Month: September 2023

As part of the 50 Years Of Hip-Hop celebration, Beastie Boys members Ad-Rock (Adam Horovitz) and Mike D (Mike Diamond) will be hosting a party at the newly renamed Beastie Boys Square this Saturday, September 9. The band had teased the street renaming earlier this week, with posters teasing the event placed around the city.

In collaboration with The City Of New York and Council Member Chris Marte, the event is being held on the corner of Ludlow and Rivington in NYC, which fans will recognize as the location of the album cover for Paul’s Boutique.

The event will include a DJ set from Jon Bless HiFi System, “pop-up activations,” and more, according to a press release. It will start at noon and end at 2 p.m. ET.

Fans will also be able to catch the first in-cinema screenings of Beastie Boys Story, the documentary that was directed by Spike Jonze and dropped on Apple TV+ in 2020. The film will play at IFC Center on Friday, September 8, and Saturday, September 9 at 11:30 p.m. — making it a way to keep the party going as a dedication to the band.

Finally, SiriusXM will be bringing back their exclusive Beastie Boys Channel on Thursday, September 7, where listeners can tune into channel 105 for “classics, deep cuts, live recordings and more.”

BIA is a couple of months removed from the release of her new EP Really Her, and in addition to teaming up with EDM wizard Tiësto and 21 Savage for their new single “Both,” she’s been prepping to go on tour. Today, she and tour opener Lakeyah announced The Really Her Tour, which is set to kick off on October 9 in Los Angeles. The tour will hit 11 more cities before circling back around and closing out at the end of the month in Santa Ana at The Observatory the night before Halloween. Lakeyah, who released her own project, No Pressure (Pt 2), last September, posted the tour flyer and the link to buy tickets. They’ll be joined on the tour by underground Houston rapper Lebra Jolie.

You can find more information on the tour here. See the full run of tour dates below.

10/09 — Los Angeles, CA @ The Belasco
10/12 — Denver, CO @ Cervantes’ Masterpiece Ballroom
10/14 — Chicago, IL @ Avondale
10/16 — New York, NY @ Irving Plaza
10/17 — Boston, MA @ Paradise Rock Club
10/18 — Philadelphia, PA @ Theater of Living Arts
10/20 — Washington, D.C. @ The Fillmore Silver Spring
10/22 – Atlanta, GA @ The Loft
10/24 – Houston, TX @ Rise
10/25 — Dallas, TX @ The Echo
10/27 – Tucson, AZ @ Encore
10/29 — San Francisco, CA @ Great American Music Hall
10/30 – Santa Ana, CA @ Observatory

If you’ve seen any of director Hayao Miyazaki‘s classics films, including My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, and Kiki’s Delivery Service, you know to expect breathtaking animation. The Boy and The Heron is no exception.

Studio Ghibli has released the first teaser trailer for The Boy and The Heron, Miyazaki’s first movie since 2013’s The Wind Rises. You can watch it above.

The Boy and The Heron was released in Japan in July — with no images, trailers, and advertisements, outside of a single poster — to strong reviews and big numbers at the box office. The Boy and The Heron will have special preview screenings in the United States on November 22nd before expanding to cinemas nationwide and in Canada on December 8th.

The official description reads:

A young boy named Mahito
yearning for his mother
ventures into a world shared by the living and the dead.

There, death comes to an end,
and life finds a new beginning.

A semi-autobiographical fantasy
about life, death, and creation,
in tribute to friendship,
from the mind of Hayao Miyazaki.

The Boy and The Heron — which is expected to be Miyazaki’s final film — will be released in both its original Japanese with English subtitles, as well as a dubbed version.

How far has Tucker Carlson fallen since leaving the comfy confines of Fox News for X? He’s interviewing a convicted “con artist” who claims he had sex with Barack Obama in the late 1990s.

“A man who claims he had sex with Barack Obama in 1999 tells his story. Wednesday. 6pm ET,” Carlson wrote on X, along with a clip from his chat with Barack Obama & Larry Sinclair: Cocaine, Sex, Lies & Murder? author Larry Sinclair. “I had given Barack $250 to pay for coke, I start putting a line on a CD tray to snort and next thing I know he’s got a little pipe and he’s smoking it,” he says in the video. “So I just started rubbing my hand along his thighs to see where it was going, and it went the direction I had intended it to go.”

Sinclair first made this claim in 2008, and it’s been bullsh*t ever since. As Politico reported at the time, Sinclair has a lengthy criminal record, “with a specialty in crimes involving deceit. The record includes forgery charges in two states, one of which drew Sinclair a 16-year jail sentence.”

