Category: Viral

It’s pretty wild how after watching every star from Doja Cat to Lil Nas X get dragged for old, offensive, edgelord tweets, stars still don’t delete everything from before they blow up. Even having a fellow group member get censured by fans wasn’t enough to convince JT, recently released from prison and resurgent thanks to the new City Girls album, to delete her old tweets — and now she’s paying the price.

The more lyrical half of the Miami duo deleted her Twitter account after fans resurfaced some of her reckless and offensive tweets from 2015 and before which found her making jokes about everything from R. Kelly’s alleged sexual abuse of teens to Osama Bin Laden. Naturally, there’s a little bigotry sprinkled in, because it wouldn’t be a Twitter controversy if someone wasn’t being a little racist or homophobic. With her account deleted, the original tweets are, of course, gone but they live on in screenshots captured before she reached her limit and hit a hard reset.

For her part, JT seemed unrepentant on Instagram, addressing the controversy in a Story post reading, “Nah all jokes aside stop searching them tweets cause I don’t feel like slapping a bitch back into the same year I was talking about them in!” She also posted a screenshot of what appears to be a new account — one with an apt handle: @fuckyallbitches11.

Still, though, as the commentary continues, this might be a good time for any and all aspiring entertainers to download a Tweet deleting app and get to work. Also, be a better person — it’s not that hard.

Back in 2019, comedians and authors Desus Nice and The Kid Mero were asked to name which guest is at the top of their Desus & Mero wish list. Michelle Obama, Nice responded, “whatever she wants, it’d be a special five-hour episode. We would do everything. I’d be doing her hair, we’d be baking pies, do a hand game, playing double dutch. Just drinking Chardonnay.” The former-First Lady hasn’t appeared on the Showtime series yet, but the Bodega Boys landed a solid fallback guest: Barack Obama.

Obama will appear in a “special half-hour interview episode” of Desus & Mero this Sunday, December 13, as part of the press tour for his new book, A Promised Land. In the preview above, he jokes about not wearing his Timberlands and burns the hosts for their basketball skills in a game against Cory Booker (“Here’s the good news, looks like y’all could play for the Knicks”). The show’s Twitter account previewed the interview by tweeting, “The Bodega Boys just ran into somebody… y’all know him?” (it wasn’t frequent target Jeremy Renner), followed by, “Says he was the 44th President of the United States or something? Idk.” Obama also has a new nickname: Barry the Gawd.

Desus & Mero airs Sunday at 11:05 p.m. EST on Showtime.

The NBA season tips off on December 22 with the league’s marquee Christmas Day slate coming on just the fourth day of the season. The league announced the first half of its schedule on Friday and as such teams know exactly when they’ll be on national TV for the first half of the season.

That may be more important information than usual, as teams begin to plan out how they will take care of their star players, particularly for those teams who played deep into the NBA Bubble in Orlando. With the two month turnaround from the end of the Finals to the start of the season, there has been the expectation, particularly for a team like the Lakers, that they will be plenty cautious with older stars such as LeBron James and resting will be even more prevalent early in this season as guys try to round back into shape.

The league also seems keenly aware of this fact and issued an update to its resting policy adopted in 2017, per Yahoo’s Chris Haynes, that will increase the fine for resting healthy players during a national TV game and on the road — although the latter seems far less important in a season that will start with very few teams having fans in arenas.

This season has been hurried along to start before Christmas almost entirely for the financial windfall that comes from playing those Christmas Day games, which are highly lucrative for the NBA as they are very important for ESPN. That revenue is important to the league and the players, so it’s understandable, as always, that the league would want its best players to be available for national TV games. The issue in this season is with the swift turnaround and shortened camp, which has players at least somewhat concerned about the potential for a similar rash of injuries like the NFL saw early in its season after players went through a brief camp without preseason games and straight into full speed action. The NBA will have a few preseason games, but a shortened camp and quick turnaround for some teams has the attention of everyone.

