After nearly a full day of being called a “Karen” online by commenters who took issue with her open letter to the music industry, Lana Del Rey responded, claiming her statement had “nothing to do with race” despite mostly naming Black and Latina women (and Ariana Grande).

In a comment on her original post, wherein she erroneously compared the critical and commercial reaction to her music to that of her peers’ material, she defied the characterization of her letter as “racist,” writing, “This is sad to make it about a WOC (women of color) issue when I’m talking about my favorite singers. I could have literally said anyone but I picked my favorite f*cking people.”

She pointedly noted her issue with a climate of political correctness, without saying as many words, griping, “This is the problem with society today, not everything is about whatever you want it to be. It’s exactly the point of my post — there are certain women that culture doesn’t want to have a voice. It may not have to do with race — I don’t know what it has to do with. I don’t care anymore but don’t ever ever ever bro call me racist that is bullsh*t.”

Lana left a “final note” as well, punctuating her comments with one more that attempted to clarify her meaning: “When I said people who look like me — I meant the people who don’t look strong or necessarily smart or like they’re in control, etc. It’s about advocating for a more delicate personality, not white women — thanks for the Karen comments tho. V helpful.”

Unfortunately for Lana, in her attempt to defend herself, she may have proved the critics correct. I don’t think anyone disputed or misconstrued her point. The problem is that her point was made at the expense of mostly women of color — particularly Black ones — and against a mountain of evidence to the contrary. As she says, she could have named any number of wilting, “delicate” personalities and they have still experienced just as much — if not more — criticism of her. But by naming those women specifically, she compared their struggles to hers, erasing those struggles, minimizing their experiences, and reducing their music to a narrow range of emotions and topics while inflating her own.

And not for nothing, at its most literal reading, her lament that “Doja Cat, Ariana, Camila, Cardi B, Kehlani and Nicki Minaj and Beyoncé have had number ones with songs about being sexy, wearing no clothes, f*cking, cheating, etc.” is flat-out wrong no matter how you dice it. Removing Kehlani from the equation, as she’s never had a No. 1 on the Billboard albums or Hot 100 charts, even the songs that have gone No. 1 from the others aren’t about being sexy or sex. The most recent entry, “Stuck With U,” is about the doldrums of an established relationship, while its immediate predecessor “Say So” is about missing out on a mutual attraction because the guy is too shy to approach. Beyonce’s last solo No. 1 was specifically about demanding no less than a ring to prove fidelity, and “Bodak Yellow” made more of Cardi retiring her clear heels to the Starlets rafters than “being sexy.” That doesn’t lend itself too well to her point that she loves their music.

Lana’s complaints stem from her perceived poor treatment at the hands of the music journalism establishment, without acknowledging that all of her peers have endured the same — many while suffering through circumstances Lana herself would never be forced to experience. For instance, she wouldn’t be subjected to the double standards of colorism. We know she doesn’t mean she deserves better for being white. But by failing to recognize her privilege and holding onto years-old imagined slights — especially just months after releasing a universally-acclaimed project — she truly is acting like a archetypical, entitled white lady and earning every “Karen” tweet that comes her way.

Earlier in the week, the Tom Hanks passion project Greyhound made the headline-grabbing jump from a Father’s Day theatrical release to premiering on Apple TV+ at a later date. While movies shifting to a streaming release is starting to become the norm in these pandemic days, Greyhound‘s acquisition is the first major step by Apple into taking theatrical films off the hands of a movie studio (in this case, Sony).

Normally, this is a Netflix strategy but according to CNBC, Apple has been showing up to talks with money to spend. It was enough to convince Hanks — who “himself had to approve before Sony and Apple made the deal” — to agree to forego the theater, for the first time, with a movie that he personally wrote and developed. Here’s why such an unprecedented move occurred:

So why did Sony decide to sell this film instead of simply delaying its release, as many studios have done with other films featuring big stars? People close to the matter say that when coronavirus shutdowns forced the cancellation of its scheduled release on Father’s Day weekend, June 19, Sony became concerned that the film wouldn’t be able to find a slot among the superhero films and franchises that had been delayed from the summer. A source close to the situation tells me that the studio shopped the film to Netflix and Apple, but Apple was willing to pay more.

