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Lauri Markkanen’s time as a free agent has come to an end, as the now-former Chicago Bulls big man is headed to the Cleveland Cavaliers as part of a three-team deal. The news of the Cavs landing Markkanen originally came via Adrian Wojnarowski of ESPN, who reported that the team will give him a four-year deal worth $67 million in a sign-and-trade.

Wojnarowski and Shams Charania of The Athletic then explained that the deal is actually going to be a three-team deal, one that also involves the Portland Trail Blazers. In addition to the various picks that are going to be on the move, the Bulls will land Portland wing Derrick Jones Jr., while the Blazers will bring in Cavaliers steady hand Larry Nance Jr.

The Cavaliers appear to be betting that Markkanen can have a career resurgence in the team’s already-loaded frontcourt, as Jarrett Allen got paid this summer and the team opted to take Evan Mobley with the No. 3 pick in the 2021 NBA Draft. As for the other two teams, Jones gives the Bulls some much-needed help on the wing and prevents them from giving Markkanen the kind of payday he coveted, while Nance brings a level of consistency when he’s healthy and helps the Blazers in their attempt to bring in new faces as Damian Lillard has made clear he wants the team to revamp its roster.

All week, Lorde has been celebrating the release of new album Solar Power with a residency on The Late Late Show With James Corden, performing the album’s title track, “California,” “Green Light” (throwback!), and now, “Fallen Fruit.” During her closing set, Lorde, in a plunging dress, came with a team of backing singers, all of whom provided strong harmony on the guitar- and keys-heavy track.

Lorde debuted “California” and “Fallen Fruit” on Good Morning America last week. “I just found myself having a lot of transformative experiences outside,” she said in the GMA interview. “I’d come off a big period of working, being really busy, and being outside, being under the sun was really inspirational to me, so I started trying to channel it into the music.”

Speaking to The Guardian about Solar Power and the protest-song elements to “Fallen Fruit,” Lorde admitted, “I do think these songs are love stories more than anything. But love is complicated.” The singer was at the same time careful about ever being labeled an activist, saying, “If you’re looking for a savior, well that’s not me […] I know enough about how people view me – we’re taught to view famous people as gods now – and I just wanted to dismantle that.”

Watch Lorde’s “Fallen Fruit” performance above. Solar Power is out now via Republic. Get it here.

Whenever Seth Meyers fires up his “A Closer Look” segment, the Late Night host never fails to go all out in roasting a topic. This time around, Meyers set his sights on the dangerous medical trend surrounding Ivermectin. Over the past month, conservatives have increasingly turned to the drug as an alternative to getting the COVID-19 vaccine and even gone so far as to claim it’s a cure to the pandemic disease. There’s just one small problem: Ivermectin is a deworming medicine for livestock. As in, not for human consumption.

During Thursday’s “A Closer Look,” Meyers unloaded on Fox News for pushing the “miracle drug,” which completely caught the Late Night host by surprise. Via Vanity Fair:

“I gotta say, when I first heard that Fox News was pushing Ivermectin, I knew it was gonna be bad, but I was not expecting it to be horse dewormer,” Meyers said. “It sounds like the name of a drug they give supersoldiers in a Paul Verhoeven movie to turn them into Robocops.” He continued, “You know someone at the company that made ivermectin once said, ‘Hey, should we put “not for people” on the horse pill labels?’ and someone else said, ‘There’s a picture of a horse on the bottle, it’s fine!’”

But Meyers didn’t stop there. The Late Night host continued to blast this latest development, which is a new low in Fox News ongoing efforts to weaken COVID mitigation efforts.

“I mean, how does this sh*t keep getting dumber and dumber?” Meyers asked. “First, it was hydroxychloroquine, then it was bleach, powerful lights, now it’s horse dewormer? I’m honestly terrified to imagine what’s next. One day, we’re gonna wake up and Brian Kilmeade’s gonna be telling people you can cure Covid by eating kibble and sleeping in a bed of kitty litter.”

