Last year, Headie One and Fred Again dropped their GANG mixtape, which included a two-minute interlude titled “Judge Me” featuring FKA Twigs. It would seem the trio had unfinished business with that song, because now they’ve shared a longer, fleshed-out version of the track titled “Don’t Judge Me.”
Fred Again previously said of the original “Judge Me,” “We made a bunch of tracks and some of them made sense being two minutes. I like the way they pace the tape, it kind of slows it down. It’s a breather. Like a macro version of the ‘Told’ lyrics, spacing everything out. I played Twigs ‘Told’ and ‘GANG’ and she was really moved by them and wanted to get involved. I’d made this sketch of pitching Headie’s vocal around that had loads of space and it just worked.”
The track comes with a video as well, and director Emmanuel Adjei offered a statement about the visual titled “The Invisible Oppressor,” writing:
“From someone’s appearance, we are unable to judge whether a person discriminates over color, sex, religion, or gender. The oppressors within the people surrounding us, most often remain invisible until their abuse against others is revealed. This is one of the reasons why, for generations, discrimination is so hard to fight. Who must the victim fight against if it can’t identify the perpetrator?
In this audio-visual document we get to witness artists FKA Twigs and Headie One, amongst other Black British influentials, fighting against invisible forces of judgement and oppression. Having the enormous Victorian-inspired fountain ‘Fons Americanus’ by visual artist Kara Walker – depicting the historical, sorrowful story of slavery and colonization – as our setting, and particularly as the spirit of the film, this important monument creates another layer of depth and meaning to an invisible yet shared history.”
Watch the “Don’t Judge Me” video above and listen to the song below.
Things could be going better for the New Orleans Pelicans this season. The team entered this season with expectations of being a young, high-flying team under new coach Stan Van Gundy, but so far, New Orleans is 5-10 and are narrowly above the Minnesota Timberwolves for the worst record in the Western Conference.
The Pelicans are a team with a particularly bright future, though, so even if this year isn’t superb, there’s reason to believe better days are on the horizon. New Orleans has been really savvy about building up a war chest of draft picks and surrounding Brandon Ingram and Zion Williamson with interesting players. Their wheeling and dealing has seemed to be built with maximizing those two in line, and according to Shams Charania of The Athletic, they’re willing to take calls on two other notable players in an attempt to continue building.
Charania reports that teams have made calls to the Pelicans about starting guard Lonzo Ball and veteran marksman J.J. Redick, and the team is willing to listen.
A team that is expected to be prominent in the trade market picture, rival teams expect: The New Orleans Pelicans. The franchise is off to an uneven 5-10 start to the season. New Orleans has been receiving calls about the availability of Lonzo Ball and JJ Redick and has shown an openness to discussing trades around both with interested teams, sources tell The Athletic. A move would create a clearer pathway for young guards Nickeil Alexander-Walker and Kira Lewis in the Pelicans’ rotation.
For the Pelicans, the future core is centered around Brandon Ingram and Zion Williamson, and although there have been hurdles along the way the franchise has remained committed to continuing to develop an identity around both cornerstones.
Both Ball and Redick are free agents at the conclusion of this season, with Ball slated for restricted free agency and Redick becoming an unrestricted free agent. They’re appealing for different reasons — Ball is still only 23 and can impact a game in a number of ways, and while Redick has struggled from deep this year, he’s still a highly-regarded marksman who can help provide floor spacing if he’s able to get back on track. Charania also notes that there have been preliminary discussions between the Warriors and Pelicans regarding a Kelly Oubre Jr. trade, but that nothing has gotten serious. Plenty of teams figure to have interest in both players and as the trade deadline approaches, expect rumors to pick up in a major way, particularly if the Pelicans remain well down the West standings.
Sub Pop signee Yuno captured hearts with his reflective musings on his power pop debut EP Moodie. The musician has been relatively quiet since his EP’s acclaimed reception, sharing a handful of one-off singles through the years including his cover of Beach House’s “Zebra.” But fans of Yuno can rest assured that there’s new music on the horizon as the singer has begun the new year with new music.
Yuno marks a distinctive emo-pop pivot with his new single “Somebody.” Over an electric beat, Yuno sings of wallowing over heartbreak in his bedroom: “Another night alone in my bedroom / Just another week that I’m struggling to get through / I guess this is the life that I’m used to / Four white walls, a ceiling that has a great view.”
