Month: January 2021

Frances Quinlan has made some of the better indie rock records for the past decade as leader of Hop Along. Then, last year, Quinlan released Likewise, their first solo album under their own name. Now, Quinlan is entering another new chapter of their life: Today, they came out as non-binary.

Sharing the news in a Twitter thread, Quinlan wrote:

“I’ve come to understand (better) why I felt so compelled to start going by my middle name when I turned 18 and went away to college. I needed distance from a role that I have never understood or felt agency within. Sixteen years later, it still confounds me.

I know this, because for so long I thought I had to be desired to gain true worth as a person. Perhaps a lot of us have felt this way. For so long I thought I had to be a ‘correct’ version of a woman. This is a falsehood I no longer buy. Honestly, I STILL don’t know what being a woman is. No one has been able to tell me.

I am privileged and grateful to have had the time, space, and generous insight offered by both advocates and friends, as I’ve learned about the expansive identity that is being nonbinary. I feel more at home with myself in a way I did not realized was possible.

I am embarrassed to say I did not realize how much space there has always been. It’s humans who have created these roles and strange rules. I am inspired and humbled witnessing so many who’ve taken great risk to be their true selves outside of these uneasy, fearful constructs.

I probably should have typed this up in a word doc. F*ck it.”

Quinlan later added, “Identifying as nonbinary has helped me to finally be at home in this body. The pronouns they/them feel most right to me.”

Find Quinlan’s tweets below.

Nas continues to support his 2020 comeback album King’s Disease with a new video for “27 Summers.” The Queens living legend heads down to Miami in the video, hooking up with local hometown hero DJ Khaled to hit the links and celebrate his nearly unprecedented longevity in the rap game. As the two tee up, Khaled marvels at Nas’s “27 Summers” of relevance, defining Nas’s penchant for “doing your thing at a high level… timeless.”

Incidentally, it was DJ Khaled who helped Nas announce that “Nas Album Done” on Major Key in 2016, on which the Queens vet confirmed that a project was on the way. However, that project seemingly never materialized after the song drove up excitement for the Illmatic rapper’s potential return to form. Instead, Nas linked up with Kanye West to release the seven-song EP Nasir in the summer of 2018 to a less than stellar reception — the result, Nas later admitted, of a rushed production process that neither rapper planned out much in advance.

However, in 2020, Nas turned to a new producer, California’s Hit-Boy, on the advice of Detroit rapper Big Sean, who appears on the King’s Disease track “Replace Me.” The new album was much better received, putting Nas in the position to truly celebrate his longevity in the game.

Watch Nas’s “27 Summers” video above.

The 2020-21 NBA season is still in its infancy, with only one month of data available for analysis. As such, everything (and I mean everything) should be taken with a grain of salt. That would be the case even without a global pandemic crippling the United States in myriad ways, but it is especially true given the nature of the circumstances the NBA is attempting to navigate while playing basketball in cities across the country.

Throughout the campaign, we’ll take a weekly look at some trends that could be impacting the state of play and, in particular, the burgeoning sports betting industry through the lens of the NBA. In today’s installment, we glance at the impact of home-court advantage or, in this case, perhaps the lack of impact.

Through Jan. 20, home teams were just 97-111-1 against the spread, covering at a 46.6 percent clip. That isn’t a wild outlier in the grand scheme, especially given the relatively small sample, but even with bookmakers accounting for the lack of crowds, they haven’t been able to keep up. Perhaps the wilder statistic is that home teams were just 107-102 straight up, representing a (very) different landscape than during a typical NBA season.

Data from the 2019-20 is difficult to manipulate since most of the regular season happened in standard fashion, but the bubble made an impact on takeaways. Still, home teams won 55 percent of their games before the bubble by an average of 2.2 points per game, which is relatively normal. In the previous season in 2018-19, the sample is much larger (1,230 games) and home teams outscored their opponents by 3,351 total points, or an average of 2.72 points per game.

This season, home teams are outscoring their opponents by only 44 total points across a 209-game sample, for an average of 0.21 points per game. That also helps to account, at least in part, for the lack of success by betting favorites so far in 2020-21.

