Category: Worldwide

Young Rock (NBC, 8:00pm) — Dwayne Johnson’s gotten very real in interviews while discussing his difficult adolescence and young adulthood, but this show will take a comedic stance while focusing on how he hustled his way into wrestling superstardom. Soon enough, he became a household name and rollercoaster-ed toward Hollywood stardom and earned that Franchise Viagra nickname. This series will focus on all of that, but also! Expect to see exploration of The Rock’s presidential semi-ambitions when his character decides to run for office in 2032 with the help of Rosario Dawson and Randall Park.

Kenan (NBC, 8:30pm) — The longest-tenured cast member on SNL (and he’s not leaving) now breaks into the family comedy business where he plays a character named Kenan, who’s attempting to do what we all do: balance every aspect of life (and usually, to some degree, make a mess while doing it). Luckily for Kenan, he’s so much funnier than the rest of us. It’ll be something to watch him dodge an overbearing father-in-law while staying sane with his family and work, so this should be quite the stress-relieving watch for anyone who wants to see Kenan Thompson painting everyday experiences in an absurd light.

Feel free to brows our list of Must-See Shows For February, and here are the rest of tonight’s programming highlights:

Finding Your Roots With Henry Louis Gates Jr. (PBS, 8:00pm) — Pharrell Williams and Kasi Lemmons get down with their own respective roots, including accounts of their enslaved ancestors.

Mixed-Ish (ABC, 9:30pm) — Bow wants to go to church with friends, and her parents aren’t into it, while Santi and Jonah attempt to prepare for their own hell.

Black-Ish (ABC, 9:00pm) — After Dre catches Junior and Olivia smoking weed, he’s naturally hesitant about recreational use. Ruby then attempts to intervene while Bow wants everyone to lighten up.

Prodigal Son (FOX, 9:00pm) — A supposedly haunted hotel gets a renovation, and that doesn’t go so well for the architect, as the team investigates.

Two Sentence Horror Stories (CW, 8:00pm) — A dark force feeds on the vulnerable within a broken medical system, and an Indigenous man visits an Old West reenactment for their podcast and uncovers some unexpected history.

Trickster (CW, 9:00pm) — Jared realizes that only he can stop his father, and Jared is on the run with Maggie.

Jimmy Kimmel Live! — Bette Midler, Eiza González, Georgia Line

In case you missed these recent picks:

Map Of Tiny Perfect Things (Amazon Prime film) — Time loops somehow don’t get old, especially after Palm Springs and Russian Doll freshened-up the concept once more. In this film. two teens find themselves reliving the same day while inexplicably drawn together. It’s a love story, of course, where they weigh how and whether to escape their never-ending yet ultimately perfect day.

Into the Dark: Tentacles (Hulu film) — The monthly horror-movie series returns with a psychosexual horror-thriller about love, or love gone wrong at least, when a young Los Angeles couple falls deeply in love, only to find that their intimacy takes an enormously dark turn. Happy holiday of love, y’all.

Quaking vibrato, improvisational lyricism, grandiose gestures, punctuating ad-libs, hooping, hollering, calling back and forth to the crowd, and running around the stage dripping in sweat, as if you’re leading the audience in some sacred ritual. If you had to ask me what I consider a quintessential rock performance, I’d rattle off the list above.

I’ve felt magnetized to the freedom and expression of rock and roll for as long as I can remember. Even when my fellow Black classmates warned me it was “white music” or when I seemed to be one of the few non-white people in the crowd, there was something that reminded me of myself, a dull whisper under the humming of the guitars calling me home. It wasn’t until halfway through Maureen Mahon’s book Black Diamond Queens: African American Women and Rock and Roll that I completely understood why.

Named after a line in a Betty Davis track, the book examines how gender, race, and genre play into the stories and careers of Black women who were inextricable and essential to rock and roll music but whose impact is either tragically underreported or unacknowledged. The book also clarified something I had never noticed about my connection to rock and roll: how much it was rooted in my upbringing as a Baptist minster’s daughter. I had previously realized my upbringing was what drew me to the live performance of music. However, I did not realize that the sonics and performance of gospel music were at the very root of rock and roll, and more than likely the reason that drew me to the genre in the first place

“It’s a great example because the gospel sound, particularly in vocals, is so crucial to the vocal sound of rock and roll,” Mahon grins over Zoom. “Not just literally through the vocal sound of African-American women who were background vocalists in the late sixties and early seventies, although that’s maybe the most obvious version of it. Historically gospel music and secular Black music are very closely intertwined. They’re borrowing from each other and building on each other. If you listen to rhythm and blues from the 1950s, they’re doing gospel quartet sounds. The girl group sound of the 1960s is coming out of that tradition as well. It’s very closely aligned with the history of African-American music. Why we don’t pay attention to it is another question.”

