Late last year, Justine Skye and Giveon stepped out as one of music’s newest couples. They were seen going on dates and enjoying a vacation together, but all of it came to a halt when Skye announced earlier this year that she and the “For Tonight” singer broke up. She shared the news in October through a string of tweets that alluded to a new heartbreak, but it wasn’t until Wednesday night that she shared what went down between her and Giveon. During an Instagram Live session, which she dubbed “Wine Down Wednesday,” Skye revealed how discovered an ex of hers, which many presumed to be Giveon, was cheating on her.
Skye says that after some prior concerns, she learned that Giveon was cheating on her after looking through an old phone that he had. It’s there that she saw he was “texting b*tches” in real-time, leaving her completely shocked at the discovery. “The reason why I could hold like my composure a little bit was because I was just like, ‘Wow, I can’t believe this is who he is. Like that’s insane,’” she said. Next, Skye recalled a moment when she got a text from Giveon while he was on a date with another woman. When she asked what he was up to, he said he was out with friends which led to her calling him out for lying and his immediate decision to break up with her.
“When he said, ‘I’m done,’ I was like… You’re done?” Skye said. “And I said, ‘No, I’m done.’” Furthermore, she claims that Giveon never apologized for his actions and was instead, more concerned with his reputation. “Finally when I hear from him one of the first things he said was, ‘Are you trying to ruin me? You told everyone?’” she added.
You can watch Skye give the rundown about Giveon cheating on her in the video above.
Young Thug is by far one of hip-hop’s most unique artists and he’s been that way since his mainstream emergence nearly a decade ago. More recently, an example of this can be found through his chart-topping second album Punk, which at times pushed the wide boundaries of his own artistry. All in all, it served as another example of what makes the Atlanta rapper stand out, and during a recent interview with i-D, Thug made a declaration that further speaks to his uniqueness.
During the sit-down with i-D, Thug revealed that he doesn’t write down his lyrics when creating songs. “I’ve never written a lyric. Ever,” he said. “I really haven’t. I kind of just freestyle. I just go with it as it comes. I never really wrote anything down. I’m not patient enough to sit and write. It just takes a lot of my day.” However, just like most rules, Thug has an exception for this.
“Only time I’ve had the time to write lyrics down is when I’ve been incarcerated,” Thug said. “Even if I just have to go to jail for a day or something. I don’t like writing and that’s the only way I can write; if I just got time on my hands and there’s nothing in the world I could do.”
After more than two years, Roddy Ricch is finally delivering a new album with his upcoming project Live Life Fast. It’s an effort that will hopefully match the success of his debut album Please Excuse Me For Being Antisocial. The 2019 project spent multiple weeks at No. 1 while also carrying a song, “The Box,” that tallied eleven weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100. Altogether, it’s a high bar that the Compton native will hopefully reach again. Just hours before he releases the project, Roddy returns to unveil its complete tracklist.
Through 18 songs, listeners will catch appearances from 21 Savage, Alex Isley, Bibi Bourelly, Fivio Foreign, Gunna, Jamie Foxx, Kodak Black, Takeoff, and Ty Dolla Sign. These are all guest appearances that Roddy previously revealed, but he did so without sharing the album’s complete tracklist until today. Now, thanks to an update to the album’s pre-save page on Apple Music, we’ve received full song titles in addition to knowing when these artists will appear beside Roddy throughout the album.
Most of the collaborations on Live Life Fast feature one guest except on two occasions: “Hibachi,” which places Kodak Black and 21 Savage with Roddy, and “Slow It Down,” which finds Ty Dolla Sign and Alex Isley working some magic together.
You can view the full tracklist for Live Life Fast below.
1. “LLF”
2. “Thailand”
3. “All Good” (Feat. Future)
4. “Rollercoastin”
5. “Hibachi” (Feat. Kodak Black & 21 Savage)
6. “Paid My Dues” (Feat. Takeoff)
7. “Crash The Party”
8. “No Way” (Feat. Jamie Foxx)
9. “Slow It Down” (Feat. Ty Dolla $Ign & Alex Isley)
10. “Man Made”
11. “Murda One” (Feat. Fivio Foreign)
12. “Everything You Need”
13. “Moved To Miami” (Feat. Lil Baby)
14. “Don’t I” (Feat. Gunna)
15. “Bibi’s Interlude” (Feat. Bibi Bourelly)
16. “More Than A Trend”
17. “Late At Night”
18. “25 Million”
Live Life Fast is out 12/17 via Atlantic. Pre-order it here.
Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
Last month, Dr. Luke, despite accusations of rape, sexual assault, and emotional abuse by Kesha, charted at No. 1 on Billboard’s ranking of hot producers. Also last month, The Recording Academy nominated comedian Louis C.K. for a Grammy, despite numerous accusations of sexual misconduct. This is all to say that the music industry often has no regard for the safety of women.
This becomes more and more obvious over time. Earlier this year, it seemed like we, as a collective society, were reflecting on the way we treated Britney Spears. Our recognition of this situation of sexism, though, was quickly commodified and made into a documentary, which happens quite frequently, giving the impression that speaking out about trauma in this industry is only necessary if it is profitable.
So maybe it was inevitable that some of the biggest releases this year would consist of women verbalizing the poor treatment they deal with in the process of making and releasing art. Olivia Rodrigo’s Sour, which arrived in May after the unspooling of memorable, wildly successful singles, painted a portrait of a young woman who’s tired of having to constantly prove herself as smarter and more mature than anyone would typically estimate. Many people — mostly men — were surprised that they took a liking to this female pop star; lots of pretentious music-lovers argued with one another over the genre of her songs. Are we allowed to throw the term rock in there? Alternative? Punk? (On a similar note, a lot of headlines dubbed Sour as a breakup album, and a lot of other headlines claimed it is not “just” a breakup album. They’re right, it’s not, but would it be a problem if it was?)
But that’s beside the point. There’s reason to distrust Rodrigo; she was, after all, a Disney kid, and that can’t be ignored when discussing the colossal impact her debut album had in the music world this year. However, one of the reasons Sour did so well is that it makes you forget all about that. The fierce first track, “Brutal,” is both vulnerable and bombastic, especially when she sings: “And I’m so tired that I might / Quit my job, start a new life / And they’d all be so disappointed / ’Cause who am I, if not exploited?” This — coming from an 18-year-old woman who played a role in the High School Musical mockumentary series — felt monumental. How often is exploitation referred to in pop music, let alone named specifically?
And a lot of this returns to the fact that, well, she is literally a teenager. A majority of the attention that’s placed on her is due to her youth, and Sour seemed determined to not let any listener find her to be naïve. She doesn’t want to be condescended or underestimated.
More recently, Taylor Swift expressed a similar sentiment on her re-recording of the 2012 Red. Her struggles with the industry were made apparent in 2020 when Scooter Braun sold her masters so that she would no longer own her past work. “Nothing New” is a collaboration with Phoebe Bridgers that’s on the new version of Red, the version she created in order to have ownership and agency over it. The beginning lines capture the treatment of women in an industry that benefits from belittling them: “They tell you while you’re young / ‘Girls, go out and have your fun’ / Then they hunt and slay the ones who actually do it / Criticize the way you fly when you’re soarin’ through the sky.” Having Bridgers hop on this track conveys the way this problem hasn’t changed since Swift wrote the song around 2012; Bridgers is the next woman in the spotlight who is wondering: “Lord, what will become of me / Once I’ve lost my novelty?”
Billie Eilish wonders this on Happier Than Ever. After turning 19, she sings on the opening track: “I’m getting older, I think I’m aging well / I wish someone had told me I’d be doing this by myself.” It’s quite obvious that the music industry often pedestals women who are in their late teenage years; the younger women are, the easier they are to be exploited and fetishized. Yet the pressures are higher, and the rate at which they grow up is intensified. This is all only exacerbated by the fact that millions of people jumped at the opportunity to sexualize and objectify these women as soon as they turn 18, as if they never viewed her as an actual person to begin with.
Similar to Rodrigo, she sings: “Things I once enjoyed / Just keep me employed now.” It really portrays the loss of sincerity and genuine creative drive once art is transformed into a career. A lot of the album reckons with these sort of meta themes; the title itself refers to the dissonance between Eilish’s private and public life. Her personal priority to be happy is constantly skewed by what stories the media are making up about her.
So much is lost when a woman puts vulnerable art into the world. It is often judged to fit into stereotypes; the “sad girl” genre is the prime example of this, showing that women cannot express feelings in music without being lumped into a category that reinforces the idea that their gender inherently makes them “hysterical” and “too emotional.” What else is lost is the musician’s ability to exist as just a being; on “Blouse,” from Clairo’s July album Sling, she repeats: “If touch could make them hear / then touch me now.” She’s sacrificing her boundaries just to be listened to, and this seems to be a requirement for every woman who makes music. It doesn’t help that the industry intentionally spotlights young, white, skinny, cis, and conventionally pretty women; the media can view them as an interchangeable type. This can obviously weigh on a musician, who is offering something sincere to an industry that repays by treating them as disposable.
