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Billboard Women in Music 2025
JSM Networking Nights could change the direction of your career. The music networking event is a place for professionals and experts to mingle, and for emerging newcomers to get to know fellow contemporaries and creatives. The goal: to break down barriers of the music industry, share ideas, thoughts and contacts on the way to developing new relationships.
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Helmed by industry legend John Saunderson (Notting Hill Music, Head of Creative), the first event was held in 2013 to help fill the gap for young musicians looking to connect. The first event, Saunderson says, started with just 70 people in the Hillgate pub in Notting Hill; it soon moved to industry hub Tileyard, then legendary venue Koko where a number of huge names have performed. Now in its 12th year and at the new home of 26 Leake Street near Waterloo, up to 1500 professionals congregate for free live music and networking.
As the spring edition of JSM Networking Nights approaches on April 14 – and with the final batch of tickets available here – Saunderson takes Billboard U.K. through the top tips for how newcomers can make the most of each night.
Get down early
Real ones get down early. Whether that’s at your mate’s show, a local band you want to support, or just get a good spot, there’s no need to hold back and not fill the room. Not only that, but you’ll get to make the most out of the full evening and make as many connections as you can. And why go to a JSM Music Night if not to get fully stuck in? Attendees all head down for the same reason, to meet and network with like-minded people. Don’t be afraid to tap someone on the shoulder and ask what someone does for a living; you never know unless you ask.
Be open-minded
JSM Networking Nights attract a vast array of industry folk, potentially from industries you may not have considered before. Figures from record labels, publishers, managers, agents, promoters lawyers, finance and media as well as artists, producers and songwriters all head down to these events to attain fresh knowledge and connect. Be open to meeting not just new people, but from sectors that you might not have considered connecting with; they may just help you along your journey without you even realising.
26 Leake Street
Gary Thomas KYPA
Come prepared
Whilst you don’t need to bring a scripted monologue, having a good idea of what your story is, some of your key achievements and what you’re looking for to be able to take the next step can only be a good thing. Don’t be afraid to tell people about yourself – they’re also at the event to meet new people and hear new stories and to help. We’re all in the same boat.
Set some goals
If you’re particularly looking for advice from a certain area, consider setting yourself a goal to speak to an ideal amount of people. Perhaps if you want to connect with songwriters, aim to give your details or card to people in that area throughout the night. It may well push you out of your comfort zone, and convince you to connect with new people you may not have met otherwise. When you come away from the event, you’ll be able to look back with some actionable plans.
John Saunderson (Head of Creative, Notting Hill Music). Sir Harry Cowell (Raiding the Rock Vault, Las Vegas). Rob Hallett (Robomagic). Rusty Egan (80’s Legend) Bruce Elliot Smith (Grammy winning producer)
Gary Thomas KYPA
Listen to people
Look, this may sound obvious – but no-one likes a self-involved chatterbox. Feel confident in yourself and to tell your story, but also listen to other people and consider giving advice or comments where you feel comfortable contributing. JSM Networking Nights is about the exchange of ideas and advice, and this could be your chance to hear something new that you might not have considered prior. You just need to keep an open mind and open ears.
Consider applying to play live
JSM Networking Nights provides a platform for live bands to play live on the night via the Apply to Play initiative. Gavin Barnard of Amplead – the night’s long-term sponsor – says that they receive hundreds of applicants to perform live on the night, and that he’s already whittled down the upcoming Spring event from 290 applicants down to 9 on the night, with a further 20 on standby. “This gives them a unique opportunity to perform on the night,” Barnard says. “Who knows who is watching: a manager, label, publisher, agent, promoter, a blogger or influencer?”
Billboard Women in Music 2025
In 1986, Simone Bouyer worked a day job in Chicago at the advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather while painting in her spare time. “I was having a problem getting my art shown,” she recalls. Bouyer was Black and queer, and “there was nowhere we could look in popular culture and see our experiences reflected,” she says. “So we thought, ‘Let’s do it ourselves,’” — and launched the Holsum Roc Gallery with Stephanie Coleman.
Perhaps unexpectedly, Bouyer was soon exploring a new medium: magazines. “A lot of creative people” visited Wholesome Roc, including Robert Ford, an assistant manager at Rose Records and amateur DJ, whom Coleman describes as “a big magnet for writers and fashionistas and musicians.” When Ford subsequently started an interconnected series of zines, Bouyer and Coleman worked on one of the publications, Thing, which ran for 10 issues from 1989 to 1993.
“It was campy, Black, and gay,” Coleman says, and it ranged across the arts, culture, fashion, and activism. Reissued in March by the Brooklyn-based non-profit Primary Information — which is selling copies online — the magazine also captured the early days of house music in Chicago.
The city was a hotbed for the fledgling genre at the time. “When we weren’t doing the zine or running the gallery, we were out dancing,” Bouyer notes. By osmosis, “house culture was a big part of Thing magazine,” according to Terry Martin, who contributed photos to the publication and worked on another short-lived, house-focused publication titled Cross Fade with Ford.
“We were in the middle of this history forming around house culture — it was blowing up in Chicago at the time,” Martin continues. Ford “knew music inside and out. It is really a thread that runs through the entire series.” (His co-editors were Trent Adkins and Lawrence D. Warren.)
Even as DJs and producers created house history in real time through riveting sets and thrilling new 12-inch singles, Thing shows that debates about the essence of the genre — and its direction — were already raging. In the second issue of the magazine, the producer Riley Evans dismisses “this ‘new house’ era.”
The sound he fell in love with was full of “fifteen minute songs with constantly changing themes and motifs.” But by April 1990 — long before the creation of many songs that are thought of as house classics today — he was put off by the repetition he was hearing in new records. “Music shouldn’t just be the same thing over and over,” Evans complained.
For Evans, the work of Larry Heard, another Chicago producer, was the exception that proved the rule. “It’s what I’ve always thought real new house music should be,” Evans says. “He took it to that next phase; he gave us what it used to be.” (Heard and other Chicago stalwarts, including Derrick Carter and Mark Farina, contributed top 10 lists to Thing.)
Thing, and later Cross Fade, fought to memorialize the origins of house and resist its commodification. Along with the Evans interview, the second issue of the magazine contained a House Top 100 ranking full of 1970s disco and early 1980s boogie, singles recorded in Philadelphia (Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes’ “Bad Luck”) and New York (Unlimited Touch’s “In the Middle”). At No. 19 on Thing‘s list: Gwen McCrae’s 1981 single “Funky Sensation,” a scorching groove but one that’s far slower, around 100 beats per minute, than what’s typically thought of house music today — usually 120 b.p.m. and up.
Thing‘s top 100 emphasizes a dissonance at the core of house. Few genres have as wide a gulf between their origins — “house music culture came out of Black and gay underground clubs,” Martin says — and their mainstream conception: In the case of house, typically pounding, programmed music made largely by European dudes. (Thing was not interested in the latter.)
In a phone interview, Martin repeats a story that’s somehow both canonical yet still not as widely known as it should be: “The term ‘house music’ was coined to capture the stuff Frankie Knuckles was playing at [a Chicago club called] The Warehouse,” Martin says. “That was more eclectic than what most people would consider ‘house music’ [today].” (Coleman remembers Knuckles, a prodigious DJ as well as a gifted producer, stopping by the gallery on occasion.)
