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In July, Nick Cave got in on the livestream performance craze, doing so by performing a full-length solo piano show at London’s Alexandra Palace. Now the musician has announced that he will be releasing the performance as a live album, and a video version of it will be available to watch in theaters beginning November 5. The album comes out shortly after, on November 20. Ahead of all that, Cave has shared a video of him performing “Galleon Ship.”

Cave told the story behind the performance, saying how playing his songs in this new way gave them a different life to him:

“The film ‘Idiot Prayer’ evolved from my ‘Conversations With…’ events. I loved playing deconstructed versions of my songs at these shows, distilling them to their essential forms. I felt I was rediscovering the songs all over again, and started to think about going into a studio and recording these reimagined versions at some stage – whenever I could find the time.

Then the pandemic came – the world went into lockdown, and fell into an eerie, self reflective silence. It was within this silence that began to think about the idea of not only recording the songs, but also filming them.

We worked with the team at Alexandra Palace – a venue I have played and love – on securing a date to film just as soon as they were allowed to re-open the building to us.

On 19th June 2020, surrounded by Covid officers with tape measures and thermometers, masked-up gaffers and camera operators, nervous looking technicians and buckets of hand gel, we created something very strange and very beautiful that spoke into this uncertain time, but was in no way bowed by it.

This is the album taken from that film. It is a prayer into the void – alone at Alexandra Palace – a souvenir from a strange and precarious moment in history. I hope you enjoy it.”

Watch the “Galleon Ship” video above.

Idiot Prayer: Nick Cave Alone At Alexandra Palace is out 11/20 via Bad Seed Ltd. Pre-order it here.

The initial reaction to the hiring of Steve Nash by the Brooklyn Nets was coated with the assumption that this must have been the preference of superstars Kyrie Irving and Kevin Durant. In an interview shortly after the hire was announced, Nets general manager Sean Marks told Adrian Wojnarowski how conversations with the two stars informed his decision to move on from interim coach Jacque Vaughn and hire Nash.

While Vaughn got more out of the Nets than was expected in the Bubble this summer, he, at the end of the day, was an unknown commodity in terms of managing two of the NBA’s biggest stars and personalities. That’s why reporting in recent weeks centered around candidates such as Ty Lue and even Gregg Popovich, two championship head coaches who would have brought instant credibility to the team.

But in the end, it appears the sway of Irving and Durant led the Nets to Nash.

“Spending a year with Kevin and Ky for the most part sidelined, it allowed me to strike up a relationship and a rapport with these guys,” Marks told Wojnarowski. “We had a lot of conversations, whether that was watching practice or postgame or over the summer here and leading into these playoffs, as to what we should be looking for (in a head coach), what we need.

“Both expressed (they wanted) high character, they wanted a great communicator, and they wanted somebody who they would respect. I think we hit the nail on the head with a hire like Steve.”

Still, Nash is an unproven commodity in the head coaching ranks. He has never even held an official coaching position on an NBA team, only served as an advisor for the Warriors, where he developed a relationship with Durant. As a way to hedge their bet on Nash, the Nets will reportedly make Vaughn the most highly paid assistant coach in the NBA, and he will likely be near the top of other young teams’ lists as well.

The question remains, though, why if Vaughn was good enough to stay on the Nets’ staff and be valuable to the organization, he wasn’t then well-regarded enough among Brooklyn’s players and executives to keep his job.

Asked about this decision, Marks called it “extremely important” to keep Vaughn and said he “loved the continuity” it created. Marks also stated that Nash himself wanted to keep Vaughn on the staff for that very reason. As with Irving and Durant’s initial decision to come to Brooklyn, Nash’s hire came as a big surprise, and it will be hard to measure the success of the hire for some time.

Britney Spears’ father, Jamie Spears, recently called the #FreeBritney movement “a joke” and noted, “All these conspiracy theorists don’t know anything. The world don’t have a clue.” The way Spears and her legal team see it, the world not knowing anything is a big part of the problem. TMZ reports that Spears wants the public to be more informed about the goings-on of her conservatorship case, and she even expressed support for the #FreeBritney movement.

