Month: February 2021

When it comes to her past, Cardi B is an open book. The rapper has often talked about growing up in the Bronx and how much work she put in before breaking out into mainstream. But one aspect of her life is oftentimes scrutinized due to the misogyny attached to the line of work: stripping. However, Cardi is an expert at shaking off critics who try to discredit her former job. In part, it’s stripping that allowed Cardi to earn enough money to start making moves in her rap career.

Cardi recently sat down for a conversation with Mariah Carey for Interview Magazine where they chatted about music, Cardi’s daily routine, and her past. Speaking about her time stripping, Cardi said the experience made her feel “on top of the world” because she was one of the most-requested dancers:

“The stripper attitude is, ‘I’m not ashamed of being a stripper because a lot of these b*tches don’t have sh*t. A lot of these b*tches don’t have a place to stay, don’t have no car, can’t afford this, can’t afford that. Y’all out here f*cking n****s for free, but y’all shaming me because I’m shaking my ass? Y’all hoes be showing y’all f*cking bodies on social media, and y’all not getting paid.’ That mentality stuck with me. I felt like, ‘You’re judging me, but I’m making more money than you.’ I felt like nobody could shame me for being a stripper. When I started stripping, I was making probably $500 a night. As I got bigger, I was making $2,000, maybe $5,000. When I got really popular on Instagram I was making $7,000 to $10,000 a week. I felt on top of the world. I felt so untouchable and so sexy, because there were rappers that all these girls lust over who would come to the strip club and request me to go to their section. They would request me. If I’m so trash, why are these guys requesting me? I’m getting paid for my looks. Nobody’s going to spend money on you if you’re ugly.”

Elsewhere in the conversation, Cardi said that, although she has a big personality, she still can get quite nervous around other celebrities. “A lot of celebrities invite me to places, but I’m really shy,” she said. “We’re doing this over the phone, but if it was in person, I wouldn’t be able to look you in the eyes. That’s how nervous I get around celebrities.”

Read Cardi and Carey’s full conversation here.

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

The Dallas Mavericks entered the 2020-21 season with lofty expectations after earning the 7-seed in the West last year in a breakout sophomore campaign from Luka Doncic. Entering his third season in the league, Doncic was the odds-on favorite to win MVP in preseason betting markets and many had the Mavs pegged for a top-4 seed in the West.

However, due to a variety of reasons, Dallas has scuffled out of the gate. Injuries and players missing time for COVID-19 protocols have played a major role in their 14-15 start, but for a team that was an offensive juggernaut a year ago, they haven’t been able to replicate that success this season. Of late, things have been looking up as they’ve won five of their last six, but few would confuse this Dallas team with a championship contender just yet.

That means there’s tinkering to be done with the roster, and just about everyone this side of Doncic is apparently up for discussion. This includes Kristaps Porzingis, the oft-injured but highly talented big man they acquired in a trade from the Knicks two years ago and gave a max deal that summer before he ever played a game for them. The expectation was he and Doncic would be a terrific fit, and last season there were times where that was the case. But overall, it hasn’t been as snug of a fit as the Mavs had hoped and, according to Bleacher Report’s Jake Fischer, they’ve been exploring his trade value with other teams this month, with the March 25 trade deadline on the horizon.

In fact, Dallas has quietly gauged the trade market for Porzingis, according to league sources, as the Mavericks have begun reevaluating whether the 25-year-old center can truly support Doncic as the second option on a contender. “They’ve kicked the tires on everybody on their roster that’s not named Luka,” one person with knowledge of Dallas’ thinking said. “You know [president of basketball operations] Donnie [Nelson]; they’re always tinkering.”

“They’ve definitely sniffed around on him,” an assistant general manager told B/R. “They’re taking the temperature, because they know at some point it’s gonna come around.”

Adding to that report, Ian Begley of SNY reports that one of the teams Dallas has spoken to about Porzingis are the Warriors, who could be looking to move off of Kelly Oubre (an expiring who would help the Mavs clear cap space to chase free agents) or Andrew Wiggins, should the Mavs believe he could be a fit. It should be noted that nothing seems inevitable on that front, just interesting that in the second year of Porzingis’ max deal they’re already exploring all the possibilities.