Sinclair has a criminal history, including convictions on forgery, fraud, and larceny charges, and has served prison time in Arizona, Florida, and Colorado… For more than a decade, Sinclair’s claims were taken seriously only by the furthest fringe of conspiracy theorists, and had largely receded from public discourse. Last week, Carlson revived the long-defunct controversy in a podcast interview.

Carlson was on Adam Carolla’s podcast when he alleged that in 2008, “it became really clear that Barack Obama had been having sex with men and smoking crack and a guy came forward, Larry Sinclair, and said ‘I’ll sign an affidavit and I’ll take a lie detector’ and he did.”

There’s not a shred of evidence that any of this happened, but Carlson will happily give this nearly toothless man a platform to tell his long-debunked conspiracy theory. For better or worse, people are excited for this train wreck.

The Rolling Stones are back. Today, the British rock icons have announced their upcoming 26th studio album, Hackney Diamonds.

Ahead of the album release, the Stones have shared a new single, “Angry.”

The song features the band maintaining their rockstar flair, apologizing to their lovers for being distant.

“Don’t get angry with me / I never caused you no pain / I won’t be angry with you / But I can’t see straight / It hasn’t rained in a month, the river’s run dry / We haven’t made love and I wanna know why / Why you angry with me?,” sings lead vocalist Mick Jagger on the song’s chorus.

In the song’s accompanying music video, the Stones are seen on interactive billboards in Los Angeles, as they move through all of their eras. Actress Sydney Sweeney is seen rocking out in the backseat of a convertible, as she celebrates these icons, marveling in their star power.

You can see the video for “Angry” above and the Hackney Diamonds album artwork and tracklist below.

1. “Angry”
2. “Get Close”
3. “Depending On You”
4. “Bite My Head Off”
5. “Whole Wide World”
6. “Dreamy Skies”
7. “Mess It Up”
8. “Live by the Sword”
9. “Driving Me Too Hard”
10. “Tell Me Straight”
11. “Sweet Sounds of Heaven”
12. “Morning Joe Cues”

Hackney Diamonds is out 10/20 via Geffen. Find more information here.

Donald Trump has never tried to hide his rage-filled rants. His off-the-hook tantrums are one of the most predictable things about him, other than that Diet Coke addiction. Granted, we don’t know if Trump is really tossing ketchup bottles while he pitches fits, but his penchant for ALL CAPS RANTS that make “ROID RAGE” trend is, well, a thing.

However, former White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany, who has been not-so-affectionally referred to as “milktoast” by her ex-boss, is here to claim that Joe Biden is the real rage monster. While speaking to Tucker Carlson time-slot replacement Jesse Watters, Kayleigh pointed the finger at the guy who apparently couldn’t even drop an f-bomb with the right amount of emphasis (until Obama enlightened him).

In a totally serious manner, Kayleigh is here to talk about how “angry” Joe is the guy who “snaps at staffers,” and she offers no proof.

Kayleigh McEnany is not exactly known for truthful or reality-based statements, but she’s likely full of (as Joe would say) malarky here. Sure, Joe Biden has had a few coarse words at the mic when challenged, just like any other president has done. Yet Kayleigh worked with the “guy who would rage tweet till 4am” while in office, and he still does it.

Kayleigh must have conveniently not noticed a certain Mark Meadows quote: “Because I knew I’d be yelled at by the president of the United States.”

You know what they say: there’s never a bad time for ketchup-bottle jokes:

A newspaper in Sweden titled Svenska Dagbladet has recently claimed that gang members are using Spotify as a tool to launder money. The paper had sources of four Swedish gang members and an anonymous police offer.

The laundering is apparently done by converting money into Bitcoin through Facebook, using the cryptocurrency to purchase fake streams for artists tied to the gangs, and then cash out the money made from said streams.

“Spotify has become an ATM for them,” the cop said (via Music Business Worldwide.) “There is a direct connection to the gangs and therefore also to the deadly violence.”

“If you’re a network and you want to attract kids and you have a rapper who’s going big, that’s half the job for you,” he added. “It is very good for recruiting purposes.”

In a recent study from France’s Centre National de Musique, they noted that only 3% of streams across platforms are fake — with MBW noting that this accounts for the ones they actually find. And, considering how little the streaming services pay artists for single streams, it seems difficult to be able to get a large return.

The paper also reached out to Spotify for the chance to comment on the matter. While they declined an interview, a spokesperson did offer a statement.

“We have no evidence that money laundering occurred via Spotify,” they said. “Less than one percent of all streams on Spotify have been determined to be tampered with.”

