Category: News

Just a couple of days ago, Pusha T released his long-awaited fourth album It’s Almost Dry. It’s a 12-track effort filled with his trademark cocaine bars backed by appearances from Kanye West, Jay-Z, Pharrell, Kid Cudi, Lil Uzi Vert, Nigo, Labrinth, and Malice. The project was also heavily produced by Kanye West and Pharrell with additional help from Labrinth, 88-Keys, BoogzDaBeast, and more. So far, It’s Almost Dry has been met with favorable reviews from listeners as it appears that Pusha has elevated his game since his 2018 album Daytona.

The arrival of It’s Almost Dry has also made some question the whereabouts of Pusha’s Madlib-produced album which he’s teased on a few occasions. During the inaugural episode of Amp’s It’s Almost Dry Radio with Idea Generation’s Noah Callahan-Bever and his longtime manager Steven Victor, Pusha gave an honest answer about that project.

“I was definitely going to work with Madlib,” he said according to Complex. “I got some beats and they were actually chops from him. I just think he’s really dope at finding ill sounds and ill chops, and things of that nature.” He added, “But at the same time, it was feeling like a beat tape situation. I felt like to step it up I had to be produced — to step it up from Daytona.”

Pusha continued, “When you think about Daytona, it’s just beats and hard raps. I wasn’t produced. The structure of Kanye West you know, taking these things out or whatever the case may be. Honestly, it was just that. It’s Almost Dry is an exercise, definitely on the Pharrell side, in being produced.”

Maybe Pusha and Madlib can get on the same page at some point in the future, especially since Pusha said it was a “bucket list thing” for him to craft an album with Madlib.

It’s Almost Dry is out now via GOOD Music and Def Jam. You can stream it here.

Lil Uzi Vert is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

For the first weekend of Coachella last week, Billie Eilish took the stage to perform fan-favorite records from her chart-topping albums, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? and Happier Than Ever, and more. During her first weekend as a headliner at Coachella last week, Billie brought out Khalid and Damon Albarn. Here, Billie and Khalid performed their duet “Lovely,” while she and Albarn joined forces for her own song, “Getting Older,” as well as Gorillaz’s “Feel Good Inc.” For the second weekend of Coachella, Billie decided to bring out Hayley Williams to the Coachella stage.

Billie introduced Hayley to the crowd and the Paramore singer was very excited to take the stage, saying, “This is my first Coachella. Woah! Thanks for sharing this with me – this is sick!” During their time together on stage, which also featured an appearance from Finneas, Billie and Hayley performed an acoustic version of Paramore’s “Misery Business,” which the band retired from their live performances back in 2018. Afterward, the duo went on to perform Billie’s “Happier Than Ever.”

You can watch clips from Billie and Hayley’s performance together above.

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

Last week, Kevin McCarthy was caught in a lie. The New York Times reported that the House minority leader had privately slammed former president Donald Trump in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 riot. McCarthy called the report false. Then the Times produced audio, proving he was the one bending the truth. While Trump himself claims to have already forgiven him, some of his fellow members of Congress are not.

Senator Elizabeth Warren appeared on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday and proceeded to tear McCarthy a new one.

“Kevin McCarthy is a liar and a traitor,” Warren said, straight-up. “This is outrageous! And that is really the illness that pervades the Republican leadership right now.” She said today’s GOP “say one thing to the American public and something else in private,” adding that “they understand that it is wrong” that there was a violent attempt by Trump supporters. (Though they might not cop to the behind-the-scenes coup being investigated by the Jan. 6 committee.)

“The Republicans instead want to continue to try to figure out how to make [the] 2020 election different instead of spending their energy on how it is that we go forward in order to build an economy, in order to make this country work better for the people who sent us to Washington,” she said, adding, “Shame on Kevin McCarthy.”

Meanwhile, more and more damning intel is emerging from the House select committee’s months-long investigation. Recently it’s been revealed that Don Jr. was texting plans to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, while GOP lawmakers like Matt Gaetz and Jim Jordan were a lot more involved in those plans than previously reported. Meanwhile, one of the biggest cheerleaders of 2020 election voting fraud misinformation embarrassed himself on The Masked Singer.

You can watch Warren’s CNN appearance in the video above. The discussion of McCarthy’s remarks begin around the 9-minute mark.

