The meme comes from a 1968 episode of Spider-Man, “Double Identity,” in which “Spider-Man attempts to catch a man looking like Peter Parker who steals a valuable manuscript, but the man’s bodyguard Brutus knocks him down. The culprit is Charles Cameo who impersonates others while stealing art treasures.”
Look, it was great to see Doc Ock, Green Goblin, Electro, Sandman, and Lizard in No Way Home, but if Marvel is serious about having the highest-grossing movie of all-time again, Charles Cameo needs to be in the next Spider-Man movie. The people (me) are demanding more Charles Cameo. Get a load of his wiki:
Along with his henchman, Brutus, he impersonates others (with full-sized costumes) and manages to steal things using them. He has impersonated: The prime minister, Peter Parker, Spider-Man, J. Jonah Jameson, Salvador Picasso (artist), and an art gallery manager.
Has Electro ever impersonated an art galley manager AND the prime minster? I think not. That’s some real villainy. Maybe he’ll be in the bonus features of the No Way Home Blu-ray (which you can preorder here).
After a nearly three-year hiatus, 80/35 Music Festival will return to Des Moines, Iowa this summer. The two-day non-profit festival kicks of Friday, July 8th at downtown Des Moines’ Western Gateway Park and boasts a line-up of over 40 acts across three stages.
Joined by the likes of Japanese Breakfast, Guided By Voices, and Meet Me At The Altar, Father John Misty will headline Friday. On Saturday, July 9th, Jamila Woods, Future Island, and Haiku Hands will take the stage ahead of headliner Charli XCX.
“We could not be more excited to return to downtown Des Moines for the first 80/35 since 2019,” said Mickey Davis, Executive Director of the Des Moines Music Coalition, in a statement. “Since 2008 the festival has become an essential part of the fabric of summer in Des Moines, and we look forward to celebrating the musicians, music fans, music industry workers, and volunteers who make this festival so special.”
Proceeds from 80/35 ticket sales will benefit Des Moines’ local music ecosystem through programs like Music University, a professional development conference for aspiring musicians, as well as the GDP showcase.
General onsale begins Friday, February 25th. Members of the Des Moines Music Coalition can purchase early-bird tickets now.
Courtesy of 80/35 Music Festival
Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
After Roku unveiled the first look photos of Daniel Radcliffe as Weird Al Yankovic in the upcoming biopic, WEIRD: The Al Yankovic Story, the actor has assured fans that he takes the role very seriously, and he’s committed to diving deep into the life of the accordion-wielding musician, wherever it might lead.
“Wearing the Hawaiian shirt is a huge responsibility that I don’t take lightly,” Radcliffe told People. “And I’m honored to finally share with the world the absolutely 100 percent unassailably true story of Weird Al’s depraved and scandalous life.”
As for Yankovic, well, he’s certain that this will become the defining role of Radcliffe career. In fact, he can’t think of anything else that might top it for the young actor. Via PEOPLE:
Yankovic, 62, said last month that he is “absolutely thrilled that Daniel Radcliffe will be portraying” him in the film, joking of the British actor, “I have no doubt whatsoever that this is the role future generations will remember him for.” He co-wrote the movie with director Eric Appel.
The stirring biopic will premiere on The Roku Channel, who also touted the epic nature of the project in a statement following Radcliffe’s casting. “The biopic holds nothing back, exploring every facet of Yankovic’s life, from his meteoric rise to fame with early hits like ‘Eat It’ and ‘Like a Surgeon’ to his torrid celebrity love affairs and famously depraved lifestyle.”
Back in December 2021, Canadian festival Osheaga announced the headliners for its 2022 event: Foo Fighters, ASAP Rocky, and Dua Lipa. Now, the festival, which goes down at Montreal’s Parc Jean-Drapeau from July 29 to 31, has unveiled its full slate of performers and there’s plenty of firepower in it.
