Category: News

Over the past year, we’ve all had a lot of time to sit at home and discover ourselves, but one person had time to discover new things about his home. Ludacris, who will make his latest appearance as hacker Tej Parker in F9 this Friday, told Ellen DeGeneres that during quarantine, he found out that his home had more amenities than he’d ever thought, including a tennis court and saunas — something he didn’t realize until he was forced, like the rest of us, to work from home for a while. Apparently, the ‘Scatter Brain’ rapper has never properly perused his 22-acre property as a result of his busy lifestyle.

“This is probably the best property to quarantine at, besides your house, of course,” he told DeGeneres. “I have like 22 acres of land. You know, I’m so used to traveling and never being here, so I’m finally able to enjoy the fruits of my labor. I’m finding things in my home and on my property that I never even knew were there. I actually have a tennis court, if you could believe it or not. I didn’t even know that this was on the property. Treehouses, saunas that I’m finding, that’s how much I was gone.

However, he continued, he enjoyed the process because “I’m able to finally relax and enjoy this property that I’ve spent so much money on.”

Like the rest of us, though, he did have some time to work on self-improvement, as well — and even turned it into Content. He secured a television special about learning to cook and posted a video of himself flying a plane which went viral on social media. Looks like Tej is picking up some new skills for his next outing, in which, yes, the Fast And Furious franchise finally goes to space. He also got back to his day job, dropping off verses on Justin Bieber’s “Peaches” remix and on Conway The Machine’s “Scatter Brain” with JID.

Watch Luda’s interview with Ellen above.

Petey is gem, whether he’s putting out delightfully offbeat music or bringing that same energy to entertaining his nearly 900,000 followers on TikTok. Now, he’s finally doing what fans of his songs have been waiting for: He’s putting out his debut full-length album, Lean Into Life, which is set for release on September 3.

Alongside the announcement came the release of the title track, a propulsive synth-driven number that comes across like LCD Soundsystem viewed through Petey’s idiosyncratic lens.

Petey says 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.”

He also said of his music more generally, “The music and the comedy are all wrapped up together as part of the same thing for me. Someone told me that a great way to create something original is to combine all of your favorite things and then fill in the gaps with your own personality. When I sing, I want to sing like Isaac Brock from Modest Mouse. When I play guitar, I want to play guitar like Chris Walla from Death Cab For Cutie. When I produce synth parts, I want to produce synth parts like Kanye West. And when I play drums, I want to play drums like Travis Barker from Blink-182. All those approaches get combined with my own story in my songs.”

Listen to “Lean Into Life” above and find the Lean Into Life art and tracklist below. Also check out our new profile of Petey here.

1. “California”
2. “Apple TV Remote”
3. “Pitch A Fit!”
4. “Don’t Tell The Boys”
5. “Microwave Dinner”
6. “Oh Nice”
7. “We Go On Walks”
8. “We Don’t Need To Talk About It”
9. “Hey Man”
10. “Comfort In The Clutter”
11. “Lean Into Life”
12. “Tell The Boys”

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

While stopping by Jimmy Kimmel Live on Tuesday night to promote his novelization of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino set the record straight. His baby boy, Leo, is not named after Leonardo DiCaprio despite the actor starring in Once Upon a Time and 2012’s Django Unchained. According to Tarantino, Leo is a family name, which he and his wife Daniella Pick almost didn’t use because of exactly what everyone’s assuming. Via People:

“We almost didn’t name him that because people would assume I named him after Leonardo DiCaprio,” the director said. “There’s nothing wrong with that, but … he’s named after my wife’s grandfather, but also because, just in our hearts, he was our little lion.”

“So he’s a lion. That’s how we thought about him,” the Oscar winner added.

Tarantino also revealed that his son is already a talker, just like his dad, and when Kimmel asked how soon it will be before little Leo is dropping F-bombs, the director was quick to respond. “As soon as possible.”

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: A Novel has been a passion project for Tarantino who wanted the paperback to feel just like buying a movie novelization in the ’70s. It might also take on more significance because Tarantino has been dropping hints that he could end his film career before delivering a tenth film.

