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The Stretch And Bobbito Show was a seismic force in ’90s hip-hop that played host to a broad swath of rappers who would go on to be all-time greats. Now the titular hosts, Stretch Armstrong and Bobbito Garcia, are remixing and remastering some of the freestyles performed on the show for a series of new EPs. The first of those, Freestyle EP 1, is out today. The debut release features verses from Jay-Z, Big L, Notorious B.I.G., Method Man, and Ghostface Killah.

Bobbito says of the series:

“I hope that listeners feel the era. The excitement. The focus. The craftmanship at hand by the MCs. I also hope that for our diehard followers who have heard these a million times since the Nineties, that our remixes bring new life to them. No one in their right mind could have imagined that a cappella versions of archival live moments in hip hop could be created, but we did it. And then flipped it. So enjoy to the fullest.”

He also noted, “We’re still driven by sharing music that matters to us, that has substance, and that screams to be heard. And not just hip-hop, either. We’re both into a multitude of genres, and just how people who fell in love with our debut LP, No Requests, with our band the M19s (released in January), we expect our audience, new and old, to have an open mind and trust what we’re offering.”

Stream the EP below.

Dan Harmon has spent quarantine watching the internet recirculate old controversies and, somehow, keeping Rick and Morty‘s latest season on schedule during a world-altering pandemic that’s interrupted basically every industry out there.

There’s a lot more Rick and Morty on the way, but the wait time between seasons has become something of a running joke among the show’s rabid fans. Good storytelling, and the animation that brings it to life, takes time, and it all tends to pile up for Harmon and Co. But according to an interview at PaleyFest, Harmon says things are moving along well for the show’s fifth season.

As SyFy pointed out, Harmon said the coronavirus pandemic managed to keep the show “more on schedule” than ever before, mostly because there’s not much else to do these days.

“We’re more on schedule than we’ve ever been,” he said, admitting that the unprecedented digital workflow caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has actually been extremely beneficial to the show’s creation, while live-action projects have stopped and started. “It kind of makes you have to focus on the whole process when you don’t have this office environment anymore. Everyone has to run this bee colony remotely, so the honey just gets made more consistently. It’s working for us.”

Not having the ability to go to an office could spark chaos for other shows, but apparently, it’s the perfect way to remove distractions for the Rick and Morty crew. Another positive of all that waiting, it seems, is that the show’s writers have things generally fleshed out for all the seasons they haven’t gotten to, either. Though Harmon admitted that there isn’t a solid plan they necessarily have to stick to.

“We don’t map it out,” Harmon said. “If we simply just keep writing in real time as fast as we can write…by now, that puts us years ahead of the air date of the most recent episode. The last thing we’d want to do in an environment like that is have a plan. We are the plan because we are the future. We’re the guys who wrote the stuff that they’re now drawing, so we make a tremendous effort to stay in the moment and never box ourselves in.”

That’s certainly good news for fans who loved hearing 70 or so episodes were on the way when Adult Swim signed on before Season 4 was released. Though as we’ve learned from television and the world at large this year, everything can change and nothing is as certain as we’d like to believe.

[via SyFy]

The NBA’s Board of Governors reportedly had plans to meet on Friday to discuss a potential start date for the 2020-21 season. According to a new report by Shams Charania of The Athletic, the league has an idea for when it wants to start the campaign, and it is slightly earlier than previous reporting suggested.

While the plan was to keep a Christmas Day start date on the table, Charania brings word that the NBA wants to start on Dec. 22. This, in addition to a 72-game schedule, would give the league the opportunity to play a season but avoid running into any issues with the Olympics, which are slated to happen next Summer in Tokyo.

This would have some pretty obvious logistical challenges. The season just ended on Oct. 11, they wouldn’t have the normal run in to the regular season, and there are some things that need to be sorted out about the league’s Collective Bargaining Agreement. Of course, lest we forget, there’s also a global pandemic happening, and there’s no word on how things like a vaccine or any potential therapeutics would become available so that players, coaches, staffers, and once they are allowed to enter games, fans are able to play safely. The question of fans is especially interesting, because a goal of the upcoming season has reportedly been to play in home markets with fans in attendance, and it is difficult to see a path for that to happen in the next two months.

