Category: News

OJ Da Juiceman finds himself at odds with the law once again, as NBC affiliate LEX18 reports he was arrested on Monday (May 2) in Hardin County, Kentucky. The 40-year-old rapper was charged with possession of a handgun by a convicted felon, possession of marijuana, and possession of drug paraphernalia. OJ was detained at the Hardin County Detention Center in Elizabethtown and is now looking ahead to his May 13 court date.

The 32 Entertainment founder‘s first legal wrinkle came in 2015 in Tennessee as he was arrested for intent to distribute, gun possession, and unlawful crime with possession of a firearm. The police found guns, marijuana, and 300 rounds of ammunition in his car as he was on his way to perform in North Carolina.

The Atlanta rapper first broke through in the late 2000s, collaborating with Gucci Mane, Jadakiss, Swizz Beats, and more. He was recognized by XXL in the 2010 iteration of their Freshman List alongside J. Cole, Wiz Khalifa, Nipsey Hussle, Big Sean, Jay Rock, and Freddie Gibbs. While he has not been the biggest selling artist in the game or from Atlanta, he did burst onto the Billboard 200’s Top 20 chart with his debut album The Otha Side Of The Trap.

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

While discussing the recent attack on Dave Chappelle during a performance at the Hollywood Bowl, which has dragged the Will Smith and Chris Rock slap back into the headlines, comedian Jim Jefferies has revealed that he was getting smacked on stage way before any of that. Jefferies opened up about the incident during a recent episode of Howie Mandel Does Stuff. However, unlike Mandel, Jeffries didn’t seem particularly concerned with a growing threat on comedians. In fact, Jefferies still finds his own onstage assault to be pretty funny.

“It was quite famous at the time,” Jefferies said via Mediaite. “I did not heckle. I did not speak to this guy, he was upset by a joke earlier on. We don’t know which joke. So there was no interaction with the audience member, he just walked up and hit me.”

According to Jeffries, he and his team later figured out that the young man, who was pulled off of the comedian by the audience, was on a date that wasn’t going so well. “Allegedly the girl that he was with wasn’t enjoying the show, it was a joke that happened earlier on, allegedly,” Jefferies said. “Once he finished his drink he thought ‘I’ll take care of this’ and he ran on the stage.”

The incident occurred all the way back in 2007, and Jefferies knew back then that you can’t buy this kind of publicity. “I put this on the internet right away,” he told Mandel with a laugh. “My tour started selling out!”

(Via Mediaite)

Five Supreme Court justices and the far-right believe that women should be barred from abortions, and to add to that awful look, Brian Kilmeade dropped his own take on pregnant women holding down jobs. Never mind that women must work to support their unwanted pregnancies after being forced to carry them to term, but that’s perhaps beside the Fox and Friends point.

Brian Kilmeade, the Chris Columbus enthusiast who recently sparred with co-host Steve Doocy over boosters, decided to go off on Biden’s new “disinformation czar.” There’s plenty to be said about the strangeness of that position, but Kilmeade wasn’t talking substance while questioning why Nina Jankowicz is on the scene. Rather, Kilmeade decided to draw attention to an issue that was grinding his gears: Jankowicz entered the job while already pregnant, and Kilmeade can’t see why “a job,” let alone an “important” job, should even go to a pregnant woman. Via Media Matters:

“For the last few months, we have had a disinformation czar and a unit within the Homeland Security Department…. Then, we find out who is in charge of it, and this woman that’s in charge of it, Nina Jankowicz, who’s about eight-and-a-half-months pregnant, so I’m not sure how you get a job and then you just – you can’t do a job for three months. I’m not faulting her, but I don’t know why you would give someone a job that you think is so important.”

This, naturally, didn’t sit too well with Kilmeade’s co-host, Ainsley Earhardt, who quizzed him on how long Jankowicz has been on the job, which appears to be “about two months.” From there, Earhardt leveled with Kilmeade: “Well, I’ll defend her on that one, Brian. She has the right to have a baby and have maternity leave.” There’s no telling why Kilmeade even went to this subject, but there you have it: awkwardness on Fox and Friends made for an interesting morning.

You can watch the video at Media Matters.

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.

