Category: News

The McGirt v. Oklahoma decision that came down from the Supreme Court last week was a landmark decision in treaty law and for the rights of Indigenous people of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation in Oklahoma. In the most basic of terms, Justice Gorsuch made it clear that the United States made treaties with Indian nations that were still the law of the land no matter how state or local governments acted, or still treat those Indigenous communities.

Very briefly, the only reason you have a place to live in the United States is due to individual tribal nations either being wiped out through genocide by American’s westward expansion and/or through treaties signed that allowed the United States to take over land in exchange for assured reservations along with funding for education, health, security, and food on those reservations “for as long as the grass grows and the water runs.”

Over the course of the last two centuries, those treaties — literal laws that only Congress can terminate — have been eroded by bad actors from the White House on down to local governors or mayors with greed and no sense of humanity. One of the biggest examples of this atrophy of land and rights was the Indian Territory the Five Civilized Tribes were promised at the end of the Trail of Tears. Over the almost 200 years since that horrific event, federal, state, and local governments have done everything they can to take as much of that land (and rights) away from the people who were forced on that walk. Now, the Supreme Court has stepped in and put a stop to it.

This is all a lot for the average person to get a handle on, we know. Treaty rights with Indigenous nations are barely mentioned in U.S. schools much less what they mean today. So, to help us better understand what’s happening, we reached out to Rebecca Nagle, writer, activist, and podcaster of the hit show This Land, to talk us through the broader implications and what this means for Indian Country.

Nagle will be releasing a full-on follow-up to the McGirt v. Oklahoma case on This Land later this week. You can subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.

How did Oklahoma get to this point where so much treaty ceded Indigenous land was taken away, and why was it necessary for the Supreme Court to step in?

Yeah, so it seems kind of odd that tribes and states would have really different legal interpretations of the status of land. A lot of times states don’t follow federal laws when it comes to respecting tribal lands. It’s actually not that unusual. And so, what the Supreme Court said is — and I think Gorsuch did a really good job of being really clear in the way he worded the decision — that we as a court can’t say, “okay, well, the state of Oklahoma has been violating federal law for so long at this point we should just say that that law is moot” you know? Gorsuch has this really great line in the decision where he said, “We don’t do that in any other area of the law, why would we do it for tribes?” which is what courts often do with tribes.

So, I think the real significance of this case — not groundbreaking in a sense, it doesn’t create a new area of law — is that the justices of the Supreme Court are being very clear that when it comes to Indians, its job is to interpret the law and treaties to mean what they say. And, in the past, that was more often not what the courts did.

Right. I think for people outside of Indian Country, there’s so little purchase on the levels of legalities when it comes to tribal nations where you kind of got to start by explaining what a treaty is and then you’ve got to explain what the Allotment Act or Dawes was then Termination, and etc., etc. It’s exhausting. So, what does this then mean for people in Oklahoma right now?

I think the irony of what we’ll see in the coming months on the ground is that it’ll become evident very quickly that Oklahoma’s warnings about how this is going to cleave the state in two and all these like the sky is falling down arguments, are pretty overblown. We’re just not going to see those things happen. I think that the people’s lives who will be most directly impacted by this shift in criminal and some civil jurisdictions are tribal citizens ourselves.

Where I live right now is not restricted Indian land. Until yesterday, if I, say, broke the law in my house, the federal government didn’t recognize my tribe’s authority over me and now it does. So if there’s a state-level change anywhere, I think it’s going to be internal for tribes. And I think it’s going to mostly be a good thing.

So, it’s not this “the land is going to be transferred back” narrative that some people are trying to push?

You know, we have had this century of a slow bleed land loss since Allotment. But it didn’t stop there. I mean, land loss is still real. We’ll have to see how this process changes with this decision. But when people have restricted land and it’s sold to a non-Indian or even just passed down to their children where it then goes into the probate process, it can be lost to Indian Country because of misfiling.

This is what’s happening in 2020. Tribes were still losing their land in the eyes of the state government and in the eyes of the federal government. So, I think really what this court decision does is it shores up the sovereignty that we have fought all this time to protect so that we can increase the foundation on which we can really build a better future for our tribes. That looks like healthcare for our citizens. That looks like preserving our languages. And, yes, it’s a lot of the stuff our tribes have already been doing, but with recognized reservations, we have more power to do that.

Absolutely. And I have personal experience with this. When my father passed in 2009, the BIA sent me a letter saying that his will was not executed correctly according to BIA rules and so they took away all the land I was meant to inherit on two reservations. And now, I have none.

Yes. The Allotment system is kind of my soapbox. I think we talk about these moments, like the Trail of Tears or about the Indian Wars and the massacres, and the violence of those moments cannot be overstated. But then the United States figured out how to do the exact same thing without guns and arrows but with paper. And, if you look at the legacy of allotment, I would argue that it’s just as devastating if not more. We’ve never recovered from that history. I mean, it’s ridiculous that the laws that were set up to separate Indians from their land are still functioning in a lot of places.

Looking out at the broader world of Indian Country, you have similar situations when you look at the Fort Laramie Treaty which enshrined basically half of what is now South Dakota to the Lakota. Of course, like Indian Country in Oklahoma, that land was slowly chiseled away. Do you think the Lakota now has a better case for getting their federally promised land and rights back now?

I would imagine that there are tribes that woke up today who have treaty rights that have not been recognized by state and local governments that are having that very conversation. I’m not privy to those conversations. But I think that Gorsuch’s opinion left no space for ambiguity. He said explicitly that this decision was just about the Muscogee Creek nation and that’s what it applies to. So, he was very narrow in the way that he wrote it, but he was also very, very clear about his rejection of some of these long-standing assumptions or arguments that come up all the time in federal Indian law.

