Month: May 2022

Rihanna looks like she could pop any day now — mazeltov! — and since Sunday was Mother’s Day, one of the music industry’s best-known moms gave the expecting Rihanna some parenting advice. Caught by TMZ leaving New York restaurant Carbone with Offset and Kulture, Cardi B offered some words of wisdom for her imminent peer in both motherhood and music.

Asked whether she had any advice for motherhood for Rihanna, she counseled, “It comes so naturally. It really comes naturally. So many people give you advice. Once [the baby is] in there, that mother instinct comes out.” Unfortunately, the mom and the mom-to-be haven’t gotten the chance to hang out lately, but perhaps a play date or two with Cardi’s youngest is possible once Rihanna and ASAP Rocky’s baby pops out.

Meanwhile, Cardi’s recent social media venting sessions about the drawbacks of fame prompted TMZ’s photographer to hope Cardi wouldn’t give up on music. However, it looks like the “Up” rapper has no plans to retire anytime soon. “I would never leave music,” she asserted. “No, I was talking about the internet. Girl, I would never leave music, that’s my bread and butter. Who gonna stop eating bread and butter?” That’s something she has in common with Rihanna as well.

You can watch the video on TMZ.

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

Four of the six major NBA awards have already been officially handed out, with Scottie Barnes winning Rookie of the Year, Ja Morant winning Most Improved Player, Tyler Herro winning Sixth Man of the Year, and Marcus Smart earning Defensive Player of the Year, leaving just MVP and Coach of the Year to go.

While those will not be officially announced until later this month, Monday brought word of the winners of both of those awards. Early in the morning, word broke that Nikola Jokic was taking home back-to-back MVP awards, edging out Joel Embiid and Giannis Antetokounmpo, while in the afternoon Shams Charania of The Athletic reported Suns coach Monty Williams would be named Coach of the Year.

The news was quickly confirmed by Devin Booker, who says an announcement will come officially on Monday.

Williams had already earned Coach of the Year honors from his fellow coaches and will now add the league’s award, as voted on by the media, to his mantle. The Suns had the best record in the NBA this season, a year after winning the Western Conference and reaching the NBA Finals. Williams beat out Miami head coach Erik Spoelstra and Memphis’ Taylor Jenkins for the honor.

Songs don’t debut at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart all that often: Of the 1,137 songs that have ever topped the chart in its history, just 61 of them debuted on top. It’s become a more common feat recently, though, as 33 of those No. 1 debuts arrived in 2018 or later. These totals all count the latest one from today, as Future, Drake, and Tems’ “Wait For U” is now the 61st song to debut at No. 1.

This was big for Drake, as it made him the first rapper with ten No. 1 singles. It was also a major moment for Future, as it made him just the fifth artist to ever have a song debut at No. 1 on the Hot 100 and an album (I Never Liked You) premiere on top of the Billboard 200 in the same week.

This is a historic moment for Tems, too: The Nigerian singer is now officially the first artist from Africa to have a song debut at No. 1 on the Hot 100. She’s also only the second Nigerian artist to go No. 1 at all; Wizkid did it first when he was featured on Drake’s No. 1 hit “One Dance” in 2016.

This is also Tems’ second top-10 single, as her and Wizkid’s “Essence” peaked at No. 9 in 2021.

Obi-Wan Kenobi is already in a dire position at the start of his new Disney+ series, and now, he’s up against an even more unstoppable villain than Darth Vader: The Emmys. According to a new report, Obi-Wan Kenobi will not be eligible for the 2022 Primetime Emmy Awards thanks to the series premiering just shy of the cutoff date for eligible shows. Obi-Wan premieres on May 27 and won’t conclude until late June, which puts it afoul of the guidelines for series with “hanging episodes.”

Of course, there is a way for Obi-Wan to maneuver into this year’s nominations, but it would require the highly secretive Lucasfilm to make the show’s final episodes privately available to Academy members, and that’s not happening. Spoilers would be all over the internet in hours.

Via Variety:

The “Obi-Wan” finale is scheduled to drop on June 22, after the start of nomination voting. So unless Disney decides to release the final two episodes on June 15 and (and far less likely) make the episodes available to the over 20,000 TV Academy members only ahead of its Disney+ debut, the show will have to sit this year out.

At the end of the day, missing the cutoff doesn’t mean that Obi-Wan is out of luck when it comes to Emmy nominations. It just means the new Star Wars series will have to wait until 2023 to be fully eligible. However, it could have at least one or two other Star Wars series to contend with in that window, as The Mandalorian Season 3 and Andor are both expected to drop within the year.

Obi-Wan Kenobi premieres May 27 on Disney+.

