Month: January 2021

Today (January 18) is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and as a result, the civil rights leader has been trending on Twitter all day. As part of that, folks in the music world have taken time to honor the late hero.

Lil Wayne, for example, wrote, “Because he had a dream I am able to live out my dreams. I am forever mindful. Forever grateful. Because he had a dream I’ll never stop dreaming and dreams are forever. King. Forever.” Ice T also tweeted, “Martin Luther King Jr. stood for equality, unity and EVERYTHING we are STILL trying to achieve in America… And they killed him. Let that sink in today..”

The Recording Academy noted that Dr. King is actually a Grammy Award winner, as he posthumously took home Best Spoken Word Recording trophy in 1971 for “Why I Oppose The War In Vietnam.”

Freddie Gibbs also came through with a photo of King sticking up the middle finger and captioned it simply, “Mood.”

Although not music-related, also noteworthy is a tweet from King’s son, Martin Luther King III. He shared a photo of himself with his father and wrote, “My father’s dream is not just a speech he gave or an idyllic view of what could be. My father’s dream is something we must all choose each and every day to work towards. Together, we are all my father’s legacy.”

Check out some more tweets about King from musicians below.

The online fallout from the failed MAGA coup attempt in Washington earlier in the month has cost Donald Trump his Twitter account and many of his followers their favorite social media site. And now Tim Cook has explained in more detail why Parler was banned from his company’s app store in the first place.

Trump himself never officially joined the platform, even after Twitter deactivated his account and permanently banned him. But the social media site was extremely popular with Trump supporters, and its user base swelled in the aftermath of Trump losing the election in November. As the Apple CEO explained in an interview with Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday, Apple’s decision to remove Parler from its app store was a fairly easy one to make in the aftermath of the insurrection in Washington because of the role it played in organizing its users to carry out the coup attempt.

During the interview, Cook called the events in Washington that left five people dead “one of the saddest moments of my life seeing an attack on our Capitol, an attack on our democracy.”

“I felt like I was in some sort of alternate reality to be honest with you,” he said. “This could not be happening.”

Parler’s ban came days after that attack, and 24 hours after Apple warned the company in a letter that it needed to show it had implemented content moderation to limit inciting violence.

“We’re always trying to do the right thing,” Cook said before noting that Apple is not the only arbiter of content online. But to be in their app store, Cook argued that there are certain safety standards they ask millions of other apps to follow.

“We obviously don’t control what’s on the internet but we’ve never viewed that our platform should be a simple replication of the internet,” Cook said. “We have rules and regulations and we just ask that people abide by those.”

Cook said it was clear Parler needed to go after it played a very obvious role in the “incitement to violence” in Washington.

“We don’t consider that free speech,” he said. “And incitement to violence has an intersection.”

Cook also made a point to note that Parler was not permanently banned, making it clear that if the company were to actually moderate content to limit hate speech and threats of violence, they would reconsider adding them back to the store.

“We’ve only suspended them Chris,” Cook said. “If they get their moderation together they would be back on there.”

The larger problem for Parler right now, however, is that they have nowhere to exist online. Amazon ending its association with the company means the site is offline with nowhere to put its data, even if it could get back into mobile stores and find new users.

Donald Trump appeared at Mount Rushmore in the middle of a pandemic last year for a Fourth of July celebration that, of course, doubled as a campaign stop in his attempt to win a second term as president. Trump didn’t win the election, but back in July he did make a bold declaration that he would create a “garden” of statues celebrating America at Mount Rushmore.

Fast-forward past a months-long attempt to undo that election and a deadly attempt by his supporters to overthrow the American government and we are finally reaching the end of Trump’s time in office. But before he goes, Trump made good on that promise to make a very bizarre statuary garden featuring an extremely dissonant set of names.

According to the executive order, America is under attack by “dangerous anti-American extremism,” though it was not made clear if it’s Trump’s own MAGA coup attempt he helped incite at the capitol a fortnight ago. In response to that perceived threat, Trump says the “National Garden Of American Heroes” will fight that by giving artists a lot of sculpting work in the years to come.

