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Country fans were not happy on Saturday (April 22) when Morgan Wallen was minutes away from his set in Oxford, Mississippi when it was announced he wouldn’t be performing. They’d sat through openers Bailey Zimmerman, Ernest, and Hardy, but then a message flashed across the screen on stage that no more music was coming.

“After last night’s show I started losing my voice so I spent the day resting up, talking to my doctor and working through my vocal exercises trying to get better,” the Lil Durk collaborator revealed on his Instagram Story. “I really thought I’d be able to take the stage and it kills me to deliver this so close to showtime, but my voice is shot and I am unable to sing. All tickets will be refunded at point of purchase. I am so sorry, I promise you guys I tried everything I could.”

This explanation hasn’t served as consolation for audience members. According to TMZ, fan Brandi Burcham has filed a lawsuit against Wallen, accusing him of breach of contract and negligence. In it, she mentions that Wallen didn’t perform, and reimbursements haven’t been provided yet. She also shared that those ticket refunds do not account for “out of pocket expenses,” such as transportation and lodging.

Burcham is looking to make it a class action lawsuit so other fans can join her as well.

I’ll be honest, the only reason I saw Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret is because I was interviewing Judy Blume for the documentary about her life and career and this book played such a large role in that film. I didn’t have any specific questions about this book in particular, but I at least wanted to know the gist. And, not having all the time in the world, I thought it would be easier to just see a screening of the new movie than it would be to read the book. So, yes, basically what George Costanza did with Breakfast at Tiffany’s. (Though, to be fair, I’m not trying to convince anyone that I did read the book.)

So, you may be surprised to learn I’m probably not the target audience for Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. I don’t really want to make any assumptions here, but I feel somewhat confident this is true. However, I still immensely enjoyed this movie. And it just feels like the kind of movie that is going to be a lot of people’s favorite.

Abby Ryder Fortson (who you probably know as Cassie Lang from the first two Ant-Man movies before the time jump ahead five years) plays Margaret Simon, an only child living with her parents (Rachel McAdams and Benny Safdie) in New York City. Margaret is informed by her parents they are moving to New Jersey, to the chagrin of Margaret and her grandmother, Sylvia (Kathy Bates very much going for it here). Margaret doesn’t want to leave her friends, but her parents tell her the great news that with moving she will make new friends (this is true) and she will keep all her old friends (this, from experience, is a lie).*

*Granted, maybe today the way technology works it is easier to stay friends with people after moving and starting a new school. So maybe kids today do stay in touch with their friends from before the move. I am open to this being possible. But we moved three times, so I went to four different school systems, all within the state of Missouri, and I kept a grand total of zero friends after each move. Sure, you try at first, but it always ends. And since Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret takes place in the early 1970s, my original point still stands.

Margaret quickly makes friends but falls into a crowd where the new ringleader isn’t the most thoughtful of others and has a tendency to make up stories. Soon, the subject of periods comes up and each member of Margaret’s new clique vies to be first, officially becoming, in their way of looking at it, a full-on adult. Margaret is also dealing with her spiritual side, as her dad’s mother very much wants her to live her life Jewish, but her mom’s parents want her to be Christian, while her parents have told her to figure it out on her own. Or don’t. Or don’t even be religious at all, it’s up to her.

I’m glad Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret keeps its early ’70s setting. There’s a simplicity to this story that would seems so much more complicated once modern technology and social media are added in. (Plus, watching Benny Safdie wear early 1970s fashion is fun.) I was hit by how well this movie captures the dynamics of starting a new school and kind of the luck of the draw who your friends wind up being at first. Kelly Fremon Craig (who also directed The Edge of Seventeen) has made a wonderful film here, one that many people have been wanted to make for the last 50 years. And I feel fairly confident this will be a seminal film to a good portion of kids who see it and for those that this book means so much to already.

You can contact Mike Ryan directly on Twitter.

Let’s start with what we know: Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell, two attractive actors, are starring in a movie called Anyone But You. There are many photos of the Top Gun and Euphoria stars looking, let’s say, cozy together while filming the R-rated romantic comedy. Sweeney hung out with his family, and Powell held her while she did whatever’s happening here.

Here’s what else we know: Sweeney is engaged to restaurateur Jonathan Davino and Powell has a girlfriend, model Gigi Paris, who had initially “commented a string of celebratory emojis on Sweeney’s post announcing the casting news for the rom-com in January,” according to the Daily Beast, but “now [her] comment appears to have been deleted.” Page Six has more:

Popular gossip account DeuxMoi has speculated that Paris’ relationship with Powell has been on the rocks in the months since filming with Sweeney began. Paris traveled to the Sydney film set to be with Powell in late March but returned to the US less than two weeks later.