Kehlani’s sophomore album, It Was Good Until It Wasn’t, focused on absorbing the destruction that failures in love and life caused against her while disallowing it from throwing her off her journey. This theme of navigating through the presence of an unwanted being was fitting at the time as the world was forced under the glass dome of a global pandemic. For Kehlani, everything else was good until it wasn’t, and for the rest of us, by that same token, the once-normal world that we previously took for granted was good until it was deemed otherwise. With that, it leaves us with two options: wait for things to work themselves out or acknowledge the circumstances as a sign to make changes in your life. With her third album Blue Water Road, Kehlani opts for the latter.

Recreating happiness is what Kehlani strives for on Blue Water Road. In its best form, it’s as pure and euphoric as the ocean waters that sat across from the Malibu stretch of road that her third album is named after. Luckily for Kehlani, happiness is not uncharted territory for her. The singer’s 2015 debut album SweetSexySavage is probably the giddiest and most spirited we’ve heard her be so far. But it came with a heavy dose of naivety and overflowing charisma that, together, asked “what could go wrong?” Well, a lot did and that’s what brought us to It Was Good Until It Wasn’t. However, time heals and it did for Kehlani as it placed her on an upward trek that returned her to her better days. Kehlani succeeds at recreating happiness on Blue Water Road while her old naivety is replaced with the gratitude to be here again. It also comes with the understanding that she’s not only experienced the worst, but a permanent residency at the top of the world goes unguaranteed.

By the end of Blue Water Road, Kehlani’s lifelong search for serenity is complete, and it’s quite fulfilling. In an Apple Music interview, she revealed that her initial intention on Blue Water Road was to make music for a deluxe release of It Was Good Until It Wasn’t. What Kehlani didn’t know at first is that the growth she needed was already in progress, and thus the music that came out of those sessions was no longer connected to her sophomore album. We waste no time learning about these changes as Kehlani yearns to “throw a paper tantrum” at a strip club for a dancer she’s grown very fond of. Just two years ago, she forced herself to be in the middle of loud music and erratically flashing lights while noting, “Damn, you know I hate the club.” Where It Was Good Until It Wasn’t begins with a chilling anecdote about a “Toxic” love, Blue Water Road sets off with accountability and the recognition of her faults in love through “Little Story.”

Kehlani progress on this journey comes with its missteps and unsuccessful moments. It’d be wrong to assume that the ever-growing 27-year-old singer suddenly figured out how to perfectly and flawlessly approach life. She enters a new relationship only to leave with regrets on the Slick Rick-sampling “Wish I Never,” she’s gaslit on “Get Me Started” with Syd, and she attempts in a very Issa Rae way to justify her infidelity on “More Than I Should” with Jessie Reyez. It’s all honest and relatable and it’s what makes Kehlani’s music so indulgent. She never approaches it from a holier than thou perspective, and she never throws stones from her glasshouse. We understand Kehlani cause we’ve been there before and we all aim to fit life’s complicated puzzle pieces together to solve some problem that we have.

With that, Kehlani successfully achieves serenity through her ability to establish it within her. You can’t fall in love without knowing and accepting what you love, and you will never find peace without dealing with the chaos that lies within. A perfect example of that comes on “Altar,” where Kehlani grapples with grief and achieves the initially impossible feat of accepting that a loved one is no longer physically present. “Soon, I’ll see your face,” she sings with undeterred optimism. “Don’t know why I ever thought you were far away / I shoulda known better.”

So what does serenity look like for Kehlani? It could be finding a love so perfect and united that she confuses her hair, reflection, and her skin for her lover’s on “Melt.” It could also be enjoying the fruits of her labor towards a healthy love on the nearly-NSFW “Tangerine” where she sings, “So don’t tell nobody what’s done in the garden / The fruits you can harvest, they grow where you water.” However, it’s best captured on “Everything” as the arrival of a new lover who checks off her physical, verbal, and compatibility boxes leaves her to praise the heavens for this gift she’s waited so long for. As a result, her excitement for it can’t be bottled. “That was before me, it’s childish, you done with your wildin,’” she sings. “Now you can be wild with me, run that mile with me / Catch some flights out with me.”

Simply put: Kehlani won. She found new love and accepted her natural identity – both sexual and physical – all while managing to keep the thunderous clouds and unsettling fires that shook her world on It Was Good Until It Wasn’t out of her present-day life. Nowadays, things are better than good, they’re great, and it’s all thanks to Blue Water Road.

Blue Water Road is out now via TSNMI/Atlantic. You can stream it here.

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

You can thank the artist very briefly not known as Prince for ensuring that one of the greatest sitcom couples of all time became a couple in the first place.

