Category: News

Billboard has been the defining name in music charts for decades, but they’ve had to face new competitors in recent years. Rolling Stone launched their own charts in 2019, and the year before that, Apple Music rolled out daily charts. Now, the biggest name in music that hasn’t been mentioned yet, Spotify, has entered the chart space: The platform has introduced its own set of charts, the first of which were revealed today.

In a post on its website, Spotify describes its set of Spotify Weekly Music Charts as “a new way for artists and their fans to celebrate milestones on Spotify” and notes, “Listeners have long been able to view the top daily songs on Spotify, but this new weekly offering brings recognition — and celebration — to a whole new level. Expanding our charts allows fans and artists alike to better share and enjoy pivotal music moments, as well as get a definitive snapshot of what music is having the most global impact — from new album releases to new hit singles.”

Included in the initial rollout is a set of Weekly Top 50 charts, which track listening data between Fridays and Thursdays and includes a US Weekly Album Chart, Global Weekly Album Chart, US Weekly Song Chart, and Global Weekly Song Chart. These charts are set to be published on Mondays. Additionally, there are also the US Top 10 Debuts and Global Top 10 Debuts charts, which “capture the biggest new releases on Spotify, Friday through Sunday” and “incorporate data from the first 72 hours a song or album is live, giving an exciting early take on new music.” The post also notes that “market-specific versions of each of these charts” are coming soon.

Spotify has launched the initiative with the creation of the @SpotifyCharts Twitter account, which this morning has unveiled the inaugural lists. Leading the first Top 50 Global Albums chart (counting streams from September 25 to October 1) is Pop Smoke’s Shoot For The Stars, Aim For The Moon. Meanwhile, 24kGoldn leads the Top 50 Global Songs chart with the Iann Dior-featuring “Mood,” Joji’s Nectar is on top of the Top 50 Albums USA chart, and Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s “WAP” is No. 1 on the Top 50 Songs USA chart.

Check out the inaugural charts below.

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

Free Guy originally sat on the release schedule for July 2020, and everyone knows what happened there. Heck, the first trailer for the movie surfaced in December 2019. It’s been a hell of a year, but the movie will come out eventually (kinda wondering if we’ll see a VOD release, rather than a continued wait, given this new trailer), and the movie’s now embracing the chaos. That’s fitting, since the movie’s about Ryan Reynolds playing a background character (Guy, natch) who realizes that he’s living inside a video game.

Cue the explosions and a Grand Theft Auto-style living environment, along with Jodie Freaking Comer (as Molotov Girl) in a wig that doesn’t belong to an assassin. How unusual, but this might be the action-comedy that people need right now, despite the endless supply of nefarious parties with dodgy weapons. While this does look like a movie that would look great on the big screen — with Michael Bay-style booms all over the place, courtesy of director Shawn Levy (Night at the Museum) — and officially, this is scheduled for a December 11 theater release, a VOD hot drop wouldn’t be unwelcome! We could use a Good Guy now.

Free Guy also co-stars Taika Waititi (acting like a smartass in this trailer) and Joe Keery. In this teaser posted over the weekend, the cast covered all bases while projecting a true release date. They’re rolling with the punches, like Reynolds in the trailer.

Netflix might want to toss a coin (or many coins) to Henry Cavill.

Enola Holmes, where he plays old brother Sherlock to Millie Bobby Brown’s younger sister Enola, continues to lurk in the most-viewed top-10, while on Monday, the Mission: Impossible – Fallout star also shared the first look at season two of The Witcher, one of the streaming service’s most popular shows. If it wasn’t for Cavill, well, Netflix would be fine, but it would be worse without Geralt of Rivia and Jaskier.

“‘It may turn out,’ said the white-haired man a moment later, ‘that their comrades or cronies may ask what befell these evil men. Tell them the Wolf bit them. The White Wolf. And add that they should keep glancing over their shoulders. One day they’ll look back and see the Wolf.’ – From the writings of Andrzej Sapkowski,” Cavill wrote on his Instagram page (Sapkowski is the author of The Witcher book series), along with two photos of himself as Geralt. One shows his new armor; the other, his mighty sword.

The Witcher returned to production in August for season two, which showrunner Lauren S. Hissrich explained will be less confusing than last season. “We get to do flashbacks, we get to do flash-forwards, we get to actually integrate time in a completely different way that we weren’t able to do in season one,” she said. Because, if you can imagine, if we were in three different timelines [in season one] and then flashed forward or flashed back, we would have been in four or five or six timelines — even I know that’s too much. So I think it will be a lot easier for the audience follow and understand, especially a new audience coming in. But there are still going to be some fun challenges with time.”

