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What a week this is already turning out to be. President Trump and President-Elect Biden greeted the nation with wildly different responses to news that Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine results point toward a pair of injections that’s not only “robustly effective” but “more than 90%” so. For his part, Joe Biden congratulated the scientists who are making this happen for giving the world “cause for hope.” Biden continued with a lengthy plea to Americans to remain masked while staying patient during this ongoing battle, and Trump, uh, dropped an all-caps mini-tweet (for him) about the stock market.

Certainly, news of vaccine progress is cause for celebration, but guess who isn’t happy? Donald Trump Jr. appears to believe that Pfizer timed their news to damage his father’s election prospects. He tweeted, “The timing of this is pretty amazing. Nothing nefarious about the timing of this at all right?

Trump Jr. is, of course, wanting everyone to congratulate his dad and probably re-do the election because his dad shouted “Operation Warp Speed!” a few times. In response, people were quick to tell the eldest Trump son that Pfizer head of vaccine development Dr. Kathrin Jansen preemptively declared, “We were never part of the Warp Speed … We have never taken any money from the U.S. government, or from anyone.”

The roasting of Junior began with fact-checks aplenty (especially regarding Pfizer’s avoidance of Trump influence) while ridiculing him for politicizing a vaccine’s calendar.

Oh, and people slammed Junior for his narcissistic response, given that he (of course) made everything about his family: “[Y]ou depraved egomaniacal simpleton. You’re not that important. Sit down.”

Some people just aren’t here for good news, right?

In the summer of 2019, Taylor Swift popped up in a Capital One commercial, in which she played a pretty bad waitress. That was the start of a multi-year promotional partnership between Swift and the credit card company, and now, another Swift-starring ad has debuted.

In the 30-second spot, a Capital One spokesman addresses the camera, boasting about how banking with Capital One is “like the easiest decision in the history of decisions, kind of like…” At this point, he trails off, and the scene shifts to Swift thoughtfully looking out a window, with her doing an internal monologue voiceover in which she says, “It’s looking kind of chilly out today. What am I going to wear?”

She then opens the barn-style doors of a large closet as her thoughts continue, “I think I’ll go with…” Looking at the rack of clothes, Swift finishes the thought out loud, “cardigan,” which is of course also the title of her latest No. 1 single. The angle changes to reveal the closet is full of a bunch of the same sweater, and Swift grabs one and winks at the camera. “Yup, even easier than that,” the spokesman concludes before talking about the Capital One app.

Watch the ad above.

It didn’t take Drakeo The Ruler very long to find his footing after his lengthy stint in jail. If anything, he’s hit the ground running, announcing he’d drop a new mixtape just a couple of hours after his release and offering a teaser with his first post-incarceration song, “Fights Don’t Matter.” The song even arrived with a low-fi music video that finds Drakeo back on the streets enjoying his freedom alongside some friends and family draped in bejeweled necklaces and throwing stacks of money at the camera.

Drakeo spent nearly four years in Los Angeles’ Men’s Central Jail after a pair of arrests that saw much of his early rise to stardom eaten up by trying to wrangle his freedom. In 2018, he was charged with first-degree murder, attempted murder, and conspiracy to commit murder stemming from a 2016 shooting in Carson, California at a party he was alleged to have attended with his crew, Stinc Team. Although he was acquitted, the District Attorney refiled new charges of criminal gang conspiracy and shooting from a motor vehicle in late 2019, accusing Stinc Team of being a gang and using LA’s antiquated (and racist) gang injunction laws to further pursue Drakeo’s continued incarceration.

Drakeo was freed this past week after Los Angeles voted to replace Jackie Lacey as District Attorney with George Gascón. The DA issued a plea deal for time served, which Drakeo accepted. It’s a sure bet that he’ll follow through on his plan to release a new mixtape because even when he was locked up, he was productive, releasing the acclaimed Thank You For Using GTL earlier this year, recording on jail phones. Drakeo’s new mixtape, We Know The Truth, is coming soon.

Watch the “Fights Don’t Matter” video above.

In August, Cardi B sat down with Joe Biden for a Zoom interview, which drew ire from conservative figures like Candace Owens. Cardi and Owens beefed about it back then, but now that Biden will be in the White House come 2021, Cardi has again taken a moment to respond to the backlash.

