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Yesterday, Burger Records addressed numerous sexual misconduct allegations and laid out big plans to move forward following the controversy. The label said it was going to reorganize its leadership structure and re-brand as BRGR RECS, in an effort “to create a clear delineation between the old and the new Burger Records.” However, there will not be a new Burger Records, as co-founder Sean Bohrman said the label is no more.

Bohrman told Pitchfork, “We decided to fold the label.” When asked if the label would continue as BRGR RECS, Bohrman replied simply, “Nope.” Then, when asked for further comment, he linked to a video for Porky Pig saying, “That’s all, folks!”

Ahead of that conversation, Bohrman told the publication the label’s releases would be removed from streaming platforms, saying, “I just asked our distro to take everything down, it’s probably not an instant process.” He confirmed, though, that artists would be able to re-upload the albums if they wanted since Burger artists own their music, saying, “I hate dealing with lawyers so we never signed contracts with bands.”

This follows a statement from Jessa Zapor-Gray, who was named the label’s new interim president. However, she has decided to step away from the label because she doesn’t believe she “will be able to achieve my intended goals in assuming the leadership role at Burger in the current climate.”

Read Zapor-Gray’s full statement below.

“In the last year and a half, I have worked with Burger and Burger artists on communications and partnerships on a contract basis.

Over the weekend I was asked to assume the role of the label’s interim president with the hope I could reform the label into something better for the good of all of you, the artists. My plan was to quickly begin assessing and evaluating if anything about the label could perhaps be salvaged and made into something better, then eventually hand off a functioning label to a future administration unrelated to the label’s founders; or if I found that rebuilding was not possible, instead to organize and prepare the label for closure.

When I was asked to take over in this capacity, I expected some blowback for my decision to accept but I believed that the opportunity to have a role in effecting real and lasting positive change within the Burger and indie music scenes was worth the risk.

Upon further review, I have informed Burger Records that I no longer believe I will be able to achieve my intended goals in assuming the leadership role at Burger in the current climate. Therefore, I have decided to step away from the label entirely to focus on my other projects.

Jessa.”

Dave Chappelle and Kanye West have been in each other’s orbit since at least 2004, when the young Chicago rapper, fresh off releasing his game-changing album The College Dropout, appeared on Chappelle’s Show to perform “The Food” with Common.

The pair reunited this week in Wyoming, where West, who recently went on a worrying Twitter rant, is holed up and surrounded by security in a ‘bunker’ on his ranch… while tweeting about visits from people such as comedian Dave Chappelle,” according to Page Six. He wrote, “THANK YOU DAVE FOR HOPPING ON A JET TO COME SEE ME DOING WELL DAVE YOU ARE A GOD SEND AND A TRUE FRIEND ALL LOVE,” while chiding Chappelle to tell a joke (“I’m still on my first cup of coffee”) in an awkward video.

To quote The Daily Show host Trevor Noah, West “doesn’t seem well,” which is why an old video of Chappelle talking about the use of the word “crazy” has gone viral. The clip is taken from a 2006 episode of Inside the Actors Studio, hosted by the late James Lipton, who asks Chappelle about his friend and co-star Martin Lawrence. He replied:

“Martin Lawrence is the guy who showed everybody you can make it from D.C. to Hollywood. And I had a personal stake in his success. Every time he did something it made me feel inspired and really good. And he was always real nice to me. He’d sit me down, ‘What’s going on with you, baby boy.’ We’d talk about comedy, whatever. When we did Blue Streak, we were promoting it, and Martin had a stroke. He almost died. And then after that I saw him I was like, ‘Oh my god, Martin, are you okay?’ And he said, ‘I got the best sleep I ever got in my life.’ That’s how tough he is.

“Let me ask you this. What is happening in Hollywood that a guy that tough would be on the street waving a gun, screaming, ‘They are trying to kill me?’ What’s going on? Why is Dave Chappelle going to Africa? Why does Mariah Carey make a $100 million deal and take her clothes off on TRL? A weak person cannot get to sit here and talk to you. Ain’t no weak people talking to you. So what is happening in Hollywood? Nobody knows. The worst thing to call somebody is ‘crazy.’ It’s dismissive. ‘I don’t understand this person, so they’re crazy.’ It’s bullsh*t… People are not crazy. They’re strong people. Maybe the environment is a little sick.”

The AV Club described Chappelle’s answer as putting “Kanye’s recent troubles in perspective” back in 2016, and people are sharing it all over again in 2020.

