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Steve Lacy is the man of the hour after his Gemini Rights single “Bad Habits” climbed the charts to overtake Harry Styles’ “As It Was” for the No. 1 spot on the Hot 100. Lacy, who is currently on his Give You The World Tour crisscrossing the United States, has gone from being a late addition to The Internet to one of Kanye West’s favorite artists (which is still saying something, even if Kanye is a little… off right now).

What makes all this even more impressive is that Lacy is defying the boundaries of being a Black artist in an era when there are still material benefits to following trends — especially the ones on TikTok. In a new feature in Billboard, Lacy’s quiet cool is compared to that of another Gemini, Lenny Kravitz, as the two rockstars — who are 34 years apart in age — get paired to talk about everything from vintage guitars to their worst breakups. They also address the above quandary, which ties into a question about whether or pop culture has become disposable due to technology-addled limited attention spans. Here’s what they thought:

Lacy: Oh, my God. I don’t believe that sh-t. I feel like people just aren’t putting the time in to make things that last longer. Me, I study things that last. I’m like, “What are those elements of songs that last?” I realized that it’s songwriting, drum selection, melodies, and lyrics.

Kravitz: Drum sounds, man! I spend so much time on the drums.

Lacy: It can kill a whole song. I’m so anal about the drums.

On a personal note, I’d throw in mixing. Underrated, almost unnoticeable, but a good mix can be the difference between a timeless classic and a disposable dud. Lacy and Kravitz’s convo is well-worth reading in full — especially for hardcore music equipment geeks — and puts an interesting twist on a fascinating glimpse into the creation processes of a legend… and a legend in the making.

Kanye West, as he often does, finds himself in hot water at the moment. This time, it’s due to the “White Lives Matter” shirt he was recently seen wearing at Paris Fashion Week. Now, it appears Ye is experiencing some consequences of his fashion choice: Adidas recently said their partnership with West is “under review,” and now it appears West is losing to opportunity to secure a major venue for an upcoming concert.

Today, West shared a screenshot of what purports to be a text conversation between himself and Berlin-based creative director Niklas Bildstein Zaar, discussing a planned show at Inglewood, California’s SoFi Stadium (where the NFL’s Rams and Chargers play their home games). It starts with a text from Ye, saying, “We have the idea for Sofi stadium.” Zaar responds, “I just got news from Vaughn, that Sofi isn’t available any longer due to inability to staff the event on the current notice. Ive already asked twice to investigate further if theres anyway to make it happen regardless, but they got back with a firm no.”

West captioned the post, “MY SOFI STADIUM SHOW ON NOVEMBER 4TH JUST GOT CANCELED I WONDER IF IT HAD SOMETHING TO DO WITH MY WHITE LIVES MATTER TEE WHAT YA’LL THINK.”

Unlike other recent posts, this one does not appear to have any hidden secret messages in it.

Greg Gutfeld is tired of college students not being hot anymore. The Five host, who for the record is 58-years-old, ranted on Thursday night that the latest generation of undergrads aren’t up to his standards. The comments came during a large discussion on a university that’s supposedly offered a course called “Doing Nothing,” which led to a typical Fox News attack on higher education before Gutfeld made things creepy.

Via The Daily Beast:

“Have you seen how miserable and how miserable-looking a lot of these students are?” he lamented.

Gutfeld claimed students are “deliberately ugly-fying themselves” and “rejecting the truth in beauty.” He continued: “You see them on TikTok, they’re out of shape, they’re asexual… they all look like rejects from the loony bin.”

After revealing that the spends his free time looking at co-eds on TikTok, Gutfeld referred to the old Fox News chestnut of complaining about academia. “I think the course in doing nothing is actually majoring in gender studies,” Gutfeld quipped before saying that he thinks the high price of tuition is “one of the main reasons why people aren’t going” to college anymore. That’s quite the remark from a guy who said earlier in the year that he’s willing to “go to war” over student loan forgiveness.

But veering back to the creepiness, the clip of Gutfeld complaining about non-hot college students started bouncing around Twitter where people had several thoughts on an almost 60-year-old Fox News host critiquing the looks of kids just out of high school.

You can see some of the reactions below:

(Via The Daily Beast)

I attended the Justice World Tour in May, and my merch now feels like a relic because Justin Bieber only performed 11 subsequent shows before he revealed his Ramsay Hunt syndrome diagnosis on June 10, causing partial facial paralysis. The generational pop star resumed his tour in Lucca, Italy, at the end of July and completed six European dates before making history at Rock In Rio on September 4. And then, another indefinite tour postponement struck.

Bieber hasn’t taken the stage since, and yesterday (October 6), it was announced “the Justice World Tour ended with Rock In Rio” with “all remaining dates of his world tour postponed to next year,” including all dates scheduled through March 25, 2023.

