“I’m so mad I did that sh*t,” she said. “I gained all this weight from being immobile while recovering and trying to preserve the fat. It was just so stupid. But who gives a f*ck. You got a BBL, you realize you didn’t need that sh*t. It doesn’t matter.”
Despite her remarks, SZA does not regret the cosmetic procedure unlike her previous breast implants. Instead, she’s beholden to it, saying: “My booty look nice. And I’m grateful that it looks pretty much… I don’t know, sometimes natural. But I don’t even care. It’s something that I wanted. I’m enjoying it. I love shaking it.”
SZA’s declaration has left many supporters confused. But her double-mindedness has made her a prolific songwriter. So, there’s that.
Of the last 25 years, there are few figures in the world of sports that had a larger impact on their sport and pop culture than Kobe Bryant. As a five-time champion and 2008 MVP with the Lakers, Bryant was, along with Shaq and Allen Iverson early and LeBron James later in his career, the face of the NBA. Being on the Lakers certainly didn’t hurt his cultural impact, as he is an L.A. icon, but his reach goes far beyond Los Angeles.
In the world of hip-hop, Bryant has been heavily referenced in song lyrics for the last two decades plus, eventually becoming the avatar for competing and championships. Here we are looking at 24 (plus a couple bonus tracks) times Bryant’s name came up in rap songs, as his legendary status is cemented by his impact not just on basketball but the culture as a whole. Even after his tragic death in 2020, Bryant’s legacy is still felt and artists continue to point to the Lakers great as one of the great examples of a winner and hooper.
“Overnight Celebrity” — Twista ft. Kanye West (2004)
Kanye: Give you ice like Kobe wife/We sorta like Goldie, right?/The way we mold ’em right
Twista: I could make you a celebrity overnight
The hook to Twista’s smash hit with Kanye features West referencing the massive diamond ring worn by Vanessa Bryant at a press conference after Kobe was charged with sexual assault in Colorado in 2003.
“Swagga Like Us” — T.I. ft. Jay-Z, Kanye West, Lil Wayne, and M.I.A (2008)
Tryna get that Kobe number, one over Jordan
This is another Kobe reference from Kanye, this time using Kobe as a stand-in for 24 (and Jordan for 23), which happens frequently, as Bryant became the most iconic No. 24 in sports.
“I Wanna Rock” — Snoop Dogg (2009)
Smokin’ on that Kobe, f**kin’ wit’ that purp
Unsurprisingly, Kobe is frequently referenced in L.A. rap. Here one of Los Angeles’ finest, Snoop Dogg, drops a Kobe reference in this 2009 track, which is far from the last time someone used Kobe and the Lakers as a metaphor for purple (and gold) strands in their weed.
Kobe Bryant” — Lil Wayne (2009)
Lil Wayne took the Kobe love to a whole new level in 2009 when he released a track titled and entirely about the Lakers star, so there’s not one bar to highlight here, but just the entire song.
“Beamer Benz or Bentley” — Lloyd Banks ft. Juelz Santana (2010)
Where my ring and my confetti? I’m Kobe Bryant-ready
By 2010, after winning his fifth title with the Lakers, there was no one more synonymous with winning than Bryant, with Lloyd Banks making that evident from his hit single from that year.
“See Me Now” — Kanye West ft. Beyonce, Big Sean, and Charlie Wilson (2010)
They say G.O.O.D. Music like the new Miami Heat, s**t/Comparin’ them to us, man they gotta add Kobe
After Bryant’s 2010 championship, LeBron James and Chris Bosh joined Dwyane Wade to create the Big 3 in Miami. However, as Big Sean boasted on “See Me Now,” comparisons to Kanye’s budding G.O.O.D. Music label and the Heat wasn’t good enough, as they’d need another legend in Bryant to be on their level.
“The City” — The Game ft. Kendrick Lamar (2011)
I’m Kobe on the Lakers floor, except I give you eighty-four
Bryant’s greatest individual performance was scoring 81 points against the Raptors in 2006, and that night gets pretty regularly referenced in hip-hop, with L.A.’s The Game providing one of the more notable ones on “The City.”
“Stay Schemin’” — Rick Ross ft. Drake and French Montana (2012)
Kobe ’bout to lose a hundred fifty Ms/Kobe my n****, I hate it had to be him
Rick Ross has a number of Kobe mentions in his songs (and, really, any NBA star); on 2012’s “Stay Schemin’” guest rapper Drake makes a reference to Bryant’s on-going divorce at the time — which Kobe and Vanessa eventually resolved and stayed together.
“Believe It” — Meek Mill ft. Rick Ross (2012)
Spend Iguodala on my Rolly/Young n**** ball like Kobe
Meek Mill gives us a double NBA reference here, with the Philly native shouting out then-Sixer Andre Iguodala and his 6-year, $80 million deal before noting he’s balling like Kobe.
“Kobe” — Chief Keef (2012)
While Lil Wayne’s 2009 track was very literally about Kobe Bryant, Chief Keef’s “Kobe” is more about the mindset of thinking he’s Kobe in various ways. But, like Wayne’s track, there are too many Kobe lines in it to just pull one out.
“Bugatti” — Ace Hood ft. Rick Ross and Future (2013)
Ballin’ on n***** like Kobe/F**k all you haters, you bore me
Ace Hood’s boastful hit from 2013 wouldn’t be complete without a reference to ballin’ like Kobe.
“Juice” — Chance the Rapper (2013)
I just faced a Veg-er/And you love being Kobe when you make the lay-er/Til you realize everybody in the world f**kin’ hates the Lakers
However, there was certainly some Lakers fatigue felt by fans outside of L.A., which Chance the Rapper makes mention of in this line from 2013’s “Juice”.
This the first time I confess/Me and Top is like a Kobe and Phil/A father figure f**k with him, you get killed/F**k with me and he will kill you himself
Another L.A. connection here, as Kendrick Lamar compares himself and Top Dawg ENT founder Anthony Tiffith to Kobe and Phil.
“Still Think About You” — A Boogie wit da Hoodie (2016)
I shoot up and lean back on some Kobe s**t/They don’t know how to pass on some Kobe s**t
One of the funniest Kobe lyrics comes from A Boogie wit da Hoodie on his 2016 track where he highlights Bryant’s reputation as a premier bucket-getter and not a facilitator.
“Views” — Drake (2016)
Me and Niko used to plot on how to make a change/Now me and Kobe doin’ shots the night before the game
Sometimes a reference is just a status check, as is the case here with Drake boasting about hanging out with Kobe.
