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Founders of Bad Ass CBD Want to Help People Live the Lives They Want

BOCA RATON, Fla., Feb. 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The founders of Bad Ass Cannabis Products are true believers in the power and healing effects of CBD oil.

That is why this Las Vegas-based company, which currently distributes its proprietary blend of CBD products in California and Nevada, is expanding throughout the United States.

"If we help one person overcome their anxiety or lessen their pain, then all our efforts will be worthwhile," said Justin Green, CEO of Bad Ass Cannabis Products.

Bad Ass Cannabis, whose parent company is Mist Health System, is promoting two major products: CBD Mind Restore, which helps combat anxiety, while CBD Body Relief helps reduce inflammation.

"We are working to be the world-class leader in CBD products that help people live their lives with reduced pain, anxiety or other health issues that this fully natural product can address," Green said. "We want to do that through high-quality products which are developed in FDA-certified facilities."

Green said a major obstacle is that consumers are confused about their industry and the difference between CBD products themselves.

Bad Ass Cannabis CBD premium liquid elixirs are natural, broad-spectrum hemp cannabis oils containing natural cannabinoids, terpenes and a range of other healthy natural compounds including flavonoids, vitamins, amino acids, and enzymes.

Green's partner, Chuck Stebbins, who has more than 30 years of experience in supplements, creates the formulas for Bad Ass products. Green and Stebbins had collaborated on different projects throughout the years and recently decided to merge their strengths to create the company. Stebbins concentrates on the science while Green uses his business experience to grow its operations.

"We make a great team. We both want to help people by bringing to them high-quality, CBD products," Green said.

For more information, visit badasscbd.com.

Please direct inquiries to:Andrew Polin, 561-544-0719 pr@inhealthmedia.com

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Meet Chloe Flower, Cardi B’s Bad Ass Grammys Pianist (And So Much More)

When the lights went up on Cardi B’s burlesque-inspired performance of “Money” at the Grammy Awards, the first thing that everyone at home saw was a woman wearing an extravagant couture gown perched at a Swarovski crystal-studded piano. (It turned out that the piano had previously belonged to none other than Liberace.) She glared into the camera and hit the keys with dramatic flair, prompting awed viewers to ask: Who is this bad ass pianist?

Although the mainstream is just now finding out who Chloe Flower is, the 33-year-old classically trained musician and producer has been in the hip-hop world for nearly a decade. A piano player since the age of two, Chloe studied at the Manhattan School of Music and Juilliard, and interned at Russell Simmons’ Rush Philanthropic. The artist-producer Babyface signed her to his now-defunct Def Jam imprint Sodapop in 2010. She’s collaborated with everyone from Questlove and Nas to Celine Dion and Deepak Chopra. And after learning how to produce by watching Babyface work, Chloe has recently been co-producing tracks for Meek Mill, Mike WiLL Made-It, and 2 Chainz.

Besides her behind-the-scenes work for others, Chloe has also become somewhat of a star in her own right. Over the past two years, she’s gained an online following for her piano covers of pop songs, which she records dripped out in fabulous outfits at her luxe New York City apartment. Even through Instagram videos, it’s clear that Chloe is a bad bitch; it’s no wonder why star choreographer Tanisha Scott, who creative directed the sultry Grammys performance, picked her to share the stage with Cardi. And after Cardi’s insistence that Chloe be prominently featured, the pianist ended up stealing the show.

Riding the high after her Grammys breakout, Chloe has announced that she is newly signed to Sony Music Masterworks, who will release her forthcoming debut album. Over the phone on the day after the Grammys, she talked to Pitchfork about working with Cardi, her connection to Liberace, and what’s next.

Congratulations on your performance! How are you feeling one day later?

Oh my god, it’s crazy. I was not expecting the kind of feedback I’ve gotten. I’m just so grateful and so excited and slightly shocked.

How much input did you have into what you were going to be playing?

They actually gave me complete creative control. They just said, “We want it to be pretty in the intro.” In the middle of the “Money” music video, there’s a slight interlude with no music. There’s just a wind sound playing and Cardi's at the piano—pretty naked. So I was like, I’m just going to write to this and write myself a second interlude. And Cardi loved it.

What was Cardi like during the rehearsal period?

She was incredible; she really made the team focus on making me shine. She was like, “I want Chloe to look extravagant. I want her to stand out. I want her to have a moment in music, and I want her to have her moment in fashion.” She was very serious about that. You don’t get that from a lot of artists, especially a lot of big female artists. She was so gracious and so supportive of me. I almost cried. I wasn’t expecting that at all. I was in the center of the stage, and she was fine with that.

Initially, I was wearing something short, and she was like, “No, that's not big enough. I need her to look more couture, more high fashion. I need her to stand out more.” I don’t know this designer [Fouad Sarkis] particularly well, but sometimes, you’ll find a piece and it works for what you’re doing. I felt like Maleficent, like Angelina Jolie.

When you were playing, you had a powerful stage presence. Did you get direction for how you were going to carry yourself?

