Category: Viral

It’s hard to think about something that’s going to happen in eight years when it’s not really certain what tomorrow will look like. Regardless, the 2028 Summer Olympics are set to descend on Los Angeles in nearly a decade from now, and an event of this scale takes a lot of preparation. So, the City Of Angels Olympic And Paralympic Committee have gotten things started by unveiling the official logo for the 2028 event today. Additionally, they worked with artists to come up with alternate designs, and Billie Eilish was among the participants.

Each of the artists were given the standard “LA28” emblem and told to design their own version of the A. Eilish’s is italicized, green, and features trailing spikes coming out of its left side. Overall, it looks similar to the New Balance logo.

LA28 Coordination Commission Chair Nicole Hoevertsz said of the new base logo, “The emblem perfectly represents the city’s energy, creativity and strong sense of community, whilst also celebrating the Olympic belief of unity in diversity. LA28 continues to create innovative ways to engage Angelenos and people from across the world in the Olympic and Paralympic Games. The idea behind the emblem, and the expressions we have seen so far, truly demonstrate that we are stronger together.”

Check out some of the other logos below.

Kanye West’s renewed interest in religion has led him down some pretty odd roads. He recently admitted on Nick Cannon’s podcast that he spent around $50 million on his Sunday Services around the nation, he compared Christians to Michael Jordan during an interview with Vogue last December, he infamously requested his collaborators refrain from sex during the recording process, he brainstormed a “clean” version of TikTok called “Jesus Tok,” and he made whatever this was supposed to be.

But during that same interview with Nick Cannon, he also credited the Man Upstairs with one of his more infamous missteps: His 2009 VMAs outburst in which he crashed the stage during Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech for winning Best Female Video to snatch the mic and declare Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” one of the “best videos of all time.” As Kanye told Cannon:

If God didn’t want me to run on stage and say, “Beyonce had the best video,” He wouldn’t have sat me in the front row. I would’ve been sitting in the back. He wouldn’t have made it the first award. And [He] wouldn’t have made it so ridiculous of an idea ’cause I had never heard of this person before that night. And “Single Ladies” is, like, one of the greatest videos of all time… And I was only drinking Hennessy because I didn’t want to go to the awards show ’cause it was a set-up!

It’s one hell of an explanation — pun most definitely intended, thank you very much. While he does provide a little more context — certainly, he wasn’t the only person who’d never heard Swift’s “You Belong with Me” before then — we’re going to file this one under “Kanye’s semi-facetious hyperbolic statements that will inevitably be taken wildly out of context.” That said, it’s a moment that helped launch both Swift and West into an entirely new tier of superstardom and at least one of them is actually trying to save this country so maybe it really is God’s plan, and He just works in mysterious ways.

The RX is Uproxx Music’s stamp of approval for the best albums, songs, and music stories throughout the year. Inclusion in this category is the highest distinction we can bestow, and signals the most important music being released throughout the year. The RX is the music you need, right now.

Angel Olsen released her 2016 record My Women on a career high — the album had launched the singer out of her lo-fi indie typecast and landed her across headlines and Album Of The Year lists. But while she was celebrating success, Olsen was also grappling with the repercussions of leaving a long-term relationship. Losing her partner also meant losing some close friends and even a part of herself. As a seasoned songwriter, Olsen processed the breakup the way she knew best: She boarded a plane to the sleepy and evergreen town of Anacortes, Washington to let her heartbreak flow out of her in Phil Elverum’s church-turned-studio.

The introspective sessions were not only cathartic, but also resulted in Whole New Mess, an album that’s purposefully unpolished and touched with post-breakup melodrama. The collection of songs would stand as the bare-bones blueprint for Olsen’s recent, new age-adjacent record All Mirrors. But Whole New Mess is not a simple collection of demos. It’s an emotional purge, a heartsore reflection of revelations, reveries, and broken promises — both from her ex-lover and from herself. It’s a vulnerable assemblage of reminders of what originally made fans fall in love with the singer’s haunting and poetic 2012 debut full-length Half Way Home. With an intimate look into the journey of self-healing on Whole New Mess, Olsen comes full circle both in her career and personal life.

