Credit: 1017 Global Music / Atlantic Recording Corporation

For his mandatory first day out of prison song, “FDO,” Pooh Shiesty turned an existential dilemma into the most gangster gangsta rap flex I’ve ever heard. Creeping across tumbling piano keys like the predator he is, he called out his shooter for having the audacity to suggest he leave petty street beef behind and enjoy his newfound freedom: “Unfortunately, I’m CEO and the top shooter for my gang.” Eight months later, it still sounds like a casual inconvenience and a humblebrag. Now that he’s back in jail for allegedly kidnapping and robbing Gucci Mane to get out of his record deal, it also sounds like a lyric that’s too specific to be false. Ditto for his new album All Eyes on Shiest, an LP that thrives on the authenticity that’s probably going to keep him behind bars until he’s as old as Gucci Mane.

As is usually the case, Shiesty’s audio self-destruction is pretty fun. His bars are as economically constructed as they are precise, with his bluntness and Memphis accent camouflaging the technique. Wielding sharp, microcosmic observations, Shiesty takes you through the nightmares and prison yards that colored his time inside cell blocks and underscored his days outside of them. Depending on what track you’re listening to, it might feel like you were actually his cellmate. If you were, you’d apparently have seen him doing A-Ok, as rich street niggas allegedly so often do. When other inmates are eating nutraloaf, Shiesty’s feasting on Popeyes and selling dope off his Apple Watch. Rather than lamenting his time behind bars, he emerged more bloodthirsty. Any hope for repentance flies out of the jail cell on “I’m Back,” where he depicts gang leadership and all-around destruction as a cosmic calling from the interdimensional Thug Overlord: “Soon as they confirmed he up in there, I sent four of my killers there/Fuck it, spray his barber too, he shouldn’t have been cuttin’ his hair.” Sandwiched between a self-affirmative hook and a trap safari soundscape, it makes “I’m going to shoot and rob people just like I always have” feel way more cathartic than it should be.

From its general construction to its content, there’s nothing transformative about All Eyes on Shiest. This is an album for people who find belief in bullet wounds and pride in prison sentences. This is “Yeah, I did that shit and I’ll do it again” music. It could all get super redundant, but Shiesty generally slides so many details into the mix it manages to be compelling anyway; there’s always the jail lock he carried as a weapon rather than his typical shank because his current prison yard is pretty chill. He’s always quick to tell you about how he’s got security guarding him against his own security because … well, being Shiesty makes you a lot of enemies. Even with the specter of prison, there’s always a surge of bravado that, for a few seconds, makes an intermittently white collar professional like me feel like Jack Reacher and Big Meech combined. On “JPay and CorrLinks,” he packages the dimensionality of the street code into more bars designed to prove he’s the most gangster gangsta ever. Of course he wants his enemy free from a jail cell; that will make him easier to exterminate. He ends it all with a bit of wordplay that’s vicious, but slick enough to slip through a metal detector: “Young and dangerous, twistin’ fingers, been everywhere they said I can’t go/Bullets rainin’ through your poncho, front and backend, all hunchos.”

When Shiesty’s not being a Super Gangster, he lets us peek beneath his armor of Shiestiness for a snapshot of belated trauma; nightmares about his shooting make his girlfriend scared because he tosses and turns so much. When it rains, he remembers his bullet wound because the change in the atmosphere makes his bones ache even years after he’s healed up. On tracks like the 2Pac-sampling “Last Man Breathin,” he swirls those intimate moments of vulnerability with his customary aggression for a track that’s as defiant as it is infectious; the Pac-interpolation does some of the work, but the accelerated tempo ups the urgency of the lyrics the hook sits between.

The exhilarating moments are exhilarating. The drab ones, like some of the by-the-numbers production, are just kinda whatever. “Booty Club” includes a Sexyy Red verse that sounds as if it was recorded through a drowsy voice note moments after she scribbled something down in her Notes app, and dope as the best rapping is, tracks like “McLaren Truck” begin to feel a little too redundant by the second half of the album. Too often, the choruses are too literal and asymmetrical to be memorable. There’s nothing with the signature symbolism of “Neighbors” or “Back in Blood.” Still, Shiesty’s blood-stained lyricism is enough to make it all mostly work anyway. Sticking to the formula made Shiesty one of the best rising street rappers six years ago. But it’s also the reason he’s still “rising” instead of sitting atop Trap Mountain.

At the time he was arrested for a shooting in 2021, Shiesty had already been selected to be a XXL Freshman, and it looked like he would become the successor Gucci Mane had been looking for. But alas, his habits landed him behind bars until last December. On his comeback single, Shiesty’s mother speaks about them being given a second chance. Now, Shiesty will looking for a third one, and you have to wonder whether he considered recording a “Last Day Out” before his arrest. After all, he knows a lot about consequences. He raps them plainly — perhaps prophetically — on the Do or Die-sampling “Reap What You Sow.”

On the track, a cut that feels sinister even for Shiesty, he seems to reference his alleged Gucci kidnapping: “All I asked was the bare minimum, nigga held his nuts on me/So I took it there, yeah, I ****, fuck you mean, nigga?/You ‘posed to put hoes on they back, you put your niggas up on they feet/Especially when they certified, took they time and ain’t scream.” It’s brazen even for Shiesty, but no one had to listen to the track to realize Shiesty gave no fucks; some people really aren’t just rapping. And if they were, we might not like them as much in the first place. It’s a seesaw that’s taken the best from hip-hop, and with the Lil Durk trial in motion, it will take many more. And even if you escape, you’ll still face judgment.

Following news that he was cooperating with authorities after being kidnapped at gunpoint, Gucci Mane faced a barrage of jokes because, for once, he failed to live up to the street code. Now, Shiesty’s back in jail because he did too good of a job living up to it. Unfortunately.

Verdict: Like It

Rating: 7.1 Jail Locks Out of 10

Check out all of it above, and as always, be sure to subscribe.

00:08 Pooh Shiesty’s New Album

06:54 The Appeal of Pooh Shiesty’s Invincibility Raps

14:01 The Cosmic Call of Clout Chasing

29:25 The Ballad of Russell Westbrook

44:15 Where Does Westbrook Rank All Time?

Rate It Or Love It Podcast Episode 8: The Lost Virtue of Mid-Movies, the Magic of Spider-Man & The Odyssey, and Shitty Rage Rappers

Rate It Or Love It Podcast Episode 7: Why LeBron and the 76ers Will Make It to the Finals Next Year

Jaylen Brown’s Celtics Trade Is Proof That Team Loyalty Is Bullshit

Tap in below.

0:00 — Why Movie Theaters Feel Special Again
9:30 — The Death of Middle-Class Movies
16:00 — Caitlin Clark vs. Paige Bueckers
25:45 — Has Rage Rap Run Its Course?
35:30 — Why Rap Feels Less Transformative
45:30 — Artist Development and Hip-Hop’s Future

Rate It Or Love It Podcast Episode 7: Why LeBron and the 76ers Will Make It to the Finals Next Year

Jaylen Brown’s Celtics Trade Is Proof That Team Loyalty Is Bullshit

• Intro — 0:03–0:49

• LeBron Joins the 76ers: First Reactions — 0:49–5:02

• Can Philly’s Four Stars Fit Together? — 5:02–14:19

• Sixers Playoff Predictions / Eastern Conference Outlook — 14:19–18:56

• YG vs. The Game Verzuz Review — 18:56–24:49

• What Makes a Great Verzuz Matchup? — 24:49–29:07

• Who Should Headline the 2027 Super Bowl Halftime Show? — 29:07–34:55

• Which LA Artist Is Most Likely to Complain About Not Performing at Super Bowl?— 34:55–37:01

• Drake, Post Malone and Super Bowl Politics — 37:01–41:36

• Country Options and Sabrina Carpenter — 41:36–45:19

Rate It Or Love It Podcast Episode 6: How Lupe Fiasco Became a Legacy Artist Too Soon

IBS Shit Bag Is a Looksmaxxing Gangster Trying to Rapmaxx. It’s Working.

We were on video, but I’m working through some visual stuff right now, so currently audio only. Tap in to listen above.

0:14 – 18:26 — Steve Lacy

18:26 – 34:22 — Rick Ross’s Strange, Yet Great Career

34:22 – 48:42 — How Lupe Fiasco Became the Penny Hardaway of Hip-Hop

48:42 – 55:05 — NBA Summer League: Boozer, Dybantsa, and Peterson

55:05 – 1:11:44 — JAY-Z’s Next Album and Colin Kaepernick

NBA on ESPN via YouTube

Nine years ago, months after temporary Boston Celtics savior Isaiah Thomas was traded for the younger and taller Kyrie Irving, Jaylen Brown posed a question that was, subtly, more moral indictment than logistical challenge.

“When I came in [to the team] everything they stressed was culture, environment, Celtic basketball,” Jaylen told COMPLEX in 2017. “Now, it’s like what is the environment, the culture,” he continued. “What is Celtic basketball?” The question is sandwiched between mandatory “this is a great opportunity for us” quotes, but even at the time, it was as close to a “What the fuck are y’all niggas doing?” as he could possibly get while still being politically correct. And also being completely correct.

After all, what does it mean when a team’s best player, an underpaid, undersized, and overscoring underdog, is traded months after scoring 53 points to win a playoff basketball game? What does it mean when you trade that player despite the fact that he played for your team just one day after the tragic death of his younger sister? What does it mean when the injury your training staff allowed him to play through during that same playoff run ultimately ended his functional basketball career? Last week, Jaylen got a hint of an answer when, just over two years removed from the day he won the Finals MVP trophy for helping lead the Celtics to a 4-1 NBA Finals win over the Dallas Mavericks, the Celtics traded him to the Philadelphia 76ers for a largely washed Paul George and a couple first round and second round picks.

The circumstances surrounding Isaiah and Jaylen’s trades are a bit different, but the frameworks and outcomes are remarkably symmetrical. Like IT4, who is one of only five guards in NBA history to score at least 28 points per game on over a 62 true shooting percentage, advanced stats love Jaylen a lot less than box score numbers. Also like IT4, the team has generally succeeded at a high level with him on it.

For the last six seasons, the Celtics have won at a 55-win pace, and Jaylen’s averaged about 25 points, 6 rebounds, and 4 assists per game on 48/35/76 splits. It sounds like the work of an all-star wing — and it is; Jaylen has made five all-star teams during this stretch. But, as plenty of nerdier people than I have noted, despite making an All-NBA second team this season, advanced stats see him as around a top 40-level player than an MVP candidate.

If it’s been hard to define Celtics basketball, it hasn’t been hard to define Jaylen Brown’s weaknesses. While he is a very good scorer, his pedestrian free throw rate of about five or six per at about 76% from the stripe per game caps his true shooting at just about league average, and him taking the majority of the shots on the team caps the ultimate team efficiency at below the best in the league. His assist-to-turnover ratio is generally pretty bad, and sometimes, plainly speaking, the boy just can’t dribble. According to Basketball Reference, the Celtics have actually scored 1.4 points more per 100 possessions with Jaylen Brown off the floor than on.

Those numbers can feel damning, but there’s significant leakage when looking at factors like durability, consistency, multi-positional defense, and team outcomes. Heading into his 10th season, Jaylen has played more games the last nine years than any star wings besides Anthony Edwards and DeMar DeRozan, while making bigger playoff runs than both. Of the star swingmen averaging over 22 points per game, none guard the opposing team’s primary scoring threat as often, and even fewer do it as well; according to public tracking through January, Jaylen opponents shot just 39.4% from the field when he was the closest defender. He finished the season eighth in defensive field goal percentage.

While some lackluster off-ball defense can limit some of his impact, Jaylen makes up for it with scoring consistency: Since his fourth season, Jaylen has never failed to average 20 points per game. In his last 98 playoff games, within the context of various teammates, coaches and systems and environments where scoring against a set defense is necessarily more difficult than in the regular season, he has averaged over 23 points per game on 57.5 true shooting. That means that, regardless of facing the best teams in the league in a role that often requires he defend the opposing team’s most dangerous scorer, neither his scoring volume nor his efficiency have dropped off. And despite what some advanced stats say, neither have his teams. At least, as far as the actual wins and losses columns go.

