Month: June 2022

After the reversal of Roe V. Wade on Friday, musicians have been using their stages to speak up. Halsey made a visceral speech that even upset some fans, Billie Eilish sang about it: “The internet’s gone wild watching movie stars on trial / While they’re overturning Roe v. Wade,” and Lorde said she was sickened and heartbroken.

Megan Thee Stallion brought up her frustration during her Glastonbury Festival set. “Texas [is] really embarrassing me right now,” she said. “I wanna have it on the record, that the hot boys and hot girls do not support this bullsh*t that y’all campaigning for.” She began a chant with the audience: “My body, my motherf*cking choice.”

The rapper has been teasing her forthcoming album for months. In May, she said in an interview, “Anything I want to give away? Actually, I’m probably like 95 percent done with my new album. I want to tease that for the hotties. I haven’t even told them nothing about my album.” More recently, she cheekily revealed, “I want to take you through so many different emotions,” she said of the record. “At first you was twerking, now you might be crying.”

Megan Thee Stallion is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Hudson Mohawke is set to drop a new album called Cry Sugar later this summer. Ahead of Cry Sugar‘s release, Mowhawke has released a new single called “Bicstan,” along with a megamix featuring portions of the album.

The Scottish DJ and producer is known for his work with Kanye West, Pusha T, Banks, and several others. His latest single, “Bicstan,” utilizes Roland TB-303 sounds, creating an “acid house” effect, along with effervescent vocals and house chords.

According to a statement accompanied by the album announcement, “a day in the life of Hudson Mohawke often involves a 7 am grill out session in an abandoned lot across the street from the club—coals blazing as the skeletal sound of cavernous bass echoes out from empty warehouses in morning twilight. These early dawn cookouts have become crucial post-rave rituals for Mohawke to stave off exhaustion and ennui. Mohawke has been ‘focusing on his health,’ taking cues from his new home in LA by trying out juice cleanses, meditation sessions, and stationary bike exercises. While smoke rises from the western Californian horizon, Mohawke flips grillables and offers sustenance to the last early morning ravers and revelers—a way to prioritize health and “give back” to sloshed club-goers who made it far enough to see the morning light.”

Check out the Cry Sugar megamix, featuring “Bicstan,” above, and the Cry Sugaralbum artwork below.

Cry Sugar is out 8/12 via Warp Records. Pre-save it here.

Millions of people around the world were shocked when it was announced last week that the Supreme Court was overturning Roe v. Wade. While we all knew it was likely coming after a draft of the decision was leaked back in May, Trevor Noah—who declared the decision “a hostile takeover of America’s reproductive rights” when the impending reversal was first leaked—doesn’t think that should make it any less shocking. “In some ways, it almost made it worse,” he said on Monday night. “We got to dread the day, and now that day is here.”

Describing the decision as “kind of surreal,” Noah noted that after 50 years of women having a “constitutional right” to choose to have an abortion, that decision—a healthcare decision—has now been ripped out of their hands… despite the fact that “the Constitution hasn’t changed,” as Noah pointed out. “The only thing that changed is that Donald Trump, of all people, managed to appoint three pro-life justices to the Supreme Court. Judges who, by the way, went on and on in their confirmation hearings about how much they ‘respect the important precedent of Roe vs. Wade.’ And we all knew they were full of sh*t, too.” But Noah saved the bulk of his ire for longtime Justice Clarence Thomas, who has sat on the Supreme Court for more than 30 years now… and whose wife just happens to be a batshit conspiracy theorist who attempted to overthrow democracy as we know it.

If the overturning wasn’t bad enough, Justice QAnon himself, Clarence Thomas, wrote that he wants the court to reconsider the right to gay marriage, gay sex, and contraception. Yeah, imagine that. The dude is so extreme he’s talking about banning rights I didn’t even realize could be banned. Just going to be reading the newspaper like, ‘Justice Thomas wants to ban the right to engage in nipple play? What?!’ Like at some point you’re not even a judge anymore; you’re just a cock block in a fancy robe. That’s all you are. You’re ganging up on everybody else.

Noah, of course, couldn’t help but notice that “the one ruling Clarence Thomas doesn’t want to overturn in all the others that he mentioned is the right to interracial marriage. Which is a coincidence, because he happens to be in an interracial marriage. Yeah, I guess if something affects Clarence Thomas personally he’s ok with it. It makes me think if we could just somehow get him impregnated by a gay man, all of our problems would be solved.”

