Former Brockhampton member Matt Champion packed a one-two punch in February. His first solo offering of the year, “Aphid” featuring Dijon, is hardly two weeks old, but Champion dropped another solo single, “Slug,” on Wednesday, February 28.
The trippy single was co-produced by Matt and Henry Kwapis, and Champion’s boundless musicality is depicted in an Anna Pollack-directed video.
In it, we find Champion within a mysterious orb in the middle of a damp forest. “I want someone,” he sings. “And that someone just happens to be you.” An unidentifiable yet undeniably gross substance drips from his fingers — which, very slug-like — while he’s slowly joined by people who seem unaware of his existence. Champion slips and slides while others execute choreography around him. Champion observes, then trips when he tries to walk away. “Won’t you be my slug?” he sings.
Finally, Champion seamlessly joins in on the dancing for a bit before returning to his initial drooped state. The music cuts off, and we’re left with the same view from the outside of the bubble. Wildlife chirps outside while Champion’s habitat totally decompresses, and he’s left lying inanimately when the screen goes black.
It would appear that Champion intends to keep fans fed, as a press release advises, “Stay tuned for more from Matt Champion soon.”
On July 26, 2023, Niger’s democratically elected president Mohamed Bazoum was overthrown in a coup, which prevented Mdou Moctar from safely returning home to Niger. The military coup happened shortly after they had completed Funeral For Justice, their newly announced album due out May 3, as explained in a press release. It was also revealed that the album was “recorded at the close of two years spent touring the globe following the release of 2021 breakout Afrique Victime [and] captures the Nigerien quartet in ferocious form.”
Mdou Moctar released the rocking title track on Wednesday, February 28. It delivered an explicitly clear message: “Dear African leaders, hear my burning question / Why does your ear only heed France and America? / They misled you into giving up your lands.”
“This album is really different for me,” Moctar, lead singer and guitarist, said in a statement. “Now the problems of terrorist violence are more serious in Africa. When the US and Europe came here, they said they’re going to help us, but what we see is really different. They never help us to find a solution.”
Bassist and producer Mikey Coltun added, “Mdou Moctar has been a strong anti-colonial band ever since I’ve been a part of it. France came in, f*cked up the country, then said, ‘You’re free.’ And they’re not.”
Moctar added, “I don’t support the coup, but I never in my life liked France in my country. I don’t hate France or French people. I don’t hate American people either, but I don’t support their manipulative policies — what they do in Africa. In 2023, we want to be free, we need to smile, you understand?”
These nuanced sentiments will be thoroughly unpacked across Funeral For Justice.
Watch the “Funeral For Justice” video above. Below, check out the album’s cover art and tracklist, as well as Mdou Moctar’s upcoming tour dates.
041/4 — Indio, CA @ Coachella Music and Arts Festival
04/21 — Indio, CA @ Coachella Music and Arts Festival
06/05 — Atlantic City, NJ @ Anchor Rock Club
06/06 — Harrisburg, PA @ The Abbey Bar at ABC
06/07 — Richmond, VA @ Cheers Brown’s Island
06/08 — Saxapahaw, NC @ Haw River Ballroom
06/09 — Asheville, NC @ The Orange Peel
06/11 — Charleston, SC @ Pour House
06/12 — Birmingham, AL @ Saturn
06/13 — Atlanta, GA @ Terminal West
06/14 — Manchester, TN @ Bonnaroo
06/15 — Indianapolis, IN @ The Hi-Fi
06/18 — Chicago, IL @ Thalia Hall
06/19 — Detroit, MI @ Magic Bag
06/20 — Cleveland, OH @ Beachland Ballroom
06/21 — Buffalo, NY @ Asbury Hall
06/22 — Greenfield, MA @ Green River Music Festival
06/23 — Boston, MA @ Paradise Rock Club
06/26 — Brooklyn, NY @ Warsaw
06/27 — Washington, DC @ 9:30 Club
06/28 — Philadelphia, PA @ Union Transfer
07/03 — London, UK @ Electric Brixton
07/07 — Beuningen, NL @ Down the Rabbit Hole
08/19 — Berlin, DE @ Festaal Kreuzberg
08/20 — Leipzig, DE @ UT Kreuzberg
08/21 — Munich, DE @ Ampere
08/22 — Milan, IT @ Magnolia Summer Stage
08/25 — Paris, FR @ Petit Bain
08/26 — Antwerp, BE @ OLT Revierenhof
08/27 — Amsterdam, NL @ Paradiso
08/30 — Dorset, UK @ End Of The Road Festival
08/31 — Manchester, UK @ Manchester Psych Fest
09/01 — Birmingham, UK @ Moseley Folk Festival
09/02 — Glasgow, UK @ Saint Luke’s
09/03 — Newcastle, UK @ Boiler Shop
09/04 — Leeds, UK @ The Brudenell Social Club
Funeral For Justice is out 5/3 via Matador Records. Find more information here.