Apart from two brand-new tracks, Whole New Mess is lyrically identical to All Mirrors. But with the production paired down to a spacious guitar and Olsen’s ethereal voice, the new album could not be further from its predecessor. Where All Mirrors is lush and cinematic, Whole New Mess is sparse and sequestered. “(We Were All Mirrors)” embodies the stark contrast between the two efforts. The song, which would eventually become her opulent All Mirrors title track, opens with Olsen’s listless lyrical delivery. The roomy production leaves the singer sounding physically distant, inching closer until a swell of screeching strings underscores the second verse. “I keep movin’,” she croons, her voice quavering as it lurches over the final word, like she’s convincing herself that moving on is necessary even if she doesn’t quite believe it’s feasible.

Whole New Mess is also devoid of the grandiose synths heard on her last release. Instead, the instrumentals implore listeners to focus on lyricism and confront minute details in Olsen’s delivery, uncovering how she oftentimes repeats choice phrases. She lays out a clear mantra on the album’s title track, one song that doesn’t have an All Mirrors counterpart. Strumming each chord with anguish, Olsen echoes her guitar’s wailing tones and belts out an honest account of her emotional journey. “I stretch my bones out on the floor / I think I really do the change.” Repeating the latter line threefold, Olsen reassures herself that growing from mistakes is possible, though difficult.

Where Whole New Mess departs from All Mirrors, it marks a return to her candid and confessional early catalog. Songs like “Chance (Forever Love)” display emotion through a piercing inflection akin to the throaty-yet-penetrating intonation heard on her debut effort’s “Acrobat” or the Strange Cacti number “Creator/Destroyer.” Similarly, tracks like “Lark Song” call back to Olsen’s lo-fi days, placing her voice at the forefront and drenching it in warm reverb.

Much of the fuzzy production on the record is thanks to location. Aptly recorded in a church, Whole New Mess is Olsen’s sermon on dejected self-understanding. Though it’s not the type of record that can be thrown on to accompany casual dinner party banter, the album curates a type of self-exploration fit for late-night identity crises and stands as Olsen’s masterclass on unguarded songwriting.

Whole New Mess offers the type of vulnerability that’s generally expected from an Olsen album but was missing on All Mirrors. Equally painful and cathartic, Olsen loses herself completely in each song. She wields her voice as a second instrument and experiments with tone, atmosphere, and resonance. The result is an album that parallels Olsen’s early catalog while distinctly displaying her growth as a songwriter, instrumentalist, and overall person.

Whole New Mess is out now via Jagjaguwar. Get it here.

Tiger King isn’t going away anytime soon. Netflix will likely launch some spinoffs, Peacock is working on a scripted series with Kate McKinnon starring as rival/animal activist Carole Baskins, and Baskins is making a ton of money on Cameo, all while the family of Baskins’ late husband, Don Lewis, is still inquiring about his whereabouts. Oh, and Cardi B did not hold back her thoughts on that situation, so expect scrutiny of Baskins to continue, especially since she’s preparing to do Dancing With The Stars.

Yes, it is happening. Baskins even danced with a stuffed tiger for this GMA-based announcement to make 2020 even weirder.

Baskins will be joined by Jesse Metcalfe, Nelly, Nev Schulman (Catfish), Johnny Weir (he’s got the moves, so he’s my prediction for winner), Anne Heche, Vernon Davis, Skai Jackson, AJ McLean, and Jeannie Mai (Holey Moley). Even more tellingly, Baskins is only one of four cast members who’ve found fame on Netflix (the other two are Monica Aldama of Cheer and Chrishell Stause of Selling Sunset).

As one can imagine, the reaction to Baskins isn’t very positive on social media. Morbid jokes abound, including imagined scenarios of what Baskins might do if her partner doesn’t help her win the show. Also, people are still looking for justice for (or even the whereabouts of) Don Lewis.

This is gonna get messy, but DWTS loves a good controversy.

(Via Hollywood Reporter)

Adrianne Lenker has been promoting one project or another pretty much non-stop over the past few years. Big Thief released albums in 2016, 2017, and two in 2019, while she had a solo album, Abysskiss, in 2018. She’s keeping the streak alive in 2020, as today, she announces a pair of new albums, Songs and Instrumentals. Lenker also released “Anything,” a lovely and delicate folk tune from Songs.