(Via The Daily Beast)

Liam Neeson has led one of the more interesting careers in Hollywood. A serious and soft-spoken Irish thespian, he’s played oily ‘80s baddies (The Dead Pool), complex historical figures (Schindler’s List), then had a surprise turn in his 50s as a Bronsonian action star. His career could have been even more colorful, as he revealed on an episode of The Rich Eisen Show.

During a segment called “Celebrity True or False,” the host grilled him on a number of rumors. They discussed his appearance as a “playboy Irish terrorist” on a 1986 episode of Miami Vice. He confirmed that he almost played Fezzik, the towering strongman, in the film version of The Princess Bride, but lost the role to André the Giant, partly because he was “only” 6’4.

Neeson also revealed something big: He almost, but not really, could have played James Bond. He recalled the period before Pierce Brosnan got the job of breathing new life into a dormant screen character. Neeson claimed to be one of the actors they were vaguely considering. (“They sent out feelers.”) He was never offered the role but even if he had been, he would have had to turn it down.

“I remember my dear, departed wife [Natasha Richardson, who died in 2009] said to me — we were shooting a film in North Carolina called Nell — and she looked at me straight in the face and she said, ‘Liam, if you’re offered this and if you do it, you know we can’t get married,’” he recalled. “And that was it.

Richardson, however, proved instrumental in getting him perhaps his most famous role: tough guy do-gooder Bryan Mills in Taken. He’d already been sent the script, but he suspected — perhaps rightly — that he was not really in contention. But when he accompanied Richardson to a film festival, where the film’s producer Luc Besson was the jury head, he went up to him and pitched him on why the same actor who played Oskar Schindler could convincingly brag about his ”very particular set of skills.” And the rest is history.

What Eisen didn’t ask him about is being taught how to drive by Helen Mirren. Or how a horse once remembered working with him. But maybe that’s because he already let those cats out of the bag.

You can watch the segment in the video above.

This summer will mark two years since Megan Thee Stallion was shot in the foot. The incident resulted in Tory Lanez being charged with one felony count each of assault with a semiautomatic firearm and carrying a loaded, unregistered firearm in a vehicle. Tory has repeatedly denied being the one who shot Megan, but testimony from an LAPD detective revealed that he allegedly apologized for shooting Megan in the foot afterward. Court proceedings for the case are still underway, with Tory’s arrest for violating Megan’s protective order against him being the most recent update in the matter. As that continues, Megan took a moment to sit down with Gayle King for an interview on CBS.

The full interview will air on Monday morning, but in a clip that was shared on Sunday, Megan gives an emotional account of what happened that summer night in 2020. “It was an argument because I ready to go, and everybody else wasn’t ready to go,” Megan says at the beginning of the clip. “But that’s like normal friend stuff, we fuss about silly stuff all the time. I never put my hands on anybody, I never raised my voice too loud, like this was one of them times where it’s like it shouldn’t have got this crazy.” Megan then went on to recall the moment she was shot in the foot.

“So I get out of the car, and everything just happened so fast. All I hear this man screaming is, ‘dance, b*tch,’ and he starts shooting, and I’m just like ‘oh my God…’ like he shot a couple of times,” Megan added. She then notes that Tory was “standing up over the window shooting” at her. Megan continued, “I didn’t even want to move. I didn’t want to move too quick cause I’m like, ‘oh my God if I take the wrong step, I don’t know if he’ll shoot something that’s super important and I don’t know if he could shoot me and kill me.”

Megan concluded the clip by saying, “I was really scared because I had never been shot at before.”

You can watch the full clip in the video above and stay tuned for Megan’s full interview with Gayle which arrives tomorrow morning.

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

Last week, Russian Doll returned for another mind-bending season, reuniting viewers with Natasha Lyonne’s time looping New Yorker. The second season is a little different from the first, which was essentially an urban riff on Groundhog Day (much as Edge of Tomorrow was Groundhog Day with aliens), while giving its co-creator/star her meatiest role yet. But all shows transform dramatically in development, and Lyonne discussed some of the ways early incarnations were different. For one thing, it would have prominently featured a performer-turned-major film auteur.

In a new interview with Entertainment Weekly, Lyonne revealed that at one point Jordan Peele played “heavily in it as a love interest.” This seems to be a number of years ago, before Get Out took his career in a very different direction. “Which is just funny to think that it’s such a pre-Jordan Peele, Oscar-winning auteur era, where we’re just like, ‘Okay, great. So he plays the boyfriend.’

