Following the untimely death of his cousin and Migos bandmate Takeoff last year, it looks like Offset is getting back into the gears of making music. Yesterday (March 13), the rapper took to Instagram to share an update on what fans believe will be his second solo album.
In an Instagram Story, he shared a picture of himself wearing a hoodie, protected by a Balenciaga windbreaker. The photo was captioned, “Album mode.” The album was planned to arrive last year, but Offset delayed the project after Takeoff’s death.
In recent months, Offset and his wife, Cardi B have been making lots of public appearances. They did not shy away from any sort of public displays of affection this past weekend at the Vanity Fair Oscars afterparty, or last month at the Grammys. During the Super Bowl, the two appeared in a commercial announcing the launch of their McDonald’s meal.
In an interview with Complex published after the commercial, both Offset and Cardi teased new music of their own.
“I’m just looking forward to the fans hearing this music,” Offset said. “I’ve been making because I [used] a lot of new producers, I did a lot of new sounds, there was some new artists. So I’m just excited for the new chapter.”
Last year, Madonna announced that she was creating a biopic of her life. Created by Universal Pictures, the role of the pop icon was reportedly given to Ozark‘s Julia Garner — as of June 2022, when Variety broke the exclusive news.
However, in the months since, the film apparently had been scrapped completely… or has it? Garner chatted with Entertainment Tonight at the Vanity Fair Oscars party, where she shared there might be still more good news to come.
“I don’t want to tell too much. I want to keep things… yeah, fingers crossed,” she said.
Other celebrities that had been in the running included Florence Pugh, Alexa Demie, Sky Ferreira, Snail Mail, and more. There was even apparently an intense boot camp where those auditioning had to learn Madonna’s famous dance numbers.
Originally, per Variety, Madonna wanted the biopic to “convey the incredible journey that life has taken me on as an artist, a musician, a dancer — a human being, trying to make her way in this world. The focus of this film will always be music. Music has kept me going and art has kept me alive. There are so many untold and inspiring stories and who better to tell it than me. It’s essential to share the roller coaster ride of my life with my voice and vision.”
On the heels of films about Elvis and other major stars, time will tell if hers comes to light.
Madonna is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
Top Gun: Maverick was nominated for six Oscars, winning once for Best Sound, and the actor’s absence was the butt of a joke from host Jimmy Kimmel. “Everyone loved Top Gun. Everybody. I mean, Tom Cruise with his shirt off in that beach football scene? L Ron Hubba Hubba, you know what I’m saying?” he said during the opening monologue (which left out “harder” Slap jokes.)
Would Kimmel have told that same joke if Cruise was in the Dolby Theater? “No,” producer (and Kimmel’s wife) Molly McNearney told Variety. “We had about a three minute chunk of the monologue dedicated to Tom Cruise, honoring him and his role in reviving the movie industry. We were so disappointed when we learned a few days before the Oscars that he wouldn’t be there. Jimmy loves him and really wanted to celebrate him.”
Cruise was expected to attend the ceremony as recently as last week, and “few believe the excuse that he just had to get back to Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part Two, especially since his right-hand producer, Chris McQuarrie, flew to L.A. just for the show,” according to Puck. I hope someone learns what really happened because OMG new Mission: Impossible poster.
In the midst of executive producing the soundtrack for Creed III and planning Dreamville Fest 2023, J. Cole is still finding time to put his pen to pad to drop new music. His latest featured verse on international music star J-Hope’s new single “On The Street” is the ultimate hip hop/K-pop crossover. However, as J-Hope revealed in the behind-the-scenes video, this collaboration was nearly a decade in the making.
During the video, J-Hope revealed, “When I started listening to music, the first artist I listened to was J. Cole. Being able to work with J. Cole after 10 years as a fan, I’m so happy. It’s just all new, and I still can’t believe it.”
J. Cole didn’t let any potential language barrier stop him from sharing his admiration for J-Hope. Working with a translator, the rapper said, “It’s a blessing to be here with y’all.” The pair initially met back at Lollapalooza 2022 and have kept an eye on each other’s work.
Inside the comment section for the official music video, fans are raving about the collaboration. In fact, the most liked comment reads, “Wow, unexpected. J Cole is my icon. I wouldn’t have thought of seeing him collaborating with a BTS member, but that is great glad it happened.”
Watch the behind-the-scenes video for “On The Street” above.
The Oscars began with a joke about The Slap, and we heard a few others along the way, but by and large, this year’s broadcast avoided that vibe. Executive producer Molly McNearny had forecasted as much (the hope to be comedic and move on) before the broadcast. She’s now revealing that there was actually much more in the works, and these jokes would have been more cutthroat.
