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Yeah, I’m sorry. This is going to start with a Hamilton reference. I’ve been thinking a lot about Aaron Burr since I saw the hip-hop musical for the first time last week. Partly because Leslie Odom Jr. is a legend that I was mostly unaware of. But also because there’s a view of Burr as a cautionary tale who is mocked for his, “Wait for it, wait for it” and his “talk less, smile more, don’t let them know what you’re against or what you’re for” guiding principals. In the context of the play, Burr contrasts the more idealistic and sometimes imprudent Alexander Hamilton. In 2020, however, maybe we need people to be a cross between the two. People who shirk the assumed responsibility to blast out underdeveloped and underinformed thoughts at every opportunity. People who aren’t cripplingly calculating. People who are guided by their principals and process and not the sound of the crowd.

When I asked Patriot Act host Hasan Minhaj about what he thought about Kanye West’s increasingly vocal presidential aspirations he did not have a snarky or sizzling hot take. Whereas I drained my outrage bar, offering an opinion at the first sight of Kanye’s tweet and his Forbes interview, Minhaj kindly explained that he wanted to “connect the dots” first. He’s going to explore the angles to figure out if this is worth getting worked up over or if it’s another hollow distraction from the real stories that are more deserving of our attention. I’m playing checkers and he’s playing chess, you see, but damn am I eager to learn — motivated by hoarseness and exhaustion if nothing else.

As we continued talking, it became clear that Minhaj’s discipline and appreciation for nuance serve as more than a response to our collective ready, fire, aim mentality. It’s also a ceaseless force that powers The Patriot Act and something that helps to keep the host and the show ever-relevant in a crowded field during a vital time. In other words, “how to account for his rise to the top? Man, the man is non stop!” Again, sorry. That musical really gets into your circuits.

I was just reading the Kanye Forbes interview. I don’t know if you got a chance to check that out.

I didn’t get a chance to read all of it. How is it looking?

It’s bad. It seems like he’s pretty serious. Let’s see: he says vaccines are the mark of the beast.

Oh, boy.

He says we’ve got to stop making God angry. Also, Kanye f*cks with Trump, in part, because he likes the saxophone in the Trump hotels. Which honestly changes everything. I didn’t know that there was a saxophone in the lobby.

It changes your complete perception of the hotel chain?

Yeah, I’ve got to rethink everything now. But no, honestly, this [the reaction] speaks a lot to what you were saying in the second to last episode [of Patriot Act‘s most recent cycle] — the democracy episode. Specifically with our attitude toward third parties. The response makes it seem like we all work for Biden now. Like, “What are you doing?! You’re going to screw this up!”

Yeah. What I loved was where we played that archival clip of the two opponents being normal human beings with each other in states with Ranked Choice Voting and being like, “Hey, you can put this person as your first choice or me as your first choice, or them as your second choice and me as your second choice.” Coalition governments are these things that are common in other parts of the world, but we have this two-party winner take all system that is fueled by negative partisanship.

I’d never really given much thought to it. Now I want to dig in a little bit deeper and figure if it makes sense to me. What do you think about Kanye’s candidacy?

Well, I mean, the thing that I’m still trying to decipher is what is the motive and is he serious? All we have is this Forbes interview. And so that’s the big thing that I’m trying to take away over these next couple of days. “Is this serious? Is a new album dropping?” We’ve heard the series of conspiracy theories, and so honestly, what I’m trying to do, man, is collect the information to see how valid this thing is before I dive in with the hot take.

Yeah, it’s interesting. It’s not out yet, but we did an episode of The People’s Party with Talib Kweli talking with Common, and I know they talked about it a little bit. I’m curious to see what they have to say on that as well.

Yeah, because they also know him personally, right?

Right, exactly.

Yeah. And I don’t know if you felt this in covering everything that you cover right now, especially you guys as a publication… sometimes just definitively connecting all the dots. A lot of times, we get baited into providing an immediate comment or a take or a position on something as we are still collecting the dots and information. And that’s the one thing that I’ve tried to, again, avoid as much as possible on the show. It’s just, “Hey, what are the big thematic questions that we’re trying to answer here?”

And I think what you were talking about when we were doing the elections episode… The feeling everybody had in the writer’s room was how are these our two choices? And I go, “That’s great. I love that.” And we always have these big questions that lead every story. The last episode of this cycle was, “Why are taxes so hard?” Because there are countries around the world that have prefilled tax forms. They literally send it to you like a postcard, you know?

It is definitely a problem, that kind of snap reaction. I’m as guilty of it as anybody else. It’s so guttural. We see something, say something, and move on to the next thing. And it just feels like, especially over these last few years, that it’s destroying us. Apart from doing what you are doing — trying to change things just by action and trying to take that beat and have a deeper conversation — how do we [as a society] change that?

I try not to prescribe. I just try to speak for what my personal responsibility is. For me, I know that I represent a show and the staff and so many people who work for me. The thing that I am always cognizant of is every time we put out one of these episodes, it’s being seen in 190 countries, and just major shout outs to our news team, our fact-checking team, our writing team, and our legal team for always making sure that we’re coming correct. That way, we don’t have to make a correction and I’m not just speaking through absolute hyperbole and what I’m saying is completely wrong. That’s always been my thing where these things exist on the Netflix platform ostensibly forever. So when people go back and watch the Affirmative Action episode or the Indian Elections episode, I want them to be able to say, “Yeah, that still holds, and he’s not just diving in with his hot take on what the current climate is in the culture war.”

How does the mindset of, “I need to speak with all of these people in mind” change your comedy processing machine?

There are two major things that I have to be cognizant of. The first is whenever I go into the writer’s room or the pitch meetings… I saw Jon do this with the 9:15 AM meetings at The Daily Show. He would really lead with, “Okay, this is what I’m trying to say,” and then work backward with the showrunner, the news team, and the writers to say, “Okay, this is where you’re right and we can back this take into a larger story,” or, “Hasan, that is completely wrong. Please do not say that on the show.”

