Year: 2024

After a star-making past year, Sabrina Carpenter is hitting the road: Today (June 20), the “Espresso” and “Please Please Please” singer announced The Short N’ Sweet Tour, in support of her upcoming album Short N’ Sweet.

The trek runs from September to November, kicking off in Columbus, Ohio before hitting major venues like New York’s Madison Square Garden, Boston’s TD Garden, Los Angeles’ Crypto.com Arena, and more. Carpenter will be supported on tour by openers Amaarae, Griff, and Declan McKenna.

Ticket pre-sales start with the Cash App Presale, on June 24 at 10 a.m. local time. That will be followed by the Team Sabrina Presale on June 25 at 10 a.m. local time. Then there’s the general on-sale, which kicks off on June 28 at 10 a.m. local time.

Visit Carpenter’s website for more information and check out the upcoming tour dates below.

Sabrina Carpenter 2024 Tour Dates: The Short N’ Sweet Tour

08/10 — San Francisco, CA @ Outside Lands Festival
09/23 — Columbus, OH @ Nationwide Arena
09/25 — Toronto, Ontario @ Scotiabank Arena
09/26 — Detroit, MI @ Little Caesars Arena
09/29 — New York, NY @ Madison Square Garden
10/02 — Hartford, CT @ XL Center
10/03 — Boston, MA @ TD Garden
10/05 — Baltimore, MD @ CFG Bank Arena
10/08 — Philadelphia, PA @ Wells Fargo Center
10/11 — Montreal, QC @ Centre Ball
10/13 — Chicago, IL @ United Center
10/14 — Minneapolis, MN @ Target Center
10/16 — Nashville, TN @ Bridgestone Arena
10/17 — Saint Louis, MO @ Chaifetz Arena
10/19 — Raleigh, NC @ PNC Arena
10/20 — Charlottesville, VA @ John Paul Jones Arena
10/22 — Atlanta, GA @ State Farm Arena
10/24 — Orlando, FL @ Kia Center
10/25 — Tampa, FL @ Amalie Arena
10/28 — Austin, TX @ Moody Center
10/30 — Dallas, TX @ American Airlines Center
11/01 — Denver, CO @ Ball Arena
11/02 — Salt Lake City, UT @ Delta Center
11/04 — Vancouver, BC @ Pacific Coliseum
11/06 — Seattle, WA @ Climate Pledge Arena
11/07 — Portland, OR @ Moda Center
11/09 — San Francisco, CA @ Chase Center
11/10 — San Diego, CA @ Pechanga Arena
11/13 — Phoenix, AZ @ Footprint Center
11/15 — Los Angeles, CA @ Crypto.com Arena

Short N’ Sweet is out 8/23 via Island Records. Find more information here.

We have reached the part of the calendar where cultural pundits reflect on the first six months of the year. Congratulations! You won a retrospective! For music critics, this means doing an inventory of 2024’s most notable albums. “Notable” can be defined in any number of ways — artistic quality, commercial success, the anachronistic “water cooler” discourse factor — but taken together these attributes ultimately speak to how memorable a particular work of art is.

But I am not interested in the notable or memorable albums of 2024 — at least not at the moment. What I am curious about is the opposite kind of album. The sort of record that is not notable and not memorable, to the point where its very existence already seems open to question.

What I’m talking about is a memory-holed album. There are a lot of them this year. As a person who is professionally obligated to remember forgotten music year in and year out, I would assert that 2024 already has more memorably unmemorable albums than normal. And I want to figure out why.

To be clear: Hundreds of albums are released every week, and 99.9 percent of them come and go with zero fanfare. And yet those records do not qualify as memory-holed. For an album to qualify as memory-holed, it must have a shot at being remembered. Therefore, it has to come from an act with a large platform. A big record label is involved. A team of publicists is on the case. The media arrives with a bounty of takes. All these things ensure a reasonable expectation that the public will care about an album. Except the public doesn’t care. They don’t care at all, spectacularly. A memory-holed album isn’t necessarily a bad album. It’s just an album that is wiped from our collective consciousness soon after it enters the world. It’s not a matter of love or hate, only indifference.

