Month: March 2022

During the LA stop at his Justice World Tour last night, Justin Bieber brought out Leon Bridges for a surprise performance. The Fort Worth, Texas-native then proceeded to perform “River” from his 2015 debut album, Coming Home.

Bridges released his most recent album, Gold-Diggers Sound, last July, which featured prominent production by Ricky Reed. Last month, he teamed up with fellow Texas musical trio Khruangbin for a collaborative EP called Texas Moon.

“Being under ‘the machine,’ you kind of have to adhere to whatever the label’s ideas are or whatever producer you’re working with,“ Bridges said of the EP in our cover story last month. “And whenever I’m doing that it’s more polished, but it’s still a vibe. Although I think my collaboration with Khruangbin is really where my heart is. I love how raw our sound is.”

Last night’s LA show was the first of two shows Bieber has planned at Crypto.com Arena on his Justice World Tour, which will take the Grammy-nominated “Peaches” singer across North America through June. Bridges is set to kick off a tour next month in Tulsa, Oklahoma, before making apperances at Hangout Festival and Glastonbury this summer.

Bieber announced last month that he would partner with Propeller and Live Free to local and national social justice organizations, including the REFORM Alliance, National Resources Defense Council, Fund For Guaranteed Income, and Last Prisoner Project.

Ever since Russia launched its horrific attack on Ukraine, Donald Trump—when he’s not not heaping praise on “smart” and “savvy” Vladimir Putin—has repeatedly claimed that the war between these two countries “would never have happened” if he had been in charge (a comment that has been echoed by Nikki Haley and others in his administration). And it’s a good thing he didn’t win his reelection bid, because—as Seth Meyers shared—the former president’s suggestions for how he would be dealing with the current war between Russia and Ukraine are like something out of a Looney Tunes cartoon.

On Monday night, Meyers reminded viewers just how close we came to having an ex-reality show star sitting in the Oval Office at this pivotal moment in world history. But the Late Night host doesn’t even need to try to imagine what Trump’s response to the Russia-Ukraine situation would be, as Trump—who Meyers calls a “criminal dingus”—has vocally volunteered his suggestions… all without anyone even asking. And his latest idea might be one of his most bonkers—not to mention unethical, illegal, and all the other ‘un’s—yet. Even Meyers barely had words for it:

“Look, we came very close—very close—to a world where Trump was still in charge during Russia’s brutal and illegal invasion of Ukraine, which is scary for many reasons. One of which is Trump keeps giving us a glimpse as to how he would have responded. And, as usual, it has that unique Trump blend of being both terrifying and incredibly stupid at the same time.

According to The Washington Post, ‘Trump mused Saturday to the GOP’s top donors that the United States should label its F-22 planes with the Chinese flag and ‘bomb the sh*t out of Russia. And then we say China did it; we didn’t do it, China did it. And then they start fighting with each other and we sit back and watch.’”

And holy sh*t, this man had the nuclear codes! For four years! And is hoping to have them again!

Meyers very well may have cracked the secret to where Trump’s utterly buffoonish ideas come from he suggested that the one-time commander-in-chief (!) “definitely gets his ideas from cartoon” and that his “Blame it on China!” approach “is a slightly stupider version of Bugs Bunny dressing up as a sexy lady to distract Elmer Fudd.”

You can watch the full clip above.

DMZ is primed to be the next critically-acclaimed DC Comics show. HBO Max has revealed the first trailer for the Ava DuVernay-produced series, which features Rosario Dawson as Alma, a medic desperately searching for her son across a dystopian New York City that’s been ravaged by the Second Civil War. As the trailer shows, Alma’s search will be no easy task as she deals with various factions that have taken control of the city. There’s also the issue of Benjamin Bratt’s Dawson to contend with.

Based on the Vertigo/DC Comics series of the same name, DMZ will be a four part series that starts streaming in its entirety later this month, which should make binge-watchers very happy. Joining Peacemaker and Doom Patrol, DMZ certainly looks like it has the makings of the next DC Comics hit as the company continues a string of much needed wins thanks to the recently released The Batman and the aforementioned John Cena show.

