As the PGA Tour nears its June 11 return to the golf course, it has outlined the safety measures it will put in place to protect its players, caddies and workers during play.

Among the new regulations will be the 400 or so people involved in each stop of the tour being swab-tested before and after they fly to each location, as well as daily symptom and temperature checks, limitations on who is allowed into locker rooms, and the withdrawal of golfers who test positive.

Not even family members and coaches are expected to be allowed into lockers rooms, while media interviews will take place in a more spread-out environment, potentially even from separate rooms, as the UFC did in Jacksonville last weekend.

When it comes to where the players and their teams and families will stay during tournaments, the PGA will strongly recommend a handful of trusted nearby hotels that have put in place enhanced safety and sanitation measure. The PGA will, however, allow them also to stay at rental homes or in RVs “with guidance from the tour.”

The tour will also pay for all testing, sanitation wipes, thermometers, and face masks. It will defer to local laws when it comes to masks and other rules regarding movement. On the course, high-fives and the traditional post-round handshake will be prohibited.

Though the first month of events, beginning June 11 in Texas, is scheduled to not have fans, the John Deere Classic on July 9 is the soonest the PGA might have a gallery of socially distanced fans watching a tournament.

Said chief tournaments and competitions officer Andy Pazder: “We are not wedded to any specific date. Obviously, it’s going to be dependent on local, state and federal regulations that will largely dictate when we’re able to resume having some number of fans.”

Golf is naturally suited to weathering this storm because it takes place outdoors and is not a contact sport, but these PGA Tour events will still be seen as an important trial as other sports consider their plans.

As I admitted to Scoob! director Tony Cervone, I was a little skeptical of Scoob!. Primarily because of the title, because it had an air of Poochie in it. Like it was trying to be “cool.” Of course, I tried to say this to Cervone in a diplomatic way – especially since I wound up liking the movie – without bringing up the name “Poochie.” Of course, as soon as I ask this, Cervone was quick to call me out, “You mean it in a Poochie kind of way?”

Yes, there’s an origin story in Scoob! where all the characters are kids, but this only takes up maybe the first 15 minutes of the film before Scoob! transitions with a very clever montage of adventures, which is almost a shot-for-shot remake of the original Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? opening credits and theme song. Which is something that many adults will see and it’s impossible for it not to tug at our nostalgia sensors.

Cervone, who has been in animation long enough to have seen it all at this point, is obviously a pretty big Hanna-Barbera nerd and has a million stories. And here, he does share a few of those. Including one about how the assassination of Robert Kennedy led to the cancellation of cartoons that were deemed violent – which put Hanna-Barbera in a position of having to come up with a whole slate of new characters almost instantly. And, yes, one of them was Scooby-Doo.

I wasn’t sure what to expect because with the title — I thought this was going to be a different take. But then the movie won me over early when you recreated the opening sequence from Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?.

Well, good. I’m glad that you’re responding to that, because recreating the Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? main title really kind of happened late in the game.

That’s surprising.

Actually, the decision to do it took a long time, and then we finally did it at the end – so late in the game that we were like there’s a whole bunch of sets that don’t exist anywhere else in the movie. There’s all of a sudden all those extra characters to create! And we’re like, can we do this? Really, the folks at Reel Effects, who did the animation, they were like, we want to do this. We will figure it out. That sequence is a lot of smoke and mirrors. We only created everything we absolutely needed. Like the spooky space kook can’t animate very much. You could animate only enough for what you’re seeing for like 12 frames.

It seems so natural that’s in there that I would have never guessed that that was a late addition.

That’s Best Coast who recreated the song. It was just right before COVID hit. We’re like, “Are you sure you can do it,” and they’re like, “Yeah, we want to do it.” It was really cool, but everyone really pitched in and came together. It was almost like an extracurricular project to get it done. I’m just saying it just to show you how much people loved it.

Warner Bros. should release that on YouTube or something, to advertise the movie.

That’s a great idea.

Because adults would watch that and be excited.

You know what? I’m going to pass that idea along. I think that’s a really great idea. We were like, well, are kids going to care? We were then like, why wouldn’t they care? Do you know what I mean?

I’ll be honest, when the title was announced, Scoob!… It sounded like it was going to be this hip, cool for kids thing…

You mean it in a Poochie kind of way?

Exactly. But I didn’t want to say that. But that’s exactly what I was thinking. And then I watched it and it is like watching a great episode of Scooby-Doo. I think if people see that opening, adults will be like oh, okay, this is also for me.

