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There are always reasons not to do something. Not ready, not enough time, not knowing where to begin — the rationale to stop before you start, especially something new or daunting, can be the most convincing.

For Jacobi Sebock, a huge fan of sports growing up in the Midwest City suburb of Oklahoma City, running track and playing baseball, football and basketball in a short, still chubby body was challenging enough. On top of the regular tests a changing body brings, Sebock was born with asthma, a first-degree heart block, and without sweat glands, a symptom of a condition called hypohidrotic ectodermal dysplasia (HED). For an athlete like Sebock who couldn’t stay away from sports if he tried, the biggest impact of his condition was the inability to naturally cool his body down by sweating.

He and his parents learned to adapt. Lugging coolers filled with ice and ice water to games and practices, and managing his condition with cooling vests he’d swap out every 20-minutes during play, plus wristbands and neck coolers.

“It was really hard,” Sebock recalls over the phone, “I would get subbed out, have to switch out my cooling vest, put on a different wristband, wet down my whole body just so I could stay cool.”

HED makes any kind of sustained physical exertion not only uncomfortable, but dangerous. Overheating can be fatal. Still, the hardest thing for Sebock was having to be taken out of the game, to stop playing.

Between his sophomore and junior year of high school he shot up nine inches to 6′ 5″, he also shed 50 pounds, but some of the weight loss was tied to yet another diagnosis: Crohn’s disease. His mother, Franki Sebock, recalls thinking to herself, Can’t he catch a break?

For most of Sebock’s life coaches had been wary of playing him too much, and trainers the family approached to help turned them away. His dad, Anthony Gilliam, stepped in. The two used Sebock’s new height and frame to their advantage, as well as the added time early COVID lockdowns brought, and trained intensely. Sebock had already learned to manage his breathing and body temperature as he got older to make sure he didn’t overheat but the training helped. He wasn’t using his cooling gear and found he could “control my body temperate with breathing while I play the game.”

Whether it was the universe listening or the more likely work of Sebock continuing to push, the break his mom wanted for him finally came in his junior year. That season, Midwest City Bombers coach, Corky McMullen, started giving Sebock more minutes — time that he devoured.

“Getting that green light in my junior year, it boosted my confidence a lot,” Sebock says.

Knowing that he had to make up for lost time lit a fire under Sebock, and he’d join AAU team Oklahoma City Elite in the summer after his junior year wrapped. It was there, getting more encouragement and minutes from coach Deangelo Anderson, that he heard about another opportunity involving the Warriors’ Stephen Curry and a tournament called UNDERRATED.

“In a 5-star world, I was a 3-star player to the decision makers on all different levels,” Curry says of the impetus behind the initiative. “The UNDERRATED Championships Tournament provides a platform for high school basketball athletes who are often overlooked in the sport, to show their true potential and to be seen by key figures in the industry.”

Curry launched UNDERRATED in 2019 as a basketball camp, tournament and showcase for high school players who felt they’d been overlooked in the tough, occasionally demoralizing recruiting rankings process.

“It’s my way of encouraging any young player with big dreams to keep believing in themselves even when it seems like the odds are stacked against them,” Curry adds. “I’ve been in those shoes, but being the underdog is also what got me where I am today.”

Sebock wrote an entry essay and applied to the camp, which was making regional stops in summer 2021 through D.C., Dallas, Chicago and L.A.. Each city would see the field narrowed from 75 to just 16 — eight boys and eight girls — in two days, with the final 64 participants being flown to Oakland for the Championships in March 2022. Sebock soon heard that he’d made it into the Dallas camp.

It was a whirlwind.

“It was like, this might be a once-in-a-lifetime chance to go prove myself and show the people what I can do on the court,” Sebock recalls.

At the end of the first day he was selected in the top 30 and asked to return the following day, and at the end of the second day he found out he was going to Oakland to compete, and to meet Curry. All he had to do was wait six months.

Back with the Bombers, Sebock focused on his team’s state title run and developing his game. Asked to describe his playing style and Sebock’s voice instantly shifts from shy to assured.

“I’m a role-player,” he says firmly. “I get rebounds, I yell out on defense what they need to do, or I need to do, I help them out by moving the ball quicker. When they get up a shot I try to box out for them and get a rebound and go back up. I try to do all the little things to help my team as much as I can.”

