Reversing one of TikTok’s favorite challenges, a newly surfaced video proves the kids just might be alright. While the app has become known as a launching pad for some artists’ careers — artists like Bella Poarch, Foushee, and Lil Nas X — it’s also a place where the generation gap couldn’t be more evident as teens challenged their older relatives to identify stars of today like DaBaby, Lil Baby, and others. However, one parent flipped the trend, showing photos of stars to her toddler, and the wholesome video rapidly accumulated a huge number of views, jumping to other platforms as well.
Seeing photos of Beyonce, Cardi B, Chance The Rapper, DaBaby, Doja Cat, Nicki Minaj, Pop Smoke, and Saweetie, the child correctly identifies most of them, getting extra excited for Cardi B and Doja, although we’ll give points for effort for exclamations of “Baby!” and “Pop Soaps!” However, one of the more inexplicable answers is for Megan Thee Stallion, who for some reason, the baby identifies as “Grandma.”
As these acts all hover in the upper echelons of the Hot 100 whenever they drop new music, it’s no wonder they’re kid-approved — or maybe it’s the other way around. In any case, judging by this toddler’s reactions, Cardi and Doja look to have long careers ahead of them — and Megan Thee Stallion might want to check her mail for that AARP card.
Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
HBO’s Betty, about an all-girl friend group of skaters in New York City, was one of the best shows of 2020 and there’s no reason to think season two won’t be just as good. First off, Kirt is back, and Kirt rules. So does Honeybear, and Indigo, and Camille, and Janay, and Kirt’s rat, Persephone, and… I want to be friends with all of them. (It would be a real “how do you do, fellow kids?” scenario.) Also, based on the trailer above, season two will have more skateboard shenanigans, romantic entanglements, and great fashion. Betty is also one of the few shows that can successfully pull off a “COVID season,” as it doesn’t look like it will be the focus of the plot, outside of an encounter with a Karen.
“It’s been a joy to ride through the streets of NYC with the inspiring women of Betty, and we’re grateful to them and to Crystal for sharing their stories and friendships with us,” Amy Gravitt, executive vice president of HBO programming, said when Betty was renewed for season two. “We can’t wait to watch where our beloved Bettys go next.”
Here’s more:
In Betty, a diverse group of young women navigates their lives through the male-dominated world of skateboarding in New York City. Starring Dede Lovelace, Moonbear, Nina Moran, Ajani Russell, and Rachelle Vinberg, from Crystal Moselle’s film Skate Kitchen.
Betty returns to HBO on June 11, although you can watch the season premiere now on YouTube.
We all need supportive cheerleaders in our lives, and when they come in the form of our own parents, it’s even better.
At every one of my performances, awards ceremonies, and graduations growing up, my dad would bellow in his big, booming voice, “THAT’S MY DAUGHTER!!!” As embarrassing as it was, it always made the whole room chuckle and I never had a single doubt that my dad was proud of me.
A dad in a viral video brought that same energy—and some impressive acrobatic skill—to his own kid’s graduation. The video first made the viral rounds in 2016 and has gotten a resurgence on social media this week. After a year of constantly shifting pandemic schooling, which was hard on students, parents, teachers, and administrators, a joyful celebration of an educational milestone just feels right to share.
For some kids, graduating is just a given—an occasion to mark, but not necessarily an enormously significant event. For others, the road to graduation is filled with obstacles, pitfalls, detours, and rough conditions that make that achievement worthy of a jubilant expression of pride.
This is just pure, unbridled celebration you can feel in your bones. (Especially when he flips back over that railing. Dang.)
This dad celebrating his son’s graduation is just what I needed today… https://t.co/S2kSRwreWQ
Interestingly, some commenters feel that the man’s exuberance was too much, that it put the attention on him instead of his kid. Maybe it’s because I had the dad I had, but this display of joy and pride felt like it was all about the kid. We don’t know what parents go through to help their kids overcome challenges. We don’t know how close this kid came to not graduating. We don’t know if the kid actually excelled and this dad is simply overjoyed at how his offspring fulfilled their own dreams.
