Year: 2024

Josh Levi knows what it means to be in the spotlight. A entertainment career that brought him to Friday Night Lights, X-Factor, and more, now has him in front of a mic full time as a young R&B singer to reckon with. At just 25 years old, the Houston native is just a little over a year removed from his last project Disc Two (Scratched Up). With 12 songs to its name, Disc Two (Scratched Up) — highlighted by the viral “Birthday Dance” — is as complete of a body of work that we’ve received from Levi. It soars high with tales of love, digs deep for moments of heartbreak, and captivates for moments, big and small, that exist in between.

Today, Levi launches into a new era with the release of “Something More.” The passionate single is supported by minimal production which allows Levi’s impressive to run free and even show off a flash of falsetto here and there. The song itself makes love sound like the feeling of a lifetime. Levi has fallen for the woman in question on the song, but she’s yet to jump off the cliff and into his awaiting warms. With lyrics like “I’ll follow you / Girl, would you take me with ya?” and “Baby, tell me how deep / Are you willing to dive / Say it with your body, baby / You don’t gotta tell me twice,” Levi makes a convincing case on why his soon-to-be companion should be by his side for the foreseeable future.

Together with the arrival of his new single, Levi also answered a few questions as a part of our Uproxx Music 20 series that aims to showcase rising artists’ inspirations, influences, and aspirations. Scroll down and learn a new thing or two about the Houston singer.

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What is your earliest memory of music?

I would say the first memory I have is singing at my sister’s kindergarten graduation. I was five years old and I wrote my first song for her that day and I remember my family all being there and getting a kick out it!

Who inspired you to take music seriously?

I grew up singing in church so I heard amazing voices all the time but I would say Michael Jackson and Brandy were some of the artists that made me fall in love with music and wanna start making my own sound.

Do you know how to play an instrument? If so, which one? If not, which instrument do you want to learn how to play?

I play piano, and a little bit of guitar but I would love to master electric guitar. It’s my favorite instrument and i’ve always wanted to be able to shred on stage!

What was your first job?

My first job funny enough was acting on Friday Night Lights when i was 9! It was my first time working and getting paid and it just so happened to be something super cool like that show! I remember my first day on set I was feelin myself and thought I could do something like that forever haha.

What is your most prized possession?

I would say my family. Nothing is more important to me than my family, I feel like it’s my most sacred, valuable thing in my life.

What is your biggest fear?

Losing someone I love, or failing. Those things both haunt me. I also have a phobia of birds unfortunately.

Who is on your R&B Mt. Rushmore?

Michael Jackson, Brandy, Jazmine Sullivan, and Boyz II Men. There’s Usher, Chris Brown, Joe, and Aaliyah too.

You get 24 hours to yourself to do anything you want, with unlimited resources: What are you doing? And spare no details!

I’m in my bed watching one of the million different shows I watch with all the lights off and some salmon and rice next to my bed with a ginger beer!

What are your three most used emojis?

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What’s a feature you need to secure before you die?

Beyoncé, Rihanna, or Drake.

If you could appear in a future season of a current TV show, which one would it be and why?

Stranger Things, Bridgerton, The Bear, The White Lotus, The Chosen, Abbott Elementary, Only Murders In The Building, Wednesday.

Which celebrity do you admire or respect for their personality and why?

I really love Prince and Whitney Houston’s personalities. I admire their candor and how unfiltered they were haha. I dream to be as unapologetic about how I feel and what’s on my mind and then on stage be this incredible talent that people revere.

Share your opinion on something no one could ever change your mind about.

Fries are great with mayo and it just is what it is!

What is the best song you’ve ever heard in your life and what do you love about it?

That’s such a crazy question! in my life?? There’s so many! First one that comes to mind is “Human Nature” by Michael Jackson. I think that song is perfectly written, perfectly composed, perfect everything. Everyday I wish I wrote that song.

What’s your favorite city in the world to perform, and what’s a city you’re excited to perform in for the first time?

