Vans brought their event space House Of Vans to Brooklyn, Chicago, LA, and Mexico City where they staged concerts and parties for creatives and music lovers alike. But since the pandemic has shut the spaces down for the foreseeable future, Vans has come up with a project to take House Of Vans’ place: Channel 66.
The company describes Channel 66 as “community radio meets public access TV” as it offers a home for daily scheduled livestreams. Japanese Breakfast is officially kicking off the broadcast with a set on Wednesday at 11 am EST. Madlib and Four Tet will follow the band’s lead, staging their own performance later at 3 pm.
Along with Japanese Breakfast and Madlib, musicians like Action Bronson, Vic Mensa, Denzel Curry, Nick Zinner, and Channel Tres have signed on to have DJ sets, curated radio shows, talks, workshops and performances. Since each city’s House Of Vans space is empty, the Brooklyn, Chicago, Mexico City, and LA locations will also serve as Channel 66 studio locations, opening an opportunity for artists across the country to showcase their talent.
In a statement about the new streaming project, Vans said they are committed to providing a virtual space for artists to gather: “Channel 66 is an embodiment of Vans’ commitment to support artists and creatives while also uplifting communities during such an unprecedented time. The COVID-19 pandemic has forever altered the events landscape and Vans has a deep history of reimagining event experiences and grassroots programs.”
Japanese Breakfast kicks off Channel 66 at 11 am EST. Tune in here.
Business of Fashion and Women’s Wear Daily report that Rihanna and LVMH have chosen to end the Fenty fashion line. In a statement to WWD, an LVMH rep said LVMH and Rihanna “have jointly made the decision to put on hold the RTW activity, based in Europe, pending better conditions” although the statement adds the caveat that the partners “haven’t ruled out taking a second run” at the line in the future.
The line was first rumored in January of 2019 and announced in May, with Rihanna saying at the time, Designing a line like this with LVMH is an incredibly special moment for us. Mr. Arnault has given me a unique opportunity to develop a fashion house in the luxury sector, with no artistic limits. I couldn’t imagine a better partner both creatively and business-wise, and I’m ready for the world to see what we have built together.”
However, it seems that the timing of the line didn’t quite align with the business partners’ stated goals. In 2020, the coronavirus pandemic hit, shutting down world economies and pretty much reducing the concept of “style” to “changing your sweatpants more than once a week” as work, school, and socializing all moved online and socially distant. It’s not all bad news, though. According to the reports, a recent round of fundraising generated $115 million to expand the Fenty X Savage lingerie line to retail — i.e. brick-and-mortar stores. Whether that’ll be through specialty Savage stores or placement in other spaces remains to be seen, but it looks like fans will have something else to look forward to as they continue to bother the superstar for her next album.
As the opening arguments of Donald Trump‘s second impeachment trial (a historic first) got underway on Wednesday, The Daily Show host Trevor Noah couldn’t help but notice that this latest offense was following in the footsteps of Hollywood sequels by “turning things up to 11.” While Trump’s first impeachment trial centered on a recorded phone call of Trump threatening to withhold military aid to Ukraine if its president didn’t interfere with the 2020 presidential election by announcing an investigation into Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden, Trump’s second impeachment involves a siege on the Capitol building prompting Noah to employ the use of machine gun sounds and explosions while equating the whole thing with a Michael Bay movie.
“The original impeachment was like, ‘Listen to this diplomat describe a phone call as you ponder the meaning of quid pro quo,” Noah joked. “But this impeachment is like ’Michael Bay presents — bum, bum, bum! — ‘Impeachment 2: We’re Storming The Capitol!’”
Noah also took aim at Trump’s impeachment attorney Bruce Castor whose weird, rambling opening remarks were so nonsensical that it caused the “Chewbacca defense” from South Park to trend on Twitter. “Trump’s lawyer is giving the speech you give when have you have to stall because the actual lawyer is stuck in traffic,” Noah quipped before noting the frustrating fact that it doesn’t matter what Castor says because Republicans in the Senate aren’t going to convict Trump. “He could get up there and trim his pubes for hours because the jury has already reached its verdict,” Noah said.