The only thing we know for sure is that this family is happy and proud and that this dad let those emotions overtake him. Imagine someone cheering for you and your achievements with this much enthusiasm. This kind of unbridled joy is something our world needs more of, not less.
The Portland Trail Blazers saw their season come to an end on Thursday night at the hands of the Denver Nuggets. In the aftermath, the usual questions that pop up when the Blazers lose in the postseason began circulating, although this time, pointed postgame comments and an Instagram post from Damian Lillard appeared to make clear that the team needs a broad plan to go from a consistently solid team in the Western Conference to a legitimate contender.
And of course, because this is a centerpiece of the discourse around the end of the Blazers’ season, plenty of folks are wondering about Lillard’s future with the franchise, despite the fact that he’s made clear he would like to play out his career in Portland. Of course, things can change, and on Friday morning’s edition of First Take, Stephen A. Smith reported that some teams immediately reached out after the Nuggets loss about Lillard’s availability, with “six or seven” believing they have a path to getting him this offseason.
“Several calls have come their way,” Smith said. “You got a lot of teams, about six or seven different teams, believe they can get their hands on him. They think they’ve got a shot. One of them includes the Knicks, who’s scheduled to have about $75 million in cap space along with some picks, but also, the Clippers, the Miami Heat, and who knows what the Lakers may try to do.”
It is important to stress that the gap between “teams think they have a shot” and “Lillard is actually attainable in a trade” is pretty gigantic, because there are 29 teams in the league that would love to trade for Lillard but that doesn’t matter if the one that he currently plays for has no interest in moving him. Still, a fun thing to monitor is going to be whether the teams that have the pieces to intrigue Portland try to make a move, because it’s much easier to say a guy is untouchable when there is no formal trade offer on your desk.
While stopping by Jimmy Kimmel Live! on Thursday night, Michael Che was supposed to be promoting his new sketch comedy show for HBO Max, That Damn Michael Che. However, he made one fatal flaw: He Zoomed into the interview from Dave Chappelle‘s house in Ohio, which resulted in the comedian hilariously hijacking the entire interview.
Right out of the gate, Chappelle popped into the background to promote his podcast, The Midnight Miracle, and every time Kimmel and Che seemed to get things back on track, Chappelle would dip in with a joke or outrageous anecdote of his own that left everyone laughing. Case in point, when Che tried to talk about the very old hotel he usually stays whenever he drops by Chappelle’s comedy venue, Chappelle couldn’t resist saying that it’s very lovely, and he once saw “Colonel Sanders’ ghost” there.
After Che managed to get some time to talk about how former Weekend Update host Colin Quinn is his “favorite Colin,” which was a friendly jab at Che’s Saturday Night Live co-anchor Colin Jost, Chappelle swooped back in again to promote his podcast and talk about the time he gave Sean “Puffy” Combs a special gift. That gift? A sweatsuit from Puffy’s own fashion line.
“He was probably just happy you paid retail,” Kimmel joked as it became clear that this was now Chappelle’s show, and he and Che were just along for the ride.
The Rundown is a weekly column that highlights some of the biggest, weirdest, and most notable events of the week in entertainment. The number of items could vary, as could the subject matter. It will not always make a ton of sense. Some items might not even be about entertainment, to be honest, or from this week. The important thing is that it’s Friday, and we are here to have some fun.
ITEM NUMBER ONE — Yeah, screw it, let’s do this
Mare of Easttown was fun. Maybe fun is the wrong word, actually. It was a bleak and sad murder show about depressed people and teenagers who were massively betrayed by the adults in their lives. It was somehow cloudy every day. A better name for the show would have been It’s Never Sunny in Philadelphia.
But it was fun that we all watched it together and speculated and went a little nuts about it all. It’s been a while since we did that. And that’s a shame, as it remains the position of this column that television is better when we experience it like that, all in a group, with theories and takes and a zillion goofball mid-week blogs to read.
The big question after Mare wrapped things up, though, is whether we’ll do it all again. Whether there will be a second go-round of Delco/Philly accents and murder and heaugies and such. The Hollywood Reporter spoke to series creator Brad Ingelsby and he was skeptical but did not expressly rule it out.
