Category: News

John Legend and Muni Long get sticky in the suggestive video for their new collaboration “Honey,” oozing sensuality in every frame. The video opens with John Legend waking up on the floor in an elegantly appointed but utterly wrecked music room amid the remains of the last night’s festivities. As he takes in the devastation, he notices honey dripping from beneath a framed portrait of Muni Long, peeling away the wallpaper to reveal a honeycomb and a hole in the wall, through which he watches the real Muni luxuriate in a bathtub full of, you guessed it, honey.

The song is John Legend’s second single of the year, following the groovy, upbeat “Dope,” which also features a rising artist in Atlanta tongue twister JID. It would seem that both singles are paving the way for Legend to release a follow-up to his 2020 album Bigger Love at some point. Legend recently wrapped up his 2021 tour for that album and as the consummate entertainer, doesn’t seem to be waiting around to unleash a new collection of loverly R&B tunes on the world.

Muni Long, meanwhile, is experiencing quite the breakout herself, garnering plenty of attention for her viral single “Hrs And Hrs” after it jumped from TikTok virality to the Billboard Hot 100. She’s also planning to release a project this year, a sequel to her star-making 2021 release Public Displays Of Affection.

Watch John Legend’s video for “Honey” featuring Muni Long above.

Last month, indie weirdos The 1975 sent postcards to fans to reveal the tracklist of their new album, Being Funny In A Foreign Language. Today, the promising first single “Part Of The Band” is out, whose funny lyrics were revealed a little while ago and intrigued many: “I like my men like I like my coffee / Full of soy milk and so sweet, it won’t offend anybody.”

The entire song is full of notable, witty lines like above, including, “Am I ironically woke? The butt of my joke? / Or am I just some post-coke, average, skinny bloke / Calling his ego imagination?” The song sounds folkier than the rest of their music, which is usually more electric and synthy. It shows a new direction for the band.

This album will follow their short hiatus, as they appeared on 2021 song “Spinning” alongside No Rome and Charli XCX, which was later remixed multiple times by AG Cook. Their last full-length was 2020’s 22-song Notes On A Conditional Form, which debuted atop the UK Albums chart, selling 34,000 album-equivalent units whereas, in the United States, it debuted at No. 4 on the Billboard 200 with 54,000 album-equivalent units sold.

Listen to “Part Of The Band” above.

Being Funny In A Foreign Language is out 10/14 via Dirty Hit.

As fans gear up for the final episodes of Better Call Saul, there are some important questions to ask: what will happen to Kim Wexler? When does Gene get his job at the Cinnabon? Who is Gene? And, an equally important question, when are Walt and Jesse going to show up?

Fans are aware that the duo was on set last year, but details have remained slim. They did not appear in the first half of the final season which means that there are only a handful of episodes where we can expect to see our favorite grumpy old man/over-active millennial duo.

Bryan Cranston recently appeared on the SMX Basic! Podcast where he very briefly spoke about his upcoming appearance on the show–without giving away too much.

“There’s a scene that Aaron [Paul] is in without me. And there’s a scene where I’m in without him. And then there’s a scene where we’re both in. So there’s three scenes to come,” Cranston explained. The actor then said that though he was on set, the details have been so under wraps, that he doesn’t even know what episodes he will appear in.

“It’s pretty cool,” the actor added. “But to be honest with you – because we shot everything in a bubble and completely out of sequence — I don’t even know what episodes we’re in. You’re gonna find out.”

Cranston has been open about his not-so-secret cameo on the series, explaining how the whole thing went down in a recent interview. “Aaron and I shot this episode a year and a half ago,” Cranston recently said on Live With Kelly And Ryan.

He added, “They weren’t even in production yet, so they actually flew us into Albuquerque under the dark of night. We took two steps off the airplane and into an SUV, cloaked, and we went to an Air BNB. They said, ‘Here’s where you stay. You cannot leave.’ It was so interesting. I was literally walking around the perimeter within the wall… You feel like you’re in the witness protection program.” Is that a potential spoiler? Will Saul end up in witness protection? Or will he finally get to eat Cinnabon in peace?!

Better Cal Saul returns July 11th on AMC.

(Via Collider)

Among the many shrewd finds from the Memphis Grizzlies’ scouting department is 26-year-old John Konchar. The 6’5 forward is a heady off-ball mover and stout defender who’s drilled over 40 percent of his triples in his career. According to ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski, Konchar agreed to a three-year, $19 million contract extension on Thursday that runs through the 2026-27 season. Wojnarowski reports the deal is fully guaranteed.

Last year, Konchar emerged as a useful part of the Grizzlies’ wing depth off the bench, appearing in 72 regular-season games and logging 17.2 minutes per night. He averaged 4.8 points, 4.6 rebounds and 1.5 assists on 61.5 percent true shooting (.515/.413/.551 split).