“Shake It Fast” — Rae Sremmurd ft. Juicy J (2016)
I get to ballin’ like Kobe in the fourth quarter/So much money on me I can’t even get it sorted
Kobe has long been the go-to for references to being clutch, as is the case here on Swae Lee’s verse from Rae Sremmurd’s 2016 hit.
“THat Part” — ScHoolboy Q ft. Kanye West (2016)
Walkin’, livin’ legend, man, I feel like Kobe/I just dropped sixty, man, I feel like Kobe/Lamar was with me, man, I feel like Kobe
More than a decade from his “Overnight Celebrity” chorus, Kanye West was back at it with the Kobe references, this time shouting out Kobe as a living legend as well as his iconic final game performance when he scored 60 against the Jazz.
“Stargazing” — Travis Scott (2018)
I’m way too gold for this beef, feel like I’m Kobe, yeah
Surprisingly one of the few references we could find that played off Kobe Bryant and Kobe beef, but Travis Scott made it happen in his 2018 track.
“Shotta FLow” — NLE Choppa (2019)
Feelin’ like I’m Kobe, can’t nan’ n**** hold me/If he wanna run up on me, shoot him like Ginobili
Another double NBA reference, this time from NLE Choppa, who is not the only one to pair Kobe and Ginobili — a match made in rap lyric heaven for the ability to rhyme together.
“Commercial” — Lil Baby ft. Lil Uzi Vert
I turned eight million right until I’m a quarterback/Spent a million like I’m tryna bring Kobe back
“Commercial” came out just a few weeks after Kobe’s death, and clearly Lil Uzi Vert’s verse was recorded at some point in that window as he became one of the first in hip-hop to mourn the loss of the legend on a track.
“Bean (Kobe)” — Lil Uzi Vert ft. Chief Keef (2020)
You know I’m ballin’, usual like Kobe
Not long after his verse on “Commercial”, Lil Uzi Vert again referenced Kobe, this time on a track with his name in the title. However, unlike Lil Wayne or Chief Keef’s songs, this one does not feature constant references to the Lakers legend, just at the start of the opening verse.
“Woodlawn” — Aminé (2020)
Look, RIP Kobe/N****, RIP Kobe/You was like a dad to a n****, so I’m sad, my n****/Had to get you tatted on me
After his death, there were tons of tributes to Bryant from all over the basketball, music, and entertainment worlds, showing how far-reaching his impact was, and on his 2020 song “Woodlawn”, Aminé pays heartfelt homage to his idol.
“Rich Flex” — Drake and 21 Savage (2022)
Ayy, I’m livin’ every twenty-four like Kobe did/Shoutout to the 6, R.I.P. to 8
Drake often plays with numbers in his lyrics, and here he pays tribute to Bryant with both his numbers, 24 and 8.
“2024” — Playboi Carti (2023)
Ooh, two fours in the Sprite, got me feelin’ like Kobe, R.I.P., uh
One of the most recent Kobe references, Playboi Carti showed once again how Bryant remains synonymous with the number 24.
BONUS TRACKS
“K.O.B.E.” — Kobe Bryant ft. Tyra Banks (2000)
This has all-but been scrubbed from the internet, but back in 2000 Kobe Bryant made a brief foray into the rap game with a debut single alongside Tyra Banks (???). It did not go over particularly well and Bryant made the wise choice to focus his efforts on the court — but he was better on the mic than he gets credit for.
“Freestyle” — Shaq (2008)
The most legendary NBA beef of the 2000s was that of Shaq and Kobe, with the peak coming when Shaq hopped on the mic for a freestyle at a club and infamously asked Kobe “tell me how my ass tastes.”
Goodbyes are never easy, even for the undead. And yet, the cast of What We Do In The Shadows is gearing up to do just that, bid farewell to their bloody little mockumentary that’s survived long past its expiration date.
“We really shouldn’t have made it this far,” Harvey Gullién tells UPROXX of the show’s incredible six season run. “But we did because our fans stood by us through some really tough times.”
Multiple industry strikes, a global pandemic, too many shutdowns to count, and a cache of critics skeptical that the FX spinoff could reanimate the bones of Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement’s cult comedy to erect something fresh and sentient — WWDITS has cheated death more times than some of the vamps who populate its macabre, ridiculous fantasy world. But then again, the show has always been about reinvention.
From the undead relics cracking open their coffins every evening hoping to assimilate into (and then conquer) their modern Staten Island community to their human caretaker, Gullién’s Guillermo de la Cruz, who’s waffled between pining for immortality and slaying those who have it with each new season – evolution has always been the point. Even as their bodies, their questionable morals, and their societal conceits feel stuck in the past, time moves forward. Gullién’s learning that, confronting the end of the series that effectively put him on the map, and then digging up those feelings every time he does an interview like this one.
“It’s an emotional rollercoaster,” Gullién tells us while recounting his final day on set. They were filming a particularly difficult scene for his character that wraps up Guillermo’s winding arc and left Gullién “destroyed.” At the same time, the cast was celebrating co-star Matt Berry’s birthday, which is just one day before his own. When filming went past midnight, the crew threw a party for Gullién as well, a bittersweet send-off for show he put his life into. Literally.
No one worked harder to promote the series than Gullién. He created an after-show to drum up excitement for its first few seasons. He met with the network’s marketing team to share ideas on how to promote it on social media. He created an entire backstory for his character, a man originally intended to be decades older, gifting him his last name, his Mexican heritage, and more.
“Everything’s worth it,” he says. “If you put your heart into something, whatever the outcome is, even if we didn’t get accolades and whatnot, it’s all worth it. [I’ll] look back and never regret all the heart that I put into it.”
“I do that with all my projects,” Gullién explains. “I like to take risks, but I always stand behind the work.”
He’s now getting to see that dedication pay off. Guillermo has enjoyed one of the most fascinating character arcs on the show, a journey that saw Gullién play a bodyguard, a Van Helsing heir, a nightclub embezzler, a vampire hybrid, and, in season six, a finance bro. Throughout it all, his complicated, sometimes toxic relationship with his master, Nandor (Kayvan Novak) has fueled and roadblocked his progress. In the show’s final season, their rocky friendship enters uncharted territory as Guillermo thrives on Wall Street and Nandor flounders — in the workplace and in the vampire world.
“Guillermo is definitely not the person that we saw in the opening pilot when he opens the door to the camera crew, and he’s definitely not the same person when you last see him,” Gullién teases. “His moral compass is a little bit questionable, but he always does it with the best intentions. And I think the audience always forgives him. Remember, he’s murdered so many people!”
We laugh at his character’s absurd fictional body count before Gullién reminds me, “it’s at the wish of his master. He doesn’t enjoy it.”
