Month: December 2020

Shakira put on a showstopping performance at this year’s Super Bowl halftime show. As she harmonized with J. Lo and confused viewers with a tongue-wagging move (which actually had meaning), no one could have predicted that the country would look vastly different just a month later. But even with all the uncertainty 2020 has presented, there’s still one truth that remains constant: Shakira’s hips don’t lie. The singer proves this by busting out her signature moves in Black Eyed Peas’ “Girl Like Me” video.

Dancing around the studio with Black Eyed Peas in the vibrant visual, Shakira shows all sides of her talent. The singer gets into an ’80s outfit to display her best Jazzercise routine and even hops on a skateboard to take laps around her collaborators — all while delivering her pumped-up verses. “Like that my lips are so glossy / Like how my neck is so bossy / Baby, if you do it my way / Just for the hell of it, I’ll let you love me,” she sings.

Speaking about the song in a statement, Black Eyed Peas’ Will.i.am said the song was originally penned in 2008 but revisited this year. “Shakira and I worked on ‘Girl Like Me’ in 2008,” he said. “I’m so happy it’s out in the world. I’ve always loved the melody, and I’m so happy Shakira and I worked together to release the song and made a video in 2020 for the world to hear and see.”

Watch Shakira and Black Eyed Peas’ “Girl Like Me” video above.

Translation is out now via Epic. Get it here.

During quarantine, the popular Verzuz battles created by Swizz Beatz and Timbaland have been a source of entertainment and relief from the exhausting and depressing news cycle. WIth the most recent faceoff between Gucci Mane and Jeezy ending with an apparent reconciliation between the two, and earlier bouts between stars like Snoop Dogg and DMX, appreciation is only growing for the format.

Fans have already been daydreaming the battles they’d like to see happen in the new format, and with Ashanti and Keyshia Cole confirmed for the next one, even fellow stars like Cardi B are getting pumped.

But even before news of Ashanti and Keyshia Cole’s impending fight, there might be another female rapper face off already on its way. Reporter Cherise Johnson was in a room on Clubhouse, a new social media app based on audio conversations, and while hanging out in the Jay Z appreciation room, to be exact, Johnson was among many others who heard Foxy Brown’s brother, Gavin Marchand, confirm that the paperwork for a battle between his sister and Lil Kim had recently been completed. Of course, this will be the battle of a lifetime, and the internet is already reaching shrieking levels of excitement over the news:

Hopefully we’ll get a more official confirmation soon.

It’s been a devastating year for millions of Americans, as the pandemic has led to death, unemployment, financial distress, mental health issues, housing instability, and so much more. The challenges of navigating this new reality have taken their toll, in one way or another, but the fallout has unfortunately been significantly more devastating for some.

Many across the country have been unable to visit sick and dying loved ones during the lockdown, while more than a quarter-million people have been faced with the grief of losing family members as a direct result of the deadly virus. And no one is being spared, as the disease targets all age groups and demographics, including athletes, celebrities, and politicians.

Back in April, Karl-Anthony Towns lost his mother to COVID-19, and the immense grief has only been compounded as six other family members have apparently died from the virus since then. It’s an unimaginable tragedy that has understandably left Towns in a difficult place emotionally.

Karl-Anthony Towns said that he “hasn’t been in a good place” since his mother went to the hospital. Towns said he’s lost 6 other family members to COVID.

“I’m the one looking for answers to try to keep my family well informed & make all the moves necessary to keep them alive.”

— Malika Andrews (@malika_andrews) December 4, 2020

Towns and the Timberwolves are gearing up for the start of the new season on December 22, just as cases of the virus continue to soar in various places around the country. It’s unclear exactly when fans might be able to return to arenas, as some teams like the Lakers are closing their doors indefinitely, while others are in the process of proposing plans that might eventually permit reduced numbers of fans back in their buildings.

Regardless, the pandemic is far from over, and Towns’ experience is a heartbreaking reminder of the reality of the situation in America that we should all take this as seriously as possible and do whatever we can to help stem the spread.

For the past eight months, millions of viewers have been flocking to the Verzuz Instagram page to watch two of their favorite artists go head-to-head with their catalog of hits. Last month, Jeezy and Gucci Mane were able to put their past differences behind them and even perform a song together in their Verzuz battle. But now, another pair of musical icons have been confirmed for next week’s livestream, and Cardi B is particularly beside herself.

