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As the global pandemic causes millions to become suddenly unemployed, many musicians have offered financial assistance to fans. Taylor Swift recently covered rent for a fan who lost their job due to the virus. Lil Nas X and Megan Thee Stallion offered to pay some of their fans’ bills. Now, Puerto Rican pop star Bad Bunny is the latest musician to offer financial assistance to one of his supporters, albeit in a different way.

Cynthia Coronado, a devoted fan of Bad Bunny, recreated one of the singer’s Instagram photos on a giant canvas. The detailed painting shows Bad Bunny sporting heart-shaped glasses while sunbathing. Coronado shared the painting on Twitter and tagged Bad Bunny in hopes he would see it: “hope y’all like and hopefully he gets to see it!” she wrote.

Not only did the painting catch Bad Bunny’s attention, but he loved the portrait so much that he offered to purchase it for an impressive sum of money. “yo lo quiero,” he wrote. The singer then said he would pay $5,000 to keep the painting.

While most people would have accepted the hefty sum of money, Coronado was satisfied enough that he enjoyed her work. The painter turned down the money and instead said his love of the artwork was “worth more than money.”

After her tweet blew up, Coronado thanked Bad Bunny’s fans for their attention and said she’s working on creating prints of the artwork.

Check out Bad Bunny’s Twitter exchange with the fan above.

Music is primarily a form of entertainment, but there’s a lot that can be learned from it, even in an academic setting. That is apparently extra true of Rapsody’s 2019 album Eve, which is set to be the subject of an upcoming college course.

Rapsody shared the news and wrote, “One of the highest honors is to create art for the culture and have it taught in our educational institutions!”

Tyler Bunzey, a doctoral student at UNC’s English department, made the announcement of his UNC-Chapel Hill course on Facebook, writing, “I’m incredibly pleased to announce that I will be teaching at course at UNC this fall on Rapsody’s magnificent album ‘EVE.’ We will be examining the album track by track with readings and media to accompany each record.” He also describes the class, “In this course, we will explore the critical womanist stance of Rapsody’s 2019 release EVE, which features 16 songs titled with names of famous Black women throughout history. This course reads Rhapsody’s album as emerging from a greater tradition of womanist discourse dating back to the 19th century, and the purpose of this course is to explore that history. Additionally students will look at hip-hop historical development to engage with albums from femme-identified hip-hoppers throughout the genre’s history.”

On a similar note, Dr. Simone Drake, a associate professor of African American and African studies at Ohio State University, also wrote an academic paper about Eve and Toni Morrison’s work. The paper is summarized, “Dr. Simone Drake’s paper, ‘Toni Morrison’s Houses of Woman and Rapsody’s Eve,’ will mine Morrison’s literary oeuvre to theorize ‘houses of women’ as physical spaces in which Black women disrupt, interrupt, and erupt into societies who conceive of Black women in ways that are both limited and limiting. Drake will trace this trope into work of Hip Hop artist Rapsody and her album Eve (2019). Read together, Drake sees Black women’s cultural production as nothing short of a way to image spaces that, by centering Black women, offers lessons on what society can gain by locating Black women at the center of cultural discourse.”

Revisit our review of Eve here.

The world remains at home in isolation and some musicians are using the quarantine as an opportunity to work on new projects. But 50 Cent and Post Malone are using the time to boost older efforts. The two rappers figured now would be a perfect time to release an official video for their 2015 track “Tryna F*ck Me Over.”

The video opens with 50 Cent and Post Malone sitting in a getaway car. The two accomplices detail their previous nights. Malone had gone home with a girl he was only slightly interested in, and 50 had managed to pull off a heist that awarded him some fast cash. Their conversation gets cut short when a police officer knocks on Malone’s window and 50 bolts from the passenger door. The remainder of the visual shows the duo showcasing their bars in a vibrant, club-like atmosphere. “Spent my life tryna be a good guy / Still people want to see me get got,” Posty raps.

Though the video is just now seeing a debut, it’s clear it was filmed several years ago. The time period can be indicated by Malone’s lack of face tattoos, which he just recently added to.

To promote the video, 50 Cent shared a doctored image of himself with Post Malone’s curly hair and signature “Always Tired” face tattoos.

Watch the “Tryna F*ck Me Over” video above.

It’s been a huge day for WWE, and not the good kind. The wrestling company, which was recently deemed an “essential business” by the state of Florida after an interesting SuperPAC donation, is releasing a growing list of wrestlers and backstage employees. Some of these performers have reacted to the cuts on social media, starting with an emotional video from Drake Maverick.

