Month: April 2023

Apparently, the lifestyle of the rich and famous isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. Well, that is what former pop star Lance Bass outlined in his latest interview. Predating groups such as BTS and One Direction, as a member of the boy band NSYNC, in the late 1990s up until the early 2000s, Bass, along with Justin Timberlake, JC Chasez, Chris Kirkpatrick, and Joey Fatone, dominated the music charts.

During his appearance on The Jess Cagle Show, when asked what it was like to be rich and famous at such a young age, Bass took a moment to correct the host. “We were famous, but we were not rich,” said Bass.

The entertainer when on to say, “I made way more money after NSYNC than I did during NSYNC,” referring to his later success on TV, in film, and by way of Broadway shows.

To shed more light on the matter, Bass went on to confess that the band’s late manager Lou Pearlman, “Took the majority of our stuff.” Pearlman was sentenced to 25 years in prison for his role in the $300 million fraud scheme. He died in prison while serving his sentence in 2016.

“And the record label too. Horrible, horrible deals,” said Bass. However, the experience wasn’t all bad as Bass said, “To do that with those guys, it was incredible, and you had some of the best experiences ever. I mean, obviously changed my life, led me to so many things I wanted to do in life.”

Watch the clip above.

It’s been over 25 years since Pamela Anderson left Baywatch, but you wouldn’t know it based on a photo she shared on Instagram. In announcing her partnership with Frankies Bikinis (who also work with Euphoria star Sydney Sweeney), the actress wore a red swimsuit that’s similar to the one she frequently sported on one of the most-watched television shows ever.

“It’s about time – I have been so excited to share this with you – I’m horrible at keeping a secret – Time went so slowly…” she wrote. “But today after a long year – I can tell you All my favorite ideas and tricks of the trade – All mixed into my swimwear collaboration with @frankiesbikinis — A dream come true.”

Since she’s spent her career wearing custom-made styles, Anderson admits she’s been a little “spoiled” for swimwear. “They take into consideration your whole body, it was very calculated,” says Anderson. She wanted to bring the lessons she learned to the collection, and reference the milestone suits in her life.

“I’m always in a bathing suit,” Anderson told Vogue UK. “I’ve tried everything, so I’m a pretty good connoisseur when it comes to swimwear.” As for her original Baywatch swimsuit (or at least one of the many), “I have one in my safe,” she revealed. “I used to put it on, I’d jump in the shower, and try to rescue my friends and run around at a party. I’ll try it on every once in a while for fun. It still fits [laughs]. But these fit better.”

The collection launches on May 4th. Sign up for early access here.

(Via Vogue UK)

The Miami Heat became the sixth 8-seed in NBA history to knock out a 1-seed on Wednesday night. Miami walked into Milwaukee with a chance to take down the 1-seed in the Eastern Conference, and despite the Bucks taking a double-digit lead into the fourth quarter, the Heat were able to scratch and claw their way back into the game, force overtime, and win in the extra period, 128-126.

The shot to force overtime — a bucket by Jimmy Butler that went through the hoop with 0.5 seconds remaining — was impressive, but basketball fans were confused about what happened after. Milwaukee had a timeout left, but instead of calling it and advancing the ball up the court, Jrue Holiday stood there for a few seconds looking for someone to get open for heave. The ball got to Giannis Antetokounmpo, who didn’t get a shot up.

Apparently, Heat players were just as surprised by all of this. Max Strus went onto “The Dan LeBatard Show with Stugotz” on Thursday and revealed that Erik Spoelstra was baffled that Milwaukee didn’t call anything. Not only that, but Miami’s players on the court just assumed the Bucks didn’t have one since they didn’t attempt to call one.

“Honestly, we were all questioning it,” Strus said. “At the end of regular time, Spo came in the huddle, he was like, ‘They didn’t call a timeout? What’re we doing? They didn’t call a timeout!’ And we were like, we didn’t even know they had a timeout, we just figured they didn’t, the guys on the court. But year, we were all kind of questioning what was going on, but thankfully, they didn’t use it.”

