Month: July 2022

Post Malone‘s love for geeky games like Pokemon and Magic: The Gathering is no secret. Last year, he announced his partnership with MTG creators Wizards Of The Coast to promote the return of Friday Night Magic, a promotional campaign for the popular fantasy card game, promising “some cool stuff” to come in the following year. More recently, we discovered just what that “cool stuff” would entail. During a live stream next Friday, August 5, Post will select one viewer to fly to Los Angeles to play a one-on-one MTG match with him for $100,000.

Pardon me while I dig out and dust off my deck.

The actual match will take place on August 11 at 6 pm local time and stream via the Whatnot app. To enter, fans will need to download the app, create an account, and tune into the live stream on Friday. The winner will be randomly selected. According to the event website, no previous experience is required as MTG champion Reid Duke will coach the competitor ahead of the match (although, let’s face it; it’ll probably help to know what you’re doing ahead of time).

For the past month, Post has been hosting livestreams on Twitch, playing the battle royale-hero shooter Apex Legends and giving money to charity. Looks like mom was wrong about not being able to make a career out of playing video games — too bad I believed her, eh?

For a guy who quit the role over three years ago, Ben Affleck sure can’t seem to stop playing Batman. After filming an appearance in The Flash and reshoots for Zack Snyder’s Justice League, Affleck is apparently back again Aquaman and The Lost Kingdom. The cameo was supposed to be a surprise, but fans on a Warner Bros. studio tour accidentally spotted the actor on the set of the Aquaman sequel. Realizing the bat’s out of the bag, Jason Momoa confirmed the news on his Instagram.

“REUNITED bruce and arthur,” Momoa wrote. “love u and miss u Ben WB studio tours just explored the backlot alright. busted on set all great things coming AQUAMAN 2 all my aloha j”

If you scroll through the photos of Momoa and Affleck hamming it up, the Aquaman star also shared the moment he knew the Batfleck cameo was busted. In the video, you can hear Momoa laughing (and dropping an “F-bomb”) as he realized that a shuttle full of tourists definitely saw Affleck walking around the set.

“Well, it’s not a f*cking secret anymore, is it? Sorry, children,” a laughing Momoa said to the group before turning to the camera to himself while continuing to crack up. “That’s what happens, Warner Bros., when you walk out of your set and there’s our fans. … Well, we tried to keep it a secret.”

Momoa then peeked into a trailer where Affleck was hiding in costume as Bruce Wayne after being spotted by the tour bus. “Sorry, bro!” Momoa said before walking away still laughing.

Aquaman and The Lost Kingdom swims into theaters on March 17, 2023.

(Via Jason Momoa on Instagram)

You’ve heard of meatless Mondays, but have you ever heard of meatless Fridays? This week, Indiecast hosts Steven Hyden and Ian Cohen are forgoing the meat of the episode in order to focus on the biggest indie news of the week. That’s right — it’s all banter to celebrate the last double-digit installment before Indiecast hits 100 episodes. That’s partly due to Steven and Ian not being able to get their hands on an advance of Beyoncé’s new album, but also because there’s simply too much indie news to discuss. In this week’s episode, Indiecast talks emo week, Joni Mitchell’s first performance in two decades, 10 years of Frank Ocean’s debut Channel Orange, and more.

In this week’s Recommendation Corner, Ian gives props to Chat Pile, an Oklahoma City band he hopes gains traction this year. Meanwhile, Steven gives a shout out to the Reigning Sound, a band formed in 2001 by Greg Cartwright who made eight great albums before disbanding.

New episodes of Indiecast drop every Friday. Listen to Episode 99 below and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. You can submit questions for Steve and Ian at [email protected], and make sure to follow us on Instagram and Twitter for all the latest news. We also recently launched a visualizer for our favorite Indiecast moments. Check those out here.

Kenan Thompson is the longest-tenured cast member in Saturday Night Live history, which should give him seniority when it comes to making decisions about the sketch show. That’s unfortunately not how it works, however, not with Lorne Michaels still kicking around Studio 8H. He’s the one who ultimately decides what makes it to air and when the show will (eventually?) end. But maybe he’ll listen to Kenan?

