Category: News

 

(For You)r Consideration is a weekly column breaking down the rappers and singers doing it RIGHT on TikTok and the viral trends and top songs taking over your FYP.

Return of the “Racks”

Over ten years ago, the Sonny Digital-produced “Racks” by YC introduced the mainstream to an up-and-coming rapper named Future and gave us the beat behind one of Lil Kim’s and Lil Wayne’s most iconic freestyles. Today, the song is the soundtrack to one of TikTok’s burgeoning trends where creators play with the age-old cliché, “If I had a dollar for every time…” and tell their For You Page about some very frequent, often awkward occurrences. Who would’ve thought the beat Sonny Digital sold to YC and his team for just $300 would play the background to over thirty thousand videos?

Get To That Money

If you’re not familiar with Arkansas’ viral king of choreography and rapper ZaeHD, you may have seen his videos cosplaying as an employee at a few popular restaurants and brands. Set to his single “GTTM” and inspired by the track’s music video, ZaeHD steps into work and does exactly what the lyrics say…”let’s get to that money.” From goofing off at the Apple Store to turning up with employees at Atlanta’s famous Slutty Vegan and somehow finding his way into a USPS uniform, the trend is pure comedy. And with just under ten thousand videos using the sound, it’s ripe for replication.

Steve Lacy’s Fans Aren’t Happy

Shortly after releasing his 2nd studio album Gemini Rights, guitarist-turned solo artist Steve Lacy announced his “Give You The World” tour, and fans went crazy. The $35 tickets sold out almost immediately, and fans have taken to TikTok using his song “Static” as background to their complaints. Lacy’s most devout followers have voiced their grievances with him and Ticketmaster about the size of the venues he’s set to play at and the over 300% markup on resale tickets. Lacy has yet to respond to complaints from friends but did use the sound on TikTok to show off a fresh set of braids. Watch below for some of our favorite Steve Lacy-hating videos.

There ain’t no rule that says a dog can’t play basketball, but there is a rule that disqualifies Jeopardy! host Ken Jennings from being a contestant again. But it’s one that the game show might be willing to break for the GOAT.

To prevent the kind of chicanery that led to the quiz show scandals of the 1950s, hosts are technically ineligible from participating in future episodes because they’ve “seen behind the curtain,” producer Sarah Foss explained on the Inside Jeopardy! podcast. That being said, if Jennings got the itch again and wanted to prove his chops against Tournament of Champions-eligible contestants Amy Schneider, Matt Amodio, and Mattea Roach, executive producer Michael Davies might be willing to bend the rules.

“But I’m telling you, it’s like if Ken is the Greatest of All Time — kind of like Arnold Palmer who tees off at The Masters — if Ken came to me desperately and said, ‘This is it. I still want to play Jeopardy!,’ I cannot believe that I would completely close the door on Ken playing any form of Jeopardy! at any point in the future,” he said.

Maybe it would be unfair for Jennings to be a contestant on regular Jeopardy!, where he shares hosting duties with Mayim Bialik — which makes this a perfect time to bring back Rock & Roll Jeopardy! on VH1. Hope you know your Steve Miller Band albums, Ken!

(Via CinemaBlend)

Earlier this year, MIA announced her sixth studio album Mata to follow up 2016’s AIM. She unveiled the first single “The One” and now she’s back with the new track “Popular,” an infectious, self-empowering anthem with a jangly rhythm. It builds up the hype for a catchy LP, though it still has no confirmed release date. Mata will mark the first MIA album released via her new partnership with Island Records, following a long-standing history with Interscope and XL Recordings.

MIA is known for her ability to provoke and stir up public conversation. In 2018, the performer got into trouble when the NFL sued MIA over the obscene gesture she flashed during her 2012 Super Bowl performance with Madonna. “If you’re talking about racism and sexism, that moment in my life showed the cracks in everyone I knew,” she said. “I was at Roc Nation at the time and Jay-Z was managing me. The lawsuit was so ridiculous, it proposed that they would keep one hundred percent of my earnings for the rest of my life if I ever earned more than $2 million dollars. Jay-Z was, like, ‘You should sign that sh*t’ and I was, like, ‘No.’”

Check out “Popular” above.

It is currently Megan Thee Stallion season: She’s just hours removed from releasing her new album Traumazine and shortly before that, she took over The Tonight Show by co-hosting alongside Jimmy Fallon.

She first popped up mid-way through the monologue and had a bunch of fun from the get-go, breaking even more than the famously break-heavy Fallon during some monologue jokes. Later on, she joined Fallon in writing some thank you notes, closing with, “Thank you Earth, for taking ‘hot girl summer’ way too literally.”

They also did some-hip-hop mad libs, starting by coming up with some words based on random prompts, then inserting them into hip-hop songs. Naturally, they had Meg do “Savage,” which ended up being about beans and farting.

