Month: July 2023

Josh Hawley used to be a law professor, which leads one to believe that he checks his facts. Not so much. The Missouri senator has been getting severely roasted after he fired off a “Patrick Henry quote” that’s not actually from Patrick Henry.

“It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians,” Hawley tweeted while erroneously citing Henry. “Not on religions, but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ. For this very reason, peoples of other faiths have been afforded asylum, prosperity, and freedom of worship here.”

However, it turns out Hawley’s mistake goes even further. On top of the Henry quote being fake, the source of the text is not great:

“Not only is this a fake quote from Henry, the source is the April 1956 edition of the virulently antisemitic & white nationalist magazine ‘The Virginian,’” historian Seth Cotlar noted. “It was reprinted in The American Mercury in 1956, the year that antisemitic rag hired George Lincoln Rockwell.”

There’s also the fact that the Founding Fathers were big on America not being a Christian nation and wrote official documents saying as much.

Via Raw Story:

In the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli ending war between the United States and the Barbary pirates, John Adams wrote, “The government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion.” Thomas Jefferson — who was as bitter an ideological rival to Adams as modern-day Democrats are to Republicans — agreed, writing, “Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law,” and saying the First Amendment establishes “a wall of separation between church and state.”

Following in the footsteps of his fellow conservative Ted Cruz, Hawley has been getting ruthlessly dunked on over the past 24 hours. You can see some of the reactions below:

(Via Josh Hawley on Twitter, Raw Story & HuffPost

Holograms of artists who have passed away have become a trend in the music industry, as acts like ABBA and Whitney Houston are able to perform posthumously on various residencies and tours. However, Dolly Parton wants to make it clear that when that time comes, she does not want to be included in it.

“I think I’ve left a great body of work behind,” Parton told The Independent. “I have to decide how much of that high-tech stuff I want to be involved [with] because I don’t want to leave my soul here on this Earth.”

Instead of getting the hologram treatment, she thinks her music alone should carry on her legacy. “I think with some of this stuff I’ll be grounded here forever,” she added. “I’ll be around, we’ll find ways to keep me here.”

The interview dropped a few months ahead of Parton’s next album, Rockstar, which finds her working with a lot of legendary acts in the genre. She gave her husband, Carl Dean, a full listen of the record — as she tried to choose covers of some of his favorite songs.

“At the end, he said, ‘It’s really good,’” she explained. “To me, that was like somebody else jumping up and down saying, ‘That’s the best thing I’ve heard.’ So that made me feel good. I wanted to please him, to be honest more than anybody else.”

While Parton might have a tiny possibility of touring for the album, one thing is for sure — it will not be in hologram form.

Beyoncé fans in Pittsburgh received some disappointing news today. When the superstar’s long-awaited Renaissance World Tour finally makes its North American swing this week, it’ll do so one show shorter. The August 3rd Pittsburgh stop has been removed from the schedule as the Acrisure Stadium announced that due to production logistics and scheduling issues, the date there will not be taking place. Refunds are being automatically issued — but that hasn’t stopped the BeyHive from expressing some serious discontent.

The Renaissance World Tour has drawn some major headlines over the past couple of months as it set venue records in seven stadiums across Europe and supposedly raised the inflation rates in Sweden. Beyoncé’s daughter Blue Ivy made her debut as one of her dancers, stealing the show, and there were even baby sex reveals on stage during the show. Pittsburgh fans probably shouldn’t return those pickups from the Amazon-exclusive merch collection just yet, though; the show will undoubtedly be rescheduled for a later date.

Even knowing this, there’s still a stan war brewing in the quotes on Acrisure Stadium’s tweet, as Swifties boast about the perceived “win” as Taylor Swift continues to add new dates to her ongoing Eras tour.

Donald Trump Jr. seemed pretty fired up over the weekend as he tweeted about the suspected cocaine found at the White House while President Biden and fam were not on the premises. As it turns out, however, the eldest boy was actually supposed to be traveling to Australia for a three-city Down Under tour due to begin on Sunday. What happened?

There has been no official reason yet, only vagaries, but a few weeks ago, word began circulating that Turning Point Australia would host Don Jr. and Brexit mastermind Nigel Farage in “Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane” for speaking engagements. However, a fair amount of Aussies signed an activist petition that protested the tour while claiming, “Donald Trump Jr is an illegal [redacted] bigoted person who should not be allowed to enter Australia for the purpose of earning himself and possibly his father any ‘Campaign Contributions.’”

