Category: News

If you aren’t following former The Late Late Show host Craig Ferguson on Twitter, you’re truly missing out on various and random pleasantries. He’s as delightful on social media as one would expect, and although he uses the platform to address professional matters (like how he won’t replace his replacement, James Corden), he also shares some periodic sunshine. That would include photos of his pets, Pippin and Seamus, in between other sharp-witted observations on life.

That’s led to a bittersweet place on Tuesday, May 17, which happens to be Craig Ferguson’s 60th birthday. It’s a day that he shared with Bob Saget (who recently passed away at age 65), but each year, Craig sent his friend a birthday roasting on Twitter.

This year, it’s obviously a very different mood. “Bob Saget and I would always text each other on our shared birthday,” Ferguson tweeted. “No text this year. Happy Birthday Bob wherever you are.”

Saget is missed by his fans and friends following his untimely death as the result of a head injury. Very soon, though, Netflix will stream a tribute special that will include many of Saget’s former co-stars. The premiere date is June 10, when one can watch and witness the impact that Saget had (and will continue to have) as his legacy lives on.

Ahead of his upcoming Vinyl Verse Tour with Wiz Khalifa, Logic will drop his seventh studio album, Vinyl Days next month. The album follows Logic’s January announcement of him coming out of his rap retirement.

Earlier this year, Logic teased the tracks “Breath Control,” along with Vinyl Days‘ title track. This month, he released “Therapy Music,” which features Russ. On “Therapy Music,” Logic raps, “I keep my ego in check, just me and this instrumental pumpin’ through this cassette deck / Money don’t represent my rank / Yeah, Logic rose from jack but even the Titanic sank / I seen cats with egos bigger than cruise ships lose it / Gain power and abuse it.”

Last month, he dropped a double single, comprised of the tracks “Tetris” and “Decades.” This came after a public dispute with Def Jam, who originally planned to release them as two standalone singles. “What the f*ck is going on, man? I told Def Jam that I wanted to release my sh*t as a two-pack,” Logic said in an Instagram video, “and I just found out that they’re releasing it as two singles at the same time. What kind of sh*t is that?… I care about my fans, man. I care about hip-hop. I care about music.”

Fortunately, it seems Logic got his way after all.

Check out the Vinyl Days artwork below.

Vinyl Days is out 6/17 via Def Jam. Pre-save it here.

Buckle up for the most amazing story of “catch and release” you’ve ever heard. Payton Moore, a resident of Sugar Land, Texas, set out to the Houston bayou and decided to catch himself a fish. And catch himself a fish he did. Moore filmed a video of himself catching an approximately 300-pound alligator gar, and let me tell you, it’s a sight to see.

Moore’s catch of the alligator gar was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, as there aren’t many left. It’s clear that Moore understands the monumental moment, and as much as it could have proven historical, he did the most humane thing he could have: He set the behemoth free.

When Peyton Moore went out on the bayou, it was with the intention of trying to catch an alligator gar. The video opens with him in a tussle with something at the end of his fishing wire. It’s clear that this is no ordinary fish. Moore has his work cut out for him if he thinks he’s going to be able to actually reel the thing in.

Initially thinking he hit some sort of snag, he quickly realizes that it is in fact, a gar. “This is a huge fish,” he says, pulling the fishing rod. “I thought we were stuck in a tree, but we’re not. We’re on something enormous.”

He understandably spends the next few minutes tussling with this “enormous” fish without knowing just how big it is. At that point, it was still too far out for him to see, so he was trying to navigate it through the water by instinct.

“It felt like somebody’s car had just started up and was rolling out of the driveway,” Moore told the Houston Chronicle.

For much of the video, the fish is far enough below the water that you can’t even see it. When Moore points or talks about the fish’s location, you just have to assume he knows what he talks about. Eventually, he does begin to bring it closer to the shore, but the war is not yet won. Remember, it’s a big fish, wrangling it isn’t going to be easy.

“They’re big, they’re strong, they’re heavy, and they give you everything they got, right away,” Moore explained.

Knowing this, he figured there was only one solution: He was going to have to tire the big fish out if he wanted any chance of catching it. There were some blocks in the water, including a downed tree, so Moore had to be careful, especially because at the time, he didn’t know how big the fish was.

After letting it swim in small circles to tire itself out, Moore was finally able to get a rope around the fish and pull it out of the water. You can see by the look on his face that this is not the alligator gar he was expecting. He measures it and announces that it’s 8 feet, 2 inches long. Based on its girth, Moore estimates that it’s around 300 pounds.

