Last Updated: June 8th, 2020

In Why I Write, George Orwell observed a truism that transcends any era: “In our age, there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues.”

Orwell nailed it. In 2020, politics seep into our lives in almost every way. Racism, gender bias, food systems, public health, police violence, Indigenous genocide… the woes we face as people are deeply rooted in our political system. Even the means by which you’re reading this — the internet — is inextricable from the political machine.

There’s a flip side, though. Politics has the ability to inspire us to action and offer avenues for tenaciously pursuing a better future. It has the potential to launch movements and, ideally, be a vital ingredient in the universe’s gradual arc toward justice. If we’re able to make sense its tangled mix of malleable facts, opinions, and veiled interests. It’s a ton to navigate and the onus is on you to stay informed.

If you truly want to be “woke” with regard to any political issue, you’ll have to dig and dig until you find something that you decide nears the truth. To start your journey, check out these ten great political documentaries currently streaming on Netflix.

13th (2016)

Run Time: 100 mins. | IMDb Rating: 8.2/10

Ava DuVernay’s look at America’s deeply rooted systemic racism is essential viewing. Named for the 13th amendment in which chattel slavery was ended but penal slavery was enshrined, 13th (our review) examines the laws and culture that have reinforced an oppressive system against people of color.

The film expertly underscores the fact that, in America, the road from the end of slavery toward equality continues to be long and full of strife.

Get Me Roger Stone (2017)

Run Time: 92 mins. | IMDb Rating: 7.4/10

You’ll either walk away from this documentary wanting to burn it all down or glad a man like Roger Stone exists. Stone was instrumental in turning modern politics away from facts and professional records toward the use of emotion and vitriol to gain power — something he’s deeply proud of.

The film reveals Stone — who’s now a bona fide felon — to be a man of so many perplexing layers, ranging from inspirational to infuriating, often within a single sentence. Get Me Roger Stone is an account of how we got from Nixon to Trump and how emotion, misinformation, and flat-out misanthropy can win elections.

Feminists: What Were They Thinking (2018)

Run Time: 86 mins. | IMDb Rating: 6.9/10

There are few words in the American political vernacular more maligned and misrepresented than “feminist.” That makes this Netflix documentary a must-watch. The film traces the steps of feminism from the late 1960s to modern-day along a winding road of triumphs and setbacks for women.

This is an American history that’s crucial for all Americans know and Feminists: What Were They Thinking makes for a great entry point to a movement that’s changing the world for the better day-by-day.

Reversing Roe (2018)

Run Time: 99 mins. | IMDb Rating: 7.4/10

Over 300 new laws have gone on the books limiting abortions across America since the ascendency of George W. Bush in 2001. Right now, abortion, women’s rights, and medical freedoms are at the epicenter of the American political zeitgeist, and Reversing Roe is there to parse that political battlefront.

The film dives into the fight over reproductive rights from both sides and asks us to come forward and really search for what we believe in when it comes to abortion. This isn’t light watching for a casual Sunday. This is a civic duty in documentary form.

Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press (2017)

Run Time: 95 mins. | IMDb Rating: 6.5/10

Nobody Speak isn’t a perfect documentary. It meanders from the main (and tantalizing) story of Peter Thiel’s war on Gawker to smaller tales of a newspaper in Nevada getting bought out by billionaires with agendas. The latter half of that story is a tale as old as time (just look up William Randolph Hearst and Rupert Murdoch).

But the main storyline — Peter Thiel using Hulk Hogan as the way to revenge kill Gawker for outing his sexuality — is spellbinding storytelling that serves as one of the greatest tests of the first amendment in the modern era.

American Factory (2019)

Run Time: 110 mins. | IMDb Rating: 7.4/10

This year’s winner for Best Documentary Feature at the Oscars — and Barack and Michele Obama’s first film project — is a fascinating look at how real-life is effected by economics and politics. American Factory takes a dive into a Chinese company, Fuyao (a glass company), opening up a facility in an old auto-factory in Ohio.

The fly-on-the-wall documentary follows American factory workers and their Chinese counterparts through their experience of working in a globalized marketplace. It’s an eye-opening look at the stark reality of our global economy, viewed from the ground level with the actual people living it.

Knock Down The House (2019)

Run Time: 87 mins. | IMDb Rating: 6.9/10

Knock Down The House takes a look at how progressives made moves after Trump’s 2016 win. The film follows the campaigns of four outsider women — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Amy Vilela, Cori Bush, and Paula Jean Swearengin — as the fight to gain seats in the House of Representatives during the 2018 election cycle.

The support and endorsement from Justice Democrats and Brand New Congress helped propel these candidates to the national stage, highlighted by Ocasio-Cortez’s victory. The overall film is a great lesson in how grassroots politics can work.

