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Nicki Minaj has had a tough go on social media to start the week after her response to the murder of Philadelphia rapper PnB Rock was compared unfavorably to Cardi B’s. While Nicki and Cardi have been on-and-off rivals for a while, the contrast in both of their responses was noted by fans of both, who criticized Nicki for offering advice to fellow rappers along with her condolences to PnB Rock’s friends and family.

“After Pop Smoke there’s no way we as rappers or our loved ones are still posting locations to our whereabouts,” she wrote. “To show waffles & some fried chicken????! He was such a pleasure to work with. Condolences to his mom & family. This makes me feel so sick. Jesus.” Nicki’s response was deemed inappropriate and victim-blaming as fans decried a swiftly spreading theory that the robbers who accosted PnB at Roscoe’s Chicken And Waffles in South Los Angeles were clued in by Instagram posts.

However, one thing Nicki Minaj won’t do is back down. She followed up with a string of responses peppered with all-caps exclamations, emphatically defending her point that entertainers must remain vigilant due to jealousy and greed. “The ppl around these rappers gain so much,” she insisted. “It’s time to start really reminding them over & over!!! At least TRY to put your foot down if you CARE! Tell them!!! You’re not loved like you think you are!!! You’re prey!!!! In a world full of predators!!!! What’s not clicking???!!!”

“It’s never the wrong time!” she continued. “f it saves ONE YOUNG RAPPER!!!! JUST ONE!!!!! THEN WE’VE DONE OUR JOBS!!!!! I spoke on losing our own @ the VMAS!!!! Enough is enough!!!! MY GOD. IDGAF about no fkng hate tweets!!!! Go fuck y’all dumb fkng selves!!!!! Y’all r not the ones that be bawling crying after you just worked with or just spoke to ONE OF YOUR OWN!!!!! I BELONG TO THIS SHIT. IMA FKNG SPEAK ON IT!!!! If it gets attention from y’all being ignorant than so be it!!! At least it’ll save lives. FOH.”

Meanwhile, PnB Rock’s death has prompted mournful responses from plenty of his peers, which you can see here.

The 2022 Primetime Emmys gave us some of the best and worst of these kinds of fancy Hollywood awards ceremonies, from exciting new honorees and inspirational acceptance speeches to groaner bits that lasted forever and a handful of egregious snubs. Let’s try to sort through it all by identifying the night’s most notable Winners and Losers.

WINNER: HBO, generally

HBO and its new parent company have had a weird couple of weeks with various merger and/or Batgirl fiascos, but on Monday night they went back to what they do best: Collecting a wheelbarrow filled with trophies at prestigious television awards shows. Succession? Won a lot. The White Lotus? Won a LOT. Jean Smart and Zendaya in their lead roles on Hacks and Euphoria? Won, although please consider this my official pitch for them to appear on each other’s show in the next season. I think the world could use Jean Smart as a wiseass English teacher on Euphoria. I think we’ve earned that.

But yeah, just a dominant performance by the network that kind of put prestige television on the map a few decades ago. And, the flipside of that coin, a pretty disappointing performance for a slew of other premium networks and streamers, with the exception of Apple and Ted Lasso. Although Apple also got blanked for its other big hit, Severance. So there was that. That probably stung. Not as much as the harsh but extremely true monologue jokes about Showtime (barely exists as a network despite the Yellowjackets love) and Netflix (that debt joke… yeesh), I imagine. A little sting. A baby bee. A little baby bee with a little baby stinger.

Let’s move on before this gets weird.

LOSER: Better Call Saul

It is madness to me that Better Call Saul has yet to win a single Emmy. I can understand the concept of Breaking Bad fatigue after that show cleaned up for a few years, and I get that spin-offs aren’t always viewed as favorably as the originals they were based on, but…yeah. No. This is nuts. How did Rhea Seehorn not win? How did Bob Odenkirk not win? How did Tony Dalton not even get nominated for playing Lalo Salamanca, the most charismatic and devious villain on all of television. It’s not right. I hate it. I’m mad. And I’m even more mad now that I remembered Frasier won a zillion Emmys in the 1990s and that show was a spinoff of Cheers, so there is precedent here. Come on. Jesus Christ.

