A few weeks ago, Atlanta trap rap pioneer Gucci Mane appeared to be disgruntled with his soon-to-be former label, Atlantic Records, accusing someone at the label of being racist and venting that all artists should go on strike until they receive more favorable record deals. Since then, he’s been using his Twitter to wonder aloud (so to speak) about possibly going independent and feeling as though people wanted to censor him. Yesterday, he promised to reveal his decision on the release date of his new album, So Icy Summer, which he set for July 3.

Early this morning, Gucci again logged in to ask fans whether he should renew with contract with Atlantic, although the question seemed more rhetorical when he tweeted it. “Should I renew contract with @Atlantic records or go independent?” he queried, promising a “big press conference July 3rd” and asking “who should do interviews???”

Gucci has been associated with Atlantic Records since 2016, beginning with the studio album Everybody Looking and including 10 projects in that time for an impressive clip of around two projects a year for the last four years. While he never did reveal what his disagreement with Atlantic Records was over, no one can say that the partnership hasn’t been productive. However, as one of the more prolific and successful independent artists in hip-hop, Gucci likely knows he can do it on his own should need be.

Whatever the case, we’ll all find out when So Icy Summer drops on 7/3.

Gucci Mane is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

On June 26, 1945, delegates from 50 countries gathered in the Herbst Theater auditorium in San Francisco.

They were there to sign the U.N. Charter, a treaty that, in its 19 chapters and 111 articles, founded and established a world organization devoted to saving “succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” It would do so by maintaining international peace and security, strengthening international law, expanding human rights, and promoting social progress and better standards of life.

On that day, World War II was not even yet over — that day wouldn’t come until September 2nd, 1945 when the Japanese surrendered — but it established an organization that, as one of its first endeavors, helped distribute lifesaving supplies and medicines to countries reeling from disease, injury and the trauma of war.

And that would be far from its first milestone towards creating a healthier world. Improving health around the world has always been a key priority of the U.N.

In fact, when diplomats met to create the organization, one of the very first things they discussed was setting up a global health agency, something they did just three years later when, on April 7, 1948, they established the World Health Organization (WHO) with the mission to help deliver on the promise of health for all. It tackles infectious disease, reduces preventable deaths for girls and women, and improves access to safe water and sanitation; it fights for the rights of people with disabilities and mental health issues; and it strengthens health systems.

Now in 2020, the UN though WHO is once again providing lifesaving equipment and supplies to more than 130 countries — leading the global fight against COVID-19.

WHO is just one of the big leaps that the U.N. has taken towards improving global health. Here are a few of the many other accomplishments it has made:

1946: The United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) is founded to help provide support and relief to children living in countries impacted by war.

1950s: This is the golden age of antibiotics discovery and implementation, helping fight such diseases as bacterial meningitis (which was fatal for children 90% of the time before), strep throat, and the spread of ear infections to the brain.

1969: The United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA) begins operations to empower women to decide if and when they have a family, to improve childbirth safety, and help children reach their potential.

1979: Smallpox is eradicated after a 12-year WHO global vaccination campaign with global partners.

1988: The Global Polio Eradication Initiative is established. Since then, polio cases have decreased by 99% because of access to immunizations.

2000: The largest-ever gathering of world leaders issues the Millennium Declaration, which lays out eight aspirational goals. Three of those goals are specifically designed to spur progress in child health, maternal health and combating disease.

2001: The Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria is created to help fight the three largest infectious disease killers in the world through global cooperation.

2006: The number of children who die before their fifth birthday declines below 10 million for the first time.

2015: All U.N. Member States adopt the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. One of those goals is to ensure health and well-being for everyone everywhere.

2018: WHO, the World Meteorological Organization, the UN Convention on Climate Change and UN Environment hold the first Global Conference on Air Pollution and Health at WHO headquarters in Geneva.

2019: 190 U.N. Member States adopt the historic political declaration on Universal Health Coverage at the UN General Assembly identifying ways to make health for all a reality.

UNICEF/Carolina Cabral

As we approach the 75th anniversary of the UN Charter’s signing, there is still a lot of work to be done.

At least half the world’s population is still without access to essential health services. Even though half as many under-5s die now than before 2000, still 5.4m children die before their fifth birthday each year. Racial and economic disparities are still rampant in healthcare, affecting maternal mortality rates, access to care, and quality of treatment. The proportion of mothers who do not survive childbirth is 14 percent higher in developing nations. And now, COVID-19 has created one of the most pressing public health crises we’ve experienced in the last century.

The pandemic is threatening to erode and reverse current progress, and yet, in May, President Trump announced the US’s plans to end its relationship with WHO. This move could hamper the world’s response to the virus, including vaccine development, science and information sharing, resource mobilization, and efforts to mitigate the impact of the virus on the most vulnerable. It also jeopardizes hard-won gains on diseases like polio, putting progress at risk.

If we don’t defeat COVID-19 everywhere, we won’t be safe anywhere — and we can only beat it by working together.

It will take action from everyone to build stable and fair health systems that challenge misinformation, invest in vaccines, and strengthen relief from disease outbreaks.

