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As they are so often quick to remind us, rappers do not want to be role models. However, they so often end up being just that, with listeners adopting behavior, slang, and style choices from their favorite entertainers. One thing that many of them don’t want their fans to imitate, though, is getting the surgical procedures that stars from Cardi B to Doja Cat to Latto have admitted to having.

Although Cardi B said that she likes being “perfect,” she also warned her followers away from the popular Brazilian butt lift that she wound up getting reversed. Doja Cat said she was getting her “titties pulled up,” but as it happens, she actually got a reduction while razzing a concern trolling commenter to “eat my warm wet farts.”

And now, Latto has added her two cents to the ongoing debate over plastic surgery via her 777 Radio podcast. During a discussion with her younger sister and constant companion Brooklyn, Latto characterized herself as “a girl who have little tweaky tweaks,” but admitted to telling her sister to avoid surgery altogether. “I’m telling you. I’m telling you to all the young girls listening, all the women listening right now,” she said. “I’m telling you from someone who’s been there, done it, find peace within your natural state. Because you’re going to find a flaw and another flaw and another flaw and another flaw. Surgery, any of that stuff is not a permanent fix.”

You can watch the interview from 777 Radio above.

How is Fox News doing in the post-Tucker Carlson era?

Well, the right-leaning news network’s social media accounts shared a video of an influencer in an American flag bikini shooting her gun at beer, tampons, and lingerie. So, y’know, business as usual.

Bri Teresi (“Making Golf Sexy Again,” her Instagram bio reads) joined the ridicoulous Bud Light boycott by, uh, buying Bud Lights, then blasting the cans with a rifle. That’ll show ’em (it’s unclear who’s being shown). “Go woke, go broke,” she says in the video before unloading on the beer, as well as Tampax tampons and Honey Birdette lingerie. Pads and bras are also now (deep sigh) “woke.” Whoever taught conservatives that word should be forced to listen to Kid Rock, and only Kid Rock, for the rest of their miserable life.

“I’m shooting at Honey Birdette lingerie, Tampax tampons & Budlight. These companies have all gone woke!” Teresi said in a reply to her original video. “Tampax tampons used a biological male to promote their tampons. Honey Birdette used a biological male to model their lingerie. & y’all know about Bud Light.”

The hypocrisy of buying something to boycott has not been lost. “Buying BudLight to destroy it in order to own the company is peak Trump supporter behavior! BUYING stuff from a company to make said company ‘go broke’.. can’t make this shit up!” one person replied to a Fox News tweet about the video. Another said, “Spent all that money to prove she has a sh*t shot.”

Here’s more:

(Via Page Six)

The Boston Celtics were expected to finish off the Atlanta Hawks in Game 5 of their first-round NBA Playoffs series on Tuesday, April 25, but the Hawks won, 119-117, and forced a Game 6 for Thursday, April 27. Free basketball is rarely a bad thing, but in this case, there was a cost.

Janet Jackson already had her Together Again Tour scheduled to stop at Atlanta’s State Farm Arena on April 27, meaning State Farm Arena was suddenly double-booked for Jackson and the Hawks’ Game 6.

State Farm Arena announced that Jackson’s concert was rescheduled for Friday, April 28.

Jayson Tatum felt bad for inconveniencing her. The Celtics later took care of the Hawks in Thursday night’s Game 6, 128-120. Tatum finished his on-court postgame interview by apologizing.

“I want to send an apology to the legend Janet Jackson,” the four-time All-Star said with a smile. “We were supposed to close it out in Boston. She had to postpone her show. I hope she sees this. I apologize for that, but we got it done today.”

Jackson seems totally unbothered by the ordeal. She posted highlights from her April 26 show in Atlanta, the first of two nights, and captioned the Instagram post, “Atlanta, show 1 of 2 tonight! See you again Friday (congrats Hawks!) …swipe to see the band’s fave parts of the show. #TogetherAgainTour [basketball emoji].”

Jackson might run into another scheduling issue with the New York Knicks if a Game 5 is needed against the Miami Heat in their Eastern Conference semifinals series, which will begin this Sunday, April 30. A potential Game 5 would be at Madison Square Garden on Wednesday, May 10 — Jackson’s second of two nights scheduled at MSG.