The impact of this updated policy will likely be minimal, as most players who rest regularly do so with legitimate health reasons behind the decision — for example, Kawhi Leonard is not beholden to the NBA’s policy because he is deemed to be constantly managing a chronic quad injury. This season, you’ll see the likes of Kevin Durant fall into the same category, as he returns from an Achilles injury, and while the Lakers stars played most games last year they were constant presences on the injury report for this reason. That further transparency on minor injuries seems to be the biggest impact of the new policy, as sore and tight muscles now get reported to provide rightful cover for someone sitting out.

Someone will undoubtedly get fined this year as the league makes an example out of any brazen attempts to rest healthy players, but at this point this is old hat and teams know exactly how to work within these guidelines. The only time it becomes tricky is if a team has a back-to-back where both games are nationally televised, but those are few and far between and if a team believes resting on a back-to-back will help them win a championship later, they’ll still happily fork over $100,000 to stick to their plan.

The long-awaited third installment of Kid Cudi’s Man On The Moon trilogy got an update today — the rapper shared a full tracklist and artwork for his project and announced the album will be released this Friday, a relatively short time after the initial announcement.

Over eighteen tracks broken up into four acts, artists like Phoebe Bridgers, Skepta, Pop Smoke and Trippie Red will appear to help Cudi tell his story. He tweeted out the artwork and also posted it on Instagram, crediting artist Sam Spratt with creating the image:

Earlier this year Cudi shared the trailer for the album, and has clearly been hard at work to get the project completed after a decade gap between this third album and the second installment, Man On The Moon II: The Legend Of Mr. Rager released back in 2010. Cudi has often been lauded within hip-hop for bringing mental health struggles to the forefront in his own music, although it’s unclear if the new album will include a similar focus. In the years since Man On The Moon II he’s released albums like Indicud in 2013, Satellite Flight: The Journey To Mother Moon in 2014, Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven in 2015, and Passion, Pain & Demon Slayin’ in 2016.

Of course, he also worked on Kids See Ghosts in 2018, a joint release with Kanye West, although Kanye isn’t credited on the latest entry in the trilogy.

With just 23 days left to go, 2020 is showing no signs of stopping its year-long streak of throwing the most random events directly into our faces. So, meet the new hot and sexy Colonel Sanders played by Mario Lopez in a Lifetime Original Mini-Movie, A Recipe for Seduction. (Yup, all of those words are real.) According to Variety, this unholy creation is basically a 15-minute advertisement for KFC, but the good news is there’s free food involved if your body can survive this sensual journey into the world of 11 herbs and spices. To promote social distancing, KFC is away free extra crispy tenders to anyone who makes a $20 order through Uber Eats for lunch during the event.

Here’s the synopsis for A.C. Slater playing a horned up Colonel Sanders because what is reality anymore? Via Lifetime:

As the holidays draw near, a young heiress contends with the affections of a suitor handpicked by her mother. When the handsome chef, Harland Sanders, arrives with his secret fried chicken recipe and a dream, he sets in motion a series of events that unravels the mother’s devious plans. Will our plucky heiress escape to her wintry happily ever after with Harland at her side, or will she cave to the demands of family and duty?

Not only did Lifetime release a trailer for A Recipe for Seduction, but it tweeted out a promotional image featuring Lopez as the beefcake Colonel, and people are losing their minds. “What am I supposed to do with this?” asks a very confused and yet oddly aroused internet.

(Via Lifetime)

Cardi B will have to go to trial over her 2016 mixtape Gangsta Bitch Music, Vol. 1 after all, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Cardi was sued in 2017 by model Kevin Brophy Jr. over the cover of her debut mixtape which depicted the rapper posing suggestively with a tattooed man. Brophy’s tattoo was apparently photoshopped onto the cover model’s back at Cardi’s direction.

Brophy contends that the distinctive tattoo constitutes misappropriation of his likeness and says it’s used in a “misleading, offensive, humiliating and provocatively sexual way.” Brophy claims that this depicts him in a false light, which in legal terms is a fusion of defamation and privacy invasion. Meanwhile, Cardi’s lawyers argue that the tattoo falls under fair use laws, as it was used “transformatively” since it was copied and pasted onto a different model.