Because of the control Sebock’s learned to best manage his condition, his game is precise by default. There are no extra steps or unplanned movements, his timing is tied to his breathing and the ball becomes an extension of his body. He calls Kyrie Irving his favorite player because of his ability to distract defenders with his handles and get his teammates involved, and Sebock is similarly watchful in his role on the wing. He has a knack for explosive dunks that feel fated, and having to pick up the movements of every other player on the floor has leant to an early-honed I.Q.

When March finally rolled around Sebock admitted he was nervous, half to be on the stage that the UNDERRATED Championship represented to him, and half because he would be going up against players whose games he didn’t know.

“After the first game I calmed down a lot,” Sebock says, noting the same thing all of the pros do, that the act of playing and putting muscle memory to work has a way of snapping nerves to focus. “Then I started playing my game that I know how to play. I started being a team player, getting everybody involved. And we just took off from there.”

Sebock’s South division team blazed through the tournament, beating out East and West within the first two days thanks in part to Sebock’s rebounding, decisive second-chance points, and springy finishes. While his team would fall in a close game to the North division team in the finals, Sebock says it was “one of the biggest times” in his life.

“Meeting my teammates, becoming friends with them over the whole weekend. We’re going to stay friends, hopefully, throughout the rest of our lives,” he says happily, recounting the weekend’s highlights, adding a little dreamily, “meeting Steph Curry the first day that we get there. He talks to us, and he even practices with us on that first day.”

For Sebock, who had a later start in the fast-paced, closely competitive world of amateur athletes working to turn pro, the UNDERRATED weekend gave him a spotlight to showcase his skills, and a chance to make meaningful connections with other athletes and their families. He’s also getting comfortable as a role model for younger athletes with health conditions that have kept them out of competition, or had them developing on a less linear timeline.

“I definitely want to go to the NBA, but most importantly I want to go through college first,” Sebock, who has already committed to Northern Oklahoma College and was just named MVP in the Big 8 Conference, says.

From there, he wants to improve with the aim of being picked up by a Division 1 school. “Work hard there, try to improve even more, get better every day, then hopefully get drafted into the NBA,” he adds, steps clear as a checklist.

His matter-of-factness has a lot in common with his game: studying the best way forward and getting there directly as he can. All there is to do now is what he’s already familiar with, to keep pushing. Excuses, or reasons not to, just make for extra steps.

Last week, Interpol announced a new album, The Other Side Of Make-Believe, and dropped the single “Toni.” Now they’re back with another advance look at the album via the new song “Something Changed.”

The video is a continuation of the band’s recent video for “Toni,” featuring the same characters and same setting as before. This time, the man and woman, now naked, are on the run from Paul Banks’ character as he pursues them in his car.

Banks previously said of working with director Van Alpert, “We bonded over shared film inspiration as well as a passion for classic music videos by the likes of Glazer, Cunningham, and Jonze. Van, in my opinion, is in the club with these legends; and it’s exciting to watch him build his own enduring body of work.”

He also noted of starting work on the new album remotely in 2020, “We usually write live, but for the first time I’m not shouting over a drum kit. Daniel [Kessler] and I have a strong enough chemistry that I could picture how my voice would complement the scratch demos he emailed over. Then I could turn the guys down on my laptop, locate these colorful melodies and generally get the message across in an understated fashion.”

Watch the “Something Changed” video above.

The Other Side Of Make-Believe is out 7/15 via Matador. Pre-order it here.

The Northman starring Alexander Skarsgard as a super ripped Viking is already racking up rave reviews ahead of its theatrical release, and director Robert Eggers couldn’t be more thrilled to deliver his first blockbuster film after an intense production. Known for his exacting detail, the action-filled Viking epic is a bit of departure from his earlier work, which included the more cerebral indie hits The Witch and The Lighthouse. In fact, Eggers recently revealed that, after The Northman, he now knows “how to make a movie” and admits he has trouble watching his breakout film, The Witch, because of how unsure he was as a director.

Via The Guardian:

“Honestly, I can’t stand watching The Witch now,” he sighs. “It’s not that it’s bad, and the performances are great, but I was not skilled enough as a film-maker to get what was in my brain on to the screen. In The Lighthouse, I was able to do that. And The Northman, I’m proud of the movie, but not everything is quite what I hoped it would be. So I would like to do something with the scope and scale that I can actually get what’s in my imagination on to the screen.”