All of these releases have done extremely well this year, whether it be through sales or streams or award nominations or placement on year-end polls, like Uproxx’s. But the industry has failed to actually listen to the actual work it’s uplifting. Change starts with viewing musicians as more than workers and women as more than objects.
Before Travis Scott and Cardi B were considered hip-hop’s consummate pitch people, Chance The Rapper was the poster child for brand partnerships. In recent years, he’s fallen back a bit as he embraced family life as a husband and father of two, but that doesn’t mean he won’t still do the occasional deal — especially when it’s for a good cause.
His latest is a crossover with ice cream brand Ben & Jerry’s which will see him grace a new flavor of the ice cream. It’s a mint ice cream loaded with fudge brownie pieces and it comes in both dairy and non-dairy versions. According to a press release, the new flavor was inspired by Chance’s childhood experiment with adding his mom’s brownies to mint ice cream, which wound up becoming his favorite. A portion of the proceeds will go to his SocialWorks non-profit, with both versions coming to stores in early 2022.
From a musical standpoint, we haven’t heard much from Chance this year, but what we have heard has been marked by notable collaborations. Early this year, he reunited with longtime his Chicago brother Vic Mensa for “Shelter” with Wyclef Jean, their first work together in years. Meanwhile, more recently, he made good on the promise of collaborating with R&B legend Dionne Warwick, sharing “Nothing’s Impossible” in November.
Is Tyler The Creator the most dazzling star in the rap constellation right now? Just to ask the question would once have been considered lunacy, liable to see the inquirer exiled to a boarding school in Samoa for an 18-month stretch. We’re talking about the Ladera Heights kid who busted out of the twilight of Tumblr to make schlocky horrorcore tunes, drank “death juice” in warped music videos, and hypothesized in interviews about how humanity was going to become subservient to ostriches.
That is to say, Tyler subverted everything that hip-hop history told us a big-ticket rapper should be. He spawned in Cali, but didn’t look to his regional forefathers for anything; a demon child who rapped in the kind of timbre you would expect to hear emanating from the attic in a haunted house movie, uttering doomed mantras that a hell wraith might recite in an attempt to corrupt the adolescents who entered.
I’ve been thinking about those crazy, giddy Odd Future gigs that happened back in the day. They were unruly events packed out with young fans who had probably been dropped off by their parents and let off the leash for their first-ever rap show. Multiple dives per member were typical. When I saw the group perform in Dublin in 2011, Tyler made the gnarly leap despite wearing protective strapping on a foot that had been broken during a previous show, when he jumped into a crowd from the top of a speaker. “Kill people, burn shit, f*ck school” chanted the group and crowd in unison — a ridiculous lyric when you look at it in plain text, but a visceral mantra for mutinous teens. Those six words were probably scrawled across a million school desks. The reverence Odd Future’s fan base bestowed upon them predicted a certain type of intensely devoted fandom that young rappers like Lil Peep and Mac Miller enjoyed before their untimely deaths.
It’s a decade later and Tyler has stayed relevant by doing what every teen tearaway artist must do to retain their place in the zeitgeist: growing up. In doing so, he’s become one of rap’s leading men. New album Call Me If You Get Lost debuted at the top of the Billboard 200, his second album in a row to do so.
The evolution of Tyler from rap villain to genre protagonist has been as gradual as it’s been thrilling. The kid who terrified fans’ parents with his lurid lyrics is now a premium artist, both popular and critically loved. It’s a transformation as inspired as it once seemed unlikely.
The misanthropy of Tyler’s early writing suggested an artist who might struggle with fame. Destiny seemed to demand he position himself more as a man behind the music, like L.A. ancestor Dr. Dre or his hero Pharrell. There’s been times in his career when he appeared to want to be anything but a rapper, dabbling in fashion, film scores, and app development. Yet now he stands at the summit of his vocation, looking down on almost everyone else. Maybe Tyler will never be a walking headline maker like Drake, or the epitome cool like Future, or a hit single machine like Cardi B, or sell as many tickets as a legacy artist like Jay-Z, or be considered a wise lauriat like Kendrick Lamar. But Tyler increasingly looks comfortable in uniting many of the elements the public want in their rap stars.