There is no word on whether or not this report by Charania comes on the heels of the Board of Governors meeting or if this is something that it plans to propose.

With Borat Subsequent Moviefilm now streaming on Amazon, the official Borat Twitter account is already sharing a deleted scene from the film that, once again, raises some serious question about how hilariously easy it is to get near Donald Trump’s inner circle, and in this case, directly into the White House.

In the short clip, Borat’s daughter (Maria Bakalova) is shadowing OAN reporter Chanel Rion who escorts the Bulgarian actress posing as a 15-year-old journalist into a White House press event with the greatest of ease. (Keep in mind both women are maskless, and the film was shot during the pandemic.) Later, Bakalova is able to talk to Donald Trump, Jr. at an indoor campaign event where, again, the young “reporter” isn’t wearing a mask and neither is the president’s son. Bakalova also scores a very telling response from Rion while asking about fake journalists.

You can see the deleted scene below:

The scene arrives just a few days after the Borat sequel made headlines for catching Rudy Giuliani in a compromising situation with Bakalova. That scandal has been a disaster for Giuliani, who has gone on to claim that the scene was a “hit job” in retaliation for his leaking of alleged Hunter Biden emails, and at one point, America’s Mayor seemed to be under the impression that Borat is a real person. The whole situation continues to be extremely bad for Rudy, and coupled with this latest deleted scene, it shows how easily the Trump administration can be duped by a comedian. If Sacha Baron Cohen can infiltrate the White House and trick the president’s closest advisor into a hotel room with a teenage girl, how difficult would be it for foreign actors with much less comedic plans?

(Via Borat on Twitter)

Historically, one of the hallmarks of NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert series has been visual consistency. While they’ve had a broad array of artists participate, they’ve all been backed by the same area of the NPR offices, so at a glance, any performance looks pretty much like any other one. That has changed this year, though, as the pandemic has altered the foundation of the series. In recent months, artists have been doing Tiny Desk performances from other locations. Some just stayed home, while BTS when to a record shop and King Princess holed up in a “quarantine shed.”

Now Spillage Village have gotten their own Tiny Desk concert, and they decided to take to a church. While they were all arranged around the altar, they got by on a technicality by putting a small desk in front of them, which is more thematic effort than other at-home performers put in. The group (minus 6lack, who was unable to be there for the performance due to travel restrictions) played a four-song set, kicking off with “End Of Daze” before moving on to “Baptize,” “Hapi,” and “Jupiter.”

Meanwhile, Spillage Village members Earthgang had another new endeavor released today: They feature on “Opium” from the new Gorillaz collection, Song Machine, Season One.

Watch Spillage Village’s Tiny Desk performance above.

Since he first ran for the presidency, Donald Trump has been on a mission to destroy the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. Whether he attacks the plan that made health insurance available to more than 20 million Americans because he genuinely understands it and doesn’t like it or because it’s something that Obama did is unclear, but either way, getting rid of it has been on his agenda for four years.

(Now might be a good time to remind people that the bones of the Affordable Care Act were built by Republican Mitt Romney, whose Massachusetts healthcare reform during his time as Governor served as a model for Obamacare.)

Trump’s promises to take down Obamacare have been accompanied by promises to replace it with something better. After all, if you take away a healthcare law that protects people with pre-existing conditions and makes health insurance available to millions who couldn’t afford it, you have to put something in its place or you literally put people’s lives at risk.

The president appears to know this, because he keeps saying he’s got a healthcare plan coming. The best healthcare. The most tremendous healthcare. Fantastic. Terrific. A big, beautiful plan the likes of which the world has never seen before. And it’s coming soon. Very soon. So very soon. Within two weeks, he’s said several different times, many months apart.

Biden pointed out at last night’s debate that Trump has no plan for healthcare, and Trump again repeated what he’s been saying since at least January 2017. The Lincoln Project compiled these claims in one video, and even though we’ve heard them before, it’s striking to see almost four years of promises condensed into a minute and fifteen seconds.

How long can a president say something is coming “very soon” and not make it happen? Apparently, an entire presidential term. Neato.

