Month: August 2023

Jabari Parker’s time in the NBA has come to an end for now. Parker, the former No. 2 overall pick in the 2014 NBA Draft who has spent the last few years jumping around the league and did not have a team last season, is heading over to Spain and joining FC Barcelona Bàsquet.

The news of Parker’s move had been going around the internet over the last day or so, and on Monday afternoon, the club announced the addition on its social media accounts.

A former top recruit at star at Duke University, Parker flashed his considerable potential as a devastating all-around scorer early on in his professional career. Unfortunately for him, injuries began piling up and prevented him from consistently getting on the floor — Parker has only played in 310 games across his entire career, and has not played in more than 38 games since the 2018-19 campaign.

Parker has played in six teams over the course of his NBA career: the Milwaukee Bucks (which drafted him back in 2014), the Chicago Bulls, the Atlanta Hawks, the Washington Wizards, the Boston Celtics, and the Sacramento Kings. Most recently, Parker appeared in 12 games for the Celtics during the 2021-22 campaign. While he was originally signed on to join the Bucks’ Summer League team this year, Parker had to back out due to a family matter.

Vladimir Putin is struggling to keep his battlefield stocked up to the point where Russia has increased penalties for those who refuse to fight his Ukraine war. On a related note, that war has caused Putin to lose plenty of allies, to the point where no country even wants free giveaways of Russian crops. As well, Putin is not exactly the most desired ally, given that those associated with him could eventually be charged with war crimes. That’s where Kim Jong Un comes in because he’s surely not afraid of such an accusation, given that he’s already responsible for an assortment crimes against humanity on his own.

Putin needs allies so badly that he probably doesn’t even care how bad this looks, but it isn’t exactly a move that sounds like it will be respected by elite North Korean government-associated hackers, who reportedly pulled off a months-long breach of a “major Russian missile developer” in 2021-2022, according to Reuters, which suggests the accessed data could have been used to further North Korea’s own missile program. Uh-oh:

Reuters found cyber-espionage teams linked to the North Korean government, which security researchers call ScarCruft and Lazarus, secretly installed stealthy digital backdoors into systems at NPO Mashinostroyeniya, a rocket design bureau based in Reutov, a small town on the outskirts of Moscow.

Reuters could not determine whether any data was taken during the intrusion or what information may have been viewed. In the months following the digital break-in Pyongyang announced several developments in its banned ballistic missile programme but it is not clear if this was related to the breach.

In other words, North Korea doesn’t even respect the boundaries of its allies and will use them to further their own offensive weaponry. Clearly, this makes Putin’s friendship with Kim Jong Un look even worse, especially since Kim Jong Un is so obsessed with this type of weapon that he recently held a victory parade full of intercontinental ballistic missiles. There’s no word yet on whether those missiles were partially engineered using technology stolen by the North Korean hackers, but it’s notable that Putin is likely using North Korea as a supplier of nukes for Belaris. What if he’s purchasing technology that was actually manufactured using Russia’s own secrets?

That’s a bit too circular to consider, so perhaps the biggest takeaway here is that not even one of Putin’s most fearsome allies is putting their foot down about respecting the Russian president.

(Via Reuters)

It stands to reason that there are very few, if any, firsts left for an artist as accomplished as Ed Sheeran to experience, but his ongoing Mathematics Tour says otherwise. Sheeran’s MetLife Stadium stop in June reportedly broke an attendance record, and then he was forced to serve as his own opener at FedExField while Khalid recovered from a car accident. Not to mention, he brought out Eminem in Detroit.

The trend continued at GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, Missouri on Saturday (August 5) when Sheeran stopped his performance to reveal the sex of a baby.

“My first gender reveal,” Sheeran captioned an Instagram video capturing the moment.

“I will get back to singing ‘Perfect,’ but I feel like this is like a first-time-type thing,” Sheeran says in the video, ripping open an envelope. “It’s a girl!” The crowd erupts in cheers, and the expecting couple embrace before Sheeran adds, “Can I just say, as a father of two daughters, it’s very awesome. It’s very awesome. Congratulations.”

In May, Sheeran took time out of promoting his – (Subtract) album in New York City to surprise two self-identified die-hard fans expecting their first child. “Month 4, it gets easier. … The one thing you need to know is that no one gets it right,” Sheeran told them, as captured by Meet Cutes NYC.

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

Drake’s It’s All A Blur Tour show in Milwaukee nearly was all a blur for one fan, who apparently fell asleep near the front row (maybe he worked a double shift to afford the tickets?). Fortunately — or maybe unfortunately — Drake spotted him while walking by and decided to troll him by posting up and singing at him until his friends woke up him. Once he was roused to alertness, Drake gave him an encouraging toast and a couple more bars before moving on.