“The rumor is, the show is ending at its 50th season because Mr. Lorne Michaels doesn’t want to do it after age 80. Is that true?” host Charlamagne tha God asked Thompson on his Comedy Central series, Hell of a Week. The former-All That and Kenan and Kel star pretended to play dumb (“Is that a rumor?”) before directly responding to the rumor. “There could be a lot of validity to that rumor, because 50 is a good number to stop at,” he said. “That’s an incredible package. He will be, probably, close to 80 years old at that point, and you know, he’s the one who’s had his touch on the whole thing.”

Thompson continued:

“So, if somebody tries to come into his shoes, you know it’s a good opportunity for NBC to save money as well, you know what I’m saying? So they might slash the budget and then at that point, you can’t really do the same kind of show. So that’s unfair to watch it just really go down kind of in flames or whatever for real because of those restrictions… Capping it a 50 might not be a bad idea,”

SNL has been around for 47 seasons — it could last forever, but 50 is a nice round number to end things. Then again, I thought the same thing about The Simpsons after 20 seasons… and 30 seasons… and now it’s up 33 seasons, with season 34 premiering in September. One thing’s for sure: the SNL series finale, whenever it happens, will feature Paul Simon. Even if he’s no longer with us, he’ll still be there, somehow.

You can watch the Hell of a Week video above.

(Via The Wrap)

Before they released their first single this past April, the only way to discover Domi & JD Beck online was getting lucky on one of those deep YouTube rabbit holes. If you happened to arrive at that layer of the internet, you’d have seen two teenagers with stupefying jazz music chops straight killing it, but with a foot firmly entrenched in the organic construction of melodic hip-hop beat canvases.

One of their relatively newer clips from December of 2020 called “Madvillainy Tribute,” sees the pair recreating Madlib’s iconic Madvillainy orchestral productions on their respective instruments. Domi plays keys and lays down bass grooves on pedals with her bare feet. Beck rips away at his modest drum kit, tapping a snare and cymbals faster than a house fly flaps its wings. The top comment on the video says, “I’m convinced these two made every adult swim bump to ever exist,” and it’s a hilarious albeit plausible assertion. Especially when you consider that a month before, they appeared in another viral YouTube video backing Thundercat and Ariana Grande’s duet of “Them Changes,” as part of Adult Swim’s peak-pandemic virtual festival.

“Thundercat is one of our closest friends. He’s done a lot for us,” Beck says backstage at Montreal’s Club Soda, before the pair’s Montreal Jazz Festival performance on July 6th, where the young audience at the foot of the stage hung on every dizzying note from their set-closing rendition of John Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things.”

But lately, it’s another friend who has helped Domi & JD Beck raise their profile considerably: Anderson .Paak. Paak made the prodigious pair the flagship signing to his brand new Apeshit Records label and their debut album, Not Tight, arrived July 29th as a joint release with the storied jazz label, Blue Note Records. Along with appearances from Paak (notably on “Take A Chance,” which the three masterfully performed on Kimmel earlier this month), the album also features Snoop Dogg, Mac DeMarco, Herbie Hancock, Thundercat, and guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel; an illustrious cast of guests to say the least. But the magnitude of none of this seems to phase the Parisian, Domi, 22, and Beck, 19, a Dallas native.

“We try not to overthink it,” Domi says. “Some people are like, ‘OMG Anderson Paak!’ And we’re like, ‘Yea, it’s Andy. We make music with him and we hang with him.’ It’s the same with Blue Note. We text and talk with them and sh*t. But we don’t try to make it like, ‘Blue Note! Blue Note!’ It’s still tight, but yea…”

They met Paak in late 2018 over Instagram. One of the members of The Free Nationals (Paak’s backing band and the other artists currently on the Apeshit roster) came to one of their shows. They later hipped Paak to their tunes, who then reached out on the app. They kept bumping into the Silk Sonic star at festivals when the pair were playing early sets or opening for soul multi-instrumentalist John Bap and just hit it off. The way they tell the story is in a ping pong recollection — equal parts nonchalant and frenetic, but always linear — each one peppering in a detail before the full picture comes together, just like their music.

