Category: Viral

Australian songwriter Gordi getting ready for the release of her sophomore album, Our Two Skins, which is due later this June. The singer has previously shared a handful of singles off the record, but now she returns with the playful number “Unready.” Along with sharing the new song and visual, Gordi announces a handful of 2021 Australian tour dates supporting Bon Iver.

The accompanying video was directed by Madeleine Purdy and features a cameo from The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel actor Alex Borstein. Compiling slightly absurd and incongruous images, the visual sheds light on the upcoming album’s more lively side. “I asked my friend and collaborator, Madeleine Purdy, to make a video in the middle of a pandemic, and we finally arrived at this idea: vignettes of despair,” Gordi said.

About the song as a whole, Gordi said it’s a departure from the remainder of Our Two Skins:

“For me it sits quite separately to the rest of the record – it’s the only song whose lyrics predate the period of my life described by the rest of the songs on Our Two Skins. When it came time to record the song we tracked every guitar we could find for the big strum sound in the chorus. Singing it proved a challenge because it sits a little higher than my comfortable register. We had tried to do the vocal takes in the cottage but it wasn’t working so one night we ventured over to my parent’s house for a change of scene. Chris asked me (as a joke) if we had any strobe lights in the house to set the mood. We always joke that you could request any object from my Mum and she’d have it to you in minutes from some treasure trove of stuff in the house. Surely enough, we found a strobe light in the wardrobe of my brother’s childhood bedroom. We turned the lights off and hit the strobe, setting the perfect conditions to finally execute the vocal take for ‘Unready’.”

Watch the “Unready” video above and below, find Gordi’s Australian tour dates supporting Bon Iver.

03/27/2021 — Adelaide, Australia @ AEC Arena
03/29/2021 — Melbourne, Australia @ Rod Laver
04/01/2021 — Brisbane, Australia @ Riverstage
04/05/2021 — Sydney, Australia @ ICC
04/06/2021 — Sydney, Australia @ ICC

Our Two Skins is out 6/26 via Jagjaguwar. Pre-order it here.

For this year’s graduates, the months leading up to their commencements have been unlike any other before them. In most cases, students weren’t even able to enjoy an official ceremony celebrating their accomplishments as the world sheltered in place to slow the spread of COVID-19. Fortunately, alternatives like YouTube’s “Dear Class of 2020” have provided this year’s graduates with messages of encouragement and inspiration, as well as offering some options for post-grad entertainment they’ll be able to return to again and again.

As part of “Dear Class of 2020,” not only were graduates given a commencement speech from Beyonce, they got a performance from Megan Thee Stallion, who put together a medley of some of her biggest hits including “Big Ole Freak,” “Hot Girl Summer,” “Captain Hook,” “Cash S*t,” and “Savage,” all performed from Megan’s own backyard. She even managed wardrobe change for a rendition of her “Savage” remix, dancing in the kitchen along with pair of friends. At the end of the performance, she encouraged viewers to “have a hot girl summer,” which may be complicated by ongoing coronavirus precautions, but is a nice sentiment.

Watch Megan Thee Stallion’s “Class Of 2020” performance above.

Megan Thee Stallion is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Keeping up with the best new music can be exhausting, even impossible. From the weekly album releases to standalone singles dropping on a daily basis, the amount of music is so vast it’s easy for something to slip through the cracks. Even following along with the Uproxx recommendations on a daily basis can be a lot to ask, so every Monday we’re offering up this rundown of the best new music this week.

This week saw a much-needed (and highly anticipated) new record from Run The Jewels, and a similarly relevant mass of new hip-hop dealing with current events. Yeah, it was a great week for new music. Check out the highlights below.

Run The Jewels — RTJ4

Killer Mike and El-P released their fourth album as a duo a couple days earlier than expected, but either way, it could not have come at a better time. Its political themes are perfect for the times for the times we’re living in, and even aside from that, Run The Jewels just go super hard here. It’s easily the best new music we heard last week.

Meek Mill — “Otherside Of America”

Meek Mill is one of the latest rappers to address the current climate through music, having done so last week with “Otherside Of America.” He kicks the track off with a Donald Trump speech sample before tackling politics and race: “Reporting live from the other side / Same corner where my brothers died / Livin’ like we ain’t got care / Told my mama I ain’t dying here.”