“We forgive him because, it’s like, ‘I do the same thing too. I have to get coffee every morning for my boss.’ We forgive because we’ve been there. We put ourselves in his shoes,” he continued. “And I think where we see him take off after season five and into season six, it’s just a new chapter. It’s a new chapter because we have a choice. We can either dwell in the circumstance and the life that we’ve been dealt, and we can say, ‘Well, that’s it. I’m going to work here for the rest of my life,’ or we make a choice. We make a choice to be like, ‘I’m not happy with my life. I’m not happy with my career or where I stand. I’ve got to change something.’ And that’s a great gift that, as humans, we forget that we have. We have the power to shift, and we have the power to say no.”
It’s a power Gullién is learning to wield with greater efficiency.
In the show’s early run, he recalls filming a climactic fight scene just before a holiday break. It was a night shoot, the crew was tired and ready to enjoy their leave, and Gullién was sick with a 104-degree fever. He was determined to get the shot, “even if it killed him.” He’s proud he did and thankful that Novak was there for support, but now, with more seasons under his belt, he wishes he’d asked for more.
“I was doing a lot of producing, without realizing it,” Gullién says. “My only regret is that I never got producer credit on Shadows, because we improvised and produced that show.”
It’s a lesson he’s taking into this next era of his career, searching for stories he can contribute to in more ways than just in front of the camera.
“There’s so much content,” he muses. “People are just throwing spaghetti at the wall but they’re also afraid to take real risks. Unfortunately, some projects don’t get looked at at all.”
That’s why Gullién is focused on creating, working with his writing partner while signing on for interesting projects like Mike Flanagan’s Stephen King adaptation with Tom Hiddleston, The Life Of Chuck, and the indie-thriller Companion with The Boys star Jack Quaid.
“It’s nice place to be where you can start creating your own content and say, ‘I’m not going to wait around for someone to write something,’” Gullién says. “For the longest time, I’d just wait around the phone and hope that my agents would call as opposed me just working with the writers I like or with another producer that I like and cultivating something together.”
‘WWDITS’ releases new episodes on Monday on FX and streams on Hulu.
If you found yourself stomping your foot along to Shaboozey, Tanner Adell, or Adrianne Lenker this year, then Waylon Wyatt is right up your alley.
The 17-year-old rising country star has caught the eyes of millions thanks to his breakout “Arkansas Diamond,” featured on EP Til The Sun Goes Down. Today (November 15), Waylon released the official lyric visualizer for another Til The Sun Goes Down standout to keep his mounting fan base addicted. On “O.D.,” Waylon tackles the deep adornment of puppy love.
“If your love was a drug I wouldn’t get enough / I’d be a cracked-out, bad-mouthed, lacking teeth a crashed out, blacked out, lacking sleep a hard sight to see living out on the streets / Being a wreck a wretch begging for cash Just so I can buy some more of that good stuff your love / Gets me weak / With just your touch I wouldn’t get clean / Better, yet I don’t think I’d even try / One more taste of those lips, and I’m done for life Oh if your love was a drug / I’d be guaranteed to O.D.,” sings Waylon.
You might find an innocent level of humor in young love. But, Waylon’s future in country music is a serious matter. Next year’s award season should prove that.
Listen to “O.D.” above.
Til The Sun Goes Down is out now via Music Soup/Darkroom Records. Find more information here.
Perhaps the best viral video of 2018 was “THE WICKED WITCH OF THE EAST, BRO!” (below), a simple 26-second clip of two guys in an argument about The Wizard Of Oz, with one of them passionately making the case that Glinda The Good Witch is a princess and not a witch. (The guy later sort of admitted he was wrong on Tosh.0.) Well, the Oz universe is on people’s minds at the moment, given the upcoming Wicked movie, so star Ariana Grande just did the best thing possible: re-created the viral video.
She and Jimmy Fallon re-made the video to promote her appearance on yesterday’s The Tonight Show. Grande brought the appropriate passion to the role, complete with original hand gestures and head bobs as she and Fallon synced to the original audio.
As for the actual Fallon show, Grande reiterated what she said recently about acting, saying, “I’m very scared to freak my fans out when I talk about this, just because music and being on stage will always be a part of my life. So that will always… I will always be there, we’ll always have that together. But I just… I really do love acting, and I think, yeah, I would love for that.”
Next week, Father John Misty will release his sixth album, Mahashmashana. It’s one of his best, displaying all the qualities associated with the man: wit, insight, grandiosity, melody, beauty, a willingness to be viewed as pretentious in service of forwarding big ideas, impeccable beard care, and so on.
It’s been a dozen years since Josh Tillman introduced this cagey and endlessly entertaining guise to the world. This seems like a good opportunity to explore his career — and to explain why he is one of the very best singer-songwriters of the 21st century.
Jeeeeeesus Christ, girl — it’s time to rank the 30 best Father John Misty songs. Some call it work, I call it “the poem zone.”
30. “In Twenty Years Or So” (2017)
The last time I interviewed Josh Tillman was among the last times that anyone interviewed Josh Tillman. It was May of 2017, one month after the release of the third Father John Misty LP, Pure Comedy. As it was with many things involving Josh Tillman at the time, our conversation happened via unconventional and somewhat chaotic circumstances. He had previously reached out via DM after I talked about the album on my podcast. During a brief back and forth, I asked if he would appear on the show. He said “yes,” and then I didn’t hear anything for a few weeks. Then, out of the blue, he asked if we could talk. “When?” I asked. “Now,” he replied. The problem is that I normally recorded in a studio, and I was presently at home. No matter. I told him to call me, and I recorded the conversation off my speaker phone.
When you listen to the episode, you can tell. It sounds like Tillman is calling from a phone booth situated inside of a soggy cave on the moon. At least he was talkative – he stayed on the phone for 80 minutes, which probably wouldn’t have been allowed had I gone through a publicist. As the conversation unfolded, it felt like an exit interview for the tumultuous Pure Comedy media cycle. With the benefit of seven years’ worth of hindsight, it also sounds like a capper for the first part of Josh Tillman’s career as the shamanistic, Frankenstein-like persona he constructed for himself with great success (and considerable headaches).
Looking at the transcript for the first time since ’17, I was reminded of tidbits that I had long forgotten. Example: Do you remember that Pure Comedy was supposed to be a musical? I did not. Our conversation began with Tillman detailing how this preposterous fever dream did not come to pass. “I had 25 people in here,” he said wearily. “People flew in for this big production meeting, and my treatment for the show was the kind of thing that would’ve looked like something that should have been held by a transient on the side of the freeway, written on cardboard.”