The Unknown Known (2013)

Run Time: 103 mins. | IMDb Rating: 7/10

This Errol Morris documentary is harrowing. The film was cobbled together from 33 hours of interviews with former U.S. Secretary of Defense (and former member of Congress and former advisor to republican presidents) Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld offers a window into the thinking process of military-industrial complex stooges at the highest ranks of the American political system.

It’s hard to watch as Rumsfeld smiles and laughs about American expansionism (wherein untold millions perished in for-profit wars) through the guise of protecting American citizens. And that’s not even the main part of the documentary. This film serves as a fascinating and frightening look into how a conservative and very capitalistic mind functions while making continual excuses for war crimes.

Mitt (2014)

Run Time: 94 mins. | IMDb Rating: 6.9/10

This film feels like a time-capsule to a completely different time. Mitt chronicles the life and times of now Republican senator from Utah who was then a Republican senator from Massachusetts as he tries to become president in 2008 and 2012.

The 2008 section of the film is a bread-and-butter political drama as Romney faces off against John McCain for the GOP nomination and loses. The 2012 portion of the film — where Romeny wins the nom but losses to incumbent Barak Obama — is more personal and, well, tragic as personal issues start plaguing the nominee’s life.

The Great Hack (2016)

Run Time: 114 mins. | IMDb Rating: 7/10

The way we receive information has changed dramatically since the advent of social media. The ability for foreign actors — and even just bad actors in the private sector — to poison the well of thought has increased exponentially. The Great Hack shows that for-profit social media platforms have almost no intention of stopping the tidal wave of lies poisoning our brains (this has been confirmed in the following years over and over again).

They accomplish by looking at how groups like Cambridge Analytica used our data to promote massive misinformation campaigns around the U.K.’s Brexit and the 2016 U.S. Presidental election. It’s fascinating, sure. But, really, this is an indictment of how social media masquerades under the banner of “freedom of speech” purely to get hold of our data and sell it to the highest bidder.

It’s been 17 years since the so-polarizing-they-might-be-underrated Matrix sequels, The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, came out, and with such a long gap between films, Keanu Reeves didn’t think he was going to reprise his role as Neo again. But then last August, surprise surprise, it was announced that The Matrix 4 was in development with Lana Wachowski returning as director and writer (it will not be a Psycho II scenario). That, and the “beautiful script” she wrote with Aleksandar Hemon and David Mitchell, is the reason why he decided to don the sunglasses once more.

“Lana Wachowski wrote a beautiful script and a wonderful story that resonated with me,” Reeves told Empire Online. “That’s the only reason to do it. To work with her again is just amazing. It’s been really special, and the story has, I think, some meaningful things to say, and that we can take some nourishment from.”

Carrie-Anne Moss (Trinity) had a similar reason for coming back. “I never thought that it would happen. It was never on my radar at all,” she said. “When it was brought to me in the way that it was brought to me, with incredible depth and all of the integrity and artistry that you could imagine, I was like, ‘This is a gift.’ It was just very exciting.”

We still don’t know what the heck The Matrix 4 (release date May 21, 2021) is about, but whatever the plot, I’m sure Elon Musk will misinterpret it.

(Via Empire Online)

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There’s something about one century concluding and another beginning that makes artists feel extra ambitious. As the end of the ’90s loomed, it became de rigueur for forward-thinking indie and alternative rock bands to make their grand studio-obsessed masterpieces. It was a time when the very idea of rock music itself was in the process of being dismantled, so it could be put back together as an entirely new thing for an entirely new millennium.

In 1999, acid-laced Oklahoma psych-rock band The Flaming Lips produced The Soft Bulletin, ditching their fuzzy guitars in favor of highly orchestrated, Pet Sounds-inspired melancholy pop. The following year, Radiohead emerged from a studio hibernation that lasted for more than a year with a strange, defiantly anti-rock LP called Kid A that Thom Yorke claimed was like “getting out an eraser and starting again.” Also in 2000, bands like Sigur Ros and Godspeed You! Black Emperor used rock instrumentation to create vast ambient soundscapes that might stretch on for more than 20 minutes. By the end of that year, Wilco would begin work on their own deconstructionist, “experimental” masterwork, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, whose tortured creation story would nearly become as beloved as the album itself.

And then there was Modest Mouse, whose strange and staggering third album, The Moon & Antarctica turns 20 this week. Along with Radiohead, Modest Mouse is the most successful of these turn-of-the-century bands, achieving a level of popularity that included a genuine hit song, “Float On,” which was the centerpiece of 2004’s platinum-selling Good News For People Who Love Bad News. Unlike many of their ’90s indie peers — including Pavement, Neutral Milk Hotel, and Built To Spill — Modest Mouse survived and thrived in the aughts, hitting the decade’s indie wave perfectly with the right single, adding scores of casual fans to a solid base of obsessive listeners.

