Month: July 2022

Harry Styles is having himself a year. “As It Was” just got knocked off the No. 1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 chart after spending 10 weeks on top, the most of any song this year. Harry’s House is the year’s best-selling vinyl album so far and the first 2022 album to go Platinum. Now, he has another achievement to add to his figurative trophy case: Chart Data reports “As It Was” is now the fastest solo song to hit 1 billion streams on Spotify.

“As It Was” was released on April 1, so as of today (July 27), it has been streaming for 118 days. Where does this put “As It Was” in terms of the fastest song overall, solo or otherwise, to cross a billion? It looks like it’s somehow exactly tied for that title. The last reported record-holder was The Kid Laroi and Justin Bieber’s “Stay,” which was released on July 9, 2021 and hit a billion streams on November 4 that year, 118 days later.

This is just Styles’ latest honor, even beyond the aforementioned. Barack Obama dropped his 2022 summer playlist yesterday and among the picks was Styles’ “Music For A Sushi Restaurant.” It was also recently revealed that Texas State University will soon offer a course called “Harry Styles And The Cult Of Celebrity: Identity, The Internet, And European Pop Culture.”

Before making his superhero debut in The Boys universe, Patrick Schwarzenegger starred in a much darker show, The Staircase, alongside Collin Firth and Toni Collette. The HBO limited series told the true story of Kathleen Peterson’s tragic death and the subsequent investigation of her husband Michael and their family.

Schwarzenegger starred as one of the Peterson children, Todd, who was in his early twenties when his mother was found dead at the bottom of a staircase. Throughout the HBO retelling of the highly-publicized story, Todd undergoes a lot of physical changes as he battled drugs and alcohol abuse. Schwarzenegger told Variety that the production team had to add prosthetics to transform the actor. “He got really heavy,” Schwarzenegger admitted. “I had to wear a four-month pregnancy belly. It was weird.”

This isn’t the first time the actor had to alter his appearance. For The Terminal List, he added nearly 20 pounds of muscle to get that Navy SEAL look. “I was eating nonstop, It was fun. I had to fill out the uniform and not look like a little shrimp,” he confessed.

Next, Schwarzenegger is portraying Golden Boy in The Boys spinoff Gen V, where he will play a college student at a prestigious superhero university. He probably won’t look like a little shrimp in that show.

(Via Variety)

Brittney Griner has been detained in Russia since February, as the WNBA star was arrested for having hashish oil cartridges in her luggage after flying into Moscow, facing a prison sentence of up to 10 years.

Griner has plead guilty to the charges but has told the Russian court she brought the cartridges unintentionally, which is the start of the process to getting her trial over and sentencing done. Russia will not release her back to the United States in any sort of diplomatic arrangement until then, but the dialogue about how to get her back has escalated to a “substantial offer” being made from the Biden administration in recent weeks.

According to CNN, the administration signed off on an offer to send Viktor Bout, a Russian arms trafficker serving a 25-year sentence, back to Russia in exchange for Griner and Paul Whelan, who has been in Russian custody since 2018 on charges of espionage and, like Griner, is considered “wrongfully detained” by the U.S. government.

“We communicated a substantial offer that we believe could be successful based on a history of conversations with the Russians,” a senior administration official told CNN Wednesday. “We communicated that a number of weeks ago, in June.”

The official declined to comment on the specifics of the “substantial offer.” They said it was in Russia’s “court to be responsive to it, yet at the same time that does not leave us passive, as we continue to communicate the offer at very senior levels.”

It remains to be seen if that will be enough to secure Griner and Whelan’s release from Russia — which again cannot happen until Griner’s trial is completed — but it’s an encouraging step for the public (and Griner) to hear, as there has been a steady push from the WNBA, basketball fans, and beyond to do more to secure her release. This is the most substantial step yet, and the hope is that Russia will agree to the swap and Griner and Whelan will be able to return to U.S. soil sooner than later.

