Category: News

Rowdy Rebel may have been gone from the rap game for the last six years, but apparently, he wasn’t forgotten by his peers. Young Thug was one of those who gave the Brooklyn rapper a warm welcome home after his half-decade stint behind bars, giving him the gift of a pair of diamond-encrusted chains. Rowdy showed them off on his Instagram along with a grateful message: “Appreciate you,” he wrote. “Slat love forever, bro.”

Along with “Hot N****” star Bobby Shmurda, Rowdy was one of the members of GS9, a rap group that was accused of being a gang by authorities. Arrested and charged with murder, attempted murder, assault, and drug dealing, Bobby and Rowdy both pled guilty to lesser charges and were sentenced to five-to-seven years in prison.

While Bobby was denied parole recently as a result of a few violations during his incarceration, Rowdy was granted parole and conditional release. Naturally, he’ll have to keep his nose clean but he already seems to be on the right track; after calling Bobby from outside, Rowdy reportedly went straight to the studio to pick up where he left off in 2014.

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

As Caroline Polachek toured behind her first post-Chairlift solo album Pang last year, one fan-favorite moment of live shows was when she delivered a rendition of The Corrs’ 2000 hit “Breathless.” Seeing as all of Polachek’s touring plans are on hold for a while, the singer decided to offer a studio version of the cover to make available on streaming services.

The original version of the song featuring sparkling keys and hollow snares familiar to the music of the early aughts. But Polachek gives the song a 2020 facelift, peppering the instrumentals with shuffling beats, electric synths, and blown-out bass.

Polachek’s “Breathless” cover isn’t a stand-alone single. Rather, the song will appear as part of Standing At The Gate: Remix Collection, which is slated for an April release. So far, Polachek has previewed the upcoming LP with a George Clanton remix of “Hey Big Eyes,” an A.G. Cook rework of “So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings,” a version of “Hit Me Where It Hurts” by Toro Y Moi, and a 10-minute-long version of her track “The Gate,” as well as a handful of others.

Listen to Polachek’s cover of “Breathless” above.

Standing At The Gate: Remix Collection is out 4/16 via Perpetual Novice. Pre-order it here.

First of all, let’s get this out of the way: Right now Pedro Pascal is in, quite possibly, the most popular series, The Mandalorian. He’s about to be in the movie event of the month, Wonder Woman 1984, which will begin streaming on HBO Max on December 25. The only thing missing is a hit song, which when you consider what year his new movie takes place in, when movie soundtracks were king, it doesn’t seem too entirely far fetched. Alas, it wasn’t meant to be, but, as Maxwell Lord, Pascal does sport a pretty nifty Simon Le Bon looking hairdo. (As we went down a rabbit hole of ’80s references that you’ll read ahead, it turns out Pascal was a pretty big Duran Duran fan. At least, big enough that he owned a Duran Duran clock.)

Pascal doesn’t really hide the fact that in Wonder Woman 1984 he’s going for it. He literally uses the phrase “hamming it up.” And it really is a sight to behold in a, well, this is how you do it kind of way. In the comics, Maxwell Lord has a pretty eventful and complicated history, but in Wonder Woman 1984 he’s playing a businessman who might just be in a little more financial trouble than he’s letting on. But fate might be on his side when he sees an opportunity, and it’s up to Wonder Woman to stop him. Also, the marketing for the film kind of downplays Pascal’s role in the film, but he’s in it a lot and is the the main antagonist of the film.

Ahead, a pretty hilariously salty Pedro Pascal takes us through his remarkable Wonder Woman 1984 performance. Also, as we saw in this season of The Mandalorian, our hero’s starship, the Razor Crest, was destroyed. For those of you who paid a lot of money for Razor Crest memorabilia, I asked if we could send him the bill for our refunds.

So… holy shit!

What? Oh I’m sorry. You’re disappointed.

That’s a very enthusiastic “holy shit!” for your performance.

Oh my God.

You were going for it.

That’s Patty, man. That’s the Patty Jenkins experience! You can’t get away with anything else. You know? I think if anyone likes it, sees it, and appreciates it, then I owe it all to her. And if anyone finds it absolutely intolerable, I also owe it to her.