There was another beloved figure who once had a smaller role: Alfred Molina, though Lyonne didn’t go into specifics. Looking back at her original pitch, she calls it a “very specific document, and it’s almost like a time capsule, because it took so long, even from the time that [Netflix] ordered a script to green lighting us direct to series, and a year went by, and in that time, so much changed.”

You can now watch the second season of Russian Doll on Netflix.

(Via EW)

It’s been almost a month since the 94th Academy Awards, where Best Picture went to CODA, Ariana DeBose won for West Side Story, and The Power of the Dog somehow only took home one trophy. Oh, and Will Smith took home Best Actor after slapping presenter Chris Rock. Even now, the comic, who did his best to quickly get things back on track, has only briefly addressed the incident. But his mom has some stuff to say.

As per The Hollywood Reporter, Rose Rock, an author, motivational speaker, and mother of one of America’s most popular stand-ups, opened up about the incident in an interview with WIS. She said her son is “still processing” what happened, but she already has some thoughts she’d like to share with the world.

“I told someone, when Will slapped Chris, he slapped all of us, but he really slapped me,” Rose said. “When you hurt my child, you hurt me.”

When Rose was asked what she’d say if Smith contacted her, she replied, “I have no idea what I would say other than, ‘What in the world were you thinking?’ Because you did a slap, but so many things could have happened. Chris could have stepped back and fallen. You really could have gotten taken out in handcuffs. You didn’t think. You reacted to your wife giving you the side-eye, and you went up, and you made her day because she was bowled over laughing when it happened.”

Rose also took umbrage with the Academy’s solution to Smith’s antics: banning him from attending the ceremony for a decade. “What does that mean? You don’t even go every year,” she said. She also wasn’t buying the brief mea culpa he released days later. “I feel really bad that he never apologized,” she added. “His people wrote up a piece and said, ‘I apologize to Chris Rock,’ but something like that is personal. You reach out.”

Rock’s mom isn’t the only family member who’s spoken about what Smith did to him. Days after the incident, his brother, Tony Rock, shot down rumors, floated by Diddy, that the two had since reconciled, effectively saying the rapper had lied.

(Via THR)

The Minnesota Timberwolves beat the Memphis Grizzlies on Saturday night, 119-118, behind the best postseason performance of Karl-Anthony Towns’ career. As a result, Minnesota tied things up in the 2-7 matchup in the Western Conference at two games each with the series shifting back to Memphis next week.

After coming under some scrutiny for only attempting four shots as the Timberwolves failed to hold onto a big lead in Game 3, Towns came out with a chip on his shoulder. As a result, he joined Kevin Garnett as the only players in franchise history to hit the 30-point and 10-rebound benchmarks in a playoff game — Towns scored a team-high 33 points, including a 14-for-17 clip from the free throw line, with 14 rebounds.

Anthony Edwards also came up big for Minnesota. He left the game early with a non-contact knee injury, but came back and did not look like he missed a beat, scoring 24 points with four rebounds, four assists, and two steals. The point guard duo of Patrick Beverley and Jordan McLaughlin combined for 33 points and seven assists.

While Ja Morant did not have a good night by his standards — 11 points on 4-for-13 shooting with 15 assists and eight rebounds — Desmond Bane was a menace. The Grizzlies’ sharpshooting guard went for 34 points and connected on eight of his 12 attempts from deep, which ties his career-best scoring mark in a single game and set a personal best in made triples.

Dillon Brooks gave the team 24 points, while Brandon Clarke scored 15 on 7-for-9 shooting with five rebounds, four assists, a steal, and a block. Still, with the series now tied up at two games each, Memphis will need to get more out of their All-Star guard, as Morant is shooting 29 percent from the field over the last two games and has not hit the 20-point mark in either of them.

Game 5 will take place in Memphis on Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. ET on ESPN.

The Brooklyn Nets are on the brink of elimination in the first round of the NBA playoffs. Brooklyn entered Saturday evening looking for its first win in its 2-7 series with the Boston Celtics, and despite things shifting to the Barclays Center for the first time, Jayson Tatum’s latest monster performance on both ends of the floor put Boston one win away from the second round. By the time the clock hit zero, Boston picked up a 109-103 victory.

