“A huge, heartfelt thank you to everyone who supported the Save Our Stages Act, which passed yesterday as a part of the economic stimulus bill. The preservation of America’s smaller, independent venues is not only crucial to the millions of concert goers whose lives are bettered by experiencing their favorite artists in the flesh, but to the future of music itself, as it gives the next generation of young musicians a place to cut their teeth, hone their craft, and grow into the voices of tomorrow.
The absence of live music this year has left us all longing for that communal feeling of connection, one that is best felt when joined in a song. The Save Our Stages Act brings us one step closer to sharing that feeling again, one that I hope we can all experience again very soon.
Everyday we’re one step closer.
See you there,
Dave.”
Grohl wrapped up the year with a flurry of activity: In addition to his work for Save Our Stages, he also busted out a Hanukkah covers series.
Musicians have about as big an impact on social media as anybody, and the numbers back that up. Now that the year is just days from wrapping up, the rankings of 2020’s most-liked Instagram posts are pretty much settled, and a couple musical names have found their way into the top ten (according to Wikipedia, with data accurate as of December 28 and updated by Uproxx on December 29 for this post).
Kylie Jenner had the strongest grip over the rankings, as four of the top posts are hers. Travis Scott pops up in a couple of them: One was a gallery post featuring photos of Scott, Jenner, and their daughter Stormi in honor of Scott’s birthday (which landed in fourth place after racking up a hair under 16 million likes). The other one featured a pair of photos of Scott and Jenner dressed up (No. 10, 14.2 million likes).
Also making the list as a late entry is Ariana Grande, whose December 20 post needed just about a week to accumulate 15.4 million likes and slide into sixth place on the list.
Outside of the music world, sports were another dominating factor. Posts from Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi about the death of soccer legend Diego Maradona took up two of the top three spots, while another post from Ronaldo and a LeBron James post about Kobe Bryant’s death also made the top ten. The acting world was also represented strongly, as the year’s No. 2 post was the one from Chadwick Boseman’s account that confirmed his death.
Check out the top ten list of the year’s most-liked Instagram posts below.
We’ve all been there: dunking on a younger sibling or cousin for celebrating their gross high school relationship “monthiversary” at Olive Garden because they think it’s fancy. And we’ve been the roasted cousin in that scenario, too. Accidentally believing that chain restaurants are the height of fine dining is a rite of passage, precisely because it’s a universal experience — as evidenced by a now-viral tweet shared by comedian John Crist early Sunday morning.
What restaurant did you think was nice as a kid but when you became an adult realized it wasn’t that nice?…
Crist’s tweet posed a simple question but had Twitter users debating the merits of their childhood favorites and looking fondly at some lost and forgotten culinary experiences. You know, like eating at a sit-down Pizza Hut. Don’t get us wrong, we are by no means saying places like Olive Garden, P.F. Changs, Red Lobster, Cheesecake Factory, and the like don’t have anything to offer. They often do.
But they aren’t haute cuisine.
We legit only went to shoneys for special occasions. I was convinced it was five star
My parents were from NYC, but we lived in Georgia when I was little. As a result, we spent many hours on the road between the two places. Whenever we approached the SC/NC border, I would BEG my parents to stop at this magical place: pic.twitter.com/MpT6fKCXcY
Under no circumstance is a restaurant with a kid’s menu fancy, because nobody wants kids at a genuinely fancy restaurant. So which restaurant did your childhood brain lead you to believe was fancy? For me, P.F. Changs was once a culinary mecca and the only restaurant I had ever been to with a statue of a horse. And for a 10-year-old, that was something!
Check more of the chatter below.
My grandparents took me and my older brother to a Ponderosa steakhouse in Michigan every Wednesday night. We thought it was top shelf.https://t.co/6iqaQ7HJAN
Old-school Pizza Hut, where you sat inside of a Hut and were served Pizza or fetched it from a hot bar, was good. It was a pure and good place. Then they removed all the good, piece by piece, and entirely transitioned to takeout and delivery.
I asked my grandparents if we could go inside and eat at Popeyes. They told me you had to have a membership to eat inside. I believed that for years. Now I know they just wanted to pick up drive thru and go home.
