Month: October 2024

Three new teams are slated to come to the WNBA over the next two years. The Golden State Valkyries will kick off their inaugural season in 2025, while teams in Toronto and Portland are coming to the league in 2026. While this would bring the league up to 15 teams, WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert has expressed that she wants the WNBA to have 16 teams by 2028, and there are plenty of cities that make a ton of sense as this round of expansion gets wrapped up.

Apparently, Kansas City is one such place, and a group spearheaded by Patrick and Brittany Mahomes is working to get the WNBA to come to their city. According to Adam Schefter of ESPN, the pair met with the league along with the rest of the ownership group of the KC Current, the city’s NWSL team.

“As WNBA expansion continues, ownership of the NWSL’s KC Current — which includes Patrick Mahomes and his wife, Brittany — has met with the WNBA and is in contention to bring the league’s next franchise to Kansas City,” Schefter said. “Mahomes also co-owns the KC Royals and Sporting KC.”

There’s no word on a potential timetable for when the league will announce its 16th team. As for what’s next on the expansion horizon, the Valkyries will build out their roster via an expansion draft in December.

There are few things more important to getting a good workout in than having the right playlist. Having the right soundtrack is vital for most people to getting maximum output, and sometimes what you need in the gym varies by what you’re doing — for example, cardio and weights might need different genres.

Everyone’s taste is a bit different, which is why there’s few things worse than forgetting headphones when going to the gym and having to listen to whatever they’ve got playing over the speakers. That is, unless you have your own fully built out home gym and can pick the music blasting through the speakers, as is the case for WWE superstar Randy Orton. The 44-year-old has been in WWE for more than two decades, and he looks like the kind of guy that is likely playing something pretty heavy in the gym.

However, as he recently explained to Sheamus in his home gym, he goes to a different genre and is far more up to date on his playlist than you’d expect. The Viper is all about the ladies when it comes to the gym, explaining that he has “an extensive female rap artist playlist” rattling off everyone from Megan Thee Stallion to GloRilla and fellow St. Louis native (and WWE fan) Sexxy Red.

It’s clearly not the answer Sheamus was expecting, but as Orton explained, “they get my blood pumpin, what can I say.” I think my only follow-up questions would be what did Randy used to listen to in the gym back in the day and when was he introduced to some of these artists, because he’s been in the gym for decades and I’d be fascinated to know when he figured out that Cardi B and Nicki Minaj got the blood going and the muscles firing in just the right way.

The next few years of Uproxx’s How To Watch The Grammys posts are going to look a lot different, as The Recording Academy has inked a 10-year deal with Disney for the House of Mouse’s properties to become the new broadcast home for the Biggest Night in Music after 50 years with CBS. Beginning in 2027, the Grammys will simulcast on ABC, Hulu, and Disney+, which could simplify viewing for a massive number of households as more folks rely on streaming than broadcast TV (while Paramount+, the Grammys’ current streamer of choice, has 71 million subscribers, Disney+ has more than double that number at over 150 million).

The deal also includes multiple music specials and other programs associated with the Grammys, which could allow you non-industry types living outside Los Angeles the chance to take in some of the events that lead up to the big show as well.

Disney has made some pretty impressive strides in securing the rights to big television events over the past few months; in 2027, its properties will host not just the Grammys, but also the Academy Awards (the Oscars), and Super Bowl LXI.

Harvey Mason Jr., the CEO of the Recording Academy, said in the press release, “We are completely thrilled to be bringing The Grammys and other new music programming to the Disney ecosystem. We are grateful to our long-standing partners at CBS and now honored to be joining with Disney, an iconic company where creators have always been at the forefront. This partnership represents another important milestone in the Academy’s transformation and growth, and strengthens our ability to fulfill our mission of uplifting and serving music people around the world.”

DMV rapper IDK has begun the rollout for his new album, Bravado + Intimo, which drops later this week via his independent imprint. Going in a slightly different direction than his last release, F65, the new album will only contain 12 tracks (as opposed to F65‘s 22 tracks), including the newly released single, “Check.”

