HBO just dropped a gritty new trailer for its upcoming Perry Mason series. While the main focus is obviously Matthew Rhys as the title character, Orphan Black star Tatiana Maslany is a captivating presence as Sister Alice, the fiery, evangelical leader of the Radiant Assembly of God whose sermons are broadcast across the country, making her a powerful force to reckon with.
Judging by the trailer, Sister Alice’s church is knee-deep in city-wide corruption that only Rhys’ Mason can untangle as he navigates his way through crooked cops and systematic injustices in 1930s Los Angeles. Also, Shea Whigham shows up, and who doesn’t love Shea Whigham?
Here’s the official synopsis for Perry Mason:
1931, Los Angeles. While the rest of the country struggles through the Great Depression, this city is booming! Oil! Olympic Games! Talking Pictures! Evangelical Fervor! And a child kidnapping gone very, very wrong. Based on characters created by author Erle Stanley Gardner, this drama series follows the origins of American fiction’s most legendary criminal defense lawyer, Perry Mason. When the case of the decade breaks down his door, Mason’s relentless pursuit of the truth reveals a fractured city and just maybe, a pathway to redemption for himself.
Alongside Rhys, Maslany, and Wigham, the rest of the cast includes John Lithgow, Juliet Rylance, Chris Chalk, Shea Whigham, Stephen Root, Gayle Rankin, Nate Corddry, Veronica Falcon, Jefferson Mays, Lili Taylor, Andrew Howard, Eric Lange, and Robert Patrick.
Anybody who thought the vinyl resurgence was just a fad was mistaken: The industry has experienced a legitimate revival. As a result, music fans are interested in physical media in ways they may not have if the decades-old medium hasn’t made a comeback. That doesn’t mean everybody is listening to just their parents’ old music, though. That’s part of it, sure, thanks to rereleases that present classic albums in new ways. A vital part of the renewed vinyl wave, though, is new projects being released as records, of which there are plenty.
Whatever you might be into, each month brings a new slew of the best vinyl releases that has something for everybody. Some stand out above the rest, naturally, so check out some of the best vinyl releases of May below.
Grateful Dead — VMP Anthology: The Story Of The Grateful Dead
Vinyl Me, Please
The story of the Grateful Dead is one of music history’s finest, and it’s one Vinyl Me, Please tells with their expansive new box set. The 8-album collection includes four classic studio albums and four live records, all pressed on colored 180-gram vinyl, and includes liner notes and other goodies that will both please season Deadheads and create some new ones.
Speaking of Vinyl Me, Please, the record purveyors, have done something special: Fiona Apple’s esteemed sophomore album, When The Pawn…, never found its way onto vinyl, but is now available as an honest-to-goodness record. Apple and the Vinyl Me, Please team even worked on new artwork for the release.
Vinyl Me, Please was on fire this month. In addition to all the above, they have also dropped a deluxe 35th anniversary rerelease of Whitney Houston’s self-titled debut album. Aside from the record itself (pressed on peaches and cream vinyl), this edition comes with an exclusive 40-page hardcover book about the album.
Ariel Pink — The Doldrums, Worn Copy, and House Arrest (Reissues)
Ariel Pink
Ariel Pink is in the midst of his “Ariel Archives” series, which looks back at his career as Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti. His latest dispatch includes a trio of his finest albums, each of which have been restored from their original cassette masters.
Wild Nothing was established as a key indie act of the 2010s with Gemini, and as the record celebrates its tenth birthday, it is getting a lovely vinyl rerelease. This edition of the album is pressed on translucent sea blue vinyl and includes a limited edition silkscreened jacket, liner notes, and a bonus poster.
John Carpenter — The Thing (Reissue) and Lost Cues: The Thing
Waxwork Records
John Carpenter is one of horror’s most beloved filmmakers and composers, and one of his most storied creations, The Thing, has been honored on a pair of vinyl releases. One is a reissue of the classic score, and the other features unreleased musical cues from the film’s score.
