even as he does what seem like the right things. It’s quite a journey, the rare podcast that I burned through as fast as I could and couldn’t stop thinking about even after it was over.

Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can access his archive of reviews here.

After collapsing and being hospitalized in 2019 due to his party-animal lifestyle, Bronx rapper French Montana had a choice to make. After spending, in his estimation, nearly “20 years without a break,” the Coke Boys frontman had to give up doing drugs and drinking if he wanted to see another 20-year run of success in hip-hop. So, as he tells XXL in a cover story published Monday, he cut out his vices and is now a year sober.

“I had a little health scare,” he says, downplaying the situation tremendously considering the situation he describes. He attributes his burnout to “a combination of a lot of things: being fatigued, dehydrated, you know, losing myself chasing money, chasing the wrong things… Too much drinking, too many pills, you know, boom.”

He says he stepped back from social media, music, and partying to focus on getting healthy and avoiding a relapse. “That’s why I took a break. I said, ‘Look, as I hard I was going on my grind, I’m ’bout to go on myself.’ And put everybody I was putting in the front on the back burner and put myself in that seat… This is how I changed it. Stepped back, took two steps back, didn’t drop no music, detox from social media… everybody is drugged up… Everything got control of my life but me.”

“So that was the day, it was November 21 last year. And since that day, I never had a drink. I just made a year.”

Among the changes French made over the course of the past year was squashing his rivalry with Harlem rapper Jim Jones. The two just released the video for their first collaboration, “Too Late.”

Run The Jewels’ video for “Walking In The Snow” is a dystopian toy story, utilizing stop-motion techniques to animate the tale of an uprising against a cruel, cold tyrant. El-P and Killer Mike appear as action figure versions of themselves, recruited into a teddy bear resistance against an ice king who turns his subjects into chilly, monstrous versions of themselves and conducts a reign of terror over the bedroom. The few remaining free toys stage a last-ditch bid to stop him and bring warmth bad to the toy box.

The dynamic duo has had an outstanding 2020 thanks in large part to the release of their latest album RTJ4 this summer and the string of singles that buoyed it to becoming one of their most successful projects yet. The album landed on many “Best Of 2020” lists, including Uproxx’s own, while songs from the project graced a number of “Best Songs Of 2020” lists as well. In addition, the duo performed RTJ4 in full on Adult Swim, contributed to the soundtrack of the long-awaited Cyberpunk 2077, and put out some truly innovative music videos for “Ooh La La,” “Out Of Sight,” and “Yankee And The Brave” from the powerful album.

Watch the “Walking In The Snow” video above.

The Cavaliers are one of the darlings of the first week of the NBA season, but the team took a big hit on Tuesday morning when Cleveland announced Kevin Love will hit the sidelines after re-aggravating his strained right calf.

The team said Love will be re-evaluated in three to four weeks, serving a blow to Cleveland. The initial strain occurred during the preseason, according to a press release from the team.

In two games as a starter this season, Love had been out of sorts, shooting just 33 percent from the field, but his absence nevertheless makes an already young Cavaliers team even thinner and takes some valuable shooting out of the starting lineup.

The Cavs charged out to a 3-0 start including a top-ten offense and defense over the first week of the season, becoming one of the most surprising teams in the league in the process. They will likely rely more on second-year stretch forward Dylan Windler as a replacement as well as veterans Cedi Osman and Larry Nance Jr., with Osman potentially sliding back into the starting lineup to replace Love.

Love has three years and about $91 million left on his contract and has been in perpetual trade rumors as the Cavs pivot to their young core, but his impact on bringing those young players has been big and they’ll miss him as he recovers for the next month.

The refreshingly tell-it-like-it-is John Fetterman, who has been dealing with loads of false voter-fraud as claims Lt. Governor of Pennsylvania, is still keeping it real. Most recently, that’s included the “Stone Cold” man of the people coming for his Texas counterpart, Dan Patrick, a Trump die-hard who previously waved a $1 million reward around while encouraging people to send evidence of voter fraud. Well, that tactic backfired because Fetterman’s state did turn up three instances of voter fraud, but they were all votes for Trump. And of course, Fetterman came for Patrick on Twitter while asking him to show everyone the money.