Tucker Carlson may be off the air at Fox News, but he’s still under contract and the conservative news network reportedly plans to keep it that way until after the 2024 elections. According to inside sources, employees at Fox are “rattled” thanks to the decision to fire Carlson causing an immediate drop in viewers for his time slot, but for now, the goal is to keep Carlson off camera at Fox or anywhere.

“As of right now, the plan remains the same: pay out Carlson’s contract and keep him on the sidelines through the 2024 elections,” a Fox News source told Breitbart. “They knew they would take a beating for this, but everyone — and I mean everyone — is pretty rattled. They weren’t expecting the blowback to be this bad. Hate to say it, but it’s clear that Rupert has lost a step or two.”

According to Breitbart, Carlson’s current contract runs through December 2024, and Rupert Murdoch is reportedly trying to hold Carlson to that agreement so he can effectively “silence him” and keep Carlson from becoming “serious competition.”

This strategy mirrors Joe Rogan‘s recent thoughts on Carlson’s firing. The controversial podcaster opined that the “smart” and “not stupid” Fox News would pay out Tucker’s contract to keep him from becoming a threat.

“You’d be better off just giving him the same amount of money he made when he was on the air, than you would have with him opposing you,” Rogan said.

(Via Breitbart)

The creators of White House Plumbers, an upcoming HBO limited series about the burglary that led to Nixon’s resignation, are betting we still care about the Watergate scandal.

Certainly, there has been no shortage of successful, zeitgeisty works about the scandal over the years. All the President’s Men is the definitive version, an inspiring, Oscar-winning tale of the dogged journalists who uncovered the truth released in 1976, shortly after the events. Secret Honor from 1984 and Nixon from 1995 painted haunting portraits of the deranged paranoiac at the scandal’s center. Then came Dick, a 1999 comedy that skewered the whole Nixon White House by reimagining Deep Throat as a pair of naive, bumbling teenagers (Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams) who bring down the president and his idiotic lackeys by accident.

On paper, White House Plumbers looks like that kind of comedy. It has a funny name. It is created by a bunch of guys who worked on Veep, including David Mandel, who also wrote for Seinfeld, The Simpsons, Saturday Night Live, and Curb Your Enthusiasm. It stars Woody Harrelson and Justin Theroux, two very funny people, as E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, the White House staffers who organized the break-in and set in motion a chain of events that ended the presidency they were trying to protect. It sounds a lot like Dick, except in this case, the bumbling is coming from inside the (White) House.

Mandel swears it’s not a comedy. “It’s a drama, but it’s really funny,’” Mandel said to Indiewire. “We definitely walk a really fine line. This show doesn’t have jokes. However, there’s a lot of funny stuff because [that’s how it] happened. That’s the easiest way I can express it.”

It sounds like White House Plumbers will largely stick to the facts of the case (which are certainly ludicrous — the burglars wore wigs after all, and picturing Theroux and Harrelson stumbling around a dark office in wigs should have you laughing already) and hope that the novelty of his framing will pique viewer’s interest. Most Watergate movies spend just a minute or two on the actual break-in before moving on to what it considers to be more important subjects: the investigation, the cover-up, or, in the case of Dick, one teenager’s crush on America’s ugliest Commander-in-Chief.

Still, the biggest question surrounding White House Plumbers is if Watergate is really still of interest to the American public. It has been fifty years since the scandal that disillusioned an entire generation, and in the interim, American politics has gotten a lot more surreal and our notion of corruption has changed dramatically. In the wake of sexual harassment in the Oval Office and the manipulation of evidence to justify the invasion of Iraq, a Watergate movie in the 2000s might have seemed quaint. In fact, the only one to arrive in that decade, Frost/Nixon, had far more sympathy for the disgraced president than anyone could have expected when it came out in 2008.

In our current era, corruption is an abstract concept. The leader of one of the two major political parties, our last president, has had so many real, actual political scandals that it requires a work of serious journalistic diligence to even keep track of them, let alone parse their meaning. In 2023, corruption is subjective, extreme, highly partisan, and ubiquitous. A mere burglary could never feel significant or dramatic next to the horror show that is our actual political environment, which is why I’m skeptical that White House Plumbers isn’t more of a comedy than its creators are letting on. Simply dramatizing the facts of the case would produce a collective yawn.

