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Donnell Russell, who described himself as disgraced singer R. Kelly’s manager has pled guilty to stalking and harassing one of the singer’s sexual abuse victims, according to Rolling Stone. The 47-year-old was accused of harassing and intimidating a Jane Doe victim and her mother using emails, phone calls, and text messages to keep her from pursuing justice against Kelly. Russell was previously accused of making gun threats in an attempt to stop a screening of Surviving R. Kelly in New York City. Last week, he was convicted on those charges.

In a statement, United States Attorney Breon Peace said, “Russell used threats, harassment and intimidation in a deliberate effort to silence one of R. Kelly’s victims and prevent her voice from being heard. When his initial effort failed, he continued his vile campaign by sending threatening messages to Jane Doe and her mother, and publishing explicit photos of the victim on the internet before and after Kelly was indicted. As this prosecution makes clear, the defendant’s conduct was not only reprehensible, but it was also criminal and will not be tolerated.”

Among the tactics that Russell used were threats to post explicit photos of Jane Doe online if she didn’t withdraw her civil suit against him. He apparently followed through after over a year of threats, posting the photos to Facebook in 2020. He might have found a better use for his time; Kelly was found guilty of sex trafficking and racketeering last year and was sentenced last month to 30 years in prison.

There is, famously, no time to die, but there is time to watch Ana de Armas kick butt.

The Knives Out breakout, who was also the best part of the most recent James Bond movie, recently shared a behind-the-scenes video from the set of Netflix’s The Gray Man. “I still run like a chicken. But, I wanna thank the incredible stunts team who helped me train and get ready for this incredibly demanding role. I couldn’t have done it without you guys. Also, we had the best time,” she wrote on Instagram, along with multiple videos. In one, she avoids getting sliced by a sword; in another, she gets up from the ground while wielding a gun and throws her training partner over her shoulder. de Armas’ John Wick spinoff movie, Ballerina, can’t get here soon enough.

You can watch the videos below:

Vanity Fair also has new photos from Blonde, Andrew Dominik’s upcoming biopic starring de Armas as Marilyn Monroe. “Andrew’s ambitions were very clear from the start — to present a version of Marilyn Monroe’s life through her lens,” the actress said about the NC-17 film. “He wanted the world to experience what it actually felt like to not only be Marilyn, but also Norma Jeane. I found that to be the most daring, unapologetic, and feminist take on her story that I had ever seen.”

Blonde comes out on Netflix on September 23.

Charli XCX has proven herself adept at both crafting pop bangers and busting out more experimental material to please more indie-leaning fans. Now, Charli is once again genre-hopping on the new single “Hot Girl (Bodies Bodies Bodies),” which is a straight-up rap song.

The track is carried by a bass-heavy trap beat and Charli’s lyrics are mostly spoken (i.e. rapped), like on the hook that oozes classic hip-hop confidence: “I’m a hot girl, pop girl, rich girl / I’m a b*tch girl, fast girl, catch me if you can, girl / You a swerve, girl, who the f*ck are you, girl? / You just wanna be me.” Charli only really starts singing on the second verse halfway through the song, and even then, there’s still very much a hip-hop rhythm to what she’s saying.

The song, as its parenthetical title indicates, is Charli’s contribution to the upcoming slasher/comedy film Bodies Bodies Bodies, which stars Pete Davidson, Amandla Stenberg, Chase Sui Wonders, Maria Bakalova, Myha’la Herrold, Rachel Sennott, and Lee Pace. Some of “Hot Girl” was heard in a trailer for the movie that dropped in April.

Listen to “Hot Girl” above.

Charli XCX is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

MAGA cheerleader congresswoman Lauren Boebert doesn’t have to keep reminding everyone that she holds a GED and therefore did not graduate from high school. She somehow persists in doing so, however, when she’s confusing Samuel Adams and John Adams or botching the branches of government and the Bill of Rights. All that matters to Boebert is guns and freedom, and she acts like the latter is under fire because people choose their own pronouns.

The rootin’ tootin’ lawmaker, who’s also recently been doubling down on her insistence that the Christian Church should run the U.S. government, took some time out of her busy campaign schedule to fire a shot at Ukrainian President Zelensky for appearing in Vogue. Granted, such a photoshoot is an easy (and somewhat valid) target, but Boebert had already dug a miles-long hole for herself with an unprovoked attack on those who voice their preferred pronouns.

“When you use pronouns to introduce yourself,” Boebert tweeted. “I’m assuming everything you have to say after is as idiotic as your introduction.”

Oddly enough, Boebert once her declared her own pronoun: “Patriot.”

Obviously, that’s a noun, not a pronoun, and people were quick to remind Boebert that she’s punching above her intellectual weight, so to speak.

