Following the streaming success of Donald Glover’s incendiary Swarm series on Amazon, the Atlanta creator sat down for a GQ profile that won’t stop. Within the piece, he reflected upon how being rejected by both SNL and Parks and Rec may have actually been the best thing to happen to his career.
Glover also looked back on how getting booed during early Childish Gambino days didn’t hurt his performance, and now, he’s shining light on how his 30 Rock stint involved him being a “diversity” hire, something that Tina Fey freely admitted to him. This involved an actual “diversity incentive” from NBC, which was very budget friendly to those shows that hired a Black writer. As Glover put it, this also (unbeknownst to him at the time) led to friction between him and Black-ish creator Kenya Barris:
“There is no animosity between us or anything like that, but [Tina Fey] said it herself…. It was a diversity thing,” says Glover. “The last two people who were fighting for the job were me and Kenya Barris.” He laughs. “I didn’t know it was between me and him until later. He hit me one day and he was like, ‘I hated you for years!’”
Well, it sure sounds like misses on both Glover and Barris’ parts turned out for the best. Both of them can essentially get projects greenlit by their mere attachment to a project, and now, Glover can also air all of this backstory.
Jimmy Fallon’s new-ish show, That’s My Jam, really does have a fun gimmick. Taking the simplicity of James Corden’s Carpool Karaoke (which is ending after this season anyhow) and plugging in a bunch of other game show mechanics like a “wheel of fortune” randomizer and the Double Dare-esque spray of water, That’s My Jam not only gives celebrities a chance to wow audiences with incredible performances but also to be more “relatable” by doing something we all do — trip up singing our favorite songs.
Last night’s teams consisted of Community‘s Joel McHale with Will.I.Am and Keke Palmer with Saweetie. During the “Mega Mix Showdown” segment, the two rappers took on some of the classics of the genre — roulette and riff-off style, having to keep the beat between the randomized songs. The tracks included DMX’s “Party Up,” Ice Cube’s “It Was A Good Day,” The Notorious B.I.G.’s “Hypnotize,” OutKast’s “Ms. Jackson,” and Tupac’s “California Love.”
Considering both rappers hail from California, you’d think they’d kill that last one, but… Fortunately, they recovered on Snoop Dogg’s “Drop It Like It’s Hot,” with Eve’s “Let Me Blow Ya Mind” offering a grand finale. For the “Slay It, Don’t Spray It” segment, though, the girls’ team had to take on pop hits like “Wrecking Ball” — which Keke proclaimed “nobody knows” — while the boys nominated Joel McHale to sing Willie Nelson’s “On The Road Again” as Will bundled up for the inevitable rinse. Who gets the big spray? You can check out the video below to find out.
Pique recently appeared for an interview with Gerard Romero, where he discussed his relationship with Shakira and how he feels about her fanbase defending her.
“With the theme that’s gone on in this past year, my ex, she’s Latino Americana, and you have no idea what I’ve received on social media from her fans,” Piqué said, according to a translated version in People. “Barbarities. And I don’t care about any of it. Truly, zero. Because I don’t know them. They are people who have no lives. You’re never going to meet them. They are like robots.”
“There’s this theme of throwing beef. Which is a trend,” he added. “We don’t think about the consequences it can have on the person’s mental health who we’re throwing this beef to. If you are too much about comments, you’re dead.”
Earlier this week, Shakira announced that she’d be moving to Miami and would be bringing the two sons she shared with Piqué with her.
“I settled in Barcelona to give my sons stability, the same that we are now looking for in another corner of the world besides family, friends, and the sea. Today we started a new chapter in the search for happiness,” she wrote on Instagram, which the publication also translated.
Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App, has reportedly been killed after being stabbed earlier this week. Lee was the CPO of MobileCoin and the former chief technology officer of Square.
Police responded to a report of a stabbing around 2:35 am on Tuesday in downtown San Francisco, according to CBS. Lee was brought to the hospital where he died shortly after.
Bill Barhydt, CEO of Abra and a friend of Lee, tweeted, “I just got devastating news that our friend Bob Lee (@crazybob) was killed in SF early today. Bob was a dad, the former CTO of Square where he created Cash App & CTO of Mobile Coin. He was a generous decent human being who didn’t deserve to be killed.” As of Wednesday morning, no arrests had been made.
