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Roc Nation Is Partnering With Time Studios On A Multi-Part Documentary About Megan Thee Stallion

Megan Thee Stallion Roc Nation Documentary
Marcello Cantu

Megan Thee Stallion never stops. The rapper is coming off the success of her new collaboration with Dua Lipa, “Sweetest Pie,” which made a pretty significant chart debut at No. 15. Though she’s still dealing with embarrassingly misogynistic fallout from Tory Lanez shooting her, Thee Stallion is still steady rising.

On that note, today Roc Nation and Time Studios announced they’ve partnered on a documentary telling Megan’s story. The upcoming multi-part documentary will be directed by Nneka Onuorah, and includes a mix of archival footage and new material. A press release stated that “beyond amplifying the Houston native’s journey to success, the project will also touch on how Megan overcame various personal hurdles to thrive in her professional career.”

“We are thrilled to be able to work with Roc Nation to share Megan’s story with the world,” said Loren Hammonds, the Co-Head of Documentary at Time Studios, in a press release. “Millions of people are familiar with her as an entertainer, but this series will give her a chance to share her truth as never before. Her story is a powerful one, and the accomplishments that she continues to achieve are remarkable. We feel lucky to have this opportunity to capture her at a crucial moment in her life and career, as she continues to grow exponentially in both her artistry and global impact.”

Roc Nation echoed those sentiments, specifically noting this artist’s resilience. “Megan has quickly blossomed into one of the pre-eminent entertainers in the world and it’s a testament to her perseverance, resilience and professionalism,” said Desiree Perez, the CEO of Roc Nation, in a press release. “Her journey is inspirational and we’re proud to have partnered with Time Studios to highlight her personal and professional trajectory over the years. Our hope is that this documentary will inspire viewers to stay the course and pursue their passions through the ups and downs.”

Executive producers on the project include Time Studios’ Ian Orefice, Loren Hammonds, Alexa Conway and Mike Beck, and Roc Nation’s Desiree Perez and Lori York, along with the director Nneka Onuorah. No release date for the project has been shared yet, but keep an eye out for more information.

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Shaq Predicts The Lakers Will Beat The Suns In The Playoffs If They Get The 8-Seed

shaq
TNT

The 2021-22 season has not been kind to the Los Angeles Lakers. After losing to the Philadelphia 76ers on Wednesday night, Los Angeles fell to 31-42 on the year, putting them in ninth place in the Western Conference. They’re currently two games ahead of the 11th-seed San Antonio Spurs, and while they’re in a play-in spot right now, the possibility of them missing the postseason altogether is very real.

Still, it’s not all bad for the Lakers. They still have LeBron James, which has historically been a pretty good way to win games in the playoffs, and Anthony Davis is expected to return from a foot sprain sometime soon. That second thing, in particular, has one Laker legend believing they’d take down the best team in basketball if they met up in the playoffs.

“I’m disappointed in my Lakers, a lot of people are,” Shaq said on The Big Podcast with Shaq. “We all forgot about their ages. ‘Ooh, Westbrook’s comin’, ooh, they got Carmelo,’ like, we’re used to having teams with big-name stars on them. So, you got a team with three Hall of Famers, you would think they’d be in six or seven, and then AD’s not playing. So, I doubt they even make the play-in game.

“But if they do, they have to win, and they will face Phoenix in the first round,” Shaq continued. “And then, if they make it to the eight spot, they will beat Phoenix.”

Shaq believes that the return of Davis will be the thing that pushes the Lakers over the top, and while he concedes that “Westbrook’s been playing bad,” he is holding out hope.

“All it takes is for certain people like that to just play good one or two games and then it snaps right back,” he said.

With nine games left in their regular season, it’d take quite the turn of events for the Lakers to catch up to the Clippers, which have a 4.5-game lead on the 8-seed and have the tiebreaker between the two teams. As such, the overwhelming likelihood is that Los Angeles’ path to the playoffs would require winning the 9/10 game, then beating the loser of the 7/8 game, then beating a Suns team that bounced them last postseason four times in seven games. It would be quite the turn of events if they could pull this off, but at least Shaq is optimistic.