In any case, Dallas is going to be a fascinating team to watch over the next month, both in seeing whether they can build on this current winning streak and vault up the West standings and, should they stall out again, what kind of moves they’ll try to make to turn things around. Mark Cuban and Donnie Nelson aren’t the most patient individuals, and if they think the Porzingis-Doncic combo isn’t the answer, it’s possible they make a major shakeup to this roster.

Before he swung his way into the Marvel Cinematic Universe by landing the coveted role of Spider-Man after Sony and Marvel formed an unprecedented deal to reboot the character following the tepid reception to the Andrew Garfield films, Tom Holland made a run at another massive franchise: Star Wars. In a new interview, Holland revealed that he tried out for the role of Finn, which ultimately went to John Boyega, who apparently can thank the Spider-Man star for laughing at the poor woman making BB-8 noises during the audition. Via Backstage:

I remember doing this scene with this lady, bless her, and she was just a drone. So I was doing all of this, like, “We gotta get back to the ship!” And she was going, “Bleep, bloop bloop, bleep bloop.” I just couldn’t stop laughing. I found it so funny. And I felt really bad, because she was trying really hard to be a convincing android or drone or whatever they’re called. Yeah, I obviously didn’t get the part. That wasn’t my best moment.

Obviously, things worked out well for Holland. He’s currently filming his sixth MCU film, Spider-Man 3, which will reportedly be a multiverse-spanning epic and the “most ambitious standalone superhero movie ever,” according to the young actor. He also got a chance to act alongside Star Wars actress Daisy Ridley in the upcoming dystopian film Chaos Walking.

As for Boyega, while he landed the role of Finn, he has been very public about the Sequel Trilogy failing the character. However, in recent months, he’s revealed that he’s had constructive conversations with Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy, and he’s no longer opposed to the idea of returning to Star Wars. (As long as it’s voiceover work.)

(Via Backstage)

It’s been months since we have published a Weekend Box Office report because, well, there’s not much box office to report on (this weekend’s highest-grossing film was The Croods: A New Age with $1.7 million). At least in the United States. Over in China, where theaters started to re-open last July, box office records are being broken.

Detective Chinatown 3, the third film in the buddy cop series, grossed a staggering $424 million during its first weekend of release (February 12-14). That’s the biggest opening in a single market ever, shattering the previous record set by Avengers Endgame in the U.S. ($357 million). “This marked the first time the country’s national box office has ever broken RMB1 billion ($155 million) a day for three consecutive days,” according to Variety, “a feat achieved despite caps on max theater capacity at 75 percent in most of the country and 50 percent in areas particularly at risk for COVID-19, such as the Beijing-adjacent Hebei province.” Despite the restrictions, Detective Chinatown 3, along with fellow mega-hit Hi, Mom, helped break even more records this past weekend:

Hi, Mom and Detective Chinatown 3 both sailed past the $600 million mark during their second weekend in cinemas — an unprecedented feat for two films competing head-to-head in a single market… Hi, Mom won the second weekend with sales totaling $134.2 million, a 17 percent decline from its opening three days, when DC3 was dominating screen share. DC3 added $45.3 million this past weekend, an 89 percent slide from its record-breaking opening of $397.2 million. Ten days into release, Hi, Mom’s cumulative total is $619.4 million, a squeak more than DC3 with $619.2 million.

Since the Lunar New Year on February 12, China’s box office has made over $1.5 billion, or “71 percent of the full 2020 North American box office,” reports Deadline. The box office in the U.S. should pick up soon, however, with New York City theaters re-opening next month.

(Via Variety and Deadline)

Billie Eilish is only 19 years old, but she’s already at the point in her career where she has a decently sized library of older, recognizable songs that other artists enjoy putting their own spin on. “Ocean Eyes” is the most iconic track of her pre-When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? library, and now Shamir has offered a cover of it.

