Month: February 2024

It’s been a minute since we heard a new single from Saweetie. The Bay Area rapper last dropped a new solo song six months ago, celebrating her “Birthday” with Tyga and YG and announcing it was “Shot O’Clock.” After completing her tour with Tyga and YG, she teamed up with fellow Bay Filipino P-Lo to craft an anthem for their San Francisco 49ers ahead of the Super Bowl push, but since then, she’s laid relatively low… until now.

Saweetie returned this week to tease her new song “Richtivities,” and today, she dropped the song along with a visualizer illustrating just what she means. The track is a departure from anything we’ve heard from her yet; rather than reviving a Y2K classic for millennial nostalgia or making a blatant bid for radio domination, she chooses to lean into hip-hop history with a soulful sample that sounds like it was inspired by DJ Paul and Juicy J’s beat for UGK’s “International Players Anthem (I Choose You).” She even slows down her flow, going for a punchy delivery that has her sounding better than ever. Best of all, she kicks things off with the words her fans have been waiting to hear for years: “Pretty B*tch Music,” the name of her long-awaited, oft-delayed debut album.

Could this mean she’s back on the rollout trail? We can only hope. Check out “Richtivities” above.

Innings Festival is here! The baseball-themed music fest kicks off in Tempe, Arizona later today (February 23), so if you’re wondering about who performs when, keep scrolling for this weekend’s set times. Also check out the festival website for more information about the event.

Innings Festival Set Times For 2024: Friday, February 23

On the Home Plate stage, Taipei Houston is on from 1:20 to 2:05 (all times local and p.m.), Bully is on from 2:50 to 3:35, 311 is on from 4:40 to 5:40, Greta Van Fleet is on from 6:50 to 8:05, and Red Hot Chili Peppers are on from 9:15 to 11.

On the Right Field Stage, Breakup Shoes are on from 12:50 to 1:20, The Beaches are on from 2:05 to 2:50, Matt And Kim are on from 3:35 to 4:35, Phantogram is on from 5:45 to 6:45, and Jimmy Eat World is on from 8:10 to 9:10.

Innings Festival Set Times For 2024: Saturday, February 24

On the Home Plate stage, Finish Ticket is on from 1:25 to 2:10, The Criticals are on from 2:55 to 3:55, Young The Giant is on from 5 to 6, Macklemore is on from 7:10 to 8:10, and Hozier is on from 9:30 to 11.

On the Right Field Stage, Nat & Alex Wolf are on from 12:55 to 1:25, Miya Folick is on from 2:10 to 2:55, Cautious Clay is on from 3:55 to 4:55, Cannons are on from 6:05 to 7:05, and Third Eye Blind is on from 8:15 to 9:15.

Find the full set times schedule for both days below.

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

When Ken Leung was approached to star in the live-action adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender for Netflix, the actor thought he was auditioning for an entirely different project that’s also called Avatar. Namely, the James Cameron movies. The Lost star wasn’t familiar with the beloved Nickelodeon series, and the secrecy surrounding the Netflix adaptation didn’t help the confusion.

“I didn’t know the original at all,” Leung told Deadline during The Last Airbender‘s red carpet premiere. “I mean, maybe it’s an age thing? But I didn’t know about it.”

Leung, who landed the role of Commander Zhao on the live-action series, says the audition process kept things purposefully vague and definitely worked in throwing him off track.

“First of all, the audition — you couldn’t tell that it was for Avatar. So it was kind of disguised as a different project. And when I first heard it was for Avatar, I thought I was going to be blue,” Leung said with a laugh.

Confusion aside, Leung is actually happy that he came into the series “blank” and without knowing anything about The Last Airbender‘s epic story and fervent fanbase.

“When you come in, when you have ideas, you can kind of corrupt a pure process,” he said. “When you come in blank, things will come into it that will inform your playing of it in a way that it might not if you came in with preconceived ideas.”

Avatar: The Last Airbender is now streaming on Netflix.

(Via Deadline)

Eminem has taken living in the past to a whole new level. Apparently, the “Stan” rapper’s key to cutting out the noise online is to downgrade his tech. Yesterday (February 22), DJ Whoo Kid revealed to his million Instagram followers that his longtime friend and collaborator still uses a BlackBerry phone. (BlackBerry, by the way, hasn’t made a new phone in years.)

