In 2016, Kid Cudi found himself in a tough place, as he made the decision to enter rehab for “depression and suicidal urges.” Since he left, though, he’s been doing a lot better. Now, Cudi has reflected on the experience in a new interview, saying that recent years have been “game-changing” for him.
In an interview for T: The New York Times Style Magazine‘s 2022 culture issue, Cudi says:
“In 2016, I was in rehab. I was at the bottom. I didn’t see anything positive happening for me. I thought that maybe it was the end of my career. After so many years of feeling miserable, it’s hard to imagine anything brighter on the horizon. But the last five years have been truly game-changing for me. Ever since I left rehab, it’s been nothing but me climbing up the mountain, getting higher and higher and achieving more, doing more, seeing more, learning more.”
He also offered a message for kids, saying, “Still, I never want kids to think there’s a quick fix, and that every time people see me now, I’m going to be happy and upbeat. I like to let kids know, ‘Right now, your favorite artist, who you think is the strongest man in the world, is having a bad day — and that’s OK. So if you have a bad day, that’s OK, too.’ I know the kids think I’m superhuman. And I am superhuman in a lot of ways, like with my music. But at my core, I’m very sensitive. I’m fragile at times. And I’m always trying to write my pain.”
30 years ago today, the Beastie Boys released their monumental third album, Check Your Head. It marked the group’s first major release to feature largely full instrumentation, with Mike D on drums, Ad-Rock on guitar, MCA on bass, as well as Mario C on drums and Money Mark on keys; a hallmark of the group that set them apart in the hip-hop canon forever. First released in 1992, the Beasties settled into their new G-Son studios in Southern California for the album’s recording.
In 2009, the Beastie Boys released an artist store 4LP box set that proved to be the definitive edition of Check Your Head. As with all collector’s items of this sort, it has become rare and out of print for over a decade. Now to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the album, the group is putting out the set again, featuring the remastered 20-track album on the first two records, and then two additional records of live recordings, remixes, B-sides, etc. It’s presented in a fabric-wrapped, stamped, hardcover case.
Peep the tracklist and photo of the four LP Check Your Head vinyl below. While the official release isn’t until June 24th, you can pre-order the Check Your Head box set now, here.
Beastie Boys
Side A
“Jimmy James”
“Funky Boss”
“Pass The Mic”
“Gratitude”
“Lighten Up”
Side B
“Finger Lickin’ Good”
“So What’ Cha Want”
“The Biz Vs The Nuge”
“Time For Livin’”
“Something’s Got To Give”
Side C
“The Blue Nun”
“Stand Together”
“Pow”
“The Maestro”
“Groove Holmes”
Side D
“Live At P. J.’s”
“Mark On The Bus”
“Professor Booty”
“In 3’s”
“Namaste”
Side E
“Dub The Mic (Instrumental)”
“Pass The Mic (Pt. 2, Skills To Pay The Bills)”
“Drunken Praying Mantis Style”
“Netty’s Girl”
Side F
“The Skills To Pay The Bills (Original Version)”
“So What’ Cha Want (Soul Assassin Remix Version)”
“So What’ Cha Want (Butt Naked Version)”
“Groove Holmes (Live Vs. The Biz)”
Side G
“Stand Together (Live At French’s Tavern, Sydney Australia)”
“Finger Lickin’ Good (Government Cheese Remix)”
“Gratitude (Live At Budokan)”
“Honky Rink”
Side H
“Jimmy James (Original Original Version)”
“Boomin’ Granny”
“Drinkin’ Wine”
“So What’ Cha Want (All The Way Live Freestyle Version)”
The Check Your Head 30th Anniversary vinyl edition is out 6/24 via Universal. Pre-order it here.
In 2020, it looked like Janelle Monáe had come out as non-binary after tweeting “#IAmNonBinary.” They later clarified in an interview, though, “I tweeted the #IAmNonbinary hashtag in support of Nonbinary Day and to bring more awareness to the community. I retweeted the Steven Universe meme, ‘Are you a boy or a girl? I’m an experience,’ because it resonated with me, especially as someone who has pushed boundaries of gender since the beginning of my career. I feel my feminine energy, my masculine energy, and energy I can’t even explain.”
