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Drake is unloading some of his property and looks to make a tidy sum, according to a new report from TMZ. He recently listed his Hidden Hills mansion — which he affectionately calls the “YOLO Estate” — for $14.8 million. For that amount, the buyer will be getting full-sized basketball and tennis courts, a swimming pool (complete with a spa grotto and water slide), a theater that seats 25, a horse stable, and 12,500 square feet of space. He’s also selling two adjacent properties for a grand total of $22.2 million.

Complex notes that the impetus for Drake’s home sale is likely his recent purchase of a new home in Los Angeles’ Beverly Crest neighborhood, which was reported in Architectural Digest. Apparently, Drake is buying English singer Robbie Williams’ home, which despite going unlisted is estimated at $50 million. It’s a good 7,000 square feet larger than the YOLO Estate, although according to Complex, it’s still much smaller than his mansion in Toronto, which is a whopping 50,000 square feet.

Although it wasn’t reported as an official reason for his move, it’ll likely also be nice to possibly throw off Drake’s stalker, who showed up at the Hidden Hills house multiple times looking for him, even going so far as to sneak in and steal some of his drinks. He’s since filed a restraining order — after she tried to have one filed against him first — but perhaps moving house will provide an added layer of security along with all that extra space.

When Dawn Staley signed a historic seven-year, $22.4 million contract last fall to stay on as the head women’s basketball coach at South Carolina, to many in women’s sports, it was a sign of hope in an industry where there isn’t always a lot of it. Not only because it was a massive reward for what has been massive success in the program, but because it drew Staley’s salary even with the men’s head coach at the university.

During negotiations, Staley had to make the case to South Carolina leadership that she had achieved enough to deserve the deal. The accolades speak for themselves — a National Championship in 2017 and three Final Fours — but Staley struggled to find comparisons for her performance in the modern game.

“What is my market value?” she asked herself and the university. “I’m a Black woman, highly successful in my profession. There aren’t many Black women who are as successful as I am in this profession. There are only either white women or white men who have had the type of success or better. So what is my fair value? What is it? Where is it?”

While Staley stands impressively atop her sport today, nearly 30 years ago, another pioneer asked herself similar questions in a similar situation. A young coach named C. Vivian Stringer, on the heels of a 1993 Final Four appearance at the University of Iowa, agreed to an extension that pulled her equal to the men’s basketball coach at the time, Tom Davis.

“I’m so grateful of my brother, Tim, who was my representative at the time, who told me I had matched the same amount of money as (Davis),” says Stringer now. “It bothers me now to (think), have we gone backward?”

Telling the story this way, pay equity among women’s basketball coaches does seem to have lost its momentum. But the same can be said of the fight for equity in sport for women across time. Billie Jean King and the Original Nine took a stand for equal tournament payouts — then Venus Williams did the same. And just as Stringer and Staley sought salaries equal to their counterparts in the men’s game, Becky Hammon left the NBA last year to reset the market for WNBA head coach salaries. The U.S. Women’s National Team soccer stars have been fighting for equal pay for so long they may as well have their own chapter in this history.

Staley didn’t negotiate this new deal just for her bank account. She did it to “strike when the iron was hot” and take a leap forward in this fight rather than baby steps.

“It’s a long, drawn-out fight that will continue, but I hope that I lend a ray of hope to continue to fight and be able to risk it all,” she says. “That’s what it takes in order for you to have a groundbreaking headline. Because everybody puts the money up there. I want to put the fight (in the headline). It was a fight. That should be the headline.”

The USWNT settled last month for $24 million, but the deal does not include back pay for past players. We are approaching the anniversary of the TikTok from Oregon star Sedona Prince that blew open the economic disparity between the men’s and women’s NCAA Tournaments. A WNBA team last fall was reportedly fined half a million dollars for chartering flights for its players. The fight continues.

That’s why Staley, Stringer and a roster of women’s hoops stars that spans generations, are coming together for a new “Retire Inequality” campaign through TIAA that takes aim directly at one key ramification of the gendered disparities in sports and across American society.

The campaign includes the launch of a new, more stable and simple TIAA retirement account, a renewed emphasis on retirement in TIAA’s lobbying efforts, and keynote sponsorship by TIAA of the Women’s Sports Foundation Equity Project.

“We now know that women have 30 percent less money in retirement, and that will continue to lag and women can’t retire in the same way that men have been able to,” Stringer says.

