Category: News

It’s a good time to be Future right now: His new album I Never Liked You just debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart thanks to the biggest week of 2022. Now, Future is on top of the Hot 100, too: On the new chart dated May 14, Future, Drake, and Tems’ “Wait For U” debuts at No. 1.

This is big for Drake, too, as it makes him the first rapper with ten No. 1 songs and one of just a few artists to ever notch that many. He, Janet Jackson, and Stevie Wonder each have ten, Whitney Houston has 11, Madonna and The Supremes have 12, Michael Jackson has 13, Rihanna has 14, Mariah Carey has 19, and The Beatles have 20.

Meanwhile, this latest entry extends a number of records Drake already held: He now has 262 total Hot 100 entries, 147 top-40 entries, 55 top-10 entries, and 40 top-ten debuts, all of which are the most of all time.

It’s not just Drake making history, though, as Future is now just the fifth artist in history to have a song debut at No. 1 on the Hot 100 and an album premiere on top of the Billboard 200 in the same week.

Future also has a few other songs in the top ten: “Puffin On Zootiez” is No. 4, “712PM” is No. 8, and “I’m Dat N****” is No. 10. All songs from the standard edition of I Never Liked You are actually on the Hot 100 this week, bringing Future’s career total to 149 songs to ever appear on the chart. That moves him to fifth all time, behind Taylor Swift (16), Lil Wayne (180), Glee (262), and Drake (262).

I’m not going to say it’s all been downhill for Netflix since American Vandal was canceled. But I’m also not not saying it…

The mockumentary was one of the best shows of 2017 and a Peabody winner; you couldn’t go anywhere without someone asking, “Do you know who drew the d*cks?” (I might be misremembering things slightly, but seriously, it was excellent.) Season two, which focused on the Turd Burglar, was also good. American Vandal unfortunately wasn’t brought back for a third season about boogers, or whatever, but creators Tony Yacenda and Dan Perrault have returned with a new series that focuses on eSports.

Players is a “comedic documentary-style series that follows a fictional pro League of Legends esports team, as they pursue their first championship after years of close calls and heartache. To win it all, they will need their prodigy, a 17-year-old rookie, and their 27-year-old veteran to put their egos aside and work together,” according to the official plot description from Paramount+. If you can’t laugh at a cocky eSports player who goes by the moniker “Cream Cheese,” well, you probably didn’t think the spray-painted dicks were funny either. That sounds like a “you” problem.

Players, which stars Noh Arrow Dong-Hyeon, Michael “Miko” Ahn, Misha Brooks, Da’Jour Jones, and Youngbin Chung, premieres on Paramount+ on June 16.

While Kendrick Lamar‘s surprise release of “The Heart Part 5” caused excitement for many fans all over the internet this past weekend, one person, in particular, feels slighted by the video: New Jersey rapper AK is accusing the Damn artist of stealing the deepfake concept from his 2020 video “Family Tree.”

Much like “The Heart Part 5,” “Family Tree” features AK morphing his face into Eminem, Snoop Dogg, Jay-Z, Lil Wayne, and coincidentally, Lamar himself. In Lamar’s video, he morphs into Will Smith, Jussie Smollett, Kobe Bryant and Nipsey Hussle. AK stated in a Monday morning Instagram video, “Maybe I’m fooling myself for thinking that Kendrick saw my video and was like, ‘Damn, that’s so good that I want to do it myself.’”

He continued, “I was under Universal; he is under Universal. I did that video in 2020 with Universal. Obviously, the song didn’t do as good as if Kendrick was to do it, but the concept was so sick and I f*cking don’t know, but it’s the same exact thing — it’s a backdrop, it’s him in front of it, it’s one take.”

AK closed the video by speaking on the challenges independent artists face, as many have come out over the years saying bigger acts have stolen their ideas as well. Kendrick Lamar likely won’t respond to the allegations, but his final TDE album Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers does release this Friday, May 13.

