Month: May 2023

The video for Nicki Minaj‘s new single “Red Ruby Da Sleeze” dropped on Mother’s Day eve. Filmed on her homeland of Trinidad and Tobago, it finds Minaj flexing comfortably as her confidence in her bars and beauty shines through. Sporting nearly half a dozen designer looks while relaxing between 2023 Carnival festivities, the musician takes in the tranquility offered by the country’s oceanside as her brash lyrics create an enticing juxtapose energy.

Minaj has proven that she can effortlessly dapple in pop music — see her latest feature with Kim Petras — but her roots are firmly planted in slick-talking rap tracks.

“Who the f*ck told bitches they was me now / I knew these b*tches was slow / I ain’t know these b*tches senile / Married a shooter case you N***** tried to breathe loud / Boom your face off then I tell him cease-fire/I’m the A, B side,” raps Minaj.

But that isn’t the only standout lines that caught fans’ ears. The lines “700 on them horses when we fixing to leave / But I’on fuck with horses since Christopher Reeves” and “Dorito b*tches / Mad that they nachos (not chose),” sparked rumors that she and another emcee is involved in a silent feud.

Co-produced by Go Grizzly and Cheeze Beatz, the track ushered in Minaj’s fierce new music persona. The song was initially released on March 3, with a teaser video clip dropped soon after. She even debuted the track live at Rolling Loud Los Angeles. Now the full video is finally here. You can watch it above.

The Milwaukee Bucks entered the NBA’s coaching carousel when the decision was made to fire head coach Mike Budenholzer on the team’s opening round loss to the Miami Heat. It’s been 10 days since that happened, and the Bucks have opted to take their time with their search, with few details becoming public about the candidates they’re going to target for the position.

On Sunday, we learned one name Milwaukee’s front office is going to bring in for an interview. According to Shams Charania of The Athletic, the Bucks are going to sit down with former Golden State Warriors coach and current ESPN analyst Mark Jackson about potentially becoming Budenholzer’s successor.

Jackson coached the Warriors from 2011-14, and has been with ESPN ever since. He accrued a 121-109 record with Golden State and got them to the postseason in two of the three years that he was at the helm, but his tenure was controversial due to, among other things, allegations of anti-gay rhetoric and reports that he tried to turn players against one another.

The Bucks won a league-best 58 games this season, but lost in five games to the Heat to make them the sixth 1-seed to lose to an 8 in NBA playoff history.

The 2020 election happened almost two years ago, and Mike Lindell still hasn’t gotten over it. The MyPillow guy has devoted a lot of his time — and a lot of his fortune — to spluttering and failed attempts to prove the existence of fraud big enough to cost Donald Trump a second stint in the White House. He’s spent so much dough that he’s gotten desperate: He’s begging people to buy stock in his bedwear company.

Lindell spoke with a reporter for the far right network RSBN during an event, during which he made a thrilling announcement. “For the next couple weeks — could be for two to four weeks — we’re offering stock to the public. This is going to be amazing,” he crowed. “I want every person out there to have a little piece of the pie.”

Lindell then blurted out a reason for wanting people to buy MyPillow stock. “I spent over $40 million, and I need help,” he said. “We need help making our voice bigger. I can’t tell the details. The lawyer says, ‘I will only let you tell this much.’”

Adding insult to injury, Lindell was recently ordered to fork over $5 million to software developer Robert Zeidma, who entered a contest in which Lindell promised that amount if they could prove his election data claims were wrong. Zeidma did just that. He also recently claimed MyPillow is not going broke.

(Via Raw Story)

The 2020 election happened almost two years ago, and Mike Lindell still hasn’t gotten over it. The MyPillow guy has devoted a lot of his time — and a lot of his fortune — to spluttering and failed attempts to prove the existence of fraud big enough to cost Donald Trump a second stint in the White House. He’s spent so much dough that he’s gotten desperate: He’s begging people to buy stock in his bedwear company.