YG — “FTP”

YG was another artist to discuss the post-George-Floyd-death country we’re living in, and he did so on “FTP.” On the track, he certainly doesn’t hide his feelings: “F*ck the police, that’s how I feel / Buy a Glock, break down the block, that’s how I feel / Murder after murder after all these years / Buy a strap, bust back after all these tears.”

Phoebe Bridgers — Inner Demos and “First Day Of My Life”

It was a busy week for the indie favorite. She covered “First Day Of My Life,” a career highlight from her frequent collaborator Conor Oberst. Then, she wrapped up the week by taking advantage of a Bandcamp fee-waiving day to share a collection of “first draft” versions of songs to benefit bail funds.

Drakeo The Ruler — Thank You For Using GTL

Technology makes it possible to record music in a variety of ways, but the way Drakeo The Ruler made his latest is different than how most projects come together. The rapper is in jail at the moment, and he was when he created this album, so he and his producer figured out how to record the whole thing over the phone.

Flatbush Zombies — Now, More Than Ever

The trio spent much of 2019 tending to Beast Coast affairs, but now they’re back with their first three-man effort since 2018. They previewed the six-track EP with “Iamlegend,” and brought things back to basics.

Terrace Martin — “Pig Feet” Feat. Denzel Curry, Daylyt, Kamasi Washington, and G Perico

Joining the flock of protest songs that dropped last week was Terrace Martin’s collaborative “Pig Feet,” which includes assists from Denzel Curry, Kamasi Washington, G Perico, and Daylyt. Martin said of the song, “Someone asked, how do I feel? I told them hurt, fearless, angry, aware, and fully ready to protect me, my family, and my people at all cost. I got together with Black men that felt the same way and created a work of truth.”

Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever — Sideways To New Italy

The latest from the Australian group is a dose of optimism in a time when people could use just that. The band’s Fran Keaney says of the album, “I wanted to write songs that I could use as some sort of bedrock of hopefulness to stand on, something to be proud of. A lot of the songs on the new record are reaching forward and trying to imagine an idyll of home and love.”

Conway The Machine — “Front Lines”

Conway’s contribution to the group of timely songs last week starts braggadocios, but he eventually gets into what’s happening in the US right now: “We ain’t takin’ no more, we ain’t just pressin’ record / Can’t watch you kill my brother, you gon’ have to kill us all.”

Lil B — I Am George Floyd

To reiterate once again, hip-hop responded to current events in a big way last week. Lil B chimed in as well with “I Am George Floyd,” on which the rapper name-checks an upsettingly long list of victims of police brutality.

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

In recent months, Juicy J has focused on producing music. The rapper has lent his hand on an unreleased collaboration between Megan Thee Stallion and SZA, as well as a track from IDK. But now, with protests persisting against police brutality and the murder of George Floyd, Juicy J is addressing systematic racism on his new track “Hella F*ckin’ Trauma.”

On the single, Juicy J spits verses in his expeditious style. Through his lyrics, the rapper addresses police brutality, racism, and a recent dispute with his record label over the rights to his masters. “Got me ready to ride ‘round with that pipe / enough is enough / Man, that sh*t ain’t right, I know my rights / Enough is enough / I can’t sit back let them take my life / Enough is enough / All this racist sh*t gone f*ck around and make me send it up / They keep killing all these n****s / A ride ain’t enough,” Juicy J raps.

In other Juicy J news, the rapper previously hinted at the return of his veteran hip-hop group Three 6 Mafia, which has materialized in the form of a reunion tour. The group previously hosted a stand-alone reunion in their Memphis hometown last fall, where DJ Paul and Juicy J reunited on stage with original members of the Hypnotize Minds crew. Now, Three 6 Mafia has rescheduled due to the pandemic and still has two more shows on the bill for October.

Listen to “Hella F*ckin Trauma” above.

As Just Mercy and Selma streamed for free over the weekend, The Help climbed into the top three of Netflix’s most-streamed movies. The 2011 historical drama (based upon a work of fiction) was beloved by the Oscars, like 2018’s Green Book, although both movies have been criticized for perpetuating the “white savior” trope, so it’s bewildering to see The Help trend as a preferred streaming selection while the Black Lives Matter movement continues to protest against police brutality.