“If there was a world in which we were convinced, this is a continuation of the story that honors the first chapter and does things an audience will appreciate, then maybe. But as of right now, I have no idea what that could be.”
Oh, so all we need is an idea? Well well well, looks like it’s my time to shine. Because I have ideas. Lots of them! Most of them pretty bad, but still. Here, look:
Mare of Ibiza — We take the Knives Out approach to sequels and keep only the lead investigator. That franchise is sending Daniel Craig and his southern accent to Greece. We can send Mare to Ibiza. Let her investigate the death of a LaSalle student who went there on Spring Break. Just thousands of sun-drenched teens in bathing suits and Mare, still vaping and wearing a parka for some reason, poking around, asking inebriated party bros what happened in the heautel. You would watch. Don’t lie to me.
Go(ne) Birds — The finale wrapped up most of its mysteries but did open up one new troubling development…
HBO
A whole season, seven hour-long episodes, spent on nothing but finding this cup. It goes all the way to the top, too. To the fat cats in city hall. To secret societies throughout history. Nicolas Cage shows up in character as Ben Gates from the National Treasure series to assist. The people need it.
Untitled Guy Pearce Prequel — It remains unfathomable to me that this show introduced Guy Pearce as a nomadic English professor and author who shows up in town the same week a teenage girl is murdered and he ended up just being a kind, sweet man who drove a Jaguar. I know it was all explained and had more to do with a favor to Kate Winslet after another actor pulled out, but still. Still! I said it before and I’ll say it again: This dude has secrets. I remain convinced he is guilty of something the show just has not yet addressed. Show me more. Age Guy Pearce down with the Benjamin Button machine and take me down that rabbit hole.
Grocery Dog — I love this guy.
HBO
Just do the same timeframe as the first season, but from the perspective of this dog that apparently goes grocery shopping. Like, just follow him around on his adventures. Give him an inner monologue with, like, Paul Rudd doing the voice. Every now and then we see Mare in the background vaping as he trots on by and then we go right back to his business.
The important thing to know here is that I am only kind of joking about these. The other important thing to know is that I should not be in charge of a television show. But you probably figured that out after the first time you saw the word “Ibiza.”
ITEM NUMBER TWO — Bosch
This is the trailer for the seventh and final season of Bosch. Bosch is a good show. I swear Bosch is a good show. I know I have some — okay, “a lot of” — fun with the way it leans its “loose cannon cop who plays by his own rules but gets results” tendencies, and the way characters on the show grumble Bosch’s name when he’s up to his shenanigans, and the way Bosch is not great at putting his hands in his pockets, but there’s a good reason for all that: I really like doing it. It makes me happy. I’m excited to do it again when the new season premieres on the 25th and I’m sad I won’t be able to do it again after that.
But still, again, Bosch is good. It’s like the best version of the loose cannon cop show you can have, with action that moves and crooked bureaucrats and criminals who think they’re smarter than they are and all of it. This is not a huge surprise when you look at its pedigree. The series is straight-up littered with veterans of The Wire, both behind the camera and in front of it. That’s what makes this particular moment from this trailer so fun.
AMAZONAMAZONAMAZON
What we have here, to be clear, is people who worked on The Wire referencing a character from The Wire and a character on their show, who played a different character on The Wire, reacting to it. It’s all very fun and very meta once you know the backstory, and it raises a number of questions that are fascinating to me and annoying to anyone I corner at a cocktail party or in a laundromat, like, for example, “If The Wire exists in the Bosch universe, does that mean that Jamie Hector’s character in Bosch, Jerry Edgar, is constantly being told that he looks like Jamie Hector’s character in The Wire, Marlo?” It’s a fair question. I’ve been thinking about it all week.
But yes, this is all great. I’m very excited. The only way I could like it any more is if it was accompanied by a video that recapped the events of previous episodes and was presented by a cute little French dog. I know, I know. That could never happen. And this now makes two sections in a row where I’ve mentioned talking dogs. I really need to stop being th-…
I do not like this. Swimming pools should not have glass bottoms or be suspended many hundred feet in the air between skyscrapers, let alone both of those things. And I should point out here that I’m not some big fraidy cat. I have no fear of heights. I like things that go way too fast. I would probably hang out in or at least around this pool if I were invited. But that does not make any of it a good idea. Too many things could go wrong. One of those things, to choose an example at random: Jason Statham could drill a hole in the bottom of the glass and suck people out via whirlpool and send them tumbling to their death.
