Category: News

Usually, when a musician is in the news for some reason, the amount of streams their music gets tends to go up, which makes sense. Naturally, then, following the Super Bowl, The Weeknd saw a substantial increase in plays.

Billboard reports that on Sunday, the day of The Weeknd’s halftime show, his overall song and album catalog sold 36,600 copies, which is an increase of 385 percent from the 7,500 sold on the day before, February 6. Breaking it down further, his song sales were up 454 percent over the same period, while his album sales shot up 138 percent. Of those total sales, 29 percent of them were from the halftime-closing song “Blinding Lights.”

All the songs that were performed had significant sales increases on February 7: “Blinding Lights” (10,000 sales; up 423 percent from the previous day), “Save Your Tears” (4,000; 245 percent), “Can’t Feel My Face” (3,500; 987 percent), “Earned It (Fifty Shades Of Grey)” (3,000; 1,240 percent), “Starboy” (2,500; 1,175 percent), “I Feel It Coming” (2,500; 1,021 percent), and “The Hills” (2,000; 771 percent).

The day after the performance, The Weeknd took a moment to hop on social media and reflect on his career-defining moment, writing, “still buzzing from last night. i couldn’t stop smiling the whole performance. thank you [Pepsi, the NFL, and Roc Nation] for believing in me to bring a fresh new take on the halftime show. XO we did it !”

In his final appearance as Drunk Uncle on SNL (May 20, 2017), Bobby Moynihan wore a red “Make America Drunk Again” hat. Donald Trump must have enjoyed that, as he didn’t realize that you’re not supposed to agree with the racist, sexist, hot take-spewing alcoholic. Moynihan, who currently stars on Mr. Mayor, told the Daily Beast‘s the Last Laugh podcast about doing Drunk Uncle in the episode that the former-president hosted.

“I remember thinking, this is one of the only things in the show that’s actually really bad-mouthing him and pointing out how racist and terrible he is. And he walked up to me afterwards and I’m like, oh no. And he shook my hand. And he was like, ‘Thank you so much. That was so nice to hear such nice things being said.’ And I was like, you moron,” Moynihan recounted. In the Weekend Update segment, Trump’s “number one fan” Drunk Uncle points out the things they have in common (“We both love white Russians”), screams “her name is Bruce” in reference to Caitlyn Jenner, and confuses Michael Che with Ben Carson. “It’s like I’m running for president, y’know?” Oh, we know.

Moynihan continued, “I was saying he’s just like me, I love him. And he was just like, thank you. And I was like, no, you idiot, I thought you were going to be mad and you’re not. And now I’m mad that you’re not mad.” The former-cast member doesn’t think Trump was the worst host during his time on the show, but “he was just delusional… The vibe felt like a bratty, rich child.” You can listen to the podcast here.

And as always, R.I.P. Ass Dan.

(Via the Daily Beast)

Jacob Ainsley Chansley, the MAGA rioter also known as the “QAnon Shaman,” recently reached a month-long realization that his hero, Donald Trump, wasn’t all that and doesn’t really care about his supporters. The former president incited MAGAs toward the January 6 insurrection and then simply decided (after a “we love you, go home” video) to pretend those rioters who are now sitting behind bars don’t exist. Well, Shaman Guy has had a rude awakening. He’s repeatedly freaked out about a lack of organic food options in jail, and he seems honest-to-god surprised at not being pardoned. That’s a ridiculous expectation to those of us at home, yep, but QAnon Shaman’s lawyer, Albert Watkins, visited with Chris Cuomo on Monday night to reveal more about his client’s state of mind.

“I am deeply disappointed in former President Trump,” read the QAnon Shaman’s initial statement through his lawyer. “He was not honorable. He let a lot of peaceful people down. I have to leave judging him up to other people. I deeply regret and am sorry that I entered the Capitol building on January 6, 2021. I should not have been there.”

