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After spending 2019 promoting her album On The Line, Jenny Lewis has mostly laid low in 2020. She dropped a charity single at the top of the year and did some Postal Service things in October, but in terms of public activity, not much went on between or since then. However, she returned with a new song today: “Unblu” is a downtempo collaboration with Chicago rapper Serengeti (real name David Cohn) on which they both provide hushed vocals.

The pair also shared a note about their collaboration, revealing that his is one of five songs they made while collaborating remotely during the pandemic. Lewis made the tracks on her phone, which were then further produced by Andrew Broder.

Watch the “Unblu” video above and read the duo’s note below.

“Jenny met Dave down a long hallway in a former Communist Media Center in East Berlin during the People Festival of 2018. Dave asked Jenny to sing on a song about Tom Selleck passing on the part of Indiana Jones. Can you imagine a world where Tom Selleck is Indiana Jones?

A fast friendship was born as they skulked about, cracking jokes and chatting about their mutual love for boxing.

Jenny threw a show for Dave at Dino’s in East Nashville when they returned from Europe. The bartenders said it was the best show they ever had. Jenny was among the 9 fans that attended and danced their asses off.

To cap the torrid evening, Dave said ‘J, I need 7 tracks! Just piano or guitar or whatever!’ Jenny inquired if one would do?

Then the world shut down and Jenny & Dave hunkered down in Los Angeles & Chicago, respectively. Jenny smoked weed every day and Dave stayed totally sober.

The result is five songs made on Jenny’s iPhone, for Dave. Beats, bass, drums, digital tanpura & topline, sent via text, ripe for Dave’s poetry. To accompany the music, Jenny made videos on her phone during the witching hours, editing while under the covers.

Then Jenny texted the tracks to another People alumnus — Andrew Broder in Minneapolis — who co-produced and mixed the songs, taking them from Garageband phone music to music that gently thumps you. Music to dance around your living room in a Day-Glo bathing suit to. Music to go bananas to while watching the news & Forensic Files on mute.

Thank you for reading this.

Enjoy, Jenny Lewis & Serengeti

P.S. It’s almost Christmas!”

Jenny Lewis is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Thanks to her prominent role in The Clone Wars animated series, Ahsoka Tano is a fan-favorite in the world of Star Wars. So when Rosario Dawson was tapped with the daunting task of playing the first live-action version of the beloved character, she received some surprising inspiration for the role. In a new interview, Dawson revealed that The Mandalorian showrunner Dave Filoni, who shepherded Ahsoka through both The Clone Wars and Rebels, told her that the wayward Jedi is in a similar place as Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings. Via StarWars.com:

“It was just interesting playing with an amalgamation of all that,” Dawson says. “I wanted to kind of have some her playfulness and her fun — the cocky eyebrow thing that she does. You know that she’s got that feistiness. You know that she’s willing to push the rules a little bit in order to get what needs to get done. But I also really like that she does have that wisdom. She’s gone through a lot. She’s really gone through a lot of things. And she’s grounded, more than when you first meet her as a young teen. It was really fun to find moments to throw homages to the different aspects to Ahsoka that I’ve always loved.”

Dawson’s portrayal of Ahsoka has been a smash hit with Star Wars fans who are receiving much credit for the actress landing the role. She recently revealed to Vanity Fair that Filoni saw tweets fan-casting Dawson and Ahsoka, and he kept them in his back pocket in case he ever got the chance to make a live-action version of the animated hero. Clearly, those tweets came in handy.

(Via StarWars.com)

By now we know that a massive aspect of the Clippers’ disappointing 2019-20 season was that they failed to gel as a team, and that in particular, the way that superstar additions Kawhi Leonard and Paul George were treated by management and the coaching staff rubbed some of the other players on the team the wrong way.

A new report from Jovan Buha of The Athletic further explains the tense situation, including how George’s lack of playoff achievement made teammates chafe at his “preferential treatment” over the course of the season:

Teammates had a level of acceptance of Leonard’s preferential treatment, as his status as a two-time champion and two-time Finals MVP — the then-reigning Finals MVP, at that — was indisputable.

