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As long as he’s been in the rap business, Russ has been about sharing the secrets of his success with fans and other aspiring artists. While that sometimes takes the form of preachy-sounding lectures on social media or interviews that can rub his intended audience the right way, he’s been getting better at softening his delivery, making sure that the message isn’t getting lost in the tone. In addition to starting his own, artist-friendly label, he seems to have found his niche thanks to TikTok, where he can speak directly to his fans, answering their questions in videos that offer more context.

A great example recently found its way to Twitter. In the video, Russ responds to a fan’s comment in a previous video asking how and why he spent $1 million on his new single, “Are You Entertained” with Ed Sheeran. In typical Russ fashion, he goes into detail, but this time, he’s sure he’s giving the right information to the right people, sounding confident instead of condescending. Offering a disclaimer, he made sure to note that “I’ve had songs go multi-platinum that I’ve spent zero dollars on and I’ve had songs do nothing that I’ve spent hundreds of thousands on. It’s not as simple as, ‘Oh, if you just spend money, the song does well.’ If that was the case, then there would be no flops.”

But on to the nitty-gritty: “Basically, I spent about $300K on the music video,” he recalls. “We shot it in London, [so] it was a whole big production. Then, I spent a little over $700K on marketing, which is like: I did Spotify marquee campaigns, radio, social media ads, [and] billboards overseas.” So, there you have it, an explanation of how much it costs to promote a new song, and a warning: It takes a lot more than money. Russ knows this, but luckily for his fans, he wants them to know it too. Check out the video below.

In the modern age of television, it’s very common (and sometimes required) for sets to have intimacy coordinators to help map out sex scenes in a way where everyone is comfortable and on the same page. This is something that has been more common in the post-#MeToo era, and has since been a pretty regular thing on sets (and SNL parodies). But, obviously, this is a relatively new thing that not everyone has experience with, including actress Amanda Seyfried.

Seyfried has been in the business since she was a teenager when intimacy coordinators were practically non-existent. In a new interview with Net-A-Porter, she explains how things were a lot different 20 years ago, and she wishes she was able to have the same on-set advocate that is available now.

“Being 19, walking around without my underwear on – like, are you kidding me? How did I let that happen?” the actress said. “Oh, I know why: I was 19 and I didn’t want to upset anybody, and I wanted to keep my job. That’s why.”

The Dropout star, who played some of the most iconic teenagers in the early 2000s movies (Mean Girls and Jennifer’s Body, just to name a few) said she was still put in some uncomfortable positions when she was just starting out. Though she does say that she came out of the pre-#MeToo era “pretty unscathed.”

According to the SAG-AFTRA protocol guide, an intimacy coordinator’s job is to “Ensure continued consent throughout the filming of scene (both consent to what their likeness is seen performing, and how the action is achieved) while minimizing interference in production flow.”

While it’s a pretty important on-set job, some actors like Sean Bean think the addition is a bit strange. Bean recently made headlines for saying that intimacy coordinators “ruin” the scenes for him. Perhaps he should consider the fact that he’s an established guy and not a young actress just starting out in a room full of strangers!

(Via Net-A-Porter)

Atlanta news station WSB-TV reports Young Thug, who is currently incarcerated in Fulton County Jail awaiting trial on racketeering charges, has been assessed a litany of new charges including drug, firearm possession, and robbery charges. According to a statement given to XXL by the Fulton County District Attorney’s office, “Charges were added for defendants via re-indictment based on evidence found at arrests. When Mr. Williams was arrested on May 9, evidence was recovered that resulted in the additional charges, including a charge of possession of a machine gun.”

Back in May, Thug, Gunna, Yak Gotti, and other members of a purported street gang going by Young Slime Life, or YSL, were indicted on 56 counts of murder, armed robbery, and conspiring to violate the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act (aka racketeering). Young Thug was initially indicted on the latter thanks to repeated mentions of YSL — also the acronym for his label, Young Stoner Life — in his lyrics. However, he was charged with seven additional felonies after police raided his home, including possession of marijuana with intent to distribute and possession of a dangerous weapon or silencer (which covers sawed-off-shotguns, sawed-off rifles, or machine guns). Many of the re-indictment charges are based on these.

