All of that came to fruition in the above clip, in which Amber Ruffin’s crew lost to the Boyz, who then proceeded to blow their Fast Money opportunity in terrifyingly hilarious fashion. And, as is often the case, Harvey let the Boyz know exactly how badly they messed up.
Our first contestant, Wanya, actually does pretty well in his Fast Money round. Though there was one potentially fatal flaw: he did answer “July” when asked to name a month that has five letters in it. If you’re comprehending this paragraph, you know that “July” has four letters in it, not five. But even with the zero on that last answer, he took a cool 130 points into the second half of the contest. And you only need 200 to win, so the Men are more than halfway there.
“You smarter than me, Shawn,” Wanya says as his partner reappears on stage. “You smarter than me.”
And then disaster strikes.
Things go pretty well, more or less, until that final question comes up once more. Name a month with five letters in it.
“August,” Shawn says after a moment’s incorrect thought.
The audience actually laughs a bit, and Shawn realizes soon enough that he made a big mistake here.
“He’s not smarter than me, Steve!” Wanya yells. “He’s not smarter than me!”
Oh, but the worst was yet to come. Because while the first four answers were once again pretty solid, the Boyz were short of their goal by nine as the penultimate answer came across the board. What’s something people put on top of oatmeal? As it turns out, in the opinion of 100 people surveyed, they can’t believe it’s not butter.
It’s worth watching the full clip for Harvey’s rant before “August” comes up, as this is truly where the longtime host shines. But if you can’t watch it, for some reason, here’s a brief summary in three images.
Netflix recently released Clusterf*ck: Woodstock ’99, their three-episode documentary series directed by Jamie Crawford exploring the titular music festival. Even though it’s been barely a year since HBO released its own Woodstock ’99 documentary, which you’d think would’ve already scratched this itch, I immediately binged all three episodes of the new version the second they were available. Then I watched them again two nights later when a friend came to visit.
I devoured it all, despite it being largely material I’d already seen, delivering information I already knew. I did it so fast and so reflexively that it forced me to ask myself, why? What is it about this seemingly obscure event from 23 years ago that makes me want to keep reliving it, rehashing it, relitigating it? What answers am I hoping to find this time around?
The last time I sped through two docs about the same thing this eagerly was Netflix and Hulu’s competing Fyre Fest documentaries, so maybe there’s just something endlessly intriguing about watching music festival-goers suffer, cocky festival organizers devoured by their own hubris. And sure, maybe there’s the nostalgia factor. I was 18 when Woodstock ’99 happened, so the time period is etched indelibly in my mind. It’s always luridly fascinating to relive those days of bare breasts, baggy pants, and ICE spiker, when the biggest political issue on most young white kids’ minds was how MTV sucks now and your moms was always trying to tell you what to do.
Yet there’s more to Clusterf**k‘s appeal than simple nostalgia. The music and fashion is safely anachronistic, but the event itself, the way it plays out and is eventually covered, feels like a cultural harbinger. It feels like a coming out party for a certain brand of feckless post-counterculture liberal that’s still with us today. These eternally optimistic yet clueless ex-hippies transform seamlessly into “the man” without even realizing it. Woodstock ’99 feels like a transitional moment, perhaps the first time that people of my generation realized that the counterculture we’d been raised to worship had become the culture, and they were hopelessly out of touch. That they’d keep trying to recycle their youth for new generations without acknowledging that the material conditions that produced it had changed.
Woodstock ’99 was an attempt to recreate Woodstock ’69, when four 20-somethings organized one of the touchstone cultural events of the sixties. 30 years later, some of the same people, notably original Woodstock organizer Michael Lang, tried to do the same thing. Only instead of putting on a cool free party featuring bands they liked for their friends, they’d sell it to their children’s generation, using all the free love imagery that had been floating in the cultural ether for the previous 30 years.
Even in the gesture itself, this self-serving capitalism disguised as pedantic altruism and generational noblesse oblige, you can see the origins of the Silicon Valley messiah complex — the way Google built a sprawling monopoly while espousing “don’t be evil” as a mantra. Instead of choosing acts they knew and understood, it was like Woodstock 99’s organizers just went to radio programmers and invited the top 40 acts, with little regard for how they’d fit with each other or further the stated themes of the festival. In that way, it feels like an early example of trusting “Big Data.”