Of course, he can rap well. Early concerns that his gruff voice wasn’t the nimblest instrument — especially when compared to the flow of friend Earl Sweatshirt, an extraordinarily dense linguist — have long been tossed out. On “Manifesto,” from Call Me If You Get Lost, his flow is dense and full of passion. Tyler’s personality is fabulously magnetic — he exudes star quality. And though in the past he resembled a music industry insurgent, hellbent on firebombing everything around him, Tyler has always been dedicated to the classic art of album making. He’s got a clutch of LPs that are distinct and memorable, which is why, like Kanye West’s catalogue, Tyler’s albums lend themselves well to debates about ranking.
Yet Tyler’s rise has been almost the inverse of what was previously considered normal for a star rap artist. His emergence was facilitated by his ability to harness the power of the internet, a nontraditional route to the cultural zeitgeist in the late 2000s. Tyler and Odd Future carpet-bombed Tumblr, Twitter, and YouTube with unfiltered thoughts, 140-character protests, and glimpses into L.A. skateboard culture. The group released so many tapes, you had to decide what was worth your limited hard drive space. Songs were recorded on a laptop camera microphone; artists of totally different skill levels were invited into the group with no overarching plan. And while Tyler and the group’s violent language and morbid imagery were controversial, they were often honest about issues such as suicide and depression. They captured the desperate condition we call being young. Tyler would veer from goofy to deeply troubled; from sadistic to just a kid who needed attention. His records played like the tumbling into the teen psyche — and it’s as alarming a place as you might expect.
I wondered if the sounds and content of Bastard (billed as Tyler’s first mixtape, released on Christmas Day 2009) and Goblin (his 2011 debut album) might have aged miserably. Trust me, they hold up. Tyler’s vulnerability laid a path for the generation of open-hearted emo rap that have followed, while musically, the jazzy chords, synth waves, resonant bass drones, and metronome drums still feel fresh and exhilarating. See the sci-fi beauty of “She,” which compliments Frank Ocean’s silvery vocal style. “Odd Toddlers” features the same sample jacked from jazz-funk group Cortex that Madlib used on the MF DOOM track “One Beer,” solidifying Tyler’s spiritual connections to the timeless sounds of the producer and supervillain. Yet Goblin already sees Tyler, just 20-years-old at the time of its release, feeling his place in the rap landscape and grappling with a sense of lost youth. On both the title track and “Golden,” he reveals his regret at the life changes stardom is leading to.
Wolf remains my favorite Tyler record and the peak of the first phase of his musical development. His production feels more vibrant than ever — Erykah Badu stops by to contribute to the jazz club ditty “Treehome95” — while his writing retains its anger, but with more flair and focus than before. “Answer” is a moving account of absent father issues as Tyler envisions what he might say if he could pick up the phone to call his missing dad. Follow up Cherry Bomb is no disaster — the Roy Ayers collaboration “Find Your Wings” is an exceptional piece of generation connecting — but too many songs awkwardly find Tyler looking backwards. To say he phoned it in might be too harsh, but for the first time you can picture a disinterested artist dropping the masters off at his label’s front desk and just heading off and doing his thing.
In that backdrop, Flower Boy felt like a miracle. Naturally growing out of his bratty persona, he turned in a meditative work. After years of hints and rumors, the record feels like real-time depiction of Tyler coming to terms with his own sexuality as he raps about hooking up with men. In doing so, he recontextualizes thorny lyrics of the past, coming across as a young man who once used ugly humor to work through his own feelings. Meanwhile, the most severe tones were stripped out of the music, as Tyler deployed chiming xylophones, soft piano chords, leisurely strummed electric guitars, and soulful vocals to deliver a more summertime experience.
Then came another tight turn with Igor, a glamorama of wild experimentation and very little rapping. I felt some of Tyler’s personality was buried beneath the audio effects, but it served up some of his most daring musical experiments. Just a few weeks before the release of Igor, Tyler took to Twitter to respond with approval at a viral video made by comedian Nat Puff, aka Left at London, that recreated his supposedly predictable methodology. Try parodying “The Boy is a Gun.” You can’t.
