FX’s hit show Atlanta, written and created by Donald and Stephen Glover, just released a teaser for their fourth and final season. The show has been a staple in the culture since its first season in 2016. However, the show has not gone without its fair share of criticism, especially on the internet and from the Black community. Donald and Stephen addressed the criticism at an appearance at the show’s TCA Press Tour today, August 2nd.
“To be real, if you’re online, everybody’s gonna have an agenda on some level,” Donald said. “It would be silly to say that sometimes what people say doesn’t affect you because—especially being Black —I feel like a lot of the Black criticism bothers me only because it sounds like [it’s from] Black people who don’t really know what we’ve been through. I don’t think they give a lot of credit to what we’ve gone through. So to be like, ‘Oh, these Black people hate Black people or these Black people hate Black women.’— I’m like, It’s such, my it’s such a small view of who we are. I feel like it might even be because of what we’ve been through that you look at us the way you look at us.”
The show creator and musical artist went on to say that he might be “through” with the culture and said that he feels as if a lot of the criticism is coming from “internet people trying to get hot.” “I kind of feel like I’m a little through with the culture, personally. I do a lot of this sh*t for the people. But the culture, I think at this point, I think a lot of us are sitting here being like, ‘Yo, a lot of this sh*t was learned because of f*cked up sh*t that happened to us. And we actually have to relearn a lot of stuff.’ So if you’re sitting there being like, ‘Oh, this is misogynoir,’ I’m wondering why you think that and why you think I feel that way when I’m nothing without my people. It’s just kind of wack to me. Some of that to me is just internet people trying to get hot, which is also something we learned in the system we’re in.”
Donald went on to admit that he does listen to the criticism and concludes that “the conversation isn’t as elevated as it should be.” “There are better ways to talk about it rather than like with sh*t I’ve heard in fourth grade about who we are because I feel this is such a Black show. To say it’s only for white people, it’s like we’re cutting ourselves down which is kind of wack to me…I’ve seen on Tiktok where people say Atlanta‘s transphobic. Man, I’m neighbors with a trans man and he told me Atlanta is his favorite show. I love how you guys talked about the trans thing because a lot of this sh*t is just takes for the internet, you know?”
Stephen Glover then chimed in and addressed the criticism from Black audieces, saying he feels “rubbed the wrong way” when Black audiences say it’s a show for White people because he thinks the show is indeed for Black people.
“For me, one thing that I don’t like is when people say the show isn’t for Black people because I think it very much is for Black people. That kind of thing rubs me the wrong way,” said Stephen . “But I will also say being in Atlanta and walking around, or even like in LA, I run into Black people all the time who tell me this is their favorite show and how they appreciate everything we do. They also say we’re making them want to do cooler and weirder stuff. You know, like the TikTok generation kids, they’ll hit me up online and say how much they love the episodes. So for me, that’s the real kind of conversations that are happening out there. Internet stuff isn’t always real; it’s not how people really feel. I kind of get my feelings from the streets, to sum that up.”
Atlanta‘s fourth and final season premieres on FX on September 15.
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.
Charlamagne Tha God has returned to Comedy Central for the second season of his late-night show. After a successful run as Tha God’s Honest Truth, Charlamagne’s show will return in a new presentation under the name Hell of a Week.
In the show’s second season, Charlamagne adds a new executive producer in Josh Lieb to a crew that featured Stephen Colbert, showrunner Rachael Edwards, Aaron McGruder, Karen Kinney, James Dixon, and Norm Aladjem.
The series will have more of a panel, and in the first episode, Charlamagne was joined by Andrew Shulz, Kenan Thompson, Coleman Hughes, and Lis Smith. Ahead of the show’s launch, Charlamagne Tha God spoke with The SOURCE about changes fans will see in the show’s second season.
The SOURCE: We are hitting season two of your late-night show, but we have a name change. What sparked the transition from The God’s Honest Truth to Hell of a Week?
Charlamagne Tha God: Well, you know, the beauty of the business that we’re in is it’s always constant research being done, you know? We found out that The God’s Honest Truth didn’t necessarily read like a talk show. If you didn’t necessarily know who I was and knew to play on the words, you wouldn’t get that. The God’s Honest Truth, you know, that is my truth. And that is how I feel about things. But Hell of a Week, not only does it read like a weekly talk show, but it feels like something everybody can relate to. Cause you, you probably said that last week, “boy, it was a hell of a week.” So it’s just something that I feel like more people can embrace.