In 2011, Kenny Williams from Mississippi managed to catch a 327-pound alligator gar that measured 8 feet, 5.25 inches, with a 47.95-inch girth, according to Outdoor Life. Moore opted not to wait to have this gar measured, setting it free instead. After releasing the massive fish, Moore is overcome by emotions at what he just witnessed.

“It’s an incredible animal to witness…they’re rare. There was a time where fish like that roamed these waters literally at the same time as you had apex predators like Tyrannosaurus rex roaming on land,” Moore added.

Watch:

I Caught The BIGGEST FISH You’ve Ever Seen! (300lb MONSTER!)

The RX is Uproxx Music’s stamp of approval for the best albums, songs, and music stories throughout the year. Inclusion in this category is the highest distinction we can bestow, and signals the most important music being released throughout the year. The RX is the music you need, right now.

Dana Margolin of Porridge Radio is sitting in a car to avoid getting a ticket, summing up these weeks leading up to her band’s album release as “crazy times.” It’s late April when we talk over Zoom, and she’s preparing to move to a new house and leave her home base of England for a short press trip in New York. “There’s a lot happening,” she says, “but anyway, enough about that.”

Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder To The Sky is the third album by the UK indie-rock group, following their lowkey 2016 debut Rice, Pasta And Other Fillers and their breakthrough 2020 masterwork Every Bad. The latter watched the quartet putting their all into colossal, evocative songs rich with raw feeling and powerful instrumentals. It put the band on a pedestal, earning them a nomination for a Mercury Prize as well as raving reviews including one from Pitchfork declaring the record Best New Music. They were about to embark on a tour in the states opening up for Car Seat Headrest when the pandemic shut everything down. Their success, then, was only tangible online. The attention startled Margolin, forcing her to grapple with the changes that come with a rising status in the music industry. This inevitably ended up as a theme in some of the new songs, such as “Back To The Radio” and “End Of Last Year.”

“I didn’t start a band on purpose,” she reflects. “I started a band by accident.” Since she was a kid, she would make up songs and poems as a way of having fun. It wasn’t until she was 20 that she began taking it more seriously, and she’s still figuring out exactly what it means to take on the role of a bandleader. “Like, who the f*ck am I to have to stand in front of people on stage and command their attention?” she speculates. “I know how to do it and I know that I love it but also it’s incredibly difficult.”

I saw Porridge Radio at Village Underground in London in November of last year. It was my first show outside of the United States, and I was running on no sleep after being wide awake on my overnight flight. Yet Margolin energized me and the entire crowd of the sold-out gig. The venue was capacious with a slanted ceiling, reminding me of a church; the songs filled up all of the space, and Margolin’s presence was like that of a priest, her words confident and cathartic like holy proclamations. Her lyrics are known for frequent repetition (In Every Bad opener “Born Confused,” she sings the line “Thank you for making me happy” 41 times), which contributes to the momentum of the recorded songs but also to the intensity of live performances. It invites everyone — even those who may have never heard the song before — to join in, similar to a chant or a choir.

On the third track of Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder To The Sky, Margolin sings the line “I don’t want to be loved” 57 times. It’s one of the many moments that feel heavy with a deep feeling of shame. When I ask if making music serves as a sort of atonement, she rejects the idea. “I think of it as a place to get something out or to reveal a part of myself that I would otherwise be too ashamed to reveal,” she explains. “It’s a space where I can try to be understood and try to let go of something and try to have people hear just what I’m experiencing.”

Along with repetition, questions are a motif in her lyrics. Trying to count how many there are on the new album would be a masochistic task, but some notable ones include: “It’s not easy, is it for you?” on the conflicted “Jealousy,” “When do I surrender?” on the closing title track, and “Do you remember when we all fell apart?” on the otherwordly second single “The Rip.” The questions vary; they ricochet from being directed at herself and at others, and some are easier to answer while others are impossible. She chalks this up as her “just trying to figure some shit out,” she says. “It’s very confusing, just having to exist and understand things.”

“Once you ask the question, you kind of know whether or not it was a stupid question,” she says. “But in the process of asking it and saying it, you can hear yourself and you can figure out if you agree with yourself. You write it down and you look at it and you think, ‘Is that true? Or is it not true? Was that a helpful question to ask?’ I think just the very act of asking a question gives you space to answer it for yourself and to process it. That is a really important part of life—asking things and saying things out loud and trying to see if you agree with yourself.”

As words are said over and over, the meaning changes, almost expanding and contracting over the course of the song. Eventually, the syllables are just sounds, as if emitted from an instrument. This makes sense in the context of Margolin’s fascination with endlessness and seeing herself and her struggles as small in the grand scheme of the universe; the more she repeats her complicated questions and declarations, the less real they seem. “I am really interested in the idea that things go on forever,” she contemplates, “and they repeat in infinite loops. I like my life and my relationships are everything, and nothing really. There’s something really beautiful and quite freeing in that idea.”