Over the past year, Detroit native Zelooperz has drawn attention as a member of Danny Brown’s Bruiser Brigade, popping up in places like The Alchemist’s This Thing Of Ours 2 (on the track “Wildstyle”), Arizona rap trio Injury Reserve’s By The Time I Get To Phoenix (on “SS San Francisco”), and on LA iconoclast Earl Sweatshirt’s Sick! (on “Vision”). He also featured on UPROXX Sessions performer Na-Kel Smith’s A Dream No Longer Deferred in 2020.

So, it’s only right that he follows in Smith’s footsteps, making his own debut on UPROXX Sessions to perform “Who U Love” from his March project, Get WeT​.​Radio. The song is a semi-tender ode to a lover, with Z insisting, “Being without you a dealbreaker, I’d rather rot.” It’s a short but sweet track that shows the Motor City rapper isn’t afraid to bare his heart.

Watch Zelooperz perform “Who U Love” on UPROXX Sessions above.

UPROXX Sessions is Uproxx’s performance show featuring the hottest up-and-coming acts you should keep an eye on. Featuring creative direction from LA promotion collective, Ham On Everything, and taking place on our “bathroom” set designed and painted by Julian Gross, UPROXX Sessions is a showcase of some of our favorite performers, who just might soon be yours, too.

Ahead of her upcoming sophomore album, Hold The Girl, Rina Sawayama has shared the album’s title track. “Hold The Girl” opens as a slow, string-driven ballad, then, once it gets to the chorus, drums join in, along with guitars and glorious piano keys, transforming the downtempo symphony into dance-ready melodies. Toward the end of the song, Sawayama delivers an empowering key change, reminding herself to give herself the love and honor she deserves.

Sawayama wrote “Hold The Girl” while on the heels of her critically-acclaimed debut album, Sawayama.

“‘Hold The Girl’ was the first song I wrote for the record at the end of 2020–I had gone to therapy and had a revelation, so I decided to write this song…that was the start of it,” said Sawayama in a statement. “I was crying before going into the studio to write about it.”

Check out “Hold The Girl” above, and the album’s tracklist and cover art below.

1. “Minor Feelings”
2. “Hold The Girl”
3. “This Hell”
4. “Catch Me In The Air”
5. “Forgiveness”
6. “Holy (Til You Let Me Go)”
7. “Your Age”
8. “Imagining”
9. “Frankenstein”
10. “Hurricanes”
11. “Send My Love To John”
12. “Phantom”
13. “To Be Alive”

Hold The Girl is out 9/16 via Dirty Hit. Pre-save it here.

Robert Glasper is doing it all these days. He’s just come off a European Tour in support of his latest album, Black Radio III, performed at the Montreal Jazz Festival earlier this month (where he received the prestigious Miles Davis Award), and is in the midst of scoring not one, but three TV and film projects. But the biggest and most personal undertaking of them all for the four-time Grammy Award-winning pianist, producer, and composer, is the inaugural Blue Note Jazz Festival in Napa, CA.

Going down at the Charles Krug Winery from July 29th – 31st, Glasper is the festival’s artist in residence and curator. The lineup is an eclectic representation of jazz, hip-hop, and R&B’s inextricable ties. Where Chaka Khan, Maxwell, and Black Star are playing rare headlining sets, the lineup is as eye-popping for the creative collaboration performances like Snoop Dogg with Dinner Party (Glasper, Kamasi Washington, and Terrace Martin), The Soul Rebels with GZA & Talib Kweli, and Glasper alongside Erykah Badu, BJ The Chicago Kid, Ledisi and D Smoke — oh, and Dave Chappelle is also the weekend’s host.

We caught up with Glasper by phone to talk about the vision behind the festival, how the legacy of Miles Davis has inspired him, and how his career sees him tracing the evolution of Black music in incredible ways.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

AS: You just got back from Europe and I saw you first tour stop at Montreal Jazz Festival a couple weeks ago. Considering your work on the Everything’s Beautiful tribute album of sorts to Miles Davis, and scoring Miles Ahead, what was it like be honored with the Miles Davis Award as someone pushing jazz music forward into new realms the way Miles did?

