Category: News

Since last year’s Miss Anthropocene Grimes has been making more headlines for personal reasons than musical ones. Her proximity to Tesla’s Elon Musk, who is the father of her child, has put her in the news for defending him against allegations that he’s “destroying the planet”, and she was part of his recent SNL performance, too. After teasing her appearance, Grimes showed up to play Princess Peach, and praised Elon’s hosting job on the show.

But lately she’s been back to teasing her own work instead of talking about her partner’s, like the snippet of her collaboration with British EDM DJ Chris Lake revealed earlier this month. This week, during a the livestream launch of the Grimes Metaverse Server on Discord, the producer shared another new snippet of a track called “Shinigami Eyes.” The song title is a reference to the anime, Death Note, and we know that Grimes has been playing with the Death Note-referencing phrase for a while because she tweeted about it back in 2019.

So check out the snippet above, which is a little less than a minute, and if you want even more Grimes this weekend take a look at her most recent reason for going viral — some confusing TikTok posts about AI and communism.

Despite a pandemic that forced much of the world to stay indoors, DMV native IDK had a pretty impressive year in 2020. The rapper shared his IDK & Friends 2 which saw contributions from Rico Nasty, ASAP Ferg and Pnb Rock. He also graced the world with a number of singles that showed off his improving skills. With that being said, it looks like 2021 will be just as strong for IDK. With plenty of music on the way, the rapper has also launched a new program aimed at aiding college students of color.

IDK will lead a new music business program in partnership with Harvard. According to the Associated Press, the 10-day No Label Academy program begins on August 21 and lasts through August 31. It aims to give students a preview of the music industry to help them understand the value of having a job in it.

The rapper spoke about the new program in a post to Instagram. “We belong in the places where few of us exist,” he wrote. “I’m making sure the world sees that. Applications for my music business course catered to Black Indigenous People of Color @ Harvard are open. Apply now. It takes 5mins.”

The announcement comes after IDK shared, “Peloton,” the second single off his upcoming album USee4Yourself which arrives on July 9.

You can view the flyer for the No Label Academy program above.

USee4Yourself is out 7/9 via Clue No Clue/Warner Records. Pre-order it here.

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

A few weeks ago Rostam released his second solo album, Changephobia, after previewing it with a string of singles like “These Kids We Knew,” “4Runner,” and “From The Back Of A Cab.” This week, he’s followed up the original record almost immediately with a deluxe version that includes a couple covers, “Train In Vain (Stand By Me)” by The Clash and “Fruits Of My Labor” by Lucinda Williams.

“What I can definitely say is that I feel like in the last five years, I’ve grown a lot as a person,” Rostam told us earlier this month over a Zoom call from the studio where he had written, recorded, and produced the album. “I’ve had time to grow and I think that growth has come from self-awareness. The concept of Changephobia, to me, is a lot about reminding yourself to be aware of what you’re feeling.”

Odds are a lot of people are feeling that way in general, if not specifically after the impact of COVID-19 gave enough of a pause to let a lot of people to reassess their priorities and lifestyle. For these two new covers, saxophone player Henry Solomon is a featured guest. Check out The Clash cover above and the Lucinda Williams one below.

Lil Baby has often lent a helping hand to his community. The latest example came when the Atlanta native stopped by a Foot Locker store in his hometown to purchase the store’s entire collection of sneakers, planning to give them all away. The act was captured on video and it showed Lil Baby and a number of store employees walking out of the store with several bags of sneakers in hand. After the video made its rounds on social media, the rapper hopped on Instagram to explain his motivations behind the act and reveal other plans for the future.

“Buying shoes ain’t what I mean by saving [my] community or giving back!!” he wrote. “That was some sh*t I did cause I seen a lot of them had on flip flops. When I say save [my] community, I mean centers, programs, jobs. You can’t imagine the sh*t I don’t post…”

The good deed comes weeks after the rapper accompanied the family of the late George Floyd for a trip to The White House, where he spoke with President Joe Biden about passing the George Floyd Police Act bill. Prior to that, he launched The Bigger Picture initiative, which gifted 1,000 coats to residents of Birmingham, Alabama.

