Category: News

Rico Nasty‘s debut album Nightmare Vacation is less than a year old, but lately, it feels as though she’s already building up to its inevitable follow-up. Within the last two months, she’s released a pair of polished singles, “Magic” and “Buss,” and just weeks after releasing the video for the former, she’s already back with a new video for “Buss.”

The video brings plenty of visual flair to its rather plain concept, embellishing Rico’s frantic performances with sizzling neon lights and sending bright bolts of vibrantly colored electricity shooting across the screen and around Rico’s body. Whatever it is she happens to be working toward, it would appear to line up with the version of Rico first introduced on her candy-coated Sugar Trap mixtapes, returning to the synth-heavy, SoundCloud-friendly production style and cocky, straightforward raps she used to cross over in the first place — as opposed to the more experimental, hyperpop-laced material on her album.

In the meantime, she’s been semi-enjoying the “bittersweet” moments of motherhood, such as sending her five-year-old off to kindergarten, and contributing to her friend IDK’s No Label Academy at Harvard University.

Watch Rico Nasty’s “Buss” video above.

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

The NBA has been rolling out its policies regarding vaccinations against COVID-19 ahead of the 2021-22 campaign. The most prominent move the league has made has been making the folks who interact with players and officials — coaches, executives, stadium staffers, etc. — get the vaccine. While players are not included due to that being something the league needs to negotiate with the union, the NBA came up with something of a workaround.

According to Shams Charania of The Athletic, players who refuse the vaccine and do not have a medical or religious exemption will not be allowed to play in home games or go to their facilities for team activities in markets where local rules will prevent them from doing so. Charania specifically pointed out the New York teams and the Golden State Warriors, both of which are based in places that have strict COVID-19 mandates.

This doesn’t mean that unvaccinated players are done for the season. Charania noted this is only for those teams when they play home games, but does not apply to players on those teams going on the road or road teams visiting those cities.

Perhaps the league will mandate the vaccine instead of relying on home cities laying out guidelines that are not particularly broad. If you are an NBA player in any of these markets and you wanna play this season, but you have not yet gotten vaccinated against the novel coronavirus, click here for information on how you can change that.

The hits (to the nuts) keep coming.

Paramount Pictures has pushed back the release dates for two already-delayed Tom Cruise movies, Top Gun: Maverick and Mission: Impossible 7, due to the pandemic. The Top Gun sequel moves from November 19, 2021, to May 27, 2022, while the seventh installment in the Mission: Impossible franchise, which was supposed to come out on that May 27th, will now be released on September 30, 2022. It gets worse:

The studio has also pushed back Jackass Forever, which moves to Feb. 4, 2022, departing an Oct. 22, 2021 date.

The Jackass movies are some of my favorite theater experiences in my life, so while I understand the reason for the delay (wear a mask and get vaccinated, folks), me and the boys are sad that we have to wait another four months to watch Johnny Knoxville get speared by a bull. Especially with Venom: Let There Be Carnage delayed, too.

While studios such as Warner Bros. and Disney have experimented with putting tentpoles on streaming services and in theaters day-and-date, Paramount has kept many of its big titles, such as A Quiet Place Part II, for theatrical only. It did sell off The Tomorrow War to Amazon and put Mark Wahlberg’s Infinite on Paramount+, but it has been expected that Top Gun and Mission would remain theatrical only, as Cruise is a strong proponent of the theatrical experience and because of the hefty budgets of these movies.

The one positive from all this: you can take your sweetie to Jackass Forever on Valentine’s Day.

(Via the Hollywood Reporter)

In 2005, perhaps no song was more ubiquitous and earthshaking than Mike Jones’ “Still Tippin’.” The track, which was the lead single from Jones’ album Who Is Mike Jones?, constituted not only most of America’s introduction to the boisterous Houston rapper but also to the signature “chopped and screwed” sound first popularized in H-Town rap. Produced by Salih Williams over a sample of Gioachino Rossini’s “William Tell Overture,” the hypnotic loop took over, launching Jones, guest rappers Slim Thug and Paul Wall, and Houston hip-hop to national recognition.

But our React Like You Know panel, which consists mostly of artists in their 20s like BIA, Blxst, BlueBucksClan, Blueface, and Houston native Erica Banks, might not remember all that. Certainly, it’s plenty of their first time watching the Dr. Teeth-directed video, as they marvel at the low-fi visual effects, country-fried concept, and the fact that, upon testing, the phone number that Jones rhymes in the song’s lyrics still works. A marketing revolution in its time, the phone number connected callers to a recorded voice message from Jones himself, which he’s astonishingly kept going for the 15 years since the song’s explosive popularity.

Watch the newest episode of React Like You Know above.

