Month: June 2022

Back in February, Kanye West released his eleventh album Donda 2 just six months after he dropped Donda which topped the albums chart to be his tenth No. 1 release. Donda 2 was a unique project as Kanye opted to drop it exclusively on his Stem Player website, making it only available to those who purchase the Stem Player device. It was uploaded with 16 songs and features from Future, Migos, Jack Harlow, the late XXTENTACION, Vory, Alicia Keys, Fivio Foreign, Soulja Boy, Sean Leon, Baby Keem, Travis Scott, and Don Toliver. Now, four months later, one of the album’s songs has earned Kanye West a lawsuit.

According to Billboard, a complaint was filed in U.S. District Court in New York on Wednesday that accused Kanye of wrongfully sampling Marshall Jefferson’s 1986 house track “Move Your Body,” aka “The House Music Anthem,” on “Flowers” from Donda 2 without permission or providing compensation. The filing says the sample was used “at least 22 times throughout” the song.

The complaint was filed by attorneys Christine Lepera and Bradley J. Mullins of the firm Mitchell Silberberg & Knupp and brought forth by Jefferson’s publisher Ultra International Music Publishing (UMP). “Defendants’ conduct is willful and deliberate,” the complaint reads. “Defendants know and have been informed that they do not possess a license to utilize the Composition in the Unauthorized Work, and yet continue to willfully infringe in blatant disregard of UIMP’s rights of ownership.”

As a result, UMP is requesting a “preliminary and permanent injunction enjoining and restraining Defendants” and their associates from using the “Move Your Body” sample as well profits and damages in an amount to be determined at trial. Alternatively, they will seek statutory damages of $150,000 per infringement, attorneys’ fees and the full cost of the lawsuit, and prejudgement interest.

Alex Klein, who co-created the Stem Player, was also named in the complaint as was Klein’s company Kano Computing Limited.

Drake is no stranger to internet culture. For over a decade, lines from his songs have spawned internet hashtags like “#YOLO,” as well as several Instagram captions. Not to mention, he has to be up-to-date, given that he’s an executive producer on HBO’s Euphoria. Earlier this week, a TikTok user shared a clip of himself imitating Drake’s singing and songwriting style.

The TikTokker’s imitation is uncanny, matching Drizzy’s vocal stylings, rhyme scheme, and cadence nearly to a tee. Of course, Drake caught wind of the video and shared his thoughts on the matter.

“F*ck ya’ll I really be saying some shit,” said Drake in an Instagram story sharing the TikTok video. The rapper appeared to be a good sport about the video, as his story contained several laughing and crying emojis.

Earlier this month, Drake dropped his seventh studio album, Honestly, Nevermind, filled with EDM and house-inspired dance tracks. On Monday, he was seen filming a video for “Sticky,” a cut from the album. Social media star 2Rare is believed to make an appearance in the upcoming visual, as he was seen on set.

Also on Monday, Billboard revealed that the 21 Savage-assisted “Jimmy Cooks” reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, making it his 11th chart-topping single.

Last week, the world — including the Trump part of it — got a bit of a surprise: Apparently the former president secretly invited a documentary crew to film him as he was doing bad things. Somehow few in his sphere even knew about it…and all of a sudden it was heading for the House select committee investigating Jan. 6. (Ditto the nation’s televisions.) Only the few that have seen it know the horrors it contains, but here’s a teensy spoiler: It probably makes Trump seem nuts.

In a new interview with The Intelligencer, the film’s director, Alex Holder, does his best to tiptoe around spoilers, but he does offer his two cents on the ex-president’s curious brain. When asked if he thought Trump really believed his own voter fraud nonsense, Holder had an interesting response:

Based on my interactions with him — I don’t claim to be a psychologist or psychiatrist, but in those moments, the position he gave to me is someone who was utterly irrational, someone living in an alternate reality, and that there was no way to have a coherent, rational conversation with him. It’s very scary when people start to believe in their own lies, and when you can’t have a rational conversation with them — that’s when things become very dangerous. And we’ve seen that play out in history, when very dangerous people start to believe in their own rhetoric and are able to get their supporters to believe.

Of course, even that may not explain why Trump would let a film crew record movements during a sensitive time. Holder explained that part of the reason the Trumps wanted to be film was because they’d “been complaining for a very long time that they weren’t given a fair shot by the media, the media were biased, et cetera. So my approach was to say ‘I’m here to listen to you.’”

In the meantime, citizens will have to subsist on the Jan. 6 hearings, which have been explosive enough to elicit some interesting responses.

(Via The Intelligencer)

Earlier this week marked three months since Taylor Hawkins’ tragic and untimely death. The Foo Fighters drummer was found unresponsive in a Colombian hotel room hours before the band was scheduled to play in the South American country. Tributes for Hawkins poured in from all corners of the music industry as names like Machine Gun Kelly, Hayley Williams, Miley Cyrus, Billie Eilish, Paul McCartney, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and more took time to honor the drummer in their own ways. Alanis Morissette has now joined that list as she remembered Hawkins during a recent show in London.