Fetterman followed up on his tweets with a Monday evening MSNBC appearance, in which he discussed the Dan Patrick silliness with Ali Velshi, who was pinch-hitting on The Rachel Maddow Show. Stone Cold came in hard: “The good news I can report from Pennsylvania is that President Trump received 100% of the dead mother vote.”

He took another swing, too: “One of the things I’ve learned from the GOP is that simping for the President and golfing waters the tree of liberty.”

Via Mediaite, Fetterman also referred to his state’s GOP members as “snake handlers.” He added, “Some random House members sent out this ridiculous simp tribute to the president and, of course, the president would retweet anything that tries to cast doubt on the election.” And he sure wasn’t wrong. On Monday, Trump quoted a mysterious fake-source without attribution, while claiming, “Breaking News: In Pennsylvania there were 205,000 more votes than there were voters. This alone flips the state to President Trump.” Twitter slapped a “fake” warning on this thing right away.

One of the most dangerous side effects of Covid-19 has been cognitive dissonance. In the early weeks of the pandemic’s spread in the United States, much of the country still looked the same. Even nightmarish reports out of New York of blaring ambulances and overcrowded hospitals sounded unreal if you lived elsewhere. Maybe you read about them in a part of the country where the stores remained open and the restaurants had yet to shut down. Maybe, in those early days, quarantining, social distancing, and mask-wearing still seemed novel, a temporary inconvenience that would soon pass. Chances are you didn’t know anyone who had contracted Covid-19, much less died of it. It could seem more like an idea than an imminent threat.

Most of us later experienced a moment when the gravity of the situation started to feel real. For some, it arrived via the most unlikely of sources: a Twitter account run by fans of the long-inactive band Ivy, which on March 30th announced that one of the band’s members, Adam Schlesinger, had been placed on a ventilator after contracting the disease. Schlesinger, who was 52, died two days later. His death gave life to all the comforting things we told ourselves in the early days of the coronavirus’ spread: that the young and middle-aged had little to worry about, that even those who contracted it would be unlikely to die unless they were already gravely imperiled by other health problems, that we’d never know anyone who died from it, that we’d stay safe, that it wouldn’t really touch us.

You might not have known Schlesinger’s name, but you almost certainly knew his music. Most famously, he was part of Fountains of Wayne, a band in which he shared co-frontman duties with singer and songwriter Chris Collingwood. Fountains of Wayne enjoyed a tremendous hit in 2003 with the inescapable, and unforgettable, “Stacy’s Mom,” a celebration of the charms of an older woman. The song was everywhere — a memorable video starring model Rachel Hunter certainly helped — its winning songcraft, catchy chorus, and cheeky theme mowing through the musical trends of the day to deliver a blissful three minutes of undiluted power pop.

It became, for better and worse, the band’s signature song, the sort of fluke hit that could earn an act a one-hit-wonder status no matter what else they did. The shadow it cast might not have been fair to the rest of the Fountains of Wayne catalog but it does capture much of what made the band work, from the hooks to the deceptively sophisticated lyric. Where other bands exploring the subject might have leered, “Stacy’s Mom” captures the lust-fogged delusions of a kid, one who’s pretty sure his friend’s mother is as into him as he is into her when the reality of the situation is likely quite different. Stacy’s mom might have had it going on, but the narrator will almost certainly have to content himself with admiring her from afar.

As good as the song is, it’s just a small, not entirely representative sample of Fountains of Wayne’s music. For evidence, look no further than the album on which it appeared, Welcome Interstate Managers, one filled with songs aptly described by this site’s own Jason Tabrys as “a meditation on suburban purgatory and angst, creating mostly nameless characters whose struggles, frustrations, and desires felt like relatable slices of life.” The upbeat pop of “Bright Future in Sales” masks the sound of a life unraveling. “Hackensack” spins a portrait of delicate heartache for a small-town girl gone Hollywood and rhymes “I saw you talkin’” with the name “Christopher Walken.”