Fall Out Boy — Believers Never Die — Greatest Hits
uDiscover Music
Fall Out Boy was one of the preeminent pop-punk groups of the 2000s, and that legacy was honored on their 2009 compilation album, Believers Never Die — Greatest Hits. Now that release has gotten a new vinyl edition (its first vinyl edition, actually), pressed on neon yellow vinyl.
Beloved in alternative rock circles, Redd Kross have only put out a handful of albums since their 1982 debut. Now, two of their ’90s releases are getting a special reissue via Jack White’s Third Man Records, which will represent the first-ever North American vinyl pressings of these two albums.
While now, in Sumney’s own words, “feels like an absolutely insane and futile time to be releasing and promoting music,” he has a tremendous new batch of it that deserves to be heard. The musician’s lush new album, Grae, is available in a couple of different black-and-white vinyl editions, both of which ought to serve the sonically rich release well.
It’s been 40 years since Joy Divison released their iconic final album, Closer, and now it’s getting a special anniversary rerelease. In addition to a new edition of the album, a trio of non-album singles — “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” “Transmission,” and “Atmosphere” — are also getting the reissue treatment, as 12-inch singles.
It has been 25 years since indie legends Yo La Tengo dropped Electr-O-Pura, and now their label home, Matador, is honoring that with a special reissue of the record. The latest release in Matador’s “Revisionist History” series, this edition of Electr-O-Pura arrives as a 2-LP set, which was cut from the album’s original master.
LeBron James has had a weird season. It started with the opulent but well-intentioned icebreaker of carting the Lakers roster to Las Vegas for pre-season workouts. There were eight new players on the team, each less mercurial than the disparate pieces James had hand-picked last season, and it was an opportunity to accelerate some chemistry between them in the most artificial and ostentatious place on earth.
James had, of course, organized everything. They would stay at the Wynn, they would train for approximately 2.5 hours every day, they would attend dinner together every night. They were told they would all individually pay their own way. It was a sumptuous trust fall and they hadn’t even signed Dwight Howard or Dion Waiters yet.
The preseason stayed strange. The Lakers played the Warriors, went to China to play the Nets right as diplomatic relations between the league and China fell apart, and then got back to California and played the Warriors three more times. They opened the season against the Clippers, because it was hard for the league to resist the lure of rekindling a western code writ large, a tangle of the two largest in the league even if that town, Los Angeles, had always been big enough for the both of them. It was home court for both, but the Clippers took it, launching immediate questions about James and the Lakers place in the West and whether they had been usurped at the top before ever getting to stake claim to that position.
The Lakers rebounded quickly and were golden through to December, with the Raptors the only ones to whip in like the Santa Anas and knock a team working to shed the inconsistent gap-year of the season before off its win streak. It wasn’t that James finally had all the pieces he wanted alongside him propelling the team to so many wins, though a happy Anthony Davis didn’t hurt, it was that his position on the floor caught up to the role he’d been assigning himself since Miami. A rose is a rose is a rose, and James, in any other position, was the person telling the entire roster exactly where they needed to be and when, but to give him the full naming rights to that power gave a new accelerant to a career many claimed to be downshifting.
It also worked in all the ways new Lakers coach Frank Vogel needed it to. James would lend his authority to the franchise no matter what, it was part of the deal — and appeal to team ownership — of his tenure in L.A. Vogel just opted to ask James to switch to point, to take control, rather than being told. It created a new kind of coachability in James even if it was primarily optics, that Vogel was getting something new out of him when in essence he was asking James to focus his energies exclusively on something he had done, gratis, all along.
But it wasn’t a divergent or a ploy, because more did come from James this season, and in entirely new ways. His assists per game climbed to a career high of 10.6 while his points per game stayed steady, on track to clock in at his career average of 27. He kept out of the paint and aimed long, full-court torpedo passes to Davis and Danny Green as they rushed to the net. He launched backward, no-look hooks to Howard, Alex Caruso, and these soaring, mid-air lobs where only when he’d gotten to the height of his jump would he swivel his head slowly to see who had stayed with him down the stretch and, with a flick of his wrist, reward them.
