Category: News

Like many festivals, Madrid’s Mad Cool took a couple years off, as its 2020 and 2021 editions were a no-go. Now, though, organizers are preparing for 2022, when they’ll host the next Mad Cool between July 6 and 9. Ahead of then, they’ve shared the stacked lineup.

It’s a big one for rock fans: Headlining the four-day festival are Metallica, Twenty One Pilots, Placebo, Imagine Dragons, The Killers, Muse, Faith No More, Kings Of Leon, and Pixies. Additionally, more headliners are set to be announced. Elsewhere on the poster as it stands now are Carly Rae Jepsen, Wolf Alice, Deftones, St. Vincent, Foals, Sigrid, Tove Lo, Beabadoobee, Cherry Glazerr, Alt-J, The War On Drugs, Mø, Phoebe Bridgers, Black Pumas, Shura, Royal Blood, Zara Larsson, Editors, Leon Bridges, Sylvan Esso, Princess Nokia, Gang Of Youths, Marika Hackman, and Bartees Strange.

Tickets for the 2020 and 2021 festivals are valid for the 2022 festival, for which tickets are currently on sale.

A lot of the 2022 lineup is made up of artists who were set to perform in 2021. Some notable ones who aren’t on the new poster, though, include Cardi B, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Anderson .Paak.

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

Though Johnny Knoxville has already come out to say that the upcoming Jackass movie will indeed be his last, the behind-the-scenes drama between Jackass co-creator Jeff Tremaine and longtime star Bam Margera is underlining the point that it truly is the end of an era.

Earlier this month, it was reported that Tremaine had obtained a restraining order against Margera following what the director described as “death threats” against both himself and his family. Now it’s being made clear that the courts are clearly taking these threats seriously, as what was originally a temporary restraining order was extended to a permanent one on Tuesday—or, in the case of the courts, a full three years. Margera has been ordered to keep at least 100 yards away from Tremaine at all times.

The trouble started when Margera, who reportedly has a long history of issues related to substance abuse, was officially fired from Jackass 4 back in February. In response, Margera has been regularly airing his grievances against the Jackass cast and crew (well, some of them) via social media. In May, as Complex reported, Margera posted a video to Instagram in which he lamented:

“My family—Jackass—has betrayed me, rejected me, abandoned me. Not all of them. I love all of them and they love me back. But specifically Jeff Tremaine and Johnny Knoxville. So I feel like my family has f***ing done everything horrible to me and made me jump on hoops and walk through eggshells—which is impossible—and strung me along like a f***ing puppet to get the $5 million I usually get when I make a movie with them because Jeff Tremaine and CKY has started it.”

Fellow Jackass Steve-O (who recently celebrated 13 years of sobriety) defended his colleagues in a comment, where he noted:

“Everyone bent over backwards to get you in the movie, and all you had to do was not get loaded. You’ve continued to get loaded, it’s that simple. We all love you every bit as much as we all say we do, but nobody who really loves you can enable you or encourage you to stay sick.”

Offline, Margera has continued his harassment of Tremaine and his family, mainly via text. One of which read:

“Look at your children and grab your pocket book and write a check, if you are greedy, and cheap, look at your children again. If you don‘t sign the paper, look at your children,” one of the text messages allegedly read. “Sign your stupid f*cking contract before your [sic] not safe anywhere.”

Jackass 4 is set to be released on October 22, 2021.

(Via TMZ)

On Friday, the long-awaited big-screen adaptation of In the Heights—Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Tony Award-winning musical drama that preceded Hamilton by nearly a decade—premiered. But even before its debut, the film was being derided by some critics for its lack of Afro-Latino representation—especially after the film’s director, Jon M. Chu, admitted that he should be better educated on the issue of colorism.

By Monday, Miranda had issued a formal apology in which he took responsibility for the failure:

“I can hear the hurt and frustration over colorism, of feeling still unseen in the feedback.

I hear that without sufficient dark-skinned Afro-Latino representation, the work feels extractive of the community we wanted so much to represent with pride and joy.

In trying to paint a mosaic of this community, we fell short.

I’m truly sorry.

I’m learning from the feedback, I thank you for raising it, and I’m listening.”

But Rita Moreno, a fervent fan of Miranda’s and a colleague (he was a co-producer on her documentary Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It), thinks everyone needs to take a breath. While appearing on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert on Tuesday night, Moreno came to Miranda’s defense. Unprompted, no less.

In the middle of Moreno’s interview with Colbert, she asked to talk about the criticisms of Miranda and In the Heights and offered her own thoughts:

“It’s like you can never do right it seems. This is the man who literally has brought Latino-ness and Puerto Rican-ness to America. I couldn’t do it. I would love to say I did, but I couldn’t. Lin-Manuel has done that, really singlehandedly and I’m thrilled to pieces and I’m proud that he produced my documentary.”

When asked to clarify her position, and whether she thinks the current criticism against Miranda is misplaced, Moreno responded:

“Well I’m simply saying: Can’t you just wait a while and leave it alone? There’s a lot of people who are puertorriqueño who are also from Guatemala who are dark and who are also fair. We are all colors in Puerto Rico. And this is how it is. And it would be so nice if they hadn’t come up with that and left it alone—just for now. They’re really attacking the wrong person.”

You can watch the full clip below.