About the song’s recording process, Yuno said he found himself reflecting a lot on his early years while at home in quarantine:
“Spending so much time at home during the pandemic brought back a lot of feelings from my adolescence. I grew up as somewhat of a loner — spending most of my time isolated in my bedroom, and I wanted to capture the parallels between my life now and the life of my younger self. I drew a lot from the pop-punk, post-hardcore, reggae, and southern hip hop that I’ve loved throughout my life. I feel like my 14-year-old self would be very proud.”
Tory Lanez wants the judge in his and Megan Thee Stallion’s assault case to drop the protective order preventing him from talking about the case, according to TMZ. Tory’s lawyers filed documents this week pointing to Megan’s reaction to a false report that the case had been dropped, saying that it was unfair for her to be able to address the case but not him.
At the time, Megan apparently believed Tory or someone close to him had released the false story to undermine her integrity, tweeting as much as Tory’s name trended on Twitter and his defenders began attacking her online. “That whole team figures out ways to create doubt with my story every week and the media eats it up,” she wrote.
While the source of the story was instead a fan gossip account misreading the LA County Superior Court website, Lanez still feels that this creates a one-sided narrative painting him as the aggressor (never mind how quickly fans believed the poorly reported story, which was shared by a number of publications despite the shoddy logic behind its conclusion).
Meanwhile, Tory’s docs claim he has evidence that he wasn’t the one who shot Megan, but can’t share it due to the protection order. He believes the optics will bias a jury against him before the case goes to trial.
This, of course, is only if you ignore the thousands of fans and numerous fellow artists giving him the benefit of the doubt, as well as his album Daystar released in the wake of the shooting going public in which he straight-up claims he’s being framed while also trying to profit from the situation through streams of the album. In the meantime, Megan hasn’t discussed any aspects of the case herself after explaining her side of the story in its immediate aftermath and refuting his Daystar claims on her sole Good News song addressing the shooting, “Shots Fired.” Tory’s also tried manipulating public opinion in other ways, such as advertising collaborators like DaBaby and Lil Wayne, insinuating that they believe his side of the story, despite his video with DaBaby never being cleared for release.
It’s hard to believe that it’s been a year since Kobe Bryant, his daughter Gianna, and seven others died in a helicopter crash near Los Angeles. It was a tragedy that shocked not only the NBA community, but the world at large, as Kobe’s enormous influence was put in stark relief after his passing.
Many are clearly still processing the grief from such an unimaginable tragedy, so it wasn’t a surprise that his wife Vanessa, on behalf of the Bryant family, asked that the NBA not flood the airwaves with tributes on the one-year anniversary on Tuesday. Still, it was inevitable that his many fans, teammates, and peers around the league would find ways to pay homage one of the NBA’s all-time greats.
Chief among them was former Lakers center Pau Gasol, who won a pair of championships alongside Bryant and forged a friendship that has practically made them part of one another’s family. On Tuesday, Pau took to Instagram to post a moving tribute to his friend and his daughter, the loss of whom will continue to reverberate for years to come.
Pau was one of Kobe’s many running mates throughout his career, and though Kobe famously clashed with several of them, his partnership with Pau was easily one of the most amicable and most successful. As such, their families have maintained a close relationship throughout the years, and Pau even gave his daughter the middle name Gianna as a way to honor Gigi’s memory.
As Marvel fans scramble to unravel the mystery of what’s really happening in WandaVision, the songwriting duo behind the Disney+ series ever-changing theme songs have revealed an interesting detail. While explaining the process of coming up with new music that matches the sitcom era of each episode, Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Bobby Lopez, who’s previous work includes both Frozen films and Coco, shared that each theme song contains a very specific musical trick with a name that could hint at an evil something — or someone — lurking beneath WandaVision. Via IndieWire:
“One of the techniques of this show is to use a bright and cheery sound, and then juxtapose it with a creepy situation,” he says. He brings up the rhyme from “A Nightmare on Elm Street” — “One, two, Freddy’s coming for you” — as a great example.
The duo explains they want the audience to feel that paranoia. “We put a tritone in the main theme which is [considered] the devil’s interval, and it might feel creepy, sometimes dreamy,” Lopez said.