What’s extra odd is that this mystery healthcare plan is also being peddled by spokespeople in his administration, with some rather hilarious optics to go along with it. Trump’s press secretary Kayleigh McEnany handed 60 Minutes journalist Leslie Stahl a staggeringly thick hardcover book, and a photo shared by the president himself showed Stahl opening it to an empty page. Jokes ensued about the entire book being blank, and since America hasn’t been given the opportunity to see it, nobody really knows what’s in it.

We do, however, have Trump’s September 24 “Executive Order on an America-First Healthcare Plan.” In it he dedicated nearly 3600 words to things his administration has done regarding healthcare (such as eliminating the ACA individual mandate, lowering drug prices, and increasing telehealth accessibility during the pandemic) and less than 500 words outlining his objectives for the future (which can basically be summed up as “make healthcare affordable and provide choice” without any actual plans or policy details for doing that). Apparently, a comprehensive healthcare plan in Trumpland means a piecemeal approach that only gets pulled together in hindsight.

In other words, he still doesn’t have a healthcare plan to replace Obamacare. And that’s a little bit important since the Supreme Court will be ruling on the constitutionality of the ACA on November 10.

But don’t worry, I’m sure that plan be coming very, very, very soon.

It feels like there’s always a new feud popping up in the music world, and sadly, today has brought yet another one. This time, it’s between Ariana Grande and Kazakhstani journalist Borat Sagdiyev.

Here’s the situation: Ariana Grande was seen at a drive-in screening of the new Borat movie (the full name of which is Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery Of Prodigious Bribe To American Regime For Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation Of Kazakhstan), and while there, she enjoyed interacting with a cardboard cutout of the titular character. Grande was so into it, in fact, that she later revealed on Instagram that she had taken the cutout home with her, as she shared a photo of it in her house.

While Grande may think it’s all fun and games, the Sasha Baron Cohen character himself was not pleased. His attempt to negotiate for the return of the cutout was a threat. He shared a video of himself in which he says, “Areola Grande: In order to secure the release of my cutout, which you stole, I am prepared to dance to your song, ‘Positions.’” Indeed, he did dance to the song, and partway through the video, his clothes vanished, save for his revealing undergarment, a modified mask. He captioned the post, “Little Woman’s! You steal my cutout. Give it back to Kazakhstan, we only have two left.”

Check out Borat’s dance video below.

I miss people. Nothing in particular about them, only the charm of passing interactions and the innate quirks we all exhibit when we’re moving through the world occupied by our own thrilling narratives. You can still get your fix in a socially distanced way now, but it isn’t as much fun with worry and caution hanging over so many people’s heads. One day, things will be normal again. I believe that. I have to. But for now, I’m glad How To With John Wilson exists.

Premiering Friday on HBO (at 11PM ET) and produced by Nathan For You‘s Nathan Fielder, the six-part series from John Wilson showcases a documentary filmmaker who went from staring at hours of uneventful footage while working for a PI to someone who has established a hybridized style and a specific tone, which allows his work to feel, at once, intimate and absurd. As an extension of some of his past short-form docs (that you can find on his Vimeo), How To takes on a new level of relevance now while providing a snapshot of the recent past as well as a minefield of awkwardness that more fully occupies our existence in more normal times.

We spoke with Wilson about shooting until you find an unmissable moment, New York at the start of COVID (and showcasing a place within this moment that is grossly misunderstood), and the oft-missed impact of human interaction.

How would you define your style?

You can approach it as a tutorial. That’s the way it’s designed and presented. But to me, it’s just a playground for me to experiment with as many different documentary styles as I can. I like to have man-on-the-street interviews and stuff like that. I’m inspired by that kind of stuff. But I also like the Cinema Verite people that try to make themselves seem invisible, and you’re a fly on the wall. I like doing that kind of stuff. But then I also like directly engaging with the people on camera, and there are certain filmmakers who do that really well that I’m inspired by. I just want to do as much as I possibly can. I like all these different directors and all the work they do, but no one was doing everything at once, and that’s what I wanted to do.