Was there a level of attachment with that name change for you? You take projects as your baby, and then for that to be your late-night intro, was there any battling inside your mind, wondering if this is the right move for you to do even though it makes more sense in a data-driven process?
Always. That’s just natural. Especially when you come up with something, you wonder, am I not good? Was that not good enough? So yes, you always do, but you know, you just gotta realize that things are bigger than you, and you gotta take a step back from yourself and realize that’s why they hire the people they hire to do this research. The first season we had success, which is why we’re getting a second season, but I want a hit show, like a hit hit show. An undeniable hit show. I want to show that people are watching. I want to show that it’s getting the right messaging out there. I want to show that people are entertained and educated by the first season, but now we’ve worked out these one or two kinks here and there. I think we will hit the ground running with season two and make more of a splash than in season one.
This title change also comes with a new format. Listening to Brilliant Idiots, I get a small understanding of what to expect in this transition, but what will fans see in this season?
What I tried to do in the first season was a lot of heavy lifting, man. I was communicating these big broad topics like critical race theory. I was delivering them, but it was through the lens of me. I think this new show is about community, which is what I like to do. When you hear me on The Breakfast Club, it’s me, Envy, and Angela. And it’s us with the guests. You hear me on Brilliant Idiots, and it’s me and Andrew Shulz. I feel like that’s where I’m my best, when I’m, sitting around kicking it with people who can elevate whatever conversation that we’re having. Andrew’s actually on the first episode. I told him, “I need you to shoot.” Because of two things, number one, everybody knows how critical Andrew’s been about Comedy Central, and number two, I want Andrew to be Andrew. I don’t want anybody to feel like we’ve all come too far to be feeling restricted by any platform. I know that’s one reason why a lot of people don’t even like to do these kinds of shows anymore. People would rather have their social media, go on their stage, or podcast so they can express themselves unapologetically. I want everybody on the show to feel comfortable enough to let it fly.
Using Andrew as an example, coming into this with someone who may not have the best history with Comedy Central, and that’s your partner. How do you make sure you create the synergy for those shows to be created with possibly two contrasting entities?
I don’t think it’s a conversation to be had because I don’t even know if Comedy Central has heard what Andrew said [laughs]. I know what Andrew has said, but guess what? A lot of the criticism probably was fair. It wasn’t like just OD slander for no reason. It was fair criticism from a comedian’s perspective, and comedians grew up on Comedy Central. We grew up on Comedy Central, with certain things like I watched Chappelle’s Show. I watched Key and Peele here and there. I love The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, but there’s a certain thing we expect from Comedy Central, and I guess a lot of comedians felt like, at some point, that thing wasn’t there. I hope to be a part of the individuals helping to bring that thing back. And I think that thing is just a little old fashion comedy, good old fashion observations of the world. I’m not a comedian per se, but I’m pretty good at making observations of the world.
I’m glad you mentioned that because a lot of comedians have to be able to catch something on the fly, be able to move around, and make a joke out of thin air. You mentioned having to be ready to shoot, but for you coming into this, especially with a new format, how do you like mentally prepare for the show?
I’m mentally preparing by being more loose. I think I put too much pressure on myself in the first season. I put too much pressure on myself like I haven’t been doing this for 20-plus years. I put pressure on myself because even though I’ve had talk shows in Charlamagne and Friends and Uncommon Sense, that did well for MTV2. When I look at those platforms, I was really training for a big opportunity like this, and that’s what literally what it was like. God blessed me with those other two opportunities to put me in a position to have an opportunity like this. When you have your name on the show, I didn’t feel that pressure with uncommon sense. And maybe cause I was just younger and didn’t have as many responsibilities as I have now. It was just fun.
We had Desus and Mero on Uncommon Sense. They had a segment on my show called Classic or Trash. I had somebody like Zuri Hall who is now on American Ninja Warrior. I had Karlous Miller, Chico Beam, and DC Young Fly. I remember Viacom told me nobody understands DC Young Fly, and now they can’t get enough of him. We had Cardi B on that show early on. It felt looser, so I didn’t have the pressure. The first season of this show felt like a lot of pressure because I wanted this to be successful. Still, I’m approaching this season much looser because if it’s one thing, God has consistently shown me everything is going to be okay and everything works out the way it’s supposed to.
Have you ever thought about yourself as the Gucci Mane of finding comedic talent? You know he finds everybody and the names you just named are big.
