Category: Worldwide

Outgoing U.S. President Donald Trump went into the White House while directing his spokesman to tell blatant, huffy lies about his crowd size, but he can’t tweet out those same lies about his departure, four years later. Yep, Trump literally left the building early on January 20. He will not attend Joe Biden’s inauguration but, instead, left for his Florida Mar-a-Lago residence. First though, he descended Marine One at Joint Base Andrews (for a final military send-off), and this is where things come full circle. Apparently, Trump’s planned departure rally did not go as planned. The chain of events as narrated on CNN was kind-of amazing.

Things looked calm enough when Jake Tapper tweeted footage of Trump flying away and made uneventful comment while kicking off coverage.

Then the dam began to break. Dana Bash got an initial dig in, saying that Trump “just looks like a small man” as he crossed the White House lawn.

And when Trump arrived at Joint Base Andrews, his followers weren’t really there for him. Wolf Blitzer flat-out called this a “pathetic, tiny little crowd.”

White House Correspondent Jim Acosta was on the scene at Joint Base Andrews, where the farewell Trump rally went as follows: “There’s no crowd at all here. This might be the smallest Trump rally ever.”

Acosta wasn’t done yet. He declared that the scene “feels more like a deposed autocrat going into exile.” And he quoted a Trump aide who stated, “Trump is like spoiled food in the refrigerator now. It’s just time to throw him out.”

Here was Acosta this morning, ready and waiting. And watching.

Trump out.

In Stephen Colbert’s first monologue after Donald Trump was elected president, he said, “We have four very interesting years in front of us.” Four years later, “I might have undersold that just a smidge,” The Late Show host joked in his final monologue of the Trump administration. Speaking from his home as the country’s lackluster response to the pandemic has made in-studio tapings impossible, Colbert recalled some of Trump’s most memorable moments as president.

“Some of the highlights of his lowlights include starting his presidency by decrying ‘American carnage,’ his Muslim travel ban, ‘very fine people on both sides,’ bonding with Putin in Helsinki, bonding with Kim Jong-un in Singapore, bonding with the My Pillow guy everywhere else, wanting to trade Puerto Rico for Greenland, talking about nuking hurricanes or changing their path with a Sharpie, calling the 26 women who accused him of sexual assault ‘liars,’ wishing an accused sex trafficker well, caging asylum seeking children that he tore from their parents, getting impeached for trying to blackmail Ukraine to interfere in our election, completely shanking a pandemic, teargassing peaceful protesters, holding a Bible dumb, undermining faith in our democracy, inciting an angry mob to murder his own vice president, and ruining ‘Y.M.C.A,’” an exhausted Colbert said. “We didn’t even try hard for that list. We were just like, it’s only an hour show.”

But despite all that misery, Colbert found one good thing that’s happened over the last four years. “Throughout all of the craziness and threats to everything we hold sacred, there was one hero who kept our country together. And that’s you. The American people,” he said. “For all of his dangerous assaults on democracy, democracy kicked his ass all the way back to Florida. And in this case, I for one will never be sick of winning.”

You can watch the monologue above.

Since the start of the pandemic, all most artists have wanted to do is perform live in front of an in-person audience again. That sort of thing isn’t happening in the US right now, but it is down in New Zealand: 20,000 people recently attended a concert in the country with no social distancing measures in place. On January 3, Earthgang was the only American act to perform at New Zealand festival Bay Dreams, and now they’ve spoken about how that experience felt.

In an interview with Billboard, Earthgang’s Olu (aka Johnny Venus) said, “It was ecstatic. It had literally been months since we’d been in front of thousands of people. Then we actually got a chance to do it again, be in front of the people and really vibe with them, and that energy’s insane. It was amazing, it was magical. It was a reminder of how magical it can be.”

They were asked about what the pre-concert quarantine process was like (which took place during Christmas), and WowGr8 (aka Doctur Dot) described it as strict, saying:

“Yeah, that was an interesting quarantine. […] They had us like all in separate hotel rooms. And it was like military outside. We got the COVID test about three, four times [a week] maybe. Like every two days, they would do another test. It was a very serious process. After a while, it got a little maddening to be just staying in one building. You can’t even go outside and have a little peep of land for a little while.”

When questioned about how many safety measures festivalgoers had to take, WowGr8 responded, “Zero! There’s zero COVID measures. The government took all the measures when they made us quarantine inside, and they took all the measures earlier in 2020, when they actually shut down the country. When we got outside, the only people who had masks on were Uber drivers and people who worked at hotels, and that was only in some of the cities. Everybody else did not have a mask on unless they just wanted to, but no, you did not have to have a mask on. You did not have to socially distance. Of course, hygiene is always a focus, so they had hand sanitizer stations and things like that available. But other than that, nothing.”