You can learn more about these goals by checking out “Voice Our Future” — an immersive and interactive reality experience exploring the then, now, and next of some of the most critical challenges of our times. You can also further the reach of your voice by taking the one-minute survey to help inform the UN’s thinking and priorities.

View Entire Post ›

The 2019-2020 NBA season came to an abrupt halt on March 11 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. With the season effectively three-quarters of the way through, many storylines, records-to-be, and developing comebacks were left in the lurch; all the bizarre, beautiful, and too-absorbing minutiae of the league halted. This is a look back at the most compelling of those suspended narratives in an attempt to figure out what could have been while reconciling, maybe wrenchingly, that however the season concludes, this will be a year in basketball that never fully happened. Welcome to Year None.

Oh, but they’re fun aren’t they? Lemon-bright and clarifying. A team that, tired of waiting to be ready, decided to play its own game. They refused to be bullied and then OK Boomer’d Andre Iguodala, and it only made their sweetness grow. It isn’t cloying, how honeyed they are with one another, it springs from kindness over the occasionally ingratiating models teams can take on. Less one prominent — obvious in salary, seniority or reputation — leader, they’ve all taken the time and energy to step up and would have stayed a Grind City best kept secret if they weren’t so happily fond of being flashy.

The first time I touched down in Memphis the plane banked low over the (now Bass Pro) Pyramid that sits to the east of the where the Mississippi River coils into the city, the late-afternoon sun sinking molten and heavy to the west. The sun’s light on the Pyramid bouncing directly up from the dark, shifting glass on all four sides of the structure to glance off the plane’s dipped wing and be delivered into the cabin in a dizzying, entirely blinding light. Even when, out of the necessity of safety, the plane changed course and the light winked out, we were all temporarily struck, dazed and blinded with sun spots scorched into our sights, wondering would this be permanent and smiling all the same. The Memphis Grizzlies are like that.

Let’s start small. Dillon Brooks plays like he is permanently running downhill and that when he gets there, a small trampoline is waiting. He has a fumbling, top-heavy energy of a nearly extinct from the league big man, but the tightly wound coordination to control it. Coming down the lane he throws his weight out with every step, swinging his elbows, clearing space and once he has it, an unobstructed look or a fresh-ploughed path he plants his feet, hops up, maybe lands and pogos again, swinging his arms like a helicopter the entire time, to deliver the ball not right into the basket but on a sweeping arc that catches your breath until it sails and sinks. It could be an infuriating sequence every time if you did not trust him, and his teammates do. Because when the ball clanks from all that extra velocity Brooks creates with every added step, he is right under it to grab his own rebound, try it again, an exhausting effort he never seems to tire of as he clears 22, 27, 32 points per game.

On a roster that as a rule never tires, adrenaline finds a corporal form in Jaren Jackson Jr. Like the tendency that lays in wait for all of us when presented with the option to cleanly lose or draw, Jackson Jr. likes to push. He has a tendency to work past himself, pushing into an elevated state of assurance where doubt and taking a breath are banished. Occasionally this ends in him being brick-walled in the paint between bigs he neglected to clock the size of, but more often than not it has him pulling up in the pocket, or out way deep mid-court, the momentum from his last rushing steps instantly diverted into his hands that fling the ball up, away, to float down in slow motion through the net and the hearts of the defenders who have turned to watch, forlorn.

The fountain of youth that blasts through this team as if affixed to a dad’s new power washer has scoured a bright new ceiling for the Toronto-tenured Jonas Valanciunas. Always steady, in the past occasionally to his detriment, the big and beloved Lithuanian has found a new versatility in the steadying role he can play for a group that can’t bear to downshift. His first year in Memphis Valanciunas averaged the highest scoring of his career, 19.9 per game, and where he has gently tapered off this year he’s made up for it at the rim, with career best averages in offensive and defensive rebounding. Valanciunas was always a player who thrived when his role was to look out for his shooters, to sweep his whole body into territorial space-making, and there are near endless options now for who needs his physicality on a team so long and green.

Where Brooks and Jackson Jr. blunder very capably into your heart and Valanciunas protects it, Kyle Anderson is loitering around outside, waiting to be let in. It feels strange to refer to any one player on this very young team as old guard, but Anderson is. The year Anderson was meant to get comfortable instead became an overhaul. The roster was jettisoned around him, coach included, its anchor points of Marc Gasol and Mike Conley heaved up, traded north and west. Anderson learned his habits in the Spurs system and this season’s run and gleeful gun Grizzlies can make his six years in the league, even compared to some of his more seasoned teammates, feel almost antiquated. Almost. His fundamentals serve him, the ones he took from San Antonio. He is a helper, understands spacing and angles and where he best fits in most plays. If wingspans can be subtle then his 7’3” worth of one is a sleeper. Where he seems slow by virtue of the cranked up velocity around him he can at least reach to rebound and worry any incoming offender. Still, these Grizzlies don’t amble, they need to run, and Anderson may prove the last inflection in a bygone Tennessee accent eventually shed for the voice of this future generation.