So right now you’re on the most popular series. You’re in the biggest movie event of the month. You need a hit song for the trifecta.

What should that song be?

Well, the movie is set in 1984…

Something from 1984? The best album of all time is from 1984.

Which one?

Purple Rain.

Oh, yes. See, Wonder Woman 1984 should go full retro and have a soundtrack like movies of that era did. Like Footloose, Purple Rain, Eddie and the Cruisers.

Eddie and the Cruisers. Wow. I saw it in the movie theater.

Is that the first Eddie and the Cruisers reference that’s come up for you today?

The first Eddie and the Cruisers reference that’s come up this year.

So you saw Eddie and the Cruisers in theaters?

I saw it in the movie theater.

Did you see the sequel, Eddie Lives!, in the movie theater?

No.

That one wasn’t as big a hit.

No, it wasn’t.

Speaking of music from that era, your hair in this movie, you know who it reminded me of?

Who?

Simon Le Bon.

Oh, wow! Oh, well, that’s a compliment.

He had great hair.

I had a Duran Duran vinyl record clock in my bedroom as a child.

Was this in support of a specific album?

It was Rio, but it wasn’t an album cover. It was just an actual record with the band and it said Duran Duran and it told the time.

What else could you want? You get to see the band and you know what time it is?

I had Duran Duran, and my sister had Cyndi Lauper. That’s all I can remember.

Well, I think you had a really good Simon Le Bon haircut going.

Wow. That’s very, very, very, very not what I expected.

Between that and Eddie and the Cruisers I’m really keeping you on your toes here.

You really are, you’re there with me. How old are you?

We are around the same age…

Oh, okay. No wonder you’re hitting such bull’s eyes.

We have the same reference points.

Keep going, man. I’m telling you, I was a sponge.

You are hamming it up in this movie.

Yeah, we were doing a big swing.

You’ve been saying Nicolas Cage was an inspiration at certain times. Is there a specific movie?

Yeah, I don’t relate any of the hamming it up to Nicolas Cage. I at one point in the conversation I was talking about what an incredible influence he was on me as an actor, which is true. And, now, so much so that I would use him as a sort of point of reference to anchor myself, to achieve something in a scene specifically with Wonder Woman, And maybe about a half-hour later in that conversation, I was self-deprecating and accusing myself of “shmacting” and hamming it up, and the two do not go together.

Oh, I see.

So, just to clarify.

I was hoping you were going to say Peggy Sue Got Married.

Dude! In the movie theater, man.

I did, too. My parents took me.

I also own it. It’s also accessible on my iPad. It’s one of my favorite movies.

Francis Ford Coppola. Yeah. It’s an amazing movie. I just watched it again.

Cage came early for me. Rumble Fish. Racing With The Moon, Valley Girl. And then Peggy Sue Got Married, Moonstruck, Vampire’s Kiss, Raising Arizona.

Again, watching you play Maxwell Lord, I just kept thinking, well, this is how you play a villain like this.

Oh my God. Who are you? You’re my new best friend.

It’s like you decided, “Oh, I don’t have to wear a helmet through this entire movie. Well, watch out world. Here I come.”

Well, I did it before I put the helmet on.

Well, you knew that you had to do it before you went into the helmet then. You had to leave an impression.

Right, right, exactly. I was like, “Whoa, what have I done here? I better put a helmet on. People are going to be really tired of this face.”

So you were a section over from me at The Rise of Skywalker premiere a year ago…

Oh, really?

The reason I know this is because you were holding court. You were standing up, you had everyone around you, having the time of your life. I bring this up because I feel if Wonder Woman 1984 had a proper premiere you would have done some sort of stunt.

Yeah. But I think that the context to everything is it’s overwhelming for all, and I guess the hope behind it all is that people are going to be able to see it.

Yes.