There’s this one powerful quote that he says towards the end of the opinion, he uses this kind of language where what’s presented in this case is this familiar argument that local governments make about tribal land where it’s like, “Yes, that’s what the treaty says. But you can’t really expect us to follow a treaty that was executed so long ago” and Gorsuch very plainly writes, “no, the role of the federal court is to interpret the language of the treaty, to take it at its face value that actually it does what it says, just like we do with any other text that Congress writes, and we interpret it based on that text.”

He even points out in another section that in any other area of statutory interpretation we assume that the statute means what it says, but somehow we make this sort of weird acceptance for federal Indian law. He has this really great line where he says, “that would create the rule of the strong, not the rule of the law.”

Basically, at a time often when Native people were recovering from genocide and death and just trying to survive the States were able to pull one over on us for a long period of time, and that would be enough to erode the meaning of the treaties. Gorsuch just completely rejects that idea. He uses very strong language in several places to call that argument to task for not really following the letter of the law.

It feels like a landmark decision.

I think that this decision will be quoted a lot. I saw somebody joking on Facebook that they want to get a tattoo of the decision. I think people in Indian Country are super excited about it. I think as we see court cases moving forward, this decision is going to be in briefs. I won’t be surprised if it’s quoted in other decisions. I think that Gorsuch wrote some strong language for tribal advocates to use, but at the same time, he was very, very clear about what this decision applied to and it just applies to Muscogee.

It’s an interesting time as we’re seeing Columbus statues fall, protests at Rushmore, and, seemingly, the end of the R*dsk*ns. And now this massive win from the highest court. How does it feel experiencing these social movements that are going in such a positive direction for Indian Country?

I think, one, we absolutely have to credit the moment of awareness about race in the United States that the leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement have created. We have to acknowledge that labor and that work to kind of create this moment that a lot of people are waking up to the idea that a lot of the long-held racist policies and cultural symbols in the United States are wrong and need to change. If it wasn’t for the conversation that black activists forced around the police killing of George Floyd, I don’t think Dan Snyder would be talking about changing the name of the Washington football team, you know? So, I think it’s really important for that credit to be given because I think that that credit is due.

I also think that the past week has been really interesting for Indian Country being on the national radar. We got the news of the Washington football team, and then it was Trump at Mount Rushmore, and then we got the really incredible news about the Dakota Access Pipeline, and then it was this Supreme Court case. It’s sort of like, I think, the biggest news week for Native people that I can think of in a long time.

You know, we break through the news cycle a few times a calendar year. If you look back at 2019, it was when the Covington high school students mocked the Native elder Nate Phillips and it was when Warren tested her DNA. That was kind of it. We had Standing Rock, which was one of the first times that mainstream media paid attention to a modern movement for Indigenous rights since Wounded Knee and the American Indian Movement. So this is a once in a generation moment where non-native people are like, “Oh, wow.! Yeah, Indigenous people are still here. They’re still fighting for this stuff.”

It’s really important for people to realize that even when these things aren’t making headlines, all of the work that Indigenous people are doing in the court, in their communities, on the frontline, is still happening and it’s still worthy of people’s attention and concern.

This case is actually a really good example of how that works. I have been writing about this since 2015. I can’t tell you how many people told me while making this podcast, “Oh my gosh, the implications for this case are so big. I can’t believe I hadn’t heard about it. I can’t believe nobody’s talking about it. I can’t believe it’s not getting more media attention.” And I think what’s undeniably true about yesterday is that if the tribe had lost, it wouldn’t have made the national headlines that it made because it would have only impacted Indians, and it would have just been tribes losing at the Supreme Court again and that would be it. But because it impacts a bunch of non-native people — or at least that’s the perception — it’s now worthy of national news.

That’s a really good way to put it. So, let’s talk a little bit about the This Land podcast. The show was sort of built around talking about the court cases and legal issues that lead to McGirt v. Oklahoma. Now, there’s a conclusion. So, what’s next for the show?

So, we are working on the update episode. I actually just spent most of yesterday and this morning doing interviews and collecting tape for that. It’s going to come out at the end of next week, probably next Thursday or Friday. It’ll be a full update because there’s so much that’s happened in the case. It’s a wild ride from the Supreme Court granting hearings to oral arguments postponed because of the Coronavirus, and then they happened online for the first time in the court’s history. Then we got this landmark decision. And so, it’s not even just the about decision, but just everything that’s happened on the way to that decision.

Awesome. So, I guess my last question is how are you going to celebrate?

I know, it was funny, I was just texting with some of my friends about that. It’s been such an emotional 36 hours. You know, I’ve talked to people who aren’t even a member of one of the Five Tribes, and they just sort of read it and wept. It is really emotional. We’re so used to … We know that the law’s on our side. We know that we are in the right. But so much of the time, that doesn’t matter.

I think Dakota Access Pipeline is a great example. That pipeline was illegal. It wasn’t only that there’s no way that the pipeline won’t poison the Standing Rock tribe’s water. There’s actually a legal way route for them to do that. That company had to follow a process. They have to do an environmental impact study. They have to consult the tribe. But even if the tribe says no after all of that, Congress is still given the power over tribes, over our treaty territories, over our reservation, over things like water rights. We have so little and then even that is not respected. Even those laws are not enough. And even the laws that are not enough are still not followed.

I think there’s an irony to the victory in that I think we have to frame it as basic. All Gorsuch said was, “this is what the law says, and guess what guys? Our job is to follow it and to make people follow it as a court.” But I think we’re so used to that not happening that it’s really emotional for it to actually happen, and to happen in this way that is sort of uncompromising and unflinching, which is the way that Gorsuch wrote that opinion.

