Month: March 2023

Gordi unveiled her album Inhuman last year. Her vulnerable, insightful songs grapple with casual tragedies, whether that’s fires in her home country of Australia on that album’s title track or a feeling of sinking emptiness on her new song, “Broke Scene.”

“The Lazy Susan spun around the yum cha table as I drained the last of my Tsingtao,” Gordi (real name Sophie Payten) said about the single. “I had an afternoon of writing ahead of me, which was giving me ‘the Sunday feeling.’ I was in such a post-lunch haze when I got back to the piano, that I thought I’d just lie down and close my eyes for a second. I woke up an hour later in a cold yum cha sweat. Almost robotically, I picked up a guitar and started playing this riff, as if I’d been dreaming about it. I looped a drum part over the top that my friend Chris Messina had sent me. By the time the sun set, I had written ‘Broke Scene.’”

The swirling song encapsulates the poignant energy of her music. “Why do you keep burning your house down? / Can you see you’re burning your house down?” she croons.

Listen to “Broke Scene” above.

Uproxx identified Momma among “Artists To Watch” in May 2022, and the alt-rockers have fulfilled that prophecy nearly one year later. After dropping Household Name last July, Momma served as Death Cab For Cutie’s tour opener. They’ll do the same for Alex G this month and for Weezer this summer.

Today, March 1, Momma’s Etta Friedman and Allegra Weingarten reflected on the whirlwind with “Bang Bang.”

The hypnotic single indulges the universal fantasy of having free time (“Bang bang and sleep in”) and doing whatever they want with it, reckless or not, without shame (“Life is good between my thighs / I get high, and you hold it down”).

“Bang Bang” was written and recorded alongside producer/bassist Aron Kobayashi Ritch following Momma’s inaugural headlining North American tour last fall, per a press release.

“Allegra and I ended up getting COVID at the same time, so we decided to isolate, get drunk, and write together,” Friedman said in a statement. “Within a night, we had demoed a hot sounding song about great sex.”

“We wanted to write something lyrically different than anything else we’d done — just super literal and crude,” Weingarten added. “We shared it with Aron, and he sent us back a new version with a lot of added extra production: drums, bass, synths, acoustic guitar, etc. It felt totally different and fresh. The finished song has a lot of classic Momma — heavy guitars and catchy melodies — but packaged in a different form. It feels immediate, like a whole new sound for the band.”

Listen to “Bang Bang” above.

Indie band Men I Trust make sprawling, dreamy songs that drew the attention of Joey Badass, who sampled their seductive “Show Me How” for his “Show Me.” The glimmering guitars serve as the perfect backdrop for his flows. After taking the track to late-night television, he’s back with an accompanying short film featuring actress Serayah.

Earlier this week, he teased this music video by posting a romantic picture of him and Serayah at dinner together, getting quite close. It sparked dating rumors immediately. The video, though, is full of as much spice as the song would suggest. The chemistry between the pair is palpable, as they live out a passionate relationship for the entirety of the nearly five-minute track.

Joey has plenty of acting experience himself. Last year, he spoke to HipHopDX about his role as Kadeem “Unique” Mathis in the TV show Power Book III: Raising Kanan.

“Acting, in general, comes pretty instinctively to me,” he said. “Just in a way where you kind of go somewhere else. Like on that stage, I gotta go into superstar mode. I’m still here, but it’s like a superstar hangover, but when I’m home, it’s a different vibe where I’m chill.”

Watch the video for “Show Me” above.

Nas finally played his hometown Madison Square Garden last Friday, February 24. The one-night-only event celebrated Nas’ collaborative King’s Disease trilogy with Hit-Boy, and the New York legend is keeping King’s Disease III top of mind. The album arrived last November, but “30” received the video treatment today, March 1.

Directed by Sarah McColgan, Nas’ “30” video is poignantly simplistic. Shot in black-and-white, Nas enters an empty warehouse alone. It’s dark, except for light shining through the slightly cracked door. Nas lets his longevity do the talking — melodically running through everything he’s overcome (“I’m done with star chicks, I survived divorces”) and asserting his resiliency (“I’m wild for keepin’ it so timeless / Almost half a century with a crispy lineup”).

