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Does bourbon get better with age? Absolutely… to a point. If you’ve ever tasted white dog or moonshine fresh off the still, you know that’s true. But bourbon does eventually hit just the right age for universal consumption — and it’s not quite as long as it is with rum.

Usually somewhere around 10 years, in most cases. Sometimes up to 15 years, though rarely do great bourbons spend 20+ years aging, like spendier rums.

So are longer-aged bourbons that much better than, say, seven-year-old expression? Are they worth the higher prices the juice demands? Can a savvy drinker — who’s been paid to taste alcohol for the better part of a decade — tell the difference in age statements without looking at the label?

Those are the questions I’m trying to answer in this blind taste test. I had a friend select six bourbons — five bottles that are ten years or older (blended and single barrel) and one affordable and accessible seven-year-old single barrel bourbon, thrown in as a monkey wrench. Once I tasted each dram, I ranked them according to taste and taste alone. Straight up; no concessions made for price or availiblity.

Spoiler: I didn’t get them all right!

Part 1: The Taste

Taste 1

Tasting Notes:

F*ckin’ A. Oak, cinnamon, and cherry stand out behind a veneer of hot oak and spice. Yes, there’s creamy vanilla and a bit of bitter woodiness with a toasty edge. But this sip is fire and not in a cool way.

I don’t know on this one. I wasn’t ready to be slapped in the face with “f*ck you, this is bourbon, motherf*cker!” at eleven in the morning.

Taste 2

Tasting Notes:

Okay, I’m back after a pint of water. There’s a mix of vanilla, Christmas spice, and stonefruit (apricot, I think) next to cherry candies and spicy wood. It’s really mellow. The end has this hint of cedar and cherry tobacco that’s really enticing.

This is good; the epitome of “smooth.”

Taste 3

Tasting Notes:

Okay… this is a complete departure — with hints of oak and vanilla leading toward a really herbal, almost green wood nose and taste. There’s a light pepperiness but it’s really that green herbal note that sticks out the most, with accents of vanilla, oak, and spice (and maybe some apple caramel) in the background.

Interesting.

Taste 4

Tasting Notes:

Um… Am I drinking the same dram? This really, really smells and tastes like the exact same thing I just tried but maybe a little more intense. Yes, there’s a bit more vanilla, spice, and oak. But that herbal green note is undeniably front-and-center.

It has never been clearer that Baker’s and Basil Hayden’s are from the same warehouse as having these two back to back. They taste almost identical. That also means that I have no idea which is the younger Baker’s now.

Taste 5

Tasting Notes:

Oh, hello Michter’s.

Maple syrup sweetness with spicy tobacco, creamy vanilla, and burnt toffee next to leathery oak? Yup. There’s that charred bitterness next to a touch of caramel fruit that lingers back through that tobacco, leather, vanilla, and maple.

It’s hard not to love that maple syrup edge. That being said, after the almost savory herbal voyage of the last two drams, this reads a little sweet.

Taste 6

Tasting Notes:

Another departure. This has an earthiness that’s really enticing and almost … mossy … with a bit of worn leather. Then there’s this underpinning of nutty toffees and cherry tobacco with a slightly spicy edge, orange oils, and a bold-yet-light body of yeasty rolls dripping with cinnamon and brown sugar-laced butter.

Finally, there’s an almost savory fruit edge that’s not quite melon but not quite pumpkin. To which I say… Yes.

This stands out and is really f*cking delicious.

Part 2: Ranking The Bourbons

6. George T. Stagg Buffalo Trace Antique Collection 2020 (15 years old)

ABV: 65.2%

Average Price: $550 (MSRP: $99)

The Whiskey:

This expression from last year’s Buffalo Trace Antique Collection is the boldest of the batch. The ABVs for this bottle is the same as absinthe. The juice is a mix of Kentucky corn, Minnesota rye, and malted barley from North Dakota that’s aged for 15 long years on three different floors of one warehouse.

That time draws out 59 percent of the whiskey to the angel’s, leaving this hefty bourbon behind.

Bottom Line:

I didn’t much care for this when I had it for the first time. I still don’t. It’s … a lot. Maybe on the rocks, to cool it goddamn down, it’ll be fine. But it’s too expensive to play around with.