Also, Ted Cruz recently named his own pronouns, so there. “Kiss” “my” and “ass” must have made him very proud, but yup, he was self-owning, too.

This final tweet, however, encapsulates the odd hysteria that’s frequently expressed by the far right, including Boebert. If pronouns could be compared to guns, according to one Twitter user, “then they’ll start asking for your nouns, adjectives, adverbs, this absurdity will only further dampen and derange how people treat each other and utterly destroy basic human communication.”

Put a chef’s kiss on that one!

During a bizarre TV appearance, Mike Lindell randomly declared that he never paid attention to politics because he spent the past 30 years on crack. The MyPillow CEO blurted out the strange sentence during an appearance on the Right Side Broadcasting Network while at a recent Donald Trump rally (of course) in Arizona. In fairness, Lindell has never been shy about going from former drug addict to millionaire pillow magnate with money to blow on fruitless election fraud investigations, but it was kind of a weird thing to say out of the blue. Via The Independent:

The reporter from the conservative channel said “In politics over the last 10, 20, 30 years, if you look back no one cared, no one was paying attention.”

“I certainly didn’t. I was on crack”, Mr Lindell responded, laughing.

While this should be yet another example of a random right-winger saying random things on a random right-wing network, Lindell’s stock has been rising in Trump world thanks to his unwavering dedication to pushing the “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was stolen. Lindell has been a loyal soldier on that front, and he has the multi-billion dollar lawsuits and crumbling business to prove it.

According to Axios, Lindell has reportedly replaced Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner in Trump’s inner circle as he prepares for a second presidential run. In a nightmare scenario where Trump actually wins another term in the White House, that would put Lindell and his wacky schemes at the highest peak of political power.

(Via The Independent)

Earlier this month, Frank Ocean‘s first proper album Channel Orange turned 10, which naturally prompted writers to sing the praises of the highly acclaimed 2010s landmark. Except the critical love was curiously qualified in the same, specific way. For instance, Rolling Stone noted that Ocean’s second LP, 2016’s Blonde, has “arguably outshined Channel Orange in scope and impact.” Similarly, Stereogum also suggested that Blonde has “arguably eclipsed [Channel Orange] in terms of influence and prestige.”

For those keeping score, Channel Orange “arguably” is now down to Blonde in scope, impact, influence, and prestige. That’s four — count ’em four! — indicators of “greatness,” all leaning in the opposite direction away from Channel Orange. Actually, as far as critical consensus goes, “arguably” almost seems unnecessary at this point. Initially released to enthusiastic but somewhat reticent reviews — many critics, including yours truly, found it to be somewhere between a masterpiece and an incomplete mess — Blonde has indeed over time overshadowed (or “outshined” or “eclipsed”) its predecessor.

Consider that Pitchfork rated Blonde a 9.0 upon release – a stellar but slightly worse score than Channel Orange‘s 9.5 — only to rank it as the best album of the 2010s three years later. (Channel Orange came in at No. 10, a stellar but of course slightly worse placement.) Over at Rolling Stone, Blonde came out over Channel Orange on its Best Albums Of The Decade list, popping up at No. 12 vs. Channel Orange‘s (far too low) No. 37 ranking. But on the magazine’s 500 Greatest Albums Of All Time list, compiled just one year later, Blonde rose all the way to No. 79 — only three albums from the 2010s (Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly, and Beyoncé’s Lemonade) did better, so perhaps Blonde is now considered that decade’s fourth best record. (Channel Orange meanwhile lagged behind at No. 148, ahead of John Prine’s self-titled debut and just below Jeff Buckley’s Grace.)

Two things appear to be true in terms of how Channel Orange is now perceived — first, it’s indisputably a classic album of its era and, second, it seems to be regarded as a bit worse than Blonde. But is this really about these Frank Ocean albums, or does it actually say more about the people who write about music for a living? I have a theory that there are actually two 2010s — early 2010s and late 2010s — and these adjacent micro-generations are defined musically in part by Channel Orange and Blonde.

I have a clear memory of when Channel Orange was released in the summer of 2012. Like almost anyone who cared about popular music at the time, I was primed for this record. I had enjoyed and reviewed 2011’s Nostalgia, Ultra, a mixtape (not technically an album) that showed Ocean to be a singer-songwriter with tremendous potential he was just coming to realize. Now all signs were pointing toward a major breakthrough.

Ocean appeared the night before the release on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, and performed a startling rendition of one of the album’s most emotional tracks, “Bad Religion.” The song touched on the themes of unrequited love and personal identity that Ocean discussed in a widely read Tumblr post from one week prior, in which he revealed in heartfelt and poetic language that he had fallen in love with a man in 2009. This letter would inform how Channel Orange was subsequently heard and written about. First and foremost, it made Frank Ocean an artist that people wanted to see succeed.

