Month: January 2022

Babyface Ray rose to fame as one of the leading names in Detroit’s re-emerging rap scene, alongside other notable acts like 42 Dugg, Icewear Vezzo, and Sada Baby. The rapper is preparing for a huge 2022 year, and he kicks it off with a brand new track. Ray unites with Pusha T and Landstrip Chip for “Dancing With The Devil,” a somber song that finds Ray and Pusha T grappling with the temptations and demons in their lives while Landstrip Chip provides a reflective hook to tie it all together. As if the new record wasn’t enough, the track also features an exciting announcement.

On January 28, Ray will release his latest album Face, which could potentially feature previously-released strong singles like “What The Business Is,” “It Ain’t My Fault” with Big Sean, and “Catch It,” in addition to “Dancing With The Devil.” It will also hopefully serve as a great follow-up to Ray’s 2021 project, Unf*ckwittable.

Ray ended 2021 with a collection of solid guest features, which paired him with acts like Big Sean, Trippie Redd, Icewear Vezzo, Mozzy, and more.

You can listen to “Dancing With The Devil” in the video above

Face is out 1/28 via Wavy Gang / EMPIRE.

Sada Baby is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

The Omicron variant doesn’t seem to be affecting movies, or at least some of them. Spider-Man: No Way Home is breaking records, and it finally got unseated by the new Scream. But one movie that’s fallen through the cracks is West Side Story, Steven Spielberg’s take on the classic musical, which was filmed in the early ‘60s to boffo box office and a ton of Oscars. It’s a shame because it’s a pretty great movie. And at least awards bodies are heaping it with trophies, including a Golden Globe for the movie’s resident Anita, Ariana DeBose.

SNL also recognized the film’s excellence, tapping DeBose to host its first episode of the new year. Naturally the Broadway and film actress, who can be seen in the filmed version of Hamilton, whipped out some West Side Story. She was joined by Kate McKinnon, self-professed West Side Story head, who’s such a fan that she knows all the shows but not so much that she actually saw the new movie.

“I don’t leave the house because of COVID and also I don’t leave the house,” McKinnon joked.

The pair then proceeded through some (though not all) of the show’s best songs, from “Tonight” to “I Feel Pretty” to “Something’s Coming” to “America.” You can watch the medley in the video above and at some point you should probably go see the new West Side Story because it’s even better than this.

For the first time since their 2016 track “Mula,” Kanye West and The Game have teamed up. On Friday, the two released “Eazy,” which featured production from Hit-Boy as well as several attention-grabbing lines. West took a shot at Pete Davidson, who is dating his ex-wife Kim Kardashian, rapping, “God saved me from that crash / Just so I can beat Pete Davidson’s ass.” He also addressed his split with Kim Kardashian saying, “N****, we havin’ the best divorce ever / If we go to court, we’ll go to court together / Matter of fact, pick up your sis’, we’ll go to Kourt’s together.”

Aside from the song’s lyrics, “Eazy” also got some attention for its cover art, which depicts a skinned monkey over a red backdrop. Shortly after the art was revealed, PETA’s president Ingrid Newkirk condemned the photo in a statement to Billboard.

“The photo is reminiscent of the monkeys PETA has found, sometimes heads, sometimes hands, sometimes the whole body, in meat markets around the world and it makes it clear that when you remove the fur you can’t miss that there’s a person in there, that they are fellow primates, and do not belong to us to abuse for any purpose, not in laboratories, roadside zoos, movies, or meat markets,” Newkirk said.

You can view the cover art about and listen to “Eazy” on Spotify here.

Like a broken clock that’s right twice a day, every now and then Trump tells the truth. It’s usually by accident and it’s rarely on purpose. Sometimes when it happens, it doesn’t seem like he realized he did it. Last month, the former president probably didn’t really mean to call his own voter fraud nonsense “stupid.” And on Saturday night, at his big rally in Arizona, he almost certainly didn’t mean to admit that he lost the 2020 election.

But that’s what he did. In his first rally of 2022, Trump aired the usual litany of lies. He trashed Dr. Anthony Fauci, inspiring the crowd to boo and chant “lock him up.” He spread vaccine misinformation, despite taking credit for the wonder drug his followers won’t take. He once again called the House committee investigating the Capitol riot of Jan. 6 the “unselect committee.” He claimed he won the election he lost by over seven million votes.

But he also…said he lost the election? Trump’s mushy brain is hard to track sometimes, and especially so when he started bragging about all the states he won, like Ohio, Florida, and Iowa. He claimed that he won all the states “having to do with legislature,” which sounded like he was repeating some half-remembered claim someone once tried to explain to him, as he’s wont to do.

But then he kept talking. After pointing out that he won a lot of key states, he added, “The only thing we didn’t win was the election.”

