Category: Worldwide

The past couple of years have been rather quiet for the Top Dawg Entertainment, who’ve only released three full-length projects from their talented acts since the start of 2019. In fact it’s been three years since signees like SZA, Kendrick Lamar, and Ab-Soul have put out new albums. Luckily it looks like that will change this year. On New Year’s Day, Ab-Soul hopped on Twitter with some good news about his upcoming fifth album. “Yea the album is on the way, but you knew that,” he wrote in a tweet. One person asked if there was one coming from Kendrick, too, to which Ab-Soul simply replied, “Yup.”

Ab-Soul’s upcoming album will be his first since 2016’s Do What Thou Wilt, while Lamar’s fifth will be his first solo release since 2017’s DAMN.. Ab-Soul’s tweet came just a day after the Roskilde Festival — which will take place in the Netherlands between June 26 and July 3, 2021 — confirmed that new music from Lamar, who headlines the festival, would arrive at some point this year. “Lamar first visited Roskilde Festival in 2013 when he played an unforgettable concert on the Arena stage,” a message on the festival’s website read. “Two albums later — and with new material along the way — he is once again ready to take Roskilde Festival’s main stage with a concert that is likely to be one of the absolute highlights of the summer.”

Ever since the election two months ago, John Fetterman has become the most famous lieutenant governor in these United States. He may be a burly beast built like Thanos, but he fights for the side of good, ridiculing Trump’s lies, taunting Republicans whose allegations of voter fraud wound up involving Republican voters, even daring the powers-that-be to take down the pride flags he has flying on state grounds. All that made the news on Tuesday even more disturbing.

As per The Philadelphia Inquirer, the state’s Republican lawmakers refused to seat a new Democratic senator, Jim Brewster, who’d narrowly defeated challenger Nicole Ziccarelli. There was much rancor. There was shouting between Republicans and Fetterman, who was presiding over the session. And after an hour Republicans had voted to remove Fetterman from his spot at the rostrum, even escorting him out of the chamber after he refused to leave.

Pennsylvania Republicans had already tried to contest the senator’s win. As per the Inquirer:

“Brewster narrowly won reelection over Republican challenger Nicole Ziccarelli, who is asking a federal judge to throw out the election results. At the heart of that legal dispute is several hundred mail ballots that lacked a handwritten date on an outer envelope, as required by state law. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court allowed those ballots to be counted, which gave Brewster the edge in the race.”

But even though Brewster’s re-election had already been certified by the state, Republicans simply refused to acknowledge their defeat. For now, at least, Brewster will have to be wait to be sworn in, while Republicans insist they receive more court time on a case they already lost.

If this sounds familiar, it should. Pennsylvania lawmakers condemned the Republicans’ gambit, with Senate Majority Leader Jay Costa calling their ploy right out of “the Trump playbook.” Governor Tom Wolfe called it “simply unethical and undemocratic,” adding, Republicans in Pennsylvania and nationally have spread disinformation and used it to subvert the democratic process.”

The outspoken Fetterman predictably did not mince words, saying, “This was a corruption of the fundamental democratic franchise in our state.” In any case, buckle in, everyone, the next couple weeks will be a bumpy — or even bumpier, somehow — ride.

(Via The Philadelphia Inquirer)

The process of transforming a world where injustice persists into one where justice reigns is a long, slow, multi-faceted one. Much of it is invisible work, and progress is often two steps forward, one step back.

But occasionally, a project comes along that is both a symbolic and practical manifestation of change. The Echo Project in Laurens, South Carolina is one of those projects.

In 1996, the Redneck Shop and “World’s Only Klan Museum” was opened in the historic Echo Theater in Laurens. The Echo had been a segregated theater during the Jim Crow era, and the town of Laurens itself was named for a wealthy slave-trader, Henry Laurens, so perhaps that shouldn’t be surprising. But still.

With Confederate flags flying and a swastika hanging on the back wall, the Redneck Shop sold racist clothing, bumper stickers, KKK robes, and other paraphernalia to neo-Nazis for years.

