GoneTrending

On the heels of Young Dolph’s posthumously released album, Paper Route Frank, the late Memphis rapper’s team has announced a museum pop-up tour in his honor. Dolphland will bring a series of Young Dolph memorabilia to fans across the US.

According to a press release, “will display original curated art and personal items that reflect Young Dolph’s unforgettable lyricism, personality, entrepreneurial spirit, philanthropy, and historic moments from his legendary career.”

The tour will kick off in New York City from January 13 to 15, at a yet-to-be-announced location. The Dolphland tour will also set up shop in Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, and Dallas, and other cities.

“The goal of the pop-up museum is to showcase the character of a leader and businessman, and to highlight the journey of someone whose early beginnings may mirror that of many young kids and entrepreneurs starting so that they may draw inspiration to keep pushing on their own endeavors,” Paper Route Empire CEO Daddy-O said in a statement.

Those who purchased tickets to any of the Dolphland pop-ups will automatically be entered into a contest to win $100,000, with the winner to be revealed at the end of the tour.

Tour dates will be announced soon, and fans can sign up to receive emails about ticket sales here. Tickets for the New York store will be available for purchase on Monday, December 26.

If you tell a cranky child it’s time to go to bed, you’ll typically be met with exhausting resistance. Which is the best way to explain Donald Trump’s reaction to the ​​House Ways and Means Committee’s decision to release six years’ worth of the former president’s tax returns. The same returns Trump himself promised to release dozens of times — before he was elected, while he was in office, and in the years since he lost his job and Diet Coke button.

As The Daily Beast reports, committee chairman and Massachusetts congressman Richard Neal aimed to make it clear that the decision to release the federal documents was not made in a “malicious” manner. “It’s about one office: the presidency,” added California congresswoman Judy Chu. “It’s about making sure there are checks and balances for the presidency.”

Trump took the news about as well as you might expect.

Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for the former president, issued an official statement to The Daily Beast decrying the orderly action as an “unprecedented leak by lameduck Democrats” and cautioned anyone reading the statement that “If this injustice can happen to President Trump, it can happen to all Americans without cause.” (Or you could just pay your taxes.)

Now that his tax returns are out in the open, Trump—via Cheung—requested that the public be privy to the same financial information from “Nancy Pelosi and her weirdo husband Paul to see how much dirty money they have made from selling out America and jeopardizing our national security.”

Ladies and gentlemen, the 45th President of these United States.

(Via The Daily Beast)

Aside from his role in The Roots, Questlove is also one of the world’s most passionate and knowledgeable music historians. He knows pretty much everything there is to know about the industry and he shared some of that knowledge in his latest book, 2021’s Music Is History. Now, with the holiday season in full swing, Questlove has just enhanced your upcoming gatherings by sharing his Christmas music playlist.

He ran through his favorite holiday tunes on NPR’s Fresh Air, and included in the mix is Paul McCartney’s “Wonderful Christmastime.” Quest said of the song, “You know, Paul doesn’t like [that song] too much. Every time I talk to him and tell him, ‘Not only is it my favorite Christmas song, but it might be my favorite Paul McCartney Post-Beatles song.’ And he’s just, like, cringing his face, like, ‘No, no, but that was a rush job.’”

His mix also includes cuts by Run-DMC, DRAM, James Brown, Marvin Gaye, and others.

Quest also came through with a particularly fascinating bit of Stevie Wonder history, saying:

“Stevie Wonder is world-famous for his unique jingles for radio stations — if you search the Internet high and low, you can find some that he’s done over the years and over the decades. There’s actually a Philadelphia version of this particular jingle that I grew up with, and that’s the thing that’s always close to my heart. So there was a point in time in which Stevie Wonder might take time out to craft maybe somewhere between 30 to 50 individualized, customized radio station jingles for the territories that were playing his music the most. And so that’s why I chose this one. This is sort of a companion piece to the Marvin Gaye ‘Christmas In The City’ bit. This is Stevie Wonder playing synthesizer.”