In Martin’s view, Knuckles and other DJs playing and producing around Chicago — along with like-minded contemporaries in cities like New York, Detroit, and Newark — “were changing the culture and being erased from the culture at the same time.” (When one of those New Yorkers, Louie Vega, came to DJ in Chicago in the summer of 1993, Thing reviewed his set, singling out his mix of MFSB’s “Love Is the Message,” a Philadelphia disco classic, for special praise: “Yes, we’ve heard it all before, but the way he dropped it did feel like the sky coming down.”)
Martin’s point was made explicitly in the November, 1992 issue of Cross Fade, which lamented that, “as Chicago-based labels like Trax and DJ International became relatively successful… Major-label record executives took notice and began to rampantly exploit and misuse the term in an attempt to cash in on this ‘new’ sound.”
Even as Thing grappled with weighty issues in dance music, it also cracked wise about the genre. One issue offered a multiple-choice quiz for prospective DJs: “You’re in the booth and you have to pee and get a drink. Which record is long enough?” It’s a trick question; all four of the choices are lengthy.
Funniest of all is a fake board game called “House Hayride” — sort of a club kids’ version of Monopoly. Players roll dice to move around the board while trying to avoid a series of dancefloor-clearing, night-ruining outcomes: “Whoops, you’re not on the guest list” (move back three), “Blown speaker!” (back one) and “Buy the Soul II Soul CD at $16.00, only to find that ‘Back to Life’ is not really on there!” (back three).
While the initial issues of Thing were chock full of “music and wild stories and all types of creativity,” as Bouyer puts it, Ford soon changed direction. “Once Robert discovered he had AIDS, he started to focus really on telling those stories in Thing,” she says. “It was quite brave, because nobody was doing that at the time again.”
Ford died in 1994, and his collaborators say it was impossible to imagine carrying on his zines without him. But more than two decades later, Thing started to percolate again in the art world — as the subject of an essay in Artforum, then in a 2021 exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago, Subscribe: Artists and Alternative Magazines, 1970-1995, and at the Brooklyn Museum in Copy Machine Manifesto: Artists Who Make Zines two years later. “We thought Thing was just a one-off,” Bouyer says. “But then interest continued; people were still into the whole idea of zines.”
Thing also caught the attention of Primary Information. “As a publisher, we focus on amplifying histories that are under the surface and archival media that is vital to our contemporary lives, yet out of reach for the average person,” says James Hoff, the organization’s co-founder and executive editor. He calls publishing Thing “a no-brainer.”
Now, with the zine’s reissue, Bouyer hopes a new generation will be curious enough to dig into its history. “Other music comes and goes,” she says. “House music is still pretty exciting.”
03/31/2025
For International Transgender Day of Visibility, Billboard asked trans and nonbinary stars about how they’re moving two steps forward while political progress takes one step back.
03/31/2025
You can bracket phases in dearALICE’s early career by their hairstyles and outfit choices. When the British K-pop boy band – comprising Blaise Noon, Dexter Greenwood, Olly Quinn, James Sharp and Reese Carter – first appeared on screens last year as part of the BBC documentary Made in Korea: The K-Pop Experience, the members each had next to no knowledge of the dizzying world of K-pop idol training they were about to step into.
We meet the boys at the start of episode one of the series, all baggy, neutral-colored clothing and skin fades; by the end of the six-part series, they’re sporting bleached buzzcuts, curtain bangs, and gravity-defying curls, visibly more confident in themselves and their image. The stylishly shot show follows the group as the five members undergo 100 days of dance and vocal bootcamp in Seoul, South Korea, with the public given a selective peek at the rigours and rewards of this process. Viewers watch the boys, who all grew up in England, also enjoy the country’s nightlife offerings and its diverse cuisine (their moniker was chosen after visiting a restaurant in Itaewon).
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Having been selected from a nationwide casting call, the five-piece trained under a world-beating management team led by Hee Jun Yoon, a director at SM Entertainment, the agency responsible for fostering the careers of many K-pop superstars including Aespa and Red Velvet. To sign dearALICE, they partnered with Kakao Entertainment, US label Gamma and British production company Moon&Back Media with the intention of showing “how cultural diversity drives artistic evolution and creative exchanges,” as the latter’s CAO, Chris Sungsu Lee, tells Billboard U.K.
In the past, achieving fame as a K-pop star has involved years of intensive fitness programmes, with a number of managers previously coming under fire for being exploitative of talent. Such practices led to the widespread strengthening of labour protections for performers last year, according to a report from Yonhap News Agency. SM’s own website makes a subtle nod to previous critique of the industry’s methods by stating its commitment to “setting the gold standard for responsible management in the industry.”
What Made in Korea sought to do, however, was to not offer analysis into the improvements made in the sector, but rather pique the curiosity of an international audience around a model that has generated dozens of influential acts. Previously, non-Korean hopefuls have faced the training machine – BLACKPINK, for example, features members born in New Zealand and Thailand – but the series brought a British group to the forefront for the first time.
“What we’re doing has never previously been done before,” says Noon, speaking over Zoom from a south London rehearsal space. “There’s no rulebook to follow, so we’re discovering all of this ourselves. We’ve been given such a wide exposure, so that we can grasp and take in what we need to help create what dearALICE is becoming, which is a fusion of cultures.”
By taking the super-slick choreography and marketing elements from K-Pop and mashing it with early-‘00s British sounds, dearALICE are arguably creating one of the most compelling fantasy worlds in contemporary pop music. They are fortifying this approach by blowing up their respective lives in order to be the group: diving headfirst into an entirely new way of life and invigorating the boy band model by injecting each calculated move they make with a dose of genuine-seeming curiosity.
They arrive at a time where the prominence of K-pop continues to grow rapidly in the U.K. market. In July, Stray Kids will take over the 65,000-capacity Tottenham Stadium, while SM Entertainment is bringing 14 acts to Twickenham Stadium, on the other side of the British capital, for a mega show in celebration of the firm’s 30th anniversary the month prior (including dearALICE). Last year, Seventeen became the first-ever K-pop act to perform on the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury.
dearALICE have quickly whipped up a fervent following of their own, having recently hosted a meet and greet event at K-lifestyle hotspot at Sokollab in central London. Fans in Atlanta have rallied together to fund electronic billboards in support of the group, while it is also garnering hundreds of thousands of followers across platforms like TikTok and WeVerse.
The question of whether a homegrown act with a major K-pop influence can cross over, and truly take root, in the notoriously discerning British mainstream is more complex. At present, country music and Stateside stars such as Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan continue to rule the roost on the U.K. charts. Not that the boys are too phased by the pressures that lay ahead just yet: “We want to show the world that there is space for a different sort of boy band,” affirms Quinn.
Last month, dearALICE launched on the global stage with “Ariana,” a feisty, neon-hued number that depicts “a guy in a relationship with a girl who’s totally in love with social media,” explains Greenwood. Though their listenership does not belong to any one age group or gender, boy bands have historically loved very specifically, with songs about gently pursuing a girl. With a titular nod to a modern pop icon, “Ariana” flips this precedent, posing questions about all-consuming celebrity obsession and the omnipresence of stan culture in the online world.“The decision to debut dearALICE with this track was a strategic choice to effectively showcase the group’s identity and establish a distinctive presence in the competitive global K-pop market,” explains Sungsu Lee. Its accompanying music video sees the group “showcase their British roots proudly, echoing aesthetics that have been so successful in taking Brit music global,” adds Ben Cook, President of Gamma (UK & Europe).