(Via the AV Club)

A favorite trivia questions is, what are the only three films Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and David Zucker (also known collectively as “ZAZ”) directed as a team? People (who are film nerds) get Airplane! pretty quickly, and seem aware the trio did not return for Airplane 2. After a couple moments, most people get Top Secret!. (A movie I love and wrote an oral history of with Zucker, Abrahams, Zucker and Val Kilmer a few years ago.) It’s that third movie people have difficultly naming. Was it The Naked Gun? No. Though the trio wrote it, only David Zucker directed it. Hot Shots? No, that was Abrahams on his own.

The answer is Ruthless People, a — at least comparatively — more straightforward comedy that Jerry Zucker says is the reason the trio split up. The thing is, Ruthless People – a movie about a botched kidnapping starring Danny Devito, Better Midler, and Judge Reinhold – was a pretty big hit and got excellent reviews. But after, Jerry Zucker didn’t want to return to parody movies. At a fateful lunch with a producer at Paramount, he asked what good scripts were available. The answer he got was something called Ghost.

And as Zucker remembers, the writer of that script, Bruce Joel Rubin, wasn’t too keen on the idea of the director of Airplane! making his movie. Well, as you probably know, things worked out. (And the two are great friends today.) Ghost grossed half a billion dollars, became the biggest movie of 1990, was nominated for Best Picture, and won Whoopi Goldberg an Oscar, and Rubin won an Oscar for Original Screenplay.

But rewatching today, it’s almost like the phenomenon of Ghost is bigger than the movie itself. It gets remembered for the pottery scene with Patrick Swayze as Sam Wheat and Demi Moore as Molly Jenson set to “Unchained Melody,” yet the movie itself is an incredibly tight, funny, action-packed adventure loaded with characters with supernatural powers. It is remarkable how great Ghost still is today.

Ghost was one of my first quarantine rewatches.

I’ll tell you, [laughs] I’d better start getting some more residuals from that, because now with the whole Coronavirus, people are at home watching these old movies.

I read that Bruce Rubin, the screenwriter, wasn’t totally excited about you doing this movie because of your comedy background.

Well, it’s funny because, yeah, that’s true. When Bruce Rubin first heard that Jerry Zucker, co-director of Airplane! and Top Secret!, was going to direct his beautiful, spiritual love story, he cried. But to Bruce’s credit, he called me and said, “Let’s have dinner, and just not even talk about the movie. Let’s just go out, get some food, and get to know each other.” We did, and I think he said he saw someone he could work with. I guess at least he saw, if I wasn’t Spielberg, at least I wasn’t an asshole or something. Or a crazy person, maybe. We’ve been friends ever since. I talk to Bruce all the time and we’ve done other projects together. Bruce and his wife were at our house the night Ghost came out. They stayed overnight, so we could get the grosses all together. Late at night and early in the morning. It’s been a lifelong friendship, and of course we always joke about that, that first moment. I also will say I gave Bruce much more access and input than writers normally would get on a movie.

How so?

I knew I needed it. This was his movie, and he wrote this. This wasn’t a clever contrivance. He wrote this from the heart and from his passionate belief in the spiritual world. And the importance of understanding death. We discussed everything. And he was there all the time. As I said, we became great friends.

One of my favorite trivia questions is to name the only three Zucker, Abrahams, Zucker directed movies, because no one gets Ruthless People.

Right, yeah.

But I am curious why, after coming off Ruthless People, did you want to do Ghost at the time? Ruthless People is a very different movie than Top Secret! and Airplane!. Was this, for you, the progression from that?

Yeah, that’s a good question. You’re right, it was very different. As a matter of fact, it’s part of why we split. I think that it was easier to direct Airplane! and Top Secret! and Police Squad! together because it was satire, and it was something we had done together for years. We invented a certain way, our way of doing it all together. We were just problem solving, trying to figure out how to get it how we all envisioned it, but we all had the same vision. Whereas Ruthless People was different. It wasn’t that kind of movie and there were a lot of different ways it could have gone. It was a little bit of a stray, and then after that I just didn’t want to go back and do another satire. I don’t know why. It just felt like I had done that. I could do that now again. And I loved working on The Naked Gun [as producer and writer], but at the time in terms of what I wanted to direct, I was just looking for something a little different.

I was having lunch with Lindsay Doran at Paramount, she was the executive on The Naked Gun, and I was asking her what Paramount had. She said, “Well, my favorite, the best script I think we have here is a script called Ghost, but it’s not a comedy.” I said, “Well, I’d be interested. I’m not necessarily looking even for a comedy.” Of course, it had comedy in it, which was great, but I also felt I got it. I loved the fact that it was fully off the ground. I don’t think I would have wanted to do a slice of life movie. At least it goes to the fantastical element of it that I felt more at home with, and so I said, “Yeah, I’m interested.”

