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Peacock just unveiled the official trailer for its upcoming miniseries, Dr. Death, based on the podcast of the same name, which follows the real-life case of Dr. Christopher Duntsch, a Dallas surgeon who left a trail of bodies in his wake. In the new miniseries, Joshua Jackson takes on the role of Duntsch while Alec Baldwin and Christian Slater play two colleagues who are struggling to figure out what is going on with the once-celebrated neurosurgeon.

Is Duntsch just that criminally incompetent or is he a psychopath reveling in playing God? More importantly, how did he get away with killing this many people, and how do they stop him?

Here’s the official synopsis:

Based on Wondery’s hit podcast, DR. DEATH is inspired by the terrifying true story of Dr. Christopher Duntsch (Joshua Jackson), a rising star in the Dallas medical community. Young, charismatic and ostensibly brilliant, Dr. Duntsch was building a flourishing neurosurgery practice when everything suddenly changed. Patients entered his operating room for complex but routine spinal surgeries and left permanently maimed or dead. As victims piled up, two fellow physicians, neurosurgeon Robert Henderson (Alec Baldwin) and vascular surgeon Randall Kirby (Christian Slater), as well as Dallas prosecutor Michelle Shughart (AnnaSophia Robb), set out to stop him. DR. DEATH explores the twisted mind of Dr. Duntsch and the failures of the system designed to protect the most defenseless among us.

Dr. Death premieres this summer on Peacock.

(Via Peacock)

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.

Closely following a St. Vincent album rollout is akin to a masterclass in world building. With each album, Annie Clark expertly fine tunes an eccentric protagonist; her 2019 Grammy-nominated Masseduction followed a dominatrix visionary freshly out of a mental hospital while her 2015 self-titled LP laid out the path of a futuristic cult leader. Clark’s previous releases envision a surreal future with cutting-edge guitars, but on her sixth album Daddy’s Home, it’s clear Clark is taking her sound in a different direction.

The beguiling persona Clark built around Daddy’s Home is drawn from the past. Her Masseduction character was deadpan in pleather and hot pink spandex, but this time, Clark dons a blown-out blonde bob and sepia-toned sunglasses. She embodies the elegant and charismatic charm of ‘70s trans icon and Warholian muse Candy Darling, who she even memorializes with a song on the LP. But hiding beneath the shiny polyester and mascara-smeared stoic gaze of Clark’s Daddy’s Home persona is her most personal album to date. A departure from the futuristic sounds heard on her previous releases, Clark’s Daddy’s Home instead looks to history in order to reckon with her own complicated past. The album is Clark’s way of reclaiming her story while offering an earnest examination of how our society romanticizes the archetype of the struggling artist.

Clark is notoriously guarded with her personal life. She’s always found ways to cleverly skirt around direct interview questions about her past, like playing a voice recording on her phone when a journalist asks her a question she’s tired of answering. But any separation built between her music and her personal life came crashing down when she began dating UK supermodel Cara Delevingne around 2015. Once their relationship went public, UK tabloid The Daily Mail scoured through court documents and rang distant family members to uncover any and all information they could about Clark’s life. The tabloid published a piece exposing Clark’s father for being imprisoned on a $43 million stock manipulation charge in 2010, a fact the musician intentionally kept secret in order to protect her younger siblings and privately work through the trauma.

With Daddy’s Home, Clark’s story is no longer under the control of tabloids. She examines the complex feelings around her father’s indictment through the lens of a sleazy struggling artist dwelling in mid-’70s New York City. The visuals released for Daddy’s Home seem to be ripped from the pages of a Patti Smith memoir, arousing the grimy chicness of a broke artist, or as Clark puts it in press materials, “glamor who hasn’t slept in three days.” Each grainy video depicts a half strung-out Clark sulking around a worn-down apartment complex looking effortlessly-cool in muted earth tones and cheap jewelry.