Keeping up with new music can be exhausting, even impossible. From the weekly album releases to standalone singles dropping on a daily basis, the amount of music is so vast it’s easy for something to slip through the cracks. Even following along with the Uproxx recommendations on a daily basis can be a lot to ask, so every Monday we’re offering up this rundown of the best new music this week.

This week saw a final piece of Juice WRLD’s legacy and Kid Cudi link up with a legend. Yeah, it was a great week for new music. Check out the rest of the best new music this week below.

Juice WRLD — Legends Never Die

Juice WRLD only turned 21 just days before his death, but during his short life, he became a brightly burning star. His new posthumous album reflects that, and while he mostly gets by on his own strength, he also got guest spots from Halsey, Marshmello, and a small handful of others.

Kid Cudi — “The Adventures Of Moon Man And Slim Shady” Feat. Eminem

Cudi called on Eminem for “help” a couple months ago, and it turns out that was part of him teasing a new collaboration with the rap icon. The pair have collaborated on “The Adventures Of Moon Man And Slim Shady,” on which Eminem gets braggadocios and honors George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery.

My Morning Jacket — The Waterfall II

Uproxx’s Steven Hyden notes of My Morning Jacket’s latest, “Much of the record is composed of bleary-eyed, pedal steel-laced ballads that dwell ruefully on loss and aspire gorgeously to a state of healing, creating an all-too-relatable vibe of heartsick restlessness driven by a desperate desire to believe that tomorrow will somehow be better.”

YG — “Swag”

YG has a fifth album on the way at some undetermined point, but while the details are a mystery, YG’s confidence level on “Swag” is undoubtedly high. He’s certainly feeling himself a lot more than he’s feeling Nicki Minaj right now.

Dinner Party — Dinner Party

Supergroups are fun, and the latest one is a real hoot: Kamasi Washington, 9th Wonder, Robert Glasper, and Terrace Martin have come together as Dinner Party and dropped their self-titled debut album not long after the group was revealed. The record was recorded in 2019 and was introduced to the world in June via the impactful single “Freeze Tag.”

Summer Walker — Life On Earth EP

2020 could be Summer Walker’s last year in the music business, so before she hangs it up for good, she has given fans a new EP to enjoy. Oddly, it seems Donald Trump is into the album bringing “the stripper back.”

100 Gecs — 1000 Gecs And The Tree Of Clues

In a time when the world could use more gecs, 100 Gecs have delivered with 1000 Gecs And The Tree Of Clues. The album features remixes of songs from 1000 Gecs and has guest appearances from Charli XCX, Rico Nasty, Fall Out Boy, and others.

The Beths — Jump Rope Gazers

After a number of alluring singles (like the raucous “I’m Not Getting Excited,” for example), the New Zealand indie outfit have shared their new record, Jump Rope Gazers. Unlike a lot of artists lately, they even got to perform a real live concert in support of it, too.

Dominic Fike — “Politics & Violence”

The genre-crossing Fike recently announced his debut album, What Could Possibly Go Wrong, heralding the release with “Politics & Violence.” He captures a bit of a Radiohead vibe with the instrumental, and he sings on the hook, “Mileage, politics and violence / At least somebody’s driving / All you need to fall in love.”

Sufjan Stevens — “My Rajneesh”

Stevens recently came out with “America,” which, at 12 minutes, is a bit lengthier than most singles. Naturally, he followed that up with the track’s B-side, “My Rajneesh,” another 10-plus-minute epic that pushes this A-side-B-side duo of songs into EP-length territory.

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

Kid Cudi guested on Lil Wayne’s Young Money Radio recently, and he told Wayne about how he helped him connect with Eminem and get their recent collaboration, “The Adventures Of Moon Man And Slim Shady,” made. During that same interview, Cudi also revealed that he was worried about Eminem “bodying” him on his own song, but that was ultimately a sacrifice we was willing to make to work with the legendary rapper.

Cudi told Wayne:

“I had the record and I just was like, ‘Man, let’s send it to him. The worst that could happen is he doesn’t f*ck with it, and then at the end of the day, I won’t be mad about it.’ So I just sent it off and he responded back. They said, ‘He f*ck with it’. And they were asking questions like when I was thinking about releasing it and all these things, and I was just like, ‘Whoa, it seems like he’s going to write this sh*t.’ Alright, OK.

So I mean, he sent it right back and, man, I got him on the phone. I had to tell him, I was like, ‘Yo bro, you f*ckin’ destroyed this sh*t.’ Because I was nervous because I was like, ‘Man, I’m f*cking going get him Eminem on my song, he going body me on my own sh*t.’ But I was like, f*ck it. like, f*ck it. I just want a joint with Em.”

Watch the full interview below.

In a record-breaking Facebook Watch video, Jada Pinkett Smith revealed to her husband Will Smith that she had a romantic “entanglement” with singer-songwriter August Alina. “We were over. From there, as time went on, I got into a different kind of entanglement with August,” the Girls Trip actress told Smith, who she married in 1997. “I was in a lot of pain and I was very broken.” After the candid video went live, rapper 50 Cent reached out to the Bad Boys for Life star to ask, “Yo Will you alright over there?”

“Yes, i’m cool. I appreciate your concern my brother,” Smith responded on Instagram. That’s where most people would have ended the conversation, maybe adding a “I’m here if you need me” for someone going through a tough time, but nope, not 50 Cent:

50 Cent: “But why she tell you that shit on a show for everybody to see?”
Smith: “We broke up so she did her and I did me.”
50 Cent: “Then she said only SHE can give permission for somebody to blow her back out”
Smith: “F*ck you 50”
50 Cent: “Wait, what I do?”