Mahon’s history of African American women in rock and roll between the 1950s and 1980s shifts trailblazing artists like LaVern Baker, the Shirelles, Labelle, Betty Davis, and Tina Turner back to the center of the conversation. Each chapter attempts to answer a singular question: Why are so many of these stories not shared in rock and roll histories? Mahon, who also serves as New York University Associate Professor of Music, notes that there are many different reasons for that.

“After the arrival of The Beatles in the 1960s, the British invasion starts in 1964, the whitening of rock really starts to happen at an accelerated pace,” she explains. “You had white artists performing rock and roll in the 1950s, people like Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, and Carl Perkins, and they would have all acknowledged they were drawing on Black musical traditions.”

Mahon shares a quote from Presley in her chapter on the raucous rhythm and blues singer Big Mama Thornton.

“The colored folks have been singing it and playing it just like I’m doin’ now man for more years than I know,” Presley remarks. But, as we all know, the original version of “Hound Dog” performed by Big Mama Thornton is rarely referenced in pop culture canon outside of being the precursor of Presley’s hit.

As Mahon explains, America wanted to hear Black music. They just didn’t want to hear it from Black people.

“Because of the way we understand race in the United States,” she says, “It’s this binary understanding that if something is Black, that means it’s not white and if something is white, that means it’s not Black. So if you have a musical form like rock and roll, which is actually a very mixed miscegenation form, we can’t understand that complexity according to the racial narratives that we grow up with and that we internalize. So if we see a predominance of white people, you know, in the crowd and onstage, we say that’s a white form, and we’re going to stay over here with this other form, which is a Black form, predominantly African-American performers, predominantly African-American audiences. I think that’s why the connections get lost.”

That issue of connection proved fatal for the careers of Black women whose sounds fell “betwixt and between” the genre’s of pop and R&B. And, as Mahon shares, for marketing and societal reasons, rock and roll was a scene that “relied on Black sound but seemed resistant to the presence of Black people.” Or, as rocker Betty Davis put it a more roughly but no less eloquently, “One thing I found out about this business, they have to be able to categorize you, if they can’t bag you, you’re f*cked.”

In the chapter “Navigating Brown Sugar,” Mahon shares the stories of three paramours of rock’s heyday: Devon Wilson, Marsha Hunt, and Claudia Lennear. We could blame record labels excluding Black artists from the rock genre on marketing, a casualty of categorization, but why were these women’s stories not more prominent in rock folklore?

“You can say they were there. Jimi Hendrix was there, but you know, Jimi Hendrix wasn’t really, he wasn’t like a Black guy,” she continues, impersonating what I assume could be a white male rock historian. “‘He was just like this really amazing guitarist. And that’s what I want to talk about when I talk about Jimi Hendrix.’ And so you erase the racial identities, which were important to the people. They were quite aware of their Blackness. They also enjoy being in this alternative space. It was a refusal of these mainstream norms they just thought were stupid and constricting, but it didn’t mean they somehow left their race behind. It’s a really interesting kind of erasure that happens with those women.”

Like many Black contributors to the early rock scene, these women seemed to fall prey to that oft-heard refrain of “I don’t see color,” a clumsy attempt at inclusion and a disservice ultimately leading to erasure.

“If you keep extracting the people who are involved from Blackness,” Mahon notes, “It makes it really hard to recognize that Black people are involved in this music. You keep pushing them into this other category and ignoring both the history of the Black roots of the music, but also the reality that there are Black people involved.”

The last chapter of the book highlights the incomparable Tina Turner, the first Black woman to claim the (well-earned) title of stadium rockstar and answer to the moniker “Queen of Rock and Roll.” In the chapter, Mahon shares an excerpt of a Rolling Stone review written by Dave Marsh. In response to Turner performing songs by Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones, Marsh laments, “This once-great singer pushing herself through a series of songs without desire or understanding” and concludes, with his preference for her to work within “an idiom [she] comprehends.”

But Turner was acutely aware of what she was doing, simply covering the artists who were covering her, if indirectly. As she shares in her memoir I, Tina. “It wasn’t like we planned it — ’Now we’re gonna start doing white rock ‘n’ roll songs.’ But those groups were interpreting Black music, to begin with.”