I think it’s a really good time to see it. And my heart’s been broken at the thought of not being able to kind of share this because of the kind of experience that it was for me. I had the time of my life, and it wasn’t just because I had a delicious part to play and one of the best directors I’ve ever worked with. But the best cast, and it really was one of the best experiences of my life. And if there was a chance that that could be shared, translated in any way, and that people could actually experience what felt so special to me, I wanted that to happen on as big of a scale as possible and be there for all of it and see it on the big screen. But, this is the world that we’re living in now. And we’ve got to find so many different ways to survive, and one way is to give people some fucking relief. Even if it’s just for a couple of hours.

So I’m in New York and it’s getting cold and my winter project was this expensive Razor Crest LEGO Set. So, I watched the episode of The Mandalorian where it gets blown up. Do I send my bill to you to get a refund? Who do I send this to?

I saw the best meme. Is that what they’re called? Meme?

They are.

This one doesn’t move, it’s just a picture. It was a spear and a module. And it was Razor Crest parts, the new LEGO Set for the range of customers. I thought that was hilarious.

Well, I’m going to send you my bill, if that’s okay.

You can send it. Yeah, definitely, talk to Warner Bros.

I will, I’m sure they’ll be thrilled to pass that along.

They have my name. They have my address.

‘Wonder Woman 1984’ will be in theaters and on HBO Max on December 25th. You can contact Mike Ryan directly on Twitter.

Kawhi Leonard found himself in the spotlight when he led the Toronto Raptors to an NBA championship. This, because of the hyper-online era we live in, meant that people had lighthearted fun at his expense. The peak of this was when a fake story went around about Leonard eating apples with a knife and fork — you have probably read this before, but here it is:

The story is both hilarious and obviously fake. Still, “Apple Time” has followed him around, because while it’s fake, people are still in on the joke and enjoy it — my personal favorite example of this is how Vince Staples, in an attempt to convince Leonard to join the Clippers, tweeted about apples a lot one night.

Anyway, Leonard went onto Jimmy Kimmel Live! on Wednesday night and got asked about the story. He laughed! But also, he confirmed that it’s not real.

“Who came up with that story right there?” Leonard said while laughing. When asked if it was true, Leonard responded, “No, no, not at all. I do have an apple tree, but I didn’t pick my apples and bring them to dinner.”

Something about Leonard saying he has an apple tree, an unexpected twist in this story, made me smile. But regardless, while this story is not real, whenever Leonard is taking over games, it will forever be Apple Time.

A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie is the latest rapper to join the growing content-sharing service OnlyFans. The Bronx rapper promises “a personal experience” to fans to subscribe to his content on the page and said he would be “unselfish” in an announcement on Instagram. His Instagram Story asked, “Wanna bump new unreleased [music] wit me?” and prompted fans to “Subscribe! Starting this week I’m being unselfish.”

The page’s bio reads, “Here for fans only! If you literally can’t wait anymore just subscribe for an approach of new unreleased music and snippets. I want to give you all a personal experience since you are a part of me! I will be reading all the comments for feedback on what songs you love the most. Don’t be hesitant to say or ask anything here!”

The move comes after A Boogie was reportedly involved in a shooting on his birthday, leading to an arrest for gun and drug possession. The rapper is only one of several who’ve joined the OnlyFans service, which became a popular choice when Beyonce shouted it out on Megan Thee Stallion’s “Savage (Remix).”

Since then, rappers like Swae Lee, Cardi B, Rubi Rose, Blueface, and Tyga have all joined, and while the site has a reputation for offering explicit content, many have instead provided fan interactions and even financial advice.

A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Sophie Turner gave birth to her and husband Joe Jonas’ first child in July, many endless months into the pandemic. We knew back then that wearing a mask in public would save thousands of lives (hell, we knew this back in March), but that hasn’t stopped people from ignoring COVID-19 guidelines, because something something it’s a free country.

The Game of Thrones star has a message for those folks.

“If I can wear a mask while I give birth, you can wear a mask at Walmart,” Turner said in an Instagram story, adding her catchphrase, “And that’s the tea.” She was telling people to wear a mask back in March, when she instructed her followers, “Stay inside. Don’t be f*cking stupid. Even if you count your ‘freedom over your health.’ I don’t give a f*ck about your freedom. You could be infecting other people, other vulnerable people around you by doing this. So stay inside guys! It’s not cool, it’s not big, and it’s not clever.”

