Month: October 2023

The James Harden era in Philadelphia has come to an end. Right before the official start of free agency in the NBA, it was reported that Harden would opt in to the final year of his contract and then work with the Philadelphia 76ers on finding a trade, specifically to the Los Angeles Clippers.

However, like Damian Lillard’s request in Portland, the Sixers chose to be patient and made clear they would let things drag on as long as needed to get the return they wanted for the former MVP. Harden, for his part, made clear he was also willing to get “uncomfortable” if needed, but despite questions about whether or not he would report, he eventually joined the team during their training camp in Colorado and was reportedly in the midst of ramping up to join the team as the regular season started to unfold.

But in a bit of good news for Harden, the deal finally got done in the early hours of Tuesday morning, with Adrian Wojnarowski of ESPN reporting that the former NBA MVP is, indeed, on his way to the Clippers.

Harden came to the Sixers at the 2022 trade deadline in a deal that saw a package centered around Ben Simmons make its way to the Brooklyn Nets. The move reunited Harden with Sixers president of basketball operations Daryl Morey, as they were two of the main driving forces behind the Houston Rockets’ success in recent years.

Unfortunately for Harden, Morey, and everyone else affiliated with the Sixers, Philadelphia was unable to break through the ceiling that has been on the team for some time: the Eastern Conference Semifinals. In 2022, the team lost in six games to the Miami Heat, and one year later, the Sixers couldn’t capitalize on a 3-2 series lead over the Boston Celtics. While he had several good games in the series against Boston, Harden was a frequent target for criticism in both series.

It is unclear what the long-term future for Harden holds, as he is an unrestricted free agent at the end of the 2023-24 season.

Next month, “Turn Your Phone Off” singer PinkPantheress‘ debut studio album Heaven Knows will be accessible across digital streaming platforms. With her breakout single, “Boys A Liar Pt. 2,” featuring Ice Spice, reaching the top of Apple Music’s charts, fans are anxious to hear what the producer cooked up for the full-length project.

In an Instagram post, she opened up about the musical influences on the body of work. Yesterday (October 30), the PinkPantheress took to her official X (formerly Twitter) page to unveil the official tracklist. With an adorable sketch, PinkPantheress let followers know that Heaven Knows will feature artists from around the world. In the portrait, the musician and her collaborators, which include Rema, Central Cee, Kelela, and Ice Spice, are all squeezed in a red pickup truck heading outside of the London city limits.

View the full tracklist and artwork for Heaven Knows below.

1. “Another Life” Feat. Rema
2. “True Romance”
3. “Mosquito”
4. “The Aisle”
5. “Nice To Meet You” Feat. Central Cee
6. “Bury Me” Feat. Kelela
7. “Internet Baby”
8. “Ophelia”
9. “Feel Complete”
10. “Blue”
11. “Feelings” (Demo)
12. “Capable Of Love”
13. “Boy’s A Liar Pt. 2” Feat. Ice Spice (Bonus Track)

Heaven Knows is out 11/10 via Warner Records UK. Find more information here.

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

The Milwaukee Bucks were able to get a measure of revenge on the Miami Heat for eliminating them from the postseason last year. Milwaukee played host to the defending Eastern Conference champions on Monday night, and thanks to big games by both Giannis Antetokounmpo and Damian Lillard, the Bucks were able to defend their home court with a 122-114 win.

Now, Milwaukee will prepare to travel to Toronto, where they’ll play the Raptors on Monday. This means that Halloween will be a travel day for the Bucks, and apparently, Giannis Antetokounmpo didn’t want to lose out on the chance to wear a costume. As such, the two-time NBA MVP decided to dress up like Hulk and take questions from members of the media.

Giannis changing his voice up to address everyone really is a nice touch, and apparently, he was like this for the entirety of his postgame media availability. He is, of course, not the first NBA player to talk to the press while dressed like a superhero, as Grant Williams dressed up like Batman and spoke in a gravelly voice last year around Halloween when he was still a member of the Boston Celtics.

The downside for Antetokounmpo is that this, sadly, is not the best costume we’ve seen from someone in the Bucks locker room, as Damian Lillard once showed up to a Portland Trail Blazers game dressed like Stone Cold Steve Austin.

The solo album from BTS’ Jungkook is nearly here. The “Dreamers” singer’s debut project, Golden, will be shared with the world this week. Here’s everything to know about Golden, including the release date, tracklist, features, artwork, and more.

In a statement shared by the recording artist’s label BigHit Music, the album’s title holds a sentimental connection with Jungkook. “[Golden] takes its motif from the golden moments of Jung Kook as a solo artist. [Jung Kook is] known as the ‘Golden Maknae’ (‘golden youngest’ in Korean) of BTS,” read the notation.

As the group is on hiatus, Jungkook is the latest member to put his individual talent on display during their obligatory break (which, according to RM, is nearly over).