Armed with his experience on The Northman, and his first time navigating the studio system, Eggers hopes to go back to making smaller films like The Lighthouse and The Witch, but more finely tuned. Considering both of those movies are great, and The Northman is thrilling critics, we’ll definitely be keeping an eye on Eggers’ next project.

The Northman opens in theaters on April 22.

(Via The Guardian)

In November, hyperpop troublemakers 100 Gecs released “Mememe” and announced that they’d be releasing their sophomore album 10000 Gecs this year. The track moved between pop-punk, ska, industrial, and electronic sounds, and this new song, “Doritos & Fritos,” out today, does the same.

In typical 100 Gecs fashion, “Doritos & Fritos” is glitchy and frantic, made weirder by a heavy bassline and autotuned vocals singing in a disorienting deadpan. “Cheetos, Doritos and Fritos, mosquitos / I’m eating burritos with Danny DeVito,” drawls Dylan Brady. It is somewhat more melodic than their old material, but still as sensory and chaotic.

The album title and release date are still yet to be announced, but the duo will probably just drop it whenever they feel like it.

100 Gecs’ debut album 1000 Gecs is known for blending eccentric music styles from the past couple decades: crunkcore group brokeNCYDE, the cheerleader noise-pop of Sleigh Bells, the pitch-shifted euphoria of nightcore remixes. As if the bombast of their first record wasn’t enough, they took it to the next level by inviting big names onto a remix of it: Emo heroes Fall Out Boy joined them on a newer version of “Hand Crushed By A Mallet” with Craig Owns and Nicole Dollganger.

Listen to “Doritos & Fritos” above.

Once obscure from the bright lights of mainstream rap, the name and profile of Baby Keem has risen the past year with the release of his debut album, The Melodic Blue, elevating him from an underground treasure to one of the genre’s most promising young stars.

Off the heels of sleeper-hit “Orange Soda” in 2019, the 21-year-old artist has scaled the Billboard charts with songs like “Range Brothers” and “Family Ties,” both assisted by his Pullitzer Prize-winning cousin Kendrick Lamar. His freshman album drew critical praise and some hardware to show for his musical ascension.

The Vegas-raised artist, born Hykeem Jamaal Carter Jr., was named Billboard’s first 2021 R&B/Hip-Hop Rookie of the Year and received three nods for the 64th Grammy Awards, including Best New Artist. He didn’t take home that coveted award — bested by Olivia Rodrigo — but was still able to take the Grammys stage for a win in the Best Rap Performance category.

Keem, the once faceless artist who hid behind palette-styled cover arts early in his career, has stepped firmly into his place as a transcendent musical talent, expanding from his enigmatic underground status to a known product of today’s sound. But even before his freshman debut and his signing to Kendrick Lamar’s pgLang media company, Keem started rapping at age 13, eventually honing his skittish flow and charismatic delivery over a cheap microphone.

“When I really started, I was 13 and I had Apple studio sh*t on my computer,” Keem said in an interview with Lamar for the 40th Anniversary Issue of i-D Magazine. “I had borrowed $300 from my grandma and I got my stuff on Craigslist. I was probably 15. I got a mic for $50. It was sh*t but it worked. So, I just started learning on that. I made it work.”

From the point his music developed, he landed a few production credits on Kendrick Lamar’s Black Panther soundtrack and the albums of Top Dawg Entertainment associates Jay Rock and ScHoolBoy Q. Keem gained some traction from his first mixtape The Sound Of Bad Habit in 2018, which set the stage for his stop-and-go flow to shine, rapping “Dare I say it / B*tch, I’m Baby Keem, I don’t have time for trends” on the opener “Wolves.”

His name flashed to the masses with Die For My B*tch a vivacious and stylishly moodish project, with the standout track “Orange Soda” becoming a platinum-certified hit because of the song’s pulsating beat, hilariously cheeky lyrics, and outward brashness. Despite the buzz from Keem’s first two mixtapes, much about him was still a mystery.

Back then, an image or interview with the California-born artist could barely be found. But things changed once rumors about Keem’s affiliation with Lamar began to swirl, and soon, the cloak of invisibility surrounding him would shed as their kinship was revealed. As an artist, Keem didn’t lean on their relationship at first. Instead, he revealed in an interview with The Rap Pack that he worked on his music without the “Alright” artist knowing. That way, he could come into form on his own and leave any thoughts of nepotism to the wayside. “He didn’t even know I made music for a while,” Keem said. “He was on some, ‘What do you want to do?’ And I was like, ‘Man, I just want to go to college, bro. I’m going to figure it out.’ I wasn’t even 100 percent sure I was even good at music.”

