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Issa Rae’s “Rap Sh!t” Gets New Trailer From HBO Max

The trailer for Issa Rae’s next HBO series, Rap Sh!t, is here. The show will center around two estranged high school friends who attempt to break into the music industry.

The friends will be played by Aida Osman and KaMillion. Rae wrote the premiere episode and also co-wrote the finale. The series was developed from her original Insecure script.


Dia Dipasupil / Getty Images

Speaking about the show with Harper’s Bazaar, Rae recently said that it’s a unique time to be a female rapper and wanted to center a story around that experience.

“I think this is just such a unique time in hip-hop, especially when it comes to female rappers, because there’s such an abundance, and it doesn’t feel like they’re all in competition with each other,” Issa explained to the outlet. “I’m a child of the ’90s, and there used to always be a tendency to put two women against one another. It feels like we’re in an era where there’s such a supportive environment now because of that abundance. All of that, combined with just my own story of coming up, became the next story that I wanted to tell.”

Insecure’s final episode aired back in December. In the years since it debuted, Rae has expanded her career by working on several films including Little, The Photograph, The Lovebirds, and more.

Rap Sh!t is scheduled to hit HBO Max on July 21, 2022.

Check out the trailer for HBO’s Rap Sh!t below.

[Via]

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Logic Denies Dissing Reason On “Vinyl Days”

Despite being one of the most harmless rappers alive, Logic somehow finds himself catching strays every so often. In 2020, Reason shook up hip-hop Twitter after he seemingly took shots at Logic on “The Soul Pt. 2” where he rapped, “See y’all mistake my name for Logic’s, y’all got me fucked up/ How you compare a n***a that take from the culture/Versus a n***a that’s for it.” In response, Logic insisted that he had no idea who Reason was. 


 Isaac Brekken/Getty Images

However, it seems like Reason felt that Logic was taking a shot at him on “Vinyl Days.” Logic’s repetitive use of the word reason in the song seemed to spark the notion that the Maryland rapper was firing back at the TDE MC. “Come on, homie, listen to the voice of reason/Yeah, you talk a lot of shit but don’t want the beef like a vegan,” he raps. “Fuckin’ with Logic, that’s the reason that you stop breathing/Cardiac arrest caught you at your chest.”

Logic clarified those bars after Rory from the Rory & Mal podcast claimed that Reason believed those bars were directed at him. He explained that he would mention names if it were an actual diss. “Hey bro @reasonTDE my boy @thisisrory said you thought I dissed you on my song Vinyl Days. If I was going to diss you, I’d diss you. I love you, you’re my brother. Let’s get ice cream together some time,” he tweeted.

Rory quoted the tweet, adding, “And here I was just trying to be sensible… smh.”

Logic’s “Vinyl Days” serves as the titular track of his forthcoming album, due out this Friday, June 17th.

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Andrew Wiggins Has Fans Calling For Him To Win Finals MVP

Andrew Wiggins was considered a bust just a few years ago. After being selected with the first overall pick, Wiggins did not excel with the Minnesota Timberwolves. While he was by no stretch the worst first overall pick ever, he was still looking pretty pedestrian out on the court. With this in mind, no one could have predicted how he would eventually turn his career around with the Golden State Warriors.

Last night in Game 5 of the NBA Finals, Wiggins showed up and showed out and he notched 26 points and 13 rebounds to lead the team to a win and a 3-2 series lead. This was Wiggins’ best game of the playoffs thus far and he ended up leading the team in points.

His play out on the court was so impressive that fans on Twitter could not believe what they were seeing. It led to plenty of “dog in him” memes but it also led to a new debate about Finals MVP. With Steph Curry looking a bit shaky in an important game, some believe that Wiggins could very well become the leading candidate for Finals MVP if he is the best player if and when the Warriors close out the series.

These arguments may be a bit of a stretch at this point, however, it speaks to just how well Wiggins has changed the narrative surrounding him. Fans love him right now and it’s great to see a player have a resurgence like this.

Let us know who you think is taking this series, in the comments below.

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Steph Curry Trolls Celtics Fans With “Ayesha Curry Can Cook” Shirt

Boston Celtics fans are some of the most ruthless in the entire NBA. Their antics can be pretty funny sometimes, however, there are other instances where they are just completely disrespectful. The NBA Finals have been a testament to that, and while Draymond Green has heard it from Boston fans, so have Steph Curry and his wife Ayesha.

