It’s an annual marquee event for J. Cole to take the Dreamville Festival stage. It happened last weekend, as expected. Unexpectedly, however, the biggest headline from Cole’s set was an … apology?
Did J. Cole Remove ‘7 Minute Drill’ From Streaming Services?
As of Friday afternoon, April 12, it would appear that Cole made good on his promise. On Apple Music and Spotify, “7 Minute Drill” is still listed on the tracklist of Might Delete Later but unavailable to stream. The song has been removed from J. Cole’s YouTube page entirely.
At Dreamville, Cole explained that he was “so proud” of Might Delete Later, “except for one part,” which is “7 Minute Drill.”
“It’s one part of that sh*t that make me feel like, man, that’s the lamest sh*t I ever did in my f*cking life, right?” Cole said, in part, later adding, “I felt conflicted because I’m like, ‘Bruh, I know I don’t really feel no way.’ But the world wanted to see blood. So, I say all of that to say, in my spirit of trying to get this music out — I ain’t gonna lie to y’all — I moved in a way that, spiritually, feels bad on me.”
He meant that — and he really took Might Delete Later literally.
As of Friday afternoon, April 12, “7 Minute Drill” is no longer available to stream on Apple Music, Spotify, or YouTube. The song is still listed on the Might Delete Later tracklist, but it’s grayed out with no option to hit play.
“I’m so proud of that project, except for one part,” Cole said on stage at Dreamville, as captured by HipHopDX. “It’s one part of that sh*t that make me feel like, man, that’s the lamest sh*t I ever did in my f*cking life, right?” After acknowledging that a lot of people don’t want to hear an apology or anything to dilute the perception of rap beef, Cole said, “I damn near had a relapse” because of how much it had been weighing on him.
Read more from Cole’s apology below.
“All of this time of me moving on my own accord, for the first time, I was tested. Why am I tested? Because I got the world and I got my n****s like, ‘What you gonna do, Cole?’ Boy, I must have had a thousand missed calls. Oh, my f*cking God. Texts flooded. I couldn’t even answer my sh*t. ‘N****, it’s wartime!’ N****s wanna see blood.
I was conflicted because, one, I know my heart. You know what I mean? And I know how I feel about my peers. These two n****s that I just been blessed to even stand beside in this game, let alone chase they greatness, so I felt conflicted because I’m like, ‘Bruh, I know I don’t really feel no way.’ But the world wanted to see blood. So I say all of that to say, in my spirit of trying to get this music out — I ain’t gonna lie to y’all — I moved in a way that, spiritually, feels bad on me.
I tried to, like, jab my n**** back, and I tried to keep it friendly. But at the end of the day, when I listen to it and when it comes out and I see the talk, that sh*t don’t make me feel right in my spirit. That sh*t disrupts my f*cking peace. So, what I want to say right here tonight is — in the midst of me doing that and trying to find a little angle and downplay this n****’s f*cking catalog and his greatness — I wanna say here tonight, how many people think Kendrick Lamar is one of the greatest motherf*ckers to ever touch a f*cking microphone? Dreamville, y’all love Kendrick Lamar, correct? As do I.”
Sage Pasch’s unique family situation has attracted a lot of attention recently. The 20-something mother of 2 shared a 6-second TikTok video on September 29 that has been viewed over 33 million times because it shows how hard it can be for young moms to be taken seriously.
In the video, the young-looking Pasch took her son Nick to the ER after he injured his leg at school. But when the family got to the hospital, the doctor couldn’t believe Pasch was his mother. “POV, we’re at the ER, and the doctor didn’t believe I was the parent,” she captioned the post.
Pasch and her fiancé , Luke Faircloth, adopted the teen in 2022 after his parents tragically died two years apart. “Nick was already spending so much time with us, so it made sense that we would continue raising him,” Pasch told Today.com.
The couple also has a 17-month-old daughter named Lilith.
Pasch says that people are often taken aback by her family when they are out in public. “Everybody gets a little confused because my fiancé and I are definitely younger to have a teenager,” she said. “It can be very frustrating.”
It may be hard for the young parents to be taken seriously, but their story has made a lot of people in a similar situation feel seen. “Omg, I feel this. I took my son to the ER, and they asked for the guardian. Yes, hi, that’s me,” Brittany wrote in the comments. “Meee with my teenager at a parent-teacher conference. They think I’m her older sister and say we need to talk with your parents,” KatMonroy added.
In order to get Taylor Swift to do something for you, you have to know her pretty well. And while a superhero movie might not seem like a place that she would show up, she would definitely do a favor to help out one of her good friends, Ryan Reynolds.
Swift has helped Reynolds with his little projects before, in addition to wearing the actual Deadpool costume for Halloween one year. So it really wouldn’t be that hard for her to make an appearance in the upcoming Deadpool & Wolverine, though director Shawn Levy isn’t spilling any secrets.