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

Twitter officially launched its new Super Follows feature on Wednesday, and predictably, it’s getting roasted on Twitter. Announced earlier in the year, the new feature will allow users to charge their followers a monthly subscription fee for access to exclusive tweets. However, the feature is not open to everybody, and naturally, Twitter will be taking a cut. Via Variety:

Users will be given 97% of the revenue generated from the monetized features after in-app purchase fees. However, once an individual user makes $50,000 in lifetime earnings from Twitter, the company will take 20%. To become eligible for the Super Follows waitlist, a user needs to have at least 10,000 followers, be 18 years old and have tweeted 25 times in the last 30 days.

So far, the reaction to Super Follows has been not great. The official Super Follows account is getting pelted with insults comparing the feature to OnlyFans but for Twitter as users scoff at the idea of paying for tweets.

According to Variety, “iOS users in the U.S. and Canada can Super Follow select accounts starting Wednesday, and the feature will roll out globally in the next few weeks,” but it’ll be interesting to see if users actually start plunking down for tweets or the reactions are a sign that your average Twitter user just don’t think that bird is ready to fly.

Get it?

Because of the logo.

It’s a very subtle joke.

(Via Variety)

Ted Cruz has been on a social media tear over the withdrawal in Afghanistan, and he already got pelted with “Cancun” comebacks after tweeting (without doing any research), “America doesn’t leave Americans behind.” This led people to pounce upon him because no one will ever forget that he flew off to a sunny Mexico resort while Texas residents froze without power during a catastrophic ice storm. Well, Cruz is in more trouble for not doing his research. He retweeted (and later deleted) a video with a false caption (the original tweet can be seen at Mediaite, with Cruz writing, “This horrifying image encapsulates Joe Biden’s Afghanistan catastrophe: The Taliban hanging a man from an American Blackhawk helicopter… Tragic. Unimaginable.”

As tragic as that situation sounded, yes, it turned out to be “unimaginable” because the video was not the situation that Cruz (and fellow GOP lawmaker Dan Crenshaw) believed it to be. As Mediaite points out, the man does not at all appear as though he’s being hung, and other footage of the scene showed the man in good spirits after landing safely with both feet on the ground. Journalist Bilal Sarwary soon tweeted the truth of the situation, which is that a Taliban fighter was attempting a maneuver with a flag.

“Afghan pilot flying this is someone I have known over the years,” Sarwary tweeted. “He was trained in the US and UAE, he confirmed to me that he flew the Blackhawk helicopter. Taliban fighter seen here was trying to install Taliban flag from air but it didn’t work in the end.”

After Cruz was alerted to what had really happened, he deleted his falsely captioned tweet (and retweet) and attempted to make some amends (while spreading more falsehoods). “It turns out the post I shared w/ a video of Taliban ‘hanging a man’ from a helicopter may be inaccurate. So I deleted the tweet,” Cruz wrote. “What remains accurate is: – The Taliban are brutal terrorists. – We left them millions in US military equipment, including Black Hawk helicopters.”

At that point, people (even those who claim to support Cruz) lectured him about the dangers of misinformation, particularly because he decided to spread even more misinformation, this time about military equipment that was left behind but disabled. Maybe one day, he’ll listen.

And here comes the “delete your account” request, which is practically obligatory.

(Via Mediaite)

Petey has become an idiosyncratic indie favorite over the past year-plus, and now he’s nearing a major career milestone, as his debut album, Lean Into Life, is set to drop at the end of the week. Before then, though, he has shared a video for the title track, and like his TikTok clips, it’s an absurd delight. In the clip, multiple characters (all played by Petey) work in an office building and interact with each other in other environments. Eventually, the characters learn how to “bust into life” and enjoy their existence more than they were before.

Petey previously said of the song, “‘Lean Into Life’ is about recognizing that things aren’t working, but instead of trying to take on everything at once, just making little changes that can start to point you in the right direction. I realized I didn’t need to take a huge leap in my life. I just needed to start leaning into things and taking tiny steps towards a healthier situation.”

In a recent interview with Uproxx, he spoke about the strangeness of his music and himself, saying, “I think that I’m really strange. I think that I’m really strange and a lot of people close to me tell me that I’m really strange. And I think that the music that I make is strange. Strange and not strange. And even the not strange, sometimes it’s strange how not strange it is. And with the TikTok too, because like I said, it’s just sort of all in the same bubble for me, I just sort of dive into what’s authentic about me, what I think makes me super weird. I realize how many people that resonates with and how many people are also super weird in the way that I think I’m super weird, which is why this is awesome and why this feels really good.”

Watch the “Lean Into Life” video above.

Lean Into Life is out 9/3 via Terrible Records. Pre-order it here.

During his nearly 30 years as a late-night host, Conan O’Brien brought us many great sketches (here are 25 of them!), but arguably none are more beloved than “Walker, Texas Ranger Lever.” The premise should be self-explanatory, but just in case: Conan pulls a lever that plays a ridiculous clip from Walker, Texas Ranger starring Chuck Norris.