“Stacy’s Mom” was just a small sample of Schlesinger’s work, too. Ivy’s grown-up, electronic-inflected pop sounded nothing like Fountains of Wayne. Schlesinger’s Oscar-nominated title song for That Thing You Do! sounded like the work of long-forgotten band Fountains of Wayne would cite as a key influence. (One sign of its greatness: it plays over and over in the movie and sounds great every time). There were other bands — Tinted Windows, Fever High — and work for the stage and screen, most notably songs for Josie and the Pussycats and Music and Lyrics. As a producer and Schlesinger worked with heroes like America and The Monkees. No project demanded as much range, however, as the Rachel Bloom- and Aline Brosh McKenna-created series Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, which demanded Schlesinger help craft pastiches of songs from across the musical spectrum, sometimes several per episode. They always played not like mockery but the work of a creator who loved music, all of it, and lived to write and perform it. (Bloom contributed a memorable cover of “Stacy’s Mom” to the posthumous tribute album Saving for a Custom Van, whose proceeds benefit the MusiCares Covid-19 relief fund.)

Schlesinger’s death came as a shock. By the end of the year, it was just part of a growing list of musicians killed in the pandemic. The jazz great Ellis Marsalis died the same day. John Prine, who’d battled and beat cancer twice, followed a few days later. The names piled up from there and touched on all genres: Matthew Seligman, who played with David Bowie, Thomas Dolby, and the Soft Boys; New Orleans bounce fixture DJ Black N Mild; Alan Merrill who wrote “I Love Rock ’n’ Roll”; saxophonist Lee Konitz; rapper Fred the Godson.

That the pandemic didn’t silence their voices only made the loss feel more profound. The great Jamaican musician Toots Hibbert released his first album in a decade in August, the very good Got to Be Tough. By September he was gone. Producer Hal Willner, known for his association with Saturday Night Live and beautiful, eccentric tribute albums died in April. His final effort, AngelHeaded Hipster: The Songs of Marc Bolan & T. Rex, appeared in September. Charley Pride, who battled industry prejudice to become one of the biggest country stars of the ’60s and ’70s died less than a month after accepting the Willie Nelson Lifetime Achievement Award from the Country Music Association. There will be more losses of giants and sidemen alike. Their songs will be with us, even though they’ve all been taken too soon by this disease no one saw coming, one those in power never did enough to curb. They leave music and memories but we’ll never see their likes again.

When I think of Schlesinger I remember the gracious man I was lucky enough to meet a couple of times as part of a former job. And I remember a sweaty Chicago concert that went deep into the night as the band played a catalog that went much deeper than the hit that made them famous. But mostly I keep coming back to one song in particular, “All Kinds of Time,” another track from Welcome Interstate Managers. It’s a slow, simple song told from the perspective of a quarterback about to make an amazing pass, experiencing a moment of grace in which “no one can touch him now.” He even has time to think of those who love him watching him on TV in his moment of glory, when he’s young and beautiful with this whole life ahead of him. His inner monologue echoes a play-by-play cliché: he’s got all kinds of time; this moment will last forever. Those are just the words, though. The song — with its slow swell, plaintive vocal, and long fade-out — knows better. It tells a different, truer story.

The 2020 offseason was one-of-a-kind in NBA circles, with a full-blown sprint through the transaction cycle in advance of a late December start. For eight teams, however, the offseason was seemingly endless, as the organizations not invited to the Orlando bubble didn’t participate in fully sanctioned regular season games for more than nine months. As such, there is special attention to be paid to how those teams, all of which struggled (by definition) last season, perform in 2020-21, but the early returns are positive for the Cleveland Cavaliers.

Cleveland finished the 2019-20 season with the NBA’s second-worst record, winning only 29.2 percent of their games. From there, the Cavs were one of the quieter teams in the offseason from a transaction perspective, instead relying on internal development and keeping their powder dry for the future. To that end, expectations were (very) modest for the team as the 2020-21 season arrived, but Cleveland has been one of the early surprises by winning the first three games.

Granted, the Cavaliers have not played the most difficult schedule, prevailing over the Hornets, Pistons and Joel Embiid-less Sixers to begin the campaign. Still, last season’s Cleveland bunch may not have been able to take care of business in this manner, especially on the defensive end of the floor. The schedule is worth noting, but the Cavs are holding opponents to just 1.003 points per possession so far this season and, after finishing dead-last in defensive rating last season, that is a notable improvement.

