Everything’s coming up Pete Davidson. Alright, that’s an exaggeration, but the King Of Staten Island star (and The Suicide Squad ensemble cast member) ends up being a topic of conversation (generally regarding his romantic life) when his pals (and even mere observers) hit the talk shows. Not too long ago, Emily Ratajkowski offered up her reasoning on why “only other men” find Pete attractive, which made sense.
For sure, the list of other men who understand Davidson’s allure does not include Kanye West, but Ben Stiller gets it. While speaking with Howard Stern, the Severance director fielded a question on Pete’s fame, which Stern believes is largely due to “dating!” Stiller knows that this is a thing and called Pete “incredibly sweet” and the possessor of “such a charisma.” He did, however, want to add that a lot of Pete’s appeal is down to how true-to-real-life he is on SNL:
“Like, to be able to go on Weekend Update and do what he does, he’s doing him, right? It’s not that easy to just be that funny and interesting and likeable. Come on, do a character, do a thing, but he’s really taking his life and he’s turning it into material. People were attracted to watching him on the show and he just has a real charm about him.”
Stiller also believes that Pete’s got “a lot of great work ahead of him,” likely both on the comedy and drama end of things. And the Zoolander star likely has a point. People saw aspects of Pete’s life (including his father’s tragic 9/11 fate) in The King Of Staten Island story, and they’ve seen him doing the “mom’s basement” thing, and he’s always able to laugh at himself, which likely makes people feel like they know him and feel at ease with him. And that’s probably a lot of what’s led to his string of high-profile girlfriends, including Ariana Grande, Kate Beckinsale, Margaret Qualley, Cazzie David, Phoebe Dynevor, and (of course) Kim Kardashian. And yeah, that’s also led to this being a huge topic of discussion, even on Howard Stern’s show. Good on ya, Pete.
Billie Eilish — who, along with Finneas, is behind the No Time To Die theme song — stopped by Late Night yesterday, and naturally, the conversation found its way to the movie, and from there, about how Daniel Craig is a “DILF” (Eilish’s words). The term, in case you’re unaware, is an abbreviation of “dad I’d like to f*ck” and is defined by Dictionary.com as “an attractive older man, usually a father, who is regarded as a sexual object.”
On the show, Meyers asked if Eilish was nervous to meet Craig, to which she replied, “Yeah. He’s James Bond! He’s a DILF!” That led to a good minute-long conversation between Eilish and Meyers about Craig’s attractiveness. They quickly honed in on his eyes, with Meyers saying to Eilish, “Let me tell you something: You have beautiful blue eyes. I have beautiful blue eyes. But we can’t even be in the same room as that man’s eyes. These look like pinkeye compared to him.”
Holding her hands about a foot or so in front of her face, Eilish said, “It feels like they’re here on him. This is his face and these are his eyes.” Meyers added, “If you weren’t psyched about it, you’d say, ‘Your eyes are in my personal space.’”
They also talked about fan signs at Eilish’s concerts, Saturday Night Live, and more, so check out the full conversation above and below.
If your defense for someone is “he doesn’t eat dogs,” something’s up. And there’s certainly something fishy about Tucker Carlson‘s defense of Vladimir Putin, who launched an invasion of Russian forces into Ukraine on Thursday. It’s being called the “darkest hours of Europe since the Second World War,” but Carlson doesn’t see it this way. “Hating Putin has become the central purpose of America’s foreign policy, it’s the main thing that we talk about. Entire cable channels are now devoted to it,” he said, as if he, a Fox News host, hasn’t devoted himself to slobbering praise for Putin.
“Very soon, that hatred of Vladimir Putin could bring the United States into a conflict in Eastern Europe. Before that happens, it might be worth asking yourselves since it is getting really serious, what is this really about? Why do I hate Putin so much?
Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him? Has he shipped every middle-class job in my town to Russia? Did he manufacture a worldwide pandemic that wrecked my business and kept me indoors for two years? Is he teaching my children to embrace racial discrimination? Is he making fentanyl? Is he trying to snuff out Christianity? Does he eat dogs? These are fair questions, and the answer to all of them is ‘no.’ Vladimir Putin didn’t do any of that.”
On Thursday’s episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live!, host Jimmy Kimmel questioned Carlson’s defense. “So, in order for you to despise a man who murders his rivals, who murders and poisons people, and is actively trying to destabilize our country, he has to do something to you personally. He has to eat your dog,” he said. “Thanks, Tuck, thanks for asking all those very dumb questions and then answering them for us. I wanna see the tape Putin has of him because it has to be something special.”
You can watch Kimmel’s monologue above (the Tucker stuff begins at 2:55).
The RX is Uproxx Music’s stamp of approval for the best albums, songs, and music stories throughout the year. Inclusion in this category is the highest distinction we can bestow, and signals the most important music being released throughout the year. The RX is the music you need, right now.
The life of Teleso “Tattersall” Le’aupepe was a grand odyssey. Born in Samoa in 1938, he eventually left for New Zealand as part of an exploitive post-war migrant workers program. He started a family there, and then moved to Australia to start another family. Years later, one of his sons started a band.
That band, Gang Of Youths, has long been invested in grand odysseys of their own. While they remain largely unknown in the U.S., they have made a name elsewhere in the world as one of rock’s most aspirational and big-sounding young bands. (When I saw them play live for the first time in 2017, it was like seeing Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band on the Born In The U.S.A. tour in a 150-person capacity club.) Now comes the astonishing Angel In Real Time, their most majestic LP yet, due Friday.
For frontman and singer-songwriter Dave Le’aupepe, Angel In Real Time is nothing less than an act of transfiguration, an attempt to bring back his father — who passed in 2018 at the age of 80 — in the form of impossibly monumental tunes that integrate a kitchen’s sink worth of sounds: chamber pop, U.K. garage, Britpop, hip-hop, and indigenous music native to his family’s Samoan and Māori cultures. Over that music, Le’aupepe opens up the innermost sanctum of his life via lyrics that spin a dense web of autobiography, cultural criticism, self-laceration, and sports references. At times, he adopts his father’s perspective; in other moments, he wonders how he’ll move on without him. It’s so personal that as a listener you feel as though you’re eavesdropping on something you shouldn’t. But then the insistent, driving music inevitably pulls you back into the fray.
If Angel In Real Time is not ultimately remembered as the best album of 2022 — though it is certainly in the running for that distinction for what is already stacking up to be a year loaded with potential all-timers — it might very well end up being the most album. There is a lot to chew on here. First, there’s the narrative: Coming after 2017’s Go Farther In Lightness put them on the map in America (and in stateside arenas as an opener for the Foo Fighters), Le’aupepe retreated to grieve his father and also wrap his head around the bombshell that his dad had another family in a different country that he never knew about, including two half-brothers.
Then there’s the meta-narrative: Gang Of Youths’ founding guitarist, Joji Malani, departed in 2018, a potentially devastating blow that eventually presented an opportunity to remake their sound. An unabashed student of seemingly every heart-on-your-sleeve arena act of the last 40 years, Le’aupepe imagined a transformation akin to what U2 pulled off in the early ’90s. If Go Farther In Lightness was their Joshua Tree — the fearlessly earnest collection of guitar-based spirituals rooted in an unending desire for transcendence — then perhaps the followup could be their Achtung Baby. An album in which beat-heavy, danceable, and often ecstatic music acts as a shield for blood-and-guts, dark-night-of-the-soul introspection. An intimate confession made to sound loud enough to engulf the entire world.