During a recent interview with the Pure Cinema Podcast, the prolific filmmaker noted that most directors final films are “lousy,” and he would be really happy “dropping the mic” by making Once Upon a Time his last entry.

NLE Choppa has been on a health kick recently, promoting plant-based diets and meditation. While the dark side of his newfound interest has meant surprising fans with vaccine conspiracy theories and snake-oil sales pitches for dubious cancer “cures,” for the most part, Choppa’s encouraged his followers to embrace self-improvement. His latest effort is an “anti-lean” challenge which he issued on social media, appealing to his fellow rappers to give up the purple drank by substituting chlorophyll.

““I Have A New Challenge For Rappers,” he wrote. “For Every Pint of Lean, Or Even Alcohol, Drink A Pint Of Chlorophyll. I Wanna Start By Challenging @MoneyBaggYo I’ll Bring This To You Personally Fam.” He also added a link to an online shop where he’s pitching bottles of the stuff, as well as some kind of “detox tea” and baggies of seamoss. Notably, he tagged fellow Memphian Moneybagg Yo in his challenge, perhaps prompted by Moneybagg’s recent post calling his single “Wockesha” “the official lean national anthem.”

Choppa isn’t the only rapper to give up lean in recent years. In 2019, Future, one of the drink’s biggest proponents over the past decade of rap, admitted that he quit but didn’t say anything publicly because he feared losing his fans, while Smokepurpp, Mustard, and more were inspired to quit by a rash of overdoses including Lil Peep’s and Mac Miller’s.

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

Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump have avoided being seen in public with former-president Donald Trump since he left office in January. This is a calculated effort on their part — after four years as his father-in-law’s most trusted senior advisor, Kushner is “just checked out of politics,” an insider told CNN in March. But of course it’s more complicated than that. A new report from CNN claims that the married couple are sick of Trump whining about the 2020 election. You and me both, “Harvard’s shiniest mistake.”

“Sometimes the former President complains for several hours about the ‘stolen’ 2020 election. Other times, his frustrations emerge in fits and starts — more likely when he is discussing his hopeful return to national politics. And while he often has a rotating audience of cheering listeners, the gap between Trump and his daughter and son-in-law grows wider by the week,” CNN’s Kate Bennett and Gabby Orr wrote after speaking to a dozen officials, friends, and members of the Trump circle.

Bennett also appeared on CNN on Wednesday morning, where she said, “They do not want to be around, nor do they want to be in the orbit of this continued not being able to move on, not being able to let go. And they’ve made a very calculated and thoughtful decision to back away and not spend as much time with the former president who, of course, also happens to be Ivanka’s father and Jared Kushner’s father-in-law.” More:

A large part of the reason for the separation is Trump’s constant harping on the past and his inability to move on. The former President has also started to question the role that Kushner — one of the few people who were able to stay close to Trump throughout his two presidential campaigns and White House tenure — has played in his presidential legacy.

It turns out, putting someone with no prior political experience in charge of “fixing” the Middle East and solving the opioid crisis wasn’t the best idea. A source also claims that Trump is “jealous” of Kushner’s seven-figure book deal, while all the major publishers are refusing to do business with Mar-a-Lago’s most windmills-fearing resident.

“It is not a secret President Trump doesn’t like when he thinks other people are getting attention for something he feels he has facilitated,” a former-Trump White House official said. “There’s a sweet spot between saying nothing about work you did and saying too much that everyone has to find — or else he gets triggered.”

Meanwhile, Ivanka is “being very present, in the moment. She’s not concerned.” Unlike Tiffany and Don Jr., she did not wish Donald a happy Father’s Day on social media.

(Via CNN)

(WARNING: Massive spoilers for Loki will be found below, so get the heck outta here if you haven’t caught up on Episode 3.)

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Disney+ delivered a very Doctor Who-ish episode of Loki called “Lamentis,” which confirmed multiple hunches about the series, including a significant detail about the mercurial trickster’s sexuality. And I’ll just cut to the chase here: Loki of Asgard is the first openly queer lead character in MCU canon. This is momentous (and the timing’s a nice nod to Pride Month), of course. Despite all the talk and suggestions about Valkyrie, Sam Wilson and Bucky Barnes, Carol Danvers, and Peter Quill (who the comics recently wrote as bisexual), it appears that Kevin Feige decided to crown Loki the first canonically queer MCU character.

