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Lil Nas X Didn’t Admit To Being A Nicki Minaj Stan Because He Feared Being Outed As Gay

For much of his nascent career, breakout star Lil Nas X has denied or avoided questions about his alleged Nicki Minaj stan account, @NasMaraj. Although many of his fans have assumed and accepted that before he was Lil Nas X, creator of “Old Town Road,” he was @NasMaraj, Nicki Minaj superfan. Nas himself has always played coy though — and today, he finally revealed why.

On Tuesday evening, after Nas sent Nicki Minaj a tweet requesting a feature verse, one of her fans asked him, “How come you never claimed her when people asked if you were a Barb? We all knew who you were.” The question seemed fair enough; after all, the question has been pretty thoroughly researched and once even got Nas in hot water for collaborating with Cardi B, Nicki’s assumed rival. There have also been some questionable tweets, which Nas has since apologized for.

Nas explained that he hid his past because, “I didn’t want people to know I was gay.” When the fan responded again to interrogate that claim, Nas pointed out the way fans online jump to conclusions and the hostile climate against gay men within hip-hop. “People will assume if you had an entire fan page dedicated to Nicki you are gay,” he said. “And the rap/music industry ain’t exactly built or accepting of gay men yet.”

Twitter

However, since Nas and other prominent performers such as Tyler The Creator and Kevin Abstract have come out, it’s probably fair to say that this is changing. As rap and the music industry become more accepting, the narrative can change, and fewer young people may feel the need to hide parts of themselves.

Check out Nas’ tweets above.

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Beyonce And Jay-Z Are Reportedly Getting Sued Over One Of Their Songs

“Black Effect,” one of the songs from Beyonce and Jay-Z’s collaborative album The Carters, begins with a recording of a woman speaking about love. That woman is Jamaican dancer, choreographer, and artist Dr. L’Antoinette Stines, and it would seem she is not thrilled about her inclusion on the song: TMZ reports Stines is suing Jay-Z and Beyonce over the track.

According to the lawsuit, which was filed in federal court on Tuesday, Stines was contacted by the famous couple in March 2018 to provide dancers for a promotional video for their then-upcoming tour. After getting the dancers, Stines was asked to be recorded speaking about her thoughts on love, and she was apparently told the conversation would be used “for promotional purposes” only, not in a song.

A contract was allegedly only given to Stines the day of the shoot, and she apparently signed without having the paperwork reviewed by her lawyer. She also claims she hasn’t been paid for her vocal work. Stines was surprised to hear her voice on “Black Effect,” and the suit said she felt “artistically raped.”

Stines is suing Beyonce and Jay-Z for copyright infringement and violation of her right to publicity. She is seeking damages and a writing credit on the song.

Neither Beyonce nor Jay-Z have publicly responded to the lawsuit.

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Amanda Seyfried: David Fincher’s Perfectionism On The ‘Mank’ Set Was As Intense As Advertised

David Fincher comes by his reputation for intense perfectionism honestly. Brad Pitt swears that the director’s also a funny dude, but Fincher’s body of work — Seven, Zodiac, Gone Girl, Mindhunter, Fight Club, and so on — more than suggests that he at least projects a certain air on set. Amanda Seyfried, who stars in the upcoming Fincher-directed Netflix movie, Mank, is revealing that working with The Social Network helmer is definitely a process, one that sounds both exhausting and invigorating.

During an interview with Collider, Seyfried discussed how Mank, in which she portrays actress Marion Davies (the movie is about the clashes between screenwriter Herman J Mankiewicz and Orson Welles during the making of Citizen Kane), was the hardest job she’s done. She also describes the experience as extremely rewarding, but it’s miraculous that the film wrapped just prior to pandemic shutdowns because Seyfried says that she filmed one scene for an entire week:

I can’t tell you how many takes we did, but I would guess 200, maybe I could be wrong and could be way off. Um, I could be underestimating by five days of one scene when I didn’t have one line… ‘You think I can just relax?’ No, because there are probably about nine or 10 different camera angles that had been on me at one point.

Mank is projected to arrive on Netflix this fall and will hopefully stir up some Oscar fuss. The tussles between the streaming giant and Academy are also growing more intense with every passing year (The Irishman was profusely nominated in 2020 but still ultimately shut out from wins), and given that theaters will have taken a six-month-or-so forced break, and Spike Lee’s latest joint will also be a contender, the delayed ceremony should be a memorable one.

(Via Collider)

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The Origin Of Samuel L. Jackson’s Most Iconic Movie Line Has Been Revealed

Among Samuel L. Jackson’s many iconic movie quotes (“I have had it with these motherf*cking snakes on this motherf*cking plane,” “And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee,” “First, we’re gonna seal off this pool…”), his most iconic might be “hold onto your butts.” That line, spoken by Ray Arnold in 1993’s Jurassic Park, is the one that screenwriter David Koepp hears “quoted most out in public,” so I can only imagine how often Jackson has some stranger yelling it at him. But where does it come from, as it’s not in Michael Crichton’s novel. According to Koepp, “hold onto your butts” actually comes from Back to the Future director Robert Zemeckis.

