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Much like the very innocent former-president, Mike Lindell is banned from Twitter due to “repeated violations” of its integrity policy. (The MyPillow account has been suspended, too.) So he’s launching a new social media website, where free speech-loving users can say whatever they want — as long as they don’t take the lord’s name in vain.

Lindell described Frank (which was originally called “Vocl” until lawyers got involved) as a “Twitter, YouTube combination,” whatever that means. “I have my own servers and everything,” the MyPillow guy said in a video on FrankSpeech.com. “We’re not going to be worried about Amazon taking it down or YouTube or Google or Apple and we are going to get our voice of free speech out there.” The platform is scheduled to launch on April 20 (dubbed a “Frank-A-Thon”), but users can get early access beginning this Thursday if they submit their phone number, which definitely doesn’t sound like a scam.

But what can people expect from Frank?

“You’re going to have your own YouTube channel, only that’s your Twitter handle. Or Twitter channel, so to speak,” Lindell explained (?). “All of the cancels, our First Amendment rights that we’re seeing right now, well, guess what? It’s coming back. You’re not going to have to worry about what you’re saying.” Except you will, because “the four swear words” are banned, Lindell said. “The c-word, the n-word, the f-word, or God’s name in vain. Free speech is not pornography. Free speech isn’t, ‘I’m going to kill you.’ It’s very well defined in our mission statement.” The mission statement is not currently on the website, but I’m sure it will be crystal f*cking clear. (Am I banned from Frank?)

Lindell discussed Frank even further on conservative commentator Eric Metaxas’ radio show on Monday. “What I’m not going to do is suppress true free speech,” he said. “When someone goes out there and says, ‘I don’t like what’s going down at the border,’ or ‘I don’t like that our country was attacked and nobody’s trying to know you did anything about it or is doing anything about it,’ that’s free speech. Another thing you can’t do [is] what we define in there is totally defame someone. What’s the Ninth Commandment? I can’t even think now, but in the Ninth Commandment, you’re bearing false witness, I believe it is. So, if you’re putting a complete lie against Eric; if I say, ‘Eric Metaxas did something terrible’ and it’s an out and out lie, that’s not free speech. That is not free speech.” That answers my questions! Twitter and YouTube must be trembling.

(Via Raw Story and Right Wing Watch)

On Monday evening, in a tweet heard around the world, the Steak-umm social media fired an opening shot at famed astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, and the internet was absolutely here for this (one-sided) battle of the ages. After seeing a tweet from Tyson that apparently rankled the steak sandwich brand, the account told the renowned educator to “Log off, bro,” before refuting Tyson’s definition of truth in science, as a frozen meat product does:

“the irony of neil’s tweet is that by framing science itself as “true” he’s influencing people to be more skeptical of it in a time of unprecedented misinformation. science is an ever refining process to find truth, not a dogma. no matter his intent, this message isn’t helpful”

In pursuit of educating the masses, the Steak-umm account even took the fight to the replies where it chastised Tyson’s understanding of epistemology. “Science itself isn’t ‘true,” the Steak-umm social media account wrote. “It’s a constantly refining process used to uncover truths based in material reality and that process is still full of misteaks. Neil just posts ridiculous sound bites like this for clout and he has no respect for epistemology.” (Yes, you just read that pun.)

Shortly after grilling Tyson and serving him on a bun with provolone and maybe some peppers, “Steak-umms” started trending on Twitter as people couldn’t help but stare in awe at watching “frozen meat sheets” school the host of Cosmos:

As for Tyson, he has yet to respond to the “controversy” outside of a general rebuttal to anyone who questioned his initial tweet about truth in science. Considering he’s still one of America’s foremost science educators, Tyson is presumably aware that if you take a shot at Steak-umm brand steak sandwiches, you best not miss.

After a year of remaining in our homes, we could all use a little optimism. And who would have guessed that Mick Jagger would be the one to deliver? On Tuesday, Jagger unveiled a surprise collaboration with Dave Grohl. Titled “Eazy Sleazy,” the joint single is a hopeful nod to the post-pandemic future.

The guitar-heavy “Eazy Sleazy” reflects on a world we all know too well. Jagger sings of Zoom calls, feeling imprisoned within his home, the eeriness of fake studio applause, and watching too much TV. But the song isn’t all dreary. Jagger looks forward to the post-lockdown world, singing of the “garden of earthly delights” that hopefully awaits us in the near future.