4. (tie) Baker’s Single Barrel Aged 7 Years

ABV: 53.5%

Average Price: $60

The Whiskey:

This is the first single barrel release from Baker’s, which used to only come in small-batch expressions. The new expression comes from the Beam warehouses and is hand-selected for its specific flavor profile and bottled at barrel-proof, leaving it untouched.

Bottom Line:

This was a true outlier on the list, except for the fact that it tastes exactly like the next entry. Really, these could be from the exact same barrel just with this being a little more intense thanks to not being proofed with water.

That being said, this feels like a steal for $60 — kind of proving you don’t need to go old to go big.

4. (tie) Basil Hayden’s Bourbon Aged 10 Years

ABV: 40%

Average Price: $75

The Whiskey:

This bottle from Beam’s high-end Basil Hayden’s line is a blend of hand-selected barrels of ten-year-old barrels from the Beam warehouse. The barrels are chosen to heighten the Basil Hayden’s bourbon experience and then proofed with that soft Kentucky limestone water to make it more accessible as a sip.

Bottom Line:

This is a bit more drinkable than Baker’s Single Barrel thanks to the lower ABV. But that then doesn’t give it the same kick. So, these two even out and land as a tie because … they taste the same!

3. Michter’s Single Barrel Bourbon Aged 10 Years

ABV: 47.2%

Average Price: $200

The Whiskey:

Michter’s 10-yo Bourbon is a very sought after and beloved bottle of booze. The barrels are hand-selected by Michter’s team for their taste and texture. Then the booze is bottled with only a touch of water just to take the edges off and make it more pleasant on the tongue.

Bottom Line:

This is usually a pretty high ranking whiskey for me. And sure, it’s in the top three on this list, but it still rang a little sweet today.

2. Four Roses Small Batch Limited Edition 2017 (12, 13, and 15-year-old blend)

ABV: 53.95%

Average Price: $380 (MSRP: $150)

The Whiskey:

Every year, Four Roses release around 13,000 bottles of their Limited Edition Small Batch. 2017 was a banner year for the brand’s release. Four Roses is known for its ten distinct bourbons. Three of them are blended in this one. This expression blended three whiskeys: A 15-year-old low rye/slight spice mash, a 13-year-old of the same, and a 12-year-old low rye/delicate fruit bourbon.

Bottom Line:

Goddamn, this is smooth. This dram was nearly number one because of that. It carries a nice velvetiness that’s just enticing. It feels like it’s worth the hunt and the price.

1. Barrell Bourbon Batch 23 (10, 12, and 15-year-old blend)

ABV: 53.89%

Average Price: $90

The Whiskey:

Barrell Craft Spirits might be one of the best whiskey blenders working today (especially in the U.S.). This expression blends 10, 12, and 15-year-old barrels from Kentucky, Tennesee, and Indiana into a final product. On paper, this shouldn’t be this refined. Moreover, this is all about expert barrel selection and blending as the final product is bottled at cask strength with no proofing or filtration to hide behind.

Bottom Line:

This really was special. Well, special today in the context of this tasting. It was so easy to drink while also carrying deep textures and flavors. It was smoothly rounded and feels like it’s something a bit more than your average dram.

Part 3: Final Thoughts

Baker’s and Basil Hayden’s tasting almost identical today meant I really couldn’t figure out which bottle was the younger ringer.

What stood out, though, was that the blends really shone the brightest. Of course, most whiskey is built for its flavor profile (even the single barrel stuff). But both of the whiskeys that are fully crafted from various ages and barrels stood out as the best-tasting drams. By far, if I’m being honest.

Lastly, yes, older whiskeys are delicious — most of the time. That 15-year-old George T. Stagg is not for the faint of heart — some could it’s argue off-putting. Yet Four Roses and Barrel Bourbon both have 15-year-old bourbons in the mix that are phenomenal.

Does age matter, then? Sure. But it will still always come down to the taste.

Last year proved to be one of the most successful years in Lil Durk’s career. The Chicago rapper earned his best performing album with Just Cause Y’all Waited 2 as it debuted at No. 2 on the album charts. Months later he returned with his second album of 2020, The Voice, and today he doubled back with its deluxe reissue. Durk repackages the album with 11 new songs including “Kanye Krazy” which was released with a nostalgic video directed by Cole Bennett.