The Sansa actress has used “…and that’s the tea” to praise soccer star Alex Morgan (“I’m really f*cking proud of you… Congratulations on your win, and that’s the motherf*cking tea”) and make a saucy joke about sister Arya’s sex scene with Gendry on Thrones. “In honor of Easter, I guess Game of Thrones wanted the storyline to have a little Easter bunny hop hop hoppin’ into that p*ssy,” she said. “And that’s the tea.”

It truly is.

(Via BuzzFeed)

This essay appears as part of the 2020 Uproxx Music Critics Poll.

Katie Crutchfield grew up in Alabama and lives in Kansas City, but the story behind Saint Cloud, her fifth and best album as Waxahatchee, begins in Barcelona. That’s where Crutchfield decided to get sober, right in the middle of touring her previous album, 2017’s Out In The Storm.

It’s a story Crutchfield told countless times this year while promoting Saint Cloud, a story that has become intertwined with the record’s surrounding narrative of recent sobriety. “I had gone back and forth a lot about my substance issues,” Crutchfield told Pitchfork last spring, “and I woke up one day and said, ‘I’m done with this forever.’ I went and got my own hotel room in Barcelona and started to work on music. I remember thinking, ‘This is the beginning of a new chapter of my life.’”

Saint Cloud, the resulting album, does sound like a new beginning. It’s an airily beautiful album, and an endlessly giving one, full of open spaces and moments of exhilarating simplicity. Crutchfield chose to paper over the roiling angst of Out In The Storm with open-hearted Americana inspired by Lucinda Williams, but she couldn’t have known she was delivering a beacon of comfort and empathy at a moment of immense, world-historic catastrophe. Saint Cloud became counterprogramming in a year of destabilization. Musically, the album, with its ringing major chords and unfussy arrangements, feels like a direct antithesis of the other hugely acclaimed singer-songwriter album from last spring, Fiona Apple’s Fetch The Bolt Cutters. There are no cacophonies of makeshift percussion or howling dogs. Just songs.

And yes, it’s a recovery album. Or maybe Saint Cloud isn’t so much an album about sobriety as an album that lives in the quiet space of clarity and gratitude that getting sober can bring. If I described it as an “early thirties” album, would you know what I mean? That’s not a diss; I mean it reminds me of records like R.E.M.’s Automatic For The People or Kate Bush’s The Red Shoes, records where you can hear a great songwriter basking in some accrued wisdom on the other side of their 20s, reflecting on losses—almost, in a way, whispering secrets back to their younger, dumber self. (As Crutchfield sings on “Fire”: “Tomorrow could feel like 100 years later / I’m wiser and slow and attuned.”)

On Saint Cloud, much of that accrued wisdom involves addiction and codependency — the record’s two major themes, in Crutchfield’s view. She flits between specificity and abstraction, confronting both her own struggles with alcoholism and the struggles of friends both living and dead. On “Oxbow,” she offers a poetic sketch of that Barcelona awakening, over bright, steady piano arpeggios that fill up the track like morning light. “Hell” goes full acoustic twang, as Crutchfield sings about the painful self-examination that recovery involves, when your worst traits are on full display: “Swallow my pride, it’s mine to quell / I’ll put you through hell, I’ll put you through hell.”

Yet the record’s emotional peak, “Arkadelphia” and “Ruby Falls,” hinges on stories involving outside characters. On the latter song, she envisions herself singing at the funeral of an old friend who died of a drug overdose. The former is a gutting and vivid slice of storytelling; over a frayed, rolling acoustic melody, Crutchfield flits between third- and first-person, singing about a different friend who’s struggled with addiction. In one of the most piercing bits of reflection, Crutchfield imagines how her own story could end if she doesn’t get clean: “If I burn out like a light bulb / They’ll say she wasn’t meant for that life / They’ll put it all in a capsule / And save it for a dark night.”

