Before Top Gun: Maverick, before his scene-stealing appearances on 30 Rock and Bob’s Burgers, even before Mad Men, Hamm was a drama teacher in St. Louis. One of his students? Future Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt co-star Ellie Kemper. “Here’s the thing. So, he’s 10 years older than I am. He went to my high school. To give people some background, he went to my high school, went to college, came back and taught drama for a year at our high school. And he’s the youngest teacher by far,” she told host Andy Cohen on SiriusXM’s Andy Cohen Live. “He’s not bad looking, and he’s teaching drama.”
Cohen had to correct Kemper. “Excuse me,” he said. “He’s great looking.” Kemper agreed. “He is, in fact, great looking. Dreamy,” she added. The Office actress only had nice things to say about “good guy” Hamm.
“Jon Hamm is a generous, selfless kind of guy. I reached out to him when I was doing my one-person show. A little comedy show. I had my little suitcase of props. I was doing this one-person show in Los Angeles, and at that time, he was already famous on Mad Men. I emailed him from our high school directory. I said, ‘Hey, I’m doing this show. I know you’re really busy, but it’d be great if you could come.’ And he came, and that’s when I really reconnected with him. I mean, that’s a class act, right? He’s a good guy.”
Jon Hamm is talented, handsome, funny, and a solid dude? I should be angry at him for making the rest of us look bad, until I remember the time he, in character as Reverend Richard Wayne Gary Wayne, sang “The Purple People Eater” on Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. Can’t be mad at that.
Stephen A. Smith has made a career out of having incredibly strong takes about everything. While he’s increasingly done this in a variety of different worlds — entertainment, politics, etc. — Smith’s bread and butter is sports, where he has the innate ability to immediately explain why something is incredibly good or extremely bad.
But now, Smith is on the other side of this. The ESPN personality went to Yankee Stadium to throw out a first pitch on Thursday night and bounced it a good bit in front of home plate. It was easily one of the 10,000,000 or so most embarrassing things to happen to someone wearing a Yankees jersey in Yankee Stadium this season, and on Friday’s edition of First Take, Smith found the shoe on the other foot, as people kept coming on the show and cooking him like a well done steak.
Things started with Smith trying his best to explain himself while everyone at the desk looked on disapprovingly.
And then, trouble started. Both Snoop Dogg and Shannon Sharpe recorded and sent in messages, with Snoop saying he should be “ashamed of that pitch” and Sharpe saying he’s gonna really cook him on Monday morning when he’s on the show next.
Steve Harvey decided to get in on the fun, as he called into the show and said that he’s been getting calls about the pitch, which left him embarrassed. ESPN’s Dan Orlovsky also decided to chime in by getting his children involved.
And guess what: Shaq called in, and after he got through some takes about the Dallas Cowboys and Deion Sanders, he actually said that he did not see the pitch. (If you do not understand the Tex Johnson thing, please enjoy maybe my favorite clip in Stephen A. Smith history.)
I would like to personally congratulate everyone on what was probably an extremely fun (and long-awaited) day for all of them.
Here’s a wild one, even for Ted Cruz: Democrats are planning on giving Joe Biden the old heave-ho so Michelle Obama can run for president instead.
That’s the baseless conspiracy theory the Texas senator pitched on the Verdict with Ted Cruz podcast earlier this week. “So here’s the scenario that I think is perhaps the most likely and most dangerous. In August of 2024, the Democrat kingmakers jettison Joe Biden and parachute in Michelle Obama. I view this as a very serious danger,” Cruz said, according to Mediaite.
“Michelle Obama, number one, you don’t infuriate African-American women, which is a critical part of the constituency that Democrats are relying on to win,” Cruz said. “But number two, you avoid the problem, if you pick from any of the four, the other three are pissed because they’re all to some extent, peers, they’re rivals. They’re all jabbing knives at each other.” The “four” are Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris, and Gavin Newsom.
Cruz doesn’t think Obama is interested in the gig, “but to parachute in August of ’24, a couple of months before the presidency and suddenly wake up and be president…” The fake beer-swigging everyman sees this as a worst-case scenario for America. “That ought to scare the hell out of anyone who is unhappy about the direction this country is going and doesn’t want us to go even crazier in an even worse direction,” Cruz added.