However, McNearny is letting the world know that Kimmel and his writing crew decided to pull back for a few reasons. That includes moving past the incident (which is still fueling offshoot drama), so that this year’s show could stand on its own, and also, they wanted to defer to Chris Rock to tell the “harder” jokes. He certainly did that a week prior while taking the gloves off for his Selective Outrage special. Here’s why that decision happened, via Variety:
Kimmel and his writers decided not to go harder with slap jokes because they felt it was Chris Rock’s story to tell. “We didn’t want to make this year all about last year,” McNearney said. “I cannot tell you how many Will Smith jokes we had that then we got rid of. We think that only the best for that room made it. There were certainly some that went harder, but we didn’t think that was our place to do that. That should be Chris Rock, not us.
“But we really liked the idea of making fun of the reaction to it last year,” she added. “I think we’re all still in a bit of shock of how that went.”
Fair enough. That Slap may have saved the Oscars the year prior, but it makes sense that the broadcast would want to prove that it could pull in viewership without that brand of drama. As well, Walt Disney TV alternative head Rob Mills told Variety that he did worry about HBO pushing forth with their The Last Of Us finale on the same evening. “It felt like HBO was saying ‘We’re not scared of the Oscars,’” Mills suggested. However, Mills also insisted, “Our ratings are up. I think we’ve proven that the Oscars are still the defining event in entertainment TV during the season.”
Perhaps the Oscar ratings are “up” over last year (with over 18 million viewers on broadcast night), but The Last Of Us ratings could be even higher when the final numbers shake out. And both entities are doing just fine, which is a fine place to be in the TV and film realm.
In 2016, he signed an exclusive deal with Amazon to bring his music to streaming. Now, he has elaborated on what he saw in Amazon that he didn’t in other services.
As Digital Music News reports, at the Country Radio Seminar in Nashville yesterday (March 13), Brooks said that it has to do with Amazon’s ability to sell physical releases of albums and how that benefits songwriters like himself:
“The fact is that Amazon is a retailer as well. So you can sign your streaming deal, but part of that streaming deal is to move those physical units so the songwriters get paid. And people, we can talk all day that ‘Garth went on to raise his kids, what a great…’ — Garth did that for himself. I stick up for the songwriters because I’m freakin’ one of them! Everything I do for the songwriters, I do for myself.
I’m the most selfish guy you’ve ever met, OK? But if we don’t take care of these songwriters, what do you guys have to play? It’s just tough, so that’s why I love partnering with [Amazon]. So the physical comes in, and nobody’s doing physical anymore. So these songwriters are still doing well.
And I hope that songwriters want to get a Garth Brooks cut. One, because I hope that they think that it would be cool. But two, right behind it closely, I hope it’s because they know that if you’re a Garth Brooks songwriter, you’re going to get paid.”
Given Brooks’ popularity, other platforms have tried to lure him. Spotify CEO Daniel Ek once even had a meeting with Brooks to try to get him on board. In 2017, Brooks said of Spotify and Apple Music:
“Spotify came in, Daniel Ek came down to sit with me, sweet man, I love Daniel, great guy. I think he gets a lot of crap. His parents were both street musicians — he’s a good guy who understands music, and I think he wants to help and believes 100 percent he’s helping.
Apple’s a little different story. They came in with their own set of rules, and if you’re already established, you have to change to get to them. I’m never going to change to fit their rules. Nice guys, we have respect for each other, we’re just never going to work together. So we were kind of dead in the water. Then out of the blue, thank God, Amazon shows up and wants to get into the streaming business. The views they shared seemed to correlate with the views we shared.”
In the battle between dragons and not-zombies, the Infected have prevailed.
The Last of Us season one finale was seen by 8.2 million night-off viewers across all platforms (HBO or HBO Max), making it the show’s most-watched episode to date even though it aired at the same time as the Academy Awards. The first six episodes of The Last of Us are now averaging 30.4 million viewers, with the premiere nearly at 40 million viewers. Those are even bigger numbers than the spin-off to HBO’s most successful show ever:
The 30.4 million figure, should it hold as more returns come in on the final three episodes, would mean that The Last of Us is bigger than House of the Dragon, which averaged 29 million cross-platform viewers over the course of its run in the late summer and fall of 2022.
The Last of Us is bringing in more eyeballs than House of the Dragon (not this one, though), but it has a long way to go to catch up to Game of Thrones.
The “cumulative audience of 30.4 million is the biggest for any HBO series since the final season of Game of Thrones averaged better than 44 million viewers in 2019,” according to the Hollywood Reporter. Except unlike the final season of Thrones, people actually enjoyed The Last of Us season one.
The White Stripes is one of the most beloved rock bands of its era and “Seven Nation Army” is a bona fide classic. The band is carried by Jack White’s distinct voice and his often-aggressive guitar, as well as by Meg White’s relatively simple drumming style, the latter of which has often been criticized. A Twitter user revived that discourse recently and The Roots drummer and music historian Questlove was not hearing it.