In an Instagram post, Cardi shared a snippet of her conversation with Biden and wrote about the situation, summarizing the moral of the post, “Don’t let nobody down play you for what you doing that’s how they try to take away your power .YOUR POWER IS YOUR VOICE!.”

Cardi wrote, “Couple of weeks ago I was getting chewed up by Trump supporters over this interview especially by miss Candace who has been degrading my name for 2 years straight. I was so nervous for this interview especially because it was on zoom and not in person but it was important for my followers to get to know our running candidate and future president. Republicans like Candace, Shapiro, Fox news made fun of me ,talk so much sh*t about me and my song WAP. They said Biden use me as a pawn then weeks later we seen a list of rappers and artists that Trump was trying to reach out to and to pay for support a list that included my name. I never got payed a dollar from Biden I just wanted to get to know him and open my fans up to the importance of voting.Im so proud of all these celebs who uses their platform and for the people who went out and voted WE DID IT! Don’t let nobody down play you for what you doing that’s how they try to take away your power .YOUR POWER IS YOUR VOICE!Congrats Biden! Your family here, and in Heaven are very proud of you! Also congratulations to Kamala you made history!”

Aside from the election results, things are looking up for Cardi, as she recently called off her divorce from Offset.

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

Welcome to another installment of Ask A Music Critic! And thanks to everyone who has sent me questions. Please keep them coming at [email protected].

It’s fall, which means I’d typically be in peak Ryan Adams listening season. Unfortunately, given the recent allegations, I’ve forced myself to move away from listening to Adams at all. What are your rules for listening to musicians who’ve been accused of bad things? Is there a line you’ve drawn, and if so, what is it? — P.J. from Simsbury, Conn.

Before I answer this question, let me state several things for the record: First, I believe Adams’ accusers. I believe the women (including Phoebe Bridgers) who say they felt pressured into entering sexual relationships at the risk of professional punishment, and who were generally treated in an abusive, exploitive manner. And I believe the woman who said that Adams knowingly solicited explicit photos from her when she was underage.

Second, I don’t really have hard and fast “rules” in these situations. (Does anybody?) I’m hardly the sort of moral authority who would determine a “line” that should be universally followed by all fans of artists accused of despicable acts. This is real life, not bowling. I’m only going to describe my own feelings. You are free to feel however you want.

Third, I really don’t want to have some abstract “separate the artists from the art” conversation right now. I would rather talk about this in practical, everyday terms, which are less absolute and perfect but, in my mind, more human and relatable.

Now, here’s my answer regarding Ryan Adams: I haven’t wanted to listen to him. It’s not really a matter of should I listen to him — the idea of putting on a Ryan Adams album hasn’t seemed at all appealing to me. And I say that as a person who owns all of his records and has written about him often in the past. (More on that in a moment.) Perhaps it helps that Adams is, at heart, a pastiche artist, and therefore can be easily supplanted by the many people he has ripped off: Gram Parsons, The Grateful Dead, Neil Young, Tom Petty, The Smiths, U2, the Rolling Stones. While I count myself as a fan of Adams’ music, taking him out of my rotation has been relatively painless.

If you still want to listen to Ryan Adams, that’s your choice. I’m not here to judge anyone’s listening habits. (Especially if you own physical copies of his music — it’s not like each post-scandal spin is going to earn him any additional money.) But for me, I can’t listen to Ryan Adams now without thinking about him and the people that he hurt. And that wasn’t true before. Songs, at their best, don’t cause us to dwell on the people who made them. Songs are supposed to make us think about ourselves — our own lives, feelings, and memories.

Cold Roses used to be an album that evoked some of the best periods of my life — back in the spring of 2006, when I met my wife and we fell in love. When we got married two years later, we listened to Cold Roses a lot in the summer months leading up to the wedding. That music was magical to me, and it was woven into the fabric of my life. But now when I put on Cold Roses, I just think about the dumb jerk who wrote the songs, and how he was messing around with a young girl who looked up to him as a mentor, when he simply regarded her as a plaything. And I would rather not think about that. I don’t like having “40something rock star exploiting a teenager” thoughts in my head. So, I’m fine not playing Cold Roses. It’s not really a moral stand. It’s just no longer pleasurable for me.

It’s that simple. In a way, the decision was made for me. Ryan Adams, and Ryan Adams alone, ripped this music out of my life. Now, I’m not saying that should be your reaction. This is just my personal preference, and it’s an honest and, I think, natural response.

