Category: News

Long one of the best tight end in the NFL, Travis Kelce has been at the core of the the league’s best offense with the Kansas City Chiefs for three years running. Up to this point, though, he had never earned the top honor in the virtual NFL world.

That honor, of course, is the “99 Club,” the shortlist of NFL athletes who have a perfect 99 rating in Madden.

The All-Pro finally saw his stats improve this week and joined the 99 Club, where he was greeted by another member: Chiefs teammate and 2018 NFL MVP Patrick Mahomes.

Earlier in the season, it was Kelce, not yet a member himself, who announced to Mahomes that he was in select company as a 99-rated quarterback. The QB returned the favor to one of his favorite targets in a video released by Madden on Thursday.

Through 12 games this season, Kelce has recorded 82 receptions for 1,114 yards and eight touchdowns as the Chiefs have run out to the best record in football. In its announcement, the game makers said “Madden Ratings Adjustors took note of improvements in pass catching and run blocking and shifted his overall rating up to a 99.”

Kelce becomes just the third-ever Chief to join the 99 Club, alongside Mahomes and former Chiefs tight end Tony Gonzalez.

Jpegmafia returned after a few quiet months in November with a new EP titled, fittingly, EP! The eight-track project features each of his previously released, exclamatory singles from 2020, including “Bald!” “Covered In Money!” and “Bodyguard!” Now, he’s preparing to release a sequel, EP2!, with “Super Tuesday!” Featuring a stripped-down instrumental and a non-stop barrage of witty, wordplay-packed bars dissing Donald Trump, “Super Tuesday!” landed on YouTube with only a warning from the rapper that he’s working on a new EP. Whether he’ll see increased promotion for the project from EQT Recordings thanks to its new deal with Republic Records remains to be seen.

Still, EQT’s deal makes for a big win for the Bandcamp favorite, who broke out in 2018 with his sophomore project Veteran and gained an even bigger following the next year with All My Heroes Are Cornballs and his spot on Vince Staples’ Smile, You’re On Camera tour. He also produced “3 Tearz” featuring Run The Jewels on Danny Brown’s Uknowwhatimsayin? album, as well as IDK’s “Hello, Pt. 4” freestyle before embarking on his run of standout, self-produced quarantine music videos. “Cutie Pie!” “The Bends!” the “Bald! (Remix),” and “Last Dance!” can all be found on EP!, while Peggy also guests on Gorillaz’s Song Machine.

Listen to “Super Tuesday!” above.

Will Ferrell and (most of) the cast of Elf are reuniting for live virtual table read to help Georgia Democrats in the upcoming senate runoff election. Considering the 2003 film has become a holiday staple, if not an outright Christmas classic, the timing of the reunion couldn’t be more perfect. Zooey Deschanel announced the news on Twitter Tuesday night.

“If I were any more excited to be in the #ElfForGeorgia reunion I might explode into a burst of snowflakes,” Deschanel tweeted. “Join me, Will Ferrell, and many other amazing people from the original cast along with some special guests for our live reading! All donations go to support GA dems.”

You can see Deschanel’s tweet below along with a secure link to tickets:

The live table read will take place on Sunday, December 13 at 4 PM EST, and almost the entire cast of Elf will be there along with some special guests. Via ElfReunion.com:

Featuring Will Ferrell, Zooey Deschanel, Bob Newhart, Edward Asner, Mary Steenburgen, Amy Sedaris, Andy Richter, Kyle Gass, John Lithgow, Danny Woodburn, Jon Favreau*, Ed Helms, Busy Phillips, and Matt Walsh. Hosted by Ashley Nicole Black.

*Pod Save America’s Favreau

Notably absent is Elf director Jon Favreau and actor James Caan. While the two could easily be busy with other projects, Caan revealed back in September that an Elf sequel never happened because Ferrell and Favreau didn’t get along. According to Caan, Ferrell was on board with returning as Buddy the Elf, but he wanted a different director, which wasn’t possible due to Favreau’s contract. “It was one of those things,” Caan said while lamenting the loss of what he hoped would be a franchise.