The Weeknd put on quite the show a few days ago with his Super Bowl halftime performance. There was one moment, though, that led to some memes: the part of the show where he was stumbling around a brightly lit and mirror-covered room, seemingly confused. There were plenty of memes and now The Weeknd himself has chosen his favorite of them.
TikTok personality Denzel Crisp shared a video based on the paternity tests and reveals often featured on Maury. In the clip, a woman claims The Weeknd is the father of her child, and footage of him from the halftime show, that makes it look like he’s talking back and acting shocked backstage, is spliced in. The effect works well, and when The Shade Room re-posted the clip on Instagram, The Weeknd took to the comments to write, “naw this is definitely the BEST one [crying laughing emoji].” The Instagram account for Maury even got in on the fun, responding to The Weeknd’s comment with an emoji of eyes.
Instagram
The day after the performance, The Weeknd offered his reflection on it, writing, “still buzzing from last night. i couldn’t stop smiling the whole performance. thank you [Pepsi, the NFL, and Roc Nation] for believing in me to bring a fresh new take on the halftime show. XO we did it !”
Check out some more memes from The Weeknd’s halftime show here.
Joe Berlinger doesn’t shy away from the darkest of discussions, given that he’s best known for projects that revolve around heinous crimes and social justice. Even if so-called “true crime” isn’t your usual bingewatching jam, you’ve almost definitely taken a taste of his Zac Efron Ted Bundy movie, Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil And Vile, from a few years ago. That was one of two recent Bundy-centered projects (including Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes) from Joe, and he digs his heels deep into justice for both victims and the accused, including the wrongfully convicted West Memphis Three defendants, who were the subject of his HBO documentary trilogy, Paradise Lost. There’s plenty more Berlinger staples in the genre for fans to enjoy, and the latest one happens to be one of the most compelling.
Netflix’s Crime Scene: The Vanishing At The Cecil Hotel is a different type of crime documentary series that you’re used to seeing. As the trailer shows, each season of this show focuses on a notorious place in true crime history. In this case, the setting is downtown Los Angeles at a murder-trap of a hotel that was once a home-away-from-home to travelers and serial killers, including Richard Ramirez, who got the full-on profile treatment in Netflix’s recent Night Stalker. For a young Canadian woman, Elisa Lam, the joint swiftly got deadly and mysterious, and viral footage of Lam’s bizarre elevator behavior sparked international interest in the case. This series swan dives into the hotel’s troubled history and soon find itself awash with both conspiracy theories and ghost stories. Joe would like to do away with both, and he was gracious enough to speak with us about the Netflix series and his most daunting (early) days as a filmmaker.
Joe, I hope you are as well as you can possibly be today.
I am! Where are you right now?
Oh I am in very scenic Tulsa, Oklahoma.
I actually like Tulsa and have spent a lot of time in Oklahoma on the Richard Glossip case, on death row. Your governor wants to kill an innocent person. They’ve already tried to kill him three times and literally wheeled him into the death chamber and started injecting when they realized that they had the wrong chemicals. Can you imagine going through that? And he’s an innocent guy. Now there’s a stay of executions in Oklahoma until they figure out some protocols, although I think the moratorium is being lifted soon. Anyway, Oklahoma likes to kill people.
That’s seriously like the state motto, you nailed it.
But I like Tulsa. Lots of good restaurants.
I can’t complain! So, with Crime Scene, the show focuses focus upon places where crimes occurred. With the Hotel Cecil, did you start framing the season around the Elisa Lam case or actually start by thinking about the hotel?
I remember seeing this elevator footage in 2013 when it kind-of went viral and remember thinking to myself how fascinating it was and captivating, but I never actually thought to do something about it as a filmmaker, and then more recently, Josh Dean, a journalist who’s written about this case, brought us this story to see if we thought there was a docuseries about her case, and I did, but I also wanted to do it through a different lens. I thought it would be interesting to examine the history of the place where the crime took place, and all the socioeconomic forces that contribute to why certain places become a nexus for crime or the perception of crime. So, we pitched Netflix the idea of not simply covering the story but the idea of focusing upon specific locations, in which a lot of crime has happened and in a way to turn the true crime genre on its head a little bit.
