Month: March 2021

Fat Joe’s time in hip-hop goes back to the early 1990s, and over the decades the Bronx native has worked with a number of notable names, including Diddy, Busta Rhymes, Lil Wayne, and many more. Alas, he narrowly missed being on an album by Notorious B.I.G. During a conversation with Verzuz founders Swizz Beatz and Timbaland, Fat Joe revealed that he and the late rapper had begun recording an album before his tragic death.

“We cut about five songs together,’ he said. “He was like, ‘You the Latino don, I’m the Black don.’ And we was in that studio going crazy. It’s verified by Puff Daddy and everybody. I’ma keep it real – at the time, we were dissing Tupac a lot and all that and so that should have never seen the light of day. Which is respectfully so, because you know they both passed on. But yeah, I worked with the B.I.G. for real.”

The discussion came a little over a week after Biggie: I Got A Story To Tell, a documentary that reflected on the late rapper’s life, was released on Netflix. Prior to that, Swizz and Timbaland shared plans to do a Biggie vs. Tupac Verzuz battle.

You can listen to a clip from the interview above.

The 2021 Grammys are just a few days away, and as with every year, conversations about the show are alive on social media. In a now-deleted tweet, one person looked back at the 2019 ceremony, calling out the Recording Academy for inviting Mac Miller’s family to the award show, where his Swimming album was nominated in the Best Rap Album category, only to give the trophy to Cardi B’s Invasion Of Privacy. Cardi caught wind of the comment and questioned their inconsistent defense of the rapper, particularly after his DUI car crash.

“His family didn’t have no mean energy so why you?” she replied. “I hate when ya make hate tweets like this go viral but where was the love when ya bullied him for months on this app & he was crying out for help? Making fun of him when he crash his car?” She posted the tweet with a screenshot of a US Magazine article about the late rapper’s family “rooting for Cardi B” ahead of the 2019 show and added, “Ya don’t care till somebody is gone.”

In another tweet, Cardi wrote, “This is why I express myself whether is on live, twitter or curse people out cause some artist got soo much hurt inside from bullyin on these apps & they afraid to speak & turn to other thing to numb the pain.” She added, “Ya forgot real quick how when he drop the album ya was like ‘flop”NBC.’”

She also discussed how cyberbullying gives artists mental health issues, such as depression. Cardi then shared a video of her honoring Mac after her Best Rap Album, where she said, “I’m sharing this Grammy with you motherf*cker. Rest in peace.”

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

The 2021 Grammys are just a few days away, and as with every year, conversations about the show are alive on social media. In a now-deleted tweet, one person looked back at the 2019 ceremony, calling out the Recording Academy for inviting Mac Miller’s family to the award show, where his Swimming album was nominated in the Best Rap Album category, only to give the trophy to Cardi B’s Invasion Of Privacy. Cardi caught wind of the comment and questioned their inconsistent defense of the rapper, particularly after his DUI car crash.

“His family didn’t have no mean energy so why you?” she replied. “I hate when ya make hate tweets like this go viral but where was the love when ya bullied him for months on this app & he was crying out for help? Making fun of him when he crash his car?” She posted the tweet with a screenshot of a US Magazine article about the late rapper’s family “rooting for Cardi B” ahead of the 2019 show and added, “Ya don’t care till somebody is gone.”

In another tweet, Cardi wrote, “This is why I express myself whether is on live, twitter or curse people out cause some artist got soo much hurt inside from bullyin on these apps & they afraid to speak & turn to other thing to numb the pain.” She added, “Ya forgot real quick how when he drop the album ya was like ‘flop”NBC.’”

She also discussed how cyberbullying gives artists mental health issues, such as depression. Cardi then shared a video of her honoring Mac after her Best Rap Album, where she said, “I’m sharing this Grammy with you motherf*cker. Rest in peace.”

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

EA Sports made huge news earlier this year when they announced they were bringing back their college football video game franchise. No longer NCAA Football, EA Sports College Football would be the new title as they were partnering with CLC, not the NCAA, to get licensing to put schools in the game.

Until name, image, and likeness rules are figured out on a national level, the game would simply feature the schools and their official logos and uniforms, but the players in the game would be completely randomized and share no likeness to the actual teams on the field. That is the workaround initially to having the athletes likeness exploited without compensation, as it was in the old games, with EA hopeful to figure out a way to license that in as well in the same manner they do in pro leagues with the respective players unions. The announcement itself was vague about details, as it’s clear all of that is being worked out, and they didn’t even offer an expected release date for the game, which wasn’t a surprise given it’s still very early in the process.

On Wednesday, though, reporting emerged on that target release date as Matt Brown of the Extra Points newsletter filed an open records request and learned that CLC told its schools that the plan internally at EA Sports is to have the game come out in July 2023.