It wasn’t the only example of Milwaukee getting burned by a decision to not call a timeout. On the final possession of overtime with the Heat up by two, the Bucks decided to push off of Gabe Vincent miss. Unfortunately for them, Miami was able to get back on defense, so the team passed it around until Grayson Allen got the ball and dribbled out the clock without getting a shot up, all while Milwaukee had two timeouts.

Rihanna just landed what will likely go down as the bluest role of her career: she has several important jobs in an upcoming Smurfs movie.

Today (April 27), Paramount Pictures revealed during a CinemaCon presentation that Rihanna will play Smurfette in an upcoming Smurfs movie, which does not currently have an announced title (as IndieWire reports). On top of that, Rihanna will also be creating and performing original music for the film, as well as producing. The film is set to premiere in theaters on February 14, 2025, via Paramount Pictures and Nickelodeon Movies.

Rihanna spoke about the movie at CinemaCon, saying, “Getting to do animation is a fun journey for me. I’m usually front and center with everything with my likeness […] but this was fun. I got to imagine, I got to show up in my pajamas in my third trimester, and be a blue badass. I hope this gives me a little bit of cool points with my kids one day.”

The movie will be co-directed by Chris Miller and Matt Landon, while Pam Brady (a South Park producer and Team America: World Police writer) wrote the screenplay. Ryan Harris, Laurence “Jay” Brown, and Tyran “Ty-Ty” Smith also produce alongside Rihanna.

The Smurfs film will be Rihanna’s second voice role in a movie, after 2015’s Home.

Miguel’s time away from the spotlight hasn’t affected his standing in music fans’ hearts very much. In fact, thanks to TikTok, his 2010 single “Sure Thing” returned to the Billboard charts for the first time in over a decade, launching it to a new peak at No. 15. Of course, this prompted some fan speculation about when he’d release new music; we got our answer this week when Miguel notified fans via social media his new song “Give It To Me” was on the way. Now that it’s here, we can only assume that there’s more on the way.

Fans last heard from the San Pedro, California singer in 2021, when he released his Art Dealer Chic, Vol. 4 EP featuring the single “So I Lie.” Since then, he’s been mostly off the radar, aside from an appearance on Diplo’s “Don’t Forget My Love,” presumably recovering from the fallout from his divorce from Nazanin Mandi, whom he dated for 13 years before getting married in 2018.

Before all that, Miguel’s last album was 2017’s War & Leisure, which featured fan favorites such the Travis Scott-featuring “Sky Walker” and “Come Through And Chill” with J. Cole. He also contributed a version of “Remember Me” from the Coco soundtrack; the original won the Academy Awards for Best Original Song in 2018.

Listen to “Give It To Me” above.

Gayle has talked about how special it is to be opening for Taylor Swift. “It just means the world to me and it just was really validating for me, and especially at a very overwhelming time,” she said last month. She also tearfully thanked the “Anti-Hero” singer onstage while performing her hit “ABCDEFU.”

However, that song is what caused Gayle to receive a lot of hate after it blew up on TikTok. Olivia Rodrigo was a source of support for her: “[She] DMed me,” Gayle revealed last year. “That was insane. She was just congratulating me on the success of the song.”

Now, she’s shared in a new interview with Teen Vogue how Swift also helped her with the wave of negativity toward “ABCDEFU.”

“I told her a story about what inspired ‘Everybody Hates Me.’ I was talking about just the internet and things that people said, or rumors that have happened,” she said. “She’s like, ‘Baby child. Come on. What controversy could you have had for the five minutes you’ve been making music?’”

“And that’s true,” she added “That’s fair. It was really, really nice for her to say, when I’ve told her my biggest, deepest worries, she’s like, ‘You’re right. And it’s fine.’”

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

Jack Harlow has kept a relatively low profile in the past few months, at least as it relates to music. Instead, the “Industry Baby” rapper has seemingly poured himself into his budding movie career. The musician is set to start in White Men Can’t Jump remake, amongst a few other projects. So, the announcement that Harlow would be releasing a new album, Jackman, tomorrow, April 28, was a total shock to fans.