“Goin’ on thirty summers,” Nas raps. “We been movin’ how you f*ck n****s want / And my ’30 for 30′ highlights doin’ numbers.” (Of course, his iconic debut album, Illmatic, dropped in 1994.)

Last week, Nas visited The Late Show With Stephen Colbert and explained that, to him, King’s Disease encompasses “over-indulgence” and detailed how he’s navigated its potential pitfalls over the years.

“I read about a lot of artists that came up in our time or before our time, and some of them were wild people. And I learned a lot from them, and it kind of gave me some of the guidelines in this business,” he said, adding that the only way to cure the King’s Disease is to “kill the ego” and “make it about the music, make it about the art, and live your life.”

That approach paid off. King’s Disease peaked at No. 5 on the Billboard 200 albums chart in 2020, followed by King’s Disease II at No. 3 in 2021 and King’s Disease III at No. 10 last year. The first of the bunch earned Nas his first-ever Grammy by claiming Best Rap Album at the 2021 Grammys.

And while it’s billed as a King’s Disease trilogy for now, 50 Cent hinted at King’s Disease IV.

Watch the “30” video above.

Michelle Yeoh is currently enjoying the biggest success of her life, and with good reason: She has always kicked ass. (For proof, watch this mind-blowing clip of her and Cynthia Rothrock in 1985’s Yes, Madam!, the first starring role for both of them.) Many Americans first saw her in 1997’s Tomorrow Never Dies, in which she out-badasses Pierce Brosnan’s James Bond. You’d think it would have led to a flurry of great parts. But in a recent interview, Yeoh revealed that during that period, she didn’t work for two full years because the roles were so crap.

In a new interview with People (in a bit teased out by Insider), Yeoh says that she got more heartache than happiness after her Bond movie. For one thing, she said, “people in the industry couldn’t really tell the difference between whether I was Chinese or Japanese or Korean or if I even spoke English.” She added, “They would talk very loudly and very slow.”

Then there were the insulting offers: “I didn’t work for almost two years, until Crouching Tiger, simply because I could not agree with the stereotypical roles that were put forward to me.”

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon wound up being a watershed, becoming one of the biggest martial arts hits at the global box office, even in America, and despite it being subtitled.

Luckily, it doesn’t seem the same thing is happening to Yeoh after Everything Everywhere All at Once. She nabbed the role of Madame Morrible in the two-part Wicked film adaptation.

“In the past, this role would’ve been for a Caucasian lady,” Yeoh told People. “This is what we call diversity, inclusivity. This is how you make it work. It is a natural process — progress, evolution that we can have as storytellers.”

And then there’s the little case of her maybe winning an Oscar in a couple weeks. If so, hopefully the orchestra knows not to dare play her off.

(Via People and Insider)

Remember that time Mark Ruffalo not-even-vaguely spoiled the ending of Avengers: Infinity War months before it came out — and somehow no one noticed? Marvel got so mad, apparently, that they sent him a dummy script for Endgame. Then there’s Tom Holland, who has a reputation for dropping spoilers. No wonder MCU honchos now treat their precious scripts like Fort Knox gold. Indeed, Anthony Mackie recently laid out what it’s like to even access his screenplays.

On an episode this week of The Kelly Clarkson Show, Mackie discussed his lead role in the Harrison Ford-featuring Captain America: New World Order, his first film as the new Cap. As it happened, on the day of filming he had just been giving the film’s script. “I haven’t read it. Haven’t opened it. I haven’t gotten my passcode to the website that lets you into the website.”

In fact, it sounds like it’s a convoluted process, which he happily laid out. “We literally get a passcode to a website that gives us a location to meet the person to sign, to sit with a computer, and read our script. They don’t trust nobody,” Mackie explained. “And it’s always like some 21-year-old intern and he just hates you. He’s sitting there eating Cheetos and he’s like ‘Read faster.’ And I’m like, ‘I’m dyslexic.’ And he’s like, ‘I don’t care.’”