Previously, you said that you “wince” at the True Crime label, so yeah, I can see why shaking things up has increasingly become your thing.
I’m normally doing stories about individual criminals or individual crimes, and as I’ve done these shows, I’ve often wondered what it is about a specific place that contributes. With the Ted Bundy Tapes a few years ago, along with the Zac Efron movie, and while I was making those films, I often thought to myself, “What is it about Seattle and the Pacific Northwest during that time period that allowed a Bundy to flourish and to get away with it for so long?” And, “What is it about South Boston that allowed Whitey Bulger to flourish?” And, “What was it about West Memphis, Arkansas, in my Paradise Lost series about the West Memphis Three, that allowed that particular community to be so blinded by the truth that they would sentence them to death — of killing eight-year-olds in a Satanic ritual — with virtually no evidence?” I’ve thought about this a lot, so when Elisa Lam was brought to me, the hotel just stood out as a major character to take a deeper dive into a place as an organizing principle for a crime show.
You’re calling the hotel a character, and I wanted to ask about that because you like to play with hidden themes. Like, the Zac Efron movie wasn’t just about Ted Bundy, it was about gaslighting the world. If the hotel is a character here, so is Skid Row, and so is the Internet. Did you feel that way also, sort of like these “characters” created a storm of conspiracy as well?
Exactly! That’s great that you observed that because that was exactly my intention. Honestly, this is not the first time that someone has told this story, but people who have told this story in the past have leaned into the ghost-story aspect (that this was a haunted place), and I just don’t buy that. I think it’s actually irresponsible to the victim to dismiss her tragedy as just another ghost story. I think if you’re going to tell a story of someone’s tragedy, you have to do it responsibly, and a responsible telling of the story is a dissection of the forces that led to their unfortunate circumstances. So, a big part of it was the social and economic forces that created a Skid Row in Los Angeles’ disastrous policy of allowing that Skid Row area to grow and fester, this policy of containment.
You get very visual with your depiction of Skid Row and how that affected people’s perceptions of the hotel and the death of Elisa Lam.
That’s where marginalized people, homeless people, people with mental health issues also were just dropped off and left to fend for themselves in this area, and what happened to downtown Los Angeles over the decades is as much of a part of the story of how people jumped to these conspiracy theories and wrong ideas of what happened to Elisa as anything else. Each of these threads are characters that we dissect how things actually came to be and actually turn the genre on its head a little bit by not leading into a sensational and the obvious while also giving the audience — to those who don’t know the story — the experience of those trying to figure it out at the time and why they jumped to those conclusions.
And it’s a place where 1980s serial killer Richard Ramirez came back to his room in blood-soaked clothing, and no one did anything about it. I can’t even imagine that happening in the Internet age and not being reported.
I think that was also a lot of people looking the other way in this place. I can imagine that it was more of a place where people were down on their luck, not really focused on anything other than their own problems, where people are just trained not to care, not to pay attention, and that’s the kind of place it was.
That’s also decades after the so-called Bystander Theory with Kitty Genovese case surfaced, and that theory more than suggests that a lot of people just don’t want to get involved when someone’s in trouble.
That’s interesting, and I do know the Kitty Genovese story well. I actually developed it as a scripted movie for HBO long ago, and it never got made, but I think that Bystander Theory could apply, for sure.
Netflix
This is “Hotel Death” with too many deaths to count. Did you think of pulling any other cases into the season?
Really, the Elisa Lam case was the only one I wanted to focus on. It’s a true-crime show about people are convinced that something criminal happened to the victim when, in fact, there actually was no crime. It was a tragic accident, and we see how a lot of these theories feel very real. You know, when you look at the circumstances in the show, they’re mind-boggling from the LAM-ELISA test for the tuberculosis outbreak to the Dark Water movie…
Oooh yeah, that part freaked me out a little bit.