Keem later added: “If I wasn’t ready to like do what I’m doing now, then it wouldn’t be happening, you know what I’m saying? Even in the process […] I wouldn’t even ask for anything. I didn’t send him my music until later, later. I just wanted to make sure it was from me personally; I wanted to make sure it was owned.”

That was then, but now, Keem has doubled down on his relationship with Lamar and squared his focus on refining his creative process and broadening his sound. As Keem highlighted in an interview with Ebro Darden in October, everything he does is in service of the music. No matter the occasion, he’s always searching for things that spark inspiration and lead to his evolution as an artist, songwriter, and record producer:

“I don’t really leave that mold. I feel like when I go home, everything I do is for the sake of the music. If I watch a movie, or if a play a video game, I’m studying something. There’s something in there I can use, especially a movie for sure. If I watch Netflix right now, I’m watching the way it’s shot because I want to shoot a music video, or I’m looking at the actors and studying them in their gestures because I might want to mimic or take inspiration from it.

I try to have my moment, but I be bored. Like, people go on vacations and things like that and I’m not there yet. I don’t know how to go on vacation yet.”

From his first project to this year’s Grammy, Keem has carved out a lane all his own, using his frenetic and experimental sound to pierce through the guards of hip-hop circles. Once overlooked, he’s now recognized as one of the industry’s young musical supernovas. On “Trademark USA,” he declares his placement in rap, “I took the torch / I quit being nice.”

His Grammy win only serves as affirmation for his current spot, and the one he’ll be in the future. But for now, he’ll enjoy the ride, and in time, learn to take the proper vacation he deserves.

On the heels of the release of her latest single, “Treat Me,” Chloe Bailey, who performs solo mononymously as Chloe, took some time to answer a few questions from fans. During her impromptu Q&A session, the Chloe x Halle half spilled some tea about her upcoming solo debut album.

When asked about her influences for her album, Chloe revealed “kanye, kelis, imogen heap, donna summer” were the ones “doing it” for her “in this very moment.”

This isn’t the first time Chloe has cited Heap or Kelis as influences. Last year, during a livestream on Instagram, she called Imogen Heap her “number one inspiration.”

“She a bad b*tch,” Bailey said of the “Hide And Seek” singer. “She produces and she writes all of her stuff.” Of Kelis, she said, “Every time I put on Kelis, I feel like the baddest b*tch.”

Also during her Q&A, she revealed that she has finalized the tracklist of her upcoming album, and also added that her verse on Fivio Foreign’s “Hello” was written and cut the night after the Grammys.

Though she didn’t announce a release date or title for her album, Chloe said fans can expect to see a more vulnerable side of her.

“…when i wrote it i was at the lowest moment and i was building myself back up,” she said. “you get everything.”

The Cut describes “big d*ck energy” (or BDE) as “a quiet confidence and ease with oneself that comes from knowing you have an enormous penis and you know what to do with it. It’s not cockiness, it’s not a power trip — it’s the opposite: a healthy, satisfied, low-key way you feel yourself.” The term was popularized after Ariana Grande revealed that her then-fiancé, Pete Davidson, has a larger than average… Dick is my favorite Kristen Dunst movie from the 1990s. (I’m just stealing a bit from Austin Powers here.)

In an interview with the Not Skinny But Not Fat podcast, Davidson’s new romantic partner, Kim Kardashian, was asked about his supposed BDE. She replied, “When we kissed, I was just like, hmm!” Their first kiss was during a sketch on SNL, which Kardashian referred to as a “a stage kiss, but it was still a little zing. It wasn’t anything like a super, crazy feeling.” But a few days later, she realized something.

“I was like, ‘Hmm, there is some BDE action,” she remembered, adding she was a bit bummed after finding out that Pete had missed her after-party following the show. “I thought about it later. I was like, ‘Damn, he’s the only person who didn’t come.’”

So, there you go: “very nice guy” Pete Davidson has a big… Willie Nelson is my favorite country music legend. (Again, apologies to Austin Powers.)

You can listen to the podcast here.

(Via E! Online)

After months (and years) of waiting, the Stranger Things season 4 trailer is finally here.