IDK also takes a new tack in the video for “Check,” stripping things down, literally and figuratively. The Maryland MC performs the boastful new song in various locations around Los Angeles while accompanied by a young woman who twerks next to him in a skimpy one-piece swimsuit and high heels. The video is shot in provocative black-and-white that slowly becomes more saturated until IDK and his companion are captured in vivid color, doing their thing under a blue sky (it never rains in Southern California, they say).

Bravado + Intimo will also include the previously released tracks “Tiffany” with Gunna, “Denim” with Joey Badass, “Kickin,” and “Supernova,” which he’s released with a slew of varied “take” videos, including one-take performances and visualizers.

You can check out the video for “Check” — provided you don’t work in an office with an open floor plan — above.

BRAVADO + INTiMO is out on 11/1 via .idk. Find more information here.

Sydney Sweeney is in the Halloween mood.

The Euphoria actress visited Universal’s Halloween Horror Nights (like Sabrina Carpenter) and wore a Minions hat, and she recently shared a photo on Instagram where she’s making pumpkin cookies. Now that October 31 is almost here, Sweeney’s Halloween costume must be good then, right? Well, it probably will be, but she hasn’t revealed what it is yet. If she was considering Barbarella, ahead of her remake, Kylie Jenner beat her to it.

We’ll update if / when she makes her 2024 Halloween costume debut.

“My love for horror began at a very young age,” Sweeney told Letterboxd while promoting Immaculate earlier this year. “My dad is a huge horror fan, and that’s the genre of film that he would sit and watch with my little brother and me growing up. Halloween is his favorite holiday, and Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios is our favorite thing to do together – I think I was 11 or 12 when I started going to Horror Nights, and I loved it. I go every year. So I’ve definitely grown up with a love of the genre and old horror films.”

Sweeney then listed her seven favorite horror films of all-time: The Silence of the Lambs, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Hereditary, The Shining, Us, Halloween, and Rosemary’s Baby. Watch them all with her blood-covered face!

“Me and Dr. Dre been working on an album for the past two months, and it’ll be done in November. And it’s produced by Dr. Dre. It’s our 30th anniversary to Doggystyle. And the name of the album is Missionary.”

Snoop Dogg said this in October 2022. Whether the album ended up being done by November is a mystery, but it certainly wasn’t released at that point. In fact, it’s still not out.

Fast-forward to this past January, when Snoop again brought up the project, saying, “I can let the rabbit out the hat: I’ve been working on a record with Dr. Dre for the past 8 months.”

Finally, we have some more concrete news on the Missionary front: Today (October 30), Snoop officially announced the Dre-produced Missionary, revealing its release date is currently set for December 13.

He also shared a 42-second teaser video. It begins with two Mormon missionaries, smiling at they approach a doorstep and knock. They’re shocked when the door opens and inside is a woman in lingerie. Upset, she exclaims, “What the f*ck! Your ad said you’re dedicated to missionary work.” The stunned missionaries then run away as the album info is displayed on screen.

Missionary is out 12/13 via Def Jam Recordings. Find more information here.

Olivia Rodrigo just released her Guts World Tour concert film on Netflix, so to mark/promote the occasion, she was a guest on The Tonight Show yesterday (October 26). On the program, Jimmy Fallon made note of Rodrigo’s friendship with Chappell Roan, and Rodrigo revealed that their relationship actually goes way back.

Rodrigo explained:

“She opened for me on this tour, and she’s actually in the concert film, which is really fun, but I’ve known her for so many years. We have the same producer, and so I’ve known her for a while. And if you listen really closely to some of my songs on Sour and on Guts, she’s singing in the back. She does background vocals on a lot of the songs.

I love her. I used to go visit her when she worked at a donut shop before she got signed, before she put out any of her music. I used to go and eat donuts with her and hang out. I’m so happy for her, she deserves the whole world. I’m so proud of her. She deserves it all.”

Roan discussed that time period in a Paper interview a few months ago, saying, “I was signed for five years to Atlantic Records when I started making music, and then I was dropped in 2020 like everyone was. When ‘Pink Pony Club’ came out, and the rebrand came out, in 2022, I was like, ‘B*tch, I need to pull myself together.’ I was dropped, I was working at a donut shop. No money. That’s what I was doing. ‘My Kink Is Karma,’ ‘Naked In Manhattan,’ it was all with my friends and for free. It was so fun and amazing, but I would never do that again.”

