Month: June 2021

Still the reigning NBA champions for a few more weeks, the Los Angeles Lakers are far from a joke in the basketball world these days. But the team will be the focus of what a former The Office alum hopes will be the next great workplace comedy on Netflix.

There are already a few Lakers-based series in the works, but Friday brought news that Netflix is bringing in Mindy Kaling and Lakers owner Jeanie Buss to executive produce a series about the ins and outs of the Lakers organization. As Deadline detailed, Netflix announced a series not about LeBron James and the action on the court, but about a fictional female governor navigating the difficulties of running a professional sports franchise.

In a competitive situation, Netflix has given a 10-episode straight-to-series order to a half-hour workplace comedy inspired by the front office of the Los Angeles Lakers. The project hails from Mindy Kaling, former star/executive producer of one of the all-time great workplace comedy series, The Office; Modern Family alumna Elaine Ko; Lakers’ President and Governor Jeanie Buss and Warner Bros. TV.

Written by Ko, the untitled series is inspired by the personal and professional dynamic between the family owners and front office team that together run one of the most iconic franchises in all of sports: the Los Angeles Lakers. The workplace comedy follows fictional team governor Eliza Reed as she navigates NBA ownership and family drama with her best friend by her side.

Ko writing the untitled series is a great start given her background in Modern Family. And it will certainly stand out among the other Lakers-based projects in the works. It’s actually the third Lakers project currently in the works, starting with an Adam McKay-ran drama about the Showtime Lakers of the 1980s. Earlier this year, Hulu also got its own nine-part docuseries about the Lakers under former owner Jerry Buss. That’s a whole lot of Lakers content coming, but the Netflix series is likely to be the funniest. And with Kaling involved in the project, there will be a high bar to reach when it comes to workplace comedies.

[via Deadline]

Right now, there are seven open head coaching jobs in the NBA. The Celtics, Mavericks, Magic, Pacers, Pelicans, Trail Blazers, and Wizards all need to figure out who will captain their respective ships in the coming days and weeks.

Every coaching job is hard. Each has its own quirks, its unexpected pitfalls, and unknown benefits that can be hard to parse from the outside. Some (Boston, Dallas, New Orleans) probably come with more immediate expectations than a job with a rebuilding team like Orlando. That means different coaches might be better fit for one type of job vs. another.

Still, some of these jobs are clearly better than the others and, if the ultimate goal is to win games and be employed for a long time, offer more than others. A possible eighth job — the Bucks job, which could become open if Mike Budenholzer if fired — might even be the best of the bunch. At the very least, it’s a top-two job, so keep that in mind in reading these rankings.

No. 7: Washington Wizards

The Wizards job as it currently exists has real downside and not much upside. Taking the job as it is now means getting to coach Bradley Beal and Russell Westbrook, but is that pairing going to lead the team in the long-term? Probably not. Westbrook has had injury issues and is probably past his overall peak. Beal is signed for two more years at age 27, but could test free agency or get dealt before then if things break the wrong way. If it all breaks down quickly, the coach is an easy fall guy with the best case scenario being the seventh or eighth seed in the Eastern Conference.

No. 6: Portland Trail Blazers

Portland is similar to Washington in that there are clear downsides. Damian Lillard and C.J. McCollum have been a long-standing productive duo, but the roster is largely maxed out for what it is now. Maybe McCollum gets dealt, but if that yields a Kevin Love or Kristaps Porzingis, is that really changing the team’s upside? Plus, Terry Stotts also did as good a job as possible in his tenure.

There’s also a longevity question here. General manager Neil Olshey is heading into the last year of his contract and might be a lame duck general manager, and on top of that, has insisted that the roster wasn’t the issue in this year’s first round exit. If that’s true, and a tear down of some kind happens, what is going to stop the new front office lead from just bringing in their own coach? There are coaches who could probably survive a regime change — Rick Carlisle and David Vanterpool, a former Blazers assistant beloved by Lillard, come to mind — but not many. There’s upside and a possible plucky playoff run to be had here behind a special talent by Lillard, but there are also a number of ways this could go wrong in a hurry.

No. 5: Orlando Magic

The Magic’s roster is lacking. Injury concerns for Markelle Fultz and Jonathan Isaac put a real damper on the young core. Mo Bamba looks like a missed Lottery pick. In a post-Steve Clifford world, this team is really starting from zero.

But that also allows a coach to grow with the roster as its built — think Brett Brown in Philadelphia during the Sam Hinkie era. He took a lot of losses, but got a chance to coach the team when it got to where it was always ended to go. It’s the path the Thunder appear to be going with Mark Daigneault as head coach, too. It’s not the right fit for every coach, but could be a good fit for the right coach willing to operate by the “wins and lessons” mantra.

No. 4: Indiana Pacers

The Pacers are a play for the middle. It’s a franchise that, perhaps to its own fault, never really goes for it fully and hasn’t made a really deep playoff run in a long time. The roster is tricky too — it’s been built around the Domantas Sabonis-Myles Turner frontcourt, but it might not be for much longer. Maybe they’ll get lucky in the Lottery this year and get a chance to shake things up.

