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Cardi B scored an interview with presidential candidate Joe Biden last month, and while it was pretty innocuous, it riled some folks up. Among those is Candace Owens, the political commentator with whom Cardi has had beef before.

During a conversation with Ben Shapiro, Owens condemned Biden for speaking with Cardi after not having granted many interviews during this campaign cycle, saying, “This would be akin to Donald Trump saying, ‘I’m going to give no interviews,’ but he came up and he decided to give an interview to Justin Bieber.” Later in her criticism, she referred to Cardi as an “illiterate rapper.”

Cardi responded on Twitter, sharing a video of her sister apparently being harassed by Trump supporters on a beach and writing, “You wanna know why joe gotta talk to me Candice cause I have the #1 song & yet my sister can’t go to the beach in the Hampton’s wit out trump supporters harassing cause they were by themselves & Santa Claus was harassing my sis GF all because they are a Afro/Hispanic gay couple.”

Owens answered, “To clarify—Joe Biden ‘gotta talk’ to you because you have the number 1 song and Santa Claus was harassing your sister? Um. K. Thanks for clearing that one up.” Cardi fired back, “Yes you are right I have the number 1 song & I have a huge platform and I can make millions go vote to get the MAN THAT USED YOU .I don’t want to argue with you Candace I really don’t have the time .I honestly just feel sorry for you.

The back and forth continued with Owens writing, “You are encouraging MILLIONS to go vote for the man that locked up entire generations of black men. Maybe go google: JOE BIDEN AND 1994 CRIME BILL. Joe Biden used you. Bernie Sanders used you. Neither one of them like or know your music. They think you’re dumb.” Cardi answered, “& you are encouraging millions to vote for a man who laugh Everytime a black men gets killed by a cop and tell millions of Americans to drink bleach. Trump didn’t even have you talking at the Republican convention. He thinks you’re dumb.MASA did you dirty but you mad at me ?”

Owens continued, “Lastly, asking racist Joe Biden to lower your taxes in the same breath that you asked for free universal healthcare is about as thick as it gets. When you stick to music, you can get left alone. When you dabble in politics, you will get called out for platforming ignorance.” Cardi responded, “Well paying taxes is something that as much as I hate it’s a reality I will always have to pay …but I rather my tax money go to free education then police funding ….Use my money on something USEFUL.Your president use our tax money to fu d his empty campaign runs.”

Cardi then took the conversation over to Instagram, sharing a six-minute video in which she criticized Owens’ positions and accused her of chasing clout. Cardi then shared a video of Owens talking about Floyd’s arrest and death, and Cardi wrote, “Lost soul. The type of people that drag me all day online all cause I hate trump.This girl tho she makes me sad.She have a identity issue.She hates her own kind.I never f*cked a white men so idk how good white duck is to make turn against my own race but this girl is six months pregnant harrassing all cause of a song Called WAP and Trump .Well I hope I made your bay kick sweety.”

Cardi then dug up an old tweet from Owens, in which she names Cardi as one of her “predictions for the black revolution for free thought.” Cardi wrote, “Since 2018 you been knew the power and potential that I have.I will never let ya SILENCE MY VOICE cause you threatened by the power that I have for a NEW BEGINNING AND CHANGE ! People will call you dumb , stupid but deep down inside they know you a f*ckin FORCE.”

Cardi B is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

HBO’s Lovecraft Country is ambitious and astounding and will undoubtedly blow your expectations away. Created by Misha Green, who’s working with Matt Ruff’s 1950s-set dark-fantasy novel as source material, the show counts horror visionary Jordan Peele and sci-fi maestro J.J. Abrams as executive producers. The show is full of literary and musical references, along with monsters, both in-your-face and and figurative; we’ll discuss the resulting symbolism on a weekly basis.

While likening the experience of Black America to a horror show, Lovecraft Country is doing its best to make heads spin. Last week, the series did it with a Poltergeist send-up, and this week, we’ve got the “A History Of Violence” episode with a visit to a museum (that exalts Titus Braithwaite), which turns into an Indiana Jones-style adventure to find Titus’ vault and a sacred scroll. Yup, Atticus and Leti (with Montrose in tow) headed up to Boston, where they want to uncover those missing pages from the Book of Names before Christina can find and decode them to weave some presumably disastrous spells. Are these spells that might wipe out Black America? That’s what Atticus seemed to suspect while urging Yahima (who Titus also turned into a siren) to help them.

That’s after they discovered Yahima in mummified form, grasping the scroll and looking supremely monstrous.

Yikes. (Yet I’m glad that none of these tunnel moments included snakes because Leti probably would have lost her damn mind if she had to face another one.) From Yahima (who is visually presented as a trans person, although characters refer to Yahima with she/her pronouns), we received more confirmation that Titus was the real monster. His expeditions led to her Caribbean tribe, who he brought to America, where he promised to help them but killed them all and imprisoned Yahima.

