The upcoming NBA 2K21 release will feature three different athlete covers, with Damian Lillard on the current generation game, Zion Williamson on the next generation console release, and Kobe Bryant on the “Mamba Forever” edition.
While the game’s release is still a ways away, details continue to trickle out about what will be a part of the game, with Monday revealing the game’s soundtrack plans. The current generation (Xbox One, PS4) edition will have a 52 song soundtrack, including a pair of unreleased tracks from Dame D.O.L.L.A.
“To be on the cover alone is a big deal to me, but to be on the cover and also have my music be a part of the game is a huge accomplishment as well,” said Damian Lillard in a release. “Personally, I’ve been introduced to new artists, songs and genres that I might hear on the radio, but I heard it first on NBA 2K.”
2K also announced plans for the next generation soundtrack (Xbox Series X, PS5), and noted that soundtrack will feature a ridiculous 202 songs and will be updated with new songs. It’s an indication of what we may see on next-gen games, as developers will be able to add even more detail to games that goes beyond upgraded visuals and offers the chance to pack games with more music offerings.
Hopefully soundtrack updates will not require lengthy downloads on next-gen consoles, but it’s certainly something to look forward to having a larger music library so as you log hours of gameplay you won’t hear the same tracks over and over.
On Monday, Puma offered official details on the RS-Dreamer, which will see a wide release to the public this Friday, July 31. The sneaker will retail for $125 and be available on Puma.com and Foot Locker’s family of stores. As J Cole notes in the press release, the goal of the sneaker was to meld a performance hoops sneaker with design elements that make it worthy of wearing off the court as well.
Puma
“Over the years, basketball shoes have progressed greatly in their level of technology and comfort but have strayed too far away from designs stylish enough for cultural relevancy,” Cole explains. “The Dreamer hopes to change that reality. The highest level of on-court performance meets the highest level of aesthetic design for daily wear. Once again, you can hoop in the same shoes you wore outside.”
From a performance standpoint, the sneaker introduces RS Foam from Puma’s running line to a basketball sneaker, along with what the brand promises to be “enhanced durability and traction.” That Puma’s top stars in the NBA have been wearing the sneaker on the court in the bubble lends credence to its bonafides as a performance sneaker, and the look speaks for itself as a fashionable off-court shoe.
Supermodel Linda Evangelista was once quoted, “We have this expression, Christy [Turlington] and I: We don’t wake up for less than $10,000 a day.” It appears that the expression travels well; while rapper Lil Baby is no supermodel, he’s set similarly high standards on his work. The in-demand Atlanta rapper tweeted his asking price to do guest verses for his contemporaries in June, asserting that “At this point it’s safe to say I want $100k for a feature.” He doubled down over the weekend, going from hypothesizing about it, to declaring anything less an offense.
At this point it’s safe to say I want 100k for a feature
“Ima feel offended if you want a verse from me but don’t got a $100k,” he tweeted. “Respect my hustle.” He followed that up with his belief that “$100k cheap by the way. Do your streaming research.” Both tweets ended up getting deleted but were preserved for posterity by obsequious drama monger Akademiks, who got a screenshot and cheerleaded, “Which broke ass rapper offered Lil Baby under $100k for a feature?” He also called rappers cheap and criticized them for “talking big in their records” because as we all know, no rapper has ever lied about how much money they make in the whole history of rap.
While it’s pretty funny to imagine Lil Baby turning down more money than most of us make in a year because it doesn’t meet his arbitrary asking price, it’s important to note that Quality Control, the same label Baby is on, is currently being sued by their biggest act, Migos, for withholding royalties. Rappers talk big because that’s what sells — that doesn’t often equate to actual net worth. Besides, most of that money is being fronted by labels, who loan rappers an advance when they sign them to recording contracts. That often translates to six or seven figures of debt for folks who may not even have had a bank account before — and has so often resulted in rappers ending up stuck in bad deals, struggling to recoup for even their biggest hits.