But there also feels like potential to make this job lasts. Nate Bjorkgren only made it a year, but that feels to be more about Bjorkgren than it does the Pacers, even if they have some fault on their end too. If the right coach comes in – which might be Carlisle, who coached in Indiana before — they could make this a team that is competitive year in and year out, but needs luck to take a bigger step, which is a very Pacers position to be in.

No.3: New Orleans Pelicans

Is the Pelicans job too low on this list because it isn’t valuing Zion Williamson’s star potential enough? Perhaps. Is it too high because of the expectations that seem to be in place? Also, perhaps. Alongside Zion, Brandon Ingram has also developed in a very good scoring wing with a little bit of playmaking juice and having two players who can carry an offense, even if the fit is clunky, is a great place to start from.

But the rest of the roster is just shaky at the moment. Is Lonzo Ball, a pending restricted free agent, part of the future? Josh Hart is a restricted free agent, too, and rumors indicate he wants a fresh start elsewhere. What about the somewhat dead weight deals of Steven Adams and Eric Bledsoe — is it possible to coach around those contracts? There’s immediate pressure to win here in the far better conference and it’s not entirely clear if the rest of the roster is ready to go where Zion is capable of going. Last year, by net rating, this was the the 18th-best team in the league and not significantly behind the ninth and 10th-seeded Warriors and Grizzlies.

But coaching Zion, and being the coach to get Zion to the next level, is a really enticing job. Someone should want to jump at it.

No. 2: Dallas Mavericks

There is definitely downside to the Mavericks job. There’s a new front office coming in. Mark Cuban is a meddlesome owner who is involved in every decision. Outside of Luka Doncic — who is the absolute reason to take this job and not think twice about it — the roster is underwhelming. Maybe there’s a coach who can help revitalize Kristaps Porzingis, but there’s so much work to do there, particularly in making his relationship with Doncic work. And notably, Tim Hardaway Jr. — arguably the team’s second or third-best player this year — is headed into free agency.

But this is a chance to coach Doncic as he heads towards his prime. Having a player of that caliber is the hardest part of any roster building, and even if the pressure is on to win, it’s a lot easier when Doncic has proven he can hang with the league’s best.

No. 1: Boston Celtics

There are tough aspects of the Celtics job. Is Brad Stevens going to be a good president of basketball operations? Who knows! Can the roster be meaningfully improved? It’s hard to see how that happens if Marcus Smart is the big trade piece on the last year of his deal, and while Kemba Walker getting traded for Al Horford helps the frontcourt, the team now lacks a point guard, plus you can argue pretty easily that Walker is better than Horford. Missing on a slew of late first-round picks is rearing its head now, too, as the roster looks thin for a team that has hopes of making a deep playoff push.

But the Celtics also have Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown. In those two, they have a pair of All-Star caliber wings to build around. That’s arguably a better starting spot than any other team currently looking for a coach and second only to the Bucks if that job opens up. Tatum alone is worth getting exited about, as he’s among the best young building blocks in the league and there’s a lot reason to believe he’ll still get better. For starter, he struggled for some time due to the after effects of COVID-19 this year, but looked to be back to his normal self in the play-in and playoffs, scoring 50 twice. The right coach could take Tatum and push him and this Celtics team to a whole other level.

There is an inherent flaw with the Madden franchise that exists in most every sports video game: Trying to make gigantic, sweeping changes to various elements of the an annual game can come at the expense of the little things that can actually make it better. For every one bit of praise about a flashy new game mode that takes hours and hours work on the back end, seemingly thousands of gamers will issue up complaints about the game itself not being particularly fun, or repetitive, or some other thing that indicates the basic goal of studios — make a game that people like playing — came up short.

Clint Oldenburg, the Gameplay Producer for the Madden franchise, was keenly aware of this. Sure, the upcoming Madden game, which hits consoles on August 22, has some major changes, but at the end of the day, Oldenburg says, there was a focus on making this year’s version of the game fun.

“In the past years or maybe even other games, when you have a giant, big, epic new feature like Dynamic Gameday, there’s usually not much time to do anything else,” Oldenburg told Uproxx, alluding to a new feature that looks to make gameday in Madden NFL 22 more authentic in a myriad of ways. “We were able to get that stuff done, and I think it has made a significant change to the way that the game feels and looks, and I certainly hope that our players see that and feel that to the level that we think that they will.”

After getting a look at some of the changes coming to Madden NFL 22, we caught up with Oldenburg to discuss new features, changes to this year’s game, and more.

What was the single biggest bit of feedback that you got on Madden 21 that you wanted to focus on for Madden 22, both from gamers and internally?