Call Me If You Get Lost completes a trinity of work that has cemented his status among critics who may have thought his early work problematic. It’s tempting to call it the squaring of a circle: the sunny grooves of Flower Boy and daring genre-bending of Igor placed Tyler in the lineage of Brian Wilson, but under the influence of Westside Gunn, Call Me If You Get Lost sees him rekindle an interest in rapping. Whether that was through direct communication or simply absorbing the music of Gunn and his Griselda Gang comrades is unclear. What is important is that Tyler raps like a man who simply loves rapping. This palpable joy in what he’s doing helps Call Me If You Get Lost navigate various hip-hop eras, styles, and forms. It’s a huge artistic statement that doesn’t go out of its way to tell you that it’s a huge artistic statement. Tyler is at his most compelling, and looks more like rap’s leading man than ever before.
The recruitment of host DJ Drama, the Philly ringmaster who’s helped facilitate some of the greatest mixtapes of the 21st century through his Gangsta Grillz series, ensures Call Me If You Get Lost trades in nostalgia, not dissimilar to the way Kendrick Lamar once summoned the ghost of Tupac. This is not perfunctory back-in-the-day remembrance that simply features a few adlibs from Drama and the famous “Gangster Grizzilz!” taglines — Tyler takes his lead from the esteemed series. The horns of “Lemonhead” feel like something you’d have heard on a classic Lil Wayne Gangster Grillz release. Drama himself slides into the role as Tyler’s foil. His yells of “We just landed in Geneva” inject extra scope into the luxury rap of “Hot Wind Blows.” You can picture Drama in the passenger’s seat snapping photos of the surroundings as Tyler takes them on a spin around the city.
A feeling of contentment ripples through the writing. Tyler is happy to muse on his success: “Mom was in the shelter when ‘Yonkers’ dropped, I don’t say it / When I got her out, that’s the moment I knew I made it,” he intones on “Massa,” an interesting revelation of warmth about his viral single from 2011 having previously rapped on “Colossus,” from Wolf, that he was, “sick of hearing about ‘Yonkers.’” On the more tension-filled “Manifesto,” he makes a point of being unapologetic for old lyrics, no matter who tries to pull them out of context and out of time — “Internet bringin’ old lyrics up, like I hide the shit / What’s your address, I could probably send you a copy, bitch” — and, as a person once banned from entering the UK, highlights the absurdity of famous people who claim to be “canceled” when they experience mild backlash: “I was canceled before canceled was with Twitter fingers.”
We can’t begin to ignore the musicality Tyler displays. Interestingly, he has never needed to surround himself in the studio with fresh voices to progress his sound. Think about how Kanye has recruited everyone from Jon Brion to Daft Punk to help him push things forward; even the lengthy career of Dr. Dre saw him rotated through co-producers, such as Scott Storch and Melle Man. Call Me If You Get Lost at once feels distinct from any previous Tyler release while being instantly recognizable as a Tyler, The Creator piece. After the synchronized piano loops of his early work, he tinkers with more free jazz performance on songs like “Massa.” His deft handling of a lush loop on the dreamy, luxuriant “Hot Wind Blows” is sample-mining that would please J Dilla. “Rise!” feels like an update of “Frontin’” and features the kind of airy hooks he’s been pinching from Pharrell since the beginning.
The guest spots are like a frequently circulated photograph of Barcelona’s talent-loaded bench. Lil Uzi Vert and Youngboy Never Broke Again are fine taste picks for a rap album in 2021. Lil Wayne continues his recent run of excellent guest spots on “Hot Wind Blows.” The presence of Domo Genesis keeps Tyler’s links to his Odd Future origins alive.
Mostly, Tyler just feels more at ease in his own skin than ever before. Maybe this is an emotional reading of the record, outside of usual music crit analysis, but after a tough couple of years for all of us, hearing him talk about enjoying his work, falling in love, and feeling healthy on “Blessed” made my heart sing. Maybe Tyler is simply delivering what his audience needs to hear in 2021. Maybe he really is that content — success is often built on great timing.
Odd Future fans are older now and, of course, more considered. Tyler has entered his 30s with them and feels primed to navigate his audience through another decade. If Call Me If You Get Lost had just been a great album, it would have been enough. But Tyler gave rap more than that. Whether he’s the genre’s greatest star right now can be debated. Inarguable, though, is that right now he’s in a group of one.
Orlando rapper LPB Poody might be at the start of his career, but his performance and energy are already off-the-charts, as demonstrated by his propulsive performance of his newly released single “I’m The One” for UPROXX Sessions. Packed to bursting with boastful gun talk and hot-blooded, me-against-the-world truculence, the thumping track lets Poody fully engage and bring his hardened outlook to vivid life as he holds eye contact with the camera.
