Month: February 2023

Even though we just checked in with Joe Goldberg over on You, there is never enough Penn Badgley, which is why we were blessed with the trailer for the next batch of episodes today.

As season four began, the Netflix series was flipped on its head after it was revealed that the famous stalker Joe was actually the stalkee for once! At the end of episode five, it was revealed that Rhys is the bad guy who was blackmailing Joe, who is also a bad guy, but we already knew that. The second half of the season will follow Joe/Jonathan as he tries to clear his name and insist on saying he is not a murderer…anymore! That’s not the kind of life you can just leave behind, though.

But speaking of leaving things behind, the teaser also revealed that one of Joe’s former lovers/victims/fan favorites Love Quinn, would appear in an upcoming episode. This begs the question…..is Love alive? Both the person and the concept.

Love, played by Victoria Pedretti, appeared in the teaser sitting in Joe’s notorious glass box that he keeps his books and victims in (this is a real show based on a best-selling novel, by the way). At the end of season three, Love allegedly burns alive after being strangled in the home that she, Joe, and their infant child share. Joe leaves the house, cuts off a few of his toes (the fake his death, of course), drops off his baby that was only used as a plot device, and heads to Europe for season four.

Assuming Love died, her appearance in season four is probably some sort of hallucination or memory, just like we saw with Beck in season one. Though on the other hand….we never really saw Love die. So perhaps we will get some more tag team Mr. and Mrs. Smith-type murders in the fifth season. It’s what the fans deserve.

You season four part 2 drops on March 9th on Netflix.

Skrillex, Fred Again.., and Four Tet have announced a new show at New York’s Madison Square Garden for this Saturday (February 18). The news comes after the trio played a surprise Valentine’s Day pop-up performance at Gold Room in the city, as well as last-minute appearances at London’s Troxy and Electric Ballroom.

It will also be a special one, as it’s just a day following Skrillex’s new album, Quest For Fire, which drops this Friday, February 17. The record features the aforementioned Fred Again.. and Four Tet, along with other features from Missy Elliott, Justin Bieber, PinkPantheress, Kid Cudi, and many, many more. It marks his first full-length release in nine years.

“People ask why ‘I’ve been gone’ or ‘fell off,’ rightfully so,” Skrillex shared on Twitter last month. “Like I said, 22 was sort of my tipping point, I had to put everything on ice, especially my projects/career.”

“For the first time in 4-5 years I’ve found a new sense of peace. It took so much work and sacrifice to get here,” he added.

Tickets for the Madison Square Garden are currently on-sale. More information is available here.

Quest For Fire is out 2/17 via OWSLA/Atlantic. Pre-save it here.

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

The rotary phone was ubiquitous until the late ‘80s when they were replaced by push-button telephones. Then, at the turn of the millennium, those were rendered obsolete by smartphones. So anyone born in the late 1990s may have never encountered a rotary phone, even though they were in everyone’s houses for decades.

It’s been years since most people dialed a rotary phone, but that familiar mechanical swish sound that happens when dialing a number is still etched in everyone’s memory.

A video of a father, Kevin Bumstead, challenging two 17-year-olds (his son Jake and nephew Kyle) to dial a phone number on a rotary phone in 2019 is making the rounds again on social media. The original video debuted on Facebook and has received over 20 million views.

Bumstead gave the teens four minutes to try to dial a number. Could they do it?

Kyle was unsure how to approach the mysterious object. “What’s with all the holes?” he asked innocently. After numerous starts and stops, the cousins figured out how to dial the number. Did they make it on time? You’ll watch the video and see.

“I love how they lift the receiver up and put it back down to ‘reset’ it,” Robert Haskell commented on YouTube. “What I found most interesting is how the mom thought that the dial tone would be a clue to a teenager that has likely never heard one,” Giancarlo G added.

It’s fun to see the teens use their problem-solving skills to unlock the mystery of the rotary phone. But it’s also a reminder that time flies and every technological marvel that seems normal today will one day be obsolete.

Fox News is not getting away with pushing Donald Trump’s “Big Lie” that easily. The conservative news juggernaut failed to convince an appeals court to dismiss Smartmatic’s $2.7 billion lawsuit against both the network and its hosts who accused the election software company of “rigging” the 2020 election in Joe Biden’s favor. The lawsuit claims Fox knowingly pushed Trump’s false conspiracy theory in an effort to retain its right-wing audience, and the appeals court found unanimous cause to allow the lawsuit to continue.