I’m going to give you two. The first, as we look at Dynamic Gameday … there’s two different players. The first is from players who are considered new or returning players. They told us that they wanted to feel an emotional connection to their favorite teams, favorite stadiums, favorite fan bases, and that’s what they craved out of Madden that wasn’t there. And then number two, if you look at players who play Madden every year, they said that they wanted more responsiveness, more control, more visual quality in gameplay. And so those are the two biggest pieces of feedback from a high level.

Given everything that went into making the last version of the game — the pandemic, the rise of next gen console, all that extra stuff that’s not normally there — how much smoother did you guys find the process of making this one?

It was a little smoother. It couldn’t help but be, because we had to learn so much on the fly during the first one. I still wouldn’t say it was as optimal as you would have hoped for, but we certainly got a lot better at it.

One of the big things that I remember from the next gen version of last year’s game was the addition of Next Gen Stats and how that informed how you played the game, how the characters in the game play the game. What was the biggest thing you learned from having it in last year’s game that you were able to apply to this one?

Yeah, that’s a really good question. So, we have a continued investment with Next Gen Stats, we loved the authenticity it brings to our game. This is year two of that, it’s going to continue in year three and four. What we did in year one was really put in the data to make sure our players … primarily padding data, speed and acceleration rates, things like that to make sure that our game was moving at the right speed, and that players were moving at the speed that they move in the real world. What we were missing and what we’re doing in year two is now we’re bridging the gap between the speed and the look.

The biggest piece of feedback we got from gen five last year was, okay, everyone’s moving a little bit slower, it’s more authentic, have more time to make my decisions. But it doesn’t really look the part, I don’t look as explosive, I don’t feel as responsive. So that’s where we concentrated with our Next Gen Stats stuffing poor gameplay. The best example of this is with ball carriers and defenders. When they were running at top speed last year, people said it felt and looked like they were just cruising, they weren’t getting a lot of effort, even though they’re running 21 miles an hour.

So we went and got a whole host of new animations to pay off the fact that he is running at top speed, and even though his speed is the exact same this year as it was last year, you’re going to feel and see that he’s actually moving, you’re gonna think he’s moving faster, but he’s not, it just looks the part. And so you take that treatment and take it across all the core gameplay features in the game and mechanics, that’s kind of the idea.

It seems to me like the most drastic changes come to the general gameday experience, and how many different different elements that’s going to encompass in this year’s game. Why was making gameday a little bit different, a little bit more broad, a little bit more authentic, such a big focus for you guys?

In addition to the feedback about our players telling us they wanted that connection with their favorite fandoms, one overarching theme that you’ll notice this year, and even last year, is we’re trying to make every game feel unique and tell its own story. And one of the criticisms over the years of Madden is after you’ve played for about a week, all the games feel the same. How do we keep players surprised and delighted through those first couple of days so that they always feel like they’re getting a new experience? So in that vein, that’s where our feature set came from, specifically Dynamic Gameday. All of these modifiers through game experience are going to change so much that hopefully you don’t feel like you’re having the same experience over and over and over.

So when you say every game, you mean like every individual game you play in Madden.

Exactly that. So, with the gameday conditions and the M-Factors, those are all going through a formula. When you boot into a game that looks at, like, “What’s the weather? What’s the turf look like? What’s the temperature? Is this a rivalry game?” All these different criteria to come up with what we’re actually going to populate in the game. And so you should be able to play for quite a while before you see the same combination of those things twice. Those things should always be changing and we’re going to continue adding those in post-launch, and that’s just one way we’re trying to make everything feel a little bit different.

I remember there were three prongs that go into that dynamic gameplay, can you walk me through those?

Yeah, so Dynamic Gameday is made up of Gameday Momentum, that’s the momentum mechanic where the factors are unlocked via your on-field performance. Then there is Next Gen Stats Star-Driven AI, that’s where we’re using the Next Gen Stats available to us to make our players and teams behave more appropriately to the real world counterpart to make offline games and solo games feel just as deep as playing against another user. And there’s Gameday Atmosphere, which is the presentation environment elements bringing those things to life through louder crowds, different presentation packages, Super Bowl presentation, things like that.

I was fascinated by the attempts to make homefield advantage really matter in this year’s game, it reminded me a bit of when I would play NCAA 2005 — you get the squiggly lines, the letters over receivers go away, that sort of thing. As someone who played in the league a bit, was that something that you in particular were passionate about trying to implement?

Yeah, that’s a good question, it’s a question I got a lot from my teammates on the dev team. There’s a lot of, “Is this really real? It seems kind of made up.” And so I always alluded to a story I have from when I was playing. I played a preseason game in Seattle — this wasn’t a postseason game, it wasn’t even a regular season game, it was a preseason game. The crowd in Seattle was so loud that I couldn’t hear anything for three quarters of the game other than the crowd. And so usually, as an offensive lineman ,you’re trying to look, “Where’s the safeties? Where’s my guy who I’m supposed to block?”All those things you’re trying to take in before the snap.