The team’s current personnel isn’t conducive to that kind of defensive leap, but Andre Drummond is making an impact, Larry Nance Jr. is a stabilizing piece and rookie lottery pick Isaac Okoro projects to be a positive on that end of the floor. Offensively, Cleveland is also playing quite well, led by its pair of young guards in Collin Sexton and Darius Garland. Sexton is averaging 27.0 points per game and shooting 59.3 percent from the floor, while Garland is adding 19.0 points and 8.3 assists per game and shooting 54.8 percent from the floor in his own right. Both will cool off from an efficiency perspective, but the internal development of young players is key for Cleveland, both in the present and the future.

Even with three wins in the bank, it would be too aggressive to start talking about the playoffs for the Cavs. After all, they are coming from an exceptionally modest baseline with only a few things to point to in terms of tangible growth from the 2019-20 season. With all of that said, it is unquestionably encouraging to see Cleveland come out of the gate in a positive manner and, if Drummond and Nance continue to anchor an improved defense with Sexton and Garland taking the next step, there is no reason the Cavs need to stay in the league’s basement as preseason over/under projections suggested.

What does a 3-0 start do for the Cavaliers in our DIME power rankings? Let’s find out.

1. Los Angeles Lakers (2-2, Last week — 1st)

It’s a little weird to leave the Lakers here after two losses, but it’s still early. This is a team that hasn’t even ventured away from STAPLES Center yet and, perhaps more importantly, no other squad did enough to take the top spot when considering priors.

2. Brooklyn Nets (2-2, Last week — 7th)

Wait, another 2-2 team? Well, the Lakers still have a +10.7 net rating so far and the Nets…. have a +10.6 net rating. Also, Brooklyn’s second loss came without both Kyrie Irving and Kevin Durant, with thoroughly dominant play in a couple of contests. It will be interesting to see what happens without Spencer Dinwiddie, but Brooklyn still impressed early.

3. L.A. Clippers (2-1, Last week — 2nd)

So, the Clippers trailed by 50 points at the half on Sunday. That happened. I also don’t care much about it. Quite obviously, L.A. wasn’t dialed in against Dallas in that matchup, but they started the season with a win over the Lakers and a road win over the Nuggets. I’m inclined to trust that sample more, especially when taking the roster into account.

4. Utah Jazz (2-1, Last week — 9th)

This entire tier is a mess, mostly because there are so few results. Utah has performed well (+5.6 net rating) and they’re doing so with Donovan Mitchell shooting 32 percent from the floor. They have an interesting showdown looming on New Year’s Eve with the Suns that will reveal more information on both sides.

5. Philadelphia 76ers (2-1, Last week — 8th)

The Sixers haven’t played a top-tier opponent yet, and their one loss came without Joel Embiid. We’re all going to need to see more to make sweeping conclusions.

6. Portland Trail Blazers (2-1, Last week — 13th)

After a blowout home loss to Utah in the opener, Portland stabilized with wins over the Rockets and Lakers. The Blazers actually went into STAPLES Center and got the best of the champs (with both LeBron and AD playing) on Monday, which is one of the better wins any team has this season.

7. Phoenix Suns (2-1, Last week — 12th)

Phoenix hasn’t quite found the groove on offense, scoring 1.06 points per possession, but their defense been stout to this point. Oh, and if Mikal Bridges is going to make threes again, good luck to everyone trying to go against him.

8. Atlanta Hawks (3-0, Last week — 16th)

The Hawks are real offensively. That wasn’t a secret after they invested a ton of money in veterans to add more scoring pop during the offseason, but the Hawks are scoring 1.2 points per possession through three games. Trae Young is out of his mind and, even with the caveat of a pretty easy schedule so far, Atlanta looks good. They’ll face a big test this week with two games in Brooklyn.

9. Indiana Pacers (3-0, Last week — 17th)

Of course the Pacers are 3-0. Why wouldn’t they be? The best early development for Indiana is probably the play of Victor Oladipo, but Domantas Sabonis looks to be in line for another leap from an already stout baseline in 2019-20.

10. Denver Nuggets (1-2, Last week — 5th)

This is some respect for Denver, because they haven’t played like a top-10 team yet. Nikola Jokic was brilliant on Monday, however, producing 19 points, 18 assists and 12 rebounds in the team’s first win.