Shamir teased the recording earlier this month, writing in a now-unavailable Instagram post, “Have you ever said to yourself ‘I love ‘Ocean Eyes’ by @billieeilish but I wish it was a haunted emo shoegaze rock song’? Well come 2/23 I got you!” Indeed, the song is as he described it, as it takes on a darker, more in-your-face tone, and Shamir’s idiosyncratic vocals suit the track perfectly.

Shamir invoked Eilish in a recent interview while yearning for more of an alternative influence on pop music, saying, “Pop music doesn’t need to be electronic-based. We’ve been sold that a lot these days. When people think of the biggest alt artist right now, people think of Billie Eilish and it’s like, come on! There’s a lot of great pop songs on the records I released post-Ratchet. But the recording and production was self-produced by me — out of complete necessity. I couldn’t get anyone to really work with me. Kyle [Pulley], who produced most of [the Shamir] tracks with me, was the first producer ever, my entire career, to reach out to me.”

Check out Shamir’s “Ocean Eyes” cover above and compare it with Eilish’s original below.

Last year, Chiiild, the moniker for Montreal-based singer Yonatan Ayal, arrived with his debut project, Synthetic Soul. The seven-track effort was led by the success of “Count Me Out” and “Pirouette,” tracks that helped bring plenty of attention to him. He was eventually named one of the most promising Canadian acts and this year, Chiiild will look to fulfill that with his upcoming debut album, Hope For Sale.

While we’ve yet to receive music or a release for the project, Chiiild’s Yonatan spoke to us about the direction fans can expect him to go in on Hope For Sale. “The intention I think was — to break it down — lyrically, to be more conversational, to reflect the times [more],” he said. “A lot of the artists that I love and I grew up on are just like mirrors of society… it’s beautiful because you see what’s happening, what’s trending in life, not so much just music, and you’re like, ‘Hey this is what I need to reflect, this is my reaction to that trend.’”

Coming off a year like 2020 that was as hectic and overwhelming as any set of 12 months could be, Chiiild insists that as an artist, it’s important for him to reflect the times for listeners of today and tomorrow. “I’m here to translate what has happened in the streets and try to immortalize it on record and say, “Hey you know what? Tomorrow’s going to be better,’” he said.

As he continues to prepare new music for a release at some point this year, we sat down with Chiiild’s Yonatan and asked him for some of the Black artists that influenced him and his sound as he grew up and found his voice, and he gave us these thoughts on the five (but really six) Black artists that inspire his work.

Gigi

She’s an Ethiopian singer. She put out this self-titled album when I was a kid, or at some point a long time ago. It was just played on rides from Montreal to Toronto every few months when I went to visit family. It was so peaceful, so moody, [and] it still had so much of our culture in it. As an artist, you’re a sponge so it just seeped into me early. I would say she’s definitely my first inspiration. If you listen to the record, she has this version of her album, it’s called “The Illuminated Audio Version,” and it is so meditative, so peaceful, it just transports you to another place. When you think about the music that we’re making, that’s a big part. There is a sense of escapism, I do want you to put your headphones on, or turn it up real loud, and just get lost in it, build a ritual around the record and I feel like that’s what that album taught me to do. The best way for me to describe it, I’m not sure what it’s called by word, but it’s that moment where something that’s not sad makes you wanna cry. That’s the feeling where you’re on the brink [of tears] and you’re like I don’t know why I just feel this way and it’s overwhelming. That’s the goal, that’s the destination [with escapism]. I know it sounds dramatic, but I’m pretty dramatic.

Massive Attack

[They’re] kind of a Black and a White artist in one. To be fair, I don’t really see color in the same way partially because of that same experience we talked about earlier. I would say that music is probably the closest attempt at blending R&B, punk, reggae, dub, [and] industrial. It’s what they created as a world their own… I feel like the attempt is to create a world of our own as well, I want to be best in class, in my space with my tribe and my people, and build that one-on-one relationship. When I listen to Massive Attack, I’m just like, this is something that doesn’t get classified as Black music, but is Black music to me. That’s something that I love. Other things in life made me tap into who I am instead of trying to fit, being an Ethiopian Canadian, it’s like how much representation do we have in the world or in media until The Weeknd, that’s like yesterday. It’s not that long ago, I would say I was encouraged to just be myself because that’s the only way that I was able to radiate the way I’m supposed to. There’s a quote that I’m going to misquote that I heard that I think kind of sums it up the best: “Great strength is shown in restraint.” Being able to restrain from doing all those things and just focusing on my values and what I want to put in the world is my greatest strength and where I find my strength. It took a really long time to get to a place where I’m just like, “This is me, this is who I am, whatever take it or leave it.’ It takes everyone a lifetime to really get fully acclimated with themselves. At the same time, that’s what this is about, that’s really why I’m doing this. I’m doing it to represent myself and people like me and people will find it.