One of my favorite ever shows was in London! I had my first headline show there last year and it was sold out and the energy was just electric, I wasn’t expecting it! I also really love performing in New York! I haven’t done a show in Paris yet or Brazil, I’ve been wanting to go there for a long time.

You are throwing a music festival. Give us the dream lineup of 5 artists that will perform with you and the location where it would be held.

It would be in Houston, Texas and I would say Beyonce, Drake, Chris Brown, SZA, and Meg Thee Stallion.

What would you be doing now if it weren’t for music?

I’d probably still be doing something creative or in culinary or in sports! Both my siblings were athletes and I’m really competitive so I’d be somewhere in that world.

If you could see five years into the future or go five years into the past, which one would you pick and why?

I would go five years into the past just to appreciate every moment I experienced more and learn the things I learned all over again. I’ve grown so much in the last couple of years so it’s been a beautiful journey of growth and healing. I’m not in a rush to see the future haha, I like to let God just do His thing and reveal things to me when He wants to!

What’s one piece of advice you’d go back in time to give to your 18-year-old self?

Trust in God’s timing!!! Don’t lose hope if things aren’t panning out at the exact time that you want because it will all align perfectly!

It’s 2050. The world hasn’t ended, and people are still listening to your music. How would you like it to be remembered?

I would love for it to be remembered as a source of healing for people that needed to feel. and I would love for my music to be remembered for it’s composition, the harmonies, the details that went into it.

It’s a tough time for touring musicians these days, what with out-of-control concert pricing so bad that even the federal government had to get involved. The latest artist to be forced to cancel her tour over the less-than-ideal conditions currently plaguing the industry is Jennifer Lopez, who today announced that her This Is Me… Live summer tour has been nixed. She previously canceled several stops and renamed the tour in efforts to avoid having to pull the plug entirely.

In a statement shared via her newsletter, J-Lo wrote:

“A Special Message to My JLovers OnTheJLo:
I am completely heartsick and devastated about letting you down.
Please know that I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t feel that it was absolutely necessary. I promise I will make it up to you, and we will all be together again.
I love you all so much.
Until next time…”

According to Variety, Lopez’s tour had struggled with ticket sales, but representatives for Lopez denied that low ticket sales were the reason for the cancelation. In March, just a month after announcing the tour, seven of the shows were canceled in Houston, Nashville, New Orleans, and more. A few weeks later, Lopez rebranded the tour to stoke stagnant sales; where it was originally a promotional tour for her new album and its accompanying documentary, under the new branding, it would have been a “greatest hits” tour to take advantage of millennial nostalgia for albums like On The 6.

Lopez’s official reason for canceling the tour is to spend more time with her family. Meanwhile, she’s far from the only star to cancel a tour recently; Busta Rhymes, Playboi Carti, Tyla, and more have all canceled shows this year, proving that the problem is systemic and not unique to any particular artist.

If there’s any Hollywood star that embodies agelessness, positivity and good old-fashioned fun, it’s Dick Van Dyke. The legendary comedic actor has had a 70-year long career in film, television and stage productions and he shows no signs of stopping.

In fact, at 98-years-old, he says he’d love to take a one-man show on the road.

“Cary Grant did it,” Van Dyke told Deadline. “And Gregory Peck. Went on the road and talked about their careers. I think it’d be fun.”

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The man behind the iconic dance scenes in “Mary Poppins” and “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” has always shown off his seemingly endless energy in his physical performances, but the fact that he’s still going strong at 18 months shy of 100 is genuinely impressive.

His secret? “Genuinely enjoying myself,” he said. He insists his success isn’t due to any particular ambition or drive, but rather that he sees his work as play. “I always loved what I was doing. If it had felt like work, I probably would have stopped it a long time ago, but I just loved it.”

And it wasn’t that he was specifically trained for the work. He started at 17 as a radio announcer and then joined a comedy troupe, in fact, he’d never even had a dance lesson before he landed some of his most well-known roles.