This was a considerable risk given what was at stake: Gang Of Youths signed a worldwide record deal with Warner Records in 2019, their best shot yet at establishing a real beachhead here in the States. But is there a slot in the marketplace for a record that aims for the grandiosity of “Bitter Sweet Symphony” on nearly every track, while also drawing on stirring samples of Pacific music collected by composer David Fanshawe in the 1970s? Will an album this inventive and rich and huge — it was made in as many as seven different countries over the course of several years as Le’aupepe started and scrapped three versions of the record — be properly received by an American music press still inclined to view them as a “cult” concern? Can an LP sound like it was made by the biggest band in the world when the band in question, well, actually isn’t?
The only honest answer to all of these questions is “I have no idea.” So let’s focus on what’s clear at the moment: Angel In Real Time is a real achievement. Musically, the depth and breadth of sounds outstrip what is normally heard in the indie-rock sphere. A relatively low-key cut like “Forbearance” might nod to The National’s recent electro-folk experiments, but so much of the album aims beyond that and straight for the moon. “The Man Himself” is especially rousing in this regard — the moment when spine-tingling choral vocals recorded in the Cook Islands are seamlessly infused with breakbeats and a surging 42-piece orchestra ranks with the most emotionally overpowering moments on any recent rock record. And then there’s “The Kingdom Is Within You,” a skittering pocket symphony that manages to absolutely earn a title like “The Kingdom Is Within You.” There’s just so much here, but the impeccable craftsmanship of intricately layering the sounds ensures that each element has its own space. Which means on a song like “Unison,” you can appreciate the audacity of slipping in a banjo lick as the strings swell and the beats slap.
As a lyricist, Le’aupepe establishes a conversational style spiked with literary wit, in which a self-effacing joke lands only after a Google search to help decipher a critical word. (Thanks to this album I now know what “tenterhook” means.) But this is only a disarming gesture preluding a series of incoming gut-punches, in which Le’aupepe unsparingly addresses grief over his dad, plumbs mixed feelings about his dad’s deception, and expresses love for the older brothers he’s gotten to know after his dad died.
Given the inspiration, Angel In Real Time might appear to be a downer. But even at its bleakest — the part in “Spirit Boy” when Le’aupepe sings, “God died today / and left me in the cold” qualifies as the single saddest moment — the constant uplift of the music successfully buoys the record. On “Tend The Garden,” over a propulsive “Mysterious Ways”-like electro-rock purr, Le’aupepe adopts his father’s voice: “Lord knows if they would ever forgive me I don’t forgive myself at least / there are strange forces in the air only time can release in a way I still believe.” Is this a son’s wishful thinking for what he hopes his dad might say? Angel In Real Time somehow manages to not feel quite so self-indulgent. Rather, it registers as a gift to a man who never had one last opportunity to speak for himself.
All of this leads to the album’s heart, which also happens to be the most stripped-down track on Angel In Real Time. This pertains to the music on “Brothers,” composed only of Le’aupepe’s hushed voice and sparse piano, as well as the lyric, which unfolds like a more-or-less straightforward account of how he met the rest of his family. This verse hits hardest:
I know our father had his reasons but that Can never make it right or fair I hate myself for stealing all his love when My brothers thought that he was dead So as I dig through the collateral The secrets kept throughout the years I know I’ll hardly ever answer them But it’s a way to keep him near
The music on Angel In Real Time forms an enormous shell in which to fit lyrics so specific you feel as though Le’aupepe has mistakenly leaked his innermost thoughts. This is the dichotomy of Angel In Real Time — it is a roar that articulates what under normal circumstances would only be whispered, if spoken at all.
Gang Of Youths is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
The conflict between Ukraine and Russia finally escalated tonight. Reports that Russia has launched a “full-scale invasion” of Ukraine broke, and American celebrities are already being confronted with the need to speak out about the political event. Yesterday, Cardi B noted that she sides with the “citizens” who are impacted by the violence, but also understands how the sanctions that Biden has imposed, and the ramifications of the conflict, are going to further fracture the already damaged global economy.
