The New England Patriots got a serious COVID-19 scare late last week when starting quarterback Cam Newton received a positive test. Despite this, the rest of the team tested negative and flew to Kansas City to take on the Chiefs in a game that got pushed back from Sunday to Monday.
Now, a new positive test that came out of the Patriots’ locker room makes it fair to question the decision to play that game. According to multiple reports, All-Pro cornerback Stephon Gilmore received a positive test for COVID-19 on Wednesday morning.
#Patriots star CB Stephon Gilmore has tested positive for the coronavirus and the team isn’t expected to practice today, per sources.
According to Mike Florio of ProFootballTalk, Gilmore was one of the members of the Patriots’ roster who flew on a plane to Kansas City that was designated for individuals who had come into close contact with Newton but traveled to the game, anyway.
Per source, Stephon Gilmore was one of the players in close contact with Cam Newton, and Gilmore was on the second plane with roughly 20 people.
And as Florio pointed out, Gilmore had close contact with Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes after the game, as the two met up and embrace at midfield following Kansas City’s 26-10 victory.
According to ESPN, the Patriots reacted to news of Gilmore’s positive test by canceling practice on Wednesday, and there is no word on the status of Sunday’s scheduled game against the Denver Broncos. There is also no word on how the Chiefs plan on proceeding, but according to ESPN, all of the tests the team administered on Wednesday morning came back negative.
After pioneering his own fusion genre, TrapHouseJazz, rapper-singer-saxophonist Masego adds another genre to his repertoire with his new single, “Silver Tongued Devil” featuring Jamaican dancehall sensation Shenseea. The song is the second single from Masego’s upcoming concept EP, his first new project since his 2018 debut album, Lady Lady.
On “Silver Tongued Devil,” Masego plays coy about which is the titular tempter between himself and a potential paramour, as the ambiguous lyrics could suggest that either is telling lies to the other. “She call me cocky man,” he croons on the hook, “I say my head level.” The instrumental, like much of Masego’s catalog, blends his mellow sax with a hip-winding groove, perfect for Shenseea to jump in on to share her perspective on the situation.
Masego may have laid low with regard to solo releases since 2018, but he’s put in plenty of work as a featured artist over the past two years, appearing on tracks with The Game, Kaytranada, Smino, Yuna, Kehlani, and Ro James since. He also contributed production to Ari Lennox’s debut album, as well as popping up recently on the Spillage Village Spilligion album on “Judas” featuring Ari and Chance The Rapper.
Listen to Masego’s “Silver Tongued Devil” featuring Shenseea above.
As one of the biggest music festivals in the world, Coachella serves as a sort of barometer for the festival industry at large. At the start of the coronavirus pandemic, they were one of the first major festivals to change their 2020 plans, after which other events followed suit. Well, the latest Coachella rumor could be a predictor of bad news for music fans in the first half of 2021: It looks like Coachella will be delayed once again.
Rolling Stone reports — citing “multiple music-industry insiders” and “sources who have been in direct communication with” AEG and Goldenvoice, the companies behind Coachella — will be pushed back to October 2021. This comes after the 2020 fest was pushed back to fall 2020 and then again to April 2021.
The publication’s sources say they have been asked to prepare to move the festival to next fall in 2021. One source, a “person who works at a major talent agency that represents popular festival performers,” insists the festival is “100% moving” again, saying, “Frankly, they were supposed to announce [the change] over Labor Day. They hadn’t. And they were supposed to announce at the end of September — they hadn’t.”
They went on to note they Goldenvoice CEO and Coachella founder Paul Tollett’s office told them the new dates will either be in the first or second week of October 2021, “but they are holding the first three weeks to be safe” since not all artists have confirmed their availability for the potential dates.
Meanwhile, another source said they would “not be surprised” if Coachella ended up getting pushed back all the way to 2022 thanks to possible scheduling conflicts with artists and the lack of a coronavirus vaccine.
With an election right around the corner, more and more artists are making efforts to encourage fans to register to vote and vote early. Jaden is the latest artist to use his platform to encourage political participation during a performance of his CTV3 song on Jimmy Kimmel Live! last night.
Standing in front of a screen projecting black-and-white scenes of protests and surrounded by signs with motivating messages, Jaden wears a tracksuit reading “Vote” down the back and sides as he sings the optimistic lyrics. Names of police shooting victims flash across the screen behind him and at the conclusion of his performance, the word “Vote” dominates the screen, reminding viewers to use their voices.