Find the full interview here.

On Tuesday, news arrived that Olivia Rodrigo landed the first No. 1 song of her career with “Drivers License” topping the singles chart. Just a week after its official release, the track tallied 100 million streams on Spotify, a massive success that the streaming platform said it has “never seen” before. The new achievement also made her one of the youngest artists ever to take the No. 1 spot on the Hot 100 at just 17 years and 11 months old. With that being said, there is plenty of celebration in order for the young singer and it seems like some of it will involve Cardi B as the two shared an awesome moment with each other on Twitter.

Cardi hopped on Twitter to show some light-hearted love to Rodrigo about her chart-topping single. “Just like that girl wrote a song about getting her drivers license Imma write a song about the struggle of not having a drivers license,” she wrote. “I really wanted my McDonald’s at 4am last night instead of today but I couldn’t so I felt asleep hungry .” Rodrigo caught wind of the tweet hours later and replied, “girl i will pick u up and take u wherever u wanna go.” Cardi returned the excitement to the pop singer and said, “Yaaayyy !!! Let’s go to McDonald’s and get happy meals !”

The interaction between Cardi and Rodrigo comes after Halsey gifted the pop singer with a custom “Drivers License” cake to celebrate the No. 1 song.

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

Wednesday marks the end of Donald Trump’s presidency and the start of Joe Biden’s term as the nation’s leader. Despite this, Trump is using his presidential powers to the fullest extent in order to hand out pardons to several individuals in prison or facing charges for an array of crimes. According to Reuters, some of those having their sentences commuted were rappers Lil Wayne and Kodak Black, who were both pardoned by Trump on Tuesday night. The action comes a week after reports claimed that the rappers were on the president’s list of potential pardons.

Wayne’s commute comes after he pled guilty in December to illegal possession of a firearm, a charge he was set to face up to 10 years in prison for due to a prior felony gun possession conviction. The new charge stemmed from a December 2019 incident where federal agents were tipped off about a firearm on Wayne’s plane at Miami-Opa Locka Executive Airport. After a search was conducted, a gold-plated Remington 1911, .45-caliber handgun was found in his bag. Kodak Black, on the other hand, is currently in prison for falsifying documents in order to buy a firearm. He was arrested on the charge in May 2019 and six months later he was sentenced to 46 months in prison.

In addition to Wayne and Kodak’s commute, Trump reportedly also pardoned Death Row Records’ co-founder Michael “Harry-O” Harris.

(via Reuters)

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

Like all social media platforms, TikTok has its pluses and negatives. In a string of posts to Twitter, Doja Cat spoke about the latter after announcing she would no longer post her own videos to the popular app.

“I’m not comfortable making tik toks anymore i feel like something is wrong w me. y’all got me,” she wrote in a tweet. One of Doja’s followers replied and apologized for “people in the world who think spreading hate and leaving rude comments on posts is ok.” The “Say So” singer responded, saying, “They’re not even being hateful they’re just unintentionally gaslighting and i’m deadass not fit to just take the joke cuz i’ve actually struggled w sh*t before and i have a lot of fear in me so it just adds up in the end when i read that kind of sh*t.”

Another fan attempted to reassure Doja that most of the negative comments are “for likes” and not a direct attempt to offend her. While she admitted that she understands and sees it that way, she also said it’s still “f*cking depressing” that she has to deal with it. Doja ultimately placed the blame on herself saying that she put herself “out there to be made fun of” early in her career but now it’s “reached a point for me personally so i’m done w the funny sh*t.” She added, “Y’all can make fun of my music n my performances cuz those not meant to be a joke and ill feel better about that.”

Trump’s been busy his last days in office. He announced a weird garden. He dropped a history pamphlet that downplayed slavery, on MLK Day. But he also threatened to make an avalanche of pardons, which he was a bit slow to do. Indeed, it was mere hours until the end of his presidency that word spread about one of the biggest, and least surprising potential pardons. According to CNN, he’s reportedly going to bestow the honor upon Steve Bannon, his former Senior Counselor, with whom he had a falling out after his departure from the White House in 2017.

Sources stress that nothing is final until Trump signs it — and, as of this writing, he only has about eight hours left in office. And what is the crime for which Bannon would be pardoned? As per CNN, back in August of 2020, he and three accomplices were federally charged with “defrauding donors of more than a million dollars as part of a fundraising campaign purportedly aimed at supporting Trump’s border wall.” In others words, Trump is pardoning Bannon for ripping off his own supporters.