The breaking news has also had an impact on another artist’s plans. After celebrating his birthday just a few days ago, The Weeknd has been teasing a big new announcement that was slated to come tomorrow, but after seeing the reports he’s decided to postpone on sharing his own news while the world focuses on something slightly more serious. “Unfortunately I’m just now seeing what’s happening with the conflict and will pause on tomorrow’s announcement,” he wrote on Twitter tonight. “I pray for everyone’s safety.”
unfortunately i’m just now seeing what’s happening with the conflict and will pause on tomorrow’s announcement. i pray for everyone’s safety.
Though fans don’t know what Abel had in store for them, speculation was rampant about either a tour, or a final third album for this new “trilogy” of releases. But postponing while such a tragic circumstance is unfolding feels like the right move, so we’ll just have to wait and see what Abel has up his sleeve.
However, it seems there are more aspects of the acquisition that still need to be finalized. According to Billboard, it appears that albums by Tupac and Dr. Dre won’t be included in the deal. A pair of Tupac’s Death Row albums, All Eyez On Me and The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory, are “no longer on the label,” which means Snoop does not have access to them. Additionally, Dre’s 1992 debut album The Chronic, which was also released on Death Row, would not be returned to him until 2023. According to the report from Billboard, the specifics of the deal are still under negotiation, so until things are finalized, Death Row’s previous owners (MNRK Music Group and investment firm Blackstone) still have the rights to the label’s catalog entries.
“It feels good to have ownership of the label I was part of at the beginning of my career and as one of the founding members,” Snoop said after acquiring the label. “This is an extremely meaningful moment for me.”
Late last month, Slim Jxmmi, who with Swae Lee makes up the rap duo Rae Sremmurd, was arrested for battery after a fight with his girlfriend in Miami. According to TMZ, the rapper allegedly attacked his girlfriend, with whom he has a child, and pulled out her hair extensions. The incident began after Slim Jxmmi, born Aaquil Brown, was confronted by his girlfriend about a woman he was following on Instagram. Brown is also accused of throwing his girlfriend’s phone over a balcony. Now, almost a month after he was arrested for battery, the charges against him have been dropped.
According to Billboard, Miami prosecutors will not pursue charges against Brown. Court proceedings in the case were closed on Tuesday due to an order from Judge Betsy Alvarez-Zane. While a spokeswoman for the Miami-Dade County Attorney’s Office did not return Billboard’s request for comment, Brown’s attorney Bradley Horenstein said prosecutors told the judge on Tuesday that the charges were dropped due to a lack of evidence. Prosecutors reportedly said that the rapper’s girlfriend recanted her initial police statement and that she also refused to cooperate with them.
Slim Jxmmi’s focus will likely return to music and his Rae Sremmurd duo has not dropped an album since 2018’s SR3MM. The duo teased the release of SremmLife 4 back in 2020, but nothing from that project has yet been released. They also made an appearance in season two of Lil Dicky’s FX show Dave.
When news broke that Bob Saget had suddenly died in early January, investigators were quick to rule out drugs or alcohol as contributing factors. But it was another month until more details were made known. Earlier this month, it was revealed an autopsy had ruled that his death was the result of severe head trauma. One doctor said it was “something I find with someone with a baseball bat to the head, or who has fallen from 20 or 30 feet.”
Now, as per People, there’s a clearer picture of what may have happened to Saget on that fateful night. The actor, comedian, and filmmaker was doing a show in Orlando. Afterwards he went back to his hotel, where he seemed animated and excited, chatting with the staff. Between when he went to his hotel room and when he was found the next morning, lifeless in his bed, remains murky. But investigators have now pieced together semblance of what may have happened:
Authorities checked the marble end tables and counters in the bathroom, but found no traces of blood or hair. Now, they believe that Saget lost consciousness in the bathroom and fell backward onto the marble floor, striking his head.
Police believe that a groggy Saget regained consciousness and stumbled into bed, where he again lost consciousness and died. His time of death was estimated to be around 4:00 am, approximately 12 hours before his body was found.