Also on Fallon, it was announced that Channel Orange was actually out right now, a week earlier than expected. As this was the early 2010s, during the lull before streaming took hold, the rush release was intended to briefly circumvent piracy. And it worked: Many of us really did purchase the album download immediately after Fallon. We wanted to hear Orange as soon as possible, and it instantly became one of the first “event” albums of the social media era. In 2012, it was still novel for “everyone” to experience an album for the first time simultaneously online, and the impromptu late-night listening party undoubtedly added to Channel Orange‘s sense of importance.

Looked at more broadly, Channel Orange came out in the waning days of Barack Obama’s first term, and it pointed toward a future in which America’s first Black commander-in-chief became the first Democrat to win two presidential elections with a majority of the vote since FDR. In Ocean, many people saw a different kind of transformational figure, a forward-thinking paradigm-shifter whose sudden rise seemed to indicate real social progress for queer Americans. (Even Obama, who entered the White House officially opposed to gay marriage, had only changed his public position two months before Channel Orange was released.) This made Channel Orange in its time more than just an excellent album; it was also a feel-good story, an optimistic bellwether portending positive change on the horizon, a quintessential Obama-era cultural signifier.

Is it possible that these short-term attributes have somehow dated Channel Orange in retrospect? There are aspects of Channel Orange that feel much older than just a decade, especially when you compare it to Blonde. The circumstances of each album’s release have a striking yin-yang quality — while Channel Orange came out at a time when it appeared as though recent progressive gains would be impossible to reverse, Blonde arrived (along with the even more radical Endless) at the end of the Obama era, as the dread-inducing murk of Trump’s America loomed. This has shaped how both albums sound in 2022.

When Pitchfork placed Blonde at the top of its best of the 2010s list, the music site effectively retconned it as a record that expressed how it felt to be alive in the cursed late 2010s better than any other work of art. “The year 2016 crystallized the political disaster right under the surface.” writer Doreen St. Felix noted. “People theorized that we needed anthems to get us through the dark night. Big choruses, hooks as wide as highway signs, regular percussion that could gird us from chaos. But our mood was languorous; jingoism was the problem in the first place. We wanted the blurred, the softened, the existential.”

Channel Orange had once also seemed “blurred,” “softened” and “existential.” Upon its release, the album felt insular, strange, and willfully anti-commercial. That was part of Orange‘s progressive appeal. But in the wake of Blonde‘s much more extreme fragmentation — in which drums and most other instrumentation were eschewed to intensify the spotlight on Ocean’s pained, introspective isolation — Orange suddenly seemed relatively buoyant and accessible, if also (perhaps) less “real.” Whereas the relatively hopeful period that Channel Orange evokes seems further away each day, the alienated interior soundscapes of Blonde feel as new as the morning sunrise, not just in terms of influence — which has been immense on pop music, which is more vibey than ever — but emotional relevance. If Channel Orange hits like a happy but distant memory, Blonde feels as present as your latest breath.

I’ve spent a lot of time listening to Channel Orange and Blonde lately, and it should be noted, before anything else, that pitting them against each other is foolish. They are, again, highly complementary albums that offer distinctly different (but equally masterful) experiences. While my feelings about Blonde were initially mixed, I now hear it as an album that feels wholly unique to Ocean’s sensibility. With Channel Orange, critics were quick to put Ocean in a continuum of icons that included shapeshifters like Sly Stone, Stevie Wonder, and Prince, all of whom managed to make wildly successful pop on their own intensely eccentric terms. But with Blonde, Ocean made the case for starting his own continuum, in which future musicians would follow a path charted by him and him alone in the 2010s and beyond.

This is why Blonde, I’m sure, now gets the edge over Channel Orange in the minds of music writers. It feels more important. But while I acknowledge the musical ingenuity and power of that record, my recent spins tell me my heart still resides with Channel Orange. I just think the songs are better, while also registering more fully as songs as opposed to vibe-y setpieces. (You can’t convince me Frank has yet topped “Pyramids,” unless you want to make a case for “Thinkin’ Bout You” or “Forrest Gump.”) As an album, it is more dynamic and well rounded — it has the stripped-down gut-punches (“Bad Religion,” “Pink Matter”) that point toward Blonde, but it also has the catchy bangers (“Super Rich Kids,” “Lost”) that Frank mostly left behind on his second album.

Above all, Blonde would not exist without Channel Orange. First, Frank Ocean assembled his original masterpiece. Then he disassembled it in order to create a pared-down second masterpiece. Together, they represent a singular journey through an uncertain and tumultuous era.

A Detroit rap duo is accusing Megan Thee Stallion of copyright infringement, claiming that a song from her 2020 debut Good News copies major elements of their own 2012, including its chorus, tempo, and tune. According to Complex, which acquired the court documents after rumors sprang up about the lawsuit on gossip blogs earlier this week, the lawsuit was filed by Duawn Payne and Harrell James, who go by Go Hard Major and H-Matic, and compares Megan’s track “Go Crazy” with their own song “Go Crazy.”