In Seattle, the only thing I could pay attention to was if the ball was going to be snapped. I’m playing right tackle and I’m looking over my left shoulder, looking at nothing but the ball, because I couldn’t hear anything. And so that was a story I told my teammates and that’s the type of thing we’re trying to create. Now, we’re not trying to make homefield advantages so powerful that you feel like you have to have it too win. For lack of a better term, what these are is throwing little logs in your path to make it a little bit more difficult to play on the road, but not something as powerful as X-Factors.

Right, so it’s not something like you’re the road team in Kansas City, you’re going to false start once every five snaps or any.

Yeah, we don’t want to do anything that makes you feel like you’re getting cheated in terms of outcomes. These are more visual treatments or slight stat boosts that are just additional things to overcome as you play through the game.

One thing that I liked was that it mentioned that the game experience could be a bit different based on the opponent — the example used was if you’re playing the Ravens, a very run-heavy team, that’s going to be quite different playing the Bills, a very pass-happy team. Can you explain the general ways in which you get differences based on what the other team is trying to do and how you have to respond to that?

We’re taking all that data from Next Gen Stats, we’re looking at play call tenancies — things like run-pass ratio — and then breaking that down further. When you pass, are you more likely to throw it deep, throw it short, run play action? When you run, are you an outside run team, inside run team, or quarterback run team? Those are the main ones.

And then that’s being surfaced to you via the new tenancy gameplan feature, which is where you can make, in Play Now and Online, you can make a gameplan pregame when you jump into the game, and then you can change it at halftime. And in Franchise, it’s the process you go through during your weekly practice as you prep for your opponent. So we’re going to show you what that team’s tendencies are and then let you make informed decisions about how you want to react. So let’s say you’re playing the Ravens and we say these guys run outside zone 60 percent of the time, that’s number one in league. You can say, “Okay, either I’m gonna do outside zone counter defense, which is I’m gonna take this thing away, or I feel like, hey, I’m pretty good at that on my own, maybe I’ll focus on the QB scramble and take that thing away instead.”

I’m glad you mentioned Franchise mode because when I played Madden, I exclusively play Franchise mode. It seemed like there were a whole bunch of upgrades to that, particularly in week-to-week and mid-game, you have to adjust on the fly. Why was changing Franchise Mode such a big focus?

As you know, fix Madden Franchise was a real thing last year. Our players told us they wanted more in Franchise, and in the same vein of, “we want a deeper experience and one that feels more dynamic, so you never feel like you’re doing the same thing over and over,” we wanted your weekly experience in Franchise to be the same thing. We want you making critical decisions for your team, whether that be via staff management, or the season engine/scenarios, whether that be via a gameplan. We always want you feeling like there’s a new puzzle to solve each and every week, so that you want to continue to play deeper and deeper and get more involved into your league,

Now I’m going to sound like someone who’s hyper-cynical. How do you like find the balance of “it’s a new challenge every week, it’s going to be interesting,” but at the same time, it’s not super overbearing, you’re not focusing on the minutiae of a football game?

I don’t have an overly scientific answer for you other than playing a bunch. As we go through production, we have to play the game so much and that’s across everything — we got to play through Franchise a bunch, we got to play through game play a bunch, we got to play Ultimate Team. We got to play it a bunch and make sure that we experience everything our players are going to experience and just dial it in.

What’s your favorite thing about this version?

The easy answer is Dynamic Gameday, but I’m not going to go there. My favorite thing is all the core gameplay improvements that we made to catching, tackling, blocking, player movements, because those are things that our players said were really important to them. And in the past years or maybe even other games, when you have a giant, big, epic new feature like Dynamic Gameday, there’s usually not much time to do anything else. We were able to get that stuff done, and I think it has made a significant change to the way that the game feels and looks, and I certainly hope that our players see that and feel that to the level that we think that they will.

This interview has been lightly edited.

Fleabag’s second season opens with an awkward family dinner that spirals into bloody chaos after a botched miscarriage confession. In Dead To Me, two middle-aged women bond over separate murders they’ve committed. Natasha Lyonne’s Nadia gets stuck in a time-loop on her 36th birthday, finding increasingly brutal ways to end her life in order to restart her cyclic timeline in Netflix’s Russian Doll.

Death, tragedy, trauma — each of these shows approach it differently but somehow, they all do it with comedy. Even more impressive? They all do it while centering the experiences of their female stars.

In the late 90s and early 2000s, TV ushered in a different kind of Golden Era. The next decade of storytelling on the small screen would be dominated by tortured male protagonists behaving badly. They were high school chemistry teachers turned drug kingpins, womanizing ad execs, serial killers with their own morally ambiguous codes, and mobsters in need of therapy. Tony Soprano may have been the first of these brooding anti-heroes, lording over his New Jersey crime empire with an iron fist and, at times, a conveniently placed staple gun, on HBO’s critically acclaimed drama, but he wouldn’t be the last of his ilk.