(Via Deadline)

SPOILERS for Loki will be found below.

After toying with viewers over the course of the first two episodes, the “Evil Loki” that’s been murdering TVA agents (a.k.a. Minutemen) across the timeline has finally been revealed. From the looks of things the villainous character appears to be Lady Loki, which may confirm a long-simmering fan theory that’s been bouncing around the internet after diligent Marvel fans learned that Sophia Di Martino had been cast in a mystery role.

Because Twitter has no chill, “Lady Loki” immediately started trending just a few hours after Loki Episode 2 premiered on Disney+, which is one of the perils of releasing shows in the dead of night. But while the spoiler-averse probably won’t be thrilled to see the character’s name bouncing all over their feed, the Marvel fans that adjusted their sleep schedules accordingly are loving the Lady Loki reveal:

After The Falcon and the Winter Soldier gave MCU fans a break from formulating wild theories, Loki is already sparking WandaVision-levels of fan theories. Most notably, that Lady Loki appears to have created the multiverse, which many assumed would be Wanda’s job:

More potential SPOILING may be found below:

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On Twitter, another theory is forming that Lady Loki is not actually Loki, but instead, she’s actually Enchantress, a well-known villain from the Thor comics. That theory is bolstered not just by her line about not wanting to be called Loki, but also by what appears to be an unintentional reveal in the Spanish version of the credits. Di Martino is listed as “Sylvie.” Why is that important? The full name of the Young Avengers version of Enchantress is Sylvie Lushton.

Either this is a masterfully placed red herring, or Marvel needs to tighten up their credit game.

(SPOILERS for Disney+’s Loki and the MCU will be found below.)

Whew. Marvel’s known for its secrecy, but when they want to tell fans that something’s coming, they get pretty damn forthright. After all, they’ve been telegraphing the arrival of the multiverse for a while and going into Disney+’s Loki, Marvel fans had to know that the multiverse was coming. The biggest clue there was the admirable audacity of the next Benedict Cumberbatch-starring film being called Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. No subtlety there!

Also, WandaVision began to make suggestions in the same direction (Elizabeth Olsen’s Wanda Maximoff/Scarlet Witch will appear in the Strange sequel, too), and there’s also more fun to had with Kevin Feige linking up FOX superheroes with the MCU. With Loki, the whole trickster aura of Tom Hiddleston’s character lent the perfect vibe to crack open the multiverse, and it sure looks like that’s what happened at the end of Episode 2. That happened after Owen Wilson’s Mobius character did his damndest to explain the rules of a multiverse without confusing anyone. It was a heck of an expositional feat, but Mobius didn’t anticipate the character who’s caused all hell to break loose.

Matters grew both more and less confusing at the end of Episode 2, when the shrouded character who killed a bunch of Timekeepers in Oklahoma revealed their identity: Lady Loki (portrayed by Sophia Di Martino).

She’s the mystery Variant that the Time Variance Authority has been chasing, and she presented herself straight to Loki’s face. He did not appear to be impressed.

However, we must get real here. What Lady Loki does is something that the actual Loki (and it’s confusing, obviously, since we’re dealing with Loki Variants, including the version that Tom Hiddleston is portraying in this series) would have never dared to or thought to do. Sure, the Loki that we’ve come to know is the same guy who invited the Chitauri down to Earth for a bunch of murderous mayhem in Avengers, but Lady Loki’s shaking things up to a degree that’s possibly beyond repair. What’s going on?

Lady Loki’s murders throughout the Sacred Timeline have been a ruse to snatch up the TVA’s timeline-resetting devices. They’re all rigged up now, and Lady Loki appears to be creating the multiverse with them.

Mobius is heard wondering where the heck these devices are going, and let’s just say that it’s not good. Bye bye, Sacred Timeline, and hello, MCU multiverse.

From here, we should (clearly) expect chaos to unfold. What form that takes remains a mystery, but Kevin Feige is truly using Loki to set up Phase Four and beyond, whether we asked for the multiverse or not. Anything is conceivable now, and I sort of wonder if that Infinity Stones gut punch last week would be redeemed by this show suggesting that Natasha Romanoff is alive and well somewhere. That could get messy, considering that the Black Widow movie is set after the events of Captain America: Civil War, but I could see this multiverse stuff factoring into how the Taskmaster learned how to fight all those Avengers, including Black Panther, without us seeing any of it onscreen. Say what you want about Kevin Feige, but he masterfully guided the layered stories of the Infinity Saga, so he might be upping his game even more.

How, exactly, the revelation of Lady Loki plays into that layering — particularly the show’s blink-and-you’d-miss-it revelation that Loki is gender fluid — it’s hard to guess. Loki’s gender fluidity is something that’s well-sourced both in the comics and in Loki’s Norse mythology roots. Lady Loki might have nothing at all to do with the gender-fluid revelation, although it could be notable that Feige decided to reveal her right after confirming the gender-fluid identity of Loki. Perhaps we’ll hear more on that note next week, or not. I suspect that the ball might be dropped there with the gender-fluid confirmation being as far as Disney+ wants to go on that issue.

What matters at the moment is this: Lady Loki is even more mischievous (and crafty) than the actual Loki or any Variant that we’ve seen so far.

Also, Kermit is not MCU canon, but with reactions like this one, I wish he was.