In the video, Durk and Bennett pay homage to fellow Chicagoan Kanye West by creating a number of iconic looks from the GOOD Music rapper’s legendary career. This includes Kanye’s “Runaway” video and the wacky “I Love It” visual he did Lil Pump where they both wore oversized Roblox suits. The nostalgia continues on the song itself where Durk raps, “You ain’t got thе answers sway / I be claimin’ I’m the realest like any other day.”

In addition to the “Kanye Krazy” track, the deluxe version of The Voice flaunts appearances from Pooh Shiesty, Lil Baby, and Sydny August. Prior to the album’s release, Lil Durk joined French Montana and Jack Harlow to throw a post-apocalyptic party in the video for their “Hot Boy Bling” track.

Press play on the “Kanye Krazy” video above.

The Voice is out now via Alamo/Geffen Records. Get it here.

After getting her name out to the public eye, Dallas’ Erica Banks is enjoying her mainstream success in 2021 less than a full month into the new year. Her popularity is in large part thanks to the Buss It Challenge, the popular TikTok trend that features her “Buss It” single. The collective use of the song in videos from fans has produced more than two billion views on the social media app. As Erica continues to ride out the success of the track, she brought her talents to fellow Dallas native Yella Beezy where the two rappers went to work on their new single, “Star.”

If you were unsure of Erica’s potential, “Star” is a perfect example of the improving talent she posses at an early point of her career. While Yella Beezy resorts to a more relaxed approach to the song, Erica slices through the song’s bouncy, go-go-sampling production (it’s E.U.’s “Da Butt“) with the sharpest blade in her possession. “Star” also arrives with a music video that finds Yella Beezy leading a class of young ladies who hope to perfect their twerking skills. Directions like “don’t be stiff” can be seen on the board in the classroom and while the other ladies in the class believe they have a chance to end the period as the best twerker, Erica Banks arrives to not only steal the show, the Yella Beezy himself.

You can listen to the track in the video above.

Erica Banks is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

The days when openly professing your love for Japanese animation and catgirl maids would get you roasted by your friends and family aren’t all the way gone, but we’ve come a long way. Now, rappers like Guapdad 4000 can proudly feature on tongue-in-cheek songs name-dropping shows like Michiko & Hatchin while searching for a potential paramour with the same hobby. That’s pretty much the premise of Lil Ricefield’s “Anime Shawty, Vol. 2” which features Guapdad and Seiji Oda. Guapdad embraces his inner weeb with his fellow Oakland rappers, who are Japanese-American brothers and first broke out with their song “Trapanese.”

The goofy video features the three rappers making earnest overtures to their dream girls while surrounded by Pokemon plushies and exuberant cosplaying cuties as cherry blossom leaves fall in front of the camera (an anime staple) and blocky Japanese characters flash across the screen. Everybody seems to be having a blast and keeping a sense of humor about the whole thing, although Guap maintains his usual high lyrical standard, even with the silly subject matter.

Of course, the Too Short-approved Oakland native is no stranger to letting his stranger sensibilities have free rein to hilarious effect. While his original “Alpha” video also embraced an anime-inspired aesthetic, the video for its remix found him adopting the “Permit Patrick” persona to poke fun at suburban denizens with 9-1-1 on speed dial.

Watch the “Anime Shawty, Vol. 2” video above.

John Chaney, the Naismith Memorial Hall of Fame basketball coach known for his success with the Temple men’s program from 1982-2006, passed away on Friday at the age of 89. The news was initially reported by Mike Jensen of the Philadelphia Inquirer.

As the head coach at Temple, Chaney made five Elite Eights, including as recently as 2001, and looked over a program that developed such talents as Aaron McKie and Eddie Jones. Chaney also won the Division II national championship while coaching at the HBCU Cheyney State in Philadelphia. He was enshrined in the Naismith Hall of Fame in 2001, shortly after his final Elite Eight appearance.

Known for his early-morning practices and larger-than-life mentor, Chaney received praise from the likes of Dawn Staley and JA Adande after his death was reported.

Chaney had a passionate style as a coach and made headlines in several instances for sticking up for his players, including an infamous postgame altercation with John Calipari in 1994 as well as another four years prior with Calipari. Late in his career, Chaney was caught up in a dispute with rival St. Joe’s over Chaney’s deployment of a player into the game solely to commit fouls and make a point to the referees, after which he was suspended for the 2005 season.

As one of the most famous coaches in Philadelphia sports history and within college basketball more broadly, Chaney will be missed, particularly among Owls fans, as he led the program to 17 NCAA Tournaments in 18 years. Coupled with the passing of another legendary Black coach, John Thompson, late last year, Chaney’s passing signals our distance from a bygone era in college hoops.