That said, DMZ will have its work cut out for it. Y: The Last Man, the last Vertigo adaptation set in a dystopian word did not last long, so it’ll be interesting to see if DMZ connects with audiences where Y: The Last Man didn’t.

Here’s the official synopsis:

DMZ leaps off the pages of the acclaimed DC graphic novel into the visual landscape of a dangerous and distorted Manhattan as one woman navigates a demilitarized zone in a harrowing quest to find her lost son.

DMZ starts streaming March 17 on HBO Max

Last year, Lucy Dacus released her third studio album Home Video, which featured the fan-favorite deep-cut “Thumbs” and the bittersweet single “Hot & Heavy.” Last month, just in time for Valentine’s Day, she returned with the new song “Kissing Lessons,” which, at first, was not available on streaming services but only through an actual telephone call because of her knack for creative marketing (before she officially unveiled “Thumbs,” she mailed fans VHS tapes with the track on it).

She brought “Kissing Lessons” to Late Night With Seth Meyers last night. She sings the wholesome story of a first kiss: “Rachel was a year older / When I was in the second grade / I thought she might know everything / I took her word like a golden ring / I asked her how to win my man / And she said, ‘I know just the thing’ / Gave me lipgloss and a hair toss / And, after school, a lesson in kissing.”

She is also standing, which is notable (and exciting!) because she’s been performing her set on tour while laying on a couch due to two herniated discs (“I am telling myself I am punk for this please do not say otherwise I’m fragile,” she had said about that arrangement.)

Watch her performance of “Kissing Lessons” above.

In the 94 years that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has been handing out Oscars to the Hollywood elite, a grand total of eight women have been nominated for Best Director. To put that into perspective, Martin Scorsese has received more nominations in this category than all the women combined. Only two women have won the prestigious prize, with Nomadland’s Chloe Zhao making history last year by becoming the first woman of color to do so (as well as the first to be nominated.) This year, history was made again as Jane Campion, the director of the startling Western drama The Power of the Dog, became the first woman director to be nominated more than once in this category. The first time a man received multiple Best Director nominations was in 1930 and that guy, Frank Lloyd, pulled it off by being nominated twice in the same year.

The never-ending battle for gender parity in the film world has been one of maddeningly incremental progress, frequently a case of one step forward and two steps back. In 2020, the number of top-grossing films directed by women fell, even as figures like Zhao, Emerald Fennell, and Regina King received vast critical acclaim for their work. It’s indicative of much that Campion is the first woman to have multiple Best Director nominations in close to a century, but that shouldn’t negate how well-deserved and long-overdue this honor is for a truly phenomenal filmmaker.

Campion is indisputably one of her generation’s finest filmmakers and yet her name is seldom included as frequently in these conversations as her male counterparts, even though she’s an Oscar, Palme d’Or, and Silver Lion winner. It’s a disheartening omission but not an especially surprising one. Female directors don’t get held up as such in the way that men are. While you’re likely to find Campion listed as the greatest woman filmmaker of all time (the BBC declared The Piano to be the best movie ever made by a woman), mixed-gender lists put her far lower. There’s a cultural notion that women only make stories for women while men’s work is universal. Such ideas dismiss the unifying ideas of female-driven narratives but also position them as somehow unimportant in the grand scheme of art. Campion has spent her career fighting that by telling layered, prickly, and often radical stories of women in search of more than what the world will allow them.

Fittingly for a filmmaker who made an adaptation of the Henry James novel The Portrait of a Lady, Campion’s filmography is defined by its depictions of women and dissections of what it means to be one at any given moment in history. It’s notable that it took until last year for Campion to make a film with a majority male perspective. Until then, her protagonists were women searching for a certain kind of freedom across time and genres, from Victorian England to the grimy noir of New York City. In The Piano, her breakthrough romantic drama that saw her become the second-ever female Best Director Oscar nominee, the mute Ada McGrath turns to her music to find a form of expression that will allow her to contest the marriage and life she has been forced into. Holy Smoke!, one of her most underrated films, sees a naïve young woman look for spiritual guidance before falling into a parodic battle of the sexes with an older man hired to undo the supposed brainwashing she’s endured. The deeply prickly lead of her debut, Sweetie, looks for clarity amid a tyrannical domestic life that includes a mentally ill and obscenely spoiled sibling.