Maverick’s video was part gracious, teary farewell, part promo. He said that he’s “very grateful” that WWE is still allowing him to compete in the tournament for an interim NXT Cruiserweight Champion, which will begin on tonight’s episode of NXT. The tournament’s round-robin format means Maverick has three more WWE matches, and he says “it’s very likely those will be the last matches I’ll ever have” and promised fans that “you’re going to get everything I have.”

Retired wrestling legend Kurt Angle bid the WWE Universe farewell with a tweet, saying “I wanted 2 say thank you to the WWE for the time I spent there.I made many new friends and had the opportunity to work with so many talented people. To the Superstars, continue to entertain the WWE Universe as well as you possibly can. They’re the best fans in the world. #itstrue.”

Fit Finlay, who was furloughed from his position as a WWE producer, also reacted on Twitter. After responding to a comment that all the pubs in Ireland should be obligated to give him free pints for life with “These guys know!!!!”, he thanked his fans and wished the wrestling industry well: “To everyone on Gods green earth. Thank you for the kind words. I’ve been doing this for 46 years(Wrestling)I pray you all get through this and we can share a hug and drink again. Stay healthy.”

Shane “The Hurricane” Helms responded with a funny tweet, then an optimistic statement that “I truly believe that this is just temporary. There are many people in this world in far worse situations than I am, so please don’t worry about me too much.” Curt Hawkins said he wasn’t in the mood to joke about his release this time around.

Former Cruiserweight Champion Lio Rush released a longer statement about his WWE journey, and promised that “This isn’t the end nor the last you will be hearing the name #LioRush.”

Andrea Listenberger, the writer behind the Otis and Mandy storyline, revealed that she had been let go as well. She reflected that “I’m proud of the work I’ve been able to do since starting in Dec., and glad that the storyline I worked on resonated with so many people. That’s what writing is about for me.”

Rusev reacted to his release just long enough before WWE officially announced it for people to think he was trolling, with a tweet that said, “Thank you All, Rusev out!” This might be the WrestleMania tank entrance of WWE release reactions so far.

More statements from former WWE workers are likely to be released throughout the day, and this article will be updated accordingly.

After the events of Avengers: Endgame, there’s been a large question mark around the future of Mark Ruffalo‘s Hulk as members of the original Avengers team began exiting the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans are both done as Iron Man and Captain America, respectively, while Scarlett Johansson’s time in the MCU will conclude after Black Widow (eventually) hits theaters.

But not all of the original team has left. Chris Hemsworth will be back in Thor: Love and Thunder, and Jeremy Renner is expected to appear in the Hawkeye series for Disney+. In a new interview with Variety, Ruffalo reveals he’s hoping to do a bit of both. Unfortunately, the actor also revealed that, currently, there are no official plans for the Hulk except for a possible cameo in the upcoming She-Hulk series, and even that isn’t fully locked down.

“If we come up with something good, that would be really interesting,” he tells Variety. “Right now that’s about it. That’s all there is on the table.”

While the actor could be pulling off some of that infamous MCU secrecy by not tipping his hand on upcoming projects before Marvel is ready to announce them, he doesn’t hold back by expressing his interest in a solo Hulk movie, which has always just been out of his reach.

“There’s an idea that I think could be really interesting,” Ruffalo said. “We’ve never really followed him into his life. He’s always kind of off on the side. He’s like the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of the Avengers. It’d be interesting to fill in all the blanks about what happened to him in between all these movies.”

As if the thought of a solo film isn’t enough to get Hulk fans excited, Ruffalo took things a step further by teasing one particular character who has a long comic book history of battling the green giant, which Ruffalo devoured as a child. “Maybe Hulk and Wolverine could hook up,” he suggested. As X-Men fans know, Wolverine made his first appearance in an issue of “The Incredible Hulk” where the two rage-filled heroes exchanged blows in the woods of Canada. Could the MCU be planning a similar debut for its new version of the clawed mutant? Maybe, if Ruffalo has his say.

(Via Variety)

Jayson Tatum has been a famous basketball player for a long time. Dating back to his days at Chaminade, basketball fans have known Tatum’s name, anxiously awaiting his NBA career. So while it’s an extraordinary feat to develop into an NBA superstar, many were hardly surprised when Tatum made that leap this season, scoring nearly 24 points per game on impressive efficiency.

