Month: July 2021

Keeping up with new music can be exhausting, even impossible. From the weekly album releases to standalone singles dropping on a daily basis, the amount of music is so vast it’s easy for something to slip through the cracks. Even following along with the Uproxx recommendations on a daily basis can be a lot to ask, so every Monday we’re offering up this rundown of the best new music this week.

This week saw Lil Nas X continue his joking ways and Justin Vernon and Aaron Dessner bring another esteemed collaborator into the Big Red Machine universe. Yeah, it was a great week for new music. Check out the highlights below.

For more music recommendations, check out our Listen To This section, as well as our Indie Mixtape and Pop Life newsletters.

Lil Nas X — “Industry Baby” Feat. Jack Harlow

While Lil Nas X became seen as a kid-friendly artist thanks to the universal success of “Old Town Road,” ahead of his “Industry Baby” video, he went ahead and warned parents that it wasn’t for their children. That definitely proved to be the case, as, among other antics, it featured Nas (but not Jack Harlow) twerking naked in a prison shower, a reference to his current legal situation with Nike.

Belly — “Better Believe” Feat. The Weeknd and Young Thug

The Weeknd has been in a collaborative mood in recent months, and he continued that last week by joining Young Thug in hopping on a new song from Belly, “Better Believe.” The Weeknd got do pull off some action movie antics in the song’s visual, as he had the honor of blowing up an oil refinery.

Big Red Machine — “Phoenix” Feat. Fleet Foxes and Anaïs Mitchell

Taylor Swift is the headlining guest on Big Red Machine’s upcoming album How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last?, but she’s far from the only esteemed collaborator. On “Phoenix,” the latest single from the project, for example, they got both Anaïs Mitchell and Fleet Foxes on the soaring track.

Leon Bridges — “Steam”

Leon Bridges continued adding to his so-far-so-good legacy last week with the release of this third album, Gold-Diggers Sound. Alongside the album, he also dropped a visual for the silky and groovy album standout “Steam,” which sees him busting some moves to the feel-good track.

Gunna and Polo G — “Waves”

NBA star Kawhi Leonard is renowned for his talents both offensively and defensively, but he’s also well-versed in the music industry. He got a bunch of rappers to participate in his Culture Jam project, and the latest look at that is Gunna and Polo G’s “Waves.” As Uproxx’s Wongo Okon notes, the track “leans more into Gunna’s lane as it features production the YSL rapper might use for his own work, but nothing too out of the box for Polo G as he flows smoothly on the new track.”

Camila Cabello — “Don’t Go Yet”

Camila Cabello is about a year-and-a-half removed from her latest album, Romance, and now she’s getting ready for her third full-length effort. She previewed it with “Don’t Go Yet,” which sees her pining for extra time with a special somebody. Uproxx’s Rachel Brodsky notes the song “is supported by dance-friendly production with a dose of Latin elements as well.”

James Blake — “Say What You Will”

At the top of the month, James Blake declared that his next album was done, and he didn’t waste time kicking off the rollout of it. That project is Friends That Will Break Your Heart, and “Say What You Will,” Blake says, is “about finding peace with who you are and where you’re at regardless of how well other people seem to be doing.”

Khalid — “New Normal”

At some point this fall, Khalid is set to drop his third album, Everything Is Changing. Sticking to the theme of things no longer being the same is the single he shared from the project last week, “New Normal,” a soulful tune that comes with a video that shows just how different things have become.

The War On Drugs — “Living Proof”

It’s been a good long while since the most recent album from The War On Drugs, the fantastic 2017 effort A Deeper Understanding. Last week, they announced that its follow-up is on the way and teased it with “Living Proof,” a gentler song than a lot of their Deeper Understanding tracks.

The Kid Laroi — “Don’t Leave Me” Feat. G Herbo and Lil Durk

Australian rapper/singer The Kid Laroi is really milking his debut mixtape F*ck Love, which was originally released in 2020. He dropped a deluxe edition of it later that year, and now he has come back with yet another expanded version of the album, this time titled F*ck Love 3: Over You. This addendum introduces seven new songs, including his Justin Bieber collab “Stay” and a joint effort with G Herbo and Lil Durk called “Don’t Leave Me.”