In the past few weeks, Amazon Music Live has become appointment viewing for music fans. Streaming on Prime Video immediately after Thursday Night Football, the weekly concert series is the go-to show to watch new, rising, and established stars perform their latest. After returning with a lineup including Jelly Roll, Big Sean, Halsey, and J Balvin, Amazon Music has announced the next pair of performers that will follow in 2024.

On November 15, Gunna will take the stage as he completes his One Of Dem Nights Tour, while on November 21, K-pop sensations TWICE will become the first performers from their genre to perform on Amazon Music Live. As usual, Actress Liza Koshy will be interviewing each guest ahead of their performances, and you can follow @amazonmusic on socials for more exclusive content.

Each episode streams live on Prime Video and the Amazon Music channel on Twitch at 9 PM PT on Thursdays, preceded by the Amazon Music Tonight! pre-show on Twitch at 8.

In addition to completing his recent tour, Gunna appears to be rolling out an extension of his new album, One Of Wun, after dropping the single “Him All Along” earlier this month. Meanwhile, TWICE’s recently released album With YOU-th topped the Billboard 200 this spring, giving the pop band their first-ever US No. 1.

“We make underground films with very little money for the love of the art,” Christopher Bickel, director of the eagerly awaited underground horror movie Pater Noster And The Mission Of Light, said in pre-release materials. “This is literally my backyard we’re shooting in. Everything we do is like The Little Rascals, putting on a show for the neighborhood kids.”

Bickel’s CV includes stints as a columnist for Maximum Rocknroll magazine and Dangerous Minds. He was also singer in the punk bands In/Humanity and Guyana Punch Line, as well as the brains behind prolific avant garde recording project Anakrid. These musical roots continue to inform his cinematic work.

“Everything I know about filmmaking, I learned from punk rock,” he says. “The movies we make are punk rock demo tapes. We operate outside of Hollywood focus groups and traditional distribution routes.”

Pater Noster And The Mission Of Light itself is also for those prone to straying off the beaten path, as Bickel notes, “We make movies for people looking for something different. What happens in Pater Noster And The Mission Of Light is beyond belief. It’s not for the squeamish or easily upset.”

In a new interview, Bickel tells Uproxx about the new movie, how it was made on a tight budget, and what makes something punk rock.

This film! I watched it, and it was like a freaking call to action. I started immediately reaching out to everyone I know, telling them that they need to see this. So, for those who don’t know anything about this movie, tell them what it’s about.

It’s about a girl who works in a record store, and she stumbles upon this rare psychedelic record that was produced by this hippie cult in the early ’70s. She kind of falls down the rabbit hole, as collectors often do, and ends up getting an invitation to visit the remnants of the commune, where these hippies existed and still exist, and things go really bad for everybody that goes along with her on the ride. It’s kind of a Grindhouse-type of horror movie. There’s a lot of violence, exaggerated violence. It’s just a lot of fun. We made it on, like, no budget. It was very, very cheap.

When you say no budget, can you tell us what the budget was?

The budget was $21,000 in total, and we raised that through crowdfunding.

This film inspires me the way early hip-hop did, where you had artists with limited resources trying to make the best possible art they could for a fan base that was loyal to them, without caring about the rest of the industry or what other genres were doing. Do you see that connection at all?

Yeah, absolutely. I come out of punk rock. Punk rock and hip-hop have a very similar track in how they started and where they went. For me, it was, when I was younger, playing in bands and putting out fanzines and stuff like that. It was just about trying to make something with no money, to reach as many people as possible. I think with punk rock and hip-hop, there’s this sort of “from the streets,” aggressive spirit about it that’s sort of screaming out into the void. And I think I’ve carried that over into movies where, you know, we’re up against these $50 million, $100 million movies, and the only way we can compete with that is to offer something that’s a little bit different, maybe a little edgier in some ways.

