Category: News

Saweetie seems to be getting closer and closer to releasing her upcoming debut album, Pretty B*tch Music. But before it arrives, the singer appeared on Saturday Night Live for a pair of exciting performances. She began the night with a medley of “Tap In” and “Best Friend,” delivering a slowed-down version in a bedazzled dress in front of backup ballerina dancers.

Later on in the night, Saweetie returned to perform “Icy Chain” for the first time. The performacne featured sharp choreography, with her dancing and twerking her way through the performance. Both songs are expected to appear on Pretty B*tch Music, which was originally set to arrive in June. But Saweetie chose to delay it after she realized “soul” was missing. She spoke about this on the red carpet at the 2021 BET Awards this past summer.

“This album needs to have feelings, it needs to have soul, it needs to have spirit,” she said. “And I have a lot of room for improvement, so I’m gonna work on that.” A release date for Pretty B*tch Music has yet to be revealed but Saweetie previously said “it’s coming soon!”

You can watch Saweetie’s SNL performances in the videos above.

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

Megan Thee Stallion was set to perform with BTS tonight at the 2021 American Music Awards. Unfortunately, the rapper was forced to cancel. She took to Twitter to apologize for the unexpected change. “Hotties I was so excited to go to the @AMAs and perform with @BTS_official,” she wrote. “But due to an unexpected personal matter, I can no longer attend. I’m so sad! I really can’t wait to hit the stage with my guys and perform #BTS_Butter real soon!”

BTS and Megan shared their remix of “Butter” at the end of August, but the road to its release was a bit turbulent. Prior to its arrival, Megan was forced to petition for the song’s release after her label 150 Certified Entertainment tried to block her from dropping it. Megan requested “emergency relief from the Court” in order to release it and hours later, a judge ruled that she free to do so.

As for the 2021 American Music Awards, which her “WAP” collaborator Cardi B will host, Megan already took home the award for Favorite Female Artist — Hip-Hop. She also received nominations in the categories Favorite Trending Song and Favorite Album – Hip-Hop.

Despite Megan’s absence, AMA organizers confirmed that BTS will still perform “Butter,” in addition to “My Universe,” alongside Coldplay, on the show.

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

The Danish Girl didn’t come out that long ago, and yet it was still a very different time. It was 2015. Eddie Redmayne had won an Academy Award one year earlier for playing Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything. He would go on to receive another Oscar nomination for The Danish Girl, in which he played Lili Ilse Elvenes (called Lili Elbe in the film), who in 1930 became one of the first people to receive sex reassignment surgery. Even at the time, before talk of onscreen representation had become as pronounced as it is today (and before Dave Chappelle was routinely making trans jokes), Redmayne received backlash for being a cis performer playing a trans character. Now, some six years later, he’s going even further than that.

In a new interview with The Sunday Times, the English actor is of a different mind than he was in 2015. “No, I wouldn’t take it on now,” Redmayne the Times. “I made that film with the best intentions, but I think it was a mistake.”

At the time, Redmayne tried to gingerly defend taking the role while acknowledging that “there has been years of cisgender success on the back of trans stories.” But he still felt that, as a performer, “one should be able to play any sort of part if one plays it with a sense of integrity and responsibility.”

Redmayne no longer feels that way. However, he was asked whether his star power — and that of his costar Alicia Vikander, who won an Oscar for playing Elvenes’ spouse, Gerda Wegener — helped the movie get made. To that, he noted that, then as now, “many people don’t have a chair at the table.” He added, “There must be a leveling, otherwise we are going to carry on having these debates.”

(Via The Sunday Times)

Adele dropped her long-awaited fourth album 30 this weekend. But she did more than that: She was able to convince Spotify to alter one of its most controversial features. The music streamer announced they would remove their default shuffle option from albums, which now allows users to listen to in their intended order.

“This was the only request I had in our ever changing industry!” Adele had written before the change was made. “We don’t create albums with so much care and thought into our track listing for no reason. Our art tells a story and our stories should be listened to as we intended. Thank you Spotify for listening.” In response, Spotify’s Twitter account replied, “Anything for you.”

A spokesperson for Spotify explained their decision to Billboard. “As Adele mentioned, we are excited to share that we have begun rolling out a new Premium feature that has been long requested by both users and artists to make play the default button on all albums,” they said. Those who want to shuffle an album will now have to go to the “Now Playing” window and press the shuffle option. “As always, we will continue to iterate our products and features to create the best experiences for both artists and their fans,” they added.

