Wrestler-turned-actor-turned-naked Oscars presenter John Cena was asked to name “the greatest four rappers” ever on Shannon Sharpe’s Club Shay Shay podcast. “So, for me, Jay-Z, Eminem, Nas, and Rakim,” the Peacemaker star said without hesitation. Cena continued, “Everyone has their bias. I know that list is obviously going to incite riots. We all have our bias. We all have our favorites. That’s what makes music special. That’s what makes creativity. I was brought up in the East Coast boom bap. I love wordplay, I love poetry, that’s what I based my character on. So I think all that’s super clever.”
Cena also shared that he started rapping due to the WWE’s “stock rap music” at the time. “WWE was a rock and roll company,” he said. “They didn’t have any depth of field for hip-hop, and I listened to my own music being like, ‘I could do better than this.’” The doctor will check out from wrestling in 2025.
You can watch the podcast above (the rap talk begins at the 29-minute mark).
Most of the time, footage of brothers fighting is reserved for family home movies or TikToks, but for the Gallagher brothers, those moments were filmed for the entire world to see. Unfortunately, those fights seemed to happen often, especially as they became one of the most influential British bands of the ’90s.
Oasis will return for a short U.K. tour in 2025. This is the plan at least, but Oasis fans know that this is not a guarantee. Noel and Liam have had many public spats over the years that have resulted in missed and cancelled shows before their eventual breakup. But can they keep it together long enough for the reunion to actually happen? Only time will tell, but hopefully there are no cricket bats in the general vicinity.
Ahead of the reunion, the 2016 documentary Oasis: Supersonic can currently be streamed on Max or Hulu. The doc uses concert footage and candid interviews for a first-hand look at the iconic band and the sibling rivalry that seemingly tore it apart… that is until this week when the brothers seemingly buried the hatchet (or cricket bat).
We know that anything could happen between now and then, but maybe we can bask in the music for a little bit longer, at least until the next round of bickering begins. Maybe someone should change Liam’s Twitter password, just to be safe.
Check out the trailer for Oasis: Supersonic below.
Kanye West is taking a massive loss on the sale of his Malibu home, according to Consequence and a press release from the buyer, Belwood Investments. The real estate equity buyer announced it is buying the house — which Kanye went to great lengths to turn into his own person “bat cave” — for around $21 million. That’s $32 million less than his initial asking price — which is another 4 million less than what he bought it for in 2021 (close to $60 million).
After gutting the property — which caused him to incur yet another lawsuit from the building’s former property manager over “unsafe work conditions” — Kanye let the building languish, which contributed to its drastically reduced sale price. Among the renovations he wanted to be made to the property were disconnecting it from city water and power and replacing the stairs with slides, all in an effort to turn it into “a bomb shelter from the 1910s.” According to the lawsuit from his former property manager, “He wants to have no doors, no windows, no fixtures, just concrete… [a place for Kanye to] hide from the Clintons in and the Kardashians in.”
After trying to sell the home in its current state for $53 million earlier this year, he dropped the price to $39 million, apparently unaware that the half-completed work made it worth way less than that.
Has it been too long since you’ve been charmed by Glen Powell? This might help.
On Monday, The Wrap shared a quote from an unnamed Hollywood producer who called the Anyone But You star “an up-and-coming movie star in the sense that audiences now go to movies to see him. Unlike an actor like Ryan Gosling whose appeal is mostly limited to female audiences, Glen appeals to both females and males.” First off, that’s a severe misunderstanding of the everyone-loves-him appeal of Gosling — he’s literally in a movie called The Nice Guys! But it’s Powell who had the biggest issue with the claim.
“Gosling is a legend. I’m just Glen,” Powell wrote on X, a reference to Gosling’s musical number in Barbie. It was nice of him to say that, but now I’m annoyed that Powell didn’t get to sing in Twisters. What rhymes with “suck zone”?
