This year’s Best New Artist category at the Grammys is anybody’s game to win: It’s a lineup full of acclaimed stars with strong hit-making capabilities. And as diverse as the field is, many of the nominees have collaborated with one another during the past year, leading to one of the friendliest competitions of the 2018 awards. Here’s a closer look at the singers, songwriters and rappers nominated for Best New Artist. Alessia Cara Who: Twenty-one-year-old Alessia Cara’s nomination for Best...
Ice-T added bawdy voiceover lines to children’s cartoons – The Magic School Bus, Arthur and Scooby-Doo – in an amusing sketch on The Tonight Show on Wednesday. Ice-T used to supplement his rap income with voiceover work on the side. “Gotta hustle, man,” he told Jimmy Fallon. “That was just a way of getting money, paying the bills.” “I actually watched a lot of these cartoons,” Fallon replied, “and to be honest, I had no clue your voice was in...
Run the Jewels tear through a breathless rendition of their Run the Jewels 3 cut “Legend Has It” in a preview from their upcoming appearance on Austin City Limits. The episode airs January 27th on PBS and marks the rap duo’s debut on the long-running concert series. While RTJ’s episode will certainly be censored for PBS audiences, the preview clip boasts El-P and Killer Mike’s uncut bars packed with brash humor and clever rhymes (“I’m fucking magic, in fact I’m...
Russell Simmons is being sued for $5 million by a woman who claims Simmons raped her in 2016 while she was at his home, Billboard reports. Aspiring filmmaker Jennifer Jarosik filed the lawsuit on Wednesday. The suit claims that she met Simmons in New York in 2006 and they allegedly bonded over their mutual passion for meditation, yoga and being vegan. The suit further claims that Jarosik trusted him due to his “reputation as a spiritual conscious person.” A decade...
NBC and the Roots‘ Questlove (Ahmir Thompson) have been named in a lawsuit filed by two ex-employees of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, The Blast reports. Camera operators Kurt Decker and Michael Cimino claim the musician targeted them for termination following an incident because they are white. According to the lawsuit, Decker and Cimino were camera operators for the show and last June they received an allegedly “unsolicited racist and misogynist text message from a Tonight Show stagehand.” They also claim...
Demi Lovato is putting her fans first for her upcoming Tell Me You Love Me tour by providing free therapy sessions and wellness workshops through CAST Centers – a wellness, addiction and mental health program based in Los Angeles – the singer announced Wednesday. Fans will have the chance to sign up for the intimate chats, led by CAST founder and CEO Mike Bayer, as well as listen to special guest speakers talk about their own personal journeys with mental...
After Neil Diamond announced he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease – canceling concerts in Australia and New Zealand – fans responded by overwhelmingly donating the refunded money to Parkinson’s research and other charities. “This makes me smile. Thank you. Thank to you everyone for your outpouring of love and support. It makes a difference,” Diamond wrote on Twitter. His wife, Katie, also wrote, “I’ve received a bunch of messages from people in Aus &...
Pearl Jam will embark on a short tour this summer, pairing their “Home Shows” in Seattle with “Away Shows” in Missoula, Montana, Chicago and Boston. Pearl Jam will play Washington-Grizzly Stadium in Missoula August 13th, after which they’ll hit Wrigley Field in Chicago for two concerts, August 18th and 20th. The band will close their quick trek with another two-night stand at Fenway Park in Boston, September 2nd and 4th. Fans can register for access to tickets through Ticketmaster’s Verified...
At an emotional New York press conference Wednesday, Elton John announced that he will retire from the road after a lengthy farewell tour. “I’m not going to be touring anymore,” he told moderator Anderson Cooper at New York’s Gotham Hall. “I’m not going to be touring and traveling the world. My priorities have changed. I have young children.” Before he finishes, however, he will spend three years on the road saying goodbye to his fans with a 300-date tour he’s...
Pearl Jam’s Jeff Ament, Mastodon’s Troy Sanders and the Kills’ Alison Mosshart are among the musicians that will auction off their artwork to raise money for a Los Angeles children’s learning center. No Doubt’s Tony Kanal, Queens of the Stone Age guitarist Troy Van Leeuwen, artist Shepard Fairey and tattoo artist Kat Von D will also provide pieces to the charity at auction, taking place February 8th at Smile + Wonder, a therapy center and preschool founded by At the...
