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In 2015, My Morning Jacket shared their album The Waterfall, which earned the group a Grammy nomination for Best Alternative Music Album. The band originally toyed with the idea of putting out the record in three parts, but eventually scrapped that plan in favor of a more palatable two-part record. Now, after five years, My Morning Jacket is finally ready to release the latter half of the record, The Waterfall II.

My Morning Jacket hasn’t given fans much warning before their album will see a release. The group detailed The Waterfall II on Tuesday and the record is slated to be released Friday. The 10-track project was inspired by the group’s idyllic surroundings in the secluded Stinson Beach in California, which vocalist Jim James likened to “living on our own little moon.”

In a statement, James continued: “As so many of us feel out of tune and long for the world to be a better place, we have to look to nature and the animals and learn from them: learn to love, accept, move on and respect each other. We gotta work for it and change our ways before it’s too late, and get in harmony with love and equality for all of humanity and for nature too.”

The band plans on hosting a live album listening party for fans just ahead of the record’s release on Thursday at 9 p.m. ET on My Morning Jacket’s YouTube and Facebook pages. While The Waterfall II debuts on digital platforms Friday, the record won’t see a physical release until August 28.

Check out My Morning Jacket’s The Waterfall II cover art and tracklist below.

1. “Spinning My Wheels”
2. “Still Thinkin”
3. “Climbing the Ladder”
4. “Feel You”
5. “Beautiful Love (Wasn’t Enough)”
6. “Magic Bullet”
7. “Run It”
8. “Wasted”
9. “Welcome Home”
10. “The First Time”

The Waterfall II is out 7/10 via ATO. Pre-order it here.

As teams prepare to make the journey to Orlando to begin isolation and, hopefully, get on the court next week to begin ramping up practices and workouts prior to the restarted season, there was a flurry of news regarding players that won’t be heading to Disney on Tuesday morning.

The first big domino to fall was that of Bradley Beal, as the All-Star guard was ruled out by the Wizards and will not travel with the team due to a lingering shoulder injury and concerns about worsening that during the restart. With Beal out, Washington’s hopes of reaching the postseason take a major hit, as they’re now without Beal, John Wall, and Davis Bertans. Elsewhere in the East playoff hunt, the Brooklyn Nets will likewise make the trip to Orlando without being at full strength.

Wilson Chandler and DeAndre Jordan both have already opted out of playing in the bubble, with Chandler citing family reasons and Jordan testing positive for COVID-19. They will now be joined by Spencer Dinwiddie in being ruled out, as Nets doctors have reportedly decided to sit the budding star guard out after he has been battling a symptomatic case of COVID-19 over the last week-plus. Dinwiddie tested positive once again on Tuesday after hoping to potentially return to the court this week, and announced the news on Twitter.

While the Nets have brought in Justin Anderson as a substitute player already, they will be without a number of key contributors as they head to Orlando and the race for the final playoff spot in the East figures to play out among two teams without most of their top players. Hopefully Dinwiddie will be clear of the virus in the near future and will be able to make a full recovery, but even if he’s cleared soon will have to simply root on his squad from home as they battle for position in Orlando.

Those who remain nostalgic about late 1990s nights spent watching MTV may have felt conflicted about Comedy Central’s decision to nab Mike Judge for a “reimagining” of Beavis And Butt-Head. The seminal MTV animated show will receive tweaks, obviously, and Comedy Central’s announcement suggested that the two juvenile delinquents have graduated into adulthood, and “[t]he Gen X defining leads are back and entering a whole new Gen Z world.” What does that mean, though?

I was kinda pulling for time travel rather than aging the duo, although the fish-out-of-water concept might not be the best option for longevity. The reimagining’s already set for at least two seasons, and Judge has stressed that “[i]t seemed like the time was right to get stupid again.” Hmm, stupid is a broad term, but it should include the pair rocking out to music videos, right?

Well, Vulture spoke with Chris McCarthy, President of Entertainment & Youth Group at Comedy Central, and the prioritization of music video interludes doesn’t sound good. It also sounds like Beavis and Butt-Head found women who wished to procreate with them, and now they’re facing real adulting challenges:

“[I]n the case of the new Beavis and Butt-head, McCarthy says Judge is looking at a show in which the iconic duo moves beyond riffs on music videos and pop culture: ‘The story that we’re talking about working with Mike is: What happens if they grow up? And what happens if they have kids?’”