QAnon Shaman’s lawyer continued, stating that Trump did the unforgivable to his followers: “What he said day in, day out, that we all permitted, included untruths… out and out lies.” The statement appears at around the 4:00 minute mark in this video clip.

We’ve heard before that the guy feels duped, but the QAnon Shaman is reportedly attempting to undergo an “unwinding process” that Watkins says is aimed at shaking his loyalty toward Trump after believing years of lies. “You make it sound like he’s being deprogrammed from a cult…” stated Cuomo. And Watkins replied, “Well, I’ve likened the entire thing to 1978 and Jim Jones down in Guyana.” He added, “This is very real for these people.”

Well, QAnon Shaman is going nowhere fast, given that he’s been transferred to a few prisons and has been charged with civil disorder, obstruction, and disorderly conduct while awaiting trial. Meanwhile, Trump’s impeachment trial attorneys are attempting to characterize his incitement of the insurrection as “metaphorical” while defending their client, who’s hanging out at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida while his followers, including the QAnon Shaman, wonder where their guy has gone.

It’s not uncommon for a Cardi B song to take off on social media, especially TikTok. This has led to accusations that Cardi makes music that panders to users of these platforms to take advantage that the popularity a viral dance can provide. Now, Cardi has set the record straight.

On Twitter yesterday, Cardi wrote in regards to her new single “Up,” “Dont try to play me like I just started this sh*t cause of tiktok .My last 4 videos I gave choreography & at award shows as well .Please me , press ,wap & up was my last videos.EAT IT UP ! It wasn’t me who started the wap challenge.I didn’t even knew how to the dance that’s why I never did the challenge in the first place .How ya mad that these female rappers songs becoming tiktok challenges because people genuinely wants to dance to it.”

Somebody replied, “there’s a difference between becoming a challenge and forcing a challenge on people, that’s what the people mean,” to which Cardi responded, “I never forced a challenge. I never offer MONEY or prices for no challenge .I never even posted hey guys do a challenge for my song .People do it cause they want to sooo miss me wit that sh*t .I pay ya to show me when I told some1 ‘ hey do a challenge for my song.’”

She later added, “Thankful for all my fans ,artist ,influencer,tiktoker,people that critic music videos and songs ,and the GP for showing me love .I’m extremely happy and satisfied. Ladies that’s in my field keep doing what you doing they going to hate always.Give them a reason too. People that don’t like you always going to find a reason to hate you .Let ‘WINNING ‘ be the reason.”

She has hopped on other TikTok challenges, though, as she shared her own contribution to the “Silhouette Challenge.”

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

It’s not surprising to see the world’s greatest artists pass their creative genes onto their offspring, and it appears that’s what Kanye West has done with his daughter North. Aside from his musical talents, Kanye is also a gifted visual artist: Some works from his teenage years popped up on Antiques Roadshow last year and showed his ability to work in different styles and mediums. Now, North is proving that she’s quite the painter herself.

Yesterday, Kim Kardashian took to Instagram to share a painting that 7-year-old North made, which depicts a mountain scene with trees and vegetation in the foreground. The landscape looks so good, especially for an artist so young, that it led to Bob Ross comparisons and for the late artist to become a trending topic on Twitter.

There was some skepticism, though, that North actually painted this herself. This led to one TikTok user to share a video in which she claims her mother is North’s art teacher. The user shared a photo of themselves as a 7-year-old and a similar painting they had created at the time, saying, “My mom taught me how to paint this and she taught North how to paint the same one two weeks ago. She’s been an art teacher for 30 years and everyone that comes through her classes goes through this exact same painting when they’re starting out.”

Check out some reactions to North’s painting below.

The recently-released documentary Framing Britney Spears examines the pop star’s life, the #FreeBritney movement, and the rampant misogyny she’s faced throughout her career. Late-night show hosts, in particular, were brutal to the pop star (“The Britney doc is also a sad reminder that not too long ago we had to pretend that jay leno was funny,” reads one emblematic tweet), with the exception of one: Craig Ferguson.