Disney+’s ‘Loki’ will stream new episodes on Wednesdays.

On the pandemic front, things are looking up. People are getting vaccinated and consequently, the country and world are starting to open back up. In celebration of that, Ariana Grande joined James Corden on The Late Late Show for a pandemic-themed Hairspray parody. The number, a rework of “Good Morning Baltimore,” was filmed on a high-production, musical-style set and features new lyrics about getting vaccinated, reconnecting with loved ones, and enjoying life in ways we hadn’t been able to recently.

Ahead of the show, Grande shared some photos from the making of the sketch and wrote, “fun with my friend @j_corden ! tune in tonight @latelateshow 12:37 am on CBS for our skit. #LateLateShow p.s. there may even be a very special, heart attack provoking cameo made by a Tony Award winning, friend of mine !

That cameo, by the way, was Marissa Jaret Winokur, who won a Tony for her role of Tracy Turnblad in the original Broadway production of Hairspray. Winokur shared a photo of herself with Grande and Corden and wrote, “It’s not about the shoes but it’s also not NOT about the shoes Tune in tonight @latelateshow 12:37am on CBS for the skit TY @j_corden and my sweet @arianagrande for including me in such a special event .”

Watch the “No Lockdowns Anymore” skit above.

What is it like to have a conversation with Isaac Brock? Actually, it’s a lot like listening to Modest Mouse — he’s somewhat erratic, often explosively funny, and, just when you least expect it, brutally honest and insightful.

Believe it or not, but Brock now qualifies as a true indie-rock elder statesman. Modest Mouse’s seventh album due out June 25, The Golden Casket, arrives 25 years after their 1996 debut, This Is A Long Drive For Someone With Nothing To Think About. Back then, Brock was a few months shy of his 20th birthday, and he sounded like it. His early songs were rough-hewn, combustible, and filled with pointed observations about small-town blue-collar life that still seem utterly unique in the largely bourgeois world of indie music. (Brock’s insistence on saying his band was from Issaquah, Washington rather than nearby Seattle had as much to do with his trailer-park allegiances as his aversion to being associated with grunge.)

The next two Modest Mouse albums, 1997’s The Lonesome Crowded West and 2000’s The Moon & Antarctica, are landmarks of modern indie. Then came 2004’s Good News For People Who Love Bad News, which shockingly transformed them into a multi-platinum mainstream rock band. While their output since then has come slower — just three albums in the past 17 years — Brock remains committed as ever to not repeating himself.

For The Golden Casket, “I didn’t go in with any plan except I told them I wasn’t going to play guitar,” he says. Instead, he set out to make “a sound effects record” in which he assembled various exotic sounds (“fucking kalimbas and weird tinkery shit,” as Brock puts it) into a sonic collage with big-time rock producers Dave Sardy (LCD Soundsystem, Band Of Horses) and Jacknife Lee (U2, The Killers). In the end, however, Brock did end up playing some guitar, though the album ultimately hews closer to the layered production of later Modest Mouse records as opposed to the band’s more feral early work.

Thematically, Brock’s concerns have remained remarkably consistent over the course of Modest Mouse’s career. Just as The Lonesome Crowded West ruminated on the early effects of urban sprawl on the Pacific Northwest, The Golden Casket evinces deep skepticism about how modern technology has turned against its human masters. Brock freely admits that his thoughts on this subject veer into “tinfoil hat” territory — he basically believes we’re all in the midst of a secret world war being waged with a combination of disinformation and underhanded hacking of essential forms of personal and political infrastructure. But even at his most conspiratorial, he can still crack a well-timed joke.

“I don’t believe that we are very restrained in our usage of anything,” Brock says. “I mean, if someone were to tell me right this second that, definitively, using cellphones gave me brain cancer, I’d still just be like, ‘But they also give me cellphones.’”

While he’s not overly fond of looking back (or doing interviews in general), Brock did agree to reflect on Modest Mouse’s seven albums, and explain how they all lead up to The Golden Casket.

This Is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About (1996)

I don’t know that I would have continued making music if I and Eric and Jeremy hadn’t managed to come up with a song like “Dramamine.” I’ve never been able to make another one like that. I’ve never heard another one like that. I love that song.

When I started Modest Mouse I didn’t want it to be confused with the Seattle scene. The Seattle scene was defined by this “Why be normal?” bullshit. Everyone was dour, and fucking had green hair, and would just party their asses off a fucking cliff. So I was more interested in making it harder to pinpoint what the fuck was going on with us. And so I talked about the town we lived in. Which, there are special things about it, but it’s not like it’s a magical alpine village.

I wasn’t reacting against grunge, because I really liked what I considered… these are the sort of things I don’t give two shits about at this point in my life. As a grown-up, what was really grunge and what wasn’t seems pretty fucking pointless. But at that time I didn’t think what was going on, when it hit the radio, barring Nirvana, was really grunge. I was like a Tad/Mudhoney person. I had very strict rules as to what made you grunge.

Everyone wants to matter for forever and shit. That’s just built into being, I think. But I don’t think I had a very clear idea of what 10 years really looked like, much less 20 or 25. I wanted it to make sense right then, and I didn’t really give a shit if it made sense the following year. Although, that’s kind of bullshit. Because I remember when writing the lyrics I’d specifically go through and weed out words that had too much attachment to the time, or so I thought. I didn’t succeed, but I thought I did that.