Does “moves beyond” mean that the show will leave music videos in the dust, like MTV arguably has? Artists are obviously still making videos (thank goodness for YouTube), but do Beavis and Butt-Head now have other focuses in life? No time for headbanging? Say it ain’t so. I might be reading too much into things, but it’s still strange to think of these guys holding down full-time jobs and making mortgage payments and grounding their own kids.

Perhaps Judge only intends to downplay the videos and use them sparingly. That would be preferable to abandoning one of the original series’ mainstays, which would be as disappointing as writing Cornholio out of pop culture history. In the meantime, Comedy Central’s also still planning a Daria spinoff (called Jodie) that’ll be voiced by Tracee Ellis Ross, and that’s part of Comedy Central’s decision to get more serious in the already crowded adult animated market.

(Via Vulture)

Linnea Siggelkow released her shimmering debut album in April under the moniker Ellis. Siggelkow can’t tour behind her record due to the pandemic, but the singer has still found ways to keep her fans engaged with her music. On Tuesday, Siggelkow shared a surprise project. The new effort is an EP of covers, and Ellis has elected to take popular songs and reimagine them as haunting electropop ballads.

Siggelkow shared her Bedroom Covers EP through Bandcamp. The singer pulled from Taylor Swift’s most recent album and turned the title track, “Lover,” into a fuzzy, synth-heavy anthem. For the remainder of her EP, Siggelkow covered Dinosaur Jr.’s 2007 track “I Got Lost” and The Used’s 2002 number “Buried Myself Alive.”

Alongside the Bedroom Covers EP, Siggelkow said the project was a way for her to find inspiration in a time that is difficult to find creativity:

I haven’t been feeling very inspired to write lately. The world is feeling equally chaotic and slow, my mind feels very strange, so I have focused on learning other people’s songs and it’s been sort of a nice break.

I wanted to cover songs by artists that have influenced me musically and as a songwriter. I love Taylor Swift’s to-the-point lyricism about her feelings, the relatability of her songs. Dinosaur Jr. is just such a cool band and J Mascis is one of my favourite guitarists. I’ve been practicing a lot more than I usually do, working on scales and trying to improve my technical skill — I want to be able to shred like J! And the Used was such a huge band for me growing up, Bert McCracken writes perfect emo songs that have stood the test of time.

Listen to Ellis cover Taylor Swift, Dinosaur Jr., and The Used above.

Bedroom Covers EP is out now via Bandcamp. Get it here.

Griselda Records‘ takeover continues with the release of the label’s latest single, Benny The Butcher’s “Deal Or No Deal.” Over a typically menacing Daringer production, Benny flexes his influence over the streets of his native Buffalo, New York, detailing drug deals, label deals, and the spoils of both. As he says at the one-minute mark of the dark song, “I make coke rap sound like a new invention.”

Benny’s single follows the release of fellow Griselda member Westside Gunn‘s second project of 2020, Flygod Is An Awesome God 2. As yet, Benny is the only member of the core trio who hasn’t yet released a project, but he’s also been the lowest-key member of the group so far. While he’s proven to be every bit as prolific as his cohorts, his production rate has also been more methodical; in the last three years since Griselda signed a label deal with Shady Records, he’s focused primarily on collaborative efforts like 2019’s Statue Of Limitations with Smoke DZA. However, in 2018, he did release Tana Talk 3, the well-received full-length album that has fans still anticipating its followup. If Benny keeps up with his labelmates Conway and Gunn, that should be coming along any day now. Stay tuned.

Listen to Benny The Butcher’s “Deal Or No Deal” above.

One of the earliest looks we get of Shannon Hoon in All I Can Say — a new documentary composed entirely of video footage self-recorded by the late Blind Melon singer from 1990 to ’95 — is on a hotel room bed in New Orleans. The date is October 21, 1995, and Hoon is in the midst of his final tour. We see him make a phone call. He doesn’t know what time it is. He says he needs some sleep.

Later, at the end of the film, this scene is revisited. More information is revealed. It appears that he’s talking to the band’s road manager. He wants to book a flight back home. He’s anxious about missing his baby daughter’s first word.

“I, like, really need to get off that fucking bus,” he pleads.

A few hours later, Hoon will climb back onto that bus and curl up by himself. A soundman will eventually attempt to wake him for a pre-show soundcheck at the famed club Tipitina’s. But Hoon, only 28 years old, will already be dead.