On Tuesday night, as Morissette performed “Ironic” from her 1995 album Jagged Little Pill, images of Hawkins appeared on a screen behind her. Afterward, the message “In Memory of Taylor Hawkins” could be read on the screen. Hawkins played in Morisette’s live band back in 1995 in support of her tour for Jagged Little Pill. He also played drums for her until 1997, the year he joined Foo Fighters.

Morissette will perform at one of two upcoming tribute concerts for Hawkins. She will join Miley Cyrus, Gene Simmons, Nikki Sixx, Chad Smith, Luke Spiller, Jon Theodore, Brad Will and Pat Wilson, and others on September 27 for a show at the Kia Forum in Los Angeles. The other tribute concert will occur earlier in the month on September 3 at Wembley Stadium in London.

You can watch Morissette’s tribute to Hawkins in the video above.

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Although Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang’s comic book about a time-traveling newspaper delivery crew predates Stranger Things by about six months, they both lean into the same 1980s nostalgia and, let’s face it, owe big chunks of their existence to Eerie, Indiana. Like Stranger Things, Paper Girls is a creepy sci-fi fantasy tale that slams headlong into coming-of-age in the Reagan years, and it’s no surprise that the trailer for the forthcoming Amazon series evokes some BHE (Big Hawkins Energy).

Here’s the official synopsis:

“It’s the day after Halloween in 1988 when four young friends accidentally stumble into an intense time war and find themselves inexplicably transported to the year 2019. When they come face-to-face with their adult selves, each girl discovers her own strengths as together they try to find a way back to the past while saving the world of the future.” Those four friends are Erin (Riley Lai Nelet), Tiffany (Camryn Jones), Mac (Sofia Rosinsky), and KJ (Fina Strazza).

Ali Wong meeting her younger self is the strangest thing in the trailer, but the show could go in dozens of bonkers directions. The comic book is more about self-identity, fate, and the complications of knowing the consequences of your decisions before making them, so it’s nothing like Netflix’s biggest show in spite of the neon stylistic similarities (hello, kids staring into the weird-colored, lightning-filled sky!). Paper Girls is set to hit Amazon Prime July 29th.

Caroline has shared a live version of a fan favorite. Ahead of their upcoming tour, for which they have announced more dates for the North American leg, the London-based eight-piece has released a live version of their song. The live version comes from their performance at Trafo in Jena, Germany, from earlier this year.

“After we finished playing at Trafo in Jena in April, they asked if we wanted to quickly record a live version of one of our songs before packing down our gear,” said Caroline in a statement. “Trafo is an old power station which is now used for shows and exhibitions. One half is a sort of lecture theatre and the other half (where we played) is where they used to keep the generators. It’s a unique space with this strange glass wall dividing the two halves, and a sort of glass booth in the middle. We decided to record a version of ‘IWR’ as the song had felt good to play that night. We cut that footage with offcuts from the original ‘IWR’ music video that we released last year as well as other footage taken on tour in the UK and EU this spring. We hope you enjoy it.”

Check out “IWR” above and the full list of tour dates below.

07/02 — FR @ Pointu Festival
07/13 — London, UK @ Somerset House (w/ Black Midi)
07/23 — UK @ Latitude Festival
07/31 — IE @ All Together Now Festival
09/03 — NL @ Into the Great Wide Open Festival
09/29 — Toronto, ON @ Long Boat Hall
09/30 — Montreal, QC @ POP Montreal at La Sala Rossa
10/01 — Portland, ME @ Space 538
10/02 — Boston, MA @ The Rockwell
10/04 — Washington, DC @ Rhizome
10/05 — New York, NY @ Le Poisson Rouge
10/08 — Chicago, IL @ Constellation
10/11 — Denver, CO @ Lost Lake Lounge
10/13 — Los Angeles, CA @ Lodge Room
10/14 — Oakland, CA @ Starline
11/01 — London, UK @ Earth
11/09 — Lorient, FR @ Les Indisciplinées
11/10 — Rennes, FR @ Antipode
11/11 — Leipzig, DE @ Trans Century Update

Hugh Grant is about to join Russell Crowe, Rip Torn, Sean Bean, Sir Laurence Olivier, and more in the not-that-exclusive fraternity of actors who have played the king of the Gods. He’ll don the toga for Netflix‘s Kaos, a series from Charlie Covell (The End of the F***ing World) that puts a “modern twist on Greek and Roman mythology, exploring themes of gender politics, power and life in the underworld.”

And he’s not the only one. He’s joined by a slew of actors, including Janet McTeer (Hera), Cliff Curtis (Poseidon), David Thewlis (Hades), Nabhaan Rizwan (Dionysus), and Aurora Perrineau, Killian Scott, Misia Butler, and Leila Farzad as mere mortals.

