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The Portland Trail Blazers are used to questions about Damian Lillard’s future with the franchise, and every time they’ve popped up, Lillard and the team have presented a united front, which has led to him stick around. But according to a new report by Henry Abbott of TrueHoop, that might change this offseason due to Lillard’s displeasure with how things are going.

Abbott reports that in the not-too-distant future, Lillard could submit a formal request for greener pastures. In a post on his Substack on Friday, Abbott wrote, “Now a source close to Lillard says that in the days to come, he plans to request a trade.”

Lillard’s frustrations have been on display in a few different ways ever since the Blazers’ offseason began following a first-round loss to the Denver Nuggets. In the immediate aftermath, Lillard made comments that raised eyebrows about the team not being good enough before making a post on his Instagram that asked “How long should I stay dedicated? How long til opportunity meet preparation?” Weeks later, reports of his frustration went to a new level amid the backlash the team’s decision to hire Chauncey Billups.

Everything is a rumor until something concrete happens, but it’s not hard to see this being different. A report from a few weeks back indicated “six or seven” teams thought that they had a chance to bring Lillard on board via a trade, and now, the opportunity to start negotiating might be just around the corner.

Pontiac, Michigan rapper DDG keeps his outstanding week going with a new collaboration with 20-year-old Louisville rapper 2KBaby. The two Midwestern artists both recently moved to Hollywood to be closer to the action, so it’s only natural that they’d feel like they’re now living the sweet life — hence the title of their new song, “Zack & Cody,” named for the iconic Disney Channel duo from the 2000s sitcom The Suite Life Of Zack & Cody. Over a simple, melodic beat, the two rappers trade bouncy verses about their parallel rises to stardom.

The new song caps a pair of breakout weeks for DDG, who went from making vlogs on YouTube to pursuing a rap career using the audience he’d built on that platform. His work in that new area culminated in last year’s debut album, Valedictorian, but it was his 2021 collaborative mixtape with producer OG Parker that shot him to the peak of his mainstream exposure so far. The tape’s single “Moonwalking In Calabasas” became his signature hit and prefaced his eventual inclusion in this year’s XXL Freshman Class. Also this week, he participated in the Freshman Cypher and featured on Uproxx’s latest digital cover.

Listen to 2KBaby and DDG’s “Zack & Cody” above and check out its video below.

2KBaby is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

This week’s roster of new albums includes the latest from John Mayer, Sob Rock. To mark the occasion, he has shared a video for album standout “Shot In The Dark.” The song features backing vocals from Maren Morris, who also contributed to the Sob Rock highlights “Last Train Home” and “Why You No Love Me.”

Also today, Mayer announced a bunch of tour dates in support of the album, which will bring him across North America between February and April 2022. Tickets are set to go on sale on July 23 at 11 a.m. local time via Mayer’s website.

Watch the “Shot In The Dark” video above and check out the full list of tour dates below.

02/17/2022 — Albany, NY @ Times Union Center
02/18/2022 — Philadelphia, PA @ Wells Fargo Center
02/20/2022 — New York, NY @ Madison Square Garden
02/23/2022 — Washington, DC @ Capital One Arena
02/25/2022 — Pittsburgh, PA @ PPG Paints Arena
02/27/2022 — Toronto, ON @ Scotiabank Arena
03/01/2022 — Belmont Park, NY @ UBS Arena
03/04/2022 — Boston, MA @ TD Garden
03/11/2022 — Las Vegas, NV @ Grand Garden Arena
03/13/2022 — Los Angeles, CA @ Forum
03/15/2022 — Los Angeles, CA @ Forum
03/18/2022 — San Francisco, CA @ Chase Center
03/22/2022 — Seattle, WA @ Climate Pledge Arena
03/25/2022 — Salt Lake City, UT @ Vivint Arena
03/27/2022 — Denver, CO @ Ball Arena
04/02/2022 — Sunrise, FL @ BB&T Center
04/05/2022 — Tampa, FL @ Amalie Arena
04/08/2022 — Atlanta, GA @ State Farm Arena
04/11/2022 — Charlotte, NC @ Spectrum Center
04/13/2022 — Nashville, TN @ Bridgestone Arena
04/20/2022 — Austin, TX @ Moody Center
04/23/2022 — Houston, TX @ Toyota Center
04/24/2022 — Dallas, TX @ American Airlines Center
04/28/2022 — Chicago, IL @ United Center

Sob Rock is out now via Columbia. Get it here.