However, now, Monáe has gone ahead and declared as directly as possible that they are in fact non-binary: In a new Red Table Talk interview (as Billboard notes), Monáe told Jada Pinkett Smith, “I’m non-binary, so I just don’t see myself as a woman, solely. I feel like God is so much bigger than the ‘he’ or the ‘she,’ and if I am from God, I am everything.”
Monáe continued, “I will always, always stand with women. I will always stand with Black women, but I just see everything that I am, beyond the binary.”
Monáe also discussed why they decided to come out now, saying, “Somebody said, ‘If you don’t work out the things that you need to work out first before sharing it with the world, then you’re going to be working it out with the world.’ That’s what I didn’t want to do.”
In recent years, it has seemed that musical content in hip-hop and R&B has been firmly divided by genre – and gender. Hip-hop gets to be the sole domain of men with toxic narratives driven by rappers like Drake and Future. They play aloof and apathetic toward the women in their lives, gaslighting them for being hoes while loudly proclaiming they’ll never settle down themselves. Meanwhile, it’s the women in R&B, like Grammy winner Jazmine Sullivan and Summer Walker, who have to play the fed-up victims of men’s mind games. Seemingly every song sounds wounded — or barring that, encouraging women to recover from the wounds inflicted on them by destructive relationships.
Kali, the 21-year-old Atlanta rapper who won viral fame thanks to beloved clips of her songs on TikTok, is dead set on upending this particular convention in Black music. In March, she unleashed her major-label debut EP, Toxic Chocolate, pointedly reversing the dynamic and staking a claim on space for women in the toxicity conversation in hip-hop. “If somebody think they going to play games with me,” she explains of the EP’s contrarian philosophy, “I’m going to show you, look, I’m competitive, and you’re going to lose this game, sir, ma’am, anybody. It’s just, like, put your foot down. The girls need to get their power back.”
That’s what she does on the EP with songs like “UonU,” a role reversal anthem that would make Michael Scott proud – oh, how the turntables… etc. There’s also “Standards,” which finds the young rapper drawing her line in the sand and demanding consistency from the men she deals with. And on the EP’s title track, she offers the following flippant missive: “I’m really in love, I ain’t really toxic / Just playin’, I’m lying / Fuck on the side, oh he throwing up crying.” Kali’s debut is what would happen if Megan Thee Stallion got stuck in the Brundle teleporter with Future while Destiny’s Child’s “Independent Women” played in the background.
Of course, she doesn’t see it that way. For her, it’s just about flipping those sad songs into veritable bangers, slathered with a greasy layer of Southern crunk. “I always hear girls, even myself… We’d be like, ‘Oh, I would never, I wouldn’t do him like that.’ But, we got enough music telling us that, enough sad music to cry about. It’s time to just be like, ‘You know what? He did it to you, why you can’t do it to him?’ Summer Walker’s stuff had just came out. Everybody sliding down walls, and crying. It was just like, ‘No, that’s not the vibes anymore.’ Do that man how he did you. Let’s see who can really take it.”
If this seems like a prescient outlook for someone who just reached drinking age, well, it is. But Kali has always been precocious, starting her rap career at the age of just 12 years old after writing down her pre-teen feelings in a journal and earning the right to her own bedroom by meeting her father’s challenge of writing a full album’s worth of rap songs to the beats he made at home. Through high school, she pursued soccer to avoid her parents’ scrutiny over her subject matter, but upon graduation returned to her first love: rapping. After a brush with early stardom thanks to an audition on Netflix’s Rhythm + Flow, Kali overcame a few more early career setbacks to achieve viral fame when she uploaded her song “Do A Bitch” to TikTok in late 2020.
