As our current situation continues, the wave of charitable efforts for pandemic relief fortunately persists. On the entertainment front, that includes the #AllInChallenge that’s allowing people the chance to walk into movies and/or host a lemonade stand with the likes of Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman. Parks And Recreation recently held a hope-filled reunion special for Feeding America, and now, NBC is following up with news of an upcoming two-hour special aimed toward funneling donations to that same organization.
The Hollywood Reporter reveals that Sunday, May 10 will be the day when an enormous (virtual) line-up of comedians will come together for the cause, which will officially fall under the name of the Feeding America Comedy Festival. Not only have the legendary Eddie Murphy, Adam Sandler, and Tiffany Haddish pledged their talents for this event, but the rest of the lineup is simply staggering. All involved will pretape their segments, of course, but this is still quite the list of names to behold:
Louie Anderson, Judd Apatow, Jack Black, Wayne Brady, Adam Carolla, Cedric the Entertainer, Margaret Cho, Andrew Dice Clay, Deon Cole, Billy Crystal, Whitney Cummings, Tommy Davidson, Bill Engvall, Mike Epps, Billy Gardell, Brad Garrett, Whoopi Goldberg, Kevin Hart, Taraji P. Henson, Kevin James, Jim Jefferies, Jamie Kennedy, Keegan-Michael Key, George Lopez, Jon Lovitz, Howie Mandel, Sebastian Maniscalco, Marc Maron, Tim Meadows, Caroline Rhea, Chris Rock, Sarah Silverman, JB Smoove, Kenan Thompson, Sheryl Underwood Marlon Wayans, and Allen.
Funny or Die and Byron Allen’s Allen Media Group are also helping to produce this special, and Allen has declared that “laughter is often the best medicine,” which will hopefully go a long way toward motivating donations for Feeding America.
The 1975’s new album Notes On A Conditional Form comes out towards the end of this month, but Matty Healy is already looking ahead: In a new interview, the frontperson described what he thinks the band’s fifth album will be like.
He said of the Notes On A Conditional Form follow-up:
“This isn’t necessarily the last record, I don’t think it is the last record, but it’s the end of this era, whatever’s next will be very different and it will be a different time. I bet you we will just do a new record and I bet you it’s dope. I think it’s going to be quite violent. […] Even though NOACF is really sprawling, the later statements are ones like ‘People.’ We’re still in a place of agitation and anxiety, we’re voyeurs of violence on a geopolitical level and we’re a band, so we feel a duty to talk about that. And now we’re in a pandemic, so if you don’t make a record, what the f*ck are you doing?”
Healy also hinted at some upcoming collaborations, but didn’t give too much away: “There’s a couple of people I’m working with remotely, but it’s difficult to talk about because I don’t know if it will happen. If it does then it could be exciting, everybody’s looking to collaborate at the moment.”
He also summarized Notes On A Conditional Form, saying of the album, “I hope people like it, but the most important thing to me is that I’m really proud of it and I stand by it. This record is very different to all our other records, it’s very meandering, very long, but not in a boring way. It’s quite succinct, but it still manages to be very all over the place.”
Notes On A Conditional Form is out 5/22 via Dirty Hit. Pre-order it here.
As he loves doing so much, Drake dropped a new project in the middle of the night to general acclaim and wound up once again dominating the online conversation. By most accounts, it seems the Dark Lane Demo Tapes mixtape hit all the right notes to sway public opinion back in the Torontonian superstar’s favor after the lackluster reception for his 2018 album Scorpion — all except one track, the most highly-anticipated one of all.
Back in the beginning of April, Drake previewed “Pain 1993,” an unexpected collaboration with fan-favorite, genre-bending, Atlanta rapper Playboi Carti and sparked a wave of anticipation for the new track. However, fans’ curiosity has seemingly curdled into disappointment as the collaboration left many unimpressed. Contrary to the reception for some of Drake’s more recent work, this time it seems as though the problem is on Carti’s side, as listeners broke out the memes and took over Twitter with reactions that raked Carti’s… let’s say “experimental” verse over the coals.
