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Drake’s ‘Certified Lover Boy’ Is The Only Rap Album Of 2021 To Reach Double-Platinum

Over a decade into his rap career, Drake continues to break records and set standards for everyone else in the rap game to follow. His latest achievement was reported by the Chart Data Twitter account, which noted that the Canadian star’s latest album Certified Lover Boy recently crossed the double-platinum threshold — and became the only rap album released in 2021 to do so.

This makes Certified Lover Boy Drake’s sixth consecutive multi-platinum album, as well as the third best-selling album of the year behind country star Morgan Wallen’s Dangerous: The Double Album (I guess America really does love its casual racism) and Olivia Rodrigo’s Sour. The rap albums CLB outsold include Kanye West’s Donda, J. Cole’s The Off-Season, Lil Nas X’s Montero, Moneybagg Yo’s A Gangsta’s Pain, and Polo G’s Hall Of Fame, which were all among the widely accepted Best Rap Albums Of 2021.

Although Drake’s sales momentum doesn’t appear to be slowing down with his sixth album, a recent study — albeit a very unscientific one — found that runners listening to Drake’s music ran slower on average, which is something to keep in mind as we all chase those New Year’s fitness resolutions. Meanwhile, the self-proclaimed 6 God continues to showcase his cultural ubiquity this year with an appearance on Aaliyah’s upcoming posthumous album Unstoppable.

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Shaq Is A Budding EDM Superstar And Just Dropped ‘Welcome To The Playhouse’ With Steve Aoki

As Shaq gears up for his ridiculous — and quite frankly, very awesome-sounding — “Shaq’s Fun House” Super Bowl weekend party with Diplo, Lil Wayne, and bottomless Roscoe’s Chicken & Waffles, he’s also adding to his EDM repertoire. Through his DJ Diesel moniker, the NBA legend has been playing gigs and festivals and collaborating with electronic stars, but none are bigger than what he just pulled off with Steve Aoki.

On “Welcome To The Playhouse,” Shaq… pardon, DJ Diesel and Steve Aoki have put down a banging trap/dubstep “gametime anthem.” The two have a real buddy comedy vibe brewing and have been friends since Shaq first saw Aoki play at TomorrowWorld in 2014. The following year, Shaq played the festival for the first time as DJ Diesel. Then in 2020, Aoki’s label, Dim Mak, released the DJ Diesel track “Ultimate.” Of this latest track, Aoki spoke on how it’s been a long time coming in a statement:

“SHAQ and I have been wanting to collaborate on a track together for a while now, but it wasn’t until he came over to Aoki’s Playhouse one day that we finally found the inspiration for our collab. We hopped into the studio and the track just came together.”

Shaq echoed the vibe in his own words:

“Working with Steve on ‘Welcome to the Playhouse’ was a blast. We went back and forth for hours together in his studio and eventually ended up with one of my favorite DIESEL releases to date. WELCOME TO THE PLAYHOUSE!”

Listen to “Welcome To The Playhouse” and watch the animated video above.

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The Weeknd Fans Think He Basically Confirmed His Rumored Angelina Jolie Relationship On ‘Dawn FM’

For months now, it has been rumored that The Weeknd and Angelina Jolie are romantically involved, ever since the pair was spotted going out to dinner back in July. Jolie stoked those flames in the eyes of some when she expertly avoided a question about The Weeknd during an October interview. Now, though, fans think The Weeknd is directly addressing the topic on his new album Dawn FM, as one lyric from the record is being interpreted as being about his supposed love interest.

On “Here We Go… Again,” he sings, “My new girl, she a movie star / I loved her right, make her scream like Neve Campbell / But when I make her laugh, swear it cures my depressin’ thoughts / ‘Cause baby girl, she a movie star.”

After the album’s release, fans took to Twitter to share their thoughts about those words, with plenty of them believing that it essentially confirms a Weeknd/Jolie relationship.

Dawn FM has only been out for a few hours now, but fans have already found plenty of elements to explore. Aside from the Jolie angle, The Weeknd also gives out a phone number on the album, which turns out to be real and not connected to the artist at all.

Listen to “Here We Go… Again” below.

Dawn FM is out now via Republic. Get it here.

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Logan Paul Plunked Down $3.5 Million For Rare Pokémon Cards, And Fans Are Sure They’re Fake

There’s never a dull moment for former YouTube titan Logan Paul, who somehow came back from the whole “suicide forest” controversy years ago to amass an absurd amount of money. Since that time, he’s been fighting with Floyd Mayweather and feuding with Jimmy Kimmel (who dubbed him as one of the world’s worst humans). In addition, Logan declared that he wants to avoid California taxes by moving to Puerto Rico (and his announcement wasn’t welcomed), where he purchased a $13.5 million mansion and hopped onto the island.