This confirmation went down during a conversation between Loki and Sophia Di Martino’s Loki Variant. For the record, she wishes to be called Sylvie but is apparently, yes, the Enchantress because she can “enchant” people, although the show does not explicitly use that name. The duo bided their time while waiting for an apocalypse to happen on the planet Lamentis-1; their conversations revealed a lot, including Sylvie confirming that all TVA Agents are wiped Variants who used to be human (no wonder Mobius loves those jet skis). More importantly for our purposes at the moment, the talk included some flirtatious tones, in which Loki confirms that he is bisexual.

Loki director Kate Herron tweeted about the reveal. “From the moment I joined @LokiOfficial it was very important to me, and my goal, to acknowledge Loki was bisexual,” Herron wrote. “It is a part of who he is and who I am too. I know this is a small step but I’m happy, and heart is so full, to say that this is now Canon in #mcu #Loki.”

Yet the dynamic between Loki and Sylvie isn’t completely forthright. Neither of them can fully be trusted to not have ulterior motives (and I loved the moment when Loki mocked Sylvie’s own apparent “glorious purpose”), although they do appear to be holding back feelings for each other. Maybe? We’ll see.

We also got a drunk and singing Loki! For an episode that only revolved around these two characters, it sure packed in a lot of the good stuff. The episode ended in dramatic fashion with Loki staring down what appeared to be imminent annihilation, and it’s a beautifully shot episode, truly like producers and writers aimed for a much more expensive-looking Doctor Who vibe. Naturally, fans made a lot of “bisexual lighting” remarks while celebrating the Loki-canon reveal.

Disney+’s ‘Loki’ streams new episodes on Wednesdays.

Stephen Colbert was not specifically named in the list of “late-night comedy mischief-makers” that Donald Trump reportedly wanted to take down using the full power of the White House and the Department of Justice for having the audacity to continue the decades-old tradition of making jokes about the current president—and he’s pretty pissed off about it. On Tuesday night’s show, The Late Show host double-downed on mocking the president by mocking the president for not wanting to be mocked (then mocked him further for not singling Colbert out in his list of targeted mockers):

“In national politics, there’s disturbing news about former president Old Wack Donald… Today, we learned he ‘wanted his Justice Department to stop SNL from teasing him.’ Wow! It’s strange. There has not been a presidential overreaction like this since Nixon sent Navy SEALs to assassinate the Smothers Brothers.

We knew the ex-pres was mad about SNL. He tweeted about them a few times, in between his more important work of calling porn stars ‘horse face.’ But, behind the scenes, he ‘asked advisers and lawyers what the Federal Communications Commission, the court systems, and the [DOJ] could do to probe Jimmy Kimmel and other late-night comedy mischief-makers.”

While Kimmel, who also talked about the story during last night’s show, made it clear that “I don’t want him probing me,” Colbert had more pressing concerns. “Folks, this is dangerous, disturbing, un-American, and why do I get lumped in with ‘other comedy mischief-makers’?,” he wanted to know. “I don’t get it. What’s a guy gotta do? All due respect to my good friend James Tiberius Kimmel, but if the DOJ thugs are kicking down doors to round up the late-night chuckleheads to drag us off to Mar-a-Gulago to be assassinated, I should get more than ‘and the rest.’ I do not appreciate the Mary Ann and Professor treatment here!”

You can watch the full clip above, starting around the 4:50 mark.

Since the beginning of Coldplay, the band’s lineup has been set: Chris Martin, Jonny Buckland, Guy Berryman, and Will Champion (as well as creative director Phil Harvey, who the band officially considers their fifth member). There was a shift at one point, though, as early in the band’s life, Champion was kicked out of the group (before being invited back just a few days later). Now, Champion has reflected on how he felt at that time.