Lee had worked for various tech companies over the years, most recently as the chief product officer of San Francisco-based cryptocurrency company MobileCoin. Before that, Lee founded CashApp, one of the largest money transfer apps in the US. The app has partnered with many celebrities over the years, including Miley Cyrus and Megan Thee Stallion.
Many of Lee’s peers and collaborators took to Twitter to share stories of Lee, who had been in the tech world for over a decade.
So sad to hear of @crazybob’s untimely passing. I first met him in summer 2006 — he didn’t care that I was only 14 and we talked tech / geeked out about programming. We remained connected over the years and he was an early supporter of Figma. It’s so hard to believe he is gone.
Woke up to some shocking texts about @crazybob stabbed to death in SF. Crazy Bob earned his nickname. His mind and energy were unmatched. We recently reconnected since he’s also working in crypto. He was truly one of a kind and he’ll be sorely missed. pic.twitter.com/BK3IWQqN5e
I’ve been friends with @crazybob for 15 years. He was one of the best humans I’ve ever met. I’m so glad we were able to spend time together recently. RIP. I hate what San Francisco has become. https://t.co/UH171tyx4N
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.
The most significant change in media and the arts in the past 20 years has been the rise of the internet and social media. Everybody knows this. But what’s overlooked is the second most significant change, which is a direct byproduct of the first: The end of regionalism.
If you’ll allow me a brief self-indulgent tangent: I started my career in media in 2000. I was hired as a general assignment features reporter by my hometown newspaper in Wisconsin, and my plan was to one day work as a columnist for a daily in a mid-sized Middle American market, like Minneapolis or Louisville. That path seemed viable 23 years ago. But it did not happen. Within a few years, I realized — like Tony Soprano with the mafia — that I came in at the end. Regional media was collapsing, and I was trapped inside. Six years later I took a job as a city editor for an alt-weekly for roughly 25 percent less pay, but that paper eventually folded.
Luckily, I was able to escape. But part of me mourns what was lost. Once, I knew the people I was writing for. We walked the same streets, ate at the same restaurants, and bought toilet paper at the same convenience stores. Now the only thing I share with readers is close proximity to electronic devices.
Basically, the same thing happened to indie rock. In the ’80s and ’90s, indie music was associated with places like Minneapolis, Seattle, and Athens, Ga. The bands that came from those cities had a local character that felt distinct from the rest of the country. The Replacements and R.E.M. might have made the same kind of music in a broad sense, but their respective Midwestern and Southern sensibilities provided specific textures that ultimately defined who they were.
That sort of thing doesn’t happen as much anymore now that we are all stuck in the same digital bucket. Does it matter where Big Thief or Alvvays or Japanese Breakfast hail from? Like the rest of us plugged into the matrix, they come from nowhere and everywhere simultaneously. I don’t mean this as a criticism, as this “nowhere and everywhere” feeling is bigger than just music. The URL takeover of IRL is all-encompassing and unavoidable.
I thought about all of this while listening to the excellent new Wednesday album, Rat Saw God, out on Friday, because it cuts against the grain of everything I just wrote. Of its many attributes, what stands out to me the most is how regional it feels. This is the first record I have heard in a long time that feels like it came from somewhere. That somewhere would be Asheville, North Carolina, a palatial community with bountiful trees and fresh mountain air and loads of regional eccentricity. I visited a dozen years ago, and briefly conspired to land a job at the local newspaper so I could move there. (I wonder if that paper is still in business.) Listening to Rat Saw God felt like going back.
On the previous Wednesday LP, 2021’s Twin Plagues, singer-songwriter Karly Hartzman wrote evocative story songs set in what I like to call the GummoSouth, a partly real and partly made-up region in which dead dogs and burned-down Dairy Queens dot the landscape like Starbucks crowd street corners in big cities. But on Rat Saw God, her songwriting exhibits a level of detail that is practically physical. The title alone of the opening track, “Hot Rotten Grass Smell,” filled my nostrils with the aroma of a humid late July day. (Wisconsin — in the summer at least — is similar to North Carolina in a lot of ways.)