The story of the game was the play of Tatum, who is in the midst of a stellar series. Beyond his defense on Kevin Durant, who struggled mightily on Saturday, Tatum filled it up, leading all scorers with 39 points.

It was not just his scoring, though, that made him such a menace. Tatum recorded six steals, six assists, and five rebounds, showing off his full arsenal and capping off the win by taking the ball away from Kyrie Irving.

As is oftentimes the case when the Celtics pick up a win, Jaylen Brown likewise had a big game, going for 23 points, five assists, four rebounds, and two steals. Boston also got 14 points and six assists from Marcus Smart, while Payton Pritchard came off the bench and gave them 10 points.

For the Nets, Bruce Brown showed up in a big way, as the team’s peskiest defender provided a team-high 26 points, eight rebounds, three assists, two steals, and a block. The 26 points mark a playoff career-high for Brown.

The big issue for Brooklyn, though, was the play of the 1-2 punch of Durant and Irving. Both players scored 16 points, and did so on a combined 12-for-28 from the field. Both players did a good job setting up their teammates — Irving had nine assists and Durant had eight, while the latter also pulled in eight rebounds — but both of them (particularly Durant) look like they’re really struggling with the workload they’ve been asked to shoulder in recent weeks and the length and physicality of Boston’s defense. While much has been made of Ben Simmons potentially making his debut in Game 4, it is hardly a stretch to say that unless both guys figure some things out very, very quickly, Boston is going to punch its ticket to the conference semifinals sooner rather than later.

Beyond them, the Nets got 13 points and seven rebounds off the bench from Nic Claxton, 12 points out of Patty Mills, and 10 from Seth Curry. Turnovers, in particular, plagued Brooklyn, as Boston was able to turn 21 of them into 37 points.

Game 4 between the Nets and the Celtics will take place on Monday night at 7 p.m. ET on TNT.

The Utah Jazz and Dallas Mavericks are headed to a Game 5 with their series all tied up. Utah was able to spoil a monster 2022 playoff debut by Luka Doncic on Saturday evening by defending their home court and picking up a 100-99 win.

After a tightly-contested first quarter which saw the Jazz hold a slim lead, the two teams swapped roles with one another in the second and third quarters. Before halftime, Utah came out firing, winning the frame 30-19 to take a 12-point lead into the break, led by the trio of Donovan Mitchell, Jordan Clarkson, and Bojan Bogdanovic — the three players combined to score 39 of the Jazz’s 54 points.

Dallas managed to flip the script in the third, starting the frame on a 15-5 run and outscoring Utah by 15 over the course of the entire quarter.

With just under three minutes left in the quarter, Dorian Finney-Smith gave Dallas its first lead since the end of the first.

In the fourth, the Mavericks were able to extend their lead to as many as five points before Clarkson ripped off a personal 6-0 run to give Utah the lead. And when Doncic managed to put Dallas ahead at the free throw line, Clarkson came right back down and buried a three to wrest the lead away.

Things turned into a slog down the stretch, with Doncic and Brunson getting the ball and trying to score on one end and Gobert making trip after trip to the free throw line on the other. While Gobert struggled to punish Dallas from the line — he only went 3-for-8 from the 4:19 to the 2:36 mark in the fourth — the Mavericks were only to get two points in that period by way of a dunk by Dwight Powell.

The teams exchanged baskets down the stretch, and with less than a minute left, Mitchell missed a layup that led to a Mavericks rebound. On the ensuing possession, Doncic got isolated by Gobert and went to one of the staples of his game — a stepback three — which he buried over Utah’s big man.

The door was cracked open, however, when Mitchell attacked the basket, made a layup, and converted an and-one the next time down the floor.

Powell got the ball and missed both free throws. Mitchell pushed it down the floor and did something he’s been criticized for not doing enough: he threw up a lob to Gobert, who finished with authority.

Spencer Dinwiddie was able to get a look at the buzzer as Utah decided to double Doncic, but he wasn’t able to convert, and as a result, Utah tied the series up at two games each.

Clarkson led the Jazz with 25 points off the bench, while Mitchell had 23 points, seven assists, six rebounds, and two steals. Gobert stuffed the stat sheet, too, with 17 points and 15 rebounds. Doncic’s 30 points, 10 rebounds, and 4 assists were tops for Dallas, while Brunson pitched in 23.

Game 5 between the Jazz and the Mavericks will take place on Monday night at 9:30 p.m. ET. The game will be aired on TNT.