Month: December 2020

Two months after endorsing Donald Trump for re-election, the conservative-leaning New York Post is telling the president to “give it up” and “end this dark charade” of denial.

“We’re one week away from an enormously important moment for the next four years of our country. On Jan. 5, two runoff races in Georgia will determine which party will control the Senate — whether Joe Biden will have a rubber stamp or a much-needed check on his agenda,” the op-ed reads, noting that Trump is more focused on the day after, January 6, when “Congress [will] certify the Electoral College vote. You have tweeted that, as long as Republicans have ‘courage,’ they can overturn the results and give you four more years in office. In other words, you’re cheering for an undemocratic coup.”

That’s unusually damning from the Post, which has a long history with Trump. But if you think the Rupert Murdoch-owned publication is suddenly turning pro-Biden, think again. There’s plenty of flattery in the piece, including praising Trump for “[coming] out of nowhere to win the presidency” and “[taking] on the elites and the media who had long lost touch with average working people” (if there’s anyone who knows average working people, it’s this guy), but “if Georgia falls, all that is threatened.” Here’s how it ends:

Securing the Senate means securing your legacy. You should use your considerable charm and influence to support the Georgia candidates, mobilizing your voters for them. Focus on their success, not your own grievances, as we head into the final week. If you insist on spending your final days in office threatening to burn it all down, that will be how you are remembered. Not as a revolutionary, but as the anarchist holding the match.

Trump has now lost Geraldo and the New York Post — on top of the election.

He hasn’t tweeted about the op-ed yet, but he surely noticed it.

(Via the New York Post)

The Washington Football Team will go into Week 17 needing a win over the Eagles on Sunday Night Football to win the NFC East. They will be doing so with a different starting quarterback than they had in their loss yesterday to the Carolina Panthers, as word emerged on Monday morning that Dwayne Haskins, the 15th overall selection of the 2019 NFL Draft, who started on Sunday had been released.

The team confirmed the news shortly after the reports poured out of the nation’s capital.

It has been a rather disastrous year for Haskins, who began it as the starter before getting benched for Kyle Allen, who then got hurt and Alex Smith became the starter, before he got injured in a win over the 49ers two weeks ago and thrust Haskins back in the lineup. With Haskins back at starter, the Football Team has lost their last two games to keep the Cowboys and Giants alive in the NFC East race.

On top of a rough year on the field, Haskins was recently fined for going to a club and violating the league’s COVID-19 protocols this past week. On Sunday, after a dismal outing in which he was 14-for-28 for 154 yards and two interceptions, Haskins was benched for Taylor Heinicke, who managed to lead the Football Team to their lone touchdown of the day and was 12-for-19 passing for 137 yards and that touchdown.

It is a precipitous decline for Haskins, who showed some promise in his rookie season and many hoped he would take a leap forward in his second season, albeit with a new coaching staff in place. Instead, it was a disastrous 2020 campaign and he now finds himself out of a job as the Football Team seem content to move forward with Heinicke and the hopeful return this week of Alex Smith.

Keeping up with the best new music can be exhausting, even impossible. From the weekly album releases to standalone singles dropping on a daily basis, the amount of music is so vast it’s easy for something to slip through the cracks. Even following along with the Uproxx recommendations on a daily basis can be a lot to ask, so every Monday we’re offering up this rundown of the best new music this week.

This week saw a surprise Kanye West drop and some more unexpected material from SZA. Yeah, it was a great week for new music. Check out the highlights below.

Sunday Service — Emmanuel EP

In case you missed it, Kanye West ran for president this year, and that didn’t go all that well. Despite that, his 2020 was peppered with wins: He made a lot of money and released a little bit of music. Before the year came to the end, though, he dropped one more effort, this time with his Sunday Service Choir, who are billed just as Sunday Service on the new Emmanuel EP. Like other material from Sunday Service, this is gospel music, which was fittingly released on Christmas Day.

Playboi Carti — Whole Lotta Red

Kanye actually popped up on a new album from Playboi Carti as well, featuring on “Go2DaMoon.” Kanye is one of a select few guests on Carti’s new effort, Whole Lotta Red, which also features Future and Kanye’s Kids See Ghosts partner Kid Cudi on “M3tamorphosis.” This album comes two years after Carti’s last one (basically an eternity in hip-hop time), so his fans are excited to finally have this one.