I didn’t put any photos of us on the record. There were discussions, I was like, “We’re going to look stupid.” And at one point I also tried talking us into not putting our names on it because I said, “It doesn’t matter.” But I lost that one.

The Lonesome Crowded West (1997)

For years, starting probably when I was 14, the house that I was living in and the property — it’s actually still where my mom and stepdad live across the street from — would get flooded. As in, there was a river running through our houses every fucking winter, once or twice. Because the people up the hill had just clear-cut shit, and they were just like, “All right, here’s a little flood for you.” So I didn’t have to be well-researched or well-taught on matters of the ecological impact of putting up fucking strip malls.

A lot of my politics were born in rhetoric taken from Crass records. I was pissed off at people — it wasn’t even their fault — about where they were standing with class and shit. I drew a line in the sand, which I don’t think is necessarily the way to fucking solve shit. But I was very cognizant of the blue-collar angle.

Personally, I struggled with the idea of being a sellout. Like, “Ah, this is very un-Fugazi of me.” I remember my friend Sam Jayne, he was the first person I was in a band with, he passed away this year. But him and I started our first band ever, and that band became Lync, on K Records. I dropped out, went to Arlington, Virginia, and they kept the band going. But I remember when I was in the band with him, he and I were arguing over the premise of, if someone offered us a million dollars to be on a major label would we do it? This is what teenagers fucking do, apparently. And I was like, “Yeah, absolutely.” He’s like, “Nah, where’s your integrity?” And I was like, “I have two dishwashing jobs, where the fuck’s my integrity right now? I’ll take the money and be not poor for a minute.”

The Moon & Antarctica (2000)

I did have a bigger budget, but it resembled the other budgets because that budget, it turns out… this was my first time really experiencing this, it was our first major-label release and I learned that the way that the recording budget thing worked is whoever’s working on it says, “So what you got in your pocket?” And you’re like, “This much.” And they’re like, “That’s how much it costs.” Which is fine when you don’t have anything in your pocket. But then you get to be the bigger dog and they’re like, “You’re paying to support other bands like you, so they can get in here for nickels and dimes.” So it didn’t necessarily feel like I was allowed more time because of a bigger budget.

A couple weeks into it, during basic tracking, I got my face broken by neighborhood kids. To quote them, “Fuck you, cowboy.” That’s after my jaw was broken and I was walking away. They were throwing beer kegs and bottles and saying, “Fuck you, cowboy.” I looked down and I was like, “Oh, I’m wearing a cowboy shirt.”

I was in Cook County Hospital, which is a fucking nightmare. I felt happy to be the one who wasn’t handcuffed to his gurney, bleeding to death. Got out and stayed in the apartment in the neighborhood where my mouth had been broken long enough to realize that the neighborhood kids were pretty psyched and they were coming back to do it again. Sort of like revving their engines all night and shit. I’d hear old neighbor ladies like, “Yeah, Johnny and the boys fucking broke one of those guys in the apartment, something to do with the face. And they said there’s a recording studio down in there. It’s nothing but some piles of garbage and dry wall.” Anyways, they were circling the property all the time, ready to just finish the job and shit.

I went to Del Prado, Indiana, where Benny [Massarella, Modest Mouse’s percussionist] was living. Got my face operated on, got my mouth wired shut, and then went back to the studio. I couldn’t go anywhere, and the rest of the band had left, and it was just me and the intern. And I couldn’t sing. On all these tracks, I was just stuck there and I got to do way too much layering.

I was left alone there to build that fucking record, with another guy who felt pretty happy to just be left alone. I obviously didn’t go forth and get my jaw broken for every record, but that was a better record because of it.

Good News for People Who Love Bad News (2004)

We had done Antarctica, and it had done fine but not major-label fine. It did really good as far as we were concerned, but below expectations, I guess. No one who was at the label really knew who we were, except for someone in the art department. While we were recording they fired our A&R guy, so at that point we didn’t even have a liaison to the label. No one was asking us about the record. We’d send in our budget saying, “Okay, we’re working on this thing. Can we do this or that?” And I thought they were going to just boot us off the label or shelve the record.

When we gave it to them it just happened to be in this particularly dry period for Epic. And the current president of the company, Steve Barnett, was storming around from office to office, throwing paper in the air or whatever you do to get shit done. And he was like, “Oh, this just came in.” And he put it on. He was like, “That! That’s the one!” There’s a kind of fairytale rock story there, just because nothing else was going on, and we happened to be.

We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank (2007)

Around The Moon & Antarctica, we started incorporating a percussionist and a violin player on stage. We had so much of that going on, it was pretty easy to just adopt the idea that Modest Mouse is a revolving door. I think it’s pretty positive. It’s there for folks if they need to come back. If I hadn’t kept a revolving door kind of community thing going on with this band, we wouldn’t be able to accomplish a lot of what we have. I think some people see … well, it’s not all positive, what people seem to feel about that. Because no one likes to be the person who disappears from the picture. Although oftentimes the person who disappears from the picture is themselves why they disappeared. It’s just an optics thing where there’s a lot of assumptions made if you’re not in the picture. Then there’s a lot of explaining, “Oh no, there wasn’t bad blood.” And sometimes there was fucking bad blood, but you know what they say, “There was no bad blood.”

