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Last month, Doja Cat canceled her upcoming tour with The Weeknd, warning her fans that she had to have tonsil surgery after they’d become infected and would require several months of rest to recover. The “Vegas” rapper apparently has undergone the required surgery, sharing a series of photos from a hospital bed on Twitter on Thursday. She also demonstrated the effect that the surgery has had on her vocal cords, attempting to rap Nicki Minaj’s fan-favorite verse from Trey Songz’s “Bottoms Up.” Unfortunately… well, you can see for yourself below.

So it looks like she’ll be out of commission for a while — which could turn out to be a blessing in disguise. After all, for much of the past year, she’s apparently been feeling the effects of burnout after skyrocketing to fame pretty quickly on the strength of her breakout hit “Say So” — which, ironically, features Nicki Minaj on the remix. The atypical pop star tweeted in October, “I’m just tired and i don’t want to do anything… I’m not happy. I’m done saying yes to motherf*ckers cuz I can’t even have a week to just chill. I’m never not working.” She also posted about feeling pressured by the demands of her flourishing career. “I’m doing all this shit that I don’t f*ckin’ wanna do,” she said in an Instagram Live stream. “I don’t want to do that. I want to be home. I wanna make music. I wanna play f*ckin’ video games.”

Doja’s time off could be a chance for her to check off some things on that to-do list while rediscovering her passion for rapping, which she says she wants to do more of on her next album. And for fans who’ll miss seeing her on tour, there’s at least some consolation; she’s always been highly active on social media, so her inevitable boredom will likely lead to some hilarious and interesting content.

James Harden is eligible to get a whole lot of money from the Philadelphia 76ers this offseason. Harden is expected to pick up his player option for the 2022-23 campaign that will see him make a little more than $47 million, but beyond that, it’s unclear exactly what the future holds for the former league MVP whose debut season in Philly raised questions about his ability to return to that level.

One person close to the situation anticipates that Harden is going to get paid like someone who can, indeed, do what needs to be done for the Sixers to become a championship contender. TMZ caught up with Doc Rivers earlier this week, with Rivers saying he anticipates Harden will sign a “huge deal” to remain with the franchise.

“I’m excited, very,” Rivers said. “I love him.”

It was reported earlier this week by Jake Fischer of Bleacher Report that the expectation is increasingly becoming that Harden will opt for a shorter-term extension with the team. Should he get a 4-year supermax extension after picking up his option, Harden can earn more than $220 million over the life of that deal and become the first player in NBA history to make more than $60 million in a season.

Detroit rapper Obie Trice — a former artist on Eminem’s Shady Records — was arrested on Thursday on a charge of using a telephone to harass or threaten someone, according to The Detroit News. He was booked into Oakland County Jail and is being held on a $10,000 bond for the misdemeanor charge, punishable by a $1,000 fine, six months in jail, or both.

Obie Trice — real name, no gimmicks — was best known for his debut album Cheers, along with appearances on albums by D12, Eminem, and on the 8 Mile soundtrack. The lead single from Cheers, “Got Some Teeth,” peaked at No. 54 on the Billboard Hot 100. Trice left Shady Records in 2008 over concerns that his music wasn’t being promoted as much as other signees’ (a concern that future Shady artists would also share over a decade later), and he continued to release mixtapes and albums independently.

In December 2019, Trice was arrested for shooting his girlfriend’s son during an argument when the 18-year-old jumped between Trice and his mother. Obie was charged with a misdemeanor and spent 90 days in Oakland County Jail.

Last year, Eminem explained what it takes to get signed to Shady Records, saying, “Obviously we want anyone who signs with Shady to succeed. But first and foremost we’ve always focused on the raw talent and ability of the artist as an MC. We’ve always been pretty clear on that being the main thing we look for: high level fundamental skills and mechanics are definitely the priority.”

It might have seemed odd when the guy who burst onto the scene with the foul-mouthed, Tarantino-esque Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels started making franchise movies — even one for Disney. But Guy Ritchie has managed to take a break from those biggies by making some smaller “for me” movies: The Gentlemen, Wrath of Man, and the forthcoming spy comedy Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre. But now he’s going back to the House of Mouse for another of their live-action remakes.

Ritchie’s name was previously on 2019’s Aladdin, with Will Smith as the wise-cracking blue genie. Now, as per Deadline, it will also be on their new take on Hercules, which will put a live-action spit-shine on the corporation’s 1997 take on the Greek legend. That film featured Tate Donovan as the voice of a more doubting, even scrawnier take on the muscle-bound taskmaster, whose main foe was a Hades voiced by no less than James Woods.

This might be a better fit for Ritchie than Aladdin, with plenty of chances for feats of strength and derring-do, as well as the occasional insults, maybe even funny names. (Ritchie previously threw characters named “Goosefat” and “Mischief John” into the world of King Arthur.)

