It’s been quite a year for Bam Adebayo. The up-and-coming 23-year-old blossomed into a full-fledged star last season with the Heat, helping lead Miami to stunning Finals run in the Bubble as they managed to topple the other Eastern Conference contenders who many picked to finish ahead of them.
He made his first All-Star team last season as well, gaining well-earned recognition for his well-rounded game and his part in transforming the Heat back into true title contenders. Adebayo also earned handsome compensation from the Heat in the form of a five-year, $163 million contract extension.
And now it appears he’s putting some of his money toward noble altruistic purposes. In true holiday spirit, Adebayo has pledged to pay a full year worth of rent to a local family that has been struggling to make ends meet after a car accident and was facing eviction.
Adebayo showed up to the house of Travillia Bogan, a single mother of two sets of twins on the verge of facing eviction, and presented her with a year’s worth of rent. A week before Christmas, it’s the best present Adebayo has ever had the privilege of giving.
“It’s gotta be No. 1,” Adebayo told Complex exclusively. “Just helping somebody like that, in that situation, and all the negative situations that’s happened to her the last couple of months, that’s definitely top of my list.”
Beyond the rent money, Adebayo has also promised to pay to maintain the property over the next year. And this isn’t his first foray into giving. Adebayo’s foundation, BBB (BAM, Books, and Brotherhood), is in charge of a number of charitable endeavors in his community each year. For a player who is just beginning to shine on the court, his generosity of spirit is burning even brighter.
Over the course of the year, Lana Del Rey has gradually dropped tidbits of information about her upcoming album, Chemtrails Over The Country Club. She declared earlier this year that it would be released in September, but the month came and went without the album. In October, however, she shared a new song, “Let Me Love You Like A Woman.” Now, she has given fans another reason to look forward to 2021, as she has announced a new video for the album’s title track with a teaser clip.
The video includes rapidly changing shots of Del Rey dressed as a cheerleader, some summer-themed B-roll, and what looks like Del Rey as a werewolf, given that she has fangs and is hanging out with an actual wolf. The clip also shows somebody (presumably Del Rey, although the person’s face isn’t clearly visible) in outfits that are more revealing than what Del Rey has traditionally worn in her professional endeavors. The full video is set to be released on January 11.
Del Rey recently noted that she plans to release a covers album on Christmas to make up for the Chemtrails delay, writing, “[There is a] 16-week delay on the vinyl process, so in the meantime, I’m going to give you a digital record of American standards and classics for Christmas because I can’t get the record plants to open until March 5. That probably goes for a lot of people out there.”
Although the emerging youth rap collective AG Club — short for “avant-garde” — proudly represents San Francisco, their breakout single is hardly beholden to the sonic conventions of the Bay Area. In fact, “Memphis” sounds much more like the bass-heavy trap rap of its namesake as it does the post-hyphy party rap of fellow NorCal denizens SOB X RBE or Guapdad 4000.
So the addition of guest rappers ASAP Ferg and NLE Choppa to the song’s remix, “Memphis Pt. 2,” is actually fitting in many ways. Like AG Club, the ASAP Mob eschewed local solidarity for an omnivorous sound that saw the blog era breakouts sampling from places like Houston, London, and yes, Houston to form their sonic playgrounds. Meanwhile, NLE Choppa is a resident of Memphis who has shown an increasing versatility beyond regional sounds as his popularity as a featured artist grows — yet here, he sounds right at home. The video finds them all linking up to wreak havoc in Los Angeles, just to really mix things up.
In an introductory interview for Vice’s i-D Magazine, AG Club gets compared to ASAP Mob as well as the LA-based diversity collective Brockhampton, while the group’s members Baby Boy, Jody Fontaine, and Mick Antony say their mission is “to take over every form of media from music to TV, film, and fashion.” Beginning with the breakout viral hit that is “Memphis,” we’d say they are well on their way.
Watch AG Club’s “Memphis” video above.
NLE Choppa is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
The Denver Nuggets are looking to get over the hump this season. After being the only team in the league to make each of the last two conference finals, the Nuggets are banking on internal development from a number of players alongside the brilliance of Nikola Jokic to get them to the NBA Finals.
Perhaps the player who needs to take a leap the most is Jamal Murray, who needs to show that his magnificent performance in the NBA’s Orlando Bubble is sustainable and capable of giving Denver a second superstar. It’s not a bad bet to make, because Murray is one heck of a player, and in what must be an endorsement of what he can become, a new report indicates that the team has no plans on trading him, even for a former league MVP.