And I think that’s what’s invaluable about having a group of people that help you execute a vision or an idea. But it starts with, “Hey, I’ve been feeling this.” I felt this way going into this cycle of episodes for quarantine edition. We had gotten past the public health crisis. We knew to, “Hey, wash your hands for 20 seconds, sing happy birthday twice, wear a mask,” that whole thing. But the thing that was brewing, that was in the air was, “Hey, how are people going to pay rent? And what happens if I cannot pay rent?” And the rent relief and rent and eviction moratorium, that discussion that’s happening right now. That [episode] was something that came from that initial conversation that I had in the writer’s room. I was like, “Hey, we’re all just holed up at home. Unemployment is on the rise. If people can’t pay their bills, most importantly their rent, what’s going to happen?” And news and the writers were able to pick up on that and go, “No, there’s a great story here about the rent and the eviction crisis about to happen.”

Is that process different when it’s something like the reaction episode you did around George Floyd? Obviously, that topic is something that’s been brewing for a long, long time, so I’m sure you’ve thought about it a bit. I’m sure your staff has too. But it’s powerful.

That was more of a, to give you the basketball analogy, “Just give him the ball and isolate on the wing. Let him work and do what he’s going to do,” because so much of that is coming from just my personal perspective and how I felt. Take an episode that we did earlier in the year called The Broken Policing System. Ironically enough, we used Minneapolis as a case study — warrior training, we talk about qualified immunity, things that were being discussed, but that weren’t at the center of the national conversation. That very much was an analysis piece on the broken policing system in America as a whole, right? This [other] piece specifically was about the conversations that were being had in my community in regards to police brutality, in regards to the protests and the riots that were happening across the country. It was a lot more social commentary, but again, it still had that Patriot Act touch where we talked about the civil rights legislation of 1964, 1965, which allowed my parents to come over here in the ’80s for me to be able to tell this story. It still was a lot of my personal take and perspective, but there still was that news and data analysis that paints the picture.

Do you think that the comedy community and just the entirety of our culture, really, is too consumed by what Trump does and says? And how do you avoid leaning into that sometimes on the show and staying with the bigger picture stuff? Because I think it’s important, but I imagine it’s hard.

Yeah, it’s extremely difficult and all media institutions are reckoning with this right now. Do you ignore the president of the United States? That is the fundamental question, right? And so the thing that I wanted to do or try to avoid through the show is, I don’t want this to be ESPN First Take but for politics where I just go directly to camera and I am cathartically expressing my disdain or emotion at the current state of affairs.

What I really wanted to do is I said, “Look, do you want to just be shouting at the camera or do you want to, to the best of your ability, lean into your strengths as a storyteller and tell a story?” And I think our Coronavirus Supply Chain episode was a storytelling example of, “Yes, we all have heard the story of ‘America is made in China.’ What you don’t know is, we made that deal a long time ago and it’s affecting our supply chain when it comes to PPE, but also meat,” and then tell the story of meat supply chains and the way the media covered Trump’s signing of the executive order to quote-unquote, “keep meat-packing plants open” and how they responded. To me, that is a very interesting way of storytelling through the clips, through the tears, to the pull quotes, and closing the argument with my take. And that, to me, feels more meaningful because I think even three or four months from now, you can go back and watch that episode and see the value of it in terms of its media analysis and the way we collected and put together the story.

The shift away from the protests to the statues feels very helpful to those in power. And yet it’s being aided and abetted, I think, by news organizations large and small. People on Twitter are obviously still posting about protests, not as much as they were, but how does the narrative get changed? Because it does feel like the deck is stacked a little bit.

The two big questions that I’ve been reckoning with and I’ve been trying to closely monitor… I don’t have the answer to it yet, but I feel it, and this is, again, an example of what I would bring into the writer’s room: trying to figure out who’s in charge and who do we trust. We have seen because of the proliferation of social media and people being able to put out information on Twitter, it’s decentralized. Anybody anywhere for the most part around the world can put stuff out. The information has been decentralized. In some ways that’s really good and in other ways that’s really bad because there is no one place to go for it.

That theme also runs true with leadership. Don’t you feel this right now where, yeah, I thought I live in the United States of America, but there’s really these 50 different semi-dystopian states that are all figuring out their own rules themselves. It’s why I had that take on our digital exclusive where I go, “We don’t need governors or a president. We need a commissioner because apparently Adam Silver has been able to manage 30 teams better than our president has been able to manage 50 states.” But it’s that idea of, who’s in charge? Who is calling the shots here? And I think we’re also seeing that in the face of massive social and political upheaval that’s happening right now.

And the second is, I think everybody’s feeling this right now: who do we trust? I don’t know. Even the way we started this conversation, you were telling me about the Kanye Forbes interview. And I remembered this morning… I didn’t even get a chance to fully look at it, but I was like, “Man, if I want to get really nitty-gritty and for me to really understand this, I’ll probably have to hear the audio or see the video of it.” Because I don’t know if you feel this way, but I need a level of nuance and detail now, and so much of what I’m consuming lacks that. That’s really what I feel. Those two questions have really defined 2020 for me. We were supposed to do the White House Correspondent’s Dinner this year, but those were going to be the big thematic questions that I was going to try to figure out, even in the Correspondent’s Dinner speech of, “Who is in charge and who do we trust?” I feel like our entire country is grappling with those two fundamental questions.

Every episode of ‘The Patriot Act’ is available on Netflix.

This year, Kanye West celebrated the Fourth Of July in a different way than most people: He announced he was running for president. That decision was met with some backlash, even more so following Kanye’s recent Forbes interview, in which he made some controversial statements about his beliefs and political platform.

Shorty after Kanye’s announcement, Elon Musk, who was photographed with Kanye days earlier, had the rapper’s back, tweeting, “You have my full support!” Musk’s words carried some weight, as the tweet has over 350,000 likes as of this post. However, following the Forbes interview, Musk appears to have reconsidered his endorsement.