With Johnny Marr, we had discussed very clearly that we were just working on three songs together and that he would do no touring. But it was too much fucking fun, so we did a whole record. And then that was too much fun, so we started touring together. And it wasn’t until we toured for fucking five years or something, four years on the same record, that Johnny had to basically be like, “I want to be making new music. And we’re just fucking playing the same shit, so we got to get out…” I remember we were in Australia, and he’s like, “Dude, what are we doing here? Let’s go make a record.” And I was like, “Ah, it’s just…” I don’t even remember what my answer was, but it wasn’t as good as, “Yeah, let’s go and make a fucking record.” So he went off, did The Cribs and stuff, which was a good move. There were another two years before we even started trying to make a record.

Strangers To Ourselves (2015)

Well, honestly, substance abuse was part of it, initially. One thing turned into another, and your eyes dilate and you work for a week on something that you have to destroy because it was never good in the first place. So there is a bit of that. It’s not the whole story, but that played into that record.

It turned out great, I love it. But that’s despite of, not because of, my bullshit and staying up. This is a very different conversation that I’d be happy to have at some point. But I was getting gang-stalked, if you’re familiar with that? Google it. Gang-stalking turned into Adderall and stuff like that, so I could keep my eyes on regular stalkers, two of which ended up in jail, one for burning my security cameras at my house. I started losing sleep, and I started taking substances to make sure I stayed awake. So other people’s bullshit made my problems on that one.

I’m starting to feel a little bashful about leaning into the negative aspects of my life that fit into an album cycle. The salacious shit, it’s okay, it makes for a good story. But all the days that weren’t shitty in fact went into making these records good, which I think probably were more important than overcoming obstacles and other shit.

The Golden Casket (2021)

I had no vision at the beginning. I went in with an almost completely blank slate. “We Are Between” was pretty much written, “Walking And Running” was sort of written, and the second half of “We Are Between,” which is “We Are Lucky,” it was two songs made in one song. And so basically there was a handful of songs that were already made. And that led back to the middle.

I didn’t want to stand and have the band showdown where we write fucking like Let It Be, where we’re talking out parts and shit. I started off with just me and Dave the producer so that we could rack up a bunch of weird sounds, and then see what we needed from the rest of the band. I just wanted everything to fucking fall together, and it did.

I wanted to make sure I didn’t accidentally make the same record again. It’s better to not put out many records, and make them all feel a bit different. I try to be very aware of whether I’m doing the same thing, or doing something too close to another thing. My canon of information — what songs are out there, not just Modest Mouse songs, but just songs in the world — I know about a lot more songs. I just remembered a song I was super psyched on with Jacknife Lee last week. I was playing the kettle drum. And I get done and I’m listening to it and I’m like, “This is fucking strange. It sounds like The Simpsons theme song.” And so I’m aware that I can’t cover songs by accident. I’m also aware that I don’t want to accidentally cover my songs.

I could talk for 10 hours bout just the subject of that song “Transmitting Receiving.” Anytime I start talking about this, I have to say, “I call this section ‘the tinfoil hat.’” It’s probably the most important shit that I’ve written about, which is the true scope of what’s going on with technology. Everything from gang-stalking, to fucking targeted individuals, to B2K, all the shit that goes on, is going on, and has been used on me. Someone bought all these salvaged IBM computers from the Pentagon, and in one of the banks of it there’s a top-secret thing called “Silent Weapons For Invisible Wars.” It’s basically the Third World War which we’ve been all participating in. But I’ll stop now.

I feel really, really optimistic about the fact that everyone’s casually talking about UFOs, and that they’re on the scene. And pretty pessimistic about our ability to handle our own shit. But UFOs are on the scene. And they haven’t turned us into human fondue yet, so maybe they’re here with good intentions. It’s hard to be a dad and be as pessimistic as I want to be. There’s something good about being a parent and just being aware that, not for your sake, you don’t want this place to fucking suck. For anyone. I don’t want other kids to have to live in shitty situations, because I like my kids.

I’m fighting the urge to do a children’s record. We started one which was just a cappella, about Tom The Hillbilly. And then we animated me climbing on him. We green-screened it so I’m just climbing all over his body. Because he’s always crawling and shit, because there’s always sugar or something on him. Anyways, that’s as far as we got, making a video where I’m climbing all over him as vermin.

The Golden Casket is out on June 25 via Epic Records. Get it here.

There’s a certain type of person who believes Donald Trump will become president again, not in 2024 (although also that) but this summer. Let’s call them “kooks.” Mike Lindell is one (“If Trump is saying August, that is probably because he heard me say it,” he confidently told the Daily Beast), and former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell is another. “A new inauguration date is set, and Biden is told to move out of the White House, and President Trump should be moved back in,” she informed attendees of the “For God & Country Patriot Roundup” conference last month. “I’m sure there’s not going to be credit for time lost, unfortunately, because the Constitution itself sets the date for inauguration, but he should definitely get the remainder of his term and make the best of it.”