At this year’s CimenaCon, Levy was asked by ET if he could reveal any cameo info, but the director played coy. “You know I can’t answer. All of America knows I can’t answer that. That is hardly confirmed nor denied in this interview,” he replied, adding that the only way to know for sure is to buy a ticket. “The proliferation of rumors about who is and isn’t in this movie–it’s fabulous. No one will ever know the truth until July 26.”
Last fall, Swift was spotted with Reynolds and Hugh Jackman, which only fueled the rumors that she would appear in their upcoming flick. While a cameo isn’t confirmed, rumors have been swirling that Swift would appear as Dazzler, a pop star superhero, though wouldn’t she want to play something different than her everyday job title? Let’s get Swift as a villain one of these days. It would be a perfect easter egg for the Rep era.
The thing about Gen X being in our 40s and 50s now is that we were never supposed to get “old.” Like, we’re the cool, aloof grunge generation of young tech geniuses. Most of the giants that everyone uses every day—Google, Amazon, YouTube—came from Gen X. Our generation is both “Friends” and “The Office.” We are, like, relevant, dammit.
And also, our backs hurt, we need reading glasses, our kids are in college and how in the name of Jennifer Aniston‘s skincare regimen did we get here?
It’s weird to reach the stage when there’s no doubt that you aren’t young anymore. Not that Gen X is old—50 is the new 30, you know—but we’re definitely not young. And it seems like every day there’s something new that comes along to shove that fact right in our faces. When did hair start growing out of that spot? Why do I suddenly hate driving at night? Why is this restaurant so loud? Does that skin on my arm look…crepey?
As they so often do, Penn and Kim Holderness from The Holderness Family have captured the Gen X existential crisis in a video that has us both nodding a long and laughing out loud. Salt-n-Pepa in the waiting room at the doctor’s office? Uh, no. That’s a line we are not ready to cross yet. Nirvana being played on the Classic Rock station? Nope, not prepared for that, either.
Watch:
Hoo boy, the denial is real, isn’t it? We grew up on “Choose Your Own Adventure” books, for goodness sake, and it’s starting to feel like we made a wrong choice a chapter or two back and suddenly landed our entire generation in a time warp. This isn’t real, is it? Thirty years ago was the 1970s. That’s just a Gen X fact. So what if we’ve lived long enough for our high school fashions to go out of style and then back into style and then back out of style again?
Seriously, though, we can either lament our age and stage in life or we can laugh about it, and people are grateful to the Holdernesses for assisting with the latter. Gen X fans are also thrilled to see their own experiences being validated, because at this point, we’ve all had that moment in the grocery store or the waiting room when one of our jams came on and we immediately went into a panic.
“They were playing The Cure in the grocery store and I almost started crying,” wrote one commenter. “I mean, how ‘alternative’ can you be if you’re being played in Krogers? You guys are great! Thanks for making us laugh.”
“I couldn’t believe it when I heard Bohemian Rhapsody being played in Walmart,” shared another. “That was edgy in my day.”
“I know!!! Bon Jovi at the grocery store!!! That was my clue in!!” added another.
If you were old enough to be anywhere near a TV screen in 1994, there’s one distinctive image that you can probably remember without even trying: O.J. Simpson‘s white Ford Bronco leading the police down the freeway 405 in Los Angeles in one of the most infamous high speed chases of all time.
After the double murder of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, the recently deceased NFL star was the prime suspect, and he certainly wasn’t helping his case by fleeing from the police. As his longtime friend and fellow NFL player Al Cowlings drove the white Bronco, The Juice sat in the backseat with a loaded gun in one of the most riveting moments in American pop culture. The chase ultimately ended with Simpson surrendering to the police, and the Bronco went back into Cowlings’ possession.
Here’s a little known fact though: The Bronco was never Simpson’s. It was Cowlings’, but for obvious reasons, he never wanted to get inside the thing ever again. The former NFL star quickly got to work unloading the vehicle. However, Cowlings eventually “scotched” a deal as he realized the Bronco might be worth a whole lot more as Simpson’s trial kicked off a media frenzy.
According to a 2014 investigation by USA Today, Cowlings ultimately sold the Bronco to Michael Pulwer, “The Porn King” owner of an adult film company. From there, the Bronco traded hands several times and popped up all over the country before landing at its current resting place.
The Bronco now sits at the Alcatraz East Crime Museum in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee along with John Dillinger’s 1933 Essex Terraplane and Ted Bundy’s Volkswagen Beetle.
“It’s one of our most popular attractions,” the museum’s programs manager told The Hollywood Reporter. “People come from all over.”
Some sequels are unwarranted, some are welcomed. Having two data breaches over the span of six months fits in the latter category.