Early ’00s R&B singers Ashanti and Keyshia Cole will officially compare their discography in the next Verzuz showdown. The news arrives after Ashanti previously toyed with the idea when Fat Joe presented the possibility in a May interview. “Listen, if they want to see it, I ain’t mad,” she responded. Cole held Ashanti to her word when she challenged the singer in the comment section of Snoop and DMX’s July battle, but the official booking still took months to confirm.

Shortly after the announcement, Cardi B took to Twitter to express her excitement about next week’s livestream. “be nice the day of the Ashanti VS Keyshia Verzuz battle,” she wrote.”

Cardi wasn’t the only one getting pumped, however.

Check out fans’ reactions above.

Cardi B is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

The queen of all things rainbow has reappeared at the end of 2020 to save pop music. Well, technically Kacey Musgraves came up as a country star, but once you’ve won the Grammy for Album Of The Year, created your own candle with Boy Smells, and collaborated with drag queens, honey, you’re a pop star. Anyway, this year of Kacey has necessarily been more of a slow burn (heh), and she’s also been dealing with some personal issues as news of her divorce from fellow musician Ruston Kelly broke this spring.

Things are clearly on the up and up now, though, as earlier tonight she shared a tweet with three names in rainbow pinks: Kacey Musgraves, Mark Ronson, and Troye Sivan. Whether it’s a single song or a whole album, this is a powerhouse collaboration that fans will definitely get behind.

With a further hint of a heart and a gun in the body of the tweet, Kacey also tagged Troye and Mark. If this is another Christmas special, well, that will be disappointing. But it’s very likely we’ll be getting at least one new track from the trio within the next few days. If we’re very lucky, the song will drop tonight.

Veep was one of the most beloved comedies that many say ended at just the right time, but the allure of more always remains. And its star says not only has the group behind the HBO comedy “talked about” a revival, the current political landscape may actually make it more likely in the coming years.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who played the show’s titular character, Selena Meyer, appeared on The New Abnormal podcast with Veep showrunner Dave Mandel to talk about Veep as well as the state of actual politics in America. Louis-Dreyfus has not hidden her preference for political parties, making an appearance at this summer’s virtual Democratic National Convention and helping organize a Veep reunion of sorts that doubled as a Democratic fundraiser.

Despite all the fun they had doing that, a real Veep revival would be something else entirely. But it’s apparently not out of the question just yet. According to the Daily Beast, a reunion has been discussed, but it’s far from officially in the works right now.

“We’ve certainly discussed it,” star Julia-Louis Dreyfus tells Molly Jong-Fast on the latest episode of The New Abnormal. “Everybody’s sort of gone off now, and everybody’s doing other projects and so on. But I don’t rule it out entirely, doing some sort of Veep-related thing. I mean, there’s an area that we could jump back into. I think [showrunner] Dave [Mandel] and I have talked about it.”

Interestingly, Louis-Dreyfus noted that the incoming Biden administration would actually make it more likely we see Veep revived. Much like how Black Mirror‘s showrunners know too much real-life dystopia makes on-screen dystopia less palatable, people need less political chaos in their lives in order to enjoy fictional political satire.

Now, Dreyfus says, “There’s always an opportunity for satire and we’re hopeful that with the Biden administration, you know, things will sort of settle down, and then we can be the outrageous ones.”

“Yeah. It requires a baseline of normalcy.” Mandel says. “And if we can get back to that, if we can get back to a time where you’re not thinking about the president every six minutes, I think maybe we can get back to some good old fashioned political satire. But [the Trumpists] made it difficult. They raise the bar on stupidity on a daily basis. So it was very hard to out-stupid. You know what I mean?”

It has been fascinating to see comedians try to do political humor in the Trump age, which often was a true struggle for everything from Saturday Night Live to stand-ups. Maybe things will get easier for everyone, even comedy writers, come mid-January. And eventually it might mean more Veep, if things settle down a little bit, that is.

[via The Daily Beast]

We Americans are an interesting bunch. We cherish our independence. We love our rugged individualism. Despite having pride in our system of government, we really don’t like government telling us what to do.

Since rebellion is literally how we were founded, it’s sort of baked into our national identity. But it doesn’t always serve us well. Especially when we find ourselves in a global pandemic.

Individualism—at least the “I do what I want, when I want” idea—is the antithesis of what is needed to keep contagious disease under control. More than anything in my memory, the coronavirus pandemic has tested our nation’s ability to put up a united front, and so far we are failing miserably.

I hear a lot of the same complaints from people who decry government mandates to wear a mask or governors’ stay-at-home orders. We don’t need a nanny state telling us what we can and can’t do! This is tyranny! This is dictatorship! What ever happened to personal responsibility?

