Month: April 2022

Donald Trump is getting blasted after a recent appearance on Fox News where he touted the “beautiful” supply chains that he had during his administration. Supply chains so perfect, he never had to even talk about them. Despite being president when the coronavirus pandemic threw the global economy into disarray and led to supermarkets rationing paper products due to widespread shortages, Trump slammed Joe Biden’s administration for leaving stores “half-empty.”

“You go to stores and they’re half empty. Many stores, they can’t get product. They can’t get anything,” Trump ranted. “You go to luxury stores or non-luxuy stores or supermarkets, and the shelves, or in some cases, half-bare. And nobody’s ever seen it. We didn’t even have to discuss supply chains during my administration because it was a perfect moving machine. It was beautiful.”

Obviously, anyone who was alive during the opening months of the pandemic remembers when store shelves really were bare as supermarkets struggled to restock from a combination of supply chain disruptions and a lack of labor. In fact, one particular item became increasingly difficult to obtain: toilet paper. Not being able to handle your bathroom business isn’t something Americans easily forget, and Trump found himself being roasted on social media by people who distinctly recall the outrageous lengths they went to for toilet tissue.

Let the reactions below be a lesson to future politicians. Deprive Americans of their Charmin at your own peril.

(Via Acyn on Twitter)

Bluegrass and Americana favorite Billy Strings is fresh off some decent exposure, as he performed on the outdoor stage at the 2022 Grammys, where he also had a pair of nominations. He’s also captured the attention of at least one household name: Post Malone, who joined Strings on stage last night for a cover of Johnny Cash’s “Cocaine Blues.”

Yesterday, Strings and his band performed at The Observatory in Santa Ana, California, where Malone unexpectedly popped up. Strings introduced Malone, saying, “I saw this guy lurking around backstage and figured we gotta drag him up here to f*ckin’ sing for us.” Posty then offered a compliment, saying, “Billy Strings is the best to ever f*ckin’ do it.”

They then launched into the cover, with Malone strumming an acoustic guitar as he sang lead vocals on the bluegrass rendition of the song. When Malone wasn’t singing, he was smiling, and based on the audience reaction, it looked like a good time was had by all.

This comes shortly after Dre London, Malone’s manager, claimed Posty’s next album, Twelve Carat Toothache, is slated for a May release, which has yet to be confirmed by Malone himself.

Watch Malone and Strings cover “Cocaine Blues” above.

Meek Mill has been on a bit of a rebellious streak lately, speaking out against music industry practices he sees as outdated or unfair. After Kanye West posted several pages of record deal revisions to Twitter in 2020, Meek claimed he wanted to do the same in 2021, writing, “I’m about to make my record deal public… just to let the world see what these people on!”

While he never quite followed through on that particular threat, he has continued to air out his issues with the recording industry. Most recently, he denounced the industry’s modern emphasis on publicizing first-week album sales numbers. In Meek’s opinion, this is an unhealthy way to do business; it unfairly hurts the public perception of artists and how their labels deal with them. He also believes that labels have more control over those statistics than they let on.

“We don’t go off first week numbers,” he wrote. “Labels run that shit … and most of the numbers be fake … you can clearly see all the artist that’s killing shit! Focus on your brand and impact!!” In a follow-up tweet, he described what he believes is the detrimental effect this is having on the music business. “They crashing the rap game out,” he predicted. “That everybody drop on Friday bs …. Wtf is that … why would you want to sell your product on the same day as the competition… for a billboard look? lol what does that do for the artist?”

While Meek’s issues appear to be with the recording industry in general, his MMG boss Rick Ross doesn’t believe Meek has issues with MMG. Rather, Ross recently said he thinks Meek’s label complaints are focused on Atlantic Records, which currently distributes his music.

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

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: it’s always a good idea to rewatch last season’s finale before the new season’s premiere. This is extra true when the TV show has been away for over two years, like Better Call Saul. But if you don’t have time to re-watch the finale, you can always read our recap of the episode or — because in the immortal words of Penny from Happy Endings, “Reading is stupid, TV rules” — check out AMC’s helpful video summary of everything that happened in season five.