But a league source said Tuesday that Murray would not be traded. His transcendent postseason run in Orlando reaffirmed why the Nuggets gave him a max contract extension last summer and underscored why they view him as a franchise cornerstone, along with center Nikola Jokic.
ESPN had previously reported that Denver and Houston had talks about a potential deal for Harden, although there is no word on what those conversations entailed. We can probably make some assumptions here — Michael Porter Jr., for example, seems like someone who would have to be included in a Harden deal — but barring a major change of heart, we can safely assume that Murray will not be going anywhere. If that’s the case, the Rockets likely won’t be jumping at a Denver offer, but depending on how MPJ performs this season, it might be worth revisiting closer to the deadline.
It’s the season of giving and Mulatto has found a way to do just that. Rather than spending big bucks on a flashy video alongside her recently released Queen Of Da Souf (Deluxe) LP, Mulatto instead used those funds to by gifts for the less fortunate in her generous “Spend It” video.
The visual depicts Mulatto gathering her team to purchase iPads, laptops, toys, and food items from Walmart for selected families and those living in Atlanta’s Section 8 housing. Speaking about her charitable actions and explaining the concept behind her video, Mulatto said:
“It’s called ‘Spend It’ so I was originally going to have this super flexed-up video, pull out them racks, pull out the foreign, and just talk about how I’m the youngest and the richest. But, it’s Christmas time, holiday time, and I feel like a better way to spend that sh*t would be giving back to the community, the people who are less fortunate than I am. Because I could spend that sh*t on me all day but today we’re going to spend that sh*t on people who need it.”
Watch Mulatto’s “Spend It” video above.
Queen Of Da Souf (Deluxe) is out now via RCA. Get it here.
The 2020 NBA Finals only just wrapped up in mid-October, but due to the league’s pandemic-altered schedule, the 2020-21 season is already starting tonight after a quick offseason with a pair of games. Both will be broadcast on TNT, and DaBaby and Dua Lipa are helping the network and the league start things right with a new promotional video.
The soon-to-be-former rapper begins the video by saying, “‘Tis the season, the season of believing. NBA opening night gives everyone hope. Every fan, every city, every team, every player. You see that look. This game keeps us looking up. That’s where the ball is. That’s where the banners at. Sure, there’s a time to hit the floor, but sometimes, you gotta tell gravity, ‘Hold on, hold on, hold on: I got something to do. Let’s levitate.’”
From there, he calls on Lipa, at which point the video for her and DaBaby’s version of “Levitating” plays between clips of the NBA’s biggest stars doing their thing. DaBaby later ends the video, “Hope is a launchpad. There’s power in powering forward, so keep your head up, because after this year, I feel like we all need to rise up with our eyes up. It’s a new season of the NBA on TNT.”
Check out the video above.
Dua Lipa is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
As a self-proclaimed workaholic, Charli XCX needed to channel her creative energy somewhere at the onset of quarantine earlier this year. She began by chronicling her life and mental health through a series of quarantine diary entries before pivoting to write and record an entire album in just two months. Now, Charli has returned to her digital diary to summarize an entire year in pop culture trends with her final entry.
Penning the reflection for Dazed, Charli’s diary touched on some of the more upsetting events of the past few months. “Well, let’s just start by saying that 2020 proved to us what we knew all along: the world is a terrible place,” she wrote. “We live in a world that is burning, a world bent out of shape by a virus, a world of job losses and health scares, a world where an orange-hued madman advises us to inject bleach into our skin, a world where JK Rowling is no longer your favourite children’s author but the internet’s most outspoken transphobic troll, a world of real bullets, rubber bullets, and violent police. An unjust world filled with racism, corruption, and pain. Hasn’t it always been this way for some?”
The singer continued to say that she thinks of 2020 as the year of “WAP“:
“2020, in my eyes at least, is the year of ‘WAP’, the year of Kamala Harris, the year of Michaela Coel. It’s the year I finally saw Hugh Grant in a different light (if you know, you know). It’s the year I really experienced Paris, via Netflix, with my infuriating friend Emily. 2020 brought us Joe Exotic, Carole Baskin, and the super-weird and creepy Doc Antle. This year was the year of the pop-star open letter, from Lorde to Lana (controversial). The Lakers did it for Kobe in 2020, and I was introduced to the wonderful budding bromance between LeBron James and Anthony Davis (it’s so cute, I can’t even). Face mask fashion boomed out of face mask necessity, and everybody forgot about phone calls and FaceTime, instead choosing to communicate exclusively on Zoom. 2020 is the year of dancing in your bedroom while your favourite artist performs at their own virtual concert. It’s the year that Taylor went to the woods, Dua went to the 70s, and Ariana went to the White House. It’s the year of the puzzle, the spontaneous marriage, the inevitable break-up. 2020 is the year we finally celebrate frontline workers and all that they do for us. It’s the year we edge towards discussing our mental health more openly. It’s the year of the family group chat and trying our best to stay in touch with friends. It’s the year our communities come together – virtually, of course.