Ayesha Curry has her own restaurant and is considered to be a pretty great cook. Despite this, Celtics fans taunted Curry and his family last week by putting up signs at local bars and restaurants that simply said “Ayesha Curry Can’t Cook.” The signs were humorous to Celtics fans while others felt they crossed the line.

As it turns out, Steph is having fun with it as on Monday night, he taunted Celtics fans with an “Ayesha Curry Can Cook” t-shirt following Game 5 of the NBA Finals. The taunt was certainly deserved as Curry and the Warriors were able to win the game and take a 3-2 series lead. Now, the team will head back to Boston where they can win the title on the Celtics’ home court. 

These NBA Finals have been very entertaining so far, although the games themselves haven’t been so close. Hopefully, that is going to change in Game 6, as we would love to see a tight game before the Larry O’Brien trophy is given out.

Let us know who you think will win, in the comments below.

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UAAP volleyball: Ateneo eliminates UST, sets up showdown vs La Salle

MANILA, Philippines–Faith Nisperos took control of Ateneo’s endgame, scoring its last five points to help defeat University of Santo Tomas, 25-23, 25-23, 25-20 Tuesday night and level up to the second round of the UAAP Season 84 women’s volleyball step-ladder semifinals at Mall of Asia Arena. The 5-foot-11 open spiker unloaded 23 points for the […]

The post UAAP volleyball: Ateneo eliminates UST, sets up showdown vs La Salle appeared first on Inquirer Sports.

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Taiwan World Cup fans likely to be listed as Chinese

DOHA/TAIPEI—An identification card that doubles as an entry visa for the World Cup in Qatar is likely to list Taiwan fans as being from China, a senior Qatari official said on Tuesday, after the island complained its citizens could not register as Taiwanese. The issue is extremely sensitive for democratically-governed Taiwan, which bristles at China’s […]

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The Avalanches on sending music to the Moon: “We’ve always been really fascinated by that”

The Avalanches have contributed to a project that involves sending exclusive transmissions to the Moon and back as part of the UK-wide Tour de Moon festival.

READ MORE: The Avalanches: “Now we’re just a regular band instead of the band who made an amazing debut”

The immersive and free festival – which brings together talks, cinema, music and games under one cosmic theme – has toured the UK throughout May and June via sustainable moon convoy, and is due to conclude at Hackney’s Pedro Youth Club on Thursday (June 16).

As part of the festival, creative director Dr. Nelly Ben Hayoun, who is also the founder of NASA’s International Space Orchestra, has collaborated with artists including The Avalanches, Massive Attack, Moses Boyd and Pussy Riot using Moonbounce: an Earth-Moon-Earth (EME) technology.

“Radio waves are beamed from the Earth to the Moon, and they basically eat the surface of the entire side of the Moon facing the Earth,” Hayoun said of the technology. “And that penetrates three metres deep into the surface before eventually being reflected and refracted by the deeper lunar rocks. And that’s a very unique way, if you’re a musician, to think about collaborating with the Moon, because effectively, the sound that you’re going to send to the Moon is going to come back to us completely distorted.

“That’s what really excited me about Moonbounce. At Tour de Moon, our festival is about new relationships to our environment, new relationships to humans and societies and looking at alternative futures. I really strongly believe that by actually starting to look at other ways of collaboration with our environment and with the cosmos we can start bringing in all new levels of innovation that avoids us just repeating history.”

When the Tour de Moon festival launched on October 21, 2021, a transmission was sent to the Moon through Moonbounce of a new original mix of the 1980 song ‘ITT (International Thief Thief)’ by Fela Kuti. The finished track included a saxophone improv that Fela Kuti’s youngest son Seun Kuti contributed over the recording.

Hayoun has previously worked with The Avalanches on other projects and was excited to be able to send some of their tracks to the Moon. “The way that The Avalanches are mixing sounds and the way that they made their latest album [‘We Will Always Love You’] is very unique in the sense that they started to look at things like transmission technology to actually compose music,” she said.

Speaking from their current tour inStockholm, Avalanches’ Robbie Chater told NME about how they got involved. “We worked with Nelly during lockdown, when we did a collaboration with the International Space Orchestra via Zoom,” he said. “We performed a version of our song ‘Wherever You Go’ together, which was a really, really incredible experience.”