The silver lining here is that the year’s eligibility window meant that only the first six episodes from the split final season were considered, which means everyone gets another chance to fix this next year. It’s going to be weird to hand out a bunch of hardware to a show that ended like 14 months earlier, but “weird” is better than “a gross miscarriage of justice that results in me going to prison for burning Hollywood to the ground,” so I will take it.

WINNER: Sheryl Lee Ralph

Three things are worth noting here:

• Sheryl Lee Ralph rules
• It was cool to see Abbott Elementary take home whatever awards Ted Lasso didn’t win, both because it’s nice to see a network sitcom succeed in 2022 and because Abbott Elementary is good as heck
• I cannot even begin to fathom the amount of confidence it takes to stand up on the stage in front of millions of people and full-on sing the first chunk of your acceptance speech

I would crash through as many brick walls as Sheryl Lee Ralph asked me to now. I hope she keeps it under, say, three, just for the sake of my cranium, but I’ll keep going until she says stop.

LOSER: Bits

I mean, do we still need bits in 2022? Or big song and dance numbers? Do we need dudes playing dead on the stage during acceptance speeches by first-time winners of fun shows? I… I don’t know. I really don’t. I doubt people watching at home are that jazzed about them at this point. There’s something to be said for trying to make the show entertaining for viewers who don’t necessarily care about the network scorekeeping and inside baseball elements of flubs and snubs, especially at a time when there are so many shows that your average civilian probably isn’t even watching more than a handful of the shows that got nominated. That’s fair.

I… don’t know, though. We could probably cut all of the singing and most of the bits and just let funny/charming people present to the winners and see if we can get this sucker in under two hours. Not made of time over here.

WINNER: Jennifer Coolidge

GOOD: Jennifer Coolidge won for her performance on White Lotus and gave an acceptance speech that started with a brief chat about lavender baths and bloating, which could not possibly have been more charming.

BAD: They started playing her off after what felt like 30 seconds, which stunk, especially considering the thing I mentioned in the last blurb about time burned on bits and singing that meant well but dragged the rest of the show out.

VERY GOOD: Jennifer Coolidge doing the thing in the screencap up there the year after she did this while taking the stage to present at the 2021 ceremony.

I love her very much. She’s the best. Let’s just invent a new awards show for the purpose of giving her a trophy and letting her talk as long as she wants.

LOSER: Whatever exactly this is

Let’s go ahead and file this one under “things I could have done without in a telecast that literally put the winners on a clock while accepting their awards,” too. I’m glad the bills got paid, I guess. That’s as far as I’ll go with that, though.

DRAW: Comedians with outrageous looks

ON ONE HAND: Jerrod Carmichael accepted his Emmy for Rothaniel wearing a white fur coat with a chain and zero shirts underneath it. That was… awesome. Such an incredibly high degree of difficulty there, doubly so for doing it all like it was just a normal thing to wear. Imagine showing up to your job dressed like that for one day. Imagine any of the other nominees last night wearing that. Imagine Michael Keaton in that exact outfit accepting the first award of the night. Just tremendous. Good for him.

ON THE OTHER HAND: Pete…

No, buddy.

Looks like he hopped out of a time machine straight from what, like, 1988 thinks the future looks like.

I cannot support this. I say this as someone who is wearing khaki shorts a free t-shirt I got at a giveaway at a bar over 10 years ago. So… take my fashion opinions with many grains of salt.

WINNER: Squid Game

The weird thing here is that Squid Game was both Netflix’s only real success of the night and the only thing really resembling a massive popular hit taking home a handful of awards. It’s kind of the best-case scenario for The Future of Television or whatever, this idea that a foreign drama about wealth inequality that only exists on the internet can capture enough attention to have it beat out big expensive American cable shows at the Emmys. That is kind of cool if you think about it a little.