It’s so funny how Miles Davis pops up in my life. Miles Davis is the first jazz musician that I ever heard cover pop songs. I was in junior high school and I got that record Miles Around The World where he covered Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature” and he also covered Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time.” That opened my eyes a lot. It’s part of the thread of who I am in just being open and being modern and not forgetting the history, but not being held back by the history. And then you fast forward and Don Cheadle asked me to score the Miles Davis movie he did, Miles Ahead, and that was the first thing I ever scored. Then in the middle of scoring that, Sony hits me and asks me to produce a record on Miles Davis because it was going to be his 90th birthday. So they asked me to do this remix record and I told them that I would love to, but I explained to them how I wanted to do it: It can’t just be that I put some hip-hop drums under a muted trumpet and call it a day. I wanted to really dive in. That’s why it’s [Everything’s Beautiful] also one of my favorite projects too, cause the way I did it, and the way I captured more of Miles than just his trumpet. I think he’s on two songs on the whole album as far as the trumpet goes. ‘Cause the other stuff, I literally have his breath tied in with the bass drum on a song, I have him talking, clapping, whistling. I’m trying to get the elements of the whole person. You can’t narrow him down to just the trumpet. So me getting that award, it just fell into place that with Miles, he is who he is, but he’s the reason that jazz started being so open to begin with. He’s a trailblazer.

He’s always looked to blur the definition of jazz, which is kind of what you’re pushing forward now.

Exactly, it was such an honor and I’ve been playing Montreal Jazz Festival for years, so it was an honor to get that. It was also the heaviest award I’ve ever gotten [laughs] I might’ve gotten knocked over by the trophy, it’s so heavy.

Oh yeah, I saw that thing, it was like as big as your torso!

And since that was the first day of my tour, I was gone for three weeks, so I had to have them mail it to me.

Well speaking of festivals, you’ve got Blue Note Jazz Festival in Napa coming up. I think it really speaks to so much amazing collaboration between jazz and hip-hop and R&B artists. What’s been the vision behind the way you guys curated this and brought everything together?

The idea literally came from my residency at the Blue Note [in New York] every October. I’ve done it three times so far and this last October, Steve [Bensusan] and Alex [Kurland] from Blue Note, the owner and the booker, came to me and started talking about doing something outside of the residency, maybe doing a festival. They approached me and I was like, “That makes all the sense in the world.” We kept talking about it here and there and then literally this past April, we pulled the trigger on it and said, “Let’s actually do it and make it happen.” The festival is cool cause it feels like a family reunion. Everyone performing at the fest, I know them. I kinda got to handpick my own f*cking festival. It doesn’t get better than that. They’re all amazing artists and I got to handpick them and put them all together. That’s not a typical thing that an artist or musician gets to do.

Yeah, and for the more high-profile collab sets like Dinner Party and Snoop, there’s also one like Amber from Moonchild and Kiefer. Like, where the hell else can I see that?

Yeah, Amber’s my homie cause she was on my R+R=Now record. We’re all friends. And really, it’s like a pick-up game. Like when Michael Jordan did Space Jam and he got to invite all his NBA basketball player friends to play pick-up games with him while he was recording the movie. This is like my Space Jam [laughs]

It definitely feels like a version of your residency on steroids.

For sure. That’s literally where the idea burst from. We even got going with some guests that we’d had on the residency before and some that we wanted to have. I think it started with me making a list of people that I wanted at my next residency and then was like, “We should do a festival and have all these people.”

Something that struck me in Montreal and now looking at the lineup of this festival, and then looking at Black Radio — Black Radio III specifically — is that you’re really trying to tell the story of the evolution of Black music and where everything is at now. Talk a little about that and how everything is connected with the artists you’ve got playing at this festival that has your name at the very top.