(Via Variety)

Good news, comic book (and Vince Staples) fans: This month, after four months of delays, Vince’s Z2 comic book, Limbo Beach, finally arrives. The book, which was announced in June 2021, will finally be arriving in “mid-May,” according to an update sent by Z2 Comics last month, and to celebrate, Vince has announced the Limbo Beach Carnival in his hometown, Long Beach, taking place on Thursday, May 12 at El Dorado Park. Vince’s dedication to The Beach is well-known thanks to his musical shout-outs and a wealth of local events, such as the Limbo Beach Carnival, and his appearance at the Activate Uptown block party in 2016.

Staples is fresh off the release of his newest album, Ramona Park Broke My Heart, named for the neighborhood in which he grew up in Long Beach. The project was his most commercially-appealing effort yet, led by the Mustard-produced single “Magic” and featuring introspective but enticing cuts such as “Rose Street” and “When Sparks Fly.” He recently performed the album in its entirety as part of a livestreaming special, Ramona Park Broke My Heart: The Musical on Moment House.

And as far as Limbo Beach goes, you can find out more on Z2 Comics’ website. It’s written by Vince Staples, Bryan Edward Hill, and Chris Robinson, illustrated by Buster Moody, and available in standard softcover and hardcover, deluxe, and super deluxe editions with plenty of goodies for hardcore fans.

As the 2022 WNBA season got started this weekend, there was once again ample discussion about the roster crunch teams face and the number of quality players that find themselves getting cut at the end of training camps. This year saw some eyebrow raising cuts, like Te’a Cooper from the Sparks and Layshia Clarendon and Crystal Dangerfield from the Lynx, and players and fans alike pointed to there being only 144 roster spots in the 12-team league as the biggest problem for the WNBA right now.

While expanded rosters would help, the way to open more spots for players would be expansion, which the league understands and commissioner Cathy Engelbert told the Seattle Times over the weekend that the goal is to add “two expansion teams in the next few years,” bringing the league to 14 teams.

“We’re transforming the economics of the league,” Engelbert said. “We want to bring new owners into the league longer term. We need to find the right time to do that. We’re doing a lot of data analysis. … We’ll continue to do that analysis and hopefully this summer at some point we’ll be able to say more. But we want to be thoughtful about it.”

“We don’t want to jeopardize the momentum we have, but we understand the issue about roster sizes,” she said. “But when you’re a country the size and scale of ours and you’re only in 12 cities, growing the league is a way to do that as well. Then you open up roster spots. I don’t think it’s about rosters per team. It’s about more opportunities to play for more players to play.”

Expansion is something WNBA fans and players have been wanting for years, and the league pulling in $75 million in investments from various companies and improved national TV deals shows that positive momentum the WNBA has right now. The biggest stumbling block towards expansion isn’t a lack of interest from the outside, but the internal battle among league owners that came to light this offseason.

The league’s $500,000 fine of Liberty owner Joe Tsai for booking charter flights for the team over the second half of last season showed the fracture at the ownership level, where new owners like Tsai, Mark Davis, and Marc Lore come in as owners of large men’s teams and want to provide that level of investment into facilities, staffing, and travel are butting heads with longtime WNBA ownership groups that don’t have that same level of cash flow. For now, the old ownership groups have the majority, but every expansion team figures to close that gap as one would expect owners of new teams to be in that Tsai/Davis/Lore realm.

Adding two teams rather than a larger expansion would be a middle ground of bringing more money into the league while also not guaranteeing that massive changes will come immediately to how teams are expected to spend on their teams — which is why expanded roster sizes or a developmental league funded by teams is likely not something that they could get the Board of Governors on board for right now.

As for where the two new teams will play, that likewise remains to be seen, but there are plenty of potential investors that have made clear they want a WNBA franchise in their city, from old homes of early WNBA franchises like Houston to new potential homes like Toronto (where Drake wants in if the league heads north of the border).

It’s a good time to be Future right now: His new album I Never Liked You just debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart thanks to the biggest week of 2022. Now, Future is on top of the Hot 100, too: On the new chart dated May 14, Future, Drake, and Tems’ “Wait For U” debuts at No. 1.

This is big for Drake, too, as it makes him the first rapper with ten No. 1 songs and one of just a few artists to ever notch that many. He, Janet Jackson, and Stevie Wonder each have ten, Whitney Houston has 11, Madonna and The Supremes have 12, Michael Jackson has 13, Rihanna has 14, Mariah Carey has 19, and The Beatles have 20.

Meanwhile, this latest entry extends a number of records Drake already held: He now has 262 total Hot 100 entries, 147 top-40 entries, 55 top-10 entries, and 40 top-ten debuts, all of which are the most of all time.

It’s not just Drake making history, though, as Future is now just the fifth artist in history to have a song debut at No. 1 on the Hot 100 and an album premiere on top of the Billboard 200 in the same week.

Future also has a few other songs in the top ten: “Puffin On Zootiez” is No. 4, “712PM” is No. 8, and “I’m Dat N****” is No. 10. All songs from the standard edition of I Never Liked You are actually on the Hot 100 this week, bringing Future’s career total to 149 songs to ever appear on the chart. That moves him to fifth all time, behind Taylor Swift (16), Lil Wayne (180), Glee (262), and Drake (262).