It takes very little to start a rumor on social media these days. It probably never took much to begin with, but thanks to platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter, one person’s private joke can spread like wildfire. Case in point: All it took to start the rumor that Nigerian Afrobeats star Tems was pregnant was a video of the star gripping the front of her coat.
The video, which appears to have been posted on her Instagram Story, sees the star greeting fans at an event, but observers online attributed the way she held the coat closed in front of her to hiding a baby bump. This quickly spun into some fans speculating that the father was her “Wait For U” collaborator Future.
The answer is very likely “no.” While Tems herself didn’t directly address the wild rumor (which seems mostly to be the result of several blogs reposting the same story quoting a handful of comments on the original video), she did subtly shoot it down on both Twitter and Instagram. “In conclusion, you people are all mad!!!” she wrote on Twitter (not X, which is a dumb name and no one should take it or its owner seriously). The star, who is used to criticism of her sartorial choices, clearly isn’t sweating the speculation.
Meanwhile, on Instagram, she posted a string of side profile photos in the same outfit — ostensibly taken on the same day — that show no bump to be seen. The star also reposted a supporter’s epic clapback at one skeptical commenter’s insistence that she’s lying. To be fair… he kinda asked for it. Just goes to show: Never stick your nose into conversations where it doesn’t belong.
It’s been a week since former Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner gave a disastrous interview to the New York Times to promote his upcoming book of classic rocker interviews, The Masters. Thankfully, it lingered just long enough in the news for Steven and Ian to talk about it on the pod. The guys reflect on Wenner’s legacy, why he chose to say out loud what many assumed were his feelings about women and black musicians, and what this means for the discourse overall. Also, they talk about the surprise re-emergence of Spin‘s Bob Guccione Jr. aka the guy Axl Rose threatened to beat up in “Get In The Ring.”
From there they talk about Laugh Track, the surprise new album by The National that dropped earlier this week. It’s their second LP of 2023 after First Two Pages Of Frankenstein, and it sounds a lot like that record. Steven and Ian are somewhat lukewarm on both records, though Steven believes that a very good single National album could have been made from their best material. What’s going on with this band, and have they lost the ability to self-edit?
In the mailbag, a listener takes the guys to task for talking about sports too much, and another letter writer asks an important CD-related question: jewel case or digipak?
In Recommendation Corner, Ian talks about the Grimes-like singer-songwriter Yeule while Steven recommends the Summerteeth-like rock band Slaughter Beach, Dog.
New episodes of Indiecast drop every Friday. Listen to Episode 156 here and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. You can submit questions for Steve and Ian at indiecastmailbag@gmail.com, and make sure to follow us on Instagram and Twitter for all the latest news. We also recently launched a visualizer for our favorite Indiecast moments. Check those out here.
Today (September 22), he shared Boys Of Faith, an EP featuring Bon Iver on the title track and Noah Kahan on “Sarah’s Place.” It’s five songs that possess Bryan’s astonishing songwriting that listeners love him for. On “Boys Of Faith,” Bryan and Justin Vernon harmonize somberly, “But you stuck around when I was down / And I’ll owe you all my days / Them boys of faith.”
About being arrested in Oklahoma, he posted a video explaining what happened. “I get too lippy with [the cop], he brings me over to his car, and I just didn’t help my situation at all,” he said. “I felt like a child. It was ridiculous, it was immature, and I just pray everyone knows that I don’t think I’m above the law. I was just being disrespectful and I shouldn’t have been. It was my mistake.”
Stream Boys Of Faith below.
Zach Bryan is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
On Scarlet, her fourth and latest full-length album, Doja Cat sounds both supremely self assured and extremely hacked off at the same damn time. Both states appear to be the result of the last two years worth of accolades and accomplishments and an overwhelming deluge of debates about whether any of it was deserved.
Let’s get one thing out of the way right here and now; absolutely, every damn bit of it was deserved and earned by Doja, by virtue of both her talent and her hard work. But so much success these days comes with caveats; if you’re the best pop star of the nascent 2020s, you simply CAN’T be a rapper. Pretty privilege plays a part, of course. Then there is that forever looming shadow of sexism, the one that says the men in the audience are owed ownership of your sexuality (even though you never made the art for them in the first place).