Just a little.

Because then we get into the whole Netflix of it all.

Which we do not want to get into.

So… let’s not.

LOSER: Jason Mantzoukas (yes, I am still mad about it)

A few notes:

• Jason Mantzoukas voiced Tommy Lee’s penis in Pam & Tommy
• He was not nominated for doing so
• I have been furious about this for over a month

I’m fine. It’s fine. I guess we just don’t honor greatness in television anymore. But I’m fine.

WINNER: Kenan doing his little punches and kicks

God bless Kenan. I stand by what I said many times about the bits and the songs and not needing them at all, but I did love this guy walking around the stage during his monologue and punctuating his jokes with his little fist pumps and kicks. He’s a good man who has been doing this for many, many years and has rarely, if ever, failed to deliver.

Say what you will about the ceremony as a whole but leave Kenan alone. He is doing the best he can.

LOSER: Anyone who had to take the stage after Lizzo

Lizzie took the stage in a big feathery red dress and collected her trophy and shouted out her crew of big girls way up in the balcony and really kind of jammed an adrenaline needle into the heart of this whole thing for a minute or two. It was great. I love seeing people look like they are legitimately having fun out there like this. I love seeing people shout out their crews in the cheap seats. I love all of it, basically.

I would not love being the person who has to take the stage after her, though. Talk about an impossibly high bar to clear. You or I will never match this energy. We could hurt ourselves even trying. Best to play it safe and just stay home.

WINNER: Henry Winkler

Dude has been massively famous for like 50 years now and seems to be just delighted by the spectacle of it all even today.

What a wonderful man.

Back in October of 2021, the Phoenix Suns and several members of the organization released a statement regarding an upcoming ESPN story about the team’s owner, Robert Sarver. It was unclear what, exactly, they were talking about until a few weeks later, when a story came out alleging that Sarver fostered a hostile work environment, which included numerous examples of racism and sexism in the workplace.

The NBA announced an independent investigation shortly after, and on Tuesday, the league handed down its punishment based on more than 300 interviews and “the evaluation of more than 80,000 documents and other materials, including emails, text messages and videos.” As a result, Sarver is banned from the Suns and the Phoenix Mercury for a year, he has been handed a fine of $10 million, and while he is away from the teams, Sarver is required to “complete a training program focused on respect and appropriate conduct in the workplace.”

Beyond that, the Suns and the Mercury “must fulfill a series of requirements for workplace improvements set forth and monitored by the NBA.” The investigation determined that, among other things, Sarver has used the N-word on multiple occasions and was inappropriate towards women and men.

Sarver purchased the Suns and the Mercury in 2004. Earlier this week, Ashley Silva, a former employee of the organization, criticized the NBA for its handling of the probe, tweeting that “a lot of us trusted you, broke our NDA, and were traumatized all over again speaking to the attorneys you assigned because we thought you’d do the right thing.”

At long last, Kelela has returned with new music. Her new single, “Washed Away” is her first release in five years, on which, she sings with her signature calming, silky vocals over a hypnotic instrumental.

“I love a banger, but for the first point of contact out of my hiatus, it felt more honest to lead with an ambient heart-check,” Kelela said in a statement.

On the song, she sings, “The mist, the light, the dust that settles, the night / The hope, the longing, fade away, blurry-eyed / Riding out on metal waves / Moving on, a change of pace.”

The song is accompanied by a music video, which was directed by Yasser Abubeke, in which Kelela is seen in the Danakil Depression in Ethiopia, standing in solitude as she feels the sun beaming onto her. Elsewhere in the video, she swims in the Danakil waters.

“I specifically want to speak to marginalized Black folk and highlight the work we do to find renewal in a world that’s built to make us feel inadequate,” She said. “This song is the soundtrack to the relief we find after going inward.”