All of this fits right in with all of the other lessons we’ve seen in this show, and of course Titus counted the abuse of indigenous people among his many other evil deeds. That Yahima doesn’t survive this episode is confusing but perhaps intentionally so (we’ll get to that soon). But using an Indiana Jones-style expedition appears to be Lovecraft Country‘s way of saying that a temple-raider is also a culture-raider, and it also fuels much of the action this week. There was a dissolving plank and a foreboding message — “Beware all ye who tread the path. Ever the tide shall rise” — and everyone nearly drowned before and after Atticus stuck his arm into a hole, and (wtf) used his blood/ancestry to unlock a door. Those scenes weren’t well lit, but we’ll make do.

“This is some Journey to the Center of the Earth-type sh*t”:

Obviously, the sci-fi-loving Atticus had to mention Jules Verne’s 1860s novel before Leti spotted one of her missing white neighbors floating in the abyss. This was probably one of the guys who got killed by that baby-headed ghost-thing, whose existence suggested that Titus and Horatio were mixing some time-travel into their white supremacist magic. And somehow, Atticus inherently understood Yahima’s language, which could have meant that he’ll be able to decode those spell pages without much trouble. That might not happen, though, since one of this week’s question marks involves Montrose, who bookended the episode by going apesh*t and then calmly slicing Yahima’s throat in the episode’s closing moments.

What the hell is going on with Montrose?

Montrose lighting a cult’s bylaws on fire and remarking that it “smells like Tulsa” is… whoa. We learned a few weeks ago that George and Montrose Freeman grew up in Tulsa, which (as Watchmen informed audiences after it was largely wiped from history accounts) is where the 1921 Race Massacre went down, including the bombing of Black Wall Street. There’s the suggestion that the Freeman brothers witnessed these horrors, as well as the possibility that Montrose is haunted by the memories. He’s also hitting the booze to deal with his grief over George, and quite possibly, the cult did something to him in Ardham. All of that bumps up against Montrose finally saying something fatherly to Atticus right before murdering Yahima behind closed doors.

Obviously, there’s duplicity here. At times, Montrose softens and seems to support Atticus, but he also tried to undermine the trip to find Titus’ vault. Taking out Yahima might also prevent Atticus from deciphering the scroll before Christina can nab it, and he burned the Order of the Ancient book that George wanted Atticus to have. Michael K. Williams explained this episode as Montrose wanting to protect Atticus, but that’s not how some Twitter users are seeing it. People have noticed that when Montrose snarls, “Smells like Tulsa,” his voice sounds different than usual. Almost like he’s possessed by a cult member, who’s orchestrating his movements? That might be a stretch, but Christina also could have put a spell on him. I really wouldn’t put anything past her.

Meanwhile, back in Chicago:

The return of Patrick was really something.

In an episode that features Cardi B. and Rihanna songs, we’ve also got the second Manson tune of the series. “I Put A Spell On You” is a cover of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ 1956 song, for which Nina Simone also recorded a version. And as with all the songs on this show, including “Killing Strangers” earlier in the season (in which Atticus’ presumed shell shock parallels the lyrics referring to the PTSD of Manson’s father in Vietnam), this song selection is a telling one. My theory — after hearing Patrick croon, “What if I told you that I could change your life, forever… it’s a promise that I can keep” — is that their sex scene involved some sort of blood ritual on his behalf. Ruby seems like a sharp tack with both eyes open, though, so I can actually envision her agreeing to something here, but maybe not involving the actual spell.

We’ve seen Patrick (who has supernatural-looking markings on his chest) operate at the behest of Christina, and he knows that Ruby is Leti’s sister. We also listened to Ruby vent to Patrick about not being able to get a department store job as a Black woman, whereas he would obviously have no problem doing so. What does Patrick want? It’s another mystery, although Christina straight-up told Leti about something that she wants.

This scene, man. It begins with Christina arriving at Leti’s house while the camera recalls a famous photograph in Black U.S. history, something that the show’s been doing all along. When Christina attempted to enter the house, she ran into an invisible spell-wall and recovered quickly, almost sounding impressed while asking, “Who helped you evict Hiram?” Christina wants something inside the house, and that includes Hiram’s orrery (a model of the solar system), but something doesn’t add up. If she wasn’t aware of not being able to enter the house, then why did she go to all the trouble of secretly giving Leti the money to purchase it?

Leti wondered if Atticus was the key here, and Christina did that contradictory thing that she does — make a feminist declaration while adding a racist twist at the end: “Don’t let the men fool you into thinking that it’s always about them. His blood may have power in it, but that’s only because Titus spelled it that way. It doesn’t make Tic special.”