The majority of the book’s stories don’t end like Turners with accolades, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductions, and Grammys. Mahon quotes a moment from Big Mama Thornton’s funeral in the epilogue where the minister preaches, “Don’t feel sorry for Big Mama. There’s no more illness. No more pain. No more suffering in a society where the color of skin was more important than the quality of your talent.”

Other heartbreaking moments in the book come by way of women like Lavern Baker. When she played passionate early rock performances in the segregated South, the audience would have “music tantrums” breaking the ropes separating them, coming together in a way she referred to as “gorgeous” despite white southerners’ condemnation of the temporary desegregation. Baker believed her music would speak for itself, so she didn’t rely on memoir or interviews to document her impact. However, as Mahon notes, “The fact that she was an African American woman worked against that contribution being fully acknowledged in histories of a genre that had developed a profile as the purview of white men.”

As I read each page of Black Diamond Queens, learning about the Black women who contributed to not only the sound but the ethos of rock and roll, I felt like I was also learning about myself. In the end, the stories felt less like a permission slip to feel at home in a genre I most resonate with, but a reminder that, like these women, I should never feel the need to ask for permission at all.

Larry Kudlow‘s Fox Business debut is off to a rocky start. During a Tuesday appearance on Fox News’ America Reports to promote, Kudlow, his new weekday show premiering that afternoon, the former economic advisor to Donald Trump was caught on a hot mic saying “bullsh*t” at multiple times while discussing Vice President Kamala Harris’ recent remarks on the previous administration’s COVID vaccine distribution plan, or more specifically, it’s lack thereof.

Harris had appeared on HBO’s Axios on Sunday where she claimed that the Biden administration is essentially starting from scratch when it comes to getting COVID vaccines to the American public. “There was no national strategy or plan for vaccinations. We were leaving it to the states and the local leaders to try and figure it out,” Harris said. Kudlow was clearly not a fan and let his feelings be known without realizing his mic was still on. Via Mediaite:

[Sandra] Smith claimed that Harris was making “false claims” about the Trump administration’s vaccine rollout, but she was drowned out by Kudlow, who was still mic’ed up and shouting “Bullsh*t! Bullsh*t! Bullsh*t!” The program tried to cut the audio at that point, even as Smith was heard reacting “that is Larry Kudlow weighing in… Wow.”

While Kudlow’s outburst seems like an unscripted moment, it actually lines up with an interview he gave earlier in the week to Variety to promote his upcoming Fox Business show. “I myself am not bashful about my own comments,” Kudlow said. “I have a few opinions.” Yeah, we know, Larry. We just heard you yelling them.

(Via Mediaite)

Bob Odenkirk describes himself as a 58-year-old dad who worked as a comedy writer for 25 years and didn’t work out at all. But in his next movie, that body is going to do some ass-kicking. And so now we have a workout video that attempts to explain how that happened.

In a video Odenkirk did with Men’s Health, he details the workout plan that allowed him to star in Nobody, a John Wick-style action flick where the dude from Tom Goes To The Mayor kills a bunch of people with his hands and feet.

“It’s very different than everything I’ve done my whole life,” Odenkirk says, as clips from his turn as Saul Goodman in Breaking Bad play. “So I had to do a lot of training and I got into good shape.”

Odenkirk credited Daniel Bernhart for his workout, and the stunt actor and trainer went through some important cardio and training steps. There’s a lot of blasting going on here, both of his core and quads. And uphill biking in a mask, because safety first.

Odenkirk also showed off the basics of “screen fighting” and did plenty of different bodyweight workouts, as well as some boxing. It’s actually a really good routine, and the video has some extra tips about improvising workouts. Considering many of us are stuck at home and may not want to go to a gym, you can actually learn a few things from the video. But it’s also a nice warmup to seeing Odenkirk in action, which may blunt the jarring effect of him suddenly morphing into John Wick when Nobody hits theaters later this year.

Tuesday marks exactly ten years since Tyler The Creator and Hodgy Beats brought their off-kilter group Odd Future to the then-titled TV series Late Night With Jimmy Fallon. At the time, the show had only been on air for two years. So when Questlove, whose group The Roots is the show’s house band, got news that Odd Future was coming to their stage, he was apprehensive. Questlove had heard rumors of Odd Future’s rebellious energy, so he was worried that their performance would lead to the network canceling Fallon’s show.

Reminiscing on the performance in an interview with Complex, Questlove recalled his anxieties ahead of the scheduled set. “My first thought was, ‘Yo, what if they try to pull off some rogue sh*t that’ll make them internet famous?’” he said. “So I thought, like, ‘This is either going to come off nicely or this could be the end. Like, we could get canceled after only being on the air for two years.” The musician also remembers thinking at the time, “This is some real sh*t that’s about to happen, and I don’t know if they know what they’re about to get into.”