He claimed that he finally came to his senses 3,000 miles above Colorado while en route to New York City, where the production was to be staged. “My choreographer is like, ‘So, this scene where you have these Girl Scouts masturbate on planet Earth …’ And I was like, ‘Could you just give me one second?’ And I had my first ever midair panic attack, where I was thinking, ‘Oh, I’ve just got to get off this plane!’ And then I realized, ‘Oh, you can’t get off a plane!’ And then I thought, ‘Well, I’ll just have a cigarette!’ And then I realized, ‘Oh my God, you can’t smoke!’ And I went to the bathroom and emailed my manager. We had film crews, we had all this stuff set up, and I’m just like, ‘What if we just didn’t do any of this?’”
How real was this? Was he pulling my leg? To this day, I’m not sure. But hearing Tillman talk about this “deeply misguided musical that I wrote on cocaine in my underwear” seemed indicative of how crazy FJM 1.0 had become. And, looking back, it feels very far from FJM 2.0. In 2017, the media circus around Tillman was threatening to completely overshadow the music. In the press, he was routinely described as an irony-addled troll of questionable sincerity. But those adjectives only applied to his pranksterish interviews, in which he jousted good-naturedly with journalists and skillfully identified the ways in which the media simultaneously roasts artists for being candid while exploiting the eyeballs such honesty attracts. A Pitchforkheadline from this period personifies this phenomenon: “Here Is The Scandalous Father John Misty Interview You’ve Been Waiting For.” The promise of provocation — and a hypocritical critique of said provocation — is laid out plainly.
But none of this really suited Tillman’s songs, which for all their surface slyness and cynicism are deeply earnest at their core. Love, death, the meaning of life, the modern obstructions to genuine human connections — these were his pet subjects in the 2010s (and beyond), they are just about as deep and emotional and sincere as you can get.
This was all especially true of Pure Comedy, an album I loved despite it troubling me for the better part of early 2017. I found it to be the most misanthropic record I had heard since Kanye West’s Yeezus, though Tillman even exceeded the rancor of that famously rancorous LP, since unlike Kanye, Tillman was disgusted with the whole human race and not just himself or his perceived enemies.
I found Pure Comedy to be deeply depressing, though at the same time it made me laugh more than anything at the time. Above all, it moved me, in part because Tillman couldn’t help but let in a little light. I think about the final song, “In Twenty Years Or So,” where he observes about how eventually “this human experiment will reach its violent end” and yet he can still carry on because right now, at least, he’s having dinner with his soulmate. “As our second drinks arrive / The piano player’s playing ‘This Must Be the Place’ / And it’s a miracle to be alive.”
That line got me in 2017, and it still gets me now. It is the “Summing Up The Rationalization One Must Do To Survive This World” Father John Misty song lyric I was waiting for.
29. “Pure Comedy” (2017)
In my review of Pure Comedy, I wondered how the album would age. I called it “the most 2017 album of 2017,” because the record’s strident rage seemed perfectly attuned to the times but, perhaps, not for the long haul. What I underestimated is that the “prison of beliefs” that he sang about on the title track was hardly a topical concern. Rather, it was a tale as old as time itself.
I’m now well over 1,000 words into this column, so I might as well finally type the words “Donald Trump.” My revisiting of Father John Misty’s discography coincided with the delayed re-election of the 45th/47th president, and it was an instance of my personal soundtrack queasily coinciding with the news cycle like the world’s worst Wizard Of Oz/Dark Side Of The Moon-esque media mash-up. Critics immediately positioned Pure Comedy as a #resistence record in 2017, a designation that Tillman instinctively, ahem, resisted. There was the matter of the timeline — the songs were written, recorded and mastered before Trump’s election — as well as the urge to not get locked into a singular moment. (The reason Pure Comedy endures while most anti-Trump music from the late 2010s languishes in the dustbin of history is that it was accidentally timely.) At the same time, in a Vulture interview, he recognized the utility for listeners trying to make sense of a confounding moment in history. “If people need that,” he said, “then I do want my music to be useful.”
This music is still useful, especially the song “Pure Comedy.” I advise paying particular attention to the concluding lyric, where he again lets a sliver of light into the void: “Just random matter floating in the dark / I hate to say it but each other’s all we’ve got.”
28. “Mr. Tillman” (2018)
At the time of Pure Comedy’s release, there was reason to question (or worry about) Josh Tillman’s mental health. For all his goofy publicity stunts — mocking Ryan Adams’ cover of 1989, eulogizing the breakup of Chuck E. Cheese’s house band, the “controversy” over the possible theft of crystal from a Moon Juice shop — there were also genuinely concerning incidents like his public meltdown at a Philadelphia radio station-sponsored concert in July of 2016. His rant that day about the shallowness of entertainment and the pettiness of humankind later formed the basis of songs like “Pure Comedy’ and “Total Entertainment Forever.” It was also a Rorschach test for fans and haters alike — the former viewed it as an alarming manifestation of a sensitive artist’s mental fragility, while the latter saw it as the act of a pretentious, above-it-all asshole.
I think I’ve made it clear where I stand. My feelings were re-enforced by my own interview with Tillman, where I observed first-hand how exhausted he was by the media hamster wheel and the ways it informed (if not perverted) how his songs were heard. “A good day for me is a day that I am absentmindedly scrolling the internet at a stoplight, and I don’t see the name ‘Father John Misty’ anywhere,” he sighed. “I mean, we put out four press releases on this album cycle. Four. There were two headlines a day. I would rather my music be the context that people experience as my thing.”
Of course, he was far from blameless. Tillman intentionally needled music journalists. He was, at times, a shameless troll. (“I remember when trolling became a saying and I was like, ‘Oh yeah, I’ve been doing that my whole life,’” he admitted.) But things had gotten out of hand. The paradox of the music press — or any part of the media — is that we fantasize about smart, interesting people who say smart, interesting things, and then we crucify them for saying smart, interesting things, which inevitably encourages everyone else to keep all of their smart, interesting thoughts to themselves.
After revisiting our interview, I’m not surprised that Tillman went into media semi-retirement soon after. “In some ways I feel good,” he told me, “because the Band-Aid has been ripped off and the most horrible takeaways or the most horrible assessments of me as a person have all happened now and I’m still alive … But I do feel good about the work. I stand by my work.”
His angst over those “horrible assessments of me as a person” was palpable in the interview. More subtle were the tremors in his personal life, which he referred to obliquely as fodder for his next album. “There’s a lot more blood in it,” he said of the record, which at the time could only be read as cryptic. Then I heard “Mr. Tillman” — a first-person recounting of a profound mental breakdown and the first single from God’s Favorite Customer — and I finally understood.
