Month: January 2021

Meghan McCain has been on maternity leave from The View since before the election (more on that later), but she couldn’t even make it through her first episode back without getting into a shouting match with her co-hosts.

The verbal scuffle broke out after Sunny Hostin said that Donald Trump is “trying to stage a coup” following his leaked phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which the president demanded Raffensperger “find” him enough votes to overturn the election. “I don’t think he’s trying to stage a coup,” McCain responded. “I think he’s ranting and pissed off that he’s irrelevant right now… I think people are taking this way too far, he’s a moron.” She’s not wrong, but Trump is setting a dangerous precedent, Hostin countered, because “this is someone who knows that what he is asking for is illegal, yet he continues to ask for it. I think that says that this is an intentional act, that this is a criminal, intentional act to steal an election. It’s a coup.”

McCain told her The View co-stars that she doesn’t buy into the talk of Trump declaring martial law (it won’t do him any good, anyway), as “things like that just scare people,” she said. “The media needs to be more respectful of Trump voters, and I think that’s how we got to this place to begin with. And going forward in 2021, I think that we need to be respectful of the 70 million Americans that for whatever reason did not feel that they could in good faith pull the trigger for President Biden and Vice President Harris.”

Here comes Whoopi!

Whoopi Goldberg argued that Trump backers ought to give respect — by acknowledging that Biden won the election — before they seek it. “Respect the people who voted for Biden and let him take his place!” she said, adding, “This is the bitch of being in a democratic society. This is what it is. Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. We lost four years ago now. He’s lost this year. You’re not allowed to kvetch and poop all over this!”

That did not settle things down, as you can see (hear) in the clip above. Be sure to look out for the Baby Yoda behind Whoopi. Only he’s allowed to kvetch and poop.

Also, if you thought McCain was done annoying people, you are mistaken! Much like a man who claims that the only reason he wouldn’t call a woman a “f*cking bitch” is because he has daughters, McCain didn’t realize paid maternity leave should be mandatory until she, herself, had a baby. “I started getting angry that conservatives in particular, given we are the party of family values.. that we are leaving women in this country without the capacity and ability to heal physically [after childbirth],” McCain said, as tweeted by the Huffington Post‘s Emily Peck. “Maybe it takes personal experience sometimes to get on board.” It also helps to, y’know, have empathy for others.

Good to have you back, Meghan.

Now that Christmas has come and gone, holiday songs are no longer dominating the Hot 100 chart like they were last week. While the top ten spots of last week’s chart featured just one non-holiday song, that has been flipped this week, as the one holiday song to make the top ten is Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You.” Carey’s holiday classic is still doing phenomenally well on the latest charts, though, as it’s still the biggest song in the world: On the new January 9-dated Billboard Global 200 chart, which tracks commercial and listening activity worldwide, “All I Want For Christmas Is You” is No. 1.

This is the song’s fourth week at No. 1 on the chart. This week’s chart was based on activity from December 25 to the 31st, so while it included Christmas Day, which was likely a high point in Carey listening, it also encompassed the six days after, which are probably less focused on Christmas music than the lead-up to the big day is.

Christmas music managed to stick around on this week’s Global 200 better than they did on the Hot 100. Aside from Carey’s single, three other Christmas songs made the top ten, including Wham’s “Last Christmas,” Brenda Lee’s “Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree,” and Bobby Helms’ “Jingle Bell Rock.”

There has been a flurry of NFL news regarding the coaching carousel in the last 24 hours as teams have moved quickly with the regular season now over to get themselves onto the coaching market and begin the process of overhauling their franchise leadership structure.

As such, folks like ESPN’s Adam Schefter are breaking news left and right and it’s never more important than in these moments to take that extra double check at the handle and verification badge when you’re on the hunt for news. This is something that is especially important if you write about sports and even moreso if you, you know, work for ESPN.