Interestingly, the conditions that led to Greyhound‘s sale to Apple may have played a role in HBO Max’s surprise decision to “Release the Snyder Cut.” With numerous productions delayed by the pandemic, streaming services are looking a possible content gap in the days ahead, and they’re not afraid to spend their way through it. Whether that’s snatching up films that are collecting dust after having their released dates scuttled, or giving Zack Snyder $20 million to re-edit an old movie, these services are ready to pony up to keep audiences watching.

(Via CNBC)

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Christopher Nolan fans have been eagerly anticipating the next trailer for his mind-bending thriller Tenet, but it’s a safe bet that none of them anticipated it would make its debut in Fortnite.

In a very surprising announcement on the hit video game’s Twitter page, Fortnite dropped the bombshell that the eagerly anticipated trailer will debut inside the new Party Royale mode starting at 8 PM EST and repeating every hour. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the online shooter, Party Royale is a recently added feature that essentially allows players a safe area to just hang out and goof around with friends. The area has already been used to host concerts from Deadmau5 and Steve Aoki, and now the giant theater screen will be used to debut a trailer for a major motion picture for the very first time. As for how Nolan feels about his prestige film being promoted in a video game… that will surely be a hot discussion for cinema buffs.

You can see the official Fortnite announcement below:

Compounding the unusual venue for the new Tenet trailer is the fact that the movie’s release date is in flux right now. It’s currently set for a July 21 release date, but with Los Angeles still under lockdown for the next three months and most theater chains being shuttered across the country, there are significant doubts that Nolan’s latest will debut this summer. According to Deadline, there are tentative plans to shift Tenet to Wonder Woman 84‘s August release date, but most industry insiders view that as an extremely optimistic outcome. If theaters do manage to open that soon, they would only be able to seat half of their capacity, at best, and that’s if moviegoers are willing to risk potential exposure to the still ongoing pandemic.

In short, the chances of bringing in the much-needed box-office haul for a big-budget Nolan film look pretty unlikely for not just this summer, but the rest of 2020. This trailer debuting in Fortnite, though… that is definitely happening. It’s a strange year.

(Via Fortnite)

In a staff meeting that was live-streamed from his personal Facebook page, Facebook’s chief executive Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company would continue to allow many of its employees to work from home permanently, even as the country begins opening up. According to The New York Times, Facebook’s 45,000 employees have been working at home since March and the temporary change has caused the company to reevaluate the idea that employees actually need to work in a shared office in a company that is almost wholly digitally-based. Zuckerberg indicated that within a decade, he expects as many as half of the company’s employees will work from home.

To implement the change, Facebook will start by allowing current employees to apply for permission to work from home, a decision that will be determined by positive work performance, and allow new hires who are senior engineers to work remotely.

The concept of working from home is really catching on in Silicon Valley, it seems (lower costs probably being the reason). The New York Times reports that a week prior to Zuckerberg’s announcement, Jack Dorsey, who leads both Twitter and Square, gave the go-ahead for employees to work from home indefinitely, and Google is allowing their employees to continue working from home until the end of this year.

Kid Cudi has teamed up with Virgil Abloh for a special merch drop that celebrates the release of Mr. Solo Dolo’s first single since 2016, “Leader of the Delinquents,” and features a sketch of Cudi drawn by Abloh himself across a single 7″ vinyl, a 12″ picture disk, a cassette tape, or a limited edition t-shirt. Or you know, all four if you’re a big Cudi fan. Dubbed the “Pulling Strings” t-shirt by the pair, Abloh’s sketch features Kid Cudi operating the strings of a marionette version of himself grabbing his crotch and flipping the bird, a reference to a pose Cudi struck while dodging an invasive TMZ interview back in 2012, according to Hypebeast.