Instead, the success of The Sopranos led to an influx of TV shows that traded in the same trope: bad men behaving badly. These shows won Emmys, they catapulted to the top of the ratings, they cemented cable networks’ place atop the hierarchy of narrative TV — but they were also grave affairs, preferring a more sobering style of storytelling that leaned on extreme violence, ethical conundrums, and corrupt motives to give them an air of gravitas they knew would strike a chord with awards show voting bodies. These were serious shows about men doing seriously awful things that rarely had time to suss out the complicated character arcs of their supporting female cast.

Which was fine back when audiences were told only “likable” women could succeed on TV. Fortunately, a new crop of women-centered dramedies has arrived that have taken the idea that only men can misbehave and they’re putting it through the proverbial meat grinder.

But, instead of delivering dour character studies set to the backdrop of gritty crime thrillers and politically charged fantasy series, these genre-bending shows are toeing the line, existing in the same in-between spaces that women have historically occupied. They teeter between comedy and drama, balancing and employing both motifs to give us a different kind of anti-hero — one that’s female, yes, but also infinitely more relatable, often incredibly sympathetic, and more illuminative when it comes to the complexity of the human condition.

There are a couple of reasons why women seem to be running the dramedy game. The first is just basic necessity. For decades, prestige dramas put male characters on an unreachable pedestal, at least during awards season. Testosterone-fueled sagas that dabbled in Machiavellian dynamics between crooked cops, oppressed gangsters, grizzled lawmen, Western outlaws, and scheming politicians were the stories lauded by critics, held up as shining examples of what the Peak TV era could accomplish now that streaming had come along. Women could be funny, or they could be put-upon centerpieces within those sagas, but they could rarely be both. And men? Well, murdering the girlfriend of your strung-out, meth-dealing business partner and negotiating hostile takeovers of world governments while pushing journalists into oncoming subway trains didn’t leave much room for them to set up a punch-line. The only way for female characters and the actresses who played them on TV, to get recognized was to start carving out their own niche — one that took very real stakes and approached them with the kind of bleak, black humor that felt authentic.

Jenji Kohan did it well, first with Weeds (the female-fronted Breaking Bad predecessor that should’ve gotten more hype), then with her prison dramedy, Orange Is The New Black. Her ability to inject comedy into a story that touched on everything from the prison industrial system to police violence and racism felt revolutionary — so much so that awards shows struggled to categorize the kind of narrative she was weaving. Was it comedy? Was it drama?

The answer, especially when we’re talking about the complex, often messy experiences lived by women today, is clearly, “both.”

In Ancient Greece, the tragicomedy delivered catharsis to audiences by having them witness suffering but then alleviating it with humor. In these female-fronted modern dramedies, writers often like to reverse that formula, masking trauma behind the thin veil of comedy before shattering that lighter illusion with a dramatic gut punch. Fleabag does this well, drowning its main character in self-deprecating humor and distracting witticism before eventually forcing her to face down the suffocating anxiety and depression that’s been fueling the worst of her habits. In Issa Rae’s Insecure, we see the show’s main character rap poetic to her bathroom mirror, airing out the daily grievances about the casual racism and unhealthy relationships she’s struggling under at work and at home. In Russian Doll, Lyonne’s Nadia is insulting and apathetic to those in her inner circle in an effort to distance herself from human connection but when she’s trapped in a comical time loop that begins and ends with her death each day, she has to dig deeper to un-nest the trauma she’s been clinging to for so long. In NBC’s Good Girls, three mothers hilariously upend their static familial routine to launch a money-laundering operation that brings out the best (and worst) in their relationships with each other, asking them where they really find fulfillment — not where society’s told them they should.

There’s self-awareness, a detached sarcasm that characterizes so many of these characters’ approaches to the issues they’re facing on-screen — one that feels uniquely feminine. After all, women are twice as likely to suffer from anxiety and depression but science has also shown that women use more mirror neurons when processing emotions — basically, women are better equipped to understand, empathize, and confront their own emotions and the emotions of others. And, if we’re constantly processing our own trauma, and the trauma of others in an effort to be more compassionate, what better way to deal with that than with humor — however dark and unexpected and, sometimes, inappropriate.

That’s not to say there aren’t any good male-fronted dramedies on TV, or that male characters are confined to more serious, more traditional anti-hero molds — but right now, it’s the women who seem to be embracing, challenging, and experimenting with the boundaries of storytelling within this misunderstood genre. Dramedy is giving us a way to relay a feminine experience that feels more genuine, more true to real life and it’s giving female creatives the opportunity to tell the kind of stories that used to be passed on and tossed out when TV believed words like “adversity” and “hardship” could only serve as labels for the arcs of tortured male anti-heroes.

In reality, the darkest parts of the human experience are often accompanied by and dealt with through humor. The women ruling TV right now get that.

For years now, streaming services like Spotify have faced criticism about how much they pay the artists whose music they depend on. It’s a nuanced situation, so on The Daily Show last night, Trevor Noah broke it down and spoke about how hard it is on make money on Spotify as a non-major artist.