That’s why what happened on Monday was rather stunning as ESPN ran a story on the Dolphins firing offensive coordinator Chan Gailey, citing an Adam Schefter report. The problem was, Schefter never tweeted the news, an account @TuaNeedsHelp did with Schefter’s avatar and their name changed to Adam Schefter as a fake and, somehow, ESPN’s news desk picked it up and ran with it.

From there, they had to issue a retraction and apology on the site and social media, which the real Schefter tweeted out.

It is the absolute nightmare scenario for someone working on the news desk, but that it happened at Schefter’s employer makes it all the more strange as ESPN changed its news breaking policy recently to insist its newsbreakers don’t tweet out information if they have not already provided said info to the news desk so they can begin working up a story for the site. In this case, Schefter obviously didn’t file anything and still this got out, which means that policy has since been pushed aside or someone thought Adam had gone rogue.

In any case, this was an unfortunate moment that all of us that work in the business dread happening and I’m sure the person on the desk that did this feels absolutely sick about it. It’s really not a tremendously big deal in the grand scheme, although the celebrating Dolphins fans on Twitter are probably a bit miffed and it likely led to some very uncomfortable calls for Schefter, Gailey, and the Dolphins as this all got sorted out.

Just hours after a taped phone call — one that proved President Trump and his team tried to pressure Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger into “recalculating votes” in his favor — leaked, the president is now burning bridges with some of his closest allies, all because they won’t support his Electoral College challenge.

Trump, whose disastrous phone call to Georgia’s election officials has some Democrats pushing for another impeachment vote, took to Twitter to single out former GOP buddies, including Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, for not supporting his claims of voter fraud. Cotton, a staunch Trump supporter, issued a statement, in which he predicted this push to take back the presidency would backfire on Republicans. He also refused to let Congress determine the winner of the 2020 Presidential Election.

“The Founders entrusted our elections chiefly to the states — not Congress,” Cotton said. “They entrusted the election of our president to the people, acting through the Electoral College — not Congress.”

Cotton’s stance echoes the position of fellow Republican Senators like Graham and even former House Speaker Paul Ryan, who have publicly opposed the president’s Electoral College Challenge. Trump, for his part, seems to be taking the news that his GOP groupies are finally turning on him in stride — and by “in stride,” we mean with nuclear-level rants on Twitter in which he vows his fanbase will “NEVER FORGET,” which Republicans aren’t falling in line with his last-ditch effort to dismantle democracy.

Trump went on to quote some of his Electoral College challengers like Senator Ted Cruz and Senator Ron Johnson, both of whom claim they believe widespread voter fraud impacted the results of the presidential election (though no real proof of that has been offered up at this time).

You know it’s bad when you’ve got to quote-tweet the guy whose wife you callously insulted just a few years ago because he’s one of the only ones left in your camp. It would all be hilariously ironic if it weren’t so damn sad.

Amazon’s making a play for award season in a big way with One Night In Miami…, a Regina King-directed film centered around Cassius Clay’s defeat of Sonny Liston in 1964. The new trailer released on Monday depicts the theatrical version of the award-winning play of the same name.

The trailer showcases some emotional moments between the men, from the soon-to-be Muhammad Ali (Eli Goree) in the ring battling Liston to tough conversations about the future of the civil rights movement playing out at the time of the film. The movie features Black men from very different fields all experiencing the same struggles because of race, as well as them finding their place in the movement.

The One Night In Miami stage play, written by Kemp Powers, is a fictionalized account of conversations between Malcolm X (played here by Kingsley Ben-Adir), Sam Cook (Leslie Odom Jr.), and Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge) have while in Miami for the Clay fight.

“Everything’s not so black and white like you make it out to be,” Odom’s Cook says at one point in the trailer, interspersed with images from the Clay match and tense music.

“But we are fighting for our lives,” Ben-Adir’s Malcolm X appears to reply, showcasing some of the powerful rhetorical skills that the real-life civil rights icon once had. There’s certainly a lot of drama in the trailer alone, and it’s a conversation that still very much rings true, especially in the months following the second civil rights revival that the U.S.experienced in 2020.