Anyone who comes to All I Can Say will know how it ends. In the film, Hoon’s demise is foregrounded. The point is to show the person that Hoon was beyond the broad strokes of his Wikipedia entry — a former jock from Lafayette, Indiana who fell into drugs and petty crime, and then escaped his dead-end hometown for relatively rapid stardom in Los Angeles, only to see that status disintegrate with similar quickness as the music industry moved on to another generation of bands. Just over three years after the release of Blind Melon’s platinum-selling debut, buoyed by one of the decade’s most famous one-hit alterna-wonders, “No Rain,” Hoon was a rock casualty. It’s a story as old as time. Or at least Tom Petty’s “Into The Great Wide Open.”

With its grainy VHS visual aesthetic, forged by the hours of videotape that Hoon recorded as a kind of diary charting Blind Melon’s fateful journey up and down the alt-rock mountain of success, All I Can Say might be described as an act of de-mythology. Only Hoon is the rare ’90s rock tragedy who was never really mythologized in the first place. The enduring image of the “No Rain” video isn’t of Hoon blissfully tripping on a sun-drenched hilltop, but that of the Bee Girl, portrayed by then-10-year-old actor Heather DeLoach, as a symbol of the song’s utopian idealization of lovable outsiders.

The Bee Girl was a meme for the pre-internet era, and like all memes, it had a brief shelf-life. When Blind Melon played Saturday Night Live, they were introduced in part by Chris Farley donning the yellow and black stripes. The band then proceeded to play a radically altered version of “No Rain,” rendering the once-effervescent hit into surly, slowed-down sludge. It was not a subtle display of resentment.

In retrospect, “No Rain” is a cautionary tale about the power of a single music video to completely and utterly define a band forever in the public consciousness. By the time Hoon died, his band was already being treated as an afterthought. His death was given passing notice by Rolling Stone and Spin, which just two months earlier had given withering reviews to Blind Melon’s second album, Soup. Less than two years prior to that drubbing, however, Blind Melon had been on the cover of Rolling Stone, for a profile in which Hoon’s mother confesses that when her son boarded a Greyhound bus for LA she expected “he would either come back in a body bag, or he would come back signed.” In a way, both prophecies came true.

While Rolling Stone called Blind Melon’s first album “remarkable,” it derided Soup in a stunningly mean one-and-a-half-star review as an irrelevant hippie curio. MTV similarly turned its back on the band, declining to put the video for Soup’s second single, “Toes Across The Floor,” in regular rotation even in the wake of Hoon’s death.

It’s a familiar story with the fickle music press: One day you’re the next big thing, and the next they act as if they never liked you at all. But this cruel reality also extended to Capitol, the very record label that had once, in the very near past, greatly profited off of the “No Rain” phenomenon. “After Shannon died, not one person from that record company ever called me to offer their sympathies,” Blind Melon guitarist Christopher Thorn told the A.V. Club in 2015. “They didn’t even contribute to the fund we set up for Shannon’s baby daughter, Nico. It was like we disappeared.”

All I Can Say feels like an overdue corrective to this memory-holing of Hoon and Blind Melon, who were always better, smarter, and more interesting than they were given credit for. In the film, Hoon comes across as sensitive, goofy, troubled, deeply talented, and a bit too unfocused by drugs and alcohol to fully harness his ability. Though, honestly, the same can also be said of virtually every talented musician in their mid-20s. The sadness of Hoon’s story, among other tragic consequences, is that Blind Melon seemed like they were on the verge of becoming truly great when he died. They just needed more time and, perhaps, a little more moral support. In the process of condescending to Blind Melon as an expired Buzz Bin throwaway, the rock world thoughtlessly disposed of one of the era’s most unsung and ill-fated talents.

I enjoyed All I Can Say for what it is — a low-key and often affecting inside look at the man at the head of that band. But the film’s weakness is that it never makes a case for why Hoon is actually an important artist. Blind Melon is remembered, if at all, for their hit debut LP. But Soup was the one that portended something really special, exploding the feel-good stoner rock of the first album for an alluring splatter of demented, Meat Puppets-style guitar excursions and pitch-black, end-of-the-night lyrical mojo. It’s a record that seems like it could have been made 20 years earlier (imagine if the Allman Brothers Band had made their own strung-out, post-’60s Goats Head Soup) while also feeling 20 years ahead of its time (it’s the surly, “anti-commercial” provocation that My Morning Jacket or Kings Of Leon should have made after they headlined Bonnaroo).

