Year: 2022

The RX is Uproxx Music’s stamp of approval for the best albums, songs, and music stories throughout the year. Inclusion in this category is the highest distinction we can bestow, and signals the most important music being released throughout the year. The RX is the music you need, right now.

Wizkid’s fourth album Made In Lagos was a huge milestone both commercially and creatively for him. For the former, the 2020 project became his highest-charting album, birthed a top-10 single with “Essence,” earned him his first two Grammy nominations as a lead artist, and kept him at center stage for song of the summer conversations in 2021. Creatively, it helped to wipe away doubts about Wizkid’s artistic trajectory after his crossover success in the mid-2010s was stumped by his underwhelming Sounds Of The Other Side album. Made In Lagos confirmed that Wizkid, one of afrobeats’ modern-day princes, had not lost his way in the genre. So much so that it would even be fair to call the album Wizkid’s magnum opus, especially in support of his worldwide appeal.

While Made In Lagos is dedicated to Wizkid’s hometown of Lagos, Nigeria, his latest offering, More Love, Less Ego is a dedication to lust, romance, passion, intimacy, and emotional connections – the type of things that, if more present in the real world, could make for a better and more unified society. On More Love, Less Ego, Wizkid doesn’t directly advocate for us to share more love and to be kinder with each other, rather, he spends 13 songs on a self-centered romance binge. While Wizkid’s craving for love and intimacy, oftentimes in its most raunchy form, drives most of the album, his success in finding it and his enjoyment of it is meant to inspire us to find it in our own lives.

The easiest way that More Love, Less Ego delivers this inspiration is through the album’s production. This credit goes in large part to producer P2J, as well as other names like Juls, Sammy Soso, Tay Iwar, and more. In addition to it being a cohesive and tightly-produced body of work, the sonics of More Love, Less Ego are built to draw the hearts together. Truthfully, that’s just a small piece of afrobeats’ beauty. At its fastest pace, the genre commands listeners to dance and be free of stiff bodily restrictions, and at its slowest, it sets the room for passion, whether timid or red-hot, to float through the air and affect those nearby. On More Love, Less Ego, this is evident between the spectrum of the slow and steamy “Flower Pads” and the lively and upbeat “Bad To Me.”

Enter: Wizkid. The afrobeats mastermind, who’s easily maneuvered through different generations of the genre (“Pakurumo,” “Ojuelegba, “Come Closer,” “Essense,” and “Bad To Me” are different for individual reasons), provides new evidence to back his lasting success. With the perfect canvas set for him, Wizkid wastes no time freefalling into raunchy and slick-mannered soliloquies about love. “Low on your body, dey on your case / Turn up the booty, yeah, yeah, whine up my charge,” he commands over airy amapiano drums on “Balance.” He goes further in his mission to seduce, later adding, “When the body pull up e dey cure my pain / And I no fit pass you like my Mary Jane now.” In the back half of the album, “Balance” is complemented by “Plenty Loving.” Here, Wizkid’s approach is less direct, but his goal remains the same. “Dem dey call me Mr lover / I go give you many loving,” he says in the song’s chorus.

In his most direct moments, Wizkid is a sheer lady’s man with promiscuous habits. The Caribbean influence that found its best life on Made In Lagos lives to see another album thanks to help from Jamaican artists Shenseea and Skillibeng on “Slip N Slide.” The cultures clash for a dripping tale of intimacy and the uncontainable desires that lead to an explosive moment in the bedroom. As Wizkid puffs his chest with lines like “Don’t dеny what you feel tonight” and “And I go f*ck you ’til the morning time,” Shenseea seductively places a finger on his lips to signal less talk and more action, as she says, “Mi nuh inna no long talk / ​​Come make me put it pon ya.” While Wizkid advocates for less ego on his fifth album, his own runs free throughout More Love, Less Ego. The catch is it does so to aid his aspirations in love instead of hindering them.