Do you feel you enjoyed making Ruthless People more than Jim and David?

I don’t know. Actually, you’d have to ask David and Jim. I don’t know. I enjoyed Ruthless People.

It was a big hit. And it got great reviews.

Yeah, it was successful, and I’m very proud of it. But it’s hard to tell what I’m looking for. I’m just looking for something always that I feel at home with, that I’m comfortable with. As far as David and Jim go, I don’t know. Jim, the next thing he did was Big Business with Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin. That wasn’t a satire. That was almost closer to Ruthless People, so I’m not sure that we felt differently about that movie.

I’ve noticed if you ask someone what Whoopi Goldberg won an Oscar for, a lot of people will answer The Color Purple as opposed to Ghost. Rewatching, she’s amazing in this movie.

Yeah. She’s brilliant.

Is there a sense of pride at all for you there? As in, I directed someone who won an Oscar for this movie.

Sure, of course there is, but my pride is more I’m proud of Whoopi, because I think she’s what makes this movie work. A lot of people, when they read the script, said, “How can you combine this? There’s all this crazy comedy, but people are dying, and the tearful moments. I don’t know how you can do this in the same movie.” The reason it works is because of Whoopi, because she has one character throughout. In other words, she doesn’t all of a sudden start doing this crazy comedy and then go back to being poignant. She’s the same person. Oda Mae is the same in different scenes. When I say the same, she’s true to her character. She’s true to who she is, and Whoopi owned that character, and never wavered from it. But that character, that human that she was playing, could be funny and could be sad. Whoopi is completely believable in both areas. She never steps out of character to get a punchline, to hit a punchline. I think that’s why it works, and it’s hard to imagine anybody else being that good.

Obviously, Demi Moore is amazing in this. Swayze is like a god in this movie. Watching it again though, Tony Goldwyn as Carl really sells this. He is so important to this movie, because you really do think of him as the fun buddy at first, and then he’s so evil at the end. And he pulls off the, “Oh, let me casually take off my shirt” scene.

I think Tony is fantastic. And he also really plays that thing of, yeah, he’s a bad guy, but he also is in over his head. He’s not a villain; he’s a guy who wanted money, and he envied people that had stuff, and he wanted it. But then he just got in over his head. Tony was able to play him both weak and dangerous. I think that that’s how he always saw the character.

Yes, very desperate.

Yeah, and the nicest guy in the world.

I think I’m out of time.

It’s okay. Mike, if you have something else you want to ask, it’s okay. I don’t have another interview. I don’t know why they’re making things so short! Go ahead. Take another five, ten minutes, whatever you need.

Alright, here’s another thing. I forgot how scary the demons are. And this was before CGI. Now you can make anything, yet those things are terrifying.

Yeah, John Van Vliet made those. Those little devils were done by John Van Vliet and Kathy Kean. This was before CGI, so he just invented these things. It may even have been shot in those motion capture, when they were being pulled away? Maybe not, but they were on dollies and being pulled. He was able to design these things. I remember there were a lot of iterations of it. “Well, how about this? How about that?” Yeah, I think it’s great. What I always loved about that was that we get to kill the villains twice.

Oh, yes, rewatching it, what really stood out about that was after Carl dies, Sam has pity for him before the demons come. Basically, you’re in for a tough ride now. Which makes us like Sam even more.

It’s interesting. There are so many movies and TV shows where they’re asking the audience to feel great about a bad guy being killed. I get it, and I feel the same way when I’m watching these things. I see some horrible guy and he gets killed. I’ve seen a lot of movies where there’s just some guys, maybe it’s a movie about a hurricane or something. And they first show two guys who are bullies, so you don’t feel bad when the hurricane takes them and smashes them, or whatever. But that’s terrible when you think about it! That we should feel so self-righteous and gleeful about these guys being murdered, being killed? That’s why I love that idea in Ghost, that he just shakes his head. Also, as I said, Carl is the weak villain in over his head, and Patrick, as it goes down, understands it all.

Yeah. You can see it in his face. “You got in over your head, buddy.”

Right, right, like what did you do? Why did you do this? You messed up. But it isn’t like this is a satisfied licking the blood off his hands, tasting his own blood, that kind of thing and feeling like a hero.

‘Ghost’ is available to stream via Showtime. You can contact Mike Ryan directly on Twitter.