The expectation was always that this would take some time to get off the ground, as few with realistic expectations thought this year or even next would see the debut of the game. Now we know the target is 2023, and as we’ve seen schools like Notre Dame withdraw until NIL legislation is in place, it seems likely that would be the case by then.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many of us have become far more familiar with epidemiology and immunology than we ever planned to be. For those of us who are not particularly science-minded, it’s been a heck of a journey. Some of us appreciate science and have the utmost respect for scientists, but harbor zero desire to delve into the scientific details ourselves. Or at least we didn’t, before a stupid virus upended life as we know it.

Some viral terminology has become household vocab at this point. (Seriously, who ever expected “infection rates” and “variants” to be things the average American discusses around the dinner table?) Others have been a bit hard to grasp, like how the mRNA vaccine works.

You know when you’re studying a tricky topic and you come across a word you don’t know, but when you look up the word the definition had three other words you have to look up, and each of those definitions have words you don’t know, and so on? That’s what it’s like to try to understand the mRNA vaccine for the average non-scientist.

We do want to know how it works, though. From what the sciencey folks say, it’s an amazing breakthrough with far-reaching potential that could change the game for lots of diseases. If we’re going to inject something into our bodies, we should know what it’s doing. We just don’t want to have to get a degree in virology to understand it.

There are some good basic explainers out there that simplify how the mRNA vaccine works, but most of them still include terms and concepts that we feel like we should probably remember from high school biology class but don’t. What we need (or want) is someone to explain it to us like we’re five.

Thankfully, somebody has.

Vick Krishna has dramatized what happens when the mRNA vaccine goes into your body in a TikTok video, and it’s the clearest layman’s explanation a non-scientist could hope for. For those of us who have a hard time visualizing the whole mRNA-spike protein-ribosome-antigen-antibody thing, this skit makes it super easy to see exactly how it works.

If you want to get slightly more scientific about it, the vaccine sends mRNA (literally “messenger” RNA) into your body with instructions for how to manufacture the spike proteins (pokey, fork-like proteins) that exist on the outside of the coronavirus. Your ribosomes follow the instructions and make the spike protein. In the meantime, your body (rather poetically) kills the messenger RNA. Your immune system sees the spike protein your ribosomes made, kicks into gear, and starts making the antibodies that will destroy the spike protein whenever it sees it (and by extension, whatever it’s attached to, like the coronavirus). Then, if/when the coronavirus invades your body, your immune system is ready. It has the antibodies ready to deploy to take the virus out by attacking those spike proteins.

Cool, huh? Not nearly as fun of an explanation as “fork hands,” though.

Doctors, immunologists, and epidemiologists are praising Krishna’s simple skit for how clear it makes the mRNA vaccine process, with some dubbing his video a masterclass in science communication. Naturally, it’s a bit more complex than that in reality, but the basics are all most of us really need to (or want to) know. More of this kind of science lesson, please, across the board.

You can follow Vick Krishna on TikTok and Instagram.

It’s been nearly two and a half months since the world learned about the death of MF DOOM. The legendary rapper passed away on Halloween last year, but the news was withheld by his family until New Year’s Eve. The rapper’s legacy became quickly clear, as a number of artists took a moment to share their condolences and thank him for his work. In a recent interview with Inked Magazine, Playboi Carti shared what DOOM’s unique influence on him was, after he referenced him on “Stop Breathing” from his album Whole Lotta Red.

“I had to tell my boy, my best friend, my engineer. He’s the person recording the song, and he didn’t know who MF DOOM was,” he said. “I’m like, you don’t know MF DOOM? You don’t know who this dude is? I had to play songs for him, because he didn’t know who he inspired. The mask! I’m anonymous myself, but he’s king of that.”

Carti added that while their respective sounds are completely different, their refusal to conform to society’s standards was fairly similar. “I don’t have to sound like MF DOOM to be inspired by him,” Carti said. “Nobody can keep a leash on him. Nobody can keep a leash on me. That’s definitely his impact. Even if I didn’t know that at first, I had to look up and think about this sh*t right here—it had already been done.”

You can read the full sit-down with Carti here.

One of the advancements in television production in recent years has been the advent of large video boards serving as set walls, allowing for multiple shows to be shot on the same set, while still being able to change backgrounds to give each show a unique look. That has allowed for smaller studio spaces and multi-purpose functionality for big television networks, which used to have to have multiple sets for its various shows.

Typically, there’s not any danger to this setup, but on ESPN Colombia on Tuesday night, one of the video walls collapsed onto one of the analysts, Carlos Orduz at the desk, crushing him between the desk and the video boards in a scary scene, as his other coworkers reacted in horror before quickly trying to get to break.

Luckily, Orduz was not seriously injured in the on-set accident, posting a video to Twitter shortly after to confirm that he was OK and discuss the situation briefly. He later said he only had some bruises and a blow to the nose, but that it was not broken.

It is a wild scene to see take place on live TV and it’s great to hear that Orduz is in apparent good spirits and health. This will probably serve as a reminder to others in the TV industry to double check their own set pieces and make sure everything is well secured.