Lil Baby may feel like he has the option to set his worth now, but he should definitely be taking whatever money there is to get — there are a lot more MC Hammers in the game than Jay-Zs.
LA indie-rock outfit Rilo Kiley downloaded nine tracks onto a handful of CDs in 1999 and passed them out at their first shows. The effort was known as their self-titled debut album and has been out of print for just over 20 years. Members of the band have since moved onto other projects — vocalist Jenny Lewis was slated to tour with Harry Styles before the pandemic — but the group has now uncovered their debut effort and announced plans to reissue the album on vinyl and digital platforms in coming months.
After Rilo Kiley garnered the group attention, the band went on to release four other acclaimed records including their 2001 major-label debut effort Take Offs And Landings. But before they had ever recorded their songs, the four-piece arrived on the LA scene in 1998 and played their inaugural show at the now-defunct Spaceland in Silverlake. Comedian Dave Foley coincidentally attended the group’s first show and recalls pushing the band to record an album:
“January 1998, I was a young man, young compared to now, hanging out in LA’s alt. rock club scene. One night in particular, I found myself at Spaceland, at the bar drinking when a band started playing. They were good, so good that I stopped fighting for the attention of the bartender and turned to see who it was. On stage was a very young, delightfully unpretentious group named Rilo Kiley. Between songs they were charming, smart and funny. During songs they were brilliant. After the set I introduced myself and learned that this was their first public performance. I was astonished. They invited me back to their rehearsal space for Thai food and to hear some songs they didn’t have room for in the set. Dreamily, I filled my belly with noodles and my head with one great song after another. I was in a full on, pop music fan swoon. Having decided to force myself into their lives, I suggested (insisted) that I should fund a demo recording. They relented. I also tried to talk them into changing the band’s name. They were unrelenting. A lot of years have passed. I remain proud to know Rilo Kiley and grateful that I had the opportunity and ability to be of some help”.
Watch Rilo Kiley’s 1999 “Frug” video above and see their self-titled album cover art and tracklist below.
Kyrie Irving was among the most outspoken NBA players during the hiatus when it came to voicing concerns about the league’s restart plan. Irving raised questions about whether the restart would be in the best interest of players, particularly amid the growing Black Lives Matter movement and the importance of NBA players continuing to be a prominent voice in that movement.
While the majority of NBA players decided to enter the bubble, the same conversations were happening on the WNBA side where a number of players opted out, both for health concerns and for social justice reasons. While NBA players that opted out had already received a significant portion of their salary for the season, WNBA players opting out were risking their entire season’s pay — in a league where players are just seeing a raise from a CBA ratified this offseason.
As such, those players do not have the potential savings of NBA players who chose not to play in the restart, and Irving wants to make sure that they are given some financial security and assistance. As such, he launched the KAI Empowerment Initiative, which is funded fully by Irving with $1.5 million that will be allocated to players that opted out of whatever reason.
“Whether a person decided to fight for social justice, play basketball, focus on physical or mental health, or simply connect with their families, this initiative can hopefully support their priorities and decisions,” Irving said in a statement on Monday.
The program will also provide a financial literacy program to players through UBS, and they’ll be able to apply online through August 11, 2020. It’s a strong show of support from Irving and will provide players who had to make a very difficult decision to sit out the season without pay with some financial security that will surely be much appreciated.
The first four seasons of Dexter are very good (the John Lithgow season is the exception, because it’s great). Unfortunately, the Showtime series continued for four more seasons, culminating in a horrible cop-out of an ending. Once you see the lumberjack beard, you can’t forget the lumberjack beard, let alone the infamous treadmill scene from a few episodes earlier. No conversation about the worst TV finales ever is complete without “Remember the Monsters?” (which has a nearly identical IMDb user rating as “The Iron Throne”), although the episode does have its defenders.
Dexter star Yvonne Strahovski, who played fellow serial killer Hannah, was recently asked what it’s like to be associated with a — to put it charitably — “polarizing” finale.