The music legend Prince was a huge fan of FOX’s New Girl, which ran from 2011-2018 and starred Zooey Deschanel as Jess Day and Jake Johnson as Nick Miller. Prince appeared as himself in a season three episode aptly titled “Prince” that aired in 2014. On The Kelly Clarkson Show on Wednesday, Minx star Jake Johnson told host Kelly Clarkson that Jess and Nick got together because it’s what Prince, inarguably the most important fan of the series, wanted.

Johnson, with his Minx beard intact, described Prince’s iconic arrival on set. “He came around and he was talking to Zooey [Deschanel],” Johnson said. “He looked at me and said to Zooey, ‘I would like to meet Nick now.’ Zooey looked at me and, obviously, whatever Prince wants…[Prince gets]. She walked over and was like, ‘Hey Nick, come over here.’ I met Prince and he was as nice as it gets.”

But it turns out the greatest musician of his generation and superfan, who passed away in 2016, came to the New Girl set with an agenda. “He wanted to live in the reality of the show, and he wanted Nick and Jess to be together,” Johnson said. “So he said he would do the show if he could help them get together. He got to live a little fantasy. He wanted them together, and we wanted Prince. Prince is the best.”

Given the direction of the show and the characters, Nick and Jess likely would have gotten together without Prince’s involvement, but Prince certainly made it happen quickly. Thank you for your service, Prince. You can watch video of the interview below.

Dr. Dre famously said he became hip-hop’s first billionaire (a title actually held by Jay-Z) back in 2014 when he sold Beats Electronics to Apple, but his boasting about it caused an ungodly amount to get cut from the final sale price. According to HipHopDX via The New York Times reporter Tripp Mickle’s new book, After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul, when Dre talked about the deal in a video posted on social media, Apple took the sale down $200 million due to a confidentiality clause in the initial $3.2 billion agreement.

If you don’t remember, the video was posted to Facebook by Tyrese, who was hanging out in the studio with Dre, both apparently drunk. As they shouted out South Central Los Angeles (Tyrese is from Watts, Dre is from neighboring Compton), Tyrese boasted that “the Forbes list just changed,” referring to the publication’s annual lists of top earners in the world of hip-hop. Dre backed up the brag, touting himself as “the first billionaire in hip-hop.” Interscope founder Jimmy Iovine, Dre’s partner in Beats, found out about the video from Diddy, who called him in the middle of the night after the video went up, prompting him to panic as Dre and Jimmy were invited to Apple’s headquarters by CEO Tim Cook.

They worried that the deal would get the ax, but instead, Cook used the opportunity to save Apple some money, adjusting the sale price by $0.2 billion. Ultimately, the deal worked out; Dre got to keep his boast, and Apple got to keep Beats, which is still paying off to this day. And really, what can you buy with $3.2 billion that you can’t get with $3 billion (although I’m sure he’d have loved the extra $100 million to give to his ex-wife)?

“Five conservative Justices on the Supreme Court are apparently poised to overturn Roe v. Wade and erase a woman’s Constitutional right to bodily autonomy, subverting the will of the vast majority of Americans and defying a half-century of legal precedent.” That’s how Seth Meyers kicked off his “A Closer Look” segment on Wednesday night, but that was just the intro of what was to come.

While Meyers discussed the “virtually unprecedented” leak of this magnitude in the history of the Supreme Court, what he was really interested in talking about was the painfully obvious irony of people complaining about the privacy of the court being violated, when said court’s goal is to ban women from having any right to privacy, or autonomy, when making decisions about their own lives, bodies, and health care.

But what irks Meyers most of all is the (admittedly unsurprising) way in which conservatives—who are set to “reap their biggest political victory in 50 years”—are still finding a way to paint it as a woe-is-us moment because of the leak itself. But what the Late Night host deemed the “most unhinged” reaction to the SCOTUS leak was a couple of bumbling Fox News hosts, including Mike Huckabee, referring to the leak of an unclassified document as “an insurrection.” Meyers wasn’t having it:

“Leaking a document is not an insurrection. January 6th, when a mob of rioters violently stormed the Capitol, that was an insurrection. In this case, someone posted a piece of paper online. Here, I’ll prove which one is worse: Do you think Mike Pence would rather be whisked out of a building by Secret Service while a mob chanted ‘Hang Mike Pence!,’ or read a leaked memo that said ‘Hang Mike Pence’?”

You can watch the full clip above.