Tanisha is an amazing creative director. I begged her for help. She was like, “Just do you.” The only direction she gave me was to look out, shift my body more towards the audience. Because you know, as a classical musician, we’re trained to face the keyboard, to zone out, and not acknowledge the audience. At the very end, she told me, “I want you to hold your pose. Whatever pose you do, hold it.” That was the only direction I got, girl. I was begging for more direction, but that’s all I got.

How did you end up getting Liberace's piano for this performance?

It’s a really funny story. I’m not like a party girl—I don’t really party and I certainly don’t do drugs. So I went to this thing that I was told was a yoga retreat-type situation outside of Vegas. When I got there, everybody was in costumes and high and running around drunk. And I was like, “Oh no.” Literally got back in my Uber and I was like, “Just take me to the strip, I'm gonna find a hotel, I'm gonna figure this out.”

My friend came with me and I was like, “We’re gonna make this trip worth it somehow.” I found the Liberace museum [on Google]. But when I got there, it was shut down, it had closed. I went on the website and there was like this little comment form. I typed in it and I emailed the person at the foundation. I was like, “Hi, I’m Chloe Flower, I’m a pianist and I’m a huge fan of Liberace. I would love to come look at your stuff, do you have a new museum? I would love to get inspiration.” And [the president of the foundation Jonathan Warren] wrote me back right away. He was like, “Can you do a meeting tomorrow?” I met him at the Liberace garage on the way to the airport and the rest is history, I started working with him.

Liberace had left his entire estate to his foundation—nothing can be separated, nothing can be sold for auction or anything. That was the rule of his foundation. Everything is in one place, it’s in the basement of Thriller Villa where Michael Jackson lived in Vegas. He has rhinestone cars, his capes, his sheet music. I was the first person to go into his archives and I’m the first person that catalogued his unwritten sheet music. I spent four days with no sleep, cataloging it all to one day do an album of his unreleased music.

So what ended up happening is that Tanisha called me and she said, “We’re gonna do this piano thing.” I thought, you know, I have Liberace's glass piano in my apartment on loan to me. But, the crystal piano is a bit smaller and it’s made out of Swarovski crystals. Shouldn’t Cardi be dancing on that? So I told Tanisha it was an option and Cardi was so excited about it. So they drove it from Las Vegas and set it up.

Why did they honor your request to loan it?

I requested it because I thought it would bring more attention to piano music. I’m always looking for new and interesting ways to bring classical music and what I do to a younger audience, primarily because I don’t sing. So I thought, maybe having this piano will be cool for younger musicians to see and they'll be like, “Wow, there’s pianos like that.”

Chloe Flower backstage at the Grammys, courtesy Chloe Flower

More

How did you transition from being a piano player to a producer?

I love orchestration and I love composing. When I signed with Babyface, I would watch him and his other producers work in the studio. And I’d be like, “Hey, what's that program you're using? Logic, oh, Pro Tools.“ My nickname began Chlo Tools because I learned how to use Pro Tools by myself. I became obsessed with learning how to use the software. I was like, "Wow, I can make this sound with the piano, and I can add cello here and I can add violin." And then I was like, “Oh my god, I can add a 95-piece orchestra if I want, like, right now.”

Now that you're signed to Sony Music Masterworks, what is next for you? What are you working on?

There’s not a lot of female producers out there. On the agenda is to really try and be a female producer. And the other thing is an album—but I’m not exactly sure what it’s gonna be. I’m thinking about instrumental covers. Or possibly something with more uptempo trap beats, which would be really fun.

Critic's Notebook: The Downside Of Stupid Money

It might be important to start this column with a firm belief: Everybody should make as much money as they can, so long as they're not breaking laws and/or hurting people in the process. That should cover it. Go, capitalism! 

That said, wow, the insanity surrounding these overall deals in the TV industry is officially ridiculous. And yes, believing that the market for big-name television creators is overheated and unwise is a little bit like complaining about sports stars killing it in the free agent market. It's not your money, why even care?

Well, in the case of the overall deal mania — which just saw Mindy Kaling get "a massive six-year, mid-eight-figure overall deal with Warner Bros. Television" on Thursday (according to The Hollywood Reporter) — it means the industry is panicking about having enough content and is doubling or even tripling down on proven hit-makers rather than doing the harder work of discovering and nurturing fresh talent. Somebody should care about that imbalance.

Translation: TV outlets want one person to create 10 shows instead of 10 people creating 10 shows because that one person they gave all the money to is "proven" and thus a better bet, according to their thinking. But that logic isn't entirely true and very, very relative.

More on that in a moment, but let's do a short recap: 

This mad rush for content creators is great for Kaling, who created The Mindy Project and recently wrote the movie Late Night, just as it was great for Nahnatchka Khan (Fresh Off the Boat) a few days earlier, and before them, Greg Berlanti (everything), Chuck Lorre (everything), Ryan Murphy (everything) and Shonda Rhimes (also everything). 

