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Public Enemy was the musical guest on last night’s episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, bringing the noise with a gritty rendition of “Grid” from their new album What You Gonna Do When The Grid Goes Down. They brought B Real of Cypress Hill and funk pioneer George Clinton of Parliament/Funkadelic, along with a blinding light show as they imagined a world without electronic devices and 24-hour television networks.

That’s the running theme of their album, which arrived on Def Jam this past Friday — the group’s first full-length project for the label in over 25 years. It dropped after several months of controversy and unrest, both within the band and the world at large, and is just one of many projects that speaks to the unsettling climate of the moment.

Pre-pandemic, it seemed that the group might be splitting up for good as Chuck D announced that Flavor Flav had been “fired” after a dispute over their recent performance at a Bernie Sanders rally in LA. Later, Chuck and Flav used the buzz generated by the headlines about their split to promote a new single, “State Of The Union (STFU),” then their new project, Grid. The new project also features old-school luminaries like Ad-Rock and Mike D of Beastie Boys, Ice-T, and Run-DMC, as well as more contemporary truth speakers Black Thought, Nas, Rapsody, and YG.

Watch Public Enemy’s Late Show performance of “Grid” above.

There is no reason why last night’s presidential debate, the first of three (maybe), should have started at 9 p.m. EST. Donald Trump and Joe Biden need sleep (I need sleep). But while most of the country went to bed after an exhausting night of screaming, the late-night hosts were just getting started.

Let’s begin with The Late Show‘s Stephen Colbert, who called Trump refusing to condemn white supremacist groups “one of the most telling, one of the most upsetting moments, not only of the night but of my lifetime.” He compared watching the debate to coming “out of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. How can we possibly do this two more times?” Mesa not sure how to answer that. Wesa in bombad trouble.

Jimmy Kimmel didn’t make any Star Wars references, but he agreed with it being a “terrible” debate. “I’d call it a nightmare, but at least during a nightmare you get some sleep,” he joked, while on The Daily Show, Trevor Noah spoke for everyone who “cannot do 90 straight minutes of this sh*t ever again. It was brutal. There’s got to be a commercial break every five minutes, and during those commercial breaks, every ad should be for antidepressants or some drug that has side effects that makes you forget the last four years.″ Even The Tonight Show‘s Jimmy Fallon was feistier than usual:

“Man, what the hell was that? Was that a debate? What did we… I am so… what was it? I am so stressed right now. I have a kink [in my back]. It felt like I just slept on an air mattress. Seriously, did anyone take anything away from tonight?” Fallon asked on The Tonight Show. “Was that helpful to any American? The only person who enjoyed that was Vladimir Putin while he was stroking a cat.”

Another fine night for America. At least the late-night jokes were good. Watch them below.

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Jimmy Kimmel Live!

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The first 2020 Presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden was one of many takeaways, like Biden calling Trump a clown and telling him to shut up. Americans across the country had their attention fixed on the spectacle, and that includes many from the music world.

Cardi B, one of the most politically involved rappers of today, offered what was essentially a live reactions vlog on her Instagram, posting tons of clips during the debate with her takes. Her final post of the night was a selfie video (with a cartoon filter) in which she condemned personal attacks Trump made against Biden. She concluded by suggesting that Biden would have been served well by consulting her before the debate: “I wish that f*ckin’ Joe Biden would have spoken to me before he did that debate, because I would have told him he better roast his ass, and I got mad jokes under my belt.”

50 Cent, ever a haver of opinions, shared a photo of a TV playing the debate and wrote simply, “entertainment at its best.”

Chance The Rapper also tweeted some thoughts throughout the debate, summarizing, “The entire country has to make a decision as to whether it will continue to downplay the fact that our President is an openly racist White Supremacist and what that means for its citizens, or… VOTE HIM OUT.”

Check out some other reactions from Ice Cube, Quavo, Guapdad 4000, Lil Dicky, and more below.