Chances are you already know the broad strokes of what happened next: the organizers, who hadn’t made enough money on Woodstock ’94 because the fence broke and people got in for free, moved the whole thing to a decommissioned air base. To save more money, they farmed out the logistics out to amoral contractors, confiscated everyone’s water on the way in, skimped on security, and, once 250,000 kids were trapped inside a massive animal pen built atop miles of scorching hot blacktop on the hottest weekend of the year, they gouged them for necessities like food and water while failing to provide the basics like security, trash, and sewage service. All while selling their flesh, exuberance, and eventually, suffering, on Pay Per View. Festival goers watched the price of food and water double and triple during the course of the festival, not yet knowing to call it “surge pricing.”
All weekend the organizers had been stoking rumors of some big closing act surprise — Prince? a reunited Guns And Roses? Michael Jackson? Bob Dylan? — but instead, when the last official act (Red Hot Chili Peppers) came to their encore, the audience received candles for a planned Columbine victim vigil, along with a giant video screen playing old Hendrix footage. At which point the attendees used the candles to torch the venue. Which was, hilariously, treated as a shocking event (Burning Man, which always ends with a big fire, had been chugging along uncontroversially for 13 years already at that point).
It’s funny that the enduring debate of the festival has been “what went wrong?” when it should be blindingly obvious to anyone why a bunch of dehydrated kids who’d been denied water wanted to break shit. And it wasn’t because Fred Durst told them to “break stuff,” no matter how big a douche Fred Durst may be (I understand that talking heads shitting on Fred Durst makes for delightful doc content, but blaming him for a riot that happened a full day and half later ignores a lot of basic cause-and-effect). To its credit, Clusterf**k seems to blame the music a lot less than the HBO version.
What other recourse did those kids have after being sold a false bill of goods, gouged, and then exploited for content? Property damage was just the most obvious way to even the score. The organizers had commodified the “Woodstock” brand, and in revenge the festival goers succeeded in sullying it forever. It’s cathartic to watch, another reason these docs are so watchable.
Of course, the leadership of the time, even 23 years later, seem utterly oblivious to all this (if not prevented from acknowledging it for legal reasons). The fascinating aspect of Woodstock ’99 is less the fires and the riots and the sexual assaults themselves (which, it should be noted, Woodstock ’69 also had lots of) than watching those same organizers continue to deny the basic material conditions that created the disaster. In that way they seem to eerily mirror our current political leadership.
In one unforgettable scene, a veteran of Woodstock ’69 drives around the trash-strewn grounds of Woodstock ’99 (the trash hauling contractors nowhere to be found), trying to hand out garbage bags in the vain hopes of getting the festival goers to clean up after themselves. If her generation could clean up their own trash (citation needed), why couldn’t these kids? When her audience, by and large, look at her like she’s insane, it doesn’t seem to inspire much self-reflection. No acknowledgment that cleaning up food and trash you’ve been allowed to bring in to sustain yourself at a free concert is fundamentally different than being asked to pick up the remains of $4 water ($7.11 water in 2022 dollars) you’ve been forced to buy by a venue that can’t maintain trash, food, or sewage after you paid them $150 to get in. And also, by the way, owns the rights to the images of you passed out naked in the mud in perpetuity.
Even 20 years later, being interviewed in the present, Woodstock 99’s organizers still seem incapable or unwilling to learn basic lessons. Asked to explain why the kids tore down their peace wall and looted their vendor village, they say, seemingly without any sense of irony, things like “I guess they just didn’t have that same spirit.”
Over and over, when presented with material conditions and institutional failure, they blame culture. Organizer John Scher (portrayed once again as one of the main villains of the story) says of the festival attendees, “I think they were entitled and fearful of growing up.”
Michael Lang, Scher’s long-haired flower child partner adds, “I don’t think they were able to embrace the social issues in the same way.”
If the definition of insanity is doing the same things over and over again and expecting the same results, what does it mean to expect people to act just like you did while treating them completely differently? These people will exploit your youth and then call you childish if you object.
It wouldn’t feel so relevant if the people who ran Woodstock ’99 didn’t seem so cut from the same Kente cloth as the people currently running the country. Lang died from non-Hodgkins lymphoma three months after shooting his interview. John Scher (whose name is conveniently scrubbed from the Woodstock ’99 Wikipedia page, and Wikipedia in general, which must’ve cost a pretty penny — and didn’t work that well considering most of his other search results are news articles about him blaming women for their own sexual assault) is still alive (he’s about 71, based on this Billboard article) and still working. Both are younger than both Joe Biden (79) and Nancy Pelosi (82), not to mention half the congressional leadership.