The Philadelphia 76ers forced a Game 7 in their Eastern Conference Semifinal series against the Atlanta Hawks on Friday night. While it wasn’t pretty, the Sixers were able to go into State Farm Arena and walk out with a 104-99 win, although their superstar big man did have one complaint about how things played out.

Following the game, Joel Embiid met with the media and expressed some frustration with the way things were officiated. He specifically pointed out the fact that Trae Young — who he referred to as “the point guard” — generally gets a pretty quick whistle, which does not always apply to him.

“I just felt like it wasn’t called both ways, especially because of the minimal contact that they get on the point guard, and when it comes to us, we don’t get the same thing,” Embiid said, per Dave McMenamin of ESPN. “So I just want it called both ways. If you’re going to call something like nothing on their point guard, it should be the same way and call the same thing [for] me when I get — if I get — touched.”

Embiid went on to claim that he was “hacked all night” by Atlanta’s various players. He does have a point that he didn’t spend a ton of time at the charity stripe — Embiid shot four free throws during the game and didn’t get to the line until the fourth quarter. Young, meanwhile, took five free throws on the evening.

There is a very real discrepancy between how much contact is needed for big men to draw a foul and how little is required for some guards. This is something Young knows, and is a major reason why he has earned a reputation for being one of the league’s most effective grifters. Now, no one in the league shot more free throws per game this season than Embiid, so he is really, really good at drawing fouls and getting to the line, but this feels, more than anything else, like an attempt to work the refs a little before a win-or-go-home game on Sunday.

The Boston Celtics were at the center of a huge trade that happened amid the NBA playoffs, which is a bit of a rarity. While other players and picks were involved, the headline of the deal was that it sent Kemba Walker to the Oklahoma City Thunder and brought Al Horford back to Boston.

Walker’s tenure with the franchise was certainly solid, but it never quite reached the heights that one would anticipate a player of his caliber could reach. Of course, his knee problems were the major reason for this, but a new piece by Jared Weiss of The Athletic indicates all was not well in the Celtics’ locker room. In fact, the issues this past season may have played a role in costing the team some frontcourt reinforcements after Blake Griffin was bought out by the Detroit Pistons.

According to a source, Brooklyn’s Blake Griffin asked a Celtics player if he should join the team midseason and was told not to come to Boston because of the apparent dysfunction.

Griffin, of course, went on to join the Brooklyn Nets and has turned into an important piece of their puzzle during their postseason run. It’s probably safe to say he would not have single-handedly changed the course of Boston’s season — even if he would have helped their frontcourt considerably — but it’s pretty eyebrow-raising that the situation with the Celtics got to this point.

On Saturday, the nation lost one of its premier pets: Champ, the German Shepherd adopted by Joe and Jill Biden back in 2008. He was 12 years old.

The president released a statement mourning their beloved pet. “Our hearts are heavy today as we let you all know that our beloved German Shepherd, Champ, passed away peacefully at home,” the statement, attributed to both he and the First Lady, read. “He was our constant, cherished companion during the last 13 years and was adored by the entire Biden family. Even as Champ’s strength waned in his last months, when we came into a room, he would immediately pull himself up, his tail wagging, and nuzzle us for an ear scratch or a belly rub.”

The Bidens adopted Champ when he was just a puppy. Joe had said that if he and Barack Obama won the election that year, he would gift the family with a pet. He was named after something Joe’s father liked to say to him whenever he was feeling down: “Get up, champ.”

“In his younger days,” the statement read, “he was happiest chasing golf balls on the front lawn of the Naval Observatory or racing to catch our grandchildren as they ran around our backyard in Delaware.”

The Bidens adopted another German Shepherd in early 2018, name of Major, who is currently three years old.

The statement from the Bidens concluded movingly: “We love our sweet, good boy, and will miss him always.”

It’s been a long wait for Saweetie’s official debut album Pretty B*tch Music, but at least it hasn’t been that grueling. That’s because the Bay Area act has released a number of tracks as she’s worked on finishing her opus. At long last, the project is complete, as its release date was revealed just moments before Saweetie’s performance on Jimmy Kimmel Live!