Elsewhere in the show, she got interviewed by Fallon and spoke some about Traumazine, saying she’s looking to take control of her own narrative with the personal album. Her dog 4oe also had a few show-stealing moments. Megan and Fallon also teamed up to interview Stranger Things star Natalia Dyer, during which Meg declared her character Nancy is a “hot girl” and had fun interrogating her about Nancy’s romantic history.

Watch clips from the episode above and below.

Megan Thee Stallion is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Getting complimented on a job well done is typically something that should make one feel good — unless the praise in question is coming from Infowars. The nearly 25-year-old far right news website, which offers up wild conspiracy theories as easily as some news broadcasts share the time or weather, is struggling at the moment, ever since founder Alex Jones was found guilty (again) of defaming some of the parents of the 20 children who were violently murdered by a gunman at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut nearly 10 years ago. Jones is now being asked to cough up as much as $150 million in compensation (with two more trials on the way), so has put Infowars into Chapter 11 bankruptcy, as The New York Times reported.

But if Infowars goes the way of the dodo bird, loyal viewers can always switch over to Fox News — a network that Owen Shroyer, host of Infowars’ The War Room With Owen Shroyer, feels is practically indistinguishable from his nutty network these days, according to Media Matters. And largely because of Tucker Carlson’s “gumption.”

While even Shroyer admitted that Brian Kilmeade, who’s sitting in for Carlson this week, “is a bit of an establishment hack” (ouch!), he believes that Tucker is the real deal “for making sure the truth gets told even though you know some of the big sponsors, corporate ad buyers, and top execs at Fox probably don’t like [it].” As he further explained:

If you’ve been tuning into the War Room, I said Fox News at night sounds more like Infowars this week than ever before. Than ever before. So that’s kind of the time period we’re in now. We’re in the Infowars paradigm of understanding current events, politics, more so than ever before, and it was the raid of Mar-a-Lago, really, that pushed the Overton window that far, and so I see that as a great victory. I see that as the reinforcements arriving. I see that as the truth finally rising to the top despite the attempts to chill free speech, censor free speech, bully, intimidate, and terrorize people from speaking the truth. It all comes from the American left in our modern political parlance, but it was Infowars that was groundbreaking. It is Infowars that’s been set for destruction.

Shroyer, as The Wrap reports, was part of the group of hooligans who stormed the Capitol on January 6th. He was charged for his part in the coup in August 2021, but later told authorities that the charges against him should be dropped because he’s like “Jesus or the Dalai Lama.”

If ever there was a sign that the top brass at Fox News may want to rethink their “news” model, this would be it. You can watch Shroyer’s full diatribe above.

(Via Media Matters)

No one can deny that it’s been a hell of a week for ex-President Trump and not in a good way. He rolled into New York Attorney General Letitia James office (as part of a civil investigation into the Trump Org’s dealings) and pleaded the Fifth Amendment “hundreds” of times (which says a lot, according to Trump’s past words). Then he let everyone know that the FBI raided his beautiful Mar-a-Lago compound. They likely found a stockpile of ketchup during the resulting search, but more than that, they were reportedly looking for the motherlode to end all motherlodes.

Washington Post is now reporting that one of the bigger items on the FBI’s list happened to be classified nuclear documents. The reports cites unnamed sources, and there’s no confirmation on whether these nuke-focused docs were actually found next to Trump’s favorite golf bag. If this report’s true, it certainly explains why the feds moved fast and partially why Attorney General Merrick Garland’s poker face was not messing around while declaring that he authorized the raid.

All of this, of course, means that we might see Trump pleading the Fifth Amendment again (and again), but he’s already a pro at doing so. One can easily envision Trump wanting to keep nuclear secrets around out of sheer ego, but there’s also the possibility that this could violate the Espionage Act. I mean, after all of Jared Kushner’s dealings with the Saudis, well, this is getting hairy. Regardless, it appears (no matter what kind of claimed ignorance is coming from Trump attorney Christina Bobb) as though there’s a major leak in the Trump dyke because someone wanted this information out there.

And because this is so dark, people naturally are coping with some morbid jokes, including some cinematic wisecracks about Trump-branding on the nukes.

In closing, let’s hope this is simply “comically ridiculous.”

We’re not even a week removed from the FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago, and several Fox News anchors are no longer even pretending to be considering the story in any fair or balanced way (good thing they no longer employ that slogan). Leading the pack is Jesse Watters, who has been pushing the conspiracy theory that the FBI raided Donald Trump’s Palm Beach golf resort/home with the sole purpose of “planting evidence” on the former president since day one.

That said, on Thursday night, Brian Kilmeade sat in for Tucker Carlson and did his best impression of the primetime Fox News host by kicking a hornet’s nest and sharing what was obviously a Photoshopped image of U.S. Magistrate Bruce Reinhart, the judge who signed off on the search warrant for the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, looking awfully cozy on a plane with Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s longtime friend/sometime girlfriend who was recently sentenced to 20 years in prison for helping Epstein sexually assault several young women over a period of years.