However, Judge Cormac Carney rejected the fair use claim, reasoning, “To constitute a transformative fair use, the revised image must have significant transformative or creative elements to make it something more than mere likeness or imitation.” It’s his view that the tattoo itself wasn’t changed very much — or at all — and that a reasonable jury would be able to identify it from the cover.

The mixtape’s cover artist even admitted that it was the same tattoo. After being paid $50 to make a quick design, he was told to change the original model’s tattoo, Googled “back tattoos,” and overlaid it onto the cover model. Judge Carney did, however, shoot down Brophy’s damages claim. The model believes he’s entitled to over $1,000,000 from the mixtapes streams — nearly all the revenue it generated — as well as over half-a-million dollars from its followup, Gangsta Bitch Music Vol. 2 — which features an entirely different cover image.

Carney said the expert Brophy produced brought a nonsensical theory that “if Defendants had not used Plaintiff’s tattoo on the GBMV1 cover, Cardi B would have made no money on the album—at least on the streaming services where the tattoo appears.”

Cardi’s legal troubles don’t stop there. She’s also due to go on trial for an August 2018 incident in which she allegedly assaulted a pair of bartenders at a strip club. She pleaded not guilty to criminal charges, but will also have to fend off civil charges.

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

As TV shows tiptoed back into production this summer and fall, all of these series faced the question of whether to ignore Covid-19 or write that damn virus into the script. We don’t yet know how all of those efforts will shake out, but in the case of Grey’s Anatomy and Station 19, for example, there wasn’t much of a choice. It simply wouldn’t seem believable for shows about frontline workers to pretend like a raging pandemic isn’t happening. In the case of Showtime’s Shameless, however, the issue didn’t seem so cut-and-dried for the dramedy’s eleventh and final season.

Those of us who adore the Shameless brand of chaos know that the show’s always prioritized keeping it real — sometimes brutally and bleakly so — amid any other absurd happenings. Think Fiona’s prison strip-search, Lip’s battles with alcoholism, Ian’s spiral into manic-depression, and many other heartbreaking developments that went down while humor hovered in the wings. Generally speaking, the writers balanced those heavier moments with more lighthearted antics elsewhere, but none of those character-based struggles could possibly approach the scope of our current global situation. Still, it’d be impossible (not to mention irresponsible) for a show that’s remained relatable for a decade to suddenly ignore reality. So, how is Shameless handling the pandemic?

Well, it’s definitely weird (and not only because Carl’s now a cop), but man, this can’t be an easy transition. The writers obviously don’t want the pandemic to take over the whole show because it’s still an escapist series, and I gotta wonder whether they’ll let the Covid-19 mentions slowly fade away as the season continues. With that said, I also can’t begin to predict whether we’ll see any characters grow gravely ill, but it’s great to see most of the family (other than Frank, who predictably is waving “hoax” around like the cockroach that he is) masking up and taking things more seriously than expected within their Chicago’s South Side setting. Is social distancing happening? No freaking way, but I don’t think Shameless would work if all of the characters hung out at home. Nor would it seem believable that they could afford to do so.

However, nothing too dramatic happens in this season premiere (if Ian was still doing the EMT thing, it’d probably be different), which is mostly Catching Up With The Gallaghers several months after the world turned upside down. At least one character, Tami, has already caught and recovered from the virus, and she’s worried about catching it again, but that’s the extent of the health-related news that we see. The ghost of Fiona isn’t hanging around (even though Emmy Rossum apparently might pop into this season), Frank’s grifting continues, and (no) surprise, the newly-wed Ian and Mickey are already at each other’s throats. This does provide an opportunity for Lip and Ian to have a heart-to-heart about how their parents never taught them how to make a relationship work, and that leads to the beef that I have with this episode.