In an odd series of events, the ownership of the building changed hands, which changed history. First it went from the former KKK Grand Wizard John Howard (who founded the shop) to his young protege Michael Burden (who lived in the building). During a temporary falling out with Howard and change of heart in 1997, Burden sold the deed to the building to Reverend David Kennedy, a Black civil rights activist whose church helped Burden out.

There was one caveat in the deed transfer—Howard would be allowed to keep running the Redneck Shop in the theater until he died.

Strange arrangement, right? Rev. Kennedy had held protests in front of the shop in the building he owned, but legally he couldn’t close it. And this went on for years. In 2006, the theater even hosted the Aryan Nations’ World Congress.

Finally, Rev. Kennedy took legal action to oust Howard and his racist shop and museum, and after a 4-year-long lawsuit, was successful. In May 2012, the Redneck Shop closed for good. (Kennedy’s story has been turned into a feature film, “Burden,” starring Forrest Whittaker, which was released last year.)

Now the theater is being prepped to become a diversity center that will focus on racial harmony and healing, which will also house a museum on racial reconciliation.

Regan Freeman helped co-found the Echo Project with Rev. Kennedy and has raised $300,000 toward the building’s renovation. He’s in the process of collecting stories of Black residents around Laurens to help build the history of the area, but it was a woman’s tweet that led him to a disturbing treasure trove of items that will add something tangible to that history.

According to ABC News, Freeman responded to a tweet from a woman who owns the land that John Howard had lived on. She had bins of items that had belonged to Howard, which she was offering to the Southern Poverty Law Center. After some negotiations, the woman sold them to Freeman. The bins include posters of Hitler, a “Klan Rally Instructions” manual, photo negatives of cross burnings, and offensive caricatures of Black people, and “business cards” KKK members would leave Black families as a form of intimidation. (The cards said that their visit had been a social one, and “don’t make the next visit a business call.”)

“This stuff isn’t from 100 years ago. Some of it is maybe from the last decade or two,” Freeman told ABC News. “I think it is important to see it and see how deep this hate goes so you can see why we need to fight so hard to change.”

Freeman plans to go through the items with historians from the University of South Carolina to determine which of them should be preserved and which will best inform the storytelling Freeman plans to do at the theater.

Though it’s appalling that the theater housed a shrine to hatred a dozen years into the 21st century, the Echo Project offers a ray of hope that transformation is possible.

“We’re hoping The Echo Project will become a place where every race could be respected — a place where diversity is not only just talked about, but is celebrated through action,” Kennedy told ABC News.

Beatuiful. Can’t wait to see it, Reverend Kennedy.

Transgender rights are some of the most controversial issues of the day. In recent years, there have been passionate fights in state and federal governments over transgender people’s rights to serve in the military, gain access to gender-affirming healthcare, and use the appropriate restroom.

It’s reasonable to believe that we could make more progress on these issues if people understood the experiences of transgendered people.

Gay, lesbian, and bisexual Americans have gained greater acceptance into mainstream society over the past few decades after becoming more visible.

When then-prime-time sitcom star Ellen Degeneres came out of the closet on her show in 1997 it was a landmark moment for gay rights because many Americans who weren’t familiar with the community felt they knew Degeneres.

This led to greater understanding and acceptance of LGBT people.

One way that we can help others better understand the transgender community is by explaining what it feels like to live with gender dysphoria. Many transgendered people experience gender dysphoria which, to put it simply, is the excruciating feeling of being trapped inside the wrong body.

According to the American Psychiatric Association, “Some people who are transgender will experience ‘gender dysphoria,’ which refers to psychological distress that results from an incongruence between one’s sex assigned at birth and one’s gender identity.”

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5)1 defines it as “a marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and their assigned gender.”

According to Black’s Medical Dictionary, gender dysphoria occurs in one in 30,000 male-assigned births and one in 100,000 female-assigned births. A study published by Cedar’s Sinai says that 73% of transgender women and 78% of transgender men first experienced gender dysphoria by age seven.