But George’s treatment was more of an issue within the locker room, league sources said. George, while a perennial All-Star and All-NBA candidate, didn’t carry the same cachet with his teammates. There was a sentiment among certain teammates of, “What have you accomplished in the playoffs?” multiple league sources said.

The story explains how George and Leonard were the only Clippers to have their own security and training staff, how the duo controlled the team’s practice schedule, and dictated when and how they spoke to media, occasionally putting teammates in the awkward position of speaking on behalf of the team.

Perhaps that was more accepted when it came to Leonard, who had just done things his own way in Toronto en route to a title, but less so with George, who has not won a championship and performed poorly in the Bubble playoffs. Both are still on the team, however, meaning Lue may have his hands full repairing relationships in the locker room and charting a path forward for the team.

Contrary to the roster turnover some believed was coming for the Clippers, their only big changes came in letting Montrezl Harrell leave in free agency, signing Serge Ibaka, and trading Landry Shamet for Luke Kennard. Outspoken veterans like Patrick Beverley and Lou Williams are still around, at least for now, and they’ve brought back Marcus Morris and Reggie Jackson in free agency.

The Clippers remain among the short list of championship contenders by way of their talent, but it’s clear mistrust runs deep in the organization run down based on how consistently these reports have come out over the past year. Getting past that will likely be their biggest hurdle, beyond the presence of the Lakers, if they are to put things together and achieve their full potential.

After a lengthy hiatus, the Strokes officially returned this year with their aptly-tiled album The New Abnormal, their first full-length release in seven years. Though most of their plans were thrown off course, the band was still able to share a couple of videos to their new songs and make an appearance on SNL. Now returning once again, The Strokes offer a visual to their album opener “The Adults Are Talking.”

Directed by Roman Coppola, the visual opens with each one of the Strokes’ members going to bat against a team of cyborgs. Of course, they were no match for the AI pitcher’s perfect throw, so each struck out immediately. Finally, vocalist Julian Casablancas got on base from a walk and was able to bring it on home when bassist Nikolai Fraiture hit a ball out of the park. After Casablancas slid safely into home plate, their team celebrated their first run against the cyborgs, who had a score of 56 in the last inning.

Ahead of the visual’s release, Casablancas admitted that while he was excited about The New Abnormal, the album is far from his favorite. “It’s my fourth favorite record I’ve ever been a part of,” he said. Casablancas didn’t name his favorite album, but said he ranks the group’s first two albums, 2001’s Is This It and 2003’s Room On Fire, above it.

Watch The Strokes’ “The Adults Are Talking” video above.

The New Abnormal is out now via RCA. Get it here.

Dexter is coming back next year as a limited series. As our own Dustin Rowles pointed out, this news is not so much a surprise as an inspiration for questioning why it took so long. Original showrunner Clyde Phillips plans to make good on remedying the maligned (and rather silly) “lumberjack” ending to the series, and the show is primed to attract an even bigger audience for Showtime. Come to think of it, this might be the best time for it to happen since almost all release dates are shuffling back, so why not add some return-serial killer mayhem to the mix?

What is very clear, however, is that anyone who wishes to catch up with Dexter on Netflix will need to get on it, and fast. All eight seasons are currently available for streaming, but that won’t last long. On December 30, the Michael C. Hall-starring series will evaporate from the streaming giant, which will leave people with the option of paid streaming (either through a Showtime subscription or Amazon Prime, etc.). Of course, anyone who wants to watch the upcoming limited-series followup will likely end up watching it on Showtime anyway. Yet if you’re looking to get ahead (even though it feels weird to say that about a show that ended in 2013), Netflix can help you do the deed, but only for three more weeks.

Incidentally, December 30 is the day that AMC’s Hell on Wheels and Showtime’s Nurse Jackie leave Netflix, too. In other words, you’ve got a lot to do, in addition to watching 96 episodes of Dexter. I have faith in you.

It’s Spotify Wrapped Day, so music fans are sharing what artists, songs, and albums they listened to most in 2020. As they continue to do so today, artists are taking notice of their names popping up on these lists and taking time to thank their fans for the support. Artists also have access to their own Wrapped recap where they learn about their overall streaming numbers, so posts about that are being shared as well.

