Month: December 2021

Where would we be without memes? In our increasingly digital lives, memes have become a shorthand for expressing our feelings in a way that feels both relatable and familiar to hundreds if not thousands of strangers online. We can throw down a certain template, put our own spin on it (or share someone else’s), and get that immediate dopamine boost from mutual friends and randos online who either share the same feelings or appreciate our skill at flipping the original concept.

High culture it’s not, but we deserve a little stupid, mindless fun. Especially after a year like 2021.

Even if you’re one of those rare few on this planet who are able to keep their screen time in check, you’ve probably shared a good dozen or two memes amongst your family, friends, or coworkers these past 365 days. Your parents probably even attempted to throw down a meme or two. Badly, but hey, bad parent memes are a meme within themselves! So in celebration of all the meme-idge of 2021, here are the 14 best memes of the year, how they impacted us, and what they say about us (if anything at all).

Bernie Sanders At The Inauguration

Kicking off our list is a meme that’s still making the rounds nearly a year later. When Bernie Sanders rolled up to the Biden Inauguration in a comfort-focused fit, a homely pair of mittens and a basic surgical face mask, all sorts of political pundits and center-left Twitter personalities attempted to roast the senator for exhibiting such a gloomy attitude during Biden’s big day. Flash forward 11 months and it feels downright prophetic. Although we’ve got Trump out of office, things are largely the same — grim. Bernie was ahead of the game, thumbing his nose at the shallow pageantry that comes along with electing a new president. (Or maybe he was just an old dude who didn’t want to freeze.)

The Bernie meme was soon recontextualized into all sorts of weird and wacky scenarios — Bernie at the Met Gala, etc. At the end of the day, it’s just a funny image. One popular enough to inspire cardboard cutouts in storefronts and murals on walls in cities across the country.

Kathryn Hahn/Agnes Harkness Winking

You don’t have to be a WandaVision fan to fall in love with this exaggerated wink from Kathryn Hahn in her role as Agnes Harkness. Case in point, me! I have no idea who Agnes Harkness is, I’ve never seen WandaVision, and I don’t plan to but I’ve been known to Kathryn Hahn wink at all manner of things!

The scene this was taken from first appeared in the debut WandaVision trailer and since people first got a glimpse of that wink, they’ve been repurposing it. Most people used the Hahn wink anytime they were openly lying, whether to their friends, their employers, their families, and, most often, themselves.

Oprah Shock!

Oprah is a meme machine. For as long as memes have been a popular form of internet discourse, we’ve been recontextualizing GIFs and photos of Oprah. In March of this year the famous journalist sat down for an exclusive interview with Meghan Markle and Prince Harry. Upon hearing that members of the royal family expressed their concern over the possible complexion of Meghan and Harry’s baby, Oprah threw her hands up in shock and disbelief.

Then the internet took it and used it for any shocking moment we had to deal with this year. The thought of jumping on a call for a conversation that could just as easily be held over email? Oprah shock! The possibility of another lockdown or another covid variant? Oprah shock. Standing next to an anti-masker while they cough and sneeze in line at Target — Oprah shock! That entire interview was filled with moments ripe for meme-ing.

DogeCoin and Meme Coin Cyrptocurrency

Earlier this year, a bunch of people on Reddit, Twitter, and Discord came together and decided to bet big on GameStop shorts and it threw the entire stock world for a loop. The play resulted in a lot of real money and it also gave birth to a whole bunch of “stock bros,” people whose entire identities revolve around talking about stocks.

First came GameStop, then AMC, then the rise of the meme coin cryptocurrency, resulting in all sorts of ridiculously named virtual money like DogeCoin, Shiba Inu, CumRocket’s Cummies, Dogelon Mars, MonaCoin, Loser Coin, Pepe Cash, and… really just way too many to name. Are any of your friends who care about cryptocurrency meme coins rich? No (except the DodgeCoin millionaire!), but I bet they won’t shut up about NFTs.

Sadly, everyone’s sudden obsession with checking their Robinhood account can be attributed to the fact that a lot of people are struggling financially right now. We all desperately want to believe we can get lucky and flip a few thousand into tens or even hundreds of thousands and be set for the years ahead. It’s certainly possible, but we wouldn’t bank on it.

