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Gray skies and drizzle gave way to sunshine, multicolored flags and celebrations as the nation’s capital held the WorldPride parade Saturday (June 7).
Tens of thousands of people participated in parades and other festivities, in defiance of what activists say is an unprecedented assault on the LGBTQ+ community that challenges the rights for which many have fought over the years.
A rainbow flag the length of three football fields flowed through the streets, carried by 500 members of the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington, D.C., to kick off the parade. Behind them, people waved Pride flags and flags representing the transgender, asexual and bisexual communities from atop a bus.
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Singer-songwriter and actor Reneé Rapp laughed and blew kisses from the back of a pickup truck draped with a transgender flag while Laverne Cox, a transgender actress and activist known for her role in Netflix’s Orange is the New Black, waved from an open convertible.
“Pride means us looking out for each other no matter what,” she declared to the crowd as the convertible rolled to a stop. “We know how to be there for each other.”
Many LGBTQ+ travelers have expressed concerns or decided to skip WorldPride due to anxieties about safety, border policies and a hostile political climate that they say hearkens back to another time. But that did not keep international travelers and other participants away, with groups visible from Iran, Namibia, Kenya and Russia.Along the parade route, hundreds gathered outside the National City Christian Church as rainbow flags and balloons lined its steps and columns. A child with rainbow face paint blew bubbles at the base of the steps while Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” blared from loudspeakers.
“D.C. is already one of the biggest cities in the country for celebrating Pride,” said Cheo White, 33, from Annapolis, Maryland, “But we are all collectively more united and turning out more because of what’s happening in the White House.”
Many have said the gathering has taken on a new meaning amid the Trump administration’s aggressive policies against protections for transgender Americans and diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
White’s partner, Nick Kerver, 26, who was visiting from Toledo, Ohio, said Pride has “always been a political tool” but has taken on more importance this year amid mounting threats to the LGBTQ+ community, especially transgender and nonbinary Americans.
“It feels more important than ever,” Kerver said while wearing a rainbow hat, sunglasses and a T-shirt. “But we also have to get involved in our local communities too.“
David Begler, a 58-year-old gay man from Philadelphia, expressed disappointment that many international travelers felt unsafe visiting D.C. for WorldPride but said he appreciates its presence in the city during this political climate.
“It’s the perfect time to have WorldPride in D.C.,” Begler said. “We need it right now. I want us to send a message to the White House to focus on uplifting each other instead of dividing.“
Stay DeRoux, 36, usually plans a day trip to D.C. Pride from her home in Fredericksburg, Virginia. But this year, she and her wife, Deenie DeRoux, planned a full weekend. “This is a really big year,” Stay DeRoux said. “There’s been a lot of turmoil. So it’s an amazing thing to be among allies, among people who love because we’ve experienced so much hate on a daily basis.”
For the day, the idea of threats and opposition took a backseat to the celebration. Streets were closed, but filled with floats, and impromptu parties broke out with music and food in streets adjoining the parade route. Cynthia Erivo was set to perform on the Capitol Stag following the parade.
Johnny Cervantes Jr., dressed in a black suit and top hat, headed to a grandstand at a church-themed float to marry his partner of 28 years, Freddie Lutz, owner of Freddie’s Beach Bar and Restaurant in Arlington, Virginia.
Events culminate Sunday with a rally and protest march and a giant street party and concert (headlined by Doechii) covering a multi-block stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue.
“This is WorldPride in the best city in the world,” Mayor Muriel Bowser declared as she walked the parade hand-in-hand with her daughter, Miranda.
Miley Cyrus is opening up about her music career after leaving Hannah Montana behind.
In a recent interview on The Ringer podcast, the 32-year-old pop star and actress revealed that following the end of the hit Disney Channel series in 2011, she was banned from performing any songs associated with the teen sitcom.
“After I left Disney, I wasn’t allowed to perform any of the Hannah Montana music,” Cyrus said. “It’s not like I wanted to, I mean performing ‘The Best Of Both Worlds’ between ‘We Can’t Stop’ and ‘Wrecking Ball,’ wouldn’t have really made sense.”
But it wasn’t easy being cut off from music so tied to her early identity. “It was still sad knowing those songs have my voice, my face, and I wasn’t allowed to sing them,” she said.
