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Kim Kardashian did not address the one topic America was dying to hear about on Monday night (April 22) when she hit the couch on Jimmy Kimmel Live!: her feelings on theories that Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department diss track “thanK you aIMee” is about her.
The American Horror Story: Delicate star did, however, cover a wide variety of other random topics, including being Madonna’s dog walker as a kid, the origin of her nipple-forward Skims Ultimate Nipple Bra shapewear and her current feelings on former one-term president Donald Trump in the midst of his hush money trial in New York for paying off a porn star.
Kimmel seemed most charmed by the Madonna stories, which included Kim describing how she lived next door to the pop superstar when she was a kid. “She was my next door neighbor when I was like seven or eight years old,” Kardashian said. “I was her dog walker. Kourtney and I would walk her dog after school… in exchange for her jewelry… She was transitioning out of the 80s neon phase, so one day she just walked downstairs and handed us a shoebox of all these neon bracelets and Kourtney and I went to school and everyone was like, ‘Oh my God I love your bracelets!’ And we were like, ‘Thanks, Madonna gave them to us.’”
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Sadly, she doesn’t still have the haul, and as Kimmel lamented, the sisters missed out on the pointy bra era castoffs. And while the K gang did not trick-or-treat at Madonna’s as kids, years later, Kardashian watched the singer shoot her “Cherish” video with photographer Herb Ritts. “Me and my friend were on the beach and it was the most magical moment ever,” Kardashian said of the sensual black-and-white clip whose every wet-and-wild frame he seemed to have committed to memory.
Though she never in her wildest dreams imagined it, as an adult Kardashian said she was once again neighbors with Madge, whom she’d run into occasionally when they went trick-or-treating with their kids. You would never know it, though, since Kim said she and Madonna both wore ski mask costumes to stay incognito. “We both had like masks on and we were going to the same house and then we looked at each other and I was like, ‘M? Kim?,’” she recalled of their incognito meet cute again moment.
In a rapid-fire segment, Kardashian, 43, responded to a series of what sounded like weird internet rumors about herself, most of which turned out to be true. Among them: does she really blow dry her jewelry before putting it on? (yes, because she hates being freezing when putting cold metal on her skin). She also confirmed that she washes her feet before getting into bed every night, sleeps with her eyes slightly open (per videos taken by her sisters), she celebrated her 14th birthday at Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch, had a fitness DVD called Kim Kardashian Fit In Your Jeans By Friday, can change a tire and has an assistant whose job it is to take the cardboard sleeve off her Starbucks orders because the sound of cardboard getting moved off the cup is “like nails on a chalkboard” to her.
In fact one of the only things Kimmel floated that wasn’t true was a rumor that Kim has six toes on one foot.
Kimmel heaped praise on Kardashian for inventing a bra with built-in nipples, with the host getting slightly thrown off when Kim said they got “amazing” feedback from breast cancer survivors on the product, a sobering fact that seemed to derail what sounded like Jimmy’s more lascivious planned line of questioning. Fun fact, the nipples in the bra are fashioned after the shape of Kardashian’s breasts and she can definitely spot their tell-tale form from afar on someone else.
Kim also said she’s working on the upcoming launch of a line of shapewear for men, which, of course, led to Kimmel sidekick Guillermo strutting out in a be-thonged bodysuit that left nothing to the imagination. The conversation was mostly light, though Kimmel did ask Kardashian about the current state of her relationship with the twice-impeached former president, whom she visited in the White House in 2020 with three women whose sentences Trump cut short following the fellow reality star’s lobbying.
“I don’t think he likes me very much,” Kardashian said diplomatically. “But… I think he did amazing stuff with prison reform and let a lot of people out and signed an amazing bill with the First Step act and that’s what I’ll focus on.” For the record, after Kimmel earlier played a series of doctored videos of the four-times indicted Trump passing gas — as he’s been rumored to be doing quite often between reported naps during his New York trial for paying hush money to a porn actress to keep their affair quiet — Kardashian smiled and gently said, “no.”
“So he saves that for court situations?,” Kimmel quipped.
Watch Kardashian’s Kimmel interview below.
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Jon Bon Jovi didn’t get to party with Michael Jackson in the ’80s, but he did get to hang out with the next best thing: the King of Pop’s beloved pet chimp, Bubbles. While chatting on Jimmy Kimmel Live! Wednesday night (April 10), the 62-year-old musician recalled one of the crazier days of his rock-star […]
You get to experience a lot of cool stuff when your dad is one of the biggest pop stars in the world. But Nicole Richie proved on Tuesday night (April 9) that the stars are not always just like us after all. Not even close.