(Via Zooey Deschanel on Twitter)

Megan Thee Stallion has had an undeniably busy year. Not only did she recently released her hit record Good News, but the rapper was named one of TIME’s Most Influential People Of 2020, had her first No. 1 song with Beyonce, and received her first Grammy nomination. The rapper appeared on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert to break down this year’s events and talk about her hit song “Body.”

Discussing her Beyonce collaboration “Savage,” Colbert asked Megan who gives better advice between Jay-Z and Beyonce. “I will say Jay-Z gives the fun advice,” Megan said. “Say if I’m having a bad day, he’ll be like, ‘Megan. Girl, you need to be somewhere driving the boat. Turn up, have a good time, forget what the people say. He gives the more hot girl advice.” But with Beyonce, Megan said: “She says it the nicer way and Jay-Z gives it to me the more turnt up way.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Megan detailed how her song “Body” was written after she noticed she had gained some weight at the start of quarantine, but still looked good:

“In the beginning of quarantine, I definitely gained the quarantine fifteen. I was literally in the living room looking at myself like, ‘Wow, girl. You’ve really done it. What are you even eating, like why are you baking so much? How many honey buns can we eat?’ So I was looking at myself in the mirror like, ‘You know what? You look good though. We should dance about it.’”

The rapper continued to say the song is about people “celebrating their bodies.” She added that she wants fans to listen to her song and leave with a sense of body positivity: “I definitely just want my fans and my supports to feel like, ‘If Megan Thee Stallion said I’m fine so I must be fine.’”

Watch Megan Thee Stallion on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert above.

Good News is out now via 1501 Entertainment. Get it here.

Megan Thee Stallion is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

While the sports calendar has been wonky in 2020, sneaker releases have kept up, with everyone from Damian Lillard to Derrick Rose either releasing or announcing new concepts just in the past few weeks. The shoe companies haven’t slowed down either, and the latest and greatest innovation from adidas is its Futurenatural technology, which the company announced Thursday and hopes will “mirror an athlete’s speed and quick change of direction.”

Futurenatural will combine the midsole technology of Boosts with the light cushioning of Lightstrike with the goal of making adidas sneakers comfortable and responsive to acceleration and change of direction.

More specifically, adidas developed the Futurenatural concept by looking over foot scans of thousands of hoopers worldwide to develop a mold that more “closely represents the shape of the actual human foot.” The bottom of the shoe uses an “athlete data-informed traction pattern” to give better grip on the court for sudden cuts and movements.

As a hat tip to the biggest adidas athlete whose game mirrors these concepts on the court, James Harden will be the first NBA player to have the Futurenatural technology in his sneakers.

The Harden Vol. 5 will be the first sneaker to have Futurenatural integrated into it, adidas announced in a press release. The Harden 5 will go on sale in “early 2021.”

Ever since rappers started wearing heavy metal bands’ tour T-shirts, it was only a matter of time before someone found a way to finally bring the two genres back together. That someone has arrived and his name is Mario Judah. Born in 1999 and cutting an imposing, bulky figure, Judah hails from Atlanta — just like many of hip-hop’s most innovative genre-benders — and saw his profile rise significantly after the release of his song “Die Very Rough” — just four months after releasing his first song “Crush.” Now he’s receiving name-checks from some of hip-hop’s most influential figures including happy-go-lucky rapper Father, go-to video director Cole Bennett, and weird Twitter pioneer turned stand-up comic and part-time MC, Zack Fox.

With just those two songs, though, Judah perfectly embodied the platonic ideal of a rapper who does metal… or maybe a metal singer who somehow found his way to rap via the melodic, scene-inspired work of Juice WRLD and Trippie Redd. In the video for “Crush,” Judah, a husky giant with Fuschia hair, raccoon eye makeup, and a Tupac T-shirt, threatens to “crush all of my enemies” over a buzzing guitar riff with thundering 808s straight out of the gothic trap pioneered by Metro Boomin and Southside. The drums are the key to the thing, I think; where previous attempts to fuse the dark instincts of metal probably overly focused on incorporating DJ scratches and corny backward cap-wearing lead singers to the mix, Judah understands that the driver of hip-hop is the rhythm.