Listen to Questlove discussing his picks here.

The first lady of Top Dawg Entertainment is having a stellar year. After earning her first No. 1 album on the Billboard charts, singer SZA avoided the sophomore jinx. Earning praises from rap superstar Drake, SOS was a new creative exploration that eventually paid off for the New Jersey native.

The five-year break didn’t deter fans from jumping into the 23-track project. In fact, the hiatus grew their love for the songwriter even fonder. Despite SZA not having the chance to collaborate with Bad Bunny, Frank Ocean, and Billie Eilish, the features that did make the cut, including fan-favorite Phoebe Bridgers, there’s still one artist “PSA” singer might love to join forces with.

Although the singer has publicly declared her love for “About Damn Time” time singer Lizzo on numerous occasions, her musical “GOAT” (greatest of all time) is someone outside the boundaries of genres. During an interview with EW, SZA revealed her GOAT is actually, Björk.

When asked about an interpolation of Björk’s “Hidden Place” appearing in her song “Forgiveless,” SZA replied, “I’ve always loved Björk. She’s the GOAT to me. From the way she was beating up reporters to the way she emotes in her music, she’s just the realest b*tch alive.”

The interviewer, Owen Myers, goes on to ask how SZA discovered Björk’s music, to which she answered, ” [An] iPod I found had a bunch of music, and her music was on there. But I had already been listening to it because we did dances to it in high school. I was part of a company called Special Dance, and we did a dance to ‘Jóga.’”

SZA is undoubtedly a woman of eclectic taste.

(Emily In Paris spoilers will definitely be found below.)

Netflix’s Emily In Paris (which hails from primetime soap-opera king Darren Star) remains frustratingly watchable, and to its credit, Season 3 went several places than relationship territory. Emily Cooper is now firmly entrenched with French life, and she’s learning the language and making actual professional strides. However! There’s no avoiding the fact that the show’s bread and butter happens to be Emily’s will-they-or-won’t-they dynamic with Chef Gabriel.

Amazingly, the show has been able to keep that question alive despite the fact that Emily and Gabriel already slept together in the Season 1 finale. From there, they both moved onto others because, for whatever reason, both parties thought it would be best if Gabriel kept stringing Camille along. Likewise, Emily decided to screw with Alfie’s heart, and this season, and Camille pulled a Daphne From The White Lotus and had her own affair. Also, Gabriel got sloppy drunk and revealed that he’s still super hung up on Emily. But! Gabriel suddenly decided to propose to Camille, and all of this was just so very dumb, but in the Season 3 finale, Camille left Gabriel at the altar. She did so while delivering a speech about how he’s obsessed with Emily, and then Alfie got mad and left the building. Good for him.

In other words, there’a a lotta broken hearts to mend in Season 4. The real surprise, though, was that Emily and Gabriel had a quiet moment when they seemed to accept their that (as with the Borg) resistance is futile… which led to Gabriel revealing that (and this is certainly why he proposed) Camille is pregnant.

[Cue cliffhanger face.]

What could possibly come next? Season 4 is definitely happening, and Camille knows everything. Granted, she should have already known what was up from that dirty skillet discovery, but yeah, girlfriend was willfully blind. It happens, but it’s a little rage-inducing how Gabriel and Emily wouldn’t break up with their respective significant others.

So, Season 4 will likely pick up with Gabriel attempting to juggle the out-in-the-open status of his love for Emily with his impending (or newfound) fatherly duties. Camille’s family has money, so they could really rake him over the legal grills, but I can’t see the show getting that dark and heavy. And I don’t know how much longer the writers can possibly draw out the love triangle/quartet, but viewers hadn’t yet tired of it before this season, so who knows?