In that sense, The Moon & Antarctica is a crucial pivot point not just for the band but for indie music overall. If Modest Mouse’s early albums helped to define the boilerplate sound of ’90s indie rock — chunky guitars, a loose and bombastic rhythm section, shout-y vocals, wry and often insightful lyrics — The Moon & Antarctica paved the way for what indie became in the 21st century. Rather than present three dudes bashing away sweatily just like they did on stage, this album was elegant and impeccably crafted, seamlessly integrating elements of folk, country, psychedelia, disco, and orchestral music. But these diverse elements counterintuitively made Modest Mouse sound (especially in retrospect) more like a “normal” rock band, smoothing out their rough edges and sweetening their most acidic attributes, a process that was finalized on the blockbuster Good News.

It’s also a record that helped to put to bed many of the rote arguments that were endemic to ’90s indie. As Modest Mouse’s first release after leaving the indie label Up and signing with the corporate behemoth Epic, The Moon & Antarctica was framed by the music press as a potential “sell out” move. And yet the album was ultimately one of their most acclaimed works, and in time the anxiety about Modest Mouse being adversely affected by signing with a major label would come to be viewed as a canard from a bygone century. Just four years later, contestants were singing “Float On” on American Idol. Anyone who pointed out that the infectiously airy riff from that song sounds like U2 playing Deep Blue Something’s “Breakfast At Tiffany’s” was bound to come off as a hipster scold. In their own small way, Modest Mouse had changed the world.

When Modest Mouse first emerged in the late ’90s as seemingly overnight underground sensations, they had the benefit of deep mythology centered on their mercurial singer, guitarist, and songwriter, Isaac Brock. Barely out of high school at the time, he had already experienced a lifetime’s worth of outsider weirdness.

The outlines of his biography are already well-known to Modest Mouse fans: Born in 1975, Brock spent his early years in Montana and Oregon, and was shaped by spending his formative years in a Christian religious sect called the Grace Gospel Church that encouraged even the youngest members to speak in tongues. His family also spent a few years living in a trailer park. By age 11, he relocated with his mother and sister to Issaquah, Washington, a community near Seattle, where his mom eventually remarried. As for young Isaac, he took up in a shed next to his parent’s home, which is where he learned how to play guitar. In time, it would become Modest Mouse’s first rehearsal space.

What makes this origin story more that just mere trivia is that Modest Mouse’s early albums and EPs seem to derive directly from the milieu of Brock’s life. The signature LP of this period, 1997’s The Lonesome Crowded West, is an incredible snapshot of the weird old Gummo America that was in the process of disappearing with the rest of the 20th century. In songs like “Trailer Trash,” “Truckers Atlas,” and “Cowboy Dan,” Brock writes evocatively about backwoods eccentrics without sentiment or judgment, giving them their due as iconoclasts without denying their menace or profound sense of desolation.

Brock has said the album was a reaction against seeing his hometown get “mall-fucked” by encroaching gentrification brought on by the emerging tech industry in the Pacific Northwest. This “paving of the west” would eventually homogenize the entire country, which makes The Lonesome Crowded West feel prescient in the same way that OK Computer is about the digital totalitarianism of the internet. It’s also, like OK Computer, an unabashedly BIG guitar-rock record, nearly maxing out the capacity of a compact disc at 74 minutes.

For Kid A, Radiohead opted to renounce the BIG guitar-rock-ness of OK Computer, in favor of something far more claustrophobic and introverted. While their musical approach was otherwise radically different — they couldn’t help but sound maximalist no matter their change in direction — Modest Mouse also felt compelled to gaze inward on The Moon & Antarctica, an instinct that seems entirely in line with the times. At the start of this new era, everybody (but especially rock bands) had to figure how, or even if, they could find a way to be in the new era.

Crucially, this reimagining of Modest Mouse meant tamping down — if not outright jettisoning — the most abrasive, punk-oriented aspects of their music. The Lonesome Crowded West is defined by its furiously animated choogle, a willful and aggressive sloppiness that was in line with the lo-fi, defiantly unprofessional ethos of that era’s indie rock. It’s a very hot record, whereas The Moon & Antarctica is decidedly chillier, like the other “ambitious” indie and alternative touchstones of the time. Just as their contemporaries were backing away from heavy riffs and boisterous rhythm sections, Modest Mouse made no effort to hide that they were now playing in the majors. The Moon & Antarctica was made with a big-label budget, and it sounds like it. The strummy sunniness of a track like “Gravity Rides Everything” belies the existential pondering of the lyrics. It also points to the bands that would become Modest Mouse’s new contemporaries by the time “Float On” broke big, pop groups like The Shins and Death Cab For Cutie who had little in common with the scrappier bands that Modest Mouse originally came up with in the ’90s.