Caroline Polachek — “So Cold You’re Hurting My Feelings”

Caroline Polachek turned a dad joke into a delightful holiday tune: “So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings” is one of her finest songs, and she re-worked her holiday edition of the track by swapping out “Hot” for “Cold.” The lyrics are good fun, too, with new lines like, “You know I live for the tinsel / But damn, I miss you tonight,” as well as “Show me the banana” swapped out for “I’m a good girl, Santa.”

SZA — “Good Days”

It’s not clear when the follow-up to SZA’s Ctrl is coming, but she has given fans a couple things to nibble on in 2020. The latest is “Good Days,” which is just her second new song of the year. If that wasn’t enough, the single art is an adorable childhood photo of SZA (albeit with a tattoo edited in, assuming she didn’t have forehead ink as a toddler).

Darkside — “Liberty Bell”

Nicolas Jaar and Dave Harrington made a slight comeback as Darkside earlier this year when they dropped a live album from the archives, but now their return is for real: Seven years after their debut album dropped, the duo has announced a second one, Spiral. They also dropped the first bit of music from it, the promising single “Liberty Bell.”

Lil Durk — The Voice

After dropping the title track this summer, Lil Durk decided to expand on it with a full-on mixtape, The Voice. The project serves as a tribute to his fallen friend and label-mate King Von, who makes a posthumous appearance on “Still Trappin’.” Elsewhere on the project, Durk also secured appearances from Young Thug, 6lack, and YNW Melly.

Grandaddy — “The Fox In The Snow” (Belle & Sebastian cover) and “In My Room” (Beach Boys cover)

Grandaddy’s 2020 has been marked by celebrating the 20th anniversary of their seminal album, The Sophtware Slump. Jason Lytle also took some time to perform a pair of songs that have special meaning for him for one reason or another, songs that are originally by Belle & Sebastian and the Beach Boys.

La Dispute — “Fifteen” and “Kinross”

For those who support La Dispute on Patreon, this isn’t news to them, as “Fifteen” and “Kinross” were previously released to just those folks. Now, though, the tracks are available to everybody, and Uproxx’s Caitlin White notes that they “are both slower tempo, eerie songs that reflect some of the uncertainty and chaos that 2020 held for everyone, and particularly for bands and music industry professionals who rely almost completely on touring to support themselves.”

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

The end of the year is often a time of reflection on the year that was and everything that took place, but for many, 2020 is a year they want to put behind them as quickly as possible. The COVID-19 pandemic swept away the last nine months and has caused millions to lose jobs and face financial and medical hardships previously unheard of.

The disruption of the sports world was a secondary concern for most of us, but for some it collided with those real world issues as arena workers in particular bore the brunt of the economic fallout, losing jobs and wages that they rely on. Some organizations took it upon themselves to keep those arena workers paid, but in many cases that didn’t happen. In Cleveland, those that take care of swapping out the floor at the Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse found themselves out of work when the NBA went on hiatus, and weren’t working until the Cavs returned to the court this month.

While Cavs owner Dan Gilbert, with his $43.9 billion net worth, apparently did not cover the wages of those crucial arena employees, Kevin Love did, as the Cavs veteran big man who made it a point to sign his extension in the midst of arena construction workers a few years ago paid it forward to help out those workers whose services would eventually be needed again.

Stories like this are heartwarming on the surface, and it’s a tremendous gesture from Love and all the other players in major sports that have made similar pledges to assist the workers that help put on games at arenas around the country. However, it’s a reminder that those with the most often are the ones least willing to help when they’re suddenly faced with the prospect of some losses that will dent their net worth but wouldn’t particularly impact their lifestyle — as opposed to those who lost jobs and found themselves in the desperate scramble of filling that income void to pay rent and bills and provide for their families.

So kudos to Love for stepping up in a big way, but it’s a shame that any of these gestures from athletes have been necessary.

Tobe Nwigwe has yet to run out of ammo for his #GetTwistedSundays #Cincoriginals campaign. Each week, he has dropped off a new video complete with coordinated costuming, complex choreography, stunning scenery, and a complete breakdown of his songs’ often complicated lyrics like clockwork, oftentimes bringing in high-profile guests to highlight his own lyrical inventiveness. This week’s video features Houston’s Killa Kyleon, putting a rapid-fire verse on “Cujo.”