Meanwhile, another fan also caught Drake’s attention, this time thanks to his wardrobe. But while Drake apparently appreciated his headgear, his footwear was a whole other story. “My man, I like the fitted hat with the…I feel you, dawg,” he joked. “You look good. Even though you got those Yeezys on, you still look good.” Of course, adorned in a tech vest with a glowing orange Nike swoosh on it, Drake wasn’t going to let the Adidas fly. Even though he’s technically patched things up with Kanye — although, being Jewish, perhaps Ye’s remarks last year didn’t sit too well with him — Drake’s always been a Nike guy at heart, and despite Adidas dropping Kanye, they still make the shoes — and sell them for a tidy profit, too.

Drake’s tour has been a well of hilarious hijinks as Drake asked fans to only throw bras onstage — only to become overwhelmed with underwear after his acknowledgement helped one especially well-endowed fan allegedly land an equally huge opportunity.

There isn’t any readily available proof that Olivia Rodrigo is capable of having a bad idea. It was a great idea to release “Vampire” as the lead single from her upcoming sophomore album, Guts, as it debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 last month — her third-career No. 1 after “Drivers License” and “Good 4 U.”

Rodrigo’s next single insinuates that she’s had at least one bad idea (or at least that she’s aware of the concept). The three-time Grammy winner shared this morning (August 7) that “Bad Idea Right?” will drop this Friday, August 11. Guts, which Rodrigo first announced in late June, is due out on September 8. It serves as the follow-up to her record-breaking May 2021 debut, Sour.

The “Bad Idea Right?” art finds Rodrigo behind a blurry mirror, on which she’s written “bad idea right” in lipstick — just as she did within her Easter egg-filled video teasing the Guts tracklist on July 31.

Rodrigo gave her fans one day to identify clues and assemble their guesses before confirming the Guts tracklist on August 1. See it below.

1. “All American Bitch”
2. “Bad Idea Right?”
3. “Vampire”
4. “Lacy”
5. “Ballad Of A Homeschooled Girl”
6. “Making The Bed”
7. “Logical”
8. “Get Him Back”
9. “Love Is Embarrassing”
10. “The Grudge”
11. “Pretty Isn’t Pretty”
12. “Teenage Dream”

Guts is out 9/8 via Geffen. Find more information here.

Noah Schnapp credits Stranger Things for helping him come out.

In an interview with Variety, the actor, who plays Will Byers on the Netflix series, explained that once he fully embraced that Will is gay, “it was just an exponential speed towards accepting it for myself. I would be in a completely different place if I didn’t have Will to portray, and to embrace and help me accept myself. I think if I never played that character, I probably would still be closeted.”

Schnapp also revealed that before he publicly came out on TikTok, he told his co-star Millie Bobby Brown that he was gay — in the middle of a Party City. “I kept trying to do it in person with her, and it was too hard,” he said. “So then I just FaceTimed her one day in the middle of a Party City and I was like, ‘Millie, I’m gay.’ And she was like, ‘Oh, Schnapper! You told me finally!’”

Stranger Things is currently on pause due to studio executives not paying writers and performs what they’re worth, but once the strikes are resolved, Will will be “center stage” in the final season, co-creator Ross Duffer explained. “This emotional arc for him is what we feel is going to hopefully tie the whole series together. Will is used to being the young one, the introverted one, the one that’s being protected. So part of his journey, it’s not just sexuality — it’s Will coming into his own as a young man.”

(Via Variety)

Blink-182’s Tom DeLonge felt vindicated in his belief that “aliens f*cking exist” last week, but his interest in the extraterrestrial took a backseat to his stance on human rights while attending The 1975’s Lollapalooza set on Friday, August 4.

“I guess myself ‘AND’ @the1975 won’t be going to Malaysia – just a couple dudes kissing during their phenomenal set at #lollapalooza,” DeLonge captioned an Instagram post showing him and The 1975 lead vocalist Matty Healy embracing.

DeLonge separately posted a video of the moment, writing, “@the1975 blew me away at Lollapalooza…. Great f*cking band. @trumanblack even gave me a quick kiss as a first time hello.”

Anybody who follows Healy and The 1975 knows Healy kissing people on stage isn’t out of the ordinary, and that tendency was a problem in Malaysia last month.