This year has been especially traumatic for Bieber, so it isn’t surprising that he needs significant time to heal away from the spotlight and unique stress of executing a world tour. One day after kicking off the North American leg in February, which had been long-delayed by COVID-19, Bieber contracted COVID-19 and had to reschedule his Las Vegas stop. In March, Hailey Bieber, his wife of four years, suffered “a very small blood clot” to her brain, leading to surgically repairing a previously unknown hole in her heart. All this, of course, before Bieber’s bout with Ramsay Hunt.

Around the official announcement from Team Bieber yesterday, fans began sharing rumors of total cancellation and notifications of rescheduled shows lingering into 2024. Bieber hasn’t publicly commented on the status of the Justice World Tour.

Justice, Bieber’s Platinum-certified sixth studio album, was released in March 2021 and nominated for eight Grammys.

Less than an hour after slapping Chris Rock at the 94th Academy Awards, Will Smith won his first Oscar. It was weird! The King Richard star delivered a weepy speech as he received a standing ovation from many of his fellow actors — but not Mila Kunis.

In an interview with C magazine, Kunis discussed why she and husband Ashton Kutcher didn’t cheer for Smith. “The idea of leading by example only makes sense when you actually have someone to lead. We have our tiny little tribe here at home, and never once do I want to tell them to do something if I’m not willing to do it myself. Not standing up to me was a no-brainer, but what was shocking to me was how many people did stand up,” she said. “I thought, wow, what a time we’re living in that rather than do what’s right, people focus on doing what looks good. It’s insane to me.”

Mila just blew her shot at starring in Wilder Wilder West, which is definitely going to happen. Oh well. Good thing she has her Family Guy money and successful movie career, including the new Netflix thriller, Luckiest Girl Alive. “It’s very zeitgeist-y to talk about an unreliable narrator, but my character is just so full of contradictions. It’s a movie about the gray area,” she said about the film. It’s available on Netflix now.

(Via C)

During a recent interview with The Sun at London’s 2022 Broadcast Music Inc. Awards, music duo Right Said Fred — best known for their 1991 hit “I’m Too Sexy” — opened up about how they really felt about Beyoncé interpolating the song in her Renaissance dance track “Alien Superstar.”

“Normally the artist approaches us but Beyoncé didn’t because she is such an arrogant person,” Right Said Fred members Fred and Richard Fairbrass said. “She just had probably thought, ‘Come and get me,’ so we heard about it after the fact, when you did.”

“We can’t stop it. There is nothing we can do. It is sh*t,” they said. “You are going to get into a conversation with someone who has a lot more presence and power and money than we do. And that won’t go well. It’s best to let it go. If you’re not careful, you spend your life looking back. We keep looking forward the whole time.”

Just a few months earlier, Right Said Fred had shared that they were included in Beyoncé’s Renaissance writing credits, even claiming that it was “nice.” Now, they feel she should’ve done more to ask permission — but aren’t planning legal action.

“We’re delighted Beyoncé is using our melody, a simple ‘please’ or ‘may I’ would have been nice,” they shared on Twitter.

They noted that while the song has been interpolated in recent years for a number of hits, from Taylor Swift’s “Look What You Made Me Do” and Drake’s “Way 2 Sexy,” those artists approached them to ask permission.

“99.9% of journalists know f*ck all about music and the most basic terminology,” Right Said Fred added on Twitter. “Irrespective of what has been written. The song usage with Taylor Swift, Drake and Beyoncé does not involve samples of our songs. The usage is all related to publishing, ie: the songwriting.”

Early on in Beyoncê’s Renaissance release cycle, Kelis also was credited for an interpolation of her song “Milkshake.” She eventually asked to be removed. “It’s not a collab it’s theft,” Kelis replied to an Instagram comment about it in August.

View Right Said Fred’s posts below.

In August, Beavis And Butt-Head premiered on Paramount+ and proved they were still hip to pop culture by having the two main characters watch a BTS video in an episode. “Yes! This song kicks ass! And the video kicks ass, too,” Beavis said about “Dynamite.”

Now, the two goofballs have been introduced to the ubiquitous pop star Olivia Rodrigo — more specifically her hit “Good 4 U.” Beavis said of the video, “These cheerleaders don’t seem all that great, you know?” Butt-Head agreed: “Yeah, really. The cheerleaders at our school are better than this and half of them are pregnant.” About the song, Beavis said, “I would love to have a girl be this mad at me because this means that I scored with her before, you know?”