The video also includes some nods to Tobe’s heritage, with an older woman in traditional clothes delivering the hook, a quote by Bruce Lee. “Be formless, shapeless like water,” she says, capping the exhortation with the Igbo word “Ighotago,” which means, “Do you understand?” The quote, which means to be flexible and avoid getting trapped in a rigid mindset, perfectly describes Tobe’s approach to music. Although he’s a truly gifted rapper, he’s been known to perform songs with almost no raps in them.

He also doesn’t adhere to the traditional business model of building a buzz, releasing an album, or signing to a label. Throughout his breakout 2020, he’s found innovative ways to approach music, settling on his current release strategies while eschewing the stereotypical rapper presentation. His family is heavily involved in his work, flying counter to the trend of rappers in committed relationships projecting themselves as players, and while he embraces some gun talk, it’s more often in service of self-defense than revenge for fallen friends. By swimming upstream — and being willing to take on many forms, Tobe has redefined success in a year when the music business has had to reckon with what success looks like without the usual means of generating profit.

Watch Tobe Nwigwe’s “Cujo” video above.

One of the worst things to happen to pop culture over the last 10 years or so is the rise of the plot hole. There are YouTube channels and message boards dedicated to pointing out the inconsistencies in Raiders of the Lost Ark (timely!), Cats (???), and Jingle All the Way (finally), to use three recent examples from a popular sinful source. It’s fair game to criticize a movie when it breaks or contradicts an established rule about its own universe (that’s good criticism!), but if you’re annoyed that Monsters, Inc. doesn’t show what Boo’s parents are up to when she’s in Monstropolis? To quote Pete Docter, who cares.

The Soul, Up, and Monsters, Inc. director was asked by the Huffington Post to discuss the Boo dilemma that continues to keep Reddit users up at night. “This is one of these questions that we asked ourselves. And we went through a lot of different machinations of writing scenes,” he said. “We didn’t actually board any, but we felt like, OK, the audience doesn’t need to know this because Sulley doesn’t know. And we’re with Sulley. So who cares?” He also discussed the “plot hole” of Buzz pretending to be an inanimate object around humans, even though he doesn’t think of himself as a toy, in Toy Story.

“We went through a lot of discussion on Toy Story, the first one, about like, ‘If Buzz doesn’t know he’s a toy, why does he go rigid when a kid walks in the room?’ We had a lot of explanations and talk about that, too. And in the end, nobody cared,” Docter said… “I think the short answer is you just have to kind of try to guess where the audience is going to find importance, or at least push their interest there,” Docter said.

I don’t need the talking toy movie to offer a real-world explanation for every minor detail; I just want to spend time with my friends Buzz and Woody. So, the next time you consider tweeting about a magic xylophone, remember: “And in the end, nobody cared.”

(Via the Huffington Post)

Vinyl records are about as popular as they’ve been since they were the latest and greatest way to buy and listen to music. Now there’s even more evidence of that, as records were in really in demand this holiday season: Billboard reports that 1.842 million LPs were sold in the week ending December 24, which is a historically large number.

In fact, that’s the highest single-week number since Nielsen Music/MRC Data began electronically tracking music sales in 1991. The previous record was actually set the week before, when 1.445 million records were sold during the week ending on December 17. Last week was great for independent record stores, too, as 733,000 copies were sold through indie retailers during the week ending December 24, which was the biggest such week since 1991.

Vinyl had a leg up on CDs as well, as that 1.842 million figure eclipsed the 1.671 million sales CDs managed during that week. This is the fourth time vinyl has outpaced CD since 1991, and each of those weeks took place in 2020.

As for the release that made up the biggest portion of sales for the week ending December 24, that was Paul McCartney’s new album, McCartney III. The new release topped the Vinyl Albums chart thanks to nearly 32,000 sales, which was the third-largest sales week for a vinyl album since 1991.

