Lil Nas X’s 2021 year just got a little better as he was one of many celebrities that were honored at The Wall Street Journal‘s 2021 Innovator Awards. He received awards at the ceremony along with Kim Kardashian, Lewis Hamilton, and Ryan Reynolds, and during an interview on the red carpet at the event, he was asked for an artist he believed is an innovator and he pointed to someone in the hip-hop world.
“I’d say Playboi Carti,” Lil Nas X, the Music Innovator Award recipient, said. “Me personally, I feel like he’s become like this huge rockstar in the rap realm. He’s a pretty entertaining performer, like, he goes out of the way and he does his own musical style. He’s gonna try what he wants to. I love that. I think that’s innovative.” He then spoke about his own work and how he tried to do things differently with his recent releases.
“As I was writing these songs and going into the booth, I was changing internally,” he said to The Wall Street Journal. “I was telling all these stories and also letting go of a lot of things that had, like, pent up through my music.”
The honor comes after Lil Nas X was given his own day in his hometown of Atlanta after he returned home to celebrate his debut album, Montero.
You can watch Lil Nas X speak about Playboi Carti in the post above
The not-Zodiac Killer strikes again. Ted Cruz was practically dancing over GOP victory in Virginia (he posted a video of his celebratory moves, if you have the stomach for them) with Glenn Youngkin taking the win over ex-Governor Terry McAuliffe. Ted was so happy that he did the microphone rotation all day on Thursday, and he got so excited that he tried to slip a lie in while visiting with Fox News host John Roberts, who promptly called him out for the falsehood.
It was a bizarre lie to tell, too. Cruz could have chosen not to be a sore winner, but nope. He decided to revert to his recent grilling of Attorney General Merrick Garland, who Ted recently pounced upon (while defending far-right parents who lose it during school board meetings and give Nazi salutes). Ted declared that Garland’s stance on chaotic school board meetings was a big reason why Youngkin won Virginia. Not only is that a far-out claim, but yeah, here comes that lie (the “domestic terrorists” part):
“The arrogance of the Democrats saying ‘parents have no control over that,’ and even worse, the attorney general (Joe Biden’s attorney general) calling those parents domestic terrorists. I think that directly led to the result last night.”
To that, Roberts responded, “In fairness, he said that they weren’t domestic terrorists. It was the National School Boards Association that said that.”
Roberts was correct, of course, and the National School Boards Association has since apologized for using the “domestic terrorists” term (which Garland did not use in his memo that addressed possible threats made at school board meetings), but Ted really has it out for Garland, so who knows what fiction the Texas lawmaker has going on in his head. It’s worth noting, though, that Ted tweeted out a clip of the same Fox News segment that cuts out the fact check. Oh boy.
When Suzy Shinn was growing up, music wasn’t an option — it was the only option. At just 26, Shinn has already settled into a prolific career as a producer and recording engineer for artists like Katy Perry, Sia, Dua Lipa, Panic! At The Disco and many more. But when she was a kid, it took her mother’s coaxing to get started on guitar, followed by voice lessons, and then everything started to click. She always had range, though spanning from showtunes to the Beach Boys to Blink-182.
“My mom forced me to play guitar and got me in voice lessons,” Shinn remembers during a recent phone interview. “I was a little showtune person! And I was into playing Led Zeppelin and Eric Clapton, all the rock classics. Then, I discovered the Beach Boys, and Blink-182, and that whole Warped Tour scene, because it was the only concert that came through Wichita, Kansas. That’s kind of what inspired me.” Eager to turn everything into a song, Shinn would set her friend’s poetry to music and perform anywhere a mic could be found — cafes, open mics, bars or pubs. It was slim pickings for a precocious pre-teen in Wichita.
“My mom got me a MacBook, GarageBand, and Logic, so I started recording my own songs when I was about 12,” Shinn says. “I would crank the AutoTune up to 100 because T-Pain was popular then. And obviously I was also on MySpace.I started off playing guitar, but I loved singing.” Graduating high school a year early in a desperate attempt to get out of Kansas quickly, Shinn attended Berklee College Of Music in Boston, studying both as a guitar major and the school’s prestigious, production major.
