Although some of the proposed matchups for the Instagram hits battle series Verzuz have landed with more of a thud than a bang, every so often someone suggests a contest that makes perfect sense. For instance, on the latest episode of N.O.R.E.’s Drink Champs podcast, the hosts asked guest DMX who he’d want to trade hits with on Instagram and X set his sights high: “Jay.”
Yes, that’s “Jay” as in “Jay-Z,” with whom DMX has had a long, sometimes fraught but mostly fruitful relationship. The two New York rappers rose to prominence in the late ’90s as two of the main draws in hip-hop at the time. They even planned to become a group at one time along with Ja Rule; all three rappers shared the cover of XXL magazine’s June 1999 issue titled “Murder Inc.” Jay and DMX collaborated on numerous songs around the time and even appeared in a scene in the documentary Backstage freestyling during their 1999 Hard Knock Life tour.
Whle Verzuz has been proposed as an arena for any classic rap acts to finally hash out their differences, its creators Swizz Beats and Timbaland, as well as many of its participants, view it as more of a celebration of history, legacy, and culture. The next battle takes place Friday, May 8, between Jill Scott and Erykah Badu. Check out our post for more info.
Last week, Diet Cig revealed Do You Ever Wonder About Me?, the duo’s third full-length album and their most cohesive. Anchored by Alex Luciano’s infectious vocal stylings and Noah Bauman’s powerful percussion, the duo tears through ten power-pop tracks that center around introspection in the wake of lost love. But somehow, Diet Cig manages to fill Do You Ever Wonder About Me? with enough love itself to make you feel warm while listening.
In celebration of the new album, Luciano and Bauman sat down to talk Lorde, burritos, and Las Vegas in the latest Indie Mixtape 20.
What are four words you would use to describe your music?
Fun, cathartic, punk, personal.
It’s 2050 and the world hasn’t ended and people are still listening to your music. How would you like it to be remembered?
Relatable tunes that still make people feel less alone.
What’s your favorite city in the world to perform?
A big bud press jumpsuit! I wear them on stage sometimes but we just got custom ones for tour! Makes it easy to pick out your outfit when theres only one piece, and no wardrobe malfunctions.
Who’s your favorite person to follow on Twitter and/or Instagram?
Right now I love @grossypelosi on instagram, the best cooking content!
What’s your most frequently played song in the van on tour?
“Can you see the live chat after the live stream youtube” lol we just did our livestream and I wanted to look at what people were saying in the chat afterwards!
Florence Pugh made her professional acting debut in 2014. Her breakout role, in period-piece Lady Macbeth, came two years later; and by 2020, she was an Oscar nominee and future-Marvel Cinematic Universe star. She would be a current-Marvel Cinematic Universe star, if Black Widow‘s release hadn’t been pushed back from May 1 to November 6, due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. In a new interview with Elle UK, Pugh discussed her choice to join the MCU after mostly starring in low-budget indies.
“When you think of Marvel, it’s big and daunting. Especially being a relatively small actor to look at it and go, ‘Oh! I’m going to be a part of this,’ that’s a big decision,” she said. Pugh was nervous to make her San Diego Comic-Con debut (“I was scared because my Russian accent was going to be out there and I didn’t know what it sounded like”), but it helped that Scarlett Johansson, who’s been doing this for years, was also anxious:
“We both stood there and I instantly had clammy, sweaty hands. Scarlett gave me her hand and we squeezed each other, and she also had clammy hands! And then I was like, oh, this never gets old. This is just as powerful [for you] and you’re their legend.”
Comic-Con was an odd experience for Pugh (it’s odd for everyone, tbh), but it wasn’t as “so amazing, so strange, so weird” as the Oscars, which she attended for the first time this year. The Little Women actress almost had a potential-viral moment when “everyone stood up to applaud Martin Scorsese” and she had “just got out a bag of M&Ms. As we all got up, a camera popped right in my face and I was waving this bag of M&Ms about. So I just had to drop it… on the floor. I thought, I can’t be the girl who’s eating M&Ms while giving Martin a standing ovation.” You can, Pugh. You can. What do you think the first “M” in M&Ms stands for? (If it’s anything other than “Marty,” please don’t correct me.)
Megan Thee Stallion is only 25 years old, but already, she has achieved what is a lifelong dream for many artists: She collaborated with Beyonce, who hopped on a new remix of “Savage.” A song with Beyonce is tough to follow, but there’s one superstar artist who Megan would also be thrilled to make music with.