Yeah. I think that’s great. As soon as I hang up, I’m sending that email out. I think that’s a great idea. Because, I mean, the whole movie is a love letter to Hanna-Barbera.

Yes, it is.

There are only a couple shots in there that aren’t in Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?, which kind of just helped establish Fred’s love of the Mystery Machine. Also, part of it is we wanted to keep Scooby and Shaggy together. In season one, the next shot was Shaggy in a bathtub. But we had so little time, we were like we can’t make a wet Shaggy. So, in season two, they’re in garbage cans in the alley, like we did, so we just stole that shot from the season two opening, not the season one.

I like that back then they decided that they needed to differentiate the opening credits for the second season.

That was Hanna-Barbera. Hanna-Barbera was pretty bold, and I learned that from them, from talking to them. They were just like, try it. You want to try that? Try it. If it doesn’t work, stop doing it. There’s a lot of different animation styles in this movie that are all kind of happening at once, and it made me nervous. Scooby and Shaggy are animated in a completely different style from the rest of the gang. And Dastardly has his own animation style. And Blue Falcon has his own. From an animation perspective, they’re all completely different styles. I was like, is this going to work? I was worried about it for a long time, but then finally I’m like, these are the people who made Laff-A-Lympics. They didn’t care as much, so just go for it.

Laff-A-Lympics was great.

I’ll tell you a story!

Go ahead.

I was animating something once, something with Penelope Pitstop, and I couldn’t really figure out how her head connects to her body. And Iwao Takamoto was still around and down the hall, so I brought my animation over to him, who was the designer of Penelope Pitstop. I described the difficulty I was having and he said, “If I knew I’d be looking at this 40 years later, I would have taken longer than 45 minutes to draw it.”

That’s a great answer.

I don’t mean to say that as if it was a bad design. But they didn’t know they were making classic characters. They were just cranking out classic characters. He didn’t know when he drew that, they didn’t know they’d be looking at Scooby-Doo for the rest of their life. They thought it’s going to live for one or two seasons and be over.

When you look at the Scooby-Doo history, they were trying to make a show about a band that solved mysteries, and the dog didn’t have much to do with it, right? And then they kept getting rejected, and it kept shifting, and then finally it was something that got accepted and that became Scooby-Doo.

Right, and its influences are all over the place. You know the story. There’s actually a great article I just read online in, I believe, on the Smithsonian website, which ties the assassination of Bobby Kennedy to the creation of Scooby-Doo.

What?

Scooby-Doo was created because of a big reaction to violence in cartoons.

Oh, right. Like Space Ghost…

Right, and Johnny Quest in particular, but there was a bunch of public anti-violent, public outroar.

I thought you were going to say Sirhan Sirhan watched Scooby-Doo or something.

No, no. Bobby Kennedy thought cartoons were garbage and much too violent. Then, after he was assassinated, there was a giant public outcry that we need to do something about violence. It is one of the things that started that anti-violence movement, which led to the cancellation of Johnny Quest and the green light of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?.

So that’s why they had to come up with stuff so quickly, to replace a slate of other stuff.

Right, yes. That, I knew for sure. I asked Joe Ruby and Ken Spears directly about all that. I know all the stories from them. So, yeah, they definitely were like what are we going to do? We have to stop making what we’ve been making and do something new in like three minutes. Luckily, Archie from the Archie cartoons had also premiered the year before.

Yes, and had a hit song, “Sugar Sugar.”

Right, it had a hit song. So that’s why at one point they were conceiving that it’s kids in a van in a band that would solve mysteries along the way.

And then after Scooby-Doo, then came similar shows like Speed Buggy, which also had a lanky guy in a green shirt.

We had fun with that in Mystery, Incorporated. We took all the Scooby-Doo rip-offs, Speed Buggy, there’s Jabberjaw, and put them all in one cartoon. That was pretty fun.

Jabberjaw is in your new movie. In the end credits.

Yeah. Jabberjaw, Adam Ant, and Grape Ape. They were all in the movie at one point, and then eventually, as we were making the movie, we were like this is a 90-minute movie and we’ve got 48 characters in it. They wound up getting cut out, but they’re ready. They’re on the sidelines ready to jump in. I do consider those end credits as part of the continuing story, so it should be considered canon, I guess. For a moment, the Falcon Fury, the Blue Falcon Ship, was intelligent. And we were going to make it stutter like Speed Buggy. We were going to give it basically Speed Buggy’s voice. Our idea, the behind-the-scenes idea, would have been Blue Falcon bought Speed Buggy at some point and then took his brain out and built the Falcon Fury around it.