It has been nearly a year since D Smoke released his debut album Black Habits but fans were given a reason to revisit it (or discover it for the first time) when it was nominated for Best Rap Album in the upcoming 2021 Grammy Awards. To bolster its newfound popularity, D Smoke returned to the album once again to provide a visual treatment for one of its standout tracks: the ganja-praising anthem “Closer To God,” which is also a collaboration between D Smoke and his Top Dawg Entertainment-signed brother SiR.

The Inglewood, California siblings keep things simple in the “Closer To God” video, visiting a local church and giving testimony to the healing power of the ironically nicknamed devil’s lettuce. In the song, they wonder why they get high, concluding on the chorus “Maybe I’m tryna get closer to God.” The verses give D Smoke an opportunity to vent about the various stressors of life that prompt him to partake of the mood-elevating vegetable, from “corporations that fund genocide” to church sermons that “left me conflicted.” While the video only encompasses the first verse, it’s enough to get the point across.

Before making his critically acclaimed debut, D Smoke earned notoriety on Netflix’s Rhythm + Flow competition show, winning in the inaugural season after meeting West Coast legend Snoop Dogg’s early-season challenge and refusing to back down. Recently, D Smoke also appeared on fellow indie rapper Tobe Nwigwe’s “Headshots.”

Watch the “Closer To God” video above.

While the Marvel movies have experienced overwhelming success with its shared cinematic universe, better known as the MCU, DC Comics has notably struggled to do the same with its deep stable of superheroes. After the back-to-back failures of Batman V Superman and Justice League, DC Films was in pretty bad shape even with a hit like Wonder Woman under its belt. But in the past few years, the studio has found its footing by going a different route than Marvel and letting its movies stand on their own without burdening them with the constraints of a connected universe.

However, in 2022, DC Films will take that philosophy even further, by not only eschewing a cohesive cinematic universe, but releasing different versions of beloved characters at the same time. More specifically, Batman, who will have several competing on-screen versions when all is said and done thanks to the introduction of DC’s Multiverse in The Flash. Via The New York Times:

Boiled down, it means that some characters (Wonder Woman as portrayed by Ms. Gadot, for instance) will continue their adventures on Earth 1, while new incarnations (Mr. Pattinson as “The Batman”) will populate Earth 2.

“The Flash,” a film set for release in theaters in 2022, will link the two universes and feature two Batmans, with Mr. Affleck returning as one and Michael Keaton returning as the other. Mr. Keaton played Batman in 1989 and 1992.

In addition to its multiple on-screen Batmen, DC Comics will continue to expand its immensely popular TV shows, which also contain characters that contradict their big-screen counterparts. While all of that sounds confusing, DC Films head Walter Hamada is confident that audiences will embrace the multiverse approach as long as the final product works.

“I don’t think anyone else has ever attempted this,” Hamada told the Times. “But audiences are sophisticated enough to understand it. If we make good movies, they will go with it.”

(Via New York Times)

The Brooklyn Nets got off to a tremendous start to the season with dominant wins over the Warriors and Celtics to open their 2020-21 campaign, but saw their first stumble on Sunday night in a rather stunning loss to the previously winless Hornets in Charlotte.

Making matters significantly worse than just dropping a game, the Nets also lost a major piece of depth when guard Spencer Dinwiddie went down with what was initially called a right knee strain. The 27-year-old guard had emerged as a terrific scorer for the Nets in recent years, particularly as a sixth man, and while he was still finding his place in this new Nets rotation, his presence afforded them a backcourt rotation stocked full of scorers.

Unfortunately, further testing revealed that Dinwiddie, who went down after landing awkwardly on his right leg, had suffered a partially torn right ACL that would potentially end his season, per The Athletic’s Shams Charania.

Whether Dinwiddie spent all season with the Nets or was eventually traded at the deadline, this season was an important one for him as he’s set to become a free agent this summer. Charania would go on to report that he’s expected to make a full recovery by the time next season begins, which is the silver lining in all of this, but his chance to show further value filling a new role on a team like Brooklyn or if he were to be dealt is gone.

For the Nets, the loss of Dinwiddie both takes away a key rotation piece while also seeing them lose one of their best trade assets should they have decided to pursue some frontcourt help down the line to create a touch more roster balance. Hopefully Dinwiddie’s recovery and rehab will go smoothly and he’ll be back on the court next season making plays for someone.