In response to a tweet mentioning the anti-vaccine and anti-abortion comments Kanye made in the interview, Musk (in a now-deleted tweet) seemed to at least question his opinion of West and the rapper’s viability as a presidential candidate, writing, “We may have more differences of opinion than I anticipated.”

In the interview, Kanye expressed his skepticism about vaccines, saying, “It’s so many of our children that are being vaccinated and paralyzed… So when they say the way we’re going to fix COVID is with a vaccine, I’m extremely cautious. That’s the mark of the beast. They want to put chips inside of us, they want to do all kinds of things, to make it where we can’t cross the gates of Heaven.”

Speaking about abortion, he said, “I am pro-life because I’m following the word of the Bible,” and insisted that Planned Parenthood does “the Devil’s work.” Naturally, the organization was not happy about what Kanye said.

Major League Soccer kicked off its MLS Is Back tournament on Wednesday night with Orlando defeating Inter Miami, 2-1. While the festivities are set to continue over the coming days and weeks, there was a major bump in the road on Monday when FC Dallas had to pull out due to a number of COVID-19 cases that popped up once the team arrived in Orlando.

Unfortunately, Dallas isn’t the only team that got put in this position due to the novel coronavirus spreading throughout its ranks. Nashville SC, one of the two expansion sides the league added for the 2020 campaign, will see its tournament conclude before it even begins, according to The Athletic.

The news was confirmed by Steven Goff of the Washington Post.

Nashville having to pull out isn’t particularly stunning, as MLS commissioner Don Garber previously said a decision would be made after nine cases of COVID-19 were identified among those who were with the squad for the tournament. The team’s first match of the tournament was supposed to occur on Wednesday but had already been canceled. With two teams dropping out, multiple reports indicate that MLS will adjust the way groups are constructed for the remainder of the tournament.

As Stejskal noted in his tweet above, there is no word on how the league’s plan to have some sort of a regular season following the conclusion of its bubble league would be impacted due to Dallas and Nashville’s inability to compete.

Despite being one of the staunchest flag-wavers for his hometown, Long Beach rapper Vince Staples is adamant that the best rappers in hip-hop hail from elsewhere. However, when he expressed this opinion while commenting on T.I.’s Verzuz challenge for 50 Cent, he inadvertently sparked a debate that had him fielding fan frustrations when some folks — mostly New Yorkers — disagreed.

According to Vince, “Atlanta got the best rappers ever and it’s not even close.” He tweeted this in response to fans writing off T.I. in a hits battle with 50 Cent, an occurrence to which he took some issue. “Y’all just be talking to fit in,” he wrote. “T.I. got a plethora of bangers.” However, once he’d made his Atlanta declaration, some fans enthusiastically disagreed.

“They don’t rap in Atlanta they make up dances,” wrote one fan. Vince replied: “The originators of hip hop was dancing around New York City in leather outfits.” This is true. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five; please look them up.

As evidence of his claim, Vince pointed out his view that “Young Dro got more wordplay than a lot of n****s from everywhere and he not even brought up as a top Atlanta rapper.” When asked to list his own top ten, he offered “Lauryn Hill, Andre, Scarface, E40, Snoop, Kurupt, Missy Elliot, Blu, Kanye, and Young Thug” as examples of some of his favorites.

When this sparked another minor backlash thanks to the inclusion of Young Thug — whose off-kilter delivery has always made him a subject of controversy, especially up north where all the beats sound like train tracks — Vince had to defend his pick by pointing out how the goalposts of lyricism move from case to case, mostly to suit those New Yorkers’ need to be at the center of the conversation.

“Can y’all define lyrical because y’all change it for every argument,” he asked. “Thug got obvious wordplay but y’all say he don’t count because he lacks ‘content’ but y’all didn’t say that for Ghostface or ODB.” He also pointed out why the backlash struck him as silly, because, “Y’all be treating personal preference like it’s the law of the land we gotta stop that.”

He spent a few more hours joking around with fans, including jibing a few by calling them white supremacists, until he realized that “the hip hop pages reposting me.” He got off a couple more jokes before logging off but this morning, delivered the coup de grace, in his typical sarcastic fashion: “I GOT HACCED!”

Check out Vince’s hilarious fan interactions above.

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

There are a lot of questions about what video games are going to look like as we enter the next generation of gaming. There’s an expectation that the debut of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X will feature a huge technological jump, which at this stage feels necessary even if video games are in an incredible place right now. Games like God of War and Control push consoles so hard that if you play them on original release systems you can hear them struggle. Control, in particular, was infamous for poor performance on earlier consoles, not because of a lack of optimization but because the console just couldn’t keep up with the technology.

When games push boundaries like this it usually comes with a hefty price tag. Making video games has never been more expensive and making AAA titles, in particular, can get very pricey. While most game development companies don’t release the actual cost of making games these days, a number of titles from Rockstar Games, the developer of Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption, are rumored to cost $100 million just to develop the title, let along advertise it and bring it to market.

Despite this, the cost of buying a major release has remained fairly stable for 15 years. The last time we saw the standard cost increase was the jump from the PS2/Xbox/Gamecube era of consoles to the PS3/360/Wii, increasing the typical price from $50 to $60 with occasional exceptions.

We still know little about the next generation of consoles, starting with what those systems will cost and the price of the AAA titles that run on them. But we do know that NBA 2K21 is expected to cost $70, something we learned recently when the developer announced both a curent-gen and next-gen cover and the differences between the titles. NBA 2K is arguably the biggest sports game in the world right now, and the break into the $70 barrier is one that could signal the new expected cost of next-gen console releases.

Of course, anyone that’s looked at 2K in the last few years might wonder if the price means something else about the game’s economic marketplace. It’s no secret that 2K releases are built around microtransactions within their virtual currency system. If players want to level up their created player quicker, they can purchase “virtual currency” with real-life money. These microtransactions have become an industry-wide norm advanced by numerous sports titles and games from other genres.