Elsewhere, the ego sheds itself on More Love, Less Ego and makes room for more gratifying things to take up space on the album. It’s best captured through Wizkid and Ayra Starr’s admitted inability to deal with additional world problems on “2 Sugar” as well as through the optimistic self-reminders for a better tomorrow on “Everyday.” Wizkid, as always, does a wonderful job of bringing artists into his world without stripping them of the things that make them so appealing and without conforming or transforming himself into something indigestible for his niche audience. Naira Marley and Skepta’s authentic contributions inject a jolt of energy that pairs impeccably with Wizkid’s cool demeanor on “Wow.” Don Toliver stays true to himself on “Special,” but thanks to the flavorful and intoxicating guitar strums that ring behind his autotuned croons, Wizkid is also able to dish out sultry compliments that perk up the ear. In its best example, Wizkid creates a similar “Essence” moment, but this time with rising Nigerian singer Ayra Starr for “2 Sugar.” In short, for Wizkid, there’s always enough space to share the spotlight.

“Love liberates / It doesn’t just hold, that’s ego / Love liberates.” These words that appear on “Everyday” from the late poet Maya Angelou couldn’t be more perfect for Wizkid’s message on More Love, Less Ego. His relentless advances for love throughout the album seek this liberation, and he knows it can only be accomplished through reciprocation. It’s why he closes the album with a call for just that on “Frames (Who’s Gonna Know).” “Give me more of you,” he sings. “Give me something / I’ll never want to lose.” There’s always a risk in pursuing a fulfilling offering for the heart, and while those risks may be daunting, embracing them rather than trying to overpower them will serve you well. Quite literally, it doesn’t hurt to approach it with more love and less ego. On More Love, Less Ego, Wizkid fearlessly liberates his desires for love, and in turn, he’ll be graciously awarded for it sooner rather than later.

More Love, Less Ego is out now via RCA/Starboy Entertainment. You can stream it here.

The Respect for Marriage Act passed the Senate this week, meaning that same-sex and interracial marriages will continue to be protected and afforded the same rights (along with the responsibilities) as what Candace Cameron Bure considers to be “traditional marriage.” The legislation was a bipartisan effort, which Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH) recently summed in a statement via his website:

“The Respect for Marriage Act is a needed step to provide millions of loving couples in same-sex and interracial marriages the certainty that they will continue to enjoy the freedoms, rights, and responsibilities afforded to all other marriages. Through bipartisan collaboration, we’ve crafted commonsense language to confirm that this legislation fully respects and protects Americans’ religious liberties and diverse beliefs, while leaving intact the core mission of the legislation to protect marriage equality.”

As USA Today reports, the bill passed with 12 Republicans coming together with Democrats to knock this thing into official existence. 37 Republican senators did not agree, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell happened to be one of them. As many know, McConnell recently dealt with Donald Trump’s “ridiculously racist” attack on Mitch’s wife, Elaine Chao, who is Asian-American and also happens to be the ex-U.S. Secretary for Transportation under the Trump administration.

Mitch voted “no” Respect for Marriage Act, and he probably actually meant to vote no on protecting gay marriage. In effect, though, he also voted against protecting interracial marriage, and that’s causing eyebrows to raise for a few reasons. Real questions here: did he forget that Elaine is Asian-American? Does he consider her to be white? And the suggestions only grow worse from there, so people aired it all out on Twitter.

Mitch recently won his reelection for Senate Minority Leader, so we’ll be seeing plenty of him as usual.

Bruce Springsteen is making the most of his The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon residency. The Boss dropped his covers album, Only The Strong Survive, last Friday (November 11). He brought “Do I Love You (Indeed I Do),” a Frank Wilson cover, to life with his E Street Band during Monday’s (November 14) show. Springsteen followed that up with a 20-person band backing him for Tuesday’s performance of “Turn Back The Hands Of Time” and last night’s (November 16) silky-smooth rendition of “Nightshift.”

Just like for “Turn Back The Hands Of Time,” the stage was full behind Springsteen. But his distinctively soothing voice stole the limelight. “Marvin, he was a friend of mine,” Springsteen softly sang to open the song. “And he could sing his song, his heart in every line / Marvin sang of the joy and pain / He opened up our minds, I still can hear him say / Oh, talk to me, so you can see what’s going on.’” And Springsteen’s delivery could have fooled anyone that he was singing from personal experience, not covering a 1985 Commodores classic.