“I appreciate both sides. I got a little bit of an insight into why they did what they did… It was just sort of about having Dexter have nobody and that that was kind of the ultimate jail in a way for him to not have anybody left. And then I get the fans as well,” the Handmaid’s Tale actress said during an episode of Collider Ladies Night. “I get that perhaps it wasn’t sort of the most dramatic ending that they had longed for. Maybe they wanted to see more blood and gore… It’s not my responsibility [laughs], so it doesn’t really bother me whether people liked it or not. It’s just something that I was a part of.”
Dexter had its problems near the ends of its run, its many, many problems, but the acting was never an issue. Strahovski, then best known for her role on Chuck, was a late-season highlight, and she and Michael C. Hall had strong chemistry together. Besides, she’s not the one who decided a 45-year-old man should be a child’s stunt double.
Classifying Beyonce as an artist is one of the most impossible tasks any music fan could ever undertake. As one of the biggest stars on the planet, Beyonce could easily be considered a pop star, but she’s also one of music’s most distinctive artists, with a singular sound easily identifiable as her own despite its massive diversity. Queen Bey could deliver a throwback R&B jam as easily as she could fire off a proto-country ballad or a New Orleans bounce bop, yet you’ll always know it’s her — and could only ever be her.
Each body of Beyonce’s work is an eclectic artistic statement that traverses such a broad range of styles that each individual track could easily fall into two or three genres on its own. Whether she is snapping off intense assertive bars as on “Flawless” or kicking and screaming on “Don’t Hurt Yourself,” Beyonce has shown throughout her catalog that she’s a stylistic chameleon who can execute both pitch-perfect riffs on any genre she tries on for size, or craft hits that defy attempts at categorizing them at just one thing.
But that’s what we’re going to try to do here: Figure out just which songs belong under which umbrella. The point isn’t to make square pegs fit into round holes, though — it’s to highlight Beyonce’s gift as blowing up the very concept that music should fit into neat little boxes in the first place. She doesn’t belong in a box as an artist, but here are the songs that best highlight her ability to both fit in and stand out — sticking to her solo output, naturally, or we’d be here all week.
Pop
By far, the majority of Beyonce’s music falls into the hazily defined category of pop music. She’s a big fan of stadium-filling anthems, triumphant brass, and heavy synth punctuated by booming percussion. While “pop” music as it stands today sounds much like an offshoot of R&B with hip-hop elements, many of Beyonce’s pop songs combine multiple elements of varied genres, with big, catchy choruses and sweeping, David Foster-esque flourishes. This is where much of Beyonce’s most well-known material lands, by virtue of being both popular and harder to fit into other categories. It’s also the broadest class of Beyonce music, from booming empowerment anthems to operatic ballads and of course, the dance floor-filling smashes.
Songs: “Crazy In Love,” “Naughty Girl,” “Deja Vu,” “Get Me Bodied,” “Upgrade U,” “Ring The Alarm,” “Freakum Dress,” “Check Up On It,” “Halo,” “Broken-Hearted Girl,” “Ave Maria,” “Satellites,” “Single Ladies,” “Radio,” “Diva,” “Sweet Dreams,” “Video Phone,” “Hello,” “Scared Of Lonely,” “Schoolin’ Life,” “Countdown,” “I Miss You,” “I Care,” “1+1,” “End Of Time,” “Run The World (Girls),” “Best Thing I Never Had,” “Start Over,” “I Was Here,” “Pretty Hurts,” “Haunted,” “Jealous,” “Mine,” “XO,” “Heaven,” “Blue,” “Pray You Catch Me,” “Love Drought,” “Sandcastles,” “Forward”
R&B
Beyonce’s R&B output runs a close second to her pop material — in many ways, it often overlaps it. But her R&B numbers tend to be more understated than her pop songs and crop up a lot more in the earlier part of her solo career. Due to the near-spoken delivery of many of her R&B songs, there’s also a lot of crossover with her more straightforward hip-hop efforts. The defining characteristic of her R&B songs, though, is content: The blues are as evident a through-line as any in Beyonce’s long and storied career.