The National Garden is America’s answer to this reckless attempt to erase our heroes, values, and entire way of life. On its grounds, the devastation and discord of the moment will be overcome with abiding love of country and lasting patriotism. This is the American way. When the forces of anti-Americanism have sought to burn, tear down, and destroy, patriots have built, rebuilt, and lifted up. That is our history. America responded to the razing of the White House by building it back in the same place with unbroken resolve, to the murders of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr., with a national temple and the Stone of Hope, and to the terrorism of 9/11 with a new Freedom Tower. In keeping with this tradition, America is responding to the tragic toppling of monuments to our founding generation and the giants of our past by commencing a new national project for their restoration, veneration, and celebration.

This makes it clear that the garden is not a response to the failed MAGA coup attempt he incited, but instead the removal of confederate monuments in recent months, a sticking point for Trump and his followers who seem intent to celebrate another failed insurrection. But disturbing as that may be, the sheer number of statues and the weirdness of them all together in the same place is what many focused on when the names were released.

For the record, here is the full list as put together in the executive order:

Ansel Adams, John Adams, Samuel Adams, Muhammad Ali, Luis Walter Alvarez, Susan B. Anthony, Hannah Arendt, Louis Armstrong, Neil Armstrong, Crispus Attucks, John James Audubon, Lauren Bacall, Clara Barton, Todd Beamer, Alexander Graham Bell, Roy Benavidez, Ingrid Bergman, Irving Berlin, Humphrey Bogart, Daniel Boone, Norman Borlaug, William Bradford, Herb Brooks, Kobe Bryant, William F. Buckley, Jr., Sitting Bull, Frank Capra, Andrew Carnegie, Charles Carroll, John Carroll, George Washington Carver, Johnny Cash, Joshua Chamberlain, Whittaker Chambers, Johnny “Appleseed” Chapman, Ray Charles, Julia Child, Gordon Chung-Hoon, William Clark, Henry Clay, Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), Roberto Clemente, Grover Cleveland, Red Cloud, William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody, Nat King Cole, Samuel Colt, Christopher Columbus, Calvin Coolidge, James Fenimore Cooper, Davy Crockett, Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., Miles Davis, Dorothy Day, Joseph H. De Castro, Emily Dickinson, Walt Disney, William “Wild Bill” Donovan, Jimmy Doolittle, Desmond Doss, Frederick Douglass, Herbert Henry Dow, Katharine Drexel, Peter Drucker, Amelia Earhart, Thomas Edison, Jonathan Edwards, Albert Einstein, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Duke Ellington, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Medgar Evers, David Farragut, the Marquis de La Fayette, Mary Fields, Henry Ford, George Fox, Aretha Franklin, Benjamin Franklin, Milton Friedman, Robert Frost, Gabby Gabreski, Bernardo de Gálvez, Lou Gehrig, Theodor Seuss Geisel, Cass Gilbert, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, John Glenn, Barry Goldwater, Samuel Gompers, Alexander Goode, Carl Gorman, Billy Graham, Ulysses S. Grant, Nellie Gray, Nathanael Greene, Woody Guthrie, Nathan Hale, William Frederick “Bull” Halsey, Jr., Alexander Hamilton, Ira Hayes, Hans Christian Heg, Ernest Hemingway, Patrick Henry, Charlton Heston, Alfred Hitchcock, Billie Holiday, Bob Hope, Johns Hopkins, Grace Hopper, Sam Houston, Whitney Houston, Julia Ward Howe, Edwin Hubble, Daniel Inouye, Andrew Jackson, Robert H. Jackson, Mary Jackson, John Jay, Thomas Jefferson, Steve Jobs, Katherine Johnson, Barbara Jordan, Chief Joseph, Elia Kazan, Helen Keller, John F. Kennedy, Francis Scott Key, Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King, Jr., Russell Kirk, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Henry Knox, Tadeusz Kościuszko, Harper Lee, Pierre Charles L’Enfant, Meriwether Lewis, Abraham Lincoln, Vince Lombardi, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Clare Boothe Luce, Douglas MacArthur, Dolley Madison, James Madison, George Marshall, Thurgood Marshall, William Mayo, Christa McAuliffe, William McKinley, Louise McManus, Herman Melville, Thomas Merton, George P. Mitchell, Maria Mitchell, William “Billy” Mitchell, Samuel Morse, Lucretia Mott, John Muir, Audie Murphy, Edward Murrow, John Neumann, Annie Oakley, Jesse Owens, Rosa Parks, George S. Patton, Jr., Charles Willson Peale, William Penn, Oliver Hazard Perry, John J. Pershing, Edgar Allan Poe, Clark Poling, John Russell Pope, Elvis Presley, Jeannette Rankin, Ronald Reagan, Walter Reed, William Rehnquist, Paul Revere, Henry Hobson Richardson, Hyman Rickover, Sally Ride, Matthew Ridgway, Jackie Robinson, Norman Rockwell, Caesar Rodney, Eleanor Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, Betsy Ross, Babe Ruth, Sacagawea, Jonas Salk, John Singer Sargent, Antonin Scalia, Norman Schwarzkopf, Junípero Serra, Elizabeth Ann Seton, Robert Gould Shaw, Fulton Sheen, Alan Shepard, Frank Sinatra, Margaret Chase Smith, Bessie Smith, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Jimmy Stewart, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Gilbert Stuart, Anne Sullivan, William Howard Taft, Maria Tallchief, Maxwell Taylor, Tecumseh, Kateri Tekakwitha, Shirley Temple, Nikola Tesla, Jefferson Thomas, Henry David Thoreau, Jim Thorpe, Augustus Tolton, Alex Trebek, Harry S. Truman, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Dorothy Vaughan, C. T. Vivian, John von Neumann, Thomas Ustick Walter, Sam Walton, Booker T. Washington, George Washington, John Washington, John Wayne, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Phillis Wheatley, Walt Whitman, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Roger Williams, John Winthrop, Frank Lloyd Wright, Orville Wright, Wilbur Wright, Alvin C. York, Cy Young, and Lorenzo de Zavala.