Grant will channel more than a little of his narcissistic Paddington 2 villain as a Zeus who plummets into paranoia after finding his first wrinkle. With Mount Olympus apparently a Botox-free zone, he goes into crisis mode. Meanwhile, Poseidon is into megayachts, Hades is terrible at managing the underworld, Dionysus is out of control, and Hera has to slap her forehead through all of it. That’s a strangely staid dynamic for a show that purports to bend the known myths. Beyond updating it into modern territory, it seems strange that they wouldn’t futz around at least a little bit with the gender dynamics that Classics 101 teachers drilled into students. This is a fun cast, but how the myths are actually being twisted remains to be seen.

(via Deadline)

Fifty years after the gloriously trashy release of Pink Flamingos, John Waters still can’t visit Hicksville, New York. The sleepy hamlet tucked away on Long Island is one of many bedroom communities where Waters’ exercise in poor taste starring the immortal Divine was hit with obscenity charges. At the time, the budding filmmaker had an unusual way of dealing with the legal cases against him: embracing them.

“I never won [obscenity cases],” Waters said in a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, celebrating Pink Flamingos joining the Criterion Collection. “Because at midnight, Pink Flamingos is joyous, it’s exciting, the audience loves it. But if you’re sworn in on jury duty in a courthouse, sitting there next to a stranger, watching a singing asshole at 7:30 in the morning, I promise you, it is obscene. It’s all about geography. I would just plead guilty, which was a $1,000 fine, and the lawyers usually cost more than that.”

The problem with those legal troubles is that Lady Justice can (sometimes) have a long memory. As part of the settlement, Waters and Newline boss Bob Shaye signed paperwork saying they’d go to jail if the movie ever screened in Hicksville again. “And I do believe Pink Flamingos may have played in Hicksville,” Waters added. “I don’t know if I’m wanted by the police, but I never drive by that town in case.”

Better safe than sorry. It’s the same reason you always call emergency services to ask if eating fresh dog feces can cause health problems just moments after eating fresh dog feces. There really never was an actor as dedicated as Divine and yet, somehow, no Oscar.

Threading the needle of warmth and disgust as only Waters can, he admitted the movie would play differently today than it would have a half-century ago, proclaiming, “Pink Flamingos might actually be worse, because of political correctness, even though the morals of Pink Flamingos are politically correct.” Hear, hear.

And for anyone living in Hicksville, NY, this is officially your invitation to start a midnight screening tradition.

(via Entertainment Weekly)

Last summer, Canadian singer Elissa Mielke debut EP Finally. The folksy project showed her ability to pen rich and introspective songs through the EP’s four records. She also delivered visuals for three of the project’s four songs, those being “Kind Of Thing,” “Palace,” and “Trying.” A little over a year after Finally was released, Mielke has returned with new music and an exciting announcement as well. On August 26, she will release her second EP Mouse, and ahead of it, she delivers a video for her new song “Paper Moth Flame.”

Mielke’s latest release arrives as a tender and emotional record upheld by her heart-wrenching and graceful vocals. In a tweet about the new track, Mielke described it as a song “about transformative power; the quiet kind like when water slowly erodes a mountain over time.” “Paper Moth Flame” also arrived with an intimate video that sees Mielke with a baby boa constrictor snake, which she says she bought from a man who “walked 5 blocks barefoot” to the set of the music video. Mielke also found some meaning with the baby boa constrictor.

“This is Merlin who is in the music video,” she wrote in a tweet attached with a video of the baby boa constrictor snake around her neck. “You have to twirl once in a while to keep him from his attempts to slowly suffocate you. Perfect metaphor for the relationship that inspired this song.”

You can watch the video for “Paper Moth Flame” above.

Mouse is out 8/26 via Mom+Pop. You can pre-save it here.

Having penned several hits for the likes of Ariana Grande, Dua Lipa, Mariah Carey, and John Legend, singer/songwriter Tayla Parx surely deserves her flowers. On her latest single, appropriately titled “Flowers,” Parx demands her flowers while she’s still among us, that way when she’s gone, her friends, family, and fans will have no regrets.

On a fast-paced, poppy, dance-ready track, Parx sings, “Give me my flowers while I’m here, so when I’m dead and gone, you won’t have to cry no tears for me.” While she is a newly independent artist, having launched her TaylaMade imprint earlier this year, the Dallas-native isn’t going to let you forget the impact she’s had (and certainly will continue to have) in the landscape of mainstream pop. Whether it’s behind the scenes or at the forefront, Parx is always going to have a reason to celebrate.

“‘Flowers’ is about living your life in the present and showing your loved ones, including yourself, how much they mean to you in the now instead of waiting until it’s too late,” said Parx in a statement. “Flowers represent life and living, and the song represents my desire to celebrate every part of my life, no matter how big or small. Go get yourself some flowers now!”

Check out “Flowers” above.