It is never enough for James to dominate, he has to take the action, the entire statistical category, and adjust our perspective of what’s possible — physically, analytically — through his own framing. When this season stalled out, James had helped with 50 percent of his teammates baskets, a career high that placed him first in the league overall in assists. To put it in gentle perspective, it has historically been players like John Stockton, Steve Nash and Chris Paul, pure point guards, that dole out this kind of consistent, intuitive help.
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The duality of James extends beyond his role as scorer and facilitator to the experience of watching him. He appeals to the rigid analytic set as much as the gut-check set. The new fan, fans who stubbornly insist they are over him, even those who claim to hate him, consider him overwrought and overrated, will follow his consistently improving career closely, thin-toothing it for faults and finding none. That exceptionalism has been the co-pilot driving his career is at once defining and to his detriment. What James has spent nearly two decades building is the exception. The example he works flat out to set is one of hard work, integrity and excellence, these aren’t bluffs, they are intrinsic to him as the rarity of his talent.
But the encapsulation of those ethics, the conduit for that talent and the drive that pushes it all forward again every day is singular to James. You can’t be him, but he has made it possible through his philanthropy, his athleticism, his advocacy, his professional acumen off the court, his role as a father, and any number of the other multitudes he has worked to contain to be like him, a little, in those pursuits.
There are more odious and awful underpinnings that crop up around James’s public character that have nothing to do with him and everything to do with the unrealistic expectations put on people of color who hold the space of their success. He isn’t granted the same anonymity that comes with being white and successful. He cannot slip into a shroud of invisibility and move with greater ease around a world where he will be asked, as he ascends, to explain himself less and less. His success, to many, is his qualifier and something he has to regularly account for, when it should be the other way around. That James works three times as hard as anyone around him is simultaneously an internal part of his person and a direct result of the pressure put there by a deeply racist and irrevocably damaged culture.
In his game, his shouldering the stigmas bound up in his success, James has shown he is adept at shifting between the characters both he and his career have created, but it’s impossible to delve into the scope of James’s duality without looking to where it’s most limiting.
In the constant comparisons of him to Michael Jordan, to Kobe Bryant, players who, if they had one thing in common, was the weight and scope and pressure to alter the league to better reflect them in it, we have to flatten history to make it better connect. Depth is lost. But how we pit things, place them sharply side by side, is founded in our fears, our shortcomings, our deepest and most concealed desire than it is on the logic that those two things had any one in common.
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James and Bryant overlapped. James played in the landscape Bryant had essentially terraformed to match his personality, his impulse. It was more unforgiving, repressed enough that emotions sat seething and pressurized just below the surface. Their relationship was initially established around absence. Not meeting in the Finals as they proceeded to leapfrog the other for a decade. Later, the dyad became Bryant segueing to James. Not overtly, but in how vehement his fans rejected James, refused to recant on James being anything close to what Bryant was for the Lakers. To James, this was always obvious. The goal was to shift into the last (likely) iteration of himself, rare in how singular. Lakers fans are governed by their own particular set of shifting rules, as mirage-like and hazy as golden hour falling on Sunset Boulevard like a shroud, but at some point they decided, probably when he brought them Davis, that James was theirs now. The only version. Exactly as James always meant it.
It was crystallizing and seizing, in the way explicitly violent timing always is, that James would pass Bryant’s team record, be congratulated by Bryant in a rare and increasing moment for Bryant where he seemed at ease with a career referred to in past tense, the day before Bryant would die.
James doesn’t get to have his own career with the Lakers, it became, this past winter, elegiac. But his wide-openness, his disbelief and grief in the weeks that followed, leading his peers, fans and the league in their shock and the encouragement to express it, became enough, finally and terribly, to put the comparison to rest.