Why or how Abloh thought to choose an 8-year-old incident to immortalize on Cudi’s first comeback single since 2016’s Passion, Pain, and Demon Slayin’ we’ll never know, but hey, that’s what makes him Virgil! On the back of the t-shirt, the single’s track is written in a stylized font that removes the vertical lines from every “E,” which kind of satisfies Abloh’s own 3% design philosophy.

While four years is a long time to take away from music, Kid Cudi hasn’t exactly been chilling all this time. 2018 saw Cudi appear as one half of the release of the underrated Kids See Ghosts album with Kanye West, and he’s spent a considerable amount time popping up on the big and small screen. Still, it’s nice to hear him shine on a solo project once again.

Head over to Kid Cudi’s site to shop the Pulling Strings t-shirt and other Leader of the Delinquents merch now.

A pod of dolphins in Queensland, Australia have been bringing gifts from the depths of the sea, presumably to encourage their human friends to return to the shore.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the pod interacted with humans every day at Barnacles Cafe & Dolphin Feeding at Tin Can Bay, north of the Sunshine Coast. The cafe and nature center has a feeding program where people interact with the wild pod every morning.

But the humans are nowhere to be found since the pandemic shut down the cafe.

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“The pod has been bringing us regular gifts, showing us how much they’re missing the public interaction and attention,” the safe posted on Facebook. “They are definitely missing you all.”

via via Barnacles Cafe & Dolphin Feeding at Tin Can Bay / Facebook

via Barnacles Cafe & Dolphin Feeding at Tin Can Bay / Facebook

The dolphins aren’t just presenting any old shell. The “gifts” are all colorful, ornate items from the ocean floor, sea sponges, barnacle-encrusted bottles and pieces of coral.

A Barnacles volunteer told a reporter from ABC that the dolphins have brought gist before but not nearly as often as they are during lockdown.

“Nothing surprises me with dolphins and their behavior anymore,” Barry McGovern, an expert in dolphin behavior, told ABC. “They do everything — they use tools, they have culture, they have something similar to names in signature whistles,” he continued.

Although he isn’t completely sure the dolphins are bringing up treasures because they miss people. “In all likelihood, they probably don’t miss humans per se,” he said. “They probably miss a free meal and the routine.”

via via Barnacles Cafe & Dolphin Feeding at Tin Can Bay / Facebook

“They often play with bits of weed and coral and all sorts of things and just leave it on their rostrum (nose),” he said. “They’re used to getting fed now, so they’re used to humans coming in.”

There are nine dolphins in the humpback pod that visits Barnacles, Patch, Ella, Squirt, Harmony, Aussie, Valentine, Chompy, White Fin and Mystique, the alpha male. They usually stop by the shoreline near the cafe at around 8 a.m. for a bite of fish and then swim out to see the sea for the day.

This isn’t the first time Australian dolphins have engaged in a bit of inter-species gift-giving either. A 2012 report from the journal Anthrozoös found that dolphins sometimes hand over over gifts to wading humans in Tangalooma.

The researchers called it “an established but infrequent part of the culture of the provisioned dolphins.” The dolphins were observed handing over dead eels, tuna, squid and an octopus on two frozen occasions.

The dolphins frequently received food from beachgoers, so the gifts could be seen as a form of reciprocity for the food. Researchers also speculate that the dolphins may be sharing their bounty with humans because they are concerned about their ability to hunt.

Regardless of the dolphins’ reasoning, the biggest gift may be that they consider us similar to themselves, which is truly beautiful.

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Previously on the Best and Worst of NXT: Timothy Thatcher confirmed the theory that he is not Matt Riddle’s bro by abandoning him to lose the Tag Team Championship, attacking him backstage, and then attacking him again after he lost a one-on-one match. Also, NXT Superstars D-Generation X announced an In Your House special.

If you’d like to read previous installments of the Best and Worst of NXT, you can do that here. Follow With Spandex on Twitter and Facebook. You can also follow me on Twitter, where everything and everyone is terrible.

And now, the Best and Worst of WWE NXT for May 20, 2020.