Old Spaghetti Factory in Trolley Square in downtown SLC, Utah. We rarely went downtown, but when we did, it was usually to go there. And I always thought it was super fancy, especially with the trolley car inside the restaurant. pic.twitter.com/JfC18h2Ezo
The Olive Garden! People in my hometown still get married at the Olive Garden
— Katherine D. Morgan | Forever a Bookseller (@blktinabelcher) December 28, 2020
Growing up in Hawaii I thought Bob’s Big Boy was a fancy burger restaurant. There was only 1 on the island and it was near downtown, 35 min away. Looking back, it might have been the fact we had to drive out of the city I lived in that made it seem fancy pic.twitter.com/TQjqwbxUtx
At the end of the day, whether you still love these restaurants or not, I think we can all agree that being able to sit down at a table, being served by a person that isn’t wearing a blast shield and gloves, and eating without fear of killing each other is a day we all desperately want to get back to. Regardless of where.
Before Harry Styles was a solo star with classic albums like Fine Line and his self-titled debut, he was already a massive star as part of One Direction. While all the boys are striking off on their own for now, most of them have remained on good terms, so Liam Payne took it all in good stride when he was asked recently to weigh in on the enormous amount of attention Harry received for wearing a dress on the cover of Vogue earlier this year.
In an interview with Capital FM’s Roman Kemp, Liam said he thinks people should focus on other things — especially in such a fraught year — and let Harry enjoy himself. “I thought it was great,” Payne began. “He’s enjoying himself and he’s free to do as he wishes. I think people don’t need to be so bothered about stuff. There’s been a lot more stuff going on this year, and whether or not he’s wearing the right clothes in someone else’s mind… in my opinion, just let him on with it! He’s enjoying himself.”
Toosii and YK Osiris were attempting to host an outdoor concert for their young fanbase in Jacksonville, Florida, but the show was shut down before it even started. As concertgoers were piling into an outdoor skate park, shots rang out and the two musicians ended up getting maced in the crowd.
According to a report from Action News Jax, the Jacksonville’s Sheriff’s Office filed an incident report about the shots fired near Toosii and YK Osiris’ concert at the Regency Square Mall. Police were speaking to the concert’s security when they heard shots ring out from nearby and concertgoers began to run for safety. Thankfully, no one was injured but police did find five bullet casings in the mall’s parking lot.
Toosii took to Twitter to deny allegations of a shooting at his show but the musician said he did end up getting maced, though he didn’t offer many details. “Last night at my show in Jacksonville, Florida I got maced for no reason at all along with several of my fans (young fans). They shut it down because of capacity so I went outside to greet everyone and this is what happened.”
Many of Toosii’s concertgoers were teenagers and he’s spoken about his fanbase’s young age before. Chatting with Uproxx in a recent interview, Toosii addressed the fact that so many young people look up to him. While he was growing up, that role model was Nipsey Hussle. “Honestly, just as far as like his head spin and keeping a level head and understanding what’s really going on in the world,” Toosii said about Nipsey’s influence. “A lot of people in my generation follow the wrong thing. Then, Nipsey was the main reason that I started investing and saving my money and doing the things that I wanted to do, because, the OG made that look like it was cool. I grew up around dope boys and doing some smack, some had guns and stuff like that. Basically, Nipsey was like a breath of fresh air. It’s like, ‘Yo, you don’t got to do that type of stuff.’”
Watch a fan-captured video of Toosii and YK Osiris in the crowd above.
The Memphis Grizzlies were one of the NBA’s best stories a year ago as they battled their way to the play-in game in the West. Ja Morant was a major reason for their surprising level of play, as he won Rookie of the Year honors in emphatic fashion, and took the league by storm in his first year in the NBA.
Morant picked up right where he left off to start this season, scoring a career-high 44 in the Grizzlies opener and following that up with 28 points against the Hawks, and while they’ve gotten off to an 0-2 start, they’ve been competitive and headed to Brooklyn for what they hoped would be their first win of the season. However, in the late second quarter disaster struck for Memphis when Morant contested a jumper from Timothe Luwawu-Cabarrot and rolled his ankle violently on the landing. The young star was writhing in pain on the floor and was eventually taken to the locker room in a wheelchair after being unable to put any weight on that left foot.
Hopefully it is just a very painful ankle sprain and nothing more serious, but for now there’s considerable concern for the Grizzlies about their young star. We will provide further updates when they become available on his status from the team, but one would expect him to get X-rays possibly tonight and an MRI tomorrow.
UPDATE: The current diagnosis is a left ankle sprain and Morant will not return to the game.
.@memgrizz injury report: Ja Morant (left ankle sprain) will not return.