How sinister of a web is Christina weaving? We later see her bizarrely approaching children to play hide-and-seek in the street, which (I guess) was her way of getting cops’ attention. Captain Lancaster wasn’t thrilled to see her, and they exchanged barbs about Hiram’s “stolen pages” being the key to unlocking something, possibly a time machine. However, no one realizes that Hippolyta is in possession of Hiram’s orrery, and she’s still determined to uncover what really happened to George. After Hippolyta spots their daughter doodling on one of George’s maps, we can gather that she’s headed to Ardham. When we last saw the manor, it was crumbling into a pile of rubble and ashes, but who knows what Hippolyta might find when she arrives. Maybe more vampire things eating bad guys? Yes, please.

HBO’s ‘Lovecraft Country’ airs Sundays at 9:00pm EST.

If you don’t already know Santina Deck’s name, you probably will soon. In December, Deck became the first woman to sign a multimillion dollar football contract when she joined the Los Angeles Fames, becoming the face of the Women’s Football League Association. But she’s not just a football player. After growing up in Houston with three football-loving brothers, she went on to run track at Texas A+M and even had dreams of qualifying for the Olympics.

But after injuries shattered that dream, she was forced to hang up her track shoes for good. One day, she saw a sign for a local flag football team’s open practice session and decided to check it out. The rest, as they say, is history. She shined on the field, earned a spot on the team, achieved viral status on social media, and made the U.S. national flag football team. From there, she went on to play rugby for the U.S. women’s national rugby sevens team

And along the way, the “Queen of Abs” continued to grow her following on social media — she currently has 666K followers on Instagram — by posting workout routine videos. In 2016, she published a book, raising awareness about child abuse, and she even started her own sneaker company, Tronus, becoming the first female athlete to do so. Now, she’s being featured on Eastbay’s conqHER platform, as a woman who is breaking boundaries in sport.

We caught up with the 28-year-old superstar to learn about how far she’s come and find out why she refuses to slow down.

First off, you signed a big contract to play in the Women’s Football League Association with the Los Angeles Fames. Did you always love football? How did your love of the sport first begin?

I’m from Houston, so all my brothers played football. You know in Texas, football is like everybody’s life. So having three brothers and then one being my twin, it was like naturally around me. They all played football, they all were running backs — I’m also a running back. So I guess I was kind of pushed into it without me really knowing because I was outside running routes, catching footballs, tackling, doing everything with them but it wasn’t something that I was like, “This is something I want to do long-term.” It was kind of, like, for fun for me because I was so into track.

Honestly, football didn’t really become a passion for me until about six years ago when I started playing flag. But it was crazy — like I knew a lot of stuff because when I was young, my brothers were teaching me things that I didn’t know I was going to use one day.

So you were a track star in college and now you’re playing professional football. How does your experience as a track athlete help you with football?

Oh man, being a track runner has honestly been one of my biggest tools as far as just being a running back, because you have to be fast, you have to have just running form period — coordination and things like that — and I feel like track taught me that. But being a running back, I feel like track is the best thing you can do, to be honest, to prepare for that position. It was a little different as far as learning how to be agile — because you know, we’re running in a straight line for the most part. But that also came naturally just because of what I was doing when I was young.

But track literally gives me my edge because most people know that if somebody runs track, they’re probably going to be good at most sports, to be honest. So I owe a lot to track, for sure. That’s my foundation.

You also have your own sneaker company, Tronus, which makes you the first female athlete to own your own shoe company. Have you always been into sneakers? How did this idea originate?

I definitely thought about [having my own shoe] a lot, but I never thought about having my own company. And how the opportunity came about was another brand had actually offered me my own signature shoe — the designer mocked up a shoe, I posted it on Instagram, and it went really, really crazy. So we kind of went back to the drawing board, and thought what if we did a signature shoe line with a variety of colors and things like that. And I was like, “Cool,” so we talked about how we wanted the design to look, he mocked it up, I posted it a second time and it went even crazier.

So then my mom, who’s also my manager, was like, “Let’s rethink this whole thing. If you’re getting this much buzz and this many people that are ready to buy this right now, imagine what would happen if you had your own company?” And at first, I was like, “Eh, that’s a little far-fetched,” think about the big dogs we have to go against like Nike, Adidas, Puma, all these really, really major brands. And I was like, “I don’t think that’s possible.” And my mom, she’s always thinking twenty thousand steps ahead, and she thinks I can literally do anything and she kind of talked me down and told me, “You can do this. It’s possible.”

And I remember just going back and sitting with myself and just being like, “OK, if I fail, at least I tried. If I don’t fail, I will have my own shoe company.” And so that kind of outweighed my fear and I just said, “OK let’s do it.” And two years later, Tronus now exists.

That’s why we need moms, right? That’s amazing. Now, you’re 28 years old, but you’ve already accomplished so much in so many different fields. How do you have all this energy to keep hustling?

So, I’ve always been a very ambitious person since I was a kid. I have so many dreams and goals for myself, and I don’t have any kids yet but I think about how everything that I’m doing is really for them. I want to leave a legacy, and I want to secure their futures and their future kids’ futures, and that it probably one of the main reasons why I went ahead with the shoe line because I was like, “If I do this, I’m not only securing my future, but I’m also securing [the future of] generations to come.” That’s probably my main driving point — man, I just want my kids to have everything that I didn’t have and more. And I just want to show young girls — just really the youth, period — that anything is possible.