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Chatting with Jimmy Fallon on the Tonight Show in an appearance to promote her starring role in the remake of the 1991 comedy Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead, avowed animal lover Richie ran down the list of her current and former favorite pets, including her new cat Lavender Bumblebee. The feline, of course, joins Nicole’s other favorite kitty, Tiger Lily Sprinkle Winks, who, she noted was initially “very upset” when LB came into the picture.
Richie also recalled her many trips to a pet store in L.A. with childhood bestie and reality TV co-star Paris Hilton to buy pet rats. “I don’t know why, I actually hate rats now,” she said of her expansive rat pack, all of whom were named after Beverly Hills 90210 characters. “So I don’t know why we were into them, but we were.” After rogue rat Tori Spelling ended up on her mom’s face one morning, the rats were out and Nicole moved on to her next obsession: Las Vegas-sourced ferrets.
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That was far from the wildest animal tale she told, though.
“Yes, Prince got me my first dog,” Richie told Fallon about the pooch the enigmatic late pop icon gave her when she was four. “I remember because the dog’s name was God. I did not name the dog, obviously.”
Richie said she was used to interactions with superstars on a regular basis from attending her dad Lionel Richie’s concerts as a kid, though she typically kept to the backstage area. “The first time that I went in the audience — I remember this so clearly — one of the Pointer Sisters was there,” Richie said, adding that the singer in question had a cute Yorkie with a pink bow in its hair at the gig. “She’s the one who brought me out into the audience for the first time.” Fallon then shared a recent video of Nicole and sister Sofia in the crowd at one of their dad’s shows losing their minds along with everyone else in the crowd.
Richie stars alongside June Squibb, Jermaine Fowler and Gus Kenworthy in the Babysitter reboot due out on Friday (April 12).
Watch Richie on The Tonight Show below.
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Last fall, R&B singer October London performed “Back to Your Place” on Jimmy Kimmel Live! with a Snoop Dogg introduction and a seven-piece band including harp and violin players. In other words, the performance wasn’t cheap — and probably far more expensive than the few thousand dollars late-night talk-show guests typically receive under union rules.
According to London’s manager, Adrian L. Miller, the appearance, which has scored 281,000 YouTube views so far, was worth it. London’s more stripped-down GMA3 performance in February had even more concrete benefits, boosting ticket sales for the singer’s show at Brooklyn Steel later that night by 100. “It’s not nothing,” Miller says. “It’s good to have the logos and the exposure through TV.”
Still, Miller concedes that the promotional benefits of late-night TV performances aren’t as great as they were in the 2000s. Back then, Jay Leno and David Letterman frequently drew 4 million to 6 million nightly viewers, compared with the roughly 1.5 million to 3 million viewers top talk shows draw today. Plus, he says, “A lot of an artist’s audience is not on television. They’re not watching these shows.”
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For many acts, especially developing artists seeking viral moments, the return on investment for late-night and daytime talk-show performances has become too minuscule to be effective. “They have, like, 2 million viewers of these shows, and that’s what we get on daily posts on TikTok,” says Ethan Curtis, manager of singer-songwriter JVKE, who played The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon in 2022. “It’s an energy drain. We travel and train for the performance and do it in one take. It doesn’t feel worth it for every song.”
And while audiences are down, the cost of mounting a memorable televised performance is way up. Another of Miller’s clients, singer-rapper Anderson .Paak, spent “out of pocket, almost six figures,” he says, for a 2017 Ellen appearance. “Everybody wants a creative director now, and the stylist and the hair and the makeup,” a major-label source says. According to label and management sources, expenses for talk-show performances range from $150,000 to $225,000 — or as high as $700,000 for a potentially career-making Saturday Night Live opportunity.
Targeted talk-show performances sometimes redeem the expense. When JVKE played “Golden Hour” on Fallon in late 2022, his team wanted to “elevate him from a TikTok artist to a ‘real artist,’” Curtis says. “That’s when the late-night show served a purpose: ‘Let’s have an example of JVKE existing outside of TikTok.’ We chopped up the footage, reposted it on social media.” (JVKE’s Fallon performance is no longer available on his socials, but a Tonight Show YouTube video of him “playing my song for the Roots” beforehand has 358,000 views.)