I actually have the same question. What did happen to personal responsibility?

Anti-mask folks throw that phrase around a lot, but I don’t think it means what they think it means. After all, if everyone were actually taking personal responsibility, we wouldn’t be in the position we’ve found ourselves in—floundering in an out-of-control pandemic with an accelerating death toll and continuing economic devastation because of our ongoing, half-assed response to it.

Taking personal responsibility doesn’t mean only looking out for yourself. It means being responsible for yourself, which includes doing the responsible thing for the society of which you are a part precisely because you are a part of it.

More than 400 years ago, the poet John Donne wrote these famous words, which are timelessly and universally true: “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” We are connected with one another whether we like it or not. And because we are part of a whole, we have a responsibility toward the whole. The irony in this particular moment, of course, is that our connectedness is what’s killing us. It feels counterintuitive that we must acknowledge our oneness by staying apart from one another, but that’s what keeping a pandemic from destroying the whole requires.

Personal responsibility in a pandemic means choosing, as individuals, to exercise that responsibility we have toward one another. It means using our individual agency, our freedom of choice, to do the right thing for the whole. It means that even if I am not personally at high risk of complications or death from COVID-19, I take responsibility for how my personal actions affect others. If lifelong public servants who are at the top of the epidemiology field ask me to wear a mask to protect others and keep our country from floundering in a pandemic, I choose to wear a mask. If the public health officials in my state, who are generally some of the least appreciated people in our government, say that we need to keep our distance from one another to protect the vulnerable, I choose to abide by their guidelines.

Making the choice to do what public health officials are recommending is what being personally responsible looks like in a pandemic.

As an American who trusts most politicians about as far as I can throw them, I understand people’s distrust of government. But just because a message is coming from government officials doesn’t mean it’s untrustworthy. Just because a mandate is coming form government officials doesn’t mean it’s tyrannical. Generally speaking, governor’s are following the advice of public health officials—the people who have spent their lives and careers preparing for just such a time as this—and if you think public health officials are in the same category as the politicians you don’t trust, well, you’re probably overly paranoid.

The key here is that if people were actually good about taking personal responsibility, we wouldn’t have to keep having government mandates in the first place. The countries that have managed to control the virus—New Zealand, Vietnam, South Korea, Taiwan, to name a few—did so with a combination of swift and decisive governmental response and unified action on the part of the people. An effective pandemic response requires both. Guidelines from the government are useless if people don’t comply, and people don’t know what they should do if the government isn’t clear about what needs to be done and why. Successful countries understood both things. America seems to have rejected both things.

Our government’s handling has been terrible, yes, but Americans’ tacit distrust of government is also not a virtue in this moment. By extending that distrust to public health officials, we are hurting ourselves and each other. We have sacrificed the societal freedom that would come with controlling the virus for individual freedom in the moment, which results in effectively losing individual freedom anyway because if the society we live in is negatively impacted by a virus, so are we.

“Live free or die” is too simplistic right now. In a pandemic, “live free or die” effectively means “live free and kill people.” Is that really the kind of freedom we cherish?

The bottom line is that my right to do what I want, when I want, doesn’t outweigh my responsibility to my fellow Americans. Not when there’s a pandemic raging through the country. I sacrifice for the greater good because I am part of that greater good. I recognize that our collective freedom in the long run is more important than my individual freedom in the moment, and I take personal responsibility by doing my part to ensure our collective freedom.

We stay distanced because we’re connected, and we isolate because we are not islands. And as John Donne wrote later in his poem, we see ourselves in one another and acknowledge what our essential oneness means as we watch the statistics rise:

“Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.“

Teams across the league are gearing up for the 2020-2021 campaign, and with the new NBA season just around the corner, the media is getting a closer look at what’s going on behind the scenes as players and coaches prepare themselves for another 82-game grind in the perpetual quest for championship glory.

Many good and entertaining things can happen during media availability week, as spirits are still high and in the mode of maintaining a light atmosphere, which sometimes also results in candid and revealing moments that might not normally happen in the thick of the season.

It’s also the time for teams to let their marketing department get creative and drum up some excitement for what’s to come. Take the Washington Wizards, for example, who decided to build off the theme of what has been a contentious election cycle in America, tapping CNN’s John King and Wolf Blitzer as a quirky way to introduce their schedule for the coming season, with a little help from the election map so many of us have been staring into like the abyss.

It’s NBA Season in America!