For 2 ½ years now, AMC Theatres has been showing the same ad before every movie. It stars Nicole Kidman and it features her waxing upon the beauty of the moviegoing experience (preferably at an AMC Theatres chain, of course). It was meant to coax audiences, who rightly stayed away from movie theaters at the pandemic’s height, back to seeing movies in public. It was so popular (to the shock of Kidman’s husband) that they kept showing it, like an aperitif. Back in 2022 the chain promised they were making a sequel, though how could one improve upon perfection?
Looks like we’ll find out sooner or later if that’s possible. Per Deadline, CEO Adam Aron revealed during a quarterly earnings call two things: 1) They made not one but three new Nicole Kidman ads; 2) They’re going to start slipping into rotation on March 1, i.e., the day Dune: Part Two officially opens.
Aron described it as “phase two of the Nicole Kidman campaign,” and seemed to imply that audiences (or at least projectionists) had grown weary of showing the 60-second commercial, “the same one, that’s appeared over and over, before every movie starts.”
And so, starting Friday, audiences will see one of three new ones that will “kind of randomly appear in our theaters prior to the show.” (He stressed that audiences will get different ones, not three in a row. That would be weird.)
This begs some questions: Will the new ones — any of them — top the original, the one where Oscar-winning thespian, who once spent a year-plus shooting the same Stanley Kubrick film with her future ex-husband, says, “We come to this place for magic”? The one where she says, quite movingly, that “heartbreak feels good in a place like this”? Will audiences recite the lines of the new ones out loud, as they do now, treating it like The Rocky Horror Picture Show? Will they even welcome something new? Or will they revolt in anger that their beloved original Nicole Kidman AMC ad is gone?
Or maybe they’ll all be very good and we’ll be okay with moving on. Perhaps the original will be seen as a relic of a time when we were most of us terrifying of going to the movies, fearing some stranger(s) will infect us. Or maybe they’ll stink on hot ice and they’ll go away, and we’ll go back to sitting through a half hour of trailers followed by that longtime cheesy welcome-to-AMC intro that used to feature a guy being so startled by a movie that he gets his popcorn everywhere, then right into the main feature.
Or maybe — and this is a good idea — they should go back to what the movies did from the ‘30s into the early ‘60s and show cartoons before the movie. AMC could pay cartoon villain David Zaslav for those hundreds of classic Looney Tunes he erased from (HBO) Max and play them before Kristen Stewart’s forthcoming lesbian thriller. Cartoons are a great cleanser before watching a movie. Then again, seeing a movie at AMC Theatres without a trace of Nicole Kidman would be kind of sad.
LeBron James, a one-time Monday Night Raw attender (that we know of) who plays professional basketball in his spare time, is apparently pretty excited to see that The Rock is back in WWE and part of The Bloodline. James and the Los Angeles Lakers took on the Clippers at Crypto.com Arena on Wednesday night, and late in the first quarter, he decided to do his best impression of some of Dwayne Johnson’s famous oversells of a stunner from Stone Cold Steve Austin.
With just under 10 seconds left in the frame, James got to his spot and pulled up for a baseline jumper. PJ Tucker contested the effort and slightly bumped him, which led to one of the funniest moments of James’ career, as he felt the need to sell the call by falling onto his back and then doing a somersault.
Seriously, this is just straight up with The Rock would do sometimes when he wanted to really sell a stunner.
I have zero clue why LeBron decided that this was the best course of action here, but I cannot stop laughing, largely because this is all extremely funny. If you are on the Lakers beat and are reading this blog, I must implore you to ask why he did this, and also, please ask if he is upset over WWE deciding that Cody Rhodes vs. Roman Reigns will main event WrestleMania XL in Philadelphia this year instead of the highly-anticipated matchup between Reigns and The Rock. In the meantime, I will be watching the famed “My Way” video package from before Rock and Austin went toe-to-toe at WrestleMania 17.
Hinds are back. The Madrid-bred duo confirmed a return to their original form — co-guitarists and co-vocalists Ana Perrote and Carlotta Cosials — by releasing “Coffee,” their first single in four-plus years. Their last album, The Prettiest Curse, arrived in 2020.
Cosials and Perrote co-directed the accompanying video, shot in Madrid in January, which depicts the inhibition expressed through lyrics like “I like black coffee and cigarettes / And flowers from boys that I’m not sleeping with” and “I said, maybe, maybe it’s all in my head / Told you, to stop calling / Don’t look at me with those eyes.”