27. “(Everything But) Her Love” (2022)
God’s Favorite Customer is a song cycle about a six-week period when Tillman was estranged from his wife and living a depressive existence at a hotel. It’s the least guarded album of his career — the snark that shielded the gooey-eyed love songs from scrutiny on I Love You, Honeybear is largely absent (references to straying into “the poem zone” notwithstanding). Overall, the buffer between Tillman (introspective, melancholy, pensive) and Misty (swaggering, confident, decadent) was narrower than ever.
Tillman waited four years until putting out the next FJM record. The pandemic was a factor, but Chloë And The Next 20th Century also felt like a decisive break from the first four albums. Misty again was less present, but so was Tillman. The songs this time were short stories, not confessionals, and the music departed from his usual ’60s/’70s SoCal pop-rock sumptuousness to ornate, lounge-y jazz and bossa nova. “(Everything But) Her Love” is the rare track on Chloë that bridges the gap between the old FJM and this chillier, ghostlier FJM, shining like a classic Burt Bacharach production broadcast out of a distant crypt.
26. “Mahashmashana” (2024)
I suspect that most Father John Misty fans will greet the new album as a return to form. The one reason I might push back is that I think Chloë And The Next 20th Century is a misunderstood and mostly overlooked record. I include myself in the group underrating it — I wrote kindly about it upon release, but it’s still not an album I totally get, even though my gut tells me that I’m to fault for that. Regardless: Mahashmashana is an easier Father John Misty record to like, as it restores many of the things that are great about earlier Father John Misty records. Among those attributes is messianic grandeur — Pure Comedy is the apoethesis of that in his catalog, but the title track of Mahashmashana finds Tillman on a similar track, boldly surveying the world’s grotesque burial grounds and corpse dances over nine minutes of orchestral folk-rock reminiscent of George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass at its most bombastic. Lyrically, “Mahashmashana” is less literal than the Pure Comedy songs — the dense and knotty narrative refers to ancient Roman political chicanery and the violence and betrayals they engender. It reminds me of Dylan’s “Changing Of The Guards” from Street-Legal, because (1) it feels like an epic summation of his career up to this point without “actually” being about that and (2) I can stare at the words endlessly without coming close to “solving” their elusive mysteries. Josh Tillman would take this as a compliment, I think.
25. “Goodbye Mr. Blue” (2022)
Hypothetical question: Can a song be accused of ripping off “Everybody’s Talkin’” when it actually improves upon “Everybody’s Talkin’?”
24. “She Cleans Up” (2024)
The hardest rocking FJM single since “Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings.” Tillman lifted the melody from Viagra Boys’ “Punk Rock Loser,” which has been described by the band’s frontman Sebastian Murphy as “a song about a real asshole.” I assume this subject matter must have attracted Tillman as much as the rubbery garage rock music. Though for “She Cleans Up,” he doesn’t write his own asshole narrative — instead, he reimagines Mary of Magdalene having a vision of the crucifixion right before Good Friday and deciding to not follow God’s plan and instead get “armed to the teeth” to defend Christ. You know, typical Father John Misty stuff.
23. “Nancy From Now On” (2012)
Josh Tillman has been Father John Misty for so long that the unlikelihood of his rise has been virtually forgotten. But at the very beginning of his career, he was known mainly as the ex-drummer of Fleet Foxes. And it’s not like he was a founding drummer of the band. He was a hired gun brought on before their second record, Helplessness Blues. He wasn’t the Dave Grohl of Fleet Foxes. He was more like Lori Goldston.
Given the path he subsequently embarked upon, I can only imagine what he must have thought of playing so many pastoral songs about wildlife and mountain ranges while sitting behind Robin Pecknold. And I mean that as no shade to Fleet Foxes — like every other white guy who voted for Obama in 2008, I played that self-titled record more than a few times back then. But it’s easy to imagine how doing a stint in the defining folk-rock band of the late aughts fueled the comparably acerbic material that would make John Tillman famous. “For me, being a drummer in a popular band was complete anesthesia,” he said later. Then he told a story about the night he left the band’s home base of Seattle, and how he was “watching Netflix, on two different screens, at the same time, because I was just so bored.” Which is a perfect Father John Misty anecdote, because it sounds like a perfect Father John Misty lyric. It zeroes in on a relatable, mundane activity that exposes how ridiculous tech-dominated modern life can be. It makes you feel depressed, and then it makes you laugh at your own depression. (Or maybe it’s the other way around.)
I don’t know the exact moment when Josh Tillman decided that Father John Misty would be a very different kind of folk-rock project from Fleet Foxes. But I like to think it was when he wrote the opening lines to this song: “Oh, pour me another drink / And punch me in the face / You can call me Nancy.”
22. “I Love You, Honeybear” (2015)
The title track to the most popular — and also (probably) best — FJM record. It’s the one where he staked a claim for being a male indie-rock sex symbol, an archetype that barely existed before Father John Misty and pretty much seems extinct almost a decade later. But I swear: If you saw him in concert during this era, you were rubbing shoulders with packs of striking, wine-drinking women between the age of 35 and 45. Even Bonnie Raitt talked about having the hots for FJM in interviews. Yes, it helped that he was handsome. But Tillman also had that Han Solo quality, where he didn’t seem to care if you thought he was a jerk. (Which was an act, because he did care. But still.) This is a positively electric attribute whether you’re a man or a woman. As humans, we are inexplicably attracted to those who are oblivious to their own potential scoundrel status.
For Tillman, this quality set him apart because virtually no other guy bothered to compete in the “confidently prancing” indie lane. In the 2010s there was Misty, and there was Matt Berninger, and that was it. (A decade later, there’s Matty Healy, but the “clever” quote-marks around his act are a little too pronounced.)
It also mattered that Misty unveiled an album of love songs that also were lust songs, and he delivered them with the melodramatic fervor of Tom Jones with a graduate degree. “Oh, honeybear, honeybear, honeybear Ooh-ooh / Mascara blood / Ash and cum / On the Rorschach sheets where we make love.” You simply could not doubt his steadfast conviction after hearing that.
21. “The Next 20th Century” (2022)
On the final track of Chloë And The Next 20th Century, Tillman dramatically departed from the album’s Kubrickian deep-freeze in order to delve into some menacing art rock reminiscent of Here Come The Warm Jets. (Dig the scorching Robert Fripp-style guitar solo, that baby’s on fire.) The lyrics return to the hell of Pure Comedy, with Tillman musing about the ease with which the media and internet can safely enclose us all in a perpetual nostalgia cycle, a 20th century that never ends. But just as “In Twenty Years Or So” concludes Pure Comedy on an ambiguously “happy” note, Tillman finds some comfort inside the technological prison that “The Next 20th Century” depicts: “But I’ll take the love songs / if this century’s here to stay / I don’t know ‘bout you / but I’ll take the love songs / and the great distance that they came.”