There is one question at the center of everything in Philadelphia as the James Harden trade saga rolls on: What does Joel Embiid think about all of this? Embiid opened the door for a potential departure from the Philadelphia 76ers earlier this offseason, as the reigning league MVP stressed that his goal is to win championships before saying “I don’t know where that’s gonna be, whether it’s in Philly or anywhere else, I just want to have a chance to accomplish that.”

With rumors circulating in the past that teams — most notably the New York Knicks — are keeping an eye on Embiid as a potential trade candidate, it’s fair to wonder if he might start looking around based on how things go with Harden. But in a new piece by Ramona Shelburne of ESPN, Sixers fans got a bit of good news on that front, as Embiid (along with standout young guard Tyrese Maxey) have apparently told the team they’re fine with riding out this storm.

Thus far, Embiid has given the franchise assurances he is OK riding out the current drama with Harden, sources said. How long he gives them to resolve the matter remains to be seen.

Maxey has done the same, even waiting on a contract extension this summer so the franchise can preserve its ability to operate under the salary cap and improve the team in the future.

Of course, it is very easy for Embiid to be fine with riding this out for now, but it’s certainly better than nothing for him to let the team know he’s not itching for a move. He has made very clear that he’d like Harden to reconsider his stance, and Shelburne noted that the pair still have a good relationship and have kept in contact despite his trade request.

Usually when Chris Evans recruits somebody, it’s to save the world from huge Grimace-looking aliens with magic murder gloves. In the new teaser for Netflix’s Pain Hustlers, Evans trades in his Captain America tights for a business suit, and let’s just say his motivations for teaming up with Emily Blunt are the opposite of heroic.

Based on the book of the same name, Pain Hustlers follows Blunt’s character as she gets roped into the highly shady world of a pharmaceutical startup thanks to Evans and Andy Garcia, who’s also along for the ride. While her new job quickly becomes highly lucrative and affords her a lavish lifestyle she’s never known, the reality of pushing a potentially dangerous drug onto unsuspecting patients begins to come crashing down on her.

According to director David Yates, Blunt relished the opportunity to tackle a less morally virtuous role.

“She said, ‘You know what, David? I’m so sick of seeing leading female characters who have to be so honorable and straightforward,” Yates told Entertainment Weekly. “What she loved about Liza is she’s sometimes a little bit shady to get the deal done and fulfill her ambition, and she gets taken up by the whole rollercoaster of it. And I think what we both love about that character is the fact that Liza is fallible, ultimately, and she sort of loses her way a little bit in the moral maze of it all.”

Here’s the official synopsis:

Dreaming of a better life for her and her young daughter, Liza (Emily Blunt) lands a job from Pete (Chris Evans) at a failing pharma start-up, where Liza’s charm, drive, and guts catapult her into the high life and the company into the center of a criminal conspiracy with dire consequences.

Pain Hustlers starts streaming October 27 on Netflix.

(Via Entertainment Weekly)

Flo Milli really deserves more credit for the consistency of her project titles. After bursting into the limelight with Ho, Why Is You Here?, the Mobile, Alabama native followed up with You Still Here, Ho? last year, announcing her second album, Fine Ho, Stay earlier this year.

For most folks, that’d be the end of the gag, but Flo Milli is truly committed to the bit. Today, she announced her upcoming headlining tour titled, fittingly, the Thanks for Coming Here, Ho tour. Like I said, you really have to appreciate the commitment to the bit. Flo will be joined by Brooklyn’s Maiya The Don (with whom Flo’s collaborated on two songs, the “Conceited” remix and “Anything Flows“), with tickets going on sale Friday, September 8 at 10 am local time. There’ll be Spotify and fan presales as well; you can get more information on Flo’s official website. See below for the full schedule.

10/21 — San Francisco, CA @ The Regency Ballroom
10/22 — Los Angeles, CA @ The Novo
10/25 — Denver, CO @ Cervantes’ Masterpiece Ballroom
10/27 — Minneapolis, MN @ The Fillmore
10/28 — Chicago, IL @ Riviera Theatre
10/29 — Detroit, MI @ The Fillmore
10/30 — Toronto, ON @ Phoenix Concert Theatre
11/01 — Boston, MA @ House of Blues
11/02 — Silverspring, MD @ The Fillmore
11/03 — Philadelphia, PA @ The Fillmore
11/06 — New York, NY @ Terminal 5
11/08 — Charlotte, NC @ The Fillmore
11/09 — Atlanta, GA @ Tabernacle
11/11 — Houston, TX @ Warehouse Live
11/12 — Austin, TX @ Emo’s
11/13 — Dallas, TX @ South Side Music Hall