Also more infuriatingly catchy songs.

President Trump’s COVID-19 diagnosis led to a series of weekend spectacles, including one in which he risked the health of Secret Service members to take an outside jaunt outside Walter Reed like he’s in North Korea. As Dan Rather summed up on Twitter, “Covid motorcades, signing blank papers, and tear gas walks to a church: the tragedy of Donald Trump’s photo ops.” No matter what side you’re coming at these developments from, this has been a truly exhausting weekend for the American people.

Fast-forward to Monday morning, and it sure looks like it’s been a long weekend for POTUS as well. He’s on steroid treatment to combat the virus, and it’s clear that he’s experiencing side effects. Yes, the president is literally tweeting on steroids. As a result, he is Hulking out on Twitter, which explains why “ROID RAGE” is sitting in the sidebar. It is… something, and as writer Amee Vanderpool observed, “The last time I took steroids was in March for Covid. I ripped a t-shirt off of my body from the neck down because the material was scratchy and irritating my skin.”

That’s a perfectly apt explanation for the seventeen all-caps tweets that Trump unloaded within one hour. He’s letting the rage fly with tweets like “SPACE FORCE, VOTE!” along with entries for the 2nd Amendment and religious liberty. The tweet that launched the avalanche ended with, “[R]emember that the Stock Market is getting ready to break its all time high. NEXT YEAR WILL BE THE BEST EVER. VOTE, VOTE, VOTE!!!!!

This healthcare entry is truly baffling, considering that Trump’s enjoying taxpayer-funded healthcare for an infection that he acquired after calling it a hoax.

And like The Terminator, he did not stop.

It’s not even 10:00am EST yet, so watch out, America. Someone’s got the rage of the ‘roids, and no one has taken away the phone charger (yet).

The internet doesn’t always make sense, but that’s what makes it fun. Recently, Nathan Apodaca, better known as @420doggface208 on TikTok, posted a selfie video recently of himself skateboarding on the street, drinking cranberry juice and lip-syncing along to Fleetwood Mac’s 1997 classic “Dreams.” The clip went viral: It has over 20 million views as of press time and caused streams of “Dreams” to nearly double and sales to triple.

The band caught wind of the video, sharing it in late September and tweeting, “We love this!” Mick Fleetwood liked it so much, in fact, that he decided to bring things full circle by recreating the viral clip. The 73-year-old rocker joined TikTok over the weekend and went full @420doggface208, riding along a paved path, taking swigs out of a bottle of Ocean Spray cran-raspberry juice, and singing along with his band’s classic track.

He captioned his post, “@420doggface208 had it right. Dreams and Cranberry just hits different.” Apodaca later re-shared Fleetwood’s post and wrote, “What a day,” along with hashtags like “cloud9,” “king,” “legend,” and “happyhippie.” Apodaca’s reshared video also included screenshots of an exchange between him and Fleetwood in the comments of the rocker’s post. Apodaca commented, “YoOoOoOoo so dope an blessed stay Steady Vibin homie,” to which Fleetwood responded, “Maybe when all this is Covid business is over we create one together !!”

Watch the original video and Fleetwood’s remake above.

In another timeline, Melania Trump basically saying “f*ck Christmas” (her actual phrasing: “I’m working… my ass off on the Christmas stuff, that you know, who gives a f*ck about the Christmas stuff and decorations? But I need to do it, right?”) would deserve an entire episode of Last Week Tonight. But because last week was so jam-packed with other, bigger headlines, like the president refusing to condemn a white supremacy group during his debate with Joe Biden, the first lady coming after Santa only got a brief mention by John Oliver in the lead-up to the segment.

Instead, Oliver focused on Donald Trump (and Melania, and Hope Hicks, and Chris Christie, and John Jenkins, and…) testing positive for coronavirus after months of downplaying its severity. “It was news that was felt shocking and utterly inevitable,” he said. “So many of the decisions that Trump and those around him made this week look absolutely appalling in hindsight, from his family refusing to wear masks at Tuesday’s debate, to failing to notify anyone on the Biden team that they may have been exposed, to the fact that the fundraiser he attended just before testing positive was a fucking buffet,” adding, “But maybe the event that looks the worst took place last weekend.”