You could argue that Kaling and Khan are not in the "everything" category quite yet, but cheers to them for nailing down that money. The streaming wars are upon us and have been for a while, which is why you're seeing stupid money from Apple, Netflix and Amazon, WarnerMedia, Disney+ and, soon enough, NBCUniversal. This doesn't exclude Hulu, HBO, FX, CBS/Showtime and others from spending stupid money, of course, it's just that so far others are spending outrageously more. Give it time, though.

OK, back to the logic behind all of this. Content is king. The industry is in a massive expansion mode. In this gold rush comes a need to find that person who not only pans more gold than the prospector next to them but in their spare time also miraculously turns straw into gold. See: Murphy, Rhimes, Lorre, Berlanti. Hell, Berlanti has 15 series on the air (a TV record, plus he recently had three pilot orders). In the summer of 2018, Berlanti re-upped at Warner Bros. Television for a reported four years at $400 million.

What's worse than stupid money? Insanely stupid money? But who the hell knows — maybe Berlanti is underpaid. That's a lot of TV series, after all. Oh, and Berlanti has a separate film deal at Fox. 

His TV deal with Warner Bros. Television came after Netflix gave Murphy $300 million and Rhimes $100 million (their deals are structured differently, with Rhimes able to possibly make a lot more than her base). Lorre has been at Warner Bros. Television forever and makes so much money on the backend it's probably illegal to make it public. His contract isn't up until 2020, the same year that Dick Wolf's deal at Universal Television is up, which is why you can already hear the sound of money being printed in the distance.

And there are plenty of other people who are likely to add to their riches soon enough, with Seth MacFarlane and J.J. Abrams, topping a very long list.

Again, if this wasn't clear before — fantastic for them.

But not everybody on this list will continue to create hits. Making popular television is difficult. Making great television is even more difficult. Fusing the two is, what, a rainbow unicorn? Some of these creators will make shows remarkably similar to the last show they made — and yes, in some quarters, that's precisely what people doling out the money are paying them to do. But television is littered with copies of copies failing. Of styles crashing out of fashion. What brings down a king is often an upstart, a series from an unknown, created with boundless ambition and talent that wasn't keeping one eye and half a brain on the money pile while doing it.

Television success is hard, but maybe the hardest thing of all — impossible, even — is predicting success. And that, more than anything, is forging this expensive desperation. Oh my God you did it once, please do it again! We'll pay you anything!

Of course the biggest hitters on this list are outliers. They are the ones who come up with multiple hits — even when the concept and definition of what a hit really is has shifted from the time when Wolf and Lorre smoked the biggest cigars and drove the biggest cars. That's why all these big names are making this magic money.

Except, well, not everybody listed above has produced at the same level, which is clear without even pointing fingers. But the money still flows.

Beyond this batch? The logic behind the largesse is missing. People all over town are getting sweet-ass glittering deals — all together now — and for what? To make a copy of the bad series they made three years ago? To contribute something marginally interesting to the pile over at Netflix? To get something on a broadcast network that's both redundant and reductive? To reboot someone else's IP? That's where the true crazy resides — and the real worry. Does locking down anybody who has done anything leave new or heretofore unknown content creators on the outside looking in?

That's the deeper concern, or should be. Because at some point gambling on history comes up snake eyes. The networks have created a problem they can't seem to escape, because once everybody started tuning in for a Wolf or Lorre or Rhimes show, then the networks gave them more Wolf and Lorre and Rhimes shows.

But the pattern confirms the bias and then it gets put on top of other creators who might not have the same track record of ratings success — Berlanti's shows in particular are not all demo or total viewer powerhouses. That's not a knock, but when you're approaching 18 series there comes a point where the notion of a "safe bet" ends up potentially locking out new voices, particularly when those "safe bet" shows aren't exactly reinventing the wheel. Everything looks and feels the same because, well, it is. Viewers then seek out something fresher elsewhere. It's kind of a Catch-22 on the overall deals for high profile content providers, aka human factories. But again, that's a particularly broadcast network/mediocre cable problem. 

The question is whether it will become a problem for streamers as the next frontier expands? Netflix is likely to keep buying up all kinds of shows, no matter how many Murphy or Rhimes shows they have, because having more shows is the business model. 

But it's worth watching if overall deals start plaguing platforms with fewer series, where that personal stamp would be more noticeable.  Exclusive rights deals are less prevalent in the streaming world. The bigger issue is more likely that an overall deal would suck a lot of the budget out of the pile for originals and fewer people would be controlling more shows. At this point its hard to imagine a streamer with such a limited budget to make that a real worry, but hey, as more platforms feel panicky and start overpaying for content providers, it's not entirely an irrational thought.

Right now it's good to see lots of newer voices — Lena Waithe being a great example — getting multiple opportunities and lots of money along with it. There are a lot of others like her and they represent the good side of the opportunities available in the content boom. 

Let's hope that what's happening now — and we're still very much in the early days of all this — is that stupid-money mega deals are for the true unicorns and that a whole lot of other people can get their money and their creative freedom and they are not, in the process, shutting less famous or less experienced people out of the party. 

We're in the Platinum Age of television, but television still needs disparate voices, multiple points of view; fresh, twisted, unique, revolutionary, ultra-imaginative perspectives.