FIFA and Madden NFL from EA put major amounts of time and effort into their ultimate team modes where you can spend actual money on cards of players to help you create the best virtual team. It’s caused many to wonder what the future of sports games is going to be. Will microtransactions continue to dominate the titles, freezing the countless in-game items bought with real money in a title that only has a shelf life of a single year?

The NBA 2K franchise has taken a lot of criticism in the last few years for its embrace of microtransactions, and it would be nice if a $70 price tag would serve as a way to lessen the prominence these have in the series. Considering it’s their entire business model, that seems unlikely, but we can take that same logic and apply it to the rest of the video game industry. I suspect if you told most gamers they had the choice between a $70 game with no (or fewer) microtransactions or paid DLC and a $60 game with those extra costs hidden and likely looming, they might be more inclined to accept the higher cost upfront and avoid surprises.

Regardless, it’s very possible that we’re heading toward a generation of consoles where $70 is the new video games price point. But with that price we could see better products with less hidden hassles and gripes from gamers. Think about how much time and effort developers will be able to put into their games if they can spend less time worrying about how to create a system that will make players buy fake currency and more on making their game the best it can be.

And if the price eliminates the crunch we see that’s harmful to both the end result and those making the game? Even better.

Of course, $70 might be the breaking point for many gamers who will wait until long after the initial release to get games on sale or take to the secondary market, although many already do this, waiting to see if games pan out as they are hyped or if it takes years to see their potential met. And even with a new threshold for AAA price points, you can still expect indie games or lower budget titles to fall below that mark. What may, indeed, happen is a return to the 80s/90s where game costs are more sporadic due to the wide difference between titles, including their development timelines and budgets. This isn’t even taking into account that we might see physical copies cost more than digital copies with consoles like the PlayStation 5 featuring a digital only option.

Of course, any step away from physical media has its own problems. Let’s say the possible cost difference means you’re more comfortable with a digital-only console. Now your ability to participate in that vibrant resell market is non-existent, meaning each game purchase is a final one (even if it the game is disappointing) and not something where you can buy new copies and then sell them back when you’re done to cut your overall investment.

It would not be unprecedented if one of Microsoft or Sony offers a buyback option with digital copies — this is something Steam offers for PC gamers, but Steam only allows you to sell a game back if you haven’t played a certain amount of hours. Still, there’s nothing to indicate that that’s on the horizon.

In terms of gaming culture on the whole, the elevated price point for games and/or systems poses the risk you see with any non-essential/hobby that significantly raises the bar of entry. You can argue that the reason games have managed to stick in the $50-$60 price range for so long is because it was sort of the perfect middle ground. $60 is just pricey enough to get a decent return on a purchase but also inexpensive enough to not price out a part-time retail worker going through college. The jump of $10 isn’t earth-shattering, but with so much acceptance of the status quo, this feels like a shock to the system, especially as the world navigates a pandemic that’s left many jobless.

Video games are incredible because they are a medium that can be about anyone and anything. It’s an escape that is just scratching the surface when it comes to living up to that potential and the potential of a more broad coalition of gamers that are breaking down the barriers that have previously been associated with that term. Any unintentional move to make gaming less accessible or harder to fully embrace runs the risk of doing damage to the future of the industry on the whole, especially at a time when gaming has revealed itself as a tool for connection and an interesting time killer for people who had left it behind or never really gotten into it before. Of course, there are still those $20 indie titles, free to play options, retro options, and bargain deals, all still a way in. But anyone who’s ever played a game knows the industry (and interest in it) is largely driven by the power and pop culture allure of the AAA releases. That’s where the money is and that’s what hooks a lot of new gamers.

We get it: Games provide more bang for your buck in terms of entertainment value than competing entertainment options. They cost more than ever to make and market against each other and those other options. Developers are frequently trying to find ways to meet those costs. But what we learned in the last generation of consoles is that while microtransactions are the answer for developers, they’ve become the enemy of gamers. Like a $70 price point with no real tangible get for gamers, they’re a shortsighted fix that runs the risk of undoing gains in interest and the flood of excitement that comes with a new console generation. As with anything, the norm is the norm for a reason, so hopefully, the industry considers all angles when shattering it.

The best new hip-hop albums coming out this week include projects from Casey Veggies, Che Noir, Juice WRLD, Rockie Fresh, Sahbabii, and Unotheactivist. Obviously, the highlight of the week is the posthumous album from the late Chicago rapper, but with Casey Veggies and Rockie Fresh reuniting for the first time in seven years and Sahbabii releasing the much-buzzed-about Barnacles, there’s plenty of other projects to get excited about. Meanwhile, Boldy James and Earl Sweatshirt are releasing long-awaited deluxe versions of their well-received recent projects, The Price Of Tea In China and Feet Of Clay, giving fans reason to revisit some old faves as well.

Here are all the best new hip-hop albums coming out this week.

Casey Veggies And Rockie Fresh — Fresh Veggies 2

I am of the opinion that the best work within the collective discographies of LA’s Casey Veggies and Chicago’s Rockie Fresh is their original 2013 collaborative project. That isn’t to say that Organic or 2019’s Destination aren’t great projects in their own right — but this duo always brought more out of each other, adding a fascinating new dimension and totaling to more than the sum of the two. There are plenty of planned features, including Iamsu, Wale, and more, but the focus here is on the unique chemistry between these two imitable MCs.

Che Noir & Apollo Brown — As God Intended

Every so often when writing this column, I forget about or just outright miss a project that leaves me kicking myself. One of those projects is Buffalo rapper Che Noir’s Juno, which you should be able to tell is extremely my sh*t. 38-Spesh — whose name you may recognize from the tracklists of those other Buffalo flag-wavers, Griselda Records, produced giving Che some very “Gangstarr in ’91”-style backdrops for her rugged, versatile rhymes. This time around, she’s linked up with Detroit beatmaker Apollo Brown, which is somehow even more perfect.