It’s 15 minutes of Saul schemes, Kim breaking bad, and Mike doing Mike things, like scowling and furrowing his brows. The recap ends with Nacho helping to stage an unsuccessful raid of Lalo’s house and Kim shooting her finger guns at Saul, followed by a reminder of where we left Cinnabon Gene. “Say… it.” “Better Call Saul.”

Speaking of Gene, Bob Odenkirk wouldn’t say how Saul ends up in Omaha, but he did offer his theory for what happens to Kim (this was before he read the series finale script). “I don’t think she dies,” the Emmy nominee said. “I think she’s in Albuquerque, and she’s still practicing law. He’s still crossing paths with her. To me, that would fuel his desire to be on billboards everywhere, because he wants her to see him.”

Better Call Saul returns on April 18, followed by the second half of the season on July 11.

It finally dawned on me about halfway through The Northman that the name of the protagonist, “Amleth,” an 8th century Viking prince on a mission to avenge the death of his father at the hands of his uncle, might be a play on “Hamlet.” Maybe I’m a little slow on the uptake. Maybe that’s why I can rarely fully appreciate Shakespeare. When I’m watching a Shakespeare adaptation, I usually find myself thinking “Why couldn’t they have done a little more, you know, adapting?”

And yet here was The Northman, doing what I’d always wanted a Shakespeare adaptation to do: make me feel the way people who love Shakespeare must feel when they watch it, the way Shakespeare’s patrons must’ve felt in his own time. The Northman is like that, this grand goth spectacle with a story that moves like music and characters who are as much fable and myth as they are people, recognizably human but slightly unknowable and awe-inspiring, like old testament gods.

Admittedly, that makes The Northman sound a lot more cerebral than it actually is. Make no mistake, director Robert Eggers (who co-wrote the script, with Lamb co-writer Sjón) is certainly a cerebral guy, who attempted to resurrect a dead dialect for his debut feature, The Witch. Yet The Northman feels more like the movie Glenn Danzig would’ve made if Glenn Danzig was the Danzig of Misfits fans’ imagination (rather than a sort of goth Tommy Wiseau).

The Northman is Shakespeare, but it’s also a movie about muscular shirtless men growling at each other. For me, it was near perfect. “The director of The Witch made a Norwegian black metal Hamlet starring Alexander Skarsgard” is the kind of simple declarative sentence that functions as the rave it’s intended to be.

This is a movie in which a seer tells Amleth that he will one day have to choose between love of his kin and hate for his enemies. Because this is a Robert Eggers movie, you can practically hear Danzig bellowing “I CHOOOOSE HAAAAAAAATE” over chugging power chords. The Northman is a beautiful goth fantasy, not a fairy tale, and logic will always take a backseat to lurid violence and operatic conflict.

Alexander Skarsgard plays Amleth, and well, he’s kind of an intense guy. In the opening frame, adolescent Amleth greets his father (Ethan Hawke), returning from battle. A ghoulish jester/prophet played by Willem Dafoe (absolutely as great as that collection of words would suggest) takes them deep into a cave for some kind of ceremony where they pretend to be wolves. Ethan Hawke burps. Young Amleth farts. Success! But just when they’re about to really get their dog-man on, Amleth’s uncle, officially listed on IMDB as “Fjolnir the Brotherless” (Claes Bang) murders Amleth’s father and carries off his mother, Gudrún (Nicole Kidman).

Young Amleth escapes his attackers (gorily, somehow), hops in a boat, and rows seemingly straight out to sea. With every stroke he repeats his vow to kill his uncle, avenge his father, and save his mother like an Arya Stark incantation.

We skip from there straight to adult Amleth, living in the land of Rus and carrying on the various family traditions: raping, pillaging, shirtlessness, bellowing. He’s graduated from wolf cub to bear, belonging to a pillaging troupe who growl like bears before sacking mud-caked villages (God, so much mud). According to Eggers, there’s nothing 8th-century Vikings liked more than taking psychedelic drugs and growling like animals in a sort of Scandinavian equivalent of the Haka. It’s the BERSERKER legend at its most stylized. (It should be noted that both berserker, “bear warriors,” and úlfhéðnar, “wolf warriors,” are ideas taken directly from history).

