NEWS
Joe Budden has never been the type to shy away from making people react online. The rapper turned podcaster sparked another round of conversation this weekend while he and the JBP crew talked about Megan Thee Stallion. During her defamation trial involving blogger Milagro Gramz, a Roc Nation staff member revealed that Megan once received an opportunity from the Call Of Duty video game franchise.
After she discovered she would be presented as a character players could shoot at, she turned the offer down. "That triggered her and she full stop said ‘I’m not doing this," Senior VP of Branding and Strategic Partnerships at Roc Nation Daniel Kinney explained.
Joe Budden and the rest of the team agreed that Megan had every reason to make that choice. The conversation shifted, however, once Joe added his own thought. "I do not even play Call Of Duty, I would have bought it off the strength."
Many people viewed that remark as an inappropriate joke tied to a serious situation. Those critics assumed Joe was suggesting he would purchase the game because it might allow players to shoot or "kill" Megan. For nearly a full day, he did not offer any follow up to clear up what he meant.
A recently surfaced audio clip from the JBTV After Hours show finally gives some clarity from Budden himself.
In the audio, Joe admits that his timing was "ill timed" and makes it clear that he is not attempting to defend the remark. He also explains that he did not say it for the purpose of cracking a joke.
His reasoning was the following: "If one of the number one games is trying to put you in as a shootable character, then that must have had data that says that will get a causal fan to the store, just for that reason."
He adds more context by saying, "So, I said as someone who does not play the game, I would go get the game. Again, maybe ill timed, but it was not so jokey jokey."
People are still pushing back on his comments, stating that he is simply trying to talk his way around what he said and that he did not truly mean any of this. As he also mentions in the clip, "There are a lot of agendas being pushed, none of them being mine."
In the end, listeners can either accept his explanation or dismiss it and disagree.
Megan's trial began on Thursday, November 20, in a Miami federal courtroom. She took the stand for roughly two hours that day, defending her belief that Milagro Gramz "created a space for a lot of people to come speak negatively about me." On Friday, November 21, Gramz' legal team cross examined her and challenged the strength of her claims.
NEWS
James Acaster has officially introduced his new band, The Wow! Scenario, alongside their debut song, ‘Zacuti’, featuring BC Camplight. More information about the project can be found below.
The Wow! Scenario began two decades ago and has now been brought to life by Acaster with his friend Graeme Wicks, BC Camplight and Emma Daman.
Their first album, ‘Stand in the Star. A Verse and a Chorus’, will arrive through Bella Union on October 23. Preorders are available here.
Listeners have also been given an early preview of the album through the jazz inspired lead single ‘Zacuti’, which is available to hear below.
Acaster and Wicks formed the group in Kettering in 2004. According to a press statement, they had already chosen to end the band by the time they recorded their full collection of songs with producer Chris Hamilton in December 2007.
The statement also revealed that the group’s name was inspired by an intoxicated audience member who tried to say they lacked “the X factor”. However, the person repeatedly used the wrong phrase and told them: “You don’t have the wow scenario, guys. You need to get the wow scenario”.
The musicians revisited the recordings with Hamilton in 2018, removing the original singing and replacing the vocal melodies with saxophone, clarinet and fiddle. At that stage, they planned to release the material as an instrumental record.
After deciding they were not satisfied with that version, the group returned to the studio for a third attempt in March 2023. BC Camplight and Emma Daman provided vocals for the new sessions, while the album was eventually mixed and finished in March 2025.
1. ‘Diving!’
2. ‘Once More!’
3. ‘Golf Socks!’
4. ‘Alpaca Spinner!’
5. ‘Reality!’
6. ‘Instructions!’
7. ‘Zacuti!’
8. ‘The Curse!’
Acaster previously created the music project Temps, which brought together a collective of 40 performers, including Quelle Chris, Xenia Rubinos, Shamir, NNAMDÏ and Seb Rochford.
When the collective was first revealed, the comedian and Off Menu podcast host discussed its origins during NME’s ‘In Conversation’ interview series.
“I was doing bands when I was a teenager into my early 20s, and I was like, ‘This is gonna be my entire life, all I’m gonna do is music,’” Acaster said. “When the band split up I started doing stand-up as a placeholder, and then I fell in love with stand-up and got really obsessed with that.
“I’d never made an album from scratch that didn’t exist yet – recording it and writing it at the same time – and I’d never produced anything before, or mixed something as intensely as this one. There’s a lot of new things – if I had been doing it on my own, I don’t know how long I would have lasted.”