After disclosing a previous data leak last month that compromised over 15,000 accounts, Roku has informed customers that there has been yet another breach, this time affecting over half a million accounts. Roku claims that it currently has 80 million active users currently residing in the purple land of Roku City.
The company issued a blog post to explain the situation and provide important tips for securing accounts.
After concluding our investigation of this first incident, we notified affected customers in early March and continued to monitor account activity closely to protect our customers and their personal information. Through this monitoring we identified a second incident, which impacted approximately 576,000 additional accounts.
While the overall number of affected accounts represents a small fraction of Roku’s more than 80M active accounts, we are implementing a number of controls and countermeasures to detect and deter future credential stuffing incidents.
The company also added that the attackers did not acquire sensitive information such as credit card numbers or addresses. Any affected accounts have been notified and passwords have been automatically reset, while Roku suggests that all users should enable two-factor authentication, even if they were not affected by the breach.
Even though the breach happened on Roku, the company says that a third party was responsible for the breach, which happened through “credential stuffing.” Further: “We sincerely regret that these incidents occurred and any disruption they may have caused,” the company said.
You know how every time an actor lands a video game role they always claim to have been huge fans of the property for years? Well, in a refreshing bit of honesty, Fallout star Ella Purnell isn’t going that route.
While promoting her breakout performance as Lucy in the Amazon series that’s already racking up rave reviews, Purnell fully admitted that she’s not a gamer and had a rough time playing the Fallout game while preparing for the show.
“I’m not a gamer, but I tried to play Fallout,” Purnell recently told Variety without elaborating on which version she played. “I’m just not good at it, and that annoys me because I’m competitive. It was the controls that I didn’t get the hang of. My thumbs don’t control the right way.”
Walton Goggins, who plays fan-favorite character The Ghoul on the show, flat-out admitted that he has “zero” video game experience. “Mine ended with Galaga,” he said before revealing that he relied on his 13-year-old son to explain the finer points of the Fallout world to him.
As for Aaron Moten, who stars as Maximus a member of the Brotherhood of Steel, his research rested somewhere in the middle. The actor turned to Twitch streams to immerse himself in the quirky, yet wildly violent post-apocalyptic world.
Next week, the WNBA will welcome a potentially trajectory-altering draft class featuring Clark, LSU’s Angel Reese, Stanford’s Cameron Brink, South Carolina’s (and Women’s Final Four Most Outstanding Player) Kamilla Cardoso, Syracuse’s Dyaisha Fair, Tennessee’s Rickea Jackson, and UConn’s Aaliyah Edwards. But miss the WNBA with any rags-to-riches undertones.
Increasingly, NIL makes it easier for women’s college basketball players to develop into mainstream faces before shouldering the weight of professional franchises. The general public is obsessed with perpetuating the myth that college stars harm their earning potential by going to the W, but the discourse should redirect to understanding the upside because of the exposure the league is in a position to provide at this particular time.
WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert seems aware of the stakes. In part, she told CNBC that she expects to “at least double our rights fees” when the league’s current media rights deals with ESPN, CBS, ION, and Amazon Prime expire. Although the W recently extended with CBS and Prime Video, it’s possible that the league’s media rights will be up for grabs again in 2025, the same year players can opt out of the current CBA. Plainly, players cannot reap the rewards of the league’s growth, including a record number of corporate sponsorship dollars, without renegotiating revenue share, which directly impacts base salaries.
As a general rule, the NBA shouldn’t be the measuring stick for the WNBA, but the NBA’s 1990 media rights deal with NBC feels like relevant context here. At the time, NBC shelled out $600 million to take over for CBS, which had previously broadcast the NBA on a four-year, $176 million contract. Twelve years later, ABC, ESPN, and TNT were so eager to get in on the NBA that their collective media rights offer was worth up to $4.6 billion.
In 1990, the median NBA salary was $650,000, and the max was Patrick Ewing’s $4.25 million. In 2002-03, the median salary had ballooned to over $2.2 million, and Kevin Garnett was that season’s top salary earner at $25.2 million. (Obviously, in the two decades since, those benchmarks have continued to rise.)
These dollar amounts aren’t directly comparable, of course, but this aspect of the NBA’s past informs what a game-changing media-rights deal would do for ensuring a sustainable, thriving WNBA future. Engelbert acknowledged as much: “We’re setting this league up not just for the next 3-5 years with this next media-rights deal, but for the next 30.”
Los Angeles Sparks guard Lexie Brown provided a player’s perspective to Uproxx, saying, “You can’t support something that you’re never able to see. So, this negotiation period is going to be key to our growth globally and in the United States. I remember when I was in college [at Duke and Maryland], you had one channel for eight games. Depending on where you were in the country, that was the game you had access to. Now, everyone has a chance to be on TV and have their own stage to perform.”