At age 22, in just his third season, Tatum was going toe-to-toe with the NBA’s best players, scoring 39 in a nationally televised victory over Kawhi Leonard and the Clippers just before his first All-Star game. Out of the break, Tatum kept spewing fire, peaking in one of the best games of the NBA season on February 23 against LeBron James and the Lakers. Though the Lakers won and James outplayed Tatum, the young Celtic’s performance was enough to earn praise from the King.

In an Instagram post after the game, Tatum received incredibly nice praise from James, who is never one to be unnecessarily flowery to his competitors.

Though Tatum has been famous since he was a teenager and memorably dominated the Eastern Conference playoffs as a rookie, 2019-20 was a culmination of his hard work. This is the Tatum basketball fans thought they were getting when they hit YouTube for highlights shot at a rural Missouri gym a half-decade ago.

After Tatum and other members of the Gatorade team came together to announce on Twitter that Ypsilanti sophomore Emoni Bates won the Gatorade Player of the Year award, the significance of being on the other side of that moment was not lost on Tatum. For years, Tatum looked up to legendary pros, posing for pictures and clinging to their advice. Now, he’s one of the NBA stars lending a hand to a new generation.

“Talking about the NBA, it is a brotherhood,” Tatum told Dime over the phone. “It’s cool, I remember coming up through high school, any time I got to meet or talk to an NBA player, whether it was quick or if I saw them in person and got to ask for a picture. I remember talking to Kevin Durant on the phone, I remember meeting LeBron, then you fast forward and you’re playing against these guys your rookie year and they remember you and they say what’s up before the game. That’s really, really cool, because by the time you get to the NBA, you’re 18, 19 years old. So you’re still a kid and you’re still looking up to all these guys, but now you’re competing against them. That feeling is really special.”

Growing up in St. Louis, his first connection with a star was Bradley Beal, someone he watched excel at the high school level and then was able to get advice from while he was going through the same process

“Yeah, I think Brad Beal, he’s like my big brother. When I was in seventh grade, he won this award at my high school and I remember the day that he was (so) surprised. They gave him the award in front of the entire school and I remember that day like it was yesterday, and I remember telling myself, ‘I want to win that some day.’

“Me and him talked about it many times, and going through high school, he always gave me advice and he would come watch me play, and I eventually won it my senior year. It was just cool for me because I remember being in the gym as a seventh-grader watching him win, then five years later, fast forward at the same school and I was able to win.”

Now, he gets that chance with Bates, who he’s been able to see up close and personal a few times.

“The first time I met him, he was in L.A. working out in the gym that I was working out in [after my rookie season],” said Tatum. “That was the first time, but I had seen his highlights on Twitter and Instagram, that’s when I first was aware of him. Then a year ago around this time, I was down in Dallas with my former AAU team and my dad was down there. We went to go watch (Bates) play in the same tournament, so that’s how that came about.”

Bates is a special talent, as evidenced by him winning Gatorade Player of the Year as just a sophomore, and he figures to follow in the footsteps of guys like Tatum that go from high school star to challenging his idols in the NBA in a few years. Having already been welcomed in by that brotherhood will only help him navigate that path.

The bad news for WWE keeps coming, and it doesn’t look like there’s an end in sight.

WWE followed up Wednesday’s conference call warning of roster cuts, furloughs, and decreased salaries by immediately releasing numerous Superstars, including former Cruiserweight Champion Lio Rush, former Tag Team Champions and Boneyard Match participants Luke Gallows and Karl Anderson, and Heath Slater, who has kids.

The latest announced cuts are nine WWE producers, including a number of recognizable names from the company’s history. Per Pro Wrestling Sheet, the producers have been furloughed and not outright released.

So far, the confirmed list of producers furloughed by the company on Wednesday afternoon includes:

• Billy Kidman
• Mike Rotunda
• Dave ‘Fit’ Finlay
• Scott Armstrong
• Sarah Stock
• Shane ‘Hurricane’ Helms
• Lance Storm
• Shawn Daivari
• Pat Buck

How can you do this to Mike Rotunda, the former Irwin R. Schyster on Tax Day? It’s also notable that Lance Storm closed his wrestling school back in November of 2019 to take the position with WWE, and is furloughed a mere five months later. Such a shame to see a number of legends who have been instrumental in the creation and development of WWE talent over the past several years losing their positions, even temporarily, due to cost-cutting measures.

As always, we’ll keep you updated on any additional names whose releases are announced today.