Doja Cat has spent the last year systematically dismantling every one of these arguments and the majority of Scarlet is directed toward that end, as well.
I already wrote about how Doja has always been a stylistic chameleon, but since then, the wildly eclectic star has revealed more of just how trying the last few years of judgment and scrutiny have been. She has railed against so-called “stan culture,” in which obsessive followers of various pop stars wage never ending and increasingly nasty wars of words on social media on behalf of performers who rarely ask them to.
On Scarlet, she hammers home the point that this is not normal. The parasocial relationship that exists between artists and their listeners has always had ominous implications but they’ve always been sublimated, hazy, just out of sight. On social media, they’ve become unavoidable, and Doja Cat is fed up. She repeatedly lashes out at the speculators and skeptics, offering them several seats to watch the show while simultaneously shushing both their toxic banter and overfamiliarity. “Stop-callin’-me-sis body bitch, we not a kin,” she snarls on “Shutcho.” “You do not exist to me, miss, I’m not your friend.”
Meanwhile, Doja also pushed back at her own public image during this album’s rollout. While the pristine presentation is polished pop perfection has served her well in climbing her way to a successful career, she’s vented many times that it hasn’t been creatively fulfilling. I keep coming back to this point again and again in writing about this artist, but Doja is at heart a backpack rap kid. She was raised by musical influences like Little Brother and Erykah Badu. And while even the staunchest of underground rappers had been unafraid to sonically experiment, for Doja, churning out disco-pop confections like “Kiss Me More” and “Say So” must have eventually worn like an itchy Christmas sweater in early autumn.
Doja wears her influences on her sleeve here; “Often” sounds straight-up like old-school Baduizm. She tried this sort of hazy, incense-tinged thing before,way back when on 2012’s “So High,” but where she didn’t quite have the poise to make it stick then, she sounds much more natural and comfortable here. Meanwhile, songs like “Paint The Town Red” and “97” track like brighter, more futuristic versions of the murky underground rap Doja was surrounded by in the orbit of early aughts Project Blowed spin-offs created by veterans of the renowned open mic.
Scarlet is clearly the album that the snarky battle rapper inside her has wanted to make since the beginning. Her pen game has always been ferocious but here, she elevates barbed wit with specific targets in mind. On the dramatically titled “Balut,” she sneers, “You are fleeting, so you can’t copy this” – a subtle jab at haters recalling the short-lived and ill-advised Twitter feature that sought to force a Xeroxed version of competitors’ products onto its own reticent user base.
Certainly, she’s had enough speculation from concern trolls in her Instagram comments calling her tattoos demonic and theorizing about things she considers nobody’s business but her own. “Skull And Bones” addresses the rumormongers directly; “Y’all been pushin’ ‘Satan this’ and ‘Satan that,’” she mocks. “My fans is yellin’, ‘Least she rich,’ you need that pact / Lookin’ like I got some things you hate I have / And trust me, baby, God don’t play with hate like that.”
On “Agoura Hills,” Doja offers her own theory about the scandals and backlashes that have followed her since she blew up – and those who start the drama. “Boys be mad that I don’t fuck incels,” she muses. “Girls hate too, gun to their pigtail.” In Doja’s mind, it’s all the same thing: Social pressure to conform directed at someone who’s accomplished so much because she refuses to do so. “Agoura Hills” also best encapsulates where Doja is on Scarlet – it’s a love song to her man, it’s a withering diss to her haters, it’s a trolling response to critics of her identity (including herself; her white girl voice on verse one is a thing of comedic beauty).
Doja said during the rollout of the album that it was written over the course of two very different periods in her life. That’s evident in the latter half of the album, when it sounds like Doja is very much in her soft girl era. But Scarlet itself is a rejoinder to the idea that artists must be only one or two things or that their entire existences belong to the fans. They often say “I wouldn’t be here without you,” and to a certain extent, that’s true. But they also wouldn’t be where they are without the quirks and individuality that make them who they are, that draw us to them. They own that part themselves and owe it to absolutely no one else. Scarlet’s as much a reminder of that to Doja Cat as it is to us.
Are Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson related?
Well, they both enjoy smoking pot, which doesn’t prove anything but it gives me an excuse to remind everyone of the time that McConaughey got so high after accidentally smoking Snoop Dogg’s weed while filming Harmony Korine’s The Beach Bum that he “rapped for thirteen hours straight.” But as for whether the True Detective co-stars are actually related, it’s complicated.