NOT A MUSIC ANALYST BUT I THINK CARTI IS CREATIVE AND HAS A UNIQUE STYLE. EVEN IF A LITTLE ODD HE IS A BREATH OF FRESH AIR EXCEPT THIS TIME, THAT VERSE AND THE NOISES SEEM REALLY FORCED AND OUT OF PLACE. IT’S OK THOUGH WE STILL LOVE EM
if playboi carti has a kid is he going to talk to them in his rap voice or will he have to create a new baby talk voice or maybe carti realizes baby talks not the move so he talks in a regular voice who knows!!!!!!!!
Fans’ reactions are understandable, if you squint. Thanks to Playboi Carti’s breakout in 2017 with “Magnolia,” he became a superstar, with all the accompanying expectations. However, since then, he’s had an unconventional approach to making and releasing music, coasting through his innovative — and controversial — 2018 album Die Lit with sheer charisma and a whole lot of ad-libs. Maybe that’s why fans anticipate so many of his releases — including the one for his upcoming follow-up full-length Whole Lotta Red — with so much fervor — and why they can feel let down when it doesn’t seem like he’s offering the sort of artistic growth expected of a superstar.
On the other hand, there may be one benefit to the backlash:
Carti getting killed out here for that Drake verse. Yall gonna fuck around and cyberbully that man into dropping Whole Lotta Red. Shit gonna get a “oh aight bet” release.
— Aye throw that Boyz II Men on (@DragonflyJonez) May 1, 2020
Keeping track of all the new albums coming out in a given month is a big job, but we’re up for it: Below is a comprehensive list of the major releases you can look forward to in May. If you’re not trying to potentially miss out on anything, it might be a good idea to keep reading.
Friday, May 1
Abrams — Modern Ways (Atypeek Music)
Alanis Morissette — Such Pretty Forks In The Road (Epiphany Music)
Alex Henry Foster — Windows In The Sky (Hopeful Tragedy Records)
Alina Baraz — It Was Divine (Mom + Pop Music)
American Aquarium — Lamentations (New West Records)
Ben Lukas Boysen — Mirage (Erased Tapes Records)
Boardgame James — Daydream EP (1000 Doors)
Boat — Tread Lightly (Magic Marker Records)
Boston Manor — GLUE (Pure Noise Records)
Caleb Landry Jones — The Mother Stone (Sacred Bones Records)
Car Seat Headrest — Making A Door Less Open (Matador Records)
Chad Lawson — Stay EP (Universal Music Classics)
Chicano Batman — Invisible People (ATO Records)
Country Westerns — Country Westerns (Fat Possum Records)
A good conspiracy theory gets the blood running hot. It should be equal measures absurd and just-believable-enough — meaning that you’re definitely entertained, even if you don’t take the ideas espoused seriously. Or maybe you do take them seriously. Maybe you get hooked on more and more increasingly batshit insane ideas until you reach “holy-Jesus-this-is-ALL-real” levels of lunacy. Then you ascend to the next level of conspiracy doc watching, spending hours with videos that are only found deep at the bottom of YouTube rabbit holes.
Hopefully, it won’t come to that. The docs presented here are a little more reasonable. Many of them have some undeniable truth at their core. They get you saying, “You know, that makes a lot of sense.” You might even corner someone at your next cocktail party and bounce these ideas off them. God knows people are tired of hearing about your sourdough starter.
The docs below are sensational and fun, but we’re not here to speak to their veracity. That’s for you to decide. Unroll the tin foil and enjoy!
This is the sort of documentary that you wish was a batshit crazy conspiracy theory. But, no, it actually happened as a conspiracy to steal our data and sell it to the highest bidder and then let them at us personally, emotionally, and politically. The results have not been … ideal.
The Great Hack is the sort of viewing that feels mandatory to understand what’s going on with our social media accounts and the companies behind them. On the flip side, it’s harrowing to watch how easily the conspiracy to manipulate the masses was carried out and how little has been done in the wake of these revelations.