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

No one expected civility. However, the first Trump-Biden presidential debate was even more of an unholy mess than anyone imagined it could be. “Moderator” Chris Wallace got slammed across the board for barely stepping in as the two candidates crosstalked. News anchors are speechless and aghast, and even writers of bad movies feel one-upped. Over on Fox & Friends, the tide is actually turning against President Trump. It’s a particularly notable turn of events for a few reasons: (1) Obviously, Fox News generally sides with Trump on all things; (2) Fox & Friends‘ Steve Doocy recently went rogue on Trump while Brian Kilmeade acted completely shocked at his co-host’s stance.

Well, Kilmeade is disgusted by what transpired during the Trump-Biden showdown. He did call out Biden for being “rude” (with the “clown” thing), but he cannot believe that Trump didn’t seize the opportunity to distance himself from white supremacists. Instead, Trump told the far-right group known as the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” before insisting that “somebody’s got to do something about Antifa and the left.” Yikes.

“Trump ruined the biggest layup in the history of debates by not condemning white supremacists,” Kilmeade declared. “I don’t know if he didn’t hear it, but he’s gotta clarify that right away… Why the president didn’t just knock it out of the park, I’m not sure.”

It’s certainly a major misstep, and even Fox News co-hosts don’t want to be viewed as applauding a failure to distance from racists. As for the definition of what Trump said to the Proud Boys, Merriam-Webster wrote on Twitter that “stand back” means to “take a few steps backwards,” but “stand by” means “to be or to get ready to act.”

Steven Yeun gave an Oscar-worthy performance in Burning, Lee Chang-dong’s fantastic 2018 film where he plays a wealthy Gatsby-type who becomes entangled in the lives of… you know what? Just watch it. It’s on Netflix. Because if you only know Yeun as Glenn from The Walking Dead, you might be surprised how fantastic he is in Burning, and how equally great he looks (both in terms of his acting abilities and, y’know, he’s a handsome dude) in Minari. The A24 drama from director Lee Isaac Chung, described as a “sweeping American epic about a Korean family putting down roots in the rugged heartland,” won both the U.S. Dramatic Grand Jury Prize and U.S. Dramatic Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year. Much like Yeun, it looks great.

Here’s the official plot synopsis:

A tender and sweeping story about what roots us, Minari follows a Korean-American family that moves to a tiny Arkansas farm in search of their own American Dream. The family home changes completely with the arrival of their sly, foul-mouthed, but incredibly loving grandmother. Amidst the instability and challenges of this new life in the rugged Ozarks, Minari shows the undeniable resilience of family and what really makes a home.

Minari, which also stars Yeri Han, Alan Kim, Noel Kate Cho, Yuh-Jung Youn, and Will Patton, does not currently have a release date, only “coming soon.”

Oasis’ 1995 album (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? is a significant piece of music history, having yielded iconic songs like “Wonderwall,” “Don’t Look Back In Anger,” and “Champagne Supernova.” Those songs have come to mean a great deal to a lot of people, but according to Noel Gallagher (who wrote them), the latter doesn’t really mean anything at all.

He recently spoke with SiriusXM’s ’90s alternative station Lithium to commemorate the album’s 25th anniversary (as Stereogum notes), and he admitted that he’s not really sure what “Champagne Supernova” is about:

“I was on my last tour and I was playing ‘Champagne Supernova.’ That song is so long, and I often find myself drifting off enjoying the song and thinking, ‘What f*cking does it mean?’ You know, ‘Walking down the hall faster than a cannonball,’ what the f*ck is all that about? And I should know, ’cause I wrote it, and I haven’t got a clue. I was somewhere in the north of England and I happened to glance up at the crowd. It was just a sea of teenagers, all young lads, all with their tops off on each other’s shoulders, singing the words of a nonsensical song by a band that were broke up when… they were two years old when the band f*cking broke up. So I think to myself sometimes, you know, ‘That’s what it means. Because we recorded it and it was written while we were still relatively young. It still appeals to young people, and it’s gone through three or four generations now.”