Taika Waititi’s time as an executive producer on What We Do in the Shadows will soon lead down another rather intriguing road. FX has announced that the eclectic auteur will take on more duties at the network, this time for a comedy series that he co-wrote with Native American filmmaker Sterlin Harjo. They’ll both executive produce, along with WWDITS‘ Garrett Basch, for a show called Reservation Dogs, and if the mere sound of that title didn’t swiftly bring Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs to mind, then FX’s first promotional photo (above) will get that job done. This time, a group of teens will be rocking awfully familiar looking suits, and perhaps this shall carry some parody vibes. No official language has surfaced yet on that end, so we’ll have to be patient.
A press release reveals that Reservation Dogs “follows four Native teenagers in rural Oklahoma who spend their days committing crime… and fighting it.” I’m hoping to also see some shades of Crystal Moselle’s The Wolfpack, which followed a band of brothers (reference intentional) as they explored the streets of New York City, but with Waititi’s new show, these teens are strutting through Okmulgee, Oklahoma (the home of the Muskogee Creek tribal headquarters). And we’re getting crime capers, perhaps? Here’s FX’s revelation of the leading quartet’s character names:
D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai (Creeped Out) as BEAR
Devery Jacobs (American Gods) as ELORA DANAN
Paulina Alexis (Beans) as WILLIE JACK
Lane Factor (newcomer) as CHEESE
You can’t beat a guy who calls himself “Cheese.” He’s already my favorite, and I (obviously) know nothing about him. According to FX Original Programming President Nick Grad, “Sterlin Harjo draws deeply on his experiences as a Native Oklahoman to make Reservation Dogs a true-to-life and incredibly funny story of youth, courage and misadventures.” As for Harjo’s own sentiments, he declared that “[a]s longtime friends, it was only natural that Taika and I found a project together, and what better than a show that celebrates the complementary storytelling styles of our indigenous communities–mine in Oklahoma and Taika’s in Aotearoa.”
There’s no word on a specific release date yet for Reservation Dogs, but the pilot already shot in Okmulgee, and eight episodes will arrive sometime in 2021.
As far as albums that aren’t yet confirmed to actually exist, Rihanna’s ninth may have been the most talked-about of 2020. Throughout the year, she dropped hints about the nature and progress of the album, and before the year is over, she has offered yet another promising tidbit.
In a conversation with UK publication Closer, Rihanna suggested that she wants to make some musical moves in 2021, saying, “2021 is a little unknown for everybody and nobody is sure what restrictions there are going to be. My creativity is within my control, though, and I want to take my music and my brands to a different level.”
She also spoke about how the pandemic has given her an opportunity to slow down, saying, “I love what I do, but I am always busy and quarantine gave me the time to do things I wouldn’t always have been able to do — watch an entire box set in a day, cook, go for walk. It’s important we do little things we enjoy and are kind to ourselves.”
Speaking of cooking, Rihanna also revealed her plan to release a cookbook that features her favorite Caribbean recipes. She said she “loves food from my Barbadian roots and eats a lot of fresh fish” and also gets down with “mac ‘n’ cheese, shepherd’s pie, and rum punch.”
Nnamdi Asomugha definitely isn’t the first former pro athlete to become an actor, but he just might be the best at it. We’ve seen athletes become stars, sometimes even stars who act (occasionally even passably), but how many athletes have truly become actors?
Now that we’re on the subject, the “becoming” part is also debatable. More often they simply leverage one form of stardom for another. Showbiz is littered with sports superstars capitalizing on their fame by starring in movies — your Shaqs, your Jim Browns, your Lebrons James — a phenomenon that probably predates movies themselves, dating back to the days when sports page heroes like Babe Ruth played themselves on Broadway.
Nnamdi Asomugha isn’t a superstar cashing in and he isn’t playing himself. He’s an ex-athlete who has reinvented himself as an actor, taking the kinds of dramatic roles young up-and-comers take when they’re trying to build buzz on the festival circuit, not the easy cameos in high-profile action movies.
In fact, we might not be hearing about his latest, Sylvie’s Love (perhaps my favorite movie of the year), in which Asomugha stars as a jazz musician opposite Tessa Thompson, if not for him. Coming off Asomugha’s surprising turn in 2017’s critically acclaimed Crown Heights (for which he was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for best-supporting actor) at Sundance, he was passed along Eugene Ashe’s script for Sylvie’s Love, a sweeping romance set in 50s and 60s Harlem. When Asomugha realized the film probably wouldn’t get made on its own, he called on his connections and put on his producer’s hat and helped make it happen himself.