Back to that absurd amassing of money, though, and Logan’s recent revelation that he spent $3.5 million (an amount that most people barely even dream about) on a “sealed & authenticated box of 1st Edition Pokémon cards.”

He was so thrilled by this Base Set purchase that Logan showed off a video of this apparently rare, unopened set, which he called “the only known one in the world.”

Well, the predominant Pokémon fan community over at the Pokébeach site reacted with the utmost skepticism about “the most expensive purchase in the history of the Pokemon TCG.” Pokébeach noted that they previously didn’t report on Logan’s purchase (at the time of the bragging) because they didn’t believe the set — which has quite a history, as the piece notes of sketchy inconsistencies about the set’s origins, all of which have been questioned after it appeared on eBay nearly a year ago — was what the eBay seller claimed it to be. Furthermore, YouTuber Rattle has laid out all the signs that point toward the set’s inauthenticity in a 42-minute video (one of four installments on the subject that are available on the Rattle Pokemon YouTube channel).

Long story short, this set was already suspected of being inauthentic for several months before Logan “dropped” his money. And this was apparently all news to him, for he’s now decided to fly “to Chicago this weekend to verify the case with BBCE, the company who insured [the set’s] authenticity.”

More news shall be forthcoming, no doubt. And it remains mind-boggling that anyone would pay that much money for a set of cards, authentic or not, period.

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Sidney Poitier, The First Black Man To Win An Oscar For Best Actor, Is Dead At 94

Sidney Poitier, who made history as the first Black man to win an Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in 1963’s Lilies of the Field, has died at 94, according to the Bahamian Minister of Foreign Affairs (via TMZ). The cause of death is still unknown.

Poitier was born on February 20, 1927, in Miami, Florida, and grew up in the Bahamas. As a teenager, he moved to New York City, where he got his start in stage plays before transitioning to film. His first credited performance was in 1950’s No Way Out (directed by All About Eve‘s Joseph L. Mankiewicz), and his breakout role came out five years later in Blackboard Jungle. He received the first of his two Oscar nominations in 1958’s The Defiant Ones, making him the first Black male actor to be nominated for a competitive Academy Award in the category, before winning for Lilies of the Field.

Poitier’s best-known role was as Det. Virgil Tibbs in 1967’s In the Heat of the Night, which won Best Picture. That same year, he also starred in To Sir, With Love and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. In later years, he received the AFI Life Achievement Award, an Academy Honorary Award, a Kennedy Center Honor, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama; he was also made an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II in 1974.

“It’s been said that Sidney Poitier does not make movies, he makes milestones, milestones of artistic excellence; milestones of America’s progress,” Obama said about the actor during the 2009 Medal of Freeman ceremony. “On screen and behind the camera, in films such as The Defiant Ones, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Uptown Saturday Night, Lilies of the Field — for which he became the first African American to win an Academy Award for Best Actor — Poitier not only entertained, but enlightened, shifting attitudes, broadening hearts, revealing the power of the silver screen to bring us closer together.”

You can watch Poitier’s historic Oscar speech below.

(Via TMZ)

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Earl Sweatshirt Drops ‘Titanic’ And Shares The ‘Sick!’ Tracklist

The January 14th release date for Earl Sweatshirt’s new project Sick! is fast approaching. We’ve already heard two cuts from Sick! in the out spaced-existential “2010” and the sprawling “Tabula Rasa” featuring Armand Hammer. Now today, Earl has dropped a third cut in “Titanic,” and shared the tracklist to the project due out next week.

Produced by Black Noise, “Titanic” is a succinct statement, with Earl spitting straight through the under two minute cut with gems like: “Yes sir, think I already feel it. Sweatshirt, ’cause you know how revenge, is best served / Cold dish.”

The ten cuts on the tracklist show only two guest features. Along with Armand Hammer on “Tabula Rasa,” Detroit rapper Zelooperz appears on a track called “Vision.” And for what it’s worth, considering both “Titanic” and “2010” come in at around two minutes, and one of the album’s tracks is an intermission (“Lobby”), what comes out on the 14th could very well be the 21-minute album that the Alchemist referenced last September when he said “I couldn’t even describe it… that would be a disservice to it.”

Listen to “Titanic” above and check out the Sick! tracklist below.

1. “Old Friend”
2. “2010”
3. “Sick!”
4. “Vision” Feat. Zelooperz
5. “Tabula Rasa” Feat. Armand Hammer
6. “Lye”
7. “Lobby (Int)”
8. “God Laughs”
9. “Titanic”
10. “Fire In The Hole”

Sick is out 1/14 via Tan Cressida/Warner Records. Pre-order it here.