Union Jack paraphernalia, expansive city vistas, the Tube: Any studious pop fan would be quick to make comparisons between the “Ariana” video and One Direction’s Up All Night era, which was characterized by images of vintage Routemasters and tonal red and white palettes. In the case of dearALICE, images of London are being used to “define them as a Western act,” says Cook, rather than emulate the one-time aesthetic of their most obvious comparison point.
There’s an element, perhaps, to dearALICE’s story about what it means to get boxed in by outside perceptions, and the tenacity needed to flourish in the face of misunderstanding. A cursory scroll through pop-adjacent Reddit forums will bring up lengthy discourse related to the lack of successful boy bands in the past decade. Recent auditions for Simon Cowell’s planned Netflix series were met with a poor turnout, while the passing of One Direction’s Liam Payne last October has brought questions around the mental health and safety of young performers into a renewed focus.
Beyond the wider cultural conversations around the future of the boy band, dearALICE and their team have chosen to reckon with taking a slow burn approach to their output. There was a six-month gap between the broadcast of Made In Korea and “Ariana” being unveiled – although the show’s OST landed in November, topping the U.K.’s Soundtrack Album Chart – leaving some fans wondering if their momentum was at risk of faltering.
Cook says that this was an intentional move, in order to break away from the typically rapid release schedule in K-pop, which can involve frequent comebacks for ‘rookie’ acts, often with new EPs or singles released every few months. “dearALICE are just starting their journey,” he says. “To make amazing music, they need to do things the right way, be true to themselves, really love what they’re doing, and be taken care of. That’s how great art is created.”
He continues: “I appreciate that in the K-pop world, people might expect a new group to follow a certain format or plan. But dearALICE are a bit different. Even though they had incredible K-pop training from the expert SM team in Seoul, they are a Western group. So, we’re helping them grow like Western artists do, which means we’re trying new things and making their own path. They love K-pop and are very influenced by the artform, but don’t purport to be a K-pop band.”
In January, dearALICE took to the stage at SMTown Live in Seoul, alongside scene-leading names including RIIZE and Hyoyeon of Girls’ Generation. Performing in front of 25,000 ticketholders, the set saw the group tightly finesse the relentless choreography it had previously struggled with in the early days of Made In Korea, offering a glimpse of the pristine pop phenomenon they are striving towards becoming in the future.
“The biggest breakthrough we’ve had was proving to ourselves that we could perform on that stage,” Quinn recalls. “It was the ultimate test for us. We felt a lot of responsibility to not mess up in front of that many people, but it really showed [the synergy] we have as a team.”For dearALICE, more new music and spontaneous fan events await in the pipeline as they continue to forge their own unique path in the pop arena. What they’ll make of their mission is an open, vastly exciting question, and it won’t have a simple answer.
Who is Amir “Aura” Khan?
That’s the question everyone has been asking as McNeese State’s Men’s Basketball student manager has been taking March Madness and the Internet by storm with his tunnel walkouts.
Before each game, Aura leads McNeese State into battle, as he wraps a boombox around his neck that blasts various rap songs from rappers like Kodak Black and NBA Youngboy, and walks the Cowboys from the locker room, through the arena tunnel, and onto the basketball court.
The guy has personality as well, and takes his role very seriously. He once said, “If they kept manager stats for rebounding and wiping up wet spots on the court, I’d put up Wilt Chamberlain numbers.”
And look how he keeps himself in shape to be the best team manager in the nation.
The guys is a maniac, telling Sporting News that his fast mopping skills are what separates him from the field. “My quickness,” he told the outlet. “As soon as a player gets down, I’m running towards the wet spot, I’m diving on the floor for everyone, wiping up as quick as I can, but also making sure I get it. [Then] getting up as fast as possible and getting ready for the next one.”
His aura has earned him not only a lifelong nickname, but it’s earned him some paper. Khan is the first student manager to have NIL (Name, Image, and Likeness) deals, and he has them with TickPick, Insomnia Cookies and Buffalo Wild Wings.
Amir Khan, you are officially a pioneer. In the wildest couple of weeks anyone could have, you’ve stayed so humble & true to yourself. First-ever college student manager to ink a NIL deal… 3 deals… all with global brands… in a week! Keep going. You deserve it all✊@amirk_23 pic.twitter.com/hvEernU05Y— Reed Vial (@reed_vial3) March 16, 2025
Here he is letting everyone know what time it is like Shedeur Sanders.
He even has the cheerleader squad wearing socks with his face on them.
The god even takes time to give out some fan love.
If you’re still not convinced, check out this list I put together of some of his best rap moments this season.
I gotta warn you, though. The aura is contagious.
Kodak Black, “No Flockin’”
Curren$y has built a nice life for himself.
The New Orleans rapper, credited with popularizing “lifestyle rap,” is back with Harry Fraud to give fans another glimpse into a day in the life. And while he’s often seen as the godfather of that certain style of rap, he sees himself more as someone who helped give it a name.
“I’m not the founder of lifestyle rap,” he tells Billboard over Zoom. “It’s a [sub]-genre that I think, through me talking about it, maybe helped name that style — and maybe helped cultivate a space for people who wanted to make music but didn’t want to make a certain type of music in order to be successful.”
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Rapping about all the fly s–t you do while smoking the best weed money can buy wasn’t a novel idea when artists like Spitta and his righthand man Wiz Khalifa came along. However, they were able to show a generation of rappers that they can become successful during an era when the rap industry was in a state of flux. He’s been able to build an empire by making the music that he wants to make for the audience he wants to make it for, and his fans have rewarded him by supporting everything he does — whether it’s copping Jet Life merch, buying tickets to his live shows, or interacting with his Starting Line Hobbies page.
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The 12-track tape, Never Catch Us, boasts features from up and comer Premo Rice, an old friend in Wiz, as well as Griselda’s Conway the Machine and Rome Streetz, the unique Bruiser Wolf, Fendi P, Dave East, Jay Worthy and DRAM. He and Harry even somehow managed to get Babyface Ray, Styles P and 03 Greedo on the same track.
We talked with Curren$y about how all those tracks came together, plus his car collection, his favorite strains and a whole lot more. Check out our conversation below.
Where you at? In the crib in New Orleans?
I’m outside in the driveway just tending to vehicles. I got the ’64 running. I’m waiting on my homeboy to come do some s—t to the drive shaft for me, I’m about to charge the batteries on the ’77. I’m washing this [Corvette] C8 then I’ma wash this little Japanese BRABUS Benz. I’m just having a driveway day.
You said that Benz is Japanese?
Yeah, this is a BRABUS B6. This car thru and thru is from Japan. See all the markers and s—t.
What’s the difference? It has some different features and s—t?
Gonna pop the hood on this joint and let you see what’s going on, then the case can rest. Nothing say Mercedes, everything all BRABUS’d out. This the only B6 in the in the country. It’s a 1999.