The darkness on The Moon & Antarctica is reserved for the words, which are very dark indeed. Religious imagery had long been part of Brock’s songs, which is unsurprising given the rich well of material from his fundamentalist childhood. But these themes really come to the forefront on The Moon & Antarctica, which unfolds as a series of parables in which the protagonist is caught in a spiritual battle between heaven (the moon) and hell (Antarctica) that in the end will not be won by the good guys. (Not to belabor the Kid A comparisons, but The Moon & Antarctica might be an even more pessimistic “dystopia” record.)

Recorded in Chicago over the course of five months in 1999, from mid-summer to late fall, The Moon & Antarctica has a similar seasonal arc, starting out relatively bright before turning dimmer and colder. The most famous anecdote from the making of The Moon & Antarctica is about how Brock broke his jaw one night while out drinking, when he was jumped by some neighborhood mooks. His jaw had to be wired shut for weeks, which obviously made it impossible to sing. (Later, before an appearance at Coachella, he supposedly removed the wires himself with pliers and a bottle of whiskey for anesthesia.) Brock also had a shattered reputation in light of a rape accusation in 1999; while he was never arrested or charged, the allegation became a permanent part of Modest Mouse’s media profiles forever after.

While Brock often comes off as sarcastic and even goofy in his interviews, his lyrics on The Moon & Antarctica are reflective self-interrogations that frequently resolve as self-lacerations. The lilting opening track, “3rd Planet,” introduces a recurring motif on the record: “Everything that keeps me together is falling apart,” he spits. “I’ve got this thing that I consider my only art of fucking people over.” Later, on the searing “Dark Center Of The Universe,” he once again sings about how “I’m real damn sure that anyone can equally easily fuck you over.”

On that track, Modest Mouse sounds most like their old selves, which makes it an exception on The Moon & Antarctica. The funky disco rhythms of “Tiny Cities Made Of Ashes” and the wildly off-kilter post-rock psych of “A Different City” are more where this album is at sonically. But the vibrance of the music frequently belies what is one of the bleakest albums to be released be a major-label band in the past two decades. How we treat each other, and the toll those transgressions take on our own souls, weighs heavily on this record.

I tend to remember the first five or six songs most vividly whenever I think about The Moon & Antarctica. So I was surprised upon revisiting the album recently by how affected I was by the back half of the album, starting with the centerpiece nine-minute epic, “The Stars Are Projectors,” in which Brock asks pointedly, “Was there a need for creation?” Like most everyone else, I’ve been in a dark frame of mind lately concerning the state of humanity, and perhaps more receptive than usual to songs that question whether we truly deserve to exist at all. But The Moon & Antarctica takes that despair one step further by arguing forcefully, and persuasively, that we most definitely do not.

The other night I watched footage of police beating protestors in some American city while listening to the most disturbing track from The Moon & Antarctica, “Wild Packs Of Family Dogs.” It opens like another dispatch from Gummo America, only the landscape has moved beyond trailer parks to full-blown apocalypse. “My mother’s cryin’ blood dust now / My dad he quit his job today, well I guess he was fired but that’s OK / And I’m sittin’ outside my mudlake, waiting for the pack to take me away.” A few songs later, “I Came As A Rat” came on, and it was as if Mephistopheles himself was seated next to me as I recoiled in horror from his televised handiwork:

I came as ice, I came as a whore

The Moon & Antarctica ends with “What People Are Made Of,” one of the most anti-human songs I’ve ever heard. Brock again has assumed his devil persona, and decides that people and their hollowed-out souls aren’t worth the effort. “The one thing you taught me ‘bout human beings was this / They ain’t made of nothin’ but water and shit.” It’s a brutal song set to the album’s most brutal music. In my most despairing moments lately, it has rung truer than I would like. But even if it is true, it ultimately means that we’re all the same, and can only be redeemed by each other.

Alex Caruso is one of the NBA’s most popular players, and not entirely because of his work on the court. The 26-year-old guard is beloved among Los Angeles Lakers fans, who have created and circulated countless memes and highlight videos of him online. Any time he dunks in a game, you can be sure that videos are already going viral on Twitter. Though he was playing less than 20 minutes per game this season, he earned plenty of All-Star votes from fans.

So why is Caruso the internet’s favorite basketball player, as SB Nation once dubbed him? It’s hard to understand why the internet likes what it likes, but Caruso is certainly a relatable figure. At 6’5 with a slightly balding hairline, he has the look of a typical white guy from Texas — albeit a very tall one that can produce powerful dunks. But fans also likely admire Caruso’s winding path to the NBA.

