The internet has been abuzz with the announcement of new Nicki Minaj music, as well as a six-part docuseries. Following yesterday’s unveiling of the trailer for the docuseries, titled Nicki, several fans have been sharing what they would like to see throughout the six episodes.
In between preparation for the August 12 release of her new single, as well as her upcoming Rolling Loud and OVO Fest performances, Minaj took time to answer questions from the Barbz in a special episode of Queen Radio.
Before going on air, Minaj instructed fans to share questions on Twitter using the hashtags #NickiDocumentary and #FreakyGirl, and also invited them to call in using the Amp app.
Early on in the episode, she admitted that she’s nervous about putting the documentary out in the world.
“It’s extremely scary to share the lows,” Minaj said. “It makes me very proud to know I inspire my fans. And seeing fans that grew up with, still here with me, always makes me emotional, to be honest. I’ll never get over that, ever ever ever. Because y’all guys are the reason. Period.”
During the session, she revealed that each of the Nicki episodes will run an hour long. She also confirmed to a fan that each of the episodes will focus on a different era of her career, and will stream in chronological order. She promised fans that there will be footage from her wedding in the docuseries, as well as footage of her recording her upcoming fifth studio album, which the Barbz have nicknamed NM5.
As for pregnancy footage, “You just gotta wait and see, boo boo,” she said.
While she did not go into details regarding a release date or even a platform on which the documentary will stream, she did revealed that the documentary is coming very soon.
“We have the month that the documentary is coming,” Minaj said. “We do not have the date, but we have the month. It’s going to be a very exciting month for the Barbz. It’s obviously coming out in 2022.”
In regards to music, she also revealed that “‘Freaky Girl’ isn’t actually going to be called ‘Freaky Girl,’” admitting that she wasn’t allowed to use that title.
The Philadelphia 76ers received a ton of praise for the free agent moves this summer, as the team signed P.J. Tucker and Danuel House to deals that should improve their three-point shooting and defense on the perimeter. The reason the team was able to make those moves was James Harden’s decision to decline his player option for next season worth $47 million and take less money, thereby freeing up room to sign Tucker and House outright.
Now, the NBA is looking into whether anything happened that violates its rules against tampering as the Sixers built their team. According to Adrian Wojnarowski of ESPN, the league has opened up an investigation into whether or not Philly reached out to sort out deals before they could.
ESPN Sources: The NBA has opened an investigation into the Philadelphia 76ers for possible tampering and early contact centered on franchise’s summer free agency class of James Harden, P.J. Tucker and Danuel House. Sixers have begun cooperating with league on probe. Story soon.
While the obvious questions will pop up around House and Tucker, the latter of whom saw his name pop up in rumors in the days leading up to June 30 ad 6 p.m. that indicated a deal with the Sixers was done and dusted, Wojnarowski reports that the league will likewise look into Harden declining his option and signing a 1+1 deal for less money.
NBA’s expected to pursue circumstances surrounding Harden declining $47M option to sign a 1+1 deal that cut salary to $33M and gave team more flexibility to sign Tucker and House. Some have wondered if another deal was already in place for future — which is against CBA rules.
In his piece for ESPN, Wojnarowski specified the following about Harden: “Around the league, there have been questions about whether there’s already a handshake agreement in place on a future contract — which would be in violation of collective bargaining rules.”
This marks the second offseason in a row in which the NBA will open a high-profile tampering case, as the Miami Heat and Chicago Bulls were investigated last year for the circumstances under which they respectively acquired Kyle Lowry and Lonzo Ball. Both teams lost a second-round pick as a result of the probe.
It’s Matt’s sober birthday! That means everyone’s favorite stretched out Semite is 13 years free from intravenous heroin (or any heroin at all!). Congrats, Matt!
To celebrate this glorious day, the Frotcast crew is back under one roof. Matt and his number one wife, Francesca Fiorentini of The Bitchuation Room, along with their number one fetus (yet to be named), join me for a spirited discussion of Netflix’s new Woodstock ’99 documentary that I forced them to watch. We also discuss Love Is Blind, or actually mostly just Buzzfeed’s article about Love Is Blind, and how they’ve managed to make their house style somehow even more obnoxious. Which inspires Matt’s brand new character, Crying Apologetic Buzzfeed writer guy. We finish off with some talk about Matt’s sobriety, impending fatherhood (or recentish fatherhood, in my case), and what makes a healthy relationship.
It’s been a while since we were all actually in the same room together while recording and it was glorious! Do NOT get used to it. We will use podcast magic to recreate these exact vibes.
SUBSCRIBE TO THE PATREON FOR ALL THIS INCREDIBLE #CONTENT!