“Gender dysphoria can come from the body, where one may feel distress over a part of their anatomy, such as their genitals, chest, or hair,” Jessie Earl writes for The Advocate. “Dysphoria can also come from social factors, such as not feeling comfortable wearing ‘women’s’ clothing or being referred to by gendered pronouns.

These explanations provide a clear way for the medical community to understand gender dysphoria. But how do you get through to someone who’s still stuck in an outdated mindset that being transgender is a form of perversion?

A Reddit user who goes by the name Cascadeon recently provided an easy-to-understand metaphor for what it feels like to live with gender dysphoria. Their simple answer is a great way to explain the issue to someone who has a hard time understanding what it’s like seeing things from a transgendered perspective.

This is an analogy I used to tell people, I don’t know if it helps but maybe.

Gender is a lot like a pair of shoes. If you have on a good, comfortable, well fitting pair, you don’t notice it or think about it. As you walk around you aren’t constantly thinking about your shoes and the comfort, it’s just there and fine and normal and it doesn’t concern you one single bit. It’s almost hard to notice because if they feel fine it seems to silly and unimportant to spend energy thinking about it.

But if your shoes are too small and tight or there is a rock in them it’s all you can think about. Every step is annoying and miserable and you don’t want to do anything else until you fix this damned rock. Doing anything else seems crazy until your shoes stop hurting you.

So I think in that sense, most people probably can’t really conceptualize the feeling of their gender well because it just fits right and always has, so it’s hard to imagine how all the small, normal things just constantly feel wrong, even if you are alone in your home.

In the end, empathy is the key to understanding. By finding more effective ways to present the experiences of marginalized groups, we can bridge the gap between these communities and those who deny them their rights. Or, in other words, teach them what it’s like to walk a mile in their shoes.

Though a divorce seemed just as imminent for Kim and Kanye back in 2016, it appears this time the super star couple really are finished. According to the extremely reliable celebrity gossip source Page Six, “multiple sources” have confirmed that the pair are working on a settlement agreement and their marriage is over.

“They are keeping it low-key but they are done,” says the Page Six source. “Kim has hired Laura Wasser and they are in settlement talks. Kim got Kanye to go up there [Wyoming] so they could live separate lives and quietly get things sorted out to separate and divorce. She’s done. Now this divorce is happening because Kim has grown up a lot. She is serious about taking the bar exam and becoming a lawyer, she is serious about her prison reform campaign. Meanwhile Kanye is talking about running for president and saying other crazy sh*t, and she’s just had enough of it.”

Kanye was notably absent for most of Kim’s 40th birthday party, a celebration on an island in the middle of a global pandemic that drew lots of criticism. Though he wasn’t present, Kanye did come for one day and send a hologram of her late father as a present for Kim. Romantic? Kanye also spent the holidays in Wyoming instead of with the massive Kardashian family, who did manage to keep Christmas and New Year’s lowkey due to national medical advice to keep gatherings small and stay at home due to the pandemic.

And a separate source explains Kanye’s side of things, that he’s fed up with being involved with the media frenzy and everything being a part of that family involves. This source says that Kanye found their reality show “unbearable” and “is completely over the entire family” and “wants nothing to do with them.” The couple seemed to be on the rocks due to political disagreements like Kanye’s support of Trump and decision to run for president himself.

The couple were married in 2014 and have four children together: North, 7, Saint, 4, Chicago, 2 (three next week), and Psalm, 19 months.

J. Cole’s partnership with Puma has gone beyond just wearing their gear during special events. Cole’s become a major member of the Puma roster, working on creative instillations with the company and even getting his own signature sneaker with the company, the RS-Dreamer, which dropped back in July of 2020 right as the NBA and WNBA restarted their 2019-20 seasons in both of their Florida bubbles.