While this song is more of a downtempo track, Kelela took to Twitter upon the song’s release to assure fans “the bangers are on the way.”

Check out “Washed Away” above.

Lately, there has been a plethora of movies about movies, which show at the movie theater and help bring back the love of movies to everyone besides Tom Cruise, who already loves movies. There was La La Land, Once Upon A Time In Holywood, Licorice Pizza, and even X had some Hollywood references thrown in there among the blood. Now, Damien Chazelle‘s upcoming film will showcase the jazz age of movies, when suddenly everyone was talking and silent films were a thing of the past.

Babylon is the latest Chazelle film to take on Hollywood, with an epic ensemble cast (with some familiar faces) that features Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Diego Calva, Samara Weaving, Li Jun Li, Katherine Waterston, Olivia Wilde, Spike Jonze, Lukas Haas, and Flea (!!!!).

The first trailer is a rollercoaster of a ride of vibrant scenes, starting with Robbie and Calva’s characters doing drugs and sharing their wildest dreams. You know, normal Hollywood stuff. Oh, and Tobey Maguire makes a “blink and you might miss it” appearance, which is always a plus! As per the official description:

From Damien Chazelle, Babylon is an original epic set in 1920s Los Angeles. A tale of outsized ambition and outrageous excess, it traces the rise and fall of multiple characters during an era of unbridled decadence and depravity in early Hollywood.

Babylon will get a limited release on December 25th and open nationwide on January 6th. Check out the trailer above.

The sequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild finally has a name and official release date. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom will be released to the Nintendo Switch on May 12, 2023, much to the delight of fans everywhere.

Fans have been giddy with anticipation for this game ever since it was first teased all the way back in 2019. Since then, we’ve only gotten bits of info here and there, including a delay at one point. However, now that the game officially has both a name and release date, we can finally get excited about an upcoming Zelda release once again.

Tears of the Kingdom has the potential to be a really pivotal moment in the history of the Zelda franchise. Breath of the Wild shook the franchise to its core when it went away from the established 3D Zelda formula in favor of a more open and explorative world. Some loved it, others wanted a return to what Zelda has always been, and while we don’t expect this one to go back to that old formula, we do wonder if any old staples will return in the sequel.

May 12 is going to be a huge day in gaming and we can’t wait to see what Tears of the Kingdom has in store for all of us.

It’s hard to call any major Nintendo IP “underrated,” but if any were to fall into that category, it’s probably Pikmin. Nintendo’s odd little resource management/survival/real time strategy game doesn’t have the same level of widespread appeal as a Zelda or a Splatoon, but it has a dedicated following of fans who adore each and every title.

Those fans have been patiently waiting for the moment when the franchise would be receiving a new sequel, and on Tuesday Nintendo delivered to them with a surprise announcement of Pikmin 4. The game is clearly still in the very early stages of development because it didn’t even receive a trailer, but Nintendo did advertise a new camera angle that places the player from the viewpoint of the Pikmin.

We don’t want to glean too much off of that, but it’s possible this title will be focused more on the intimidating wild creatures of these worlds, and a new camera angle would definitely help with that.

We probably won’t be seeing this new game anytime soon, but it would be very cool if sometime next summer we got a new trailer showing off all the cool features we can expect in Pikmin 4. For now, fans will just have to be excited that we’re getting a new game at all.

Rudy Giuliani has a complicated relationship to 9/11. In many ways, it’s because he was mayor of New York City on September 11, 2001, that so much of the world knows his name (yes, even before the Four Seasons Total Landscaping fiasco). Yet in the 21 years since that horrific act of terrorism, Giuliani has sort of coopted the tragedy to build up his own legacy.

On Friday, as Insider reported, Giuliani stirred up a bit of confusion and controversy when, just ahead of the 21st anniversary of the attacks on our nation, he sat down with Newsmax and described September 11th as both “the worst day of my life and in some ways, you know, the greatest day of my life, in terms of my city, my country, my family.”