The big screen has been bereft of Hercules for quite some time, the last major one being a more postmodern take starring Dwayne Johnson. In fact, there aren’t too many Hercules movies at all, besides the Italian ones with Steve Reeves and the truly bizarre one where Lou Ferrigno fights a guy in a bear suit. Then again, there was that long-running TV series featuring future Republican punching bag Kevin Sorbo, and its Ryan Gosling-starring spinoff. So maybe the big guy is due.

(Via Deadline)

Over the past two years, student debt has become a hot-button issue, in part because of certain campaign promises made by Joe Biden during his successful bid for the Presidency. While conservative commentators have railed against debt forgiveness — mostly to oppose Democrats, despite the policy’s overwhelming popularity among voters — others have taken matters into their own hands. In 2019, Vista Equity founder and billionaire Robert F. Smith paid off the tuition of the entire Morehouse University graduating class. Now, Pharrell Williams, in an attempt to lead by example, has done the same for five student leaders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

During a Friday panel on the student debt crisis for Black scholars at the St. Regis Hotel in Washington, DC, Pharrell announced he was paying off all student debt for students of Southern University, Howard, and Florida A&M, as well as alumni of North Carolina AT, and Norfolk State. The panel’s organizer, NAACP National Director of Youth and College Wisdom Cole, said, “Pharrell forever changed their lives. This was a powerful moment. Now just imagine if President Biden made this a reality for all student debt holders in America.”

Meanwhile, NCAAP President and CEO Derrick Johnson posted photos of the youth leaders as they learned of their debt cancelation on Twitter, imploring President Biden, “It’s your turn now to do the same for all Americans plagued by student debt.” Hours later, Pharrell kicked off his Something In The Water Festival, where he’s set to perform with Clipse, Justin Timberlake, SZA, and more.

The argument can be made that the best wide receiver prospect in the 2022 NFL Draft was the second player off the board at his position. After an ultra-successful collegiate career as a member of the Ohio State Buckeyes, Garrett Wilson was the 10th overall selection by the New York Jets, a potential No. 1 receiver for second-year signal caller Zach Wilson.

There’s a whole lot of hype around what he can achieve in the league, and ahead of his rookie campaign, Wilson appeared on The Pivot podcast. It featured one spectacular moment where Wilson was informed what it means to pay for a rookie dinner, which left him stunned.

“I gotta take all the receivers to a dinner,” Wilson said around the 44:55 mark. “That’s gonna be cool, I’m excited for that.”

It was at this point that Ryan Clark, Channing Crowder, and Fred Taylor told him this is very much not cool, with Taylor informing him that the bill could get run up to $75,000. Wilson could not believe this.

“Nah, they ain’t doing me for $75k,” Wilson said before getting resoundingly told that he’s wrong.

“All I’m gonna say is, we didn’t do a whole lot of rookie dinners, all the rookies, when I was in Jacksonville,” Taylor said. “We did position by position. But when I was in New England, the entire team went out on the rookies — if it’s 10, 12 rookies, whatever it might be in that class. All I know is, that bill comes back $50-60,000, because Tom [Brady] would come in there and buy a $3, $4, $5,000 bottle of wine, take one sip, put it, and say ‘goodnight.’ So, it’s gonna happen.”

Wilson laughed at this story, but deep down, we can tell that he’s still getting ready to spend a lot more money on a meal than he anticipated.

They might be the oddball-iest couple in the public sphere: Kellyanne and George Conway. She spent nearly four years as Donald Trump’s senior counselor (and was part of his empire for well before that). He’s a longtime Republican who became famous for trashing his wife’s boss and even trying to end his re-election chances. For years, Kellyanne kept shtum about how they made that work, but lately she’s been speaking ill of her spouse of over 20 years.

As caught by Raw Story, Kellyanne went on CNN, where host Michael Smerconish dared ask about the state of her marriage, especially considering her husband had accused Trump of “witness tampering” on MSNBC mere hours before. He got more than he perhaps expected.

“You know, in 2016, known as the year of the tweet, George Conway sent zero tweets,” Kellyanne said. “Now he’s sent over 100,000. He can change his mind about Donald Trump, this is a free country, George has no allegiance to a political party or presidential candidate but his vows to me I feel were broken because we were all in.”

Kellyanne then launched into an epic rant, which Smerconish tried — and often failed — to interupt. She said it was George that told her to take the campaign management job that led to her post in the White House, but that he eventually turned on Trump, tweeting about him relentlessly and even co-founding the Lincoln Project, comprised of anti-Trump renegade Republicans. She she confronted him about his “steady diet of ‘Trump, Trump, Trump,” but to no avail. Instead, he “became some kind of resistance folk hero but not at a small cost.”