Maggie Rogers is grateful for the streams she has received this year, as she wrote, “getting weepy seeing all this spotify wrapped stuff. from the bottom of my heart — thank you for spending time w my sounds this year. and for continuing to let me conjure sparkling noise for you.” Tinashe offered some praise for her fans, writing, “If I’m in your Spotify wrapped this year, you have top tier taste and I love you so muchhh.”

Meanwhile, some artists used Wrapped as an opportunity to criticize Spotify over the common perception that they doesn’t pay artists well. Clipping wrote, “One thing about all these Spotify posts–this was the first quarter as a band where our Spotify royalty payments totaled about as much as our three personal Spotify subscriptions.” Pronoun also noted, “would be EPIC if Spotify WRAPPED it up with PAYING us :).”

Check out some more posts from artists below.

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

Just three weeks removed from a years-long stint at Men’s Central Jail, South Central rapper Drakeo The Ruler is free and already back to work. His new album, We Know The Truth, was released on his birthday and features an unbowed Drakeo returning to his tried-and-true formula of boastful, imaginative rhymes over bass-heavy, hyperactive beats. We Know The Truth is Drakeo’s second album of 2020 after he released the defiant Thank You For Using GTL this summer, recorded on jail phones.

Drakeo was released from Men’s Central after being offered a plea deal for time served in his case. He was accused of criminal gang conspiracy and shooting from a motor vehicle despite being cleared of first-degree murder, attempted murder, and conspiracy to commit murder charges in July 2019. Los Angeles District Attorney Jackie Lacey refiled the more recent charges, prompting Drakeo and his supporters to call the case a personal vendetta against him. However, with the election of a new DA, George Gascón, Drakeo was given the deal that led to his release just a day after the election.

In an interview with NPR, Drakeo posited the reason for Lacey’s animus. “I was successful and I was from the streets. They don’t like to see someone like me make it, it goes against how they operate. For someone like me to get out of the streets, it just goes against everything that they stand for.”

We Know The Truth is out now. Check it out above.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has perfected the Twitter takedown, and she just came for Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.

DeVos led an online meeting of the Federal Student Aid office, and many hoped this would address President Trump’s possible extension of the administration’s pause of student loan payments. In August, Trump extended his student debt relief plan through the end of the year, but there’s been no word on whether the government would force students and graduates to begin paying back their loans come 2021. Unfortunately, instead of addressing this very real and pressing concern, DeVos spent most of the conference theorizing on President-elect Joe Biden’s ideas on how to forgive millions of their student debt and make higher education free for those who qualify.

DeVos, a conservative billionaire philanthropist, has gotten plenty of flack for her efforts to roll back Title IX protections in schools and to steer funding away from public education. During her speech, she attacked Biden’s support for plans to forgive up to $10,000 in federal aid for borrowers and to push colleges and universities to make tuition free for families who earn less than $125,000 per year.

“We’ve heard shrill calls to cancel, to forgive, to make it all free,” DeVos said. “Any innocuous label out there can’t obfuscate what it really is: wrong. The campaign for free college is a matter of total government control. Make no mistake: It is a socialist takeover of higher education. Now, depending on your personal politics, some of you might not find that notion as scary as I do. But mark my words: None of you will like the way it will work.”

DeVos went on to paint a grim picture of what higher education might look like if it was free and available to all, one that included references to DMV wait times and invoked the failings of K-12 public schools. Of course, considering we currently operate under a free market system when it comes to secondary education, one that often leaves children in need behind, some people just aren’t buying that. And by some people, we mean Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who sharpened her knives and skewered DeVos on social media over her comments.

And that’s how you get schooled on Twitter. Better luck next time, Betsy.

After dropping the highly anticipated trailer for the first Euphoria special, HBO has announced (in a press release) that fans can catch the episode a few days early on HBO Max. According to a press release, Euphoria Part 1: Rue will start streaming on HBO Max on Thursday, December 3 at 12:00 a.m. ET/9:00 p.m. PST before airing on its previously announced date of Sunday, December 6.

There’s a little confusion going on, however. A tweet from the official Euphoria Twitter account says the special will start streaming on Friday. While that’s technically correct for the East Coast, not so much for the West Coast. But the important thing is that you can watch Emmy Award Winner Zendaya early, and there’s no confusion on that being awesome.