Megan was asked how she tops working with Beyonce in a recent interview, and she responded, “I’m good, I don’t need anyone else to collab with. I already collabed with Nicki and I’ve collabed with Beyonce, my life is made — bye, thank you. Thank you, everybody!” When asked about possibly working with Rihanna, though, she offered, “Rihanna is that girl, and I always wear Fenty, so… Oh my God, that would blow my mind! If I could collab with Rihanna, I would honestly be super happy.”
She also broke down how she came to work with Beyonce, saying, “I was like, ‘God? Is this real?’ Like, we really did it! But shout out to Beyonce, like, thank you so much! Roc Nation is my management, so somebody from my team called me like, ‘Hey, Beyonce wants to do a ‘Savage’ remix,’ and I’m like, ‘Shut up — y’all are lyin’!’ They’re like, ‘Seriously, go record a new verse.’ I didn’t hear the song again until the week after that. When I heard it, I was like, ‘This is really Beyonce! Like… this is really Beyonce. Do y’all know that this is really Beyonce?!’”
There were actually rumors in 2019 that Megan and Rihanna were working together, but Rihanna said that story was “a lie.”
While a Rihanna collab is something potentially on the horizon, Megan has another big meet-up that’s out right now: Diplo’s Major Lazer has offered their own remix of “Savage,” which infuses more of an electronic house influence into the track. Give that a listen below.
El-P stays making moves. Even with the release of Run The Jewels 4 about as imminent as it gets without an official release date, the man named El Producto still found time to score the upcoming Capone biopic starring Tom Hardy. With the film releasing in a little less than a week, El-P shared some news about his score for it, saying that it’s coming soon in a recent tweet teasing its song titles.
Capone, which is directed and written by Chronicle director Josh Trank, is just the latest film to get a score composed by El-P. In March 2018, El-P shared the full version of his rejected score for Blade Runner 2049 on Twitter.
But El-P’s day job is still pumping out jams as part of Run The Jewels with Killer Mike. The duo recently released the video for the lead single from their upcoming fourth album “Ooh La La” and teased a song called “The Yankee And The Brave” on Instagram. Meanwhile, El-P has kept busy waiting for sample clearances to finish the project by starting a podcast about movies with his wife, comedian Emily Panic. That leaves plenty of Run The Jewels-related content for fans to enjoy while they wait for the album to drop.
Welcome to another installment of Ask A Music Critic! And thanks to everyone who has sent me questions. Please keep them coming at [email protected].
What are the best album-opening lyrics ever? — Andrew from Chicago
Great question, Andrew! And I appreciate your pithiness. We might not have much time, so let’s get right to the point.
I’ve actually given this one a lot of thought over the years. What is it exactly that makes an album-opening lyric great? I feel like it comes down to the following criteria:
1) It must be implanted permanently on your brain. This is a given.
2) It must exist on a classic album. This is also a given. (Well, maybe this one is less of a given. But I think it will make more sense after I tell you the other criteria.)
3) It must be an actual good lyric. Many great albums have classic opening lines that aren’t actually very good. This is true of pretty much every Led Zeppelin LP, for instance. (The exception is “Immigrant Song” from Led Zeppelin III, which qualifies as stupid good: “We come from the land of the ice and snow / From the midnight sun, where the hot springs flow / The hammer of the gods.”)
4) It must set the tone from what is to come, and immediately make it clear that what you’re about to hear is a masterpiece. A mission statement, in other words.
With those four points in mind, here are my top five best album-opening lyrics.
5. “I’m a street walking cheetah / with a heart full of napalm” — The Stooges, “Search And Destroy,” Raw Power.
Probably the most Iggy Pop lyric of all-time, from the Stooges’ best album. It’s impossible to stop listening after hearing that line.
4. “I am an American aquarium drinker / I assassin down the avenue” — Wilco, “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart,” Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.
What does it mean? I have no clue. Is it evocative? Absolutely! Also, it appears that I have an affinity for album-opening lyrics that start with “I am.”
3. “Lights out tonight, trouble in the heartland / got a head-on collision, smashing in my guts, man” – Bruce Springsteen, “Badlands,” Darkness On The Edge Of Town.
You remember the album before this, where Bruce was singing epic, fanciful songs where kids flash guitars like switchblades? Well, dreamtime is over. Welcome to Bruce’s nightmare. With this lyric, you’re in the middle of it immediately.
2. “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine” — Patti Smith, “Gloria: In Excelsis Deo,” Horses.
This isn’t just a brilliant album opener, it reads like the first line of a classic novel. An ideal tone-setter for perhaps the defining “literary” rock album.