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That changed in August 2024, when Cyrus was officially inducted as a Disney Legend during a ceremony at the Honda Center in Anaheim, Calif.
“After being inducted as a Disney Legend, I was given permission to perform those songs in the future, which is pretty cool,” she told The Ringer.
Hannah Montana debuted in March 2006 and quickly became a cultural phenomenon, premiering to a record-breaking 5.4 million viewers, the highest in Disney Channel’s history at the time. Cyrus, then 13 years old, played Miley Stewart, a teenager living a secret double life as a Malibu student by day and global pop star by night.
Under her TV alter ego, Cyrus charted 20 songs on the Billboard Hot 100 as Hannah Montana. “He Could Be the One” became the biggest hit, reaching the top 10 in 2009. The show’s theme song, “The Best of Both Worlds,” also made the chart, reaching No. 92 in 2006.
Cyrus also earned three No. 1 albums on the Billboard 200 as Hannah Montana: Hannah Montana, Hannah Montana 2/Meet Miley Cyrus, and Hannah Montana: The Movie soundtrack.
Rod Stewart has canceled additional U.S. tour dates as he continues to recover from the flu. On Saturday (June 7), the 80-year-old music icon announced on social media that he is canceling four concerts and rescheduling two others due to ongoing health concerns. “I have to cancel and reschedule my next six concerts in June […]
No bad blood here. Leah Remini addressed the status of her friendship with Jennifer Lopez in a new interview this week. The Flight Risk actress told Us Weekly that she reconnected with her longtime friend after the superstar’s highly publicized split from Ben Affleck and her own divorce from ex-husband Angelo Pagán after more than […]
Mariah Carey is teasing MC16 with her dangerously hot new track in years “Type Dangerous.” Anderson .Paak shares what it was like to work with the queen, and how Mariah celebrated her new single. What do you think of “Type Dangerous”? Let us know in the comments! Anderson .Paak: Shout-out to the Queen, Mariah Carey. […]
Eric Church looked back on his unexpected involvement in the lawsuit over Taylor Swift‘s hit single “Shake It Off” in a new interview.
Back in 2017, the superstar got hit with allegations of copyright infringement by Sean Hall and Nathan Butler, the songwriters behind 3LW’s 2001 single “Playas Gon’ Play.”
“In her deposition, when [talking about the line] ‘players gonna play, haters gonna hate,’ she says, ‘The first time I heard that phrase was in Eric Church’s song ‘The Outsiders,’” the country singer explained in a sit-down with Rolling Stone published Friday (June 6). “She was saying she never heard it on [the 3LW song], which is what they were suing her for. And two weeks later, I got served by the people that were suing her!”
According to Church, getting slapped with his own legal papers prompted him to reach out to Swift via text. “I was like, ‘Hey, thanks. Next time, let’s just skip that part?’” he said. “And she sent me a text: ‘I’m sorry. It’s the truth, though. That’s when I heard that phrase.’”
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“It’s since been settled,” Church added of his own involvement. However, the “Hands of Time” singer concluded in the interview that the whole experience still had him wondering, “‘How did this even happen?’”
Since an agreement to drop the “Shake It Off” lawsuit was reached between Swift, Hall and Butler in late 2022, Church has released his eighth studio album, 2025’s Evangeline vs. the Machine, which he’ll be promoting this fall with his upcoming Free the Machine Tour.
More recently, Church also collaborated with Morgan Wallen on I’m the Problem album cut “Number 3 and Number 7,” and in the same Rolling Stone interview, defended Bruce Springsteen after the namesake of his hit 2011 single “Springsteen” criticized President Trump and his administration during a concert.
This week, Jon Bellion returned to center stage after years of remaining behind the scenes: the veteran songwriter-producer released Father Figure, his first album in seven years and a poignant reflection on fatherhood, including his relationship with his own father and his experiences as a dad of three. A deeply personal project that includes a picture of his parents on the album cover and a voicemail from his uncle on the track list, Father Figure also demonstrates Bellion’s status as a gifted collaborator, with Luke Combs, Pharrell Williams and Jon Batiste lending their voices to his story.