Now, Cole and Puma have something new up their sleeves. In an image posted to Cole’s Instagram account on Tuesday, the rapper is shown wearing a pair of vibrant yellow sneakers from the apparel company that have never been seen before. With the post was the caption “The Off-Season… Let’s work.“

Sources tell Uproxx that the name of the shoe is the Dreamer 2, the latest in the Puma Hoops Dreamer line. Not much is known about them outside of the name and the color scheme, but they do look to have a similar vibrant yellow color as the second signature sneaker Puma dropped as it got back into the basketball game, the Uproar Spectras. These, however, are yellow with yellow laces on what looks to be a black sole and midsole with a black tongue that features the RSD logo. While the price is still unknown, the first RS-Dreamer retailed for $125.

The 2020 NBA offseason was a strange one, as it took place over the course of a week or so in November with an incredibly condensed schedule that brought us from the NBA Draft to free agency to the preseason in one fell swoop. Within that, the strangest saga of the offseason was that of Bogdan Bogdanovic, the restricted free agent shooting guard of the Kings who was reported to be headed to Milwaukee in a sign-and-trade days before free agency began.

In the subsequent days, that deal fell apart in large part because Bogdanovic didn’t know it was happening and hadn’t agreed to a deal, which is a key part of a free agent sign-and-trade. The league investigated what happened and ended up docking the Bucks a future second round pick for tampering, and in the end, Bogdanovic ended up in Atlanta where he has taken on the role of sixth man for the Hawks, albeit a very well paid one.

On Tuesday, The Athletic’s Sam Amick published an interview with Bogdanovic that dove into that botched sign-and-trade from his perspective. The young Serbian standout said it eroded any remaining trust he had with the Kings, resulting in him wanting out and being worried they might match the Hawks deal, and also led to mass confusion for he and his team when he awoke in Serbia to the news on Twitter.

I just couldn’t believe everything was happening like that, you know? Nothing was in my hands, really. When I saw that tweet about the Milwaukee stuff, I really saw it on Twitter. It’s not bullshit. That’s why I felt caught off guard.

…

When the news came out, we were like, ‘What the fuck?’ I didn’t know what was going on. I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure what was going on.

It is truly one of the weirdest free agency stories in recent years, at least since the infamous DeAndre Jordan will he, won’t he between the Clippers and Mavericks with emojis and barricaded doors. For now, Bogdanovic seems happy to be out of Sacramento and on an up-and-coming Hawks team, even in a role he might not be fully enthralled by — he says the right things about taking on whatever coach Lloyd Pierce calls on him to do, but it seems fairly clear he’s not in love with his sixth man role. As for the Bucks, they were left scrambling to refigure their roster after failing to land a fourth star, and are still working on dialing in their rotations as the season rolls on.

Alex Trebek made a lot of TV appearances over the years, the best of which is almost certainly the time on Cheers when Cliff Clavin unexpectedly bombed on Jeopardy! But he didn’t do a ton of movies, even if the only thing he did in them was play his charming self. (His filmography’s wild, too, spanning the Julia Roberts cancer weepie Dying Young, the Leslie Nielsen spoof Spy Hard, and the 2000 Charlie’s Angels.) But one of the last times you see him may wind up being his cameo in the long delayed Ryan Reynolds movie Free Guy, in which he played himself. And during the final run of Trebek’s Jeopardy! episodes, Reynolds paid back the favor, making a cameo on the beloved game show — a move that now seems extremely bittersweet.

Reynolds’ appearance came on the first Jeopardy! of 2021, when he appeared in the video of one of the night’s clues. His answer involved “NPCs,” and if you don’t know what that acronym stands for, well, then you’re not as up on things as Brayden Smith, the contestant who got it right. Here’s a hint, though: It involves the plot of Free Guy, in which he plays a Regular Joe he discovers he’s been living inside an open-world video game.

Reynolds’ appearance was paired with a brief montage from the film, which was supposed to open in July of 2020, but then, well, you know. (It’s now scheduled for May 21, but frankly even that seems optimistic.) Is this the first time what was essentially an ad for a movie was sneaked into a Jeopardy! clue? Possibly! Still, two of Canada’s most beloved entertainers briefly got to share a screen, even if that now feels unbearably sad.