The music on Daddy’s Home is steeped in the same aesthetic. The woozy sitars, sultry back-up vocals, and embellishing jazz flutes draw inspiration from the early ‘70s music Clark grew up listening to. Her album opener and lead single “Pay Your Way To Pain” begins with playful piano keys before breaking down into a fuzzy and entrancing riff. It’s here she introduces her album’s languid protagonist who wanders the streets in search of survival. “You’ve got to pay / Your way in pain / You’ve got to pray / Your way in shame,” she repeats with a hint of sarcasm at the chorus, poking fun at our society’s obsession with hustle culture and the notion one must suffer in order to make it big.

Songs like “Down And Out Downtown” and “Living The Dream” similarly unpack what it means to be a struggling artist. A groovy bassline offers the backbone to the former track, a song where Clark soulfully speaks to the less-than-glamorous act of the early morning walk of shame. “Living The Dream” adds a more personal touch. It’s a fever dream of shimmering sitars opening with her protagonist waking up from a drunken stupor to find themselves in an unfamiliar place. Contending with her creative lifestyle, Clark listlessly asserts, “I can’t live in the dream / The dream lives in me.” The line speaks how essential music is to her life while also examining the concept of lineage and inheritance. Can she avoid some of the traits passed on by her father, or are they inevitable and living dormant inside of her?

Exploring a different facet of her artistry, Clark’s track “The Melting Of The Sun” questions her legacy. Briefly shirking her Daddy’s Home persona, Clark grapples with the duties of being crowned an influential woman in rock music. The sorrowful-yet-heady tune name drops pop culture and famous feminist icons like Tori Amos, Joni Mitchell, and Nina Simone, praising the serious sacrifices they made for their art while wondering if she herself is worthy of comparison. The song also pays tribute to Marilyn Monroe, someone who became an era’s symbol of beauty while quietly suffering in private. “Who’m I trying to be / A benz’d out beauty queen?” Clark wonders, wrestling with how she critiques culture by crafting characters rather than taking a more direct approach.

When Clark does decide to be direct, it’s still somewhat veiled. Her mellow title track “Daddy’s Home” is the most explicit she’s ever spoken about her personal life. She sings of signing autographs for various inmates as she waits for her father’s official release from prison, a surreal moment that actually happened. She notes how strange it was to see her father’s green prison jumpsuit in contrast with the fancy Italian leather shoes on her own feet. Repeating the words “Daddy’s Home” with an acerbic sense of humor, Clark explores how the fatherly roles have been reversed. Yes, her father is finally returning home, but this time she’s taken on the role of caretaker.

Though Daddy’s Home finally sheds light on Clark’s personal life, the album does it in her own way: dreamy, vague, and heavily cloaked in references. She’s now in control of her own story, sharing some insights while still leaving room for speculation with a take-it-or-leave-it attitude. That’s because, like any true artist, it’s the act of creation that’s for herself. “I think once I make the work and put it out in the world, it’s really for everybody else,” Clark said about the album. “How you take it is no business of mine.”

Daddy’s Home is out now via Loma Vista. Get it here.

J. Cole’s new album The Off-Season has only been out for three days but it’s already trending toward being one of the top-selling releases of the year so far. This is despite a rollout that only included two singles before the album’s release, neither of which received a music video. Today, the first video for The Off-Season arrived, and rather than being for either “The Climb Back” or “Interlude,” J. Cole instead released a video for the album’s second track “Amari,” which is named for his Dreamville labelmate Bas’s nephew.

We don’t know yet whether “Amari” is the video that Cole shot in January as he crossed off his to-do list ahead of “The Fall-Off,” but the video is an eye-catching collection of shots in which Cole flies a helicopter (sort of), reflects on his dorm-to-mansion come-up, and literally sets “the booth” on fire.

Aside from the “Amari” video, Cole’s unusual album rollout also included a documentary, Applying Pressure, a cover story in Slam in whch he denied that he’s preparing for retirement, an incendiary freestyle for the LA Leakers radio show, and most unusually of all, a surprise signing to the Basketball Africa League’s Rwanda team, where he scored three points in his debut game.

Watch J. Cole’s “Amari” video above.

The Off-Season is out now via Dreamville/Roc Nation. Get it here.