That’s a lot to explain to an eight-year-old kid.

Yeah, I know. If you think this movie is nerdy now, there are versions that are mega nerdy.

You can contact Mike Ryan directly on Twitter.

Previously on the Best and Worst of NXT: Karrion Kross and Scarlett made their official debut like a Final Fantasy X summon, and Charlotte Flair showed us what’s waiting for Io Shirai should she ever get sent to Raw.

If you’d like to read previous installments of the Best and Worst of NXT, you can do that here. Follow With Spandex on Twitter and Facebook. You can also follow me on Twitter, where everything and everyone is terrible.

And now, the Best and Worst of WWE NXT for May 13, 2020.

Best: Welcome To Armageddon (2003)

I want to give NXT credit here for preying on the subconscious of the longtime fans. Anyone who was watching at the time remembers WWE’s liberal use of ‘The End,’ the Jim Johnston composed Doors sound-a-like that welcomed us to such pay-per-views as Armageddon, and sometimes Judgment Day. That’s going to immediately trigger a response in our brains that makes us realize Karrion Kross and Scarlett are bringing Armageddon and Judgment Day to NXT. There’s levels to this.

Worst: It’s Clobberin’ Tim

This week’s most important plot development is the sudden but inevitable betrayal of Timothy Thatcher, who decides a relatively innocuous Malfunction At The Junction is enough to abandon not only his tag team partner, but the NXT Tag Team Championship he has now both won and lost by doing nothing. I fully expected a turn here — all we’ve gotten about Thatcher as a character is that he’s (kayfabe) boring and kinda looks like Drew Gulak with marbles in his mouth — but I thought for sure it’d be because Timbo realized he preferred Imperium’s violent dutifulness to Riddle’s weed and paddleboats. I thought maybe we’d get the full Ric Flair turning on Sting treatment, but nope, Thatcher’s just out of place and gets a calf to the shoulder and suddenly he’s willing to forfeit a WWE championship 28 days into his debut. Seems pretty harsh, Tim.

The good news here is that Imperium managed to pick up the NXT Tag Team Championship after having somehow never been NXT UK Tag Team Champions. Aichner and Bartel have been doing awesome work this year, and if Thatcher’s seriously not getting fitted for a tracksuit, their win can move off in its own direction with a new story while Riddle handles his grapplefuckery elsewhere.

I sincerely hope a jump to Imperium is in the plans for next week, because if not, they seriously undercut Thatcher’s turn. They did the turn, and before even that one episode of television could be over and allow us a moment to breathe, they did two backstage dust-ups and a blow-off match where the guy who turned loses clean. They just hustled right on through it. Thatcher attacks Riddle after the match to keep it going, but I think they severely overestimate the power of a post-match attack. At some point I want someone to be like, “I think you’re an asshole and a poor sport for jumping me after the match, but hey, I won, so, point proven,” and move on with their lives.

P.S. I want them to play out the Riddle vs. Thatcher and Imperium story until the quarantine’s passed so Pete Dunne can make a triumphant return, only for Riddle to suddenly decide he also thinks wrestling mats should be worshipped and leave us heart-bro-ken by attacking Stallion Pete.

P.P.S. I don’t actually want that, I want Riddle and Dunne to be best friends forever, I think my brain’s just used to seeing a wrestling story and immediately breaking it down psychologically until it’s emotionally wounded and tragic. It might do that with everything, I don’t know, I’m not a doctor.

Demon Vs. Priest, Get It

In other betrayal of trust news, ‘Infamous At Archery’ Damian Priest reveals himself as the mysterious Finn Bálor attacker from a few weeks ago and attacks him again, causing him to lose a fall to cruiserweight George Steele Cameron Grimes. It’s a Priest versus a Demon! That’s too much of a lay-up to miss, isn’t it? It’d be a good way to establish that even though Finn’s super cereal about everything these days doesn’t mean he can’t still draw from the well of Unstoppable Witchcraft.