This article originally appeared on 04.15.19

On May 28, 2014, 13-year-old Athena Orchard of Leicester, England, died of bone cancer. The disease began as a tumor in her head and eventually spread to her spine and left shoulder. After her passing, Athena’s parents and six siblings were completely devastated. In the days following her death, her father, Dean, had the difficult task of going through her belongings. But the spirits of the entire Orchard family got a huge boost when he uncovered a secret message written by Athena on the backside of a full-length mirror.

After removing the mirror from the wall, Dean discovered a 3,000-word letter written all the way down its backside in black pen. “She never mentioned it, but it’s the kind of thing she’d do,” her father told People magazine. “She was a very spiritual person, she’d go on about stuff that I could never understand – she was so clever.” The moving letter revealed her deepest feelings about her fight with the dreaded disease. “Every day is special, so make the most of it, you could get a life-ending illness tomorrow so make the most of every day,” she wrote. “Life is only bad if you make it bad.”

via YouTube

Although Athena is gone, the mirror now serves as a powerful memory of her undying spirit. “We’re keeping the mirror forever, it is a part of her we can keep in the house, it will always be in her room,” her mother, Caroline, said. “Just reading her words felt like she was still here with us, she had such an incredible spirit.”

Athena’s full message:

“Happiness depends upon ourselves. Maybe it’s not about the happy ending, maybe it’s about the story. The purpose of life is a life of purpose. The difference between ordinary and extraordinary is that little extra. Happiness is a direction not a destination. Thank you for existing. Be happy, be free, believe, forever young. You know my name, not my story.

You have heard what I’ve done, but not what I’ve been through. Love is like glass, looks so lovely but it’s easy to shatter.

Love is rare, life is strange, nothing lasts and people change. Every day is special, so make the most of it, you could get a life ending illness tomorrow so make the most of every day. Life is only bad if you make it bad. If someone loves you, then they wouldn’t let you slip away no matter how hard the situation is. Remember that life is full of ups and downs.

Never give up on something you can’t go a day without thinking about. I want to be that girl who makes the bad days better and the one that makes you say my life has changed since I met her!

Love is not about how much you say I love you – it’s about how much you can prove it’s true. Love is like the wind, you can feel it but you can’t see it. I’m waiting to fall in love with someone I can open my heart to. Love is not about who you can see spending your future with, it’s about who you can’t see spending your life without… Life is a game for everyone but love is the prize. Only I can judge me.

Sometimes love hurts. Now I’m fighting myself. Baby I can feel your pain. Dreams are my reality. It hurts but it’s okay, I’m used to it. Don’t be quick to judge me, you only see what I choose to show you… you don’t know the truth. I just want to have fun and be happy without being judged.

This is my life, not yours, don’t worry about what I do. People gonna hate you, rate you, break you, but how strong you stand, that’s what makes you… you!

There’s no need to cry because I know you’ll be by my side.”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has a habit of attracting MAGA kooks. If being stalked by Marjorie Taylor Greene at every turn through the halls of Congress weren’t enough, now she has Tina Forte to contend with—yet another bleached-blonde Republican whose only real interest in politics seems to be in taking AOC down.

Forte, who would be a shoo-in to be part of the cast if Jersey Shore did a reboot for 50-somethings, has made no secret of her disdain for AOC, as her campaign video, which you can watch below, makes clear. (It’s a gem.) But Raw Story is reporting that there are a few far more disturbing things that video doesn’t show, which Snopes dug up on the congressional wannabe. Specifically: That in addition to pushing a number of QAnon theories, and regularly posing with Proud Boys, Forte both promoted and attended the “Save America” rally in Washington, D.C. on January 6—the event that led to the insurrection at the Capitol.