Since he arrived on the Celtics, they’ve been to the Conference Finals five times. They’ve been to the NBA Finals twice. They won the championship in 2024. In the years he played, his team has only lost in the first round once. Dating back to his rookie season, his teams have never missed the NBA playoffs. If you’re going to give Jaylen a super max, you’re betting on the most reassuring form of mundanity. You’re counting on the general idea that he’s a big, two-way wing that’s guaranteed to average 25 points per game regardless of context. You’re betting that he’ll remain durable and devoid of true controversy. You’re betting that, whether in the regular season or the playoffs, he’ll be on the court and he’ll produce while he’s there.

As Tom Haberstroh notes, the Celtics could be betting that Payton Pritchard, who’s quietly become one of the best isolation scorers in the world, can scale up his volume to turn 17 points per game on very good efficiency to 22 points per game on elite efficiency, and that Derrick White really is more valuable relative to his contract than Jaylen is. And honestly? It’s not the worst idea in the world, even if it’s unlikely Paul George even plays 60 games next year. With the supermax, Jaylen would make more money than Pritchard ($8 million per year) and White combined. Immediately speaking, I would bet the Celtics are worse next year. But in the future, the move could free open space for the Celtics to sign a player they actually believe is worth the super-max. If they somehow land Shai Gilgeous-Alexander at the end of all this, it will have been worth it. That is, as a basketball move.

But when it comes to the concept of team lore, loyalty, sacrifice, and tradition, logistics can’t exist in a vacuum. If they did, this controversy wouldn’t exist, and Jaylen wouldn’t have to revisit the question he posed nine years ago. What does Celtics Basketball mean when you win the Finals MVP trophy to win an NBA championship just to get traded in the prime of your career two years later? What does Celtics basketball mean when your team’s ostensible best player ruptures his achilles tendon and you respond with the best statistical season of your career just to get traded for someone six years older than you less than two weeks after the season? What does Celtics Basketball mean when you, while being one of the 25 or so best players in the world, start and sustain multiple educational and financial empowerment initiatives just to get traded when you’ve still got three years left on your contract?

In the best, fairytale terms for the absolute best players, there’s something resembling a happy ending. The Lakers drafted LeBron’s son, and the Golden State Warriors made an abrupt trade for an aging, but still elite Jimmy Butler to give Stephen Curry a chance at one last championship run. Years ago, even after Kobe Bryant ruptured his achilles tendon, the Lakers still made him the highest-paid player in the Association. Jaylen isn’t LeBron, Steph, or Kobe, but Boston did give him his own holiday. And he did give them about 13,000 points. And a championship. Even if he didn’t deserve the most extreme version of a happy ending, he at least deserved the decency to not be traded to the team that just defeated you.

As the days pass and he settles into his self-proclaimed villain role, Jaylen might finally settle into an answer he seemed to intuitively understand even as a rookie. The same thing he seemed to understand when, after Nike suspended Kyrie Irving for moral issues, he asked “when did Nike start caring about morals?” When he asked about what constituted Celtics Basketball all those years ago, the question was probably rhetorical. The simple answer is something like mortality, championships, and cruel economics. The existential one is that team spirit, sacrifice, and even proven performance are only as valuable as how well they line up with the simple one.

Verdict: Hate It

Rating: 3 Icy Economic Decisions out of 10

Rylo S.K.A.T.E.s All Over His New Album

For a guy with such an understated, murmuring flow, Rylo Rodriguez spits literally some of the wildest punchlines I’ve ever heard. Imagine the quietest guy you know all the sudden rocking a Frank Lucas fur. In just two bars, he managed to make light of an international atrocity and a relatively local one: “My vans white like human trafficking/I saw a fit in Gucci, I kidnapped it” (“Low Top Vanz”).

I hate that for Gucci, but S.K.A.T.E. kinda goes, and there’s basically no shortage of snappy one-liners from Alabama’s finest.

Verdict: Like It

Rating: 7.5 Outta Pocket Punchlines Out of 10

Tierra Whack’s Whack Museum Isn’t Wack

Tierra Whack begins her new project by rapping, “They say I should rap more,” and she’s right. But I’m glad she ended the drought with Whack Museum, which is a jungle gym for phonetic adventures and wordplay that’s at once childish and precise. I get heavy late 2007 Weezy vibes mixed with Missy here. Girl is just good.

Verdict: Like It

Rating: 7.5 Weird Ass Micro Songs Out of 10

Super Lupe’s Silly Lyrical Arguments

Debates about lyricism feel very, very mid-2000s even for a guy like me, who once rapped under the name Prolyfic. But unfortunately, my boy Lupe brought me back into it and I’m a little annoyed. On and off for about a decade, he’s talked about how so and so isn’t as good as this obscure rapper because they don’t have this many decorative, but useless triple entendres or they don’t rap fast. That’s how we landed at Lupe saying things like Kendrick Lamar doesn’t rap better than Logic. Most recently, he just reaffirmed his claim that he’s better at rapping than KDot, too, even while admitting Kenny’s a better artist.

For my money, he’s right on the latter point. Lupe’s syntax is more precise, his storytelling always has more subtext, and it’s always felt like his best lines were more memorable. At least, before “Not Like Us.” But this conversation always makes me cringe because a lot of the guys Lupe lists as being superior lyricists simply do not make good music, and I wish Lupe himself focused on musicality the way he did on Food & Liquor and The Cool. The raps were strong on those projects, but back then, he didn’t focus as much on trying to prove to you he was the smartest in the room, and that allowed him to rap with the beat instead of against it. You know — make songs that I could actually listen to.

Drill Music in Zion and Samurai are really good, but this tired ass lyricism conversation always reminds me that there were levels Lupe could’ve reached if he weren’t such a goddamn nerd like Eminem.

Verdict: Dislike

Rating: 5 Unnecessary Metaphors Out of 10.

LeBron Leaves Lakers

So, after eight years, LeBron’s finally left the Lakers. I wanted more than one championship and I wish he and Luka had one more playoff run together, but I also get the sense Bron and the Lakers barely fucked with each other, and he was generally always asking too much. But honestly, how much is too much when a 41-year-old sends a higher-seeded playoff team home in the first round despite missing his first and third best players? As disappointing as some of his Lakers tenure was, it was also miraculous.

I saw a screenshot breaking down his Lakers career, and even this stint is its own self-contained Hall of Fame career. He did some annoying shit (like the Lakers trade, for instance), but once again, he proved it was largely worth it, and it will be worth it for his next team, too. Especially if he signs for the vet minimum.

Official Yu-Gi-Oh! via YouTube

In the real world, believing in the “heart of the cards” feels just as silly now as when I heard Yugi Muto’s grandpa explain it to him 25 years ago.

Unlike conventional shonen tropes — “the power of friendship” or “give it your all” — aka, things you can at least influence with your will, this Yu-Gi-Oh! idea was based entirely on chance: “If you’re a good enough person while playing this 3-D card game, you’ll draw just the card you need to defeat the person you decided you deserve to defeat at the moment you need it most.” An evil nepo baby wants to humiliate you and take your most prized possession? That’s okay, just believe in your cards. The same guy almost kills your grandpa? That’s fine, just believe harder. Imagine if, instead of trying to take out a loan or start a GoFundMe to stop your house from being foreclosed, your pops just told you, “believe harder, son.”

But on Kids’ WB!, it worked.

As a result of putting his heart in the cards (i.e., just blind, dumb luck), Yugi Muto ended up assembling a mythical gaming creature with the ability to instantly obliterate his opponent. Even as a 9-year-old, I thought that was too stupid — too arbitrary — to actually work. But then Jalen Brunson went ahead and did it in real life. Two years ago, Brunson put his heart in the cards and — probably — his financial advisor into despair when he sacrificed $113 million in guaranteed money for his latest contract. And like Yugi, he’s been rewarded with a cosmically validating win. Also like Yugi: he did it the hard way.

The 2026 Knicks’ roster construction wasn’t exactly getting out of the mud, but Brunson and the front office didn’t exactly get it out of a bed of rose petals, either. The plucking began with Brunson’s contract. The first one. Folks knew Brunson was going to be a problem when he left the Dallas Mavericks. But they didn’t guess that he’d become a quantum physics equation. Since joining the squad, he’s averaged 26.8 points and 6.8 assists on 59-percent true shooting. In the playoffs, with rosters of varying quality, he’s maintained the volume without losing meaningful efficiency. In each of the last four seasons, the Knicks have been to the Eastern Conference Semifinals or better, and Brunson’s become a top 10 player. People will rightfully remember his sacrifice, but the act of signing a small-ish guard who’s never averaged 20 points per game to a $104 million deal is something. If not a full leap of faith, a small bound.

Many of the subsequent moves were similarly unheralded; no Blue-Eyes White Dragons. Yet. In 2023, they traded a flashy former upside guy (Cam Reddish), along with a couple other hopeful journeymen for Josh Hart, a 6’3” glue-guy wing who had been Brunson’s teammate at Villanova. Then, they signed an underutilized Donte DiVincenzo to add more two-way depth. In a shrewd move, they flipped former lottery picks RJ Barrett and Immanuel Quickley to the Toronto Raptors for OG Anunoby by the end of that year. And then, for the price of Bojan Bogdanović, Shake Milton, Mamadi Diakite, four unprotected first-round picks and some other things no Knicks fan will ever think about again, they got Mikal Bridges, a solid two-way wing miscast as a No. 1 option on the Brooklyn Nets.

By the fall of 2024, Brunson and the gang, like Yugi’s grandpa before them, had put together a solid deck, with pieces that fit together spiritually and strategically. Brunson, Bridges, and Hart won the 2016 NCAA National Championship for Villanova years ago. And everyone seemed to be as optimally positioned as Wemby grabbing a rebound over a six-year-old who said he wasn’t good enough. A 20-point-per-game scorer became a two-way wing third option (Bridges), another physical two-way wing became the fourth option (OG Anunoby) and Brunson and Hart became podcast partners. The juju was strong — about as strong as the roster was going to become once the Knicks traded Julius Randle for Karl-Anthony Towns in October 2024.

In KAT, Brunson and the Knicks got someone who, despite claims about his toughness, is certifiably one of the greatest shooting big men of all time — a two-way threat who gave Brunson the spacing, tertiary playmaking and ancillary skills to be the All-NBA second option every aspiring NBA championship team needs. Now, instead of colliding egos and shot attempts, the squad had three non-Brunson members that could potentially perform as playoff second options or better, with players like Jordan Clarkson, Mitchell Robinson, and Landry Shamet filling in the margins like SAT answers.

If you hadn’t been paying attention, it could feel like the Knicks surfaced out of empty nothingness. But it’s now been exactly the same length as an undergrad college career. It took some time; this wasn’t a moody superstar fat-maxxing his way into a forced trade, or a spiritual awakening that forced a gifted scorer into the hands of their arch rival. This was a fairly lengthy, considered trek to a non-GMO superteam. An institution that’s never even heard the term “AI.” And it wasn’t without protest.

Brunson was too small to be a “1A” option on a championship contender, KAT was too soft and had already let the Minnesota Timberwolves down in the conference finals. Four first-round picks for Bridges was insane. Until Saturday — or sometime during other parts of their 16-3 postseason run — they were seen as too little of this, or too much of this. As a result of savvy GMing and Brunson’s sacrifice, they were too good for the rest of the NBA to stop from winning a championship.

Too many people will write about how the NBA is better for the Knicks winning a championship and how New York is the greatest city in the world and this and that. But they’ve got a point. So did Yugi’s grandpa. At the time, my wannabe cynical 9-year-old ass wanted to get some laughs off at the expense of this fictional anime character. So much so that I misread the message: his grandfather wasn’t asking Yugi to subscribe to a blind sense of divine providence; he was really just asking him to trust his deck of cards, one Yugi’s grandfather had spent decades assembling the old-fashioned way. During his travels, he collected the five pieces of the Forbidden One, Exodia. Individually, the cards were negligible. But once assembled, they ensure automatic victory.

I wouldn’t call the Knicks’ championship “automatic,” but it felt similarly inevitable; during the championship round, they completed three of the biggest comebacks in NBA Finals history. They only lost three times the entire playoffs. They didn’t earn their Exodia from strong-arm tactics or public subliminal messages. Just work that was as steady, crafty, and mostly ethical as their now-franchise legend.

Yugi’s grandfather wasn’t asking Yugi to close his eyes and make a wish as much as asking him to put faith in something that already existed. He knew something maybe me and Yugi didn’t: that he’d given Yugi something to believe in the first place.