Beck: “We just became friends.”

Domi: “Then we met him at a festival in New Orleans and met him and sh*t.”

Beck: “Like six or seven of our shows were in the same city.”

Domi: “Then he asked us to come through.”

Beck: “We’d play a bunch of jam sessions with them and stuff.”

Domi: “And then went to LA and he invited us to his studio and then dinner and sh*t. And he was like ‘Hey, I’m starting a label…”

Beck: “We met Mac DeMarco on that same tour.”

Everything is so matter-of-fact with them. They barely remember how they met each other in the first place. It was at the NAMM Convention in Anaheim (National Association of Music Merchants) and they can’t recall why they both ended up there, just that the whole experience was a drag, but they bonded over how hilariously bad everything felt.

“I was playing these electronic drums. So fake,” Beck says. Domi laments the in-ear monitor and a bunk keyboard they had her on. It’s almost as if they caught each other’s eye from an opposite corner of a stage and laughed. “We saw each other at a jam session the night before and he was with Thundercat,” Domi says. “That’s the first time I met him and hung out,” Beck adds. “Domi was there and she barely spoke English at all…she dapped me up like this.” [motions a half-assed fist bump]

They laugh because they remember the experience in the same way. And if there’s a brother/sister vibe to them, it’s because they literally spend 24 hours a day, seven days a week together. “It’s been like that since 2018. But we beat each other up all the time,” Domi says. “We’re more like sumo wrestlers,” Beck adds. “It’s 50/50 on who wins.”

They currently split time between Dallas and LA. Before that, Domi was finishing up her studies at the Berklee School of Music, which the French national needed to do in order to maintain her visa (she graduated in 2020.) “‘I’d do all my classes in one day and then fly right back to Dallas,” she says. “Take a 5am flight, do my classes and fly back at midnight.”

Dallas is where they write, chill, and play video games when they’re not making music. But their writing process can be unconventional to say the least. Take “Smile” for example, a lead single from Not Tight and one of the most mesmerizing pieces of music you’ll hear this year. Domi’s Nord keyboard lays down an impeccable melody, and then no sooner than it starts to bounce alongside her MIDI keys bass, Beck’s snare and cymbal smacks jump symbiotically with it. They sound like Karriem Riggins and Bob James scoring a Quasimoto cartoon in the year 2030.

“JD was on the toilet, singing the melody and sh*t and I heard him scream ‘Domi! You gotta help me out!” Domi recalls of the song’s inception. “And he sang me the melody so I had to play and record it and then he was guiding me through the whole sh*t. We wrote it together, but it started with him on the toilet singing that melody. That’s the full disclosure.”

If jazz musicians ever created on the toilet, they’d never admit it. That’s part of what makes these two unique. But they have dexterous compositional chops as well. Writing melodies, chords, and bass together, but not on their instruments. “We notice that when you write on our instruments, that’s how it gets lazy and you write the same sh*t all the time,” Domi says. “That’s why a lot of people end up sacrificing their playing for writing,” Beck adds. “So we want to do it like composers, flesh out a whole song to write it and then the playing comes after.”

But you can’t pigeonhole what they are. With them, jazz is hip-hop and hip-hop is jazz. It’s the way music has been shifting since Flying Lotus’s Brainfeeder sound joined forces with Kamasi Washington’s West Coast Get Down and started bringing it to the masses. Domi & JD Beck embody this paradigm shift in spades. Two Gen Z’ers who don’t give a f*ck, just want to create lasting work, and what they make is so cool and fresh; subversive and enlightening. It’s the same way that Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters was in 1973. A jazz and funk fusion that was as audacious as it was classically on point.

Hancock, who appears on Not Tight in the far-out “Moon,” in fact invited Domi & JD Beck on stage with him at the Hollywood Bowl last September, just after they recorded the song together. On this warm Southern California evening, they joined him for his pioneering fusion standard, “Chameleon.”