Moreover, Campion’s women are frequently bound by a sense of the erotic. Few working directors make films so steeped in sensuality as Campion, and so uniformly focused on female pleasure at that. Whatever the female gaze is, and academics have argued about that for decades, Campion possesses it, utilizing it with such force that she’s helped to realign audiences’ focus away from a default male ideal. Take, for instance, In the Cut, a bleak erotic thriller that was once derided as her biggest flop. Many critics saw the drama’s plot of a woman descending into a torrid affair with a potentially murderous cop as needlessly tawdry. What they missed (and what many have discussed with the film’s long-overdue reassessment) is the ways that those sex scenes define the catch-22 of female desire: how do you look for satisfaction when you live under the stranglehold of patriarchy and doing so could very well put your life at risk? Campion uses eroticism as a way to take on issues like this but sometimes, in her films, sex is just sex, and we’re all the better for it!

The Power of the Dog may stand unique in her filmography as her first feature focused primarily on a male protagonist, it’s fully within the boundaries of her tales of women in search of liberation. George Burbank, as played by Benedict Cumberbatch in perhaps his greatest performance, is the most purely distilled embodiment of masculinity at its cruelest and most insidious. A rancher who seemingly embodies the all-American cowboy ideal, he lords over his domain – and his meek brother – with an iron fist, growing all the more tyrannical when Rose (Kirsten Dunst) moves into his home alongside her sensitive son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee, giving the best performance of 2021). He seems furious that anyone would seek to disturb his dictatorial grasp over a life that nobody seems equipped to thrive in. Gentleness is to be snuffed out, preferably in as callous a manner as possible.

Such men are familiar presences in Campion’s work, albeit mostly in far less aggressive ways: The stilted stoicism of Ada’s husband slowly giving way to petulant abuse; the callous gaslighting of Gilbert Osmond in The Portrait of a Lady; P.J. Waters’ condescension evolving into a pathetic obsession in Holy Smoke! George’s closest contemporaries in Campion’s work can be found in In the Cut, where every male character is some variation of terrifyingly toxic, desperate to own women or destroy them. While his own motives are not sexual, the calculated giddiness with which George seeks to break Rose’s spirit is similarly forceful. He still wants to deny a woman’s right to her own destiny, something Campion has spent decades exploring, and the character’s spiral into alcohol and loneliness is almost Shakespearean in its tragedy. In The Power of the Dog, empathy is given to George for his own plight, a man as smothered by masculine demands as he is empowered by them, but he is not excused for it. Campion has heroines but seldom heroes. Her men are as broken by masculinity as anyone in Scorsese’s filmography. In many ways, she feels like his cinematic sibling, two halves of a double bill on the ways that the world sets men up to suffer.

The Power of the Dog is currently a frontrunner to take home Best Picture. At the very least, being the most nominated film of the 2022 Oscars will ensure that Campion’s legacy among mainstream audiences is given a much-needed boost. Perhaps this will finally give some industry figures the push to see her as one of the greats and not someone whose masterful output is forever seen as second best to the guys.

Being on live television is surely a nerve-wracking experience, but Camila Cabello had a particularly rough go of it recently as she had a wardrobe malfunction on the air.

BuzzFeed News notes Cabello was a guest on BBC’s The One Show yesterday, and during the interview, host Alex Jones (not that Alex Jones) asked Cabello to stand up and show off her favorite dance move. After she stood up, she adjusted her shirt, which left her nipple exposed for a brief moment, which got some “oh!” reactions from others on the show.