11. Orlando Magic (3-0, Last week — 21st)

The Magic are undefeated in the almighty Southeast Division. Orlando did knock off Miami, which explains the ranking of the next team on this list, but in all seriousness, it’s a good start for an undermanned team. Steve Clifford is a wizard.

12. Miami Heat (1-1, Last week — 4th)

Miami split their first two games in relatively anonymous fashion. Everyone is looking toward a back-to-back against Milwaukee that begins on Tuesday, which should inform opinions on both teams.

13. Boston Celtics (1-2, Last week — 6th)

The Celtics… have not played well. They’re getting torched defensively (116.9 points per 100 possessions) and their offense hasn’t been up to its usual baseline either. Small sample size caveats apply, but there is some actual concern right now after that opening night win over Milwaukee. Speaking off…

14. Milwaukee Bucks (1-2, Last week — 3rd)

Boston beat Milwaukee this week, and the Celtics hop ahead of the Bucks as a result. None of that actually matters, but Milwaukee had two weird results after the opener. The Bucks absolutely annihilated the Warriors on the Christmas stage… only to go on the road and lose by 20… to the Knicks? Best of luck trying to decipher that but, as noted above, a back-to-back against Miami should answer questions about where both teams are right now.

15. Dallas Mavericks (1-2, Last week — 10th)

I have no idea what to do with the Mavs. They looked pretty bad in a blowout loss to the Lakers, then beat the Clippers by approximately one hundred points. It’s early, folks.

16. New Orleans Pelicans (2-1, Last week — 18th)

Because they were outmatched by the Heat on Christmas, the buzz isn’t necessarily there for New Orleans right now. The Pelicans are playing well, though, and their defense (!) has been the better unit through three games. That won’t continue in all likelihood, but it’s noteworthy.

17. Cleveland Cavaliers (3-0, Last week — 27th)

The Cavs! Without any priors, they would be even higher, but the ten-spot jump tells the story.

18. San Antonio Spurs (2-1, Last week — 20th)

Derrick White hasn’t played yet and the Spurs are 2-1 with wins over the Grizzlies and Raptors. San Antonio is also reasonably fun to watch, with some interesting lineup combinations and young players. It wouldn’t be wise to ignore them.

19. Sacramento Kings (2-1, Last week — 23rd)

Sacramento went on the road and beat Denver before splitting a pair of games against Phoenix. It’s only three games, but that is a very nice start for a team with modest expectations. They’ll get another test on Tuesday evening against Denver because, as usual, the Western Conference is unrelenting.

20. Houston Rockets (0-2, Last week — 14th)

The Rockets have been in the news! On the court, Houston is 0-2, but both losses came on the road to good teams, so that isn’t too alarming. James Harden and Christian Wood are putting up video game numbers and, eventually, the Rockets will play some games they are favored to win once they get more than nine players on the active roster.

21. Toronto Raptors (0-2, Last week — 11th)

Toronto is better than this, but they haven’t played well on either end of the floor. In conjunction with an offseason that saw the roster get worse and the bizarre circumstances of their operation in Tampa, it wasn’t a perfect start for Nick Nurse’s team. They’ll be fine.

22. Minnesota Timberwolves (2-1, Last week — 25th)

It was a mixed bag for Minnesota this week. No. 1 pick Anthony Edwards looked good and the Wolves started with two wins in three games. On the flip side, Karl-Anthony Towns is battling a wrist issue that could sideline him for a bit, and that isn’t ideal.

23. Memphis Grizzlies (1-2, Last week — 22nd)

The Grizzlies’ win over the Nets looks more impressive than it actually is, as Brooklyn was without Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving and Spencer Dinwiddie in the game. Before that, Memphis was pretty shaky in home losses to Atlanta and San Antonio, and they need to get healthy in a hurry, particularly with Jaren Jackson Jr. still on the shelf and Ja Morant suffering a nasty looking ankle injury in that win in Brooklyn.

24. Oklahoma City Thunder (1-1, Last week — 30th)

It’s hard to figure out the Thunder, simply because they are not constructed to win now. Still, they have enough competent pieces like Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Al Horford to be competitive on a nightly basis for a while, and that is already on display through two games.

25. Charlotte Hornets (1-2, Last week — 26th)

The Hornets are probably better than the Thunder, but Charlotte lost to OKC at home this week. That explains the disparity, but the Hornets did knock off the full-strength Nets in a very solid performance to end the week.