He was asked about his dismissal from the group in a Twitter Q&A today and he wrote in response, “It was a very difficult period for us as a band and needless to say it was very upsetting. But it was important that we dealt with our issues early on in our career. It left us in a stronger place to move forward together.”

Martin discussed booting Champion from the band in a 2009 interview, saying that incident kicked off a tradition of drinking too much vodka as a form of self-punishment: “It started when I had to ask forgiveness for sacking our drummer Will Champion ten years ago. Three days later, the rest of us were feeling miserable and we asked Will to meet me and our bassist Guy Berryman in Monkey Chews in Camden, where we asked him to come back. They made me have lots of vodka and cranberry juice in remembrance of what a nasty piece of work I was being. Now if I find myself making a big mistake, I have to force myself to drink that stuff to remind me not to be such an idiot!”

Berryman also answered some Twitter questions today, including one asking if he thinks the band would be successful if they stuck with one of their early names, Starfish. He said, “Whereas it’s definitely not a great name, I hope that the strength of our band is based on the music we make rather what we’re called. And Coldplay is almost as weird a name anyway.”

Check out the full Q&A here.

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

Donald Trump‘s response to the coronavirus pandemic was lacking, to put it generously, and according to a new book, the former president was openly hoping the rampant virus would take out his political enemies. In a newly released excerpt from Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration’s Response to the Pandemic That Changed History by Washington Post reporters Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta, Trump reportedly used to mock anyone in his orbit who caught COVID, and during one meeting, he made a remark about the virus killing former National Security Advisor John Bolton, who was planning to release a damning book about his time in the administration.

While the Bolton remark sounds like just another one of Trump’s “jokes,” the authors sources believe he was being “dead serious,” according to Axios. Here’s more:

At one meeting several months [before Trump got sick], NEC director Larry Kudlow had stifled a cough. The room had frozen.. … Trump had waved his hands in front of his face, as if to jokingly ward off any flying virus particles, and then cracked a smile. “I was just kidding,” he’d said. “Larry will never get COVID. He will defeat it with his optimism.” … “John Bolton,” he had said … “Hopefully COVID takes out John.”

While wishing for a former employee’s death is (obviously) not great, it’s just another in a long line of moments that show Trump was not the best person to be leading the country during the pandemic. (Or at all.) A previous excerpt from Nightmare Scenario revealed that one of his plans to contain the spread of COVID was to send the infected to Gitmo. Although, that idea wasn’t so much about containment as it was about keeping America’s case count low, so it looked like everything was going great heading into the 2020 election.

(Via Axios)

The RX is Uproxx Music’s stamp of approval for the best albums, songs, and music stories throughout the year. Inclusion in this category is the highest distinction we can bestow, and signals the most important music being released throughout the year. The RX is the music you need, right now.

The feeling of pining for a faded time is embedded in the title of Lucy Dacus’ third album, Home Video. It’s fitting for a record that reflects on the 26-year-old’s youth, particularly the usual coming-of-age fodder about fumbling with outsized feelings of love, lust, and loss. “Hot blood in my pulsing veins / heavy memories weighing on my brain,” she sings on the opening track, “Hot & Heavy,” which nails the mix of nausea and nostalgia such remembrances tend to provoke.

But Home Video is also a signifier of movies, which might have been Dacus’ career path had she not emerged as one of the best songwriters of her generation. Before she was persuaded to make her 2016 debut, No Burden, by her friend and longtime collaborator Jacob Blizard — he’s still in the fold as a co-producer of Home Video — Dacus was a film school student. (She was apparently a devotee of Miranda July, among other directors.) But even as a musician, there’s a cinematic quality to her work. It’s just that she’s channeled those impulses into her songs, which tend to be highly visual narratives that unfold like tragicomic vignettes. On Home Video, these stories are grainy but tactile, in which even the fuzziest details culled from the past seem so real you can almost touch them.

Take the song “Thumbs,” which was legendary among Dacus’ fanbase as a concert staple long before it was slated for Home Video. The first-person lyric describes a friend who has just been contacted by her wayward father. The narrator tries to dissuade her from seeing this man, but when that fails she decides to tag along to their meeting instead.