“Most bands come in with the same amount of crew and backline as if they were putting on a show. They ask the record label to pay for it and [labels] don’t want to,” says Chris Gentry, who managed Phoenix in 2009 when the band’s SNL appearance helped turn its album Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix into a smash.
In an analysis of 458 artist appearances on top talk shows such as Kimmel, Fallon, Ellen, SNL and The Late Late Show With James Corden, music data analyst Chartmetric found the artists’ monthly Spotify listeners averaged 1.78% more the week after the show. Some artists’ distinctive performances make a bigger impact: BTS on SNL in 2019 and Bartees Strange on Kimmel in 2022 both boosted their monthly Spotify listeners by nearly 85%.
Other talk-show performances barely register. Chartmetric reports that 192 artists experienced decreases in monthly Spotify listeners after their talk-show gigs; London’s Kimmel performance in October had minimal impact on his Spotify metrics. “We’ve had these conversations for a long time: Late night doesn’t move the needle,” says the major-label source, who nonetheless remains a proponent of such appearances because “Jimmy Fallon or NBC helps spread a piece of digital content in an era when we’re constantly trying to break through the noise.”
While Ken Weinstein, a veteran publicist whose company, Big Hassle, represents Phish, Jack White, the Pretenders and many others, acknowledges “labels are definitely more thoughtful about how they spend the money,” he adds that prominent talk-show performances can have promotional benefits far beyond the initial TV appearances. “Honestly, the appearance itself is as valuable as ever,” he says. “Only in a few instances really are there giant sales bumps from a particular TV appearance — but the conversation it begins is still very relevant, very powerful.”
Peter Katsis, who manages Bush, booked frontman Gavin Rossdale on Fallon in January; a Tonight Show Instagram clip of “Glycerine” scored 344,000 views, and numerous media outlets covered the performance. “It’s really not about what Fallon‘s numbers are anymore,” says Katsis. “It really starts with what you decide to do with the opportunity. All that stuff becomes way more valuable than just that initial appearance.”
“Everything’s more expensive, which is the reason to do it at the right time and have it be part of a larger plan,” says Diana Miller, supervising producer for The Talk, which recently booked Bush and Rachel Platten, adding that shows often negotiate with artists over paying a portion of their expenses, in addition to the low thousands of dollars in union rates they pay musicians to appear. “How much would four minutes be for advertising on this show? You can’t just promote to your own fanbase. You can’t assume Ariana Grande fans know she has new music out.”
Some artists have taken it upon themselves to economize. The Lemon Twigs, a band from Long Island, played Fallon in late January with a “very stripped-back backline” and “hardly any money at all,” according to Gentry, who manages the group. “We did it really for the cost of the flight for the drummer from L.A.,” he says. “What’s interesting right now with Fallon is how social media plays into it — 14 million on Instagram, 15 million on TikTok. It’s almost like you get more now.”
This story will appear in the March 30, 2024, issue of Billboard.
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Dr. Dre is having a great week after the legendary producer had a star placed on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, sharing the moment with some of his famous pals. Speaking of those friends, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, and 50 Cent joined Dre in a hilarious skit spoofing Grey’s Anatomy.
During Tuesday’s (March 19) airing of Jimmy Kimmel Live, Dr. Dre appears in the spoof of the long-running ABC drama, Grey’s Anatomy titled “Dre’s Anatomy” with the artist born Andre Young in the role of an emergency room doctor.
Dre, Snoop, and Fif all take turns examining Kimmel’s “situation” down below and the most amazing thing about the skit is that nobody breaks character during it all.
After the skit turns into an all-out party with Dre on the beat machine and Snoop taking hits of a mysterious vapor, the skit cuts to a break and teases a new show titled “EM” with Eminem.
The quartet were all on hand this week for Dre’s Hollywood Walk of Fame unveiling, displaying their close friendship and support of one another.
Check out Dre, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, and 50 Cent in the “Dre’s Anatomy” skit via Jimmy Kimmel Live below. And we’ll echo the sentiments of others to say this needs to be a real series.
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Photo: Christopher Polk / Getty
After getting his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame earlier in the day, Dr. Dre, 59, visited Jimmy Kimmel Live! on Tuesday night (March 19) to talk legacy and drop a little news about his upcoming projects. The legendary producer was joined on the couch by longtime proteges Snoop Dogg and 50 Cent, and while the fourth leg of his gold-plated hip-hop table, Eminem, may not have been in the studio, he still managed to grab the headlines.