Aside from this partnership, both Staley and Stringer, who is away from her job as head coach at Rutgers for the second straight season for personal reasons, say the best thing they can do is keep excelling and speaking out. As perhaps the most recognizable women’s basketball coach today, Staley is the leader that Stringer and others look to.

“I’m proud of Dawn. She’s making that and has made the case for herself,” Stringer says. “That will allow any female and any Black female to show the need to have equality in their pay. With that said, Dawn is the first person that steps up on this side of it, and it began some time ago. It sets the stage for us to close the gender gap, and I’m hoping that everybody that’s in control of women’s pay will realize that.”

With partners in this campaign like Prince and Dallas Wings star Arike Ogunbowale, TIAA is using a multi-generational outreach campaign and the 50th anniversary of Title IX to show how much work there is still to be done. Staley sits on Stringer’s shoulders; Ogunbowale sits on Staley’s. As has long been the case in women’s sports, even the most assertive advocates for equity in pay, working conditions, and respect know strength is in numbers.

Staley hopes her new contract can set a baseline for how excellence in coaching should be rewarded in women’s basketball, and become another domino toward true financial equity for women, from entry level to retirement.

Aaron Dessner has earned himself some clout in the pop sphere in recent years thanks to his work on Taylor Swift’s new albums; He’s collaborated with her on Folklore, Evermore, Fearless (Taylor’s Version), and Red (Taylor’s Version). He’s earned the favor of at least one Swift-adjacent music superstar, too, as Ed Sheeran says he and Dessner have been working together.

Sheeran is in the midst of a legal copyright battle over “Shape Of You,” and during the trial, Sheeran noted (according to BBC News reporter Mark Savage) that he and Dessner recently wrote 25 songs together in the span of a week.

BBC reports songwriters Sami Chokri and Ross O’Donoghue say the hook of Sheeran’s “Shape Of You” is strikingly similar to part of “Oh Why,” which Chokri released as Sami Switch in 2015. The pair’s lawyer claimed Sheeran “borrows ideas and throws them into his songs, sometimes he will acknowledge it but sometimes he won’t.”

For his part, Sheeran denied he’s a “magpie” who incorporates the work of others without acknowledgement. He pointed out that he regularly shares credit with lesser-known artists, like he did on recent tunes “Shivers” and “Visiting Hours.”

Ed Sheeran is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Whether he’s being generous to his co-workers, supporting Tibet, or acting respectful around his fans, Keanu Reeves seems like a certified Good Dude. Here’s another We Should All Be More Like Keanu story for the collection. A recent Ask Reddit prompt wondered, “What’s something a famous person has done that just completely changed how you viewed them?” The whole thread is worth a read — some replies are positive, like Danny Devito and Rhea Pearlman taking care of Mara Wilson while her mother was battling breast cancer during the filming of Matilda, while others are negative, like the comment that simply reads, “Tom Cruise – Scientology.” But my favorite (and the one that went viral thanks to Goodable) has to do with The Matrix star.

“My grandmother had a crush on Keanu Reeves because he reminded her of my grandfather when he was young. Saw all his stuff, from Bill and Ted to the Matrix,” afdc92 wrote. “She had a stroke in her early 70s and was pretty much housebound for the last 10 years of her life, so watching movies was her main hobby, and became almost like friends to her because she so rarely got to see any of her own.”

They continued:

Not too long after the Matrix came out my uncle was in LA for business and was eating at a really swanky restaurant when Keanu came in with a woman. When he finished his meal my uncle came up to their table and said “I don’t usually do this, but I just wanted you to know that my 80-year-old mother loves you and has seen all of your movies. You remind her of my dad.” He said Keanu asked if he had a cell phone on him and when he confirmed that he did, he said “Give her a call, I want to talk to her.” He spoke with my grandmother for several minutes and it absolutely made her year. She was so isolated and his genuine kindness to her and interest in her showed what a truly amazing man he is.

Could the story be fake, considering it’s from some random person on Reddit? Of course. But I believe it to be true, because it’s absolutely something Keanu Reeves would do. Or as another Redditor put it, “There is virtually no positive story I would not instantly believe about Keanu Reeves.”