Lenker shared a note describing the process of recording the albums, which began in April when she retreated to a cabin in western Massachusetts with engineer Phil Weinrobe. She wrote of making the albums, “I had a handful of songs that I was planning on recording, but by the time Phil arrived I was on a whole new level of heartsick and the songs were flying through my ears. I was basically lying in the dirt half the time. We went with the flow. A lot of the focus was on getting nourishment from our meals. We cooked directly on the woodstove, and we went on walks to the creek every day to bathe. ”

Listen to “Anything” above. Below, find the art and tracklists for Songs and Instrumentals, as well as Lenker’s full note about the albums.

1. “Two Reverse”
2. “Ingydar”
3. “Anything”
4. “Forwards Beckon Rebound”
5. “Heavy Focus”
6. “Half Return”
7. “Come”
8. “Zombie Girl”
9. “Not A Lot, Just Forever”
10. “Dragon Eyes”
11. “My Angel”

1. “Music For Indigo”
2. “Mostly Chimes”

“It was early March 2020 and the Big Thief tour had just been cut short, so I flew from Europe to NYC. It just so happened that there was a little cabin available for rent right next door to Zoe and Brian in the mountains in Western MA. So I grabbed my truck and drove out to the country. As I settled into the cabin over the course of a month, I grew really connected to the space itself. The one room cabin felt like the inside of an acoustic guitar — it was such a joy to hear the notes reverberate in the space . I got a hankering to capture it, so I called my friend Phil and asked ‘How’d you like to get outta the city and make a record that sounds like the inside of an acoustic guitar?’ Phil said ‘100%’ and by the grace of some of our dear friends, we were able to gather the materials needed. Brendan lent us about 45 tape machines. Eli lent us a binaural head (which looked remarkably like Phil), and Shahzad lent us a pile of XLR cables. I drove into the city at 5am on the 20th of April, scooped up Phil and then we filled my truck to the brim as we stopped and gathered the gear along the way back to Massachusetts.

We unloaded all of the equipment into the small cabin and began setting up. Unfortunately, one of the first things that happened was the unstable electricity fried four of our tape machines, including the Otari 8 track. Bill tried to fix it at his shop in Sturbridge, but it was beyond repair.

After almost three weeks of setup and troubleshooting, the studio finally was operating — although the only functioning tape recorder we had was Phil’s battery powered Sony Walkman. We felt at peace with the idea that we might just be recording the whole record on cassette tape, but that would have meant no overdubs, so I’m grateful for the rescue Otari 8 Track that Brendan was able to dig out of storage and deliver to us right before we had lost all hope.

I had a handful of songs that I was planning on recording, but by the time Phil arrived I was on a whole new level of heartsick and the songs were flying through my ears. I was basically lying in the dirt half the time. We went with the flow. A lot of the focus was on getting nourishment from our meals. We cooked directly on the woodstove, and we went on walks to the creek every day to bathe.

Nine of these songs were written freshly during the recording session. We began and closed each day with an improvised acoustic guitar instrumental, and we made a collage of our favorite pieces, which became the first side of the instrumentals album.

I’m grateful that this music has come into existence. These songs have helped me heal. I hope that at least in some small way this music can be a friend to you.”

Songs and Instrumentals are out 10/23 via 4AD. Pre-order them here.

How does an album that is underrated come to be properly seen, decades later, as great? How does an album become underrated in the first place? Who decides these things anyway?

To answer these questions, it’s worthwhile to ponder the story of the 11th LP by The Rolling Stones, Goats Head Soup.

When The Rolling Stones released Goats Head Soup on August 31, 1973, it was easy to argue that it was a success. An unlikely mix of druggy funk-rock jams and sentimental ballads, it not only swiftly topped the charts in various countries around the world, it also produced a genuine international hit single, “Angie,” that crossed over into the pop space like no other Stones song in years. As a touring act, they performed two successful runs that year in Europe and along the Pacific Rim, playing for several hundred thousand people. With the possible exception of Led Zeppelin, The Stones still seemed like the biggest rock ‘n’ roll band in the world.

And yet, in spite of all those statistical signifiers, Goats Head Soup was widely perceived as not only a failure, but as a harbinger of a greater artistic decline. In the press, reviews ranged from qualified praise to open hostility. Rolling Stone gamely admitted that it had initially dismissed Exile On Main St., so the magazine was now prepared to cautiously endorse Goats Head Soup, in spite of reviewer Bud Scoppa’s only intermittent enthusiasm. “If they’ve played it safe this time, their caution has nevertheless reaped some rewards,” he wrote, in anticipation of eventually loving the album. The upstart Creem magazine was naturally more skeptical, calling Soup “future muzak” and backhandedly praising The Stones as a “perfect corporation.” In a separate pan, Creem‘s resident philosopher critic Lester Bangs sniffed, “There is a sadness about The Stones now, because they amount to such an enormous, So what?”