You can watch the full clip above.

Alec Baldwin says he isn’t responsible for an accidental shooting death on the set of a movie set last year, but he is definitely responsible for bringing Woody Allen back into the spotlight in order to promote the director’s new book. The two chatted on Instagram Live about said book on Tuesday, avoiding all the controversial topics that have maligned the two Hollywood mainstays such as Baldwin’s prop gun incident late last year and accusations of molestation against Allen that have endured for decades.

Despite all of that, Baldwin decided Tuesday was the perfect time to interview Allen and not ask him about those subjects. And while there may have been some news to come from the virtual session, the thing everyone who tuned in actually took away from it is that even experienced filmmakers can have crippling technical issues when they’re streaming.

As anyone watching — and also Variety — noted, the session was stopped a number of times due to technical issues. Which amounted to Allen completely disappearing from the stream, often in the middle of a sentence.

It looked and sounded a little something like this.

“Are they in a room where they have the best Wifi?” Baldwin asked off camera after Allen’s video dropped a second time, according to Variety. “They need to be in a room with the best Wifi in the house.”

While the mashup may have been far from palatable to everyone, some people did have fun with the technical difficulties at least.

That was the notable bit of news from the interview once it did start: Allen is unsure if he will make more films at this point.

Per Variety:

“I’ll probably make at least one more movie. A lot of the thrill is gone,” Allen said. “When I used to do a film it’d go into a movie house all across the country. Now you do a movie and you get a couple weeks in a movie house. Maybe six weeks or four weeks and then it goes right to streaming or pay-per-view…It’s not the same…It’s not as enjoyable to me.”

“I don’t get the same fun doing a movie and putting it in a theater,” Allen added. “It was a nice feeling to know that 500 people were seeing it once… I don’t know how I feel about making movies. I’m going to make another one and I’ll see how it feels.”

Whether he directs more movies or not at this point is up to him, but after Tuesday one thing is clear: neither Baldwin or Allen have much of a future as a content creator on social media.

(Via Variety)

Just last week, more than 100 million women across America were stripped of their right to make personal healthcare decisions for themselves and their own bodies and many Republicans celebrated then went about their day. But when a grocery store worker in Staten Island patted former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani on the back so that he could voice his disgust about that decision, all hell broke loose in Rudytown!

Since footage of what was being called an “attack” on Giuliani was made public, anyone with eyes and a glint of sanity has commented on the disparity between what we can see on the tape and the way that Donald Trump’s longtime doormat described the events of that day, which he has described as being like getting “shot” in the back and/or “a boulder.” And now he’s on a tear about New York City at large, and how it has turned into something like HBO’s Deadwood.

The New York Post reports that Giuliani claims he is suffering from “swelling” and “a sore back” as a result of the incident, in which a ShopRite worker tapped the septuagenarian on the back. “He hit me to knock me down and if that doesn’t merit jail time in New York, we’re in the Wild, Wild, West,” Giuliani said during a virtual press conference.

Clearly feeling like he was on a roll, Rudy swears the man could have easily killed him. “It was a very, very heavy shot,” he said. “He could have easily hit me, knocked me to the ground and killed me. He’s lucky he didn’t knock me down. Falling is extremely dangerous for an elderly person.”

Rather than acknowledge that none of the unlikely scenarios that could have resulted in his death came to pass, Giuliani swore that the grocery store worker—who was expressing his anger at Roe v. Wade being overturned, and the role Giuliani played in making that possible—intended “to cause serious harm … I could have fallen and cracked my skull and died.”

“This guy should be in prison,” Giuliani concluded.

Meanwhile, lawyers for the perpetrator of the backpat—39-year-old Daniel Gill—have issued their own statement claiming that the video speaks for itself (read: Rudy’s recollection of how everything went down has been extremely exaggerated). The charges against Gill, who was originally kept in NYPD custody for more than 24 hours, have since been downgraded, which further pissed off the man formerly known as “America’s Mayor.”

“Finally, I thought we had a DA in New York in Staten Island who was a real DA in favor of protecting victims and not letting criminals go free so they can start hitting other 78-year-old men,” Giuliani said.

(Via New York Post)

Machine Gun Kelly has been a magnet for a lot of negative attention over the years and in his new documentary, Life In Pink, he recalls how it all came to a head, resulting in a suicide attempt that he barely survived.