Why did Shameless provide scant follow-up to Lip falling off the wagon during the last season finale? He downed hard liquor at Ian and Mickey’s wedding reception after a vicious fight with Tami, and we’re supposed to believe that they’re doing alright now, and Lip is back on the wagon, no problem? I’m not buying that their biggest issue is how Lip can manage to fool Tami into thinking he bought fancy-ass paint and coffee, but again, at least he’s wearing a damn mask, and kudos to Shameless for reinforcing to me how low the bar is for judging Americans’ pandemic behavior. And maybe we’re supposed to believe that quarantine brought Lip and Tami back together, but it still feels odd that Lip’s tragic slide back into booze-soaked behavior was a short-lived detour.

Other than that, this was mostly a placeholder episode. Some loose ends:

– Debbie’s still somehow the worst sibling, so of course she walks around with her nose hanging out of her mask. She’s truly aghast at being labeled as a sex offender, and the show makes things uncomfortable by having someone fudge up Debbie’s record to make it look like she committed statutory rape of a 7-year-old girl instead of a 17-year-old one. I kind-of feel like this is post-dated comeuppance for Debbie losing her virginity by raping the guy she was kind-of dating at the time. Then again, she’s allowing Frannie to bedazzle mom’s ankle bracelet, so no lessons have been learned there.

– Kevin and Veronica are as enterprising as ever, so they’re running a speakeasy-gym in The Alibi. That’s not great, but they are requiring masks be worn by patrons at all times. Realistic or not, I’m always happy to see them get more airtime while possibly tiptoeing their way toward a future spinoff. That’s probably a wish in vain, or maybe things will happen Dexter-style with the Gallagher neighbors revisiting TV screens in several years. Hey, a lady can dream.

Showtime’s ‘Shameless’ airs on Sundays at 9:00pm EST.

“Unprecedented.” “Quarantine.” “Pandemic.”

2020 has been awful for just about everything except buzzwords. This year was full of new ones most of us didn’t really use before March but that now hover over our lives as unrelentingly as the world-altering virus they spawned from. Heck, the third one I listed was Merriam-Webster’s word of the year.

Unless you’re a SARS-CoV-2 virus, the past two hundred months have left much to be desired. (That’s how long the pandemic has been going on, yeah?) We’d all have been justified in doing little else in 2020 beyond yearning for large crowds, Thanksgiving dinners with outspoken and politically oppositional family members, and other things we never wanted to deal with again not that long ago.

It’s fair to want to look back at how things used to be, but at least a handful of musicians peered slightly further into the past than 2019. Artists like Dua Lipa, Jessie Ware, and Kylie Minogue had visions of the mid-’70s dancing in their heads as they resurrected a buzzword that on one fateful 1979 evening sent folks at Comiskey Park into a historic fit of rage: “disco.”

For a year without discotheques, clubs, dancehalls, bars, dives, hangouts, hotspots, cantinas, pool halls, and other places where people gather and get sweaty via movement, there sure was a lot of disco music. Many of the year’s biggest singles — Dua Lipa’s “Don’t Start Now,” Doja Cat’s “Say So,” Lady Gaga’s “Stupid Love,” BTS’ “Dynamite” — are at the very least disco-inspired, and the trio of artists mentioned earlier made albums (three of my personal favorites this year) that are totally indebted to the genre.

I’m hardly the first person to notice the 2020 disco revival, I’m sure. The question, though, is how did it happen?

It’s not like it was as inevitable as it seems now. In a Rolling Stone interview from this summer, Dua Lipa’s collaborators described her disco pivot as risky, especially since pop radio was skewing more “urban” at the time the material was being written. Ian Kirkpatrick admitted he “de-discoed” some elements of “Don’t Start Now” and said, “I was just so scared. You just don’t know what’s gonna catch and what’s not gonna catch.”

Of course, though, that gamble paid off and disco ended up soundtracking the year, because the formerly antiquated genre ended up being perfect for the times.

Young people get off on (future) nostalgia, even for things they weren’t actually around for. On top of that, people needed an escape from the burning, insect-infested, mask-covered world around them. What better way to achieve that than doing one of the out-of-house activities that can actually be re-created at home: dancing.

Dance therapy is a real thing, and people the world over self-medicated this year with disco, music made explicitly for dancing, as their score. Moving around in our living rooms — or in my case, making a delighted stank face and nodding my head while busting out Cardi B news posts — to music that’s comfortingly familiar, kinetically stimulating, and endorphin-generating was maybe the most effective temporary escape from reality that we had access to this year.