The real question here is this: how Gabriel can remain so appealing despite being a terribly written character. He’s not even slightly tortured or nuanced and doesn’t compare to Carmy from The Bear in terms of having an intense drive for his work. Camille lands like the ultimate pushover, and now, there’s going to be a child involved in this mess, and Emily somehow remains likable despite screwing over her so-called friend and being a pretty bad friend to Mindy, too. The show’s inherent addictive nature, however, is a testament to the sleight of hand that this show performs, and you can bet that people will be waiting for and wondering about Season 4.

Emily In Paris Season 3 is now streaming on Netflix.

Feid faced an online leak this year when his album surfaced months in advance. The rising Colombian star combated another leak last night (December 20) when his song “Yandel 150” circulated online. So, he released music video for his alluring collaboration with Puerto Rican icon Yandel shortly after.

Feid had planned to release his album in December, but an online leak forced him to release it in September. He dropped the LP with the title Feliz Cumpleaños Ferxxo Te Pirateamos El Álbum, which translates to “Happy Birthday Ferxxo We Pirated Your Album.” The album went on to become the biggest of Feid’s career. Thanks to hits like “Normal” and “Feliz Cumpleaños Ferxxo,” he appeared at No. 48 among the 50 most-streamed artists of the year on Spotify.

Yesterday, Feid posted on Twitter that he noticed that “Yandel 150,” his collaboration with Yandel, leaked online. “Well, the the song with Yandel leaked.” he wrote. “What do we do? Should we release it?”

Yandel ended up releasing the music video for “Yandel 150” last night. He sings the sexy reggaeton romp alongside Feid in a strip club. Both artists serenade the exotic dancers who have their full attention.

Yandel featured on Feid’s Feliz Cumpleaños Ferxxo Te Pirateamos El Álbum. They previously teamed up for the song “XQ Te Pones Así.” Over the weekend, Feid was a special guest at one of Wisin y Yandel‘s farewell concerts in Puerto Rico. He announced that next year he will headline a show by himself at the iconic El Coliseo where the concert was taking place.

For the better part of the year, it seemed like the ubiquitous heartthrob reigning over all of our algorithms and plastered on every magazine cover would be Harry Styles. At first, I was a bit irritated, never having been too fond of him. But as I watched more videos that came up, I became disarmed, giggling as he talked to fans from the stage and danced in glittery outfits. He’s perfectly wholesome. He passes all of the purity tests. He’s not overly sexual, but when he is, he’s talking about giving women head (he hasn’t outwardly admitted it because that would be too much, but he’s vaguely confirmed it as the meaning of “Watermelon Sugar”). When the “As It Was” singer took a water bottle to the nuts and a skittle to the eye, it was painful to watch.

Is this what we want? An undeniably good figure that poses no challenges? No moral ambiguity? Enter Matty Healy of The 1975, who announced Being Funny In A Foreign Language in July. Now that’s a polarizing man. If he took a water bottle to the nuts, fans would cheer. They would celebrate and say he deserved it. And there’s something beautiful in that.

We’re in the midst of an era where the internet is divided into two insufferable sectors of overbearing liberals and agitative edgelords. The fun thing about Healy is that he’s probably pissing both of them off. One minute he’s making a joke about grooming, and the next he’s pushing for his fans to show up to polls to vote.

Being Funny In A Foreign Language reflects this duality, containing some of the most powerful, emotive instrumentation you’ve ever heard in your life (the outro of the opener, the fuzzy guitars in “About You”) and probably the weirdest sentences to ever exist in a song (“Don’t f*ck it / You muppet,” “John’s obsessed with a fat ass / And he’s 10 years old”). There’s now a whole TikTok trend of fans ranking the weirdest lyrics on the album.