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Bellion — who has contributed to hits by Justin Bieber, Maroon 5 and Miley Cyrus, and recently co-helmed “Friend of Mine,” Rihanna’s first new single in three years — says that he’s not playing a “numbers game” with the album, and that the metric of success he’d like to reach with Father Figure is more abstract. “If my album can give you one more day, then I’m cool with that — that’s the goal,” he tells Billboard. “To give a listener another day of inspiration? I could live with that.”
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Yet along with its emotional power, Father Figure also offers a fresh industry blueprint, as the rare project in which its credited co-writers will receive a percentage of master royalties, or “points,” on the album. Bellion worked alongside the artists that comprise Beautiful Mind Projects — his management, publishing and label company — including studio whizzes Pete Nappi, Tenroc and Elkan, all of whom also contributed to Rihanna’s “Friend of Mine.”
Bellion says that the decision to provide points to his fellow songwriters was the result of his own “frustrations of being a songwriter and being paid dirt — morally paid dirt — for 10 years. I don’t want to hear people talking about, ‘Oh, he’s made money and he’s successful, so he can’t talk about how songwriters get paid dirt.’ … If you write an entire song with a group of people, and there’s $10 and they only pay you 25 cents, there’s moral injustice there.
“If it’s $10 million and they only pay you $250,000, there’s moral injustice there,” he continues. “It doesn’t matter the way you microscopically change that — it’s an insane thing to say. I’ve always been vocal about that, and I don’t care what people’s perception of that is, because songwriters get paid f—king dirt.”
After self-funding Father Figure, Bellion admits that he does have “a new perspective and a new appreciation for what the label is doing,” but still believes that there’s a way for record labels to allocate less money toward promotional efforts and more towards creative collaborators. To that end, Bellion says that he decided to focus his promotional campaign less on short-form content, and more on proper music videos for four songs from the album — including the title track, which received a moving visual on Friday (June 6).
Bellion says that the album rollout has been an invaluable learning process. “You’ve got to start somewhere,” he says. “I’m understanding the workings of the label, and stumbling through it. And even if I come out losing money — which I think I will on this album — but still getting the writers paid at least a point or two, and giving them the courage to go into the next meeting to say ‘Well, John did it!’ … Someone has to be the guy to be like, ‘I don’t really know how to make my money back while giving out a ton of points if I’m funding the thing myself, but I’m gonna have to jump into the world to put my money where my mouth is.’ I don’t know if this is gonna work out, but at least I tried to do the thing.”
As Bellion gears up to promote Father Figure from the stage — he’ll perform a sold-out intimate show at SOB’s in New York, and headline Forest Hills Stadium on Aug. 23 — he hopes that his unique standing in the industry will turn his gambit with the album into a successful model.
“I’ve been on both sides of the spectrum,” he says. “I’ve been on the label side, I’ve been on the publisher side, I’ve been on the writer side, and I’ve been on the artist side. So there’s more of a holistic angle, and I can try to bring everything in closer, to get to a better place, possibly.
“I’m not trailblazing,” Bellion continues. “I’m gonna go to Capitol Hill and dedicate my life to — I’m not saying that. But putting my money where my mouth is, where it actually counts? It’s a good place to start.”
In an alternate universe, Miley Cyrus‘ iconic Bangerz era would’ve been made complete with a wild music video starring Madonna, Nelly and more superstars popping wheelies and wrestling in the mud. Unfortunately, we do not live in that universe.
In an interview on the Every Single Album podcast posted Thursday (June 5), the “Flowers” singer revealed that she had been dead set on rounding up a star-studded group of friends to shoot a raucous visual for “4×4,” a song on her smash-hit 2013 album that ultimately never became a single. “I had everyone already lined up,” Cyrus said. “Nelly … Madonna was down to do the video, Miranda Cosgrove.”
“This was before Taylor [Swift] had a lot of famous people in her crew,” she continued, laughing. “I was friends with famous people first. I wanted to do that. I had a f–king squad, and my squad was very, very cool.”