My Fall Plans/ The Delta Variant

This simple framework was used aside a bunch of different stills from cartoons, television shows, and movies that at the end of the day boil down to one singular feeling — despair. It touched on the optimism we all felt for the early months of 2021 when the vaccine was being rolled out and it looked like we were actually going to have a regular summer, and how quickly that all faded away with the Delta variant.

It was a serious situation, but the meme helped us all cope just a little bit. Then came Omicron.

French Dispatch Premiere Meme

Taken during the Cannes premiere of Wes Anderson’s French Dispatch, this photo was snapped of the film’s director standing alongside cast members Timothée Chalamet, Tilda Swinton, and Bill Murray, and the foursome couldn’t look more like they were part of completely different worlds. Timothée looked like a modern-day Hollywood celeb (so basically, a dude from the ‘90s) Tilda Swinton looked like Bowie during his poppy ’80s era, Bill Murray looked like he toured the country following the Grateful Dead, and Wes Anderson looked…well like you’d expect Wes Anderson to look.

Soon the internet took this photo and used it as a basic template to show the stark differences between anything they felt the need to compare. This is one of those memes that got old painfully fast. In fact, we’re sorry we even brought it up and made you relive it.

Anakin Skywalker & Padme Amidala, ‘For The Better, Right?’

People might not be able to agree on whether the Star Wars prequel trilogy is any good, but one thing we can all agree on is that it’s a goldmine for memes. GIFs of Jar Jar being a jackass, anything with Ewan McGregor looking overly emotional, the phrase “I hate sand,” there is a lot of good material fit for memes! This year gave us this gem, a four-panel template from Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones.

The original scene concerned Anakin and Padme’s differing views on the Galactic Republic, then it made its way to Twitter with altered dialogue as a sort of proto version of the Red Flag Emoji meme. Now people use it as a simple four-scene joke where the punchline is always shared by panels two and four. The above example doesn’t follow that simple rule, but it’s a masterful use of the tempalate.

Anakin Skywalker as a character goes through probably pop culture’s greatest heel turn, and as such the meme is usually used in reference to people or ideas we previously thought were good and universally loved but have a darkness lurking beneath them. Like the internet itself.

Mary Jane Defending Peter Parker

The title of this meme is a bit deceptive, Kirsten Dunst’s Mary Jane isn’t actually defending Peter Parker here, she’s talking to her boss Enrique, but context doesn’t matter to the internet. Instead, this scene has been repurposed by anyone looking to defend someone else over something they might otherwise get bullied for. The context it’s now used in is always a bit lighthearted, as such, there isn’t a lot of depth or a deeper meaning here — it’s not a mirror that reflects where we are as a society or anything like that. It’s just a silly meme that people like to have fun with.

Sometimes that’s all we need.

Kim Kardashian Met Gala Outfit

You have to give it to Kim Kardashian, she has a certain skill for breaking the internet. We have to think a small part of her knew that she’d inspire the internet to give her the meme treatment when she rolled up to the Met Gala in a full-body black Balenciaga fit that made her look like a Dementor from Harry Potter. Soon every photo of her snapped at the Met Gala became a template ripe for memes.

Our favorite is this photo of her standing next to younger sister Kendall Jenner, soon the two figures began to represent the duality of our own identities.

Red Flag Emoji

The Red Flag Emoji meme was widespread to the point of exhaustion. It was the buzzing fly of your social media feed, always showing up with a tired joke that felt a week too late, but hey, we’ve got to give credit where credit is due — people got a lot of mileage out of this meme.

What started out as a wholesome attempt on TikTok about legitimate dating red flags became shorthand for separating yourself and your interests from those with differing views. It was a way to have a take and be entrenched on your side without explanation. Ultimately it was a less imaginative and less funny version of the Anakin and Padme meme. As such, it was considerably more popular.