Springsteen will again appear on The Tonight Show‘s Thanksgiving episode next Thursday, November 24.

It also was announced yesterday that Springsteen’s two-plus-hour Halloween sit-down interview with SiriusXM’s The Howard Stern Show will air in its entirety on HBO on November 27, then be available to stream on HBO Max. Watch the trailer here.

And watch the 20-time Grammy winner deliver “Nightshift” above.

A quick-thinking 10-year-old boy escaped a woman trying to lure him by pretending that a local store clerk was his mother. ABC 6 reports that Sammy Green was walking home from school in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, on Friday, November 11, when a strange woman started following him.

The woman “started walking with him and asking him where his family was, asking where his dad was,” Sam Green, the boy’s father, told ABC6. The boy didn’t know the woman but she insisted that she knew his family.

She tried to lure him into going with her by promising she’d buy him “anything he wanted” at Wawa, a local convenience store that sells shakes, sandwiches and other treats.

“She was like, ‘I’m going to Wawa, are you going there? What are you getting from Wawa? Where’s your family at?'” Sammy told CBS.

u201cthat are so scary i glad he was able to get help nnA 10-year-old boy in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, escaped a woman who was following him.nnThe boy asked a cashier to pretend to be his mother nhttps://t.co/2WYLX9nQvNu201d

— Hu1ea1nh Lien ud83cudff3ufe0fu200dud83cudf08 (@Hu1ea1nh Lien ud83cudff3ufe0fu200dud83cudf08)
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“She said she probably knew me and was going to Wawa and that he was supposed to go with her and he could get anything he wanted,” Sam Green said.

In an attempt to flee the suspicious woman, Sammy walked into Dani Bee Funky, an unconventional gift shop, where he went straight to 17-year-old Hannah who was working the register. “He was like, ‘Pretend like you’re my mom,'” Hannah told CBS, “and I was just like, ‘all right go to the back.’ He didn’t want to leave my side.”

Security footage shows that Hannah then calmly walked up to the store’s front door and locked it, preventing the woman from coming inside. After she was locked out, the woman walked away. “I was still shaking when I was in here,” Sammy said.

The security camera footage is hard for Sammy’s dad to watch. “When we were watching that video, I cried every time I saw it,” said Green.

The shop’s owner has nothing but praise for Hannah’s calm way of handling the dangerous situation. “I am very proud of her. Hannah is a 17-year-old young lady. She did everything correctly,” Small said.

This story is a great reminder for parents to talk to their kids about what to do if they are approached by a suspicious person. The first thing they should know is that it’s OK to say “No!” as loudly as possible to a suspicious person. They should then scream, “Help! This is not my mom or my dad!” to alert the adults around them and then run. If they are grabbed by the person they should bite, punch and kick as hard as they can until they can get free.

Sammy’s dad is proud that his son remembered what he told him to do when confronted by a suspicious stranger. “Think of every scenario and make sure that children know and also practice it,” he reminded parents. “Practice your situations and scenarios just like fire drills.”

For the time being, Sammy is going to have a family friend walk him to and from school. The Pottstown Police have spoken with the woman and she is now getting help for mental health issues.

Chances are you’re having a tough time keeping up with Brockhampton. Their new album The Family, out today, was supposed to be their last album. That was until they started teasing TM, which began when they shared a graphic this morning to promote The Family, but small text towards the bottom reads: “SURPRISE ALBUM (TM) MIDNIGHT LOCAL.”

A press release says that TM is “an album made up of songs that were started by the group during a two-week stint in Ojai, California in 2021, but were never fully completed during those sessions.” Apple Music shows that the LP is 11 tracks long and runs for 37 minutes.

The only Brockhampton member on The Family is Kevin Abstract, who explained that “the members of the band began to move our separate ways and focus on our individual careers and passions. With this project, a few of us were inspired to make something new that would bring closure to the past and set the table for all of us to finally be able to explore our individual futures.”