It’s not to say that everyone from the same generation is exactly the same (which by implication would make me responsible for the popularity of Limp Bizkit, a band that once released an album called “Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water”), but it is hard not to see echoes of that confused hippie lady desperately trying to hand out trash bags in every dire-sounding fundraising email from the DNC. “Won’t you please help us clean up this mess we created?? All we need is a bit more of your money!”
It’s hard not to see a little of Joe Biden in the footage of John Scher and Michael Lang’s increasingly out-of-touch press conferences, insisting that everything is okay, and even if it isn’t it definitely isn’t their fault. The Chapo Trap House boys once described Joe Biden as “the guy who tells you the ice cream machine is broken” and I haven’t been able to think of him any other way ever since. John Scher and Michael Lang were early harbingers of this, the guys who smile and say the shitters are full but they’re working real hard on it. What was Bill Clinton’s famous catchphrase? “I feel your pain.”
These are all people who have clearly sold out their peace and love and flower power values for a comfortable position in society long ago, but if you point out their hypocrisy in any of this or their basic incompetence in any way, it’s because you’re too selfish or irresponsible. The youths are too entitled! They can’t even appreciate being charged for things we got for free!
It’s not so much their hypocrisy or their incompetence that rankles; my own generation is clearly capable of same, as the aforementioned Fyre Fest example could attest. It’s the refusal to relinquish the cultural conversation, the refusal to stop insisting. Nancy Pelosi is in her eighties and has tens, or hundreds of millions of dollars to her name, depending on who you ask. Dianne Feinstein, widely whispered to be suffering from dementia, is almost 90 and even richer. Joe Manchin, the Democrats’ bete noire, is 74 and also a millionaire. Donald Trump looks like this now.
Nothing against older folks, I hope to become one myself some day. But the majority of the political leadership on both sides is well past the age when we would start to consider them incompetent for other jobs. They could just ride off into the sunset for comfortable retirements, on dopily named yachts eating fancy ice creams from custom fridges, and everyone would be happy for them. And yet they don’t. It seems that they can’t manage the one act even Limp Bizkit was ultimately capable of: leaving the stage.
‘Clusterf**k: Woodstock ’99’ premieres August 3, 2022 on Netflix. Vince Mancini is onTwitter. You can access his archive of reviewshere.
Today marks the theatrical release of B.J. Novak’s new movie Vengeance, in which he stars alongside Ashton Kutcher. It turns out Kutcher once gave Novak his big break on TV, as Novak appeared in a number of episodes of Punk’d in the early 2000s. Novak talked about that during an appearance on The Late Show yesterday and told a terrific story about pranking Usher.
Stephen Colbert mentioned the Punk’d connection and Novak noted Kutcher “changed my life with that show.” Colbert asked if the celebrities he helped prank ever got mad, and Novak was quick to respond, “Terribly mad, and here’s the problem: So I’m meeting all these celebrities for the first time, right? It’s thrilling for me. I’m meeting Missy Elliott, I’m meeting Usher; It’s the worst day of their life!”
He then got into the Usher prank that was on the Season 2 premiere (that aired on October 26, 2003), explaining the situation and how Usher acted after the reveal:
“My job once, I got to meet Usher, but my job was I was a store owner on Melrose and [Usher’s] little brother had been busted for shoplifting; he was in on it with us. And the only way I would let the brother go was if [Usher] recorded a rap jingle for my store, which I rapped for him. And he was like, ‘First of all, I’m not a rapper. Second of all, why does it refer to ‘Ice?” I’m like, ‘Well, we wanted Vanilla Ice.’ It’s a well-written show, I didn’t write the joke, it’s so funny.
So then he’s furious and then Ashton comes out and he’s like, ‘Bro!’ Like, it’s a huge hug. And I’m like [open arms gesture] and he’s like, ‘No no no no no.’ Like, your first impression of someone sticks, you know, so I have not run into Usher since. I don’t think he’ll be in my next movie.”
Watch the Novak interview above and find clips from the Usher Punk’d episode below.
Back in May, Cara Delevingne stole the show at the 2022 Billboard Music Awards, whether she was taking not-so-great photos of Doja Cat or having enthusiastic interactions with Megan Thee Stallion, which led to accusations of her “fetishizing Black women” and just being a bit too much. Now, Delevingne has spoken about that fateful night on The Tonight Show.