Senator Ted Cruz is getting publicly trolled by his constituents once again, but this time it’s got nothing to do with fleeing his home state during the middle of a devastating snowstorm for a poorly-timed trip south of the border.

Cruz, who’s pretty much universally disliked in the state of Texas at this point, was recently called out by the father of a Marine who was jailed in Russian two years ago. Trevor Reed was arrested for allegedly grabbing a Russian police officer after a night of drinking in Moscow in 2019. He was sentenced to nine years in prison, despite insufficient evidence that he had done anything wrong. His family, including his father Joey Reed, has worked tirelessly ever since, trying to overturn that decision and get him home. And they’ve had bipartisan help from officials in their state to do it with Republican Senator John Cornyn and Representative Michael McCaul and Democratic Representatives Sheila Jackson Lee and Joaquin Castro pressing Russia to free Reed. But one proud Texan who apparently didn’t care to get the serviceman released was Cruz and now that Reed is back on American soil his family isn’t letting the GOP slacker forget it.

After Cruz shared a statement on Twitter expressing his relief that Reed had been freed, the Marine’s family accused him of jumping on the good press bandwagon.

“He didn’t do anything,” Joey Reed told The Dallas Morning News. “He’s an embarrassment to the state of Texas, let me just say that. I don’t care what or who runs against him, I will work for their campaign to defeat that son of a b*tch.”

According to Reed’s family, they begged for Cruz’s help years ago and were told the Senator didn’t feel comfortably publicly supporting the military man’s release “out of concern for antagonizing Russian strongman Vladimir Putin.” Cruz suggested any official statement he made supporting Reed’s fight might negatively affect his chances of getting out of prison because Cruz is “such an enemy of Putin.” The only problem? We’re pretty sure Cruz isn’t even on Putin’s radar at the moment, something an expert that the paper talked to for the story later confirmed.

“He is not held in a special category by Russian diplomats, I can tell you that as a fact,” Jeremi Suri, a professor of history and public policy at the University of Texas at Austin told Dallas Morning News. “Oftentimes, the State Department does ask senators and members of the House to quiet down on certain things, but rarely, rarely if ever, has Senator Cruz followed that. So it would be strange if in this case, he listened.”

Really it just sounds like Cruz didn’t care about bringing the Marine home but he wants to take some kind of credit for it. That’s not surprising, but it’s also something the Reed family isn’t about to let fly.

(Via The Dallas Morning News)

When Taylor Swift released her 2020 album Folklore, the album’s credits spawned a mystery, as credited on a couple of songs was William Bowery, who nobody had ever heard of before. It wasn’t a longstanding mystery, though, as it didn’t take long for Swift to reveal that Bowery was actually boyfriend Joe Alwyn. Now, Alwyn himself has spoken about how he came to collaborate with Swift, revealing that it was unintentional.

In a new Vulture profile, he notes he was “messing around” on piano and singing the first verse of what would become “Exile,” which ended up being a duet between Swift and Bon Iver, when Swift overheard.

Alwyn continued, “It was completely off the cuff, an accident. She said, ‘Can we try and sit down and get to the end together?’ And so we did. It was as basic as some people made sourdough.”

He also noted of writing the chorus to “Betty,” “I’d probably had a drink and was just stumbling around the house. We couldn’t decide on a film to watch that night, and she was like, ‘Do you want to try and finish writing that song you were singing earlier?’ And so we got a guitar and did that.”

Read the full interview here.

This August is the 60th anniversary of Marilyn Monroe’s death, but fascination remains high in the Golden Age of Hollywood actress. Ana de Armas will play her in a biopic that director Andrew Dominik called the “NC-17 version of the Marilyn Monroe story” (he also compared Blonde to if “Citizen Kane and Raging Bull had a baby daughter,” whatever that means), while Kim Kardashian walked the Met Gala red carpet in the same dress that Monroe wore when she seductively sang “Happy Birthday” to President John F. Kennedy in 1962. Kardashian was also gifted a lock of the Some Like It Hot star’s hair by kitsch emporium Ripley’s Believe It or Not — except it might not be Monroe’s hair.