He wrote, “#Eminem was trying to figure out who ate his last mom’s spaghetti box in the dressing room. I was like @momsspaghettidetroit I told him it was @iamdenaun and by the way yes. He still has a blackberry phone.”

While most followers focused on DJ Whoo Kid’s photo of homemade spaghetti, others couldn’t help but point out the technological relic.

“[Is] that a blackberry,” asked rapper Gashi, leading others to dogpile on.

DJ Whoo Kid, seemingly experiencing secondhand embarrassment, replied, “Yes. He still has it.”

Another user called out their friend and Eminem for being “the only people left in this world communicating w BlackBerry.”

“LMAOOOO the blackberry phone,” wrote one user.

“Does using a Blackberry keep you from aging or what Slim,” jokingly asked one user.

Maybe vintage tech is the foundation of youth everyone’s so desperately been after. Or it could just be Eminem being his typical introverted self. There is no way you can get into an X (formerly Twitter) spat if your phone can’t even access the app in the first place. Kendrick Lamar’s Pgland company might’ve found its ideal customer for their anti-distraction device, LightPhone.

Kid Cudi started 2024 on a high note with the January release of his ninth album, Insano. Usually, there’s a tour announcement to accompany the release of an album from a major artist like Cudi, but Insano came and went with no tour news.

Is Kid Cudi Going On Tour In 2024?

Now, though, Cudi has confirmed that he is indeed going on tour. On X (formerly Twitter) yesterday (February 22), Cudi shared a poster announcing the Insano World Tour, with support from Pusha T, Jaden Smith, and others to be announced.

No tour dates have been announced yet, but Cudi included a link to a website where interested parties can sign up with their email address to be notified when dates are unveiled. So, no dates yet, but one would imagine Cudi will be on the road in 2024, given how early in the year he’s teasing the tour.

Meanwhile, 2024 has been a year of beef for Cudi. In January, he and Lupe Fiasco got into it a bit before he later confirmed that the two are finally “good” and on a “brand new journey.” Then, a few days ago, he seemingly indicated he’s not on the best terms with Donald Glover/Childish Gambino.

There hasn’t been much news about HBO’s Harry Potter series since it was first announced last year. But this morning, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO (and public enemy number one among Looney Tunes fans) David Zaslav offered an update on the reboot, which unfortunately involves J.K. Rowling.

“We’ve not been shy about our excitement around Harry Potter. The last film was made more than a dozen years ago. I was in London a few weeks ago with Casey [Bloys, CEO of HBO] and Channing [Dungey, chairperson of Warner Bros Television] and we spent some real time with J.K. and her team,” Zaslav said during a fourth quarter earnings call, according to The Wrap. “Both sides just thrilled to be reigniting this franchise. Our conversations were great, and we couldn’t be more excited about what’s ahead.”

Zaslav also revealed that the show is expected to premiere in 2026, a year shy of the 30th anniversary of the first book in the series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. “We can’t wait to share a decade of new stories with fans around the world on Max. We’re aiming for a debut in 2026,” he said, adding that every season is expected to cover one book for seven total seasons.

Maybe skip the S.P.E.W. episodes?

(Via The Wrap)

Action Movie Star Tom Cruise is tremendous, but the Tom Cruise who works with auteur filmmakers is even better.

Cruise has collaborated with some of the greatest filmmakers of the last 40 years, including Stanley Kubrick (Eyes Wide Shut), Paul Thomas Anderson (Magnolia), Martin Scorsese (The Color of Money), and Oliver Stone (Born on the Fourth of July), and given terrific performances in all their film. But he’s still searching for his first Academy Award. He’s been nominated three times (Best Actor twice for Born on the Fourth of July and Jerry Maguire and Best Supporting Actor for Magnolia), but with zero wins.

Cruise just took a big step towards getting his long-overdue Oscar, however.

On Thursday, Deadline reported that “Warner Bros. and Legendary Entertainment are in negotiations for an untitled Alejandro G. Iñárritu film starring Tom Cruise. The project would mark Iñárritu’s first English-language pic since his 2015 smash The Revenant.”

Not counting Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, a movie that no one saw and I’m not sure actually exists, the leads of Iñárritu’s last three movies have all been nominated for Oscars: Javier Bardem for Biutiful; Michael Keaton for Birdman; and Leonardo DiCaprio for The Revenant. That was Leo’s first Oscar after years of nomination.