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Preview The Mesmerizing Short Films That Will Accompany Lykke Li’s Next Album, ‘EYEYE’

Yesterday, Swedish singer-songwriter Lykke Li finally followed up her last (and arguably best) album, So Sad So Sexy with a new single called “No Hotel.” We got the Still Sad Still Sexy EP in 2019, but she hadn’t released a full-length project in a minute, so the news that will be changing this year is welcome. She’s officially announced that her next record will be called EYEYE, and according to a press release, Lykke wanted to pursue a completely different, very analogue approach to this album.

“There were no clicktracks, no headphones, and no digital instruments,” the release stated. “The vocals were recorded on a handheld $70 drum mic, often in the moment of composition, giving the lyrics the still-beating sound of fresh heartbreak being whispered into your ear.” In her own words, Lykke said she “wanted the record to have the intimacy of listening to a voice memo on a macro dose of LSD.” Based off this first track, she seems to have achieved all she was looking for. The analogue setup also continued to the mixing stage, as this album was mixed to tape by Shawn Everett.

Today she’s shared a visual component that will set the album apart, too. Directed by Theo Lindquist and shot on 16 millimeter film by cinematographer Edu Grau, seven one-minute visual “fragments” will accompany the music. Lykke stars in the clips alongside Jeff Wilbusch, and you can watch a preview of the films up top. “We wanted to capture the beauty and grandeur of a three-hour European arthouse movie, while making something native to modern media,” Lykke said. “The intention is to deliver the full impact of a movie in sixty seconds on a phone screen, which is where most of our emotional experiences happen now anyway.”

EYEYE will be out on May 20 and she will embark on a tour behind the project beginning in September of 2022. Check out the tracklist for the record below.

EYEYE tracklist:
1. “No Hotel”
2. “You Don’t Go Away”
3. “Highway To Your Heart”
4. “Happy Hurts”
5. “Carousel”
6. “5D”
7. “Over”
8. “ü&i”

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Whoopi Goldberg Is Calling Out The GOP’s Hypocrisy In Condemning Judge Ketanji Jackson Brown But Not Matt Gaetz

Whoopi Goldberg The View
ABC

During a panel discussion on Ketanji Brown Jackson‘s Senate confirmation hearing, Whoopi Goldberg once again came out swinging at Republicans for their line of questioning that smacked of hypocrisy. In a move that fellow The View co-host Sara Haines called a “dogwhistle to QAnon,” Republicans have been aggressively grilling Jackson over her sentencing in a child pornography case. Sunny Hostin, a former prosecutor, noted that the sentencing was well with the “guidelines,” but Goldberg could not stand the ridiculous of it all given the GOP’s penchant for looking the other way when it comes to their own. Specifically, Matt Gaetz who Goldberg had no problem name-dropping while blasting the Republican’s sudden concern for underage sex crimes.

Via Mediaite:

“Why didn’t they want to hear the allegations against Brett Kavanaugh?” Goldberg asked. “Why weren’t they interested in that? Why — why didn’t they condemn Matt Gaetz, who is being investigated for allegedly sex trafficking. Allegedly. I just want to make sure y’all heard me say allegedly.”

The host then pointed to the allegations against Roy Moore, adding, “I always bring him up, and they didn’t say boo.”

As for the details of the case that has Republicans up in arms, again, Hostin explained that the situation involves an 18-year-old gay teen who looked at gay porn online of other teens, some of whom were not of age yet. He was sentenced by Jackson to three months in prison. “Those are the facts,” Hostin explained. “This is not someone that participated in creating pornographic images.”

(Via Mediaite)

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A female writer jokingly asked what’s a ‘universal thing men like’ and the responses were hilarious

Writer and illustrator Aubrey Hirsch jokingly asked her followers on Twitter what’s a “universal thing that most men like?” because she was writing a comic and “just realized I don’t actually know any men in real life.” The tweet inspired an avalanche of funny responses.

Hirsch is the author of “Why We Never Talk About Sugar,” a collection of short stories, and her work has appeared in The New York Times, Child, American Short Fiction and Time.