“Almost flashed you,” Cabello said before continuing, although there was no “almost” about what happened. After Cabello finished her dance, she added, “I hope you didn’t see nipple.” Trying to help Cabello save face, Jones responded, “Do you know what? There was a bit of a wardrobe malfunction. I don’t know what I saw. There was a flash of something.” Cabello nervously laughed and said, “My mom is in the next room right now, possibly freaking out about my wardrobe malfunction.”

Later, Cabello laughed the moment off on TikTok, sharing a video of herself lip-syncing to Muni Long’s “Time Machine,” specifically the line, “I wish I had a time machine.” On-screen text reads, “when my stylist asked me if I wanted nip covers and I said no.” Cabello also commented on the post, “Least they’re cute tho [smiling tongue sticking out emoji].”

The Big Bang Theory star Mayim Bialik is used to being on series with passionate fanbases, but Jeopardy! viewers are on a different level. For instance, it did not go undetected when the host made the smallest of tweaks to the game show’s format by referring to the opening round of Jeopardy! as “Single Jeopardy,” as opposed to simply “Jeopardy.” Bialik, whose Twitter mentions must be a nightmare (“There’s no reason hearing Mayim say ‘Single Jeopardy’ should annoy me as much as it does but it makes me irrationally annoyed” reads one of the few non-all caps tweets), discussed the, uh, “controversy” in an interview with Yahoo Entertainment.

“People care a lot. I get it. And I’m sorry; I’m doing my best!” she said. Bialik also explained that she doesn’t go off-script; if she did, the show’s producers would stop the taping. “If it wasn’t right, they would’ve had me redo it. I barely act alone… there’s so many things that we re-tape,” she explained. “If it was literally not kosher there’s a million producers, writers and researchers and they’re all listening to me.”

Besides, it’s not like she’s the first person to say “Single Jeopardy.”

Bialik says that dearly departed Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek himself was known to use it on certain occasions. “I know it may not be the norm, but… it was not not out of the norm,” she says. “I will never do it again! Even if it’s in this script, I will not say it.”

If it was good enough for Alex, it should be good enough for everyone.

(Via Yahoo Entertainment)

It’s 1966. Jerry Garcia is tripping on acid while walking through Los Angeles at dawn. He and his band, The Grateful Dead, have just driven to a local neighborhood to stare at the Watts Towers art installation. An iconic work of outsider art, the cement-and-steel towers were built out of found objects over the course of 30 years by an Italian immigrant construction worker named Sabato “Simon” Rodia. It’s precisely the sort of thing you want to look at if you’re high as hell at sunrise.

Jerry peers at the towers. As his mind expands beyond the limits of his skull and toward the farthest reaches of the universe, he decides that his future as a musician will be the opposite of what these towers represent. He will not devote the next 30 years of his life to building a monument that will come to dominate the landscape. He will instead live in the moment, and for the moment, without any thought of what he leaves behind. Instead of creating a legacy that will survive his own death, he will have fun now.

When I first heard this story in Amir Bar-Lev’s 2017 documentary Long Strange Trip, I was confused. Yes, I understood how Jerry’s point translated to the Dead’s philosophy of live improvisation and favoring the concert experience over the relatively stale ordeal of making albums. But … aren’t The Dead basically the musical equivalent of the Watts Towers? That’s where I assumed the story was going! It seemed more logical: As a group who allowed — even encouraged — fans to tape their shows, they are likely the most closely documented rock band ever. Maybe Jerry left the music behind each night as soon as he left the stage. But the rest of us are able to hear practically every note he ever publicly performed. And this, many would agree, has been an incredible boon for music lovers.

I bring this up in order to address what’s become a hot-button issue in the live music world. A scourge that has compelled some of our most famous musicians to speak out. No, I’m not talking about the run-of-the-mill annoyances that seem frustratingly unsolvable: The guy behind you who won’t stop talking over the music no matter how many times you flash him a dirty look, the idiot who starts whistling non-stop when the person on stage attempts to tell a funny story between songs, the beefy dude who won’t budge when you attempt to recover your spot on the floor after hitting the bathroom.