Are you a capable three-point shooter who lives in the Long Island, New York area? Then please find the park where Adam Sandler is apparently playing pickup basketball every day because the Sandman needs YOU.

On Monday morning, video of Sandler playing pickup basketball in a polo shirt and what one can only assume to be XXL basketball shorts went viral. I’m not 100 percent sure why video of Adam Sandler playing basketball goes viral so often, as he loves playing basketball more than I think anything else in the world and there are these kinds of videos that pop up quite regularly, but there is a joy to watching him out there in his incredibly baggy clothes playing the most fundamentally sound basketball you’ve ever seen in a game of pickup hoops.

However, there is a glaring issue facing Sandler based on the two videos we have from his latest appearance on the blacktop: no one can knock down a f*cking shot for him. Just look at these two beautiful feeds to open three-point shooters who don’t come close to cashing in on the Sandman dimes.

I am begging you, Long Island Pickup Basketball Community. Do better. Look at how dejected Sandler is after his feed on the first video results in the basketball crashing into the backboard. How do you even go about your day after that? For the rest of your life, you’ll be waking up in a cold sweat replaying that moment in your mind. Sandler, drawing all the eyes of the defense, kicking it out to you right in the shooting pocket, you rising up confidently only to miss the rim completely, and finally, you see Sandler, the source of so much joy for so many, despondent that his efforts were all for nothing.

In the second clip, Sandler is out here setting screens for folks, gets the ball back, recognizes the defense is sagging and skip passes it to the corner for a wide open three that clangs off the rim. Sandler was getting ready to celebrate you and you can’t do anything but leave it short on the front iron? Disgraceful. Get it together, Long Island. You’ve been blessed by the presence of Adam Sandler in his business basketball casual attire and this is the best you can do?

Up-and-coming Detroit rapper Sada Baby has been on the rise since his 2018 record “Bloxk Party” went viral, securing him a record deal and the attentions of such luminaries as Big Sean and Nicki Minaj. The latter featured on a remix of his TikTok-favorite 2020 track “Whole Lotta Choppas,” and Sean included him on the hometown-praising “Friday Night Cypher” from Detroit 2.

Capitalizing on these connections, Sada Baby released yet another Big Sean collaboration today, the Hit-Boy-produced “Little While.” Like “Whole Lotta Choppas,” it employs a techno-influenced beat that taps into his Motor City roots while offering an upbeat departure from his usual gritty sound. In an interview with Apple Music, he explained the intentions behind the beat choice.

“I’m the type of artist that likes to dance and just give the energy through the music,” he elaborated. “So songs like ‘Whole Lotta Choppas,’ and this one are intentionally made for people to have fun. I feel like I do those with ease. I have a lot of them, but I never wanted that to be my main thing. That’s what people expect from you.”

He also said hearing Detroit 2 prompted him to scrap his entire debut album and start over. “Me hearing his album made me scrap everything that I had, as far as [how] we’re going to structure these songs and then put them into the album,” he said. “So nope. I scrapped it and set up fresh studio time in LA to start from scratch.” He says he’s now three weeks away from completing the recording process, leaving him with enough material for three planned mixtapes next year as well.

Listen to Sada Baby’s “Little While” featuring Big Sean and Hit-Boy above.

Sada Baby is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Going into the final day of the NBA regular season, 18 of the 20 seeds in the playoffs and play-in were still up for grabs, as teams jockeyed to move up (and down) in the last game of the season. In the end, things shook out just about as expected, with some tremendous games early between the Hornets and Wizards for eighth in the East and the Warriors and Grizzlies for eighth in the West.

Elsewhere, the Clippers somehow out-tanked the Thunder to stay in 4th, while Portland cruised past an unmotivated Denver team also hoping to maybe slip to 4th, securing the final playoff spot in the West and forcing the Lakers into the play-in. With L.A. in seventh and the Warriors taking eighth, the marquee matchup of the inaugural play-in tournament is set for Wednesday night at 10 p.m. ET in Los Angeles (on ESPN), as LeBron James and Stephen Curry’s paths will cross once again in the postseason.