The New York Mets, just like the rest of us, are a work in progress. But if they know what’s good for them the very least they can do is take some free work from one of the team’s more notable fans from the world of music.
Julian Casablancas, lead singer of The Strokes, is now publicly pleading with the team and its broadcast partner to let him give the team some new music for the upcoming season. Michael Clair of MLB.com talked to Casablancas in an interview was initially to discuss the music video for “The Adults are Talking,” a single from “The New Abmornal,” which was released in April. The video is baseball-themed, and so much of the piece is discussing where that idea came from and how they executed it.
But though the band’s uniforms are straight from the sunburst Houston Astros era, Casablancas is a huge Mets fan, one who apparently wants to offer his services to the team. The band already has a Mets-related song, “Ode to the Mets,” but Casablancas apparently wants to make a proper Mets theme song for the team’s broadcasts on SNY. And the current tune bothers him enough that he’s willing to do it for free.
Still, there’s one wish Casablancas has: For SNY, the network that airs Mets games, to let him write the music they use before games.
“The SNY song was driving me nuts,” Casablancas said. “I used to watch a lot of games. I knew someone who worked for the Mets, who hooked me up with tickets sometimes. I had a whole song. I was like, ‘Let me do like the song for SNY for the game.’ It was kind of epic, rising — like an exciting game is gonna happen. But they just didn’t have their [stuff] together. And they were like, ‘We don’t have a budget.’ I was like, ‘You don’t need a budget. I’ll just give you the song. I’ll do it for free.’”
Perhaps the Mets, now under new ownership, can give him a chance and make this actually happen. There’s also another idea in play, though: Casablancas joked that the team could always play ‘Ode to the Mets’ when the team loses.
Pat Sajak has a history of speaking his mind when it comes to what contestants say or do on Wheel of Fortune. That even includes dismissing some wistful nostalgia when the time is right. That time came last week during a Wheel of Fortune episode where the show’s host took some time to roast both the show’s past and a contestant yearning for it, which made for a lot of people looking back on what Wheel of Fortune used to be like.
TV Line has video of the moment, where Sajak recalled a contestant who said they missed the throwback “shopping segment,” in which contestants could use their winnings to secure physical prizes by way of shouting them out as their winning total went down to nothing. It’s part of the show that has been long phased out, and Sajak made it clear that he has no interest in bringing it back by calling it “the most boring three minutes of television” when the contestant brought it up.
He then went back for seconds in the show’s final moments.
Unsatisfied with his first take’s brevity, Sajak later launched into a rant at Wednesday’s show closing, confessing to co-host Vanna White that he’s always loathed the classic shopping spree gimmick.
“I don’t miss them,” he confessed on air. “In retrospect [you think], ‘Oh, that was kind of fun,’ but, really, it was this thing going around with the [contestant’s] head in a circle … It was really not exciting television. We like it just the way it is.”
White politely agreed their beloved program “is so much better now,” as they signed off.
You can see the element in action here, immortalized in a YouTube video because of a joke a contestant makes about a decorative pig, which then stares deeply into your soul to rob you of something that you’ll never get back.
Just from a tax perspective alone, the lump sum of a cash prize is much better and useful than a bunch of random “camping” equipment or whatever the Wheel staff would assemble for contestants. Cash is king, baby. Sajak made it clear that he agrees, which thankfully means you won’t see that pig on air in HD anytime soon.
When people think about single malt whiskies, their thoughts most often head to the land of William Wallace, haggis, and unicorns (the country’s official animal): Scotland. This logic holds water — when we talk about truly special bottles of scotch, we’re most often referring to single malt whisky expressions. And with the likes of Glenlivet, The Macallan, Lagavulin, and others, it’s not surprising that Scotland gets top billing.
But did you know that a rapidly increasing number of US distilleries are making high-quality single malts as well?
The find them, we went to a suitable source for most booze-related information, our friendly bartenders. We asked them to tell us their favorite American single malt whiskies/ whiskeys for winter and they didn’t disappoint. With great offerings from Waco to Washington, the US is officially putting the Scots on notice.
Baller by St. George Spirits is simply put straight-up baller.
Made from American barley and aged in bourbon and French oak wine casks then filtered through maple charcoal, this spirit has a delicate yet robust palate that is one of a kind. With a tinge of sweetness and smoky after notes, don’t waste this beauty in a cocktail. I recommend drinking it neat with a water back to help cleanse the palate between sips and experience the true complexities of the spirit.