(Via Reddit)

When we asked Prince Daddy And The Hyena vocalist/guitarist Kory Gregory to describe his music in four words, he answered, “Loud, quiet, fast, slow.” In a similarly nonsensical fashion, the press release for their new song “A Random Exercise In Impermanence (The Collector)” says it is recommended if you like “bootleg Coldplay” or “if Alex G covered Green Day songs.” This is all to say that the Albany, NY-based four-piece has a sound that cannot be summed up in a normal way.

This new relentlessly exhilarating track, “A Random Exercise in Impermanence (The Collector),” comes from their just-announced forthcoming self-titled album, out this spring. It focuses on Gregory’s fear of death, which was worsened by a van accident that happened in 2018.

“I think the record as a whole, as a journey, feels bittersweet and hopeful in a way,” Gregory stated, and this single vividly showcases this tension of darkness and light. While his panicked yells are communicating stories of anxiety and cynicism, the instruments build an enveloping, optimistic landscape that’s as entertaining as a roller coaster.

Watch the video for “A Random Exercise in Impermanence (The Collector)” above, and check out the album art and tracklist for Prince Daddy And The Hyena below.

1. “Adore The Sun”
2. “A Random Exercise In Impermanence (The Collector)”
3. “Jesus F*cking Christ”
4. “Something Special”
5. “El Dorado”
6. “Hollow, As You Figured”
7. “Curly Q”
8. “Keep Up That Talk”
9. “Shoelaces”
10. “In Just One Piece”
11. “Discount Assisted Living”
12. “Black Mold”
13. “Baby Blue”

Prince Daddy And The Hyena is out 4/15 via Pure Noise Records. Pre-order it here.

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

During the LA stop at his Justice World Tour last night, Justin Bieber brought out Leon Bridges for a surprise performance. The Fort Worth, Texas-native then proceeded to perform “River” from his 2015 debut album, Coming Home.

Bridges released his most recent album, Gold-Diggers Sound, last July, which featured prominent production by Ricky Reed. Last month, he teamed up with fellow Texas musical trio Khruangbin for a collaborative EP called Texas Moon.

“Being under ‘the machine,’ you kind of have to adhere to whatever the label’s ideas are or whatever producer you’re working with,“ Bridges said of the EP in our cover story last month. “And whenever I’m doing that it’s more polished, but it’s still a vibe. Although I think my collaboration with Khruangbin is really where my heart is. I love how raw our sound is.”

Last night’s LA show was the first of two shows Bieber has planned at Crypto.com Arena on his Justice World Tour, which will take the Grammy-nominated “Peaches” singer across North America through June. Bridges is set to kick off a tour next month in Tulsa, Oklahoma, before making apperances at Hangout Festival and Glastonbury this summer.

Bieber announced last month that he would partner with Propeller and Live Free to local and national social justice organizations, including the REFORM Alliance, National Resources Defense Council, Fund For Guaranteed Income, and Last Prisoner Project.

Ever since Russia launched its horrific attack on Ukraine, Donald Trump—when he’s not not heaping praise on “smart” and “savvy” Vladimir Putin—has repeatedly claimed that the war between these two countries “would never have happened” if he had been in charge (a comment that has been echoed by Nikki Haley and others in his administration). And it’s a good thing he didn’t win his reelection bid, because—as Seth Meyers shared—the former president’s suggestions for how he would be dealing with the current war between Russia and Ukraine are like something out of a Looney Tunes cartoon.

On Monday night, Meyers reminded viewers just how close we came to having an ex-reality show star sitting in the Oval Office at this pivotal moment in world history. But the Late Night host doesn’t even need to try to imagine what Trump’s response to the Russia-Ukraine situation would be, as Trump—who Meyers calls a “criminal dingus”—has vocally volunteered his suggestions… all without anyone even asking. And his latest idea might be one of his most bonkers—not to mention unethical, illegal, and all the other ‘un’s—yet. Even Meyers barely had words for it:

“Look, we came very close—very close—to a world where Trump was still in charge during Russia’s brutal and illegal invasion of Ukraine, which is scary for many reasons. One of which is Trump keeps giving us a glimpse as to how he would have responded. And, as usual, it has that unique Trump blend of being both terrifying and incredibly stupid at the same time.

According to The Washington Post, ‘Trump mused Saturday to the GOP’s top donors that the United States should label its F-22 planes with the Chinese flag and ‘bomb the sh*t out of Russia. And then we say China did it; we didn’t do it, China did it. And then they start fighting with each other and we sit back and watch.’”