“The reign of House Targaryen begins…”

HBO will attempt to wipe the bad taste that the Game of Thrones series finale left in many people’s mouths with House of the Dragon, a prequel series set 200 years before Bran was pushed out of any towers. Get ready for icy blonde wigs, dragons, and if you love Targaryen lore, folks, this is the show for you. “Men would sooner put the realm to the torch than see a woman ascend the Iron Throne,” Rhaenys (Eve Best), who got passed over for the Throne by Viserys (Paddy Considine), tells Princess Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy as an adult, Milly Alcock as a youngster) in the teaser trailer above.

Daenerys, many years later, can relate.

A Song of Ice and Fire author George R.R. Martin has watched a couple of House of the Dragon episodes. and he’s very “pleased” with what he’s seen. “Those of you who like complex, conflicted, grey characters (as I do) will like this series, I think,” he wrote. “There will be plenty of dragons and battles, to be sure, but the spine of the story is the human conflicts, the love and the hate, character drama rather than action/ adventure.

House of the Dragon also stars Matt Smith, Olivia Cooke, Steve Toussaint, Fabien Frankel, Sonoya Mizuno, and Rhys Ifans, while Ryan Condal and Miguel Sapochnik are showrunners duty. The 10-episode season premieres on August 21.

WARNING: Spoilers for the Moon Knight season finale below.

After Moon Knight dropped its wild finale this week, which in true Marvel style, saw the Egyptian moon god Khonshu battle the alligator goddess Ammit in a Godzilla vs. Kong-style fight in front of the ancient pyramids, the big question is will the Oscar Isaac series return for a Season 2? The end-credits reveal of Moon Knight’s third identity, Jake Lockley, left the door wide open for more stories of the protector of the night, but the situation is apparently fluid.

The biggest issue is that Isaac is not contracted for any more episodes. Shortly after Moon Knight premiered, the actor made it a point to tell Variety that he didn’t want the “golden handcuffs” that keeps other MCU stars bound to the franchise, plus he just went through all of that as Poe Dameron in Star Wars. However, as a crucial part of the creative team, Isaac was given a considerable amount of freedom that could easily be used to woo him back as Moon Knight.

As for what that return might look like, nobody knows. Series director Mohamed Diab has been doing a round of interviews following the finale, and he’s been very transparent that Marvel has told him nothing. Via Deadline:

“Marvel doesn’t go with a conventional way, so even if they like the character and want to extend the world, it could be season 2, it could be a standalone film, or he can join another superhero’s journey,” added the director of the season one finale.

“I’m kept in the dark, just like the fans,” Diab added.

Moon Knight executive producer Grant Curtis told Deadline that he’s also in the dark. “Where Moon Knight lands in MCU after this, I actually don’t know,” he said.

However, Marvel may have already tipped its hand to the future of Moon Knight. A few days before the finale arrived on Disney+, Marvel teased the episode on Twitter and used some notable wording that caught fans’ attention. Despite Moon Knight being touted as a limited series, Marvel tweeted that the sixth episode would be the “season finale” not the series finale. While nothing is official at this point, and Isaac could be content with the surprisingly self-contained story that just wrapped up, we would probably hedge our bets on seeing the unusual Marvel hero return for a Season 2.

Moon Knight is currently streaming on Disney+.

A24 is producing a new television series about iconic Black entertainer Josephine Baker and her role as a freedom fighter against the Nazis. It’s called De La Resistance, and according to Deadline, the show has already found its star in a burgeoning modern icon, Janelle Monae. Monae will portray Baker as the show follows her exploits as a spy in the French resistance during World War II, as well as her adventures as one of the most celebrated performers of the early 20th century.

Monae is also billed as a producer for the series via her Wondaland Pictures imprint, through which the singer has a first-look production deal with Universal Pictures. Monae’s previous acting credits include roles in Harriet, Hidden Figures, and Moonlight, and will also appear in the upcoming sequel to Knives Out. Monae’s new book, Memory Librarian, is also out now. The showrunner is Jennifer Yale, who previously worked on outstanding television dramas such as See, Outlander, and Underground.

They’ve certainly chosen an intriguing figure, whose real-life exploits sound like excellent fodder for a film or TV series. After refusing to perform to segregated audiences in the US, Baker emigrated to Paris, where her racy revue became a worldwide phenomenon and left behind some truly iconic imagery (which Monae recently paid homage to at the 2022 Met Gala). After the Nazis occupied France, Baker became a spy for the Allies, earning The National Order of the Legion of Honour, the highest French order of merit, both military and civil.