That song, which she later remixed with Rico Nasty, laid the groundwork for her next viral single, “MMM MMM,” to truly take off. “My first reaction [to the song going viral] was, ‘I did it again,’” she recalls. “‘I’m doing it again, y’all.’ I can say, ‘I got the plan, I just need the platform.’” The platform came just a few weeks later when fellow Atlanta rapper Latto reached out to her to jump on the remix. There likely couldn’t be a better candidate; aside from sharing a hometown, the two rappers both started their rap careers young, both garnered a bit of initial attention thanks to a reality TV rap competition, and both were given the co-sign of an older, more established artist – the very epitome of paying it forward.
Latto continued to pay it forward, recruiting Kali to her first-ever headlining tour. At the stop in Los Angeles, I got to see the impact of Kali’s music firsthand as the sold-out crowd at the Novo recited back her lyrics bar-for-impressively-witty-bar. “A lot of people have been telling me, ‘Kali, your tape is no-skips, straight through,’” she humblebrags. “‘I’ve listened to this every day straight through.’ Even being on tour, people knowing the words already – and it hasn’t even been that long, and I’ve only had like five shows – is super crazy to me, it makes me so happy. Every show, I see that one person that knows every song, word for word, and even a crowd singing along by the second hook, I’m like, ‘Oh, well y’all really is tuned in.’”
Kali admits that there’s been an adjustment to the newfound fame, but she’s already ready for more. “I want to do my own tour,” she muses. “I would love to do that. That’s why I’m putting in so much work on this one… I leave the show with a goal every day: Hopefully, someone left the show like, ‘Oh, I didn’t know Kali, but I’m going to look up more of her music.’ I just want to be super big. So whatever I got to do to be big, that’s what I’m going to do.” When I ask whether or not she accepts the claims that she’s rap’s women’s answer to Future, she demures.
“No, no, this is a toxic phase,” she laughs. “I’m just letting you all know, I don’t play games. This is not that. So, if you ever trying to shoot your shot, just make sure you listen to the tape first. Before you show me your A-S-S, I got you. But as soon as you do that, Toxic Chocolate will appear. And I would throw a toxic tantrum.”
Kali is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
On the latest episode of The Kardashians, Kim Kardashian recalls making her debut on Saturday Night Live. Though she and ex-husband Kanye West had been separated at the time, West allegedly flew to New York City from Los Angeles to support Kardashian on her big night.
On The Kardashians, Kim said, “He literally took a coach, commercial flight, sat in a seat next to the bathroom. […] He said he didn’t sleep all night long just so he can get in town early enough to meet up with Dave [Chappelle] and go over jokes and really, like, help.”
Despite West’s efforts, the two did not reconcile, per Kim’s established boundaries. “Kanye and I are staying at separate hotels,” she said. “I’ve been really clear with him as far as, like, where we stand in our relationship.”
Before Kardashian’s appearance on SNL and before West released his 10th album, Donda, the two hadn’t spoken in eight months, as Kardashian said on the Not Skinny But Not Fat podcast to host Amanda Hirsch.
“We went about eight months without even speaking to each other at the beginning of the divorce,” Kardashian said. “And then, you know, we started talking again and I went to the Donda premiere. He would still see the kids and stuff, just him and I took a minute of not talking. And I think it all, in relationships, it’ll be like that. I only hope for, I hope we are the ‘co-parenting goals’ at the end of the day.”
Earlier this month, West dropped out of a headlining slot at Coachella. Rapper Fivio Foreign tweeted that West “is on a Island relaxing clear’n his mind & healing from all the stress of Society.. He appreciates the support for the Album [Foreign’s debut, B.I.B.L.E., on which West is featured and credited as a producer] & the response.”
YE is on a Island relaxing clear’n his mind & healing from all the stress of Society.. He appreciates the support for the Album & the response
The Philadelphia 76ers are one game away from the Eastern Conference Semifinals after a thrilling comeback win over the Toronto Raptors on Wednesday night. Philly picked up the 104-101 win in overtime thanks to the heroics of Joel Embiid — beyond once again putting up numbers with a 33-point and 13-rebound performance, Embiid hit a game-winning turnaround three with less than a second left on the clock to get the Sixers one game away from a sweep.
