Month: September 2021

Ted Cruz has been on a social media tear over the withdrawal in Afghanistan, and he already got pelted with “Cancun” comebacks after tweeting (without doing any research), “America doesn’t leave Americans behind.” This led people to pounce upon him because no one will ever forget that he flew off to a sunny Mexico resort while Texas residents froze without power during a catastrophic ice storm. Well, Cruz is in more trouble for not doing his research. He retweeted (and later deleted) a video with a false caption (the original tweet can be seen at Mediaite, with Cruz writing, “This horrifying image encapsulates Joe Biden’s Afghanistan catastrophe: The Taliban hanging a man from an American Blackhawk helicopter… Tragic. Unimaginable.”

As tragic as that situation sounded, yes, it turned out to be “unimaginable” because the video was not the situation that Cruz (and fellow GOP lawmaker Dan Crenshaw) believed it to be. As Mediaite points out, the man does not at all appear as though he’s being hung, and other footage of the scene showed the man in good spirits after landing safely with both feet on the ground. Journalist Bilal Sarwary soon tweeted the truth of the situation, which is that a Taliban fighter was attempting a maneuver with a flag.

“Afghan pilot flying this is someone I have known over the years,” Sarwary tweeted. “He was trained in the US and UAE, he confirmed to me that he flew the Blackhawk helicopter. Taliban fighter seen here was trying to install Taliban flag from air but it didn’t work in the end.”

After Cruz was alerted to what had really happened, he deleted his falsely captioned tweet (and retweet) and attempted to make some amends (while spreading more falsehoods). “It turns out the post I shared w/ a video of Taliban ‘hanging a man’ from a helicopter may be inaccurate. So I deleted the tweet,” Cruz wrote. “What remains accurate is: – The Taliban are brutal terrorists. – We left them millions in US military equipment, including Black Hawk helicopters.”

At that point, people (even those who claim to support Cruz) lectured him about the dangers of misinformation, particularly because he decided to spread even more misinformation, this time about military equipment that was left behind but disabled. Maybe one day, he’ll listen.

And here comes the “delete your account” request, which is practically obligatory.

(Via Mediaite)

Petey has become an idiosyncratic indie favorite over the past year-plus, and now he’s nearing a major career milestone, as his debut album, Lean Into Life, is set to drop at the end of the week. Before then, though, he has shared a video for the title track, and like his TikTok clips, it’s an absurd delight. In the clip, multiple characters (all played by Petey) work in an office building and interact with each other in other environments. Eventually, the characters learn how to “bust into life” and enjoy their existence more than they were before.

Petey previously said of the song, “‘Lean Into Life’ is about recognizing that things aren’t working, but instead of trying to take on everything at once, just making little changes that can start to point you in the right direction. I realized I didn’t need to take a huge leap in my life. I just needed to start leaning into things and taking tiny steps towards a healthier situation.”

In a recent interview with Uproxx, he spoke about the strangeness of his music and himself, saying, “I think that I’m really strange. I think that I’m really strange and a lot of people close to me tell me that I’m really strange. And I think that the music that I make is strange. Strange and not strange. And even the not strange, sometimes it’s strange how not strange it is. And with the TikTok too, because like I said, it’s just sort of all in the same bubble for me, I just sort of dive into what’s authentic about me, what I think makes me super weird. I realize how many people that resonates with and how many people are also super weird in the way that I think I’m super weird, which is why this is awesome and why this feels really good.”

Watch the “Lean Into Life” video above.

Lean Into Life is out 9/3 via Terrible Records. Pre-order it here.

During his nearly 30 years as a late-night host, Conan O’Brien brought us many great sketches (here are 25 of them!), but arguably none are more beloved than “Walker, Texas Ranger Lever.” The premise should be self-explanatory, but just in case: Conan pulls a lever that plays a ridiculous clip from Walker, Texas Ranger starring Chuck Norris.

“I think nine months went by [after Norris himself appeared in a meta send-off on Late Night] and we had two weeks off and Conan came back from break and he said, ‘All anyone’s saying to me everywhere I go is you’ve got to keep doing more. We need more Walker clips,’” writer Mike Sweeney told us. “It was an endless supply. They went down and found more great clips and we ended up doing it again for another two months. Then we stopped again. The same thing happened again nine months later. Fans on the street were like, ‘Come on, show more clips.’ I think there was a third round of it.”

But Conan eventually had to stop playing Walker clips, or else the show would have gone bankrupt. “I loved that bit. It was one of my favorite things to do and then we had to stop doing it,” he said on the latest episode of his Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend podcast. “The actors who were in the clips, they started to recognize that we were showing these clips of them and they started to demand all the money that you needed to pay them in residuals.” After his producer, Jeff Ross, told him that they couldn’t do it anymore because it would “cost them millions of dollars,” Conan replied, “No, we’re going to keep doing it… I want it to go to trial, and I want to defend myself. And I want to show the clips to the jury and say, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, that is not acting.’”