Of course, nothing has been confirmed or denied. There were rumors about Powell and Zoey Deutch while they were making Set It Up, so maybe he just has good chemistry with his co-stars? (Both female, as seen here, and male, as seen in Everybody Wants Some!!) It’s not on the level of Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain, but nothing is. They were hot enough to melt ice(man).

If this is a PR stunt for Anyone But You, it’s working.

(Via the Daily Beast and Page Six)

Harry Belafonte is dead at 96 years old, The New York Times reports. He died today (April 25) at his home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan due to congestive heart failure, longtime spokesman Ken Sunshine told the publication.

Belafonte was born on March 1, 1927 in Harlem, but spent a significant portion of his childhood growing up in Jamaica. He is perhaps best known for his recording of “Banana Boat (Day-O),” a traditional Jamaican folk song. The track appeared on Belafonte’s iconic 1956 album Calypso, which is recognized as the first album by a single artist to sell 1 million copies. Belafonte is widely credited with popularizing calypso music internationally. Belafonte also had the idea for the iconic 1985 charity single “We Are The World.”

His musical success led to a trailblazing career in movies: The New York Times called him “the first Black actor to achieve major success in Hollywood as a leading man.” He was also a civil rights leader and friend of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

In a 2021 interview, Belafonte spoke about the current generation of educators teaching about Black history, saying, “As a singer and an activist, I found this to be true: You can cage the singer, but you cannot cage the song. This is a very potent philosophy. The impact of art is irreversible, and I think it’s the same when young people learn their true history. You can ban the lesson plan — and across the country, we see that they are doing just that — but you can’t stop the impact of that knowledge from taking root in the minds of young people. Those who are teaching Black history in ways that reach our young people and the masses are doing critically important work.”

Ron DeSantis hasn’t officially announced he’s running for president yet, but he did make an eyebrow-raising visit to Japan this week and not just because the state of Florida was recently hit with disastrous flooding. (Although, that didn’t look great.) As part of his “world tour,” the governor has been talking to the press, which hasn’t been going well as he attempts to convince Republicans that he’s a better candidate than Trump.

Case in point, DeSantis conducted an interview with Sean Hannity via satellite where the governor looks absolutely miserable thanks to his face being pointed directly at the sun.

This kind of amateur mistake doesn’t speak well for DeSantis’ campaign, who let the governor go on camera looking like Squints McGoo and social media had a field day with DeSantis’ looking absolutely miserable.

“The reason I know DeSantis is going to lose the primary is because no one on his team thought to check the sun position before agreeing to this setup and no one at Fox cared enough to say something before they went live,” Amanda Smith tweeted.

“The only explanation for every decision this campaign has made is that it’s being run by a secret Democratic operative who hates DeSantis more than anyone else on Earth,” wrote Geoff LaTulippe.

You can see more reactions to Ol’ Pudding Cup DeSantis clearly having the time of his life below:

(Via Aaron Rupar on Twitter)

Just days after releasing his new album, D-Day, through his Agust D solo project, BTS’ Suga is keeping fans entertained with some special surprises tied to the record. One of which is a brand-new music video for “Amygdala.”

“So, is all countless suffering for my own good? / What didn’t kill me only made me stronger / And I begin to bloom like a lotus flower once again,” he sings on the track.

Visually, Suga grapples with a traumatic car accident as he sits in a dark room alone with his troubling thoughts, doubling as a metaphor for mental health. It follows his previously-released video for “Haegeum,” which dropped last week and found him fighting with himself — as he played both a cop and a criminal.

As for what’s next, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon has begun teasing Suga’s upcoming appearance on the show, where he’ll make his late-night solo debut on May 1. BTS is currently on hiatus as the other members are completing their mandatory military service, leaving those remaining able to explore their individual musical careers.

Suga is also touring North America as Agust D later this summer. A complete list of tour dates and ticketing info can be found here.

Check out Agust D’s music video for “Amygdala” above.

Vladimir Putin has a secret network of train tunnels that run to his various Russian luxury hideouts, so as to avoid detection. One of these homes, a compound near Sochi, is said to be stocked to the brim with pickles as well as a missile defense system and a spa. This sounds like Putin paradise. Still, he would apparently love to travel abroad, an act that isn’t so feasible when one has an arrest warrant out from the International Criminal Court.

Of course, there are some countries who will not enforce the warrant, if Putin would like to limit travel to, say, Iran and China. That’s not the desired case, according to the Moscow Times, which is reporting that the Kremlin is steamed after the warrant tossed a wrench into an August summit in South Africa that Putin had planned to attend. As for any discussion of the warrant, the Kremlin declared that “[t]hese discussions naturally displease the Kremlin” while adding, “It would like them to end.” One official spoke to the publication on an anonymous basis, but he didn’t hold back:

A senior Russian government official who wished to remain anonymous told The Moscow Times that the arrest warrant was “stupid.”