30 is out now via Columbia Records. Get it here.

It’s been over a year since Donald Trump lost re-election, which means we’re closing in the anniversary of the Jan. 6 Capitol siege, when the former president’s supporters violently tried to overturn the results. There’s still been no proper investigation by the Department of Justice, leaving that work to the House’s Jan. 6 committee. They’ve run into some roadblocks, including ignored subpoenas and one high-profile indictment. But many others are in fact talking, according to one of its members.

California representative Zoe Lofgren went on CNN Saturday, where she brought host Jim Acosta up-to-speed — or as up-to-speed as she could be without making too much public. But they’ve interviewed over 200 witnesses, on top of the dozens of subpoenas they’ve issued, with more en route. And a large number of them are former Trump staffers squealing on their own recognizances.

“Let me not be that specific, but let me say certainly there have been people, part of the Trump administration, who have spoken to us and provided important insights that have led us to further questions,” Lofgren told Acosta. She said many of them are “people who were in the administration during the former president’s term who have information that they want to give to us,” adding that a lot of them are “coming in voluntarily.”

Lofgren suggested that one reason for their willing compliance is to avoid any legal issues. Last month, three witnesses who have been speaking to the committee anonymously spoke with Rolling Stone, alleging, among other things, that no less than Paul Gosar — who last week was censured by the House for posting an anime video of him murdering both fellow representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and President Joe Biden — offered some staffers blanket pardons as they set up rallies in the lead-up to that fateful day.

Lofgren also spoke about former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, who also ignored a subpoena, citing “executive privilege” — a move Lofgren dismissed as erroneous.

You can watch Lofgren’s appearance on CNN in the video above.

(Via Insider)

The Florida Gators entered this season with hopes of being a playoff contender and the top challenger to Georgia in the SEC East. After pushing Alabama to the brink early in the season in a two-point loss, it seemed those expectations might have been on point, but since beating Tennessee a week later, the wheels have come off in Gainesville.

Florida has lost five of its last seven games, with its only wins coming against Vanderbilt and Samford — and Samford led them at the half and finished with 52 points. Most recently, the Gators fell to Mizzou in Columbia in a 24-23 overtime loss that saw them once again looking listless on the offensive end. Less than 24 hours later, head coach Dan Mullen was fired from his post ahead of the Gators’ final game against Florida State.

It is a rather incredible fall from grace for Mullen in his fourth season at Florida, who entered this season with a 29-9 record as head coach before this year’s disastrous 5-6 effort. Mullen came under fire initially following the loss to Georgia when Kirby Smart took a not so subtle shot at the Gators struggles on the recruiting trail, leading Mullen to say he would talk about recruiting after the season — an indication that the Florida head man was not taking that part of his job seriously enough.

Now the Gators will enter yet another coaching search, desperate to find someone who can elevate the team back to their Urban Meyer era success — something they hoped Mullen, the offensive coordinator under Meyer, would do. To do that, recruiting figures to be at the top of the Gators’ wish list, as Mullen’s abilities as a playcaller were rarely in doubt, but it was clear by this weekend that the team was no longer all-in with him as coach and their struggles on the recruiting trail made it a pretty easy decision for boosters to move on.

The Sacramento Kings got off to a solid start to the season, but the wheels quickly fell off and they now find themselves at 6-11 after losing seven of their last eight contests. Most recently, the Kings lost to the Utah Jazz in a game where a fan literally puked on the court, halting play for 15 minutes as the arena crew cleaned up and offering a heavy-handed, but on the nose, metaphor for Kings basketball this season.

On Sunday, 12 hours after that loss, head coach Luke Walton was relieved of his duties as head coach, as reported by ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski. Alvin Gentry will take over the team on an interim basis.

It’s not a surprising outcome, given there were rumblings a week ago that Walton was back on the hot seat amid a losing streak and, this year, there wouldn’t be any slack given to him to try and work through long droughts like a season ago when he survived not one but two separate nine game losing streaks. Walton exits Sacramento with a 68-93 record as head coach, never getting the Kings back on track enough to reach the playoffs, which has been the stated goal of this season.

The Kings will now hope Gentry can bring a fresh perspective to the top seat on the bench and get a Kings team that has talent but struggles to put it all together to become something approaching a consistent, cohesive unit.

The Golden State Warriors boast the NBA’s best record at 14-2 and they are about to add a major piece back to their lineup. The Warriors, as they have for the past two seasons, have started this season without the services of Klay Thompson as he continues to work his way back from a torn Achilles — suffered last offseason after returning to the court from a torn ACL.