At the fore of that expeditious era is Ja Morant. Twenty years old and torqued with joy, Morant was exactly who the Grizzlies wanted when they drafted him 2nd, and who the team needed to pull its plan together. But where they wanted someone to perhaps ease into play, Morant instead bounded, impervious to slow growth as much as to gravity. Where he became immediately a new model of player is where his delight and control collide. The gear he operates in does not typically lend to control, to hairpin execution within second split by pressure, but Morant funnels each moment through an existential ice luge, giving his already deft handles a chilling control. Morant went unscouted in high school, discovered by chance at a camp when an assistant coach from Murray State went in search of a vending machine to score an overpriced bag of chips from. He plays with the simultaneous joy of someone who recognizes luck but also understands inherently its runway. That at some point, you’re going to have to conjure your own. Morant was always going to be a wonder, but the more unbelievable fact is that we get to watch.

Watching him, you feel your heart heave and shudder, your doubts contract. He has made the most curmudgeonly analysts and recalcitrant critics lead with their eyes, the rest of us force sharp breath through clenched teeth as he soars, saturnalian, as far as physics will let him push before yanking him hard back down to earth. With Morant you are at every moment as elated as you are afraid for the unfortunate circumstance of his bones, as breakable as our own more sheepish skeletons.

The full extent of his fearlessness is on display when he falls. His body connecting with hardwood a taunt he takes one step further by lying there, prone, making Mr. Olympia poses. As many half court lobs that come magnetized to his two waiting hands, body laying in wait mid-air, as many dunks that seem to see him accelerate to the rim with arms bent back behind his head, no tactile way to increase his speed but speed increasing all the same, it is maybe the way that he does not shy from colliding with the floor that embodies what this team is and will be. A certain invincibility of youth, yes, but the rote wisdom of where the very rules of the game, its form and physics, can be pressed, nudged and broken. One big slogan writ large by Morant, by the Grizzlies in gameplay, in how guys engage with one another and protectively come for those who don’t get it, is Why wait?

If you reserved any empathy for Iguodala these past few months then please, release it. Spend it elsewhere or stash it for later. He made himself a martyr, that was what he had set out to do all along, but where his own self-sacrifice turned on him was where he least expected, in rookies and those he felt automatically junior calling him — correctly — out. The core value of this team, that flourishes where they’ve miscalculated a should-be win or run themselves ragged, is showing up for each other. It is where they thrive and how you know they are here for a longer run than this season’s meteoric showing. Iguodala never understood that, because he never made himself available to either the team or its players. He felt he was owed a respect on the standing of his quantified experience alone. Brooks was the first to be asked about the veterans absence and his answer should have been clarifying enough, “First time I seen him was on TV talking about us. It doesn’t even matter. Andre Iguodala is a great player. I feel like he’s doing the right thing for his career. But we don’t really care.” And why should they? What mattered to the team minus Iguodala was showing up, the physicality of being there.

Brooks, in the vein of what it means to be a Grizzly, ran with it, “A guy on our team that doesn’t want to be on our team, I can’t wait ’til we find a way to trade him so we can play him and show him what Memphis really about.”

It was funny! It was also the kind of biting honesty that can be so rare in the hierarchal trappings of the league. To make a threat about sitting out your presence has to be missed, but Iguodala’s never was. In what Brooks said and Morant and others later echoed, they were already looking at the interruption as brief and had their sights set past it, if anything annoyed by the dead weight of Iguodala’s contract and attempts at trying to turn it into something it never was — a hindrance on their potential.

In all the teams that had their seasons and stories sidetracked this year with the lurching pause and even more untenable return to play, it is the Grizzlies and the sudden snuffing of their quickening joy that we should feel protective of, even though they will bounce back the fastest in whatever form this season or the next will manifest as. They are a young team in collective age as much as their history, a legacy impatient to unfurl full tilt, and this year will prove another temper to their resiliency, a blip for a group already putting mile after breathless and joyful mile behind them.

As touring and live performances slow up in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, artists who’d normally be on the road for most of the year suddenly have a lot of free time on their hands. While many have filled up the additional hours of the day with work on new music, some are finding other ways to both scratch their creative itch and stay active. One of the more popular occupations has been podcasts and the latest rapper to hop on that particular wave is Kid Cudi.

On Wednesday evening, Cudi posed the question to his Twitter followers, “Should I do my own podcast?” When the replies seemed to agree on a resounding “yes,” he confirmed, “Ok… I’m doing my own podcast then.” He elaborated that his brand of content would include “All love no sh*t talkin’. Only uplifting artists and talkin with my friends and fans. All positive vibes! It’ll be like your hangin with me, smokin’ and shootin’ the sh*t for awhile. It’ll be meant to comfort the lonely.”

The idea caught on like wildfire, with at least one celebrity co-signer: Ben Schwartz, who most recently voiced the title character in the Sonic The Hedgehog movie and launched the Netflix comedy series, Middleditch And Schwartz with fellow actor Tom Middleditch. Schwartz noted he was “already very excited for the intro/outro music and the words in between” and said he couldn’t wait to listen, sharing a photo of himself with Cudi from earlier this year when Cudi rented out a theater to screen Sonic with Ben and fans. The two stars discovered they were each other’s fans last year on Twitter.

Other stars to catch the podcasting bug include Lil Wayne, whose Young Money Radio has already been filled with illustrious guests like Drake, Eminem, and Nicki Minaj.