The Family is a limited-run series that’s easily bingeable over five, 45-minute episodes. The docuseries outlines the conspiracy conducted by The Fellowship, originally led by Doug Coe, who set out to turn American politics towards fundamentalist evangelicalism through the backdoors of Washington, DC. The Fellowship eschews any teachings or the actual words of Jesus Christ in the pursuit of power, domination, and pure greed on the national stage to make America into their version of fundamentalist nation.
It’s a chilling portrayal of how a religious power-conspiracy reached the highest echelons for decades. It’s even more chilling that it hasn’t seemed to stop.
Bob Lazar is a legend in the UFO community. The former scientist (now pyrotechnician) actually worked at Area 51’s S-4 facility. A military installation where, allegedly, Lazar and other “top men” were reverse-engineering extraterrestrial tech. What stands out most in this whole story (and doc) is that over time — as some documents have become unclassified — some of Lazar’s claims have been proven. Most notably that element 151 (a specific nuclear isotope) exists.
That doesn’t mean Lazar’s decades-long claim to extraterrestrial technology isn’t an Andy Kaufman-level performance artist bit, but it’s certainly enough to get you into the movie.
This is perhaps the most frustrating entry on the list. There’s little fun to be had here and more grimacing. Luckily, the doc takes a very tongue in cheek approach to the rise of flat earth conspiracy by showing those who believe the lie and fail over and over again to prove themselves right.
Where do the grimaces come in? No matter who much evidence and failed tests the flat earthers seem to find or run into, they remain unwavering in their belief. If anything, the documentary is a testament to the current age of social media bubbles and YouTube echo chambers people can fall into.
Oliver Stone has settled into a role as an agent provocateur of the American film world. He’s become known for his documentaries that take off-kilter looks at world figures like Chavez and Putin. In this series, Stone examines why so much of our history has been largely erased from the national narrative. It’s a conspiracy that’s harrowingly based on real-life events that we should know but rarely do.
There are so, so many docs about the existence of extraterrestrials out there. What’s interesting about Unacknowledged is that it’s less about the existence or contact with otherworldly beings and more about how governments — the U.S. in particular here — are able to manipulate the masses and create their own realities/narratives. The film lays out with evidence from the government, newspapers, and very high-level sources that we have contact and technology from extraterrestrial life. It’s a given. It’s compelling, sure. Where it really gets deep is how the government allegedly operates with that information. This is the sort of film that leaves saying, “hum…” at the end.
It’s not necessarily a conspiracy that the cattle industry is a very bad thing for the planet. Yet, the film treats the whole industry like one huge conspiracy that goes all the way to the top, man! You can perhaps get some interesting information from a lot of the posturing about secrets and lies, but it’s still a very sensational — and fun to watch — look into the cattle industry from a very skeptical point of view.
Erik Nelson and Werner Herzog first teamed up to make the much-lauded documentary Grizzly Man with Nelson producing Herzog’s directing. In A Gray State, those roles were reversed to tell the story of aspiring filmmaker David Crowley’s untimely death by apparent suicide in his Minnesota home. That’s the easy part of this documentary. The story gets wild from here on out.
Crowley was a libertarian filmmaker working on a feature film about America being a police state and getting overrun by a foreign authoritarian regime. He was spending his time raising cash for his film by touring the far-right and libertarian circuits with the likes of Alex Jones and Ron Paul. He had gotten far enough in the filmmaking process to produce three trailers for his film and raise $60,000 for the budget. Then, Crowley along with his wife and young daughter were all found murdered in their home. From then on, right-wing conspiracy theorists latched onto the deaths with wild ideas about what “really” happened to the Crowleys — something no one can know for sure. The film explores all of the conspiracy-making along with the filmmaking by Crowley in a head-scratching documentary about an event ripe for conspiracy theorists.