After sharing a compilation of news clips that charted the music industry’s shift from CDs to digital downloads to streaming, Noah got into it, starting by calling streaming “the best thing to happen to the music industry since the government created LSD.” He then noted, though, that while streaming services have “arguably saved music,” they’re “not exactly sharing the wealth.”

Noah shared more video clips, ones illustrating how little artists get paid when their songs get streamed. Then, Noah got into Spotify specifically, giving them credit for providing smaller artists with valuable exposure. He went on to point out, though, that regardless of who subscribers listen to, a hefty portion of their money still goes to major artists. As Noah put it, “Even if you are way too cool to listen to the top ten artists on Spotify, they still get most of your money. And the bands that you do listen to get almost none of it.”

Noah concluded by noting, “For now, maybe the most important things for artists to do is get the word out to their fans.” Then, he introduced Aloe Blacc, who has been vocal about issues with streaming music since he earned just $4,000 from streaming for Avicii’s international hit “Wake Me Up,” which he co-wrote. For The Daily Show, Blacc wrote and performed a new version of his “I Need A Dollar,” with lyrics modified to directly address Spotify and streaming problems.

Watch the whole segment above or find just Blacc’s performance below.

Turns out Jordan Klepper’s visit to Mike Lindell’s MAGA rally was as bats*it as the MyPillow guy himself made it look. The Daily Show correspondent was among the several who turned out to his MAGA rally in Wisconsin over the weekend, and he managed to snag an interview with Lindell and many of the Trump supporters who still believe a long list of lies Trump’s litany of sycophants tout about the election and Trump’s apparent coming reinstatement to the presidency later this summer.

Lindell tried to turn the tables on The Daily Show by posting video of the interview before it aired on Comedy Central, but perhaps he didn’t come off as well in that reveal as he’d hoped. Which is why the actual segment airing on Thursday night was a topic of interest, to say the least.

Klepper’s ‘Fingers The Pulse’ segment heavily featured Lindell on Thursday, but started with several who attended the rally and parroted the usual misinformation about the election, Democrats and how Lindell is a real American who tells it like it is. But when he actually talked to Klepper, well, things didn’t go so well.

“I already have the evidence,” Lindell claimed, without evidence before he went into a speil about what the rally really is for. “Do you know what this is doing? Do you guys get it?”

The actual purpose of the rally is not for Trump, Lindell claimed, but a show of free speech against… demonetization on video sharing platforms. OR something.

“This is a free speech rally, my platform, Frank Speech, for all the individuals whether they’re Democrat or Republican. Right now if you talk about machines, vaccines, the border, Jesus, you speak out for anything and YouTube and Vimeo and people like you guys, the journalists, suppress it, cancel us. And try and destroy something good that’s coming out of this.

“This is a free speech rally,” he continued. “This isn’t a Trump rally. Did you call it a Trump rally?”

Klepper points out that it says “MAGA” in the event’s title and Trump is supposed to speak via video later in the day.

“You got his picture on the poster, Mike,” Klepper says. Lindell replies to that Trump “got suppressed” just like the rest of the things currently airing on national television in the segment.

Klepper pointed out that the “elongation” of this election conspiracy process from Trump supporters and amplifying of those voices by Lindell has led to death threats for otherwise anonymous election officials in several states and had harmful impacts in the real world, including the January 6 insurrection in Washington. Lindell demurred here a bit, and Klepper then called out the oscillation he keeps having about his role in all this.

“Do you either want to be the guy everybody comes to or not the guy everybody comes to?” Klepper asks. “Because you have answers for being the guy that the cyberpunks come to but you have no other answers.”

The line is a reference to Lindell saying “white hat hackers” came to him with incriminating information about “the crime of the century” but his reluctance to share it with anyone else. Later, Klepper asks what Lindell will do if Trump does not get reinstated in August, as he’s promised again and again in recent weeks. Of course, there was more fight ahead.

“Then the states are all going to pull it down because they’re doing audits in every state,” Lindell said. Which prompted Klepper for perhaps his best line of the segment.

“It’s like watching that Bigfoot show,” Klepper suggested. “They don’t find Bigfoot at the end but, if you tune in next week, maybe it’s gonna happen.”

Lindell laughed, then seemed to understand what Klepper was saying and ended the interview, walking away saying “you guys are horrible.” So, tune in next week for more, I guess.

Since Iron Man kicked off the MCU all those years ago, I’ve come to find that if there’s one thing Marvel Cinematic Universe fan’s love apart from, well… Marvel, it’s a thoughtful crossover. Whether it be a massive, universe-altering event, or a subtle interaction that harkens back to a conversation that happened five years prior, crossovers and connections are indisputably fun to find, theorize about, and simply experience. Fortunately for Marvel fans, the MCU is chock-full of ’em, and their newest Disney+ show, Loki, is no exception. However, rather than take a look at every little Easter egg tucked away in the show’s most recent episode (Revengers, anyone?), we’re going to talk about one item in particular: Roxxcart.