“I was always pretty light footed,” Van Dyke told Entertainment Weekly. “When I auditioned for Bye Bye Birdie, [director] Gower Champion said, ‘You have the part.’ And I said, ‘Mr. Champion, I don’t dance.’ He said, ‘I’ll show you.’ And he did. He saw that I had the physical ability to do it, and it was like learning to fly.”

As is typical for his age, Van Dyke’s long-term memories are sharp while he forgets things like what he ate for breakfast. But his wife, Arlene, whom he’s been married to for 12 years, helps keep him going.

“She keeps me in shape, feeds me and I love her more everyday,” he told Forbes. “We’re just getting closer and closer.”

Arlene (52) also shared with Forbes how Van Dyke has made her a better person, reinforcing that his loveable, jolly demeanor is just who he is.

“I was very cynical, I think, when I first met him,” she said. “He’s such a great human being and he’s so pure in his thoughts and his heart, that it’s rubbed off on me. Just all the wholesome things of life—that’s what he has and he’s just made me a better person.”

Van Dyke doesn’t see himself the way the rest of us do, as a legend and an icon. “It’s a little hard for me to get my brain around that,” he told Deadline. “I don’t see myself that way and I can’t comprehend myself as that.”

However, the recent CBS television special that showcased his life and career in a variety show, “Dick Van Dyke 98 Years of Magic” made it clear that his legendary status is solidly understood. Between the joy his performances have brought to children and adults alike, the positivity he exudes on screen and off, the longevity and vitality he displays on every level, he’s proven himself to be entertainment and aging goals personified.

With age comes a lot of loss, however, and Van Dyke admits there’s a bit of sadness in seeing his career being showcased, as most of the people he’s worked with have passed. He told Deadline that Carl Reiner’s death hit him particularly hard.

““I think I learned more from Carl Reiner than anyone else,” he said. “He understood comedy. He understood drama. He had a sense of timing like nobody else. And he was just so sharp and bright and a philosopher on top of it. He was the finest human being I ever knew.”

But regardless of age, Van Dyke has no plans to retire, ever. He just did his first soap opera spot on “Days of Our Lives,” and he delights in seeing how his work—his “play”—continues to make an impact.

“I’m on my third generation now of kids who are writing to me,” he told Deadline. “And I’m getting wonderful mail from their parents thanking me for providing good entertainment for their kids. They’re so kind about it. That I really appreciate. I’m so lucky.”

The desire to become a parent is at once an incredibly simple biological impulse and a complex psychological decision. As mammals, we have an innate evolutionary drive to reproduce and pass on our genes. As humans, we may feel compelled to nurture a child, to grow a family, to leave a lineage and legacy behind…or we may not.

Some people don’t feel the desire to have children, but research shows most young adults do. The phenomenon known as “baby fever” is real, and it happens to both women and men. For women, the desire for a baby tends to start off strong and decrease with age and after having children, whereas for men baby fever tends to increase as they get older.

But how does popular culture impact that desire? Do parenting depictions in media and advertisements have an influence one way or another?

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Those are the questions researchers from the UBC Sauder School of Business explored in a 2022 study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied.

“Advertising and social media play an important role in how we view the world. In general, what we see on Instagram and Facebook are positive portrayals of parenthood, with #blessed and #bestkidsever. How often do we see parents post #mykidsareterrible?” asked study co-author Dr. Lisa Cavanaugh. “We wanted to see if, by simply showing pictures of kids in advertising, we could affect the desire to have children.”

The study authors observed 1,093 childless young adults between the ages of 18-35 as they viewed positive and negative parent-child advertisements and ads with the children removed (neutral images). Positive images showed things like a parent and child smiling while interacting or doing something fun and creative together, while negative images showed children having meltdowns or parents clearly exasperated with a child’s misbehavior.

What they found was that positive parenting images increased the participants’ desire to have a child by 22 percent compared to the neutral images. However, there was no inverse effect with the negative parent-child images.

