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Tyler, The Creator has had his fair share of weirdo run-ins already this year. First, he recently called out some fans for asking him “weird a– questions” whenever he’s randomly spotted somewhere. Now, he’s taking aim at an undisclosed shop owner for posting a screenshot of security footage without his consent with a lengthy rant […]
Just over a week after A$AP Rocky (born Rakim Mayers) was found not guilty on all counts in his 2021 felony shooting case, A$AP Relli (born Terell Ephron) is moving forward with his civil lawsuit against the A$AP Mob frontman.
On Wednesday (Feb. 26), Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge William Fahey lifted a hold on Relli’s assault and battery case against Rocky and set a trial date of Jan. 12, 2026, according to Rolling Stone.
Relli’s lawyer, Melisa Mikhail, reportedly appeared virtually at the hearing and said that her client had no plans of dropping the lawsuit while citing the lower burden of proof in a civil versus criminal court.
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“We intend to continue litigating this case,” Mikail said. “The standard in a criminal case is much higher than the preponderance of the evidence standard in a civil matter. We still believe that our claims have merit, and we intend on fully litigating them.”
During the hearing, Rocky’s civil attorney James Sargent reportedly argued that “there’s no longer a basis” for the case. “Mr. Ephron testified in the criminal case as to the facts and circumstances,” Sargent said. “The jury’s acquittal speaks volumes as to how they valued that testimonial evidence.”
The next hearing in the civil lawsuit — which was originally filed in 2022 — is scheduled for May 28. Billboard has reached out to attorneys for both Relli and Rocky for comment.
In both the criminal and civil cases, Rocky is accused of firing a weapon at Relli following a heated confrontation near a Hollywood hotel on Nov. 6, 2021. In the criminal trial, Relli maintained that he was grazed by gunfire, but Tacopina argued that the weapon was in fact a prop gun filled with blanks.
Rocky, who had faced two felony counts of assault with a firearm and a maximum of 24 years in prison in the criminal case, was acquitted by a jury on Feb. 18. Upon the reading of the verdict, the Harlem rapper embraced his attorney and then dove into the gallery to celebrate with his partner, Rihanna. The rapper had earlier turned down a final plea deal ahead of trial that would have resulted in a 180-day jail sentence.
In today’s episode of ‘Billboard Unfiltered,’ Billboard staffers Kyle Denis, Damien Scott, Carl Lamarre and Trevor Anderson break down Drake tying with Taylor Swift & Jay-Z on the Billboard 200 with ‘$ome $exy $ongs 4 U,’ if MCs should take J.Cole seriously, Ye sharing an alleged DM of The Game DMing Tina Knowles, Rolling Stone’s worst song on Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller,’ the 15 up and coming hip-hop, African & R&B artists to watch in 2025 and more!
Carl Lamarre:
Yo yo. What’s going on, y’all, welcome to a fresh episode of Billboard Unfiltered, gentlemen!
Kyle Denis:
Yo yo.
Carl Lamarre:
What it do, what it do, what it do, what it do? How y’all feeling?
Trevor Anderson:
You a little high today?
Carl Lamarre:
I’m on my high horse.
Trevor Anderson:
Clearly!
Damien Scott:
We all know why.
Carl Lamarre:
We all know why!
Kyle Denis:
A high horse? Uh-oh, why?
Carl Lamarre:
The reason why-
Kyle Denis:
Something happened?
Carl Lamarre:
Huh?
Kyle Denis:
Something happened?
Carl Lamarre:
Something monumental will happen.
Kyle Denis:
Oh, put me on. What happened?
Trevor Anderson:
Monumental?
Carl Lamarre:
Potentially, I’m not gonna say historic, but we’re on the doors of something, well, on the steps of some history-making sh–. I gotta say we’re gonna start this off with brother Aubrey Graham notched-
Damien Scott:
Surprise, surprise.
Carl Lamarre:
Notched number 14.
Trevor Anderson:
Come on, notch?
Carl Lamarre:
Notch. Come on. I took some advanced classes back in the day. Brother Aubrey and PARTYNEXTDOOR notched a No. 1 album on the Billboard 200, ‘$ome $exy $ongs 4 U.’ 246,000 album equivalent units, marking number 14 for Mr. Aubrey Graham, tying him with Jay-Z and Taylor Swift for the most No. 1s for soloists still trailing, of course, The Beatles with 19.
Kyle Denis;
Come on.
Trevor Anderson:
Hey, they got the AI song a few years ago, a lil AI album.