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

After confronting Tucker Carlson inside a fly fishing store and capturing the epic moment on video, a Montana man has become quite the social media legend. In an Instagram post shared on Saturday, Dan Bailey can be seen walking up to the controversial Fox News host and telling Carlson directly to his face, “You are the worst human being known to mankind. I want you to know that.”

In the caption to his now-viral video, Bailey expanded on getting to tell off Carlson for being a top source of COVID vaccine misinformation. Via Instagram:

“It’s not everyday you get to tell someone they are the worst person in the world and really mean it! What an a**hole! This man has killed more people with vaccine misinformation, he has supported extreme racism, he is a fascist and does more to rip this country apart than anyone that calls themselves an American.”

However, while Montana Man continues to trend on social media as people praise Bailey for confronting Carlson, Fox News condemned the confrontation in a statement:

“Ambushing Tucker Carlson while he is in a store with his family is totally inexcusable — no public figure should be accosted regardless of their political persuasion or beliefs simply due to the intolerance of another point of view.”

Clearly, a large contingent of social media disagrees with Fox’s statement. Bailey has been receiving so many offers to buy him a beer that he should probably start eyeing up a liver transplant just to be safe. It’s not everyday that Carlson is caught out in the wild and forced to face the consequences of his nightly rhetoric.

During a Sunday San Diego Comic-Con panel, Showtime revealed the official title (Dexter: New Blood) for the return of everyone’s favorite serial killer and the fateful date (November 7). The new trailer declared that “the Dark Passenger awaits,” so yeah, things are gonna get bloody, and the show suggested that a lot of knife play was to come. Not only that, but we’ll be seeing Jennifer Carpenter and John Lithgow return as Debra Morgan and the Trinity Killer, respectively, and they’ll presumably only do so in flashback form, which should be just fine for the audience.

While discussing the show’s return, star Michael C. Hall went deeper on his previous statements of understanding on why fans felt furious about the original show’s ending. That sentiment, of course, referred to how people felt let down by watching Dexter inexplicably dump Debra’s dead body into the ocean before sailing into a massive hurricane and somehow surviving to swap out coasts for the lumberjack life. To Hall, the fan reaction and the desire to revamp the show’s legacy (as affected by the ending) led to the decision to revive. Via Comic Book:

“It was a huge part of it. I think the ending was mystifying at best to people, confounding, exasperating, frustrating, on down the line of negative adjectives. I think this is a show that’s very important to all of us and the chance to revisit it and maybe in the process, redefine the sense of the show’s ending and the sense of the show’s legacy more broadly was certainly a part of our motivation. No doubt.”

Dexter: New Blood will run for 10 episodes, officially. However, Hall hinted during the panel that he’s not closed off to more episodes if things go well. Fingers are still duly crossed here for a flashback appearance by Doakes that goes something like this:

You can watch the full SDCC panel discussion below.

Amy Winehouse’s final album, 2006’s Back To Black, is a highlight of Mark Ronson’s production discography; He produced about half the songs on the album and got a writing credit on the title track. Now, though, Ronson admits that he has regrets about the way he “behaved around” Winhouse while they made the album specifically how he handled her struggles with addiction that ultimately led to her death.

In a new profile from The Guardian, Ronson said:

“Obviously, we had our ups and downs and it was troubling. I don’t know if I fully loved the way that I behaved around her. When she was going through addiction, I wish I’d been a little bit more upfront or confrontational about it. But I just was like, ‘Ah, she’ll sort it out — she did it already once.’ So, whatever.”

He also described how Winehouse treated paparazzi that camped outside of her house, saying, “She would wave to them, occasionally bring them out food. At first I was like, ‘This is just like a pantomime; you both understand what this is.’ Then I was like, ‘No: this is f*cking horrible and disgusting.’ I know people have to make a living — but I hated a lot of those people.”

Check out the full feature here.

This Star Trek legend deserves to be the new host of Jeopardy!.

Who is LeVar Burton?

Following the death of Alex Trebek, Jeopardy! has rotated through celebrity guest hosts instead of settling on a permanent option. Aaron Rodgers has done the best job so far, but Robin Roberts, George Stephanopoulos, Ken Jennings, Katie Couric, Mayim Bialik, Dr. Mehmet Oz, Savannah Guthrie, and Dr. Sanjay Gupta have also all filled in. For the next week, however, it will be fan favorite LeVar Burton behind the host podium.