Upon discovering that Fjolnir the Brotherless has emigrated to Iceland, Amleth disguises himself as a slave, complete with branded skin, in order to gain passage. Did I mention Amleth is kind of intense? He willingly gives up his status as a prominent bear warrior to become the lowliest of the low, a slave, just so that he can murder a dude who has already been exiled to a barren wasteland. This is exactly the kind of guy whose contemporary ancestors heard English heavy metal and didn’t realize the satanic thing was a bit, so they invented Norwegian black metal and started burning down churches and killing each other.

On the slow boat to Iceland (God, that must’ve sucked) Amleth meets a Slavic witch (“Olga of the Birch Forest,” played by Anya Taylor-Joy). The two kind of hit it off, and thus, all the pieces for Amleth’s big choice between family and vengeance are now in place.

The reason I love Robert Eggers is that he tells stories in such a way that the fantastic is real. The characters in The Witch and The Northman don’t battle spirits and demons and have prophetic drug-fueled visions because Eggers is taking liberties, they do these things because that’s how people in the 8th and 16th centuries genuinely understood their world. For them, the fantastic was reality. That’s how Eggers treats it, and if we the audience get to live deliciously in the process, so much the better.

The Northman is one of the few movies I’ve seen in which the Shakespearian style of operatic plotting, with characters whose choices are meant to evoke the poles of human nature and ring of universal truths, actually works. That’s largely because Eggers’ vision is so unabashedly extreme and fully realized that it works as spectacle even when the characters behave more like ancient legends than people (and I suspect this is exactly how Shakespeare’s plays were intended to function).

The language itself isn’t necessarily Shakespearian, and, thanks to a combination of muddy sound mix and foreign actors attempting fictional accents, it’s at least 35% unintelligible. Nor is it overtly comedic, but it carries with it the unmistakable whiff of a screenwriter who was having fun. There was zero chance I wasn’t going to love a movie that allows Alexander Skarsgard to growl the line “Fjolnir is fortunate that a woman’s tide is the only blood that flowed inside his house tonight.”

Thank God for Robert Eggers. He’s one of the best we’ve got. I can’t wait to rewatch The Northman with the subtitles on.

Vince Mancini is on Twitter. More reviews here.

Welp, it finally happened. Elon Musk is trying to buy Twitter. After the Tesla CEO rejected an offer to join the social media company’s board of directors, analysts predicted his was laying the groundwork for a hostile takeover. That day has arrived. Musk has offered Twitter a $41 billion cash offer along with a plan to take the company private.

“Twitter has extraordinary potential. I will unlock it,” Musk said in a letter to the company’s board. Via Reuters:

Musk, who calls himself a free-speech absolutist, has been critical of the social media platform and its policies, and recently ran a poll on Twitter asking users if they believed it adheres to the principle of free speech.

“My offer is my best and final offer and if it is not accepted, I would need to reconsider my position as a shareholder,” Musk added.

Musk’s offer arrives after a week of messiness. Following Twitter announcing that Musk rejected the company’s offer to join the board of directors, which raised speculation that he didn’t want to submit to a background check, the Tesla CEO was sued by shareholders a few days later over his failure to report to the SEC that he purchased more than 5% of Twitter’s shares. However, that clearly has not impeded Musk’s hopes to takeover the company.

You can read Musk’s full letter to Twitter’s board below:

Chairman of the Board,

I invested in Twitter as I believe in its potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe, and I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy.

However, since making my investment I now realize the company will neither thrive nor serve this societal imperative in its current form. Twitter needs to be transformed as a private company.

As a result, I am offering to buy 100% of Twitter for $54.20 per share in cash, a 54% premium over the day before I began investing in Twitter and a 38% premium over the day before my investment was publicly announced. My offer is my best and final offer and if it is not accepted, I would need to reconsider my position as a shareholder.

Twitter has extraordinary potential. I will unlock it.