“When the war is over, how will they talk to Putin? The complete lack of logic in the West’s actions is somewhat discouraging,” he said. “Or I don’t understand it.”

A parliamentary deputy is further quoted as sounding alarmed: “This is essentially a call to overthrow the government in Russia.”

Well, an arrest warrant was bound to happen after Putin not only invaded Ukraine but also allegedly abducted children and deported them to Russia. That’s something that the ICC doesn’t take too lightly.

There’s no word on whether Putin will grow publicly frustrated about not being able to attend the next G20 summit, which will go down in India, where Putin does not have automatic protection against the warrant. There’s been plenty of speculation on whether Prime Minister Narendra Modi would actually have Putin arrested, but it says a lot that the Kremlin has yet to confirm or deny Putin’s attendance for the September event.

(Via Moscow Times, Reuters & CNN)

Chlöe is celebrating the recent release of her debut solo album In Pieces with an exciting tour. It kicked off earlier this month in Chicago, where she didn’t hesitate to confront critics: “F*ck what the f*ck anybody wanna f*ckin’ say,” she said onstage.

In Atlanta on Sunday night (April 23), the audience was in for a special treat. To spice up her performance, the “How Does It Feel” singer brought out her sister and fellow Chloe X Halle member Halle Bailey, who’s been in the spotlight as well for her role in The Little Mermaid. The Bailey siblings performed their 2020 songs “Ungodly Hour” and “Do It” together, looking happier than ever.

Chlöe shared a grateful post to social media about the “magical” night.

“ATL love yall so much,” she wrote on Instagram. “I got to reunite with my best friend on stage and even have my own national day now (Chloe Day April 22nd) each night on tour has been so magical.”

Just last week, the two reunited on Jimmy Fallon’s That’s My Jam and sang a medley of breakup anthems, including Destiny’s Child’s “Survivor” and Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated.”

Watch the pair play “Ungodly Hour” above and “Do It” below.

Tucker Carlson isn’t exactly beloved by all, and last year, he got into some beef with Maren Morris. On the Fox News program Tucker Carlson Tonight last September, a photo of Morris was shown and labeled “Lunatic Country Music Person.” She was unbothered, though, sharing a screenshot of it and tweeting, “#NewProfilePic.”

Meanwhile, it was revealed yesterday (April 24) that Carlson and Fox News have agreed to part ways. So, Morris had some celebrating to do.

After the news broke, Morris took to her Instagram Story. In one post, she shared the “lunatic country music person” screenshot and wrote, “Happy Monday, MotherTucker.” Furthermore, the photo was scored with an appropriate song choice: Taylor Swift’s Midnights highlight “Karma.”

Morris then shared a graphic that reads, “The only Tuckers allowed are the drag queens.”

Speaking of drag queens: Earlier this year, Morris appeared on RuPaul’s Drag Race and used some airtime to speak about the LGBTQ+ community, saying, “Coming from country music and its relationship with LGBTQ+ members, I just want to say I’m sorry. I love you guys for making me feel like a brave voice in country music. I just want to thank you guys for inspiring me. I’m gonna cry, I need to go.”

The new album by The National is accompanied by a familiar narrative: They almost broke up. Seriously. For real this time. As Matt Berninger recently told The Washington Post, the forthcoming First Two Pages Of Frankenstein (due Friday) “kind of saved our band. I mean, every single one of our records saved our band in one way or another. But this one, the record really came to the rescue.”

I’m sure Berninger and his bandmates will understand if long-time National loyalists take quotes like this with a grain (or a metric ton) of salt. As even he admits, every National album seems to put them on the precipice of extinction. Let’s do a brief review: Alligator was the “we need to get our act together or else” record. Boxer was the “can we capitalize on our burgeoning indie fame” record. High Violet was the “can we get to the next level and achieve actual fame” record. Trouble Will Find Me was the “we almost broke up trying to make a ‘let’s try to not break up this time’ record” record. Sleep Well Beast was the “we may live on separate continents now but can we regroup at Aaron’s upstate New York studio without falling apart” record.

Which brings us to 2019’s I Am Easy To Find, an album that really did sound like a band that might be coming apart. On their previous efforts, The National managed to move forward without losing their innate “stoic on the outside/manic and drunk on the inside” National-ness. But on I Am Easy To Find, a certain restlessness with their sound and persona was perceptible among these Ohio transplants. It’s not only that Berninger ceded a good share of the vocals to backing female singers, sacrificing one of The National’s defining sonic attributes. The songs themselves reiterated the low-key electro-folk balladry of Beast, with a handful of twitchy rockers added for the sake of balance, in a rather perfunctory matter.