Rating: 10 silly little proverbs out of 10

Verdict: Love It

Scary Movie 6

As a rule, Scary Movie flicks are unashamedly low-vibrational frequency spectacles. In the first scene of the latest film in the franchise, a main character calls them out for their low-brow humor, preferring Judd Apatow flicks that another character says aren’t actually funny, but make white people feel smarter than everyone else. I laughed. It’s just too bad that was one of the only times I did.

Scary Movie 6, which is actually called Scary Movie, is a heavy-handed mosaic of mostly outdated horror flick tropes and fart jokes. Every once in a while a punchline will land, but a good amount of the time, it’s just the Wayans Bros. trying to stick it to the wokes with middling execution. I wanted this movie to be good, but like … come on. They were never actually good. But it was a novel concept and there were some cheap laughs. Think about it like trash TV.

Anyway, against my instincts, I took one for the team to support my people. Let’s just say, putting my “heart in the cards” didn’t exactly work out this time.

Rating: 4 fart jokes out of 10

Verdict: Don’t Like It

Vince Staples’ Rock Album

When you use a magnifying glass for granular analysis, microscopic phenomena become legible. When you try to use it to peep something a lot bigger, things lose their shape and get blurry AF. Listening to the worst parts of Vince Staples’ latest album, Cry Baby, it can feel like he’d have been better off using his reading glasses instead of the telescope. For this album, he trades his customary raps for post-punk to mostly good enough effect, but nearly too often, he trades his gift for concise, episodic analysis for broad-stroke lyricism that can verge on platitudinal.

For tracks like “Cotton,” “Go, Go, Gorilla!” and “The Running Man,” he collapses the distance between broader song structures and his typically sharp rap couplets. But on tracks like “TV Guide,” he veers into fake deep bullshit. Ironically, the hook for “TV Guide” sounds like a really bad rap song from a made-for-TV movie: “T-t-t-television, you turn me on/L-l-l-looking at you all night long/M-m-m-movie magic up on the screen/I think the television’s controlling me, woah, oh, oh.”

Still, his voice is a little more malleable than he gets credit for, his thoughts can still be sharp, and as inoffensive and unremarkable as the instrumentals are, they blend together well and Vince hasn’t been doing inventive music since The Big Fish Theory anyway. So trading pedestrian hip-hop soundscapes for average rock isn’t the loss people think — just like Cry Baby is neither the masterpiece nor disaster people think.

Rating: 7.1 successful genre-flips out of 10

Verdict: Like It.

Yeezy and Lil Wayne Jr. Link Up

I have hope for the children, but this is empty calories rage rap that should’ve stayed on someone’s MacBook.

Rating: 5 would-be Opium signees out of 10

Verdict: Don’t Like It

Trump Fucks Up the Vibes

Trump showed up for Game 3 at MSG and the crowd booed so loudly that the internet speculated that the guy who sang the national anthem was invited to sing it again because it sounded like the crowd booed him. Pretty crazy shit. Even if you can accept the notion of the president pulling up to an NBA Finals game, him falling asleep midway through is pretty unacceptable. Like, all that extra security and canceled watch parties so he can pretend like he’s watching Scary Movie. Nah.

Rating: 2 mid-game naps out of 10

Verdict: Hate It

Euphoria’s Ending — Not Very Euphoric

I care about Rue way more than I should, but I guess that’s just the Zendaya effect. And what I’d say is some underrated character writing. So then, I was obviously devastated when she died in the last episode. Fucking Alamo, man. I’ll just say bro got what he deserved. No one in Euphoria really got what I’d call a “Happy Ending,” but it feels appropriate enough. It feels like most people never escape drug addiction, and even if they technically do, they’re still bound by the decisions they made while being addicted. For Rue, it was her becoming connected to Laurie, which in turn led her to be connected to Alamo Brown, which in turn led her to be connected to the DEA, who of course didn’t care about her quite enough to make sure she was okay.

But still, I wanted so much more for her, man. That last scene breaks my heart. I hadn’t felt that way since the end of 13 Reasons Why.

Rating: 7.25 tragic, but justified deaths out of 10

Verdict: Like It

JAŸ-Z Rains Hellfire

If you ever want to hear someone make a fun argument you still completely disagree with, listen to Jay Electronica’s A Written Testimony, wherein JAŸ-Z defends himself from sell-out accusations after the Colin Kaepernick-NFL saga. On tracks like “Flux Capacitor,” he flaunts the ability to introduce and disarm an argument simultaneously. When one of the Rurouni Kenshin bad guys say that Kenshin is able to use god-like speed to defeat his opponents with the least possible movement, I’d imagine the rap version is something like this: “Why would I sell out? I’m already rich, don’t make no sense/Got more money than Goodell, a whole NFL bench/Did it one-handed like Odell handcuffed to a jail/I would’ve stayed on the sidelines if they could’ve tackled the shit themselves.”

I don’t really agree with what HOV said there, but I love the impulse and the creativity it took to say it. Defensive HOV is basically the best HOV. Check out “The Ruler’s Back,” or “Blueprint 2.” or his freestyle at this year’s Roots Picnic. For the second song portion of the set, he launched into a three-and-a-half-minute or so freestyle that took aim at Dame Dash, Kanye, Tory Lanez and his pops, Oschino, Nicki Minaj, and Drake, who came at HOV on his recent No. 1 single, “Janice STFU.” The quotables are all over the place, but the Drizzy quips are particularly hard:

“My next update, the jig is up/Nigga, I’m up ten/Wrong chart, champ, you gotta look up again/Niggas look up to Hov, I never looked up to them/Them crackers got your publishin’, gangster, go talk tough to them.”

Man. I respect Drake’s ambition, but I’m not sure he wants it with HOV — even if he’s indicating that he apparently wants it with HOV. But yeah. Jay, who’s treated most post-2016 verses as State of the Union addresses, once again addressed the fuck out of everything.

Rating: 9 incisive clapbacks out of 10

Verdict: Love It

Tay-K Release Rumors

So, here’s the thing about people saying their favorite incarcerated rapper is “coming home soon”: they’re almost never coming home soon. It wasn’t true when French Montana swore Max B was on his way home at various points in the 2010s, it wasn’t true when folks said YNW Melly would be free, and it most certainly isn’t true for Tay-K, who is in prison serving time for murder as we speak. But that didn’t stop his sister from using a social media post to say so. But, as COMPLEX’s Shawn Setaro noted, there’s no sign that Tay-K is headed anywhere except for maybe a prison yard to play some basketball.

I don’t want to be too glib here: any way you look at it, it sucks. It sucks that Tay-K extinguished the lives of two people, it sucks that his frontal lobe wasn’t even close to being developed when he did it, and it sucks that things this serious can be used as warped marketing games.

Rating: 1 unfulfilled future out of 10

Verdict: Hate It

00:51 – 11:35 — Jay-Z’s Roots Picnic Freestyle & Hov’s “Public Service Announcement” Mode (the a cappella opener, the picked-out afro, the shots at Dame, Kanye, and the “Jig is up / go talk tough to them” Drake jab)

11:35 – 21:19 — Could Drake Beat Jay-Z? Sizing Up the Battle Odds (Jay’s GQ comments, the last competition left, Drake punching down vs. up, the Cudi diss, and why Peter hates Drake’s chances)

21:19 – 32:00 — Wemby’s Rise & Chet Holmgren’s Fall: The OKC Exit Survey (the Thunder’s elimination, Chet’s frame/strength questions, the Kobe “10-for-30” mentality, and Wemby’s ascent with the Spurs)

32:00 – 42:04 — Knicks & Spurs in the Finals & Jalen Brunson Breaking the Archetype (big-market energy, Becky Hammond’s old take, Peter, the Westbrook truther, and anti-traditionalist roster-building)

42:04 – 42:30 — Outro

Rate It Or Love It Podcast, Episode 4: The Official ‘Iceman’ Exit Survey

Rate It Or Love It: Gucci Mane and Surviving Your Own Legend

Credit: Drake via YouTube

Strictly speaking, I didn’t need that extra slice of Hawaiian pizza. I definitely didn’t need the extra drumstick or the meatloaf, or the soft serve vanilla ice cream with hot chocolate poured atop it. But after a long, tedious Sunday mass in Kennesaw, Georgia, half-a-day before I’d have to return to the rigors of football practice and elementary school, it felt like I did. And even if I didn’t — it was right there. I mean, it was all just right there. And I was going to shove in all the sugary, cheesy, empty calories my 4’11,” 90-pound frame could take. And I was going to do it at the pedestrian paradise. I was going to stuff my chubby little face at Golden Corral.

Depending on the dish, Golden Corral food generally oscillated between fine and pretty damn good. If you skipped breakfast or you’re really hungover, you might convince yourself those buttery yeast rolls and the semi-succulent pot roast were transcendent. But more than the quality of any single dish was the abundance. An abundance of solids. More wholesome and more tasty than McDonalds, and even faster. More varied than Olive Garden, but without the elite bread sticks. Obviously not Peter Luger’s Steakhouse, but at age 11, I had no idea what the fuck that was anyway. And the truth is, unless you’re committed to a life of fake flexing, Golden Corral was good enough for anyone: a year-round, instantaneous supply of any and everything you could want rendered with moderate taste and occasional flashes of inspiration. It was a Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory for Mid. Sometimes, a little above that. And if you didn’t like one dish, you could just put your plate to the side, walk up to the counter and get another one. It was a lot, and there was always more. It was post-2015 Drake.

If art dealers trade in paintings, stock traders trade in futures, and rappers trade in raps, post-2015 Drake trades in excess. After beginning his career with more linear album rollouts, he began releasing new music for every season of the year about 12 years ago. A self-mythologizing, an “11 AM in Thailand” here, a slimy sneaky-link theme song there. R&B over there, a random dancehall excursion all the way over there. And then there’d be an album like More Life, which had all of those tasty treats in one place. You could get a double cheeseburger with extra ketchup and extra cheese (“Sacrifices” with Young Thug and Travis Scott) or something wholesome like a sirloin steak with mashed potatoes and yeast rolls (“Do Not Disturb”). Maybe you decide you want to go healthy, get a salad (“Passionfruit”). Maybe you say fuck that and cop some vanilla ice cream with sprinkles like I did (“Fake Love”). Unfortunately, his next three albums were so bloated — and sometimes, so calorically empty — they’d leave you feeling nauseous.

He fixed the menu with his new three-album drop, Iceman, Habibti, Maid of Honour, and a musical set that distills Drake when he acts tough (Iceman), Drake with the melodies (Habibti), and Drake when he has fun (Maid of Honour) into tidy, self-contained entities. In a sense, it’s a tripling down on his Golden Corral formula, but whereas before he had all the food at one restaurant, he’s now divided them all into separate spots all while enhancing the quality of the individual parts. Iceman is Sei Less — sleek, dimly lit rap space with upscale versions of some bomb ass comfort food. I love their chicken satay, filet mignon & broccoli, and varied fried rice I get to eat for free whenever I go to some mandatory rap promo event. His rhymes are tightly wound, vengeful, and efficient, his choruses are anthemic and even if there’s a part you don’t like, you’re only one or two away from “Janice STFU,” or “Make Them Pay” — apex displays of hook-crafting or pure bars. Maybe the best pure rap album of the year. Maid of Honour is Sylvia’s and Habibti is The Cheesecake Factory. Drake split the work up and, in the words of Ace Boogie, everybody eats — and everybody ate. But he left the Golden Corral in the past. Meanwhile, critics are headed into the most popular all you can eat discourse in town: X.

When Drake isn’t being an expansive musical repository, he’s moonlighting as a shapeshifting avatar for cultural grievances. An all you can eat buffet for that annoying internet trend you know’s his fault even if you can’t quite prove it. And to be fair, he’s kept the counters stocked for a while now. His excellent 21 Savage joint album, Her Loss, was deflated by the abominable Megan Thee Stallion bars and Serena Williams shots, he spends too much time associating with nihilistic streamers like Adin Ross and DJ Akademiks, and his Stake endorsement deal smells like greed and the sweat of exasperated gamblers who can’t support their lifestyle. Then there’s the ghostwriting rumors and the bloated albums and possible stream chasing. If you’re looking to criticize Drake, your plate should be pretty fucking full. You might even have two plates.