After the Lakers beat the Pelicans and knew of their fate, LeBron James spoke about once again running into Steph in the postseason and looked back on their battles, the respect they have for each other, and made a pretty passionate case for Curry to be the MVP over the presumptive winner Nikola Jokic.

It’s possible LeBron believes this strongly, but James also knows better than anyone how to craft and curate his own legacy in real time. In a year where injuries took himself out of the MVP conversation — he also noted in postgame that he felt he was playing the best basketball of his career before a “grown man” dove into his legs — the next best thing for LeBron is to build a path through the guy he thinks should be MVP, possibly meeting the actual MVP in the second round, and then likely either the team with the NBA’s best record or the in-town rival Clippers in the conference finals.

James is a wrestling fan so he knows you always put over your opponent, and on top of that he gets to stir up a little drama in the process by seeing if he can maybe swing some votes over Curry’s way who has had, undoubtedly, one of the best seasons in the NBA. James references his support for Russ to win the MVP when he first averaged a triple-double, noting that record can’t be a deciding factor when someone has an historic season. What he’s also done is ensured that the MVP debate will rage for some time longer even as the regular season comes to a close, and that Curry vs. Jokic will be one major topic of conversation — but one that comes after discussion of the latest matchup of Curry vs. LeBron.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed from March, former-White House senior advisor and Slender Man body double Jared Kushner declared an end to the conflict in the Middle East. “We are witnessing the last vestiges of what has been known as the Arab-Israeli conflict,” he wrote. Guess it’s time to unfurl the “Mission Accomplished” banner.

As the conflict continues to escalate between Israel and Palestine, including Israel launching deadly airstrikes against Gaza, many on Twitter are mocking Kushner for “bringing peace” to the Middle East. “The one positive thing to come out of the Trump administration was Kushner’s brilliance in bringing peace to the Middle East,” director Rob Reiner tweeted, while comedian Nell Scovell added, “Late tonight, while Jared is asleep, Ivanka will slip into the kitchen and quietly remove the ‘I Brought Peace to the Middle East’ mug that she bought him last Chanukah.”

Kushner, who was put in charge of brokering peace in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict by his father-in-law despite no previous foreign relations experience, recently founded “an organization called the Abraham Accords Institute for Peace to work on deepening the normalization agreements he helped strike between Israel and Arab countries,” according to Axios.

Kushner is also writing a book “about his experience in helping broker the deals,” which assuredly won’t mention the “between $172 million and $640 million” he and wife Ivanka Trump made while working in the White House. He’s too busy with all that peace.

(Via Raw Story)

The 2020-2021 NBA regular season has officially come to a close and it did so in rather spectacular fashion, with a wild final day that saw teams battling for play-in positioning, playoff seeding, and some outright tanking into different matchups.

The day started out with some phenomenal games including three furious comebacks: one actually completed by the Wizards to beat the Hornets and earn the 8-seed in the East, another other by the Grizzlies, briefly taking the lead on Golden State before Stephen Curry happened and the Warriors won, and another by the Celtics to scare the Knicks who held on to earn the 4-seed in the East.

The night slate wasn’t nearly as competitive for all the reasons one might expect, as teams rested and positioned themselves to be healthy and ready for the playoffs. Out West, the Nuggets were playing guys but clearly weren’t invested in their game in Portland the same way the Blazers were, as Portland ran away early to secure the 6-seed in the West and push the Lakers into the play-in, despite L.A. getting a win in New Orleans (although with a bit of a scare from LeBron apparently tweaking his ankle). Meanwhile, the Jazz started slow but eventually pummeled the Kings to lock down the 1-seed, keeping Phoenix in second out West.

With Denver losing, the Clippers would move to the 3-seed with a win, but they clearly wanted no part of that as they did the unthinkable, out-tanking the Thunder to lose in Oklahoma City (after losing to Houston) and getting into the 4-seed to face Dallas (who lost to Minnesota trying to possibly tank their way to the 6 to dodge the Clippers). All in all, it was a wild day and at the end of it all, here is how the play-in and playoffs will shake out.