In the movie, you see how Hoon arrived at the cusp of artistic brilliance… as well as inside that lonely bus in New Orleans. Born on September 26, 1967, he was the youngest of three kids, and described by his mother as hyperactive. Instead of medicating him, she enrolled him in karate classes. As Hoon entered his teen years, his parents kept pushing him into sports, and he was active in wrestling, football, and pole vaulting. When Hoon’s camera in All I Can Say catches a glimpse of his senior photo, still proudly displayed in his parents’ home years later, he looks like one of the lunkheads who beat up Ralph Macchio in The Karate Kid.

By the time he was 17, Hoon inevitably rebelled. He started smoking pot, growing out his hair, and writing songs. He was also getting into fights and burglarizing homes. He was arrested several times. The following year, he lit out for LA, supposedly with the law at his heels, and soon hooked up with another Lafayette bad boy done good: Axl Rose. This was around the time that Rose skyrocketed to fame with Appetite For Destruction, an album sold partly on the strength of a music video in which he plays a country bumpkin who arrives in the big, bad City Of Angels on a Greyhound bus. “Welcome To The Jungle” was Rose’s autobiography, but he could have very well also been talking about Hoon. (In the end, only one of them was “gonna die.”)

Axl is spotted briefly in All I Can Say, during a 1990 recording session for the Use Your Illusion albums in a Christmastime video that Hoon is shooting for his mother. But Rose famously had a major impact on Hoon’s career — he included Hoon on GNR’s hit power ballad “Don’t Cry” as a backing singer, and also put him in the extremely popular (and extremely pretentious) music video.

By then, Hoon had already hooked up with the other members of Blind Melon. While the film never explicitly makes the connection, it seems obvious that Hoon’s proximity to the biggest rock band in America expedited Blind Melon’s career trajectory, which hit a new peak in early 1991 when they were signed by Capitol on the strength of just a four-song demo. For the self-titled album, they linked up with producer Rick Parashar, who had just worked with Pearl Jam on their soon-to-be massively successful debut, Ten.

The first Blind Melon album feels like a jammier, more southern version of Pearl Jam, with its obvious AOR musical influences and focus on the tender and elliptical lyrical expressions of a good-looking lead singer. But whereas Ten is a collection of angsty, hard-rock brow-beaters, Blind Melon is warmer and more amiable, with an emphasis on good-time choogle that occasionally veers into slightly woolier psychedelia.

Early ’90s rock radio would soon become crowded with retreads trying to out-huff Eddie Vedder. But “No Rain” endures today as one of the most enjoyable rock hits of the era precisely because its pleasant escapism ran counter to so many of the trends of the time. At a time when grunge bands were sneering at the Grateful Dead, “No Rain” peaks with a delightfully trippy country-rock solo that tears unexpectedly out of the song’s gently glistening guitar hook.

“No Rain” put Blind Melon ahead of the curve on what would become a bumper crop of popular hippie-leaning rock bands. By the mid-’90s, Dave Matthews Band and Phish were becoming arena-rock attractions. Even Blues Traveler had multiple hit singles. Looking back, it does seem like Blind Melon were onto something as they decamped to New Orleans to start work on Soup in late 1994. The idea was to reject the sunshine pop of “No Rain” in favor of an aggressive and heady mix of smacked-out rock, lysergic folk, deadbeat funk, and New Orleans funeral marches. The kind of record that doesn’t produce hits, but does inspire an audience to become lifelong fans.

Blind Melon was among the bands who benefitted from that brief window of time when record labels and the media fetishized any music that seemed vaguely alternative. By 1995, that window had already closed, and the seeds of the music that would come to dominate the latter half of the decade – nu-metal and teen pop — were already in the process of sprouting fruit. Instead of pretending that this wasn’t the case, as many alt-rock bands did, Blind Melon made a record about it. Soup unfolds as an elegy for a scene haunted by drug addiction and lost potential. Whenever I put it on, I’m always struck by the part in “Galaxie” when Hoon sings about “the Cadillac that’s sittin’ in the back,” a line that evokes the old country music standard “Long Black Limousine,” in which the big dark car doubles as a symbol of fame and death. “It isn’t me,” Hoon hollers at unseen demons. “Oh, no, no, no it isn’t me.” No other song for me better captures the downer vibes of the mid-’90s post-alt hangover. I can only compare it to how Neil Young’s “ditch” records encapsulate the “dream is over” malaise of the mid-’70s.