Thompson has been champing at the bit to get back on the court, oftentimes doing pregame warmups in full uniform to get that feel back of being in the arena and on an NBA court. Now, according to The Athletic’s Shams Charania and Anthony Slater, Thompson has been cleared to be a full participant at Warriors practices after successfully getting through a week of scrimmages. Most notably, his return could come much sooner than initially anticipated.

Klay Thompson came through well after a week of 5-on-5 scrimmaging and has been cleared to be a full-time participant in all future Warriors’ practices, sources tell The Athletic. Thompson is trending toward a potential return the week before Christmas Day, those sources said.

Prior to the season there was some hope Klay might make a Christmas debut, but Steve Kerr tried to keep expectations low for his star’s return by noting the Warriors were simply hoping for some time in January. Thompson, however, is known as a relentless competitor and it comes as little surprise that he has worked his way back a bit ahead of schedule. Golden State will be in Phoenix on Christmas Day, and if this new timetable is accurate, it would make sense for Thompson to make his return either on Dec. 20 or Dec. 23, as the Warriors host the Kings and then the Grizzlies on those two dates which would be after a 5-game road trip out East.

The Republicans of 2021 are so unlike the Republicans of the pre-Trump era that they might as well be a different party. (SNL even lampooned this unusual development on this weekend’s show.) Case in point: Fox News has gone from a GOP propaganda machine to not right wing enough for the likes of Donald Trump, who will give Newsmax more love than the network that arguably started it all, even though he’s gotten them in financial and legal headaches. Speaking of lawsuits, one of the Trumpiest Trumists, Mike Lindell, is so mad at them that he’s staging a protest — while still giving them advertising dollars.

As per The Daily Beast, the MyPillow Guy took his Fox News hatred to new heights on Friday, telling listeners of his show that he’ll be paying them a visit.

“We are going to do something out in front of Fox News, I think we should have—you know, if people want to go down there, maybe we should give out Frank Speech signs,” Lindell said. “They are a big part of our country being taken from us,” then called them both a “controlled opposition” and the “worst media outlet in probably the history of the planet.”

The beef between Lindell and Fox News dates back to the summer, when he network refused to air ads not for MyPillows but for a viral symposium chockful of voter fraud lies and other misinformation about the year-old 2020 election. Enraged, he took his toys and went home, pulling his pillow ads as well. The stalemate only lasted a couple months. By late September, MyPillow ads were back on the network watched by everyone’s older, Facebook-loving relatives.

But clearly the two have yet to fully patch things up. Lindell’s sidekick, Douglas Frank, doubled down on his compatriot’s anti-Fox rhetoric, claiming they were “not a credible source of news” and calling them “traitors to our country.” Of course, you don’t have to be on the far right to disagree with those sentiments.

(Via The Daily Beast)

When he won his one-term presidency, Donald Trump did more than just radically alter the GOP. He made it trickier-than-ever to tell who’s Republican and who’s Democrat. And in a sketch on this weekend’s Simu Liu-hosted SNL, we got a stark reminder of how blurry the lines separating parties that have long been at loggerheads have become.

SNL premiered a new satirical game show. It’s called “Republican or Not?,” and the premise is simple: Contestants meet strangers and, based on some of their opinions, must guess which side of the political divide they fall on. “ Seems easy, right?” jokes host Keenan Thompson, knowingly.

“I grew up in Ohio so I’ve been playing this game my whole life. Kind of an expert,” boasts contestant Ego Nwodim. But she reveals she’s about as good at this game as her competition, played by Liu.

A typical example: Kyle Mooney plays a man who “thinks Facebook is evil.” But that’s not terribly helpful. “Because they’re spreading misinformation or because they banned Donald Trump?” Liu asks. Other Mooney opinions include “I respect pro-athletes who stand up for their beliefs” and “God, I hate cops.” But does he mean he hates police forces overrun by systemic racism, or does he hate the cops who protected the Capitol building from violent Trump supporters?

One of the people is no stranger: It’s Liz Cheney, the daughter of Dick Cheney and a lifelong, classical Republican, who was ousted last week by the Wyoming Republican Party over her opposition to Donald Trump. “I’ve been fighting for Republican values all my life,” she tells the crowd.

But Thompson knows she’s not conservative, not in 2021’s version of the GOP. “Like it or not you are the Rachel Dolezal of the Republican party,” he informs her. “We will see you on MSNBC in about a week.”

You can watch the sketch in the video above.