Spears’ lawyer said in legal documents, “Britney herself is vehemently opposed to this effort by her father to keep her legal struggle hidden away in the closet as a family secret. […] Far from being a conspiracy theory or a ‘joke’ as James reportedly told the media, in large part this scrutiny [#FreeBritney] is a reasonable and even predictable result of James’ aggressive use of the sealing procedure over the years to minimize the amount of meaningful information made available to the public.”

Additionally, Spears’ lawyers included an article about #FreeBritney alongside the documents and noted that Spears “welcomes and appreciates the informed support of her many fans.”

This news arrives shortly after it was revealed that Spears’ conservatorship is voluntary, and that she has a preferred conservator (not her father) in mind.

There are exactly two things in this works that I am reasonably qualified to speak about at length, based only on the amount of time I spend watching and thinking about them:

• Television shows
• Basketball

With this in mind, in part because there’s not much else going on and in part because I really want to, I have attempted to rank the characters from the HBO drama Succession based on how good I think they would be at basketball. Not how good they are at basketball, or how good the actors who play the characters are at basketball. How good I think the characters are. It’s a profoundly stupid exercise and I’m borderline giddy that I have a place to discuss it like this because otherwise I would just be dialing random numbers on my telephone and ranting about it to whoever picks up. It’s not even the first time I’ve done something like this. A few years ago, I did it with characters from Game of Thrones. I don’t have to explain myself to any of you.

Below, please find my rankings. I feel very strongly about all of the opinions contained within. Especially the ones about Gerri.

18. Roman Roy

I have this image in my head, crystal clear. Roman is sitting on the bench in a gymnasium while a game in progress. He’s playing on his phone and scoffing at things around him. Scoffing at everything. Dismissing it all out of hand. Then, the coach shouts his name to send him into the game and a look of pale panic appears on his face, as though he had not considered this possibility. He walks onto the court — please do stop here to picture Roman in basketball shorts and sneakers — and within five seconds of action he gets hit in the face with the ball. Blood everywhere. He leaves as everyone laughs. He hops into the backseat of a chauffeured town car and never returns.

17. Connor Roy

Two things I know for certain here. One, there is absolutely no chance Connor can play basketball. You will never convince me otherwise, not in a million years. Which brings me to number two: he definitely thinks he could play basketball if he wanted to, which he does not. “You toss the ball into the hoop. Big whoop. A trained dolphin at Seaworld can do it,” he would say. Everyone would groan very loudly.

16. Ewan Roy

On the one hand, he is very tall. On the other hand, he does not seem like a man who enjoys games. Any game. Basketball, Scrabble, hide and go seek, whatever. He would just stand still on the court and stare at the other players with disdain, just disgusted at all the choices they’ve made that have led them to this moment.

15. The Pierce Family, Generally

No.

14. Willa

Willa is tall and seems reasonably coordinated, which implies some sort of natural athleticism that could translate to the basketball court. I originally had her higher. What complicated the issue is two factors:

• She is an aspiring playwright, which makes her a Theater Kid, and while I apologize for the generalization I’m about to make, Theater Kids are not typically good basketball players
• She strikes me as more of a volleyball person

I’m open to opinions here. None of this is written in stone. We’re doing art, not science.

12. (tie) Gil Eavis and Frank Vernon

Very strong “old dude at the YMCA who has on like wristbands and knee pads and is immovable in the post on account of being 500 percent stronger than he looks like he should be, which makes his sweeping hook shot an unstoppable offensive weapon” vibes from both of these guys.

11. Caroline Collingwood

Logan’s second wife — mother of Kendall, Shiv, and Roman — strikes me as someone who would come off the bench and lock down the other team’s ball-handler for 5-7 minutes, pick up three fouls, then return to the bench. Big trash talker. Not normal trash talk either. Like, very personal, cutting trash talk that devastates you and sends you back to therapy immediately after the game.