There’s a moment in the finale with a skunk in an ATM vestibule, and I started thinking to myself, “Either this man is incredibly lucky, or he has reams of footage.” How much is there?

Yeah. We have a psychotic amount of footage.

How do you define “psychotic amount?” What’s a ballpark?

I can’t even give you a ballpark of how much material we shoot compared to how much of it makes it into the show. It is luck and it is a coincidence, and it’s just a numbers game. The more you shoot, the more once-in-a-lifetime stuff you’re going to capture. I’ve been just shooting every single day for the past couple of years for the show. I haven’t even stopped since we were technically wrapped. It’s just a rolling thing that happens, and I also have a team of second unit people that are just roving the city in multiple boroughs every single day during the production, just capturing as much as they possibly can. They may be out for a whole day and end up with one usable shot. But that is enough for the show. Or they could capture something else incredible. But I mean, I shoot about three-quarters of the show, and then the other quarter is more B-roll stuff.

The season finale takes place right at the start of COVID, and it’s an amazing snapshot of that time, which already feels like years ago, honestly.

Yeah. I know, right?

That was March. Into April, into May, into the full height of the COVID crisis in New York, were you guys out shooting during that as well?

I mean, once COVID happened, I was shooting by myself. I had nothing else to do. So, I never stopped shooting. That would have been the worst time to stop shooting for me. When the city was going through the most… I mean, it was a real before-and-after moment. The beauty of the show too is that when you have to shut down, the visual quality of the show and production value doesn’t change whatsoever. When you strip away all of the production that was there to prop you up, there’s no decrease in production value because it always looked like sh*t.

I think we have a bunch of priceless footage of a city during a major transitional period that I’d really like to put into something that everyone can see. Someone asked me if they think that New York is less interesting for the show now and I feel the opposite way. New York is more interesting now than it’s been in the past 10 years. I walk outside and… It’s really sad that we all have to figure it out together… it’s sad that we have to figure it out on our own but it also creates this landscape that is born out of necessity, and it’s all patchwork, and it’s really visually exciting in a way even though it’s every man for himself.

So, you shoot a ton and I think I assumed that you stumbled upon storylines, but is that not the case? Is there some pre-planning that goes into it?

The pre-planning is mostly just in the research. I did an episode about scaffolding. We researched what laws made it so there’s scaffolding everywhere these days, and what improvements are they trying to make on scaffolding, and what are the statistics on scaffolding failures? Stuff like that is something that we research and try to squeeze into the edit. But a lot of it is just like… I’m like a Mr. Magoo type character where I just walk through a door and just start talking to someone and they may just open their world to me. Sometimes it doesn’t work out, and they really clam up. But again, it’s just the numbers game and the more things I try, the more organic the story feels. So the arc is basically, I wanted the story to be able to find me. So much of it is just a coincidence. The more pieces you have, the more of a story you can build and if you’re lucky (and I think we were lucky enough), you get something that leads to an emotional crescendo and it feels satisfying by the end. But there are jokes in the show and some of the jokes are pre-planned.

Have you gotten better or more lucky at getting people to open their world to you?

I think I’ve gotten better at it. People usually don’t mind if you’re respectful and you approach them with a camera. Some people don’t like it, and they usually make that clear immediately and you just don’t film them. But a lot of the time I find that people are just literally waiting for this opportunity. There’s something disarming about me being the host who’s also filming the show. Because a lot of the time people don’t realize that I’m the host when I’m filming. They just think that I’m a really talkative cameraman. So they feel, I think, a bit more comfortable talking to me because they don’t feel like it’s actually usable footage. Because in what world is the footage of the cameraman talking to the talent making the cut?

What is it about people that fascinates you and that keeps you coming back to that in your work?

I’m a big non-fiction person. I love Studs Terkel. He had this book called Working, it was just hundreds of interviews with different people who had different jobs. And they just talked about their jobs. Just hearing someone being able to speak in their own words and give them time to… you give the microphone to people who usually don’t get it. I want to see what makes these people happy or sad or what they think about all of these complicated issues. We pretend to be all black and white about stuff, but we all live in this gray area, and a lot of times people don’t know why they feel a certain type of way about something. I feel like I can relate to that a lot and that’s why I just like having discussions with people and showing them… I don’t know, I also feel like it’s anthropology in a way and just documenting a specific time and place. A lot of my favorite documentaries are people just talking about their love lives or their obsessions or stuff like that.