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

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Kenan Thompson Has A Theory About Why Dionne Warwick Thinks He Runs ‘Saturday Night Live’

Kenan Thompson stopped by The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon on Thursday night where he talked about all things Saturday Night Live from having to slap together a scaled down episode with Paul Rudd thanks to COVID and why Dionne Warwick thinks Thompson runs the show. While talking to Fallon, who praised Warwick’s previous appearance on SNL, the late night host brought up a viral tweet where Warwick was asked if she’s ever going to host the show.

“That is a question for the person who runs the show. Lorne or Kenan,” Warwick tweeted back.

As for why Warwick is under the impression that Thompson runs SNL, he explained to Fallon, “I think Black people migrate towards each other. So for some reason she thinks I represent SNL, and she can speak through me, you know, to get her message across. Like, if we see a crowd of people, and we see a Black person in the crowd, we’re going to go to them and ask them, like, “Who made the chicken?” I guess. I don’t know.”

Whether Thompson was right or not, his answer had Fallon almost falling out of his chair laughing. Of course, maybe Dionne Warwick is onto something. Thompson is one of the show’s longest running cast members and Lorne Michaels has recently started talking about retiring. Why couldn’t the top job be his? Let Kenan run SNL, you fools!

(Via The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon)

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The Final Season Of ‘Search Party’ Jumps The Shark In The Best Possible Way

It’s nearly impossible to take stock of Search Party’s fifth and final season, which lands on HBO Max this week, without revisiting its entire, wild, genre-switching, network-hopping run. The show launched as an interrogation of millennial anxieties, set in the nebulous of hipster culture at the time (Brooklyn) and filled with sly, biting commentary on the self-entitlement and, simultaneously, the very real dread inherited by a generation raised in the post-Y2K internet boom. They brunched, they stalked their frenemies on social media platforms, and they found a misguided sense of purpose in hunting down a familiar face that wound up on a missing person’s poster. They fed each other’s narcissism and delusions of grandeur, but they also filled voids in each other’s lives – ones left by absentee and overbearing parents, needy boyfriends, and unfulfilling career paths.

All of that still rings true for the show’s final hurrah – a trippy Magical Mystery Tour of cults, tech gods, influencer culture, and an apocalyptic event or two. For any other show, this amalgam of competing story threads would probably prove too much to handle. But Search Party’s final magic trick is to take a term we normally reserve for shows that completely lose the plot by their last season and transform it into a kind of weirdly aspirational goalpost for the next-gen of dark comedy on TV.

In other words, Search Party’s final run purposefully “jumps the shark” and, honestly, we couldn’t think of a better way for it to end.

We won’t spoil that completely unexpected curtain close, but we will preview the winding road to enlightenment the group travels down to get there. Dory (Alia Shawkat) has somehow survived being held hostage by her twink stalker and the raging inferno we saw her trapped in when season four ended. She was clinically dead for 37 seconds – a medical phenomenon she eventually builds an entire cult around – and subsequently placed in a mental asylum by Drew (John Paul Reynolds), Elliott (John Early), and Portia (Meredith Hagner), when she came to spouting off about doomsday visions and her need to help others experience her spiritual awakening.

While she’s on lockdown, the gang tries to find some semblance of normalcy, although even a concept as familiar as “settling down” conflicts with the megalomania of this trio. Portia and Drew begin dating because they believe no one else will understand what they’ve been through while Elliott reunites with boyfriend Mark to adopt a genetically engineered baby because “they’re conversation starters.” When Dory does eventually escape the mental hospital to find them, there’s judgmental apprehension but also, the feeling that all of them are secretly relieved to be drawn back into their friend’s toxic orbit. Their lives were incredibly boring without her.

It makes sense then that a sincere apology and lunch at a chic pop-up is all it takes to convince the group to join Dory on her quest to spread enlightenment, one that leads them to the door of smarmy tech mogul Tunnel Quinn (Jeff Goldblum continuing the show’s tradition of booking bigger-than-life guest stars who perfectly fit in this world). Quinn’s a billionaire businessman who surrounds himself with inventors and scientists smarter than him in order to peddle products that promise to revolutionize but seem to always disappoint. In Dory, he sees another grift that can bolster his prophetic tech messiah image and earn him some serious cash. (We don’t have to spell out who Goldblum’s parodying here, right?)

It’s a scheme for Quinn, one Elliott is all too happy to buy into and Drew is too spineless to stand up to, but Dory and, oddly, Portia, believe in it. Or, at least, they believe in the image it can help them create. Shawkat is hypnotizing as Dory gently descends down a path so many true crime documentary subjects seem to careen to. She’s quietly powerful, earnestly convincing her friends and us that she does, in fact, just want to help people. Her egocentric impulses are disguised by flowing white linens and soothing mantras about “unconditional love” and one’s individual ability to change the world. She persuades her friends, detractors, and the group of influencers she hires to help get her message to the masses that death is a logical stepping stone to enlightenment. And don’t we all want enlightenment? Or, at the very least, the constant euphoric high it seems to be giving her?