With the departures of De’Anthony Melton and Kyle Anderson, there’s a chance Konchar may stand to garner increased minutes next season. However, Memphis is loaded with options, so that’s far from a lock. Nonetheless, Konchar is a rock-solid wing who’s set to earn over $30 million in his career after being undrafted back in 2019, so this is quite the cool development.

Konchar is a bit marginalized because of how many excellent players the Grizzlies roster. He could certainly carve out a more substantial and consistent rotation spot on many other teams. He’s a good player who fills the gaps well on both ends. This is a nice deal for he and Memphis, but most importantly him, of course.

Has an electro rock band ever aged this gracefully? Hot Chip have their eighth album, Freakout/Release, on deck for an August 19th release and they’ve never stopped making dance rock that grows as naturally as they do. Alexis Taylor, Joe Goddard and company have slowly been bringing in more of their crate-digging influences into their last couple of albums and the lead single from Freakout/Release, “Down,” saw them reviving a sample from 60’s soul staples, Universal Togetherness Band. Now on “Eleanor,” the band flexes their incomparable ability to craft electro-pop songs that match up nimbly to the defining Hot Chip sound; emotional, danceable and uniquely cathartic.

Dashing synths drift comfortably into Taylor’s familiar coo and the band turns heartache and pain into sheer strength. “You’re like a river flowing, that will never stop (Eleanor). You’re like the toughest tree, that withstands the chop,” Taylor sings. “It’s about the world smashing into you, waves crashing into you, all-encompassing pain, and how you have to walk through it,” the vocalist said in a statement. “The verses are about separation when families are divided against their will. It’s about strong friends. It’s also about Samuel Beckett giving Andre The Giant lifts to school, and about how Beckett must have learned a lot from Andre’s wisdom.”

Listen to “Eleanor” above.

Freakout/Release is due out on 08/19 via Domino Records. Pre-order it here.

Since 2017, Westside Boogie has been signed to Eminem‘s label Shady Records. Because of this, he’s been able to talk to the iconic rapper and even receive some wisdom from him about performing and taking criticism. He discussed some of this on Raquel Harper’s It’s Tricky podcast (as HipHopDX notes).

“Performance-wise, he told me stop stage-diving ’cause I can get sued,” he said. “That’s just a physical thing. He don’t like how I be jumping in the crowd ’cause he said I could get sued and how he got into fight for doing that. But I just like jumping into the crowd — it’s like my thing, you know what I’m saying? So I don’t know if that’s necessarily good advice, but that’s the advice he gave me.”

He continued, “Music advice, he talked to me about not taking everything personal from blogs, ’cause it’s hard for me because my music is so genuine to me. So not seeing good responses sometimes frustrates me ’cause I know how much I put into it, but I think that’s every artist. Plus, coming from a neighborhood where we can’t let nobody punk us, gotta stand up for ourselves, when somebody come for me crazy on the internet, it’s always hard to not reply.”

James Caan, the Oscar-nominated actor best known for his role as hot-head Sonny Corleone in The Godfather, as well as roles in Thief and Elf, has died at 82 years old, his family announced on Twitter. “It is with great sadness that we inform you of the passing of Jimmy on the evening of July 6. The family appreciates the outpouring of love and heartfelt condolences and asks that you continue to respect their privacy during this difficult time,” the tweet reads, followed by Caan’s customary sign-off: “End of tweet.”

Caan made his on-screen debut in 1961 for an episode of Naked City. He landed his first leading role in 1965’s Red Line 7000 before getting his big break in 1970’s Brian’s Song, the made-for-TV movie about Chicago Bears teammates Brian Piccolo and Gale Sayers that’s been known to make even the most stereotypically macho dads weep. Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather — you might have heard of it — came two years later, followed by The Gambler, for which he was nominated for a Golden Globe; a cameo in The Godfather Part II; Funny Lady, which earned him another Golden Globe; and Michael Mann’s neo-noir classic Thief. (Thief rules. You should watch it tonight.)

Caan’s “personal and professional life crumbled in the 1980s,” as the New York Times put it in a 1990 article, but he had a career rebirth in the 1990s and 2000s with roles in Dick Tracy, Bottle Rocket, Dogville, and Elf. His final film released before his death was 2021’s Queen Bees.

Caan was an incredible actor, but let’s not overlook his equally amazing work on Twitter:

While you were sleeping (at some point), Elon Musk officially managed to have more kids than Nick Cannon does. Really! We hear a lot about Nick Cannon’s fertility (some of that from Nick Cannon himself), so I assumed that he had at least ten under his belt so far, but his official total is seven children. Whereas Elon Musk’s now the parent of nine children, two of whom are twins who were (as the world learned over the past 24 hours) born to one of his executives, Shivon Zilis of Neuralink. These secret children came into this world last fall while Elon was still partnered with Grimes, who had revealed that they had a second child sometime last year.