And clearly that work has paid off. You’re being featured in Eastbay’s conqHer platform as a woman that done things that were maybe previously unthinkable in the world of sports. What do you want girls all over the world to learn from seeing you accomplish so many firsts in a male-dominated world of sports?

The thing for me — and this is something I would say to my daughter — if you want something, you need to go get it. No matter what it takes. No matter how much sacrifice, no matter how many friends you’re going to lose or if people are not going to understand what you’re doing or think you’re crazy because honestly, you have to be a little crazy to dream big anyway.

But I would tell them that the limit in life is what you put on yourself. So if you want to go and be the first female doctor to also be a surgeon to also be a ballerina, then go for it. You can be good at more than one thing, you can be successful in more than one area — because I also feel like that’s something that we put on ourselves like, “Oh, I can only do one thing.” But I never believed in that. I always felt that if you want to do 20,000 different things and be god at them, then do it. But do what it takes and understand that it’s going to take sacrifice and understand what’s going to come with that.

Justin Bieber has looked back not so fondly on some aspects of his past in recent years, admitting to shortcomings he had earlier in his life. He took some time to reflect and do so again this weekend, admitting that he was driven by “ego and power” as a teenager.

Sharing a pensive photo of himself on Instagram (and later sharing the text of his caption as its own post), Bieber wrote:

“I came from a small town in Stratford Ontario Canada. I didn’t have material things and was never motivated by money or fame I just loved music. But as I became a teenager I let my insecurities and frustrations dictate what I put my value in. My values slowly started to change. Ego and power started to takeover and my relationships suffered because of it. I truly desire healthy relationships. I want to be motivated by truth and love. I want to be aware of my blind spots and learn from them! I want to walk in the plans God has for me and not try and do it on my own! I want to give up my selfish desires daily so I can be a good husband and future dad! I’m grateful that I can walk with Jesus as he leads the way.”

Bieber received positive feedback in the comments of his posts, including from Tom Brady, who wrote, “Well said. Always learning and growing.”

Check out Bieber’s posts below.

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted practically everything, and that certainly includes the music industry: tours have been postponed or canceled altogether, releases have been pushed back, and musicians the world over have been forced to consider different approaches when it comes to almost every aspect of their profession. But for Gus Dapperton life in quarantine times has been — as much as it can be — business as usual.

“There was no drastic change for me,” the 23-year-old musician born Brendan Patrick Rice states as we spoke over the phone last month. He’s dialed in from his Brooklyn apartment, where he’s been holed up since deciding to take a break from the constant touring grind at the top 2020. “I’m pretty used to being at home in my apartment and home studio, messing around. So I’ve just been taking it all in, observing, learning, and not forcing myself too hard to be creative.”

During this period of relative downtime, Dapperton put the finishing touches on his sophomore album Orca (out September 18), a record of overcast, glowing pop-rock that he largely wrote while on the road promoting his breakout debut, last year’s Where Polly People Go to Read. “I had a lot of music done already, so I wasn’t pushing myself too hard to finish things,” he reflects on the necessity of going easy on himself over the past six months, while emphasizing the restorative effects of solitude on his mental well-being. “I was introverted when I was younger, and I still am. I’m able to spend long periods of time by myself, so it’s been a good change of pace for me instead of touring and meeting so many new people every day.”

There’s a sense of relief palpable in Dapperton’s voice as he finishes that last sentence, and with good reason. Since his music started receiving attention online in 2017 — a streak of internet-native success that led to his current record deal with indie-focused label AWAL, as well as placement on the soundtrack for the second season of Netflix’s teen drama 13 Reasons Why — the resulting success, as he tells it, has proved overwhelming.

His story so far is as unique to his own experiences as it is increasingly common in popular music: a young bedroom-bound auteur builds an audience online, the music industry takes notice, and before long things are moving so quickly that it becomes difficult to keep one’s feet on the ground. But despite being a denizen of the digital era, Dapperton professes an overall lack of online engagement, claiming that he mostly uses social media “more to observe” than to directly interact with others. He’s similarly quick to downplay the notion of himself as an artist borne out of logging on — more than reasonable, really, when considering his IRL artistic beginnings.

Dapperton grew up in the upstate New York town of Warwick, with early memories of “Friday night dance parties” in which his father hooked up a Hi8 camcorder to their television so the whole family could see themselves grooving on TV. While dodging the ever-present pressure to participate in his town’s athletics programs, Dapperton spent his adolescence skateboarding and engaging in minor creative pursuits with friends that he lovingly refers to as “outcasts.”