“The same reason why studios and financiers and other producers were saying no to it was the exact reason that I was in love with it,” Asomugha says. “The fact that I hadn’t seen it before.”
How did he get some of those connections? Well, it’s probably easier when you’re married to the actress Kerry Washington. Still, it’s hard not to appreciate someone who seems genuinely motivated by the work and not the fame or money that comes from it. Keep in mind, this isn’t some guy with a brief college or pro career either, a la The Rock or insert pro wrestler here. Asomugha was a 10-year pro and three-time Pro Bowl cornerback with the Raiders, Eagles, and 49ers. He’d never even considered acting until he retired in 2013. And now he’s holding his own alongside Lakeith Stanfield and Tessa Thompson? How crazy is that?
With Sylvie’s Love finally hitting Amazon Prime on December 23rd so everyone can see what I’ve been shouting about, I spoke to Asomugha this week, to see if he could explain what seems like his charmed existence.
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Was acting something that you came to later after football or was it something that you’d always done that you had to put on hold for a while?
No, I’ve never done acting. It’s very much brand new. The weird thing is, I’ve now been in it for a handful of years, but because I’ve done so few projects it still feels very brand new. But no, this wasn’t a dream of mine as a kid. I mean, I was playing football and my thought was, all right, when I’m finished playing, I’m going to become one of the NFL correspondents, where I sit behind a desk and talk about the games or whatever. That was the plan. I think it was the road that a lot of my colleagues were going down. And, I don’t know, there was some moment midway through my career, where I was doing a commercial, and the director of the commercial just started talking to me about acting, and about how great I was in the commercial. And I was like, “It was just a commercial. It’s no big deal.” He’s like, “No, I see guys all the time. I was just with…” And he’ll name a quarterback or something, “and they don’t have that skill level that you’ve displayed today. I think you should really look into it when you’re done.”
So I put my heart into that. I mean, the other piece of advice that I got from some big-time names, they would talk to me and they would say, “Look, whatever you go into next, you have to really love it. Love it like you love football.” And I always loved movies. I always loved television and watching performances. So I just coupled those two things together, and said this is the direction that I needed to go.
Who were some of those people?
Oh, man! I mean, I remember specific conversations with… I’ll just name names — Ronnie Lott, Rod Woodson, Mike Haynes, Charles Woodson, Willie Brown. I remember specific conversations with them, all separately, where they were saying the exact same thing. When you’re hearing it from guys like that, you listen.
So when you were growing up playing football, you never saw people doing theater, and there wasn’t part of you that wanted to do that?
(Laughs) I hated the theater. I really did. Not with a passion, but it was just boring to me. I mean, plays at school, not even that I was in any, but just watching them. I’ll say now as an adult, I hadn’t matured enough to understand theater and musicals and all that, but it just was not interesting to me at all. My parents would make us stand up in front of church — every weekend we would have to recite something from the Bible to the church, or we’d have to put on some performance of the nativity scene or something, and I hated doing that stuff. I really did. Then one day my sister really wanted to see this musical called Wicked. I was in the middle of my career, and I had been that guy that, if I was dating someone and they said, “Hey, I want to go see a show.” I would be like, “Oh, I don’t watch the theater. I’m not going,” and then I’d make fun of it.
But my sister, we were in LA and she really wanted to go see Wicked. And finally I was like, “Oh, all right, I’ll go with you.” And I was blown away by the musical. I mean, she explained to me that this is the Wizard of Oz, but it pre-dates the Wizard of Oz, that we’re following [The Witch] — I was just fascinated by this. I was like, “Why would somebody even think of that?” I got into it. And so, I don’t know, I slowly started to appreciate it all as I got older, this world that I really tried to ridicule or to move away from.
Did you seek out people to study acting with? What was the process of learning to do it like?
I did. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to go to these conservatory schools, like a Juilliard or a Yale or NYU or anything like that. But I knew that I could find out who those teachers were, and I could figure out a way to study with them on my own. And I could also find online, which you can find, the course study. So like with the catalog, what they go through throughout the year. So I downloaded all of that when I finished playing. I got in touch with individual teachers at these schools for their individual stuff. I had no clue what any of this stuff was, but they took the time to teach me. Obviously, it wasn’t as rigorous for me as those students, because they were in an actual class. It’s completely different, but I just needed the foundation. I needed to understand what I was getting into. And then I sought out acting coaches in LA and New York and just really wanted to figure it out and see if there was a lane for me in there. So that was the initial process.