Check out the artwork and tracklist for TM below.

1. “FMG”
2. “Animal”
3. “Listerine”
4. “New Shoes”
5. “Keep It Southern”
6. “Man On The Moon”
7. “Better Things”
8. “Crucify Me”
9. “Duct Tape”
10. “Always Something”
11. “Goodbye”

Traveling is hard, especially when you have to get to the airport early, dump your water bottles out on the street and then pay $12 for another one. It’s a taxing system! But it’s in place for a reason: so that if somebody decides to smuggle drugs on a plane, they will likely get caught. Sure, not every time, but most of the time…someone is going to pay the price, which is exactly what happened at JFK last week when a woman was arrested for bringing a little too much cocaine into the airport. About 28 pounds too much.

According to AP, officers at Kennedy International Airport confiscated over $450,000 worth of cocaine from a traveler who was hiding the drugs in the wheels of her wheelchair. Officials became suspicious when the wheels were not turning correctly, forcing TSA to X-ray the chair and discover the white powdery substance.

What’s even more upsetting is the fact that the official US Border Patrol website made a horrible “Wheels On The Bus” joke in its official press release about the ordeal:

The wheels on this passenger’s wheelchair stopped going round and round on arrival at John F. Kennedy International Airport when U. S. Customs and Border Protection officers seized her loaded wheelchair.

This just goes to show that people need editors to stop them from posting things, now more than ever! Of course, social media was very entertained by the story, for better or worse, with most people asking the eternal question: what is TSA always looking for, anyway?

Surprisingly, this is not the first (or second!) time this has happened this year alone. The moral of the story here is to maybe not bring drugs into the world’s busiest airport surrounded by police. It has literally never worked out for anyone.

If ever there was an appropriate time to whip out that Michael Jackson eating popcorn GIF you’ve got saved on your phone, it might be now. With Donald Trump prematurely announcing his intentions to try and outrun any federal indictments run for president in 2024 earlier this week, all eyes have now turned to Florida governor Ron DeSantis — who, after handing his gubernatorial opponent’s ass to him during last week’s midterms, is slowly but surely winning over many of his fellow Republicans who believe they may have found their new golden boy. Of course, as Seth Meyers reminded viewers, it’s worth remembering that Trump and DeSantis are BOTH total a**holes — and he can’t wait to watch them tear each other apart.

On Thursday night, the Late Night host noted that the historically disappointing midterms results are still all the GOP can talk about, and many are blaming MAGA candidates and election deniers, a.k.a. Trump’s “handpicked clown car of doinks and bozos,” for the humiliating defeat.

“Trump is such a proven loser, and his effects on the midterms were so toxic, Republicans across the spectrum — from moderates to his most ardent supporters — were urging him to delay his presidential announcement,” Meyers explained. But Trump, of course, refused to listen to anyone. Which means that we’re now about to be sucked back into the misery of what so many of us felt between 2016 and 2020, when Trump chewed up every news cycle.

Though it might be good for late-night monologue fodder, Meyers doesn’t seem to care: “No! Shut up! F**k! You don’t get to do this,” he yelled at a clip of Trump announcing his candidacy. “You don’t get to start campaigning two years before the next election, one week after the last election, and three months before what I’m assuming is one solitary old woman counting the votes in Maricopa County.”

As pissed off as he is, however, Meyers did allow that there is one good thing that could come out of Trump (yawn!) yet again running for president: watching Trump and DeSantis — who recently trafficked a plane full of Venezuelan migrants as a JOKE and who Meyers says “is like if a mailbox could be racist” — try their best to paint the other guy as the worst human being.

“I have no idea which of these a**holes will out-a**hole the other a**hole and win,” says Meyers, “but it will certainly be interesting to watch them destroy each other.”

You can watch the full segment above.

With just a few weeks to go until Trevor Noah sits behind The Daily Show desk for the final time, he may have officially run out of f**ks to give — which is a glorious thing to behold. Case in point: His annoyance with Donald “Woe Is Me” Trump, and the former president’s penchant for playing the victim.