The “In Da Club” hit-maker captioned the Instagram post, “Damn it’s like that.” It’s like that (I’m guessing Smith isn’t the first person to say “f*ck you 50” over the years).

In the video, Pinkett Smith said that after her relationship with Alsina ended, she and her husband reconciled. “I told you the first year we were married, that I could love you through anything,” Will told Jada before Jaden and Willow’s parents added their own spin to the Bad Boys mantra: “We ride together, we die together. Bad marriage for life.”

Cardi B and Offset threw their daughter Kulture a second birthday party for the ages over the weekend, but it seems that either they partied a little too hard or have some really nosy neighbors. During the party, Cardi posted videos to Instagram Live showing police officers showing up to the party over noise complaints. Her caption read, “We was too loud I guess,” while Cardi continued to enjoy a martini despite the officer’s presence behind her.

It seems that things were sorted out in relatively short order, as Cardi went back to posting video of the festivities, including Offset’s hilariously accurate impression of Michael Jackson dancing. There was also a huge pile of presents and a walking tour, where Cardi showed off a mask station (the masks were printed with Kulture’s name) with gloves and sanitizer, a cotton candy machine, and adult beverages for the chaperones.

Kulture seemed to have a prolific birthday, with presents ranging from a Power Wheels Bugatti to a tiny Patek Philippe watch (Future is going to be livid when he finds out they got away with that one). The entire family appeared to be all smiles throughout the party, although that mask station didn’t seem to get too much work. Hopefully everyone remains healthy despite the faux pas.

Cardi B is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Ten years ago today, Christopher Nolan’s Inception arrived in theaters. I saw it opening weekend, and I think I liked it though I know I didn’t understand it. This seems like the typical reaction to Nolan’s work. Few filmmakers have ever made as much money by simultaneously dazzling and confounding movie audiences. And Inception is his single most dazzling and confounding film, a film about a crack team of corporate espionage thieves who specialize in “extracting” information out of powerful people’s dreams, which they achieve by traversing several layers of consciousness with the help of, um, state-of-the-art napping machines and incredible drugs. Somehow, this pulled in about $830 million worldwide at the box office.

When I called Inception Nolan’s most “dazzling” film, I don’t necessarily mean best (I think that’s probably Dunkirk) or the one I’ve seen the most (The Dark Knight) or even my favorite (lately, weirdly, The Dark Knight Rises) — I mean the one that bowls over audiences to maximum Nolan-esque, “holy fucking shit” effect. Inception does all of the things that we expect from him with the highest degree of difficulty, while also making sure that we know precisely how difficult pulling it off is. The puzzle pieces are smaller and the overall picture is more ornate and elliptical. We move freely between different versions of reality, in which characters swiftly morph into other characters, while the plot pieces are moved in and out of order, and explanations for how this all is supposed to work are spoken with great rapidity and sometimes drowned out by the booming and Wagnerian Hans Zimmer score.

Though the most spectacular aspect of Inception, in spite of all this, is how popular it was in 2010, and remains a decade later, when the prospect of an original summer blockbuster unattached to well-entrenched IP that still manages to pack theaters seems all the more extraordinary for Covid and non-Covid-related reasons. It’s the sort of achievement that, right or (definitely) wrong, might theoretically give a man license to remove every chair from his workplace environment. When it comes to the big-budget prestige summer film, Christopher Nolan stands alone.

Critics have always been a little slower to embrace Nolan than the general public, and the reviews of Inception — beyond the predictable “masterpiece!” raves from fanboy film websites — were a little mixed.

“It trades in crafty puzzles rather than profound mysteries, and gestures in the direction of mighty philosophical questions that Mr. Nolan is finally too tactful, too timid or perhaps just too busy to engage,” said the New York Times, which patted Inception on the head with the faint praise of being a “diverting reverie.” I probably would have agreed with that in 2010. Like I said, I enjoyed Inception, but I didn’t feel especially stimulated intellectually by what Nolan was doing. I was, to be frank, very stoned and very into staring blankly at Joseph Gordon Levitt levitate down hotel hallways.

But when I watched Inception again this week — I believe it was my fourth viewing, and the first one without chemical additives — I was surprised by how much it did make sense. Yes, I attribute 20 percent of that to not being baked. But there was something about this film that not only seemed logical now, but even sort of linear. And I realized that this was true because the way that I experience “the real world” has changed a lot since 2010, to the point where following Leonardo DiCaprio into the inner recesses of Cillian Murphy dream skull seem almost as mundane as logging on.

Follow me with this: Inception is a movie that’s basically about two things. The first is the so-called “nature of reality,” which is what every Nolan is about but Inception is really deep into. The central tension for Leo and all the other characters is whether they can maintain separation between the “waking” world and the “dream” world. At face value, the “dream” world seems almost obviously unreal as a place where large-scale gunfights with faceless, suited gunmen take place with regularity. But with greater immersion in this world comes a less firm grasp on what constitutes plausible “actual” life.

To assist with delineating these worlds, each person carries a totem unique only to them, which he or she can use as a kind of tether to the waking world as they drift deeper into the dream world. In the second half of the movie, when they’re attempting an inception caper inside Cillian Murphy’s cranium, we learn that the heavy sedatives they’ve taken to go deeper into his subconscious carry the risk that they will be sent adrift in a “limbo” zone where dreamers no longer realize that they’re in the “dream” world. This is pitched in Inception as a fate worse than death, a self-lobotomy in which a person risks living a vegetative “waking” life in order to live a “false” existence in a “dream” world.