During an interview yesterday, Jimmy Fallon showed a photo of the Only Murders In The Building actor holding the train of Megan’s dress on the BBMAs red carpet and asked for the story there. Delevingne noted Megan invited her to join her at the show and help her memorize an acceptance speech, but Delevingne didn’t think she’d end up being a noticeable part of the proceedings. On the red carpet, Delevingne noticed Megan struggling with her train, so she helped out by moving it around for her.
She then spoke about that aforementioned Doja photo (not directly but seemingly so based on context), saying, “I walked in and I had a seat in the front row. I’m like, ‘I’m not meant to be here.’ So I was like, ‘Hi!’ And then I was getting on the floor, taking pictures. That’s what what I do because I’m like, I don’t know, I was just really excited. I was like, ‘Let me get my angle, guys, I’m a photographer!’”
She added, “I was living my best life, but people found it a bit odd, which… people find me odd, but that’s me. No shame!”
Check out the interview above.
Megan Thee Stallion is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
In a last-minute effort to create the song of the summer, Steve Martin and the Only Murders In The Building team have cooked up what’s sure to be the best track of 1989! Just kidding, but Hulu has been going all-out with their music production here. In the most recent episode of Only Murders In The Building, the crime-solving trio learned about Martin’s character Charles’ hit track from way back in the 1980s.
“Angel In Flip Flops” is a summer anthem, featuring Charles and his beachy hair on guitar singing about his summer love, who happens to be walking around in a pair of flip flops, as one does in the 80s.
Hulu released a music video for the world-famous song, which has been sampled by “like, 50 rap stars” according to Charles’ step-daughter (played by Zoe Coletti). The video features some much-needed context: “The year was 1989 and Brazzos’ single, Angel in Flip Flops, was riding high on the charts… until the Berlin Wall came down.” As we learned in the episode, the song was a hit in Germany, charting at number 83, just before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Co-creator John Hoffman told Decider how the some came about. “When the notion came up in our writers’ room of Charles-Haden Savage, at the height of his success with his original Brazzos series, maybe having recorded an album that did really well in Germany before the Berlin Wall fell, we knew we had to talk further about it — immediately!” Hoffman explained. “When we shared this idea with Steve Martin — well, I think it was a day (if even?) before Steve had a title and a tune making its way through his genius mind and we were more than off and running.”
Of course, Charles’ friends Mabel and Oliver (Selena Gomez and Martin Short) did not think the song was genius. “I’m such a huge fan of terrible music. How have I never heard this?” Oliver says as they are listening to the track on vinyl. At least he has a nice perm on the album cover!
Time was that box office hits were more diverse. Before franchise movies ruled the multiplex, a year’s biggest grosser could be a comedy (Three Men and Baby, 1987), a drama (Rain Man, 1988), or a ghostly romance (Ghost, 1990). Even high-concept extravaganzas could be one-offs (E.T., Titanic, Armageddon). This is a roundabout way of saying that everyone should break out the champagne, because a non-franchise movie just crossed the $100 million mark, and in only four weeks of release.
As per Variety, this weekend, Elvis — Baz Luhrmann’s over-the-top biopic about the King — crossed a benchmark, bringing its cume to a whopping $106.2 million. It’s still in the top five (albeit in the fifth slot), behind a three franchise movies (Thor: Love and Thunder, Minions: The Rise of Gru, and Top Gun: Maverick), as well as another non-franchise entry: Where the Crawdads Sing, which chalked up a respectable $17 million for third place.
Elvis stars Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’s Austin Butler (who did not — we repeat not — punch Ezra Miller in the face at a Tokyo bar) as the one born Elvis Aaron Presley, whose life and career are both made and derailed by his manager, Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks, in a fat suit and with an unplaceable European-Southern accent). It’s clearly bewitched audiences, though it is a bit strange that none of Presley’s songs have suddenly creeped back into the Billboard 100, as Stranger Things help do to ‘80s tunes by Kate Bush and Metallica. In a just world, “Polk Salad Annie” would crack the Top 10.
As per Variety, Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck filed their official marriage license on Saturday, a mere three months after they announced their engagement. The license was filed in Clark County, Nevada, which means they likely tied the knot in Las Vegas, just like many a happy couple. Lopez officially took his surname, though it’s currently unclear if she’ll continue using her professional name or not.
In the 2000s, the two only dated for a year and a half, but they became one of the most tabloid-happy couples of the decade. They were one of a handful of celebrity pairs known jointly as a portmanteau, namely “Bennifer.” The press had it out for them, especially when they made two films together. Gigli, released in 2003, became one of the most notorious bombs of the era, so derided by critics and the public alike that Lopez’s already small role in Kevin Smith’s Jersey Girl, released the following year, was reduced even further.