EMAIL us at [email protected], leave us a voicemail at 415-275-0030.
We may have to wait until 2024 until the third season of HBO’s teen drama, Euphoria. In the meantime, Labrinth, the man behind the show’s musical score, has shared a new single. On “Lift Off,” his first solo single since 2019, and his first musical offering outside of the Euphoria universe, Labrinth soars outside of the confines of the world, shooting for the stars.
“Lift off / Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, gone / You see my rocket ship / Head up in the clouds / When the spaceship lit, ignite / Hit me from the ground / I’m about to lift off,” he sings on the song’s chorus.
The song is a departure from the darker lyrical themes of his Euphoria music, however, utilizes much of the same organ and synth sounds. In an interview with Okayplayer earlier this year, Labrinth revealed that his upcoming album will be gospel-inspired.
“Gospel will be in everything that I do,” he said. “It’s one of the most consistent anchors in my career, it’s in some way on everything I’ve made.”
One of Spotify’s most buzzy playlists is getting a companion podcast. Launching Tuesday, August 4, RapCaviar will debut their official podcast exclusively on Spotify.
Earlier this month, RapCaviar also announced that an eight-episode docuseries based on the playlist is in development at Hulu.
Hosted by journalist and media personality Brandon “Jinx” Jenkins, RapCaviar will touch on an assortment of topics, with each episode featuring groups of hip-hop tastemakers. In the trailer, Jinx and crew are seen discussing Kendrick Lamar‘s best albums, Jack Harlow’s place in the space of hip-hop, and who will be rap’s savior.
In an interview with Variety, the playlist’s official curator, Carl Cherry, explained why he wanted to add a video and audio component to his iconic playlist. According to Cherry, the podcast has been two years in the making.
“I always had the opinion that a playlist is not enough,” Cherry said. “You look at other outlets that were important throughout hip-hop history, whether it’s XXL or the blog era, there’s always context. They were able to contextualize whatever they’d present to you. It’s different when you go on RapCaviar, you see the songs and that’s it. It’s important to us to create these different channels where we can add context and speak to what’s important to us and the culture.”
The New York Knicks were rumored to be the frontrunners for Donovan Mitchell when news dropped that the three-time All-Star was available in a trade. New York’s president, Leon Rose, used to run the agency that currently represents Mitchell, while the Knicks spent the offseason offloading salary to sign Jalen Brunson and accumulating draft capital in the event a player of Mitchell’s caliber came available.
Basically, New York seemed like an obvious trade partner because of those draft picks, connections to Mitchell (and his connections to the city as a native of Westchester County), and their desire for a true star. However, Shams Charania reported that talks between Utah and New York have recently stalled out.
“As of right now, sources tell me that talks between the Jazz and the Knicks around a Donovan Mitchell trade have stalled out.”
Utah reportedly wants at least six of the Knicks’ eight tradeable first-round picks along with young talent, which may be a little too rich for New York. As Utah landscapes the league for other suitors, Charania reports that Washington and Charlotte are among the teams that have been in contact.
The Jazz sit in a position of strength because they don’t need to trade Mitchell — the team’s front office can drag out a bidding war until they get the deal they truly want. The dust has mostly settled for league business for the time being, but the Mitchell trade will remain a central story until a team, whether it be the Knicks or someone else, decides to go all in.
Netflix recently released Clusterf*ck: Woodstock ’99, their three-episode documentary series directed by Jamie Crawford exploring the titular music festival. Even though it’s been barely a year since HBO released its own Woodstock ’99 documentary, which you’d think would’ve already scratched this itch, I immediately binged all three episodes of the new version the second they were available, then watched them again when a friend came to visit the next night.
I devoured it all, despite it being largely material I’d already seen, delivering information I already knew. I did it so fast and so reflexively that it forced me to ask myself why? What is it about this seemingly obscure event from 23 years ago that makes me want to keep reliving it; rehashing, and relitigating? What answers am I hoping to find this time around?
The last time I sped through two docs about the same thing this eagerly was Netflix and Hulu’s competing Fyre Fest documentaries, so maybe there’s just something endlessly intriguing about watching music festival-goers suffer, and cocky festival organizers devoured by their own hubris. And sure, maybe there’s the nostalgia factor. I was 18 when Woodstock ’99 happened, so the time period is etched indelibly in my mind. It’s always luridly fascinating to relive those days of bare breasts, baggy pants, and ICE spiker, when the biggest political issue on most young white kids’ minds was how MTV sucks now and your moms always trying to tell you what to do.