And holy sh*t, this man had the nuclear codes! For four years! And is hoping to have them again!

Meyers very well may have cracked the secret to where Trump’s utterly buffoonish ideas come from he suggested that the one-time commander-in-chief (!) “definitely gets his ideas from cartoon” and that his “Blame it on China!” approach “is a slightly stupider version of Bugs Bunny dressing up as a sexy lady to distract Elmer Fudd.”

You can watch the full clip above.

DMZ is primed to be the next critically-acclaimed DC Comics show. HBO Max has revealed the first trailer for the Ava DuVernay-produced series, which features Rosario Dawson as Alma, a medic desperately searching for her son across a dystopian New York City that’s been ravaged by the Second Civil War. As the trailer shows, Alma’s search will be no easy task as she deals with various factions that have taken control of the city. There’s also the issue of Benjamin Bratt’s Dawson to contend with.

Based on the Vertigo/DC Comics series of the same name, DMZ will be a four part series that starts streaming in its entirety later this month, which should make binge-watchers very happy. Joining Peacemaker and Doom Patrol, DMZ certainly looks like it has the makings of the next DC Comics hit as the company continues a string of much needed wins thanks to the recently released The Batman and the aforementioned John Cena show.

That said, DMZ will have its work cut out for it. Y: The Last Man, the last Vertigo adaptation set in a dystopian word did not last long, so it’ll be interesting to see if DMZ connects with audiences where Y: The Last Man didn’t.

Here’s the official synopsis:

DMZ leaps off the pages of the acclaimed DC graphic novel into the visual landscape of a dangerous and distorted Manhattan as one woman navigates a demilitarized zone in a harrowing quest to find her lost son.

DMZ starts streaming March 17 on HBO Max

Last year, Lucy Dacus released her third studio album Home Video, which featured the fan-favorite deep-cut “Thumbs” and the bittersweet single “Hot & Heavy.” Last month, just in time for Valentine’s Day, she returned with the new song “Kissing Lessons,” which, at first, was not available on streaming services but only through an actual telephone call because of her knack for creative marketing (before she officially unveiled “Thumbs,” she mailed fans VHS tapes with the track on it).

She brought “Kissing Lessons” to Late Night With Seth Meyers last night. She sings the wholesome story of a first kiss: “Rachel was a year older / When I was in the second grade / I thought she might know everything / I took her word like a golden ring / I asked her how to win my man / And she said, ‘I know just the thing’ / Gave me lipgloss and a hair toss / And, after school, a lesson in kissing.”

She is also standing, which is notable (and exciting!) because she’s been performing her set on tour while laying on a couch due to two herniated discs (“I am telling myself I am punk for this please do not say otherwise I’m fragile,” she had said about that arrangement.)

Watch her performance of “Kissing Lessons” above.

In the 94 years that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has been handing out Oscars to the Hollywood elite, a grand total of eight women have been nominated for Best Director. To put that into perspective, Martin Scorsese has received more nominations in this category than all the women combined. Only two women have won the prestigious prize, with Nomadland’s Chloe Zhao making history last year by becoming the first woman of color to do so (as well as the first to be nominated.) This year, history was made again as Jane Campion, the director of the startling Western drama The Power of the Dog, became the first woman director to be nominated more than once in this category. The first time a man received multiple Best Director nominations was in 1930 and that guy, Frank Lloyd, pulled it off by being nominated twice in the same year.

The never-ending battle for gender parity in the film world has been one of maddeningly incremental progress, frequently a case of one step forward and two steps back. In 2020, the number of top-grossing films directed by women fell, even as figures like Zhao, Emerald Fennell, and Regina King received vast critical acclaim for their work. It’s indicative of much that Campion is the first woman to have multiple Best Director nominations in close to a century, but that shouldn’t negate how well-deserved and long-overdue this honor is for a truly phenomenal filmmaker.

Campion is indisputably one of her generation’s finest filmmakers and yet her name is seldom included as frequently in these conversations as her male counterparts, even though she’s an Oscar, Palme d’Or, and Silver Lion winner. It’s a disheartening omission but not an especially surprising one. Female directors don’t get held up as such in the way that men are. While you’re likely to find Campion listed as the greatest woman filmmaker of all time (the BBC declared The Piano to be the best movie ever made by a woman), mixed-gender lists put her far lower. There’s a cultural notion that women only make stories for women while men’s work is universal. Such ideas dismiss the unifying ideas of female-driven narratives but also position them as somehow unimportant in the grand scheme of art. Campion has spent her career fighting that by telling layered, prickly, and often radical stories of women in search of more than what the world will allow them.