Best: Shotzi Blackheart Tanks

Up first this week I have to talk about this Shotzi Blackheart promo, in which she sounds like she’s a contestant on MTV’s Next.

“My name is Shotzi Blackheart, from Oakland, California. My motto in life is T … C … B; take care of business! I am balls to the wall! Who’s your daddy? I’m your daddy! Some people like to take Ubers, some people like to take cars … but I like to ROCK, and this is how I roll!”

“My name is Shotzi, I’m 27 years old, and I love tanks! And after our date, the boys will ALL be saying tanks!” By the end of it she sounded like Rick Sanchez listing off all his imaginary catchphrases. “I am just like tank. Because tanks don’t give a shit! UH OH, SOMERSAULT JUMP! LICK LICK LICK M’BALLS!” I love it. I wish the show as just two hours of Shotzi doing dramatic poses on a tank and saying asinine shit about how she’s a TESTICLE WEREWOLF who ROCKS YOUR BUTTHOLES and TANKS NO PRISONERS.

Also I wish we’d gotten a cutaway where Triple H is watching and asks, “Wait, is that what a tank looks like? I’ve been calling jeeps tanks!”

Best: You’ll Get Caught Up In The Kross Fire

Going from one “daddy” to another, Tommaso Ciampa interrupts Karrion Kross’ victory over the dreaded LIAM to challenge him for NXT TakeOver: In Our Gym. Ciampa should watch himself, though, because if he fought gentle Cleveland baby Johnny Gargano for the better part of a dramatically produced hour and lost to a kick in the butt, what’s he gonna do when he’s in there against, for all intents and purposes, … the Anti-Christ? What’s Karrion Kross’ character, exactly? A guy who teams up with his goth girlfriend to bring about the Biblical end times with foggy suplexes?

P.S. this is for real the best Northern Light suplex I’ve ever seen.

Kross and Scarlett are money, and easily the freshest thing on these quarantine shows. Their entrance is only going to get better and more fine-tuned the more they do it. I hope Kross completely wrecks Ciampa at TakeOver and beats him as easily as he beat LIAM. Let’s raise the stakes on this shit and cut it out with the hour of mindless kick-outs.

Worst: [squints in editor]

Dexter Loomis vs. Roderick Strong was solid — I like that Loomis is so deranged he can’t feel pain so he’s like the serial killer version of Lenny form Of Mice and Men, and I especially love that a member of the Undisputed Era won a match by their goddamn self — but I want to talk about the post-match … well, I wanted to call it a “stunt,” but I guess it’s more accurate to call it a, “hilarious edit.”

So, Loomis tries to counter the Strong Hold by twisting it into a roll-up, but Strong just sits down on it and pins him. Loomis, being a poor sport and also a serial killer, handles the loss by slithering over to the apron on his belly and grabbing Strong in the Jake Hager Clutch. Undisputed Era show up to make the save but can’t get Loomis off Roddy, so Adam Cole preps for (presumably) a superkick. That gets him jumped from behind by Loomis’ also very weird friend, the Velveteen Dream. Dream goes up top and hits a Purple Rainmaker from the top rope to the cement floor. It would’ve been a hell of a visual if the cut hadn’t been so obvious, and they’d ignored some pretty crucial editing elements like Dream’s legs being on the right of Cole on the way down, but somehow landing off to his left. See if you can see what I’m talking about:

Maybe he swung his legs over at the last minute, like Lacey Evans? I really hope someone got fired for this blunder!

Best, Then Worst: The WWE Brands Super Show Starring Charlotte Flair

The ratings aren’t going to go up unless Charlotte Flair is featured heavily on three shows per week, so here she is popping in at the end of Io Shirai vs. Rhea Ripley to get involved and set up the triple threat they probably had in mind for Bianca Belair before they called her up to Raw and then immediately put her to the side in favor of pick-up basketball games and hilarious axe throwing contests.