“It’s a funny thing because it’s the most played song that everybody just ruins and destroys,” Domi says. “Like every jam session where you can find the least amount of groove ever and everybody just plays like ten-minute solos. But we were playing it with f*cking Herbie Hancock.”

“If you’re ever gonna play ‘Chameleon,’ you have to play it with Herbie Hancock,” Beck jokes. ”Otherwise? Don’t play it.”

“But as we walked out,” Domi continued, “He said, ’Check em out on YouTube!’ ‘Cause that’s how he found us too. And I was like, there’s no way that 82-year-old Herbie Hancock — legendary — just shouted out our YouTube at the Hollywood Bowl.”

Not Tight is out now via Apeshit/Blue Note. Listen to it here.

Taylor Swift‘s music has been all over cinema lately, with “This Love (Taylor’s Version)” up in The Summer I Turned Pretty, “Wildest Dreams (Taylor’s Version)” in a trailer for Spirit Untamed, and “Carolina” in Where The Crawdads Sing.

Now, the pop star’s influence is reaching even further into the film world with “Bad Blood (Taylor’s Version)” and “Message In A Bottle (Taylor’s Version)” will be in DC League Of Super-Pets, which is in theaters as of today. This was confirmed by The Rock and Kevin Hart via TikTok. The Rock captioned his video with, “Pumped to have TWO of my friend @Taylor Swift’s tracks in our #DCSuperPets! In theaters TONIGHT!” The “Love Story” singer left a comment, “Leave it to my friend Dwayne to support the ethically sourced versions of my songs. Good luck with the film!! Ur the man.”

Swift has been all about surprising her fans lately. Recently, she joined Haim on stage at a show in London and sent the arena. She told the crowd, “I haven’t been on stage in a very long time. It’s nice…it’s nice, it’s very nice. When I heard my girls were playing in London at the O2, I thought, ‘I’m going to have to see that.’”

It’s no secret that noted pronoun hater Lauren Boebert passed the GED mere months before her election to the U.S. House of Representatives. Legend has it that, in addition to the documented time of passage, that it took her four times to pass the test that stands as an equivalent to a high school diploma. She did not graduate from high school and obviously did not attend college, and all of that would be just fine if Boebert wasn’t a U.S. lawmaker who often appears to decide that she doesn’t need to brush up on the U.S. Constitution.

After all, she knows about the Second Amendment to the Bill of Rights, and she apparently believes that’s enough. Boebert’s frequently willful lack of knowledge of high school civics matters, including the branches of government, and the difference between Samuel and John Adams, well, it’s all led to mockery. That spirit often turns into comeuppance when Boebert decides to righteously punch down at every opportunity. And let’s just say that her proposal for more reading time isn’t going as planned.

Boebert has proposed a rule for House lawmakers to receive 5 days (apparently a working week for those who are feeling traditional) to read bills before voting on them. She tucked that into this 4-minute video full of patriotic production values.

Federal lawyer Ron Filipkowski brought the waiting period to attention.

And no one is debating that lawmakers should actually read bills before voting on them. It’s particularly egregious when lawmakers are scribbling additional lines in margins immediately before the vote, simply does to slip things in undetected. However, five days does seem like a long time for bills that need immediate attention. And that makes me wonder if Boebert should spend less time tweeting and more time working.

Responses to Boebert’s proposal were not too kind.

And now, she’s lashing out: “Democrats being outraged that I’m pushing to force a five-day period for legislators to actually read legislation before they pass it tells you everything you need to know about how they think government should work.” The rooter and tooter added, “Know what’s in the bill BEFORE passing it. Pretty simple.”

Boebert also retweeted this defense, and to be fair, she seems to be struggling to keep up with her job. It happens! But again, if she spent less time trolling and insulting people and turned off her phone, that would make more sense than a week-long waiting period in a lot of cases. We’ll see how this proposal fares, though.

Today marks the theatrical release of B.J. Novak’s new movie Vengeance, in which he stars alongside Ashton Kutcher. It turns out Kutcher once gave Novak his big break on TV, as Novak appeared in a number of episodes of Punk’d in the early 2000s. Novak talked about that during an appearance on The Late Show yesterday and told a terrific story about pranking Usher.