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In fact, there was no negative effect at all. Seeing parenting being portrayed negatively did not change participants’ minds about wanting to have a child.

“These are people who don’t yet have children, so it could be they see the comedy in kids behaving badly. When it’s not you trying to clean up the mess or get a child to eat before you go to work, it can be humorous,” Dr. Cavanaugh posited. “But we can say with certainty that people without children who saw these negative parent-child moments were not dissuaded.”

One thing the authors found in measuring how negative parenting images impacted “baby fever” was that both positive and negative parenting images evoked a sense of empathy in participants, which correlated with a greater desire to have children. Even the negative parenting images tended to create an empathic response (though not as significantly as the positive parenting images did) leading to a slight increase in desire to have a child.

“Further bolstering the importance of empathic emotions in understanding the desire to have children, our results indicated that the depiction of negative parent–child moments also increases the desire to have children via empathic emotions,” the authors wrote. “This finding suggests that the valence of parent–child images (i.e., that they are positive and sweet) may be less critical to the increased desire to have children. Instead, empathic emotions seem to be critical in predicting the desire to have children.”

So perhaps the quips we see on social media posts of misbehaving children or stressed out parents about them being “birth control” really are just jokes. According to this study, “baby fever” isn’t so easily brought down.

The Breaking Bad movie Heisenberg isn’t real. Mindhunter season 3 still isn’t happening. And now, to complete the trilogy of obviously fake viral posts that people seem to believe are legimate, we have a reboot of The Sopranos.

“SOPRANO SERIES – MICHAEL GANDOLFINI!!!,” a post originated by popular Facebook account YODA BBY ABY reads. “Witness 10 episodes set in the gritty streets of late 1980s Newark, SOPRANO follows a young Tony Soprano as he rises through the ranks of the mob under the watchful eye of his mentor, Paulie Gualtieri. Struggling with family obligations and the lure of organized crime, Tony forms a tight-knit crew, including his childhood friend Silvio Dante. David Chase masterfully captures the origins of an iconic mob boss in this compelling prequel to The Sopranos, coming soon to MAX.”

Some of the details are believable enough — Michael Gandolfini, the son of James, played young Tony in The Many Saints of Newark, for instance — and many Facebook users are falling for it. But there are red flags. To begin with, as Snopes notes, YODA BBY ABY describes itself as “100% satire and fake news.”

Actually, that’s the only red flag you need: The Sopranos isn’t getting a prequel series. But if it does, it should be about Johnny and Ginny Sack. How did those crazy kids meet?!

(Via Snopes)

Everyone knows that Snoop Dogg’s best friend is Martha Stewart since they do just about everything together. But Martha has been busy with her other friends lately, so now Matthew McConaughey is using this pre-Yellowstone time to swoop in on Snoop to re-establish their friendship…by making himself look cool in front of his son.

McConaughey posted a video to Instagram showing off his new Death Row Records chain that his pal Snoop Dogg gave him. While it’s not the same type of chain that his dog counterpart named Bow wears, but it’pretty close!

In the video, McConaughey is seen showing off his new look while in front of a Snoop record. “Snoop, I mean are you reading my mail or am I reading yours?” He said. Reading someone else’s mail is a federal offense, by the way. But it’s fine.

While it might seem like an unlikely pair (not as unlikely as his other friendships), the two became fast friends after starring together in 2019’s stoner comedy The Beach Bum, and the rapper has had nothing but kind words to say about the actor.

“It’s magic,” Mr. Dogg told Jimmy Kimmel in 2019. “I think certain people in life are meant for each other. I think me and Matthew were meant for each other. It’s supposed to be,” Snoop added. Martha Stewart could not be reached for comment.

(Via Billboard)

Let me transport you back to the year of 2015. Mad Max: Fury Road just revved the engines of action fans everywhere, revitalizing the once long-dormant franchise. There’s excitement about the world and characters from mastermind director George Miller and fans can’t wait for more. Fast forward a bit to September 1st, 2015 and fans are eagerly lining up to buy their blu-ray copies of Fury Road (trust me, I was one of them) and a hot new open-world video game that released on the same day:Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. The rest was history.