I think there’s a genre where they think the joke is being bad, and it’s an easy way to cop out of having a low budget, and you see that in music as well. I’ve always disliked it in music. What I loved about your movie is I felt like it was trying to be good. For example, the sound mix: it’s amazing. Do you buy into the notion that for something to be punk rock, it’s just three chords? For me, I think there’s a lot of high art in punk and in this type of filmmaking.

Yeah, I’m with you. I’ve never gone in for the movies that are intentionally trying to be a B movie. You know, “We’re going to be a B movie just because of our budget,” right? We want to try to make the best thing that we can, and I think that’s where the authenticity is in this, or for anybody else working at this level. If you’re trying to do your best, people are going to see the heart in it and appreciate it.

You know, we don’t need to try hard to make a bad movie. We want it to escape our budgetary restraints, I guess is what I’m trying to say. The only way you can do that is to try to do the best thing you can.

What makes something punk rock?

Man, how do you answer that? I think it’s a spirit. There’s a rebelliousness to it, an anti-authoritarian streak. This is a crazy time we’re living in right now. There’s a lot of stuff that might happen within the next couple of years that really scares a lot of people. This movie in particular was sort of written against a lot of that. There are themes throughout it about women being forced to carry babies they don’t want to carry. I mean, it’s done in a very Grindhouse kind of way, but it’s a reflection of the time we live in. And to me, that’s punk rock.

Let’s get into some of these film details. It’s clearly a feminist movie. Would you agree?

I think so, yeah. There are things that are happening in our culture right now that I think we have to take women’s side on. So, I try to put that into the movie, maybe in kind of a sneaky way, you know, because I’m still just telling a horror story about this demon and a forced pregnancy with a mutant baby and stuff like that.

The film is a love letter, in some ways, to independent record stores. Where does that come from?

I’ve worked in record stores my entire life. I was in college when I started, and I’ve owned my own shop for a while, and I worked in another shop. So a lot of the dialogue that’s in there… we keep a book behind the counter of dumb sh*t customers say. A lot of the dialogue that’s in the movie is straight out of that book.

That’s amazing. The other musical thing that grabbed me, and you might get a kick out of this, is the movie describes the music of the fictional band as a mix of psych free jazz and early electronics. And I thought to myself, “God, this filmmaker literally reached into my brain and devised the exact album that I would want to go hunt for if I was record collecting.” Where did that come from?

Just stuff that I’m into personally. The idea was that it was a record made in 1972 that would have been slightly ahead of its time in ’72, so the influences they would have had at the time would have been like the Stooges and Black Sabbath. Like rock and free jazz, but maybe just slightly ahead of the curve on that stuff.

We wrote a whole album of the songs for the movie that aren’t even in the movie because we couldn’t shoehorn them in, but we put out an album that just came out with all the music. So all the music is sort of taking that idea that it’s 1972, but really, we’re kind of playing around in, like, 1976.

In the movie, there’s a massive modular synth room. What’s up with the synth room?

It’s just because when you make a low-budget movie, you just have to use stuff that you have access to. I have a friend that has all these analog synths, so I knew that I had to write a scene in a room with a bunch of synths. And I work at a record store, so I knew that there had to be a scene in a record store. The whole movie came about because some friends of mine, they’re gear heads that work on all these old cars and stuff. They got this bus, and they said they wanted to paint it like an old hippie bus, like the Ken Kesey bus from the ’60s. That’s basically why the movie exists, because they said they had this hippie bus, so I wrote a movie around that.

Well, you know what’s funny about the Ken Kesey hippie bus: I kept on thinking about this line in the movie, “F*ck your whole generation.” I was wondering to myself how much of this movie was taking aim towards the hippie generation or the ’60s, or was that just a fun line to have?

It was mostly a fun line to have, but I think that every generation hates the one that came right before. It’s playing around with that a little bit: “You guys thought that you were the coolest people in the world, and you were the cutting edge of everything, and now you’re just the establishment.”

I loved it so much. He could have said anything to them. And it was like, those hippies want to stay young, right? By saying, “F*ck your whole generation,” it was this acknowledgement of, “You’re old and your ideas are bad.”

That was totally the intent. You nailed it.

Your sound mix in this movie is insane. If you told me that the sound mix was from a major-budget movie, I would totally believe you.