This docu-series from the History Channel is conspiracy theory-lite. Each episode covers a mainstream conspiracy theory in a very introductory way. They hit on the main talking points from “experts” but rarely draw any conclusions, which is kind of the point of conspiracy theories as entertainment. The ripple here is that each episode is based around a place like Fort Knox, Area 51, the White House, and so on. There are three exceptions with episodes about Free Masons (naturally), the FBI, and Black Ops.
In the end, this can be a mild way to scratch that conspiracy theory itch without too much investment.
Speaking of rabbit holes, MKUltra is a deep one. Fake hippy communes and brothels, Charles Manson, the CIA dosing people randomly for decades, a massive institution-spanning coverup in the highest offices of the land, MKUltra has it all.
Wormwood — from acclaimed documentarian Errol Morris — dives into the very dodgy 1953 “suicide” of CIA employee Frank Olson who was part of the LSD-dosing experiments under the umbrella of MKUltra. The docuseries uses dramatic reenactments to fairly decent effect with Peter Sarsgaard and Tim Blake Nelson turning in believable performances. Those flashbacks are inter-spliced with a present-day investigation that looks into CIA handbooks on assassination and how deeply MKUltra seeped its way into American society.
Sometimes the only thing more difficult than making an instant classic is figuring out what to do next. For Will Toledo of Car Seat Headrest, whose 2016 album Teens Of Denial was one of the best indie-rock LPs of the previous decade, this process has dragged on for several years. Though unlike a lot of artists who have been in this position, Toledo hasn’t wasted time doing nothing. He’s worked throughout this fraught period, though at times it’s seemed as though he’s rigorously chasing his own tail.
In 2018, Toledo released a re-recorded version of one his greatest early LPs, Twin Fantasy. Originally put out seven years earlier on Bandcamp, Twin Fantasy was already an epic song cycle, though Toledo could now afford to lavish it with the spoils of a bigger production budget and his own improved skills as a record-maker. But as impressive as the Twin Fantasy redux was sonically, the project ultimately felt pointless, like tracing over a beautiful drawing with a more expensive pen. Instead of focusing on his next step, he was obsessing over “improving” an old album that was already great.
It turns out, however, that all the while Toledo was also working on a proper follow-up to Teens Of Denial, which finally arrives today after four years of tinkering in the form of Making A Door Less Open. It is the epitome of an “I don’t know what to do next” record, similar in some ways to the music U2 made in the ’90s after Achtung Baby, specifically in how Toledo has inevitably pursued the “electronic” detour that’s de rigueur for ambitious guitar acts, and also because he’s adopted a MacPhisto-like alter ego to free him from the spotlight’s glare. (More on that in a moment.)
To his credit, Toledo has truly hit upon a new artistic direction, dramatically simplifying his song structures and favoring sprawling, ambient soundscapes over overstuffed classicist rock. While markedly less dazzling than Teens Of Denial, Making A Door Less Open succeeds modestly because Toledo opts to not top his masterwork, instead carving a deliberately bumpier, less consistent path beyond it. This won’t be your favorite CSH record, but it will probably be the one you’re tempted to defend as “underrated.”
Actually, Making A Door Less Open is three slightly different records — the version that lives on streaming platforms is arranged differently than the vinyl and CD versions, which also have altered takes of a few tracks. The most substantial differences occur on a track tellingly called “Deadlines”: The digital album includes two versions of the song — including the best version, “Deadlines (Thoughtful)” — while the CD has one album track and one “bonus” acoustic take, and the vinyl sticks with just one “Deadlines.” (While I implore you to support your local independent record store by purchasing a physical copy, the best version of Making A Door Less Open is the digital one.)
Confused yet? One wonders if Toledo himself is also a bit bewildered. A recent New York Times profile painted the 28-year-old wunderkind as personally diffident and artistically bold, with the former quality sometimes undercutting the latter. This pertains especially to Toledo’s decision to conduct this press cycle under the guise of a new persona, Trait, which includes wearing a “Darth Vaderish” mask, even when doing an interview with a journalist over Zoom. The inherent awkwardness of this gambit — Toledo apparently decided to stop wearing the mask halfway into the conversation — is reiterated by its unfortunate timing. Somehow the gesture of donning headgear in order to comment on the nature of celebrity and the mass-entertainment industrial complex has less power when we all have to wear masks in order to go to the grocery store. The extraordinary became mundane in the space of single indie-rock album campaign.