But that isn’t stopping anyone. More recently, creators have been looking for untold stories in the Watergate saga. Slow Burn was a popular Slate podcast delving into the story of Martha Mitchell, wife of Nixon Attorney General John Mitchell, who was actually the first to connect Nixon to the burglary publicly. It was adapted into a largely-ignored Starz series starring Julia Roberts and Sean Penn in a fatsuit. There was also 18 ½, a 2022 historical fiction film that imagined the relationship between a journalist and a White House staffer who somehow had a copy of the missing White House tapes.

The mixed reception and mere existence of these projects and White House Plumbers show how our politics and our viewing habits have changed in the last fifty years. All the President’s Men, released in the twilight of Watergate itself, sculpted the story into marble, sparking deep analysis and serious thought. Years later, storytellers are still chipping away at it and using the pieces to make something new, even if those projects could never be nearly as significant.

Obviously, Watergate still has enough currency to get a green light. The question is, can Mandel’s blend of comedy and drama (and this great cast) find a way to connect with a broad audience and break new ground, where other recent other projects on the same subject have felt stuck in the mud?

Of course, some sh*t goes down when it’s billion dollars on an elevator, as Beyoncé sang on the “Flawless” remix featuring Nicki Minaj. But, the singer doesn’t want any smoke with the IRS. The Grammy Award-winning musician refutes claims that she owes millions in unpaid taxes and penalties, according to Page Six.

The Balmain collaborator is getting her financial documents into formation. Forbes revealed that back in January, the Notice of Deficiency asserted that the “Cuff It” singer owed a grand total of $2.7 million in unpaid taxes and penalties. When breakdown, the organization alleged that the entertainer had a tax bill of $805,850 for 2018 with $161,170 in penalties, and a tax bill of $1,442,747 in 2019 with $288,549.40 in penalties.

However, earlier this week, it is being reported by the outlet that Beyoncé and her legal team filed a petition in tax court to dispute these findings. The musician’s representatives claim that the IRS did not correctly account for several millions of dollars worth of deductions, including in charitable contributions over those two years.

To be exact, in 2018, Beyoncé supposedly contributed $868,766 to an unnamed charitable organization. In the newly filed petition, the recording artist requests that her penalties be waived since she “has acted reasonably and in good faith.”

Michael C. Cohen, the singer’s attorney, told Page Six, “We are working with the IRS and anticipate that the matter will be resolved shortly.”

The IRS might want to tread lightly as the singer’s fiercely loyal fan base, the Beyhive just might take matters into their own hands to ensure the Renaissance World Tour kicks off without a hitch.

James Corden’s final show as the host of The Late Late Show was an eventful one. Harry Styles talked about One Direction; Will Ferrell destroyed a desk; and Corden got (fake) hit by a car during “Crosswalk the Musical,” the segment most famous for the time that the host thrusted in a mouse costume.

Corden also convinced Tom Cruise to dress as Pumbaa and sing “Hakuna Matata” and “Can You Feel the Love Tonight?” for a live performance of The Lion King. That’s the kind of thing you can do when one of your goals as a late-night host is to “make friends with as many celebrities as I can,” as Corden said.

As Corden played up his sadness at saying farewell to Cruise, the duo broke into [“Can You Feel the Love Tonight?”] (which, of course, won an Oscar in 1994 for its part in the animated Lion King film). Corden began: “Tom, I mean, everything you’ve done for my show, everything you’ve done for me, I’ll never be able to…” Cruise interrupted him: “James, you had me at hello.” “I love you Tom,” Corden added. “I know,” responded Cruise, before hopping on a waiting helicopter.

If you’ve ever wanted to hear Tom Cruise voice a warthog with a vaguely Brooklyn accent, you’re in luck. You can watch the video above.

Ed Sheeran’s copyright infringement trial began earlier this week in New York. Sheeran took the stand on Tuesday, April 25, and defended against allegations that he stole from Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On” for his 2014 pop ballad “Thinking Out Loud.”

Ben Crump, the plaintiffs’ attorney, presented a past show of Sheeran’s during which he performed a mashup of “Let’s Get It On” and “Thinking Out Loud” as “a confession” to plagiarism, as reported by The Guardian, and Sheeran swatted that logic away: “If I had done what you’re accusing me of doing, I’d be a quite an idiot to stand on a stage in front of 20,000 people and do that.”