As you may have noticed, it’s been a while since Donald Trump was on Twitter. It’s been a lot quieter since the former president was permanently banned, with a lot less need to worry that the most powerful person in the world could cause real damage with simply a few rage tweets. But he’s not entirely gone: Every great now and then he fires off what looks like a formal fax and someone posts it somewhere online, in the hopes that it will find its way onto twitter.com. And on Wednesday, such an event took place.

Like previous post-Twitter Trump missives, it was written on presidential letterhead, billing itself faux-triumphantly as a “statement” from the “45th president.” (Nowhere does it imply there’s now a 46th.) And this time he had something to say about the vaccines that are currently being rolled out en masse after a clumsy start under his watch. Also, there was some racism.

“I hope everyone remembers when they’re getting the COVID-19 (often referred to as the China Virus) Vaccine, that if I wasn’t President, you wouldn’t be getting that beautiful ‘shot’ for 5 years, at best, and probably wouldn’t be getting it at all,” it reads. It concludes with a repeat of the words, “I hope everyone remembers!” (in case anyone forgot them).

It’s a classic Trump statement: the wounded narcissism, the unnecessary but very pronounced bigotry, the random capitalizations, the random quotation marks, the ridiculous boasts that he then increases to make himself feel better, the pointless repetition.

Thing was, people weren’t shaken to see him back in the public eye, such as he is. People simply found it pathetic.

Some thought he seemed like a man on a street corner.

Or that he had real father-in-law energy.

Some were annoyed that he’s found a way to circumvent the Twitter ban.

In fact, the full statement is even the size of a tweet.

But on weird letterhead.

Since he was boasting about his role in combating the pandemic — a truly bizarre thing to do, given the last year — some thought it was only fair to remind him of statements he made at the start of it.

And others pointed out the real reason it’s bizarre for him to claim credit for the vaccines: The people who actually listen to him aren’t going to take it.

Before LaMarcus Aldridge joined the Spurs back in 2015, he was once considered one of the league’s best power forward. Aldridge had thrived over the course of nearly a decade with the Portland Trail Blazers, helping usher in a new era for the franchise and turning himself into a multi-time All-Star.

When he arrived in San Antonio, there was still some hope that he might be the successor to Tim Duncan, a player to pair alongside the budding superstar Kawhi Leonard and build a foundation for the future. But in the intervening years, the NBA progressively moved away from Aldridge’s throwback game.

Still, Gregg Popovich and company were able to tweak their space-and-pace schemes to feature Aldridge’s post game and maintain their run as a perpetual playoff threat. Now, it appears Aldridge’s time in San Antonio will soon come to an end, as the two sides are working on a plan to part ways, as announced by Popovich on Wednesday evening.

Gregg Popovich on LaMarcus Aldridge: pic.twitter.com/OQN0U3jVNV

— Tim Reynolds (@ByTimReynolds) March 11, 2021

The organization is currently exploring several options to make the move happen before the trade deadline approaching later this month.

The Spurs will explore trades for LaMarcus Aldridge between now and the March 25 trade deadline and presumably move onto buyout discussions if no deal can be struck.

— Marc Stein (@TheSteinLine) March 11, 2021

There’s a level of confidence that a trade partner will be found for Aldridge — perhaps even in the next week — and no movement toward a contract buyout, sources tell ESPN.

— Adrian Wojnarowski (@wojespn) March 11, 2021

There are several interesting scenarios for Aldridge around the league, including Boston, Phoenix, or even a homecoming Portland, who has struggled with a depleted roster all season. But his $24 million contract makes trading him complicated. Still, the Spurs will spend the next week-plus seeking a trade that can at least net them something in return before turning to the last resort of buyout talks.

Over the past month or so, NFTs — aka, non-fungible tokens — have been all the rave across the art and tech worlds. Grimes and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey are just some of the big names that have taken it up, and it looks like Post Malone will join them. The Hollywood’s Bleeding singer is teaming up with cryptocurrency group, Fyooz, to launch a new NFT experience that will allow select fans to compete with him in a game of beer pong.

The announcement is part of a larger experience from Fyooz that aims to allow token holders to get up close and personal with their favorite celebrities. The experience will allow for a direct and personal interaction that can be “one-off, multiple interactions, or indeed a ticket for ongoing events with the artists,” according to a press release. The beer pong with Post Malone is their maiden effort.

In case you’re new to the whole NFT thing, it’s essentially a one-of-a-kind digital collectible that’s created using blockchain technology. Jack Dorsey recently minted an NFT of the first tweet ever sent on Twitter. According to CNN, the CEO of Bridge Oracle, Sina Estavi, offered $2.5 million for said tweet. Elsewhere, Grimes made $6 million by selling her art collection WarNymph Collection Vol 1 as an NFT. Each digital art piece was accompanied by exclusive audio that could only be obtained by purchasing an NFT.

You can check out more about the Fyooz NFTs here.