The other thing that Inception is about is the possibility that ideas can be “stolen” from or “implanted” in our brains by other people who have invaded our consciousness without our consent or even knowledge. In the film, “extraction” is conceptualized as a relatively easy maneuver, so long as your team is headed up by Leo and backed by untold millions from Cobol Engineering. “Inception,” however, as we’re told many times by various people, is “impossible.” In the scene on Ken Watanabe’s helicopter, Levitt says that “true inspiration is impossible to fake” because “the subject can always trace the genesis of the idea,” an argument he illustrates by telling Watanabe to not think about elephants. (Now, for a moment, we’re all thinking about elephants.) By the way, this argument doesn’t make any sense. Writers, musicians, painters, philosophers — they all talk about how their best ideas come out of nowhere as they happen to be reaching for the shampoo in the shower. Nobody knows where any ideas come from. Besides, Leo thinks he can perform an inception, which is what he ends up doing.

What Inception ultimately plays on is the general feeling among many of us that we are being controlled by the thoughts, moods, and whims of unseen strangers, just as it exploits our overall suspicion that there is a sizable gap between how we (or at least they) perceive reality and what reality actually is.

When I watched Inception in 2010, I thought about it purely in terms of a literal reading of the movie, which is about the waking world vs. the dream world. But when I watched it again in 2020, the movie took on a different, unintended, but still significant interpretation. It actually didn’t look like a far-fetched sci-fi film; it was more like my own daily life, and maybe yours.

Five months before Inception opened, I joined Twitter. At the time, I had been an internet native for almost 15 years. But like a lot of people, my use of the internet changed dramatically once I was sucked into the social-media sphere. I found that in this world, people acted differently than they did out there, IRL. (In the waking world, if you will.) For one thing, rhetorical gunfights broke out with far greater regularity! People also had the ability to morph into something else. Sometimes the people you thought you were interacting with were in factor avatars for other people. At first, this seemed strange. But it was fun, because you could create your own world in this blank space of endless possibilities, just like the “architect” Ellen Page in Inception.

Over time, as I spent more time in this dream world — usually about eight hours a day, the length of a night’s sleep and also my daily work shift — it became harder and harder to tell the difference between this and reality. Did the things that people cared about so much in the dream world really matter in the waking world? Did drifting down several levels in the dream world, being “extremely online,” run the risk of forever imperiling you there in a spiritual limbo? Could it really be that if you went too far, you could be killed by enemies in the dream world and then “canceled” in the waking world?

Inception isn’t a “dream” movie to me anymore, it’s a movie about the modern internet, a place where stealing people’s brains and stuffing them full of unwanted ideas is at the core of Mark Zuckerberg’s business plan. It’s just that I hadn’t been on Twitter long enough in 2010 to see it back then. Even the ending of Inception plays differently. A decade ago, audiences argued whether the lingering shot of the spinning totem suggested that Leo was now free of the dream world, or stuck there forever. But now, when I see Leo hugging his kids while neglecting to check on the status of his twirling top, I realize that he doesn’t care where he is. For him, IRL and URL have become one and the same. I can relate.

Hamilton is one of the biggest musicals in Broadway history, and it truly has transcended the stage and continues to do so. A filmed version of the musical recently started streaming on Disney+, and it spawned a successful cast recording album. In fact, the Hamilton album is currently doing better than ever, even though it was released nearly five years ago: Hamilton now sits at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 chart, which makes it the highest-charting Broadway cast recording album in over half a century.

The last cast recording to reach the top two of that chart was the original cast album of Hair, which topped the chart for 13 weeks in 1969, 51 years ago. The previous chart peak for Hamilton came on the July 2, 2016 chart, where it reached No. 3. This was shortly after the 2016 Tony Awards, where the musical took home 11 awards, including Best Musical.

This week also marks the album’s 250th week on the Billboard 200, and it hasn’t left the chart since debuting at No. 12 on October 17, 2015. That’s the most time a cast album has spent on the chart since the highlights edition of the original London cast recording of The Phantom Of The Opera, which spent 331 weeks on the chart between 1990 and 1996.

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

Kanye West’s recent announcement that he plans to run for president of the country received a lot of push-back, but not from everybody. Elon Musk gave Kanye his “full support” (but later seemed to cool off on it), and now it appears Kanye has Chance The Rapper in his corner as well.

Last night, Kanye West shared a new song called “Donda,” in honor of his late mother’s birthday. Chance was apparently moved by the video, as he used it as an opportunity to seemingly support Kanye’s presidential bid, sharing the visual and writing, “And yall out here tryna convince me to vote for Biden. Smfh.”

One fan replied to Chance’s tweet, “Chance, I like you, I really do but if you don’t realize this is just an attempt to steal liberal voters and swing the vote for Trump then you got an issue man #AnyoneButTrump2020.” He responded, “Everything I seen been more on the #anyonebutKanye side, but I understand the only vote for who I think can win politics.”

Chance followed that up by asking his fans, “Are we pro two-party system?” After one user responded, “We are against Kanye running for president,” Chance asked, “Why tho? Is there a better choice?” A few minutes later, he added, “Ima keep it real alota u n****s is racist.”

He then posed a question to his followers: “Are u more pro biden or anti ye and why? I get that you’ll want to reply that you’re just tryna ‘get trump out’ but in this hypothetical scenario where you’re replacing Trump, can someone explain why Joe Biden would be better??”

This comes days after Chance shared video of an old Kanye interview and wrote, “If you have a 30 mins today, watch the Kanye Interview with the breakfast club from 2013. This is on the heels of Yeezus being his most hated album and him and right after he left NIKE for ADIDAS. Its crazy how right he was about everything.”

This also comes a couple years after he came to Kanye’s defense after controversial tweets about Trump.