[Laughs] That’s a Black reference. That’s a reference only Black people from a particular club get. You know, I’ve never thought of that, but no. I know what you mean cause Gucci, I respect him for that. I respect anybody who does that because coming up, man, I always heard these stories of people that were selfish and didn’t want to share the stage. Didn’t wanna share the spotlight, didn’t want to share that platform. The people that I always thought were super dope were the people who had their stars and poured into everybody. My four inspirations in entertainment are Petey Greene; God bless the dead, an amazing radio personality. Arsenio Hall, Jay-Z and Clarence Avant.
Petey was just a servant of the people like he was. If you ever watched the movie Talk to Me with Don Cheadle and Taraji P Henson, Don Cheadle plays Petey Greene. He was just a servant of the people. That was his thing. He opened his platform to the community. He opened his platform to the people so much that when the riots broke out after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., they had to put him on air cause he was the only one who could talk to the community then. Arsenio Hall, if you ever watch his old, late-night talk show, man, there’s nobody that puts more Black creatives on television. The first time you saw the cast of Living Single or Wu-Tang as a collective was there. They weren’t getting those looks on the shows that were on NBC and anybody else at the time.
JAY-Z, I think his track record speaks for itself. Look at all the different people that he had poured into. And Clarence Avant is the godfather. You know, country boy from North Carolina. I’m from South Carolina. But that young man went to Hollywood and did great. If you watch The Black Godfather on Netflix, you see how he’s had his hand in everything from Hollywood to the music industry to politics. I admire people like that. I don’t know if I said this before, but if what I’m doing only serves me, it’s not big enough.
You are bringing together all types of people, professions, and more for this show to find solutions. Why do you think to this point, people have not zoned in on finding solutions, but instead, just discussing the problems?
Because the problems make for better television, Chris Rock had that joke back in the day. I think it was a joke about disease, and he was like, the money’s not in the cure, the money is in the treatment. It’s the same thing with this. It’s like if we get to the solutions, then that takes away from all the time we could spend talking about problems, and the problems cause conflict, and it causes viral moments. But man, I want to get to solutions cause the reality of the situation is there’s no problem that America has that’s going to be solved in 30 minutes on a TV show. So we will never run out of problems to try to solve. Too many questions are being asked on television instead of people making actual statements. Everybody is asking should Donald Trump go to jail for the January 6th Insurrection. I’m like, what do you mean, should he? If you’ve been watching, they already said they got more than enough to charge him. If there’s any question that should be asked, it’s what the hell is the DOJ [Department of Justice] doing? What is the DOJ waiting for in bringing charges? That should be the question.
Hell of a Week with Charlamagne Tha God with Charlamagne Tha God airs Thursdays on Comedy Central at 11:30 EM/PT, Paramount Plus, or on Comedy Central online.
The fourth and final season of the hit FX series Atlanta has been announced with a premiere date. A “Back to the A”teaser was released over the weekend showing the four main characters, along with many references to previous episodes throughout the series.
The characters are set to return to their hometown of Atlanta this season, after last season took place in Europe. Donald Glover’s series Atlanta won five Emmy Awards for the first two seasons, and season three which premiered May 10 is nominated for three more.
Episodes from the final season are scheduled to begin in September, without a specific date announced yet.
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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.
Issa Rae’s follow-up to Insecure is already off to a strong start, as fans have taken to the first two episodes of Rap Sh!t on HBO Max the same way they took to her breakout show. And, in an immaculate example of Issa’s marketing prowess, the signature song from burgeoning on-screen Miami rap duo Mia and Shawna, “Seduce & Scheme,” has received an official release from Issa’s Atlantic-backed label, Raedio.
In the show, “Seduce & Scheme” is the result of a drunken late-night reunion between the two lead characters after their post-high school falling out. It goes viral, becoming the launching point for their rap group ambitions, with Mia encouraging the passionate but preachy Shawna to loosen up while Mia learns to take herself and her own talent more seriously. The show, which is also executive produced by City Girls, is a loose re-telling of the Quality Control hitmakers’ own origin story, with some Issa Rae flair thrown in.
So far, fans have been loving the show’s subtle social commentary on subjects like the double standards for women in rap and the seemingly incessant cultural appropriation surrounding the genre. Highlighting the latter, viewers were delighted by the show’s use of a real-life viral moment to promote an in-show character’s “hit” song. Atlanta rapper Omeretta The Great had posted what looked to be a white woman covering her viral hit “Sorry Not Sorry,” imitating the streetwise declarations that the surrounding suburbs were “not Atlanta.”