Generally speaking, a lot of rap music often touches on a group of recurring topics. One of those is the acquisition and possession of wealth, and on that front, Meek Mill has established some serious goals. On Twitter today, he declared that he wants his value to balloon up to $100 million dollars, and he thinks he knows when that target will be hit.

Mill tweeted today, “Ima touch a 100m by summer 2022!” He then added, “Minimum,” alongside a diamond emoji.

$100 million is obviously a big number, but it’s not clear how close or far Mill is to that figure right now. Sites like Celebrity Net Worth say Mill’s net worth is $20 million, although it’s not clear what data that claim is based on. In 2019, meanwhile, Forbes claimed Mill was one of 2019’s highest-paid rappers with earnings of $21 million. Mill seemed to think that number wasn’t quite accurate, though, as he tweeted in response, “The Forbes got our accounts f*cked up lol ….”

Whatever the case may be, Mill has about 18 months to reach his goal. If the possibility of touring returns in the near future, that could be helpful (although he got back on stage recently and people weren’t happy about it).

Meek Mill is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Streaming services saved our sanity during the pandemic, which is obviously still going, and they are still here for us. Every single weekend, they are cranking out the content, so we are going to lay it all out here on a weekly basis. One thing, though: it’s slightly unfair to start this process at the end of a month, since there will be a fresh crop of library editions and releases that appear in February, so consider this a trial run. With that unfairness acknowledged for all to see, the obvious winner here is Netflix.

Again, this is unfair! HBO Max has an enormous back catalogue, Amazon Prime is currently prepping some major series for us, Disney+ is bringing us new MCU offerings for the first time in a year, and Hulu can’t be beat with the next-day offerings. Still, the sheer variety and quantity coming from Netflix is crushing all competition for the next few days, but we’ll be back for more next week, when surely, a challenger will emerge. Here are the best streaming shows to check out this weekend.

NETFLIX:

We Are: The Brooklyn Saints (Netflix series) — Rudy Valdez, the Emmy-award winning filmmaker who poured his soul into HBO’s The Sentence, is here with more intimate verité footage of his newest subject. Here, Valdez turns his camera upon a youth football program in the heart of inner city Brooklyn. The program, of course, is much more encompassing than a pastime but also a vehicle for opportunity for these boys. They also become family with an incredible support system of coaches and parents, all while they strive for victory and overcome losses on and off the field. All of this, hopefully, will point toward a brighter future for all involved.

50M2 (Netflix series) — This Turkish hitman series (and how can you not be intrigued?) revolves around Gölge doing the second-chance thing while doing dirty work for Servit Nadir while taking refuge in a tailor shop. Gölge is masqurading as the late tailor’s son, and he’s transforming the neighborhood and vice versa. Meanwhile, Gölge doesn’t recall his own childhood, so get ready for the photograph-related fallout there.

Finding ‘Ohana (Netflix film) — Two siblings who hail from Brooklyn head to rural O’ahu, where they explore their Hawaiian heritage and head off on an epic adventure in search of long-lost treasure. Naturally, this involves a cryptic pirate’s journal, and one of the siblings is very skeptical while the other’s plowing full-steam ahead. In the process, they learn to love their native culture and discover that the true treasure is family.

Fatma (Netflix series, Sunday) — A cleaning lady transforms into a killer, which is, yeah, a little unexpected, but it’s almost hilarious when she’s only considered a “cleaner” because her clients have no idea.

The White Tiger (Netflix film) — Priyanka Chopra Jonas stars as passengers for a young hero jockey who becomes a driver, Balram Halwai (Adarsh Gourav). He narrates this purportedly epic story about his darkly humorous rise from rags to riches in modern India. He’s cunning and ambitious and doesn’t want to sit in his socially acceptable box, and his journey takes an unconventional and somewhat rogue turn, which leads him to become a different type of master than, again, also socially acceptable. The film’s based upon the New York Times bestselling novel of the same name.

And here’s what else you might want to catch from the rest of the streaming services with new offerings this weekend.

