Category: News

Marjorie Taylor Greene claims that she no longer holds the kooky views that were unearthed after she wound up becoming an elected public official. Like how she once seemed to approve of now-colleague Nancy Pelosi being executed. Or how she believed that a deadly wildfire in California in 2018 was caused by space lasers controlled in part by a Jewish member of a banking firm. That tinfoil conspiracy came to be better known as “Jewish space lasers,” a term that earned her much online dunking and has stuck with her ever since.

Well, Greene is still upset about the term, inspired by something she actually once believed. In an interview earlier this month with Mike Huckabee on his Newsmax show, she admitted that the this one — and not the many, many other things that have earned her mockery and scorn — really got to her.

“Terrible attacks, especially about silly things about something called ‘Jewish space lasers,’” Greene told Huckabee. “That was a term I had never used in my life but someone wrote an article and then they copied and pasted and put it all across the media.”

The dust-up left still haunts her. “That really hurt my feelings,” Greene said. “Because I’m a Christian and I would never say anything against any group of people, especially Israel. I would never do that.”

Speaking of which, earlier this year Greene did what she never did and apologized after repeatedly drawing offensive comparisons between those trying to save lives during a pandemic and the Nazis. After inspiring widespread condemnation from Jewish and Holocaust remembrance groups, Greene issued a rare mea culpa. She even went to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where she seemed to finally learn what others learn much earlier in life.

In the meantime, Greene’s fans can be assured that she still has plenty of kooky, illogical beliefs, some of which got her permanently suspended from Twitter at the year’s start.

(Via Raw Story)

After earning a lot of attention last year, rising Houston rapper Monaleo wasted no time getting to work in 2022. In 2021, she had her breakout single “Beating Down Yo Block,” plus an appearance on fellow Houston native Maxo Kream’s Weight Of The World album. She ended the year by dropping the single “We Not Humping,” which she recently graced with a video. In it, Monaleo and her boyfriend and rapper Stunna 4 Vegas throw a raucous house party that upsets at least one of her neighbors, but that proves to be the least of her worries.

The video is set to be the latest offering from Monaleo’s upcoming debut project, which is set to arrive spring of this year. The song also captured her growing popularity as the video became her quickest to tally 100,000 views, doing so in just a day. In addition to records like “Beating Down Yo Block” and “We Not Humping,” Monaleo has also shown her versatility through the muscle-flexing “Suck It Up” and the warm-spirited “Girls Outside.”

Other highlights in Monaleo’s career so far include being selected for Beyonce’s Summer 2021 Ivy Park campaign and Youtube Music’s Foundry Class of 2021.

You can check out the video for “We Not Humping” above.

The Detroit Pistons are having a rather dreadful year, as they have been without their best player for much of the season as Jerami Grant deals with a torn thumb ligament, and have only managed 10 wins at the midway point of the season.

The No. 1 overall pick from last year Cade Cunningham has struggled with efficiency, as rookies often do when they have to be the lead creators for an offense, but is averaging 15.5 points, 5.8 rebounds, and 5.3 assists per game, providing some bright spots for the faithful in Detroit. For Cunningham, the losing has been frustrating and on Sunday against the Suns, it seemed he was trying to get himself and his team fired up and earned an early exit for it in questionable fashion.

After picking up a first half technical, Cunningham was able to get the baseline and unload a little frustration on the rim with a thunderous dunk on a late contest from Jalen Smith, who Cunningham pointed at to let everyone know who he got. That led to his second technical, which Cunningham obviously disagreed with as did most watching, as to give that as a second technical felt pretty soft.

It’s not a shocking technical, as the league has long tried to penalize players for directly taunting other players with points and gestures — Dikembe Mutombo’s finger wag being the most famous example as it had to start being done to the crowd rather than in a player’s face. Still, it’s a tough way to get tossed and in a game the Pistons were already losing considerably, there’s now not a lot for fans to even look to enjoy on the floor with Cunningham taking an early shower.

When Jay-Z tweets, you might as well buy a lottery ticket. After sending a total of zero tweets in both 2019 and 2020, Hov sent a meager five to the three million followers of his @sc account in 2021. Two were thank yous following his Rock And Roll Hall of Fame induction, and three were about Jack Dorsey/Square’s purchase of Tidal. There was also one reply to Jack Dorsey, who was bigging up Tidal’s algorithm. It’s not the most riveting stuff and Jay-Z (who won’t do a Verzuz battle) also follows exactly zero people on the platform. Suffice it to say, Twitter just isn’t his thing. That’s cool. But pardon us for getting excited when he does tweet out something revealing, which is exactly what happened Sunday in a brief exchange with Questlove.