That’s, uh, a lot of names, ranging from Canadian-born Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek to not one, not two, but three Adams, Wrights, Roosevelts and Washingtons. It’s an overwhelmingly silly list of people, quite frankly, put together in response to something equally absurd. Which is why there were a lot of jokes made about certain statues interacting in this still-hypothetical garden.

People were VERY confused about German philosopher Hannah Arendt making the cut.

In any event, congratulations to Mount Rushmore, which gets to disrupt even more of nature to honor the whims of a man desperate to get his face carved next to the presidents there. It’s unlikely a president impeached twice in four years will get that honor, but at least Kobe Bryant, Julia Child and Dr. Seuss will get to hang out there together now.

As Joe Biden’s inauguration draws closer (it’s on January 20), more info about the proceedings is being revealed. Today, it was announced that Garth Brooks will perform as the swearing in ceremony, and he explained why in a virtual press conference.

Brooks said, “In our household, this is not a political statement: This is a statement of unity. […] The message they’re pushing is unity, and that’s right down my alley, man. If we’re gonna get anywhere, we’re gonna get there together.”

He added, “I might be the only Republican at this place, but it’s reaching across, loving one another, because that’s what is going to get us together during one of the most divided times.”

Brooks also spoke about the recent riot at the Capitol Building, saying:

“It was disturbing. It was sad. Try to remember that we the human race, so I’m always going to find sunny sides in there. […] The fact that we do make choices very much on the spur of the moment. I deal in music, I deal in raw emotion. That is what music is all about, and all that passion, guided, misguided as it is, I think that you saw the human race at a time that, for me as a person, seemed to reflect some other country’s deadline, if that makes any sense. But it’s here, and all I can do is beg and plead for everybody to take that second, that moment, take a breath and think about it. Think about your family. Think about what the mark you’re going to leave on this planet as a human being, and with the children that you raise, and then make your decision.