But when Questlove actually encountered Tyler on set, the rapper only had one thing on his mind: Justin Bieber. “The weirdest thing was, Tyler instantly disarmed me with—of all things in the world—a conversation about Justin Bieber,” he said. “The Biebs had been on the show recently, so Tyler kept asking me, ‘What’s he like, man? You’ve got to tell me about Biebs, man. What was that motherf*cker like?’ And I thought he was trying to troll me. But 10 minutes into the conversation, I was like, ‘Wait a minute. You really do like Justin Bieber!’”

Fallon wasn’t worried, however. Instead, the host was along for the ride. “I think they were so nervous, because it was their first time, that they left,” Fallon recalled. “Some bands do that. They perform, and then they think they’re kind of in trouble or something. They finish their song, and then they go, ‘All right, let’s get out of here.’ I remember even Kanye was nervous when he performed. He was like, ‘Can I do that one more time?’ I thought there were going to be people right in front of me. I didn’t know it was just going to be cameras.’”

Watch a clip of their raucous performance above.

Most of us set out on our parenting journey with the best of intentions to keep our kids off of screens, and some of us may even succeed at it to some degree. But we live in the digital age, and especially in a year like the one we’ve just had, parents also need to utilize the tools we have to stay sane.

Since smartphones make it so most of us carry a screen around with us at all times, it’s easy for parents to pull up a child’s favorite show or movie to put on when the going gets tough. What’s not so easy is keeping a kid from touching the screen or pushing buttons that take them out of the video (best case scenario) or mess up your apps or settings on your phone (I once had a kid accidentally do a hard reset on my iPhone by accident—oof).

Apparently, folks with Android phones have something called “Kid Mode” that takes care of that issue with one step. For parents with iPhones, it’s not nearly so simple.

However, a dad on TikTok has shared how to do it in a video that’s been viewed more than 25 million times. The steps aren’t super intuitive, but once you get it down it only takes a few seconds to play a video on the phone while disabling the screen and buttons so a kid can’t muck anything up.

Here’s the video with step-by-step instructions below:

(The instructions below work on an iPhone 11. Other versions may work slightly differently.)

1) Search for Guided Access in Settings.

2) Turn on “Guided Access” and “Accessibility Shortcut”

3) Start playing a video in an app (YouTube, Netflix, whatever)

4) Triple-click the power button. This will turn on Guided Access.

5) Click “Options,” then disable all of the options.

6) Click “Done” and then “Start” or “Resume.” The video should play and you should be able to touch anywhere on the screen and push any button and nothing should happen.

7) To end Guided Access and stop the video, triple-click the power button, then click “End.” (You may have to enter your phone’s passcode before clicking “End,” depending on your security settings.)

Though that all may sound overly complicated, once you have the initial set-up done, it’s just a matter of triple-clicking the power button and disabling the options any time you want to put on a video for your kiddo. (Or setting specific options—you can actually set a time limit during that step, which parents may find useful. Or you can make it so that the volume buttons work but nothing else does.)

Guided Access can also be used to keep kids just in one app, so if they want to play a game but you don’t want them to be able to do anything else, you can enable Guided Access and just keep the Options turned on. The hack above just makes it so you can keep one specific video playing (which is helpful in an app like YouTube Kids, where it’s so easy for kids to click into other videos).

Undoubtedly, some people will chastise parents for handing their kids a video to watch instead of interacting with them, but sometimes a parent’s gotta do what a parent’s gotta do. Pandemic parenting has added an extra layer of difficulty to child-rearing, so everyone needs to give one another an extra measure of grace and understanding. So many of us are working from home now with kids out of daycare or school, and even full-time stay-at-home parents need a break from the relentlessness.

While too much screen time is certainly a valid concern, watching a quality kids’ show on a phone here and there isn’t going to ruin a child. However, it might just save a parent’s sanity, and any tool that makes parenting a bit easier right now is a welcome gift.

Since releasing her debut single “Drivers License,” singer and actor Olivia Rodrigo has been busy. Along with being put in the middle of a teen pop love triangle, she’s earned co-signs by celebrities like Taylor Swift and Halsey and completely dominated the charts. Now, her prosperity continues: On the Billboard Hot 100 chart dated February 20, “Drivers License” is once again at No. 1.