Aside from the headliners, the lineup features 100 Gecs, Ashnikko, BIA, Beabadoobee, Big Sean, Bleachers, Burna Boy, Charli XCX, Cordae, Dominic Fike, Freddie Gibbs, Girl In Red, Glass Animals, Idles, Khruangbin, King Hannah, Kygo, Local Natives, Lucy Dacus, Machine Gun Kelly, Men I Trust, Mitski, Pi’erre Bourne, Pierre Kwenders, PinkPantheress, Porter Robinson, Sampa the Great, Slowthai, The Kid Laroi, Tinashe, Tones And I, Tove Lo, Turnstile, Wet Leg, and Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
OSHEAGA 2022 TIME TO SHINE! We are proud to present our 15th anniversary lineup for OSHEAGA presented by @Bell_FR in collaboration with @coorslightcanada! Weekend passes on sale NOW, Single-days available on Friday at NOON https://t.co/wO7B31Oaqopic.twitter.com/RxnAVupFFf
This is a big year for the fest, as its 2020 and 2021 editions were canceled for obvious reasons. That said, they did host a mini all-Canadian event in October 2021, which featured Jessie Reyez, Majid Jordan, Dvsn, Roy Woods, Grandson, and Faouzia.
Weekend passes for the 2022 fest are available now, while single-day passes will be available starting this Friday. For more information on that front, check out the Osheaga website.
Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
Spoilers for The Power of the Dog will be found below.
Oscar nominations abounded for Jane Campion’s new Netflix movie, The Power Of The Dog, starring Benedict Cumberbatch as a sinister rancher (who’s fueled by toxic masculinity). Phil ended up coming around to a more civilized stance later in the film, but he still continued to terrorize his sister in law (Kirsten Dunst), and Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee) kept his word to protect his mom. As the film shows, however, there’s a lack of definitive clarity in how Phil dies, and the realization of what happened came a surprise not only to his brother (Jesse Plemons) but the audience.
Peter, a bookish lad wise on the ways of pathogens, had hatched the idea of tainting a rope while noting that Phil had an open wound on his hands. That rope carried the Anthrax bacterium, which sealed Phil’s fate, as theorized by the medical examiner who attended his funeral.
Netflix
Phil’s brother had a hard time believing that his generally careful brother (when it came to dealing with potentially infected animals) had fallen prey to Anthrax, and his cause of death was not technically confirmed in the movie. Instead, Campion and her editor (Peter Sciberras, who’s Oscar-nominated for his work on the movie) told The Wrap how he and Campion decided to scrap the final shot of the movie, which went like this:
“It was a slow pan across Peter’s desk in his room, which showed a medical book on his desk,” revealed Sciberras. “And then the camera landed on the definition of anthrax in the book. And that was the last shot of the film.”
For the audience, this would have explicitly connected Phil’s untimely death to Peter’s knowledge and cunning of how to use anthrax as a poison. “That’s the exact thing that the novel does,” Sciberras pointed out.
The final open-ended note certainly generated discussion, and as Sciberras noted, he wrestled with the idea of removing that shot, but Campion pushed for the subtler ending. In the end, Sciberras came around while noting that the book’s ending worked in a less visual medium, but onscreen, “it felt kind of like a really basic idea.” And the Academy responded positively while showering the movie, including Campion and Sciberras with nods ahead of the March 27 ceremony.
The Power of the Dog is currently streaming on Netflix.
Season one of the Korean zombie series has spent four weeks in the top 10, and as noted by Comic Book, it’s “now the #3 Non-English language TV show on all of Netflix with over 536.39 million hours streamed.” The only shows with more hours viewed within the first 28 days of release (which is how Netflix calculates these things) are Squid Game season one, obviously, and Money Heist part four on the non-English side, and Bridgerton season one, Stranger Things season three, and The Witcher season one on the English chart. But because that 536.39 million hours only includes the first 23 days, All of Us Are Dead could top everything but Squid Game by this time next week.