He continued: “I suppose we’ve always been interested in the idea of sampling and of sound as a kind of never ending life-force, a cycle of transmission that goes around and around and around. I love thinking about how there’ll be an old record that we find and I often think about what was going on in the person’s life who made that record at the time, say in the 1950s, and how they’ve recorded all their emotion and feelings onto wax.

“That record may have had various owners over the years who have played it over and over and added to crackles in the sound. Then I’ll find that record and sample it and then it’s broadcast out on the radio again or at a festival, where you have people singing along to old lyrics from songs from the ’50s that we’ve sampled and it’s sort of this never ending cycle of music and energy.

Chater added: “We’ve always been really fascinated by that. Sending some music to the moon and back feels like an extension of that idea and that cycle. We were really excited when Nelly told us it might be possible. We’ve been thinking about it for a long, long time, but never knew if it actually would technically be possible.”

Though the band haven’t actually heard the final result, Chater is pleased that they had the opportunity to take part in the first place and has some idea what their track may sound like. “I imagine it will be quite staticky – other earth transmissions I’ve heard are quite staticky,” he said. “But I love that kind of sound and that aesthetic, full of hiss and crackle and static, is in our records too. We feel very grateful to have been able to do this. It’s like a dream come true for us.”

The Australian duo are currently on tour in support of their third album ‘We Will Always Love You’, with dates coming up in Glasgow, Manchester, London and Brighton later in June, as well as a slot at Glastonbury. Any remaining tickets can be found here.

“It’s been so lovely,” Chater told NME about the band’s tour. “I can’t describe actually how moving it’s been, I don’t think I was prepared. We felt sort of stuck in Australia because our borders were closed for so long and you basically couldn’t travel. I knew the record had been well received around the world, but that’s just like an intellectual understanding.

“We were a little flat for a while that we were putting our hearts into this record and it coming out. It kind of felt like, ‘Oh, is that it?’ So now it’s so wonderful to be playing those songs. We were in Oslo a few days ago and people knew all the words to all the new songs, and I never would have expected that. It’s been wonderful.”

Admitting that “obviously in the past we’ve taken a long time to make records”, with 16 years between their seminal debut ‘Since I Left You’ and follow-up ‘Wildflower’, Chater said that they “had a very, very clear idea and a feeling we wanted to explore and some quite big themes” on 2020’s ‘We Will Always Love You’. “On a deeper level, it’s about exploring the nature of transmission, the history of recorded sound and vibration and energy and how that relates to us as living beings,” he said.

“I often think about how every radio broadcast has ever been broadcast from planet Earth since we started broadcasting terrestrial radio is still sort of floating out there in space. So there’s Elvis’s voice and John Lennon’s voice and Dolly Parton’s voice all floating out there in the cosmos, and traveling away from earth. It’s fun to think about where those voices will end up and if anybody’s listening and what they would make of planet Earth.”

It’s a really special moment to finally announce we’ll be playing @glastonbury 2022! After two years of delay it will be wonderful to share ‘We Will Always Love You’ with you all pic.twitter.com/imPdJZUqW4

— The Avalanches (@TheAvalanches) March 4, 2022

Looking ahead to their slot at Worthy Farm next week, Chater said: “We’ve only done Glastonbury once before, but I’m so excited. As a kid growing up in Australia, I would get the NME and read all about Glastonbury and be like, ‘Oh, my God, one day I want to go’.

“Last time we were on a crazy schedule and we were in and out. We were literally there for like two hours. So this this year, we’ll be there the night before and we’ll get to see other acts and hang out and experience the whole thing. So I’m just so excited.”

Last year, Cola Boyy released the single, ‘Don’t Forget Your Neighborhood’, co-written and produced by The Avalanches. Of working with other artists and the band’s future, Chater said that fans should keep their eyes peeled for more new music.

“We’re mainly focused on our records,” he said, “but we did a track with Kacey Musgraves when we were in the States recently to play Coachella. We went down to Nashville for a day to work with her and that was absolutely incredible. So I’m not sure what we’re going to do with that song, but it’s really beautiful.

“We’ve got heaps of new music floating around,” Chater added. “I think it’s just a matter of finishing touring and then sort of figuring out what to do with all these new songs.”

Tour de Moon festival concludes on Thursday June 16. Visit here for more information.

The band will then perform at The Park Stage at Glastonbury on Saturday June 25. Check out the full line-up and stage times here.

The post The Avalanches on sending music to the Moon: “We’ve always been really fascinated by that” appeared first on NME.

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