(There’s a side issue here about whether there are still enough Ryan Adams fans to make a comeback viable. Nearly two years after the allegations broke, this remains unclear. The fact that one of his accusers is a beloved singer-songwriter in her own right no doubt complicates his future. Lots of people who love Phoebe Bridgers are probably always going to despise Ryan Adams, with justification. I suspect that Adams will likely never regain the stature he once had, though he will surely be back in some capacity in the near-ish future.)

I can already anticipate the counter-argument to my personal preference. It will come from a guy on Twitter with 17 followers and a bio that simply reads, “Free Thinker.” This person will point out that musicians in the past — including icons that you and I love — also did terrible things, and that it is inconsistent to not listen to one artist because of past transgressions and give those other people a pass. While I am not forcing this person to feel as I do, he will be offended that anyone is supposedly “canceling” Ryan Adams, even on a personal, one-to-one level.

This is my reply: Of course I’m being inconsistent! Human beings are inherently inconsistent. You can’t program yourself to have feelings that always correspond precisely to your ideology, especially when it comes to art. Also, I am aware of all the bad things my heroes have done. And I don’t excuse them, even if I still listen to their music. But a lot of that stuff happened years or even decades before I was even born, which strikes me as quite different than news that breaks in the present, when we’re all adults who now have to respond to awful newspaper articles in real time.

As a critic, I’ve written nice things about Ryan Adams’ music, and while I think he has talent, I now regret the role I played in giving him a platform that he abused time and again. That’s why this is different for me than debating about what Led Zeppelin did or didn’t do on the road in 1973. Yes, it’s important that all unseemly details are included in the histories of our favorite bygone bands, so that the totality of how they impacted culture — positively and negatively — is accounted for. But I wasn’t around for that. I am, however, around for this. Therefore, it is more personal to me, and I’m still learning from it, as a fan and as a critic. Ultimately, I don’t want to enable this guy any longer. I love a lot of albums. I can afford to set Ryan Adams aside.

I recently irritated a punk-loving friend by describing the Talking Heads as “proggy.” He argued they come out of punk which is diametrically opposed to prog and that being clever/inventive isn’t the same thing. To my mind, they worked with Eno who is at least prog-adjacent, and I feel like they appeal to lots of people who find straight-ahead punk rock boring (i.e. classic rock fans, prog fans, even jam band fans). So I guess my question is, is there a line at which something becomes “prog”? Are there any other bands like Talking Heads who sort of blur that line? — Tina from South Bend, Ind.

Before I answer this question, Tina, I just want to thank you for annoying your punk-loving friend. Annoying punk-loving friends is a special pastime that I have enjoyed for many years, especially when it involves the implication that prog is kinda better and more interesting than punk.

It would probably be more accurate to describe Talking Heads as “post-punk,” which describes the wave of bands that arrived shortly after the advent of punk that took that movement’s spirit and applied it to a wider range of sounds and musical influences beyond just three-chord rock. But I think you’re on to something when you contextualize Talking Heads as prog, as post-punk is basically a more progressive version of punk rock. This is certainly true of Talking Heads, who moved well beyond their bedrock CBGB sound once they hooked up with Brian Eno. But it also applies to many of their contemporaries, who have their own proggy attributes, like Television (long guitar solos), Wire (odd time signatures and plenty of synths), and The Damned (lots of colorful on-stage costumes and an album produced by Pink Floyd’s Nick Mason).

I would even venture to say that nearly every great punk band has some prog in them. What is The Clash’s Sandinista! if not a proggy-punk statement on par with Tales From Topographic Oceans? You could say the same about Husker Du’s sprawling concept double-album Zen Arcade or The Minutemen’s endlessly innovative and musically complex Double Nickels On The Dime. Or even Green Day’s American Idiot, which is at least as dense as The Wall. If you love Black Flag, note that Henry Rollins loves King Crimson. Or that Greg Ginn is a notorious Deadhead.

I could go on but tell me: Has your friend’s head exploded yet?

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

Dua Lipa has had an aggressive and lengthy promotional campaign surrounding her latest album, Future Nostalgia. Lead single “Don’t Start Now” came out back in October 2019, the album was released in March, the Club Future Nostalgia remix album dropped in August, and she just released a new single, “Fever.” Between “Don’t Start Now” and today, Lipa has released singles and videos, been on TV, and otherwise made Future Nostalgia inescapable.

