Month: November 2022

Today is practically a global holiday, as Spotify dropped their annual Wrapped feature for all users. For those unaware, this showcases an individual’s most listened-to songs, albums, and artists for 2022 so far. However, the streaming platform hasn’t stopped the tracking there. They compiled the streams to determine which artists, songs, and in this case, albums were played the most across the globe throughout this year.

It doesn’t seem like an easy task, either. 2022 has seen major releases from Beyoncé, Harry Styles, Taylor Swift, Drake and 21 Savage, and so many other incredibly popular artists. This year, one album shined above them all.

Bad Bunny’s summer record, Un Verano Sin Ti, holds Spotify Wrapped’s record for the most globally streamed album in 2022. Released back in May, Bad Bunny has been heading out on a world tour tied to the album, which likely only increased the popularity. He also holds Spotify Wrapped’s record for the most globally streamed artist this year.

The other albums rounding out the top five include Styles’ Harry’s House, Olivia Rodrigo’s Sour, Ed Sheeran’s =, and Doja Cat’s Planet Her.

While some of these albums weren’t necessarily released this year, they have certainly continued to make an impact on listeners.

Here’s to what next year’s Spotify Wrapped brings!

At last, 2022’s Spotify Wrapped is here. Aside from the individual per-user data that gets listeners excited, Spotify also takes this opportunity to share some year-end lists of its own and highlight the artists and music that was streamed the most on its platform this year. Generally, new music tends to dominate these ranks (of course), but Spotify also has a couple of lists dedicated to older tunes.

Those lists break down the most-listened to “throwback” albums and songs, with “throwback” meaning the work was released more than 20 years ago. Across both lists, Eminem, Kate Bush, and Coldplay dominate.

Here’s the top throwback albums list:

1. Eminem — The Marshall Mathers LP
2. Kate Bush — Hounds Of Love
3. Coldplay — Parachutes
4. Dr. Dre — 2001
5. The Beatles — 1

And here’s the throwback songs list:

1. Kate Bush — “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)”
2. Coldplay — “Yellow”
3. Eminem — “The Real Slim Shady”
4. Coolio — “Gangsta’s Paradise”
5. Nirvana — “Smells Like Teen Spirit”

Bush’s high placements are unsurprising following the Stranger Things-sparked “Running Up That Hill” resurgence. Coolio placing on the songs list is also notable given his death this past September.

Check out more Spotify Wrapped data here.

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

If Danny DeVito directs a tweet towards a politician, you know it’s going to be good.

“Antonin Scalia retire bitch” belongs in the Twitter Hall of Fame (before the Twitter Hall of Fame collapses into a sinkhole caused by one of the Boring Company’s secondhand machines), but lately, the actor/director/hoagie enjoyer has been hoping to get the attention of President Biden. Earlier this week, DeVito tweeted, “Joseph, while you’re fixing things with the railroad… get them to pass The Equality Act affording civil rights to the LGBTQ community. And extend the child tax credit. How bout the 35$ cap on insulin… all’s I’m saying, a few things already passed in the house. C’mon buddy.”

After Biden called on “Congress to move immediately to block a strike by more than 100,000 union members at the nation’s freight railroads set for the end of next week,” according to CNN, DeVito was fed up. “No Joe, you’re supposed to help the railroad workers… you got it backwards,” he wrote in a follow-up tweet. “A handful of sick days c’mon! Workers of the world unite!”

If Biden doesn’t do something, he’s going to get one of these:

For now, DeVito is being hailed as a pro-union man of the people.

One of the most pervasive male stereotypes in advertising is the strong, silent type. The most famous of these is the Marlboro Man, a dude alone on horseback with a pack of cigarettes and nothing around him but cattle and a wide-open prairie.

Tom Nakayama at the Center for Media Literacy says that this stereotype damages men because it presents a very limited form of masculinity. “In general, these concentrated views of manhood suggest the many ways in which advertising negatively affects men by narrowing the definition of what it means to be a man in American society,” Nakayama writes.

As times change the jobs and scenarios that the aloof, silent man finds himself may change, but the message is still the same. This representative of the masculine ideal is little more than a romanticized meat suit of bottled aggression waiting to be unleashed.

Three years ago, videographer Connor Simmons had some fun with this stereotype by creating a video called, “How to Advertise to Men.” The mock commercial features a man photographed in black and white, walking alone near a mountain range and looking extremely bored.

The video’s producers note that this scenario can be used to sell just about any product.