The interesting thing about the responses is that they weren’t the typical stereotypes about men. She didn’t get a ton of people talking about sex, sports or toxic masculinity. Instead, there were a lot of folks that mentioned very specific male behaviors as if they were talking about a bizarre species they discovered in the wild.

There were two things that got the most comments on her post. First, men enjoy throwing heavy objects into bodies of water. Preferably, the larger the rock, the deeper the body of water and from the highest vantage point possible.

The other is watching construction sites. Evidently, the phenomenon is so popular in Italy that there is a specific word for this type of person in Italian.

Here are 19 of the best responses to the question, “What’s a universal thing that most men like?”

1.

When asked why men enjoy watching construction sites so much, a poster on Reddit named justdaps had the perfect response. “I just find it really satisfying and interesting to see the process behind things being built,” he wrote.

2.

3.

4.

I have seen dudes do this and I have done it plenty of times myself. I usually stand while watching TV when I want to really focus on what’s happening and do not want to be distracted. This usually happens while watching sporting events or the news. It’s also a great way to use your body language to let other people know that there is something very important happening on the television.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

When we do this 99% of the time we’re pretending that the sign is 10 feet high and that we have the ability to dunk a basketball. There are two types of men, those that can dunk and mere mortals.

10.

As a man, this one is near and dear to my heart. I can’t tell you the number of hours I have spent with my friends just throwing lines from “The Big Lebowski” back and forth.

“Nice marmot.”

“The Dude abides.”

“Say what you want about the tenets of national socialism, Dude. At least it’s an ethos.”

A movie that’s running up the ranks of being among the most quotable is another dude buddy pic, “Once Upon a Time … In Hollywood.”

“All right, that’s too hot. Anything we can do about that heat?” … “Rick, it’s a flamethrower.”

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

Unfortunately, this is true and men do far too much of it.

19.

Evidently, after reading the responses, Hirsch knew what was going to happen next. No need to feel ashamed about going viral. It just means you created something that people love.

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Grimes Takes Credit For A 2012 Cyber Attack That Took Indie Blog Hipster Runoff Offline

For those too young to remember, Hipster Runoff was a popular indie music blog that ran from 2007 to 2013. Perhaps the site’s most enduring claim to fame is coining the term “chillwave” in the early ’00s. A not-so-chill moment in the site’s history is when it was the victim of a cyber attack in 2012, about which Carles, the site’s anonymous creator and writer, told Motherboard at the time, “My hosting company and support team say that there are signs of foul play on the server, and some of the last actions before it crashed are very suspicious.”

Now, it looks like we know who perpetrated the attack, as Grimes is claiming responsibility.

In a recent Vanity Fair video, Grimes tell the story behind a 2012 photo of her and a female friend kissing. She explains:

“Back in the day, before the woke era, like, I actually got canceled for this, which is so crazy. I was just at a party with my friends, somebody took this photo, and it got leaked to this website called Hipster Runoff. And then he [Carles], like, ran this story, and this was, like… I was trying to be like all integrity and, you know, like, start my career. And it was, like, ‘Grimes gone wild’ or something. And it was just this, like, super wack, like, mean story. And it was, like, this meme that was going all over the internet.

But my friend who worked for — I will not say which video game — had access to… OK, well I don’t wanna get him in trouble, but, anyway, we were actually able to DDoS Hipster Runoff and basically blackmail them. We were like, like, ‘We’re not gonna let you run your… put your site back up until you take the story down.’ And he did, in fact, take the story down, and it was like my coolest hacker moment. So, yeah, that’s the story of this photo.”

Cloudflare defines a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack as “a malicious attempt to disrupt the normal traffic of a targeted server, service, or network by overwhelming the target or its surrounding infrastructure with a flood of Internet traffic. DDoS attacks achieve effectiveness by utilizing multiple compromised computer systems as sources of attack traffic. Exploited machines can include computers and other networked resources such as IoT devices. From a high level, a DDoS attack is like an unexpected traffic jam clogging up the highway, preventing regular traffic from arriving at its destination.”