So we meet him at a bar.
You were holding my hand hard.
He ordered rum and coke.
I can’t drink either anymore.
He hadn’t seen you since the fifth grade.
Now you’re nineteen and you’re 5’8”.
He said, “Honey, you sure look great.
Do you get the checks I send on your birthday?”

The money line (“I would kill him / if you let me”) comes next, but the power of “Thumbs” is that the threat feels almost unnecessary. It’s the details that Dacus carefully weaves together that makes the listener want to murder this guy. The bar rendezvous, the drink order, the glib question about the checks he sent on her birthday — you can picture exactly who the dad is based entirely on how Dacus chooses to describe him. It’s a perfect little film projecting inside your skull.

To use the parlance of her band Boygenius, Dacus is more low-key than Julien Baker, though that has less to do with her writing style than her voice, a smokey purr that has always sounded out of time, like a throwback to the torch singers of the early 20th century. She’s also less oblique than Phoebe Bridgers, whose penchant for droll one-liners and unexpected barbs tends to muddy rather than clarify the nutgrafs of her songs.

Dacus simply is the most natural and gifted storyteller of her cohort. Like any great writer, she hooks you with a grabby opening line. (From “VBS,” a sly depiction of her religious upbringing at vacation Bible school: “In the summer of ’07 / I was sure I’d go to heaven, but I was hedging my bets at VBS.”) And then, with a combination of naturalistic dialogue and some well-chosen details that build a small world, she manages to tell what feels like a complete narrative, even as she leaves enough unsaid to create the ambiguity required for infinite relistens.

This is the sort of songwriting that people like Bruce Springsteen, John Prine, Lucinda Williams, and Jason Isbell specialize in. Lucy Dacus is the latest to master it.

If her album titles are any indication, Dacus is a self-aware self-chronicler. Her previous album, 2018’s Historian, similarly nodded at her reflexive tendencies. But while Historian was an album of songs about life in her early 20s, Home Video is an origin story. And it’s right on time for a person now on the doorstep of her late 20s, a time when you are just far enough from adolescence to romanticize it, but not so far that you can’t still access the feelings you had then.

Dacus either has a fine-tuned memory or the imagination to fill in the blanks with authentic inventions. Either way, her songs come alive with vividly drawn scenes. Or, should I say, vividly drawn mundane scenes. What Home Video captures best about being teenager is how life-changing events can occur amid the extreme boredom of being stuck in an unglamorous town just because you happen to be young and experiencing certain feelings and situations for the first time. It’s not so much that young people have extraordinary lives; it’s that being young makes everything seem extraordinary.

One reason Dacus has bristled at being labeled a “sad girl,” I suspect, is because it underplays how funny her songs often are. If there is a melancholy edge to Home Video, it’s a sadness that’s reminiscent of an episode of Freaks & Geeks, in which the pathos is balanced with an appreciation for the absurdity of childhood. In “Brando,” two pals skip school and proceed to have an adventure by … doing not much at all: “They play oldies in the afternoon / for the elderly and me and you / Fred and Ginger, black and white / I watch you watch ‘It’s A Wonderful Life.’” In “Going, Going, Gone,” a flirtation turns into a romance marked by “sweaty palms” and “averted eyes” and uncertainty about whether it’s an actual relationship. In “Partner In Crime,” a girl dating an older man is dropped off on the curb around the corner from her house “so nobody sees you / You drop a hint that you got a girlfriend / I try my best to take it.”

Dacus’ strengths as a lyricist have tended to outpace the music on her records, but on Home Video she has all but closed that gap. The urgent, rock-oriented arrangements use the Historian standout “Night Shift” as a starting point, tilting Dacus’ thoughtful, diaristic writing in a bolder, near-anthemic direction. But it’s the stories on Home Video that ultimately stick the most with you. As the narrator, Dacus doesn’t play these songs for cheap melodrama or gooey sentimentality. She honors the original emotional intensity that these stories had at their source, while imbuing them with the perspective of a person who has moved well beyond them toward something resembling wisdom.

Home Video is out 6/25 via Matador. Get it here.