According to Snopes:

We found Forte repeatedly used hashtags related to QAnon conspiracy theories. The QAnon mentions even included cries of “Save the Children,” referring to the debunked conspiracy theory that makes claims of mass pedophilia and “Satanic blood-drinking” by Democrats. She took multiple photographs in October, November, and December 2020 with far-right Proud Boys leader Henry “Enrique” Tarrio. Further, we uncovered evidence that Forte pushed false election conspiracy theories, including the phrase “Stop the Steal.”

Forte’s accounts that pushed potentially dangerous content were still active months later on Facebook, Instagram (which is owned by Facebook), Twitter, and YouTube. Even more striking was the fact that Forte herself attended the Capitol riot, where she livestreamed on Facebook. She took selfies with a number of attendees who considered her a “superstar.” In a live video, she urged people at then-U.S. President Donald Trump’s rally on the Ellipse to make their way to the Capitol. We even found that she entered a restricted area after the crowd knocked down barriers that law enforcement installed. All of her posts promoting the date in the weeks before Jan. 6 appeared to reach at least tens of thousands of people, but likely many more.

Forte live-streamed her visit to our nation’s capital, and the Capitol, via Facebook Live, where she urged her viewers to “Get your asses to the Capitol,” adding that, “We need to fight for our freedom, fight for our country, fight for our president, fight for our Constitution.”

Snopes reached out to Forte’s team for comment about their report—which goes much, much deeper—but so far has not received a response. You can view the full report here.

(Via Raw Story)

Elon Musk’s ventures know no bounds, and that’s prompting a few worries, like with his plans to build humanoid robots. There are also alarm bells concerning Space-X’s Starlink satellites, which a leading scientist says are currently responsible for about 50% of all close encounters that could result in collisions between two spacecraft. However, there are also reports that Starlink outages are very much a thing, which might be partially why SpaceX is (according to the Verge) preparing to launch 30,000 more satellites, if the company can get approval from the FCC.

This led, of course, to complaints, including a letter of protest from Amazon subsidiary Kuiper Systems, which has deployed its own array of broadband-internet satellites. As such, Amazon is asking the FCC to deny SpaceX’s request at this time, which isn’t too far-fetched, considering that SpaceX’s current 1740 low-earth satellites are already causing potential collision issues. Well, yeah, as one can imagine, Elon Musk isn’t too happy, so he’s got jokes, first about what Jeff Bezos might be doing with his retirement when he’s not riding on his own rocket.

“Turns out Besos [sic] retired in order to pursue a full-time job filing lawsuits against SpaceX,” the Tesla CEO tweeted.

And of course, Musk giggled along with jokes about Bezo’s famed Blue Origin joyride rocket and a planned spacecraft for Project Jarvis.

It’s just another day in the billionaire space-race rivalry. Fortunately, Richard Branson has refrained from comment.

(Via The Verge)

Courtney Barnett has shared her version of The Velvet Underground & Nico’s classic 1967 track “I’ll Be Your Mirror,” which appears on the forthcoming I’ll Be Your Mirror: A Tribute to the Velvet Underground & Nico album. Executive produced by Hal Willner, who sadly died of COVID-19 last year, the all-star tribute album is out on September 24 and also features contributions from Michael Stipe, Matt Berninger (“I’m Waiting For The Man”), Sharon Van Etten with Angel Olsen, Andrew Bird, Lucius, Kurt Vile & The Violators (“Run Run Run”), St. Vincent and Thomas Bartlett, Thurston Moore, Bobby Gillespie, King Princess, Fontaines D.C., and Iggy Pop and Matt Sweeney (“European Son”).

Reimagining the track in a sing-speak manner, Barnett makes “I’ll Be Your Mirror” her own with crisply plucked, sometimes dissonant acoustic guitar and even-keeled tambourine. “I love them… [The Velvet Underground & Nico],” said Barnett in a press release. “When I listen to ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’ and read the lyrics, I realize it’s a perfect song. I can relate to every inch of it. I just felt like I could get inside the world of this song.”

Earlier in the summer, Matt Berninger shared his rendition of “I’m Waiting For The Man,” which he’d previously covered on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon back in December. Kurt Vile also shared his cover of “Run Run Run” in mid-July.