… where literally the plot of the movie (which came out before her death) was a distillation of her disappearance. The plot of the movie could actually be a distillation of what happened to Elisa Lam. But at the end of the day, none of these things are true. And that to me, as somebody who has toiled in the criminal justice system for years, I have seen too many prosecutors pull together circumstantial evidence, rumor, and innuendo, and build a strong case against somebody who’s actually innocent in my opinion. So to me, this is a cautionary tale and an important lesson about not believing in circumstantial evidence on its own. You need corroborating forensic and physical evidence to prove your case. I’ve examined many criminal cases where you could point out a number of strange coincidences in a number of cases, but that doesn’t make the person be the killer. At the end of the day, no crime happened here, and the many theories that are still out there as urban legends are debunked.
Netflix
Speaking of urban legends, let’s talk about that death metal singer who was accused by conspiracy theorists of killing Elisa. Those people ruined his life.
Yes, Morbid. His real name is Pablo Viguera.
Did you have a difficult time convincing him to appear onscreen?
Yeah, it took a lot to talk him into it. Luckily and as a death metal guy, he knew my Metallica film [2004’s Metallica: Some Kind of Monster]. That’s not death metal, obviously, but it’s metal. It was considered by some to be a seminal rock film, and he loved that film, so he took the call for that reason. But it took a lot of persuading to convince him to do it because he really hadn’t talked about it before, and it really had a deep impact on him. I thought it was a very theme of the show: as well-intentioned as people are in wanting to solve a crime that, unless you have all the facts, you have to be very careful of who you accuse.
Obviously, we’re also getting relevant right now with the explosion of conspiracy theories working some widespread, real-life damage.
We live in this very post-truth world right now, where whoever provides the best narrative seems to be the purveyor of truth. And I think, well, not that I made the show for that reason, but the nature of truth is something that has been a concern of mine from the earliest days of my filmmaking. We are living in some very treacherous times when it comes to false narratives really having a deep impact. You’d have to be living under a rock to not know what I’m talking about.
Are you, by chance, talking about a certain ex-president and those lawmakers who remain loyal to the guy?
I don’t want to bore you with examples, but we have members of Congress who believe that Jewish space lasers are causing California wildfires. We live in very strange times! So to me, this series became a meditation on the nature of truth and the need for an objective reality.
The truth might hurt in these cases, but a lack of truth ultimately hurts a lot more.
[One] thing that I want people to take away is that just because something looks sinister, it doesn’t mean that it is. And that is very important in the criminal justice realm, where I’ve seen too many people be convicted of crimes for circumstantial evidence, like the West Memphis Three. You need evidence. Just because something sounds creepy or sinister or nefarious doesn’t mean you can go cyber-bully somebody who seems like a suspect. Demystifying the spooky aspects of the story and reminding people that there’s an objective reality and truth is important.
So, I gotta say that you are known for doing a lot of bleak projects. Do you ever, you know, wanna lighten up?
You know, if we went out to dinner or something, you’d actually think I was kind-of a funny guy! So I feel like I do have a sense of humor, and it surprises me that I haven’t exercised that muscle. It is hard to do these stories sometimes. In the early days, I felt like I took the darkness home. I remember after a long edit-day of doing autopsy photos and crime scene video for the West Memphis case, I had an 18-month old child in a crib at home, and I remember coming home late at night after having these horrible images of 8-year-olds with terrible things done to them. I went into my daughter’s room and scooped her out of the crib, and I remember resenting the project because my fatherly innocence had been robbed from me because I had seen things that people shouldn’t see, particularly a new father. Over the years, I’ve been able to guard against that.
You’ve got lots and lots of practice there.
People think I delve into dark material, and that’s true, but to me, it’s more about wanting to have an impact where I see that I can have one. With stories of crime and filmmaking, I feel that my filmmaking can make a difference. Occasionally, I jokingly say to my friends that my projects fall into two buckets: music and murder. So after a couple of years of murder films, I tend to go off and do a music project, so not all of my work is dark, but I admit that a huge chunk of it is.
Well, if you ever do get lighthearted, I’ll totally click on it and watch it.
[Laughs] Sounds good.
Netflix’s ‘Crime Scene: The Vanishing At The Cecil Hotel’ streams on February 10.