The implication was that The Stones were already over the hill in 1973, the year of glam and Philly Soul, and also the period during which Mick Jagger turned 30. Even critics who reviewed it positively thought of Goats Head Soup strictly as brand management, product delivered in lieu of real inspiration and invention.

When I started reading music books in the late ’80s as a budding grade-school classic-rock student, I found that Creem‘s take on Goats Head Soup had won out over Rolling Stone‘s guarded optimism. Time and again, Goats Head Soup was positioned as a sloppy and ill-considered departure point, a downward spiral from the heights of the “classic” ’68-’72 period that produced Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, and Exile On Main St. It formed a trilogy with the band’s other mid-’70s albums, It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll and Black And Blue, as a bad stretch of road between Exile and the triumphant 1978 comeback LP, Some Girls, as The Records Best Left Ignored By Future Generations.

Even Rolling Stone came to adopt this position. In the first two editions of the Rolling Stone Record Guide, which I read religiously as a music ignorant lad, Goats Head Soup was saddled with a pitiful one-star rating, with critic Dave Marsh declaring it “a mistake, a jumble or the beginning of the end.” Around the same time, in the magazine’s comprehensive Illustrated History Of Rock ‘n’ Roll, Robert Christgau called Goats Head Soup “musicianly craft at its unheroic norm, terrific by the standards of Foghat or the Doobie Brothers but a nadir for the Rolling Stones.”

As for the band members, they also turned their noses at the poor Soup. In an interview with famous British rock journalist Nick Kent, The Stones’ longtime pianist and unofficial conscience Ian Stewart called it “bloody insipid.” Guitarist Mick Taylor — whose feelings about Goats Head Soup were perhaps tempered by not getting proper credit for co-writing one of the better tracks, “Winter” — referred to it as “not one of my favorite albums.” And then there’s Keith Richards, who has routinely badmouthed Goats Head Soup over the years, including in his iconic 2010 memoir, Life, in which he compares it unfavorably to Exile. In Keith’s view, it was a “marking-time” album crowded with too many sidemen and not quite enough Stones.

In a way, he’s right — ringers like Nicky Hopkins and Billy Preston are all over the album, whereas Bill Wyman plays on only three tracks. Also, Keith himself was slipping into a heroin coma around this time. (An alternate theory is that Exile, which is widely viewed as Keith’s album, was criticized by Mick Jagger as being unfocused, which obliged Keith to slag Goats Head Soup — a Mick album through and through — in return. When Mick years later offered his own criticism of the album, he made sure to pin it on his partner: “I mean, everyone was using drugs, Keith particularly,” he told Rolling Stone in 1995.)

In my own book, I referred to Goats Head Soup a great “bad” album, meaning I really love it in spite of its weaknesses. (Or, rather, because of its weaknesses, as listening to a band like The Stones fall apart will always be more interesting than hearing a typical band at their relatively meager best.) But now I wonder if this album really is “bad” at all, or if I simply read too many rock books telling me it was bad during my formative years. After all, whenever I put on Goats Head Soup now, it just sounds like a great “great” album. So many of the tracks stand up superbly well: “100 years Ago,” “Coming Down Again,” “Winter,” and “Star Star,” along with the hits “Angie” and “Heartbreaker (Doo Doo Doo Doo).” If Keith Richards has internalized all that criticism of Goats Head Soup, maybe I did, too.

I bring all this up because there’s a new box set coming out on Friday that attempts to rescue Goats Head Soup, once and for all, from its bad historical reputation. The case made in the liner notes — this is a “lost album” that’s “been sitting in front of you all along” — is the sort of intriguing revisionism that’s become increasingly common in the classic rock reissue market.

This expansive Goats Head Soup reissue — outfitted with the de rigueur selection of outtakes, demos, and live tracks — is part of a mini-trend of using the box-set format to reassess formerly maligned albums, a gambit that has similarly worked for the likes of Don’t Tell A Soul by The Replacements and Monster by R.E.M. If you instinctively recoil at the thought of reconsidering a record you decided long ago is garbage, it’s worth pondering how putting certain “garbage” albums in a newly reverent context can change what those albums mean, providing a new way to hear music that was formerly drowned out by so many entrenched and infinitely reiterated opinions.