I got this, maybe, like a month ago they got here a month ago, my homeboy Vico from the Patina Collective. He has the biggest Mercedes Benz collection in the world. He has the Sultan of Brunei’s car. He got Princess Diana’s car.
When he wants to sell that Princess Diana whip, you gotta cop that. Imagine getting that s—t just to be able to rap about having Princess Diana’s limo.
You know what? If I got it, bro, I would gift it to someone who I think will hold it down. If I get it, it’s getting smoked in, there’s gonna be french fries in the seats, because of my son Cruz. Imma live with it, so I’ll give it to somebody who going to put it away. I’ll get it for Harry Fraud. I’ll give it to bro.
This is like your eighth, ninth, 10th project with Harry?
I don’t know. I mean it was Cigarette Boats. And then… Yeah, dude, you right. Eight, nine, 10, 11, it’s somewhere around there. You right. It’s probably 10, 11, 12, 13 and then every time we drop one, we do a deluxe. One time we did two. We did The Marina then we did The Director’s Cut, and then we came back with another one within two weeks. And this one here, there’s songs that we didn’t put on this one, so we already set up to drop again immediately. So, if everybody responds how we think they will, we’ll just hurry up and just give it to them and strike while the iron’s hot.
Although you still drop pretty consistently, is it fair to say — and maybe it’s your chemistry with Harry Fraud — but that this felt like vintage Spitta?
That’s exactly what happened, bro. You just go into a different mental space when you deal with certain people — and anytime I work with Harry Fraud, I remember the first time that we ever worked, and that was in the middle of me getting ready to put out Weekend at Burnie’s. And I had just did a little move with with Atlantic and Warner, so my bread was changing a little bit. I was in a different space when we lined up, so I approached those beats with all this new money I had just grabbed. I had a different mindset, and I was attacking s—t.
So, now every time we line up, I feel the same way. I think that’s why I just bought those cars. That’s the BRABUS Benz out there and that yellow 355 Ferrari. Ferrari mode is always Harry Fraud. Whenever I’m f—kin’ around like that. That’s me and bro hangin’.
I peeped that canary yellow Ferrari. What year is that?
Yeah, yeah. 355 F1. It’s a ’99. I wanted that before I got the blue one. That was the one I always wanted, but my manager and s—t — when I bought my Spider, the first one, they was like, “Nah, you can’t get that old ass Ferrari.” It got the flip up lights and s—t. That’s my era. I grew up on Miami Vice. That’s the stuff I want.
I was going to ask about Miami Vice, because of the speed boat on the album artwork.
What I liked most about the show is whenever Crockett would get lost, whenever he would go undercover. Sometimes — I don’t know if he had a mental problem — his character would get lost into being a drug dealer too long, like, “Sonny, you’re still a cop!” They have to wake him up. But every time he’s lost, that motherf—ker lived the life. 3:00 a.m. Ferrari rides. 5:00 a.m. speedboat rides.
Miami Vice never would really show the the bad guys and per se, living large, too much for us to see it and romanticize it — they would make it more about the police work. But whenever Crockett would get lost on the job, he had access to so much, it was just cool to see.
Yeah, it’s funny because my pops used to build model cars, and he used to get mad at me because I always played with the white Testarossa and break it all the time.
You can’t roll them around, man, it’s art. [Laughs.]
Talk about your Starting Line Hobbies Instagram page.
I had been building model cars forever, but when we couldn’t go nowhere during the pandemic, I was like, I ought to figure out what else I could do. I started taking pictures of the ones I was building, and people just kept asking me where I got them from. So I was like, I might as well open an account with the people who I buy the models from, and start a business to sell them to people who wanted to build them because people didn’t really know where to get that kind of stuff from.
That like an art that has kind of died out. When I was little, that stuff was in stores. Used to go in the toy section, get models, paint. You can only find all that online now — or you gotta go to a mom-and-pop hobby shop that’s still holding on.
You also race diecast cars on a track on that page.
It’s a racing league. People who follow it, register and I post all the Hot Wheels you could pick. When I post the season, I do a draft with the cars that are available and I don’t open them beforehand, so nobody knows if they’re fast or not. So you draft your car, name it, and then I @ you every time we get ready to race. I go on Live or I go on Twitch and race them. I’ve been doing that since the pandemic, and that s—t fun as hell.
You be chillin’, man. You got your formula figured out. You make your music, you do your shows.
Yep, and just use that money to keep me in the house. My whole plan was always to make my surroundings comfortable enough to where I didn’t want to leave, because I live in a dangerous city. People always like, “D–n, bro, why you still live here? Why don’t you move? Blah, blah, blah.” But as long as you all you watch how you move around, you’re not gonna make it easy for nobody.
Would you ever get an electric car?
Oh, hell nah. It’s against everything that I stand for. All the electric cars I have are literally right here on this table. I got lowriders. I got a few on-road sports cars, and I got some dirt-track trucks. I built the dirt track around my house. I got an RC track outside, like blazed right through the middle of my lawn. Don’t tell the HOA.
Let’s get back to the tape. You were saying that you were in the zone. So, how did you and Harry work on this? Was it over email? Did you guys link up?
We didn’t link up this time, but we just both knew it was time to do it, and with that urgency, we worked quicker than if we would’ve, pulled up on each other. If I would’ve flown out there, it had been two or three days of just bulls—ting and eating cheeseburgers and just smoking and possibly not even pulling up to the studio.
It was better this way and faster this way — because that’s actually my homeboy, so when we link up, I might not want to work. I might just want to download all of the Mortal Kombat fatalities and do each character’s fatality on the first Mortal Kombat together. Like, “Can we do that today instead of going through the beats?” I feel like it’s equally as productive, because it makes us that much closer.
Yeah, I had interviewed him and Boldy James when they dropped their album and he said that he likes to link up with people in person, but that with you it really didn’t matter, because the chemistry was already there.
It’s actually… I like to do that because with him, I’ll do all the records and then I won’t send them. Like, I’ll put a little clip on Instagram, and he’ll realize I use this beat or that beat. I’m kind of unprofessional with bro, because I’ll record nine records and send him two, and then a week or later I’ll send him two more. I just have so many records. After this project was turned in, I had forgotten about like seven more records. I was like, “Is it too late? Can we add them?” We decided to hold them for part two.
How did the the features come together? The one that surprised me the most was the track with Babyface Ray, Styles P and 03 Greedo.
When I heard that beat, I was just gonna make a verse and a hook. Usually, that’s what I do anyway, if I don’t put somebody else on a song. But I heard all of my homeboys on it in my head. I was like, “Damn bro, go off on this b—ch, but then down the big homie will go off. but damn then dude’ll go off.” So, I was like, “F—k it, just send it to everyone.” And everybody sent their s—t back in a day. Some of them, I sent them done already. Like, “Yo, I put bro on here.”
I’m lucky enough to have friends in the industry. I have people who, if I reach out, they lend a hand instantly. Those are the people that I work with. The first time that me and Rome worked, he flew out here. There’s no way I woulda came back again without putting bro down.
I feel like to a lot of the younger underground, indie guys, you’re the OG now. You help make the blueprint to being independent in the Internet age streaming age.