As the HuffPost now notes, Turning Point announced that the tour has been “postponed.” No crystal clear explanation was given on the promotional website, other than that “unforeseen circumstances” were to blame. The organization then elaborated a bit more on Facebook with a “#CancelCulture” hashtag and more:

“It seems America isn’t the only country that makes it difficult for the Trumps…
Announcement & more info coming soon about the postponement of the tour.
Hold onto your tickets, this is a short delay nothing more. #CancelCulture
The dates will be changing for all shows to a later date.”

Could there possibly have been a visa SNAFU? There’s no telling, but Don Jr. hasn’t tweeted about whatever mysterious incident caused the delay. Maybe he shall unleash one of his rants sooner or later. Previously as well, Newsweek reported that Don Jr. claimed to have a “huge fan base in Australia.”

(Via HuffPost)

This fall, U2 will play a series of concerts inside of a giant bowling ball in Las Vegas. Dubbed The Sphere, the bowling ball costs an estimated $2 billion and has been dubbed the “world’s largest spherical structure,” which suggests that it is even larger than Joe Rogan’s skull. Actually, The Sphere is much larger than Joe Rogan’s skull — it is 26 stories tall and 37 stories wide, which is big enough to fit 164,000 speakers and around 18,000 people.

Because this story involves 1) a giant bowling ball in Las Vegas and 2) the internationally famous rock band U2, people naturally goofed on the residency when it was originally teased during the Super Bowl in February. But as The Edge explained to Rolling Stone, “We’re always on the lookout for emerging technologies in the world of concerts and audio.” That is absolutely true, particularly as it pertains to U2’s most famous concert experience, The Zoo TV Tour of the early ’90s, which utilized a barrage of video screens to create a multi-media experience that simultaneously harnessed and satirized the seductive qualities of television. The Sphere run is directly linked to Zoo TV by branding that centers on U2’s landmark 1991 album Achtung Baby, which will be the focal point of the shows.

But when I ponder the reality of a giant, state-of-the-art bowling ball in Las Vegas, the U2 album that feels more appropriate for this gaudy/campy sci-fi scenario isn’t the one that opened Zoo TV, but rather the one that concluded it. I refer to the seventh U2 LP, Zooropa, which was released 30 years ago today.

On that record, U2 dared to imagine something that in the present moment seems to be of little common interest: the future. When I say “the future,” I don’t mean the future as we have come to understand it, which is a slightly removed version of the present that’s scarcely different save for some incremental iPhone updates and steadily worse weather. I mean the future as it stood in the ’90s, when people looked beyond the 20th century and envisioned a radically different world emerging from a period of political and cultural uncertainty. Zooropa came out of that moment, and its version of the future makes a lot more sense in 2023 than it did in 1993.

I’ll give you an example: On the back half of the Zoo TV tour, Bono adopted a devilish persona he called MacPhisto. When playing this character, he applied white facepaint and lipstick in a manner that recalled Joel Grey’s emcee character from the 1972 Nazi musical Cabaret, and affected a mock British accent that resembled David Bowie at his most gacked-out. He wore a golden leisure suit, a puffy red shirt, and devil horns, as if he were a lounge singer from Hell (or Las Vegas). In 1993, this confounded a lot of U2 fans, because Bono was acting like the singer of a band who might one day play inside of the world’s largest bowling ball. Now we know he was just foreshadowing.

Of course, I understand why Zooropa is not the focus of a Las Vegas residency for which U2 will be paid $10 million on top of taking 90 percent of the gate at every gig. Achtung Baby is one of U2’s best-selling and most critically acclaimed records, and Zooropa … is not. At the time, it was their worst-selling record since their second, 1981’s pre-fame October, and was widely perceived as an inessential tangent from its predecessor. (Their next album, 1997’s Pop, sold even worse.)

Even the members of U2 have classified Zooropa as an arty indulgence that came in the midst of their least accessible era. (1995’s Original Soundtracks 1 by the Brian Eno-assisted side project Passengers took this experimentation to its furthest extreme.) By the dawn of the 21st century, U2 ceased reimagining the future and re-embraced its past, and immediately revitalized itself as one of the world’s top stadium-rock attractions.