EAST

PLAY-IN
7. Boston Celtics vs. 8. Washington Wizards (Tuesday, TNT, 9:00 p.m. ET)
9. Indiana Pacers vs. 10. Charlotte Hornets (Tuesday, TNT, 6:30 p.m. ET)

PLAYOFFS
1. Philadelphia 76ers vs. 8. Winner of Play-In Game 2 (loser BOS/WAS vs. winner IND/CHA)
2. Brooklyn Nets vs. 7. Winner of BOS/WAS
3. Milwaukee Bucks vs. 6. Miami Heat
4. New York Knicks vs. 5. Atlanta Hawks

WEST

PLAY-IN
7. L.A. Lakers vs. 8. Golden State Warriors (Wednesday, ESPN, 10:00 p.m. ET)
9. Memphis Grizzlies vs. 10. San Antonio Spurs (Wednesday, ESPN, 7:30 p.m. ET)

PLAYOFFS
1. Utah Jazz vs. 8. Winner of Play-In Game 2 (loser LAL/GSW vs. winner MEM/SAS)
2. Phoenix Suns vs. 7. Winner of LAL/GSW
3. Denver Nuggets vs. 6. Portland Trail Blazers
4. L.A. Clippers vs. 5. Dallas Mavericks

Once the play-in games are done and the full matchups are set for the playoffs, the complete TV schedule for the first round will be released.

Late last year, when Young Thug was asked whether he’d participate in a Verzuz hits battle, the genre-bending Atlanta rapper’s answer caused a minor dustup on social media because of his controversial inclusion of one of rap’s biggest names in the response. “It would probably have to be like [Lil Wayne],” he said at the time. “… Jay-Z ain’t got 30 songs like that.”

While some fans thought that Thug’s mention of Jay-Z was disrespectful, Thug later explained on his Instagram that he wasn’t trying to diss Jay, he was just “talking too fast.” Today, he returned to the scene of the faux pas, the Million Dollaz Worth Of Game podcast, to further elaborate on his original comments and set the record straight with regard to where he stands on Jay-Z’s legacy.

Host Gillie Da Kid tees him up saying, “You were basically saying you got a lot of f*ckin’ records,” to which Thug replies, “That’s all I was saying, I just used his name because he the biggest n**** in the world to me. I just used his name, to let the world know, ‘Yo, I got just as many hits as the biggest n**** in the world.’ I’m doing two hours on stage. I don’t remember my last hour show… and I don’t do too much talking.”

Still, it might be interesting to see how the two fanbases would react to a Verzuz-style battle. Obviously, both have more than enough hit records to go back-and-forth, but the generation gap and difference in their styles could generate some fun debate among hip-hop heads, possibly even bringing them together across the regional and generational splits that have prompted so much of hip-hop’s friction over the years. However, it might be more productive for the two to collaborate on a new hit record that brings them together instead of forcing them to compete.

You can watch the full interview with Million Dollaz Worth Of Game above.

The concert and festival landscape has been bleak over the past year-plus for obvious reasons. Now, though, things seem to be slowly returning to normal (or something like what normal used to be, anyway). Artists are announcing tour dates for this summer and fall, and music festival organizers are also preparing to host events later this year. Now, one of the country’s most esteemed events is slated to make its return in 2021: Pitchfork Music Festival has announced its 2021 dates and lineup.

The fest is set to hit Chicago on the weekend of September 10 to 12. The headliners for Friday are Phoebe Bridgers, Big Thief, and Animal Collective. Saturday will be led by St. Vincent, Angel Olsen, and Kim Gorden. Capping things off on Sunday will be Erykah Badu, Flying Lotus, and Thundercat.

Elsewhere, performers will include Yaeji, Black Midi, Hop Along, Kelly Lee Owens, Dogleg, Armand Hammer, Ty Segall & Freedom Band, Waxahatchee, Jay Electronica, Jamila Woods, Faye Webster, Bartees Strange, Danny Brown, Cat Power, Andy Shauf, Caroline Polachek, and Yves Tumor.

Tickets are on sale now, so learn more about this year’s festival here.

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.