After his father died in July of 2020, MGK says he fell into a depression, during which he says he locked himself away, sleeping with a shotgun next to his bed. “I couldn’t get closure on it,” he recalls. “I wouldn’t leave my room and I started getting really, really, really dark.”

He says that even his then-budding romance with actress Megan Fox became a stressor. “I called [girlfriend Megan Fox], I was like, ‘You aren’t here for me,’”
he remembers. “I’m freaking out on her and I put the shotgun in my mouth. I’m yelling on the phone and the barrel’s in my mouth. I go to cock the shotgun and the bullet as it comes back up, the shell just gets jammed. Megan’s dead silent.”

The incident prompted Kelly to seek therapy, which he says helped him cope with life in the spotlight and losing his dad. Hopefully, he also made amends with his girlfriend for what was almost certainly a traumatizing experience.

MGK isn’t the only star who struggled with suicidal ideation in recent years. In 2021, Logic’s memoir also touched on the backlash he received from the public on social media, much of it ironically over his hit song “1-800-273-8255” named for the American National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. While the song certainly helped awareness of the issue (calls to the number went up and suicide rates went down), Logic himself nearly gave in under the weight of the negative commentary sent his direction, only reversing course to avoid becoming “a meme about how the Suicide Guy killed himself.” That’s something to think about before you hit “send” on that “funny” tweet or comment you were just typing up.

You can check out Life In Pink streaming now on Hulu.

If you or someone you know is at risk of suicide or contemplating self-harm, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255, text TALK to 741741, or visit Speakingofsuicide.com for additional resources.

Dakota Johnson was a star from the second she appeared in The Social Network. Actually, she was a star from the moment she was born, considering her parents are Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith, but the decade-defining birth of Facebook movie is when she got the greatest compliment of her career, courtesy of director David Fincher: “David said that role could have easily been thankless and that I did something different with it. I found that to be the most wonderful thing anyone’s ever said to me.”

Johnson’s first leading role came four years later when she starred in Fifty Shades of Grey. The erotic-drama, which was followed by two sequels, was a huge hit at the box office and, as Vanity Fair put it in a new cover story, “turned Johnson into a globally known name in 2015.” But not a lover of limes. Looking back at playing Anastasia Steele now, Johnson has mixed feelings about the films. “There were a lot of different disagreements. I haven’t been able to talk about this truthfully ever, because you want to promote a movie the right way, and I’m proud of what we made ultimately and everything turns out the way it’s supposed to, but it was tricky,” she said.

“I’m a sexual person, and when I’m interested in something, I want to know so much about it,” she begins. “That’s why I did those big naked movies.” She sips her tea without breaking eye contact. “I signed up to do a very different version of the film we ended up making.”

I ask if the studio or the directors were the problem, or if it was a combo platter.

“Combo,” she says. She leans in. “It was also the author of the books.”

That would be E. L. James, who got the inspiration for the Fifty Shades books after writing Twilight fan fiction under the name “Snowqueens Icedragon.” (Do you think Johnson, Robert Pattinson, and Kristen Stewart, three of the finest — and finest looking — working actors in their 30s, ever text about this? They should.)

When asked if she regrets starring in the Fifty Shades trilogy, Johnson replied, “No. I don’t think it’s a matter of regret. If I had known… If I had known at the time that’s what it was going to be like, I don’t think anyone would’ve done it. It would’ve been like, ‘Oh, this is psychotic.’ But no, I don’t regret it.” She doesn’t wanna live forever with regret.

You can watch Johnson in Cha Cha Real Smooth, now on Apple TV+.

(Via Vanity Fair)

This was probably one of the most difficult weeks to get through after the overturning of Roe v. Wade, which sent the country into panic. Many musicians spoke up about it, from world-dominating pop star Billie Eilish to old-school legends Pearl Jam, providing comfort to fans who know that their idols support the same values as them. It even brought Taylor Swift to Twitter to discuss the matter. Despite the chaos, there were some great releases in pop music this week, which can be found below.

Each week, Uproxx rounds up the best new pop releases. Listen up.

Taylor Swift — “Carolina”

Taylor Swift’s new song “Carolina” is for the forthcoming film Where The Crawdads Sing. It’s a haunting ballad that feels taken from Folklore; it’s in touch with her patient, folky side. Her vocals linger in a lower range, imbuing the track with a visceral seriousness.