Rodrigo holding down the No. 1 spot impressively marks the fifth consecutive week the song has topped the charts. The song remaining in the top spot is a big achievement, seeing as not many songs that debut at No. 1 stay there. In fact, “Drivers License” is only one of ten songs to ever spend its first five weeks at No. 1.

According to Billboard, “Drivers License” actually saw an increase in both streams and downloads this week compared to last. The song racked up 27.6 million US streams and 16,000 downloads, which is an increase of 26 percent since the last reported charts.

Rodrigo wasn’t the only musician who scored big on the Hot 100 chart this week. The Weeknd, who is on the heels of his grandiose Super Bowl halftime show performance, holds two songs in the top four spots. His After Hours track “Blinding Lights” is seated at No. 3 while his song “Save Your Tears” hovers closely behind at No. 4. This means that this week marks the tenth time The Weeknd has simultaneously held two top-five positions on the Hot 100.

Check out this week’s top ten singles above.

Kehlani has the honor of gracing Playboy‘s second-ever digital cover, which also comes with a Kehlani Q&A. In the feature, she reveals that now that she is a mother, she feels sexier than she ever has.

Kehlani was asked how it feels to be a sex symbol and she responded:

“I hope people know being a mom doesn’t make you less sexy. Being a mom is the sexiest thing ever. I think something happened to me when I became a mom; I just became sexier. I was this quirky little person before — not super in touch with myself, a super tomboy. Then I became a mom, and all of a sudden I got these mom hips. I got this mom sensuality and grown-woman attitude and in-touch-ness with my body that I never had before. You really f*cking get to know your body when you birth. When you get pregnant, you become a f*cking universe and a portal. So I think motherhood has made me this insane sex symbol even to myself.”

She also described the times when she feels like she’s at her sexiest, saying, “I feel the sexiest when I’m really bare — when I’m taking extra time to oil up after my bath and put essential oils into my shea butter. For me, sexy is very internal. It’s in the comfort and the feeling — not when do I look most sexy, but when do I feel scrumptious? When do I feel like, ‘Oh, somebody could just come lick me from my head to my toe right now. That’s how f*cking good I smell and that’s how moisturized I am.’ That’s when I feel sexy.”

Check out the full interview here and check out some photos and behind-the-scenes footage from the feature below.

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

A winter storm hammered numerous corners of the United States over the last few days, with Texas getting hit particularly hard. Power outages across the state have been reported, as a state not used to this sort of inclement weather is now reckoning with the fact that more than 4.4 million citizens were unable to get electricity as of Tuesday morning, according to CNN.

In response to all of this, the Dallas Mavericks announced that they would not be able to play their previously-scheduled home tilt against the Detroit Pistons, which was slated to take place on Wednesday evening. The team made clear that the Texas state government’s response to the crisis made playing the game untenable, and while there is no word on when they will able to take the floor against one another, the plan is to reschedule the game at a later date.

Dallas is currently scheduled to play its next three games — a road tilt against Houston on Friday and home games against Memphis and Boston next Monday and Tuesday, respectively — in Texas before embarking on a three-game road trip. As for the other Texas teams, the Rockets are in Philadelphia on Wednesday before returning home, while San Antonio’s next four games are postponed due to COVID-19.

Throughout hip-hop’s long and well-documented history, MCs have been boasting about their sexual prowess. While this pendulum swings both ways, for much of that history, way too much focus was put on men’s points of view on the subject, leading to a genre that is still steeped in toxic masculinity and over-the-top declarations of sexual conquest. Not only does UPROXX Sessions’ latest guest BigKlit seem like a counterpoint to that perspective, but her performance song “Liar” truly takes that version of the narrative to task.

For one thing, BigKlit doesn’t bother rapping smoothly, she shout-raps as aggressively as possible, straight up accusing men — rappers, f*ckboys, and dudes, in general — of “lyin’ on your dick,” i.e., inflating their abilities and accomplishments when bragging to make themselves seem more important. Whether that’s generous accounting of the number of partners a guy has had or “adding inches” when describing their physical attributes, BigKlit is having none of it, challenging those assertations and assuring the titular “Liar” that he’s “a slave for this pussy” who’s just “insecure inside.” Remember guys, hit dogs holler — if you feel a way about it, she might be talking to you.

Watch BigKlit’s UPROXX Sessions performance of “Liar” above.

UPROXX Sessions is Uproxx’s performance show featuring the hottest up-and-coming acts you should keep an eye on. Featuring creative direction from LA promotion collective, Ham On Everything, and taking place on our “bathroom” set designed and painted by Julian Gross, UPROXX Sessions is a showcase of some of our favorite performers, who just might soon be yours, too.