More than any other U2 album, Zooropa has a muddled legacy. It has inspired thoughtful reappraisals, and it has also been called the U2 record that “almost killed their career.” But what fans and detractors agree on is that Zooropa ranks as the riskiest record U2 ever made, and that’s due entirely to the period from which it came. The process of making Zooropa began in early 1993 between legs of the Zoo TV Tour. Originally conceived as an EP, the album’s amalgam of sardonic media commentary and dead-serious spiritual crisis reflected the tone of the Zoo TV shows. On stage, U2 mixed cheeky pranksterism (like ordering 10,000 pizzas from a local pie shop in Detroit) with post-modern quasi-journalism (like the live remotes from Sarajevo with war-scarred locals during the tour’s European leg). Off stage, the band was shuttling around the world in their own “Zoo Plane” private jet and blasting ABBA songs nonstop. Their collective head space was not, as they say, normal.

The outside world was also in a state of flux. “The old ideologies have fallen away,” The Edge opined to Rolling Stone in a 1993 cover story. “Capitalism won out. You can’t even say it was democracy, because ultimately the ground upon which the battle was fought was economics — it was about money. And the West’s economy won, and communism is pretty much over.”

In the story’s next paragraph, The Edge — who was credited as Zooropa‘s co-producer, which nodded to his commanding role in guiding the music and even collaborating on the lyrics — essentially articulates the album’s central theme. “People are perplexed. Maybe the stability that the Cold War created was the foundation of the West’s movement forward, and now that that’s gone and we have the resurgence of radical nationalism, people in Europe don’t know who they are trying to be. Not only do they not know who they are, they don’t know who they want to be. They don’t know whether they want to be Europeans, part of the European community or whether they should be fighting to protect their national and ethnic identities.

“Even national boundaries don’t mean much anymore. You’ve got the movement in Italy to partition the country into two or three autonomous states. There’s the Basque-separatist movement that’s alive and kicking. Northern Ireland is still no closer to a real solution. And Yugoslavia is the most obvious example of where things are starting to dissolve. Sarajevo has been a symbol of this.”

This breakdown in boundaries and traditional roles is what Zooropa addresses, both lyrically and musically, throughout the record. U2’s mission, for once, is to constantly bewilder the listener. The album-opening title track is an update of “Where The Streets Have No Name,” only the desire for spiritual transcendence is expressed via the bland language of advertising-speak. (“Zooropa better by design / Zooropa fly the friendly skies / Through appliance of science / We’ve got that ring of confidence.”) On the album’s first single, the monotone oddity “Numb,” Bono abandons the lead singer role so that The Edge can intone a long list of “don’ts.” (This happens again at the end of the album in more dramatic fashion when Johnny Cash guests on the minimalist electronic epic “The Wanderer.”) For the second single, “Lemon,” the album’s most crushing personal narrative — Bono mournfully addresses the death of his mother — is set to its poppiest, most ABBA-like music.

Meanwhile, car crash imagery — an everyday form of technological disorientation and destruction — recurs in multiple songs. Even the most conventional U2-sounding track, “Stay (Faraway So Close),” double-backs on itself twice in the title. “Uncertainty can be a guiding light” is Zooropa‘s defining lyric, and yet another contradiction. Uncertainty guided U2, but there is very little light on this esoteric record made by the era’s broadest guitar-rock band.

Zooropa was artistically successful in that it set out to evoke an increasingly incoherent world by making anyone who heard it also feel incoherent. But that kind of artistic success plainly put it at cross-purposes with commerciality. (It is unlikely that the majority of listeners will ever appreciate the difference between deliberate confusion and confusion-confusion.) In 2023, however, Zooropa sounds different than it did in 1993. Unlike a lot of big-time alt-rock records from that year, it doesn’t feel dated. It, in fact, seems more relevant now than it did then.

To explain this, allow me to go on a brief, personal tangent: In August of 1993, more than a month after Zooropa was released, I reviewed the album for my local hometown newspaper. I was 15, and this was my first paid music-writing gig. I gave the album an “A” and wrote that it was composed of “pop songs that sound nothing like pop songs.” (I believe I was paid $15 for this incisive prose.)

My family did not own a computer in 1993. I wrote this review out longhand on notebook paper. I then asked my mother to drive me downtown to the newspaper office, at which point I slipped my folded-up notebook paper sheets with the fringes on the side into the mail slot. An editor then entered this data into a computer as big as 50 iPhones, and it wound up in the newspaper a week or so later.