Listen to Courtney Barnett cover “I’ll Be Your Mirror” above. I’ll Be Your Mirror: A Tribute to the Velvet Underground & Nico is out 9/24 via Verve Records. Pre-order it here.

Later in September, Sable, one of the most anticipated video games of 2021, will be released. Japanese Breakfast has been attached to the project for some time; her soundtrack is set to be released on the same day. Earlier in the summer, JBrekkie’s Michelle Zauner performed “Glider” from the soundtrack at Summer Game Fest, and now the dreamy, glitchy single is out digitally.

Of the soundtrack, Zauner said in a press release:

“I was so lucky Daniel Fineberg and Gregorios Kythreotis from Shedworks invited me onto this game so early on. I was immediately captivated by the world they’d built, a desert planet filled with mysterious natural and architectural wonders, and the story they’d imagined, one of a young girl coming of age through exploration. It was important to me that each biome in this world felt unique. I used woodwinds and vocal layering to make monumental ruins feel ancient and unknown, industrial samples and soft synths to make atomic ships feel cold and metallic, classical guitar and bright piano to make encampments feel cozy and familiar. I wanted the main themes to recall iconic works of Joe Hisaishi and Alan Menken, to fill the listener with the childlike wonder of someone on the precipice of a grand discovery.”

Listen to “Glider” above.

The Sable soundtrack is out 9/24 via Sony Music Masterworks. Pre-order it here.

The RX is Uproxx Music’s stamp of approval for the best albums, songs, and music stories throughout the year. Inclusion in this category is the highest distinction we can bestow, and signals the most important music being released throughout the year. The RX is the music you need, right now.

We all tried to make the most of being stuck in quarantine during Covid. But it’s unlikely that you made more of it than Aaron Dessner. Pre-pandemic, he was known as the co-founder of The National, a self-effacing guitarist and composer who seemed content to remain in the background. Now, 17 months later, he is pop’s least likely hitmaker in the wake of his Grammy-winning collaborations with Taylor Swift on the 2020 sister albums, Folklore and Evermore. Introspective and analytical by nature, he’s now a bonafide stand-alone star.

According to a recent New York Times profile, the 45-year-old Dessner doesn’t seem entirely comfortable with his newfound status as a person that lots of other people — some of them presumably on the same level of fame as Swift — want to work with. “I like the idea that I could count my collaborators on one or two hands, to stay with this family feeling,” he told the Times. “So I’m not rushing out to work with a million people. It’s not really my personality.”

The “family feeling” that Dessner referenced didn’t necessarily pertain to The National, but rather to Big Red Machine, the side project he founded with frequent collaborator Justin Vernon of Bon Iver. A self-described “laboratory for experimentation,” the collective grew out of the festivals that Dessner and Vernon have spearheaded in the past decade, including Eaux Claires in Eau Claire, Wis. and the People festival in Berlin. The animating idea of these festivals is to gather friendly musicians in a collegial, forgiving environment and encourage them to work together in creating art that goes to unexpected places. On their self-titled 2018 debut, the minds behind Big Red Machine sought to carry this idea over to a record.

What’s interesting about the second Big Red Machine album out today, How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last?, is how unexperimental it sounds. Whereas the first Big Red Machine record consisted of esoteric sketches that felt like excerpts from long, heady jam sessions, How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last? includes some of the most approachable and pop-oriented material that Dessner or Vernon have ever produced. This can partly be attributed, of course, to the involvement of Swift, who along with suggesting the album title appears on the album’s most immediate track, “Renegades.” But the rest of the record is similarly melodic and warm, evincing little of the electro-indie dissonance of the recent output by The National and Bon Iver. If you’re a Swiftie who hasn’t yet dipped into Dessner’s back catalogue, this is actually a very accessible entry point.