10. Rhea Jarrell

I believe in my heart that Rhea Jarrell shoots 35-40 percent from three, in large part because I have never doubted Holly Hunter and do not plan to start today.

9. Cousin Greg

Toughest entry on the list. My sweet boy is very, very tall, and younger than just about anyone else on the show. He has all the physical advantages one could want. On the other hand, he is hilariously uncoordinated and passive and appears to be developing a secret cocaine habit. I’ve been trying so hard to envision a scenario where he can be a contributing member of a basketball team but every time I start to get there I see him tripping and falling on a fast break because he somehow got his shoes tied together in the middle of the previous play.

Still, he ranks this high because there is a bubbling rage inside that gangly body and we simply cannot rule out the possibility that he plays with the intensity of Kevin Garnett in the brief spells between him falling like a whirling cyclone of arms and legs.

8. Marcia Roy

Would pay $29.99 for a PPV of her and Caroline playing HORSE. Nothing but midrange jumpers and tossed-off insults so hurtful that it makes the people announcing the contest too uncomfortable to comment.

7. Shiv Roy

I get a lot of “played point guard in high school and was a stabilizing force on the court except for the four or five times a year when she snapped and heaved the ball at her own coach” feelings when I think about Shiv and I see no reason to question them at this point.

6. Karl

My favorite thing about the Waystar CFO and yes-man is that he does not appear to have a last name. Like, I’m sure he does, probably, but he’s just Karl and such a Karl that there’s no need to elaborate. I can see him right now, in his 20s, playing Division II basketball at some elite private school, scoring 24 points per game in a jersey that has “KARL” on the back of it. I love him.

5. Logan Roy

I do not think Logan Roy is actually good at basketball today at his advanced age, or that he was ever good at it, for that matter. I would be kind of surprised if he ever played it, even once, just to try it. But I do believe that he could berate and bully the other team into giving up entirely on defense before passing the ball to teammates who can waltz in for a series of uncontested layups, and that seems like a valuable skillset to bring to a squad.

4. Kendall Roy

Another tough one. On one hand, complete failure at everything, all the time, usually but not always due to substance abuse in the middle of the day. On the other hand, between his iconic rap performance and the fact that he straight-up has a child whose first name is Iverson, we have to at least consider the fact that he was an And1 Mixtape junkie in his teens and developed Professor-like ball-handling skills that he showed off in pick-up games with various hooligans and delinquents he knew exclusively through narcotics-related circumstances.

3. Gerri Kellman

There’s a chance this is mostly a glasses/haircut thing, but I get very strong Doris Burke energy from Gerri. I’m sure she could hit a pull-up three on a fast break. I’m confident she could whip a one-handed skip pass to an open shooter. I have not one iota of doubt she could cross you up while wearing heels and a smart business skirt. Close your eyes and think about it for a few minutes. You can see it, too.

2. Stewy Hosseini

I have no reason to believe this and cannot explain my position in even the vaguest and most unhelpful terms, nor will I try, but I am as sure as I am that the sun is hot and the ocean is wet that Stewy can dunk. Two-handed. In his dress pants and $500 wingtips, with his sleeves rolled up and his tie tucked in between the buttons of his dress shirt. No amount of hard evidence to the contrary will convince me that I’m wrong.

1. Tom Wambsgans

Tom Wambsgans gives off the single most “scored 2,000 points in high school in the Midwest on a steady diet of threes and turnaround jump shots and had a couple Division II scholarship offers but turned them down because his transparently two-faced ambition convinced him to walk-on at a more prestigious school, where he went mad with power the instant he got playing time as a junior and was kicked off the team for hazing the freshman” energy of any television character I’ve ever seen. I have no doubt he could hit 9 out of 10 free throws at any moment with no warmup. I bet he scored 60 points in a game once. Tom is undoubtedly good at basketball.

Upon the video’s release, Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s “WAP” video went instantly viral. The song’s raunchy lyrics combined with the NSFW visuals recieved reactions from everyone from Fox News host Tucker Carlson to even the animal rights organization PETA. The video’s director, Colin Tilley, was pleasantly surprised about the video’s overwhelming response, especially with the multitude of memes created from the visual. In an interview, Tilley broke down the filming process, behind-the-scenes footage, and all the challenges the production crew faced along the way.

