Category: News

While NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts have switched to an “at-home” format over the course of the last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many of the guests have branched out, stretching the concept to incorporate diners, nail salons, and rental spaces to perform their fan-favorite hits. Reggaeton star J Balvin takes it a step further in his scenic Tiny Desk Concert, performing his set from at atop a barge floating on New York’s East River, with the Brooklyn Bridge hanging over the gorgeous backdrop.

The set, which opens with “Vestido” and closes with his latest hit “In Da Getto,” also includes emphatic performances of “Que Locura,” “OTRO FILI,” and “F40,” all of which appear on his newly released album, Jose, released September 10 via Universal Latin.

In addition to releasing his new album and performing on Tiny Desk, J Balvin’s busy 2021 has included a performance at Governor’s Ball, a feature on “Nirvana” from Skepta’s new EP All In, a remix of Eladio Carrion’s “Tata” featuring Bobby Shmurda and Daddy Yankee, and an appearance on Metallica’s covers album, turning the band’s “Wherever I Roam” into a reggaeton anthem. Balvin also teamed up with UPS to support Latinx small businesses.

Watch J Balvin’s Tiny Desk Concert performance above.

Elvis Costello’s motiviations, in this moment, appear to be punctuated by a want to bring more people into the circus tent that is music. These are, of course, commercial endeavors, but there’s a purity to them that feels like a friend sitting in a corner sharing secrets about the sometimes vexing but always tantalizing guitar or sliding a box of records over to you with a promise of something cool and unique.

Working with Audible with their Words + Music series, Costello has just launched How To Play The Guitar And Y, an instructional that’s a bit deconstructed, providing a more mellow and meditative experience. Costello, a master storyteller, romanticizes the instrument and the craft of learning it here, giving people a bit more meat than they’d get with a black and white technical manual.

In addition to that release comes Spanish Model, a reimagining of 1978’s This Year’s Model, but powered by a mix of the original’s music from Costello and The Attractions and a roster of Spanish language stars who put their own spin on the words, freshening a classic and giving Costello’s music an entirely new audience.

Uproxx had a chance to speak with the iconic rocker about these projects and their DNA, that effort to bring people into the tent, growing up with a sonic mixing bowl of inspirations, and whether he’s choosing to make songs of lament or songs that kick out of the box that COVID times have put us in. Here’s the result.

I am a 20-years-in terrible guitar player. I’ve never bothered to learn the technical way, I’ve tried with apps and stuff and it just never fits.

I’m 50 years into playing and you can still walk up to the guitar and point at the neck, and go, “what note is that?” And I go, “I have no idea.” And I’m not [just] saying that. That is not false modesty. I’ve deliberately kept some parts of it mysterious. And I think it’s important to keep the inner idiot alive when it comes to playing rock and roll, certainly.

What made you go down this road (an audio, non-standard demystification of the guitar) with this project?

So you probably get the idea if you’ve listened to this piece, that this is really about taking away your fear of failing… as much as I can from example. It’s not supposed to be a hard and fast foolproof instructional. It’s, as I say, a work of comedic philosophy because it’s about the state of mind. But there’s got to be something I can let people in on. Not a secret trick that’s going to make them successful, and then people love them and throw money or their underwear at them, but [something that] takes away some of that trepidation, which as you say, you can play for a long time and not feel like you’re getting anywhere, well, a lot of that is where the starting place comes.

Some people are quite happy with the three chords they can pull out at a party. Some people’s three-chord trick becomes a curiosity in which they learn every chord and they learn music more formally. I did that. I think I was in my forties before I learned how to write music down. I had written hundreds of songs, but they weren’t songs that required the writing of music. Then I started to want to do some music that did require musical coding, so to speak, which is no different than computer coding when you think about it, it’s just a mathematical diagram for ideas. But all the time, I’ve still, as I said, kept alive that idea of just playing it.

With the electric guitar, that can be very much an expression of anger, and when you play the guitar quietly, it can be your deepest sorrow or your biggest praise that you want to give, or the most heartfelt expression of love. You can do that with three chords, as well as you can with 25, if you’ve got the right song. That’s why I chose the Hank Williams song. That is such a beautiful song, but it’s only three chords. When you hear it from the outside of the music, you probably imagine anything that’s lasted that long and has mattered that much to people must be more complicated. And then actually when you get into it, it isn’t. Not technically, it’s not more, it’s where it’s phrased, and the trust that your fingers will follow you, particularly if you’re not playing in a key that’s mechanically intimidating like C, which leaves you with this great puzzle.