Somehow, this all started when a Pro Wrestling podcast host sent an innocuous tweet about the polarizing 1997 single “Always Be My Sunshine.” “Hot take: ‘Sunshine’ by Jay-Z was fine and got an unnecessarily bad rap. Actually holds up better now than it did then,” tweeted Will Washington. This prompted a quoted retweet from Questlove, who had some feelings of his own about Jay-Z’s 1997 sophomore album, his first with Def Jam. “Our main argument is his hate for Vol 1. He is embarrassed for trying to make a monster & not putting numbers up. But ALOT of this lp contains his best moments. Fight me @sc,” Questo said.

And lo and behold, this got Mr. Carter out of hiding. At 8:45 am on January 16th in the year of our lord 2022, Jay-Z clapped back, writing, “Agreed . More so, I know what could have been, so it haunts me … streets is watching was the first song made !”

Babyface Ray rose to fame as one of the leading names in Detroit’s re-emerging rap scene, alongside other notable acts like 42 Dugg, Icewear Vezzo, and Sada Baby. The rapper is preparing for a huge 2022 year, and he kicks it off with a brand new track. Ray unites with Pusha T and Landstrip Chip for “Dancing With The Devil,” a somber song that finds Ray and Pusha T grappling with the temptations and demons in their lives while Landstrip Chip provides a reflective hook to tie it all together. As if the new record wasn’t enough, the track also features an exciting announcement.

On January 28, Ray will release his latest album Face, which could potentially feature previously-released strong singles like “What The Business Is,” “It Ain’t My Fault” with Big Sean, and “Catch It,” in addition to “Dancing With The Devil.” It will also hopefully serve as a great follow-up to Ray’s 2021 project, Unf*ckwittable.

Ray ended 2021 with a collection of solid guest features, which paired him with acts like Big Sean, Trippie Redd, Icewear Vezzo, Mozzy, and more.

You can listen to “Dancing With The Devil” in the video above

Face is out 1/28 via Wavy Gang / EMPIRE.

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

The Omicron variant doesn’t seem to be affecting movies, or at least some of them. Spider-Man: No Way Home is breaking records, and it finally got unseated by the new Scream. But one movie that’s fallen through the cracks is West Side Story, Steven Spielberg’s take on the classic musical, which was filmed in the early ‘60s to boffo box office and a ton of Oscars. It’s a shame because it’s a pretty great movie. And at least awards bodies are heaping it with trophies, including a Golden Globe for the movie’s resident Anita, Ariana DeBose.

SNL also recognized the film’s excellence, tapping DeBose to host its first episode of the new year. Naturally the Broadway and film actress, who can be seen in the filmed version of Hamilton, whipped out some West Side Story. She was joined by Kate McKinnon, self-professed West Side Story head, who’s such a fan that she knows all the shows but not so much that she actually saw the new movie.

“I don’t leave the house because of COVID and also I don’t leave the house,” McKinnon joked.

The pair then proceeded through some (though not all) of the show’s best songs, from “Tonight” to “I Feel Pretty” to “Something’s Coming” to “America.” You can watch the medley in the video above and at some point you should probably go see the new West Side Story because it’s even better than this.

For the first time since their 2016 track “Mula,” Kanye West and The Game have teamed up. On Friday, the two released “Eazy,” which featured production from Hit-Boy as well as several attention-grabbing lines. West took a shot at Pete Davidson, who is dating his ex-wife Kim Kardashian, rapping, “God saved me from that crash / Just so I can beat Pete Davidson’s ass.” He also addressed his split with Kim Kardashian saying, “N****, we havin’ the best divorce ever / If we go to court, we’ll go to court together / Matter of fact, pick up your sis’, we’ll go to Kourt’s together.”

Aside from the song’s lyrics, “Eazy” also got some attention for its cover art, which depicts a skinned monkey over a red backdrop. Shortly after the art was revealed, PETA’s president Ingrid Newkirk condemned the photo in a statement to Billboard.

“The photo is reminiscent of the monkeys PETA has found, sometimes heads, sometimes hands, sometimes the whole body, in meat markets around the world and it makes it clear that when you remove the fur you can’t miss that there’s a person in there, that they are fellow primates, and do not belong to us to abuse for any purpose, not in laboratories, roadside zoos, movies, or meat markets,” Newkirk said.

You can view the cover art about and listen to “Eazy” on Spotify here.