Whatchu talking ‘bout, Rudy?

But things got even more confusing this week, when Giuliani sat down with Dr. Gina on Real America’s Voice and seemed to maybe agree that 9/11 was an inside job?!

After asserting that “we should always remember and never forget” what happened on 9/11, Gina remarked that she “noticed a sincere, strong uptick in the number of folks asking about things that have traditionally been painted [as] conspiracy theories.” While she claimed that she doesn’t necessarily believe the wild theories that have been suggested, she also noted that she doesn’t “fault people for asking questions that may sound outlandish when our government is a proven enemy of some people.”

While Rudy could have easily shut this nonsense down and maintained that he was the true hero of the day, he surprisingly seemed to agree with Dr. Gina. As he noted:

I find myself now saying things and realizing they’re true — [but] if I had said them five years ago, I would have thought I was crazy.

You and everyone else, Rudy. But rather than keep it totally on topic, he decided to pivot:

Let’s take Russian collusion: that a political party would spend a couple million dollars to make up a charge to frame a candidate for president, then to try to frame a candidate for president, then to try to frame a president and remove him on a charge that… is a complete lie, carry it on for four or five years and have the support of the American press? I would’ve said, ‘That’s crazy. That can’t happen. That can’t possibly happen. The press will be outraged.’

Something is definitely crazy here.

Giuliani continued by stating that once everyone determined something like Russian collusion was a “fraud” (which they have NOT), they’d just move onto the next fraud — ”the whole thing with the Ukraine, which turned out to be another fraud.”

Perhaps MSNBC’s Chris Hayes summed up Giuliani’s statements best.

Burna Boy‘s hit single “Last Last” proved to be one of the buzziest songs of the past summer. Since its release, the song has reached the top of Billboard‘s Afrobeats Songs chart and has pulled in over and its video has pulled in over 75 million streams on YouTube.

Last night, Burna visited The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, where he performed the song accompanied by live instrumentalists. Throughout the performance, Burna’s vocals maintain the song’s Afrobeats roots, while the keyboardists, drummers, and saxophonists give the song a jazzy feel.

Burna Boy is often credited for helping popularize Afrobeats music in the United States. He’s accomplished several incredible feats, including selling out Madison Square Garden. While he dreams of playing many more iconic venues in his career, he revealed to Billboard that he also has several unconventional ideas for music performances.

“My dream venues, other than all the stadiums in the world, are unorthodox,” Burna said, “like a theme park or a f*cking train station. A concert in a big-ass train station, and there’s no trains, and the whole tracks are filled with people. I just want to do weird sh*t like that for my own pleasure.”

Check out the performance above.

Burna Boy is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

In addition to being one of hip-hop’s most notable pioneers, Chuck D of Public Enemy has long been considered one of the genre’s most formidable lyricists. According to Rolling Stone, he’s now cashed in that reputation — and on the lucrative catalog of genre-shaping hits he wrote as Public Enemy’s de facto frontman — after selling a huge portion of his songwriting catalog to Reach Music.

Reach Music has been the rap titan’s publisher for the past two decades, and now owns 100 percent of Chuck’s songwriter’s share along with 50 percent of his publishing copyrights. Chuck will retain the other 50 percent of his copyright share. Neither party has revealed how much Chuck was ultimately paid for the catalog, but given the cultural ubiquity and timeless urgency of hits like “Bring The Noise,” “Don’t Believe The Hype,” and “Fight The Power,” Chuck’s fee would certainly be in line with other recent sales by pop forces like David Bowie, Justin Timberlake, and John Legend.

In a statement, Chuck said, “[D]oing this deal was the right timing for a forward and logical evolution of our business together in an ever-changing industry. Reach has always been ahead of the curve on establishing respect for the HipHop genre songwriting and publishing-wise, and they will continue taking care of my works.”

For more on how publishing rights work, check out Uproxx’s interview with Naima Cochran.