@keiramillin he was being funny in english actually!! why r the cows wearing matty’s sweater!!!! #the1975 #mattyhealy ♬ original sound – keira

Even since I started writing this very article, many things have happened. First, Healy received criticism for posting pictures of his fans on his Instagram Story and calling them the “hot girls of the tour.” There’s a distinct irony in getting upset over something like this. Part of the attraction of The 1975 is that being a part of the fan base means instantly becoming a hot girl — a Tumblr-native, knee socks-sporting, cigarette-smoking hot girl. The aesthetic is as important as the music is; wearing a white top and a black American Apparel skirt to the show is basically the dress code. Those who criticize Healy say he shouldn’t be doing this “at his big age,” as if a 33-year-old rock star is supposed to be well-behaved. Again, is that what we really want?

It’s not like that’s not problematic; criticism, especially against Healy, is often warranted. There was a lot of damage done in the 2014 Tumblr scene that catapulted The 1975 into fame. It glorified bad habits, the worst probably being the prioritization of skinny bodies. In many ways, it feels like these harmful values never left the community, and that’s worth acknowledging. However, there has been a lot of criticism of Healy for kissing fans, which is rather counterproductive. Some are claiming there’s an obvious dynamic between a celebrity and a fan, but every situation has dynamics. People can only make attempts toward a semblance of balance — like Healy literally checking a fan’s ID before kissing her. It all boils down to this current obsession of stripping women of agency and painting them as victims because it is easier to do that than believe that they are autonomous and can feel active desire. Women literally hold up signs with requests ranging from “be my first kiss” to “spit in my mouth,” yet when Healy complies he is portrayed as doing something bad to them rather than fulfilling their wants.

And Healy is aware of this — of the subconscious purity embedded into our minds, no matter how progressive we pretend to be. Before performing “Somebody Else” at one show, he rambled about the way our culture has demonized resentful feelings of sexual ownership that occur post-breakup: “If you’re a bloke, you have those feelings and you feel like a bit of a misogynist or something like that. But if you’re a girl, the narrative is that you’re just some crazy b*tch,” he said. “And the truth is, is that neither of those are true. Sexual ownership after you break up with someone is just a phenomenon and it’s got nothing to do with politics or how woke or privy you are. It’s just your genitals.” This is a fact most people can’t accept — a lot of things cannot be explained, especially not through Twitter threads. Somehow, The 1975 are able to capture the nuanced nature of everything, not providing answers but helping with the general direction.

Something else that happened: Healy deactivated his Twitter. This is tragic for me as I was hoping to insert some of his tweets like I did in my review of their Madison Square Garden show (“might start working on my handwriting cos some of these tattoos are f*cking dog sh*t,” I quoted). But that’s fine considering “Part Of The Band,” the grabbing lead single of the LP, reads like a chronically online Twitter thread: “Am I ironically woke? The butt of my joke? / Or am I just some post-coke, average, skinny bloke / Calling his ego imagination?” From name-dropping Arthur Rimbaud to mumbling about being canceled, Healy achieves his goal of coming off as unbearable, like a Red Scare listener you meet in the smoking section of a show and get stuck in a conversation with. But Healy has proven himself to be too thoughtful and genuine to be written off as a vapid, arrogant pseudo-intellectual. Their 2020 album Notes On A Conditional Form opens with a speech from Greta Thunberg about climate change. “People” from that record begs for young people to take action: “Wake up, wake up, wake up / We are appalling and we need to stop just watching shit in bed.” Eating raw meat on stage was a simultaneous commentary on masculinity and successful attempt to irritate the general public.

Just the opening track of Being Funny In A Foreign Language serves as a mélange of zeitgeist humor and charming earnestness. He sings about QAnon and boners in an effortless flow against shameless LCD Soundsystem-ripped piano and ends it with the poignant, apologetic refrain: “I’m sorry if you’re living / And you’re seventeen,” repeating it over and over. On “Human Too,” he grasps for personhood: “Don’t you know that I’m a human too?”