26. New York Knicks (1-2, Last week — 29th)

After two lopsided defeats, the Knicks beat the Bucks by 20 on Sunday, and Milwaukee had its core pieces on the floor. That is quite a bizarre result, but it bumps New York up a few spots because all of the games count.

27. Washington Wizards (0-3, Last week — 19th)

To be fair to Washington, the 0-3 start includes losses to the Magic (twice) and 76ers. They also weren’t blown out in any game. The Wizards still gave up almost 1.14 points per possession defensively, and it would be tough to argue that this is the start Scott Brooks envisioned in a season that actually has some expectations.

28. Golden State Warriors (1-2, Last week — 15th)

I don’t actually think the Warriors are a bottom-three team if Stephen Curry is playing, but the first week was not encouraging. Golden State has the worst net rating in the league (-18.4) and that includes a very narrow win over the Bulls. Granted, the Warriors got bludgeoned by two very good teams in Milwaukee and Brooklyn, but they are essentially non-competitive in those games. There is a lot of work to do, and they need Draymond Green.

29. Detroit Pistons (0-3, Last week — 28th)

Detroit actually battled impressively without both Blake Griffin and Derrick Rose on Monday evening. That’s the kindest thing that should be said after an 0-3 start with losses to the Hawks, Wolves and Cavs.

30. Chicago Bulls (0-3, Last week — 24th)

It’s been ugly for Chicago. The Bulls opened with three straight home losses, giving up more than 1.15 points per possession, and lost to a pair of non-playoff teams from last season in the process. Chicago shouldn’t be this bad overall, but they earned the bottom spot this week.

Three projects in, you know what you’re getting with a Playboi Carti album. When the squeaky-voiced, non-sequitur technician first appeared on the scene in 2017 with “Magnolia,” his style was a revelation — or the death of hip-hop as we know it, depending largely on your personal taste and, well, yes, how old you were. Now, though, no matter how unhinged his chaotic energy becomes, there are essentially no surprises on a Playboi Carti album — other than the fact that the album even exists.

Such is the case with Whole Lotta Red, the long-awaited, oft-delayed, most recent effort from ATL’s hip-hop Dadaist. The fact the thing even exists feels something like a minor miracle; after a year-long hype cycle that saw deconstructed tweets teasing its coming, several aborted release dates, and increasing fan fervor, it finally arrived, fittingly, on Christmas Day. Unfortunately, it didn’t get the triumphant reception one might have expected from such an anticipated release.

Instead, fans complained that the album represented a “whole lotta skips” rather than a compilation worthy of the hype. It has its defenders, to be sure — and I find myself alarmed to be one of them — but on the whole, it’s garnered the sort of collective response that in hindsight would seem a foregone conclusion for an album this magnified in the public consciousness. Simply put, there is no way to live up to this kind of hype, at least not in the moment.

But with Carti, it’s hard to know what anyone could have expected in the first place. More than anything else, it seemed what drew so many young fans to Carti in 2017 was his rebellious refusal to adhere to any accepted convention of hip-hop. “Magnolia” was nothing if not a three-minute collection of ad-libs over an absolutely slobber-knocking Pi’erre Bourne beat. He wasn’t so much rapping as he was being raptured, speaking in tongues more than he was expressing a gift of gab.

When he delivered more of the same in 2018 with Die Lit, there was a similar expectant backlash as well. Fans who’d since grown a little, learned about some new artists, and grown in their musical sophistication perhaps expected proportionate growth from Carti as well. However, appearing in a perhaps even more stripped-down form, Carti’s gift for expressing himself through dizzying displays of cathartic yelping and mangled chants probably disappointed those fans, who are likely the ones even more disappointed by Whole Lotta Red, because they were probably looking to the new project to “make up for” its predecessor.

Those who wanted Carti to restore the feeling of three years ago might have been better served searching elsewhere for their hit of nostalgia. The very essence of what he does rejects that sort of codification, rejects formalism, resists categorization and classification. Besides, in the meantime, we’ve experienced a hellish presidency, a global pandemic, social upheaval on an international scale, and the “a-woken-ing” of social media — all such chaotic events that looking for comfort in the chaos Carti peddles is like jumping into the ocean during a typhoon, just hoping to get dry.