Jaden’s latest project, Cool Tape, Vol. 3 was released in August, bringing an eclectic range of nostalgic styles from the breezy Justin Bieber reunion “Falling For You” to the old-school rap influenced “Rainbow Bap.” In the lead-up to the project’s release, he shared the surf rock-esque “Cabin Fever,” delivering a smooth sunset performance on The Tonight Show.
Although he changed his stage name earlier this year to drop the “Smith,” he remains as focused on activism as ever. His new docuseies The Solution Committee premiered on Snapchat last month with episodes discussing criminal justice reform, gender justice, climate change, and education reform.
Watch Jaden’s performance of “Boys And Girls” on Jimmy Kimmel Live! above.
In the last 20 years, the internet has become almost as essential as water or air. Every day, many of us wake up and check it for the news, sports, work, and social media. We log on from our phones, our computers, even our watches. It’s a luxury so often taken for granted. With the COVID-19 pandemic, as many now work from home and children are going to school online, home access is a more critical service than ever before.
On the flip side, some 3.6 billion people live without affordable access to the internet. This digital divide — which has only widened over the past 20 years — has worsened wealth inequality within countries, divided developed and developing economies and intensified the global gender gap. It has allowed new billionaires to rise, and contributed to keeping billions of others in poverty.
In the US, lack of internet access at home prevents nearly one in five teens from finishing their homework. One third of households with school-age children and income below $30,000 don’t have internet in their homes, with Black and Hispanic households particularly affected.
The United Nations is working to highlight the costs of the digital divide and to rapidly close it. In September 2019, for example, the UN’s International Telecommunication Union and UNICEF launched Giga, an initiative aimed at connecting every school and every child to the internet by 2030.
Closing digital inequity gaps also remains a top priority for the UN Secretary-General. His office recently released a new Roadmap for Digital Cooperation. The UN Foundation has been supporting both this work, and the High Level Panel on Digital Cooperation co-chaired by Melinda Gates and Jack Ma, which made a series of recommendations to ensure all people are connected, respected, and protected in the digital age. Civil society, technologists and communications companies, such as Verizon, played a critical role in informing those consultations. In addition, the UN Foundation houses the Digital Impact Alliance (DIAL), which advances digital inclusion through streamlining technology, unlocking markets and accelerating digitally enabled services as it works to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.
Pexels / Andrea Piacquadio
The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic only further exposed the global digital divide as schools and universities all over the world shut their doors and sent their 1.5 billion students (roughly 9 out of 10 students worldwide) home. The sudden nature of the pandemic provided educators little time to plan for sustained distance learning.
According to UNESCO, about half of all students — roughly 826 million children — kept out of classrooms lack access to a household computer and 43% do not have the internet at home. This means that low-income or disadvantaged students are falling even further behind their wealthier peers. While the gaps are particularly acute in low-income regions, such as in sub-Saharan Africa, no country is spared from this issue — including the United States.
“COVID-19 has exposed that many of the systems designed to support the most vulnerable, are broken, exacerbating the divides that already existed in education, economic development and workforce mobility, among other areas,” said Rose Stuckey Kirk, Chief Corporate Social Responsibility Officer at Verizon. “Large global enterprises have a responsibility to help solve these issues and build opportunities for individuals to thrive in a digital economy.”
To address emerging education inequalities in remote learning, communications companies are stepping up. For example Verizon has scaled up its long-standing Verizon Innovative Learning program, and unlocking online tools and unveiling new resources from expanded data plans, hotspots and devices for Title 1 middle schools and high schools to teacher trainings and parent resources for STEM. This work to address digital inclusion is part of Citizen Verizon, the company’s responsible business plan for economic, environmental and social advancement that will empower the technology leader to deliver on its mission to move the world forward.
“The digital divide in our country is very real, and we need to make sure every student has the device and internet access they need to be connected with their school community,” said Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Austin Beutner.
Programs such as Education Cannot Wait, which Verizon recently supported with a $1 million contribution, are making learning more accessible and connected for children globally, especially those in crisis by catalyzing funding and investment in quality education during humanitarian and other crises.
“During this critical moment, technology, innovation and connectivity are more important than ever and we are doubling down on our commitment to transform education by providing technology resources and the networks that will give underprivileged students the vital tools they need and the education they deserve wherever they are,” Kirk said.