Sound familiar? It’s time for Tom to get his Oscar before AI takes over Hollywood and all movies are written by and star the Entity.

(Via Deadline)

Steven and Ian begin this week’s episode with an impromptu Moviecast about the news that Sam Mendes is directing four separate biopics about each member of The Beatles. Steven has often said that he can’t ever have too much Beatles content, but this might finally test that theory. The guys also try to think about music biopics that are actually good, and come up with 24 Hour Party People, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story and the immortal made-for-VH1 classic about Def Leppard.

From there, they talk about the latest album from MGMT, Loss Of Life, as well as the band’s career. Shockingly, Ian has never heard Oracular Spectacular in its entirety! They also discuss the buzziest band of early 2024, the British export The Last Dinner Party, and the lineage of heavily hyped English rock bands.

In the mailbag, they are asked to give a yay-or-nay verdict on the Lemonheads and whether band lineup changes have ever helped bands in the long run.

In Recommendation Corner, Ian pays tribute to Complex.com and a reissue of a lost classic by Curling while Steven recommends the latest from the jammy folk-rock outfit Itasca.

New episodes of Indiecast drop every Friday. Listen to Episode 177 here and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. You can submit questions for Steve and Ian at [email protected], and make sure to follow us on Instagram and Twitter for all the latest news. We also recently launched a visualizer for our favorite Indiecast moments. Check those out here.

Free Nationals have teamed up with frequent collaborator Anderson .Paak, as well as rapper ASAP Rocky, for a scorching new track. Tonight (February 23), the artists have shared “Gangsta,” which amalgamates the signature components of each act, and results in untouchable musical chemistry.

Over a groovy, hypnotic beat, which comes by way of brilliant production by Free Nationals, Rocky taps into a sense of bravado, remembering his father who taught him his gangster ways. .Paak delivers a soulful chorus, somehow making the life of a gangster sound smooth and sweet.

The song’s accompanying video features younger versions of .Paak and Rocky driving through town looking fly, and getting in trouble along the way

It’s been awhile since we’ve gotten new music from any of the three acts. Neither Free Nationals nor .Paak have released an album since 2019, and Rocky hasn’t dropped one since 2018.

But in an interview with Dazed published last fall, Rocky teased his long-awaited fourth album, teasing a more adventurous sound.

“I want to leave expectations wide and open,” Rocky said. “I don’t want to tell you what to expect. I just want people to experience it how they do naturally.”

You can see the “Gangsta” video above.

Anderson .Paak is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Within the first half hour of Constellation — Apple TV+’s latest sci-fi series — you’ll think you have the show’s premise pegged. It’s a by-the-book space disaster complete with severed limbs, cosmic explosions, and freak accidents that force brilliant minds to make heroic sacrifices. But, in the waning minutes of its premiere, Constellation throws viewers a gravity-assisted curve ball that brings all of those preconceived notions crashing back down to Earth.

The show, created by Doctor Who writer Peter Harness and directed by Breaking Bad visionary Michelle MacLaren, isn’t really about what happens to astronauts in space at all. It’s about everything that goes wrong once they come home. With Noomi Rapace (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) playing Jo Ericsson – a scientist who survives a mission-ending tragedy aboard the International Space Station only to confront a sinister conspiracy when she re-enters Earth’s atmosphere – Constellation tells a timeline-hopping story about love, loss, and how we define what’s real.

Uproxx spoke with MacLaren about setting her sci-fi head-scratcher of a series apart from the rest of the streaming glut, the mysteries of space travel, and whether TV really is too dark these days.

From your first gig on The X-Files to this, what about the world of sci-fi is interesting to you as a director?

I would say that Constellation is actually a mix of genres, which I like. It’s a character-driven drama, first of all, and a psychological thriller. There’s action, there’s adventure, and there’s horror. It’s fun to mix those genres. In this one specifically, there are so many different elements going into it that I drew on a lot of my different experiences to bring to the table.

I love that, other than Jonathan Banks, there’s a tie-in between the show about a drug-dealing science teacher and the show about a space catastrophe.

On Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, I really got to play a lot, be very creative, and think out of the box. That taught me a lot about how to use the camera best to tell the story and where to put it. It’s wonderful to work in different genres and be able to experiment and try different things, and then when you do something like this where there’s a mixture you can draw on those experiences.

This show hits the gas within the first 20 minutes and it doesn’t let up after that. Why did you want to just throw the audience in the chaos from the jump?