While the lopsided attention paid to Clark’s performances is a point of contention, Brown believes the die-hard devotion to monitoring Clark’s every move will inevitably lead to exposure for all the players and teams deserving of the same energy.
“Every Caitlin Clark game should be televised,” Brown says. “Let’s not be dumb. That’s what the NBA did with [San Antonio Spurs rookie Victor Wembanyama]. That’s what you should do with a star like that. If there’s ever a future where there will be multiple WNBA games on TV at once, I’ll lose my mind. But that takes investment, engagement, and genuine care.”
Brown is close to getting her wish. The Indiana Fever will surely draft Clark with the first pick to pair with 2023 No. 1 overall pick (and NIL-to-WNBA success story) Aliyah Boston, who oozes charisma in her own right and is the reigning WNBA Rookie of the Year. Not-so-coincidentally, the WNBA announced that 36 of the Indiana Fever’s 40 regular-season games in 2024 will be nationally televised — the most in the league, followed by the reigning back-to-back champion Las Vegas Aces (35) and 2023 runners-up New York Liberty (31).
The Fever’s ubiquitous visibility will be new in 2024, and the Clark phenomenon is an undeniable launching point, but countless women have steadily built this rocket ship. Last season was the WNBA’s most-watched regular season in 21 years, with a 21 percent spike from 2022. According to Bloomberg in April 2023, the W was projected to earn between $180 million and $200 million in combined revenue last season — up from $102 million in 2019. Yet, misconceptions about the WNBA’s viability persist because well-intentioned casual fans and misogynistic haters alike fixate on players’ salaries maxing out at $240,000.
“This downtrodden charity case persona that has followed the WNBA for so many years needs to be debunked, and I think we’re on our way to doing that,” Brown says. “I had to sit down with myself one day and be like, ‘Am I really letting these people make me feel bad about making six figures to play basketball?’”
The Aces have built perhaps the most well-rounded case for debunking that narrative. They just became the first-ever WNBA franchise to sell out season tickets because people will always crave proximity to dynastic dominance — fueled by one-of-one stars like A’ja Wilson, Candace Parker, Kelsey Plum, or Jackie Young. But irresistible appeal isn’t exclusive to Vegas. New York Liberty beat reporter Myles Ehrlich witnesses it covering the “Big Three” of Breanna Stewart, Sabrina Ionescu, and Jonquel Jones.
“Sab and Stewie are good examples in the New York market,” Ehrlich says. “They both had signature sneakers come out last year — with Nike and Puma, respectively — and it just goes to show that their brand is not negatively affected by having a WNBA platform rather than a college one. In fact, they’ve got more time without school or classes to pursue any extracurricular interests, and we’ve seen this more and more as players around the league have been taking on roles coaching or doing TV analyst work during their W offseasons.”
It’s an organic formula for habit-forming and sustainable cultural relevancy. Theoretically, players proactively introducing themselves to new audiences during the offseason prompts those people to want to invest time in watching their teams during the season. While the offseason still sees some playing overseas — not “to make ends meet” financially but more so to stay in game shape, according to Brown — more and more players are generating visibility through Athletes Unlimited and endorsements. WNBA players do the legwork, and it’s time for corporate and media magnates to show the same commitment.
“Our game has lacked star power — not because we don’t have stars, but because we didn’t have the machine behind it,” Brown says. “As soon as the WNBA understands that there can be more than one star, then the league is really going to take off. There will always be one or two faces of any league, but there are other stars and personalities [worth investing in].”
After the events of X, it would make sense for the lone survivor Maxine to retreat to a quiet life of anonymity, but she’s a star! So a measly little massacre surely isn’t going to stop her.
In the X trilogy, Mia Goth plays two distinct yet similar characters: Pearl and Maxine. 2022’s X was the first film featuring Goth as both Maxine and Pearl, the elderly woman who goes on a killing rampage. Director and writer Ti West immediately began making Pearl, a prequel featuring Goth as a young Pearl, while the upcoming MaXXXinewill be a sequel to X, with Goth reprising her role of Maxine.
She is a star. Also a murderer.
Maxxine takes place over five years after the events of X and follows the titular character as she pursues her dreams of being a movie star. “I see MaXXXine as a superhero movie – that’s how I read the script,” Goth recently told SFX Magazine. “Maxine, as a character, has come a long way. She’s a survivor, she’s gone through a lot. When we meet her again, in this new world that she’s in, she’s really fought for everything that she has, and she’s not about to give that up. She’s going to fight for what she has. She’s a badass. There’s a strength to her. And she’s a really proactive, determined, focused woman. She goes after what she wants, and she’s not really going to take no for an answer.”
MaXXXine, which also stars Elizabeth Debicki, Moses Sumney, Michelle Monaghan, Bobby Cannavale, Lily Collins, Halsey, Giancarlo Esposito, and Kevin Bacon, opens in theaters on July 5.
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