This week’s episode of Indiecast opens with Steve and Ian discussing recent albums from the offspring of famous people. This leads naturally into a conversation of Sling, the new sophomore album from indie pop phenom Clairo. Claire Cotrill’s parents are well-connected in the music industry, which many haters use as a way to discount her success as an artist over the last few years and reiterate the “bootstraps” mentality (that is a driving force of the capitalist mindset, but we digress).

Musically, Sling is a very low-key affair that could be viewed as another “reaction to fame” record that exists as the opposite end of the harshness spectrum from Nirvana’s In Utero. Produced by Jack Antonoff, the LP stems from the pent-up anxiety of Cotrill’s sudden fame after her debut, and the intense touring schedule that followed. It’s not as immediately gripping as Immunity, but seems like a record that could get definitely grow on a listener after it settles in the brain and ages.

In this week’s Recommendation Corner, both Steve and Ian are plugging brand new surprise EPs from two of their favorite artists. Steve is urging everyone to check out Total Serene, the latest short-form release from Gang Of Youths, and Ian can’t get enough of the new EP from Yves Tumor.

New episodes of Indiecast drop every Friday. Listen to Episode 48 on Apple Podcasts and Spotify below, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts here. You can submit questions for Steve and Ian at [email protected], and make sure to follow us on Instagram and Twitter for all the latest news. We also recently launched a visualizer for our favorite Indiecast moments. Check those out here.

When Black Widow catches up with David Harbour’s Red Guardian in the present day, he’s in a Russian gulag arm-wrestling his fellow inmates and telling tall tales about his encounters with Captain America. Eventually, one of the inmates, played by the towering Dutch bodybuilder Olivier Richters, sits down for a match and pokes a major hole in one of Red Guardian’s stories about fighting Cap. Before brutally breaking the massive inmate’s arm, Red Guardian refers to the man as “Ursa,” which immediately caught the attention of Easter egg-obsessed Marvel fans.

In the comics, Ursa Major is the codename for Mikhail Ursus, a member of the Russia fighting team, the Winter Guard. More importantly, Ursa Major is a mutant whose power is transforming into a large walking, talking bear who’s gone up against several of Marvel’s heavy-hitters. While there’s been not confirmation from Marvel that the MCU version of Ursa has the same origin as his comics counterpart, Richters is now claiming that his character is, in fact, a mutant. If true, this would make Ursa the first mutant to appear in the MCU.

Via Richters’ Instagram:

After two years I can finally tell who my character is: Ursa Major : the first mutant (X-Men) to appear in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. … Ursa is part of the Winter Guard, noted for being “Russia’s answer to the Avengers”. His power transforms him into an incredible bear, transcending The Hulk in size. Ursa appears many times in the comics fightning Wolverine and The Hulk. When production on set told me who I really was in Black Widow I let some tears in my hotel room, because my movie dream became true: being a official comic super Hero. I can only hope Marvel will bring back Ursa in full form

You can see Richter’s full post below. He’s the hulking 7′ 2″ beast on the right making his fellow bodybuilder, Tony Montalbano, look like a small child.

(Via Olivier Richters on Instagram)

Several years ago, I decided to conduct a thought experiment with John Mayer: I imagined him having the exact same career, except now it started in the year 1980 rather than the year 2000. This was actually pretty easy to imagine, given that a musician of his ilk — a soft-rock guitarist with pronounced singer-songwriter musical leanings — was much more common in the yacht-rock era than today. If Mayer had that career arc, would I feel differently about his music?