And what a rhythm it is. It’s trap, to be sure, but it’s also just similar enough to the backlines of bands like Pantera (a Mario Judah inspiration) that it could pass as a reasonable facsimile of the sound with the right temp adjustments. Judah sings with a throaty vibrato straight from his bowels, with just enough grit to evoke the “I’m possessed” disposition of its influences. The video is full of the horrorshow imagery that permeates the metal world as well; bloody skulls, plague masks, and a menacing Joker mask worn by an eerily posing figure brandishing a knife a la The Strangers make everything suitably creepy. The video has racked up nearly 800,000 views to date, but it was its follow-up that helped bring Judah to his current level of notoriety.

“Die Very Rough” has over 10 million views on YouTube since September — and continues racking them up by the thousands every day. This one is again a threatening display of murderous intent, with Genius contributors describing it as “a marvel of medieval rap” and comparing his flow to a Disney villain’s showstopping theme song. It’s an accurate summation of his approach: Throw Scar from The Lion King into a blender with Slipknot (substitute with Avenged Sevenfold if no Slipknot is available), throw in TM88’s drum kit along with a half-gallon of lean, and hit puree. Lyrically, Judah compares himself to a big dog and a lion, while the listener is “the prey that is hiding.” Finding the bridge point between the two poles — the hyperviolent bravado that marks their typical subject matter — and incorporating the most fun parts of each allows Judah to reside in a tenuous harmony directly in the middle. Whether or not he can keep it up for a full project is anyone’s guess, but we’ll soon have a chance to find out.

The project, according to Judah’s recent run of increasingly obstreperous promotional tweets, is to be titled Whole Lotta Red. But wait, isn’t that the title of the long-awaited Playboi Carti follow-up to 2018’s Die Lit that was supposed to have released this year? Yes. Yes, it is. That’s the genius. By tying his release to a higher-profile one impatient fans have kept near the top of social trends, Judah outs himself as a disciple of Young Thug’s eye-and-ear-grabbing promotional ethics. In 2016, Thugger trolled Lil Wayne with the title of his debut commercial mixtape, Barter 6, after Wayne repeatedly delayed the fifth installment of his Tha Carter album series. Capitalizing on the vacuum created by the album’s absence, Thug was able to supplant Weezy atop fans’ wish lists and assert himself as rap’s hot new star.

Judah’s employed the same strategy, threatening to drop Carti’s album himself after assigning a deadline of December 6. While he didn’t release a full project, he did share “Bih Yah,” his third standalone single which departed from his own established style by hijacking Carti’s signature squeaky-voiced, non-sequitur-spewing flow over a beat that could make a gamer prepare for a boss fight. He accompanied the track with yet another ultimatum: Either Carti puts out Whole Lotta Red on December 11 or Judah will. Since it seems unlikely the major label-constrained Carti will be able to meet his demands, Mario Judah just might get exactly what he wants: a cadre of ravenous fans eagerly awaiting his appearance on the proverbial Wrestlemania ramp. Bah Gawd, that’s Judah’s music, and this rap-rock disruptor has designs on taking over the game — even if he has to go through his own heroes to do it.

In the past year, a number of prominent hip-hop icons have revealed some weirdly anti-scientific and counterproductive thinking. GZA got dragged for subscribing to the Flat Earth conspiracy theory, while Ice Cube tweeted anti-Semitic memes and championed his Contract With Black America with the outgoing Trump administration. Truly 2020 has been a whole mess. But since we apparently couldn’t get out of this dumpster fire of a year without losing all of our faves, pioneering producer Pete Rock just had to make this contribution to the flames:

That’s right. Soul Brother Number One, Mr. “T.R.O.Y.” himself is an anti-vaxxer. Because of course, he is. Unfortunately for Pete, this is also the year hip-hop heads reached their limit with the genre’s legends espousing dumb thinking and conspiracy theories. Fed-up fans immediately got their engines revving to serve up a reality check for the skeptical soul sample master, explaining that vaccines keep people from getting sick — you know, like our teachers taught us in third grade.