About the single, Jagger mentioned that it was inspired by the feeling of lockdown bans being lifted. “It’s a song that I wrote about coming out of lockdown, with some much-needed optimism,” he said. “Thanks to Dave Grohl for jumping on drums, bass, and guitar, it was a lot of fun working with him. Hope you all enjoy ‘Eazy Sleazy.’”

Echoing Jagger’s statement, Grohl added: “It’s hard to put into words what recording this song with Sir Mick means to me. It’s beyond a dream come true. Just when I thought life couldn’t get any crazier……and it’s the song of the summer, without a doubt!!”

Listen to Mick Jagger and Dave Grohl’s “Eazy Sleazy” above.

Watching the Masters over the weekend I was bombarded, over and over, with a stat that didn’t exist when I started watching golf as a kid. Maybe you remember those old standbys — greens in regulation, putts per round, driving distance, fairways hit, etc. Those are gone, replaced with a newer, supposedly more mathematically sound statistic called “strokes gained.”

There are a few different variations of this: strokes gained, strokes gained tee-to-green, strokes gained putting, etc. According to the PGA Tour’s website:

Strokes gained is a better method for measuring performance because it compares a player’s performance to the rest of the field and because it can isolate individual aspects of the game. Traditional golf statistics, such as greens in regulation and putts per green, are influenced by a player’s performance on shots other than those being measured. […]

Strokes gained: total simply compares a player’s score to the field average. For example, a player will gain three strokes on the field if he shoots 69 on a day when the field averages 72. A player who shoots 74 on that day loses two strokes to the field.

Strokes gained: putting measures how many strokes a player gains (or loses) on the greens. Strokes gained: tee-to-green measures all strokes not taken on the putting green. […]

Strokes gained: tee-to-green + strokes gained: putting = strokes gained: total

This, the PGA Tour explains, is a concept developed in 2011 by Mark Broadie, a professor at Columbia University (to whom, coincidentally, I still owe many thousands for my own graduate degree). And to be fair, a lot of people, including the Uproxx Sports editors I pitched this piece to, love this stat. I suppose it can tell you how much better one player drove the ball or hit approach shots than the rest of the field, but it’s a failure of imagery. It’s a qualitative, this guy is doing this particular thing a lot better than the field stat. Which I find sort of pointless in an individual sport, because at the root of it, it just says “this guy is doing better.” And for that we already have the leaderboard. A green in regulation or a fairway hit is something you can picture, and that alone makes it a more effective “statistic” than a strenuously accurate comparative measure.

Regardless, it’s of a piece with the same “Sabermetrics Revolution” that overtook baseball and gave us Moneyball and everything else. This quantitative (supposedly) revolution has gone on to affect virtually every other sport, the most obvious example being baseball, where old fashioned metrics like RBIs and stolen bases have largely been replaced by Sabermetrics statistics like On Base Percentage Plus Slugging. Which, as Brad Pitt taught us in a middling movie adaptation of a Michael Lewis book, is a much more effective measurement of a player’s value than the old stats. We’re all now expected to treat our sports stars with the same productivity metrics that corporations apply to their employees.

The same movie (and book, which like most Michael Lewis books is an entertaining and informative read) taught us that the old scouts were stuck in arbitrary group-think, relying on capricious measures like whether a player had a “good baseball body” or an attractive girlfriend to decide who to draft. They were in desperate need of a shakeup, which BIG DATA was only too happy to provide. Whether actual fans were in need of same is another matter.

The shakeup was probably necessary — at least for people who were trying to decide how much to pay their employees — but now it seems like we’ve merely traded one false God for another. Now we don’t repeat “defense wins championships” like an incantation. We don’t argue about whether Joe Flacco is elite (as much). Now Amazon Web Services (AWS!) can accurately (so they claim) calculate the percentage at which Patrick Mahomes will complete a certain pass! This according to NFL-season commercials I was forced to sit through approximately twelve million times. These up-to-the-second “chance of a successful play” stats are every bit as worthless as whether a player has the “correct” looking body or a sufficiently attractive lover. Either Mahomes completes the pass or he doesn’t. Do we need to know it was a 7% chance of completion to be awed by the play? Why would we need a hypothetical, faux-quantitative measurement of what our eyes were already telling us?