“In Greece a few years ago, we’re sitting around talking about how close we are and our families,” McConaughey said on the Let’s Talk Off Camera with Kelly Ripa podcast earlier this year. “And my mom is there, and she says, ‘Woody, I knew your dad.’ Everyone was aware of the ellipses that my mom left after ‘knew.’ It was a loaded K-N-E-W.” They discovered that Harrelson’s dad “was on furlough at the same time that my mom and dad were in their second divorce. Then there’s possible receipts and places out in West Texas where there might have been a gathering, or a meeting, or a ‘knew’ moment.”
Harrelson has been pushing for a reluctant McConaughey to take a DNA test, but, as the Interstellar actor explained, “he’s asking me to take a chance to go, ‘Wait a minute, you’re trying to tell me my dad may not be my dad after 53 years of believing that?’ I got a little more skin in the game.”
If McConaughey does go through with it, there’s only one man for the job.
“I just heard about the possibilities,” paternity test expert Maury Povich told E! News. “I mean, Matthew, I don’t know you. Woody, you’re my pal, but guess what? I would come out of retirement! We could do prime-time DNA: Maury’s back with Woody and Matthew.” He added, “Woody’s got my number. I’m ready!” McConaughey replied to the offer, “I don’t know if we’re going to be calling you to do it on your show, but I like the way you’re thinking.”
While the song “Skull And Bones” addresses fans’ theory that the entertainer is a satanist, on “97,” Doja shares her comments on the massive social media unfollow spree led by former fan pages. In July, she took a jab at supporters that crowned themselves “Kittenz” for the juvenile name choice. Then, she doubled down on the social media app Threads, calling out fan pages for their unhealthy, obsessive behavior. This online rant resulted in over 250,000 users unfollowing the musician on Instagram.
On “97,” which was co-written by Doja Cat, Jay Versace, and Sam Barsh and produced by Barsh and Versace, Doja confesses that she has no regrets. In fact, she encourages more to follow suit to help boost her social media analytics.
“Pull up and they smiley instead (actin’ stupid) / Like they wasn’t tryna fight me in Threads (’bout some music) / In a tweet that I’ma probably still stand by (I’m ruthless) / Keep your money, funky b*tch, ’cause I don’t play about (the rumors) / They gon’ buy it, they gon’ pirate, they gon’ play it, they consume it/ If you’re scootin’ let me know, ’cause that’s a comment, that’s a view / And that’s a rating, that’s some hating, that’s engagement I could use / And I could teach y’all how to do this, but I’d much rather be cruisin’,” rapped Doja on the track’s second verse.
Doja Cat’s relationship with supporters and social media has been extreme over the years. But based on “97,” she has realized that it’s all smoke and mirrors. Her happiness is the most important.
Listen to Doja Cat’s “97” below.
Scarlet is out now via RCA. Find more information here.
Netflix has finally dropped the first look at Squid Game: The Challenge, the new reality competition series based on the wildly popular Squid Game series. Obviously, the contestants in this version won’t compete to the death. What they will compete for, however, is the largest cash prize in TV history.
According to the teaser, 456 players will push themselves to the limit for a whopping $4.56 million. As one of the player says, “People do a whole lot worse for a whole lot less.”
Thanks to the massive popularity of the original series, contestants flocked to participate in Squid Game: The Challenge, but the production quickly became bathed in controversy. Reports started coming in that players were experiencing “inhumane conditions” and suffering “multiple injuries.” Netflix reportedly conducted a safety review and Britain’s Health and Safety Executive visited the set. No violations were found, but it was stressed that the production “properly plan for risks.”
What exactly were those players put through? Guess we’ll find out soon.
Here’s the official synopsis:
Though the reality version of ‘Squid Game‘ isn’t a matter of life or death, there’s still a lot on the line. 456 players will compete to win $4.56 million, the largest cash prize in reality television history. Through a series of games, each player will be pushed to their limits and forced to ask themselves just how far they’ll go to win, with opportunistic alliances, cutthroat strategies and timely betrayals to follow.
Squid Game: The Challenge premieres November 22 on Netflix.
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