Did he misspeak? Almost certainly. Perhaps he simply meant that others, such as the media, vote counters, states, and the federal government think he didn’t win re-election, because he didn’t. Or perhaps it really was a Freudian slip, and he accidentally said the quiet part loud. Maybe deep down, buried under a thick coat of self-delusion, he knows he lost, and bigly.

Or as journalist Ricardo Brooks put it, “If you wait long enough, he always tells the truth.”

The one-term president and failed blogger also returned to another bizarre boast: Wasn’t the crowd at the Capitol riot that led to multiple deaths and which ended his presidency in disgrace pretty huge?

In any case, we’re only two weeks into 2022 and Trump has already told the truth twice: Last week, he called Republican governors, like Ron DeSantis, who won’t admit they’re vaccinated “gutless.” That’s no lie.

The hip-hop community is mourning another loss. Wavy Navy Pooh, who had been signed to the label Quality Control, which also features City Girls, Lil Baby, Migos, and more, was shot and killed during a drive-by shooting in South Miami. According to WSVN, police officers say that the 28-year-old rapper, born Shandler Beaubien, was behind the wheel of a Toyota Camry at an intersection when another vehicle pulled up beside it and fired 15 shots into the driver’s side door. Beaubien was hit multiple times and pronounced dead at the scene.

Law enforcement says that the rapper was accompanied by a female passenger and his two children — a five-year-old and an infant — during the shooting. They also said that the other occupants in the vehicle were not injured. “An unknown subject in a four-door Lexus, a gray Lexus, approached him from the driver’s side, opened fire and then fled westbound on 152nd Street,” Miami-Dade Police detective Alvaro Zabaleta told WSVN. “On the front seat, there was a one-year-old child in a car seat that easily could have been struck by gunfire and taken his life.”

Quality Control issued a statement about Beaubien’s death, which they shared on Instagram. “It is with great sadness we announce the loss of one of our beloved artist, Wavy Navy Pooh,” they wrote. “Wavy put his heart and soul into his music. He believed in giving back to his community as well as sharing his hardships through his music. Wavy, your Quality Control family loves you and will forever miss you. Your Life was a blessing and will never be forgotten. Our thoughts are with his family at this time.”

Last week, a lot of people on social media lost their minds over a new trailer. It’s for Bel-Air, Peacock’s forthcoming dark and gritty reimagining of the ‘90s sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, which made the already popular Will Smith an even bigger star than he was. That show was fun, albeit with the occasional “very special episode.” This new one, co-developed by Smith himself, is…well, it looks like it’s all “very special episodes.” To drive home how potentially silly this new revival is, SNL applied the same idea to another fun ‘90s sitcom.

That show is Family Matters, the Perfect Strangers spin-off about a middle-class Black family living in Chicago that ran for nine seasons, making it the longest-running U.S. sitcom with a predominantly Black cast. One reason it was popular: Steve Urkel, the scene-stealing, catchphrase-deploying nerd played by Jaleel White, who took what was supposed to be a one-off character and made him the thing that effectively made the show.

In SNL’s Urkel, though, he’s the main attraction. The parody stars Chris Redd — who also spent the episode lampooning New York City’s new mayor Eric Adams — doing the Urkel bit in a grittier depiction of Chicago. There are guns. There are alcoholic moms. There’s Kenan Thompson as Reginald VelJohnson’s Carl Winslow, looking sad and angry. There’s a sharp deployment of Urkel’s most famous line. And considering how serious Bel-Air looks, it’s really not that unlikely that a new and darker Family Matters could one day hit Peacock’s coffers.

You can watch the parody in the video above.

On Saturday, Kanye West and Kim Kardashian celebrated the fourth birthday of their third child, Chicago West. A party was held to commemorate the occasion, but according to West himself, the location of that party was withheld from him. After several failed attempts to get into contact with people in and around his family, West went on Instagram Live to air his grievances. “I wasn’t allowed to know where her party was,” he said. “There’s nothing legal. They’re saying these are the kind of games that are being played. This the kind of thing that has really affected my health for the longest.”

Luckily for him, Kanye eventually received the address and was later spotted at the event playing with his daughter and speaking with Kris Jenner. Once he left the party, he returned to Instagram Live with an update, in which he credited Travis Scott and Kylie Jenner with helping him get to the event. “Yo, I’m so happy right now,” Kanye said during the livestream. “I just came from Chi’s party and I just got to shout out Travis Scott for sending me the address and the time and making sure that I was able to spend that birthday memory with my daughter, to be there with the rest of my family.” He added, “It was Kris [Jenner] and Corey [Gamble], Kylie … Kylie let me in right when I got to the spot ’cause security stopped me once again when I got there.”