That now makes two references to the “devil” in WandaVision. During Episode 2, Kathryn Hahn‘s Agnes made the off-handed remark, “That’s not the only place he is,” when one of the characters said “the devil is in the details.” This quickly led to fan theories that the Marvel villain Mephisto could show up on the Disney+ series, and may even be Agnes’ husband, Ralph, who has yet to make an appearance.
However, Elizabeth Olsen recently told Elle that the show might not even have a “villain” in the way that Marvel fans are using to seeing them on screen. “Someone said to me when you watch any of these hero movies, you know when the villain’s about to show themselves, and you also have an idea of who the villain is. With our show, you don’t know what the villain is, or if there is one at all,” Olsen said.
Of course, Marvel is notoriously secret, so Olsen could simply be doing her part to keep fans guessing.
Indie music has grown to include so much. It’s not just music that is released on independent labels, but speaks to an aesthetic that deviates from the norm and follows its own weirdo heart. It can come in the form of rock music, pop, or folk. In a sense, it says as much about the people that are drawn to it as it does about the people that make it.
Mike Milosh has been pretty prolific throughout the 2010s and into the 2020s, and his latest LP Home doesn’t falter in its dreamy and ambitious approach. “It seems trite to describe Rhye as indie-pop given the grand melodies, powerful beats, and strikingly idiosyncratic perspectives that comes across in Mike Milosh’s singular music,” wrote Steven Hyden in a recent issue of the Indie Mixtape newsletter.
Typhoon – Sympathetic Magic
Almost three years to the date after unleashing their last album Offerings, Typhoon is back with a surprise new LP, which dropped out of the sky last Friday. Sympathetic Magic is as politically-charged as Typhoon has ever gotten on a record, taking on the pandemic and political unrest that has been on full display over the last year.
CARM – CARM
CJ Camerieri has had a hand in recent music from Taylor Swift, Paul Simon, The National, and plenty more, but now he has centered his focus on the release of a self-titled debut album under the moniker CARM, which features flourishes of horns and entrancing instrumentation, along with guest appearances from Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, Sufjan Stevens, and members of Yo La Tengo.
Kiwi Jr – Cooler Returns
Just over a year after releasing their debut album Football Money, Toronto quartet Kiwi Jr. are back with their sophomore effort, successfully building upon the template that quickly garnered them comparisons to Pavement. On Cooler Returns, the band’s “shambolic yet catchy songs are loaded with fractured riffs and lyrical non-sequiturs,” wrote Steven Hyden in a recent issue of the Indie Mixtape newsletter.
The Head And The Heart – Rivers And Roads: Live From Pike Place Market
In August of 2019, Seattle natives The Head And The Heart found themselves performing atop the city’s iconic Pike Place Market to 30,000 fans, the same market where they would busk at the beginning of their journey as a band a decade ago. The performance included energetic versions of tracks from throughout the band’s career, including “Honeybee” and “Missed Connection.” The group commemorated the event with a concert film and album, which can be watched in full on Amazon.
Palberta – Palberta5000
New York art-punk trio Palberta has been forging ahead over the last several years, dropping impressive album after impressive album. Palberta5000 might be the most intriguing of all the band’s releases to date, with Steven Hyden praising the band for finding “the middle ground between minimalist, deconstructionist indie and the danceable grooves and relentless rhythms of funk and R&B” in the latest Indie Mixtape newsletter.
Camp Trash – Downtiming EP
After generating a good amount of hype around their debut EP with the release of two promising singles, Camp Trash made good on the promise of an excellent (albeit short) collection of emo-inspired power pop tracks with Downtiming. The EP’s four tracks feel like a throwback to the height of teen movies, where a song like “Bobby” could soundtrack a high schooler surfing the internet for the first time. They should hang out with Beabadoobee.
Chai – “Action”
Japanese quartet Chai signed to esteemed indie label Sub Pop for their third full-length album Wink. “Action” is a great first taste of the LP, with glitchy electronic production and Mana’s affected vocals giving the song a unique futuristic aesthetic.
Hand Habits – “4th Of July”
Hand Habits’ Placeholder was one of our favorite albums of 2019, and now Meg Duffy is back with all new music on Dirt EP. The effort’s lead single “4th Of July” is what Derrick Rossignol calls for Uproxx a “climactic folk-rocker,” a slow-burning number that features little more than guitar and vocals at the outset before building to a dreamy, cinematic conclusion.