The fact that this is the first thing I thought of when I saw this clip can be chalked up to two primary reasons: One, I have seen the Jason Statham movie Mechanic: Resurrection; and two, Mechanic: Resurrection rules.
Look at Statham. Look at him.
This is somehow not even my favorite part of the movie, either. It’s somehow also not the first time I’ve mentioned the movie in this very column. I don’t care. We’re doing it again. Because I want to remind you that, within the first like 10-15 minutes of the movie, Jason Statham escapes bodily harm by leaping off of a suspended gondola through the air and onto the top of a passing hang glider, as shown in this GIF…
Summit Entertainment
… and that Tommy Lee Jones, of all the people in the world to show up in the last 30 minutes of a movie where Jason Statham assassinates a guy via airborne swimming pool and makes a completely separate getaway on a stranger’s hang glider, shows up in the last 30 minutes of the movie. And he looks like this.
Summit Entertainment
So I guess my point in all of this, to the extent I have one (debatable), is that I would like to thank the makers of this exceedingly dumb and dangerous swimming pool for giving me another excuse to mention a Jason Statham movie that runs on expanded basic cable like twice a month. I appreciate it.
ITEM NUMBER FOUR — We really need to start cutting each other some slack
Netflix
If you are not already familiar with the Ellie Kemper Debutante Ball Saga from this week, please, I beg you, stop reading here. Skip straight to the next section. You don’t need it in your brain if it’s not there already. Go. Get out of here. There’s a trailer for a wild apparently unauthorized movie about Celine Dion coming up. You won’t believe it.
Okay, now that it’s just us too-online sickos…
What are we doing here? Honestly. Because I’ve been following this story closer than I’d like to admit for a few days now and here’s what I’ve got: Kimmy Schmidt star Ellie Kemper won some weirdo debutante ball at age 19 in St. Louis, and the ball had some extremely not-great roots involving racism and classism and other gross -isms that have plagued American society throughout its history, but by the time she entered the ball it had mostly just become a standard fancy party for rich people. When people found out about it this week, though, or re-discovered it, they ran with the racist history part of it and dragged Ellie Kemper all over social media for being like a secret member of the KKK or something. It was weird.
I think this is another one of those Two Things Can Be True At Once situations. In this case, those things are:
You are correct to be suspicious of large institutions and to question the grosser parts of history because that’s how you start to root out the bad stuff and make improvements
We have got to start cutting each other a little slack here
We’ve all been through a lot, man. The last year and change has been traumatic, whether we’ve all come to terms with it or not yet. There was a pandemic and a particularly ugly election and an insurrection and we all experienced it largely isolated and alone inside our homes from behind various screens. We are all fried in ways we probably haven’t even realized yet. But that’s why we need the slack-cutting. I promise you it is not that hard. Just try to cut the same amount of slack to other people that you’d like other people to cut you. Even if they’re famous and starred in a couple good television shows. Most of us are just out here doing the best we can, you know?
Again, none of these words I’m typing are meant to wash away hundreds of years of injustice and bad behavior. Remember all of that, forever. But also, like, maybe if you see something questionable that someone did when they were a teenager, an age when some of us are still calling our moms to figure out what can and cannot go in a microwave, consider just letting it slide a little. Or at least looking at the person they are now and seeing if they’ve grown from whatever it was before you dive head-first into the fray. Again, most of us are just trying our best, and we’re all going to screw it up now and then. The point is to learn from those screw-ups and get better. Let’s try cutting each other a little more slack, okay? Just a little. It’ll probably make you feel better and less on-edge, too. Baby steps, people. This is all I ask.