Tapping into that kind of visceral sense memory grants instant authenticity to the world that Hartzman creates on this record. The nail salons with the lights turned off, the sex shops off the highway with biblical names, the rundown houses with cocaine and guns hidden in the walls — you see, smell, feel, hear, and taste them all. Even the parts of Rat Saw God that evince full-on Harmony Korine-style surrealism have the intensely visual feel of fractured memories, like the kid in “Bath County” who sips on “piss colored bright yellow Fanta” and talks about someone who died in a Planet Fitness parking lot. Or the truck in “Formula One” that was too tall for the overpass and got its top ripped off. Or the many tales of misspent youth described in “Chosen To Deserve,” the spiritual center of the record.
I should note that in musical terms this band sounds like it was produced in a lab by scientists who were determined to cater to a person with my tastes. Do you also love Southern Rock Opera, Car Wheels On A Gravel Road, and Siamese Dream so much that you wish you could listen to all three albums at the same time? Are you thrilled by the prospect of pedal steel guitar put through a distortion pedal? Are you intrigued by the premise of a band that’s so good it doesn’t need MJ Lenderman to contribute any songs? Shouldn’t more country tunes be eight and a half minutes long and conclude with a woman screaming about Mortal Kombat? This record answers every question in the affirmative, as would I.
Hartzman has said that she wrote the lyrics to the concluding track, “TV In The Gas Pump,” in a phone note while on tour. The song’s banal imagery — “people standin’ with their arms crossed / in the line at the Panera Bread” — belies the comic/horrific vérité tone that pervades the rest of Rat Saw God. In Hartzman’s songs, dread and joy freely commingle, as they do in life. But above all there is a sense of wonderment that a world so terrible and wonderful exists at all. America is still a big, strange place if you allow yourself to touch grass (rotten or not) every now and then. Wednesday draws you into their own unique milieu on Rat Saw God, and I am grateful for their hospitality.
It looks like we’ll be seeing a lot more Lizzo on our screens in the near future. Following a recent extension of her first-look deal with Amazon Studios, Lizzo shared an audition casting call on her Twitter page for the second season of her Emmy-winning documentary series, Watch Out For The Big Grrrls.
During the first season of Watch Out For The Big Grrrls, Lizzo sought out a group of women to join her on what would later be her Special tour. According to the casting call, Lizzo is searching for women who can both dance and sing for the second season.
Hi. I know it’s been a lot of noise.
My mission is to help as many marginalized people as I can with my platform…
If you are a big girl that can sing & dance I’m currently holding auditions for season 2 of my show ‘Watch Out for the Big GRRRLS’ https://t.co/qWuEqXKyHM
“I’m thrilled to continue this partnership with the Amazon team after an incredible experience on Season 1 of Watch Out for the Big Grrrls,” said Lizzo in a statement (per Variety). “I’ve witnessed lives change through this show and I’m grateful for the opportunity to continue making space for even more Big Grrrls around the world to shine and break down barriers across this industry.”
Last week, Lizzo announced that her activewear brand, Yitty, is launching a line of gender-affirming shapewear, with binding tops and tucking thongs.
“You deserve to feel like you,” she said in a tweet. “You deserve to feel good in Your Skin.”
Donald Trump’s attorney Alina Habba apparently wanted her client to change his inner thug life (a motto of the late raper Tupac Shakur), but it didn’t quite work out in his favor.
Although both rap pioneers did know and have been photographed with Trump, Tupac’s sister Set Shakur isn’t here for the comparisons. In a statement shared with TMZ, Shakur flat out called Habba’s remarks “blasphemous.”
“My brother was measured by his integrity, his principles, and personal and collective responsibility,” said Shakur.
While the late rapper was found guilty of sexual assault in 1995, Shakur emphasized the difference between Trump and her brother is that “[Tupac] took accountability during his 1994 sexual abuse trial,” whereas, within Trump’s recent indictment, it is reported that in 2016 Trump tried to pay his accuser off with hush money.
Shakur later added that her brother’s time in prison wasn’t what made him popular. Instead, it was the fact that people “were able to measure him by his words and actions that aligned.”
Back in 1992, Tupac called out Trump for his greedy ways during an interview with MTV, saying, “If you want to be successful, if you want to be like Trump, gimme gimme gimme, push push push push. Step, step, step, crush, crush, crush. That’s how it all is, and it’s like… nobody ever stops.”