Powell’s upcoming projects include a remake of The Running Man and A24’s Huntington alongside Margaret Qualley, Ed Harris, Jessica Henwick, Topher Grace, Zach Woods, and Bill Camp. As for Gosling, he’ll star in Project Hail Mary as the sole survivor astronaut on a mission to save humanity. Has Powell saved humanity yet? I didn’t think so (only the rom-com).
The National Park Service says, “Never drink water from a natural source that you haven’t purified, even if the water looks clean. Water in a stream, river or lake may look clean, but it can still be filled with bacteria, viruses, and parasites that can result in waterborne diseases. […] It is essential that you purify natural water.”
On August 23, he performed at the Alaska State Fairgrounds in Palmer, Alaska. While there, he decided to take in the local sights, and a video of him drinking glacier water went viral, with commenters expressing concern about Luda’s health. (A 2022 study showed that “hundreds of thousands of tons of bacteria are being released by melting glaciers.”)
So, in a follow-up video shared today (August 27), Usher decided to assure everybody that he’s doing just fine post-gulp. He says in the clip, “Yo, for everybody asking me how that glacier water really tasted… When I tell y’all I’m a water snob: It was the best-tasting water I’ve ever had in my life, and as I drank it, I felt like every cell in my human body was being hydrated and rejuvenated at the same damn time.”
After a brief acting hiatus, Demi Moore is returning to the screen in full force. She’ll star in Taylor Sheridan’s upcoming dramaLandman but before that, she has a buzzy role in Cannes breakout The Substance, which heads to theaters next month. It’s almost as if we’ll be seeing…..Moore of her. Sorry.
The Substance is the upcoming body horror film from French director Coralie Fargeat, who highlights the true evil entity of the universe: aging. Moore stars as an aerobics instructor who loses her job after turning 50, only to be presented with a unique drug that creates a younger version of herself, played by Margaret Qualley. The movie was praised after premiering at Cannes earlier this year, and the leading duo have been praised for their on-screen counterparts.
While filming, Moore and Qualley had no choice but to get very close (they were playing the same person, after all) but it helped that they actually like each other. In a new Interview Magazine spread, Moore explained their on-set dynamic to actress Michelle Yeoh. “There was truly a part, when Margaret [Qualley] and I were on this cold tile floor having to be draped on one another—and it was a very serious scene—that we both just burst out laughing, saying, ‘Thank god we like each other, because otherwise this would be really awkward,’” she said.
Moore added that she and Qualley had a unique approach to the unconventional story. “I felt like I had such a partner in this with Margaret, that we both were exploring this from two different aspects,” she explained.
Director Coralie Fargeat penned the story, which Moore related to in her own way. “Sometimes it felt like I represented Coralie in her present time, and Margaret was representing this perfected idea that was, in Coralie’s experience, held against her. And I don’t even think it’s limited to women,” she added. But who would Dennis Quaid turn into if he took the very Substance that he was pushing? Probably his Nepo Baby son, Jack Quaid.
When Kevin Owens and Cody Rhodes lock up with the Undisputed WWE Championship on the line on Saturday at Bash in Berlin, their careers will intersect in a way many didn’t imagine just eight years ago.
Firmly established as a top star in NXT in 2015, Owens wasted little time making his presence felt in his transition to the main roster. In less than a full calendar year, Owens moved from holding the NXT Championship to a rivalry with John Cena, and eventually claimed the Intercontinental Championship. At the same time, Rhodes was unhappy, felt like he deserved more, and was considering leaving WWE amid his run as Stardust. As Rhodes weighed that decision, he was met with support from his longtime friend, Owens.
“At the very least, he felt like he needed a reset and to go do something different so that he would be viewed different by the people that were running WWE at the time, and I encouraged him to do that,” Owens tells Uproxx Sports.
Funny enough, Cody was not the first member of the Rhodes family with whom Owens grew close. Like many who came through the NXT pipeline, Owens can’t help but speak highly of Dusty Rhodes, and quickly hit it off with Cody as a result. It got to the point that, when Cody opted to leave WWE, Owens admits he struggled, as “I was really losing somebody I considered like a brother.”