Songs: “Hip-Hop Star,” “Be With You,” “Me, Myself And I,” “Yes,” “Signs,” “Speechless,” “That’s How You Like It,” “The Closer I Get To You,” “Dangerously In Love,” “Suga Mama,” “Kitty Kat,” “Green Light,” “Resentment,” “If I Were A Boy,” “Ego,” “Love On Top,” “Party,” “Dance For You,” “Rather Die Young,” “Blow,” “No Angel,” “Rocket,” “Superpower,” “All Night”
Hip-Hop
I have said before and I maintain that Beyonce has not only always been a rapper, but that she is also the primary pioneer of the singsong style that dominates the landscape today. Go all the way back to some of her verses on Destiny’s Child’s breakout albums Writing On The Wall and Survivor, and those deliveries sound an awful lot like the chatterbox styles employed by many of today’s most prominent rap names. That said, Beyonce rarely tapped into a full rap persona until her 2014 self-titled album, where “Flawless” and “7/11” sound a lot more like New Orleans bounce than straight-up hip-hop. Even so, she’s so confident with her chanting bar work, these ones probably live up to the standard well enough to warrant inclusion.
A later entry to her oeuvre, Beyonce dabbled in harder-edged guitar stuff on Lemonade alongside Jack White. While it’s a small-ish part of her overall catalog, it’s also important because it highlights how 13 years into her solo career, Beyonce is still growing as an artist, incorporating new sounds to suit her new moods. Clearly, even the mostly stoic artist, activist, mother, and wife likes to thrash every now and then. While this probably won’t ever become the most expansive part of her discography, it’s fun to imagine a latter-day Bey going full Ozzy Osbourne for a side project and really cutting loose, Aggretsuko style. There’s some soft-rock stuff earlier in her career, too.
Songs: “Smash Into You,” “Don’t Hurt Yourself”
Country
Another part of Beyonce’s output that has recently expanded is Beyonce’s country work, thanks to the recently-renamed The Chicks and “Daddy Lessons.” But, the roots of her interest in the genre can be seen as far back as her album B’Day, where “Irreplaceable” found Stargate strumming an acoustic guitar in a very Western-ish way as Beyonce delivered lyrics that wouldn’t sound out of place at a Carrie Underwood concert. While “everything you own in the box to the left” is hardly a “Louisville Slugger to both headlights,” Beyonce did eventually graduate to letting the ol’ hot sauce out of her bag to do some damage in the video for “Hold Up.”
Speaking of “Hold Up,” that Lemonade standout was the second time Beyonce slipped Caribbean-influenced songs onto her albums. Starting from her earliest collaboration with Sean Paul, Bey later dipped into that well for the aforementioned “Hold Up,” evolving her relationship with dancehall riddims to eventually incorporate more roots reggae and thread some elements of dub throughout. It’s a lane she would do well to return to on future projects.
Songs: “Baby Boy,” “Hold Up”
So what genre is Beyonce anyway? If anything, this exercise shows that distinguishing most of these songs into individual genres falls short of capturing the entire picture. At this point, Beyonce is a genre. And no matter what style of music she tackles next, she will find a way to make it her own.
As the quarantine persists and many shops remain closed, St. Vincent, aka Grammy Award-winning musician Annie Clark, gave fans a way to transport themselves back to one aspect of pre-pandemic life. The singer shared a tongue-in-cheek tribute to the time when music lovers could spend hours messing around on different instruments in guitar shops by sharing a snippet of herself playing Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway To Heaven” on electric guitar.
Sharing the clip to social media, Clark wrote: “Since guitar stores have been closed, I thought you might have missed the sound of someone fumbling through ‘stairway to heaven,’” The singer continued to give an “honorable mention” to the songs “Smoke On The Water,” “Sweet Home Alabama,” “Black Dog,” and “Wherever I May Roam.”