Yet there’s more to Clusterf**k‘s appeal than simple nostalgia. The music and fashion is safely anachronistic, but the event itself, the way it plays out and is eventually covered, feels like a cultural harbinger. It feels like a coming out party for a certain brand of feckless post-counterculture liberal that’s still with us today, these eternally optimistic yet clueless ex-hippies transform seamlessly into “the man” without even realizing it. Woodstock ’99 feels like a transitional moment, perhaps the first time that people of my generation realized that the counterculture we’d been raised to worship had become the culture, and they were hopelessly out of touch. That they’d keep trying to recycle their youth for a new generation without acknowledging that the material conditions had changed.
Woodstock ’99 was an attempt to recreate Woodstock ’69, when four 20-somethings organized one of the touchstone cultural events of the sixties. 30 years later, some of the same people, notably original Woodstock organizer Michael Lang, tried to do the same thing. Only instead of putting on a cool free party featuring bands they liked for their friends, they’d sell it to their children’s generation, using all the free love imagery that had been floating in the cultural ether for the previous 30 years.
Even in the gesture itself, this self-serving capitalism disguised as pedantic altruism and generational noblesse oblige, you can see the origins of the Silicon Valley messiah complex — the way Google built a sprawling monopoly while espousing “don’t be evil” as a mantra. Instead of choosing acts they knew and understood, it was like they just went to radio programmers and invited the top 40 acts, with little regard for how they’d fit with each other or the state themes of the festival. In that way, it feels like an early example of trusting “Big Data.”
Chances are you already know the broad strokes of what happened next: the organizers, who hadn’t made enough money on Woodstock ’94 because the fence broke and people got in for free, moved the whole thing to a decommissioned air base. To save more money, they farmed out the logistics out to amoral contractors, confiscated everyone’s water on the way in, skimped on security, and, once 250,000 kids were trapped inside a massive animal pen built atop miles of scorching hot blacktop, they gouged them for necessities like food and water while failing to provide the basics like security, trash, and sewage service. All while selling their flesh, exuberance, and eventually, suffering, on Pay Per View. Festival goers watched the price of food and water double and triple during the course of the festival, not yet knowing to call it “surge pricing.”
All weekend the organizers had been stoking rumors of some big closing act surprise — Prince? Reunited Guns And Roses? Michael Jackson? Bob Dylan? — but instead when the last official act (Red Hot Chili Peppers) came to their encore, the audience received candles for a planned Columbine victim vigil, along with a giant video screen playing old Hendrix footage. At which point the attendees used the candles to torch the venue. Which was, hilariously, treated as a shocking event (Burning Man, which always ends with a big fire, had been chugging along uncontroversially for 13 years already at that point).
It’s funny that the enduring debate of the festival has been “what went wrong?” when it should be blindingly obvious to anyone why a bunch of dehydrated kids who’d been denied water wanted to break shit. And it wasn’t because Fred Durst told them to “break stuff,” no matter how big a douche Fred Durst may be (I understand that talking heads shitting on Fred Durst makes for delightful doc content, but blaming him for a riot that happened a full day and half later ignores a lot of basic cause-and-effect). To its credit, Clusterf**k seems to blame the music a lot less than the HBO version.
What other recourse did those kids have after being sold a false bill of goods, gouged, and then exploited for content? Property damage was just the most obvious way to even the score. The organizers had commodified the “Woodstock” brand, and in revenge the festival goers succeeded in sullying it forever. It’s cathartic to watch, another reason these docs are so watchable.
Of course, the leadership of the time, even 23 years later, seem utterly oblivious to all this, if not prevented from acknowledging it for legal reasons. The fascinating aspect of Woodstock ’99 is less the fires and the riots and the sexual assaults themselves (which, it should be noted, Woodstock ’69 also had lots of) than watching those same organizers continue to deny the basic material conditions that created the disaster. In that way they seem to eerily mirror our current political leadership.
In one unforgettable scene, a veteran of Woodstock ’69 drives around the trash-strewn grounds of Woodstock ’99 (the trash hauling contractors nowhere to be found), trying to hand out garbage bags in the vain hopes of getting the festival goers to clean up after themselves. If her generation could clean up their own trash (citation needed), why couldn’t these kids? When her audience, by and large, look at her like she’s insane, it doesn’t seem to inspire much self-reflection. No acknowledgment that cleaning up food and trash you’ve been allowed to bring in to sustain yourself at a free concert is fundamentally different than being asked to pick up the remains of $4 water ($7.11 water in 2022 dollars) you’ve been forced to buy by a venue that can’t maintain trash, food, or sewage after you paid them $150 to get in. And also, by the way, owns the rights to the images of you passed out naked in the mud in perpetuity.