Two Guys On A Bus

Credit goes to Brazilian cartoonist Genildo Ronchi, who illustrated this image way back in 2013. The original caption read, “escolha o lado feliz da vida!” Which roughly translates to “Choose the happy side of life!” How that cartoon became a meme template in 2021 is anyone’s guess. The image circulated with swapped text within Brazilian Twitter circles back in 2019, according to KnowYourMeme, but didn’t appear widespread in the US until this year where countless people used it to represent the duality of choice. It’s a modern-day choose your own adventure.

Some people hit this meme solely for the laughs, while some used it in some seriously dark ways. Are we always better off in life for making the “right” decision? You decide.

Fat Joe — Yesterday’s Price is Not Today’s Price

This is a meme that is surely near and dear to the fans of Verzuz. The phrase was uttered by Bronx rapper Fat Joe during his Versuz battle with Ja Rule. Consensus says that Ja won that battle, but the only thing anyone really remembers from that battle is all the beautiful Fat Joe memes we’ve gotten out of it. It then hit the stratosphere when Joey crack yelled it after seeing Jadakiss singlehandedly demolish the LOX vs. Dipset Verzuz.

This clip, where Fat Joe says “Yesterday’s price is not today’s price” to us represents the way many of us stopped taking shit from our employers this year and started viewing ourselves as the invaluable assets that we are. When you’re working hard in the midst of an almost three-year-long pandemic and it seems like your employers are doing everything they can to put you in harm’s way while raking in all the profits, you’ve got to ask yourself — is it really worth it? The heroes amongst us let our bosses know this year that yesterday’s prices aren’t today’s, so pay up.

The Feminine Urge

For the better part of a year, whether you spend your time on Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, Tumblr, or Instagram, you’ve probably been hearing about the feminine urge to… do pretty much anything. That soon morphed into the less often used “masculine urge” and “non-binary urge,” but for the most part, it’s all about the feminine urge.

This isn’t a meme that is divided by gender and it doesn’t even really need to make sense to be funny. Some of the most successful implementations of this meme have to do with seemingly nonsensical urges that have nothing to do with feminity or masculinity. The more absurd the better.

Yassification

If you’re not super keyed into memes, you might not know that the Yassification meme — which took Twitter by storm last month — has been brewing for quite some time. In late 2020 the term “yassification” first started making the rounds on social media platforms and by February of 2021 people were comparing minor celebrities to super celebrities and referring to them as the post-yassified form.

But the yassification meme was arguably in its most popular form by the fall of 2021 when people would “yassify” photos of celebrities through a Face App filter that made them look otherworldly attractive. We did it to everyone, from the cast of Seinfeld to Shrek, to Joe Biden. In an ugly year, it represents our need to surround ourselves with beauty, no matter how banal.

Dolly Parton may have a reputation for shying away from sharing her opinion on political topics, but she’s been a vocal proponent of taking COVID-19 safety precautions seriously since the beginning of the pandemic. Not only did the singer donate $1 million to help fund the Moderna vaccine, but she also posted a video of her getting the shot. Now, Parton shares her thoughts on anti-maskers, saying she doesn’t “think it’d kill anybody to wear their mask and to do their social distancing.”

The singer recently had a conversation with Mic about all of her recent accomplishments, like her upcoming novel Run, Rose, Run. Parton also discussed her thoughts around the pandemic’s safety measures, saying she at first didn’t realize there would be people who would refuse the vaccine. Staying true to her diplomatic nature, Parton says she’s “not one to tell people what to do,” but still thinks everyone needs to be “mindful” — especially when it comes to wearing a mask:

“I’m not one to get in the middle of controversy. When I first donated my money to help with it, and I got my shot, I thought everybody was waiting in line to get their shot. I didn’t realize there were people not wanting to do it whether for religious reasons, health reasons, personal reasons — whatever it be. I’m not one to tell people what to do. But I was just happy to be part of that, and I think we all certainly need to do our part in being careful. Whether you get the shot or not, you need to be mindful. And I don’t think it’d kill anybody to wear their mask and to do their social distancing, especially now that we have new variants of the pandemic going around. So I really think people should just be very cautious, and careful and mindful, and like I said I’m not one to bother around in people’s lives, I just try to do my part the best I can.”

Read Parton’s full interview with Mic here.