Lindell spoke with a reporter for the far right network RSBN during an event, during which he made a thrilling announcement. “For the next couple weeks — could be for two to four weeks — we’re offering stock to the public. This is going to be amazing,” he crowed. “I want every person out there to have a little piece of the pie.”

Lindell then blurted out a reason for wanting people to buy MyPillow stock. “I spent over $40 million, and I need help,” he said. “We need help making our voice bigger. I can’t tell the details. The lawyer says, ‘I will only let you tell this much.’”

Adding insult to injury, Lindell was recently ordered to fork over $5 million to software developer Robert Zeidma, who entered a contest in which Lindell promised that amount if they could prove his election data claims were wrong. Zeidma did just that. He also recently claimed MyPillow is not going broke.

(Via Raw Story)

Lil Durk is almost healed from the past traumas of losing his friends and family to gun violence, or so his forthcoming album’s title suggests. But, unfortunately, in hip-hop, beef is what moves the promotional needle forward. The rapper has had his fair share of high-profile feuds, including longstanding tension with NBA YoungBoy and social media disputes with Tekashi 69 and Soulja Boy. Still, Durk alleges that he has been offered money to participate in a few. Taking to Twitter, he wrote, “Labels try to pay me to beef. I just can’t fake it. I’m different. I’m him. Unpredictable.”

Later in the day, he returned to the platform to post, “Automatic support get y’all munyun (money) together all that other cap is bap,” many fans believing that Durk was closing out his initial post.

Over the past few years, the “All My Life” rapper has begun to publicize his advocacy work. While some have criticized his motives, Durk has maintained that it is to showcase his positive work, highlighting that he is much more than the beef he’s been linked to. Some of those efforts included meeting with his hometown Chicago’s mayor-elect Brandon Johnson, to discuss programs for the city’s children. Another was the formation of his HBCU-focused scholarship.

Taylor Swift’s rumored romance with The 1975’s frontman Matty Healy is still brewing; her bond with her fans (the Swifties) is rock solid. A security guard in Philadelphia learned this the hard way. On Saturday, May 13, during her The Eras Tour stop at the Lincoln Financial Field Arena, the singer noticed a commotion happening around the barricade surrounding the stage.

In footage secured by TMZ, Swift is visibly upset with the arena’s staff and the way in which they were handling her fans. As she belts out the lyrics to her song “Bad Blood,” she stopped to protect a fan mid-performance. “She’s fine. She wasn’t doing anything,” yelled Swift to reprimand the guard.

A fan claiming to have been in the audience at the time of the incident took to Twitter to recount what led up to Swift’s exchange with security. “Taylor was yelling at a security guard because they fully kept putting their hands on us to physically push us off of the barricade instead of just telling us to move,” they wrote. “We weren’t throwing anything. We weren’t screaming anything insane, she was fully coming over to dance and sing with us, and it resulted in security being extremely aggressive for no reason.”

Swift’s tour is set to return to the venue tomorrow for its final show in Philadelphia.

Ja Morant has once again been suspended for an incident involving a firearm on Instagram Live. The Memphis Grizzlies announced on Sunday morning that their All-Star guard has been “suspended from all team activities pending League review” after a video surfaced of him holding a gun while sitting in the driver’s seat of a car that wasn’t moving.

Additionally, the NBA announced through a spokesperson that it’s going through “the process of gathering more information.”

A video began circulating on Sunday morning of Morant via an Instagram Live broadcast that showed him in a car listening to music with some friends. At one point, Morant is no longer on camera, and when it cuts back to him, he’s pulled out a gun that he’s waving around. The camera is quickly taken off of him, and when he returns, he no longer is holding a gun.

This came on the heels of an incident back in March in which Morant, while sitting in a club in Colorado, pulled out a gun and waved it around. He took a leave of absence from the team before getting suspended eight games by the league. During his time away from the Grizzlies, Morant announced that he entered a counseling program in Florida.