That is how technology worked in 1993. Technology was slow, cumbersome, and ancient. But unbeknownst to me or my mother, the world as we knew it was already finished. About four months before I wrote that review — on April 30, 1993 — a world-changing innovation dreamt up by a 37-year-old Swiss physics researcher named Tim Berners-Lee entered the public domain. It was called the World Wide Web, and it was a new information system that made it possible for the average person with little or no computer knowledge to explore the Internet with ease. The effect of this, obviously, was seismic. In 1993, only 1 percent of all information moving through telecommunication networks came from the Internet. By 2007, it was 97 percent.

When U2 made Zooropa, they weren’t thinking about the World Wide Web, because virtually nobody was thinking about the World Wide Web in 1993. They were instead concerned with things like satellite television, that thrilling and overbearing new-ish innovation that allowed you “to go anywhere,” as Bono croons in “Stay (Faraway So Close).” Even though technology in 1993 was slow, cumbersome, and ancient, it felt quick, easy, and overwhelmingly immediate. The preoccupation with satellite TV should make Zooropa seem dated. But, incredibly, it does not. And that’s because the world U2 thought they were commenting on in 1993 was in reality just coming into existence, and it’s the world we’re living in now.

Zooropa is often uncanny in how it accidentally comments on online culture. The industrial guitar hook in “Numb” resembles the squawk of an Internet dial-up. “Babyface” is a good song about obsessing over a TV starlet, but it’s a great song about how internet porn disconnects chronic users from reality. And then there are the songs that unfold like lists (“Zooropa,” “Numb,” “Some Days Are Better Than Others”), which replicate the disconnected data dumps that populate social media feeds.

Above all, Zooropa summons the modern desire to unplug from the grid and reconnect with something “real” or “authentic.” The trilogy of songs that close the record (“The First Time,” “Dirty Day,” “The Wanderer”) meld the shadowy iconography of ’40s film noir and ’70s anti-westerns with Old Testament sermonizing about a godless society wracked by climate disasters and familial dysfunction where “sons turn their fathers in.”

The most remarkable track on Zooropa is also the most forward-looking: For “The Wanderer,” U2 was once again ahead of the curve in their appreciation of Johnny Cash, who was a year away from his Rick Rubin-assisted comeback with 1994’s American Recordings. Unlike Rubin, who stripped Cash’s music down to the studs, U2 mashed him up with a backing track that resembled the alien soundscapes of Another Green World. Thirty years ago, this might have seemed like a gimmick. But now, given the flattening of cultural boundaries online and the power of A.I. to situate deceased musical legends in any context we wish, putting Johnny Cash on the moon is plausible to the point of seeming barely noteworthy.

Listening to the song, you can picture Johnny traversing a post-apocalyptic hellscape. “Now Jesus, don’t you wait up,” he says. “Jesus, I’ll be home soon.” He’s out here “in search of experience.” He wants to feel as much as a man can before he repents, which is another way of saying that he wants tomorrow to be more exciting than today. In 1993, tomorrow presented real possibilities. No one could see what was around the corner. What we didn’t know is that the future wound up being scarier, and more banal (and definitely more spherical), than we could possibly imagine.

Rick Ross can’t seem to dodge zealous skydivers. This past Sunday (July 2), Ross hosted a pool party at his house in Georgia. This party spawned various viral clips, including one of him stumbling off of a diving board as he attempted to make a dive into the pool.

But in a perhaps more full circle moment, it appears a favored guest of Ross’ made a second appearance at his Promised Land estate.

In a clip shared to social media, Ross is seen in astoundment, as he learns that a skydiver is parachuting into his yard.

“They told me the parachute guy landed somewhere,” said Ross in the clip. “Where he at?”

Ross then faces the camera toward the sky, where the skydiver is seen making his way through the air, and preparing to land on Ross’ roof.

“Ay don’t land on my roof!,” says Ross in the clip.

This isn’t a parachuter’s first attempt to enter Ross’ property. Back in June, a parachuter tried to jump his way into Ross’ car show, however, was arrested upon his landing. Ross urged the police not to press charges on this fan.

At the time of writing, it is unclear as to whether or not the skydiver who crashed the pool party is the same skydiver who attempted to crash the car show.

You can see a clip above.

Taylor Swift is days away from releasing her re-recorded Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) album. Obviously, fans are excited. They are also wondering if her updated version of “Better Than Revenge” will be a little different — after initially spotting it was three seconds longer when the song lengths dropped.