The problem isn’t so much that these sort of statistics exist, it’s that entities like Amazon expect us to care. To be as thrilled by these hyper-accurate hypotheticals (note the oxymoron here) as Amazon execs are by statistics measuring how much time their workers spend actually sorting and how much they spend pissing in bottles, say. It’s using data to create the illusion of certainty. The human is not a human, but a productivity machine. This kind of thinking has infected all of culture, where moviegoers are expected to care not only about whether they liked a movie, but how it fits in with the brand’s larger expanded universe. If, as John Steinbeck argued, poor Americans all see themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires, now television networks want sports fans to see ourselves as temporarily demoted team executives.

Like Amazon itself, the Sabermetrics Revolution has spurred a drive towards more and more “effective” and “accurate” stats, without ever questioning what the value of those stats actually is in the first place. A lot of people didn’t discuss the old stats because we believed that they were a perfectly objective measure of sports performance (nor did we care to do what these stats were actually intended to, measure a player’s “value”). We discussed them because they conjured an image in the mind. When someone says “home run,” you instantly picture the crack of a bat, the roar of the crowd, and a baseball sailing over the outfielders’ awed heads while some poor sap hangs his head on the mound. What happens in your mind when you hear, say, BPM, a fancy math stat for basketball players? Here’s the explanation of that one, from basketball-reference:

BPM uses a player’s box score information, position, and the team’s overall performance to estimate the player’s contribution in points above league average per 100 possessions played. BPM does not take into account playing time — it is purely a rate stat! Playing time is included in Value Over Replacement Player (VORP) which is discussed below.

League average is defined as 0.0, meaning 0 points above average or below average. Because above-average players play more minutes, there are far more below-average players than above-average players in the league at any time. A value of +5.0 means the team is 5 points per 100 possessions better with the player on the floor than with average production from another player. (In the 2018-19 season, teams averaged around 100 possessions per 48 minute game.)

Stats like this sound more like entries in Excel spreadsheets. Which, essentially, they are. They turn something heroic into drudgery. And that was fine for Billy Beane, because baseball was his fucking job. For the fans, of baseball, or golf, or football, or whatever, sports is not our job, and it shouldn’t have to be. It’s our escape from our jobs.

Sports statistics, I would argue, are a form of storytelling. The point was never to be a perfect, all-encompassing assessment of a player. What we’re looking for isn’t necessarily the most objective measurement of quality, but to be able to relive those moments of glory. The worst of these Sabermetrics-style stats take sports, a thrilling exhibition of humans transcending the normal boundaries of physical achievement, and applies to them the cold, corporate logic of extracting maximum value for minimum input.

I can understand if sports fans spent decades being terrorized by Skip Bayless and Stephen A. Smith takes about how “Tim Tebow is just a winner” and whether certain teams have that “killer instinct,” and that in that context hard numbers might feel refreshing by comparison. But if the antidote is a sports stat that’s harder to parse than my taxes, I choose the poison. You don’t have to be a team executive. It’s okay to just be a fan.

The last time Kevin Durant got into a Twitter beef with a fellow famous person, it landed him a hefty fine from the NBA for some awful, homophobic language he used in DMs to Michael Rapaport, who screenshotted them and shared them with the world. However, if anyone thought that’d keep KD away from Twitter, they don’t know the sports world’s most famous poster, and on Monday night and Tuesday morning he was at it again, but this time there was no doubt Durant was in the right.

It started with Shannon Sharpe going on Undisputed and citing a fake Durant quote from a meme and KD, understandably, calling “drunk uncle” Shannon out for it.

Sharpe, rather than just admitting he’d goofed, doubled down and fired back at KD, who is never one to let something go so he continued to ask why he was using fake quotes.

Shannon asked for KD to talk with him outside the “eye” of social media to settle their differences, which is a weird thing to say when you get called out for citing a fake quote on your television show to suddenly want to discuss things privately.

On top of all of a sudden wanting to take things offline, Sharpe has to know that’s not how KD rolls. This is a man who has said over and over that he logs onto the bird looking for drama and wanting to argue, so you can’t expect him to suddenly look to take this to a phone call to settle some differences — which, again, are solely caused by Sharpe here, who could just say “I got got, my bad” and have all of this be done rather than doubling down.

