In November of last year, Britney Spears was finally granted freedom from her conservatorship. This was not the end of legal battles. But today the pop star is experiencing another victory with the ruling from Judge Brenda Penny that her father, Jamie Spears, has to sit for a deposition and produce the documents requested by Britney’s team.
Within the next 30 days in L.A., the father will have to produce all documents related to electronic surveillance, which will help the “Toxic” singer’s case after all of her allegations about being monitored and recorded. “I’ll go years without contact, and then I’ll get a call every once in a while from her in a closet,” her ex-manager Sam Lufti once said. “Last time she called me, she was at Ralphs, in Calabasas[…] After she hung up, I got a call from the same number — it’s an Asian doctor, who says, ‘Wow, this is surreal, Britney just borrowed my phone.’ Five years ago, she borrowed a phone at the gym and just made off with it.”
It’s been a big week (month, really) for rappers going off on police officers. Maybe it’s a little bit of payback for the seemingly constant surveillance and harassment hip-hop artists have endured from the authorities, or perhaps the outcry against prosecutors for focusing on rappers’ lyrics in cases like those against Young Thug and YoungBoy Never Broke Again has emboldened them. Either way, we’ve seen a growing boom in videos of rappers reacting to being arrested — or intervening in others’ arrests — and the latest to inadvertently join this trend is Baton Rouge’s Boosie Badazz.
In a video currently going viral on Twitter, Boosie can be seen handcuffed during a traffic stop in Georgia and really laying into the officers detaining him. “I can’t be going through this though, bro,” he exclaims. “It’s harassment, it’s every day. I can’t even live. I moved to the country to f*ckin’ live, bro.” He also seems to threaten the officers with both physical altercation and legal action, while pointing out that they seemingly have no good reason for pulling him over in the first place. “Car’s not stolen, registration is right, the tag is right,” he says. “You f*cking motherf*ckers are targeting my vehicles.”
According to TMZ, the original source of the video, Boosie and his driver were pulled over for tinted windows and concealed tags. The officers claim they smelled marijuana, searched the car, and found a plastic bag with weed in it. Eventually, he was cited and the weed was confiscated but he was released.
The video doesn’t paint Boosie in the best light, despite having a legitimate claim about possible harassment, but at least he’s yelling about someone actually bothering him — unlike the other times he’s gone viral in recent years.
While it’s been a few years since 2016’s A Moon Shaped Pool, now is actually a great time for Radiohead fans. Side project The Smile recently released a new album and have more new music on the way. Now, Thom Yorke has dropped off a solo offering, a new version of “Bloom” recorded for a Greenpeace video called “The Lonely Shark.”
The rendition, led by Yorke vocals and piano, scores an animated video of two sharks happily enjoying a life together in the ocean until one of them meets a tragic and bloody demise after getting caught in a fishing hook.
The video description reads, “These two aren’t the only sharks with an unhappy ending… In the last 50 years the global shark population has plummeted by 70%. Sharks are being wiped out by overfishing for profit. But our oceans can recover if we protect them. Sign the petition for a strong Global Ocean Treaty: www.greenpeace.org/protecttheoceans.”
When it comes to the original song, Yorke previously told BBC 6 Music it was inspired by documentary series The Blue Planet, saying, “It was me lying on the sofa trying to go to sleep after being up too late with my young son and it was just coming in and out of my subconscious.” Fittingly, in 2017, Yorke and Hans Zimmer re-worked the song into “(Ocean) Bloom” for Blue Planet II.
Buffalo Trace is renowned for high-priced bourbon whiskey that, these days, is damn near unattainable (Weller, Pappy, Stagg, Eagle Rare…). The thing is, Buffalo Trace is a massive distillery operation with 19 brands coming off their stills, which means they’re also producing plenty of inexpensive bourbon whiskey. Benchmark is just such a whiskey, and today I’m going to rank the whole line.
Benchmark is one of the many brands that come from Buffalo Trace’s “Mash Bill no. 1,” which is their low-rye bourbon mash (one of Buffalo Trace’s four core mash bills overall). Of course, Buffalo Trace doesn’t divulge the exact parameters of any of their bills, so we don’t know how “low” the rye content is or how “high” the corn content is. We do know that the same mash bill is used to make Buffalo Trace Bourbon, Stagg, Eagle Rare, Old Charter, and Colonel E.H. Taylor, Jr. bourbons.
While using the same mash bill doesn’t quite make Benchmark the “poor man’s Eagle Rare,” it does speak to the quality of the spirit that goes into the barrel and eventually the bottles. Each of the bourbons from that famed mash bill are still all housed and aged in unique ways that inform the flavor profile of the final product. Benchmark is batched, proofed, and bottled to match Benchmark’s flavor profile, not Taylor’s or Stagg’s.