Even 20 years later, being interviewed in the present, Woodstock 99’s organizers still seem incapable or unwilling to learn basic lessons. Asked to explain why the kids tore down their peace wall and looted their vendor village, they say, seemingly without any sense of irony, things like “I guess they just didn’t have that same spirit.”
Over and over, when presented with material conditions and institutional failure, they blame culture. Organizer John Scher (portrayed once again as one of the main villains of the story) says of the festival attendees, “I think they were entitled and fearful of growing up.”
Michael Lang, Scher’s long-haired flower child partner adds, “I don’t think they were able to embrace the social issues in the same way.”
If the definition of insanity is doing the same things over and over again and expecting the same results, what does it mean to expect people to act just like you did while treating them completely differently? These people will exploit your youth and then call you childish if you object.
It wouldn’t feel so relevant if the people who ran Woodstock ’99 didn’t seem so cut from the same Kente cloth as the people currently running the country. Lang died from non-Hodgkins lymphoma three months after shooting his interview. John Scher (whose name is conveniently scrubbed from the Woodstock ’99 Wikipedia page, and Wikipedia in general, which must’ve cost a pretty penny — and didn’t work that well considering most of his other search results are news articles about him blaming women for their own sexual assault) is still alive (he’s about 71, based on this Billboard article) and still working. Both are younger than both Joe Biden (79) and Nancy Pelosi (82), not to mention half the congressional leadership.
It’s not to say that everyone from the same generation is exactly the same (which by implication would make me responsible for the popularity of Limp Bizkit, a band that released an album called “Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water”), but it’s hard not to see that confused hippie lady desperately trying to hand out trash bags in every dire-sounding fundraising email from the DNC. “Won’t you please help us clean up this mess we created?? All we need is a bit more of your money!”
It’s hard not to see a little of Joe Biden in the footage of John Scher and Michael Lang’s increasingly out-of-touch press conferences, insisting that everything is okay, and even if it isn’t it definitely isn’t their fault. The Chapo Trap House boys once described Joe Biden as “the guy who tells you the ice cream machine is broken” and I haven’t been able to think of him any other way ever since. John Scher and Michael Lang were early harbingers of this, the guys who smile and say the shitters are full but they’re working real hard on it. What was Bill Clinton’s famous catchphrase? “I feel your pain.”
These are all people who have clearly sold out their peace and love and flower power values for a comfortable position in society long ago, but if you point out their hypocrisy in any of this or their basic incompetence in any way, it’s because you’re too selfish or irresponsible. The youths are too entitled! They can’t even appreciate being charged for things we got for free!
It’s not so much their hypocrisy or their incompetence that rankles; my own generation is clearly capable of same, as the aforementioned Fyre Fest example could attest. It’s the refusal to relinquish the cultural conversation, the refusal to stop insisting. Nancy Pelosi is in her eighties and has tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to her name, depending on who you ask. Dianne Feinstein, widely whispered to be suffering from dementia, is almost 90 and even richer. Joe Manchin, the Democrats’ bete noire, is 74 and also a millionaire. Donald Trump looks like this now.
Nothing against older folks, I hope to become one myself some day. But the majority of the political leadership on both sides is well past the age when we would start to consider them incompetent for other jobs. They could just ride off into the sunset for comfortable retirements, on dopily named yachts eating fancy ice creams from custom fridges, and everyone would be happy for them. And yet they don’t. It seems that they can’t manage the one act even Limp Bizkit was ultimately capable: leaving the stage.
‘Clusterf**k: Woodstock ’99’ premieres August 3, 2022 on Netflix. Vince Mancini is onTwitter. You can access his archive of reviewshere.
The top-2 picks in the 2022 NBA Draft are headed to the Pacific Northwest to suit up in a pro-am. Earlier this week, it was announced that Orlando Magic forward Paolo Banchero will suit up and play in The CrawsOver, the annual basketball pro-am at Seattle Pacific University put on by former NBA player Jamal Crawford.
Banchero has played in The CrawsOver in the past, and it had been announced that he’s on the roster for Real Ballers, which also features Atlanta Hawks guard Dejounte Murray. But we did get some news on Friday afternoon about another 2022 draft pick and CrawsOver alum showing up this weekend, as Oklahoma City Thunder big man Chet Holmgren will make a surprise appearance.
These two, along with Jaden McDaniels of the Minnesota Timberwolves, are all confirmed to be in attendance for this weekend’s slate of games, while Toronto Raptors guard Malachi Flynn played and went for 73 points at The CrawsOver earlier this year.
It’s really cool to see the top-2 picks in the last draft give back to an area in which they have such close ties — Banchero is from Seattle originally while Holmgren played his college ball on the other side of the state at Gonzaga. The pair were slated to play against one another earlier this month at the NBA Summer League in Las Vegas, but that fell through when the Magic opted to shut down Banchero prior to the game.