More often than not, the home team is favored in betting circles, even if the gap is closing this season. Favorites are an ugly 94-114-1 (45.2 percent) against the number so far, lending credence to the widespread assumption that a) home-court advantage is a lot smaller than it usually is, and b) there is more variance right now.

Being that the writer of this post is not a data scientist, it is hard to quantify everything taking place here, especially when it comes to statistical modeling of variance. Still, it is noteworthy, at the very least, that home teams are only slightly better than road teams this season, all while franchises are still flying all over the country.

Perhaps it is the lack of home crowds, perhaps it is officials not being influenced by crowd noise, or perhaps it is even a little bit of small-sample size nonsense. It is still a trend worth monitoring because, even if everyone (including bookmakers) knows the deal to some degree, the visitors have been more profitable through one month of NBA action. For those looking for an edge, to this point, that’s been a fairly easy way to find one.

(Spoilers from Marvel Studios and Disney+’s WandaVision will be found below.)

Things are moving quickly in WandaVision, and we’re not just talking about Vision’s super-speed. (Did he have that before?) During a recent interview with Rotten Tomatoes, Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige gave an interesting answer when asked if Wanda’s family members could appear in the Disney+ series. Considering Friday’s Episode 3 included a very pivotal reference to Wanda’s late brother Pietro, a.k.a. Quicksilver, we’re already starting to see major signs that Wanda’s familial connections will be explored. Of course, the big question on Marvel fan’s mind is if those connections will include the biggest one of them all: Magneto.

For those who don’t know, Magneto is the father of the Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver in the comics, which has not been the case in the Marvel Cinematic Universe — so far. With Disney now owning the rights to the X-Men, fans have been theorizing that WandaVision will begin laying the groundwork for mutants to appear in the MCU. When asked if the show will include Wanda’s mutant family members, here’s what Feige had to say. Via Comic Book:

“This is more about that relationship with Vision, and more about that dynamic and the evolving relationship of that couple, and how that grows and evolves and unfolds.”

When pressed about “other family members” appearing in WandaVision, Feige said with a smile, “There are other characters in other episodes of this show. Who they are, what they are, not worth discussing right now.”

As to whether or not the MCU would actually introduce Magneto in a Disney+ series is open for debate, but that’s what makes this experimental opening to Phase 4 so great. Marvel can do whatever it wants with the story. It could go anywhere! To add further evidence to the mutant theory, Episode 3’s Easter Egg commercial contained a very interesting tag line for Hydra Soap: “Find the goddess within.”

Who’s known for referring to mutants as gods? Magneto.

(Via Rotten Tomatoes & ComicBook)

After establishing the Indiecast Hall Of Fame last week, Steven Hyden and Ian Cohen are taking questions from listeners on this week’s episode. The episode kicks off with a discussion ska, the oft-maligned sect of punk that people tend to joke about, but also have an encyclopedic understanding of its intricacies. After the recent critical reevaluation of nu metal, is ska next in line for a reinvention? Jeff Rosenstock has been proudly waving the flag of ska for years, and the world is finally starting to come around.

This week features many thoughtful questions from listeners, guiding Hyden and Cohen’s conversation on the episode and finding the duo discussing their methods for digging into the discography of a newly-discovered artist, the big-budget albums they’d like to hear, and the role of Manchester Orchestra in modern indie.

In this week’s Recommendation Corner, Cohen has been enjoying Downtiming, the debut EP from Camp Trash. Instead of new music, Hyden is taking the opportunity to plug his recent interview with The Wrens’ Charles Bissel, who revealed that the band’s long awaited follow up to 2003’s The Meadowlands might finally be released later this year!

New episodes of Indiecast drop every Friday. Listen to Episode 23 on Spotify and Apple Podcasts below and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts here. Stay up to date and follow us on Instagram and Twitter.

Joe Biden has been president for less than 48 hours (and only one full day), but Sean Hannity has already seen enough: it’s a disaster.