For fans who can’t get enough of the album, this has been great news, of which there is now even more. As Pop Crave notes, over the weekend, Lipa revealed that she plans to release a collection of Future Nostalgia B-sides at some point in 2021, as she noted in a YouTube chat, “B sideeeee next year [heart emoji].”

In an interview from earlier this year, Lipa explained how a social media break helped her make Future Nostalgia, saying, “In all honesty, I don’t think I could have done my second record if I hadn’t taken a step back from social media. When you first start, when I first started putting new music out, everything was super positive and I had lots of nice messages. I think the more stuff you do, then there is criticism and comments and it all comes in thick and fast, and for a while it was really getting to me. I just felt like people had nothing but mean things to say or I was being picked on. It did upset me, it made me feel I didn’t deserve to do certain things.”

Dua Lipa is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

A tired nation woke up from an eventful weekend to the headline: “Pfizer’s Early Data Shows Vaccine Is More Than 90% Effective.” The pharmaceutical company has been working with German drugmaker BioNTech on a vaccine for COVID-19 that the New York Times describes as “robustly effective.” If the 90 percent figure holds, that “would put it on par with highly effective childhood vaccines for diseases such as measles. No serious safety concerns have been observed.” Pfizer will ask the Food and Drug Administration for “emergency authorization” of the vaccine this month; if it’s successful, “it will have manufactured enough doses to immunize 15 to 20 million people.”

Now there’s still a long way to go before concert venues are at capacity again (as the Times notes, “It is not conclusive evidence that the vaccine is safe and effective, and the initial finding of more than 90 percent efficacy could change as the trial goes on”), and god only knows how much the vaccine is going to cost. But it’s still a promising update on a potential return to normalcy. When alerted about the news, Joe Biden, who officially won the U.S. presidential election over the weekend, said, “Last night, my public health advisors were informed of this excellent news. I congratulate the brilliant women and men who helped produce this breakthrough and to give us such cause for hope.”

He continued:

At the same time, it is also important to understand that the end of the battle against COVID-19 is still months away. This news follows a previously announced timeline by industry officials that forecast vaccine approval by late November. Even if that is achieved, and some Americans are vaccinated later this year, it will be many more months before there is widespread vaccination in this country.

This is why the head of the CDC warned this fall that for the foreseeable future, a mask remains a more potent weapon against the virus than the vaccine. Today’s news does not change this urgent reality. Americans will have to rely on masking, distancing, contact tracing, hand washing, and other measures to keep themselves safe well into next year. Today’s news is great news, but it doesn’t change that fact.

America is still losing over 1,000 people a day from COVID-19, and that number is rising — and will continue to get worse unless we make progress on masking and other immediate actions. That is the reality for now, and for the next few months. Today’s announcement promises the chance to change that next year, but the tasks before us now remain the same.

Here’s how Donald Trump responded, not with concern but about the stock market:

If Biden’s statement makes him “sleepy,” well, sign us up for a four-year nap.

(Via New York Times)

Everyone knew that John Oliver, who grew misty-eyed while voting for the first time as a U.S. citizen, would be thrilled over President Trump’s election loss. And yes, he was happy to put an “absolute year of a week” into the past. “He lost,” the host elaborated. “All that bullsh*t, which we’ve grown accustomed to seeing work, did not work this time.”

Oh, partying definitely happened. Oliver, who realizes that there’s much work and worrying still to be done to heal the U.S. (most acutely regarding the pandemic), granted himself 30 seconds to party hard in a socially distanced way. Granted, everyone’s got a different definition of partying, and Oliver’s favorite way to get down is to run footage of people dancing in the streets while he shouted octopus trivia, including “if octopuses take ecstasy, they’ll hang out and party with other octopuses.” (It’s true and surreal.)

Oliver did not shy away from metaphors while describing Saturday in New York City, which he said felt like a “reverse 9/11” for a few reasons, including the presence of “complete euphoria, an abiding disgust for Rudy Giuliani, and this time, people were actually dancing on the rooftops in New Jersey.” He also turned to Trump’s recent “nightmarish” and lie-filled attack on voting, and in doing so, Oliver shouted out one of the week’s leading voices of sanity, Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, for having the “best response” to Trump’s election lies.

While dubbing Fetterman as “Lt. Gov. Stone Cold,” Oliver dug his comparison of the Trump campaign standing on a street corner and claiming to have won the state as being “like a bad House of Cards episode.” To that, Oliver remarked, “This is like House of Cards in that it’s full of political intrigue, there’s a sexual predator pretending to be president at the very heart of it, and it’s gone at least four seasons too long.”