News broke this week that super producer Jimmy Iovine had sold his catalog to Hipgnosis Songs Fund, but the money from the deal won’t be adding to Iovine’s already substantial fortune, but going toward education in Los Angeles.

In a statement, Iovine said that he’s committing the proceeds of the deal to build a high school in South LA, a school that will be something of an extension of the USC Jimmy Iovine and Andre Young Academy, an undergraduate program he established in 2013 with his frequent business partner Dr. Dre (Andre Young). “I’m happy that my work as a producer with so many great artists has found the right home,” Iovine said. No further details on the exact location or construction of the high school have been shared yet. As for the deal with Hipgnosis, founder Merck Mercuriadis gushed about his admiration for Iovine’s work over the years.

“While barely in my teens, I noticed that so many of my favorite albums had one name in common,” he told Billboard. “The best albums by John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith all had Jimmy Iovine on them. I have been glued to everything Jimmy does ever since. His incomparable success with Interscope and Beats means that he would never have to make a deal for money again, but leave it to Jimmy to figure out the most efficient way possible to use his producer royalties to build a best-in-class high school in the inner city and once again make a massive difference, as he has throughout his life. It’s an honor to now be a custodian of his incredible work on these iconic albums and I’m very happy to welcome him to the Hipgnosis family.”

If you’ve been extremely online at all in the past few months, you may have noticed a strange phenomenon: that Eve 6, a briefly medium-famous post-punk group from the early 2000s, had seemed to have been reborn as a weird Twitter account. The account had been on a tear, @-ing celebrity accounts, asking everyone from Elon Musk to Kamala Harris, “do you like the heart in the blender song?” This in reference to Eve 6’s biggest hit, 1998’s “Inside Out.”

A few even responded, leading to surreal moments like the actor Vincent D’Onofrio (Men In Black, Full Metal Jacket) checking in to say that he was more a fan of “Here’s To The Night.”

In parallel to that, the account seemed to be practicing radical honesty, both about Eve 6’s own trajectory and catalogue, and about a lot the folks they crossed paths with along the way to 90s and early aughts pseudo-stardom. About “Inside Out,” the so-called “heart in the blender song” that brought them fame and infamy, the account wrote “I was literally a virgin when I wrote that song,” adding the beautifully timed tag a few beats later, “i’ve since had sex.”

@Eve6 also shared a meme about it:

Then there were the celebrity stories, most notably all the ones starring Third Eye Blind’s Stephan Jenkins. Jenkins, one of the last of the rockstar’s rockstars, had, according to Eve 6, done everything from boasting of having slept with Eve 6’s girlfriend to getting him “fake arrested” for stealing candy.

Between the near-perfect style-imitation of popular weird Twitter accounts like Dril and PixelatedBoat, to the self-referential kitsch and conscious attempts to start surreal beefs, it was easy to wonder whether the Eve 6 guy had undergone some kind of Office Space-style conversion. Did he get hypnotized and then wake up one day simply not giving a shit? Or maybe the band, gearing up for another run with two of their three original members, had just hired a brilliant social media person who had a particular affinity for goofy leftist Twitter.

About that second possibility… In an age when brands like Steak Umms and Whoopie Pies frequently ape online irony, it’s impossible not to wonder “Is this a trick?” every time a new phenomenon crops up on Twitter. And this new incarnation of online Eve 6 seemed an almost too perfect new twist on the old Us Weekly standard, “Celebrities Are Just Like Us!” Only now reformulated, and aimed specifically, almost to the point of genuine pain, at me. “Bands you listened to in 2001 tweet just like you!”

The rebirth of Eve 6 as a funny Twitter account having already spawned countless articles, in everything from Spin to Rolling Stone to Billboard to the A/V Club, I had to know what was behind it. So I reached out to the account online. As it turns out, by his own reckoning and as far as I can verify, @Eve6 is indeed being controlled by Eve 6 frontman Max Collins, the writer of the heart in the blender song.