As the 2010s unfolded, The National embraced an open-door policy of collaboration with outsiders like Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon and filmmaker Mike Mills, a move positioned as artistic evolution that pushed their music in new and unpredictable directions. But in reality, it had the opposite effect — I Am Easy To Find was missing something at its center, and that something was a band identity rooted in the fundamental chemistry of the five core members. For the first time, The National sounded like guests on their own album.

After that, the pandemic (of course) came down, which accelerated Aaron Dessner’s creativity as a musical soothsayer for pop superstars (Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran) and handicapped Berninger’s muse with a bad case of writer’s block. Though I wonder if this would have happened anyway, even without the forced work stoppage, given that The National’s interest in being The National seemed to wane during the Easy To Find era.

Cut to the summer of 2022. When I saw The National on their West Coast tour, I was delighted to discover that they were re-energized and sounding like, well, a rock band again. Especially exciting was the Dessner brothers’ guitar interplay, which elevated the band beyond the “mournful pianos and skittering electronic beats” aesthetic that has marked their recent work. And then there was the mighty Bryan Devendorf, one of the great modern indie-rock drummers, whose talents have been perversely under-utilized on recent National albums.

The setlist included several unreleased new songs, and they came across like (pretty great) “back to basics” numbers. Not quite a full return to the after-hours Brooklyn bar music of Alligator, perhaps, but certainly a credible evocation of the surging arena-indie of High Violet and Trouble Will Find Me. Bryce Dessner told me that the band was working on their new record during off-hours on the tour, and incorporating live versions of the new material into the proper album.

This was (pardon the lame pun) music to my ears. And, at its best, First Two Pages Of Frankenstein lives up to that original promise. This is the most National-like that The National has sounded in years. I count at least two home runs here, and several doubles and triples. Those good parts are so good that I wish The National had fully committed to the concept of being themselves on this almost-great record.

First, the smashes: When I first heard “Tropic Morning News” last summer, it felt like an instant-classic National song. And the album version — culled from a widely bootlegged performance in Hamburg — sticks the landing. The rhythm section glides with subtle virtuosity. The guitars lock in on a hypnotic pulse that slow-burns toward a satisfying peak in the outro. And Berninger delivers his patented blend of funny and distraught non sequiturs with pained panache. (Here’s a question for the band’s subreddit: Is the line about how “you can stop and start an athlete’s heart” a Damar Hamlin reference?)

The album’s other undisputed champ is “Eucalyptus,” an end-of-a-relationship dirge that escalates from wry indifference to genuine rage, with Berninger howling over a lurching guitar riff lifted from a rehearsal recording lodged at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, N.Y. Berninger doesn’t quite revive his “Mr. November” scream here, but “Eucalyptus” does re-assert the National’s gift for setting up an orderly musical framework and then slowly ripping to shreds over the course of four minutes.

The other highlights on Frankenstein — “New Order T-Shirt,” “Grease In Your Hair,” “Alien,” “Ice Machines” — don’t deliver the emotional highs of the two strongest tracks. But they do re-focus The National on their most essential attribute, which is the sound of these lifelong friends and brothers playing together with minimal extra baggage. As is the case with all great rock bands, the simplest approach — plug in, stand in a circle, block out the outside world — typically is the most winning. And on First Two Pages Of Frankenstein, The National have rediscovered this.

Not that they can (or will) ever completely close the door on their celebrity friends. Long-time collaborator Sufjan Stevens appears on the album-opening “Once Upon A Poolside,” while the ubiquitous Phoebe Bridgers checks in on two pleasant soundalike piano songs, “This Isn’t Helping” and “Your Mind Is Not Your Friend.” And then there is The National’s most famous pal of all, the one who has single-handedly turned our nation’s reigning dad-rock standard-bearers into a Gen Z institution. Taylor Swift’s contribution to “The Alcott,” a vignette about two lovers at a hotel, will surely make it one of The National’s biggest streaming hits. Not only does her vocal offers a bright contrast to Berninger’s middle-aged purr, it’s also an obvious fact that putting Taylor Swift’s name on elephant flatulence would push elephant flatulence to 100 million spins. So, “The Alcott” — which to be clear is significantly better than elephant flatulence — should at least do 200 million.

And that’s great. I’m happy for them. I would just prefer more of them and a little less of everybody else on a National album. I have given up hope that they will ever gather in a room with a crate of whiskey and yell and weep their blues away in an Alligator 2.0-type fashion, the ultimate “back to basics” move. But these guys still sound pretty amazing when it’s just the five of them playing National songs. The worthy First Two Pages Of Frankenstein confirms this, and also leaves me wanting more.