“I think nine months went by [after Norris himself appeared in a meta send-off on Late Night] and we had two weeks off and Conan came back from break and he said, ‘All anyone’s saying to me everywhere I go is you’ve got to keep doing more. We need more Walker clips,’” writer Mike Sweeney told us. “It was an endless supply. They went down and found more great clips and we ended up doing it again for another two months. Then we stopped again. The same thing happened again nine months later. Fans on the street were like, ‘Come on, show more clips.’ I think there was a third round of it.”

But Conan eventually had to stop playing Walker clips, or else the show would have gone bankrupt. “I loved that bit. It was one of my favorite things to do and then we had to stop doing it,” he said on the latest episode of his Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend podcast. “The actors who were in the clips, they started to recognize that we were showing these clips of them and they started to demand all the money that you needed to pay them in residuals.” After his producer, Jeff Ross, told him that they couldn’t do it anymore because it would “cost them millions of dollars,” Conan replied, “No, we’re going to keep doing it… I want it to go to trial, and I want to defend myself. And I want to show the clips to the jury and say, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, that is not acting.’”

Conan didn’t go through with his idea, but let’s pull that lever!

You can listen to the Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend episode below (the Walker talk starts around the 15 minute mark).

Sometimes a person opens their mouth to sing, and magic happens. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what qualities make a voice transcend the average and transfix an audience, but we know it when we hear it.

Enter Shawn Louisiana.

A video of him singing in a barbershop has gone viral and it’s definitely worth a watch. He wrote on YouTube, “The older guy didn’t think I could pull off a Sam Cooke song,” but when he started singing “A Change is Gonna Come,” he definitely proved that he could. Really well. Like, whoa.

Watch:

The older guy didn’t think I could pull off a Sam Cooke song #achangegonnacome

www.youtube.com

There’s a reason that video has gotten nearly 7 million views on TikTok alone.

Louisiana frequently shares videos of himself just singing casually for the camera, and I don’t understand why this man’s talent is not more well known yet.

I mean, just listen to this “Stand By Me” cover. Like butter. Sing me to sleep, sir.

Stand By Me – Ben E. King cover #tiktok

www.youtube.com

His Instagram account says he’s available to book for weddings. That’s nice, but someone please get this man a record deal so we can listen to him croon all day.

For more from Shawn Louisiana, follow him on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.

Donald Trump still thinks the 2020 Presidential Election was stolen from him and now, he’s blaming stairs.

During a wildly incoherent interview Monday evening with right-wing pandering network OAN, Trump chatted with host Dan Ball about the electoral loss he just can’t seem to move on from, but he had some new theories as to why the whole thing was rigged against him. In discussing the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan, the twice-impeached former president claimed he would’ve handled the situation much better than his predecessor, President Joe Biden, and ended up calling into question his rival’s physical and mental fitness. Why? Because … stairs.

When he fell up the stairs, fell up the stairs three times, it was not on any program,” Trump rambled (via Raw Story). “If that was me, it would have been the biggest story for months, career-ending. It was never on the media, never on mainstream media, his trip. It’s okay, you can trip. Gerald Ford tripped, never lived it down. I would go very carefully down the stairs, I don’t want to trip. You don’t live it down with these people. With him, they never put it on.”

Trump had more than a few run-ins with the stairs leading up to the entrance of Air Force One that were, in fact, covered by the media at the time. He also regularly went on disjointed tangents during his many rallies and once bragged about taking a dementia test on-air, so the connection between his inability to confidently scale a few steps and his mental capacity to run an entire country seemed legitimate, like something the free press should investigate. How one stumble from Biden relates to a months-long plan to pull U.S. Forces out of the Middle East, one that was indirectly launched by Trump’s own negotiations with Taliban leaders, remains to be seen.

But this is Trump, so he’ll find a way to connect the red string on his ever-growing board of conspiracy theories eventually. This time, he’s using the negative coverage he got from “Stair-Gate” to somehow prove his suspicion of voter fraud. We’ll let him tell it:

Why do they protect them, and with Biden, there’s nothing — the people get it, ultimately the people get it,” Trump continued. “I got 75 million votes. I had the media totally against my, outside of yourself and a few others, I had the media against me as much as anyone has ever seen. No one has seen anything like it. I had the vicious Democrats, communists socialists, call them whatever the hell they are or they’ll impeach you if you sneeze, and just vicious what they do, and I had big tech against me, and I was told you can’t win if you have big tech. I had 75 million votes, more than any sitting president has ever gotten. They said he had 81 million, there’s no way he got 81 [million votes].”

What we’re getting from this heap of nonsense is that Trump thinks some bad coverage of his continuing battle with those Democrat-backed stairs proves the media is committed to protecting Biden, which is why they won’t admit the election was stolen? But hey, if you’re fluent in gibberish, feel free to offer a better translation.

(Via Raw Story)