Fittingly for a filmmaker who made an adaptation of the Henry James novel The Portrait of a Lady, Campion’s filmography is defined by its depictions of women and dissections of what it means to be one at any given moment in history. It’s notable that it took until last year for Campion to make a film with a majority male perspective. Until then, her protagonists were women searching for a certain kind of freedom across time and genres, from Victorian England to the grimy noir of New York City. In The Piano, her breakthrough romantic drama that saw her become the second-ever female Best Director Oscar nominee, the mute Ada McGrath turns to her music to find a form of expression that will allow her to contest the marriage and life she has been forced into. Holy Smoke!, one of her most underrated films, sees a naïve young woman look for spiritual guidance before falling into a parodic battle of the sexes with an older man hired to undo the supposed brainwashing she’s endured. The deeply prickly lead of her debut, Sweetie, looks for clarity amid a tyrannical domestic life that includes a mentally ill and obscenely spoiled sibling.

Moreover, Campion’s women are frequently bound by a sense of the erotic. Few working directors make films so steeped in sensuality as Campion, and so uniformly focused on female pleasure at that. Whatever the female gaze is, and academics have argued about that for decades, Campion possesses it, utilizing it with such force that she’s helped to realign audiences’ focus away from a default male ideal. Take, for instance, In the Cut, a bleak erotic thriller that was once derided as her biggest flop. Many critics saw the drama’s plot of a woman descending into a torrid affair with a potentially murderous cop as needlessly tawdry. What they missed (and what many have discussed with the film’s long-overdue reassessment) is the ways that those sex scenes define the catch-22 of female desire: how do you look for satisfaction when you live under the stranglehold of patriarchy and doing so could very well put your life at risk? Campion uses eroticism as a way to take on issues like this but sometimes, in her films, sex is just sex, and we’re all the better for it!

The Power of the Dog may stand unique in her filmography as her first feature focused primarily on a male protagonist, it’s fully within the boundaries of her tales of women in search of liberation. George Burbank, as played by Benedict Cumberbatch in perhaps his greatest performance, is the most purely distilled embodiment of masculinity at its cruelest and most insidious. A rancher who seemingly embodies the all-American cowboy ideal, he lords over his domain – and his meek brother – with an iron fist, growing all the more tyrannical when Rose (Kirsten Dunst) moves into his home alongside her sensitive son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee, giving the best performance of 2021). He seems furious that anyone would seek to disturb his dictatorial grasp over a life that nobody seems equipped to thrive in. Gentleness is to be snuffed out, preferably in as callous a manner as possible.

Such men are familiar presences in Campion’s work, albeit mostly in far less aggressive ways: The stilted stoicism of Ada’s husband slowly giving way to petulant abuse; the callous gaslighting of Gilbert Osmond in The Portrait of a Lady; P.J. Waters’ condescension evolving into a pathetic obsession in Holy Smoke! George’s closest contemporaries in Campion’s work can be found in In the Cut, where every male character is some variation of terrifyingly toxic, desperate to own women or destroy them. While his own motives are not sexual, the calculated giddiness with which George seeks to break Rose’s spirit is similarly forceful. He still wants to deny a woman’s right to her own destiny, something Campion has spent decades exploring, and the character’s spiral into alcohol and loneliness is almost Shakespearean in its tragedy. In The Power of the Dog, empathy is given to George for his own plight, a man as smothered by masculine demands as he is empowered by them, but he is not excused for it. Campion has heroines but seldom heroes. Her men are as broken by masculinity as anyone in Scorsese’s filmography. In many ways, she feels like his cinematic sibling, two halves of a double bill on the ways that the world sets men up to suffer.

The Power of the Dog is currently a frontrunner to take home Best Picture. At the very least, being the most nominated film of the 2022 Oscars will ensure that Campion’s legacy among mainstream audiences is given a much-needed boost. Perhaps this will finally give some industry figures the push to see her as one of the greats and not someone whose masterful output is forever seen as second best to the guys.