Here’s the full list:
1. Squid Game: Season 1 (1.650 billion hours)
2. Money Heist: Part 4 (619 million hours)
3. All of Us Are Dead: Season 1 (536.39 million hours)
4. Money Heist: Part 3 (426.4 million hours)
5. Money Heist: Part 5 (395 million hours)
6. Café con aroma de mujer: Season 1 (326.9 million hours)
7. Lupin: Part 1 (316.83 million hours)
8. Elite: Season 3 (275.3 million hours)
9. Who Killed Sara?: Season 1 (266.43 million hours)
10. Elite: Season 4 (257 million hours)
Greene registered her complaints with noted and very, very loud conspiracy theorist Alex Jones of all people, who—subplot alert!—has been pushing Greene to run for president. She appeared on his InfoWars on Sunday—which might just have been the perfect audience to normalize her very much not-normal behaviors. But MTG seemed downright serious when she carped about the way she is treated by not just Democrats, but by the media at large.
“It bothers me so much,” Greene said. “They treat me as if I’m some kind of crazy person, or like I have three horns coming out of my head.”
Wait, she doesn’t?
Marge Greene says she is misunderstood: “It just bothers me so much. They treat me as if I’m some kind of crazy person – like I have 3 horns coming out of my head. But what they don’t understand is, they’re the ones that are crazy.” pic.twitter.com/u8XEdZEtdw
Ms Greene, who was stripped of her congressional committee assignments last year after video surfaced of her harassing a school shooting survivor, added that “they” do not understand that “they’re the ones that are crazy and they’re the ones that are so disconnected.”
Spoken like every 5-year-old who’s ever tried that “I know you are, but what am I?” bit.
Debates about who the best rapper is never seem to end, and now Vince Staples has shared his thoughts on one aspect of the discussion: When it comes to the “biggest” rapper, he thinks Snoop Dogg occupies that throne.
Speaking with Ebro Darden for a Black History Month episode of Apple Music 1’s The Message, Staples said of Snoop, “Snoop Dogg has always been the biggest rapper as far as brand, and namesake, to me at least. You can argue, people are equal, but you can’t argue nobody’s bigger than Snoop Dogg… He got the Martha Stewart show cracking right now, and nobody’s saying, ‘Who is that,’ when they watching the show, you know what I mean?”
He also explained why this year’s hip-hop-focused Super Bowl Halftime Show didn’t feel like a big deal to him, because it’s something that was supposed to happen:
“To me, [the halftime show]’s not even something to be super-duper excited about. It’s like, finally, because you can’t lie about it no more. It’s been so many times that they’ve pretended that this wasn’t a phenomenon, you know what I’m saying? They were playing songs from decades ago. That just goes to show you how long it’s been a thing, how long it’s been the pinnacle, but it’s good that they finally stop being stubborn and start coming around because it’s unavoidable at this point. […]
It’s just good to have that moment and just see how it comes full circle from Eminem taking his knee stance, to bringing it full circle with the Kaepernick situation, and the work that Jay-Z’s done in the messaging, and the lyrics, and all that… My pops used to always tell me… You come home like, ‘Oh, yeah. I got good grades.’ He’s like, ‘What you expect? You happy? You supposed to do that.’ I’m not giving people pats on the back for doing what they supposed to do. That’s just not how I’m built. I’m not proud of them, I’m not happy that they did it: they should have did it, you know what I’m saying? What else you going to do? What you going to put on there that’s more popping in LA for the LA Super Bowl? What’s your options? They had no other options except for the biggest hip-hop producer in the history of hip-hop arguably, the biggest rapper in hip-hop history arguably, and the biggest rapper out right now arguably. What other choice did you have? They didn’t do us no favor. They did what they was supposed to do.”
In his songs, Adam Granduciel presents himself as a man adrift — he’s out on the road, or standing in the rain, or floating in between the waves, or perhaps just lost in a dream. But on stage last week in St. Paul with his band, The War On Drugs, he cut an entirely different figure: He looked happy.