Kanye West was active on Twitter last night, and the main takeaway from his series of posts was his talk about wanting to get divorced from Kim Kardashian. That wasn’t the only newsworthy tweet Kanye shared last night, though: In one post, he suggested he might not continue his 2020 presidential campaign.

Kanye shared a photo of a handwritten tracklist for his upcoming album and suggested that he might instead run for president in 2024, writing, “#2020VISION of maybe ’24. I guess all black people supposed to vote on Biden? Y’all want me to run or nah???”

Kanye’s campaign certainly hasn’t been a runaway success. After hosting a rally in South Carolina, Kanye did not manage to get on the state’s ballot. A poll also recently suggested that not a lot of voters would check the box next to Kanye’s name come November.

If Kanye decides to end his presidential bid, he will still have plenty to do to keep himself busy in the coming months and years. He recently signed a deal to enter a huge 10-year partnership with Gap, he and Kid Cudi have an animated show on the way, and he’s working on a new album that he says will be out this week

It has been an eventful past few weeks in the world of Kanye West, and the story continued last night: Kanye took to Twitter to fire off a series of tweets, many of which have since been deleted. In one of them, he claimed that he has been “trying to get divorced” from Kim Kardashian.

In a tweet, Kanye seemed to suggest that something went on between Kardashian and Meek Mill around the time of the Criminal Justice Reform Summit, which took place in November 2018 and at which both Kardashian and Mill spoke. Kanye tweeted, “They tried to fly in with 2 doctors to 51/50 me. I been trying to get divorced since Kim met with Meek at the Warldolf for ‘prison reform.’” He continued in another tweet, “Meek is my man and was respectful. That’s my dog. Kim was out of line.”

In the aforementioned initial tweet, he continued, “I got 200 more to go. This my lady tweet of the night … Kris Jong-Un. Lil baby my favorite rapper but won’t do a song wit me.” In subsequent tweets, he seemed to imply that Drake and Larsa Pippen are up to no good, as he tweeted both of their names with thinking emojis and added, “Should I name more?”

Meanwhile, amid all this, Kanye is set to release a new album this week.

Meek Mill is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

A pair of NBA players, Zion Williamson of the New Orleans Pelicans and Montrezl Harrell of the Los Angeles Clippers, have left the league’s bubble in Orlando due to urgent matters elsewhere. On Tuesday evening, we learned of a third player who needs to depart from the bubble, and unfortunately for the Clippers, it’s yet another member of their roster.

Malika Andrews of ESPN reported that Los Angeles starting point guard Patrick Beverley has to go tend to “an emergency personal matter.” As for whether he’ll be able to return, Andrews reports that is in the cards somewhere down the road.

Beverley and Harrell aren’t the only Clippers players who aren’t with the team, as both Ivica Zubac and Landry Shamet have yet to join the squad in the bubble.

The No. 1 priority, of course, is that Beverley and everyone in his family is safe and healthy, so here’s to hoping that whatever issue popped up is resolved. Losing him is a tough blow for the Clippers, which sit in the 2-seed in the Western Conference but are only 1.5 games up on the 3-seed Denver Nuggets. L.A. does have options for offensive initiators — Reggie Jackson has performed admirably since joining the team earlier this season, and while neither Kawhi Leonard nor Lou Williams are point guards, giving them the ball and having them figure something out has worked out well for the Clippers this year.

The Clippers will begin their eight games in the bubble on July 30, when they’ll take on the Los Angeles Lakers.

Animal attack movies seem to have truly peaked about a decade ago, but Megan Fox is apparently trying her best to subvert the war genre with a lion attack film of her own with Rogue. The trailer, which dropped on Tuesday, starts out looking like a classic war film with a specialized force, led by a tattered Yankees cap-wearing Fox, executing a rescue plan against a well-armed group of unknown origin.

The trailer lays the plot of the movie out as such: Fox’s team has recovered the daughter of a governor, played by Jessica Sutton (The Kissing Booth). Their extraction helicopter blows up, though, setting up a fight for survival that will take them far from the original plan. And then a… lion shows up to try eating everyone in sight?

The trailer quickly goes from war film to horror, with an upbeat musical cue and the revelation that the movie is from the director of Silent Hill: Revelation. And unlike Cloverfield, we get to see the Big Bad right away here.

Fox has shined in these kind of less serious roles before, with Jennifer’s Body atop the list of cult favorites in that realm. The trailer actually has an odd juxtaposition to it, with the beginning and end looking straight out of the war-torn cliche playbook and the middle serving as the big reveal to the film’s true antagonist: a female lion. The tag line “All Hail The Queen” surely will have some symbolism to work with: is it about Fox’s Samantha O’Hara or the lion trying to kill every human on screen?