“At the time production was the hardest major to get into,” she says. “You had to test into it and you had to interview into it. My friends, my guy friends, in particular, were always recording themselves, and I wanted to do that too. They were making music, and producing, and really creating soundscapes. It opened up this whole world of production that I had no idea existed. I didn’t know that there was an art and a science behind it.”
But after her first few years at Berklee, Shinn got an internship at a recording studio in Los Angeles, and it went so well that she decided to continue working in the field instead of returning to Boston. Still, working at a recording studio as a young woman, particularly a woman of color, didn’t come easy. The music industry is notoriously male, white, with low pay and all manners of nepotism and sexism. Shinn remembers taking odd jobs like scrubbing toilets, putting up mics, and getting food — working 24/7 to make ends meet and prove herself in the early years. And there was always the implication that, as a girl, she had to be twice as good just to get by.
“As a girl, you have to work twice as hard,” she said. “You have to know your stuff two, three times more and better than any dude out there. But I learned more in a summer of interning than I did in my major degree that was supposed to teach me all about that. Real experience is always going to outweigh the education component, I think, in this particular field.”
As Shinn got more established in Los Angeles, she began to work with artists that plenty of recording engineers would dream of, especially in the pop space. But in working with some of the biggest names in the world, she was also lucky to find that fame wasn’t the whole story. “With these artists that I get to work with, it’s raw talent,” she marveled. “Brendan Urie, from Panic! At The Disco, he’s just so talented, and on top of that, he’s a kind, hilarious, cool person. Or Katy Perry, I was so scared and nervous to work with her because I’d listened to her music for so long. But she started to sing and it was like ‘Yup, that’s Katy no matter what microphone you put in front of her.’”
And aside from being a complete professional in the booth, Katy is also a great person to be co-working with. Why? She’ll go out and pick up Taco Bell, and bring some back for the rest of the crew, too. “After she walked in for the session, she went out to get Taco Bell and offered to bring me a burrito — just a cool human,” Shinn laughed. “She’s an extremely gifted, highly-successful person, but I would also hang out with her anytime.”
In Shinn’s experience, when it comes to working with pop artists, the vocal production is the most important thing. Pop tends to be more sample-based with less live instrumentation, and vocals, melody, and lyrics are what she focuses on when working with an artist in that genre. “Pop artists are not as instrument-based,” she explained. “That will be sample-based and it’s more focused on the vocal production, the lyrics, the melody — those three together are it. Pop is a singer, in a way, so those three things need to be in sync, and they need to be mind-blowing. And each in their own way: Katy Perry is not the same as Dua Lipa is not the same as Courtney Love. But my focus will be on the pop vocal cutting through.”
As a young woman who is thriving in the engineering space, Shinn hopes that her story will help more girls and young people trying to break in to know that women are doing it. The music industry is tough, yes, but representation is coming slowly but surely. “I’ve read some quotes over the years being like ‘where are the women?’” she said. “I’m like, I’m busting my ass! I’m here. What I want to say to young women is: Don’t walk away. I’ve been in this for over ten years and it hasn’t always been pretty, but we need more of us. If you don’t give up, you’ll find good people. If you don’t walk away, it will come.”
Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
Kristen Stewart casually revealed this week that she’s engaged to her girlfriend of two years, Dylan Meyer. “We’re marrying, we’re totally gonna do it,” the Spencer actress said on The Howard Stern Show. “I wanted to be proposed to, so I think I very distinctly carved out what I wanted and she nailed it. We’re marrying, it’s happening.” Congratulations to the happy couple! Now that the proposal is out of the way, Stewart and Meyer can focus on what really matters: getting Guy Fieri to officiate the wedding.
Stewart told host Howard Stern she and Meyer would likely officiate the wedding themselves, but admitted, “We did hear that Guy Fieri from the Food Network officiates a lot of gay weddings.” She added, “So, the idea of that man — that sweet, sweet spiky-headed man — coming to our wedding and officiating it, it just makes me laugh so much.”
In 2015, Fieri officiated 101 gay weddings in Miami, Florida, in honor of his late sister, who was gay. Why 101? The ‘101 Gay Weddings’ celebration was named after the 101 Dalmatians animated film to target Florida attorney general Pam Bondi, who had actively fought against lifting the same-sex marriage ban,” according to the Hollywood Reporter.