ITEM NUMBER FIVE — I do not know what any of this is but I love all of it very much
There was this classic arc on 30 Rock a number of years back where Jane Krakowski’s character, Jenna Maroney, landed the lead in a troubled Janis Joplin biopic that, for myriad legal/comedic reasons, was not allowed to use Joplin’s name, which resulted in the lead character of the fake movie being called Jackie Jormp-Jormp. I bring this up now in part to remind you that 30 Rock was an incredible show and in part because it’s kind of happening in real life.
The trailer above is for a movie called Aline, which was written by and directed by and stars a woman named Valérie Lemercier, and it is very clearly a biopic about Celine Dion, whose music is used but whose name is not, and who is portrayed by the 50+-year-old Lemercier from about age 17 to the present day. I’m… thrilled by all of this? I am. At least I appear to be. I love the audacity of the whole thing, on every level. I love the chaos of it all, all laid out pretty well in this paragraph from Pajiba.
The whole trailer is fascinating, if nothing else. Dion would have had to sign off on the music. It’s not like the film is making Aline sing nothing but covers, although it would have been one way to avoid potential copyright issues given that Dion’s done a lot of very popular covers. But those are Dion songs. ‘I’m Alive’ was written for her! So they decided to make a very traditional biopic, detail the most notable and talked-about aspects of their subject’s life, pay for the music, make the whole thing super polished, then… just not call it Celine? I have to assume there’s a legal barrier in place or something but I honestly haven’t the foggiest.
I haven’t the foggiest either. But I wouldn’t want the foggiest. It’s too fun without it. I hope this becomes a huge hit and I hope it leads to a zillion copycats and I hope one of them is a thinly-disguised Bruce Springsteen biopic where the main character is named like Barce Summersteen.
READER MAIL
If you have questions about television, movies, food, local news, weather, or whatever you want, shoot them to me on Twitter or at [email protected] (put “RUNDOWN” in the subject line). I am the first writer to ever answer reader mail in a column. Do not look up this last part.
From Marshall:
Have you watched Search Party? I ask for two reasons – First, because it is a great show that just keeps making increasingly wild choices and it seems like it would be right up your alley.
Second, the show keeps adding amazing guest stars and increasingly funny side character names. It’s not on the level of Fargo (yet), but I feel like you are the only person who will appreciate the silliness of them. Some of the best ones:
– Twins named April and June
– A lawyer named Bob Lunch (played by Louie Anderson!)
– A skeevy investor named William Badpastor (played by Wallace Shawn!)
– A villainous stalker named Chip Wreck (Chip Wreck!)
Just wanted to bring this to your attention, both for your own entertainment and selfishly so that I might be able to read the inevitable appreciation post you write about the show.
Well, I have some good news and some bad news here, Marshall. The good news is that this is a great email for reasons I will elaborate on in the next paragraph. The bad news is that I have not seen much of Search Party. I don’t know why I haven’t. It seems like a show I would like. I bet I’ll watch it all in one 10-day marathon about three years from now and then get angry that no one recommended it to me before then, as though you did not send this very good email. I know this much about myself.
But more importantly: Bob Lunch! Mother of God. Bob Lunch! What a perfect name. I wish I knew someone named Bob Lunch. I wish my name was Bob Lunch. Bob Lunch. Come on. There’s a part of me that wants to never watch the show now, just to preserve this in a perfect little amber case. You have given me so much to think about, Marshall.
A herd of elephants that packed its trunks for an unexpected 500km (300 mile) trek has arrived at a Chinese city where millions of people live.
I have a confession to make: I love these guys. I love these elephants. I’ve read every article I’ve seen about them all week and I’ll keep reading articles about them until people stop writing them. I love my sweet traveling boys.
It is unclear why they left their habitat to embark on the journey, which has captivated residents and experts.
Some have suggested an inexperienced leader may have led the herd astray, while other believe the elephants could be searching for a new habitat.
“An inexperienced leader may have led the herd astray.” Tell me you don’t have this image in your head right now, some dopey elephant — I’m picturing one who just got back from its freshman year of college and is trying to be more grown-up — like 350 miles into this trek, still insisting it knows where it’s going. God, it’s so perfect. Make a movie about this right now. Let Jonah Hill voice the hopeless lead elephant.
The Kunming Daily says the cities of Kunming and Yuxi deployed almost 700 police and emergency workers armed with 10 tonnes of corn, pineapples and other food. They were backed up by trucks and drones to try to divert the animals on to a safe path.