Conan didn’t go through with his idea, but let’s pull that lever!

You can listen to the Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend episode below (the Walker talk starts around the 15 minute mark).

Sometimes a person opens their mouth to sing, and magic happens. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what qualities make a voice transcend the average and transfix an audience, but we know it when we hear it.

Enter Shawn Louisiana.

A video of him singing in a barbershop has gone viral and it’s definitely worth a watch. He wrote on YouTube, “The older guy didn’t think I could pull off a Sam Cooke song,” but when he started singing “A Change is Gonna Come,” he definitely proved that he could. Really well. Like, whoa.

Watch:

The older guy didn’t think I could pull off a Sam Cooke song #achangegonnacome

www.youtube.com

There’s a reason that video has gotten nearly 7 million views on TikTok alone.

Louisiana frequently shares videos of himself just singing casually for the camera, and I don’t understand why this man’s talent is not more well known yet.

I mean, just listen to this “Stand By Me” cover. Like butter. Sing me to sleep, sir.

Stand By Me – Ben E. King cover #tiktok

www.youtube.com

His Instagram account says he’s available to book for weddings. That’s nice, but someone please get this man a record deal so we can listen to him croon all day.

For more from Shawn Louisiana, follow him on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.

Donald Trump still thinks the 2020 Presidential Election was stolen from him and now, he’s blaming stairs.

During a wildly incoherent interview Monday evening with right-wing pandering network OAN, Trump chatted with host Dan Ball about the electoral loss he just can’t seem to move on from, but he had some new theories as to why the whole thing was rigged against him. In discussing the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan, the twice-impeached former president claimed he would’ve handled the situation much better than his predecessor, President Joe Biden, and ended up calling into question his rival’s physical and mental fitness. Why? Because … stairs.

When he fell up the stairs, fell up the stairs three times, it was not on any program,” Trump rambled (via Raw Story). “If that was me, it would have been the biggest story for months, career-ending. It was never on the media, never on mainstream media, his trip. It’s okay, you can trip. Gerald Ford tripped, never lived it down. I would go very carefully down the stairs, I don’t want to trip. You don’t live it down with these people. With him, they never put it on.”

Trump had more than a few run-ins with the stairs leading up to the entrance of Air Force One that were, in fact, covered by the media at the time. He also regularly went on disjointed tangents during his many rallies and once bragged about taking a dementia test on-air, so the connection between his inability to confidently scale a few steps and his mental capacity to run an entire country seemed legitimate, like something the free press should investigate. How one stumble from Biden relates to a months-long plan to pull U.S. Forces out of the Middle East, one that was indirectly launched by Trump’s own negotiations with Taliban leaders, remains to be seen.

But this is Trump, so he’ll find a way to connect the red string on his ever-growing board of conspiracy theories eventually. This time, he’s using the negative coverage he got from “Stair-Gate” to somehow prove his suspicion of voter fraud. We’ll let him tell it:

Why do they protect them, and with Biden, there’s nothing — the people get it, ultimately the people get it,” Trump continued. “I got 75 million votes. I had the media totally against my, outside of yourself and a few others, I had the media against me as much as anyone has ever seen. No one has seen anything like it. I had the vicious Democrats, communists socialists, call them whatever the hell they are or they’ll impeach you if you sneeze, and just vicious what they do, and I had big tech against me, and I was told you can’t win if you have big tech. I had 75 million votes, more than any sitting president has ever gotten. They said he had 81 million, there’s no way he got 81 [million votes].”

What we’re getting from this heap of nonsense is that Trump thinks some bad coverage of his continuing battle with those Democrat-backed stairs proves the media is committed to protecting Biden, which is why they won’t admit the election was stolen? But hey, if you’re fluent in gibberish, feel free to offer a better translation.

(Via Raw Story)

Every year, nearly a quarter-million people flock to the California desert to attend Coachella. But amid the Instagram moments, celebrity sightings, and flower crown weaving, one California festival isn’t competing for your attention. Just an hour outside of the Coachella campgrounds is where the annual Desert Daze music festival is held. After making a name for themselves over the past decade, the resident psych-rock event has become the go-to anti-festival for those seeking a profound experience rather than a three-day bender.

Desert Daze started as a happy accident. Founded by Jjuujjuu musician Phil Pirrone and his wife Julie Edwards Pirrone, Desert Daze first began as Moon Block Party in 2012; An 11-day event in Pomona, CA hosting 120 bands across several venues. Pirrone doesn’t like to think of himself as a concert promoter, but he has been organizing shows and touring as a musician since his preteen days. “Somewhere around 2008, I started putting on outdoor events more officially. It was a natural extension of what I had already been doing,” Pirrone explained over the phone. Pirrone said the event started “organically,” with him and other musicians calling up their friends in bands and asking them to play — and they continue to maintain their DIY ethos to this day. Pirrone’s best friends still help run sound, assist with promotions, manage installation art, and even act as food and beverage director.