Thug, Gotti, and Gunna have all pled “not guilty” and maintained their innocence, although they were also denied bail. Their trial was set for January 9, 2023.

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Donald Trump is getting raked over the coals for pleading the fifth in the ongoing New York civil investigation into his business. The former president arrived at Attorney General Letitia James office on Wednesday morning where he reportedly “declined to answer the questions under the rights and privileges afforded to every citizen under the United States Constitution.”

“I once asked, ‘If you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?’ Now I know the answer to that question,” Trump said in a statement via the Associated Press. “When your family, your company, and all the people in your orbit have become the targets of an unfounded politically motivated Witch Hunt supported by lawyers, prosecutors and the Fake News Media, you have no choice.”

To be clear, like all American citizens, Trump has the constitutional right to not incriminate himself in a court of law, and that is almost definitely the best legal advice his attorneys can give him. However, as Trump himself notes in his own statement (which demonstrates that the less he talks, the better) he has made several grand statements in the past about how only guilty people plead the fifth.

“The mob pleads the fifth,” is a phrase Trump loved to say, and now, it’s coming back to bite him in the orange butt. Following the announcement that he refused to answer questions in the New York investigation, Twitter went wild dunking on Trump for pleading the fifth after years of dogging others for doing the same.

You can see some of the reactions below:

(Via Associated Press)

The old adage “you can’t predict baseball” got taken to a new level on Tuesday night when the Pittsburgh Pirates traveled to Arizona to take on the Diamondbacks. Pirates infielder Rodolfo Castro tried going from first to third on a single by Oneil Cruz, and thanks to a head-first slide, he safely found himself 90 feet away from scoring.

The issue is that Castro’s slide meant something fell out of his back pocket. That something? Well, it was a cell phone.

It was extremely bizarre, and in the aftermath, everyone had exactly one question: How the heck can this happen? Castro was asked about this after the game and explained that it was totally unintentional.

“I don’t think there’s any professional ballplayer that would ever go out there with any intentions of taking a cell phone,” Castro said, per ESPN. “It’s horrible it happened to me. Obviously, it was very unintentional.”

Castro went on to stress that it was both an “accident” and a “mistake,” while Pirates manager Derek Shelton told the press that “You stay around the game and you see things you haven’t seen before. This was just a kid who made a mistake. It’s just one of those things we move forward from and tell him, ‘You can’t do that.”’

As for the game itself, the Diamondbacks went on to win, 6-4.

Steven Seagal’s got a bit of a love affair going on with autocrats and doing strange things on camera during mutual butt-kissing sessions. John Oliver recently revisited the time that the Under Siege star ate carrots with “the last and only dictator in Europe.” And the worst SNL host of all time has been enamored with Russian President Vladimir Putin for quite some time. As seen above, the pair aired their bromance to the press (in 2013) during the opening of a Moscow martial-arts school that helps to train KGB agents.

Here’s where it gets stranger. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine earlier this year, Seagal was said to have pulled out of his “special envoy” role (tied to humanitarian causes since 2018) that he enjoyed with Russia. All of that talk must have gone nowhere, though, and it’s worth noting that Joe Rogan recently passed on a fake story about Seagal fighting alongside Putin’s troops against Ukraine.

As it turns out, the spirit of that story that might be spot on because Seagal apparently popped onto the site of a destroyed prison in war-torn Ukraine. In July, the facility (Donetsk’s Olenivka prison) was bombed, killing 50 of Russia’s prisoners of war, and the Military Times reports on footage aired by Russian websites, which detail the propaganda spread by Seagal while attempting to convince everyone that Ukrainians did the bombing here. There’s some heavy tin-foil hat flavor going on:

Seagal added a conspiracy angle by suggesting that HIMARS was used by Ukrainian troops because the country’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wanted to silence a “Nazi” being held at the prison.

“The interesting thing is that one of the killed Nazis is a Nazi who just started talking a lot about Zelensky,” Seagal added, “and that Zelensky is responsible for the orders about torture and other atrocities that violate not only the Geneva War Convention, but are also crimes against humanity.”