Nowadays, you’re competing against so much. You want to grab ahold of your audience, you want to say, ‘Okay, here we go, we’re going to take you on a ride.’

We want to get to the catastrophe and put Jo in that situation where she’s by herself on the ISS, she’s in survival mode, and what she really wants is to get back to her daughter. That’s the core of the setup. So we wanted to get to that, I think, as quickly as possible. And then we wanted to give it time for you to sit with Jo and experience the terrifying survival instincts that she has to go through on the ISS — rebuilding the battery and the ticking clock, for you to feel the angst and her longing to want to be with her child.

This is a space story we don’t see often – what happens when someone comes back down to Earth? Did any of your research answer that question?

Well, one of the things that really fascinated me about this was the idea of what would happen if you woke up one day and your world looked familiar, but it changed. It didn’t seem quite right. It was off. How would you deal with that? Peter Harness, who created the show, did a lot of research and he too was drawn in by the various stories from the people who went to space and had odd experiences like whether they saw angels or light passing through their hands or heard voices, dogs barking, that kind of thing. And then, when they came back to Earth… there have been some astronauts who have been really challenged. Some go on to live wonderful, successful lives, but the ones who have gone awry, is it from traveling in space or is it from reaching the pinnacle of your career? Who knows?

But he talked a lot about the overview when you’re up there and the astronauts look down at this little blue dot and everything they know and love is down below and the kind of effect that it can have on you. Space travel is fascinating and I think that what it does to the mind, who knows when you go up there if you come back the way you left.

If you’ve never helmed a space movie before, it’s probably a bit of a learning curve learning how to shoot zero-gravity – and make it believable. How much of this show was just you, MacGyvering your way through it?

[laughs] Shooting the ISS was very challenging. We had to storyboard every piece of the spacewalk. It’s so expensive to shoot. So we had to create everything and get everything approved ahead of time. And then we still changed things in the execution. So having everything broken down to every specific shot was really important for everybody involved, especially the stunts and the special effects and the visual effects because in every shot the characters are floating — whether they’re miming it or whether they’re on wires or whether they’re on a seat that rolls or a platform that was built for them to be on their stomachs — they’re doing all this while acting. And then we had specific camera rigs that had a float to them, one we called the chicken cam because it had so much flexibility and we could move it in small places. I learned so much, it was all very new to me.

Did you get any input from actual astronauts on how to make those scenes look as authentic as possible?

Scott Kelly was our astronaut consultant and he really helped us with the authenticity. He came to Berlin and he showed us how you move and talked about how it felt and what to be careful of. If you move too fast in space and you hit something, there’s the ricochet effect and it can be deadly, which was in itself a challenge because here we are shooting an action sequence, but you can’t move quickly because you’ll kill yourself. So it’s like, ‘How do we keep that exciting?’ It was really challenging, but we really wanted to make it as grounded and realistic as possible.

There’s an ongoing discussion about the look of TV shows these days – how dark they are. This series is filled with night shots, scenes on frozen lakes, and tons of images that could easily be impossible to actually see. But they’re not. Where do you stand on the issue of too-dark TV shows?

Ah, that’s interesting. Well, first of all, I’ll just say that it was really important to us that we went to practical locations so that we could shoot 360. We did go to the Moroccan Desert, to Kazakhstan, and we did build most of the International Space Station. We were very fortunate that we got to do that because it was really important to me that you understand the scope, the vastness of space, the vastness of the desert, the vastness of the Arctic, and how small we are.

In Finland. The sun never rose. We were there in February, so the sky just glowed. So we were able to shoot in that twilight, which everybody loves shooting in, which you usually only get 15 or 20 minutes of. That was the majority of our day. So I’m glad you felt like you could see it. We wanted you to feel the immenseness of these locations, and of course, you have to see them to do that.

What good is having Jonathan Banks lose it on a large frozen lake if you can’t see him?

Jonathan is amazing. I mean, he’ll go anywhere and do anything. He was absolutely in the north. I’ll tell you a secret that I shouldn’t — Jonathan got sick and he couldn’t make it to Morocco. And Barbara [Sukowa] who plays the head of the Russian Space Station, she broke her ankle. Those actors were never in Morocco. So we actually shot all the wide shots on the runway with doubles, and then we shot their close-ups in a parking lot in Berlin. But those are the types of things that happen when you go to places.