“I was finishing Death Becomes Her when I was writing Jurassic Park, and we had an ending that was really disastrous at first from one of these horrible test screenings where they almost kill you. So we’d very quickly gone out to shoot a new ending for the movie, but there was little time before the movie came out, so we were in the dailies of the reshoots, and there was gonna be no opportunity to redo the reshoots. So this was it, this really had to work,” Koepp told the ReelBlend podcast. “We sat down in the dailies, and as the lights were going down, Bob Zemeckis said, ‘Hold onto your butts.’ I happened to be working on the script at that time, and I was like, ‘Oh, I love that.’ I went back and I typed it into the script immediately, and then Sam Jackson said it.”

Imagine being friendly enough with Samuel L. Jackson to call him “Sam Jackson.” That’s the dream. Anyway, the next time you tell someone to hold onto their butt, remember that you have Meryl Streep to thank. It’s among the many reasons to thank Meryl.

(Via CinemaBlend)

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The Minnesota Freedom Fund Raised Over $30 Million After George Floyd’s Death. Now It’s A Target.


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‘New Girl’ Nailed The Art Of A Slow-Burn TV Romance

We’re living in strange times. A pandemic. Civil unrest. Cannibal rats. Jeremy Piven’s Zoom auction. The universe seems to be testing our collective sanity so, of course, we’re turning to Netflix. To keep us entertained. To keep us distracted from the uncontrollable chaos. To keep us from falling into a deep depression where our anxiety acts as a black hole, eating up all of the Garden Salsa SunChips in our parents’ pantry before feasting on dried ramen noodles under the soft glow of a computer screen at 3 a.m. in the morning.

That last scenario is completely anecdotal. Just an example really. We’ve never done that. But we have been consuming more streaming content. Specifically, TV shows. And though it may be taboo to admit, it’s been hard to find the energy to invest in new series. To get motivated to commit any of our free time — of which there is now plenty — to shows that might. Might be great. Might be terrible. You’ll have to wait a few episodes, an entire season really, to find out. No, thank you. I want the guarantee of a good thing, which is why I’ve been revisiting Fox’s adorkable comedy series, New Girl (God, “adorkable” was such a bad marketing term to slap on this thing).

A mix between Friends (which I’ve admittedly never seen), Cheers, How I Met Your Mother, and probably every other ensemble comedy centering on a mix-gendered group of friends just trying to make it in a big city, the Liz Meriwether series stars Zooey Deschanel, Jake Johnson, Max Greenfield, Hannah Simone, Lamorne Morris, and Damon Wayans Jr.

Deschanel plays Jessica Day, a young school teacher suffering through a bad breakup who answers a Craigslist ad and finds herself living in an oversized loft with three male roommates: grouchy bartender Nick Miller (Johnson), looks-obsessed marketing exec Schmidt (Greenfield), and former pro baller Winston Bishop (Morris). The group quickly becomes a makeshift family, weathering weird hookups, awkward breakups, career mishaps, and brushes with the Mexican police. It’s their pure, unadulterated friendship that provides most of the comforting, comedic moments each episode, which is why it’s the perfect re-watch right now, but I’m not here to praise Winston’s stylish shirt-game or hype up Schmidt’s douchebag jar antics.

No, I’m here to talk about sex. Or at least, sexual tension. Because if New Girl does anything well — and it does most things well — it’s the chemistry between its leads, Deschanel’s quirky, wide-eyed optimist and Johnson’s gruff, pessimistic man-child. Slow burns, particularly in the comedy space, are notoriously tricky to pull off. You either spend too long trying to get two lovable characters to hook up (Gilmore Girls, Jane the Virgin), or you struggle to make their romance interesting after the fact (The Office, Moonlighting).

Of course, it’s even harder to infuse the necessary romantic angst that keeps these pairings from fizzling out when you’re working on a show whose main focus is on the friendships between its core cast. The dynamics on Friends suffered under the weight of Ross and Rachel’s “Were they on a break” debate. How I Met Your Mother landed like a deflated balloon with its season finale reveal. The Big Bang gang lost an intangible something when Sheldon finally got together with Amy.

When you’ve spent seasons establishing storylines and character arcs that are fueled by the chemistry and built-up friendships between a group of eclectic individuals, introducing a romantic subplot can throw the whole thing out of whack. It’s like placing a rock on a track and watching the train derail. Sex, and to a larger extent, romance, is that rock.

But not on New Girl. Early on (and we’re talking like pilot early), New Girl recognized the undeniable sexual tension between Jess and Nick. It wasn’t planned, in fact, the cast has admitted they were told to temper the heat between the two long before the series decided to lean into their prospective romance. The show put two attractive opposites into a confined space and drew out the conflict and chaos that adversarial connection provided, balancing it with a dose of sincere friendship and platonic love that eventually elevated it to something more than just a slow-burn trope.