Snoop Dogg is one of the most famous weed smokers of all time, but as he has said on many occasions, there’s one music legend who can out-smoke him: Willie Nelson. Now Nelson has told a story about one time they got together to partake in some marijuana in a weed tour of Amsterdam.
only person that every smoked me out is willie mothafuckn nelson!!! straight O.G.
In a new interview with Daily Beast, Nelson was asked about the time that Snoop said he tried to hang with Nelson but couldn’t keep up. Nelson said with a laugh, “That was over in Amsterdam! I called Snoop and I said, ‘Hey buddy, you gotta come over here. This is where it’s at!’ So he came over and we hit every bar, every smoke place in Amsterdam. We had a helluva time.”
The Snoop quote referenced in the question comes from a 2018 interview on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, where Snoop told Kimmel, “Willie Nelson is the only person who’s ever out-smoked Snoop Dogg. I had to hit the timeout button.”
Nelson was also asked if he’s ever been out-smoked and he replied, “Oh, I don’t know. There’s probably people that can out-smoke me! I don’t do a lot of smoking anymore. I’ve switched over to a vaporizer because it’s better on my lungs.”
Back in December, Hilaria Baldwin — a former yoga instructor and the wife of Alec Baldwin — was accused of pretending to be Spanish after her Spanish accent drifted into an American accent in a conversation with Amy Schumer. In response to the accusations, Baldwin explained that she was born in Boston but spent much of her life in Spain, where her parents still live and that she is raising her children to be bilingual. “In this country I would use the name Hillary. In Spain, I would use the name Hilaria. I identify more as Hilaria because that’s what my family calls me,” she said in December.
One person who never understood what the big deal was is Salma Hayek, currently starring alongside Owen Wilson in the Amazon Prime film, Bliss. Hayek, who is a longtime friend of Alec Baldwin and knows Hilaria, appeared on WTF with Marc Maron this week, and though she prefaced it by saying, “I’m going to get in trouble” for saying this, Hayek strongly came to Baldwin’s defense.
“Why are they going after this woman?” Hayek exclaimed. “Why are they going after this wonderful girl, great mother, wonderful wife? I mean, Alec has never been better. She makes him happy. Why are they going after this woman?”
“She’s been going to Spain since she was six months old,” Hayek added. “I knew she was born in Boston. She told me she was born in Boston. So, it is her story. What happens if she identifies with [being both Spanish and American]? Who is she hurting?”
Maron agreed with Hayek, saying that he thought it was weird that people tried to make it sound like “a scam.”
“What kind of scam?” Maron asked. “She obviously identifies strongly and feels better identifying with the part of her that respects her Spanish background,” Maron continued, although it should be noted that though her family has spent extensive amounts of time in Spain and is fluent in Spanish, neither she nor anyone in her family is of Spanish descent.
All the same, Hayek continued to defend her. “Her parents still live there, and the kids are speaking Spanish. They’re bilingual,” Hayek argued. “Who is she hurting? She’s not selling tapas in the corner. She’s not an actress pretending to be Spanish to take roles meant for Spanish people. She is hurting no one. Why are they so mean to this person?!”
Hayek also defended Hilaria from accusations of cultural appropriation. “How is she appropriating? Why are you not flattered? She identifies with our culture! Why not? Why do we go after these people?”
“After all the lies from the last few years of our lives. The big lies,” Hayek added, citing the missing weapons of mass destruction and the war in Iraq. “But let’s go after Hilarie? Why? She’s a nice girl.”
Ultimately, Hayek said she thought it would all go away fast because “it was so ridiculous,” but suggested that women are often targeted “very strongly for very silly things.” This, to Hayek, was just such an example.
Ahead of the return of HBO’s Last Week Tonight this Sunday, John Oliver dropped by The Late Show with Stephen Colbert for his 13th appearance on the late-night program. “Only Bernie Sanders has appeared on the show more than you,” Colbert informed his fellow The Daily Show alumni, who’s in a second-place tie with… CBS News reporter John Dickerson? That’s cross-platform synergy, baby. Speaking of CBS: Oliver watched the Super Bowl on the network, and like many of us, he was surprised to see so many people in the stands. “A bold thing to do during the pandemic,” he opined.