In the case of Goats Head Soup, the outtakes don’t add a whole lot to the picture, as enjoyable as they are. The much-ballyhooed “Scarlet” basically is a studio jam with Jimmy Page, which (clearly) is awesome even if the song itself doesn’t amount to much. Two other previously unheard tracks, the cowbell-mad “All The Rage” and the funk-rock workout “Criss Cross,” are better if not exactly essential. For serious Stones-heads, the demos portion of the box set will disappoint for what’s not included, namely embryonic versions of tracks like “Waiting On A Friend,” “Tops,” and “Short and Curlies” that wound up on subsequent records. The Soup sessions, which commenced in November 1972 at Dynamic Sound Studios in Kingston, Jamaica — Wyman remembers their space as being “little bigger than an out-house” — were, contrary to the slovenly reputation of the album, highly productive, helping to lay the groundwork for future Stones releases over nearly a decade. But the box set’s rather stingy pick of outtakes doesn’t really reflect that.

The live album Brussels Affair, originally issued in 2011 and then taken out of circulation ahead of this box set, is another story entirely. Compiled from two shows performed during the European tour, Brussels Affair for a time was due to come out after Goats Head Soup. (When plans to add some studio cuts to the live tracks resulted in enough material for an entirely new studio LP, It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll, the live album was scuttled.) As it is now, nearly 50 years later, Brussels Affair dispels the notion that The Stones were simply on auto-pilot in 1973. On the contrary, they were still very near the peak of their powers as a live act, stretching out like never before on jammy versions of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” and “Midnight Rambler” — at nearly 13 minutes, it goes on longer than even the Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out! cut — while also energetically tearing into the murk of the Exile material and the funk of the Goats Head Soup songs. (Keith, as always, remained agnostic, supposedly pulling a knife on Billy Preston at one show for playing his organ too loud.) While it’s not quite as good as Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out!, Brussels Affair outclasses every other official Stones live LP.

But the main attraction here, as it should be, is the album itself. All these years later, Goats Head Soup benefits from not having the generational baggage that boomer critics projected on it in the moment. In 1973, The Rolling Stones were an avatar for larger cultural disappointments — if the utopian aspirations of the ’60s never came to fruition, that had to mean that The Stones were frauds, too. This idea is echoed over and over in contemporary assessments of Goats Heads Soup. It colors the assertion that this album marks the point when they became merely a “professional” band and stopped being a revolutionary one.

If that charge sounds familiar, perhaps it’s because music critics tend to eventually turn against bands who linger on into middle age. All criticism is autobiography, after all, and writing about legacy acts often reveals the insecurity that music critics have about their own relevance. But for The Stones, it was especially difficult because they were among the first rock bands ever to actually grow old. And on Goats Head Soup, specifically, they dared to sing about aging while also sounding like they were worn out. Tempos slightly lag, even on the fast songs. The keyboards and guitars blur in and out of focus. Jagger sounds either mournful or contemptuous. More than ever before, The Stones actually seem vulnerable, even fragile.

I imagine that was particularly galling for boomers, the most Peter Pan-obsessed of all generations. It was just easier to dismiss Goats Head Soup as a “safe” retreat than to contend with their super-human decadent princes staggering fearfully into adulthood. But in its own way, a song like “100 Years Ago” is risky, because Jagger admits that he’s no longer a young man and wishes he still was: “Sometimes it’s wise not to grow up,” he sighs. And yet you have no choice but to do it. Goats Head Soup is where they finally accepted this.

Everywhere you turn on Goats Head Soup, the bleakness of the grown-up world looms. The romantic ballad “Angie” is a breakup song in which true love is crushed by the logistical impracticality of incompatible lives. “Winter” uses the titular season as a metaphor for a time when “a lotta love is burned out,” likening the early ’70s to a frigid wasteland. Again, this was not a band that usually expressed any misgivings about their sins or triumphs. After the supposed moral reckoning of Altamont, they put out their two most gloriously amoral albums, Sticky Fingers and Exile On Main St. Contrast that with Goats Head Soup, which contains at least two tracks — “Coming Down Again” and “Heartbreaker” — that can be loosely described as anti-drug (or at least “drug wary”). Who could believe this? The Rolling Stones, of all bands, was sick and tired of the rock ‘n’ roll life. Even the requisite “life on the road” party jam, “Star Star,” cynically depicts backstage trysts as a series of cold, passionless transactions between the haves and wannabe haves. The song rocks, but the lyrics hardly depict a world that you would want to live in. If Exile is about raging against the dying of the light, then Goats Head Soup is simply the dying of the light.