But the thing about buffets is … it’s all just … right there. And it’s never quite enough. You gotta eat until you’re sick. Otherwise, what’s the point? You want to get up to say Drake shouldn’t have joked about Megan, but a Trump communication strategy is there too, so might as well throw on a slab of political conspiracy. Sure, you were already going to say Drake should say fuck Akademiks, but why just say that when you can also link him to ICE? Sure, his album cover is silly, but why not also connect it to white supremacy? Why just review his album when you can also review the person at the expense of the album review? Why just call him a misogynist when you can also call him MAGA? Why just criticize Iceman when you can blame him for ICE? Mostly because, inspired as it may be, soft-serve with hot chocolate and Hawaiian pizza and meatloaf and a fried chicken drumstick simply don’t belong together.

The cultural appropriation takes have always been — chef’s kiss — but now that every region is copying each other, they don’t feel so flavorful. If you forget that Drake called out US lawmakers for overturning Roe V. Wade, and the fact that he donated $100,000 to the Black Lives Matter national bail out fund, I’m sure the Drake-MAGA connection looked tasty. Admittedly, flooding the zone sounds delicious. But Drake’s been flooding the zone for a really long time now. He’s dropped 21 albums and mixtapes since 2006. That’s more than one project a year. And countless remixes and freestyles and guest spots in between. You don’t need to suddenly flood something when you’ve already got a whole ass reservoir. The “Drake should’ve known better than to call his new album Iceman because of ICE” looks like ox tails with rice & peas — until you realize that he began promoting the album about a year before the notorious ICE raids began getting major national attention. The take looks even heartier if you pretend the government, which already used music from SZA and Sabrina Carpenter for social media posts, wasn’t going to find a way to use the biggest rap star of all time to promote Trump regardless of his album title.

But the questionable mixing and matching won’t stop critics who’ve been writing the same Drake essays for three years now. They’re going to have their fried chicken with chocolate syrup and mashed potatoes and sprinkles. Maybe a California roll. They’re at the mid discourse buffet, and unlike Golden Corral, the food is mostly kinda trash. But there’s a lot of it, and you can stack your plates until they overflow, your stomach hurts, and you’ve lost all sense of taste.

Rating: 3 Yeast Rolls Out of 10

Verdict: Hate It

Elon Musking

If Elon Musk wants to discover space’s new frontier, he should probably focus on that instead of stupid things to be mad about. For his latest grievance, he’s accused Christopher Nolan of hiring Lupita Nyong’o — one of the world’s most beautiful and talented actresses — to play Helen of Troy just so that his forthcoming epic, The Odyssey, can meet some unspoken rule for Academy Award consideration. He’s been harping on it for like four months now and this insistence is just kinda like … expected. Maybe a little more annoying than offensive, at this point.

Rate: 2 Silly Grievances Out of 10

Verdict: Hate It

Jacob Elordi’s Season-Long Troll

If you suspected that Jacob Elordi had Sam Levinson rewriter his character’s role in order to minimize his character, Nate Jacobs, involvement in Euphoria Season 3, you’ve gotta be feeling pretty good now. This past Sunday, after weeks of being essentially an entirely different person from the psycho Nate that terrorized Euphoria High for two seasons, Big Nate got put in a nice pine box to be bitten by a drug dealer’s snake and die. I almost get the feeling that, because Elordi or his manager or whoever sapped the character of his inherent absurdity, they had to inject the absurdity into his circumstances.

And so they did, and 6’6,” elite athlete Nate Jacobs, rather than contacting law enforcement and even entertaining the idea of using his rich whiteness to combat the even more evil drug dealer, just danced around his home with no defense mechanisms and meandered until the day he finally. It’s stupid but I have to say, I was at least a little entertained, and Euphoria Season 3 has really grown on me. Sydney Sweeney deserves a bunch of Emmy consideration. Cassie’s sister is a jealous lame, but I kinda get it. Maude Apatow is solid as a judgy younger sister who just wants attention. Zendaya is pretty dope. Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje is borderline transcendent as Alamo Brown.

Rate: 7 Inexplicable Character Shifts Out of 10

Verdict: Like it

The End of The Boys

The Boys Season 5 might be holding down a 92% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but on my end of things, the whole thing was pretty mid — and the finale wasn’t really any different. It’s not that it was bad — the writers for the Amazon adaptation of the satirical comic book are too solid for things to get too trash. But Homelander’s flip to total insanity erased a lot of tension from the show; before, he was a dick to be sure, but it wasn’t as though he’d literally kill someone for no reason every episode. And the whole him believing he’s Jesus Christ thing was also over the top. It all just stopped being plausible. The first few seasons were dope, in part, because they so closely mirrored a society dictated by fear and ignorance. Now, everyone was just clearly being dominated by a dictator and the people who weren’t terrified were just total mush heads.

The last few episodes felt like a rush toward closure. Homelander’s demise felt alarmingly convenient (seriously, he couldn’t fly away, or laser Kimiko through her stomach? And he’s not way stronger than Billy Butcher?) The show itself is an 8.5 to me, but this season hovered at around a 7. It was running on fumes the whole way, but it just so happens they were just strong enough to finish the race.

Rating: 8 Humiliating Deaths Out of 10

Verdict: Like It

Drake’s Redemption

Look: I named my Stereogum rap column after a Drake song. I always thought Drake was the rapper who was most similar to me. I always thought he was cooler and smarter than everyone thought. All of that is to say that the last 24 months or so have been rough for me. The Kendrick loss was hard enough. I could accept that. But then the Universal Music Group lawsuit, the poor sportsmanship, and outright delusion made me largely disengage. And $ome $exy $ongs 4 U didn’t make that hard to do. So then, it cried Sad Boy Tears when I heard “Make Them Cry,” and then “Make Them Pay,” and then “Janice STFU,” and then “Whisper My Name,” and then like 90% of the rest of Iceman and his accompanying two new albums, Habibti and Maid of Honour. It’s the best music he’s made in nearly a decade and he’s got the sharp raps I always preferred over the melodies. But then he’s still got the melodies and dance tracks on the other two projects. Parasocial relationships with celebrities aren’t cool, but I’m happy about this outcome.

Rating: 8 Belated Comebacks Out of 10

Verdict: Love It

The Legend of Jalen Brunson

The whole concept of “No. 1 option” versus “No. 2 option” has always been kind of nebulous and context dependent. You might be a No. 1 option on a lottery team, but maybe you’d be better off as a No. 3 option on a second-round playoff team. You could be an elite No. 2 option on an NBA Finals team, but you cap out as a second-round playoff kind of No. 1 option. Etc.

Despite what Becky Hammon said about Jalen Brunson being too small to be a No. 1 option on a contender, his box score numbers, advanced stats (27 points, about 7 assists on about 60 TS%) and team outcomes have suggested he could occupy the role for a while now. The fact that the Knicks just swept the Cleveland Cavaliers in the Eastern Conference Finals confirms it, and Jalen Brunson stands as the best Knick since Patrick Ewing.

Rating: 8 Underdogs Out of 10

Verdict: Love it

There’s No Heaven 4 a Harden

People are going to shit on James Harden, but let’s not forget: Darius Garland was injury prone, about to leave the Cavaliers, and frankly, not as good as even Year-17 Harden, who remains a top 20 player. People might be mad at his underwhelming Conference Finals play, but they need to remember that his timely baskets and playmaking were a major reason the Cavs were there in the first place. Of course, they won’t and this will feed into a larger conversation about his supposed playoff issues. I buy the issues, but only relative to LeBron James, Michael Jordan, Stephen Curry and other greats. Prime Harden averaged about 28 points, 7 assists and 6 rebounds on 58 true shooting percentage to go along with a 7.4 BPM in the playoffs. At his peak somewhere between 2016 and 2020, he lost to all-time great teams like the Golden State Warriors and great squads like the 2020 Lakers with LeBron and AD being the Monstars.

His athleticism has all but completely vanished, but he’s gotten by with guile and size. He’s continually miscast into a No. 1b or so option instead of a No. 2 option after his 2021 hamstring injuries, and that’s made people forget that, at this point, he shouldn’t be relied on for all that extra shit anyway. Imagine if he played with Wemby, or on OKC? People would feel differently and we’d be reading stories about his redemption as a No. 2 / No. 3 option. But you know … he’s here. I hate it for bro.

Rating: 3 Overstated Narratives Out of 10

Verdict: Hate It

Tap in above to watch.

00:00 – 00:22 — Intro

00:22 – 23:07 — Drake's "Iceman" & the Return of Vintage Drake

23:07 – 34:19 — "Made of Honor" & Ranking Iceman vs. GNX

34:19 – 44:28 — "Habibti" & Drake's Growing-Up Arc

44:28 – 56:28 — Three Albums, Three Genres & the Case Critics Are Missing

56:28 – 1:08:46 — Drake the Showman & Dreamville Festival 2023

1:08:46 – 1:09:13 — Outro

Rate It Or Love It Podcast, Episode 2: Did Jaylen Brown Just Undo the Best Season of His Career?

00:00 – 00:27 — Intro

00:27 – 17:29 — Chris Brown’s “Brown” Album & Pitchfork Review

17:29 – 21:12 — Rick Ross vs. French Montana Verzuz

21:12 – 34:24 — Drake’s “Iceman” Album Rollout

34:24 – 36:24 — Kevin Hart Roast Special & Comedy Risk

36:24 – 49:59 — NBA Draft Prospects (Cameron Boozer, Cooper Flagg)

49:59 – 50:03 — Outro

Rate It Or Love It Podcast, Episode 2: Did Jaylen Brown Just Undo the Best Season of His Career?

Credit: HBO via YouTube

Rust might have raw-dogged Marty’s wife and beat his ass in front of the police station, but destiny doesn’t care about hard feelings. In the final episodes of True Detective Season 1, estranged antiheroes are mid-staredown when Rust reminds his one-time partner of their cosmic mandate. “A man remembers his debts,” he says, his whispery Southern accent seeping out like a Clint Eastwood on psychedelics. “We left something undone… we gotta fix it.” In their case, fixing things looks like solving a series of ritualistic murders. For Maddy and Cassie, it’s their pockets. And maybe their friendship.

Years after Cassie stole her boyfriend, Nate Jacobs, in Euphoria Season 2, she enlisted her one-time bestie Maddy Perez to help her become an OnlyFans superstar. Maddy’s ambivalent. But she’s also in a dead-end job and needs a pathway to a level up. And even after watching Cassie marry her ex, she’s looking like a sturdy bridge. In last week’s episode, after executing a masterful clout-enhancement scheme, they slip off into a cloak of darkness (an Uber*) with the temporary satisfaction of a job well done.

Thousands of miles away, in the real world, Quavo and Offset are in the middle of their own reconciliation. Or, at least it looks like it. Five years after Migos’ last album, and more than three since the tragic death of Takeoff, Quavo and Offset had mostly been in the middle of a quasi cold war. Folks speculated about why Unc & Phew had become a thing instead of Culture 4. We never got direct answers about it, but when Takeoff was killed by a stray bullet, the door to a creative reunion began to open. Slowly. It apparently opened up even more once one of Lil Tjay’s associates allegedly shot Offset in Florida last month. Last week, images of Offset and Quavo at the studio popped up on social media. There’s no music yet, but after the deaths of Young Scooter, Rich Homie Quan, Trouble and others, there doesn’t have to be.

Atlanta’s been through some shit. Saving the city would be dope. Resurrecting a dormant brotherhood might be even better. I don’t know if Quavo and Offset or Maddy and Cassie can fix anything. It’s impossible to make things exactly as they were before. But maybe, at the end of all of this, they’ll get the chance to limp away from the trauma. Look up at the stars or something.

If nothing else, maybe they can all just get richer.

Rating: 8 Belated Reunions Out of 10

Verdict: Love It

Skip Bayless and Stephen A. Smith Reunite for More Sloppy Steaks

Some things are just right. Kyrie Irving tossing LeBron an alley oop on a fastbreak. Batman taking down a bunch of grizzled henchmen before Robin comes swinging through the window to knock down the one he forgot. Drake and Weezy on “Right Above It.” A double smash burger with that special sauce and buttermilk-battered fries and a Coke. It’s Americana. And not the abstract, maybe racist Americana. But the way America should be. In the most utopian terms possible.

That’s how I felt yesterday. That’s what I felt watching Skip Bayless return to First Take for another series of inane sports arguments with Stephen A. Smith. It was just the sort of hyperbolic, clickbaity slop that helped destroy good faith sports discourse forever. After doing the impossible for the 100th time, LeBron has only worked his way up to No. 9 on Skip Bayless’ top 10 list. He calls Stephen A “Stephen Naismith” because he knows so much about basketball. He roasts Stephen A’s car commercial, calls Playoff P “Playoff Pee.” Imagine Wizards MJ jumping off the bench to drop 40. Except Scottie’s there, too, and all of a sudden you start thinking they might make the conference finals.

