Category: News

NBA All-Star is always a big weekend for sneaker companies, as they launch new colorways for their stars to honor their appearance in the midseason festivities. This year, there is obviously a different feel to the proceedings, as a number of players have voiced concern with having the game and, on Sunday, we learned the Sixers two All-Stars, Joel Embiid and Ben Simmons, will both miss the game due to contact tracing from a barber in Philly.

The other 22 players are set to play in this evening’s game and competitions, along with the four additional players participating in the Skills Competition and Dunk Contest, and many of them are breaking out some special kicks for the night.

Stephen Curry will wear a “Wish Flow” colorway of his signature sneaker, with Under Armour and Foot Locker donating $1,000 for each point he scores to Good Sports, Inc.

Damian Lillard broke out a new “Rose City” colorway of his Dame 7s for the All-Star Game.

Kawhi Leonard has a bright pair of his New Balance signature for the occasion, while teammate Paul George has a bright green edition of his PG5.

The Nike crew of George, LeBron James, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Kevin Durant, and Kyrie Irving each have a special All-Star colorway of their signature lines releasing for the weekend.

A closer look at the Nets duo of Kyrie and James Harden’s kicks for the evening.

Chris Paul will wear a colorway of his signature sneaker honoring HBCUs on Sunday, as he’s been among those spearheading efforts to have this year’s game benefit HBCUs, among other initiatives he’s been a part of in the last few years.

Jaylen Brown will wear some T-Macs for his All-Star debut.

Donovan Mitchell has a bright colorway of his D.O.N. Issue 2 cued up.

Bradley Beal, Luka Doncic, Mike Conley, and Obi Topping will have special Jordan 35s on Sunday.

Julius Randle and Domantas Sabonis will wear the All-Star Kobe 6 Protro for the game.

The Blazers duo competing in the Skills Competition and Dunk Contest both broke out the Nike Cosmic Unity’s for the events.

Nikola Vucevic will wear some Kyrie 7s for his second All-Star appearance.

Morgan Wallen’s chart dominance has entered its second month, as his album Danergous has yet again maintained its position at No. 1 this week. The singer shared his sophomore effort at the beginning of the year and it quickly broke records on the Billboard 200. Dangerous tallied biggest streaming week in country music history, with 240 million on-demand streams of the album’s songs. This kicked off a lengthy streak of chart-topping weeks that continued despite a racial slur controversy that resulted in his record label contract being suspended. Despite that, Wallen’s album has continued to sell big, now entering its eighth week atop to the charts.

The feat makes Wallen one of five country artists to land eight or more total weeks at No. 1, while he remains the only country artist to spend their first eight weeks atop the charts. The singer extended his streak thanks to 82,000 units sold on the chart dated March 13. The number is backed by 75,000 streaming equivalent album units and 6,000 pure album sales. Wallen is currently tied with Eagles’ Hotel California and Garth Brooks’ The Hits for the fourth-most weeks at No. 1 for a country album. Dangerous has also also tied Taylor Swift’s 2020 album, Folklore, for the second-most weeks at No. 1 in the last five years. Drake’s Views has the most thanks to thirteen non-consecutive weeks in 2016.

This week marks a year since much of the nation went into lockdown, in an attempt to battle the COVID-19 pandemic. A lot of people have been marking the occasion in one way or another. Some are piling on an old Elon Musk tweet, in which the moneyed entrepreneur predicted it wouldn’t be that bad. (Whoops.) Meanwhile, one of the first public figures to test positive — Rita Wilson, along with her husband Tom Hanks — took to Instagram to note the first anniversary of when she thinks she caught it.

“One year ago today I was playing the Sydney Opera House @sydneyoperahouse , the next day started feeling very tired and achy, two days later hospitalized with Covid 19,” the actress wrote in the caption. She then thanked the medical team that helped her and Hanks while they were in Australia, as well as musicians she’s been listening to. “Music has been very healing this year. So thankful for that, too.”

When the two revealed that they tested positive, Hanks was set to appear in Baz Luhrmann’s biopic about Elvis Presley, playing his manager Colonel Tom Parker. That, of course, never happened. Hanks and Wilson were treated, went into quarantine, and eventually came back to their home in Los Angeles. Hanks later revealed that Wilson had it much rougher than he did, although his was no walk in the park either. Hopefully by this time next year we’ll all be in a much, much better place.

(Via Deadline)

A fictional world with superheroes is bound to be very different from the one we actually live in, but The Boys universe is only slightly more absurd than ours, at least when it comes to shameless corporations peddling gendered products. Showrunner Eric Kripke knows that better than anyone, which is probably why the second set of images we’ve seen from the set of Season 3 features lots of pink guns targeted toward women.