“I likened our Twitter account to Dudley Moore from Crazy People,” says Collins, now a 42-year-old father of two, a reference to the 1990 film in which Moore plays an advertising exec who one decides to tell the truth.

Collins also says he started playing around with the account right around the time he got back together with his other Eve 6 founding member Jon Siebels to start making new music. So in a way, both theories (change of heart or promotional strategy) are kind of true.

Still, it’s all the work of Collins himself, aka Eve 6, and perhaps I should’ve known. Just beneath the adherence to the weird Twitter style guide (no caps, frequent use of imagery divorced from traditional sentence structure, practiced glibness), there’s an honest introspection to the tweets that would be hard to fake. Which is probably why so many people seem to love them. The virgin thing, for instance, wasn’t just a joke, it was also true. Regarding the same song, Collins tweeted, “imagine if the worst diary entry you ever wrote as a teenager went double platinum.”

In that way, @Eve6 combines Mortified (the stage show where performers read their own adolescent diaries), irony Twitter, and True Hollywood Stories, all of which Collins seems fully aware of. As evidenced by his declaration, mid-random anecdote about Staind, “im writing the memoir of alternative rock mediocrity rn.”

And honestly, who better? Wordplay was always Eve 6’s strong suit (I always thought Eve 6 had the Cake curse, of becoming famous for arguably one of their lesser songs). With everyone suddenly interested again, I managed to get in touch with Collins almost immediately (probably not surprising for a musician in the middle of a quarantine who is also extremely online) and scheduled a Zoom call. (For the record, I beat the Washington Post by two days.)

—

I imagine you’ve gotten a lot of interview requests lately.

Yeah, a lot of interview stuff, a lot of podcast stuff. It’s just, it’s very surreal, the whole thing is quite surreal.

Have you been surprised by that?

I’ve been surprised by the whole thing. I guess I’d be lying if I said when I pushed out the “I was a virgin when I wrote the heart in a blender song” tweet that I didn’t think that it was a good tweet, but I didn’t think it would go viral.

So, I need to ask about your Stephan Jenkins’ feud/whatever. Also, I have a tangential connection there because my podcast co-host used to be friends with someone Stephan Jenkins was dating, so he does a Stephan Jenkins’ impression and also has Stephan Jenkins’ stories.

That’s funny.

I think you said one about him f*cking your girlfriend, but I’ll take any and all Stephan Jenkins’ stories.

Yeah, we were at the Fillmore, on his turf in San Francisco in the dressing room. And I don’t know if my impression of him will match up to your friends, but he was like [doing a Jenkins impression, which is sort of a cross between catty gay man and SoCal frat bro], “So, I heard you’re dating Sonya.” And I said, “Yeah.” And the context that makes this even funnier is that he was at least 34 at the time and I was 19 or 20, so he’s flexing on a teenager. And he goes, “You know I f*cked her, right?” And I honestly think I just laughed. But yeah, certainly never forgot it.

What year would that have been?

It would have been ’98, I think. ’98 or ’99. We did two tours with them. I can’t remember if they were consecutive but they were pretty close because we did their Bonfire Tour and then we did the MTV Campus Invasion Tour, and both tours were long, full U.S. runs. So, yeah.

You guys were still in high school when you had your first record deal?

Well, our first record deal was with a tiny label out of Orange County called Doctor Dream Records that signed all the guys from washed-up punk bands. We started doing a record with Steve Soto from The Adolescents. And then the label hooked us up with this woman named Jennifer Harold who had a syndicated radio program at the time called Radio Asylum. We recorded three live songs for her there in the studio, and she thought we were good and wanted to manage us and sent a copy of that live recording to Brian Malouf at RCA. A couple of months later Brian Malouf and another A&R guy flew out and saw us do a showcase out here. We did a showcase for them that I just remember being really awful. I remember our drummer dropping his sticks and stuff. And I was like, “Oh, they’re going to hate this.” But they didn’t and they signed us. But we stayed in high school and finished school. So it was a record deal, but in practice it was more like a glorified production deal. Because I feel like they thought, “Oh, maybe these kids will turn into something. We want to have a claim on it if they do.” I think that was their mentality.