Best/Worst: This Week In The Largely Unnecessary Interim NXT Cruiserweight Championship Tournament

I don’t know if it’s by design of if someone went over their time, but both Cruiserweight Championship tournament matches were dreadfully short. Jake Atlas versus Tony Nese only got five minutes, and Isaiah Scott versus Jack Gallagher only got three and a half. I guess since these were “so and so is already eliminated from the tournament so they’re just playing SPOILER” matches they didn’t want to do much with them?

The positives are that Jake Atlas looked really good again, and it appears we’re both attempting to develop Isaiah Scott’s personality beyond a nickname and a look and give him some semblance of a plot to work with, as Tony Nese jumps him during his entrance. It’s something, and nobody had to get kidnapped in the parking lot to make it happen!

Women’s Division Content

The NXT women’s division, which seemed so stacked with talent only a few months ago, has been whittled down to jobber squashes and Aliyah angles. I’m starting to think that trading Bianca Belair and half of Rhea Ripley for a dismissively dominant Charlotte Flair might have been bad for the division. It just feels to me like the air’s been let out of the room. Honestly it’d probably be really great if they played it up more like the NXT competitors are in her league, and less like Charlotte’s Giannis Antetokounmpo joining a pick-up game at your local YMCA. This is all not meant to be as dramatic as it sounds. “I don’t meant this to sound so dramatic” should be the title of my memoir.

Anyway, Tegan Nox gets a strong win over Indi Hartwell, who’s in the same PC class as Shotzi Blackheart and Scarlett. It’s almost confusing seeing Tegan doing anything on NXT without Dakota Kai involved, so that’s probably a good thing to do more often. Kai only appears in this video package about how she and Raquel just wanna put on club clothes and ride motorcycles in the mall parking lot.

In other women’s division action, Aliyah tries to win the representation of the Robert Stone Brand® in a match against Kayden Carter and loses, because of course she does. Aliyah is like if early NXT Bayley was mean instead of nice. Robert Stone walks away disappointed, as though flamboyantly representing jobbers isn’t already his thing. What happened to Vanessa Borne, did she die?

Also On This Episode

Johnny Gargano and Candice LeRae throw shade at Keith Lee and Mia Yim over dinner, which feels like a mistake. Mostly I just want to know if the black and white shift with the camera shakes is something we’re to assume WWE production or Johnny and Candice themselves edited in later, or if they’re CAUSING it with their EVIL. Is that why the nWo camera was always black and white and moving around?

Three mall Santas stop tailgating the Steelers game long enough to tell us about NXT TakeOver: In Your House on June 7. If nobody wins a house, I’m calling bullshit.

Finally, this week’s episode of The BayBay Bunch features an explanation for Kyle O’Reilly’s absence — he’s starring in a movie about nuns that fight ghosts only to fall in love and tragically die that co-stars Daniel Day Lewis, Danny DeVito, or some combination of the two — and the decision that Roderick Strong, as always, should be the lead stormtrooper in charge of handling Adam Cole’s problems. Needs more FlimFlamming. See you never, Denster Loonis.

Best: Top 10 Comments Of The Week

King of Smark Style

Friend: Yo wat u gunna do with your stimulus check
Me:

Endy_Mion

Regal: back in my day we just voted Thatchers out.

Dave M J

If Shotzi Blackheart rolls in with her tank and blows up Triple H and Shawn, she’s my favorite wrestler ever

“I am starting to not like NXT right now…”

NXT: Hey, you wanna watch Keith Lee vs. Evil Johnny Gargano?

Me: …sigh. Yes.

Baron Von Raschke

This video segment is just showing that Dakota Kai did nothing wrong and she is completely justified in her actions!

EvilDucky

Timothy Thatcher is the only one I’ve seen ever stomp on Riddle’s bare feet and he’s done it twice in the last 5 minutes. That immediately makes him the smartest on the NXT roster and one of my new favorites

Bobski58

Aliyah screwing up the second someone important starts paying attention to her seems a little too on-the-nose.

troi

I refuse to believe Regal would give Matt Riddle his number

Caz

Dunne is gonna swim from England to Florida to kick Thatcher’s ass and I can’t wait

AshBlue

I think advertisers might be the biggest heels of the whole pandemic.

SexCauldron

Just realized that after that Dakota promo, all my Debbie Gibson posters are now Tiffany posters

Counterpoint:

That’s it for this week’s Best and Worst of NXT. We’re not sure you ever actually read this part or do what we ask (or if you even scroll down through the top 10 comments of the week), but hey, it would really help us if you commented down below and shared the column if you liked or laughed at anything. The world’s tough, and that makes this kind of thing a lot easier.