If there’s one thing Marjorie Taylor Greene is actually good at, it’s sharing truly idiotic ideas and bad takes—like comparing COVID to cancer or asserting that the Declaration of Independence gave insurrectionists the right to “overthrow tyrants” on January 6th. Now she’s doubling down on what might be her dumbest idea yet: a “National Divorce.”

On Wednesday, Greene chimed into a conversation that Pedro L. Gonzalez, associate editor of the ultra-conservative Chronicles Magazine, seemed to be having with himself in which he called liberals “a cancer” and suggested that any non-conservative who moves from one state to another should be denied the right to vote for a specific period of time, and also be taxed for “their sins.”

Greene, of course, thinks this is a great idea, as it plays right into her bright idea of a National Divorce:

This isn’t the first time Greene has broached the concept of red and blue states calling it quits on one another, despite the fact that even red states have millions of Democrats and vice versa. As Newsweek reported:

In October, Greene conducted a Twitter poll about people’s interest in a national divorce between Republican- and Democratic-leaning states. According to her poll, Greene found 48 percent of respondents wanted the country to stay together and 43 percent wanted states separated by their political leaning. Nine percent were undecided.

Greene, apoplectic that 100 percent of those polled didn’t agree with her, claimed that the “outraged left” had clearly shared her poll in order to skew the results and “tank it.” She told Steve Bannon much the same that very same month when she chatted with him for his War Room podcast, citing “irreconcilable differences” as the reason for the much-needed divorce. According to Newsweek, even Bannon said he “vehemently” disagreed with the idea and suggested that, instead, Republicans needed to start governing “like we mean it” and “acting like you’re in charge.”

(Via Newsweek)

While dedicating its latest issue to Betty White’s 100th birthday, a monumental event for the ages if there ever was one, People magazine couldn’t help but bring up Ryan Reynold‘s unrequited crush on the legendary actress, which the Deadpool actor did not appreciate. That wound is apparently still fresh after the two met on the set of 2009’s The Proposal starring Sandra Bullock.

“I’m absolutely sick of the media exploiting past relationships just to drive clicks,” Reynolds tweeted after seeing People’s headline that he “can’t get over” White.

In the linked article, it’s actually White who brings up Reynolds, and while she’s flattered that the actor is beguiled by her and “can’t get over his thing for me,” she’s all business when it comes to “The One” for her: Robert Redford. Of course, this is clearly just friendly banter between two friends, and when it came time to honor White’s 100 years on Earth, Reynolds had nothing but praise for the elderly force of nature. Via People:

“I heard that scripts for Golden Girls were only 35 pages, which makes sense because so many of the laughs come from Betty simply looking at her castmates,” he says, also joking that White is “a typical Capricorn. Sleeps all day. Out all night boozing and snacking on men.”

For anyone curious, White’s 100th birthday hasn’t happened just yet. The official date is January 17, 2022, but this is Betty White we’re talking about. She can celebrate whatever she wants whenever she wants.

(Via People)

On Tuesday, Ghislaine Maxwell was found guilty of helping Jeffrey Epstein recruit and abuse underage girls. This follows revelations that Donald Trump was among the names (also including Kevin Spacey, Chris Tucker, and Bill Clinton) who took joyrides on Epstein’s plane, and let’s just say that the book may not be closed on the subject. Despite the many Getty Images of Trump hanging with Epstein, however, rootin’ tootin’ Lauren Boebert didn’t get the memo about Trump’s Epstein association, which makes things mighty awkward, considering that Boebert is a major Trump fan and also called for more justice following the Maxwell verdict.

“Ghislaine Maxwell deserves to rot behind bars for the rest of her days,” Boebert tweeted (while possibly thinking only of Clinton). “[A]nd the public deserves to know every single person involved in the Epstein sex trafficking network. We deserve to know the whole truth, not just some vague court sketches.”

That’s pretty awkward stuff from the possible “covfefe” imitator and defender of gingerbread men everywhere. That’s especially the case since Trump’s previous “I wish her well” statement about Maxwell made the rounds following the guilty verdict.