The stakes are high in Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder To The Sky — but there are also no stakes at all. The sprawling, fragile finale is buoyed by simple chords and Margolin’s soft vocals as she lulls the last lines: “No, I don’t want the end / But I don’t want the beginning / All the way down to hell / And all the way up to heaven.” Her words soar like doves; it’s an incantation of liberation.

Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder To The Sky is out Friday on Secretly Canadian. Get it here.

In the midst of being pilloried for pushing the Great Replacement Theory that sparked the mass shooting in Buffalo over the weekend, Tucker Carlson managed to spark a new controversy on Monday night by insulting Republican Congressman Dan Crenshaw for his support of the $40 billion aid package for Ukraine. Carlson, who’s been routinely criticized for pushing pro-Russia talking points, has been a vocal opponent of sending aid to the Ukraine. The Fox News host has said any Republicans supporting it should face primary challengers, but he took things even further when it came to Crenshaw.

During a segment with Tulsi Gabbard, Carlson insulted Crenshaw for saying that anyone who opposes the aid package is pro-Russia, which we already know is a sensitive subject for Tucker. Via Mediaite:

“There is no imminent threat, or even long-term threat of Russia invading Finland or Sweden,” Gabbard argued. “Russia can barely hold on to a very small sliver of Ukraine right now.”

Carlson then ripped Crenshaw as an iteration of late Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) with an eyepatch.

“You know, the more I think about it, it takes a lot of gall for eyepatch McCain to attack moms who are worried about baby formula as pro-Russia,” he said.

Carlson’s insult was an interesting development considering Gabbard, who’s also a veteran, let it fly by without comment. More notably, Carlson was among the many conservative voices demanding Pete Davidson‘s head after he joked on Saturday Night Live that the Texas congressman looked like “a hitman in a porno movie.” Davidson was forced to apologize to Crenshaw, and the two later appeared together on SNL to bury the hatchet. It was a huge ordeal at the time, so naturally, people can’t help but notice the hypocrisy of Carlson doing the exact same thing with little pushback from the right.

You can check out some of the reactions on social media below:

(Via Mediaite)

Over the weekend, an 18-year-old white man walked into a market in Buffalo, New York, and began shooting people. He killed 10 and injured another three, motivated by bigotry and ignorance as evidenced by a 180-page manifesto he posted online. It was one of just four mass shootings that took place over the past weekend, and the latest example of how genuinely messed up the political and social climate has gotten. As the world reacted to the tragedy, Cardi B, who often has canny observations about current events, didn’t reserve any sympathy for the perpetrator.

“Mass shooters are not mentally ill,” she tweeted on Sunday in the wake of the attack. Oftentimes, in the wake of a mass shooting (the fact I have to write “often” in that sentence is pretty sick, right?), the discourse will turn into a debate about mental health. However, Cardi wasn’t having any of this distraction tactic this time around. “They have [an] evil mentality.”

As usual, Cardi might be onto something. It’s telling that there’s assumed victimhood for the people who perpetrate these terroristic acts, as though they can’t be held responsible for their actions. But I gotta say, a guy writes 180 pages about how much he hates people he’s never met, that tells me he’s perfectly functional, his thinking has just been warped.

Cardi B is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Rajon Rondo’s former partner and the mother of his two children, Ashley Bachelor, filed and received an emergency protective order on Friday in Louisville that will temporarily require Rondo to remain 500 feet away from her and their two children, as well as turn over any firearms he owns to the court.

This comes after an incident last week in which Bachelor alleged Rondo became enraged after she asked her son to stop playing video games with Rajon and help with laundry, threatening her with a gun and demanding to see the children outside while holding the gun, as first reported by TMZ and confirmed by ESPN’s Baxter Holmes.

In it, she alleged that Rondo and a child were playing video games Wednesday when she asked the child to separate laundry. Rondo reacted angrily, according to the woman, ripping the game console out of the wall and smashing several items in the house, leaving the boy and another child there upset.

The woman alleges that Rondo said to her “you’re dead” before leaving the house, only to return shortly thereafter, this time with a gun and demanding to see one of the children. The woman said she grew scared of the situation, so she brought the child downstairs, and Rondo pulled the child outside, allegedly while still holding the gun, while he yelled at him. He then demanded to see the other child, too, and she also came outside, as Rondo yelled at both of them for being afraid of him, the woman alleged.