I’m not going to say it’s all been downhill for Netflix since American Vandal was canceled. But I’m also not not saying it…

The mockumentary was one of the best shows of 2017 and a Peabody winner; you couldn’t go anywhere without someone asking, “Do you know who drew the d*cks?” (I might be misremembering things slightly, but seriously, it was excellent.) Season two, which focused on the Turd Burglar, was also good. American Vandal unfortunately wasn’t brought back for a third season about boogers, or whatever, but creators Tony Yacenda and Dan Perrault have returned with a new series that focuses on eSports.

Players is a “comedic documentary-style series that follows a fictional pro League of Legends esports team, as they pursue their first championship after years of close calls and heartache. To win it all, they will need their prodigy, a 17-year-old rookie, and their 27-year-old veteran to put their egos aside and work together,” according to the official plot description from Paramount+. If you can’t laugh at a cocky eSports player who goes by the moniker “Cream Cheese,” well, you probably didn’t think the spray-painted dicks were funny either. That sounds like a “you” problem.

Players, which stars Noh Arrow Dong-Hyeon, Michael “Miko” Ahn, Misha Brooks, Da’Jour Jones, and Youngbin Chung, premieres on Paramount+ on June 16.

While Kendrick Lamar‘s surprise release of “The Heart Part 5” caused excitement for many fans all over the internet this past weekend, one person, in particular, feels slighted by the video: New Jersey rapper AK is accusing the Damn artist of stealing the deepfake concept from his 2020 video “Family Tree.”

Much like “The Heart Part 5,” “Family Tree” features AK morphing his face into Eminem, Snoop Dogg, Jay-Z, Lil Wayne, and coincidentally, Lamar himself. In Lamar’s video, he morphs into Will Smith, Jussie Smollett, Kobe Bryant and Nipsey Hussle. AK stated in a Monday morning Instagram video, “Maybe I’m fooling myself for thinking that Kendrick saw my video and was like, ‘Damn, that’s so good that I want to do it myself.’”

He continued, “I was under Universal; he is under Universal. I did that video in 2020 with Universal. Obviously, the song didn’t do as good as if Kendrick was to do it, but the concept was so sick and I f*cking don’t know, but it’s the same exact thing — it’s a backdrop, it’s him in front of it, it’s one take.”

AK closed the video by speaking on the challenges independent artists face, as many have come out over the years saying bigger acts have stolen their ideas as well. Kendrick Lamar likely won’t respond to the allegations, but his final TDE album Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers does release this Friday, May 13.

Senator Ted Cruz is getting publicly trolled by his constituents once again, but this time it’s got nothing to do with fleeing his home state during the middle of a devastating snowstorm for a poorly-timed trip south of the border.

Cruz, who’s pretty much universally disliked in the state of Texas at this point, was recently called out by the father of a Marine who was jailed in Russian two years ago. Trevor Reed was arrested for allegedly grabbing a Russian police officer after a night of drinking in Moscow in 2019. He was sentenced to nine years in prison, despite insufficient evidence that he had done anything wrong. His family, including his father Joey Reed, has worked tirelessly ever since, trying to overturn that decision and get him home. And they’ve had bipartisan help from officials in their state to do it with Republican Senator John Cornyn and Representative Michael McCaul and Democratic Representatives Sheila Jackson Lee and Joaquin Castro pressing Russia to free Reed. But one proud Texan who apparently didn’t care to get the serviceman released was Cruz and now that Reed is back on American soil his family isn’t letting the GOP slacker forget it.

After Cruz shared a statement on Twitter expressing his relief that Reed had been freed, the Marine’s family accused him of jumping on the good press bandwagon.

“He didn’t do anything,” Joey Reed told The Dallas Morning News. “He’s an embarrassment to the state of Texas, let me just say that. I don’t care what or who runs against him, I will work for their campaign to defeat that son of a b*tch.”

According to Reed’s family, they begged for Cruz’s help years ago and were told the Senator didn’t feel comfortably publicly supporting the military man’s release “out of concern for antagonizing Russian strongman Vladimir Putin.” Cruz suggested any official statement he made supporting Reed’s fight might negatively affect his chances of getting out of prison because Cruz is “such an enemy of Putin.” The only problem? We’re pretty sure Cruz isn’t even on Putin’s radar at the moment, something an expert that the paper talked to for the story later confirmed.

“He is not held in a special category by Russian diplomats, I can tell you that as a fact,” Jeremi Suri, a professor of history and public policy at the University of Texas at Austin told Dallas Morning News. “Oftentimes, the State Department does ask senators and members of the House to quiet down on certain things, but rarely, rarely if ever, has Senator Cruz followed that. So it would be strange if in this case, he listened.”

Really it just sounds like Cruz didn’t care about bringing the Marine home but he wants to take some kind of credit for it. That’s not surprising, but it’s also something the Reed family isn’t about to let fly.

(Via The Dallas Morning News)