Have you ever looked at your dog napping soundly in the middle of the day and secretly wished you could have a dog bed, too? Newer styles of dog beds look like soft and cozy nests that you can sink into like a cloud.
Well, dreams do come true. Two college kids from Vancouver, Canada, Noah Silverman and Yuki Kinoshita, have created the world’s first human-sized dog bed and they call it the Plufl.
“The Plufl is a premium napping bed engineered to provide the optimal napping experience,” it says on the Plufl’s Indie GoGo site. “It is created to maximize comfort and foster a sense of security, delivering relief for those who have ADHD, stress, and anxiety-related issues. A nap in the Plufl will boost your mood and have you feeling refreshed.”
That’s a pretty impressive claim. They could have just written, “You’ll sleep like a dog” and sold millions.
It may seem like a pie-in-the-sky idea, but there’s a lot of serious demand for the beds. The founders raised more than $290,000 in a Kickstarter campaign to get the company going and the beds are so popular that you have to get on a waiting list to buy one.
The beds cost $399 for one or $699 for two. If you buy yours now you’ll get it in January 2023, just after the holidays. The company currently only ships to the U.S. and Canada.
The beds are a clever idea but Jimmy Fallon had some fun with them on “The Tonight Show.”
“And finally, a company called Plufl has created the first human-sized dog bed and it costs $400,” Fallon said. “Honestly, I can’t tell what’s more annoying, the bed, the price or that I just had to say the word ‘Plufl.'”
The beds are made out of 4-inch-thick orthopedic memory foam that’s covered with faux fur. The CertiPUR-US certified foam is made with materials that are safe for humans, dogs and the environment.
The first Plufl offerings are one-size-fits-all and can fit two nappers up to 6-foot, 5 inches tall. The founders hope to make multiple sizes that fit everyone comfortably in future iterations. The beds fold up for easy storage.
Reply to @itsjalynnhoe it’s easy to store and put away the Plufl!
Silverman and Kinoshita told The New York Post that they were inspired to create the beds by their friend Lady, a Great Dane who hangs out at their local coffee shop. The dog is so large that its owners had to purchase a custom-made bed for the 200-pound dog.
That gave the founders an idea. If you can make a custom dog bed for a Great Dane, why not a human?
Over the past few years, there has been a big push for people to take more naps to improve their mental and emotional well-being throughout the day. I bet that if everyone had a massive, human-sized dog bed in the office, the percentage of people who nap every day would triple.
We know that dogs have highly sensitive noses. Anyone who’s tried to hide a peanut butter snack deep in the bottom of a backpack has found this out the hard way. But a new study suggests that dogs not only use their powerful snouts to smell, they also use them to see the world.
The study, published in The Journal of Neuroscience, revealed that vision and smell are linked in the neural pathways found in a dog’s brain. This is a trait not currently found in any other species in the world. If you need any further proof that dogs are special, here it is.
A team of veterinary and biology researchers performed MRI scans of a variety of canines and mapped an “extensive network,” starting from the olfactory bulb (the part of the brain that deals with smells) and forming connections with multiple cortices of the dog’s brain. That included the occipital lobe (the area of the brain that processes vision), but also the corticospinal tract and limbic system.
Basically, how a doggo sees, moves, feels … it’s all connected to smell. Yes, they really are just adorable walking noses.
This enhanced network explains why a blind dog might still be able to successfully play fetch, veterinary expert and one of the researchers on the study Dr. Philippa Johnson told Sky News.
She used the example that where humans tend to walk into a room and rely heavily on vision to interpret their environment, blind dogs “can orientate around their environment, and they don’t bump into things.” This can be especially comforting for those who own dogs with incurable eye disease, Johnson noted.
Considering that a dog’s nose has up to 300 million olfactory receptors (compared to the mere six million we humans have), it’s understandable that smell would play such a large role in a dog’s everyday experience. With just one inhale, they can detect bombs, recognize a long lost friend and find their way back home.
According to VCA Animal Hospitals, they can even detect the adrenaline we secrete when we are scared or anxious. That talent alone makes them very empathetic companions.
The study’s findings mark only the beginning of exploration. Johnson and her team plan to study other animals who rely heavily on their sense of smell. Included in that research lineup are horses, whose heads are “predominantly a nasal organ,” and cats, who “have the most amazing olfactory system too, and probably more connections than the dog,” according to Johnson.
Meanwhile, we can all bask in yet another reason to love dogs. Suddenly all that nonstop sniffing makes sense.
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