With little in the way of formal training or lessons, Dapperton was bitten by the musical bug in eighth grade after his music teacher issued an assignment that doubled as a contest: He and his fellow students had to write, produce, and record their own song using Garageband, and the winners would get to play their music on a local radio station. Dapperton won off a song called “Shock,” his sister Amadelle possessing the only copy of which to this day; the early taste of success left him wanting more. “I was like, ‘Wow. I want to do this for the rest of my life,’” he recalls.

Citing early influences ranging from legendary hip-hop producer Madlib to Taylor Swift’s self-titled debut, Dapperton initially dabbled in production before pivoting to full-on songwriting “once I found my voice and decided I had a lot I wanted to say.” His off-kilter, distinctive fashion sense — a style highlighted by Dapperton’s taste-the-rainbow predilection for hair dye, including the cherry-red hue he sports on the cover of Orca — emerged around this time too, as he dug through thrift stores and artfully distressed his duds.

If Dapperton’s parents were accepting of his constantly changing appearance, they possessed a bit more apprehension when it came to his pursuing music as a career. “They thought the extent of a musician’s career was a jam band playing at a restaurant,” he chuckles; eventually, they came around after his father’s perspective was shifted by Malcolm Gladwell’s 2008 book Outliers: The Story Of Success. “I think he read that and thought, ‘Well, I guess my kid puts more hours into this than I’ve seen any other kid put into anything.’”

In 2014, Brendan Patrick Rice officially became Gus Dapperton after uploading the laid-back, hip-hop-flavored “If the Sky Was Vivid,” featuring his friends Elijah Bank$y and Lo.Rd Lingo, to one of his multiple Soundcloud accounts he maintained “back when it was less for listening and more for creators.” “It was the same as naming a newborn baby,” he explains when asked about the origins of the Gus Dapperton moniker. “I heard my voice had this sound, and I thought the name summed up the sound, as well as the person that I wanted to be — someone who wasn’t afraid to express themself and create.”

The song turned Dapperton into an overnight internet sensation, with a string of buzz-building EPs — Yellow And Such in 2017, the following year’s You Think You’re a Comic! — that followed as he, while finishing high school and attending Drexel to study music technology, became a self-described “worse student.” After two years at college, he made the decision to drop out permanently to focus on music full-time: “It wasn’t a super encouraging program. I learned some of the equipment, but I just couldn’t focus. After two years, I just couldn’t do it anymore.”

Dapperton hesitates to describe the three years that followed as a “blur,” but the rigors of near-constant touring — which carried through the creation and release of Where Polly People Go To Read, the title of which referencing a fictional people that Dapperton drew as a kid — undoubtedly wore on him. “As soon as I started touring, the last three years of my life went by so fast,” he recalls. “I was making and recording music on my tour bus, and in hotel rooms — writing songs whenever I could. I’d be living with someone for three months, and then I’d be across the world playing shows.”

It was under this strain that Orca came together, the dusky first single “First Aid” one of the first songs he wrote for the project. “It’s about these deeper and darker thoughts I’d neglected to be a strong person — but in reality, being a strong person is about confronting those feelings,” he explains while discussing the song’s thematic bent, elaborating that its lyrical intentions also encompass Orca as a whole. “When I’m feeling depressed and lost in the world, there’s not many things that help me. Therapy doesn’t help me very much. But putting it into the music is very therapeutic for me.”

Orca is a melancholic departure from Dapperton’s vibe-oriented earlier material; his raw voice is surrounded by full-bodied instrumentation that as much recalls Death Cab For Cutie as it does generational scions like Mac DeMarco and Porches. It bears the overall mark of someone pushed to the brink of excess that overnight success in the music industry is often accompanied by — a careful retreat, with no short supply of personal reflection and self-care. “I’ve probably missed out on a lot of the life lessons that people go through in adulthood, so there’s this huge imbalance in my life that I’m reflecting on,” he explains. “The longest break I had over the course of three years was a month. I’d have to socialize while playing this music that I consider very sacred to myself every night. All of that on top of not getting eight hours of sleep, having physical exhaustion, drinking every night — it takes a huge toll on you.”

Dapperton describes Orca as an album about “feeling trapped, depressed, and having these people and unconditional forces of love in your life that reel you back in.” It’s fitting, then, that Amadelle joins him throughout the album as a vocalist, providing literal harmony to his fractured feelings. The pair have collaborated in some form since early adolescence, but Orca represents their artistic kinship more than ever before — an embodiment of Dapperton’s message that the ones you love are the ones you need the most. “A lot of the things I’m talking about are really timely right now,” he states on what the future might hold for him, choosing instead to reflect on the potential impact his music could have during our peculiar societal moment. “I have a responsibility to release this music.”

Orca is out September 18 via AWAL. Get it here.

A funny thing happened almost immediately after Madden NFL 21 dropped. It seemed like everyone who had the game did one of two things: Get blown away by how much of a buggy mess it was, or hop onto one of several ratings sites and toss a one-star rating its way. As of this writing, here’s what users on Google think of the game:

Real bad! If Dylan from the Making the Band skit on Chappelle’s Show dropped an album — not the person it was based on, I mean Dave Chappelle doing Dylan for 45 minutes — it would have done better than this. There is an evident sense of frustration among Madden fans over the current direction of the game, something that has been going on for years and seems to have come to a head for this version.