A lot of people have put jazz in this box of exclusivity. Where it’s this exclusive thing that doesn’t f*ck with anybody else, any other genres. And that’s just not the case. In its conception, it’s already amuck. Jazz is mixed with classical music, blues, gospel… And later on, when you listen to certain jazz standards, they weren’t even standards, they were show tunes. They were songs people got from musicals. Like “My Favorite Things” or “All The Things You Are,” these important jazz standards, these weren’t jazz tunes. These were jazz artists reaching out into the world and bringing worldly things into the music and then they became standards. That’s kind of where I come from it. Black music is a big house and it has many genres under that roof, blues, gospel, jazz, hip-hop, R&B, you name it. I like to go room to room in this big house of Black music. Like I have a key to it all, because it’s in my DNA. I studied this music, I went on tours with some of the greatest in each genre, so I feel like I’m one of the people that can represent this thing that we call Black music. There are so many amazing artists and trailblazers, and to have them all in one festival represents so much and represents how free the music can be.

I’m hard-pressed to think if I’ve ever seen a festival lineup quite like this. What’s your hope for this weekend?

I’m hoping that this turns into an annual thing. But also, with the kinds of musicians and artists that we have, it lends itself to probably a lot of things we’ve never seen before. People sitting in with other people, cross-pollination on the stage. Most of the time on the festival stage, you go see that one artist and that’s what you see, thats what the festival is. But this one’s gonna be more cross-pollination, with a family-oriented kind of vibe. It’s smaller than most festivals on purpose. We’re trying to mirror the Blue Note residency so we wanted to keep it intimate (in festival terms) and try to mimic that feeling that you get when you’re in a small club; like the residency, with unexpected pop-up guests. I’m getting all kinds of calls from all kinds of artists on it. I’m really looking forward to it.

For tickets, visit Blue Note Jazz Fest’s site here.

Back in May, ESPN dropped a 30 for 30 about the And1 Mixtape Tour. The Greatest Mixtape Ever told the story of the beloved streetball tour that became a fixture in the world of basketball. Now, Netflix is deciding to get in on the fun by diving into the rise and fall of the brand and the tour that helped turn it into an empire.

A trailer dropped on Wednesday morning for the latest edition of the company’s Untold series, with this episode revolving around the tour. Untold: The Rise and Fall of AND1 features interviews with some of the biggest names in the game — the trailer on YouTube indicates The Professor, Hot Sauce, Skip 2 My Lou, The Main Event, and Shane the Dribbling Machine are among those in the film — as it looks to paint the picture of And1.

“To tell the story of And1 you have to tell the story of grit, passion, perseverance and an undying love of the game of basketball,” director Kevin Wilson Jr. said in a statement to Complex. “Not only is this the story of streetball legends who kicked off a culture shifting movement and lived out their dreams to get paid to hoop when virtually everyone else shut them out. It’s also the story of regular people around the world who, because of And1, finally gained access to the energy and pandemonium of in-person high skilled, high energy basketball.”

Untold: The Rise and Fall of AND1 will premier on Netflix on Aug. 23, 2022.

This past weekend was major for 78-year-old Joni Mitchell, as she popped up at Newport Folk Festival for a 13-song set, constituting her first full-length performance since 2002 (and her first time at the Rhode Island festival since 1969).

The performance was especially noteworthy given the health journey Mitchell has been on. In 2015, she had a brain aneurysm and her recovery was long and tough: She said in a 2020 interview, “I couldn’t walk. I had to learn how again. I couldn’t talk. Polio didn’t grab me like that, but the aneurysm took away a lot more, really. Took away my speech and my ability to walk. And, you know, I got my speech back quickly, but the walking I’m still struggling with.”

So after all that, while Brandi Carlile played a role in making this comeback happen, she wants to make sure Mitchell gets the credit she deserves.

Charles L. Hughes, author of the books Country Soul: Making Music And Making Race In The American South and Why Bushwick Bill Matters, tweeted yesterday, “i want to say something *gently* about the Joni Mitchell performance at Newport. While it’s wonderful & necessary to credit Brandi Carlile for all her work in making this possible, please don’t reiterate ableism by de-centering Mitchell’s importance in making her own way back.”