Sam Cooke

Because of how “Count Me Out” was conceived. “Count Me Out” really came from me watching an episode of Being Mary Jane and Sam Cooke’s “(Somebody) Ease My Troublin’ Mind” was playing. I was just immediately taken back by it, went and bought every CD I could find, or vinyl, but I essentially collected them all within that year and studied it, studied it, studied it and I was like, “I want this.” I want to do something like this that feels like this but that is a reflection of all my inspirations. When you think of “Count Me Out” and how starts in that string intro and how it’s in 6/8 and just the way it’s composed. You can tell that as an artist you’re a sponge, I’ve been listening to Sam Cooke for the whole year, “Count Me Out” happens, it’s just the natural process. I’m not sure anything that I’m doing other than trying to be my own being is on purpose. I think as artists we recognize things that are beautiful, interesting forms and that stuff happens in your everyday life. You go out the house and you see a strange car and you’re like, “Oh, this is really interesting, there’s something really attractive about it.” With music, you go into the studio and press a bunch of buttons and do all kinds of things and when something really special happens, as a great artist you recognize it, that’s all you’re doing. Like yeah, you did press the buttons, and yeah, you make it sound, but the point is you recognized it, that’s the difference.

Bob Marley

I’m kind of going back in time, so it’s like that’s also part of my DNA growing up. If you’re in an Ethiopian household, you understand the impact of Bob Marley but what’s impressive and with Bob Marley is his ability to represent everybody. Every shade of Black was represented with Bob Marley and that’s one man, it’s unbelievable. He did his thing and I really truly respect that and aspire to radiate one-fifth of his energy. I think some things are popular because they’re popular and some things are popular because they’re good and I think Exodus is popular because it’s both good and popular. It’s just incredible, that’s probably the album I listen to the most. I love “Buffalo Soldier,” I love the storytelling element, “No Woman No Cry” [as well]. It’s a journey, you turn on that album and from top to bottom it just feels incredibly homogenous. He’s telling his story, but at no point do you feel attacked or threatened by what he’s saying, and I think that’s a big superpower of him and his collaborators. He can be revolutionary without making you defensive. That’s magic, I don’t know how you do that. You just sing along to it whether you’re the perpetrator or the victim. You’re just like, “I’m with you.” That needs to be studied if it hasn’t already been studied it’s just the way that his messaging is just second to none.

Jimi Hendrix/The Weeknd

I would say Jimi Hendrix for his incredible gift, his talent, and ability to just communicate through his instrument, that’s something that we all as musicians want to be able to do. The other one would be The Weeknd more recently. Representation alone, the fact that he just keeps pushing the bar for artists like us, like I said, growing up there was no one that looked like me on TV and for him to go and continue to push the bar it’s incredibly inspiring and challenging at the same time. I’m in constant awe. That’s kind of the bar that keeps moving, if that makes sense. I’m grateful that we have somebody like that.

Netflix is getting back in the superhero game after jettisoning their MCU series (Jessica Jones and the rest of The Defenders) from its roster. To that end, it’s been over three years since we’ve heard that the streamer acquired Millarworld, a move that was forecast to yield plenty of fresh comic-book-adapted content. You know how the past year has gone, though, so things undoubtedly slowed down. Finally, Jupiter’s Legacy is on the way from Kick-Ass and Kingsman: The Secret Service writer Mark Millar, along with the Eisner-award winning Frank Quitely, and both are executive producing.