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Cyrus claimed the idea was eventually shut down by RCA, her label at the time, whom she quipped didn’t want her “talking about a pit bull [and] piss” in a song they’d be promoting. “Madonna was down to mud wrestle with Miranda Kerr,” the Grammy winner reminisced wistfully. “I was like, ‘I’m gonna get all these girls, all these supermodels, all these Victoria’s Secret models and all of these pop icons to come to my dad’s farm, get in the back of 4x4s, and we’re gonna mud wrestle, and we’re gonna go out and do doughnuts.”
Despite the lack of a “4×4” visual, Bangerz remains one of Cyrus’ most successful albums to date. The LP debuted atop the Billboard 200 and spawned her first-ever No. 1 single on the Billboard Hot 100, “Wrecking Ball,” which was followed closely by “We Can’t Stop” at No. 2.
The “Party in the U.S.A.” artist was signed to RCA for a three-album run, later dropping Younger Now in 2017 and Plastic Hearts in 2020 under the Sony Music imprint. In 2021, she inked a new deal with Columbia Records, through which she just released new album Something Beautiful on May 30.
Later in the podcast episode, Cyrus recalled another time where she and her former label weren’t quite on the same page. According to her, she never would’ve put a certain fellow pop star on “Prisoner,” one of the singles on Plastic Hearts. “No shade to Dua Lipa, it just isn’t cohesive with the album,” Cyrus said frankly.
“She would’ve been much better on something like [2023 LP] Endless Summer Vacation,” the singer continued of Dua Lipa. “She would’ve been great on ‘Wildcard,’ she would’ve been great on any of them — ‘River,’ can you imagine?”
Cyrus added that she thought her team at RCA wasn’t entirely confident in how Plastic Hearts would perform, so they brought in some “medicinal Dua” to give the LP some commercial oomph. “They basically were like, ‘Oh, great, here’s this piece of s–t album she gave us, let’s spray a little Dua Lipa on there,’” Cyrus said, laughing.
Listen to Cyrus’ full interview on Every Single Album below.
Ed Sheeran’s +–=÷× (Tour Collection) is back at No. 1 on the U.K.’s Official Albums Chart on Friday (June 6) as excitement builds for his new LP, Play.
The collection is made up of Sheeran’s hits from his Mathematical series of records: 2011’s + (Plus), 2014’s × (Multiply), 2017’s ÷ (Divide), 2021’s = (Equals), and 2023’s – (Subtract). A number of songs from 2019’s standalone No.6 Collaboration Project, including songs with Justin Bieber (“I Don’t Care”) and Rudimental (“Lay It On Me”), also feature on the tracklist.
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The LP was released in September 2024 and first hit the top spot back in January, remaining in the top 10 ever since. On Sept. 12, Sheeran will share his new studio album, Play, his eighth, and on Thursday (June 5), he shared the latest taster of the record with “Sapphire,” following previous singles “Azizam” and “Old Phone.”
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As she shares the Jack Antonoff-produced single “Manchild” and headlines Primavera Sound festival in Barcelona, Spain, Sabrina Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet holds steady at No. 2 and earns a 41st week on the chart.
Miley Cyrus’ ninth LP, Something Beautiful, is the week’s highest new entry at No. 3; she has hit the top spot only twice in her career with 2013’s Bangerz and 2023’s Endless Summer Vacation. Greatest hits collections by Fleetwood Mac (50 Years – Don’t Stop, No. 4) and The Weeknd (The Highlights, No. 5) complete the top five.
Following news of her reacquisition of her masters, Taylor Swift’s Reputation (2017) enjoys a 63-position leap up to No. 7, experiencing a 146% week-on-week uplift. Reputation and her self-titled debut are the only LPs from her Big Machine era not to be re-recorded by Swift, and fans are uncertain whether Reputation will get the Taylor’s Version treatment. (Taylor Swift has already been “completely re-recorded,” according to the superstar.) Albums from Garbage (Let All That We Imagine Be the Light, No. 24) and The National frontman Matt Berninger (Get Sunk, No. 27) also make top 40 debuts.
Alex Warren has reached new heights with a record-breaking moment for “Ordinary” as he secures a 12th consecutive week at the summit of the U.K. Singles Chart on Friday (June 6). He is now the U.S. male solo act with the longest-running continuous stay at No. 1, besting Slim Whitman, who lasted 11 consecutive weeks […]