“It’s my birthday and I’m going to play a fucking Bob Seger song!” he goofily exclaimed at the first of two packed mid-week concerts at the Palace Theater. Granduciel then proceeded to tease “Night Moves,” the most heartland rock-y tune in the legendary heartland rocker’s catalog, before finally landing on a song that The War On Drugs had never played live before, the stately ballad “Against The Wind.”
It was a sentimental choice for the 43-year-old Granduciel, who mentioned that “Against The Wind” is a song he’s played frequently for his young son, Bruce. But it also had a perhaps subliminal thematic importance for a band dealing with the usual headaches (and a few unusual headaches) of playing live in the “sort of but not really” post-Covid era. Two weeks before the tour began in mid-January, they were forced to cancel two shows in Toronto due to Canadian indoor capacity restrictions. They also decided to send their support acts packing, in order to keep the tour party bubble as small as possible. But then a member of the party got sick anyway a few days into the tour, which required postponing gigs in Nashville and Atlanta.
And then there was the tour’s would-be crowning moment, a headlining show in late January at Madison Square Garden in New York City, a “we made it!” achievement for any band. But for The War On Drugs, it was accompanied by a fierce Nor’easter that swamped the East Coast in a blizzard the day of the concert.
As bassist Dave Hartley mused to me in a recent interview. “Going into that show I was like, is this tour snakebitten?”
By the time The War On Drugs reached the Midwest a few weeks later, any worries about being stuck on a cursed journey had seemingly abated. Having seen the band more than a half-dozen times over the course of a decade — and after digging deep into their bootlegs — I am confident in declaring that they have never played better than they are right now. The shows in St. Paul found them in an enviable sweet spot — the performances were focused and powerful, and the camaraderie between the band and the audience was funny and celebratory. Along with the “Against The Wind” bust out, the birthday show was distinguished by a pizza being delivered to Adam on stage, which he then gifted to the band’s lighting director. That was after an epic balloon drop during the set’s cathartic high point, “Under The Pressure.” It all felt simultaneously tight and loose.
In the band’s press photos, Granduciel typically is seen brooding by himself, a signifier of the solitary manner in which he has assembled most War On Drugs albums. But for their latest LP, 2021’s I Don’t Live Here Anymore, they projected more of a group identity as Granduciel behind the scenes also sought to make the writing and recording process more collaborative. And that has translated big time to the communal vibe of the current tour. Like The E Street Band, each member of The War On Drugs now has a recognizable persona — Hartley is the stoic consigliere situated to Granduciel’s immediate right, drummer Charlie Hall is the kimono-clad showman, keyboardist Robbie Bennett is the swaying creator of synth-y moods, multi-instrumentalists Anthony LaMarca and Charlie Natchez are the invaluable utility fielders, and new touring musician Eliza Hardy Jones is the Patti Scialfa figure.
“There’s something about seeing us where it’s like, ‘Oh, this stuff gets a little bit more fully realized in the live environment,’” Granduciel told me. “It was like one day all of a sudden we were a good live band.”
If Granduciel sounds somewhat surprised by this development — I would call them a great live band, by the way — it’s only because he’s aware of the band’s history before their 2014 breakthrough, Lost In The Dream. For many fans, the history of The War On Drugs starts with their third album, which is also when the current lineup first came together as a live unit. But the story of how they got there is long and rife with dramatic twists and turns that for years seemed to portend all but certain failure.
“I don’t think people realize how strange our trajectory is, where each record has been incrementally a little bit better and a little bit bigger than the last one,” said Hartley, the band’s only other charter member. “Most people think that all of a sudden we came out of nowhere. That’s not really how it went at all.”
Formed in 2005 a few years after Granduciel moved to Philadelphia, The War On Drugs didn’t start out making heart-tugging, widescreen anthems that evoke the surging emotionalism of stadium rock. Initially, it was “a purely freaked out art show” featuring Granduciel and his good friend Kurt Vile doing a noisy and deconstructionist take on AOR, Hartley said. “We were playing basements, and it was just very experimental in the early days.”