Kilmeade, who really struggled to get a full sentence out, told viewers that what they were seeing was a photo of Epstein’s longtime wing-woman and “the judge in charge of the, of the ahhh, of the, ummm, as you know, of the warrant. And we’ll see if he’s going to release it next. He likes Oreos and whiskey.”

First: Who doesn’t like Oreos and whiskey? Is that supposed to be some sort of stain against his character? Life is hard, we should consume Oreos and whiskey when needed to help us get through it.

Second: If Kilmeade really wanted to find a photo of Reinhart and Maxwell together, there could very well be one out there, as Politico reports that the judge previously worked as a “defense attorney on behalf of individuals connected to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein” (namely, several pilots and his former scheduler). But, as Snopes reports, all it took to discover the truth was a quick reverse image search, which found that the photo was indeed doctored and the feet being massaged belong to none other than Jeffrey Epstein. The whiskey and the Oreos, however, are all Reinhart’s; the image was pulled from a photo posted to his Facebook page five years ago, when he was sitting down to watch some football.

Case closed.

(Via Spopes)

Christina Bobb, former-president Donald Trump’s senior legal representative, appeared on something called NewsNation on Thursday to discuss the FBI’s raid at his Mar-a-Lago compound. “Will the president and his team object to unsealing the search warrant and the evidence recovered?” host Leland Vittert asked her (the Department of Justice is looking to unseal the warrant and make its contents public, which Trump can either consent to, or file a motion to block its release). Bobb gave a, let’s say, peculiar answer.

“It doesn’t appear at this time like we would object, but the court has ordered the Department of Justice to coordinate with us and to work on how that release would take place, and what that would look like. Our team has responded. We have reached out to the Department of Justice to coordinate that and have not been able to make contact,” she said (via Mediaite). Bobb continued:

“So, we’re waiting to hear back from them and we’re very eager. We know that people want information and we’re eager to respond as best as possible in coordination with the Department of Justice. So, we’re just waiting to hear back from them.”

That’s quite the word salad, which is weird, because Trump hates salads (unless it’s in taco bowl form).

Vittert pressed Bobb, wondering if “you guys have a copy of the warrant, and you’re given a receipt at the end of an FBI search warrant, why wouldn’t you just release that yourselves?” She answered, “Well, this is part of the discussion with the Department of Justice, of course we’re trying to do everything in accordance with the law —” Vittert cut her off to note that there’s nothing stopping them from doing just that. Bobb replied, “Other than decorum. I mean, we’re trying to work well with the Department of Justice.”

Trump is very concerned with decorum.

(Via Mediaite)

On September 8, 2015, the debut episode of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert aired. Aside from Colbert himself, a major part of the show’s identity was Jon Batiste and his Stay Human house band. Since early June this year, Batiste has actually been away from the show on a break, so band member Louis Cato has been filling in as leader. Now, that change has been made permanent: On last night’s Late Show, Colbert announced that Batiste is leaving the program after just shy of seven years.

Colbert shared the news last night, saying, “Sharp-eyed viewers may have noticed that Jon hasn’t been here this summer. Well, I have an update: Jon has decided to leave the show.” That got an “aww” from the audience and Colbert continued, “I know, I feel the same way, but it’s for all the best reasons, including to continue sharing his art with the world.”

He added, “We have been so lucky to have a front-row seat to Jon’s incredible talent for the past seven years, and will we miss him here? [Batiste voice] ‘Yeeaah! Yeeaah!’ But we’re happy for you, Jon, and I can’t wait to have you back on as a guest with your next hit record. I love you.”

Colbert went on to reveal that Cato is taking over as bandleader and that the house band is now called The Late Show Band.

Batiste has yet to offer a statement about leaving the show. He’s definitely in the midst of a career high-point, though: Earlier this year, he got five Grammy wins (including Album Of The Year for We Are) off a whopping 11 nominations, and he’ll soon be making his acting debut in a remake of The Color Purple.

Beyoncé’s Renaissance came after a long break between projects, as it was her first solo album since 2016’s Lemonade (although she did drop The Lion King: The Gift in 2019 and her and Jay-Z’s Everything Is Love the year before). Now that she’s back in the swing of things, though, the music isn’t stopping. Along with Renaissance, Beyoncé shared a surprise “Break My Soul” remix EP followed by a standalone “Queens Remix” version of the song with Madonna.

Today, she returns with even more new material: Beyoncé joined Ronald Isley for a new duet rendition of “Make Me Say It Again Girl, Pts. 1 & 2,” originally from the 1975 Isley Brothers album The Heat Is On. The new version is titled “Make Me Say It Again, Girl” and will appear on a new Isley Brothers album that’s set to drop later this year.

On the Renaissance front, the era has been going swimmingly for Beyoncé. The album debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart, while “Break My Soul” rose to the top of the Hot 100 following the album’s release. It hasn’t been stumble-free, though, as she’s changed the album due to issues with samples and lyrics.

Listen to “Make Me Say It Again, Girl” above.