Motherf—ker’s saw me get all of the s—t that the other motherf—kers have who kind of take the bait or kind of go through the s—t that we don’t want to go through [don’t get to]. You could still have that s—t and stay yourself. And a lot of people would tip they hat to me for — not necessarily for showing them it could be done, but adding reassurance to the thought that they already had, because they already had to be thinking that too. They had that mindset already. Here’s another example of somebody who was thinking that way and turned it into what they wanted to.
Would you ever sign to a major again?
I am a major. I’d sign to the Pelicans. I would do that, but that’s it. [Laughs.]
What advice would you give to someone that wants to be a rapper today? What are the pros and cons of being independent?
You’re gonna have to trust someone in a game where you can’t trust nobody. So, it’s damned if you do, damned if you don’t. You can handle it all yourself, but then it can only grow to a certain level. You only got two arms, so you’re going to have to entrust some homies, so you gotta keep your circle tight.
And as much as you can do for free, you do it. You know, as far as the resources and the people you got around you. If you know somebody who knows how to work the camera, he might not shoot at the quality of what you need, but grow with him. One: you put one of your homies in motion with a gig, and two: you got a weapon at your disposal every time you need to film, so you could put out as much content as you want.
Content is king. People want to see you brush your teeth. They don’t necessarily want to hear the music. They want to know how many backflips you could do. I show them my Hot Wheel wall. I’m trying to get the first motherf—ker with a million Hot Wheels. They’re like, “Yo, let’s stream it, he needs these dollars.”
This generation of independent artists figured out how to tap in with the fans. We had to figure out what you could do to impact people’s lives outside of the music. And you can also provide some dope merch like a jacket to wear. They can go to a game with a jacket and people will know what artists they represent, who they like. Now you know something about them. Like, if a girl shows up with a Jet Life jacket, you can probably assume that she knows her way around the shoe store. She probably doesn’t smoke trash. Don’t try to pass her no bum weed. Now you know what you’re dealing with.
What you got planned for 420?
I’m on the road, man, my tour starts two days before 420. You know who you can’t find for 420? Me, Wiz, Devin the Dude, Cypress Hill, Smoke DZA. That’s a blessing to know that if we ever fell off and had to survive on only one check, you know one that’s guaranteed to come every year. [Laughs.]
Even if you’re working, do you have a ritual on 420?
Nah, I would have one if I didn’t smoke regularly, if it wasn’t what I did with everything I do. I would have a special 420 blanket with a neck hole cut out of it, so I could just put it on and sit in a Morocco room with pillows all over the floor and watch Cheech and Chong movies. That’s just the life anyway.
Do you have a favorite stoner movie?
I like Nice Dreams, because the opening sequence has some lowriders coming over the hill, so I dug that. I really like [Cheech & Chong] movies because they had good cars in them.
How did you react when you watched Nice Dreams for the first time and seen Pee-Wee Herman coked up?
Bro, I don’t think people around me understood what we was getting. It was like jumping into a time machine. We not supposed to even get this? That’s what I’m going to do when I get done washing these cars. I know what I’m doing today. Also, as clichéd as it may be, Half Baked was amazing for a lot of reasons. Half Baked was good to me when I didn’t smoke weed. I had the VHS.
Do you have any favorite strains?
All of my own. Andretti OG, Grape Jelly, Bourbon Street Brunch, Berry Beignet.
I haven’t tried any of those. Are they in dispensaries?
Yeah, in select ones. We’re kind of a boutique brand because we’re trying to keep it as true to form. What we managed to do was track down some of the genetics and growers from when weed was weed. You’re from the time, so you was there when Sour Diesel hit. It’s not like it died down, it’s just that other people began to grow and cut corners.
There’s so many different names now, you have to check which strains they were made from.
Absolutely, and that’s what I’m telling you. It’s like the coke or anything else, they stepping on it, they start f—king with the lights to make it look a certain way when it when it reaches a bud and sh—t, and it’s not real. And in a lot of the motherf—kers who do that don’t even smoke. It’s like when Bape got f—ked up and n—as became Bape dealers. They didn’t even wear the s—t, but they knew you wanted it. It’s like Pit Bull puppies, bro. The weed got f—ked up, just like the dogs got f—ked up. They start looking bad, breathing crazy. That’s what happened with the weed.
So, all we did was go back to those growers and let them do exactly what they were doing with the newest technology. Let us know what you would have in your dream grow, and what you would do, and then we provide it for ’em and we get the best s—t.
There’s an article came out last year about the dude who invented Sour Diesel. He made it legit now. He makes the original New York Sour Diesel, and he’s selling it to dispensaries.
And the other dude. You knew about Chemdawg [Greg Krzanowski]? Him too.
I’ve been seeing Chemdawg around too, so that makes sense. That’s the sh—t we used to read about in High Times.
Yeah, and they had to sit in the shadows to do interviews. They couldn’t be Berner (founder of Cookies). They wasn’t out at in Berner’s time. They couldn’t just stand in front of the sh—t and say, “I made this,” but they still have enough youth in their bones to grab some cash and see what’s going on in the industry. They’re legends to people like us who keep it 100 and know that these new strains aren’t necessarily new strains, it’s just people not keeping it funky with the genetics. We haven’t been alive long enough for a motherf—ker to have grew some unheard of s—t like come on, dawg. The Earth been making tomatoes from the beginning.
They inventing strains like they invented broccoli.
Come on, man, you got it, dude. But that’s what they’ll tell you.
I wanted to just get back to the cars a little bit more. How many do you have now? Are you over 40?
Yeah, it got out of hand. It’s not 50, though. I would know for sure if I had 50 cars. I’m around like 46 cars right now.
And you drive all of them? Do you have a rotation? Like you would do with sneakers.
I’ll just change the whole front of the house. I got eight of them at my house, and then my mom lives right across the street, and she got four of them in her driveway. She be driving them too — or does she have her own rotation? She got a rotation alright. She gets a new Benz every Christmas. That’s what she gets. She got lowriders in her driveway. She always thinks she’s gonna hit the switches with her leg, so she doesn’t really get in them. But, what I’ll do is, [I] have some of the homies to take cars back and forth to the warehouse.
You switch the rotation up depending on how you feeling.
How many movies did I watch? What era do I think it is? The newer cars are always from my management and my staff. They bought that Corvette C8 for my birthday. I had the first convertible C8 that existed. The one that they used for all the promo when they wasn’t selling it, that’s the car that I have. The Rolls Royce Cullinan is dope because you could just have somebody drive it. I got a Wraith, but I kind of felt like a d—k driving that motherf—ker to a f—king Walmart to go Hot Wheel hunting. I put the Wraith at the warehouse, because I look like an a—hole with two cars worth a million dollars.
How does it feel, though? To be able to cop and drive all these cars.
It feels like Grand Theft Auto, bro. I knew my life would be like this, because I felt too connected to that kind of s—t. I don’t know how to say it, but people have visions and ideas of what they life gonna be, and you gotta believe them, because they mean that s—t. The s—t is tangible. The s—t is not from Mars, you don’t have to go to f—king planet Saturn to get a f—king Lamborghini.
You mentioned that being around Cash Money early on helped you.
Hell yeah. Just seeing motherf—kers do that. from No Limit to Cash Money. There was game I picked up when I started moving with Dame Dash and them in New York, too. Listening to the stories he would tell me from the golden era. It’s like, “Damn, off rap, off making words rhyme, you were able to do this?”