The 1975 were mid-set at Good Vibes Festival 2023 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia when Healy protested the country’s anti-LGBTQ+ laws with a speech. He and his bandmate sealed the message with a kiss. The set was cut short, with Healy informing the crowd that he and the band were now “banned” from Malaysia, and the festival’s remainder was subsequently canceled altogether (as confirmed by this official statement).

Most recently, The Guardian reported that the festival’s promoters, Future Sound Asia (FSA) “are now pursuing a claim against the British band calling on them to acknowledge liability and compensate FSA for damages incurred.”

The report continued, “If they fail to do so, FSA will take action in the UK. FSA claim that Healy’s actions ‘tarnished’ the festival’s reputation and that they ‘intentionally contravened the agreement [the band] had with FSA.’”

Of all the music festivals I have covered in the past few years as Hip-Hop Editor at Uproxx, 88rising’s Head In The Clouds Festival has been my favorite. That was true of last year’s edition of the fest, which I both streamed online and attended in person, and remained true of this year’s iteration, which returned to the Rose Bowl in Pasadena for another two days and nights highlighting global Asian talent from across a wide spectrum of genres.

Now, there’s no disrespect intended to Coachella or Rolling Loud, which both put on great shows in 2022 and 2023, respectively. But there are three areas which I consider pretty much essential to the music festival experience and Head In The Clouds has just consistently delivered in all of them both years I attended. From the music to presentation to the vibes of the crowd, Head In The Clouds LA offers one of the best music experiences around, despite its lower profile — or maybe even because of it.

After all, one of the main complaints you hear from festival-goers these days is how “corporate” so many of them have gotten. Sometimes, it can feel like the sponsorships have overridden the focus on the music. Plus, since music discovery is so driven by algorithms and streaming, oftentimes, it can seem as though the booking agents for the bigger fests are just continually grabbing from the same overcrowded pool of talent, resulting in a lot of lineups that share a lot of the same names.

Because Head In The Clouds has a focus on the artists signed to 88rising and a specific, mostly untapped niche, its lineups often present a variety of fresh acts — many of whom are performing in the US for the first time. This means that the potential to discover something truly new is higher than the clouds, as acts from Korea and Japan share their excitement to perform for a whole new set of fans. On Sunday, I learned about Korean R&B singers Yerin Baek and Zion.T and Japanese girl-pop group XG, whose unique takes on familiar grooves perked up my ears and prompted frantic Google sessions.

Meanwhile, being on the fringes of US mainstream awareness gives many of these artists room to experiment. To put it bluntly, anyone with eyes and ears can see how quickly most mainstream popular artists are pigeonholed due to their ethnic background. While the lines between genres have blurred in recent years, you can still see how Black artists in rock are considered novelties, white R&B singers are shunted into a generic “pop” title, and artists who start in one place stylistically can find it nearly impossible to shake off a genre tag no matter how drastically that style shifts over multiple projects.

But because Asian acts are so overlooked by the American mainstream (to the American mainstream’s detriment, I might add) and folks of Chinese, Filipino, Korean, Japanese, Malaysian, Thai, or dozens of other origins don’t fall so easily into the reductive American racial binary, the artists highlighted at Head In The Clouds get to proudly draw influences from across a wide spectrum without judgment or expectation. This leads to stuff like Zior Park’s inventive blend of operatic pop and hip-hop, Eyedress’ nihilistic take on punk and folk, and NIKI being able to coolly swing back and forth between a T Swift-esque form of soft guitar pop to upbeat R&B.

And while it’d be nice to see artists like Filipino-American Lyn Lapid become huge stars, you also get the impression that without the pressure of appealing to a massive, four-quadrant audience, they get to just be themselves and make the music they want to make, which ultimately is more interesting than even the most innovative and experimental alt-pop stuff currently fighting for space on the airwaves lately.

Of course, the festival’s execution makes all this discovery possible, and that’s where Head In The Clouds shines for me. While Brookside at the Rose Bowl is relatively small, it still feels almost too large for this fest. It’s both cozy and roomy at the same time; where other, sprawling fests can make you walk up to a half-mile between the acts you want to see, feeling like a sardine in a can the whole time, the two stages (and the dance music tent) here are all just a couple of minutes’ walk from each other. While sitting by the golf course’s adorable water hazard to catch some shade, we could actually clearly hear both stages — which wasn’t a problem, since few enough of the acts overlapped.

Meanwhile, the grounds themselves are pretty (although the super warm weather lately made this year’s fest a lot dustier than last year’s), with glowing cloud installations dotted throughout the golf course. Each, of course, had a lengthy line of festival-goers looking to take a photo to remember their day. There’s also an animated cloud mascot — a combination of a mechanical gizmo and a projected face — atop the main stage, and its facial expressions often reflect the mood of the music (any time an artist mentioned “tears,” it would cry, which was just about the cutest thing I’ve ever seen).