After going undrafted in 2016, he played for the Philadelphia 76ers in Summer League that year before being signed and subsequently released by the Oklahoma City Thunder in October. He then plied his trade in the NBA G-League before impressing the Lakers in the 2017 Summer League, helping the team win the championship that year. The Lakers signed Caruso to their first-ever two-way contract in 2017 and then again in 2018 before he made it through the ranks to earn a two-year, $5.5 million contract last July. His scrappy style of play and the fact that he is a man of the people who has even joked about dapping up Rihanna “for the culture,” just adds to the legend of the Bald Mamba.

The Lakers, led by LeBron James and Anthony Davis, started the 2019-20 as one of the favorites to challenge for the title before Commissioner Adam Silver was forced to suspend the 2019-20 NBA season due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. The league has since slowly taken steps to resume play, and on Thursday, the NBA’s Board of Governors voted to approve a plan that would send 22 teams to Orlando for an eight-game regular season and playoffs.

Dime caught up with Caruso last week on behalf of smALL-Stars about his life at home in LA during the NBA hiatus, the Lakers’ hopes for the rest of the season and his cult-like online following.

First off, how are you and how have you been keeping busy at home during the past couple of months?

It’s been a strange time. Everything was kind of abrupt, kind of thrown at us, and we weren’t really prepared for it, so I’ve been doing my best to kind of roll with the punches. To take every day as it comes and honestly, it’s been okay. I do well on my own, just kind of hanging by myself and staying out of the public. Just a couple workouts at home, video games, movies, started reading some books. It’s been good, but obviously I’m excited to get back out there and play.

I saw that you started streaming on Twitch since you’ve been at home. What made you want to start streaming, and what are some of your favorite video games?

I think [my favorite] to stream is probably Fortnite. That was the one that’s probably most popular to stream. But Call of Duty: Warzone has been picking up — my true love is FIFA. It just doesn’t have as much traction on streaming as some of the other ones. I’ve always watched people on Twitch, and I know other NBA players and athletes had streamed before. I kind of leaned on Josh Hart, one of my old teammates in L.A., to talk to about getting a computer for it and getting everything set up, so shout out to Josh for helping me. It’s been a lot of fun. It’s a good way to connect fans even in this time of separation.

What about 2K?

I recently started trying to play 2K, but it’s just really hard for me because they don’t do the things that I want them to do. I’m so used to basketball being a certain way, and when it’s a little more robotic, it’s frustrating.

Fair enough. I’ve seen a lot of NBA players getting into video games and just streaming a lot more since the season was suspended. How do you think you compare to the rest of the league’s gamers?

I think I’m up there, you know I’m not a cocky guy but I’m confident in my abilities, especially — Warzone maybe not as much just because I’ve played so much Fortnite and FIFA over the last few years — but I think I can definitely compete.

The Lakers started having practice sessions again — obviously they look a little different because of social distancing and other safety precautions. What have those sessions been like?

They’ve been good. It’s been pretty minimal as far as the number of bodies in the facility. They try to keep as many people away as they can at a time just so there’s less chance of catching anything, spreading anything, bringing anything in. It’s been one-on-one work with the coach and one-on-one work with the strength coaches and one-on-one work with the training staff, but it’s been good. Everything was going to eventually have a first step, and I think this has been a good first step to kind of getting back to it.

There was a lot of talk and speculation around how the league could and possibly would resume the season. During that time of uncertainty, how did you and your teammates stay focused and motivated?

I think for the team, it’s just about realizing what we want to do. Our goal for the beginning of the season was to compete for a championship, and I think that’s still our goal. It’s still our mission; it’s just been a different path than we first expected to take.

Talking about your personal career path, you went undrafted in 2016, played in the G-League, and now, just four years later, you’re playing for a real championship contender. When you reflect on how you got to where you are today, how do you feel, and what are your hopes for your future?

It’s been a crazy journey so far, and I wouldn’t change it for anything. I think I’ve grown up a lot as a person through the struggle of trying to get where I’m at now. That’s been really good for me to just kind of grow up and assume a lot of responsibility in my life as well as in basketball. It’s been great for me to realize the full potential, and everybody has a dream, whether it’s playing in the NBA or to become a big lawyer or politician or something else, and it takes a lot of hard work to get there, regardless of what it is. I think that having the success that I’m having now and being part of this team is rewarding, and then, for the rest of the year it’s to continue to do what we set out to do. We’re going to continue to chase that trophy, that championship team at the end. We want to be the last team standing. So as soon as we can get back to that, I’m going to be excited.

The kind of attention that you’ve earned from NBA fans on social media is pretty intense. I’m sure you can attest to this, but almost every time you make a good play it goes viral, and of course there’s also all of the Alex Caruso memes that have made the rounds on Twitter. How do you feel about all this mania surrounding you?

I’m fortunate that, like we talked about earlier, my career path has brought me to this point. So I won’t take it for granted any time that somebody tweets out a video or tweets out a photo or something that I’ve done. And I think it’s great for the fans too just because it gives them a chance to connect and to celebrate something — especially for Lakers fans where it’s been a rough couple of years leading up to this, basketball-wise.