A fascinating subplot is what happens in future editions of Madden, but you did not come here for that, you came for a review of this game. As I played through it, one overarching thought was seared into my brain: Despite some things I really enjoyed, this just felt like last year’s Madden with a few more bells and whistles.

Let’s start with the good. I really liked playing The Yard. Would I recommend dropping serious coin on Madden just to play it? No, I would not, but if you’re going to purchase the game, this is a really fun addition that breathes some life into a game that feels a bit stale — for fans of the other football, think of it like VOLTA Football in FIFA 20, both in terms of aesthetic and how it adds a different dimension that wouldn’t otherwise exist in the game.

The general concept of The Yard seems to be heavily inspired by NFL Street. It’s backyard-style football with backyard football playbooks, taking place on a collection of fields and letting you mix and match players together. You can read more about it right here, but in general, this is the mode to play, especially if you can get together with a group of friends. It’s not quite the same as The Neighborhood in NBA 2K — which is a pretty easy comparison to make — due to the fact that there isn’t a whole world where you exist, but the general comp of a street/backyard game mode with different rules, a different approach, and one individual, customizable character isn’t a bad one.

It’s not perfect, if only because it doesn’t always feel like you’re playing a different game and it can feel like you’re playing a slightly looser version of Madden if you don’t have down the various little tricks that give you a leg up, plus I am not someone who gets super into customizing my avatar, although I certainly understand that that’s a personal preference. An option that would let gamers build their teams where they are picking teammates from every NFL roster would be interesting, too. But generally, The Yard is fun, and I’m excited to see how it develops over the years.

I’m also a fan of Superstar KO, if only because it’s quick, fun, and customizable. The act of playing football over and over can, of course, get a little repetitive, and while I enjoyed The Yard more, Superstar KO is a good way to get a few quick, unique games in. It can get a bit hectic, and the gameplay issues I have that we’ll get into in the next graf or two, but this is one of the two game modes that, I believe, you’d enjoy sinking the most time into if you picked this up.

The mere act of playing Madden isn’t a negative, but generally, it’s fine, albeit imperfect. The main thought that went through my head the entire time was something that Steven Petite of GameSpot also articulated in his review: Playing Madden, along with the apparent ignoring of Franchise mode and Ultimate Team — both of which feel exactly the same as last year’s version of the game — makes this feel like more of a season update than a game that, ostensibly, had a full year to turn into something new, fresh, and worth $60.

Two main examples of things I didn’t love in last year’s Madden that are still evident in this one. For one, if a player’s Superstar X-Factor is activated, you are absolutely useless trying to do anything against them. While playing against the Packers, Jaire Alexander’s “Shutdown” x-factor was activated, and if I threw the ball within his area code, it was picked off, with my wide receiver not even attempting to make a play on the ball. The other issue is how frequently my receivers would catch the ball, come down with it, have a defender bump into them, and drop the ball. In an obvious attempt to make it so every game doesn’t turn into a pass-happy shootout, the last two Madden games have made passing unnecessarily finicky.

After getting a few games under my belt, I referred to this post on the EA Sports site about gameplay. It was, admittedly, a little less tricky to do run defense, but for the most part, all of these gameplay tweaks didn’t really stick out. Again, it largely feels like you are playing the exact same Madden game as last year. Which is fine! It’s just not sink tons of money into purchasing a new game levels of fine.

This is the issue at the heart of having to put this game together during a global pandemic. This is something that, I believe, needs to be front and center during the Madden discourse — due to circumstances outside of the control of every single person at EA Sports, the game needed to be put together with people unable to sit in offices together and do all of the things you normally need to do to build an entire dang video game. That’s really, really hard to do, and it’s something that I think about a lot as I am playing Madden, because it feels like a game that just isn’t complete, something that EA Sports has tacitly admitted with the number of patches and updates, such as the September title update or the Franchise Mode one that is coming in November.

I suppose this is where I should talk about bugs and glitches. Boy, there are a lot of them, aren’t there? A few, in my experience:

1. SMOOTH FIELD.

2. Whatever this is supposed to be.

3. Some general sloppiness in Face of the Franchise (which we will get to shortly!). This included things like needing three tries for the game to accept the player I created’s build and features, or my difficulty automatically resetting to “Rookie” when I’d exit out of the mode. Little things, too, like my tenure at Oregon featuring teammates that wore generic white and blue uniforms during a cutscene, or the inability to simulate and only do offense/defense/key moments being taken away during one FotF for no identifiable reason, or in my first game in the mode, when I’d do kickoffs and the camera would set up shop right behind the uprights, so my entire screen would be blocked for a hot second.