“One of the things that excites me about it is that it requires such a different skill set—and Alex made it look easy. It was like breathing for him. It’s not easy in the least; I know, I’ve tried,” the Reading Rainbow star told GQ about getting the opportunity to host the game show. “So the challenge of mastering that job of being behind the podium is exciting to me. I relish the challenge.” Burton also said that “knowledge and information” is what most excites him about the job. “That half-hour of television, every evening, is a cultural touchstone in America. And for a Black man to be at that podium — more specifically, for me to be at that podium — it makes a whole lot of sense,” he added.

You can watch Burton’s hype video above, and catch him on Jeopardy! tonight.

Jennifer Lopez gave an Oscar-worthy performance in Hustlers, but it’s not her best role to date. No, it’s not The Cell or Out of Sight, either (although consider this your reminder that Out of Sight rules). It’s the “Jenny from the Block” music video, where between shots of Lopez dancing and going on a shopping spree, she has then-boyfriend Ben Affleck admire her famous butt like it’s the Mona Lisa. The music video — directed by Francis Lawrence, who would later make three of the four Hunger Games movies — premiered on TRL in November 2002, the same month the pair got engaged. Less than a year later, they called off the engagement; by January 2004, the relationship was over.

Until this year, when Affleck and Lopez, like a phoenix tattoo rising from the ashes, started seeing each other again. “They are madly in love,” a source told People. “Even though their split many years ago was devastating for Jennifer, she has never had a bad word to say about Ben. She believes that it just wasn’t meant to be then and feels like they’ve been given a second chance.” Over the weekend, the celebrity couple made it Instagram official (“Instagram official” is to 2021 as “MySpace official” was to 2002) and, more importantly, inadvertently recreated the “Jenny from the Block” music video:

Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck appear to be feeling nostalgic during their romantic getaway to Saint Tropez for her 52nd birthday. Affleck, 48, was pictured applying sun cream to his girlfriend’s famous posterior, striking a very similar scene to the one included in J-Lo’s video for the song, which played on their power couple status at the time.

The Daily Mail has the visual evidence, although you could watch the “Jenny from the Block” video and get the same experience, plus hear a mighty catchy song. It’s your choice. Me, I’ll be toasting the happy couple with an iced signature latte from Dunkin.

I hear they’re catering the wedding.

(Via the Daily Mail)

Ed Sheeran is back and in the midst of promoting a new album, but for much of 2020, he went silent. It turns out that was almost a permanent arrangement, as Sheeran says he considered retirement after the birth of this daughter.

In an interview with SiriusXM (as NME notes), Sheeran revealed:

“I stopped playing music for a bit, and music is entirely me as a person. Then I had my daughter and I was like, ‘Right, that’s it. This is me. I am probably just going to be a dad. I am not going to play music anymore.’ […] Then I was suddenly like, ‘It is more important for my daughter to grow up knowing that her parents have a work ethic.’ I slowly got back into music that way and the creative process started flowing again.”

He also noted that he’s coming off a stretch of immense productivity, saying, “I have done two albums and have written like 250 songs. In that, about 50 ballads. I write about 25 songs a week and one of them will be all right and that will go on the ‘maybe’ list.”

Sheeran’s songwriting is at the top of the world right now, as BTS’ “Permission To Dance,” which Sheeran co-wrote, is currently the No. 1 song in the US.

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

Last Week Tonight returned from a month-long hiatus (during which the show released breezy segments about octopuses and an enormous penis) to confront a serious subject: housing discrimination in the United States. In doing so, Oliver (after literally talking to his show’s “void” and preparing for a return to a studio audience) made a case for what some feel is necessary to begin closing the racial wealth gap. That hot-button subject would be reparations: “When you deprive somebody of something, you make it right by paying what you owe.”

Oliver referenced Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Case For Reparations,” a 2014 article in The Atlantic. Coates’ piece has proven to be highly influential and is referenced far and wide (it inspired Damon Lindelof’s Watchmen reimagining), even though only a minority of Americans believe that reparations should be paid by current generations for the acts of the past. Oliver went in deep on the subject with this ultimate takeaway: “The only really strange thing about paying reparations to Black people is that we haven’t done it yet.”

While making his argument, Oliver revealed how housing discrimination includes methods that are seldom seen by those who don’t experience them. That would include, say, federal home-loan discrimination and even discrimination by appraisal companies. In other words, it saturates every inch of the housing market.