“Let me tell you something, let me explain something to you right now: Eminem is working on his own album which is coming out this year,” Dre said to cheers from the studio audience during his first late night appearance in 30 years. “And I actually talked to him and he said it okay for me to make that announcement right here on this show. So he has an album coming out, I’ve got songs on it and it’s fire. I’m actually gonna hear the entire album for the first time for tomorrow.”
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Slim Shady’s as-yet-untitled 12th studio album will be the follow up to 2020’s Music to Be Murdered By, which surprise dropped in January of that year and featured guest spots from Ed Sheeran, Juice WRLD, Q-Tip, Anderson .Paak and many more.
While he didn’t offer any additional information on what fans can expect from the reclusive MC, Dre said even he doesn’t always know what Eminem has in store, since he “holds his music close to his chest so I haven’t heard everything. I haven’t even heard everything complete that I’ve done, but I’m gonna hear it, and he’s putting out an album this year.” Dre said while he’s always very “hands on” with his music, he confessed that “there’s things that I have to mix that I’ve done, but I get the chance to hear the album in its entirety.”
The three-segment hang began with Dre talking about the honor of getting his Walk of Fame star and telling Kimmel that while he’s open to working with artists from any genre — revealing “I love Dolly Parton!” and that “Jolene” is one of his favorite songs — he prefers to stay in his beloved hip-hop lane. “Absolutely I could do that [work with Parton], but hip-hop is my love,” Dre said.
He was soon joined by longtime friend and collaborator Snoop Dogg, with the old pals discussing their work on Dre’s iconic 1992 The Chronic album and Dre revealing that he’s “never” found an artist from being handed a demo tape, except for Snoop and Eminem. While Dre and Snoop got into a playful argument about how they came up with the Chronic album title — which included Dre describing his first time smoking weed — the pair also said they’re almost done with Snoop’s upcoming Missionary album, the sequel to the only other full-length LP Dre has produced for the Doggfather since working on Snoop’s 1993 debut, Doggystyle. Snoop said that Dre is slated to start mixing Missionary in “mid-April.”
The long hang ended with 50 Cent dropping by to talk about Dre working on his debut, Get Rich or Die Tryin’, and to joke about how unpleasant it was to hang upside down for his iconic appearance during the 2002 Super Bowl halftime show. “I was like 30 pounds heavier at that point, I was not ready for that,” 50 laughed, noting he’d gained a bunch of weight for a TV role and “really didn’t think that out.” 50 also doubled-down on his earlier announcement that he’s practicing celibacy this year, saying he’s two months into his vow of abstinence and things are going great so far.
“I’m focused right now,” 50 said. “My life is better, things are a little clearer… I’m trying to make it to Lent.” For the record, Dre and Snoop do not believe 50 is holding his fire.
Watch Dre, Snoop and 50 on Kimmel below.
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Looking late night ready in a pin-striped white jacket, black pants and crisp white shirt, Justin Timberlake pinch-hit for 2024 Oscars host Jimmy Kimmel on Monday night (March 11), subbing in for the late night host’s monologue on Jimmy Kimmel Live! The multi-hyphenate singer who returned later to perform he debut of his upbeat new […]
David Spade was characteristically off the cuff during his appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live Monday night (Feb. 26), and one of the subjects he broached is something that’s on many people’s minds — Taylor Swift‘s romance with Travis Kelce.
More specifically, the comedian pointed out how much pressure the “Anti-Hero” singer was under every time she attended one of the Kansas City Chiefs’ games to cheer on her pro athlete boyfriend. “Poor Taylor Swift, you know, those cameras are like snipers on her,” joked Spade.
“She gets up to get a chalupa and they’re like, ‘Where’s Taylor? Why isn’t she watching?’” he continued. “She’s like, ‘I’m just having one bite!’ They’re like, ‘Oh no, they’re breaking up, she wasn’t watching!’”
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In the months Swift and Kelce went public with their relationship in September, fans and critics alike scrutinized the amount of screen time the pop star gets every time she shows up to an NFL game. In October, however, the league issued a statement defending its coverage of the couple, and Swift herself spoke out about the complaints in her December Person of the Year Time cover story.
“I’m just there to support Travis,” she said at the time. “I have no awareness of if I’m being shown too much and pissing off a few dads, Brads and Chads.”
On Kimmel, Spade added, “She really has to be there the whole time, ’cause everyone’s watching her watch the game … That’s stressful.”