Tell me about the smALL-Stars collection and how people can get a slice of basketball even now when there is no live NBA action happening.

[*Pulls out his miniature LeBron James smALL-Star collectible*]I’m hanging out with Bron right now. We just got done playing FIFA together. smALL-Stars is great. I like to think of it as the modern-day Bobbleheads. Bobbleheads used to be all the rave back in the day, and I think this is the new thing. They’re about a foot tall, and they’re basically just cool representations of your favorite players. I think it’s a really cool way to connect with the fans in a unique and different aspect.

For sure, and maybe one day you’ll get your own smALL-Star!

Yeah, we’re crossing our fingers!

As protests against police brutality continued to take place throughout the weekend, one planned protest for Breonna Taylor, the 26-year-old EMT shot to death by Louisville Metro police officers serving a warrant at her apartment, has drawn criticism for being organized under false pretenses.

Montgomery, Alabama rapper Chika, who lives in Los Angeles, has been a fixture at several of the LA-based protests over the past two weeks, even getting detained during one and documenting the experience after slipping out of her zip ties. She had words for Compton rapper YG, though, after the latter revealed that he was shooting the video for his new song “FTP” during the most recent protest in Hollywood on Sunday. “Shooting a music video while Breonna Taylor’s killers are still walking the streets is f*cking disgusting,” she wrote.

Later on the same day, Chika filmed a video for Instagram detailing her issues with the video shoot. “You don’t say on a flyer, ‘This is a vigil, bring flowers, bring candles…’ You don’t use this moment to shoot a music video… Everything that we’ve been doing march-wise has working because of the way that we showed up. The way that we know what we are fighting for, the way that we are informed. This today was not that. If you saw YG’s name on a poster and you showed up because you saw YG’s name on a poster, you’re f*cked because the lives lost was not enough to do that for you.”

Meanwhile, YG himself reacted to the backlash on his own Instagram, writing, “For anyone out there talking I don’t question your advocacy and don’t think you should question mine.” For YG, “The real story here is me and Black Lives Matter brought out 50,000 people today to peacefully protest and unite for change. I wanted to document that so when they hear this song and think we are reckless and violent they see a peaceful protest of all different people coming together for a common cause. That is history. That is breaking down these stereotypes on our people and our neighborhoods.” He also admonished his critics, “All of us protesting are on the same side here..instead of questioning each other’s activism we should be directing that energy at the cops and the government and helping to create the change we want to see. Stay focused and stop that social media judgement without knowing facts and hurting a cause we all a part of. We got a real enemy and it ain’t each other.”

Watch Chika’s video calling out YG and see his response above.

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

Earlier this year, Pete Davidson sounded like he was done with SNL.

The King of Staten Island star told Charlamagne Tha God, “I’m like, cold open, political punchlines. I’m like, Weekend Update jokes. When I’m not there, they’ll be like, ‘Huh huh huh, Pete’s a f*cking jerk face.’ And you’re like, ‘Whose side are you on?’ I have a weird feeling in that building where I don’t know whose team they’re playing for really, if I’m the joke or I’m in on the joke.” He also said that he’s “literally painted out to be this big dumb idiot.” But in the months since, Davidson has changed his tune. You gain a lot of perspective when you’re stuck in your mom’s basement during a pandemic, turns out.

“I will be [on SNL] as long as they allow me to be,” Davidson told ET Online. “I think I’m very lucky to be on that show and I’m really lucky to have Lorne Michaels as, you know, not only a mentor and a boss, but a friend. I’ll be there as long as they allow it.”

Davidson also opened up about his “dark and scary” battle with mental health issues. “I got as close as you can get — just like testing the waters,” he said on CBS Sunday Morning about contemplating suicide. “Until I met the right treatments and met the right doctors and did all the work that you need to do to not feel that way, it got pretty dark and scary.” You can watch the CBS Sunday Morning interview below, and Judd Apatow’s The King of Staten Island, which also stars Bill Burr and Steve Buscemi, on June 12.

(Via ET)

Brooklyn Nine-Nine star Terry Crews recently found a warm reception on Twitter after his remarks on the death of George Floyd (for which Minneapolis cop Derek Chauvin has been charged with second-degree murder). That thread began with Crews stating that Floyd’s death “forced me to search my heart to find out what more I can do, as a human being, as a citizen, and more specifically as a Black man,” which led to a declaration that he wanted to “make further amends to black women.” A few days later, Crews is feeling an intense backlash after a “Black supremacy” tweet amid another weekend of protests against police brutality. It’s a swift turn of events that’s been compounded by Crews’ attempt to explain his perspective. In the process, he created a bigger mess.

“Defeating White supremacy without White people creates Black supremacy,” Crews tweeted on Sunday. “Equality is the truth. Like it or not, we are all in this together.”