The episode is one of two specials meant to tide over fans until the proper return of Euphoria‘s second season sometime in 2021. While there’s no date for the second special, we do know the details for Part 1: Rue, which takes place after the climactic events of the season one finale. Via Variety:

Spoilers for Euphoria season one below in this synopsis:

These special episodes pick up right after the season 1 finale, in which Rue (Zendaya) uses cocaine and relapses after her girlfriend Jules (Hunter Schafer) gets on a train and leaves her after their high school winter formal. Rue sits in a diner contemplating her life when she runs into Ali (Colman Domingo), whom she met at her Narcotics Anonymous meetings. The first episode will find Rue in the aftermath of being left by Jules at the train station and relapsing. The episode, written and helmed by series creator Sam Levinson, follows Rue as she celebrates Christmas.

Euphoria Part 1: Rue starts streaming either Thursday, December 3 or Friday, December 4 on HBO Max. It’s definitely one of those days.

There’s a weird thing that happens when we talk about people dying, no matter what the cause. The 2,977 souls who lost their lives in the 9/11 attack felt overwhelming. The dozens of children who are killed in school shootings are mourned across the country each time one happens. The four Americans who perished in Benghazi prompted months of investigations and emotional video montages at national political conventions.

But as the numbers of deaths we talk about get bigger, our sensitivity to them grows smaller. A singular story of loss often evokes more emotion than hearing that 10,000 or 100,000 people have died. Hearing a story of one individual feels personal and intimate, but if you try to listen to a thousand stories at once, it all blends together into white noise. It’s just how our minds work. We simply can’t hold that many individual stories—and the emotion that goes along with them—all at once.

But there are some ways we can help our brains out. An anonymous visual effects artist has created a visualization that can better help us see the massive number of Americans who have been lost to the coronavirus pandemic. The number alone is staggering, and seeing all of the individual lives at once is overwhelming.

In this video, each marble represents one American who has died of COVID-19, and each second represents six days. At the top, you can see the calendar fill in as time goes by. Unlike just seeing a grid of dots representing the visual, there’s something about the movement and accumulation of the marbles that makes it easier to see the scope of the lives impacted.

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Just watch:

(If you’re curious, the artist has clarified that no, the flesh tones of the spheres are not representative of the racial makeup of those impacted by the pandemic.)

The artist, who you can find on Reddit wrote on Vimeo, “A single death is terrible but something I can comprehend as I have life experience to draw upon. When the number of deaths become 5, 10, 50, [it’s] a tragedy and still something I can connect with at a very personal level. However, as death tolls start to hit the 100s it becomes something else. It becomes an event. An awful event. It becomes harder to conceptualize and empathize with. I suspect the threshold for this is different for everyone and varies between cultures. The goal of this project was to help me visualize 230,000 as a number but it also helped reconcile that these are people with families, friends and social circles…“

The artist said they started working on this project on November 1 and finished November 15. During that time, an additional 15,000+ Americans died from COVID-19.

Furthermore, from the time the project was finished to the time this article was written—two weeks—another 22,000+ have died from the virus.

The scope of the tragedy of the pandemic truly is hard to fathom. When you think of the extended circles of people each of these marbles represent—the family and friends of the people who have died from this disease—it becomes even moreso.

And it didn’t have to be this way. In the early months of the outbreak, we were told that if we managed the pandemic, we might lose 100,000 to 200,000 Americans total. We’ve already blown past the top of that range, with our average daily death toll trending upwards. And with hospitals filling up and a limited supply of healthcare workers, we are likely to see those averages spike even further.

We can slow that spike with our own behaviors—staying at home as much as we can, wearing masks when we have to go out, keeping up social distancing and handwashing. But no matter what happens, each of the lives lost to this disease deserves to be recognized for the tragedy that it is. And they each deserve the acknowledgement that we could have and should have done more to keep it under control. We have examples in countries like New Zealand, Australia, Vietnam, Taiwan, and South Korea, who managed to successfully keep the virus at bay and prevent the deluge of deaths that we’ve seen here.

Let’s learn from this experience so the next time a pandemic hits—and there assuredly will be a next time—we’ll have a better grasp on what to do from the get go. And let’s make sure that hundreds of thousands of Americans dying in a matter of months never become just another statistic.