“You start seeing people’s reactions and you’re like, ‘Okay, I think we were right here,’” Tilley said about the video’s breakout success in an interview with Genius. Tilley continued that the production window for the shoot was fairly short and his crew only had three weeks to make Cardi’s vision a reality. After brainstorming with the rapper, Tilley knew he wanted to make the video have “a little bit more innocence than the song.”

While most of the filming went off without a hitch, there were a few difficulties along the way. In particular, the scene where the two rappers are covered in snakes led to a few problems. Not only did a snake pee on Cardi, but one managed to wrap itself around Meg’s neck and body. “A lot of the snakes in this scene were real and it was pretty much the funniest thing ever to see their reactions to seeing some of the snakes at first,” Tilley said. “I don’t think I would put those snakes on me.”

Watch Colin Tilley break down the viral clip above.

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

Blimes And Gab are fresh off the release of their debut album, Talk About It, and bring their bouncy, synth-poppy single “Shellys (It’s Chill)” to UPROXX Studios for an exuberant performance on UPROXX Sessions.

The dynamic duo diddy-bop their way through the ’80s-inspired two-step anthem, with Gab offering silkly vocals and Blimes spitting a confident, flirty rap. The pair’s chemistry is on full display in their Sessions performance as they sychronize their dance steps, harmonize with each other, and basically have a ball.

Initially, both Blimes Brixton and Gifted Gab were solo artists on the grind, but when they teamed up for the battle rap “Come Correct,” the internet responded, turning their pairing into a viral hit and establishing the high demand for more group outings. They solidified their partnership after both releasing solo albums in 2019, with everyone from the Insecure team to Wu-Tang Clan’s Method Man co-signing.

Watch Blimes And Gab perform “Shellys (It’s Chill)” above and find out why they are the internet’s new favorite aunties.

UPROXX Sessions is Uproxx’s new performance show featuring the hottest up-and-coming acts you should keep an eye on. Featuring creative direction from LA promotion collective, Ham On Everything, and taking place on our “bathroom” set designed and painted by Julian Gross, UPROXX Sessions is a showcase of some of our favorite performers, who just might soon be yours, too..

The Boys returns in less than 24 hours, and Amazon is pulling out all the stops to promote the second season.

In a new video posted to The Boys Twitter account, Homelander (Antony Starr) narrates an ad promoting The Seven in a TV spot that would feel right at home during the current election year. While vowing to protect the American people from terrorists and evil forces, the video showcases Homelander’s greatest power: propaganda. With the public practically worshipping The Seven as saviors, it’s allowed the corporate-run superhero squad to become morally deprived monsters behind the scenes, leaving a trail of death and wrecked lives in their wake.

But as you can see by the the caption below, The Boys have had enough and are taking it to The Seven in Season 2.

Following the literally explosive events of the season one finale, the second season of The Boys will follow the ragtag team as they hide from the law after being framed for the death of Vought executive Madelyn Stillwell (Elisabeth Shue). But with Stillwell out of the picture, Vought turns to Giancarlo Esposito’s Edgar to keep Homelander in check, which puts the murderous “Supe” on a bizarre trajectory. Complicating matters is Aya Cash’s Stormfront who’s been added to The Seven. She presents a threat that Homelander has never experienced before, and he doesn’t take it well.

“[He’s] used to everyone being scared of him. She matches him,” Cash told Entertainment Weekly. “That’s not to say she doesn’t understand his power and tiptoe around it sometimes, but she’s also willing to challenge him. Ultimately, I think the dynamic between the two is terrifying and will change who Homelander is.”

The first three episodes of The Boys season two will premiere September 4 on Amazon followed by a new episode each week. Fans can also expect the short film “Butcher” to debut at some point during the season.