Affleck eventually moved on to Jennifer Garner, to whom he was married from 2005 through 2018. The two had a tumultuous relationship. He also dated actress Ana de Armas for about a year. Lopez, meanwhile, wound up with singer Marc Anthony, to whom she was married for a decade starting in 2004. She also dated her former backup dancer Casper Smart and Yankee Alex Rodriguez.
In April of last year, it was reported the two had reconnected after nearly two decades. Now look at them. Also, did you know Ben’s middle name is “Géza”? It’s the Hungarian word for “little prince.” The more you know! And congrats to the happy couple!
The performer was caught in an airport in Omaha Saturday, sitting among the throngs, waiting on a plane. Unlike everyone else, he was belting out a rendition of “With or Without You,” the classic U2 song off their album The Joshua Tree. He wasn’t performing for the crowds. He was just a regular dude sitting in a seat, singing like he didn’t care who was around him. It’s a good song, too. Good for him entertaining people in an Omaha airport and, thanks to the video taken of him, all of us.
Morgan himself could use a break, too. Back in March, he broke down in tears during a stint on Conan O’Brien’s podcast while recalling the difficulty of doing his first stand-up set after suffering through a car accident thanks to a Walmart truck. He’s got a lot of pain. We all do. Again, stuff is bad, man. So take a little self-care break and listen to the guy sing some U2.
Jak Knight, a comedian known for co-creating and acting on Peacock original series, Bust Down, has died at 28. In addition to Bust Down, Knight was a writer on shows like Blackish and Big Mouth, on the latter of which, he voiced DeVon. Although he proved to be a promising comedian, Knight was very much known and loved within the realm of music.
In 2018, Knight appeared in a live version of Zach Fox’s Bruh podcast, alongside rapper Amine. In one of his most iconic stand-ups, he hilariously detailed Chance The Rapper‘s career evolution and recounts a time when he saw the rapper perform at a music festival while on shrooms.
“I thought I was in The DaVinci Code, directed by Jordan Peele. This sh*t was crazy as hell,” he said in a Comedy Central special.
Following the news of his death, several musicians have taken to social media to mourn the loss of Knight.
“RIP to Jak Knight,” said Flying Lotus, “honestly was my fav comedian these days. Unapologetically bold and hilarious.”
RIP to Jak Knight, honestly was my fav comedian these days. Unapologetically bold and hilarious
Television personality and rapper Steelo Brim, who once had Knight as a guest on his Wine And Weed podcast, said “Truly don’t know what to say but Jak Knight was & is the man. He will be forever missed and loved, lit up every room and was as pure as they come. F*ck this one hurts.
Truly don’t know what to say but Jak Knight was & is the man. He will be forever missed and loved, lit up every room and was as pure as they come. Fuck this one hurts
To mark the 20th anniversary of Austin Powers in Goldmember, and more importantly, the film’s surprise casting of Beyoncé as Foxy Cleopatra, Vulture has cobbled together an oral history of how the pop star’s presence in the Mike Myers comedy transitioned her from pop singer to one of the largest superstars on the planet. While the film didn’t exactly blow the doors off the box office, Beyoncé was a favorite amongst critics who lamented that her character wasn’t given more to do.
According to the deep dive, working with Beyoncé was a surreal experience. Not because she was a diva or anything (by all accounts she was surprisingly shy), but because she was a cordial collaborator who wanted to make sure she looked “fabulous” as a Black woman in the ’70s. As part of that pursuit, the producers were surprised when she made an uncommon request for an actress, according to an anecdote from makeup artist Kate Biscoe.
When we were shooting, someone brought her a poster that would be promoting the movie. He showed it to her, like, “Do you like it?” And she was kind of like, “Yeah.” He goes, ’What’s the matter?” And she says, “You made me too skinny. It’s not me.” Then she did this hourglass shape. And he said, “Okay, we’ll fix that.” She walked away to go do the scene, and I looked at him and smiled, like, “Is that the first time that you’ve ever had an actress ask to make her body bigger?” He was like, “Yes. It’s going to cost me thousands of dollars, but I am going to do it.”
Keep in mind, Beyoncé made this request in the early 2000s during the heyday of Maxim magazine and super-thin actresses and socialites. She was bucking a pretty significant and unhealthy trend, and it clearly didn’t harm her career one bit.
with a Y 
(@wyntermitchell) 