After their surprise wore off and without many details to go off of, social media became hyper-fixed on the gritty album cover in which Harlow is posed shirtless in an alley. In the comment section, the semi-appropriate response to a thirst trap is to respond with something equally thirsty. However, instead of a fleet of smitten ladies lining up to fawn over the rapper, a plague of jokes has flooded social media.

In the last 24 hours, Harlow has been compared to Drake’s adorable son Adonis, the American Dad alien Roger, and more.

Check out some of the funnier reactions below.

Some users took a step further by adding their own personal touches to the image.

Jackman is out 4/28 via Atlantic. Find more information here.

Jack Harlow is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

When Taylor Sharp and Holland Gallagher set out to create The Break, the series they filmed in real-time along with this past G League season, they had no idea the perfect story arcs the universe was going to present to them.

The series, produced in partnership with the G League and The General, began in early December and followed three G League players: Mac McClung, Sterling “Scoot” Henderson, and Norris Cole. The premise was simple enough, to trail each athlete through a typical G League season in order to give viewers a better sense of the highs, lows, challenges, uncertainty, and joy that goes hand in hand with playing at that level. There were underlying story beats Sharp and Gallagher wanted to trace, like Henderson’s alternate route with the G League’s own purpose-made team, Ignite, and his hope to declare for the 2023 NBA Draft. There was McClung’s journey to get into the NBA and Cole’s joining the G League as an NBA veteran.

It’s three different players at three very different points in their basketball playing careers, which was some of the logic that went into picking these three athletes as the show’s inaugural stars.

“When we set out to do this in the beginning of the season we picked three players whose seasons, we had no idea how they would go,” Sharp says over the phone, enjoying some downtime in the North Carolina countryside after wrapping editing on The Break’s season finale hours earlier. “We certainly hoped that Mac [McClung] would have an opportunity to get a call up at some point to the NBA, but we had no idea he would win the Slam Dunk Contest.”

Sharp and Gallagher were in Utah to capture McClung’s “Dunk Contest saving” win, as well as the heady afterglow McClung went through in the days that followed — McClung had so many media requests that he needed to turn down outlets like CNN. The All-Star specific episode did a wonderful job of distilling down the chaos of McClung’s weekend into quiet moments with his family in the aftermath, all of which was balanced with Henderson’s quieter, albeit still important, All-Star Weekend performance.

It’s that balance that became crucial as The Break went on, the two learned in real-time.

“You can’t be everywhere always, so really being intuitive and strategic about what shoot days to choose is something we learned over this past season,” Sharp says. “Just because we’re following three players over the stretch of a season, it was a larger stretch of time and of possibilities we had never dealt with. That was something we found a pretty good groove with.”

Sharp credits his lengthy partnership with Gallagher (the two have made some wonderful documentaries in and outside of basketball, including 2021’s Hoop Portraits) with their ability to cover the kind of ground the series required. But the pair also established close ties with their three main character’s teammates and families, plus other G League videographers, occasionally asking them to be the ones recording in moments when Sharp and Gallagher had to be elsewhere. That cooperation also wound up creating an atmosphere of collaboration and interest between the athletes involved who never all got to be together in person, but nonetheless were following along with each other’s stories throughout the season. Sharp says even Shaquille O’Neal, the series’ narrator, would pepper him and Gallagher with questions about McClung, Henderson, and Cole whenever he sat to record.

In the series’ final episode, which airs on Thursday on the G League’s YouTube channel, we see the three storylines make their necessary “end” for the show, though all skew intentionally open-ended. McClung — who had a cup of coffee this season with the Philadelphia 76ers — and the Delaware Blue Coats win the G League Finals but his goal of a longterm NBA contract remains. Henderson wraps his season at the Ignite’s end of season celebration, the team falling short of the playoffs and title as Henderson prepares for the Draft. And Cole, who wound up leaving the G League midway through the season to play in Puerto Rico for Atleticos de San German, returns to his alma mater of Cleveland State University to be inducted into the school’s Hall of Fame.