Well, people were ready to highlight those Getty photos of Donald and Melania with Epstein and Maxwell at Mar-a-Lago, along with other remarks adding up to backlash.

And of course, some January 6 remarks entered the mix, too.

We’re almost to 2022, guys. Might be a good time for Boebert to tweet a little less frequently, but that’s probably not gonna happen because it’s also book promotion time for her. This is a cover, alright.

The voices of Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker have been a constant presence in my life for the past 25 years, one I often seek out as sanctuary when the newness of new music becomes too overbearing. But, it was only in 2021 that I actually discovered their capacity for shock.

Maybe because I was hearing just their voices as Low introduced their 10th album Hey What — the first minute of “Days Like These” is a cappella, which no one ever does on a lead single. And it’s a complete 180 from the shock tactics of 2018’s Double Negative, which all but eliminated Low as recognizable humans, rendered ghostly under layers of burbling static and bottomless bass. What Double Negative did for Low’s status might have been more shocking than the music itself, earning the duo a newfound and possibly unprecedented bleeding-edge relevancy rather than the polite applause awaiting indie rock bands who have yet to embarrass themselves three decades into their career.

The context of 2018 helped, of course, as Low had stumbled upon the era’s ultimate cheat code. Like pretty much everything released in that year — especially music with a more apocalyptic bent — Double Negative was viewed as a response and perhaps even a protest of Donald Trump, despite having very few legible lyrics. Or, maybe because of that. Lord knows how much popular and instantaneously dated art we got in that year from artists trying to present themselves as the Sound of Our Resistance. So that’s why I was taken aback by how Low was willing to lean into the possibility of voicing a generational anthem — “when you think you’ve seen everything / you’ll find we’re living in days like these.” So many days like these! If anyone wanted to project their anxieties about the Delta variant or the pullout from Afghanistan or whatever else in 2021, “Days Like These” could serve such a purpose. And yet, most shockingly of all, no one took the bait. Whether a refusal to lump Hey What in with The Discourse was a result of narrative exhaustion or just astute criticism, I can’t say — either way, Low might not have made the most 2021 album of 2021, but it’s the one that I believe will sound just as daring and extraordinary five, ten or twenty years from now.

If you’ve ever read a single year-end list, what I’m about to say about the editorial process is not an industry secret: we are all kindly asked to avoid rehashing what a song or album sounds like and focus instead on its relevance, what it had to say about the past year or what it says about us. This is particularly difficult with Hey What (which comes in 9th on the 2021 Uproxx Music Critics Poll) for a few reasons, not the least of which is that it’s the most sonically fascinating album I’ve heard in 2021. I can think of very few, if any, of the countless indie artists who have dutifully namedropped Blonde and/or Yeezus as influences who have managed anything beyond the most superficial resemblance. Oftentimes, Hey What sounds like both, even if Low hardly seems like the type of band who’d point that out. About 95% of Hey What has no percussion at all, and from an act that made a record called Drums And Guns, its absence hovers like a Sword of Damocles that eventually drops after nearly 45 minutes; an unnerving dread rather than narcotized vibe of post-Blonde Feel Good Indie playlists. The mixing and mastering is so aggressively loud that no Hey What song can really fit into any playlist.

I don’t care how many hours Low spent making this album, I’d be fine if they got all Peter Jackson with it and made an eight-hour documentary that showed how they managed to make the guitars on “More” sound like they’re gushing from a fire hydrant only to become completely frozen in air. Or how they stumbled on the magical and maddening chord progression of “All Night.” Or how BJ Burton guided the second half of “Hey” to emulate a disappearance into the k-hole. Or the decision to finally add drums halfway through the last song on the album. Or the untreated guitars that pop up for a few seconds on “Days Like These” and absolutely nowhere else. If you recognize most of the names filling up the mid and lower tiers of mainstream festival posters over the past couple of years, there should be at least a passing familiarity with the mercenary and blatant ripoffs that BJ Burton’s work with James Blake and Bon Iver has inspired. Hey What is too forbidding, too anti-vibe — I can’t quite imagine bands trying to emulate it in any real way.