So I think what happened was we saw people in the heat of the moment, and we’ve seen it on television before, but I’m with you. I felt like it was in some other country, but it was here. And now we deal with it, take responsibility, we claim it, and now we do our best to make sure something like that doesn’t happen again.”

This news made Garth Brooks, along with his former alter ego Chris Gaines, a Twitter trending topic today. Brooks previously performed at Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009, and while he was asked to perform at Trump’s ceremony in 2017, he was unable to due to a scheduling conflict.

Keeping up with new music can be exhausting, even impossible. From the weekly album releases to standalone singles dropping on a daily basis, the amount of music is so vast it’s easy for something to slip through the cracks. Even following along with the Uproxx recommendations on a daily basis can be a lot to ask, so every Monday we’re offering up this rundown of the best new music this week.

This week saw Ariana Grande recruit some big names for a remix and DaBaby continue his run of dominance. Yeah, it was a great week for new music. Check out the highlights below.

Ariana Grande — “34+35 (Remix)” Feat. Doja Cat and Megan Thee Stallion

Grande got fans excited last week when she teased a “34+35” remix featuring a pair of guests. Many guesses were thrown out there, and a lot of people accurately speculated that Doja Cat and Megan Thee Stallion would be the ones joining Grande on the track. Doja made her presence known thanks to some shade she decided to throw at Tekashi 69.

Juice WRLD — “Bad Boy” Feat. Young Thug

It’s been just over a year since Juice WRLD unexpectedly passed away in late 2019, a death that had a significant impact on the music world. Even posthumously, though, Juice has maintained an active presence, such as on his latest post-death appearance, his Young Thug collaboration “Bad Boy.”

DaBaby — “Masterpiece”

DaBaby releases new music basically as often as other artists even think about working on new material. Unsurprisingly, he may be planting the seeds for another project with his new single, “Masterpiece.” On the track, he praises a lover while also touching on some moments from his life, like the 2018 his Walmart shooting incident.

Flo Milli — “Roaring 20s”

Flo Milli had a strong 2020 thanks to her debut album Ho, Why Is You Here?, and she’s looking to carry that momentum into 2021. She kicked off her year with “Roaring 20s,” which uses the Fiddler On The Roof classic “If I Were A Rich Man” as a template but takes things in a decidedly different direction.

Dvsn — Amusing Her Feelings

A Muse In Her Feelings was one of 2020’s best R&B albums, and now Dvsn have expanded it for 2021 with a deluxe edition. Re-titled Amusing Her Feelings, the new version of the album functionally adds a four-song EP to the front of the tracklist. A highlight is “Use Somebody,” which delightfully recontextualizes the titular Kings Of Leon song as well as the band’s “Sex On Fire.”

Foo Fighters — “Waiting On A War”

Dave Grohl’s birthday was last week, and to celebrate, the band dropped a new single, “Waiting On A War.” It’s another strong preview of Medicine At Midnight, which starts as an acoustic-based rocker before gradually working its way to a huge guitar-driven climax.

Julien Baker — “Hardline”

Baker has so far demonstrated a stylistic progression in the lead-up to her new album, Little Oblivions. The latest example of that is “Hardline,” which opens with dramatic organ and drifts into climactic post-rock territory, a far cry from the most stripped-back nature of Baker’s previous material.

Selena Gomez — “De Una Vez”

Spanish-language music has enjoyed increased popularity among English-language listeners in recent years, and now Gomez is ready to get in on the fun. She has a full Spanish album on the way, and she offered her first preview of it with “De Una Vez,” a promising start for the Mexican-American pop star.

Lana Del Rey — “Chemtrails Over The Country Club”

When Del Rey wasn’t busy being involved in yet another controversy last week, she actually released some new music. Namely, the title track for Chemtrails Over The Country Club, a woozy, scene-setting number that was accompanied by a video that seems in her usual wheelhouse before taking a surprise twist.

Divine — “Jungle Mantra” Feat. Vince Staples and Pusha T

Pusha T and Vince Staples mostly kept their heads low in 2020, but so far in 2021, that has changed. They linked up with Indian-born rapper and Mass Appeal signee Divine for “Jungle Mantra,” which is set to appear in the Netflix film White Tiger. On the track, Staples and Pusha address matters of finances and inequality, all set to an infectiously rhythmic instrumental.