That said, Buffalo Trace is still a business with a bottom line too. If, say, a few barrels of Eagle Rare or Old Charter don’t quite meet the flavor profile standards of those brands, those barrels will likely end up (ie, be blended out) in a Benchmark, which is still a bottom-shelf whiskey. That said, this is also a cheap bourbon that’s having a bit of a moment thanks to awards love over the last year or two (it’s still a Buffalo Trace product after all). Multitudes, folks!
Alright, let’s dive in and rank some great bourbon — on taste alone — from the bottom shelf.
Also Read: The Top 5 UPROXX Bourbon Posts Of The Last Six Months
The juice in this bottle is from the aforementioned Buffalo Trace Mash no. 1. This is a standard straight bourbon. Once the barrels are vatted, the whiskey is proofed all the way down to 80 proof for bottling.
Tasting Notes:
Faint lemon candies and honey lead to an old vanilla wafer and wet cornmeal on the nose but not much else. The taste is “classic” bourbon with very watery hints of leather, spice, and cornmeal next to vanilla extract, caramel, and old buttered popcorn. The end is very faint and almost vodka-like with a tapwater vibe.
Bottom Line:
This isn’t great. It’s pretty watery and faint overall. It might be fine for a shot and a beer but that’s about it.
This is a standard “small batch” though there’s not a whole lot of information on what that entails exactly. The “batch” could be 20 barrels or 200. The bourbon is cut down slightly less to a bolder 90 proof.
Tasting Notes:
Vanilla extract, slightly wet oak, and that Buffalo Trace Bourbon raw leather/wet grain dominate the nose. The taste pretty much stays in that arena with caramel apples and floral honey popping up next to a slight metallic note and soft mineral water mouthfeel. The end is short and sweet and leaves you with that leather, oak, and vanilla primarily.
Bottom Line:
This feels like a good shooter or mixer for a whiskey and Coke. Beyond that, it’s a little watery still for highlighting in a cocktail.
This expression says it all in the name. The barrels are pulled from the top floors of the Buffalo Trace warehouses. Essentially, heat rises and the barrels on those top floors age/mature more quickly and can have a deeper flavor thanks to that accelerated process. This whiskey vatted from those barrels and proofed down to a slightly higher 86 proof.
Tasting Notes:
There’s a mild sense of orange oils and Christmas spice on the nose with a touch of buttery yet sweet caramel and a whisper of raw leather. The palate follows along that path pretty closely as butterscotch and orange marmalade with a hint of sourdough pancake lead to caramel corn and subtle “oak” on the finish.
Bottom Line:
This is simple but good. I could see drinking this in a highball or maybe even on the rocks as an everyday table bourbon.
This is a four-year-old bonded bourbon that’s not that far off the Colonel E.H. Taylor, Jr. line, as all of those bourbons are bonded too. That also means that this bourbon is only proofed down to 100 proof, far above the Old No. 8 entry point above.
Tasting Notes:
This is surprisingly bright with a nose full of lemon-honey tart sweetness, a touch of vanilla extract, a hint of charred wood, and maybe a little wet leather. The taste keeps it simple and really leans into the oak and vanilla while the honey sweetness mellows to a standard caramel with a hint of spicy tobacco. The end is pretty short but leaves you with that vanilla, honey, and tobacco.
Bottom Line:
This is actually good. For $20, this is great. I’d mix an old fashioned with this in a heartbeat. I’d go a little easy on the sugar as this is already on the sweeter side, but it’d be a good cocktail.
This is the standard Benchmark bottled at barrel proof. Well, it’s more than that. Only a few barrels of Benchmark make it to a flavor point that’ll allow full proof barreling. So, this batched bourbon is all about the pure juice from the barrel with no cutting with water to tame it.
Tasting Notes:
There’s a mild intensity with notes of spicy dry tobacco next to dark chocolate, a hint of eggnog spices, and creamy vanilla. Overall, it’s creamy on the nose with that leathery/wet grain note completely gone. That all delivers on the palate with the addition of spicy stewed apples soaked in brandy, a touch of dark fruit leather chewiness, and a long, spicy tobacco finish with a hint of orchard fruit in the background.
Bottom Line:
This is where things get interesting. This is a really solid mixing bourbon for cocktails. Those high ABVs are almost non-existent (to me) but really pop in a cocktail format. The flavor profile also feels very “classic” bourbon, which would make a hell of a Manhattan or old fashioned.