You mention Hank Williams and George Jones comes up in the piece. I’m fascinated by the influence of country music, specifically, that era, on UK-raised artists. When did US country music really start to influence you?

I think somebody that grew up… I’m the perfect age to be a Beatles fan. Okay. So I was eight years old when “Love Me Do” came out. I was 16 when “Let It Be” came out. So the whole of my childhood into my teenage years was the Beatles were the group. Fairly early on, they did this song and it’s like a jokey… “Act Naturally,” and Ringo’s singing it. It’s sung with a sense of humor. And I heard Jim Reeves’ [version], and that was very sentimental. Then I heard Johnny Cash and now that was something else. But I didn’t even really think that was country music as much as like some kind of rock and roll.

And then I have to say like a lot of people in my generation, The Byrds playing country music sort of made it… [I] sort of went, hold on a second. Now they’re doing a song that I’ve heard that was written by the guy that sang “Private Number,” William Bell. Now what’s going on here, now that music just jumped out of the box that I thought it was in, and it’s walked over to this other box and jumped in there. And then I heard The Flying Burrito Brothers do “Do Right Woman.” And I go, hold on a second, now I’ve got the Aretha Franklin version of that. And that’s the thing when you shouldn’t have these signposts for the names of types of music be a barrier or a stop sign, because then you go well, oh, wait a minute, both those songs are great. They are different, but one’s got a pedal steel guitar, the other’s got an organ. But is one less felt than the other? No, not really. Aretha’s obviously technically a much better singer than Graham Parsons, but they both move me. That’s all that matters. Isn’t it? That’s how it got in.

Of course, then I understood after a while, where a lot of those cues came from. They came from George Jones, they came from Merle Haggard. And they’re more complex writers like Felice and Boudleaux Bryant, who wrote a lot of the songs for the Everly’s, and wrote those songs that Emmylou Harris and Gram Parsons did: “Love Hurts” and “Sleepless Nights.” And then you discover, oh, Willie Nelson… Willie Nelson wrote that song “Funny How Time Slips Away,” which I knew as a Georgie Fame song.

So I heard it as an R&B song, first. He was covering an R&B cover of that song, not a country song. So the names for all this music all got very mixed up in England. We heard a lot of songs twice and three times over. So my familiarity with, say, the songs of Burt Bacharach were both from Dionne Warwick and people from the local music scene who were covering those songs because they were hits on the American charts. My own father was singing on the radio dance band. And I was hearing him practice songs, which I then heard sung by my favorite group. You understand, it’s confusing when you have that kind of upbringing.

What do you listen to now? Do you retreat more to things that are familiar? Are you still looking voraciously to find new influences?

Well, recently, of course, I’ve been listening to a lot of singers from Latin America because I’ve been working on Spanish Model for a couple of years. And I knew some of the artists before, and some of them were friends, and I’d worked together with Marisol and I knew Fito Páez. When I went to Argentina, he welcomed us there. But Sebastian Krys and I have worked together on a lot of different records. Some of them are available already. Some of them are still to come. And he’s also done work on things like the Armed Forces box set, where he makes four albums worth of live material to complete the reissue. So we’ve had a way of looking at different music. And one of those projects was Spanish Model, which is using the original backing tracks [from This Year’s Model] with brand new vocals by Latin artists.

This wasn’t something planned in a marketing room. This was something where I actually dreamt it up and waited for him [Sebastian] to tell me that it was crazy. And he said, “yes, it’s crazy, and that’s all the more reason why we should do it.” And we’ve worked together on finding a combination of young, successful, unknown, rising stars… people who have very artistic profiles. Some of them are very pop and would really surprise and even horrify people, even Latin audiences, that they would even be singing my song. You have to understand that I’m completely unknown in most of the countries in Latin America. So if somebody like Sebastian Yatra, who’s a big current Colombian pop star, sings one of my songs, I’m a songwriter who Yatra is singing, I’m not a famous recording artist in my own right.

So all of these different stories… the reversal of the perspective of the songs by having a young woman sing a song in her twenties that I wrote when I was in my twenties, this is all the reason why we’re doing it. That required me to become acquainted with these singers and to hear the sense of possibility in their voices. I wanted their voices to be right ones, and then asked them if they felt they could sing music that in many cases was very outside of their common experience. It wasn’t even the kind of music they sang often, and they did a great job. So that was a big lot of listening, to listen to that.