In maybe the most memorable scene in Todd Phillips’ Joker, Arthur Fleck, played by Oscar winner Joaquin Phoenix, dances down a set of stairs to Gary Glitter’s “Rock and Roll Part 2” while dressed in his Joker attire. Hence, the “Joker Stairs,” which became a popular (and obnoxious for local residents) tourist destination following the film’s release. The dance has been meme-d, criticized, and turned into a Wikipedia page, and now Phillips has shared a behind-the-scenes photo of Phoenix filming the iconic scene.

“Weekend. Although at this point, what’s the difference? Stay safe,” Phillips captioned the image. The Joker doesn’t wear a mask, but Batman does. Be like Batman.

Anyway, Phillips previously explained that Phoenix’s Clown Prince of Crime dances so much because he has “the music” in him. “I think one of the earliest things we spoke about was that Arthur had music in him. You know, like it just existed in him. Some people that you might know personally have that feeling, and I always thought that about Arthur, but it was sort of kept in and trapped,” he said. “I love the dancing in the movie. I think we should have more of it.” Jack Nicholson’s Prince-loving Joker agrees.

(Via Instagram/Todd Phillips)

Sometimes an episode of television sticks with you. It can happen for any number of reasons: the subject matter hits close to home, the timing catches you in a vulnerable moment, or the storytelling is just that good. Once in a while, things align themselves perfectly and an episode will deliver on all three of those aspects and just wallop you, leaving you staring at the screen as the credits roll, or staring at the wall or ceiling, or just, like, staring, generally, with your eyes not fixed on anything in particular as your brain overheats. This — the staring, the sticking — happened to me most recently when I watched the Mythic Quest quarantine episode.

Mythic Quest was a good show before the quarantine episode. Its first season debuted on Apple earlier this year and I binged it all in about two days. The series is set at a video game company that produces a franchise called, you guessed it, Mythic Quest, a kind of epic magical medieval game that is one part The Legend of Zelda and one part Game of Thrones. It stars — and was co-created by — It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia star and co-creator Rob McElhenney, who plays Ian (pronounced “eye-an”), the egomaniac creative genius behind the game. The whole thing is basically a workplace comedy, but more, with silly jokes and long arcs of character growth and moments that are legitimately moving. Again, a very good show. One of the best of the year so far.

The quarantine episode took all that and leveled-up. All the characters were suddenly stuck working from home and communicating via video chat. The silly jokes were still there, in the way other shows doing pandemic specials have touched on, but the episode was also very real in a way those specials didn’t match. That’s what struck me about it. That’s why I wanted to talk to the people involved. I wanted to know more about how this little slice of powerful television came to be.

“The conception of the entire endeavor was, well, how can we get the crew working again?” McElhenney told me when we spoke by phone. The quarantine had screeched things to a halt suddenly, with no end in the foreseeable future. “I mean, it was a full stop end of day Friday, we were done. And then they hadn’t worked for a month and a half. We thought, well, if we can get everybody working and paid and focused on something for two to three weeks, that’s a win. That was really the inception of the entire thing.”

Co-creator Megan Ganz said the same thing: “I think the first and foremost reason was that we had just gone into production on the second season. We shot for one week before we had to shut down production and so the crew was furloughed and we really, really wanted to get people back to work.”

But deciding to do something and actually doing it are two different things. There are always logistical hurdles to clear and unforeseen problems to solve in a normal situation, let alone the one we’re all dealing with now, which — I don’t think I’m going out on a limb here — can safely be referred to as abnormal. It’s even more difficult when you’re trying to capture a specific moment. “We decided that if we’re going to work on anything,” Ganz explained, “we should tell the story of right now and what we’re going through currently. But we knew that story would only be relevant if we could also release the episode during quarantine, which meant that we had to do it on a very expedited timeline.”

This sounded, to me, as I attempted to comprehend it all, like an incredible hassle.

PART I: “Hassle is putting it lightly”

The quote in that heading is from McElhenney, who also directed the episode, in response to me saying the thing I said in the previous sentence. “It was a Herculean effort by a cast and crew of true professionals motivated to get it right. And to get it done in a fashion that made sure that we were presenting a premium episode of the show. All without anyone ever leaving their homes.”

This is where making a television show for a technology company comes in handy. Acquiring the equipment was not a problem. Apple had iPhones galore and the stands and brackets necessary to set them up all shipped out within 24 hours of the pitch. “All of these things were delivered to the actors,” Ganz told me. “The microphones and lighting equipment and all of that, already sanitized, and then actors then sanitized them again.” And once all the sanitizing and scrubbing was done, each actor had to position the phone in such a way that the screen was facing the Zoom camera on their laptop so McElhenney could see what everyone was doing from his own setup at home.

“The directing, actually, when I’m speaking directly to the actors, was not that difficult,” McElhenney said. “The prep in getting to those positions was really where the work was put in.”

Yes, about that.

The prep work wasn’t just nailing down the technology of it all. They also had to make the show. The actors had to act, with no one else around them, in their own homes, without the kind of assistance they have on a set. “If I had a couple of scenes to shoot in the day,” said Charlotte Nicdao, who plays Poppy, the game’s tech mastermind, “I would be on a FaceTime call to my makeup artist and my hairstylist, and they would talk me through everything, which I really needed because I was very bad at doing my hair and makeup.”

There was also the matter of finding a spot to shoot in each actor’s home, a stressful and collaborative experience in a number of ways. Think about how you present your home when you have company coming over for dinner. Now think about that company being millions of strangers watching you from their own homes. Now think about all of that and add in the fact that you — like Nicdao in the episode — are playing a character who very much does not have it together during quarantine.

“I would deliberately set things up to look kind of messy and gross,” she said. “I would feel like every time I signed on, I would want to be like, ‘I’ve made it look like this. This isn’t how I usually live.’”

