Month: June 2021

The Philadelphia 76ers forced a Game 7 in their Eastern Conference Semifinal series against the Atlanta Hawks on Friday night. While it wasn’t pretty, the Sixers were able to go into State Farm Arena and walk out with a 104-99 win, although their superstar big man did have one complaint about how things played out.

Following the game, Joel Embiid met with the media and expressed some frustration with the way things were officiated. He specifically pointed out the fact that Trae Young — who he referred to as “the point guard” — generally gets a pretty quick whistle, which does not always apply to him.

“I just felt like it wasn’t called both ways, especially because of the minimal contact that they get on the point guard, and when it comes to us, we don’t get the same thing,” Embiid said, per Dave McMenamin of ESPN. “So I just want it called both ways. If you’re going to call something like nothing on their point guard, it should be the same way and call the same thing [for] me when I get — if I get — touched.”

Embiid went on to claim that he was “hacked all night” by Atlanta’s various players. He does have a point that he didn’t spend a ton of time at the charity stripe — Embiid shot four free throws during the game and didn’t get to the line until the fourth quarter. Young, meanwhile, took five free throws on the evening.

There is a very real discrepancy between how much contact is needed for big men to draw a foul and how little is required for some guards. This is something Young knows, and is a major reason why he has earned a reputation for being one of the league’s most effective grifters. Now, no one in the league shot more free throws per game this season than Embiid, so he is really, really good at drawing fouls and getting to the line, but this feels, more than anything else, like an attempt to work the refs a little before a win-or-go-home game on Sunday.

The Boston Celtics were at the center of a huge trade that happened amid the NBA playoffs, which is a bit of a rarity. While other players and picks were involved, the headline of the deal was that it sent Kemba Walker to the Oklahoma City Thunder and brought Al Horford back to Boston.

Walker’s tenure with the franchise was certainly solid, but it never quite reached the heights that one would anticipate a player of his caliber could reach. Of course, his knee problems were the major reason for this, but a new piece by Jared Weiss of The Athletic indicates all was not well in the Celtics’ locker room. In fact, the issues this past season may have played a role in costing the team some frontcourt reinforcements after Blake Griffin was bought out by the Detroit Pistons.

According to a source, Brooklyn’s Blake Griffin asked a Celtics player if he should join the team midseason and was told not to come to Boston because of the apparent dysfunction.

Griffin, of course, went on to join the Brooklyn Nets and has turned into an important piece of their puzzle during their postseason run. It’s probably safe to say he would not have single-handedly changed the course of Boston’s season — even if he would have helped their frontcourt considerably — but it’s pretty eyebrow-raising that the situation with the Celtics got to this point.

On Saturday, the nation lost one of its premier pets: Champ, the German Shepherd adopted by Joe and Jill Biden back in 2008. He was 12 years old.

The president released a statement mourning their beloved pet. “Our hearts are heavy today as we let you all know that our beloved German Shepherd, Champ, passed away peacefully at home,” the statement, attributed to both he and the First Lady, read. “He was our constant, cherished companion during the last 13 years and was adored by the entire Biden family. Even as Champ’s strength waned in his last months, when we came into a room, he would immediately pull himself up, his tail wagging, and nuzzle us for an ear scratch or a belly rub.”

The Bidens adopted Champ when he was just a puppy. Joe had said that if he and Barack Obama won the election that year, he would gift the family with a pet. He was named after something Joe’s father liked to say to him whenever he was feeling down: “Get up, champ.”

“In his younger days,” the statement read, “he was happiest chasing golf balls on the front lawn of the Naval Observatory or racing to catch our grandchildren as they ran around our backyard in Delaware.”

The Bidens adopted another German Shepherd in early 2018, name of Major, who is currently three years old.

The statement from the Bidens concluded movingly: “We love our sweet, good boy, and will miss him always.”

It’s been a long wait for Saweetie’s official debut album Pretty B*tch Music, but at least it hasn’t been that grueling. That’s because the Bay Area act has released a number of tracks as she’s worked on finishing her opus. At long last, the project is complete, as its release date was revealed just moments before Saweetie’s performance on Jimmy Kimmel Live!

The host of the late-night show gave a brief introduction to Saweetie before her performance of “Fast (Motion).” It was here that Kimmel revealed Pretty B*tch Music will be released on June 25. This gives fans less than a week to prepare themselves for the album’s arrival, which also lands on the same day of projects to be released by Tyler The Creator and Doja Cat.