This lines up with what Gallagher has said of the song before. In a 1995 interview, before the album was even released, he told NME, “Some of the lyrics were written when I was out of it. There’s the words, ‘Someday you will find me / Caught beneath a landslide / In a champagne supernova in the sky.’ That’s probably as psychedelic as I’ll ever get. It means different things when I’m in different moods. […] But some of the words are about nothing. One is about Bracket The Butler [from British children’s television series Chipley]. He used to take about 20 minutes to go down the hall, and then I couldn’t think of anything that rhymed with ‘hall’ apart from ‘cannonball,’ so I wrote, ‘Slowly walking down the hall / Faster than a cannonball,’ and people were like, ‘Wow, f*ck, man.’”

Listen to snippets of the SiriusXM interview below.

Even among Fantastic Four movies, the 2015 version is considered the Bad One. That’s saying something, too, because they’re all bad: 1994’s The Fantastic Four was never officially released, although bootlegs are available online for Roger Corman completists; 2005’s Fantastic Four was no Spider-Man 2, released one year prior; and 2007’s Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer couldn’t even win a Teen Choice Award (#JusticeForChiklis). Then there’s 2015’s Fantastic Four, the one with Miles Teller, Michael B. Jordan, Kate Mara, and the wildly miscast Jamie Bell. The Josh Trank-directed film was called “the biggest superhero disaster since Catwoman,” with a 9 percent “Fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and won three Razzies, including Worst Picture (it tied with Fifty Shades of Grey). As the great Jay Sherman once said, it stinks!

But don’t take my word for it. Let’s hear from the guy who wrote the thing (and the Thing).

During Tuesday night’s “sh*tshow” of a presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, Jeremy Slater, who co-wrote the Fantastic Four screenplay with Trank and Simon Kinberg, tweeted, “That was the worst thing I’ve ever seen, and I wrote FANTASTIC FOUR.” Solid joke. Oh, and in case you’re wondering where his politics lay:

Other writers of terrible movies got in on the fun, too, including Alec Berg (The Cat in the Hat), who wrote, “It was the worst thing I’ve ever seen and I wrote The Cat in the Hat movie,” and John Rogers (Catwoman), who added, “Welcome to the club, mate.”

Mark Hamill and many others added their contribution to the “bad pop culture” canon.

Unlike our elected politicians, bad movies are bringing people together.

We’ve all been through a lot over the past four years, and especially throughout 2020. Yet hardly anyone can deny that the first Trump-Biden presidential debate was even more disastrous than anyone could imagine before it happened. “Moderator” Chris Wallace got slammed across the board for barely stepping in as the two candidates crosstalked into oblivion. Trump refused to let his opponent speak, Biden told him to shut up, and absolutely nothing was accomplished over the course of 90 minutes. After the figurative curtains closed, America’s news anchors were quite frankly shocked.

No one can blame them. There’s never been a U.S. presidential debate like this one, and over on CNN, the post-debate rehash began. Jake Tapper (who’s normally calm, cool, and collected) sat slack-jawed for multiple seconds at one point. When he described what he’d witnessed, he put things in super-blunt terms: “That was a hot mess… a dumpster fire inside a train wreck… the American people lost. That was horrific.” His colleague, Dana Bash, could only utter, “That was a shitshow.” She added a caveat: “We’re on cable so I can say this.” Soon, Billy Madison jokes about Tapper emerged, along with CNN’s Brianna Keilar only tweeting her co-workers’ words:

Over on ABC, George Stephanopoulos (who’s a former Bill Clinton de facto press secretary and advisor, so he’s seen some sh*t) summed up the evening without shying away from issuing his professional opinion. “I have to speak personally here as someone who’s watched presidential debates for 40 years, as somebody who’s moderated presidential debates, as somebody who’s prepared candidates for presidential debates, as someone who’s covered presidential debates,” he declared. “That was the worst presidential debate I’ve ever seen in my life.”

His colleague, Jon Carl, agreed while speaking to “a mess of interruptions, petty insults.” Carl explained that he “was in touch with some people on the floor who told me they were stunned by what they were seeing transpire on that stage.”