I’ll illustrate what I mean: Imagine I am holding a gun to your head. And imagine the gun is loaded. And imagine that I am the kind of maniac who will murder someone over a hypothetical scenario. Would you stake your life on guaranteeing — with 100 percent certainty — that Green Day put out a record in first half of 2024?

If you said “yes,” I have good news: Your head presently is still intact. Green Day did put out an LP, Saviors, in January, though I’m sure you did not actually know this any more than you could possibly “know” that a coin will land heads or tails. This was surely a triumph of mathematical probability, not pop-punk knowledge.

Green Day is a perfect example of the “memory-holed album” phenomenon because they have put out so many of them in the past 20 years. Just try to name a Green Day record released after American Idiot. I’ll give you extra credit if you can name a single song from any of those records. (I might also ask if you are Billie Joe Armstrong in disguise.) For Saviors, music writers dutifully reported that Green Day was back to making “political” music in the style of American Idiot (which turns 20 this year) with a dash of the snotty, n’er-do-well charm of Dookie (which turns 30 in 2024). The album was talked about a lot during a slow time of the year for music releases. It certainly had an opportunity to be remembered. Nevertheless, here I am at the end of this paragraph and I’m having trouble recalling who I was talking about at the start of the paragraph. That’s what I call a good and thorough memory-holing!

I don’t want to pick on Green Day too much, as later work by legacy rock bands typically is memory-holed by default. You might be surprised to learn that Kings Of Leon put out a record, Can We Please Have Fun, last month. Harry Styles’ producer apparently worked on it, though I doubt even he could either confirm or deny it at this point. The Black Keys recently got an extra push for their memory-holed 2024 album, Ohio Players, though for the worst possible reason: Their arena tour in support of said album was canceled. People forgot the record, but they remember the shuttered tour. The music business, like life itself, is cruel.

2024 is extraordinary thus far for how many albums you would have predicted being at least somewhat relevant not being relevant at all. Legacy rock bands have a low relevancy ceiling, but what about young and promising rock acts? The U.K. indie outfit The Last Dinner Party entered 2024 riding a wave of hype for their debut album, Prelude To Ecstasy, released in February. Comparisons to another buzzy British rock act, Wet Leg, were inevitable. For about two weeks this winter, I heard about them constantly. And then … crickets. As if a power cord was suddenly kicked out of an outlet. The same could be said for All Born Screaming, the well-reviewed seventh album from St. Vincent that was swiftly erased from the critical conversation soon after its late-April release.

(We also can’t forget to remember to forget Hymnal Of A Troubled Man’s Mind, the latest LP from one of 2023’s most buzzed-about lightning rods. Alas, the fudge rounds have fallen by the wayside in 2024.)

Let’s raise the stakes. In February, Usher performed for more than 100 million people at the Super Bowl. Two days before that, he put out his ninth record, Coming Home. Honestly! I assure you this happened! The following month, Justin Timberlake released his sixth LP, which I’m told was called Everything I Thought It Was. It came and went so fast that there was barely any time for the pre-programmed anti-JT backlash. (Don’t worry backlashers, your time has arrived.) Oh — I forgot this part — Jennifer Lopez also put out an LP, This Is Me … Now, in February that got the unfortunate Black Keys-esque “canceled tour” publicity bump a few months later.

Of those albums, only the Lopez record can be considered an out-right bomb. (It peaked at only No. 38.) The Usher and Timberlake releases both debuted in Billboard’s Top 5. But short-term success does not prevent long-term memory-holing. Think about the slowly erasing family photo from Back To The Future. A lot of memory-holed albums are like that. You can sense them fading away in real time. Two LPs that debuted at No. 2 on the chart, Dua Lipa’s Radical Optimism and Kacey Musgraves’ Deeper Well, have essentially evaporated, while Ariana Grade’s Eternal Sunshine similarly feels a little fuzzy at this point despite some enduring singles.