Mackie also discussed his dyslexia:

“That’s what got me into acting. Teachers are the most important foundation of American culture. And I had this teacher named Ms. Dorsey. I was making straight As and Bs. I couldn’t figure out English. ‘See spot run,’ I didn’t even know Spot was in a race. She was like, ‘We just need to find something to pique your interests, make reading interesting.’ And then she gave me this whole program and all of a sudden I’m reading Shakespeare, I’m reading Ibsen, I’m reading Chekhov. I’m reading all this different stuff and it’s making sense.”

Making cracking open their scripts difficult isn’t the only way they’ve played coy with Mackie. As of last fall, the actor wasn’t even sure if he’d be in one of the next big films, Thunderbolts.

You can watch Mackie’s chat with Kelly Clarkson in the video below.

(Via IndieWire)

No matter where you’re from, how much money you have or how famous you are, when you become a mother your whole world turns upside down. Motherhood can catapult you to the highest highs, drag you through the lowest lows and fling you around corners you never saw coming. It’s like the best and worst roller coaster ever.

Throw in dealing with your own childhood issues, and motherhood becomes an even more terrifying thrill ride. A friend recently remarked that raising kids can be simultaneously triggering and therapeutic for people with their own childhood traumas, and it’s so true. Just ask Drew Barrymore.

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Barrymore, who had a famously tragic childhood and poor parenting models, has talked about how she feels her experiences have given her a strong toolkit for raising her two daughters, and how healing motherhood has been for her. But the fear of messing up our kids is real for all moms, and Barrymore shared some of those worries with Pink on her talk show.

Sitting face to face on the sofa, Pink and Barrymore shared an intimate conversation about motherhood that was refreshingly real and relatable. Barrymore’s daughters are 8 and 10 years old and Pink’s kids are 11 and 6, so they are both right in the middle of their mothering journeys, the stage when parenting becomes more emotionally demanding than physically demanding.

The conversation opens with Barrymore asking Pink, “What can I tell myself when I’m afraid my kids will do some of the stuff I did?” which leads to laughter, some wise advice and Pink admitting she carries a tote bag that says “I literally have no idea what I’m doing” to preschool drop-off.

Definitely worth a watch:

“Omg- being the mom of two single digits kids- these two women moved me. I wish I had friends like this to have deep, real conversations with,” wrote one commenter.

“As someone who has idolized Pink since I was about 14, I hang on to her every word, and that last part brought me to tears. I felt the exact same way when my daughter was born. A beautiful little girl, unscathed by the world. Wow,” wrote another.

“None of us knows what we’re doing and it’s tragic and beautiful all at the same time,” wrote another. Amen to that.

Every mom needs this kind of heartfelt honesty in her life. Thanks for giving us a glimpse of what that can look like, Drew and Pink.

Like it or not, we’ve recently entered the age of artificial intelligence, and although that may be scary for some, one guy in Florida thinks it’s a great way to make people laugh. Cam Harless, the host of The Mad Ones podcast, used AI to create portraits of every U.S. president looking “cool” with a mullet hairstyle, and the results are hilarious.

The mullet is a notorious hairdo known as the “business in the front, party in the back” look. It’s believed that the term “mullet” was coined by the rap-punk-funk group Beastie Boys in 1994.

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While cool is in the eye of the beholder, Harless seems to believe it means looking like a cross between Dog the Bounty Hunter and Kenny Powers from “Eastbound and Down.”

Harless made the photos using Midjourney, an app that creates images from textual descriptions. “I love making AI art,” Harless told Newsweek. “Often I think of a prompt, create the image and choose the one that makes me laugh the most to present on Twitter and have people try and guess my prompt.”

every american president, but they’re all cool and they all sport a mullet

46. Joe Biden pic.twitter.com/qoE9AJSxj5

— Cam Harless (@hamcarless) March 1, 2023

“The idea of Biden with a mullet made me laugh, so I tried to make one with him and Trump together and that led to the whole list of presidents,” he continued.