At the time of this experiment, I was indifferent to Mayer as an artist, and had negative feelings about him as a person. Musically, I dismissed him as a lightweight, a precursor to every bland pop-folk superstar of the past two decades, from Ed Sheeran to Shawn Mendes. As an interview subject, he seemed smug or even arrogant. (Consider that Mayer, in that infamous 2010 Playboy profile doomed to re-appear in nearly everything subsequently written about him, brazenly used the n-word, an offense that certainly would’ve permanently derailed his career had it occurred even five years later.)

But I had reason to suspect that I had judged him unfairly. People I admired seemed to admire John Mayer. Frank Ocean recorded with John Mayer. Dave Chappelle toured with John Mayer. Bob Weir asked John Mayer to join his band. So I did my thought experiment. Maybe then, I could appreciate the guy.

If you know anything about music history, it’s clear that artists who are loaded down with inconvenient contemporary baggage — and John Mayer definitely had a deluxe luggage set of inconvenient baggage — suddenly appear liberated once they escape their era. With Mayer, I found that putting him in the same mental context as artists such as Phil Collins, Dire Straits, and Bruce Hornsby — all of whom were once wrongly maligned as cheesy relics, and are now rightly acknowledged as consummate pop-rock craftsmen — transformed how I thought about his music. I found that I could get beyond his pretty-boy smirkiness and the cultural baggage of songs like “Your Body Is A Wonderland” and “Daughters” and appreciate him as a songwriter and guitar player. Turns out that he slots with some of my all-time favorite smooth rockers from the 1970s and ’80s with extreme comfort. It was what finally made me a John Mayer fan.

I bring this up because, incredibly, John Mayer appears to have conducted this exact same thought experiment in regard to John Mayer. For his eighth studio album out today, Sob Rock, Mayer has said that it was goal to “pretend someone made a record in 1988 and shelved it and it was just found this year.” He officially introduced this musical costume with the lead single “Last Train Home,” a loving homage to the sort of beer-commercial synth-rock that 40-something-year-old boomers like Steve Winwood and Don Henley turned out regularly during the Reagan/Bush years. For maximum verisimilitude, he enlisted ringers such as Lenny Castro of Toto and prolific studio musician Greg Phillinganes (who most notably contributed to Michael Jackson’s Off The Wall, Thriller, and Bad) to silky up the grooves. And then there’s Sob Rock‘s delectable album cover, which is so fully realized as an encapsulation of an ’80s corporate rock aesthetic that even the constituency least inclined to give Mayer a chance — nerdy vinyl collectors — have to grudgingly acknowledge its sly observational genius.

Mayer has gone as far as to liken like the snarkily titled Sob Rock to “shitposting.” But the reason the album works as well as it does is that it’s not actually all that far removed sonically from Mayer’s best work. Albums like 2006’s Continuum and 2009’s Battle Studies are also indebted to the least fashionable strains of MOR blues-accented rock. What’s different now is that Mayer is about a decade removed from his peak as a hit-making pop star. His Sob Rock guise allows him to return to his former style, only this time with quote marks. He’s no longer the radio-dominating stud at the center of culture; he’s pursuing a different sort of post-modern cool that stems from being an aging, self-effacing rogue. To paraphrase “Fast Eddie” Felson (Paul Newman) from the Clapton-soundtracked 1986 film The Color Of Money: He’s acting like himself, but on purpose.

Playing the “self-aware washed” card has been a long game for Mayer. One of the highlights of Sob Rock is “New Light,” a witty slice of low-key Box Scaggs-style funk originally released as a single back in 2018, in which Mayer sings about “pushing 40 in the friend zone.” (Mayer is now 43.) Entering middle age has been transformational for Mayer, as it is for everyone. Ever since 2017’s underrated The Search For Everything, he hasn’t shown much urgency about putting out new music. In interviews, he’s hinted that the existence of Sob Rock was precipitated by the pandemic, when he was grounded from touring and suddenly had little to do.