The origin stories of many successful rappers are full of times when people in power passed on them. Joe Budden recently shared one of those tales on The Joe Budden Podcast, a story about the time he didn’t let Kanye West open a concert for him.

Budden said he was running late to a hometown concert when Kanye made a last-minute request to open the show for him, which Budden understandably shot down. Budden said:

“I had a show in South Jersey somewhere, […] and I had to perform. And this was at the height of ‘Pump It Up.’ I was super, super late for this performance in Jersey, my hometown. When I walked in, it’s a sold-out crowd, like aggy ’cause I’m late. They’re chanting my name, I should have been on 40 minutes ago, and I wasn’t. I’m looking to run in, just get something to drink, and hit the stage. I go to my dressing room or somewhere in there, and Kanye is there, and he says, ‘Joe, do you mind if I could rock, just before you go out?’ ‘N****, no! No, no!’”

When asked where Kanye was in his career at that point, Budden continued, “It didn’t matter what Kanye it was. I’m here to do a service and this crowd is aggy and I wouldn’t even do that to you. I wouldn’t even do that to you right now. The crowd is screaming, ‘Joe,’ and you don’t have a record anybody knows. This just isn’t a great idea. I’m not sure that went over so well with him.”

“Pump It Up” was released as a single in May 2003, and the song peaked at No. 10 on the Billboard Hot Rap Songs chart that June. So, it’s likely this incident took place at some point in mid-2003, which would have been a few months before Kanye released his debut single, “Through The Wire,” on September 30, 2003.

Watch the video above.

It feels strange to point this out during a year in which so many bad, no good, completely awful things have happened. But! 2020 has been a really excellent year for music so far.

When it comes to picking my favorites from the first half of 2020, I initially planned on sticking with a succinct Top 10. But I was leaving so many records that I love off the table. So I opted for 20. (Though even then I’ve left off some really good releases from the likes of Dogleg, Melkbelly, Grimes, and Pearl Jam.) There are a number of great records that seem to have been made about 2020, even though they obviously weren’t. And there are records that feel like antidotes to the madness we’re experiencing each and every day via our social media feeds and front windows.

Music can be a mirror, and it can also be a balm. This year abounds with examples of both. Here are my favorites, listed in alphabetical order.

Fiona Apple — Fetch The Bolt Cutters

How perfect is it that the defining album of 2020’s first half was made by a reclusive genius who rarely leaves her house? In both its rattling, raw sound and scathing, perceptive lyrics, Fetch The Bolt Cutters feels like a record made specifically to address our time of quarantine. It’s depressive, claustrophobic, clattering, cathartic, and loaded with stinging gallows humor. The twist is that for Apple — a droll misanthrope who rails against the awfulness of dinner parties in the brilliantly funny “Under The Table” — escaping into exile has always been the goal. As she sings on the title track, most people “don’t know shit” anyway.

Armand Hammer — Shrines

If Fetch The Bolt Cutters takes you inside the interior life of a solitary eccentric willfully sequestered from the world, Armand Hammer’s head-swimming, psychedelic hip-hop fantasia Shrines feels like an appropriately surreal snapshot of a larger world that’s rapidly deteriorating. Everything about this album is confounding and yet undeniably true — football players lose their minds, ancient Egyptian pharaohs rise to power once again, wild tigers lurk inside dilapidated apartments. Rappers Billy Woods and Elucid wield evocative metaphors about urban decay and then conjure them into a kind of weird dream-logic reality, against a backdrop of punch-drunk drum machines and swirling synths that move freely between waking and sleeping nightmares.

Bonny Light Horseman — Bonny Light Horseman

So many great albums from the first half of 2020 somehow intuited the frayed emotional landscape of this time well in advance. In the case of the self-titled debut by Bonny Light Horseman, this occurred by counterintuitively dipping into a deep well of timeless folk and gospel standards. A supergroup of sorts featuring a who’s-who of musician’s musicians and singers — including Eric D. Johnson of Fruit Bats, Hadestown‘s Anaïs Mitchell, and noted indie-folk multi-instrumentalist Josh Kaufman — Bonny Light Horseman recalls the disarmingly informal Mermaid Avenue albums made by Billy Bragg and Wilco, who similarly reconnected with a dormant spirit of American music and infused it with a younger, vital energy, producing incredible, necessary beauty for a year when our very national fabric is coming undone.

Phoebe Bridgers — Punisher

On the title track of her stunning second album, Phoebe Bridgers imagines herself as a needy, abusive fan stalking her idol, the late Elliott Smith. Just as Smith once specialized in writing heartfelt pop-folk tunes that moved listeners to the point of fanaticism, Bridgers now functions in that role for a current generation steeped in trauma and dread over the future. Though Bridgers’ delicate, emotionally numb vocals and doleful lyrics shouldn’t completely obscure the very real wit on display in Punisher, which is loaded with lines that will make you laugh (like the “Tears In Heaven” diss in the middle of “Moon Song”) even as you’re ugly-crying over yet another vividly evoked heartbreak.