Carl Lamarre:
Still got some work to do. But you know, first off, of course, Mr. PARTYNEXTDOOR, shout out to PARTY getting his first No. 1 album.
Kyle Denis:
Absolutely.
Damien Scott:
This is his biggest first week, right?
Carl Lamarre:
Biggest first week.
Keep watching for more!
Another week means another new episode of Billboard Unfiltered. This episode was broadcasted live on Wednesday (Feb. 26) with the core four back together.
Drake and PartyNextDoor topped the Billboard 200 with $ome $exy $ongs 4 U earning 246,000 first-week units. The feat brings Drizzy to 14 No. 1 albums, which ties him for the most ever among soloists.
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Deputy Director Damien Scott thinks Drake cracked the code with his album sequencing in the streaming era with Views. “Views, to me, is where Drake figured it out. He’s like, ‘Oh, this long-ass album with a multitude of genres.’ He figured out how to make an album for the way people consume music now and then he kept trying to make that album over and over again,” he said. “He’s never dropped below a certain qualitative point where people are like, ‘I’m not gonna pay attention to this.’ … I’m curious to see what the staying power is.”
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Staff Writer Kyle Denis considered the first-week sales for Drake to be “soft” when comparing to his previous bodies of work. “I’ll never take away this kind of feat. Tying the record for most No. 1 albums by a rapper, that’s something to celebrate about. But at the same time, when you contextualize these numbers they’re kind of soft,” he said. “I think him not clearing 300,000 is pretty surprising to me… This is squarely more in his wheelhouse and he’s still 100K behind his collab albums he did with Future and 21 Savage.”
When looking ahead to the all-time No. 1 albums list, Billboard charts expert Trevor Anderson wonders if Drake albums will continue to remain events. “Will Drake ever come out and it’s eh, fine, top 10 or will they always be events?” Anderson pondered.
Deputy Editor Carl Lamarre reported that he’s hearing that Drake could possibly come with his next heavily-anticipated solo album this summer surrounding his three-night headlining performance across the pond at Wireless Festival.
Meanwhile, J. Cole returned with “Clouds” last week, and it appears a possible feud with Freddie Gibbs is brewing on the horizon. After side-stepping the Kendrick Lamar feud last year, would Cole step into the ring with Freddie Kane?
“If he were to go at Cole, I don’t have any inside information, but I don’t think Cole would be like, ‘I’m alright, man.’ Gibbs is basically calling him a b—h, like you’re not gonna squeeze off with anybody. The dude’s still an amazing rapper,” Scott said. “The circumstances around the Kendrick beef are very particular… It won’t be like that otherwise.”
Ye and The Game also reunited earlier this week and appeared to be using Tina Knowles as the duo’s creative muse while Yeezy teased Game’s The Documentary 3.
“He’s just too old to be acting like this,” Denis said. “45 and 47, really? It’s just so desperate and so pathetic and it’s so clear you want their attention and they haven’t given you it in recent years.”
Watch the full episode below.
It’s a homecoming for Master P. The New Orleans rap dignitary has been named the President of Basketball Operations at the University of New Orleans.
The move was made official during a press conference on Wednesday (Feb. 26) where P — born Percy Miller — revealed his plans to restore glory to his hometown university’s basketball program.
“Today is history,” he began. “We’ve come a long way. Growing up in New Orleans, when I was a kid, I looked at the University of New Orleans basketball program as probably one of the best in the country. Every kid wanted to come to the Lakefront Arena and be a part of this.”
Master P continued: “I’m just so appreciative and blessed that God has given me this opportunity … to rebuild this program. We gonna change this. This is our culture, this is our team and this is our family. We want to give that family love out here to the city to bring the people back where it should be at.”
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The No Limit Records boss is promising to “change the culture” at UNO, and he’s got his work cut out for him, as the Privateers fell to a lowly 4-25 following loss to Texas A&M-Commerce on Monday (Feb. 24). The team is yet to secure a win on its home floor this season.
The 2024-2025 Privateers season has been draped in controversy, as The Field of 68‘s Jeff Goodman reported on Wednesday that the University of New Orleans has held out four of its top five starters on suspension due to an ongoing gambling investigation.
The team has lost eight straight games in the players’ absence. They last suited up on Jan. 27. “Leading scorer James White (19.2 ppg), Jah Short (9.2 ppg), Dae Dae Hunter (8.2 ppg) and Jamond Vincent (7.8 ppg) have all been out since the 74-58 loss to UIW,” Goodman wrote. “There is currently an ongoing school and NCAA investigation.”
https://twitter.com/GoodmanHoops/status/1894744804015194305?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet
Master P has quite the hoops background in his own right. He was on a college basketball scholarship at the University of Houston before injuring his knee. P battled back to earn pre-season roster spots on the Charlotte Hornets and Toronto Raptors in 1998 and 1999, but was cut before the regular season.