This expression is from the single barrels that actually hit that prime spot/flavor profile to be bottled one at a time. This is the best of the best of the barrels earmarked for Benchmark in the Buffalo Trace warehouses. Those barrels are watered down slightly before bottling at a healthy 95 proof.
Tasting Notes:
That orange and caramel really come through on the nose with a thin line of creamy dark chocolate and some nutmeg and cinnamon. The palate largely adheres to that flavor profile while adding in layers of dark fruit, old leather, mild oak, and orange cookies. The finish arrives with a sense of winter spices and dark chocolate oranges next to a twinge of cherry-kissed spicy tobacco chew and a final note of old porch wicker.
Bottom Line:
This was hard to place. I really like it but it’s not quite as bold as it could be. That said, this is a perfectly fine on-the-rocks sipper or cocktail base. It’s complex enough to handle mixing while also blooming nicely with a little water or ice. Plus, come on! That price for a single barrel bourbon in 2022? That’s pretty amazing.
Get busy living or get busy dying, the choice is yours. Brooklyn wild man Meechy Darko’s latest Gothic Luxury single “Get Lit Or Die Tryin’” takes its inspiration from this quote, as well as the philosophy of 50 Cent‘s star-making first album, Get Rich Or Die Tryin’, as well as a sample (from “Hustler’s Ambition”). The gravel-voiced Flatbush Zombie demonstrates just how intense this nihilistic outlook can get in the song’s black-and-white video, which follows Meechy and his gang as they live recklessly, robbing gangsters and challenging each other to a game of Russian roulette.
“Get Lit Or Die Tryin’” is the second single from Gothic Luxury, Meechy’s upcoming solo debut album. He announced the album a month ago with the defiant video for “Kill Us All (K.U.A.),” a (justifiably) paranoid anthem detailing the systemic oppression of Black Americans at the hands of the government and its agents. That backdrop is the overall inspiration for Gothic Luxury, which he calls “the most personal thing I’ve ever done.” “I’m in an extremely soul-stirring part of my life right now,” Meechy explained in a statement. “Who I was yesterday may not be who I am tomorrow. I’m not who I was last week. There’s no telling who I’ll be next year or the year after, so it’s very important to capture this while I can still feel.”
Watch Meechy Darko’s “Get Lit Or Die Tryin” video above.
Gothic Luxury is due 8/26 via Loma Vista Recordings. You can pre-save it here.
Last night (July 13), as part of their Music Of The Spheres tour, Coldplay put on a show at Olympiastadion in Berlin, Germany. The band is on the stretch of the tour that features HER as their opening act and they seem pretty enamored by one of her performances… but not an on-stage one.
Today, Coldplay shared a video, taken backstage at that Berlin show, of HER and her band firing off a quick a capella rendition of Coldplay’s enduring 2005 single “Fix You.” It starts with some vocalists singing the song’s instrumental before HER comes in with the first verse. On the chorus, everybody joins in and harmonizes with HER for a gorgeous conclusion to their truncated cover.
Sharing the video, Coldplay wrote, “Fix You by @HERMusicx, backstage in Berlin. We’re so lucky to hear these voices every night on tour.”
This comes shortly after Hannah Reid (of London Grammar, Coldplay’s other tour opener) joined the band on stage, also in Berlin, on July 10, singing duet with Chris Martin on “Let Somebody Go,” Coldplay’s single from earlier this year that features Selena Gomez.
Watch both of those performances above.
Coldplay is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
With a little over a month to go until the massive drama finally takes streaming audiences by storm, Amazon has released a new trailer for its heavily-anticipated series, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. The preview is the deepest look yet at the sprawling (and wildly expensive) project set thousands of years before the events of the events of the Lord of the Rings films that turned the J.R.R. Tolkien series into a box office phenomenon.
In the new trailer, a young Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) refuses to heed the urging of Elrond (Robert Aramayo) to put down her sword as peace seemingly envelopes Middle Earth. Haunted by fiery visions, Galadriel knows an evil darkness is coming that will lock the vast fantasy world into a brutal war with no end in sight.
Here’s the official synopsis:
This epic drama is set thousands of years before the events of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and will take viewers back to an era in which great powers were forged, kingdoms rose to glory and fell to ruin, unlikely heroes were tested, hope hung by the finest of threads, and the greatest villain that ever flowed from Tolkien’s pen threatened to cover all the world in darkness. Beginning in a time of relative peace, the series follows an ensemble cast of characters, both familiar and new, as they confront the long-feared re-emergence of evil to Middle-earth. From the darkest depths of the Misty Mountains, to the majestic forests of the elf-capital of Lindon, to the breathtaking island kingdom of Númenor, to the furthest reaches of the map, these kingdoms and characters will carve out legacies that live on long after they are gone.