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There was a time when I kinda resented their whole schtick. But there’s something comforting about things being able to go back to exactly the way they were. They already basically got rid of Zach Lowe, deprioritized writing. Fuck it, bring Skip back. If you’re gonna slop it up, dump all the water on the steaks.

Rating: 8.5 Sloppy Steaks Out of 10

Verdict: Love It

Druski Wins

To be honest, I don’t really care about Black Brits playing African Americans or vice versa, etc. But Druski got another one. His shitty London accent and fake eloquence kill me. “A bit quite surreal” is a perfectly crude, yet exact, composite of the empty, Inside Baseball-esque actor talk we’ve all got to sit through at one point or another. Seeing him switch from exasperated gangster to meticulously trained thespian killed me. That’s kind of the reality of it all. Whether you think it’s a problem or not, the switch up is inherently insane. Or rather, a bit quite surreal.

Rating: 8 Ceaseless Exercises in Identity Politics Out of 10

Verdict: Love It

French and Rozay Both Lose Verzuz

My boy Ian Stonebrook nodded to the low-stakes nature of a French Montana and Rick Ross Verzuz. And he was right. There’s not enough bad blood. They fuck with each other too much. It was basically a joint concert. Also: Rozay didn’t even play “Hold Me Back.” No “Free Mason.” French did a lot of heavy hitters, but I wanted more Chinx. Maybe “Off the Rip.” More deep cuts. This was just a party — more With than Verzuz.

Rating: 5 Good Battles Out of 10

Verdict: Don’t Like It

Draymond Misses Another Shot

Charles Barkley isn’t blameless — he did mention Golden State Warriors’ impending demise for like, no great reason. But Draymond needs to keep his fucking mouth closed. He’s always reacting emotionally. Warriors fans always spin it as Draymond being Draymond, but it’s also probably the reason they have four championships instead of like, six or seven. And, great as he is on defense, his complete inability to put the ball in the hoop rendered his shot blocks, steals and perfect rotations a moot point when he failed to make the playoffs for multiple seasons even in Steph’s prime. I say all that to say he looked like an idiot for trying to clown Chuck for his Houston Rockets tenure. I’m just glad Kenny Smith was there to check him,

Rating: Three Triple Singles Out of 10

Verdict: Hate It

Wemby Wonder

I mean, just watch. The fluidity, the reflexes, the shot-making package. I first saw Wemby about five years ago, and it was clear he was going to be historically elite. And it was also clear it’d be pretty early, too. But looking at him beating the shit out of the helpless Timberwolves to the tune of 39 points, 15 rebounds and 5 blocks was something different. As in, only Shaq, Hakeem, and Kareem have ever done it in an NBA playoff game. Wemby was already Him. Now, he might be Himothy. Or perhaps, Wembothy.

Rating: 9 Freaky Blocked Shots Out of 10

Verdict: Love It

00:00 – 01:01 — Intro, podcast premise, Ian check-in

01:01 – 09:20 — 76ers vs. Celtics Game 7, Embiid’s redemption arc, Tatum injury twist, Paul George resurgence

09:20 – 18:29 — Jaylen Brown’s career year and post-loss Twitch incident, sportsmanship, rage-baiting culture, Scottie Pippen ‘94 parallel

18:29 – 29:06 — NBA Youngboy’s belated superstardom

29:06 – 35:31 — North West’s new EP

35:31 – 35:40 — Outro

Read Also:

Rate It Or Love It Podcast, Episode 1: Is a French Montana and Rick Ross Verzuz Like Jake Paul v. Floyd Mayweather?

Rate It Or Love It: Rudy Gobert and the Banana Baby Killers

Credit: Courtesy of IBS Shit Bag

It was a merciful death as far as executions go. Maybe better than he deserved. At least in the eyes of the most nefarious men in history. After being implicated in the attempted assassination of Adolf Hitler, the tyrannical and increasingly unstable dictator offered Erwin Rommel a choice. He could attend a public trial and see himself and his entire family disgraced. Or he could ingest a cyanide pill. The famed military strategist and trusted Nazi general chose the latter. He died silently. The Nazis announced that he was a victim of injuries he sustained in Normandy. He was given a state funeral.

Sitting on the stairs of an abandoned North Idaho warehouse, a husky, curly-haired 23-year-old contemplates Rommel’s deeds and misdeeds before letting off a diagnostic report and a shrug. “That stash only made bro’s neck fat more obvious. He was probably just mad Rommel out-mogged him,” he explains. “I could never go out like that.” These days, the man, IBS Shit Bag, can’t really go out anywhere. Reason 1: He’s on house arrest after robbing a sock store at gunpoint last summer. Reason 2: The crowds of his fans could trample him to death. Since surfacing with his feral debut single, “Shittin on Your Dead Homies” two years ago, IBS Shit Bag has emerged as a potential superstar in a city long deprived of them. Injecting snarky humor into rage beats with a vocal register that sounds like the Ying Yang Twins on that whisper song, he specializes in raps that are as visceral as they are indistinct and unintelligible. He also might be the best rapper alive.

At press time, IBS Shit Bag sits at 36 million monthly Spotify streams. Media personality DJ Loathsome says he’s better than JAY-Z. “If HOV is Israel, Shit Bag is Palestine,” he says. “Except with Shit Bag, Palestine might actually win.” Medium-Large magazine called him both a distant cousin of 2Pac, Future, and the Detroit rap scene. But better. SPACERRR wrote about him in their special print edition of Artists You Knew About Before We Did, But Here Ya Go, last month. It sold out within minutes, single-handedly revitalizing the brand’s print-first approach. “This was like the third media property we bought in the last two years, but they just didn’t sell,” says CEO-COO-Refounder Zane Leonne, son of Leonne Holdings Founder, Hector Beaxtrix Leonne. “Because of Shit Bag, dad didn’t have to gut this one,” Zane says, stifling a laugh. “Yet.”

Magazine editors can, for now, cast aside career switches because of Shit Bag. So can live venues. More importantly, so can bored rap fans. Blessed with an arrhythmic flow, impenetrable nonchalance, and reflexive instincts for metaphorical asymmetry, IBS Shit Bag is a new framework for conventional stardom.

“When everybody’s trying to stay in the pocket, he always all the way out of it,” says Masked-Up Dae-Dae, a rapper and IBS affiliate of nearly two weeks. “People try to make it make sense, but it don’t.” It feels counterintuitive, but in a world of contradictions and internet nihilism that’s spilled into politics, it’s tailor-fitted, says Dae-Dae. “Shit Bag don’t make sense, but the world don’t make sense neither,” he shares. “So he’s perfect.”

If he’s perfect musically, Shit Bag seems indifferent about it. At the moment, he’s more concerned with completing his daily face cleansing ritual he created when he started looksmaxxing four years ago. Each morning, he irons his face before applying a peanut butter and jelly face mask to his simmering skin. “The sugar and protein seep into my pores for 32.56 minutes as they recirculate the blood between my cranium and my cheek bones,” he tells me, with jelly leaking from his eye socket like his brain’s falling out. “It’s better than Botox.”

After face cleansing, it’s the baby powder bath. Then it’s the manual face sculpting. Most looksmaxxers use hammers to pummel their own faces to obtain a more chiseled facial structure. Shit Bag is a little different. On days like today, he throws a red bathrobe around his shoulders like a cape, runs out to a dark alley on 46-43-395th street, where his IBS teammates await him. Once there, he stands with his back to the wall before singing a Michelle Branch song of his choosing and letting each member of the 12-unit squad take 10 seconds to punch him into oblivion. It looks unspeakably painful, but he’s hopped up on so much Xanax he doesn’t actually feel anything. Sometimes he passes out. Today, he’s a little luckier. “If I keep going at this rate, I can look like Aaron Pierre in six months,” Shit Bag tells me, blood oozing from his artificial dimples like a brown Gusher. Next it’s off to the studio.

He usually writes his verses in a tanning booth he installed right next to the vocal booth. Though a very brown-skinned man, he tans for maintenance, and out of fear his skin will turn as white as Michael Jackson’s. Vitiligo or no vitiligo. “I want to be able to look at the man in the mirror,” he tells me. Once in the studio, he unloads a series of gurgling flows along with some of his most coherent wordplay to date. “All them guys lame, pussy niggas need to tighten up/Caught ‘em with his pants down/Shit bag eem, wipe his butt,” he raps on a luminous track that could’ve been produced by XavierSoBased.

It’s both confident street rap and a cathartic nod to his tragic past. Born Normandy Barcrow Rattworth in 2001, Shit Bag grew up with more worries than friends. A part of that was because he was on the autism spectrum. The other part was he had an incredibly debilitating variation of Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS). Any time he’d try to go to a movie or partake in a game of kickball, his stomach would start rumbling. “‘When you feel a pain in your tummy, it’s time to take a runny,’” Shit Bag remembers his mother telling him. “A runny” is a sprint to the nearest toilet. But sometimes Shit Bag wouldn’t make it, and when he didn’t, a classmate would be there to remind him. Kids teased him, and teachers sequestered him from other students so they wouldn’t have to deal with the smell. His own father, Normandy Rattworth, Sr., left him at the age of 13. “He said I had to get my shit together,” Shit Bag says, twiddling around a blunt in one hand and a cotton candy laxative smoothie in the other.

One day, after one particularly violent bowel explosion, Shit Bag ran away to the bathroom with tears in his eyes. After emerging from a lengthy dump, something had changed. “He was never the same after that,” says YouTuber Hood Fables, from Australia. From that day on, Shit Bag began boxing a punching bag his dad left in their basement. He began robbing his classmates when they’d make fun of him. His teachers, too. “I just decided that, if they make me feel bad, I’ma make them feel extra shitty,” he remembers. He started rapping at around the same time, with the looksmaxxing coming into play after a girl said he looked like a young Forest Whitaker. After he launched a looksmaxxing TikTok, he gained 10,000 followers after he successfully converted his face to look like a young Laurence Fishburne.

But at that follower count, looksmaxxing isn’t enough to make money, and after dropping out of high school, he had few employment options. Soon, he began robbing local candy stores and pizza shops, marking his presence with a soon-familiar calling card: a floating turd in the first stall of every establishment. He became known to local law enforcement as IBS. Then, one day, after being ambushed in a cosmetics store he frequented to get face draining needles, he let off three shots from a .357 magnum. He was aiming for his attackers, but one of his bullets ricocheted off a tricycle and into an innocent bystander’s stomach. They had to use a colostomy bag. His friend, local rapper-mobster Limitless Tragedy, started calling him Shit Bag. “The name just stuck,” Shit Bag says.

For Shit Bag, the name is as much a personal origin story as a mission. “It’s not just about violence or, any of that corny ass rapper shit. I’m just saying, when niggas — and or systems and corporations or whatever the case may be — try to press you, just do what I did,” he says. “Shit Bag ‘em.”

Thus far, the medical emergency is going just as intended. But Shit Bag has grander goals. “I want to turn the whole world into my fucking toilet. I’ma need all that paper,” he tells me. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t appreciate the progress. “It’s funny they used to make fun of me for always having to go to the bathroom,” he says “’Cause now I’m shitting on these niggas.”

Credit: Kaushik Kalidindi

Rating: 8 Shit Bags Out of 10

Verdict: Love It

Check out the timestamp breakdown to hear what you want to hear about most. And when you’re done, check out the latest newsletters below:

00:02 – 03:02 — Intro + Rate It Or Love It rating scale

03:03 – 21:30 — Rick Ross vs. French Montana Verzuz, blog-era, rap competition, older rappers vs. new stars

21:31 – 29:53 — AI fruit memes, brainrot, and whether meme culture can be monetized

29:54 – 53:11 — Megan Thee Stallion/Klay Thompson breakup discourse, celebrity relationships, parasocial projection, gender wars, athlete relationships

53:12 – 57:55 — Joel Embiid, the Sixers, healthy stars, and the NBA playoff grind

57:56 – 01:09:08 — Lakers vs. Rockets, LeBron’s late-career brilliance, Bronny James, Reed Sheppard, and young players proving themselves

01:09:09 – 01:09:40 — Outro

Credit: Minnesota Timberwolves via YouTube

A pair of filthy, unsparing hands reaches into a loving home to destroy an innocent family forever. Clutching onto her resolve, the mother comforts her frightened children. “It’s okay, stay close to me,” she tells them as their skin is being ripped from their flesh. “Mom,” one of them cries out. “I’m cold without my peel.” She tells them to come closer, but it’s too late: this family of little bananas is literally about to be put into a blender and turned into a delicious smoothie. It’s an ignominious fate, but here, in the world of nihilistic AI memes, over-enunciating banana babies won’t be spared from the laws of nature.