The lawsuit also names Big Sean, a featured artist on “Go Crazy,” as well as 1501 Certified Entertainment, 300 Entertainment, and Universal Music Publishing. Oddly enough, though, Complex notes that 2 Chainz, who also features on the song, is not named. Here’s the original “Go Crazy,” which you can compare to Megan Thee Stallion’s “Go Crazy” below:

Go Hard Major and H-Matic say they performed their song at multiple nightclubs in Detroit, Big Sean’s hometown, that he would have frequented. They also claim they’ve sold “thousands” of physical copies of the track on CD, creating plenty of opportunities for Sean to access the track. They’re seeking unspecified damages for copyright infringement and say they’ve sent cease and desist letters to both Megan and Sean.

Megan Thee Stallion is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Shawn Mendes‘ Wonder tour has unfortunately come to an early close. Following an announcement earlier this month in which he shared that he would be postponing several tour dates over the course of the weeks to follow, Mendes has taken to social media to announce that the remainder of the tour is cancelled.

“As you guys know, I had to postpone the past few weeks of shows, since I wasn’t totally prepared for the toll that being back on the road would take me,” Mendes said in Twitter and Instagram posts. “I started this tour excited to finally get back to playing live after a long break due to the pandemic, but the reality is, I was not at all ready for how difficult touring would be after this time away. After speaking more with my team and working with an incredible group of mental health professionals, it has become more clear that I need to take the time I’ve never taken personally, to ground myself and come back stronger.”

Shawn assured fans that he will tour in the future when he feels he is in a better place. He also noted that he will continue to make new music.

This fall, Mendes is set to appear in an upcoming live-action adaption of Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile, in which he plays the titular character.

Earlier this month, Kodak Black once again found himself in legal trouble when he was arrested on drug charges in Florida. Police officers pulled him over for a possible illegal window tint, and when they approached his car, they smelled a strong scent of marijuana, which led to a vehicle search. They discovered 31 oxycodone pills and $74,960 in cash. Kodak was then charged with possession of a controlled substance without a prescription and trafficking oxycodone. Days after he was released from jail after posting $75,000 in bond, Kodak took to Twitter to share his thoughts on the arrest, which he called an attempt at “character assassination.”

“This Sh*t bogus Af,” Kodak began in one tweet. “I feel like This a character assassination issue [cause there’s] no way I should be getting harassed bout my tag being expired, that’s no reason to even search my car in the first place and going to jail about having my medication in the car is insane.” In a second post, he continued, “Ima Sue these people for every dollar I gotta spend bout this sh*t !”

Kodak went further with his thoughts about the arrest in future tweets. “I’m being racially profiled and as a black man in America,” he wrote. “I deserve my freedom especially with everything I do for my community I should be getting love , respect and support from the authorities ! To move freely , not getting arrested for expired tag and dark windows.” In a final message, Kodak accepted some blame in the matter, but still labeled the situation as an attack on him.

“This a self inflicted wound that coulda been prevented !” he added. “My people posta made sure my tags stay up and my tints Just right but @ da same time I should have a pass to drive with tints due to my status AT LEAST !!! I show all this love round here just to get slapped in the face [sad face emoji].”

You can view the tweets from Kodak above.

Kodak Black is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

St. Vincent is in the middle of a fun side gig right now: From July 25 to 28, she is filling in for a vacationing Jon Batiste and joining the Stay Human house band on The Late Show. By design, Annie Clark’s temporary job is to mostly stay in the background and build/complement the show’s atmosphere, but she found her way to the forefront on last night’s episode via an impromptu moment with one of the show’s guests.

On the program yesterday was Brett Gelman, the beloved actor and comedian who has gained increased notoriety in recent years thanks to playing Murray Bauman on Stranger Things. After Stephen Colbert played a Stranger Things clip and introduced Gelman, Gelman emerged from backstage as St. Vincent and Stay Human played him on by performing Stevie Wonder’s timeless 1972 favorite “Superstition.” As Gelman shook Colbert’s hand and acknowledged the crowd, he got so into the Wonder cover that he grabbed a microphone and complemented Clark’s singing with some scatting.

Vincent has plenty of love for Wonder, as she previously cited his work as a primary influence behind her 2021 album Daddy’s Home, saying in a 2020 interview, “[The album marks] a tectonic shift. I felt I had gone as far as I could possibly go with angularity. I was interested in going back to the music I’ve listened to more than any other — Stevie Wonder records from the early ’70s, Sly And The Family Stone. I studied at the feet of those masters.”

Watch the Gelman interview segment above.