Willow — “Maybe It’s My Fault”

Willow, who pivoted to pop punk with her latest album Lately I Feel Everything, has barely rested in the past year. “Maybe It’s My Fault” is the newest of her songs, after collaborations like “Psychofreak” and “Purge,” and it has the same sharp edge and bombastic personality, but it’s even more inventive and catchy, really leaning into the darkness.

Muna — “What I Want”

“Silk Chiffon” singers Muna have had to prove that they’re more than that hit, and this new self-titled album succeeds. This electronic track “What I Want” is colorful and holds nothing back: “I want the full effects / I want to hit it hard / I want to dance in the middle of a gay bar,” they sing. It’s the perfect pride anthem.

Nessa Barrett — “Die First”

Nessa Barrett’s strength is her vulnerability, and her new song “Die First” takes that to the next level. In Morrissey-like fashion (“To die by your side is such a heavenly way to die,” of course), Barrett shows her love and devotion through tragic means, contemplating her own mortality as well as that of her lover: “I hope I die first / ‘Cause I don’t wanna live without you,” she sings.

Conan Gray — “Disaster”

“Disaster” portrays pop star Conan Gray’s immaculate storytelling ability. Against a bouncy beat, he sings about his reluctance about engaging in romance. He thinks about the worst possible scenario, as we’re all prone to do: “I’m a little bit plastered / You call me a liar, / Now I’m falling in faster / This could be a disaster,” he sings entertainingly.

Kacey Musgraves — “Can’t Help Falling In Love”

A lot of artists have taken on the task of covering this classic, but Kacey Musgraves is definitely one of the best candidates. Her soft voice and twangy style make it sound as if the ballad is her own; her vocals glow with earnestness and emotion against the slow piano. Though it’s brief, every second is impactful.

Dove Cameron — “Breakfast”

Dove Cameron is not messing around on this new song “Breakfast,” which is propelled forward with a brooding, menacing rhythm as well as mischievous vocals. She haunts in a Lana Del Rey or Billie Eilish kind of way, with incisive lyrics: “I eat boys like you for breakfast / One by one hung on my necklace / And they’ll always be mine / It makes me feel alive,” she sings.

Charlie Puth, Jung Kook — “Left And Right”

This collaboration between Charlie Puth and BTS’ Jung Kook is about trying to move on from a relationship that’s hard to forget. The two singers trade off verses, singing about the pain over a breezy beat: “Did you know you’re the one that got away / And even now baby I’m still not okay,” Puth sings.

Hayley Kiyoko — “Deep In The Woods”

“‘Deep in the Woods’ is a song that captures the feeling of instant connection,” said singer Hayley Kiyoko, “as if you’ve known someone forever even though you’ve only just met.” She does a great job conveying this powerful sensation in her emotive new song, on which she sings, “I know I met you in another life / You’re unforgettable.”

Glaive — “Minnesota Is A Place That Exists”

Glaive’s new song “Minnesota Is A Place That Exists” is an addictive, vivacious anthem about youthful, reckless love: “Smoking cigarettes with pretty girls inside my head / Do you remember when you / Said you’re smoking less and then you ashed it on your chest,” he sings over an almost hyperpop sound. The track bursts with idiosyncratic synths and an eccentric aura that will make you press repeat.

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

SpotemGottem is known for getting in trouble. The Jacksonville, FL rapper, whose real name is Nehemiah Harden, has been arrested after a jet ski chase. According to NBC Miami, Miami police tried to pull Harden over when he was speeding on a jet ski. Needless to say, he did not pull over. When the cops caught him, he was charged with reckless operation of a boat and fleeing police.

Last year, the “Beat Box” star was arrested by US marshalls on firearm violations and aggravated assault. He and several of his friends broke the gate at a parking garage in Miami and reportedly threatened someone who tried to stop them — the story doesn’t make clear whether this was a passerby or the garage attendant — with a semi-automatic weapon. He was granted an $18,500 bond.

A few months after that incident, he was shot multiple times while driving on the I-95. He told police he was being driven south on the highway when someone in another car began shooting at his car, hitting his driver in the hip and wounding Spotem, who was sitting in the passenger seat, in both legs. The report said at least 22 shots were fired, likely from an automatic weapon.