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

Morgan Wallen made headlines in 2020 for an unfortunate reason: He was set to be a musical guest on Saturday Night Live, but was ousted after videos of him at a maskless party surfaced. Wallen did end up making his SNL debut on the show a few weeks later, though, an appearance that included a sketch about that fateful party.

Here in 2021, though, Wallen is making news for better reasons: His latest album, Dangerous: The Double Album, has debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart dated January 23, and it did so thanks to a historic week of streaming.

Of the 265,000 equivalent album units Wallen’s album earned, 184,000 were streaming equivalent albums units, which is equal to 240.18 million on-demand streams of the album’s songs. That’s the biggest streaming week ever for a country album, as it more than doubled the previous record holder: Luke Combs’ What You See If What You Get racked up 102.26 million streams during the week ending October 29, 2020, the week that Combs reissued the album with bonus songs, bringing the total to 23 tracks.

The fact that Dangerous features 30 tracks likely helped this number grow so large, since the count is based on total streams across all the album’s songs. Billboard notes, though, that “even if the album were trimmed down to the 18 least-streamed tracks (in the week ending Jan. 14), their sum of 105.08 million would still beat Combs’ former record.”

While the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine hasn’t gone as smoothly as anyone would like, the actual data from the vaccine’s effectiveness has given scientists a lot of confidence about what will happen once more people have gotten the vaccine itself. With the pandemic still ongoing and the new UK variant worrying scientists about its increased contagiousness any good news on the vaccine front is welcome, and how the vaccine itself has performed appears to be that good news.

According to a report in the New York Times, the two vaccines currently being used across the country from Moderna and Pfizer are even more effective than first thought when the numbers from their trials were made public. And though some reactions and other stories about people getting vaccinated have seen considerable headlines and press among detractors, early data from studies of its effectiveness show it may be one of the safest ever created when compared to vaccines for other diseases.

A doctor described the public opinion of the coronavirus as “underselling the vaccine” and the report detailed why medical experts are so excited about the results they’ve seen. Here’s the Times summary of what we know so far:

The Moderna and Pfizer vaccines — the only two approved in the U.S. — are among the best vaccines ever created, with effectiveness rates of about 95 percent after two doses. That’s on par with the vaccines for chickenpox and measles. And a vaccine doesn’t even need to be so effective to reduce cases sharply and crush a pandemic.

If anything, the 95 percent number understates the effectiveness, because it counts anyone who came down with a mild case of Covid-19 as a failure. But turning Covid into a typical flu — as the vaccines evidently did for most of the remaining 5 percent — is actually a success. Of the 32,000 people who received the Moderna or Pfizer vaccine in a research trial, do you want to guess how many contracted a severe Covid case? One.

There’s still, of course, a lot we don’t know about how the vaccine works long-term and whether people can still spread coronavirus after they’ve been vaccinated and are not experiencing symptoms and actually being infected themselves. That’s why those that do get the vaccine will still need to wear masks and continue to practice social distancing in an effort to keep others safe while the vaccine goes to work.

But the numbers scientists are seeing are absolutely encouraging, and though rollout has been slow there are more vaccines being tested and could hit the market later in the year. It would be welcome news for the millions of people eager to get the vaccine and hope to resume a more normal life in the coming months, and perhaps put those at ease who are still skeptical of vaccines in general.

In the wake of police murdering George Floyd in Minnesota, massive protests launched around the country and around the world to once again shine light on systemic racism in policing and the issue of police brutality — and the refusal of the system to hold officers accountable for their actions.

The NBA world was particularly impacted by Floyd’s murder because of the connection Floyd had to Stephen Jackson, a lifelong friend who referred to Floyd as his “twin.” Jackson became a vocal and forward leader in Minnesota after Floyd was killed and called on many of his friends in the NBA and beyond to amplify what they were doing and bring more attention and resources to the fight ahead. The response from the NBA and WNBA communities was swift and forceful, and has continued in the months since.