HBO MAX:

The Little Things — Three Oscar winners headline a film that’s mostly landing on streaming (there are few limited theaters in the mix), so thank goodness for the Internet during pandemic times. The movie stars Denzel Washington and Rami Malek as police officers hunting a 1990s-era serial killer in Los Angeles. (Yep, Denzel is playing a cop again! You can’t hate on that.) Their prime suspect is portrayed by Jared Leto, and this is a tale of overarching obsession and secrets that are best left uncovered.

Euphoria: Second Special Episode — This installment is called “F*ck Anyone Who’s Not a Sea Blob,” so, yes, that’s cryptic. We do know that this episode will be a mirror reflections for what happened after Rue was left standing alone at a train station by Jules after the two scrapped their joint getaway plan. This led to some sad Zendaya diner action by the former, and the second episode (directed by creator Sam Levinson) will inform the audience of what went down on Jules’ end. Hunter Schafer, who portrays Jules, also co-wrote this one.

DISNEY+

Wandavision: Episode 4 (Disney+ series) — The Marvel Cinematic Universe has launched into Phase Four with abandon, and oh boy, things got seriously dark this week. The good news is that we got a lot of answers this week, and there’s one heck of a villainous curveball coming your way if you haven’t watched yet. The show’s more inventive than most superhero-oriented fare that we’ve seen in the past few years, and it’s fantastic to finally see the Marvel titles coming our way once more.

Beyond the Clouds: A Promise Kept: Finale (Disney+ series) — It’s finale time for this incredible true story in miniseries form. The story’s an ode to the life of 17-year-old Zach Sobiech, a singer/songwriter who embarked upon a tragic and unforgettable journey after learning that he’s diagnosed with a rare bone cancer. He spends the last of his time on earth chasing after his dreams with the help of his best friend and a teacher who’s also a mentor. Before all is said and done, a record deal emerges.

AMAZON:

Flack: Season 1 (PopTV series moving to Amazon Prime) — Flack came out two years ago on Pop TV, presumably as a limited series, but all that has changed now. Amazon picked up the Anna Paquin-starring show for an unexpected second season, which will arrive later this year. If you are in need of some guilty-pleasure escapism, consider giving this series a whirl. It’s voyeuristic and at times thrilling to watch. Flack also feels like an amalgamation of many shows and movies you’ve seen before, including The Devil Wears Prada, Scandal, and Sex and the City.

HULU:

The Sister: Season 1 (Hulu series) — ITV commissioned this series with Hulu, and it’s already a hit in the U.K. The show’s based upon Burial, a best selling novel by Neil Cross (Luther) and involves a family’s life being rocked into oblivion when a presence from the past literally shows up on the porch with some unwelcome and shocking news. This development, of course, transforms into catastrophic decisions and long-lasting effects that aren’t so desirable.

Jann: Complete Seasons & 2 (Distribution 360 series on Hulu) — This is a weird one but delighfully so. The show revolves around a former pop star, Jann, who’s attempting to get over. breakup, deal with her mother’s health issues, and finally conquer archrival… Sarah McLachlan? Alright.

LEGO recreations of basically anything are always a fan favorite, even for infamous events, but one Jeopardy! fan really went the extra mile for what doubles as a loving tribute to late show host Alex Trebek.

It’s a LEGO recreation of the Jeopardy! set, but as Jess Hughes and its creator make clear, it’s more of a kinetic sculpture. That’s because everyone on the set can move. LEGO Alex Trebek moves back and forth, and each of the three GOAT Tournament contestants reach for their signaling device and can ring in. Their podiums even light up when they do, which is a really cool feature.

The pre-pandemic contestant bench looks great here, and the video is actually a well-done introduction to the individual character models using audio from the show. There’s even some game play that’s recreated in LEGO, and later in the video there’s a peek behind the podiums to see how the electronics work here.

Current Jeopardy! guest host and Greatest Of All Time Tournament winner Ken Jennings shared it online as did the show’s own Twitter account, so it’s clear the tribute made an impact on those it was intended for. And it really is lovingly done, complete with some custom nameplates that Jennings, Brad Rutter and James Holzhauer used during the GOAT Tournament. The set looks a bit different now, as we still live in the pandemic age, but it’s a lovely tribute to Trebek and a nice reminder of how much fun that tournament was to watch a year ago.

Keeping a New Year’s resolution isn’t always the easiest thing to do, but it gets not quite so hard when you have Drake helping you out.