“The Biden administration is off to a very rocky start,” the conservative Fox News host and Olive Garden fanatic said to kick off Thursday’s episode of Hannity. He claimed the president was “struggling to answer simple questions,” referring to an incident yesterday where an Associated Press reporter asked, “You set the goal at 100 million vaccines in the first 100 days. Is that high enough? Shouldn’t we set the bar higher? That’s basically where the U.S. is right now.” Biden replied, “When I announced it you all said it’s not possible.” Then came the first “come on, man” of the administration: “Come on, give me a break, man. It’s a good start, 100 million.” It’s not good enough for Hannity, however:

The Fox host then decried Biden’s “anti-energy policies” as “destroying” what will be “hundreds of thousands of American jobs,” in an apparent reference to the president living up to his campaign promise to, in part, shut down the Keystone XL pipeline… A State Department assessment of the project forecasted that the number of permanent jobs to maintain the pipeline totaled just 35.

On his first day in office, Biden signed more than a dozen executive actions, including rejoining the Paris climate accord and the World Health Organization, ending his predecessor’s Muslim ban, and stopping construction on the border wall. Disastrous!

(Via Mediaite)

Shaquille O’Neal is one of the larger people in the world, so naturally, his voice is pretty darn deep. That means that when it comes to impressions, his normal speaking voice isn’t necessarily the best starting point for impersonating somebody with a higher voice then him. It’s not that surprising, then, that his impression of Cardi B is not great.

Shaq was a guest on The Tonight Show last night, and at one point during the program, he and Jimmy Fallon played a game of Guess The Impression. The game was simple: Each of them were presented with a name and they had to quickly do an impression of that person to get the other person to guess it correctly. Shaq’s impressions were less about getting the voice right and more about saying things that person might say. So, Shaq, in a slightly higher voice, said things like “shmoney” and “I got the red-bottoms on,” which was enough for Fallon to correctly guess Cardi B.

Elsewhere during the segment, Shaq took a similar approach to his impersonation of Elvis Presley, just singing some lines from “Hound Dog.”

Watch the Guess The Impression segment above.

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

(Spoilers from Marvel Studios and Disney+’s WandaVision will be found below.)

Last week, Disney+ premiered WandaVision‘s first two episodes, which were a retro dream that conjured up visions of The Dick Van Dyke Show and Bewitched. Episode 3 switches to Brady Bunch vibes in a big way, although all of that is mere framing for something sinister brewing in Westview. The baby twins arrive, which (for those nerds who have dug into the comic history of those babes) suggests that Wanda Maximoff’s fantasy world is getting out of hand and will eventually crumble down around her. She became pregnant quickly (and possibly without the physical aid of Vision, who may or may not have the proper anatomy), quite like she conjured it all in her mind, right? That likely inevitability — Wanda has created this wacky sitcom-escape as a means of coping with her trauma and cherishing some final moments with Vision, however imaginary, before sh*t hits the fan in Phase 4 for her — is made even clearer this week.

Exactly how tragic things will get when reality fully crashes through remains to be seen, but aside from what feels like about 83 fruit references (including Vision getting seriously punny while calling himself a “proud papaya”), there’s something very rotten at work here. And again, the show’s “commercials” are pushing out reminders of Wanda’s past as a HYDRA test subject. After seeing a Strucker watch last week (that was a reference to Baron Strücker, who we learn in Age of Ultron performed experiments on Wanda and Pietro), we’re practically being trolled with the obviousness of “Hydra Soak” here.

Let’s talk about what’s possibly rotten here: how about those neighbors? We’ve got passive-aggressive Herb (David Payton).

And the extremely shady Agnes. Look at Kathryn Hahn bringing it here.

Both Herb and Agnes are suspicious of Geraldine, who’s new to town and has the audacity to arrive without a husband in tow. There are pointed references to her having “no home,” and once again, Agnes makes reference to her husband, Ralph, who people suspect might secretly be Mephisto, which would tie in with other fan suspicions that Agnes is really Agatha Harkness, a sorceress from the comics who helped Wanda come into her powers while training with HYDRA. And that would be exactly why she’s not fond of Geraldine, who’s inside the house with Wanda and not-at-all hiding that SWORD symbol on her necklace. (SWORD is essentially a cosmic version of SHIELD that similarly deals with threats to humanity that would include HYDRA.)