Toledo front-loaded his distaste for indie celebrity by putting out the snotty, electro-punk “Hollywood” as a single. The track is important to Make A Door Less Open only in the sense that it’s the product of Toledo’s collaboration with CSH drummer Andrew Katz in the jokey side project 1 Trait Danger, which opened a creative portal for Toledo into the worlds of EDM, hip-hop, and improvisational music. Beyond that, however, “Hollywood” is among the very worst songs that Toledo has ever released, a charmless piece of obnoxious dreck that sounds like something Beck might have spent 10 minutes on during his Midnite Vultures period before moving on.
Fortunately, “Hollywood” is hardly indicative of the rest of Making A Door Less Open. Up until now, Toledo has tended to pack a dozen good song ideas into a single massive track, with scores of hooks and time-signature changes complementing that density of his lyrics. Making A Door Less Open, in comparison, embraces space. Rather than long songs made up of tuneful fragments, the new album has either long songs that stick with the same zone-out drone for several minutes or punchy pop songs that hit with more directness than any previous CSH album.
Much of what was special about Car Seat Headrest is inevitably lost in the process. Nothing on Making A Door Less Open rises to the anthemic swell of “Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales” from Teens Of Denial. At the same time, the mechanical menace of “There Must Be More Than Blood,” MADLO‘s best track, displays a newfound patience for creating a slow-boil simmer, in which Toledo’s deadpan vocal about feeling spiritually displaced by a profound personal change (“You were playing your music but you got drowned out / You go back to the old house but you’ve been locked out”) cuts against an unending post-rock groove spiked with screaming guitar squeals. This song, like “Deadlines (Thoughtful),” recalls David Bowie’s prog-funk hybrids on Station To Station, as well as CSH’s own “The Ending Of Dramamine,” one of the very best songs of their Bandcamp era.
Elsewhere, Toledo proves adept at writing straightforward and highly accessible indie-pop songs, whether it’s the hopped-up pop of “Weightlifters,” the spiky punk-folk of “Martin,” or the moody, National-like balladry “Life Worth Missing.” The most surprising aspect of Making A Door Less Open ultimately is how not alienating it is. Put another way: This is Will Toledo’s mask record?
Yes, it addresses matters of personal identity and how the internet can undermine your sense of self-worth. But it rarely delves as deep into those subjects as previous CSH releases. Next to Teens Of Denial, it feels glib, like using a mask as a metaphor … for hiding yourself. On its own terms, however, Making A Door Less Open is an enjoyable enough indie-pop record that for now, sadly, won’t be heard in the large theaters and festival spaces it was designed to dominate.
Making A Door Less Open is out now on Matador. Get it here.
Harley Quinn (which recently returned for season two) is the best reason to subscribe to DC Universe, although beginning this weekend, SYFY is airing between three and four episodes every Sunday night throughout May. The quicker you catch up, the quicker you can watch “Batman’s Back Man,” which focuses entirely on Batman. It’s the first episode of the animated series to do so, and in the extremely meta clip below, two fanboys, one in a Release the Snyder Cut shirt and the other sporting a “The Last Jedi is not canon” tee, complain about Harley Quinn having, uh, too much Harley Quinn.