I refer instead to the epidemic of phones. Some artists apparently find them anathema to the concert experience. Last month, Mitski took to Twitter to complain about fans using their phones to film her performances. In Jerry-like fashion, she declared that phones can get in the way of living in the moment. “When I’m on stage and look to you but you are gazing into a screen,” she wrote, “it makes me feel as though those of us on stage are being taken from and consumed as content, instead of getting to share a moment with you.”

Jack White — possibly the most anti-phone musician on the planet — has gone as far as to confiscate phones from fans before they’re permitted into his concerts. And he’s defended this, again, using “Jerry at the Watts Towers” logic. “I want people to live in the moment, and it’s funny that the easiest way to rebel is to tell people to turn off their phone,” he said in 2018. “If your phone is that important to you that you can’t live without it for two hours then I don’t know. Maybe it’s time to see a therapist.”

As was the case when I watched Long Strange Trip, I can certainly understand where the anti-phone people are coming from. The prevalence of phones in every facet of our lives can seem oppressive and even anti-human. We are all stuck living a highly mediated existence in which we are cut off by technology from the primal immediacy of the natural world. If you have the courage to stand on stage in front of thousands of people in order to expose your very soul via your art, I’m sure it can be disconcerting to look out and see rows and rows of gadgets made in sweatshops staring back at you.

Personally, I try not to use my phone at concerts. Occasionally, if I have downed one too many beers, I will tweet an over-enthusiastic assessment of how my face is being rocked off my head and in the process use too many exclamation points. (I apologize for this.) But I’m not one who is generally into shooting videos or taking pictures. For the most part, I guess, I subscribe to the idea that concerts are great because they are fleeting, and you have to hold on to them with your own personal memories.

But here’s the thing: I’m happy not everyone is like me. In other words, I think the Watts Towers are cool and I’m glad they exist, even though I would never spend three decades building art out of garbage. Similarly, I’m grateful that I can go on YouTube and see literally millions of shaky, grainy, and sometimes shitty videos of wonderful performances I wouldn’t get to see or hear otherwise.

Just last week, someone posted a video of My Morning Jacket performing the Rolling Stones’ “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking” with Phish’s Trey Anastasio in Mexico. It appears that the person who filmed it was standing about 100 feet from the stage, so it’s not a great angle. You don’t ever get a close up of the musicians. The sound quality is decent but I wouldn’t want to hear it on a Dolby system. Nevertheless — as a person who enjoys MMJ, the Rolling Stones, and Trey Anastasio — I was delighted by the video. Was it Jonathan Demme directing Stop Making Sense? No. But it brightened my day.

I have had countless other experiences with fan-shot videos over the years, both as a fan and as a music critic. When I wrote recently about The War On Drugs’ current tour, I was enriched greatly by the scores of videos that concert attendees have posted, including several complete shows. When I was unable to attend a local Turnstile gig, the raucous clips circulating on social media provided a methadone fix (while also exacerbating my FOMO). When weighing the pros and cons of purchasing a concert ticket, I have often consulted YouTube to determine whether the money is worth it.

And then there’s the documentary aspect of these clips. The era of phones capable of shooting decent-ish video is still relatively young. We can’t fully appreciate yet how these amateur-made mini-movies will affect how music history is written. But it seems clear that the ability for anyone to collect sounds and images in the live-concert wild will inform how the music of today is remembered many years from now. These videos won’t have to be filtered through the perspectives of filmmakers or journalists with their retrospective biases. It will be raw data available for anyone to appreciate in the future. All because the person next to you took out his stupid phone last night and filmed the set’s hottest banger.

There’s an assumption, I think, on the part of anti-phone artists that people who shoot video of a concert are more enamored with their phone doing something cool than with the music. And maybe that’s true for some or even most people. But there are also those who wind up sharing those videos with the rest of us, and I would argue that they are providing a service that benefits fans and, yes, artists. (That is, unless you suck at performing live. Then posting video evidence might in fact be a hindrance.)