One of the Tate Taylor-directed movie’s stars, Bryce Dallas Howard, has decided to open a dialogue. In a Facebook post, she expressed fond memories for working with co-stars that include Octavia Spencer, Jessica Chastain, Viola Davis, Allison Janney, and Emma Stone. However, she’d like everyone to consider that the story very much arrived “through the perspective of a white character and was created by predominantly white storytellers.” While stressing that “[w]e can all go further,” Howard expressed a desire to point people toward more essential viewing:

Stories are a gateway to radical empathy and the greatest ones are catalysts for action. If you are seeking ways to learn about the Civil Rights Movement, lynchings, segregation, Jim Crow, and all the ways in which those have an impact on us today, here are a handful of powerful, essential, masterful films and shows that center Black lives, stories, creators, and / or performers.

⁣

From there, Howard suggested Just Mercy and Selma, along with a handful of other projects, including HBO’s Watchmen, When They See Us (a much better Netflix option than The Help), and Malcolm X. They’re all solid recommendations that will hopefully draw a few eyeballs in a more deserving direction. Viola Davis would likely agree; in 2018, she listed The Help as one of her career regrets, although she (like Howard) still values the friendships with the “extraordinary human beings” who starred alongside her.

(Via Bryce Dallas Howard on Facebook & New York Times)

Just over a week ago, Elias was hit by a car at the beginning of Smackdown, and had to be taken away to a Local Medical Facility. Whether that care was driven by Jeff Hardy or a red-bearded man trying to frame Jeff, the effect was the same for Elias — he was out of the Intercontinental Championship Tournament and off of Smackdown TV in general.

Obviously we all knew the hit-and-run was a work, but we’ve now learned that it happened in part to give Elias a storyline explanation for a real injury that’s expected to put him on the shelf for a while.

According to Dave Meltzer at the Wrestling Observer, Elias really does have a torn pectoral muscle, and he’s expected to be out for months. Running him over with a car is certainly a dramatic way to cover for that absence. Plus there’s always the option to have him looking for revenge when he eventually returns, although of course the entire storyline may be completely forgotten by then. Memories are short in WWE.

This isn’t the first time Elias has been injured in the midst of a tournament. Just last fall, an ankle injury took him out of the King of the Ring Tournament that was eventually won by Baron Corbin. Hopefully whenever he makes it back from this, he has more of a chance to build momentum going forward.

While the past two weeks of protests against police have been inspiring and unifying liberation movements across the nation, unfortunately, they are just the latest reaction to a recurring problem of American society. We last saw mass protests on a similar scale less than five years ago after several Baltimore police officers killed Freddie Gray.

At the time, Prince addressed the injustice with the song “Baltimore” from his final album, Hit n Run Phase Two. Yesterday, on what would have been Prince’s birthday, his estate re-released the song with a new lyric video as a reaction to ongoing protests against the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. The estate also shared a handwritten note from his archives which reads “Nothing more ugly in the whole wide world than intolerance [between] black, white, red, yellow, boy or girl. Intolerance.”

“Baltimore,” although specifically referencing Freddie Gray and Michael Brown, is more broadly about ending violence, but also incorporates the protest chant, “If there ain’t no justice, then there ain’t no peace.” Meanwhile, the video uses photos and headlines from the Black Lives Matter protests that took place in the aftermath of Gray’s death that could just as easily taken place over the past weekend.

Watch Prince’s “Baltimore” video above.

As protests persist across the country in response to police brutality and the murder of George Floyd, many are pushing for cities to defund their police departments. The movement to defund police has been met with confusion, so John Legend offered his explanation as to what defunding police would really look like. No, it doesn’t mean abolishing police entirely. Rather, defunding police suggests redistributing budgets away from police and towards social programs.

Legend opened his explainer by acknowledging that many conjure up images from The Purge when envisioning American cities defunding police departments. “I know this word ‘defund’ has caused some controversy, even from some who are inclined to agree with a lot of the underlying arguments,” he began.

Legend pointed out that huge portions of a city’s budget are directly funneled into police departments. Money that could potentially benefit social service programs like health care and education, which are known to benefit low-income areas and reduce the crime rate, suffer at the expense of police surveillance.

Instead, Legend nudges his followers to envision a “healthier world” in which we use resources to uplift communities, rather than policing them. Legend explains that defunding police doesn’t mean getting rid of them entirely. It means there would be fewer police officers combined with more social workers touting expertise in areas like health care, conflict resolution, and drug treatment.