Matthew E. White & Lonnie Holley – “This Here Jungle Of Moderness/Composition 14”
Sometimes, it takes the creative push of a collaborative partner to help create your best work. This is the case for Matthew E. White and Lonie Holley, who claim in a press release that their new five-track effort Broken Mirror: A Selfie Reflection features the most exciting and explosive tracks of their collective careers. Lead single “This Here Jungle Of Moderness/Composition 14” is a sprawling seven-minute epic that encompasses everything from avant garde to funkadelic.
Deb Never – “Someone Else”
After running into a creative dry spell in Los Angeles, Deb Never packed her bags and booked a one-way flight to London, where she moved in with longtime collaborator Michael Percy with the only goal of writing an onslaught of music. “Someone Else” is the first taste of Never’s “London period,” a lo-fi indie number produced by Jam City that opens in a subdued, reflective nature before a hyper pop beat drops and transforms the song into something resembling a dance track.
Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
“Who is Rico Nasty?” Uproxx gives you a chance to find out in the latest installment of our “Who Is…?” documentary series focusing on the colorful DMV rapper/fashion icon. In the mini-doc, Rico recounts her growth from a boarding school student named Maria to the badass symbol of feminine self-determination she’s become thanks to hits like “Smack A Bitch,” “Key Lime OG,” “Own It,” and “OHFR?”
“I always had tough skin,” she admits. “I always left out the house with a chip on my shoulder like, ‘Hey, look, bitch. I’m here though. I’m alive!’” Rico explains how being a loner who classmates thought was weird set the stage for her to be the rebellious role model she is today. “I’m just happy that when another Black girl does this, she won’t feel so different,” she says. “I know that there’s a lot of other girls that are like me that are probably to be whoever they are or who they wanna be, but I make room for that.”
Watch Uproxx’s “Who Is Rico Nasty?” documentary above.
Nightmare Vacation is out now via Atlantic Records. Get it here.
Rico Nasty is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
Usually, artists release new songs or albums on Friday, which allows the material to have a full week of tracking activity for Billboard chart consideration and therefore give it the best chance to place highly on the weekly ranks. However, Billie Eilish and Rosalía released their new collaboration, “Lo Vas A Olvidar,” on January 21, which was a Thursday. That means it only had one day to make an impact on the charts, and sure enough, it did: The single debuted at No. 45 on the Hot Latin Songs chart dated January 30, which gives Eilish her first appearance on the chart.
Eilish recently spoke about the track with Zane Lowe and said of it, “I love it. I actually think it’s so beautiful and it’s not something I feel like I’ve done. [Rosalía] just opened a little channel in me that I hadn’t tried out before. Obviously, a lot of it is in Spanish, which I think is so important. […] It went through lots of stages, which is kinda rare for us. Usually the production we do is the production we end up with. This one was really not that way. The time I heard it when it was done, I was just like, ‘This is so weird.’ I don’t feel like I’ve heard a song that sounds like this.”
It’s an emotional day around the NBA and the basketball world in general, as Tuesday marks the one-year anniversary of the tragic helicopter crash that killed Kobe Bryant, his daughter Gianna, and seven others. Friends, fans, family, and peers have come together to pay tribute to the Lakers legend who is gone far too soon.
Kobe’s leap from high school to the NBA was still something of a rarity at the time, but those who were lucky enough to witness him put his enormous talents on display in the lead-up to the 1996 NBA Draft were left in awe by what they saw. Now, a brief but compelling piece of video evidence has finally emerged showing Kobe doing the Mikan drill.
On first glance, it might not look that impressive. But the rigorous physical demands required to jump that high and that quickly for a solid minute is much harder than seems on the surface and speaks directly to both his otherworldly athleticism at such a young age and, perhaps more important, his competitive nature.
Just ask Rex Kalamian, the Lakers video coordinator at the time, who called it “probably the most athletic Mikan drill you’re ever going to see,” via the LA Times. Kalamian had the wherewithal to preserve a good chunk of the VHS tape of Kobe’s workout instead of recording over it, as was standard practice.
There is apparently more than an hour of footage remaining that has yet to be released, and we can only hope we’ll eventually get to see more of it, as we continue to honor Kobe’s memory in whatever way we can.
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