One of the more striking parts of the finale, which has plenty of storybook moments, is how Cole’s season (and career) concluding doesn’t come to feel like a deceleration when compared to Henderson and McClung’s, who are still ramping up. Most obviously, because Cole is still playing, but on the quieter side, in how he was captured in accepting what was, to him, one of the biggest honors of his career.

“It was really beautiful to be able to capture him in a celebratory way, looking back on such an illustrious career from the roots of it at Cleveland State,” Sharp recalls. “It was fitting for us to be able to include that scene, it had much more to do with his success than possibly what happened for him in the G League season.”

Talk to anyone who covers the G League or follows it as a fan, and you’ll quickly come to understand the breadth and depth of compelling stories paired with all the athletes within its ranks. Sharp calls it a “perfect alchemy” not just for a filmmaker, but anyone with the curiosity to learn more about the people playing the sport.

“It’s not just that we haven’t heard all these stories, there’s something about the ethos and the culture of the league that to me inspires some type of wonderful alchemy of a yearning for this next step in their career, and present appreciation of where they are, it’s a nice perspective,” Sharp notes.

Part of that is due to the uncertainty of the future for these athletes and the well of perseverance required to continually “buy-in,” and part of it is due to the trajectories of each athlete being so non-linear. It’s not a comfortable concept in pro sports, that steps forward were almost always preceded by dozens of steps back, but it’s an important and humanizing one, that even Giannis Antetokounmpo alluded to in his postgame presser after the Bucks’ surprising season-ending series.

“When we get to work with G League players,” Sharp adds, “it’s almost like we’re putting something in a time capsule for them.”

That encapsulation will continue next season. The G League says it’s their intention to have Sharp and Gallagher back to record a second season of The Break, with an entirely new cast of athletes. For now, Sharp and Gallagher are enjoying some downtime to reflect, joking that it’s the closest they’ll get to what a player’s offseason feels like.

Rock The Bells has returned! The long-running hip-hop festival, which originally focused on legacy and underground rap acts, was basically defunct for the past ten years. However, that was until the rapper whose song the festival is named after revived the festival last year. The man born Todd Smith revealed the full lineup for the 2023 festival today with a trailer reproducing scenes from headliner Queen Latifah’s 1996 film debut Set It Off (this is a trend), showing the only thing that changed is the coast (the original Rock The Bells took place in California, and so featured more West Coast artists).

The lineup for this year’s festival (“don’t call it a comeback”) includes Big Daddy Kane, Boot Camp Clik, De La Soul, Fabolous, Ludacris, MC Lyte, MC Sha Rock, Method Man & Redman, Monie Love, Rakim, Roxanne Shanté, Salt-n-Pepa, Slick Rick, Swizz Beatz and friends, The Cold Crush Brothers, and Yo-Yo. In addition, the festival will feature a tribute to the late Sean Price by the members of Boot Camp Clik, including his widow Bernadette Price, as well as a set honoring the pioneering women of hip-hop who are often ignored.

The 2023 Rock The Bells Festival will take place on Saturday, August 5, 2023, at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens, New York. You can get more information here.

A little over a year ago, Beach House shared the enchanting album Once Twice Melody. They just released Become a few days ago on Record Store Day, an EP of five tracks taken from the sessions of that record. It was only available as a crystal-clear vinyl disc, an exclusive for RSD, but fans are lucking out.

The group has announced that it’ll be available to stream on all DSPs as soon as tonight. Become will also be available as black vinyl/CD/CS on Friday, May 19th.

“The Become EP is a collection of 5 songs from the Once Twice Melody sessions,” Alex Scally and Victoria Legrand said about the EP in a press release. “We didn’t think they fit in the world of OTM, but later realized they all fit in a little world of their own. To us, they are all kind of scuzzy and spacious, and live in the spirit realm. It’s not really where we are currently going, but it’s definitely somewhere we have been. We hope you enjoy these tunes.”

It was mastered by Greg Calbi and Steve Fallone at Sterling Sound. It has tracks like “Holiday House,” “American Daughter,” “Devil’s Pool,” and “Black Magic,” as well as the title track.