Pitchfork notes DDoS attacks are illegal in the US and continues, “The attacks are deemed unlawful conduct per 18 U.S.C. § 1030(a)(5)(A): ‘Whoever — knowingly causes the transmission of a program, information, code, or command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally causes damage without authorization, to a protected computer… shall be punished [with]… a fine under this title or imprisonment for not more than ten years.’”

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Mxmtoon Announces Her New Album ‘Rising’ With Its First Single, ‘Sad Disco’

Mxmtoon 2022
Lissyelle Laricchia

Arriving this May is Mxmtoon’s new album, Rising. On Rising, Mxmtoon writes letters to her younger self, creating electrifying instruction manuals for surviving as a teenager.

Mxmtoon got her start by posting covers in a guest room in her parents’ Oakland home in 2017 at 17 years old. Now, at 21, the queer singer/songwriter has become an indie-pop sensation, drawing in listeners with infectious electronic beats and poignant anecdotes.

Ahead of Rising, Mxmtoon has released a new single called “Sad Disco,” a groovy synth and drum-infused coming of age song which sees her finding joy in her own company.

Mxmtoon 'Rising' artwork
Album artwork courtesy of AWOL

“I was 17 years old when I wrote my song ‘Prom Dress,’” said Mxmtoon in a statement. “Four years later, I sat and listened to it, wondering if the lyrics and ideas still resonated with my now 21-year-old self. I decided that it did, and it also didn’t. I’d grown up since I wrote that song and realized I wanted to make something that felt current to my individual. “Sad Disco” was the resolution to that desire. A song built with the same bones that “Prom dress” was made from, but more reflective of the growth I’ve experienced in my own life since. It’s a song meant to make you find joy in the quiet, to emulate that feeling of being alone in your bedroom, blasting music through a pair of headphones in the middle of the night. In a way, it feels like an answer to the girl who wrote “Prom Dress” in the first place. Serving as a reminder that she isn’t stuck on the floor with tears streaming down her face forever, but that she’ll grow up, and the loneliness she sometimes feels won’t define her. She can still choose to dance and have her own “Sad Disco.”

Last month, Mxmtoon showed off her ukelele chops on another Rising cut called “Mona Lisa.”

Check out Rising‘s tracklist below.

1. “Mona Lisa”
2. “Learn To Love You”
3. “Victim Of Nostalgia”
4. “Sad Disco”
5. “Frown”
6. “Florida”
7. “Scales”
8. “Growing Pains”
9. “Dizzy”
10. “Haze”
11. “Dance (End Of The World)”
12. “Coming Of Age”

Rising is out 5/20 via AWAL. Pre-save it here.

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Kurt Vile’s New Single ‘Mount Airy Hill (Way Gone)’ Is Sublime ‘Fried’ Pop

Golly Kurt Vile. The long-haired slacker folk icon is back with a vengeance in 2022, a very cool and sweet vengeance, of course. Each of the first two singles from his upcoming ninth studio album, Watch My Moves, has been absolutely sublime. From the mellow gold of “Hey Like A Child” to “Like Exploding Stones,” which immediately became one of the best songs in his deep catalogue. Now he’s shared “Mount Airy Hill (Way Gone),” the third single from the album due out on April 15th, and it’s a tribute to the bucolic Philadelphia suburb where he recorded the album in his OKV Central home studio.

A comfy slacker folk tune, “Mount Airy Hill (Way Gone)” feels like a walk among the trees and blossoms of Mount Airy. Vile’s guitar is like a gentle whisper and it’s another balmy tune from the singer.

Vile said in a statement, “When Waylon Jennings became an outlaw country artist, he liked to record at Hillbilly Central, which was Tompall Glaser’s studio. OKV Central is my version of that in Mount Airy. I’ve come into my own here, and at the same time I’m getting back to my home-recording roots.”