I miss sports a lot, and if you are reading our sports website, odds are high you miss sports, too. I miss buzzer-beaters in basketball games, world-class goals in soccer games, and considering the point of the normal sports calendar we are in, I really miss baseball teams hitting moonshot home runs that constantly leave me in awe of how a human being can mash a baseball hundreds of feet into the air and have it land in the outstretched palm of some random guy who just happened to be in the right place at the right time.

Unfortunately, we do not have that in the United States right now as part of a preventative measure to try and slow the spread of COVID-19. What we do have, however, are some sports leagues in other corners of the world, and fortunately for us, they are playing real, live games. An example of this came via the Chinese Professional Baseball League in Taiwan, where Chu Yu-Hsien of the Rakuten Monkeys hit a walk-off dinger against the Uni-President 7-Eleven Lions.

Getting the obvious out of the way here, it is very strange to see this sort of thing happen in a venue that does not have fans, something that Dr. Anthony Fauci said we will need to see in the United States if we are going to get sports any time soon. The mannequins in the stands and the piped-in noise are a nice touch, even if they are going to take some time to get used to — also it’s very funny that despite having no actual fans the TV broadcast still cuts to the mannequin crowd reaction as the guy rounds the bases.

Having said that, holy crap! It’s a live baseball game ending with someone hitting a baseball to the moon to win! This is like standing under a waterfall after spending a month in the desert, man. And what a homer this was! The pitcher missed his spot completely and left a meatball over the middle of the plate, and the batter made him pay, turning on the pitch and dropping it right into the seats that are usually occupied by fans who decide at the last minute they wanted to go check out a ballgame.

It stinks, but we’re not getting live sports on our shores for a while. It’ll be tough for fans, sure, but fortunately, we have other ways to consume baseball, and basketball, and football, and everything else that we miss. At the very least, I have never been so invested in a walk-off that did not involve my team.

Most festivals and concerts have either been postponed or canceled entirely for weeks now, and there’s really no word yet on when some of them might come back. Generally, it looks like most events are rescheduling for the fall, like Coachella, which was pushed back from April to October. It remains to be seen if that will be enough of a delay. California Governor Gavin Newsom seems to think it’s not necessarily a matter of time, but that it’s more about one important thing happening.

Newsom answered questions during a press event yesterday (April 14), and he was asked about when he thinks life in California can return to normal (or closer to it). He suggested that mass gatherings (like concerts) likely won’t come back until a coronavirus vaccine is widely available, saying, “The prospect of mass gatherings is negligible at best until we get to herd immunity and we get to a vaccine. So large-scale events that bring in hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of strangers, all together across every conceivable difference, health and otherwise, is not in the cards based upon our current guidelines and current expectations. […] When you suggest June, July, August: it is unlikely.”

This comes after Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute Of Allergy And Infectious Diseases, said earlier this month that a vaccine could be a year to 18 months away.

Watch Newsom’s explanation above.

Dwayne Johnson doesn’t strike me as a guy who hears “no” often. He was (and still occasionally is) an extremely popular wrestler who transitioned into an extremely popular actor with multiple franchises to his name. Also, people call him “The Rock” like that’s totally normal. But one of his biggest career what-ifs is the franchise that he’s not part of.

When asked on Instagram if there was a movie role that he “wanted but lost to another actor,” Johnson replied, “In Hollywood, actors are kind of like in-a-box. There are actors that can vie for a particular role because it allows for them to have a certain look, skin color, size, etc. Fortunately, for me, there aren’t a lot of guys at all who look like me. So, all of my roles, from the beginning of my career, I’ve been a lucky son of a b*tch that they’ve been created and designed for me — except Jack Reacher.” Yup, Johnson wanted to play Jack Reacher, a role that went to Tom Cruise, despite Cruise being 5′ 7″ and Jack Reacher, the book character, being 6′ 5″. The same height as the Rock.

He added, “Now, this was ten years ago, and I was in a much different place, I recognize that. Tom was the biggest movie star in the world, and I was not… I’m positive that the role of Jack Reacher, because it was an established character, an IP that was well known and beloved around the world, that I wouldn’t have had the creative space to do what I wanted with the character. I look back in gratitude that I didn’t get Jack Reacher.”

This worked out well for everyone: Tom Cruise got to star in Jack Reacher and Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, two fun movies in a “lazy afternoon on TNT” kind of way, and because the Rock’s availability was open, he received a phone call from Universal to make a cameo in Fast Five. Eventually leading to this great moment in cinema history.

(Via Collider)