Achieving “a future with one world, one net, one vision,” as UN Secretary-General António Guterres said, and closing the digital divide will require companies, educators and international bodies like the UN working closely together.
That is how we can level the playing field for students across the globe.
The Postal Service (Ben Gibbard, Jimmy Tamborello, and Jenny Lewis) set the indie music world abuzz yesterday when they teased something new. Fans speculated there would be new music, or that the group was reuniting to help benefit some sort of cause. It turns out the reason for all this is the latter: The group has shared a new comedy video to benefit Headcount’s Make Your Vote Count campaign.
In 2013, to celebrate the 10th anniversary re-release of Give Up, the band teamed with Funny Or Die to make a fake auditions video, in which they gave some famous folks a chance to be in the band. Their new video is a sequel to that, although this time, it all takes place over Zoom.
The band is presented with the idea of going on a reunion tour to help get out the vote, which they aren’t huge on in light of the current state of the world and due to Sub Pop’s insistence they add new band members. Still, they let a bunch of famous music people audition over Zoom anyway: Kenny G, “Weird Al” Yankovic, Slash, Duff McKagan, Rick Springfield, Huey Lewis, Bret McKenzie of Flight Of The Conchords, Susanna Hoffs of The Bangles, Caroline Polachek, Michelle Zauner (aka Japanese Breakfast), Tunde Adebimpe of TV On The Radio, Joe Wong, Ishmael Butler of Shabazz Palaces, Big Freedia, J Mascis, some of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, Ronnell Johnson, and Kim Thayil. Others who got in on the fun include Jon Daly, Anne Hathaway, Tim Robinson, IRLrosie, Vanessa Bayer, Patton Oswalt, Aparna Nancherla, Jon Wurster, and Walter Harris.
Even if this doesn’t mean new music is on the way, it’s still nice to see the group members all doing something together again.
Watch the new video above, and revisit the original one below.
Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
Earlier this week, Netflix made the disappointing decision to cancel GLOW, one of the streaming service’s best shows. There are multiple reasons why the wrestling drama may have been axed, including that it was an expensive series that faced high additional, COVID-related costs for its large cast and that Netflix might be prioritizing new subscribers over existing users, but whatever the reason, GLOW is gone.
Unless Netflix listens to Marc Maron’s pitch for a wrap-up movie.
“Let us wrap it up in a two-hour Netflix movie. Give the showrunners and the cast and the writers the chance to finish the story in a movie, right? Then it’s all fine. That would take the financial pressure off and the writers could play it out, we could shoot it out,” the WTF podcast host said in an Instagram video. “The thing about shooting a movie is that when you have the whole shooting script you can be economical about your shooting. I think they could do it in less time than it would take to shoot the show.”
I like this idea. But you know what would be even better? A Kimmy vs. the Reverend-style interactive special. Every option ends with GLOW-bot offering drugs. Betty Gilpin, who deserved an Emmy (or three) for her performance as Debbie “Liberty Belle” Eagan, also eulogizedGLOW, calling it “the best job I’ll ever have… In a world with so much wickedness, I am so very grateful I got to spend three years in Oz. And in a real backhanded All About Eve move, in this metaphor I’m going to cast myself as Dorothy and Alison Brie as the Scarecrow. Because, of course, I’m going to miss you most of all.”
Chadwick Boseman’s death at age 43 stunned the world, including Spike Lee. The Da 5 Bloods director previously revealed that he never suspected that anything was amiss with Boseman’s health. And that’s how the actor who embodied King T’Challa wanted it, since he shielded virtually everyone from news of his Stage 3 diagnosis in 2016 (while superhero-ing in Captain America: Civil War all the way to Avengers: Endgame). While speaking with Variety, Spike Lee has revisited Boseman’s passing in light of his resolute devotion on his set.
The Da 5 Bloods helmer discussed how shocked he was to hear the news, and Lee has rewatched the film since the tragic happening. He now feels that Chadwick was “a ghost already” during a very recognizable scene in the movie, and “that was God sending heavenly light on Chadwick.” Lee does, however, understand why Boseman did not alert anyone of his condition, and he respects the decision. Quite simply, Boseman didn’t want his director to dilute anything that happened in the film:
“I didn’t know Chad was sick. He did not look well, but my mind never took that he had cancer. It was a very strenuous shoot. I mean, we all didn’t get to Vietnam until the end of the movie at Ho Chi Minh City. But that other stuff, the jungle stuff, was shot in Thailand. It was 100 degrees every day. It was also at that time the worst air pollution in the world. I understand why Chadwick didn’t tell me because he didn’t want me to take it easy. If I had known, I wouldn’t have made him do the stuff. And I respect him for that.”