20. “I Guess Time Just Makes Fools Of Us All” (2024)
A mid-2020s Father John Misty song that musically resembles a late-1970s Steely Dan number? Have I died and gone to “louche middle-aged guys who love tragedy laced with sardonic humor” heaven?
(Also the line about how he is the least famous person to turn down the cover of Rolling Stoneis apparently true.)
19. “When You’re Smiling And Astride Me” (2015)
More sex symbol stuff from I Love You, Honeybear. You can practically feel the coital thrusts emanating from the sultry back beat and those celestial backing singers. “You see me as I am, it’s true,” our debauched hero croons. “Aimless, fake drifter / And the horny man-child Mama’s boy to boot.”
To appreciate his path to “horny man-child status,” one must account not only for his stint with the relatively virginal Fleet Foxes but also his long-forgotten pre-FJM solo guise. Between 2003 and 2010, he put out eight albums as J. Tillman, two more than he’s so far released as Father John Misty. But when you listen to those records, they feel more like 20 albums. They feel like 20 years of downbeat, no-beat, extremely deadbeat music. It’s not a fun body of work. The amount of “confidently prancing” material is zero.
I saw him on one of his final tours as J. Tillman, as an opener for Phosphorescent. He sat on stage — I think it was a stool, though it might have been a folding chair, I wasn’t paying that close of attention — and he sullenly plowed through his set like a man praying for a tragic accident to suddenly turn him into a martyr in the afterlife. “That’s really what I wanted out of this music,” he said later, “to be taken seriously, which is a very understandable pursuit in your twenties.”
Years later I interviewed the talented producer and songwriter Jonathan Wilson, possibly Tillman’s most important collaborator during the FJM years, and he said something about his own music that could also apply to Tillman. “I’m trying to push things. You can’t really push them in songwriting, playing the old fucking cowboy chords again. You’re not gonna be Townes Van Zandt, it’s just not possible. So, I’m trying to push it in some other ways.”
“When You’re Smiling And Astride Me” was Josh Tillman trying to push it in some other ways. (Namely with his pelvis.)
18. “Josh Tillman And The Accidental Dose” (2024)
The most “we’re so back” moment from Mahashmashana. I’m happy to report that Josh Tillman is once again writing “Josh Tillman” songs. This track in particular feels like a flashback to the Fear Fun era, with Tillman reminiscing about a bad trip against crashing piano chords and a startling string arrangement that bops and weaves in breathtaking fashion amid the narrator’s panic attack.
It opens with a familiar snapshot of vapid discourse, a la the most infamous “Josh Tillman” song, “The Night Josh Tillman Came To Our Apt.” Once more he’s at a crappy party. “She put on Astral Weeks/Said ‘I love jazz,’ and winked at me / This is the last place I oughta be / But I can’t drive, and I sure can’t sleep.” This time, however, he’s not headed to a disreputable sexual encounter at the song’s conclusion. This is, after all, an older and wiser Misty. Instead, his fate is more existential in nature. “Dawn long broke by the time / I realized that I lost my mind / I ate an ice cream / Dazed in the street / But it never tastes quite as sweet / Again.”
17. “Bored In The U.S.A.” (2015)
Another Rorschach test separating the lovers from the haters. Perhaps the definitive test. If you can’t stand the guy, I’m sure you find this song unforgivably smarmy. “Save me, White Jesus,” indeed. If you love the guy … you can probably concede that the laugh track is a little much. (Maybe it should be called “Broad In The U.S.A.”) But if you saw him do this song on Letterman before I Love You, Honeybear dropped, it was just abundantly clear (to the heads, anyway) that this guy had the juice. Nearly a decade later, the juice is still palpable. We’re talking Led Zeppelin II levels of juice here.
16. “Chateau Lobby #4 (In C For Two Virgins)” (2015)
Fear Fun was one of the great debuts of indie’s “late” imperial era. But things shifted dramatically away from that kind of music by the following year, when an emerging generation of pop-minded acts with indie-adjacent resumés took over and drop-kicked most of the bearded guys out of the musical vanguard. Tillman was among the few who managed to not only stick around but thrive for much of the decade. And I Love You, Honeybear was the reason why. The album presented him as the complete package: great singer, funny lyricist, flamboyant musical orchestrator, exciting live performer, compelling persona.
At the same time, he was still just another white guy writing about his life with unguarded sensitivity. In “Chateau Lobby,” he gives a more or less straightforward account of falling in love with his wife. “And I haven’t hated all the same things / As somebody else / Since I remember / What’s going on for? / What are you doing with your whole life? / How about forever?”
What is this, an Ed Sheeran song? Again, the audacity of the Misty persona — note the jokey mock-sophistication of the titular parenthetical — provided the cover Tillman needed to pour his heart out in embarrassing fashion without the public exactly realizing how embarrassing it was. Pay no attention to the soft-hearted man behind the curtain. Enjoy this mariachi band instead.
15. “Just Dumb Enough To Try” (2018)
God’s Favorite Customer is the flipside to I Love You, Honeybear. Upon the album’s release, Tillman told Uncut, somewhat cryptically, that “This one needed to go down near the blast site, so to speak. If I had waited the industry standard amount of time between cycles I might not have been able to find a way back into the songs.” I think what he meant is that Josh Tillman needed to venture near the blast site of his personal life, which you hear him do on one of the more agonizing tracks, “Just Dumb Enough To Try.” There are no distractions this time. An army of chirpy horns isn’t coming to save anyone from the anguish. Tillman instead indicts himself at every turn. “I know my way ’round a tune / Won’t be a single dry eye in the room / But you can take what I know about you / And maybe fill a small balloon.”
14. “Hangout At The Gallows” (2018)
This song appears to start in the middle of the instrumental introduction, right before Tillman starts singing about Noah appearing over the horizon with an ark and the ensuing battle to be among the few who are saved. Perhaps he did this to convey how “Hangout At The Gallows” points to the themes of the predecessor record, Pure Comedy. Or maybe it was beamed from the future — January 2025 to be precise. Either way, sneaking one his most despairing politic songs on his “romantic dissolution” record makes it hit twice as hard once you catch up with it.