As for the performance itself, Saweetie delivered a flashy set atop a rooftop that was riddled with flashing lights and a squad of backup dancers. Pretty B*tch Music will also arrive a little over two months after Saweetie’s most recent project, Pretty Summer Playlist: Season 1.

You can watch her performance on Jimmy Kimmel Live! above.

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

Mike Lindell’s had a busy 2021. The MyPillow guy tried to help Trump overturn the election. He’s been sued in two separate billion-dollar lawsuits. He’s released multiple, very long videos teeming with wacko conspiracy theories. He was even the subject of a bizarre (and quite untrue) romantic rumor involving Jane Krakowski. But did you know he also tried to make a dent in the once-thriving mask market? And that he lost millions of dollars doing it?

Actually, you might remember this, although it was a lifetime ago. Back in March of last year, early into the pandemic, then-president Donald J. Trump held one of his surreal Rose Garden press conferences that used to be a staple of American life. In it, he announced that Lindell would be mass producing masks for charity, to be, for the most part, donated to frontline workers. That never happened.

According to The Daily Beast, Lindell is now sitting with millions of unused masks and around $7 million in personal losses. The businessman told the publication that he “can’t give them away,” and that he wishes he could burn them all.

What happened? It’s hard to get a straight answer from Lindell, who is prone to conspiratorial tangents filled with Dadaist inventions, but the story The Daily Beast was able to piece together involves paints it as a “failed charity effort that Lindell then turned into a failed business venture, which he then turned back into a charity.” He had retrofitted about 75% of machines once used to crank out his fancy pillows into mask-sewing units. But he ran amok of commercial and regulatory roadblocks. The Food and Drug Administration, for instance, said it did not meet their standards.

Lindell also blamed “many bad people in the mask industry.”

Eventually the market flooded with masks, and Lindell was still lagging behind. Soon he was buying masks from other sources and then donating those instead — a move that cost him some $4 million.

Then he tried a different tack. As per the Beast:

He began selling them to the public and promoting the items online and in media appearances. And while Lindell vowed he was not gunning for a profit and only sold masks at or below the $1.50 cost of production, that’s only the most recent discounted rate. The MyPillow website once priced them as much as three times that rate, and in a June 2020 radio interview, Lindell marked them up four dollars a pop.

By the fall, he’d given up. Now he’s surrounded by the fruits of his failures — “un-given-away” face coverings, some of them surgical masks, others disposables, others made of cloth. The kicker? Lindell now doesn’t even believe masks worked at all. But now he’s giving them away. “Anyone can have them now,” he told the Beast. “I don’t care.” So if you need a mask, we know a guy.

(Via The Daily Beast)

Juneteenth honors the day the Emancipation Proclamation reached the state and thus marked all slaves as free. First celebrated in Texas, it’s expanded over the years. Indeed, this week President Joe Biden made it a federal holiday. On Friday night, just a day before the holiday, ABC held a Juneteenth TV special, Together We Triumph, that featured performances by Jimmie Allen, Chloe Bailey, and Leon Bridges. By the end of the night, it was clear that Chloe’s performance caught the most attention.

The singer took to the stage to share her cover of Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good” during the Juneteenth TV special. Her performance came with a spicy dance routine that left people divided, with some deeming it unfit for the classic soul song. “Idc Chloe Bailey ATE,” one person wrote on Twitter. “Just at the wrong table though—baby it’s Nina Simone [looking eyes emoji].” Others, though, defended what she’d done.

“Y’all MUST do some research on Nina Simone before saying Chloe Bailey didn’t understand the assignment,” they wrote. “Nina Simone was literally a free-spirited woman.” They added, “Go watch the documentary of Nina on Hulu, then tweet lol.”

You can watch a clip of Chloe’s performance above and check out more reactions to it below.

Fran Lebowitz is famously grumpy. In public appearances and in both a TV movie and a Netflix show directed by Martin Scorsese, the author and wit wields the power of withering disdain like it was a superpower. So when Bowen Yang, he of outside-the-box Weekend Update ideas, learned that she was not that into the impersonation he did of her on SNL earlier this year, he wasn’t upset. He saw it as a win.

Back in January — when Scorsese’s Pretend It’s a City, which let Lebowitz yap over seven episodes, dropped on the streamer — Yang appeared on Weekend Update, doing his best take on the beloved public speaker. (Opposite him was Kyle Mooney, busting out a motormouthed impersonation of her legendary filmmaker, who spent much of the series laughing uproariously at her quips.) The bit may have brought more attention to Lebowitz, more of a cult figure, than she’s ever had before.