Limping off the court at the Target Center Thursday night, Nikola Jokić and the Denver Nuggets must’ve felt like those poor little bananas after Rudy Gobert and the Minnesota Timberwolves plucked them from the ground and sent them into oblivion in the first round of the Western Conference Playoffs. Jokić may or may not be telling his costars to stay close. But after they got their chain took by a Wolves squad without Anthony Edwards, it might not even be up to him.

It was an act of business-like cruelty that will lead to others. It’s hard to think the Nuggets will run it back after failing to make the conference finals for three seasons. Jamal Murray’s career year ends in a half-whimper and there’s no telling how long he’ll be healthy as he turns 30 next year. Everyone’s getting a year older. Gravity defeats everyone. There is no gravitational pull heavier than hollow sports narratives and confirmation bias, both of which will drag Jokić down into inane sports talk conversations: Were those 30-point triple double seasons meaningless? Will this stop the pesky media from trying to convince us that scoring and passing more efficiently than everyone else in history makes you a historically great player?

For my part, I will, just as I did when LeBron was quartered and drawn during and after the 2011 NBA Finals, ignore ESPN, drink and watch Dragon Ball Z reruns. Or maybe just tap back in to see whether Strawberryana gets her revenge on the evil Bananito for knocking up her sister.

Jokić Hive Is Under Attack

If you’ve ever felt that Jokić’s ascension was some sort of conspiracy, the Timberwolves series was like your Juneteenth, and for once, you work at a company that will give you that day off. Being on NBA Twitter the last decade, I knew it was coming. I’m proud to say I was something like the first person to say he was a legitimate top five player. That was all the way back in 2019. But even then, I remember people arguing that Damian Lillard was the better player. That his conditioning was an issue. I still remember Brian Windhorst laughing off Gregg Popovich’s assertion that Joker was like Larry Bird.

Over time, through force of will — and strength of skill — Jokić has generally made me look spectacularly right. Dating back to the 2020-2021 season, he’s averaged 26.9 points, 9.3 assists, and 12.4 rebounds on 66 true shooting percentage. During the same time period, he’s had a BPM of 13. LeBron James only ever reached above a 13 BPM once. Michael Jordan never did it. If you check out his playoff numbers, they’ve generally held up, too. This is the only series he’s ever lost that … well, he wasn’t supposed to lose.

But that won’t stop the narratives, because those are determined more by feeling than anything resembling reality. In the same way Megan fans will pretend like Klay Thompson was Anthony Bennett after their breakup, pundits and coaches and annoying ass tweeters will pretend like Jokić has had plenty of other playoff meltdowns as they use his one true loss to codify whatever cosmic truths they needed to be made self-evident.

I say all that to say, us Jokić fans will, statistically right or wrong, have to carry this L like Jesus shouldered the cross. At least until he makes it to the finals again.

Rating: 1 Sombor Shuffle Out of 10

Verdict: Hate It

Rudy Gobert’s Ascension

As wack as it is to see Joker sent to hell, I’m happy for Rudy Gobert. Because of the Utah Jazz’s garbage ass perimeter defenders in the 2010s and early 2020s, he would end up a scapegoat for all their defensive woes. Living proof that advanced stats were about as valuable as a Snapple Fun Fact. Well, here’s another fun fact: According to NBA.com, Joker shot 2-16 against Gobert in the second halves across games 1-4. How’s that for data?

It was a transcendent performance, but maybe only because it’s Joker. Rudy’s been a top 20 or so player for a decade now. Dating back to his days in Utah, he’s basically been a one-man guarantee that your team will have a top 10 defense. While he’s limited offensively, he’s still hyper efficient, and when you make the kind of defensive impact he does, you don’t need a lot of buckets. Even though I’d say that Joker was missing a lot of shots I think he’d usually make regardless of defense, it did look like Gobert bottled his ass up at various points of the series. It’s the most frustrated I’ve ever seen Joker look.

Gobert was never going to have the flashy game-winners of an Anthony Edwards or Kobe Bryant, so this series is probably his closest approximation of a “signature game.” But this series was surreal, and anyone that can play Joker that tightly is an All-NBA-level player. That he managed to pull out this series after injuries to Donte DiVincenzo and Ant will force people to put more than respect on his name. Maybe he can even get reverence. Or maybe we’ll just ignore the whole … you know … COVID thing.

It feels like now, people will have to face the reality of Gobert’s dominance for the first time. Ant might be the best player but the gap between them isn’t as drastic as you might think. After all: imagine the Wolves beating the Nuggets without Gobert?

Rating: 7.5 Demoralizing Blocked Shots Out of 10

Verdict: I Like It

Druski Chosen to Host BET Awards

Sometimes … sometimes … people just get things right. Shouts to BET for this one. Druski’s been on one this whole year. The Erika Kirk bit was peak satirical efficiency. Ditto for the grifting church pastor. He’s the youngest BET Awards host ever at 31, and this is going to be his first time hosting a major awards show. I’m usually only watching this awards show because I’m covering it for work, but Druski is giving me a reason to tap in.

Rating: 8 Druski Chuckles Out of 10

Verdict: Love It

French Montana x Rick Ross Verzuz Is 2010s Nostalgia Nirvana

If you were born between 1988 and 1994, rocked cargo shorts and Foamposites with Ralph Lauren tops, and drank Ciroc in your best friend’s basement, the French Montana x Rick Ross Verzuz is for you. So, it’s definitely for me.

Coming from the Hartford area, I’ve always been a French apologist. He and Max B used to come through Hartford and friends would have stories about hitting the studio with them. Or smoking with them. He tapped in with area rappers. They have a track called “CT Bitches.” I felt seen. Aside from those umm … tender memories, I just think French is underrated. He’s not the most incredibly talented, but bro is … like, pretty talented. His voice, delivery, and cadences are cross-regional. He’s got hits with Swae Lee and hits with Kodak Black. Doja Cat and Drake. Coke Boyz tapes were immaculately wavy. Same for Coke Wave with Max B. He even tossed Max a hit single with “Ever Since You Left Me.” Standup guy, held Max down for the whole 16 years he was behind bars.

Then there’s Rozay. Teflon Don. Rich Forever. God Forgives I Don’t. His run wasn’t as long as it should have been, but he collapsed the distance between trap music and theatrical East Coast street rap. His instincts for theatricality reminded me of Biggie. His agility was as impressive as his hooks. “Free Masons” and “Aston Martin Music” are timeless. As is “Hold Me Back,” and MMG anthems like “Pandemonium.”

I need all of the nostalgia. I need French to play “Choppa Choppa Down” before Rick Ross counters with “Hold Me Back.” I need them to team up for a performance of “Stay Schemin” and “Pop That” before Drake somehow pops out to support both of them and say real friendships never die and we can expect YOLO any day now. I need all of this like I need therapy, or maybe a thick bookworm that tells me everything will be alright, even when I know it won’t be.

Rating: 8 Hans Out of 10

Verdict: Love It

Sydney Sweeney and the New LaKeith Stanfield

I’m coming around on Euphoria Season 3. Zendaya’s been great as usual. It was cool to see her share scenes with Hunter Schafer again. Alexa Demie keeps reminding me I’d sacrifice my soul for her. But Sydney Sweeney is the one I’m fucking with most, and she reminded me why in last week’s episode.

In it, her teary-eyed stares and quivering voice really channel authentic exasperation in a way that makes it hard to turn away from the screen. Even in the scene where Nate’s getting his ass beat, I’m mostly drawn to her. She’s convincingly selfish and, by now, completely unhinged. It gives me big “Maddy discovers you were cheating with her boyfriend in Season 2” vibes. She was a little annoying with the American Eagle stuff last fall, but the girl can just act.

I’m also tapping in with Darrell Britt-Gibson. I barely remember him from The Wire, but his whole quiet, vaguely eccentric, well-spoken gangster act is really doing it for me. Kinda feels like he’s the Paul Pierce of LaKeith Stanfields. I hope he gets more work.

Rating: 7.5 Exasperated Shrieks Out of 10

Verdict: Like It

The Real Emily From The Devil Wears Prada Speaks Out

In general, I’m always extremely cautious about taking what people say about other people at face value. So much of how we all interpret the world is hyper subjective, and if you’re too invested in your own personal fable, it can be hard to see things for how they are. So then, when I heard that Leslie Fremar, the person The Devil Wears Prada character Emily was based on, spoke out about the book, I had to see what she said (via People).

Interestingly, she didn’t say it was all cap. But she did note that she felt she was having to do Anne Hathaway’s character’s job in addition to her own when they worked at Vogue magazine together years ago. And IDK. Seems like a pretty frustrating situation to be in. I’d be frustrated too. Just a thought about who and what can constitute our personal villains. I … would’ve been pretty tight about being referenced in any movie.

Also: Fremar says she told Emily Blunt that she was the character Blunt was playing in the breakout role. “She was not that interested, to be honest. I thought I was gonna get this, like, huge reaction. Like, no. It was like, ‘Oh, OK.’” Kinda reminds me of when the real Freeway Ricky Ross sued Rick Ross to get his own name back. He lost.

Rating: 4.5 Subjective Realities Out of 10

Verdict: Don’t Like

Credit: Megan Thee Stallion via YouTube

If we were projecting, the story of Megan Thee Stallion and Klay Thompson was filmed for IMax: a Disney fairytale designed to tell us that Hot Girl Summers can turn into Cuffing Season Conquests, and that fuckboys of summers past can recede into the glory of her light — an iridescent glow that can’t be stolen by the inconsiderate, inadequate men she decided to date. In this story, Megan was supposed to be the Ciara to Klay Thompson’s Cooler Russell Wilson. But if she’s to be believed, Klay turned out to be just another Future, and that fantasy — ours, and potentially hers — has been pulled from production. Whatever he and she say about it, their split is, to us, the death of a romantic nirvana. A fate prescribed by nosy spectators who decide who and what deserves a happy ending. Dating back to dates themselves, it usually hasn’t been women like Megan Thee Stallion.

During a recent episode of their podcast It Is What It Is, a show that doubles as an example of things being what they shouldn’t be, hosts Mase and Cam’ron took a moment to give an autopsy for the breakup. In Mase’s eyes, Megan’s alleged roster, which included Tory Lanez, Pardison Fontaine, Torrey Craig, Moneybagg Yo, and others, meant the romance was a predetermined dub. Like Charles Barkley and John Stockton before her, she could play her heart out, but wouldn’t get a ring. “And he was supposed to marry her?” Mase asked, nodding to Klay. “No, he wasn’t supposed to marry her if that’s the list.” Cam and Mase dress their opinions in thinly veiled, politically correct jargon, but they’re basically calling her a THOT. And to a lot of people, THOTs don’t deserve the max extension. Too many short-term deals with too many teams. But those situationships were on Megan’s terms. And that’s always been the point.

I don’t want to re-litigate Megan’s iconhood or give a heavy handed sociological breakdown. If you’ve made it to this site, I’ll just assume you know all of that. Instead, here’s some 24-year-old bars from Meg’s thematic ancestor, Lil’ Kim: “Here’s something I just can’t understand/If a guy have three girls then he’s the man/He can even give her some head, then sex her raw/If a girl do the same, then she’s a whore/But the tables ‘bout to turn, I bet my fame on it.” It’s hard to say which woman was most responsible for belated mainstream sex revolutions, but if the tables did turn, Megan was one of the DJ’s.

Adopting the Pimp C-inspired playgirl character Tina Snow, Megan turned HOV into a prophet: Ladies is pimps, too. Except Megan would get a nigga — potentially your nigga — to brush her shoulders off instead. I’ve seen the rumored roster. In my experience and proximity to rap stars, things usually are at least somewhat what they look like. Men aren’t usually kicking it with baddies they can’t smash or haven’t smashed before. I say all that to say if the roster is even half accurate, Megan was living her raps. Theoretically, she’s a living role reversal thousands of years in the making. She’s not a playgirl. She’s a member of the front office — a player coach in the running for MVP. She’s running through the league. But the thing is, to the rap world, that still just means “run through.” HOV deserves Beyoncé, Meg deserves cheaters.