Sharpe then blocked Durant, which unsurprisingly gave KD the final word.

If you don’t know the name Richard Thompson, there’s a good chance you love an artist who was influenced by him.

Ever since the late 1960s, Thompson has been one of the world’s most accomplished folk musicians and songwriters. A co-founder of the pioneering British rock band Fairport Convention when he was still a teenager, Thompson subsequently put out a series of acclaimed albums in the ’70s and early ’80s with his then-wife Linda Thompson, culminating with the searing 1982 classic Shoot Out The Lights, which coincided with the couple’s divorce. Thompson commenced an acclaimed solo career not long after, and his songs have since been covered by Bob Dylan, Elvis Costello, R.E.M., and many others.

Thompson is revered because he can seemingly do everything extremely well — he’s an incisive and bitingly honest lyricist, a natural with melody, a stirring singer, and a virtuoso guitarist. But he’s never been all that famous, though it seems that the unassuming 72-year-old prefers it that way.

Thompson has, however, interacted with some of the world’s biggest rock stars, which he writes about in his warm and witty new memoir, Beeswing: Losing My Way And Finding My Voice, 1967-1975. The book chronicles the creatively fertile but often turbulent early years of Thompson’s career, when he came into contact with various music legends — including members of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, and Led Zeppelin — all while changing the course of British rock with his band’s innovative reinventions of ancient European folk styles. (What The Band was to North American music, Fairport Convention was to the U.K.)

As a young man barely out of school, Thompson saw the world and collaborated with future icons. But he also struggled to overcome incredible tragedy, including a tragic van accident in 1969 that killed one of his bandmates and his girlfriend. While Thompson was able to survive this period, many of his contemporaries — like Sandy Denny and Nick Drake — did not.

Thompson discussed his book and career last week in a phone interview from his current home in New Jersey.

Beeswing focuses on a very intense and momentous eight-year period. Why did you choose to write just about that time between 1967 and 1975?

A lot of people ask me about that time period. They seem to love the music that came out of that time. They still listen to Dark Side Of The Moon, they still listen to Led Zeppelin records. The Stones are still one of the most famous bands on the planet. It’s a strange thing, maybe, just numerically, because of the baby boom. But that generation had such a big influence subsequently. So I thought I would like to write something about that time period, when I was young and things were very, very alive for me. Rather than writing about when I was 60 and doing things for the 20th time. It’s a lot more interesting when you see things through a young person’s eyes.

A lot of famous people show up in the book, but only in brief cameos and usually on the periphery. If you were, say, a less principled man, could you have written a much more gossipy book about British rock stars of the ’60s and ’70s?

The simple answer is yes. I was trying to be musically focused. I left out a lot of the debauchery, which is probably libelous anyway. But I was trying to strike a particular balance between being very musically focused, but also mentioning, “Oh, there’s Jimi Hendrix” or “There’s Graham Nash,” because I think people are interested in that.

The impression that you get from your book of the late ’60s British rock scene is that in spite of having all of these icons rubbing shoulders, it was actually quite small and intimate. For instance, you mention The Beatles and The Stones sending you flowers after the 1969 van accident.

Absolutely. It was probably 1/10th of the size of the music business now. Literally a 10th. We knew everybody in London because we played shows with them, and we probably knew everybody in Britain sooner or later. The Beatles and the Stones were part of a slightly older generation so we didn’t really run into them very much. But everybody else — Pink Floyd and Zeppelin and all these people — before they became legends, they were just people that you played with and maybe you hung out with backstage. Maybe you shared a meal with them. I mean, it was truly an intimate scene. How many bands were in London at that time? Maybe 30? Not so many.

I have to ask you about 1969, because Fairport Convention had one of the greatest years for any rock band that year. You put out three albums — What We Did On Our Holidays, Unhalfbricking, and Liege & Lief — that all are excellent and also significantly differ from each other. Looking back, what do you think accounts from these successive creative leaps the band was making at that time? It’s like you had three years in one in 1969.