If you grew up with The Stones in the ’60s and early ’70s, I can imagine how much of a bummer Goats Head Soup must have felt in the moment. But for those of us who came along later, and without the generational baggage, Goats Head Soup has an incredible, melancholic beauty. Yes, the band is exhausted. But the album itself is about exhaustion; they were either too honest or too tired to not foreground it. And that resonates now in 2020 more profoundly than, say, an untouchable classic made by indestructible millionaire rock stars in the south of France. For all the well-worn mythology around this band, the Goats Head Soup post-apocalyptic Rolling Stones — the band who felt old before their time, and sensed that their lives might have already peaked — feels newly, hauntingly fresh.

Goats Head Soup will be reissued on Friday via Polydor/Interscope/UMe. Get it here.

It’s easy to forget that Game of Thrones was Kit Harington’s first credited on-screen role. The biggest TV show of all-time? Not a bad way to kick off your career. But what’s next for the King of the North, now that the length of his hair is no longer breaking news? Harington plays Black Knight in Marvel’s recently-retitled Eternals, and he also stars in the new season of Netflix’s Criminal, the trailer for which was released on Wednesday.

Criminal — which should not be confused with Criminal Minds — is an anthology series where each episode centering around one case. “Four new cases, four new suspects, one room that changes everything,” the Netflix tagline reads. “It’s about how someone reacts when a photo is put down in front of them or what happens when the air conditioning in the room goes off. It becomes about the environment and about the about the human interaction between the cops and the detectives,” creator Jim Field-Smith explained. Harington stars in one episode where his character is accused of manipulating a woman, while Sophie Okonedo (Hotel Rwanda), Sharon Horgan (Catastrophe), and Kunal Nayyar (The Big Bang Theory) appear in the other three.

Criminal season two premieres on Netflix on September 16.

Now that John Boyega has “moved on” from Star Wars, after starring in The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi, and The Rise of Skywalker (which he admits does have “some disappointments”), he’s able to talk freely about his time working with Disney. “It’s so difficult to maneuver,” he told GQ. “You get yourself involved in projects and you’re not necessarily going to like everything. [But] what I would say to Disney is, do not bring out a Black character, market them to be much more important in the franchise than they are, and then have them pushed to the side. It’s not good. I’ll say it straight up.”

The Attack the Block star says that Star Wars (and by proxy, directors J.J. Abrams and Rian Johnson) “knew what to do with Daisy Ridley, you knew what to do with Adam Driver, you knew what to do with these other people, but when it came to Kelly Marie Tran, when it came to John Boyega, you know f*ck all. So what do you want me to say? What they want you to say is, ‘I enjoyed being a part of it. It was a great experience…’ Nah, nah, nah. I’ll take that deal when it’s a great experience. They gave all the nuance to Adam Driver, all the nuance to Daisy Ridley. Let’s be honest. Daisy knows this. Adam knows this. Everybody knows. I’m not exposing anything.” He continued:

“I’m the only cast member who had their own unique experience of that franchise based on their race. Let’s just leave it like that. It makes you angry with a process like that. It makes you much more militant; it changes you. Because you realize, ‘I got given this opportunity but I’m in an industry that wasn’t even ready for me.’ Nobody else in the cast had people saying they were going to boycott the movie because [they were in it]. Nobody else had the uproar and death threats sent to their Instagram DMs and social media, saying, ‘Black this and black that and you shouldn’t be a Stormtrooper.’ Nobody else had that experience. But yet people are surprised that I’m this way. That’s my frustration.”

Boyega is refreshingly candid, especially for someone in his profession, as he showed back in June during a Black Lives Matter speech. “I’m speaking to you from my heart,” he spoke through a megaphone. “Look, I don’t know if I’m going to have a career after this, but f*ck that.” About that moment of honesty, director Steve McQueen, who worked with Boyega on Small Axe, said, “He shone very brightly and I rang him a few days after to say thank you.” Small Axe opens the New York Film Festival on September 25.