It’s a remarkable lyric, and one that doesn’t need to get specific to invoke countless lost greats whose names are mentioned with those sad headshakes.

Crutchfield’s willingness to speak and write plainly about her experiences with alcoholism is invaluable to fans coping with their own addictions in private. But it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Saint Cloud feels like the culmination of a recent trend of great songwriters — particularly within the indie-rock realm — confronting sobriety and recovery directly in their songwriting.

Two years ago, the Canadian punk band Dilly Dally released one of the best songs in this category: “Sober Motel,” a raw, howling ode to sobriety that singer Katie Monks wrote for a bandmate dealing with addiction while immersed in a touring culture that romanticizes it. The song raises a middle finger at that culture: “Fuck the notion / That you should be higher / I’ve been lost in a fog for forever,” Monks sings in her exhilarating, charred voice.

A year later, indie-rock songwriter Melina Duterte, better known as Jay Som, approached the same theme from a softer angle on “Get Well,” an alt-country gem from her 2019 album Anak Ko. The song is a plaintive ode to an alcoholic friend or acquaintance: “How do you find peace with a drink in your hand?”

In an interview that year with Uproxx, Duterte spoke plainly about her own decision to quit drinking after some months of heavy binge-drinking following her move to L.A. “You go to shows, and instead of giving you food or money, they give you beers,” Duterte said. “When you mix that with touring, it’s extremely chaotic. I think I just wanted to feel more like myself.”

This new pantheon of songs and records centered around the once-taboo subject of sobriety helps provide comfort and meaning to music fans who are in recovery. Such songs implicitly confront how the touring life (well, when touring existed) encourages alcohol abuse. They also form a stark contrast with a certain indie-rock culture of yesteryear — remember when bands like Guided By Voices or The Libertines made drug- and booze-fueled decadence look cool as hell? By 2020, a range of artists across genres and generations were opening up about their own recent or semi-recent sobriety: Fiona Apple, Thundercat (who quit drinking not long after the 2018 death of Mac Miller), Miley Cyrus (who recently acknowledged relapsing during the pandemic).

Yet in recent years, no indie-rock legend has been more open and forthright about his recovery story than Jeff Tweedy of Wilco fame. In his 2018 memoir, Tweedy wrote extensively — and in frank detail — about his early-2000s addiction to painkillers and subsequent stint in rehab. (At his lowest moment, he stole his mother-in-law’s morphine while she was sick with cancer.)

When I interviewed Tweedy for a Newsweek story that year, he explained that the desire to share his recovery story in order to help others was one of the main reasons he wrote the memoir. “The fact that I’ve gone through rehab,” Tweedy said, “and had some pretty public struggles with depression and opioids — I feel like that’s a good reason to share your story.”

Tweedy’s own recovery album was Wilco’s Sky Blue Sky, a suspiciously calm comedown LP whose track titles — “Please Be Patient with Me,” “Leave Me (Like You Found Me)” — sometimes resemble pleas for understanding. The album was critically slammed for its rootsy, soft-rock sheen. By the time Tweedy’s memoir came out a decade later, the songwriter was reflecting on his addiction story in the lyrics of his 2018 solo album Warm. “Bombs Above” references sage advice he received in rehab, while “Having Been Is No Way to Be” obliquely bites back at fans who wish he’d develop a drug habit again so he could make records that sound like A Ghost Is Born: “But they’re not my friends / And if I was dead / What difference would it ever make to them?” Tweedy sings.

For a recovery album to be as good as Waxahatchee’s Saint Cloud feels like an act of defiance. It’s a quiet rebellion against that noxious trope that songwriters must be tortured to write, that great art can only emerge from self-destructive habits and psychological torment. Talking to Uproxx last spring, Crutchfield acknowledged romanticizing that myth — and the substance abuse that often accompanies it — while making her earlier records. Saint Cloud is a clean break, a balm to anyone who worries that getting sober or entering treatment will flatten their own creativity.

“I think making this record was also partially me proving to myself, and being really scared that I would fail, that I can be mentally, physically healthy and make my best album,” Crutchfield said. “To prove to myself that like, ‘Oh, I don’t have to be a complete fucking mess to make great music.’”