Guy Fieri rules. Kristen Stewart rules. I don’t know much about Dylan Meyer, but she once tweeted, “You either recognize the 1996 Bax Luhrman Romeo and Juliet soundtrack as the apex of soundtracks or you don’t know what soundtracks are,” so she rules, too. Fieri officiating the wedding needs to happen. Someone needs to get in touch with him. It’s probably not too difficult. I bet Guy still has a Yahoo! email address.
When I interviewed Lindsey Jordan of Snail Mail in 2018 I was — like the scores of other music journalists who spoke with Jordan upon the release of her debut Lush — thoroughly charmed. She was funny, self-possessed, and seemingly wise beyond her relatively young age of 18. While she was appreciative of the hype that greeted Lush, a surprisingly classicist ’90s guitar rock throwback, she was also refreshingly skeptical of the media narratives already being projected upon her music.
“I’m just a songwriter before anything else,” she said. “It’s mostly the categorization of Snail Mail being this woman-centric rock outfit that has everything to do with my age, gender, and sexuality, and nothing to do with the music… [It] feels like a pat on the back that I don’t want, for things I can’t control.”
Wow, I thought. She really is going to take over the world.
As impressive as Jordan was, however, I also couldn’t help feeling a slight twinge of concern. She seemed to be working awfully hard at an age when most people are doing bong rips and playing video games. Snail Mail was fixture at indie festivals and music websites. There wasn’t an opportunity — a tour, an interview, a TV appearance, a streaming video performance — that she seemed to turn down. And then there was the cult of personality surrounding Jordan, which resembled similarly intense fan bubbles around other young woman indie artists such as Phoebe Bridgers, Mitski, Lucy Daucus, Julien Baker, and Clairo. Like those singer-songwriters, Jordan was adored for vividly recreating personal traumas in her music, to the point of fostering a devoted (and potentially toxic) following that crowded out all appropriate personal boundaries.
Judging by the very good new Snail Mail album out Friday, Valentine, Jordan has set about re-establishing some of those boundaries. In recent interviews, Jordan has talked about a 45-day rehab stint that occurred after the busy Lush tour cycle. She also references this in one of the most stinging tracks from Valentine, the deceptively poppy synth-rocker “Ben Franklin.” Elsewhere on the album, nearly every song includes a lyric that could be construed as a comment on Jordan’s own suffocating indie fame, including the title track (“Those parasitic cameras, don’t they stop to stare at you?”), the wistful jangler “Headlock” (“Felt the crowd was wrong to claim you / Won’t they ever quiet down?”), and the wispy bedroom folk number “c. et al” (“Even with a job that keeps me moving / Most days I just wanna lie down.”)
In an interview with Pitchfork, Jordan admitted she used to “channel the actual events of the songs” she wrote, which would sometimes cause her to break down on stage. She’s since come to see how unhealthy this is. “It was exhausting,” she said. “My emotional boundaries are so different now. Like, they exist.”
But is that a risk? Fans of Lush responded to Jordan’s eagerness to expose herself in her music, particularly as a young woman with an uncommon ability to articulate feelings most people her age struggle to fully grapple with. On Valentine, she’s just as honest and insightful, it’s just that the message is, “Step off, please.”
The “reaction to indie fame” aspect of Valentine is only one part of the story. This is also Jordan’s “level up” record, the ambitious follow-up to the ingratiating but relatively simple Lush. On the first record, she focused almost solely on guitar, to the point of aligning herself with indie “shredders” like Kurt Vile and Steve Gunn. But on Valentine, she’s expanded her musical palate significantly, layering her songs with keyboards and strings in a manner consistent with “mature sophomore efforts” from young indie phenoms.
Assisting Jordan is producer Brad Cook, an increasingly common presence in the liner notes of acclaimed indie albums. At times Valentine resembles one of Cook’s most celebrated recent productions, Waxahatchee’s Saint Cloud, another post-substance abuse effort marked sonically by a roomy, expansive naturalism. The arrangements on Valentine are more expansive than on Lush, most notably on “Forever (Sailing),” in which Jordan sings about an obsessive relationship over a bed of piano, synths, a sneaky-jazzy bassline, and drum machines. On “Madonna,” she dabbles in bump-and-grind R&B on the verse before unexpectedly downshifting to a chunky indie-rock chorus. For “Light Blue,” a stark acoustic melody is elaborated with a string section that edges Jordan in a coffeehouse direction.