Whether she was simply being herself or she made a conscious decision to be Thee Hot Girl, Megan’s existence is, unbearably corny as this sounds, an act of defiance. After a grown man catcalled her at age 15 Meg’s turned her body, rap skills, and mentality into weapons against ain’t shit men in an even more ain’t shit system. It’s also a prescriptive prison: the more she “does her” as she has every right to, the less suitable she’ll be deemed. And neither her dozens of platinum records nor her cross-functional talent nor the fact that she made time to get her bachelor’s degree in public health administration will change that.

As detestable as she seems to be to men — well, a lot of them — she’s just as much of an emblem for women still in pursuit of their happy ending. Like Lil’ Kim before her, she’s a freedom fighter for the sexually liberated — a mascot for folks who believe in an extended “ho phase.” For every “Plan B” she drops or twerk video she posts, she might as well be shouting Thug Life. “This MF spittin.” That’s probably why this annoying, if understandable spurt of gender wars is unfolding the way it is now.

Parts of it involve extensive exercises in revisionist history. “Klay Thompson, Offset, Stefon Diggs. Men who don’t understand that they are just tolerated because the women they are with is the light,” wrote one X user. It’s almost as if Klay Thompson’s alleged infidelities erase his status as a four-time NBA champion who happens to be the second greatest shooter of all time. It’s like Offset being a selfish thirst bucket means he wasn’t on “Bad and Boujee” more than a year before “Bodak Yellow” dropped, and like Cardi didn’t literally tolerate years of Offset cheating because she’s a human being who loves too hard. Before she made the same mistake with Stefon Diggs.

Posts like those are misguided fan fiction. But part of me wishes they were true. They’re better than whatever the fuck DJ Akademiks, Mase, Cam’ron and other swiss cheeseheads are rambling about. But it still just means participating in wishful theater with actors I don’t know and scripts I don’t have access to. If there is a happy ending — if there is a heaven for Hot Girls — there’s a chance we wouldn’t even recognize it if we saw it. Maybe we just don’t know what it is in the first place. Either way, we’ll all stick around and watch. Maybe we just shouldn’t try to write it.

Rating: 3 Hot Girl Summers Out of 10

Verdict: Hate It

Credit: NBA via YouTube

Toward the very end of Game 1 of the Eastern Conference Quarterfinals, New York Knicks fans took a break from their victory lap to eviscerate a familiar, but absent foe. “Fuck Trae Young,” they shouted, with all enthusiasm a million Bud Lights and team spirit can give you. Considering that Ice Trae was traded months ago, the chant was equal parts absurdist troll and euphoric nostalgia. I’m sure it was fun. It’s just too bad Mikal Bridges forgot how to play basketball, because for the second game in a row, CJ McCollum’s given them a new name to curse.

Last night, CJ — or, as I’ll call him, CJ McKiller — sent the Knicks straight to Hell when he drained a fadeaway, game-winning mid-ranger with just over 12 seconds on the clock. It was as cold as this past February. Chillier than that half-Japanese baddie that ghosted me last summer. But it was also just CJ. It was the McKiller I’ve always known.

Dating back to his days as Damian Lillard’s capable second option in Portland, McKiller’s been one of the most slippery scorers in the game. A less talented, more ground-bound, Kyrie Irving that never discovered Alex Jones. Also healthier. He was always a bad defender and his low free throw rate kinda capped him as a fucker instead of a true motherfucker. There’s a difference. But still, he averages about 20 points per game for his career and will likely reach the 20,000-point mark one day. If he’d been on the East Coast his whole career, he’d have a couple all-star games. Phasing in, out, and around his opponents like LeMillion, he’s looked like an Eastern Conference starter as he’s averaged an efficient 27 points against Jalen Brunson and the rest of the Knicks.

The Hawks are now up 2-1 on the Knicks, and if the Knicks lose the series, they’ll probably lose half their roster, too. Speaking of “if,” CJ McKiller is thus far rejecting any mythology. After reporters basically asked him how he felt about being the Knicks’ newest antagonist, CJ offered a simple retort: “I’m no villain.” If he keeps playing like this, it won’t be up to him.

Rating: 8 Revitalized Legacies Out of 10

Verdict: Love It

Page Snitch

In theory, I shouldn’t really blame Page Six for upending Mike Vrabel’s life. They’re literally the gossip section of The New York Post. Their photos make it look like he’s been cheating on his wife with Dianna Russini. She’s supposed to be a professional reporter. There’s a clear-cut conflict of interest. Those interviews of herself and Vrabel now almost read as exhibitionist taunts; the first episode of Naughty America’s Reporters Smashing Coaches, starring Lisa Ann. They were being bad. Real bad.

But am I wrong if I just feel like this shit’s kinda wack? Like, what about Vrabel’s wife and kids? What if Vrabel and Russini are both in open relationships? Was this something that couldn’t have been handled internally, maybe? IDK. Call me old fashioned, but I’m not with the cyber snitching.

Rating: 5 Incriminating Photos Out of 10

Verdict: Don’t Like

Scoot Blenderson

You know the story: ahead of the 2024 NBA Draft, some pundits suggested that Scoot Henderson was nearly as good a prospect as a 7’4” Rudy Gobert with a Kobe ISO package. Scoot goes on to not only fall well short of those obviously unreachable expectations. He even failed to be an average rookie. He’s written off, and he’s not much better his second year with the Portland Trail Blazers. That’s Scoot Henderson.

But today, I’m not talking about Scoot Henderson. I’m talking about Scoot Blenderson — a levitating tornado of turnaround jumpers, Eurosteps, and big-stage audacity. Taking advantage of the fact that the Spurs’ Victor Wembanyama had to leave the game with a concussion, Scoot proceeded to get buckets in pretty much every way conceivable as he dropped 31 points and reminded folks why he appeared to be an excellent choice for the No. 3 spot in the draft two years ago.

Obviously bro hasn’t beaten the bust allegations. Yet. But 31 points in your second-ever playoff game is a self-contained W that deserves celebration. Also: Scoot Blenderson is an incredible nickname, so he had to be here.

Rating: 8 Belated Awakenings Out of 10

Verdict: Love It

LeBron Being Very Unreasonable

I’ll admit it: I thought LeBron was finally washed. Things weren’t looking good at the beginning of the season. And why would they have? He was about to turn 41. He was injured. Even being LeBron James, it would’ve been totally reasonable for him to turn washed like four years ago. But LeBron’s not a very reasonable nigga. You’re talking about someone who forced his son into the NBA three years early. Someone who pretended to read The Autobiography of Malcolm X in the Miami Heat locker room just for vibes. Who’s scored more points than anyone else in NBA history. The regular rules don’t apply.

And so, it makes sense that, despite the fact that he’s lost about 20 inches on his vertical leap, LeBron blew right the fuck past Kevin Durant for a reverse pump dunk in the halfcourt this past Wednesday. In this warped reality, it makes sense that, despite the fact that 2016 LeBron makes 2026 LeBron look like he’s running under water, LeBron’s leading everyone in the Los Angeles Lakers versus Houston Rockets series in points and assists and has the Lakers up 2-0 without Luka Doncic and Austin Reaves.

Rating: 9 Unreasonable Wins Out of 10

Verdict: Love It

Beef Season 2

Let me tell you, man, Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan did that. I didn’t think Beef Season 2 could be better than Season 1, but I think it’s narrowly got it. The conflict in this season is more simmering than explosive, and the setting — and even the subplot — is way higher stakes. Somehow, a rich middle-aged couple goes from simply beefing with some opportunistic young couple to the throes of an international conspiracy. It’s all threaded by writers, actors, and directors that understand human dimensionality — the nature of appearance versus reality, hard truths learned through pensive stares, awkward silences and kisses that hurt. The ending here isn’t really bittersweet, but it’s somehow satisfying. Feels like a reminder that even beef can be beautiful. As long as it’s cooked right.

Rating: 8.5 Begrudging Truths Out of 10

Verdict: Love It

Ice Spice Squares Up

Where do I even begin? I love that, even though she’s besties with literally Taylor Swift, Ice Spice is still humble enough to eat at a Los Angeles McDonald’s. I love that she trolled her supposed fan just before the random girl smacked her. I love that she immediately squared up and jumped into action. I love that she wanted all the smoke like she was rolling all the windows up for an attempted suicide. I love that, after telling social media such a fight wouldn’t happen in Wendy’s, she’s now probably about to launch some brand-new Ice Spice Wendy’s meal. What I also love: that there’s like a 25% chance this was all a sham to introduce the new Ice Spice chicken nuggets (If they’re nuggets at all).

Rating: 8 Unintentional/Intentional Wendy’s Rollouts Out of 10

Verdict: Love It

So Does The Iceman

To be very real: Drake hasn’t dropped a lot of good music the last two years. And besides that? His suing UMG because Kendrick curb-stomped him is something beyond humiliating. But using a massive ice structure to announce the release date for your new album called Iceman? Nah. That’s hard. You got that one Drizzy. Now: drop a good album.

Rating: 8 Massive Ice Structures Out of 10

Verdict: Love It

Anne Hathaway

Anne Hathaway — my forever crush since the moment I saw The Princess Diaries 25 years ago. Bad AF then, even badder now. Love watching her dance. Love watching her act. Her interviews are flawless. She’s so angelic. So human. I’ma go watch The Devil Wears Prada 2 and The Odyssey as soon as they drop. PEOPLE just made her the cover star for their Most Beautiful People issue. Accurate.

Rating: 9 Extremely Charming Interviews Out of 10

Verdict: Love It

Credit: HBO Max via YouTube

Ugly puppy costume aside, you could argue Cassie Howard’s in the middle of a level up. After years of flaunting her body to keep the attention of men who don’t love her, Sydney Sweeney’s character is wielding it to more lucrative effect: As an OnlyFans model. It’s a switchup that’s made critics call Euphoria Season 3 a humiliation ritual. To a generation that would rather have a good night’s rest than sex, and rather play chess than get drinks, Cassie’s OF submissions are nothing but acts of submission. To the male gaze and creator Sam Levinson. Proof that all the Euphoria High memes weren’t memes at all. But here’s the thing: Season 3 is actually just reupping on the status quo. The makeup’s a little sexier, and the stakes have grown up with the characters facing them. Rue’s gone from recovering drug addict to drug mule to quasi pimp. Jules is a sugar baby. There’s a lot of near-naked strippers. A lot of sex. But Levinson’s freaky Degrassi is no more cringe than it’s always been. It’s just this time around, the audience isn’t so eager to take their clothes off.

In Euphoria Seasons 1 and 2, Cassie also wasn’t so quick to strip. But she did so to make her boyfriends happy. After Cassie was slut shamed because other boys posted clips of her sex tapes online, she found herself at the whims of stereotypical jock boyfriends and stereotypes themselves: another girl who learned to use sexuality to cope with abandonment issues. Cassie’s sexual history made her boyfriend McKay have trouble claiming her in public, but he’d get her to send nudes when he wanted them, and sex usually came on his terms. From there, Cassie went from one mildly toxic romance to a nuclear one. McKay wanted her body and mind. Nate Jacobs wanted everything, controlling what she wore and what she ate as he exploited her for affection. So then, by the time she tells Nate she’s launching an OnlyFans account to help pay for their overpriced wedding flowers, he’s got little choice but to accept or pay up, and she’s in the middle of a raging rebellion. But to fans and critics, it looks more like she’s being conquered. Again. Maybe it’s because they feel like they’ve been conquered, too.

Scrolling down my timeline a week before Euphoria Season 3 debuted, I tripped over a generational divide I didn’t see until I nearly cracked my skull open. Generation Z was blaming millennial feminists for allegedly making them think casual sex was a source of power. There’s a bitterness that feels more instinctive than performed.

“Stop acting dense lmfao i’m an older gen z who grew up on millennial spaces, i was 12 on tumblr and twitter being incentivized by older people into reading Lolita and making the rice purity/BDSM tests. i developed a daddy kink at 14. you’re purposely being obtuse,” one X user wrote in response to a post dismissing the idea that millennials were to blame for espousing hyper-sexuality. “As a very early gen z i most certainly remember the ‘be a slut!! do whatever you want!!’ propaganda all over this app in 2016/2016,” wrote another.