As one can imagine, this didn’t go over well (his wording suggested a warning against something, “Black supremacy,” which does not exist), and Crews’ name trended for several hours in a way that no one should be thrilled to be mentioned. At the forefront of responses was Tyler James Williams, his former TV son on Everybody Hates Chris.

“[W]e’re rightfully angry right now and fed up with anyone not with our cause wholeheartedly,” Williams explained after an expression of love. “I don’t want to see that energy pointed your way or diverted from the cause.”

Crews responded that “I was not saying Black supremacy exists, because it doesn’t.” And he continued: “I am saying if both Black and Whites don’t continue to work together– bad attitudes and resentments can create a dangerous self-righteousness.”

The responses to that reply grew heated with some pointing out that Crews’ initial choice of words had left a lot to be desired. Others accused him of “gaslighting,” but again, it was mostly noted that Crews had clumsily called for people to work together, and “that was already happening.” His language, argued another user, “play[ed] into the white supremacist narrative of being ‘concerned’ about the protests.”

At that point, Crews probably should have stopped tweeting, but that didn’t happen. He further tweeted about “gatekeepers of Blackness” and doubled down: “Any Black person who calls me a coon or and Uncle Tom for promoting EQUALITY is a Black Supremist, because they have determined who’s Black and who is not.”

Most of what fans hear from J. Cole is through his music, as he isn’t the most active on social media. Even when he does post online, it’s mostly about whatever new project he has on the way or has just come out.

Over the weekend, though, he took to his sparingly used Twitter account to offer his thoughts on the recent vote to disband the Minneapolis Police Department following the death of George Floyd and the civil unrest that has ensued. For his third tweet of 2020, Cole shared an article about the department disbanding and wrote, “Powerful powerful.”

Over the weekend, nine of the 13 Minneapolis city council members declared their intention to defund and dismantle the city’s police department. Council President Lisa Bender told CNN, “We committed to dismantling policing as we know it in the city of Minneapolis and to rebuild with our community a new model of public safety that actually keeps our community safe. [We need] to listen, especially to our Black leaders, to our communities of color, for whom policing is not working and to really let the solutions lie in our community.”

While Cole hasn’t been active on social media since Floyd’s death, that doesn’t mean he’s not supporting the cause, as he attended a protest in North Carolina in May.

The ‘Billions’ Stock Watch is a weekly accounting of the action on the Showtime drama. Decisions will be made based on speculation and occasional misinformation and mysterious whims that are never fully explained to the general public. Kind of like the real stock market.

STOCK DOWN — Chuck, repeatedly

Not a great week for Chuck Rhoades, a man whose new move appears to be “showing up unannounced to dump a problem on very successful women, to various degrees of success.” He stopped by Wendy’s office to ask her about donating a kidney to his dying, liquor-drinking, cigar-smoking, pigheaded father. He showed up at Cat’s door to ask her to kind of compromise her life’s work so he could hammer the Manhattan DA with a threat about punishing sex workers. And he crashed the Manhattan DA’s fancy dumpling lunch to deploy that threat in his efforts to steal back the tax fraud case he started building against Axe. No high-achieving woman in New York is safe from the old Chuck drop-in. I’m surprised he didn’t wake up Sacker at 2 a.m. to ask her if she knew his Netflix password.

The worst part: All of it ended up being for naught, as Axe out-maneuvered him with a midnight art ruse that involved a helicopter and a dozen or so empty crates. That one hurt him. He had been riding so high earlier, especially when he swung by Axe’s apartment to make a circular threat and spill wine on a priceless Van Gogh to smoke out Axe’s true reaction, dropping references to the classic and true “Steve Wynn flails his elbow through a Picasso” story. (Please read Nora Ephron’s telling of this. It’s a great story.) But there he was, later on, befuddled and bamboozled, his case in tatters, his father still kidney-less, and altogether just defeated, except for the part where Cat got them a sex worker for the night as some sort of reward/lesson involving his decision to not follow through with his really ugly threat about burying other sex workers out of spite.

Baby steps, I guess.

STOCK UP — Axe, professionally if not personally

Axe should be happy, in theory. He got everything he wanted. He and his team figured out how to dodge the tax fraud case by turning his masterpiece-filled apartment into a private art gallery owned by his charitable foundation. He’s well on the way to getting his bank, after sidestepping various regulators — one of whom was bought off by Chuck, the other of whom justifiably hates him and thinks Spyros is a putz, also justifiably — and calling in a favor from Krakow, the Secretary of the Entire Dang Treasury. Wins all around, in situations where he definitely deserved to take losses.