Trump being reinstated before Candyman hits theaters is not going to happen, but that hasn’t stopped a “ticket” for his inauguration from making the rounds on social media. “This is just INSANE on a whole other level! These ‘tickets’ are being sold for as high as $1200.00 each on Q sites all over the internet, and the really crazy part is that people are talking about how excited they are because they’ve already purchased them WTAF the deeper one digs the weirder it gets,” reads a Facebook post that has made its way to Twitter. I wish I could say “needless to say,” but I clearly need to say it: the ticket, which has been shared thousands of times across multiple social media platforms, is a fake, via Reuters:

A poorly edited ticket for President Donald Trump’s alleged “second inauguration” has made the rounds on social media, with users critical of Trump and his followers claiming the ticket is being sold online among followers of conspiracy theory QAnon. While the ticket in the photograph is indeed a fabricated image, Reuters found no evidence of such tickets being sold or bought within self-described QAnon groups online.

Here’s the ticket:

Come on everyone. The ticket is an obvious fabrication: there’s no way Beach Boys singer Mike Love wouldn’t join Kid Rick and Ted Nugent.

(Via Reuters)

In a few days, on June 20, Foo Fighters will perform at Madison Square Garden for the storied venue’s first full-capacity show of the year. Ahead of then, though, the band actually performed another show, at Canyon Club, a 600-person-capacity venue in Agoura Hills, California. That was last night, and the show was only for fans who could show proof of vaccination. This ruffled the feathers of some anti-vaxers, who decided to protest the event.

Foo Fighters fans shared photos of the scene, with one writing, “This is what happens when you just want to attend a @foofighters concert at a small local concert hall and the next thing out know you’re a ‘Vaccine Segregationist’.”

CBS Los Angeles quotes one protestor as saying, “What they’re doing is saying only vax people… separating humans is not OK. Those of us who have healthy immune systems should be able to enjoy these freedoms just like everybody else.”

Variety reports that photos from the protest seem to show Ricky Schroder, an actor best known for his childhood role in the ’80s TV sitcom Silver Spoons, in attendance. Ahead of the event, he wrote on Facebook, “Dave Grohl is an ignorant punk who needs slapped for supporting Discrimination. Ignorance comes in all shapes & sizes. Kurt Cobain is laughing at you Dave along with Millions of Patriots….Fool.”

“I think it’s on you. This article will persuade the world that this is the right choice, or not.” These are the words of Late Night with Seth Meyers producer Mike Shoemaker, half-joking, but half not, that the onus is on me to convince you that the current iteration of Late Night – this one that currently does not have a studio audience – is a Late Night finally firing on all cylinders.

Now, it’s true I do believe that. And, yes, I showed up to studio 8G at 30 Rockefeller Center on a hot June New York City Thursday afternoon with an agenda: to convince Seth Meyers and Mike Shoemaker of this (correct) opinion. But both Meyers and Shoemaker have been in television a long time and I know that they also know this, but haven’t fully decided quite what to do about it yet. So I, somewhat jokingly, but mostly seriously, said back to Shoemaker, “I don’t think this article needs to convince America, I think it’s just the two of you.” To which Shoemaker replied, “Now you know Seth’s secrets. That’s the way to do it.”

“Look, one day the audiences are going to come back and I’ll fall back in love with them. I feel very confident about that,” says Meyers. To which I respond there’s no part of me that believes that even a little bit. To which Meyers says, “That’s very fair of you to say. A very fair assessment based on how much I’m talking about enjoying them not being here.”

***

Since the Seth Meyers version of Late Night debuted in 2014, the show has undergone some tweaks here and there. There was the decision to start the show with Meyers seated at his desk instead of starting with the more traditional stand-up monologue. And there was the addition of the show’s now-signature feature, “A Closer Look.” but it would take world-changing-level circumstances to force Late Night (and everyone else in the world, really) to make significant changes to its format. The difference with Late Night, though, is the significant changes to its format have been for the better. It’s, now, less a structured late night talk show, and more a madcap hour featuring Seth Meyers and a carnival full of jokes from Amber Ruffin and Jeff Wright; a fake recap of a television show called Tiny Secret Whispers; weird off-camera characters Meyers just has full conversations with; yelling at his cue card guy, Wally; yelling at his writer Mike Scollins about jokes he doesn’t like; Al Pacino impressions; Werner Herzog impressions; Meyers’s new fake musical, Cicada Cicada; and, well, a lot of Meyers laughing. He’s almost now the late night equivalent of Mister Rogers (this is now a show that features talking inanimate objects, like paintings and craft-works) only with Meyers as sort of a playfully reluctant host to all this whimsy, but, by the end, can’t resist. Right now, it’s not a show easily comparable to any other iteration of Late Night, or any other talk show, really. And in the seven years Meyers has been hosting Late Night, I’ve never seen him happier.

“It got here sort of step-by-step,” says Meyers. “Starting with, of course, a pandemic and the many different iterations the show had taken until it’s reached its way back into an empty studio, post a Trump presidency. I feel like a lot of different things happened to make it what it is now.”

But, however, it got to what it is now, isn’t this the best version?

Meyers: “Well, we certainly are aware it’s the most natural version of the show we’ve ever done. Wouldn’t you agree with that?”

Shoemaker: “Yeah. Definitely, yes. I don’t even know if it’s natural, it’s certainly not labored. We don’t have to work hard to fit it into this box. It doesn’t take much of that. So in that sense, it is very natural.”

So in the past did you feel you were trying to fit Late Night into a box?