In reality, it turns out that the rapper, Reina Reign, was actually an actor, Kat Cunning, gamely playing the role of a clueless appropriator who switches from doing acoustic covers of rap songs to full-on Black girl cosplay in an effort to bank off the increasing popularity of female rappers. And just like that video went viral, Rap Sh!t‘s signature single — which was penned in part by real rapper Dreezy and some of the show’s staff, looks like it’s going to be a hit as well.
You can listen to “Seduce & Scheme” above.
Raedio is a subsidiary of Warner Music. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
Even before they landed the lead roles on Issa Rae’s new HBO Max series, Aida Osman and KaMillion have been living and breathing this rap sh*t. The new show, appropriately titled Rap Sh!t, tells the story of two estranged high school friends – the poetic, lyric-focused Shawna Clark (Osman) and the confident, sexually liberated Mia Knight (KaMillion) – reuniting to form a rap duo. While this is both actors’ first times starring in a lead role, their TV counterparts are entities the two have been manifesting for years.
Before Rap Sh!t, KaMillion had been putting out independent mixtapes and singles for eight years. Osman had worked as a writer and producer on shows like Big Mouth and Betty, and was initially hired to be a writer for Rap Sh!t. With Rap Sh!t, the two are at the forefront of their own sharp pen game after years of putting in work behind the scenes.
“It’s so complicated and scary and weird to actualize,” Osman says of being a lead on television. “Every time I see the photo of me and Milly in the car that they’re using for the Rap Sh!t art, I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s somebody else. That’s not me and her’ But like, that is me and her. That’s me and my friend. When I drive by the billboard now, it’s so weird to see that that’s us. It’s surreal.”
Alicia Vera/HBO Max
Aida Osman plays the lyric-focused Shawna Clark. She is also a writer on the show.
Osman’s affinity for hip-hop began as a secret love affair. Having grown up in a Muslim household in Lincoln, Nebraska, she was not allowed to watch TV or listen to hip-hop, which the TV writer and actress on a hip-hop-centered show admits is “crazy… because look at me now.” As a teenager, she would often take her computer and sit in her room, watching Nicki Minaj videos in secret. She played drums and performed in her school’s choir throughout high school, and by college, she was quietly writing her own rhymes and exploring beatmaking.
Today, Osman’s mother is more than supportive of her work, even if she doesn’t quite get it.
“[My mom] hates Big Mouth so much,” Osman says. “She’s always like, ‘What is this? They’re ugly.’ She thinks it’s all ugly, and she thinks the concept is so stupid. But she always pauses at the credits like, ‘That’s my baby.’ And I’m like, ‘Which is it? Which is it?’ I don’t even know if my mom understands the concept of Rap Sh!t, but we’ll see.”
KaMillion, on the other hand, has always been immersed in the world of hip-hop, having grown up in Jacksonville, Florida, and hearing music constantly playing outside. “I started writing poetry at first,” says KaMillion, “just looking at the community that I was raised in, and everything I was going through. Everything started out as poetry, and then I just put a beat to it. When I felt like I could do it, I started rapping and getting with different producers. Hip-hop has just always been in me just because of how I was raised in the neighborhoods where I came from.”
When we first meet Osman’s Shawna on the show, she is working the front desk at a Miami hotel. She is recognized for one of her viral freestyles, however, it is revealed that she now wears a mask when she records her rap videos, that way people can focus on her lyrics instead of her appearance. She is critical of the hypersexual nature of women rappers and is fed up with being slept on and wants very badly for industry professionals to take her seriously.
KaMillion’s Mia, on the other hand, strives to be a woman’s fantasy in regards to sexual liberation – a la Lil Kim in the ’90s. As an aspiring rapper single mother, a make-up artist, and an OnlyFans model, Mia wears many hats throughout the series.
Sex work is a big component of the Rap Sh!t universe. In the first episode, we see Mia live streaming on OnlyFans, taking requests and tips from men. In real life, KaMillion briefly dipped her toes in the OnlyFans waters during the early phases of the COVID-19 pandemic, though not for what she considers sex work, but rather to share intimate pictures that wouldn’t make it past the Instagram censors. “We’ve all done odd jobs to come up,” KaMillion says. “I danced briefly to make ends meet, so I understood that aspect when it came to my character, because I’ve experienced it.”