Don’t gawk or leave corn or salt out; keep your distance and don’t disturb them with firecrackers, residents have been told.
“Do not disturb the elephants with firecrackers” is definitely one of those notes that does not get written unless some dude or dudes had already been disturbing the elephants with firecrackers. I bet the idea started with one extremely confident guy saying “I know how to stop these freaking elephants” and then marching off toward a shed. Everyone in this story — the hiking elephants, random fireworks enthusiasts, etc. — is doing so much. Good for them.
There were thought to be 17 elephants initially, but two appeared to turn back when reaching Mojiang county. Other reports say it was 16 originally but a newborn calf helped the number back to 15 once the two abandoned the trek.
Big fan of the two who were like, “That’s it. Larry doesn’t know where he’s going. We can figure it out ourselves” and then split. These guys are voiced by Danny McBride and Walton Goggins in the movie.
A video on social media showed people running down the street shouting “they are coming”, followed soon after by a police car and the elephants, the South China Morning Post reported.
A Yunnan government notice said the herd had “caused trouble 412 times” there.
I love it. Let the elephants have the city. I think they’ve earned it.
Rudy Giuliani kicked off the latest episode of his YouTube series, “Rudy Giuliani’s Common Sense,” with a tease. “Today’s episode, I think you’re going to find unusual and very exciting and very mind-expanding because we’re in the middle, we’re at the beginning of, we’re in the middle of a very important week in America,” he rambled. No kidding: this is the week that everyone learned Giuliani is doing promos for MyPillow.
Roughly 40 minutes into a punishing hour-long conversation with “UFO expert” Nick Pope (“the media call me the real Fox Mulder,” his Twitter profile reads), the cigar-chomping former-mayor cut to an ad break for Mike Lindell’s pillow empire. “I’ve been sleeping on MyPillows for some time. I love them. They’re simply the very best pillows ever made,” Giuliani said. And the black goo washes right off! But did you know that MyPillow now offers other products, like sheets, towels, and slippers, as seen here:
Rudy Giuliani is doing My Pillow ads during his hour-long YouTube video on UFOs. pic.twitter.com/7eIEYFpPYx
There’s even a promo code for Giuliani’s YouTube channel subscribers. I’ll give you a hint: it’s not “Dominion.”
The inclusion of MyPillow on Giuliani’s show follows the company’s longtime airing of advertisements on the right-leaning Fox News channel. Lindell, the company’s CEO, has regularly appeared on right-leaning media outlets to repeat Trump’s baseless claim that an unprecedented nationwide conspiracy of voting fraud caused him to lose the 2020 election.
The world is confusing and scary, but “Rudy Giuliani selling Mike Lindell’s pillows and slippers in a YouTube video about aliens” makes perfect sense. It’s almost comforting… almost. It’s also led to a lot of discussion on Twitter.
If you told 25 year old me that someday I would be a voting rights lawyer and Rudy Giuliani would be hawking pillow products while under criminal investigation, I would have said you were nuts. https://t.co/YmUaU1xotL
Viral favorite singer Fousheé released her debut album Time Machine this week, along with the cheeky video for “My Slime.” The self-directed video finds Fousheé and the goon of her dreams robbing a bank, going on the run, and forced to split up when he finally gets caught. The incongruity between them — him with his gold grill and ski mask and her with her whimsical schoolgirl look — makes for a lot of comedy as she plays the lovestruck Harley Quinn to her beau’s blinged-out Joker. Even the bank tellers are smitten with their romance — although, Fousheé’s poor trigger discipline makes me want to gnaw off my own fingers.
“My Slime” isn’t the first time the singer — who really only wants to “Sing About Love” — has toyed with the dichotomy between the soft, cotton-candy vibes of her dreamy R&B and the aggressive, boastful projections of rugged rap aesthetics. In her video for “Gold Fronts,” the stripped-down, drumless backing track allows an off-kilter but engaging backdrop for Lil Wayne to flex his lyrics while Fousheé sings about wanting a pair of gold fronts — a historically atypical topic for the sort of soulful music she creates. By playing with expectations, she puts her own unique twist on all the songs on Time Machine, which is out now via RCA Records. Get it here.