In 2007, The Late Late Show host explained why he refused to mock Spears’ public breakdown. “Tonight, no Britney Spears jokes, and here’s why,” he began. “The kind of weekend she had, she was checking in and out of rehab, she was shaving her head, getting tattoos, that’s what she was doing this weekend. This Sunday, I was 15 years sober. So I looked at her weekend, and I looked at my own weekend, and I thought, ‘You know, I’d rather have my weekend.’ But what she’s going through reminds me of what I was doing. It’s an anniversary, you start to think about it, and it reminds me of where I was 15 years ago, when I was living like that.” Ferguson refrained from diagnosing Spears, but “she clearly needs help.” He also said that he felt “uncomfortable about making fun” of celebrities like Spears and Anna Nicole Smith, who had recently passed away, when we should be “attacking the powerful people, the politicians and the Trumps and the blowhards.” (Ferguson was really ahead of his time by singling out Trump.)

Ferguson discussed his monologue, which has gone viral since Framing Britney Spears premiered, in 2019 with the Los Angeles Times. “I wanted to put myself in the position of what Ms. Spears had been in that weekend, [to show] that I understood, that I identified with her discomfort,” he said. “And I because I had done that, other people identified with me too. It feels odd to talk about, because I don’t want to aggrandize myself. I didn’t mean to do it. It just felt right at the time. But it has definitely stuck.”

You can watch the full monologue above, or an excerpt below.

The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson is deeply missed.

The RX is Uproxx Music’s stamp of approval for the best albums, songs, and music stories throughout the year. Inclusion in this category is the highest distinction we can bestow, and signals the most important music being released throughout the year. The RX is the music you need, right now.

A particular scene from True Detective’s second season is stuck in Sun June vocalist Laura Colwell’s mind as she describes her band’s sound. The scene in question opens with a forlorn woman perched atop a stool on a bar’s dusty stage. The woman croons a lonely tune with her guitar’s weeping chords before the camera slowly pans to the main characters’ conversation. That’s where Colwell imagines their sophomore album Somewhere would fit: crammed in the corner of a dive bar, setting a somber atmosphere for a serious exchange of words.

But casting their album as a mere extra accompanying a monologue from Vince Vaughn is selling themselves short. On the contrary, Sun June’s Somewhere is fit for the spotlight. Throughout eleven gripping tracks, the Austin, Texas five-piece find poetry in the monotony and grief of life’s most dramatic moments.

No one is immune to grief, especially given the events that plagued our country last year. Nearly everyone is experiencing a sliding scale of anguish — and that’s something Colwell knows all too well. “I definitely am just always dealing with grief in some way,” she tells me over the phone from Austin. As we speak, the remainder of her band (including her partner and songwriting companion Stephen Salisbury) is spread out all across the US. Most of Sun June’s songs delicately explore how grief presents itself in various ways — grieving an old life, isolation, sobriety, the loss of a friend, or even something as simple as a carefree day that’s finally come to its inevitable end.

Songs like “Everything I Had” deal with the particular grief that arises from unwilling change. As people living in the transient city of Austin, Sun June are used to seeing transformation. Friends are constantly moving to or away from the city and, as someone who has settled there, this has made Colwell feel uneasy. “Seeing others around you thriving and you’re feeling out of place is also part of that feeling,” she says. As heard on the remainder of their tracks, the production on “Everything I Had” mirrors its theme of reluctant change. After Colwell croons of missing her former life, her band breaks into a cascade of arpeggio synths and descending keys, evoking a poignant sense of longing that’s further explored throughout each verse.

While change can be difficult, it’s oftentimes for the better. But even with this knowledge, it’s hard not to fantasize about how different life would be if one never learned from their mistakes. On their song “Bad Girl,” Colwell examines the missteps of her youth through a nostalgic lens. “I have a terrible memory and I repeat my mistakes a lot. So maybe I’ve been starting to learn that, no, I don’t have to keep repeating the same old dumb mistakes,” she says. Throughout the song’s lyrics, Colwell looks back on her naive slip-ups with rose-tinted glasses. She daydreams about the act of trashing an apartment without thinking of the consequences and chuckles at the time she irresponsibly spent her last dollar on a pack of cigarettes. “All the moments of your life are not something you necessarily want back, but you do miss it,” she says. “You’re grieving a part of you.”