1. “Teenage angst has paid off well / now I’m bored and old” — Nirvana, “Serve The Servants,” In Utero.
Funny, sad, self-referential, self-mocking, autobiographical, media-baiting, mythical, anti-mythical. For me, no other album-opening lyric comes close.
Let’s say that a long-running, famous artist has been in a pronounced skid. Their last album definitely wasn’t great or well-received, and maybe that’s one of a few in a row that trended worryingly downward. It’s now possible for this artist to make a Competence Album. Not quite the Late-Era Classic, but proof that the artist can still sound like themselves. It’s enjoyable but usually kind of a second or third tier album. Examples include Pearl Jam’s self-titled, Interpol’s El Pintor, Weezer’s Everything Will Be Alright In The End, Oceania by The Smashing Pumpkins, and R.E.M.’s Accelerate. What are some other examples? — Blake from Cincinnati
My goodness, Blake. I feel like another music critic just hijacked this column. Maybe I should be the one asking you questions. Here’s my first one: Can I steal this idea for myself?
You have correctly identified a common phenomenon for legacy acts. We’re all familiar with the Good-Bad Album, which is the post-peak effort that is deeply flawed in a profoundly interesting way, illuminating how and why that act’s classic work is great by offering a less-than-great contrast. And then there’s the rare but oft-discussed Late Career Masterpiece, the unicorn release that only a precious few legacy acts ever achieve.
Meanwhile a Competence Album is a far more common occurrence. Like you said, this is where you do that thing you do in a way that displays to your fanbase that you “still have it,” though let’s be real you don’t still have it that much. Most legacy bands ride out the rest of their careers making albums like this. U2, for instance, has been doing it for 20 years, since 2000’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind.
Along with the examples you already mentioned, I feel like special mention must be made of Steel Wheels by The Rolling Stones, which is among the earliest instances of a Competence Album. Steel Wheels was accompanied by a massive tour in 1989, the Stones’ first such campaign in several years, and was generally regarded as their “pretty good and solidly professional” comeback after two misfires, 1983’s Undercover and 1986’s Dirty Work. (Though, in retrospect, those two albums are more fun to revisit than Steel Wheels.) That same year, Neil Young put out Freedom, his first album since the ’70s that seemed most reminiscent of his ’70s albums after an odd and misspent period in the ’80s. Actually, Freedom might be slightly too good for a Competence Album, given that it includes one of his most famous songs, “Rockin’ In The Free World.” Though I’m not sure it quite deserves to be considered a Late Career Masterpiece. (Neil made two of those, Ragged Glory and Harvest Moon, soon after Freedom.)
Do we need to make up another archetype here? Perhaps a “Rolling Stone 4-star Semi-Classic”? Give me another idea I can steal, Blake.
What’s the best album by a band that had been together at least 25 years at the point of release? — Tom from Minneapolis
Wow, lots of questions about oldsters this column. I get it — we’re all worried about our elders in these trying times.
It’s interesting that you specified band here, because I think it’s much harder for a band to put out something really great later in their career than it is for a solo artist. Just keeping a band together for more than 25 years is an accomplishment. As we just discussed, merely receiving competence from our aging bands seems like the best we can expect. However, there are examples of bands putting out really excellent LPs well into their advanced years. In fact, more than I expected before I started brainstorming.
The most recent to pull it off is Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds, who might very well be the grand champions of late-career masterworks. In 2019, they put out the luminous Ghosteen, which arrived 35 years after the band’s 1984 debut, From Her To Eternity. (You could also count two other Nick Cave albums from the 2010s, 2013’s Push The Sky Away and 2016’s Skeleton Tree.) Another band that performed strong in their later years was Rush, which delivered two later-career gems, 2007’s Snakes And Arrows and 2012’s Clockwork Angels, 33 and 38 years respectively after the band’s 1974 self-titled debut. And then there’s Yo La Tengo, who put out the strangely beautiful There’s A Riot Goin’ On in 2018, 32 years after the release of their 1986 debut, Ride The Tiger.
If I had to pick the best record out of that bunch, I’d probably go with one of the Nick Cave albums. But in terms of my favorite, I’m going with something totally disreputable: Pink Floyd’s The Division Bell, released 27 years after their debut. Yes, I know Roger Waters was long gone by then. And, sure, that album is more remembered for the massive tour that followed. But as a sucker for David Gilmour guitar tones, I can’t resist “High Hopes.” This album is underrated, I’m telling you! Brilliant competence!