It isn’t like Pete Rock is the only one. Nas has repeatedly expressed anti-vax views in his music but it rhymes, so most folks can just ignore it (nobody really listens to lyrics anyway). But social media is the one realm where these ideas can be challenged in real-time, so it’s no wonder Pete caught the wrath for misusing his platform — just like plenty of other stars have over the past few months. Let’s just hope he can learn from this mistake the easy way and not like Doja Cat, who mocked coronavirus only to come down with a bad case herself weeks later. We still need hip-hop’s elder statesmen around — but maybe they should stick to recalling hip-hop history for posterity and leave the science to the actual scientists.

It’s been a few years since we’ve had a new Radiohead album, but Thom Yorke dropped a solo effort, Anima, just last year. Jon Hopkins was a fan of that, and now he has shared his rendition of a highlight from that record, “Dawn Chorus.”

It’s a relatively straightforward recording, led by just Hopkins’ piano and some synth embellishments. Hopkins says of the song and his version of it, which he recorded in one take on a piano he’s had since childhood:

“I felt such bliss the first time I heard this piece — it seemed so mysterious and hypnotic, oblique but warm. I thought there was so much beauty in that chord sequence that there was room to explore it on the piano and see what grew from it. One day in early April when everything was particularly quiet and surreal outside, I went into my studio for the first time in weeks and ended up recording the whole thing in one take. I left it very raw and upfront, with just some sub bass and vocal drones in the background. The whole thing was done in a day and was a very cathartic experience.”

Hopkins is a couple years removed from his most recent album, as Singularity dropped in 2018.

Listen to Hopkins’ cover of “Dawn Chorus” above.

It remains to be seen whether the Houston Rockets will acquiesce to James Harden’s trade request any time soon, but if they do, one potential landing spot is the Brooklyn Nets. Harden reportedly wants to go to Brooklyn, where he would theoretically team up with Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving and create one heck of an offensive juggernaut.

A new report by Shams Charania of The Athletic, though, indicates that it might be hard for that to come to fruition. Charania reports that the Rockets — which have been clear that they want a whole lot back for Harden — aren’t particularly interested in a lot of what the Nets would offer up. The thing that would change that, though, is if they include one of their two stars.

The Rockets don’t have an urgency to move Harden and the franchise expects a mammoth package for the six-time All-NBA first team performer: along the lines of a young star and tremendous draft assets. Sources said the Rockets have no interest in a Nets offer, unless it would include either Kevin Durant or Kyrie Irving.

Now, this would almost certainly be a non-starter from Brooklyn’s point of view, because breaking up the Durant-Irving pairing before the former ever got a chance to take the floor seems completely out of the realm of possibility. This does, however, hammer home that Houston is negotiating from a place of strength for now, as Harden is under contract for two more years and they are under no obligation to make a move. Whether this changes as the year begins and the market for his services does something the Rockets don’t expect is one thing, but if they are steadfast that a deal centered around guys like Caris LeVert and Jarrett Allen and a whole lot of picks isn’t enough, it seems hard to imagine that Harden will get to Brooklyn via a trade between the two teams.

After Phoebe Bridgers declared on Twitter that Phoebe Waller-Bridge is the “best phoebe bridge,” the singer tapped her to direct a visual alongside her Punisher track “Savior Complex.” Following up the cinematic black-and-white visual, Bridgers shares some behind-the-scenes footage of the shoot where she talks working with the acclaimed director and jokes about how she hopes they get married so that they can have the “exact same name.”

The “Savior Complex” visual was shot in Europe, which meant that Bridgers had to learn how to drive on the left side of the road. It was also the first time she’s ever filmed a video somewhere other than LA, “so this is definitely a change of scenery,” she noted.

Speaking about meeting Waller-Bridge, the singer described her as an “angel.” She added: “I hope we get to get married so that we can have the exact same name.”

Elsewhere in the behind-the-scenes footage, Bridgers also described working with the director:

“So I had sent Phoebe the whole record in an email and and I was like, ‘I’d love to pick this, this, or this song’ and none of them were ‘Savior Complex.’ And she was like, ‘No. We’re going to do ‘Savior Complex.’ […] Phoebe called me and was like, ‘Okay bare with me. You’re fired as the leading lady of this music video. I have a better leading lady.’ And then she sent me a picture of a Chihuahua. So that’s how the news was delivered.”

Watch the “Savior Complex” behind-the-scenes footage above.

Punisher is out now via Dead Oceans. Get it here.