That said, there’s such thing as too much of a good thing, as anybody who has ever had a salt shaker cap fall off on them can tell you. Over-saturation was a major factor in the build-up to the previously alluded-to Disco Demolition Night, after all. Thankfully, not all 2020 disco was created equal.

Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia merged the style with contemporary pop and dance music, Jessie Ware’s What’s Your Pleasure? paid more attention to the genre’s orchestral elements, and Kylie Minogue’s DISCO — as the shouty, caps-lock-indebted title suggests — is a direct tribute to disco’s most pleasingly identifiable elements. There was a ton of disco, but a lot of it arrived to the club in its own uniquely over-the-top John Travolta suit and kept the room from filling up with repetitive, grating caricatures.

When Dua Lipa pushed the release of Future Nostalgia forward in March, she made the announcement with a video in which she said of the album, “I hope it brings you some happiness, and I hope it makes you smile, and I hope it makes you dance. I hope I make you proud.”

“Happiness.” “Smile.” “Dance.” There’s a better set of buzzwords that Lipa and her partners in disco helped bring to life this year. Even if it was only for as long as the runtime of a song, any sort of escape is a valuable public service. So yes, Dua, you made us proud.

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

Slain South Florida rapper XXXTentacion’s father Dwayne Onfroy wants his son’s alleged killers to pay the ultimate price for their actions. Posting to his Instagram Story, he told viewers he would seek the death penalty when the case continues. The text reads, “Y’all killed that young man, that father, that son, that brother without a cause. I say that with no malice in my heart. I am seeking life without parole for the participants in the robbery and COLD BLOODED MURDER OF MY SON. AND THE MAN WHO PULLED THE TRIGGER, I AM GOING TO SEEK THE DEATH PENALTY.”

Dedrick Williams, Robert Allen, Trayvon Newsome, and Michael Boatwright were all arrested shortly after X’s death on June 18, 2018. They’ve been charged with first-degree murder. Police believe Boatwright was the one who killed the rapper. The four men allegedly ambushed the rapper as he shopped for a motorcycle, attacking him as he left the dealership and shooting him multiple times in the neck.

At the time of his death, XXXTentacion was on trial for allegedly brutally beating his ex-girlfriend, even seemingly admitting to it in a recording made after his arrest. He also faced charges of witness tampering after allegedly threatening the victim during the case.

The Crown played nice, for the most part, with the British Royals for three seasons, but all of that ended (in a dramatic fashion) with the fourth season, which sh*ts all over the fairy tale, thereby raising voices on the other side of the pond. That’s because this season has awakened a brand new generation to the ill-fated marriage of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer, which (of course) ended very badly. And some people aren’t happy to see Charles not only portrayed as a cad who ran to his mistress before and after his marriage, but also as a tantrum-throwing man who scowled over the public’s adoration of his wife.

Following Season 4’s arrival, whispers indicated that the Royals were steamed over the Charles and Diana business. British culture minister Oliver Dowden quickly rang the alarm to ask for a “fiction” disclaimer while stating, “I fear a generation of viewers who did not live through these events may mistake fiction for fact.” Well, Netflix has made their perspective clear. Via Deadline, there shall be no disclaimer, for the streaming service believes that its viewers are smart enough to judge fact vs. “fiction” on their own:

“We have always presented The Crown as a drama – and we have every confidence our members understand it’s a work of fiction that’s broadly based on historical events. As a result we have no plans – and see no need – to add a disclaimer.”

Seems clear enough. For what it’s worth, one of the first individuals that came forward to fuss over this season was Princess Diana’s brother, who expressed his desire for everyone to remember that this is a dramatized work of fiction. He only wishes to honor Diana’s memory, and perhaps he wasn’t thrilled to see the semi-graphic portrayal of Diana’s anxiety-exacerbated eating disorder portrayed onscreen. No matter the source of the request, though, Netflix is standing firm.

(Via Deadline)