Harless made AI photos of all 46 presidents with mullets and shared them on Twitter, and the response has been tremendous. His first photo of Joe Biden with a mullet has nearly 75,000 likes and counting.

Here’s our list of the 14 best presidents with mullets. Check out Harless’ thread here if you want to see all 46.

Joe Biden with an incredible blonde mane and a tailored suit. This guy takes no malarkey.

every american president, but they’re all cool and they all sport a mullet

46. Joe Biden pic.twitter.com/qoE9AJSxj5

— Cam Harless (@hamcarless) March 1, 2023

Donald Trump looking like a guy who has 35 different pairs of stonewashed jeans in his closet at Mar-a-Lago.

45. Donald Trump pic.twitter.com/QeaGStPgXL

— Cam Harless (@hamcarless) March 1, 2023

Barack Obama looking like he played an informant on “Starsky and Hutch” in 1976.

44. Barack Obama pic.twitter.com/6evMo4EgFU

— Cam Harless (@hamcarless) March 1, 2023

George H.W. Bush looking like he plays bass in Elvis’s backing band at the International Hotel in Vegas in ’73.

41. George H.W. Bush pic.twitter.com/vW6pNfCkDt

— Cam Harless (@hamcarless) March 1, 2023

Gerald Ford looking like the last guy on Earth that you want to owe money.

38. Gerald Ford pic.twitter.com/hjf3WhAxpY

— Cam Harless (@hamcarless) March 1, 2023

“C’mon down and get a great deal at Dick Nixon’s Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep and Ram, right off the I-95 in Daytona Beach.”

37. Richard Nixon pic.twitter.com/G66eqFbA3Z

— Cam Harless (@hamcarless) March 1, 2023

“Who you calling Teddy? That’s Theodore Roosevelt to you.”

26. Theodore Roosevelt pic.twitter.com/uaf5ttVkXr

— Cam Harless (@hamcarless) March 1, 2023

Grover Cleveland is giving off some serious steampunk vibes here.

22. Grover Cleveland pic.twitter.com/WECEck8zlz

— Cam Harless (@hamcarless) March 1, 2023

Pray you never key Chester A. Arthur’s Trans Am. If you know what’s best for you.

21. Chester A Arthur pic.twitter.com/siJZGgVIGc

— Cam Harless (@hamcarless) March 1, 2023

Honest Abe? More like Honest Babe. Am I right?

16. Abraham Lincoln pic.twitter.com/djmXNi2BBa

— Cam Harless (@hamcarless) March 1, 2023

Franklin Pierce looking like your favorite New Romantic singer from 1982. Eat your heart out, Adam Ant.

14. Franklin Pierce pic.twitter.com/2AB4hpNWcX

— Cam Harless (@hamcarless) March 1, 2023

“Daniel Day Lewis stole my look in ‘Last of the Mohicans.'” — John Tyler

10. John Tyler pic.twitter.com/MGvzJoHIU9

— Cam Harless (@hamcarless) March 1, 2023

Many have tried the tri-level mullet but few pulled it off as beautifully as James Madison.

4. James Madison pic.twitter.com/UzVR54OSqC

— Cam Harless (@hamcarless) March 1, 2023

Washington’s mullet was like a white, fluffy cloud of freedom.

1. George Washington pic.twitter.com/gpQaVzXneC

— Cam Harless (@hamcarless) March 1, 2023

Find more cool, mulletted U.S. presidents here.

Teaching has never been an easy job. Add to that the surge of remote learning challenges, making up for curriculum lost during school closures, a growing concern for safety and—last but not least—having to help more anxious and depressed kids than ever

The responsibilities have increased for an already taxing job. And yet, teacher salaries remain abysmally low, forcing many to either quit altogether or find supplemental income.

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Alexis Longcrier falls into the second category. Longcrier still teaches full time during the day. At night, she delivers pizza for Domino’s just to get by. A video sharing her story is taking over TikTok for its candid portrayal of what teachers are having to endure just to make ends meet while holding onto their jobs.