Join us here next week for Kushida vs. Drake Maverick, Akira Tozawa vs. El Hijo del Fantasma, and Io Shirai vs. Rhea Ripley. A dream card in the hands of anyone reasonable. See you then!

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For the first time ever, fans are able to stream music from EL-P’s extensive back catalog. To celebrate the 18th anniversary of his debut solo album, EL-P has shared a reissue of Fantastic Damage. The massively influential album is now available on streaming services for the first time, with physical versions of the record set for release later this year.

Fantastic Damage signaled the beginning of EL-P’s career as a solo artist, who is now known for being one half of Run The Jewels. The record was revolutionary at the time and marked a break-out release for EL-P’s label Def Jux, which would establish itself as a powerhouse for independent rap and go on to sign the likes of Aesop Rock, RJD2, and more. At the time, Fantastic Damage was co-signed by many major publications. But the release has been widely unavailable since Def Jux’s hiatus in 2010. Now, fans are able to hear the record on streaming services for the first time ever.

Fantastic Damage is the second reissue of EL-P’s solo work through the label Fat Possum, which put out the rapper’s 2007 effort I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead back in January. The rapper plans on more releases this year, including Run The Jewels’ highly-anticipated record RTJ4 as well as his score to the film Capone.

In a statement alongside the record’s reissue, EL-P said he’s glad that fans are finally able to rediscover the record:

“This album is raw and noisy and f*cked up and exactly how I felt when I made it. It’s the first time I ever tried to tackle a whole record on my own all those years ago. It was produced and recorded and mixed in my bedroom/studio in the apartment in Brooklyn I lived in at the time, right around the year 2000. It’s not where I am now but it is a moment that really meant something to me and it’s a huge part of my DNA as an artist so I’m glad to finally be able to get it back out there. Not only for those who knew it and missed its presence but for anyone who may have not known about it before now. I hope you enjoy this and thanks for all the amazing support over the years. I love doing what I do and I live to keep pushing forward. Fantastic Damage is, in a lot of ways, the start of all of it.”

Watch EL-P’s “Deep Space 9mm” video above and see the Fantastic Damage cover art and tracklist below.

1. “Fantastic Damage”
2. “Squeegee Man Shooting”
3. “Deep Space 9mm”
4. “Tuned Mass Damper”
5. “Dead Disnee”
6. “Delorean”
7. “Truancy”
8. “The Nang, The Front, The Bush And The Sh*t”
9. “Accidents Don’t Happen”
10. “Stepfather Factory”
11. “T.O.J.”
12. “Dr. Hellno And Praying Mantus”
13. “Lazerfaces’ Warning”
14. “Innocent Leader”
15. “Constellation Funk”
16. “Blood”

Fantastic Damage is out now via Fat Possum. Get it here.

With Double or Nothing coming up on May 23, All Elite Wrestling set up several new matches for the pay-per-view on last night’s episode of Dynamite. Nyla Rose and Hikaru Shida will have a No DQ match for the AEW Women’s Championship, Britt Baker and Kris Statlander will go one-on-one, and the pre-show will have a number one contender’s match between Private Party and Best Friends. Chris Jericho also challenged The Elite to a new kind of match created by the Inner Circle: the Stadium Stampede.

What exactly a Stadium Stampede match is and who will wrestle this one hasn’t been officially announced yet, but Dave Meltzer of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter broke the planned lineup for the Elite team. The Inner Circle (Jericho, Jake Hager, Sammy Guevara, Santana, and Ortiz) will take on Kenny Omega, Matt Hardy, Hangman Page, and The Young Bucks. That is the regular full Elite lineup minus Cody (plus Hardy), but it’s notable as Page and the Jackson brothers’ first AEW appearance since March.

Page and the Bucks, along with some other AEW wrestlers, stopped traveling to Dynamite when the show moved out of Daily’s Place and started taping in Georgia, and haven’t returned to the program since it started airing live again, now as an “essential” business in Florida. The Young Bucks continued to wrestle during this period, however, recording matches for Being the Elite at “the BTE Compound” in California, include a Falls Count Anywhere match against each other and a nine-person “Under the Limit Battle Royal.”