My favorite story about the actors filming themselves at home involved F. Murray Abraham, the 80-year-old, Oscar-winning veteran of the stage and screen, who plays the high-minded story consultant for the game. He was enthusiastic and game for anything, Ganz assured me, but there are certain technological issues that do not transcend generations. “We had to deliver all of his equipment to New York and then, from here, over the phone, set up his whole situation to shoot himself in Zoom,” she said. “And I think the place they started with was trying to figure out what his Wi-Fi password was.”

So, yes. A hassle. But a worthwhile one.

PART II: “Hey, it’s okay to cry. It’s okay to be scared.”

The thing I liked most about this episode was the way it showed how people are struggling in different ways during quarantine. Some are finding goofy outlets for their excess energy (the characters played by Danny Pudi and David Hornsby engage in a heated online Street Fighter battle with large charitable donations and shaved eyebrows on the line), some are just trying to fill the day however they can (there’s a whole bit about passing things from one Zoom window to another that takes on added significance later), and some people are really, truly struggling. This brings us to the part where things get real. This brings us to Poppy and Ian.

Poppy and Ian are opposites in almost every way. Poppy is the hard-charging coder who was born with her foot on the gas pedal, a workaholic who dives into the minutiae of that work, taking on more and more and trying to put out the fires caused by everyone else, most notably Ian. She’d been spending quarantine neck-deep in a coding sprint to finish a huge project. Nicdao describes her character thusly: “The way I see Poppy is that she has not stopped working her whole life. I mean, she’s this supernova genius that probably skipped a bunch of grades in school and moved to the States from Australia to go to college well before she was college age. Then she went straight from that into creating this hugely successful game, which is her baby, that she wouldn’t leave alone, especially not with Ian, for a moment.”

Ian is a big idea guy. He’s great at explaining themes and rallying the troops and projecting confidence, but he is hopeless at dealing with the smaller steps it takes to get to those big ideas, and he is not particularly good at dealing with any part of the world he cannot bend and shape into his own vision through force of will. He’d been spending most of quarantine barricaded in his compound and sending “inspirational” videos to the staff. McElhenney describes Ian’s struggle in quarantine thusly: “A character like Ian, who was such a narcissistic egomaniac, would never admit that he was struggling. And in fact, he would just project this air of machismo more than anything else. And then because he’s so insufferable, he would force it upon everybody else so that he was almost like, it was so clear that what he was doing was creating this aura of confidence that everybody could kind of smell.”

The problem started when the project ended. Poppy finished coding and celebrated for about 10 seconds and then promptly fell to pieces with nothing to do, with no immediate purpose. It’s what I said earlier about her being born with her foot on the gas. Now she’s mashing the gas and brake at the same time and her engine starts to blow.

“I think for years and years,” Nicdao explains, “her entire life has been her work and her ambition and her creation. And being forced into thinking about other things, I think, would be extremely traumatic for her.”

One line, in particular, was traumatic for both Poppy and Nicdao, whose Australian accent in the show is her own: “I had a line that was like, ‘My family are thousands of miles away.’ And every time I had to say that line, I would break a little bit because it’s true.”

This all leads to one of the most powerful moments of television I’ve seen this year. Poppy crashes — tears and anxiety and hopelessness streaking across her face. Ian sees this and finds the motivation he needs to leave his compound and venture out into a world he finds very scary, filled with things he can’t control. He shows up at her door and they hug. It’s a long hug, a deeply meaningful hug, one that is not romantic at all but more of a release. It’s two flawed people — friends — who need each other, reaching out, knowing in that moment that mental health trumps quarantine for this specific situation. The camera lingers for a long time, much of the action half out of view because it’s only being recorded by Poppy’s laptop camera at her desk. For an extended period of time, it’s basically a black screen and muffled sobs.

This is the part that hit me. The way the show addressed this kind of heavy emotional aspect of our current shared experience head-on. It’s something everyone can relate to even if we don’t often discuss it openly. Nicdao put it beautifully over the phone: “It was really important that people could also see that what they were feeling was valid. I think that there’s been a lot of, ‘Be strong. Set it aside. It’ll be over soon. Don’t worry.’ I found it really comforting when people in my life have said, ‘Hey, it’s okay to cry. It’s okay to be scared. This is unprecedented.’ So I sort of saw Poppy’s storyline as being able to say that to our audience as well.” In short, it’s okay to not be okay sometimes. That’s heavy, and true, and very, very real.

I really can’t overstate how terrific Nicdao’s performance is in this scene. Especially when you add in the weird circumstances she dealt with while filming it. The person she’s hugging isn’t actually McElhenney; it’s her husband, who isn’t even an actor. McElhenney filmed his part outside his house and in his garage. The characters shared a deeply personal, emotional moment while the actors playing them remained miles apart. I feel like I’m not getting across how impressive this is. Let’s just go ahead and turn it over to McElhenney, who said all of this without a single pause when I asked him what he thought of Nicdao’s work in the scene.

We have to recognize that there’s only one person in that room and that’s her. Her husband is out in the hallway waiting. She has to operate the camera. She has to make sure all the settings are correct. She has to operate all the audio settings. She has to make sure her hair and makeup is right, right before we roll. Then she just listened to a little bit of direction and some ideas that I had from a directing standpoint. Then she has to get herself into an emotional state where it’s believable and emotionally resonant and ultimately cathartic when he comes through that door.

Then I walk out to the street and then I say, “Action,” and we begin the scene. Then I step onto my own property and I go into the garage. She then walks through the hallway. I can hear me speaking into her headphones as the character, and then both as the director and producer. The door opens, I’m now talking to her husband and her because their positioning was a little off and I was trying to get them to turn. She’s listening to me give her direction as she’s having this moment of great emotional catharsis, heaving sobs into someone’s chest who yes, is her husband, but it’s not an actor. I’m also giving him direction that she can hear because he’s positioning his body in an unnatural way. All of this is happening as she is giving one of the greatest performances that I’ve seen all year.