There was another video game that released that day though. One that flew under many people’s radar, including my own. That video game was Mad Max from Avalanche Studios, makers of the Just Cause franchise.

The game set out to immerse players into the revitalized world of Fury Road and presented a story that acted as a prequel of sorts to the film. Players would take control of Max Rockatansky, the last of the V8 interceptors, as he comes face to face with Scrotus, the son of warlord Immortan Joe from Fury Road. Left out in the wasteland for dead and without his trusty vehicle, players would guide Max and his companion Chumbucket through the open-world and build the “Magnum Opus”, a new deathbringer vehicle. Players would get to visit iconic locations from the series such as Gastown and The Bullet Farm, and even come into contact with characters that would appear in both Fury Road and Furiosa.

Mad Max stood out from other open world games at the time and allowed players to fully customize their car with various upgrades and defenses. Sure there was hand to hand combat evocative of the Batman: Arkham games, but Mad Max shined the brightest when it focused on vehicle combat. (The player vehicle “Deathbringer” allowed users to take out some of the game’s toughest enemies without ever leaving the driver’s seat.) But, even when you had to leave the Magnum Opus, the game was an absolute blast to play, scouring a barren wasteland for water and gasoline while laying waste to any unfortunate raider that got in your way.

Not only did the game give players the chance to live out all their wasteland fantasies but the game’s story also tied into Fury Road and Furiosa in meaningful ways. Avalanche Studios worked with series creator George Miller, using his input to make the game as authentic to the series as possible. As revealed in Blood, Sweat, and Chrome, a book about the making of Fury Road, Miller has a series bible of sorts about locations and characters and even had the story for Furiosa planned out from an early stage. Taking place before the events of Fury Road, the game explains Scrotus’ absence in that film as a result of his run-in with Max. The game also makes mention of the 40-day wasteland war that resulted in the death of Dementus, the tyrant that ran Gastown and attempted to conquer the entire wasteland. (This event would go on to be depicted in a pivotal segment of Furiosa, though it would play out a tad differently.) In fact, Furiosa even contains depictions of the characters Scrotus and Chumbucket (who gives Furiosa a shell of a vehicle that could have possibly been a proto-Magnum Opus).

So if the game sought to provide an authentic Mad Max experience with involvement from its creator, why has it been mostly forgotten, made effectively non-canon by the release of Furiosa? Why has George Miller gone on to say “It wasn’t as good as I wanted it to be?”

Many factors are at play here. For starters: the release date. Publisher Warner Bros. Interactive made the baffling decision to release it the same date as Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, the latest outing from video game auteur Hideo Kojima and the beloved Metal Gear series. This effectively buried Mad Max from many potential buyers. Avalanche Studios co-founder Christofer Sundberg said last week of the situation that “it was a hell of a great game, but released in a terrible release window, which we could not convince the publisher to do otherwise.”

Sundberg went on to elaborate that Mad Max featured a somewhat tumultuous development also saying “After the first year of development they realized that they had forced us to make a linear experience rather than the open world game we pitched. We threw away a year of work.” According to Sundberg then, there was an entirely different version of the game that fans never saw and that the publisher was unhappy with.

But the real irony of the whole situation is reflected in George Miller’s recent comments. In a recent interview he said that he would want to revisit a Mad Max video game if a creator such as Hideo Kojima would take on the project (though he goes on to admit he would never ask). Miller also expressed his disappointment in the 2015 game despite his team’s involvement. This interview feels like the punctuation point in the long saga of why Mad Max didn’t hit the mark.

Mad Max was a video game pulled in many different directions. A product from a studio that cut their teeth on open world experiences, a game that the publisher never seemed to want in the first place, and an external addition to a series by one of filmmaking’s greatest creators. Between conflicting visions and a release date going up against one of the most anticipated games of all time, it’s no surprise that Mad Max has been mostly forgotten by the gaming public. It’s a real shame though, because it adds depth to one of the greatest film franchises of all time, has some of the most exciting vehicular combat of any video game in recent memory, and features a unique barren wasteland not seen in many other post-apocalyptic games from a developer that knew what they were doing. Mad Max is everything great about Fury Road and Furiosa in video game form.