The host of the late-night show gave a brief introduction to Saweetie before her performance of “Fast (Motion).” It was here that Kimmel revealed Pretty B*tch Music will be released on June 25. This gives fans less than a week to prepare themselves for the album’s arrival, which also lands on the same day of projects to be released by Tyler The Creator and Doja Cat.

As for the performance itself, Saweetie delivered a flashy set atop a rooftop that was riddled with flashing lights and a squad of backup dancers. Pretty B*tch Music will also arrive a little over two months after Saweetie’s most recent project, Pretty Summer Playlist: Season 1.

You can watch her performance on Jimmy Kimmel Live! above.

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

Mike Lindell’s had a busy 2021. The MyPillow guy tried to help Trump overturn the election. He’s been sued in two separate billion-dollar lawsuits. He’s released multiple, very long videos teeming with wacko conspiracy theories. He was even the subject of a bizarre (and quite untrue) romantic rumor involving Jane Krakowski. But did you know he also tried to make a dent in the once-thriving mask market? And that he lost millions of dollars doing it?

Actually, you might remember this, although it was a lifetime ago. Back in March of last year, early into the pandemic, then-president Donald J. Trump held one of his surreal Rose Garden press conferences that used to be a staple of American life. In it, he announced that Lindell would be mass producing masks for charity, to be, for the most part, donated to frontline workers. That never happened.

According to The Daily Beast, Lindell is now sitting with millions of unused masks and around $7 million in personal losses. The businessman told the publication that he “can’t give them away,” and that he wishes he could burn them all.

What happened? It’s hard to get a straight answer from Lindell, who is prone to conspiratorial tangents filled with Dadaist inventions, but the story The Daily Beast was able to piece together involves paints it as a “failed charity effort that Lindell then turned into a failed business venture, which he then turned back into a charity.” He had retrofitted about 75% of machines once used to crank out his fancy pillows into mask-sewing units. But he ran amok of commercial and regulatory roadblocks. The Food and Drug Administration, for instance, said it did not meet their standards.

Lindell also blamed “many bad people in the mask industry.”

Eventually the market flooded with masks, and Lindell was still lagging behind. Soon he was buying masks from other sources and then donating those instead — a move that cost him some $4 million.

Then he tried a different tack. As per the Beast:

He began selling them to the public and promoting the items online and in media appearances. And while Lindell vowed he was not gunning for a profit and only sold masks at or below the $1.50 cost of production, that’s only the most recent discounted rate. The MyPillow website once priced them as much as three times that rate, and in a June 2020 radio interview, Lindell marked them up four dollars a pop.

By the fall, he’d given up. Now he’s surrounded by the fruits of his failures — “un-given-away” face coverings, some of them surgical masks, others disposables, others made of cloth. The kicker? Lindell now doesn’t even believe masks worked at all. But now he’s giving them away. “Anyone can have them now,” he told the Beast. “I don’t care.” So if you need a mask, we know a guy.

(Via The Daily Beast)

Juneteenth honors the day the Emancipation Proclamation reached the state and thus marked all slaves as free. First celebrated in Texas, it’s expanded over the years. Indeed, this week President Joe Biden made it a federal holiday. On Friday night, just a day before the holiday, ABC held a Juneteenth TV special, Together We Triumph, that featured performances by Jimmie Allen, Chloe Bailey, and Leon Bridges. By the end of the night, it was clear that Chloe’s performance caught the most attention.

The singer took to the stage to share her cover of Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good” during the Juneteenth TV special. Her performance came with a spicy dance routine that left people divided, with some deeming it unfit for the classic soul song. “Idc Chloe Bailey ATE,” one person wrote on Twitter. “Just at the wrong table though—baby it’s Nina Simone [looking eyes emoji].” Others, though, defended what she’d done.

“Y’all MUST do some research on Nina Simone before saying Chloe Bailey didn’t understand the assignment,” they wrote. “Nina Simone was literally a free-spirited woman.” They added, “Go watch the documentary of Nina on Hulu, then tweet lol.”

You can watch a clip of Chloe’s performance above and check out more reactions to it below.