It’s not known how Saget lost consciousness; that may remain a mystery. But now there’s more closure on what happened than there was before.
Saget’s death prompted widespread shock and mourning. Family, friends, and well-wishers offered tributes that stayed true to someone who was known as both a kindly patriarchal TV figure and a hilariously blue comic. It was his longtime Full House costar John Stamos who pointed out that, even after death, he managed to slip in “one last d*ck joke.”
You know what they say: When life hands you lemons, make lemonade. For Ben Stiller, those lemons were the box office returns for Zoolander 2, his 2016 sequel to his sleeper hit about a dingbat male model he made 15 years prior. And in a new Esquire profile (in a bit teased out by The AV Club), the actor and filmmaker discusses the lemonade he made from that critical and commercial disaster.
The lemonade, if you can excuse the dodgy metaphor, came in the form of two TV shows: Escape at Dannemora and Severance. The first is the Emmy-gobbling thriller with Patricia Arquette and Benicio Del Toro that aired two years after Zoolander 2 croaked. The second, a sci-fi thriller about a disturbing workplace, is one of the most hyped shows of the new year. (Its run on Apple TV+ began last week.) Neither are comedies, though they can be funny. But both were directed (in the latter’s case, mostly) by Stiller, who was nominated for an Emmy and won a DGA award for his work.
Perhaps this is not the path Stiller’s had taken had a certain aforementioned sequel not tanked. “If Zoolander 2 had been a huge hit, and then people were saying ‘Zoolander 3! Do this movie! That movie!’” he said. “[T]hat might have taken me off the road of having the space to work on developing Dannemora.”
He imagines what could have happened otherwise. “I might have gotten distracted by other bright shiny objects, but instead it opened a path where I could just do what I’d honestly wanted to do for years and years, which was: just direct something!” Stiller said. “To say, I’m just going to work on this project that I want to work on, because it takes a little time to get these things going, and if you don’t stick with it you don’t get there.”
Stiller has done plenty of serious work before. Indeed, his big screen directorial debut, Reality Bites, is a drama-comedy-romance that was also one of Hollywood’s first looks at then-still-young Gen X. But people still seem surprised that he’s not exclusively cranking out comedies in which intellectually impaired guys set themselves ablaze.
“People do ask me, ‘Why were you drawn to this? You’re not a guy who does these kinds of things,’” Stiller told Esquire. “I get asked that about Severance, I heard it a lot about Dannemora. ‘You’re funny. Be funny.’ I get it. But I don’t analyze it. In my mind, it made total sense.”
Severance drops new episodes every Friday through April 8 on Apple TV+.
For quite some time, Britney Spears has used her Instagram account to air grievances. She’s used it to discuss her former conservatorship, which lasted 13 years, as well as her relationship with her sister Jamie Lynn. It’s become a diary of sorts for the singer, and in a recent post, she used her account to go after her former business management firm Tri Star Sports & Entertainment and her former business managers Lou Taylor and Robin Greenhill.
In an Instagram post she shared on Wednesday, Britney said that before “they sent me away” to a treatment facility, Tri Star brought her into their offices. “The swanky suited up b*tches … SO NICE with their ‘We are here to make you feel SPECIAL’ [thumbs up emoji],” she wrote, before specifically calling out her former business managers. “I had lunch with Lou Taylor and Robin Greenhill … they said ‘Britney, look at your picture on the wall!’ With a huge black and white framed picture in the hall of their office !!!!! Kate Beckinsale was there too !!!!! They sucked up to me and ‘made me feel special’ … RIGHT …. Ha those same b*tches killed me a week later !!!!”
Britney added that her father Jamie Spears “worshipped” Taylor and Greenhill and claimed he “would have done anything they asked of him.” She concluded, “Nobody else would have lived through what they did to me !!! I lived through all of if and I remember all of it !!!! I will sue the sh*t out of Tri Star !!!! Psss they got away with all of it and I’m here to warn them every day of my precious life !!!!”
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