I could’ve lived without every aspect of the finish, especially if it’s just to set up a triple threat where Charlotte can lose the title without getting pinned, but 10 minutes of Ripley vs. Shirai is always welcome. I’m excited to see what Charlotte does this Friday on Smackdown, and how she follows it up on Raw, and how she follows that up on NXT, and how that builds momentum heading into Smackdown. Can we get Charlotte on 205 Live already? She’s billed at 150 pounds, which is definitely not what a 5-foot-10 person coated in muscles would weigh, but I’m sure she’d make the limit, and I’m sure she’d kick the ever-loving shit out of the Bollywood Boyz.

Best/Worst: This Week In The Largely Unnecessary Interim NXT Cruiserweight Championship Tournament

Mr. Monday Night Akira Tozawa uses all his Wednesday stat buffs to try to top El Hijo del Fantasma, but it’s not meant to be. To make matters worse, he forgets about all the recent muggings and kidnappings and wanders out into the Full Sail parking lot, where he’s jumped by the Lucha Car Party. Two notes:

• Love that Ultimo Dragon shirt. We got Liger for a match in NXT, can we bring in Ultimo Dragon to wrestle KUSHIDA or something?
• The fact that Fantasma is the only guy to avoid a Conquistador conquering in the parking lot and the weird blocking of this attack where he’s trapped in his car and can’t help definitely means he’s the one behind the kidnappings, doesn’t it? I’m into it, don’t get me wrong, I just want to find out Joaquin Wilde and Raul Mendoza got taxidermied and displayed in his home.

On the other side of the NXT1 Classic we’ve got Drake Maverick pinning KUSHIDA, which is a sentence fragment I never thought I’d type. After the pin (which was thankfully a total surprise, and not a situation where KUSHIDA was ever in any real danger of getting his ass kicked and beaten), NXT General Manager Byron Saxton (or whatever) pops in to tell us that thanks to a three-way tie in the block, we’re getting a playoff triple threat between KUSHIDA, Maverick, and Maverick’s very nice and helpful friend who DEFINITELY won’t do anything shady to cost him the block, Jake Atlas. Congratulations on being the only guy in your block to lose, Tony Nese.

The Atlas thing is a pessimistic joke, by the way, as WWE’s kinda beaten me into accepting that nobody who helps you is really your friend and life’s every man for himself. Real life concerns about the angle aside, it would be funny as shit though if Jake Atlas spent weeks being like, “no, Drake Maverick, BELIEVE IN YOUR DREAMS,” only to roll him up, eliminate him from the tournament, and send him packing out of WWE entirely with a, “HA! STOLE YOUR DREAMS!”

Fantasma vs. KUSHIDA seems like the obvious final, but it’s too good to be true, isn’t it? Maverick finding a way to get all the way to the finals only to find out that (surprise!) this luchador has been in charge of all the luchador attacks going down at Full Sail would be pretty compelling, I think. And then Jordan Devlin shows up with the actual Cruiserweight Championship again and is all, “WHY ARE THERE SO MANY LIGEROS ALL OF A SUDDEN, WHAT’S GOING ON?”

Also On This Episode

Danny Burch and Oney Lorcan, who are deeply in love with kicking ass, get a strong tag team win over Ovaries. There is so much room to grow for a team of basic-looking bald guys who are so into kicking ass that you can practically see their blood boiling. Plus, we never really got a good enough followup to Oney and Twoey’s RAGE REVIVAL bit.

Mia Yim takes out Santana Garrett this week and runs afoul of Candice LeRae and Johnny Gargano, the corrupted and deluded married couple who have let their sense of self-worth cloud their judgment and make them forget Keith Lee exists. So they pick on Mia and start shit, and Keith jogs out to make the save. Honestly, I want to see how high Keith could throw Johnny. I bet he could hit the lights if he really tried. Huge bonus points if this sets up the match for In Your House, and they actually just let all four of them wrestle without the dumb “mixed tag team match” rules. Johnny and Mia are like the exact same size, nobody cares what you think about bone density. People are getting kidnapped by masked wrestlers in the parking lot, we aren’t doing an MMA sim over here.