The above teaser doesn’t show of much at all about the epic superhero drama (which shall explore decades of complex family, power, and loyalty dynamics), other than some shimmery CGI and a release date (May 7), but the show promises that “the next generation is rising.” We also get to hear a voiceover from Josh Duhamel (who portrays The Utopian leader), who promises, “One day you’re going to be stronger than anyone else in the world. Every evil you can imagine is going to rise up against mankind, not for justice, but for vengeance… You’re going to be the future.”

Jupiter’s Legacy will co-star Leslie Bibb, Ben Daniels, Elena Kampouris, Andrew Horton, Mike Wade, and Matt Lanter. The first season will stream on May 7, 2021.

“Are you my therapist?” Julien Baker asked me toward the end of our interview last month. We had just spent nearly an hour talking about addiction, religion, the cult of personality around indie-rock singer-songwriters, and the best album of her career, Little Oblivions, due out Friday. Baker, 25, is known for emotionally intense indie-folk songs that have the candor of religious confessionals. Talking with her sometimes has a similar life-or-death urgency.

“In some Baptist churches, there’s this thing where to be absolved of sins, you have to confess them to one another,” she continued. “You have to stand up in the middle of church and be like, ‘I cheated on my wife,’ or whatever, or ‘I stole from a tip jar.’ I wonder if that just comes from human beings desperately needing to be seen, like human beings wanting to be understood and the weight that carrying around an unseen part of your life puts on you.” Baker was talking about the central impulse behind Little Oblivions, an album in which she writes with incredible (even uncomfortable) candor about a fraught period in her life when it seemed, from the outside, she should have been basking in her greatest professional success yet.

After gaining glowing critical notices for her 2015 debut Sprained Ankle — which established Baker’s brand of introspective self-laceration laced with her anguished, near-operatic vocals — Baker entered the world of indie stardom with 2017’s Turn On The Bright Lights and the 2018 Boygenius EP, a collaboration with fellow rising 20something-year-old singer-songwriters Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus. A busy tour schedule got even more frenzied as media coverage lingered on the thoughtful, idealized humanism professed by Baker in her songs. Unlike Bridgers, who has a playful and occasionally acerbic public image, Baker was backed into a corner of public piousness. In time, she found that she was playing a version of herself in public that didn’t ring true to her private self.

This all started coming to a head in early 2019 when Baker stopped touring and suddenly felt adrift. In magazine profiles, she had professed her own sobriety, but now she found herself slipping back into day-drinking. The schism between the “good” Julien of her songs and the “bad” Julien of reality started weighing on her. She enrolled at Middle Tennessee State University and wondered if she should do something else with her life. And then Covid happened.

“I think I realized I’m more of a homebody than I thought,” she said. “Basically, I hadn’t lived in the same place for longer than six months since I was 17, and I was just couch surfing and here and there, renting rooms, being on tour, not wanting to get an apartment. Now that I’ve been home for a really long time, it feels like, I don’t know, it’s easier for me to be healthy. I didn’t realize that I was just maladapted to a really unnatural way of life.”

When she began writing songs for Little Oblivions, Baker was determined to put down a true representation of the “real” Julien. The result is a record in which she is often very hard on herself. “Blacked out on a weekday / is there something that I’m trying to avoid?” she sings on the album-opening “Hardline.” “Start asking for forgiveness in advance for all the future things I will destroy.” In one of the album’s best songs, “Relative Fiction,” Baker wonders “do I get callous or stay tender” after rueing another weekend bender. “Ringside” might be the most punishing of all: “Beat myself until I’m bloody / And I’ll give you a ringside seat.”

The contradiction of Little Oblivions is that it’s the most musically inviting album that Baker has made yet, with extra heft added to the guitars and rhythm section nudging her closer to a full-on rock record. But the emotional brutality of the lyrics somehow melds with the uplifting beauty of the music, perhaps giving Baker some peace in the process.

You’ve talked about how burned out you were at the end of your last tour cycle. What happened?

It’s rare that I let myself talk about this to people who aren’t my friends — who are also touring musicians — because I feel so weird complaining about the best job ever. But I had a rigorous attitude, I guess. It wasn’t even really that I had a rigorous schedule, but I would get up at 4:30 and run, every day. I was running so much on tour, in 2018, that my iliotibial band was fucked up and my knees got all fucked up, and I wasn’t taking days off because I was running out of anxiety. And then I came home.