Also, the food is the greatest combination of items I’ve ever seen. My girl and I devoured a pair of pork belly bao … tacos, I guess … blending all kinds of different Asian cuisines, like a comestible metaphor for Head In The Clouds itself. Food trucks offered a variety of options — we went with garlic chili noodles from a truck called, fittingly, Noods — and even got our photo taken by an appreciative vendor of boba drinks and mochinuts (if you haven’t had mochi donuts, you’re missing out).

What made Head In The Clouds such a positive experience, though, was the vibe of the crowd. As much as some festivals are all about getting the audience to turn up and rage out, that can be an exhausting and anxiety-inducing experience. Not to sound like too much of a square, but watching folks get way too high and pass out or throw up from the hot sun and tightly-packed crowds isn’t something I usually walk away from feeling energized about. But the crowd at Head In The Clouds is there for the music, for the solidarity, to appreciate sharing in common a similar — but not monolithic — experience of existing in society in the paradoxical state of conspicuous and invisible at the same time. I can’t say I know it on the same level, but I can certainly relate.

There are still ways this fest can improve. While the experience inside the grounds is top notch, the parking situation is still a little nerve-wracking due to large chunks of the drive up to the parking area being unattended with few signs or landmarks to follow. At one point, I found myself driving through a residential neighborhood just hoping I was headed in the right direction. And while efforts were made to provide shade, those efforts could have been stronger (I get giving concertgoers more incentive to invest in VIP, where tables with umbrellas were set up, or buy umbrellas from the general store, but maybe put people over profit a little).

But these are minor quibbles against a sea of positive impressions. Give me a dozen festivals like Heads In The Clouds — niche, small fests dedicated to shared interest and a mellow good time — and, like the second stage at 88rising’s unique festival, I will have double happiness.

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

When Offset announced his new single “Jealousy” with his wife Cardi B, many fans were awed that he somehow secured a cameo from legendary actress Jamie Lee Curtis in a preview for the song. The clip, which recreated an unusual 1988 interview between CNN’s Dr. Sonya Friedman and a seemingly unhinged James Brown, found Curtis taking on the role of Friedman and Offset giving the same sort of wildly improvised answers as Brown. Today, on Good Morning America, Offset explains how he got such a high-profile cameo.

“Jamie Lee Curtis is a real one,” he exclaimed. “How that happened is, I DMed Jamie Lee Curtis on Instagram and said, ‘Yo, I got an idea. I would love to work with you.’ So, she wrote me back so quick and she like, ‘Yeah, I got you, but you need to follow me.’” He says after she heard the idea, she was game… and the best part? All this took place after her recent Oscar win for her role in Everything Everywhere All At Once.

Offset also talks about his and Cardi’s kids, admitting that “for the girls, I’m a softie, but for the boys, I’m a disciplinarian,” and how being vulnerable as a man can be “challenging.” Check out the clip above for more, but don’t expect to hear his upcoming album’s title just yet; that’s apparently something he’s keeping tightly under wraps for the time being.

Donald Trump landed himself in hot water over the weekend after he fired off an all-caps threat on Truth Social after being specifically warned during his latest arraignment to stop targeting officers of the court. “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!” the former president wrote, prompting the federal government to immediately move for a protective order. Judge Tanya Chutkan is now demanding a response from Trump’s legal team, who is already trying to wave the post away as “political speech.”

While Trump not being able to control his outbursts on social media is par for the course, the Morning Joe crew can’t believe that Republicans are sitting on their hands while Trump is publicly threatening judges and prosecutors.

“The silence is deafening,” Joe Scarborough said before tearing into the GOP, and his old pal Lindsey Graham.

Via Mediaite:

He’s gone full mobster here. And yet, no criticism from Republicans in the House, Republicans in the Senate, very little from the Republicans on the campaign trail. Let me say it again, he has threatened a federal prosecutor, and it seems the only thing Republicans know how to do is fall more meekly in line with him, like Lindsey Graham this past week. Just fall in line behind a guy who is behaving like a mobster and threatening a federal prosecutor.

While Republicans aren’t doing anything to rein in Trump, obviously, Special Counsel Jack Smith is watching his every move. However, that has yet to stop the former president. Even after the government filed for a protective order, Trump continued to rail against Judge Chutkan and refer to Smith as “deranged,” which has been his go-to insult for the special counsel.

(Via Mediaite)