Inside the house, Geraldine has helped Wanda birth her babies, and a mention of twins quickly leads to a namedrop about Pietro/Quicksilver, who Geraldine not-so-casually mentions was killed by Ultron.

So many Age of Ultron references seemed like an inevitability in WandaVision, given that the movie deals so heavily in Wanda and Pietro’s origins. Whether that history will keep on resurfacing and haunt Phase 4 (including movies) in earnest, it’s hard to say. We’ll definitely see some HYDRA-linked characters in Falcon and Winter Soldier, though, so buckle up for that wildness. In the meantime, I’m still thinking of poor Pietro.

Wanda’s thinking of him too, and this is perhaps the first time she’s allowed herself to do so since Age of Ultron. She actually utters his name in response, which yeah, that is huge for her. It looks like we’re gonna see a lot more from inside of Wanda’s mind, because clearly, she cannot escape her past (last week made reference to Stark Industries and the bomb that killed her parents), and she can’t hide in Westview forever. Geraldine looks to be a full-on agent of SWORD, which has been trying to communicate with Wanda through radios and an ominous beekeeper, and so on. Let’s talk about Geraldine for a moment before we wrap up until next week.

Geraldine may have rolled back into the real world at the end of the episode. I’m assuming that we’ll see follow-up there, but this is where things get confusing because actress Teyonah Parris was initially announced to be picking up the role of a grown-up version of Captain Marvel‘s Monica Rambeau, who might actually become Captain Marvel one day. There’s no clue on whether there’s alias business going on or a casting switcheroo (which I would not put past Marvel because they’re so secretive). Whether the character’s name is Geraldine or Monica, however, her SWORD necklace leaves no mystery about her belonging to the Sentient Weapon Observation and Response Division, which WandaVision is introducing into live-action for the first time.

In the end, Episode 3 lays more groundwork for some HYDRA and SWORD clashes to come and more of the crumbling coming from Wanda’s concocted world. Vision’s beginning to sense that something (or everything) is amiss, but he might not even really exist, either. Wanda may have imagined him (and the return of his not-“indestructable head”), too. The MCU is back and preparing us for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, no doubt, and it’s a damn fine thing to watch this unfold.

‘WandaVision’ will stream new episodes each Friday.

Flack came out two years ago on Pop TV, presumably as a limited series, but all that has changed now. I only recently caught up on the first season because (for obvious reasons) there’s a little more time than usual these days to catch up on TV, and with only six episodes, it seemed like a nice binge over the holidays. Well, it definitely checked off that box, and now, another development: Amazon picked up the show for an unexpected second season, which will arrive later this year. The first season will be available to stream on Amazon Prime beginning January 22, and let me tell you this: if you are in need of some guilty-pleasure escapism, consider giving this series a whirl. That last reason’s actually the best one to click “play” because there’s zero reason to stress about anything on this show. It’s voyeuristic and at times thrilling to watch. Flack certainly isn’t a great show, but it’s a pretty enjoyable one; and even if it often feels like an amalgamation of many shows and movies you’ve seen before, the sum ends up being greater than the individual parts that make up the whole.

Those predecessors must be mentioned here because, honestly, there’s plenty of comfort-food in them. There’s The Devil Wears Prada in there, except that we’re talking about a celebrity PR agency rather than a fashion magazine. There are shades of Scandal, Sex and the City, and Absolutely Fabulous as well, and then there’s a slice of Homeland. That last one doesn’t seem like it fits into the rest of the group (it ain’t comforting), but it’s also key to understanding how the lead character functions. Anna Paquin, who portrays Robyn, is coping with her own trauma, which is part of why she’s so talented at keeping the layers of spoiled onion from revealing their rotten core.