Another parallel I keep coming back to for Blind Melon at this juncture is Radiohead, who released their “aggressive and heady” second album, The Bends, just five months before Soup. Radiohead’s debut album, Pablo Honey, came out four months after Blind Melon’s first album, and was similarly sold on the strength of a breakout hit, “Creep,” that for a time was more famous than the band who recorded it. With The Bends, Radiohead was trying to escape the specter of one-hit-wonderdom, and at least initially it didn’t seem wholly successful. Writing in Spin, venerable rock critic Chuck Eddy mocked Radiohead’s fear of being “pigeonholed into the only style it’s very good at.” Coincidentally, Eddy also chided Blind Melon on similar grounds for Spin‘s review of Soup.

Where Radiohead and Blind Melon diverge is that Capitol Records, who put out both The Bends and Soup, supported Radiohead and ultimately knew how to market The Bends as a forward-thinking move by an evolving band. It doesn’t appear that Soup was ever given similar consideration, nor was Blind Melon ever really positioned as a peer of up-and-comers like DMB and Phish, a shift that might have played down their early-’90s also-ran status and positioned them as a bellwether of a thriving scene.

Another crucial difference, of course, is that Thom Yorke didn’t have a drug problem. Though, in the case of Soup, drugs didn’t hurt Blind Melon’s creative process in the short term anymore than it did for the Stones or the Dead. Hoon writes about addiction with unsettling clarity in one of Soup‘s best and most frantic songs, “2×4,” in which he likens the drug buzz to someone “pouring warm gravy all over me.” This, again, both grounds Soup in the period and makes it feel like timeless classic rock. As Thorn put it to the A.V. Club, “It starts off and it’s like, ‘We’re in New Orleans. We’re out of our minds. Welcome to our record—strap your shit in.’”

Hoon’s death didn’t cause critics to revisit Soup with fresh ears. Rather, his passing was chalked up to the self-indulgence that Blind Melon’s detractors claimed had already derailed the band. When I put on Soup, it doesn’t strike me as an especially prescient album, in terms of what happened to Hoon. Instead, it seems like the work of a band in the process of figuring out who they really are and where they want to go. It’s an album brimming with ideas and possibilities, pointing toward a future in which Blind Melon might have made the ’90s psych-tinged southern-rock version of OK Computer.

The melancholy of watching All That I Can Say is how it shows that the world lost a kind and decent soul long before his time. The melancholy of listening to Soup is how it spotlights a band that never had the chance to fully live up to its promise.

You can stream All I Can Say here.

If there was any suspense about who would be the eight playoff teams in the Eastern Conference when the NBA restarts in the Disney bubble later this month, that evaporated on Tuesday.

The Washington Wizards will enter the bubble 5.5 games back of the Orlando Magic with eight games to play and were already going to be without the services of sharpshooter Davis Bertans, who opted out of the restart due to injury concerns as he enters a critical free agent summer. Tuesday, the team announced All-Star guard Bradley Beal will likewise not be joining the team in Orlando out of caution for a shoulder injury that bothered him all season.

“Bradley did everything possible to be ready to play, but after closely monitoring his individual workouts we came to the conclusion that it was best for him to sit out the upcoming games in Orlando and avoid the risk of further injury,” said Wizards General Manager Tommy Sheppard. “Although he was able to play through the majority of the season with the injury, the layoff from March until now did not leave any of us feeling comfortable that he would have enough time to be ready to perform at the extremely high level we are all accustomed to seeing and agreed that not participating in the games in Orlando was the right decision.”

“This was a difficult decision and one that I did not take lightly as the leader of this team,” said Beal. “I wanted to help my teammates compete for a playoff spot in Orlando, but also understand that this will be best for all of us in the long term. I appreciate the support of my teammates, the fans and the entire organization and look forward to returning next season to continue the progress we have made.”

Beal sitting out due to an injury means he will not miss out on game checks during the bubble that those who opt out will, and for the Wizards the decision wasn’t very difficult given the stakes. Risking Beal’s long-term health was in no way worth the potential to sneak into the 8-seed where the Milwaukee Bucks would be waiting in the playoffs, and their stay in Orlando was almost assuredly going to be brief.

Washington will look to use the eight-game restart to continue developing young players like Rui Hachimura, in hopes of being ready to jump into the playoff picture again next year with a healthy Beal and John Wall.