During his first appearance on Instagram Live, West explained why he went public with his frustrations. “I’m just putting this online ’cause I need y’all support,” he said. “I done called Kim, text the nannies. I got on the phone with Tristan, he asked Khloe. Won’t nobody give me the address to my daughter’s birthday party, right now. That’s gonna imprint in her mind that I wasn’t there for her.”

The Brooklyn Nets moved to 27-15 on Saturday night with a win over the New Orleans Pelicans, but the focus after the game was on the health of their star forward, as Kevin Durant left the game with a knee sprain after just 12 minutes of play.

A Sunday morning MRI confirmed a sprained MCL for Durant, but no more significant damage to his knee. The Nets announced the injury update in a release, but they did not offer an official timetable for Durant’s return to play, saying he’s expected to “return to full strength following a period of rehabilitation.”

Durant is in the midst of one of his best seasons, averaging 29.3 points, 7.4 rebounds, and 5.8 assists per game on 52/37.2/89.4 shooting splits, logging 36.5 minutes per game, his most since leaving the Thunder.

It’s the same injury that has sidelined Anthony Davis since Dec. 18, who had a timetable of at least four weeks when he suffered it, and according to ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski, the hope is that Durant will be back in 4-6 weeks for Brooklyn.

That would put Durant’s return after the All-Star break in late February, which is certainly less than ideal for a Nets team currently second in the East, but only two games ahead of the Cavs in sixth. Brooklyn has 17 games on the schedule before the All-Star break, with 12 coming on the road, which may help lessen the sting of Durant’s absence as Kyrie Irving will be available for the majority of the Durant-less action.

New York City kicked off the new year with a new mayor: the, shall we say, eccentric Eric Adams. When he was running, he was caught doing unusual things, like driving on the sidewalk. Since taking office, he’s done unusual things, like keep schools open despite soaring COVID cases, diss “low-skill workers,” and appoint his under-qualified brother to a major position. So it was only natural that SNL, perhaps the city’s most famous television program, would send him up.

Chris Redd stepped in as a very cocky Adams, who spoke largely about himself — and his “swag” — during a press conference populated by deeply confused journalists. “The city’s never had a mayor with so much swagger before,” he boasted. “You can tell I have swagger. Keeps me healthy.”

He then diagnosed what’s really wrong with New York City. No, not ever-escalating income inequality. No, not skyrocketing cases in the most densely populated are of the America. No, not a broken subway system.

“The city’s been suffering from what I like to call a ‘swagless existence,’” Redd’s Adams postulated. “Y’all ain’t have any swagger, that’s why you’re getting sick.” He then claimed, “I haven’t been sick in over 60 years.” (Adams is 61.)

Over the course of the sketch his boasts grew ever more impossible. At one point he said he’d been a police officer for “70 years,” then later for “97 years.” When he was questioned about the scandals he’s accrued in a mere fortnight in office, his gaffes grew worse. At one point, he said COVID is “welcome any time in New York, and you can print that.” Considering the real Adams said that “low-skill” workers “don’t have the academic skills to sit in a corner office,” SNL’s really not being that far-fetched.

Still, New Yorkers are probably happy Adams is not Bill De Blasio. But then, he’s also not Bing Bong.

You can watch the sketch in the video above.

The Cincinnati Bengals advanced to the Divisional Round of the NFL Playoffs on Sunday with a 26-19 win over the Las Vegas Raiders that wasn’t without controversy, namely regarding some rather baffling decisions from the officiating crew led by head referee Jerome Boger.

Boger’s crew had a rough Saturday in Cincinnati, headlined by the decision to allow a Bengals touchdown to stand despite a whistle blowing the play dead before the catch was made in the end zone — which the league tried to provide cover, saying the decision was made the whistle came after the catch despite video evidence to the contrary. That wasn’t the only questionable decision, as there was a phantom timeout that took away a big Bengals pass play on a third down, among other questionable calls and rulings.

On the whole, the Raiders’ inability to score in the red zone was a bigger factor in their loss on Saturday, but the officiating became a headline for Raiders fans and NFL fans as a whole, which is never a good thing. On Sunday morning, ESPN’s Adam Schefter reported that when the league grades out the officials for their performance this weekend, Boger’s crew is expected not to do well and, as such, that crew won’t be on any games deeper in the postseason.

Referee Jerome Boger and the crew that worked the AFC wild-card game between the Raiders and Bengals are not expected to officiate again this postseason after their problematic performance Saturday highlighted by a controversial whistle.

…

One league source did not express surprise at Boger’s performance; others around the league have commented on it during various points of the season, and the NFL has received mixed reviews for mixing its officiating crews in postseason games, taking officials from different crews and assigning them to work together.

It’s unfortunate that one of the lead talking points was the officiating, but in a game decided by a touchdown, a TD being granted despite an inadvertent whistle stopping players midplay certainly stands out.