For one thing, the leaks that had fans clamoring for the finished product, like the TikTok-favorite Young Thug collaboration “Pissy Pamper,” are nowhere in evidence here. Nor is false start lead single “@ meh,” which arrived with a dull thud in April, just as global lockdowns were beginning to put a damper on summer festival plans. Perhaps it was knowing there’d be no mosh pits that numbed fans to its release and now that the year has dragged on long enough for us to adjust our brains to a new normal, those kinds of works just can’t hold the same excitement.

That’s a shame too because if you approach Whole Lotta Red without the expectation of formalistic “growth” from Carti, it’s a pretty enjoyable, throw-on-and-veg-out, vibe-generating hour of unconventional party music. The rumbling “Rockstar Mode” the moody “M3tamorphosis” with Kid Cudi, the quirkily-titled “Meh,” “ILoveUIHateU,” and more are exactly the sort of frantic, skin-tingling trap that antsy hip-hop fans miffed by the constraints of this year’s wordy, regimented spate of critical favorite rap records would look to for relief in simpler times.

Although Kanye delivers an uninspiring verse on “Go2DaMoon” and the album meanders around the time “Punk Monk” kicks in at track 15 — with nine more tracks to go — Whole Lotta Red is, for better or worse, as close to a classic Carti album as it gets. He’s never been the lyrical mastermind, or even much of a hook master. He’s energy, raw, diffuse, crackling, and yes, chaotic. While there are definitely some skips here, they’re the result of conventional or repetitive production, not Carti’s yelping and yowling. If audiences are finally getting bored with his anti-real-hip-hop stance, the good news is that there are plenty of choices along the spectrum to offer some more predictable comforts.

Whole Lotta Red is out now on AWGE / Interscope. Get it here.

Adidas bought Reebok in 2005 in an attempt to compete with Nike in the US, but expectations were not met. Now, they’re looking to sell. The sportswear brand has a pair of serious potential buyers in rapper and businessman Percy Miller (aka Master P) and former NBA all-star Baron Davis, Forbes reports.

Adidas scooped up Reebok for $3.8 billion fifteen years ago, but last year, Adidas declared Reebok’s book value had fallen to $995 million. Now it appears the asking price to sell will be around $2.4 billion, and Miller and Davis are apparently in talks to make a deal happen.

Miller said of Reebok, “As we focus on turning Reebok into a lifestyle brand — not just a basketball brand — our most important initiative will be to put money back into the community that built this company.” Davis also noted of the brand, “I think Reebok is being undervalued. I left Nike as a 22-year-old kid representing myself and made the jump to Reebok, which took a chance on me as a creative and as an athlete. I want the people I know athletes, influencers, designers, celebs to sit at the table with me.”

It’s not yet clear how negotiations have gone so far and whether or not this deal is closer to reality than it is to dream. If it does come to fruition, though, it would be a significant addition to Miller’s already stacked business portfolio.

Throughout the year, we’ve seen some truly interesting — and odd — brand synergy between big-name businesses and rappers as both tried to weather the economic downturn brought on by the global coronavirus pandemic. McDonald’s reached out to Travis Scott and J Balvin, resulting in a pair of personalized meals and some truly outrageous merchandise, while Puma outfitted the NBA with J Cole’s signature shoe as the rapper himself aimed at a training camp experience for a possible roster slot. But the latest brand collab may be one of the most unusual as you’ll soon find a rapper’s face gracing your cereal aisle.

A month after releasing his “Reese’s Puffs Rap (The REE-MIX)” on SoundCloud, Lil Yachty posted a photo of himself to social media, posted up with several boxes of the cereal all featuring his signature beaded braids and grinning face. “I’ve done a lot of things in my career, but this is one I’m probably most proud of,” reads the caption. The rapper has made Saturday morning cartoons a huge part of his brand. Now, he’s adding the other half of the equation. Intriguingly enough, the last rapper to execute such collaboration was none other than Travis Scott, who appeared on the Reese’s Puffs box in 2019.

According to a press release, the box will roll out in 2021, and in an interview with Hypebeast, he called the collab a “super cool and crazy accomplishment.”

Yachty is also one of the performers for TikTok’s upcoming New Year’s Eve live stream.