In the protective order, Bachelor says it is not the first time Rondo has shown “volatile, erratic, and explosive behavior,” and alleges he has a history of verbal abuse towards her and both of their children. The NBA told ESPN the league is aware of the situation and is “gathering more information” on the incident, while Rondo has not yet been named a suspect in any criminal reports, per TMZ.

As part of Tommy Hilfiger’s Classics Reborn series, the fashion house has revealed Shawn Mendes’ cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing In The Dark.” In the campaign’s accompanying video, we see shots of Mendes running through fields, playing guitar and showing off his abs while rocking signature Hilfiger fashions.

“Shawn’s not only a multitalented musician — he also represents a new generation of future-makers who understand the need for action,” said Hilfiger in a statement. “By joining forces with Shawn to learn, share and innovate, we can build upon what we’ve already achieved and take our sustainability journey to the next level. While we recognize we still have a long way to go, together we can build even more awareness to make a positive, lasting impact.”

The Classic Reborn series launches in tandem with Hilfiger’s Play It Forward movement, which sees Hilfiger recreating some of the house’s iconic looks, but in a more sustainable manner. Some of the looks include their signature jeans, polo shirts and boxers. For this line, the jeans are designed with 20% post-consumer recycled cotton, which requires less water and energy during its finishing stages.

Much of Mendes’ wardrobe on his Wonder tour will consist of liability fabrics and trimmings, along with deadstock vintage Tommy Hilfiger fabrics. Play It Forward gifted Mendes a $1 million donation, portions of which will fund regenerative cotton farming.

“I’ve always been inspired by Tommy and the iconic brand he built, and I’m excited to share our journey together with my fans,” said Mendes in a statement. “Everyone has a role to play in creating a more sustainable future and I’m inspired to see what we can achieve. I look forward to learning from each other, exploring how creative reimagination can have a positive effect on the fashion industry, and sharing what living more sustainably means to me.”

Check out “Dancing In The Dark” above.

The only thing worse than possibly taking an L and having the whole internet laugh at you over it is having video footage of said L pop up online. Freddie Gibbs, who recently performed in Buffalo, New York with what appeared to be a swollen eye, had been the subject of some nasty rumors that said he’d been jumped just hours before. Now, TMZ has the footage, which depicts Gibbs and a whole bunch of other men trading blows inside the Dinosaur Bar-B-Que restaurant.

While there’s still no official word on just what started the brawl, fans have been running with one theory in particular due to its location and the war of words Freddie has been waging on hometown hero Benny The Butcher. While he’d previously enjoyed a healthy working relationship with all the members of Griselda Records, a recent exchange between Gibbs and the notoriously outspoken Westside Gunn seemed to sour that connection.

Then, after Benny dismissed a rumor of a joint album between the two, saying their time “came and went,” the prickly Gibbs took his words as a challenge. They have been going back and forth on social media ever since. However, if recent events are connected to their tiff, perhaps cooler heads will prevail and they can talk out their differences like grownups.

Watch the video of Freddie Gibbs’ restaurant fight above.

Solo: A Star Wars Story is by far the lowest grossing Star Wars movie. The anthology film, starring Alden Ehrenreich as Han Solo, Donald Glover as Lando Calrissian, and Chewbacca as Chewbacca, made only (“only”) $392 million at the box office, compared to $1.056 billion for Rogue One; it earned less than 1983’s Return of the Jedi, even before adjusting for inflation. Solo also received indifferent-at-best reviews with a 69 percent “Fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes, although the film does have its supporters.

There’s a fun Star Wars movie in there, but a troubled production (and maybe the worst scene in the entire franchise) did Solo no favors.

The underwhelming response to Solo changed the course of Star Wars, both in the short term, with more “Star Wars Story” installments on hiatus, and the long term. In a lengthy profile, Lucasfilm chief Kathleen Kennedy told Vanity Fair that future Star Wars projects probably won’t have new actors play old characters, like Ehrenreich as everyone’s favorite space scoundrel (even if his performance is one of the best things about Solo):

The 2018 movie Solo explored Han Solo’s younger years, with Alden Ehrenreich taking on the role of the smuggler originated by Harrison Ford. The film has its admirers, but it made less at the box office than any other live-action Star Wars movie. Solo’s swagger may be too singular for another actor to replicate. “There should be moments along the way when you learn things,” says Kennedy. “Now it does seem so abundantly clear that we can’t do that.”

The implication here: get ready for lots of new characters, which is great, and LOTS of CGI and deep fake technology, which is… less great. See, this is why every Star Wars movie and TV show should be about the adventures of Watto and his little hat.

There’s no pesky humans to deal with.

(Via Vanity Fair)