Colwell’s youthful regrets aren’t universal, but Sun June’s poetic lyrics leave just enough mystery for listeners to insert themselves into. Colwell even admits to covering her prose with a purposeful veil of ambiguity, which not only helps listeners find Sun June’s songs relatable, but also acts as a way for Colwell to examine her emotions from an outside perspective. “Sometimes you reverse engineer yourself: you write a song and have no idea why you wrote it,” she says. “And then you realize when you put it all into the spotlight that, ‘Oh, okay. This is what’s going on with me, good to know.’ It’s hard to know what really makes sense or matters. We all get caught up in this fantasy of life sometimes, and it’s easy to lose yourself in it.”

For Sun June, the “fantasy of life” can be as simple as romanticizing a usually monotonous moment. Colwell believes this is best explored on their wistful track “Karen O.”

“We get into our heads sometimes, with mourning the loss of a part of you,” she says. “I think it’s really easy to fall into that spiral of feeling bad about yourself. [Karen O] also picks these random moments that are just kind of melodramatic. Like, climbing the stairs of your apartment. That’s so melodramatic — it’s like the end of a movie. No one actually lives that way, but it’s fun to get caught up in the fantasy of every minute detail meaning more than it really should.”

Somewhere does grapple with melodrama and grief, but not all of their tracks are forlorn. Each song is touched with a playfulness that arises from the band’s close-knit chemistry. “We’re all just tightly wound, and yet at the same time, very easy going and like to have a good time,” Colwell says, excitedly explaining how each member of the band equally contributes to a given song. Colwell and Salisbury begin to write music separately before reworking each other’s recordings. Leaning on the mantra “melodies are king,” their lead guitarist Michael is then passed the demo to flesh out lush tones. The rest of the group offers their edits at band practice, which results in a truly collaborative process.

Before starting Somewhere’s songwriting stage, the band collectively decided on a sonic theme for the record. After some deliberation, they eventually agreed on a universe where their album lives: a futuristic prom set in Albuquerque in a time where global warming has lapsed to a point of climate cooling. If their album as a whole is a prom dance, then, according to Colwell, the dreamy track “Once In A While” would be the night’s slow song. “It is a heady song, but also full of heartbreak and drunken stupor — which is all of what prom was,” Colwell says, continuing to set the scene. “The ball is spinning. And you’re in a hypnotic state when everything around you is just falling apart.”

Little did they know it at the time, but Somewhere is being released at a time when everything does feel like it’s falling apart. Nevertheless, it has arrived at the perfect moment. From start to finish, listening to Somewhere is therapeutic. It’s a lesson in patience, both with yourself and with the world, and it’s a thoughtful reminder that sometimes romanticizing the most monotonous moments is also a beautiful study in staying present.

Somewhere is out now via Run For Cover/Kneed Scales. Get it here.

Last year Queens rapper Nas released a new album called King’s Disease, the follow-up to his admittedly rushed Kanye West-produced Nasir in 2018. Although that record was a gamble in itself, due to the sometimes brilliant, sometimes wildly unstable genius of Ye, he seems to have hit upon something good by collaborating with Hit-Boy on King’s Disease.

Now, the pair have previewed another new project in the works via a video Hit-Boy shared on Twitter tonight. “New Nas E.P.M.D this Friday,” the producer wrote in the caption, sharing the initials of either a new song — or maybe a full album? — most likely named in homage to New York rap duo EPMD, composed of rappers Erick Sermon and Parrish Smith.

From the sound of the 50-second video clip, which shows the pair listening to a snippet of the new song in the studio, it will just be a new song. But given how much time everyone has had on their hands due to the pandemic, lockdown, quarantine and a dearth of live shows, there might be more than one new track between these two.