Janelle Monáe is best known as a Grammy-nominated musician, but she’s built up an impressive filmography, too, including roles in Best Picture winner Moonlight, Hidden Figures, and Harriet. Occasionally, the world collide. It was while recording Dirty Computer (one of the best albums of 2018) in Atlanta that she invited Chadwick Boseman, Lupita Nyong’o, and Michael B. Jordan, who were in town filming Black Panther, into her recording studio, and when she met director Ryan Coogler. When asked by Empire whether she’s discussed joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe with the filmmaker, Monáe not only said “yes, obviously, of course” (or something along those lines) but even offered which character she’d want to play.

“I definitely have thrown it out there,” she said. “One of my dreams has always been to play Storm. I don’t know if she comes in Black Panther, but it would be a dream to have her in it. I don’t know where they are with that. A lot of women have played Storm and they’ve done an exceptional job, and I would love to be in that line of artists and get to do Storm justice.” X-Men fan favorite Storm has been played by Halle Berry and Alexandra Shipp in the 20th Century Fox movies, although now that Disney owns the studio, she, and the rest of her mutant superheroes, are welcome to appear in the MCU.

Monáe’s next movie, Antebellum, is scheduled to come out on August 21, while Coogler is at work at Black Panther 2 (and Space Jam 2), due out May 6, 2022.

(Via Empire)

A few days ago, an unreleased Pop Smoke song, “Paranoia,” leaked. The track features Young Thug, Pusha T, and Gunna, and on it, Pusha had some words about Drake. After learning about the situation, Thug disavowed Pusha’s lyrics, saying he doesn’t “respect” them. This morning, Pusha has hopped on his Instagram Story to offer a response.

Sharing four slides of text, Pusha addressed Thug directly, saying that he believes Drake had some power in silencing Pusha’s verse. He also claimed that Thug only appears on the track because Pusha requested him, and noted that he doesn’t need Thug’s respect. He wrote:

“Aye @youngthug couple things: 1. Don’t feel bad, NOBODY knew what the verse was abt. The label heads that stopped it didn’t even know. They ONLY ASSUME because HE TOLD them! The same way HE TOLD abt the Ross ‘Maybach 6’ verse. And If HE’LL TELL record executives abt rap verses, God only knows what else HE’LL TELL! I don’t deal in Police Work, Police Rappers or Police N****s!!!

2. @youngthug you were the last verse added to the song and that’s ONLY because I requested YOU!!

3. And most important @youngthug, just so we are clear…I WOULD NEVER look or need YOUR respect for what is it I bring to this rap game!!”

He concluded by addressing Steven Victor — the head of Smoke’s label, Victor Victor Worldwide — and demanding to be taken off the deluxe edition of Shoot For The Stars, Aim For The Moon, so this drama doesn’t detract from the album. He wrote, “@stevenvictor I demand you take me off the deluxe @realpopsmoke album to avoid any confusion that make take away from This amazing body of work!”

Aside from the obvious points Pusha made, his posts also indicate that a deluxe edition of Shoot For The Stars, Aim For The Moon is actually on the way. A new version of the album hasn’t officially been announced and is therefore currently only rumored. This certainly adds validity to those rumors, though.

Check out Pusha’s Instagram Stories below.

Shoot For The Stars, Aim For The Moon is out now via Victor Victor Worldwide and Republic Records. Get it here.

Yesterday, for 50 Cent‘s birthday, T.I. spent most of the day baiting the Queens rapper, challenging him to a Verzuz battle. “For your birthday, I offer you a challenge, sir,” he said in a video posted to his Instagram. “Pull your ass up with 20 of your records, sit across from me, and get this work, man.” Of course, being T.I., he couldn’t resist spicing things up with a little trash talk, reminding 50 that the last rapper to directly challenge him outsold him by a lot back in 2007. “I understand if you don’t want to answer to that challenge. Because last time you got challenged Kanye West dusted your ass off, so, you might not wanna do that.”

Of course, 50 has his own penchant for using his Instagram to reply back to any critics. In typical 50 fashion, he posted a screenshot of HipHopDX’s headline with the caption: “Somebody passed T.I. the weed they gave Smokey in Friday.” This sparked T.I. to follow-up his challenge with a five-minute video offering his explanation and wondering whether 50 was scared to step up.

50 may just be uninterested in participating in the livestream hits battle series in general, though. He previously responded to a challenge from his old rival Ja Rule in much the same way, trolling Ja rather than outright declining. It seems unlikely that anyone could arrange a battle that genuinely excites 50, as his days of chasing hits seem long behind him after the success of his Showtime drama Power.

Watch T.I.’s challenge videos above.

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