Via Reuters:

In a 5-0 decision, the Appellate Division in Manhattan said Smartmatic USA alleged in “detailed fashion” how Fox News and some anchors and guests “effectively endorsed and participated in (defamation) with reckless disregard for, or serious doubts about” whether the company engaged in election fraud.

Smartmatic had sought $2.7 billion in damages, saying Fox News knowingly lied about its technology and how it was used in order to boost ratings, and keep Trump supporters from defecting to the right-wing networks Newsmax and One America News.

Despite the ruling, attorneys for Fox News are confident they will prevail in court.

“There is nothing more newsworthy than covering the president of the United States and his lawyers making allegations of voter fraud,” Fox’s legal team said in a statement. “Freedom of the press is foundational to our democracy and must be protected, in addition to the damages claims being outrageous, unsupported, and not rooted in sound financial analysis.”

Keep in mind, this lawsuit is entirely separate from the legal action the network is also facing from Dominion Voting Systems. That software company is seeking $1.6 billion in damages from Fox, who also named Dominion in its promotion of Trump’s election fraud claims. To date, there has been no evidence that the 2020 election was rigged, so it should be interesting to see if Fox can get out of either suit without paying out the nose. So far, it’s not looking good.

(Via Reuters)

After dropping a pair of fire singles — the vulnerable “Do You Like Me?” and the brutal “Let Me Go” — Daniel Caesar has finally announced his third studio album. His new effort, Never Enough, is set to drop this spring.

Ahead of Never Enough, Caesar has dropped a trailer for the upcoming album. The trailer sees Caesar swinging upside down from a tree. A woman is then seen standing opposite him, as the trailer fades to his logo.

New music can be heard in the trailer as well. On the song, which seems to come from the album, Caesar sings, over a brooding, minimalistic beat, “In the nick of time, that’s when you appear / Girl I was lost, until you found me here / My head was low.”

In an interview with Complex last year, Caesar revealed that while this album isn’t collaboration-heavy, however, working with producer Dylan Wiggins has been an inspiration to his craft.

“If I wasn’t excited about music before — like if I had started to wane in my love for the artform — he definitely has re-inspired me and made me excited about things,” Caesar said.

Watch the trailer for Never Enough above.

Never Enough is out 4/7 via Republic. Pre-save it here.

Marjorie Taylor Greene rarely gets her feathers ruffled, other than when one mentions her Jewish space laser conspiracy theorizing. Her general unruffled attitude is rather amazing, however, considering the earful that she received after torching the Black National Anthem without realizing that participating country singer Chris Stapleton is a Black Lives Matter supporter. So one would expect that we might have a quiet Marjorie week in the aftermath, but that’s not the case.

As Newsweek relays, Greene also spoke over the weekend in Idaho to the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee, where she had quite an enthused audience. However, once she started talking about the Chinese Spy Balloon again, she drew a 9/11 analogy (while bashing Biden), and the room went pretty silent.

“The excuses that were given on this were pathetic, absolutely pathetic,” Marjorie ranted. “They told us it was too risky, oh, it was too risky to shoot down a Chinese spy balloon. Do you know what a bunch of bullsh*t that is?”

“OK, well, do you guys remember on 9/11 when an airplane crashed in Pennsylvania?” Greene continued. “It didn’t kill anybody on the ground. Killed everybody on board, but it didn’t kill anybody on the ground. So they want to tell all of us that it was too risky to take down that Chinese spy balloon over rural Idaho or Montana or any of these other states, or Alaska.”

Biden did eventually make the call to shoot down the balloon, and since that time, multiple other identified objects have surfaced and caused a world conspiracy theorizing about aliens and such. Considering Marjorie’s penchant for conspiracy theorizing, she could very well hop on the alien wagon, too. And considering that she’s now sitting on the House Homeland Security Committee and the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, this could get really interesting.

(Via Newsweek)

There is perhaps no greater sign of the rise of Afrobeats (aka Afropop, aka Afrofusion) in the US than this: The upcoming 2023 NBA All-Star Game features a wealth of Nigerian stars as halftime performers. Burna Boy, Rema, and Tems have all been announced as the performers for the halftime show, along with the performers for the national anthem and a pregame show featuring none other than Post Malone.

In addition to the three huge names listed above, the NBA announced that the pregame show will be performed by Post Malone, while the US national anthem, “Star Spangled Banner,” will be performed by singer-songwriter Jewel, who was actually born in Utah, where All-Star Weekend is being held this year (she was raised in Alaska, though. It probably can’t be easy finding too many nationally famous stars from Utah). Meanwhile, the Canadian national anthem, “O Canada,” will be sung by R&B star Jully Black.