That “spoiled” nature is what also makes this show into two mini-shows: (1) Anna Paquin playing a no-nonsense “fixer” of celebrity antics, a sort-of amoral titan and the very best at dressing down idiot clients and performing CPR at the same time; (2) Anna Paquin playing a deeply damaged antihero and survivor of trauma with deep roots that extend back into childhood. Make no mistake, Paquin is great in both capacities, which overlap but not in a heavy-handed way. We see her inner conflict arise only occasionally while the show maintains an observant distance without judging. In doing so, Flack allows the viewer to be judge, jury, and executioner of the celebrity culture (with all of its inherent falsities) that Robyn keeps churning out, but we’re so seduced that we might end up condemning ourselves in the process (and enjoying it, too).

Robyn is joined by the rest of her female-fronted firm, which includes the even more cynical Eve (Lydia Wilson), Robyn’s colleague who gets all the best one-liners even if she is otherwise obnoxious in a charming way. They’re accompanied by an amiable intern named Melody (Rebecca Benson), who edges closer to corruption every day, and a very Miranda Priestly-like boss, Caroline (Sophie Okonedo), who’s injected enough Botox on-the-job to displace that moral compass at least a decade ago. Together, these four ladies concoct a world of fiction, and lest one believe that they’re the bad guys, the show slowly reveals that the whole of society’s in on it with them. For some strange reason, people do want to believe the lies that they’re told about the rich and famous, and that’s why these agent are allowed to be as successful as they are.

Not that they feel good about it all the time. Well, Eve and Caroline feel fine, but there are glimpses of humanity inside of Robyn. She cracks, ever-so-slightly, at choice moments, and it’s high time we see Paquin starring in a show that’s equally as trashy as her most famous project (HBO’s True Blood) but in a very different role than Sookie Stackhouse. As Robyn, she’s an American expat in London, who cleans up the messiest situations for the most disastrous, enemy-to-themselves clients. She marches her well-heeled feet through the diciest situations with the sketchiest of stances, and she’s a master of controlling chaos. That need for control, of course, comes from inner and unresolved turmoil, which yeah, is fairly cliché but it’s a hell of a lot of fun to watch.

The high-paced series practically flies by, and a lot of that is owing to the structure. We’ve all heard of monster-of-the-week, and this series tweaks that for a crisis-of-the-week format. Each episode, one high-profile entertainment, fashion, or sports figure (and, often, their family as well) is rescued from impending public disaster in some shape or form. There are the clients caught in compromising positions and whose careers could disintegrate in mere minutes if not for Robyn’s talents. There’s the young star who fakes a sexy situation to save a flagging career. And there are the fake and/or crumbling marriages that exist to preserve careers. One particularly engrossing crisis takes place in a bottle episode, where Robyn is stuck on a plane with a celebrity who’s about to implode his whole career, and she must figure out how to fix that sh*t while her phone’s stuck in airplane mode and none of her usual tools (or threats) shall work.

Flack will suck you in if you enjoy your TV shows dark but breezy with a side of anything vaguely scandalous. This is a sheer confection of a series that threatens to float off into space while snorting the odd line of coke, here and there. It’s not very grounded, other than the reality inside of characters that gets pushed back into submission, so that fantasy can fly high. And that’s alright. We could still use more escapism than usual during our current situation, and Flack is more than willing to oblige.

‘Flack’ streams on Amazon beginning on January 22.

Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a supporter of the QAnon conspiracy theory, indicated that she intended to file articles of impeachment against newly minted president Joe Biden. Sure enough, on his first full day in office, she did just that. Ultimately, she doesn’t have a lot of supporters in this quest and it will likely end up going nowhere.

Cardi B is among those wondering why Greene thinks her impeachment attempt is a good idea, and she expressed so on Twitter. This morning, Cardi tweeted, “How they trying to impeach Biden already? He hasn’t even taken a sh*t at the White House yet .This just shows me how delusional and dumb people can be.”

Like many others, Cardi is on board with the Biden administration. She recently joked, “Ugh I was supposed to perform wap at the inauguration today but I had a dentist appointment ….maybe next time.” She also interviewed the new-president while he was campaigning, and she was happy to hear the news about Donald Trump’s second impeachment.

Meanwhile, Cardi has also done a bit of bonding with “Drivers License” singer Olivia Rodrigo over the song: Cardi doesn’t have a license herself, so Rodrigo offered to drive her anywhere, an offer Cardi just may take her up on.

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