Shoemaker: “I think we always took how something would play to an audience into account.”

Meyers: “I mean, when I look back at this show and the sort of different acts it’s had, I think the first 18 months was probably the most we ever tried to fit it into a box, and what we thought a late night show was. And then we found our way via ‘A Closer Look,’ certainly, into doing the show we most wanted to do. But, now … I guess I thought we were doing the show we most wanted to do, but it wasn’t the show, so I was wrong. This is the show we’ve most wanted to do for sure.

So on that aforementioned hot New York City Thursday at studio 8G inside 30 Rockefeller Plaza, I watched a taping of Late Night with Seth Meyers. A thing I had done before, but not like this, not without an audience. As an “audience member,” under these circumstances, it was a fascinating experience in that watching the process is so much more interesting because literally nothing was conducive to me having an enjoyable viewing experience. It was much more like watching all the stuff that happens behind the scenes during the commercial breaks at SNL than it was “an afternoon of comedy for the crowd,” like it used to be. Almost everything that now plays so well and so weird for the actually late at night television crowd at home, I just imagined the silence of a full crowd in the room wondering, “What on Earth am I watching here? Why is Seth Meyers doing an Al Pacino impression? Wait, who is Werner Herzog?”

But there’s the conundrum, it’s the best experience watching Late Night in person, but you can’t have an audience to have this experience. I mention this to Meyers after the show and he jokes, “That’s like saying how much you love flying coach, as long as there’s no one else in coach.”

***

“You know, pre-COVID, we had a test audience,” says Shoemaker. “Which is, basically, during our rehearsal, we would invite people from the building, 25 tourists. And we didn’t always rely on it, but that based a lot of the choices. We tried everything that way, and then that was kind of the barrier to entry. And that’s all gone. It’s really like brain to mouth to television.”

Meyers: “Now, I should note, there are a few stopgaps in place. It’s not like we’re just barfing things onto the page and then doing it.”

Shoemaker: “I mean, some things are!”

But, see, that’s the strange dichotomy of a late night studio audience. The show has to play to both the 200-some people in the room in the late afternoon, as well as to the millions of people watching at home well past midnight. That balance seems way off. Why should the 200 people in the room, who, mostly, were just asked off the street if they want to watch a taping and hadn’t really considered it much before that day, dictate what millions of people are seeing at home? (Also, daytime humor seems a lot different than humor after midnight.)

Meyers recalls, “When I was doing a show in an attic, and I was talking into an iPad with the realization that most of the people who would be watching it would be on the other side of their iPad, it felt really stripped down. And when you take out the performance to an audience? A very small percentage of the people who watch your show, obviously, are in the live studio any given night. And by removing them, I did feel like it brought us a lot closer to the people at home.”

I mention to Meyers that when he was on Conan O’Brien’s podcast a few weeks ago he told Conan that if a studio audience reacts too positively to a joke, he starts to question himself.

Meyers: “I mean, it has been very liberating. We have people, of the 10 to 12 people that are watching any given night, they’re people like Shoemaker who is not an easy laugh. And so there’s still a way to mark, as it’s going, how it’s going.”

I then mentioned that, in the press, Meyers has a tendency to tell us that he will love audiences again, as he said to me, but then he will tell guests and other late night hosts the complete opposite and that, yes, we can see him when he does this because this is on television. Meyers jokes, “I’m not going to lie to Gayle King.”

Shoemaker: “It took you time for you to even realize that it was a possibility for them not to be here.”

Meyers: “Well, I think the reality and the thing I keep coming back to is, I didn’t dislike the audience when they were here. I liked them a great deal.”

Shoemaker: “It wasn’t an option. I mean, it’s possible that you could say you’d have to do it from your house. I mean, I could see that in a catastrophe, but we never thought we’d get to do it in the studio with lights and audio that works … and nobody here. This is the most unpredictable outcome. And yet, it’s the thing we found the most fun, because it wasn’t as much fun when you were at your house, for you. I think that there’s a lot of lifting that being actually done in the studio, when you didn’t have to worry about everything.”

Meyers: “My entire day is taken up focused on writing and performance, which was not the case when I was home. And so that also is liberating.”

Look, I know, and if you’re reading this, you know, that Meyers and Jimmy Fallon have very different comedic tastes and styles. But to the layperson who is just flipping through channels around 12:30 a.m. (11:30 a.m. central), there’s now a sharp contrast between the two shows. Back in 2014, Fallon, a host in a suit, would be delivering jokes to a crowd of people and then here comes Meyers, a host in a suit, located one floor above Fallon, delivering jokes to an audience. But now, Fallon ends, and viewers instead get a casual Meyers, with no audience in sight, delivering Al Pacino impressions to the delight of only his crew. It’s filmed at 4 p.m., but it feels like something that was filmed at 12:30 a.m. It feels like something made specifically for someone still up in the wee hours on a weekday.

Meyers: “It makes total sense that the contrast would be bigger now.”

Shoemaker: “Last week, Seth even said, I wonder what it’s like watching the end of Jimmy that has a full audience and applause, and go into us. And I said yeah, I wonder. I still haven’t checked. Like, I don’t know. I wonder if that’s jarring.”

I can answer that. The answer is it feels like something that’s actually filmed late at night.