(Via GQ)

A summer without live concerts or festivals due to COVID-19 has meant that music fans have to get their fix through virtual experiences. Timbaland and Swizz Beatz’ Verzuz battle series has been a saving grace through these difficult times, putting together iconic match-ups like Alicia Keys vs. John Legend, DMX vs. Snoop Dogg, and Brandy vs. Monica to provide necessary entertainment and a brief escape to celebrate the culture’s architects. On July 27, when Timbaland asked his followers who the next Verzuz matchup should be, a confident Juicy J, who already wanted to challenge Dr. Dre, quote tweeted him with another unexpected request: Nas.

On that day, Rap Twitter exploded with divided opinions on who would win. “That was funny,” Juicy says by phone, chuckling.

“Nas is my favorite rapper,” he continues. “It’s not so much Nas, I consider whomever. I want people to understand that I’ll go against whomever. My catalogue speaks for itself. I got a solo catalogue that’s amazing and I got a catalogue with Three 6 Mafia that’s just as amazing. So it’s like I could really go up against anybody.”

Tweets by spirited fans were all across the board, ranging from “Juicy J bout to wash Nas with Blue Dream & Lean” to “Wait y’all think Juicy J is better than Nas? 2020 is different.” Juicy knows stylistically it doesn’t make sense, but no one should ever count him out.

“A lot of people don’t want to give me that juice ‘cause they so stuck on what they stuck on. But if anybody looks at my track record, you cannot deny [it]. It’s facts. I’ve sold hundreds and millions of records. C’mon. I’m a cold motherf*cker, man. I’m just as good as anybody else,” Juicy says. “I wouldn’t say I’m a lyricist or someone like a Nas. Nas got them bars. To me, Nas is one of the greatest. He’s like my No. 1. If someone says Juicy what’s your Top 5? I’ll probably say Nas is No. 1. I’ll give him that. But at the end of the day, Juicy J is definitely up there with the greats.”

Juicy J — rapper, producer, entrepreneur, music executive, mentor, and father to his daughter Kamai Houston — has accomplished a lot in his lifetime. He could be someone who announces his retirement tomorrow and you’d be perfectly fine celebrating his storied career and influence in pop culture — Shutdafukup! catchphrases and all. Well into his 40s, the living legend who stays “trippy, mane” refuses to slow down, gearing up to release his fifth studio album, The Hustle Continues, via eOne on October 14. The title represents Juicy J moving forward with his life as a new father, proud owner of his masters, and independent musician after leaving Columbia Records, as well as brokering new business deals like launching LA-based cannabis brand Asterisk* with his partners Gary Vaynerchuk and Cody Hudson.

To have a hustler’s spirit means possessing passion and drive, which Juicy puts forth in everything he’s associated with. Take it back to 2010 when Juicy J first dropped Rubba Band Business with Lex Luger, the mixtape that solidified him as a solo rapper. He remembers having a lot of doubt that no one would take him seriously. “I never thought somebody would want to listen to me,” he says. “It just kind of happened by surprise. And it is still happening by surprise. I was always a grinder. I always kept working and kept hustling and kept moving forward. I was always trying to do this and produce this. Or help this artist out or help that artist out. I was helping a bunch of artists out. I was jumping on a bunch of features and people started looking at me and started to consider me as a solo artist. Things just started to get bigger.”

After DJ Paul and Juicy J released their solo albums, Scale-A-Ton and Hustle Till I Die, in 2009, the group’s tentatively titled Laws Of Power album was put on hold. Juicy J says work on new Three 6 Mafia music was sounding different and they needed to evolve because “the waves of music were sounding different.” But as Juicy started to grow his buzz, Wiz Khalifa saw an opportunity for him to be part-owner of Taylor Gang Entertainment where he signed as an artist and A&R in 2011. Juicy caught a second career wind under Wiz, but that left the future of Three 6 Mafia in limbo.

“I always felt like Three 6 Mafia could make a comeback,” he says. “But it always had me kind of nervous and scared to even do that. Because we’ve done so much in music that I didn’t want it to be like, ‘Aw, they’re not good enough.’ Or ‘Aw, they got old.’ Or they’re not creative like they used to be or things ain’t the way they were. We never really went down that road to bring the group back.”