“I’m doing this because I can’t survive on my teacher paycheck’” Longcrier says in the clip. “Everyone’s talking about all the reasons teachers want to leave. But what about all the teachers that want to stay, but literally can’t afford to?”

Longcrier is not alone. Her video received a slew of responses from fellow teachers who have found themselves in similar situations.

Here are just a few:

“Hi, fellow teacher. I had to start my own mobile welding business on the side for the same reason.”

“I love it, but I’m doing Lyft after work and spreading myself super thin.”

“I work at Target part time for the same reason.”

“Teacher w a masters and i have a 2nd job to pay the bills… it shouldn’t have to be this hard.”

“Teacher here. I also work as customer support for a travel company.”

“I’m a teacher with a masters and I sell my plasma to get by.”

“I have a masters and work extra duties. Work a part-time job, sell my plasma. We need a livable wage.”

“I’m a teacher who has fully accepted that I’ll never own a house, have kids, be able to support anyone but myself, live in a nicer area.”

@alexislongcrier Teachers don’t just deserve a living wage – they deserve a thriving wage! #teacher #teachersoftiktok #teacherlife #teachers #highschool #middleschool #elementaryschool #teach #teachertok #teaching #teachertiktok #teachersontiktok #teacherproblems #tiktok #tiktokviral #viral #fyp #foryourpage #foryou #student #students #pay #broke #money #school #class ♬ original sound – AlexisLongcrier

As Longcrier clarified in a follow-up video, her argument is that everyone deserves a living wage—not just teachers. This was in response to a comment saying that “everyone works two jobs now.”

“If you work a full-time job, you should only work one,” she said. “And you should be able to afford to eat out sometimes, go see a movie, enjoy your life. You were not made to just work, struggle, and die. None of us just deserve a life, we deserve a quality of life, too.”

@alexislongcrier Replying to @awesometheadam And it’s a shame. We all deserve better. #response #responsevideo #comment #teacher #highschool #students #teachersoftiktok #tiktok #tiktokviral #viral #fyp #foryou #foryourpage #money #happiness #health #enjoyment #deserve ♬ original sound – AlexisLongcrier

Longcrier has a point. Work should somehow add to our quality of life. It’s no secret that teachers usually do what they do out of a sense of purpose, not for financial gain. But now that passion is being squelched, leaving the profession without much reward. Those who are sticking it out are paying a hefty price

Yellowstone chaos may or may not exist, depending upon who one asks. Kevin Costner’s attorney, for example, has spoken out about the “ridiculous” rumor that dropped as part of a more overarching Deadline report about Costner potentially moving on from the Paramount+ granddaddy series of them all. The “ridiculous” claim in question was that Costner allegedly “only wanted to spend a week shooting” the current season’s back half. The idea that Costner would have thought it possible to film a half season of his lead role in one week does sound far fetched, but still, his potential departure was the takeaway.

The overall worry that he’s leaving the show has caused speculation to swirl, and of course, Costner has other plates spinning, like directing and also writing music for his band, Kevin Costner & Modern West, so one can expect people to have some fun there. Or some misery, depending upon how one interprets some new lyrics that Costner revealed to the world on Twitter. He co-wrote this song, “One More Day,” and the lyrics are, well, something or nothing.

“We’re all trying to live our lives the best we can,” Costner’s next tweet began. “Sometimes we fall short, but the heart of life is that we keep on trying. When it comes to the end and we meet our maker, the question I would ask is ‘Could you just give my good friend one more day?’”

What. Does. It. Mean. Maybe nada! And possibly/probably nothing to do with Yellowstone and the idea that he might move on, thereby ending the flagship series amid a sea of prequels and offshoots from Taylor Sheridan. Speaking of which, the initial report about Costner’s departure also arrived with word that Matthew McConaughey could be ready to step into the franchise, if not literally as John Dutton but as a spiritual successor.

Again, these lyrics could mean zero. They could simply be, you know, a nice song, rather than Yellowstone being the “good friend” mentioned above. Oh, but mankind cannot resist some dishy, panic-inducing cowboy gossip.