As cheesy as it sounds, Nick and Jess worked so well because they were friends before lovers. Sure, he sometimes served as her emotional fluffer when she needed the motivation to keep things strictly physical with certain paramours and she tried to fight against her reputation as his “cooler” by getting him laid with impromptu games of True American, but the show made a conscious choice to let their desire live alongside their growing bro-ship. They acknowledged those feelings, joked about them, questioned how they were influencing the overall mood of the loft, and then instead of mining them for seasons-worth of melodrama or completely ignoring them and frustrating fans, they simply let the romance develop organically.

It was real. It was messy. It was Nick refusing to smooch Jess during a game of True American before yanking her into an electric make-out session later when the two were alone. It was Jess getting hot-and-bothered by Nick’s newly-embraced responsibility at work and his excitement over doing laundry for the first time only to get pummeled with a two-by-four at a hardware store and shatter a Bond villain-sized fish tank after an angry hookup with her infuriating crush.

And it stalled in ways that felt plausible too, with confessions that, on any other show would signal the development of a new ship, but on New Girl, just hung in the air, acknowledged and ignored and then acted upon and then tucked away again. When Jess admitted things couldn’t return to normal during a fight over a coveted parking spot because Nick “nailed her mouth hard.” When neither could settle on whether they were on a date only to be goaded by Jess’s older ex who called out their childish antics. When finger guns were an “I love you too,” and terribly planned birthday parties worked out and a spontaneous trip to Mexico distracted the pair from putting a label on their connection.

Even when a survivalist Thanksgiving ended with Jess eating putrid fish and falling into a pit, these two managed to make light of the disasters that accompanied their romance. That’s something the show never shied away from: the idea that just because their love was complicated and hard didn’t t mean it wasn’t worth it. And as immature as both characters could be — Jess with her constant need to fix everyone and Nick with his refusal to do something, anything with his life — they helped each other to grow up. They fought, they broke up, but they still loved each other. Their bond didn’t rest solely on their sexual chemistry, which might have been the secret sauce all along.

So, if you’ve got time (and hell, who doesn’t these days?), invest in one of TV’s best slow-burns. And maybe together, we can make sex mugs a thing.

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J. Cole Addresses Noname While Elaborating On ‘Snow On Tha Bluff’

J. Cole dropped a surprise new track called “Snow On Tha Bluff” last night, and in it, he discusses his struggles with activism. He also begins the track by addressing somebody who many have assumed is Noname. Noname offered a response to the track, and now Cole has taken some time this morning to elaborate on the song.

In a series of tweets, Cole wrote that he stands behind the song, and while he doesn’t directly and explicitly confirm the track is about Noname, he does mention her. He implored his fans to follow her and praised her as an informed leader, something Cole feels he feels he is not. Cole wrote:

“Morning. I stand behind every word of the song that dropped last night. Right or wrong I can’t say, but I can say it was honest. Some assume to know who the song is about. That’s fine with me, it’s not my job to tell anybody what to think or feel about the work. I accept all conversation and criticisms.

But let me use this moment to say this: Follow @noname. I love and honor her as a leader in these times. She has done and is doing the reading and the listening and the learning on the path that she truly believes is the correct one for our people. Meanwhile a n**** like me just be rapping.

I haven’t done a lot of reading and I don’t feel well equipped as a leader in these times. But I do a lot of thinking. And I appreciate her and others like her because they challenge my beliefs and I feel that in these times that’s important. We may not agree with each other but we gotta be gentle with each other.”

Find Cole’s tweets below.

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Noname Responds To J. Cole’s ‘Snow On Tha Bluff,’ Which Is Believed To Be About Her

The music world listens when J. Cole speaks, and he did so last night by dropping a new song, “Snow On Tha Bluff.” After listening, many have come to believe that Cole wrote the song about Noname, as he addresses “a young lady out there” who is “way smarter than” he is and discusses social issues. On the song, Cole criticizes this person’s approach to sharing thoughts on these issues, saying at one point, “It’s something about the queen tone that’s botherin’ me.”

After the song dropped, Noname offered a response via a quick tweet referencing the aforementioned line, writing simply, “QUEEN TONE!!!!!!” That tweet has since been deleted.

Cole’s track also drew a reaction from Dreamville artist Ari Lennox, who shared a photo of Noname on Instagram and wrote, “Thank you QUEEN for giving af about us constantly and endlessly. I feel and appreciate everything you put out to the world. Almost everything you tweet moves me. I need and I am moved by so much you stand for. @nonamehiding thank you for enlightening us queen. I pray more folks will appreciate and understand!!!”

Meanwhile, Noname previously declared her intentions to release a new album, Factory Baby, this year, although it may be her final album.

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A Florida Woman And 15 Of Her Friends Have The Coronavirus After One Night Out


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23 Hilariously Ruthless Parents Whose Patience Is Wearing Really, Really Thin


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