I’ve been a musician for a lot longer than I’ve been a filmmaker, and my background, aside from being in punk rock bands, is I do a lot of avant garde music, and I have for decades. So I’m deeply rooted in sort of experimental soundscape-type stuff. So, it was really easy to apply that towards making movies. Getting the mix right is tough. I’m doing everything just on a desktop computer. It’s like a real crappy setup, but, you know, I think it turned out OK.

It’s incredible. So, I want to talk a little bit about your philosophy. I’ve seen you in an interview, and you gave a list of five perfect movies. They were Taxi Driver, Harold And Maude, The Shining, The Exorcist, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Yeah, that’s definitely my list.

Do you have a list of perfect albums or perfect songs, or even perfect musicians that inspire you?

Oh, crap. I wish I had time to think about this. My favorite song of all time is “Surrender” by Cheap Trick. I think that’s the perfect pop song. My favorite album of all time is Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols. I just think it’s the greatest punk record ever. I would probably put Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” way up at the top of my list. I think that, when I hear that song, I feel like the heavens open up, and she’s just an angel, and it’s just lifting the listener up into the clouds.

Having worked in record stores for so long, I love pretty much every genre of music. You know, every day I’m in a store where I’m buying and selling records and listening to them all day long. So, you know, there’s just so much great sh*t out there.

Speaking of buying records, your film is a bit of a cautionary tale about record collecting. Were you making fun of the fact that people take it a little too far?

Oh, absolutely. This is me indicting myself. The character Max in the movie, she finds all these rare records, and her roommates are like, “Well, you need money, you have duplicates of these: you should sell them.” And she’s like, “No. I found these in the wild, I rescued these. If I sell this record, it’s just going to go to some rich bougie guy.” There’s this weird sort of fetishizing of things and wanting to hold on to them. And it’s pretty ridiculous, but I’m just as guilty of it.

How can people watch it the movie? I want everyone to go see it.

We’re doing all our own distribution. It’s all DIY. Right now, people can buy the streaming or pre-order the Blu-ray at paternostermovie.com, and that just takes you to our Indiegogo page. We’re sort of using that as a retail outlet now, but for the time being, it’s only on Night Flight. They’ve just been super cool to me, so they didn’t ask for it, but I offered to give them an exclusive for a month on it, just because they’ve been really cool with promoting it, and cool with paying me on time, which is somewhat of a rarity. But, after a month is up, then it’ll probably be on Prime any any of the other big streamers.

So if anyone wants to see it for Halloween: Night Flight, that’s the place.

Dwyane Wade’s new statue outside the Kaseya Center in Miami has garnered a lot of conversation, unfortunately much of it making fun of how it looks nothing like Wade, but it has also sparked some discussion of who will be next to get a statue in the NBA.

LeBron James in Cleveland and Stephen Curry in Golden State are locks, but the other top star from their generation doesn’t expect to end up with a statue anywhere. Kevin Durant is a surefire Hall of Famer with a pair of championships and an MVP award, but he’s been something of a basketball nomad over his career and explained to Kay Adams on “Up and Adams” that, despite Wade saying he deserves a statue, he “highly doubts” that happens.

Durant is nothing if not pragmatic, and he knows that statues are reserved for those with extended runs as the face of a franchise that have own. His longest tenured stop was in Oklahoma City, but he didn’t deliver the Thunder a title and left on bad terms with the organization, bolting for the rival Warriors — and if anyone’s getting a statue in OKC, it’s Russell Westbrook. He won a pair of titles and Finals MVP awards in Golden State, but spent just four years there on a team with Curry as the established face of the franchise. His time in Brooklyn didn’t go according to plan, and he joined a Suns team that, even if they go on to win a championship or two, would build a Devin Booker statue before a Durant one.

I appreciate that Durant doesn’t try to act like this would be some great injustice, but simple states it as a matter of fact. It is, in a way, the price he’s paid for his journey, but he’s also been highly successful at just about every stop, even if some have fallen short of the loftiest expectations. He’ll be good with his Hall of Fame plaque and the respect of his peers, even as his colleagues will surely be getting immortalized in bronze in San Francisco and Cleveland in the not too distant future.