Release Date

Golden is out 11/3 via Big Hit. Find more information here.

Tracklist

View the confirmed tracklist below.

1. “3D” (ft. Jack Harlow)
2. “Closer To You” (ft. Major Lazer)
3. “Seven” (ft. Latto) Explicit Ver.
4. “Standing Next To You”
5. “Yes Or No”
6. “Please Don’t Change” (ft. DJ Snake)
7. “Hate You”
8. “Somebody”
9. “Too Sad To Dance”
10. “Shot Glass Of Tears”
11. “Seven” (ft. Latto) – Clean Ver.

Singles

Ahead of the body of work hitting streaming services, Jungkook released two singles. The first was “Seven” featuring Latto. Immediately after being made public, it secured the No. 1 spot on the music charts. The next was “3D” with Jack Harlow.

Features

Based on the confirmed tracklist, several recording artists will appear on Golden. Of course, Latto and Jack Harlow are set to appear thanks to Jungkook’s past singles. In addition to them, Major Lazer and DJ Snake are also listed as special features.

Artwork

View the artwork for Golden below.

Tour

As of today (October 30), Jung Kook has not announced an official tour for the project.

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

The 2010s were a boon for indie horror. The Babadook. Green Room. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. The V/H/Ses. Both Hereditary and Midsommar. One of the best was It Follows. It was probably an allegory about fears of losing one’s virginity. It was also so brilliantly directed that it turned the audience into paranoid freaks, scanning each widescreen frame for creeping baddies like they were readers of Where’s Waldo? It’d be hard to sequelize. And yet guess what?

Per Variety, both writer/director David Robert Mitchell and star Maika Monroe are reuniting for They Follow, which will begin filming next year, a decade after the original hit Cannes. That film concerned teens, one of whom, after having sex for the first time, finds herself plagued with enigmatic attackers only she can see. Will this one find some equally blood-curdling thing to say about ones 20s? Since the film already has a distributor, Neon, which is also co-producing it, looks like you’ll find out.

Like a number of 2010s indie horrors, It Follows was a modest crossover hit, enough that Mitchell was able to follow it up with something even more ambitious, one could call hubristic. That film was Under the Silver Lake, in which a very funny Andrew Garfield played an unemployed Los Angelino who goes way, way, way deep into the rabbit hole of kooky conspiracy theories. That movie wasn’t as well-received or seen as its predecessor, but it had cult item written all over it even before the further rise of QAnon, to say nothing of COVID/anti-vaxx nonsense. It also all but ensures that Mitchell has some real ideas, as opposed to lazy ones, about how to follow up his biggest hit to date.

(Via Variety)

Due to a few cryptic post-and-deletes across her official social media pages, fans of Dua Lipa believe she’s preparing a new album, which will all but assure her return to the top of all music metrics. So, does the “Levitating” singer have any new music coming soon?

This year, Dua Lipa has only released one new song, “Dance The Night,” which was featured on the soundtrack to Barbie, in which she had a role (as one of the many Barbies). Other than that, the public is in a Dua drought. However, recently she’s hinted at a full-fledged comeback with cleverly captioned uploads online, which has since been removed. Dua also made a few artistic updates to the cover images on her Apple Music page.

Still, no word on his new song is slated to drop this year. But we do know, thanks to a sit down with Kurt Soller for The New York Times’ T Magazine, that Dua Lipa plans on releasing new music at the top of 2024. But you never know with musicians. Surprise drops happen all the time. So you’ll want to keep a close eye on Dua Lipa.

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

Since his passing Saturday, a lot of people have paid tribute to Matthew Perry. The cause of death has yet to be made public, but the Friends actor spent a good chunk of his life wrestling with addiction issues, which he was very open with, including in his memoir last year. People have been celebrating his work as well as praising him for helping people with similar struggles. One of them is one of his oldest pals, Hank Azaria.

Per Entertainment Weekly, the beloved actor and Simpsons voice artist posted a video Sunday, in which he looked back on their long friendship.

“Matthew was the first friend I made in Los Angeles when I moved there. I was 21, he was 16,” Azaria explained. “Matthew and I became really good friends and we were really more like brothers for a long time. We drank a lot together, we laughed a lot together, we were there for each other in the early days of our career.”

Azaria said he “really loved” Perry, though he confessed that a “lot of us who were close to him felt like we lost him to drugs and alcohol a long time ago because — as he documented in his autobiography — there was so much suffering.”

He admitted he had trouble getting through that memoir, last year’s Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing. “I had to pick up and put down that biography, like, 11 times,” he said. “It was so painful for me to read.”

Azaria then talked about his own addiction issues, and how Perry helped him. “I’m a sober guy for 17 years, and I wanna say that, the night I went into AA [Alcoholics Anonymous], Matthew brought me in,” Azaria explained. “The whole first year I was sober, we went to meetings together. He was so caring and giving. He totally helped me get sober. And I really wish he could’ve found it in himself to stay with the silver life more consistently.”