Lily Allen confronts teenage wildness and adult maturity in her nostalgic video for “Trigger Bang,” the lead single from the singer’s upcoming fourth LP, No Shame. The clip opens with the vignette of a young man hanging out on a street corner – which appears to be a flashback of sorts for guest rapper Giggs. The visual follows a young woman as she drinks with friends in a field, at a party and in the backseat of a car. A...
This time every year, as the Grammys loom on the horizon, we all try to second-guess the Recording Academy, hoping against hope that the best artists (or at least our favorites) will get to take something home from the big ceremony. Once again, we’ve weighed the evidence and predicted who will be victorious, while also suggesting who should win and who should be angry they weren’t This article originally appeared on www.rollingstone.com: Grammy Predictions 2018: Who Will Win, Who Should...
Modest Mouse will return to the road this spring with another tour in support of the band’s 2015 album Strangers to Ourselves. Isaac Brock and company’s 25-date trek opens April 18th in This article originally appeared on www.rollingstone.com: Modest Mouse Set Spring U.S....
Just south of Blackshear, Georgia, down a bumpy dirt road, the Moccasin Creek Off-Road Park spreads across 500 acres of wooded countryside. On a Thursday in late September, RVs, pickup trucks and trailers loaded with all manner of all-terrain vehicles wait to enter the park for the sixth annual Lactember Fest, quite possibly the world’s biggest celebration of country rap. Nearly 7,000 This article originally appeared on www.rollingstone.com: Rhymes From the Backwoods: The Rise of Country...
The big story of the 2018 Grammys? The ceremony is finally getting serious about hip-hop. The awards have always had a strange history with rap, going back to the Eighties, when the voters were convinced (along with most of the music industry) that all this rap stuff the kids were into was a fad. For years, hip-hop artists were allowed to play but not to take home trophies. But this year, all This article originally appeared on www.rollingstone.com: Rap’s Odd...
Salvador Ochoa “Sup’ Sumner,” says the Jamaican-American dancehall-reggae star Shaggy, as he emerges from the elevator at New York’s Sear Sound studios and greets the bass player he’s been working with on a new album. This particular Sumner – also a singer and songwriter whose real first name is Gordon – is much better known by the nickname he’s employed since he formed the Police four decades ago: Sting. He and Shaggy are in Manhattan – where Sting lives and...
Lil Wayne unleashed a relentless new song, “Big Bad Wolf,” set to appear on his upcoming mixtape, Dedication 6 Reloaded. The track finds Wayne delivering a breathless and dextrous performance over a barebones beat of snappy drums and resounding bass hits. Weezy starts at a steady pace and builds until he reaches a spitfire stream-of-consciousness, unleashing punchlines like, “Sound like a symphony or opera, too though/ Hittin’ some new notes/ And I am the maestro and you just a typo/...
The Voidz, the side project of Strokes frontman Julian Casablancas, unveiled an infectious new track, “Leave It In My Dreams.” The song is anchored by a disco-tinged groove comprised of layers of spindly guitars and keys that balance pop with deft forays into the surreal. Casablancas presides over this engrossing mix with his quintessential disaffected drawl, tossing out unexpected vocal turns as well as irresistible hooks like, “Trying to wake so early/ I get up in the morning, it just hurts.”...
As arguably the biggest artist of the post-Kanye era, Drake has exerted a transformative influence on how pop music works, what it does, how it can matter. Hip-hop used to be all about being hard; he opened it up to softness. It used to obsess over regional purity; he’s helped it feel more global. Sometimes Drake flaunts his casual disregard for conventions as a matter of course, like calling his last album, More Life, a “playlist,” cleverly suggesting the record...
For the past 15 years, Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood has enjoyed another professional life as a film composer. Now, a decade after the Academy disqualified his score for There Will Be Blood because it incorporated previous music he’d written in it, he has become an Oscar nominee for the lushly orchestral, romantic score he contributed to Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Phantom Thread. Despite the acknowledgement, the prospect of winning an Oscar doesn’t totally bowl him over. “ not sure about...