“The product is irrelevant at this point, it could be aftershave or whisky or sunglasses or this watch. It really doesn’t matter. What matters is, the product looks cool,” the deep-voiced narrator says.

The ad hopes to mock these cliché advertisements out of existence because they’re not great for the male psyche and they’re predictable and boring. Spread this video far and wide and maybe, just maybe, advertisers will be forced to come up with a new idea.

In separate projects, Rob Zombie and Tim Burton launched resurrections of similarly kitschy TV projects this fall, but only one of the projects hit the viewership out of the ballpark. That’s to be expected, really, since Zombie took a more niche (and arguably too campy) approach to rebooting The Munsters. Whereas Burton refashioned The Addams Family with intrigue in a show that stands apart from the original series to put spooky, traditionally poker-faced Wednesday Addams into a mystery worth caring about. Jenna Ortega also gives us a Wednesday worth watching for how she pays tribute to but also adds a few layers to the role originated by Christina Ricci.

Wednesday stars Catherine Zeta-Jones and Luis Guzmán in roles that that they appear destined to play (Morticia and Gomez, respectively), and Wednesday herself is relevant for a 2022 coming-of-age spin, which is quite an accomplishment. As it turns out, buckets of people want to see her time at Nevermore Academy. Additionally, bypassing a more obvious (and crowded) Halloween release date in favor of the binge-friendly, pre-Thanksgiving release date turned out to be a wise move. Via Deadline, Netflix now has a new second-place record:

Wednesday has summoned a new record for Netflix. The supernatural series drew a whopping 341.23M hours viewed in its first week on the streamer, soaring to the top of the TV charts.

It now holds the record for the most hours viewed in a week for any English-language TV series on Netflix. Impressively, that beats Stranger Things 4, which previously held the title. At its peak, the first seven episodes of Stranger Things 4 notched 335M hours viewed in their first full week on the service (and second week in the Top 10).

Still, both Wednesday and Stranger Things have yet to eclipse Squid Game, which has almost universal global appeal on its side and achieved a peak-week record of 571.8 hours viewed. Still, it’s not too shabby to achieve a gothy-success when Burton’s project was promoted as him essentially fashioning a “eight-hour Tim Burton movie.” That sounds fatiguing, but the actual Wednesday is quite the opposite for Netflix’s audience.

(Via Deadline)

For weeks now, music fans have been waiting for Spotify Wrapped, the streaming platform’s annual round-up of the year’s most-played music, to drop. It’s usually unveiled around December 1 annually, and now, it’s here.

Aside from user-specific data that you’re probably already seeing all over social media by now, Spotify also offers a round-up of the top acts among all users. For the third year in a row, Bad Bunny was the world’s most-streamed artist, followed by Taylor Swift, Drake, The Weeknd, and BTS. Bad Bunny is the first artist to ever three-peat, so in celebration, Spotify has turned its heart button into the singer’s custom red-heart icon. When narrowed to just the US, Drake is No. 1, then Swift, Bad Bunny, Kanye West, and The Weeknd.

If you want to get even more specific and look at just the world’s top K-pop artists of 2022, they were, from first to fifth, BTS, Blackpink, Twice, Stray Kids, and Seventeen. Spotify also has a list of the year’s most “viral” artists globally, meaning “their music is most frequently shared to social platforms from Spotify.” Topping that rank is Swift, followed by The Weeknd, Bad Bunny, BTS, and Lana Del Rey.

Check out the data yourself here.

Back in 2018, Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, and Julien Baker released a self-titled EP as Boygenius. It was a beloved collaboration and since then, fans have been clamoring for more from the supergroup. Well, now it looks like more could indeed be coming, as speculation is rampant after a TikTok video shared yesterday showed the three posing for a photoshoot.

The five-second clip filmed from a moving car shows Bridgers, Dacus, and Baker in vibrant outfits, posing by a telephone pole as two photographers stand across the street. Some fans noted that it appears the trio were re-creating a Nirvana photoshoot for Mademoiselle Magazine in November 1993, in which Kurt Cobain, Dave Grohl, and Krist Novoselic wore similarly colorful dresses and posed in a similar-looking environment.

Although it’s not clear when exactly this video was taken, one Reddit commenter noted, “This has to be recent, Julien has both arms fully tattooed, when they formed boygenius she didn’t have them like this.” Somebody else also wrote, “Well we do know that Lucy and Phoebe were in L.A. for the 1975 concert [on November 28]… I do see Willoughby Ave in the video and I recognize the spot because it’s by a Sprout’s in Hollywood. I’m really hoping this is real because we need more boygenius.”

