Category: News

VanJess arrived with their first project in almost three years at the beginning of 2021 with their Homegrown EP. The project’s eight songs came attached with features from Jimi Tents, Garren, Kaytranada, Phony Ppl, and Devin Morrison. While all the aforementioned names provided strong collaborations on Homegrown, the EP’s strongest effort is a solo track. “Slow Down” grew to be a fan favorite off the project and now it’s getting a well-deserved remix with help from R&B standout act and labelmate Lucky Daye.

Lucky Daye leads the way with a brief verse to begin the song while VanJess sticks to the verses they laid for the song’s original version. During an interview with Uproxx earlier this year, VanJess’ Ivana and Jess spoke about the song and revealed what inspired them to create it. “The toxic love thing we hear about all the time and it seems trendy and that’s kind of what we’re thinking about, let’s put out a song about positive love, you know, what love is supposed to be?” Jess said. “Can we get back to that? That’s how that one had come.”

The remix arrives after Lucky Daye kicked off his 2021 campaign with an EP of his own, Table For Two, which delivered collaborations alongside Ari Lennox, Mahalia, Joyce Wrice, Yebba, Tiana Major9, and Queen Naija.

You can listen to the “Slow Down” remix in the video above.

Homegrown is out now via Keep Cool/RCA. Get it here.

Wizkid’s mainstream appeal has noticeably increased since the afro-fusion star dropped his stellar fourth album Made In Lagos last fall. The project saw the singer work with big names like H.E.R., Ella Mai, Burna Boy, and Skepta, but the album’s most popular song came through an unexpected collaboration with fellow afro-fusion singer Tems on “Essence.” The track has grown to not only run in contention for song of the summer this year, but it’s also the highest-charting African song ever, as it peaked at No. 54 on the singles chart this past week. Now, the song is due for a huge boost thanks to a new remix.

Wizkid and Tems invite Justin Bieber into the “Essence” experience for a brand new remix of the track. While some fans felt the collaboration was a bit inorganic, Wizkid and Bieber are paying no mind to the comments, showing each other love on social media. “Thank u for letting me jump on the song of the summer,” Bieber wrote in a Twitter post that announced the remix. In his own post, Wizkid wrote, “I promised you something special. @temsbaby & @justinbieber on da way.”

In another post, Wizkid teased more music on the way for fans. “Made In Lagos Deluxe,” he wrote on Twitter.

Press play on the remix to “Essence” in the video above.

Made In Lagos is out now via Starboy Entertainment/RCA. Get it here.

It’s been almost two years since Lizzo delivered a new track to the world, with that being a remix of “Good As Hell” with Ariana Grande. However, when you consider how monumental 2019 was for Lizzo’s career, it’s understandable why the singer may have opted for a break once everything settled down. Between her Platinum-selling third album, Cuz I Love You, which peaked at No. 4 on the albums chart and winning in the Best Urban Contemporary Album category at the 2020 Grammys, that year’s success was life-changing for Lizzo. But now she’s back with Cardi B by her side for a brand new single, “Rumors.”

On the track, which arrives with an elegant video, Lizzo and Cardi use sarcasm to laugh off their haters by labeling all the rumors about them as true. Lizzo touches on comments on her body image, her music, and a possible fling with Drake while Cardi addresses claims of having “fake ass and fake boobs” and using streaming machines to boost her music.

“Rumors” is the latest track that finds Cardi B aligned with a big-name female act within the music industry. Last summer, she teamed with Megan Thee Stallion for their No. 1 single “WAP” and earlier this year, she joined Normani for the singer’s comeback single, “Wild Side.”

You can press play on “Rumors” in the video above.

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

Major League Baseball’s Field of Dreams game finally happened on Thursday night, with the Chicago White Sox and New York Yankees squaring off in the middle of a corn field reminiscent of the movie the event was named after. The game was at thriller, with a two-run walk-off home run from Chicago’s Tim Anderson sealing the win against the visiting Yankees.

Much like the NHL’s outdoor game in Lake Tahoe earlier this year, this game was all about visuals. A literal cornfield was the outfield fence, and players (and Kevin Costner) emerged from the fields to take the, well, field, on Thursday.

A lot of people noticed how tall the corn was in the outfield, especially when the players emerged from the field. It’s much taller than they are! Even Aaron Judge, who is a large home run-hitting human being. He’s dwarfed by those stalks.

And there’s a good reason for that: the corn out there is a bit different than many non-agrarian baseball fans may expect. That’s usually called field corn, which grows much taller than the sweet corn you might eat fresh off the considerably shorter stalk. Which is why when some White Sox players tried to eat it on Thursday night, it did not go well at all.

Joe Buck even asks “that’s feed corn, right?” as a player abruptly spits it out. Because it’s not good corn! As you can read here, there’s a pretty big difference between the corn in that outfield and the sweet corn you’d expect to find at a grocery store. It’s generally used for very different things, and needs to age on the stalk to actually be something people enjoy putting inside their bodies after a bit of additional processing. Basically, that corn is often turned into corn meal or corn flour and used for other corn-like purposes like tortilla chips and corn flakes. So it’s technically edible just, you know, not yet.