In May, the singer celebrated a year since the release of that album, Sour, writing, “It’s been almost a year since Sour‘s come out. So much has happened in that year: I graduated high school; I went to the White House, which was amazing; and I won three Grammys, which is absolutely insane. This past year, it’s been, you know, a lot of career milestones and stuff, but I’m freshly 19, there are so many things that I’m learning and just normal teenager milestones that I’m going through every day.”

Watch the clip from Beavis And Butt-Head above.

Way back in May, we heard that Vladimir Putin’s inner circle was maneuvering to install a successor while they grew concerned about his mental (and physical) health. Fears about the former are increasingly coming to the forefront around the world, although it surely seems that Putin has been able to push back any resistance to his Russian rule as time wears forth. He’s also insisted upon ignoring reality (Ukraine’s making major advances as troops take back territory) and formally “annexing” parts of Ukraine, and amid this hot mess, spectators increasingly worry about Putin’s nuke-happy vibe. This week, President Biden declared that Putin is “not joking” when he talks about using nuclear weapons, especially “because his military is — you might say — significantly underperforming.”

That underperformance has apparently led Putin to approach his 70th birthday while “isolated deep inside nuclear bunkers,” according to The Daily Beast. The piece quotes people who have known Putin over the years, as well as a high-school student who participated in Putin’s recent Zoom broadcast (for Teacher’s Day), in which he went on an “insane” rant “from some bunker about Nazis.” The student expressed fear about Putin deciding to go nuclear, and here’s more from The Beast:

Putin’s whereabouts is often a subject of fascination in Russia. When he holds his meetings on Zoom it is hard to figure out where he is, but during the pandemic it became obvious that he has at least two identical offices, one in Moscow and the other in his residence on the Black Sea, in the city of Sochi.

Gennady Gudkov, an exiled former Russian parliamentarian, told The Daily Beast that the president was taking precautions as the war in Ukraine spirals out of control. “Putin is going to hide in a bunker in case of a nuclear war,” he said. “But he is not safe there either; he will be destroyed — that’s what Biden should tell Putin clearly now.”

From there, one wonders whether intervention is possible, although Putin doesn’t take kindly to criticism and even jails his critics on a long-term basis (ask Alexei Nalvany how terribly that goes). Russia has grown increasingly isolated (other than befriending the Taliban and holding onto Iran and China) following Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and Zelensky’s army is now driving Russian tanks down streets after pushing Putin’s troops out of supposedly annexed territory. It’s not going great for Putin over there, but let’s hope he doesn’t lose it and push the wrong button.

(Via The Daily Beast)

Some bands are sprinters; they release new material with impressive speed. But other bands are more like marathon runners, taking their time with each release. Canadian indie pop group Alvvays are the latter since their new album Blue Rev is their first in five years. In this week’s Indiecast, hosts Steven Hyden and Ian Cohen review marathoners Alvvays’ latest release as well as Björk‘s mushroom-inspired LP Fossora.

The biggest music news of this week was a pleasantly surprising No. 1 single. It’s Steve Lacey’s R&B hit “Bad Habit,” which dethroned Harry Styles’ long-running “As It Was” No. 1, and it seems like a very organic ascent. In other news, indie music celebrated the 10th anniversary of a majorly influential album: Tame Impala’s Lonerism. While the idea of celebrating album anniversaries is a relatively new phenomenon, it does encourage younger listeners to revisit classic albums in an age when we’re constantly introduced to new music.

This week’s recommendation corner has Ian urging listeners to check out his recent interview with Will Sheff and his band Okkervil River’s new album Nothing Special. Steven suggests Zach Bryan, a 26-year-old singer-songwriter whose 34-song LP American Heartbreak is one of the year’s most sprawling albums.

New episodes of Indiecast drop every Friday. Listen to Episode 108 here or below 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.

The Golden State Warriors, fresh off of their first NBA championship since 2018, are dealing with a training camp controversy surrounding do-everything forward Draymond Green and high-scoring guard Jordan Poole. According to reports, Green and Poole got into an altercation recently in practice that saw Green swing at the youngster, although it was unclear what exactly led to the two going at it.

The one thing that was reported — Poole’s attitude during camp as he is on the verge of an extension has been less than ideal — got rebuked by both Steve Kerr and Steph Curry. And on Friday morning, TMZ published a video of the incident, which appears to show the two players standing on the court, Green accosting Poole, Poole responding by shoving him away, and Green throwing a punch that made Poole hit the deck.

There is still plenty that remains unclear about the incident, particularly what happened or was said between the two players that led to things starting and, eventually, Green throwing a punch. Reports indicated that Green’s actions were going to lead to some sort of internal discipline. Green has also apologized to the team, and per Kendra Andrews of ESPN, is expected to rejoin them on Saturday after the entire team has a day off on Friday.