The 6ixBuzz TV Instagram account posted a video from a Toronto-based rapper known as BucksInDaCut, in which he declares that his goal for 2021 is to get and save money more than he did in 2020. After declaring he started the year with $500, he counts his current stack of cash, which was up to $1,300. Surprisingly, Drake popped up on the comments and wrote, “Yo what’s this mans PayPal I’m doubling that for my guy Bucks B.”

In a follow-up video, Bucks confirmed that Drake paid up, and that he went above and beyond by also taking care of his student debt. In the clip, Bucks says, “Yo fam, listen up: I gotta big up Drizzy, the one and only Drake, fam. He’s a man of his word, fam. He doubled my money and on top of that, fam, I told him about my OSAP [Ontario Student Assistance Program loan] and he cleared my debts, fam. So I gotta big up this guy one more time. He’s the biggest name in the city, fam. Drizzy Drake, fam, I’m tryna be be like him one day.”

Check out the BucksInDaCut videos below.

I truly had no idea what to expect when I flipped on Derek DelGaudio’s In And Of Itself on Hulu. I’d seen it praised up and down social media, with exhortations to drop everything and watch it, often without necessarily saying it was good, and always without explanation of what it actually is. After having watched it, I think I understand. In And Of Itself is fascinating and infuriating. I don’t know quite what it is and I think I might hate it, but I desperately want everyone I know to watch it so that we can scream about it together. Shall we?

(Yes, there will be spoilers in this piece, because that’s what discussion requires, and anyway, can you even “spoil” magic?)

In And Of Itself is a magic show, sort of, and even if Derek DelGaudio doesn’t perform that many tricks in this 90-minute one-man show, the show itself is an act of magic. It has card tricks, impressive ones, but DelGaudio’s central sleight of hand is the illusion of transparency. That magic is not just magic but some form of self-fulfillment. DelGaudio has been described in The New York Times as “the comedian who wants to break magic.” He’s famous, too, sort of. He was a magic consultant on Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige, worked as an assistant to the late Ricky Jay, and has been hailed as a prodigy by everyone from David Blaine to Penn and Teller.

DelGaudio’s latest work, In And Of Itself, directed by Muppet godfather Frank Oz and with music by Mark Mothersbaugh from Devo, combines elements of self-actualization, performative introspection, young millennial navel-gazing, and influencer culture. It’s either a brand new kind of magic or just the same old magic wrapped in nearly impenetrable layers of self-justification.

The show opens pensively. Home videos play as DelGaudio narrates: They ask you, what do you want to be when you grow up?

…Later they ask you, what do you do?

Which is just another way of saying, ‘what have you become?’”

So you search, you look at the roles the world offers you, trying to find the one that reflects you.

This leads us inside the theater, to a wall on which cards have been placed reading “I AM,” with some kind of “role” underneath — opponent, ophthalmologist, optimist. Sometimes they’re jobs, sometimes personality traits, sometimes puns or states of being. The audience files in, choosing one card for themselves, then quietly wait for the show to begin as a title card tells us that DelGaudio performed this show 552 times in a small theater in New York City. DelGaudio, who looks like a cross between Man Vs. Food‘s Adam Richman and young Seth MacFarlane, takes the stage, opening the show on a pensive note. He solemnly delivers his first anecdote, about a man in a bar in Spain who told DelGaudio that DelGaudio reminded him of someone. That someone was known as “The Rouletista.”

The Rouletista, DelGaudio goes on to explain extremely slowly, was a man who came back from the Great War an alcoholic, who turned to playing Russian Roulette. Without referencing The Deer Hunter, DelGaudio explains that the man played the first night and won, and then did what Russian Roulette players rarely do: he came back for a second night. He came back again and again, as audiences and purses grew and grew, until he added more and more bullets. One bullet. Two bullets. Three bullets. Four. Again and again he won until finally he demanded to play with six bullets. As he put the now fully-loaded revolver to his temple, there was an earthquake that displaced a ceiling beam, knocking the gun out of the man’s hand, at which point he quit the game.

Retiring to a mansion built with the money he made playing roulette, The Rouletista was confronted one day by a burglar. The burglar pointed a gun at The Rouletista, who scoffed at the notion that he could be harmed by guns, whereupon the burglar shot him dead through the heart.

All of this foreshadows DelGaudio’s chosen identity and his basic storytelling style. First of all, why Spain? It doesn’t seem to be important at all, yet DelGaudio includes the apparently throwaway detail, something he will do throughout the show, adding random details to everything in a way that makes us wonder, “Where the hell is he going with all of this?” It’s the central question driving In And Of Itself forward even as the answer, it seems, is ultimately nowhere.