Drive-By Truckers — The Unraveling

Back in January, the world’s greatest post-modern Southern rock band put out their 12th album, The Unraveling, and unwittingly created an overture for a very strange year. All around us, things are truly unraveling, and you can hear many of the reasons why on this exceedingly bleak record, a sequel of sorts to DBT’s 2016 effort, American Band. On The Unraveling, songwriters Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley once again explore the moral and spiritual disasters currently ravaging America, including political insincerity (“Thoughts And Prayers”), inherently racist systems (“Babies In Cages”), shameless demagoguery (“Grievance Merchants”), and hopeless drug dependency (“Heroin Again”).

Bob Dylan — Rough And Rowdy Ways

At the age of 79, Bob Dylan seems to have realized that being a living legend who has accomplished everything that anyone could ever hope for in music gives you license to make the most perverse and idiosyncratic album you want. His latest, Rough And Rowdy Ways, is precisely that — you won’t find another record this year that mixes the profound and the silly with so much brazen bravado. In “Murder Most Foul,” Dylan plumbs the depths of American darkness while also shouting out Don Henley and Glenn Frey. In “Black Rider,” he ponders death while also making a dick joke. In “I Contain Multitudes,” he wonders about the duality of man while bragging about his love of fast food. A million books and documentaries have been made about this guy and he’s still an utter mystery to us. How wonderful.

Empty Country — Empty Country

As the frontman of the ’10s era prog-emo band Cymbals Eat Guitars, Joseph D’Agostino made epic rock songs that unfolded like sequences of movements building to overwhelming crescendos. His new band Empty Country feels like a more mature project, pivoting from punk and emo to grander soundscapes drawn from ’80s classic rock and contemporary Americana. But D’Agostino hasn’t tamped down his ambition, but rather focused it, letting his songs breathe a little easier so the finely crafted narratives of his insightful, cinematic lyrics can really shine through. You won’t find many albums (or even TV shows and movies) that create worlds as fully realized as Empty Country, a place populated by self-destructive psychics, sociopathic 9/11 obsessives, and other fascinating iconoclasts.

Jason Isbell And The 400 Unit — Reunions

Ever since he cleaned up his personal life, Jason Isbell has seen his professional and artistic fortunes skyrocket, easing into arena headliner status as his songwriting has become increasingly refined and literary. His latest album Reunions isn’t quite the dramatic leap forward that his 2013 breakthrough Southeastern was, though only because he has already risen so far. Rather, Isbell’s latest is yet another refinement, finding him writing about this pet themes — sobriety, the relationships between parents and children, the universal need for redemption — with as much elegance as he ever has. More than ever, his songs feel like fully formed stories, whether it’s the child who must transcend his parents’ flaws in “Dreamsicle” or the man in “River” who isn’t quite as good or remorseful as he initially lets on.

Stephen Malkmus — Traditional Techniques

For nearly 30 years, Stephen Malkmus has been saddled with a “slacker” reputation that belies his steady output with both Pavement and his winding and thriving solo career. The past several years have been especially productive, including a really good rock album with his stalwart backing band the Jicks, Sparkle Hard, his sorta electronic experiment Groove Denied, and the best LP of the bunch, this year’s Traditional Techniques. On this album, Malkmus works in the idiom of West Coast folk music and in the process produces some of his loveliest and most layered songs, including “The Greatest Own In Legal History,” a first-person con job that unexpectedly unfolds against a tender, finger-picked musical backdrop.

Jeff Parker — Suite For Max Brown

You might know the name Jeff Parker if you’ve followed the excellent Chicago indie band Tortoise, or (less likely) a bevy of other experimental groups from the Windy City. But if you’re looking for an introduction to this guitarist and composer’s wide-ranging catalogue — which bridges rock, jazz, R&B, and electronic music — it might as well be his latest release, the gorgeously funky Suite For Max Brown. Parker lays down clean, incisive guitar lines amid hot-buttered soundscapes that have the feel of ’60s avant-jazz while remaining unexpectedly accessible. It’s a record that’s rooted as much in the primacy of classic southern soul as it is in free-form sonic explorations, and it never fails to feel like tonic whenever I put it on.

Phish — Sigma Oasis

The quarantine has been onerous for all touring bands, but it must be especially crippling for the most popular jamband in America, which thrives on in-the-moment improvisation and a close connection with a large fanbase. But Phish responded to our current crisis in exceedingly surprising fashion — by releasing its best studio album in about 20 years. As free and thrilling as the band sounds on stage, they’ve often been encumbered by stiff and thin production on their records. Sigma Oasis answers this problem with an obvious but nonetheless effective solution: They simply jam, man, allowing epics like “Everything’s Right” and “Thread” to sprawl well past the 10-minute mark.

Ratboys — Printer’s Devil

As the Chicago folk-rock duo Ratboys, Julia Steiner and Dave Sagan make slow-burn strummers that marry rustic instrumentation with incisive lyrics about the pitfalls of millennial life, a genre they’ve jokingly dubbed “post-country.” On their third album, Printer’s Devil, they make a decisive turn toward big-sounding rock, a shift inspired by touring with boisterous punk bands like Pup. While Ratboys remain as tuneful as ever, the extra muscle pushes them toward a ’90s pop-punk sound, specifically the salty-sweet bands that appeared on the soundtrack to 10 Things I Hate About You. It’s a grungy, gleefully riff-y blast of sugar.