This is very much Dessner’s album, by the way, in which Vernon relegates himself to a supporting role. “I wanted to continue to support Aaron and honestly challenge him, frankly, to get out in front more,” Vernon told the Times. “There are little bits and pieces that I show up and do on the record, and I obviously wrote some words and sang some tunes, but really, this is Aaron’s record.”

As perhaps the ultimate ur-Aaron Dessner text, How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last? functions as a kind of mixtape in which singers come and go — including Robin Pecknold of Fleet Foxes, Sharon Van Etten, Naeem, and Anais Mitchell — but the instrumental beds showcasing the Svengali’s musical signatures remain constant. This includes pianos — lots and lots of pianos! — playing circular, repetitious licks over skittering electronic beats that gradually blossom from lonely wallows to grand swells of emotion.

That was the formula of Folklore and Evermore, as well as the last two National albums, Sleep Well Beast and I Am Easy To Find. But it reaches an apotheosis on How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last?, in which Dessner for the first time on record steps forward as a frontman. He sings in a shy, Elliott Smith-style croon on confessional songs such as “Brycie,” a touching ode to his twin brother Bryce about how he lifted him out of a deep teenaged depression, set to music that evokes The National’s “I Need My Girl.” (Only in this case it’s “I Need My Bro.”) Elsewhere Dessner makes his presence felt via the carefully considered soundscapes that appear on affecting songs such as “Hutch” and “June’s A River,” the latter of which spotlights the fine singer-songwriter Ben Howard, whose 2021 LP Collections From The Whiteout was produced by Dessner.

While the original idea of Big Red Machine was to give the creators an excuse to breakout of their usual molds, How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last? seems like the opposite of that. It doesn’t redefine what Dessner does so much as reiterate just how distinct and pervasive his current musical mode is. While he’s about a half-dozen big-ticket pop smashes away from being as overexposed as Jack Antonoff, there is the possibility that this highly productive period for Dessner has run its course. At 65 minutes, the album feels about 15 to 20 minutes too long, with a surfeit of tasteful, samey-sounding piano ballads. While Dessner’s musical acumen can’t be questioned, I did occasionally yearn for a singer with a big personality for him to play off of — whether that’s Matt Berninger or Taylor Swift — who might have also injected more humor and insight into the record.

As good as many of these songs are — how nice is it to hear Justin Vernon sing over piano chords on tunes like the jazzy, Steely Dan-esque “Reese”? — How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last? seems more like a capstone to an era than a new beginning. I have no doubt that Dessner is already pondering his next move. (Here’s an idea: Get the five guys from The National in a room and knock out a rock record in two weeks. Bring it back to Alligator for the heads!) But it seems like it’s time to move on.

How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last? is out now via Jagjaguwar/37d03d. Get it here.

Beyonce has a handful of No. 1 singles to her name, but what is perhaps her biggest song isn’t actually one of them: “Halo,” which peaked at No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 2009, recently became Beyonce’s first song to eclipse a billion streams on Spotify. One of the song’s co-writers is OneRepublic leader and songwriter extraordinaire Ryan Tedder, who guested on The Tonight Show yesterday. While there, he spoke about how he and co-writer E. Kidd Bogart were able to pen “Halo” in just three hours.

Tedder told Jimmy Fallon:

“I had a three-hour gap in the middle of the day. My wife was gone, I called a friend [Bogart], and I said, ‘Hey, get over here, Beyonce wants me to write a song, let’s do it together.’ He had written a big No. 1 for Rihanna [‘SOS’]. I turned the keyboard on and — I wish every session went like this, but they don’t — the first sound that happened to play on the keyboard was the opening sound of the song. It sounded like angels and I was like, ‘Why don’t we do a song about angels, like her guardian angel, like Jay-Z is her guardian angel?’ Two minutes later, it evolved into, ‘Ooh, ‘Halo,’ that’s such a cool title, let’s go with ‘Halo.” Three hours later, the song was done, and then like 12 months later, the song came out, and it was that simple.”

Meanwhile, OneRepublic performed “Someday” on the show, so check that out below.