The singer explains that the operative word in the movement is “defund,” which is meant to signal a redistribution of resources away from policing forces and towards other programs. Electing to “reform” or “retrain” police would not be as effective, as many cities have been retraining officers for decades and yet police brutality still persists.

Legend ended his message by reminding his followers that increasing the minimum wage and passing gay marriage laws seemed impossible decades ago, but activists have successfully pushed legislation that has made progress a reality.

Read Legend’s full explainer on defunding the police above.

The NBA is coming back next month, with training camps set to start on July 1 before 22 teams head to Orlando for the 8-game race to the playoffs starting on July 31.

With under a month before teams are back together in their facilities, there is plenty of excitement building for the league’s return, including among players, many of whom are making clear their desire to be back on the court after three months at home.

However, this sentiment is not shared in totality around the league, as there are some that still have legitimate concerns about the unknowns regarding the COVID-19 pandemic, namely that we still do not understand the long-term effects of the disease — particularly on the lungs. There are also the ongoing protests nationwide in response to the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in Minneapolis and Louisville, which has gripped the league as players have once again taken a leadership role in protests of police brutality and systemic racism.

A number of stars from around the league have participated in protests, like Damian Lillard, Stephen Curry, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Russell Westbrook, Jaylen Brown, and many more. According to Matt Barnes, who joined Josiah Johnson and LaJethro Jenkins on Yahoo’s Dunk Bait podcast, there are some players he is aware of — mostly on the L.A. teams where he’s most plugged in — that do not want to return right now so as not to distract from the movement.

There have been some players that have voiced this opinion on Twitter, noting they don’t want to allow the NBA to be a distraction for people to escape a systemic issue that the Black community is unable to ever get away from.

While there’s absolutely validity to this point and it’s an understandable concern, it is incumbent upon the league to allow the players to take the lead on how they want to keep Floyd and Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery’s names at the forefront even when games return. The argument in favor of players taking the floor is that when games are happening is when the league has the greatest spotlight, and them continuing protesting police brutality and racial injustice and making the message clear on those national broadcasts (when people are clamoring for sports to be back) would give them a bigger platform than most any of them have off the court.

Still, that requires a partnership with the league to be willing to let players to use that platform and not be afraid of backlash, but given ESPN and TNT’s recent coverage of the protests and allowing their most prominent figures to have open discussions of racial injustice on air, one would think the broadcast partners would be more accommodating than maybe they would have been in the recent past.

As the league comes back, there is little doubt players will still have plenty they want to say on police brutality and racism, and if there are some with concerns about the return becoming a distraction from the movement, it’s the league’s responsibility to help ensure they can present their message how they see fit when the lights are brightest.

It’s hard to be a music fan these days. Lately, it seems as though no sooner than you’ve learned all the lyrics to your favorite artist’s latest hit — and mastered the accompanying TikTok dance routine — than your fave has waded hip-deep into some murky, possibly racist corner of the internet or fired off a tweet that got a little too spicy with an unpopular opinion. In the past weeks, we’ve seen wave after wave of Stan Twitter “cancelation parties,” for everything from offensive language to poorly-framed comparisons.

Of course, it’s also far easier for artists in the thick of a controversial quagmire in the era of social media. All you need to do is fire up the old Notes app, record a long apology video, or vanish for an appropriate amount of time before popping back up like nothing ever happened. No artist is a better example of the latter than Kanye West, who is no stranger to the art of image rehabilitation.

Even when it seemed like he’d committed too many acts of egregious ego stroking, supported a shameful leader’s inflammatory rhetoric, and submitted a string of subpar projects, he and his fans have showed that he’s practically teflon when it comes to backtracking on his social miscues. Now, though, it might be time to recognize that he will have to do a lot more to make up for the damage he’s done in the past few years — both to his brand and to the rest of the world at large.

As protests against police brutality took place over the past two weeks, Kanye came under scrutiny for his sudden silence after being so outspoken for most of his career about, well, everything else. Some wondered whether he’d make some sort of statement addressing the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd which had sparked the protest. The urgency increased after Donald Trump — for whom Kanye had loudly stumped throughout most of 2018 and 2019 — wrote tweets threatening protestors with military force and praising law enforcement despite their obvious overreach.