“I can’t believe you want to watch this show,” the Snyder Cut bro (voiced by James Adomian) complains to his Last Jedi-hating buddy (Phil LaMarr), referring to Harley Quinn. “You know they just did a three-episode arc where Harley beats Penguin, Riddler, and Mr. Freeze, using nothing but her Mary Sue powers?” Sounds like every conversation on Reddit about Rey in The Force Awakens. And The Last Jedi. And…
After Snyder Cut grumbles that he doesn’t watch Harley Quinn “because I’m not a 12 year old girl,” even though he seems to know everything about it, he explains to Last Jedi why he watched all five seasons of Gotham, another, show without Batman. “It wasn’t a f*cking tsunami of virtue signaling,” he says. The clip ends with the Harley and Poison Ivy-less synopsis of the episode being read out loud, with one last whine from Snyder Cut: “If it sucks, we’re watching Family Guy.” A lot of people feel seen right now.
Watch the clip below (but dear lord, don’t read the replies).
Last night, Drake came out of nowhere and decided to take early ownership of May by dropping Dark Lane Demo Tapes, which compiles “[a lot] of the songs people have been asking for (some leaks and some joints from SoundCloud and some new vibes),” as Drake put it. That was great, but it turned out he wasn’t even done sharing new music that night. After the project dropped, he took to Instagram Live and teased even more fresh material.
On one of the tracks, Drake speaks French for the first time on one of his songs. Drake has surely spent some time surrounded by the language during his upbringing in Canada: about 20 percent of Canadians (about 7.2 million people) speak French as their mother tongue, and that number doesn’t even include those who speak French as a second language.
Additionally, Drake also played a new song of his with Roddy Ricch, which Boi-1da teased during an Instagram Live battle with Hit-Boy back in March.
It wouldn’t be surprising to see these tracks appear on Drake’s upcoming sixth album. He teased that release when announcing Dark Lane Demo Tapes, saying that he plans on dropping it this summer.
Watch Drake preview some more new music above.
Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
There has been a lot of talk about the brilliant sitcom Scrubs of late. A classic scene from the series went viral again in March because of how deftly it illustrates the necessity of social distancing. Soon thereafter, Zach Braff and Donald Faison started their Scrubs rewatch podcast, and it could not have come at a more perfect time. For longtime Scrubs fans, it’s like spending an hour with J.D. and Turk, who are best friends in real life as they were on the show, and it shows in the podcast. The twice-a-week episodes have been one of the few highlights of the pandemic.
I was also really looking forward to the the first appearance of John C. McGinley on the podcast. McGinley, of course, played Dr. Cox, the gruff doctor and mentor to J.D. Despite his penchant for ranting monologues and brutal insults, Dr. Cox not-so-secretly had a huge heart beneath his defensive posturing. How did McGinley manage to get that across in each episode, even as he was delivering irate monologues at the expense of Hugh Jackman?
As it turns out, McGinley — who often had to deliver lengthy, two-page, single-space monologues — kept composition notebooks, which he used to memorize his lines by writing down those monologues. In each of the composition notebooks, McGinley also wrote a clear mission statement: “Find a place below the text in every episode where you can say ‘I love you’ to Max.”
Max is McGinley’s son, who was born with Down’s Syndrome a couple of years before Scrubs premiered. “I decided underneath it all, so it’s not too drippy, that in every episode there had to be one spot where I, John (not Dr. Cox) got to say ‘I love you’ to Max.”
By way of example, Dr. Cox offers up an exchange he was with Carla on the seventh episode of the series, “My Super Ego.” “In this episode,” he says, “it’s right where I’m talking to Judy [Reyes], and I say, ‘Just because a guy has problems doesn’t mean he doesn’t need,’ and then there’s this long pause and it’s because I kept getting an apple in my throat, and then I said, ‘you.’ [The scene] reminded me that I took everything so goddamn seriously, this mission statement I wrote to Max. And it informs everything that Cox does [over the course of Scrubs].”
“I always consider the camera an x-ray machine,” McGinley continued. “It can see through an actor’s bullsh*t… so when an actor actually brings a mission statement that demands he find a place somewhere just underneath the text to say I love you to a kid who was just born with challenges, that pops. The camera goes, ‘It’s his truth!’”
And that is why John C. McGinley was so very good at playing the hard-ass with the heart of gold: Because he took a moment in every single episode to express his affection to his son.
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