With Jordan, there is no point. One’s universe was shrinking while the other’s exploded out. There was no overlap, not even in culture or league landscape. Their language — court, conversational — wholly different. There’s not going to be any gotcha or analytical basis for what is entirely feeling, preference, the blithe alignment of staking a personal claim. Demanding there be a greatest of all time is to already give up on anything that comes after.
James’s career, in the lurch of this season, has not been shortened or derailed any more than the moon will, shrouding in phases, still be capable of pulling at tides as a lucent hangnail. He will fold the strangeness of this stretch, it’s urgency, into a usable outcome, optimize the hiatus as nothing more than a deep, diaphragmatic breath before vaulting back to where he was, already in motion, eyes placidly fixed to the horizon where all the lines meet.
It was only last November when the world was introduced to “The Child” in Disney+’s The Mandalorian, but it was love at first sight. The Baby Yoda puppet has since been called “the future of Hollywood” and the $5 million it cost to make the puppet was quickly recouped in merchandise sales alone. Can I interest you in a Baby Yoda water bottle? Or a Baby Yoda tote bag? Or Baby Yoda air freshener? The reason “The Child” became such a sensation is partially due to Star Wars nostalgia, but really, it’s because he’s so freaking cute. Would the Baby Yoda craze have caught on if he looked like this, though?
DISNEY+
That nightmare comes from the latest episode of Disney Gallery: The Mandalorian, a documentary series about the making of The Mandalorian. In “Practical,” developer Jon Favreau takes us through the process of creating and designing Baby Yoda, as well as some of the too-cute and too-ugly concept designs that didn’t make the cut.
“We all, I think had a vision for what [a] bad version of [Baby Yoda] was,” Favreau said. “And what was written in [the script] was just that it was a little baby of Yoda’s species” (George Lucas is notoriously reluctant to explain Yoda’s backstory). He continued, “The look of the big ears, we had inherited that from Yoda, and I had already been preoccupied with the look of big eyes and using ears for motion because I had been working on a VR project called Gnomes and Goblins for many years. And so, the idea of the face not being that expressive, but everything was about the eyes looking at you and the ears moving, was something that I had wanted to try.” And try they did.
Here are some of the early Baby Yoda concepts, some of which “were too cute, some of them were too ugly, some of them were the wrong proportions,” Favreau said.
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Finally, there was one image, from illustrator Christian Alzmann, that caught his eye. “His eyes were a little weird and he looked a little out of it,” he said. “We found it charming and that became the rallying image that we said, this is good.” And the rest is adorable, mega-profitable history. Disney+’s The Mandalorian returns for season two in October.
Camila Cabello rose to fame when she auditioned for The X Factor and was placed alongside several other talented singers in the pop group Fifth Harmony. Cabello has since shined in her solo career, sharing sophomore record Romance at the end of last year. While the singer has been open about much of her personal life with fans and followers, Cabello has now decided to get candid about her struggle with mental health and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.
Cabello addressed her struggles with mental health in a story she wrote for the Wall Street Journal. In the article, Cabello said that while the public can see many positive aspects of her life that she shares on social media, she has been quietly struggling with “relentless” anxiety and OCD:
“Here’s what there aren’t pictures of from the last year: me crying in the car talking to my mom about how much anxiety and how many symptoms of OCD I was experiencing. My mom and me in a hotel room reading books about OCD because I was desperate for relief. Me experiencing what felt like constant, unwavering, relentless anxiety that made day-to-day life painfully hard.”
Cabello admitted that she hasn’t been open about her mental health struggles because she feared the public would change their perception of her. “I didn’t want the people who thought I was strong and capable and confident — the people who most believed in me — to find out that I felt weak,” she wrote. “The little voice in my head was telling me that if I was honest about my mental health struggle and my internal battles (i.e. being human), people would think there was something wrong with me, or that I wasn’t strong, or that I couldn’t handle things.”