Let’s go to @wolfblitzer and @JohnKingCNN for more.@CNN | @CapitalOne pic.twitter.com/AwYO2sQ0gL

— Washington Wizards (@WashWizards) December 4, 2020

It was the perfect gimmick for a team that is at the epicenter of the electoral process, executed brilliantly by the two CNN election stalwarts, who played it with a straight face from start to finish.

The Wizards, of course, made other headlines this week when they traded John Wall to the Rockets for Russell Westbrook, closing the chapter on an era that was once so filled with potential but had been derailed by injuries. But with a fresh start, Washington is hoping to get back into contention and secure the “votes” (wins) they need to secure the “White House” (NBA title).

Fans of Rico Nasty and Big Mouth alike were in for a treat Friday. Not only did Rico Nasty drop her highly-anticipated debut album Nightmare Vacation, but Netflix released the fourth season of Big Mouth — and some dedicated fans picked up on a sly homage to popular musicians in the show.

The season has been out for less than a day, but it didn’t take fans long to spot a reference to their favorite singers in the show. It appeared in a scene halfway through the second episode of season four when Missy sits in her cousins’ bedroom while they teach her about Black culture. During their conversation, fans spotted an Easter egg: Missy’s cousins had their walls plastered with cartoon posters for SZA, Rico Nasty, Killer Mike, and Angela Davis.

None of the musicians have addressed their short cameo in the animated series just yet, but Rico Nasty has clearly had a big day. Speaking about the release of Nightmare Vacation in a recent interview with Uproxx, the rapper said she hasn’t yet claimed a genre:

“Obviously, we don’t know what [my genre] is now because it’s only been three years of rapping. It’s because they’re just unfamiliar with it, but 10 years down the line, it’ll be a trail of what this is. It could be punk, it could be a bunch of things. But I say I don’t resonate with those things, because rather than putting me in those things, I would rather people just watch and see what happens. Because I change a lot, so you never know what it could be. Just appreciate it for what it is.”

Check out the Rico Nasty, SZA, and City Girls reference on Big Mouth above.

Nightmare Vacation is out now via Sugar Trap/Atlantic. Get it here.

Rico Nasty is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Today marked a big win for marijuana… Look, we know we’ve been saying that a lot lately, but weed just keeps winning as our favorite psychoactive plant slowly (but surely) makes its way toward full legalization. This week’s win comes out of the United States House of Representatives (we told you it was big!), which voted to decriminalize and tax marijuana at the federal level in a 228-164 win.

According to AP, the bill sets out to officially remove marijuana from a list of federally controlled substances, allow states to still make their own rules and decisions regarding pot, and use money from a new tax on marijuana to help reverse some of the damage done by the decades-long “War on Drugs,” expunging existing federal marijuana convictions and arrests. This is absolutely huge, and the only reason you’re not hearing more about it is that this bill is essentially dead on arrival at the Republican-controlled Senate.

Even though this vote is destined for failure and the votes fell pretty much along party lines with 222 Democrats and just 5 Republicans voting to pass the bill, it’s still an indication that this is where a large portion of the American public’s heads are at when it comes to legalizing weed. Right now, marijuana is legalized in 15 states across the country, with four states voting to increase access medically or recreationally in 2020 elections alone. So make no mistake, weed will be legalized in America in our lifetimes.

Hold up if there’s this much broad public support for marijuana, why is this bill destined for failure in the senate?

Because of Mitch McConnell. Not only has the Senate Majority leader already mocked the bill in deflections over the Senate’s inaction on a Coronavirus relief bill, sarcastically calling the marijuana bill “serious and important legislation befitting this national crisis,” but he’s let similar weed-related bills die on the Senate floor by never offering them up for a vote, like a bill passed in the House last year that would give pot businesses access to traditional banking services.

Could a handful of Republicans and all of the Democrats in the Senate get this bill to pass? It’s possible, but McConnell will never put it up for a vote to begin with.

So then all hope is lost?

Nope. On January 5th Georgia will enter a special runoff election to decide which two senators will represent the state. If both Democrats win, control of the Senate will go to the Democratic party, Mitch McConnell won’t be Speaker of the House anymore, and this bill will surely pass. That means Republicans have essentially put marijuana on the ballot in the Georgia runoff election, which has got to be the dumbest political misstep by the Republican party since… well, you know.

TLDR: If you’re a Georgia resident who doesn’t give two f*cks about politics and you just wish you could get high in your state legally, you’ll get there a lot faster by voting for the democrats on January 5th.