Juice WRLD — Legends Never Die

Long live Juice. The burgeoning superstar couldn’t seem to miss for the last three years, giving the world monstrous hits like “Lucid Dreams,” “Bandit,” “Robbery,” and “Hear Me Calling.” Before his death, he started receiving huge cosigns and even managed to capture the attention of the notoriously youth-averse Eminem. Unfortunately, 2020 has been a year with entirely too many posthumous releases. Given Juice’s bonkers work ethic, this one was likely much closer to completion and his artistic vision than any others save Mac Miller’s Circles. Bring a tissue.

Sahbabii — Barnacles

After the success of his 2016 single “Pull Up Wit Ah Stick,” it seemed that Sahbabii just didn’t get the same attention for his last handful of releases but he smartly released Barnacles on Tuesday, giving himself more time for folks to catch on. Catch on it has; the album received a high-profile cosign from none other than Vince Staples and fans have been quoting its absurdist punchlines on Twitter for days. Maybe Sahbabii hasn’t quite become the superstar it appeared he would in 2016, but he’s still putting out high-quality audio surrealism that’s worth checking out.

UnotheActivist — 8

Billed as Uno’s debut studio album, 8 has generated some buzz on the Atlanta underground scene and has been in the works for around three years. After undergoing a label-mandated name change, Uno says he chose “8” because he wanted the legacy of the project to be infinite. It’s off to a decent start, with an 18-song tracklist that gives him plenty of room to make his case and a couple of high-profile features from Calboy and Ty Dolla Sign. Fans expecting an appearance from Uno’s cousin Playboi Carti may be disappointed, but Uno’s got enough of Carti’s mad scientist creativity to make up for it.

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

Grammy Award-winning singer James Blake released his stunning fourth record Assume Form just last year, but the singer is already setting his sights on the future. Following his first track of 2020, “You’re Too Precious,” Blake returns with a lofty number, “Are You Even Real?”

With his latest single, Blake continues to experiment with sound and reaches beyond the confines of electro-pop. “Are You Even Real?” begins slow, evoking a dreamlike state with cascading keys and enveloping harmonies. A pounding, leisurely beat eventually arrives as Blake delivers his lyrics with bewilderment. “I spend the day / Dreaming of connection / Just to feel / How you feel, you feel, you feel,” he swoons.

Prior to sharing his first singles, Blake stayed engaged with fans while in quarantine. The singer hosted several livestreams where he stripped down much of his music to captivating piano arrangements accompanied by his soaring vocals. During his livestreams, the singer put his own spin on several of his favorite songs. Blake covered Billie Eilish’s “When The Party’s Over” and Radiohead’s “No Surprises.” More recently, Blake gave a tender rendition of Nirvana’s “Come As You Are” and Frank Ocean’s “Godspeed” for a benefit livestream where he matched donations raised by fans.

Listen to “Are You Even Real?” above.

Donald Trump once claimed that he was “the only person who immediately walked out of my Ali G interview,” which, no. According to Sacha Baron Cohen, who played the fictional “voice of da yoof” character, the future-president “was there for about seven minutes,” which, he noted, was “quite a long time” for an Ali G interview.

Even Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, bailed quicker than that.

Giuliani told Page Six that he called the cops on Baron Cohen after he crashed an interview he was doing it. “This guy comes running in, wearing a crazy, what I would say was a pink transgender outfit,” he said with all the sensitivity you’d expect from this guy. “It was a pink bikini, with lace, underneath a translucent mesh top, it looked absurd. He had the beard, bare legs, and wasn’t what I would call distractingly attractive”:

“This person comes in yelling and screaming, and I thought this must be a scam or a shake-down, so I reported it to the police. He then ran away.”

Giuliani eventually realized the prankster was Baron Cohen (“I thought about all the people he previously fooled and I felt good about myself because he didn’t get me”), as he’s an admirer of his work. “I am a fan of some of his movies, Borat in particular, because I’ve been to Kazakhstan. ‘She is my sister. She is number four prostitute in all of Kazakhstan.’ That was pretty funny.” First off, what? Also, for more of Rudy’s movie reviews, give him your phone number and he’ll butt-dial you while watching Anger Management.

(Via Page Six)

In this weird, current era of hip-hop dictated by streams and social media, going viral can be a blessing. It can mean getting a leg up on the competition, getting your name out there while so many others languish in obscurity. It can be the difference between getting picked up and endorsed by major outlets and grinding out a few thousand YouTube views at a time, hoping to build an organic fanbase in a world where attention cycles are getting shorter by the day and more and more content fills the ether hoping to catch that dwindling supply of attention.

But going viral can also be a curse. It comes with expectations, assumptions, increased scrutiny, and even mistaken identity. That was the case for Portland rapper Wynne, who at 20 years old has gone viral not just once but twice. Both times, her freestyles so impressed viewers that numerous blogs picked up coverage of them and mistook her for Hailie Mathers, the daughter of Detroit rap legend Eminem — despite the fact that Hailie is four years older and looks nothing like Wynne, minus their characteristic blonde hair and blue eyes.

Wynne, who says she really doesn’t “want to be the viral white girl,” is flattered by the attention, but in something of an anachronistic relationship with modern zeitgeist, would prefer to build a grassroots following the old-fashioned way. She has leveraged the close-knit culture of her hometown’s hip-hop scene to cultivate a strong local following, and a chance meeting with Dreamville’s JID led to “Ego Check,” a lyrically gymnastic display of the duo’s verbal prowess that proved that Wynne could hang with some of the best.