The reason why we had to cancel shows wasn’t because I was burnt out on touring, it was that people around me were like, “You can’t tour anymore.” I was desperately like, “No, I don’t know what to do with myself when I’m not on tour. This is my life. My life is, every day, I wake up and there’s some sort of travel, I get on a train or a plane or in a van, and then I set up my stuff, I sing my songs, and I go to bed in a hotel.” When I was home, I started to realize how little identity or structure I had built for myself in my life outside of being a touring musician, and I was just like, “Wow, what do I do?”

I think in that empty space, it just opened up the door for me to slip back into negative relationships with substance and anxiety. I didn’t realize, until I stopped performing, that when I was a kid, I was playing music because, at my core, I identified myself as a musician who was in love with and enthralled by and obsessed with music and its making. And then I started touring and never really stopped, and I became so fixated on myself as a performer. And because I didn’t want to be disingenuous, I was like, “Okay, well, all the things I am on stage, I need to be all the time, to everyone.”

Was there ever a moment, before Covid happened, where you thought, “Maybe I’ll walk away, and just do something else”?

Yeah.

What was your thought process?

I registered for school, I had already missed the registration date, and I was talking to the people on my team about tours being canceled. And I was just like, “If I don’t try to do something with the rest of my year, I feel like I’ll have all the time in the world to just destroy myself.” So, I just looked at it as something to clear a stopgap, at first, and then the more I got into it, and I was studying all these things that had little or even nothing to do with music, I realized I could be fulfilled by them and still play music at my home and not feel like I’d lost something massive. And then I started thinking, “Maybe I don’t ever play music again.”

I don’t know what it is about myself, but I always think every record is going to do really poorly, and I just operate under that assumption. So, I was like, “I’m going to make a really weird record that I wouldn’t have made because I would have been scared to jeopardize my career as a musician.” When I went back to school and realized that everything could go away and I would still be alive and be making music, I think it became easier for me to do things without those high-stakes fears.

I think you’ve reached the point in your career where you could make a weird record and people would be into it.

It’s actually not that extreme, it just feels extreme for me. I’m like, “Drum machines, wow.” I’m slow to change, I’m slow to changing who I am as a person. It takes me a while to adjust to stuff. So, I thought of this as a weird record.

In a way, you just answered my next question, because I know from interviewing you in the past that you are among the most analytical musicians I’ve ever met. You can really step back and deconstruct your own work, in a way that a critic would. As a journalist, I really appreciate that. But I wonder if your intense self-analytical nature ever gets in the way of your creativity.

Sometimes, yes. I think being an analytical person in general — and I would even go as far as to say obsessively analytical — to the point where it gets in the way of me making decisions or having conversations, it makes me awkward because I’ll not say a thing just quite right and it’ll make me panic for days after a conversation. I spend so much time just trying to figure out how to do things the best way. Everybody has a different definition of “best,” but, to me, especially with Turn Out the Lights, it’s like all of a sudden I had people listening to my music on a scale that I had never dreamed of. And I wasn’t playing stadiums, I was just playing clubs, but it was still unthinkable to me that people would roll out in places that weren’t Memphis to listen to my music.

And so I was like, “What do I need to do — as a person of faith, as a person who isn’t just making art in a vacuum, but who is contributing art that is going to have an effect on all these people?” I just considered all these possibilities so much because I felt like if I’m going to be given a seat at the table of being a musician with a platform, I wanted to do the right thing with it. I put my duty as an artist being a good person in the world ahead of the art itself, like ends over means. But I didn’t realize that I was making something that was, I don’t know, corny. Maybe “corny” isn’t the right word, but well-meaning, yet obviously withholding something. I’ve messed up so hard that I think it was good, on this record, to just let go of the prospect of ever being able to be a fully good person. It produced a lot different lyrical content, because I wasn’t listening back to the songs with a lens of myself as a puppet representing an ideal. I was just like, “These are reports from my life.”