So, why is this happening? There are numerous explanations, some of which you might have already heard. There is too much music. Attention spans are too short. Tech platforms are incentivized to push volume of songs over focusing on certain tracks that might deserve extra attention. And then there is the matter of Taylor Swift and how she has eaten the corpus of pop music in the 2020s. Her latest album, The Tortured Poets Department, has stayed perched at the top of the charts for months, which has inevitably overshadowed her aforementioned pop challengers. Taylor has even affected the recent work of Billie Eilish and (sorry!) Beyoncé, whose respective albums Hit Me Hard And Soft and Cowboy Carter aren’t exactly memory-holed but feel a little memory-muted after their initial PR blitzes.

All these explanations are valid. But I would add another: The numbing and frankly dull familiarity of pop music in 2024. Here’s an honest question: How often are you surprised by what is popular? If you’re like me, the answer is “not often at all.” To be fair, this is true of all of pop culture. A feeling of déjà vu also pervades our movies and TV shows. We are in the middle of a prolonged, stagnant, “rerun” moment in so much of what we watch and listen to. And this naturally makes much of our art a lot less memorable.

Even the stuff people love feels a little warmed-over. The most acclaimed pop record of recent weeks is Brat, the latest from Charli XCX, the 31-year-old British singer who has been cast in an upstart role in relation to the hegemony of Taylor Swift. Only Charli has been played that part for more than a decade at this point. (There are countless “Charli XCX is the future of pop music” articles going back to the early 2010s to support this.) But while Brat musically is well-constructed and enjoyably frothy, lyrically it is just as self-absorbed and borderline insipid as Taylor’s overstuffed 2024 opus. (Oh, there is a song inspired by one of the co-hosts of Red Scare? This should not be a selling point for an album, it should be a point of mockery!)

The music that stands out the most in the first half of 2024 feels at least slightly unexpected — the slow-build rise of Chappell Roan in the pop world, the acclaim garnered by Cindy Lee in indie circles. And then there was the epic battle between Drake and Kendrick Lamar, the only pop moment that managed to dethrone Taylor Swift from the center of conversation this year. Who could have predicted at the start of the year that Kendrick would re-emerge from self-appointed exile to say hilariously mean (and slanderous) things about the most commercially successful rapper of the last 10 years? Not me. And not you, either. Though it’s possible that we’re not remembering things properly.

Travis Scott was arrested in Miami Beach, Florida on charges of disorderly intoxication and trespassing on property after a warning.

According to Miami’s WSVN, the incident took place early this morning, at 12:44 a.m. on June 20. Officers were called to the Miami Beach Marina, where Scott was reportedly getting off a charter boat when the boat owner asked him to leave. According to police, Scott “became irate screaming profanities, left and returned to disturb some more.” He was arrested at 1:17 a.m. and booked at 4:35 a.m. (at Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center, per NBC News).

Seemingly in reaction to the news, Scott posted on X (formerly Twitter) this morning, “Lol.”

This comes a month after Scott was involved in a scuffle at a Cannes Film Festival party in May. Scott and Alexander “AE” Edwards, who reportedly instigated the conflict, got into a physical altercation at the event, where punches were thrown.

Meanwhile, Scott recently settled the final Astroworld Festival wrongful death lawsuit, shortly after nine out of the 10 suits were settled weeks earlier. However, there are still hundreds of injury cases (which were combined into a single case under a Texas statute) that have not been settled and are still on the table.

Most people are of the belief that Taylor Swift can do no wrong, but if there’s one recurring point of criticism from recent years, it’s been her private jet usage and its impact on the environment. Now, Just Stop Oil, a group of climate-focused activists, have decided to leverage this attention: Recently, two group members broke into a private airfield where Swift’s private jet had landed and spray-painted two private jets.