We’ve already seen a very, uh, up close look at a Homelander statue from the man behind the series. But Kripke shared the latest images on Saturday, showing off three photos from the set in Toronto that show off a new line of Vaught Industries products: GalGear by Vought.

The first image is of what looks to be promotional material for a line of women-marketed weaponry. A banner featuring a woman holding a rifle called Linda Lockett has the GalGear brand name, along with a quote from Lockett about how much she loves guns.

“I love protecting my family,” Lockett says. The second image is more to the point: a banner that reads “Girls just want have guns,” along with what appears to be a much younger woman in hunting camo holding a rifle.

A third image really drove the point home: a hot pink rifle apparently also ready to make an appearance in Season 3.

Interestingly, that image appears to be a photo taken of a monitor of some sort, so it’s unclear if that’s from an in-show ad that will run or simply the showrunner taking a picture of what’s being filmed appearing on a monitor on set.

It’s unclear just how guns will protect you from a person who can make your head explode just by looking at you but, hey, a sale’s a sale. Especially in as cynical a universe as the one shown in The Boys.

Following a rather short-lived beef with his label, Rod Wave is ready to release some new music to his fans. The Florida rapper took to Instagram to announce that his upcoming project, Soulfly, will arrive at the end of the month. He shared the news in a post that displayed the project’s tracklist, which presents 19 songs for listeners to enjoy, as well as newly-released merch and photos from what can be assumed is an upcoming music video. Soulfly will also be a predominantly solo effort outside of a lone guest appearance from Chicago rapper, Polo G.

It was just a little over a month ago that the Florida native put his label, Alamo Records, on blast for apparently not paying him. In a post to his Instagram story, he said, “P*ssy ass label playing wit a n**** sh*t I ain’t dropping sh*t f*ck ya pay me. Y’all wanna album ask @alamorecords.” Just a few days later he apologized for the post and revealed that everything was “cool” now with his label.

You can check out the announcement above and the tracklist below.

1. “Soul Fly (Intro)”
2. “Gone Till November”
3. “Blame On You”
4. “Don’t Forget”
5. “Tombstone”
6. “All I Got”
7. “Richer” Feat. Polo G
8. “Street Runner”
9. “Pillz & Billz”
10. “How The Game Do”
11. “Shock Da World”
12. “What’s Love?? (Interlude)”
13. “OMDB”
14. “Invisible Scar”
15. “Calling”
16. “Sneaky Links”
17. “Believe Me”
18. “Moving On”
19. “Changing (Outro)”

Soulfly is out 3/26 via Alamo Records.

Elon Musk was the talk of Twitter over the weekend, but unlike other times he’s gone viral, it wasn’t because of something he did recently. It revolved around an old tweet from a media outlet that got people debating just how smart the Tesla and SpaceX founder actually is.

The New York Post did a story about potential plans for a neural implant that would make people smarter, with the headline “Could Elon Musk’s Neuralink brain chips make us all as smart as he is?”

The headline was met with immediate backlash on Twitter, causing people to talk about how smart the billionaire actually is.

Later, the Post published the story with a different headline on Twitter.

But that didn’t stop screenshots of the tweet to keep talk on Twitter going.

A lot of people pointed to Musk’s insistence that the COVID-19 pandemic wouldn’t be that big a deal in 2020, especially in the wake of 500,000 Americans dying from the virus a year later.

Most just wanted to know more about this brain chip that’s supposed to make us all genius billionaires.

We’ll have to wait and see if this chip does what it says it can do, but there are plenty of folks out there who don’t seem too optimistic about the concept — especially considering the brains behind it.

Calling anyone an “epic trophy wife” is probably not a great idea for a man of the cloth, but it’s especially troublesome if the person you’re describing is Melania Trump. A pastor got himself into hot water by doing just that during a sermon that quickly went viral when video of it was posted online.

Pastor Stewart-Allen Clark, a Baptist pastor in Missouri, was placed on leave in the wake of the sermon where he was critical of women and their appearance in a speech that was described as sexist at the very least. A BBC story detailed some of what’s in the 22-minute video of the sermon, which was posted on Facebook and quickly spread to other social media sites as well.

In it, he is seen using a well-known online meme of a distracted boyfriend to tell women not to “give him a reason to be looking around”.

He tells churchgoers that it is “really important” for men to have a beautiful woman on their arm, asking the crowd: “Why is it so many times that women, after they get married, let themselves go?”