That would be the ceremony in the White House Rose Garden to celebrate Trump’s latest Supreme Court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett (who tested positive for coronavirus over the summer). There was hugging and handshakes, but few masks. Oliver said:

“Much like the slew of utterly horrifying Supreme Court rulings over the next few decades, it seems we may look back on Saturday’s White House event and say, ‘All of this began there.’ And there is something utterly infuriating about watching them hugging each other when many in this country haven’t seen their families for months or have died alone in a hospital. And it’s not just that they’re putting themselves at risk, more importantly, it’s that they’re risking infecting others. The thing about a highly contagious virus is your recklessness could end up killing someone you never meet.”

Oliver ended the segment by echoing Trump’s message for the Proud Boys: “This week more than ever, proves that in the midst of a pandemic, when you act without caution, you cannot expect a virus to stand back and stand by.” He also covered the election (oh yeah, that!) during Sunday’s episode, which you can watch below.

21 Savage and Metro Boomin only got a handful of guests on Savage Mode II, but the ones they got made a splash. Drake, for example, used his verse on “Mr. Right Now” to reveal he previously was in a relationship with one of today’s best R&B singers: “Yeah, said she wanna f*ck to some SZA, wait / ‘Cause I used to date SZA back in ’08.”

Now, SZA herself has spoken out about the lyric, confirming that Drake was mostly correct.

Taking to Twitter last night, SZA confirmed the relationship but noted that Drake’s timeline was a bit off. She wrote, “So It was actually 2009 lol.. in this case a year of poetic rap license mattered. lol I think he jus innocently rhymed 08 w wait . Anybody who really knows me and was around during this time can confirm.. it’s all love all peace.” She later added, “I just didn’t want anybody thinking anything underage or creepy was happening . Completely innocent . Lifetimes ago .” At this time (October 5) in 2009, SZA was 18 years old, whereas she would have been 17 at this time on 2008. At this time in 2009, Drake was 22.

Meanwhile, Drake had another big collaboration on Friday aside from this one, as he also joined Bryson Tiller on “Outta Time.”

The first episode of the new The Walking Dead spin-off, The World Beyond, has premiered, and the show immediately throws us into a new mystery. The limited series — scheduled to run for only two seasons and 20 episodes — is designed to answer this question: “What is the Civic Republic, and what are their motives?”

There’s a new cast of characters here, and an explosive secret between them, namely that Elton’s mom killed Hope and Iris’s mom on Monument Day ten years ago, while Hope accidentally killed Elton’s mom in retaliation. Now, Hope, her sister Iris, Elton, and Silas are all on a journey from Nebraska to New York to find the father or Hope and Iris, who is working in New York to help the Civic Republic find a cure for the zombie virus. Silas, meanwhile, appears to be zombie chum, but I suspect he’ll be the Carol Peletier of the group: a character who starts out weak but who evolves when confronted by zombies. Elsewhere, two other characters, Felix (head of security) and Huck, are tracking the other foursome.

Meanwhile, the end of the episode reveals that the CRM liquidated the Campus Colony in Nebraska. Elizabeth and the military, it appears, killed absolutely everyone there, which certainly suggests that the Civic Republic is made up of very bad people. But like a lot of other villainous groups we’ve seen in The Walking Dead universe, the Civic Republic probably thinks they are serving a greater good. They are, after all, ostensibly searching for a cure for the virus.

In the meantime, before Elizabeth — who is the head of the CRM — liquidated the Campus Colony, she had a conversation with Hope and Iris, in which she gave them a map and told them where their father is, which suggests that she wanted Hope and Iris to escape before everyone in the Campus Colony was killed. Why? That remains unclear.

However, there was one exchange between Elizabeth and Hope and Iris that’s very intriguing for fans of Fear the Walking Dead. “I have a daughter,” Elizabeth tells Hope and Iris. “She’s a bit older than you. She’s a soldier in the CRM. She’s away from me a great deal, and that makes me scared sometimes.”

Elizabeth doesn’t come right out and say her name, but it’s worth combining that exchange with what Scott Gimple said during Comic-Con a couple of months ago — namely that we will “find out more about Isabelle in the future.” Who is Isabelle? Isabelle is a CRM soldier (a little older than Hope and Iris), who we met on Fear the Walking Dead. She’s the CRM soldier who was searching for gas for her helicopter in Texas and fell in love with Althea.