You got Wiz on this project, and people always excited when you guys link up…
Yeah, man, because that’s my brother. We went from from zero to this. We both had record deals with majors and stepped away. Had people looking at us like we didn’t know what we were doing, telling us what they would have did if they had a record deal, and we still did our thing.
Have you been paying attention to his freestyles these last couple months?
Yeah, it’s good stuff. The work that he’s doing was actually beneficial to me, because I never changed. I never stopped. I always did this. And my bro had achieved mega stardom; things got to change, you gotta move a certain way, people kind of can’t just have access to your art that much, and things come into play, so I understand. But to then have a resurgence and kind of show that you ain’t going nowhere either is good.
And then it benefits me, because by me reaching out to collaborate — it’s nothing to us, because that’s what we do — but it’s everything to the people who grew up and put themselves together based on the music we was putting out. That’s what makes it count so much.
You guys ever plan on doing another tape together?
Yeah, man, we got enough records already. Between him and Larry [June], I got like 35 records.
People like to compare you to Larry too.
Yeah, that’s my man. We done did a gang of work together. We got an album worth of music too. I’m not the founder of lifestyle rap. It’s a [sub]-genre that I think, through me talking about it, maybe helped name that style, and maybe helped cultivate a space for people who wanted to make music but didn’t want to make a certain type of music in order to be successful. As long as they do it the right way, it’s good with me.
Max B is your favorite rapper…
Yeah, he’s supposed to be touching down in seven months.
Are you hoping to work with him when he comes home?
Yeah, man, no pressure. You know how people try to gatekeep music? What happened with me was, my listeners gatekept my music, because they didn’t want other people to be on it too. I didn’t gatekeep Max B’s music. I knew through promoting and telling people about it — they would love it — but what happens with me is, the higher-ups, they borrow from me a lot. I don’t get upset, but people who are further up in the game, they pay attention to what we do, and then they do it. They did that with [Max B] too. It’s like, “Yo, you didn’t even know Max B, bro.”
So, these people are going to be clamoring to collaborate with him — and you gotta let it happen, because they’re going to pay so much to do it, because they paying for the love and for that affiliation because they know they slept on Max. So, I want him to make all of that money. Get all that bread and then come f—k with me.
Do you have a favorite song or tape of his?
“Cake and Eat It Too.” That’s my favorite song. I will listen to that song from here to Houston.
Billy Corgan has spent over three decades reshaping alternative rock, carving out a legacy as bold and uncompromising as his music.
From the dreamy haze of Siamese Dream to the sprawling ambition of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness—a No. 1 Billboard 200 smash—his work plays like a fever-dream diary, each album a restless search for meaning in a world that refuses to stay still.
With The Magnificent Others, The Smashing Pumpkins frontman’s latest foray into long-form storytelling, Corgan channels that same restless curiosity into candid, unfiltered conversations with some of music’s most fascinating figures. Featuring legends like Diane Warren, Gene Simmons, Sharon Osbourne, Tom Morello and Wolfgang Van Halen, the podcast isn’t just a name-drop fest—it’s a deep dive into music’s untold stories.
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“It’s really not that different from how I am in my personal life,” Corgan tells Billboard. “I’ve been lucky enough through the years to talk to so many well-known and successful people, and so it’s not that different to what I would ask if I was just sitting around a dinner table.”
“Some people take umbrage with the fact that I insert myself or tell stories, but that’s just how I talk,” he continues. “I don’t do this professionally—I didn’t go to school for it. It’s not like I wrote for a fanzine for five years before jumping in. I went straight to the highest level, talking to some of the most famous people in the world.”
Fans have noticed the difference. “My favorite compliment was people writing me saying, ‘I haven’t heard an interview like that for Gene Simmons in 25 years.’”
His approach has led to moments that even surprise him. In a recent episode with Diane Warren, the legendary songwriter revealed that, after writing over 1,500 songs, her process is still entirely instinctual.
“I expected some kind of formula, but she just said, ‘I feel it. I’m looking for that song that makes the hair rise up on your arm,’” Corgan explains “It’s very similar to Rick Rubin—Rick will openly say, ‘I don’t know anything about recording. I only know what I’m attracted to and what makes me feel something.’
“So here are two people at the top of their field who don’t have an intellectual overlay to their work. They trust their instincts, and somehow that translates to the common public in a way that’s more universal than anything I’ve ever done. And that shocks me—like, how do you just roll out of bed and know what the right song is?”
For Corgan, these conversations aren’t just about craft—they’re about legacy. He’s spent his entire career pushing against the weight of his own past, sometimes at great personal cost.
“Celebrity culture basically influences the zeitgeist to the point where if you don’t play along, something’s wrong with you,” he reflects. What followed was a period of exile where he felt stripped of status and dismissed in ways that undermined his accomplishments.
“There was a period where I completely resisted nostalgia, and I was punished for it,” he admits. Punished in a way that was actually very cruel. Not only was I stripped of my celebrity or my status, I was sort of mocked. The best way I could explain it, if you and I were just sitting around a table, is they tried to take away from me the things that I actually did, right? It wasn’t enough that I wrote those songs and didn’t want to play them—it was like, ‘We’re not even sure he wrote those songs.’”
Eventually, he found peace with it. He realized that celebrating his past didn’t mean being trapped by it.
“I found some kind of balance in there, where I can play the songs that people want to hear—and by the way, I wrote them, so it doesn’t hurt me,” he says. “At the same time, I can balance it with new material. And once I found that balance in the last six, seven years, it’s been super positive energy around me, around the band, around the shows. So I feel very good that I made the right decision, because I do want people to have a good time.
“For every person that wants to talk about Siamese Dream, there’s just as many people that want to talk to me about the album that didn’t sell—because the album was good, it just didn’t sell,” he says. “But in the pop world, it’s sell or not sell. Sell or don’t exist. That’s a Faustian bargain.”
The fracturing of musical culture particularly fascinates him. Where The Smashing Pumpkins emerged in an era when alternative rock briefly became the mainstream – with Corgan appearing on magazine covers alongside other alternative figureheads – today’s landscape is infinitely more splintered.
“People use the term ‘digital ghetto,’ and I think what they mean is that things exist in a particular zip code digitally,” he explains. “You could drop a name that all your friends know as the hottest thing in the world, and your five neighbors would be like, ‘Who?’”
He contrasts this with his formative years, when cultural touchstones were truly universal. “I sat at tables in 1986 where grandma was debating Madonna. Because what Madonna did on MTV, everybody saw it. That’s not how it was in the ’80s or the ’90s. Everybody knew Madonna.”
“I don’t know if the pop stars of today, outside of maybe Taylor Swift,” he says, explaining, “Her future will probably look a lot like Madonna’s, in that it will have a very long tail, and they’ll follow her until the end. But for a lot of the rest of them? I don’t think we have any idea what’s going to happen.”
And, of course, there’s Britney. “I think it’s fair to call Britney the prototypical pop siren of the 21st century. Britney set the f—ing new template,” he declares.
For Corgan, his own legacy isn’t just a professional concern—it’s personal. He wants to make sure his children understand his place in the world.
“My son was surprised when I told him not everyone likes my music,” Corgan says, laughing. “I told him, ‘Look, it’s cool. Not everybody likes what Daddy does, but a lot of people do.’ And he looked at me and said, ‘Well, I think you’re the best.’”