On her independently-produced 2019 debut album, …If I May, Wynne’s skills take the forefront as songs like “Roll Call” address the elephant in the room when it comes to issues of white privilege in a Black culture such as hip-hop. Other highlights include “The Thesis” a Portland-centric posse cut that gets a boost in star power from Trail Blazers guard Damian Lillard as his rapping alter ego Dame D.O.L.L.A., and “Ken Mastrogiovani,” an improvisational track named for the drummer who freestyles an unconventional beat that Wynne has no trouble dancing over with scintillating wordplay and impeccable cadence.

The album’s warm reception among fans, as well as Wynne’s previous connection with Dreamville through JID, led to her becoming the opening act on Earthgang’s Welcome To Mirrorland tour along with new Spillage Village member Jurdan Bryant and Mick Jenkins. Their stop at the Fonda Theatre in Hollywood is where we connected for an in-depth interview that speaks eloquently to the current moment, despite taking place before 2020’s pandemic quarantine and civil uprising. Call it prescience, call it good fortune, or attribute it to the frustrating cycle of national indifference to the very real social cancer of systemic racism, but when Wynne talks about the need for white allies to tackle injustice alongside the oppressed, her words ring as true now as they did when tours were still a thing.

I don’t necessarily see a lot of young artists your age, who have your particular independent hustle and vibe and that ingenuity and that tenacity to just stick to it. Where does that come from?

I don’t know. I have great parents who work really hard and they instilled a lot of incredible qualities in me and my siblings about hard work and perseverance. And it was the kind of family that if you join a sport and you don’t like it, it sucks because you’re now on this team for two years.

That was their thing. So I took a lot of that. And really, I just, I was lucky enough to figure out what I wanted to do when I was 12. And I was like, damn, I’m going to lock myself in my room and I’m going to make this happen. I don’t think it’s very common that you know so early. And I think that helped me get a leg up because I spent all of college, all of high school, just studying and listening and looking and just trying to understand.

That’s crazy you say 12 because that is young. And also, not to down your hometown or anything, but like…

That’s a great question. So I’m from a suburb called Lake Oswego and it’s the whitest suburb you can imagine. And my older brother actually introduced hip-hop to me when I was nine. We just shared an iTunes account so I had all of his music. And I was asking him for recommendations and he played a lot of the Aftermath stuff at the time. This is like 2006, 2007. And so I just was listening to everything. He was on a lot of Lupe, Kanye, Jay-Z, 50, Eminem, and taught myself by learning to rap along with them. And then when I was 12 and I was in middle school was when I started writing music and I was like, shit, I think I could do this. I think I could be good at this.

And I feel like hip-hop has kind of an outcast art form and I very much was an outcast in my community. I’m not super social. I’m not about bougieness or glamor or anything. And my suburb is very much that way. So I was just to myself and found solace in my favorite MCs and really just fell in love with the way people could put words together and was fascinated by it. It was like a puzzle.

And it’s actually funny that you mention being an outcast and also mentioned Eminem because those are the two people who I think you draw the most comparisons to: Eminem and Iggy Azalea, who both talk about not fitting in and finding solace in rap. Why do you think people are so invested in connecting you specifically to people just because you look a certain way? Do you think that holds you back in any kind of way?

No. I think it’s, honestly, I think it’s fair. How many times do white people see one Black person and they’re like, “They must all be this way?” I spent a long time when I was younger wrestling with the idea of “am I going to be accepted?” and really just came to learn that if you’re authentic and you’re yourself, people will accept you. If you try to be fake, then they won’t accept you. And I think people like what’s familiar to them. So they see a white girl rapping and they think Eminem. Obviously I’ve taken influence from Eminem so it’s just an easy comparison. It didn’t help that I went viral as his daughter a year ago. That’s been a process.

It happened twice. I was offended on your behalf. Did these guys do any basic research where they just started throwing stuff out there?

No, it was a trip.

Going back to you pointing out that a lot of people will make a judgment based on a bias and prejudice, I noticed that very early on in your album you get that right out of the way. You just establish right out of the way, “I have a voice and a platform. This is what I intend to do with it.” Why was it so important for you to throw that line in there?

I basically went to college for studying social justice issues. So I spent a lot of time in political science and ethnic studies and women and gender studies courses, just trying to understand my place in the world and what that means. Especially as a person who participates in hip-hop, you just need to know your shit. That’s a huge reason why it exists: so people have a voice. And I think it’s super important for… I guess what I’ll say is the oppressed will not stop being oppressed until the oppressor realizes they’re oppressing.

The more white people talk about it, the more, hopefully other white people can recognize it. Especially because so much of my fan base is going to be white people. And I can’t fix all of them. I can’t have one-on-one conversations about this is what this means, but I can at least spark a thought. It’s going to take a lot of those sparks, but as many as I can put, I think that’s important. I have a lot of people come up to me like, “Hey, you’re opening a door for other white women to be rappers and that’s really dope.” And I’m like, okay, but…

That’s not the goal.

I’ve never set out to open a door for white women to be rappers. If white people are going to participate in hip-hop, they just need to know their shit. And so I just want to help set that standard that if there are going to be people after me, cool, but this is how I did it. So if I eventually get to a place, 10 years, where I can reach legendary status, hopefully there’s a blueprint of “know your shit.”

That’s actually funny because on the show that we do, People’s Party, El-P came on and said, “You can’t have love for the culture without having a love for the people.”

That’s huge.

A thing that I thought that you did on the album was very smart was the interlude where you immediately throw a lampshade on everything anybody can say about you.

Exactly. And the reality of it is I really don’t fit many of those stereotypes, but people think I do.

I was sitting there co-writing jokes. There’s a lot of sides to who I am that are very helpful because I can go viral. I’m clickbait. When I walk out there between Jurdan Bryant, Mick Jenkins, and EarthGang, people pay attention to me because it looks weird. It looks out of place, but it’s also, we need to get some shit out of the way first. If we’re going to get to this point and you’re going to respect me, let’s just throw this… You have to be able to make fun of yourself. I’ve known Cipha Sounds for a while. He was one of the first people to find me in 2016. And he does a lot of comedy stuff now and tours with Dave Chappelle and Michael Che. And I just knew that I wanted him to roast me. So I called him up and he was like, “Hell yeah, I’ll come roast your ass.”