“Now look, I’m not saying every woman can be the epic trophy wife of all time like Melania Trump, I’m not saying that at all,” he says, as an image of the former First Lady appears on screen behind him.

“Most women can’t be trophy wives, but you know… maybe you’re a participation trophy.”

You can watch a bit of the clip below.

The backlash to the sentiment was pretty significant, both in the comments from the pastor but also in him calling Trump a role model to emulate. The pastor got some ire from Twitter, to say the least.

And so did Melania Trump, who didn’t exactly ask for this but also has earned her own ire over the last four years after various instances where she quietly supported her husband’s long like of racist, sexist and insurrectionist behavior along with her own controversies. Such as, for example, saying she didn’t give a f*ck about Christmas.

Some had other ideas of who to emulate.

Either way, don’t expect to see any more videos from this pastor talking about what women should be doing anytime soon.

It’s March, in case you hadn’t heard, and as such, it’s that time of year for college basketball to take center stage and turn up the drama as we approach NCAA Tournament time.

On Sunday, a red-hot Memphis team visited No. 9 Houston in a massive game for their NCAA Tournament hopes, as the Tigers are currently on the outside looking in on the tournament according to most bracketologists, and a win over a top-10 squad would’ve gone a long way to getting Penny Hardaway’s team into the field. With 10 seconds to play and trailing 64-61, Memphis needed a three to force overtime and, after a miss and offensive rebound, they got it from Boogie Ellis with just under two seconds to play.

With Houston needing to go the full length of the court for a game-winner of their own, it seemed all but assured we’d be headed to an extra frame, but Tramon Mark had different ideas, as he caught the ball near midcourt, turned and managed to bank in a prayer to give Houston the win and hand Memphis a gutting loss.

It’s the kind of moment you dream about as a player in March, the chance to hit a buzzer-beater in a massive game, whether in the tournament or in the weeks leading up where seeding is on the line. Memphis, falling to 15-7 on the season, will now need a lot of help or a run in the AAC Tournament next week to get themselves into the dance.

This year is certainly an unconventional year for the Grammys. On top of working around the coronavirus pandemic, the show is holding the award ceremony much later in the year than normal. The Recording Academy was forced to delay the show from its original January 31 date following a spike in coronavirus cases in the Los Angeles area. It was rescheduled for March 14 and with just a week left until showtime, it appears things are going as planned as the Grammys have officially announced performers for the upcoming show.

The Recording Academy announced the lineup for the 63rd Grammy Award show in a string of tweets. The resulting list displays Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, Cardi B, DaBaby, Lil Baby, Roddy Ricch, Doja Cat, Bad Bunny, BTS, and Harry Styles as some of the chart-topping acts that will take the stage next Sunday. Chris Martin, Post Malone, Dua Lipa, HAIM, Mickey Guyton, Brittany Howard, Maren Morris, John Mayer, Miranda Lambert, and Black Pumas are also slated to perform.

On the awards side of things, Beyonce leads the way for the 2021 Grammys with nine nominations. She’s followed by Dua Lipa, Taylor Swift, and Roddy Ricch, who each tallied six nominations.

Scroll down to see the announcement for each artist performing at the show.

https://twitter.com/RecordingAcad/status/1368622222219350022?s=20

The 63rd Annual Grammy Awards will air on 3/14 at 8pm EST/ 5pm EST on CBS.

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

On Thursday night, the NBA aired the 2021 All-Star Draft as LeBron James and Kevin Durant made their selections for their respective squads, and after 21 picks had been made, the final two players left on the board were both from the Utah Jazz.

Charles Barkley called the two captains out for “Utah Jazz slander” and LeBron tried to insist that wasn’t the case and, in doing so, proceeded to dump all over the franchise’s history, noting that no matter how good they’ve been, no one has ever really wanted to pick the Jazz’s stars. It drew plenty of laughs, but in Utah, it was the latest example of disrespect towards a franchise that believes it hasn’t gotten its just due, particularly this season as they enter the All-Star break with the league’s best record.

On Sunday, Donovan Mitchell had his All-Star availability and was asked about James’ comments, noting that he doesn’t care about it at this point and that he’s heard people “talking sh*t” about him since he came into the NBA.

It’s the right response from Mitchell, who has certainly had plenty of experience this season dealing with some Hall of Fame criticism after the entire episode with Shaq earlier in the year. Between letting their frustration with the officials fly after the first half finale in Philadelphia and the All-Star Draft process, the Jazz won’t be short on motivation going into the second half of the season. As for Sunday night’s All-Star Game, Mitchell will be playing against his two Utah teammates as part of Team Durant, and can try to exact a little on-court revenge on LeBron if able.