On Thursday, April 27, Sheeran upped his defense by playing “Thinking Out Loud” for the jury. The Associated Press relayed the scene:

“He reached back, grabbed his guitar from a rack behind the witness stand, and explained that writing a song was second nature to him. He said he used his own version of phonetics to create songs so quickly that he could write up to nine in a day. Even last weekend, Sheeran claimed, he wrote 10 songs. Then he sang just a few words of the pivotal tune, bringing smiles to the faces of some of the spectators in the courtroom of Judge Louis L. Stanton.

‘I’m singing out loud,’ he sang, loud enough to be heard but not raising decibels in the court. After he finished singing those words, he spoke a few too, saying ‘and then words fall in’ as he tried to teach the jury his method of creating music. He said he collaborated on the song with a co-writer, Amy Wadge, who wrote the opening chords.”

As explained by The New York Times, the plaintiffs in the case are the heirs of Ed Townsend, a credited songwriter on Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On,” and the lawsuit was filed against Sheeran in 2017.

This week we’re talking about wily veterans. And that includes Aaron Rodgers, who is the topic of the emergency Sportscast segment at the top of the episode. Steven has some heavy feelings to work out about his quarterback for the past 15 years, and all Ian can do in response is trash the 2005 film Hustle & Flow. (It makes sense when you hear the episode.)

With that out of the way, the guys get into the business of Indiecast by talking about First Two Pages Of Frankenstein, the new album by The National. Ian admits that he’s lost interest in the band after loving them in the aughts, and this record hasn’t really changed his mind. Steven meanwhile is still a believer, and thinks this album improves on the previous National record, I Am Easy To Find, though it’s not a complete comeback.

Next the guys turn to One Wayne G, the new 199-song data dump by Mac DeMarco. Did we listen to all eight hours? Not yet! Will we ever? Who knows? Steven and Ian try to figure out where Mac is at in his career. Is he quiet quitting a la Frank Ocean?

Finally, we talk about Atum, the new rock opera by Smashing Pumpkins that is so sprawling it is not yet fully released. Steven and Ian contemplate the story of Shiny, the hero at the center of the album, and whether his tale is a metaphor for cancel culture. More importantly, why does this album sound so bad? Can we reconnect Billy Corgan with Flood?

In Recommendation Corner, Ian talks up the DJ Avalon Emerson, while Steven stumps for the Nashville garage band Country Westerns.

New episodes of Indiecast drop every Friday. Listen to Episode 136 here and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. You can submit questions for Steve and Ian at [email protected], and make sure to follow us on Instagram and Twitter for all the latest news. We also recently launched a visualizer for our favorite Indiecast moments. Check those out here.

Here and there, Post Malone has dealt with rumors about drug use and other worrisome health issues. His recent weight loss has fed into that some, and now Malone laid his cards on the table and shared how he’s doing.

In a new Instagram post, Malone wrote, “i wanted to say that i’m not doing drugs, i’ve had a lot of people ask me about my weight loss and i’d suppose, performance on stage. i’m having a lot of fun performing, and have never felt healthier. i guess dad life kicked in and i decided to kick soda, and start eating better so i can be around for a long time for this little angel. next up is smokes and brews, but i like to consider myself a patient man… lol!”

He added of new music and where he’s at mentally these days, “i’ve spent a bit in the studio lately working on new music, and am so excited to share it with you, thank you for your patience and support y’all. you make my heart beat. i just wanted to say hi, and hopefully i’ll be posting more on here, my brain is in a super dope place, and i’m the happiest i’ve been in a long time.”

Find his full post below.

“4/28/2023, Antwerp Belgium! hello everybody, i hope you’re having a great night. i wanted to say that i’m not doing drugs, i’ve had a lot of people ask me about my weight loss and i’d suppose, performance on stage. i’m having a lot of fun performing, and have never felt healthier. i guess dad life kicked in and i decided to kick soda, and start eating better so i can be around for a long time for this little angel. next up is smokes and brews, but i like to consider myself a patient man… lol! i’ve spent a bit in the studio lately working on new music, and am so excited to share it with you, thank you for your patience and support y’all. you make my heart beat. i just wanted to say hi, and hopefully i’ll be posting more on here, my brain is in a super dope place, and i’m the happiest i’ve been in a long time. if you’re having a hard time or need some love, i can say that you’re loved more than you know, and keep f*cking crushing it. goodnight nerds [face with steam from nose emoji] spread love and rock on [boot emojis]”