Even from the grave, the rapper was able to hit ’em up.
Anya Taylor-Joy was born in Florida; spent her childhood in Argentina; and moved to London when she was six. She was initially not a fan. “Argentina is all green and I had horses and animals everywhere,” she once told Vulture. “All of a sudden I was in big city and I didn’t speak the language.”
Taylor-Joy, who grew up speaking Spanish, initially refused to learn English when she moved to London because she wanted to “send my family back home,” but she began to pick the language up thanks to a movie starring one of her fellow The Super Mario Bros. Movie voice actors. “At the school I went to when I first moved to London, they would play School of Rock every Friday. At that time, I didn’t really speak much English, if any, so that and Harry Potter and Jumanji are like how I learned English!” she told BuzzFeed.
Taylor-Joy was starstruck the first time she met Black:
“I didn’t realize I was going to be doing the press day for this movie with Jack Black, so when I read that, the sound that came out of me was just this high pitch shriek that I was not expecting! We haven’t met each other because we all recorded our parts individually, so I was super starstruck when I saw the schedule for today. I very seldom get like that, but I was just running around earlier like, ‘Oh my God, Tenacious D, this is amazing.’”
Anya Taylor-Joy and Jack Black will lead as two kings.
Heading into Donald Trump’s arrest, the former president has reportedly been getting roasted around the world, and surprisingly, Russia is no exception. Despite Trump and Vladimir Putin seemingly being close, Kremlin state media went to town on Trump as several talk shows mocked him for facing a potential prison sentence.
As AI-generated graphics of Trump in prison clothes graced the screens, state media programs like Sunday Evening With Vladimir Solovyov joked about the former president fleeing to Russia. Via The Daily Beast:
“Should we afford the opportunity for Donald Trump to escape the unfair political persecution in Russia?,” Solovyov asked. He then joked that “Donald Fredovych” could be given an apartment in Rostov-on-Don, formerly occupied by the disgraced former president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych. Andrey Sidorov, deputy dean of world politics at Moscow State University, bitterly noted: “First, one has to earn the spot in Rostov-on-Don… I am quite disappointed with Donald. He disappointed me back on January 6, 2021.”
As for why January 6 disappointed Sidorov, The Daily Beast reports that Kremlin talking heads “have long lamented that Trump had failed to trigger civil war in the United States.” Yeah…
Meanwhile, on the Russian version of 60 Minutes, one of the hosts was downright jovial despite guests wearing oversized ties in solidarity with Trump and suggesting that the Democrats somehow tricked him into having an affair with Stormy Daniels.
“Trump may soon be outfitted in an orange jumpsuit and handcuffed,” co-host Olga Skabeeva joked. “We’re getting lots of popcorn and waiting!”
Disney+ seems to be venturing into new territory lately. The streamer has a lot of original shows, though many of them take place in a galaxy far far away, or in some sort of multiverse situation. Perhaps in an effort to keep people on toes, Disney has ordered a new series that will surely be a family favorite, as it involves a one-night stand and the devil. Are you following this?!
Pauline is an original German series that follows the titular teenager who unexpectedly becomes pregnant after a one-night stand with a mysterious man named Lukas. Unfortunately, this man happens to be the actual Devil. Hey, it could happen to anyone. With school and the pressures of being a teen all weighing down on her, Pauline has no time to have a crush on the Devil in this day and age. Pauline will be portrayed by Sira-Anna Faal, while Ludger Bökelmann will bring the Devil to life as Lukas.
The series is written by Sebastian Colley with executive producers Philipp Käßbohrer and Matthias Murmann. The team also brought the popular series How To Sell Drugs Online (Fast) to Netflix in 2019. That series was recently greenlit for a fourth season, according to German outlet DWDL.
In a statement (per Deadline) Käßbohrer and Murmann expressed their excitement to join the Disney+ family. “For a long time, the series has been and still remains a project very close to our hearts. We’re thrilled that Disney+ loves this coming-of-age story as much as we do and that we’ve now been able to begin filming with such an amazing cast and crew.”
It’s so nice that Disney is giving fans what they want: messy teenage love stories which involve both demons and high school. Some would say they go hand in hand.
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