Vile has become nothing short of one of the best modern American songwriters. His pen keeps getting sharper on each release and the music he makes further defines a style that is uniquely his own. He promises many more sparks on Watch My Moves of what he refers to as “fried” pop music. “It’s about songwriting. It’s about lyrics. It’s about being the master of all domains in the music,” he adds. “I’m always thinking about catchy music, even though it’s fried, or sizzled, out. It’s my own version of a classic thing — it’s moving forward and backward at the same time.”

Watch the spaced out video for “Mount Airy Hill (Way Gone)” above.

Watch My Moves is out 4/15 via Verve Records. Pre-order it here.

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Pusha T Explains Why He Thinks Rap Beef Has Changed Over Time On ‘Hot Ones’

“[Rap beef] is really corporate now,” Pusha T says in between bites of hot sauced-covered chicken wings during his appearance on the popular interview show Hot Ones. The question he’s been asked by unflappable host Sean Evans is, “What would you say is the biggest difference between how diss tracks were exchanged 20 years ago versus today and why is still important who wins?”

Pusha would know; he’s been keeping a running feud going with Lil Wayne for nearly 20 years himself (over a hoodie, no less), pulling in Wayne’s protege Drake and outing the latter as the father of a secret child in 2018. Continuing to share his thoughts, he elaborates that “Now, you’ll have a rap beef and the record label gets involved. The CEOs are like, ‘Whoa! You can’t do this to my artist!’ I don’t think they end careers anymore, because people don’t have the same pride level about the art.”

He also thinks it’s less important who wins, because “Back in the day it was career-ending… Nowadays, people don’t care. They’re like, ‘Oh well, they lost today. No big deal.’”

And okay, I’m sorry, all due respect to Push but as the resident hip-hop historian, I gotta say GTFOHWTBS. 20 years ago, Jay-Z and Nas held a knock-down, drag-out rhyme fight over the King Of New York title that fans still debate about and neither’s career suffered over it. In fact, both became more popular, with Nas’ “Ether” arguably revitalizing his standing with fans after a pair of lukewarm releases to close out the ’90s. And if my man is talking about the 50 Cent/Ja Rule thing, it’s important to remember that Ja Rule’s label was shut down by the freaking FBI.

No one’s career was ever buried by a rap beef. Since the beginning, battle was an integral part of the genre; if there’s any culprit to blame for rappers’ short-lived careers, it’s fickle fans and quickly evolving musical tastes. Of course, the highest-profile rap beef with the highest stakes wasn’t even about rap, which explains why it came to such a tragic end — which, contrary to conspiracy theories that float around the internet to this day, had little to do with the rules of engagement in hip-hop.

Pusha’s entitled to his opinion but at the end of the day, the narrative of rap beefs ending careers is just that: a narrative. As a matter of course, these things are always much more nuanced than we tend to idealize them as with our nostalgia glasses on. Anyway, for Pusha’s latest beef, check out his McDonald’s diss track “Spicy Fish Diss,” which he made in conjuction with Arby’s. How’s that for corporate?

Watch Pusha T’s full Hot Ones interview above

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Watch A Clip Of Olivia Rodrigo’s First-Ever Take Of ‘Brutal’ From Her ‘Driving Home 2 U’ Film

While the lasting impact of Olivia Rodrigo’s debut album, Sour, is still being felt — namely it is nominated for a whopping seven awards at this year’s Grammys — she’s decided to share more of the behind-the-scenes process of making the album with fans. To that end, Rodrigo announced a new film about making the album called Driving Home 2 U, that will come out this Friday, March 25.

The visual will include a completely unreleased song from Rodrigo, as well as first takes and recording footage from the making of the songs her fans already know and love. We’ve already seen a few different clips from the film, including a lengthy trailer, but today Olivia is exclusively sharing a brief snippet that gives us a look at her first take recording the vocals for one of the album’s best songs, “Brutal.” Keep an ear out for an earlier version of a lyric about exploitation, and also note the extremely supportive encouragement of produce Dan Nigro.

Olivia looks directly into the camera and lets everyone know that she and Dan wrote the song yesterday, before launching into her initial recording of the tune. Check out the snippet up top and keep an eye out for the visual to hit the Disney Plus streaming platform at midnight tonight.