Late last night/early this morning (March 14), Questlove shared a tweet from a user that read, “The tragedy of the White Stripes is how great they would’ve been with a half decent drummer. Yeah yeah I’ve heard all the ‘but it’s a carefully crafted sound mannnn!’ takes. I’m sorry Meg White was terrible and no band is better for having sh*tty percussion.”
To that, he responded, “I try to leave ‘troll views’ alone but this right here is out of line af. Actually what is wrong w music is people choking the life out of music like an Instagram filter—trying to reach a high of music perfection that doesn’t even serve the song (or music).” He added in another tweet, “This is why I walk that Dilla path and play like a drunken sloppy af amateur because them flaws is the human element in music that is missing. Real film >>>>>>> IG filter photo.”
I try to leave “troll views” alone but this right here is out of line af. Actually what is wrong w music is people choking the life out of music like an Instagram filter—-trying to reach a high of music perfection that doesn’t even serve the song (or music) pic.twitter.com/hCj43qNpcG
This is why I walk that Dilla path and play like a drunken sloppy af amateur because them flaws is the human element in music that is missing. Real film >>>>>>> IG filter photo
In a 2002 interview, Meg White said of the criticism she faced, “I appreciate other kinds of drummers who play differently, but it’s not my style or what works for this band. I get [criticism] sometimes, and I go through periods where it really bothers me. But then I think about it, and I realize that this is what is really needed for this band. And I just try to have as much fun with it as possible.”
Granted, this anecdote is technically from 2007, but thanks to it recently being shared by FX artist Dave Rand, it’s like the world is now privy to a whole new layer of Fraser’s enduring kindness.
In a lengthy two-part Twitter post, Rand detailed how his special effects crew for “Journey to the Center of the Earth” had nearly been robbed of $1.3 million dollars worth of work.
“In November 2007 our paychecks stopped,” he wrote. Meteor Studios, the company producing the film, had convinced Rand and his crew to complete their work on the handful of shots left, guaranteeing that they’d be compensated with overtime.
Then, the studio filed for bankruptcy. “As soon as we delivered the last shot, we were escorted out. It was two weeks before Christmas and we’d soon learn there was no money,” Rand said.
Rand had tried to share his plight with Hollywood news outlets, to no avail. Even Variety rejected him, saying “another visual effects company going bankrupt, however sad, is really not newsworthy at this time.”Even trying to publish their own press release was met with threats.
Desperate, Rand attempted reaching out to Fraser, who was the star and a producer on the film. Or rather, he tried to contact Fraser’s “people.” According to Rand, “they said they’d tell him, they did not.”
Finally, thanks to gossip column Page Six, Fraser actually did see what was happening. And he immediately called Rand.
“My phone rang as I was reading the piece, a 212 area code, I answered to thank the girl, but a man answered and he said. ‘Is this Dave Rand?’ I said ‘Yes,’” he wrote. “’This is Brendan Fraser, what the f**k is going on?’”
Rand continued, “He had no idea that artists were not paid on his movie. He listened intently, asked a lot of questions and promised he would call me regularly until this was solved.”
Fraser publicly campaigned for the artist, starting with a tell-all with The Post. Two years later, the crew got 80% of what they were owed.
Rand concluded with perhaps the world’s most accurate statement:
It’s all too often that artists do not get paid what they deserve for the work they do. That goes especially for those who work in crafts that aren’t exactly the center of attention. Fraser using his celebrity to offer these people some leverage in a dire situation is reason #132 why he’s seriously the coolest guy in Hollywood.
Prior to the season, not many would’ve circled Bucks-Kings on the calendar in March and expected it to produce one of the more intense and exciting games of the season, but that’s what we got in Sacramento on Monday night.
The top-seed in the East and the three-seed in the West went toe-to-toe, with Milwaukee coming back from a double digit deficit to win the game 133-124, but not before some fireworks in the final minute. After a physical game, Giannis Antetokounmpo was dribbling the clock out when he cut across the court towards the Bucks bench in front of Trey Lyles. Lyles decided to reach in and try to poke the ball away, fouling Giannis and then shoving him away.
Brook Lopez took exception to that and got in Lyles face, which led to Lyles mushing Lopez’s face and sparking a brawl. Lyles appeared to have his hand on Lopez’s neck while Brook had a firm grip of Lyles’ head that he would not let go of, pushing Lyles and a pile of bodies onto the scorers table as everyone tried to pry and incensed Lopez away.
Lopez had been running hot for a bit, as he had taken a shot to the eye that had him bleeding earlier in the fourth and that fire was still smoldering when Lyles put his hand in his face and that led to Brook snapping. Lopez is a very large individual and it took a lot of people to separate the two, with Lopez eventually getting escorted back to the Bucks bench. You don’t often see the Bucks center get that mad, but he and Lyles both earned their ejections just prior to the end of the game, with Milwaukee coming out ahead with the win.
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