It’s funny because I basically write articles all the time where I speak to these issues with white fans in hip-hop. It leads to some really angry comments and awkward moments in real life, but it feels necessary.

And it’s like let’s talk about it because when people say they’re colorblind… you can’t be colorblind because then you’re ignoring all of the differences between people that cause certain people to be oppressed and certain people to be uplifted. So it’s like let’s talk about these things and about how different I am, because I’m super different and that’s a huge deal. I didn’t fucking grow up like this. I don’t face these kinds of oppression, but I’m still participating in the music that is a reflection of those things. So let’s talk about what that means.

If you had to give somebody the Hollywood logline of what the album is about, what do you tell them? What’s the elevator pitch of your album?

It’s basically me giving myself permission to be a little bit dumb.

Because like I said, I really spent my… up until I was 20 locked in my room, learning how to rap. And then I was 20 and I was like, “Shit, I should be a college student.” So I did that and I turned up and I made all these fun memories and I came to LA and I went to some stupid parties. I went to some really sick ones. You have to go through shit to tell the stories. And so this was me letting myself come a little bit out of my shell and then tell those stories.

What are some of the drawbacks of doing it independently and what are some of the advantages?

Is actually, it’s really interesting because I’m not signed to a label, but I wouldn’t consider myself independent. I have a distribution deal. So I’ve had a little bit of funding for the project, but mostly just I have an incredible team who was able to connect me with a lot of incredible people. So it’s like I’m working with my idols. I’m working with Sounwave and Hit-Boy and Christo, all these incredible people, but I’m still a nobody. So I’m stoked. But it comes out and it takes time for people to discover it so the downfall is, we don’t have a shitload of money to just throw into marketing and publicity. And it’s hard because you spend so much time making this incredible body of work. To you, it’s the most important thing you’ve ever done. And that’s anything in the music business these days. It’s something’s hot for a week.

And so a huge goal of this project, between me and my engineer, Itay, who is also my tour manager, was to make a project that felt timeless. Something that maybe could have come out in 1997. And it maybe could have come out in 2019. Because instrumentation doesn’t get old. A fad does. Specific programmed 808s do. But when you have… it does something to your brain when you hear an acoustic guitar. It does something to your brain when you hear a drum loop that was recorded live. And that kind of thing, it makes it easier to put out a project independently because someone can discover it, in six months it’ll still be relevant. Someone can discover it in two years, it’ll still feel relevant. And it’s fun to grow day by day. It was overwhelming when we were going viral. I didn’t like that.

What you’re talking about as far as songs having to sit for a little while and build, when you think about Lizzo had “Truth Hurts” out for two years and nobody cared about Lizzo. Doja Cat had Amala, which is an incredible album but nobody cared. “Mooo!” comes out and suddenly everybody’s like, “Who’s this Doja Cat girl?” What’s the process or what was the conversation that was had around how we use this or do we decide not to use this?

I was very intentional about “I do not want to monetize this moment.” I always knew I was going to do this, but I didn’t know how it was going to happen, and I should have known it was going to be by going viral. And it did great things for me. It connected me with my team. It gave me incredible opportunities. It gave me a platform to be able to reach out to people. It was great. We sat with all the labels, but when we walked in, we said, “We’re not here to sign, but we just want to talk.” From there, they put you in a room with people and you can start negotiating, but it was just like, “I don’t want to be the viral white girl.”

I actually sat with a label who called themselves out because they brought me in because I went viral and I played my song, “An Open Letter to Donald Trump.” And the president of the label at the time starts tearing up. My publisher starts tearing up and I’m tearing up and they say to me, “We’re doing you an injustice because we brought you in here because you went viral and we sign however many acts a year for a couple hundred thousand dollars and then we get a hit out of them and that’s kind of it. And you’re not that.”

And that was huge for me because I’ve always known my worth. And I’ve always known there’s power in uniqueness. And I really didn’t want to capitalize on being the viral white girl that can freestyle on Twitter.

If I May… is out now. Get it here.

Well, guess what: I’m mad about Popstar. Again. I’m mad about Popstar again. This happens every now and then, to be fair, most recently a few months ago when I wrote about Walk Hard. There’s nothing I can do about it, really. Popstar, The Lonely Island’s music mockumentary that was released in 2016, is a perfect movie, basically, and no one saw it. You probably didn’t see it in theaters. Why didn’t you go see Popstar in the theaters? I didn’t either, if we want to be technical about it, but we’re not talking about me right now. And I was busy. Shut up.

This is a pattern with Lonely Island movies, sadly. They’re all terrific and they all bomb at the box office. Hot Rod is a perfect American story that no one saw. MacGruber is a work of unhinged genius that no one saw. Popstar opened in eighth place (eighth!), behind such cinematic classics as The Angry Birds Movie (in its third week) and That Ninja Turtle Movie With Megan Fox. It’s infuriating, is what it is. Popstar is so good.

The options for recourse are limited, unfortunately. Short of inventing a time machine and forcing people into theaters all over America through bribery and/or threats of violence, our best option is to just yell about it now, years later, in a cathartic screed about how good it is. Yes, let’s go ahead and do that. For now. Time machine is still on the table.

The time has come to talk about Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping.

1. The plot of Popstar goes something like this: Andy Samberg plays Connor Friel aka Connor4Real, a big deal white rapper and former member of a group called The Style Boyz, which featured his Lonely Island partners Akiva Shaffer as Lawrence aka Kid Brain and Jorma Taccone as Owen aka Kid Contact. There is a fallout and a fissure. Connor goes solo with Owen as his DJ, Lawrence moves to a farm. The action picks up as Connor is preparing to release his second album, which is getting slaughtered in the press and by fans. The movie is a classic tragedy-to-redemption story, but with full-frontal male nudity and pancakes that contain dog poop. It does all of that in just over 90 minutes. The movie is as funny as it is ruthlessly efficient. I appreciate this.