Carlile shared that tweet and added, “I think this is important and true. watching her get herself to this point has changed my whole outlook on life.What she’s accomplished with her body belongs to @jonimitchell and Joni alone.All the rest of us can do is love her..and that’s been nothing but a pleasure.Go joni.”

In recent years, Carlile has become a major friend and supporter of Mitchell. In 2021, for example, she performed Mitchell’s classic album Blue in 2019 and 2021. Carlile and Mitchell became friends after meeting at a 2018 tribute concert in honor of Mitchell.

The late night TV desk, like the cockroach, will seemingly never die. Some hosts have tried to escape the desk, but it never seems to work out. Just ask Conan O’Brien, Desus, Mero, and now Samantha Bee, all hosts of late night shows that pushed against the norms and who no longer have shows (for various reasons). Is this evidence of some kind of curse or does it say something about the futility of trying to push an audience out of their comfort zone? I’m not sure, but the loss of those particular shows certainly makes late night less interesting and hints at an ominous future.

I don’t think desk shows are bad, by the way. Colbert, Kimmel, Seth, and Amber Ruffin do great things and showed immense creativity in surviving and thriving creatively during the pandemic. This is more a sorrow song for the lack of alternative options, the shows we’ve already lost, and what feels like a muted industry response.

Conan is gone now with the O’Brien deciding to leave TBS a little more than a year ago after 28 years of groundbreaking esoteric comedy that aimed for the light of silliness. This after a 2019 format change to lose the desk and give more time for conversation. Which was quickly followed by the pandemic, remote records, and then a stripped-down live model. At the time, the plan was for some kind of HBO Max series to follow, but we’re still waiting for more details on that. In the meantime, O’Brien seems to be having a blast growing his podcast network and its crown jewel, Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend. On that show, the longer form interviews are the whole meal as O’Brien gleefully indulges his want in having the kind of real, uncanned conversations that serve as a challenge within the structure of a late night show, even if you push the bounds of that structure.

As with Conan, the end of Desus & Mero does not appear to be due to network pressure, as far as we know. But who really does know? The palace intrigue of late night isn’t as on display as it was when that messy bitch Jay Leno was a part of the mix. Maybe this era will get its own Bill Carter (noted late night historian) book that exposes a bunch of secrets like the Leno/David Letterman wars and the Leno/O’Brien wars did. But for now, we go on face value alone, which is to say Daniel Baker aka Desus Nice and Joel Martinez aka The Kid Mero don’t want to be Desus AND Mero anymore. The brand is… broken, sad to say.

These talents leave behind their own legacy, not as lengthy as O’Brien’s, but one that demands a lot of respect. Desus & Mero modernized the idea of a late night talk show, bringing hip-hop culture into late night in an authentic way (a feat wonderfully memorialized by Uproxx hip-hop editor Aaron Williams) while also creating a comfortable space that allowed guests to let their shoulders rest and let the stories flow. The pair also brought a healthy disrespect for authority and institutions, including the institution of late night comedy and what it’s supposed to be. Same as Letterman (who blessed the show early in the middle of its Showtime run), O’Brien, Craig Ferguson, and Jon Stewart, who took a different kind of desk show with The Daily Show and turned it from a kind of news and pop culture Sportscenter clone to something that melded comedy and purpose.

Full Frontal with Samantha Bee is, of course, from the Daily Show branch of the late night tree, with Bee playing a key role in that show’s potent run, but her just-canceled TBS show was a different thing, with a greater depth in its reporting and a unique perspective/tone. It might be a symptom of the different times each show existed in, but I saw Stewart as an idealist progressively made angrier by the world and his inability to change it despite being anointed as the most trusted name in news. And with Bee, I saw a realist and someone with no illusions about the shittiness of the world. Someone who just wanted to tell stories that mattered about forgotten people while punching up and getting under the skin of the people most responsible for that shittiness.

This is probably an unfair generalization, but it feels like Jon Stewart wanted (or wants, in his current Apple TV+ show) to fix the system, and Sam Bee recognized that we probably need a new one.