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power premieres September 2 on Amazon.
The Beths are releasing Expert In A Dying Field later this year, and today they’ve unveiled the resonant title track. “Expert In A Dying Field” is a tame earworm with Elizabeth Stokes’s soaring, gentle vocals as the centerpiece as she sings inquisitive contemplations: “Can we erase our history?”
“I really do believe that love is learned over time,” explains Stokes in a statement. “In the course of knowing a person, you accumulate so much information: their favorite movies, how they take their tea, how to make them laugh, how that makes you feel. And when relationships between people change, or end, all that knowledge doesn’t just disappear. The phrase ‘Expert in a Dying Field’ had been floating around my head for a few years, I was glad to finally capture it when writing this tune.”
“Expert In A Dying Field” is slower than their last single “Silence Is Golden,” which Stokes explained was a “song is about stress and anxiety manifesting as an intolerance to noise.” These singles follow February’s release of “A Real Thing,” an energetic one-off song.
Watch the video for “Expert In A Dying Field” above.
Expert In A Dying Field is out 9/16 via Carpark Records. Pre-order it here.
Bridgerton‘s second round didn’t show off quite as much sex appeal as the season revolving around Daphne and Duke Simon. And that’s for the better, honestly, since it’d be rather difficult to do that again without, well, The Duke. The sophomore season still pulled off a viewing record for Netflix, and everything’s still going full steam ahead for more Bridgerton and a Queen Charlotte spinoff, but of course, people miss The Duke.
Regé-Jean Page, who crushed ovaries on SNL to poke fun at The Duke phenomenon, will probably always carry that character with him. He’s onto starring roles in franchises like Dungeons & Dragons, and he plays a villain in The Gray Man (Netflix’s movie starring Chris Evans’ stache, Ryan Gosling, and Ana de Armas). Naturally (and as he revealed), journalists keep asking him about The Duke, and that included Variety‘s Marc Malkin, to whom Page observed that Simon really wasn’t a good guy before all of that “redemption.”
Remember, Simon was a “rake” who (as Daphne put it) was “raking across the continent”? And here’s a clip of Page telling Malkin that Simon was “kind-of this horrific…” and “a Regency f*ckboy” (with his quote below):
“Shonda and I had a wonderful conversation at the end of the Season 1. We were quite happy about how we stuck the landing on that one. I’m still proud of how we stuck the landing on that one. I’ve had a lot of conversations on this junket of folks saying, ‘You know, Simon was such a lovely gentleman, and now, you’re playing this super bad character…’ I think we did so well on that redemptive arc, people forgot that Simon was kind-of this horrific… he was the best example of a ‘Regency f*ckboy’ that any of us have come across.”
Further, Page revealed that he hasn’t caught Season 2 yet, and while he has always seemed grateful for the opportunity to play Simon in the first place, everyone should feel “free” to recast The Duke if they really want him in the show. Page previously turned down a guest spot for Simon in this second season, and now we know more about why he’s moving onto other places.
Still, Page would like to stress how he feels like “you really have to be brave about ending stories like that.” That’d refer to Simon’s transformation for love, “And because we brought that round full circle so well, because we stuck that landing, you’re left with this great feeling.” And that means (credit to John Oliver) less “jizzing in blankets.”
Bridgerton‘s first two seasons are currently streaming, and Netflix’s The Gray Man streams on July 22.
The Bear is the breakout television show of the summer. It’s got a killer dad rock soundtrack, turned “yes, chef” into a catchphrase, and inspired people to share their deepest, darkest secret (the time they hooked up with restaurant line cooks, not all of whom are as handsome as Jeremy Allen White, presumably). Unsurprisingly, The Bear has been renewed by FX for another eight-episode season.
“The Bear has exceeded our wildest creative, critical and commercial expectations,” Eric Schrier, FX Entertainment President, said in a statement. “We deeply appreciate the brilliant work led by creator and co-showrunner Christopher Storer and co-Showrunner Joanna Calo. Jeremy Allen White’s lead performance is spectacular, as are those of his co-stars Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Ayo Edebiri, Abby Elliott, Lionel Boyce, and Liza Colón-Zayas. We can’t wait to get to work on season two.”
Storer and Calo added, “We are so grateful to FX, our insanely talented cast, our crew who worked hard, fast, and in the dead of winter, not to mention everyone who watched. And we can’t wait to bring you all back to The Bear in 2023.” They celebrated the renewal not with a bottle of champagne, but by splitting an Italian beef sandwich (I assume).
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