Granduciel and Hartley have been reflecting lately on those early days in light of how dramatically their fortunes have changed in the past decade. Yes, mounting a tour during a lingering pandemic is a challenge. But it’s nothing compared with one of their first tours in the late aughts, when they were invited to open some dates in the upper Midwest for a noise-punk band from Brooklyn who subsequently broke up the day before the tour was supposed to start. The clubs said The War On Drugs could play, but they wouldn’t get paid.
“We still fucking went!” Hartley said. “It was me and Kurt and Adam. We piled in Adam’s Volvo. And as we’re driving pieces of the Volvo started falling off.”
The tour only got worse from there. They had to pick up a drummer in every city; one night, they couldn’t find anyone so Hartley played drums. “The whole tour was a trainwreck,” he said. “Really fucked up shows, nobody came, we lost money. The Volvo was spewing out fumes. The catalytic converter literally fell off as we were pulling back into Philly.”
“We had no real concept,” Granduciel admits. “I didn’t have any confidence. I was kind of driving a ship with my eyes closed.”
In those years, a semi-stable lineup of Granduciel, Vile, and Hartley was augmented by a revolving cast of support musicians. One of those people was the affable Hall, who didn’t become the permanent drummer until the Lost In The Dream era.
“Sometimes there were four of us. Sometimes there were eight of us,” he said of the early days. “You weren’t entirely sure who was going to be at the gig when you showed up.”
The band’s career path was so haphazard in the late aughts and early 2010s that it’s probably overly generous to call it a “career path.” And yet amid the chaos, there was an important evolution taking place. What started as a dirty, lo-fi revisionist take on classic rock was slowly moving toward an extension of that tradition. Hartley noticed it initially with Granduciel’s guitar playing, which would ultimately become one of the band’s sonic signatures. “In the very beginning he played acoustic through an amp generally,” he recalled. “At some point he started playing electric. I remember literally being like, ‘Whoa, he’s soloing all the time now. When did this happen?’”
Another turning point occurred in 2008 at the La Route du Rock festival in France, around the time of The War On Drugs’ debut album, Wagonwheel Blues. The band was under-rehearsed and barely recognized. But something magic happened when they were suddenly thrust into a wide open space in front of a large audience. The music could finally swell to proper size.
“Even before we knew how to present live music, it didn’t feel like it was a house or basement-type show,” Granduciel said. “It always felt like we needed space.”
If there is a specific moment when the modern version of The War On Drugs was born, it was a six-week trek across the United States in support of Destroyer in the spring of 2011. Dan Bejar invited them to open in spite of their second album, Slave Ambient, not being scheduled for release until that August. But that’s not the only reason why playing these shows might have seemed at the time like a bad idea. There was also the matter of the tour starting in Bejar’s hometown of Vancouver, a city located about 4,800 miles from Philadelphia.
“If we would have had proper management, somebody would’ve said, ‘No, you’re not going to do that tour,’” Granduciel said. “But we didn’t. So, I was like, ‘Yeah, let’s do it.’”
Destroyer had just released one of their most acclaimed and popular albums, Kaputt. To pull off that album’s lush, 1980s-inspired sound, the lineup swelled to eight musicians. I never made the connection until Granduciel mentioned this tour, but the current lineup of The War On Drugs has a lot in common with Kaputt-era Destroyer, down to the prominent use of atmospheric saxophone wails to complement romantic, synth-driven soundscapes.
Not that The War On Drugs sounded at all like that in 2011. I saw them for the first time on this tour at a bar in Madison, Wis., with about 20 other people who arrived about an hour before Destroyer was set to perform. (I had been a War On Drugs fan ever since hearing “Arms Like A Boulders” a few years earlier on a local college radio station.) Touring as a four-piece that now included Bennett on keyboards and guitar, they were in the midst of their “primal” era, in which they played harder and louder and with more improvisations.