When Rhodes left, Owens helped him as much as he could, putting him in touch with friends that could help since he’d never been on the independent scene. As Rhodes toured the indies and began to rebuild his image across Ring of Honor and various promotions, Owens remembers seeing the tide turn.
“I remember texting him a lot after those matches, very often telling him like, ‘Hey, this is what you were missing,’” he recalls. “When he left, he just got this whole change of attitude, a whole change of how he carried himself and he just threw caution to the wind, I guess he just went all in and it ended up working out for him. I always knew he had that in him and so did he, which is why he left.”
While Rhodes was making his name elsewhere, Owens continued his rapid rise up the WWE roster. Just a year into his main roster tenure, Owens captured the WWE Universal Championship for the first time in career, holding the belt for seven months before dropping it to Goldberg.
“It wasn’t the most memorable run,” Owens reflects. “At the time, I didn’t really appreciate it for what it was. So I’d love to be able to get another run at it, another shot at it, and have a good championship run. Just be able to look back at a run and be able to say I was a good champion.”
In the past few years, that’s been a change in mindset for Owens. He says he’s done a lot of work trying to live in the moment, enjoying and appreciating what he gets to experience in his career — earlier during his time with the promotion, Owens admits he never took the time to take a step back and realize how fortunate he was to be in that position, which has led to a conscious effort to “keep things in perspective.”
For Owens, it’s no small feat to have retained a top spot in WWE over the last decade.
“I had no expectations (coming into WWE) and I was told many times by a lot of people when I started not have expectations,” he says. “In fact, I was told at the time you’re probably only going to be in NXT. I had no expectations at all. I don’t think anybody did. I remember, I just passed 10 years last week that they re-announced my signing. And I was reminded on social media by a lot of people, I remember people saying I probably won’t last six months because who I was, how I looked, all kinds of stuff. So I think to say that my career in the WWE over the last 10 years exceeded expectations is an understatement.”
Owens has carved a unique place in the hearts of wrestling fans. He’s a character who at his core is consistent. He consistently has good matches, is endlessly entertaining, and is constantly pushing the boundaries of what fans have grown to know and expect from professional wrestling.
“It seems like most of the audience, from what I can tell, enjoys what I do. And when I go back and watch what I do, mostly, I enjoy it — I take a lot of pride in that,” Owens says. I just want people to enjoy what I do. I want to contribute positively to the television program I’m on and to the shows I’m on. Once I feel that’s not the case anymore, I’ll be out of here. But until then, I pride myself on putting up good stuff. Pretty much everybody at WWE does, which is why I think WWE is so, I don’t want to say hot, but it is. It’s hot. It’s on fire right now. I think that’s just because everybody works extremely hard, everybody prides themselves on their work, and the audience is enjoying what we’re doing.”
Just how long the 40-year-old Owens has left wrestling is up in the air. While his contract is set to expire with WWE in early 2025, he hasn’t signed an extension.
“I don’t have a decade left here,” Owens adds. “Another 5, 6 years or something if the opportunities are there and the circumstances are right.”
He’d love another title run, in large part because it’d “probably make my daughter really happy,” but admits that won’t make or break things.
“Mainly, though, I really just want everything I do to be memorable and enjoyable for people watching, and I really want to help the future of the industry,” Owens says. “Whether, you could say work with the younger talent or whatever, but it’s not even necessarily younger talent, there’s talent of all ages that are coming up, that are developing. And I want to have a blast doing it.”
Owens specifically mentions that a lot of the women on WWE shows have continued to seek advice because they “really want to do everything that can to be as good as they can.” He also says he’s gone to the Performance Center and rolled around in the ring with anyone who wants to.
While NXT is in a very different place than it was when Owens held its top championship for 143 days in 2015, he still believes it’s the best place for developing talent. He’s consistently impressed whenever he gets the chance to tune in, and specifically credits the coaches along with Matt Bloom and Shawn Michaels for the work they’re doing.
“As the training goes, you can’t ask for a better place to learn, they’re doing an amazing job,” Owens says. “If you watch NXT on its own, without even considering Raw and SmackDown at all, you just watch NXT for what it is, they have their own stars in the NXT world, they’re huge stars. And the crowd goes crazy for them and cares about them. They’re doing a great job of making themselves into their own product. And making it very important for that fan base, and that’s pretty sweet.”