While she became well-versed on the platform of her own accord, bringing the OnlyFans action to the screen was an entirely new challenge for KaMillion.
Alicia Vera/HBO Max
KaMillion plays the ambitious, sexually-liberated Mia Knight.
“When you’re recording kinky little videos on your phone, no one’s in there watching you,” KaMillion says, “but now, you’ve got to perform in front of the camera guy and the director. Like they’re up in your coochie, and I’m like ‘Did I shave good enough?’ ‘How’s every angle looking?’”
Although Shawna hasn’t done any sex work in the series, Osman, similarly to KaMillion, said one of her most challenging scenes to shoot was a virtual sex scene in the first episode, in which she is having FaceTime sex with her long-distance boyfriend, Cliff (Devon Terrell).
“There will be a closed set for things like this, so it’s just you, the cameraman, the producer, the main writer, and the showrunner,” Osman says. “But every time that we film a scene, we do a practice round before, where the necessary crew comes in and maps out what the scene is going to look like. So to lay in a bed while Issa Rae is just watching me masturbate is the goofiest thing. I felt funny and stupid, and I couldn’t take that scene seriously. I kept cackling mid-orgasm.”
Throughout the series, the promising rappers navigate the treacherous music industry as their single, “Seduce And Scheme,” continues to go viral. They face challenges like handling personal relationships as artists, remaining couth at industry functions, and the pressures of viral fame. All the while, the two channel the spirit of women in rap to help them get through the titular rap sh*t, both on-and-off screen.
Viewers with a keen ear will catch the characters referencing iconic quotes by female rappers in casual conversation. In the second episode, when Mia and Shawna are brainstorming ideas for songs, Mia says she wants to make “something fun, something for the summertime, something for the girls to get ready and party to,” referring to Saweetie’s 2019 interview for Amazon Music’s Rap Rotation. In a later episode, where the ladies head to New York City, Mia recreates Nicki Minaj’s 2017 viral “you b*tches can’t even spell Prague” video, recording a clip in front of a black Cadillac Escalade, saying, “Attention, this is how a bad b*tch leaves Miami and arrives in Queens. You b*tches can’t even spell Queens.”
Like the hidden Drake-lyrics in the dialogue of the first season of Rae’s breakout series, Insecure, and the Frank Ocean-lyrics in the second, this was something the writers did on purpose.
“It’s definitely about paying homage, and we love that,” Osman says. “It always feels amazing to catch a little easter egg like that. So with our show, it only made sense for the writers to be like, ‘Let’s put in our favorite moments from Black women in rap.’”
As Mia and Shawna become stars on Rap Sh!t, both Osman and KaMillion are becoming stars in real life, alongside their breakout characters. According to Osman, Rae first commissioned her to write “a month’s worth of television” when she was hired onto the show’s staff. She was comfortable working as a writer “for the rest of [her] life,” and even assumed that someone else had landed the role of Shawna before she was asked to do a chemistry read with KaMillion.
KaMillion had been working toward her breakthrough moment in music for nearly a decade, and now, with Rap Sh!t, she feels like the stars are all aligning.
“I think it’s a blessing for me to be able to make a living in hip-hop,” KaMillion says. “And, ultimately, to be on a show like this – that I feel is about to be culture.”
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.
Usher is taking to television: The Grammy Award-winning vocalist has signed on as an executive producer for an upcoming television series called Storyville, as reported by Variety.
The series, set in New Orleans, will tell the story of five brothel madams seeking to gain control over the city’s Red Light District. It is a music-centered series which will be focused on the beginning of the Jazz Age in New Orleans.
“Storyville is an epic tale sparked by the origins of the sound that inspired my career — a story that touches the nerve of social and cultural relevance today,” Usher said in a statement.
At the time of reporting, the series is currently in development by Starlings Television and is targeted for global sale to various networks. Starlings TV President/EP Chris Philip and CEO Karine Martin are also set to co-executive produce the show, alongside Usher, as well as creators and showrunners Bill Macdonald and Walt Becker, and Marcus Morton.
“Usher’s massive global appeal, musical and acting genius will propel this unique and compelling original series into must-see viewing worldwide,” Philip said in a statement. “His invaluable creative and musical contributions to Storyville fulfill our vision of contrasting the gritty, sometimes brutal sides of New Orleans life with it giving birth to a beautiful, diverse and defining new artform.”
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