When you have that interaction and you get to know somebody within a brief moment and then you never see them again, does it change you? Do you still have a relationship with the guy on the beach from the first episode? Or is it just a moment in time that happened, that was powerful, and then you move on?

We hung out that night on my last night there and yeah, I mean, we’ve been DM-ing with each other on Instagram since we filmed. But you can’t keep up with everybody the way you can your good friends, and I’m glad that he wanted to keep up with me. I thought I was weirding him out, but he made an effort to reach out to keep up the relationship afterward and I think that’s cool. I like doing that when I have the opportunity to because these people do offer a lot to me. I just really hope that they like the movies that I make. It is really important to me, and it doesn’t sit well with me when someone doesn’t like something that they’re in.

I also feel like, I don’t know, TV is just so over-edited these days, especially documentary or reality TV, it’s like you don’t get a real sense of who these people are. They’re all these amazing characters and amazing stories on TV, but they’re told in the most awful ways and chopped up into these really stylized reality shows. And in my show, I just want to create an opportunity for people to very nakedly have the microphone and just say what they want, and I feel like giving people that extra time on camera, I think gives them much more, I don’t know, an actual platform rather than just over-editing something. I’m having a hard time describing this.

‘How To With John Wilson’ debuts on HBO Friday at 11PM ET

The six years between Gone Girl and Mank is the longest David Fincher has gone between films. This is unacceptable, as the Oscar-nominated filmmaker is incapable of making a bad movie (even The Curious Case of Benjamin Button has its moments), but also understandable, considering he was busy with Mindhunter in the years between.

Fincher served as the unofficial showrunner for season one of Mindhunter, but when the scripts came in for season two, “I ended up looking at what was written and deciding I didn’t like any of it. So we tossed it and started over,” he told Vulture. “I brought in Courtenay Miles, an AD I’d worked with who wanted to write, and she ended up co-showrunning Mindhunter.” That lightened the load, but it was still 90-hour work weeks (“When I got done, I was pretty exhausted”), and there was another issue: the budget.

“Listen, for the viewership that it had, it was an expensive show. We talked about ‘Finish Mank and then see how you feel,’ but I honestly don’t think we’re going to be able to do it for less than I did season two. And on some level, you have to be realistic about dollars have to equal eyeballs.”

When asked by Vulture about a possible third season, a Netflix representative said, “Maybe in five years.” That’s still a shorter amount of time than between Gone Girl and Mank, which premieres on the streaming service on December 4.

(Via Vulture)

The first presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden was basically a disaster. Trump was a constant source of interruptions and went on wild tangents about Biden’s family, which eventually prompted Biden to tell Trump to shut up (he also called him a clown). Trapped in the middle of all that was moderator Chris Wallace, who was widely panned for his inability to rein in Trump and attempts to pacify the president by promising him that he’s going to “love” the next topic. Even Wallace himself admitted he was “disappointed” by the whole proceeding.

However, thanks to the trainwreck from Biden and Trump’s first clash, the Presidential Debate Commission made the wise decision to mute the candidates’ mics whenever their opponent is talking, and it made a world of difference in the final debate. While there were still plenty of outlandish moments, the president was more subdued thanks to the inability to interrupt Biden, which led to a relatively smoother debate by comparison. Moderator Kristen Welker also received praise for her choice of questions and her aggressive attempts to keep Trump on topic that was made easier by the muted mics. Needless to say, that’s an option Wallace wish he had, and he wasn’t ashamed to admit to his Fox News colleagues that he was “jealous.”

In Wallace’s defense, he was in an impossible position with Trump. Had the first debate not gone terribly because of the president’s frantic behavior, the muted mics would have never been an option. And even then, there were still several moments in Thursday’s debate where Welker struggled to rein in Trump. At the end of the day, Chris Wallace shouldn’t feel too bad because, when you think about it, he had to be steamrolled so Kristen Welker could mute.