So then in terms of this movie, you came on pretty early in the process. Right? You came on as a producer?
I did. So I came on as an actor, it was right after Sundance. I had another film that was there called Crown Heights. The woman that was producing this film, her name is Gabrielle Glore. She saw Crown Heights. And it was maybe two days later, I was flying home, and my management sent me this script. And they said, “Hey, we got this script. Someone saw you at Sundance and thinks that you’d be right for it.”
So I read [the script for Sylvie’s Love] on the plane and fell in love with it early. And that was the acting part of it. I would talk to them for the next several months as just an actor, but then it became clear that nobody wanted to make the film. The feedback that kept coming was, “We don’t know that there’s an audience for this type of film. We haven’t seen it. It’s a little risky.”
Now, obviously, they’ve seen a love story. But they hadn’t seen a love story surrounding black people that didn’t have anything to do with the societal issues that you might have in a story about black people. It was just about love. So we got a lot of nos. And I had produced films up until this point, successful ones, and I just talked to my producing partner, Jonathan Baker, and we said, “We have to make this film, or else it’s probably not going to get made.” It was that great a script. So we went in and I became a producer on it.
What was it that you liked so much about it?
I think the biggest thing was the fact that I hadn’t seen it before. The same reason why studios and financiers and other producers were saying no to it was the exact reason that I was in love with it. There was no true metric for it. We don’t see it very often. And it takes place in the fifties and sixties. We can watch The Notebook a 1000 times, but we’re never going to see it with black people in it. We’re going to be looking at Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams. And so now we have an opportunity to make this type of film we can see ourselves in. And it just felt like, how do you not tell this story when you have the opportunity? That’s not to say that this is The Notebook or better or worse, it’s just to say, it’s a period film that centers around love. And so it was rare and we wanted to be a part of it.
Well, I can say it. It’s better than The Notebook.
There you go.
On Crown Heights, you played a Trinidadian, and you had a dialect coach. This one obviously is a little different, it’s just set in a different time period. Did you do anything to learn that period dialect at all?
Oh, to learn the dialects, without a doubt. And that was more about just watching documentaries. The main focus was the music. I read the script, it was clear that everything about this guy’s life was music. I started watching movies from that time. Watched a lot of Paul Newman. Remember I watched Paris Blues with Sydney Poitier and Paul Newman as the two male leads, and Joanne Woodward was opposite Paul Newman. And they were in the bedroom and she saw him playing. They were at home, she sees he wrote music, and it’s on the piano or something. She says, “You write music too?” And he says, “I live music. Morning, noon, and night. Everything else is just icing on the cake.”
And I wrote that on my script because that was Robert, that was my character. I knew I had to start with the music. So I watched jazz documentaries, I learned how to play the saxophone. I made sure that the style, the way that I sat, the way that I walked, the way that I spoke, the way I played the instrument, that all of those things were authentic to what I was seeing in those documentaries. I wanted it to be true, even though a lot of us won’t be able to tell.
So when you retired from football, what was that decision like? Did it take a long time or was it just like it came to you right away?
When you know, you know. It’s one of those things where, you know life doesn’t end there. Then you’re able to make decisions a little more clearly. Of course, that didn’t make it any easier. So the question is, did I know? Yeah, I felt that it was a good time, but it didn’t make it any easier. It’s a game that ’till this day I miss, and I miss playing. It’s not that I want to go play again, but I miss so many aspects of it; being around the team, being around the coaching, that calm before the storm. Getting ready to go out to the game, running out onto the field, and the crowd is going crazy. And the thrill of victory. All that type of stuff. The agony of defeat. I mean, it’s all part of it. It’s all a part of the growing process and I miss it. So it wasn’t difficult, I knew that I wanted to do it. I knew that it was time. But like I said, it didn’t make it any easier to do. It’s not my first love, but it was the first love that truly worked out for me. And it’s like, you want that sort of thing. You want that to last forever. You want it to last for a 100 years. And sadly, when it comes to an end. You have to figure out what you’re going to do next. And you have to go into the scary parts of what’s out there. And that’s what I had to do.
Well, thank you so much for talking to me. I can tell you that after I saw the movie, I saw your name in the credits and I knew your name from football. And I had to Google it to make sure you were the same person. Because you were so good at the movie that I was like, “There’s no way that’s the same guy. That can’t be true.”
Oh, I appreciate it. Thank you. And thank you for your too support.
‘Sylvie’s Love’ hits Amazon Prime on December 23rd. Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can access his archive of reviews here.
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