Well, it’s a year that really got kind of chopped into pieces. At some point our producer Joe Boyd would have us in the studio really all the time. We didn’t say we’re going into make a record this week or anything like that. We’d just do tracks as they became recordable, as we rehearsed them, like, “Let’s do those two songs.” Sometimes even after a show, we would go to the studio at midnight and record. So we recorded pretty much every week, and that was our work regimen. We had the Unhalfbricking album in the can when we had the accident, and then at that point we said, “We don’t want to do those songs anymore. Let’s work on a whole new project that will be the idea that we had, playing traditional music with a rock ‘n’ roll rhythm section.” That was the Liege & Lief album. In retrospect, it does seem like an awful lot of work to get through, but we were young. Somehow we managed it.

You referred to the van accident that occurred in the middle of 1969, which killed drummer Martin Lamble and your girlfriend, Jeannie Franklyn, along with severely injuring the rest of the band. You write about the accident vividly in the book. I imagine that must have been horrible to revisit.

It was very difficult to write it, and it was even harder to read the audiobook. I had to really stop and get myself together a few times during the audiobook. I think I had to write it as if it was about somebody else. It was too painful to relive it sometimes. But I knew I had to get through it and I had to get past it. And I suppose in doing that, maybe I laid some demons to rest.

I think we didn’t grieve properly. In those days, no one said, “Oh, you guys should go to therapy.”

You write that Sandy Denny was fired after Liege & Lief, which I don’t think was widely known before. And yet you stayed friends and even worked together after that. You also maintained friendly relationships with the people in Fairport after you quit the band. How was that possible? It seems pretty unusual.

I suppose we were always a friendly band. We started out as a group of friends, interested in music and we probably didn’t hire people that we thought would be a lot of trouble. We didn’t hire assholes. We really tried to hire nice people with a sense of humor that we could get along with. When I left the band, I didn’t even move out [of their communal house]. I mean, I was still there, co-habitating with the band. Sandy left the band and I was working with Sandy a year later.

The British folk-rock world was quite small. You did inevitably find yourself working with the same people over and over again in slightly different formats because there are only three or four bands on that scene and a certain number of musicians that could play a style of music. So there were only three guitar players and two drummers, three fiddlers, et cetera. It was small and friendly.

You write later in the book about how a truck crashed into the Fairport house. Fortunately nobody was hurt, but it does seem like you were close to death a lot in those days. This is a heavy question, but do you ever wonder how you survived those years?

Yes. I definitely have had some survivor’s guilt, particularly about the van accident, in that that was something where you think, “Why me? Why us?” We could have all been killed. It was that bad. Somehow a lot of us survived.

Every band has got stories — road accidents, drug overdoses, jealous boyfriends, jealous husbands. There’s a lot of things that can happen to you on the road. And there’s a lot of self-destruction in creative people. And you have to sit back and watch that happen. It’s a terrible thing, but people choose to do that to themselves until they hit the bottom and bounce back up, or they kill themselves. I don’t think Fairport’s story is that unusual really. We definitely had some tragedy and we had some joy as well. And I think that’s par for the course.

Does it just boil down to luck? Or did you have something inside of you that kept you out of the abyss?

I feel like I was lucky. I didn’t get into drugs that heavily, so that’s one way of preserving myself, I suppose. I didn’t always like the effect it had on me. But I used to drink. I used to drink a lot. And I think at some point I really saw the fork in the road, where you go down one road and you’re not going to survive. I think again, a lot of musicians have got to that point. And most of the musicians that I knew who got past about 35 years old had basically quit everything and the others were dead. It’s as simple as that.

At one point you write about how by 1976, you were wondering if you were still going to have a career. Interest in British folk had faded, and it was the dawn of disco and punk. You’ve had such a long career, obviously, but were there other moments where you doubted if you were still professionally viable?

I think there were moments where I doubted the kind of music I could play. But I figured that I could always be employed as a musician somehow. So if I wasn’t playing my music, I could be in a band. I could be planning the pit in Las Vegas. I could be doing something.

For me the back half of the ’70s was, in a sense, the worst time because our audience seemed to have been eroded. It wasn’t until the ’80s that I felt I was building a new audience, really. And I thought, “Well okay, this is good. I can keep playing solo.” But in the ’70s I was thinking, “Well, what am I going to do? If I can’t be a band leader, then Linda and I will get back into the folk clubs and we’ll earn a living that way.” That’s not a terrible thing, but it’s not like a career choice. It’s not going to take you anywhere else. It’s going to keep you in the folk clubs.

I’m struck by the pragmatism and professionalism of that answer. “If I can’t do this, I’ll find a gig in Las Vegas.” Is that the key to longevity, that ability to ride out the wave as it rises and falls?