Besides Third Eye Blind, who are some of the other people that you were touring with in your heyday? I don’t know if it’s offensive to say heyday or not but…

Oh dear, no. Not at all. Let’s see. We did a tour with Wheatus. A full headlining tour with Wheatus.

Oh yeah, I saw the tweet about you accidentally turning off their sound system at some point.

I accidentally stepped on their cable outside of the stage. And the thing about Wheatus is their show is completely self-sustained. They don’t even use a front of house guy. Their drums are electronic. They run their light show themselves. All the instruments are electric. There’s no acoustic sound emanating from the stage whatsoever. And when I stepped on this cable their entire light rig went out and a hundred percent of their sound went out in the middle of “Teenage Dirtbag.” Who else? American Hi-Fi, Goldfinger. We did a co-headline with them.

So I can’t remember if there was a Better Than Ezra story or if someone just asked you about that.

No. There’s not a Better Than Ezra story, there’s a Soul Asylum story. Maybe that’s what you’re thinking of? We were on tour with them in 2013, them and Everclear and Spacehog. We were doing a show at a venue on Long Island. And after my set I went with Dave [Pirner, of Soul Asylum] to this little bar that was around the corner and we were sitting there for a minute just talking and stuff. Then I realized I was late to go introduce Everclear. So I got up quickly and left, and when I walked off the stage after introducing them Dave was there holding a wallet and he said, “You might want to take this with you.” And I said, “Oh man, that’s not my wallet.” So he went and returned it to the bar and the guy whose wallet it was thought he’d stolen it and punched him in the face.

Wow!

Yeah. I’m a huge fan of Soul Asylum, but Dave’s a pretty eccentric guy, and I think he felt like the universe was sending him messages around this. The next day he got off of his tour bus, I forget where we were, and a homeless person pointed at him and said something like, “You’re a bad person.” And that fed into this narrative and really put him into a depression for a couple of days. Understandably, Jesus. But yeah, no good deed.

Are there other personalities or surreal moments that stand out from that era of touring?

Let me think here… not really. I think that’s why Stephan Jenkins is such a polarizing figure, because I think most of the other guys in the “late ’90s alternative milieu” were really nice guys, and also pretty boring. I did a tweet about it, but I would venture to guess that there is a performative element to his seemingly abject shitty personality, which is okay with me. I think at the end of the day that stuff can be pretty entertaining.

Of the people that you asked whether they like the heart in the blender song what were some of the most memorable responses?

Well, Hillary Duff responded saying she preferred “Wrong Things” by Chevy Mustang, which is my alter ego, this project born of quarantine that’s absolutely stupid and that everybody hates called Chevy Mustang that I do with the guys from the band KONGOS. So that was cool. Marianne Williamson saying yes was quite surreal. Who else responded? Ninety percent of people-

I saw Vincent D’Onofrio gave you a nice compliment.

Yeah, that was nice. And then there was a little bit of miscommunication because I think he thought I was being mean, but I was just trying to be fun on the internet when I accused him of having false humility and it being an unattractive trait. But I tried to clean that up and then I didn’t feel like any of it was landing so I just deleted it.

Yeah, that happens. Oh, so there was another burning question that’s been on my mind: what was it like to have your song referenced in a Limp Bizkit song? (In 1999’s “Nookie,” Fred Durst raps, “she put my tender / heart in a blender / and still I surrendered.” The 90s were f*ckin’ weird, man.)

Very strange! I ended up at a urinal next to Fred Durst at some bar and he was like, “Hey, man, I used your lyric in a song,” and I was like, “I know.”

You got sober after your guys’ initial fame when you were younger, right?

I didn’t get sober till ’06. So we did all three records and touring cycles when I was very much still in it. And then disbanded in ’03 and then in ’06 I got sober.