But more pertinent to the time and task at hand, how does one account for what Low or Hey What say about 2021? They have no peers, no connection to the slowcore subgenre from whence they originally emerged, no real connection to any of the various threads that we’ve fashioned into greater trends. My Indiecast cohost Steven Hyden considered the possibility that 2021 granted us no instant classics, and that may be true. But I also think no album really advocated for that designation, not at least the way we’ve seen over the past half decade – “Love It If We Made It” and “The Greatest” were richly rewarded for doubling as their own preemptive year-end blurbs, stringing together evocative and timestamped phrases that left critics no choice but to gesture broadly and say This Is Us In The Twitter age. None of the albums that swept 2020’s lists could’ve possibly predicted the societal breakdown to come, but the time-tested, singer-songwriter craft of Punisher, Saint Cloud and Fetch The Bolt Cutters provided a salve in otherwise unprecedented times. And unlike in 2015 and 2017, Kendrick Lamar did not make an album.

I could easily bring up how this past year was bookended by panic about the pandemic’s long tail and the cancellation of major sporting events or the debate about whether we’re at the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end. But when I really think back on the best way to invoke the seemingly endless churn of 2021 talking points, how’s this: we’re still living in a year where Donald Trump was the President of the United States for several weeks.

While I enjoy publication year-end lists in a kind of fantasy football way, I get the most value out of individual ones; trying to say What It All Means is an admirable but ultimately futile goal, whereas What It All Meant To Me is unassailable, relatable despite being a wholly individual experience. While 2021 was absolutely not a “back to normal” year, there was enough separation from the experience of 2020 to realize things just couldn’t be put on hold anymore. And so in 2021, my wife and I got a dog. We bought a house. We got married. We were now a true unit in social settings, making crucial small talk about the real estate market in San Diego and pet ownership and retirement funds. These are the experiences we now share with our peers and also the things that fortify our boundaries, set us apart as us, prepare us for a future where couples move because of schools and affordable housing, stop going to shows, stop drinking or really just admit that the pandemic fast-forwarded through most of the processes that split friend groups apart after the age of 35.

Hey What didn’t help me understand or process any of that; “Don’t Walk Away” and “I Can Wait” only vaguely reflected upon Parker and Sparhawk as a couple and I’m pretty sure this first Low album cycle where they talked about their Mormon faith. What Low offered, again, was a kind of sanctuary: Hey What is every bit as abrasive and aggressive as the screamo and metalcore I gravitated towards in 2021, as mesmerizing as any of the ambient jazz that wowed critics and as lyrically transparent as any of the indie pop and R&B that it sits alongside in year-end lists — and it has almost nothing at all to do with any of it, BJ Burton’s uncanny sound manipulation surrounding Sparhawk and Parker with a buzzing, electrical current. Throw any headline or subtrend at Hey What, and it remains simply a reflection of the people who made it — a married couple who were making tentative steps towards reestablishing a connection with the greater community, only to find out that there was so much more to explore at home.

Quavo of Migos is being sued by a Las Vegas limo driver, who claims that the rapper and his entourage beat him up over the summer when he supposedly left behind a member of the group. According to TMZ, the driver’s suit says that on July 3, he was hired to take the group to the Virgin Hotel, but when someone has left at the club where he picked them up, the passengers started yelling at him — which escalated to one of them throwing a bottle at him.

The bottle throw apparently triggered a larger attack, with five of the passengers punching and kicking the driver while hotel staff and security fled back inside the hotel. The driver is suing Quavo, Migos Touring, and the Virgin Hotel for unspecified damages, due to physical injuries, mental stress, and “disfigurement.”

Quavo was most recently subject to police investigation stemming from video of an elevator altercation with his ex, Saweetie, that depicted her swinging at him, and him slinging her to the floor of the lift. However, it was later reported that neither would face charges for the fight, which happened at some point before the announcement of their breakup. Quavo later noted that “We had an unfortunate situation almost a year ago that we both learned and moved on from. I haven’t physically abused Saweetie and have real gratitude for what we did share overall.”