“I want my son to understand my perspective of my musical and artistic life, so that when he encounters other people’s opinions of me, he’ll have formed his own version of it,” he explains.
But beyond sentimentality, he’s thinking about the long-term future of his work. “I want to make sure that if anything happens to me, my affairs are put in order in a way that my children cannot only benefit from my hard work but also know what to do with it,” he says.
“There’s at least 100 unreleased songs. And I think I’ve released 350 or so at this point. So understanding that those are valuable things—they have to be protected like works of art.”
At this point in his career, Corgan isn’t chasing approval or trying to rewrite the past. He’s found his balance—honoring the legacy he’s built while continuing to explore what’s next. Shortly after the conversation, he announced A Night of Mellon Collie and Infinite Sadness, a reimagining of the landmark album as an opera, set to debut at the Lyric Opera of Chicago on Nov. 21.
“People associate me so strongly with the Pumpkins,” he reflects. “It’s hard for them to imagine me apart from it.”
On Thursday, March 6, Hamilton Leithauser kicked off his annual residency at Cafe Carlyle, the intimate posh supper club known primarily for its Marcel Vertès murals, martinis and cabaret and jazz performances by Peter Cincotti, Jeff Goldblum, Sandra Bernhard and others. The residency, which The Walkmen frontman began as an against-the-grain lark — he skipped 2020 because of the pandemic — has grown into a hot ticket. This time around, Leithauser will perform 15 dates through March 29 (his most ever), and unveil some surprises along the way.
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Opening night took place on eve of the release of Leithauser’s new album, This Side of the Island, a hook-heavy pop-rock record that he co-produced with his wife Anna Stumpf (who also plays keyboards in the band), and an assist from his friend, The National’s Aaron Dessner. This Side of the Island is a more concise and conceptual effort, compared to his last full-length, 2020’s The Loves of Your Life, which is a masterpiece of musical storytelling. And initial chart results for the single, “Knockin’ Heart,” indicate the new music is resonating: The song is currently No. 16 on Adult Alternative Airplay chart for a second week — Leithauser’s highest peak yet on the chart. “Knockin’ Heart’ also debuted at No. 42 on Rock & Alternative Airplay, Leithauser’s first time on that chart.
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If the crowd’s response to Leithauser’s opening-night performance is any indication, “Knockin’ Heart” won’t be the only song from This Side of the Island to chart. Here were some of the evening’s highlights.
More New Songs (And They Didn’t Come Easy)
Leithauser previewed three new tunes on This Side of the Island at last year’s residency: “Fistful of Flowers,” “What Do I Think?” and “Ocean Roar,” an ode to his late friend, the singer-songwriter and producer Richard Swift. This time, the audience got to hear all nine of the album’s songs, along with music from his past albums, such as “In A Blackout,” “A 1,000 Times” and “The Garbage Men.”
Leithauser says the album’s title was sparked when his two daughters read Jean Craighead George’s young adult novel, My Side of the Mountain — about a boy who runs away from his parents home in New York City and learns to survive in the Catskill Mountains. “It’s another way of saying, ‘From my perspective,’” he explains, adding he was “very isolated” when he was writing and recording This Side of the Island at his studio, the Struggle Hut. It’s an appropriate name given the length of time he wrestled with the music. “I literally recorded the piano and guitar “Fist of Flowers” when Barack Obama was president. This was at my old apartment, which I sold in 2017.”
Leithauser has no explanation for his delays. “If I knew, I would be so happy to know how to avoid it next time,” he says. “I had been working by myself for so many years, and I didn’t know what I had. When you’re really trying to finish something and you can’t it’s so frustrating. It gets kind of scary because your livelihood depends on it. You’re like, ‘What am I doing with myself? I’m wasting my life here.’
“I fought through it,” he continues, “and at the very end went upstate to work for one and a half days with my friend Aaron Dessner. He was the only outside person I had ever played anything for — even my wife. It could have been one of those moments where he could be like, ‘Dude, this ain’t happening. Just go to law school.’”
Instead, Dessner “was so complimentary, excited about it, and he wanted to play on some of it,” Leithauser says. “I was like, ‘Please, anything to change my perception, change my idea of what it is.’ He started putting little things on it and added a modern sound.” Leithauser left Dessner’s studio confident that This Side of the Island was ready to be released. “I was like, ‘Man, I want people to hear this.’”
Leithauser Goes Electric
An electric guitar has always featured in Leithauser’s Carlyle shows, but it’s usually played by one of his band members — most recently by master of subtlety Larry Oliver – while the man himself strummed an acoustic six-string. On this run, Leithauser’s breaking out his black 1961 Fender Jazzmaster and 1960 mapleglo natural Rickenbacker Capri 360 to reproduce the bright rock sound of This Side of the Island. Although he told the crowd that ear plugs were available, the volume was suited to the room, and it was a gas to see the packed crowd rocking out in sportcoats and evening wear as they sipped their martinis and goblets of wine.
A Rockin’ Wedding Standard?
“Knockin’ Heart”‘s lyrics and Leithauser’s full-throttle performance of it on the record makes it sound like fervent pledge of unconditional love: “From the courtship to the chapel, from the branches to the apple, to the elegy in the bone yard — you’ll be knockin’ in my heart.” Told that the song could be a wedding-reception staple, given the right band or DJ, Leithauser laughs. “I’d love to go to that wedding,” he says, adding that while the song’s message is, “I’ll love you through time. Actually, the person in the song can’t get through to the person they’re looking for. The idea is there’s a guy driving home from the party. He’s stoned and drunk and wishing he can say this to the person. But the person is not there.”
A (Psycho) Killer Cover
Leithauser’s Carlyle sets always include at least one cover, and on March 6, he chose the Talking Heads classic “Heaven” — which, he says, is one of his all-time favorite songs. (He also said elsewhere that he listened to Fear of Music, which includes that song, a lot while making This Side of the Island.) The choice was all the more appropriate, because former Heads frontman David Byrne has recruited Leithauser for his latest project. “It’s crazy,” Leithauser says. “When he contacted me, I thought I was being punked.”
Surprise Guests
Opening night belonged solely to Leithauser — as an ad-hoc record-release show should be — but he says that “a lot of well-known musicians are going to be coming out over the course or the four weeks” to join in on the fun. He’s keeping the names under wraps, “Because I want them to be surprising.”
Leithauser is the Kevin Bacon of indie rock, with a deep network of friendships with other musicians, so the surprises should be genuinely surprising. At his March 8 show, J Mascis was Leithauser’s special guest, and imagining the Dinosaur Jr. frontman at a strait-laced place like Cafe Carlye is mind-blowing on its own.
BLACKPINK already accomplished the hard part. Over the past half-decade, the quartet has transcended the boundaries between K-pop and the global mainstream in ways that no other girl group had done before, turning the momentum from their 2010s singles and projects into a 2020s breakthrough, particularly in North America.
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Since 2020, BLACKPINK has released a pair of albums, including their first Billboard 200-topper, 2022’s Born Pink; collaborated with Lady Gaga, Selena Gomez and Cardi B, among others; become the highest-charting Korean girl group in Hot 100 history, with a total of five top 40 entries; and racked up several Western awards, including a Billboard Music Award and multiple MTV VMAs. Their commercial might in the U.S. was best demonstrated with their live show, which had reached stadium levels by 2023 and included a headlining gig at Coachella that year, making BLACKPINK the first K-pop act in that night-capping slot.