But Azaria also wanted to focus on the good times. “Most nights you spent with Matthew you were crying laughing by the end,” Azaria said. “As an actor, he was so brilliant. I just wish we could have gotten what the rest of his career would’ve been.”

Azaria didn’t get to work alongside Perry that often, at least not on the big or small screen. But he did have a recurring role on Friends, playing David, the nerdy love interest of Lisa Kudrow’s Phoebe, who appeared across five episodes.

(Via EW)

After months of waiting, Doja Cat’s The Scarlet Tour will launch Tuesday, October 31. The “Paint The Town Red” rapper’s performances at the 2023 VMAs gave fans a taste of what they should expect when she stops at a nearby city. Ahead of the launch date, Doja has teamed up with Amazon Music for an exclusive merch drop made for the tour.

The company revealed the partnership earlier Monday. The line features several clothing items, including a hooded sweatshirt, t-shirt, crop top, sweatpants, socks, hats, and more in varying colors. With the expectation of the hoodie, none of the pieces in the Amazon Music drop will be made available on-site during Doja’s tour stops. The company revealed that a separate collection will be accessible in person at each venue.

Doja’s finalized Scarlet album cover is one of the central visual elements. But in typical Doja nature, she wanted to spice things up by adding a layer of humor, with one of the pieces of merch features imagery poking fun at online claims that she’s a member of the Illuminati.

The Doja Cat and Amazon Music merch for The Scarlet Tour is available for purchase now. Prices range from $25 to $120. Find more information here. Preview the line below.

Over the past few weeks, album sales, or the lack thereof, have been hotly debated online amongst music fans. Today’s music climate revolves around streaming metrics. While artists such as Drake, Taylor Swift, and Bad Bunny pull in record-breaking numbers on each platform, they’re not being compensated in kind. For mid- and smaller acts, that pot shrinks significantly.

To aid recording artists in understanding their earnings, on Monday, October 30, Billboard added a royalty calculator for Spotify and Apple Music. Here’s how to calculate the royalties for streaming payouts.

The tool, developed by the legal and consulting firm Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, offers multiple calculations based on data gathered from direct source payers. Although the formulas are based on United States models, international artists are encouraged to use the software as a reference.

After considering four key points (total payout for the number of streams, sound recording payout, mechanical royalties, and performance royalties), the estimated total is provided in an itemized breakdown.

For example, the results of a Spotify search calculate several rates based on the servers’ paid tier, ad-supported tier, and other tiers. This is also the case with Apple Music. An example on the site compared the earnings from one million streams on both platforms. The song on Spotify brings in $3,700 for sound recording owners, $591 for mechanical royalties, $506 for performance royalties, and $2,279 remains with Spotify. On Apple Music, the payout is estimated at $7,085 for sound recording owners, $899 for mechanical royalties, $819 for performance royalties, and $2,551 given to Apple.

Billboard’s Spotify & Apple Music royalties calculator is available online. Find more information here.

Martin Scorsese pictures aren’t always money-gobblers. Sometimes they are. The Wolf of Wall Street, to name one, did more than swimmingly. But usually they attract their biggest audiences over the years, after their theatrical runs, because people genuinely adore them and want to watch them ad infinitum. The legendary filmmaker has a new one out and it’s doing pretty well for a 3 ½ hour epic about a grim subject and with no intermission. But he’s still a scourge of some comic book movie die hards, which may be why one Marvel director decided to treat him to some teasing.

Per Variety, Joe Russo — one half of the Russo brothers, who made some of the MCU’s biggest titles — recently dropped a video on Instagram. It begins with him copying one of Scorsese’s recent popular TikToks, in which he “directs” his pet schnauzer, instructing him to “show me sadness.”

Russo then pops up, holding his own schnauzer. He notes that Scorsese’s is named, appropriately enough, Oscar. (Though he’s somehow only won one, for directing The Departed.) He then jokes that his dog is named “Box Office.”

It seems like Russo’s just joshing. He even tagged Scorsese, which presumably he have done had he really wanted to rub it in his face that his movies have never made Avengers: Endgame money.

Still, Russo’s video did not sit well with some of Scorsese’s fanbase.

Scorsese may be the director of some of the most enduring motion pictures of the last six decades, but to some he’s the guy who called comic book movies “not cinema.” After that enraged that fanbase, he doubled down, arguing, in part, that they’ve caused what was once a diverse medium to become narrow in focus — in short, making it harder for people, like him, who don’t make comic book movies to make movies.

The Russos are among the many comic book movie directors who seemed hurt that one of the greats wasn’t happy about the kinds of films they make.

“But, at the end of the day, what do we know?” Joe joked in 2019. “We’re just two guys from Cleveland, Ohio, and ‘cinema’ is a New York word. In Cleveland, we call them movies.”

Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon is now in theaters.

(Via Variety)