Clark is clearly a Zeppelin fan as this isn’t the first time the singer has shared a clip of herself performing one of their songs in recent months. Back in May, the musician shared an acoustic and “moderately-played, half-remembered partial-cover” of the group’s Houses Of The Holy track “Dancing Days” from the side of her van.
Watch St. Vincent play “Stairway To Heaven” above.
Some of the artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
The Major League Baseball season is just four days old, but it is now in serious danger of being put on hold.
The Miami Marlins had four players scratched due to positive COVID-19 tests from Sunday’s game against the Phillies, including their starting pitcher, and somehow still managed to pull out an 11-6 win on the road. However, the Marlins, concerned of an outbreak within the team, stayed in Philadelphia rather than traveling home on Sunday night ahead of their home opener against the Orioles to await the next round of testing results.
Unfortunately, the fears of an internal outbreak were warranted, as results indicated Monday that, in total, 11 players and two coaches tested positive — of the 33 players that traveled, per ESPN’s Jeff Passan. As a result, Miami’s game with Baltimore was postponed, as was the Phillies scheduled game with the Yankees.
Updating the Miami Marlins’ outbreak: The total number of infected players is 11 of the 33 who have been traveling with the team and two coaches, sources tell ESPN.
The Marlins-Orioles and Yankees-Phillies games tonight have been postponed. For now, the rest may be played.
As Karl Ravech notes, the MLB season likely hinges on whether the Phillies, who played the Marlins last night, have any positive test results. The issue is, as we have learned, it’s possible to test negative for a few days before eventually testing positive, so Philadelphia is likely days away from being fully in the clear, even if their next round of test results come back negative.
The Phillies organization becomes a hugely important factor now in where things go from here. Test results on personnel likely will be known this evening. I believe other games scheduled for tonight will be played.
With baseball not in a bubble environment, there was always enhanced risk of an outbreak because of how slow testing can show a positive case. Juan Soto of the Nationals was the first player to test positive ahead of the Thursday opener against the Yankees — after having practiced with the team — as baseball hoped that would be an isolated incident. Unfortunately, the Marlins — who had been in Atlanta for scrimmages prior to heading to Philly — were not as lucky and when cases arrived in their locker room, the virus spread to a third of the team.
Baseball will apparently press on with the 26 other teams, but it sadly seems like the clock is ticking on the season. There will reportedly be a league-wide call among the owners on Monday afternoon to discuss the situation further, and determine how the league will proceed.
MLB has its scheduled call with all 30 owners today at about 12:30 pm Eastern. That suddenly is a different call than it would have been 48 hours ago.
For now, we can simply hope the Marlins players who contracted the virus remain asymptomatic or only battle mild cases and the Phillies avoid an outbreak of their own, but baseball’s nightmare scenario for the opening weekend appears to have arrived.
British grime pioneer Wiley may have a tough time repairing his career after posting a series of anti-Semitic tweets on Friday, as his management team at A-List Management have dropped him as a client and his label’s distribution partner, ADA Worldwide (Alternative Distribution Alliance) also kicked him to the curb in the wake of his day-long tirade.
John Woolf, who has managed Wiley for years, tweeted, “Following Wiley’s anti semitic tweets today we at [A-List Management] have cut all ties with him. There is no place in society for antisemitism.” Meanwhile, a spokesperson for ADA said in a statement, “We oppose antisemitism and any form of discrimination and racism. While Wiley controls and releases his music through his own label, he has a digital distribution agreement with ADA and we are terminating that agreement.”
Wiley’s outburst also sparked an outcry from members of the UK’s government. BBC reports that dozens of British celebrities and entertainers joined a boycott of Twitter, calling on the platform to take steps to address anti-Semitism and racism. Even the Prime Minister chimed in via a representative, saying, “Twitter needs to do better.”
Meanwhile, the majority of Wiley’s tweets referencing conspiracy theories about Jewish people secretly controlling the world were removed, while Wiley himself has not tweeted since, suggesting his access may have been suspended. The criticism of Wiley’s actions has also extended to calls to revoke his membership in The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, which he was awarded in 2018.
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