Prior to HBO and Damon Lindelof’s Watchmen (2019), not many people knew about the Tulsa Race Massacre. That reality extended not only to Americans but Tulsans as well, many of whom were vaguely aware that something abominable had happened in Tulsa’s Greenwood district, but details stayed scarce, at least publicly. Public schools didn’t dive into specifics during Oklahoma history classes, and that sentiment was shared with us by Watchmen star Tim Blake Nelson, who spent his formative years in Tulsa. Well, Tom Hanks — who has obviously starred in numerous cinematic depictions of U.S. history — didn’t know about the massacre until 2020. He’s now written a New York Times op-ed, in which he implores Americans to “learn the truth” about the event.
Hanks’ words arrive on the heels of the May 31-June 1 centennial marking of the massacre, which began in 1921 with a false accusation against a Black man and continued with a white mob burning the Greenwood district to the ground, killing up to 300 Black Tulsa residents and leaving thousands without homes. This week, President Biden visited Tulsa and declared that the event (which was, until recently, referred to as “a riot” in very loaded, reparation-preventative manner) was “a massacre.” Now, Hanks hopes that people will commit to learning about one of the most horrific instances of racially-motivated violence in U.S. history, and he wonders whether current times might not be so fraught with systemic racism, had the truth not been excised from the books:
How different would perspectives be had we all been taught about Tulsa in 1921, even as early as the fifth grade? Today, I find the omission tragic, an opportunity missed, a teachable moment squandered. When people hear about systemic racism in America, just the use of those words draws the ire of those white people who insist that since July 4, 1776, we have all been free, we were all created equally, that any American can become president and catch a cab in Midtown Manhattan no matter the color of our skin, that, yes, American progress toward justice for all can be slow but remains relentless. Tell that to the century-old survivors of Tulsa and their offspring. And teach the truth to the white descendants of those in the mob that destroyed Black Wall Street.
Hanks’ full op-ed is well-worth reading, and he also expresses gratitude towards both Watchmen and Lovecraft Country for bringing awareness of this event into people’s living rooms. “Like other historical documents that map our cultural DNA,” Hanks writes, “[T]hey will reflect who we really are and help determine what is our full history, what we must remember.” That is to say, “An American Black Wall Street was not allowed to exist, was burned to ashes,” and Hanks believes that 1921 exposes the truth about America, and one that should never again be overlooked.
Previously, Lindelof revealed that he didn’t know about the total decimation of Black Wall Street until reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Case for Reparations” (2014) in The Atlantic. That invaluable article is a good place to start gaining knowledge about the massacre, along with a new PBS documentary, Tulsa: The Fire and the Forgotten, for which we also interviewed Greg Robinson, a descendant of massacre survivors and a local Black Lives Matter activist, on the lasting damage from the massacre and how much work still remains to be done.
Today marks the release of the movie Gully, which IMDb describes, “Three teens living in LA, all victims of extreme childhoods, wreak a hedonistic riot across the city over the course of 48 hours, unbound by societal norms.” The movie is helmed by music video director Nabil Elderkin. He’s also the executive producer of the soundtrack, which is out today and features a lot of gems. That includes a new one from Dua Lipa, “Can They Hear Us.”
The track is her first non-Future Nostalgia-related single as a lead artist since the album, and indeed, it marks a different stylistic direction. Instead of upbeat disco-inspired pop, “Can They Hear Us,” while still in the pop lane, is a more emotional and less energy-driven tune that features cinematic strings and warm brass.
It’s a big day for Dua Lipa fans. Not only have they gotten “Can They Hear Us,” but she also just dropped a new video for “Love Again.”
The soundtrack, by the way, is absolutely stacked. Aside from Lipa, it also features 21 Savage, Ty Dolla Sign, Schoolboy Q, B-Real, Don Toliver, Miguel, Buddy, Snoh Aalegra, Gary Clark Jr., 2 Chainz, Sleepy Rose, and Mike Will Made-It.
Listen to “Can They Hear Us” above.
Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
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