After the first year went off without a hitch, Pirrone was contacted by a roadhouse in the desert who asked him to put on the event the next year; thus Desert Daze was born. “It was a significant moment in our lives,” he said. “It was a turning point for us where the thing that we did as an extension of what we’ve been doing as a touring musician suddenly became our number one focus and it quickly became a career.” Since it began, Desert Daze has fluctuated in size. Some years, it’s been a one-day event. But as it’s grown in popularity, Desert Daze has become a multiple-stage, weekend-long festival complete with overnight campgrounds.

Desert Daze isn’t only focused on music — although, with acts like Tame Impala, Iggy Pop, and My Bloody Valentine over the years, the music is definitely the main draw. But more than that, Desert Daze is focused on creating an experience. Life-size art installations cover the festival grounds that attendees can interact with, some of which have been with the event from the very beginning. Various workshops and retreats have also become a major staple of the festival. A network of practitioners and healers called Mystic Bazaar puts on events that range from yoga and breath work to educational lectures. One year, Desert Daze even invited former death row inmate Damien Echols to speak about spirituality and the power of manifestation.

While Desert Daze remains true to its roots, Pirrone has noticed how the festival landscape has shifted in the past decade. Venture capitalists set out to start festivals to turn a profit rather than build a community — and that’s why Pirrone sees Desert Daze as the anti-festival. “It’s not a job,” he said. “It’s our life and the Desert Daze community is life and we work for that community.” To him, “business venture” is the very last thing that defines Desert Daze. “I feel like a public servant, straight up,” he said. “We’re not putting out fires and saving people’s lives. But we are enriching their lives. We are inspiring them. We are giving them profound moments, profound learning experiences where they can extract something from the experience and inject it into their everyday life.”

This year, Desert Daze will look a little different from previous iterations. Though it will still be located on the sandy shores of Lake Perris, organizers are making sure Desert Daze is returning in a way that prioritizes health and safety. For one, they’ve pushed the dates back to the weekend of November 12-14 2021. While headliners Toro Y Moi, The War On Drugs, Kamasi Washington, and Japanese Breakfast mean indie music-lovers will still get their fix of reverb pedals, this year’s event has been scaled back from three stages to just one. The festival’s capacity has been a bit restricted and all the performances will take place at night, meaning this year’s art installations will involve much more trippy lighting projections. They’re even trying to incorporate some film elements into their artists’ sets, though they’ve opted out of livestreams over the past year.

Even with this year’s changes, rejuvenating workshops will take over the campground during the day to ensure that attendees leave feeling connected to themselves, their community, and the universe. And that connection is what Pirrone is most looking forward to after over a year without live music. “When we’re together, that’s what we live for,” Pirrone said. “We feel like we know the people who come to Desert Daze and some of them feel like they know me. I walk around the festival site and people are calling my name. I’m taking pictures with people. I give them high fives. These are my people, and I’m their people. That’s what I looked forward to most — being back with them.”

Check out the rest of Uproxx’s 2021 Music Festival Preview here.

As summer draws to a close, it’s nice to get a reminder that the weather is still technically warm and we could, if we wanted to, find an above-ground pool to laze around in for a few hours. Which brings me to a new offering from singer/songwriter Andy Shauf called “Spanish On The Beach,” which he’ll likely play on his upcoming tour.

Over strummed guitar and hazy clarinet, Shauf tells a story about a couple taking a vacation on an all-inclusive resort (how very White Lotus of him). During their stay, the song’s narrator proposes to Judy, which some listeners might remember as the character from the singer’s last album, 2020’s The Neon Skyline.

“It’s the same theme as the story ended up being at the Skyline but the narrator’s life is a little bit booze-fueled,” Shauf says in a statement about the song. “And this vacation is kind of like the first stop on the way to destruction.”

Meanwhile, the track’s lyric video is simple but oddly ASMR-like, which is to say, it features a lone, sunglasses-wearing rubber ducky bobbing along in an above-ground pool, which is what we should all be doing.

Check out “Spanish On The Beach” above.

Elton John has spent a lot of time working with other artists over the past year or so, and now he’s commemorating that era with The Lockdown Sessions, a new album consisting of collaborations. While the project, which is set for release on October 22, is billed as a new album, it is like a compilation in ways, as it features previously released songs on which John is featured, like Gorillaz’s “The Pink Phantom” and Miley Cyrus’ cover of Metallica’s “Nothing Else Matters.”