Like a broken clock that’s right twice a day, every now and then Trump tells the truth. It’s usually by accident and it’s rarely on purpose. Sometimes when it happens, it doesn’t seem like he realized he did it. Last month, the former president probably didn’t really mean to call his own voter fraud nonsense “stupid.” And on Saturday night, at his big rally in Arizona, he almost certainly didn’t mean to admit that he lost the 2020 election.

But that’s what he did. In his first rally of 2022, Trump aired the usual litany of lies. He trashed Dr. Anthony Fauci, inspiring the crowd to boo and chant “lock him up.” He spread vaccine misinformation, despite taking credit for the wonder drug his followers won’t take. He once again called the House committee investigating the Capitol riot of Jan. 6 the “unselect committee.” He claimed he won the election he lost by over seven million votes.

But he also…said he lost the election? Trump’s mushy brain is hard to track sometimes, and especially so when he started bragging about all the states he won, like Ohio, Florida, and Iowa. He claimed that he won all the states “having to do with legislature,” which sounded like he was repeating some half-remembered claim someone once tried to explain to him, as he’s wont to do.

But then he kept talking. After pointing out that he won a lot of key states, he added, “The only thing we didn’t win was the election.”

Did he misspeak? Almost certainly. Perhaps he simply meant that others, such as the media, vote counters, states, and the federal government think he didn’t win re-election, because he didn’t. Or perhaps it really was a Freudian slip, and he accidentally said the quiet part loud. Maybe deep down, buried under a thick coat of self-delusion, he knows he lost, and bigly.

Or as journalist Ricardo Brooks put it, “If you wait long enough, he always tells the truth.”

The one-term president and failed blogger also returned to another bizarre boast: Wasn’t the crowd at the Capitol riot that led to multiple deaths and which ended his presidency in disgrace pretty huge?

In any case, we’re only two weeks into 2022 and Trump has already told the truth twice: Last week, he called Republican governors, like Ron DeSantis, who won’t admit they’re vaccinated “gutless.” That’s no lie.

The hip-hop community is mourning another loss. Wavy Navy Pooh, who had been signed to the label Quality Control, which also features City Girls, Lil Baby, Migos, and more, was shot and killed during a drive-by shooting in South Miami. According to WSVN, police officers say that the 28-year-old rapper, born Shandler Beaubien, was behind the wheel of a Toyota Camry at an intersection when another vehicle pulled up beside it and fired 15 shots into the driver’s side door. Beaubien was hit multiple times and pronounced dead at the scene.

Law enforcement says that the rapper was accompanied by a female passenger and his two children — a five-year-old and an infant — during the shooting. They also said that the other occupants in the vehicle were not injured. “An unknown subject in a four-door Lexus, a gray Lexus, approached him from the driver’s side, opened fire and then fled westbound on 152nd Street,” Miami-Dade Police detective Alvaro Zabaleta told WSVN. “On the front seat, there was a one-year-old child in a car seat that easily could have been struck by gunfire and taken his life.”

Quality Control issued a statement about Beaubien’s death, which they shared on Instagram. “It is with great sadness we announce the loss of one of our beloved artist, Wavy Navy Pooh,” they wrote. “Wavy put his heart and soul into his music. He believed in giving back to his community as well as sharing his hardships through his music. Wavy, your Quality Control family loves you and will forever miss you. Your Life was a blessing and will never be forgotten. Our thoughts are with his family at this time.”

Last week, a lot of people on social media lost their minds over a new trailer. It’s for Bel-Air, Peacock’s forthcoming dark and gritty reimagining of the ‘90s sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, which made the already popular Will Smith an even bigger star than he was. That show was fun, albeit with the occasional “very special episode.” This new one, co-developed by Smith himself, is…well, it looks like it’s all “very special episodes.” To drive home how potentially silly this new revival is, SNL applied the same idea to another fun ‘90s sitcom.

That show is Family Matters, the Perfect Strangers spin-off about a middle-class Black family living in Chicago that ran for nine seasons, making it the longest-running U.S. sitcom with a predominantly Black cast. One reason it was popular: Steve Urkel, the scene-stealing, catchphrase-deploying nerd played by Jaleel White, who took what was supposed to be a one-off character and made him the thing that effectively made the show.

In SNL’s Urkel, though, he’s the main attraction. The parody stars Chris Redd — who also spent the episode lampooning New York City’s new mayor Eric Adams — doing the Urkel bit in a grittier depiction of Chicago. There are guns. There are alcoholic moms. There’s Kenan Thompson as Reginald VelJohnson’s Carl Winslow, looking sad and angry. There’s a sharp deployment of Urkel’s most famous line. And considering how serious Bel-Air looks, it’s really not that unlikely that a new and darker Family Matters could one day hit Peacock’s coffers.

You can watch the parody in the video above.