Colbert and Oliver also discussed Trump’s second impeachment trial, including yesterday’s eventful proceedings. It was supposed to be super dry, but instead, “it was a perfect echo of the Trump presidency,” Oliver said. “Something that is supposed to be nothing is made very much something. I gather that the first lawyer engaged in a kind of freestyle beat poetry for a while and then the second threatened civil war, is that right?”
Colbert then shifted the conversation to Last Week Tonight coming back on Valentine’s Day. “Do you have a romantic subject this week?” he asked. “I like to think that every subject we touch on [is romantic], do you not agree with that? There’s a kind of sexual tension crackling through any story that we do.” So, it’s probably going to be about the animal labor being used to make those disgusting candy hearts, or something.
Aspiring 7-year-old artist North West went viral yesterday after the internet was so impressed by one of her paintings that she started drawing comparisons to Bob Ross. However, there were those online who questioned whether Kanye West and Kim Kardashian’s daughter actually created the art, a response that Kardashian is having none of.
Last night, Kardashian took to her Instagram Story to emphatically declare that North made the painting as part of “a serious oil painting class.” Her post reads:
“DON’T PLAY WITH ME WHEN IT COMES TO MY CHILDREN!!!
My daughter and her best friend have been taking a serious oil painting class where their talents and creativity are being encouraged and nurtured. North worked incredibly hard on her painting which took several weeks to complete. As a proud mom, I wanted to share her work with everyone. I’m seeing op-ed pieces in the media and social media from grown adults breaking down whether or not my child actually painted this! How dare you see children doing awesome things and then try to accuse them of NOT being awesome!?!?! Please stop embarrassing yourselves with the negativity and allow every child to be GREAT!!! NORTH WEST PAINTED THAT PERDIOTDDDDDABCDEFGZFDT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
She also shared a photo of North holding her painting, as well as tweets and news articles about the painting. In one of her posts, she shared a photo of some of Kanye’s teenage artwork that popped up on Antiques Roadshow last year and wrote, “Throwback to some of her dads art that he did when he was a kid,” following by some emojis of DNA, suggesting that North has art skills in her genes.
It’s impossible to talk about Black art and not talk about Black life — just as it’s impossible to talk about Black life without talking about Black art. Art is life and throughout the generations, Black life has centered around art as much as any other unifying concept other than religion. The recently-released film version of Kemp Powers’ stage play One Night In Miami is just one example that highlights the interplay between the two, and it might be one of the best depictions of that history, even taking into account some of the creative license Powers and the film’s director Regina King took in imagining that one, possibly pivotal night in Black life, music, and politics.
One Night In Miami poses a possible exchange between four of the civil rights era’s most accomplished activists and entertainers in 1964, shortly after one of their number, Muhammad Ali, defeated Sonny Liston to become world heavyweight champion for the first time. Settled into a hotel room to celebrate, Ali — then still known as Cassius Clay — is joined by singer Sam Cooke, football star Jim Brown, and outspoken Nation of Islam firebrand Malcolm X for a night of discussion, debate, and reflection on their respective duties toward using their platforms and popularity to change Black Americans’ second-class status in a world where Jim Crow was still the order of the day.
Their conversation — and their relationships — are heavily fictionalized, largely by necessity; two of the four men died in the months after that night’s events, while Ali passed away between the play’s conception in 2013 and the movie’s creation. But at its heart, the film asks and seeks to answer the question: “What is the responsibility of Black celebrities to Black Americans as a whole?” Taking up opposite ends of the debate, Kingley Ben-Adir‘s Malcolm X and Leslie Odom Jr.’s Sam Cooke become each others’ primary antagonists, while Brown and Clay find themselves drawn in both directions throughout the night, like flags on the rope in a game of tug-of-war.