But she didn’t seem to be amused. When asked about it by the Los Angeles Times, Lebowitz seemed to write it off. “People started calling me because they saw it. I would not have watched it even if I knew,” she told them. “I said, ‘If you’ve never had a caricature drawn of you, you might think this is a great thing [to be parodied] — but no one likes them.’”

It seems to be more of a blanket dismissal of impersonations than any animosity specifically directed at Yang. Whatever the case, Yang loved it.

“That’s confirmation that she’s seen it and that she doesn’t care for it, and I think that’s the highest compliment you could possibly get from someone like Fran,” Yang told Seth Meyers on Late Night.

Meyers agreed. “I think that if Fran Lebowitz said, ‘Oh my God, I loved it, and it’s so cool to be on SNL!’ it would just ruin everything,” the host told Yang.

“Absolutely. So I wear it as a badge of honor that she did not like my portrayal of her,” Yang said. “I probably wouldn’t either, if someone who was so demographically opposite of me, portrayed me. I’d be like, ‘Come on!’”

So to sum up, if you’re ever get successful enough to get dissed by Fran Lebowitz, flaunt it, baby.

You can watch Yang’s Late Night appearance in the video above. And you can watch the offending sketch below.

(Via EW)

Kamasi Washington has been racking up accolades for his psychedelic jazz-fusion for quite some time now, and his 2018 epic Heaven And Earth was the last formal release fans have gotten from the epic jazz powerhouse. But that doesn’t mean he hasn’t been releasing one-off tracks and special projects in the meantime, like scoring Michelle Obama’s Becoming documentary, teaming with the likes of Terrace Martin and Denzel Curry to release the protest song, “Pig Feet,” and even forming the new band, Dinner Party, with 9th Wonder, Robert Glasper, and Martini.

Today he’s back with some more music of his own, though, sharing a hopeful new track off the Liberated EP that’s part of The Undefeated’s Music For the Movement series. This is volume 3 of that project, and includes contributions from other artists like Chloe Bailey, Common and Cordae, while artists like Tinashe have contributed to the project before. For Kamasi’s newest track, “Sun Kissed Child,” he had contributions from plenty of fellow artists, including vocalists Dwight Trible and Patrice Quinn, as well as drummer Ronald Bruner Jr., who is the older brother of Thundercat.

Hear the new song above and look out for more new music and hopefully more live performances coming from Kamasi very soon.

Ever since fans got a tiny glimpse into the life of Billie Eilish via her The World’s A Little Blurry documentary, there’s been a lot more chatter about her romantic relationships than ever before. A few scenes from the film depict a fairly one-sided and tumultuous relationship between Eilish and her ex, Brandon Adams, who is also an artist and performs as 7:AMP. Adams was in his twenties when the pair dated while Eilish was and is still a teenager, so when she released a new song called “Your Power” that addresses a similar age gap, fans felt it must’ve been addressing that experience.

But in a new cover story with Rolling Stone, Eilish is adamant that is not the case. She’s said from the beginning “Your Power” is about “many different situations” and holds to that in her new interview: “Everybody needs to shut up,” she told Rolling Stone, adding that the documentary “was a microscopic, tiny, tiny little bit of that relationship. Nobody knows about any of that, at all. I just wish people could just stop and see things and not have to say things all the time.”

Well, there’s Billie’s current perspective at least. Check out the song above and decide for yourself, and read the rest of her interview with Rolling Stone right here.

Earlier this year Lord Huron announced their new album, Long Lost with the lead single, “Mine Forever,” and now that the record is released, they took some time to call into The Late Late Show With James Corden for a live rendition of the track. Though it wasn’t technically their first new music of 2021, “Not Dead Yet” held that honor, it was the song that introduced the record, and is, according to Corden, one of his personal favorites on the album.

Band leader Ben Schneider told Corden some background on the song before the performance: “It’s kind of from the perspective of somebody who’s maybe got a little delusional about a relationship they had,” he explained. “And not really coming to terms with the fact that it’s over, and wanting to keep it alive forever in their mind. So it’s kind of a sad song but it’s got some jauntu guitars to it, to even that out.

Long Lost is the band’s first new record since their excellent 2018 release, Vide Noir, and if you’re into what you hear above, make sure to also check out the cowboy vibes on the album’s title track right here. For now, check out their live performance of “Mine Forever” above and tap into your own delusional lover.