Normani may be close to finishing up her debut album, but she’s still riding the success of her 2021 Cardi B collaboration “Wild Side.” As Normani knows, part of being a chart-topping pop star is being an expert at promoting yourself and your music on social media to some extent. But while Normani is great at crafting bangers like “Wild Side,” she admits her strengths don’t quite lie in the art of social media — and that’s where her grandmother comes in.

Normani recently sat down for a conversation with Ciara on The Ellen DeGeneres Show where she spoke about the viral success of “Wild Side,” which was turned into a TikTok dance challenge, the status of her debut album, and the fact that her grandma is better at using social media than she is:

“I’m really bad with social media — it’s bad. My grandma at this point has me beat. She’ll be sending me TikToks and videos and people doing the dance challenge. […] She’s better than me. I’m the grandmother. It’s terrible, we’ve reversed roles.”

Of course, Normani also gave some updates on the status of her new music, saying she’s “almost done” with her debut album. The singer knows fans are impatient to hear her songs, but Normani says “people really underestimate” how much work really goes into one body of work. “Coming out of a girl group, there was a lot I had to figure out about myself; fears I had to deal with head-on. I was always so safe being in a girl group,” she said. “I remember when I was little, my mom was like, ‘Why do you want to be in a girl group so bad? Is it because you want to hide?’ And I think that was pretty much the answer. But God had other plans for me.”

Watch a clip of Normani’s conversation with Ciara above.

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

Jack Harlow, who is currently in the midst of his Creme De La Creme Tour, was “disgusted” by a video of an altercation outside his latest tour stop in Atlanta between police officers and a woman who apparently wanted to see his show. In the video, the woman is visibly distraught, telling the officers that “all I wanted to do was go see the Jack Harlow concert.” One of the officers shoves the woman back, placing his hand close to or on her neck. Harlow wasn’t happy about it, posting a demand to see the officer in question fired for putting his hands on a Black woman.

“This video came to my attention a few hours ago,” he wrote. “When I watched it I was disgusted by that cop and all I wanted to do was make something good happen for this girl immediately…I told the world to help me identify her so I could find a way to give her a hug and give her as many tickets to as many shows as she wants. But that’s not enough and it’s not a solution to a systemic issue that people who don’t look like me have to face. The next step is identifying this police officer and getting him unemployed as fast as we can. Assaulting a young woman and putting his hands on her neck is sickening. I look out in the crowd every night and see black women in my front row…screaming my lyrics, traveling to see me, supporting me, riding for me. I want this woman, and every black woman that supports me to know – I am so sorry. I want you to be protected and I want this guy to lose his job so fucking fast. I love you. Let’s find this officer.”

Fortunately for Jack, other stops on his tour have been more positive, as he was surprised by Drake at one stop and reunited with one of his oldest fans at another.

See his post and the video below.

For Ted Cruz, who once swallowed a booger during a presidential debate, doing something idiotic is pretty much a daily occurrence—and yesterday was no exception. As Raw Story reports, the Texas senator went off on yet another one of his notoriously dumb Twitter rants, this one about “blue-state Dems” in Washington going all Footloose on residents and attempting to enforce a no-dancing rule on New Year’s Eve, even at private parties. Except Ol’ Ted had inserted himself into a conversation about Western Australia’s COVID mandates, not Washington’s.

After seeing the below tweet from far-right YouTuber and InfoWars contributor Paul Joseph Watson:

Cruz, who was too busy to actually read the tweet—even though Twitter now even helpfully reminds you to do so—picked up the mandate-bashing baton and ran with it. He retweeted Watson, but shared his own thoughts on those damn dirty Dems, noting: “Blue-state Dems are power-drunk authoritarian kill-joys. Washington State: NO DANCING ALLOWED!!! Any rational & free citizen: Piss off.” (He later deleted the tweet about being raked over the coals for it, but not before many could screengrab it.)

It didn’t take long for Twitter to do its thing and let Cruz know that he was an idiot, prompting the Cancun fan to quietly delete his tweet—though he should know by now that no dumb tweet ever really goes away.

Ironically enough, tough-guy Ted did attempt to pick a fight with the “tyrannical” Australian government back in October, and promptly got owned by a Chief Minister. Proving that thinking Ted Cruz is a moron is now a global pastime.

(Via Raw Story)