All of which is to say: JENNIE, JISOO, LISA and ROSÉ have climbed a mountain together that no other commercial act like them has conquered before. Over the past six months, however, they’ve all set out to achieve something different — this time separately, and all roughly at the same time.
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This Friday (Mar. 7), JENNIE will release her debut album, RUBY, one week after LISA released her own, Alter Ego. Jisoo released her debut solo mini-album, Amortage, two weeks before that, and while ROSÉ issued her own debut album, Rosie, in December, its singles have been promoted throughout early 2025, including with a handful of live performances. Members of pop collectives releasing solo projects after their original groups achieved mainstream success is a practice that stretches back decades, from The Beatles to the Jackson 5 to the Spice Girls to One Direction. Yet we’ve never seen every member of a group attempt to establish themselves as individual stars quite so simultaneously, four voices flooding the zone across a three-month span.
To some degree, BLACKPINK’s members launching solo music at the same time can be chalked up to a scheduling quirk, based on when studio material is completed and promotional opportunities arise; each member is working with a different U.S. major label partner (Columbia for JENNIE, RCA for LISA, Warner for JISOO and Atlantic for ROSÉ), who all have their own plans for how to most effectively roll out a debut project. And because BLACKPINK’s return as a collective is imminent, with a new world tour scheduled to kick off in early July, those respective teams have been working with limited time frames to set up solo eras.
Still — that’s a lot of BLACKPINK solo projects, being released very close to one another. The output could risk alienating casual fans, whose music consumption might be cannibalized by competing projects from members of the same group. BLACKPINK fans were always going to support these solo endeavors, but JENNIE, JISOO, LISA and ROSÉ are trying to establish their own voices, and build individual fan bases. Even if they’re not in competition with each other, they are competing to command an unfamiliar listener’s attention.
Yet as these solo releases have played out over the past few months, the BLACKPINK members have not drowned each other out. Instead, this onslaught may have been the best thing for the group’s four stars — and also, for the group itself.
Let’s start with the biggest crossover hit of the solo releases so far: “APT.,” ROSÉ’s fizzy pop-rock chant-along alongside Bruno Mars, has become a legitimate smash in the U.S. and worldwide. Upon its October release, “APT.” became the first top 10 hit on the Hot 100 for any K-pop female act, and has since spent multiple months in the upper frame of the chart, along with reaching No. 1 on the Global 200 chart and staying there for a record 16 total weeks (and counting).
That huge single has been complemented by other chart achievements from the BLACKPINK members: ROSÉ’s debut album Rosie bowed at No. 3 on the Billboard 200 in December, while LISA has notched three Hot 100 hits from her Alter Ego project thus far, the same number as JENNIE from her RUBY album. Both of those albums have a solid shot at following Rosie into the top 10 of the Billboard 200 over the next two weeks.
The commercial wins have been accompanied by enviable co-signs and pop culture showcases. Just as ROSÉ corralled Mars for a team-up, LISA’s Alter Ego features collaborations with Future, Tyla, Megan Thee Stallion and Rosalía, among others; its lead track, “Born Again,” has guest spots by Doja Cat and Raye, both of whom joined LISA at the Oscars last Sunday, where they performed a medley of James Bond theme songs in front of nearly 20 million viewers. Meanwhile, JENNIE has already released collaborations with Doechii and Dominic Fike from RUBY, and the album’s track list also includes Dua Lipa, Childish Gambino and Kali Uchis.
JENNIE’s most successful single with a North American artist, “One of the Girls” with The Weeknd, resulted from her supporting turn on The Idol last year; a few months later, LISA is co-starring on the current season of The White Lotus. Along with different fashion spotlights and TV performances, the appearances in high-profile HBO dramas has helped increase the members’ visibility in the States – they’re more familiar to U.S. audiences now, totally outside the K-pop purview.
Those opportunities would be valuable at any pace, but combined with the rapidity of these solo rollouts, the BLACKPINK members have worked toward a type of ubiquity that has no doubt shaken some unfamiliar listeners awake. Did you know that in each of the past five weeks, Spotify’s flagship new-release playlist New Music Friday has had a song by a BLACKPINK member in the first five slots? They have highlighted songs like JENNIE’S “Love Hangover” with Fike, JISOO’s “Earthquake” and LISA’s “Fxck Up the World” with Future — and with RUBY out this Friday, that streak is all but certain to continue for a sixth consecutive frame.
Part of the reason why this rising-tide, all-boats model can work for the BLACKPINK members has to do with the circumstances of the group itself. These solo projects are taking place during a pause in group activity, not a hiatus; this is not a situation like an *NSYNC or a Destiny’s Child, in which one member of a group is clearly poised to ascend to solo fame and leave their cohorts behind, and it’s also not like a One Direction or a Fifth Harmony, in which one member has abruptly split to start their own career, while the others have to figure out how and when to catch up.
Instead, these concurrent rollouts have acted as a stopgap that’s been creatively fulfilling and drama-free — especially since a date has already been set for everyone to return to the BLACKPINK mothership for a world tour. In this way, the solo endeavors have functioned similarly to the group’s fellow K-pop superstars BTS (whose staggered military obligations has caused a more sprawling timeline of solo projects, but the promise of an eventual return remains), but also recalls rap groups of the late 20th century, whose members would peel off to record solo albums before linking back up for a group project. BLACKPINK probably didn’t examine the similarities between themselves and a post-36 Chambers Wu-Tang Clan, but that has unwittingly become a highly successful model.
In any regard, the members have offered nothing but praise for what their group mates have accomplished on their own. “We know each other so well and know how much energy we have to put into every single project,” Lisa told Billboard late last year. “So we want to support and say, ‘You did really well!’ … This is what we all wanted to do, so I just wanted to say that I really do love their songs.”
Ultimately, this release strategy has created a balance — giving each member room to shine on their own, and the overlapping campaigns underlining their different music styles. Alter Ego demonstrated LISA’s pop-rap versatility, JENNIE’S advance RUBY singles underlined her effortlessly cool hook deployment, JISOO’s Amortage was defined by a graceful pop sensibility, and ROSÉ’s Rosie took a playful approach to radio-ready singer-songwriter fare. Longtime BLACKPINK fans had located the nuances in the four members’ approaches – but when stacked separately against one another, their singular talents were made more evident to a wider audience. A generation removed from each Spice Girl getting tagged with a different look and nickname, the BLACKPINK members have gotten to establish their personas by more artistic, and less reductive, means.
And soon, those personas will have the opportunity to live in front of stadium audiences. With the BLACKPINK world tour kickoff less than four months away, we’ll see how the recent solo material is incorporated into the group’s live show. Beyond that, future BLACKPINK studio output will be driven by four women who have had their confidence grow as artists and performers, and whose respective skill sets have been given room to expand and strengthen. BLACKPINK was already huge before this recent period of solo releases, but there’s no doubt that they’ve scooped up at least some new fans for the collective with their individual efforts — new fans of “Apt.” or Amortage or Alter Ego diving further down the rabbit hole, and becoming full-blown BLINKs.