For Jordan, the grown-up, MOR indie of Valentine is a subtle hint that she’s no longer a precocious wunderkind of Lush, and therefore shouldn’t be fetishized solely for her youth or confessional lyrics. And yet Valentine isn’t fully grown up, just as nobody at 22 is fully grown up. Jordan still portrays herself in these latest songs as a person who falls in love a little too hard, and then has to deal with the consequences when things fall apart. This, of course, is the most “young person” subject matter imaginable. (She apparently wrote the songs for Valentine back at her childhood bedroom in Baltimore.)
Along with the asides about indie celebrity, Valentine unfolds like a song cycle in which the protagonist drifts into romantic obsession before slowly coming to accept the punishing reality of being alone. This point arrives on the album’s final track, the doleful “Mia,” in which Jordan sings in a cracked, vulnerable rasp, “Lost love so strange / And Heaven’s not real, babe / I wish that I could lay down next to you.”
Herein lies the tricky balance that Jordan strikes successfully more often than not on Valentine — she’s moved on from childhood, but not all the way. She’s expanded her musical range, but the core intimacy of her songs remains their most urgent attribute. Her heart has been broken, but she has the wherewithal to move forward. She may have re-set her boundaries, but Snail Mail’s music is as inviting as ever.
Valentine is out tomorrow on Matador. Get it here.
With only a week to go until it smashes onto Disney+ with a bucket full of mayhem, Home Sweet Home Alone released a new teaser trailer showcasing the modern update on the holiday classic. This time around, Archie Yates will defend his home from first-time burglars Rob Delaney and Ellie Kemper. What the couple thinks will be an easy job turns into a funhouse of pain as Yates’ does his best to capture the psychotic glee that Macaulay Culkin brought to the 1992 classic.
And while it will be a tall order for Home Sweet Home Alone to match the original, the new teaser makes it clear that this latest installment won’t be skimping on the firepower or elaborate traps.
Here’s the official synopsis:
Max Mercer, a mischievous and resourceful young boy who has been left behind while his family is in Japan for the holidays. So when a married couple attempting to retrieve a priceless heirloom sets their sights on the Mercer family’s home, it is up to Max to protect it from the trespassers, and he will do whatever it takes to keep them out. The reboot promises hilarious hijinks of epic proportions, and despite the absolute chaos, Max eventually comes to realize that there really is no place like home sweet home.
Home Sweet Home Alone starts streaming November 12 on Disney+.
For those of you too young to remember what Joe Millionaire was, or have spent years in therapy attempting to block it out, it was a 2003 reality dating show with a twist: The wealthy bachelor women were scratching each other’s eyes out to marry turned out to be a regular old “construction worker.” Ewww! The show ran for two seasons, then disappeared into the footnotes of the early aughts. Where it ideally would have remained, except FOX has decided that—more than two decades later—it’s still totally cool to portray women as little more than money-grubbers. Except now they’re adding a new twist: There will be TWO bachelors, and only ONE of them is rich. Which means it’ll be up to these gold-diggers to fall in love with the right bachelor—because who wants to fall in love with a guy who isn’t rich?! Gasp!
In what might be the most damning indictment of the 2000s, Deadline wrote that the season 1 finale of Joe Millionaire “drew more than 40 million viewers and was the most-watched entertainment show of the 2003 season and Fox’s most-watched entertainment show in its history at the time.”
“This revival of Joe Millionaire represents a potent combination: One of the most innovative and popular dating shows of all time with [Jersey Shore executive producer/developer] SallyAnn Salsano, who ranks among the most fearless producers in the business,” Rob Wade, Fox Entertainment’s president of alternative entertainment & specials said in a statement. “I’ve long admired Joe Millionaire for its daring premise, and since the moment I joined Fox, I’ve wanted to bring it back in the spotlight in a whole new way for both new viewers and fans of the original.”
That makes one of us. You can watch the trailer for the rebooted ruse above.