LCD Soundsystem has really taken to extended residencies in recent years, and now they’re back on that grind: Today (May 31), the group announced a residency that will take place at two beloved Los Angeles venues: Shrine Expo Hall and Hollywood Palladium. This is the band’s first LA residency since their five-night run at the Palladium in 2017.

The general on-sale for tickets starts on June 7 at 10 a.m. PT. That will be preceded by an artist pre-sale that kicks off on June 5 at 10 a.m. PT. Find more information, including how to register for the pre-sale, on the residency website.

This announcement follows a pair of residencies the band already enjoyed this year, both earlier this month: They posted up at Seattle’s Paramount Theatre for four nights and then had a four-night run at Chicago’s Byline Bank Aragon Ballroom, which just wrapped up on the 27th.

Check out the full list of tour dates below.

LCD Soundsystem 2024 Los Angeles Residency Dates

10/31 — Los Angeles, CA @ Shrine Expo Hall
11/01 — Los Angeles, CA @ Shrine Expo Hall
11/02 — Los Angeles, CA @ Shrine Expo Hall
11/03 — Los Angeles, CA @ Shrine Expo Hall
11/07 — Los Angeles, CA @ Hollywood Palladium
11/08 — Los Angeles, CA @ Hollywood Palladium
11/09 — Los Angeles, CA @ Hollywood Palladium
11/10 — Los Angeles, CA @ Hollywood Palladium

The thing about British shows is that many of them sound fake. Celebrity Gogglebox? Glow Up: Britain’s Next Make-Up Star? Loose Women? They’re (somehow!) all real, and Maya Jama has been on all of them at some point.

Jama is one of the current hosts of the original UK version of dating reality series Love Island (now that’s how you title a show), and this week, she shared an X-rated message from one of her, uh, loyal fans.

In a message from 2021, the admirer said that Jama looked “amazing” in a photo she included in an Instagram Story, which is a weird thing to send to someone you don’t know. But it gets weirder. After a three-year break, the follower responded to another pic this week, telling Jama, “Last night I thought about you whilst I f*cked my boyfriend. Should I be concerned.”

Jama should be concerned about the use of the word “whilst,” but instead, she had a good sense of humor about the whole thing. According to The Daily Mail, she shared a screenshot of the exchange with her three-million plus followers, writing, “An insight into my dms. Some say f me… some think about it,” along with the laughing emoji.

Maybe the DM was from King Charles?

(Via The Daily Mail)

Genre-bending Compton rapper Channel Tres announced his debut album, Head Rush, earlier this month, following the announcement with the release of its first single, “Berghain” with Barney Bones. Today, he follows up with another new single, “Cactus Water.”

Inspired by Berghain’s techno scene, the funky new track incorporates elements of nu-disco, with a hard-hitting groove, a hefty bassline, and a chattering rhythm guitar. Tres details a new romantic interest, telling his paramour he’s “been a little thirsty lately,” requesting the refreshment of the titular beverage — a thinly veiled reference to after-club activities.

Tres has a busy 2024 schedule coming up, with performances at festivals all over the place. In March, he performed at Boise, Idaho’s Treefort Festival, while this past weekend, he joined Ludacris and an army of dance music DJs in Detroit for Movement Festival. In August, he’s on the lineup for HARD Festival with Disclosure and Nelly Furtado.

Head Rush will be Channel Tres’ first album under RCA Records, to which he signed in 2022, and his second project for the label overall after he dropped his EP Real Cultural Sh*t in February 2023. Head Rush does not have a release date just yet, but you can bet it’ll be sooner rather than later with summer right around the corner.

You can listen to Channel Tres’ “Cactus Water” above.