The singer continued that her fight with anxiety had come to a tipping point and it was affecting her general well being. “For a long time, anxiety felt like it was robbing me of my humor, my joy, my creativity and my trust,” Cabello admitted. “But now anxiety and I are good friends. I listen to her, because I know she’s just trying to keep me safe, but I don’t give her too much attention. And I sure as hell don’t let her make any decisions.”
Cabello concluded her story by saying social media oftentimes pushes unrealistic standards, but she has since learned that there is power in prioritizing mental health. “We live in a culture that pursues an unattainable perfection,” she wrote. “Social media can make us feel like we should be as perfect as everybody else seems to be. Far from being a sign of weakness, owning our struggles and taking the steps to heal is powerful.”
Previously on Total Bellas: Brie and Bryan tried to convince Nikki to buy a $30,000 pool fence and Brie took Artem to look at $500,000 diamond rings.
Was There Anything About Wrestling On This Week’s Episode Of Total Bellas?
No, but there was a lot of Daniel Bryan, so let’s just jump into that part of the show!
Love Yurts
Just in time for next week’s proposal-and-double-pregnancy season finale, Bryan and Brie make a breakthrough with their marriage. They’ve been trying to stop growing apart and wondering what will happen to their relationship if they can’t all season, and they made so little meaningful progress at this it seemed like the reality TV version of the Danielson-Bella marriage might be too far gone. However, it turns out this wasn’t because their love was lost, but because they hadn’t consulted any shamans yet.
Brie and Bryan start their path to healing when they head off on a trip to “a place from their past,” the “wellness resort” in Sedona, Arizona, where they got married (in the season two finale of Total Divas.) So many of their interactions this season have been tense, but from the time they start heading to the resort, they seem like a sweet, granola-y couple and you’re reminded that these people genuinely like spending time together.
They visit “a Native American healer” (the first of two people in this episode the show introduces with the job title “shaman”), and with the “wellness” thing and Brie saying that Bryan “loves the Native American culture” (which one?), it seemed like this segment might take things from granola to Goop. It has some questionable, “mystical” production aspects, but the heavy meditation Brie and Bryan do with Shaman #1 gets intense and effective results.
Bryan starts crying and voicing dark thoughts that are largely bleeped out because of swearing, Brie comforts him, and the healer has him do some breathing exercises to recover. In a talking head, Bryan explains that he was in a deep trance and felt like he was observing his behavior from outside his body. I’m not sure what exactly happened here because it’s so heavily edited, but it leads to a much clearer discussion about both Bryan and Brie’s marriage and Bryan’s long struggle with depression.
At this point, I think I need to mention the other discussion about wrestling, reality TV, and mental health that’s been going on since last week as part of the fallout of Hana Kimura‘s suicide. Basically, though there are some topical similarities, there’s not much to compare. Her death brought up issues, to different degrees, with mental illness, cyberbullying, reality TV production, misogyny, racism, and celebrity culture, but only she knows why she committed suicide. As you’ll hear from people trained in suicide prevention, suicide isn’t a way to make others understand your pain and no one can control how it impacts the people who knew you. With Kimura, there is clear evidence of the harassment she was facing, but the public has almost no clues as to why she reacted to it in such a permanent way. Mental health wasn’t addressed as such on Terrace House and Hana didn’t talk about it as a public figure.
Total Bellas is much less slickly produced than Terrace House and much worse at making anything that happens on it seem real, but it’s weirdly one of the few examples of a humane depiction of mental illness in a medium known for allowing viewers to voyeuristically revel in the breakdowns of others. Daniel Bryan’s struggles with his physical and mental health on Total Bellas have sometimes been so uncomfortable because they seemed so real and so serious that they shouldn’t be watched, but they’re also not treated as a reason to grab some popcorn.