One Night In Miami… starts streaming on Amazon on January 15.

On last week’s Billboard Hot 100 chart (dated January 2), Christmas music dominated. Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You” was in the midst of its now-annual return to No. 1, and 24kGoldn and Iann Dior’s “Mood” was the only non-holiday song in the top ten spots of the chart. Across the entire Hot 100 chart, there were 39 holiday songs included on last week’s tally, which is an all-time record.

Now, though, 2021 has arrived and the holiday season is over, so the Hot 100 is starting to return back to normal. On the latest Hot 100 (dated January 9), Carey’s hit has fallen down to No. 9 and is the only holiday tune remaining in the top ten, while “Mood” is back to No. 1 for the seventh total week. What is perhaps the most impressive chart feat of the week, though, is the return of The Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights.” The single, which initially was released in November 2019, wasn’t on the Hot 100 at all last week, but now it’s back up to No. 3. That is the biggest re-entry in the history of the chart, meaning that no song that has ever left the chart has come back from off the chart to on it in this high a ranking.

This means that “Blinding Lights” extends the records it holds for both most weeks spent in the top 5 of the Hot 100 and in the top 10. As for Carey, she managed to avoid repeating last year’s drastic “All I Want For Christmas Is You” chart descent, when it became the first song to ever fall from the top spot of the Hot 100 one week to off it completely the next week.

The pivotal Georgia Senate runoff election, which will decide whether the U.S. Senate remains in Republican control under Mitch McConnell or switches over to the Democrats, is fast approaching. And by fast approaching we mean it’s tomorrow. This means if you’re planning on lending a helping hand in some way — be it by phone banking, posting support to social channels, or donating (or voting, if you’re a Georgian) — now is the time to get to it.

In a call to action for Georgia voters, Lift Every Vote, a collective of musicians and creators teamed up with the BIPOC-led Georgia-based non-partisan group of organizers CivicGeorgia for a special campaign focused on boosting voter turnout and raising donations for grassroots civic engagement, specifically relating to the Georgia runoff. The campaign features a fitting and dramatically reimagined rendition of the Ray Charles classic “Georgia on My Mind,” arranged and produced by Grammy Nominated bass clarinetist Oran Etkin.

A cover of “Georgia on My Mind” while everyone in the country is literally obsessing over Georgia might seem a little too on the nose, but Etkin switches things up here playing with the song’s harmony and melody and leaving plenty of space for his remote jazz group (consisting of players from LA, NYC, Miami, and Georgia) to express themselves.

“The video is structured as a flowing series of musical conversations — oftentimes between a vocalist and an instrumentalist because I think what we want to do is promote open conversation around the issues our country faces,” Etkin says. “I wanted to create something fresh and new out of the familiarity of ‘Georgia on My Mind,’ so this arrangement plays with the harmony and groove of the original song and leaves room for all of the wonderful artists to add their own voices. I hope this can be an inspiration to create something fresh and new within our political system that can give everyone room to lift their voices.”

Check out Etkin’s arrangement above and make sure to vote. If you’d like to donate to CivicGeorgia, visit the organization’s website here, and keep in mind that while CivicGeorgia is non-partisan, it is not a 501(c)(3), meaning your donation is not tax-deductible.

Rudy Gobert has become something of a polarizing figure for NBA fans. The two-time DPOY inked a new max contract this offseason that will keep him paired up with Donovan Mitchell in Utah, and his pay day re-sparked debates over just where he belongs in the NBA hierarchy of players given his new $205 million contract.

Given that his greatest impact is on the defensive end rather than on offense where he is more limited than some other star big men, particularly as a shooter, Gobert has many who consider him vastly overrated. As such, the discourse around Gobert can get heated and the French superstar hasn’t been shy about making his feelings on his worth very clear. You can count Shaquille O’Neal among those who are not huge fans of Gobert, which should come as little surprise given Shaq’s propensity on Inside the NBA to demand that big men dominate the game to the tune of 25 and 12 or whatever other arbitrary numbers he chooses to throw out there on any given night.