Elon Musk

(Via Reuters)

On April 20, 2021, almost a year ago today, Michelle Zauner (of Japanese Breakfast fame) released Crying In H Mart, her debut book that was a runaway success. It’s a vulnerable work, in which Zauner discusses her mother’s battle with cancer and eventual death. Now, as the book approaches its one-year anniversary, Zauner has taken a moment to share some thoughts on it and her mother.

In a tweet consisting of screenshots of her Instagram Story, Zauner starts with a screenshot of Crying In H Mart on the New York Times Bestsellers List and notes, “Next week my little book will have been out in the world for one whole year. And as of today it has spent 38 WEEKS on the @nytimes Bestsellers List [exploding head emoji].”

The next slide features a photo of Zauner’s mother and reads, “Thx for looking out for me 엄마,” with the Korean word translating to “mom.” The text continues, “I love this photo. I make this face all the time. This is the face I’m making rn thinking about how crazy it is that a book where I basically just unearthed our family’s greatest tragedies and tried to make sense of the wreckage has gone on to become this runaway bestseller.”

The next photo is of Zauner crying and she wrote, “And all the tears I cried and all the days I wanted to give up because I felt too stupid and sad to finish.” The final image is of a young Zauner and her mother, accompanied by the text, “And now the world has fallen in love with your character and cries for you too.”

Find Zauner’s post above.

For those who channel the power of Mariah Carey in every aspect of their lives, Mimi is finally giving the Lamb-ily a look at her creative process. Carey has partnered with Masterclass for a nine-video online series, in which she shows writers how to take care of their voices, work around samples, and navigate the music industry. As part of her Masterclass, Carey has released a re-recording of one of her fan-favorite cuts, “The Roof,” this time, featuring singer Brandy.

“The Roof” was first released as a solo track on Carey’s 1997 Butterfly album. “The Roof” failed to chart in the US, but the song and its video remain a fan favorite.

In one of the Masterclass videos, Carey can be seen coaching Brandy throughout the process of arranging and recording the track.

“I’ve never let cameras in when I am creating — not when I’m writing, and especially not when I’m singing,” said Carey in a statement. “But now I’m taking MasterClass members into my studio to show them how they can write and produce music using their voice and become anything they want to be as long as they create, re-create, reimagine, and reinvent.”

The new version of the roof will be released exclusively with the Masterclass. Fans can access the Masterclass via a $15 monthly subscription to Masterclass, and can also take online lessons from Usher, St. Vincent, and Timbaland.

Some of the chapters for Carey’s Masterclass include “Writing With Samples,” “Producing With Your Voice,” “Taking Care of Your Voice,” “Surviving in the Music Industry,” and “Lyricism: Write About the Realness.”

“Mariah is simply a genius,” said David Rogier, founder and CEO of MasterClass, in a statement. “She’s one of the greatest artists of all time. In her class, Mariah is opening up her studio for the first time ever, teaching members how to use their voice throughout the music-making process, including in the studio and while navigating the industry.”

Check out the trailer for the Masterclass above.

There are few things Jimmy Kimmel derives more pleasure from than finding new reasons to poke at Ted Cruz, and this week gave him a doozy of a story. While giving a talk at Yale University recently, a young man named Evan stood up and asked the Texas senator a question that seemed straightforward enough: “Assuming it would end global hunger, would you fellate another man?”

While Cruz was visibly taken aback by the question, which rendered him absolutely speechless, Kimmel sees this brave exchange as proof that the future might be in safe hands after all. “Most people my age don’t have anything nice to say about the kids nowadays,” Kimmel explained. “They say they’re lazy and entitled and too sensitive. But then a young man like this comes around [and] it gives you real hope for the future of this country.”

While Cruz attempted to recover, his co-host—political pundit and Yale grad Michael Knowles—took one for the team, so to speak, and decided to try and knock young Evan down a peg by conservative-splaining that, “Like a typical left-wing undergraduate, you are engaging in consequentialist ethics” before answering “absolutely not.”

Kimmel suspects that if Cruz had answered, and been honest, “Only if that man was Donald Trump” would be more accurate. Still, he thinks it was “a really good question,” especially as “Ted Cruz can unhinge his jaw like a rat snake.”

You can watch the full clip above.