It brings to mind how Bryan’s real-life problems have been used to enhance his WWE storylines. Maybe it’s in bad taste, but the whole art form is in bad taste. And while reality TV and WWE are also both known for exploiting performers, Bryan seems to manage to escape that enough to be a part of personal stories that are actually meaningful and beneficial. (To make the Kimura connection again, she clearly did not have the ability to do that on Terrace House and she didn’t have it in a lot of ways in Stardom, if the episode of The Wrestlers about the company is anything to go by.)
Storylines about Bryan’s health create some of the best dramatic TV that Total Bellas can do, and they stand out as something clearly based in a reality in a very fake world. When Brie and Bryan turn the emotional breakdown into a marriage breakthrough, they’re talking to Shaman #2, a white lady you can tell definitely has crystals charging at home who seems to really just be a marriage counselor who does her sessions outside. It’s a setting made for TV and this specific couple, but the conversation gets into some stuff that just feels like people trying to deal with problems as they go through life. It’s also the first time this season you can tell that the Total Bellas version of this couple is also a fictionalized version of the couple that brought about the moving “Fight for your dreams, and your dreams will fight for you” part of Bryan’s return-to-the-ring speech.
Bryan is reluctant to open up to Brie about his depression because “You have enough on your plate already” (“That’s the first thing I want on my plate,” she replies.) He has a history of doing this; he brings up when three years earlier he had a “mental breakdown” and just left for Washington state for three months. There are apologies, resolutions, and reminders of what Brie and Bryan love about each other (Brie tells Bryan she loves that “You are the same to every single person”), and they go home having experienced healing in their relationship. It seems like Bryan opening up about what he’s going through finally removes that block they’ve had when they’ve tried to talk about other issues with their family and lifestyle this season.
Though it’s a happy ending to this one of this episode’s plots and one of this season’s subplots, it’s the type of ending that shows the characters ready to face more difficulties together, rather than an end to difficulty. Despite all the heavy editing and scripting that makes much of Total Bellas feel so artificial, Bryan’s mental illness is presented in a way that feels true to life and not like a conflict that should be solved at some point on the show. It’s shockingly responsible and a much weirder phenomenon in reality TV history than John Cena’s house rules.
From Russia With Love
The lighter storyline this week focused on those two crazy thirty-somethings in love, Artem and Nikki, as they make long strides down the path to marriage. The Bellas and Artem are going to France for a wine-related business trip and Artem reveals that his parents will come over from Russia to meet them. For Nikki, this kicks off an attempt to learn a little more about the Russian language and culture. She is not good at any of it, but Artem thinks all her failures are super endearing, so it still basically works out. (I am concerned that it seems like she’s given up on pronouncing her future in-laws’ last name though.)
Meanwhile, Brie and Kathy, the more observant women in the family, immediately clock that Artem inviting his parents means a proposal is imminent. I think Brie not realizing that Artem was planning to propose soon when it seemed like she was encouraging him to do that exact thing last week and even TOOK HIM TO A RING STORE is a continuity error, but she and Kathy not being sure how Nikki will react makes sense. If I didn’t know from real life she said yes, I would be unsure too because we’ve seen her flip flop so much on major life decisions this season.
Artem, who also got a choreography gig this week and generally seems very happy and confident, eventually confesses to Brie that he bought one of those rings and he did invite his parents to France because he’s going to propose. This and all the other Artem/Nikki scenes don’t make up much of a subplot this week, but they do set up next week’s proposal in France to be romantic and maybe a little suspenseful, but mostly romantic.
Bella Lines Of The Week
Brie describing Artem in the ring store to her mom: “He was sweating balls. He was like ‘I can’t afford this shit.’” I don’t think he said those exact words?
Nikki and Artem babysit Birdie, which puts Nikki in a positive headspace about raising kids with Artem in the future. Then she asks Birdie if she thinks she would be a good mom, and the angelic toddler replies, “Um, you would be an alright mom.”