Meyers: “I think one of the things we’re going to be most interested by, and obviously are going to try to stay tuned into is, whether or not people will find it jarring. And whether once more shows come back with audiences, will people watching at home opt for those shows over ones like ours that don’t have a studio audience there.”

Well, I don’t think people care as much about there being an audience at a show than maybe someone who works on a TV show thinks.

Shoemaker: “I think that you’re right and I made this argument in the past. I know there’s a thinking, like in regular primetime television, that if you have a multi-cam, you don’t put it in the same block as the single cam. And I think it doesn’t matter. I think that people go to what they like. I don’t think that you’re shaken when all of a sudden you go from The Office to Will and Grace. I don’t think that it matters. And I think this is probably the latest example that maybe it doesn’t.”

Meyers: “I think you’ve been here when there were audiences before?”

I have.

Meyers: “You come out, you talk to the audience ahead of time, there’s a warm-up comedian. Before the band comes on I would go into the audience and do a Q&A, and those were all things I liked doing. But, obviously, now, I would be mentally, clinically insane if I did that now. So it is true as well I think doing this show now, you realize, oh, 12:30 at night on a Tuesday is not a time where you’re usually with a large group of people. Like, when I was in high school, I would watch SNL with a bunch of friends, but I never had people over to watch Letterman.”

***

Okay, it’s time to try and convince “the world.” (In other words, it’s time to try and convince Seth Meyers and Mike Shoemaker.) Both Meyers and Shoemaker know right now the show is the best its ever been. They both say it’s the most fun. And they both agree this is the version of Late Night they’ve wanted to do. Also, it’s the most efficient version: All that time spent warming up an audience is time used on the show for the home viewer instead. So if the show is the best it’s been, if the show is the show they both want to be doing the most, if the show is the most fun it’s been … why is bringing audiences back even a question right now?

Well, first, it sounds like some filibustering is going on before any real decisions are made. Meyers says they could have audiences now (like Fallon and Colbert have done), but the earliest audiences even would possibly come back to Late Night is September. Which, to be fair, gives them three full months to kick the tires a few more times to see how it’s going before any real decisions are made. But, also, they make it clear that they believe the decision is theirs to make and they know they only get one shot at this because once audiences come back, they can’t just decide, oh, we made a mistake, and make them go away again.

How much power do you actually have just to tell the suits you would rather keep the show the way it is with no audience?

Meyers: “We feel like we have the power to say that.”

Shoemaker: “We haven’t had a lot of conversations about it. I mean, it wasn’t an option until very recently. And if anything, they felt bad that it wasn’t. Because there are many COVID protocols. Whereas other shows, I think, were unhappy to not have an audience. Like SNL and Fallon, we were not. So now that the people are coming back no one is saying to us, “When are you?” They just want to know, ‘Hey, when are you (bringing back audiences) so that we have notice because we have to get the elevators working and things like that.’ Literally no one from the network has asked to speed it up, or even for a timetable. Which is not to say that they haven’t discussed it without us, but it isn’t an issue yet.”

Meyers: “I will say this. We will not even… the earliest would be September for us. And so we’ve given ourselves the freedom to enjoy a summer without putting any pressure on it.”

Shoemaker: “But we feel it’s coming. Mostly, guests, which are now maybe half Zoom and half here, I think guests enjoy the audience a little more.”

Do they? I’ve been watching a lot of clips of Later with Bob Costas. Everyone on that show seems to have a great time and there’s no audience.

Shoemaker: “And they’re perfectly fine?”

You know why, because I think they like the crew laughter better than audience laughter, too.

Shoemaker: “Yeah, that could be. We haven’t done a poll. We have not asked them. We have all this time to figure it out. It’s only been a handful of guests since we started letting them in. So we don’t really have a good sampling.”

Meyers: “I think it’s very fair for you to make the observation that I’m not telling the truth when I say I want an audience to come back. I think what it really is, Mike, and again, I’m not disabusing you of your previous notions: I’m very aware that once we have audiences back, it’s only a one-way street, right? Unless there’s another pandemic, you don’t go back to no audiences.”

Which nobody wants.

Meyers: “You don’t, right. So you knock on wood that once the audience has come back, it’ll be like that forever. And so it will be hard not to mourn the ending of a thing that we have managed to find joy in. I guess I do know that when audiences come back, I’m going to have to go out for the warmup and be like, no, look, I know you guys have read some stuff I’ve said. But I love you. It wasn’t you, it was me! That was stuff I was working through!”

Could you imagine being in that first audience back? Knowing you are the most unwelcome guests of a late night show ever? You are going to be hissed.

Meyers: “The best will be when a joke bombs in front of an audience and my save is that would have worked if none of you were here. If the studio was empty, that would have killed. I’m going to have a side camera for the people watching at home that I’m just going to look at and be like, sorry about my guests.”

Shoemaker: “Well, Mike, now I think it’s on you. This article will persuade the world that this is the right choice, or not.”

Who am I trying to convince? You both just said you have the power to do this. Am I trying to convince the two of you?

Shoemaker: “We’re not saying that out loud so much.”

Okay, then I’m just telling you, just don’t do it. Don’t do it.

Shoemaker: “Let’s see how you convince America. I think you could do it, Mike. I believe in you.”

You can contact Mike Ryan directly on Twitter.