Great, next you’re going to tell me the Ripley’s tour guide is fake, too.

“News Alert: Marilyn Monroe Hair Gifted to Kardashian by Ripley’s is Fake. Who styled Marilyn’s hair for the JFK gala: Robert Champion or Kenneth Battelle?” Monroe historian Scott Fortner wrote on Instagram (via People). He continued:

A photo of some blonde hair in a frame with the caption reads, It’s no doubt that one of Marilyn’s most defining physical feature (sic) was her bombshell platinum-blonde hair. This lock was clipped by her hairstylist Robert Champion just prior to her Madison Square Garden performance. Paul Fraser Collectibles sold the hair in 2019. Their description for the lot: “Just hours before her performance, Monroe visited her personal hairdresser Robert Champion at the Coiffures Americana Beauty Salon, housed within the luxury department store Bergdorf Goodman on Fifth Avenue.”

However, Fortner notes, “Champion did not cut and style Marilyn’s hair for the JFK gala. It was actually the one and only ‘Mr. Kenneth’ (Kenneth Battelle) who had the honors. Battelle is responsible for Marilyn’s famous hairstyle from that night, as documented by a receipt from Lilly Dache Beauty Salon.” (He literally has the receipt.)

Kardashian said she was going to do “crazy voodoo sh*t” with her Ripley’s gift, but what if Fortner is correct? What if the hair didn’t belong to Monroe? The Kardashians have been blamed for everything that’s wrong with America — if an ancient evil is about to be unlocked, they’ll be to blame for everything that’s wrong with the world.

(Via People)

Elizabeth Olsen is firing back at the spate of directors who have criticized Marvel movies over the years. The actor, who currently stars in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, has been playing Wanda Maximoff (a.k.a. Scarlet Witch) since 2015’s Avengers: Age of Ultron, and she’s not a fan of seeing the crew disrespected by remarks from Martin Scorese and Francis Ford Coppola that treat Marvel films like a “lesser type of art.”

Obviously, Olsen understands that the MCU are designed to be more broad and aimed at general audiences as opposed to more arthouse fare, but that doesn’t mean they’re not incredibly creative projects made by talented people behind the scenes. Via The Independent:

“I’m not saying we’re making indie art films, but I just think it takes away from our crew, which bugs me,” she says. “These are some of the most amazing set designers, costume designers, camera operators – I feel diminishing them with that kind of criticism takes away from all the people who do award-winning films, that also work on these projects.”

Again, Olsen concedes that the Marvel films are a different flavor of cinéma, but she’s not going to sit back and let people disparage the hardworking crew.

“From an actor’s point of view, whatever, I get it; I totally understand that there’s a different kind of performance that’s happening,” Olsen said. “But I do think throwing Marvel under the bus takes away from the hundreds of very talented crew people. That’s where I get a little feisty about that.”

(Via The Independent)

Jack Harlow is winning right now. His latest single, “First Class,” is his first solo No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, his new album, Come Home The Kids Miss You is out now and receiving warm reviews from fans on social media, and now, he’s headed off on his first headlining arena tour. His Come Home The Kids Miss You Tour is set to take off from Nashville, Tennessee on September 6 and run through Atlanta, Georgia on October 16 with opening artists City Girls joining him at all but one stop — Fenway Park in Boston. The title’s kind of fitting when you think about it. Naturally, tickets will be available here beginning on May 13 at 10 am local time. You can sign up for pre-sale access beginning on May 11 at jackharlow.us/tour. See the full list of dates below.