After successfully nailing down when and where the Loki Variant (or are they?) is located, Loki, Mobius, and a squad of the Time Variance Authority’s finest Minutemen travel to the year 2050 and head to Haven Hills, Alabama, a corporate town owned and operated by the Roxxon Corporation (which, just to be clear, has no relation to UPROXX). So once in Haven Hills, the team busts into the corporation’s version of a Walmart-like big box store, Roxxcart, where they encounter folks seeking shelter from an imminent and sadly devastating hurricane, as well as the variant they’ve been hunting down. While everything that happens within Roxxcart is incredibly engaging, if you’re anything like us you might have spent a least a bit of time wondering why Roxxcart sounds vaguely familiar and if there’s any significance to it the neon-lit superstore’s appearance. Well, we’re here to tell you there is a reason why, and there certainly is a least a little bit of significance.

So as I mentioned before, Roxxcart is Roxxon’s privately owned superstore, and while Loki marks the first time Roxxcart has even been mentioned in both the MCU and the comics, Marvel and Roxxon has a history in both. First appearing in Captain America #180 in 1974, Roxxon Energy is essentially the evil corporation of the Marvel universe and has been involved in several stories with several Marvel heroes. Much like the Umbrella Corporation in Resident Evil, Jurassic Park‘s Ingen, and Alien’s Weyland-Yutani, Roxxon is basically always up to something that’s either actively harming the planet or humanity all in the pursuit of “progress,” which lands them in hot water a lot. However, seeing as Loki and the gang are waltzing into a Roxxon-operated store in the year 2050, you can safely assume these guys never really learn their lesson, and — like all multi-billion-dollar conglomerates — have themselves so intertwined in the people’s lives that their profitability is unwavering. However, even before 2050 we’ve seen Roxxon everywhere.

Prior to Roxxon’s appearance in Loki, the energy and power company has made appearances in Agent Carter, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Cloak and Dagger, Helstom, Iron Fist, Daredevil, Runaways, and every last one of the Iron Man movies, as seen above. While Roxxon never serves as the villain in any of these stories, in every single last one of them, Roxxon acts as an important part of Marvel’s world-building. People have conversations about the company, hear about them in the news, or walk past their ads on the streets. In Daredevil, Matt Murdock and Foggy Nelson defend the company as interns. In Iron Man 3, “The Mandarin” threatens to kill a Roxxon employee on air after the company spilled a million gallons of oil into the gulf and faced zero consequences for it. In Agent Carter, you discover that in the Marvel world, Roxxon is responsible for creating America’s atomic bombs.

So while Roxxon has yet to take center stage in any MCU story, we are constantly reminded the company exists, and that these worlds are all so intimately connected to one another, making the Roxxcart Easter egg a pretty damn cool one.

XXL‘s annually anticipated list of hip-hop Freshmen has hit the ‘net and as usual, garnered a tremendous response as those in the know celebrated their emerging faves and everyone else groused about being out of the loop. Of course, along with those reactions, the list also brought an inevitable third response: Fans expressing disappointment that their own favorite artists didn’t quite make the cut.

All of these artists definitely deserve to be here, and as we find out over the next few weeks which artists turned down spots or missed the availability window, it’s important to congratulate everyone who did make it for their accomplishment and acknowledge the hard work and luck it takes to get this far. Sometimes it’s just a matter of timing, as some artists’ big moments came just after the list was finalized.

That said, it’s always fun to play “What If?” with the list, especially because so many artists could qualify for a spot. However, let’s call the below seven artists something like a shortlist of names to watch for next year’s installment of the Freshman Class. Just because they missed out this year doesn’t mean they don’t deserve your attention now — and who knows? Maybe next year, you’ll be seeing these names on the big stage and thinking, “Hey, I know them!”

Babyface Ray

Born and raised on the east side of Detroit, Babyface Ray has a smooth, almost lackadaisical flow and blunt, plainspoken punchlines that are equal parts hilarious and understated (picture Danny Brown on a whole lot of downers). Like many of the best-known, up-and-coming rappers from his city such as Sada Baby and Tee Grizzley, he’s willing to rap on anything, but he stands apart thanks to his poise and stripped-back demeanor, which let his rhymes sneak up on listeners like a sip of sake rather than his contemporaries’ hard-body shots of no-chaser liquor. It’s an approach that makes for a stealthy come-up, but one that is every bit as undeniable

Erica Banks

Whether from the reductive Twitter jokes about being Megan’s offspring or from the maniacal meme that took over TikTok throughout the early part of the year when quarniness (quarantine horniness) was at its absolute peak, you know Erica Banks. And she’s putting in the effort to ensure that remains the case, whether that’s through collabs with fellow Texans like BeatKing, Big Jade, and Yella Beezy, or connecting with New York rising star DreamDoll. Banks has already proven she has the chops to hang with the likes of her contemporaries, and “Buss It” provided her a certified hit — all that’s left is to remain on the grind.