4. The strictness over profanity in names was completely insane — in a weird personality quirk, I like to name my characters one of “Gil Faizon” or “George St. Geegland,” because I am a loser, but both “Gil” and “St. Geegland” were ruled to include profanity, for some reason. I swear, I am not making this up.

Again, it is not hard to see how putting this game together during a pandemic hurt EA Sports a ton, as little things are just not right. You have, certainly, seen compilations of bugs and glitches that exist in this game, so this is not an issue that only I dealt with. One can only wonder if the game could have gone through another two weeks worth of quality control checks before going out to gamers would have smoothed over those various cracks, because they are as much a part of this game as pressing “X” on my PlayStation controller to hike the ball.

Ending on a sour note isn’t fun, but this is where talking abut Face of the Franchise fits in. It’s just not good. I’ve been of the thought for a year or two that we really don’t need to have big narrative modes in sports games — Madden, FIFA, 2K, maybe The Show, etc. — but this cemented my belief. It is all done through the eyes of your character giving an interview after his career, and you, as is commonplace in these modes, go through an entire career, from a new player on a high school football team behind a star, to taking over for that star as a junior because he has a heart condition, to playing alongside him as a senior, to going to the same college as him, to a pro. You’re called the Heartbreak Kids, which is an admittedly good name for a football duo, in large part because I am a Shawn Michaels stan. Your NFL career ends up having ups and down, but generally, it’s nothing remarkable.

The whole thing felt inflexible as a story. An example: During your junior year in college, you start the season opener, then you jump right to the College Football Playoff semifinal, where you start after being told the two quarterbacks rotated all year. While there, I torched LSU, 70-0. The other QB ended up starting the national title game, anyway. He gets hurt at halftime, you come in, save the day (for me, this was against USC), and win a national title.

Then, the next scene is the coach telling you that you will be the backup quarterback next year, and you have two choices: Go to the NFL Draft or switch positions to running back or wide receiver. While I did the former, a colleague did the latter, and he got two extra college games before getting the option to switch back to quarterback prior to entering the NFL if you want. Why you, the national title-winning quarterback, go through this is not clear. It is Sorkin-esque writing insofar as it tried way too hard to do way too many things and just ended up getting in its own way.

Ultimately, where I land on Madden is this: Despite the addition of The Yard, and despite how much fun Superstar KO can be, it would have been way better for EA to drop a monster season update to Madden 20 and perfect the next full game. While I can’t say for sure, I suspect this would have been the case regardless of the extenuating circumstances that made creating a video game so difficult right now. It’s not as bad as the flood of negative reviews it received from frustrated gamers who, hopefully, will spur major changes to future editions of the game, but I can’t justify forking over the money to buy it right now. Do keep an eye out for sales and what not, though, because there is enough to like that getting the game at some time isn’t the worst idea in the world.

Over the weekend, Big Sean celebrated the release of his Detroit 2 album by hosting an #AskBigSean Q&A on Twitter. While Detroit 2 is still fresh, Big Sean is also looking towards the future, as he is apparently planning on launching his own record label, and is looking for suggestions on who he should sign.

One fan asked Sean is he was still signed to GOOD Music, and he responded, “Yep! I’m starting my own after this album though. Any artist u think I need to sign? It’s time!” It doesn’t appear there are hard feelings between Sean and Kanye or anybody else at the label, though. Yesterday, Kanye tweeted out a link to Sean’s album and wrote, “Congratulations to my brother Big Sean on his new album Good music for life.” Sean responded, “Love you big bro no matter what! Thank you! 4 Life!”

Kanye was an executive producer on the album, and in the Q&A, Sean outlined his involvement in the project, tweeting, “Lotta advice! And more, he actually did a lot of references n parts that helped out a lot.”

Elsewhere during #AskBigSean, the rapper shared some trivia about the new album, so revisit all the tweets from the Q&A here.

Virtually every boundary-pushing indie artist won’t deny that Radiohead inspired them at one point or another. Subsequently, the group has been covered a lot, and the latest artist to pay homage in this way is Phoebe Bridgers. She performed a Radio 1 Piano Session, with Arlo Parks doing the ivory-tickling, and they gave a rendition of “Fake Plastic Trees,” with Bridgers delicate and powerful voice soaring over Parks’ piano and backing vocals. The pair also linked up for a performance of Bridgers’ “Kyoto.”

Bridgers has covered the indie legends before. In fact, she covered “Fake Plastic Trees” at a performance in a London church in 2017. The next summer, she joined Mumford & Sons during a surprise Newport Folk Festival set to cover the 2007 In Rainbows highlight “All I Need.”

Bridgers has been active in recent days aside from this. She recently contributed to a star-studded benefit album. She performed an intimate show at the huge LA Colosseum. Other things she has gotten up to lately include appearing on Zack Fox’s wild new Twitch show, make out with an old woman in the “I Know The End” video, virtually collaborate with Gillian Welch for a cover, and, of course, re-live the time she pooped her pants on stage.