Elmo and his Sesame Street cohorts have welcomed a bunch of guests onto the program over the years, and as the show gets ready to enter its 52nd season, more new friends have been announced. The music world is well-represented in the upcoming season, as a recently shared trailer shows a clip featuring Jon Batiste singing with Elmo and a character who appears to be a garbage collector. We also get a glimpse of Kacey Musgraves sharing smiles with Elmo, Big Bird, and a handful of other characters.
Furthermore, USA Today reports that the 35-episode season will also feature Billie Eilish and Anderson .Paak. Eilish will appear alongside The Count, while .Paak is set to perform a song for a Martin Luther King Jr. Day episode. The new season starts streaming on HBO Max on November 11 before coming to PBS Kids in the fall of 2022.
But through it all, director David Ayer hasn’t given up on the world seeing Suicide Squad the way it was meant to be seen. “I made something amazing. My cut is intricate and emotional journey with some bad people who are sh*t on and discarded… The studio cut is not my movie,” he wrote in an open letter that was published before James Gunn’s well-received The Suicide Squad was released. Ayer has also been steadfast that Leto did “magnificent work” as the Joker, a claim he brought up again on Wednesday.
“Jared killed it. But no one knows,” Ayer tweeted, along with a never-before-seen photo of Leto’s Joker carrying a baseball bat. He shared more pictures on Instagram, including a close-up of Leto laughing maniacally and another where he’s holding a golden gun.
A lot of people thought Justice League sucked. Then we got the actually cut and realized it was great!!! Let’s just go ahead and #ReleaseTheAyerCuthttps://t.co/CHnFa0Apvu
Ben Collins has seen a lot of bizarre shit in his time. As a senior reporter for NBC News, Collins’ specific coverage beat is extremism, disinformation, and the internet, which means he’s uncomfortably familiar with QAnon and the conspiracy theorists it/he attracts. But even Collins was blown away by just how many people took a pilgrimage to Dallas this week to try to witness the reemergence of JFK Jr. And by that we mean the “reemergence” that never happened because JFK Jr. died in a plane crash more than 20 years ago.
On Wednesday, as Raw Story reported, Collins chatted with Rachel Maddow about the events of this week, and how even he—seasoned witnesser of bizarre cultist behavior—was “shocked,” and more than a little disconcerted, by just how many people showed up in Texas. Maddow told Collins she had wanted to speak with him specifically because he has been so enmeshed in extremism culture through his reporting.
“It is easy to sort of point and drop your jaw and be agog at this,” Maddow said of the Dallas gathering. “But I feel like you’ve been smart about how these are our fellow Americans and these are people who are politically engaged in their own way and these folks are looking for something and believing they are finding it within these strains.” Collins agreed, but admitted that even he was “shocked about this, frankly. In the QAnon universe, this is like a denomination of it—this JFK, Jr. thing.”
But Collins also wanted to remind viewers “what QAnon is: It’s this idea that there’s this guy named Q who’s embedded in the government. He was saying that there’s this big, secret plan for Donald Trump to save the world from all these pedophiles. At the end of it, all these satanic pedophiles, who they believe are like Hillary Clinton… would be killed in the streets on live television. That’s why this is scary first of all, because all these people believe this. And all these people are hoping for it.”
According to Collins, back in December 2018, even Q “got kind of sick of his followers… He said, ‘Look, this is not true. The JFK, Jr. thing? He’s not alive. He’s not coming back.’” Q, in a rare moment of seeming sanity, also told his followers that the flat Earth theories were not true and that elections were safe. As a result, says Collins, a majority of QAnon followers “moved on to different kinds of conspiracy theories. But there is this one subset, this extremely religious subset, that has made Donald Trump basically a messiah in this space. And JFK Jr. as his ostensible running mate when he comes back to life.”
Collins noted that as most of these people have been thrown off of Facebook and Twitter, they’re using Telegram—a social media platform specifically for extremists—to essentially create “a religion in real time. And the scary thing is, even the people who think they’re nuts in the QAnon community, the end game is still there. The end game is still: Let’s go murder our enemies.”
Maddow summed it up when called this a “spooky and unsettling story.” You can watch the full interview above.
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