The movie is going the on-demand route, with a release date set for August 28 according to the trailer. As for an explanation for this particularly human-hunting lion? Take it from one character in the film, who simply said “some lions go rogue.” Good enough for me.

If you aren’t familiar with textured hair, it’s hard to know how to style it properly. Similarly to how straight-haired people may not know that curly-haired people often don’t use shampoo, people who don’t have textured hair often have no clue what products to use to keep hair healthy or what hairstyles work best with different hair types.

That can be a problem when non-Black parents adopt Black kids. Hair is a significant cultural reality, and knowing how to manage one’s hair is important. If parents are clueless about helping their kids with personal grooming, children will grow up missing out on that aspect of their personal identity.

Enter Styles4Kids, a non-profit organization founded by Tamekia Swint in 2010. Swint had helped a transracial adoptive mom learn how to style her three daughters’ hair, and that mom began referred Swint to other adoptive parents. She founded Styles4Kids with just a handful of clients, and how helps thousands of parents and kids. The non-profit organization focuses on hair care education, training, and services for transracial adoptive parents as well as children in foster care, residential facilities and detention centers.

Great Big Story created a video about Swint and her organization that explains why helping kids with their natural hair is so important.

“Sometimes transracial adoptive families don’t understand how important hair is,” Swift says in the video. “It’s much bigger than. hair. It’s really about the care and the confidence that we’re giving to the child through the hairstyle.”

A white mom with six Black kids shared her own realization that her hair styling skills were not up to the challenge, and how Swint helped her gain the skills and confidence she needed to help her care for and style her kids’ hair.

“I would want to tell other transracial adoptive parents that it is your job to make your kid look decent when you’re out of the house, and if you can’t do that naturally on your own—and most of us can’t—then it’s your job to seek out help from somebody who can teach you.”

Styles4Kids even has a non-profit salong now, “where multiracial, foster and adoptive kids are empowered to embrace their natural, ethnic crown.” Swint calls her services “Hair Care With Heart,” fulfilling the organization’s vision of building “a diverse community of people creating and celebrating hairstyles that boost kids’ self-esteem and cultural pride.”

Learn more about Styles4Kids on the organization’s website here.

The Sacramento Kings will be jockeying for playoff position when the NBA begins seeding games in Orlando in late July. However, the Kings have been battling roster issues as competition nears and, on Monday, the team announced that former No. 2 overall pick Marvin Bagley III suffered a right injury during a practice. That issue required an MRI and further examination revealed an injury that will sideline the second-year big man for the entirety of Sacramento’s stay in the bubble.

In short, this is unfortunate for both player and team. The Kings don’t have overwhelming depth in the frontcourt and, considering the team’s position in the standings, Sacramento has virtually no margin for error as games begin.

For Bagley, the 2019-20 campaign is essentially a lost season, as the former Duke star appeared in only 13 games as a result of injury issues. Bagley did average 14.2 points and 7.5 rebounds per game when he was able to play, but he wasn’t terribly efficient and the Kings have interesting roster-building concerns as they continue to evaluate what he can bring to the table.

If nothing else, it would have been informative to see Bagley on the floor in a high-intensity environment, and the Kings will lose out on valuable evaluation time as a result. In the grand scheme, though, Bagley’s health is of greater concern than anything that could have taken place in Orlando for the 21-year-old, and the next time he will be on the floor in a competitive environment will be during the 2020-21 season.

Rocket League is the sports game of choice for a lot of people who like juggling a giant ball with a car while flying through the air, and now the audience for that game will get a lot larger. Psyonix announced Tuesday that Rocket League will become a free-to-play game “later this summer” and will leave the Steam store for the Epic Game store as well.

Rocket League has seen a considerable evolution since it was first released on PlayStation 4 and PC in 2015. The game is on every console now and has become a big hit online. The game’s makers said on Tuesday that anyone who bought and played the game online before it went free-to-play will get “legacy status” and a number of bonuses, including an “Est. 20XX’ moniker that displays when they first started playing the game. Common items collected in the paid game will also become “legacy” quality and players will get a special boost, set of wheels and a player banner at no extra charge.

Psyonix teased some changes to its Tournament and Challenge systems and more details about the change to free-to-play, which wasn’t given an official date just yet, either. But it’s big news for a vibrant online community that’s likely to get a lot bigger now that it’s an extremely cheap game to get started with.