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Meet Sam Wise, the Kensington-Born Rap Star Living His Dream
Sam Wise is living the dream. Since releasing his latest project Free Game last year featuring the likes of Lord Apex, Knucks, Swift, Yung Fume, and Jesse James Solomon, the South London-born artist has been a leading spearhead in a new resurgence of alternative rap in the UK that has had labels and execs alike eagle-eyed and eager to see what happens next. Wise originally made his name within the rap collective House of Pharaohs, and the London-based group has been doing things how they want to –without any outside control –from the jump. Comprising six core members that are supported by the group’s in-house managers and fashion designers, H.O.P. has kept its creativity in its own hands. The H.O.P. members also all enjoy their solo ventures, and Sam Wise himself often dives in and o...
A Day in the Life of… Jeremy & Ajay Popoff of Lit
“Jeremy and I grew up around music. Our grandfather was a musician and our dad was in radio,” explains Lit’s Ajay Popoff of how he and his older brother, guitarist and bandmate Jeremy, were destined for a life in music. They started playing instruments at a young age. By seven, Jeremy had learned a few songs on his grandfather’s Hammond organ, and his grandfather bought him his own. “I used to take lessons from this older lady who’d get mad at me for not reading the music and for playing everything by ear,” says Jeremy. “I would see her daughter taking kids upstairs for guitar lessons and I was super envious of those kids. They seemed super happy.” Everything changed after they went to their first concert: UFO, with Iron Maiden as the opening act. “My mind was absolutely blown and I never ...
The Umbrella Academy Season 3 Treats Elliot Page’s Transition With Respect: Review
The Pitch: The Umbrella Academy is not a subtle show. Characters outwardly express both what’s happening on screen and their feelings about it. The cinematography calls constant attention to itself with aerial shots and CGI camera maneuvers to glide us around stately mansions and old-fashioned hotels. In one episode of the show’s third season, “Cat’s in the Cradle” plays as an ironic musical accompaniment for a spoof on a father-and-son bonding montage. There are somehow needle drops more obvious than that. That The Umbrella Academy is a show that, in a way, serves as its own audio description, might be more of a liability were it not for its characters, both the core of ne’er-do-well estranged adopted Hargreeves super-siblings as well as the many beings they get to know. Watching this sho...
The Techno Six: New Documentary Spotlights Detroit’s Dance Music Pioneers
First, there were six. The term “techno” is often evocative of its European emblems, like Germany’s Berghain and Sweden’s Drumcode. So much so that techno music is widely considered to be one of the continent’s exports. But a new documentary seeks to firmly correct this history, tracing techno’s origins back to a cohort of six Black producers from Detroit: “the first cover boys of techno,” said Kristian Hill, a Detroit denizen and the director of God Said Give ‘Em Drum Machines, in an interview with EDM.com. He’s referring to Juan Atkins, Blake Baxter, Santonio Echols, Eddie Fowlkes, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson, who were collectively featured on the cover of British music magazine Record Mirror in 1988. According to God Said Give ‘Em Drum Machin...
Art Alexakis’s World of Noise: Everclear at 30
When Everclear‘s Art Alexakis logs onto Zoom, you can’t help but notice that he’s seated casually in front of a wall of platinum records. “You know, it’s funny, I’ve had them for years and before I got this studio I’d never put them on the walls,” he says. The studio is a space he shares with his wife, a scant mile and a half from their home in Pasadena. While Alexakis’s side is platinum records and endless racks of gear, his wife’s side is the tonal opposite. “She does healing sound baths and yoga stuff,” Alexakis says with a chuckle, taking a bite of microwave popcorn, “it’s more hippie over there and more punk rock on my side.” Alexakis is Everclear’s principal songwriter and long-running front person, a band made famous in the mid-’90s with the massive success of singles like Sparkle A...