In the song Nas criticizes social media and other big tech companies like the new audio app Clubhouse. “Why you talking on Clubhouse, the guns out / This ain’t audio chat boy this audio crack / Social media platforms they ratting on / Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon / Some say…” and the clip trails off right there. Ironically absent from the list is Twitter, where the duo chose to share the clip. Guess Jack and his crew are safe from the wrath of new Nas bars… for now.

Some fans are worried that announcing the release date early in the week gives Jay-Z enough time to release something of his own in an attempt to eclipse his longtime rival. Jay and Bey famously dropped their surprise joint album Everything Is Love as The Carters the day after Nasir came out, and last year on the release day of King’s Disease Jay put out his collaboration with Pharrell, “Entrepreneur.”

While he was working on his acclaimed album After Hours, The Weeknd called on Oneohtrix Point Never (aka Daniel Lopatin) to lend production assistance. Since then, the two have formed a friendly working relationship. The Weeknd appeared on Lopatin’s recent LP, and Lopatin in turn was invited to be the musical director for The Weeknd’s Super Bowl halftime show. In fact, the two musicians enjoy working together so much so that they may be releasing a collaborative project very soon.

Lopatin recently joined Bryce Segall on Radio.com’s New Arrivals show to chat about his work with The Weeknd. During their conversation, Lopatin revealed that the two have a “whole bunch of music” together in the works, which points to the possibility of a joint project:

“Everything was just rolling together for a couple years for us. We have a whole bunch of music in the pipeline, we worked on After Hours, I was sharing my music, we were having discussion all the time, we would get into heated debates about what constitutes an interesting song or good production or whatever and it occurred to me I was having these conversations so frequently with him, that we were just kind of artistically invested in one another, and when he offered to co-exec, I said sure. Like, how could you not.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Lopatin said he’s “tantalized” by the thought of The Weeknd’s fans being exposed to his music by proxy. “I’m tantalized by the idea of mischievously getting legions of Weeknd fans to listen to my bizarre machinations,” he said. “The name Oneohtrix Point Never literal has the trickster embedded in it. My job is to constantly… I don’t wanna allow myself to get comfortable. So if I have an opportunity to do something new that’s a once in a lifetime opportunity. I’m usually saying yes just to see what bizarre results come of it. Its like being able to bend the matrix or whatever”

Listen to Lopatin’s full interview above.

The Golden State Warriors tipped off their first of two back-to-back games in San Antonio with a rough second half performance that saw a five-point halftime lead evaporate into a 105-100 loss.

The Warriors scored just 41 in the second half, as the Spurs defense, led by Dejounte Murray and his eight steals on the game, put the clamps on Golden State to allow themselves to pull in front and hang on. Stephen Curry did his best to keep the Warriors hopes alive, scoring 32 including this stepback to cut the lead to one with nine seconds to play and give the Warriors a fighting chance.

After a pair of DeMar DeRozan free throws to get to 21 points on the night, the Warriors got the ball with 8.7 seconds to play needing a three to tie. The Spurs put a lot of focus on Curry, unsurprisingly, and when the inbound pass went to Draymond Green, the Warriors big man anticipated a foul was coming and, well, you can see for yourself.

The Warriors broadcast crew’s reaction was the best, as they couldn’t help but wonder aloud, “what’d he do that for?!” and an exasperated, “why?!” Now, it looks worse than it actually was because Green was, of course, trying to get three free throws to tie the game — although he had just missed two free throws not long before that so the likelihood of him sinking three in a row felt low — but it looked hilarious as Derrick White recoiled and avoided contact to allow Green to brick a 35-footer with authority.

Naturally, people immediately jumped to the Carlton Banks basketball moment and Green will have to live with the jokes for some time.

The Spurs got the win, thanks to Murray’s 27-point, 8-steal night and DeRozan’s 21 as well, and the two teams will get to do it all over again tomorrow in the same place.