It was only a few days that Matt Reeves’ The Batman resumed production, and it’s already been shut down again. “A member of The Batman production has tested positive for COVID-19 and is isolating in accordance with established protocols,” a Warner Bros. spokesperson said earlier today in a statement. “Filming is temporarily paused.”

It turns out that the “member” was the Dark Knight himself, Robert Pattinson.

Vanity Fair reports that Pattinson “has tested positive for the coronavirus, causing filming of The Batman to be halted just days after the superhero drama resumed work at studios outside of London.” Pattinson could not be reached for comment by Vanity Fair.

Little else is known about Pattinson’s condition (he hasn’t recorded a The Rock-style video), but according to Variety, The Batman was “about seven weeks into filming when they had to turn off cameras due to the pandemic. The movie has approximately three months of material left to shoot and hopes to be done filming by the end of the year.”

The Batman, which also stars Zoë Kravitz, Paul Dano, Jeffrey Wright, John Turturro, Peter Sarsgaard, Barry Keoghan, Jayme Lawson, Andy Serkis, and Colin Farrell, is scheduled to be released on October 1, 2021.

(Via Vanity Fair)

One of the worst parts of the basketball discourse is the insistence in breaking star players into one of two categories: Jordans and Pippens. The first category is meant for players who can be a lead star and the second is for players who need to be the secondary star on a championship team.

It’s reductive and fails to account for an awful lot of nuance in that, often, it’s best to pair two stars who can each take the lead at times and handle various responsibility, but has become a favorite discussion point not just among fans, but talking heads and former players turned analysts. This discussion ramped up again on Wednesday night after the Bucks lost to the Heat to fall behind 0-2 in there series, as Richard Jefferson professed his belief that Giannis Antetokounmpo was a Pippen, not a Jordan.

Pippen himself scoffed at that notion — and dunked on Jefferson in the process by asking what player that would have made him — but things got even messier when ESPN’s Jay Williams chimed in. Williams asserted that LeBron James was once a Pippen to Dwyane Wade’s Jordan, but eventually learned to become a Jordan.

That, uh, didn’t sit well with LeBron, who decided to respond with frustration and confusion as to why he was being dragged into this, noting he’s never been anything but himself on the floor, not a Pippen or a Jordan.

LeBron and Wade were, maybe more than any star duo in league history, incredible at sharing the lead role. Their first season they had nearly identical scoring output, efficiency, and volume, so while Wade was certainly more established at winning titles having already gotten one, it’s off-base to call LeBron a Pippen while in Miami. The insistence with comparing things to a specific situation like Pippen and Jordan is always going to be messy and, rarely, will fit totally.

There’s certainly something to be said about what Giannis needs to do — or who he needs around him — to be at his most successful come playoff time, but trying to wedge that into the Jordan-Pippen dichotomy is just tired. One day, maybe we’ll move past this, but until then, it’s if nothing else guaranteed to make some people very mad.

The Milwaukee Bucks find themselves in a rough spot right now. The team is down, 2-0, in the Eastern Conference Semifinal series against the Miami Heat, and while Game 2 ended under strange circumstances, the Heat have all the momentum. Because this is happening in 2020, takes are abound, including one from Richard Jefferson that drew the ire of a Hall of Fame inductee.

In the aftermath of Game 2, Jefferson suggested that Giannis Antetokounmpo is more Scottie Pippen than Michael Jordan. As such, Jefferson believes that Giannis needs to team up with an alpha dog who can fill the Jordan role.

Now, Pippen is one of the best players to ever live, so being Scottie Pippen should, in theory, be a compliment. That changes a bit, though, whenever it is mentioned in the same sentence as Jordan, as the implication becomes that a player is not good enough to win on their own and needs someone better to get to the promised land.

There’s also the fact that Pippen has a Twitter account, saw this, and provided both a pretty reasonable response that also took a swipe at Jefferson’s game.

Jefferson, to his credit, took this in stride.

As we saw during The Last Dance, if there is one thing you could always count on with the 1997-98 Chicago Bulls, it was that somehow, someway, a joke was going to be made at the expense of Scott Burrell.