The horror movie-inspired season will begin to answer questions about the Upside Down and, hopefully, why anyone in their right mind would want to live in Hawkins, Indiana. “This season, we really wanted to really get into it and [reveal] some of those answers. But to do that properly, we needed time, so it just became bigger and bigger,” Stranger Things co-creator Ross Duffer said, adding that season four is about “revelations, in that we really wanted to start giving the audience some answers.”

After watching the trailer above, I need answers to some questions, including:

1. What’s the deal with the creepy Creel house?
2. What is the “war” that can’t be won without Eleven’s help?
3. How will Hopper escape his Russian prison and make it back to Hawkins?
4. How is Steve’s hair still so perfect?
5. Is this guy shredding a guitar on a rooftop during an end of the world-looking storm immediately my new favorite character?

I can answer that last one: yes.

Stranger Things, which stars Millie Bobby Brown, Winona Ryder, David Harbour, Finn Wolfhard, Gaten Matarazzo, Caleb McLaughlin, Noah Schnapp, Sadie Sink, Natalia Dyer, Charlie Heaton, Joe Keery, Maya Hawke, and Brett Gelman, along with new cast members Robert Englund (Freddy Krueger!), Amybeth McNulty, and Eduardo Franco, premieres on May 27, followed by the second half of the season on July 1.

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Seven Rings star Simu Liu has watched Disney+’s Moon Knight, and let’s just say that he’s not thrilled with the film’s accent work. He’s not alone (Oscar Isaac found himself defending the choice to portray Steven Grant with an English accent, and Isaac apparently made that call), but it’s notable that an MCU star is making this criticism. That’s particularly the case because Shang-Chi took great pains to be authentic and inclusive, from the cast (which was 98% Asian) to the crew.

To that end, Liu finds himself calling out the Mandarin spoken by Ethan Hawke’s cult-leading villain. The Shang-Chi star tweeted, “Alright Arthur Harrow needs to fire his Mandarin teacher.”

Liu was swiftly joined in his responses, including a “what happened here?” response with a tweeted clip.

It’s an awkward development, especially since Moon Knight director Mohamed Diab pointedly aimed to nail the show’s Egyptian representation. In the lead up to streaming time, Diab called out Wonder Woman 1984 for what he deemed “orientalism” (which Diab condemned as “dehumanizing”) particularly the DCEU sequel’s rendering of Cairo. Diab stressed that Moon Knight would portray Egypt “as authentic[ally] as possible, in the realm of being fantastical,” and Diab declared that “[r]epresentation opportunities shouldn’t be wasted” while speaking of the upcoming Black Adam and its casting practices. And especially given that Liu’s an MCU lead, his criticism of Harrow’s dialogue is more than relevant and worth watching for followup.

Someone might want to check on David Mamet. The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright behind Glengarry Glen Ross, Speed-the-Plow, and American Buffalo shared some pretty shocking opinions about what he believes are the unconscious motives of the people who dedicate their lives to teaching our kids—and with Fox News of all places.

As NBC News reports, Mamet sat down with Fox News’ Mark Levin on Sunday, presumably to push his new book, Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch, in which (according to the publisher) the celebrated writer “calls out, skewers, mocks, and, most importantly, dissects the virus of conformity which is now an existential threat to the West.” And if going against the norm is what Mamet thinks is most needed right now, he certainly chose a bold hill on which to prove his point when he claimed that, whether they know it or not, all teachers have a natural predisposition toward pedophilia.

(No, that’s not a typo.)

“We have to take back control,” Mamet said. “If there’s no community control of the schools, what we have is kids being—not only indoctrinated, but groomed, in a very real sense, by people who are, whether they know it or not, sexual predators. Are they abusing the kids physically? No, I don’t think so. But they’re abusing them mentally and using sex to do so.”

“This has always been the problem with education,” Mamet continued, digging an even deeper hole for himself. “Is that teachers are inclined—particularly men, because men are predators—to pedophilia.”

Come again?

But really: What in the actual f*ck?

While Mamet laid out these accusations as seeming facts, he neither cited any sources nor provided any other proof for just how he came to these conclusions. Of course, it didn’t help that Levin just sat there sort of nodding his head as if all of this made perfect sense and was in no way inflammatory—or insane.

NBC News spoke with Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, who described Mamet’s comments as “a repulsive demonization of the very people who have been the lifeline to our kids.” NBC also reached out to Mamet via his lawyer, but had not received a response.

(Via NBC News)