“Coffee is a sincericide, screaming the nasty truth as loud as you can with no shame,” Hinds said in a statement, as per a press release. “It’s about admitting to all the things you’re not supposed to like or doing all the things you’re not meant to do. It’s a lot of fun when you can be fully honest and shut that little voice in your head that tells you what you should or shouldn’t do.”
Hinds shared an additional message about “Coffee” on Instagram, writing, “Let’s have a toast for standing up after falling. A toast for imagination and dreams. A toast for a year soaked in joy. A whole new world is ahead of us all, guys. Our most sincere thank you for your patience, for your unconditional support, for sticking with us during the wildest storm. We’ve missed you. We’ve missed this. We ain’t disappearing ever again.”
To that point, Hinds will be very visible this spring. They’re due to perform at SXSW from March 13-16 before staging back-to-back sold-out shows at Baby’s All Right in Brooklyn, New York on March 18-19.
Watch the “Coffee” video above, and see Hinds’ upcoming European and UK tour dates below.
05/17 — Paris, France @ Supersonic Records
05/19 — Munich, Germany @ THEATRON Pfingstfestival
05/21 — Berlin, Germany @ Monarch
05/26 — Brighton, UK @ Prince Albert (Matinee)
05/26 — Brighton, UK @ Prince Albert (Evening)
05/27 — London, UK @ The Lower Third
05/28 — London, UK @ The Lower Third
Guards turning down good shots from two to get a teammate a great look from three isn’t a new thing. Having said that, Jevon Carter of the Chicago Bulls took that a little too far during Wednesday night’s game against the Cleveland Cavaliers, as the veteran guard flat out decided to not take about as automatic of a two points as you’ll ever see.
Carter thought about pulling up from the corner, but realized in mid-air that Georges Niang was gonna block his shot into the third row. Instead, he made a very smart play, as he kicked it to Nikola Vucevic, cut right to the rim, and got the pass back from his big man. He was, quite literally, the only player for either team in the restricted area and had as cut-and-dry of a layup as there is, but instead of taking that, he kicked it out to Coby White behind the three-point line, who missed.
You can hear the crowd’s confusion, while Chicago’s broadcasters wondered what exactly he was doing here. Maybe he didn’t like that his momentum was taking him away from the rim or something? I have no idea, it’s certainly a unique one.
The funny thing is Carter kicking it out to an open White is a pretty good decision most of the time. White has been a revelation for the Bulls this year — he’s averaging 19.4 points per game and has hit 39 percent of his attempts from behind the arc, making him arguably the brightest spot on a Chicago team that has just not been up to par this year. Getting him a wide open look is normally about as good of an outcome as the team can have, but that’s a pretty easy two points if Carter just took it.
Drake posted two Instagram photos of his mother, Sandra “Sandi” Graham, presumably at a recent stop on his ongoing It’s All A Blur Tour — Big As The What?with J. Cole. The first photo shows Sandi beaming (and rocking a tie-dyed OVO hoodie) while holding her iPhone. The next slide is a zoomed-in photo of her phone open to a text she wrote, which reads, “I always cry when I come to his concerts… I’m so proud of him.” Drake captioned the post, “Posting this as a forever core memory.” (It’s extremely important to note that Sandi uses enlarged text like a true mom.)
From the moment he became a well-known rapper, Drake has publicized his devotion to his mother. Last July, during one of three shows at New York City’s Madison Square Garden during his initial It’s All A Blur Tour with 21 Savage, he emotionally rapped “Look What You’ve Done” to his mom while she sat beside him on stage.
As for Drake’s current It’s All A Blur Tour — Big As The What? leg, the next shows are scheduled for Saturday, March 2, and Sunday, March 3, in Kansas City, Missouri. See all of the remaining dates here.
Megan Thee Stallion is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
James Clavell’s 1975 novel Shōgun runs a whopping 1152 pages. The first time it was adapted into a TV miniseries, in 1980, they banged the whole thing out in five episodes. Mind you, those episodes were nearly two hours each, totaling nine hours and change. The book’s inspired a new limited series (as they call miniseries nowadays), which bowed its first two episodes today. But how many episodes will it take to get through the Clavell now?
The answer: 10. The difference is that each episode is between 60 and 75 minutes, meaning it will probably wind up being only slightly longer than the previous TV adaptation — 10, maybe 11 hours total, depending on how long each episode is. In other words, it’s about an hour per every hundred pages of the tome.
The expansive story follows the outbreak of a 1600s civil war and also revolves around the accounts of an English ship captain, John Blackthorne (Cosmo Jarvis), whose shop becomes marooned, which is the first step in him becoming pivotal in the conflict, particularly on the side of Lord Yoshii Toranaga (Hiroyuki Sanada), whose rule has been dragged into chaos by an opposing Council of Regents (i.e., “vultures”). However, Blackthorne and Toranaga must rely upon a translator, Toda Mariko (Anna Sawai), who is no mere impartial party.