Watch Bridgers and Parks perform “Fake Plastic Trees” and “Kyoto” above.

For three decades, J.K. Simmons has been one of the best and most recognizable “That Guys” around. The character actor moved from stage to screen in HBO’s 1997 drama Oz, and he’s been working steadily ever since in movies such as Juno, Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies, and the movie for which he finally won an Oscar, Whiplash.

On this week’s WTF with Marc Maron, J.K. Simmons spoke at length about the process of winning the Oscar — not the acting, but the awards’ season experience. According to Simmons, actors who want to be considered for Oscars basically have to put themselves through a process, which Simmons was very reluctant to do. “No thanks, I’ll be at home with my wife and kids, or working on my next project,” he had initially told Sony Classics.

However, his director on Juno, Jason Reitman, talked him into it, telling him he could be “that guy, an artiste,” or you could do it … for the film, its director, etc., but also “everyone you have ever known your whole life from your best friend in second grade to all your fourth cousins. All of those people are going to be so excited and so happy and thrilled for you. The people who you were doing theater with in Buffalo in the 1970s … all these people, and obviously, your close friends and family. That really sunk into me.”

Simmons said he and his wife had a “heart-to-heart” about committing to the process — “because it’s a whole thing” — and he agreed when the studio allowed Simmons to bring his wife and kids along with him for all of the awards’ season events. In fact, by the time the Oscars finally arrived, he’d won so many awards for the performance that when they finally announced his name at the Oscars, it came “as a relief because how big a schmuck would I have been if they’d said someone else’s name” when the odds of Simmons winning were so astronomically high by that point.

One of Simmons’ favorite aspects, however, was when he was going up to up to accept the award. “There’s a billion people watching, and you’re in the Kodak theater with every famous actor you grew up watching, so I was a little nervous, and I never actually wrote an acceptance speech. I had a theme in mind … and I wanted to talk about what’s most important in life, which is family. So, I’m kind of formulating my thoughts and walking up on stage, and Lupita Nyong’o was going to hand me the trophy and I reach out with one hand to take the trophy, and I reach out with the other hand to shake her hand, like we’re two dudes making a business deal, and then I realized, ‘Oh no, it’s Hollywood. You’re supposed to do the fake kiss on the cheek.’ So, I kind of awkwardly go in for the fake kiss on the cheek thing, and I gave her a little of a head butt. But [thankfully] not enough to take her down.”

You can see the head butt and Simmons’ family-specific speech here:

Source: WTF with Marc Maron

Sometimes the best new R&B can be hard to find, but there are plenty of great rhythm and blues tunes to get into if you have the time to sift through the hundreds of newly released songs every week. So that R&B heads can focus on listening to what they really love in its true form, we’ll be offering a digest of the best new R&B songs that fans of the genre should hear every Friday.

This week, Bryson Tiller emerged from a three-year intermission to share with fans his new single titled “Inhale” and also announced that a new project is on the way this year. SZA also surprised fans this week with the release of her new single “Hit Different” featuring Ty Dolla Sign after a three-year intermission of her own. And R&B vet Monica released her new track with the assistance of fellow Atlanta native Lil Baby. Check out the rest of the best new R&B music below.

Bryson Tiller — “Inhale”

It’s been three long years since Bryson Tiller‘s 2017 album True To Self and today the mystical R&B singer makes his return with “Inhale.” The song takes a little from Mary J. Blige’s “Not Gon’ Cry” and a little from SWV’s “All Night Long” to create a sexy groove that has Tiller singing about missing his ex. Based on the excitement of Twitter when the song dropped on Friday (September 4) at midnight, it’s clear fans are certainly pumped for a new wave of Bryson Tiller slow jams to be released and the Grammy award-nominated singer promises that something for is coming just in time for cuffing season this fall.

SZA — “Hit Different” Feat. Ty Dolla Sign

Last month, it seemed as if SZA and Top Dawg were at odds about when she’d be releasing new music again. To everyone’s surprise this week, however, the R&B talent decided to share her first single of the year in the form of “Hit Different” featuring Ty Dolla Sign with an accompanying music video of her dancing in a scrapyard. “Hit Different” is SZA’s first release in three years and was produced by The Neptunes at DJ Khaled’s crib.

Monica — “Trenches” Feat. Lil Baby

During the Brandy and Monica Verzuz battle this week, Monica took the opportunity to drop her new song with Lil Baby titled “Trenches.”

FKA Twigs — “Sad Day”

FKA Twigs delivered an elaborate visual for her song “Sad Day.” Filled with beautifully choreographed martial arts and fight scenes, Twigs gets her point across vocally and visually.

Ricco Barrino — Ugly EP

Singer Ricco Barrino finally released the last EP of his musical trilogy, Ugly, this week. The project features his new single “Friday Night Lights” with DaBaby and his baby sister, Grammy award-winning musician Fantasia, also makes an appearance.

Check out this week’s R&B picks, plus more on Uproxx’s Spotify playlist below.

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