Circling back to the “Jerry at Watts Towers” story: For an artist, there’s obvious merit in approaching a concert as a once-in-a-lifetime proposition, because it gives every performance the urgent edge it needs. But for us listeners, having the ability to revisit great performances of the past also has obvious merit. Imagine if phones had existed during all of the legendary concerts of the past that technology wasn’t around to document — the premiere of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the first performance of Stravinsky’s The Rite Of Spring, any barroom gig by Robert Johnson. Even Jack White would probably be probably psyched to see that last one.

For all of the irritating aspects of ubiquitous phone use, documenting live music performances for the sake of posterity strikes me as a rare positive attribute. That doesn’t mean I won’t get mad if your phone blocks my view. But as long as the phone people aren’t impeding on the experience of their fellow audience members, I see little harm and lots of good that come from their efforts. Living in the moment is essential. But making the moment last for others has value, too.

This past weekend, Saweetie was honored with the Game Changer Award at Billboard‘s 14th annual Women In Music event in Inglewood. While the Bay Area rapper behind “My Type” and “Best Friend” also performed the new track “Closer”with HER at the event, it was her date for the evening who had everyone talking.

Saweetie’s mom, Trinidad Valentin, actually presented the Game Changer Award to her daughter. Before the show, Saweetie posted a series of selfies on her Instagram and her Twitter accounts of her and Valentin’s look for the evening. It didn’t take long for social media to be ablaze and in disbelief that her Mom looked very much like she could’ve been her sister.

“Momma ate her up. Also if you told me that saweetie’s mom was a secret older sister of Jhene Aiko I would definitely believe you,” one user said, while another replied on Twitter, “Your mom!? If you said your sister I so would have believed you.” “Yall look like sisters. Not mom and daughter,” said one Instagram commenter. Another simply cited how they both looked stunning with, “She literally get it from her mama, beautiful!”

The caption on Saweetie’s post says “mahal kita mamaaa,” which in Tagalog means “I love you mom.” It’s a nod to Saweetie’s Filipino heritage from her mother’s side. Check out the photos on Saweeties’s Instagram below.

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

Russell Westbrook’s first season with the Lakers has been about as rough as anyone could’ve imagined, as the former MVP has struggled to find his place within the hierarchy of L.A.’s new Big Three in the sporadic time they’ve had all together, much less when the roster has been in flux due to injuries and absences.

Westbrook has clashed with the coaching staff at times over rotations and being sat at the end of games when he’s had a poor night, and at the February trade deadline there was considerable buzz that the Lakers were trying to find a way to move him but ultimately weren’t willing to give up a first round pick to make that happen. What we are left with is an awkward situation that will now drag on into the summer, when L.A. will again have to make a decision on Westbrook’s future with the team, and in the meantime he will continue playing things out on a Lakers team that is mired in the bottom half of the West, scrapping for a play-in spot, far from the contender they planned to be.

The Lakers problems go far beyond Westbrook, but he is the starting point for most all criticism and his struggles make for an easy target. While critiques aren’t new for Westbrook, playing on the Lakers brings a new level of scrutiny and every game makes for new fodder for the A-block of national sports TV shows. On Tuesday, Nina Westbrook took to Twitter to call out Skip Bayless for being “childish” with his constant talk about Russell and called for him to apologize, before offering up more thoughts on what she and her family deal with from fans.

After the Lakers loss to the Spurs on Tuesday night, Westbrook addressed his wife’s tweets and opened up in a way he rarely does about how this season is affecting him and his family.

Harrison Faigen provided a full transcript of his statement, as he spoke on how it’s weighing on his family and why the name-calling at games has hit him so hard recently after seeing his son be so proud of his last name.

It is incredibly sad that Westbrook feels he can’t bring his family to any games, even at home, without them dealing with harassment. One of the main reasons Westbrook wanted to get traded to Los Angeles was to be closer to his family, and for that to be soured the way it has is unfortunate.