Yeah, absolutely. Flexibility. If all you can do is be a star in the front of a rock band, and that goes away, I don’t know what you’re going to do, really. You’re going to be washing dishes or something. There are many, many short careers in music. People who go in and believe the press about themselves and become egotistical can crash, very, very abruptly.

You write in the book that songwriting is something you do “to understand and to decode life.” Did writing this book perform a similar function?

I think writing songs is a fairly naked thing. You do expose yourself and you give emotionally of yourself in the songwriting process and in the performing process. I think in a book, if anything, you have to be even more honest. If you put something obscure in a song, people aren’t going to hold you to task for it. They’re going to think that you’re a tortured genius or something. But if you write a book, you have editors and editors say, “Well, you have to explain what you mean by this.” So to me that was a bit of a shock, having actually to explain things.

There are instances in the book where you write about events that you’ve already written songs about. For instance, the song “Broken Doll” is about this encounter you had with a mentally ill fan in the late 1960s.

In a song you’re entering a formulated world. There’s a verse structure. Words have to be singable. The rhythm is important. So in a sense, you’re limiting the possibilities for meaning in the song. I think in this particular song, the meaning comes across fairly well. But if you didn’t know the back story, you could make up all kinds of hypotheses about what the song was about. You wouldn’t necessarily know, you kind of speculate. Writing the story down is much more of a linear experience. I’m giving a lot more detail and there shouldn’t be any ambiguity there really at all. I always think a song exists in the mind of the listener and every listener has their own, slightly different version of what’s going on.

Some of your most famous songs are informed by public knowledge of your personal life. I’m thinking specifically of Shoot Out The Lights, your final album with your ex-wife Linda Thompson, from 1982. It’s considered one of the great “divorce” records of all time. But is it ever difficult for you that so many people know so much about this really dark period of your life?

Well, it is difficult. But I always think songs are a bit more veiled than that. The Shoot Out The Lights album was written a couple of years before we ever got divorced. Sometimes, who was going to sing a song would change. A song I was going to sing, I’d say, “This is the wrong key for me. You should sing it.” And vice versa. So psychologically you can interpret those songs that are saying, “Oh, this is the end of the marriage.” But at the time, they were just songs. People could layer their interpretation onto it, when maybe that wasn’t our intention at all. We were just writing songs as stories. We’re happy to sing it and leave it to other people to decide what it means.

A box set of your work with Linda called Hard Luck Stories came out in 2020. What did you think about that?

I’m not sure I’m comfortable with everything that’s on there. They scraped fairly low down the barrel. You’ve got things that were intended to be B-sides, or were never intended to be released. And sometimes there is a reason for that. There is a reason that stuff gets left on the cutting room floor. I think Linda and I bit our lips a lot and said, “Okay, you can have that track.” But we were a little uncomfortable being exposed in that way.

You’ve lived in America since the early 1980s, which is interesting to me, because Fairport Convention was at the forefront of bringing British roots music into rock ‘n’ roll. At that time, it seemed like having a British identity was really important to you. How connected do you still feel to your home country?

Before I spent more time in the States, I was a bit bored with Britain. America seemed more optimistic and outgoing and a place that was more welcoming in many ways. So, I was kind of glad to spend less time there, but now I really miss it. It’s strange. I haven’t been there for six months right now and I’m looking forward to heading over. It’ll be nice to be there, lockdown permitting.

You’ve been on the road for most of your life. How hard has the last year been?

It’s been very difficult. I’ve been on the road since I was a teenager. And I calculate I’ve done at least 10,000 shows and so that’s a big gap in my life. I mean, everyone is in the same boat. We all love playing. We love being out there. And for me, anyway, that connection to the audience is very, very important. I love to do that. That’s the best part of music for me, to play to people. So it’s been a tough time. It’s been a good time for writing. I’ve written a couple of albums, so I’ve got all that in the bank. But I’ll be very happy to get back on the road. And some bookings are coming in now, stuff in the summer, which is fantastic.

Usher went viral yesterday after it was reported that he paid strippers with fake dollar bills that had his own face on it, in lieu of actual money. Now, TMZ reports that things are not as they seem.