And now we all know.

By all accounts, No. 2 overall pick Jalen Green has looked the part during the 2021 NBA Las Vegas Summer League. The talented guard has put on a show with his shot creation profile, making life difficult on opponents, and it is very clear that Green has sky-high potential, even after only a few minutes of play in a Summer League setting. Unfortunately for excited basketball observers, though, it appears that Green will not be participating for the remainder of the week in the desert, as Chris Haynes of Yahoo reports it is now likely that he will be shut down due to a hamstring issue.

Tim MacMahon of ESPN went on to report that the team is not particularly worried about the injury and this is being done as a precaution.

Green left Thursday’s game against the Toronto Raptors after only 12 minutes, and his hamstring was the culprit of that early exit. The former G League Ignite standout did finish with 13 points before heading to the bench, though, and Green averaged 20.3 points per game on 51 percent shooting and a blistering 53 percent from three-point range in the first three contests.

At this stage, Green’s reported shutdown seems to be precautionary in nature, and that is obviously a good thing. There is no reason to push him in any way, shape, or form, and as of now, the focus should be on training camp and the beginning of a promising rookie season.

What seemed like a silly gimmick turned into one of the best Major League Baseball games of the year. Thursday night’s tilt between the New York Yankees and the Chicago White Sox during the league’s inaugural Field of Dreams game in Iowa ended with Chicago star Tim Anderson hitting a baseball deep into a big honkin’ corn field to give the White Sox a 9-8 win.

Chicago entered the ninth inning with a comfortable lead and closer Liam Hendricks on the mound. Unfortunately for him, the Yankees were able to go yard twice — Aaron Judge sent a Hendricks offering over the outfield wall for a two-run moonshot, and after the recently-acquired Joey Gallo drew a walk, Giancarlo Stanton stepped up to the plate and hit a dinger of his own to put New York ahead.

But the White Sox were undeterred. Zach Britton took the bump and, after picking up the first out via a grounder, walked Seby Zavala, who battled back from an 0-2 count.

Up stepped Anderson, who sent the first pitch he saw deep into the night.

It a brutal loss for the Yankees, which find themselves in the thick of the American League Wild Card race, while the White Sox are now 2.5 games back of the Tampa Bay Rays for the No. 1 seed in the AL as the race for the postseason ramps up.

Horatio Sanz has found himself in legal trouble over his time on Saturday Night Live and the lawsuit apparently has a number of the show’s past stars involved as well. Thursday brought word that a lawsuit has been filed against the former SNL actor accusing him of grooming an underage girl as well as sexual assault amid a years-long sexual relationship.

As Page Six detailed with the full criminal complaint, Sanz is accused of meeting an underage “superfan” and grooming her online through sexually-charged messages and offers of information on the show. He eventually invited her to a cast party where he groped her and made inappropriate advances toward her, including offering her alcohol while cast members “looked the other way.”

The unnamed Pennsylvania teen, who was 17 at the time, was running an “SNL” fan site in May 2002 when Sanz allegedly took her on a limo ride then “digitally penetrated her genitals” at a post-show bash, according to the lawsuit, filed in Manhattan Supreme Court.

The girl first met Sanz at age 15 — when he was 31 years old — in 2000 after he invited her to a taping of the sketch comedy show, according to the lawsuit, which names the actor and SNL Studios as defendants.

The next year, he summoned her to several after-show parties where he allowed her to drink, touched her inappropriately and told her “to sit on his lap,” according to the lawsuit.

As the suit details, in August of 2001, when the girl was 16, Sanz reached out online and offered her tickets to the show as well as gave her behind-the-scenes details about the cast and its musical guests. He then asked her for explicit photos and “to perform sexual acts, including masturbation, which he asked her to describe to him.” The suit claims this is the start of a years-long virtual sexual relationship with the girl that later escalated when they met in person.

According to the report, Sanz has called the lawsuit “categorically false.” But the report also detailed an alleged meeting between the two in 2019 where he apologized and claimed to be a “different person” more than a decade later.

When she ran into Sanz at a comedy event in 2019, he apologized, said he “felt terrible” and admitted she could “#metoo” him for his actions, according to the lawsuit.

“[I] swear on a stack of improv books … I’m a different person,” he allegedly said.

“I had a real issue with sex. I was stunted. I didn’t know how it worked,” he added, according to the lawsuit. “I spent all my 20’s trying to be funny. So I wasn’t normal with girls.”

The details of the suit are still unfolding publicly, and the allegations described are disturbing to say the least. But as pointed out both by Page Six and others reading the lawsuit, the particulars are not positive for anyone involved with the show at the time. Cast parties are mentioned several times, and Jimmy Fallon is mentioned by name in the suit, including allegedly emailing the underage girl in addition to Sanz.

You can read the full lawsuit here.

[via Page Six]

The WNBA is back from its Olympics break, and if Thursday night’s Commissioner’s Cup was any indication, the Seattle Storm look like the team to beat. Seattle, led by a stat sheet-stuffing 17 point-night from Breanna Stewart, smoked the Connecticut Sun, 79-57, to reopen the WNBA season and snag a $30,000 prize per player.