Rose City Band — Summerlong

As a member of the Bay Area psych-rock band Wooden Shjips, Ripley Johnson dwells on the lingering menace of the long lost hippie dream, a dreamscape where biker gangs bully hippies while the Rolling Stones soundtrack the violent end of the ’60s. Johnson’s latest project, Rose City Band, is that band’s surprisingly sunny and hopeful counterpart, an easygoing outfit content to play ambling guitar jams that sparkle like a sunset over the Pacific Ocean. Rose City Band’s latest, Summerlong, has relatively modest aims compared with some of the music on this list — it seeks merely to soothe with an ample dose of warm-hearted choogle. But given how hard it is to come by a little soothing these days, I’m awfully appreciative of the effort.

Jeff Rosenstock — No Dream

Speaking of warm-hearted people, Jeff Rosenstock has one of the best souls in the punk scene. On his recent run of albums, including his 2016 breakthrough Worry., he’s been as committed to fairness and social justice as he is to ensuring that anyone within earshot of his shout-y, triumphant anthems is having a good time. (He’s also fighting the good fight to redeem ska, which is thankless work indeed.) While Rosenstock’s intentions have always been pure, what truly distinguishes No Dream is how canny Rosenstock has gotten at goosing his anxious, politically charged songs with zesty pop touches like squealing synths, power-pop guitar jangle, and infectiously danceable rhythms. Rosenstock confirms every suspicion you have about how the system is corrupt and must be destroyed, and then his music reminds you that being alive still deserves to be celebrated.

Andy Shauf — The Neon Skyline

Canadian singer-songwriter Andy Shauf works in a tradition of wistful, story-oriented pop-rock most associated with giants like Randy Newman, Harry Nilsson, Paul Simon, and Joni Mitchell. While Shauf has a long way to go before he can exist in that kind of company, you have to admire the literary ambitions of an album like The Neon Skyline. A song cycle that traces a night in the life of a man suffering from a personal crisis while sinking into the lonely barstool at his neighborhood dive, The Neon Skyline is like an old ’70s comedy-drama set to luminous folk-rock recorded with some of the most lovingly retro guitar, drum, and bass tones in recent memory.

The Strokes — The New Abnormal

The Strokes for so long have been haunted by comparisons to their instant classic 2001 debut Is This It that it’s easy to overlook how strange, dark, and enduring their other albums are. While aughts-era nostalgists will find plenty to appreciate on The New Abnormal — particularly the opening track “The Adults Are Talking,” which sounds like it was written by an Is This It algorithm — this album will be most appreciated by those enjoy The Strokes’ wiggy later period work as well as Julian Casablancas’ output with The Voidz. As they reach middle age, The Strokes aren’t afraid to be dark, depressive, or (here’s a new one) vulnerable.

Tame Impala — The Slow Rush

For the fourth Tame Impala album, The Slow Rush, Kevin Parker found a way to incorporate everything he learned about studio craft on the previous three masterful records. The Slow Rush carries forward the space-funk sound of Currents, while also indulging in the vintage instrumentation and spacey soundscapes of InnerSpeaker and Lonerism. The result is an album that would have — in a normal year — made Tame Impala the unquestioned rock champions of the outdoor summer festival circuit. The fact that Parker never had that chance in 2020 is the indie-rock equivalent of Michael Jordan briefly retiring in the middle of the Chicago Bulls’ championship run in the ’90s. Hopefully, Tame Impala will have the chance to claim their rightful prize in the near future.

Wares — Survival

Few records this year have made me miss the unique excitement of seeing and hearing a feral rock band positively explode inside a small club like Survival. Canadian singer-songwriter Cassia Hardy has apparently studied the curriculum of messianic rock closely, evoking everything from Smashing Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream to Titus Andronicus’ The Monitor in her dynamic, shamelessly aspirational music. Lyrically, Survival recalls another modern “big” rock album classic, Against Me!’s Transgender Dysphoria Blues, exploring Hardy’s own transition into a woman that mirrors Wares own evolution from an introspective solo-folkie act into expansive guitar epics.

Waxahatchee — Saint Cloud

Katie Crutchfield has spent much of her musical career — which has lasted for about half of her life, stretching back to her teens — running away from her southern heritage, preferring punk rock and the Velvet Underground to country and Americana music. But after making her loudest rock album yet with 2017’s Out In The Storm, Crutchfield opted to make a dramatic 180 toward the sort of lived-in, down-home music associated with one of her great heroes, Lucinda Williams. The resulting album, Saint Cloud, is her most stunning work yet, filled with gripping travelogues set to warm and invigorating country rock.

Yves Tumor — Heaven To A Tortured Mind

On their previous albums, Yves Tumor brazenly disregarded genre boundaries. They were commonly associated with experimental electronic music, but those records also had plenty of gooey, catchy pop appeal. Heaven To A Tortured Mind continues this fearless eclecticism by re-envisioning the sort of sexy, guitar-heavy funk rock that was once synonymous with Prince and Sly and the Family Stone. Though those comparisons might be too limiting for Yves Tumor — Heaven To A Tortured Mind isn’t a nostalgic trip through funk’s past, but rather a thoroughly modern evocation of pleasure and fear through the lens of murky riffage and chunky, druggy rhythms. Listening to it feels like being quarantined inside the filthiest club with a lifetime supply of molly, a proposition as enticing as it is terrifying.