EST Gee

After Lil Baby’s 2020 co-sign on “Real As It Gets” launched him into the public consciousness, the Louisville native hit the ground running, dropping viral hit after viral hit tapping into the same sort of rough-edged, street-bred, unfiltered vein as Lil Baby. Gee’s strategic collaborations with more artists in that lane — Moneybagg Yo, 42 Dugg, Yo Gotti — furthered his gritty street rap appeal but his connection with fellow Louisvillian Jack Harlow on the latter’s more polished “Route 66” also solidified his crossover potential.

Hotboii

Hailing from Orlando, FL, Hotboii’s look is eye-catching, to say the least, but he pairs it with some of the most compelling autobiographical rhymes the Sunshine State has produced in the last big chunk of the streaming era. It’s slurry and simple but with an undercurrent of genuine distress — he’s seen some stuff, and he’s just trying to keep a straight face. This approach has turned out to be successful for him over the past year, as videos generate a million views a go at the minimum and his December debut album Double O Baby shot to the top of Billboard‘s Top Heatseekers chart.

Lil Poppa

Propelled by a fluid, bouncy cadence, Jacksonville rapper Lil Poppa has quietly accumulated one of the more loyal fanbases in hip-hop. His discography also boasts more than a few appearances by current playlist dominators like Lil Durk, Polo G, and Toosii, while his emotive and passionate storytelling makes him a compelling figure. He also understands how to write a catchy song, something he attributed to growing up a “big Lil Bow Wow fan,” as he told XXL‘s The Break.

RMR

Ever since he finagled his way to viral stardom with his cover of Rascal Flatts’ “Bless the Broken Road,” the masked ATLien has been consistently surprising listeners with his moves. Whether that means tapping in with trap favorite Future, Lil Baby, and Young Thug, recruited boom-bap revivalist Westside Gunn to his cause, or becoming a one-man cover band trying on everything from Drake hits to ’90s alt-rock favorites, the only thing you can expect from RMR is the unexpected.

Yung Bleu

Mobile, Alabama’s rap scene is popping off right now. After spawning the 2021 XXL Freshman brat rapper Flo Milli, its next star could very well be Yung Bleu, who’s gotten love from both Drake and Nicki Minaj as his breakout single “You’re Mines Still” racked up enough streams to become a legitimate, out-and-out hit. It helps when Drake jumps on the remix, but what likely means more is having a foundation of beloved tracks for new fans to discover and Yung Bleu certainly has that, including another 2021 Freshman, Coi Leray on “Thieves In Atlanta.”

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

We are now only a week from The Golden Casket, which will be Modest Mouse’s first album in six years, following 2015’s Strangers To Ourselves. Ahead of the June 25 release, the band has shared what will presumably be the final pre-album single, “The Sun Hasn’t Left Yet.” It’s a jaunty, upbeat tune that almost sounds like a children’s song at times with its lighthearted instrumentation.

Isaac Brock recently spoke with Uproxx’s Steven Hyden about the album, saying, “I wanted to make sure I didn’t accidentally make the same record again. It’s better to not put out many records and make them all feel a bit different. I try to be very aware of whether I’m doing the same thing, or doing something too close to another thing. My canon of information — what songs are out there, not just Modest Mouse songs, but just songs in the world — I know about a lot more songs. I just remembered a song I was super psyched on with Jacknife Lee last week. I was playing the kettle drum. And I get done and I’m listening to it and I’m like, ‘This is f*cking strange. It sounds like The Simpsons theme song.’ And so I’m aware that I can’t cover songs by accident. I’m also aware that I don’t want to accidentally cover my songs.”

Listen to “The Sun Hasn’t Left” above and check out our interview with Brock here.

The Golden Casket is out 6/25 via Epic Records. Pre-order it here.

Next week, Modest Mose is releasing The Golden Casket, their first new music since 2015’s Strangers To Ourselves . We recently got Isaac Brock to review every Modest Mouse album, including their latest, and now it’s time for Steve and Ian to give their takes on the band’s first release for the better part of a decade.

In addition to new music, Steve and Ian are also reflecting on the catalogue and career of one of the brightest lights in the indie rock scene of the aughts: The Shins. The band recently celebrated twenty years of Oh, Inverted World with a newly remastered version of the album, considered to be one of the definitive touchstones of the indie rock canon. How does it hold up two decades after its initial release?

In this week’s Recommendation Corner, Steve is excited about the return of Gang Of Youths with the new single “The Angel Of 8th Ave.” Ian is digging Megabear, the new album from UK outfit Me Rex.

New episodes of Indiecast drop every Friday. Listen to Episode 44 on Apple Podcasts and Spotify below, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts here. Stay up to date and follow us on Instagram and Twitter. We also recently launched a visualizer for our favorite Indiecast moments. Check those out here.