Grimes and Elon broke up (again) shortly after that news, which arrived well after Elon admitted that he doesn’t do much actual parenting with their first child. He’s also the father to twins and triplets with ex-wife Justine Wilson, and man, does this guy have fertility on his side, or what? Of course, plenty of people out there would love to have more children but simply cannot afford (from a cost or time standpoint) to bring more babies into this world. Elon, though, begs to differ, and he officially greeted news of his secret twins with some tweets befitting of a Billionaire Playboy Philanthropist.

Elon tweeted, “Doing my best to help the underpopulation crisis.” He added, “A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far.”

He followed up with a few more tweets about Mars and how people should have more kids to save this world, even though Mother Nature (and her extreme weather wrought by climate change) seems to be rebelling against the people who are already here.

This shouldn’t be too surprising. Elon’s already proved that he’s controversially obsessed with America’s low birth rate, and he’s even had a graph about “below min sustainable levels” pinned to his Twitter profile. It very much sounds like a different spin on the racially-charged replacement theory pushed by Tucker Carlson and the far-right. And never mind that Elon’s transgender daughter, Vivian Jenna Wilson, doesn’t want Elon’s last name or anything to do with him. That’s possibly the result of more of his incendiary tweets about how “pronouns suck.” And Elon will simply keep on tweeting.

As the world awaits a new album from The xx, Oliver Sim is going ahead and taking some time for his solo career. He has a new album, Hideous Bastard, on the way, which he’s offered some previews of so far via a handful of singles. Today, Sim has delivered a new one, “GMT,” an ethereal and subtly thumping tune he co-wrote with his The xx bandmate Jamie xx.

Sim told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe of the track:

“I wrote this song with Mr. Jamie xx, my brother and best friend, and one winter he kind of decided to escape English winter, which is brutal, brutal, brutal. Real months where you question life and everything. So he went off to Australia and I chased him there. And we spent a few weeks in Sydney, did a road trip down to Byron Bay, listening to music, swimming a lot… we were listening to a lot of The Beach Boys at the time. When we arrived in Byron Bay, we started ‘GMT.’ Sampling is such a personal thing. You’re not just sampling because of how beautiful it sounds, but because of all of the emotional memories you have locked into it. We had to solidify the moment. We sampled The Beach Boys and ‘GMT’ was created.”

Listen to “GMT” above. Sim also just announced tour dates for this fall, so find those below.

09/29 — Seattle, WA @ The Showbox
10/01 — Los Angeles, CA @ The Wiltern
10/02 — San Francisco, CA @ The Fillmore
10/05 — Chicago, IL @ Metro
10/06 — Toronto, ON @ The Phoenix Concert Theatre
10/08 — Washington, DC @ Lincoln Theatre
10/09 — Boston, MA @ Royale
10/10 — New York, NY @ Webster Hall
10/11 — Philadelphia, PA @ Union Transfer
10/20 — Copenhagen, DK @ Vega
10/22 — Paris, FR @ Le Cabaret Sauvage
10/23 — Amsterdam, NL @ Melkweg
10/24 — Brussels, BE @ Cirque Royal
10/26 — Berlin, DE @ Admiralspalast
10/27 — Hamburg, DE @ Uebel & Gefaehrlich
10/29 — Manchester, UK @ New Century Hall
10/30 — London, UK @ KOKO

Hideous Bastard is out 9/9 via Young. Pre-order it here.

Back in 2012, when a 17-year-old Joey Badass dropped his star-making mixtape 1999, one of his closest compatriots in the Pro Era crew was Capital Steez, who featured with him on the song “Survival Tactics.” Two years later, Steez was gone after committing suicide by jumping from a rooftop. Since then, his friends have kept his memory alive with their annual Steez Day music festival but that hasn’t stopped Joey from feeling the residual effects. He tackles those thoughts head-on in his new song “Survivors Guilt,” a mournful ode to his late friend.

“Steezy told me get ’em so I got em / Now my n**** gone, he will never be forgotten,” Joey raps. “Ever since he left I’ve just been struggling without him.” He also admits to feeling guilty for not being there for his friend when he needed him, rhyming, “Then I caught a little wave and headed back to shore / And that’s when he started drowning / And he had no one around him / So partially I feel it’s my fault.”

After “Where I Belong,” “Survivors Guilt” is the second single Joey put out in preparation for the release of his album, 2000, the spiritual successor to 1999, which was postponed due to sample clearance issues. In the meantime, Joey has also offered guess verses to Chance The Rapper’s new single “The Highs And The Lows” and Black Thought’s “Because” with Danger Mouse and Russ.

Listen to Joey Badass’ “Survivors Guilt” above.