And yet… not so much. He’s a paranoid wreck all the time, convinced the world is out to get him (which it is, as of a result of his many shady actions over the years), and the thing with Wendy and his artist, Nico, is driving him insane. I don’t know how else you can describe it. He saw the portrait sketch of a mostly nude Wendy and punished Nico by forcing him to paint a portrait of Krakow, and then stayed up all night drinking wine and watching bootleg security footage of the building to see how long Wendy was there. Then he called her as soon as she left in the morning and set up an ominous dinner between him, the two of them, and whoever he chooses to bring, which will almost certainly be a catastrophe designed to punish everyone. Axe is a child. He’s broken and ruined and dangerous and he destroys everything he touches.

But at least he got to keep his paintings, I guess.

STOCK DOWN — Art, which, for this discussion, also includes pizza

Tough week for otherwise principled artists, as Axe continued his long and storied tradition of corrupting everything he claims to love. There was the aforementioned thing with Nico about doing the portrait by commission of noted weasel Todd Krakow (and, really, does anyone anywhere play a better weasel than Danny Strong?). And then, literally, on the way out the door from that discussion, he poked his head into the pizza kitchen to propose bastardizing a pizza maestro’s work — the same pizza maestro who doesn’t like delivering his pizza because it loses quality en route — by adding frozen pies and gelato and an entire empire of high-end Italian freezer stuffers, much to the delight of the chef’s cousin and business manager, Manz, played by Dominic Lombardozzi, in his ongoing quest to appear in every premium cable drama on television. I’m rooting for him. Love that guy.

Art has never won a battle with commerce on Billions. It never will. If and win Axe ruins this pizza operation, I will be inconsolable. Pizza is the one pure thing we have left in the world. We must protect it.

STOCK UP — Taylor Mason

Yes, Taylor outflanked Oscar to land the big fancy methane client for the new impact fund with Wendy. Yes, acquiring the patent and tracking down the rogue employee were brilliant Axe-like moves that negated Oscar’s attempted massive overpay Raiders-inspired punishment. Great, terrific, wonderful. None of that is why Taylor falls under Stock Up this week. The real reasons are as follows:

• Taylor did a surprisingly decent Mike Birbiglia impression while making the pitch in front of both Birbiglia’s character and the methane guy
• Taylor got to call in Hard Bob, noted zero bullshit broker, who is way up there with Chuck’s goon Karl on the list of menacing older dudes from this show I wish I could call to handle my own problems

So Taylor has that going for them, which is nice.

STOCK UP — Mafee and Ben Kim, my sweet boys of finance

We learned a couple things about Spyros this week: He’d been faking his status as a member of Mensa and his nickname at the SEC was “Roomba,” not because he cleaned up problems but because he sucked and was creepy. These double confidence blows led to a tailspin, which led to him studying for the Mensa test for real, which led to the discovery that Mafee is like a world-class genius, which led to my sweet finance boys Mafee and Ben Kim putting a whole fake test in motion so Spyros could pass and get off their backs.

I love Mafee and Ben Kim. I would watch an entire episode where they just go on vacation together and mosey around some high-end all-inclusive resort, hopelessly chatting up fellow tourists and drinking umbrella drinks and being their awkward, kindhearted selves for an hour, but in swimsuits. Mafee has suntan lotion all over his nose. Ben Kim gets giggly when he’s drunk. I can see it all now. And I want it. I could use a break from Axe and Chuck trying to destroy themselves and each other.

STOCK DOWN — Pig kidneys

Senior has problems. His kidneys are failing and no one — not even his bastards, which he denied in a furious rage and then admitted to moments later — is a match. He’s sitting at home alone and lashing out with extra cruelty at Chuck, the only person who is trying to help him, and a person he has screwed up beyond even Wendy’s help. I shouldn’t feel bad about any of this. The man is a crusty old bigoted monster whose view of the world was out-of-date 30 years before he was born. I am a little sad, though. I think it’s his way with words. I mean, his delivery of the line in that screencap up there immediately after Wendy suggested looking into the promising practice of using pig kidney… just delightful.

We must keep him alive or let him stick around as a ghost that haunts Chuck. Like, a real ghost. A Jacob Marley and Scrooge situation. But Senior is somehow both Jacob Marley and Scrooge. This makes perfect sense to me.

STOCK UP — Having a braintrust

I do not envy Axe in many ways. As I said earlier, he’s a broken little boy who wants every toy and refuses to share. He is incapable of real happiness because there’s a bottomless pit inside him that he needs to keep heaving things into in a perpetual and impotent attempt to fill it. I hope he goes to prison as soon as possible.

But, look. I would very much like to have a group of people on call who can orchestrate something like a midnight art helicopter swaperoo. I don’t see a scenario in my life where I will ever require a midnight art helicopter swaperoo. I don’t even see a scenario where I will require any kind of helicopter swaperoo at any time of day, to be honest.

It would be comforting to know I have the option, though. That’s all I’m saying.