“There would be a lot of long jams,” Bennett said. “Holding a groove for a really long time. I think doing that helps you gel as a band.”
For Granduciel, the challenge was “how can we make these albums that were done with loops and sampling and resampling sound like a band?” Every gig was a process of trial and error with the goal of reinventing The War On Drugs in real time. There was also the aspirational aspect of seeing a more successful and organized band like Destroyer function on the road.
“Opening for Destroyer every night, they have this big band, and this big sound,” he said. “And they were in a bus, which to us seemed like, ‘Oh, man, I doubt we’ll ever be in a bus. But what if we are?’”
When it came time to tour behind Lost In The Dream, Granduciel insisted on making his own kind of “big sound,” even if he was reasonably sure it would break him financially. This is when Hall, LaMarca, and Natchez entered the picture. “It was just like, ‘If this is my last tour with this band, before it starts hemorrhaging money, I really want to have a six-piece band.”
And the rest, as they say, is history. Though The War On Drugs continue to grow in significant ways. The lack of confidence that Granduciel copped to early on has been replaced by the bravado of road-tested veterans. I was sad to miss the MSG show — the weather conspired against taking a flight to New York — but reports from friends and colleagues suggest that it was a triumph under trying circumstances. In St. Paul, the grandness of the performances — which on both nights extended to more than two and a half hours — evidenced a band hitting a new peak. If you can, see them now.
Of the new songs, the MVP is “Harmonia’s Dream,” which has been stretched to about 12 minutes thanks to an extended, Kraftwerk-like prologue that sets up a crowd-pleasing explosion of sound. I also loved hearing “Slow Ghost,” a great mid-tempo number reminiscent of Tom Petty’s Hard Promises period that was inexplicably left off of I Don’t Live Here Anymore. Hartley singled out the “Darkness On The Edge Of Town energy” of “Wasted” as a personal highlight, as well as the “fucking sick” funk of “Victim” and the undeniable title track. (“I see a lot of cellphones pop out when we play that song,” he said.) There’s also room for improvement — the instrumental fade-out on “Change” seems ripe for greater musical exploration down the road. (“I don’t feel like we’ve totally cracked that one yet,” Hartley admitted.)
On the second night in St. Paul, Granduciel solicited requests from the crowd and responded by leading the band into “Coming Through,” a rarity from 2010’s Future Weather EP. The last time I heard them play it was at that show in Madison, Wis. with Destroyer. Both the times and the band have changed so much since then.
For all of the many valleys The War On Drugs have traversed, Granduciel seemed to enjoy riding their current peak. After playfully teasing the riff from “Night Moves” throughout the night — some city is bound to get the whole song on this tour — he called back to a line from the previous night’s “Against The Wind”
“Let the cowboys ride!” he exclaimed with an infectious smirk. And with that, The War On Drugs walked off stage and headed off to the next city.
The War On Drugs is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
As usual, a new release from Kanye means a new slew of drama. Some fans will likely be impacted by his decision to bring out both accused rapist Marilyn Manson and embattled rapper DaBaby at yet another listening. Then, there’s the fact that he sampled his own estranged ex-wife, Kim Kardashian, praising his skills in one of the Donda 2 tracks. But Ye has also included words from another pretty famous woman on his new album. Getting back into his political lane, Ye included none other than Vice President Kamala Harris on one of Donda 2‘s tracks.
In case you missed the moment during last year’s tumultuous election, it’s the recorded phone call between Kamala and President Joe Biden when she calls him with the confirmed results that their ticket did, in fact, win the White House. Though the Democratic party is currently in power, and still seeming incapable of getting any real change pushed through congress, perhaps Kanye quoting Kamala’s heartfelt “we did it!” chant was a little early on. But Kanye is never one to shy away from political games,especially since he ran for president himself in the race Joe eventually won. Still, his inclusion of Kamala’s take on the situation is notable,and might even lead to more.
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OSHEAGA 2022 