As Embiid walked off the floor in Toronto, he ran into noted Raptors fan and guy who has courtside seats for their home games, Drake. The two apparently went back-and-forth with one another during the game, according to Tobias Harris.
Tobias Harris says Embiid had a very famous doubter talking trash during the game. “Drake was over there saying he can’t play here. And I said to him, he can play here, for sure.”
Video eventually popped up of Embiid and Drake exchanging pleasantries after the game, with Embiid insisting that Drake is in his usual seat for Game 4 so he can witness a sweep.
Joel Embiid to Drake: “That’s what you call a f***ing superstar… I’m coming for the sweep too. You better be there.”pic.twitter.com/7aB2okOtrR
“That’s what you call a f*cking superstar,” Embiid said. “Get your ass up, I’m coming for the sweep, too. You better be there.”
Drake said he would, but unsurprisingly predicted it’ll be a 3-1 series after Game 4. That game will take place on Saturday afternoon, and is scheduled to tip off at 2 p.m. ET on TNT.
On 4/20, multi-hyphenate Machine Gun Kelly revealed the trailer to his upcoming stoner comedy film, Good Mourning. Credited by his birth name Colson Baker, Good Mourning sees Kelly play an actor named London Clash.
One morning, London receives a text message from his girlfriend, Apple (Becky G), reading, “I wish I didn’t have to do this thru text,” then a follow-up message reading, “Good Mourning.” Assuming Apple is going to break up with him, London falls into a spiral. Joining him on his pot-fueled mission to get his girlfriend back are rapper Gata (of Dave fame), Pete Davidson, and Whitney Cummings. Kelly’s real-life fiancée Megan Fox also appears in the movie.
“We are looking forward to bringing this wild comedy to audiences in theaters and at home on demand. The film is a reminder of how fun movies can be to make and watch,” Open Road Films CEO Tom Ortenberg said in a statement. “Colson and this incredible cast will bring audiences to their knees in laughter and leave their jaws on the floor.”
Check out the red band trailer above.
Good Morning is out 5/20 in theaters and on demand.
If you’ve been on Instagram in the past week, then you’ve witnessed the “influencer Olympics” that is the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival. Scandalous sparkling ensembles, greasy festival food, and crowds of people on…questionable substances were abundant on the ol’ feed.
Incredible performances and head-turning festival fashion aside, there’s one underrated Coachella component that goes unmatched on the festival circuit. We’re talking about the Do LaB Stage, where the die-hard partiers go to rage in between headlining sets. The stage featured performances by Diplo, Rebecca Black & Friends, SG Lewis, Dom Dolla b2b John Summit, JAUZ Off The Deep End, Subtronics, Walker & Royce b2b VNSSA, MEUTE, and more.
The non-stop party leveled up with water guns splashing into the crowd, ariel artists hanging overhead, and the Do Lab’s signature rainbow tent fixture. If you’re heading to weekend two of Coachella, the Do Lab Stage deserves a spot on your festival weekend itinerary — the photos below prove why.
If the Vibe Shift is real, there’s no better artist to help soundtrack it than Girl Talk. DJ Gregg Gillis made his mark tackling the mashup genre in his own way, deconstructing and reconstructing tracks with a cohesive vision, in a way that allowed for his titled songs to be played at times individually as standalones, but also part of the overall album experience. By taking cues more from borrowers like Daft Punk and the Beastie Boys, he had artistic license with his sampling, giving new life to otherwise standard songs from a variety of genres. It was in this spirit that he leaned heavily into music discovery, giving club kids, hip-hop fans, indie heads, and others a chance to hear tracks in a new light, finding the beat in the mundane or elevating a rap song into a metal-inspired breakdown.
Back with his first album since 2010’s All Day, Gillis has a lot to celebrate. Full Court Press is a collaboration with Wiz Khalifa, Big K.R.I.T., and Smoke DZA, and it’s far different from anything he’s released commercially in his career. The album elicits threads of different genres and eras, much like his sampling, but in much more cohesive, straightforward songs that showcase the rappers’ unique styles.