09/06 — Nashville, TN @ Nashville Municipal Auditorium *
09/08 — Irving, TX @ The Pavilion at Toyota Music Factory *
09/10 — Houston, TX @ 713 Music Hall *
09/11 — Austin, TX @ Moody Center *
09/13 — Phoenix, AZ @ Arizona Federal Theatre *
09/17 — San Diego, CA @ Viejas Arena *
09/20 — Inglewood, CA @ The KIA Forum *
09/23 — Seattle, WA @ WAMU Theater *
09/24 — Vancouver, BC @ Rogers Arena *
09/25 — Portland, OR @ Veterans Memorial Coliseum *
09/27 — Salt Lake City, UT @ Maverik Center *
09/28 — Denver, CO @ 1STBANK Center *
09/30 — Minneapolis, MN @ The Armory *
10/01 — Chicago, IL @ Credit Union 1 Arena *
10/02 — Detroit, MI @ Fox Theatre *
10/05 — Toronto, ON @ Coca-Cola Coliseum *
10/08 — Philadelphia, PA @ The Liacouras Center *
10/09 — Boston, MA @ MGM Music Hall at Fenway
10/11 — Washington DC @ The Anthem *
10/14 — Miami, FL @ PFL Solar Amphitheater at Bayfront Park *
10/15 — Tampa, FL @ Yuengling Center *
10/16 — Atlanta, GA @ State Farm Arena *
* with City Girls

Indie darling Angel Olsen announced her new album Big Time in March and has been unveiling dazzling singles and music videos since then. The “Shut Up And Kiss Me” singer stated that this album came after an intense period of her life, during which she was reckoning with her sexuality and then grieving the loss of her parents all at once. Today, she’s announced that Big Time will come with an accompanying film of the same title.

The film will be 28 minutes, premiering the night before the release of the album. It will stream on the Amazon Music channel on Twitch and via the Amazon Music App. This is what Olsen has to say about the film:

“At the time of my mothers passing I kept having these super visual dreams about time travel. Later on I decided I’d name the record Big Time, not only because of the song but also as a kind of wink to time expansion and change. When I approached Kimberly Stuckwisch about making these videos, I thought it would be cool to include the storyline of one of the dreams I’d had, and really use it as a way to tell the story of the songs. She added dialogue and events, some that are based in reality and others that haven’t happened, to create a story arc around my dream, to give it a thicker plot, using the music videos within and creating a larger film. I’ve always had a vivid imagination and it was really special to make these subconscious moments real, but it was also a really emotional and raw process and felt almost at times like a spiritual clearing, that by putting myself in the story and moving pieces of it around, I also personally had to re-examine my losses and find a new way to process the events that actually took place in my life. Though most of it is scripted, it is probably the most intimate work I have ever made and shared with the public […] and it serves as an homage to my mother. I only wish my mom was here to listen to the record, because something tells me that she would have really liked this one.”

Watch the trailer above.

Big Time is out 6/3 via Jagjaguwar. Pre-order it here.

It seems like Olivia Rodrigo just can’t miss as of late. The 19-year-old took home three Grammys at this year’s event, she’s popular among the masses, and now she’s blazing multiple stages on tour supporting her debut album Sour. Portland attendees were treated to a Veruca Salt and Avril Lavigne cover, only for Rodrigo to then bring Lavigne out to sing “Complicated” at her Toronto tour stop.

This past Friday in Philadelphia, the California native tried her hand at No Doubt’s 1995 record “Just A Girl” and the crowd seemed pleased. She moved back and forth across the stage with passion as she belted the lyrics over the backing of her band.

Olivia Rodrigo got her start in entertainment on television, appearing in Bizaardvark and High School Musical: The Musical: The Series. From there, she released her debut single “Drivers License” in 2020, which broke many records and is one of the best-selling songs of 2021. Her debut album Sour was a global chart-topper, earning her a Brit Award and three Grammys, most notably Best New Artist. Time named her 2021’s Entertainer Of The Year and Billboard selected her as 2022’s Woman Of The Year. Needless to say, life has been anything but sour for the artist.

Watch the No Doubt cover above.