Since 2015, a significant part of Mayer’s touring life has been filled by Dead & Company, one of the world’s most successful live bands. While Sob Rock has little in common musically with the Grateful Dead — weirdly, the two LPs he put out right before joining Dead & Company, 2012’s Born & Raised and 2013’s Lonesome Valley, most resemble his current band — it does seem like Mayer has adopted the Dead’s time-honored aversion to modern pop trends. For decades, the Grateful Dead have endured by sounding unwaveringly like themselves. The less they try to sound trendy, the more successful they are. Once you get past the superficial “shitposting” nostalgic trappings, that seems to be the animating idea behind Sob Rock.

I’m just one month older than Mayer, and I’ve similarly accepted that being comfortable in your own skin is the only way to survive as a semi-lame middle-aged man. The alternative for Mayer would have been to partner up with young turks in a bid for relevancy — “New Light” feat. Olivia Rodrigo! — which would have likely backfired. So instead he’s leaning into his own passé style with equal parts irony and earnestness. Yes, songs like the frisky beach party shuffle “Wild Blue” and the remorseful cad ballad “Guess I Just Feel Like” evoke an era of Michelob ads and Two-For-Tuesday nights on WROK The Eagle. But those songs also sound a whole lot like Mayer’s own “classic” period.

Actually, let’s remove those quote marks from classic. As Sob Rock demonstrates, Mayer remains an eternally tasteful musician with a natural feel for melody and songcraft, and those qualities make his catalogue much more consistent than he’s given credit for. Well, perhaps the sappy likes of “Why You No Love Me” isn’t worthy of the “tasteful” tag. And the album-closing “All I Want Is To Be With You” — a shameless rip-off of U2’s “All I Want Is You” from 1988’s Rattle & Hum — can only be described as derivative. But overall, Sob Rock doesn’t feel like a costume. It sounds like John Mayer coming back into himself.

Sob Rock is out now via Columbia Records. Get it here.
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While Clairo’s debut album, 2019’s Immunity, was co-written in part with Rostam Batmanglij, on her latest, the newly released Sling, she teamed up with Jack Antonoff. That connection allowed her to get acquainted with Lorde, who provided background vocals on the single “Blouse” (and in turn got Clairo to feature on her own “Solar Power“). In a Rolling Stone interview published last week, it was revealed that Lorde also contributed vocals to the Sling cut “Reaper,” and now that the album is out today, so too is the new Clairo/Lorde collaboration.

On the gentle folk-y tune, Clairo sings about the societal pressure she feels to become a mother: “I’m born to be somebody, then somebody comes from me / I’ll tell you about the Rabbit Moon and when to keep walking / I’ll spare you pain, I can feel my shame come through that door / I can’t f*ck it up if it’s not there at all.”

In the aforementioned Rolling Stone piece, Clairo said of working with people like Lorde and Antonoff, “It’s still really hard for me to wrap my head around these people giving me the time of day. Without that support, I don’t know if I would have been able to finish the record. And they like it, which is sick. They’re not bullsh*tting me. I’m just recently starting to accept it, because now I actually believe in this music.”

Listen to “Reaper” above.

Sling is out now via Fader Label/Republic Records. Get it here.

It has been more than 10 years since Community debuted its pilot episode on NBC. While the comedy hit more than a few rough patches over its six seasons, it managed to earn a cult following that continues growing to this day. And they’re not ready to say goodbye to the gang from Greendale Community College—especially when shows like Nash Bridges are getting rebooted. While the show’s cast members and creators have moved on to other projects, series creator Dan Harmon isn’t counting out the idea that a Community movie could be in the cards.

In an interview with Vulture’s “Good One” podcast, which was spotted by Syfy, Harmon talked about the “philosophical” questions he needs to answer before truly digging into the possibility of a Community movie:

“Here’s the biggest philosophical question: Are you supposed to service a mythical new viewer? The obvious, dogmatic, practical, off-the-street answer is like, No, you don’t. It’s fan service. Why would there be a Community movie? Who do you think is going to walk in off the street and buy popcorn and sit and watch a Community movie like that? They deserve to be punished. Why are they doing that?…

Formalistically, you owe a movie that I think the fans can not only enjoy, but they can stand back and go, You know, the crazy thing about this Community movie is that if you didn’t know there was a show, this is an insanely good movie.”