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

Millie Bobby Brown continues to telekinetically fire up Netflix’s Stranger Things with each successive season, and this fall, she’ll appear on the streaming giant and Legendary Pictures’ new Sherlock Holmes-involved film (which is now the subject of a copyright infringement lawsuit from the Conan Doyle Estate). Brown will portray the iconic detective’s teen sister in Enola Holmes, and Netflix has now released a few photos to provide a glimpse at how this young “super-sleuth” will be represented onscreen. Perhaps you’ll be making the same expressions as Henry Cavill (who will pile his Sherlock atop the many other takes on this character) and Sam Claflin (picking up the Mycroft Holmes character) in the above still.

Enola’s clearly not sitting down and letting the action swirl around her. Of course, that’s what both Sherlock and Mycroft would prefer that she’d do, since the plot involves them attempting to send her off to a finishing school, where she’d become a “proper” lady. This attempted atrocity goes down in 1884 after Enola’s sixteenth birthday, when she awakens to find that her mother (Helena Bonham Carter) has evaporated without a trace. As noted, her brothers are keen to ship her off, but she rebels and strikes out with her own investigative ways to find her mom. From the synopsis:

Refusing to follow their wishes, Enola escapes to search for her mother in London. But when her journey finds her entangled in a mystery surrounding a young runaway Lord (Louis Partridge), Enola becomes a super-sleuth in her own right, outwitting her famous brother as she unravels a conspiracy that threatens to set back the course of history. Based on the beloved book series by Nancy Springer, ENOLA HOLMES is a dynamic new mystery-adventure that introduces the world’s greatest detective to his fiercest competition yet: his teenage sister. The game is afoot.

Enola Holmes will stream in September 2020.

View Entire Post ›

There was a time when a new Will Ferrell comedy was an event. But beginning in the mid-2010s, the quality of his films began to slip, reaching its nadir in 2018 with Holmes & Watson. That’s why we’re so pleased about the generally positive reviews for Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga, his new Netflix movie with Rachel McAdams about two Icelandic singers who represent their country at the international song competition. Is this the beginning of the Ferrell-aissance? Here’s hoping so, because from the late 1990s to the late 2000s, he was arguably the funniest comedy actor around. That made a best-of list difficult, but after many heated arguments about what should and shouldn’t count (we disqualified glorified cameos, so no Austin Powers, Dick, and Wedding Crashers), we identified the 10 greatest Will Ferrell movies. Feel free to yell at us for leaving off, like, Melinda and Melinda in the comments.

10. Stranger Than Fiction

The idea that people contain multitudes is still somewhat novel to some when it comes to performers breaking type, such as it was in 2006 when Will Ferrell took a semi-serious detour from the comedies that dominate this list. But while initial interest may have come from the surprise of seeing Ferrell straight-faced and un-silly, he pays off people’s curiosity with one of his best performances, playing an everyman trying to navigate the tragedy and comedy of life while plagued by a voice in his head that is narrating said life… possibly to death. And if all that isn’t enough to inspire a rewatch or a first viewing, allow me to heap praise on the clever script, the Spoon-fronted soundtrack, and tremendous performances by a supporting cast anchored by Emma Thompson. — Jason Tabrys

9. Zoolander

Most Will Ferrell movies are exactly that: Will Ferrell movies. He’s the lead, the reason you remember the movie at all (can you name any character in Old School other than “Frank the Tank”? I sure can’t). That makes Zoolander an interesting exception. Ferrell is fourth billed, behind Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, and Christine Taylor, but even though his name doesn’t appear above the title on the poster, you’d have to be taking crazy pills to not recognize Mugatu as one of Ferrell’s funniest characters. — Josh Kurp

8. The Lego Movie

Future generations will sit and marvel at this crown jewel in Will Ferrell’s cap. That’s because, after years of perfecting impersonations on sketch comedy series like SNL, Ferrell has become a master voice actor. Nowhere is that more apparent than in Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s animated comedy about a Lego hero launching a rebellion against a tyrannical corporate overlord. Of course, Ferrell doesn’t play the miniature-bricked savior. No, he’s Lord Business (a.k.a. President Business) a deliciously evil, kind of incompetent villain with plans to glue everything in the Lego world into his vision of perfection. Ferrell’s got the kind of range that leaves other “comedy actors” shook, and it shows here. — Jessica Toomer

7. Blades of Glory

Quite frankly, this comedy is better than anyone ever expected it to be, or that it needed to be, as a spoof on ice skating that largely adheres to the Will Ferrell recipe for laughs. Quite literally, the action and the script coast along the ice on their journey through the wafer-thin narrative, but my goodness, Ferrell and Jon Heder still throw in all possible effort to win over the judges in this silly spectacle. Ferrell’s at the top of his “gleefully clueless” game here, and Heder’s holding his own next to a great. Come for the Iron Lotus, stay despite a frozen sea of crotch and decapitation jokes. — Kimberly Ricci