When he first toyed with the idea of buying Twitter, Elon Musk vowed to make it a haven for unbridled free speech. He promised to reinstate accounts that had been banned, including the one belonging to Donald Trump. Soon after the deal first went through in October, he tweeted, “Comedy is now legal on Twitter.” And so freedom flew on Twitter…unless you’re in Turkey.

Over the weekend, it was revealed that Musk had bowed to requests from Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s incumbent president, who’s facing a tough battle to hold onto his seat. The Erdogan administration is infamously restrictive and undemocratic, to the point that they demanded Musk censor tweets from his opponents or face the whole service being blocked in the nation. So the free speech absolutist censored free speech.

When called out on it by journalist Matthew Iglesias, Musk stood his ground. “Did your brain fall out of your head, Yglesias? The choice is have Twitter throttled in its entirety or limit access to some tweets. Which one do you want?” he replied.

Musk was roundly condemned for backing down on his alleged principles.

The founder of Wikipedia even stepped in to let Musk know how they’ve handled such attacks.

Some pointed out that this has happened with Erdogan before — and Twitter did not comply.

Perhaps Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s original honcho, is feeling even more remorse than he already did.

(Via Mediaite)

It’s fair to say that there’s no kinder character on TV than Ted Lasso. Over three seasons, star Jason Sudeikis has explored the complexity of decency. Ted isn’t perfect and he wrestles with demons, but he’s powerfully uncynical and always seeks the best in people. One reason the show has clicked is because these are dark times, with people divided. So it’s no shock to learn that Ted was partly inspired by a certain divisive politician.

In a new profile by The Guardian (in a bit caught by Deadline), Sudeikis talks about the evolution of the character, who originated in a sketch from the early 2010s. In 2015, Sudeikis decided to revisit the character, who he described as more broadly comic and “belligerent.” Obviously he dramatically changed his mind about that after seeing where the culture was heading.

“I’m not terribly active online and it even affected me,” Sudeikis says about the world becoming angrier and more divided. “Then you have Donald Trump coming down the escalator. I was like, ‘OK, this is silly,’ and then what he unlocked in people… I hated how people weren’t listening to one another. Things became very binary and I don’t think that’s the way the world works. And, as a new parent – we had our son Otis in 2014 – it was like, ‘Boy, I don’t want to add to this.’ Yeah, I just didn’t want to portray it.”

And that’s why Ted Lasso is such a nice guy and why Ted Lasso is such a nice show. The character has become a kind of guru of positivity in a negative era. When Sudeikis and his cast visited the White House recently to discuss mental health issues, they discovered that someone had even taped a blue-and-white sign above the door with the word “BELIEVE” — the motto of the show’s team. It’s almost a shame that it’s (probably, almost certainly) coming to an end.

(Via The Guardian and Deadline)

Ja Morant has once again been seen holding a gun on an Instagram Live broadcast. In a video that started to make its way around the internet on Sunday morning from the account of his longtime friend Davonte Pack, the Memphis Grizzlies star was seated in the driver’s seat of a car while listening to music with some friends.

At one point, Morant is no longer on camera, and when it cuts back to him at the 13-second mark, he’s holding a firearm, which leads to his friend immediately taking the camera off of him. You can watch the video below:

This is the second incident in several months involving Morant brandishing a firearm while on an IG Live. Back in March, Morant flashed a gun in a nightclub in Denver, which led to an investigation from the NBA, a leave of absence for Morant that turned into a suspension, and his entry into a counseling program in Florida, where Morant said that he needed “to get help and work on learning better methods of dealing with stress and my overall well-being.”

It is unclear if this incident can lead to any sort of investigation from the NBA, as one of the major questions surrounding the incident in Denver revolved around whether or not Morant violated the league’s Collective Bargaining Agreement by bringing the firearm somewhere he was not allowed.