As surreal as the show itself could be, Harmon himself cannot help but apply basic logic when thinking about how to make a Community reunion work. Also, given how much time has passed, he wants to create a situation in which all of these characters come back together in a way that feels organic.

“Do you want to see these people play dress-up in their old outfits and come in and go, ‘Look at me. Meep meep, moop moop. Look what I used to do’? Yes, to some degree; no, to some degree. And contrary to that, do you want to see these people not doing that and coming in in pantsuits and going, ‘I’m an adult now. Meep meep, moop moop. Remember when we did this?’”

It’s a question that only Harmon can answer, and it looks like he’s getting there—even if the process is taking longer than fans would have hoped. “I am, at least once a week, thinking about it, because the gears are turning,” Harmon said. “There is, like … a thing is happening. Logistically, the locks are coming away. And the only problems are becoming the creative ones, which is great, because I love those problems. I love having these conversations, and they’re being had.”

(Via Syfy)

Though David Harbour is currently making the PR rounds for his role in Marvel’s Black Widow, he’s still best known for his role as the lovable Sheriff Jim Hopper on Stranger Things. And while the 46-year-old and his young co-stars on the megahit Netflix series have had nothing but wonderful things to say about each other since the show began, there is one former colleague who Harbour harbors no love for: the pooch who had the misfortune of being cast as the Byers’ family dog in season 1, as The Hollywood Reporter noted.

Blame it on the capsaicin if you must. Earlier this week, Harbour appeared on the popular YouTube series Hot Ones to chow down on some spicy wings and talk about a range of topics, from Shakespeare to Stranger Things. When someone brought up the fact that Harbour had previously had some harsh words to say about the pooch that played the Byers’ pup on Netflix’s ode to the ’80s, the actor did not hesitate in admitting: “I hated that f***ing dog so bad.”

The way Harbour tells it, the dog in question was not as well-trained as the showrunners had been led to believe, which made working with him rather impossible.

“Take after take it would wander off or do something,” Harbour said. “And then I remember the trainer on the sidelines going, ‘Come on! We got to make our money!’ Yeah, I walked up to them, and I was like, ‘You know, the Byers should probably have that dog put to sleep next season.’”

Whether it was Harbour who made the poor pupper disappear or a decision made independently by the powers that be, the dog hasn’t been seen since season 1—and no one’s even made mention of it since. But Harbour has an idea of how to creatively address the mystery of Chester’s disappearance: “We should find it in the Upside Down in one of these future seasons.”

You can watch the full clip below.

(Via The Hollywood Reporter)

Whether or not Donald Trump understands the definition of the word “coup” is up for debate. That he incited one on January 6, 2021 is not. And while Stephen Colbert has preferred not to speak the Orange One’s name since the former president shuffled off to Florida ahead of Joe Biden’s inauguration earlier this year, there are moments and situations that call for Colbert to lift his moratorium. This week provided one of them.

Earlier this week, portions of a new book, Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker’s I Alone Can Fix It, were published by New York Magazine. One of the biggest bombshells was that chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley was alarmed enough by Trump’s behavior during his final days in office that Milley sounded the alarm to his colleagues. According to Leonnig and Rucker, Milley “believed Trump was stoking unrest, possibly in hopes of an excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act and call out the military,” leading Milley to issue a warning that: “This is a Reichstag moment.”

While Colbert had no problem declaring that “Donald Trump is a fascist,” what he really wanted to talk about was Trump’s public response to these claims—which somehow managed to read like a rejected letter sent to Penthouse Forum.

“Clearly the forum president didn’t like the tea that Milley spilly, because earlier today the ex-pres released a statement declaring, ‘I’m not into coups!’ Adding: ‘If I was going to do a coup, one of the last people I would want to do it with is General Mark Milley.’

Ok, you’ve clearly put some thought into this thing you’re ‘not into.’ ‘Honey, come on, I’m not into three-ways. But if I was, I wouldn’t do it with our neighbor Alice. Your sister is way hotter.’”

You can watch the full clip above.