This is an interesting category of whiskey because the definition is still fairly open-ended. It seems like a lot of the products vary as a result. I do like the ones that aim to be a bit like an American expression of a Scotch. Of that loose category, High West’s single malt is one I have tried and can confidently recommend.
It has a nice touch of smoke, and a nice balance of smoothness and alcoholic “heat” — perfect for cold weather.
Corsair Triple Smoke
Corsair
Andy Printy, beverage director at Chao Baan in St. Louis
Corsair Distillery has some great single malts, but their Triple Smoke is by far my favorite. It’s made with three types of smoked malted barley; using peat, cherry wood, and beechwood. It gives the whisky a super unique nose and the palate is where the complexity of smoke and the subtle cherry and stone fruit all come together for a one-of-a-kind profile in the single malt world.
Town Branch Malt
Town Branch
Sean Ebbitt, owner and bartender at Bluegrass Tavern in Lexington, Kentucky
My favorite American single malt whiskey is Town Branch Malt. With its 7-year age statement, it’s one of the older American-made single malts available.
They age it in a barrel that has been used for Town Branch Bourbon, and Kentucky Bourbon Barrel Ale. This unique aging process gives it sweet cereal notes and hints of molasses.
There are quite a few that fit this category, but for me, Hill Rock Single Malt is the best. The late Dave Pickerell, who is a bit of a legend in the distilling world, helped create the distillery, and the product they’re turning out is out of this world. After spending time in the charred barrels, it’s finished with Oloroso and Px Sherry Casks to give it a smooth and delicious complexity.
Westland is one of my favorites. It has oak and toasted caramel notes from the charred barrels used for its aging process, making it the best choice for a drink with character this time of year.
Writer’s Picks:
Westward American Single Malt
Westward
This unique single malt was made with locally sourced barley, brewed with ale yeast, and aged in new, charred, American oak casks. The result is a complex, well-rounded whiskey with hints of sweet malts, dried fruits, and dark chocolate.
Virginia Port Cask Finished
Virginia Distilling
This single malt from the folks at Waco’s Balcones is filled with hints of dried orange peels, caramelized sugar, sweet vanilla, charred oak, and subtle spicy cinnamon. For a sipper, it’s a great chance of pace from your usual Scottish-made single malts.
Balcones Texas Single Malt
Balcones
This single malt from the folks at Waco’s Balcones is filled with hints of dried orange peels, caramelized sugar, sweet vanilla, charred oak, and subtle spicy cinnamon. A nice burst of winter in a glass, straight from the Lone Star State.
Stranahan’s Single Malt
Stranahan
Made only using Rocky mountain water and locally sourced barley, this single malt is aged for four years in American oak barrels before finishing in sherry butts. The result is a complex, non-chill filtered whiskey with hints of sweet caramel, maple syrup, and honey.
50 Cent recently theorized that Drake and Lil Wayne would make ideal opponents in a Verzuz battle, but a different rapper thinks he’s more suited for a competition with Weezy. Young Thug said he’d be up for appearing on the series, only if he goes against Lil Wayne himself.
Thugger discussed the possibility on a recent episode of the Million Dollaz Worth Of Game podcast. Answering the host Gillie Da King’s question about a Verzuz battle, he cited career influence when saying Wayne would be a worthy opponent.
“It would probably have to be like [Lil Wayne],” Young Thug said. “Because you got to think—we got to talk about influence. We got to talk about everything. We got to talk about everything. It’s not just about no rap.” Further clarifying his statement, Thugger said he has an arsenal of songs that everyone at his show knows all the words to. “We ain’t talking about stream sales, we ain’t talking about none of that. We talking about anthems, we talking about songs they know. When I perform, I got 30, 40 songs that the whole stadium going to know. They gone know these mothaf*ckers, all 30 songs. […] N****, Jay-Z ain’t got 30 songs like that.”
“Jay-Z don’t got 30 songs like that”
We’re dropping the video of episode 93 with Young Thug at 7:30 tonight.
Continuing to speak about his relationship with the rapper, Thug said Wayne gave him the cold shoulder on their first encounter. “The first day that n**** didn’t goddamn dap me up,” he said. “Tried me. That n**** tried my pimping… My motherf*cking feet hurt n****, cause I’m a real stepper. Don’t do me like that.”
Watch a clip of the interview above.
Young Thug is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
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