This seems fairly prescient with The Last Dance — there is a huge discrepancy between what musicians can recall and what athletes can about their shows and games, respectively. Michael Jordan is able to essentially give play-by-play of fairly obscure games from early in his career and then of course continues to do this throughout the documentary. I’ve seen this with baseball players and football players, too. Yet I’ve read about musicians saying that shows blend together and they can’t recall set lists and shows. Why does this disconnect exist? — Andrew from Milwaukee
Woody Harrelson’s got a bit of a reputation… as a stoner. He loves weed, and although he did quit the stuff in 2017, the Venom: Let Their Be Carnage star admitted to having a difficult time telling Willie Nelson the bad news. By 2019, Harrelson was back to smoking weed after he ran into Nelson, which was probably meant to be. Harrelson’s played a stoner in multiple projects (including alongside Matthew McConaughey in the far-too literally titled Stoner, Dude) and on SNL, where (in a different sketch) he played a football coach to Pete Davidson. Now these two will play stoners together.
At least, they’re both voicing stoner characters in an adult animated series called The Freak Brothers, also co-starring Tiffany Haddish and John Goodman. The project (without casting details) was actually announced during San Diego Comic-Con 2019 as an (updated) adaptation of The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers underground comic (created by Gilbert Shelton) that first surfaced in 1968. Three stoner brothers, obviously, are the “freaks,” and Haddish will voice their ornery cat as they barrel through San Francisco, looking for their next high.
As one can imagine, these roles seem tailor made for both Harrelson and Davidson (who plays a weed-loving character with a history much like his own in Judd Apatow’s upcoming VOD release, The King Of Staten Island). And John Goodman isn’t exactly a stranger to that vibe either, as The Big Lebowski fans know. However, Harrelson’s the co-star who’s shouting this news from the Instagram rooftops.
“I’m really psyched to be a part of this legendary comic @TheFreakBrothers,” the True Detective actor wrote. “I don’t know why, but this humor seems to be right up my alley.” The series doesn’t have a TV home yet, but it does have a sneak peak already, and oh boy, this is definitely tweaked for 2020. The brothers and their cat apparently crashed out for 50 years after smoking a genetically-enhanced supply. This looks nuts (not only is there the weed factor, but the brothers have infiltrated the Oval Office), but a streaming service just might pick it up soon.
With no basketball going on right now, fans of the sport are all-in on The Last Dance, ESPN’s 10-part docuseries on the 1997-98 Chicago Bulls that doubles as a look back on Michael Jordan’s tenure with the franchise. One day after that wraps up, hoops fans will get the chance to dive into a new series revolving around the end of Donald Sterling’s tenure as the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers.
Blackballed makes its debut on May 18. Directed by Michael Jacobs and centered on a five-day stretch that featured the unearthing of racist comments from Sterling and the response by Clippers’ players and coaches, it will be the latest program on mobile streaming medium Quibi.
A new trailer for the program — one that highlights those who will appear on Blackballed in some form or fashion — debuted on Thursday morning. You can watch it right here.
The Sterling saga has been the source of intrigue in recent months as ESPN debuted a 30 for 30 podcast called The Sterling Affair last August. As a refresher, following TMZ’s reveal of the aforementioned comments and Clippers players expressing their disgust with Sterling, NBA commissioner Adam Silver levied the harshest punishment against an owner in league history, banning Sterling for life and fining him $2.5 million. Soon after, Sterling sold the Clippers to Steve Ballmer, who still owns the franchise to this day.
The Seinfeld series finale was seen by 76 million viewers, meaning roughly 41 percent of all households with television sets in the United States at the time tuned in to watch Jerry, Elaine, George, and Kramer get thrown in jail. That series-capping plot point was a huge secret, so much so that Jason Alexander was offered a bribe to leak the finale.
By his own publicist.
“My own publicist — I don’t know if this came for you, too — my publicist was asking me if I was willing to leak out some secrets for money,” the actor told Julia Louis-Dreyfus during a virtual reunion this week. “And I went, ‘They’ll kill us!’ How can you do that?” When the Emmy-winning Veep actress said she hoped the publicist was fired, Alexander replied, “No, I gave him a raise.” This probably says more about me than anything, but I’m imagining Alexander’s publicist as Dunston, the titular star of orangutan-comedy Dunston Checks In (was the bribe in dollars or bananas, who’s to say?). Or maybe I’m just looking for an excuse to re-watch Dunston Checks In? Probably that.
Louis-Dreyfus and Alexander reunited to raise money for Direct Relief, which helps healthcare workers on the front lines. You can watch the video below, and donate here.
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