The 1980 Shōgun was a massive hit, turning its star Richard Chamberlain — already a fixture of television — into the era’s king of miniseries. The trashy The Thorn Birds was soon to follow. That Shōgun, which also features the legendary Toshiro Mifune, is not available to stream but is on Blu-ray.
New episodes of Shōgun will drop every Wednesday on Hulu and Disney+ as well as on FX.
Drake and J. Cole spent Wednesday, February 28, at KeyBank Center in Buffalo, New York for the second of back-to-back shows for their co-headlining It’s All A Blur Tour – Big As the What?However, a part of Drake is still in St. Louis, Missouri, where two fans were struck by a car and killed while leaving a Big As The What? concert on February 13. The victims were mother and daughter, 42-year-old Laticha Bracero and 21-year-old Alyssa Cordova.
Per XXL Magazine, Drake paused Wednesday’s show in Buffalo to deliver a broader message about gratitude in the victims’ honor.
“You never know what somebody else’s reality will be when they walk out of this building,” Drake told the audience in XXL‘s fan-taken video. “So, for this moment that all of us are together — all 18,000 people — what I want to do [is] I want you to turn to somebody that you do not know. Not somebody that you came with. I want you to turn to somebody that you do not know, I want you to look them in the eyes, and I want you to prove that you’re grateful for your life. I want you to take five seconds out of your day to make somebody else’s day. Just show them some love because you never know what comes next. Just some f*ckin’ love tonight in Buffalo, New York.”
Drake continued, “I think one of the most important things in life is the idea that you have two choices. You can either wake up every day, and you can be a piece of sh*t, or you can wake up every day and be a decent person, so I appreciate y’all being good for [inaudible]. Rest in peace to that young mother and her child.”
Drake performs in Buffalo, N.Y. and says, “Rest in peace,” to mother and daughter that were killed after leaving his show in St. Louis earlier this month. pic.twitter.com/FTdCK31io5
According to KTVI FOX 2 in St. Louis, the alleged driver has been identified as 22-year-old Monte Henderson, who has been out on bond and subsequently “ordered to undergo house arrest and wear a GPS ankle monitor.”
The local news outlet also reported the alleged sequence of events, as excerpted below.
“Henderson was charged with two counts of first-degree involuntary manslaughter and two counts of armed criminal action in the deaths of Laticha Bracero, 42, and Alyssa Cordova, 21.
The crash happened around 12:30 a.m. on February 14 at North 18th and Olive streets, near city police headquarters, in Downtown West as Bracero and Cordova were leaving a Drake concert.
The St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department’s probable cause statement claims that Henderson was speeding in excess of 70 miles per hour in a 2020 Jeep Cherokee, driving eastbound on Olive Street. At some point, Henderson allegedly blew through a red light and sideswiped the front end of a 2017 Mitsubishi Outlander, which was traveling north on 18th Street. The Cherokee spun out and struck Bracero and Cordova, who were using the crosswalk on Olive.”
There are great lawyers, and then there’s Alina Habba — which is to say someone who doesn’t appear to be great legal representation. The former president has burned through endless lawyers during his many recent legal woes, and at this point the best he can do seems to be someone under the intense delusion she’s better than Taylor Swift. Her latest blunder might be her worst: She let slip that her client is not only not as rich as he claims to be but is apparently straight-up not rich.
Per Raw Story, Trump’s lawyers filed a request asking to stay Justice Arthur Engoron’s decision to force their client to fork over $454.2 million after being found liable in his New York fraud case. That request was denied, by the way, but not before they suggested Trump simply doesn’t have the dough.
“In the absence of a stay on the terms herein outlined,” the filing read, “properties would likely need to be sold to raise capital under exigent circumstances, and there would be no way to recover any property sold following a successful appeal and no means to recover the resulting financial losses from the Attorney General.”
In other words, Trump doesn’t have half a billion at the ready. What’s more, this directly contradicts what Habba told Newsmax after they asked if he had “that kind of money sitting around.”
“Yes,” Habba replied. “I mean, he does, of course he has money. You know, he’s a billionaire. We know that.”
Do we, though? When asked if Trump could simply write a check, Habba kind of waffled. “I’m not gonna get into privileged information, but there will be a bond, and there will be no issues with that,” she said. “So that’s all I’ll say on that.”
Habba later told Fox News something similar, claiming “he’s resilient and he happens to have a lot of cash.”
Will Trump throw ketchup at Habba next time he sees her? Maybe not. He’s already been open about how difficult he is as a client, saying any lawyer who takes him on as a client would have to be “crazy.” At least he has Habba.
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