There’s a chance he is not the final member of the Owens family to spend some time down in NXT — his son stands 6’8 at 16 years old, which is the same age Owens was when he had his first match. While his son is interested in the opportunity, Owens admits that it’s probably too early to make any decisions on pursuing a wrestling career. We can say with some certainty, though, that the elder Owens is the overwhelming favorite to be the next member of his family to hold the Undisputed WWE Championship.
Where did all the new rap superstars go? It’s beginning to appear that the genre’s mainstream struggles are deeper than taking nine months last year to produce its first No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. While that wasn’t a problem this year, it’s somewhat telling that the most dominant rapper chart-wise is Kendrick Lamar, a 15+ year veteran, who would be releasing his sixth album this year. So, what happened? Did all the kids finally figure out what Cypress Hill was talking about 20 years ago (pretty much the same thing Chappell Roan said this year) and decide it didn’t sound all that attractive to be a rap superstar? Big house, five cars, sure, but looking over your shoulder constantly? Meh.
It isn’t like there is a dearth of new artists. 310babii, BossMan Dlow, Cash Cobain, Ice Spice, GloRilla, Hunxho, Lola Brooke, Luh Tyler, Rob49, Skilla Baby… The list goes on and on. But while these names and others have been anointed by <em>XXL Freshman columns and viral hits on TikTok, we’ve yet to see their early buzz translate into the kind of instant name recognition that used to follow rappers who could parlay ravenous underground fanbases into massive groundswells of support — and the sort of mainstream coverage that turned folks like Nicki Minaj, Kanye West, or Jay-Z into household names.
Like most problems these days, the answer is likely a bit too complex and nuanced to be distilled to one big issue with a single solution. However, if we’re doing a pie chart of the reasons it seems no new rappers have reached maximum mainstream saturation the way, say, Cardi B did in 2018, or Drake did in 2013, or hell, Snoop Dogg did during this year’s Olympics, the biggest slice is going to belong to “the labels.” This isn’t a new problem; in fact, it’s a familiar one in the recording industry, but what is new is the overall climate in which the industry exists.
So, quick history lesson: Long before rap music was the utter juggernaut that it has been for the past 20 years, major labels considered it somewhat of a fad. Therefore, it wasn’t really “worth” pouring a lot of marketing money into. I feel like I bring up Dan Charnas‘ book The Big Payback in a feature once a quarter, but it really is a treasure trove of insights into the early rise of rap music and hip-hop culture through marketing, advertising, and corporate investment. Simply put, many of your favorite canon classics, like Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), Low End Theory, 2Pacalypse Now, and more, needed someone to fight for them — to secure the budgets not just to record them, but to properly advertise them so they could actually sell.
This means long rollouts — which are essentially awareness campaigns — with press releases, listening events, traditional advertising, press tours, and more. All of which requires money — and no guarantees of a return on that investment. This is why you see so many truncated rollouts from rap artists these days. Since labels can’t guarantee profits, they instead cut their expenses. Rap is usually the first on the chopping block, because that early impression of rap as limited in its audience reach and staying power has proved to be annoyingly pernicious, even in light of the genre’s tremendous successes over the intervening decades. Worse, a lot of those early advocates have since moved on; labels have been restructured as a response to changing times, and in many cases, the teams left over to work rap releases are stripped-down, operating on shoestring budgets with skeleton crews.
It doesn’t help that modern technology, particularly streaming and social media, can “break” stars so quickly — and wash them away just as fast. It’s harder than ever to tell what will connect with rap’s still mostly young audience, or when that audience will lose interest in a new star and move on. Look at how quickly Ice Spice rose to the heights of recognition; a year later, fans seemed bored with her by the time she released her debut album. This process has repeated over and over in the past decade and only seems to be accelerating. A hit on TikTok is no guarantee of a sustained career, and in some cases, those hits have come along before the artist in question is even ready for the limelight, forcing them to learn how to perform and market themselves on the fly.