Fully committing to music in 2016, Poody’s perseverance marks a 180-degree course change from his early life, when he was in and out of juvenile detention. Although he’s still facing a probation violation charge from earlier this year, Poody’s music illustrates exactly why he felt he needed to turn his life around — and the passion with which he raps highlights how wise a decision it was. Like many artists of his generation, he can credit his career taking off this year to TikTok, where his 2019 single “Address It” has become a favorite on the app, driving streams elsewhere and propelling him to a new starting point, where he has the chance to leave the violent past behind and embrace a much brighter future.
Watch LPB Poody’s UPROXX Sessions performance of “I’m The One” above.
UPROXX Sessions is Uproxx’s performance show featuring the hottest up-and-coming acts you should keep an eye on. Featuring creative direction from LA promotion collective, Ham On Everything, and taking place on our “bathroom” set designed and painted by Julian Gross, UPROXX Sessions is a showcase of some of our favorite performers, who just might soon be yours, too.
Ye (aka Kanye West) recently had a conversation with British-German artist Tino Sehgal for German culture magazine 032c, and he really said a lot of noteworthy things during the chat. He revealed that he plans to be “homeless in a year” because he’s turning his homes into churches. Ye also noted that he’s working on a performance piece called The Funeral Rehearsal Of Kanye West. Elsewhere during the interview, he also dropped some names and called himself the “template” for some major artists.
Ye said:
“Moses could do everything his army could do, but he couldn’t free his people without the army. And you know, all these leaders, all these people who created the templates — Walt Disney, Steve Jobs, George Lucas — were crazy as f*ck but influenced so many people. I’m just saying, I’m the template. Kanye West is the template for Drake and Travis and…”
He said something similar elsewhere in the conversation, noting, “At this point, every art piece I do is a window, an app, for human beings. 808s & Heartbreak was the app for Drake and The Weeknd, and The Funeral Rehearsal Of Kanye West will be the app for others.”
The interview is print-only and is included as “a special edition booklet” in Issue #40 of 032c, so grab a copy for yourself here.
Tierra Whack continues her comeback with the release of her third three-song-one-genre EP, R&B? — following her Rap? and Pop? EPs, which showed off the Philly artist’s impressive array of talents. The lead video from R&B? is the somber “Heaven,” which came with an equally low-key music video. In true Tierra Whack fashion, the video features a surrealistic twist: as she walks in the rain, it slowly dawns on you that the rain is coming from her umbrella rather than over it.
Lyrically, the song features a sobering but relatable theme for anyone who’s lost loved ones — especially over the past year. “Heaven has all of my favorite people,” she sings. “I wanna go there.” In addition to the melancholy of “Heaven,” R&B? features “Sorry,” a wistful address to a former flamed she wronged, and “Cutting Onions,” on which she processes the passing of her beloved grandmother. All three songs are more downtempo than Whack’s prior output in the series, and true to form, feature her putting all her skills on display despite what the project’s title might suggest.
Now that she’s released three EPs in the same mode, it’ll be interesting to see whether she keeps the theme going — there’s always dance music, rock, and a half-dozen other genres I’m sure fans would love to see her try out — or moves on, but one thing’s certain: It’ll be the thing she wants to do and she will do it her own way.
Watch Tierra Whack’s “Heaven” video above and listen to the R&B? EP here.
Yep, that’s right. Killer Mike joined Stephen Colbert on last night’s episode of The Late Show to celebrate the film series’ 20th anniversary with an elf-laden rap video in which Colbert, dressed hilariously in an old-school hip-hop get-up that LL Cool J would have loved back in the ’80s, Late Show bandleader Jon Batiste, and Mike rampage through a Blockbuster-like video store set, putting down other film trilogies like Star Wars and The Godfather as vastly inferior.
Then the hobbits themselves show up. Yes, Billy Boyd, Dominic Monaghan, and Sean Astin show up as raptified versions of their mischievous film characters to continue the song along with Elijah Wood, who poses in front of a Benz with “Baggins” on the license plate. The music video even gets meta, as Wood disses the Pitch Perfect trilogy, prompting a quick interlude of that series’ star Anna Kendrick looking very confused and kind of disgusted.
Method Man shows up to replace Gandalf actor Ian McKellan, Killer Mike slates Back To The Future, Indiana Jones, The Mighty Ducks, Twilight (another Kendrick cameo!), and The Dark Knight trilogy. Andy Serkis — aka Gollum — plays the flute as Hugo Weaving raps in freaking Elvish. This video has everything. You should really check it out.