The profile’s chock full of insight, including Lee’s musings on what could happen if Trump loses the election. In summary, Lee stops short of predicting any election outcome, but he does believe that “a civil war” could follow if Trump doesn’t win a second term. Considering what we’ve seen from POTUS this week, that doesn’t feel like a far-fetched scenario. Read the full Variety interview here.
Cardi B and Offset’s relationship has had its share of ups and downs, and since they’re both prominent rappers, much of the drama has played out in the public eye. The latest development is that Cardi filed for divorce from Offset. It’s been less than a month since that news was revealed, and Cardi is ready to see herself as a single woman again.
Yesterday, she shared a photo of herself in a red, horned costume and wrote, “Single,bad and rich.I do the controlling.” Offset saw the picture and offered a subtle reaction: As HotNewHipHop reports, Offset is among the users who liked the post. The publication also notes that Offset did not like Cardi’s similar follow-up post, which makes no mention of her relationship status.
In an Instagram Live broadcast last month, Cardi revealed her reasoning for filing for divorce, saying, “I just got tired of f*cking arguing. I got tired of not seeing things eye to eye. When you feel like it’s just not the same anymore, before you actually get cheated on, I’d rather just leave. […] Nothing crazy out of this world happened, sometimes people really do grow apart. I been with this man for four years. I have a kid with this man, I have a household with this man… sometimes you’re just tired of the arguments and the build-up. You get tired sometimes and before something happens, you leave.”
Cardi B is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
The RX is Uproxx Music’s stamp of approval for the best albums, songs, and music stories throughout the year. Inclusion in this category is the highest distinction we can bestow, and signals the most important music being released throughout the year. The RX is the music you need, right now.
“Every day is Groundhog’s Day now,” John Ross sings on a track from A Billion Little Lights, the excellent new album by one of indie’s best and most underrated bands, Wild Pink, due out in February. When Ross wrote that lyric, he wasn’t anticipating a pandemic — he was referring to the cyclical nature of touring life, and perhaps also hinting at a darker reality about how America’s past tends to linger in the background of our present.
On previous Wild Pink albums, Ross wrote sensitive story songs about millennial ennui set to surging synth-based rock, producing a rich, stirring sound that evoked a cross between Death Cab For Cutie and Lost In The Dream. Ross’ own tastes, though, tend to skew toward the daddiest regions of classic rock, particularly singer-songwriters like Tom Petty, Jackson Browne, and Paul Simon. For A Billion Little Lights, he made a Spotify playlist that acted as a sonic mood board for the record that touched on Celtic-tinged Irish rockers (Van Morrison, The Pogues, The Waterboys), singer-songwriter country (Townes Van Zandt), and unfashionable ’80s and ’90s entries by legacy acts (Rod Stewart, Bob Seger).
What Ross was chasing was a big, lush sound that integrated Americana instrumentation like pedal-steel guitar and fiddle into his usual synth-rock mix. For a while, the music fed into a concept that Ross initially conceived about a massive double-album exploring the history of the American West. Eventually, he pared back this idea into a relatively conventional (and concept-free) LP, though you can still hear traces of his original ambitions in cinematic, futurist-rustic tunes like “Track Mud” and “Oversharers Anonymous.” In the latter song, Ross time-travels 200 years in the space of a single verse, leaping from a road trip on a modern highway to the buffalo-strewn plains of the Wild West.
If there’s a statement there about the consequences of Manifest Destiny — and how the tragedies that paved the way for modern conveniences can’t be so easily set aside, even centuries later — Ross is reluctant to elaborate. In our previousconversations, I’ve found Ross to be a thoughtful if also reticent interview subject. While A Billion Little Lights is his most ambitious and overall best work, infused with deep lyrical craft and impeccable melodies that set Wild Pink apart from the indie-dude pack, Ross isn’t one to necessarily tip his hand when it comes to discussing his thematic obsessions. But he does admit that’s he’s rightfully proud of the album.
“I wanted to have something very lush and just bigger than anything that I’d done before,” he said. “And I got to play with amazing players, that was my favorite part.”