“There always been thoughts,” he adds. “I even recorded a couple songs and I got Lord Infamous — rest in peace to him — with a couple of his verses on. I always thought about it, we just never really pursued to do it.”

In 2020, before the coronavirus halted live entertainment indefinitely, Three 6 Mafia agreed to do a reunion tour. Juicy was able to rock a few shows with Triple Six, performing to tens of thousands of people and revisiting classics that are decades old. “Even though we are older and we’ve all been through different things in our lives, it felt like it was 1999 or ’92 or ’93 again,” Juicy says. The renewed energy has positioned him for The Hustle Continues, and allowed for some great synergy in terms of the label that will release it. Alan Grunblatt, eOne’s President of Urban Music, signed Three 6 Mafia to their first record deal.

While The Hustle Continues is a title that’s been floating around since 2014, Juicy J says he’s the type of person that just goes with the flow. Originally, the album was set to be mostly him with just one special feature, but he has since brought in a bevy of younger talent: ASAP Rocky, Lil Baby, Young Dolph, Key Glock, Logic (who he calls his best friend), NLE Choppa, Megan Thee Stallion (who he calls “the verse killer”), Ty Dolla Sign, Rico Nasty, and Jay Rock. The album is “98 percent” produced by him, but he collaborated with other producers such as Internet Money, Lex Luger, and 6ix.

As he explains using a basketball analogy, the veterans and the rookies need to coexist on the same court so they can grow with each other. “You need those people as coaches,” he says. “You know, people that stand over your shoulder and be like ‘let’s do it this way, let’s do it that way.’ I learned things from them and they learn things from me.”

Juicy J says you get a little bit of everything on this album: ‘90s Juicy, 2000s Juicy, and 2010s Juicy. The perfect example of this is “Take It” which features Rico Nasty and the late Lord Infamous, merging nostalgia with the next generation. Originally, Juicy’s idea was to make “Take It” a Three 6 Mafia reunion song.

“I had that song done,” he says. “I produced that with a friend of mine named 6ix, Logic’s producer. We did that and I had this Lord Infamous song just sitting in the vaults. And I was like, ‘Man, I got this song sitting up here.’ So I took them and I combined them. You will hear the beat change. It’s a combined type of record. It’s a dope song. I love the song. I was in the studio with Rico and I listened to it the other day. I was like, ‘Man.’ Every time I hear it I get chills. I feel like he’s in the studio with me.”

It’s not surprising that after The Hustle Continues drops, Juicy J is already thinking about his next album. On Twitter, he’s been teasing a Juicy J and Wiz Khalifa collaborative project that still needs a name. In a genre where your age means everything for your relevance, Juicy is arguably outworking everyone, proving hip-hop has no age limit. He’ll continue to work with up-and-coming artists and keep his ear to the streets, adding to a rolodex of who’s who in hip-hop that could be useful if he wants to run a major label as president or CEO.

With all that Juicy’s done in his career, it’s fair to wonder what he would want to leave his legacy on?

“I think it is still being written,” he says. “But I’m the Michael Jordan of rap music. I’m that guy. When they mention Jay-Z and Nas, they gonna have to mention Juicy J as far as being great.”

The Hustle Continues is out on October 14 via eOne.

BTS have teamed up with South Korean automaker Hyundai for promotional endeavors before, but they went above and beyond for the latest campaign. Hyundai is launching a new electric vehicle line-up brand, IONIQ, and they got BTS to write a song, “IONIQ: I’m On It,” and film a video for it. Although it’s a song for a commercial, the group took the track seriously, and the result is a fun, disco-inspired tune that stands evenly alongside their beloved discography.

Hyundai notes that each member of the group has “lyrics that reflect a new future.” Those are “time of newness” (V), “time of adventure” (Jungkook), “time of inner self” (RM), “time of hope and encouragement” (Suga), “time of emotion” (Jimin), “time of creation and inspiration” (J-Hope), and “time of continuous effort” (Jin).

RM said of the song, “For this special project, we have all focused on individual moments that are important to us. For me, time for inner self is extremely important, I believe we all need time for reflection to be able to grow.” Suga added, “We hope this song will inspire everyone to find time for what matters most and they can do the right thing for a cleaner future.” Jimin also said, “Individually we all look for different things in life, but collectively we come together for a better future.”

Watch the “IONIQ: I’m On It” video above.