He passed down his love of basketball to his children. P’s son Hercy Miller suits up for Southern Utah University, while Mercy Miller is a freshman at the University of Houston. The Houston Cougars are currently ranked No. 4 in the country and a bona fide National Championship contender.
Watch the full press conference below.
Vince Staples and his manager Corey Smyth made an appearance on After Hours podcast and talked about how they were able to get Netflix to understand the concept behind The Vince Staples Show.
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“A lot of the times people undermine the intelligence of the audience, and then that becomes learned behavior,” he explained. “And I feel like a lot of the time we just have to have conversation like, ‘OK, we’re making a dark comedy in the streaming era … some are on television and have commercial breaks. We ended up putting title cards in the show because it was important to have tonal breaks in this dry, slow show or else we end up boring. There’s a big difference between boring and interesting, but there’s also a fine line between the two.”
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Staples then brought up some executives and fans having trouble disassociating Vince the rapper and the person with Vince the character. “The way the show was written — and this was always the intention — The Vince Stapes Show is not about Vince Staples as a character,” the Long Beach rapper and actor said. “It’s about a perspective. It’s The Vince Staples Show because I made it not because it’s about me. I think that was a hard thing for a lot of people to grasp. Going from writing for me and then writing for the characters it became kind of a disconnect because they’re expecting me to come in and write a show about myself, but I’m writing a show about other people and how they view me in the world.”
He then got into being underestimated when it came to tone, execution and directorial style while also dealing with a big company such as Netflix. “I just don’t think people think I know as much as I do about certain things,” he suggested. “So, if I’m making a show, they’re expecting me to have seen certain shows. They always say, ‘This is like Curb [Your Enthusiasm], have you ever seen Curb?’ And I say I haven’t seen it, but I know who Larry David is, I’m familiar with his work and I like it.”
Staples continued, “That would kind of throw people for a loop, so then it would get shaky. Especially when you’re dealing with a big company with a lot of finances and a lot of things on their slate it’s not wrong to answer those questions for them. I think that’s the place a lot of creative people have to get to.”
He added, “Of course, I’m going to ask what you’re doing if I don’t know what you’re doing. But sometimes that hurts people, so we just wanted to make sure that we were communicating and letting people know the real influences, the real identity of the show, and the way I wanted it to be.”
Last May, Netflix picked up The Vince Staples Show for its second season. Still no word on a release date yet, though.
You can watch the conversation below.
Drake becomes the first act in the 12-year history of Billboard’s Streaming Songs chart to earn 100 top 10s, scoring four new top 10s on the March 1-dated survey.
The rapper achieves the feat via songs from his new collaborative album with PARTYNEXTDOOR, $ome $exy $ongs 4 U, which concurrently debuts at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, as previously reported.
“Gimme a Hug” leads the way, debuting at No. 4 with 24.5 million official U.S. streams earned in the week ending Feb. 20, according to Luminate.
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Drake’s other new top 10s include “Nokia” (No. 7, 20.2 million streams), PARTYNEXTDOOR and Drake’s “CN Tower” (No. 9, 19.8 million streams) and PARTYNEXTDOOR, Drake and Yebba’s “Die Trying” (No. 10, 18 million streams).
Drake now boasts 103 top 10s on Streaming Songs, which was first published as of the Jan. 26, 2013, Billboard charts. He was part of the region on the inaugural ranking as a featured artist on A$AP Rocky’s “F–kin Problems” (alongside 2 Chainz and Kendrick Lamar), which ranked at No. 10 (and ultimately peaked at No. 2 in February 2013). His first top 10 as a lead artist followed that March with the No. 3 peak of “Started From the Bottom.”
His 103 top 10s is nearly double the next closest act; Taylor Swift has the second most at 58.
Most Top 10s, Streaming Songs
103, Drake
58, Taylor Swift
35, Lil Baby
33, Kendrick Lamar
33, The Weeknd
32, 21 Savage
31, Future
31, Travis Scott
Drake also holds the record for the most No. 1s on the chart: 20, 11 ahead of his next-closest competitor, Swift.
And the mark for most chart entries overall? Drake too — with 15 new appearances on the March 1 chart, he now has 277 entries; Swift is second with 179.