In a show all about identity and self-conception, the central question is why DelGaudio takes being called The Rouletista to be such a painful revelation. Initially, it leads to magic tricks. This will become the pattern of In And Of Itself — DelGaudio doing a confusing 15-minute monologue about knowing one’s self as a lead up to two minutes of very impressive magic tricks.

He tells a story about someone throwing a brick through his window because his mom was a lesbian. Then he makes the brick disappear. He does card tricks — second deals and precise cuts that clearly require hundreds of hours of practice, effortlessly sorting and making people’s cards disappear and reappear in surprising ways. The choose-a-card, any-card trick leads into a similar one, only now the cards are actually letters. DelGaudio brings audience members onstage to open and read the letter they’ve chosen, seemingly at random. The letters turn out to be something heartfelt from someone who loves them. How did he do that??

Like almost all magic, the trick involves making the audience believe that the magician can read minds and predict the future. Unlike all magicians, DelGaudio uses this power not so much to make the crowd “ooh and ahh” but to convince them they are loved, that they are appreciated, that maybe they should reach out to that estranged father or tell their best friend they love them. He’s like Tony Robbins meets David Blaine meets an inspirational quote shared on Instagram. By the end basically the entire audience is crying and it’s hard to say exactly why.

Meanwhile, there are weird celebrity cameos. Hey, isn’t that Kamau Bell in the audience?

In Delgaudio’s closer, he reapplies the card trick again, identifying each audience member by the card they’ve chosen. He looks at them and then, with intense eye contact, reads their card back to them. Truth-teller. Mother. Midnight Toker. The celebrity cameos increase in frequency and weirdness. Deray. Larry Wilmore. Tim Gunn from Project Runway. The performance artist Marina Abramovic. Bill Gates. Being identified as the card they’ve chosen seems to, Rouletista-like, cut everyone to the core. Tim Gunn’s hand is shaking. Another woman bursts into tears after being identified as… an entomologist. I still cannot fathom why this would make a person cry. Finally, I can admit it to the world: I study bugs!

Perfectly capitalizing on a culture of performative empathy, Derek DelGaudio’s greatest trick of all was making his audience feel seen. DelGaudio cries along with them (even though we know he has done this more than 500 times), identifying his own mother and brother in the crowd and at one point tearfully telling the audience that, “I’m not just a rouletista… I’m also a son.”

Just like that, we’re back to The Rouletista thing. Why would one object to this identity? Is DelGaudio the Rouletista because he risks destroying himself in order to please an audience? As he told the Times in the same profile, “I daily suffer from the slings and arrows of being ‘a magician.’”

But what exactly are those slings and arrows? DelGaudio treats them as self-evident when they’re anything but. Hannah Gadsby famously contemplated quitting comedy in her acclaimed Netflix special, Nanette, but in that case Gadsby’s critique of the format was specific and pointed, with a clear explanation of why the act, as popularly conceived, was difficult for her, specifically as a gay woman. DelGaudio, by contrast, gives the impression that he invented an elaborate identity for himself (The Rouletista!) only so that he could chafe against it. It’s an odd thing, using one’s art as a forum to complain about having to do art.

DelGaudio said in 2017, that “the next step, with In And Of Itself, is using magic to express real ideas.”

But what real ideas does In And Of Itself express? That some people are mothers and others are entomologists? That Derek DelGaudio is a reluctant rouletista? It’s paradoxical that to justify magic requires claiming that it’s something else. It’s not just magic, it’s art! It’s self-expression!

Some of DelGaudio’s “grand” illusions have a similarly self-canceling effect. The more people cry and DelGaudio acts as if he’s serving us up some tender part of himself, the more I started to reflexively and retroactively apply banal explanations to his tricks. Oh, he has an assistant feeding him the answers. Oh, the person reading the heartfelt letter was clearly a plant.

In And Of Itself sets out to be not just magic, but an exploration of self. Yet I come to the end knowing very little about Derek DelGaudio, about labels, or about myself. In the end, it is exactly what we thought it was and not what Derek DelGaudio seemingly spent 90 minutes trying to convince us it wasn’t. It’s a trick.

‘Derek DelGaudio’s In And Of Itself’ is is streaming via Hulu. Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can access his archive of reviews here.