Many first thought that the added length would be Swift opening the track with the “Leave a message, make it hot” lyric that she used when performing it during the Speak Now World Tour. However, fans now are suspecting that Swift changed one of the song’s controversial lyrics: “She’s better known for the things that she does on the mattress.”

When searching for the lyric right before it, “She’s not a saint and she’s not what you think / She’s an actress,” it registers as “Better Than Revenge (Taylor’s Version)” on iTunes. However, the first lyric about the mattress does not — taking fans only to the original. (I also tested this myself to confirm.)

Given the song was first released in 2010, the way it has aged has been questionable — with internalized misogyny and shaming toward Joe Jonas’ girlfriend at the time. Despite this, many Swifties enjoy the chaos of the original.

While we won’t fully know if Swift changed the line (or what the swap will be) until tomorrow night, fans still have a lot of thoughts. Find some reactions below.

Shortly after the release of the long-awaited Pink Tape, Lil Uzi Vert has already begun teasing another upcoming album. Uzi previously noted that Pink Tape would not be getting a deluxe edition — breaking tradition with many recent new releases — and that they would instead put out a whole new album. This is similar to what they did in 2020 with Eternal Atake, whose “deluxe edition” turned out to be a completely different album titled LUV Vs. The World 2.

It seems Uzi is starting a new tradition because they have changed their Instagram bio to read “Luv is rage 3,” suggesting another sequel to their 2015 debut mixtape is on the way. Considering how quickly Uzi turned around LUV Vs. The World 2 — which came out just a week after Eternal Atake — perhaps fans won’t have to wait very long to find out. Uzi first teased Luv Is Rage 3 in 2020, so they’ve had plenty of time to get it done. If Uzi continues in the same vein they did back in 2020, a potential Luv Is Rage 3 could have a completely different sound from Pink Tape.

This could be a good thing, depending on your feelings on Pink Tape‘s wild range of sounds, which included takes on 2000s Eurodance hits, a cover of System Of A Down’s resurgent signature hit, a collaboration with Travis Scott, and even a sample of WWE star Shinsuke Nakamura’s ring entrance music.

Lil Uzi Vert is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Among celebrity couples, Kaitlin Olson and Rob McElhenney rank among the best. (Also in the top 10: Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn, Kevin Kline and Phoebe Cates, and Donald Duck and Minnie Mouse — I have my sources) So I was a little worried when I saw reports that they broke up “after the husband cheated on her in Wales.” I became less worried when I realized that the rumors came from Perez Hilton, by way of anonymous gossip account DeuxMoi, and not at all worried when Olson responded to the allegations.

“It was me who had the affair,” she tweeted. “But it was not with someone from Wales. It was with a whale. I’ve always loved whales. They’re the bosses of the ocean and I’m attracted to power. We ask for privacy as we navigate this difficult time.” McElhenney added, “Sad to admit that the rumor is true. However some of the details are…. incorrect.”

Even the fan club for the It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia co-creator and star’s soccer team got in on the fun. “Something tells me they are not fin-ished… moar to this story I’m shore,” Wrexham USA tweeted. (It’s good to know Deadpool is staying busy during the writers’ strike.)

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia needs to run forever, and celebrity gossip sites need to stay from Kaitlin Olson and Rob McElhenney. Thank you.

In January, Meghan Trainor announced that she was pregnant with her and husband Daryl Sabara’s (Juni Cortez in the Spy Kids movies) second baby together. Well, nature has taken its course and the baby is officially here.

The couple made the announcement on social media yesterday (July 4). A post shared on both Trainor and Sabara’s Instagram accounts features miscellaneous photos of the baby and Trainor. The caption reads, “On July 1st (our 7 year anniversary of our first date) we welcomed Barry Bruce Trainor into the world. He was a big boy at 8lbs 7oz…and sideways (transverse), but we had an amazing, successful c-section, and I finally got my skin to skin time! Thank you to all of the incredible doctors and nurses who took such great care of us.”

The two went viral in April when Trainor discussed the difficulties they have during sex. Noting that she had been diagnosed with vaginismus, which causes tension that makes penetrative sex more difficult, she said, “[It’s] to the point where I’m like ‘Is it all in?’ and he’s like, ‘Just the tip.’ And I’m like, ‘I can’t do anymore.’ I don’t know how to fix that. […] As he would penetrate, I would be like, ‘Ow, ow, ow,’ like, to the point when […] I had to ice myself after.”