Is there a want to continue to do things like this where you work through your back catalog and work with other younger, up-and-coming artists to put a new spin on these things?

Would I do this again? Oh, I don’t know. It hadn’t occurred to me. People that want to be sarcastic about it will say, oh, what’s coming next? A Serbo-Croat version of King Of America? I don’t know. If somebody wanted to take it on and they thought there was something to be had from it, maybe, but I don’t know. This was different because Sebastian was born in Argentina and raised in Miami, which is the perfect example of a city… it’s got a huge Latin culture and you’ve got the states in America, you know the ones on the border, like Texas and California, that are as Spanish speaking as they are English speaking in some parts. That’s all represented in this record. It’s not like a political statement in any sense, it just acknowledges the reality that it’s a shared culture.

Sebastian’s worked with so many Latin artists, both northern and southern hemisphere. He was uniquely placed to suggest to me people who would really sing this well. So it wasn’t just an exercise in getting the most successful singer of that demographic to use that word and hope that they could relate to this, that we could have a conversation about what was in the songs and what we wanted that song to be in this version. Would that work in another language? I don’t know.

But we did, of course, release a French EP off the back of Hey Clockface because Steve Nieve, my cohort of 43 years, lives in France, he carries a French passport. I knew that Iggy Pop could sing in French. So I thought let’s have Iggy sing the translation. Steve then and his partner Muriel Teodori got Isabelle Adjani, who was somebody I would’ve dreamed of working with… [and she] recited one of the pieces from that Hey Clockface record. I just wanted something to offer to the French audience that was in their own language, on an EP. I have no idea whether the Spanish language record will open a door for us in Latin America where I’m currently not really very well known. It doesn’t really matter. They might just like that one song, sung by Raquel Sofia or by Jesse & Joy or any of the other artists on the record.

How has the COVID era influenced your songwriting?

It didn’t really influence the songwriting so much as the attitude to recording, because I had begun Hey Clockface in Helsinki just before the last tour I was able to do in 2020. I went to Helsinki, recorded three songs, went to Paris, recorded nine songs. That wasn’t quite the record I had in mind. So I came back and completed it with two more pieces, which were recorded from remote occasions. So once we had crossed that barrier off, which is purely a state of mind, because, as you know, many records are recorded instrument by instrument. I’ve made records both ways, live in the studio, instrument by instrument, both have their virtues, both have their pitfalls. But largely when you know you can’t get together, the only thing really holding you back is the feeling that you are somehow confined by the general malaise to your spirit, of being separated from those you respond to normally — producers, other musicians, your family. You’re far away from your friends and your family, you’re concerned for their well-being, particularly their mental, emotional health. And you try not to dwell on all of the implications of every piece of misinformation that might come through your window.

You’ve got two choices then: you can make music sort of, to some degree, embracing that sense of isolation and make songs of lament. Or you can say, well, what circumstances have put us in this box? Let’s kick our way out of here. I’ll let you guess which one of those I chose.

‘How To Play The Guitar And Y’ is available to download on Audible and ‘Spanish Model’ is also available now

Elton John has announced that he would have to postpone the UK and European legs of his Farewell Yellow Brick Road: The Final Tour due to needing surgery on his hip.

“At the end of my summer break I fell awkwardly on a hard surface and have been in considerable pain and discomfort in my hip ever since,” he explained in a post to Instagram. “Despite intensive physio and specialist treatment, the pain has continued to get worse and is leading to increasing difficulties moving.”

He continued, “I have been advised to have an operation as soon as possible to get me back to full fitness and make sure there are no long-term complications. I will be undertaking a program of intensive physiotherapy that will ensure a full recovery and a return to full mobility without pain.”

Still, John noted that he would be playing the Global Citizen Live charity concert in London on September 25, as the set would be “a very different physical undertaking to the demands of playing for close to three hours every night on tour and traveling overnight between countries.”

After the operation, the singer will hopefully return to touring in January 2022. In the interim, fans can look forward to John’s collaborative release, The Lockdown Sessions, which arrives on October 22 and features collabs with Gorillaz, Miley Cyrus, Stevie Wonder, Stevie Nicks, Nicki Minaj, and Young Thug.