The group wrote (as NME notes), “Jennifer and Cole cut the fence into the private airfield at Stansted where Taylor Swift’s jet is parked, demanding an emergency treaty to end fossil fuels by 2030. We’re living in two worlds: one where billionaires live in luxury, able to fly in private jets away from the other, where unlivable conditions are being imposed on countless millions. Meanwhile, this system that is allowing extreme wealth to be accrued by a few, to the detriment of everyone else, is destroying the conditions necessary to support human life in a rapidly accelerating never-ending ‘cruel summer.’ Billionaires are not untouchable, climate breakdown will affect every single one of us.”

Police said Swift’s jet wasn’t actually at the airfield when the incident occurred, but it had landed there hours earlier. The two protesters were arrested on “suspicion of criminal damage and interference with the use or operation of national infrastructure.”

This comes shortly after Just Stop Oil pulled a similar stunt at Stonehenge.

Given that yesterday (June 19) was Juneteenth, it was a relatively slow news day in the music world. That is, except for one thing: Last night, Kendrick Lamar hosted The Pop Out — Ken & Friends, a special concert event that wasn’t about the Drake feud, but was also totally about the Drake feud. A number of Lamar’s Drake diss tracks made the setlist, most notably “Not Like Us,” which was performed five times in a row to end the show.

Folks online took notice: Drake became the No. 1 trending topic on X (formerly Twitter) and still is as of this post on Thursday morning.

A lot of the reactions were people imagining Drake’s reaction to the show, particularly to the repetition of “Not Like Us,” with tweets comedically imagining Drake feeling anger, frustration, or sadness.

Others just admired the whole situation. As one user put it, “17,000+ people gathered together in one place to call Drake a pedophile with Kendrick Lamar. This level of hate will never be duplicated.” Another noted, “Not Like Us to Drake is how Back To Back was for Meek [crying laughing emoji] Kendrick preformed the song 4 times and the entire arena rapped it word for word all 4 times.”

Check out some more reactions below.

There are few things that feel more awful than being stranded at the altar by your spouse-to-be. That’s why people are cheering on Kayley Stead, 27, from the U.K. for turning a day of extreme disappointment into a party for her friends, family and most importantly, herself.

According to a report in The Metro, on Thursday, September 15, Stead woke up in an Airbnb with her bridemaids, having no idea that her fiance, Kallum Norton, 24, had run off early that morning. The word got to Stead’s bridesmaids at around 7 a.m. the day of the wedding.

“[A groomsman] called one of the maids of honor to explain that the groom had ‘gone.’ We were told he had left the caravan they were staying at in Oxwich Bay (the venue) at 12:30 a.m. to visit his family, who were staying in another caravan nearby and hadn’t returned. When they woke in the morning, he was not there and his car had gone,” Jordie Cullen wrote on a GoFundMe page.

u201cDevastated bride goes ahead with party after groom stood her up on their wedding day ud83dudc4fnn[THREAD] ud83euddf5u201d

— Manchester News MEN (@Manchester News MEN)
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Stead spoke with the groom at 4 p.m. the previous day, but they stayed the night with their respective parties to save some mystery before the big day. “The groom and I had already agreed not to speak the night before the wedding anyway, so I didn’t know what was happening on his end, I didn’t have a clue,” Stead told The Metro.

Stead was in absolute shock after hearing the news. She had paid for nearly the entire wedding herself, using up all of her life savings on the £12,000 ($13,000) affair. “As a joke, the videographer said ‘Why don’t you carry on, girls? You’ve spent all this money, you’re not getting it back, all your guests are there, why don’t you just go?’” Stead told The Metro.

So, she did just that. Stead decided that the wedding would go on without her fiance.

u201cKayley Stead made the brave decision to carry on with the celebrations without her partner of four years Kallum Norton after he ditched her before the ceremonynnhttps://t.co/BoBM7KUSOhu201d

— The Daily Record (@The Daily Record)
1664316000

“That’s when I was like, I’m going to do it,” she said. “I’d spent all this money, I’d been looking forward to the food, a dance with my dad, spending time with my family, so why not?”