Aside from the aforementioned, the album features collaborations with Brandi Carlile, Charlie Puth, Dua Lipa, Eddie Vedder, Lil Nas X, Nicki Minaj, Rina Sawayama, SG Lewis, Stevie Nicks, Stevie Wonder, Surfaces, Years & Years, Young Thug, and others.

John says of the project:

“The last thing I expected to do during lockdown was make an album. But, as the pandemic went on, one‐off projects kept cropping up. Some of the recording sessions had to be done remotely, via Zoom, which I’d obviously never done before. Some of the sessions were recorded under very stringent safety regulations: working with another artist, but separated by glass screens. But all the tracks I worked on were really interesting and diverse, stuff that was completely different to anything I’m known for, stuff that took me out of my comfort zone into completely new territory. And I realized there was something weirdly familiar about working like this. At the start of my career, in the late 60s, I worked as a session musician. Working with different artists during lockdown reminded me of that. I’d come full circle: I was a session musician again. And it was still a blast.”

Check out the The Lockdown Sessions art and tracklist below.

1. Elton John and Dua Lipa — “Cold Heart (Pnau Remix)”
2. Elton John, Young Thug and Nicki Minaj — “Always Love You”
3. Surfaces — “Learn To Fly” Feat. Elton John
4. Elton John and Charlie Puth — “After All ”
5. Rina Sawayama and Elton John — “Chosen Family”
6. Gorillaz — “The Pink Phantom” Feat. Elton John and 6lack
7. Elton John and Years And Years — “It’s a sin (global reach mix)”
8. Miley Cyrus — “Nothing Else Matters” Feat. Watt, Elton John, Yo-Yo Ma, Robert Trujillo, and Chad Smith
9. Elton John and SG Lewis — “Orbit”
10. Elton John and Brandi Carlile — “Simple Things”
11. Jimmie Allen and Elton John — “Beauty In The Bones”
12. Lil Nas X — “One Of Me” Feat. Elton John
13. Elton John and Eddie Vedder — “E-Ticket”
14. Elton John and Stevie Wonder — “Finish Line”
15. Elton John and Stevie Nicks — “Stolen Car”
16. Glen Campbell and Elton John — “I’m Not Gonna Miss You”

The Lockdown Sessions is out 10/22 via Interscope. Pre-order it here.

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

The Spider-Man: No Way Home trailer is a star-studded affair with appearances from Tom Holland (Peter Parker), Zendaya (“my MJ”), Benedict Cumberbatch (Doctor Strange), Marisa Tomei (Aunt May), Benedict Wong (Wong), Willem Dafoe’s laugh (Green Goblin), and Alfred Molina (Doctor Octopus, sadly not singing Fiddler). But much of the discussion around the trailer is about someone who isn’t in it at all.

Some Spider-Man fans are convinced that it’s Charlie Cox’s Matt Murdock interrogating Peter Parker in the trailer. These same people also believe that the Daredevil actor canceled an appearance at San Antonio’s Celebrity Fan Fest in July to be in the movie.

Let’s hear it from the man himself.

“I can promise you those are not my forearms,” Cox confirms exclusively with ComicBook.com.

A very normal statement. Cox previously told Comic Book that he — and his forearms — aren’t in any scene in the movie. “I hadn’t heard those rumors, but it’s certainly not with my Daredevil. I’m not involved in it. If that’s true, it’s not with me. It’s with another actor,” he said, although he does “love the idea of Jessica and Matt showing up in the background or Matt as a lawyer advising Peter Parker. That’d be really, really cool.”

Assuming Cox is telling the truth, somewhere out there is an anonymous actor who can’t say that it’s his forearms in the trailer because he signed an NDA and he doesn’t want Disney to sue him, his kids, his grandkids, and his great-grandkids. Movie magic, baby!

Spider-Man: No Way Home opens on December 21.

(Via Comic Book)

Damon Albarn is currently readying his second solo album, The Nearer The Fountain, More Pure The Stream Flows, which arrives on November 12 via Transgressive Records and follows 2014’s Everyday Robots. So far, the Gorillaz leader shared its title track and a follow-up, “Polaris.” Now, Albarn has shared a mellow new single, “Particles,” which was reportedly inspired by a conversation the singer had about the pandemic with a fellow passenger on a flight to Reykjavik.

Albarn, who also just released a new Gorillaz EP, previously said of the album, “I organized musicians, string players, three bass trombones, some percussion, and keyboards into an interesting arrangement. […] I took some of these real-time, extreme elemental experiences [of Iceland] and then tried to develop more formal pop songs with that as my source. I wanted to see where that would take me. Sometimes it took me down to Uruguay and Montevideo. Other times I went to Iran, Iceland, or Devon. With travel being curtailed, it was kind of nice to be able to make a record that put me strangely in those places for a moment or two.”

Listen to “Particles” above.

Albarn’s The Nearer The Fountain, More Pure The Stream is out 11/12 via Transgressive Records. Pre-order it here.

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