Last summer, Jay-Z’s Roc Nation brand launched its School of Music, Sports, and Entertainment at Long Island University in order to “educate the next generation of industry changemakers.” The partnership is designed to grant undergraduate students opportunities to work in the music, sports, and entertainment industries, offering degrees in music, music technology, entrepreneurship & production, as well as sports management. Today, in honor of the upcoming fall semester, the school has released its first official merchandise collection, with proceeds going to the HOPE Scholarship program.

The collection is available via the university’s student-operated store and online, featuring everything from beach towels to water bottles, as well as the usual assortment of apparel such as hats, hoodies, shorts, socks, sweatpants, and t-shirts. According to a press release, additional options will be added in the future.

Roc Nation’s Hope Scholars are selected from freshmen based in New York determined by need, while the school also offers other scholarships based on GPA. When the school first launched, Long Island University President Dr. Kimberly Cline was quoted, “Our proximity in and around New York City’s epicenter of music and sports clearly positions us to offer unparalleled experiential learning and access to professional opportunities that will launch students to success.”

Check out some of the options below.

It’s not surprising that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who once suggested that Southerners should welcome Joe Biden’s “police state friends” with firearms, is offering her (unvaccinated) supporters a chance to win a .50 caliber rifle. But it should be. It really, really should be. There is nothing normal about the giveaway — or the deeply weird hype video she posted on her YouTube channel.

“Joe Biden abandoned Americans in Afghanistan, got 13 of our best soldiers killed, gave a kill list of Americans to the Taliban, And armed an Islamic terrorist nation with $83 billion in weapons… like this one,” Taylor Greene said, lifting a comically large gun. “Biden should be impeached. Now I’m doing a gun giveaway of my own, but for Americans only. I want you to win this .50 caliber rifle that Democrats will ban if they keep the House next year.” She then started talking about Nancy Pelosi, for some reason, before adding, “In 2022, I’m going to blow away the Democrats’ socialist agenda.” This is depicted by MTG shooting a car with “socialist” printed on the side.

These are all real images from the video:

Taylor Greene — who valued the rifle at $10,000 and called it “the same type of gun the hate-America gun-grabbers in DC would love to BAN if they ever get the votes” — previously posted an image of herself holding a deadly weapon next to Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib:

“Squad’s worst nightmare,” said text at the bottom of the image, referring to the nickname for the group of leftist women of color in Congress. In the post, Greene called Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, and Tlaib “hate America leftists [who] want to take this country down.”

You can watch the… whatever is happening above.

(Via Raw Story)

Jeopardy! producers (which no longer include Mike Richards) still haven’t settled on a full-time host to replace Alex Trebek (again, no Mike Richards), but they have decided on who will host the rest of the season. TMZ reported and Variety confirmed that Mayim Bialik and Ken Jennings will fill in following Richards’ exit from the legendary game show:

Sony production sources tell us the quiz show is going to keep it semi-consistent from here on out — at least for this season — with Mayim on hosting duty for more than half of the episodes, and Jennings shooting a few weeks worth of episodes. We’re told execs have not decided about next season yet, but are still searching for a full-time, permanent replacement for Alex Trebek, and as we’ve told you … Mayim still seems to be the frontrunner.

Richards was axed as host after offensive comments he made on a podcast were resurfaced. “It pains me that these past incidents and comments have cast such a shadow on Jeopardy! as we look to start a new chapter,” he said in a statement, adding, “I want to apologize to each of you for the unwanted negative attention that has come to Jeopardy! over the last few weeks and for the confusion and delays this is now causing. I know I have a lot of work to do to regain your trust and confidence.” He did not regain the crew’s trust and confidence.

Meanwhile, Matt Amodio has the third longest winning streak in Jeopardy! history.

(Via TMZ and Variety)

There’s maybe no roster spot more in flux on a fantasy team than the defense, as opponent matchups dictate the fantasy success of defenses almost as much as the talent they put on the field. Playing a team like Jacksonville or [insert New York team here] is going to make your defense one of the best in the league for that week, and as such it’s a mad dash each week on the waiver wire for defenses that have favorable matchups.

On the opposite side of that, even a good defense is going to give up points and yards to the NFL’s elite offenses, making them unplayable against the likes of Kansas City, Tampa Bay, Buffalo and the rest. As such, vigilance in scouting matchups is key to ensure you aren’t trotting a defense out there that’s about to run into a buzz saw.

Each week, we’ll be compiling a consensus ranking of NFL defenses based on their fantasy projections, which take into account matchup and past performance, from four sites (ESPN, NFL, CBS, FantasyPros).