Over on Fox News, though, Sean Hannity (who has pointedly stated that he’s not a journalist but a TV host), declared that his candidate of choice performed like “a gladiator warrior fighter” who has entered battle and done “everything that he says he’s going to do, including battling covid.” No surprise there, but counterpoint? Fox News’ Chris Wallace, who didn’t do much despite being on the scene.

We need some humor, yes? Let’s let The Daily Show take it away from here.

Kanye West has drawn some ire (to put it lightly) in the music community and beyond for his political views and support of Donald Trump. Now, one of his closest associates, Kid Cudi, wants there to be no mistake about where he stands.

In a new Esquire interview, Cudi addresses Kanye’s Trump support, saying flat-out that he does not share that view with Kanye:

“I thought some people would be foolish about it and be like, ‘Oh, he must’ve talked to Kanye,’ or, ‘Kanye must’ve got to him,’ or some sh*t like that. I think he knows where I stand, and I think he doesn’t bring it up to me. We just don’t talk about it. I totally disagree with it; I think he knows that. And if he doesn’t know, he knows now. That’s my brother. I’ll go on record: That’s my brother. I love him. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to agree with everything he f*cking says and he f*cking does, you know?”

Meanwhile, Cudi is in the main cast of the recently premiered HBO drama We Are Who We Are (for which Dev Hynes provided the score). He also has a full collaborative album with Travis Scott on the way.

Read the full feature here.

Last year, we shared the sad impact that plastic pollution has had on some of our planet’s most beautiful places. With recycling not turning out to be the savior it was made out to be, solutions to our growing plastic problem can seem distant and complex.

We have seen some glimmers of hope from both human innovation and nature itself, however. In 2016, a bacteria that evolved with the ability to break down plastic was discovered in a Japanese waste site. Two years later, scientists managed to engineer the mutant plastic-eating enzyme they called PETase—named for polyethylene terephthalate, the most common plastic found in bottles and food packaging—in a lab.

Here’s an explainer of how those enzymes work:

Ending Plastic Pollution with Designer Bacteria

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Now researchers have revealed another game-changer in the plastic-eater—a super-enzyme that can break down plastic six times faster than PETase alone.

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The super-enzyme is a bit of a frankenzyme, created by linking different enzymes together. “When we linked the enzymes, rather unexpectedly, we got a dramatic increase in activity,” Prof John McGeehan, at the University of Portsmouth, UK, told The Guardian. “This is a trajectory towards trying to make faster enzymes that are more industrially relevant. But it’s also one of those stories about learning from nature, and then bringing it into the lab.”

This new research has been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Combining enzymes could be the key to making various kinds of plastics and combined materials fully recyclable. “There’s huge potential,” said McGeehan. “We’ve got several hundred in the lab that we’re currently sticking together.”

For example, combining the plastic-eating enzymes with existing enzymes that break down natural fibers could allow fabrics made of mixed materials to be recycled, McGeehan told The Guardian. “Mixed fabrics [of polyester and cotton] are really tricky to recycle. We’ve been speaking to some of the big fashion companies that produce these textiles, because they’re really struggling at the moment.”

This newest research isn’t the first to improve upon the plastic-eating bacteria discovery. In April, a French chemistry company called Carbios shared their own mutant enzyme that can degrade 90% of plastic bottles within 10 hours. However, that enzyme, which originally discovered in a pile of composting leaves, requires heating above 70 degrees Celsius (nearly 160 degrees Fahrenheit), whereas this new super-enzyme works at room temperature.

Not that it’s a cutthroat competition. We are talking about helping out the entire planet and saving life as we know it, after all. McGeehan suggested that the researchers work together with the private sector to get the enzymes working out in the real world. “If we can make better, faster enzymes by linking them together and provide them to companies like Carbios, and work in partnership, we could start doing this within the next year or two,” McGeehan told The Guardian.

McGeehan did emphasize to CNN that the super-enzyme is “still way too slow” to be commercially viable at this point, but it is a huge step in the process. “We were actually quite surprised it worked so well,” he told CNN.

Here’s to science coming up with solutions to the problems human scientific advances have created, and here’s to learning to live in better balance with nature in the process.