When you were talking just now, it made me think of “Song In E” from the new album, where you basically sing about feeling like a phony. The lyric in that song that stands out to me is, “It’s the mercy that I can’t take.” You’re awfully hard on yourself.

I always talk about it in the context of not being able to accept love because it’s almost more painful for a person to show you graciousness or mercy when you know that you have failed or hurt them in some way. I find myself, often, wishing for punishment because that would make sense in my brain. That would even out the abacus of right and wrongdoing, and that would make everything feel okay. And when someone doesn’t respond that way, it makes you feel even worse because you’re like, “Wow, I did something mean to you and you don’t even have the decency to be petty.”

That’s a very, dare I say, Christian way of looking at things, the idea that you have to be punished for your sins in order to be absolved.

Exactly. “Song In E” is a great example of what’s so uncomfortable about common Christian understandings of propitiation or Christ fulfilling the need for God to punish humans. I think so much less literally about my faith now, and I feel … I don’t know, I have said some things in the past that were pretty naïve and idealistic. I’ve had a lot of time to really evaluate how religion can be really damaging. I don’t know that I would identify as a Christian person, even though I would still say that I’m a person of faith. I’ve just seen that institution wreak havoc in obvious and subtle ways in so many people’s lives, including my own.

This idea that you’re taught, from the very beginning of going to Sunday School, about Jesus being brutally murdered because you were born bad, because of things that God knew you were going to do. That is destructive to put into a child’s psyche, and yet millions of people are walking around, saying that they have no worth except for that God benignly decided to torture and kill a quasi-deity on your behalf. So, what does that teach you? There’s such a disconnect for me there of saying you’re worthy of love.

When people talk about your songs, there is an assumption that there’s no separation between Julien Baker the person and Julien Baker the artist. And it seems like that has also been difficult for you. I mean, your songs are intense, and I imagine that gets reflected back on you with equal or greater intensity.

To me, that’s what was so distressing about being a performer, because you can do it in terms of being a good person or a bad person, or being a fake or an honest person, or being a punk or unpunk, but I felt like I didn’t get to make that distinction. If I wanted to be an artist, I felt like it would be disingenuous for there to be too big of a schism between Julien Baker, the person, and Julien Baker, the artist, and all the things that I say I believe about the world and kindness and healing and recovery and God. But then, instead of trying to bring my music closer to who I really was as a person, I just tried to bring myself closer to the ideal. But, of course, that’s impossible.

Every time somebody would come up to me at a show and talk to me, it would break my heart to ever respond to anybody in a negative way. So I just would be like, “This person cares about your music, they are a human being on this Earth, they deserve love and attention and to be taken seriously.” And then I would just slip into this dissociative world of totally intellectualizing a conversation I’m having with a person and being like, “This is a minute part of your duty to the human world, to be kind to this person right now, even when you feel like your head is going to explode.”

But in that person’s mind, they’re interacting with your record and what they project you are on your record, not necessarily who you actually are.

Exactly. But that kind of thing is hard to see when I held myself to this impossible standard of genuineness because I didn’t want to be a fake. Who wants to be a fake?

And, also, you have a feedback loop of your narrative being reinterpreted for you by other people and then retold to you. I wish I were immune to it, and I did so many mental acrobatics to try to keep my ego small and not become whatever monster of celebrity that is dreaded by people. But when someone writes something about you, you want to read it and you want to see if it’s true. And I think reading other people’s impressions of me, it’s like hearing your voice on a video. Do you ever hear your voice back and you’re like, “God, I sound like that?”

Maybe that was the thing that tripped all these wires and made me just start blowing my life up when I got off tour. It’s a head trip, and I’m still navigating it.

You write a lot about substance abuse on Little Oblivions, and often in very tough, even brutal ways. But there’s also this weird history of songs that make addiction sound like hell, and it actually encourages people to take drugs. Like, so many people somehow decided that heroin sounded amazing after hearing the Velvet Underground’s “Heroin.” I’m sure this is something you’ve thought about.