While announcing his intention to run for president (again!) in 2024 in the most boring way possible, Trump — who spoke as if his presumed Adderall prescription hadn’t been renewed — declared that “we must conduct a top to bottom overhaul to clean out the festering rot and corruption of Washington, DC” (which sounds like a line he might have stolen from his personal doctor just ahead of his most recent colonoscopy). The twice-impeached former POTUS then went on to whine that he, too, has been a victim of the evil machinations of America’s political machine. Noah wasn’t buying it.

“‘That’s right folks, I’m the biggest victim of all,’” The Daily Show host said in his best Trump voice. “‘Every time I do something illegal, they come after me. I’ve done 30 illegal things — they’ve come after me at least 20 times! It’s so unfair. So unfair.’”

But for all the BS that Trump was spewing, Noah admitted that he was “actually glad he’s being honest about why he’s running. He’s running for the same reason every shirtless guy on Cops runs: The popo is chasing him! This is what Trump does. He’s always the victim. The poor billionaire who only owns 15 golf courses and got to run the world’s most powerful country for four years. Oh, woe is me!”

Ultimately, concluded Noah, “If Trump was a prince in a fairy tale, the movie would suck and the princess would never get saved. The dwarves would be like, ‘Please, we need you to save Snow White!’ And he’d be like, ‘Who’s gonna save ME?’”

You can watch the full segment, Trump impersonations and all, beginning around the 2:25 mark.

It was touch-and-go for Lil Tjay this summer. He was shot multiple times on June 22 during an attempted robbery in Edgewater, New Jersey. Tjay was rushed into emergency surgery but remained unconscious for a week. In August, he erected an “I’m Back” billboard in the Bronx and updated fans on his near-death experience.

Last night (November 16), he and fellow Bronx rapper Ice Spice took to the streets to be with their fans for a turkey drive.

“We in the Bronx with it. Listen, I got a whole lot of turkeys to give out,” Tjay said in an Instagram video capturing the overwhelming turnout.

Another fan-posted clip shows non-stop flashing cameras and someone screaming toward Ice Spice and Tjay, “Hi! I love you!”

Both stars have blessed fans with more than turkey lately. Tjay dropped “Give You What You Want” last Friday, November 11, while Ice Spice appeared on the November 9 episode of The RapCaviar Podcast and teased a forthcoming EP.

“I’m excited for this new music,” Ice Spice said. “I’m about to put out an EP. It’s about to be like six songs. ‘Bikini Bottom‘ is on there, and then there’s some that people haven’t heard. It’s about to be a vibe. Visuals coming with it, too. Yeah, a bunch of content around it. It’s lit.”

As Donald Trump and his sycophantic MAGA World continue to crumble, which has not halted his presidential ambitions, the knives are coming out for the former president’s number one adviser: Steve Bannon. Gun-loving GOP staple Dana Loesch recently blasted Bannon on her show, and she’s clearly done pretending he’s some sort of master strategist with his “War Room” podcast that continues to host only loyal Trump acolytes like Marjorie Taylor Greene.

According to Loesch, if Bannon — or “Sloppy Steve” as she calls him — had been running things going into the midterm elections, the results would have been even worse for the GOP who failed to produce a red wave because of Trump’s meddling. Via Media Matters:

Had Sloppy Steve Bannon gotten his way, Mr. War Room, you would’ve had Greitens in Missouri and you would’ve lost that damn Senate seat. I’ve never met anyone so politically stupid and strategically dumb in my entire life, and rides the coattails of everyone else, and people just fall for it. It’s amazing. But I can say this having known the guy for over a decade.

Loesch joins a growing line of GOP operatives who are tired of Bannon, Trump, and their Big Lie nonsense. While interviewing Bannon at a Kari Lake event for Showtime’s The Circus, former GOP adviser Tim Miller cut the whole thing short after calling out Bannon to his face for pushing election fraud conspiracy theories.

“You don’t really believe this sh*t?” Miller asked. When Bannon replied, “100 percent,” Miller unloaded. “People stormed the Capitol over this sh*t, dude. These are lies!”

(Via Media Matters)