CONSENSUS WEEK 2 DEFENSE PROJECTION RANKINGS

1. Washington
2. New England
3. New Orleans
4. LA Rams
5. Denver
6. San Francisco
7. Cleveland
8. Tampa Bay
9. Pittsburgh
10. Green Bay
11. Bufalo
12. New York Giants
13. Chicago
14. Arizona
15. Carolina
16. Kansas City
17. Seattle
18. Indianapolis
19. Cincinnati
20. Miami

It’s been two years since Lil Nas X released his record-breaking debut single “Old Town Road,” and he’s now gearing up for his debut album, Montero. But since the musician doesn’t do anything conventionally, he’s been advertising that he’s “pregnant” with his debut album for weeks, going so far as to sport a fake baby bump. Now that he’s just hours away from the LP’s officially release, Lil Nas X continues to lean into the pregnancy stunt by now saying he’s having painful contractions.

Promoting the impending release of Montero, Lil Nas X shared a video of him tightly clutching his rotund belly and breathing heavily in pain. “I think it’s coming. I think the baby is coming,” he says while pretending to have contractions.

Along with experiencing the pains of contractions, Lil Nas X also wanted to have some fun with his pregnancy, so he threw a Pinterest-ready baby shower. His event was complete with cupcakes with images of his Montero album frosted on top, balloons, and a silver throne. But much to his disappointment, none of his guests arrived on time to the baby shower. “spent hours setting up for my baby shower and no one showed up,” he wrote alongside a video of the event.

Montero is out 9/17 via Columbia. Pre-order it here.

Embattled Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) can’t stop dusting her guns off to come back swinging. This week’s disastrous toilet joke may have led Sarah Palin Lite to try and up her game with some slightly philosophical musings, but that hasn’t gone over well, either. All of this has happened recently after she earned a horrific nickname before blaming God for her place in Congress and failing at fashion commentary.

She is not to be deterred, even after stumbling mightily on Twitter with her praise of the Taliban and completely botching her use of the word “patriots” during a rude pronoun discussion. This doesn’t even account for her historically inclined flubs, including a confused Samuel/John Adams tweet, and yet, here we are.

Are you ready for Boebert’s proclamation on how she believes government should work? Presumably, this is about Covid guidelines (given that she reportedly threw a mask at a House staffer before raging against Nancy Pelosi’s “totalitarian” mandates), but let’s get on with her actual declaration.

“The proper role of government is not to keep you safe every day,” she tweeted. “The proper role of government is to keep you free.”

Her usual word-salad methods aren’t too prominent here, but consider this. On Sept. 19, 2020 (and while running for Congress), Boebert tweeted that “the government is supposed to both defend our individual rights and our collective safety.”

How soon they forget. However, no one has forgotten about Boebert’s self-declared hardline pro-military and pro-law-enforcement stances. And of course, people still can’t forget about the Daily Beast’s coverage of Boebert’s restaurant, Shooter’s Grill, allegedly giving people food poisoning at a rodeo.

Will Boebert be back for more? You betcha.

There is no position in football more loathed than the kicker. Misses drive fans and coaches insane, while makes (at least those not in a clutch moment) are expected and rarely celebrated with great fanfare. It is the position most affiliated with mental fragility, where opposing coaches literally try to psych out a kicker by icing them with a timeout.

Some fantasy leagues have done away with the kicker entirely, but others still press on with football’s least favorite position occupying a key roster spot. Even moreso than any other position, projecting kicker production feels like a complete shot in the dark, but we’ve compiled four different fantasy projections (ESPN, NFL, CBS, FantasyPros) and averaged them together to come up with the top 20 kickers for Week 2.

CONSENSUS WEEK 2 KICKER PROJECTION RANKINGS

1. Ryan Succop (TB)
2. Justin Tucker (BAL)
3. Harrison Butker (KC)
4. Brandon McManus (DEN)
5. Matt Prater (ARI)
6. Chris Boswell (PIT)
7. Cairo Santos (CHI)
8. Jason Myers (SEA)
9. Jason Sanders (MIA)
10. Chase McLaughlin (CLE)
11. Tyler Bass (BUF)
12. Mason Crosby (GB)
13. Matt Gay (LAR)
14. Robbie Gould (SF)
15. Tristan Vizcaino (LAC)
16. Younghoe Koo (ATL)
17. Aldrick Rosas (NO)
18. Rodrigo Blankenship (IND)
19. Dustin Hopkins (WAS)
20. Daniel Carlson (LV)