Ross discussed A Billion Little Lights in a phone interview and a subsequent email exchange.
When we spoke back in 2018, you mentioned that you were working on a concept album about the American West. This album is obviously not that. What happened to that idea?
The initial idea back in 2018 was to make a double LP about the West, and the idea definitely evolved beyond that. The album took two years to make — way longer than I’ve ever spent on an album and in that time, it had a lot of room to grow. At its core though, it’s an album I will always associate with the West: I recorded a lot of it in LA and more than a few songs are about the West and inspired by some books and TV I was consuming about the subject. I wanted to make a lush, expansive album which the West certainly is. Before too long though I felt like I was starting to get boxed in by that idea and so I took off those parameters for myself. I just wanted to make something maximal and huge in scope – this album totally builds off the self-titled and Yolk In The Fur in that regard. Basically, I wanted to explore.
What exactly is it about the West that intrigues you?
We went to the West Coast for the first time in 2018. We did this West Coast and European tour and I was writing a lot at that time, which is where I think that that idea for this Western-inspired album started. [As a child], I had an aunt in LA and I would go visit in the summers and I just thought it was amazing. And we’d just go to really cool record stores and restaurants. I never lived there, so I never had a chance to fall out of love with it.
In the song “Pacific City,” you reference Michael Mann’s Heat in the opening lyric. That’s an iconic LA movie.
Oh, it’s a total LA movie. That and Chinatown are my favorite LA movies. It’s Pacino at a really weird, late stage in his career. Maybe not even late, but just a weird time, he’s over the top.
One of my favorite songs on the album is “Oversharers Anonymous,” in which you appear to jump from the present to the distant past in the space of a single verse. You sing about hunting buffalo at one point.
It’s like a daydream. I wrote a lot of that driving around here, upstate, thinking about this book called The Earth Is Weeping. It’s just an awesome, epic, history book about the West. I also loved Ken Burns’ The West, I was watching that as well. There wasn’t any intention to jump around in time and space but it definitely feels like a daydream now that you mention it. Things that are early on in the song are definitely in the present, driving on the Taconic Parkway. And then we jump to another time period.
I don’t know exactly what this album is about — it has grown outside the boundaries I set for it. I enjoy a little mystery though and I think it serves this album. Making music is escapism and I get lost in the albums I make while I’m in the process of making them, this one especially. It’s a fantasy world where I can be somewhere else when I’m listening. There are old western elements as well as heavily electronic ones. And as you noticed, at one point the lyrics are in the front seat of a car driving down a highway in upstate New York and the next they’re transported back 200 years to the plains and prairies of the West. It’s pretty non-linear and nebulous, which I find appealing. The songs I’m most satisfied with happen to be when I don’t fully understand them.
Musically, you use a lot of pedal steel and fiddle on the record, which also evokes the West. You’re almost flirting with country music at times.
I didn’t want to make a country record or anything like that but I love certain elements of country, like pedal steel, for sure. And fiddle. But I wouldn’t call this a country record or anything. Even from the beginning, that wasn’t the idea.
Pedal steel is definitely one of my favorite instruments and I met an incredible pedal steel player, Mike Renner. He was in Magnolia Electric Company, he plays around with a lot of bands now, and I actually recorded part of the record with him in Philly. And he just became an enormous part of the sound for this record.
As far as fiddle goes, there’s Townes Van Zandt and the song “If I Needed You.” That one song has been, more than anything else musically, probably the biggest inspiration for this record. The fiddle on that song, at the end, I think really stuck out with me. I’ll listen to one song on repeat for days and weeks at a time, nonstop. It just totally got under my skin.
In the song “Bigger Than Christmas,” you talk about The Pogues, which comes out of left field. How did you get into them?
I don’t know why they came up. I think maybe I was watching a video of Joe Strummer sitting in with the band and then just kind of went down a rabbit hole. Right now, I’m deeper into “Rhythm Of My Heart” by Rod Stewart.
Really?
It’s such a beautiful song. I want to find a way, whenever we tour again, to do some kind of rendition of it during our set. It’s just so beautiful. I think the chorus is just amazing. And there’s this kind of Celtic Irish thing running through that song, through the Townes song, obviously through The Pogues. There’s something to that for this record too, traditional Irish melodies, whether I’m aware of it or not. Using, or just hinting at, something like that.
A Billion Little Lights is out February 19, 2021 via Royal Mountain Records. Get it here.
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