As I wrote yesterday, the timing for Bee’s cancelation couldn’t be worse. We can debate all the live long day the actual power of any of these more politically inclined shows, but it’s better to keep people engaged and motivated on issues that don’t get nearly enough steady attention. And Full Frontal kept people engaged and motivated better than any other late night show, all while making us laugh along the way.

That’s what we’ve lost in the last year — bold comics and fighters, all with their own portfolios of greatness and passionate fan bases. Over the last few years, however, we’ve also lost shows from an array of super interesting and skillful hosts in Hasan Minhaj, Wyatt Cenac, Larry Willmore, Lilly Singh, and Chelsea Handler. That’s a pretty jarring bit of evidence that we’re stuck in a moment where late night has become less interesting and seeing a pullback on the long-needed push for more diversity in late night. So this is much more than a stylistic problem, though both the lack of creative diversity and representation create a similar issue: a limit on who is going to be compelled to watch and/or talk about these shows because they don’t feel like they appeal to their tastes or speak to their perspectives. Cultural homogenization, in other words.

So, do TV bosses care about that or the loss of all this talent? We aren’t really seeing a swell of new shows and new talents that would lead you to assume that they do. Maybe the late night evolution of a near decade ago with its greater focus on YouTube and social relevancy was their last stand and they can’t stomach another change, this time toward a generation that’s more democratic in where it gets its comedy clips, turning to TikTok and even further from the idea of sitting on a couch at midnight watching television.

Maybe we’re in late night’s death spiral and we don’t even know it because we’re in a self-perpetuating cycle convinced that the outpouring of sad tweets and flowery show obituaries indicate the loss of these huge and valuable franchises when, in all actuality, number crunchers don’t seem to be sweating it despite that immense cultural relevance. But they should, everyone should, because of late night’s influence on culture and comedy through the years, but also because it just makes more sense from a business standpoint to create more product over only leaning on a shrinking collection of stalwarts.

Go to TikTok and recruit the next Lilly Singh. Mine The Daily Show (for the love of God, give Roy Wood Jr. a show!) and writer’s rooms to find the next Amber Ruffin. Make the Corden time slot into a comedy lab where you let talented performers play and maybe strike gold, ala the great Pally/Schwartz one-off. Take risks that, oh, by the way, will cost next to nothing, especially in comparison to the salaries of more established stars.

In 2016, I wrote an article here begging for a late night revolution that saw a greater commitment to leaving the studio and bringing in new voices (I also advocated for virtual interviews, whoops!), and while gains toward those ends have happened (and now largely been undone), this is the time to recommit and continue finding ways to break the mold. It certainly isn’t the time to sit on hands and do nothing, accepting that late night is doomed to be less interesting and less bold. After all, the solution to fading relevancy isn’t retreat, it’s attack. I just hope we see evidence of that in the near future.

There’s no denying Cordae’s success in music. At just 25 years old, the DMV rapper packed plenty of accomplishments on his resume. He’s a Grammy-nominated rapper thanks to his debut album, The Lost Boy. He’s worked with celebrated artists like Eminem, Chance The Rapper, HER, Robert Glasper, Common, Nas, and more. He also has two top-15 albums to his name thanks to The Lost Boy and From A Birds Eye View. All of these accomplishments and more are at the center of his new single, “Multi-Platinum.”

Cordae’s latest release is quite the celebratory effort as he takes a moment to relish in his success, something he has every right to do especially at his young age. Thanks to production from Kid Culture, Cordae uses the track to narrate this very success from start to now. The track also stands as his first official release since sharing From A Birds Eye View earlier this year.

Months after releasing From A Birds Eye View, Cordae admitted that the project was not better than his debut. “Yo so l just drove on a lil 4 hour road trip and listened to both my albums front to back,” he wrote. “And f*ck I must say it’s most definitely “The Lost Boy > FABEV lmaooo. My bad y’all. Ima do better next time. I got sumn to prove.”

You can listen to “Multi-Platinum” in the video above.

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