It doesn’t take a big leap to put two and two together here and draw the conclusion that Isabelle is likely Elizabeth’s daughter. It’s worth noting, too, that Isabelle told Althea in Fear the Walking Dead that she is from Indiana, which could possibly answer one lingering question on The World Beyond: Where is the Civic Republic? Is it Indiana? Possibly. Elizabeth, after all, noted that she had to travel a long ways to get to the Campus Colony in Nebraska, and Indiana and Nebraska are 800 miles away from each other. That’s a “long way,” but not so long that the alliance of three — between Portland, Nebraska, and possibly Indiana — isn’t out of the question (Nebraska to Oregon, after all, is 1200 miles).

Likewise, remember what Isabelle told Althea? “If you see someone wearing this [CRM] jacket, you should be afraid…” That was made abundantly clear in the final seconds of The World Beyond premiere when the CRM took out hundreds of people. “We are a force who are not living for ourselves or for now. You have your stories, already making every day the past. We have the future,” Isabelle told Althea on Fear the Walking Dead. That language syncs perfectly with the damage that Elizabeth and the CRM did to the Campus Colony, which was almost certainly more about the future than the now.

I bet it won’t be the last connection between The World Beyond and the other two shows, either. Scott Gimple may have planted another future Easter Egg by having Huck and Felix spray-paint zombies blue to track how far they travel. I bet we end up seeing the odd blue zombie in the other shows in the future. We’ll find out in the coming weeks.

The World Beyond returns next week with its second episode, along with the sixth season premiere of Fear the Walking Dead on AMC.

LeBron James can be the best player in the world at any given moment. The Lakers star might not be quite the same athletic specimen that flew around the court, dunked everything possible, and made entire teams bend to his will as he was in his absolute prime, but he’s still LeBron James. That means that he can still lead teams to wins on his own. In Game 3 of the NBA Finals, he certainly tried with an impressive 25 points, 10 rebounds, and eight assists performance (with eight turnovers), but it wasn’t enough though to overcome Jimmy Butler’s 40 point triple-double as Miami picked up a 115-104 win to make it a 2-1 sereis.

As the Heat dribbled out the clock with victory in hand they allowed themselves a 24-second violation. Before the violation could occur LeBron James, Rajon Rondo, and Anthony Davis began to walk off the floor. Once they realized that the game technically wasn’t over most of them returned to the floor. James did not. This actually resulted in a bit of a delay to the game ending as the Lakers had to scramble to get a 5th player on the floor — hello, Jared Dudley Finals minutes — so they could allow the clock to expire. James simply continued on to the locker room.

It is a moment that will garner plenty of discussion from talking heads, but maybe he just thought the game was over right? After the game, James was asked about it and he confirmed that he did think the game was over, but he also mentioned that a part of his walk off was his frustration with the loss.

“When you walked off the court with about 10 seconds left was that frustration or did you think the game was over?”

“Both.”

This really isn’t that huge a deal. It’s not like the Heat had just finished off the Lakers to win the series and James was escaping congratulatory handshakes. Players frequently leave losses without speaking to one another and James choosing to leave early, while not the best look in the world, is really minor in terms of ways to react poorly to a situation.

Of course, this is LeBron James we’re talking about here and everything he does is under a microscope. He has to be aware that every single decision he makes is going to become a talking point and a potential drama startup. James appears to have taken care of it pretty quickly by giving a clear “both” and nothing else about the walk off, but Miami, a team perpetually searching for fuel, will certainly have noticed it.

Jimmy Butler ensured that we at least get two more games of the NBA Finals with his 40-point, 13-assist, 10-rebound performance in Game 3 against the Lakers on Sunday. It was a Herculean effort from the Heat star, one they desperately needed with Bam Adebayo and Goran Dragic both still out with injuries.

Butler had 10 of his 40 in the fourth quarter, including eight in the closing four minutes to keep the Lakers at bay as they pulled away for an 11-point win. As Butler walked to the bench after his final bucket to ice things, he was yelling “they’re in trouble!” at his teammates to their delight, and while it’s not out of character for Butler to talk his talk after a game like that, it did raise some eyebrows.

After the game, he was asked about that very moment by the NBA TV crew on site, and he explained that he was simply repeating something LeBron James told him in the first half.

I didn’t think it got much spicier than yelling “they’re in trouble” as a pretty strong underdog (even still with a 2-1 series deficit and injury questions) but it’s that much better that he was barking the same thing LeBron tried to tell him in the first half as the Lakers chipped away at Miami’s advantage.

We knew Butler and the Heat would fight in this series no matter what, but not too many thought they’d get a game without Adebayo and Dragic. Now that they have, with one or both of those players potentially returning to the court soon, things are very interesting and the chatter will only pick up if Miami can come out firing again in Game 4.