On the road to support the new album – and a return to touring that was delayed by the pandemic – Girl Talk’s energy is as infectious as ever, with a live show that mirrors the ADHD-fueled mania of his earlier works. At the Regent Theater on Monday, after an inspired homecoming set from opener Hugh Augustine, Gillis brought the entire indie sleaze era into focus.
The sold-out crowd was in it from the jump, in a room that as Gillis pointed out, felt “40 degrees hotter” than any other venue on his tour. The stage was an ever-evolving mishmash somewhere between Everything Everywhere All At Once and I Think You Should Leave With Tim Robinson. There were no fewer than 40 people on stage (including Augustine at one point), toilet paper guns, clouds above the stage that had images blasted onto them with projectors, various sizes of balloons, confetti cannons, gigantic light-up palm trees, t-shirt guns, guys in skeleton costumes, guys in tuxedos with ski masks, a hundred-foot long condom filled with confetti, enormous inflatables that resembles cornhole bags, a dude in a Sonic The Hedgehog wig, and Girl Talk with his laptop, shedding a layer of clothing at a time.
The set was a tight 90 minutes; any longer, and the danced-out, overheated, and dehydrated crowd might’ve been in trouble. What’s always made Girl Talk inviting and even more interesting as a creative project is the lens through which Gillis sees not just music, but how people consume music. His work in the 2000s forecasted the natural evolution of crate digging into mp3s into streaming, and even the TikTok experience. Songs on TikTok take on a life of their own independent of label, time period, or even context. A song may trend and get warped into having an entirely different meaning, and it’s less important how fans come to a song than it is that they discover it at all.
One of my favorite memories of 2008’s Feed The Animals was on “Hands In The Air,” where the first, instantly recognizable lines of “Whoop There It Is” spill out into the air. But the backing beat was one I couldn’t quite place. It took me much longer than I like to admit to learn that it was “In A Big Country” by Big Country, a song I eventually would put on a bunch of playlists and still listen to today. It’s entirely possible someone out there heard Gillis use “Lovefool” by the Cardigans over a Doja Cat song at a live show, and has spent days trying to place it before the sheer joy of connecting the dots, and listening to it on Spotify.
Monday night’s show felt similar to those early days of trying to track down any beat and any song that made me feel that way, and it gets me nostalgic, but also excited for any generation that can find songs — new, old, or reworked — that inspire them. Whether it’s Olivia Rodrigo utilizing the DNA of pop-punk songs that have been around her whole life, a Fleetwood Mac hit finding new breath on TikTok, or ’90s songs slowed down and inserted into dramatic movie trailers, the flattening of culture and the inexhaustable nature of streaming makes everything, everywhere, all at once a creative well that is equally as maddening and dizzying as it is inspiring.
It’s only fitting Girl Talk gets to have his encore, his chance to stand on a table and look out at it all.
A year before he released his first album with Rick Ross’ Maybach Music Group, Wale gave fans one of their favorite projects from him with his sixth mixtape, More About Nothing. The project is a highlight release from the blog era and it’s one that arrived two years after Wale’s fourth mixtape The Mixtape About Nothing. Comprised of 21 songs, the project is inspired by Seinfield, one of Wale’s favorite shows, and each song follows the naming format for the show itself by starting each title with the word “The.” More About Nothing is also laced with audio clips from various episodes of Seinfield.
Thank Jerry Seinfeld . That guy made all the calls to clear so much stuff ..#moreaboutnothing is otw .
Nearly twelve years after the project was released, Wale announced today that More About Nothing is coming to streaming services. He revealed that Jerry Seinfield, whom he has a close relationship with, had a big hand in helping to get the mixtape on DSPs. “Thank Jerry Seinfeld,” Wale wrote in a tweet. “That guy made all the calls to clear so much stuff ..#moreaboutnothing is otw.”
Wale also shared the news in a video that showed some moments he and Jerry shared together over the years. At the end of the video, the date “4.29.22” appeared on the screen, signaling that More About Nothing could arrive on streaming services next week.
You can view Wale’s posts about More About Nothing above.
Wale is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