Concurrently, as previously reported, “Gimme a Hug” debuts at No. 6 on the multimetric Billboard Hot 100, leading all 21 songs from $ome $exy $ongs 4 U onto the ranking.
Drake postponed the remaining handful of dates on his Anita Max Wynn Tour slated to run through Australia and New Zealand in March. And now, fans are reacting to the unexpected news. It all started after rep for Drake confirmed Tuesday (Feb. 25) that the trek was delayed due to a “scheduling conflict” in a […]
Lauryn Hill paid loving tribute to the “beauty and brilliance” of late quiet storm singer Robert Flack on Tuesday (Feb. 25) in a lengthy post in which the Fugees frontwoman and solo star described the world-changing, enduring impact the “Killing Me Softly With His Song” singer had on her life and career.
“Whitney Houston once said to me that Roberta Flack’s voice was one of the purest voices she’d ever heard. I grew up scouring the records my Parents collected. Mrs. Flack was one of their favorites and quite instantly became one of mine as soon as I was exposed to her,” Hill, 49, said of Grammy-winning singer Flack, who died on Monday at 88 of undisclosed causes.
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“She looked cool and intelligent, gentle and yet militant. The songs she recorded from ‘Compared To What’ to ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’ to her version of ‘Ballad Of The Sad Young Men’ fascinated me with their beauty and sophistication,” Hill continued in an Instagram post that featured a gallery of Flack in her 1970s prime, as well as a shot of the two women together as part of one of the many emotional tributes to the singer, pianist and lifelong educator.
“Mrs. Flack was an artist, a singer-songwriter, a pianist and composer who moved me and showed me through her own creative choices and standards what else was possible within the idiom of Soul,” wrote Hill, who noted that though Flack did not write her Grammy-winning, career-defining 1973 Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 hit “Killing Me Softly With His Song” — it was penned by Charles Fox, Norman Gimbel and Lori Lieberman — she made it “hugely popular.”
In fact, not only did Flack score a No. 1 with the track and win record of the year and best pop vocal performance, female Grammys for “Killing” in 1974, she also gave Hill and her group the song that “catapulted myself and the Fugees into household phenomena.”
The hip-hop group recorded their own version of the song in 1996 and also hit No. 1 around the world — though not in the U.S. because it wasn’t officially released as a commercial single — topping the Pop Airplay and R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay charts on its way to winning the group a Grammy for best R&B vocal performance by a duo/group and an MTV Video Music Award for best R&B video. Flack and the Fugees performed the song together at the 1996 VMAS.
“We wanted to honor the beauty and brilliance of this song and her performance of it to our generation,” Hill wrote. “I will forever be grateful for the sensitivity and delicate power of her Love and Artistry. Rest in Grace Beloved One.”
Check out Hill’s tribute here.
Kendrick Lamar and SZA land new No. 1s on Billboard’s Streaming Songs chart – Lamar his seventh, SZA her third – as “Luther” rises to the top of the March 1-dated ranking.
“Luther” enjoys its coronation in its 13th week on the tally with 45.2 million official U.S. streams in the week ending Feb. 20, a boost of 6%, according to Luminate.
Originally released as part of Lamar’s album GNX on Nov. 22, “Luther” finally climbs to No. 1 on Streaming Songs after it was performed during Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime show set on Feb. 9, plus continued success on user-generated content apps such as TikTok.
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Lamar replaces himself atop the survey; “Not Like Us,” also performed during the halftime show, ascended back to the summit on the Feb. 22 list via 49 million streams Feb. 7-13; it ranks at No. 2 on the latest ranking (39.2 million streams, down 20%).
All told, Lamar boasts seven No. 1s on Streaming Songs, which began in 2013. With his seventh ruler, he assumes sole possession of the third-most No. 1s in the chart’s history, breaking out of what had been a three-way tie with Ariana Grande and Justin Bieber.
Most No. 1s, Streaming Songs
20, Drake
9, Taylor Swift
7, Kendrick Lamar
6, Ariana Grande
6, Justin Bieber
5, Travis Scott
Lamar first reigned in 2017 with the four-week rule of “Humble.” Four of his No. 1s have occurred in the past year, beginning with the reign of Future, Metro Boomin and Lamar’s “Like That,” which led for three weeks beginning last April.
As for SZA, “Luther” is her third leader, following four weeks at No. 1 for “Kill Bill” in 2022 and 2023 and one frame atop the survey in 2023 for Drake’s “Slime You Out,” on which she’s featured.
Concurrently, as previously reported, “Luther” rises to No. 1 on the multimetric Billboard Hot 100.