Do you have Twitter influences?

Probably too many to name and a bunch that I would forget. I did tweet the other day about how I don’t use punctuation because I was moved by Luke O’Neil’s “Welcome To Hell World” newsletter, which is absolutely true. I don’t know if you read him at all.

I do. I’ve had him on my podcast.

I have a weird Luke O’Neil story. I was on tour with Fitness, this other band that I was doing for a while, and we were out supporting Big Data. We were in Boston, and I’m a swimmer so I try to find lap swim pools. And I found a YMCA fairly close to the venue and I was doing my swim. I had a lane to myself which is really nice, and then this big dude I saw from the other side of the pool sauntering over and got into my lane. And now he’s swimming in my lane and I’m thinking, “This guy looks really f*cking familiar.” And I thought, okay, the tell is going to be the nose ring, because I remembered the nose ring from his picture. And so we both stopped at the same side of the pool and I was like, “Are you Luke O’Neil?” And he’s like, “Yeah.” And I said, “Oh, I’m a big fan.” And he’s like, “Oh, that’s cool.” I didn’t tell him about Eve 6, I just told him I was in a band that was playing that night with Big Data. Did he want to come? No, he was busy. And then that was that. We finished our swim. We interacted, over the last couple of years and DM’d a few times and he’s since figured out I’m the heart in a blender guy. He told me that the heart in a blender song was the first song he learned on guitar and stuff like that. So, yeah. Shout out to Luke.

That’s got to be hard. It seems like something that would be weird to just bring up when you first meet someone, like “Hey I’m the heart in the blender guy,” but then after the fact, I feel like people would be like “why didn’t you tell me?”

Yeah. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t identify with it so it’s like… I don’t know.

So I read your tweet about “imagine if the worst diary entry you ever wrote as a teenager went double platinum.” Are there lyrics that stand out as things that make you cringe that you are forced to keep singing again and again?

Yeah, but you develop a compartmentalized relationship with the stuff, because even the stuff that makes me cringe about that song I have framed, and maybe it’s just a survival technique, but in a way I do also see beauty in it. Because with that song, and I said this to a journalist at Spin, it’s guileless. It’s so absurdly open-hearted and for that reason there’s just a big target on its back. Also for that reason, I think it worked because… do you know what I’m saying?

Yes. It’s not guarded. That’s why it’s good.

Yeah, it’s the opposite of guarded, for better or for worse. And so it’s hard to run any kind of counterfactuals with this stuff, because if we had waited and developed more and made our first record when we were 27, who knows? Maybe we would’ve made a better record and no one would have heard it. Maybe we would’ve made a great record and it would have been big. Who f*cking knows?

I always thought you were an English major just from the way that you wrote songs. So I was surprised to learn how young you guys were when your first hits were coming out.

Well, thanks. I definitely littered those songs with five-dollar words. I think it was some kind of compensatory thing because I didn’t have any comprehension of melody when I was writing that stuff. And you hear it, the chorus of “Inside Out” is basically one note. So I think I would play with words and jam words in to make up for the fact that there wasn’t a lot that was particularly melodically interesting going on.

I didn’t even think that they were necessarily five-dollar words. I think that about Panic! At The Disco, or even Bad Religion to some extent, but with you guys I just thought it was clever wordplay, and genuinely enjoyable.

Thank you. I appreciate that.

So you guys have new music coming out?

Yeah. We were going to wait to do this announcement about new music because we’re on a label called Velocity that is brand new and is just getting their website up and stuff. But we have a five-song EP called Black Nova that’s going to come out soon, in about a month. The first single’s called “Black Nova.” It’s a little punk record. And we started making music again, when was it, I guess at the end of 2019, just to do it. We were like, “If we’re going to do this we’re going to do just exactly what we want with no extra f*cking considerations.” And so that’s what we did. And I guess I’d be remiss if I didn’t say we do have a record coming out in about a month.

Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can access his archive of reviews here.