Citing “sources close to Usher,” the publication reports that somebody in Usher’s crew, but not Usher himself, left some of the fake Usher-branded “money” behind “as a bit of a gag,” both as a joke and to promote Usher’s Las Vegas residency. A representative of the Sapphire club where this happened told TMZ that Usher did not give strippers his fake money and that he tipped the staff overall “quite generously” (with real money). Usher apparently spent thousands on dancers and paid for bottle service. Sapphire also told TMZ they’d be happy to host Usher again.

This story began when a stripper shared photos of the phony Usher money, printed in various denominations and designed to look like real money, and asked her followers, “Ladies what would you do if you danced all night for usher and he threw this??” She also noted, “& the money does not have a trade in value what so ever! Lmao don’t y’all think he should be blasted on social media for this sh*t?”

Rico Nasty, the DMV artist who blends hyperpop and hip-hop with punk rock aesthetics, would seem like the perfect headliner for a festival called “Afropunk,” right? Afropunk announced the lineup for its 2021 virtual festival “Black Spring” today, and guess who’s headlining: Rico Nasty. I love it when a plan comes together.

The genre-agnostic festival, now in its sixteenth year, was forced to move online for its most recent iterations by the global coronavirus pandemic, but clearly, the show must go on. The Black Spring show, scheduled for April 23, will take place in Miami at 4 pm ET but will stream worldwide at planetafropunk.com.

In addition to Rico Nasty, who returns to the festival after previously performing in 2019, performers will include Black Pantera, ChocQuibTown, Dawerxdamper, Jup Do Bairro, Seafoam Walls, Seu Jorge, and Projexx. Afropop is also collaborating with NPR Music for “Tiny Desk Meets Afropunk,” a collection of stripped-down performances in the style of the popular NPR web show from Calma Carmona, ChocQuibTown, Luedji Luna, and Nenny.

Afropunk, which bills itself as the festival for alternative Black and Latin artists who are generally overlooked by the mainstream, has previously hosted such versatile, outspoken artists as Erykah Badu, Grace Jones, Solange Knowles, Tyler The Creator, and more.

You can find out more information at planetafropunk.com.

Rico Nasty is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Halle Bailey of R&B sister duo Chloe x Halle stays busy. Not only was she Grammy-nominated for their 2020 Ungodly Hour album, but she’s currently living in London while filming the live action remake of The Little Mermaid in which she plays the starring role of Ariel. On top of that, Halle has been making handmade jewelry in the very little free time she has. Halle decided to start selling some of her unique jewelry pieces online, but they were so popular that they sold out in just a few minutes.

It all started when Halle shared a few photos of some of the earrings she has been making for herself, telling her fans that she wanted to start selling some. “been making jewelry for a while but thinking about selling you guys some if you’re interested!!”

Her sister was very on board with the idea. “wow i just love you so much my creative queen,” Chloe responded.

After her original jewelry tweet got some attention, Halle decided to open up an Etsy shop, which she named Hallelujah Jewelry.

The singer opened the shop with 50 items for sale. But because Halle has such a big following, all 50 jewelry pieces sold out in under an hour. “lol guyss they’re sold out already i’m sorry,” she wrote shortly after her Etsy shop opened. “i make them by myself so it will take me some time to do all of these but then i will open it again and restock lol love you guys sm.”

Check out some of Halle’s jewelry pieces above and see her Etsy shop here.

The Denver Nuggets have lost the last two games in rather disappointing fashion, but prior to that they had looked like one of the league’s best teams once again following the Aaron Gordon trade. At 34-20, they have climbed to fourth in the West, a game ahead of the Lakers and 2.5 games behind the Clippers, rounding into form behind the MVP frontrunner in Nikola Jokic, strong play from Michael Porter Jr. and Aaron Gordon, but as importantly, a resurgence from Jamal Murray.

The Bubble’s breakout star during the playoffs, Murray got off to a bit of an inconsistent start to the season before finding his groove once again and when he did, Denver began taking off. The young star guard had missed the last four games due to right knee soreness and made his return on Monday, only to suffer a season-ending ACL tear in his left knee in the final minute of the game as Denver tried to mount one last push against the Warriors.

Murray’s injury looked awful in the moment and the Nuggets confirmed the worst on Tuesday morning, and in the aftermath stars from around the league offered their prayers and support to a player who has garnered immense respect from his peers for the work he’s put in to get to where he is.