Personally, as a guy born in 1992, I don’t remember it being like that: I remember it, for once, being okay for women to be outwardly sexual without immediately getting eviscerated for it. And some uptight peers who judged them. But there was no propaganda; just options. Over time, that extended to the idea of OnlyFans being cool, and sex work being praised. In that continuity, Cassie’s maximizing her agency — taking back the power men so cruelly used against her. In earlier seasons, Cassie’s sexual history could have been a barrier to the man of her dreams. Now, she hopes it’s a platform to a dream life. But it’s hard for Twitter to see that idyllic existence with the puppy dog ears in the way.

In the four years since Euphoria Season 2 ended, Gen Z’s been bedrotting, hungover from post-millennial feminism. Women who feel as used as Cassie did are realizing they aren’t built for a Hot Girl Summer. Maybe not even a lukewarm one. Gen Z guys and gals are collectively learning that being out all night and sleeping all day can actually be kinda shitty, and are drinking 30% less than millennials. For a while now, some authors have condemned casual sex as a matter of maintaining gender equality.

Writing in her 2022 book, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, Louise Perry argues that, “Hook-up culture is a solution to the sexuality mismatch that benefits some men at the expense of most women.”

On the more extreme end of things, pink-piller influencer Kanika Batra denounced the casual hook-ups as being essentially unacceptable. “I am strongly against hook-up culture and any kind of casual sex,” she told The Times. “I think that’s disgusting. I love the feminists of the Seventies, but the sexual revolution was just handing men vaginas on a platter. Now women are trying to fool themselves into thinking that they can sleep around.”

Their ideas aren’t new as much as they’re refreshed and reinforced; women have been writing about the insidious evil of blowjobs for decades now. It’s just that now, it’s a sociological prism instead of a fringe philosophy. There’s a stereotype about women living through the “hoe phase” only to become born-again Christians. It’s framed as a way to make themselves more suitable for a prospective husband. Now, in an era where dating is statistically less common, it looks like women are “skipping the hoe phase” not for suitability, but for survival. It’s easy to finger-wave at the prudeness, but in a world of STDs, unwanted pregnancies, unsupportive fathers, and emotional hollowness, it’s arguably physical and spiritual armor. It’s also an instructive, interpretive frame for Euphoria discourse.

In a world where one-night stands are acts of self-hatred, Cassie is a cog in a regressive machine designed to destroy women — even if she’s the one that’s actually getting married. It’s a familiar world that’s simultaneously liberal and conservative; not getting laid is the new liberal. It’s the same one where Sabrina Carpenter’s performances get called pandering to the male gaze instead of being playfully — willfully, and maybe even satirically — sexy. It’s the same one where Euphoria currently carries a 41% Tomatometer rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Critics have noted the show is suffering from the lurid male gaze of its creator. But four years ago, we were all gazing from the same vantage point. Maybe we just got tired of looking — 8.5 million viewers be damned.

Rating: 4 Fake Puppy Ears Outta 10

Verdict: I Don’t Like It

Credit: Amazon

As Homelander reclines in a bath tub of breast milk, I have a chilling, disorienting realization: I’m genuinely more shocked by Donald Trump than anything I’ve seen in The Boys; Season 3, episode three or otherwise. A week-and-a-half after declaring intentions to eviscerate Iranian hospitals on literal Easter Sunday— a few weeks after he openly told a reporter she was sexy during a press conference — I’d just seen an AI-generated Trump Jesus healing a sick man on my timeline.

In it, a glowing, benevolent Trump presses his fingers against the forehead of a sickly man. With a worried nurse, dutiful soldier, and warrior angels hovering in the background, it looks like a retro movie poster for an MCU flick. This one would be called The End of Days. Less abstractly, it looks more like the end of satire.

Things had been trending that way, but as the days pass and Trump empties the clip like he’s gotta use all his bullets to get to heaven, The Boys has become almost boring. When A-Train had his wholesome redemption moment, I knew Homelander was ‘bout to send him to God. As soon as Starlight leaked the video of Maeve and Homelander’s airplane incident, I knew the Vought administration would say it was AI. Like a Bronny James crossover, every move is telegraphed, with inherited force still being enough to propel it skyward.

Bans aside, trash or fire, right or wrong, folks will keep fucking with Kanye’s music, Dave Chappelle will keep feeling like a victim, and Trump will continue Trumping like a crazed method actor with dementia. The script’s been written — the roles have been cast. We know what’s good, whether we want to or not. All the tension has dissolved in a vat of breast milk.

But at least Sexyy Red just dropped.

Lena Dunham’s Flippant Chaos

I never watched more than a couple episodes of Girls, but I know Lena Dunham is talented. She’s also gifted when it comes to annoying the fuck out of me. I think it started when she tried to imply that, by getting curved by Odell Beckham, she was somehow the victim of some primal sexism. It’s cool she apologized, but that image stuck with me. There are worse people, obviously. But she strikes me as a self-mythologizer who’s got the ability to recast herself and situations to fit whatever self-image she’s conjured in her self-seriousness. It seems like she’s continued it in her new memoir, Famesick.

In it, she speaks on some admittedly poor, if not evil, behavior from Girls costar Adam Driver before implying that her ex, Jack Antonoff, was cheating on her with Lorde. It’s not even that I think those things aren’t potentially true. It’s more that she aligns dangerous connotations without committing to them. Which, to me, feels like she’s either trying to make people look shitty, or, maybe more disturbingly, is haphazard and thoughtless enough to let those ideas linger without any accountability — until someone forced her to take it.

Those aren’t the worst people, but because they’re cloaked in popular, self-affirming buzz words, it’s hard to criticize them without looking mean, and that enables some stupid shit to live on a little too long. Sanctimoniously.

I’m not old enough to know whether this was always a thing. But feels like an archetype for a generation engulfed in a miasma of main character syndrome. If there’s a world made for people who brunch at Kellogg’s Diner, get ghosted by mid Chads and vomit phrases like “live in your truth,” Lena might have created it.

Rating: 4 Messy Excerpts Out of 10

Verdict: Don’t Like

Clavicular Gets Face Mogged by Reporter

The argument of whether or not to “platform” Clavicular was always as embarrassing as it was detached. As an influencer with a creepy cult following of self-hating incel robots, he’s his own self-sustaining platform. His stage — his platform — is wherever and whenever he decides to jump on Twitch. He was clearing $100k per month before The New York Times and GQ features. He’s a big deal and, if you want to accurately chronicle history, you have to chronicle Clav. Cringe as he is. It’s harder in a post-Trump world, but to some extent, you have to trust the world to realize bro is a whole weirdo. Interestingly, he’s made that increasingly easy.

During a 60 Minutes interview this past week, Clavicular looks and sounds like Buzz Lightyear trying to convince Woody he’s a real nigga. But it’s clear he’s a sad, potentially autistic young man who was crushed by the same systems he’s smashed his face to embody. Kid’s got problems. Casual bigotry and sexism aside, I genuinely, reflectively feel bad for him.

But not bad enough that I didn’t enjoy shots of the uber-handsome reporter guy out mogging Clav on national TV. Clav left the interview after bro asked him a series of incel questions, but lowkey, he might’ve just realized he was getting out mogged by a guy 20-something years his senior. It’s funnier to think that.

Not so funny was his livestream overdose. He says he’s rebooting. That he’s off the drugs. At least meth. I hope. Mogging ain’t easy. It also, obviously, isn’t everything.

Rating: 8 Face Mogs Out of 10

Verdict: Love It.

Sexyy Red’s Yo Favorite Writa Favorite Rappa

I’m not saying Sexyy Red is the most consistent mainstream rapper of the last three years. I’m not saying crunk was ever dead, or that she’s revived it. I’m also not saying she’s the truest inheritor of Gucci Mane’s legacy, or that she’s Chief Keef with red hair and a Tourette’s-esque compulsion to utter obscenities. It might be reductive to say she swirls Crime Mob with Gangsta Boo, or that “Rackies” is the best snap rap reinvention I’ve ever heard. I’m not going to say she never mixes. I’m not going to say any of those things. But on the faintest, most lowest of keys — I’m not not saying it.

Rating: 7.75 Unspeakable Profanities Out of 10

Verdict: Love It

Euphoria Season 3 Isn’t Beating Mid Allegations … So Far

I’m not sure if Euphoria Season 3 is as bad as critics say it is, but I’m not overly impressed by the first episode. There’s a lot of world rebuilding at work, but Sam Levinson moves efficiently enough, even if reintroducing the characters after the timeskip prevents a lot of momentum. I also wonder what will become of Nate. Remember when he was like, a jumbo-sized, demented Rob Pattinson a few years ago? Well now he’s just another mediocre republican. Sounds about right.

On the non-Nate end of things, Zendaya’s kinda keeping things afloat with Rue. There’s just a magic in seeing her kick it with prostitutes and dreaming of being a pimp instead of a drug mule / recovering drug addict. I almost want that for her. I also want Season 3 to beat the trash allegations.

Rating: 5 Existential Crises Out of 10

Verdict: I Don’t Mind It

Iran Walks Trump Jesus Down

Trump nor Trump Jesus got to wait too long before facing their own judgement day. On Wednesday, a Twitter account belonging to the Iran Embassy in Tajikistan uploaded what appeared to be an AI-generated animation of the real Jesus smacking him into a pit of lava. Close enough, I suppose.

Rating: 9 Lava Deaths Out of 10

Verdict: Love It

Dave Chappelle, The Martyr

The internet is playing I Told You So with Dave Chappelle, and, as annoying as it can be collectively, it’s right. In a recent NPR interview, Dave called out the Republicans for supposedly “weaponizing” his anti-trans jokes. Thing is, Dave blaming republicans for politicizing his trans jokes is like Lockheed Martin complaining about America using its missiles. This wasn’t some esoteric riddle or abstract outcome that could’ve never been imagined: Dave’s jokes did exactly what those kinds of jokes do, and he was either too arrogant or too stupid to realize it. It’s part of his third career act that’s seen him jump from surreal sociologist comedian to a self-absorbed, fake Nelson Mandela. Someone who’s much more sensitive than the people he loves making fun of.

Rating: 2 Shitty Jokes Out of 10

Verdict: Hate It

Ben 10 and All Star JR

So, the story goes that a certain music exec wanted NBA Youngboy affiliate NBA Ben 10 to rob Detroit rapper AllStar JR for his chain, but things went as left as they could when JR secured a gun and ended up sending NBA Ben 10 to the hospital with a few bullet wounds. Family friends say that, despite initial reports to the contrary, Ben 10 is walking and won’t end up paralyzed. That’s great. Not so great: AllStar JR

taunting him with a series of social media posts and his new music video. I get the idea that things could’ve gone differently and the world could’ve been tweeting “R.I.P. JR, the Coldest outta Detroit” or some variation of that. He has the right to feel however about someone who allegedly tried to rob him at gunpoint — if that’s what actually happened. But it’s all part of a macabre tradition that’s grown as stale as it is tragic.

Rating: -3 out of 10

Verdict: Super Hate It

Clippers Getting What They Fucking Deserve

There’s a special place in hell for organizations that treat their franchise legends like players on three-day contracts. But even within hell, there’s a velvet-roped, VIP torture chamber for teams that also trade the maybe best guard since Michael Jordan to a conference rival to form a squad that ultimately never advanced past the second round of the playoffs. After being sent home by a banged up Stephen Curry and annoying ass Draymond Green a couple days ago, the Los Angeles Clippers should find themselves in that eternity of agony. Especially if, as I suspect, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and the Oklahoma City Thunder repeat as NBA champions this year.

The night of their L, Chris Paul posted that famous “biggest hater funeral” meme to his Instagram story, and I couldn’t help but appreciate the scale of the cosmic getback. In what was supposed to be his retirement tour with a team that helped define his career, the Clippers unceremoniously sent CP3 home. In what was supposed to be an easy chance to defeat a team whose best player is a 38-year-old guard coming off a knee injury, Stephen Curry sent the Clippers to hell in the most ceremonious terms possible.

Rating: 8.5 Unfulfilled Ambitions Out of 10

Verdict: Love It

Homelander’s Breast Milk Bath

It… just feels like Homelander’s reached his climax, you know? Like, his arc stopped at the end of Season 4 and they’re using a backup generator to create something roughly shaped in Homelander absurdity. Hence: the breast milk bath. Would’ve been funnier last season. This one? Ehh. Nothing surprises me, things are going in a funny nihilistic superhero merry-go-round and I’m ‘bout ready to get off. No breast milk’s that good, Mr. Lander.

Rating: 5 Glasses of Breast Milk Out of 10

Verdict: I Don’t Mind It