David Guetta has performed all over the world, captivating some of the largest and most rambunctious audiences that any musician is capable of pulling. It’s his comfort zone, the perch from which he’s established himself as perhaps the most well-known DJ on earth. The issue is that those sorts of performances can’t happen right now, as shows around the world are on an indefinite hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
That doesn’t mean Guetta has to stop performing, he just needs to find outside-the-box ways to do what he does best. So earlier this month, Guetta put on a show in Miami under radically different circumstances than usual — he set up poolside between a pair of buildings and performed for 90 minutes, with people taking to their balconies and computers to enjoy his show. And even he, a master showman, needed some time to get used to his new surroundings.
“I was super nervous because it’s the first time that I’m not performing in front of a crowd,” Guetta told Uproxx over the phone. “But actually, my idea was to do it in the middle of towers so that people could be on their balconies. And I also had screens, and people could interact with me on Zoom.”
Guetta’s goal wasn’t just to perform. He wanted to use music as a way to fundraise for those struggling during the COVID-19 pandemic, and with his show in Miami, he was able to raise $750,000 for charity. For the first few weeks of quarantine, Guetta admitted that he spent a whole lot of time in thought. He’s used to life on the road, with airports and hotels as constant in his life as studios and packed venues.
This, in a bit of news that will excite fans, gave him the opportunity to make new music, saying “I’ve made more music than I don’t even know since how long. It’s just the fact that it’s the time and also the focus, there was nothing else, no social activities, no nothing. I realized how much it makes me happy to focus on music only.”
But even beyond music, Guetta took some time to think about his life, the platform he has, and how he wants to do more for those in need. As such, it took 10 days to throw together the Miami event. While on the makeshift stage, Guetta held up a David Beckham shirt. A football fan and a Parisian, Guetta’s nod to Beckham — a member of the ownership group of MLS expansion side Inter Miami CF — caught the former PSG player’s eye.
As a result, Beckham and Guetta spoke, and on Saturday, Guetta will team up with Major League Soccer and Heineken to put on a show in New York City to raise money for the Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York City, Feeding America, the World Health Organization, and Fondation Hôpitaux de Paris — Hôpitaux de France. The 90-minute show will kick off at 7 p.m. on Saturday, May 30, following the the city’s daily clap for frontline healthcare workers.
It will be broadcast on a host of mediums: Guetta’ Guetta’s Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Twitch, VK, and TikTok pages, along with MLS’ Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube channels and the league’s website. And like his Miami show, the NYC performance will feature the chance for fans to interact with Guetta via Zoom.
“The location that we’re doing this in New York is really crazy,” Guetta said. “So it’s going to be very special. But yeah, it’s a different approach, but now, I’m less nervous because I know I can really bring a vibe and atmosphere, and that’s what was scaring me. But now I’ve done it, so I know I can do it.”
The location is a surprise — Guetta says it’s in an attempt to keep people from gathering and violating social distancing recommendations. It’s hardly the only surprise Guetta has up his sleeve, as he’s promising to lead off his set with a tribute to his host city.
“I thought it was cool to be in such as special city,” Guetta said. “Since I was a kid, it’s a city that made me dream and I wanted to open the show with a homage to the city, so I prepared a special remakes that I’m going to use only for this occasion.”
New York City has been hit particularly hard by the virus, as it earned the unfortunate distinction of being the global epicenter of the pandemic for a spell. Normalcy, to whatever extent it is possible following a traumatic event that touched every corner of our planet, is some time away, a harsh, sobering reality for all of us as we count down the days until a vaccine is found.
In the meantime, we can all find little things that help us forget about the current situation and experience an element of joy. Music is a constant, even if performers who want to put on shows are forced to find unique ways to accomplish that goal. Sports, slowly but surely, are returning — soccer leagues in Europe in particular are making their way back onto the pitch, and stateside, leagues like MLS and NWSL are inching closer and closer to their returns. In Guetta’s eyes, getting to sit at the intersection of those two things, even for a night, has the potential to give people something that everyone needs right now.