The still-untitled seventh film in the Mission: Impossible series was supposed to come out on July 23, 2021, but the release date was pushed back to November 19 due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Understandable! But still frustrating, because few things lift my spirits as much as Tom Cruise looking like he’s going to run out of his skeleton while jumping off a skyscraper onto a helicopter, or whatever crazy nonsense he’ll do next. There is some good M:I news, though: director and writer Christopher McQuarrie told the Light the Fuse podcast that the next film will actually be films.

“When we went into making Fallout, I said to Tom, ‘I really want to make this more of an emotional journey for Ethan Hunt]. Going into this, I said, ‘I want to take what we learned from Fallout and apply it to every character in the movie. I want everyone to have an emotional arc,” he said. “I just want the movie to have more feeling across the board.”

“The ending of the first movie snapped into place. We knew what the ending was and we knew what the beginning was,” said McQuarrie. “And now I had these two sequences, which means, I’ve got 40 minutes of Mission: Impossible 8 figured out.”

One thing he doesn’t have figured out, though, is who will be in Mission: Impossible 7. The main cast — Cruise, Rebecca Ferguson, Ving Rhames, Vanessa Kirby, Simon Pegg, etc. — will be back, and Agent Carter‘s Hayley Atwell is a welcome addition to the gang, but he teased an “incredibly exciting casting coup.” McQuarrie was circling an actor he was “excited about” before the “world blew up,” but “I don’t know where that is.”

Is it Vin Diesel? I bet it’s Vin Diesel.

(Via Hollywood Reporter and Light the Fuse)

Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: Beyonce and Nicki Minaj made Billboard history this week. This time along though, they brought two up-and-coming artists to break ground with them. Doja Cat and Nicki Minaj’s “Say So” remix topped the Billboard Hot 100 chart. And at No. 2 was Megan Thee Stallion’s “Savage” remix, which featured Beyonce delivering raps that had social media and the blogosphere in a frenzy.

For the first time ever, four Black women occupied the top two spots on the Billboard Hot 100. And they didn’t do it with the help of male artists, or any other acts. This was an instance of four self-contained entities pulling dual power moves and steepling the Hot 100. The collaborations made perfect sense. Doja Cat, like Nicki, is a vibrant, genre-bending artist while Meg and Beyonce are beloved, Houstonians with a similar knack for setting the cultural agenda. Both tracks feature all four artists in their wheelhouse of liberated lyricism unconcerned with the male — or any other — gaze.

While Nicki Minaj achieved her first No. 1, Doja and Megan benefitted the most from this unprecedented circumstance. Doja Cat has notched her first No. 1 at just 24, while Meg, who at 25, could very well reach the top in the coming weeks (though she’ll face staunch competition from the 6ix9ine hive). But it doesn’t matter if Megan doesn’t hit the top spot with “Savage,” because she’s already at the top of her game.

What happened in the last week was a culminating moment for a movement of women who rap. For several years, Megan, Doja, Cardi B, Rico Nasty, and dozens of other women have deconstructed the tokenizing stigmas surrounding women in rap. For decades, women dealt with subjugative energy that relegated many of them to be a “first lady” of a crew, or otherwise feeling compelled to have proximity to a male artist to be marketed effectively. Acts were pitted against each other, festering a sexist perception that there could only be one “queen of rap.” Even the idea that there is such thing as a separate genre called “women’s rap” is fundamentally reductive.

Women in rap, of all styles and aesthetics, have collectively been shattering constructs one triumph at a time. And this shared moment between four powerful artists is one that concretely exemplifies something everyone should know by now: women in rap are too big to be relegated.

In recent years, Nicki Minaj has faced criticism for several legitimate, alarming reasons. But in the context of a discussion of advocacy for women in rap, she deserves credit. It makes sense that she was involved in this moment. Nicki deserves credit for using her stature (and devout Barb stanbase) to empower other artists, whether that’s collaborating with Doja or Megan or shouting out women peers on Queen Radio. She has the following to annex herself from the rest of the music world (as it looked like she was going to do during the most caustic moments of her Queen era), but she’s using her considerable power to solidify up and comers.

Beyonce isn’t known primarily as a rapper, but her co-sign is big enough to have had the same star-making effect for Megan. Given their shared Houston roots and Megan’s status as a Roc Nation signee (for management), it feels like the Beyonce collaboration was inevitable for Megan as she continued to rise. But with a recitation-worthy verse replete with quotables like, “If you don’t jump to put jeans on, baby, you don’t feel my pain,” Beyonce delivered the kind of appearance that will have the “Savage” remix playing through what Megan has already branded a “Savage Summer.” Megan personally expressed that she “cried” when she heard that Beyonce wanted to jump on the record, knowing that the song could very well be a gateway into her next realm of music stardom.