Noting that he met the 14-time Grammy winner back in 2015 at the Saturday Night Live 40th anniversary special, Spade continued, “I like her, I think she’s a great performer — she does a great job.”
“It’s just tough,” added the Joe Dirt actor before diving into an improvised skit about Kelce’s recent visit to Sydney, where the athlete attended his third Eras Tour show. “[Swift is] here, then she goes to Australia, then he’s like, ‘Do you want me to come down there, babe?’ She’s like, ‘Yeah.’ He’s like, “You doing some new stuff? Same five-hour show?’”
Watch David Spade on Jimmy Kimmel Live above.
When No Doubt take the stage together at Coachella in April for their first show in nine years Gwen Stefani predicts it will be “crazy.” The band’s singer and solo star told Jimmy Kimmel on Wednesday night (Feb. 14) that she’s really looking forward to reuniting with her old mates bassist Tony Kanal, guitarist Tom […]
All eyes are on Taylor Swift and boyfriend Travis Kelce as the tight end’s team prepares to go to the Super Bowl for the fourth time in five years. And while the Kansas City Chiefs more than earned their ticket to Feb. 11’s Super Bowl LVIII in Las Vegas with excellent play and one of the best records in the NFL this season, there are some who think it’s all a conspiracy, man.
Jimmy Kimmel broke down the QAnon-like meltdown currently racing through the conservative media world on Tuesday night (Jan. 30), pointing out the outrageous tin foil hat-esque theories being amplified on Fox News and other right-wing outlets. “You expect to hear this from a couple of nuts and then it disappears, but if anything it’s picking up steam,” Kimmel said of the phantom dot-connectors he dubbed the “Not-Too-Swifties.”
The host read a Jan. 28 tweet that helped kick off the fantasy football fiction, which posited, “The NFL is totally RIGGED for the Kansas City Chiefs, Taylor Swift, Mr. Pfizer (Travis Kelce). All to spread DEMOCRAT PROPAGANDA. Calling it now, KC wins goes to the Super Bowl, Swift comes out at the halftime show and ‘endorses’ Joe Biden with Kelce at midfield. It’s all been an op since day one.”
He also ran down another tweet suggesting that the Super Bowl is “rigged,” featuring a complaint about the “unneeded” and “unwarranted” Swift coverage during games and calling the Chief’s path to the big game “totally scripted.” That one also conjured a similar image of TNT at the game together and announcing their support for Biden.
For clarity, while Swift has attended a number of Chiefs games this season to support her beau Kelce, and Kelce has appeared in a series of commercials encouraging Americans to get the life-saving COVID-19 vaccine, neither has made any political endorsements in this year’s presidential campaign. And it is still unclear if Swift can, or will, make it back from her Eras Tour show in Japan on the night before the Super Bowl to cheer the tight end on.
In Oct. 2020, Swift made a rare political endorsement when she announced that she would be voting for Biden.
Kimmel continued, reading a tweet suggesting that the Super Bowl will be “rigged [just like our elections],” parroting the incessant refrain from one-term former president Donald Trump falsely claiming that he actually won the 2020 election over President Joe Biden. The bit included a tweet from failed GOP presidential nominee Ohio businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, who suggested that “there’s a major presidential endorsement coming from an artificially culturally propped-up couple this fall.”
“Let me get this straight,” Kimmel said. “The same people who think that Joe Biden has dementia and needs [Vice President] Kamala Harris to feed him butterscotch tapioca every night also believe that he has somehow planned and executed a diabolically brilliant scheme to fix the NFL playoffs so the biggest pop star in the world could pop up on the JumbTron during the Super Bowl in between a Kia and a Tostitos commercial to hypnotize her 11-year-old fans into voting for Joe Biden.”
Kimmel then ran a series of Fox News, Newsmax and OAN clips from the network’s talking heads begging Swift to “not get involved” in politics, suggesting the whole relationship is a “massive psyop [psychological operation]” and, most outrageously, that her music is a form of “witchcraft” and that “the devil owns her [Swift’s] soul.”
Trump even seemed to get on the Taylor-bashing train, with Rolling Stone reporting this week that unnamed sources said the four-times-indicted former reality TV host has been telling people in his inner circle that he is “more popular” than Swift and that he has more committed fans than she does.
Watch Kimmel’s MAGA meltdown mash-up below (Swift bit begins at 2:49 mark).
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