The episode ended as it should: with a montage of news personalities talking about “dumps” of votes. Never change, John Oliver. Granted, we didn’t get to see this next visual happen again, but the sentiment still stands.

Lil Nas X fans have spent the past few months watching the rapper teasing new music and charting the progress of a new album. Nas offered quantitative updates about how complete his album is with percentages, and last month, he declared that November would be “Nasvember.” Now, a few months into Nasvember, Nas is about to deliver, as he has dropped a teaser for his next single, “Holiday.”

The 48-second teaser video is a clear continuation of the “Old Town Road” cinematic universe. It begins with Nas, on horseback, entering the frame through some sort of portal. He finds himself in an Old West-style town, where a drunk Santa Claus is kicked out of a saloon. The jolly man collapses on the ground, and Lil Nas X takes his hat, which, like the movie The Santa Clause, reveals that he is the new Santa. Suddenly, his horse is transformed into a reindeer and he becomes more Santa-like himself. In another cinematic homage, he and a team of reindeer take off into another portal, at which point Back To The Future star Michael J. Fox to say, “Whatever you do, Nas, don’t go to 2020.”

The song comes out on Friday, so ahead of then, watch the “Holiday” teaser above.

On the surface, a story involving Brad Pitt, Courteney Cox, and Jon Lovitz doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense — in what world would you hear those three names together — until you remember that Jon Lovitz’s best friend growing up with Lisa Kudrow’s brother. Also, Jon Lovitz encouraged Lisa Kudrow to get into comedy, and she ended up on Friends with Courteney Cox (who shared the famous “tartlet” scene with Lovitz) and Jennifer Aniston, who was married to Brad Pitt during her Friends years.

As it turns out, Jon Lovitz also knew Brad Pitt before he was famous, because they shared a manager, whose name is Cynthia Pett-Dant. She introduced the two over the phone years ago, and they became acquainted. Their mutual manager also had a beach house next to Jon Lovitz’s beach house, and Brad Pitt would occasionally stay there.

In one such instance — as Lovitz tells it on this week’s episode of Literally! with Rob Lowe — Pitt was staying in Cynthia’s beach house, and he was walking Cynthia’s nine dogs. Unfortunately, one of the dogs got loose, ran into Jon Lovitz’s house, and killed his cat. The cat meant a lot to Lovitz because he’d gotten the cat after his Dad died to help him feel better about the loss.

Lovitz was obviously distraught over the “murder” of his cat. That night, he went to Courteney Cox’s house — they had been friends since starring the two starred together in a movie called Mr. Destiny. Lovitz has described Cox in the past as someone he basically regarded as his little sister. Anyway, when he got to Courteney Cox’s house, she was with Cynthia and several other women. They were all crying, and Jon asked, “What’s going on?” and Cox said, “We just feel so bad for Cynthia!”

“You feel bad for Cynthia?” Lovitz asked. “My cat was killed! Murdered! Most foul! In my bedroom.”

“And Courteney goes, ‘Well, food chain!’”

“And I said, ‘What? Excuse me! Food chain?’”

“Yes, well, cats kill dogs,” Cox told him.

“My cat was in my bedroom, minding its own business. And the dog came in and murdered my cat!”

Lovitz did not soon forget about the incident. “Five years later,” Lovitz told Rob Lowe, “Someone says to me, ‘Courteney Cox’s grandmother died,’ and I say, ‘Whoa! Tell her I said, ‘food chain!’”

“Three years later,” Lovitz continues, “I see her at a Dodger game, and she says, ‘You’re still mad about that?’ And I say, ‘I hear your grandmother died. FOOD CHAIN!’”

“Just say you’re sorry, Courteney!”

“And she says, ‘OK, fine, [I’m sorry].”

When someone slams me, Lovitz tells Lowe, “I hold a grudge x 10. It’s called, ‘Being Jewish.’”

It’s a surprisingly fun interview, where Lovitz also tells Rob Lowe that Jerry Bruckheimer had originally considered casting him and Dana Carvey for the lead roles in Bad Boys before hiring Martin Lawrence and Will Smith, and he also tells a story about Chris Farley being in that same beach house while fires were raging all around it.

Source: Literally! with Rob Lowe