Modern technology has also contributed to the end of monoculture, the concept that we’re all watching and reading and listening to the same things, more or less at the same time. In the cable TV era, shows like Total Request Live and 106 & Park could show us what “the whole country” was listening to. There were only a handful of main options for music discovery, so music fans ended up listening largely to the same stuff. Even in terms of what you would consider “underground,” there were only a few avenues to become a fan of an El-P or a Mos Def, and so, those names were able to stick in a way that modern artists never get a crack at.
Today, there are so many hyperpersonalized playlists and social feeds, and advertising is so targeted, that breaking out of one person’s bubble into another’s is nearly impossible. Let’s say the algorithm determines that you’re Lil Uzi Vert fan. It’ll show you Playboi Carti and Trippie Redd, maybe Lil Yachty, perhaps some Future. But unless an artist very specifically falls under that sound or aesthetic, you might never see anything else. So Anderson .Paak is probably out of the question, as would be a Cordae, Chance The Rapper, Kota The Friend, or Leikeli47. Let’s say you love GloRilla and Flo Milli; would the algorithm ever suggest anything outside that particular wheelhouse? Probably not.
So, yeah, it’s hard to be a rap superstar in the vein of a Ludacris or a 50 Cent or a Missy Elliott these days. But on the bright side, it’s easier to find an audience — even one that’s big enough and enthusiastic enough to support a sustainable, long-running career. It may not come with the big house and five cars, but it’s a living.
Halsey released the single “Lucky” in July, and at the time, the title of the album the song would appear on was not known. Now, it is: Today (August 27), Halsey announced The Great Impersonator.
There’s no release date, cover art, or tracklist yet, but the project is described as “a confessional concept album.” Halsey shared a teaser video today, and in it, she says in a voiceover:
“I really thought this album would be the last one I ever made. When you get sick like that, you start thinking about ways it could have all been different. What if this isn’t how it all went down? 18-year-old Ashley becomes Halsey in 2014. What if I debuted in the early 2000s? The ’90s? The ’80s? The ’70s? Am I still Halsey every time, in every timeline? Do I still get sick? Do I become a mom? Am I happy? Lonely? Have I done enough? Have I told the truth? I spent half my life being someone else. I never stopped to ask myself: If it all ended right now, is this the person you’d be proud to leave behind? Is it even you?”
It appears the album will continue Halsey’s trend of being vulnerable. She recently discussed a time she had a miscarriage on stage, saying, “I started miscarrying before the show. I knew and I was in a really tough position, because it was really early on in my career, and there was a lot attached to the show. […] What ended up happening was I ended up just putting on an adult diaper. […] I went and I did the show, I left stage, I threw up in the parking lot, I went to a hotel, and I was sick all night. I remember sitting in the bathtub, because I just didn’t know what to do with all the blood — forgive me for being so graphic — and then waking up at 5 or 6 in the morning to get on another airplane to go to Canada.”
After exploding into stardom with his viral hit “Million Dollar Baby,” emerging singer Tommy Richman has announced his debut album, Coyote, which is due for release on September 27 via Brent Faiyaz’s ISO Supremacy and Pulse Records. The DMV native got his first exposure to the limelight on Faiyaz’s Larger Than Life standout “Upset,” and has since become a star in his own right, with “Million Dollar Baby” even making its way into former President Barack Obama’s celebrated summer playlist alongside other breakouts from the likes of Charli XCX, Shaboozey, and Tems.
Rather than resting on his laurels, Richman followed up the success of “Million Dollar Baby” with “Devil Is A Lie,” a second single that will presumably appear on Coyote. While it didn’t reach the same heights as Richman’s breakout (which peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100), it turned out to be a success in its own right, peaking at No. 32 on the Hot 100. Prior to the release of Coyote, Richman plans to give fans a sneak peek at his future musical direction with the Before The Desert mini-tour, which will hit four cities — Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and his native Washington, DC — in early September.
Coyote is due 9/27 via ISO/Pulse. You can find more information here.
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