The title “Being Funny In A Foreign Language” accurately encapsulates the essence of the band’s appeal. Sometimes it feels like Healy’s jokes are ones only he can understand, with some close fans let in on them. If you get it, you get it. If you don’t… that sucks because he’s probably all over your algorithms, fueling your resentment and confusion. At the end of the day, these conversations are more interesting than anything Harry Styles has ever done.

For years, Gabriella Wilson has garnered accolades and thrilled audiences as the multi-talented but mysterious R&B chanteuse HER, but recently, she’s said she wanted to step out from behind the persona and let us get to know the real, well, her. She started rocking the shades and going by the SEO-confounding mononym as to create a kind of alter ego to protect her from personalized scrutiny and keep the focus firmly on her music — much like a comic book superhero donning a mask and colorful spandex to protect their loved ones from their enemies.

Well, the ruse worked — maybe a little too well. Because even after racking up half an EGOT (the collective title for a winner of all four major performance awards, Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony) and becoming the first-ever Black-and-Filipina Disney princess in the Beauty And The Beast 30th Anniversary Celebration on ABC, fans were still befuddled by a recent Instagram photo of the 25-year-old San Franciso native without her signature shades. In fact, they couldn’t help but compare her to possibly the most iconic bespectacled superhero, Superman — although in his case, he’s more super when he takes his glasses off instead. Some jokers even photoshopped some shades back onto the pic, instantly recognizing her again, while others added references to Hannah Montana and Perry The Platypus (different strokes, I guess). Even Gabby herself had to get in on the action, responding, “I don’t get it either tbh” with a slew of laughing emojis. Check out some of the responses below.

Sure you might be busy this holiday season, but are you “Dave Grohl busy”? Last week, the Foo Fighters leader found time to join Billie Eilish on stage in Los Angeles for a song. Then yesterday, Grohl played Foo Fighters classics and a Nirvana rarity as part of an acoustic session for the Letters To Santa benefit. Meanwhile, his and producer Greg Kurstin’s The Hanukkah Sessions is in full swing, dropping a new performance on each of the eight nights of the Jewish holiday. Judd Apatow and Pink joined Grohl and Kurstin for the first two editions of the series this year and night three, features Kurstin’s bandmate in The Bird And The Bee, singer Inara George, taking the lead with Tenacious D’s Jack Black and Kyle Gass on backing vocals.

In the new clip taken from The Hanukkah Sessions live show at Los Angeles’ Largo at The Coronet venue, George, Grohl, Kurstin, Black, and Gass take on 10cc’s “The Things We Do For Love.” While we still have a dearth of Hanukkah songs within the holiday music spectrum, The Hanukkah Sessions is dedicated to songs by Jewish musicians.

“Once referred to as the ‘biggest Jewish band to come out of Britain,’ 10cc’s MOTs Godley, Crème and Gouldman recorded a ton of hits,” Grohl and Kurstin wrote in the video’s caption. Gass and Black provided high-pitched backing vocals to George’s lead in a delightful revue of the tune.

Watch Grohl, Kurstin, George, Black, and Gass perform “The Things We Do For Love” above.

Maggie Rogers surprised fans with a new live performance of “Different Kind Of World,” the closing track from her recent album, Surrender. Filmed in Paris through Blogothèque and director Hugo Jouxtel, the video opens with Rogers happily engaging with her friends at a dinner table. Eventually, she grabs her guitar to treat everyone to the song.

“It’s like an end-of-dinner prayer,” Rogers says in the video. “On the recording, there’s all this noise. So, everyone can do their own version of that.” She explains that her friends can tap on the table or do whatever while eventually explaining the vocal notes as a call-and-response. It works out wonderfully, as her friends add some gentle backing vocals to the uplifting song.

“I feel like thinking about the state of the world has always been a part of my record process. It’s because I am a part of the world,” she told NME about the song. “I don’t know how you go through the pandemic, or the election, or the amount of social change the last couple years, and not have it be a part of what you’re thinking in some way.”

Watch Rogers’ live performance of “Different Kind Of World” above.