That debate has echoes in recent history, ones that we now see played out on social media and on podcasts between crowds of commenters instead of behind closed doors. Today, Sam Cooke’s role is occupied by entertainers like Beyonce and Jay-Z, who receive criticism from both common commentators and their celebrity peers alike. For instance, take Noname, who came under fire from Beyonce’s self-appointed defenders for suggesting that the star take a more firm position on the troubles of the African continent after filling her visual album Black Is King with imagery from throughout African nations like Nigeria and South Africa. Noname may not be Malcolm X, but the analogies are certainly there for anyone looking.
In One Night In Miami, Cooke argues, much like Jay-Z or any number of other modern celebrities, that he’s doing his part to advance the race just by opening doors to rooms they would ordinarily be barred from, manifesting in his obsession in performing at the Copacabana nightclub. This is akin to Jay partnering with the NFL to offer opportunities to Roc Nation clients like The Weeknd to perform on one of the biggest stages in entertainment, the Super Bowl. This, in turn, generates even more revenue for The Weeknd and Roc Nation, which then theoretically filters outward through their various charities and foundations. Less tangibly, their presence inspires others, both through the art itself — which can be motivating and uplifting — and through the aspirational example they provide. Others seeing Jay-Z’s success can use him as a role model, pursuing financial freedom through ownership and entrepreneurship and doing what Jay boasts on “Moment Of Clarity”: “I got rich and gave back; to me, that’s a win-win.”
Meanwhile, Malcolm X’s character berates Cooke’s approach as facile and self-serving, pointing out the practical obstacles to others following in his footsteps and pushing him to be more vocal about the prejudices and injustices facing Black Americans in the 1960s. Likewise, we see critics like Noname and others pointing out the very material ways Jay’s approach, which strongly resembles the “trickle-down” economics embraced by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, falls short of addressing many real problems and injustices born of those policies that persist to this day. Sure, Jay-Z opens doors, but mainly to enrich himself, with any benefits to the race as a whole becoming tertiary at best — after all, his business partners made the lion’s share of the money as millions tuned in to the “big game” to see what The Weeknd’s performance would look and sound like.
The film ends somewhat ahistorically, with Malcolm’s harassment apparently having an effect on Sam Cooke, prompting him to use his appearance on The Tonight Show to debut the moving anthem “A Change Is Gonna Come,” directly addressing in words the injustices done to Black Americans over the years. In truth, Cooke’s performance came a full two weeks before the title bout in Miami on February 7, 1964. However, other details are kept somewhat true to life: Cooke was certainly inspired by Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ In The Wind” in 1963, embarrassed that a white singer had addressed the topic of racism when he had not, for fear of alienating his large white fanbase. To some degree, he was right; “A Change Is Gonna Come” was only a moderate hit compared to smashes like “You Send Me” and “Bring It On Home To Me.” However, it’s become one of his most enduring and beloved songs, selected for preservation in the Library of Congress in 2007 and receiving countless covers and placements in pop culture, from film to television to a quote from Barack Obama after being elected president in 2008.
In many respects, this is the part of the film and the history that has been the most resonant throughout the years: Black artists have used their platforms to speak out about injustice, even in the face of potential backlash. From NWA and Public Enemy speaking out against police brutality and authoritarian overreach in the 1980s to Tupac Shakur addressing the pressures facing Black people in 1992 on “Changes” (released posthumously in 1998) to Cardi B using her social media to stump for Bernie Sanders, Black music and activism are more thoroughly tied together than ever before. Look no further than Chika’s powerful television debut with “Richey V. Alabama” in 2019. Given a national television audience and the first big look of her young career, the courageous, then-21-year-old rapper used what could have very well been the only opportunity she would have to make a lasting impression to shed light on the devastating injustices taking place in her home state.
It has been a long time coming and a change may come, but not without folks who are willing to create it by any means available. One Night In Miami highlights the variety of forms this activism may take, as well as the disagreements that may arise between adherents to one form or another. But it also highlights how interrelated all of those forms are, how needed both the examples and the outspoken voices can be, even if they don’t always agree on the best ways to leverage the influence they’ve been given to wield. The film tries to make one thing certain; that the responsibility to speak out never goes away, that for Black Americans, success is always political, and that no matter what, we’re connected by bonds that are way more than skin deep.
One Night In Miami is out now on Amazon Prime Video. Watch it here.
Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
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