Damian Priest, as good as he is, really looks like an unfinished gimmick now that Killer Kross is around. Kross’ “FALL AND PREY” side graphics are in the same flaming letters as Priest’s entrance video and everything. Regardless, Priest wants to “live forever” by I guess eating Finn Bálor’s heart and stealing his power, or whatever, because Finn needs something to do while WALTER’s waiting for the okay to fly across the Atlantic and open-hand slap Finn’s entire rib cage out of his body.

Finally, Timothy Thatcher and Matt Riddle agree to have a cage match where you can only win by knockout or submission. Please, for the love of God, I’m BEGGING YOU to bring back the Lion’s Den match for this. I know y’all have it in storage still. Give me Thatcher and Riddle grapplefucking inside an enormous reusable K-Cup, please and thank you. Get Dan Severn to ref it. LET’S DO THIS.

Best: Top 10 Comments Of The Week

PTI_IMTOMMY

That Shotzi promo package was like Connor’s “catchphrase verse” from Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping

Clay

Kushida must feel terrible that this is the time line he was stranded in

Pdragon619

You know it just occurred to me, what if Charly calling Edge/Orton the best match of all time was actually just low key Savage Charly sarcasm? Like what’s more cruel than putting the burden of getting a five star match out of Orton on Edge’s shoulders.

Taylor Swish

@BrodieLee: “It’s Wednesday. You know what that means.”
Tozawa: Yes!!!

Mr. Bliss

Forget about weight classes, Keith Lee is, pounce-for-pounce, the best athlete in the world.

FeltLuke

Yes he is prone to sneak attacks, but Ciampa truly understands how terrifying being seen and slowly, confidently walking towards someone to woop their ass can be.

Caz

KUSHIDA wrestling this match like Maverick’s arm is gonna be his gift for Becky Lynch’s baby shower

DEVLIN: “why do they keep forgetting to call it the *Interim* NXT Cruiserweight Championship Tournament?”

SAMI ZAYN: “oh Jordan, you beautiful tropical fish.”

Baron Von Raschke

Jake Atlas looking like Bruce Campbell in Spider-Man about to announce BONESAW!

notJames

Keith Lee: “Who in the Blue Hell records themselves eating dinner!?”
Instagram: “EVERYONE!!!”

That’s it for this week’s Best and Worst of NXT. We’re not sure you ever actually read this part or do what we ask (or if you even scroll down through the top 10 comments of the week), but hey, it would really help us if you commented down below and shared the column if you liked or laughed at anything. The world’s tough, and that makes this kind of thing a lot easier.

Join us here next week for an Adam Cole championship anniversary celebration, KUSHIDA vs. Drake Maverick vs. Jake Atlas for a match against El Hijo del Fantasma, and Stallion Matt versus Regular Horse Timothy in a cage match. See you then!

Ever since she came on the scene in late 2018, Megan Thee Stallion has made no secret of her love for anime. However, while her music video aesthetics embraced every look from blaxploitation movies to the “yee-haw agenda” to dominatrix vibes — sometimes all at once — she’s somehow avoided using the colorful visuals associated with her favorite My Hero Academia character Todoroki in her videos — until now.

Probably thanks in part to quarantine protocols preventing more elaborate live-action shoots, Meg’s video for her viral hit “Savage” finally fully embraces the aesthetic of her beloved Japanese cartoon shows by way of some very video game-esque CGI. Directed by Jude MC, the video crafts a Ghost In The Shell-style cyberpunk narrative that sees Meg’s avatar shooting her way through hallways full of goons, riding motorcycles on futuristic freeways, and of course, doing the TikTok-favorite choreography. With character designs by one of hip-hop’s favorite illustrators McFlyy (who’s worked with Chris Brown, Nike, Russell Westbrook, and YG), the video is the perfect blueprint for Megan’s love of animation to build upon in future projects.

“Savage” is the third single from Megan’s Suga EP, which released in March of this year.

Watch Megan Thee Stallion’s video game-influenced “Savage” video above.