Instead, Kanye’s PR loudly proclaimed his contributions to a college fund for Floyd’s daughter and legal funds for Taylor’s family as they pursued a wrongful death suit against the Louisville Metro Police Department. Later, Kanye himself turned up at a protest in his native Chicago, dressed in a nondescript, all-black sweatsuit with a mask covering the lower half of his face. West was reportedly on the scene for less than 30 minutes, mainly being swarmed by fans and criticized by the protest’s organizers for “hijacking” the march with his celebrity.

Just like that, Kanye West fans were ready to believe that he’d made up for his past half-decade of transgressions. Twitter lit up with praise for the prodigal rapper, with one tweet surmising he’d been running a “long con” going viral. Credulous commenters rushing to reiterate their longstanding belief that he’d been “playing chess, not checkers” over the past few years of running around in a “Make America Great Again” cap and buddying up to a wannabe dictator. The bar is on the floor, folks. Kanye has never been one to apologize — he never even issued a mea culpa for interrupting Taylor Swift’s 2009 VMA acceptance speech, after all. He just moves on to the next thing and hopes we’ll all forget his last one.

Think back to 2018. After struggling to bounce back from his 2016 support of Donald Trump’s election campaign, Kanye seemed to lean into his association with Trump’s cabal. He began sporting Trump’s “Make America Great Again” caps while promoting the albums from his GOOD Music label’s so-called Wyoming Sessions. When the release parties for those GOOD Music projects received more attention than the underwhelming albums themselves, Kanye became a choir leader. When he flubbed the release on his first “gospel” album, he promoted another one. When that one failed to reconcile him to the good graces of the public and the press, he pivoted to glorified Easter pageants billed as “opera.”

Now needing yet another fumble recovery, it appears Kanye is again attempting to make up for past mistakes without acknowledging how and why he messed up in the first place. Contrary to fan conspiracy theories, Kanye has never owned up to the damage his support of Trump has done and has, in fact, repeatedly doubled down on it. The aforementioned “long con” tweet took a pair of quotes from two stories nearly a year apart out-of-context to make him out to be an espionage hero, but he’s not. People have been hurt by his actions and his silence on serious issues and these charitable acts do not come close to reversing their suffering.

Kanye West’s acts of charity are all fine and good, but they are sullied by the climate in which he’s made them — a climate he helped create. Kanye’s prison reform efforts are undermined by the fact that he supported a “law-and-order” strongman, who just a week ago sought to bully protestors into silence, writing “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” to his 81.8 million followers on Twitter. To date, the only person Trump personally tried to free from incarceration was ASAP Rocky, who wasn’t even locked up in the US — mainly as a way to distract from ongoing investigations against him.

Kanye also failed to condemn Donald Trump’s inflammatory, racist rhetoric — rhetoric that led to an increase in the rate of hate crimes nationally. Those crimes included the death of Ahmad Arbery, which contributed to the powder keg that exploded into the protests of the past few weeks. When Kanye said “slavery sounds like a choice,” he unknowingly used a Republican Southern Strategy talking point that gaslights Black people. It pretends the targeting and inequitable treatment against us by police are a result of our “victim mentality” and not a coordinated, deliberate, statistically-proven pattern of abuse by police departments all across America against people of color — especially Black people.

West isn’t directly responsible for Trump’s actions, but he is culpable — as is anyone who enabled or excused Trump’s rise to power and all the tactics he used to get it. His actions normalized Trump’s, perhaps even popularized them, and to date, Kanye has never acknowledged the harm he’s done, only the backlash he’s received. His explanation for that backlash — “class warfare” — confirms that he doesn’t understand the impact he’s had or what class warfare actually means.

Let’s be real: Kanye’s charitable contributions are more to assuage his own conscience so he can go back to his farm in Wyoming and feel like he did his part. While other artists organize, march, provide reform resources, and advocate for change, Kanye’s only advocating for his own public image — just as he always has. By spending $2 million against his highly-touted billion-dollar net worth, by giving 30 minutes of his time — arguably in order to soak up some praise from celebrity-worshipping fans among the protestors — Kanye wants to project the appearance of redemption and growth without actually putting in the work. If he truly wants absolution, to negate the harm he’s caused, he’ll have to actually acknowledge it and spend the rest of his life making amends.