Business Insider notes that the footage (which has been popping up on YouTube) hasn’t yet been authenticated, but it’s been aired by Russian state media and contains Putin-endorsed talking points. Seagal’s aiming to convince everyone that it’s really Ukraine who committed this war-crime atrocity, and a Russian TV host, Vladimir Solovyov, has attempted to put it on public record that Seagal has “personally examined” rocket fragments during the (convenient) course of making a documentary.

Even though Seagal purportedly has access, though, the New York Times reports that the International Red Cross Committee still hasn’t been permitted to visit the site since the fatal July attack. [Big sigh]

(Via Military Times, Business Insider, Newsweek, & New York Times)

Ahead of their upcoming third album, Blue Rev, Alvvays has released a new song. On “Easy On Your Own,” the band’s lead vocalist Molly Rankin finds herself asking if life gets “easier on your own,” at what seems to be a pivotal point in her life.

She opens the song, singing, “I dropped out of college / Education’s a dull knife / If you don’t believe in the lettered life / Then maybe this is our only try.” Near the end of the song, she sings, “I waited so long for you/ Wasted some of the best years of my life/ And I wanted to see it through this time.”

In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Rankin opened up about her creative process and how she builds her own worlds around each album.

“I find it really fun to make these tiny little movies in my mind,” she said. “I’m a pretty sensitive person, so I feel a lot of feelings, and I try and channel that into the little scenarios that I make. But I don’t feel like my life is all that wild or exciting. To me, it’s more entertaining to create a different universe.”

Check out “Easy On Your Own” above.

Blue Rev is out 10/7 via Polyvinyl. Pre-order it here.

A month ago, Kanye West anointed California crooner Steve Lacy “one of the most inspiring people on the planet,” bringing some much deserved attention and praise to Lacy’s new album, Gemini Rights. Obviously, Kanye’s blessing has been a godsend — no pun intended — for many younger artists on the come-up over the years, even if those artists are no longer on speaking terms with the mercurial producer. However, for now, at least, West and Lacy have sealed their bond — alongside Lil Uzi Vert, no less — by getting matching, mismatched tattoos. Lacy posted a pic on Instagram:

To save you the trouble of zooming in, the bicep tattoos all read, “We here forever technically.” The final word is in a different font, metaphorically marking all three artists’ quick-change tendencies; they’re never just one thing. The artist is Los Angeles-based tattooer Mez Afram, whose Instagram is full of straightforward, unadorned designs like butterflies, big cats, and scorpions. Meanwhile, the woman snapping the shot for the three artists is Lauren Pisciotta, a music manager who now works as Kanye’s assistant and has since made the jump to OnlyFans.

Jumping back to Steve Lacy for a moment, the newly-minted star-in-the-making recently announced his upcoming Give You The World Tour, which starts in October, hits 27 cities, and concludes in his hometown on November 11 at the Greek Theatre.

A month ago, Marcus Mumford shared a new solo song called “Cannibal” (the one with the Stephen Spielberg-directed video). While the song’s intense lyrics seemed personal (like the opening line, “I can still taste you, and I hate it / That wasn’t a choice in the mind of a child and you knew it”), it turns out they were more so than we realized: Mumford now says the song is about being sexually abused as a child.

Mumford made the reveal in a new GQ profile, saying of the incident that happened when he was six years old, “Like lots of people — and I’m learning more and more about this as we go and as I play it to people — I was sexually abused as a child. Not by family and not in the church, which might be some people’s assumption. But I hadn’t told anyone about it for 30 years.”

He also spoke about playing the song for his mother, who later came back and asked what the song was about, at which point she learned about the abuse for the first time. Mumford said, “[My mother said,] ‘Can I ask what that song’s about?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, it’s about the abuse thing.’ She was like, ‘What are you talking about?’ So once we get through the trauma of that moment for her, as a mother, hearing that and her wanting to protect and help and all that stuff, it’s objectively f*cking hilarious to tell your mom about your abuse in a f*cking song, of all things.”

This news adds another layer to a quote from a newsletter Mumford shared in July: “In January last year I set myself the task of trying to write some songs and just follow where they led. When I showed the first two to the lads in the band, we all agreed it was probably a story I had to tell on my own.”