Stead, her friends, family and even the groomsmen didn’t let things go to waste and they enjoyed her wedding entrance, food, speeches, dances and even posed for photos. “I didn’t want to remember the day as complete sadness,” she said.

“She was the most beautiful bride we had ever seen,” Cullen added.

The good news is that after the party, Cullen set up a GoFundMe page to help Stead recoup her losses and it has already reached its goal of £10,000 ($10,830). Almost two weeks after the event, Stead still doesn’t know why she was stood her up on her wedding day.

u201c”There were so many special moments, like my wedding entrance, the sparkler walk, the first dance and punching the wedding cake, so there was still happiness in the day. I’d spent all this money.” – Kayley Steadu201d

— Birmingham Live (@Birmingham Live)
1664199021

The Sun caught up with Norton and he refused to apologize. The only thing he had to say was, “I don’t want to talk about the article.”

While it’s terrible that Stead was stood up on her wedding day, she should be applauded for making the best of the worst day ever. It’s also wonderful that her bridesmaids and family stood by her side and supported her as she dealt with a serious blow. Let’s hope she finds someone better soon. It shouldn’t be too hard—standing someone up at the altar and then not even explaining yourself is a pretty low move.

This article originally appeared on 09.29.22

Kendrick Lamar concluded his sensational The Pop Out — Ken & Friends Juneteenth concert at Kia Forum in Los Angeles on Wednesday night, June 19, by welcoming all of the night’s surprise performers — the “friends” in the billing — to dance while he ran through “Not Like Us,” his masterclass Drake diss track that hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, five times in a row.

Below, check out all of those surprise performers from DJ Hed, Mustard, and Kendrick Lamar’s respective sets.

Here Are All Of The Surprise Performers From Kendrick Lamar’s ‘The Pop Out’ Concert

DJ Hed

Remble (“Touchable”)
Ray Vaughn (“Problems”)
Cuzzos (“Goldmembers”)
Rucci & AzChike (“Light It Up”)
Meet The Whoops (“Meet The Whoops”)
Wallie The Sensei (“03 Flow”)
Westside Boogie (“Silent Ride”)
Zoe Osama (“Underrated”)
Kalan.FrFr & G Perico (“Right Wit It”)
Bino Rideaux (“Bozo”)
BlueBucksClan (“Walkin’ In”)
RJMrLA (“Get Rich”)
OhGeesy (“Geekaleek”)
Jason Martin (“Like Whaaat”)
Tommy The Clown

Mustard

310babii (“Soak City [Do It]”)
Blxst (“Overrated” & “Chosen”)
Ty Dolla Sign (“Paranoid”)
Dom Kennedy (“My Type Of Party” & “When I Come Around”)
Steve Lacy (“Static” & “Bad Habit”)
Tyler The Creator (“WusYaName” & “Earfquake”)
Roddy Ricch (“Racks In The Middle,” “Die Young,” “The Box,” “Ballin’”)
YG (“BPT,” “My N****,” “You Broke,” “Toot It And Boot It,” “Who Do You Love?” & “Big Bank”)

Kendrick Lamar

Jay Rock (“Money Trees,” “Win,” “King’s Dead”)
Ab-Soul (“6:16 In LA”)
Schoolboy Q (“Collard Greens” & “THat Part”)
Dr. Dre (“Still D.R.E.” & “California Love”)

Kendrick Lamar was a man on a mission tonight (June 19). His The Pop Out — Ken & Friends concert at Los Angeles’ Kia Forum featured DJ Hed and Mustard as openers, and their sets were each stacked with guest appearances, but Lamar exceeded all expectations once his set began. The bar was set extremely high from the jump, as Lamar opened with the live debut of “Euphoria,” one of his recent Drake diss tracks, but he cleared it with ease by punctuating the night with “Not Like Us” five times in a row. Five!