Oliver glided through an intricate argument, including a relevant clip from an interview (around 19:30 in the above video) with a Black female homeowner, whose house appraisal seemed stunningly low. As an experiment, she asked a white male friend to step into her shoes, and her appraisal amount immediately doubled, no questions asked. Her elation turned to despair when she realized, “I’m the thing that’s devaluing my house.” As Oliver put things, this is an unconscionable result. “We all know the only time the addition of a white man should increase value to anything,” the host explained. “Is if that thing is a movie, and that white man is Stanley Tucci. Otherwise it is just not okay.”

Fair enough. Speaking of fair (or rather, unfair), Oliver also addressed the bipartisan dropping of this ball. The host pointed toward how Richard Nixon torpedoed certain segments of the Fair Housing Act by refusing to have the federal government weigh in on integration of neighborhoods. Oliver also shredded Joe Biden’s idea for a $15,000 first-time homebuyer tax-credit idea that would apply to everyone. This measure, Oliver argued, was one of many “efforts to address the legacy of housing discrimination [that] have been resolutely color blind.” The end result, Oliver argues, is “a wound that we are actively choosing not to heal.” Watch the full segment above.

The USA women have not lost a game at the Olympics since 1992 and will look to extend that streak to win their opening game of group play on Tuesday in Tokyo against Nigeria.

The two teams met in exhibition action in Las Vegas earlier this month in a game that saw the American women find their form with a 31-point victory. Nigeria will have a big addition that didn’t play in that game in Chiney Ogwumike, but Team USA remains a heavy favorite to extend their Olympics winning streak to 50 games — with the added intrigue of Diana Taurasi possibly making her first appearance for Team USA this summer.

The game, as so many during the Tokyo Olympics, will be in the middle of the night stateside, taking place at 12:40 a.m. ET on Tuesday (9:40 p.m. PT on Monday). The good news for those looking to watch is that it will be broadcast live on TV, with USA Network handling the broadcast starting at 12:30 a.m. ET, while it is also streaming here (with a TV provider login) and on Peacock with a premium subscription.

Tip Time: Tuesday, July 27 at 12:40 a.m. ET (Monday, July 26 at 9:40 p.m. PT)
TV Channel: USA Network
Streaming Info: NBCOlympics.com (with TV provider login) and Peacock app (with premium subscription)

On Sunday morning, the USA men disappointed in their opening game of the Olympics, losing to France after a fourth quarter collapse as their offense failed to produce anything in the closing minutes. USA hoops recent struggles offensively have served as a reminder of how different the NBA game is from FIBA basketball, with the physicality allowed and how the lack of defensive three seconds closes the paint off more.

It’s an advantage for those who have that FIBA experience, and we saw that on full display in the wee hours of Monday morning as another NBA star, Luka Doncic, had no problems readjusting to the international game as he lit up Argentina in an historic Olympic scoring performance.

It didn’t take long for Doncic to get it going, scoring 17 in the first quarter including a few of his patented stepback threes that set the tone for what was going to be one of the most dominant individual performances in Olympics history.

In the first half, Doncic finished with 31 points and eight rebounds, as he was simply unstoppable, using his physicality to bully the Argentina guards in the post and using his quickness to get by bigger defenders any time they switched on the perimeter.

In the second half, Doncic started to put some extra sauce on his performance, highlighted by this outrageous behind the back bounce pass to a rolling Mike Tobey as an exclamation point on a sensational game.

Doncic finished with 48 points, 11 rebounds, and five assists on 18-of-29 shooting (6-of-14 from three), as Slovenia ran away with a 118-96 win over the fourth-ranked team in the world, announcing their presence on the Olympic stage for the first time in style. Doncic’s 48 points tied him with Eddie Palubinskas for the second most points in an Olympic basketball game (which, a reminder, are just 40 minutes long), trailing only Oscar Schmidt’s 55 points for the all-time record.

Klemen Prepelic was the secondary star of the night for Slovenia, drilling 4-of-6 from three as he supported Doncic with 22 points, lighting it up from downtown — the broadcast said he’s called the Slovenian Stephen Curry, apparently for fairly good reason. Argentina certainly didn’t have the shooting night needed to keep up with Doncic, Prepelic, and the rest of Slovenia, as they were a dismal 5-of-31 from deep and will now face an uphill battle to get out of a tough group that also includes Spain.