6. Old School

It’s dumb, it’s inconsequential, and it’s a movie that one could argue that you’ve seen many times before, what with Animal House and Caddyshack and even Revenge of the Nerds looming large in the rearview mirror. Still, this is one hell of a party with Ferrell managing to somehow be the life of the party. That’s saying something, considering that he’s up teamed up with Vince Vaughn and Luke Wilson, and they’re all managing to one-up each other at various broadly comic points, but no one takes a tranquilizer to the jugular like Ferrell. This movie is for anyone who wants to try and be young again while gloriously (and vicariously) failing hard. — Kimberly Ricci

5. The Other Guys

The thing we must mention when we discuss The Other Guys is that the funniest scene in the entire movie does not feature Will Ferrell at all. That’s not his fault. He’s very funny in The Other Guys as the dorky accountant cop who pairs with Mark Wahlberg’s ultra-alpha loose cannon cop. And the movie weaves a message in there too, about our financial system and corporate greed and how justice might be better served using spreadsheets and calculators instead of guns. It’s a fun and funny movie that makes a point and features Michael Keaton as a beleaguered chief who moonlights as an employee of a hardware store. Ferrell gets a lot of credit for just making that happen, along with writer/director Adam McKay. Good for them.

But the funniest scene in the movie is and always will be The Rock and Samuel L. Jackson’s “aim for the bushes” death. Still gets a legit lol from me, today, just now even, after dozens of viewings. Congrats and/or R.I.P. to everyone involved. — Brian Grubb

4. Elf

It’s hard to crack the Christmas pop culture rotation.

Think about the songs. What’s the most recent classic Christmas song? Is it… is it Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You”? I think it is. And that song came out in 1994, over 25 years ago. It’s not quite as bad with movies, but it’s still an exclusive club. Home Alone is 30 years old. The original Grinch cartoon is from the 1960s. Die Hard and Lethal Weapon — “Christmas movies” — are from the 1980s. It’s the same deal, basically: Busting through to achieve classic status at this point requires something special.

That might be the best endorsement for Elf you can give. The movie, starring Will Ferrell as an overgrown elf whose real father is played by James Caan, is a holiday staple now, running about three dozen times every December on basic cable. As it should. It’s more kid-friendly than most of Ferrell’s movies but it still has the same energy. He gets to go up to the line and across it with goofball antics. He gets to sing, terribly, with Zooey Deschanel. He gets to do it all, every year, all over again, quite possibly for eternity. Just based on lasting power alone, Elf is a damn triumph.

The only people who have a legitimate gripe about Elf’s placement on this list are the real-life mall Santas who have been dealing with insufferable grown men shouting “You sit on a throne of lies” at the Santa’s Village setup near the fountain. I’m sorry, guys. I won’t do it this year. Probably. — Brian Grubb

3. Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby

Ron Burgundy is Will Ferrell’s most enduring character, but Ricky Bobby may be his best. Setup as a send-up of hollow machismo, Ferrell’s dim but ultra quotable race car driver goes on a transformative odyssey, losing both his hold of and belief in his surface treasures after being bested by a seemingly unbeatable rival. The journey matters more than the destination here as Bobby learns to slow down and see the true value of friendship, family, and love. He’s still a prideful straight-up moron at the end, but he’s a moron with a little more perspective. — Jason Tabrys

2. Step Brothers

If you can make it past Comedy Central when Step Brothers is airing at 3 p.m. on a lazy Sunday without stopping to watch the sleepwalking scene, or the car-singing scene, or the job interview scene, or any scene with Richard Jenkins, you have a stronger will than I. Or you have terrible taste. One of the two. Step Brothers is an endlessly quotable comedy masterpiece, with masterful chemistry between step-siblings Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly and married couple Mary Steenburgen and Richard Jenkins and an all-time smarmy performance from Adam Scott. “Dane Cook, pay–per–view, 20 minutes, let’s go!” is one of about 75 lines that still make me laugh every time I hear them.

But you know who wasn’t laughing? Critic Roger Ebert, who wrote that Step Brothers “lowers the civility of our civilization,” and that after seeing the comedy, he questioned whether he was “living in a nightmare.” He gave the existential breakdown 1.5 stars. But if Ebert was still with us, he, and everyone else who didn’t “get” Step Brothers the first time they saw it (it gets GREAT after viewing #13), might re-watch it and think, “When I look at you now, I don’t want to kick you in the head quite as much.” — Josh Kurp

1. Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy

Listen, Will Ferrell wears many different hats. Just on this list alone he’s excelled at voice acting, dramatic character work, and, perhaps the most difficult of all thespian pursuits, elf impersonations. But he’s undoubtedly at his best when he commits fully to selling eccentric, over-the-top caricatures of overconfident assfaces who, eventually, undergo moving character transformations. That’s what happens in this tongue-in-cheek comedy about a ’70s era news reporter named Ron Burgundy, whose carefully crafted world of dick jokes being acceptable in the workplace comes tumbling down when he’s forced to work with a female co-anchor (played by the exceptional Christina Applegate). The whole cast, which includes Steve Carell and Paul Rudd, is fantastic but with his perfectly coifed mustache, his classy signature sign-off, and his fragile ego, Ferrell makes even the most ridiculous of gags — think Kodiak Bear enclosure rescues and dog puntings — seem believable and, therefore, the funniest damn thing we’ve ever seen onscreen. — Jessica Toomer