13. “Things It Would Have Been Helpful To Know Before The Revolution” (2017)
Pure Comedy is the album that prompted critics to compare Josh Tillman to Randy Newman. And songs like this are responsible for Pure Comedy earning that reputation. Randy Newman is renowned for voicing characters in his songs that are alien to his mostly liberal and upwardly mobile audience: racists, sociopaths, racist sociopaths, etc. In the process, he humanizes these monsters. Tillman actually does the opposite of this in songs like “Things It Would Have Been Helpful To Know Before The Revolution.” His songs voice characters that closely resemble the people in his mostly liberal and upwardly mobile audience. And then he turns these humans into monsters. In “Things It Would Have Been Helpful To Know Before The Revolution,” these people (us people?) are sent back to the caves after consumerism destroys the world, at which point we slowly rebuild the very consumer system that destroyed everything in the first place.
12. “Total Entertainment Forever” (2017)
“Bedding Taylor Swift / every night inside the Oculus Rift.” That line triggered numerous critics, journalists, and stans, because media literacy in this country underperforms like the Democratic Party with most demographic groups. Say it with me: That lyric does not endorse virtual sex with a pop star, it critiques artistic and moral bankruptcy enabling bottom-feeding entertainment. And to think that Taylor Swift’s career was at a relatively low ebb in 2017. If anything — given the proverbial, ahem, Oculus Rift-type behavior the press has exhibited toward our top pop-star nation state in the 2020s — “Total Entertainment Forever” hardly registers as satire now.
11. “I’m Writing A Novel” (2012)
Around the time that Josh Tillman wrote this song, he literally wrote a novel. Give it a read and come back. We have some discussing to do.
10. “True Affection” (2015)
The least “Father John Misty”-sounding Father John Misty song. He once explained to Grantland that he was writing about being “on tour while trying to woo someone with text message and email and trying to make a connection that way and the frustration of that. So that song had to be synthetic and inorganic.” That is certainly a clever way of describing how the electronic music informs the lyric. But he could have also just said, “I wanted to write a pop banger but do it on my terms.” Based on this track alone, Charli XCX should have asked him to appear on the Brat remix album.
9. “The Night Josh Tillman Came To Our Apt.” (2015)
The pinnacle of Josh Tillman doing his Han Solo “I don’t care if you think I’m jerk” thing. Though, again, he does care, and putting this song on I Love You, Honeybear apparently caused him anxiety. “I thought, I am fucked, I am done, I am going to good-person jail forever,” he told Pitchfork. But that didn’t really happen. I Love You, Honeybear was acclaimed, and most critics took him at his word that this was writing about a misogynistic character and not endorsing misogyny. At least they did in the moment. Within a few years, the environment shifted in part because of you-know-who. At the time, Tillman dismissed the view of music as “correct, prescriptive, how-to-live shit” — which became predominant shortly after I Love You, Honeybear came out — and stood up for weird and difficult songs like “The Night Josh Tillman Came To Our Apt.” that cut against the grain.
“I think that life is messy and that human beings are insane,” he said. “In some way, music demystifies the parts of us that we’re most afraid of. When I was growing up, I was taught that a sexual thought equaled sexual deed, and the thing that really disturbs me about the current liberal environment is how eager liberals seem to impress upon you how infrequently they ever have an incorrect thought.”
He was right then, and I think he’s right now.
8. “Please Don’t Die” (2018)
There aren’t three words in the English language more vulnerable or desperate than “Please Don’t Die.” He’s literally pleading, I fucked up, I’m sorry, don’t ever leave me. Not to beat a dead horse but: How can you listen to this song and think this guy is just some aloof, irony-poisoned hypebeast?
7. “Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings” (2012)
His rock god move. Also, the music video not only established Misty as a sexually magnetic and spiritually haywire figure in 2010s pop culture, it did the same for Aubrey Plaza, who did her own transformation after starring as the bookish April Ludgate in Parks & Recreation, aka the Fleet Foxes of 21st century sitcoms.
6. “Only Son Of The Ladiesman” (2012)
Another classic Letterman performance. Unlike the “Bored In The U.S.A.” clip, he’s not fully locked in with the 100 percent pure FJM juice. You feel him working out his mojo in real time. He’s shorn the Fleet Foxes mane and he’s working out some hip shakes. He does a mock wink. You sense that his beard is filling in with each word he sings the hell out of. By the second verse, you’re buying in: He really is a Dodgers fan, a leading brand, and a one-night stand. Then Dave comes out and calls the performance good, great, and very nice and very good. “Are we touring this summer? I’m coming,” he promises. Me too, Dave. Me too.
5. “Leaving L.A.” (2017)
The longest song in his catalog, and possibly the most personal. It’s also the most J. Tillman-like song credited to Father John Misty, this never-ending dirge about his decision to move to New Orleans after the release of Fear Fun. Only I doubt J. Tillman would have thought to describe clout-chasing L.A. bands as phonies that “sound like dollar signs and Amy Grant.” Or himself as “another white guy in 2017 / who takes himself so goddamn seriously.” He later claimed that he had the first line — “I was living on a hill” — stuck in his head for a year. And he just sung it over and over until he figured out that that particular lyric was an entry point for the most sprawling retelling yet of his own origin story, in which bullshit mythology is finally set aside for bracing stories from Josh Tillman’s childhood. Like the story about how he almost choked to death in a JC Penny’s store while Fleetwood Mac’s “Little Lies” played in the background. Anecdotes like that give you permission to write a 13-minute song.
4. “Ballad Of The Dying Man” (2017)
As we reach the end of this column, I hope I have demonstrated a sufficient level of FJM critical knowledge. I like to think that I have, but I also know that I will not match the top FJM critic, which just so happens to be Josh Tillman. Here’s the single most insightful thing that Tillman once said about Father John Misty: “The irony is that the people who hate me the most are the people who are exactly like me.”
That quote instantly makes me think about this song. It’s the best example of Tillman doing the reverse Randy Newman on his own audience, skewering our online habits until its’ ridiculous and self-defeating true shape is revealed. If Bob Dylan had been young at the time when the social-media industrial complex loomed over daily life like the military industry complex, he would have written “Ballad Of The Dying Man” rather than “Masters Of War.”
3. “The Palace” (2018)
“Last night I wrote a poem / man, I must have been in the poem zone” is probably the single greatest lyric in the FJM songbook. It’s also a red herring, a redirect from all the other words in this song, which are among his most romantically despairing. And they’re rendered over stark piano chords that echo out in brutally dark loneliness. “Last night I texted your iPhone / and said ‘I think I’m ready to come home’ / I’m in over my head.” Our hero is at the hotel, popping prescription feed, and slowly losing his mind over a broken heart. The poem zone is no laughing matter.