To put all of that into perspective, I can say that I’ve never seen an actor pull something like that off in 15 years of producing television.

Yeah, that just about says it. To pull off that scene, under those circumstances, is a borderline superpower. “By the time it was done, I didn’t feel vulnerable,” Nicdao said of the performance. “It kind of felt cathartic.” As someone who did none of the hard work setting up, filming, or performing the scene, and really just sat there in bed taking it all in, I felt the same. I’m kind of feeling it again now, just typing this. I wasn’t joking about this sticking with me.

But you don’t want to end on that moment. You want to end on a win, a triumph for everyone, possibly even, just maybe, with an aggressively complicated Rube Goldberg device that involves over a dozen Zoom windows and the theme music from the Rocky movies. That could work.

PART III: “Let’s see what happens if I just call Sly and see what he says”

My questions after watching the episode’s closing Rube Goldberg scene, which you should watch if you haven’t yet, were twofold:

• How does one set up a huge Zoom Rube Goldberg machine that features 16 people in 16 separate boxes doing something that flows from one box to the other, seamlessly, without having everyone in the same room at any point?
• How does one go about clearing the Rocky music for a television show?

The answer to the first one was as tricky as I imagined, as McElhenney explained. “I called production design, our special effects coordinator, our property department, and said, ‘Hey, we need to figure out how to do this.’ And so each individual box was discussed and then our special effects coordinator, Jonathan, then went and built each individual machine and then would send me videos of them.”

Then it was in the hands of the actors, who actually had to film the moving pieces with their phones, the only shots not lined up with a steady mounted camera. “Everything had to be sanitized and delivered it to the individual actors, who then had to set it up inside their apartments,” Ganz said. “Jessie Ennis, her part of her Rube Goldberg was 100 ping pong balls dumping on her head. And she sanitized each one individually.” And, Ganz added, there were often many, many takes. “Danny Pudi, I think, did 17 takes or something like that. He would do a take and think he got it right and then he would send the video to us, and then we would be like, ‘Oh, but actually, you can’t see it fall out of the frame, or it falls too far to the left or whatever it is. So you have to redo it.’”

Again, a hassle. But again, a good one, as Ganz clarified. “We felt as triumphant as the people did at the end of that Rube Goldberg because we also felt like we pulled off this crazy technical achievement.”

Which brings us to the music. The whole scene is set to Bill Conti’s “Going the Distance” score from the Rocky franchise, which is almost a cheat code to the heartstrings of fans of those movies and Eastern Pennsylvania boys like both McElhenney and this reporter. (I asked both McElhenney and Ganz if he demanded they use the song given his Philly ties. Ganz: “Yes, that was all Rob.” McElhenney: “First of all, I didn’t demand it. I suggested it.”)

The song works perfectly. The bells ding, the swells swell, it sucks you in and gets you invested in anything you set it to. It should be used in everything. There’s a good reason it isn’t, though: Clearing the rights to the music is notoriously hard. So, again, how?

The key here is that McElhenney had cleared the music once before, for the Super Bowl episode of Always Sunny. I was not fully prepared for how that happened when Ganz told me.

“In order to clear it for that episode,” she said, “he called Sylvester Stallone. He called him directly.”

Excuse me? He just called Sylvester Stallone to get permission to use the Rocky music? I asked McElhenney about this later, in part to get confirmation and in part because I had to know more.

“MGM, who owns it, was very nervous about it,” he said. “And they essentially just defer to Sly on those matters and say, ‘Look, this is something that we feel very protective of,’ which they should, ‘and this is a part of our brand.’ And so they actually denied our usage for Sunny. I just figured, well, I don’t know, let’s see what happens if I just call Sly and see what he says. I reached out and he said he was a fan of the show. I don’t know if that was true or not, but he seemed to be really open to what we were going for and he approved it. So we used it in Sunny and the same thing happened with this.”

So that answers the question about clearing the Rocky music. You just call Sylvester Stallone and ask him. Easy peasy.

(I’ll tell you this: I do try to be professional. I try to have follow-up questions locked and loaded when I talk to very busy people. I try to make it appear as though I know what I’m doing as often as possible. I did not have a follow-up to “so I called Sly directly and he said yes.” I’m still wrapping my head around it, to be honest. I listened to the audio of our conversation again when I was putting this together and my entire response in the moment was “That is… cool.” Very professional. Very good.)

The combination of the Rube Goldberg machine and the dramatic emphasis added by the Rocky music gave the episode the triumphant, victorious ending it needed after taking the audience on that emotional rollercoaster. I did not ever expect a Rube Goldberg device to make me cry. And yet, there I was, staring with misty eyes at nothing in particular as the credits started to roll. It put a perfect uplifting bow on an episode that was powerful and emotional and captured a moment I think all of us are feeling right now in one way or another. I laughed and cried and felt understood all in 30 minutes. You can’t ask for much more than that out of an episode of television. Or any piece of art, really.

I think Nicdao put it best when I asked her to sum up the experience: “There was a sense of almost like guerrilla filmmaking in the way that we did it. We were constantly problem solving and experimenting to figure out how to do something. So it really did feel like, whenever we got it right… it felt like a really big celebration and achievement.”

Achievement is accurate, but probably an understatement. To make an episode of television this good under these circumstances is almost a miracle. I think that’s one of the reasons it stuck with me in the first place. It’s definitely one of the reasons it’s still sticking with me now. I don’t see it going away any time soon, either.