O-T Fagbenle on Why He Doesn’t Care About the Size of His Roles, from The First Lady to The Handmaid’s Tale
O-T Fagbenle has been keeping busy the last 12 months, between the release of Marvel’s Black Widow, the return to production for The Handmaid’s Tale Season 5, and working on his own projects following the 2020 release of the original series Maxxx, which he wrote, directed, and starred in. Not only that, he’s also now in the Emmys this year conversation for two very different roles: The very strategic venture capitalist Cameron in WeCrashed and modern symbol of hope Barack Obama in The First Lady. In the interview below, transcribed and edited for clarity, the actor and writer reveals why his career has included so many supporting roles of late, and what was key to playing arguably one of the most famous men on the planet. He also explains why he didn’t mind getting asked about Black Widow ...
Lightyear Review: A Sweet, But Relatively Safe Buzz Lightyear Origin Story
The Pitch: It’s fitting that after four editions of Toy Story over the last 25 years, numerous spin-off shows and games, and a still-undisputed legacy status, Pixar simply wasn’t done telling stories in this universe. But this one is a bit of a curveball: In the year 1995, a young boy named Andy is given an action figure of Buzz Lightyear, a space ranger who served as the protagonist in Andy’s favorite film. Lightyear is that film. Lightyear promises to be the definitive origin story of one of the film’s most iconic characters, complete with a sci-fi backdrop, his signature attitude and catchphrase, and a major appearance from Buzz’s primary antagonist, Zurg. Though they’ve traded Tim Allen for Chris Evans in the recording booth, there’s undoubtedly a classic Pixar feel to Lightyear. The f...
How Uber & AURA Work Together to Enhance Safety
Image sourced from intelligenttransport.com Ride-hailing services, such as Uber, are transforming the way we move around. A few clicks on a smartphone can have you on your way in no time, meeting the modern consumer’s need for on-demand, accessible and convenient services. According to a recent report by Genesis Analytics and the Financial Sector Conduct Authority (FSCA), data from the South African Police Services shows that carjacking incidents have increased across the country over the past three years (2018 – 2020), jumping by a 10% compound annual growth rate (CAGR). Uber collaborated with AURA in 2018. AURA is South Africa’s security and medical response platform which currently has more than 250,000 active users. The collaboration provides drivers and riders on the Uber platform acc...
On-Prem ERP & the Cloud: How Do They Compare?
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Players Uses League of Legends to Satirize Sports Docs, and It’s Hilarious: Review
The Pitch: What Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story did for music biopics, Netflix’s American Vandal did for the true-crime docuseries. For two glorious seasons of adolescent dick and poop jokes painted with all the forensic seriousness of Making a Murderer, Tony Yacenda (who also directed episodes of Dave and real-life true crime doc Trial by Media) and Dan Perrault perfectly threaded the needle between the melodramatic trivia of teenhood and the over-the-top mechanics of true crime. After that show’s unceremonious cancellation, Yacenda and Perrault are back with another pointed critique of the documentary format and the juvenile antics of manchildren. This time, the question is: What would The Last Dance look like if it were actually about mouthbreathing esp...
The Barry Season 3 Finale Captures Keenly Why Connection Matters
[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers through the Season 3 finale of Barry, “starting now.”] It has always been a tricky thing, calling Barry a comedy, but the show may have left that word behind for good. The third season of the Emmy-winning HBO series has been awfully focused on consequences — or, more importantly, the ripple effects of a person’s actions in life, especially when those actions involve the death of another. And while we’ve been seeing those ripple effects all season long, primarily in the form of people trying to kill Barry (Bill Hader) as revenge for his past crimes, things really do come full circle in the season finale. Breaking it down, the narrative’s a relatively simple one, wrapping up key storylines across the season. Gene’s (Henry Winkler) career prospe...
Jurassic Park Movies Ranked From Best to Worst
Welcome to Dissected, where we disassemble a band’s catalog, a director’s filmography, or some other critical pop-culture collection in the abstract. It’s exact science by way of a few beers. This time, we sort through the best and worst of the franchise born from a simple question: What if dinosaurs lived again? For over three decades now, the Jurassic franchise has dwelled happily at the intersection of horror and action, but when digging into them, what stands out is how the ones which feel the least successful are the ones that feel compelled to treat this as a monster movie franchise. Yes, aesthetically a T. Rex and Godzilla have some similarities, but the reason Jurassic Park remains a masterpiece is that it’s a tightly made disaster movie, where dinosaurs are just one facet of...