2. “Funtimes In Babylon” (2012)
The first song on the first record. It announced Tillman as the latest in a lineage of L.A. songwriters who serenade their town will equal amounts of love and bile. In “Funtimes In Babylon,” he’s coming at the city from the opposite side of Warren Zevon in “Desperadoes Under The Eaves” — he’s the wide-eyed newcomer rhyming with Warren’s grizzled lifer, opening himself up to Hollywood despite his suspicions of what might lay ahead. Government camps, the ghouls who will paint you up like a corpse, the beast looking for last month’s rent — none of them can keep Misty down (for now).
1 “Holy Shit” (2015)
I once called this the best song of the 2010s. For now, I’ll stand by it. It’s certainly, to me, the song that captures what the decade felt like. In the documentary about my life that plays in my head, “Holy Shit” is on the soundtrack when I think about the good things that happened that decade (my kids being born, the Packers winning the Super Bowl, I think that’s it) and the bad things that happened that decade (too many socio-political disasters to list here). It conveys the information overload and the technological malaise and the paralyzing self-reflexiveness and the soul-destroying stupidity and the hilarious stupidity and the surprising moments of grace, and the love, always the love. Multiple lines from this song make me tear up, but I’m not going to say which ones because I don’t feel like tearing up now. I just fail to see what that’s gotta do with you and me.
Lil Durk’s legal fight for his freedom has officially begun. Yesterday (November 14), the “All My Life” rapper was arraigned in Los Angeles federal court for the murder-for-hire plot of fellow rapper Quando Rondo and firearms charges he was hit with over the past several weeks.
According to USA Today, Lil Durk (real name Durk Davontay Banks) formally entered a plea of not guilty to the charges against him, which include one count of conspiracy, one count of using interstate facilities to commit murder-for-hire resulting in death, and one count of “using, carrying, and discharging firearms and a machine gun and possession of such firearms in furtherance of a crime of violence resulting in death.”
After news of Durk’s arrest was shared across online platforms, Rondo took to Instagram with a message (viewable here), seemingly for Durk. “We didn’t get into this music industry to make it just to stay caught up in this street sh*t,” he wrote. “We all have families and communities counting on us. It’s time to leave all that behind. We’ve already lost so much, and it’s heavy on my heart to forgive anyone I had issues with in the past. It’s all love from me. Praying for everyone.”
Durk’s trial has reportedly been scheduled for January 7, 2025. Although Durk maintains his innocence, if the Grammy Award winner is convicted of these charges, he could face up to life in prison.
More Lioness, a Tulsa King season finale, and Yellowstone weren’t enough for Taylor Sheridan in November. The Paramount TV king is also premiering Landman, which Sheridan co-created with Christian Wallace. The series stars former 1883 actor Billy Bob Thornton, who was the exact guy that Sheridan was thinking of while writing the lead.
The series explores inner workings of the Texas oil fields, from the daily dirty work of roughnecks to the deals being made in both unsavory and posh surroundings. And not only is Tommy Norris’ particular position a grueling one, but his personal life gives him quite a thrashing, too. In short, it’s an oil-soaked and explosion-dotted soap opera, which should prove to be as popular as Sheridan’s other series, so logistics on how and when to watch are useful.
When Does Taylor Sheridan’s Landman Premiere?
The series will debut two episodes on Sunday, Nov. 17 only on Paramount+. Weekly single episode drops will follow for a total of 10 episodes. Eventually (as with 1923 and other Sheridan titles), the show will probably air on Paramount Network, CBS, and/or Comedy Central, but if you want to catch the show live without worrying about spoilers, then Paramount+ is the way to go. From the show’s synopsis:
Based on the 11-part podcast Boomtown, Landman is a modern-day tale of fortune-seeking in the world of oil rigs. The new original drama is set in the proverbial boomtowns of West Texas, and presents a story of roughnecks and wildcat billionaires – the people who have fueled a boom so big, it’s reshaping our climate, our economy, and our geopolitics.
Landman co-stars Jon Hamm, Demi Moore, Ali Larter, Michelle Randolph, Jacob Lofland, Michael Peña, Andy Garcia, Paulina Chávez, and Armando Medina. Hold onto your pants because some characters are about to lose theirs, both literally and metaphorically.
Over the past couple days, it has looked like Lana Del Rey and Lizzo have had an unexpected feud with each other, but there’s a bit of confusion involved in the situation.
Are Lana Del Rey And Lizzo Beefing?
As Complex notes, a November 13 post from the X (formerly Twitter) account Drop Pop shared supposed screenshots of Lizzo commenting on a Del Rey TikTok video, “I’d like to see you back on the charts.” Del Rey allegedly replied, “I would love to see you run on a treadmill.”
However, Drop Pop is a self-proclaimed parody account and the screenshot was fake. Still the post made the rounds. Drop Pop eventually deleted it, but not before it racked up 20 million impressions, 380K likes, and 22K reposts.
A follow-up Drop Pop post portrayed Lizzo as responding, “I hope that alligator eats your big ass,” and Del Rey replying, “you’d know about eating biggie.”
As Pop Base (not a parody account) notes, Del Rey commented on an Instagram post about the fabricated feud, writing in three comments, “I don’t think I have an official TikTok, other than the grants one sooooo,” “Or a Twitter,” and, “Very random.”
So, there you have it: Lana and Lizzo are chill, no beef.
Tonight, November 15, is the much-publicized boxing match between Mike Tyson and Jake Paul. Ahead of the fight, which will stream on Netflix, Iron Mike was asked by internet-famous teen reporter Jazlyn Guerra, a.k.a. Jazzy’s World TV, for his thoughts on legacy. He took it very seriously.
“Well, I don’t know. I don’t believe in the word ‘legacy,’” Tyson replied. “I just think that’s another word for ego. Legacy doesn’t mean nothing. That’s just some word everybody grabbed onto. Someone said that word, and everyone grabbed on the words, and now it’s used every five seconds. It means absolutely nothing to me. I’m just passing through. I’mma die, and it’s gonna be over. Who cares about legacy after that?”
Tyson somehow wasn’t done. “What a big ego,” he continued. “So I’mma die. I want people to think that I’m this, I’m great. I’m, no. We’re nothing. We’re just dead. We’re dust. We’re absolutely nothing. Our legacy is nothing.”
Guerra responded to Tyson’s stream-of-consciousness existentialism with a polite “thank you so much for sharing that,” but 50 Cent had another takeaway. “G*ddam it! Mike ya scaring the kids, WTF chill,” the rapper wrote on X. “Note to self, keep the kids away from Mike.”
Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson streams on Netflix beginning at 8 p.m. ET.
This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt-out if you wish. Cookie settingsACCEPT
Privacy & Cookies Policy
Privacy Overview
This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may have an effect on your browsing experience.
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