Jackson recently sat down with Etan Thomas on “The Rematch” podcast to speak on all of that and spoke on some of the incredible assistance his friends have provided the Floyd family in the months since, including Kyrie Irving purchasing the family a new home (the 25:20 mark of the above video).

“She’s getting so much love from not just us, but from people all around the world who are showing support,” Jackson said. “I’m just continuing to do what I said I was going to do; I said I was going to be my brother’s keeper and take care of his daughter and make sure that her next days are her best days. I had a lot of my friends — Kyrie Irving bought them a house. Lil Wayne’s manager bought them a Mercedes Benz. Barbra Streisand gave them stock in Disney.

“I think God has definitely blessed her. Right now she’s doing the best she’s ever done; she’s happy. We’re just waiting for all this trial stuff to get out of the way, where she don’t have to keep reliving the situation and she can go about living her life and being happy.”

Jackson promised to take care of Floyd’s daughter, Gianna, and seems to be doing just that, and it’s nice to hear the support she has received from so many to help set her up with some stability after such a traumatic event. Irving in particular has taken it upon himself recently to be more active in the community, from providing tuition to students at HBCUs to this gesture of purchasing a home for Floyd, as he has become more and more active and vocal about inspiring and creating change.

The coronavirus had a drastic impact on most parts of the world, but New Zealand stands out as a country that has fared extraordinarily well in dealing with COVID-19. It was only a matter of months before the island nation ended the pandemic domestically, and there are currently just 85 active cases (none of which are being treated in hospitals) out of 1,906 total confirmed cases. So, life is looking closer to normal in the country, which explains why it was just able to host its largest concert since the start of the pandemic.

Popular New Zealand group Six60 performed in Waitangi to an audience of about 20,000 people. Metro reports that there were no social distancing measures put in place and the band’s Chris Mac even interacted with the audience.

Six60 singer Matiu Walters told local publication the Northern Advocate, “Being here and able to get together while the rest of the world basically can’t has really given us a good appreciation of how well our country has done in managing COVID and just how lucky we are. I feel really proud that we have got our act together so well on COVID.”

The show was the first of a brief national tour for Six60, which will also take the band to Hastings, New Plymouth, Christchurch, Wellington, and Hamilton.

Meanwhile, there’s optimism that concerts will return to the US at some point in 2021, with Dr. Anthony Fauci suggesting that some venues could be able to open in the fall.

Peaky Blinders will be back for a sixth and final season, but there may be more of the story to tell elsewhere. According to several reports, the show will return for one last run with the gang before finishing its time on the BBC.

The Hollywood Reporter wrote Monday that production has begun on a final season, with additional precautions to keep people safe during the pandemic. But showrunner Steven Knight and executive producer Caryn Mandabach seem confident that the story, which stars Cillian Murphy and involves the dealings of the titular English gang, will not end once the BBC show wraps up.

“Peaky is back and with a bang,” said Knight. “After the enforced production delay due to the COVID pandemic, we find the family in extreme jeopardy and the stakes have never been higher. We believe this will be the best series of all and are sure that our amazing fans will love it. While the TV series will be coming to an end, the story will continue in another form.”

Executive producer Caryn Mandabach added: “Along with our wonderful, supportive, partners at BBC and Netflix, we have been working diligently to ensure we can get Peaky safely back into production; the safety of our cast and crew is always our priority. Thank you to all the Peaky fans who have been so unwaveringly supportive and patient. Steve’s scripts are incredible and mark the end of an epic story that has entranced audiences since it first started in 2013, but the world of Peaky Blinders will most definitely live on.”

Whether that “form” is a movie or a new spinoff show isn’t made clear just yet, but it’s good news for everyone involved in the ensemble show as well as fans who have discovered it on streaming services or while it’s aired on the BBC. Making anything in the age of the coronavirus pandemic is difficult, not to mention expensive, but it seems those behind Peaky Blinders intend to give the show a fitting sendoff before moving on to whatever’s next for the gang.