Oh my gosh, I remember I used to print out lyrics and tape them to my bedroom wall. My dad, who smoked pot and drank as a teenager, he came into my room and saw that I had these Nirvana lyrics posted on my wall about sniffing glue, and he was like, “What is this? Why would you listen to music about sniffing glue? It’ll ruin your whole life. Why in the hell does that sound fun to you?” At that point, I was young, I hadn’t formed a relationship with substances. It wasn’t even a forecast of a thing that I wanted to emulate. But I think in a more complicated way, seeing someone with a similar self-loathing as yours sing about the sorrows of substance abuse, it almost seemed natural to me then to start when my friends all of a sudden had drugs. Because the self-loathing is familiar to me, the desire for escape is also familiar to me, and beyond that, the belief that I deserve the self-harm through substances.

I worry about that a lot. I talked to a whole bunch of my friends, who are musicians, about my fear that in disclosing all of these things in the record. But I needed to be like, “Hey, people ask me in interviews about being sober, and I spent a whole year day-drinking and blowing up my life, please don’t trust me, please don’t put that on me.” I wrote all these songs with that kind of urgency to tell everyone I’m a bad person, or that I’m just fallible. I was so afraid of sensationalizing it though.

How much control do I have over people’s situations and their family environments and their experiences that make them graft themselves onto songs that make them feel understood and consciously, or unconsciously, emulate that behavior? Do I have control over it, totally? No. But I think the whole reason that stigma continues to exist is because people confuse sensationalizing with normalizing. I stole that phrase from Lucy Dacus. She and I were talking about this recently, and she was like, “Yeah, there’s a big difference between sensationalizing something and normalizing it, and being like, ‘Why don’t we talk about these things? Why do we continue to hide them from each other?’”

Little Oblivions is out Friday on Matador. Get it here.

Idris Elba is best known for his acting work, but he’s also well-established in the music world. He performed at Coachella in 2019, he co-starred in a Stormzy video later that year, and also in 2019, he dropped a mixtape. In recent times, he’s been working on music and it looks like he has a Megan Thee Stallion collaboration on the way.

In an interview with CapitalFM’s The All-New Capital Weekender (as Billboard notes), Elba revealed he has a track with Meg and Davido on the way: “I’m putting out quite a bit of music, man. I’ve been really focused in coming out of last year into this year, trying to put more music out, so expect more. I’ve got a tune with Frankie Wah coming, I think it’s gonna be good. […] I got a sneaky tune with Meg Thee Stallion and Davido, shout out to the fanatics.”

He also added that he hopes to get on a track with his Cats co-star Taylor Swift, saying, “I’ve known Taylor a few years. People see the album sales, the awards. What they don’t see is the hard work. She is an incredibly hard-working person, she isn’t resting on her achievements. To perform live with her would be fun and hopefully we can make that happen.”

Watch Elba talk about his upcoming projects below.

Megan Thee Stallion is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Last week’s freak winter storm exposed significant weaknesses in Texas’ infrastructure as millions were left stranded for days without electricity and water. The main culprit was frozen equipment as natural gas turbines locked up from the cold. But instead of addressing the issues with Texas deregulated utilities, which are notably not connected to the federal power grid because Texas, Republicans have been blaming Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Green New Deal, which as Seth Meyers points out, is insane because the Green New Deal isn’t a thing yet. It’s literally just a list of policy initiatives that not even the Democrats agree on.

During his “A Closer Look” segment on Late Night, Meyers hammered Fox News host Tucker Carlson who trotted out the usual right-wing lies that windmills and AOC are to blame for Texas’ power woes. There’s just one small problem with blaming windmills. Texas predominantly uses natural gas and coal. “Which, of course it does, it’s Texas!” Meyers said. “They used to have a football team called the Houston Oilers, not the Houston Solar Panels.”

The Late Night host then turned his attention to Carlson’s attacks on AOC and the Green New Deal. Via Yahoo:

“And I’m sorry that I have to say this because it’s, you know, insanely obvious,” he continued, “but the Green New Deal is not a thing that exists in Texas or at the national level. This is like blaming your problems on Avatar 2. It’s not out yet!”

After returning to the fact that renewable energy only makes up seven percent of Texas power, Meyers dropped one final burn: “Kind of like how you can only believe about 7 percent of what you see on Fox News.”