What follows, as Dory assembles her tracksuit disciples and starts promising a scientifically-engineered jelly bean that can both kill you and save your life, is completely unexpected and yet, also, totally predictable. When Dory started this journey, her intentions to find a missing woman named Chantal were good, if not extremely self-serving and they eventually led her to ruin not only her life but the lives of everyone around her. Season five follows that same basic premise – Dory wants to do good and be recognized for it, Dory destroys everything and everyone she loves in the process – but ramps up the drama and fantasy and horror and comedy up to unprecedented heights. It leans into the absurd and impossible in a way that gives everyone, particularly Early and Hagner, room to shine. Those two have been the not-so-secret MVPs of the show’s entire run and here, they get to stretch their legs with the kind of over-the-top weirdness comedically gifted people normally only dream of performing on TV. And Reynolds reliably plays everything – from Drew’s romantic epiphanies to his sleuthing trips to Maine – in a straight-man fashion that can be particularly hard to nail on a show so bizarre, so magnified.

There are some pretty glaring tonal issues, especially as the show makes a grand shift in its final few episodes, and though Clare McNulty’s Chantal Witherbottom is always funny, her subplot with Kathy Griffin (another lucky get) feels disjointed and disconnected from the main story in a way that is never fully rectified.

Still, for a series that introduced itself as a show about millennials who brunch, Search Party has found a way to hit on the singular selfishness, paranoia, and frustrating disillusion of an entire generation in refreshingly unique ways. There’s no show on TV quite like it. We doubt there will be again.

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Ben Affleck Thinks He Finally Figured Out How To Play Batman In ‘The Flash’

Ben Affleck has played Batman three times (four times if you count Justice League and Zack Snyder’s Justice League as different entities), and while he was initially “thrilled” to step into the Batsuit, he eventually lost his passion.

“It just so happened that I had done a couple of those movies, and I kind of lost my passion for it,” the actor said in 2020. “I kind of lost my passion for telling those stories.” Much like Stella, though, he got his Batgroove back: Affleck had a “great time” being the Dark Knight again in The Flash, to the point where he called it his best work as Batman.

“I have never said this — this is hot off the presses — but maybe my favorite scenes in terms of Batman and the interpretation of Batman that I have done, were in the Flash movie,” he told the Herald Sun. “I hope they maintain the integrity of what we did because I thought it was great and really interesting — different, but not in a way that is incongruent with the character. Who knows? Maybe they will decide that it doesn’t work, but when I went and did it, it was really fun and really, really satisfying and encouraging and I thought, ‘Wow — I think I have finally figured it out.’”

Weird, it looked like he was having so much fun before.

The Flash, which also stars Michael Keaton, opens on November 4.

(Via the Herald Sun)

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The Weeknd Gave Out A Real Phone Number On ‘Dawn FM’ And Fans Are Calling It

The Weeknd’s new album Dawn FM has been out for a few hours now, and while fans are enjoying the music, one of the project’s lyrics also inspired some curiosity-driven phone calls. Towards the end of “Every Angel Is Terrifying,” The Weeknd says, “Call 1-800-444-4444 / That’s 1-800-444-4444 now to order ‘After Life.’” Naturally, fans were quick to make note of that number and give it a ring.

However, the number doesn’t lead to any Dawn FM Easter eggs, as The Weeknd has nothing to do with it. In fact, it’s already relatively well-known in its own right and has been for some time: The oldest existing mention of the number online appears to be from a 2003 forum post. Vice noted of the number in 2016, “Perhaps the easiest number you’ll ever dial, this MCI-controlled phone number is perhaps the most prominent example of an ‘automatic number announcement circuit,’ or ANAC number. These numbers, which are generally well-guarded by phone providers, are designed to repeat back to you the number you’re calling from.”

Indeed, when calling the number, a voice says, “Thank you for calling MCI. Our system indicates you are calling from [caller’s phone number]. If this is the number you are calling about, press 1. If not, please listen to the following two options. To enter the number you are calling about, press 2. If you do not have a telephone number currently in service and need to establish a new telephone number, press 3.”

So, if you call 1-800-444-4444 hoping for some sort of Weeknd-related goodie, you’ll come up empty. However, if you do not have a telephone number currently in service and need to establish a new telephone number (which may not be likely considering you’re able to call the number), then today’s your lucky day.

Listen to “Every Angel Is Terrifying” below.

Dawn FM is out now via Republic. Get it here.