2. A music mockumentary doesn’t work if the songs don’t. They need to be catchy and slick enough that you can buy them as real radio hits, but also stupid and funny enough to gets laughs. It’s a tough needle to thread. Walk Hard did it beautifully and, yes, this is mostly just an excuse to mention “Let’s Duet” again, but Popstar isn’t exactly a slouch in this department either. There’s the lunatic energy of “Finest Girl (Bin Laden Song),” the Macklemore-roasting of “Equal Rights,” and the Adam-Levine-featuring “I’m So Humble,” among others, all of them little slices of brainworm-y genius. But my favorite, if I had to choose, and I’ve kind of backed myself into a corner here where I do, is “Mona Lisa,” a full-length song — only featured briefly in the film — about how the famous Da Vinci painting is “an overrated piece of shit.”

It’s so powerfully stupid. I love it like a long lost pet who returned home after running away three weeks earlier. I have literally played this in my car. With the windows down. I feel great about it.

3. I’ve already mentioned Walk Hard twice so let’s just go ahead and do this. The two movies have so much in common. Let’s tick off some similarities:

• They’re both satires of music movies, with Walk Hard covering biopics like Ray and Walk the Line, and Popstar covering more modern-day iterations, like Justin Bieber and his 2011 documentary Never Say Never, complete with references to the Anne Frank museum and a strange attachment to an unconventional pet (Bieber: monkey; Connor; huge turtle)
• They’re both big cult hits after underperforming financially
• They both feature wieners a-hangin’
• I love them both unconditionally
• Judd Apatow was involved with both, producing and co-writing Walk Hard and producing Popstar, which I respect greatly because it means at some point he said “Well, apparently people don’t like goofy music satires enough to make them financially viable, but screw it, we’re doing another one!”

Bless you, Judd.

4. Ahh, wait. There’s one more similarity: both movies feature Tim Meadows, as they should, because Tim Meadows is the best. He doesn’t have quite as memorable a role here (there’s nothing close to “You don’t want no part of this” for him to sink his teeth into), but he’s just so good as Conner’s sleazy manager. Tim Meadows is never bad in anything. This is a fact.

5. Things really start going sideways for Connor when he brings a new act on tour with him, Hunter the Hungry (Chris Redd), a Tyler the Creator knockoff who loves pranks and is definitely crazy. This all leads to a prank involving stage tricks and fast wardrobe changes that leaves Connor nude on stage with his penis tucked back through his legs as headlines like “Connor The Dickless” appear on trashy tabloid shows all over the country. He’s embarrassed and ashamed and starts a downward spiral that leaves him all alone. It is so, so stupid. This is the major turning point in the movie. I couldn’t love it more if I tried.

6. Popstar is littered with dumb little jokes, like a massive bee attack that happens when the cameras aren’t rolling, or a whole bit involving Seal and “party wolves” gone mad, or long runs of fake EDM stars (DJ Tommy Pizza, Oprah Spinfrey, Vinyl Richie, R2LSD2, Ecstasy-3PO, LSD-3P0, Elton John) and weed strains (Witch’s Titty, Aqua Butt, Beethoven’s Nightmare, Frog Jizz, the last of which actually appeared to be just a jar of real frog semen). All wonderful little pieces of business, to be sure. But my favorite is the recurring fake TMZ bit featuring Rob Huebel, Eric Andre, Chelsea Peretti, and Mike Birbiglia.

It’s basically just them drinking from giant thermoses and devolving into a group of howling jackals over and over throughout the movie until it stops making anything resembling sense. Just shouting and slurping and wigs and even more shouting. I have no idea how it works, but it does. Well.

7. Connor’s post-tuck tailspin, in bullet point form:

• Has a fight with his band
• Serves pancakes laced with dog poop to his hangers-on to see if they’re just yes men, which pisses off Owen, who points out that he’s Connor’s oldest friend and not some lackie before leaving the tour
• Fires his manager
• His beloved turtle dies
• He’s just kind of cruising around passed out on a hoverboard.

It’s not ideal.

This brings us to the redemption. To the triumph. To a huge weed farm in the country where Lawrence has been living, building things out of wood and stewing over a years-long grudge about credit for a particular verse.

8. You really do need to watch the confession scene to grasp how funny it is. Words and screencaps will not do, although I’ll try. The short version: Connor holds a one-sided conversation with Lawrence in which he slowly, then quickly, changes his story as the truth becomes apparent to him. The delivery of the whole speech is so good, the kind of thing that Samberg has been doing well for well over a decade now. Here are some of the screencaps I told you wouldn’t do it justice. Ugh. Why are you still reading this, anyway? Why aren’t you watching Popstar again? Incredibly poor performance on your part today.

9. Popstar has a million music cameos in it. Mariah Carey, Ringo Starr, Questlove, 50 Cent, Usher, the list is absurd. Literally dozens of them. And I would list them all here for you if not for two small issues: One, I do not want to; two, I would rather point out that a musician named “Hammerleg” is mentioned a few times during the movie and we only get to finally see him at the very end of the movie and GUESS WHO PLAYS HAMMERLEG.

Oh hell yes, Weird Al. Weird Al is the greatest. The man has been doing nothing but producing joyful parodies of pop songs and being an absolute sweetheart for like four decades now. We do not do enough to thank Weird Al for his contributions to society. There should be statues of him and his accordion scattered across the country. His birthday should be a holiday. A fun cameo in a good movie where he plays a dude named Hammerleg is a decent start, I guess. I’m serious about the statues, though.

10. The movie ends with the Style Boyz reuniting on-stage to perform a new song titled “Incredible Thoughts,” a spoken-word performance that consists of dozens of stoner observations punctuated by a Michael Bolton chorus.

It is very dumb and very funny. Just like Popstar. A good movie.