Kellyanne was even surprised at how far George went. “I feel that I should have known ahead of time if this thing called the Lincoln Project was going to exist there were going to be ads, dumping an op-ed the next day, his tweets are going to be about my boss,” she said. She continued:

“Again, just so your viewers who are saying ‘why did you have her on? I turned off the TV,’ although they didn’t or are reading online, they should know that George — I feel like I was owed an explanation. And this is not the situation, I gave up millions of dollars to go be a public servant in the White House. George wanted to have a big job in the Trump administration, we moved our family to Washington as a family. He changed his mind about Donald Trump somewhere along the way. Famously, Donald Trump never changes. I didn’t change my mind.”

Kellyanne has been promoting her new memoir, which has led to revelations about how much Trump hated all the mean things her husband was saying about him. Nevertheless, she’s standing by her old boss.

You can watch Kellyanne’s CNN appearance in the video above.

(Via Raw Story)

Hip-hop fans have been through a lot in the last few years. There hasn’t been a single year in the past half-decade that hasn’t seen the death of one of rap’s most prominent rising stars. In 2019, Nipsey Hussle was shot and killed in front of his Marathon Clothing store in Los Angeles. Later that same year, Juice WRLD overdosed coming off a flight at Midway International Airport in Chicago. More recently, Drakeo The Ruler was stabbed to death backstage during Once Upon A Time in LA Festival, and Lil Keed died of apparent kidney failure earlier this year.

Last night, during his set at Something In The Water Festival, Compton rapper Roddy Ricch paid homage to these artists and more with a tender performance of his breakout hit “Die Young.” Images of his fallen peers and contemporaries flashed behind him as he crooned the all-too-fitting lyrics of his song’s chorus: “Tell me, why the legends always gotta die quick?”

Roddy was at least partly associated with many of the rappers to whom he paid homage Friday night; he won a Grammy with Nipsey Hussle for their song “Racks In The Middle,” while Keed was a member of YSL Records, a frequent Roddy collaborator via Gunna and Young Thug. Roddy shouted out Gunna on Instagram, calling for his release from Fulton County jail as he awaits trial on racketeering charges with the rest of the YSL crew.

Watch Roddy’s tender performance of “Die Young” above.

In the last year-and-a-half, a large number of people have been arrested for invading the Capitol building. (Others have simply forfeited a large chunk of their salary for not complying with other rules.) To that list, add a most surprising figure: Triumph the Insult Comic Dog.

On Thursday, as per The Hollywood Reporter, a number of people working for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert were detained by U.S. Capitol police while filming a skit. Among them was Robert Smigel, the writer and performer who since 1997 has been the voice and puppeteer behind Triumph, the cigar-chomping Yugoslavian Mountain Hound-Rottweiler who trades almost exclusively in insult comedy.

A CBS spokesperson told THR that Smigel and crew had been on the Capitol premises on Wednesday and Thursday, collecting interviews for Colbert’s show, presumably pertaining to the ongoing Jan. 6 committee hearings. (Triumph spent much of his career on various Conan O’Brien programs.) The team had arranged a number of meetings, but on Thursday wound up staying late — too late, after the building was closed to visitors. They were approached by officers, and — unescorted and without Capitol IDs — they were arrested and charged with unlawful entry.

It’s a serious crime, and the seven arrested, Smigel included, may face additional criminal charges.

Smigel has long made Triumph a fixture of politics, covering presidential elections going back to 2004 and ramping it up in the Trump era. He’s even insulted Ted Cruz to his face — but the Texas senator seems to be used to people, and dog puppets, pointing out his flaws.

(Via THR)

On the heels of Drake’s new surprise release album, Honestly, Nevermind, fans are suspecting the reason Joey Badass pushed back his album, 2000, is so he wouldn’t be in direct competition with Drake.

This past Thursday, before Drake had even announced the album, Joey took to Twitter to explain that 2000 wouldn’t be released this week, as originally planned.

“Man I got some terrible news,” he said. “my album won’t be coming out tonight due to sample clearance issues. Right now, it’s unclear how long I’ll have to postpone it but my hope is no more than 2 weeks. I wanted to have a new date before I told you guys but it’s out of my control.”

He continued, saying, “I’ll keep you guys updated obviously, I’m almost certain I’ll have a new date by Monday.”

Following the announcement of Honestly, Nevermind, fans theorized that this may have been a cover-up to hide the fact that he pushed it back as not to compete with Drake. Joey has since taken to Twitter to deny these rumors, saying, “Y’all thinking I pushed my album back because drake is comedy. Can’t say I ain’t happy tho hahaha.”

He later showed praise for the album, saying, “I f*x with this new drake tho.”

Had 2000 come out as originally planned, it would’ve coincided with the 10th anniversary of Joey’s breakthrough mixtape, 1999. As of now, there is no confirmed release date for 2000.