Bannon was a key architect of the outgoing president’s campaign in 2016, a job for which he left his post executive chairman at Breitbart News, where Trump remains a (mostly) hallowed figure to this day. Though the two parted ways — in part because he insulted his kids, even calling Ivanka “dumb as a brick” — they had reportedly reconnected in the last months of Trump’s administration. Bannon allegedly fanned the flames of his voter fraud conspiracy theories, and on the day before the failed MAGA coup, he told listeners of his podcast, called “War Room,” that “All hell is going to break loose tomorrow.”

When news broke of Bannon’s potential pardon, people were quick to point out what he was being pardoned for.

Some remembered Bannon didn’t work alone.

Others reminded people that Bannon, like Trump, is banned from Twitter, albeit for the crime of demanding people be beheaded.

Others remembered other weird Bannon stuff.

Some reminded everyone that Trump doesn’t pardon people because he likes them.

In any case, this hardly means Bannon is out of the woods.

On a more amusing note, there as at least one case of accidentally appropriate autocorrects.

(Via CNN)

After going more than three years without a solo single, SZA was back in action at the end of 2020 with a pair of singles: “Hit Different” and “Good Days.” The latter became the singer’s most successful single after it cracked the top 25 of the singles chart last week, coming in at No. 23. Now it’s the first song of her career to earn a top 10 spot on the Billboard chart.

Once SZA got word of the news, she took to Twitter to rejoice. “Listen to me .. I’m so fucking speechless I JUST WANNA SAY THANK YOU FOR TAKING US TO THE TOP FUCKING TEN I DONT UNDERSTAND HOW WE GOT HERE BUT GOD IS ACTUALLY WYLING,” she wrote. “Wow THANK YOU SO MUCH I LOVE YOU!! BEYOND THE INNANNETS.” She also added that the music video for the track is “COMING SOON AFFFF.”

Speaking of, SZA recently asked fans to submit clips for the video and she said there were so many submissions that the Gmail account she created ran out of space. Despite the overwhelming amount of clips, she told her followers that the music video would not be strictly fan-submitted footage, saying, “it’s PART of the video .. jus part.”

For the last four years, the majority of Republican lawmakers have stuck by Donald Trump’s side, through thick and thin, no matter how many norms he shredded, even when as he spread voter fraud lies. That changed dramatically on January 6. Since the failed MAGA coup, key GOP leaders — among them Mitch McConnell — have finally thrown him under the bus, as though they, too, had had enough. (But at least he still has the MyPillow guy.) But it looks like Trump has an ace up his sleeve: According to the Wall Street Journal, the outgoing president has been talking about starting his own political party.

Sources tell the publication that in his final full week in office, Trump was telling several aides about the new party, which he was thinking of calling the “Patriot Party.” (It’s worth nothing that many of those who stormed the Capitol loudly referred to themselves as “patriots.”)

As per WSJ, it’s “unclear how serious Mr. Trump is” about this new venture, adding that doing so “would require a significant investment of time and resources.” The piece also point out that third parties, such as the Green Party, usually fail to draw significant support in elections, often siphoning off voters from the two major parties.

In other words, it could be disastrous for Republicans if Trump could wrangle the resources to steal his die-hard base from the party. Of course, he’s also about to deal with potential financial and legal troubles, and that’s on top of the looming impeachment vote in the Senate that could bar him from running for president in 2024. Then again, there’s always Don Jr.

In any case, when the news broke, people on Twitter — where Trump is permanently banned — had jokes.

Although some doubted the name would stick.

And some pointed out that it might not have been Trump’s idea.

(Via WSJ)

In just a little over two weeks, Foo Fighters will share their tenth album Medicine At Midnight, which will be their first full-length release since 2017’s Concrete And Gold. The upcoming album was first announced at the beginning of November and since then, the group has built up anticipation by sharing songs and interesting tidbits about it. Recently frontman Dave Grohl delivered some new information about the album’s second single, “No Son Of Mine.”

During an interview with the U.S. edition of OK! magazine, Grohl revealed that the song is a tribute to the late Lemmy Kilmister, aka simply Lemmy, the Motörhead singer, who passed away in 2015. “[It started out with] this country swing to it, but then we decided for something a bit more aggressive, and it turned into these chunky riffs,” he said. “I wish Lemmy were alive to hear it, because he would see how much an influence he’s been to me.”

In another interview with Classic Rock magazine, Grohl reflected on a morning he spent drinking with Lemmy. “I was shocked at how f*cking disgusting it was,” he said. “These aisles of magazines and VHS tapes, stacked three to four feet high, Lemmy sitting on the couch, in his black bikini underwear with a spiderweb on them, after just dyeing his hair black, doing a phone interview, with a video game on pause on the television.”

(via Classic Rock)

Medicine At Midnight is 2/5 via Roswell/RSA. Pre-order it here.