(For the especially curious, the video was shot near the intersection of Willoughby Ave. and N Formosa Ave. in Los Angeles; Here’s the Google Maps Street View of the spot.)

Back in June 2021, Dacus said of potential plans for the trio to record together again, “There aren’t any plans, but we talk all the time. I think we are the biggest Boygenius fans. We want it to happen, so we’re not working against it.”

Outside of horror franchises, few sequels are as samey as Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. Next verse is same as the first, with one predictable caveat: Everything’s bigger. The quaint (and moneyed) Chicago suburb of the first becomes New York City. No celebrity cameos leads to a certain then-future president. And that violent climax, which treats burglars Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern like Looney Tunes villains? It’s thrice, maybe four times as deadly. Indeed, one of the sequence’s victims reveals he got badly hurt for real.

In a new interview with People about the film, which just turned 30, Pesci talked about the joys of doing more “slapstick” comedy, which was a nice diversion from the more dialogue-driven yuks of films like Easy Money and the Lethal Weapon sequels (to say nothing of arguably the funniest film on his CV, Goodfellas). But comedy is pain, as Pesci recalls.

“In addition to the expected bumps, bruises, and general pains that you would associate with that particular type of physical humor,” he recalled, “I did sustain serious burns to the top of my head during the scene where Harry’s hat is set on fire.”

Indeed, Pesci’s character gets his head set on fire in both of his Home Alone appearances, but the second is even more extreme, leaving Pesci’s Harry walking around, unaware that his head is ablaze. If he looks like he’s in pain, it’s not acting.

Luckily, he didn’t have to put his life on the line for, say, the part where he falls three floors down a building, and survives. “I was fortunate enough to have professional stuntmen do the real heavy stunts,” he says.

Maybe that’s one reason Pesci did a soft-retire from acting, returning only occasionally, if his old pal Martin Scorsese asks nicely. After all, why would he want to get hurt on set when he can chill in his bonkers beach house.

(Via People)

21 Savage made some controversial comments about iconic rapper Nas recently. “I don’t feel like he’s relevant, he just has a loyal ass fanbase and he still makes good-ass music,” he said in a Twitter space. He then backtracked on the statement after receiving backlash, writing in a tweet, “I would never disrespect nas or any legend who paved the way for me y’all be tryna take stuff and run with it .”

It looks like that all may have been a publicity stint. 21 Savage made an Instagram post about a collaboration with Nas, announcing “One Mic, One Gun” only an hour before its release. It’s out now, and it’s a skittish, relentlessly catchy track, watching the two talented rappers switching verses and embarking on flows about their own determination and success in a genre that poses a lot of challenges.

There are many reasons why we should take 21 Savage’s word with a grain of salt, all pertaining to his rollout with Drake for Her Loss. The cycle was packed with fake press — a faux NPR Tiny Desk, a spoof Howard Stern interview, a parody SNL performance, and a photoshopped Vogue cover. This led to Conde Nast opening a lawsuit against the rappers, seeking either $4 million in damages “or triple the defendants’ profits from their album and ‘counterfeit’ magazine.”

UAB is one of the college football programs on the lookout for a new head coach. The Blazers spent the 2022 campaign under the guidance of Bryant Vincent, the former offensive coordinator who ascended to an interim head coach role after Bill Clark resigned in June to tend to lingering back problems.

After going 6-6 this season with a 4-4 record in Conference USA, it appears UAB is getting closer and closer to finding Clark’s permanent replacement. They school has apparently decided to go Jeff Saturday mode with the search, because according to Football Scoop, former NFL quarterback, ESPN analyst, and current high school coach Trent Dilfer is expected to get offered the job, with the belief being that he will accept the position.

Per sources familiar with the process, UAB officials are expected to approach Dilfer with a formal offer to coach the Blazers’ program, and those sources said that the Blazers’ brass are “optimistic” that Dilfer will accept what would be his first-ever college head coaching position.

The news was confirmed by Matt Fortuna and Bruce Feldman of The Athletic.

Dilfer currently serves as the head coach at Lipscomb Academy, a private school in Tennessee. He has not coached at a higher level, meaning this would be his first college coaching job if he accepted it. The news comes on the same day that UAB players authored a letter to express gripes about the search and throw their support behind Vincent.

UAB still has one game to play this season, as the team will participate in the Bahamas Bowl.