Over the weekend, Shaq posted to Instagram with a photoshop of him dunking on Gobert, asserting that he would’ve had “45 points, 16 rebounds, 10 missed free throws in three quarters” and fouled Gobert out if he’d played against the Jazz center. Gobert brushed that off in the comments with some laughing emojis and an “I guess we’ll never know” response, and then took to Twitter to further clarify that there is no beef between he and the Hall of Famer, as he’s just letting it all go.

I doubt this is the last we hear from Shaq on the matter, as he’s always enjoyed taking shots at the current big men in the NBA and whenever this comes up on TNT, you can bet Charles Barkley will egg him on into pouring more fuel on the fire. In any case, Gobert doesn’t seem interested in a war of words with Shaq, which comes as a bit of a surprise but shows some growth from the Frenchman. It’s probably a wise move as there’s really no way of winning in this and best to simply ignore it and carry on.

With less than two weeks to go until the premiere of WandaVision, Disney+ is pulling out all of the stops for its first original Marvel series. On Monday, the streaming service dropped a new video featuring just one of the WandaVision theme songs from Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez, who have a strong record of delivering hit songs for Frozen, Coco, and Frozen 2. In statement from Disney, the duo revealed that the series will feature several “unique themes” as each episode will focus on a different era of television. Via /Film:

“WandaVision is such a cool, strange, one-of-a-kind project,” Lopez said. “When the director, Matt Shakman—an old friend from my college days—pitched it to us, we didn’t have to think about it. We loved the bright feeling of American sitcoms mixed with the deep sense of unease the story had, and it was a really inviting challenge to help set that tone.”

Added Anderson-Lopez, “I grew up in the ’80s watching shows from every decade on the networks all day long. Episodes from I Love Lucy, Brady Bunch and Family Ties shaped who I am and how I move through the world. So this project was a dream come true.”

Disney also announced that WandaVision will run for nine episodes, which is a welcome surprise after months of rumors that the series would only have six episodes. The extended episode count will prevent a gap in Marvel content when The Falcon and The Winter Soldier premieres in March just a week after WandaVision ends. It also gives the series plenty of time to tell its reality-bending story that officially kicks off Phase Four of the MCU, which was supposed to start with Black Widow back in April 2020, but COVID-19 had other plans.

(Via Marvel & /Film)

Harry Styles has been in (or has at least been rumored to have been in) a number of high-profile relationship, and it seems he’s at the start of another one. TMZ reports that over the weekend, Styles attended a wedding with Olivia Wilde as his plus-one, and they were “holding hands and very much together.”

The small ceremony, which only had 16 attendees, was in Montecito, California (near Santa Barbara) and was for Styles’ manager Jeffrey Azoff and his now-wife Glenne Christiaansen, who works for Apple Music. Styles actually officiated the ceremony. Furthermore, People reports the two “have dated for a few weeks” and that after the wedding, they were seen at Styles’ Los Angeles home. Styles and Wilde recently worked together on the film Don’t Worry Darling, which Wilde directed and in which Styles plays a lead role alongside Florence Pugh.

Wilde isn’t too far removed from a long-term relationship, as she and Jason Sudeikis began dating in November 2011 and got engaged at some point during the 2012 holiday season. Then, a couple months ago, it was reported that the pair had called off their engagement and split up in early 2020. The pair are apparently amicably co-parenting their two children, a six-year-old son and a four-year-old daughter.

As for how the internet feels about all this, there are a lot of different reactions on Twitter. Some users wonder why Styles and Wilde holding hands has sparked dating rumors but him holding hands with Lizzo (or Louis Tomlinson) didn’t. Some internet users have apparently also taken to harassing Wilde on her social media posts, which others have condemned as deplorable behavior.

Check out some reactions below.

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