Seth Meyers tore into the “F*ck your feelings” crowd on Wednesday night after being subjected to a NewsMax clip where host Greg Kelly still refused to acknowledged that Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in the 2020 election. Despite the Electoral College certifying the votes and prominent Republicans like Mitch McConnell accepting that Trump lost, Kelly told viewers that while it’s “technically correct” for people to call Biden the president-elect, “I personally feel they’re wrong.” After the 5:00 mark above, Meyers launched into a scathing takedown of the right-wing news network. Via The Daily Beast:

“Oh, you personally feel they’re wrong?” the Late Night host asked. “You don’t want your controversial views to stain the sterling journalistic reputation of Newsmax, which up until recently got less attention than a stand-up comic opening at Ozzfest.” Meyers went on to joke that Newsmax “sounds like one of those fake news shows that’s really just a late-night infomercial for hair plugs.”

Meyers also couldn’t help but note that Trump supporters were a big fan of the “F*ck your feelings” slogan during his 2016 campaign, but they seem to be signing a very different tune this time around. “For a crowd that constantly claims your feelings don’t matter, they seem to think Donald Trump’s feelings matter a lot,” he said.

While NewsMax might be refusing to accept the election results, Fox News has been getting downright combative with Trump supporters who refuse to believe Biden won. On Thursday evening, Geraldo Rivera lectured MAGA voters who are still holding out hope for some last minute reversal. “Those people who continue to promote some fantastic legislative or judicial or constitutional, you know, magic wand that’s going to save the Trump presidency: You are wrong. You are misleading the American people.” Rivera called for an end to the “nonsense” by stating, “You are tearing at the fabric of the American republic.”

Bad Bunny is quickly fleshing out his IMDb page. He landed a role in the upcoming Pete Davidson movie American Sole (in which Offset will also appear), and now he has booked another acting gig. This time, he is joining a cast led by Brad Pitt in the film Bullet Train, as Deadline reports. Also set to appear in the movie are Joey King, Aaron Taylor Johnson, Brian Tyree Henry, Zazie Beetz, Michael Shannon, Logan Lerman, Masi Oka, and Andrew Koji.

The movie is based on the Japanese novel Maria Beetle by Kotaro Isaka. The Hollywood Reporter recently described the book, “Published in Japan to bestselling success in 2010, the book has all of the elements that US studios typically look for in bankable source material: indelible characters, a thrilling premise (hitmen and assassins aboard a train hurtling through Tokyo), and a relentlessly twisty plot. But like countless other works of inventive Japanese fiction, the novel is unknown in the West; it had sat untranslated, unread, and un-optioned for nearly a decade.”

In even better recent news, Bad Bunny is feeling good after being diagnosed with COVID-19, as he told James Corden, “I feel great, thank God. I already tested negative, so I’m so happy. I feel great. I feel perfect.”

George Floyd’s daughter Gianna just had her first birthday since the death of her father but thanks to some high-profile guests, she was able to celebrate in style in spite of her loss. According to Forbes, Atlanta rapper Lil Baby and former NBA player Stephen Jackson threw a social-distancing LOL Dolls-themed birthday party for the seven-year-old at Atlanta’s Pink Hotel. They were aided by Atlanta restauranteurs Ericka and William Platt of Restaurant Ten and Rosie’s Café to plan the party, while Lil Baby sponsored it.

George Floyd’s death became a cause célèbre this summer when the former member of Houston’s Screwed-Up Click who once went by Big Floyd was killed by police officer Derek Chauvin while being detained. A video showed Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes as Floyd tried to tell him he couldn’t breathe. Once the video circulated online, it became the focal point of widespread protests against police brutality, as well as the lack of accountability for police who kill citizens and face few to no consequences.

Lil Baby’s song “The Bigger Picture” was an unofficial anthem of the protests, which was the most-streamed protest song of the summer after dozens of hip-hop artists stepped up to contribute their thoughts. Stephen Jackson was close to Floyd, calling him his “twin,” and has helped care for Gianna since Floyd’s death.