Stephen Colbert mentioned the Punk’d connection and Novak noted Kutcher “changed my life with that show.” Colbert asked if the celebrities he helped prank ever got mad, and Novak was quick to respond, “Terribly mad, and here’s the problem: So I’m meeting all these celebrities for the first time, right? It’s thrilling for me. I’m meeting Missy Elliott, I’m meeting Usher; It’s the worst day of their life!”

He then got into the Usher prank that was on the Season 2 premiere (that aired on October 26, 2003), explaining the situation and how Usher acted after the reveal:

“My job once, I got to meet Usher, but my job was I was a store owner on Melrose and [Usher’s] little brother had been busted for shoplifting; he was in on it with us. And the only way I would let the brother go was if [Usher] recorded a rap jingle for my store, which I rapped for him. And he was like, ‘First of all, I’m not a rapper. Second of all, why does it refer to ‘Ice?” I’m like, ‘Well, we wanted Vanilla Ice.’ It’s a well-written show, I didn’t write the joke, it’s so funny.

So then he’s furious and then Ashton comes out and he’s like, ‘Bro!’ Like, it’s a huge hug. And I’m like [open arms gesture] and he’s like, ‘No no no no no.’ Like, your first impression of someone sticks, you know, so I have not run into Usher since. I don’t think he’ll be in my next movie.”

Watch the Novak interview above and find clips from the Usher Punk’d episode below.

Metallica have been enjoying a new moment in the spotlight ever since Stranger Things character Eddie Munson performed “Master Of Puppets” during a pivotal scene from the show’s fourth season. They’ve really embraced all the attention and their new connection to the show, too, taking it to a new level at their performance at Lollapalooza yesterday (July 28).

At Chicago’s Grant Park, they closed out their encore with “Master Of Puppets” and actually showed clips of Munson’s big scene on giant screens behind them as they performed the song.

Joseph Quinn (the actor who plays Eddie Munson) recently told Jimmy Fallon about playing the song on the show, saying, “It was kind of nerve-wracking. It was at a weird point in the pandemic where no one had seen any live music for ages. It was me and Gaten [Matarazzo] and it was so fun. I was nervous but it was kind of like a rock concert and I got to feel like a rock star for one night, and that was pretty great.”

After the Stranger Things episode with “Master Of Puppets” premiered, Metallica shared a note about it, writing, “The way The Duffer Brothers have incorporated music into Stranger Things has always been next level, so we were beyond psyched for them to not only include ‘Master of Puppets’ in the show, but to have such a pivotal scene built around it. […] It’s an incredible honor to be such a big part of Eddie’s journey and to once again be keeping company with all of the other amazing artists featured in the show.”

Margot Robbie appeared on the Australian soap opera Neighbours from 2008 to 2011. Her breakout role in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street (where she may have interacted with “complete and utter buffoon” Donald Trump) came two years later; since then, she’s become the face of the DC Extended Universe, been nominated for multiple Oscars, and used her influence to start a female-focused production company, LuckyChap Entertainment. Also, she’s playing Barbie. But Robbie hasn’t forgotten her Aussie roots, and she appeared on the series finale of Neighbours this week.

“The Australian soap bowed out on Channel Ten after 37 years on screen, becoming the top-rating show of the night, with 873,000 tuning in across the country’s five state capital cities,” Deadline reports, including cameos from singer Kylie Minogue, actor Guy Pearce, and Robbie, who appeared via Zoom. She’s a busy person, y’know?

“The years living on Ramsay Street were honesty some of the best of my entire life,” Robbie said in her brief video appearance. “You all stood by me, even when I invented the Shrugalero.” That reference went over like gangbusters to everyone who has seen all 8,900-plus episode of Neighbours. To everyone else (me), here’s Robbie saying the word “Shrugalero” in her Australian accent a bunch of times.

You can watch Robbie’s cameo below:

And here’s her first appearance on Neighbours:

(Via Deadline)