Check out Lamar’s full The Pop Out setlist below.

Kendrick Lamar’s ‘The Pop Out — Ken & Friends’ Concert Setlist

1. “Euphoria” (Live debut)
2. “DNA.”
3. “ELEMENT.”
4. “Alright”
5. “Swimming Pools (Drank)”
6. “Money Trees” (With Jay Rock)
7. “Win” (Jay Rock cover) (With Jay Rock)
8. “King’s Dead” (Kendrick Lamar, Jay Rock, Future, James Blake cover) (With Jay Rock)
9. “6:16 In LA” (With Ab-Soul) (Live debut)
10. “Collard Greens (Schoolboy Q cover) (With Schoolboy Q, Ab-Soul, and Jay Rock)
11. “THat Part” (Schoolboy Q cover) (with Schoolboy Q)
12. “King Kunta”
13. “m.A.A.d city”
14. “HUMBLE.”
15. “Like That” (Future and Metro Boomin cover) (Live debut)
16. “Still D.R.E.” (Dr. Dre cover) (With Dr. Dre)
17. “California Love” (2Pac cover) (With Dr. Dre)
18. “Not Like Us” (Live debut)
19. “Not Like Us”
20. “Not Like Us”
21. “Not Like Us”
22. “Not Like Us”
23. “Not Like Us” (Instrumental)

It was already a consensus opinion that Kendrick Lamar obliterated Drake when they exchanged diss tracks this spring. But just in case there were any doubt, Lamar delivered an epic knockout punch during his set at his The Pop Out — Ken & Friends Juneteenth concert at Los Angeles’ Kia Forum on Wednesday, June 19. First, Lamar opened his set by performing “Euphoria” live for the first time — adding a Tupac-related bar, to boot — but that paled in comparison to Lamar’s grand finale.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning Compton rapper welcomed Dr. Dre to the stage. They performed “Still D.R.E.” and “California Love,” and that seemed to be that before Lamar stopped him from walking off the stage. “You ain’t gonna say nothin’ else before we continue to party?” Lamar asked. Dre said, “Psst, I see dead people,” thus beginning a relentless medley of Lamar performing “Not Like Us” five times in a row.

Eventually, Lamar was joined on stage by the guest performers from the night — plus DeMar DeRozan and Russell Westbrook — and they all metaphorically danced on Drake’s grave. Still, Lamar paused between the fourth and fifth run through “Not Like Us” to emphasize that this Juneteenth concert was meant “for all of us to be together on stage” and display “united at its finest.” Lamar shouted out the late Nipsey Hussle and Kobe Bryant and acknowledged, “We lost a lot of homies to this music sh*t, to this street sh*t.”

Lamar dropped “Not Like Us” in early May, and it became his fourth-career No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100.

For a few hours on Wednesday night, Kendrick Lamar was the most powerful man on earth as he held The Pop Out in Los Angeles. The whole thing was quite the spectacle, as it turned into one of the biggest nights in music even before Kendrick got on stage and started his performance.

And then, Kendrick tore the house down at The Forum in Los Angeles, which included Black Hippy reuniting and running through a medley of songs. The high point of the performance came at the very end, when he performed his Drake diss “Not Like Us.” Then he did it again, and then he did it again … and then, for good measure, he did it a fourth time, with the crowd losing its mind the entire time. During his final performance, a number of people joined him on stage, which included two of L.A.’s most beloved basketball players, Russell Westbrook and DeMar DeRozan.

They weren’t the only NBA players who made it out on Wednesday night, as a collection of players that included LeBron James were in attendance. And as he ran through “Not Like Us,” Donovan Mitchell was like many of us who sat at home and watched

Anyway, after Kendrick did his fourth performance of “Not Like Us,” he took a picture with the huge group that popped up on stage … before doing “Not Like Us” for a fifth time.