“The connection is not so obvious between football and music,” Guetta said. “I come from Europe, and the soccer is really a religion where I come from. And I think that sports and music is what brings people together and the world is in so much need of unity right now. So this is perfect.”
David Guetta is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
The NBA is currently exploring its options for resuming the season, with Disney World in Orlando the presumptive choice as a bubble location that, depending on the scenario that wins out, would host either an abbreviated season or a direct jump into the playoffs. The specifics still haven’t been ironed out.
There are some, of course, who aren’t too thrilled about these options. Damian Lillard, for instance, said earlier this week that he isn’t interested in participating in a restart unless the Blazers have a legitimate chance at the postseason, given the multiple risks involved.
That statement drew the ire of one member of the Get Up crew. ESPN football analyst Dan Orlovsky criticized Lillard for his stance, calling him a “spoiled and entitled brat.”
Lillard obviously wasn’t going to sit this one out, and on Thursday night, he tweeted this response to Orlovsky.
Entitled and spoiled? Mf watch yo mouth. My background , family, and character couldn’t be further FROM entitled and spoiled. I said what I said! https://t.co/yM30aU5xl2
Given that Lillard is one of the hardest-working and most principled players around the league, not to mention the large sums of his own personal money he’s donated to COVID-19 relief for Blazers workers, Orlovsky’s comments hardly justified a response to begin with. But it bears mentioned that Get Up guests Domonique Foxworth and Doris Burke jumped to his defense immediately after Orlovsky’s insensitive comments, and after Lillard responded, Orlovsky appeared to backtrack on his criticism.
No you’re right I was wrong to use that phrase at the end. That’s my bad. My comment started with saying I hope we all realize nothing is meaningless anymore. And if it’s about protecting loved ones-100%. I shouldn’t have said entitled or brat and that’s on me and my bad.
Go back on TV w @realskipbayless and tell all those viewers that. And tell skip I can answer his question as well “what have I done” since y’all got so much to say. And I don’t know either one of y’all. https://t.co/4EPHPyEnaB
To be clear, any player who doesn’t wish to put themselves or their family at risk is well within their right. Should the NBA return with a normal postseason after only 70 games played, the Blazers would almost certainly miss out. Players sit out all the time when squads are mathematically eliminated from the playoffs, and considering we live in the midst of a pandemic, Lillard’s position makes all the sense in the world.
Even though governments both local and foreign are beginning to loosen restrictions, many world citizens are still doing their best to quarantine during the COVID-19 pandemic. That apparently includes pro wrestling fans, as well. Despite Raw and Smackdown’s ratings cratering throughout the pandemic, and AEW Dynamite and NXT continuing to battle back and forth for ratings supremacy, when it comes to live pay-per-view events, wrestling fans are apparently showing up en masse.
In the latest edition of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter, Dave Meltzer reports that AEW’s latest pay-per-view, Double Or Nothing, is on track to be the highest-selling event in the nascent company’s history. Current data from B/R Live and FITE TV account for between 100,000-110,000 buys, which is a 10 to 15 percent increase from what AEW Revolution did in February — itself a 10 percent increase from AEW Full Gear last November.
Additionally, Meltzer speculates that the final tally could be somewhere near 120,000 buys, which would make Double Or Nothing 2020 the biggest pay-per-view in AEW history, dethroning Double Or Nothing 2019. The final numbers won’t come in for a few months, though, as Meltzer explains:
Traditional cable buys are harder, and take three months to get an accurate number although estimates are usually there within a few days. There’s also the aspect that streaming buys as a general rule over the past year are increasing at a higher level than cable buys, which are decreasing. So streaming buys both in the U.S. and overseas being the biggest in company history does not necessarily mean cable numbers will follow suit.”
Still, AEW has to be happy with Double Or Nothing’s success. Will the pattern continue with All Out 2020? We’ll find out after September 5.
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