And the same is true for Doja Cat, who has previously said that she “wished” for a Nicki feature. Some of her fans believed that the Gucci Mane-featuring “Like That” would feature Nicki when the feature name was blurred out on a Hot Pink tracklist she shared. But while “Like That” didn’t turn out to be the one, the summery “Say So” proved ripe for the team-up. The original track was a perfect example of Doja’s versatility, as she assumed the role of pop starlet for the first half of the song before jumping into a charismatic verse that served as a thematic harbinger for Nicki’s contribution.

And while Nicki’s “used to be bi, but now I’m just hetero” bar is distractingly puzzling and other critics noted that the foursome’s feat doesn’t quell concern about the industry’s colorism, the moment is still one to marvel for fans of popular music. Two years ago, Megan was known for viral freestyles while Doja was the “‘Moo’ girl.” Now they’re solidified stars, crafting a blueprint for mainstream success that other aspirants can follow. It’s also worth noting that both “Say So” and “Savage” celebrate women with volition of their bodies and romantic experience independent of external judgment.

When Black women in the music industry and their supporters were calling for unity among each other, it wasn’t just about solidarity for the sake of solidarity. Working together paves the way for moments like what we had this week, where women could consolidate their impact and smack us in the face with a double dose of reality that Black music runs the pop world.

Josh Trank’s Tom Hardy gangster movie, Capone, filled in a VOD blank this week (on May 12). The movie followed notorious gangster Al Capone’s life (and mindset) after nearly a decade behind bars, following the onset of dementia. Hardy gets to wear a diaper, fire a machine gun, and defecate in his pants, and the movie’s certainly an interesting way for Trank to reenter the movie world after the implosion of Fantastic Four, along with the director’s feud with 20th Century Fox. However, the formerly exiled filmmaker’s using Capone as a launchpad for the next project he wants to do, and he reveals that Hardy’s onboard as well.

In an interview with Collider, Trank revealed that the Venom star plans to appear both behind and in front of the camera for an untitled project about the CIA. The pair hopes to produce a limited series, and although no network or studio gets named, it sounds like a passion project that’s so “really big” that Trank says it twice:

“I’m working on this limited series that Tom Hardy is producing and that he’s involved in and he’s very excited about, and I’m excited about, [and it’s] a story that spans decades, from right at the end of World War II and concerning the formation of the CIA, but from a point of view that hasn’t really been seen in a movie or in television before, and is just mentioned in books. It deals a lot with Castro and Cuba, and capitalism versus Communism. It’s really big. Sort of the, you know, capitalism versus communism. It’s really big.”

Collider mentions that Hardy’s continuing to foster close ties with FX following his Taboo run and a pair of Dickens-centered projects, soooo maybe this project could land there as well? It actually sounds like something that could potentially find a home on the new FX on Hulu platform, but of course, that’s all speculation. No matter what Trank and Hardy do together, it’s sure to bring curious eyeballs to whatever network picks up the project.

Capone, also starring Linda Cardellini, Kyle MacLachlan, Matt Dillon, and Jack Lowden, is on VOD now.

(Via Collider)

Today, Pop Smoke’s manager Steven Victor revealed the release date for the late rapper’s posthumous major-label debut album: June 12, 2020. A summertime release feels appropriate, as it was Pop’s 2019 anthem “Welcome To The Party” from his debut mixtape Meet the Woo that first introduced him to a mass audience and set him on the path to stardom — a path that was cut short earlier this year when Pop was shot to death in a home invasion in Los Angeles.

At the time of his death, Pop Smoke’s buzz was such that many members of rap’s fraternity from all over the map were clamoring for a verse from the Brooklyn star. The result was a spate of feature bars from Pop that have since cropped up on projects from the likes of Gunna, Lil Tjay, Nav, and Fivio Foreign’s upcoming debut.

The release date of June 12 is just a little later than the date promised by 50 Cent, who maintained that he would be executive producing the project, reaching out to artists as wide-ranging as Chris Brown and Roddy Ricch for their involvement.

While Victor himself has yet to confirm 50’s involvement — or indeed, whether the artists 50 reached out to will appear on the project after all — we at least have a better idea of when we’ll all find out.

Pop Smoke’s debut album is due 6/12 on Republic Records.