Burna Boy, Rema, and Tems have all have huge breakouts in the past year or so. While Burna gained notoriety, headlining festivals like Afropunk and the upcoming Afro Nation in Miami, Rema teamed up with American pop star Selena Gomez on a remix of his breakthrough hit “Calm Down.” Likewise, Tems had a huge year, winning a Grammy for her collaboration with Drake and Future on “Wait For U,” for which she was also the first African artist to debut at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. She also penned Rihanna’s Wakanda Forever ballad “Lift Me Up” while contributing her own cover of “No Woman, No Cry.”

The 2023 NBA All-Star Game will be held on Sunday, February 19 at 7 p.m. ET on TNT.

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

Rihanna, ASAP Rocky, and their first child have graced the new cover of British Vogue, complete with an interview that sheds light on how the singer’s doing.

While she just headlined the Super Bowl LVII Halftime Show over the past weekend, Rihanna faced some initial pushback. She had been previously critical of the organization for its treatment of Colin Kaepernick and turned down a performance opportunity in 2018.

“So what changed? There’s still a lot of mending to be done in my eyes, but it’s powerful to break those doors, and have representation at such a high, high level and a consistent level,” Rihanna explained about her decision to finally perform. “Two Super Bowls back-to-back, you know, representing the urban community, globally. It is powerful. It sends a really strong message.”

“Of course, raising a young Black man is one of the scariest responsibilities in life,” she added. “You’re like, ‘What am I leaving my kids to? This is the planet they’re gonna be living on?’ All of those things really start to hit differently.”

Rihanna admitted that she was approached again to headline shortly before the official announcement but waited to give them a direct answer.

“It’s this knowing that you can do anything, even things that seem the craziest, like, ‘I’m going to say yes to the Super Bowl in the middle of postpartum?’” Rihanna described, and, as we now know, she used the event to reveal her second pregnancy. “What the heck am I thinking? But you’re geeked on a challenge like that because you know what your body just did. You feel this sense of ‘Nothing is impossible.’ It was almost like an out-of-body experience. I have not been on stage in seven years. Seven years! From zero to Super Bowl? That’s mental.”

Shannon Elizabeth hasn’t been in many movies lately, especially compared to the late 1990s and early 2000s, but it’s not because she hasn’t been busy. She played in the World Series of Poker, founded a non-profit animal rescue organization, and helped launch the One Woman’s Legacy Scholarship, “a program for African women to further their careers through postgraduate studies.” Elizabeth has lived quite the life, one that she recently discussed on the Inside of You with Michael Rosenbaum podcast.

One topic that came up was her non-specific European accent as Nadia in the American Pie movies. “When I did American Pie, they called me in to do ADR,” she said. “They were like, ‘We’re gonna play with the accent.’ So I’d say something and then they’d go, ‘OK, do less of an accent.’ I was like, ‘Why are they messing with this accent so much?’ I had worked really hard with a dialect coach on this.”

Elizabeth told her friends that the 1999 sex comedy was going to “suck” because “they messed with my accent so much… I was like, ‘No, they’re ruining it. Don’t watch it.’ I was devastated after ADR.” The actress was only paid “couple thousand” dollars for her role (probably less than Blink-182), but she demanded more for the sequels. “I guess I had a number in my head I felt like they should pay and I got them to that number,” she said.

You can listen to the podcast below.

(Via EW)

Halle Bailey is not letting any lingering rumors surrounding her romantic relationship distract her from the upcoming release of Disney’s live-action adaption of The Little Mermaid. The film, slated to hit theaters this May, will mark the singer’s biggest acting role to date.

Despite the disgusting racist remarks made about the beloved underwater princess being played by a Black woman, both the film’s director Rob Marshall and the public have overwhelmingly verbalized support for Bailey. Even at one point, Bailey was brought to tears of joy after seeing hundreds of excited young girls as they watched the first teaser for the film, which was released back in September.

Now, the official trailer is here, and if you weren’t excited before, you might change your tune after watching it. Bailey took to Twitter to share it with her followers, writing, “I’m so very excited to continue the #Disney100 celebration with this new look at #TheLittleMermaid just 100 days until it arrives in theaters!”

In the trailer, Ariel (played by Bailey) explores beyond her hidden cave oasis shown in the first look teaser giving up a glimpse into the full ocean city oasis. Bailey’s dreadlocks eloquently sway as she explores near the sea floor and onto the surface. Bailey embodies the innocence of the beloved Disney character, and any pressure she felt going into filming certainly melted away as soon as the cameras began rolling.

The Little Mermaid hits theaters on May 26. In the meantime, watch the new trailer above.