The game was the first of its kind, broadcast on Amazon Prime Video and held at a neutral site, the newly named Footprint Center in downtown Phoenix. The Storm and Sun earned the chance to compete for the Cup by way of their regular-season record in 10 conference games, though this final contest counted only for prize money and not in the standings.

The Cup began relatively close, but Seattle’s ruthless efficiency on offense soon won out. Stewart, the MVP of the game and winner of her own additional $5,000 reward, led the Storm with 15 first-quarter points. She didn’t miss a beat after earning MVP of the Tokyo Olympics women’s basketball tournament.

On the other side, Jonquel Jones, who is vying for league MVP alongside Stewart after leading the Sun to a 14-6 record during the first half of the season, made a few dazzling plays in the open court for Connecticut.

In the second half, Jones’ shot didn’t fall quite as easily, and the Storm turned their defense intensity up a few notches. As a result, the tempo sped up to favor Seattle, and they were able to generate open jump shots and layups repeatedly.

In particular, once the Sun’s defense keyed into Stewart, she started dishing passes around the court and setting up teammates for great looks. She only scored two points after the first but added three assists, four steals, and three blocks.

Though Connecticut was favored to win heading into the game, it was the Storm who came out of the gates looking like the league’s best side. Just as they did repeatedly in the Bubble last year, Seattle was able to spread their out, play fast, and turn defense into offense. When they do that, it’s time to cross your fingers and hope they miss.

In the first-ever WNBA Commissioner’s Cup, fans were treated to a dominant showing from the Storm dynasty that has defined the past four seasons, setting off a stretch run in which they clearly have pole position.

As the Delta variant of the novel coronavirus continues to upend life in America, a number of institutions are weighing just how to help bring an end to the pandemic and see life return to something much closer to normal than we’ve had the last 18 months. For many, that means requiring employees or patrons to show proof of vaccination or negative COVID-19 tests.

Those less willing to accept that vaccination is a clear path to helping end the death and suffering of the pandemic have launched a number of legal cases to fight vaccination mandates from various institutions. But one somewhat surprising blow to their cause came on Thursday when Supreme Court Justice (and controversial Trump nominee) Amy Coney Barrett denied a request to block a vaccine mandate from Indiana University.

According to the New York Times, the Supreme Court allowed the university to impose its vaccine mandate, dismissing a suit brought by eight students who claimed the rule violated their constitutional rights to “bodily integrity, autonomy and medical choice.”

Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who oversees the federal appeals court in question, turned down the students’ request for emergency relief without comment, which is the court’s custom in ruling on emergency applications. She acted on her own, without referring the application to the full court, and she did not ask the university for a response. Both of those moves were indications that the application was not on solid legal footing.

The students were represented by James Bopp Jr., a prominent conservative lawyer who has been involved in many significant lawsuits, including the Citizens United campaign finance case.

That the ruling was turned down is not particularly surprising given the case law about vaccine mandates from other eras of US history, including the right of schools to mandate vaccines for students to enroll. But that it was Barrett who ruled to dismiss the suit caused some conservatives to lose their mins on Thursday. Especially given her extremely conservative view of the law and that she was a Trump appointee to the court pushed through quickly after the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the word “traitor” seemed to be thrown around a lot about Barrett after less than a year on the court.

There were a lot of tweets about the ruling, enough to make the justice’s name trend on Twitter by Thursday night.

That a ruling was made that largely makes sense and is still a surprise given who is on the Supreme Court says a lot about where we are in America as well as about the highest court in the land. But expect to hear a lot more about court cases and vaccine mandates as the Delta variant surges and life amid a pandemic continues to evolve.

Drake has worked with a long list of names in his lengthy career. While many of them have proved to be successful, few have created chemistry with the Toronto rapper like Rick Ross has. The duo has a decent list of collaborations, with each receiving positive reviews from fans when it arrives. With that being said, it comes as no surprise that Drake has high praise for Rick Ross, but his recent comments bring things to a new level.

On Thursday, the Toronto rapper shared a video to his Instagram Story that captured the first meeting between Rick Ross and Smiley, OVO Sound’s newest signee. Drake captioned the post, “The greatest rapper alive met my favorite rapper alive.” While the greatest rapper alive title might be debatable to some, Drake has had a front-row seat to seeing Rick Ross work thanks to their many songs together. Their most recent effort, “Lemon Pepper Freestyle,” follows highlights that include “Free Spirit,” “Stay Schemin” with French Montana, “Aston Martin Music,” “Diced Pineapples” with Wale, and many more.

The compliment from Drake also comes after Rick Ross spoke about a possible joint album between himself and Drake. “He’s wrapping up his project and I’m in the same space,” he said. “So the timing and everything is aligning. It’s something that we really want to give to the streets, on some real sh*t.” He added that the project’s potential release is “looking real solid.”

You can watch Drake’s Instagram Story post with Rick Ross and Smiley above.

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